Searchable Theosophical Texts
Theosophy House
The Secret
Doctrine
By
H P Blavatsky
Return
to Searchable Text Index
Theosophische
Schriften Auf Deutsch
Die Geheimlehre Von H P Blavatsky
VOLUMES 1 and 2
-------
Searchable Full
Text of H P Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine
--------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales----------------
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page i]]
THE SECRET
DOCTRINE.
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page ii]]
HELENA PETROVNA
BLAVATSKY
1831-1891
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page iii]]
THE SECRET
DOCTRINE:
THE SYNTHESIS
OF
SCIENCE,
RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY.
BY
H. P. BLAVATSKY,
AUTHOR OF "
"There is
no Religion higher than Truth."
VOL. I. --
COSMOGENESIS.
THE THEOSOPHICAL
PUBLISHING COMPANY, LIMITED.
7, Duke Street,
Adelphi, W.C.
WILLIAM Q.
JUDGE,
117, Nassau
Street, New York.
THE MANAGER OF
THE THEOSOPHIST,
Adyar, Madras.
---
1888.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page iv]]
"Entered
according to Act of Congress in the year 1888, by H. P. Blavatsky,
in the Office of
the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page v]]
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.
----Cardiff Theosophical Society in
Wales, UK. CF24-1DL-----
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page vi]]
[[blank]]
----Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales, UK. CF24-1DL-----
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 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 Aryan 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] viii
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.
H.P.B.
London, October,
1888.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page ix]]
TABLE OF
CONTENTS.
-------
PAGE.
INTRODUCTION ...
xvii.
The Need of such
a Book ... xix.
The Antiquity of
Documents and MSS. ... xxiii.
What the Book is
intended to do ... xxviii.
-------
VOLUME FIRST.
COSMOGENESIS.
PROEM ... 1
The Oldest MSS.
in the world and its Symbolism ... 2
The One Life,
Active and Passive ... 4
The Secret
Doctrine -- Pantheism -- Atheism ... 6
"Space"
in all Religions and in Occultism ... 9
Seven Cosmic
Elements -- Seven Races of Mankind ... 12
The Three
Postulates of the Secret Doctrine ... 14
Description of
the Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan ... 20
-------
BOOK I. -- PART
I.
COSMIC
EVOLUTION.
SEVEN STANZAS
FROM THE BOOK OF DZYAN ... 27
-------
The Seven
Eternities ... 36
"Time"
... 37
The Universal
Mind and the Dhyan Chohans ... 38
Nidana and Maya:
The Causes of Misery ... 39
The Great Breath
... 43
Being and
Non-Being ... 45
The Eye of
Dangma ... 47
Alaya, the
Universal Soul ... 49
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] x CONTENTS.
PAGE.
STANZA II. --
THE IDEA OF DIFFERENTIATION ... 53
The Absolute
knows Itself not ... 55
The Germ of Life
was not yet ... 57
The Universe was
still concealed in the Divine Thought ... 61
-------
STANZA III. --
THE AWAKENING OF KOSMOS ... 62
The Great
Vibration ... 63
Nature's Symbols
... 65
The Power of
Numbers ... 67
The Logoi and
the Dragon ... 73
The Astral Light
... 75
Primeval
Radiations from Unity ... 79
The Web of Being
... 83
Conscious Electricity:
Fohat ... 85
-------
STANZA IV. --
THE SEPTENARY HIERARCHIES ... 86
The Sons of the
Fire ... 86
The Vehicle of
the Universe -- the Dhyan Chohans ... 89
The Army of the
Voice ... 93
Speech and Mind
... 95
The Ogdoad and
the Heptad ... 99
The Stellar
"Sons of Light" ... 103
-------
STANZA V. --
FOHAT: THE CHILD OF THE SEPTENARY HIERARCHIES ... 106
The Fiery
Whirlwind and the Primordial Seven ... 106
They Produce
Fohat ... 108
The Correlation
of the "Gods" ... 113
Evolution of the
"Principles" of Nature ... 119
The Mystery of
the Fire ... 121
The Secret of
the Elements ... 123
The Square of
the Tabernacle ... 125
The Planetary
Spirits and the Lipika ... 129
The Ring
"Pass Not" ... 130
The Sidereal
Book of Life ... 131
The Soul's
Pilgrimage and its "Rest" ... 134
-------
STANZA VI. --
OUR WORLD, ITS GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT ... 136
The Logos ...
136
Mystery of the
Female Logos ... 137
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xi CONTENTS.
PAGE.
The Seven Layu
Centres ... 138
The
"Elementary Germs" ... 139
The Evolution of
the Elements ... 140
The Building of
the Worlds ... 145
A Neutral Centre
... 147
"Dead"
Planets -- The Moon ... 149
-------
THEOSOPHICAL
MISCONCEPTIONS ... 152
The Planetary
Divisions and the Human Principles ... 153
The Moon ... 155
Transmigrations
of the Ego ... 159
The Septenary
Chain ... 161
Relation of the
other Planets to the Earth ... 163
-------
EXPLANATIONS
CONCERNING THE GLOBES AND THE MONADS ... 170
The Lunar Chain
and the Earth Chain ... 172
The Earth, the
Child of the Moon ... 173
Classification
of the Monads ... 175
The Monad
Defined ... 177
The Lunar Monads
-- the Pitris ... 179
A Triple
Evolution in Nature ... 181
-------
STANZA VI. --
CONTINUED ... 191
"Creation"
in the Fourth Round ... 191
The
"Curse," "Sin," and "War" ... 193
The Struggle for
Life and the Birth of the Worlds ... 202
The Adepts and
the Sacred
-------
STANZA VII. --
THE PARENTS OF MAN ON EARTH ... 213
Divisions of the
Hierarchies ... 214
Correlations of
Beings ... 223
What incarnates
in Animal Man ... 233
Formation of
Man: the Thinker ... 238
Occult and
Kabalistic Pneumatics ... 243
Akasa and Ether
... 257
The Invisible
"Lives" ... 259
Occult Vital
Chemistry and Bacteriology ... 261
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xii CONTENTS.
PAGE.
The Watcher and
his Shadow ... 265
Earth peopled by
the Shadows of the Gods ... 267
-------
SUMMING UP ...
269
The pith and
marrow of the Secret Doctrine ... 273
Hermes in
Christian Garb ... 285
Some Occult
Aphorisms ... 289
The Seven Powers
of Nature ... 293
---------------------
BOOK
THE EVOLUTION OF
SYMBOLISM IN ITS APPROXIMATE ORDER.
§§
I. SYMBOLISM AND
IDEOGRAPHS ... 303
Emblem and
Symbol differ ... 305
Magic Potency of
Sound ... 307
Mystery Language
... 309
-------
II. THE MYSTERY
LANGUAGE AND ITS KEYS ... 310
The Jews and
their System ... 313
Moses copied
from Sargon ... 319
Identity of
Ancient Symbols ... 323
-------
III. PRIMORDIAL
SUBSTANCE AND DIVINE THOUGHT ... 325
Divine Thought,
or Cineritious Matter? ... 327
Ether and
Intelligence ... 330
The Seven
Prakritis ... 335
The Mystic Fire
... 339
One Tree of
Knowledge ... 341
-------
IV. CHAOS --
THEOS -- KOSMOS ... 342
The
The Birth of
Mind ... 345
-------
V. THE HIDDEN
DEITY, ITS SYMBOLS AND GLYPHS ... 349
The Gnostic Idea
... 351
International
Correlation of Gods ... 355
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xiii CONTENTS.
§§ PAGE.
VI. THE MUNDANE
EGG ... 359
Egg-born Logoi
... 363
The Winged Globe
... 365
-------
VII. THE DAYS
AND NIGHTS OF BRAHMA ... 368
Human Gods and
Divine Men ... 369
The Rebirth of
Gods ... 371
The Puranic
Prophecy ... 377
-------
VIII. THE LOTUS
AS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL ... 379
Exoteric and
Esoteric ... 381
The Purity of
early Phallicism ... 383
The Egyptian
Lotus ... 385
-------
IX. DEUS LUNUS
... 386
A Glance at the
Lunar Myth ... 387
A Key-note to
the Moon ... 389
Copies and
Originals... 393
The Moon
Bi-sexual ... 397
-------
X. TREE AND
SERPENT AND CROCODILE WORSHIP ... 403
Degeneration of
the Symbol ... 405
The Seven-headed
Dragons ... 407
Dragon and
Crocodile ... 409
-------
XI. DEMON EST
DEUS INVERSUS ... 411
Death is Life
... 413
The Fall of the
Angels ... 418
Transformation
of the Legend ... 421
-------
XII. THE
THEOGONY OF THE CREATIVE GODS ... 424
The Point within
the Circle ... 426
The Logos or
Verbum ... 429
The Factors of
Creation ... 432
Identity of the
Hierarchies in all Religions ... 438
Difference
between the Aryan and Semitic Systems ... 444
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xiv CONTENTS.
§§ PAGE.
XIII. THE SEVEN
CREATIONS ... 445
The Gnostic and
the Hindu Versions ... 449
The Seven
Puranic "Creations" ... 450
-------
XIV. THE FOUR
ELEMENTS. ... 460
The
"Gods" and the "Elements" ... 463
The Language of
the Elements ... 464
Pagan and
Christian Worship of the Elements ... 467
-------
XV. ON
KWAN-SHI-YIN AND KWAN-YIN ... 470
Kwan-Shi-Yin and
Phallicism ... 471
The Real Meaning
... 472
---------------------
BOOK
SCIENCE AND THE
SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
§§
I. REASONS FOR
THESE ADDENDA ... 477
Occultism versus
Materialism ... 479
The Sabbath of
the Mystic ... 481
-------
II. MODERN
PHYSICISTS ARE PLAYING AT BLIND MAN'S BUFF ... 482
-------
III. AN LUMEN
SIT CORPUS NEC NON? ... 483
The Hypothetical
Ether ... 485
Scientific
Theories of its Constitution ... 489
-------
IV. IS
GRAVITATION A LAW? ... 490
Intelligences or
Blind Forces? ... 493
The Cause of
Attraction ... 498
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xv CONTENTS.
§§ PAGE.
V. THE THEORIES
OF ROTATION SCIENCE ... 500
Conflicting
Hypotheses ... 502
More Hypotheses
... 505
-------
VI. THE MASKS OF
SCIENCE ... 506
What are the
"Forces?" ... 508
The View of the
Occultists ... 510
Scientific and
Occult Theories on Heat ... 515
The Atoms of
Science ... 519
-------
VII. AN ATTACK
ON THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF FORCE BY A MAN OF SCIENCE ... 523
Ether and Atoms
... 527
-------
VIII. LIFE,
FORCE, OR GRAVITY? ... 529
Dr. Richardson
on Nervous Ether ... 531
The Senses and
their Action ... 535
Too much
"Life" may Kill ... 539
-------
IX. THE SOLAR
THEORY ... 540
The Primordial
Element ... 542
Elements and
Meta-Elements ... 546
The Tree of Life
and Being ... 549
Prof. Crookes on
the Elements ... 552
-------
X. THE COMING
FORCE ... 554
Mr. Keeley, an
Unconscious Occultist ... 557
Inter-Etheric
Waves ... 561
The Secrets of
Sound and Odour ... 565
-------
Xl. ON THE
ELEMENTS AND ATOMS ... 566
Metaphysical
Chemistry ... 569
What are the
Seven Planets? ... 575
The Cyclic Fall
of the Gods ... 577
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xvi CONTENTS.
§§ PAGE.
XII. ANCIENT
THOUGHT IN MODERN DRESS ... 579
All-Potential
Unity ... 583
The
"Seventh" in Chemistry ... 585
-------
XIII. THE MODERN
NEBULAR THEORY ... 588
Forces are
Emanations ... 591
What is the
Nebula? ... 595
-------
XIV. FORCES --
MODES OF MOTION OR INTELLIGENCES? ... 601
The Vital
Principle ... 603
Occult and
Physical Science ... 605
-------
XV. GODS,
MONADS, AND ATOMS ... 610
The Gods of the
Ancients -- the Monads ... 613
The Monad and
the Duad ... 617
The Genesis of
the Elements ... 621
Hermes and
Huxley ... 625
The Teaching of
Leibnitz ... 627
The Monads
according to Occultism ... 632
-------
XVI. CYCLIC
EVOLUTION AND KARMA ... 634
Karmic Cycles
and Universal Ethics ... 637
Destiny and
Karma ... 639
Karma-Nemesis
... 643
-------
XVII. THE ZODIAC
AND ITS ANTIQUITY ... 647
The Jewish
Patriarchs and the Signs of the Zodiac ... 651
Zodiacal Cycles
... 656
Hindu Astronomy
... 661
-------
XVIII. SUMMARY
OF THE MUTUAL POSITION ... 668
Science
Confesses her Ignorance ... 669
Materialism is
leading
-------
N.B. -- The
Index and Glossary will be found at the close of Volume II.
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page xvii]]
INTRODUCTORY.
-------
"Gently to
hear, kindly to judge."
-- SHAKESPEARE.
SINCE the
appearance of Theosophical literature in
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 Pali 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 aeons and ages.
"Esoteric
Buddhism" was an excellent work with a very unfortunate
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahmins 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 (Vidya), the faculty of cognizing,
from the Sanskrit root "Budh," to know. We theosophists of
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
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xix INTRODUCTORY.
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
Adi, and Adhi Budha, the one (or the First) and "Supreme Wisdom" is a
term used by Aryasanga in his Secret treatises, and now by all the mystic
Northern Buddhists. It is a Sanskrit term, and an appellation given by the
earliest Aryans to the Unknown deity; the word "Brahma" not being
found in the Vedas and the early works. It means the absolute Wisdom, and
"Adi-bhuta" is translated "the primeval uncreated cause of
all" by Fitzedward Hall. AEons 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
Atma. "When Buddhi absorbs our EGOtism (destroys it) with all its Vikaras,
Avalokiteshvara becomes manifested to us, and Nirvana, or Mukti, is
reached," "Mukti" being the same as Nirvana, i.e., freedom from
the trammels of "Maya" or illusion. "Bodhi" is likewise the
name of a particular state of trance condition, called Samadhi, 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 Brahmins), simply because the name
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Ens. 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"* ("Dhyan") 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 Saptaparna cave (the Sattapanni of Mahavansa) near
Time and human
imagination made short work of the purity and philo-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Dan, now
become in modern Chinese and Tibetan phonetics ch'an, is the general term for
the esoteric schools, and their literature. In the old books, the word Janna is
defined as "to reform one's self by meditation and knowledge," a
second inner birth. Hence Dzan, Djan phonetically, the "Book of
Dzyan."
** Mr. Beglor,
the chief engineer at Buddhagaya, and a distinguished archaeologist, was the
first, we believe, to discover it.
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
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 Brahmins of his day. The Buddha was a child of the Aryan soil; a born
Hindu, a Kshatrya and a disciple of the "twice born" (the initiated
Brahmins) or Dwijas. 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 -- Nirvana -- 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 Nirvana 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, 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
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 circulo
vicioso, foregone conclusions generally changing places with premisses as in
the syllogisms of more than one Sanskrit and Pali 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 to-day, 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 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
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahminical, 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 Himalayas, 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 Devanagari.
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
It is maintained,
furthermore, that every sacred book of that kind, whose text was not
sufficiently veiled in symbolism, or which had any
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Prof. Max
Muller shows that no bribes or threats of Akbar could extort from the Brahmans
the original text of the Veda; and boasts that European Orientalists have it
(Lecture on the "Science of Religion," p. 23). Whether
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
palaeographer, 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 Brahmans to conceal their MSS.
Such was Badaoni, who had an undisguised horror for Akbar's mania for
idolatrous religions.*
Moreover in all
the large and wealthy lamasaries, there are subterranean crypts and
cave-libraries, cut in the rock, whenever the gonpa and the lhakhang are
situated in the mountains. Beyond the Western Tsay-dam, in the solitary passes
of Kuen-lun** there are several such hiding places. Along the ridge of
Altyn-Toga, 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.***
All this is very
likely to provoke a smile of doubt. But then, before
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Badaoni wrote
in his Muntakhab at Tawarikh: "His Majesty relished inquiries into the
sects of these infidels (who cannot be counted, so numerous they are, and who
have no end of revealed books) . . . As they (the Sramana and Brahmins) surpass
other learned men in their treatises on morals, on physical and religious
sciences, and reach a high degree in their knowledge of the future, in
spiritual power, and human perfection, they brought proofs based on reason and
testimony, and inculcated their doctrines so firmly that no man could now raise
a doubt in his Majesty even if mountains were to crumble to dust, or the
heavens were to tear asunder." This work "was kept secret, and was
not published till the reign of Jahangir." (Ain i Akbari, translated by
Dr. Blochmann, p. 104, note.)
**
*** According to
the same tradition the now desolate regions of the waterless
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxv INTRODUCTORY.
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 Lao-tse, the predecessor of Confucius.*
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
"Tao-te-King," or the sacred scriptures of the Taosse, 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 Muller 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 Lao-tse 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 Lao-tse, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "If we
turn to China, we find that the religion of Confucius is founded on the Five
King and the Four Shu-books, in themselves of considerable extent and
surrounded by voluminous Commentaries, without which even the most learned
scholars would not venture to fathom the depth of their sacred canon."
(Lectures on the "Science of Religion," p. 185. Max Muller.) But they
have not fathomed it -- and this is the complaint of the Confucianists, as a
very learned member of that body, in
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxvi INTRODUCTORY.
If one turns to
the ancient literature of the Semitic religions, to the Chaldean Scriptures,
the elder sister and instructress, if not the fountain-head 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
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 Caesarea --
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
Written in Greek
by Berosus, 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,* made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in his role 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 Bunsen**
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?
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Found out and proven
only now, through the discoveries made by George Smith (vide his "Chaldean
account of Genesis"), and which, thanks to this Armenian forger, have
misled all the civilized nations for over 1,500 years into accepting Jewish
derivations for direct Divine Revelation!
** Bunsen's
"
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxvii INTRODUCTORY.
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 Berosian 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 Aryan literature, the Rig-Veda, the student will find, following strictly
in this the data furnished by the said Orientalists themselves, that, although
the Rig-Veda contains only "about 10,580 verses, or 1,028 hymns," in
spite of the Brahmanas and the mass of glosses and commentaries, it is not
understood correctly to this day. Why is this so? Evidently because the
Brahmanas, "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 Kanjur and the Tanjur 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
Saddharma alankara,* 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 Muller, rejoicing only in 3,567,180 letters.
Notwithstanding, then, these "325 volumes" (in reality there are 333,
Kanjur comprising 108, and Tanjur 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."** 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 Brahmins?
Considering the
sacredness for the Buddhists of every line written
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Spence Hardy,
"The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists," p. 66.
**
"Buddhism in
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxviii INTRODUCTORY.
upon Buddha or
his "Good Law," the loss of nearly 76,000 tracts does seem
miraculous. Had it been vice versa, 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,
Owing to the
expressed regrets and numerous confessions of almost every one of the
Orientalists (See Max Muller'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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Lassen,
("Ind. Althersumkunde" Vol. II, p. 1,072) shows a Buddhist monastery
erected in the
** Reverend T.
Edkins, "Chinese Buddhism."
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxix INTRODUCTORY.
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."* 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 Aryan religion before
the separation of the Aryan 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" (Compar. Theol., p. 318), he has not the slightest "historical
basis" for it. He makes history and fact subservient to his
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* So little
acquainted are our greatest Egyptologists with the funerary rites of the
Egyptians and the outward marks of the difference of sexes made on the mummies,
that it has led to the most ludicrous mistakes. Only a year or two since, one
of that kind was discovered at Boulaq,
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxx INTRODUCTORY.
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 Muller 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
Questioned
further on this point, he would say no more. This was at
No doubt the
mystification played, in the last century at
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxi INTRODUCTORY.
in that affair
than the Missionaries and Colonel Wilford themselves. The former, on the
testimony of Sir William Jones himself (see Asiat. Res., Vol. I., p. 272), were
silly enough to maintain that "the Hindus were even now almost Christians,
because their Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesa were no other than the Christian
trinity."* 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 Puranic story
about Chrishna was plagiarized by the Brahmins from the Bible! But the facts
cited by the Oxford Professor in his Lectures on 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 Brahmans 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 Brahmans, 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 Brahman learning. But all such
proofs must lose their value, in the presence of the latest theory worked out
by Prof. Max Muller. What it is everyone knows. The code of phonetic laws has
now become a universal solvent for every identification and
"connection" between
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Max
Muller's "Introduction to the Science of Religion." Lecture On False
Analogies in comparative Theology, pp. 288 and 296 et seq. This relates to the
clever forgery (on leaves inserted in old Puranic MSS.), in correct and archaic
Sanskrit, of all that the Pundits of Col. Wilford had heard from him about Adam
and Abraham, Noah and his three sons, etc., etc
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxii INTRODUCTORY.
the gods of many
nations. Thus, though the Mother of Mercury (Budha, Thot-Hermes, etc.), was
Maia, the mother of Buddha (Gautama), also Maya, 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
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxiii INTRODUCTORY.
"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 Tchertchen, for instance, situated about 4,000 feet above
the level of the river Tchertchen-D'arya, 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 Khoorassan
claims to have come from what is now known as
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxiv INTRODUCTORY.
woollen garment,
her bosom was covered with golden stars, the feet being left naked." (From
a lecture by N. M. Prjevalsky.) To this, the famous traveller adds that all
along their way on the river Tchertchen 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 Kerya.
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
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 Swami Dayanand
Sarasvati, "the Mlechchhas (outcasts, savages, those beyond the pale of
Aryan 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
-------
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxv INTRODUCTORY.
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
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
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
----Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales, UK. CF24-1DL-----
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxvi INTRODUCTORY.
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
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
Aryan, 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, a very ancient
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxvii INTRODUCTORY.
legislator in
historical chronology, though a very modern Sage in the World's History, shown
by Dr. Legge* -- 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."** (Quoted in
"Science of Religions" by Max Muller.)
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 stand-points.
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.*** Have not the latter been derided, rejected,
and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Lun Yu (§ I a)
Schott. "Chinesische Literatur," p. 7.
** "Life of
Confucius," p. 96.
*** This is no
pretension to prophecy, but simply a statement based on the knowledge of facts.
Every century an attempt is being made to show the world that Occultism
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxviii INTRODUCTORY.
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 Lempriere and other scholars? About 1820, Prof. Max Muller tells
us, the sacred books of the Brahmans, 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 Tripitaka, 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).
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 "
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] is no vain superstition. Once the door permitted
to be kept a little ajar, it will be opened wider with every new century. The
times are ripe for a more serious knowledge than hitherto permitted, though
still very limited, so far.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xxxix INTRODUCTORY.
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xl INTRODUCTORY.
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xli INTRODUCTORY.
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 mediaeval 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
In other words
-- "THERE IS NO RELIGION (OR LAW) HIGHER THAN TRUTH" -- "SATYAT
NASTI PARO DHARMAH" -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Lectures
on the Science of Religion," by F. Max Muller, p. 257.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xlii INTRODUCTORY.
it rather, and,
though entirely independent of the earlier work, an indispensable corollary to
it. Much of what was in
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 "Adamic"
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.
"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 Siphrah Dzeniouta -- 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 ADAM* 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The name is
used in the sense of the Greek word [[anthropos]].
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xliii INTRODUCTORY.
The "very
old Book" is the original work from which the many volumes of Kiu-ti were
compiled. Not only this latter and the Siphrah Dzeniouta but even the Sepher
Jezirah,* the work attributed by the Hebrew Kabalists to their Patriarch
Abraham (!), the book of Shu-king, China's primitive Bible, the sacred volumes
of the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes, the Puranas 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 Manushis, 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
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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Rabbi Jehoshua
Ben Chananea, who died about A.D. 72, openly declared that he had performed
"miracles" by means of the Book of Sepher Jezireh, and challenged
every sceptic. Franck, quoting from the Babylonian Talmud, names two other
thaumaturgists, Rabbis Chanina and Oshoi. (See "Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin,"
c. 7, etc.; and "Franck," pp. 55, 56.) Many of the Mediaeval
Occultists, Alchemists, and Kabalists claimed the same; and even the late
modern Magus, Eliphas Levi, publicly asserts it in print in his books on Magic.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Sankaracharya.
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 Kabalists 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons 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 Post-diluvian
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 Eliphas Levi (!), Paracelsus (!!), and, mirabile
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] xlvi INTRODUCTORY.
dictu, Buddhism
and Brahmanism (!!!) As well charge Renan with having stolen his Vie de Jesus
from the Gospels, and Max Muller his "Sacred Books of the East" or
his "Chips" from the philosophies of the Brahmins 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 stand-point 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page xlviii]]
[[blank]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 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,* wherein lies concealed the plan of every future Cosmogony
and Theogony.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is hardly
necessary to remind the reader once more that the term "Divine
Thought," like that of "Universal Mind," must not be regarded as
even vaguely shadowing forth an intellectual process akin to that exhibited by
man. The "Unconscious," according to von Hartmann, arrived at the
vast creative, or rather Evolutionary Plan, "by a clairvoyant wisdom
superior to all consciousness," which in the Vedantic language would mean
absolute Wisdom. Only those who realise how far Intuition soars above the tardy
processes of ratiocinative thought can form the faintest conception of [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,"*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] that absolute Wisdom which transcends the ideas
of Time and Space. Mind, as we know it, is resolvable into states of consciousness,
of varying duration, intensity, complexity, etc. -- all, in the ultimate,
resting on sensation, which is again Maya. Sensation, again, necessarily
postulates limitation. The personal God of orthodox Theism perceives, thinks,
and is affected by emotion; he repents and feels "fierce anger." But
the notion of such mental states clearly involves the unthinkable postulate of
the externality of the exciting stimuli, to say nothing of the impossibility of
ascribing changelessness to a Being whose emotions fluctuate with events in the
worlds he presides over. The conceptions of a Personal God as changeless and
infinite are thus unpsychological and, what is worse, unphilosophical.
* Plato proves
himself an Initiate, when saying in Cratylus that [[theos]] is derived from the
verb [[theein]], "to move," "to run," as the first
astronomers who observed the motions of the heavenly bodies called the planets
[[theoi]], the gods. (See Book II., "Symbolism of the Cross and
Circle.") Later, the word produced another term, [[aletheia]] -- "the
breath of God."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 3 PROEM.
phenomenon in Nature.*
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 Brahminism, and even the Kabala, 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 these conditions are called the "Days" and the
"Nights" of Brahma. The latter is either "awake" or
"asleep." The Svabhavikas, or philosophers of the oldest
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nominalists,
arguing with
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, roaring amid thunder and lightning. In its
turn, rationalistic science greets the Buddhists and the Svabhavikas 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 Brahma" in Part II.)
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 [[diagram]] the second one in the Archaic
symbol shows [[diagram]], 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" (Rig Veda), the point in the
disc, or potential Space within abstract Space. In its third stage the point is
transformed into a diameter, thus [[diagram]] It now symbolises a divine
immaculate Mother-Nature within the all-embracing absolute Infinitude.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 5 PROEM.
When the
diameter line is crossed by a vertical one [[diagram]], 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
[[diagram]] 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 [[diagram]] or as a
"Thor's hammer," the Jaina cross, so-called, or simply Svastica
within a circle [[diagram]]
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 -- [[diagram]] -- 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 [[diagram]], 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', and in Hebrew n'cabvah, of the first-formed
races;* then it changed into the Egyptian [[diagram]] (emblem of life), and
still later into the sign of Venus, [[diagram]] Then comes the Svastica (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 [[diagram]] -- the sign of human sorcery, with
its two points (horns) turned heavenward, a position every
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See that
suggestive work, "The Source of Measures," where the author explains
the real meaning of the word "sacr'," from which "sacred,"
"sacrament," are derived, which have now become synonyms of
"holiness," though purely phallic!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 6 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Occultist will
recognise as one of the "left-hand," and used in ceremonial magic.*
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 Advaitee 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 Parabrahmam 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. Parabrahm is not "God," because It is not a God.
"It is that which is supreme, and not supreme (paravara)," explains
Mandukya Upanishad (2.28). IT is "Supreme" as CAUSE, not supreme as
effect. Parabrahm 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, Paramarthika," and
the absolute Chit and Chaitanya (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." (Bodhi-mur, 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 Sankaracharya. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We are told by
the Western mathematicians and some American Kabalists, that in the Kabala also
"the value of the Jehovah name is that of the diameter of a circle."
Add to this the fact that Jehovah is the third Sephiroth, Binah, a feminine
word, and you have the key to the mystery. By certain Kabalistic
transformations this name, androgynous in the first chapters of Genesis,
becomes in its transformations entirely masculine, Cainite and phallic. The
fact of choosing a deity among the pagan gods and making of it a special
national God, to call upon it as the "One living God," the "God
of Gods," and then proclaim this worship Monotheistic, does not change it
into the ONE Principle whose "Unity admits not of multiplication, change,
or form," especially in the case of a priapic deity, as Jehovah now
demonstrated to be.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 7 PROEM.
philosophy?
Parabrahm 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.* "In the beginning THIS was the Self, one
only" (Aitareya Upanishad); the great Sankaracharya, 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 Upanishads, 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, Parabrahmam 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 Parabrahm, 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 Vedantin postulates
attributes as belonging simply to its emanation, calling it "Iswara plus
Maya," and Avidya (Agnosticism and Nescience rather than ignorance), it is
difficult to find any Atheism in this conception.** 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 Brahma (the male-female Potency) becomes or expands itself into
the manifested Universe. Narayana 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Vedanta Sara," by Major G. A. Jacob; as also "The Aphorisms of
S'andilya," translated by Cowell, p. 42.
** Nevertheless,
prejudiced and rather fanatical Christian Orientalists would like to prove this
pure Atheism. For proof of this, see about Major Jacob's "Vedanta
Sara." Yet, the whole Antiquity echoes this Vedantic thought:--
"Omnis enim
per se divom natura necesse est
Immortali aevo
summa cum pace fruatur."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The orthodox
Brahmins, those who rise the most against the Pantheists and Adwaitees, calling
them Atheists, are forced, if Manu has any authority in this matter, to accept
the death of Brahma, 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 Adwaita Vedantin 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 Brahma -- 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,* and on that of mayavic perception,
the Plenum, 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 Rishi's "The Universe lives in, proceeds from,
and will
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The very names
of the two chief deities, Brahma and Vishnu, ought to have long ago suggested
their esoteric meanings. For the root of one, Brahmam, or Brahm, is derived by
some from the word Brih, "to grow" or "to expand" (see
Calcutta Review, vol. lxvi., p. 14); and of the other, Vishnu, from the root
Vis, "to pervade," to enter in the nature of the essence;
Brahma-Vishnu being this infinite SPACE, of which the gods, the Rishis, the
Manus, and all in this universe are simply the potencies, Vibhutayah.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 9 PROEM.
return to,
Brahma (Brahma)": for Brahma (neuter), the unmanifested, is that Universe
in abscondito, and Brahma, the manifested, is the Logos, made male-female* in
the symbolical orthodox dogmas. The God of the Apostle-Initiate and of the
Rishi 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.** The Occultist
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Manu's
account of Brahma separating his body into male and female, the latter the
female Vach, in whom he creates Viraj, and compare this with the esotericism of
Chapters II., III., and IV. of Genesis.
** Occultism is
indeed in the air at the close of this our century. Among many other works
recently published, we would recommend one especially to students of
theoretical Occultism who would not venture beyond the realm of our special
human plane. It is called "New Aspects of Life and Religion," by
Henry Pratt, M.D. It is full of esoteric dogmas and philosophy, the latter rather
limited, in the concluding chapters, by what seems to be a spirit of
conditioned positivism. Nevertheless, what is said of Space as "the
Unknown First Cause," merits quotation. "This unknown something, thus
recognised as, and identified with, the primary embodiment of Simple Unity, is
invisible and impalpable" -- (abstract space, granted); "and because
invisible and impalpable, therefore incognisable. And this incognisability has
led to the error of supposing it to be a simple void, a mere receptive capacity.
But, even viewed as an absolute void, space must be admitted to be either
Self-existent, infinite, and eternal, or to have had a first cause outside,
behind, and beyond itself.
"And yet
could such a cause be found and defined, this would only lead to the
transferring thereto of the attributes otherwise accruing to space, and thus
merely throw the difficulty of origination a step farther back, without gaining
additional light as to primary causation." (p. 5.)
This is precisely
what has been done by the believers in an anthropomorphic Creator, an
extracosmic, instead of an intracosmic God. Many -- most of Mr. Pratt's
subjects, we may say -- are old Kabalistic ideas and theories which he presents
in quite a new garb: "New Aspects" of the Occult in Nature, indeed.
Space, however, viewed as a "Substantial Unity" -- the "living
Source of Life" -- is as the "Un- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Dhyani-Buddhas, or Dhyan-Chohans, the "Rishi-Prajapati" of the
Hindus, the Elohim or "Sons of God," the Planetary Spirits of all
nations, who have become Gods for men. He also regards the Adi-Sakti -- the
direct emanation of Mulaprakriti, the eternal Root of THAT, and the female
aspect of the Creative Cause Brahma, in her A'kasic form of the Universal Soul
-- as philosophically a Maya, and cause of human Maya. But this view does not
prevent him from believing in its existence so long as it lasts, to wit, for
one Mahamanvantara; nor from applying Akasa, the radiation of Mulaprakriti,* 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 archaeologists; then,
passing over a number of religions that will be mentioned later, comes the
Jewish, esoterically, as in the Kabala, 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 Zohar, the initial four chapters
of Genesis are the fragment
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] known Causeless Cause," is the oldest dogma
in Occultism, millenniums earlier than the Pater-AEther of the Greeks and
Latins. So are the "Force and Matter, as Potencies of Space, inseparable,
and the Unknown revealers of the Unknown." They are all found in Aryan
philosophy personified by Visvakarman, Indra, Vishnu, etc., etc. Still they are
expressed very philosophically, and under many unusual aspects, in the work
referred to.
* In
contradistinction to the manifested universe of matter, the term Mulaprakriti
(from Mula, "the root," and prakriti, "nature"), or the
unmanifested primordial matter -- called by Western alchemists Adam's Earth --
is applied by the Vedantins to Parabrahmam. Matter is dual in religious
metaphysics, and septenary in esoteric teachings, like everything else in the
universe. As Mulaprakriti, it is undifferentiated and eternal; as Vyakta, it
becomes differentiated and conditioned, according to Svetasvatara Upanishad,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 11 PROEM.
of a highly
philosophical page in the World's Cosmogony. (See Book III., Gupta Vidya and
the Zohar.) 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
Rabbis, 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 Anupadaka."* "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., maya,** one of the centres***).
It expands and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Meaning
"parentless" -- see farther on.
** Esoteric
philosophy, regarding as Maya (or the illusion of ignorance) every finite thing,
must necessarily view in the same light every intra-Cosmic planet and body, as
being something organised, hence finite. The expression, therefore, "it
proceeds from without inwardly, etc." refers in the first portion of the
sentence to the dawn of the Mahamanvantaric period, or the great re-evolution
after one of the complete periodical dissolutions of every compound form in
Nature (from planet to molecule) into its ultimate essence or element; and in
its second portion, to the partial or local manvantara, which may be a solar or
even a planetary one.
*** By
"centre," a centre of energy or a Cosmic focus is meant; when the
so-called "Creation," or formation of a planet, is accomplished by
that force which is designated by the Occultists LIFE and by Science
"energy," then the process takes place [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Manwantara and Pralaya. The Germ is
invisible and fiery; the Root (the plane of the circle) is cool; but during
Evolution and Manwantara 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 Brahma, 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.* These seven elements with their numberless Sub-Elements
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] from within outwardly, every atom being said to
contain in itself creative energy of the divine breath. Hence, whereas after an
absolute pralaya, or when the pre-existing material consists but of ONE
Element, and BREATH "is everywhere," the latter acts from without
inwardly: after a minor pralaya, everything having remained in statu quo -- in
a refrigerated state, so to say, like the moon -- at the first flutter of
manvantara, the planet or planets begin their resurrection to life from within
outwardly.
* It is curious
to notice how, in the evolutionary cycles of ideas, ancient thought seems to be
reflected in modern speculation. Had Mr. Herbert Spencer read and studied
ancient Hindu philosophers when he wrote a certain passage in his "First
Principles" (p. 482), or is it an independent flash of inner perception
that made him say half correctly, half incorrectly, "motion as well as
matter, being fixed in quantity (?), it would seem that the change in the
distribution of Matter which Motion effects, coming to a limit in whichever
direction it is carried (?), the indestructible Motion thereupon necessitates a
reverse distribution. Apparently, the universally co-existent forces of
attraction and repulsion which, as we have seen, necessitate rhythm in all
minor changes throughout the Universe, also necessitate rhythm in the totality
of its changes -- produce now an immeasurable period during which the
attracting forces predominating, cause universal concentration, and then an
immeasurable period, during which the repulsive forces predominating, cause
universal diffusion -- alternate eras of Evolution and dissolution."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* not even A'kasa
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 AEther,
"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, subtile out of
gross, and gross out of subtile. . . . . Thus, perhaps, may all things be
originated from Ether," (Hypoth, 1675).
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 Dhyani-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 Brahma."
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whatever the
views of physical Science upon the subject, Occult Science has been teaching
for ages that A'kasa -- of which Ether is the grossest form -- the fifth
universal Cosmic Principle (to which corresponds and from which proceeds human
Manas) is, cosmically, a radiant, cool, diathermanous plastic matter, creative
in its physical nature, correlative in its grossest aspects and portions,
immutable in its higher principles. In the former condition it is called the
Sub-Root; and in conjunction with radiant heat, it recalls "dead worlds to
life." In its higher aspect it is the Soul of the World; in its lower --
the DESTROYER.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Mandukya, "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,"* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"first" presupposes necessarily something which is the "first
brought forth, the first in time, space, and rank" -- and therefore finite
and conditioned. The "first" [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 15 PROEM.
the Kosmos is
the pure noumenon of thought. This advance on his part brings him very near to
the esoteric and Vedantin tenet.*
Parabrahm (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 (Parabrahm), 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 fons et origo 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 (Mulaprakriti) 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 vehicle** 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] cannot be the absolute, for it is a
manifestation. Therefore, Eastern Occultism calls the Abstract All the
"Causeless One Cause," the "Rootless Root," and limits the
"First Cause" to the Logos, in the sense that Plato gives to this
term.
* See Mr. Subba
Row's four able lectures on the Bhagavad Gita, "Theosophist,"
February, 1887.
** Called in
Sanskrit: "Upadhi."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 16 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 Dhyan Chohans,* 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 Parabrahm of the Vedantins 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 Purusha and
Prakriti, 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
MAHA-BUDDHI.
The ONE REALITY;
its dual aspects in the conditioned Universe.
Further, the
Secret Doctrine affirms:--
(b.) The
Eternity of the Universe in toto 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"** is
like a wink
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Called by
Christian theology: Archangels, Seraphs, etc., etc.
**
"Pilgrim" is the appellation given to our Monad (the two in one)
during its cycle of incarnations. It is the only immortal and eternal principle
in us, being an indivisible part of the integral whole -- the Universal Spirit,
from which it emanates, and into which it is absorbed at the end of the cycle.
When it is said to emanate from the one [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma.")
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 (Dhyani-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 Brahmâ, 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 (Brahmâ the vehicle of Brahma) are viewed by metaphysical
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] spirit, an awkward and incorrect expression has
to be used, for lack of appropriate words in English. The Vedantins call it
Sutratma (Thread-Soul), but their explanation, too, differs somewhat from that
of the occultists; to explain which difference, however, is left to the
Vedantins themselves.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 18 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
antiphrasis as
illusive and Mayavic. 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 "Theophania," "Bodhisatvas
and Reincarnation," etc., etc.)
In its
absoluteness, the One Principle under its two aspects (of Parabrahmam and
Mulaprakriti) 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 quo*), the first that re-awakes to active
life is the plastic A'kasa, 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 Kabala it is also
Father-Mother-Son. But whereas in the Eastern doctrine, these are the Seventh
Principle of the manifested Universe, or its "Atma-Buddhi-Manas"
(Spirit, Soul, Intelligence), the triad branching off and dividing into the
seven cosmical and seven human principles, in the Western Kabala of the
Christian mystics it is the Triad or Trinity, and with their occultists, the
male-female Jehovah, Jah-Havah. 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. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and
Sankara -- the three hypostases of the manifesting "Spirit of the Supreme
Spirit" (by which title Prithivi -- the Earth -- greets Vishnu in his
first Avatar) -- are the purely metaphysical abstract qualities of formation,
preservation, and destruction, and are the three divine Avasthas (lit.
hypostases) of that which "does
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is not the
physical organisms that remain in statu quo, least of all their psychical
principles, during the great Cosmic or even Solar pralayas, but only their
Akasic or astral "photographs." But during the minor pralayas, once
over-taken by the "Night," the planets remain intact, though dead, as
a huge animal, caught and embedded in the polar ice, remains the same for ages.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 19 PROEM.
not perish with
created things" (or Achyuta, a name of Vishnu); 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 Bhrantidarsanatah --
"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 Vishnu Purana.
"That Brahma in its totality has essentially the aspect of Prakriti, both
evolved and unevolved (Mulaprakriti), and also the aspect of Spirit and the
aspect of Time. Spirit, O twice born, is the leading aspect of the Supreme
Brahma.* The next is a twofold aspect, -- Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved,
and is the time last." Kronos 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 Kabala also. The Western Kabala, however, now in
the hands of Christian mystics, ignores it altogether, though it is plainly
shown in the Zohar. These sectarians begin at the end, and show as the symbol
of pregenetic Kosmos this sign [[diagram]], calling it "the
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Thus Spencer,
who, nevertheless, like Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, only reflects an aspect
of the old esoteric philosophers, and hence lands his readers on the bleak
shore of Agnostic despair -- reverently formulates the grand mystery;
"that which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form,
under these sensible appearances which the Universe presents to us, is an
unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognise as without
limit in Space and without beginning or end in time." It is only daring
Theology -- never Science or philosophy -- which seeks to gauge the Infinite
and unveil the Fathomless and Unknowable.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 20 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Secret Doctrine.
Brahma (neuter) is called Kalahansa, meaning, as explained by Western
Orientalists, the Eternal Swan or goose (see Stanza III., Comment. 8), and so
is Brahma, the Creator. A great mistake is thus brought under notice; it is
Brahma (neuter) who ought to be referred to as Hansa-vahana (He who uses the
swan as his Vehicle) and not Brahma the Creator, who is the real Kalahansa,
while Brahma (neuter) is hamsa, and "A-hamsa," as will be explained
in the Commentary. Let it be understood that the terms Brahma and Parabrahmam
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, mutatis mutandis, to
all evolution: to that of our tiny earth, to
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Dhyan 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.
---------------------
NOTE.
The Stanzas
which form the thesis of every section are given throughout in their modern translated
version, as it would be worse
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Thibetan 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 foot-notes,
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 I would read as
follows:--- "Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas zhiba. All
Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone
Tho-og Yinsin in night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna), &c.,
&c.," 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 25]]
PART I.
COSMIC
EVOLUTION.
---------------------
SEVEN STANZAS
TRANSLATED WITH COMMENTARIES
FROM THE
SECRET BOOK OF
DZYAN.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 26]]
Nor Aught nor
Nought existed; yon bright sky
Was not, nor
heaven's broad roof outstretched above.
What covered
all? what sheltered? what concealed?
Was it the
water's fathomless abyss?
There was not
death -- yet there was nought immortal,
There was no
confine betwixt day and night;
The only One
breathed breathless by itself,
Other than It
there nothing since has been.
Darkness there
was, and all at first was veiled
In gloom
profound -- an ocean without light --
The germ that
still lay covered in the husk
Burst forth, one
nature, from the fervent heat.
. . . . . . . .
Who knows the
secret? who proclaimed it here?
Whence, whence
this manifold creation sprang?
The Gods
themselves came later into being --
Who knows from
whence this great creation sprang?
That, whence all
this great creation came,
Whether Its will
created or was mute,
The Most High
Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it --
or perchance even He knows not."
"Gazing
into eternity . . .
Ere the
foundations of the earth were laid,
. . . . .
Thou wert. And
when the subterranean flame
Shall burst its
prison and devour the frame . . .
Thou shalt be
still as Thou wert before
And knew no
change, when time shall be no more.
Oh! endless
thought, divine ETERNITY."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 27 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
COSMIC
EVOLUTION.
In Seven Stanzas
translated from the Book of Dzyan.
---------------------
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
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 PARANISHPANNA, 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.
9. BUT WHERE WAS
THE DANGMA WHEN THE ALAYA OF THE UNIVERSE WAS IN PARAMARTHA AND THE GREAT WHEEL
WAS ANUPADAKA?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 PARANISHPANNA. THE PRODUCERS OF FORM FROM NO-FORM --
THE ROOT OF THE WORLD -- THE DEVAMATRI AND SVABHAVAT, 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 MATRIPADMA 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 MAYA.
5. THE SEVEN
SONS WERE NOT YET BORN FROM THE WEB OF LIGHT. DARKNESS ALONE WAS FATHER-MOTHER,
SVABHAVAT; AND SVABHAVAT 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
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
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
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 SVABHAVAT.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
** In the
English translation from the Sanskrit the numbers are given in that language,
Eka, Chatur, etc., etc. It was thought best to give them in English.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
SVABHAVAT 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 ARUPA, THE RUPA, AND THE FORCE OF DIVINE MAN -- THE SUM TOTAL. AND
FROM THE DIVINE MAN EMANATED THE FORMS, THE
4. THIS WAS THE
ARMY OF THE VOICE -- THE DIVINE MOTHER OF THE SEVEN. THE
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 31 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
5.
"DARKNESS" THE BOUNDLESS, OR THE NO-NUMBER, ADI-NIDANA SVABHAVAT:--
I. THE
ADI-SANAT, THE NUMBER, FOR HE IS ONE.
II. THE VOICE OF
THE LORD SVABHAVAT, THE NUMBERS, FOR HE IS ONE AND NINE.
III. THE
"FORMLESS SQUARE."
AND THESE THREE
ENCLOSED WITHIN THE [[diagram]] ARE THE SACRED FOUR; AND THE TEN ARE THE ARUPA
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 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
3. HE IS THEIR
GUIDING SPIRIT AND LEADER. WHEN HE COMMENCES WORK, HE SEPARATES THE
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 32 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
FIRST DIVINE
WORLD IS READY, THE FIRST IS NOW THE SECOND. THEN THE "DIVINE ARUPA"
REFLECTS ITSELF IN CHHAYA LOKA, THE FIRST GARMENT OF THE ANUPADAKA.
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 RUPA AND THE
ARUPA: 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 -- KWAN-YIN -- THE "TRIPLE" OF
KWAN-SHAI-YIN, RESIDING IN KWAN-YIN-TIEN, FOHAT, THE BREATH OF THEIR PROGENY,
THE SON OF THE SONS, HAVING CALLED FORTH, FROM THE LOWER ABYSS, THE ILLUSIVE
FORM OF SIEN-TCHANG AND THE SEVEN ELEMENTS:*
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 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
REVEALED, TWO AND ONE HALF CONCEALED; SIX TO BE MANIFESTED, ONE LAID ASIDE.
LASTLY, SEVEN SMALL WHEELS REVOLVING; ONE GIVING BIRTH TO THE OTHER.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Verse 1 of
Stanza VI. is of a far later date than the other Stanzas, though still very
ancient. The old text of this verse, having names entirely unknown to the
Orientalists would give no clue to the student.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
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 WOULDEST 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 NIRVANA, 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 SAPTASARMA.
4. IT IS THE ROOT
THAT NEVER DIES; THE THREE-TONGUED FLAME OF THE FOUR WICKS. THE WICKS ARE THE
5. THE SPARK
HANGS FROM THE FLAME BY THE FINEST THREAD OF FOHAT. IT JOURNEYS THROUGH THE
SEVEN WORLDS OF MAYA. 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 VAHAN 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 subtile invisible properties in visible matter. It is the
Soul, so to say, of the ONE infinite Spirit. The Hindus call it Mulaprakriti,
and say that it is the primordial substance, which is the basis of the Upadhi
or vehicle of every phenomenon, whether physical, mental or psychic. It is the
source from which Akasa radiates.
(a) By the Seven
"Eternities," aeons 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 36 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the term sempiternity,
the eternal only in futurity, anything better than a misnomer.* 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 Maha-Kalpa or the "Great Age"
-- 100 years of Brahma -- making a total of 311,040,000,000,000 of years; each
year of Brahma being composed of 360 "days," and of the same number
of "nights" of Brahma (reckoning by the Chandrayana or lunar year);
and a "Day of Brahma" 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 7x (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.
-------
2. TIME WAS NOT,
FOR IT LAY ASLEEP IN THE INFINITE BOSOM OF DURATION (a).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is stated
in Book II., ch. viii., of Vishnu Purana: "By immortality is meant
existence to the end of the Kalpa;" and Wilson, the translator, remarks in
a footnote: "This, according to the Vedas, is all that is to be understood
of the immortality (or eternity) of the gods; they perish at the end of universal
dissolution (or Pralaya)." And Esoteric philosophy says: They
"perish" not, but are re-absorbed.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------
3. . . .
UNIVERSAL MIND WAS NOT, FOR THERE WERE NO AH-HI (celestial beings) TO CONTAIN
(hence to manifest) IT (a).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Dhyan-Chohans)
are the collective hosts of spiritual beings -- the Angelic Hosts of
Christianity, the Elohim 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.
-------
4. THE
(a) There are
seven "Paths" or "Ways" to the bliss of Non-Exist-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nippang in
** The
"12" Nidanas (in Tibetan Ten-brel chug-nyi) the chief causes of
existence, effects generated by a concatenation of causes produced (see
Comment. II).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Nidanas 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 Nidanas being based
on the four truths, a doctrine especially characteristic of the Hinayana
System.* 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
-- Devachan. The Hinayana System, or School of the "Little Vehicle,"
is of very ancient growth; while the Mahayana 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
Hinayana and Mahayana Schools (the latter, that of the "Great
Vehicle") both teach the same doctrine in reality. Yana, or Vehicle (in
Sanskrit, Vahan) is a mystic expression, both "vehicles" inculcating
that man may escape the sufferings of rebirths and even the false bliss of
Devachan, by obtaining Wisdom and Knowledge, which alone can dispel the Fruits
of Illusion and Ignorance.
Maya 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 color, 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 Dhyan-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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Wassilief
on Buddhism, pp. 97-950.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Maya.
-------
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 WHEEL* 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 mayavic
character. Darkness, then, is the eternal
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* That which is
called "wheel" is the symbolical expression for a world or globe,
which shows that the ancients were aware that our Earth was a revolving globe,
not a motionless square as some Christian Fathers taught. The "Great
Wheel" is the whole duration of our Cycle of being, or Maha Kalpa, i.e.,
the whole revolution of our special chain of seven planets or Spheres from
beginning to end; the "Small Wheels" meaning the Rounds, of which
there are also Seven.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
versa. 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 Brahma," 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. "Karana" -- eternal cause -- was alone.
To put it more plainly: Karana is alone during the "Nights of
Brahma." 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 Brahma -- the symbol
of the Universe. In esoteric parlance, Brahma 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 cosmicophysical
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. §: "Days and Nights of Brahma.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 PARANISHPANNA (b) (absolute perfection, Paranirvana,
which is Yong-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 Dhyan-Chohans, who correspond
to the Hebrew Elohim. It is the same hierarchy of Archangels to which St.
Michael, St. Gabriel, and others belong, in the Christian theogony. Only while
St. Michael, for instance, is allowed in dogmatic Latin theology to watch over
all the promontories and gulfs, in the Esoteric System, the Dhyanis watch
successively over one of the Rounds and the great Root-races of our planetary
chain. They are, moreover, said to send their Bhodisatvas, the human
correspondents of the Dhyani-Buddhas (of whom vide infra) 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 Irenaeus 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)
"Paranishpanna" is the absolute perfection to which all existences
attain at the close of a great period of activity, or Maha-Manvantara, and in
which they rest during the succeeding period of repose. In Tibetan it is called
Yong-Grub. Up to the day of the Yogacharya school the true nature of Paranirvana
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
Paranirvana, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Prasanga Madhyamika teaching,
whose dogmas have been known ever since it broke away from the purely esoteric
schools.* Our ideas, in short, on duration and time are all derived from our
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Dzungarian
"Mani Kumbum," the "Book of the 10,000 Precepts." Also
consult Wassilief's "Der Buddhismus," pp. 327 and 357, etc.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Maya 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 Paramartha lest one should become too easy a prey to
Samvriti -- is a philosophical axiom.*
-------
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 Nidana and Maya. 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In clearer
words: "One has to acquire true Self-Consciousness in order to understand
Samvriti, or the 'origin of delusion.'" Paramartha is the synonym of the
Sanskrit term Svasam-vedana, or "the reflection which analyses
itself." There is a difference in the interpretation of the meaning of
"Paramartha" between the Yogacharyas and the Madhyamikas, neither of
whom, however, explain the real and true esoteric sense of the expression. See
further, sloka No. 9.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 intrauterine 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 Maya 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" toward the essence of
things in which no Maya can have any influence. It is here that the teachings
of esoteric philosophy in relation to the Nidanas and the Four Truths become of
the greatest importance; but they are secret.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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"* OF THE DANGMA
(b).**
(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 Prabhavapyaya, "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., Vishnu Purana); for Jagad Yoni (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 Puranic Commentators explain it by Karana --
"Cause" -- but the Esoteric philosophy, by the ideal spirit of that
cause. It is, in its secondary stage, the Svabhavat 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 Vedantin views his Parabrahm and Mulaprakriti, the one under
two aspects. It seems indeed extraordinary to find great scholars speculating
on the possibility of the Vedanta, and the Uttara-Mimansa especially, having
been "evoked by the teachings of the Buddhists,"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In India it is
called "The Eye of Siva," but beyond the great range it is known as
"Dangma's opened eye" in esoteric phraseology.
** Dangma means
a purified soul, one who has become a Jivanmukta, the highest adept, or rather
a Mahatma so-called. His "opened eye" is the inner spiritual eye of
the seer, and the faculty which manifests through it is not clairvoyance as
ordinarily understood, i.e., the power of seeing at a distance, but rather the
faculty of spiritual intuition, through which direct and certain knowledge is
obtainable. This faculty is intimately connected with the "third eye,"
which mythological tradition ascribes to certain races of men. Fuller
explanations will be found in Book II.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Upanishads are made to rest.*
The above, according to the teachings of Sri Sankaracharya,** 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 Vedantin 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 WHEN THE ALAYA OF THE UNIVERSE (Soul as the basis of all, Anima
Mundi) WAS IN PARAMARTHA (a) (Absolute Being and Consciousness which are
Absolute Non-Being and Unconsciousness) AND THE GREAT WHEEL WAS ANUPADAKA (b)?
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And yet, one,
claiming authority, namely, Sir Monier Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at
Oxford, has just denied this fact. This is what he taught his audience, on June
the 4th, 1888, in his annual address before the Victoria Institute of Great
Britain: "Originally, Buddhism set its face against all solitary
asceticism . . . to attain sublime heights of knowledge. It had no occult, no
esoteric system of doctrine . . . withheld from ordinary men" (!!) And,
again: " . . . When Gautama Buddha began his career, the later and lower
form of Yoga seems to have been little known." And then, contradicting
himself, the learned lecturer forthwith informs his audience that "We
learn from Lalita-Vistara that various forms of bodily torture,
self-maceration, and austerity were common in Gautama's time." (!!) But
the lecturer seems quite unaware that this kind of torture and self-maceration
is precisely the lower form of Yoga, Hatha Yoga, which was "little
known" and yet so "common" in Gautama's time.
** It is even
argued that all the Six Darsanas (Schools of philosophy) show traces of
Buddha's influence, being either taken from Buddhism or due to Greek teaching!
(See Weber, Max Muller, etc.) We labour under the impression that Colebrooke,
"the highest authority" in such matters, had long ago settled the
question by showing, that "the Hindus were in this instance the teachers,
not the learners."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 48 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(a) Here we have
before us the subject of centuries of scholastic disputations. The two terms
"Alaya" and "Paramartha" have been the causes of dividing
schools and splitting the truth into more different aspects than any other
mystic terms. Alaya is literally the "Soul of the World" or Anima
Mundi, the "Over-Soul" of Emerson, and according to esoteric teaching
it changes periodically its nature. Alaya, though eternal and changeless in its
inner essence on the planes which are unreachable by either men or Cosmic Gods
(Dhyani Buddhas), alters during the active life-period with respect to the
lower planes, ours included. During that time not only the Dhyani-Buddhas are
one with Alaya in Soul and Essence, but even the man strong in the Yoga (mystic
meditation) "is able to merge his soul with it" (Aryasanga, the
Bumapa school). This is not Nirvana, but a condition next to it. Hence the
disagreement. Thus, while the Yogacharyas (of the Mahayana school) say that
Alaya is the personification of the Voidness, and yet Alaya (Nyingpo and Tsang
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 Paramartha: the Yogacharyas interpret
the term as that which is also dependent upon other things (paratantra); and
the Madhyamikas say that Paramartha is limited to Paranishpanna 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 Samvritisatya or relative truth; and the latter teach the existence
of Paramarthasatya, the "absolute truth."* "No Arhat, oh
mendicants, can reach absolute knowledge before he becomes one with Paranirvana.
Parikalpita and Paratantra are his two great enemies" (Aphorisms of the
Bodhisattvas). Parikalpita (in Tibetan Kun-ttag) 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Paramartha" is self-consciousness in Sanskrit, Svasamvedana, or the
"self-analysing reflection" -- from two words, parama (above
everything) and artha (comprehension), Satya meaning absolute true being, or
Esse. In Tibetan Paramarthasatya is Dondampaidenpa. The opposite of this
absolute reality, or actuality, is Samvritisatya -- the relative truth only --
"Samvriti" meaning "false conception" and being the origin
of illusion, Maya; in Tibetan Kundzabchi-denpa, "illusion-creating
appearance."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 49 ALAYA, THE UNIVERSAL SOUL.
Paratantra is
that, whatever it is, which exists only through a dependent or causal
connexion, 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 Mundi!" 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 "Alaya" has a double and even a triple meaning. In the
Yogacharya system of the contemplative Mahayana school, Alaya is both the
Universal Soul (Anima Mundi) and the Self of a progressed adept. "He who
is strong in the Yoga can introduce at will his Alaya by means of meditation
into the true Nature of Existence." The "Alaya has an absolute
eternal existence," says Aryasanga -- the rival of Nagarjuna.* In one
sense it is Pradhana; which
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Aryasanga was
a pre-Christian Adept and founder of a Buddhist esoteric school, though Csoma
di Koros places him, for some reasons of his own, in the seventh century
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 50 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
is explained in
Vishnu Purana as: "that which is the unevolved cause, is emphatically
called by the most eminent sages Pradhana, original base, which is subtile
Prakriti, viz., that which is eternal, and which at once is (or comprehends)
what is and what is not, or is mere process." "Prakriti,"
however, is an incorrect word, and Alaya would explain it better; for Prakriti
is not the "uncognizable Brahma."* 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 Mundi, 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 Clazomene was not its inventor
but only its propagator, as also was Plato. That which he called Mundane
Intelligence, the nous ([[nous]]), the principle that according to his views is
absolutely separated and free from matter and acts on design,** was called
Motion, the ONE LIFE, or Jivatma, ages before the year 500 B.C. in India. Only
the Aryan 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 Hartman in his pessimistic philosophy of the Unconscious, while it is,
perhaps, the closest approximation made by European speculation to the Hindu
Adwaitee Doctrines, similarly falls far short of the reality.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] A.D. There was another Aryasanga, who lived
during the first centuries of our era and the Hungarian scholar most probably
confuses the two.
* "The
indiscreet cause which is uniform, and both cause and effect, and which those
who are acquainted with first principles call Pradhana and Prakriti, is the
incognizable Brahma who was before all" (Vayu Purana); i.e., Brahma does
not put forth evolution itself or create, but only exhibits various aspects of
itself, one of which is Prakriti, an aspect of Pradhana.
** Finite
Self-consciousness, I mean. For how can the absolute attain it otherwise than
as simply an aspect, the highest of which known to us is human consciousness?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Parabrahm, 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 Dhyan
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?* A Vedantin 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 Purusha and Prakriti 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 Archaeus a discovery of Paracelsus nor of
his pupil Van Helmont; for it is again the same Archaeus or
"Father-Ether," -- the manifested basis
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
Schwegler's "Handbook of the History of Philosophy" in Sterling's
translation, p. 28.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Anupadaka, "parentless," or without progenitors, is a mystical
designation having several meanings in the philosophy. By this name celestial
beings, the Dhyan-Chohans or Dhyani-Buddhas, are generally meant. But as these
correspond mystically to the human Buddhas and Bodhisattwas, known as the
"Manushi (or human) Buddhas," the latter are also designated
"Anupadaka," once that their whole personality is merged in their
compound sixth and seventh principles -- or Atma-Buddhi, and that they have
become the "diamond-souled" (Vajra-sattvas),* the full Mahatmas. The
"Concealed Lord" (Sangbai Dag-po), "the one merged with the
absolute," can have no parents since he is Self-existent, and one with the
Universal Spirit (Svayambhu),** the Svabhavat in the highest aspect. The
mystery in the hierarchy of the Anupadaka is great, its apex being the
universal Spirit-Soul, and the lower rung the Manushi-Buddha; and even every
Soul-endowed man is an Anupadaka 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
Anupadaka." (See Part II., "Primordial Substance.")
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Vajra --
diamond-holder. In Tibetan Dorjesempa; sempa meaning the soul, its adamantine
quality referring to its indestructibility in the hereafter. The explanation
with regard to the "Anupadaka" given in the Kala Chakra, the first in
the Gyu(t) division of the Kanjur, is half esoteric. It has misled the
Orientalists into erroneous speculations with respect to the Dhyani-Buddhas and
their earthly correspondencies, the Manushi-Buddhas. The real tenet is hinted
at in a subsequent Volume, (see "The Mystery about Buddha"), and will
be more fully explained in its proper place.
** To quote
Hegel again, who with Schelling practically accepted the Pantheistic conception
of periodical Avatars (special incarnations of the World-Spirit in Man, as seen
in the case of all the great religious reformers) . . . . "the essence of
man is spirit . . . . only by stripping himself of his finiteness and
surrendering himself to pure self-consciousness does he attain the truth. Christ-man,
as man in whom the Unity of God-man (identity of the individual with the
Universal consciousness as taught by the Vedantins and some Adwaitees)
appeared, has, in his death and history generally, himself presented the
eternal history of Spirit -- a history which every man has to accomplish in
himself, in order to exist as Spirit." -- Philosophy of History. Sibree's
English translation, p. 340.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 53 THE STATE OF PARANIRVANA.
STANZA II.
COMMENTARY.
1. . . . . WHERE
WERE THE BUILDERS, THE LUMINOUS SONS OF MANVANTARIC DAWN (a)? . . . . IN THE
UNKNOWN DARKNESS IN THEIR AH-HI (Chohanic, Dhyani-Buddhic) PARANISHPANNA, THE
PRODUCERS OF FORM (rupa) FROM NO-FORM (arupa), THE ROOT OF THE WORLD -- THE
DEVAMATRI* AND SVABHAVAT, 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 Maha-Kalpa or "the (great)
Age of Brahma," 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)
Paranishpanna, remember, is the summum bonum, the Absolute, hence the same as
Paranirvana. Besides being the final state it is that condition of subjectivity
which has no relation to anything but the one absolute truth (Para-marthasatya)
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
Paranishpanna. But there is a great difference between conscious and
unconscious "being." The condition of Paranishpanna, without
Paramartha, the Self-analys-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
"Mother of
the Gods," Aditi, or Cosmic Space. In the Zohar, she is called Sephira the
Mother of the Sephiroth, and Shekinah in her primordial form, in abscondito.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 54 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ing
consciousness (Svasamvedana), 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,* and continuing in
full possession of Paramartha.
-------
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Hence
Non-being is "ABSOLUTE Being," in esoteric philosophy. In the tenets
of the latter even Adi-Budha (first or primeval wisdom) is, while manifested,
in one sense an illusion, Maya, since all the gods, including Brahma, have to
die at the end of the "Age of Brahma"; the abstraction called
Parabrahm alone -- whether we call it Ensoph, or Herbert Spencer's Unknowable
-- being "the One Absolute" Reality. The One secondless Existence is
ADWAITA, "Without a Second," and all the rest is Maya, teaches the
Adwaita philosophy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 55 THE ABSOLUTE KNOWS ITSELF NOT.
condition of the
Universe when it goes to sleep, or ceases to be, during the "Nights of
Brahma" -- 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 "Chaos, Theos,
Kosmos," in Part II.)
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 Brahma, or the Universe). Brahma (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 Purana, that treat of
"creation."
Therein Brahma
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 Vedanta and Nyaya, nimitta is the
efficient cause, as contrasted with upadana, the material cause, (and in the
Sankhya, pradhana implies the functions of both); in the Esoteric philosophy,
which reconciles all these systems, and the nearest exponent of which is the
Vedanta as expounded by the Advaita Vedantists, none but the upadana can be
speculated upon; that which is in the minds of the Vaishnavas (the Vasishta-dvaita)
as the ideal in contradistinction to the real -- or Parabrahm and Isvara -- can
find no room in published speculations, since
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Parabrahm), 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 MATRI-PADMA
(mother lotus) HAD NOT YET SWOLLEN (b).*
(a) 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 understood 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,** 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.*** (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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* An unpoetical
term, yet still very graphic. (See foot-note to Stanza III.)
** Even in
Christianity. (See Part II., "Primordial Substance and Divine
Thought.")
*** Gross,
"The Heathen Religion," p. 195.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 typifies 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 Ilus, 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 MAYA (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 Logos, or the male aspect of the
Anima Mundi, Alaya) -- 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
wouldest 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 59 ASTRAL LIGHT IS NOT THE ANIMA MUNDI.
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 Kabalists:
"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.* 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 Mundi. 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 Kabala
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 Logoi -- Viraj,
or Brahma; 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 (Kabalistic)
value, he writes that in Genesis, ch. iv., v. 1, "It is called the 'Man
even Jehovah'
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A Vedantin of
the Visishtadwaita philosophy would say that, though the only independent
Reality, Parabrahmam is inseparable from his trinity. That He is three,
"Parabrahmam, Chit, and Achit," the last two being dependent
realities unable to exist separately; or, to make it clearer, Parabrahmam is
the SUBSTANCE -- changeless, eternal, and incognizable -- and Chit (Atma), and
Achit (Anatma) are its qualities, as form and colour are the qualities of any
object. The two are the garment, or body, or rather attribute (Sarira) of
Parabrahmam. But an Occultist would find much to say against this claim, and so
would the Adwaitee Vedantin.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 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 Jod, He, Vau, He, or Jehovah. . . . The expansion of 565
into 56.5 x 10 is purposed to show the emanation of the male (Jod) from the
female (Eva) 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 or Jod-he-vau-he is androgyne, or both
male and female. Above, the Son is the whole KOSMOS; below, he is MANKIND. The
triad or triangle becomes Tetraktis, 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 Kabalists have it, the
"Ancient of Days," descending on Adam Kadmon whom he uses as his
vehicle to manifest through, gets transformed into Tetragrammaton. It is now in
the "Lap of Maya," the Great Illusion, and between itself and the
Reality has the Astral Light, the great Deceiver of man's limited senses, unless
Knowledge through Paramarthasatya 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, SVABHAVAT, AND SVABHAVAT 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.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 61 DIVINE THOUGHT, DIVINE THINKERS.
Svabhavat, the
"Plastic Essence" that fills the Universe, is the root of all things.
Svabhavat is, so to say, the Buddhistic concrete aspect of the abstraction
called in Hindu philosophy Mulaprakriti. It is the body of the Soul, and that
which Ether would be to Akasa, the latter being the informing principle of the
former. Chinese mystics have made of it the synonym of "being." In
the Ekasloka-Shastra of Nagarjuna (the Lung-shu of China) called by the Chinese
the Yih-shu-lu-kia-lun, it is said that the original word of Yeu 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 Svabhavat, 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.
Brahma, 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Khandakala). One is the abstraction or noumenon of infinite
time (Kala); 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 Pradhana (undifferentiated
substance, or the periodical aspect of Mulaprakriti, the root of Nature), which
(Pradhana) is called Maya, the Illusion. In this respect, I believe, esoteric
teaching differs from the Vedantin doctrines of both the Adwaita and the
Visishtadwaita schools. For it says that, while Mulaprakriti, the noumenon, is
self-existing and without any origin -- is, in short, parentless, Anupadaka (as
one with Brahmam) -- Prakriti, its phenomenon, is periodical and no better than
a phantasm of the former, so Mahat, with the Occultists, the first-born of
Gnana (or gnosis) knowledge, wisdom or the Logos -- is a phantasm reflected
from the Absolute NIRGUNA (Parabrahm, the one reality, "devoid of
attributes and qualities"; see Upanishads); while with some Vedantins
Mahat is a manifestation of Prakriti, 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 Brahma." 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 63 THE UNIVERSE, A FLITTING SHADOW.
of Maya."
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 "AEon," 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 Brahma," such a
"Day" consisting of 1,000 aggregates of four ages, or 1,000
"Great Ages," Mahayugas. 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"); 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
Dhyan-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).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Brahminical Narayana (the mover on the Waters), who is the personification of
the eternal Breath of the unconscious All (or Parabrahm) of the Eastern
Occultists. The Waters of Life, or Chaos -- 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.
2. [[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 chaos. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Kabalists, "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.") 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" -- Chaos 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 66 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
stated in Vishnu
Purana, where elements are translated "Envelopes" and a secret one is
added: "Aham-kara" (see Wilson's Vishnu Purana, Book I., p. 40). The
original text has no "Aham-kara;" 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 (Hiranyagarbha), WHICH IN
ITSELF IS THREE (the triple hypostases of Brahma, or Vishnu, the three
"Avasthas"), CURDLES AND SPREADS IN MILK-WHITE CURDS THROUGHOUT THE
DEPTHS OF MOTHER, THE ROOT THAT GROWS IN THE OCEAN OF LIFE (b).
The use of
geometrical figures and the frequent allusions to figures in all ancient
scriptures (see Puranas, Egyptian papyri, the "Book of the Dead" and
even the Bible) must be explained. In the "Book of Dzyan," as in the Kabala,
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Number* 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,** every one of them having some definite
Occult meaning, extracted from the allegorical "churning of the
ocean" by the Hindu gods. Besides Amrita, the water of life or
immortality, "Surabhi" 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 "Satapatha Brahmana" it is stated that the churning of the
"Ocean of Milk" took place in the Satya Yug, the first age which
immediately followed the "Deluge." As, however, neither the Rig-Veda
nor
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Number, truly;
but never MOTION. It is Motion which begets the Logos, the Word, in occultism.
** The
"Fourteen precious things." The narrative or allegory is found in the
Satapatha Brahmana and others. The Japanese Secret Science of the Buddhist
Mystics, the Yamabooshi, has "seven precious things." We will speak
of them, hereafter.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 68 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Manu -- 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 Noah, 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 Revelations chap. xii.). The Brahmanas, 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 Parabrahmam; 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),*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The original
for Understanding is Sattva, which Sankara (acharya) renders antahkarana.
"Refined," he says, "by sacrifices and other sanctifying
operations." In the Katha, at p. 148, Sattva is said by Sankara to mean
buddhi -- a common use of the word. ("The BHAGAVATGITA with The
Sanatsugatiya and The Anugita," trans- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 69 THE BLOSSOM OF THE ROOT OF LIFE.
eternal (Nitya)
unconditioned reality or SAT (Satya), whether we call it Parabrahmam or
Mulaprakriti, 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 Dhyani-Buddhas, is, during the periodical sleep of
the Universe, of the ultimate tenuity conceivable to the eye of the perfect
Bodhisatva -- 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 (Amrita)* 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, 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 instru-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] lated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A.; edited
by Max Muller.) Whatever meaning various schools may give the term, Sattva is
the name given among Occult students of the Aryasanga School to the dual Monad
or Atma-buddhi, and Atma-buddhi on this plane corresponds to Parabrahm and
Mulaprakriti on the higher plane.
* Amrita is
"immortality."
** See
Commentary No. 1 to this Stanza.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 70 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ments 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 Father* and Mother, may be taken here to mean the divine Ray and
Chaos. "Chaos, from this union with Spirit obtaining sense, shone with
pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos (the first-born light),"
says a fragment of Hermas. Damascius calls it Dis in "Theogony" --
"The disposer of all things." (See Cory's "Ancient
Fragments," p. 314.)
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 Maya.
Even in the
mind-baffling and science-harassing Genesis, light is created out of darkness
"and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (ch. i. v. 2.) -- and
not vice versa. "In him (in darkness) was life; and the life was the light
of men" (John i. 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. Demon est Deus inversus.
The devil is now called Darkness by the Church, whereas, in the Bible he is
called the "Son of God" (see Job), the bright star of the early
morning, Lucifer (see Isaiah). There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in
the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Chaos, was
called Lux (Lucifer), the "Luminous Son of the Morning," or man-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Kwan-Shai-Yin." The real name from the text cannot be given.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 71 LIGHT EMERGES FROM DARKNESS.
vantaric Dawn.
He was transformed by the Church into Lucifer or Satan, because he is higher
and older than Jehovah, and had to be sacrificed to the new dogma. (See Book
II.)
---------
STANZA III. --
Continued.
7. BEHOLD, OH
LANOO!** 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
TRIDASA*** (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).
"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 Judaeus. He is
called the "Blazing Dragon of Wisdom,"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
** Lanoo is a
student, a chela who studies practical Esotericism.
***
"Tri-dasa," or three times ten (30), alludes to the Vedic deities, in
round numbers, or more accurately 33 -- a sacred number. They are the 12
Adityas, the 8 Vasus, the 11 Rudras, and 2 Aswins -- the twin sons of the Sun
and the Sky. This is the root-number of the Hindu Pantheon, which enumerates 33
crores or over three hundred millions of gods and goddesses.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Maya."
Kwan-Shai-Yin is
identical with, and an equivalent of the Sanskrit Avalokiteshwara, and as such
he is an androgynous deity, like the Tetragrammaton and all the Logoi* of
antiquity. It is only by some sects in China that he is anthropomorphized and
represented with female attributes,** when, under his female aspect, he becomes
Kwan-Yin, the goddess of mercy, called the "Divine Voice."*** The
latter is the patron deity of Thibet and of the island of Puto in China, where
both deities have a number of monasteries.**** (See Part II. Kwan-Shai-Yin and
Kwan-yin.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Hence all the
higher gods of antiquity are all "Sons of the Mother" before they
become those of the "Father." The Logoi, like Jupiter or Zeus, Son of
Kronos-Saturn, "Infinite Time" (or Kala), in their origin were
represented as male-female. Zeus is said to be the "beautiful
Virgin," and Venus is made bearded. Apollo is originally bisexual, so is
Brahma-Vach in Manu and the Puranas. Osiris is interchangeable with Isis, and Horus
is of both sexes. Finally St. John's vision in Revelation, that of the Logos,
who is now connected with Jesus -- is hermaphrodite, for he is described as
having female breasts. So is the Tetragrammaton = Jehovah. But there are two
Avalokiteshwaras in Esotericism; the first and the second Logos.
** No religious
symbol can escape profanation and even derision in our days of politics and
Science. In Southern India the writer has seen a converted native making pujah
with offerings before a statue of Jesus clad in woman's clothes and with a ring
in his nose. When asking the meaning of the masquerade we were answered that it
was Jesu-Maria blended in one, and that it was done by the permission of the
Padri, as the zealous convert had no money to purchase two statues or
"idols" as they, very properly, were called by a witness -- another
but a non-converted Hindu. Blasphemous this will appear to a dogmatic
Christian, but the Theosophist and the Occultist must award the palm of logic
to the converted Hindu. The esoteric Christos in the gnosis is, of course,
sexless, but in exoteric theology he is male and female.
*** The Gnostic
Sophia, "Wisdom" who is "the Mother" of the Ogdoad (Aditi,
in a certain sense, with her eight sons), is the Holy Ghost and the Creator of
all, as in the ancient systems. The "father" is a far later
invention. The earliest manifested Logos was female everywhere -- the mother of
the seven planetary powers.
**** See
"Chinese Buddhism," by the Rev. J. C. Edkins, who always gives
correct facts, although his conclusions are very frequently erroneous.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* Yet they all
made a difference between the good and the bad Serpent (the Astral Light of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Like the logoi
and the Hierarchies of Powers, however, the "Serpents" have to be
distinguished one from the other. Sesha or Ananta, "the couch of
Vishnu," is an allegorical abstraction, symbolizing infinite Time in
Space, which contains the germ and throws off periodically the efflorescence of
this germ, the manifested Universe; whereas, the gnostic Ophis contained the
same triple symbolism in its seven vowels as the One, Three and Seven-syllabled
Oeaohoo of the Archaic doctrine; i.e., the One Unmanifested Logos, the Second
manifested, the triangle concreting into the Quaternary or Tetragrammaton, and
the rays of the latter on the material plane.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 Sarparajni.) The Aitareya Brahmana calls the Earth Sarparajni,
"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.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Astral
Light, or the AEther, of the ancient pagans (for the name of Astral Light is
quite modern) is Spirit-Matter. Beginning with the pure spiritual plane, it
becomes grosser as it descends until it becomes the Maya or the tempting and
deceitful serpent on our plane.
** By "God,
the Father," the seventh principle in Man and Kosmos are here
unmistakeably meant, this principle being inseparable in its Esse and Nature
from the seventh Cosmic principle. In one sense it is the Logos of the Greeks
and the Avalokiteswara of the esoteric Buddhists.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 75 NOUMENAL AND PHENOMENAL LIGHT.
The celestial
Ocean, the 'Ether . . . . 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 Brahma or Siva, appears as
Vishnu, says Sankhya Sara (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" (Anugita, 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 Kumara in Vishnu Purana) 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.* All the Kabalists and Occultists, Eastern and Western, recognise (a)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
Egyptian as in the Indian theogony there was a concealed deity, the ONE, and
the creative, androgynous god. Thus Shoo is the god of creation and Osiris is,
in his original primary form, the "god whose name is unknown." (See
Mariette's Abydos II., p. 63, and Vol. III., pp. 413, 414, No. 1122.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 76 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the identity of
"Father-Mother" with primordial AEther or Akasa, (Astral Light)*; 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,** Ob,
and Aour, active and passive, positive and negative, like day and night: it is
the first light in Creation" (Eliphas Levi'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
[[hebrew]], 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 subtile from the solid . . . that
which ascends from earth to heaven and descends again from heaven to earth. It
(the subtile light), is the strong force of every force, for it conquers every
subtile 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See next note.
** Od is the pure
life-giving Light, or magnetic fluid; Ob the messenger of death used by the
sorcerers, the nefarious evil fluid; Aour is the synthesis of the two, Astral
Light proper. Can the Philologists tell why Od -- a term used by Reichenbach to
denominate the vital fluid -- is also a Tibetan word meaning light, brightness,
radiancy? It equally means "Sky" in an occult sense. Whence the root
of the word? But Akasa is not quite Ether, but far higher than that, as will be
shown.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma) 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
[[hebrew]], Hoa, Atah, Ani; He, Thou, I; are used to symbolize the ideas of
Macroprosopus and Microprosopus in the Hebrew Qabalah. Hoa, "He," is
applied to the hidden and concealed Macroprosopus; Atah, "Thou," to
Microprosopus; and Ani, "I," to the latter when He is represented as
speaking. (See Lesser Holy Assembly, 204 et seq.) It is to be noted that each
of these names consists of three letters, of which the letter Aleph [[hebrew]],
A, forms the conclusion of the first word Hoa, and the commencement of Atah and
Ani, as if it were the connecting link between them. But [[hebrew]] is the
symbol of the Unity and consequently of the unvarying Idea of the Divine
operating through all these. But behind the [[hebrew]] in the name Hoa are the
letters [[hebrew]] and [[hebrew]], 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, Hoa Atah Ani, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 Purana) 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 Kala-Hansa being the
supposed vehicle of Brahma-Prajapati, in the exoteric texts and translations of
the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is again
similar to the doctrine of Fichte and German Pantheists. The former reveres
Jesus as the great teacher who inculcated the unity of the spirit of man with
the God-Spirit (the Adwaita doctrine) or universal Principle. It is difficult
to find a single speculation in Western metaphysics which has not been
anticipated by Archaic Eastern philosophy. From Kant to Herbert Spencer, it is
all a more or less distorted echo of the Dwaita, Adwaita, and Vedantic
doctrines generally.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 80 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Orientalists, it
is quite a mistake. Brahma, the neuter, is called by them Kala-Hansa and
Brahma, 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 Brahma, 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 Brahma, then, who is Kala-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,* 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.** (See Part II. "The Hidden Deity and its Symbols and
Glyphs.") Appearing with every Manvantara as Narayan, or Swayambhuva (the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whether the
genus of the bird be cygnus, anser, or pelecanus, it is no matter, as it is an
aquatic bird floating or moving on the waters like the Spirit, and then issuing
from those waters to give birth to other beings. The true significance of the
symbol of the Eighteenth Degree of the Rose-Croix is precisely this, though
poetised later on into the motherly feeling of the Pelican rending its bosom to
feed its seven little ones with its blood.
** The reason
why Moses forbids eating the pelican and swan, classing the two among the
unclean fowls, and permits eating "bald locusts, beetles, and the
grasshopper after his kind" (Leviticus xi. and Deuteronomy xiv.) is a
purely physiological one, and has to do with mystic symbology only in so far as
the word "unclean," like every other word, ought not to be read and
understood literally, as it is esoteric like all the [[Footnote continued on
next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 81 PRIMEVAL DIFFERENTIATIONS.
Self-Existent),
and penetrating into the Mundane Egg, it emerges from it at the end of the
divine incubation as Brahma or Prajapati, 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 --
Brahma-vach (the female) and Brahma-Viraj (the male), that the Prajapati
becomes the male Brahma.
-------
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,"** 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. . . .
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] rest, and may as well mean "holy" as
not. It is a blind, very suggestive in connection with certain superstitions --
e.g., that of the Russian people who will not use the pigeon for food; not
because it is "unclean," but because the "Holy Ghost" is
credited with having appeared under the form of a Dove.
** Not the
Mediaeval Alchemists, but the Magi and Fire-Worshippers, from whom the
Rosicrucians or the Philosophers per ignem, the successors of the theurgists
borrowed all their ideas concerning Fire, as a mystic and divine element.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,*
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.** These are both electro-positive and electro-negative.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* [[para]],
"beyond," outside.
** Each of these
and many more are probably the missing links of chemistry. They are known by
other names in Alchemy and to the Occultists who practise in phenomenal powers.
It is by combining and recombining in a certain way (or dissociating) the
"Elements" by means of astral fire that the greatest phenomena are
produced.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 SWABHAVAT (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). Brahma, 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 Brahma the "Creator" is, as a term, derived
from the root brih, to increase or expand. Brahma "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."
-------
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)
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (nebulae) 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.
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 Swabhavat, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
SVABHAVAT 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.* . . .
"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.")
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is said
in the sense that the flame from a fire is endless, and that the lights of the
whole Universe could be lit at one simple rush-light without diminishing its
flame.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Bhagavatgita (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. Sankaracharya the greatest of the Esoteric
masters of India, says that fire means a deity which presides over Time (kala).
The able translator of Bhagavatgita, Kashinath 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther in its purest form,
and hence is not regarded as matter, but it is the unity of Aether -- 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 or 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 Brahmana says in Anugita:
"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 Brahmana who speaks."
("Sacred Books of the East," ed. by Max Muller, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma
(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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
(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 Vaidhatra (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 Brahma 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 Brahma separating into two and recreating in one of his halves
(the female Vach) himself as Viraj, 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 Brahma-Prajapati), who answers to
the numbers 7, and 14, and 21 respectively. The Prajapati are, like the
Sephiroth, only seven, including the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The 4,
represented in the Occult numerals by the Tetraktis, the Sacred or Perfect
Square, is a Sacred Number with the mystics of every nation and race. It has
one and the same significance in Brahmanism, Buddhism, the Kabala and in the
Egyptian, Chaldean and other numerical systems.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 90 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
synthetic
Sephira of the triad from which they spring. Thus from Hiranyagarbha or
Prajapati, 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 Sarvatma,
the "Super-Soul." "The seven Lords of Being lie concealed in
Sarvatma 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 Mahabharata the Prajapati are 21 in number, or ten, six,
and five (1065), thrice seven.*
(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.** 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 (pi), as this
ratio is called -- the symbol being always used in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the Kabala
the same numbers are a value of Jehovah, viz., 1065, since the numerical values
of the three letters which compose his name -- Jod, Vau and twice He -- are
respectively 10 ( [[hebrew]]), 6 ( [[hebrew]]) and 5 ( [[hebrew]]); or again
thrice seven, 21. "Ten is the Mother of the Soul, for Life and Light are
therein united," says Hermes. "For number one is born of the Spirit
and the number ten from matter (chaos, feminine); the unity has made the ten,
the ten the unity" (Book of the Keys). By the means of the Temura, the
anagrammatical method of the Kabala, and the knowledge of 1065 (21), a
universal science may be obtained regarding Kosmos and its mysteries"
(Rabbi Yogel). The Rabbis regard the numbers 10, 6, and 5 as the most sacred of
all.
** The reader
may be told that an American Kabalist has now discovered the same number for
the Elohim. It came to the Jews from Chaldaea. See "Hebrew Metrology"
in the Masonic Review, July, 1885, McMillan Lodge, No. 141.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 91 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTIONS.
mathematical
formulae 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 [[hebrew]] (a) is 1 : [[hebrew]] (l) is 3 (or 30); [[hebrew]]
(h) is 5; [[hebrew]] (i) 1 for 10; and [[hebrew]] (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." Prajapati is
called the first procreating male, and "his Mother's husband."* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We find the
same expression in Egypt. Mout signifies, for one thing, "Mother,"
and shows the character assigned to her in the triad of that country. "She
was no less the mother than the wife of Ammon, one of the principle titles of
the god being "the husband of his mother." The goddess Mout, or Mut,
is addressed as "our lady," the "queen of Heaven" and of
"the Earth," thus "sharing these titles with the other mother
goddesses, Isis, Hathor, etc." (Maspero).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,*
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is the
literal translation from the IXth and Xth Sections: "Ten numbers without
what? One: the spirit of the living God . . . . who liveth in eternities! Voice
and Spirit and Word, and this is the Holy Spirit. Two: Spirit out of Spirit. He
designed and hewed therewith twenty-two letters of foundation, three Mothers
and seven double and Twelve single, and one spirit out of them. Three: Water
out of spirit; he designed and hewed with them the barren and the void, mud and
earth. He designed them as a flowerbed, hewed them as a wall, covered them as a
paving. Four: Fire out of water. He designed and hewed therewith the throne of
glory and the wheels, and the seraphim and the holy animals and the ministering
angels, and of the three He founded his dwelling, as it is said, He makes his
angels spirits and his servants fiery flames!" Which words "founded
his dwelling" show clearly that in the Kabala, as in India, the Deity was
considered as the Universe, and was not, in his origin, the extra-cosmic God he
is now.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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).*
(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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The literal signification
of the word is, among the Eastern Occultists of the North, a circular wind,
whirlwind; but in this instance, it is a term to denote the ceaseless and
eternal Cosmic Motion; or rather the Force that moves it, which Force is
tacitly accepted as the Deity but never named. It is the eternal Karana, the
ever-acting Cause.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Vach, 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 Anugita a
conversation is given (ch. vi., 15) between a Brahmana and his wife, on the
origin of Speech and its occult properties.* The wife asks how Speech came into
existence, and which was prior to the other, Speech or Mind. The Brahmana tells
her that the Apana (inspirational breath) becoming lord, changes that
intelligence, which does not understand Speech or Words, into the state of
Apana, 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 Prajapati, according to the
commentator Arjuna Misra), and asked him to destroy their doubts and decide
which of them preceded and was superior to the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Anugita forms
part of the Asvamedha Parvan of the "Mahabharata." The translator of
the Bhagavatgita, edited by Max Muller, regards it as a continuation of the
Bhagavatgita. Its original is one of the oldest Upanishads.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Vach, the goddess also of secret learning or Esoteric
Wisdom), "verily, dwelt always between the Prana and the Apana. But O
noble one! going with the Apana wind (vital air), though impelled, without the
Prana (expirational breath), she ran up to Prajapati (Brahma), saying, 'Be
pleased, O venerable sir!' Then the Prana 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 Prana, and which then goes (is transformed) into Apana, and then
becoming assimilated with the Udana (physical organs of Speech) . . . then
finally dwells in the Samana ('at the navel in the form of sound, as the
material cause of all words,' says Arjuna 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 Anugita explains, says Arjuna Misra, Pranayama, 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 Hatha 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Pratyahara (the restraint and regulation of the senses,
Pranayama being that of the "vital winds" or breath). The Brahmana
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."*
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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This shows the
modern metaphysicians, added to all past and present Haegels, Berkeleys,
Schopenhauers, Hartmanns, Herbert Spencers, and even the modern Hylo-Idealists
to boot, no better than the pale copyists of hoary antiquity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 Commentary** 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."***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is the
knowledge of this law that permits and helps the Arhat to perform his Siddhis,
or various phenomena, such as disintegration of matter, the transport of
objects from one place to another.
** These are
ancient Commentaries attached with modern Glossaries to the Stanzas, as the
Commentaries in their symbolical language are usually as difficult to
understand as the Stanzas themselves.
*** In a
polemical scientific work, "The Modern Genesis," the author, the Rev.
W. B. Slaughter, criticising the position assumed by the astronomers, asks:--
"It is to be regretted that the advocates of this (nebular) theory have
not entered more largely into the discussion of it (the beginning of rotation).
No one condescends to give us the rationale of it. How does the process of
cooling and contracting the mass impart to it a rotatory motion?" The
question is amply treated in the Addendum. It is not materialistic science that
can ever solve it. "Motion is eternal in the unmanifested, and periodical
in the manifest," says an Occult teaching. It is "when heat caused
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 98 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA IV. --
Continued.
5. . . . . .
WHICH IS:----
"DARKNESS,"
THE BOUNDLESS OR THE NO-NUMBER, ADI-NIDANA SVABHAVAT: THE [[diagram]] (for x,
unknown quantity):
I. THE
ADI-SANAT, THE NUMBER, FOR HE IS ONE (a).
II. THE VOICE OF
THE WORD, SVABHAVAT, THE NUMBERS, FOR HE IS ONE AND NINE.*
III. THE
"FORMLESS SQUARE." (Arupa.) (b).
AND THESE THREE
ENCLOSED WITHIN THE [[diagram]] (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 (Bhaskara) (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 Brahma the Creator, called also Sanat among his other names and
titles.
Svabhavat 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] by the descent of FLAME into primordial matter
causes its particles to move, which motion becomes Whirlwind." A drop of
liquid assumes a spheroidal form owing to its atoms moving around themselves in
their ultimate, unresolvable, and noumenal essence; unresolvable for physical
science, at any rate.
* Which makes
ten, or the perfect number applied to the "Creator," the name given
to the totality of the Creators blended by the Monotheists into One, as the
"Elohim," Adam Kadmon or Sephira -- the Crown -- are the androgyne
synthesis of the 10 Sephiroth, who stand for the symbol of the manifested
Universe in the popularised Kabala. The esoteric Kabalists, however, following
the Eastern Occultists, divide the upper Sephirothal triangle from the rest (or
Sephira, Chochmah and Binah), which leaves seven Sephiroth. As for Svabhavat,
the Orientalists explain the term as meaning the Universal plastic matter
diffused through Space, with, perhaps, half an eye to the Ether of Science. But
the Occultists identify it with "FATHER-MOTHER" on the mystic plane.
(Vide supra.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 99 THE OGDOAD AND HEPTAD.
Material
Worlds"; the Scintillae 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) [[diagram]]
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 Spirit* (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 Muller, "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,
Martanda," 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.** But esoterically and theologically,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "In union
with the Spirit and the Voice," referring to the Abstract Thought and
concrete Voice, or the manifestation thereof, the effect of the Cause. Adam
Kadmon or Tetragrammaton is the Logos in the Kabala; therefore this triad
answers in the latter to the highest triangle of Kether, Chochmah and Binah,
the last a female potency and at the same time the male Jehovah, as partaking
of the nature of Chochmah, or the male Wisdom.
** The Secret
Doctrine teaches that the Sun is a central Star and not a planet. Yet the
Ancients knew of and worshipped seven great gods, excluding the Sun and Earth.
Which was that "Mystery God" they set apart? Of course not Uranus,
discovered only by Herschel in 1781. But could it not be known by another name?
Says the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Martanda) 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.* 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.** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] author of "Maconnerie Occulte":--
"Occult Sciences having discovered through astronomical calculations that
the number of the planets must be seven, the ancients were led to introduce the
Sun into the scale of the celestial harmonies, and make him occupy the vacant
place. Thus, every time they perceived an influence that pertained to none of
the six planets known, they attributed it to the Sun. The error only seems
important, but was not so in practical results, if the ancient astrologers
replaced Uranus by the Sun, which is a central Star relatively motionless,
turning only on its axis and regulating time and measure; and which cannot be
turned aside from its true functions." . . . . . . The nomenclature of the
days of the week is thus faulty. "The Sun-Day ought to be Uranus-day
(Urani dies, Urandi)," adds the learned writer, Ragon.
* Planetary
System.
** "The Sun
rotates on his axis always in the same direction in which the planets revolve
in their respective orbits," astronomy teaches us.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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-Brahmana of Haug also; p. i) teach "that the fire
verily is all the deities." (Narada in Anugita).
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 matter* -- 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, Manas** is the Upadhi of Buddhi.***
(d) 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This Essence
of Cometary matter, Occult Science teaches, is totally different from any of
the chemical or physical characteristics with which modern science is
acquainted. It is homogeneous in its primitive form beyond the Solar Systems,
and differentiates entirely once it crosses the boundaries of our Earth's
region, vitiated by the atmospheres of the planets and the already compound
matter of the interplanetary stuff, heterogeneous only in our manifested world.
** Manas -- the
Mind-Principle, or the human Soul.
*** Buddhi --
the divine Soul.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.**
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 Martanda and
his feeding on the "sweat and refuse" of "Mother Space."
What could affect Neptune,*** Saturn and Jupiter,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Very similar
ideas in Mr. W. Mattieu Williams' "The Fuel of the Sun;" in Dr. C.
William Siemens' "On the Conservation of Solar Energy" (Nature, XXV.,
p. 440-444, March 9, 1882); and also in Dr. P. Martin Duncan's "Address of
the President of the Geological Society," London, May, 1877.
** See
"Comparative Geology," by Alexander Winchell, LL.D., p. 56.
*** When we
speak of Neptune it is not as an Occultist but as a European. The true Eastern
Occultist will maintain that, whereas there are many yet undiscovered planets
in our system, Neptune does not belong to it, his apparent connection with our
sun and the influence of the latter upon Neptune notwithstanding. This
connection is mayavic, imaginary, they say.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Bhaskara
(light-making), because they (the planets) were all comets and suns in their
origin. They evolve into Manvantaric life from primaeval Chaos (now the
noumenon of irresolvable nebulae) 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 Brahma," 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 104 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"Scribes."*
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."** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These are the
four "Immortals" which are mentioned in Atharva Veda as the
"Watchers" or Guardians of the four quarters of the sky (see ch.
lxxvi., 1-4, et seq.).
**
"Conflict between Religion and Science." -- Draper, pp. 132 and 133.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
** Les Mysteres
de l'Horoscope, p. XI.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 106 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
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 (a).
COMMENTARY.
(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 Puranic phrase about
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 107 NO MAN -- NO GOD.
Brahma 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,* RUNS CIRCULAR ERRANDS. HE IS THE
STEED, AND
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The difference
between the "Builders," the Planetary Spirits, and the Lipika must
not be lost sight of. (See Nos. 5 and 6 of this Commentary.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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, Amitabha is the
Dhyani-Buddha of Gautama Sakyamuni, manifesting through him whenever this great
Soul incarnates on earth as He did in Tzon-kha-pa.** As the synthesis of the
seven Dhyani-Buddhas, Avalokiteswara was the first Buddha (the Logos), so
Amitabha is the inner "God" of Gautama, who, in China, is called
Amita(-Buddha). They are, as Mr. Rhys Davids
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See A. P.
Sinnett's "Esoteric Buddhism," 5th annotated edition, pp. 171-173.
** The first and
greatest Reformer who founded the "Yellow-Caps," Gyalugpas. He was
born in the year 1355 A.D. in Amdo, and was the Avatar of Amitabha, the
celestial name of Gautama Buddha.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Gaea, Eros: answering to the Kabalistic En-Soph (for Chaos is
SPACE, [[chaino]], "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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Ether and Hemera, the light of the superior and the
light of the inferior or terrestrial regions. Darkness generates light. See in
the Puranas Brahma's "Will" or desire to create; and in the
Phoenician Cosmogony of Sanchoniathon the doctrine that Desire, [[pothos]], 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 Brahma 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 Avalokiteshwara (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.* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Mr. Subba Row
seems to identify him with, and to call him, the LOGOS. (See his four lectures
on the "Bhagavadgita" in the Theosophist.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* and the preserving fourth
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In 1882 the
President of the Theosophical Society, Col. Olcott, was taken to task for
asserting in one of his lectures that Electricity is matter. Such,
nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine. "Force,"
"Energy," may be a better name for it, so long as European Science
knows so little about its true nature; yet matter it is, as much as Ether is
matter, since it is as atomic, though several removes from the latter. It seems
ridiculous to argue that because a thing is imponderable to Science, therefore
it cannot be called matter. Electricity is "immaterial" in the sense
that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet it may be
-- and Occultism says it is -- atomic; therefore it is matter. But even
supposing it were unscientific to speak of it in such terms, once Electricity
is called in Science a source of Energy, Energy simply, and a Force -- where is
that Force or that Energy which can be thought of without thinking of matter?
Maxwell, a mathematician and one of the greatest authorities upon Electricity
and its phenomena, said, years ago, that Electricity was matter, not motion
merely. "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." (Helmholtz, Faraday Lecture, 1881). We will go
further than that, and assert that Electricity is not only Substance but that
it is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of
the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world according to the eternal
Law of KARMA. (See the Addendum to this Book.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
Aurnavabha 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is well
known that sand, when placed on a metal plate in vibration assumes a series of
regular curved figures of various descriptions. Can Science give a complete
explanation of this fact?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 113 THE CORRELATION OF THE GODS.
The meaning is
plain.* 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 Ormazd** -- and the
latter
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The numbers 3,
5, and 7 are prominent in speculative masonry, as shown in "Isis." A
mason writes:-- "There are the 3, 5, and 7 steps to show a circular walk.
The three faces of 3, 3; 5, 3; and 7, 3; etc., etc. Sometimes it comes in this
form -- 753/2 = 376.5 and 7635/2 = 3817.5 and the ratio of 20612/6561 feet for
cubit measure gives the Great Pyramid measures," etc., etc. Three, five
and seven are mystical numbers, and the last and the first are as greatly
honoured by Masons as by the Parsis -- the triangle being a symbol of Deity
everywhere. (See the Masonic Cyclopedia, and "Pythagorean Triangle,"
Oliver.) As a matter of course, doctors of divinity (Cassel, for instance) show
the Zohar explaining and supporting the Christian trinity (!). It is the
latter, however, that had its origin from the [[diagram]] of the Heathen, in
the Archaic Occultism and Symbology. The three strides relate metaphysically to
the descent of Spirit into matter, of the Logos falling as a ray into the
Spirit, then into the Soul, and finally into the human physical form of man, in
which it becomes LIFE.
** Ormazd is the
Logos, the "First Born" and the Sun.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 114 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
is identical
with Kronos, in his AEolian 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 (4) of Stanza IV. the reader will
understand why, while the trans-Himalayan Chackra has inscribed within it
[[diagram]] | [[diagram]] | [[diagram]] (triangle, first line, cube second
line, and a pentacle with a dot in the centre thus: [[diagram]], and some other
variations), the Kabalistic circle of the Elohim reveals, when the letters of
the word [[hebrew]] (Alhim or Elohim) are numerically read, the famous numerals
13514, or by anagram 31415 -- the astronomical (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 [[hebrew with numbers above]] or otz -- "the Tree of the
Garden of Eden,"* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This was the
symbol of the "Holy of Holies," the 3 and the 4 of sexual separation.
Nearly every one of the 22 Hebrew letters are merely phallic symbols. Of the
two letters -- as shown above -- one, the ayin, is a negative female letter,
symbolically an eye; the other a male letter, tza, a fish-hook or a dart.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 115 MANIFESTED SYMBOLS.
and astronomical
truths.* 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
Purana 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We are told by
a Kabalist, who in a work not yet published contrasts the Kabala and Zohar with
Aryan Esotericism, that "The Hebrew clear, short, terse and exact modes
far and beyond measure surpass the toddling word-talk of the Hindus -- just as
by parallelisms the Psalmist says, 'My mouth speaks with my tongue, I know not
thy numbers' (lxxi., 15). . . . The Hindu Glyph shows by its insufficiency in
the large admixture of adventitious sides the same borrowed plumage that the
Greeks (the lying Greeks) had, and that Masonry has: which in the rough
monosyllabic (and apparent) poverty of the Hebrew, shows the latter to have
come down from a far more remote antiquity than any of these, and to have been
the source (!?), or nearer the old original source than any of them." This
is entirely erroneous. Our learned brother and correspondent judges apparently
the Hindu religious systems by their Shastras and Puranas, probably the latter,
and in their modern translation moreover, which is disfigured out of all
recognition, by the Orientalists. It is to their philosophical systems that one
has to turn, to their esoteric teaching, if he would make a point of
comparison. No doubt the symbology of the Pentateuch and even of the New
Testament, comes from the same source. But surely the Pyramid of Cheops, whose
measurements are all found repeated by Professor Piazzi Smythe in Solomon's
alleged and mythical temple, is not of a later date than the Mosaic books?
Hence, if there is any such great identity as claimed, it must be due to
servile copying on the part of the Jews, not on that of the Egyptians. The
Jewish glyphs -- and even their language, the Hebrew -- are not original. They
are borrowed from the Egyptians, from whom Moses got his Wisdom; from the
Coptic, the probable kinsman, if not parent, of the old Phoenician and from the
Hyksos, their (alleged) ancestors, as Josephus shows in his "Against
Apion," I., 25. Aye; but who are the Hyksos shepherds? And who the
Egyptians? History knows nothing of the question, and speculates and theorizes
out of the depths of the respective consciousnesses of her historians. (See
Isis Unveiled, vol. II., p. 430-438.) "Khamism, or old Coptic," says
Bunsen, "is from Western Asia, and contains some germ of the Semitic, thus
bearing witness to the primitive cognate unity of the Aryan and Semitic
races"; and he places the great events in Egypt 9,000 years B.C. The fact
is that in archaic Esotericism and Aryan thought we find a grand philosophy,
whereas in the Hebrew records we find only the most surprising ingenuity in
inventing apotheoses for phallic worship and sexual theogony.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 116 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
nothing to do
with the classification of the septenary chain and belong to the purely
aethereal, 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 Brahma' 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 aeons) of life, MOTION, which, during the periods of Rest
"pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom"* (Commentary on
Dzyan), assumes an evergrowing
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It may be
asked, as also the writer has not failed to ask, "Who is there to
ascertain the difference in that motion, since all nature is reduced to its
primal essence, and there can be no one -- not even one of the Dhyani-Chohans,
who are all in Nirvana -- to see it?" The answer to this is:
"Everything in Nature has to be judged by analogy. Though the highest
Deities (Archangels or Dhyani-Buddhas) are unable to penetrate the mysteries
too far beyond our planetary system and the visible Kosmos, yet there were
great seers and prophets in olden times who were enabled to perceive the
mystery of Breath and Motion retrospectively, when the systems of worlds were
at rest and plunged in their periodic sleep."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Rotae -- 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
doctrine of the rotation of the earth about an axis is taught by the
Pythagorean Hicetas, probably as early as 500 B.C. It was also taught by his
pupil Ecphantus, and by Heraclides, a pupil of Plato. The immobility of the Sun
and the orbital rotation of the earth were shown by Aristarchus of Samos as
early as 281 B.C. to be suppositions accordant with facts of observation. The
Heliocentric theory was taught about 150 B.C., by Seleucus of Seleucia on the
Tigris. -- [It was taught 500 B.C. by Pythagoras. -- H. P. B.] It is said also
that Archimedes, in a work entitled Psammites, inculcated the Heliocentric
theory. The sphericity of the earth was distinctly taught by Aristotle, who
appealed for proof to the figure of the Earth's shadow on the moon in eclipses
(Aristotle, De Coelo, lib. II, cap. XIV.). The same idea was defended by Pliny
(Nat. Hist., II., 65). These views seem to have been lost from knowledge for
more than a thousand years. . . ." (Comparative Geology, Part IV.,
"Pre-Kantian Speculation," p. 551, by Alex. Winchell, LL.D.).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* (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.
-------
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* That
Swedenborg, who could not possibly have known anything of the esoteric ideas of
Buddhism, came independently near the Occult teaching in his general
conceptions, is shown by his essay on the Vortical Theory. In Clissold's
translation of it, quoted by Prof. Winchell, we find the following resume:--
"The first Cause is the Infinite or Unlimited. This gives existence to the
First Finite or Limited." (The Logos in His manifestation and the
Universe.) "That which produces a limit is analogous to motion. (See first
Stanza, supra.) The limit produced is a point, the Essence of which is Motion;
but being without parts, this Essence is not actual Motion, but only a connatus
to it." (In our Doctrine it is not a "connatus," but a change
from eternal vibration in the unmanifested, to Vortical Motion in the
phenomenal or manifested World). . . "From this first proceed Extension,
Space, Figure, and Succession, or Time. As in Geometry a point generates a
line, a line a surface, and a surface a solid, so here the connatus of a point
tends towards lines, surfaces and solids. In other words, the Universe is
contained in ovo in the first natural point . . . the Motion toward which the
connatus tends, is circular, since the circle is the most perfect of all
figures . . . The most perfect figure of a Motion . . . must be the perpetually
circular, that is to say, it must proceed from the centre to the periphery and
from the periphery to the centre." (Quoted from Principia Rerum
Naturalia.) This is Occultism pure and simple.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the Rig
Veda we find the names Brahmanaspati and Brihaspati alternating and equivalent
to each other. Also see "Brihad Upanishad"; Brihaspati is a deity
called "the Father of the gods."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The four
aspects are the body, its life or vitality, and the "Double" of the
body, the triad which disappears with the death of the person, and the
Kama-rupa which disintegrates in Kama-loka.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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 [[stoicheia]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says the scholarly
Vossius, in his Theol. Cir. I. VII.: "Though St. Augustine has said that
every visible thing in this world had an angelic virtue as an overseer near it,
it is not individuals but entire species of things that must be understood,
each such species having indeed its particular angel to watch it. He is at one
in this with all the philosophers . . . For us these angels are spirits
separated from the objects . . . whereas for the philosophers (pagan) they were
gods." Considering the Ritual established by the Roman Catholic Church for
"Spirits of the Stars," the latter look suspiciously like
"Gods," and were no more honoured and prayed to by the ancient and
modern pagan rabble than they are now at Rome by the highly cultured Catholic
Christians.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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 maelstrom 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.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Not of course
in the sense of the German Materialist Moleschott, who assures us that
"Thought is the movement of matter," a statement of almost unequalled
absurdity. Mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted as such. But
that does not affect the position that every thought, in addition to its physical
accompaniment (brain-change), exhibits an objective -- though to us
supersensuously objective -- aspect on the astral plane. (See "The Occult
World," pp. 89, 90.)
** The views of
our present-day scientific thinkers as to the relations between mind and matter
may be reduced to two hypotheses. These show that both views equally exclude
the possibility of an independent Soul, distinct from the physical brain
through which it functions. They are:--
(1.)
MATERIALISM, the theory which regards mental phenomena as the product of
molecular change in the brain; i.e., as the outcome of a transformation of
motion into feeling (!). The cruder school once went so far as to identify mind
with a "peculiar mode of motion" (!!), but this view is now happily
regarded as absurd by most of the men of science themselves.
(2.) MONISM, or
the Single Substance Doctrine, is the more subtle form of negative psychology,
which one of its advocates, Professor Bain, ably terms "guarded [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Materialism." This doctrine, which commands
a very wide assent, counting among its upholders such men as Lewis, Spencer,
Ferrier, and others, while positing thought and mental phenomena generally as
radically contrasted with matter, regards both as equal to the two sides, or
aspects, of one and the same substance in some of its conditions. Thought as
thought, they say, is utterly contrasted with material phenomena, but it must
be also regarded as only "the subjective side of nervous motion"
whatever our learned men may mean by this.
* Thus the
sentence, "Natura Elementorum obtinet revelationem Dei," (In
Clemens's Stromata, R. IV., para. 6), is applicable to both or neither. Consult
the Zends, vol II., p. 228, and Plutarch De Iside, as compared by Layard,
Academie des Inscriptions, 1854, Vol. XV.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Hindus
happen to divide the world into seven continents, exoterically as esoterically;
and their four cosmic Devas are eight, presiding over the eight points of the
compass and not the Continents. (Compare "Chinese Buddhism," p. 216.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*) .
. . "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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Angels
recognised by the Roman Catholic Church who correspond to these
"Faces" were with the Ophites:-- Dragon -- Raphael; Lion -- Michael;
Bull, or ox -- Uriel; and Eagle -- Gabriel. The four keep company with the four
Evangelists, and preface the Gospels.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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-Palas, "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.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Jews, save
the Kabalists, having no names for East, West, South, and North, expressed the
idea by words signifying before, behind, right and left, and very often confounded
the terms exoterically, thus making the blinds in the Bible more confused and
difficult to interpret. Add to this the fact that out of the forty-seven
translators of King James I. of England's Bible "only three understood
Hebrew, and of these two died before the Psalms were translated" (Royal
Masonic Cyclopaedia), and one may easily understand what reliance can be placed
on the English version of the Bible. In this work the Douay Roman Catholic
version is generally followed.
** The Symbol
for Sacred and Secret Knowledge was universally in antiquity, a Tree, by which
a Scripture or a Record was also meant. Hence the word Lipika, the [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 129 THE LIPIKA.
STANZA V. --
Continued.
6. THE LIPIKA
CIRCUMSCRIBE THE TRIANGLE, THE FIRST ONE (the vertical line or the figure 1.),
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, novenaries, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] "writers" or scribes; the
"Dragons," symbols of wisdom, who guard the Trees of Knowledge; the
"golden" apple Tree of the Hesperides; the "Luxuriant
Trees" and vegetation of Mount Meru guarded by a Serpent. Juno giving to
Jupiter, on her marriage with him, a Tree with golden fruit is another form of
Eve offering Adam the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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.** 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The sentence
in the Sepher Jezirah and elsewhere: "Achath-Ruach-Elohim-Chiim"
denotes the Elohim as androgynous at best, the feminine element almost
predominating, as it would read: "ONE is She the Spirit of the Elohim of
Life." As said above, Echath (or Achath) is feminine, and Echod (or Achod)
masculine, both meaning ONE.
** This
metaphysical tenet can hardly be better described than Mr. Subba Row's in
"Bhagavadgita" lectures: "Mulaprakriti (the veil of Parabrahmam)
acts as the one energy through the Logos (or 'Eswara'). Now Parabrahmam, is the
one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy, which I shall
for the present call the Logos. . . . It is called the Verbum . . . by the
Christians, and it is the divine Christos who is eternal in the bosom of his
father. It is called Avalokiteshwara by the Buddhists. . . . In almost every
doctrine, they have formulated the existence of a centre of spiritual energy
which is unborn and eternal, and which exists in the bosom of Parabrahmam at
the time of Pralaya, and starts as a centre of conscious energy at the time of
Cosmic activity. . . ." For, as the lecturer premised by saying,
Parabraham is not this or that, it is not even consciousness, as it cannot be related
to matter or anything conditioned. It is not Ego nor is it Non-ego, not even
Atma, but verily the one source of all manifestations and modes of existence.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, 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
nebulae in astronomy. But this is as erroneous a conception as that of the
topography and the descriptions, given in Puranic 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 nebulae, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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 Sarira** 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.*** 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These
voluntary re-incarnations are referred to in our Doctrine as Nirmanakayas (the
surviving spiritual principles of men).
**
Sukshma-sarira, "dream-like" illusive body, with which are clothed
the inferior Dhyanis of the celestial Hierarchy.
*** Compare this
esoteric tenet with the Gnostic doctrine found in "Pistis-Sophia"
(Knowledge = Wisdom), in which treatise Sophia Achamoth is shown lost in the
waters of Chaos (matter), on her way to Supreme Light, and Christos delivering
and helping her on the right Path. Note well, "Christos" with the
Gnostics meant the impersonal principal, the Atman of the Universe, and the
Atma within every man's soul -- not Jesus; though in the old Coptic MSS. in the
British Museum "Christos" is almost constantly replaced by
"Jesus."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 communication* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The greatest
philosopher of European birth, Imanuel Kant, assures us that such a
communication is in no way improbable. "I confess I am much disposed to
assert the existence of Immaterial natures in the world, and to place my own
soul in the class of these beings. It will hereafter, I know not where, or
when, yet be proved that the human soul stands even in this life in indissoluble
connection with all immaterial natures in the spirit-world, that it
reciprocally acts upon these and receives impressions from them." (Traume
eines Geistersehers, quoted by C. C. Massey, in his preface to Von Hartmann's
"Spiritismus.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,"** which
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* E.g., all that
modern physiological research in connection with psychological problems has,
and owing to the nature of things, could have shown, is, that every thought,
sensation, and emotion is attended with a re-marshalling of the molecules of
certain nerves. The inference drawn by scientists of the type of Buchner, Vogt,
and others, that thought is molecular motion, necessitates a complete
abstraction being made of the fact of our subjective consciousness.
** See "Le
Livre des Morts," by Paul Pierret; "Le Jour de 'Viens a nous' . . .
c'est le jour ou Osiris a dit au Soleil: Viens! Je le vois rencontrant le Soleil
dans l'Amenti." (Chap. xvii., p. 61.) The Sun here stands for the Logos
(or Christos, or Horus) as central Essence synthetically, and as a diffused
essence of radiated Entities, different in substance, but not in essence. As
expressed by the Bhagavadgita lecturer, "it must not be supposed that the
Logos is but a single centre of energy manifested from Parabrahmam; there are
innumerable other centres . . . and their number is almost infinite in the
bosom of Parabrahmam." Hence the expressions, "The Day of Come to
us" and "The Day of Be with us," etc. Just as the square is the
Symbol of the Four sacred Forces or Powers -- Tetraktis -- so the Circle shows
the boundary within the Infinity that no man can cross, even in spirit, nor
Deva nor Dhyan Chohan. The Spirits of those who "descend and ascend"
during the course of cyclic evolution shall cross the "iron-bound
world" only on the day of their approach to the threshold of Paranirvana.
If they reach it -- they will rest in the bosom of Parabrahmam, or the
"Unknown Darkness," which shall then become for all of them Light --
during the whole period of Mahapralaya, the "Great NIGHT," namely,
311,040,000,000,000 years of absorption in Brahm. The day of
"Be-With-Us" is this period of rest or Paranirvana. See also for
other data on this peculiar expression, the day of "Come-To-Us," The
Funerary Ritual of the Egyptians, by Viscount de Rouge. It corresponds to the
Day of the Last Judgment of the Christians, which has been sorely materialised
by their religion.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 136 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA VI.
1. BY THE POWER
OF THE MOTHER OF MERCY AND KNOWLEDGE (a), KWAN-YIN,* 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,**
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-Bhuta, manifested in the
Logos, Avalokiteshwara; -- and from the purely occult and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This stanza is
translated from the Chinese text, and the names, as the equivalents of the
original terms, are preserved. The real esoteric nomenclature cannot be given,
as it would only confuse the reader. The Brahmanical doctrine has no equivalent
to these. Vach seems, in many an aspect, to approach the Chinese Kwan-yin, but
there is no regular worship of Vach under this name in India, as there is of
Kwan-Yin in China. No exoteric religious system has ever adopted a female
Creator, and thus woman was regarded and treated, from the first dawn of
popular religions, as inferior to man. It is only in China and Egypt that
Kwan-Yin and Isis were placed on a par with the male gods. Esotericism ignores
both sexes. Its highest Deity is sexless as it is formless, neither Father nor
Mother; and its first manifested beings, celestial and terrestrial alike,
become only gradually androgynous and finally separate into distinct sexes.
** The
"Theosophist" of February, 1887, p. 305, first lecture on the
Bhagavadgita.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 137 THE MYSTERY OF THE FEMALE LOGOS.
Cosmical,
Fohat,* 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 Vach,
the goddess of Speech, or of the Word. For Vach -- the daughter and the female
portion, as is stated, of Brahma, 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 Vach; "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 Prajapati. 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 Akasa, the synthesis of all the forces in Nature; thus Vach 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
Brahma (the Logos also) is shown dividing his body into two parts, male and
female, and creating in the latter, who is Vach, Viraj, who is himself, or
Brahma again -- it is in this way a learned Vedantin Occultist speaks of that
"goddess," explaining the reason why Eswara (or Brahma) is called
Verbum or Logos; why in fact it is called Sabda Brahmam:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says the
lecturer on p. 306: "Evolution is commenced by the intellectual energy of
the Logos, not merely on account of the potentialities locked up in
Mulaprakriti. This light of the Logos is the link . . . between objective
matter and the subjective thought of Eswara (or Logos). It is called in several
Buddhist books Fohat. It is the one instrument with which the Logos
works."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Vach is of four kinds (see Rig Veda and the Upanishads).
Vaikhari-Vach is what we utter. Every kind of Vaikhari-Vach exists in its
Madhyama, further in its Pasyanti, and ultimately in its Para form.* The reason
why this Pranava is called Vach is this, that the four principles of the great
Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vach. 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-Vach, 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 Vach. 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 Layu** (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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Madhya is said
of something whose commencement and end are unknown, and Para means infinite.
These expressions all relate to infinitude and to division of time.
** From the
Sanskrit Laya, the point of matter where every differentiation has ceased.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Fohat" has several meanings. (See Stanza V., Commentary et infra).
He is called the "Builder of the Builders," the Force that he
personifies having formed our Septenary chain.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 -- Akasa, Jivatma, 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."* Once more this is an unwarrantable state-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The shades of
our pre-historical ancestors might return the compliment to modern physicists,
now that new discoveries in chemistry have led Mr. Crookes, F.R.S., to admit
that Science is yet a thousand leagues from the knowledge of the compound
nature of the simplest molecule. From him we learn that such a thing as a
really simple [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther;
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] molecule entirely homogeneous is terra incognita
in chemistry. "Where are we to draw the line?" he asks; "is
there no way out of this perplexity? Must we either make the elementary
examinations so stiff that only 60 or 70 candidates can pass, or must we open
the examination doors so wide that the number of admissions is limited only by
the number of applicants?" And then the learned gentleman gives striking
instances. He says: "Take the case of yttrium. It has its definite atomic
weight, it behaved in every respect as a simple body, an element, to which we
might indeed add, but from which we could not take away. Yet this yttrium, this
supposed homogeneous whole, on being submitted to a certain method of fractionation,
is resolved into portions not absolutely identical among themselves, and
exhibiting a gradation of properties. Or take the case of didymium. Here was a
body betraying all the recognised characters of an element. It had been
separated with much difficulty from other bodies which approximated closely to
it in their properties, and during this crucial process it had undergone very
severe treatment and very close scrutiny. But then came another chemist, who,
treating this assumed homogeneous body by a peculiar process of fractionation,
resolved it into the two bodies praseodymium and neodymium, between which
certain distinctions are perceptible. Further, we even now have no certainty
that neodymium and praseodymium are simple bodies. On the contrary, they
likewise exhibit symptoms of splitting up. Now, if one supposed element on
proper treatment is thus found to comprise dissimilar molecules, we are surely
warranted in asking whether similar results might not be obtained in other
elements, perhaps in all elements, if treated in the right way. We may even ask
where the process of sorting-out is to stop -- a process which of course
pre-supposes variations between the individual molecules of each species. And
in these successive separations we naturally find bodies approaching more and
more closely to each other." (Presidential address before the Royal
Society of Chemists, March, 1888.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
reassociation, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 143 THE SLEEP OF THE ETERNAL MOTHER.
Solar limits.*
Therefore, they cannot be taken as a standard for comparison with the same in
other worlds.** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is again
corroborated by the same man of science in the same lecture, who quotes Clerk
Maxwell, saying "that the elements are not absolutely homogeneous."
He writes: "It is difficult to conceive of selection and elimination of
intermediate varieties, for where can these eliminated molecules have gone to,
if, as we have reason to believe, the hydrogen, &c. of the fixed stars is
composed of molecules identical in all respects with our own." And he adds:
"In the first place we may call in question this absolute molecular
identity, since we have hitherto had no means for coming to a conclusion save
the means furnished by the spectroscope, while it is admitted that, for
accurately comparing and discriminating the spectra of two bodies, they should
be examined under identical states of temperature, pressure, and all other
physical conditions. We have certainly seen, in the spectrum of the sun, rays
which we have not been able to identify."
** "Each
world has its Fohat, who is omnipresent in his own sphere of action. But there
are as many Fohats as there are worlds, each varying in power and degree of
manifestations. The individual Fohats make one Universal, Collective Fohat --
the aspect-Entity of the one absolute Non-Entity, which is absolute Be-Ness,
'SAT.' "Millions and billions of worlds are produced at every
Manvantara" -- it is said. Therefore there must be many Fohats, whom we
consider as conscious and intelligent Forces. This, no doubt, to the disgust of
scientific minds. Nevertheless the Occultists, who have good reasons for it,
consider all the forces of Nature as veritable, though supersensuous, states of
Matter; and as possible objects of perception to Beings endowed with the
requisite senses.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 144 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
gratitude.*
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."**
(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.***
(a) The Worlds
are built "in the likeness of older Wheels" -- i.e., those that
existed in preceding Manvantaras and went into Pralaya,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Indeed, if
such an imaginary Chemist happened to be intuitional, and would for a moment
step out of the habitual groove of strictly "Exact Science," as the
Alchemists of old did, he might be repaid for his audacity.
** He who would
allotropise sluggish oxygen into Ozone to a measure of alchemical activity,
reducing it to its pure essence (for which there are means), would discover
thereby a substitute for an "Elixir of Life" and prepare it for
practical use.
*** A period of
311,040,000,000,000 years, according to Brahminical calculations.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma "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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Substantialists* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Scientific Arena," a monthly Journal devoted to current
philosophical teaching and its bearing upon the religious thought of the Age.
New York: A. Wilford Hall, Ph.D., LL.D., Editor. (1886, July, August, and
September.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,"* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Such, we
believe, is the name applied by Mr. Keely, of Philadelphia, the inventor of the
famous "Motor" -- destined, as his admirers have hoped, to
revolutionise the motor power of the world -- to what he again calls the
"Etheric Centres."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The moon is
dead only so far as regards her inner "principles" -- i.e.,
psychically and spiritually, however absurd the statement may seem. Physically,
she is only as a semi-paralysed body may be. She is aptly referred to in
Occultism as the "insane mother," the great sidereal lunatic.
** The instance
of Uranus and Neptune, whose satellites, four and one respectively, revolved,
it was thought, in their orbits from East to West, whereas all the other
satellites rotate from West to East, is a very good one, as showing how
unreliable are all a priori speculations even when based on the strictest
mathematical analysis. The famous hypothesis of the formation of our Solar
System out of the nebulous rings, put [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] forward by Kant and Laplace, was chiefly based
on the above fact that all the planets revolved in the same direction. It is on
this fact, mathematically demonstrated during the time of Laplace, that this
great astronomer, calculating on the theory of probabilities, offered to bet
three milliards to one that the next planet discovered would have in its system
the same peculiarity of motion Eastward. The immutable laws of scientific
mathematics got "worsted by further experiments and observations," it
was said. This idea of Laplace's mistake prevails generally to this day; but
some astronomers have finally succeeded in demonstrating (?) that the mistake
had been in accepting Laplace's assertion for a mistake; and steps to correct
it without attracting general attention to the bevue are now being taken. Many
such unpleasant surprises are in store for hypotheses of even a purely physical
character. What further disillusions, then, may there not be in questions of a
transcendental, Occult Nature? At any rate, Occultism teaches that the
so-called "reverse rotation" is a fact.
* The
Occultists, having most perfect faith in their own exact records, astronomical
and mathematical, calculate the age of Humanity, and assert that the latter (as
separate sexes) has existed in this Round just 18,618,727 years, as the
Brahmanical teachings and even some Hindu calendars declare.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 stand-point 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Esoteric
Buddhism" and "Man."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 omitted* 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 versa.
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 others** -- that
each of these, whether known or unknown, is a septenary, as is the chain to
which the Earth belongs (see "Esoteric
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See the note
which follows the Commentary on the preceding page, and also the summary of the
Stanzas in the Proem, page 22.
** Many more
planets are enumerated in the Secret Books than in modern astronomical works.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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:--
HUMAN
PRINCIPLES.
(1) Spirit*
(2) Soul
Vehicle of
Spirit
(3) Mind
(4) Animal Soul
Upadhi of Mind
(5) Life
(6) Astral Body
Upadhi of Life
(7) Physical
Body**
The Upadhi of
all the 6 Princ.
PLANETARY
DIVISION.
Descending into
matter
1
2
3
4 D Our Earth or
any (Visible) Planet
Ascending to
Spirit
4 D Our Earth or
any (Visible) Planet
5
6
7
DIAGRAM I.
[[above is in
diagram format in the original text]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As we are
proceeding here from Universals to Particulars, instead of using the inductive or
Aristotelean method, the numbers are reversed. Spirit is enumerated the first
instead of seventh, as is usually done, but, in truth, ought not to be done.
** Or as usually
named after the manner of Esoteric Buddhism and others: 1, Atma; 2, Buddhi (or
Spiritual Soul); 3, Manas (Human Soul); 4, Kama Rupa (Vehicle of Desires and
Passions); 5, Linga Sarira; 6, Prana; 7, Sthula Sarira.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
It is said that
the planetary chains having their "Days" and their
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says the
author of "Modern Science and Modern Thought," Mr. Samuel Laing:
"The astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so uncertain,
that while in some cases they give results incredibly short, like that of 15
millions of years for the whole past process of formation of the solar system,
in others they give results almost incredibly long, as in that which supposes
the moon to have been thrown off when the Earth was rotating in three hours,
while the utmost actual retardation obtained from observation would require 600
millions of years to make it rotate in twenty-three hours instead of
twenty-four" (p. 48). And if physicists persist, why should the chronology
of the Hindus be laughed at as exaggerated?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 -- aeons 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 Satellite*) pouring forth into
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* She is the
satellite, undeniably, but this does not invalidate the theory that she has
given to the Earth all but her corpse. For Darwin's theory to hold good,
besides the hypothesis just upset (vide last footnote), other still more
incongruous speculations had to be invented. The Moon, it is said, has cooled
nearly six times as rapidly as the Earth (Winchell's "World-Life"):
"The Moon, if the earth is 14,000,000 years old since its incrustation, is
only eleven and two thirds millions of years old since that stage . . ."
etc. And if our Moon is but a splash from our Earth, why can no similar
inference be established for the Moons of other planets? The Astronomers
"do not know." Why should Venus and Mercury have no satellites, and
by what, when they exist, were they formed? Because, we say, science has only
one key -- the key of matter -- to open the mysteries of nature withal, while
occult philosophy has seven keys and explains that which science fails to see.
Mercury and Venus have no satellites but they had "parents" just as
the earth had. Both are far older than the Earth and, before the latter reaches
her seventh Round, her mother Moon will have dissolved [[Footnote continued on
next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] into thin air, as the "Moons" of the
other planets have, or have not, as the case may be, since there are planets
which have several moons -- a mystery again which no OEdipus of astronomy has
solved.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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:--
CLASSIFICATION
IN ESOTERIC BUDDHISM.
1. Sthula
Sarira.
2. Prana.**
3. The vehicle
of Prana.***
4. Kama Rupa.
5. Mind
(a) Volitions
and feelings, etc.
(b) Vignanam.
6. Spiritual
Soul.*****
7. Atma.
VEDANTIC
CLASSIFICATION.
[[1.]] Annamaya
kosa.*
[[2., 3.]]
Pranamaya kosa.
[[4., 5.(a)]]
Manomaya kosa.
[[5.(b)]]
Vignanamaya kosa.
[[6.]]
Anandamaya kosa.
[[7.]] Atma.
CLASSIFICATION
IN TARAKA RAJA YOGA
[[1., 2.]]
Sthulopadhi.****
[[5.(a), (b)]]
Sukshmopadhi.
[[6.]]
Karanopadhi.
[[7.]] Atma.
[[above is in
table format in the original text.]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Kosa (kosha)
is "Sheath" literally, the sheath of every principle.
**
"Life."
*** The astral
body or Linga Sarira.
****
Sthula-Upadhi, or basis of the principle.
***** Buddhi.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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)* 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,"
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We are not
concerned with the other Globes in this work except incidentally.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 OEdipus 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (a) 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.* As to Mars, Mercury, and "the four other
planets," they bear
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* With the
exception of course of all the planets which come fourth in number, as our
earth, the moon, etc., etc. Copies of all the letters ever received or sent, with
the exception of a few private ones -- "in which there was no
teaching" the Master says -- are with the writer. As it was her duty, in
the beginning, to answer and explain certain points not touched upon, it is
more than likely that notwithstanding the many annotations on these copies, the
writer, in her ignorance of English and her fear of saying too much, may have
bungled the information given. She takes the whole blame for it upon herself in
any and every case. But it is impossible for her to allow students to remain
any longer under erroneous impressions, or to believe that the fault lies with
the esoteric system.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 164 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
a relation to
Earth of which no master or high Occultist will ever speak, much less explain
the nature.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In this same
letter the impossibility is distinctly stated:-- . . . "Try to understand
that you are putting me questions pertaining to the highest initiation; that I
can give you (only) a general view, but that I dare not nor will I enter upon
details . . ." wrote one of the Teachers to the author of "Esoteric
Buddhism."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Brahmanas, and the Upanishads of the Vedas and even in the Puranas. 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. . . . . Phobos,
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), Phobos 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 --
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 your 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 versa. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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 Puranas -- namely,
"Yajna-Vidya" (the performance of religious rites in order to
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Lucifer," May, 1888.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 flumen? Why should the West . . . learn .
. . from the East . . . that which can never meet the requirements of the
special tastes of the aesthetics?" 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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);* 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
EARTH CHAIN.
FIG. 2.
A+ G+
B+ F+
C+ E+
D+ (Our Earth)
LUNAR CHAIN.
FIG. 1.
A G
B F
C E
D (Our Moon)
DIAGRAM II.
[[above is in
diagram format in the original text]]
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Occultism
divides the periods of Rest (Pralaya) into several kinds; there is the
individual pralaya of each Globe, as humanity and life pass on to the next;
seven minor Pralayas in each Round; the planetary Pralaya, when seven Rounds
are completed; the Solar Pralaya, when the whole system is at an end; and
finally the Universal Maha -- or Brahma -- Pralaya at the close of the "Age
of Brahma." These are the three chief pralayas or "destruction
periods." There are many other minor ones, but with these we are not
concerned at present.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Yamaboosis, the mystics of the
Lao-Tze sect and the ascetic monks of Kioto, the Dzenodoo -- the "seven
jewels." Only the Japanese and the Chinese
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We are forced
to use here the misleading word "Men," and this is a clear proof of
how little any European language is adapted to express these subtle
distinctions.
It stands to
reason that these "Men" did not resemble the men of to-day, either in
form or nature. Why then, it may be asked, call them "Men" at all?
Because there is no other term in any Western language which approximately
conveys the idea intended. The word "Men" at least indicates that
these beings were "MANUS," thinking entities, however they differed
in form and intellection from ourselves. But in reality they were, in respect
of spirituality and intellection, rather "gods" than "Men."
The same
difficulty of language is met with in describing the "stages" through
which the Monad passes. Metaphysically speaking, it is of course an absurdity
to talk of the "development" of a Monad, or to say that it becomes
"Man." But any attempt to preserve metaphysical accuracy of language
in the use of such a tongue as the English would necessitate at least three
extra volumes of this work, and would entail an amount of verbal repetition
which would be wearisome in the extreme. It stands to reason that a MONAD
cannot either progress or develop, or even be affected by the changes of states
it passes through. It is not of this world or plane, and may be compared only
to an indestructible star of divine light and fire, thrown down on to our
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,*
that: "The full development of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Earth as a plank of salvation for the personalities
in which it indwells. It is for the latter to cling to it; and thus partaking
of its divine nature, obtain immortality. Left to itself the Monad will cling
to no one; but, like the "plank," be drifted away to another
incarnation by the unresting current of evolution.
* The term
"Man epoch" is here used because of the necessity of giving a name to
that fourth kingdom which follows the animal. But in truth the "Man"
on Globe A during the First Round is no Man, but only his prototype or dimensionless
image from the astral regions.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Pradhana, 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
physical* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Physical" here means differentiated for cosmical purposes and work;
that "physical side," nevertheless, if objective to the apperception
of beings from other planes, is yet quite subjective to us on our plane.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Algae; 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
aeons 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 versa; 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 versa. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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"*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide CONCLUSION
in Part II. of this Book.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 efforts 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 foetus follows
now in its transformations all the forms that the physical frame of man had
assumed throughout the three Kalpas (Rounds) during the tentative efforts 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 Sixth* 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.**
The last human
Monad incarnated before the beginning of the 5th
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nature never
repeats herself, therefore the anthropoids of our day have not existed at any
time since the middle of the Miocene period; when, like all cross breeds, they
began to show a tendency, more and more marked as time went on, to return to
the type of their first parent, the black and yellow gigantic Lemuro-Atlantean.
To search for the "Missing Link" is useless. To the scientists of the
closing sixth Root-race, millions and millions of years hence, our modern races,
or rather their fossils, will appear as those of small insignificant apes -- an
extinct species of the genus homo.
** These
"Elementals" will become human Monads, in their turn, only at the
next great planetary Manvantara.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 185 THE MAN, OR THE APE; WHICH THE FIRST?
Root-Race.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Such
anthropoids form an exception because they were not intended by Nature, but are
the direct product and creation of "senseless" man. The Hindus give a
divine origin to the apes and monkeys because the men of the Third Race were
gods from another plane who had become "senseless" mortals. This
subject had already been touched upon in "Isis Unveiled" twelve years
ago as plainly as was then possible. On pp. 278-279, the reader is referred
"to the Brahmins, if he would know the reason of the regard they have for
the monkeys. For then he (the reader) would perhaps learn -- were the Brahman
to judge him worthy of an explanation -- that the Hindu sees in the ape but
what Manu desired he should: the transformation of species most directly
connected with that of the human family, a bastard branch engrafted on their
own stock before the final perfection of the latter. He might learn, further,
that in the eyes of the educated 'heathen' the spiritual or inner man is one
thing, and his terrestrial physical casket another. That physical nature, the
great combination of physical correlations of forces, ever creeping onward
towards perfection, has to avail herself of the material at hand; she models
and remodels as she proceeds, and finishing her crowning work in man, presents
him alone as a fit tabernacle for the overshadowing of the divine Spirit."
Moreover, a
German scientific work is mentioned in a footnote on the same page. It says
that a Hanoverian scientist had recently published a Book entitled "Ueber
die Auflosung der Arten durch Naturliche Zucht-wahl," in which he shows,
with great ingenuity, that Darwin was wholly mistaken in tracing man back to
the ape. On the contrary, he maintains that it is the ape which is evolved from
man. He shows that, in the beginning, mankind were morally and physically the
types and prototypes of our present Race, and of our human dignity, by their
beauty of form, regularity of feature, cranial development, nobility of
sentiments, heroic impulses, and grandeur of ideal conception. This is a purely
Brahmanic, Buddhistic and Kabalistic philosophy. The Book is copiously illustrated
with diagrams, tables, etc. It asserts that the gradual debasement and
degradation of man, morally and physically, can be readily traced throughout
the ethnological transformation down to our time. And, as one portion has
already degenerated into apes, so the civilized man of the present day will at
last, under the action of the inevitable law of necessity, be also succeeded by
like descendants. If we may judge of the future by the actual Present, it
certainly does seem possible that so unspiritual and materialistic a body
should end as Simia rather than as Seraphs. But though the apes descend from
man, it is certainly not the fact that the human Monad, which has once reached
the level of humanity, ever incarnates again in the form of an animal.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 superspiritual; 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Natures* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Natures of
the seven hierarchies or classes of Pitris and Dhyan Chohans which compose our
nature and Bodies are here meant.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Kesari, 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.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And if this is
found clashing with that other statement which shows the animal later than man,
then the reader is asked to bear in mind that the placental mammal only is
meant. In those days there were animals of which zoology does not even dream in
our own; and the modes of reproduction were not identical with the notions which
modern physiology has upon the subject. It is not altogether convenient to
touch upon such questions in public, but there is no contradiction or
impossibility in this whatever.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
aeon. 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.
6. 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It was, as we
shall see, at this period -- during the highest point of civilization and
knowledge, as also of human intellectuality, of the fourth, Atlantean Race --
that, owing to the final crisis of physiologico-spiritual adjustment of the
races, humanity branched off into its two diametrically opposite paths: the
RIGHT- and the LEFT-hand paths of knowledge or of Vidya. "Thus were the
germs of the White and the Black Magic sown in those days. The seeds lay latent
for some time, to sprout only during the early period of the Fifth (our Race)."
(Commentary.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 194 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
right of
free-agency and responsibility, since man and angel are alike under Karmic
Law.*
"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 spirit** (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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Explaining
Kabalistic views, the author of the "New Aspects of Life" says of the
Fallen Angels that, "According to the symbolical teaching, Spirit, from
being simply a functionary agent of God, became volitional in its developed and
developing action; and, substituting its own will for the Divine desire in its
regard, so fell. Hence the Kingdom and reign of Spirits and spiritual action,
which flow from and are the product of Spirit-volition, are outside, and
contrasted with, and in contradiction to the Kingdom of Souls and Divine
action." So far, so good; but what does the Author mean by saying,
"When man was created, he was human in constitution, with human
affections, human hopes and aspirations. From this state he fell -- into the
brute and savage"? This is diametrically opposite to our Eastern teaching,
and even to the Kabalistic notion so far as we understand it, and to the Bible
itself. This looks like Corporealism and Substantialism colouring positive
philosophy, though it is rather hard to feel quite sure of the Author's meaning
(see p. 235). A FALL, however, "from the natural into the supernatural and
the animal" -- supernatural meaning the purely spiritual in this case --
means what we suggest.
** On the
authority of Irenaeus, of Justin Martyr and the "Codex" itself,
Dunlap shows that the Nazarenes regarded "Spirit" as a female and
Evil Power in its connection with our Earth. (Dunlap: "Sod," the Son
of the Man, p. 52).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 195 THE CODEX REPEATS THE ALLEGORY.
feminine. Thus
the spirit of the Earth perceiving that for Fetahil,* the newest man (the latest),
the splendour was 'changed,' and that for splendour existed 'decrease and
damage,' she awakes Karabtanos,** '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.***"
"Then the
Codex proceeds to tell how Bahak-Zivo was separated from the Spiritus, and the
Genii or angels from the rebels.**** Then Mano***** (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,****** he being the third
life, and commiserating the rebellious and foolish Genii, on account of the
magnitude of their ambition, says: 'Lord of the Genii******* (AEons), see what
the Genii, the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Fetahil is
identical with the host of the Pitris who "created Man" as only a
"shell." He was, with the Nazarenes, the king of light, and the
creator; but in this instance he is the unlucky Prometheus, who fails to get
hold of the Living Fire necessary for the formation of the divine Soul, as he
is ignorant of the secret name, the ineffable or incommunicable name of the
Kabalists.
** The spirit of
Matter and Concupiscence; "Kamarupa" minus "Manas," Mind.
*** See Franck's
"Codex Nazaraeus," and Dunlap's "Sod, the Son of the Man."
**** Codex Nazaraeus,
ii., 233.
***** This Mano
of the Nazarenes strangely resembles the Hindu Manu, the Heavenly Man of the
"Rig Vedas."
****** "I
am the true Vine, and my father is the husbandman." (John xv., 1.)
******* With the
Gnostics, Christ, as well as Michael who is identical with him in some
respects, was the "Chief of the AEons."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 196 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
rebellious
angels do, and about what they are consulting.* 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."**
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"*** 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 Levi -- in their desire to
reconcile the Occult Sciences with Church dogmas, did their best to make of the
"Astral Light" only and preeminently 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Codex
Nazaraeus, i, 135.
** Ibid.
*** See the
Cosmogony of Pherecydes.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 Egoship 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)
-- Akasa;** while Sophia Achamoth personified the lower Astral Light or Ether.
Ilda-Baoth,*** or Jehovah, is simply one of the Elohim, the seven
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* They are
found, however, in the Chaldean Book of Numbers.
** The astral
light stands in the same relation to Akasa and Anima Mundi, as Satan stands to
the Deity. They are one and the same thing seen from two aspects: the spiritual
and the psychic -- the super-ethereal or connecting link between matter and
pure spirit, and the physical. See for the difference between nous, the higher
divine wisdom, and psyche, the lower and terrestrial (St. James iii. v. 15-17).
Vide "Demon est Deus inversus," Part II. of this volume.
*** Ilda-Baoth
is a compound name made up of Ilda, [[hebrew]], "a child," and Baoth;
both from [[hebrew]] the egg, and [[hebrew]] Baoth, "chaos,"
emptiness, void, or desolation; or the child born in the egg of Chaos, like
Brahma.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 198 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
creative
Spirits, and one of the lower Sephiroth. He produces from himself seven other
Gods, "Stellar Spirits" (or the lunar ancestors*), for they are all
the same.** 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.*** 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 via 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 Maha-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.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Jehovah's
connection with the moon in the Kabala is well known to students.
** About the
Nazarenes see Isis, Vol. II. p. 131 and 132; the true followers of the true
Christos were all Nazarenes and Christians, and were the opponents of the later
Christians.
*** Vide supra,
the diagram of the lunar ring of seven worlds, where, as in our or any other
chain, the upper worlds are spiritual, while the lowest, whether Moon, Earth,
or any planet, is dark with matter.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 199 THE SEVEN PLANES.
STANZA VI. --
Continued.
6. THE OLDER
WHEELS ROTATED DOWNWARD AND UPWARD (a). . . . THE MOTHER'S SPAWN FILLED THE
WHOLE (Kosmos).* THERE WERE BATTLES FOUGHT BETWEEN THE CREATORS AND THE
DESTROYERS, AND BATTLES FOUGHT FOR SPACE; THE SEED APPEARING AND REAPPEARING
CONTINUOUSLY (b).**
(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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The reader is
reminded that Kosmos often means in our Stanzas only our own Solar System, not
the Infinite Universe.
** This is
purely astronomical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
1st Plane
2nd P.
The Three higher
Planes of the Septenary Kosmos
The Divine &
Formless World of Spirit*
3rd Plane
Eastern Gupta
Vidya [[--]] Chaldean Kabala
1st P The
Archetypal World**
Globe A [[/]] G
[[--]] Geburah A [[/]] Chesed G or Z
[[--]] Tephireth
F
2nd Plane The
Intellectual World
B [[/]] F [[--]]
Hod B [[/]] Netzah E
3rd Plane The
Substantial or Formative World
C [[/]] E [[--]]
Yesod C
4th Plane The
Material*** World
The Earth Globe
D [[--]] The Earth Malkuth D
[[above is in
diagram format in the original text]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Arupa or
"formless," there where form ceases to exist, on the objective plane.
** The word
"Archetypal" must not be taken here in the sense that the Platonists
gave to it, i.e., the world as it existed in the Mind of the Deity; but in that
of a world made as a first model, to be followed and improved upon by the
worlds which succeed it physically -- though deteriorating in purity.
*** These are
the four lower planes of Cosmic Consciousness, the three higher planes being
inaccessible to human intellect as developed at present. The seven states of
human consciousness pertain to quite another question.
[[-------]]
(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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 201 NO SHADOW, NO LIGHT.
differentiation.*
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."**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* To see and
appreciate the difference -- the immense gulf that separates terrestrial matter
from the finer grades of supersensuous matter -- every astronomer, every
chemist and physicist ought to be a psychometer, to say the least; he ought to
be able to sense for himself that difference in which he now refuses to
believe. Mrs. Elizabeth Denton, one of the most learned, and also one of the
most materialistic and sceptical women of her age -- the wife of Professor
Denton, the well-known American geologist and the author of "The Soul of
Things" -- was, nevertheless, one of the most wonderful psychometers some
years ago. This is what she described in one of her experiments; with a
particle of a meteorite placed on her forehead, in an envelope, the lady, not
being aware of what it contained, said:
"What a
difference between that which we recognise as matter here and that which seems
like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I
wonder that we can endure it all, much more that we can desire to continue our
present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they
are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the
elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this, the
real existence." (Vol. III. p. 345-6.)
** When
carefully analysed and reflected upon, this will be found as scientific as
Science could make it, even at our late period.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranic
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 Puranas; 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 Tanaim . . . 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Akasa (Ether) colour and sound as well." . . . . . . "Sound is the
characteristic of Akasa (Ether): it generates air, the property of which is Touch;
which (by friction) becomes productive of Colour and Light." . . . . . .
(Vishnu Purana.)
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 Trumholdt'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.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The seven fundamental
transformations of the globes or heavenly spheres, or rather of their
constituent particles of matter, is described as follows: (1) The homogeneous;
(2) the aeriform and radiant (gaseous); (3) Curd-like (nebulous); (4) Atomic,
Ethereal [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma 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 Brahma (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 x 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.*
(b) There are
four grades of initiation mentioned in exoteric works, which are known
respectively in Sanskrit as "Srotapanna," "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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] (beginning of motion, hence of differentiation);
(5) Germinal, fiery, (differentiated, but composed of the germs only of the
Elements, in their earliest states, they having seven states, when completely
developed on our earth); (6) Four-fold, vapoury (the future Earth); (7) Cold
and depending (on the Sun for life and light).
* This cannot be
so very unscientific, since Descartes thought also that "the planets
rotate on their axes because they were once lucid stars, the centres of
Vortices."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Let those who
doubt this statement explain the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge
possessed by the ancients -- alleged to have developed from lower and
animal-like savages, the cave-men of the Palaeolithic age -- on any other
equally reasonable grounds. Let them turn to such works as those of Vitruvius
Pollio of the Augustan age, on architecture, for instance, in which all the
rules of proportion are those taught anciently at initiations, if he would
acquaint himself with the truly divine art, and understand the deep esoteric
significance hidden in every rule and law of proportion. No man descended from
a Palaeolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in
millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those
incarnated Rishis and Devas of the third Root Race, who handed their knowledge
from one generation to another, to Egypt and Greece with its now lost canon of
proportion; as it is the Disciples of the Initiates of the 4th, the Atlanteans,
who handed it over to their Cyclopes, the "Sons of Cycles" or of the
"Infinite," from whom the name passed to the still later generations
of Gnostic priests. "It is owing to the divine perfection [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. 587 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
Brahma. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of those architectural proportions that the
Ancients could build those wonders of all the subsequent ages, their Fanes,
Pyramids, Cave-Temples, Cromlechs, Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers
of machinery and a knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a
child's play, and which that skill refers to itself as the 'works of
hundred-handed giants.'" (See "Book of God," Kenealy.) Modern
architects may not altogether have neglected those rules, but they have
superadded enough empirical innovations to destroy those just proportions. It
is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of construction of the Grecian
temples erected to the immortal gods; and the ten books of Marcus Vitruvius
Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short, who was an initiate, can only be
studied esoterically. The Druidical circles, the Dolmen, the Temples of India,
Egypt and Greece, the Towers and the 127 towns in Europe which were found
"Cyclopean in origin" by the French Institute, are all the work of
initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those primarily taught by the
"Sons of God," justly called "The Builders." This is what
appreciative posterity says of those descendants. "They used neither
mortar nor cement, nor steel nor iron to cut the stones with; and yet they were
so artfully wrought that in many places the joints are not seen, though many of
the stones, as in Peru, are 18 ft. thick, and in the walls of the fortress of
Cuzco there are stones of a still greater size." (Acosta, vi., 14.)
"Again, the walls of Syene, built 5,400 years ago, when that spot was
exactly under the tropic, which it has now ceased to be, were so constructed
that at noon, at the precise moment of the solar solstice, the entire disc of
the Sun was seen reflected on their surface -- a work which the united skill of
all the astronomers of Europe would not now be able to effect." --
(Kenealy, "Book of God.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 miracle* . . . . 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* That which was
natural in the sight of primitive man has become only now miracle to us; and
that which was to him a miracle could never be expressed in our language.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There is no
nation in the world in which the feeling of devotion or of religious mysticism
is more developed and prominent than in the Hindu people. See what Max Muller
says of this idiosyncracy and national feature in his works. This is direct
inheritance from the primitive conscious men of the Third Race.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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)* (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 (Avalokiteswara) THE SHINING SEVEN
(the "Builders").** 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 Brahma exoterically, and the
Panchasyam, the five Brahmas, 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 --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This relates
to the Cosmic principles.
** The seven
creative Rishis now connected with the constellation of the Great Bear
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 XIIth 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, Aior) is the only self-existent, whereas its
"Depth" (Bythos or Buthon of the Gnostics, called Propator) is only
periodical. The latter is Brahm 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 215 ONE PARENT FLAME, COUNTLESS FLAMES.
occultatus est
et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus."
(Rosenroth; Liber Mysterii, IV., 1.) 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.* 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.** 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,"*** the great mother in all religions,
the Androgyne, the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Indeed, the
Microprosopus -- who is, philosophically speaking, quite distinct from the
unmanifested eternal Logos "one with the Father," -- has been finally
brought, by centuries of incessant efforts, of sophistry and paradoxes, to be
considered as one with Jehovah, or the ONE living God (!), whereas Jehovah is
no better than Binah, a female Sephiroth. This fact cannot be too frequently
impressed upon the reader.
** The
Microprosopus is, as just said, the Logos manifested, and of such there are
many.
*** Sephira is
the Crown, KETHER, in the abstract principle only, as a mathematical x (the
unknown quantity). On the plane of differentiated nature she is the female
counterpart of Adam Kadmon -- the first Androgyne. The Kabala teaches that the
word "Fiat Lux" (Genesis ch. i.) referred to the formation and
evolution of the Sephiroth, and not to light as opposed to darkness. Rabbi
Simeon says: "Oh com- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther; the third is
composed of Fire, AEther and Water; the fourth of Fire, AEther, Water, and
Air."* 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,"**
as said in the
Commentary.
(c) The second
Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and AEther (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 egglike 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 aethereal" (Yo) principle
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] panions, companions, man as an emanation was
both man and woman, Adam Kadmon verily, and this is the sense of the words 'Let
there be Light, and it was Light.' And this is the two-fold man." (Auszuge
aus dem Zohar, pp. 13-15.)
* See next
footnote. These elements of Fire, Air, etc., are not our compound elements.
** This
"Consciousness" has no relation to our consciousness. The
consciousness of the "One manifested," if not absolute, is still
unconditioned. Mahat (the Universal Mind) is the first production of the
Brahma-Creator, but also of the Pradhana (undifferentiated matter).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Nazaraeus 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 noncreating
"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 Puranas, wherein man is the seventh creation of Brahma.
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).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Forms*). 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 septenary** host -- the great
mystery of human conscious and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is worthy
of notice that, while rejecting as a superstition of Occultism, and religion
too, the theory of substantial and invisible Beings called Angels, Elementals,
etc. -- without, of course, having ever looked into the philosophy of these
incorporeal Entities, or thought over them -- modern chemistry, owing to
observation and discovery, should have unconsciously been forced to adopt and
recognize the same ratio of progression and order in the evolution of chemical
atoms as Occultism does, both for its Dhyanis and Atoms -- analogy being its
first law. As seen above, the very first group of the Rupa Angels is
quaternary, an element being added to each in descending order. So are the
atoms, adopting the phraseology of chemistry, monatomic, diatomic, and
tetratomic, progressing downwards. Let it be remembered that Fire, Water, and
Air, or the "Elements of primary Creation" so-called, are not the
compound Elements they are on Earth, but noumenal homogeneous Elements -- the
Spirits thereof. Then follow the septenary groups or hosts. Placed on parallel
lines in a diagram with Atoms, the Natures of those Beings would be seen to
correspond in their downward scale of progression to composite elements in a
mathematically identical manner, as to analogy. This refers, of course, only to
diagrams made by the Occultists; for were the scale of Angelic Beings to be
placed on a parallel line with the scale of the chemical atoms of Science --
from the hypothetical Helium down to Uranium -- they would of course be found
to differ. For these have, as correspondents on the Astral plane, only the four
lowest orders -- the higher three principles in the atom, or rather molecule or
chemical element, being perceptible only to the initiated Dangma's eye. But then,
if Chemistry desired to find itself on the right path, it would have to correct
its tabular arrangement by that of the Occultists -- which it may refuse to do.
In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds to and depends on
its higher noumenon -- the Being to whose essence it belongs; and above as
below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the psycho-mental from the
Spiritual -- tainted from its lower plane by the astral -- the whole animate
and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on parallel lines, and drawing its
attributes from above as well as from below.
** The number
seven does not imply only seven Entities, but seven groups or Hosts, as
explained before. The highest group, the Asuras born in Brahma's first body --
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] which turned into "Night" -- are
septenary, i.e., divided like the Pitris into seven classes, three of which are
arupa (bodiless) and four with bodies. (See Vishnu Purana, Book I.) They are in
fact more truly our Pitris (ancestors) than the Pitris who projected the first
physical men. (See Book II.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Mankara 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* One of the
explanations of the real though hidden meaning of this Egyptian religious glyph
is easy. The crocodile is the first to await and meet the devouring fires of
the morning sun, and very soon came to personify the solar heat. When the sun
arose, it was like the arrival on earth and among men "of the divine soul
which informs the Gods." Hence the strange symbolism. The mummy donned the
head of a crocodile to show that it was a soul arriving from the earth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A world when
called "a higher world" is not higher by reason of its location, but
because it is superior in quality or essence. Yet such a world is generally
understood by the profane as "Heaven," and located above our heads.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 foetus 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Paracelsus
calls them the Flagae; the Christians, the "Guardian Angels;" the
Occultist, the "Ancestors, the Pitris;" they are the sixfold Dhyan
Chohans, having the six spiritual Elements in the composition of their bodies
-- in fact, men, minus the physical body.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 foetus, 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.* But if this physical
pheno-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
materialists and the evolutionists of the Darwinian school would be ill-advised
to accept the newly worked-out theories of Professor Weissmann, the author of
Beitrage zur Descendenzlehre, with regard to one of the two mysteries of
Embryology, as above specified, which he seems to have solved -- as he thinks.
For, when it is solved, Science will have stepped over into the domain of the
truly occult, and stepped for ever out of the realm of transformation, as
taught by Darwin. The two are irreconcileable, from the standpoint of
materialism. Regarded from that of the Occultists, it solves all these
mysteries. Those who are not acquainted with the new discovery of Professor
Weissman -- at one time a fervent Darwinist -- ought to hasten to repair the
deficiency. The German Embryologist-philosopher shows -- thus stepping over the
heads of the Greek Hippocrates and Aristotle, right back into the teachings of
the old Aryans -- one infinitesimal cell, out of millions of others at work in
the formation of an organism, determining alone and unaided, by means of
constant segmentation and multiplication, the correct image of the future man
(or animal) in its physical, mental, and psychic characteristics. It is that
cell which impresses on the face and form of the new individual the features of
the parents or of some distant ancestor; it is that cell again which transmits
to him the intellectual and mental idiosyncracies of his sires, and so on. This
Plasm is the immortal portion of our bodies -- simply through the process of
successive assimilations. Darwin's theory, viewing the embryological cell as an
essence or the extract from all other cells, is set aside; it is incapable of
accounting for hereditary transmission. There are but two ways of explaining
the mystery of heredity; either the substance of the germinal cell is endowed
with the faculty of crossing the whole cycle of transformations that lead to
the construction of a separate organism and then to the reproduction of
identical germinal cells; or, those germinal cells do not have their genesis at
all in the body of the individual, but proceed directly from the ancestral
germinal cell passed from father to son through long generations. It is the
latter hypothesis that Weissmann accepted and has worked upon; and it is to
this cell that he traces the immortal portion of man. So far, so good; and when
this almost correct theory is accepted, how will Biologists explain the first
appearance of this everlasting cell? Unless man "grew" like the
"immortal Topsy," and was not born at all, but fell from the clouds,
how was that embryological cell born in him?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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." ("[[Anthropos]],") 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Science, dimly
perceiving the truth, may find Bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human
body, and see in them but occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases
are attributed. Occultism -- which discerns a life in every atom and molecule,
whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water -- affirms that our
whole body is built of such lives, the smallest bacteria under the microscope
being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 226 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Body -- thus
confuse the "breath of life" with immortal Spirit.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The learned
and very philosophical author of "New Aspects of Life" would impress
upon his reader that the Nephesh chaiah (living soul), according to the
Hebrews, "proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit
or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and
take the place of that spirit in the thus constituted self, so that the spirit
passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the living Soul." The
human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which,
the Soul (which he seems to place higher than the spirit) is developed -- considered
functionally and from the standpoint of activity, the Soul stands undeniably
higher in this finite and conditioned world of Maya -- the Soul, he says,
"is ultimately produced from the animated body of man." Thus the
author identifies "Spirit" (Atma) simply with "the breath of
life." The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is
based on the erroneous conception that Prana and Atma or Jivatma are one and
the same thing. The author supports the argument by showing that with the
ancient Hebrews, Greeks and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus -- with the
Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably -- meant Wind;
the Greek word Anemos (wind) and the Latin Anima "Soul" having a
suspicious relation.
This is very far
fetched. A legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be
found, since Mr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a
kind of Kabalist-Positivist, and the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the
Vedantins, are all Idealists. The Occultists are also of the extreme esoteric
Vedantin school, and they call the One Life (Parabrahm), the Great Breath and
the Whirlwind; but they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter
or any relation to, or connection with it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 227 THE EGYPTIAN SYSTEM.
of the seven
principles or the "Seven Souls of Man."* 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 Uraeus" (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 Uraeus of
Flame" (Manas and Atma-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are
their mother's husbands.**
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide in Part
II., Book II., "The Seven Souls of Man," the divisions made
respectively by Messrs. Gerald Massey and Franz Lambert.
** Another
suggestive analogy between the Aryan or Brahmanical and the Egyptian
esotericism. The former call the Pitris "the lunar ancestors" of men;
and the Egyptians made of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.
This "moon-god" "expressed the Seven nature-powers that were
prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was
the manifestor as the eighth one (hence the eighth sphere). The seven rays of
the Chaldean Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones indicate the same septenary
of souls." . . . "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." (See The Seven Souls, etc.) As well known to every
Hindu, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and as
such is called Riksha, and Chitra-Sikhandinas.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* Later on, when the moon became connected with female
goddesses** -- with Diana, Isis, Artemis,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the oldest
systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma is, with the Hindus, a kind of
sidereal Don Juan, a "King," and the father, albeit illegitimate, of
Buddha -- Wisdom, which relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through
a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries including those of sexual
generation. (See "Holy of Holies.")
** If instead of
being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the Bible, the armies of
the ragged and the poor were taught Astrology -- so far, at any rate, as the
occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are
concerned, then there would be little need to fear increase of the population
nor to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest.
For it is the Moon and her [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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;
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and
every astrologer in India knows it. During the previous and the present races,
at least at the beginning of this one, those who indulged in marital relations
during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile were regarded as
sorcerers and sinners. But even now those sins of old, based on the Occult
knowledge and the abuse of it, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day,
which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of, and disbelief in
all such occult influences.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
SAPTAPARNA (b).
(a) "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 Brahma) 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
Narayana, the Purusha, "concealed in Akasa 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 chain*
with their mineral,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Several
inimical critics are anxious to prove that no seven principles of man nor
septenary constitution of our chain were taught in our earlier volume,
"Isis Unveiled." Though in that work the doctrine could only be
hinted at, there are many passages, nevertheless, in which the septenary
constitution of both man and chain is openly mentioned. Speaking of the Elohim
in Vol. II., page 420, it is said: "They remain over the seventh heaven
(or spiritual world), for it is they who, according to the Kabalists, formed in
succession the six material worlds, or rather, attempts at worlds that preceded
our own, which, they say, is the seventh." Our globe is, of course, upon
the diagram representing the "chain," the seventh and the lowest;
though, [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma." 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] as the evolution on these globes is cyclic, it
is the fourth in descending the arc of matter. And again, on page 367, Vol.
II., it is written: "In the Egyptian notions, as in those of all other
faiths founded on philosophy, man was not merely . . . an union of soul and
body; he was a trinity when spirit was added to it; and besides that doctrine
made him consist of body, astral form, or shadow, the animal soul, the higher
soul, and terrestrial intelligence and a sixth principle, etc., etc. -- the
seventh -- SPIRIT." So clearly are these principles mentioned, that even
in the Index, one finds on page 683:-- "Six principles of man" -- the
seventh being the synthesis of the six, and not a principle but a ray of the
Absolute ALL -- in strict truth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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"* 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,**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Creation is an
incorrect word to use, as no religion, not even the sect of the Visishta Adwaitees
in India -- one which anthropomorphises even Parabrahmam -- believes in
creation out of nihil as Christians and Jews do, but in evolution out of
preexisting materials.
** The so-called
"Spirits" that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of
mediums are not the Monads or Higher Principles of disembodied personalities.
Such a "Spirit" can only be either an Elementary, or -- a
Nirmanakaya.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.** Therefore, that which living
men (Initiates)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* On p. 340-351
(Genesis of the Soul) in the "New Aspects of Life," the Author states
the Kabalistic teaching: "They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter
of corresponding opacity and density tended to coalesce; and that the resultant
created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which
the differing opacities and transparencies of Elemental or uncreated Spirit
were reproduced. And that these Spirits in the disembodied state attracted,
appropriated, digested and assimilated Elemental Spirit and Elemental Matter
whose condition was conformed to their own." "They therefore taught
that there was a wide difference in the condition of created Spirits; and that
in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter,
the more opaque Spirits in the disembodied state were drawn towards the more
dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of
the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the
more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the
most rarified finding their home in its satellite."
This relates
exclusively to our Elementary Spirits, and has naught to do with either the
Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces or
"Angels" as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish
Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with ceremonial magic,
busied themselves solely with the spirits of the Planets and the "Elementals"
so-called. Therefore this covers only a portion of the Esoteric Teaching.
** The
possibility of the "Soul" (i.e., the eternal Spiritual Ego) dwelling
in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a
pre-eminently occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy.
See "Isis Unveiled," vol. i., [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] p. 602, for an illustration. Many are the
Soulless men among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked
materialists as well as in persons "who advance in holiness and never turn
back." (See ibid and also "Isis," vol. ii., p. 369.)
* This identity
between the Spirit and its material "double" (in man it is the
reverse) explains still better the confusion, alluded to already in this work,
made in the names and individualities, as well as the numbers, of the Rishis
and the Prajapatis; especially between those of the Satyayuga and the
Mahabharatan period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret
Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root and the Seed Manus (see Book ii.
"On the primitive Manus of humanity"). Not only those progenitors of
our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has its prototype in the
Spiritual Spheres; which prototype is the highest essence of his seventh
principle. Thus the seven Manus become 14, the Root Manu being the Prime Cause,
and the "Seed-Manu" its effect; and when the latter reach from
Satyayuga (the first stage) to the heroic period, these Manus or Rishis become
21 in number.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. Panchasikha, agreeably to Bhagavata Purana (V.
XX. 25-28), is one of the seven Kumaras who go to Sveta-Dvipa to worship
Vishnu. We shall see further on, what connection there is between the
"celibate" and chaste sons of Brahma, 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 name* 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," "The Septenary in the
Vedas," etc. etc.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Egyptian
allegory in the "Book of the Dead" already mentioned, the hymn that
relates to the reward "of the Soul," is as suggestive of our
Septenary Doctrine as it is poetical. The deceased is allotted a piece of land
in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead,
glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven
cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into 14 and 7 portions. This
corn is the food on which they live and prosper, or that will kill them, in
Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo field is a domain. For, as said in the
hymn, (see chap. xxxii. 9) the deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes
pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the "Seven times
seventy-seven lives" passed or to be passed on Earth. The idea of the corn
reaped as the "fruit of our actions" is very graphic.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 237 THE IMMORTAL ROOT.
STANZA VII. --
Continued.
4. IT IS THE
ROOT THAT NEVER DIES, THE THREE-TONGUED FLAME OF THE FOUR WICKS* (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")** (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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
three-tongued flame of the four wicks corresponds to the four unities and the three
Binaries of the Sephirothal tree (see Commentary on Stanza VI.).
** Useless to
repeat again that the terms given here are Sanskrit translations; for the
original terms, unknown and unheard of in Europe, would only puzzle the reader
more, and serve no useful purpose.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Sephra Dzenioutha (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) 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 seven*) 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The formation
of the "living Soul" or man, would render the idea more clearly.
"A Living Soul" is a synonym of man in the Bible. These are our seven
"Principles."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Matronitha, 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 xxii. of "Ha Idra Zuta Kadisha." "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 Brahma 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.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, 1. 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 tatchi-no-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 Levi
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
Mysteres" is septenary. This
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 242 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
may be seen at a
glance on page 389, "Une prophetic et diverses pensees 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"* from the same "Key of the Great Mysteries" by Levi to
find the same, though with a different interpretation.
Thus it stands
with both the Kabalistic and the Occult names attached:--
7 Neschanah
[[--]] Pure Spirit [[--]] Atma
6 Ruach [[--]]
Spiritual Soul [[--]] Buddhi
5 Nephesch
[[--]] Plastic Mediator [[--]] Manas
N. B. -- Please
remark that this triad is disconnected with the lower Quaternary, as it
disconnects itself always after death.
THE UPPER TRIAD
[[--]] The Immortal. E. Levi calls Nephesch what we name Manas, and vice
versa.*
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
The lower
Quarternary: the Transitory and the mortal.
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nephesch is
the "breath of (animal) life" breathed into Adam, the man of dust; it
is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing element. Without Manas, or what
is miscalled in Levi's diagram Nephesch instead of Manas, "the reasoning
Soul," or mind, Atma-Buddhi are irrational on this plane and cannot act.
It is Buddhi which is the plastic mediator, not Manas, "the intelligent
medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary." But there are
many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic
works -- a convincing proof that its literature has become a sad jumble. We do
not accept the classification except in this one particular, in order to show
the points of agreement.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 243 OCCULT AND KABALISTIC DOCTRINES.
We will now give
in tabular form what the very cautious Eliphas Levi says in explanation of his
diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches -- and compare the two. Levi,
too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics. (See
"Histoire de la Magic," pp. 388, 389.)
[[first column]]
Says Eliphas
Levi, the Kabalist:--
KABALISTIC
PNEUMATICS.
1. The Soul (or
EGO) is a clothed light; and this light is triple.
2. Neschamah --
"pure Spirit."
3. Ruach -- the
Soul or Spirit.
4. Nephesch --
plastic mediator.**
5. The garment
of the Soul is the rind (body) of the image (astral Soul).
6. The image is
double, because it reflects the good as the bad.
7. Imago, body.
-------
OCCULT
PNEUMATICS.
As given by
Eliphas Levi.
1. Nephesh is immortal
because it renews its life by the destruction of forms.
[But Nephesh,
the "breath of
[[first column
continued on next page]]
[[second
column]]
Say the
Theosophists:--
ESOTERIC
PNEUMATICS.
1. Ditto, for it
is Atma-Buddhi-Manas.
2. Ditto.*
3. Spiritual
Soul.
4. Mediator
between Spirit and its Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.
5. Correct.
6. Too uselessly
apocalyptic. Why not say that the astral reflects the good as well as the bad
man; man, who is ever tending to the upper triangle, or else disappears with
the Quaternary.
7. Ditto, the
earthly image.
-------
OCCULT
PNEUMATICS.
As given by the
Occultists.
1. Manas is
immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Atma-Buddhi something
of itself, and
[[second column
continued on next page]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Eliphas Levi
has, whether purposely or otherwise, confused the numbers: with us his No. 2 is
No. 1. (Spirit); and by making of Nephesch both the plastic mediator and Life,
he thus makes in reality only six principles, because he repeats the first two.
** Esotericism
teaches the same. But Manas is not Nephesch; nor is the latter the astral, but
the 4th principle, if also the 2nd prana, for Nephesch is the "breath of
life" in man, as in beast or insect, of physical, material life, which has
no spirituality in it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 244 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
[[first column
continued from previous page]]
life," is a
misnomer and a useless puzzle to the student.]
2. Ruach
progresses by the evolution of ideas (! ?).
3. Neschamah is
progressive without oblivion and destruction.
4. The soul has
three dwellings.
5. These
dwellings are: the plane of the mortals: the Superior Eden; and the Inferior
Eden.
6. The image
(man) is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth.
7. The fatal
image (the astral) endows Nephesch with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to
substitute for this (vitiated) Nephesch the image
[[first column
continued on next page]]
[[second column
continued from previous page]]
thus,
assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.
2. Buddhi becomes
conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas after every new incarnation and
the death of man.
3. Atma neither
progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane: it is but
the ray of light eternal which shines upon and through the darkness of matter
-- when the latter is willing.
4. The Soul
(collectively, as the upper Triad) lives on three planes, besides its fourth,
the terrestrial sphere; and it exists eternally on the highest of the three.
5. These
dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or the animal Soul; Kama-loka
(Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the
higher Triad.
6. Correct.
7. The astral
through Kama (desire) is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material
passions and desires. But if the better man
[[second column
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 245 OCCULTISTS AND KABALISTS DIFFER.
[[first column
continued from previous page]]
conquered in
accordance with the inspirations of Neschamah.
-------
[[second column
continued from previous page]]
or Manas tries
to escape the fatal attraction and turns its aspirations to Atma -- Spirit --
then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal
Spirit.
-------
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:--
[[first column]]
1. The body is
the mould of Nephesch; Nephesch the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of the
garments of Neschamah.
2. Light (the Soul)
personifies in clothing itself (with a body); and personality endures only when
the garment is perfect.
3. The angels
aspire to become men; a perfect man, a man-god is above all the angels.
4. Every 14,000
years the soul rejuvenates and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.
[[second
column]]
1. The body
follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the light of
Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the "garments" of
Atma, because Atma is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is its
vehicle only figuratively.
2. The Monad
becomes a personal ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that
personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate
Buddhi. 3. Correct.
4. Within a
period, "a great age" or a day of Brahrna, 14 Manus reign; after
which comes Pralaya when all the Souls rest in Nirvana. (Souls = Egos).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
introductory chapters of Genesis were never meant to represent even a remote
allegory of the creation of our Earth. They embrace a metaphysical conception
of some indefinite period in the eternity, when successive attempts were being
made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly
stated in the Zohar: "There were old worlds, which perished as soon as
they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the
smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The
sparks are the primordial worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred
Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite
sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at
his work." See Zohar, "Idra Suta," Book iii., p. 292, b. The
Supreme consulting with the Architect of the world -- his Logos -- about
creation. ("Isis Unveiled," vol. ii., p. 421.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 primaeval seven races -- this doctrine has left
its impress on every Archaic Scripture.
"Who forms
Manu (the Man) and who forms his body? The LIFE and the LIVES. Sin** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Read in Isis,
vol. ii., pp. 297-303, the doctrine of the Codex Nazaraeus -- every tenet of
our teaching is found there under a different form and allegory.
** The word
"Sin" is curious, but has a particular Occult relation to the Moon,
besides being its Chaldean equivalent.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* Fire alone is ONE, on the plane of
the One
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Is Pasteur
unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science in declaring that, if
he dared express his full idea upon this subject, he would say that the Organic
cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with
the cessation of a current of Oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account,
break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence
of that gas? "I would add," goes on Pasteur, "that the evolution
of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we
must class processes of fermentation"; and life, according to Claude
Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there
exist in Nature Beings or Lives that can live and thrive without air, even on
our globe, was demonstrated by the same men of science. Pasteur found that many
of the lower lives, such as Vibriones, and some microbes and bacteria, could
exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen
necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surround
them. He calls them AErobes, living on the tissues of our matter when the
latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called
very unscientifically by science "dead matter"), and Anaerobes. The
one kind binds oxygen, and contributes vastly to the destruction of animal life
and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter later
on into the constitution of other organisms; the other destroys, or rather
annihilates finally, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being
impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of
yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt
themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances
coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in
fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation.
"Therefore the vegetable cell manifests in this case its life as an
anaerobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form in this case an
exception"? asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance
of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself,
stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard
thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application
and corroboration in the fact that Urea increases in the blood during
strangulation: LIFE therefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism
teaches us, it is also in the atom. Also see infra, at the close of this
Section.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, front 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 nebulae,
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.* 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is a Vedic
teaching that "there are three Earths corresponding to three Heavens, and
our Earth (the fourth) is called Bhumi." This is the explanation given by
our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning and allusion to it
in the Vedas is that it refers to our planetary chain, three "Earths"
on the descending arc, and three "heavens" which are the three Earths
or globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc: by
the first three we descend into matter, by the other three we ascend into
Spirit; the lower one, Bhumi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say,
and containing potentially as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. We shall
treat of this hereafter.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 worth while 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 that* -- 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."** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Professor
Zollner's theory has been more than welcomed by several Scientists --who are
Spiritualists -- Professors Butlerof and Wagner, of St. Petersburg, for
instance.
** "The
giving reality to abstractions is the error of Realism. Space and Time are
frequently viewed as separated from all the concrete experiences of the mind,
instead of being generalizations of these in certain aspects." (Bain,
Logic, Part II., p. 389.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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.** Those of the fourth Round have added
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The order in
which these Elements are placed above is the correct one for esoteric purposes
and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the "Powers
of Fire, Air, Water, Earth"; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no
existence before the 4th Round, hundreds of million years ago, the commencement
of our geological Earth. The globe was "fiery, cool and radiant as its
ethereal men and animals during the first Round," says the Commentary,
uttering a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science;
"luminous and more dense and heavy during the second Round; watery during
the Third!" Thus are the elements reversed.
** If we had to
frame our conclusions according to the data furnished to us by the [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 253 THE GREAT ARCHAEUS.
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 Levi
calls in one breath "the body of the Holy Ghost," and in the next
"Baphomet," the "Androgyne Goat of Mendes"*; AIR, simply
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] geologists, then we would say that there was no
real water -- even during the Carboniferous period. We are told that gigantic
masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere as Carbonic
Acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed
in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the Carbonic
Acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite,
etc., and went towards the formation of limestone, and so on, that all this was
at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been
seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid? But how then could the carboniferous
period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian ages -- those of Fishes and
Molluscs -- on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have
exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How
could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand
that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he
shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his
colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.
* Eliphas Levi
shows it very truly "a force in Nature," by means of which "a single
man who can master it . . . might throw the world into confusion and transform
its face"; for it is the "great Arcanum of transcendent Magic."
Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form (see
The Mysteries of Magic, by A. E. Waite), we may explain them perhaps the better
by the occasional addition of a word or two to show the difference between
Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The Author says of the
great Magic Agent -- "This ambient and all-penetrating fluid, this ray
detached from the (Central or 'Spiritual') Sun's splendour . . . fixed by the
weight of the atmosphere (?!) and the power of central attraction . . . the
Astral Light, this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is
represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis which twines round two
poles and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem
of prudence and of Saturn" -- emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos
-- "Time" -- not the god Saturn or the planet. "It is the winged
dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of
Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau lastly, it
is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force (it is not
blind, and Levi knew it), which souls must conquer in order to detach
themselves from the chains of Earth; 'for if they should not,' they will be
absorbed by the same power which first produced them and will return to the
central and eternal fire." This great archaeus is now discovered by, and
only for one man -- Mr. J. W. Keeley, of [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 254 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Nitrogen,
"the breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome," as the
Mohammedan 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 Levi 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Philadelphia. For others, however, it is
discovered, yet must remain almost useless. "So far shalt thou go. . .
."
All the above is
as practical as it is correct, save one error, which we will explain in the
text further on. Eliphas Levi commits a great blunder in always identifying the
Astral Light with what we call Akasa. What it really is will be given in Part
II. of Vol. II.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 255 BUT WHY SLANDER THE INDIAN HIEROPHANTS?
on the lowest
planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Akasa; 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
Levi 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 Puranic 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 Akasa 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 Puranas, have occasionally confused Akasa with Prakriti,
with Ether, and even with the visible Sky! It is true also that those who have
invariably translated the term Akasa by "Ether" (Wilson, for
instance), finding it called "the material cause of sound"
possessing, moreover, this one single property (Vishnu Purana), 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 Akasa is
neither infinite nor immortal. But all this is erroneous, since both the words
Pradhana
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 256 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(primeval
matter) and sound, as a property, have been misunderstood; the former term
(Pradhana) being certainly synonymous with Mulaprakriti and Akasa, 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 Purana:
"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 Pradhana (primordial matter)."
. . . . (Book I., ch. ii.).
Now, what is
Pradhana, if it is not Mulaprakriti, the root of all, in another aspect? For
Pradhana, 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
Pradhanika 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 Pradhana.* Hence Pradhana even in the Puranas is an
aspect of Parabrahmam, not an evolution, and must be the same as the Vedantic
Mulaprakriti. "Prakriti in its primary state is Akasa," says a
Vedantin scholar (see "Five Years of Theosophy," p. 169). It is
almost abstract Nature.
Akasa, then, is
Pradhana 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 Prakriti** -- the ever
immaculate "Mother" of the fatherless Son, who becomes
"Father" on the lower manifested plane. For MAHAT is the first
product of Pradhana, or Akasa, and Mahat -- Universal intelligence "whose
characteristic property is Buddhi" -- is no other than the Logos, for he
is called "Eswara" Brahma, Bhava, etc. (See Linga Purana, sec. lxx.
12 et seq.; and Vayu Purana, but especially the former Purana -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The student
has to note, moreover, that the Purana is a dualistic system, not evolutionary,
and that, in this respect, far more will be found, from an esoteric standpoint,
in Sankhya, and even in the Manava-dharma-Sastra, however much the latter
differs from the former.
** In the
Sankhya philosophy, the seven Prakritis or "productive productions"
are Mahat, Ahamkara, and the five tanmatras. See "Sankhya-karika,"
III., and the Commentary thereon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 257 AKASA IS NOT ETHER.
the
"first-born" of whom the Puranas 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 Purana adds: "In this manner -- as were the seven forms (principles)
of Prakriti reckoned from Mahat to Earth -- so at the time of pralaya
(pratyahara) these seven successively re-enter into each other. The egg of
Brahma (Sarva-mandala) is dissolved with its seven zones (dwipa), seven oceans,
seven regions, etc." (Vishnu Purana, Book vi., ch. iv.)*
These are the
reasons why the Occultists refuse to give the name of Astral Light to Akasa, 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,** 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 Akasa, if it can be called even that --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* No use to say
so to the Hindus, who know their Puranas by heart, but very useful to remind
our Orientalists and those Westerns who regard Wilson's translations as
authoritative, that in his English translation of the Vishnu Purana he is
guilty of the most ludicrous contradictions and errors. So on this identical
subject of the seven Prakritis or the seven zones of Brahma's egg, the two
accounts differ totally. In Vol. 1, page 40, the egg is said to be externally
invested by seven envelopes -- Wilson comments: "by Water, Air, Fire,
Ether, and Ahamkara" (which last word does not exist in the Sanskrit
texts); and in vol. v., p. 198, of the same Vishnu Purana it is written,
"in this manner were the seven forms of nature (Prakriti) reckoned from
Mahat to Earth" (?). Between Mahat or Maha-Buddhi and "Water,
etc.," the difference is very considerable.
** According to
the great metaphysician Hegel also. For him Nature was a perpetual becoming. A
purely esoteric conception. Creation or Origin, in the Christian sense of the
term, is absolutely unthinkable. As the above-quoted thinker said: "God
(the Universal Spirit) objectivises himself as Nature, and again rises out of
it."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Akasa 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 aerobes 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. "Whatsoever 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Akasic principle named
*** "that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral
Light, which Eliphas Levi calls "the imagination of Nature,"**
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.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
** Speaking of
it in his Preface to the "History of Magic" Eliphas Levi says:
"It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly
communicate with each other; from it -- that sympathy and antipathy are born;
from it -- that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena of second sight and
extra-natural visions take place. . . . . Astral Light, acting under the
impulsion of powerful wills, destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers
in all things. . . . God created it on that day when he said: Fiat Lux, and it
is directed by the Egregores, i.e., the chiefs of the souls who are the spirits
of energy and action." Eliphas Levi ought to have added that the astral
light, or primordial substance, if matter at all, is that which, called Light,
LUX, esoterically explained, is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their
very essence. Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane and the
reflected radiance of the Divine Light emanating from the collective body of
those who are called the "LIGHTS" and the "FLAMES." But no
other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the
other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence and in such
flowing language, as Eliphas Levi. He leads his reader through the most lovely,
gorgeously blooming valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren
rocky island.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 foetus 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.
(c) 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, aerobes, anaerobes, 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 ptomaine (the alkaloid poison generated by
decaying matter and corpses -- a life also) extracted
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 ptomaine; the venomous essence of
certain mushrooms (fungi) being nearly identical with the venom of the cobra of
India, the most deadly of serpents.* 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.** Such
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The French
savants Arnaud, Gautier, and Villiers, have found in the saliva of living men
the same venomous alkaloid as in that of the toad, the salamander, the cobra,
and the trigonocephalus of Portugal. It is proven that venom of the deadliest
kind, whether called ptomaine, or leucomaine, or alkaloid, is generated by
living men, animals, and plants. The same savant, Gautier, discovered an
alkaloid in the fresh meat of an ox and in its brains, and a venom which he
calls Xanthocreatinine similar to the substance extracted from the poisonous
saliva of reptiles. It is the muscular tissues, as being the most active organ
in the animal economy, that are suspected of being the generators or factors of
venoms, having the same importance as carbonic acid and urea in the functions of
life, which venoms are the ultimate products of inner combustion. And though it
is not yet fully determined whether poisons can be generated by the animal
system of living beings without the participation and interference of microbes,
it is ascertained that the animal does produce venomous substances in its
physiological or living state.
** It might be
supposed that these "fiery lives" and the microbes of science are
identical. This is not true. The "fiery lives" are the seventh and
highest subdivision of the plane of matter, and correspond in the individual
with the One Life of the Universe, though only on that plane. The microbes of
science are the first and lowest sub-division on the second plane -- that of
material prana (or life). The physical body of man undergoes a complete change
of structure every seven years, and its destruction and preservation are due to
the alternate function of the fiery lives as "destroyers" and
"builders." They are "builders" by sacrificing themselves
in the form of vitality to restrain the destructive influence of the microbes,
and, by supplying the microbes with what is necessary, they compel them under
that restraint to build up the material body and its cells. They are
"destroyers" also when that restraint is [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] removed and the microbes, unsupplied with vital
constructive energy, are left to run riot as destructive agents. Thus, during
the first half of a man's life (the first five periods of seven years each) the
"fiery lives" are indirectly engaged in the process of building up
man's material body; life is on the ascending scale, and the force is used in
construction and increase. After this period is passed the age of retrogression
commences, and, the work of the "fiery lives" exhausting their
strength, the work of destruction and decrease also commences.
An analogy
between cosmic events in the descent of spirit into matter for the first half
of a manvantara (planetary as human) and its ascent at the expense of matter in
the second half, may here be traced. These considerations have to do solely
with the plane of matter, but the restraining influence of the "fiery
lives" on the lowest sub-division of the second plane -- the microbes --
is confirmed by the fact mentioned in the foot-note on Pasteur (vide supra)
that the cells of the organs, when they do not find sufficient oxygen for
themselves, adapt themselves to that condition and form ferments, which, by absorbing
oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, ruin the latter. Thus the
process is commenced by one cell robbing its neighbour of the source of its
vitality when the supply is insufficient; and the ruin so commenced steadily
progresses.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
-------
STANZA VII. --
Continued.
6. FROM THE
FIRST-BORN (primitive, or the first man) THE THREAD BETWEEN THE SILENT WATCHER
AND HIS SHADOW BECOMES MORE
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Phallic
worship has developed only with the loss of the keys to the true meaning of the
symbols. It was the last and most fatal turning point from the highway of truth
and divine knowledge into the side path of fiction, raised into dogma through
human falsification and hierarchic ambition.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Paramatma (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.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Mythopoeic 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See the
"Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quiches, 11,500 years ago,"
by Auguste le Plongeon, who shows the identity between the Egyptian rites and
beliefs and those of the people he describes. The ancient hieratic alphabets of
the Maya and the Egyptians are almost identical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 268 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
our five
physical senses.* 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 resurect from the many into the
One Life. Then he ascends into heaven indeed; where, plunged into the
incomprehensible absolute Being and Bliss of Paranirvana he reigns
unconditionally, and whence he will re-descend again a 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Which are in
truth seven as shown later, on the authority of the oldest Upanishads.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 270 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
portion of the
Vedas,* 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.
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* . . .
"The Vedas have a distinct dual meaning -- one expressed by the literal sense
of the words, the other indicated by the metre and the swara -- intonation --
which are as the life of the Vedas. . . . Learned pundits and philologists of
course deny that swara has anything to do with philosophy or ancient esoteric
doctrines; but the mysterious connection between swara and light is one of its
most profound secrets." (T. Subba Row, Five Years of Theosophy, p. 154.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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 Bhashya 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 Bhashyas (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 Smartava
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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* Also called
"the Sons of Wisdom," and of the "Fire-Mist" and the
"Brothers of the Sun" in the Chinese records. Si-dzang (Tibet) is
mentioned in the MSS. of the sacred library of the province of Fo-Kien, as the
great seat of Occult learning from time immemorial, ages before Buddha. The
Emperor Yu, the "great" (2,207 years B.C.), a pious mystic and great
adept, is said to have obtained his knowledge from the "great teachers of
the Snowy Range" in Si-dzang.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Ghats of Mysore. On the other hand,
there is no sect in that desperately exclusive caste of the Brahmins, more
exclusive than is the Smartava; 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
Puranas. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 mediaeval Nominalists, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons 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 reflection 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"* is in reality an aggregate of
forces mani-
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* Nature taken
in its abstract sense, cannot be "unconscious," as it is the emanation
from, and thus an aspect (on the manifested plane) of the ABSOLUTE
consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation
and even to minerals a consciousness of their own. All he can say is, that this
consciousness is beyond his comprehension.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Souls*; 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.
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* "When
thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are . . . but enter into thine
inner chamber and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in
secret." Matt. vi.). Our Father is within us "in Secret," our
7th principle, in the "inner chamber" of our Soul perception.
"The Kingdom of Heaven" and of God "is within us" says Jesus,
not outside. Why are Christians so absolutely blind to the self-evident meaning
of the words of wisdom they delight in mechanically repeating?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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
Athenienes," 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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* To this the
late Mrs. (Dr.) Kingsford, the able translator and compiler of the Hermetic
Fragments (see "The Virgin of the World") remarks in a foot-note;
"Dr. Menard observes that in Greek the same word signifies to be born and
to become. The idea here is that the material of the world is in its essence
eternal, but that before creation or 'becoming' it is in a passive and
motionless condition. Thus it 'was' before being put into operation; now it
'becomes,' that is, it is mobile and progressive." And she adds the purely
Vedantic doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy that "Creation is thus the
period of activity (Manvantara) of God, who, according to Hermetic thought (or
which, according to the Vedantin) has two modes -- Activity or Existence, God
evolved (Deus explicitus); and Passivity of Being (Pralaya) God involved (Deus
implicitus). Both modes are perfect and complete, as are the waking and
sleeping states of man. Fichte, the German philosopher, distinguished Being
(Seyn) as One, which we know only through existence (Dasein) as the Manifold.
This view is thoroughly Hermetic. The 'Ideal Forms' are the archetypal or
formative ideas of the Neo-Platonists; the eternal and subjective concepts of
things subsisting in the divine mind prior to 'becoming'" (p. 134).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
mediaeval 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,* 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,** 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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The
centripetal and the centrifugal forces, which are male and female, positive and
negative, physical and spiritual, the two being the one Primordial Force.
** Occultism teaches
that no form can be given to anything, either by nature or by man, whose ideal
type does not already exist on the subjective plane. More than this; that no
such form or shape can possibly enter man's consciousness, or evolve in his
imagination, which does not exist in prototype, at least as an approximation.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* each separate being, came into
existence. "All things and all elementary substances were contained in it
in potentia 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)** 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.
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* This word is
explained by Dr. Hartmann from the original texts of Paracelsus before him, as
follows. According to this great Rosicrucian: "Mysterium is everything out
of which something may be developed, which is only germinally contained in it.
A seed is the 'Mysterium' of a plant, an egg that of a living bird, etc."
** It is only
the mediaeval Kabalists who, following the Jewish and one or two Neo-Platonists,
applied the term Microcosm to man. Ancient philosophy called the Earth the
Microcosm of the Macrocosm, and man the outcome of the two.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* They all spring from the "Mysterium Magnum."
(Philosophia ad Athenienses.)
Compare this
with Vishnu Purana.
"From
Pradhana (primordial substance) presided over by Kshetrajna (embodied Spirit?)
proceeds the evolution of those qualities. . . . From the great Principle Mahat
(Universal Intellect, or mind) . . . proceeds
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The Eastern
Occultist says -- "are guided and informed by the Spiritual Beings" the
Workmen in the invisible worlds and behind the veil of Occult nature, or nature
in Abscondito.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 285 HERMES CHRISTIANIZED.
the origin of
the subtle elements and from these the organs of sense (Book I., ii.).
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 foot-notes. And she says:.......... The creation of the
visible world by the 'working gods' or Titans, as agents of the Supreme God,* 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 Pyrnander," 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
Puranas.
Compare two
invocations, one to the Hermetic "Supreme All," the
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* A frequent
expression in the said Fragments, to which we take exception. The Universal
Mind is not a Being or "God."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Stobaeus.)
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 Parasara, 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 subtile and corporeal, indiscreet and
discreet; to Vishnu the cause of final emancipation, the cause of the creation,
existence, the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 287 ALONE THE ETERNAL IS REST.
end of the
world; who is the root of the world, and who consists of the world."
(Vish. Purana, Book L.)
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, 0 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. A. 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 genii* 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:--
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The Hermetic
philosophers called Theoi, gods, Genii and Daimones (in the original texts),
those Entities whom we call Devas (gods), Dhyan Chohans, Chitkala (Kwan-yin,
the Buddhists call them), and by other names. The Daimones are -- in the
Socratic sense, and even in the Oriental and Latin theological sense -- the
guardian spirits of the human race; "those who dwell in the neighbourhood of
the immortals, and thence watch over human affairs," as Hermes has it. In
Esoteric parlance, they are called Chitkala, some of which are those who have
furnished man with his fourth and fifth Principles from their own essence; and
others the Pitris so-called. This will be explained when we come to the
production of the complete man. The root of the name is Chiti, "that by
which the effects and consequences of actions and kinds of knowledge are
selected for the use of the soul," or conscience the inner Voice in man.
With the Yogis, the Chiti is a synonym of Mahat, the first and divine
intellect; but in Esoteric philosophy Mahat is the root of Chiti, its germ; and
Chiti is a quality of Manas in conjunction with Buddhi, a quality that attracts
to itself by spiritual affinity a Chitkala when it develops sufficiently in
man. This is why it is said that Chiti is a voice acquiring mystic life and
becoming Kwan-Yin.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 289 A FEW OCCULT APHORISMS.
EXTRACTS FROM A
PRIVATE COMMENTARY,* hitherto secret:--
(xvii.)
"The Initial Existence in the first twilight of the Maha-Manwantara (after
the MAHA-PRALAYA that follows every age of Brahma) 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 LAYA** throughout infinity as a colourless
spiritual fluid. It is on the SEVENTH PLANE, and in its SEVENTH STATE in our
planetary world.***
(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. SURYA (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,
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* This (teaching)
does not refer to Prakriti-Purusha beyond the boundaries of our small universe.
** The ultimate
quiescent state: the Nirvana condition of the seventh Principle.
*** The teaching
is all given from our plane of consciousness.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 290 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
therefore, four
degrees higher than the solar reflected substance. As there are seven Dhatu
(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.* 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 him** 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,*** 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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* Or the
"dream of Science," the primeval really homogeneous matter, which no mortal
can make objective in this Race or Round either.
** "Vishnu
in the form of the Solar active energy, neither ever rises nor sets, and is at
once, the sevenfold Sun and distinct from it," says Vishnu Purana (Book
II., Chap. 11).
*** "In the
same manner as a man approaches a mirror placed upon a stand, beholds in it his
own image, so the energy or reflection of Vishnu (the Sun) is never disjoined
but remains in the Sun as in a mirror that is there stationed"
("Vishnu Purana").
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
sub-divisions, are the FORTY-NINE Fires* mentioned in sacred books . . . . . .
(xxix.)
"The first is the . . . . 'Mother' (prima MATERIA). Separating itself into
its primary seven states, it proceeds down cyclically; when** 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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* In
"Vishnu" and other Puranas.
** See the
Hermetic "Nature," "Going down cyclically into matter when she
meets 'heavenly man.' "
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 292 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of the water,
attracts and repels the waves* 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:
"Kanya (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-
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The writers of
the above knew perfectly well the physical cause of the tides, of the waves,
etc. It is the informing Spirit of the whole Cosmic solar body that is meant
here, and which is referred to whenever such expressions are used from the
mystic point of view.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* . . . 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,** 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,*** and who are classed beneath the astral powers (Superhuman
astral Spirits.) They change perpetually, not always identically, but revolving
in circles.**** 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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* See Stanzas
III. and IV. and the Commentaries thereupon, especially the Comments on Stanza
IV. "the Lipika and the four Maharajas," the agents of Karma.
** And
"Gods" or Dhyanis, too, not only the genii or "guided
Forces."
*** The meaning
of this is that as man is composed of all the Great Elements: Fire, Air, Water,
Earth and Ether -- the ELEMENTALS which belong respectively to these Elements
feel attracted to man by reason of their co-essence. That element which
predominates in a certain constitution will be the ruling element throughout
life. For instance, if man has a preponderance of the Earthly, gnomic element,
the gnomes will lead him towards assimilating metals -- money and wealth, and
so on. "Animal man is the son of the animal elements out of which his Soul
(life) was born, and animals are the mirrors of man," says Paracelsus (De
Fundamento Sapientiae). Paracelsus was cautious, and wanted the Bible to agree
with what he said, and therefore did not say all.
**** Cyclic
progress in development.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 295 UNIVERSAL ILLUSION.
for the
reception of (the) God,* 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.** 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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The God in man
and often the incarnation of a God, a highly Spiritual Dhyan Chohan in him,
besides the presence of his own seventh Principle.
** Now, what
"god" is meant here? Not God "the Father," the
anthropomorphic fiction; for that god is the Elohim collectively, and has no
being apart from the Host. Besides, such a god is finite and imperfect. It is
the high Initiates and Adepts who are meant here by those men "few in
number." And it is precisely those men who believe in "gods" and
know no "God," but one Universal unrelated and unconditioned Deity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Caesar
what is Caesar'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.* These
secrets, along with
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The astral
light of the Kabalists is very incorrectly translated by some
"AEther;" the latter is confused with the hypothetical Ether of
Science, and both are referred to by some theosophists as synonymous with
Akasa. This is a great mistake.
"A
characteristic of Akasa will serve to show how inadequately it is represented
by Ether," writes the author of Rational Refutations, thus unconsciously
helping Occultism. "In dimension it is infinite; it is not made up of
parts; and colour, taste, smell, and tangibility do not appertain to it. So far
forth it corresponds exactly to time, space, Isvara, ("The Lord," but
rather creative potency and soul -- anima mundi). Its speciality, as compared
therewith, consists in its being the material cause of sound. Except for its
being so, one might take it to be one with vacuity" (p. 120.)
It is vacuity,
no doubt, especially for Rationalists. At any rate Akasa is sure to produce
vacuity in the brain of a materialist. Nevertheless, though Akasa is not that
Ether of Science, not even the Ether of the Occultist, who defines the latter
as one of the principles of Akasa only, it is as certainly, together with its
primary, the cause of sound, only a physical and spiritual, not a material
cause by any means. The relations [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 mediaeval 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."* 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."
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of Ether to Akasa may be defined by applying to
both Akasa and Ether the words said of the god in the Vedas, "So himself
was indeed (his own) son," one being the progeny of the other and yet
itself. This may be a difficult riddle to the profane, but very easy to
understand for any Hindu -- though not even a mystic.
* National
Reformer, January 9th, 1887. Article "Phreno-Kosmo-Biology," by Dr.
Lewins.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 time* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]-------------------------------------------------
* This is Cyclic
law, but this law itself is often defied by human stubbornness.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 300]]
[[blank]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 301]]
BOOK I., PART
II.
THE
EVOLUTION OF
SYMBOLISM
IN ITS
APPROXIMATE ORDER.
---------------------
EXPLANATORY
SECTIONS.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 302]]
CONTENTS.
-------
§§. PAGE.
I. -- SYMBOLISM
AND IDEOGRAPHS ... 303
II. -- MYSTERY
LANGUAGE ... 310
III. --
PRIMORDIAL SUBSTANCE AND DIVINE THOUGHT ... 325
IV. -- CHAOS,
THEOS, KOSMOS ... 342
V. -- THE HIDDEN
DEITY AND ITS GLYPHS ... 349
VI. -- THE MUNDANE
EGG ... 359
VII. -- THE DAYS
AND NIGHTS OF BRAHMA ... 368
VIII. -- THE
LOTUS AS A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL ... 379
IX. -- DEUS
LUNUS ... 386
X. -- TREE AND
SERPENT AND CROCODILE WORSHIP ... 403
XI. -- DEMON EST
DEUS INVERSUS ... 411
XII. -- THEOGONY
OF THE CREATIVE GODS ... 424
XIII. -- THE
SEVEN CREATIONS ... 445
XIV. -- THE FOUR
ELEMENTS OF THE ANCIENTS ... 460
XV. -- ON
KWAN-SHI YIN AND KWAN-YIN ... 470
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 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 Muller 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 Muller, 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 304 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ing done by
proxy. Professor Max Muller, 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.* 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.** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As far as
divine revelation is concerned, we agree. Not so with regard to "human
history." . . . For there is "history" in most of the allegories
and "myths" of India, and events, real actual events, are concealed
under them.
** When the
"false theologies" disappear, then true prehistoric realities will be
found, contained especially in the mythology of the Aryans -- ancient Hindoos,
and even the pre-Homeric Hellenes.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Mullerite
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 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 § VII. Deus Lunus) 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 Cyclopaedia, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas 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 sigillae, 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 of 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 -- Haeckel, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas, 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,*
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Thus, a
Japanese who does not understand one word of Chinese, meeting with a Chinaman
who has never heard the language of the former, will communicate in writing
with him, and they will understand each other perfectly -- because the writing
is symbolical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 1.) 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.
--------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Esneh under Caesar-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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 phoenix, 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As we said in
Isis (Vol. II. p. 438-9), "To the present moment, in spite of all
controversies and researches, History and Science remain as much as ever in the
dark as to the origin of the Jews. They may be as well the exiled Tchandalas of
old India, the 'bricklayers' mentioned by Vina-Svata, Veda-Vyasa and Manu, as
the Phoenicians of Herodotus, or the Hyk-Sos of Josephus, or descendants of
Pali shepherds, or a mixture of all these. The Bible names the Tyrians as a
kindred people, and claims dominion over them. . . . Yet whatever they may have
been, they became a hybrid people, not long after Moses, as the Bible shows
them freely intermarrying not alone with the Canaanites, but with every other
nation or race they came in contact with."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 315 PIAZZA 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:--
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas, 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* Its greatest scholars, instead of
pooh-poohing that supposed
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* One by one the
claims become admitted, as one Scientist after another is compelled to
recognize the facts given out from the Secret Doctrine -- though he rarely, if
ever, recognizes that he has been anticipated in his statements. Thus, in the
palmy days of Mr. Piazzi Smyth's authority on the Pyramid of Gizeh, his theory
was, that the porphyry sarcophagus of the King's Chamber "is the unit of
measure for the two most enlightened nations of the earth, England and
America," and was no better than a "corn bin." This was vehemently
denied by us in Isis Unveiled just published at that time. Then the New York
press arose in arms (the "Sun" and the "World" chiefly)
against our presuming to correct or find fault with such a star of learning. On
p. 519, vol. I., we had said, that Herodotus when treating of that Pyramid
"might have added that, externally it symbolized the creative principle of
Nature, and illustrated also the principles of geometry, mathematics,
astrology, and astronomy. Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre
recesses were performed the mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the
initiation-scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry sarcophagus,
which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, degrades into a
corn-bin, was the baptismal font, upon emerging from which the neophyte was
"born again" and became an adept."
Our statement
was laughed at in those days. We were accused of having got our ideas from the
"craze" of Shaw, an English writer who had maintained that the
Sarcophagus had been used for the celebration of the Mysteries of Osiris; (we
had never heard of that writer!). And now, six or seven years later, this is
what Mr. Staniland Wake writes on p. 93 of his paper, on "The Origin and
Significance of the Great Pyramid."
"The
so-called King's Chamber, of which an enthusiastic pyramidist says, 'The
polished walls, fine materials, grand proportions, and exalted place,
eloquently tell of glories yet to come -- if not, the chamber of perfections of
Cheops' tomb, was probably the place to which the initiant was admitted after
he had passed through the narrow upward passage and the grand gallery, with its
lowly termination, which gradually prepared him for the [[Footnote continued on
next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] final stage of the SACRED MYSTERIES." Had
Mr. Staniland Wake been a Theosophist, he might have added that the narrow
upward passage leading to the King's chamber had a "narrow gate"
indeed; the same "strait gate" which "leadeth unto life,"
or the new spiritual re-birth alluded to by Jesus in Matthew vii. 13 et seq;
and that it is this gate in the Initiation temple, that the writer who recorded
the words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking of.
* All we have
said in Isis is now found corroborated in the "Egyptian Mystery; or The
Source of Measures," by those readings of the Bible with the numerical and
geometrical keys thereto.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* On page 224 of
Assyrian Antiquities Mr. George Smith says: "In the palace of Sennacherib
at Kouyunjik I found another fragment of the curious history of Sargon. . . .
published in my translation in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical
Archaeology, vol. I. part I. p. 46." The capital of Sargon, the Babylonian
Moses, "was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semitics Akkad --
mentioned in Genesis as the capital of Nimrod." (Gen. x. 10) . . .
"Akkad lay near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of
Babylon." (See Isis, vol. II. p. 442-3,) Another strange coincidence is
found in the fact that the name of the neighbouring above-mentioned City of
Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of Moses -- Zipporah (Exodus ii.).
Of course the story is a clever addition by Ezra, who could not be ignorant of
it. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and
reads as follows:--
1. Sargona, the
powerful king, the king of Akkad am I.
2. My mother was
a princess, my father I did not know; a brother of my father ruled over the
country.
3. In the city
of Azupiran, which is by the side of the River Euphrates.
4. My mother,
the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she brought me forth.
5. She placed me
in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she sealed up.
6. She launched
me in the river, which did not drown me.
7. The river
carried me, to Akki the water-carrier it brought me.
8. Akki, the
water-carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted me, etc., etc.
And now Exodus
(ii): "And when she (Moses' mother) could not longer hide him, she took
for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put
the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Sabaean 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, monoecious, dioecious, etc., etc.) -- are known in astronomy as
sextiles, quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and aeons 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.* Hence one finds
numbers and figures used as an
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] "The story," says Mr. G. Smith,
"is supposed to have happened about 1600 B.C. rather earlier than the
supposed age of Moses. As we know that the fame of Sargon reached Egypt, it is
quite likely that this account had a connection with the event related in
Exodus ii., for every action, when once performed, has a tendency to be
repeated." But now, when Professor Sayce has had the courage to push back
the dates of the Chaldean and Assyrian Kings by two thousand years more, Sargon
must have preceded Moses by 2,000 years at the least. (See Professor Sayce's
Lectures on the subject.) The confession is suggestive, but the figures lack a
cypher or two.
* As a reminder
how the Esoteric religion of Moses was crushed several times, and the worship
of Jehovah, as re-established by David, put in its place, by Hezekiah for one,
read pp. 436-42, vol. II., in Isis Unveiled. Surely there must have been some
very [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Ozimandyas, in
the mounds of the Caucasian snowcapped 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.* This kind of measure was made to co-ordinate with the
idea of the origin of human life, and hence the phallic form.**"
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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] good reasons why the Sadducees, who furnished
almost all the high Priests of Judea, held to the Laws of Moses and spurned the
alleged "Books of Moses," the Pentateuch of the Synagogue and the
Talmud.
* Once more, remember
the Hindu Wittoba crucified in space; the significance of the "sacred
sign," the Swastica; Plato's Decussated man in Space, etc., etc.
** "Source
of Measures."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See farther on
the description given of the early Aryan initiation: of Visvakarma crucifying
the Sun, "Vikkartana," shorn of his beams -- on a cruciform lath.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Some of its
defenders must have lost their reason, one would rather say. For what can one
think when, in the face of the dead-letter absurdities of the Bible, these are
still supported, publicly and as fiercely as ever, and one finds its
theologians maintaining that though "the Scriptures carefully refrain (?)
from making any direct contribution to scientific knowledge, they have never
stumbled upon any statement which will not abide the light of ADVANCING
SCIENCE"!!! -- ("Primeval Man," p. 14).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 324 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Adam and a
yellow Adam."* Were they Hindus enumerating the rebirths of Vamadeva from
the Linga Purana, 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
Kumara becomes "four youths of a yellow colour." This strange
coincidence, as Mr. Proctor would say, speak only in favour of scientific
intuition, as Siva-Kumara 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 man** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Primeval
Man Unveiled, or the Anthropology of the Bible"; author (unknown) of the
"Stars and the Angels" 1870, p. 195.
** Especially in
the face of the evidence furnished by the authorized Bible itself in ch. iv. of
Genesis, v. 16 and 17, which shows Cain going to the land of Nod and there marrying
a wife.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Akasa, 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 AKASA, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For instance,
when he terms the "First Cause" -- the UNKNOWABLE -- a "power
manifesting through phenomena," and "an infinite eternal Energy"
(?) it is clear that he has grasped solely the physical aspect of the mystery
of Being -- the Energies of Cosmic Substance only. The co-eternal aspect of the
ONE REALITY -- Cosmic Ideation -- (as to its noumenon, it seems non-existent in
the mind of the great thinker) is absolutely omitted from consideration.
Without doubt, this one-sided mode of dealing with the problem is due largely
to the pernicious Western practice of subordinating consciousness, or regarding
it as a "by-product" of molecular motion.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 nonexistent; 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
protyle* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The term
Protyle is due to Mr. Crookes, the eminent chemist, who has given that name to
pre-Matter, if one may so call primordial and purely homogeneous substances,
suspected, if not actually yet found, by Science in the ultimate composition of
the atom. But the incipient segregation of primordial matter into atoms and
molecules takes its rise subsequent to the evolution of the Seven Protyles. It
is the last of these -- having recently detected the possibility of its
existence on our plane -- that Mr. Crookes is in search of.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 consciousness* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Cosmic
Ideation focussed in a principle or upadhi (basis) results as the consciousness
of the individual Ego. Its manifestation varies with the degree of upadhi,
e.g., through that known as Manas it wells up as Mind-Consciousness; through
the more finely differentiated fabric (sixth state of matter) of the Buddhi
resting on the experience of Manas as its basis -- as a stream of spiritual
INTUITION.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Puranas 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 Puranas) 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. (Taittiriya Upanishad II. 1).
It becomes thus
evident that it is not this Ether -- sprung at the fourth
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther," and "Magnus AEther" 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.* 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 AEther 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 forma et
figura, 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."**
This proves that Ether, itself an aspect of Akasa, has in its turn several
aspects or "principles."
All the ancient
nations deified AEther in its imponderable aspect and potency. Virgil calls
Jupiter, Pater omnipotens AEther, "the great AEther."*** The Hindus
have also placed it among their deities; under the name of Akasa (the synthesis
of AEther). And the author of the Homoiomerian
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For it is thus
that the Church has interpreted verse 12 in the VI. Chapter to the Ephesians.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world." Further
on St. Paul mentions the spiritual malices ("wickedness" in English
texts) SPREAD IN THE AIR -- "Spiritualia nequitiae coelestibus," the
Latin texts giving various names to these "malices," the innocent
"Elementals." But the Church is right this time, though wrong in
calling them all devils. The ASTRAL LIGHT or lower Ether is full of conscious
and semi-conscious and unconscious entities; only the church has less power
over them than over invisible microbes or mosquitoes.
** Effatum XVI.
"Oracles of Zoroaster."
*** Georgica.
Book II.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 332 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
System of
philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, 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 Akasa, wrongly translated AEther, 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 AEther?" 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
AEther, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in itself the
germs of universal creation. Upper AEther or Akasa, 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. AEther is the Aditi of the Hindus, and it is Akasa.
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 -- AEther; 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").
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Brahma," 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 Medhatithi, the son of Viraswamin, and the author of the
Commentary, "the Manubhasya," 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 1. 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 undiscrete (undifferentiated) cause, eternal, which Is and Is not, from
It issued that male who is called in the world Brahma. . . . .
Here we find, as
in all genuine philosophical systems, even the "Egg" or the Circle
(or Zero), boundless Infinity, referred to as IT,* and Brahma, the first unit
only, referred to as the male god, i.e., the fructifying Principle. It is [[diagram]]
or 10 (ten) the Decade. On the plane of the Septenary or our World only, it is
called Brahma. On that of the Unified Decade in the realm of Reality, this male
Brahma is an illusion.
(14.) "From
Self (atmanah) he created mind, (1) which is and is not;
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The ideal apex
of the Pythagorean triangle: vide Sections in Vol. II., "Cross and
Circle," and the "Earliest Symbolics of the Cross."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 334 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(2) and from
mind, Ego-ism (Self-Consciousness) the ruler; (3) the Lord."
(1.) The mind is
Manas. Medhatithi, 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)* 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.) Medhatithi
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 subtile parts of those six (the Great Self and
the five organs of sense) of unmeasured brightness, to enter into the elements
of Self (Atmamatrasu) created all beings."
When, according
to Medhatithi, it ought to read matra-Chit instead of "Atmamatrasu,"
and thus be made to say:--
"He having
pervaded the subtile 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 Atma, and
thus constitutes the seventh principle, the synthesis of the "six."
Such is also the opinion of the editor of Manava-dharma Shastra, 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
Medhatithi. Rejecting the tanmatra, or subtile elements, and the atmamatrasu 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;"
atmamatra 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 subtile elements of bodily forms of This One depend
on these six, so
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide A. Coke
Burnell's translation, edited by Ed. W. Hopkins, Ph.D.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 335 THE SEVEN PRAKRITIS.
the wise call
his form carira" (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 subtile elements of
forms of those seven very glorious principles" (purusha).
Commenting upon
which, according to Medhatithi, the Editor remarks that "the five elements
plus mind (Manas) and Self-Consciousness (Ahamkara)* are meant;"
"subtile 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 Puranas the "Seven Prakritis."
Moreover, these
"five elements" or "five portions" are spoken of in verse
27 as "those which are called the atomic destructible portions" --
therefore "distinct from the atoms of the nyaya."
This creative
Brahma, 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 Brahma, however, it could not be said, as of Dionysos:
"[[protogonon diphue trigonon Baccheion Hanakta Hagrion arreton kruphion
dikerota dimorphon]]" -- 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 Vallabacharyas 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 tanmatras are called the seven Prakritis (or Natures),
and they are counted from Maha-Buddhi or Mahat down to Earth. (See Sankhya
Karika III. and Commentaries.)
Nevertheless,
however disfigured for Rabbinical purposes is the original Elohistic version by
Ezra, however repulsive at times even the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Ahamkara, as
universal Self-Consciousness, has a triple aspect, as also Manas. For this
conception of "I," or one's Ego, is either sattwa, "pure
quietude," or appears as rajas, "active," or remains tamas,
"stagnant," in darkness. It belongs to Heaven and Earth, and assumes
the properties of either.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 336 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
esoteric meaning
in the Hebrew scrolls, which is far more so than its outward veil or cloaking
may be* -- once the Jehovistic portions are eliminated, the Mosaic books are
found full of purely occult and priceless knowledge, especially in the first
six chapters.
Read by the aid
of the 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 Puranas 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 Puranas 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,** "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.***
"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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See "The
Holy of Holies."
** The word
"eternity," by which Christian theologians interpret the term
"for ever and ever," does not exist in the Hebrew tongue -- either as
a word or meaning. Oulam, says Le Clerc, only imports a time when beginning or
end is not known. It does not mean "infinite duration," and the word
for ever in the Old Testament, only signifies a "long time." Nor is
the term "eternity" used in the Christian sense in the Puranas. For
in Vishnu Purana, it is clearly stated that by Eternity and Immortality only
"existence to the end of the Kalpa" is meant (Book II. chap. viii.).
*** Orphic
theogony is purely Oriental and Indian in its Spirit. The successive
transformations it has undergone, have now separated it widely from the spirit
of ancient Cosmogony, as may be seen by comparing it even with Hesiod's
theogony. Yet the truly Aryan Hindu spirit breaks forth everywhere in both
Hesiod's and the Orphic theogony. (See the remarkable work of James
Darmesteter, Cosmogonies Aryennes, in his Essais Orientaux.) Thus the original
Greek conception of Chaos is that of the Secret Wisdom Religion. In Hesiod,
therefore, Chaos is infinite, boundless, endless and beginningless in duration,
an abstraction at the same time as a visible presence. SPACE filled with
darkness, which is primordial matter in its precosmic state. For in its
etymological sense, Chaos is Space, according to Aristotle, and Space is the
ever Unseen and Unknowable Deity in our philosophy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahmas 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.* "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;"** 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.*** "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."****
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The manifested
Spirit; Absolute, Divine Spirit is one with absolute Divine Substance:
Parabrahm and Mulaprakriti are one in essence. Therefore, Cosmic Ideation and
Cosmic Substance in their primal character are one also.
** "Sepher
Jezireh," chap. 1, Mishna ix.
*** Ibid. It is
from Arba that Abram is made to come.
**** "Zohar,"
I., 2a.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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.** It is the "Spirit of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Sepher
Jezireh," Mishna ix., 10. Everywhere throughout the Acts, Paul calls the
invisible Kosmic Beings the "Elements." (See Greek Texts.) But now
the Elements are degraded into and limited to atoms of which nothing is known,
so far, and which are only "children of necessity" as Ether is too --
as we said in "ISIS." "The poor primordial elements have long
been exiled, and our ambitious physicists run races to determine who shall add
one more to the fledgling brood of the sixty and odd elementary
substances." Meanwhile there rages a war in modern chemistry about terms.
We are denied the right to call these substances "chemical elements,"
for they are not "primordial principles of self-existing essences out of
which the universe was fashioned," according to Plato. Such ideas
associated with the word element were good enough for the "old Greek
philosophy," but modern science rejects them; for, as Professor Crookes
says, "they are unfortunate terms," and experimental science will
have "nothing to do with any kind of essences except those which it can
see, smell, or taste. It leaves others to the metaphysicians. . . ." We
must feel grateful even for so much.
** Writing upon
this subject in Isis Unveiled we said of it that it was: "The Chaos of the
ancients, the Zoroastrian sacred fire, or the Atash-Behram of the Parsees; the
Hermes-fire, the Elmes-fire of the ancient Germans; the lightning of Cybele; the
burning torch of Apollo; the flame on the altar of Pan; the inextinguishable
fire in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the fire-flame of
Pluto's helm; the brilliant sparks on the hats of the Dioscuri, on the Gorgon
head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff of Mercury; the Egyptian Phtha-Ra; the
Grecian Zeus Cataibates (the descending) of Pausanias; the pentacostal
fire-tongues; the burning bush of Moses; the pillar of fire of the Exodus, and
the "burning lamp" of Abram, the eternal fire of the "bottomless
pit"; the Delphic oracular vapours; the Sidereal light of the
Rosicrucians; the AKASA of the Hindu adepts; the Astral Light of Eliphas Levi;
the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; the od of the Reichenbach; the
Psychod and ectenic force of Thury; the psychic force of Sergeant Cox, and the
atmospheric magnetism of some naturalists; galvanism; and finally, electricity
-- all these are but various names for many different manifestations or effects
of the same mysterious, all-pervading cause, the Greek Archeus." We now
add -- it is all this and much more.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Resha
trivrah" (the White Head), whose Will causes the fiery fluid to flow in
370 currents in every direction of the universe. It is identical with the
"Serpent that runs with 370 leaps" of the Siphrah Dzenioota, 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
Part II. in Vol. II., §§ 3, "The Many Meanings of the War in
Heaven.")
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"
("Contributions to Theory of Natural Selection").
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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* the first-begotten 'was pleased to employ twelve
thousand years in its creation.' The latter number is expressed in the
Tyrrhenian cosmogony,** which shows man created in the sixth millennium. This
agrees with the Egyptian theory of 6,000 'years'*** 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 Brahma being equal to 4,320,000,000 years. Sanchoniathon**** 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 Mot, or the ilus (mud).***** From this proceeded the spores of
creation and the generation of the universe.
"Zeus-Zen
(aether), 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,****** 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)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Plato:
"Timaeus."
**
"Suidas" v. Tyrrhenia."
*** The reader
will understand that by "years" is meant "ages," not mere
periods of thirteen lunar months each.
**** See the
Greek translation by Philo Byblus.
***** Cory:
"Ancient Fragment."
****** Mithras
was regarded among the Persians as the Theos ekpetros -- god of the rock.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 341 ONE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.
Mithras is the
son of Bordj, the Persian mundane mountain,* from which he flashed out as a
radiant ray of light. Brahma, 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 psychochemical 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 AEther, 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
submersed 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 languages, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Bordj is
called a fire-mountain -- a volcano; therefore it contains fire, rock, earth
and water: the male, or active and the female, or passive, elements. The myth
is suggestive.
--------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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 (Siphrah Dzenioota, i, § 16), 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 AEther of the Greek philosophers is not
its dregs -- of which indeed they knew more
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "New
Aspects of Life," by Henry Pratt, M.D.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther was the Akasa 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 AEther, 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 aether 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.'* 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 AEther (Akasa)
pervades all things; and it was called there-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Damascius, in
the "Theogony," calls it Dis, "the disposer of all things."
Cory, "Ancient Fragments," p. 314.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas.
There, also,
Brahma 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-Sesha, 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 Brahma."
"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
Agathodaemon, the good spirit: in its opposite aspect, it is the Kakodaemon --
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. Brahma 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.* . . . 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, Brahma, 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, Brahma soliloquises in consternation: "Who am I? Whence came I?"
Then he hears a voice:** "Direct your thoughts to Bhagavat." Brahma,
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 Brahma 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* With the
Greeks, the "River-gods," all of them the Sons of the primeval ocean
(Chaos in its masculine aspect), were the respective ancestors of the Hellenic
races. For them the OCEAN was the father of the Gods; and thus they had
anticipated in this connection the theories of Thales, as rightly observed by
Aristotle (Metaph. I., 3, 5).
** The
"Spirit," or hidden voice of the Mantras, the active manifestation of
the latent Force, or occult potency.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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.**
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 NAME*** -- 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 [[theein]], "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 Brahma who
creates in the Rig Veda, but the Prajapati, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Orthography of
the "Archaic Dictionary."
** We do not
mean the current or accepted Bible, but the real Jewish one, now explained
kabalistically.
*** It is
"unutterable" for the simple reason that it is non-existent. It never
was a name, nor any word at all, but an Idea that could not be expressed. A
substitute was created for it in the century preceding our era.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 [[diagram]], 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,"* 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 'AEther, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Cosmic
Tabernacle of Moses, erected by him in the Desert, was square, representing the
four cardinal points and the four Elements, as Josephus tells his readers
(Antiq. 1, viii ch., xxii.) It is the idea taken from the pyramids in Egypt and
in Tyre, where the pyramids became pillars, the Genii, or Angels have their
abodes in the four respective points (See § xiv.; "The Four
Elements.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas (e.g., Vishnu
Purana 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 Puranas) -- 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.*
"The
Egyptians," says Dunlap,** "distinguish between an older and younger
Horus; the former the brother of Osiris, the latter the son of Osiris and
Isis." 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.***
"The
Mundane God, eternal, boundless, young and old, of winding form,"**** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Plutarch,
"Isis and Osiris," I., vi.
** "Spirit
History of Man," p. 88.
*** Mover's
"Phoinizer," 268.
**** Cory,
"Fragments," 240.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 349 THE MANY ARE ONE.
savant, before
laughing at it "to remodel entirely its own system of
cosmo-pneumatological education." Satis eloquentiae, sapientiae 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.)
--------------
§ 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
Brahma-Purusha down through the Seven divine Rishis and ten semi-divine
Prajapati (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 Son* (who is Brahma among the rest) that is to the
mind" (nous), Irenaeus 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As
Mulaprakriti is known only to Iswar, the LOGOS, as he is called now by Mr. T.
Subba Row, of Madras. (See his Bhagavadgita Lectures.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 350 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
For, as the
Basilidians taught, "there was a supreme god, Abraxas, 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 AEons 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 Puranas, wherein
the Incomprehensible drops a seed, which becomes the golden egg, from which
Brahma is produced. Brahma 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. Quaest. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEon, 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.)* All these sounds when united are the
collective Beingless,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Iswara, or the
Logos, cannot see Parabrahmam, but only Mulaprakriti, says the lecturer, in the
Four Lectures on Bhagavatgita. (See Theosophist, Feb., 1887.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 352 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
unbegotten AEon,
and these are the Angels that are ever beholding the face of the Father* (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 [[omega]], her neck [[psi]], shoulders and hands
[[gamma]], and [[chi]], 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 Brahma 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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The
"Seven Angels of the Face," with the Christians.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 353 THE EGYPTIAN VERSION.
was called the
"Mother," Sophia with the Gnostics (or the female Wisdom), the
Sephira with the Jews, Saraswati or Vach, 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,* as it can act
only through the Dual Force emanating from the Eternal Essence. Even
AEsculapius, 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 Akasa 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, &c. 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 [[hebrew]] = [[to pan]] =
[[apeiros]], Endless, Boundless, non-Existent, [[hebrew]] so
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We use the
term as one accepted and sanctioned by use, and therefore more comprehensible
to the reader.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 354 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
long as the
Absolute is within Oulom,* 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 [[hebrew]] the Mercaba and the lahgash (secret speech or
incantation), will learn the secret of secrets." Lahgash is nearly
identical in meaning with Vach, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* With the
ancient Jews, as shown by Le Clerc, the word Oulom meant only a time whose
beginning or end is not known. The term "eternity," properly
speaking, did not exist in the Hebrew tongue with the meaning, for instance,
applied by the Vedantins to Parabrahm.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 a 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" (Zohar I.
20a). 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,* Chochmah or Wisdom,
"a masculine, active potency whose divine name is Jah ([[diagram]]),"
and BINAH, a feminine passive potency, Intelligence, represented by the divine
name Jehovah ([[diagram]]); 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.* 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 Prajapati are the
Sephiroths. Ten with Brahma they dwindle to seven, when the Trimurti, and the
Kabalistic triad, are separated from the rest. The seven Builders (Creators)
become the seven Prajapati, 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 Malefemale or androgynous Principle, and
their ten and seven Emanations (Brahma-Viraj and Aditi-Vach on the one part and
the Elohim-Jehovah, or Adam-Adami (Adam Kadmon) and Sephira Eve on the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the Indian
Pantheon the double-sexed Logos is Brahma, the Creator, whose seven "mind
born" sons are the primeval Rishis -- the "Builders."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 356 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
other), with
their Prajapati 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" Sutra:
"In the beginning, a ray issuing from Paramarthika (the one and only true
existence), it became manifested in Vyavaharika (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 Light* (Darkness) used the [[hebrew]](heavenly form)
as a chariot [[hebrew]] 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. . . .
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" (Zohar
iii., 290). "The seventh palace, the fountain of life, is the first in the
order from above" (ii. 261). 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 Wuliang-sheu (Boundless
Age), Amitabhe, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says Rabbi
Simeon: "Ah, companions, companions, man as an 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." ("Auszuge aus dem
Sohar," p. 13, 15.) Light, then, in Genesis stood for the Androgyne Ray or
"Heavenly Man."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 357 ORNITHOLOGICAL SYMBOLS.
brother
Christians of other denominations, and yet one and all accept a 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," aniyamsam aniyasam (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.*
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 mediaeval 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 Brahma also, because the root
of all this is that mystery of mysteries -- the MUNDANE EGG. (See preceding §).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Seven
Swans that are believed to land from Heaven into Lake Mansarovara, are in the
popular fancy the Seven Rishis of the Great Bear, who assume that form to visit
the locality where the Vedas were written.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, &c.; 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.)
--------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (iii., 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" (Sec. V., 2, 3, etc.).
Ra is shown like
Brahma 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., 11). "It is the
Egg of the great clucking Hen, the Egg of Seb, who issues from it like a hawk"
(lxiv., 1, 2, 3; lxxvii., 1).
With the Greeks
the Orphic Egg is described by Aristophanes, and was part of the Dionysiac and
other mysteries, during which
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 360 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Mundane Egg
was consecrated and its significance explained; Porphyry showing it a
representation of the world, [[Ermenenei de to oon kosmon]]. 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) Puranas, 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 Muller. As said in the Vishnu Purana: "Intellect
(Mahat) . . . the (unmanifested) gross elements inclusive, formed an egg . . .
and the lord of the Universe himself abided in it, in the character of Brahma.
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 "[[diagram]]," 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 Muller says that
"the two words cipher and zero, which are but one, are sufficient to prove
that our figures are borrowed from the Arabs.* Cipher is the Arabic
"cifron," and means
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Max
Muller's "Our Figures."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 361 WHENCE OUR FIGURES?
empty, a translation
of the Sanscrit name of nought "sunya," he says.* The Arabs had their
figures from Hindustan, and never claimed the discovery for themselves.** 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
numerals*** the 1 and the nought, as the first and final ciphers. And Porphyry,
who quotes from the Pythagorean Moderatus,**** 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 Muller 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
Muller 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,***** 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.****** 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."******* 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A Kabalist would
be rather inclined to believe that as the Arabic cifron was taken from the
Indian Synya, nought, so the Jewish Kabalistic Sephiroth (Sephrim) were taken
from the word cipher, not in the sense of emptiness but the reverse -- that of
creation by number and degrees in their evolution. And the Sephiroth are 10 or
[[diagram]].
** See Max
Muller's "Our Figures."
*** See King's
"Gnostics and their Remains," plate xiii.
**** "Vita
Pythag."
***** 608 B.C.
****** This city
was built 332 B.C.
*******
"Metaph." vii., F.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 363 EGG-BORN LOGOI.
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 cortege 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 Philoe in Upper Egypt, an egg was
artificially prepared of clay made of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Crucifixion*; 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.**
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And this only
because the brazen serpent was lifted on a pole! It had rather a reference to
Mico the Egyptian egg standing upright supported by the sacred Tau; since the
Egg and the Serpent are inseparable in the old worship and symbology of Egypt,
and since both the Brazen and "fiery" serpents were Saraphs, the
"burning fiery" messengers, or the serpent Gods, the nagas of India.
It was a purely phallic symbol without the egg, while when associated with it
-- it related to cosmic creation.
** "Brass
was a metal symbolizing the nether world . . . . that of the womb where life
should be given . . . The word for serpent was in Hebrew Nakash, but this is
the same term for brass." It is said in Numbers (xxi.) that the Jews
complained of the Wilderness where there was no water (v. 5); after which
"the Lord sent fiery serpents" to bite them, when, to oblige Moses,
he gives him as a remedy the brazen serpent on a pole to look at; after which
"any man when he beheld the serpent of brass . . . . lived" (?).
After that the "Lord," gathering the people together at the well of
Beer, gives them water, (14-16), and grateful Israel sang this song,
"Spring up, O Well," (v. 17). When, after studying symbology, the
Christian reader comes to understand the innermost meaning of these three
symbols -- water, brazen, the serpent, and a few more -- in the sense given to
them in the Holy Bible, he will hardly like to connect the sacred name of his
Saviour with the "Brazen Serpent" incident. The Seraphim [[hebrew]]
(fiery winged serpents) are no doubt connected with, and inseparable from, the
idea "of the serpent of eternity -- God," as explained in Kenealy's
Apocalypse. But the word cherub also meant serpent, in one sense, though its
direct meaning is different; because the Cherubim and the Persian winged
[[gruphes]] "griffins" -- the guardians of the golden mountain -- are
the same, and their compound name shows their character, as it is formed of
[[hebrew]] (kr) circle, and [[hebrew]] "aub," or ob -- serpent --
therefore, a "serpent in a circle." And this settles the phallic
character of the Brazen Serpent, and justifies Hezekiah for breaking it. (See
II. Kings, 18, 4). Verbum sat. sapienti.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 OEdipus 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 AEther first, and then the air, from which Ulom, the
intelligible ([[noetos]]) deity (the visible Universe of Matter) is born out of
the Mundane Egg. (Mover's Phoinizer, p. 282.)
In the Orphic
Hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the divine Egg, which the AEthereal Winds
impregnate, wind being "the Spirit of the unknown Darkness" --
"the spirit of God" (as explains K. O. Muller, 236); the divine
"Idea," says Plato, "who is said to move AEther."
In the Hindu
Katakopanishad, Purusha, the divine spirit, already stands before the original
matter, "from whose union springs the great soul of the world,"
Maha-Atma, Brahma, the Spirit of Life,* etc., etc.** 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The latter
appellations are all identical with Anima Mundi, or the "Universal
Soul," the astral light of the Kabalist and the Occultist, or the
"Egg of Darkness."
** Weber,
"Akad Vorles," pp. 213, 214 et seq.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
Diodorus Siculus
states that Osiris was born from an Egg, like Brahma. 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.** 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,
Phoenicians, 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
Horus*** was the same Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with
matter and assuming an actual existence. (Compare Mover's "Phoinizer,"
p. 268.) The same with Khnoum and Ammon;**** 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;
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Isis is almost
always represented holding a lotus in one hand and in the other a circle and
the Cross (crux ansata), the Egg being sacred to her.
** The Chinese
seem to have thus anticipated Sir William Thomson's theory that the first
living germ had dropped to the Earth from some passing comet. Query! why should
this be called scientific and the Chinese idea a superstitious, foolish theory?
*** Horus -- the
"older," or Haroiri, is an ancient aspect of the solar god,
contemporary with Ra and Shoo; Haroiri is often mistaken for Hor (Horsusi), Son
of Osiris and Isis. The Egyptians very often represented the rising Sun under
the form of Hor the older, rising from a full-blown lotus, the Universe, when
the solar disc is always found on the hawk-head of that god. Haroiri is Khnoum.
**** Ammon or
Mon, the "hidden," the Supreme Spirit.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 367 THE SCANDINAVIAN LOGOS.
Ammon-Ra, the
generator, is the secondary aspect of the concealed deity. Khnoum was adored at
Elephanta and Philoe,* Ammon at Thebes. But it is Emepht, the One, Supreme
Planetary principle, who blows the egg out of his mouth, and who is, therefore,
Brahma. 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,** 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.***
In the
Scandinavian Cosmogony -- placed by Professor Max Muller, 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* His triadic
goddesses are Sati and Anouki.
** Phtah was
originally the god of death, of destruction, like Siva. He is a solar god only
by virtue of the sun's fire killing as well as vivifying. He was the national
god of Memphis, the radiant and "fair-faced God." (See Saqquarah
Bronzes, Saitic Epoch.)
*** The
Brahmanda Purana contains the mystery about Brahma's golden egg fully; and this
is why, perhaps, it is inaccessible to the Orientalists, who say that this
Purana, like the Skanda, is "no longer procurable in a collective
body," but "is represented by a variety of Khandas and Mahatmyas
professing to be derived from it." The "Brahmanda Purana" is
described as "that which is declared in 12,200 verses, the magnificence of
the egg of Brahma, and in which an account of the future Kalpas is contained as
revealed by Brahma." Quite so, and much more, perchance.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
--------------
§ VII.
THE DAYS AND
NIGHTS OF BRAHMA.
THIS is the name
given to the Periods called MANVANTARA (Manuantara, 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
Brahma. 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
Brahma, for it is said in the Brahma Vaivarta: "Chronologers compute a
Kalpa by the Life of Brahma; 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 Brahma (in the present Maha Kalpa) has already expired; the last Kalpa was
the Padma, or that of the Golden Lotos; the present one being Varaha* (the
"boar" incarnation, or Avatar).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There is a
curious piece of information in the Buddhist esoteric traditions. The exoteric
or allegorical biography of Gautama Buddha shows this great Sage dying of an
indigestion of pork and rice, a very prosaic end, indeed, having little of the
solemn element in it. This is explained as an allegorical reference to his
having been born in the "Boar," or Varaha-Kalpa when Brahma assumed
the form of that animal to raise the Earth out of the "Waters of
Space." And as the Brahmins descend direct from Brahma and are, so to
speak, identified with him; and as they are at the same time the mortal enemies
of Buddha and Buddhism, we have the curious allegorical hint and combination.
Brahminism (of the Boar, or Varaha Kalpa) has slaughtered the religion of
Buddha in India, swept it away from its face; therefore Buddha, identified with
his philosophy, is said to have died from the effects of eating of the flesh of
a wild hog. [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 369 HUMAN GODS AND DIVINE MEN.
By the scholar
who studies the Hindu religion from the Puranas, 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 Varaha 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 versa. 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 "Yudishthira* born on the mountain of the hundred peaks at the
extremity of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] The idea alone of one who established the most
rigorous vegetarianism and respect for animal life -- even to refusing to eat
eggs as vehicles of a latent future life -- dying of a meat indigestion, is
absurdly contradictory and has puzzled more than one Orientalist. But this
explanation, unveiling the allegory, explains all the rest. The Varaha,
however, is no simple boar, and seems to have meant at first some antediluvian
lacustrine animal "delighting to sport in water." (Vayu Purana.)
* According to
Colonel Wilford, the conclusion of the "Great War" was B.C. 1370.
(See A. R., Vol.9, p. 116); according to Bentley, 575 B.C.!! We may hope,
perhaps, that before the end of this century, the Mahabharatean epics will be
found and proclaimed identical with the wars of the great Napoleon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Judaeo-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 OEdipuses 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 Brahma's
dissolution, it is said in Vishnu Purana, in condensed form, that "at the
end of a thousand periods of four ages, which complete a day of Brahma, 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, Kalagni,' 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 NAIMITTIKA*
"occasional" or "incidental," caused by the intervals of
"Brahma'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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the Vedanta
and Nyaya "nimitta" (from which "Naimittika") is rendered
as the efficient cause, when antithesized with upadana the physical or material
cause. In the Sankhya pradhana is a cause inferior to Brahma, or rather Brahma
being himself a cause, is superior to Pradhana. Hence "incidental" is
wrongly translated, and ought to be translated, as shown by some scholars,
"Ideal" cause, and even real cause would have been better.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 371 THE RE-BIRTH OF GODS.
other is called
PRAKRITIKA -- and occurs at the end of the Age or Life of Brahma, 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 subtile forms, destined to become re-embodied, in similar
capacities as their former, when the world is renewed at the beginning of the
succeeding Kalpa;" (Vayu Purana).
" . . . .
These clouds, mighty in size, and loud in thunder, fill up all space
(Nabhas-tala)," goes on Vishnu Purana. -- (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 Brahma 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 372 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(Creator?) Hari,
sleeps upon the ocean of Space in the form of Brahma -- glorified by Sanaka*
and the Siddha (Saints) of Jana-loka, and contemplated by the holy denizens of
Brahma-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. . . . .** 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 Brahma (in the original it
is Padma-yoni, the same as Abjayoni -- "lotos-born," not Brahma), so
his Night consists of the same period. "Awaking at the end of his night,
the unborn . . . creates the Universe anew. . . ." (Vishnu Purana.)
This is
"incidental" pralaya; what is the Elemental Dissolution? "When
by dearth and fire," says Parasara to Maitreya, "all the worlds and
Patalas (hells) are withered up . . .*** 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 Vibhavasu (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 (murttimat) and vast, and pervades the whole Space. Akasa, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The chief
Kumara or Virgin-god (a Dhyan Chohan) who refuses to create. A prototype of St.
Michael, who refuses to do the same.
** See
concluding lines in Section, "Chaos, Theos, Kosmos."
*** This
prospect would hardly suit Christian theology, which prefers an eternal,
everlasting hell for its followers.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 373 THE DISSOLUTION OF THE EGG.
Elements* 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."**
"The Egg of
Brahma (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 (Akasa); 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 (naman and jati, or rupa,
hence body rather than species), or the like -- remains as the sole existence
(SATTA). . . Prakriti and Purusha both resolving finally into SUPREME SPIRIT. .
. ." (From Vishnu Purana, Wilson's mistakes being here corrected, and
original words put in brackets).
This is the
final PRALAYA*** -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The term
"Elements" must be understood here to mean not only the visible and
physical Elements, but also that which St. Paul calls Elements -- the
spiritual, intelligent Potencies -- Angels and Demons in their Manvantaric
form.
** When this
description is correctly understood by Orientalists in its esoteric
significance then it will be found that this Cosmic correlation of
World-Elements may explain the correlation of physical forces better than those
now known. At any rate, theosophists will perceive that Prakriti has seven
forms, or principles, "reckoned from Mahat to Earth." The
"Waters" mean here the Mystic "mother"; the Womb of
abstract nature, in which the manifested Universe is conceived. The Seven
"zones" have reference to the Seven Divisions of that Universe, or
the Noumena of the Forces that bring it into being. It is all allegorical.
*** As it is the
Maha, the Great, or so-called final PRALAYA which is here described, every
thing is re-absorbed into its original ONE Element -- the "Gods
themselves, Brahma and the rest" being said to die and disappear during
that long NIGHT.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma." 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 Brahma 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
Pashut. 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. T. Myer's excellent book on the Kabalistic works he seems to
have well studied. I quote verbatim. "B'raisheeth barah elohim ath hash
ama yem v'ath haa'retz -- i.e., 'In the beginning the God(s) created the
heavens and the earth;" (the meaning of which is:) the six Sephiroth of
Construction,* over which B'raisheeth 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
elohim . . . . was breathing (me' racha 'phath) -- i.e., hovering, brooding
over, moving. . . . . Thirteen depend on thirteen
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"Builders" of the Stanzas.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 millennium) 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." (Qabbalah, p. 233,
from Siphrah Dzeniuta, c. i., § 16, s. 9.)
The
"Sephiroth of Construction" are the six Dhyan Chohans, or Manus, or
Prajapati, 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 [[diagram]] 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 Swayambhuva the fourteenth (13, instead of 14, being an
additional veil): those fourteen Manus who reign within the term of a Mahayuga,
a "Day" of Brahma. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Purana
(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
Purana), 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 Brahma. "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 Brahma; 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 rasichakr (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. Surya (the Sun)
flickers and goes out, matter falls into dissolution (pralaya), and Brahma
merges back into Dayus, the Unrevealed God, and, his task being
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 377 THE PURANIC 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."*
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
Purana 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 Mlechchhas will be in the centre and the Aryas in the end.')** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
Jacquolliot's "Les Fils de Dieu"; l'Inde des Brahmes, p. 230.
** If this is
not prophetic, what is?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* They will return
hither in the beginning of the Krita age . . . Moru** 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."*** (Vayu Purana, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Matsya Purana
gives Katapa.
** Max Muller
translates the name as Morya, of the Morya dynasty, to which Chandragupta
belonged (see Sanscrit Literature). In Matsya Purana, chapter cclxxii, the
dynasty of ten Moryas (or Maureyas) is spoken of. In the same chapter, cclxxii,
it is stated that the Moryas will one day reign over India, after restoring the
Kshattriya race many thousand years hence. Only that reign will be purely
Spiritual and "not of this world." It will be the kingdom of the next
Avatar. Colonel Tod believes the name Morya (or Maureyas) a corruption of Mori,
a Rajpoot tribe, and the commentary on Mahavansa thinks that some princes have
taken their name Maurya from their town called Mori, or, as Professor Max
Muller gives it, Morya-Nagara, which is more correct, after the original
Mahavansa. Vachaspattya, we are informed by our Brother, Devan Badhadur R.
Ragoonath Rao, of Madras, a Sanscrit Encyclopedia, places Katapa (Kalapa) on
the northern side of the Himalayas, hence in Tibet. The same is stated in
chapter xii. (Skanda) of Bhagavat, Vol. III, p. 325.
*** The Vayu
Purana declares that Moru will re-establish the Kshattriya in the Nineteenth
coming Yuga. (See "Five years of Theosophy," p. 483. "The Moryas
and Koothoomi.")
--------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.** 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 Brahma -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
Christian religion Gabriel, the Archangel, holding in his hand a spray of water
lilies, appears to the Virgin Mary in every picture of the Annunciation. This
spray typifying fire and water, or the idea of creation and generation,
symbolizes precisely the same idea as the lotus in the hand of the Bodhisat who
announces to Maha-Maya, Gautama's mother, the birth of the world's Saviour,
Buddha. Thus also, Osiris and Horus were represented by the Egyptians
constantly in association with the lotus-flower, the two being Sun-gods or Fire
(the Holy Ghost being still typified by "tongues of fire"), (Acts).
** See Sir
William Jones' "Dissertations Relating to Asia."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 380 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
female aspect of
Vishnu,* 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 Sri, 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 Demiurge** 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Lakshmi is Venus
-- Aphrodite, and, like the latter, she sprang from the froth of the ocean with
a lotus in her hand. In the Ramayana she is called Padma.
** In Esoteric
philosophy the Demiurge or Logos, regarded as the CREATOR, is simply an
abstract term, an idea, like "army." As the latter is the
all-embracing term for a body of active forces or working units -- soldiers --
so is the Demiurge the qualitative compound of a multitude of Creators or
Builders. Burnouf, the great Orientalist, has seized the idea perfectly when
saying that Brahma does not create the earth, any more than the rest of the
universe. "Having evolved himself from the soul of the world, once
separated from the first cause, he evaporates with, and emanates all nature out
of himself. He does not stand above it, but is mixed up with it; Brahma and the
universe form one Being, each particle of which is in its essence Brahma
himself, who proceeded out of himself."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 § X., "Deus Lunus.")
"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.** The new born is an ever-recurring miracle, an evidence that
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In Indian
Puranas it is Vishnu, the first, and Brahma, the second logos, or the ideal and
practical creators, who are respectively represented, one as manifesting the
lotus, the other as issuing from it.
** Not the
"efforts" of the trained psychic faculties of an Initiate into
Eastern metaphysics, and the mysteries of creative Nature. It is the profane of
the past ages who have degraded the pure ideal of cosmic creation into an
emblem of mere human reproduction and sexual functions: it is the esoteric
teachings, and the initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be,
to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception so sadly profaned by
its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and personations by
theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The silent worship of abstract or
noumenal Nature, the only divine manifestation, is the one ennobling religion
of Humanity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 description** 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Surely the
words of the old Initiate into the primitive mysteries of Christianity,
"Know ye not ye are the Temple of God" (I Corinth. iii. 16) could not
be applied in this sense to men? The meaning may have been, and was so,
undeniably, in the minds of the Hebrew compilers of the Old Testament. And here
is the abyss that lies between the symbolism of the New Testament and the
Jewish canon. This gulf would have remained and ever widened, had not
Christianity -- especially and most glaringly the Latin Church -- thrown a
bridge over it? Modern Popery has now spanned it entirely, by its dogma of the
two immaculate conceptions, and the anthropomorphic and at the same time idolatrous
character it has conferred upon the Mother of its God.
** It was so
carried only in the Hebrew Bible, and its servile copyist, Christian theology.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The same idea
is carried out exoterically in the incidents of Egypt. The Lord God tempts
sorely Pharaoh and "plagues him with great plagues," lest the king
should escape punishment, and thus afford no pretext for one more triumph to
his "Chosen people."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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: [[diagram]]. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.)* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Even to the
seven daughters of the Midian priest, who, coming to draw the water, had Moses
water their flock, for which service the Midian gives to Moses Zipporah
(sippara = the shining wave) as wife (Exod. ii.) All this has the same secret
meaning.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
dogma of
resurrection.* 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" "[[ego eimi
anastasis]]."** These frog goddesses are also found on all the mummies.
-------------
§ IX
THE MOON, DEUS
LUNUS, PHOEBE.
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 Phoebe
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* With the
Egyptians it was the resurrection in rebirth after 3,000 years of purification,
either in Devachan or "the fields of bliss."
** Such
"frog-goddesses" may be seen at Bulaq, in the Cairo Museum. For the
statement about the Church lamps and inscriptions it is the learned ex-director
of the Bulaq Museum, Mr. Gaston Maspero, who must be held responsible. (See his
"Guide du Visiteur au Musee de Bulaq," p. 146.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* like Brahma-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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The goddess
[[Trimorphos]] in the statuary of Alcamenes.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Chaldaean 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 Chaldaea 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) languages a logical raison d'etre 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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 foetus 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:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Ancient
Mythology includes ancient Astronomy as well as Astrology. The planets were the
hands pointing out, on the dial of our solar system, the hours of certain
periodical events. Thus, Mercury was the messenger appointed to keep time
during the daily solar and lunar phenomena, and was otherwise connected with
the God and Goddess of Light.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 390 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"The basic
idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained
all things within himself*; 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,** 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.*** . . . 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,**** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A caricatured
and dwarfed Vedantin notion of Parabrahmam containing within itself the whole
Universe as being that boundless Universe itself, and there existing nothing
outside of itself.
** Just as they
are to this day in India, the bull of Siva and the cow representing several
Sakti -- goddesses.
*** Hence the
worship of the moon by the Hebrews.
**** "Male
and female, created he them."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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
he [[diagram]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Because it was
too sacred. It is referred to as THAT in the Vedas: it is the "Eternal
Cause," and cannot, therefore, be spoken of as a "First Cause,"
a term implying the absence of any cause, at one time.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
[[diagram]], 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 Indovansas, 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 393 COPIES AND ORIGINALS.
and loudly
confess to it. In a Memoire 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." (ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE
VIRGIN MOTHER," 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 R'Hez'quee-yah,
which is very old," says our author, "and forms part of our Brody
edition of the Zohar (I, 5b. sq.) is an account of a journey taken by R. El'azar,
son of R. Shim-on b. Io'hai, and Rabbi Abbah." 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 394 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(Law).
"They asked: 'Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy load?'
He answered: 'The letter [[diagram]], (Yod, which = 10, and is the symbolical letter
of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy name [[diagram]] 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 .
. . R. El'azar 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 Qu-tamy 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
[[stoicheia]], and according to figures that were located in the sky and called
[[alexeteroi]], or the tutelary gods. Those who traced out the [[stoicheia]]
were called [[stoicheiomatichoi]], or the diviners by the [[stoicheia]]. (De
Diis Syriis, Teraph, II. Synt. p. 31) vide infra, the Teraphim.
It is such
sentences, however, in the "Nabathean agriculture," that
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
[[pneumata ton stoicheion]]" (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 Anaitis, as shown by an inscription of
Koloe: '[[Artemidi 'Anaeiti]]. 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 [[Kalliste]], and of whom Hippolitus wrote:
[[Kallista polu parthenon]]. (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 [[Trimorphos]] 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 ([[Trimorphos]]) 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced
derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, "mother," from the root
ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all
those goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.* Its primitive meaning,
however, was Maya, Durga, 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,** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Roman
Catholics are indebted for the idea of consecrating the month of May to the
Virgin, to the pagan Plutarch, who shows that "May is sacred to Maia
([[Maia]]) or Vesta" (Aulus-Gellius, word Maia) -- our mother-earth, our
nurse and nourisher personified.
** Thot-Lunus is
"Budha-Soma" of India, or "Mercury and the Moon."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons
later in the Mahabharatan 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-Skemesh,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* During that
period which is absent from the Mosaic books -- from the exile of Eden to the
allegorical Flood -- the Jews worshipped with the rest of the Semites Dayanisi
[[hebrew]] "the Ruler of Men," the "Judge," or the SUN.
Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the sun become the
"Lord God" and Jehovah in the Bible, yet the latter is full of
indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah the sun, and
Astoreth the moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present metaphorical
element given to it. God is a "consuming fire," appears in, and is
encompassed by fire." It was not only in vision that Ezekiel (viii., 16)
saw the Jews "worshipping the sun." The Baal of the Israelites (the
Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites) was the identical
"Sun-Jehovah," and he is till now "the King of the Host of
Heaven," the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the "Queen of Heaven"
-- or the moon. The "Sun of Righteousness" has become a metaphorical
expression only now.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 Rouge is unable to understand, in the text
which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-Ra saying to King Amenophes (supposed
to be Memnon), "Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee"; and as he
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The earth
flees for her life in the allegory, before Prithu, who pursues her. She assumes
the shape of a cow, and, trembling with terror, runs away and hides even in the
regions of Brahma. Therefore, it is not our Earth. Again, in every Purana, the
calf changes name. In one it is Manu Swayambhuva, in another Indra, in a third
the Himavat (Himalayas) itself, while Meru was the milker. This is a deeper
allegory than one thinks.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 399 THE DIGNITY OF SAIS.
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"* what "the Divine Father and Son"
were with the Egyptians, de Rouge 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 Sais. Yet he quotes
the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses when introducing that king into the
Saitic temple: "I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Sais, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* His clear
realization of it is, that the Egyptians prophesied Jehovah (!) and his
incarnated Redeemer (the good serpent), etc., etc.; even to identifying Typhon
with the wicked dragon of the garden of Eden, and this passes as serious and
sober science.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Egyptians
Hathor, another aspect of Isis,* 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 Rochetti 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 [[Monogenes Theou]], "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, [[panbasileia]];
"at the names of which, as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other
infernal goddesses," "tremble all the demons."**
"[[Semelen
premousi daimones]]." 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, Archaeologie de la Vierge mere) 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 versa, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Hathor is the
infernal Isis, the goddess pre-eminently of the West or the nether world.
** This is De
Mirville, who proudly confesses the similarity, and he ought to know.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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." -- (Archaeol. 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; (Apocal., ch.
xii., Comm. by Cornelius a Lapide).
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 task. But then "they
believe in nothing and reject even the 'Nabathean Agriculture' as a romance and
a pack of superstitious nonsense," complains the memorialist. "In
their perverted opinion Qu-ta-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 "Memoires 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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?"*
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 SABAEANISM 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Quoted in Mr.
G. Massey's Lecture.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."
--------------
§ 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Vita 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. Haeres. 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 Nagas of the Hindu and
Tibetan adepts were human Nagas (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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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"* -- 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 --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Natural
Genesis, by Gerald Massey, Vol. 1, p. 340.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Brahma or Brahman in his highest manifestations, say Sridhara
and Madhusudana), 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 Brahma.
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons 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 Nidhogg -- 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 Puranic 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 --
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Kronos), 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.* 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.** . . . 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 "Naga"; 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For the same
reason the division of the principles in man into seven are thus reckoned, as
they describe the same circle in the human higher and lower nature.
** Thus the
septenary division is the oldest and preceded the four-fold division. It is the
root of archaic classification.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 409 DRAGON AND CROCODILE.
milion Bird, and
Azure Dragon, is called in the Secret Books, -- the "Four Hidden Dragons
of Wisdom" and the "Celestial Nagas." 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 Timaeus," 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Agathodaemon and the Kakodaemon. 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
bond 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 Agathodaemon, 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 [[omega]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Agathodaemon and Kakodaemon
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Puranic literature is one of her greatest Rishis and Yogis -- Narada, surnamed
the "Strife-maker."
And he is a
Brahmaputra, a son of Brahma, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas, only
far more ample and philosophically suggestive.
Thus Pulastya, a
"Son of God" -- one of the first progeny -- is made the progenitor of
Demons, the Rakshasas, the tempters and the Devourers of men. Pisacha (female
Demon) is a daughter of Daksha, a "Son of God" too, and a God, and
the mother of all the Pisachas (Padma Purana). The Demons, so called in the
Puranas, are very extraordinary devils when judged from the standpoint of
European and orthodox views about these creatures, since all of them --
Danavas, Daityas, Pisachas, and the Rakshasas -- 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 Puranic giants and Titans are called Devils. The Missionaries, ever on
the watch to show, if they can, the Hindu traditions no better than a
reflection of the Jewish Bible, have evolved a whole romance on the alleged
identity of Pulastya with Cain, and of the Rakshasas with the Cainites,
"the accursed," the cause of the Noachian Deluge. (See the work of
Abbe Gorresio, who "etymologises" Pulastya's name as meaning the
"rejected," hence Cain, if you please). Pulastya dwells in Kedara, he
says, which means a "dug-up place," a mine, and Cain is shown in
tradition and the Bible as the first worker in metals and a miner thereof!
While it is very
probable that the Gibborim (the giants) of the Bible are the Rakshasas 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 Puranic sages and their Christ-like mansuetude. When Parasara, whose
father was devoured by a Rakshasa, 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 Rakshasas 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed; let thy sacrifice cease. Mercy is
the might of the righteous" (Vishnu Purana, 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 Parasara 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 AEons" 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 418 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of the right or
the left hand. At the same time they show that Michael, "the
generalissimos 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 Samael (an
Elohim, also and synonymous with Jehovah in his collectivity), are identical with
Michael and his host. In short, the roles are reversed, all the combatants are
confused, and no student is able to distinguish clearly which is which.
Esoteric explanation may, however, bring some order into this confusion, in
which Jehovah becomes Saturn, and Michael and his army, Satan and the
rebellious angels, owing to the indiscreet endeavours of the too faithful
zealots to see 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 Puranic 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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 Purana 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 Parasara, 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),** the discomfited gods address many
supplications "to the first
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* One "Day
of Brahma" lasting 4,320,000,000 years -- multiply this by 365! The Asuras
here (no-gods, but demons) are still Suras, gods higher in hierarchy than such
secondary gods as are not even mentioned in the Vedas. The duration of the war shows
its significance, and that they are only the personified Cosmic powers. It is
evidently for sectarian purposes and out of odium theologicum that the illusive
form assumed by Vishnu Mayamoha, was attributed in later rearrangements of old
texts to Buddha and the Daityas, in the Vishnu Purana, unless it was a fancy of
Wilson himself. He also fancied he found an allusion to Buddhism in
Bhagavatgita, whereas, as proved by K. T. Telang, he had only confused the
Buddhists and the older Charvaka materialists. The version exists nowhere in
other Puranas if the inference does, as Professor Wilson claims, in the
"Vishnu Purana"; the translation of which, especially of Book iii.,
ch. xviii., where the reverend Orientalist arbitrarily introduces Buddha, and
shows him teaching Buddhism to Daityas -- led to another "great war"
between himself and Col. Vans Kennedy. The latter charged him publicly with
wilfully distorting Puranic texts. "I affirm," wrote the Colonel at
Bombay, in 1840, "that the Puranas do not contain what Professor Wilson
has stated is contained in them . . . until such passages are produced I may be
allowed to repeat my former conclusions, that Professor Wilson's opinion, that
the Puranas as now extant are compilations made between the eighth and
seventeenth centuries (A.D.!) rests solely on gratuitous assumptions and
unfounded assertions, and that his reasoning in support of it is either futile,
fallacious, contradictory, or improbable." (See Vishnu Purana, trans. by
Wilson, edit. by Fitzedward Hall, Vol. V., Appendix.)
** This
statement belongs to the third War, since the terrestrial continents, seas and
rivers are mentioned in connection with it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Paramapadatmavat
(beyond the condition of spirit) and in essence and substance (rupa), the whole
of this (Universe)." (Book III., ch. xvii., Vish. Purana.)
The above is
quoted as an illustration of the vast field offered by the Puranas 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:--*
"The
Puranas 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
Puranas. . . . ."
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In Book I.,
chap. xvii., narrating the story of Prahlada -- the Son of Hiranyakasipu, the
Puranic Satan, the great enemy of Vishnu, and the King of the three worlds --
into whose heart Vishnu entered.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Purana, if Orientalists would only notice it.* There is Vishnu, as Brahma, and
Vishnu in his two aspects, philosophy teaches. There is but one Brahma,
"essentially prakriti and Spirit," &c.
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. Levi
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This ignorance
is truly and beautifully expressed in the praise of the Yogins to Brahma,
"the upholder of the earth" (in Book I., chap. iv. of V. P.), when
they say, "Those who have not practised devotion conceive erroneously of
the nature of the world. The ignorant who do not perceive that this Universe is
of the nature of wisdom, and judge of it as an object of perception only, are
lost in the ocean of spiritual ignorance. But they who know true wisdom, and
whose minds are pure, behold this whole world as one with divine knowledge, as
one with thee, O God! Be favourable, O universal Spirit!"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Sarai, 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 Purana 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.* . . . . 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 (Ameyatman) 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
(Mayamoha, "the deluder by illusion") which he gave to the Gods and
thus spake: "This Mayamoha 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, Mayamoha, 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 Mahamoha, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "There
was a day when the Sons of God came before the Lord, and Satan came with his
brothers, also before the Lord" (Job ii., Abyss., Ethiopic text).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Purana,* 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 Puranas 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-AEther by the Greeks, Jupiter-Titan, etc., etc. They
know that the soul of the ASTRAL LIGHT is divine, and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Wilson's
opinion that the "Vishnu Purana" is a production of our era, and that
in its present form it is not earlier than between the VIIIth and the XVIIth
(!!) century, is absurd beyond noticing.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 reflection 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 [[mythos]],
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,* 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 ([[Peri archon]]) they
referred to it as "the Unknown DARKNESS." The Babylonians passed over
this principle in silence: "To that god," says Porphyry, in [[Peri
apoches empsuchon]], "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,"** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Magazine" for April, 1797.
** [[Etoi men
protista chaos genet; geneto]] being considered in antiquity as meaning
"Was generated" and not simply was. (See "Taylor's Introd. to
the Parmenides of Plato," p. 260.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther and Chaos of Orpheus
and Hesiod, and the bound and infinity of Pythagoras and Plato.* . . . .
Proclus says of this highest principle that it is. . . . "the Unity of
Unities, and beyond the first adyte. . . . . 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,"** 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 Brahma is not even named,
Cosmogony is preluded with the Hiranyagharha, "the Golden Egg," and
Prajapati (Brahma 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 [[apeiron]] and [[peras]]. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is the
"bound" confused with the "Infinite," that Kapila
overwhelms with sarcasms in his disputations with the Brahman Yogis, who claim
in their mystical visions to see the "Highest One."
** See T.
Taylor's article in his Monthly Magazine quoted in the Platonist, edited by T.
M. Johnson, F.T.S., Osceola, Missouri. (Feb. Number of 1887.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 427 THE CREATIVE LOGOI, 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,* 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 Brahma 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 Brahma 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 Brahma or Prajapati-Vach of the Vedas, and the androgyne of Plato, which is
but another version of the Indian symbol.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vach -- the
"melodious cow, who milks sustenance and water," and yields us
"nourishment and sustenance" as described in Rig-Veda.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Iswara (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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
This great
circle (which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the point within the Boundless
Circle) is the Avalokiteswara, 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 Avalokiteswara, Brahma, 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,
&c., &c. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* From the
Masonic Review for June, 1886.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 light*; 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, existence** 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 Vach,*** 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 Vach is identical with Brahma, and is called the female Logos. In the
Rig-Veda, Vach is "mystic speech," by whom Occult Knowledge and
Wisdom are communicated to man, and thus Vach is said to have "entered the
Rishis." She is "generated by the gods;" she is the divine Vach
-- the "Queen of gods"; and she is associated -- like Sephira with
the Sephiroth -- with the Prajapati in their work of creation. Moreover, she is
called "the mother of the Vedas," "since it is through her power
(as mystic speech) that Brahma 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.****
But Vach being
also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha -- "the god who lives in all the
Kalpas" -- her Mayavic character is thereby shown:
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Called, in the
Bhagavat-Gita, Daiviprakriti.
** Objective --
in the world of Maya, of course; still as real as we are.
*** "In the
course of cosmic manifestation, this Daiviprakriti, instead of being the mother
of the Logos, should, strictly speaking, be called his daughter."
("Notes on the Bhagavat-Gita," p. 305, Theosophist.)
**** The wise
men, like Stanley Jevons amongst the moderns, who invented the scheme which
makes the incomprehensible assume a tangible form, could only do so by
resorting to numbers and geometrical figures.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 431 THE FEMALE LOGOI.
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 Vach, Brahma (the Logos) created
the primordial waters." In the Kathaka Upanishad it is stated still more
clearly: "Prajapati was this Universe. Vach was a second to him. He
associated with her . . . she produced these creatures and again re-entered
Prajapati."*
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 Brahmana" -- namely, that Brahma, as the father of men,
performed the work of procreation by incestuous intercourse with his own
daughter Vach, 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 Brahma, or rather Prajapati, 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 Vach is a permutation of Aditi and Mulaprakriti (Chaos), and
Brahma a permutation of Narayana, the Spirit of God entering into, and
fructifying nature; therefore, there is nothing phallic in the conception at
all.
As already
stated, Aditi-Vach 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This connects
Vach and Sephira with the goddess Kwan-Yin, the "merciful mother,"
the divine VOICE of the soul even in Exoteric Buddhism; and with the female
aspect of Kwan-Shai-yin, the Logos, the verbum of Creation, and at the same
time with the voice that speaks audibly to the Initiate, according to Esoteric
Buddhism. Bath Kol, the filia Vocis, the daughter of the divine voice of the
Hebrews, responding from the mercy seat within the veil of the temple is -- a
result.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Vach is of four kinds . . . . para, pasyanti, madhyama,
vaikhari (a statement found in the Rig-Veda and the Upanishads) . . . .
Vaikhari Vach 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-Vach
exists in its Madhyama . . . . Pasyanti and ultimately in its Para form. . . .
. The reason why this Pranava* is called Vach is this, that these four
principles of the great Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vach. . . . .
The whole Kosmos in its objective form is Vaikhari Vach; 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 Vach."
(Notes on the Bhagavad-Gita).
Thus Vach,
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 (Brahma) Prajapati-Vach. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Pranava, like
Om, is a mystic term pronounced by the Yogis during meditation; of the terms
called, according to exoteric Commentators, Vyahritis, or "Om, Bhur,
Bhuva, Swar" (Om, earth, sky, heaven) -- Pranava is the most sacred,
perhaps. They are pronounced with breath suppressed. See Manu II. 76-81, and
Mitakshara commenting on the Yajnavahkya-Suriti, i. 23. But the esoteric
explanation goes a great deal further.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 433 THE PYTHAGOREAN IDEA.
incognisable
DEITY in One).* "When the Heavenly man (or LOGOS) first assumed the form
of the Crown** (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 Brahma-Prajapati, once he became separated from, yet
identical with Vach, caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajapatis to
issue from that crown. In Exotericism one will always find 10 and 7, of either
Sephiroth or Prajapati; in Esoteric rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also
10. Only when divided in the manifested sphere into 3 and 7, they form
[[diagram]], the androgyne, and [[diagram]], 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.*** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is this
trinity that is meant by the "three steps of Vishnu"; which means:
(Vishnu being considered as the Infinite in exotericism) -- that from the
Parabrahm issued Mulaprakriti, Purusha (the Logos), and Prakriti: the four
forms (with itself, the synthesis) of Vach. And in the Kabala -- Ain-Soph,
Shekinah, Adam Kadmon and Sephirah, the four -- or the three emanations being
distinct -- yet ONE.
** Chaldean Book
of Numbers. In the current Kabala the name Jehovah replaces Adam Kadmon.
*** Justin
Martyr tells us that, owing to his ignorance of these four sciences, he was
rejected by the Pythagoreans as a candidate for admission into their school.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Vach, 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 Vach. 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 Brahma (Iswara, or the Logos) and Vach, 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 [[diagram]], and the |, and the [[diagram]], the second | and
the [[diagram]]* in her bosom, ready to bring them forth, the valiant sons of
the [[diagram]] [[diagram]] || (or 4,320,000, the Cycle) whose two elders are
the [[diagram]] 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 personae. "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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* 31415, or
[[pi]]. The synthesis, or the Host unified in the Logos and the Point called in
Roman Catholicism the "Angel of the Face," and in Hebrew [[hebrew]]
"who is (like unto, or the same) as God" -- the manifested
representation.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 435 ANTIQUITY OF THE PYRAMIDS.
Commentary.*
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 OEdipus, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Appearing at
the beginning of Cycles, as also of every sidereal year (of 25,868 years) therefore
the Kabeiri or Kabarim received their name in Chaldea, as it means the measures
of Heaven from Kob -- measure of, and Urim -- heavens.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Purana" 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 Puranas," 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 Brahma, are referred to in the Satapatha Brahmana
under one set of names; in the Mahabharata under another set; and that the Vayu
Purana 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 Prajapati
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 Brahma-Prajapati, Adam Kadmon, Ormazd, and so many other
Logoi, the chief and synthesis of the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Uraeus (serpent or naja)* 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 uraeus, 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 Prajapati, 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 Yacna,
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This Egyptian
word Naja reminds one a good deal of the Indian Naga, the Serpent-God. Brahma
and Siva and Vishnu are all crowned with, and connected with Nagas -- a sign of
their cyclic and cosmic character.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Shaddai, [[hebrew]], 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.* 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,"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says the
translator of Avicebron's "Qabbalah" (Mr. Isaac Myer, LL.B., of
Philadelphia) of this "Sum Total": "The letter of Kether is
[[hebrew]] (Yod), of Binah [[hebrew]](Heh), together YaH, the feminine Name;
the third letter, that of Hokhmah, is [[hebrew]] (Vau), making together,
[[hebrew]] YHV of [[hebrew]] YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, and really the complete
symbols of its efficaciousness. The last [[hebrew]](Heh) of this Ineffable Name
being always applied to the Six Lower and the last, together the Seven
remaining Sephiroth." . . . Thus the Tetragrammaton is holy only in its
abstract synthesis. As a quaternary containing the lower Seven Sephiroth, it is
phallic.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 ago* 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.** Everywhere there is either a LOGOS -- a "Light shining
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The statement
will, of course, be found preposterous and absurd, and simply laughed at. But
if one believes in the final submersion of Atlantis 850,000 years ago, as
taught in "Esoteric Buddhism" (the gradual first sinking having begun
during the Eocene age), one has to accept the statement for the so-called
Lemuria, the continent of the Third Root Race, first nearly destroyed by
combustion, and then submerged. This is what the Commentary says: "The
first earth having been purified by the forty-nine fires, her people, born of
Fire and Water, could not die . . . etc.; the Second Earth (with its race)
disappeared as vapour vanishes in the air . . . the Third Earth had everything
consumed on it after the separation, and went down into the lower Deep (the
Ocean). This was twice eighty-two cyclic years ago." Now a cyclic year is
what we call a sidereal year, and is founded on the precession of the
equinoxes, or 25,868 years each, and this is equal, therefore, in all to
4,242,352 years. More details will be found in the text of Book II. Meanwhile,
this doctrine is embodied in the "Kings of Edom."
** The same
reserve is found in the Talmud and in every national system of religion whether
monotheistic or exoterically polytheistical. From the superb religious poem by
the Kabalist Rabbi Solomon Ben Gabirol in "the Kether Malchuth," we
select a few definitions given in the prayers of Kippur. . . . "Thou art
one, the beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all edifices; Thou art
One, and in the secret of Thy unity the wisest of men are lost, because they
know it not. Thou art one, and Thy Unity is never diminished, never extended,
and cannot be changed. Thou art one, but not as an element of numeration; for
Thy Unity admits not of multiplication, change or form. Thou art existent; but
the understanding and vision of mortals cannot attain to thy existence, nor
determine for thee the Where, the How, and the Why. Thou art Existent, but in
thyself alone, there being none other that can exist with thee. Thou art
Existent, before all time and without Place. Thou art Existent, and thy
existence is so profound and secret that none can penetrate and discover thy
secrecy. Thou art Living, but within no time that can be fixed or known; Thou
art Living, but not by a spirit or a soul, for Thou art thyself, THE SOUL OF
ALL SOULS," etc., etc. There is [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
([['Energeia]]), incandescent celestial stones (lapides igniti coelorum), and
especially, "supporters of the World" ([[Kosmokratores]]), governors
or RULERS of the World (rectores mundi), the "Wheels" of the World
(Rotae), 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,"* 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 life** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] a distance between this Kabalistical Deity and
the Biblical Jehovah, the spiteful and revengeful God of Abram, Isaac, and
Jacob, who tempted the former and wrestled with the last. No Vedantin but would
repudiate such a Parabrahm.
* Rev. Joseph
Edkins "On Cosmogony," p. 320. And very wisely they have acted.
** If he
rejected it, it was on the ground of what he calls the changes -- in other
words, rebirths -- of man, and constant transformations. He denied immortality
to the personality of man -- as we do -- not to MAN.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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,** the Lion, and occasionally
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* He may be
laughed at by the Protestants; but the Roman Catholics have no right to mock
him, without becoming guilty of blasphemy and sacrilege. For it is over 200
years since Confucius was canonized as a Saint in China by the Roman Catholics,
who have thereby obtained many converts among the ignorant Confucianists.
** The animals
regarded as sacred in the Bible are not few: the goat for one, the Azaz-el, or
God of Victory. As Aben Ezra says: "If thou art capable of comprehending
the mystery of Azazel, thou wilt learn the mystery of His (God's) name, for it
has similar associates in Scriptures. I will tell thee by allusion one portion
of the mystery; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Agathodaemon probably.* 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 Puranas 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 prajapati, 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 Brahma"); thus answering to the seven AEons, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] when thou shalt have thirty three years of age
thou wilt comprehend me." So with the mystery of the tortoise. Rejoicing
over the poetry of Biblical metaphors, associating with the name of Jehovah,
"incandescent stones," "sacred animals," etc., and quoting
from the Bible de Vence (Vol. XIX. p. 318) a French pious writer says: "Indeed
all of them are Elohim like their God; for, these Angels assume, through a holy
usurpation, the very divine name of Jehovah each time they represent him."
(Pneumatologie, Vol. II., p. 294). No one ever doubted that the NAME must have
been assumed, when under the guise of the Infinite, One Incognizable, the
Malachim (messengers) descended to eat and drink with men. But if the Elohim
(and even lower Beings), assuming the god-name, were and are still worshipped,
why should the same Elohim be called devils, when appearing under the names of
other Gods?
* The choice is
curious, and shows how paradoxical were the first Christians in their
selections. For why should they have chosen these symbols of Egyptian paganism,
when the eagle is never mentioned in the New Testament save once, when Jesus
refers to it as a carrion eater? (Matt. xxiv. 28); and in the Old Testament it
is called unclean; that the Lion is made a point of comparison with Satan, both
roaring for men to devour; and the oxen are driven out of the Temple. On the
other hand the Serpent, brought as an exemplar of wisdom to follow, is now
regarded as the symbol of the Devil. The esoteric pearl of Christ's religion
degraded into Christian theology, may indeed be said to have chosen a strange
and unfitting shell to be born in and evolved from.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 eth-h'orebv [[diagram]], = 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 B'rash, [[diagram]], or the first word
of Genesis, with its prepositional prefix, signifying the same concreted
general form
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 444 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
astronomically,
with the one here intended." Now the secret reading of the first verse of
Genesis being: "In Rash (B'rash) 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.)* The
"Raven," or the Eth-H'Orebv, yields the same numerical value as the
"Head," and returned not to the ark, while the dove returned,
carrying the olive-branch, when Noah, the new man of the new Race (whose
prototype is Vaivasvata Manu), prepared to leave the ark, the womb (or Argha)
of terrestrial nature, 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."** Hence the whole cycle of events
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Bryant is
right in saying "Druid Bardesin says of Noah that when he came out of the
ark (the birth of a new cycle), after a stay therein of a year and a day, that
364 + 1 = 365 days, he was congratulated by Neptune upon his birth from the
waters of the Flood, who wished him a happy New Year." The
"Year," or cycle, esoterically, was the new race of men born from
woman after the separation of the sexes, which is the secondary meaning of the
allegory: its primary meaning being the beginning of the Fourth Round, or the
new Creation.
** Unpubl. MSS.
(But see "Source of Measures.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma 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 Prajapatis, 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.
--------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 445 GOD IS OUR HIGHER SELF.
§ 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
Pumis (Spirit) and Pradhana (crude matter)" (Veda: "Vishnu Purana
Commentary"); or literally: "One Pradhanika Brahma Spirit: THAT
was." The "Pradhanika Brahma Spirit" is Mulaprakriti and
Parabrahmam.
In Vishnu
Purana, Parasara says to Maitreya, his pupil:-- "I have thus explained to
you, excellent Muni, six creations. . . . the creation of the Arvaksrotas
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,"* -- i.e., with the seven notes of the scale, the Seven
Spirits of the Stars, &c., &c.
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 Timaeus (p. 121), "is a Monad, Duad, and
Heptad," comprehending in herself all the Titanidae, "who are
seven."
The Seven
Creations are found in almost every Purana. 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) Bhuta or
Bhutasarga, elemental creation, the first differentiation of Universal
indiscrete Substance; (3) Indriya or Aindriyaka, organic evolution. "These
three were the Prakrita creations, the developments of indiscrete nature
preceded by indiscrete principle"; (4) Mukhya, the fundamental creation of
perceptible things, was that of inanimate bodies**; (5) Tairyagyonya, or
Tiryaksrotas, was that of animals; (6) Urdhwasrotas, or that of divinities***
(?); (7) Arvaksrotas, was that of man. (See Vishnu Purana.)
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
Brahma. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Origen contra
Celsum, b. vi., chap. xxii.
** The text
says: "And the fourth creation is here the primary, for things immovable are
emphatically known as primary." (See Fitzedward Hall's Corrections.)
*** How can
"divinities" have been created after the animals? The esoteric
meaning of the expression "animals" is the germs of all animal life
including man. Man is called a sacrificial animal, and an animal that is the
only one among animal creation who sacrifices to the gods. Moreover, by the
"sacred animals," the 12 signs of the zodiac are often meant in the
sacred texts, as already stated.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma," 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 Brahmana "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) Brahma, 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
Purana, 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 Puranas.
"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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
Irenaeus 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 Purana and
others. Thus Irenaeus 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 Puranas, to which two more are added of which the
eighth, termed Anugraha, "possesses both the qualities of goodness and
darkness," a Sankhyan more than a Puranic idea. For Irenaeus 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 Irenaeus 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,"** 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 Irenaeus;
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, Martanda -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Qabbalah, p.
415-16, by T. Myer, Philadelphia.
** Superior to
the Spirits or "Heavens" of the Earth only.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Ildabaoth* (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,** 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 Irenaeus, 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 Viraj . . .
spontaneously produced" (I., 33). He first creates the ten lords of Being,
the Prajapatis, 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" (Irenaeus, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See "Isis
Unveiled," Vol. II., p. 183.
** See also
King's Gnostics. Other sects regarded Jehovah as Ildabaoth himself King
identifies him with Saturn.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 450 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"The
creators (Elohim) outline in the second 'hour' the shape of man," says
Rabbi Simeon (The Nuctameron 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
Brahma" has 14 Manus, which the Hebrew Kabalists, following, however, in
this the Chaldeans, have disguised into 12 "Hours."* The Nuctameron
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).** 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'" 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." (Vishnu Purana.)
"Seeing that the potencies of all beings are under-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Elsewhere,
however, the identity is revealed. See supra, the quotation from Ibn-Gabirol
and his 7 heavens, 7 earths, etc.
** This must not
be confused with precosmic "DARKNESS," the Divine ALL.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Purana;
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 Brahma 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 Brahmanas and Puranas 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, Brahma, 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," -- [[Nous o diakosmonte kai panton aitios]].
Wilson saw at a
glance the suggestive connection between Mahat and the Phoenician 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 Brucker (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."* . . .
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The nous of
the Greeks, which is (spiritual or divine) mind, or mens, "Mahat,"
operates upon matter in the same way; it "enters into" and agitates
it:
"Spiritus
intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat
molem, et magno se corpore miscet."
In the
Phoenician Cosmogony, "Spirit mixing with its own principles gives rise to
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma, the first
manifested creative Power; and the Dhyani-Energies are the Manus, or
Manu-Swayambhuva 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," "Bhuta," was of the rudimental principles
(Tanmatras), thence termed the elemental creation (Bhuta-sarga).* It is the
period of the first breath of the differentiation of the pre-Cosmic Elements or
matter. Bhutadi means literally "the origin of the Elements," and
precedes Bhuta-sarga -- the "creation" or differentiation of those
Elements in primordial "Akasa" (Chaos or Vacuity).** In the
"Vishnu Purana" it is said to proceed along, and belong to, the
triple aspect of Ahankara, 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" Ahankara becomes "passionate" and finally
"rudimental"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] creation" also; (Brucker, I., 240); the
Orphic triad shows an identical doctrine: for there Phanes (or Eros), Chaos,
containing crude undifferentiated Cosmic matter, and Chronos (time), are the
three co-operating principles, emanating from the Unknowable and concealed
point, which produce the work of "Creation." And they are the Hindu Purusha
(phanes), Pradhana (chaos), and Kala (Chronos) or time. The good Professor
Wilson does not like the idea, as no Christian clergyman, however liberal,
would. He remarks that "as presently explained,. the mixture (of the
Supreme Spirit or Soul) is not mechanical; it is an influence or effect exerted
upon intermediate agents which produce effects." The sentence in Vishnu
Purana: "As fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, and not
from any immediate operation upon mind itself, so the Supreme influenced the
elements of creation," the reverend and erudite Sanscritist correctly
explains . . . : "As perfumes do not delight the mind by actual contact,
but by the impression they make upon the sense of smelling, which communicates
it to the mind," adding: "The entrance of the Supreme into spirit, as
well as matter, is less intelligible than the view elsewhere taken of it, as
the infusion of spirit, identified with the supreme, into Prakriti or matter
alone." He prefers the verse in Padma Purana: "He who is called the
male (spirit) of Prakriti . . . that same divine Vishnu entered into
Prakriti." This "view" is certainly more akin to the plastic
character of certain verses in the Bible concerning the Patriarchs, such as Lot
(Gen. xix., 34-38) and even Adam (iv., v. 1), and others of a still more
anthropomorphic nature. But it is just that which led Humanity to Phallicism,
Christian religion being honeycombed with it, from the first chapter of Genesis
down to the Revelation.
* All these
sentences are quoted from "Vishnu Purana," Book I., ch. v.
** Vishnu is
both Bhutesa, "Lord of the Elements, and all things," and Viswarupa,
"Universal Substance or Soul."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (rupa): the Chitrasikhandina (bright-crested) or the
Riksha -- those Rishis who have become the informing souls of the seven stars
(of the Great Bear).* In astronomical and Cosmogonical language this Creation
relates to the first stage of Cosmic-life, the Fire-Mist Period after its
Chaotic stage,** when atoms issue from Laya.
(III.) The third
(the Indriya) was the modified form of Ahankara, the conception of
"I," (from "Aham," "I") termed the organic
Creation, or creation of the senses (Aindriyaka). "These three were the
Prakrita 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 Ahankara 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See concerning
their post-types, the Treatise written by Trithemius (Agrippa's master, 16th
cent.). "Concerning the seven secondaries, or Spiritual Intelligences,
who, after God, actuate the Universe;" giving out, besides secret cycles
and several prophecies, certain facts and beliefs about the Genii, or the
Elohim, which preside over and guide the septenary stages of the World's Course.
** From the
first, the Orientalists have found themselves beset by great difficulties with
regard to any possible order in the Puranic Creations. Brahma is very often
confused with Brahm, by Wilson, for which he is criticised by his successors.
The "Original Sanscrit Texts" are preferred by Mr. Fitzedward Hall
for the translation of Vishnu Purana and texts, to those used by Wilson.
"Had Professor Wilson enjoyed the advantages which are now at the command
of the student of Indian philosophy, unquestionably he would have expressed
himself differently," as said by the editor of his works. This reminds one
of the answer given by one of Thomas Taylor's admirers to those scholars who
criticised his translations of Plato. "Thomas Taylor may have had less knowledge
of the Greek than his critics have, but he understood Plato far better than
they do," he said. Our present Orientalists disfigure the mystic sense of
the Sanskrit texts far more than Wilson ever did, though the latter is
undeniably guilty of very gross errors.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 454 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
fane from
perceiving the truth. This is called "incongruity" and
"contradictions" by the Orientalists.*
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 Brahma
awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the universe void." Then Brahma
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 . . . " Charachara, or the synonymous sthavara 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 Brahma's activity. As in
that period, in the words of "Vishnu Purana": "The first
creation was that of Mahat (Intellect), the second, of Tanmatras (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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
three Creations beginning with Intelligence are elemental, but the six
creations which proceed from the series of which Intellect is the first are the
work of Brahma" (Vayu-Purana). Here "creations" mean everywhere
stages of Evolution. Mahat, "Intellect" or mind (which corresponds
with Manas, the former being on the Cosmic, and the latter on the human plane)
stands here, too, lower than Buddhi or Supra-divine Intelligence. Therefore,
when we read in Linga Purana that "the first Creation was that of Mahat,
Intellect being the first in manifestation," we must refer that
(specified) creation to the first evolution of our system or even our Earth,
none of the preceding ones being discussed in the Puranas, but only
occasionally hinted at.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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.**
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 rupa (embodied in their first ethereal
form), so animal creation has to precede,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Professor
Wilson translates it, as though animals were higher on the scale of
"creation" than divinities, or angels, although the truth about the
devas is very plainly stated further on. This "creation," says the
text, is both primary (Prakrita) and secondary (Vaikrita). It is the latter, as
regards the origin of the gods from Brahma (the personal anthropomorphic
creator of our material universe); it is the former (primary) as affecting
Rudra, who is the immediate production of the first principle. Rudra is not
alone a title of Siva, but embraces agents of creation, angels and men, as will
be shown further on.
** Neither plant
nor animal, but an existence between the two.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 456 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
for that same
reason, divine MAN on earth. And this is why we find in the Puranas: "The
fifth, the Tairyagyonya creation, was that of animals, and --
(VI). The
Urdhvasrotas creation, or that of divinities (Vishnu Purana 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.* 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 Purana, 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 (Prakrita) Creation.** The
Eighth, then, called Anugraha (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 (Anugraha) in contradistinction to organic
creation." It is the correct perception of our relations to the whole
range of "gods" and especially of those we bear to the Kumaras -- 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 Kumara Creation, which is both primary and secondary," says
Vishnu Purana, the oldest of such texts.*** "The Kumaras," explains
an esoteric text,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Created
beings" -- explains Vishnu Purana -- "although they are destroyed (in
their individual forms) at the periods of dissolution, yet being affected by
the good or evil acts of former existences, are never exempted from their
consequences. And when Brahma produces the world anew, they are the progeny of
his will . . ." "Collecting his mind into itself (Yoga willing),
Brahma creates the four orders of beings, termed gods, demons, progenitors, and
MEN" . . . "progenitors" meaning the prototypes and Evolvers of
the first Root Race of men. The progenitors are the Pitris, and are of seven
classes. They are said in exoteric mythology to be born of Brahma's side, like
Eve from the rib of Adam.
** "These
notions," remarks Dr. Wilson, "the birth of Rudra and the saints,
seem to have been borrowed from the Saivas, and to have been awkwardly
engrafted upon the Vaishnava system." The esoteric meaning ought to have been
consulted before venturing such a hypothesis.
*** Parasara,
the Vedic Rishi, who received the Vishnu Purana from Pulastya and taught it to
Maitreya, is placed by the Orientalists at various epochs. As correctly
observed, in the Hindu Class. Dict:-- "Speculations as to his era differ
widely from 575 B.C. to 1391 B.C., and cannot be trusted." Quite so; but
no less, however, than any other date as assigned by the Sanskritists, so
famous in this department of arbitrary fancy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 457 WHO THE KUMARAS ARE.
"are the
Dhyanis, derived immediately from the supreme Principle, who reappear in the
Vaivasvata Manu period, for the progress of mankind."* The commentator of
the Vishnu Purana corroborates it, by remarking that "these sages live as
long as Brahma; 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 Kumaras are, exoterically,
"the creation of Rudra or Nilalohita, a form of Siva, by Brahma, and of
certain other mind-born sons of Brahma. But, in the esoteric teaching, they are
the progenitors of the true spiritual SELF in the physical man -- the higher
Prajapati, while the Pitris, or lower Prajapati, 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
Kumaras being secret.** (Compare what is said of "The Fallen Angels"
in Book II.).
The Exoteric
four are: Sanat-Kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanatana; and the esoteric three
are: Sana, Kapila, and Sanat-sujata. 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 Puranas 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 PROGENY*** (and thus rebelling against Brahma),
remained, as the name
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* They may
indeed mark a "special" or extra creation, since it is they who, by
incarnating themselves within the senseless human shells of the two first
Root-races, and a great portion of the Third Root-race -- create, so to speak,
a new race: that of thinking, self-conscious and divine men.
** "The
four Kumaras (are) the mind-born Sons of Brahma. Some specify seven" (H.
Class. Dict.). All these seven Vaidhatra, the patronymic of the Kumaras,
"the Maker's Sons," are mentioned and described in Iswara Krishna's
"Sankhya Karika" with the Commentary of Gaudapadacharya
(Sankaracharya's Paraguru) attached to it. It discusses the nature of the Kumaras,
though it refrains from mentioning by name all the seven Kumaras, but calls
them instead "the seven sons of Brahma," which they are, as they are
created by Brahma in Rudra. The list of names it gives us is: Sanaka,
Sanandana, Sanatana, Kapila, Ribhu, and Panchasikha. But these are again all
aliases.
*** So
untrustworthy are some translations of the Orientalists that in the French
Translation of Hari-Vamsa, it is said "The seven Prajapati, Rudra, Skanda
(his son) [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 458 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of the first
implies, ever boys, Kumaras: that is, ever pure and innocent, whence their
creation is also called the "Kumara." (Book I. chap. v., Vishnu
Purana.) The Puranas, 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-Kumara" (Linga purana, prior section LXX. 174.) In the Saiva Purana,
the Kumaras are always described as Yogins. The Kurma Purana, after enumerating
them, says: "These five, O Brahmans, were Yogins, who acquired entire
exemption from passion." They are five, because two of the Kumaras fell.
Of all the seven
great divisions of Dhyan-Chohans, or Devas, there is none with which humanity
is more concerned than with the Kumaras. 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 Kumaras, the
"mind-born Sons" of Brahma-Rudra (or Siva)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] and Sanat-Kumara proceeded to create beings."
Whereas, as Wilson shows, the original is: "These seven . . . created
progeny; and so did Rudra, but Skanda and Sanat Kumara, restraining their
power, abstained from creation." The "four orders of beings" are
referred to sometimes as "Ambhamsi," which Wilson renders:
"literally Waters," and believes it "a mystic term." It is
one, no doubt; but he evidently failed to catch the real esoteric meaning.
"Waters" and "water" stand as the symbol for Akasa, the
"primordial Ocean of Space," on which Narayana, the self-born Spirit,
moves: reclining on that which is its progeny (See Manu). "Water is the
body of Nara; thus we have heard the name of water explained. Since Brahma
rests on the water, therefore he is termed Narayana" (Linga, Vayu, and
Markandeya Puranas) ". . . Pure, Purusha created the Waters pure . .
." at the same time Water is the third principle in material Kosmos, and
the third in the realm of the Spiritual: Spirit of Fire, Flame, Akasa, Ether,
Water, Air, Earth, are the cosmic, sidereal, psychic, spiritual and mystic
principles, pre-eminently occult, in every plane of being. "Gods, Demons,
Pitris and men," are the four orders of beings to whom the term Ambhamsi
is applied (in the Vedas it is a synonym of gods): because they are all the
product of WATERS (mystically), of the Akasic Ocean, and of the Third Principle
in nature. Pitris and men on earth are the transformations (rebirths) of gods
and demons (Spirits) on a higher plane. Water is, in another sense, the
feminine principle. Venus Aphrodite is the personified Sea, and the mother of
the god of love, the generator of all the gods as much as the Christian Virgin
Mary is Mare (the sea), the mother of the Western God of Love, Mercy and
Charity. If the student of Esoteric philosophy thinks deeply over the subject
he is sure to find out all the suggestiveness of the term Ambhamsi, in its
manifold relations to the Virgin in Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the
Alchemists, and even to the "Waters of Grace" of the modern Baptist.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* are the progeny of Siva, the Mahayogi,
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 Kumaras 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 Kala (time), a
form of Brahma (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," Brahma (in his triune form), whose name is
also "Sanat," the Ancient? Every Kumara 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 ([[diagram]] "who is as God"). He
is the patron, and guardian Angel of the Jews, as Daniel tells us (v. 21); and,
before the Kumaras 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-Sujata,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Siva-Rudra is
the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the preserver; and both are the regenerators of
spiritual as well as of physical nature. To live as a plant, the seed must die.
To live as a conscious entity in the Eternity, the passions and senses of man
must first DIE before his body does. "To live is to die and to die is to
live," has been too little understood in the West. Siva, the destroyer, is
the creator and the Saviour of Spiritual man, as he is the good gardener of
nature. He weeds out the plants, human and cosmic, and kills the passions of
the physical, to call to life the perceptions of the spiritual, man.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 460 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
-- the chief of
the Kumaras -- is called Ambhamsi, "Waters," -- according to the
commentary on Vishnu Purana. 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 Akasa, 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 -- AEther, 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."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Mochus, we find Ether first, and then the air; the two principles from which
Ulom the intelligible ([[noetos]]) God (the visible universe of matter) is born.*
In the Orphic
hymns, the Eros-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the AEthereal
winds impregnate, Wind being "the Spirit of God," who is said to move
in AEther, "brooding over the chaos" -- the Divine "Idea."
In the Hindu Katakopanisad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before
the original matter, from whose union springs the great Soul of the World,
"Maha = Atma, Brahm, the Spirit of Life;"** 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
[[stoicheia]], (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; daemons 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Movers:
"Phoinizer," 282.
** Weber:
"Akad. Vorles," 213, 214, etc.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* The ancients knew of no worse
abode after death than the Kamaloka, 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 Adonai, or "Jurbo Adonai," as
Jehovah is called in Codex Nazaraeus. "Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who
is named Adonai, whose name is also Kadush and El-El" (Cod. Naz., I, 47;
see also Psalm lxxxix., 18), and also "Lord Bacchus." Baal-Adonis of
the Sods or Mysteries of the pre-Babylonian Jews became the Adonai 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-Adonai, 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Gehenna of
the Bible was a valley near Jerusalem, where the monotheistic Jews immolated
their children to Moloch, if the prophet Jeremiah is to be believed on his
word. The Scandinavian Hel or Hela was a frigid region -- again Kamaloka -- and
the Egyptian Amenti a place of purification. (See Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p.
11.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma -- 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 AETHER, 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther" 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.)*
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 [[pneuma]], 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We cannot be
taken to task by the Protestants for interpreting the verse from the
Corinthians as we do; for, if the translation in the English Bible is made
ambiguous, it is not so in the original texts, and the Roman Catholic Church
accepts the words of the Apostle in their true sense. For a proof see the
Commentaries on St. Paul's Epistles, by St. John Chrysostom "directly
inspired by the Apostle," and "who wrote under his dictation,"
as we are assured by the Marquis de Mirville, whose works are approved by Rome.
And St. Chrysostom says, commenting on that special verse, "And, though
there are (in fact) they who are called gods . . . . -- for it seems, there are
really several gods -- withal, and for all that, the God-principle and the
Superior God ceasing to remain essentially one and indivisible." . . .
Thus spoke the old Initiates also, knowing that the worship of minor gods could
never affect the "God Principle" (See de Mirville, "Des
Esprits," vol. ii., 322).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Typhoeus," who were chained and
unchained at will by AEolus, 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 personae, and since Christians believe in
the same to this day? The Hesiodic AEolus, Boreas, etc., etc., were named
Kadim, Tzaphon, Daren, and Ruach Hajan by the "chosen people" of
Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference? While the Hellenes were taught
that AEolus 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 oelicius, and denounced as the
soul of lightning, its daemon*; 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 Daemon 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 I. 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Cosmolatry, p.
415.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Provencal sailors, copied textually from that of the Phoenician mariners to
their Virgingoddess 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
"ineffectual," 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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?
--------------
§ 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 (Kala-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 "China
Revealed" (McClatchey) 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 "Phallicism," 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Muller, in his "False Analogies," says that "the most
celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Remusat," 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 Remusat, 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 Agathodaemon, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 473 SNOBS, OR DRAGONS?
are always found
inscribed with the name [[CHNOUBIS]] (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.
---------------------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 474]]
[[blank]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 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?"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page 476]]
CONTENTS.
--------------
PAGE
I. REASONS FOR
THESE ADDENDA ... 477
II.MODERN
PHYSICISTS ARE PLAYING AT BLIND MAN'S BUFF ... 482
III. "AN
LUMEN SIT CORPUS, NEC NON" ... 483
IV. IS
GRAVITATION A LAW? ... 490
V. THE THEORIES
OF ROTATION IN SCIENCE ... 500
VI. THE MASKS OF
SCIENCE ... 506
VII. AN ATTACK
ON THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF FORCE BY A MAN OF SCIENCE ... 523
VIII. LIFE,
FORCE, OR GRAVITY? ... 529
IX. THE SOLAR
THEORY ... 540
X. THE COMING
FORCE ... 554
XI. ON THE
ELEMENTS AND ATOMS ... 566
XII. ANCIENT
THOUGHT IN MODERN DRESS ... 579
XIII. THE MODERN
NEBULAR THEORY ... 588
XIV. FORCES --
MODES OF MOTION OR INTELLIGENCES? ... 601
XV. GODS, MONADS,
AND ATOMS ... 610
XVI. CYCLIC
EVOLUTION AND KARMA ... 634
XVII. THE ZODIAC
AND ITS ANTIQUITY ... 647
XVIII. SUMMARY
OF THE MUTUAL POSITION ... 668
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 477 MUTUAL POSITION DEFINED.
ADDENDA TO BOOK
I.
--------------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 planes*;
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Their
intellection, of course, being of quite a different nature to any we can
conceive of on Earth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 prima 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 mediaeval 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
The eminent
physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted saying the same in the 43rd
Volume of the Memoires 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Concepts
of Modern Physics," p. xi-xii., Introd. to the 2nd Edit.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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,"**
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Recherches experimentales sur la relation qui existe entre la resistance
de Pair et sa temperature," p. 68.
** From the
criticism of "Concepts of Modern Physics" in Nature. See Stallo's
work, p. xvi. of Introduction.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 484 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"light, heat,
etc., etc.* 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 (Soirees,
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,"** 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Mr. Robert
Ward, discussing the questions of Heat and Light in the November Journal of
Science, 1881, shows us how utterly ignorant is Science about one of the
commonest facts of nature -- the heat of the sun. He says:-- "The question
of the temperature of the sun has been the subject of investigation with many
scientists: Newton, one of the first investigators of this problem, tried to
determine it, and after him all the scientists who have been occupied with
calorimetry have followed his example. All have believed themselves successful,
and have formulated their results with great confidence. The following, in the
chronological order of the publication of the results, are the temperatures (in
centigrade degrees) found by each of them: Newton, 1,699,300 deg.; Pouillet,
1,461 deg.; Tollner, 102,200 deg.; Secchi, 5,344,840 deg.; Ericsson, 2,726,700
deg.; Fizeau, 7,500 deg.; Waterston, 9,000,000 deg.; Spoeren, 27,000 deg.;
Deville, 9,500 deg.; Soret, 5,801,846 deg.; Vicaire, 1,500 deg.; Rosetti,
20,000 deg. The difference is as 1,400 deg. against 9,000,000 deg., or no less
than 8,998,600 deg.!! There probably does not exist in science a more
astonishing contradiction than that revealed in these figures. And yet without
doubt if an Occultist were to give out an estimate, each of these gentlemen
would vehemently protest in the name of 'EXACT' Science at the rejection of his
special result." (From the Theosophist.)
** According to
one atheistic idealist -- Dr. Lewins -- "When Sir Isaac, in 1687 . . . .
showed mass and atom acted upon . . . . by innate activity . . . . he effectually
disposed of Spirit, Anima, or Divinity, as supererogatory."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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;* 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 AEther, the first concept of which belongs
undeniably to ancient philosophers, the Greeks having borrowed it from the
Aryans, and the origin of modern AEther being found in, and disfigured from,
AKASA? This disfigurement
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Stallo's
above-cited work, "Concepts of Modern Physics," a volume which has
called forth the liveliest protests and criticisms, is recommended to anyone
inclined to doubt this statement. "The professed antagonism of Science to
metaphysics," he writes, "has led the majority of scientific
specialists to assume that the methods and results of empirical research are
wholly independent of the control of the laws of thought. They either silently
ignore, or openly repudiate, the simplest canons of logic, including the laws
of non-contradiction and . . . resent with the utmost vehemence, every
application of the rule of consistency to their hypotheses and theories . . . .
and they regard an examination (of these) . . . . in the light of these laws as
an impertinent intrusion of 'a priori principles and methods' into the domains
of empirical science. Persons of this cast of mind find no difficulty in
holding that atoms are absolutely inert, and at the same time asserting that
these atoms are perfectly elastic; or in maintaining that the physical
universe, in its last analysis, resolves itself into 'dead' matter and motion,
and yet denying that all physical energy is in reality kinetic; or in
proclaiming that all phenomenal differences in the objective world are ultimately
due to the various motions of absolutely simple material units, and,
nevertheless, repudiating the proposition that these units are equal" . .
. . (p. xix.) "The blindness of eminent physicists to some of the most
obvious consequences of their own theories is marvellous . . . . When Prof.
Tait, in conjunction with Prof. Stewart, announces that 'matter is simply
passive' (The Unseen Universe, sec. 104), and then, in connection with Sir W.
Thomson, declares that 'matter has an innate power of resisting external
influences' (Treat. on Nat. Phil., Vol. I., sec. 216), it is hardly impertinent
to inquire how these statements are to be reconciled. When Prof. Du Bois
Reymond . . . . insists upon the necessity of reducing all the processes of
nature to motions of a substantial, indifferent substratum, wholly destitute of
quality ('Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens,' p. 5), having declared shortly
before in the same lecture that 'resolution of all changes in the material
world into motions of atoms caused by their constant central forces would be
the completion of natural science,' we are in a perplexity from which we have
to be relieved." (Pref. xliii.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 roles 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 thermodynamics, for Clerk Maxwell
showed that such a medium would be simply gas.* 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).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Clerk
Maxwell's "Treatise on Electricity of Magnetism" and compare with
Cauchy's "Memoire sur la Dispersion de la lumiere."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther.
(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 akasa nor as the one
sacred AEther 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 AEther or Akasa in Occultism), while, as Stallo justly observes,
there is no physical action,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aether 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
different* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Somewhat
different!" exclaims Stallo. "The real import of this 'somewhat' is,
that the medium in question is not, in any intelligible sense, material at all,
having none of the properties of matter." All the properties of matter
depend upon differences and changes, and the "hypothetical" aether
here defined is not only destitute of differences, but incapable of difference
and change -- (in the physical sense let us add). This proves that if aether is
"matter" it is so only as something visible, tangible and existing, for
spiritual senses alone; that it is a Being indeed -- but not of our plane:
Pater AEther, or Akasa.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 verae
causae.* And I may add that, inasmuch as the hypothetical undifferentiated**
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 nature*** 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 lecons de physique Generale, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Verae causae
for physical science are mayavic or illusionary causes to the Occultist, and
vice versa.
** Very much
"differentiated," on the contrary, since the day it left its laya
condition.
*** For the
Occultists who say that the author of nature is nature itself, something
indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it follows that those who are
conversant with the occult laws of nature, and know how to change and provoke
new conditions in ether, may -- not modify the laws, but work and do the same
in accordance with those immutable laws.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aeons 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 Revolution 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther, 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 aether
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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.** For Pythagoras the Forces were Spiritual Entities, Gods inde-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Attraction," Le Couturier, a materialist, writes, "has now
become for the public that which it was for Newton himself -- a simple word, an
idea" (Panorama des Mondes), since its cause is unknown. Herschell
virtually says the same, when remarking, that whenever studying the motion of
the heavenly bodies, and the phenomena of attraction, he feels penetrated at
every moment with the idea of "the existence of causes that act for us
under a veil, disguising their direct action." (Musee des Sciences,
August, 1856.)
** If we are
taken to task for believing in operating "Gods" and
"Spirits" while rejecting a personal God, we answer to the Theists
and Monotheists: "Admit that your Jehovah is one of the Elohim, and we are
ready to recognise him. Make of him, as you do, the Infinite, the ONE and the
Eternal God, and we will never accept him in this character." Of tribal
Gods there were many; the One Universal Deity is a principle, an abstract
Root-Idea which has nought to do with the unclean work of finite Form. We do
not worship the Gods, we only honour Them, as beings superior to ourselves. In this
we obey the Mosaic injunction, while Christians disobey their Bible --
Missionaries foremost of all. "Thou shalt not revile the gods," says
one of them -- (Jehovah) -- in Exodus xxii. 28); but at the same time in verse
20 it is commanded, "He that sacrificeth to any God, save unto the Lord,
he shall be utterly destroyed." Now in the [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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;"* 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, [[ta theoitera pon phaneron]]" (De
Caelo. I. 9).
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 ratiocinativae,
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 qua 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] original texts it is not "god" but
Elohim, -- and we challenge contradiction -- and Jehovah is one of the Elohim,
as proved by his own words in Genesis iii. 22, when "the Lord God said:
Behold the Man has become as one of us," etc. Hence both those who worship
and sacrifice to the Elohim, the angels, and to Jehovah, those who revile the
gods of their fellow-men, are far greater transgressors than the Occultists or
any Theosophist. Meanwhile many of the latter prefer believing in some one
"Lord" or other, and are quite welcome to do as they like.
* To liken the
"immateriate species to wooden iron," and laugh at Spiller referring
to them as "incorporeal matter" does not solve the mystery (See
"Concepts of Modern Physics," p. 165 et infra).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Athenaeum 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
Boehme, with whom gravitation or ATTRACTION is the first property of
Nature." . . . For with him "his (Boehme'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 Boehme 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 Boehme, the nursling of the genii (Nirmanakayas) 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,"* 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?"** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* World-Life.
Prof. Winchell, LL.D (pp. 49 and 50).
** "Il
n'est plus possible aujourd'hui, de soutenir comme Newton, que les corps
celestes se mouvent au milieu du VIDE immense des espaces. . . . Parmi les
consequences de la theorie du vide etablie par ce grand homme, il ne reste plus
debout que le mot 'attraction,' et nous verrons le jour ou ce dernier mot
disparaitra du vocabulaire scientifique." ("Panorama des
mondes," pp. 47 and 53.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Optics, III., query 28, 1704; quoted
in "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
AEther 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 496 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
were dethroned
to-morrow, the day after the Scientists would discover some other new mode of
mechanical motion.* 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 motion** 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 geologues pour faire la geologie de la Lune,
c'est d'etre astronomes. A la verite il manque aussi quelquechose aux
astronomes pour aborder avec fruit cette etude, c'est d'etre geologues."
But he might have added, with still more pointedness, "Ce qui manque a
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 minutiae 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* When read in a
fair and unprejudiced spirit, Sir Isaac Newton's works are an ever ready
witness to show how he must have hesitated between gravitation and attraction,
impulse and some other unknown cause to explain the regular course of the
planetary motion. But see Treatise on Colour (Vol. III., question 31.) We are
told by Herschell that Newton left with his successors the duty of drawing all
the scientific conclusions from his discovery. How modern Science abused the
privilege of building its newest theories upon the law of gravitation, may be
realised when one remembers how profoundly religious was that great man.
** The
materialistic notion that because, in physics real or sensible motion is
impossible in pure space or vacuum, therefore, the eternal MOTION of and in
Cosmos (regarded as infinite Space) is a fiction -- only shows once more that
such words as "pure space," "pure Being," "the
Absolute," etc., of Eastern metaphysics have never been understood in the
West.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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.** This was proven by Newton himself; for
there are many phenomena in our
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Correl.
Phys. Forces," p. 173. This is precisely what Occultism maintains, and on
the same principle that "where force is made to oppose force, and produce
static equilibrium, the balance of pre-existing equilibrium is affected, and
fresh motion is started equivalent to that which is withdrawn into a state of
abeyance." This process finds intervals in the pralaya, but is eternal and
ceaseless as the "Breath," even when the manifested Kosmos rests.
**
"Trans-solar space," writes the great Humboldt, "does not
hitherto show any phenomenon analogous to our solar system. It is a peculiarity
of our System, that matter should have condensed within it in nebulous rings,
the nuclei of which condense into earths and moons. I say again, heretofore,
nothing of the kind has ever been observed beyond our planetary system."
(See Revue Germanique of the 31st Dec. 1860, art. "Lettres et
conversations d'Alexandre Humboldt.") True, that since 1860 the nebular
theory has sprung up, and being better known, a few identical phenomena were
supposed to be observed beyond the solar system. Yet the great man is quite
right; and no earths or moons can be found -- except in appearance -- beyond,
or of the same order of matter as found in our system. Such is the Occult
teaching.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 hypothese
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 mediaeval 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:
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 499 CHRONIC NEGATION.
(I.) The Sun is
a great Magnet.* This is what some eminent modern scientists and also the Occultists
believe in.
(II.) The Solar
substance is immaterial.** (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. Herschell, 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 Encyclopaedia 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 Revelation.***) It will be well, perhaps, to examine both
these theories as being directly or indirectly connected.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* But see
Astronomie du Moyen Age, by Delambre.
** In the sense,
of course, of matter existing in states unknown to Science.
*** We shall be
taken to task for contradiction. It will be said that while we deny God, we
admit Souls and operative Spirits, and quote from Roman Catholic bigoted
writers in support of our argument. To this we reply: "We deny the
anthropomorphic god of the Monotheists, but never the Divine Principle in
nature. We combat Protestants and Roman Catholics on a number of dogmatic
theological beliefs of human and sectarian origin. We agree with them in their
belief in Spirits and intelligent operative powers, though we do not worship
"Angels" as the Roman Latinists do."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* or simply by the action of the
central gravity of the mass."**
"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;*** 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.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The terms "high"
and "low" being only relative to the position of the observer in
Space, any use of those terms tending to convey the impression that they stand
for abstract realities, is necessarily fallacious.
** Jacob Ennis,
"The Origin of the Stars," p. 221 et seq.
*** If such is
the case, how does Science explain the comparatively small size of the planets
nearest the Sun? The theory of meteoric aggregation is only a step farther from
truth than the nebular conception, and has not even the quality of the latter
-- its metaphysical element.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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*; (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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And even on
these figures Bischof disagrees with Thomson, and calculates that 350 million
years would be required for the earth to cool from a temperature of 20,000
degrees to 200 degrees centigrade. This is, also, the opinion of Helmholtz.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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" (Musee 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!*
"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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For over a
century all distinction between body and force is made away with. "Force
is but the property of a body in motion," say the physicists; and
"life -- the property of our animal organs -- is but the result of their
molecular arrangement," answer the physiologists. "In the bosom of
that aggregate which is named planet," teaches Littre, "are developed
all the forces immanent to matter . . . i.e., that matter possesses in itself
and through itself the forces that are proper to it . . . and which are
primary, not secondary. Such forces are the property of weight, the property of
electricity, of terrestrial magnetism, the property of life. . . . Every planet
can develop life . . . as earth, for instance, which had not always mankind on
it, and now bears (produit) men" . . . (Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15,
1860.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 503 SCIENTIFIC ABERRATIONS.
planets rotate
because they are made to rotate . . . . . and the modern physical system of the
universe is a physical impossibility." (Soirees.) For did not Herschell
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, &c., &c., 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 Herschell,
"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 wittily* . . . . . "Voila
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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Deuxieme
memoire, "Manifestations Historiques," p. 272.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 nebulae," 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 affect 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
Caesar'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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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
hajaschar ("the light Forces"), the hachoser ("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 Memoires de l'Academie des Sciences de Montpellier, Vol. II.,
fasc. I., 1854.)
--------------
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* L'Univers
explique par la Revelation, and Cosmogonie de la Revelation. But see De
Mirville's Deuxieme Memoire. The author, a terrible enemy of Occultism, was yet
one who wrote great truths.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Weltaether 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,* and without any power to act at a
distance" (p. 4).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Something dead
implies that it had been at some time living. When, at what period of
cosmogony? Occultism says that in all cases when matter appears inert, it is
the most active. A wooden or a stone block is motionless and impenetrable to
all intents and purposes. Nevertheless, and de facto, its particles are in
ceaseless eternal vibration which is so rapid that to the physical eye the body
seems absolutely devoid of motion; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aether.
Expressed in occult language it might be said with more correctness that this
"force-substance" is the ever-active phenomenal positive aether --
prakriti; while the omnipresent all pervading ether is the noumenon of the
former, the substratum of all, or Akasa. 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 -- aether 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."*
For AETHER, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] and the spacial distance between those particles
in their vibratory motion is -- considered from another plane of being and
perception -- as great as that which separates snow flakes or drops of rain.
But to physical science this will be an absurdity.
* See
"Popular Science Review," Vol. V., pp. 329-34.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The newest
Authorities have rejected these explanations as "exploded theories,"
and have now deified "Motion" as their sole Idol. But, surely, they
and their idol will one day share the fate of their predecessors.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* (See Buckwell's "Electric
Science.")
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"** -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This ominous
confession was made, we believe, at a Scientific Congress at Swansea. Faraday
held a similar opinion, however, as stated by Tyndall: "What do we know of
the atom apart from its force? You imagine a nucleus which may be called a and
surround it by forces which may be called m; to my mind the a or nucleus
vanishes and the substance consists of the powers m. And, indeed, what notion
can we form of the nucleus independent of its powers? What thought remains on
which to hang the imagination of an a independent of the acknowledged
forces?"
** Schelling,
"Ideen," etc., p. 18.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 supermundane 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 Theorie Mecanique 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,"* 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,"** 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.'*** This principle
is known as the law of Avogadro or Ampere."****
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,"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Concepts
of Modern Physics," xxxi., Introductory to the 2nd edition.
** Loc. cit.
*** J. P. Cooke,
The New Chemistry, p. 13.
**** "It imports
that equal volumes of all substances, when in the gaseous state, and under like
conditions of pressure and temperature, contain the same number of molecules --
whence it follows that the weights of the molecules are proportional to the
specific gravities of the gases; that therefore, these being different, the
weights of the molecules are different also; and inasmuch as the molecules of
certain elementary substances are monatomic (consist of but one atom each)
while the molecules of various other substances contain the same number of
atoms, that the ultimate atoms of such substances are of different
weights" (Concepts of Modern Physics, p. 34). As shown further on in the
same volume, this cardinal principle of modern theoretical chemistry is in
utter and irreconcilable conflict with the first proposition of the
atomo-mechanical theory -- namely, the absolute equality of the primordial
units of mass.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."
(Kroenig, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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.** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Referring to
the Aura, one of the Masters says in the "Occult World," "How
could you make yourself understood by, command in fact, those semi-intelligent
forces, whose means of communication with us are not through spoken words but
through sounds and colours in correlation between the vibrations of the
two." It is this "correlation" that is unknown to modern
Science, yet was many times explained by the Alchemists.
** The
"substance" of the Occultist, however, is to the most refined
substance of the physicist, what radiant matter is to the leather of the
Chemist's boots.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
Thus, we put
forward the Occult teaching which maintains the reality of a supersubstantial
and supersensible essence of that Akasa (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.** We are also told that the two great
obstacles to the fluid (?) theory of heat undoubtedly are:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The names of
the Seven Rays -- which are, Sushumna, Harikesa, Viswakarman, Viswatryarchas,
Sannaddha, Sarvavasu and Swaraj -- are all mystical, and each has its distinct
application in a distinct state of consciousness, for occult purposes. The
Sushumna, which, as said in the Nirukta (11, 6), is only to light up the moon,
is the ray nevertheless cherished by the initiated Yogis. The totality of the
Seven Rays spread through the Solar system constitute, so to say, the physical
Upadhi (basis) of the Ether of Science; in which Upadhi, light, heat,
electricity, etc., etc., -- the forces of orthodox science -- correlate to
produce their terrestrial effects. As psychic and spiritual effects, they
emanate from, and have their origin in, the supra-solar Upadhi, in the ether of
the Occultist -- or Akasa.
** To cite a
most impartial critic, one whose authority no one can call in question, as a
reminder to Western Dogmatists, that the question cannot be in any way
considered as settled: "There is no fundamental difference between light
and heat . . . each is merely a metamorphosis of the other. . . . Heat is light
in complete repose. Light is heat in rapid motion. Directly light is combined
with a body, it becomes heat; but when it is thrown off from that body it again
becomes light." (Leslie's Fluid Theory of Light and Heat.) "Whether
this is true or false we cannot tell, and many years, perhaps many generations,
will have to elapse before we shall be able to tell." (Buckle's History of
Civilization, Vol. III., p. 384.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
prehistoric 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,** 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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* On the plane
of manifestation and illusionary matter it may be so; not that it is nothing
more, for it is vastly more.
** Neutral, or
zero.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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." Buchner, 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."*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Scientific Letters," Butlerof.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Zollner, 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
Puranas, 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 --
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 521 CHEMICAL GODS.
personified by
the Sons of Daksha's daughters and the Rishis, their husbands, "who with
the first son of Brahma 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 Puranas, where (as in the Vayu Purana) many of the
qualities of the personified fires are explained. Thus, Pavaka is electric, or
Vaidyuta, fire; Pavamana, the fire produced by friction, (or Nirmathya): and
Suchi is solar (or Saura) fire* -- all these three being the sons of Abhimanin,
the Agni (fire), eldest son of Brahma and of Swaha. Pavaka, moreover, is made
parent to Kavyavahana, the fire of the Pitris: Suchi to Havyavahana -- the fire
of the gods; and Pavamana, to Saharaksha, the fire of the Asuras. Now all this
shows that the writers of the Puranas 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 Purana, 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 "undiscrete Principle" -- Avyaktanugrahena,
as applied
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Called the
"drinker of waters," solar heat causing water to evaporate.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Ramanujacharya, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 523 SUGGESTIVE ALLEGORIES.
physical Forces,
certain passages in his Puranas, 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 Pururavas and the celestial Gandharva,* 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 gayatri" must have a
secret meaning, or else the writers of the Vedas and Puranas 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 (Vach), the primeval woman after the
Deluge, the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu. The allegory is suggestive,
in whatever Purana it may be read and studied.
--------------
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" --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Gandharva
of the Veda is the deity who knows and reveals the secrets of heaven and divine
truths to mortals. Cosmically -- the Gandharvas are the aggregate powers of the
solar-fire, and constitute its Forces; psychically -- the intelligence residing
in the Sushumna, Solar ray, the highest of the seven rays; mystically -- the
occult force in the Soma (the moon, or lunar plant) and the drink made of it;
physically -- the phenomenal, and spiritually -- the noumenal causes of Sound
and the "Voice of Nature." Hence, they are called the 6,333
"heavenly Singers" and musicians of Indra's loka who personify (even
in number) the various and manifold sounds in Nature, both above and below. In
the latter allegories they are said to have mystic power over women, and to be
fond of them. The esoteric meaning is plain. They are one of the forms, if not
the prototypes, of Enoch's angels, the Sons of God, who saw that the daughters
of men were fair (Gen. vi.) who married them, and taught the daughters of the
Earth the secrets of Heaven.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,*
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 vacuum** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Not only
"through space," but filling every point of our solar system, for it
is the physical residue, so to say, of Ether, its lining on our plane; Ether
having to serve other cosmic and terrestrial purposes besides being the
"agent" for transmitting light. It is the astral fluid or
"Light" of the Kabalists, and the "Seven rays" of
Sun-Vishnu.
** What need, then,
of etheric waves for the transmission of light, heat, etc., if this substance
can pass through vacuum?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,'* 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.**
"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."***
. . . "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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And how can it
be otherwise? Gross ponderable matter is the body, the Shell of matter or
Substance, the female passive principle; and this Fohatic force is the second
principle, prana -- the male and the active? On our globe this Substance is the
second principle of the septenary Element -- Earth; in the atmosphere, it is
that of air, which is the cosmic gross body; in the Sun it becomes the Solar
body and that of the Seven rays; in sidereal space it corresponds with another
principle, and so on. The whole is a homogeneous Unity alone, the parts are all
differentiations.
** Or the
reverberation, and for sound, repercussion on our plane of that which is a
perpetual motion of that Substance on higher planes. Our world and senses are
victims of Maya, ceaselessly.
*** An honest
admission, that.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 526 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
is such that we
have no word, except ether,* by which to express it. It pervades and fills space,
but alone it too is quiescent -- dead.** 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:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Yet it is not
Ether, but only one of the principles of Ether, the latter being itself one of
the principles of Akasa.
** And so does
prana (Jiva) pervade the whole living body of man; but alone, without having an
atom to act upon, it would be quiescent -- dead; i.e., would be in laya, or as
Mr. Crookes has it, "locked in protyle." It is the action of Fohat
upon a compound or even a simple body that produces life. When a body dies it
passes into the same polarity as its male energy and repels therefore the
active agent, which, losing hold of the whole, fastens on the parts or
molecules, this action being called chemical. Vishnu, the Preserver, transforms
himself into Rudra-Siva, the Destroyer -- a correlation seemingly unknown to
Science.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
term* we may still call, as the ancients did, Aith-ur -- Solar fire, AETHER.
This fluid, unchangeable in composition, indestructible, invisible,** pervades
everything and all [ponderable. -- H. P. B.] matter,*** 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 suns**** the suns
are the generators of it, the store-houses of it, the diffusers of it.*****
"(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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Verily, unless
the occult terms of the Kabalists are adopted!
**
"Unchangeable" only during Manvantaric periods, after which it merges
once more into Mulaprakriti; "invisible" for ever, in its own essence,
but seen in its reflected coruscations, called the Astral light by the modern
Kabalists. Yet, conscious and grand Beings clothed in that same Essence move in
it.
*** One has to
add (ponderable), to distinguish it from that Ether which is matter still,
though a substratum.
**** The Occult
Sciences reverse the statement, and say that it is the sun, and all the suns
that are from it, which emanate at the Manvantaric dawn from the Central Sun.
***** Here, we
decidedly beg to differ with the learned gentleman. Let us remember that this
AEther, whether Akasa is meant by the term, or its lower principle, Ether -- is
septenary. Akasa is Aditi in the allegory, and the mother of Martanda (the
sun), the Deva-matri -- "Mother of the gods." In the solar system,
the sun is her Buddhi and Vahan, the Vehicle, hence the 6th principle; in
Kosmos all the suns are the Kama rupa of Akasa and so is ours. It is only when
regarded as an individual Entity in his own Kingdom that Surya (the sun) is the
7th principle of the great body of matter.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 528 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Science to speculate
beyond the line drawn by modern materialism -- or call it agnosticism rather,
to be more correct* -- 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 millimetre at the red end of the spectrum to about three hundred and
ninety-three millionths of a millimetre 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"** -- 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 flame, and have mistaken the vital
principle of that luminary for a purely material thing, and called it
"chromosphere."*** We have hypotheses and theories only so far, not
law -- by any means.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Brutal but
frank materialism is more honest than Janus-faced agnosticism in our days.
Monism is the Pecksniff of modern philosophy, turning a pharisaical face to
psychology and idealism, and its natural face of a Roman Augur, swelling his
cheek with his tongue -- to Materialism. The Monists are worse than the
Materialists; because, while looking at the Universe and psycho-spiritual man
from the same negative stand-point, the latter put their case far less
plausibly than sceptics of Mr. Tyndall's or even Mr. Huxley's stamp. Herbert
Spencer, Bain and Lewes are more dangerous to universal truths than Buchner.
**
"Geology," by Professor A. Winchell.
*** See Five
Years of Theosophy -- Articles: "Do the Adepts deny the nebular
theory?" and "Is the Sun merely a cooling mass?" -- for the true
Occult teaching.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Francoeur ("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 Herschell -- 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. Martanda (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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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., p. 148), 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 Herschell, 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 offered respecting
those leaf or lens-like objects, is that the photosphere* 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,** 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 Herschell says, 'Though it would be too
daring to speak of such organizations as partaking of life [why not?],*** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And the
central mass, too, as will be found, or rather the centre of the reflection.
** That
"matter" is just like the reflection in a mirror of the flame from a
"photogenic" lamp-wick.
*** See
"Five Years of Theosophy," p. 258 -- answer to this speculation of
Herschell's.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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* The precise chemical (?)** composition 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 atmosphere*** 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 mediaeval 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 Vitae, a nerve fluid .
. . in which is contained the nature, quality, character, and essence of
beings." . . . (De Generatione Hominis). . . . "The Archaeus or
Liquor Vitae is an essence that is equally distributed in all parts of the human
body. . . . The Spiritus Vitae takes its 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):--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Paracelsus for
one, who called it liquor vitae, and Archaeus.
** Rather
alchemical -- "composition."
*** "This
vital force . . . radiates around man like a luminous sphere" . . . says
Paracelsus in Paragranum.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This does not
mean that every bush, tree or stone is God or a god; but only that every speck
of the manifested material of Kosmos belongs to and is the substance of
"God," however low it may have fallen in its cyclic gyration through
the Eternities of the ever becoming,; and also that every such speck
individually, and Kosmos collectively, is an aspect and a reminder of that
universal One Soul -- which philosophy refuses to call God, thus limiting the
eternal and ever-present root and essence.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Anugita: "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 Anugita; and also: "Every one who is twice-born
(initiated) knows such is the teaching of the ancients. . . . . Space is the
first entity. . . . . Now Space (Akasa, or the noumenon of Ether) has one
quality . . . and that is sound only . . . and the qualities of sound are
Shadga, Rishabha, Gandhara, Madhyama, Panchama, and beyond these five Nishada and
Dhaivata"; (the Hindu gamut). These seven notes of the scale are the
principles of sound. (Vide ch. xxxvi. of Anugita.) 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 535 THE SEVEN PHYSICAL SENSES.
skin, and the
ear as the fifth (organ of sense) Mind and Understanding,* 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.** These (the agents) being possessed of qualities (sattwa, rajas,
tamas), enjoy their own qualities, agreeable and disagreeable" (Anugita).
Then one reads
in the Bhagavadgita (chap. vii.) the Deity (or Krishna) saying:--
". . . .
Only some know me truly. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space (or Akasa, AEther),
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 (Mundakopanishad, p. 298). . . . I am
the taste in the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The division
of the physical senses into five, comes to us from great antiquity. But while
adopting the number, no modern philosopher has asked himself how these senses
could exist, i.e., be perceived and used in a self-conscious way, unless there
was the sixth sense, mental perception to register and record them; and (this
for the Metaphysicians and Occultists) the SEVENTH to preserve the spiritual
fruition and remembrance thereof, as in a Book of Life which belongs to Karma.
The ancients divided the senses into five, simply because their teachers (the
Initiates) stopped at the hearing, as being that sense which developed in the
physical plane (got dwarfed rather, limited to this plane) only at the
beginning of the Fifth Race. (The Fourth Race already had begun to lose the spiritual
condition, so pre-eminently developed in the Third Race.)
** The modern
commentators, failing to comprehend the subtle meaning of the ancient
Scholiasts, take this sentence, "causes of the agents," to mean
"that the powers of smelling, etc., when attributed to the Self, make him
appear as an agent, as an active principle" (!), which is entirely
fanciful. These "seven" are understood to be the causes of the
Agents, because "the objects are causes, as their enjoyment causes an impression."
It means esoterically that they, these seven senses, are caused by the AGENTS,
which are the "deities," for what does, or can, the sentence which
follows this one mean? "Thus," it is said, "these seven (senses)
are the causes of emancipation" (i.e., when these causes are made
ineffectual). "And among the learned (the wise Initiates) who understand
the qualities which are in the position (in the nature, rather) of the deities,
each in its place," means simply that the "learned" understand
the nature of the noumenoi of the various phenomena; and that
"qualities," in this instance, mean the qualities of the high
planetary or Elementary gods or Intelligences, which rule the elements and
their products, and not at all "the senses," as the modern commentator
thinks. For the "learned do not suppose their senses to have aught to do
with them, any more than with their SELF." (Vide pp. 278 and 279 of the
VIII. Vol. of "The Sacred Books of the East." Anugita.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* in the holes of which are
the sprouts, namely, the senses, of which the great (Occult, or invisible)
elements are the flower-bunches,** 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 -- Akasa, as dual-natured Akasa 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 AEther 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Ahamkara, I
suppose, that Egoship (or Ahamship) which leads to every error.
** The elements
are the five tanmatras of earth, water, fire, air and ether, the producers of
the grosser elements.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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" (Akasa), 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 538 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
friction.* 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.** 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 Vitae 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
Vitae" will re-awaken into action, and begin its work on the atoms
chemically. Brahma-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
Archaeus 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The conductor
in the sense of Upadhi -- a material or physical basis; but, as the second
principle of the universal Soul and Vital Force in Nature, it is intelligently
guided by the fifth principle thereof.
** And too great
an exuberance of it in the nervous system leads as often to disease and death.
If it were the animal system which generated it, such would not be the case,
surely. Hence, the latter emergency shows its independence of the system, and
connection with the Sun-Force, as Metcalfe and Professor Hunt explain it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 539 THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE.
it has been made
impure, and restore the health" (Paragranum; "Life of
Paracelsus," by Dr. F. Hartmann.)
That the two,
Archaeus 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 Vidyadharas* (the inferior
Pitris) at the lower.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In a recent
work on the Symbolism in Buddhism and Christianity (in Buddhism and Roman
Catholicism, rather, many later rituals and dogmas in Northern Buddhism in its
popular exoteric form, being identical with those of the Latin Church) some
curious facts are to be found. The author of this volume, with more pretensions
than erudition, has indiscriminately crammed into his work ancient and modern
Buddhist teachings, and sorely confused Lamaism with Buddhism. On page 404 of
this volume, called "Buddhism in Christendom, or Jesus the Essene,"
our pseudo-Orientalist devotes himself to criticizing the "Seven
Principles" of the Esoteric Buddhists, and attempts to ridicule them. On
page 405, the closing page, he speaks enthusiastically of the Vidyadharas,
"the seven great legions of dead men made wise." Now, these
"Vidyadharas," whom some Orientalists call "demi-gods," are
in fact, exoterically, a kind of Siddhas, "affluent in devotion,"
and, esoterically, they are identical with the seven classes of Pitris, one
class of which endow man in the Third Race with Self-Consciousness by
incarnating in the human shells. The "Hymn to the Sun," at the end of
his queer volume of mosaic, which endows Buddhism with a personal god (!!), is
an unfortunate thrust at the very proofs so elaborately collected by the
unlucky author.
Theosophists are
fully aware that Mr. Rhys Davids has expressed his opinion on their beliefs
likewise. He said that the theories propounded by the author of Esoteric
Buddhism "were not Buddhism, and were not Esoteric." The remark is
the result of (a) the unfortunate mistake of writing "Buddhism"
instead of "Budhaism," or Budhism, i.e., of connecting the system
with Gautama's religion instead of with the Secret Wisdom taught by Krishna,
Sankaracharya, and by many others, as much as by Buddha; and (b) of the
impossibility of Mr. Rhys Davids knowing anything of true esoteric teachings.
But he is, at all events, the greatest Pali and Buddhist scholar of the day,
and whatever he may say is entitled to respectful hearing. But when one who
knows no more of exoteric Buddhism on scientific and materialistic lines, than
he knows of esoteric philosophy, defames those whom he honours with his spite,
and assumes with the Theosophists the airs of a profound scholar, one can only
smile and -- heartily laugh at him.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 influence of another force. . . . .
Life is not antagonistic to the inanimate forces, but it governs and rules
their action by its laws."*
--------------
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Human Species," p. 11.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. Herschell 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,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Not only does
it not deny the occurrence, though attributing it to a wrong cause, as always,
each theory contradicting every other, (see the theories of Secchi, of Faye,
and of Young), the spots depending on the superficial accumulation of vapours
cooler than the photosphere (?), etc., etc., but we have men of science who
astrologize upon the spots. Professor Jevons attributes all the great
periodical commercial crises to the influence of the Sun spots every eleventh
cyclic year. (See his "Investigations into Currency and Finance.")
This is worthy of praise and encouragement surely.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Haeckelian monera, is now viewed as the archebiosis of
terrestrial existence (Mr. Huxley's "protoplasm")*; and Bathybius
Haeckelii 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: "Brahma
has essentially the aspect of prakriti, both evolved and unevolved . . . .
Spirit, O twice-born, (Initiate) is the leading aspect of Brahma. 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 Brahma (as distinct from Brahma
neuter), and it means "atom": Aniyamsam aniyasam, "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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Unfortunately,
as these pages are being written the "archebiosis of terrestrial
existence" has turned, under a somewhat stricter chemical analysis, into a
simple precipitate of sulphate of lime -- hence from the scientific standpoint
not even an organic substance!!! Sic transit gloria mundi!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 nebulae; for
as Professor Newcomb shows (in his "Popular Astronomy," on page 444),
resolvable nebulae are not a class of proper nebulae.
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 "aniyamsam aniyasam" (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,"* it has
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In his
"World-Life" -- page 48 -- in the appended foot notes, Professor
Winchell says:-- "It is generally admitted that at excessively high
temperatures matter exists in a state of dissociation -- that is, no chemical
combination can exist;" and would appeal, to prove the unity of matter, to
the spectrum, which in every case of homogeneity will show a bright line,
whereas in the case of several molecular arrangements existing -- in the
nebulae say, or a star -- "the spectrum should consist of two or three
bright lines!" This would be no proof either way to the
physicist-Occultist, who maintains that beyond a certain limit of visible
matter, no spectrum, no telescope and no microscope are of any use. The unity
of matter, of that which is real cosmic matter to the Alchemist, or
"Adam's Earth" as the Kabalists call it, can hardly be proved or
disproved, by either the French savant Dumas, who suggests "the composite
nature of the "elements" on certain relations of atomic
weights," or even by Mr. Crookes's "radiant matter," though his
experiments may seem [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* (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 meme, 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 a
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] "to be best understood on the hypothesis of
the homogeneity of the elements of matter, and the continuity of the states of
matter." For all this does not go beyond MATERIAL matter, so to say, even
in what is shown by the spectrum, that modern "eye of Siva" of
physical experiments. It is of this matter only, that H. St. Claire Deville
could say that "when bodies, deemed to be simple, combine with one
another, they vanish, they are individually annihilated"; simply because
he could not follow those bodies in their further transformation in the world
of spiritual cosmic matter. Verily modern science will never be able to dig
deep enough into the cosmological formations to find the roots of the
world-stuff or matter, unless she works on the same lines of thought as the
medieval alchemist did.
*
"World-Life," Ibid.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
PRADHANA, 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 pradhana, 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,
pradhana, original base, which is subtile prakriti, viz., that which is
eternal, and which at once is, and is not, a mere process."*
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 Brahma, 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,** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Book I. ch.
II. Vishnu Purana, Fitzedward Hall's Translation.
** Vide
preceding Section IX., "Life, Force, and Gravity," quotation from
Anugita.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, &c., 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 547 OCCULT CHEMISTRY.
how in justice
are we to exclude the series of elemental bodies or meta-elements made known to
us by Kruss 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 548 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
aggregations of
nebulae 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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!"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
[[diagram]]
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;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 philos-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 552 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ophy, 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 Brahma;" and (b) an Universal pralaya -- the MAHA-PRALAYA -- only after
the lapse of every Brahma'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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
caesium; 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 supernatural* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The word
"supernatural" implies above or outside of nature. Nature and Space
are one. Now Space for the metaphysician exists outside of any act of
sensation, and is a purely subjective representation; materialism, which would
connect it forcibly with one or the other datum of sensation, notwithstanding.
For our senses, it is fairly subjective when independent of anything within it.
How then can any phenomenon, or anything else, step outside of or be performed
beyond that which has no limits? But when spacial extension becomes simply
conceptual, and is thought of in an idea connected with certain actions, as by
the materialists and the physicists, then again they have hardly a right to
define and claim that which can or cannot be produced by Forces generated
within even limited spaces, as they have not even an approximate idea of what
those forces are.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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),** 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 . . . ."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is not
correct, when speaking of idealism, to show it based upon "the old
ontological assumptions that things or entities exist independently of each
other, and otherwise than as terms of relations" (Stallo). At any rate, it
is incorrect to say so of idealism in Eastern philosophy and its cognition, for
it is just the reverse.
** Independent,
in a certain sense, but not disconnected with it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Creator* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "By
Fohat, more likely," would be an Occultist's reply.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 capacities* 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.** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The reason for
such psychic capacities is given farther on.
** The above was
written two years ago, at a time when hopes of success for the "Keely
Motor" were at their highest. What was then said by the writer proved
true, in every word, and now only a few remarks are added to it with regard to
the failure of his expectations, so far, which has now been admitted by the
discoverer himself. Though, however, the word failure is here used the reader
should understand it in a relative sense, for as Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore
explains: "What Mr. Keely does admit is that, baffled in applying
vibratory force to mechanics, upon his first and second lines of experimental
research, he was obliged either to confess a commercial failure, or to try a
third departure from his base or principle; seeking success through another
channel."
. . And this
"channel" is on the physical plane.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We learn that
these remarks are not applicable to Mr. Keely's latest discovery; time alone
can show the exact limit of his achievements.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 aerial 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 561 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 of 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 Akasa.
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 --
Molecular
vibrations at 100,000,000 per second.
Inter-molecular
vibrations at 300,000,000 per second
Atomic
vibrations at 900,000,000 per second
Inter-atomic
vibrations at 2,700,000,000 per second
AEtheric vibrations
at 8,100,000,000 per second
Inter-AEtheric
vibrations at 24,300,000,000 per second
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Purana, in the Ramayana 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEther.
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.* 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
sub-division where this luminiferous ether is developed in its crude form as
far as my researches prove.** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This also is
the division, made by the Occultists, under other names.
** Quite so,
since there is the seventh beyond, which begins the same enumeration, from the
first to the last, on another and higher plane.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In this case
the American "Substantialists" are not wrong (though too
anthropomorphic and material in their views to be accepted by the Occultists)
when arguing through Mrs. M. S. Organ, M.D., that "there must be positive
entitative properties in objects which have a constitutional relation to the
nerves of animal sensations, or there can be no perception. No impression of
any kind can be made upon brain, nerve, or mind -- no stimulus to action --
unless there is an actual and direct communication of a substantial
force." ("Substantial" as far as it appears in the usual sense
of the word in this universe of illusion and MAYA, of course; not so in reality.)
"That force may be the most refined and sublimated immaterial Entity (?).
Yet it must exist; for no sense, element, or faculty of the human being can
have a perception, or be stimulated into action, without some substantial force
coming in contact with it. This is the fundamental law pervading the whole
organic and mental world. In the true philosophical sense there is no such
thing as independent action: for every force or substance is correlated to some
other force or substance. We can with just as much truth and reason assert that
no substance possesses any inherent gustatory property or any olfactory
property -- that taste and odour are simply sensations caused by vibrations;
and hence mere illusions of animal perceptions. . . ."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 567 METAPHYSICAL CHEMISTRY.
English
geologists*, 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 proemial, 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."** 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 Brahma
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In answer to a
friend, that eminent geologist writes: . . . ."I can only say, in reply to
your letter, that it is at present, and perhaps always will be, IMPOSSIBLE to
reduce, even approximately, geological time into years, or even into
millenniums." (Signed William Pengelly, F.R.S.)
** Plato
speaking of the irrational, turbulent Elements "composed of fire, air,
water, and earth," means Elementary Daemons. (See Timaeus.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* No ancient philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists,
ever dissociated Spirit from matter or vice versa. 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;"** 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 Cyclopaedia), 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.*** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Plato uses the
words "secretions" of turbulent Elements (Timaeus).
** Valentinus'
Esoteric Treatise on the Doctrine of Gilgul.
*** Surely no
educated Jew ever believed the literal sense of this allegory -- namely, that
"the bodies of Jews deposited in foreign lands contain within them a
principle of Soul which cannot rest, until by a process called the
"whirling of the Soul" the immortal particle reaches once more the
sacred Soil of the "Promised land." The meaning is evident to an
occultist. The process was supposed to be accomplished by a kind of
metempsychosis, the psychic spark being conveyed through bird, beast, fish, and
the most minute insect. (See Royal Masonic Cyclo. Mackenzie.) The Allegory
relates to the atoms of the body, which have each to pass through every form
before all reach the final state, which is the first starting point of the
departure of every atom -- its primitive Laya State. But the primitive meaning
of Gilgoolem, or "Revolution of Souls," was the idea of the
re-incarnating Souls or Egos. "All the Souls go into the gilgoolah,"
into a cyclic or revolving process; i.e., they all proceed on the cyclic path
of re-births. Some Kabalists interpret this doctrine to mean only a kind of
purgatory for the souls of the wicked. But this is not so.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 570 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Sankaracharya
(Viveka Chudamani)*, 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.** It is called in the
Esoteric philosophy "the One Witness,"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Translated for
the Theosophist, by Mohini M. Chatterji as "Crest Jewel of Wisdom,"
1886. (See Theosophist, July and August numbers).
** Now that the
revised version of the gospels has been published and the most glaring
mistranslations of the old versions are corrected, one will understand better
the words in St. John v., vi., and vii.: "It is the Spirit that beareth
witness because the Spirit is the truth." The words that follow in the
mistranslated version about the "three witnesses," -- hitherto
supposed to stand for "the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost" --
show the real meaning of the writer (St. John) very clearly, thus still more
forcibly identifying his teaching in this respect with that of Sankaracharya.
For what can the sentence, "there are three who bear witness: the Spirit
and the Water and the Blood" -- mean, if they bear no relation to, or
connection with, the more philosophical statement of the great Vedanta teacher,
who, speaking of the sheaths (the principles in man) Jiva, Vignanamaya, etc.,
which are, in their physical manifestation, "water and blood" or
life, adds that atma (spirit) alone is what remains after the [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Brahma or either of the other two Trimurtian Hypostases, hence
identical also with the Rishis and Prajapatis. Thus, a passage is found in
Anugita, 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, Pisachas, Asuras, Rakshasas, all have been created by
Svabhava (Prakriti, or plastic nature), not by actions, nor by a cause" --
i.e., not by any physical cause.
"These
Brahmanas (the Rishi Prajapati?), the creators of the world, are born here (on
earth) again and again. Whatever is produced from
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] subtraction of the sheaths and that it is the
ONLY witness, or synthesized unity. The less spiritual and philosophical
school, solely with an eye to a trinity made three witnesses out of
"one," thus connecting it more with earth than with heaven.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 tanmatras)* goes to the highest goal." "The
Lord Prajapati (Brahma) 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 "Brahmanas" 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 Brahmanas, 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 Maha-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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Tanmatras
are literally the type or rudiment of an element devoid of qualities; but
esoterically, they are the primeval noumenoi of that which becomes in the
progress of evolution a Cosmic element in the sense given to the term in
antiquity, not in that of physics. They are the logoi, the seven emanations or
rays of the logos.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Sankaracharya. 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Hence the
seven chief planets, the spheres of the indwelling seven spirits, under each of
which is born one of the human groups which is guided and influenced thereby.
There are only seven planets (specially connected with earth), and twelve
houses, but the possible combinations of their aspects are countless. As each
planet can stand to each of the others in twelve different aspects, their
combinations must, therefore, be almost infinite; as infinite, in fact, as the
spiritual, psychic, mental, and physical capacities in the numberless varieties
of the genus homo, each of which varieties is born under one of the seven
planets and one of the said countless planetary combinations. See Theosophist,
for August, 1886.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 574 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
'ATMA,' round
whose pavilion is the darkness of eternal MAYA."* 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.**
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).*** 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.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The now
universal error of attributing to the ancients the knowledge of only seven
planets, simply because they mentioned no others, is based on the same general
ignorance of their occult doctrines. The question is not whether they were, or
were not, aware of the existence of the later discovered planets; but whether
the reverence paid by them to the four exoteric and three secret great gods --
the star-angels, had not some special reason. The writer ventures to say there
was such a reason, and it is this. Had they known of as many planets as we do
now (and this question can hardly be decided at present, either way), they
would have still connected with their religious worship only the seven, because
these seven are directly and specially connected with our earth, or, using
esoteric phraseology, with our septenary ring of spheres. (See supra.)
** It is the
same, only still more metaphysical idea, as that of the Christian Trinity --
"Three in One" -- i.e., the Universal "over-Spirit,"
manifesting on the two higher planes, those of Buddhi and Mahat; and these are
the three hypostases, metaphysical, but never personal.
*** The
identity, and at the same time the illusive differentiation of the Angel-Monad
and the Human-Monad is shown by the following sentences: "My Father is
greater than I" (John xiv. 26); "Glorify your Father who is in
Heaven" (Matt. v. 16); "The righteous will shine in the kingdom of
their Father" (not our Father) (Matt. xiii. 43) "Know ye not ye are a
temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? (I Cor. iii. 16);
"I ascend to my Father," etc., etc.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 religions* -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These are
planets accepted for purposes of judicial astrology only. The astrotheogonical
division differed from this one. The Sun, being a central star and no planet,
stands in more occult and mysterious relations with its seven planets of our
globe than is generally known. The Sun was, therefore, considered the great
Father of all the Seven "Fathers," which accounts for the variations
found between seven and eight great gods of the Chaldean and other countries.
Neither the earth nor the moon -- its satellite -- nor yet stars, for another
reason -- were anything else than substitutes for esoteric purposes. Yet, even with
the Sun and the Moon thrown out of the calculation, the ancients seem to have
known of seven planets. How many more are known to us, so far, if we throw out
the Earth and Moon? Seven, and no more: Seven primary or principal planets, the
rest planetoids rather than planets.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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
x 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* When one
remembers that under the powerful telescope of Sir W. Herschell, that eminent
astronomer, gauging merely that portion of heaven in the equatorial plane, the
approximate centre of which is occupied by our Earth -- saw pass in one quarter
of an hour, 16,000 stars; and applying this calculation to the totality of the
"Milky Way" he found in it no less than 18 (eighteen) millions of
SUNS -- one wonders no longer that Laplace, in conversation with Napoleon I.
should have called God a HYPOTHESIS -- perfectly useless to speculate upon for
exact physical Science, at any rate. Occult metaphysics and transcendental
philosophy will alone be able to lift the smallest corner of the impenetrable
veil in this direction.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,"* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* C. W. King,
identifies it with "that summum bonum of Oriental aspiration, the Buddhist
Nirvana," perfect repose, the Epicurean Indolentia, which looks flippant
enough in its expression, though not quite untrue.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 seed* . . . 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 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Abraham and
Saturn are identical in astro-symbology, and he is the forefather of the
Jehovistic Jews.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Elemental
Vortices inaugurated by the Mind have not been improved by their modern
transformation.
** I have been
often taken to task for using expressions in Isis denoting belief in a personal
and anthropomorphic God. This is not my idea. Kabalistically speaking, the
"Architect" is the generic name for the Sephiroth, the Builders of
the Universe, as the "Universal Mind" represents the collectivity of
the Dhyan Chohanic Minds.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 580 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Plato, lighted a
fire which we now call the sun,"* 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 concentrate 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, 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.'**
Herschell'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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Timaeus."
** Modern
Chemistry.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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 [[pro]] (earlier than) and
[[hyle]] (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 [[hyle]] and every element is converted into the
nature of another element."
The Knowledge of
Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old magician** by inspiration, but
because he studied ancient works on
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Mr. Crookes'
"Presidential Address" at Birmingham. "There is but one unknown
-- the ultimate substratum of Spirit (Space). That which is not the Absolute
and the One is, in virtue of that very differentiation, however far removed
from the physical senses, always accessible to the spiritual human mind, which
is a coruscation of the undifferentiable Integral." -- (Practical Lessons
on the Occult.)
** Thus, what
the writer of the present work said ten years ago in "Isis Unveiled"
(Vol. I.) was prophetic, it seems. These are the words: "Many of these
mystics, by following what they were taught by some treatises, secretly
preserved from one generation to another, achieved discoveries which would not
be despised even in our modern days of exact sciences. Roger Bacon, the friar,
was laughed at as a quack, and is now generally numbered among 'pretenders' to
magic art; but his discoveries were nevertheless accepted, and are now used by
those who ridicule him the most. Roger Bacon belonged by right, if not by fact,
to that Brotherhood which includes all those who [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
existed* -- 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. Pradhana (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 Pradhana are
immutable and unconsumable, or Aparinamin and Avyaya, in eternity; and both
during the Mayavic periods may be referred to as Vyaya and Parinamin, 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 Kala "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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] study the occult sciences. Living in the
thirteenth century, almost a contemporary, therefore, of Albertus Magnus and
Thomas Aquinas, his discoveries -- such as gunpowder and optical glasses, and
his mechanical achievements -- were considered by everyone as so many miracles.
He was accused of having made a compact with the Evil One."
* Just so;
"those forms of energy . . . which become evident . . ." in the
laboratory of the chemist and physicist; but there are other forms of energy
wedded to other forms of matter, -- which are supersensuous, yet known to the
adepts.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 concerned* . . . 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."** 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-called elements, from their analogy
to the compound radicles! " Hitherto,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is just the
existence of such worlds in other planes of consciousness that is claimed by
the Occultist. The secret science teaches that the primitive race was boneless.
(See Book II.); and that there are (to us) invisible worlds, peopled as our
own, besides the populations of Dhyan Chohans.
** "Five
Years of Theosophy," p. 258 et seq.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
". . . 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.** But can we form a clear conception of a body which
combines with other bodies in proportions expressible by negative qualities?"***
"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 of
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says Mr.
Crookes in the same address: "The first riddle which we encounter in
chemistry is: 'What are the elements?' Of the attempts hitherto made to define
or explain an element, none satisfy the demands of the human intellect. The
text books tell us that an element is 'a body which has not been decomposed
''that it is 'a something to which we can add, but from which we can take
nothing,' or 'a body which increases in weight with every chemical change.'
Such definitions are doubly unsatisfactory: they are provisional, and may cease
to-morrow to be applicable in any given case. They take their stand, not on any
attribute of the things to be defined, but on the limitations of human power:
they are confessions of intellectual impotence."
** And the
lecturer quotes Sir George Airy, who says (in Faraday's Life and Letters Vol.
II., p. 354), "I can easily conceive that there are plenty of bodies about
us not subject to this intermutual action, and therefore not subject to the law
of gravitation."
*** The Vedantic
philosophy conceives of such; but then it is not physics, but metaphysics,
called by Mr. Tyndall "poetry" and "fiction."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 585 THE "SEVENTH" IN CHEMISTRY.
energetic gas
which chemists 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,* 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.** In the general array of the elements, as
known to us, we have seen a striking approximation to that of the organic
world.*** 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 classification**** . . . Summing up all the above considerations we
cannot,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the form
they are now, we conceive?
** And to Kapila
and Manu -- especially and originally.
*** Here is a
scientific corroboration of the eternal law of correspondences and analogy.
**** This method
of illustrating the periodic law in the classification of elements is, in the
words of Mr. Crookes, proposed by Professor Emerson Reynolds, of Dublin
University, who . . . . "points out that in each period, the general
properties of the elements vary from one to another, with approximate
regularity until we reach the seventh member, which is in more or less striking
contrast with the first element of the same period, as well as with the first
of the next. Thus chlorine, the seventh member of Mendeleef's third period,
contrasts sharply with both sodium, the first member of the same series, and
with potassium, the first member of the next series; whilst on the other hand,
sodium and potassium are closely analogous. The six elements, whose atomic
weights intervene between sodium and potassium, vary in properties, step by
step, until chlorine, the contrast to sodium, is reached. But from chlorine to
potassium, the analogue of sodium, there is a change in properties per saltum.
. . . . If we thus recognise a contrast in properties -- more or less decided
-- between the first and the last members of each series, we can scarcely help
admitting the existence of a point of mean variation within each system. In
general the fourth element of each series possesses the property we might
expect a transition-element to exhibit. . . . . Thus for the purpose of graphic
translation, Professor Reynolds considers that the fourth member of a period --
silicon, for example -- may be placed at the apex of a symmetrical [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] curve, which shall represent for that particular
period, the direction in which the properties of the series of elements vary
with rising atomic weights.
Now, the writer
humbly confesses complete ignorance of modern chemistry and its mysteries. But
she is pretty well acquainted with the Occult doctrine with regard to
correspondences of types and antitypes in nature, and perfect analogy as a
fundamental law in Occultism. Hence she ventures a remark which will strike
every Occultist, however it may be derided by orthodox Science. This method of
illustrating the periodic law in the behaviour of elements, whether or not
still a hypothesis in chemistry, is a law in Occult Sciences. Every well-read
Occultist knows that the seventh and fourth members -- whether in a septenary
chain of worlds, the septenary hierarchy of angels, or in the constitution of
man, animal, plant, or mineral atom -- that the seventh and fourth members, we
say, in the geometrically and mathematically uniform workings of the immutable
laws of Nature, always play a distinct and specific part in the septenary
system. From the stars twinkling high in heaven, to the sparks flying asunder
from the rude fire built by the savage in his forest; from the hierarchies and
the essential constitution of the Dhyan Chohans -- organized for diviner
apprehensions and a loftier range of perception than the greatest Western
psychologist ever dreamed of, down to Nature's classification of species among
the humblest insects; finally from worlds to atoms, everything in the universe,
from great to small, proceeds in its spiritual and physical evolution,
cyclically and septennially, showing its seventh and fourth number (the latter
the turning point) behaving in the same way as shown in that periodic law of
atoms. Nature never proceeds per saltum. Therefore, when Mr. Crookes remarks to
this that he does not "wish to infer that the gaps in Mendeleef's table,
and in this graphic representation of it (the diagram showing the evolution of
atoms) necessarily mean that there are elements actually existing to fill up
the gaps; these gaps may only mean that at the birth of the elements there was
an easy potentiality of the formation of an element which would fit into the
place" -- an Occultist would respectfully remark to him that the latter
hypothesis can only hold good, if the septenary arrangement of atoms is not
interfered with. This is the one law, and an infallible method that must always
lead to success, one who follows it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Akasa, 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,* 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 Puranas, 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A group of
electricians has just protested against the new theory of Clausius, the famous
professor of the University of Bonn. The character of the protest is shown in
the signature, which has "Jules Bourdin, in the name of the group of
Electricians, which had the honour of being introduced to Professor Clausius in
1881, and whose war-cry (cri de ralliement) is A bas l'Ether" -- down with
ether, even; they want Universal Void, you see!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 nebulae 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,* 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 nebulae 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Smithsonian Contributions," xxi., Art. 1, pp. 79-97.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 condition* -- 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. Herschell, 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 Herschell 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Beyond the
zero-line of action.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Cassiopoeia, in 1572, had been formed out of that matter.
("Progymnasmata" p. 795.) Kepler believed the star of 1606 had been
likewise formed out of the ethereal substance that fills the universe ("De
stella nova in pede Serpentarii," 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. ("Hypotheses
Cosmogoniques," C. Wolf.) Still later, in 1714, -- the existence of a
self-luminous matter was recognised by Halley ("Philosophical
Transactions"). Finally, the journal of this name published in 1811 the
famous hypothesis on the transformation of the nebulae into stars, by the
eminent astronomer, Sir W. Herschell (See "Philosophical
Transactions," of 1811, p. 269, et seq.), after which the nebular theory
was accepted by the Royal Academies.
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.
Herschell], 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Herschell, 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.
Herschell'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 resume 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.")* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"World-Life." Prof. Winchell points to a good many mistakes of
Laplace in his work; but as a geologist he is not infallible himself in his
"astronomical speculations."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 .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 nebulae, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Five
Years of Theosophy," pp. 249-50. Art. "Do the Adepts deny the Nebular
Theory?"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 595 WHAT ARE THE NEBULAE?
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 matter* 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. Herschell'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. Herschell'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 nebulae, 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 nebulae 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 nebulae 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Had
astronomers held simply, in their present state of knowledge, to the hypothesis
of Laplace, which was simply the formation of the planetary system, it might in
time have resulted in something like an approximate truth. But the two parts of
the general problem, that of the formation of the universe, or the formation of
the suns and stars from the primitive matter, and then the development of the
planets around their sun, rest on quite different facts in nature and are even
so viewed by Science itself. They are at the opposite poles of being.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Systeme 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,* "could the nebular hypothesis show in its favour, with
W. Herschell, the existence of planetary nebulae in various degrees of
condensation, and of spiral nebulae, with nuclei of condensation on the
branches and centre.** But, in fact, the knowledge of the bond that unites the
nebulae 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Member of the
Institute, Astronomer of the Observatory, Paris, "Cosmogonical
Hypotheses."
** But the
spectra of these nebulae have never yet been ascertained. When they are found
with bright lines, then only may they be cited.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 598 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
difficulty
arising for them out of such undeniable variety and heterogeneity of matter in
the constitution of nebulae, 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,* -- 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 nebulae, -- 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.**
"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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Mr. Crookes'
"Protyle" must not be regarded as the primary stuff, out of which the
Dhyan Chohans, in accordance with the immutable laws of nature, wove our solar
system. This protyle cannot even be the first prima-materia of Kant, which that
great mind saw used up in the formation of the worlds, and thus existing no
longer in a diffused state. It is a MEDIATE phase in the progressive
differentiation of cosmic substance from its normal undifferentiated state.
Protyle is then the aspect assumed by matter in its middle passage into full
objectivity.
** "The
question of the resolvability of the nebulae has been often presented in too
affirmative a manner and quite contrary to the ideas expressed by the illustrious
experimenter with the spectra of these constellations -- Mr. Huggins. Every
nebula whose spectrum contains only bright lines is gaseous, it is said, and
hence is irresolvable; every nebula with a continuous spectrum must end by
resolving into stars with an instrument of sufficient power. This assumption is
contrary at once to the results obtained, and to spectroscopic theory. The Lyra
nebula, the Dumb-bell nebula, the central region of the nebula of Orion, appear
resolvable, and show a spectrum of bright lines; the nebula of Canis Venatici
is not resolvable, and gives a continuous spectrum. Because, indeed, the
spectroscope informs us of the physical state of the constituent matter of the
stars, but affords us no notions of their modes of aggregation. A nebula formed
of gaseous globes (or even of nuclei, faintly luminous, surrounded by a
powerful atmosphere) would give a spectrum of lines and be still resolvable;
such seems to be the state of Huggins' region in the Orion nebula. A nebula
formed of solid or fluidic particles in a state of incandescence, a true cloud,
will give a continuous spectrum but will be irresolvable." (C. Wolf,
Cosmogonical Hypotheses.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 599 THE NEBULAR THEORY A ROMANCE.
internal weight:
such are the nebulae 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 nebulae. If the primitive chaos were a cold luminous gas,*
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 nebulae 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."**
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Stanza
III. about "Light, or the cold Flame," and Commentary Number 8, where
it is explained that the "mother" (Chaos) is a cold Fire, a cool
Radiance, colourless, formless, devoid of every quality. "Motion is the
One Eternal is, and contains the potentialities of every quality in the
Manvantaric Worlds," it is said.
** Hypotheses
Cosmogoniques, C. Wolf, 1886.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 600 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
it allows that
this "fire mist may have previously existed in a cold, nonluminous 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."*
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."**
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"World-Life," p. 196.
** Westminster
Review, XX., July 27, 1868.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 abovequoted work upon astronomy,
by Wolf,* 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 (Konigsberg)
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, Akasa,
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "LES
HYPOTHESES COSMOGONIQUES. Examen des Theories Scientifiques modernes sur
l'Origine des Mondes, suivi de la Traduction de la Theorie du Ciel de
Kant."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Logos*) -- 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 Puranas, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Which
"Light" we call Fohat.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* obeying other influences, an agent
possessing no initiative power, no vis or energia naturae,** 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.***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is a
mistake, which implies a material agent, distinct from the influences which
move it, i.e. blind matter and perhaps "God" again, whereas this ONE
Life is the very God and Gods "Itself."
** The same
error.
*** "Is the
Jiva a myth, as science says, or is it not?" ask some Theosophists,
wavering between materialistic and idealistic Science. The difficulty of really
grasping esoteric problems concerning the "ultimate state of matter"
is again the old crux of the objective and the subjective. What is matter? Is the
matter of our present objective consciousness anything but our SENSATIONS?
True, the sensations we receive come from without, but can we really (except in
terms of phenomena) speak of the "gross matter" of this plane as an
entity apart from and independent of us? To all such arguments Occultism
answers: True, in reality matter is not independent of, or existent outside,
our perceptions. Man is an illusion: granted. But the existence and actuality
of other, still more illusive, but not less actual, entities than we are, is
not a claim which is lessened, but rather strengthened by this doctrine of
Vedantic and even Kantian Idealism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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, Archangels, Archons, Seraphs, and Morning
Stars: in all those theological Deliciae 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 Maistre was right in calling the law of
gravitation merely a word which replaced "the thing unknown"
(Soirees), 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 Herschell and many others. (Vide Musee 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 coordinately
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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 etvmology 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Even the
question of the plurality of worlds inhabited by sentient creatures is rejected
or approached with the greatest caution! And yet see what the great astronomer,
Camille Flammarion, says in his "Pluralite des Mondes."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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.** 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."*** Do not we
know through the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nevertheless,
it will be shown on the testimony of the Bible itself, and of such good
Christian theologians as Cardinal Wiseman, that this plurality is taught in
both the Old and the New Testaments.
** See "The
Plurality of the Worlds," wherein the list of many men of Science, who
wrote to prove the theory, is given.
*** Professor A.
Winchell -- arguing upon the plurality of the worlds -- makes the following
remarks: "It is not at all improbable that substances of a refractory
nature might be so mixed with other substances, known or unknown to us, as to
be capable of enduring vastly greater vicissitudes of heat and cold than is
possible with terrestrial organisms. The tissues of terrestrial animals are
simply suited to terrestrial conditions. Yet even here we find different types
and species of animals adapted to the trials of extremely dissimilar
situations. . . . . . That an animal should be a quadruped or a [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] biped is something not depending on the
necessities of organization, or instinct, or intelligence. That an animal
should possess just five senses is not a necessity of percipient existence.
There may be animals on the earth with neither smell nor taste. There may be
beings on other worlds, and even on this, who possess more numerous senses than
we. The possibility of this is apparent when we consider the high probability
that other properties and other modes of existence lie among the resources of
the Kosmos, and even of terrestrial matter. There are animals which subsist
where rational man would perish -- in the soil, in the river, and the sea"
. . . (and why not human beings of different organizations, in such case?) . .
. "Nor is incorporated rational existence conditioned on warm blood, nor
on any temperature which does not change the forms of matter of which the
organism may be composed. There may be intelligences corporealized after some
concept not involving the processes of injection, assimilation, and
reproduction. Such bodies would not require daily food and warmth. They might
be lost in the abysses of the ocean, or laid up on a stormy cliff through the
tempests of an Arctic winter, or plunged in a volcano for a hundred years, and
yet retain consciousness and thought. It is conceivable. Why might not psychic
natures be enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum? These substances are
no further from the nature of intelligence than carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and lime.
But, not to carry the thought to such an extreme (?), might not high
intelligences be embodied in frames as indifferent to external conditions as
the sage of the western plains, or the lichens of Labrador, the rotifers that
remain dried for years, or the spores of bacteria which pass living through
boiling water. . . . These suggestions are made simply to remind the reader how
little can be argued respecting the necessary conditions of intelligent,
organized existence, from the standard of corporeal existence found upon the
earth. Intelligence is, from its nature, as universal and as uniform as the
laws of the Universe. Bodies are merely the local fitting of intelligence to
particular modifications of universal matter or Force." (World-Life, or Comparative
Geology, pp. 496-498 et seq.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 remarked* that "the Esoteric Doctrine may well be called the
'thread-doctrine,' since, like Sutratman, in the Vedanta philosophy,** 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 lese-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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Septenary Principle," art. in "Five Years of Theosophy," p. 197.
** The Atman or
Spirit (the Spiritual SELF) passing like a thread through the five subtle
bodies (or principles, Koshas) is called "thread-soul," or Sutratman
in Vedantic philosophy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 AEons -- 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* -- 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,"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Science
of Numbers," by the Rev. G. Oliver (p. 36).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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, De Placitis
Placitorum); 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.** By mystic transmutation they became the Quaternary -- the triangle
became the TETRAKTIS.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Kant's
Critique de la Raison pure (Barni's transl., Vol. II., p. 54).
** In the Greek
and Latin churches -- which regard marriage as one of the sacraments -- the
officiating priest during the marriage ceremony represents the apex of the
triangle; the bride its left feminine side and the bridegroom the right one,
while the horizontal line is symbolised by the row of witness, the bridesmaids
and best-men. But behind [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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."**
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] the priest there is the altar with its mysterious
containments and symbolic meaning, inside of which no one but the consecrated
priests ought to enter. In the early days of Christianity the marriage ceremony
was a mystery and a true symbol. Now, however, even the churches have lost the
true meaning of this symbolism.
* See Von
Hartmann's and Herbert Spencer's works.
** "New
Aspects of Life," by Henry Pratt, M.D.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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,** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the world
of Form, having found its expression in the Pyramids, Symbolism has in them
both a triangle and a square, with their four co-equal triangles or surfaces,
the four basic points, and the fifth -- the apex.
** "New
Aspects of Life."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Shaddai, 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 Hu (He), and His
Shekinah, the Hidden and Concealed Hu, blessed be YHVH (the Quaternary) for
ever." "Ha is said to be masculine and YAH feminine, together they
make the [[hebrew]] 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 Puranas, 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 anthropomorphised 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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).* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Such recent
works as the Qabbalah of Mr. Isaac Myer and of Mr. S. L. MacGregor Mathers,
fully justify our attitude towards the Jehovistic Deity. It is not the
transcendental, philosophical, and highly metaphysical abstraction of the
original Kabalistic thought -- Ain-Soph-Shekinah-Adam-Kadmon, and all that
follows -- that we oppose, but the crystallization of all these into the highly
unphilosophical, repulsive, and anthropomorphic Jehovah, the androgynous and
finite deity for which eternity, omnipotence, and omniscience are claimed. We
do not war against the IDEAL REALITY, but the hideous theological Shadow.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Psychology* -- 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,** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Let not the
word "psychology" cause the reader to carry his thought by an
association of ideas to modern "Psychologists," so-called, whose
idealism is another name for uncompromising materialism, and whose pretended
Monism is no better than a mask to conceal the void of final annihilation --
even of consciousness. Here Spiritual psychology is meant.
** T. Subba Row,
see Theosophist for Feb., 1887.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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,"** 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,*** 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.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Vishwanara is not merely the manifested objective world, but the one
physical basis (the horizontal line of the triangle) from which the whole
objective world starts into existence." And this is the Cosmic Duad, the
androgynous Substance. Beyond only, is the true Protyle.
** By W.
Crookes, F.R.S., V.P.C.S., delivered at the Royal Institution, London, on
Friday, February 18th, 1887.
*** How true it
is will be fully demonstrated only on that day when his discovery of radiant
matter will have resulted in a further elucidation with regard to the true
source of light, and revolutionized all the present speculations. Further
familiarity with the northern streamers of the aurora borealis may help the
recognition of this truth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 623 THE GENESIS OF ATOMS.
radiant matter
will have vindicated in time the Archaic Aryan works on Occultism and even the
Vedas and Puranas. For what are the manifested "Mother," the
"Father-Son-Husband" (Aditi and Daksha, a form of Brahma, 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, mediaeval, 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 Puranas; 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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"* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Corresponding
on the cosmic scale with the Spirit, Soul-mind, Life, and the three Vehicles --
the astral, the Mayavic and the physical bodies (of mankind) whatever division
is made.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Martanda (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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."* 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.** 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 added*** -- 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The Lord
is a consuming fire." . . . "In him was life, and the life was the
light of men."
** Which if separated
ALCHEMICALLY would yield the Spirit of Life, and its Elixir.
*** Foremost of
all, the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic
substances or bodies. Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical
"atoms" are simply organic units in profound lethargy. Their coma has
an end and their inertia becomes activity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Leibnitz* 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'
and Spinoza's systems
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The real
spelling of the name -- as spelt by himself -- is Leibniz. He was of Slavonian
descent though a German by birth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 agrege 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 630 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
They are with
us, as with Leibnitz -- "the expression of the universe,"* 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.** Again, the atoms
(molecules,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Leibnitz's
Dynamism," says Professor Lachelier, "would offer but little
difficulty if, with him, the Monad had remained a simple atom of blind force.
But . . . ." One perfectly understands the perplexity of modern
materialism!
** Leibnitz was
an absolute Idealist in maintaining that "material atoms are contrary to
reason" (Systeme nouveau, Erdmann, p. 126. col. 2). For him matter was a
simple representation of the monad, whether human or atomic. Monads, he thought
(as we do), are everywhere. Thus the human soul is a monad, and every cell in
the human body has its monad, as every cell in animal, vegetable, and even in
the (so-called) inorganic bodies. His atoms are the molecules of modern
Science, and his monads those simple [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] atoms that materialistic Science takes on faith,
though it will never succeed in interviewing them -- except in imagination. But
Leibnitz is rather contradictory in his views about Monads. He speaks of his
Metaphysical Points and Formal Atoms, at one time as realities, occupying
space; at another as pure Spiritual ideas; then again endows them with
objectivity and aggregates and positions in their co-relations.
* The atoms of
Leibnitz have, in truth, nothing but the name in common with the atoms of the
Greek Materialists, or even the molecules of modern Science. He calls them formal
atoms, and compares them to the substantial forms of Aristotle. (See Systeme
Nouveau, § 3.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 632 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
degrees of
distinct perceptions." (§ 60, Monadologie.)* 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 present** -- 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,*** 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Leibnitz, like
Aristotle, calls the created or emanated monads (the Elementals issued from
Cosmic Spirits or Gods) -- Entelechies, [[Entelecheia]] -- and
"incorporeal automata." (§ 18, Monadologie.)
** These three
"rough divisions" correspond to spirit, mind (or soul), and body, in
the human constitution.
*** Brother C.
H. A. Bjerregaard, in his lecture (already mentioned), warns his audience not
to regard the Sephiroth too much as individualities, but to avoid at the same
time seeing in them abstractions. "We shall never arrive at the
truth," he says, "much less the power of associating with those
celestials, until we return to the simplicity and fearlessness of the primitive
ages, when men mixed freely with the gods, and the gods descended among men and
guided them in truth and holiness" (No. 10, Path) . . . . "There are
several designations for 'angels' in the Bible which clearly show that beings
like the Elementals of the Kabala and the monads of Leibnitz, must be
understood by that term rather than that which is commonly understood. They are
called 'morning stars,' 'flaming fires,' 'the mighty ones,' and St. Paul sees
them in his cosmogonic vision as 'Principalities and Powers.' Such names as
these preclude the idea of personality, and we find ourselves compelled to
think of them as impersonal Existences . . . as an influence, a spiritual
substance, or conscious Force." (Path, No. 11, p. 322.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
influences, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 635 THE ROOTS AND CAUSES.
of renascent
life, Svabhavat, "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 kingdoms* (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 Brahma," 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,"** they teach that only
"two things are (objectively) eternal, namely Akasa 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 Akasa (or Svabhavat
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide Stanza
VI. (Book I.) and Commentary.
** Buddhist
Catechism, by H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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 -- [[Kuklos]] --
"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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We refer those
who would regard the statement as an impertinence or irreverence against
accepted Science, to Mr. James Hutchinson Stirling's work concerning
"Protoplasm," which is a defence of a vital Principle versus the
Molecularists -- Huxley, Tyndall, Vogt, and Co. -- and request them to examine
whether it is true or not to say that the scientific premises may not be always
correct, but that they are accepted, nevertheless, to fill up a gap or a hole
in some beloved materialistic hobby. Speaking of protoplasm and the organs of
man, as "viewed by Mr. Huxley," the author says: "Probably then,
in regard to any continuity in protoplasm of power, of form, or of substance,
we have seen lacunae enow. Nay, Mr. Huxley himself can be adduced in evidence
on the same side. Not rarely do we find in his essay admissions of PROBABILITY,
where it is CERTAINTY that is alone in place. He says, for example: 'It is more
than probable that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored we shall
find all plants in possession of the same powers.' When a conclusion is
decidedly announced, it is rather disappointing to be told, as here, that the
premisses are still to collect' (!!) . . . . . Again, here is a passage in
which he is seen to cut his own 'basis' from beneath his own feet. After
telling us that all forms of protoplasm consist of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and
nitrogen 'in very complex union,' he continues: 'To this complex combination,
the nature of which has never been determined with exactness (!!), the name of
protein has been applied.' This, plainly, is an identification, on Mr. Huxley's
own part, of protoplasm and protein; and what is said of one, being necessarily
true of the other, it follows that he admits the nature of protoplasm never to
have been determined with exactness, and that even in his eyes the lis is still
sub judice. This admission is strengthened by the words, too, 'If we use this
term -- protein -- with such caution as may properly arise out of our
comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands . . . etc., etc. (p. 33
and 34, in reply to Mr. Huxley in "Yeast").
This is the
eminent Huxley, the king of physiology and biology, who is proven playing at
blind man's buff with premisses and facts. What may not the "smaller
fry" of science do after this!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 638 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
intelligently in
Space and Eternity. There are "Cycles of matter"* 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 aeons 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Cycles of Matter," a name given by Professor Winchell to an Essay of his
written in 1860.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 coordinately 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 Buchner, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
Buchners 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.*
"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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Men of science
will say: We deny, because nothing of the kind has ever come within the scope
of our experience. But, as argued by Charles Richet, the physiologist: "So
be it, but have you at least demonstrated the contrary? . . . Do not, at any
rate, deny a priori. Actual Science is not sufficiently advanced to give you
such right." ("La suggestion mentale et le calcul des
probabilites.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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 West** -- do not
affect all mankind at one and the same
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "On World
History" in "Philosophy of History," p. 26. (Sibree's Eng.
Transl.).
** This
symbolism does not prevent these now seemingly mythic personages from
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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"*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] having ruled the earth once upon a time under
the human form of actual living, though truly divine and god-like man. The
opinion of Colonel Vallancey (and also of Count de Gobelin) that the names of
the Kabiri appear to be all allegorical, and to have signified no more (?) than
an almanac of the vicissitudes of the seasons -- calculated for the operations
of agriculture" (Collect. de Reb. Hibern., No. 13, Praef. Sect. 5) is as
absurd as his assertion that OEon, Kronos, Saturn and Dagon are all one,
namely, the "patriarch Adam." The Kabiri were the instructors of
mankind in agriculture, because they were the regents over the seasons and
Cosmic cycles. Hence it was they who regulated, as planetary Spirits or
"Angels" (messengers), the mysteries of the art of agriculture.
* Who dread
Karma-Nemesis would be better.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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,"*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Dryden.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. . .
. . . .*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Not all, however,
for there are men of Science awakening to truth. This is what we read:
"Whatever way we turn our eyes we encounter a mystery . . . . all in
Nature for us is the unknown. . . Yet they are numerous, those superficial
minds for whom nothing can be produced by natural forces outside of facts
observed long ago, consecrated in books and grouped more or less skilfully with
the help of theories whose ephemeral duration ought, by this time, to have
demonstrated their insufficiency, . . . . I do not pretend to contest the
possibility of invisible Beings, of a nature different from ours and
susceptible of moving matter to action. Profound philosophers have admitted it
in all epochs as a consequence of the great law of continuity which rules the
Universe. That intellectual life, which we see starting in some way from
non-being (neant) and gradually reaching man, can it stop abruptly at man to
reappear only in the infinite, in the sovereign regulator of the world? This is
little probable." Therefore . . "I [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] no more deny the existence of Spirits than I
deny soul while trying to explain certain facts without their hypothesis . .
." "The Non-Defined Forces," Historical and Experimental
Researches, p. 3. The above is written by A. de Rochas, a well-known man of
science in France, his work being one of the signs of the time. (Paris: Masson,
Boulevard St. Germain, 1887.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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"** (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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Astronomie
Antique.
** The Pleiades,
as all know, are the seven stars beyond the Bull, which appear at the beginning
of spring. They have a very occult meaning in the Hindu esoteric philosophy,
and are connected with sound and other mystic principles in Nature.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Villapandus (Temple de
Jerusalem, Vol. II., p. 2nd part, chap. xxx). Sir James Malcolm, in his History
of Persia (ch. vii.), 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 Judaeus, 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 sun 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
names of the signs
of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians themselves are far earlier than the
Chaldaeans. 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 (318) that "if we read this number of years by the month which
Euxodus 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 (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 Timaeus, 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;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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. (Creuzer, Book
III., page 930.)
Whether
"the genii of the planets" (our Dhyan Chohans of supra-mundane
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, [[ev ouraniois
semeiois]] (Cyropedie, "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 decouvrir le moindre
trait de ressemblance entre les parties du ciel et les figures que les astronomes
y ont arbitrairement tracees, et de l'autre cote; le hazard est
impossible," he says. (Origine des Cultes, "Zodiaque.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 [[Ichthus]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 in this constellation," he averred, "that
was placed the star of the Magi." This statement, quoted by Dr. Sepp (Vie
de notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, Vol. I. p. 9), emboldened him to remark that
"all the Jewish traditions while announcing that star, that many nations
have seen,"(!)* added that "it would absorb the seventy planets that
preside over the destinies of various nations on this globe."** "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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whether many
nations have seen that identical star, or not, we all know that the sepulchres
of "the three Magi," who rejoice in the quite Teutonic names of
Kaspar and Melchior, Balthazar being the only exception, and the two having
little of the Chaldean ring in them -- are shown by the priests in the famous
cathedral of Cologne, where the Magian bodies are not only supposed, but firmly
believed to have been buried.
** This
tradition about the seventy planets that preside over the destinies of nations,
is based on the occult cosmogonical teaching that besides our own septenary
chain of world-planets, there are many more in the solar system.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Puranas 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 Dynasties* 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 Brahma equals 4,320,000,000 years, as also a
"Night" of Brahma, or the duration of Pralaya, after which a new SUN
rises trium-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Every scholar
is aware, of course, that the Chaldeans claimed the same figures (432) or
(432,000) for their divine dynasties as the Hindus do for their Mahayuga,
namely, 4,320,000. Therefore has Dr. Sepp, of Munich, undertaken to support
Kepler and Wilford in their charge that the Hindus had borrowed them from the
Christians, and the Chaldeans from the Jews, who, as claimed, expected their
Messiah in the lunar year of the world 4,320!!! As these figures, according to
ancient writers, were based by Berosus on the 120 Saroses -- each of the
divisions meaning six neroses of 600 years each, making a sum total of 432,000
years -- they do not thus appear peremptory. But the pious professor of Munich
undertook to explain them in the correct way. He claims to have solved the
riddle by showing that "the saros being composed according to Pliny of 222
synodial months, to wit, 18 years 6/10," the calculator naturally fell
back into the figures "given by Suidas," who affirmed that the 120
saroses made 2,222 sacerdotal and cyclic years, which equalled 1,656 solar
years." (Vie de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ, Vol. II., p. 417.)
Suidas said
nothing of the kind, and, if he had, he would prove little, if anything, by it.
The neroses and saroses were the same thorn in the side of uninitiated ancient
writers, as the apocalyptic 666 of the "great Beast" is in that of
the modern, and they have found their unlucky Newtons as the latter figures
have.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
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
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The reader has
to bear in mind that the phrase "climacteric year" has more than the
usual significance, when used by Occultists and Mystics. It is not only a
critical period, during which some great change is periodically expected,
whether in human or cosmic constitution, but it likewise pertains to spiritual
universal changes. The Europeans called every 63rd year "the grand
climacteric," and perhaps justly supposed those years to be the years
produced by multiplying 7 into the odd numbers 3, 5, 7 and 9. But seven is the
real scale of nature, in Occultism, and 7 has to be multiplied in quite a
different way and method, unknown as yet to European nations.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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'Academie 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. M. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For a detailed
scientific proof of this conclusion, see page 121 of Mr. Bailly's work, where
the subject is discussed technically.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
to-day 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 1492; 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 Libra.
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 [[degrees]] and Saturn 17 [[degrees]]
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 M. C. 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 Libra. 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 "Poussiniere" they name it: Pillaloo-codi -- the
"Hen and chickens." This name has therefore, passed from people to
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 [[ ]] 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;* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Why it should
be "fictitious" can never be made plain by European scientists.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 667 THE ARYAN HINDUS VINDICATED.
in 1687, when
they were brought from India by M. de la Loubere. 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.* 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' "Surya-Siddhanta," 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The following
is an answer to those men of science who might suspect that our Astronomy was
carried to India and communicated to the Hindus by our Missionaries. 1st. Hindu
astronomy has its own peculiar forms, characterized by their originality; if it
had been our astronomy translated, great skill and knowledge would have been
needed to disguise the theft. 2nd. When adopting the mean movement of the moon,
they would have adopted also the inclination of the ecliptic, the equation of
the sun's centre, the length of the year; these elements differ completely from
ours, and are remarkably accurate as applying to the epoch of 3102; while they
would be exceedingly erroneous if they had been calculated for last century.
3rd, finally, our missionaries could not have communicated to the Hindus in
1687 the tables of Cassini, which were not then in existence; they could have
known only the mean motions of Tycho, Riccioli, Copernicus, Bouilland, Kepler,
Longomontanus, and those of the tables of Alphonso. I will now give a tabular
view of these mean motions for 4383 years and 94 days:--
Table.
------------- Mean Motion. --- Difference from Hindu.
Alphonso
............9d 7h 2m 47s ... - 0h 42m 14s
Copernicus
......... 9d 6h 2m 13s ... - 1h 42m 48s
Tycho
.............. 9d 7h 54m 40s .. + 0h 9m 39s
Kepler
............. 9d 6h 57m 35s .. - 0h 47m 26s
Longomontanus
...... 9d 7h 2m 13s ... - 0h 42m 48s
Bouilland
.......... 9d 6h 48m 8s ... - 0h 58m 53s
Riccioli
........... 9d 7h 53m 57s .. + 0h 8m 56s
Cassini
............ 9d 7h 44m 11s .. - 0h 0m 50s
Indian
............. 9d 7h 45m 1s
None of these
mean motions, except Cassini's, agrees with that of the Hindus, who therefore,
did not borrow their mean motions, since their figures agree only with those of
Cassini, whose tables were not in existence in 1687. This mean motion of the
moon belongs, therefore, to the Hindus, who could only have obtained it by
observation." -- Bailly's "Traite de l'Astronomie Indienne et
Orientale."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.
-------
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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 influences, 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 by Mr. Huxley.)
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.)
Pray explain,
for this is rather hazy.
"IN
MECHANICS THERE IS ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL ENERGY: WORK
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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." . . . .
(Ganot's Physics.)
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,"
(Dubois Reymond,) and on effects, 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 ARCHAEUS"?
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?"*
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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Le
Mystere et la Science," Conferences, Pere Felix de Notre Dame; des
Mousseaux: "Hauts Phen. Magiques."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 Swabhavat --
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,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Behold the
work of Cycles and their periodical return! Those who denied such
"Entities" (Forces) to be bodies, and called them "Spaces,"
were the prototypes of our modern "Science-struck" public, and their
official teachers, who speak of the Forces of nature as the imponderable energy
of matter and modes of motion, and yet bold electricity (for one) as being as
atomic as matter itself -- (Helmholtz). Inconsistency and contradiction reign
as much in official as in heterodox Science.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Hermes
here includes as gods the sensible Forces of nature, the elements and the
phenomena of the Universe," remarks Mrs. A. Kingsford in a foot-note
explaining it very correctly. So does Eastern philosophy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 [[degrees]] 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 nebulae.
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,* 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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Oh Toum,
Toum! issued from the great (female) which is in the bosom of the waters"
(the great Deep or Space) . . . "Thou, luminous through the two
Lions" (the dual Force or power of the two solar eyes, or the
electro-positive and the electro-negative forces. (See Book of the Dead, III.,
and Egyptian Pantheon, chapter ii.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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.* . .
. . I glide on the soil of the field of Aanroo,** 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 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* An image
expressing the succession of divine functions, the substitution from one form
into another, or the correlation of forces. Aam is the electro-positive force,
devouring all others as Saturn devoured his progeny.
** Aanroo is in
the domain of Osiris, a field divided into fourteen sections "surrounded
with an iron enclosure, within which grows the corn of life seven cubits
high," the Kama-loka of the Egyptians. Those only of the dead, who know
the names of the janitors of the "seven halls," will be admitted into
Amenti for ever; i.e., those who have passed through the seven races of each
round -- otherwise they will rest in the lower fields; "and it represents
also the seven successive Devachans, or lokas. In Amenti, one becomes pure
spirit for the eternity (xxx. 4.); while in Aanroo "the soul of the
spirit," or the defunct, is devoured each time by Uraeus -- the Serpent,
Son of the earth (in another sense the primordial vital principles in the Sun),
i.e., the Astral body of the deceased or the "Elementary" fades out
and disappears in the "Son of the earth," limited time. The soul
quits the fields of Aanroo and goes on earth under any shape it likes to
assume. (See chapter xcix., Book of the Dead.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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 M. 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" (Maspero, in the Guide au Musee de Boulak.) 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
1, Page]] 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."*
While
Materialists deny everything in the universe, save matter, Archaeologists 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 Archaeologists -- 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."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------
* Revue des Deux
Mondes, 1865, pp. 157 and 158.
END OF VOL. I.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
THE SECRET
DOCTRINE
BY H. P.
BLAVATSKY
VOLUME 2
THEOSOPHCAL
UNIVERSITY PRESS ASCII EDITION
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page i]]
THE SECRET
DOCTRINE.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page ii]]
[[blank]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page iii]]
THE SECRET
DOCTRINE:
THE SYNTHESIS
OF
SCIENCE,
RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY.
BY
H. P. BLAVATSKY
AUTHOR OF
"ISIS UNVEILED."
"There is
no Religion higher than Truth."
VOL. II. --
ANTHROPOGENESIS.
London:
THE THEOSOPHICAL
PUBLISHING COMPANY, LIMITED.
7 Duke Street,
Adelphi, W. C.
WILLIAM Q.
JUDGE,
117 Nassau
Street, New York.
THE MANAGER OF
THE THEOSOPHIST,
Adyar, Madras
---
1888.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page iv]]
"Entered
according to Act of Congress in the year 1888, by H. P. Blavatsky,
in the Office of
the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page v]]
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page vi]]
[[blank]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page vii]]
TABLE OF
CONTENTS.
-------
VOLUME SECOND.
PRELIMINARY
NOTES. PAGE.
On the Archaic
Stanzas, and the Four Prehistoric Continents ... 1
The Imperishable
Sacred Land ... 6
The Hyperborean
... 7
Lemuria ... 7
Atlantis ... 8
The Tropics at
the Pole ... 11
-------
BOOK II. -- PART
I.
ANTHROPOGENESIS.
STANZAS FROM THE
BOOK OF DZYAN... 15
-------
STANZA I. --
BEGINNINGS OF SENTIENT LIFE ... 22
Man, the Third
Logos ... 25
The Celestial
Governors of Humanity ... 29
Parent Stars and
Sister Planets ... 33
Three Kinds of
Light ... 35
The Numbers of
Creation ... 39
The First War in
Heaven ... 45
-------
TWO ANTEDILUVIAN
ASTRONOMERS ... 47
-------
STANZA II. --
NATURE UNAIDED FAILS ... 52
The Monsters of
Chaos ... 53
The "Double
Dragon" ... 57
Who are the
Flames? ... 63
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] viii CONTENTS.
PAGE.
THE CHRONOLOGY
OF THE BRAHMINS ... 66
The Race that
never dies ... 67
Cosmogony, an
intelligent plan ... 73
-------
STANZA III. --
ATTEMPTS TO CREATE MAN ... 75
The various
classes of Creators ... 77
Man, a god in
animal form ... 81
"Fires,"
"Sparks," and "Flames" ... 83
-------
STANZA IV. --
CREATION OF THE FIRST RACES ... 86
Pitris of the
Gods and Demons ... 89
What Prometheus
symbolized ... 95
The Hammer of
Thor ... 99
The Divine
Rebels ... 103
Man's Father,
the Sun ... 105
-------
STANZA V. -- THE
EVOLUTION OF THE SECOND RACE ... 109
The Secret Work
of Chiram ... 113
The outgrowth of
Races ... 117
Leda, Castor, and
Pollux ... 121
Jah-Hovah
Androgynous ... 125
The Jewish
God-name ... 127
-------
STANZA VI.-THE
EVOLUTION OF THE SWEAT-BORN ... 131
Bi-sexual
reproduction ... 133
The Virgin Third
Race ... 135
A Few Words
about Deluges and Noah's ... 138
Various Deluges
... 141
The Arkite
Symbols ... 143
Could Men Exist
18,000,000 Years ago? ... 148
Spontaneous
Generation ... 151
The Solar System
in the Puranas ... 155
Oceans of
Carbonic Acid? ... 159
-------
STANZA VII. --
FROM THE SEMI-DIVINE DOWN TO THE FIRST HUMAN RACES ... 161
Monads and
Rounds ... 167
A Suggestive
Explanation ... 171
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] ix CONTENTS.
PAGE.
A Saint --
Hypnotised ... 175
Sweat-born and
Androgynes ... 177
-------
STANZA VIII. --
EVOLUTION OF THE ANIMAL MAMMALIANS -- THE FIRST FALL ... 180
Archaic Zoology
... 182
The Sin of the
Mindless Men ... 183
-------
WHAT MAY BE THE
OBJECTIONS TO THE FOREGOING ... 185
-------
STANZA IX. --
THE FINAL EVOLUTION OF MAN ... 191
The Hairy Men of
China ... 195
The Separation
of Sexes ... 197
Primeval
Language ... 199
-------
EDENS, SERPENTS
AND DRAGONS ... 202
The Garden of
Eden a College ... 203
Flying Camels
... 205
Two Schools of
Magic ... 211
The Flying
Dragons ... 219
-------
THE SONS OF GOD
AND THE SACRED ISLAND0 ... 220
The Magicians of
Atlantis ... 223
-------
STANZA X. -- THE
HISTORY OF THE FOURTH RACE ... 227
The Mysteries
among the Mayas ... 229
Satanic Myths
... 233
Mahasura and
Satan ... 237
Man, the pale
shadow of God ... 243
The curse of
Vasishta ... 247
-------
ARCHAIC
TEACHINGS IN THE PURANAS AND GENESIS ... 251
From worm to man
... 255
Identity of Human
and Animal embryos ... 259
-------
A PANORAMIC VIEW
OF THE EARLY RACES ... 263
The Natural
"Fall" ... 267
The Symbolism of
Kronos ... 269
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] x CONTENTS.
PAGE.
STANZA X. --
Continued ... 271
The Golden Age
... 273
The Devil's
outside Humanity ... 275
-------
ARE GIANTS A
FICTION? ... 277
The Seven Virgin
Youths ... 281
The Tibetan
Lilith ... 285
The Races of Men
not all Human ... 287
-------
THE RACES WITH
THE "THIRD EYE" ... 289
Occult
Physiology ... 295
The Evolution of
the Eve ... 299
The Third Eye is
now a Gland ... 301
-------
THE PRIMEVAL
MANUS OF HUMANITY ... 307
The Four Earlier
Races ... 311
The Esoteric
Meaning of "Fish" ... 313
-------
STANZA XI. --
THE CIVILIZATION AND DESTRUCTION OF THE FOURTH AND FIFTH RACES ... 316
Degeneration of
Mankind ... 319
Atlantis now
Ocean Floor ... 325
Changes of
Climate ... 329
How to Read
Symbols ... 335
The Antediluvian
Buddhas ... 339
-------
CYCLOPEAN RUINS AND COLOSSAL STONES AS
WITNESSES TO GIANTS 341
Living,
Speaking, and Moving Stones ... 345
It takes a God
to become a Man ... 349
-------
STANZA XII. --
THE FIFTH RACE AND ITS DIVINE INSTRUCTORS 351
The Astronomical
Dragon ... 353
Serpents and
Dragons under different Symbolisms ... 355
The Sidereal and
Cosmic Glyphs ... 357
Our Divine
Instructors ... 365
The Origin of
the Satanic Myth ... 378
Noah was a Kabir,
hence he must have been a Demon ... 390
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] xi CONTENTS.
PAGE.
The oldest
Persian Traditions about the Polar, and the Submerged Continents ... 393
Western
Speculations founded on the Greek and Puranic Traditions ... 401 [[sic]]
The
"Curse" from a Philosophical point of view ... 409
-------
ADDITIONAL
FRAGMENTS FROM A COMMENTARY ON THE VERSES OF STANZA XII. ... 423
The Oldest
Records about Atlantis ... 425
The Doom of
Atlantis ... 427
The Races,
Sub-Races, and Family Races ... 434
CONCLUSION ...
437
-------
BOOK II. -- PART
II.
THE ARCHAIC
SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-RELIGIONS.
ESOTERIC TENETS
CORROBORATED IN EVERY SCRIPTURE ... 449
-------
§ XVI.
ADAM-ADAMI ... 452
The Cabalistic
Four Adams ... 457
-------
XVII. THE
"HOLY OF HOLIES": ITS DEGRADATION ... 459
Christian
Symbolism ... 463
The
"Four-faced" Brahm ... 465
The Old and the New
Jehovah ... 469
-------
XVIII. ON THE
MYTH OF THE "FALLEN ANGEL," IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS ... 475
The Evil Spirit:
Who and What? ... 475
The Gods of
Light proceed from the Gods of Darkness 483
The many
meanings of the "War in Heaven" ... 492
-------
XIX. IS PLEROMA
SATAN'S LAIR? ... 506
Jehovah's
Personating Spirit ... 509
The Mysterium
Magnum ... 512
The Logos and
Satan are One ... 515
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] xii CONTENTS.
PAGE.
XX. PROMETHEUS
THE TITAN ... 519
His Origin in
Ancient India ... 519
The Boon he
Gives ... 523
-------
XXI.
ENOICHION-HENOCH ... 529
-------
XXII. THE
SYMBOLTSM OF THE MYSTERY NAMES IAO, AND JEHOVAH 536
Cross and Circle
... 545
The Fall of the
Cross into Matter ... 553
-------
XXIII. THE
UPANISHADS IN GNOSTIC LITERATURE ... 563
When Time be no
longer ... 565
The Divine
Self's Wisdom ... 566
-------
XXIV. THE CROSS
AND THE PYTHAGOREAN DECADE ... 573
Poseidon's Five
Ministers ... 577
The Mystery of
the Number Six ... 583
The Cross and
Christian After-thought ... 587
-------
XXV. THE
MYSTERIES OP THE HEBDOMAD ... 590
Saptaparna ...
590
The Tetraktis in
relation to the Heptagon ... 598
The Septenary
Element in the Vedas ... 605
The Septenary in
the Exoteric Works ... 611
Seven in
Astronomy, Science and Magic ... 618
The Seven Souls
of the Egyptologists ... 630
---------------------
BOOK II. -- PART
III.
ADDENDA.
SCIENCE AND THE
SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
§§
I. ARCHAIC, OR
MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY? ... 645
The Occult and
the Modern Doctrines ... 649
Science is
Silent on every Problem ... 653
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] xiii CONTENTS.
PAGE.
II. THE
ANCESTORS MANKIND IS OFFERED BY SCIENCE ... 656
Various Modes of
Reproduction ... 659
A Pithecoid Man
Wanted ... 669
Plastidular
Souls and Conscious Nerve-Cells ... 670
The atoms of our
"Father-Bathybius" ... 674
-------
III. THE FOSSIL
RELICS OF MAN AND THE ANTHROPOID APE ... 675
Insurmountable
difficulties for the Darwinians ... 677
The Argument of
"Rudimentary Organs" ... 683
"Epitomized
History" in the Foetus ... 684
The Evidence of
Skulls ... 687
-------
IV. DURATION OF
THE GEOLOGICAL PERIODS, RACE CYCLES, AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN ... 690
Sayce's Sketch
of Chronology ... 691
(a) Speculations
on the Age of the Globe ... 694
The
Adept-Astronomer ... 698
(b) On Chains of
Planets and their Plurality ... 699
States of
Consciousness ... 701
Worlds mentioned
in the Bible ... 703
(c) Esoteric
Geological Chronology ... 709
Parallelism of
Life ... 711
The Two Sciences
contrasted ... 713
The Paleolithic
Landseer ... 721
Astral Man --
the Solution ... 728
The Kabalists
and Science ... 730
-------
V. ORGANIC
EVOLUTION AND CREATIVE CENTRES ... 731
Dhyan Chohans
and these Centres ... 732
(a) Origin and
Evolution of the Mammalia ... 734
(b) The European
Paleolithic Races -- whence and how distributed ... 738
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] xiv CONTENTS.
PAGE.
VI. GIANTS,
CIVILIZATIONS, AND SUBMERGED CONTINENTS TRACED IN HISTORY ... 742
A Mysterious
Nation ... 743
The Seven
Sabbaths ... 747
"Revelation"
and the "Secret Doctrine" ... 748
Druidic Stones
... 752
Races of Giants
... 755
Mazdean
"Seven Earths" ... 759
(a) Statements
about the Sacred Islands ... 760
The Heirloom of
Atlantis ... 763
The God-bearing
Land ... 765
The Power of
Names ... 767
The Sons of
Coelus and Terra ... 769
Southern and
Northern Atlantis ... 770
Niobe and her
Children ... 771
The Cycles of
Time ... 773
The Titans in
Prison ... 776
-------
VII. SCIENTIFIC
AND GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF SEVERAL SUBMERGED CONTINENTS ... 778
Corroborations
of Occultism by Geology ... 779
Evidence of the
Flora ... 781
Atlantis
necessary to Ethnology ... 783
Astraea falls on
her Head ... 785
Communication
between South-Sea Islands ... 788
Evidence of
Language ... 790
[[And now to
conclude. ... 794]]
Ragon explains
Masonic Symbols ... 795
The End a fitting
prelude to Truth ... 798
-------
INDEX. [[Not
included in ASCII version.]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page xv]]
[[Eh eme didache
ouk estin eme, alla tou pemphantos me.]]
"My
doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me."
-- John vii. 16.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 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 preexisted 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
Voluspa, 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 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.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Genesis
ch. ii., v. 19. Adam is formed in verse 7, and in verse 19 it is said:
"Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every
fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call
them." Thus man was created before the animals; for the animals mentioned
in chapter i. are the signs of the Zodiac, while the man, "male and
female," is not man, but the Host of the Sephiroth; FORCES, or Angels,
"made in his (God's) image and after his likeness." The Adam, man, is
not made in that likeness, nor is it so asserted in the Bible. Moreover, the
Second Adam [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 men* 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. (Zohar,
Siphrah Dzeniouta, Idrah Suta, 2928, La Kabbale, p. 205.) "Seven Kings,
brethren, appeared and begat children, 6,000 in number were their peoples"
(Hibbert Lectures, p. 372). The god Nergas (death) destroyed them. "How
did he destroy them?" "By bringing into equilibrium (or balance)
those who did not yet exist" (Siphrah Dzeniouta). 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] is esoterically a septenary which represents
seven men, or rather groups of men. For the first Adam -- the Kadmon -- is the
synthesis of the ten Sephiroth. Of these, the upper triad remains in the
Archetypal World as the future "Trinity," while the seven lower
Sephiroth create the manifested material world; and this septenate is the
second Adam. Genesis, and the mysteries upon which it was fabricated, came from
Egypt. The "God" of the 1st chapter of Genesis is the Logos, and the
"Lord God" of the 2nd chapter the Creative Elohim -- the lower
powers.
* Thus saith
Pymander -- "This is the mystery that to this day was hidden. Nature being
mingled with the Heavenly man (Elohim, or Dhyanis), brought forth a wonder . .
. . Seven men, all males and females (Hermaphrodite) . . . according to the
nature of the seven Governors" -- Book II. v. 29) -- or the seven Hosts of
the Pitris or Elohim, who projected or created him. This is very clear, but
yet, see the interpretations of even our modern theologians, men supposed to be
intellectual and learned! In the "Theological and philosophical works of
Hermes Trismegistus, Christian (?) Neoplatonist," a work compiled by John
David Chambers, of Oriel College, Oxford, the translator wonders "for whom
these seven men are intended?" He solves the difficulty by concluding
that, as "the original pattern man (Adam Kadmon of ch. i. Genesis) was masculine-feminine,
the seven may signify the succeeding patriarchs named in Genesis" (p. 9) .
. . A truly theological way of cutting the Gordian knot.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Bible* 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
Puranas 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 "Philosophumena," 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As it is now
asserted that the Chaldean tablets, which give the allegorical description of
Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, even to the legend of the Tower of Babel,
were written "before the time of Moses" (See G. Smith's
"Chaldean Account of Genesis," p. 86), how can the Pentateuch be
called a revelation? It is simply another version of the same story.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* 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" 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 Puranic 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide §
"Adam-Adami," in Part II. of this volume.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 5 THE SECRETS OF KOUYUNJIK.
suddenly by the
waters of the Euxine, regarded up to that time as a lake.* 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
Kouyunjik 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Pliny, 4,
c. 12; Strabo, 10; Herodotus, 7, c. 108; Pausanias, 7, c. 4, etc.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Airyanem Vaego (see Bund. 79, 12)
wherein was born the original Zoroaster,* is called in the Puranic 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."**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* By
"original" we mean the "Amshaspend," called "Zarathustra,
the lord and ruler of the Vara made by Yima in that land." There were
several Zarathustra or Zertusts, the Dabistan alone enumerating thirteen; but
these were all the reincarnations of the first one. The last Zoroaster was the
founder of the Fire temple of Azareksh and the writer of the works on the
primeval sacred Magian religion destroyed by Alexander.
** In India
called "The Day of Brahma."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
[[Eggus gar nuktos te kai ematos eisi keleuthoi]], 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.* It was a real Continent, a bona-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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Volcker,
"Mythological Geography," pp. 145 to 170.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 8 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Secondary
period," writes Mr. C. Gould in "Mythical Monsters," p. 47. The
subject is treated at length elsewhere.*
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,**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is to be remarked,
however, that Mr. Wallace does not accept Mr. Sclater's idea, and even opposes
it. Mr. Sclater supposes a land or continent formerly uniting Africa,
Madagascar, and India (but not Australia and India); and Mr. A. R. Wallace
shows, in his "Geographical Distribution of Animals" and "Island
Life," that the hypothesis of such a land is quite uncalled for on the
alleged zoological grounds. But he admits that a much closer proximity of India
and Australia did certainly exist, and at a time so very remote that it was
"certainly pre-tertiary," and he adds in a private letter that
"no name has been given to this supposed land." Yet the land did
exist, and was of course pre-tertiary, for "Lemuria" (accepting this
name for the third Continent) had perished before Atlantis had fully developed;
and the latter sunk and its chief portions had disappeared before the end of
the Miocene period.
** One more
"coincidence" --
"Now it is
proved that in geologically recent times, this region of North Africa was in
fact a peninsula of Spain, and that its union with Africa (proper) was effected
on the North by the rupture of Gibraltar, and on the South by an upheaval to
which the Sahara owes its existence. The shores of this former sea of Sahara
are still marked by the shells [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Zohar (iii., fol. 10a): "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 comitatis 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;* or whether again Mr. Croll "allows fifteen millions since
the beginning of the Eocene period," as quoted by an English geologist,**
both sets of figures cover the claims
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] of
the same Gastropoda that live on the shores of the Mediterranean." (Prof.
Oscar Schmidt, "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," p. 244.)
* A. Winchell,
Professor of Geology, "World-Life," p. 369.
** Mr. Charles
Gould, late Geological surveyor of Tasmania, in "Mythical Monsters,"
p. 84.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 10 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
made by the
Secret Doctrine.* 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Sir Charles
Lyell, who is credited with having "happily invented the terms Eocene,
Miocene, and Pliocene," to mark the three divisions of the Tertiary age,
ought really to have settled upon some approximate age for his
"Mind-offspring." Having left the duration of these periods, however,
to the speculations of specialists, the greatest confusion and perplexity are
the result of that happy thought. It seems like a hopeless task to quote one
set of figures from one work, without the risk of finding it contradicted by
the same Author in an earlier or a subsequent volume. Sir W. Thomson, one of
the most eminent among the modern authorities, has changed, about half-a-dozen
times, his opinion upon the age of the Sun and the date of the consolidation of
the Earth's crust. In Thomson and Tait's "Natural Philosophy," one
finds only ten million years allowed, since the time when the temperature of
the Earth permitted vegetable life to appear on it; (App. D et seq. also Trans.
Roy. Soc. Edin. xxiii, Pt. 1, 157, 1862, where 847 is cancelled). Mr. Darwin
gives Sir W. Thomson's estimate as "a minimum of 98 and a maximum of 200
millions of years since the consolidation of the crust" (See Ch. Gould).
In the same work (Nat. Phil.) 80 millions are given from the time of incipient
incrustation to the present state of the world. And in his last lecture, as
shown elsewhere, Sir W. Thomson declares (1887) that the Sun is not older than
15 millions of years! Meanwhile, basing his arguments as to the limits to the
age of the Sun's heat, on figures previously established by Sir W. Thomson, Mr.
Croll allows 60 millions of years since the beginning of the Cambrian period.
This is hopeful for the lovers of exact knowledge. Thus, whatever figures are
given by Occult Science, they are sure to be corroborated by those of some one
among the modern men of Science who are considered as authorities.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Royal
Society," London, Vol. XXVIII., 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 degrees) 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas -- 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 13]]
BOOK II. -- PART
I.
ANTHROPOGENESIS.
---------------------
STANZAS
TRANSLATED WITH COMMENTARIES
FROM THE
SECRET BOOK OF
DZYAN.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 14]]
In primeval
times, a maiden,
Beauteous
Daughter of the Ether,
Passed for ages
her existence
In the great
expanse of Heaven,
. . . . . . . .
. . .
Seven hundred
years she wandered,
Seven hundred
years she laboured,
Ere her
first-born was delivered.
. . . . . . . .
. . .
Ere a beauteous
duck descending,
Hastens toward
the water-mother.
. . . . . . . .
. . .
Lightly on the
knee she settles,
Finds a
nesting-place befitting,
Where to lay her
eggs in safety,
Lays her eggs
within, at pleasure,
Six, the golden
eggs she lays them,
Then a Seventh,
an egg of iron . . . . ."
(Kalevala, Rune
I.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 15 STANZAS FROM THE BOOK OF DZYAN.
ANTHROPOGENESIS
IN THE SECRET VOLUME.
(VERBATIM
EXTRACTS.*)
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.
-------
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.
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* Only
forty-nine Slokas out of several hundred are here given. Not every verse is
translated verbatim. A periphrasis is sometimes used for the sake of clearness
and intelligibility, where a literal translation would be quite unintelligible.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 17 THE SLOKAS OF "DZYAN."
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 BHUTA, 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 BHUTA . . . . THUS HAVE THE BONELESS GIVEN LIFE TO THOSE WHO BECAME
MEN WITH BONES IN THE THIRD.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 18 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
EXPANSION, THE
A-SEXUAL FROM THE SEXLESS* -- 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.
-------
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.
-------
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
[[Footnote(s)
-------------------------------------------------]]
* The idea and
the spirit of the sentence is here given, as a verbal translation would convey
very little to the reader.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
MANASA, 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. .
-------
VIII.
28. FROM THE
DROPS OF SWEAT; FROM THE RESIDUE OF THE SUBSTANCE; 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 20 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
IX.
33. SEEING WHICH,
THE LHAS WHO HAD NOT BUILT MEN, WEPT, SAYING:--
34. "THE
AMANASA 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.
-------
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.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
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. . .
. . .
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 22 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA I.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* All the words
and sentences placed in brackets in the Stanzas and Commentaries are the writer's.
In some places they may be incomplete and even inadequate from the Hindu
standpoint; but in the meaning attached to them in Trans-Himalayan Esotericism
they are correct. In every case the writer takes any blame upon herself. Having
never claimed personal infallibility, that which is given on her own authority
may leave much to be desired, in the very abstruse cases where too deep
metaphysics is involved. The teaching is offered as it is understood; and as
there are seven keys of interpretation to every symbol and allegory, that which
may not fit a meaning, say from the psychological or astronomical aspect, will
be found quite correct from the physical or metaphysical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas. 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 genesis* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* According to
Dr. A. Wilder's learned definition, Genesis, [[genesis]], is not generation,
but "a coming out of the eternal into the Kosmos and Time": "a
coming from esse into exsistere," or "from BE-NESS into 'being'
" -- as a Theosophist would say.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 25 MAN, THE THIRD LOGOS.
the Cosmic
Ultimates. Force succeeds Mulaprakriti; but, minus Force, Mulaprakriti is for
all practical intents and purposes non-existent.*
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 [[To agathon]], 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: "Unum intra
alterum, et alterum super alterum" (Zohar, Idra Suta, sec. VII).
"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 Demi-urge, 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For a clearer
explanation of the origins, as contained in the esotericism of the Bhagavad
Gita, see the Notes thereon published in the "Theosophist" for
February, March and June, 1887, Madras.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 26 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the right and
the left-hand Magic. In the epic poem of Finland, the Kalewala,* 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**; and they create men
by incarnating themselves in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* J. W. Alden,
New York.
** It has been
repeatedly stated that the Serpent is the symbol of wisdom and of Occult
knowledge. "The Serpent has been connected with the god of wisdom from the
earliest times of which we have any historical notice," writes Staniland
Wake. "This animal was the especial symbol of Thot or Taut . . . and of
all those gods, such as Hermes (?) and Seth who can be connected with him. This
is also the primitive Chaldean triad Hea or Hoa." According to Sir Henry
Rawlinson, the most important titles of this deity refer to "his functions
as the source of all knowledge and science." Not only is he "the
intelligent fish," but his name may be read as signifying both
"life" and a serpent (an initiated adept), and he may be considered
as "figured by the great serpent which occupies so conspicuous a place
among the symbols of the gods on the black stones recording Babylonian
benefactions." Esculapius, Serapis, Pluto, Knoum and Kneph, are all
deities with the attributes of the serpent. Says Dupuis, "They are all
healers, givers of health, spiritual and physical, and of enlightenment."
The crown formed of an asp, the Thermuthis, belongs to Isis, goddess of Life
and Healing. The Upanishads have a treatise on the Science of Serpents -- in
other words, the Science of Occult knowledge; and the Nagas of the exoteric
Buddhist are not "the fabulous creatures of the nature of serpents . . .
beings superior to men and the protectors of the [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 AESERS 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.*
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 astronomical fact,
"that Mercury receives seven times more
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] law of Buddha," as Schlagintweit believes,
but real living men, some superior to men by virtue of their Occult knowledge,
and the protectors of Buddha's law, inasmuch as they interpret his metaphysical
tenets correctly, others inferior morally as being black magicians. Therefore
it is truly declared that Gautama Buddha "is said to have taught them a
more philosophical religious system than to men, who were not sufficiently
advanced to understand it at the time of his appearance." (Schlagintweit's
"Tibetan Buddhism.")
* The Mandragora
is the mandrake of the Bible, of Rachel and Leah. They are the roots of a
plant, fleshy, hairy, and forked below, representing roughly the limbs of a
man, the body and even a head. Its magical and mysterious properties have been
proclaimed in fable and play from the most archaic ages. From Rachel and Leah,
who indulged in witchcraft with them, down to Shakespeare, who speaks of
shrieking --
. . . .
"Like mandrakes torn out of the earth
That living
mortals, hearing them, run mad"
-- the
mandragora was the magic plant par excellence.
These roots,
without any stalk, and with large leaves growing out of the head of the root, like
a gigantic crop of hair, present little similitude to man when found in Spain,
Italy, Asia Minor, or Syria. But on the Isle of Candia, and in Karamania near
the city of Adan, they have a wonderfully human form; being very highly prized
as amulets. They are also worn by women as a charm against sterility, and for
other purposes. They are especially effective in Black Magic.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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 [[chrusophaes Hermes]] 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 Agathodaemon. 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Copernicus
wrote his theories on the "Revolution of the Heavenly Bodies" in the
XVIth century, and the Zohar, even if compiled by Moses de Leon in the XIIIth
century, states that: "In the book of Hammannunah, the Old, we learn . . .
that the earth turns upon itself in the form of a circle; that some are on top,
the others below, . . . . that there are some countries 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." (Zohar iii., fol. 10a
"Qabbalah," p. 139.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 seven* Firstborn (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,
Saturn** 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
[[diagram]])."***
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 [[diagram]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Science
teaches that Venus receives from the sun twice as much light and heat as the
earth. Thus the planet, precursor of the dawn and the twilight, the most
radiant of all the planets, said to give the earth one-third of the supply she
receives, has two parts left for herself. This has an occult as well as an
astronomical meaning.
** "As it
is above so it is below" is the fundamental axiom of occult philosophy. As
the logos is seven-fold, i.e., throughout Kosmos it appears as seven logoi
under seven different forms, or, as taught by learned Brahmins, "each of
these is the central figure of one of the seven main branches of the ancient
wisdom religion;" and, as the seven principles which correspond to the
seven distinct states of Pragna, or consciousness, are allied to seven states
of matter and the seven forms of force, the division must be the same in all
that concerns the earth.
*** Venus is
thus [[diagram]] the Earth [[diagram]].
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
deity* -- is the son of Bhrigu, one of the Prajapati and a Vedic sage, and is
Daitya-Guru, or the priest-instructor of the primeval giants. The whole history
of "Sukra" in the Puranas, refers to the Third and to the Fourth
Races.
"It is
through Sukra that the 'double ones' (the Hermaphrodites) of the Third
(Root-Race) descended from the first 'Sweat-born,'" says the Commentary.
Therefore it is represented under the symbol of [[diagram]] (the circle and
diameter) during the Third (Race) and of [[diagram]] 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 [[diagram]]; after
which it becomes [[diagram]] or male-female separated** (See first pp. of Book
I) and fallen into generation. Venus (the planet) is symbolised by the sign of
a globe over the cross, which shows it as presiding over the natural generation
of man. The Egyptians symbolised Ank, "life," by the ansated cross,
or [[diagram]], which is only another form of Venus (Isis) [[diagram]], and
meant, esoterically, that mankind and all animal life bad stepped out of the
divine spiritual circle and fallen into physical male and female generation.
This sign, from the end of the Third Race, has the same phallic significance as
the "tree
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
esoteric philosophy it is male and female, or hermaphrodite; hence the bearded
Venus in mythology.
** Therefore,
putting aside its religio-metaphysical aspect, the Cross of the Christians is
symbolically far more phallic than the pagan Svastica.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 31 THE HORSES OF SUKRA'S CAR.
of life" in
Eden Anouki, a form of Isis, is the goddess of life; and Ank was taken by the
Hebrews from the Egyptians and introduced by Moses, one learned in the Wisdom
of the priests of Egypt, with many other mystical words. The word Ank in
Hebrew, with the personal suffix, means "my life," my being, which
"is the personal pronoun Anochi," from the name of the Egyptian
goddess Anouki.*
In one of the
most ancient Catechisms of Southern India, Madras Presidency, the hermaphrodite
goddess Adanari (see also "Indian Pantheon") has the ansated cross,
the Svastica, the "male and female sign," right in the central part,
to denote the pre-sexual state of the Third Race. Vishnu, who is now
represented with a lotus growing out of his navel -- or the Universe of Brahma
evolving out of the central point Nara -- is shown in one of the oldest
carvings as double-sexed (Vishnu and Lakshmi) standing on a lotus-leaf floating
on the water; which water rises in a semicircle and pours through the Svastica,
"the source of generation" or of the descent of man.
Pythagoras calls
Sukra-Venus the Sol alter, "the other Sun." Of the "seven
palaces of the Sun," that of Lucifer Venus is the third one in Christian
and Jewish Kabala, the Zohar making of it the abode of Samael. According to the
Occult Doctrine, this planet is our Earth's primary, and its spiritual
prototype. Hence, Sukra's car (Venus-Lucifer's) is said to be drawn by an
ogdoad of "earth-born horses," while the steeds of the chariots of the
other planets are different.
"Every sin
committed on Earth is felt by Usanas-Sukra. The Guru of the Daityas is the
Guardian Spirit of the Earth and Men. Every change on Sukra is felt on, and
reflected by, the Earth."
Sukra, or Venus,
is thus represented as the preceptor of the Daityas, the giants of the Fourth
Race, who, in the Hindu allegory, obtained at one time the sovereignty of all
the Earth, and defeated the minor gods. The Titans of the Western allegory are
as closely connected with Venus-Lucifer, identified by later Christians with
Satan. Therefore, as Venus, equally with Isis, was represented with Cow's horns
on her head, the symbol of mystic Nature, and one that is convertible with, and
significant of, the moon, since all these were lunar goddesses, the
configuration of this planet is now placed by theologians between the horns of
the mystic Lucifer.** It is owing to the fanciful interpretation of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The ansated
Cross is the astronomical planetary sign of Venus, "signifying the
existence of parturient energy in the sexual sense, and this was one of the
attributes of Isis, the Mother, of Eve, Hauvah, or Mother-Earth, and was so
recognised among all the ancient peoples in one or another mode of
expression." (From a modern Kabalistic MS.)
** Athenaeus
shows that the first letter of Satan's name was represented in days of old by
an arc and crescent; and some Roman Catholics, good and kind men, would
persuade the public that it is in honour of Lucifer's crescent-like horns that
Mussulmen [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 years B.C. (See "City of God" lxxi., ch. viii.).
As Venus has no
satellites, it is stated allegorically, that "Asphujit" (this
"planet") adopted the Earth, the progeny of the Moon, "who overgrew
its parent and gave much trouble," a reference to the occult connection
between the two. The Regent (of the planet) Sukra* loved his adopted child so
well that he incarnated as Usanas and gave it perfect laws, which were
disregarded and rejected in later ages. Another allegory, in Harivansa, is that
Sukra went to Siva asking him to protect his pupils, the Daityas and Asuras,
from the fighting gods; and that to further his object he performed a Yoga rite
"imbibing the smoke of chaff with his head downwards for 1,000
years." This refers to the great inclination of the axis of Venus
(amounting to 50 degrees), and to its being enveloped in eternal clouds. But it
relates only to the physical constitution of the planet. It is with its Regent,
the informing Dhyan Chohan,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] have chosen the Crescent for their national
arms. Venus has always been identified, since the establishment of Roman
Catholic dogmatism, with Satan and Lucifer, or the great Dragon, contrary to
all reason and logic. As shown by the symbologists and astronomers, the
association between the serpent and the idea of darkness had an astronomical
foundation. The position which the constellation of Draco at one time occupied
showed that the great serpent was the ruler of the night. This constellation
was formerly at the very centre of the heavens, and is so extensive that it was
called the Great Dragon. Its body spreads over seven signs of the Zodiac; and
Dupuis, "who," says Staniland Wake, "sees in the Dragon of the
Apocalypse a reference to the celestial serpent," remarks that "it is
not astonishing that a constellation so extended should be represented by the
author of that book as a Great Dragon with seven heads, who drew the third part
of the stars from heaven and cast them to Earth"; (Dupuis, tome III., p.
255). Only Dupuis never knew why Draco, once the pole-star -- the symbol of
"Guide," Guru and director -- had been thus degraded by posterity.
"The gods of our fathers are our devils," says an Asiatic proverb.
When Draco ceased to be the lode-star, the guiding sidereal divinity, it shared
the fate of all the fallen gods. Seth and Typhon was at one time, Bunsen tells
us, "a great god universally adored throughout Egypt, who conferred on the
sovereigns of the 18th and 19th Dynasties the symbols of life and power. But
subsequently, in the course of the 20th Dynasty, he is suddenly treated as an
evil Demon, insomuch that his effigies and name are obliterated on all the
monuments and inscriptions that could be reached." The real occult reason
will be given in these pages.
* Sukra is the
son of Bhrigu the great Rishi, and one of the Seven Prajapati, the founder of
the Race of Bhargavas, in which Parasu Rama is born.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 33 PARENT STARS AND SISTER PLANETS.
that Occult mysticism
has to deal. The allegory which states that for killing Sukra's mother, Vishnu
was cursed by him to be reborn seven times on the Earth, is full of occult
philosophical meaning. It does not refer to Vishnu's Avatars, since these
number nine, the tenth being still to come, but to the Races on Earth. Venus,
or Lucifer (also Sukra and Usanas) the planet, is the light-bearer of our
Earth, in both its physical and mystic sense. The Christians knew it well in
early times, since one of the earliest popes of Rome is known by his Pontiff
name as Lucifer.
"Every
world has its parent star and sister planet. Thus Earth is the adopted child
and younger brother of Venus, but its inhabitants are of their own kind. . . .
All sentient complete beings (full septenary men or higher beings) are
furnished, in their beginnings, with forms and organisms in full harmony with
the nature and state of the sphere they inhabit."*
"The
Spheres of Being, or centres of life, which are isolated nuclei breeding their
men and their animals, are numberless; not one has any resemblance to its
sister-companion or to any other in its own special progeny."**
"All have a
double physical and spiritual nature."
"The
nucleoles are eternal and everlasting; the nuclei periodical and finite. The
nucleoles form part of the absolute. They are the embrasures of that black
impenetrable fortress, which is for ever concealed from human or even Dhyanic
sight. The nuclei are the light of eternity escaping therefrom."
"It is that
LIGHT which condenses into the forms of the 'Lords of Being' -- the first and
the highest of which are, collectively, JIVATMA, or Pratyagatma (said
figuratively to issue from Paramatma. It is the Logos of the Greek philosophers
-- appearing at the beginning of every new Manvantara). From these downwards --
formed from the ever-consolidating waves of that light, which becomes on the
objective plane gross matter -- proceed the numerous hierarchies of the
Creative Forces, some formless, others having their
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is a flat
contradiction of Swedenborg, who saw, in "the first Earth of the astral
world," inhabitants dressed as are the peasants in Europe; and on the
Fourth Earth women clad as are the shepherdesses in a bal masque. Even the
famous astronomer Huygens laboured under the mistaken idea that other worlds
and planets have the same identical beings as those who live on our Earth,
possessing the same figures, senses, brain-power, arts, sciences, dwellings and
even to the same fabric for their wearing apparel! (Theorie du Monde). For the
clearer comprehension of the statement that the Earth "is the progeny of
the Moon," see Book I., stanza VI.
** This is a
modern gloss. It is added to the old Commentaries for the clearer comprehension
of those disciples who study esoteric Cosmogony after having passed through
Western learning. The earlier Glosses are too redundant with adjectives and
figures of speech to be easily assimilated.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Range* as the Manus, the
Rishis, the Pitris**, the Prajapati, and so on; and as Dhyani Buddhas, the
Chohans, Melhas (fire-gods), Bodhisattvas,*** and others, on this side. The
truly ignorant call them gods; the learned profane, the one God; and the wise,
the Initiates, honour in them only the Manvantaric manifestations of THAT which
neither our Creators (the Dhyan Chohans) nor their creatures can ever discuss
or know anything about. The ABSOLUTE is not to be defined, and no mortal or
immortal has ever seen or comprehended it during the periods of Existence. The
mutable cannot know the Immutable, nor can that which lives perceive Absolute
Life."
Therefore, man
cannot know higher beings than his own "progenitors." "Nor shall
he worship them," but he ought to learn how he came into the world.
(c) Number
Seven, the fundamental figure among all other figures in every national
religious system, from Cosmogony down to man, must have its raison d'etre. It
is found among the ancient Americans, as prominently as among the archaic
Aryans and Egyptians. The question will be fully dealt with in the second part
of this Book; meanwhile a few facts may be given here. Says the author of the
"Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches, 11,500 years
ago"****:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Beyond" the Great Range, means, in our case, India, as being the
Trans-Himalayan region for the Cis-Himalayan region.
** The term
Pitris is used by us in these Slokas to facilitate their comprehension, but it
is not so used in the original Stanzas, where they have distinct appellations
of their own, besides being called "Fathers" and
"Progenitors."
*** It is
erroneous to take literally the worship of the human Bodhisattvas, or Manjusri.
It is true that, exoterically, the Mahayana school teaches adoration of these
without distinction, and that Huien-Tsang speaks of some disciples of Buddha as
being worshipped. But esoterically it is not the disciple or the learned
Manjusri personally that received honours, but the divine Bodhisattvas and
Dhyani Buddhas that animated (Amilakha, as the Mongolians say) the human forms.
**** The author
of this work is Augustus Le Plongeon. He and his wife are well known in the
United States for their untiring labours in Central America. It is they who discovered
the sepulchre of the royal Kan Coh, at Cichen-Itza. The author [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 35 THE "SEVEN" MYSTERY.
"Seven
seems to have been the sacred number par excellence among all civilised nations
of antiquity. Why? Each separate people has given a different explanation,
according to the peculiar tenets of their (exoteric) religion. That it was the
number of numbers for those initiated into the sacred mysteries, there can be
no doubt. Pythagoras . . . calls it the 'Vehicle of Life' containing body and
soul, since it is formed of a Quaternary, that is Wisdom and intellect, and of
a Trinity or action and matter. The Emperor Julian, 'In matrem, etc.,'
expresses himself thus: 'Were I to touch upon the initiation into our Sacred
Mysteries, which the Chaldees Bacchized, respecting the seven-rayed god,
lighting up the soul through him, I should say things unknown to the rabble,
very unknown, but well known to the blessed Theurgists.' " (p. 141).
And who,
acquainted with the Puranas, the Book of the Dead, the Zendavesta, the Assyrian
tiles, and finally the Bible, and who has observed the constant occurrence of
the number seven, in these records of people living from the remotest times
unconnected and so far apart, can regard as a coincidence the following fact,
given by the same explorer of ancient Mysteries? Speaking of the prevalence of
seven as a mystic number, among the inhabitants of the "Western
continent" (of America), he adds that it is not less remarkable. For:--
"It
frequently occurs in the Popul-vuh . . . we find it besides in the seven
families said by Sahagun and Clavigero to have accompanied the mystical
personage named Votan, the reputed founder of the great city of Nachan,
identified by some with Palenque. In the seven caves* from which the ancestors
of the Nahuatl are reported to have emerged. In the seven cities of Cibola, described
by Coronado and Niza. . . . In the seven Antilles; in the seven heroes who, we
are told, escaped the Deluge . . . ."
"Heroes,"
moreover, whose number is found the same in every "Deluge" story -- from
the seven Rishis who were saved with Vaivasvata Manu, down to Noah's ark, into
which beasts, fowls, and living creatures were taken by "Sevens."
Thus we see the figures 1, 3, 5, 7, as perfect, because thoroughly mystic,
numbers playing a prominent part in every Cosmogony and evolution of living
Beings. In China, 1, 3, 5, 7, are called "celestial numbers" in the
canonical "Book of Changes." (Yi King, or transformation, as in
"Evolution").
The explanation
of it becomes evident when one examines the ancient
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] seems to believe and to seek to prove that the
esoteric learning of the Aryans and the Egyptians was derived from the Mayas.
But, although certainly coeval with Plato's Atlantis, the Mayas belonged to the
Fifth Continent, which was preceded by Atlantis and Lemuria.
* These seven
caves, seven cities, etc., etc., stand in every case for the seven centres, or
zones, upon which the seven primitive groups of the first Root-race were born.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. [[diagram]], the symbol of evolution and
fall into generation or matter, is reflected in the old Mexican sculptures or
paintings, as it is in the Kabalistic Sephiroth, and the Egyptian Tau. Examine
the Mexican MSS (Add. MSS. Brit. Mus. 9789)*; you will find in it a tree whose
trunk is covered with ten fruits ready to be plucked by a male and female, one
on each side of it, while from the top of the trunk two branches shoot horizontally
to the right and left, thus forming a perfect [[diagram]] (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 [[diagram]] 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 [[diagram]], the central point; the 3 or
[[diagram]]; the five, [[diagram]], and the seven or [[diagram]], or again
[[diagram]]; the triangle in the square and the synthesizing point in the
interlaced double triangles. This for the world of the archetypes. The
phenomenal world receives its culmination and the reflex of all in MAN.
Therefore he is the mystic square -- in his metaphysical aspect -- the
Tetraktis; and becomes the Cubeon the creative plain. His symbol is the cube
unfolded** and 6 becoming 7, or the [[diagram]] three crossways (the female)
and four vertically; and this is man, the culmination of the deity on Earth,
whose body is the cross of flesh, on, through, and in which he is ever
crucifying and putting to death the divine Logos or his HIGHER SELF.
"The
universe," says every Philosophy and Cosmogony, "hath a Ruler (Rulers
collectively) set over it, which is called the WORD (Logos); the fabricating
Spirit is its Queen: which two are the First Power after the ONE."
These are the
Spirit and Nature, which two form our illusory universe. The two inseparables
remain in the Universe of Ideas so long as it lasts, and then merge back into
Parabrahm, the One ever changeless. "The Spirit, whose essence is eternal,
one and self-existent," emanates a pure ethereal LIGHT -- a dual light not
perceptible to the elementary senses -- in the Puranas, in the Bible, in the
Sepher
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The engraving
is reproduced in the "Sacred Mysteries of the Mayas and Quiches" on
p. 134.
** See
"Source of Measures" p. 50 to 53 and also Book II. Part 2.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 37 THE THREE KINDS OF LIGHT.
Jezirah, the
Greek and Latin hymns, in the Book of Hermes, in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, in
the esotericism of Lao-tse, everywhere. In the Kabala, which explains the
secret meaning of Genesis, this light is the DUAL-MAN, or the Androgyne (rather
the sexless) angels, whose generic name is ADAM KADMON. It is they who complete
man, whose ethereal form is emanated by other divine, but far lower beings, who
solidify the body with clay, or the "dust of the ground" -- an
allegory indeed, but as scientific as any Darwinian evolution and more true.
The author of
the "Source of Measures" says that the foundation of the Kabala and
all its mystic books is made to rest upon the ten Sephiroth; which is a
fundamental truth.* He shows these ten Sephiroth or the ten numbers in the
following diagram:--
[[diagram]]
wherein the
circle is the naught, its vertical diameter line is the first or primal ONE
(the Word or Logos), from which springs the series of the other numbers up to
9, the limit of the digits. The 10 is the first Divine Manifestation**
containing "every possible power of exact expression of proportion."
By this Kabalistic speculation we are taught that the Sephiroth "were the
numbers or emanations of the Heavenly Light (figures 20612 to 6561), they were
the 10 'Words,' DBRIM, 41224, the light, of which they were the flux, was the
Heavenly Man, the Adam KDM (the 144- 144); and the Light, by the New Testament
or Covenant (or 41224) created God; just as, by the Old Testament God (Alhim,
31415) creates light (20612 to 6561)."
Now there are
three kinds of light in Occultism, as in the Kabala. (1) The Abstract and
Absolute Light, which is Darkness; (2) The Light of the
Manifested-Unmanifested, called by some the Logos; and (3) The latter light
reflected in the Dhyan Chohans, the minor logoi (the Elohim, collectively),
who, in their turn, shed it on the objective Universe. But in the Kabala --
re-edited and carefully adjusted to fit the Christian tenets by the Kabalists
of the XIII. century -- the three lights are described as:-- (1) The clear and
penetrating, that of Jehovah; (2) reflected light; and (3) light in the
abstract." This light abstractly taken (in a metaphysical or symbolical
sense) is Alhim (Elohim God),
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Masonic Review," Cincinnati, June 1886, Art. Kabala No. 6.
** See "Isis
Unveiled," Vol. II., pp. 300 et seq., for a proof of the antiquity of the
decimal system of figures.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 unitone, as the
basis, in general, of all calculation and all mensuration. But, for the
production of animal life, and for especial time measure or the lunar year,
that influence which causes conception and embryotic development, the numbers
of the Jehovah measure ('man even Jehovah' measure), viz. 113 to 355, have to
be specialised.* But this last ratio is but a modified form of light or 20612
to 6561, as a '[[pi]]' value, being only a variation of the same (that is 20612
to 6561 is 31415 to one, or Alhim or God) -- and in such a manner that one can
be made
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Source of Measures," pp. 276, et seq. App. VII.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 39 THE NUMBERS OF CREATION.
to flow into and
be derived from the other, and these are the three steps by which the Unity and
sameness can be shown of the divine names. That is, the two are but variations
of the same ratio, viz., that of '[[pi]].' The object of this comment is to
show the same measuring use for the Cabbalah as was employed in the three
Covenants of the Bible, and in the symbols of Masonry, as just noticed."
"First
then, the Sephiroth are described as Light, that is, they themselves are a
function of, indeed, the same as, the manifestation of Ain Soph; and they are
so from the fact that Light represents the ratio of 20612 to 6561, as part of
the 'Words,' DBRIM, 41224, or as to the Word, Debar, 206 (= 10 cubits). Light
is so much the burden of the Kabbalah, in explaining the Sephiroth, that the
most famous book on the Kabbalah is called Zohar or Light. In this we find
expressions of this kind:-- 'The Infinite was entirely unknown and diffused no
light before the luminous point violently broke through into vision . . . .'
'When he first assumed the form (of the Crown, or the first Sephira), he caused
9 splendid lights to emanate from it, which, shining through it, diffused a
bright light in all directions': that is, these 9 with his one (which was the
origin, as above, of the nine), together made the 10, that is [[diagram]] or
[[diagram]], or the sacred Ten (numbers or Sephiroth), or Jod -- and these
numbers were 'the Light.' Just as in the Gospel of St. John, God (Alhim, 31415
to one) was that light (20612 to 6561) by which (Light) all things were
made."
In Sepher
Jezirah, or Numbers of Creation, the whole process of evolution is given out in
Numbers. In its "32 paths of Wisdom" the number 3 is repeated four
times, and the number 4 five times. Therefore, the Wisdom of God is contained
in numbers (Sephrim or Sephiroth), for Sepher (or S-ph-ra when unvowelled)
means "to cipher." And therefore, also, we find Plato stating that
the deity geometrizes in fabricating the Universe.
The Kabalistic
book, the Sepher Jezirah, opens with a statement of the hidden wisdom of Alhi
in Sephrim, i.e, the Elohim in the Sephiroth.
"In thirty
and two paths, hidden wisdom, established Jah, JHVH, Tzabaoth, Elohi of Israel,
Alhim of Life, El of Grace and Mercy -- exalted, uplifted Dweller on high, and
King of Everlasting, and his name -- Holy! in three Sephrim: viz:-- B-S'ph-r,
V-S'ph-r, V-Siph-o-r."
"This
Comment sets forth 'the Hidden Wisdom' of the original text by hidden Wisdom,
that is, by the use of words carrying a special set of Numbers and a special
phraseology, which will set forth the very explanatory system which we find to
fit so accurately in the Hebrew Bible. . . . . In setting forth his scheme, to
enforce it, and to finish out his detailed exposition in a general postulate,
viz., the one word
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Rabbi*:-- "I wish now that thou wouldest impart to
me some of the chiefest or leading principles of Natural Philosophy, which as
thou sayest were in former times worked out by them (the Ancient Wise Ones)";
to which the Rabbi makes answer:-- "To such principles appertains the
Number of Creation of our Race-father Abraham" (that is Abram and Abraham,
or numbers 41224 and 41252). He then says that this book of Number treats of
teaching the Alhim-ness and One-ness through, "DBRIM," viz., the
numbers of the Word "Words." That is, it teaches the use of the ratio
31415 to one, through 41224, which last, in the description of the Ark of the
Covenant, was divided into two parts by two tables of stone, on which these,
DBRIM or 41224, were written or engraved -- or 20612 by 2. He then comments on
these three subordinately used words, and takes care as to one of them to make
the comment:-- "And Alhim (31415 to 1) said: Let there be Light (20612 to
6561)."
The three words
as given in the text are: [[hebrew]]. And the Rabbi in commenting upon them
says: "It teaches the Alhim-ness (31415) and One-ness (the diameter to
Alhim) through Words (DBRIM, 41224), by which on the one side there is infinite
expression in heterogeneous creations, and on the other a final harmonic
tendency to One-ness" (which as everyone knows is the mathematical
function of "[[pi]]" of the schools, which measures, and weighs and
numbers the stars of heaven, and yet resolves them back into the final Oneness
of the Universe through Words). "Their final accord perfects itself in
that Oneness that ordains them and which consists in [[hebrew]] (Book of
Al-Chazari), that is the Rabbi, in his first comment, leaves the jod, or i, out
of one of the words, whereas afterwards he restores it again. If we take the
values of those subordinate words, we find them to be 340, 340, 346; together
these are 1026, and the division of the general word into these has been to
produce these numbers, which by Temurah may be changed in various ways for
various purposes." (Kabala.)
The reader is
asked to turn to Stanza IV. of Book I. and its fourth commentary to find that
the 3, 4 -- (7), and the thrice seven, or 1065, the number of Jehovah, is the
number of the 21 Prajapati mentioned in the Mahabharata, or the three Sephrim
(words in cipher or figures). And this comparison between the Creative Powers
of Archaic philosophy and the anthropomorphic Creator of exoteric Judaism
(since their esotericism shows its identity with the Secret Doctrine) will lead
the student to perceive and discover that, in truth, Jehovah is but a lunar and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
"Book Al-Chazari" by Jehuda-ha-Levi, translated by Dr. D. Cassell.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 41 THE EMANATIONS OF AIN-SOPH.
"generation"
god. (See Book I, Part 2, "Deus Lunus.") It is a fact well known to
every conscientious student of the Kabala, that the deeper he dives into it,
the more he feels convinced that unless the Kabala -- or what is left of it --
is read by the light of the Eastern esoteric philosophy, its study leads only
to the discovery that, on the lines traced by exoteric Judaism and
Christianity, the monotheism of both is nothing more exalted than ancient
Astrolatry, now vindicated by modern Astronomy. The Kabalists never cease to
repeat that primal intelligence can never be understood. It cannot be
comprehended, nor can it be located, therefore it has to remain nameless and
negative. Hence the Ain-Soph -- the "UNKNOWABLE" and the
"UNNAMEABLE" -- which, as it could not be made manifest, was
conceived to emanate manifesting Powers. It is then with its emanations alone
that human intellect has to, and can deal. Christian theology, having rejected
the doctrine of emanations and replaced them with direct, conscious creations
of angels and the rest out of nothing, now finds itself hopelessly stranded
between Supernaturalism, or miracle, and materialism. An extra-cosmic god is
fatal to philosophy, an intra-cosmic Deity -- i.e. Spirit and matter
inseparable from each other -- is a philosophical necessity. Separate them and
that which is left is a gross superstition under a mask of emotionalism. But
why "geometrize," as Plato has it, why represent these emanations
under the form of an immense arithmetical table? The question is well answered
by the author just cited. His remarks are quoted in Part II., § "The
Theogony of the Creative Gods."
"Mental
perception," he says, "to become physical perception, must have the
Cosmic principle of light: and by this, our mental circle must become visible
through light; or, for its complete manifestation, the Circle must be that of
physical visibility, or Light itself. Such conceptions, thus formulated, became
the groundwork of the philosophy of the divine manifesting in the
Universe."
This is
philosophy. It is otherwise when we find the Rabbi in Al-Chazari saying that
"under s'ph-r is to be understood calculation and weighing of created
bodies. For the calculation, by means of which a body must be constructed in
harmony or symmetry, by which it must be in construction rightly arranged and
made to correspond to the object in design, consists at last in number,
extension, mass, weight; co-ordinate relation of movements, then harmony of
music, must consist altogether by number, that is (S'ph-r). . . By Sippor
(s'phor) is to be understood the words of Alhim whereunto joins or adapts
itself the design of the frame or form of construction; for example, it was
said 'Let Light be.' The work became as the WORDS were spoken, that is, as the
numbers of the work came forth. . . . ."
This is
materialising the Spiritual without scruple. But the Kabala
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Muller's negation notwithstanding. The Jews got their Adam from
Chaldea; and Adam-Adami is a compound word and therefore a manifold symbol, and
proves the occult dogmas.
This is no place
for philological disquisitions. But the reader may be reminded that the words
Ad and Adi mean in Sanskrit "the first"; in Aramaean, "One"
(Ad-ad, "the only one"); in Assyrian, "father" whence Ak-Ad
or "father-creator."* And once the statement is found correct it
becomes rather difficult to confine Adam to the Mosaic Bible alone, and to see
therein simply a Jewish name. Vide Part II. of this Volume, §
"Adam-Adami."
There is
frequent confusion in the attributes and genealogies of the gods in their
theogonies, as given to the world by the half-initiated writers, Brahmanical
and Biblical, the Alpha and the Omega of the records of that symbolical science.
Yet there could be no such confusion made by the earliest nations, the
descendants and pupils of the divine instructors: for both the attributes and
the genealogies were inseparably linked with cosmogonical symbols, the
"gods" being the life and animating "soul-principle" of the
various regions of the Universe. Nowhere and by no people was speculation
allowed to range beyond those manifested gods. The boundless and infinite UNITY
remained with every nation a virgin forbidden soil, untrodden by man's thought,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
appellation Ak-ad (or Akkadians) is of the same class as Ad-m, Ha-va (Eve),
AEd-en (Eden); Ak-Ad meaning "Son of Ad" (like the sons of Ad in
Ancient Arabia). Ad-ad, the "Only One" and the First, was the Ad-on
or "Lord" of Syria and consort of Ad-ar-gat or Aster't, the Syrian
goddess. And Gan-AEden (Eden) or Gandunia was Babylonia and Mesopotamia. In
Assyrian Ak meant Creator, the letter K pronounced Kh (Ah) gutturally. According
to Swedenborg's mysticism Adam was not a man but a church (?) of primitive
light. In the Vedas Ad-iti is the primitive light, the Akasa of the phenomenal
world.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Aramaean Ad is "One," and Ad-ad the "only
one," while Ak is in Assyrian "creator." Thus Ad-am-ak-ad-mon
became Adam Kadmon in the Kabala (Zohar), meaning as it did, the "One
(Son) of the divine Father, or the creator," for the words "am"
and "om" meant at one time in nearly every language the divine, or
the deity. Thus Adam Kadmon and Adam-Adami came to mean:-- "The first emanation
of the Father-Mother or divine nature," and literally "the first
divine one." And it is easy to see that Ad-Argat (or Aster't, the Syrian
goddess, the consort of Ad-on, the lord god of Syria or the Jewish Adonai), and
Venus, Isis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Eve, etc., etc., are identical with the Aditi and
Vach of the Hindus. They are all the "Mothers of all living" and
"of the gods." On the other hand -- cosmically and astronomically --
all the male gods became at first "Sun-gods," then, theologically,
the "Suns of Righteousness" and the Logoi, all symbolised by the
Sun.* They are all Protogonoi (the first-born) and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Adam-Jehovah,
Brahma and Mars are, in one sense, identical; they are all symbols for
primitive or initial generative powers for the purposes of human procreation.
Adam is red, and so also are Brahma-Viraj and Mars -- god and planet. Water is
the blood of the Earth; therefore, all these names are connected with Earth and
Water. "It takes earth and water to create a human soul," says Moses.
Mars is identical with Kartikeya God of War (in one sense) -- which god is born
of the Sweat of Siva, Siva Gharmaja and the Earth. In the Mahabharata he is
shown as born without the intervention of a woman. And he is also called
"Lohita," the red, like Adam, and the other "first men."
Hence, the author of "The Source of Measures" is quite right in
thinking that Mars (and all the other gods of like attributes), "being the
god of war and of [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* for
instance, who was the "Sun born"; Osiris, Ormazd, and so on, were all
followed by, and found themselves transformed later on into still more earthly
types: such as Prometheus, the crucified of Mount Kajbee, Hercules, and so many
others, sun-gods and heroes, until all of them came to have no better
significance than phallic symbols.
In the Zohar is
it said "Man was created by the Sephiroth (Elohim-Javeh, also) and they
engendered by common power the earthly Adam." Therefore in Genesis the
Elohim say:-- "Behold Man is become as one of us." But in Hindu
Cosmogony or "Creation," Brahma-Prajapati creates Viraj and the
Rishis, spiritually; therefore the latter are distinctly called "the
Mind-born Sons of Brahma"; and this specified mode of engendering
precluded every idea of Phallicism, at any rate in the earlier human nations.
This instance well illustrates the respective spirituality of the two nations.
-------
3. SAID THE
"LORD OF THE SHINING FACE." "I SHALL SEND THEE A FIRE WHEN THY
WORK IS COMMENCED. RAISE THY VOICE TO OTHER LOKAS, APPLY TO THY FATHER THE LORD
OF THE LOTUS (Kumuda-Pati) (a) FOR HIS SONS . . . . THY PEOPLE SHALL BE UNDER
THE RULE OF THE FATHERS (Pitri-pati). THY MEN SHALL BE MORTALS. THE MEN OF THE
LORD OF WISDOM (Budha, Mercury) NOT THE SONS OF SOMA (the Moon) ARE IMMORTAL.
CEASE THY COMPLAINTS (b). THY SEVEN SKINS ARE YET ON THEE. . . . THOU ART NOT
READY. THY MEN ARE NOT READY (c).
(a) Kumuda-Pati
is the Moon, the Earth's parent, in his region of Soma-loka. Though the Pitris
(Pitar or "Fathers") are sons of the Gods, elsewhere sons of Brahma
and even Rishis, they are generally known as the "lunar" ancestors.
(b) Pitri-pati
is the lord or king of the Pitris, Yama, the god of Death and the Judge of
mortals. The men of Budha (Mercury) are
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] bloodshed, was but a secondary idea flowing out of the
primary one of shedding of blood in conception for the first time." Hence
Jehovah became later a fighting god, "Lord of Hosts," and one who
commands war. He is the aggressive Zodh -- or Cain by permutation who slew his
(female) "brother," whose "blood crieth from the ground,"
the Earth having opened her mouth to receive the blood. (Genesis iii.)
* Apollo
Karneios is certainly a Greek transformation from the Hindu Krishna Karna.
"Karna" means radiant from "carne," "a ray," and
Karneios, which was a title of Apollo with the Celts as with the Greeks, meant
"Sun born."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranic
legend, the son of the Moon (Soma) is Budha (Mercury), "the intelligent"
and the Wise, because he is the offspring of Soma, the "regent" of
the visible Moon, not of Indu, the physical Moon. Thus Mercury is the elder
brother of the Earth, metaphorically -- his step-brother, so to say, the
offspring of Spirit -- while she (the Earth) is the progeny of the body. These
allegories have a deeper and more scientific meaning (astronomically and
geologically) then our modern physicists are willing to admit. The whole cycle
of the "first War in Heaven," the Taraka-maya, is as full of philosophical
as of Cosmogonical and astronomical truths. One can trace therein the
biographies of all the planets by the history of their gods and rulers. Usanas
(Sukra, or Venus), the bosom-friend of Soma and the foe of Brihaspati (Jupiter)
the instructor of the gods, whose wife Tara (or Taraka) had been carried away
by the Moon, Soma -- "of whom he begat Budha" -- took also an active
part in this war against "the gods" and forthwith was degraded into a
demon (Asura) deity, and so he remains to this day.*
Here the word
"men" refers to the celestial men, or what are called in India the
PITAR or pitris, the Fathers, the progenitors of men. This
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Usanas-Sukra
or Venus is our "Lucifer," the morning star, of course. The ingenuity
of this allegory in its manifold meanings is great indeed. Thus Brihaspati (the
planet Jupiter) or Brahmanaspati is, in the Rig Veda, a deity who is the symbol
and the prototype of the exoteric or ritualistic worship. He is priest
sacrificer, suppliant, and the medium through which the prayers of mortals
reach the gods. He is the Purohita (family priest, or Court Chaplain) of the
Hindu Olympus and the spiritual Guru of the Gods. Soma is the mystery god and
presides over the mystic and occult nature in man and the Universe. Tara, the
priest's wife, who symbolizes the worshipper, prefers esoteric truths to their
mere shell, exotericism; hence she is shown as carried off by Soma. Now Soma is
the sacred juice of that name, giving mystic visions and trance revelations,
the result of which union is Budha (Wisdom), Mercury, Hermes, etc., etc.; that
science in short which to this day is proclaimed by the Brihaspatis of Theology
as devilish and Satanic. What wonder that by expanding the cycle of this
allegory we find Christian theology espousing the quarrel of the Hindu gods,
and regarding Usanas (Lucifer), who helped Soma against that ancient
personification of ritualistic worship (Brahmanaspati, the lord of the
Brahmans, now become "Jupiter-Jehovah") as SATAN, the "enemy of
God"!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* surely required no purified gases to breathe and
live upon (see Part III. of this Volume). Therefore, however strongly the
impossibility of this teaching may be urged by the devotees of modern science,
the Occultist maintains that the case was as stated aeons of years before even
the evolution of the Lemurian, the first physical man, which itself took place
18,000,000 years ago.**
Preliminary
evolution is described in one of the BOOKS OF DZYAN and the Commentaries
thereon 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 (avikara) immutable nature (Essence, sadaikarupa) had awakened and
changed (differentiated) into (a state of) causality (avayakta), and from cause
(Karana) had become its own discrete effect (vyakta), from invisible it became
visible. The smallest of the small (the most atomic of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As shown
elsewhere, it is only the "Heavenly Man," Adam Kadmon, of the first
chapter of Genesis, who is made "in the image and likeness of God."
Adam, of chapter ii., is not said to be made in that image nor in the divine
likeness, before he ate of the forbidden fruit. The former Adam is the
Sephirothal Host; the second Adam is the Mindless first human Root-race; the
third Adam is the race that separated, whose eyes are opened.
** For a
discussion of the scientific objections to the views and figures here
enunciated, the reader is referred to the Addenda, which form Part III. of this
book.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 47 NARADA AND ASURAMAYA.
atoms, or
aniyamsam aniyasam) became one and the many (ekanekarupa); and producing the
Universe produced also the Fourth Loka (our Earth) in the garland of the seven
lotuses. The Achyuta then became the Chyuta.*
The Earth is
said to cast off her old three skins, because this refers to the three
preceding Rounds she has already passed through; the present being the fourth
Round out of the seven. At the beginning of every new ROUND, after a period of
"obscuration," the earth (as do also the other six "earths")
casts off, or is supposed to cast off, her old skins as the Serpent does:
therefore she is called in the Aitareya-Brahmana the Sarpa Rajni, "the
Queen of the Serpents," and "the mother of all that moves." The
"Seven Skins," in the first of which she now stands, refer to the
seven geological changes which accompany and correspond to the evolution of the
Seven Root-Races of Humanity.
Stanza II.,
which speaks of this Round, begins with a few words of information concerning
the age of our Earth. The chronology will be given in its place. In the
Commentary appended to the Stanza, two personages are mentioned: Narada and
Asura Maya, especially the latter. All the calculations are attributed to this
archaic celebrity; and what follows will make the reader superficially acquainted
with some of these figures.
--------
TWO ANTEDILUVIAN
ASTRONOMERS.
To the mind of
the Eastern student of Occultism, two figures are indissolubly connected with
mystic astronomy, chronology, and their cycles. Two grand and mysterious figures,
towering like two giants in the Archaic Past, emerge before him, whenever he
has to refer to Yugas and Kalpas. When, at what period of pre-history they
lived, none save a few men in the world know, or ever can know with that
certainty which is required by exact chronology. It may have been 100,000 years
ago, it may have been 1,000,000, for all that the outside world will ever know.
The mystic West and Freemasonry talk loudly of Enoch and Hermes. The mystic
East speaks of NARADA, the old Vedic Rishi, and of ASURAMAYA, the Atlantean.
It has already
been hinted that of all the incomprehensible characters in the Mahabharata and
the Puranas, Narada, the son of Brahrna in Matsya Purana, the progeny of
Kasyapa and the daughter of Daksha
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Achyuta is an
almost untranslatable term. It means that which is not subject to fall or
change for the worse: the Unfalling; and it is the reverse of chyuta, "the
Fallen." The Dhyanis who incarnate in the human forms of the Third
Root-Race and endow them with intellect (Manas) are called the chyuta, for they
fall into generation.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 48 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
in the Vishnu
Purana, is the most mysterious. He is referred to by the honourable title of
Deva Rishi (divine Rishi, more than a demi-god) by Parasara, and yet he is
cursed by Daksha and even by Brahma. He informs Kansa that Bhagavat (or Vishnu
in exotericism) would incarnate in the eighth child of Devaki, and thus brings
the wrath of the Indian Herod upon Krishna's mother; and then, from the cloud
on which he is seated -- invisible as a true Manasaputra -- he lauds Krishna,
in delight at the Avatar's feat of killing the monster Kesim. Narada is here,
there, and everywhere; and yet, none of the Puranas gives the true
characteristics of this great enemy of physical procreation. Whatever those
characteristics may be in Hindu Esotericism, Narada -- who is called in
Cis-Himalayan Occultism Pesh-Hun, the "Messenger," or the Greek
Angelos -- is the sole confidant and the executor of the universal decrees of
Karma and Adi-Budh: a kind of active and ever incarnating logos, who leads and
guides human affairs from the beginning to the end of the Kalpa.
"Pesh-Hun"
is a general not a special Hindu possession. He is the mysterious guiding
intelligent power, which gives the impulse to, and regulates the impetus of
cycles, Kalpas and universal events.* He is Karma's visible adjuster on a
general scale; the inspirer and the leader of the greatest heroes of this
Manvantara. In the exoteric works he is referred to by some very
uncomplimentary names; such as "Kali-Karaka," strife-maker,
"Kapi-vaktra," monkey-faced, and even "Pisuna," the spy,
though elsewhere he is called Deva-Brahma. Even Sir W. Jones was strongly
impressed with this mysterious character from what he gathered in his Sanskrit
Studies. He compares him to Hermes and Mercury, and calls him "the
eloquent messenger of the gods" (see Asiat. Res. I. p. 264). All this led
the late Dr. Kenealy ("Book of God"), on the ground that the Hindus
believe him to be a great Rishi, "who is for ever wandering about the
earth, giving good counsel," to see in him one of his twelve Messiahs. He
was, perhaps, not so far off the real track as some imagine.
What Narada
really is, cannot be explained in print; nor would the modern generations of
the profane gather much from the information. But it may be remarked, that if
there is in the Hindu Pantheon a deity which resembles Jehovah, in, tempting by
"suggestion" of thoughts and "hardening" of the hearts of
those whom he would make his tools and victims, it is Narada. Only with the
latter it is no desire to obtain a pretext for "plaguing," and thus
showing that "I am the Lord God."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is
perhaps the reason why, in the Bhagavad Gita, we are told that Brahma had
communicated to Narada in the beginning that all men whatsoever, even
Mlechchhas, outcasts and barbarians, might know the true nature of Vasudeva and
learn to have faith in that deity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas, who visits the
so-called nether or infernal regions, Patala. Whether or not it was from his
intercourse with the thousand-headed Sesha, the serpent who bears the seven
Patalas and the entire world like a diadem upon his heads, and who is the great
teacher of astronomy,* that Narada learned all that he knew, certain it is that
he surpasses Garga's Guru in his knowledge of cyclic intricacies. It is he who
has charge of our progress and national weal or woe. It is he who brings on
wars and puts an end to them. In the old Stanzas Pesh-Hun is credited with
having calculated and recorded all the astronomical and cosmic cycles to come,
and with having taught the Science to the first gazers at the starry vault. And
it is Asuramaya, who is said to have based all his astronomical works upon
those records, to have determined the duration of all the past geological and
cosmical periods, and the length of the all the cycles to come, till the end of
this life-cycle, or the end of the seventh Race.
There is a work
among the Secret Books, called the "Mirror of Futurity," wherein all
the Kalpas within Kalpas and cycles within the bosom of Sesha, or infinite
Time, are recorded. This work is ascribed to Pesh-Hun Narada. There is another
old work which is attributed to various Atlanteans. It is these two Records
which furnish us with the figures of our cycles, and the possibility of
calculating the date of cycles to come. The chronological calculations which
will presently be given are, however, those of the Brahmins as explained
further on; but most of them are also those of the Secret Doctrine.
The chronology
and computations of the Brahmin Initiates are based upon the Zodiacal records
of India, and the works of the above-mentioned astronomer and magician --
Asuramaya. The Atlantean zodiacal records cannot err, as they were compiled
under the guidance of those who first taught astronomy, among other things, to
mankind.
But here again
we are deliberately and recklessly facing a new difficulty. We shall be told
that our statement is contradicted by science, in the person of a man regarded
as a great authority (in the West) upon all subjects of Sanskrit literature --
Professor Albrecht Weber, of Berlin. This, to our great regret, cannot be
helped; and we are ready to maintain what is now stated. Asuramaya, to whom the
epic tradition points as the earliest astronomer in Aryavarta, one to whom
"the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Sesha, who is
also Ananta, the infinite, and the "Cycle of Eternity" in
esotericism, is credited with having given his astronomical knowledge to Garga,
the oldest astronomer of India, who propitiated him, and forthwith knew all
about the planets and how to read omens.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 50 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Sun-god imparted
the knowledge of the stars," in propria persona, as Dr. Weber himself
states, is identified by him, in some very mysterious way, with the
"Ptolemaios" of the Greeks. No more valid reason is given for this
identification than that "this latter name (Ptolemaios), as we see from
the inscription of Piyadasi, became the Indian 'Turamaya,' out of which the
name 'Asuramaya' might very easily grow." No doubt it "might,"
but the vital question is -- Are there any good proofs that it has thus grown?
The only evidence that is given for it is, that it must be so: "since this
Maya is distinctly assigned to Romaka-pura in the West."* The Maya is
evident, since no Sanskritist among Europeans can tell where that locality of
"Romaka-pura" was, except, indeed, that it was somewhere "in the
West." Anyhow, as no member of the Asiatic Society, or Western
Orientalist, will ever listen to a Brahmanical teaching, it is useless to take
the objections of European Orientalists into consideration.
"Romakapura" was in "the West," certainly, since it was
part and parcel of the last continent of ATLANTIS. And it is equally certain
that it is Atlantis, which is assigned in the Hindu Puranas as the birth-place
of Asuramaya, "as great a magician as he was an Astrologer and an
Astronomer." Moreover, Prof. Weber refuses to assign any great antiquity
to the Indian Zodiac, and feels inclined to think that the Hindus never knew of
a Zodiac at all till "they had borrowed one from the Greeks."** This
statement clashes with the most ancient traditions of India, and must therefore
be ignored. (Vide "The Zodiac and its Antiquity"). We are the more
justified in ignoring it, as the learned German Professor himself tells us in
the introduction to his work (History of Sanskrit Literature) that "in
addition to the natural obstacles which impede investigation (in India), there
still prevails a dense mist of prejudices and preconceived opinions hovering
over the land, and enfolding it as with a veil." Caught in that veil, it
is no wonder that Dr. Weber should himself have been led into involuntary
errors. Let us hope that he knows better now.
Now whether
Asuramaya is to be considered a modern myth, a personage who flourished in the
day of the Macedonian Greeks, or as that which he is claimed to be by the
Occultists, in any case his calculations agree entirely with those of the
Secret Records.
From fragments
of immensely old works attributed to the Atlantean astronomer, and found in
Southern India, the calendar elsewhere men-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Lectures on the Indian Literature," p. 253, by Prof. A. Weber; in
Trubner's Asiatic Series.
** Even the Maya
Indians of Guatemala had their Zodiac from untold antiquity. And
"primitive man acted in the same manner independently of time or locality
in every age," observes a French writer.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 51 WHAT THE EARTH-WHIRL PRODUCED.
tioned was compiled
by two very learned Brahmins* in 1884 and 1885. The work is proclaimed by the
best Pundits as faultless -- from the Brahmanical standpoint -- and thus far
relates to the chronology of the orthodox teachings. If we compare its
statements with those made several years earlier in "Isis Unveiled,"
with the fragmentary teachings published by some Theosophists, and with the
present data derived from the Secret Books of Occultism, the whole will be
found to agree perfectly, save in some details which may not be explained; for
secrets of higher Initiation -- as unknown to the writer as they are to the
reader -- would have to be revealed, and that cannot be done. (But see
"Chronology of the Brahmins" at the close of Stanza II.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"Tirukkanda Panchanga" for the Kali Yug 4986, by Chintamany
Raghanaracharya, son of the famous Government astronomer of Madras, and
Tartakamala Venkata Krishna Rao.
--------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 52 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA II.
NATURE UNAIDED
FAILS.
-------
§ (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 300,000,000*). IT CONSTRUCTED RUPAS (forms).
SOFT STONES, THAT HARDENED (minerals); HARD PLANTS, THAT SOFTENED (vegetation).
VISIBLE FROM INVISIBLE, INSECTS AND SMALL LIVES (sarisripa, swapada). SHE (the
Earth) SHOOK THEM OFF HER BACK, WHENEVER THEY OVERRAN THE MOTHER (a). AFTER
THIRTY CRORES OF YEARS, SHE TURNED ROUND. SHE LAID ON HER BACK; ON HER SIDE. .
. . . SHE WOULD CALL NO SONS OF HEAVEN, SHE WOULD ASK NO SONS OF WISDOM. SHE
CREATED FROM HER OWN BOSOM. SHE EVOLVED WATER-MEN TERRIBLE AND BAD (b).
(a) This relates
to an inclination of the axis -- of which there were several -- to a consequent
deluge and chaos on Earth (having, however, no reference to primeval chaos), in
which monsters, half-human, half-animal, were generated. We find it mentioned
in the "Book of the Dead," and also in the Chaldean account of
creation, on the Cutha Tablets, however mutilated.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* 300 million
years, or Three Occult Ages. The Rig Veda has the same division. In the
"Physician's Hymn," (X 97 1) it is said that "the plants came
into being three ages (Triyugam) before the gods" on our Earth (See
"Chronology of the Brahmins" at the end of this Stanza).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 53 THE MONSTERS OF CHAOS.
It is not even
allegory. Here we have facts, that are found repeated in the account of
Pymander, as well as in the Chaldean tablets of creation. The verses may almost
be checked by the Cosmogony, as given by Berosus, which has been disfigured out
of recognition by Eusebius, but some of the features of which may yet be found
in fragments left by ancient Greek authors -- Apollodorus, Alexander
Polyhistor, etc., etc. "The water-men terrible and bad," who were the
production of physical nature alone, a result of the "evolutionary
impulse" and the first attempt to create man the "crown," and
the aim and goal of all animal life on Earth -- are shown to be failures in our
Stanzas. Do we not find the same in the Berosian Cosmogony, denounced with such
vehemence as the culmination of heathen absurdity? And yet who of the
Evolutionists can say that things in the beginning have not come to pass as
they are described? That, as maintained in the Puranas, the Egyptian and
Chaldean fragments, and even in Genesis, there have not been two, and even
more, "creations" before the last formation of the Globe; which,
changing its geological and atmospheric conditions, changed also its flora, its
fauna, and its men? This claim agrees not only with every ancient Cosmogony,
but also with modern science, and even, to a certain degree, with the theory of
evolution, as may be demonstrated in a few words.
There is no
"dark creation," no "Evil Dragon" conquered by a Sun-God,
in the earliest World-Cosmogonies. Even with the Akkads, the great Deep (the
Watery Abyss, or SPACE) was the birthplace and abode of Ea, Wisdom, the
incognizable infinite Deity. But with the Semites and the later Chaldeans, the
fathomless Deep of Wisdom becomes gross matter, sinful Substance, and Ea is
changed into Tiamat, the dragon slain by Merodach, or Satan, in the astral
waves.
In the Hindu
Puranas, Brahma, the creator, is seen recommencing de novo several creations
after as many failures; and two great creations are mentioned,* the Padma and
the Varaha, the present, when the Earth was lifted out of the water by Brahma,
in the shape of a boar, or "Varaha Avatar." Creation is shown as a
sport, an amusement (Lila) of the creative god. The Zohar speaks of primordial
worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence. And the same is
said in Midraish, Rabbi Abahu explaining distinctly (in Bereschith Rabba,
Parscha IX.) that "the Holy One" had successively created and de-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These two must
not be confused with the seven creations or divisions in each Kalpa (See Book
I. "The Seven Creations"). The primary and secondary creations are
here meant.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 "Hibbert Lectures," p.
390); and as shown by the author of "The Qabbalah," in the Zohar,
Siphrah Dzeniouta, in Jovah Rabbah, 128a, etc., etc. The Kabala states the
same.
(b) Oannes (or
Dagon, the Chaldean "Man-fish") divides his Cosmogony and Genesis
into two portions. First the abyss of waters and darkness, wherein resided most
hideous beings -- men with wings, four and two-faced men, human beings with two
heads, with the legs and horns of a goat (our "goat-men,")*
hippocentaurs, bulls with the heads of men, and dogs with tails of fishes. In
short, combinations of various animals and men, of fishes, reptiles and other
monstrous animals assuming each other's shapes and countenances. The feminine
element they resided in, is personified by Thalatth -- the Sea, or
"Water" -- which was finally conquered by Belus, the male principle.
And Polyhistor says: "Belus came and cut the woman asunder, and of one
half of her he formed the Earth, and of the other half the heavens, and at the
same time he destroyed the animals within her." As pertinently remarked by
I. Myer, "with the Akkadians each object and power of Nature had its Zi,
Spirit. The Akkadians formed their deities into triads, usually males (sexless,
rather?); the Semites also had triadic deities, but introduced sex" (p.
246) -- or phallicism. With the Aryans and the earliest Akkadians all things
are emanations through, not by, a creator or logos. With the Semites everything
is begotten.
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whence the
identity of the ideas? The Chinese have the same traditions. According to the
commentator Kwoh P'oh, in the work called Shan-Hai-King, "Wonders by Sea
and Land," a work which was written by the historiographer Chung Ku from
engravings on nine urns made by the Emperor Yu, (B.C. 2255), an interview is
mentioned with men having two distinct faces on their heads, before and behind,
monsters with bodies of goats and human faces, etc. Gould, in his
"Mythical Monsters," p. 27, giving the names of some authors on
Natural History, mentions Shan-Hai-King. According to Kwoh P'oh (A.D. 276-324)
this work was compiled three thousand years before his time, or at seven
dynasties distance. Yang Sun of the Ming Dynasty (commencing A.D. 1368) states
that it was compiled by Kung Chia and Chung Ku (as stated above). Chung Ku at
the time of the last emperor of the Hia dynasty, B.C. 1818, fearing that the
emperor might destroy the books treating of the ancient time, carried them in
his flight to Yin. (See "Mythical Monsters," by C. Gould, p. 27.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* 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,** but who "were
destroyed" because they were not "perfect," i.e., they
"were sexless, like the Kings of Edom."
Weeded of
metaphors and allegories, what will science say to this idea of a primordial
creation of species? It will object to the "Angels" and
"Spirits" having anything to do therewith: but if it is nature and
the physical law of evolution that are the creators of all there is now on
Earth, why could there be "no such abyss" when the globe was covered
with waters, in which numbers of monstrous beings were generated? Is it the
"human beings" and animals with human heads and double faces, which
are a point of the objection? But if man is only a higher animal and has
evolved from the brute species by an infinite series of transformations, why
could not the "missing links" have had human heads attached to the
bodies of animals, or, being two-headed, have heads of beasts and vice versa,
in Nature's early efforts? Are we not shown during the geological periods, in
the ages of the reptiles and the mammalia, lizards with birds' wings, and
serpents' heads on animal bodies.*** And, arguing from the standpoint of
science, does not even our modern human race occasionally furnish us with
monster-specimens: two-headed children, animal bodies with human heads,
dog-headed babies, etc., etc.? And this proves that, if nature will still play
such
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Gods and
planetary Spirits, especially the Ribhus. "The three Ribhus" who yet
become "thrice seven in number" of their gifts.
** Remember the
"winged Races" of Plato; and the Popol-Vuh accounts of the first
human race, which could walk, fly and see objects, however distant.
*** See
"Mythical Monsters," by Charles Gould.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the first
volume of the lately published "Introduction a l'atude des Races
Humaines," by M. de Quatrefages, there is proof that since the
post-tertiary period and even before that time -- since many Races were already
scattered during that age on the face of the Earth -- man has not altered one
iota in his physical structure. And if, surrounded for ages by a fauna that
altered from one period or cycle to another, which died out, which was reborn
in other forms -- so that now there does not exist one single animal on Earth,
large or small, contemporary with the man of that period -- if, then, every
animal has been transformed save man himself, this fact goes to prove not only
his antiquity, but that he is a distinct Kingdom. Why should he alone have
escaped transformation? Because, says de Quatrefages, the weapon used by him,
in his struggle with nature and the ever-changing geological conditions and
elements, was "his psychic force, not his physical strength or body,"
as in the case of animals. Give man only that dose of intelligence and reason
with which other mammalia are endowed, and with his present bodily organization
he will show himself the most helpless of creatures of Earth. And as everything
goes to prove that the human organism with all its characteristics,
peculiarities and idiosyncrasies existed already on our Globe in those far distant
geological periods when there was not yet one single specimen of the
now-existing forms of mammalia, what is the unavoidable conclusion? Why this:
Since all the human races are of one and the same species, it follows that this
species is the most ancient of all the now-living mammalia. Therefore it is the
most stable and persevering of all, and was already as fully developed as it is
now when all the other mammalia now known had not made even their first
approach to appearance on this Earth. Such is the opinion of the great French
Naturalist, who gives thereby a terrible blow to Darwinism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 57 THE "DOUBLE DRAGON."
7. DISPLEASED
THEY WERE. OUR FLESH IS NOT THERE (they said). THIS IS NO FIT RUPA FOR OUR
BROTHERS OF THE FIFTH. NO DWELLINGS FOR THE LIVES.* PURE WATERS, NOT TURBID,
THEY MUST DRINK (a). LET US DRY THEM (the waters).
(a) Says the
Catechism (Commentaries):--
"It is from
the material Worlds that descend they, who fashion physical man at the new
Manvantaras. They are inferior Lha (Spirits), possessed of a dual body (an
astral within an ethereal form). They are the fashioners and creators of our body
of illusion." . . . .
"Into the
forms projected by the Lha (Pitris) the two letters** (the Monad, called also
'the Double Dragon') descend from the spheres of expectation.*** But they are
like a roof with no walls, nor pillars to rest upon." . . . .
"Man needs
four flames and three fires to become one on Earth, and he requires the essence
of the forty-nine fires**** to be perfect. It is those who have deserted the
Superior Spheres, the Gods of Will,***** who complete the Manu of illusion. For
the 'Double Dragon' has no hold upon the mere form. It is like the breeze where
there is no tree or branch to receive and harbour it. It cannot affect the form
where there is no agent of transmission (Manas, "Mind") and the form
knows it not."
"In the
highest worlds, the three are one,****** on Earth (at first) the one becomes
two. They are like the two (side) lines of a triangle that has lost its bottom
line -- which is the third fire." (Catechism Book III., sec. 9.)
Now this
requires some explanation before proceeding any further. To do so especially
for the benefit of our Aryan Hindu brethren --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Monads of
the presentments of men of the Third Round, the huge Ape-like forms.
** In the esoteric
system the seven principles in man are represented by seven letters. The first
two are more sacred than the four letters of the Tetragrammaton.
*** The
intermediate spheres, wherein the Monads, which have not reached Nirvana, are said
to slumber in unconscious inactivity between the Manvantaras.
**** Explained
elsewhere. The "Three Fires," Pavaka, Pavamana, and Suchi, who had
forty-five sons, who, with their three fathers and their Father Agni,
constitute the 49 fires. Pavamana (fire produced by friction) is the parent of
the fire of the Asuras; Suchi (Solar fire) is the parent of the fire of the
gods; and Pavaka (electric fire) is the father of the fire of the Pitris (See
Vayu Purana). But this is an explanation on the material and the terrestrial
plane. The flames are evanescent and only periodical; the fires -- eternal in
their triple unity. They correspond to the four lower, and the three higher
human principles.
***** The Suras,
who become later the A-Suras.
****** Atma,
Buddhi and Manas. In Devachan the higher element of the Manas is needed to make
it a state of perception and consciousness for the disembodied Monad.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas.
In the allegories of the latter, Brahma, who is collectively the creative Force
of the Universe, is said to be "at the beginning of the Yugas (cycles) . .
. . Possessed of the desire and of the power to create, and, impelled by the
potencies of what is to be created, again and again does he, at the outset of a
Kalpa, put forth a similar creation," (see Vishnu Purana, Book I. ch. V.,
closing Sloka. Also "Manava Dharma Shastra" I. 30.) It is now
proposed to examine the exoteric account in the Vishnu Purana, and see how much
it may agree or disagree with our occult version.
-------
CREATION OF
DIVINE BEINGS IN THE EXOTERIC ACCOUNTS.
In the Vishnu
Purana -- which is certainly the earliest of all the scriptures of that name --
we find, as in all the others, Brahma assuming as the male God, for purposes of
creation, "four bodies invested by three qualities."* It is said:
"In this manner, Maitreya, Jyotsna (dawn), Ratri (night), Ahan (day), and
Sandhya (evening twilight) are the four bodies of Brahma" . . (p. 81, Vol.
I., Wilson's translation). As Parasara explains it, when Brahma wants to create
the world anew and construct progeny through his will, in the fourfold
condition (or the four orders of beings) termed gods (Dhyan Chohans), Demons**
(i.e., more material Devas), Progenitors (Pitris) and men, "he collects
Yoga-like (Yuyuje) his mind."
Strange to say,
he begins by creating DEMONS, who thus take precedence over the angels or gods.
This is no incongruity, nor is it due to inconsistency, but has, like all the
rest, a profound esoteric meaning, quite clear to one free from Christian
theological prejudice. He who bears in mind that the principle MAHAT, or
Intellect, the "Universal Mind" (literally "the great"),
which esoteric philosophy explains as the "manifested Omniscience" --
the "first product" of Pradhana (primordial matter) as Vishnu Purana
says, but the first Cosmic aspect of Parabrahm or the esoteric SAT, the
Universal Soul,*** as Occultism
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This has in
esotericism a direct bearing upon the seven principles of the manifested
Brahma, or universe, in the same order as in man. Exoterically, it is only four
principles.
** Demons is a
very loose word to use, as it applies to a great number of inferior -- i.e.,
more material -- Spirits, or minor Gods, who are so termed because they
"war" with the higher ones; but they are no devils.
*** The same
order of principles in man:-- Atma (Spirit), Buddhi (Soul), its vehicle, as
Matter is the Vahan of Spirit, and Manas (mind), the third, or the fifth
microcosmically. On the plane of personality, Manas is the first.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 59 THE BODIES OF BRAHMA.
teaches -- is at
the root of SELF-Consciousness, will understand the reason why. The so-called
"Demons" -- who are (esoterically) the Self-asserting and
(intellectually) active Principle -- are the positive poles of creation, so to
say; hence, the first produced. This is in brief the process as narrated
allegorically in the Puranas.
"Having
concentrated his mind into itself and the quality of darkness pervading
Brahma's assumed body, the Asuras, issuing from his thigh, were first produced;
after which, abandoning this body, it was transformed into NIGHT." (See
Part II., § "The Fallen Angels.")
Two important
points are involved herein:-- (a) Primarily in the Rig-Veda, the
"Asuras" are shown as spiritual divine beings; their etymology is
derived from asu (breath), the "Breath of God," and they mean the
same as the Supreme Spirit or the Zoroastrian Ahura. It is later on, for
purposes of theology and dogma, that they are shown issuing from Brahma's
thigh, and that their name began to be derived from a privative, and sura, god
(solar deities), or not-a-god, and that they became the enemies of the gods.
Every ancient theogony without exception -- from the Aryan and the Egyptian
down to that of Hesiod -- places, in the order of Cosmogonical evolution, Night
before the Day; even Genesis, where "darkness is upon the face of the
deep" before "the first day." The reason for this is that every
Cosmogony -- except in the Secret Doctrine -- begins by the "Secondary
Creation" so-called: to wit, the manifested Universe, the Genesis of which
has to open by a marked differentiation between the eternal Light of Primary
Creation, whose mystery must remain for ever "Darkness" to the prying
finite conception and intellect of the profane, and the Secondary Evolution of
manifested visible nature. The Veda contains the whole philosophy of that
division without having ever been correctly explained by our Orientalists,
because it has never been understood by them.
Continuing to
create, Brahma assumes another form, that of the Day, and creates from his
breath the gods, who are endowed with the quality of goodness (passivity)*. In
his next body the quality of great passivity prevailed, which is also
(negative) goodness, and from the side of that personage issued the Pitris, the
progenitors of men, because, as the text explains, "Brahma thought of
himself (during the process) as the father of the world."** This is
Kriya-sakti -- the mysterious Yoga power
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Thus, says the
Commentary, the saying "by day the gods are most powerful, and by night
the demons," is purely allegorical.
** This thinking
of oneself as this, that, or the other, is the chief factor in the production
of every kind of psychic or even physical phenomena. The words "whosoever
shall say to this mountain be thou removed and cast into the sea, and shall not
doubt . . . . that thing will come to pass," are no vain words. Only the
word "faith" ought to be translated by WILL. Faith without Will is
like a wind-mill without wind -- barren of results.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 60 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
explained
elsewhere. This body of Brahma when cast off became the Sandhya (evening
twilight), the interval between day and night.
Finally Brahma
assumed his last form pervaded by the quality of foulness, "and from this
MEN, in whom foulness and passion predominate, were produced." This body
when cast off became the dawn, or morning twilight -- the twilight of Humanity.
Here Brahma stands esoterically for the Pitris. He is collectively the Pitar,
"father."
The true
esoteric meaning of this allegory must now be explained. Brahma here symbolizes
personally the collective creators of the World and Men -- the universe with
all its numberless productions of things movable and (seemingly) immovable.* He
is collectively the Prajapatis, the Lords of Being; and the four bodies typify
the four classes of creative powers or Dhyan Chohans, described in the
Commentary directly following Stanza VII. in Book I. The whole philosophy of
the so-called "Creation" of the good and evil in this world and of
the whole cycle of Manvantaric results therefrom, hangs on the correct
comprehension of these Four bodies of Brahma.
The reader will
now be prepared to understand the real, the esoteric significance of what
follows. Moreover there is an important point to be cleared up. Christian theology
having arbitrarily settled and agreed that Satan with his Fallen Angels
belonged to the earliest creation, Satan being the first-created, the wisest
and most beautiful of God's Archangels, the word was given, the key-note
struck. Henceforth all the pagan scriptures were made to yield the same
meaning, and all were shown to be demoniacal, and it was and is claimed that
truth and fact belong to, and commence only with, Christianity. Even the
Orientalists and Mythologists, some of them no Christians at all but
"infidels," or men of science, entered unconsciously to themselves,
and by the mere force of association of ideas and habit, into the theological
groove. Purely Brahmanical considerations, based on greed of power and
ambition, allowed the masses to remain in ignorance of great truths; and the
same causes led the Initiates among the early Christians to remain silent,
while those who had never known the truth disfigured the order of things,
judging of the hierarchy of "Angels" by their exoteric form. Thus as
the Asuras had become the rebellious inferior gods fighting the higher ones in
popular creeds, so the highest archangel, in truth the Agathodaemon, the eldest
benevolent Logos, became with theology the "Adversary" or Satan. But
is this warranted by the correct interpretation of any old Scripture? The
answer is, most certainly not. As the Mazdean Scriptures of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The same idea
is found in the first four chapters of Genesis, with their "Lord" and
"God," which are the Elohim and the Androgynous Eloha.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 61 WHAT THE GNOSTICS SAY.
Zend-Avesta, the
Vendidad and others correct and expose the later cunning shuffling of the gods
in the Hindu Pantheon, and restore through AHURA the Asuras to their legitimate
place in theogony, so the recent discoveries of the Chaldean tablets vindicate
the good name of the first divine Emanations. This is easily proved. Christian
Angelology is directly and solely derived from that of the Pharisees, who
brought their tenets from Babylonia. The Sadducees, the real guardians of the
Laws of Moses, knew not of, and rejected, any angels, opposing even the
immortality of the human Soul (not impersonal Spirit). In the Bible the only
"Angels" spoken of are the "Sons of God" mentioned in Genesis
vi. (who are now regarded as the Nephilim, the Fallen Angels), and several
angels in human form, the "Messengers" of the Jewish God, whose own
rank needs a closer analysis than heretofore given. (Vide Supra, Stanza I.,
sub-sections 2, 3, et seq., where it is shown that the early Akkadians called
Ea, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
flaming sword (or animal passions) had put to flight the Spirits of Darkness."
Yet it is the latter who fought for the supremacy of the conscious and divine
spirituality on Earth and failed, succumbing to the power of matter. But in
theological dogma we see the reverse. It is Michael, "who is like unto
God," the representative of Jehovah, who is the leader of the celestial
hosts -- as Lucifer, in Milton's fancy, is of the infernal hosts -- who has the
best of Satan. It is true that the nature of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 63 WHO ARE THE "FLAMES"?
Michael depends
upon that of his Creator and Master. Who the latter is, one may find out by
carefully studying the allegory of the "War in Heaven" with the
astronomical key. As shown by Bentley, the "War of the Titans against the
gods" in Hesiod, and also the war of the Asuras (or the Tarakamaya)
against the devas in Puranic legend, are identical in all save the names. The
aspects of the stars show (Bentley taking the year 945 B.C. as the nearest date
for such conjunction) that "all the planets, except Saturn, were on the
same side of the heavens as the Sun and Moon," and hence were his
opponents. And yet it is Saturn, or the Jewish "Moon-god," who is
shown as prevailing, both by Hesiod and Moses, neither of whom was understood.
Thus it was that the real meaning became distorted.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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:--
-------
9. MOTHER-WATER,
THE GREAT SEA WEPT. SHE AROSE, SHE DISAPPEARED IN THE MOON, WHICH HAD LIFTED
HER, WHICH HAD GIVEN HER BIRTH (a).
(a) Now what can
this mean? Is it not an evident reference to tidal action in the early stage of
the history of our planet in its fourth Round? Modern research has been busy of
late in its speculations on the Palaeozoic high-tides. Mr. Darwin's theory was
that not less than 52,000,000 years ago -- and probably much more -- the Moon
originated from the Earth's plastic mass. Starting from the point where
research was left by Helmholtz, Ferrel, Sir William Thomson and others, he
retraced the course of tidal retardation of the earth's rotary motions far back
into the very night of time, and placed the Moon during the infancy of our planet
at only "a fraction of its present distance." In short, his theory
was that it is the Moon which separated from the Earth. The tidal elevation
concurring with the swing of the globular mass -- centrifugal tendency being
then nearly equal to gravity -- the latter was overcome, and the tidally
elevated mass could thus separate completely from the Earth.*
The Occult
teaching is the reverse of this. The Moon is far older than the Earth; and, as
explained in Book I., it is the latter which owes its being to the former,
however astronomy and geology may explain the fact. Hence, the tides and the
attraction to the Moon, as shown by the liquid portion of the Globe ever
striving to raise itself towards its parent. This is the meaning of the
sentence that "the Mother-Water arose and disappeared in the Moon, which
had lifted her, which had given her birth."
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* But see the
difficulties suggested later, in the works of various geologists, against this
theory. Compare Sir R. S. Bull's article in "Nature" (Dec. 1, 1881),
and also what the American geologists say.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 65 DIVINE WILL BECOMES EROS.
10. WHEN THEY
(the Rupas) WERE DESTROYED, MOTHER-EARTH REMAINED BARE,* SHE ASKED TO BE DRIED
(a).**
(a) The time for
its incrustation had arrived. The waters had separated and the process was
started. It was the beginning of a new life. This is what one key divulges to
us. Another key teaches the origin of Water, its admixture with Fire (liquid
fire it calls it),*** and enters upon an alchemical description of the progeny
of the two -- solid matter such as minerals and earths. From the "Waters
of Space," the progeny of the male Spirit-Fire and the female (gaseous)
Water has become the Oceanic expanse on Earth. Varuna is dragged down from the
infinite Space, to reign as Neptune over the finite Seas. As always, the
popular fancy is found to be based on a strictly scientific foundation.
Water is the
symbol of the female element everywhere; mater, from which the letter M, is
derived pictorially from [[diagram]] a water hieroglyph. It is the universal
matrix or the "Great Deep." Venus, the great Mother-Virgin, issues
forth from the Sea-wave, and Cupid or Eros is her son. But Venus is the later
mythological variant of Gaia (or Gaea), the Earth, which, in its higher aspect
is Nature (Prakriti), and metaphysically Aditi, and even Mulaprakriti, the root
of Prakriti or its noumenon.
Hence Cupid or
Love in his primitive sense is Eros, the Divine Will, or Desire of manifesting
itself through visible creation. Thence Fohat, the prototype of Eros, becomes
on Earth the great power "Life-electricity," or the Spirit of
"Life-giving." Let us remember the Greek Theogony and enter into the
spirit of its philosophy. We are taught by the Greeks (See "Iliad"
IV., 201, 246) that all things, gods included, owe their being to the Ocean and
his wife Tethys, the latter being Gaea, the Earth or Nature. But who is Ocean?
Ocean is the immeasurable SPACE (Spirit in Chaos), which is the Deity (see Book
I.); and Tethys is not the Earth, but primordial matter in the process of
formation. In our case it is no longer Aditi-Gaea who begets Ouranos or Varuna,
the chief Aditya among the seven planetary gods, but Prakriti, materialised and
localised. The Moon, masculine in its theogonic character, is,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The goddess
who gave birth to these primordial monsters, in the account of Berosus, was
Thallath, in Greek Thalassa, "the Sea."
** See, for
comparison, the account of creation by Berosus (Alexander Polyhistor) and the hideous
beings born from the two-fold principle (Earth and Water) in the Abyss of
primordial creation: Neras (Centaurs, men with the limbs of horses and human
bodies), and Kimnaras (men with the heads of horses) created by Brahma in the
commencement of the Kalpa.
*** See
Commentary following Sloka 18.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
THE CHRONOLOGY
OF THE BRAHMINS.
No greater
riddle exists in science, no problem is more hopelessly insoluble, than the
question: How old -- even approximately -- are the Sun and Moon, the Earth and
Man? What does modern science know of the duration of the ages of the World, or
even of the length of geological periods?
Nothing;
absolutely nothing.
If one turns to
science for chronological information, one is told by those who are
straightforward and truthful, as for instance Mr. Pengelly, the eminent
geologist, "We do not know."* One will learn that, so far, no
trustworthy numerical estimate of the ages of the world and man could be made,
and that both geology and anthropology are at sea. Yet when a student of
esoteric philosophy presumes to bring forward the teachings of Occult Science,
he is at once sat upon. Why should this be so, since, when reduced to their own
physical methods, the greatest scientists have failed to arrive even at an
approximate agreement?
It is true that
science can hardly be blamed for it. Indeed, in the Cimmerian darkness of the
prehistoric ages, the explorers are lost in a labyrinth, whose great corridors
are doorless, allowing no visible exit into the Archaic past. Lost in the maze
of their own conflicting speculations, rejecting, as they have always done, the
evidence of Eastern tradition, without any clue, or one single certain
milestone to guide them, what can geologists or anthropologists do but pick up
the slender
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For a similar
admission see Prof. Lefevre's Philosophy, p. 481.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 67 THE RACE THAT NEVER DIES.
thread of
Ariadne where they first perceive it, and then proceed at perfect random?
Therefore we are first told that the farthest date to which documentary record
extends is now generally regarded by Anthropology as but "the earliest
distinctly visible point of the pre-historic period." (Encyclopaedia
Britannica.)
At the same time
it is confessed that "beyond that period stretches back a vast indefinite
series of prehistoric ages." (Ibid.)
It is with those
specified "Ages" that we shall begin. They are
"prehistoric" to the naked eye of matter only. To the spiritual eagle
eye of the seer and the prophet of every race, Ariadne's thread stretches
beyond that "historic period" without break or flaw, surely and
steadily, into the very night of time; and the hand which holds it is too
mighty to drop it, or even let it break. Records exist, although they may be
rejected as fanciful by the profane; though many of them are tacitly accepted
by philosophers and men of great learning, and meet with an unvarying refusal
only from the official and collective body of orthodox science. And since the
latter refuses to give us even an approximate idea of the duration of the
geological ages -- save in a few conflicting and contradictory hypotheses --
let us see what Aryan philosophy can teach us.
Such
computations as are given in Manu and the Puranas -- save trifling and most
evidently intentional exaggerations -- are, as already stated, almost identical
with those taught in esoteric philosophy. This may be seen by comparing the two
in any Hindu calendar of recognised orthodoxy.
The best and
most complete of all such calendars, at present, as vouched for by the learned
Brahmins of Southern India, is the already mentioned Tamil calendar called the
"Tirukkanda Panchanga," compiled, as we are told, from, and in full
accordance with, secret fragments of Asuramaya's data. As Asuramaya is said to have
been the greatest astronomer, so he is whispered to have also been the most
powerful "Sorcerer" of the "WHITE ISLAND, which had become BLACK
with sin," i.e., of the islands of Atlantis.
The "White
Island" is a symbolical name. Asuramaya is said to have lived (see the
tradition of Jhana-bhaskara) in Romaka-pura in the West: because the name is an
allusion to the land and cradle of the "Sweat-born" of the Third
Race. That land or continent had disappeared ages before Asuramaya lived, since
he was an Atlantean; but he was a direct descendant of the Wise Race, the Race
that never dies. Many are the legends concerning this hero, the pupil of Surya
(the Sun-God) himself, as the Indian accounts allege. It matters little whether
he lived on one or another island, but the question is to prove that he was no
myth, as Dr. Weber and others would make him. The
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 68 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
fact of
"Romaka-pura in the West" being named as the birth-place of this hero
of the archaic ages, is the more interesting because it is so very suggestive
of the esoteric teaching about the "Sweat-born" Races, the men born
from the pores of their parents. "ROMAKUPAS" means
"hair-pores" in Sanskrit. In Mahabharata XII. 10,308, a people named
Raumyas are said to have been created from the pores of Virabhadara, the
terrible giant, who destroyed Daksha's sacrifice. Other tribes and people are
also represented as born in this way. All these are references to the later
Second and the earlier Third Root Races.
The following
figures are from the calendar just referred to; a footnote marks the points of
disagreement with the figures of the Arya Samaj school:--
I. From the
beginning of cosmic evolution,* up
to the Hindu
year Tarana (or 1887) .............. 1,955,884,687 years.
II. The (astral)
mineral, vegetable and animal
kingdoms up to
Man, have taken to evolve** ........ 300,000,000 years.
III. Time, from
the first appearance of
"Humanity"
(on planetary chain)...................1,664,500,987 years.***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The esoteric
doctrine says that this "cosmic evolution" refers only to our solar
system; while exoteric Hinduism makes the figures refer, if we do not mistake,
to the whole Universal System.
** Another point
of disagreement. Occultism says: "The astral prototypes of the mineral,
vegetable and animal kingdoms up to man have taken that time (300 million
years) to evolve, re-forming out of the cast-off materials of the preceding
Round, which, though very dense and physical in their own cycle, are relatively
ethereal as compared with the materiality of our present middle Round. At the
expiration of these 300 million years, Nature, on the way to the physical and
material, down the arc of descent, begins with mankind and works downwards,
hardening or materialising forms as it proceeds. Thus the fossils found in
strata, to which an antiquity, not of eighteen, but of many hundreds of
millions of years, must be ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the
preceding Round, which, while living, were far more ethereal than physical, as
we know the physical. That we perceive and disinter them as tangible forms, is
due to the process of materialization or crystallization referred to, which
took place subsequently, at the beginning of the Fourth Round, and reached its
maximum after the appearance of man, proceeding parallel with his physical
evolution. This alone illustrates the fact that the degree of materiality of
the Earth changes pari passu with that of its inhabitants. And thus man now
finds, as tangible fossils, what were once the (to his present senses) ethereal
forms of the lower kingdoms. The above Brahmanical figures refer to evolution
beginning on Globe A, and in the First Round. In this Volume we speak only of
this, the Fourth Round."
*** This
difference and the change of cyphers in the last three triplets of figures, the
writer cannot undertake to account for. According to every calculation, once
the three hundred millions are subtracted, the figures ought to stand,
1,655,884,687. But they are given as stated in the Tamil calendar above-named
and as they were translated. The school of the late Pandit Dayanand Saraswati,
founder of the Arya Samaj, gives a date of 1,960,852,987. See the "Arya
Magazine" of Lahore, the cover of which bears the words: "Aryan era
1,960,852,987."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 69 THE VARIOUS PRALAYAS.
IV. The number
that elapsed since the "Vaivasvata Manvantara"* -- or the human
period -- up to the year 1887, is just ................. 18,618,728 years.
V. The full
period of one Manvantara is ..... 308,448,000 years.
VI. 14
"Manvantaras" plus the period of one Satya Yuga make ONE DAY OF
BRAHMA, or complete Manvantara and make .............. 4,320,000,000 years.
Therefore a
Maha-Yuga consists of ... ......... 4,320,000 years.**
The year 1887 is
from the commencement of
Kali-Yuga
......................................... 4,989 years.
To make this
still clearer in its details, the following computations by Rao Bahadur P.
Sreenivas Row, are given from the "Theosophist" of November, 1885.
Mortal years.
360 days of
mortals make a year .......................... 1
Krita Yuga
contains .............................. 1,728,000
Treta Yuga
contains .............................. 1,296,000
Dwapara Yuga contains
.............................. 864,000
Kali Yuga
contains ................................. 432,000
The total of the
said four Yugas constitute a
Maha Yuga
........................................ 4,320,000
Seventy-one of
such Maha-Yugas form the
period of the
reign of one Manu ................ 306,720,000
The reign of 14
Manus embraces the duration
of 994
Maha-Yugas, which is equal to ......... 4,294,080,000
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* VAIVASVATA
Manu is the one human being -- some versions add to him the seven Rishis -- who
in the Matsya Avatar allegory is saved from the Deluge in a boat, like Noah in
the Ark. Therefore, this Vaivasvata Manvantara would be the
"post-Diluvian" period. This, however, does not refer to the later
"Atlantean" or Noah's deluge, nor to the Cosmic Deluge or Pralaya of
obscuration, which preceded our Round, but to the appearance of mankind in the
latter Round. There is a great difference made, however, between the "Naimitika,"
occasional or incidental, "Prakritika," elemental,
"Atyantika," the absolute, and "Nitya," the perpetual
Pralaya; the latter being described as "Brahma's contingent recoalescence
of the Universe at the end of Brahma's DAY." The question was raised by a
learned Brahmin Theosophist: "Whether there is such a thing as Cosmic
Pralaya; because, otherwise, the Logos (Krishna) would have to be reborn, and
he is Aja (unborn)." We cannot see why. The Logos is said to be born only
metaphorically, as the Sun is born daily, or rather a beam of that Sun is born
in the morning and is said to die when it disappears, whereas it is simply
reabsorbed into the parent essence. Cosmic Pralaya is for things visible, not
for the Arupa, formless, world. The Cosmic or Universal Pralaya comes only at
the end of one hundred years of Brahma; when the Universal dissolution is said
to take place. Then the Avyaya, say the exoteric scriptures, the eternal life
symbolized by Vishnu, assuming the character of Rudra, the Destroyer, enters
into the Seven Rays of the Sun and drinks up all the waters of the Universe.
"Thus fed, the seven solar Rays dilate to seven Suns and set fire to the
whole Cosmos. . . . ."
** Since a
Maha-Yuga is the 1,000th part of a day of Brahma.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 70 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Add Sandhis,
i.e., intervals between the reign of each Manu, which amount
to six
Maha-Yugas, equal to ............................................................
25,920,000
The total of
these reigns and interregnums of 14 Manus, is 1,000 Maha-Yugas,
which constitute
a Kalpa, i.e., one day of Brahma
......................................................... 4,320,000,000
As Brahma's
Night is of equal duration, one Day and Night of Brahma would contain
................................................. 8,640,000,000
360 of such days
and nights make one year of Brahma make .....................................................
3,110,400,000,000
100 such years
constitute the whole period of Brahma's age, i.e., Maha-Kalpa
................................................... 311,040,000,000,000
These are the
exoteric figures accepted throughout India, and they dovetail pretty nearly
with those of the Secret works. The latter, moreover, amplify them by a
division into a number of esoteric cycles, never mentioned in Brahmanical
popular writings -- one of which, the division of the Yugas into racial cycles,
is given elsewhere as an instance. The rest, in their details, have of course
never been made public. They are, nevertheless, known to every
"Twice-born" (Dwija, or Initiated) Brahmin, and the Puranas contain
references to some of them in veiled terms, which no matter-of-fact Orientalist
has yet endeavoured to make out, nor could he if he would.
These sacred
astronomical cycles are of immense antiquity, and most of them pertain, as
stated, to the calculations of Narada and Asuramaya. The latter has the
reputation of a giant and a sorcerer. But the antediluvian giants (the Gibborim
of the Bible) were not all bad or Sorcerers, as Christian Theology, which sees
in every Occultist a servant of the Evil one, would have it; nor were they
worse than many of "the faithful sons of the Church." A Torquemada
and a Catherine de Medicis certainly did more harm in their day and in the name
of their Master than any Atlantean giant or demigod of antiquity ever did;
whether his name was Cyclops, or Medusa, or yet the Orphic Titan, the
anguipedal monster known as Ephialtes. There were good "giants" in
days of old just as there are bad "pigmies" now; and the Rakshasas
and Yakshas of Lanka are no worse than our modern dynamiters, and certain
Christian and civilised generals during modern wars. Nor are they myths.
"He who would laugh at Briareus and Orion ought to abstain from going to,
or even talking of, Karnac or Stonehenge," remarks somewhere a modern
writer.
As the
Brahmanical figures given above are approximately the basic calculations of our
esoteric system, the reader is requested to carefully keep them in mind.
In the
"Encyclopaedia Britannica" one finds, as the last word of science,
that the antiquity of man is allowed to stretch only over "tens of thou-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 71 SCIENTIFIC SELF-COMPLACENCE.
sands of
years."* It becomes evident that as these figures may be made to fluctuate
between 10,000 and 100,000, therefore they mean very little if anything, and
only render still denser the darkness surrounding the question. Moreover, what
matters it that science places the birth of man in the "pre- or post-glacial
drift," if we are told at the same time that the so-called "ice
age" is simply a long succession of ages which "shaded without abrupt
change of any kind into what is termed the human or Recent period . . . the
overlapping of geological periods having been the rule from the beginning of
time." The latter "rule" only results in the still more
puzzling, even if strictly scientific and correct, information, that "even
to-day man is contemporary with the ice-age in the Alpine valleys and in the
Finmark."**
Thus, had it not
been for the lessons taught by the Secret Doctrine, and even by exoteric
Hinduism and its traditions, we should be left to this day to float in
perplexed uncertainty between the indefinite ages of one school of science, the
"tens of thousands" of years of the other, and the 6,000 years of the
Bible interpreters. This is one of the several reasons why, with all the
respect due to the conclusions of the men of learning of our modern day, we are
forced to ignore them in all such questions of pre-historic antiquity.
Modern Geology
and Anthropology must, of course, disagree with our views. But Occultism will
find as many weapons against these two sciences as it has against astronomical
and physical theories, in spite of Mr. Laing's assurances that*** "in
(chronological) calculations of this sort, concerning older and later
formations, there is no theory, and they are based on positive facts, limited
only by a certain possible (?) amount of error either way," occultism will
prove, scientific confessions in hand, that geology is very much in error, and
very often even more so than Astronomy. In this very passage by Mr. Laing,
which gives to Geology pre-eminence for correctness over Astronomy, we find a
passage in flagrant contradiction to the admissions of the best Geologists
themselves. Says the author --
"In short,
the conclusions of Geology, at any rate up to the Silurian period,**** when the
present order of things was fairly inaugurated, are approximate (truly so)
facts and not theories, while the astronomical conclusions are theories based
on data so uncertain, that while in some
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See article
"Geology," in "Encyclopaedia Britannica."
** This allows a
chance even to the Biblical "Adam Chronology" of 6,000 years. (Ibid.)
*** See his
"Modern Science and Modern Thought."
**** To the
Silurian period as regards Molluscs and Animal life -- granted; but what do
they know of man?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 state of constant though slow progression for
the last 50,000 years of period of 15 millions, or for the last 500,000 years
of a period of 150 millions" ("Modern Science, etc." p. 49), as
Mr. S. Laing tells his readers, it is very much so for the claims of the
Occultists. Unless the latter show that it is a possibility, if not a perfect
certainty, that man
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 73 COSMOGONY, AN INTELLIGENT PLAN.
lived 18
millions of years ago, the Secret Doctrine might as well have remained
unwritten. An attempt must, therefore, be made in this direction, and it is our
modern geologists and men of science generally who will be brought to testify
to this fact in the third part of this volume. Meanwhile, and notwithstanding
the fact that Hindu Chronology is constantly represented by the Orientalists as
a fiction based on no "actual computation,"* but simply a
"childish boasting," it is nevertbeless often twisted out of
recognition to make it yield to, and fit in with, Western theories. No figures
have ever been more meddled with and tortured than the famous 4, 3, 2, followed
by cyphers of the Yugas and Maha-Yugas.
As the whole
cycle of prehistoric events, such as the evolution and transformation of Races
and the extreme antiquity of man, hangs upon the said Chronology, it becomes
extremely important to check it by other existing calculations. If the Eastern
Chronology is rejected, we shall at least have the consolation of proving that
no other -- whether the figures of Science or of the Churches -- is one whit
more reliable. As Professor Max Muller expresses it, it is often as useful to
prove what a thing is not as to show what it may be. And once we succeed in
pointing out the fallacies of both Christian and scientific computations -- by
allowing them a fair chance of comparison with our Chronology -- neither of the
two will have a reasonable ground to stand upon, in pronouncing the esoteric
figures less reliable than its own.
We may here
refer the reader to our earlier work "Isis Unveiled," Vol. I., p. 32,
for some remarks concerning the figures which were cited a few pages back.
To-day a few
more facts may be added to the information there given, which is already known
to every Orientalist. The sacredness of the cycle of 4320, with additional
cyphers, lies in the fact that the figures which compose it, taken separately
or joined in various combinations, are each and all symbolical of the greatest
mysteries in Nature. Indeed, whether one takes the 4 separately, or the 3 by
itself, or the two together making 7, or again the three added together and
yielding 9, all these numbers have their application in the most sacred and
occult things, and record the workings of Nature in her eternally periodical
phenomena. They are never erring, perpetually recurring numbers, unveiling, to
him who studies the secrets of Nature, a truly divine System, an intelligent
plan in Cosmogony, which results in natural cosmic divisions of times, seasons,
invisible influences, astronomical phenomena, with their action and reaction on
terrestrial and even moral nature; on
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Wilson's
"Translation of Vishnu Purana," Vol. I., pp. 50, 51.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 75 THE SECRET OF THE FALL OF THE ANGELS.
STANZA III.
ATTEMPTS TO
CREATE MAN.
§§ (11) The
Descent of the Demiurge. (12) The lunar gods ordered to create. (13) The higher
gods refuse.
11. THE LORD OF
THE LORDS CAME. FROM HER BODY HE SEPARATED THE WATERS, AND THAT WAS HEAVEN
ABOVE, THE FIRST HEAVEN (the atmosphere, or the air, the firmament) (a).
(a) Here
tradition falls again into the Universal. As in the earliest version, repeated in
the Puranas, so in the latest, the Mosaic account. In the first it is said:
"He the Lord" (the god who has the form of Brahma) "when the
world had become one ocean (Harivamsa I. 36) concluding that within the waters
lay the earth, and desirous to raise it up," to separate it, "created
himself in another form. As in the preceding Kalpa (Manvantara) he had assumed
the shape of a tortoise, so in this one he took the shape of a boar, etc.
etc." In the Elohistic "creation" (Genesis, verses 6, 7, 8, and
9) "God" creates a firmament in the midst of the waters . . . . . and
says "let dry land appear." And now comes the traditional peg
whereunto is hung the esoteric portion of the Kabalistic interpretation.
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 --
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 76 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"But the
vitalizing power of heaven lay chiefly with the moon. . . . It was the Hebrew
[[hebrew]] (Jehovah), and St. Paul enjoins: 'Let no man judge you for your
observance of the seventh day, and the day of the new moon, which are a shadow
of things to come; but the body (or substance) is of Christ" or Jehovah,
that function of this power that "made the barren woman . . . a mother . .
. for they are the gift of Jehovah" . . . which is a key to the objection
which her husband made to the Shunamite, as to her going to the man of God -- "for
it is neither the seventh day nor the day of the new moon. . . . (2 Kings, iv.,
23.) The living spiritual powers of the constellations had mighty wars, marked
by the movements and positions of the stars and planets, and especially as the
result of the conjunction of the moon, earth, and sun. Bentley comments on the
Hindu "War between the gods and the giants," as marked by the eclipse
of the Sun at the ascending node of the Moon, 945 B.C. (! !), at which time was
born* or produced from the sea, SRI (Sarai, S-r-i, the wife of the Hebrew
A-bram**). Sri is also Venus-Aphrodite the Western emblem "of the
luni-solar year or the moon (as Sri is the wife of the moon; vide foot-note),
the goddess of increase*** . . . " Therefore . . . "the grand
monument and landmark of the exact period of the lunar year and month, by which
this cycle (of 19 tropical years and 235 revolutions of the moon) could be
calculated, was Mount Sinai -- the Lord Jehovah coming down thereon. . . . Paul
speaks (then) as a mystagogue, when he says concerning the freed woman and bond
woman of Abraham: 'For this Hagar (the bond-woman) is Mount Sinai in Arabia.'
How could a woman be a mountain? and such a mountain! Yet . . . she was. . . .
Her name was Hagar, Hebrew [[hebrew]], whose numbers re-read 235, or in exact
measure, the very number of lunar months to equal nineteen tropical years to
complete this cycle. . . . Mount Sinai being, in the esoteric language of the
wisdom, the monument of the exact time of the lunar
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* According to
the wonderful chronology of Bentley, who wrote in days when Biblical chronology
was still undisputed; and also according to that of those modern Orientalists
who dwarf the Hindu dates as far as they can.
** Now Sri is
the daughter of Bhrigu, one of the Prajapatis and Rishis, the chief of the
Bhrigus, "the Consumers," the aerial class of gods. She is Lakshmi,
the wife of Vishnu, and she is "the bride of Siva" (Gauri), and she
is Sarasvati, "the watery," the wife of Brahma, because the three
gods and goddesses are one, under three aspects. Read the explanation by
Parasara, in Vishnu Purana in Bk. I., ch. viii. (Vol. I., Wilson's trans., p.
119), and you will understand. "The Lord of Sri" is the moon, he says,
and "Sri is the wife of Narayana, the God of Gods"; Sri or Lakshmi
(Venus) is Indrani, as she is Sarasvati, for in the words of Parasara:
"Hari (or Iswara, "the Lord") is all that is called male in the
Universe; Lakshmi is all that is termed female. There is nothing else than
they." Hence she is "female," and "God" is male
Nature.
*** Sri is
goddess of, and herself "Fortune and Prosperity."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 77 THE VARIOUS CLASSES OF CREATORS.
years and
months, by which this spiritual vitalizing cycle could be computed -- and which
mountain, indeed, was called (see Fuerst), "the Mountain of the Moon
(Sin). So also Sarai (SRI), the wife of Abram, could have no child until her
name was changed to Sarah, [[hebrew]], giving to her the property of this lunar
influence."*
This may be
regarded as a digression from the main subject; but it is a very necessary one
with a view to Christian readers. For who, after studying dispassionately the
respective legends of Abram or Abraham, Sarai or Sarah, who was "fair to
look upon," and those of Brahma and Sarasvati, or Sri, Lakshmi-Venus, with
the relations of all these to the Moon and Water; -- and especially one who
understands the real Kabalistic meaning of the name Jehovah and its relation
to, and connection with, the moon -- who can doubt that the story of Abram is
based upon that of Brahma, or that Genesis was written upon the old lines used
by every ancient nation? All in the ancient Scriptures is allegorical -- all
based upon and inseparably connected with Astronomy and Cosmolatry.
-------
13. THEY (the
Moon-gods) WENT, EACH ON HIS ALLOTTED LAND: SEVEN OF THEM, EACH ON HIS LOT. THE
LORDS OF THE FLAME REMAINED BEHIND. THEY WOULD NOT GO, THEY WOULD NOT CREATE
(a).
(a) The Secret
teachings show the divine Progenitors creating men on seven portions of the
globe "each on his lot" -- i.e., each a different race of men
externally and internally, and on different zones. This polygenistic claim is
considered elsewhere (vide Stanza VII.). But who are "They" who
create, and the "Lords of the Flame," "who do not"?
Occultism divides the "Creators" into twelve classes; of which four
have reached liberation to the end of the "Great Age," the fifth is
ready to reach it, but still remains active on the intellectual planes, while
seven are still under direct Karmic law. These last act on the man-bearing
globes of our chain.
Exoteric Hindu
books mention seven classes of Pitris, and among them two distinct kinds of
Progenitors or Ancestors: the Barhishad and the Agnishwatta; or those possessed
of the "sacred fire" and those devoid of it. Hindu ritualism seems to
connect them with sacrificial fires, and with Grihasta Brahmins in earlier
incarnations: those who have, and those who have not attended as they should to
their household sacred fires in their previous births. The distinction, as
said, is derived from the Vedas. The first and highest class (esoterically) the
Agnishwatta,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Masonic
Review"; Cincinnati, June 1886, Art. "The Cabbalah."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 78 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
are represented
in the exoteric allegory as Grihasta (Brahman-householders) who, in their past
births in other Manvantaras having failed to maintain their domestic fires and
to offer burnt sacrifices, have lost every right to have oblations with fire
presented to them. Whereas the Barhishad, being Brahmins who have kept up their
household sacred fires, are thus honoured to this day. Thence the Agnishwatta
are represented as devoid of, and the Barhishad as possessed of, fires.
But esoteric
philosophy explains the original qualifications as being due to the difference
between the natures of the two classes: the Agnishwatta Pitris are devoid of
fire (i.e., of creative passion), because too divine and pure (vide supra,
Sloka 11th); whereas the Barhishad, being the lunar spirits more closely
connected with Earth, became the creative Elohim of form, or the Adam of dust.
The allegory
says that Sanandana and other Vedhas, the Sons of Brahma, his first progeny,
"were without desire or passion, inspired with the holy wisdom, estranged
from the Universe and undesirous of progeny" (Vishnu Purana, Book I.
vii.). This also is what is meant in Sloka 11 by the words: "They would not
create," and is explained as follows:-- "The primordial Emanations
from the creative Power are too near the absolute Cause. They are transitional
and latent forces, which will develop only in the next and subsequent
removes." This makes it plain. Hence Brahma is said to have felt wrathful
when he saw that those "embodied spirits, produced from his limbs (gatra),
would not multiply themselves." After which, in the allegory, he creates
other seven mind-born Sons (see "Moksha-Darma" and "Mahabharata"),
namely, Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasishta, the
latter being often replaced by Daksha, the most prolific of the creators. In
most of the texts these Seven Sons of Vasishta-Daksha are called the seven
Rishis of the Third Manvantara; the latter referring both to the Third Round
and also to the third Root-Race and its branch-Races in the Fourth Round. These
are all the creators of the various beings on this Earth, the Prajapati, and at
the same time they appear as divers reincarnations in the early Manvantaras or
races.
It thus becomes
clear why the Agnishwatta, devoid of the grosser creative fire, hence unable to
create physical man, having no double, or astral body, to project, since they
were without any form, are shown in exoteric allegories as Yogis, Kumaras
(chaste youths), who became "rebels," Asuras, fighting and opposing
gods,* etc., etc. Yet it is they
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Because, as
the allegory shows, the Gods who had no personal merit of their own, dreading
the sanctity of those self-striving incarnated Beings who had become ascetics
and Yogis, and thus threatened to upset the power of the former by their
self-acquired powers -- renounced them. All this has a deep philosophical
meaning and refers to the evolution and acquirement of divine powers through
self-exertion. Some Rishi- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 79 THE LIVING SPIRITUAL FIRE.
alone who could
complete man, i.e., make of him a self-conscious, almost a divine being -- god
on Earth. The Barhishad, though possessed of creative fire, were devoid of the
higher MAHAT-mic element. Being on a level with the lower principles -- those
which precede gross objective matter -- they could only give birth to the outer
man, or rather to the model of the physical, the astral man. Thus, though we
see them intrusted with the task by Brahma (the collective Mahat or Universal
Divine Mind), the "Mystery of Creation" is repeated on Earth, only in
an inverted sense, as in a mirror. It is those who are unable to create the
spiritual immortal man, who project the senseless model (the Astral) of the
physical Being; and, as will be seen, it was those who would not multiply, who
sacrificed themselves to the good and salvation of Spiritual Humanity. For, to
complete the septenary man, to add to his three lower principles and cement
them with the spiritual Monad -- which could never dwell in such a form
otherwise than in an absolutely latent state -- two connecting principles are
needed: Manas and Kama. This requires a living Spiritual Fire of the middle
principle from the fifth and third states of Pleroma. But this fire is the
possession of the Triangles, not of the (perfect) Cubes, which symbolize the
Angelic Beings:* the former having from the first creation got hold of it and
being said to have appropriated it for themselves, as in the allegory of
Prometheus. These are the active, and therefore -- in Heaven -- no longer
"pure" Beings. They have become the independent and free
Intelligences, shown in every Theogony as fighting for that independence and
freedom, and hence -- in the ordinary sense -- "rebellious to the divine
passive law." These are then those "Flames" (the Agnishwatta)
who, as shown in Sloka 13, "remain behind" instead of going along
with the others to create men on Earth. But the true esoteric meaning is that most
of them were destined to incarnate as the Egos of the forthcoming crop of
Mankind. The human Ego is neither Atman nor Buddhi, but the higher Manas: the
intellectual fruition and the efflorescence of the intellectual self-conscious
Egotism -- in the higher spiritual sense. The ancient works refer to it as
Karana Sarira on the plane of Sutratma, which is the golden thread on which,
like beads, the various personalities of this higher Ego are strung. If the
reader were told, as in the semi-esoteric allegories, that these Beings were
returning Nirvanees, from preceding Maha-Manvantaras -- ages of incalculable
dura-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Yogis are shown in the Puranas to be far more
powerful than the gods. Secondary gods or temporary powers in Nature (the
Forces) are doomed to disappear; it is only the spiritual potentiality in man
which can lead him to become one with the INFINITE and the ABSOLUTE.
* See Book I.,
Stanzas III. to V. The triangle becomes a Pentagon (five-fold) on Earth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 aeriform, devoid of compactness, and MINDLESS. He had
no middle principle to serve him as a medium between the highest and the
lowest, the spiritual man and the physical brain, for he lacked Manas. The
Monads which incarnated in those empty SHELLS, remained as unconscious as when
separated from their previous incomplete forms and vehicles. There is no
potentiality for creation, or self-Consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our
plane, unless its too homogeneous, perfect, because divine, nature is, so to
say, mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is
only the lower line of the Triangle -- representing the first triad that
emanates from the Universal MONAD -- that can furnish this needed consciousness
on the plane of differentiated Nature. But how could these pure Emanations,
which, on this principle, must have originally been themselves unconscious (in
our sense), be of any use in supplying the required principle, as they could
hardly have possessed it themselves? The answer is difficult to comprehend,
unless one is well acquainted with the philosophical metaphysics of a
beginningless and endless series of Cosmic Re-births; and becomes well
impressed and familiarised with that immutable law of Nature which is ETERNAL
MOTION, cyclic and spiral, therefore progressive even in its seeming
retrogression. The one divine Principle, the nameless THAT of the Vedas, is the
universal Total, which, neither in its spiritual aspects and emanations, nor in
its physical atoms, can ever be at "absolute rest" except during the
"Nights" of Brahma. Hence, also, the "first-born" are those
who are first set in motion at the beginning of a Manvantara, and thus the
first to fall into the lower spheres of materiality. They who are called in
Theology "the Thrones," and are the "Seat of God," must be
the first incarnated men on Earth; and it becomes comprehensible, if we think
of the endless series of past Manvantaras, to find that the last had to come
first, and the first last. We find, in short, that the higher Angels had
broken, countless aeons before, through the "Seven Circles," and thus
robbed them of the Sacred fire;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 81 MAN, A GOD IN ANIMAL FORM.
which means in
plain words, that they had assimilated during their past incarnations, in lower
as well as in higher worlds, all the wisdom therefrom -- the reflection of
MAHAT in its various degrees of intensity. No Entity, whether angelic or human,
can reach the state of Nirvana, or of absolute purity, except through aeons of
suffering and the knowledge of EVIL as well as of good, as otherwise the latter
remains incomprehensible.
Between man and
the animal -- whose Monads (or Jivas) are fundamentally identical -- there is
the impassable abyss of Mentality and Self-consciousness. What is human mind in
its higher aspect, whence comes it, if it is not a portion of the essence --
and, in some rare cases of incarnation, the very essence -- of a higher Being:
one from a higher and divine plane? Can man -- a god in the animal form -- be
the product of Material Nature by evolution alone, even as is the animal, which
differs from man in external shape, but by no means in the materials of its
physical fabric, and is informed by the same, though undeveloped, Monad --
seeing that the intellectual potentialities of the two differ as the Sun does
from the Glow-worm? And what is it that creates such difference, unless man is
an animal plus a living god within his physical shell? Let us pause and ask ourselves
seriously the question, regardless of the vagaries and sophisms of both the
materialistic and the psychological modern sciences.
To some extent,
it is admitted that even the esoteric teaching is allegorical. To make the
latter comprehensible to the average intelligence, requires the use of symbols
cast in an intelligible form. Hence the allegorical and semi-mythical
narratives in the exoteric, and the (only) semi-metaphysical and objective
representations in the esoteric teachings. For the purely and transcendentally
spiritual conceptions are adapted only to the perceptions of those who
"see without eyes, hear without ears, and sense without organs,"
according to the graphic expression of the Commentary. The too puritan idealist
is at liberty to spiritualise the tenet, whereas the modern psychologist would
simply try to spirit away our "fallen," yet still divine, human Soul
in its connection with Buddhi.
The mystery
attached to the highly spiritual ancestors of the divine man within the earthly
man is very great. His dual creation is hinted at in the Puranas, though its
esoteric meaning can be approached only by collating together the many varying
accounts, and reading them in their symbolical and allegorical character. So it
is in the Bible, both in Genesis and even in the Epistles of Paul. For that
creator, who is called in the second chapter of Genesis the "Lord
God," is in the original the Elohim, or Gods (the Lords), in the plural;
and while one of them makes the earthly Adam of dust, the other breathes into
him the breath of life, and the third makes of him a living soul (ii. 7), all
of which readings
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 82 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
are implied in
the plural number of the Elohim.* "The first man is of the Earth, the
second (the last, or rather highest) is from heaven," says Paul in I.
Corinthians xv. 47.
In the Aryan
allegory the rebellious Sons of Brahma are all represented as holy ascetics and
Yogis. Re-born in every Kalpa, they generally try to impede the work of human
procreation. When Daksha, the chief of the Prajapati (creators), brings forth
10,000 sons for the purpose of peopling the world, Narada -- a son of Brahma,
the great Rishi, and virtually a "Kumara," if not so in name --
interferes with, and twice frustrates Daksha's aim, by persuading those Sons to
remain holy ascetics and eschew marriage. For this, Daksha curses Narada to be
re-born as a man, as Brahma had cursed him before for refusing to marry, and
obtain progeny, saying:-- "Perish in thy present (Deva or angelic) form
and take up thy abode in the womb," i.e., become a man (Vayu Purana;
Harivamsa, 170). Notwithstanding several conflicting versions of the same
story, it is easy to see that Narada belongs to that class of Brahma's,
"first-born," who have all proven rebellious to the law of animal
procreation, for which they had to incarnate as men. Of all the Vedic Rishis,
Narada, as already shown, is the most incomprehensible, because the most
closely connected with the occult doctrines -- especially with the secret
cycles and Kalpas (vide supra).
Certain
contradictory statements about this Sage have much distracted the Orientalists.
Thus he is shown as refusing positively to create (have progeny), and even as
calling his father Brahma "a false teacher" for advising him to get
married ("Narada-Pancha-Ratra"); nevertheless, he is referred to as
one of the Prajapati, "progenitors"! In Naradiya Purana, he describes
the laws and the duties of the celibate adepts; and as these occult duties do
not happen to be found in the fragment of about 3,000 Stanzas in the possession
of European museums, the Brahmins are proclaimed liars; the Orientalists
forgetting that the Naradiya is credited with containing 25,000 Stanzas, and
that it is not very likely that such MSS. should be found in the hands of the
Hindu profane, those who are ready to sell any precious olla for a red pottage.
Suffice it to say, that Narada is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Seth, as
Bunsen and others have shown, is not only the primitive god of the Semites --
early Jews included -- but also their "semi-divine ancestor." For,
says Bunsen ("God in History," vol. i, pp. 233, 234), "the Seth
of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man) must be considered as originally
running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam's father."
"According to Bunsen, the Deity (the god Seth) was the primitive god of
Northern Egypt and Palestine" (Staniland Wake, "The Great
Pyramid"). And Seth became considered in the later Theology of the
Egyptians as "AN EVIL DAEMON," says the same Bunsen, for he is one
with Typhon and one with the Hindu demons as a logical sequel.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 83 "FIRES," "SPARKS," AND "FLAMES."
the Deva-Rishi
of Occultism par excellence; and that the Occultist who does not ponder,
analyse, and study Narada from his seven esoteric facets, will never be able to
fathom certain anthropological, chronological, and even Cosmic Mysteries. He is
one of the Fires above-mentioned, and plays a part in the evolution of this
Kalpa from its incipient, down to its final stage. He is an actor who appears
in each of the successive acts (Root-Races) of the present Manvantaric drama,
in the world allegories which strike the key-note of esotericism, and are now
becoming more familiar to the reader. But shall we turn to other ancient
Scriptures and documents for the corroboration of the "Fires,"
"Sparks," and "Flames?" They are plentiful, if one only
seeks for them in the right places. In the "Book of the Concealed
Mystery," they are clearly enunciated, as also in the "Ha Idra Zuta
Qadisha," or the lesser holy Assembly. The language is very mystical and
veiled, yet still comprehensible. Therein, among the sparks of Prior Worlds,
"vibrating Flames and Sparks," from the divine flint, the workmen
proceed to create man, "male and female" (427); which "Flames
and Sparks" (Angels and their Worlds, Stars and Planets) are said,
figuratively, to "become extinct and die," that is to say, remain
unmanifested until a certain process of nature is accomplished. To show how
thickly veiled from public view are the most important facts of
anthropogenesis, two passages are now quoted from two Kabalistic books. The
first is from the Book of the Concealed Mystery:--
(429.) From a
Light-Bearer (one of the seven sacred planets) of insupportable brightness
proceeded a radiating Flame, dashing off, like a vast and mighty hammer, those
sparks which were the prior worlds.
(430.) And with
most subtle ether were these intermingled and bound mutually together, but only
when they were conjoined together, even the great Father and great Mother.
(431.) From Hoa,
himself, is AB, the Father; and from Hoa, himself, is RUACH, the Spirit; who
are hidden in the Ancient of Days, and therein is that Ether concealed.
(432.) And it
was connected with a Light-Bearer (a planet and its angel or regent), which
went forth from that Light-Bearer of insupportable brightness, which is hidden
in the bosom of Aima, the Great Mother.*
Now the
following extract from the Zohar** also deals with the same mystery:--
"The Pre-Adamite Kings. 'We have learned in the Siphrah D'Tzniootha: That
the At-tee'kah DAt-tee'keen, Ancient of Ancients, before He prepared his Form,
built Kings, and engraved
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Mr.
Mather's "Kabbalah Unveiled."
** Translated in
I. Myer's Qabbalah.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Resha'Hiv'rah, the White Head, the At'-tee-'kah
D'At-tee'keen, Ancient of Ancients, arranged Himself . . . . and formed all
forms above and below. . . . Before He arranged himself in his Form had not
been formed all those whom he desired to form, and all worlds have been
destroyed . . . . they did not remain in their places, because the form of the
Kings had not been formed as it ought to be, and the Holy City had not been
prepared." (Zohar iii., 135a; 292a Idra Zootah. Brody, etc.)
Now the plain
meaning of these two allegorical and metaphysical disquisitions is simply this:
Worlds and men were in turn formed and destroyed, under the law of evolution
and from pre-existing material, until both the planets and their men, in our
case our Earth and its animal and human races, became what they are now in the
present cycle: opposite polar forces, an equilibrized compound of Spirit and
Matter, of the positive and the negative, of the male and the female. Before
man could become male and female physically, his prototype, the creating
Elohim, had to arrange his Form on this sexual plane astrally. That is to say,
the atoms and the organic forces, descending into the plane of the given
differentiation, had to be marshalled in the order intended by Nature, so as to
be ever carrying out, in an immaculate way, that law which the Kabala calls the
Balance, through which everything that exists does so as male and female in its
final perfection, in this present stage of materiality. Chochmah, Wisdom, the
Male Sephiroth, had to diffuse itself in, and through, Binah, intelligent
Nature, or Understanding. Therefore the First Root-race of men, sexless and
mindless, had to be overthrown and "hidden until after a time"; i.e.,
the first race, instead of dying, disappeared in the second race, as certain
lower lives and plants do in their progeny. It was a wholesale transformation.
The First became the Second Root-race, without either begetting it, procreating
it, or dying. "They passed by together," as it is written: "And
he died and another reigned in his stead" (Genesis xxvi. 31 et seq. Zohar
iii., 292a). Why? Because "the Holy City had not been prepared." And
what is the "Holy City"? The Maquom (the Secret Place or the Shrine)
on Earth: in other words, the human womb, the microcosmic copy and reflection
of the Heavenly Matrix, the female space or primeval Chaos, in which the male
Spirit fecundates the germ of the Son, or the visible Universe.* So much so,
that in the paragraph on "the Emanation of the Male and Female
Principles" in the Zohar
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide "The
Holy of Holies: its esoteric meaning," in Part IO of this Volume.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[diagram]]
(Yod) in the [[diagram]] (Heh), they become impregnated and produce a Son. And,
therefore, it is called Binah, Understanding. It means BeN YaH, i.e., Son of
YaH. This is the completeness of the whole."*
This is also the
"completeness" of phallicism by the Rabbis, its perfect apotheosis,
the divine being dragged into the animal, the sublime into the grossness of the
terrestrial. Nothing so graphically gross exists in Eastern Occultism, nor in the
primitive Kabala -- the "Chaldean Book of Numbers." We have said so
in "Isis Unveiled":--
"We find it
rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour out their vials of wrath
in such sentences as these: 'In a multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever
and always assuming, like the Grecian batylos, the brutally indecent form of
the lingham . . . the Maha Deva.' Before casting slurs on a symbol whose
profound metaphysical meaning is too much for the modern champions of that
religion of sensualism par excellence, Roman Catholicism, to grasp, they are in
duty bound to destroy their oldest churches, and change the form of the cupolas
of their own temples. The Mahody of Elephanta, the Round Tower of Bhangulpore,
the minarets of Islam -- either rounded or pointed -- are the originals of the
Campanile column of San Marco, at Venice, of the Rochester Cathedral, and of
the modern Duomo of Milan. All of these steeples, turrets, domes, and Christian
temples, are the reproductions of the primitive idea of the lithos, the upright
phallus." (Vol. II., p. 5.)
Nevertheless,
and however it may be, the fact that all these Hebrew Elohim, Sparks, and
Cherubs are identical with the Devas, Rishis and the Fires and Flames, the
Rudras and the forty-nine Agnis of the ancient Aryas, is sufficiently proven by
and in the Kabala.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Zohar iii.,
290a, quoted in Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, p. 387.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 86 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA IV.
CREATION OF THE
FIRST RACES.
§§ (14) Creation
of men. (15) They are empty shadows. (16) The Creators are perplexed how to create
a THINKING man. (17) What is needed for the formation of a perfect Man.
14. THE SEVEN
HOSTS, THE "WILL (or Mind)-BORN" LORDS, PROPELLED BY THE SPIRIT OF
LIFE-GIVING (Fohat), SEPARATE MEN FROM THEMSELVES, EACH ON HIS OWN ZONE (a).
(a) They threw
off their "shadows" or astral bodies -- if such an ethereal being as
a "lunar Spirit" may be supposed to rejoice in an astral, besides a
hardly tangible body. In another Commentary it is said that the
"Ancestors" breathed out the first man, as Brahma is explained to
have breathed out the Suras (Gods), when they became "Asuras" (from
Asu, breath). In a third it is said that they, the newly-created men,
"were the shadows of the Shadows."
With regard to
this sentence -- "They were the shadows of the Shadows" -- a few more
words may be said and a fuller explanation attempted. This first process of the
evolution of mankind is far easier to accept than the one which follows it,
though one and all will be rejected and doubted even by some Kabalists,
especially the Western, who study the present effects, but have neglected to
study their primary causes. Nor does the writer feel competent to explain a
mode of procreation so difficult of appreciation save for an Eastern Occultist.
Therefore it is useless to enter here into details concerning the process,
though it is minutely described in the Secret Books, as it would only lead to
speaking of facts hitherto unknown to the profane world, and hence to their
being misunderstood. An "Adam" made of the dust of the ground will
always be found preferable, by a certain class of students, to one projected
out of the ethereal body of his creator; though the former process has never
been heard of, while the latter is familiar, as all know, to many Spiritualists
in Europe and America, who, of all men, ought to understand it. For who of
those who have witnessed the phenomenon of a materialising form oozing out of
the pores of a medium or, at other times, out of his left side, can fail to
credit the possibility, at least, of such a birth? If there are
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 87 MAN NOT CREATED PERFECT.
in the Universe
such beings as Angels or Spirits, whose incorporeal essence may constitute an
intelligent entity notwithstanding the absence of any (to us) solid organism;
and if there are those who believe that a god made the first man out of dust,
and breathed into him a living Soul -- and there are millions upon millions who
believe both -- what does this doctrine of ours contain that is so impossible?
Very soon the day will dawn, when the world will have to choose whether it will
accept the miraculous creation of man (and Kosmos too) out of nothing,
according to the dead letter of Genesis, or a first man born from a fantastic
link -- absolutely "missing" so far -- the common ancestor of man,
and of the "true ape."* Between these two fallacies,** Occult
philosophy steps in. It teaches that the first human stock was projected by
higher and semi-divine Beings out of their own essences. If the latter process
is to be considered as abnormal or even inconceivable -- because obsolete in
Nature at this point of evolution -- it is yet proven possible on the authority
of certain "Spiritualistic" FACTS. Which, then, we ask of the three
hypotheses or theories is the most reasonable and the least absurd? Certainly
no one -- provided he is not a soul-blind materialist -- can ever object to the
occult teaching.
Now, as shown,
we gather from the latter that man was not "created" the complete
being he is now, however imperfect he still remains. There was a spiritual, a
psychic, an intellectual, and an animal evolution, from the highest to the
lowest, as well as a physical development -- from the simple and homogeneous,
up to the more complex and heterogeneous; though not quite on the lines traced
for us by the modern evolutionists. This double evolution in two contrary
directions, required various ages, of divers natures and degrees of
spirituality and intellectuality, to fabricate the being now known as man.
Furthermore, the one absolute, ever acting and never erring law, which proceeds
on the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* ". . . Huxley,
supported by the most evident discoveries in Comparative Anatomy, could utter
the momentous sentence that the anatomical differences between man and the
highest apes are less than those between the latter and the lowest apes. In
relation to our genealogical tree of man, the necessary conclusion follows that
the human race has evolved gradually from the true apes." ("The
Pedigree of Man," by Ernest Haeckel, translated by Ed. B. Aveling, p. 49).
What may be the
scientific and logical objections to the opposite conclusion -- we would ask?
The anatomical resemblances between Man and the Anthropoids -- grossly
exaggerated as they are by Darwinists, as M. de Quatrefages shows -- are simply
enough "accounted for" when the origin of the latter is taken into
consideration.
"Nowhere,
in the older deposits, is an ape to be found that approximates more closely to
man, or a man that approximates more closely to an ape . . . . . ."
** ". . . .
. The same gulf which is found to-day between Man and Ape, goes back with
undiminished breadth and depth to the Tertiary period. This fact alone is
enough to make its untenability clear," (Dr. F. Pfaff, Prof. of Natural
Science in the University of Erlangen).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
ON THE IDENTITY
AND DIFFERENCES OF THE INCARNATING POWERS.
THE Progenitors
of Man, called in India "Fathers," Pitara or Pitris, are the creators
of our bodies and lower principles. They are ourselves, as the first
personalities, and we are they. Primeval man would be "the bone of their
bone and the flesh of their flesh," if they had body and flesh. As stated,
they were "lunar Beings."
The Endowers of man with his conscious,
immortal EGO, are the "Solar Angels" -- whether so regarded
metaphorically or literally. The mysteries of the Conscious EGO or human Soul
are great. The esoteric name of these "Solar Angels" is, literally,
the "Lords" (Nath) of "persevering ceaseless devotion"
(pranidhana). Therefore they of the fifth principle (Manas) seem to be
connected with, or to have originated the system of the Yogis who make of
pranidhana their fifth observance (see Yoga Shastra, II., 32.) It has already
been explained why the trans-Himalayan Occultists regard them as evidently
identical with those who in India are termed Kumaras, Agnishwattas, and the
Barhishads.
How precise and
true is Plato's expression, how profound and philosophical his remark on the
(human) soul or EGO, when he defined it as "a compound of the same and the
other." And yet how little this hint has been understood, since the world
took it to mean that the soul was the breath of God, of Jehovah. It is
"the same and the other," as the great Initiate-Philosopher said; for
the EGO (the "Higher Self" when merged with and in the Divine Monad)
is Man, and yet the same as the "OTHER," the Angel in him incarnated,
as the same with the universal MAHAT. The great classics and philosophers felt
this truth, when saying that "there must be something within us which
produces our thoughts. Something very subtle; it is a breath; it is fire; it is
ether;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 89 PITRIS OF THE GODS AND DEMONS.
it is quintessence;
it is a slender likeness; it is an intellection; it is a number; it is harmony.
. . . . " (Voltaire).
All these are
the Manasam and Rajasas: the Kumaras, Asuras, and other rulers and Pitris, who
incarnated in the Third Race, and in this and various other ways endowed
mankind with Mind.
There are seven
classes of Pitris, as shown below, three incorporeal and four corporeal; and
two kinds, the Agnishwatta and the Barhishad. And we may add that, as there are
two kinds of Pitris, so there is a double and a triple set of Barhishad and
Agnishwatta. The former, having given birth to their astral doubles, are reborn
as Sons of Atri, and are the "Pitris of the Demons," or corporeal
beings, on the authority of Manu (III., 196); while the Agnishwatta are reborn
as Sons of Marichi (a son of Brahma), and are the Pitris of the Gods (Manu
again, Matsya and Padma Puranas and Kulluka in the Laws of the Manavas, III.,
195).* Moreover, the Vayu Purana declares all the seven orders to have
originally been the first gods, the Vairajas, whom Brahma "with the eye of
Yoga, beheld in the eternal spheres, and who are the gods of gods"; and
the Matsya adds that the Gods worshipped them; while the Harivansa (S. 1, 935)
distinguishes the Virajas as one class of the Pitris only -- a statement
corroborated in the Secret Teachings, which, however, identify the Virajas with
the elder Agnishwattas** and the Rajasas, or Abhutarajasas, who are incorporeal
without even an astral phantom. Vishnu is said, in most of the MSS., to have
incarnated in and through them. "In the Raivata Manvantara, again, Hari,
best of gods, was born of Sambhuti, as the divine Manasas -- originating with
the deities called Rajasas." Sambhuti was a daughter of Daksha, and wife
of Marichi, the father of the Agnishwatta, who, along with the Rajasas, are
ever associated with Manasas. As remarked by a far more able Sanskritist than
Wilson, Mr. Fitzedward Hall, "Manasa is no inappropriate name for a deity
associated with the Rajasas. We appear to have in it Manasam -- the same as
Manas -- with the change of termination required to express male
personification" (Vishnu Purana Bk. III., ch. I., p. 17 footnote). All the
sons of Viraja are Manasa, says Nilakantha. And
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We are quite
aware that the Yayu and Matsya Puranas identify (agreeably to Western
interpretation) the Agnishwatta with the seasons, and the Barhishad Pitris with
the months; adding a fourth class -- the Kavyas -- cyclic years. But do not
Christian, Roman Catholics identify their Angels with planets, and are not the
seven Rishis become the Saptarshi -- a constellation? They are deities
presiding over all the cyclic divisions.
** The Vayu
Purana shows the region called Viraja-loka inhabited by the Agnishwattas.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 90 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Viraja is
Brahma, and, therefore, the incorporeal Pitris are called Vairajas from being
the sons of Viraja, says Vayu Purana.
We could
multiply our proofs ad infinitum, but it is useless. The wise will understand
our meaning, the unwise are not required to. There are thirty-three crores, or
330 millions, of gods in India. But, as remarked by the learned lecturer on the
Bhagavad Gita, "they may be all devas, but are by no means all 'gods', in
the high spiritual sense one attributes to the term." "This is an
unfortunate blunder," he remarks, "generally committed by Europeans.
Deva is a kind of spiritual being, and because the same word is used in
ordinary parlance to mean god, it by no means follows that we have to worship
thirty-three crores of gods." And he adds suggestively: "These
beings, as may be naturally inferred have a certain affinity with one of the
three component Upadhis (basic principles) into which we have divided
man." -- (Vide Theosophist, Feb., 1887, et seq.)
The names of the
deities of a certain mystic class change with every Manvantara. Thus the twelve
great gods, Jayas, created by Brahma to assist him in the work of creation in
the very beginning of the Kalpa, and who, lost in Samadhi, neglected to create
-- whereupon they were cursed to be repeatedly born in each Manvantara till the
seventh -- are respectively called Ajitas, Tushitas, Satyas, Haris, Vaikunthas,
Sadhyas, and Adityas: they are Tushitas (in the second Kalpa), and Adityas in
this Vaivasvata period (see Vayu Purana), besides other names for each age. But
they are identical with the Manasa or Rajasas, and these with our incarnating
Dhyan Chohans. They are all classes of the Gnana-devas.
Yes; besides
those beings, who, like the Yakshas, Gandharvas, Kinaras, etc., etc., taken in
their individualities, inhabit the astral plane, there are real Devagnanams,
and to these classes of Devas belong the Adityas, the Vairajas, the Kumaras,
the Asuras, and all those high celestial beings whom Occult teaching calls
Manaswin, the Wise, foremost of all, and who would have made all men the
self-conscious spiritually intellectual beings they will be, had they not been
"cursed" to fall into generation, and to be reborn themselves as
mortals for their neglect of duty.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* 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 Puranas agree that three of these are arupa, formless, while four are
corporeal; the former being intellectual and spiritual, the latter material and
devoid of intellect. Esoterically, it is the Asuras who form the first three
classes of Pitris -- "born in the body of night" -- whereas the other
four were produced from the body of twilight. Their fathers, the gods, were
doomed to be born fools on Earth, according to Vayu Purana. The legends are
purposely mixed up and made very hazy: the Pitris being in one the sons of the
gods, and, in another those of Brahma; while a third makes them instructors of
their own fathers. It is the Hosts of the four material classes who create men
simultaneously on the seven zones.
Now, with regard
to the seven classes of Pitris, each of which is again divided into seven, a
word to students and a query to the profane. That class of the "Fire
Dhyanis," which we identify on undeniable grounds with the Agnishwattas,
is called in our school the "Heart" of the Dhyan-Chohanic Body; and
it is said to have incarnated in the third race of men and made them perfect.
The esoteric Mystagogy speaks of the mysterious relation existing between the
hebdomadic essence or substance of this angelic Heart and that of man, whose
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This was
hinted at in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., p. xxxviii., though the full explanation
could not then be given: "The Pitris are not the ancestors of the present
living men, but those of the first human kind or Adamic race; the spirits of
human races, which, on the great scale of descending evolution, preceded our
races of men, and were physically as well as spiritually, far superior to our
modem pigmies. In Manava-Dharma-Sastra they are called the Lunar
ancestors."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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-knowing" or
"omniscient Lord"; and Asura-Mazdha, become later Ahura-Mazdha, is,
as Benfey shows, "the Lord who bestows Intelligence" -- Asura-Medha
and Ahura-Mazdao. Elsewhere in this work it is shown, on equally good
authority, that the Indo-Iranian Asura was always regarded as sevenfold. This
fact, combined with the name Mazdha, as above, which makes of the sevenfold
Asura the "Lord," or "Lords" collectively "who bestow
Intelligence," connects the Amshaspends with the Asuras and with our
incarnating Dhyan Chohans, as well as with the Elohim, and the seven informing
gods of Egypt, Chaldea, and every other country.
Why these
"gods" refused to create men is not, as stated in exoteric
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Kumaras in connection with the
Zodiac.)
The Christian
system is not the only one which has degraded them into demons. Zoroastrianism
and even Brahmanism have profited thereby to obtain hold over the people's
mind. Even in Chaldean exotericism, Beings who refuse to create, i.e., who are
said to oppose thereby the Demiurgos, are also denounced as the Spirits of
Darkness. The Suras, who win their intellectual independence, fight the Suras
who are devoid thereof, who are shown as passing their lives in profitless
ceremonial worship based on blind faith -- a hint now ignored by the orthodox
Brahmins -- and forthwith the former become A-Suras. The first and mind-born
Sons of the Deity refuse to create progeny, and are cursed by Brahma to be born
as men. They are hurled down to Earth, which, later on, is transformed, in
theological dogma, into the infernal regions. Ahriman destroys the Bull created
by Ormazd -- which is the emblem of terrestrial illusive life, the "germ
of sorrow" -- and, forgetting that the perishing finite seed must die, in
order that the plant of immortality, the plant of spiritual, eternal life,
should sprout and live, Ahriman is proclaimed the enemy, the opposing power,
the devil. Typhon cuts Osiris into fourteen pieces, in order to prevent his
peopling the world and thus creating misery; and Typhon becomes, in the
exoteric, theological teaching, the Power of Darkness. But all this is the
exoteric shell. It is the worshippers of the latter who attribute to
disobedience and rebellion the effort and self-sacrifice of those who would
help men to their original status of divinity through self-conscious efforts;
and it is these worshippers of Form who have made demons of the Angels of
Light.
Esoteric
philosophy, however, teaches that one third* of the Dhyanis -- i.e., the three
classes of the Arupa Pitris, endowed with intelligence, "which is a
formless breath, composed of intellectual not elementary substances" (see
Harivamsa, 932) -- was simply doomed by the law of Karma and evolution to be
reborn (or incarnated) on Earth.** Some
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whence the
subsequent assertions of St. John's vision, referred to in his Apocalypse,
about "the great red Dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven
crowns upon his heads," whose "tail drew the third part of the stars
of heaven and did cast them to the earth" (ch. xii.).
** The verse
"did cast them to the Earth," plainly shows its origin in the
grandest and oldest allegory of the Aryan mystics, who, after the destruction
of the Atlantean [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 94 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of these were
Nirmanakayas from other Manvantaras. Hence we see them, in all the Puranas,
reappearing on this globe, in the third Manvantara, as Kings, Rishis and heroes
(read Third Root-Race). This tenet, being too philosophical and metaphysical to
be grasped by the multitudes, was, as already stated, disfigured by the
priesthood for the purpose of preserving a hold over them through superstitious
fear.
The supposed
"rebels," then, were simply those who, compelled by Karmic law to drink
the cup of gall to its last bitter drop, had to incarnate anew, and thus make
responsible thinking entities of the astral statues projected by their inferior
brethren. Some are said to have refused, because they had not in them the
requisite materials -- i.e., an astral body -- since they were arupa. The
refusal of others had reference to their having been Adepts and Yogis of long
past preceding Manvantaras; another mystery. But, later on, as Nirmanakayas,
they sacrificed themselves for the good and salvation of the Monads which were
waiting for their turn, and which otherwise would have had to linger for
countless ages in irresponsible, animal-like, though in appearance human,
forms. It may be a parable and an allegory within an allegory. Its solution is
left to the intuition of the student, if he only reads that which follows with
his spiritual eye.
As to their
fashioners or "Ancestors" -- those Angels who, in the exoteric
legends, obeyed the law -- they must be identical with the Barhishad Pitris, or
the Pitar-Devata, i.e., those possessed of the physical creative fire. They
could only create, or rather clothe, the human Monads with their own astral
Selves, but they could not make man in their image and likeness. "Man must
not be like one of us," say the creative gods, entrusted with the
fabrication of the lower animal but higher; (see Gen. and Plato's Timaeus).
Their creating the semblance of men out of their own divine Essence means,
esoterically, that it is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] giants and sorcerers, concealed the truth --
astronomical, physical, and divine, as it is a page out of pre-cosmic theogony
-- under various allegories. Its esoteric, true interpretation is a veritable
Theodice of the "Fallen Angels," so called; the willing and the
unwilling, the creators and those who refused to create, being now mixed up
most perplexingly by Christian Catholics, who forget that their highest
Archangel, St. Michael, who is shown to conquer (to master and to assimilate)
the DRAGON OF WISDOM and of divine Self-sacrifice (now miscalled and
calumniated as Satan), WAS THE FIRST TO REFUSE TO CREATE! This led to endless
confusion. So little does Christian theology understand the paradoxical
language of the East and its symbolism, that it even explains, in its dead
letter sense, the Chinese Buddhist and Hindu exoteric rite of raising a noise
during certain eclipses to scare away the "great red Dragon," which
laid a plot to carry away the light! But here "Light" means esoteric
Wisdom, and we have sufficiently explained the secret meaning of the terms
Dragon, Serpent, etc., etc., all of which refer to Adepts and Initiates.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* who, in their turn, could give only what
they had in their own natures, and no more. Subservient to eternal law, the
pure gods could only project out of themselves shadowy men, a little less
ethereal and spiritual, less divine and perfect than themselves -- shadows
still. The first humanity, therefore, was a pale copy of its progenitors; too
material, even in its ethereality, to be a hierarchy of gods; too spiritual and
pure to be MEN, endowed as it is with every negative (Nirguna) perfection.
Perfection, to be fully such, must be born out of imperfection, the
incorruptible must grow out of the corruptible, having the latter as its
vehicle and basis and contrast. Absolute light is absolute darkness, and vice
versa. In fact, there is neither light nor
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In spite of
all efforts to the contrary, Christian theology -- having burdened itself with
the Hebrew esoteric account of the creation of man, which is understood
literally -- cannot find any reasonable excuse for its "God, the
Creator," who produces a man devoid of mind and sense; nor can it justify
the punishment following an act, for which Adam and Eve might plead non compos.
For if the couple is admitted to be ignorant of good and evil before the eating
of the forbidden fruit, how could it be expected to know that disobedience was
evil? If primeval man was meant to remain a half-witted, or rather witless,
being, then his creation was aimless and even cruel, if produced by an
omnipotent and perfect God. But Adam and Eve are shown, even in Genesis, to be
created by a class of lower divine Beings, the Elohim, who are so jealous of
their personal prerogatives as reasonable and intelligent creatures, that they
will not allow man to become "as one of us." This is plain, even from
the dead-letter meaning of the Bible. The Gnostics, then, were right in regarding
the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy
denizens of the invisible World.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* to which class they
relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah.
Mankinds
different from the present are mentioned in all the ancient Cosmogonies. Plato
speaks, in the Phaedrus, of a winged race of men. Aristophanes (in Plato's
Banquet), speaks of a race androgynous and with round bodies. In Pymander, all
the animal kingdom even is double-sexed. Thus in § 18, it is said: "The
circuit having been accomplished, the knot was loosened. . . . and all the
animals, which were equally androgynous, were untied (separated) together with
man. . . . ." for. . . . "the causes had to produce effects on
earth."** Again, in the ancient Quiche Manuscript, the Popol Vuh --
published by the late Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg -- the first men are described
as a race "whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at
once": thus showing the divine knowledge of Gods, not mortals. The Secret
Doctrine, correcting the unavoidable exaggerations of popular fancy, gives the
facts as they are recorded in the Archaic symbols.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In Isis
Unveiled several of these Gnostic systems are given. One is taken from the
Codex Nazaraeus, the Scriptures of the Nazarenes, who, although they existed long
before the days of Christ, and even before the laws of Moses, were Gnostics,
and many of them Initiates. They held their "Mysteries of Life" in
Nazara (ancient and modern Nazareth), and their doctrines are a faithful echo
of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine -- some of which we are now
endeavouring to explain.
** See the
translation from the Greek by Francois, Monsieur de Foix, Evesque d'Ayre: the
work dedicated to Marguerite de France, Reine de Navarre. Edition of 1579,
Bordeaux.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 97 THE TREES OF LIFE.
(b) These
"shadows" were born "each of his own colour and kind," each
also "inferior to his creator," because the latter was a complete
being of his kind. The Commentaries refer the first sentence to the colour or
complexion of each human race thus evolved. In Pymander, the Seven primitive
men, created by Nature from the "heavenly Man," all partake of the
qualities of the "Seven Governors," or Rulers, who loved Man -- their
own reflection and synthesis.
In the Norse
Legends, one recognizes in Asgard, the habitat of the gods, as also in the Ases
themselves, the same mystical loci and personifications woven into the popular
"myths," as in our Secret Doctrine; and we find them in the Vedas,
the Puranas, the Mazdean Scriptures and the Kabala. The Ases of Scandinavia,
the rulers of the world which preceded ours, whose name means literally the "pillars
of the world," its "supports," are thus identical with the Greek
Cosmocratores, the "Seven Workmen or Rectors" of Pymander, the seven
Rishis and Pitris of India, the seven Chaldean gods and seven evil spirits, the
seven Kabalistic Sephiroth synthesised by the upper triad, and even the seven
Planetary Spirits of the Christian mystics. The Ases create the earth, the
seas, the sky and the clouds, the whole visible world, from the remains of the
slain giant Ymir; but they do not create MAN, but only his form from the Ask or
ash-tree. It is Odin who endows him with life and soul, after Lodur had given
him blood and bones, and finally it is Honir who furnishes him with his
intellect (manas) and with his conscious senses. The Norse Ask, the Hesiodic
Ash-tree, whence issued the men of the generation of bronze, the Third
Root-Race, and the Tzite tree of the Popol-Vuh, out of which the Mexican third
race of men was created, are all one.* This may be plainly seen by any reader.
But the Occult reason why the Norse Yggdrasil, the Hindu Aswatha, the Gogard,
the Hellenic tree of life, and the Tibetan Zampun, are one with the Kabalistic
Sephirothal Tree, and even with the Holy Tree made by Ahura Mazda, and the Tree
of Eden -- who among the western scholars can tell?** Nevertheless, the fruits
of all those "Trees," whether Pippala or Haoma or yet the more
prosaic apple, are the "plants of life," in fact and verity. The
prototypes of our races were all enclosed in the microcosmic tree, which grew
and developed within and under the great mundane macrocosmic tree***; and the
mystery is half revealed in the Dirghotamas, where it is said: "Pippala,
the sweet fruit of that tree upon which come spirits who
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Max
Muller's review of the Popol-Vuh.
** Mr. James
Darmesteter, the translator of the Vendidad, speaking of it, says: "The
tree, whatever it is . . ." (p. 209).
*** Plato's
"Timaeus."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Patala, the Hindu Naraka or Hell"? It does: but what is Ananta? As Sesha,
it is the almost endless Manvantaric cycle of time, and becomes infinite Time
itself, when called Ananta, the great seven-headed Serpent, on which rests
Vishnu, the eternal Deity, during Pralayic inactivity. What has Satan to do
with this highly metaphysical symbol? The Svastica is the most philosophically
scientific of all symbols, as also the most comprehensible. It is the summary
in a few lines of the whole work of creation, or evolution, as one should
rather say, from Cosmo-theogony down to Anthro-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 99 THE HAMMER OF THOR.
pogony, from the
indivisible unknown Parabrahm to the humble moneron of materialistic science,
whose genesis is as unknown to that science as is that of the All-Deity itself.
The Svastica is found heading the religious symbols of every old nation. It is
the "Worker's Hammer" in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the
"Hammer" just referred to in the "Book of Concealed
Mystery" (Ch. I., §§ 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), "which striketh sparks from
the flint" (Space), those sparks becoming worlds. It is "Thor's
Hammer," the magic weapon forged by the dwarfs against the Giants, or the
pre-cosmic Titanic forces of Nature, which rebel and, while alive in the region
of matter, will not be subdued by the Gods, the Agents of Universal Harmony,
but have first to be destroyed. This is why the world is formed out of the
relics of the murdered Ymir. The Svastica is the Miolnir, the
"storm-hammer"; and therefore it is said that when the Ases, the holy
gods, after having been purified by fire (the fire of passions and suffering in
their life-incarnations), become fit to dwell in Ida in eternal peace, then
Miolnir will become useless. This will be when the bonds of Hel (the
goddess-queen of the region of the Dead) will bind them no longer, for the
kingdom of evil will have passed away. "Surtur's flames had not destroyed
them, nor yet had the raging waters" of the several deluges. . . . .
"Then came the sons of Thor. They brought Miolnir with them, no longer as
a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heaven and
the new Earth. . . . . "*
Verily many are
its meanings! In the Macrocosmic work, the "HAMMER OF CREATION," with
its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual motion and
revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In that of the manifested Kosmos
and our Earth, it points to the rotation in the cycles of Time of the world's
axes and their equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastica [[diagram]]
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Asgard and the Gods": "The renewal of the World."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 100 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
its spiritual
death in the scholastic interpretations of mediaeval Anthropomorphists. It is
the Alpha and the Omega of universal creative Force, evolving from pure Spirit
and ending in gross Matter. It is also the key to the cycle of Science, divine
and human; and he who comprehends its full meaning is for ever liberated from
the toils of Mahamaya, the great Illusion and Deceiver. The light that shines
from under the divine hammer, now degraded into the mallet or gavel of the
Grand Masters of Masonic Lodges, is sufficient to dissipate the darkness of any
human schemes or fictions.
How prophetic
are the songs of the three Norse Goddesses, to whom the ravens of Odin whisper
of the past and the future, as they flutter around in their abode of crystal
beneath the flowing river. The songs are all written down in the "Scrolls
of Wisdom," of which many are lost but some still remain: and they repeat
in poetical allegory the teachings of the archaic ages. To summarise from Dr.
Wagner's "Asgard and the Gods," the "renewal of the world,"
which is a prophecy about the seventh Race of our Round told in the past tense.
The Miolnir had
done its duty in this Round, and:--
". . . . on
the field of Ida, the field of resurrection (for the Fifth Round), the sons of
the highest gods assembled, and in them their fathers rose again (the Egos of
all their past incarnations). They talked of the Past and the Present, and
remembered the wisdom and prophecies of their ancestor which had all been
fulfilled. Near them, but unseen of them, was the strong, the mighty One, who
rules all things. . . . and ordains the eternal laws that govern the world.
They all knew he was there, they felt his presence and his power, but were
ignorant of his name. At his command the new Earth rose out of the Waters of
Space. To the South above the Field of Ida, he made another heaven called
Audlang, and further off, a third, Widblain. Over Gimil's cave, a wondrous
palace was erected, covered with gold and shining bright in the sun."
These are the three gradually ascending planets of our "Chain." There
the Gods were enthroned, as they used to be. . . . From Gimil's heights (the
seventh planet or globe, the highest and the purest), they looked down upon the
happy descendants of LIF and LIFTHRASIR (the coming Adam and Eve of purified
humanity), and signed to them to CLIMB up higher, to rise in knowledge and
wisdom, step by step, from one "heaven to another," until they were
at last fit to be united to the Gods in the house of All-Father (p. 305).
He who knows the
doctrines of Esoteric Budhism, (or Wisdom), though so imperfectly sketched
hitherto, will see clearly the allegory contained in the above.
Its more
philosophical meaning will be better understood if the reader thinks carefully
over the myth of Prometheus. It is examined
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 101 THE DIVINE BABE, AGNI.
further on in
the light of the Hindu Pramantha. Degraded into a purely physiological symbol
by some Orientalists, and taken in connection with terrestrial fire only, their
interpretation is an insult to every religion, including Christianity, whose
greatest mystery is thus dragged down to matter. The "friction" of
divine Pramantha and Arani could suggest itself under this image only to the
brutal conceptions of the German materialists -- than whom there are none
worse. It is true that the Divine babe, Agni with the Sanskrit-speaking Race,
who became Ignis with the Latins, is born from the conjunction of Pramantha and
Arani (Svastica) during the sacrificial ceremony. But what of that? Twashtri
(Viswakarman) is the "divine artist and carpenter"* and is also the
Father of the gods and of creative fire in the Vedas. So ancient is the symbol
and so sacred, that there is hardly an excavation made on the sites of old
cities without its being found. A number of such terra cotta discs, called
fusaiolos, were found by Dr. Schliemann under the ruins of ancient Troy. Both
these forms [[diagram]] and [[diagram]] were excavated in great abundance,
their presence being one more proof that the ancient Trojans and their
ancestors were pure Aryans.
(c) Chhaya, as
already explained, is the astral image. It bears this meaning in Sanskrit
works. Thus Sanjna (Spiritual Consciousness), the wife of Surya, the Sun, is
shown retiring into the jungle to lead an ascetic life, and leaving behind to
her husband her Chhaya, shadow or image.
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"Father of the Sacred Fire," writes Prof. Jolly, "is Twashtri .
. . his mother was Maya. He himself was styled Akta (anointed, [[christos]]),
after the priest had poured upon his head the spirituous (?) SOMA, and on his
body butter purified by sacrifice"; ("Man before Metals," p.
190). The source of his information is not given by the French Darwinist. But
the lines are quoted to show that light begins to dawn even upon the
materialists. Adalbert Kuhn, in his "Die Herabkunft des Feuers,"
identifies the two signs [[diagram]] and [[diagram]] with Arani, and designates
them under this name. He adds: "This process of kindling fire naturally
led men to the idea of sexual reproduction," etc. Why could not a more
dignified idea, and one more occult, have led man to invent that symbol, in so
far as it is connected, in one of its aspects, with human reproduction? But its
chief symbolism refers to Cosmogony.
"Agni, in
the condition of Akta, or anointed, is suggestive of Christ," remarks
Prof. Jolly. "Maya, Mary, his mother; Twastri, St. Joseph, the carpenter
of the Bible." In the Rig Veda, Viswakarman is the highest and oldest of
the Gods and their "Father." He is the "carpenter or
builder," because God is called even by the monotheists, "the
Architect of the Universe." Still, the original idea is purely
metaphysical, and had no connection with the later Phallicism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Kavyavahana, electric
fire), WHICH IS THE FIRE WHICH BURNS IN EARTH. THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH CALLED
TO HIS HELP THE SOLAR FIRE (Suchi, the spirit in the Sun). THESE THREE (the
Pitris and the two fires) PRODUCED IN THEIR JOINT EFFORTS A GOOD RUPA. IT (the
form) COULD STAND, WALK, RUN, RECLINE AND FLY. YET IT WAS STILL BUT A CHHAYA, A
SHADOW WITH NO SENSE (b) . . . . . .
(a) Here an
explanation again becomes necessary in the light, and with the help of the
exoteric added to the esoteric scriptures. The "Manushyas" (men) and
the Manus are here equivalent to the Chaldean "Adam" -- this term not
meaning at all the first man, as with the Jews, or one solitary individual, but
mankind collectively, as with the Chaldeans and Assyrians. It is the four
orders or classes of Dhyan Chohans out of the seven, says the Commentary,
"who were the progenitors of the concealed man," i.e., the subtle
inner man. The "Lha" of the Moon, the lunar spirits, were, as already
stated, only the ancestors of his form, i.e., of the model according to which
Nature began her external work upon him. Thus primitive man was, when he
appeared, only a senseless Bhuta* or a "Phantom." This
"creation" was a failure, the reason of which will be explained in
the Commentary on Sloka 20.
(b) This attempt
was again a failure. It allegorizes the vanity of physical nature's unaided
attempts to construct even a perfect animal -- let alone man. For the
"Fathers," the lower Angels, are all Nature-Spirits and the higher
Elementals also possess an intelligence of their own; but this is not enough to
construct a THINKING man. "Living Fire" was needed, that fire which
gives the human mind its self-perception and self-consciousness, or Manas; and
the progeny of Parvaka and Suchi are the animal electric and solar fires, which
create animals, and could thus furnish but a physical living constitution to
that first astral model of man. The first creators, then, were the Pygmalions
of primeval man: they failed to animate the statue -- intellectually.
This Stanza we
shall see is very suggestive. It explains the mystery of, and fills the gap
between, the informing principle in man -- the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is not
clear why "Bhutas" should be rendered by the Orientalists as meaning
"evil Spirits" in the Puranas. In the Vishnu Purana, Book I, ch. 5,
the Sloka simply says: "Bhutas -- fiends, frightful from being
monkey-coloured and carnivorous"; and the word in India now means ghosts,
ethereal or astral phantoms, while in esoteric teaching it means elementary
substances, something made of attenuated, noncompound essence, and,
specifically, the astral double of any man or animal. In this case these
primitive men are the doubles of the first ethereal Dhyanis or Pitris.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 103 THE DIVINE REBELS.
HIGHER SELF or
human Monad -- and the animal Monad, both one and the same, although the former
is endowed with divine intelligence, the latter with instinctual faculty alone.
How is the difference to be explained, and the presence of that HIGHER SELF in
man accounted for?
"The Sons
of MAHAT are the quickeners of the human Plant. They are the Waters falling
upon the arid soil of latent life, and the Spark that vivifies the human
animal. They are the Lords of Spiritual Life eternal." . . . . "In
the beginning (in the Second Race) some (of the Lords) only breathed of their
essence into Manushya (men); and some took in man their abode."
This shows that
not all men became incarnations of the "divine Rebels," but only a
few among them. The remainder had their fifth principle simply quickened by the
spark thrown into it, which accounts for the great difference between the
intellectual capacities of men and races. Had not the "sons of Mahat,"
speaking allegorically, skipped the intermediate worlds, in their impulse
toward intellectual freedom, the animal man would never have been able to reach
upward from this earth, and attain through self-exertion his ultimate goal. The
cyclic pilgrimage would have to be performed through all the planes of
existence half unconsciously, if not entirely so, as in the case of the
animals. It is owing to this rebellion of intellectual life against the morbid
inactivity of pure spirit, that we are what we are -- self-conscious, thinking
men, with the capabilities and attributes of Gods in us, for good as much as
for evil. Hence the REBELS are our saviours. Let the philosopher ponder well
over this, and more than one mystery will become clear to him. It is only by
the attractive force of the contrasts that the two opposites -- Spirit and
Matter -- can be cemented on Earth, and, smelted in the fire of self-conscious
experience and suffering, find themselves wedded in Eternity. This will reveal
the meaning of many hitherto incomprehensible allegories, foolishly called
"fables." (Vide infra, "The Secret of Satan.")
It explains, to
begin with, the statement made in Pymander: that the "heavenly MAN,"
the "Son of the Father," who partook of the nature and essence of the
Seven Governors, or creators and Rulers of the material world, "peeped
through the Harmony and, breaking through the Seven Circles of Fire, made
manifest the downward-born nature."* It explains every verse in that
Hermetic narrative, as also the Greek allegory of Prometheus. Most important of
all, it explains the many allegorical accounts about the "Wars in
Heaven," including that of Revelation with respect to the Christian dogma
of the fallen angels. It explains the "rebellion" of the oldest and highest
Angels, and the meaning of their being cast down from Heaven into the depths of
Hell,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Pymander," Bk. II., verses 17 to 29.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 105 MAN'S FATHER, THE SUN.
17. THE BREATH
(human Monad) NEEDED A FORM; THE FATHERS GAVE IT. THE BREATH NEEDED A GROSS
BODY; THE EARTH MOULDED IT. THE BREATH NEEDED THE SPIRIT OF LIFE; THE SOLAR
LHAS BREATHED IT INTO ITS FORM. THE BREATH NEEDED A MIRROR OF ITS BODY (astral
shadow); "WE GAVE IT OUR OWN," SAID THE DHYANIS. THE BREATH NEEDED A
VEHICLE OF DESIRES (Kama Rupa); "IT HAS IT," SAID THE DRAINER OF
WATERS (Suchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct). THE BREATH NEEDS A
MIND TO EMBRACE THE UNIVERSE; "WE CANNOT GIVE THAT," SAID THE
FATHERS. "I NEVER HAD IT," SAID THE SPIRIT OF THE EARTH. "THE
FORM WOULD BE CONSUMED WERE I TO GIVE IT MINE," SAID THE GREAT (solar)
FIRE . . . . (nascent) MAN REMAINED AN EMPTY, SENSELESS BHUTA . . . . THUS HAVE
THE BONELESS GIVEN LIFE TO THOSE WHO BECAME (later) MEN WITH BONES IN THE THIRD
(race) (a).
As a full
explanation is found in Stanza V. (Vide paragraph (a)), a few remarks will now
suffice. The "Father" of primitive physical man, or of his body, is
the vital electric principle residing in the Sun. The Moon is its Mother,
because of that mysterious power in the Moon which has as decided an influence
upon human gestation and generation, which it regulates, as it has on the
growth of plants and animals. The "Wind" or Ether, standing in this
case for the agent of transmission by which those influences are carried down
from the two luminaries and diffused upon Earth, is referred to as the
"nurse"; while "Spiritual Fire" alone makes of man a divine
and perfect entity.
Now what is that
"Spiritual Fire"? In alchemy it is HYDROGEN, in general; while in
esoteric actuality it is the emanation or the Ray which proceeds from its
noumenon, the "Dhyan of the first Element." Hydrogen is gas only on
our terrestrial plane. But even in chemistry hydrogen "would be the only
existing form of matter, in our sense of the term,"* and is very nearly
allied to protyle, which is our 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Genesis of the Elements," by Prof. W. Crookes, p. 21.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Kumaras and Rudras headed by Kartikeya -- a
Kumara also. This is quite evident even exoterically; and these Hindu deities
were, like the Kabeiri, the personified sacred Fires of the most occult powers
of Nature. The several branches of the Aryan Race, the Asiatic and the
European, the Hindu and the Greek, did their best to conceal their true nature,
if not their importance. As in the case of the Kumaras, the number of the
Kabeiri is uncertain. Some say that there were three or four only; others say
seven. Aschieros, Achiosersa, Achiochersus, and Camillus may very well stand
for the alter egos of the four Kumaras -- Sanat-Kumara, Sananda, Sanaka, and
Sanatana. The former deities, whose reputed father was Vulcan, were often
confounded with the Dioscuri, Corybantes, Anaces, etc.; just as the Kumara,
whose reputed father is Brahma, (or rather, the "Flame of his Wrath,"
which prompted him to perform the ninth or Kumara creation, resulting in Rudra
or Nilalohita (Siva) and the Kumaras), were confounded with the Asuras, the
Rudras, and the Pitris, for the simple reason that they are all one -- i.e.,
correlative Forces and Fires. There is no space to describe these "fires"
and their real meaning here, though we may attempt to do so if the third and
fourth volumes of this work are ever published. Meanwhile a few more
explanations may be added.
The foregoing
are all mysteries which must be left to the personal intuition of the student
for solution, rather than described. If he would learn something of the secret
of the FIRES, let him turn to certain works of the Alchemists, who very
correctly connect fire with every element, as do the Occultists. The reader
must remember that the ancients considered religion, and the natural sciences
along with philosophy, to be closely and inseparably linked together.
AEsculapius was the Son of Apollo -- the Sun or FIRE of Life; at once Helios,
Pythios, and the god of oracular Wisdom. In exoteric religions, as much as in
esoteric philosophy, the Elements -- especially fire, water, and air -- are
made the progenitors of our five physical senses, and hence are directly
connected (in an occult way) with them. These physical senses pertain even to a
lower creation than the one called in the Puranas Pratisarga, or secondary
Creation. "Liquid fire proceeds from indiscrete fire," says an Occult
axiom.
"The Circle
is the THOUGHT; the diameter (or the line) is the WORD;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 107 BATH-KOL, DAUGHTER OF THE VOICE.
and their union
is LIFE." In the Kabala, Bath-Kol is the daughter of the Divine Voice, or
primordial light, Shekinah. In the Puranas and Hindu exotericism, Vach (the
Voice) is the female Logos of Brahma -- a permutation of Aditi, primordial
light. And if Bath-Kol, in Jewish mysticism, is an articulate praeternatural
voice from heaven, revealing to the "chosen people" the sacred
traditions and laws, it is only because Vach was called, before Judaism, the
"Mother of the Vedas," who entered into the Rishis and inspired them
by her revelations; just as Bath-Kol is said to have inspired the prophets of
Israel and the Jewish High-Priests. And both exist to this day, in their
respective sacred symbologies, because the ancients associated sound or Speech
with the Ether of Space, of which Sound is the characteristic. Hence Fire,
Water and Air are the primordial Cosmic Trinity. "I am thy Thought, thy
God, more ancient than the moist principle, the light that radiates within
Darkness (Chaos), and the shining Word of God (Sound) is the Son of the
Deity." ("Pymander," § 6.)*
Thus we have to
study well the "Primary creation," before we can understand the
Secondary. The first Race had three rudimentary elements in it; and no fire as
yet; because, with the Ancients, the evolution of man, and the growth and
development of his spiritual and physical senses, were subordinate to the
evolution of the elements on the Cosmic plane of this Earth. All proceeds from
Prabhavapyaya, the evolution of the creative and sentient principles in the
gods, and even of the so-called creative deity himself. This is found in the
names and appellations given to Vishnu in exoteric scriptures. As the
Protologos (the Orphic), he is called Purvaja, "pregenetic," and then
the other names connect him in their descending order more and more with
matter.
The following
order on parallel lines may be found in the evolution of the Elements and the
Senses; or in Cosmic terrestrial "MAN" or "Spirit," and
mortal physical man:--
1. Ether ...
Hearing ... Sound.
2. Air ... Touch
... Sound and Touch.
3. Fire, or
Light ... Sight ... Sound, Touch and Colour.
4. Water ...
Taste ... Sound, Touch, Colour and Taste.
5. Earth ...
Smell ... Sound, Touch, Colour, Taste and Smell.
As seen, each
Element adds to its own characteristics, those of its
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The opponents
of Hinduism may call the above Pantheism, Polytheism, or anything they may
please. If Science is not entirely blinded by prejudice, it will see in this
account a profound knowledge of natural Sciences and Physics, as well as of Metaphysics
and Psychology. But to find this out, one has to study the personifications,
and then convert them into chemical atoms. It will then be found to satisfy
both physical and even purely materialistic Science, as well as those who see
in evolution the work of the "Great Unknown Cause" in its phenomenal
and illusive aspects.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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: Bhutas, which
proceeded from Bhutadi, "origin," or the "original place whence
sprung the Elements." Hence they proceeded with all the rest from
Prabhavapyaya, "the place whence is the origination, and into which is the
resolution of all things," as explained by the Commentator. Whence also
our physical senses. Whence even the highest "created" deity itself,
in our philosophy. As one with the Universe, whether we call him Brahma,
Iswara, or Purusha, he is a manifested deity, -- hence created, or limited and
conditioned. This is easily proven, even from the exoteric teachings.
After being
called the incognizable, eternal Brahma (neuter or abstract), the
Punda-Rikaksha, "supreme and imperishable glory," once that instead
of Sadaika-Rupa, "changeless" or "immutable" Nature, he is
addressed as Ekanaka-Rupa, "both single and manifold," he, the cause,
becomes merged with his own effects; and his names, if placed in esoteric
order, show the following descending scale:--
1. Mahapurusha
or Paramatman ........ Supreme Spirit.
2. Atman or
Purvaja (Protologos) .... The living Spirit of Nature.
3. Indriyatman,
or Hrishikesa ....... Spiritual or intellectual soul (One with the senses).
5. Bhutatman
........................ The living, or Life Soul.
6. Kshetrajna
....................... Embodied soul, or the Universe of Spirit and Matter.
7. Bhrantidarsanatah
................ False perception -- Material Universe.
The last name
means something perceived or conceived of, owing to false and erroneous
apprehension, as a material form; but, in fact, only Maya, illusion, as all is
in our physical universe.
It is in strict
analogy with ITS attributes in both the spiritual and material worlds, that the
evolution of the Dhyan Chohanic Essences takes place; the characteristics of
the latter being reflected, in their turn, in Man, collectively, and in each of
his principles; every one of which contains in itself, in the same progressive
order, a portion of their various "fires" and elements.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 109 THE TABULA SMARAGDINA.
STANZA V.
THE EVOLUTION OF
THE SECOND RACE.
-------
§§ (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.
---------------------
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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 111 THE SHELLS OF SHEBA HACHALOTH.
The entire
scheme is in the "Chaldean Book of Numbers," and even in the Zohar,
if one only understood the meaning of the apocalyptic hints. First comes
En-Soph, the "Concealed of the Concealed," then the Point, Sephira
and the later Sephiroth; then the Atzilatic World, a World of Emanations that
gives birth to three other worlds -- called the Throne, the abode of pure
Spirits; the second, the World of Formation, or Jetzira, the habitat of the
Angels who sent forth the Third, or World of Action, the Asiatic World, which
is the Earth or our World; and yet it is said of it that this world, also
called Kliphoth, containing the (six other) Spheres, [[hebrew]], 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 [[angelos]], Angel, called the great Teacher; and under him are the
Angels of the third World, Jetzira, whose ten and seven classes are the
Sephiroth,* of whom it is said that "they inhabit and vivify this world as
Essential Entities and Intelligences, whose correlatives and contraries inhabit
the third or Asiatic World." These "Contraries" are called
"the Shells," [[hebrew]], or demons,** who inhabit the seven
habitations called Sheba Hachaloth, which are simply the seven zones of our
globe. Their prince is called in the Kabala Samael, the Angel of Death, who is
also the seducing serpent Satan; but that Satan is also Lucifer, the bright
angel of Light, the Light and Life-bringer, the "Soul" alienated from
the Holy Ones, the other angels, and for a period, anticipating the time when
they would have descended on Earth to incarnate in their turn.
"The Souls
(Monads) are pre-existent in the world of Emanations," (Book of Wisdom
viii., 20); and the Zohar teaches that in the "Soul" "is the
real man, i.e., the Ego and the conscious I AM: 'Manas.' "
"They
descend from the pure air to be chained to bodies," says Josephus
repeating the belief of the Essenes (De Bello Judaeo, 11, 12). "The air is
full of Souls," states Philo, "they descend to be tied to mortal
bodies, being desirous to live in them." (De Gignat, 222 c.; De Somniis,
p. 455)***; because through, and in, the human form they will become
progressive beings, whereas the nature of the angel is purely intransitive,
therefore man has in him the potency of transcending the faculties of the
Angels. Hence the Initiates in India say that it is the Brahmin, the
twice-born, who rules the gods or devas; and Paul repeated it in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Vol. I.
Part III., "Gods, Monads and Atoms." It is symbolised in the
Pythagorean Triangle, the 10 dots within, and the seven points of the Triangle
and the Cube.
** Whence the
Kabalistic name of Shells given to the astral form, the body called Kama Rupa,
left behind by the higher angels in the shape of the higher Manas, when the
latter leaves for Devachan, forsaking its residue.
*** Which shows
that the Essenes believed in re-birth and many reincarnations on Earth, as
Jesus himself did, a fact we can prove from the New Testament itself.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 112 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
I Corinthians
vi., 3: "Know ye not that we (the Initiates) shall judge angels"?
Finally, it is
shown in every ancient scripture and Cosmogony that man evolved primarily as a
luminous incorporeal form, over which, like the molten brass round the clay
model of the sculptor, the physical frame of his body was built by, through,
and from, the lower forms and types of animal terrestrial life. "The Soul
and the Form when descending on Earth put on an earthly garment," says the
Zohar. His protoplastic body was not formed of that matter of which our mortal
frames are fashioned. "When Adam dwelt in the garden of Eden, he was
clothed in the celestial garment, which is the garment of heavenly light. . . .
light of that light which was used in the garden of Eden," (Zohar II 229
B). "Man (the heavenly Adam) was created by the ten Sephiroth of the
Jetziric world, and by the common power they (the seven angels of a still lower
world) engendered the earthly Adam . . . . First Samael fell, and then
deceiving (?) man, caused his fall also."
(b) The
sentence: "They were the shadows of the shadows of the Lords," i.e.,
the progenitors created man out of their own astral bodies, explains an
universal belief. The Devas are credited in the East with having no shadows of
their own. "The devas cast no shadows," and this is the sure sign of
a good holy Spirit.
Why had they
"no fire or water of their own"?* Because:--
(c) That which
Hydrogen is to the elements and gases on the objective plane, its noumenon is
in the world of mental or subjective phenomena; since its trinitarian latent
nature is mirrored in its three
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is
corroborated, however, as we have shown, by the esotericism of Genesis. Not
only are the animals created therein after the "Adam of Dust," but
vegetation is shown in the Earth before "the heavens and the Earth were
created." "Every plant of the field before it (the day that the
heavens and the Earth were made, v. 4) was in the Earth" (v. 5). Now,
unless the Occult interpretation is accepted, which shows that in this 4th
Round the Globe was covered with vegetation, and the first (astral) humanity
was produced before almost anything could grow and develop thereon, what can
the dead letter mean? Simply that the grass was in the earth of the Globe
before that Globe was created? And yet the meaning of verse 6, which says that
"there went up a mist from the Earth" and watered the whole face of
the Earth before it rained, and caused the trees, etc., to grow, is plain
enough. It shows also in what geological period it occurred, and further what
is meant by "Heaven and Earth." It meant the firmament and dry
incrustated land, separated and ridden of its vapours and exhalations.
Moreover, the student must bear in mind that, as Adam Kadmon, "the male
and female being" of Genesis, ch. I., is no physical human being but the
host of the Elohim, among which was Jehovah himself -- so the animals mentioned
in that chapter as "created" before man in the dead letter text, were
no animals, but the Zodiacal signs and other sidereal bodies.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 113 THE SECRET WORK OF CHIRAM.
active emanations
from the three higher principles in man, namely, "Spirit, Soul, and
Mind," or Atma, Buddhi, and Manas. It is the spiritual and also the
material human basis. Rudimentary man, having been nursed by the
"air" or the "wind," becomes the perfect man later on;
when, with the development of "Spiritual fire," the noumenon of the
"Three in One" within his Self, he acquires from his inner Self, or
Instructor, the Wisdom of Self-Consciousness, which he does not possess in the
beginning. Thus here again divine Spirit is symbolised by the Sun or Fire;
divine Soul by Water and the Moon, both standing for the Father and Mother of
Pneuma, human Soul, or Mind, symbolised by the Wind or air, 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 [[diagram]]
reads "Root," as in the Secondary likewise.
Thus in Alchemy
or Western Hermetism (a variant on Eastern Esotericism) we find:--
X. . . . . . . .
. [[diagram]] . . . . . . X.
Sulphur . . . .
. . Flamma . . . . . . Spiritus
Hydrargyum . . .
. . Natura . . . . . . Aqua
Sal . . . . . .
. . Mater . . . . . . Sanguis
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, from Isa, but this is primarily the name of
Siva, the Destroyer; and the three Vedic chief gods are Agni (ignis), Vayu, and
Surya -- Fire, Air, and the Sun, three occult degrees of fire. In the Hebrew
[[hebrew]] (aza), means to illuminate, and [[hebrew]] (asha) is fire. In Occultism,
"to kindle a fire" is synonymous to evoking one of the three great
fire-powers, or "to call on God." In Sanskrit Osch or Asch is fire or
heat; and the Egyptian word Osiris is compounded (as shown by Schelling) of the
two primitives aish and asr, or a "fireenchanter." Aesar in the old
Etruscan meant a God (being perhaps derived from Asura of the Vedas). Aeswar
and Eswara are analogous terms, as Dr. Kenealy thought. In the Bhagavad Gita we
read, "Iswara resides in every mortal being and puts in motion, by his
supernatural power, all things which mount on the Wheel of Time." It is
the creator and the destroyer, truly. "The primitive fire was supposed to
have an insatiable appetite for devouring. Maximus of Tyre relates that the
ancient Persians threw into the fire combustible matter crying: 'Devour, oh
Lord!' In the Irish language Easam, or Asam, means 'to create,' and Aesar was
the name of an ancient Irish god, meaning 'to light a fire' " (Kenealy).
The Christian Kabalists and symbologists who disfigured Pymander -- prominent
among them the Bishop of Ayre, Francois de Tours, in the 16th century -- divide
the elements in this way:--
The four
elements formed from divine substances and the Spirits of the Salts of Nature
represented by --
[[diagram]]. .
St. Matthew. . Angel-Man. . Water. . (Jesus-Christ, Angel-Man, Mikael)
A - [[diagram]]
. St. Mark. . .The Lion . . Fire
E - Y . . . . .
. St. Luke. . . The Bull . . Earth
I - O . . . . .
. St. John. . . The Eagle . . Air*
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* To those who
would inquire "What has Hydrogen to do with air or oxygena- [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 115 SONS OF YOGA.
H, THE
QUINTESSENCE, [[HEPHLOX]], FLAMMA-VIRGO (virgin oil), FLAMMA DURISSIMA, VIRGO,
LUCIS AETERNA MATER.
The first race
of men were, then, simply the images, the astral doubles, of their Fathers, who
were the pioneers, or the most progressed Entities from a preceding though
lower sphere, the shell of which is now our Moon. But even this shell is
all-potential, for, having generated the Earth, it is the phantom of the Moon
which, attracted by magnetic affinity, sought to form its first inhabitants,
the pre-human monsters, (vide supra, Stanza II.). To assure himself of this,
the student has again to turn to the Chaldean Fragments, and read what Berosus
says. Berosus obtained his information, he tells us, from Ea, the male-female
deity of Wisdom. While the gods were generated in its androgynous bosom
(Svabhavat, Mother-space) its (the Wisdom's) reflections became on Earth the
woman Omoroka, who is the Chaldean Thavatth, or the Greek Thalassa, the Deep or
the Sea, which esoterically and even exoterically is the Moon. It was the Moon
(Omoroka) who presided over the monstrous creation of nondescript beings which
were slain by the Dyanis. (Vide Hibbert Lectures, p. 370 et seq.; also in Part
II. "Adam-Adami.")
Evolutionary law
compelled the lunar "Fathers" to pass, in their monadic condition,
through all the forms of life and being on this globe; but at the end of the
Third Round, they were already human in their divine nature, and were thus
called upon to become the creators of the forms destined to fashion the
tabernacles of the less progressed Monads, whose turn it was to incarnate.
These "Forms" are called "Sons of Yoga," because Yoga
(union with Brahma exoterically) is the supreme condition of the passive
infinite deity, since it contains all the divine energies and is the essence of
Brahma, who is said (as Brahma) to create everything through Yoga power.
Brahma, Vishnu and Siva are the most powerful energies of God, Brahma, the
Neuter, says a
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] tion?" it is answered: "Study first
the ABC of Occult Alchemy." In their anxiety, however, to identify
Pymander, "the mouth of Mystery," with St. John the Baptist
prophetically, they thus identified also the 7 Kabeiri and the Assyrian Bulls
with the Cherubs of the Jews and the Apostles. Having, moreover, to draw a line
of demarcation between the four and the three -- the latter being the Fallen
Angels; and furthermore to avoid connecting these with the "Seven Spirits
of the Face," the Archangels, they unceremoniously threw out all they did
not choose to recognise. Hence the perversion in the order of the Elements, in
order to make them dovetail with the order of the Gospels, and to identify the
Angel-Man with Christ. With the Chaldees, the Egyptians, from whom Moses
adopted the Chroub (Cherubs in their animal form), and the Ophites; with all
these, the Angels, the Planets, and the Elements, were symbolized mystically
and alchemically by the Lion (Mikael); the Bull (Uriel); the Dragon (Raphael);
the Eagle (Gabriel); the Bear (Thot-Sabaoth); the Dog (Erataoth); the Mule
(Uriel or Thartharaoth). All these have a qualificative meaning.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 116 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Puranic text.
Yoga here is the same as Dhyana, which word is again synonymous with Yoga in the
Tibetan text, where the "Sons of Yoga" are called "Sons of
Dhyana," or of that abstract meditation through which the Dhyani-Buddhas
create their celestial sons, the Dhyani-Bodhisattvas. All the creatures in the
world have each a superior above. "This superior, whose inner pleasure it
is to emanate into them, cannot impart efflux until they have adored" --
i.e., meditated as during Yoga. (Sepher M'bo Ska-arim, translated by Isaac
Myer, Qabbalah, pp. 109-111.)
-------
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."*
"Budding" is the very word used in the Stanza. How could these
Chhayas reproduce themselves otherwise; viz., procreate the Second Race, since
they were ethereal, a-sexual, and even devoid, as yet, of the vehicle of
desire, or Kama Rupa, which evolved only in the Third Race? They evolved the
Second Race unconsciously, as do some plants. Or, perhaps, as the Amoeba, only
on a more ethereal, impressive, and larger scale. If, indeed, the cell-theory
applies equally to Botany and Zoology, and extends to Morphology, as well as to
the Physiology of organisms,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Laing's
"Modern Science and Modern Thought," p. 90.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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"* -- 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, [[diagram]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Book I.
Part I. Stanza VII Commentary 10.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 118 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
in each Race, each
covering aeons of time. What physiologist or biologist could tell whether the
present mode of generation, with all its phases of gestation, is older than
half a million, or at most one million of years, since their cycle of
observation began hardly half a century ago.
Primeval human
hermaphrodites are a fact in Nature well known to the ancients, and form one of
Darwin's greatest perplexities. Yet there is certainly no impossibility, but,
on the contrary, a great probability that hermaphroditism existed in the
evolution of the early races; while on the grounds of analogy, and on that of
the existence of one universal law in physical evolution, acting indifferently
in the construction of plant, animal, and man, it must be so. The mistaken
theories of mono-genesis, and the descent of man from the mammals instead of
the reverse, are fatal to the completeness of evolution as taught in modern
schools on Darwinian lines, and they will have to be abandoned in view of the
insuperable difficulties which they encounter. Occult tradition -- if the terms
Science and Knowledge are denied in this particular to antiquity -- can alone
reconcile the inconsistencies and fill the gap. "If thou wilt know the
invisible, open thine eye wide on the visible," says a Talmudic axiom.
In the
"Descent of Man"* occurs the following passage; which shows how near
Darwin came to the acceptance of this ancient teaching.
"It has
been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various
accessory parts appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong
to the opposite sex. . . . Some remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate
kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous** . . . But here we
encounter a singular difficulty. In the mammalian class the males possess
rudiments of a uterus with the adjacent passages in the Vesiculae prostaticae;
they bear also rudiments of mammae, and some male marsupials have traces of a
marsupial sac. Other analogous facts could be added. Are we then to suppose
that some extremely ancient mammal continued androgynous after it had acquired
the chief distinctions of its class, and therefore after it had diverged from
the lower classes of the vertebrate kingdom? This seems very improbable,*** for
we have to look to fishes, the lowest of all the classes, to find any still
existent androgynous forms."
Mr. Darwin is
evidently strongly disinclined to adopt the hypothesis which the facts so
forcibly suggest, viz., that of a primeval androgynous
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Second
Edition, p. 161.
** And why not
all the progenitive first Races, human as well as animal; and why one
"remote progenitor"?
*** Obviously
so, on the lines of Evolutionism, which traces the mammalia to some amphibian
ancestor.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Medusae and Ascidians." Mankind, thus constituted
physiologically, "would retain a sufficient evolutive force for the rapid
production of the various great human races."
De Quatrefages
criticises this position in the "Human Species." It is unscientific,
he says, or, properly speaking, Naudin's ideas "do not form a scientific
theory," inasmuch as primordial Blastema is connected
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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" (p. 125).
Nor will it have
any more to say to the occult teachings, which are to some extent approached by
Naudin. For if we but see in his "primordial Blastema" the
Dhyan-Chohanic essence, the Chhaya or double of the Pitris, which contains
within itself the potentiality of all forms, we are quite in accord. But there
are two real and vital differences between our teachings. M. Naudin declares
that evolution has progressed by sudden leaps and bounds, instead of extending
slowly over millions of years; and his primordial Blastema is endowed only with
blind instincts -- a kind of unconscious First Cause in the manifested Kosmos
-- which is an absurdity. Whereas it is our Dhyan Chohanic essence -- the
causality of the primal cause which creates physical man -- which is the
living, active and potential matter, pregnant per se with that animal
consciousness of a superior kind, such as is found in the ant and the beaver,
which produces the long series of physiological differentiations. Apart from
this his "ancient and general process of creation" from
proto-organisms is as occult as any theory of Paracelsus or Khunrath could be.
Moreover, the
Kabalistic works are full of the proof of this. The Zohar, for instance, says
that every type in the visible has its prototype in the invisible Universe.
"All that which is in the lower (our) world is found in the upper. The
Lower and the Upper act and react upon each other." (Zohar, fol. 186.)
Vide infra, Part II., "Esoteric Tenets corroborated in every
Scripture."
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 121 LEDA, CASTOR AND POLLUX.
of the
Brahmanical system, as the title is a reference to their mode of birth, these
Pitris being stated to have issued from Brahma's "body of twilight."
(See the Puranas.)
-------
21. WHEN THE
RACE BECAME OLD, THE OLD WATERS MIXED WITH THE FRESHER WATERS (a); WHEN THE
DROPS BECAME TURBID, THEY VANISHED AND DISAPPEARED, IN THE NEW STREAM, IN THE
HOT STREAM OF LIFE. THE OUTER OF THE FIRST BECAME THE INNER OF THE SECOND. (b).
THE OLD WING BECAME THE SHADOW, AND THE SHADOW OF THE WING (c).
(a) The old
(primitive) Race merged in the second race, and became one with it.
(b) This is the
mysterious process of transformation and evolution of mankind. The material of
the first forms -- shadowy, ethereal, and negative -- was drawn or absorbed
into, and thus became the complement of the forms of the Second Race. The Commentary
explains this by saying that, as the First Race was simply composed of the
astral shadows of the creative progenitors, having of course neither astral nor
physical bodies of their own -- this Race never died. Its "men"
melted gradually away, becoming absorbed in the bodies of their own
"sweat-born" progeny, more solid than their own. The old form
vanished and was absorbed by, disappeared in, the new form, more human and
physical. There was no death in those days of a period more blissful than the
Golden Age; but the first, or parent material was used for the formation of the
new being, to form the body and even the inner or lower principles or bodies of
the progeny.
(c) When the
shadow retires, i.e. when the astral body becomes covered with more solid
flesh, man develops a physical body. The "wing," or the ethereal form
that produced its shadow and image, became the shadow of the astral body and
its own progeny. The expression is queer but original.
As there may be
no occasion to refer to this mystery later, it is as well to point out at once
the dual meaning contained in the Greek myth bearing upon this particular phase
of evolution. It is found in the several variants of the allegory of Leda and
her two sons Castor and Pollux, which variants have each a special meaning.
Thus in Book XI. of the Odyssey, Leda is spoken of as the spouse of Tyndarus,
who gave birth by her husband "to two sons of valiant heart" --
Castor
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 122 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and Pollux.
Jupiter endows them with a marvellous gift and privilege. They are
semi-immortal; they live and die, each in turn, and every alternate day;
[[eteremeroi*]]. As the Tyndaridae, the twin brothers are an astronomical
symbol, and stand for Day and Night; their two wives, Phoebe and Hilasira, the
daughters of Apollo or the Sun, personifying the Dawn and the Twilight.**
Again, in the allegory where Zeus is shown as the father of the two heroes --
born from the egg to which Leda gives birth -- the myth is entirely
theogonical. It relates to that group of cosmic allegories in which the world
is described as born from an egg. For Leda assumes in it the shape of a white
swan when uniting herself to the Divine Swan.*** Leda is the mythical bird,
then, to which, in the traditions of various peoples of the Aryan race, are
attributed various ornithological forms of birds which all lay golden eggs.****
In the Kalevala (the Epic Poem of Finland), the beauteous daughter of the
Ether, "the Water Mother," creates the world in conjunction with a
"Duck" (another form of the Swan or Goose, Kalahansa), who lays six
golden eggs, and the seventh, "an egg of iron," in her lap. But the
variant of the Leda allegory which has a direct reference to mystic man is
found in Pindar***** only, with a slighter reference to it in the Homeric
hymns.****** Castor and Pollux are in it no longer the Dioscuri (of Apollodorus
III. 10, 7); but become the highly significant symbol of the dual man, the
Mortal and the Immortal. Not only this, but as will now be seen, they are also
the symbol of the Third Race, and its transformation from the animal man into a
god-man with only an animal body.
Pindar shows
Leda uniting herself in the same night to her husband and also to the father of
the gods -- Zeus. Thus Castor is the son of the Mortal, Pollux the progeny of
the Immortal. In the allegory made up for the occasion, it is said that in a
riot of vengeance against the Apherides******* Pollux kills Lynceus -- "of
all mortals he whose sight is the most penetrating" -- but Castor is
wounded by Idas, "he who sees and knows." Zeus puts an end to the
fight by hurling his thunderbolt and killing the last two combatants. Pollux
finds his brother dying.******** In
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Odyssey," xi. 298 to 305; "Iliad," iii., 243.
** Chants
Cypriaques, Hyg. Tal., 80. Ovid, "Fasti," etc. See Decharme's
"Mythologie de la Grece Antique."
*** See Brahma
Kalahamsa in Book I. Stanza III., p. 78.
**** See
Decharme's "Mythologie," etc., p. 652.
***** Nem., x.,
80 et seq. Theocras, xxiv., 131.
****** xxxiv.,
v. 5; Theocritus, xxii., 1.
*******
Apollodorus, III. ii., 1.
********
Castor's tomb was shown in Sparta, in days of old, says Pausanias (III., 13,
1); and Plutarch says that he was called at Argos the demi-mortal or demi-hero
[[mizarchagetas]]. (See Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae, 23.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 123 THE ALLEGORY OF CASTOR AND POLLUX.
his despair he
calls upon Zeus to slay him also. "Thou canst not die altogether,"
answers the master of the Gods; "thou art of a divine race." But he
gives him the choice: Pollux will either remain immortal, living eternally in
Olympus; or, if he would share his brother's fate in all things, he must pass
half his existence underground, and the other half in the golden heavenly
abodes. This semi-immortality, which is also to be shared by Castor, is
accepted by Pollux.* And thus the twin brothers live alternately, one during
the day, and the other during the night.**
Is this a
poetical fiction only? An allegory, one of those "solar myth"
interpretations, higher than which no modern Orientalist seems able to soar?
Indeed, it is much more. Here we have an allusion to the "Egg-born,"
Third Race; the first half of which is mortal, i.e., unconscious in its personality,
and having nothing within itself to survive***; and the latter half of which
becomes immortal in its individuality, by reason of its fifth principle being
called to life by the informing gods, and thus connecting the Monad with this
Earth. This is Pollux; while Castor represents the personal, mortal man, an
animal of not even a superior kind, when unlinked from the divine
individuality. "Twins" truly; yet divorced by death forever, unless
Pollux, moved by the voice of twinship, bestows on his less favoured mortal
brother a share of his own divine nature, thus associating him with his own
immortality.
Such is the
occult meaning of the metaphysical aspect of the allegory. The widely spread
modern interpretation of it -- so celebrated in antiquity, Plutarch tells
us,**** as symbolical of brotherly devotion -- namely, that it was an image
borrowed from the spectacle of Nature -- is weak and inadequate to explain the
secret meaning. Besides the fact that the Moon, with the Greeks, was feminine
in exoteric mythology, and could therefore hardly be regarded as Castor -- and
at the same time be identified with Diana -- ancient symbologists who held the
Sun, the King of all sidereal orbs, as the visible image of the highest deity,
would not have personified it by Pollux, a demi-god only.*****
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Pindar. Nem.
x., 60, Dissen.
** Schol. Eurip.
"Orestes," 463, Dindorf. See Decharme's "Mythol.," etc., p.
654.
*** The Monad is
impersonal and a god per se, albeit unconscious on this plane. For, divorced
from its third (often called fifth) principle, Manas, which is the horizontal
line of the first manifested triangle or trinity, it can have no consciousness
or perception of things on this earthly plane. "The highest sees through
the eye of the lowest" in the manifested world; Purusha (Spirit) remains
blind without the help of Prakrit (matter) in the material spheres; and so does
Atma-Buddhi without Manas.
****
"Morals," p. 484 f.
***** This
strange idea and interpretation are accepted by Decharme in his
"Mythologie de la Grece Antique." "Castor and Pollux," he
says, "are nothing but the Sun and [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
THE DIVINE
HERMAPHRODITE.
An impenetrable
veil of secrecy was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught,
after the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some 12,000
years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy, and so desecrated. Of
these sciences several have now become exoteric -- such as Astronomy, for
instance, in its purely mathematical and physical aspect. Hence their dogmas
and tenets, being all symbolised and left to the sole guardianship of parable
and allegory, have been forgotten, and their meaning has become perverted.
Nevertheless, one finds the hermaphrodite in the scriptures and traditions of
almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement if the statement is only
a fiction?
It is this
secrecy which led the Fifth Race to the establishment, or rather the
re-establishment of the religious mysteries, in which ancient truths might be
taught to the coming generations under the veil of allegory and symbolism. Behold
the imperishable witness to the evolution of the human races from the divine,
and especially from the androgynous Race -- the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of
the Ages! Divine wisdom incarnating on earth, and forced to taste of the bitter
fruit of personal experience of pain and suffering, generated under the shade
of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil -- a secret first known only to
the Elohim, the SELF-INITIATED, "higher gods" -- on earth only.*
In the Book of
Enoch we have Adam,** the first divine androgyne,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Moon, conceived as twins . . . The Sun, the
immortal and powerful being that disappears every evening from the horizon and
descends under the Earth, as though he would make room for the fraternal orb
which comes to life with night, is Pollux, who sacrifices himself for Castor;
Castor, who, inferior to his brother, owes to him his immortality: for the
Moon, says Theophrastus, is only another, but feebler Sun." (De Ventis 17.
See Decharme, p. 655.)
* See "Book
of Enoch."
** Adam (Kadmon)
is, like Brahma and Mars, the symbol of the generative and creative power
typifying Water and Earth -- an alchemical secret. "It takes Earth and Water
to create a human soul," said Moses. Mars is the Hindu Mangala, the planet
Mars, identical with Kartikeya, the "War-God," born of Gharma-ja
(Siva's sweat) and of the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 125 JAH-HOVAH ANDROGYNOUS.
separating into
man and woman, and becoming JAH-HEVA in one form, or Race, and Cain and Abel*
(male and female) in its other form or Race -- the double-sexed Jehovah** -- an
echo of its Aryan prototype, Brahma-Vach. After which come the Third and Fourth
Root-Races of mankind*** -- that is to say, Races of men and women, or
individuals of opposite sexes, no longer sexless semi-spirits and androgynes,
as were the two Races which precede them. This fact is hinted at in every
Anthropogony. It is found in fable and allegory, in myth and revealed
Scriptures, in legend and tradition. Because, of all the great Mysteries,
inherited by Initiates from hoary antiquity, this is one of the greatest. It
accounts for the bi-sexual element found in every creative deity, in
Brahma-Viraj-Vach, as in Adam-Jehovah-Eve, also in
"Cain-Jehovah-Abel." For "The Book of the Generations of Adam"
does not even mention Cain and Abel, but says only: "Male and female
created he them. . . and called their name Adam" (ch. v. 5). Then it
proceeds to say: "And Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his
image, and called his name Seth" (v. 3); after which he begets other sons
and daughters, thus proving that Cain and Abel are his own allegorical
permutations. Adam stands for the primitive human race, especially in its
cosmo-sidereal sense. Not so, however, in its theo-anthropological meaning. The
compound name of Jehovah, or Jah-Hovah, meaning male life and female life --
first androgynous, then separated into sexes -- is used in this sense in
Genesis from ch. v. onwards. As the author of "The Source of
Measures" says (p. 159): "The two words of which Jehovah is composed
make up the original idea of male-female, as the birth originators"; for
the Hebrew letter Jod was the membrum virile and Hovah was Eve, the mother of
all living, or the procreatrix, Earth and Nature. The author believes,
therefore, that "It is seen that the perfect one" (the perfect female
circle or Yoni, 20612, numerically), "as originator of measures, takes
also the form of birth-origin, as Hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic form and
use."
Precisely; only
"the phallic form and use" came long ages later; and the first and
original meaning of Enos, the son of Seth, was the First Race born in the
present usual way from man and woman --for Seth is no man, but a race. Before
him humanity was hermaphrodite.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Earth. He is Lokita, the red, like Brahma also
and Adam. The Hindu Mars is, like Adam, born from no woman and mother. With the
Egyptians, Mars was the primeval generative Principle, and so are Brahma, in
exoteric teaching, and Adam, in the Kabala.
* Abel is
Chebel, meaning "Pains of Birth," conception.
** See
"Isis Unveiled," Vol. II, p. 398, where Jehovah is shown to be Adam
and Eve blended, and Hevah, and Abel, the feminine serpent.
*** See
"Isis Unveiled," Vol. I., 305: "The union of the two create a
third Race, etc."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Yak and Jab, the letters i or j or y
being interchangeable, or Jah-Hovah, i.e. male and female;* Jah-Eve an
hermaphrodite, or the first form of humanity, the original Adam of Earth, not
even Adam Kadmon, whose " mind-born son" is the earthly Jah-Hovah,
mystically. And knowing this, the crafty Rabbin-Kabalist has made of it a name
so secret, that he could not divulge it later on without exposing the whole
scheme; and thus he was obliged to make it sacred.
How close is the
identity between Brahma-Prajapati and Jehovah-Sephiroth, between Brahma-Viraj
and Jehovah-Adam, the Bible and the Puranas compared can alone show. Analysed
and read in the same light, they afford cogent evidence that they are two
copies of the same original -- made at two periods far distant from each other.
Compare once more in relation to this subject Genesis ch. 4. verses 1 and 26
and Manu I., and they will both yield their meaning. In Manu (Book I. 32)
Brahma, who is also both man and god, and divides his body into male and
female, stands in his esoteric meaning, as does Jehovah or Adam in the Bible,
for the symbolical personification of creative and generative power, both
divine and human. The Zohar affords still more convincing proof of identity,
while some Rabbins repeat word for word certain original Puranic expressions;
e.g., the "creation" of the world is generally considered in the
Brahmanical books to be the Lila, delight or sport, the amusement of the
Supreme Creator, "Vishnu being thus discrete and indiscrete substance,
spirit, and time, sports like a playful boy in frolics." (Vishnu Purana,
Book I., ch. ii.) Now compare this with what is said in the Book,
"Nobeleth' Hokhmah": "The Kabalists say that the entering into
existence of the worlds happens through delight, in that Ain-Soph (? !) rejoiced
in Itself, and flashed and beamed from Itself to Itself . . . . which are all
called delight," etc. (Quoted in Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 110).
Thus it is not a "curious idea of the Qabbalists," as the author just
quoted remarks, but a purely Puranic, Aryan idea. Only, why make of Ain-Soph a
Creator?
The "Divine
Hermaphrodite" is then Brahma-Vach-Viraj; and that of the Semites, or
rather of the Jews, is Jehovah-Cain-Abel. Only the "Heathen" were,
and are, more sincere and frank than were the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Jod in the
Kabala has for symbol the hand, the forefinger and the lingham, while
numerically it is the perfect one; but it is also the number 10, male and
female, when divided.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 127 SETH OUR PROGENITOR.
later Israelites
and Rabbis, who undeniably knew the real meaning of their exoteric deity. The
Jews regard the name given to them -- the Yah-oudi -- as an insult. Yet they
have, or would have if they only wished it, as undeniable a right to call
themselves the ancient Yah-oudi, "Jah-hovians," as the Brahmins have
to call themselves Brahmins, after their national deity. For Jah-hovah is the
generic name of that group or hierarchy of creative planetary angels, under
whose star their nation has evolved. He is one of the planetary Elohim of the
regent group of Saturn. Verse 26 of Genesis, ch. iv., when read correctly,
would alone give them such a right, for it calls the new race of men sprung
from Seth and Enos, Jehovah, something quite different from the translation
adopted in the Bible:-- "To him also, was born a son, Enos; then began men
to call themselves Jah or Yah-hovah," to with men and women, the
"lords of creation." One has but to read the above-mentioned verse in
the original Hebrew text and by the light of the Kabala, to find that, instead
of the words as they now stand translated, it is:-- "Then began men to
call themselves Jehovah," which is the correct translation, and not
"Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord"; the latter being
a mistranslation, whether deliberate or not. Again the well-known passage:
"I have gotten a man from the Lord," should read: "I have gotten
a man, even Jehovah."* Luther translated the passage one way, the Roman
Catholics quite differently. Bishop Wordsworth renders it: "Cain -- I have
gotten Kain, from Kanithi, I have gotten." Luther: "I have gotten a
man 0-- even the Lord" (Jehovah); and the author of "The Source of
Measures": "I have measured a man, even Jehovah." The last is
the correct rendering, because (a) a famous Rabbin, a Kabalist, explained the
passage to the writer in precisely this way, and (b) because this rendering is
identical with that in the Secret Doctrine of the East with regard to Brahma.
In "Isis Unveiled,"** it was explained by the writer that "Cain
. . . is the son of the 'Lord' not of Adam (Genesis iv. I)" The
"Lord" is Adam Kadmon, the "father" of Yodcheva, "Adam-Eve,"
or Jehovah, the son of sinful thought, not the progeny of flesh and blood.
Seth, on the other hand, is the leader and the progenitor of the Races of the
Earth; for he is the son of Adam, exoterically, but esoterically he is the
progeny of Cain and Abel, since Abel or Hebel is a female, the counterpart and
female half of the male Cain, and Adam is the collective name for man and
woman: "male and female (Zachar va Nakobeh) created he them . . . and
called their name Adam." The verses in Genesis from chs. i. to v., are
purposely mixed up for Kabalistic reasons. After MAN of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Source of Measures," p. 227.
** Vol. II., p.
264, et seq.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[diagram]]
(Ain, nothing, or the "Ain-Soph" of the Kabalists), and again, the
"Spirit" (of God) that moves upon the face of the waters, in Genesis.
All these are identical. Moreover, in Genesis, ch. i., v. 2, is placed as verse
1 in the secret Kabalistic texts, where it is followed by the Elohim
"creating the Heaven and the Earth." This deliberate shifting of the
order of the verses was necessary for monotheistic and Kabalistic purposes.
Jeremiah's curse against those Elohim (gods) who have not created the Heavens
and the Earth, ch. x., v. 11, shows that there were other Elohim who had.
II. The
"Heavenly" Manu-Swayambhuva, who sprang from Swayambhu-Narayana, the
"Self-existent," and Adam Kadmon of the Kabalists, and the androgyne
MAN of Genesis ch. 1 are also identical.
III.
Manu-swayambhuva is Brahma, or the Logos; and he is Adam Kadmon, who in Genesis
iv., 5, separates himself into two halves, male and female, thus becoming
Jah-Hovah or Jehovah-Eve; as Manu Swayambhuva or Brahma separates himself to
become "Brahma-Viraj and Vach-Viraj," male and female; all the rest
of the texts and versions being blinds.
IV. Vach is the
daughter of Brahma and is named Sata-Rupa, "the hundred-formed," and
Savitri, "generatrix," the mother of the gods and of all living. She
is identical with Eve, "the mother (of all the lords or gods or) of all
living." Besides this there are many other occult meanings.
What is written
in "Isis," although scattered about and very cautiously expressed at
the time, is correct:
Explaining
esoterically Ezekiel's wheel,* it is said of Jodhevah or Jehovah: -
"When the
ternary is taken in the beginning of the Tetragram, it expresses the divine
creation spiritually, without any carnal sin; taken at its opposite end it
expresses the latter: it is feminine. The name of Eva is composed of three
letters, that of the primitive or heavenly
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Isis
Unveiled," Vol. II., p. 462.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 129 THE JEWISH GOD-NAME.
Adam, is written
with one letter, Jod or Yodh; therefore it must not be read Jehovah but Ieva,
or Eve. The Adam of the first chapter is the spiritual, therefore pure,
androgyne Adam Kadmon. When woman issues from the rib of the second Adam (of
dust), the pure Virgo is separated, and falling "into generation," or
the downward cycle, becomes Scorpio, emblem of sin and matter. While the
ascending cycle points to the purely spiritual races, or the ten prediluvian
patriarchs, the Prajapatis and Sephiroth are led on by the creative Deity
itself, who is Adam Kadmon or Yod-cheva. Spiritually, the lower one (Jehovah)
is that of the terrestrial races, led on by Enoch or Libra, the seventh; who,
because he is half-divine, half-terrestrial, is said to have been taken by God
alive. Enoch, Hermes, and Libra, are one."
This is only one
of the several meanings. No need to remind the scholar that Scorpio is the
astrological sign of the organs of reproduction. Like the Indian Rishis, the
Patriarchs are all convertible in their numbers, as well as interchangeable.
According to the subject to which they relate they become ten, twelve, seven or
five, and even fourteen, and they have the same esoteric meaning as the Manus
or Rishis.
Moreover,
Jehovah, as may be shown, has a variety of etymologies, but only those are true
which are found in the Kabala. [[hebrew]] (Ieve) is the Old Testament term, and
was pronounced Ya-va. Inman suggests that it is contracted from the two words
[[hebrew]] Yaho-Iah, Jaho-Jah, or Jaho is Jah. Punctuated it is [[hebrew]]
which is, however, a Rabbinical caprice to associate it with the name Adoni or
[[hebrew]], which has the same points. It is curious, and indeed hardly
conceivable, that the Jews anciently read the name [[hebrew]] (Adoni), when
they had so many names of which Jeho and Jah and Iah constituted a part. But so
it was; and Philo Byblus, who gives us the so-called fragment of Sanchoniathon,
spelt it in Greek letters [[IEUO]], Javo or Jevo. Theodoret says that the
Samaritans pronounced Yahva, and the Jews Yaho. Prof. Gibbs, however, suggests
its punctuation thus: [[hebrew]] (Ye-hou-vih); and he cut the Gordian knot of
its true occult meaning. For in this last form, as a Hebrew verb, it means
"he will -- be."* It was also derived from the Chaldaic verb
[[hebrew]] or [[hebrew]] eue (eva) or eua (Eva) "to be." And so it
was, since from Enosh, the "Son of Man," only, were the truly human
races to begin and "to be," as males and females. This statement
receives further corroboration, inasmuch as Parkhurst makes the verb [[hebrew]]
to mean: (1) "To
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See for
comparison Hosea, xii. 6, where it is so punctuated.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 eua (Eva) "to be" being [[hebrew]]
Heve (Eve), which is the feminine of [[hebrew]] and the same as Hebe, the
Grecian goddess of youth and the Olympian bride of Heracles, makes the name
Jehovah appear still more clearly in its primitive double-sexed form.
Finding in
Sanskrit such syllables as Jah and Yah, e.g., Jah (navi) "Ganges" and
Jagan-natha, "Lord of the World," it becomes clear why Mr. Rawlinson
is so very confident in his works of an Aryan or Vedic influence on the early
mythology of Babylon. Nor is it to be much wondered at that the alleged ten
tribes of Israel disappeared during the captivity period, without leaving a trace
behind them, when we are informed that the Jews had de facto but two tribes --
those of Judah and of Levi. The Levies, moreover, were not a tribe at all, but
a priestly caste. The descendants have only followed their progenitors, the
various patriarchs, into thin, sidereal air. There were Brahms and A-brahms, in
days of old, truly, and before the first Jew had been born. Every nation held
its first god and gods to be androgynous; nor could it be otherwise, since they
regarded their distant primeval progenitors, their dual-sexed ancestors, as
divine Beings and Gods, just as do the Chinese to this day. And they were
divine in one sense, as also were their first human progeny, the
"mind-born" primitive humanity, which were most assuredly bi-sexuals
as all the more ancient symbols and traditions show. Under the emblematical
devices and peculiar phraseology of the priesthood of old, lie latent hints of
sciences as yet undiscovered during the present cycle. Well acquainted as may
be a scholar with the hieratic writing and hieroglyphical system of the
Egyptians, he must first of all learn to sift their records. He has to assure
himself, compasses and rule in hand, that the picture writing he is examining
fits, to a line, certain fixed geometrical figures which are the hidden keys to
such records, before he ventures on an interpretation."
"But there
are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the
double-sexed first creators of every Cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zen (AEther),
and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (water), his wives; Osiris and
Isis-Latona -- the former god also representing AEther, the first emanation of
the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light; the goddess Earth and
Water again; Mithras, the rock-born god, the symbol of the male mundane fire,
or the personified primordial light, and Mithra, the fire goddess, at once his
mother and his wife; the pure element of fire (the active, or male principle)
regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or Matter, the
female or passive element of cosmical generation" -- all these are records
of the primeval divine Hermaphrodite.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 creates 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
Precis Elementaire de Physiologie, citing "a case where the umbilical cord
was ruptured and perfectly cicatrized," yet the infant was born alive,
pertinently asks, "How was the circulation carried on in this organ?"
On the next page he says: "Nothing is at present known respecting the use
of digestion in the foetus;" and respecting its nutrition, propounds this
query: "What, then, can we say of the nutrition of the foetus?
Physiological works contain only vague conjectures on this point."
"Ah, but," the sceptic may urge, "Magendie's book belongs to the
last generation, and Science has since made such strides that his stigma of
ignorance can no longer be fixed upon the profession." Indeed; then let us
turn to a very great authority upon Physiology, viz., Sir M. Foster (Text-Book
of Physiology, third edition, 1879, p. 623); and to the disadvantage of modern
Science we shall find him saying, "Concerning the rise and development of
the functional activities of the embryo, our knowledge is almost a blank. We
know scarcely anything about the various steps by which the primary fundamental
qualities of the protoplasm of the ovum are differentiated into the complex
phenomena which we have attempted in
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 confrere.
This is a very
curious statement as explained in the Commentaries. To make it clear: The First
Race having created the Second by "budding," as just explained, the
Second Race gives birth to the Third -- which itself is separated into three
distinct divisions, consisting of men differently procreated. The first two of
these are produced by an oviparous method, presumably unknown to modern Natural
History. While the early sub-races of the Third Humanity procreated their
species by a kind of exudation of moisture or vital fluid, the drops of which
coalescing formed an oviform ball -- or shall we say egg? -- which served as an
extraneous vehicle for the generation therein of a foetus and child, the mode
of procreation by the later races changed, in its results at all events. The
little ones of the earlier races were entirely sexless -- shapeless even for
all one knows*; but those of the later races were born androgynous. It is in
the Third Race that the separation of sexes occurred. From being previously
a-sexual, Humanity became distinctly hermaphrodite or bi-sexual; and finally
the man-bearing eggs began to give birth, gradually and almost imperceptibly in
their evolutionary development, first, to Beings in which one sex predominated
over the other, and, finally, to distinct men and women. And now let us search
for corroboration of these statements in the religious legends of East and
West. Let us take the "Egg-born Race" first. Think of Kasyapa, the Vedic
sage, and the most prolific of creators. He was the son of Marichi, Brahma's
mind-born son; and he is made to become the father of the Nagas, or Serpents,
among other beings. Exoterically, the Nagas are semi-divine beings which have a
human face and the tail of a serpent. Yet there was a race of Nagas, said to be
a thousand in number only, born or rather sprung from Kadra, Kasyapa's wife,
for the purpose of peopling Patala, which is undeniably America, as will be
shown; and there was a NAGA-Dwipa, one of the seven divisions of
Bharata-Varsha, India, inhabited by a people bearing the same name, who are
allowed, even by some Orientalists, to be historical, and to have left many a
trace behind them to this day.
Now the point
most insisted upon at present is that, whatever origin be claimed for man, his
evolution took place in this order: (1) Sexless, as all the earlier forms are;
(2) then, by a natural transition, he became,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See the
"Timaeus."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Extracts
from that Essay in "The Theosophist," of February, 1883.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 134 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
circular.* They
were terrible in force and strength and had prodigious ambition. Hence Zeus
divided each of them into two, making them weaker; Apollo, under his direction,
closed up the skin."
Meshia and
Meshiane were but a single individual with the old Persians. "They also
taught that man was the product of the tree of life, growing in androgynous
pairs, till they were separated at a subsequent modification of the human
form.**"
In the Toleduth
(generation) of Adam, the verse "God created (bara, brought forth) man in
his image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he
them," if read esoterically will yield the true sense, viz.: "The
Elohim (Gods) brought forth from themselves (by modification) man in their
image . . . . created they him (collective humanity, or Adam), male and female
created he (collective deity) them."*** This will show the esoteric point.
The sexless Race was their first production, a modification of and from
themselves, the pure spiritual existences; and this was Adam solus. Thence came
the second Race: Adam-Eve or Jod-Heva, inactive androgynes; and finally the
Third, or the "Separating Hermaphrodite," Cain and Abel, who produce
the Fourth, Seth-Enos, etc. It is that Third, the last semi-spiritual race,
which was also the last vehicle of the divine and innate Wisdom, ingenerate in
the Enochs, the Seers of that Mankind. The Fourth, which had tasted from the
fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil -- Wisdom united already to earthy, and
therefore impure, intelligence **** had consequently to acquire that Wisdom by
initiation and great struggle. And the union of Wisdom and Intelligence, the
former ruling the latter, is called in the Hermetic books "the God
possessing the double fecundity of the two sexes." Mystically Jesus was
held to be man-woman. See also in the Orphic hymns, sung during the Mysteries,
we find:
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Compare
Ezekiel's vision (chap. i) of the four divine beings who "had the likeness
of a man" and yet had the appearance of a wheel, "when they went they
went upon their four sides . . . . for the spirit of the living creature was in
the wheel."
** See Prof.
Wilder's Essay "The Primeval Race Double-Sexed."
*** Eugibinus, a
Christian, and the Rabbis Samuel, Manasseh ben Israel, and Maimonides taught
that "Adam had two faces and one person, and from the beginning he was
both male and female -- male on one side and female on the other (like Manu's
Brahma), but afterwards the parts were separated." The one hundred and
thirty-ninth Psalm of David recited by Rabbi Jeremiah ben Eliazar is evidence
of this. "Thou hast fashioned me behind and before," not beset as in
the Bible, which is absurd and meaningless, and this shows, as Prof. Wilder
thinks, "that the primeval form of mankind was androgynous."
**** See the
union of Chochmah, Wisdom, with Binah, Intelligence, or Jehovah, the Demiurge, called
Understanding in the Proverbs of Solomon, ch. vii. Unto men Wisdom (divine
occult Wisdom) crieth: "Oh, ye simple, understand Wisdom; and ye fools, be
of an understanding heart." It is spirit and matter, the nous and the
psyche; of the latter of which St. James says that it is "earthly,
sensual, and devilish."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 135 THE VIRGIN THIRD RACE.
"Zeus is a
male, Zeus is an immortal maid." The Egyptian Ammon was the goddess Neith,
in his other half. Jupiter has female breasts, Venus is bearded in some of her
statues, and Ila, the goddess, is also Su-Dyumna, the god, as Vaivasvata's
progeny.
"The name
Adam," says Professor A. Wilder, "or man, itself implies this double
form of existence. It is identical with Athamas, or Thomas (Tamil Tam), which
is rendered by the Greek Didumos, a twin; if, therefore, the first woman was
formed subsequently to the first man, she must, as a logical necessity, be
'taken out of man' . . . and the side which the Elohim had taken from man,
'made he a woman' (Gen. ii.). The Hebrew word here used is Tzala, which bears
the translation we have given. It is easy to trace the legend in Berosus, who
says that Thalatth (the Omoroca, or Lady of Urka) was the beginning of
creation. She was also Melita, the queen of the Moon. . . . The two twin births
of Genesis, that of Cain and Abel, and of Esau and Jacob, shadow the same idea.
The name 'Hebel' is the same as Eve, and its characteristic seems to be
feminine," continues the author. "Unto thee shall be his
desire," said the Lord God to Cain, "and thou shalt rule over
him." The same language had been uttered to Eve: "Thy desire shall be
to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." . . .
Thus the
pristine bi-sexual unity of the human Third Root-Race is an axiom in the Secret
Doctrine. Its virgin individuals were raised to "Gods," because that
Race represented their "divine Dynasty." The moderns are satisfied
with worshipping the male heroes of the Fourth Race, who created gods after
their own sexual image, whereas the gods of primeval mankind were "male
and female."
As stated in
Book I, the humanities developed coordinately, and on parallel lines with the
four Elements, every new Race being physiologically adapted to meet the
additional element. Our Fifth Race is rapidly approaching the Fifth Element --
call it interstellar ether, if you will -- which has more to do, however, with
psychology than with physics. We men have learned to live in every climate,
whether frigid or tropical, but the first two Races had nought to do with
climate, nor were they subservient to any temperature or change therein. And
thus, we are taught, men lived down to the close of the Third Root-Race, when
eternal spring reigned over the whole globe, such as is now enjoyed by the
inhabitants of Jupiter; a "world," says M. Flammarion, "which is
not subject like our own to the vicissitudes of seasons nor to abrupt alternations
of temperature, but which is enriched with all the treasures of eternal
spring." ("Pluralite des Mondes," p. 69.) Those astronomers who
maintain that Jupiter is in a molten condition, in our sense of the term, are
invited to settle their dispute with this learned French
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 136 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Astronomer.* It
must, however, be always borne in mind that the "eternal spring"
referred to is only a condition cognised as such by the Jovians. It is not
"spring" as we know it. In this reservation is to be found the
reconciliation between the two theories here cited. Both embrace partial
truths.
It is thus a
universal tradition that mankind has evolved gradually into its present shape
from an almost transparent condition of texture, and neither by miracle nor by
sexual intercourse. Moreover, this is in full accord with the ancient
philosophies; from those of Egypt and India with their Divine Dynasties down to
that of Plato. And all these universal beliefs must be classed with the
"presentiments" and "obstinate conceptions," some of them
ineradicable, in popular faiths. Such beliefs, as remarked by Louis Figuier,
are "frequently the outcome of the wisdom and observation of an infinite
number of generations of men." For, "a tradition which has an uniform
and universal existence,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* An hypothesis
evolved in 1881 by Mr. Mattieu Williams seems to have impressed Astronomers but
little. Says the author of "The Fuel of the Sun," in Knowledge, Dec.
23, 1881: "Applying now the researches of Dr. Andrews to the conditions of
Solar existence . . . I conclude that the Sun has no nucleus, either solid,
liquid, or gaseous, but is composed of dissociated matter in the critical
state, surrounded, first, by a flaming envelope, due to the recombination of
the dissociated matter, and outside of this, by another envelope of vapours due
to this combination."
This is a novel
theory to be added to other hypotheses, all scientific and orthodox. The
meaning of the "critical state" is explained by Mr. M. Williams in
the same journal (Dec. 9, 1881), in an article on "Solids, Liquids, and
Gases." Speaking of an experiment by Dr. Andrews on carbonic acid, the
scientist says that "when 88 [[degrees]] is reached, the boundary between
liquid and gas vanished; liquid and gas have blended into one mysterious
intermediate fluid; an indefinite fluctuating something is there filling the
whole of the tube -- an etherealised liquid or a visible gas. Hold a red-hot
poker between your eye and the light; you will see an upflowing wave of
movement of what appears like liquid air. The appearance of the hybrid fluid in
the tube resembles this, but is sensibly denser, and evidently stands between
the liquid and gaseous states of matter, as pitch or treacle stands between
solid and liquid."
The temperature
at which this occurs has been named by Dr. Andrews the "critical
temperature"; here the gaseous and the liquid states are
"continuous," and it is probable that all other substances capable of
existing in both states have their own particular critical temperatures.
Speculating
further upon this "critical" state, Mr. Mattieu Williams emits some
quite occult theories about Jupiter and other planets. He says: "Our
notions of solids, liquids, and gases are derived from our experiences of the
state of matter here upon this Earth. Could we be removed to another planet,
they would be curiously changed. On Mercury water would rank as one of the
condensible gases; on Mars, as a fusible solid; but what on Jupiter?"
"Recent
observations justify us in regarding this as a miniature sun, with an external
envelope of cloudy matter, apparently of partially-condensed water, but
red-hot, or probably still hotter within. His vaporous atmosphere is evidently
of enormous depth, and the force of gravitation being on his visible outer
surface two-and-a-half [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 137 EGYPTIAN BELIEF.
has all the
weight of scientific testimony."* And there is more than one such
tradition in the Puranic allegories, as has been shown. Moreover, the doctrine
that the first Race of mankind was formed out of the chhayas (astral images) of
the Pitris, is fully corroborated in the Zohar. "In the Tzalam (shadow
image) of Elohim (the Pitris), was made Adam (man). (Cremona, Ed. iii., 76a;
Brody, Ed. iii., 159a; "Qabbalah," Isaac Myer, p. 420.)
It has been
repeatedly urged as an objection that, however high the degree of metaphysical
thought in ancient India, yet the old Egyptians had nothing but crass idolatry
and zoolatry to boast of; Hermes, as alleged, being the work of mystic Greeks
who lived in Egypt. To this, one answer can be given -- a direct proof that the
Egyptians believed in the Secret Doctrine is, that it was taught to them at
Initiation. Let the objectors open the "Eclogae Physicae et Ethicae"
of Stobaeus, the Greek compiler of ancient fragments, who lived in the fifth
century, A.D. The following is a transcription by him of an old Hermetic
fragment, showing the Egyptian theory of the Soul. Translated word for word, it
says:--
"From one
Soul, that of ALL, spring all the Souls, which spread themselves as if
purposely distributed through the world. These souls undergo many
transformations; those which are already creeping creatures turn into aquatic
animals; from these aquatic animals are derived land animals; and from the
latter the birds. From the beings who live aloft in the air (heaven) men are
born. On reaching that
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] times greater than that on our Earth's surface,
the atmospheric pressure, in descending below this visible surface, must soon
reach that at which the vapour of water would be brought to its critical
condition. Therefore we may infer that the oceans of Jupiter are neither of
frozen, liquid, nor gaseous water, but are oceans or atmospheres of critical
water. If any fish or birds swim or fly therein, they must be very critically
organized."
As the whole
mass of Jupiter is 300 times greater than that of the Earth, and its
compressing energy towards the centre proportional to this, its materials, if
similar to those of the Earth, and no hotter, would be considerably more dense,
and the whole planet would have a higher specific gravity; but we know by the
movement of its satellites that, instead of this, its specific gravity is less
than a fourth of that of the Earth. This justifies the conclusion that it is
intensely hot; for even hydrogen, if cold, would become denser than Jupiter
under such pressure.
"As all
elementary substances may exist as solids, liquids, or gases, or, critically,
according to the conditions of temperature and pressure, I am justified in
hypothetically concluding that Jupiter is neither a solid, a liquid, nor a
gaseous planet, but a critical planet, or an orb composed internally of
associated elements in the critical state, and surrounded by a dense atmosphere
of their vapours and those of some of their compounds such as water. The same
reasoning applies to Saturn and other large and rarified planets."
It is gratifying
to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the
borderland of our occult teachings.
* "The Day
After Death," p. 23.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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 Puranas about our Progenitors are as contradictory in their details
as everything else. Thus while, in the Rig Veda, Ida (or Ila) is called the
Instructress of Vaivasvata Manu, Sayana makes of her a goddess presiding over
the Earth, and the Sathapatha Brahmana shows her to be the Manu's daughter, an
offering of his sacrifice, and, later on, his (Vaivasvata's) wife, by whom he
begat the race of Manus. In the Puranas, again, she is Vaivasvata's daughter,
yet the wife of Budha (Wisdom), the illegitimate son of the Moon (Soma) and the
planet Jupiter's (Brihhaspati's) wife, Tara. All this, which seems a jumble to
the profane, is full of philosophical meaning to the Occultist. On the very
face of the narrative a secret and sacred meaning is per-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The first
occurred when what is now the North Pole was separated from the later
Continents.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 139 WHAT THE FLOOD MEANS.
ceivable, all
the details, however, being so purposely mixed up that the experienced eye of
an Initiate alone can follow them and place the events in their proper order.
The story as
told in the "Mahabharata" strikes the key-note, and yet it needs to
be explained by the secret sense contained in the Bhagavad Gita. It is the
prologue to the drama of our (Fifth) Humanity. While Vaivasvata was engaged in
devotion on the river bank, a fish craves his protection from a bigger fish. He
saves and places it in a jar, where, growing larger and larger, it communicates
to him the news of the forthcoming deluge. It is the well-known "Matsya
Avatar," the first Avatar of Vishnu, the Dagon* of the Chaldean Xisuthrus,
and many other things besides. The story is too well known to need repetition.
Vishnu orders a ship to be built, in which Manu is said to be saved along with
the seven Rishis, the latter, however, being absent from other texts. Here the
seven Rishis stand for the seven Races, the seven principles, and various other
things; for there is again a double mystery involved in this manifold allegory.
We have said
elsewhere that the great Flood had several meanings, and that it referred, as
also does the FALL, to both spiritual and physical, cosmic and terrestrial,
events: as above, so it is below. The ship or ark -- navis -- in short, being
the symbol of the female generative principle, is typified in the heavens by
the Moon, and on Earth by the Womb: both being the vessels and bearers of the
seeds of life and being, which the sun, or Vishnu, the male principle, vivifies
and fructifies.** The First Cosmic Flood refers to primordial creation, or the
formation of Heaven and the Earths; in which case Chaos and the great Deep
stand for the "Flood," and the Moon for the "Mother," from
whom proceed all the life-germs.*** But the terrestrial Deluge and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We must remember
that at the head of all the Babylonian gods were Ea, Anu, and the primeval Bel;
and that Ea, the first, was the God of Wisdom, the great "God of
Light" and of the DEEP, and that he was identified with Oannes, or the
Biblical Dagon -- the man-fish who rose out of the Persian Gulf.
** See Part. II.
§ "The Holy of Holies."
*** It is far
later on that the Moon became a male god; with the Hindus it was Soma, with the
Chaldeans Nannak or Nannar, and Sin, the son of Mulil, the older Bel. The
"Akkadians" called him the "Lord of Ghosts"; and he was the
god of Nipoor (Niffer) in northern Babylonia. It is Mulil who caused the waters
of the Flood to fall from heaven on Earth, for which Xisuthrus would not allow
him to approach his altar. As the modern Assyriologists have now ascertained,
it is the northern Nipoor which is the centre whence Chaldean (black) magic
spread; and Eridu (the Southern) which was the primitive seat of the worship of
the culture god, the god of divine wisdom -- the Sun-God being the supreme
deity everywhere. With the Jews, the Moon is connected with Israel's Jehovah
and his seed, because Ur was the chief seat of the worship of the Moon-god, and
because Abraham is said to have come from Ur, when from A-bra(h)m, he becomes
Abraham.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 140 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
its story has
also its dual application. In one case it has reference to that mystery when
mankind was saved from utter destruction, by the mortal woman being made the
receptacle of the human seed at the end of the Third Race,* and in the other to
the real and historical Atlantean submersion. In both cases the
"Host" -- or the Manu which saved the seed -- is called Vaivasvata
Manu. Hence the diversity between the Puranic and other versions; while in the
Sathapatha Brahmana, Vaivasvata produces a daughter and begets from her the
race of Manu; which is a reference to the first human Manushyas, who had to
create women by will (Kriyasakti), before they were naturally born from the
hermaphrodites as an independent sex, and who were, therefore, regarded as
their creator's daughters. The Puranic accounts make of her (Ida or Ila) the
wife of Budha (Wisdom), the latter version referring to the events of the
Atlantean flood, when Vaivasvata, the great Sage on Earth, saved the Fifth
Root-race from being destroyed along with the remnants of the Fourth.
This is shown
very clearly in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna is made to say:--
"The Seven
great Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my essence, were born from
my mind: from them sprung (were born) the human races and the world."
(Chapter X., verse 6).
Here the four
preceding "Manus," out of the seven, are the four Races** which have
already lived, since Krishna belongs to the Fifth Race, his death having
inaugurated the Kali Yuga. Thus Vaivasvata
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* When Narada,
the virgin-ascetic, threatened to put an end to the human race by preventing
Daksha's sons from procreating it.
** This is
corroborated by a learned Brahmin. In his most excellent lectures on the
Bhagavad Gita (see "Theosophist," April, 1887, p. 444) the lecturer
says: "There is a peculiarity to which I must call your attention. He
(Krishna) speaks here of four Manus. Why does he speak of four? We are now in
the seventh Manvantara, that of Vaivasvata. If he is speaking of the past
Manus, he ought to speak of six, but he only mentions four. In some
commentaries an attempt has been made to interpret this in a peculiar manner.
The word 'Chatvaraha' is separated from the word 'Manavaha,' and is made to
refer to Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanatkumara, and Sanatsujata, who are also included
among the mind-born sons of Prajapati. But this interpretation will lead to a
most absurd conclusion, and make the sentence contradict itself. The persons
alluded to in the text have a qualifying clause in the sentence. It is well
known that Sanaka and the other three refused to create, though the other sons
had consented to do so; therefore, in speaking of those persons from whom
humanity has sprung into existence, it would be absurd to include those four
also in the list. The passage must be interpreted without splitting the
compound into two nouns. The number of Manus will then be four, and the
statement would then contradict the Puranic account, though it would be in
harmony with the occult theory. You will recollect that it is stated (in
Occultism) that we are now in the Fifth Root-Race. Each Root-Race is considered
as the Santhathi of a particular Manu. Now, the Fourth Race has passed, or, in
other words, there have been four past Manus. . . . . "
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 141 VARIOUS DELUGES.
Manu, the son of
Surya (the Sun), and the saviour of our Race, is connected with the Seed of Life,
both physically and spiritually. But, at present, while speaking of all, we
have to concern ourselves only with the first two.
The
"Deluge" is undeniably an universal tradition. "Glacial
periods" were numerous, and so were the "Deluges," for various
reasons. Stockwell and Croll enumerate some half dozen Glacial Periods and
subsequent Deluges -- the earliest of all being dated by them 850,000, and the
last about 100,000, years ago.* But which was our Deluge? Assuredly the former,
the one which to this date remains recorded in the traditions of all the
peoples, from the remotest antiquity; the one that finally swept away the last
peninsulas of Atlantis, beginning with Ruta and Daitya and ending with the
(comparatively) small island mentioned by Plato. This is shown by the agreement
of certain details in all the legends. It was the last of its gigantic
character. The little deluge, the traces of which Baron Bunsen found in Central
Asia, and which he places at about 10,000 years B.C., had nothing to do with
either the semi-universal Deluge, or Noah's flood -- the latter being a purely
mythical rendering of old traditions -- nor even with the submersion of the
last Atlantean island; at least, only a moral connection.
Our Fifth Race
(the non-initiated portions), hearing of many deluges, confused them, and now
know of but one. This one altered the whole aspect of the globe in its
interchange and shifting of land and sea.
We may compare
the traditions of the Peruvians:-- "The Incas, seven in number, have repeopled
the Earth after the deluge," they say (Coste I, IV., p. 19); Humboldt
mentions the Mexican version of the same legend, but confuses somewhat the
details of the still-preserved legend concerning the American Noah.
Nevertheless, the eminent Naturalist mentions twice seven companions and the
divine bird which preceded the boat of the Aztecs, and thus makes fifteen elect
instead of the seven and the fourteen. This was written probably under some
involuntary reminiscence of Moses, who is said to have mentioned fifteen
grandsons of Noah, who escaped with their grandsire. Then again Xisuthrus, the
Chaldean Noah, is saved and translated alive to heaven -- like Enoch -- with
the seven gods, the Kabirim, or the seven divine Titans; again the Chinese Yao
has seven figures which sail with him and which he will animate when he lands,
and use for "human seed." Osiris, when he enters the ark, or solar
boat, takes seven Rays with him, etc., etc.
Sanchoniathon
makes the Aletae or Titans (the Kabirim) contemporary
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge," xviii.; "American
Journal of Science," III., xi., 456; and Croll's "Climate and
Time." Lemuria was not submerged by a flood, but was destroyed by volcanic
action, and afterwards sank.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 142 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
with Agruerus,
the great Phoenician god (whom Faber sought to identify with Noah*); further,
it is suspected that the name of "Titan" is derived from Tit-Ain --
"the fountains of the chaotic abyss"** (Tit-Theus, or Tityus is
"the divine deluge"); and thus the Titans, who are seven, are shown
to be connected with the Flood and the seven Rishis saved by Vaivasvata
Manu.***
They are the
sons of Kronos (Time) and Rhea (the Earth); and as Agruerus, Saturn and Sydyk
are one and the same personage, and as the seven Kabiri are said to be the sons
of Sydyk or Kronos-Saturn, the Kabiri and Titans are identical. For once the
pious Faber was right in his conclusions when he wrote: "I have no doubt
of the seven Titans and Kabiri being the same as the seven Rishis of the Hindu
mythology (?), who are said to have escaped in a boat along with Manu, the head
(?) of the family."
But he is less
fortunate in his speculations when he adds "The Hindoos, in their wild
legends have variously perverted the history of the Noachidae (? !), yet it is
remarkable that they seem to have religiously adhered to the number
seven."**** Hence Captain (Col.) Wilford very judiciously observes: that
"Perhaps the seven Manus, the seven Brahmadicas and the seven Rishis are
the same, and make only seven individual persons.***** The seven Brahmadicas
were Prajapatis, or lords 'of the prajas or creatures.' From them mankind was
born, and they are probably the same with the seven Manus. . . . These seven
grand ancestors of the human race were created for the purpose of replenishing
the Earth with inhabitants." (Asiatic Researches, Vol. V. p. 246); and
Faber adds that: "the mutual resemblance of the Kabirs, the Titans, the
Rishis, and the Noetic family, is too striking to be the effect of mere
accident."******
Faber was led
into this mistake, and subsequently built his entire theory concerning the
Kabiri, on the fact that the name of the scriptural
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Agruerus is
Kronos, or Saturn, and the prototype of the Israelitish Jehovah. As connected
with Argha, the Moon or Ark of salvation, Noah is mythologically one with
Saturn. But then this cannot relate to the terrestrial flood. (But see Faber's
"Kabiri," Vol. I, pp. 35, 43, and 45.)
** See ibid.,
Vol. II., p. 240.
*** Sanchoniathon
says that the Titans were the sons of Kronos, and seven in number; and he calls
them fire-worshippers, Aletae (sons of Agni?), and diluvians. Al-ait is the god
of fire.
**** Of which
seven, let us remark, the Aryans, and not the Semites, were the originators,
while the Jews got that number from the Chaldeans.
***** Seven
individual sons of God, or Pitars and Pitris; also in this case the sons of
Kronos or Saturn (Kala "time") and Arkites, like the Kabiri and
Titans, as their name -- "lunar ancestors" -- shows, the Moon being
the Ark, or Argha, on the watery abyss of space.
****** See
"Kabiri," Vol. I., p. 131.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Koeus, Kroeus,
Phorcys, Kronos, Oceanus, Hyperion, and Iapetus:--
[[Koion te,
Kroion te melan, Phorkun te krataion,
Kai Kronon,
Okeanon d, 'Huperioa te Iapeponet.]]
-- (Orph. apud
Proclum. In Tim. lib. v. p. 295.
But why could
not the Babylonian Ezra have adopted the name of Iapetos for one of Noah's
sons? The Kabiri, who are the Titans, are also called Manes and their mother
Mania, according to Arnobius. (Adversum Gentes, lib. III., p. 124.) The Hindus
can therefore claim with far more reason that the Manes mean their Manus, and
that Mania is the female Manu. (See Ramayana.) Mania is Ila or Ida, the wife
and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu, from whom "he begat the race of
Manus." Like Rhea, the mother of the Titans, she is the Earth (Sayana making
her the goddess of the Earth), and she is but the second edition and repetition
of Vach. Both Ida and Vach are turned into males and females; Ida becoming
Sudyumna, and Vach, "the female Viraj," turning into a woman in order
to punish the Gandharvas; one version referring to cosmic and divine theogony,
the other to the later period. The Manes and Mania of Arnobius are names of
Indian origin, appropriated by the Greeks and Latins and disfigured by them.
Thus it is no
accident, but the result of one archaic doctrine common to all, of which the
Israelites, through Ezra, the author of the modernised Mosaic books, were the
latest adapters. So unceremonious were they with other people's property, that
Berosus (Antiquitates Libyae, I, fol. 8), shows that Titea -- of whom Diodorus
makes the mother of the Titans or Diluvians (See Bibl. lib. III. p. 170) -- was
the wife of Noah. For this Faber calls him the "pseudo-Berosus," yet
accepts the information in order to register one proof more that the pagans
have borrowed all their gods from the Jews, by transforming patriarchal
material. According to our humble opinion, this is one of the best proofs
possible of exactly the reverse. It shows as clearly as facts can show, that it
is the Biblical pseudo-personages which are all borrowed from pagan myths, if
myths they must be. It shows, at any rate, that Berosus was well aware of the
source of Genesis, and that it bore the same cosmic astronomical character as
the allegories of Isis-Osiris, and the Ark, and other older "Arkite"
symbols. For, Berosus says that "Titea magna" was afterwards called
Aretia,* and worshipped with the Earth; and this
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Aretia is the
female form of Artes (Egyptian Mars). Thence the Chaldean (and now Hebrew) word
[[hebrew]] (Aretz) "Earth." The author of "Beitrage zur
Kenntniss" (Art. under "Artes" Mars) quotes: "Addit
Cedrenus (Salem I., 3): Stella Martis ab [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 144 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
identifies
"Titea," Noah's consort, with Rhea, the mother of the Titans, and
with Ida -- both being goddesses who preside over the Earth, and the mothers of
the Manus and Manes (or Tit-an-Kabiri). And "Titea-Aretia" was
worshipped as Horchia, says the same Berosus, and this is a title of Vesta,
goddess of the Earth. "Sicanus deificavit Aretiam, et nominavit eam lingua
Janigena Horchiam." (Ibid. lib. V. fol. 64.)
Scarce an
ancient poet of historic or prehistoric days who failed to mention the sinking
of the two continents -- often called isles -- in one form or another. Hence
the destruction, besides Atlantis, of the Phlegyae. (See Pausanias and Nonus,
who both tell how:
"From its
deep-rooted base the Phlegyan isle
Stern Neptune
shook, and plunged beneath the waves
Its impious
inhabitants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ."
-- Dionysius lib
xviii. p. 319).
Faber felt
convinced that the "insulae Phlegyae" were Atlantis. But all such
allegories are more or less distorted echoes of the Hindu tradition about that
great Cataclysm, which befell the Fourth, really human, though gigantic, Race,
the one which preceded the Aryan. Yet, as just said, like all other legends,
that of "the Deluge has more than one meaning. It refers in Theogony, to
pre-cosmic transformations, to spiritual correlations -- however absurd the
term may sound to a scientific ear -- and also to subsequent Cosmogony; to the
great FLOOD of WATERS (matter) in CHAOS, awakened and fructified by those
Spirit-Rays which were swamped by, and perished in, the mysterious
differentiation -- a pre-cosmic mystery, the Prologue to the drama of Being.
Anu, Bel, and Noah preceded Adam Kadmon, Adam the Red, and Noah; just as
Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva preceded Vaivasvata and the rest." (See
"Isis Unveiled.," Vol. II., pp. 420 et seq., where one or two of the
seven meanings are hinted at.)
All this goes to
show that the semi-universal deluge known to geology (first glacial period)
must have occurred just at the time allotted to it by the Secret Doctrine:
namely, 200,000 years (in round numbers) after the commencement of our FIFTH
RACE, or about the time assigned by Messrs. Croll and Stockwell for the first
glacial period: i.e., about 850,000 years ago. Thus, as the latter disturbance
is attributed by geologists and astronomers to "an extreme eccentricity of
the Earth's
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Egyptiis vocatur Ertosi (plantare, generare).
Significat autem hoc omnis generis procreationem et vivificationem, omnisque
substantiae et materiae naturam et vim ordinantem atque procreantem." It
is Earth as "source of being"; or, as explained by the author of
"The Source of Measures," Arts is the same in Hebrew and Egyptian,
and both combine the primeval idea of Earth as source; precisely as in the Hebrew
itself, under another form, Adam and Madim, (Mars) are the same, and combine
the idea of Earth with Adam under the form of H-Adam-H.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 145 THE JEWISH NOAH AND THE CHALDEAN NUAH.
orbit," and
as the Secret Doctrine attributes it to the same source, but with the addition
of another factor, the shifting of the Earth's axis -- a proof of which may be
found in the Book of Enoch,* if the veiled language of the Puranas is not
understood -- all this should tend to show that the ancients knew something of
the "modern discoveries" of Science. Enoch, when speaking of
"the great inclination of the Earth," which "is in travail,"
is quite significant and clear.
Is not this
evident? Nuah is Noah, floating on the waters in his ark; the latter being the
emblem of the Argha, or Moon, the feminine principle; Noah is the
"spirit" falling into matter. We find him, as soon as he descends
upon the Earth, planting a vineyard, drinking of the wine, and getting drunk on
it, i.e., the pure spirit becomes intoxicated as soon as it is finally
imprisoned in matter. The seventh chapter of Genesis is only another version of
the First. Thus, while the latter reads: "and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," in
ch. 7 it is said " . . . and the waters prevailed . . . and the ark went
(with Noah, the spirit) upon the face of the waters." Thus Noah, if
identical with the Chaldean Nuah, is the spirit vivifying matter, which latter
is Chaos, represented by the DEEP, or the Waters of the Flood. In the
Babylonian legend (the pre-cosmical blended with the terrestrial event) it is
Ishtar (Astaroth or Venus, the lunar goddess) who is shut up in the ark and
sends out "a dove in search of dry land." ("Isis Unveiled"
Vol. II, pp. 423 and 424).
George Smith
notes in the "Tablets," first the creation of the moon, and then that
of the sun: "Its beauty and perfection are extolled, and the regularity of
its orbit, which led to its being considered the type of a judge and the
regulator of the world." If this story related simply to a cosmogonical
cataclysm -- even were this latter universal -- why should the goddess Ishtar
or Astoreth, the Moon, speak of the creation of the sun after the deluge? The
waters might have reached as high as the mountain of Nizir (Chaldean version),
or Jebel Djudi (the deluge mountains of the Arabian legend), or yet Ararat (of
the Biblical narrative), and even the Himalaya (of the Hindu tradition), and
yet not reach the sun: the Bible itself stopped short of such a miracle! It is
evident that the deluge of the people who first recorded it had another
meaning, less problematical and far more philosophical than that of an
universal deluge, of which there are no geological traces whatever.
As all such
Cataclysms are periodical and cyclical, and as Manu Vaivasvata figures as a
generic character, under various circumstances and events (vide infra: "The
Seven Manus of Humanity"), there seems to be no
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Chap. lxiv.,
Sect. xi.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."*
The Second Flood
-- the so-called "universal" -- which affected the Fourth Root Race
(now conveniently regarded by theology as "the accursed race of
giants," the CAINITES, and "the sons of Ham") is that flood
which was first perceived by geology. If one carefully compares the accounts in
the various legends of the Chaldees and other exoteric works of the nations, it
will be found that all of them agree with the orthodox narratives given in the
Brahmanical books. And it may be perceived that while, in the first account,
"there is no God or mortal yet on Earth," when Manu Vaivasvata lands
on the Himavan; in the second, the Seven Rishis are allowed to keep him company:
thus showing that whereas some accounts refer to the sidereal and cosmic FLOOD
before the so-called creation, the others treat, one of the Great Flood of
Matter on Earth, and the other of a real watery deluge. In the Satapatha
Brahmana, Manu finds that "the Flood had swept away all living creatures,
and he alone was left" -- i.e., the seed of life alone remained from the
previous dissolution of the Universe, or Mahapralaya, after a "Day of
Brahma"; and the Mahabharata refers simply to the geological cataclysm
which swept away nearly all the Fourth Race to make room for the Fifth.
Therefore is Vaivasvata Manu shown under three distinct attributes in our
esoteric Cosmogony:** (a) as the "Root-Manu"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* All such
expressions are explained in the "Anthropogenesis" of this Book, and
elsewhere.
** One has to
remember that, in the Hindu philosophy, every differentiated unit is such only
through the cycles of Maya, being one in its essence with the Supreme or One
Spirit. Hence arises the seeming confusion and contradiction in the various
Puranas, and at times in the same Purana, about the same individual. Vishnu --
as the many-formed Brahma, and as Brahma (neuter) -- is one, and yet he is said
to be all the 28 Vyasas (Vishnu Purana). "In every Dvapara (third) age,
Vishnu, in the person of Vyasa, divides the Veda, which is one, into four and
many portions. Twenty-eight times have the Vedas been arranged by the great
Rishis in the Vaivasvata Manvantara, in the Dvapara Yuga . . . and,
consequently, twenty-eight Vyasas have passed away . . . they who were all in
the form of Veda-Vyasas, who were the Vyasas of their respective eras. . . .
" (Book III., Ch. III.) "This world is Brahma in Brahma, from Brahma
. . . nothing further to be known." Then, again . . . "There were in
the First Manvantara seven celebrated sons of Vasishta, who in the Third
Manvantara, were sons of Brahma (i.e., Rishis), the illustrious progeny of
Urja." This is plain: the Humanity of the First Manvantara is that of the
seventh and of all the intermediate ones. The mankind of the First Root-Race is
the mankind of the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. To the last it forms a
cyclic and constant reincarnation of the Monads belonging to the Dhyan Chohans
of our Planetary chain.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 147 AGREEMENT OF DATES.
on Globe A in
the First Round; (b) as the "seed of life" on Globe D in the Fourth
Round; and (c) as the "Seed of Man" at the beginning of every
Root-Race -- in our Fifth Race especially. The very commencement of the latter
witnesses, during the Dvapara Yuga,* the destruction of the accursed sorcerers;
"of that island (Plato speaking only of its last island) beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic Ocean, from which there was an easy
transition to other islands in the neighbourhood of another large
Continent" (America). It is this "Atlantic" land which was
connected with the "White Island," and this White Island was Ruta;
but it was not the Atala and the "White Devil" of Colonel Wilford
(see "Asiatic Researches," Vol. VIII., p. 280), as already shown. It
may well be remarked here that the Dvapara Yuga lasts 864,000 years, according
to the Sanskrit texts; and that, if the Kali Yuga began only about 5,000 years
ago, that it is just 869,000 since that destruction took place. Again, these
figures are not very widely different from those given by the geologists, who
place their "glacial period" 850,000 years ago.
Then "a
woman was produced who came to Manu and declared herself his daughter, with
whom he lived and begat the offspring of Manu." This refers to the
physiological transformation of sexes during the Third Root-Race. And the
allegory is too transparently clear to need much explanation. Of course, as
already remarked, in the separation of sexes an androgyne being was supposed to
divide his body into two halves (as in the case of Brahma and Vach, and even of
Adam and Eve), and thus the female is, in a certain sense, his daughter, just
as he will be her son, "the flesh of his (and her) flesh and the bone of
his (and her) bone." Let it be also well remembered that not one of our Orientalists
have yet learned to discern in those "contradictions and amazing
nonsense," as some call the Puranas, that a reference to a Yuga may mean a
Round, a Root-Race, and often a Sub-Race, as well as form a page torn out of
pre-cosmic theogony. This double and triple meaning is proved by various
references to one and the same individual apparently, under an identical name,
while it refers, in fact, to events divided by entire Kalpas. A good instance
is that of Ila. She is first represented as one thing and then as another. In
the exoteric legends it is said that Manu Vaivasvata, desiring to create sons,
instituted a sacrifice to Mitra and Varuna; but, through a mistake of the
officiating
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Dvapara
Yuga differs for each Race. All races have their own cycles, which fact causes
a great difference. For instance, the Fourth Sub-Race of the Atlanteans was in
its Kali-Yug, when destroyed, whereas the Fifth was in its Satya or Krita Yuga.
The Aryan Race is now in its Kali Yuga, and will continue to be in it for
427,000 years longer, while various "family Races," called the
Semitic, Hamitic, etc., are in their own special cycles. The forthcoming 6th
Sub Race -- which may begin very soon -- will be in its Satya (golden) age
while we reap the fruit of our iniquity in our Kali Yuga.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 148 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Brahman, a
daughter only was obtained -- Ila. Then, "through the favour of the
gods," her sex is changed and she becomes a man, Su-dyumna. Then she is
again turned into a woman, and so on; the fable adding that Siva and his
consort were pleased that "she would be male one month and female
another." This has a direct reference to the Third Root-Race, whose men
were androgynes. But some very learned Orientalists think (see "Hindu
Classical Dictionary") and have declared that "Ila was primarily
food, nourishment, or a libation of milk; thence a stream of praise,
personified as the goddess of speech." The "profane" are not
told, however, the reason why "a libation of milk," or "a stream
of praise," should be male and female by turn: unless, indeed there is
some "internal evidence" which the occultists fail to perceive.
In their most
mystical meanings, the union of Swayambhuva Manu with Vach-Sata-Rupa, his own
daughter (this being the first "euhemerization" of the dual principle
of which Vaivasvata Manu and Ila are a secondary and a third form), stands in
Cosmic symbolism as the Root-life, the germ from which spring all the Solar
Systems, the worlds, angels and the gods. For, as says Vishnu:--
"From Manu
all creation, gods, Asuras, man must be produced,
By him the world
must be created, that which moves and moveth not. . . . ."
But we may find
worse opponents than even the Western Scientists and Orientalists. If, on the
question of figures, Brahmins may agree with our teaching, we are not so sure
that some of them, orthodox conservatives, may not raise objections to the
modes of procreation attributed to their Pitar Devatas. We shall be called upon
to produce the works from which we quote, while they will be invited by us to
read their own Puranas a little more carefully and with an eye to the esoteric
meaning. And then, we repeat again, they will find, under the veil of more or
less transparent allegories, every statement made herein corroborated by their
own works. One or two instances have already been given as regards the
appearance of the Second Race, which is called the "Sweat-Born." This
allegory is regarded as a fairy-tale, and yet it conceals a
psycho-physiological phenomenon, and one of the greatest mysteries of Nature.
But in view of
the chronological statements made herein, it is natural to ask:--
COULD MEN EXIST
18,000,000 YEARS AGO?
To this
Occultism answers in the affirmative, notwithstanding all scientific objectors.
Moreover, this duration covers only the Vaivasvata-Manu Man, i.e., the male and
female entity already separated into
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 149 HOW OLD IS HUMANITY?
distinct sexes.
The two and a half Races that preceded that event may have lived 300,000,000
years ago for all that science can tell. For the geological and physical
difficulties in the way of the theory could not exist for the primeval,
ethereal man of the Occult teachings. The whole issue of the quarrel between
the profane and the esoteric sciences depends upon the belief in, and
demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the
former independent of the latter. Paul d'Assier, the Positivist, seems to have
proven the fact pretty plainly,* not to speak of the accumulated testimony of
the ages, and that of the modern spiritualists and mystics. It will be found
difficult to reject this fact in our age of proofs, tests, and ocular
demonstrations.
The Secret
Doctrine maintains that, notwithstanding the general cataclysms and
disturbances of our globe, which -- owing to its being the period of its
greatest physical development, for the Fourth Round is the middle-point of the
life allotted to it -- were far more terrible and intense than during any of
the three preceding Rounds (the cycles of its earlier psychic and spiritual
life and of its semi-ethereal conditions) physical Humanity has existed upon it
for the last 18,000,000 years.** This period was preceded by 300,000,000 years
of the mineral and vegetable development. To this, all those who refuse to
accept the theory of a "boneless," purely ethereal, man, will object.
Science, which knows only of physical organisms, will feel indignant; and materialistic
theology still more so. The first will object on logical and reasonable
grounds, based on the preconception that all animate organisms have always
existed on the same plane of materiality in all the ages; the last on a tissue
of most absurd fictions. The ridiculous claim usually brought forward by
theologians, is based on the virtual assumption that mankind (read Christians)
on this planet have the honour of being the only human beings in the whole
Kosmos, who dwell on a globe, and that they are consequently, the best of their
kind.***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Posthumous Humanity" -- translated by H. S. Olcott, London, 1887.
** Professor
Newcomb says: "The heat evolved by contraction would last only 18,000,000
years" ("Popular Astronomy," p. 500); but "a temperature
permitting the existence of water could not be reached earlier than 10,000,000
years ago" (Winchell's "World-Life," p. 356). But Sir W. Thomson
says that the whole age of the incrustation of the Earth is 18,000,000 years,
though, this year, he has again altered his opinion and allows only 15,000,000
years as the age of the Sun. As will be shown in the Addenda, the divergence of
scientific opinions is so great that no reliance can ever be placed upon
scientific speculation.
*** The essay on
"The Plurality of Worlds" (1853) -- an anonymous work, yet well known
to have been the production of Dr. Whewell -- is a good proof of this. No
Christian ought to believe in either the plurality of worlds or the geological
age of the globe, argues the Author; because, if it is asserted that this world
is only one among the many of its kind, which are all the work of God, as it is
itself; that all are the seat [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 150 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The Occultists,
who believe firmly in the teachings of the mother-philosophy, repel the
objections of both theologians and scientists. They maintain, on their side,
that, during those periods when there must have been insufferable heat, even at
the two poles, successive floods, upheaval of the valleys and constant shifting
of the great waters and seas, none of these circumstances could form an
impediment to human life and organization, such as is assigned by them to the
early mankind. Neither the heterogeneity of ambient regions, full of deleterious
gases, nor the perils of a crust hardly consolidated, could prevent the First
and Second Races from making their appearance even during the Carboniferous, or
the Silurian age itself.
Thus the Monads
destined to animate future Races were ready for the new transformation. They
had passed their phases of immetalization, of plant and animal life, from the
lowest to the highest, and were waiting for their human, more intelligent form.
Yet, what could the plastic modellers do but follow the laws of evolutionary
Nature? Could they, as claimed by the Biblical dead-letter, form
"Lord-God"-like, or as Pygmalion in the Greek allegory, Adam-Galatea
out of volcanic dust, and breathe a living soul into Man? No: because the soul
was already there, latent in its Monad, and needed but a coating. Pygmalion,
who fails to animate his statue, and Bahak-Zivo of the Nazarean Gnostics, who
fails to construct "a human soul in the creature," are, as
conceptions, far more philosophical and scientific than Adam, taken in the
dead-letter sense, or the Biblical Elohim-Creators. Esoteric philosophy, which
teaches spontaneous generation -- after the Sishta and Prajapati have thrown
the seed of life on the Earth -- shows the lower angels able to construct
physical man only, even with the help of Nature, after having evolved the
ethereal form out of themselves, and leaving the physical form to evolve
gradually from its ethereal, or what would now be called, protoplasmic model.
This will again
be objected to: "Spontaneous Generation" is an exploded theory, we
shall be told. Pasteur's experiments disposed of it twenty years ago, and
Professor Tyndall is against it. Well, suppose he is? He ought to know that,
should spontaneous generation
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of life, all the realm and dwelling of
intelligent creatures endowed with will, subject to law and capable of
free-will; then, it would become extravagant to think that our world should
have been the subject of God's favours and His special interference, of His
communications and His personal visit. . . . . . . Can the Earth presume to be
considered the centre of the moral and religious Universe, he asks, if it has
not the slightest distinction to rely upon in the physical Universe? Is it not
as absurd to uphold such an assertion (of the plurality of inhabited worlds),
as it would be to-day to uphold the old hypothesis of Ptolemy, who placed Earth
in the centre of our system? . . . The above is quoted from memory, yet almost
textually. The author fails to see that he is bursting his own soap-bubble with
such a defence.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 151 SPONTANEOUS GENERATION.
be indeed proven
impossible in our present world-period and actual conditions -- which the
Occultists deny -- still it would be no demonstration that it could not have
taken place under different cosmic conditions, not only in the seas of the
Laurentian period, but even on the then convulsed Earth. It would be
interesting to know how Science could ever account for the appearance of
species and life on Earth, especially of Man, once that she rejects both the
Biblical teachings and spontaneous generation. Pasteur's observations, however,
are far from being perfect or proven. Blanchard and Dr. Lutaud reject their
importance and show that they have none. The question is so far left sub
judice, as well as that other one "when, at what period, life appeared on
the Earth?" As to the idea that Haeckel's Moneron -- a pinch of salt! --
has solved the problem of the origin of life, it is simply absurd. Those
materialists, who feel inclined to pooh-pooh the theory of the "Self-existent,"
the "Self-born heavenly man," represented as an ethereal, astral man,
must excuse even a tyro in Occultism laughing, in his turn, at some
speculations of modern thought. After proving most learnedly that the primitive
speck of protoplasm (moneron) is neither animal nor plant, but both, and that
it has no ancestors among either of these, since it is that moneron which
serves as a point of departure for all organized existence, we are finally told
that the Monera are their own ancestors. This may be very scientific, but it is
very metaphysical also; too much so, even for the Occultist.
If spontaneous
generation has changed its methods now, owing perhaps to accumulated material
on hand, so as to almost escape detection, it was in full swing in the genesis
of terrestrial life. Even the simple physical form and the evolution of species
show how Nature proceeds. The scale-bound, gigantic sauria, the winged
pterodactyl, the Megalosaurus, and the hundred-feet long Iguanodon of the later
period, are the transformations of the earliest representatives of the animal
kingdom found in the sediments of the primary epoch. There was a time when all
those above enumerated "antediluvian" monsters appeared as
filamentoid infusoria without shell or crust, with neither nerves, muscles,
organs nor sex, and reproduced their kind by gemmation: as do microscopical
animals also, the architects and builders of our mountain ranges, agreeably to
the teachings of science. Why not man in this case? Why should he not have
followed the same law in his growth, i.e., gradual condensation? Every
unprejudiced person would prefer to believe that primeval humanity had at first
an ethereal -- or, if so preferred, a huge filamentoid, jelly-like form,
evolved by gods or natural "forces," which grew, condensed throughout
millions of ages, and became gigantic in its physical impulse and tendency,
until it settled into the huge, physical form of the Fourth Race Man, -- rather
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 152 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
than believe him
created of the dust of the Earth (literally), or from some unknown anthropoid
ancestor.
Nor does our
esoteric theory clash with scientific data, except on first appearance, as Dr.
A. Wilson, F.R.S., says, in a letter to "Knowledge," (Dec. 23, 1881).
"Evolution -- rather Nature, in the light of evolution -- has only been
studied for some twenty-five years or so. That is, of course, a mere fractional
space in the history of human thought." And just because of that we do not
lose all hope that materialistic science will amend its ways, and will
gradually accept the esoteric teachings -- if even at first divorced from their
(to science) too metaphysical elements.
Has the last
word on the subject of human evolution yet been said? "Each . . . . answer
to the great Question (Man's Real Place in Nature), invariably asserted by the
followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final,
remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, it may be for
twenty," writes Prof. Huxley; "but, as invariably, time proves each
reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth -- tolerable chiefly on
account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly
intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors"! !
Will this eminent Darwinian admit the possibility of his pithecoid ancestry
being assignable to the list of "wholly intolerable beliefs," in the
"larger knowledge" of Occultists? But whence the savage? Mere
"rising to the civilized state" does not account for the evolution of
form.
In the same
letter, "The Evolution of Man," Dr. Wilson makes other strange
confessions. Thus, he observes, in answer to the queries put to
"Knowledge" by "G. M.":--
" 'Has
evolution effected any change in man? If so, what change? If not, why not?' . .
. If we refuse to admit (as science does) that man was created a perfect being,
and then became degraded, there exists only another supposition -- that of
evolution. If man has arisen from a savage to a civilized state, that surely is
evolution. We do not yet know, because such knowledge is difficult to acquire,
if the human frame is subject to the same influences as those of lower animals.
But there is little doubt that elevation from savagery to civilized life means
and implies 'evolution,' and that of considerable extent. Mentally, man's
evolution cannot be doubted; the ever-widening sphere of thought has sprung
from small and rude beginnings, like language itself. But man's ways of life,
his power of adaptation to his surroundings, and countless other circumstances,
have made the facts and course of his 'evolution' very difficult to trace."
This very
difficulty ought to make the Evolutionists more cautious in their affirmations.
But why is evolution impossible, if "man was created a perfect being, and
then became degraded?" At best it can only apply
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Caelo, Book II., c. 13.) The same with regard to man. The theory taught in the
Secret Doctrine, and now expounded, is the only one, which can -- without
falling into the absurdity of a "miraculous" man created out of the
dust of the Earth, or the still greater fallacy of man evolving from a pinch of
lime-salt, (the ex-protoplasmic moneron) -- account for his appearance on
Earth.
Analogy is the
guiding law in Nature, the only true Ariadne's thread that can lead us, through
the inextricable paths of her domain, toward her primal and final mysteries.
Nature, as a creative potency, is infinite, and no generation of physical
scientists can ever boast of having exhausted the list of her ways and methods,
however uniform the laws upon which she proceeds. If we can conceive of a ball
of Fire-mist becoming gradually -- as it rolls through aeons of time in the
interstellar spaces -- a planet, a self-luminous globe, to settle into a
man-bearing world or Earth, thus having passed from a soft plastic body into a
rock-bound globe; and if we see on it everything evolving from the
non-nucleated jelly-speck that becomes the sarcode* of the moneron, then passes
from its protistic state** into the form of an animal, to grow into a gigantic
reptilian monster of the Mesozoic times; then dwindles again into the
(comparatively) dwarfish crocodile, now confined solely to tropical
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Or what is
more generally known as Protoplasm. This substance received its name of
"Sarcode" from Prof. Dujardin Beaumetz far earlier.
** The Monera
are indeed Protista. They are neither animals "nor plants," writes
Haeckel; " . . . the whole body of the Moneron represents nothing more
than a single thoroughly homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive
condition." ("Journal of Microscopical Science," Jan., 1869, p.
28.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 154 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
regions, and the
universally common lizard* -- how can man alone escape the general law?
"There were giants on earth in those days," says Genesis, repeating
the statement of all the other Eastern Scriptures; and the Titans are founded
on anthropological and physiological fact.
And, as the
hard-shelled crustacean was once upon a time a jelly-speck, "a thoroughly
homogeneous particle of albumen in a firmly adhesive condition," so was
the outward covering of primitive man, his early "coat of skin," plus
an immortal spiritual monad, and a psychic temporary form and body within that
shell. The modern, hard, muscular man almost impervious to any climate, was,
perhaps, some 25,000,000 years ago, just what the Haeckelian Moneron is,
strictly "an organism without organs," an entirely homogeneous
substance with a structureless albumen body within, and a human form only
outwardly.
No man of
science has the right, in this century, to find the figures of the Brahmins
preposterous in the question of Chronology; for their own calculations often
exceed by far the claims made by esoteric science. This may easily be shown.
Helmholtz
calculated that the cooling of our Earth from a temperature of 2,000
[[degrees]] to 200' Cent. must have occupied a period of no less than
350,000,000 years. Western science (including geology) seems generally to allow
our globe an age of about 500,000,000 years altogether. Sir W. Thomson,
however, limits the appearance of the earliest vegetable life to 100,000,000
years ago -- a statement respectfully contradicted by the archaic records.
Speculations, furthermore, vary daily in the domains of science. Meanwhile,
some geologists are very much opposed to such limitation. "Volger . . . .
calculates, that the time requisite for the deposit of the strata known to us
must at least have amounted to 648 millions of years . . . . " Both time
and space are infinite and eternal. "The Earth, as a material existence,
is indeed infinite; the changes only which it has undergone can be determined
by finite periods of time" (Burmeister). "We must therefore assume
that the starry heaven is not merely in space, what no astronomer doubts, but
also in time, without beginning or end; that it never was created, and is
imperishable." (See Czolbe).**
Czolbe repeats
exactly what the Occultists say. But the Aryan Occultists, we may be told, knew
nothing of these later speculations. "They were even ignorant of the
globular form of our earth."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Behold the
Iguanodon of the Mesozoic ages -- the monster 100 feet long -- now transformed
into the small Iguana lizard of South America. Popular traditions about giants
in days of old, and their mention in every mythology, including the Bible, may
some day be shown to be founded on fact. In nature, the logic of analogy alone
ought to make us accept these traditions as scientific verities.
** "Force
and Matter"; by L. Buchner, edited by J. F. Collingwood, F.R.S.L., p. 61.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 155 THE SOLAR SYSTEM IN THE PURANAS.
(Coleman.) To
this the Vishnu Purana contains a reply, which has forced certain Orientalists
to open their eyes very widely.
. . . "The
Sun is stationed, for all time, in the middle of the day, and over against
midnight, in all the Dwipas (continents), Maitreya! But the rising and the
setting of the Sun being perpetually opposite to each other -- and in the same
way, all the cardinal points, and so the cross-points, Maitreya; people speak
of the rising of the Sun where they see it; and where the Sun disappears,
there, to them, is his setting. Of the Sun, which is always in one and the same
place, there is neither setting nor rising, for what is called rising and
setting are only the seeing and the not seeing the Sun." (Vishnu Purana,
Book IL, ch. viii.)
To this
Fitzedward Hall remarks, "The Heliocentricism taught in this passage is
remarkable. It is contradicted, however, a little further on."
Contradicted purposely, because it was a secret temple-teaching. Martin Haug
remarked the same teaching in another passage. It is useless to calumniate the
Aryans any longer.
To return to the
Chronology of the geologists and anthropologists. We are afraid Science has no
reasonable grounds on which she could oppose the views of the Occultists in
this direction. Except that "of man, the highest organic being of
creation, not a trace was found in the primary strata; only in the uppermost,
the so-called alluvial layer," is all that can be urged, so far. That man
was not the last member in the mammalian family, but the first in this Round,
is something that science will be forced to acknowledge one day. A similar view
also has already been mooted in France on very high authority.
That man can be
shown to have lived in the mid-Tertiary period, and in a geological age when
there did not yet exist one single specimen of the now known species of mammals,
is a statement that science cannot deny and which has now been proven by de
Quatrefages.* But even supposing his existence in the Eocene period is not yet
demonstrated, what period of time has elapsed since the Cretaceous period? We
are aware of the fact that only the boldest geologists dare to place man
further back than the Miocene age. But how long, we ask, is the duration of
those ages and periods since the Mesozoic time? On this, after a good deal of
speculation and wrangling, science is silent, the greatest authorities upon the
subject being compelled to answer to the question: "We do not know."
This ought to show that the men of science are no greater authorities in this
matter than are the profane. If, according to Prof. Huxley, "the time
represented by the coal formation would be six millions of years,** how many
more millions would be required to cover
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Introduction a l'Etude des Races Humaines."
** "Modern
Science and Modern Thought," by S. Laing, p. 32.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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?*
The writer is
well aware that those specialists, whose computations of the ages of the globe
and man are the most liberal, always had the shyer majority against them. But
this proves very little, since the majority rarely, if ever, turns out to be
right in the long run. Harvey stood alone for many years. The advocates for
crossing the Atlantic with steamers were in danger of ending their days in a
lunatic asylum. Mesmer is classed to this day (in the Encyclopaedias) along
with Cagliostro, and St. Germain, as a charlatan and impostor. And now that
Messrs. Charcot and Richet have vindicated Mesmer's claims, and that "Mesmerism"
under its new name of Hypnotism -- a false nose on a very old face -- is
accepted by science, it does not strengthen one's respect for that majority,
when one sees the ease and unconcern with which its members treat of
"Hypnotism," "Telepathic Impacts," and its other phenomena.
They speak of it, in short, as if they had believed in it since the days of
Solomon, and had never called its votaries, only a few years ago,
"lunatics and impostors!"**
The same
revulsion of thought is in store for the long period of years, claimed by
esoteric philosophy as the age of sexual and physiological mankind. Therefore
even the Stanza which says:--
"The
mind-born, the boneless, gave being to the will-born with bones"; adding
that this took place in the middle of the Third Race 18,000,000 years ago --
has yet a chance of being accepted by future scientists.
As far as XIXth
century thought is concerned, we shall be told, even by some personal friends
who are imbued with an abnormal respect for the shifting conclusions of science,
that such a statement is absurd. How much more improbable will appear our
further assertion, to the effect that the antiquity of the First Race dates
back millions of years beyond this again. For, although the exact figures are
withheld, and it is out of the question to refer the incipient evolution of the
primeval Divine
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Esoteric
Buddhism," p. 70.
** The same fate
is in store for spiritualistic phenomena and all the other psychological
manifestations of the inner Man. Since the days of Hume, whose researches
culminated in a nihilistic idealism, Psychology has gradually shifted its
position to one of crass materialism. Hume is regarded as a psychologist, and
yet he denied a priori the possibility of phenomena in which millions now
believe, including many men of science. The Hylo-idealists of to-day are rank
Annihilationists. The schools of Spencer and Bain are respectively positivist
and materialist, and not metaphysical at all. It is psychism and not
psychology; it reminds one as little of the Vedantic teaching as the pessimism
of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann recalls the esoteric philosophy, the heart and
soul of true Buddhism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 157 THE SLEIGHT-OF-HAND OF SCIENCE.
Races with
certainty to either the early Secondary, or the Primary ages of geology, one
thing is clear: that the figures 18,000,000 of years, which embrace the
duration of sexual, physical, man, have to be enormously increased if the whole
process of spiritual, astral and physical development is taken into account.
Many geologists, indeed, consider that the duration of the Quaternary and
Tertiary Ages demands the concession of such an estimate; and it is quite
certain that no terrestrial conditions whatever negative the hypothesis of an
Eocene Man, if evidence for his reality is forthcoming. Occultists, who
maintain that the above date carries us far back into the secondary or
"Reptilian" age, may refer to M. de Quatrefages in support of the
possible existence of man in that remote antiquity. But with regard to the
earliest Root-Races the case is very different. If the thick agglomeration of
vapours, charged with carbonic acid, that escaped from the soil or was held in
suspension in the atmosphere since the commencement of sedimentation, offered a
fatal obstacle to the life of human organisms as now known, how, it will be
asked, could the primeval men have existed? This consideration is, in reality,
out of court. Such terrestrial conditions as were then operative had no touch
with the plane on which the evolution of the ethereal astral races proceeded.
Only in relatively recent geological periods, has the spiral course of cyclic
law swept mankind into the lowest grade of physical evolution -- the plane of
gross material causation. In those early ages, astral evolution was alone in
progress, and the two planes, the astral and the physical,* though developing
on parallel lines, had no direct point of contact with one another. It is
obvious that a shadow-like ethereal man is related by virtue of his
organization -- if such it can be called -- only to that plane from which the
substance of his Upadhi is derived.
There are
things, perhaps, that may have escaped the far-seeing -- but not all-seeing --
eyes of our modern naturalists; yet it is Nature herself who undertakes to
furnish the missing links. Agnostic speculative thinkers have to choose between
the version given by the Secret Doctrine of the East, and the hopelessly
materialistic Darwinian and Biblical accounts of the origin of man; between no
soul and no spiritual evolution, and the Occult doctrine which repudiates
"Special creation" and the "Evolutionist" Anthropogenesis
equally.
Again, to take
up the question of "Spontaneous generation"; life -- as science shows
-- has not always reigned on this terrestrial plane.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It must be
noted that, though the astral and physical planes of matter ran parallel with
one another even in the earliest geological ages, yet they were not in the same
phases of manifestation in which they are now. The Earth did not reach its
present grade of density till 18,000,000 years ago. Since then both the
physical and astral planes have become grosser.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 158 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
There was a time
when even the Haeckelian Moneron -- that simple globule of Protoplasm -- had
not yet appeared at the bottom of the seas. Whence came the Impulse which caused
the molecules of Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, etc., to group themselves into the
Urschleim of Oken, that organic "slime," now christened protoplasm.
What were the prototypes of the Monera? They, at least, could not have fallen
in meteorites from other globes already formed, Sir W. Thomson's wild theory to
this effect, notwithstanding. And if they have so fallen; if our Earth got its
supply of life-germs from other planets; who, or what, had carried them into
those planets? Here, again, unless the Occult teaching is accepted, we are
compelled once more to face a miracle; to accept the theory of a personal,
anthropomorphic Creator, the attributes and definitions of whom, as formulated
by the Monotheists, clash as much with philosophy and logic, as they degrade
the ideal of an infinite Universal deity, before whose incomprehensible awful
grandeur the highest human intellect feels dwarfed. Let not the modern
philosopher, while arbitrarily placing himself on the highest pinnacle of human
intellectuality hitherto evolved, show himself spiritually and intuitionally so
far below the conceptions of even the ancient Greeks, themselves on a far lower
level, in these respects, than the philosophers of Eastern Aryan antiquity.
Hylozoism, when philosophically understood, is the highest aspect of Pantheism.
It is the only possible escape from idiotic atheism based on lethal
materiality, and the still more idiotic anthropomorphic conceptions of the
monotheists; between which two it stands on its own entirely neutral ground.
Hylozoism demands absolute Divine Thought, which would pervade the numberless
active, creating Forces, or "Creators"; which entities are moved by,
and have their being in, from, and through that Divine Thought; the latter,
nevertheless, having no more personal concern in them or their creations, than
the Sun has in the sun-flower and its seeds, or in vegetation in general. Such
active "Creators" are known to exist and are believed in, because
perceived and sensed by the inner man in the Occultist. Thus the latter says
that an ABSOLUTE Deity, having to be unconditioned and unrelated, cannot be
thought of at the same time as an active, creating, one living god, without
immediate degradation of the ideal.* A Deity that manifests in Space and Time
-- these two being simply the forms of THAT which is the Absolute ALL -- can be
but a fractional part of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The conception
and definition of the Absolute by Cardinal Cusa may satisfy only the Western
mind, prisoned, so unconsciously to itself, and entirely degenerated by long
centuries of scholastic and theological sophistry. But this "Recent
philosophy of the Absolute," traced by Sir W. Hamilton to Cusa, would
never satisfy the more acutely metaphysical mind of the Hindu Vedantin.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 159 OCEANS OF CARBONIC ACID?
whole. And since
that "all" cannot be divided in its absoluteness, therefore that
sensed creator (we say Creators) can be at best but the mere aspect thereof. To
use the same metaphor -- inadequate to express the full idea, yet well adapted
to the case in hand -- these creators are like the numerous rays of the solar
orb, which remains unconscious of, and unconcerned in, the work; while its
mediating agents, the rays, become the instrumental media every spring -- the
Manvantaric dawn of the Earth -- in fructifying and awakening the dormant vitality
inherent in Nature and its differentiated matter. This was so well understood
in antiquity, that even the moderately religious Aristotle remarked that such
work of direct creation would be quite unbecoming to God -- [[aprepes toi
theo]]. Plato and other philosophers taught the same: deity cannot set its own
hand to creation, -- [[autournein hapanta]]. This Cudworth calls
"Hylozoism." As old Zeno is credited by Laertius with having said,
"Nature is a habit moved from itself, according to seminal principles;
perfecting and containing those several things which in determinate times are
produced from it, and acting agreeably to that from which it was
secreted."*
Let us return to
our subject, pausing to think over it. Indeed, if there was vegetable life during
those periods that could feed on the then deleterious elements; and if there
was even animal life whose aquatic organization could be developed,
notwithstanding the supposed scarcity of Oxygen, why could there not be human
life also, in its incipient physical form, i.e., in a race of beings adapted
for that geological period and its surroundings? Besides, science confesses
that it knows nothing of the real length of "geological periods."
But the chief
question before us is, whether it is quite certain that, from the time of that
which is called the "Azoic" age, there ever was such an atmosphere as
that hypothesised by the Naturalists. Not all the physicists agree with this
idea. Were the writer anxious to corroborate the teachings of the Secret Doctrine
by exact science, it would be easy to show, on the admission of more than one
physicist, that the atmosphere has changed little, if at all, since the first
condensation of the oceans -- i.e., since the Laurentian period, the Pyrolithic
age. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of Blanchard, S. Meunier, and even of
Bischof -- as the experiments of the latter scientist with basalts have shown.
For were we to take the word of the majority of scientists as to the quantity
of deadly gases, and of elements entirely saturated with carbon and nitrogen,
in which the vegetable and animal kingdoms are shown to have lived, thriven,
and developed, then one would have to come to the curious conclusion that there
were, in those days, oceans
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*Cudworth's
"Intellectual System," I. p. 328.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 161 A SUGGESTIVE STANZA.
STANZA VII.
FROM THE
SEMI-DIVINE DOWN TO THE FIRST HUMAN RACES.
-------
§§ (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.
---------------------
24. THE SONS OF
WISDOM, THE SONS OF NIGHT (issued from the body of Brahma when it became Night),
READY FOR RE-BIRTH, CAME DOWN. THEY SAW THE (intellectually) VILE FORMS OF THE
FIRST THIRD (still senseless Race) (a). "WE CAN CHOOSE," SAID THE
LORDS, "WE HAVE WISDOM." SOME ENTERED THE CHHAYAS. SOME PROJECTED A
SPARK. SOME DEFERRED TILL THE FOURTH (Race). FROM THEIR OWN ESSENCE THEY FILLED
(intensified) THE KAMA (the vehicle of desire). THOSE WHO RECEIVED BUT A SPARK
REMAINED DESTITUTE OF (higher) KNOWLEDGE. THE SPARK BURNT LOW (b). THE THIRD
REMAINED MIND-LESS. THEIR JIVAS (Monads) WERE NOT READY. THESE WERE SET APART
AMONG THE SEVEN (primitive human species). THEY (became the) NARROW-HEADED. THE
THIRD WERE READY. IN THESE SHALL WE DWELL, SAID THE LORDS OF THE FLAME AND OF
THE DARK WISDOM (c).
This Stanza
contains, in itself, the whole key to the mysteries of evil, the so-called Fall
of the angels, and the many problems that have puzzled the brains of the
philosophers from the time that the memory of man began. It solves the secret
of the subsequent inequalities of intellectual capacity, of birth or social
position, and gives a logical explanation to the incomprehensible Karmic course
throughout the aeons which followed. The best explanation which can be given,
in view of the difficulties of the subject, shall now be attempted.
(a) Up to the
Fourth Round, and even to the later part of the Third Race in this Round, Man
-- if the ever-changing forms that clothed the Monads during the first three
Rounds and the first two and a half races of the present one can be given that
misleading name -- is, so far, only an animal intellectually. It is only in the
actual midway Round that he develops in himself entirely the fourth principle
as a fit vehicle for the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Schoettgen says in Horae Hebraic, etc., the first terrestrial Adam
"had only the breath of life," Nephesh, but not the living Soul.
(b) Here the
inferior Races, of which there are still some analogues left -- as the
Australians (now fast dying out) and some African and Oceanic tribes -- are
meant. "They were not ready" signifies that the Karmic development of
these Monads had not yet fitted them to occupy the forms of men destined for
incarnation in higher intellectual Races. But this is explained later on.
(c) The Zohar
speaks of "Black Fire," which is Absolute Light-Wisdom. To those who,
prompted by old theological prejudice, may say: "But the Asuras are the
rebel Devas, the opponents of the Gods -- hence devils, and the spirits of
Evil," it is answered: Esoteric philosophy admits neither good nor evil
per se, as existing independently in nature. The cause for both is found, as
regards the Kosmos, in the necessity of contraries or contrasts, and with
respect to man, in his human nature, his ignorance and passions. There is no
devil or the utterly depraved, as there are no Angels absolutely perfect,
though there may be spirits of Light and of Darkness; thus LUCIFER -- the
spirit of Intellectual Enlightenment and Freedom of Thought -- is metaphorically
the guiding beacon, which helps man to find his way through the rocks and
sandbanks of Life, for Lucifer is the LOGOS in his highest, and the
"Adversary" in his lowest aspect -- both of which are reflected in
our Ego. Lactantius, speaking of the Nature of Christ, makes the LOGOS, the
Word, the first-born brother of Satan, the "first of all creatures."
(Inst. div. Book II., c. viii., "Qabbalah," 116.)
The Vishnu
Purana describes these primeval creatures (the Arvaksrota) with crooked
digestive canals: They were "endowed with inward manifestations, but
mutually in ignorance about their kind and nature." The twenty-eight kinds
of Badha, or imperfections, do not apply, as Wilson thought, to the animals now
known and specified by him,* for these did not exist in those geological
periods. This is quite plain in the said work, in which the first created (on
this globe) are the "five-fold immovable creation," minerals and
vegetables; then come those fabulous animals, Tiryaksrota, (the monsters of the
abyss slain by the "Lords," see Stanzas II. and III.); then the
Urdhwasrotas, the happy celestial beings, which feed on ambrosia; then lastly,
the Arvaksrotas, human beings -- Brahma's
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Book I.,
chap. v., p. 71.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Brahma who
creates things and men on this Earth, but the chief and Lord of the Prajapati,
the Lords of Being and terrestrial Creation.* Obeying the command of Brahma,
Daksha (the synthesis, or the aggregate, of the terrestrial creators and
progenitors, Pitris included) made superior and inferior (vara and avara)
things "referring to putra" progeny, and "bipeds and quadrupeds,
and subsequently by his will (the Sons of Will and Yoga) made females,"
i.e., separated the androgynes. Here again, we have "bipeds" or men,
created before the "quadrupeds" as in the esoteric teachings. (Vide
supra and Stanza XII as explained.)
Since, in the exoteric
accounts, the Asuras are the first beings created from the "body of
night," while the Pitris issue from that of Twilight; the "gods"
being placed by Parasara (Vishnu Purana) between the two, and shown to evolve
from the "body of the day," it is easy to discover a determined
purpose to veil the order of creation. Man is the Arvaksrota coming from the
"Body of the Dawn"; and elsewhere, man is again referred to, when the
creator of the world, Brahma, is shown "creating fierce beings, denominated
Bhutas and eaters of flesh," or as the text has it, "fiends frightful
from being monkey-coloured and carnivorous."** Whereas the Rakshasas are
generally translated by "Evil Spirits" and "the enemies of the
gods," which identifies them with the Asuras. In the Ramayana, when
Hanuman is reconnoitering the enemy in Lanka, he finds there Rakshasas, some
hideous, "while some were beautiful to look upon," and, in Vishnu
Purana, there is a direct reference to their becoming the Saviours of
"Humanity," or of Brahma.
The allegory is
very ingenious. Great intellect and too much knowledge are a two-edged weapon
in life, and instruments for evil as well as for good. When combined with
Selfishness, they will make of the whole of Humanity a footstool for the
elevation of him who possesses them, and a means for the attainment of his
objects; while, applied to altruistic humanitarian purposes, they may become
the means of the salvation of many. At all events, the absence of
self-consciousness and intellect will make of man an idiot, a brute in human
form. Brahma is Mahat -- the universal Mind -- hence the too-selfish among the
Rakshasas showing the desire to become possessed of it all -- to
"devour" Mahat. The allegory is transparent.
At any rate,
esoteric philosophy identifies the pre-Brahmanical
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Vishnu
Purana," Book I., chap. xv. of vol. 2.
** Ibid., Book
I., chap. v.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 164 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Asuras, Rudras,*
Rakshasas and all the "Adversaries" of the Gods in the allegories,
with the Egos, which, by incarnating in the still witless man of the Third
Race, made him consciously immortal. They are, then, during the cycle of
Incarnations, the true dual Logos -- the conflicting and two-faced divine
Principle in Man. The Commentary that follows, and the next Stanzas may, no
doubt, throw more light on this very difficult tenet, but the writer does not
feel competent to give it out fully. Of the succession of Races, however, they
say:--
"First come
the SELF-EXISTENT on this Earth. They are the 'Spiritual Lives' projected by
the absolute WILL and LAW, at the dawn of every rebirth of the worlds. These
LIVES are the divine 'Sishta,' (the seed-Manus, or the Prajapati and the
Pitris)."
From these
proceed --
1. The First
Race, the "Self-born," which are the (astral) shadows of their
Progenitors.** The body was devoid of all understanding (mind, intelligence,
and will). The inner being (the higher self or Monad), though within the
earthly frame, was unconnected with it. The link, the Manas, was not there as
yet.
2. From the
First (race) emanated the second, called the "Sweat-born"*** and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whom Manu
calls "our paternal grandfathers" (III., 284). The Rudras are the
seven manifestations of Rudra-Siva, "the destroying god," and also
the grand Yogi and ascetic.
** See § II, §§
1, Commentary.
*** To speak of
life as having arisen, and of the human race as having originated, in this
absurdly unscientific way, in the face of the modern Pedigrees of Man, is to
court instantaneous annihilation. The esoteric doctrine risks the danger,
nevertheless, and even goes so far as to ask the impartial reader to compare
the above hypothesis (if it is one) with Haeckel's theory -- now fast becoming
an axiom with science -- which is quoted verbatim:--
". . . How
did life, the living world of organisms, arise? And, secondly, the special
question: How did the human race originate? The first of these two inquiries,
that as to the first appearance of living beings, can only be decided
empirically (! !) by proof of the so-called Archebiosis, or equivocal
generation, or the spontaneous production of organisms of the simplest
conceivable kind. Such are the Monera (Protogenes, Protamoeba, etc),
exceedingly simple microscopic masses of protoplasm without structure or
organisation, which take in nutriment and reproduce themselves by division.
Such a Moneron as that primordial organism discovered by the renowned English
zoologist Huxley, and named Bathybius Haeckelii, appears as a continuous thick
protoplasmic covering at the greatest depths of the ocean, between 3,000 and
30,000 feet. It is true that the first appearance of such Monera has not up to
the present moment been actually observed; but there is nothing intrinsically
improbable in such an evolution." (The "Pedigree of Man,"
Aveling's translation, p 33.)
The Bathybius
protoplasm having recently turned out to be no organic substance at all, there
remains little to be said. Nor, after reading this, does one need to consume
further time in refuting the further assertion that . . . . "in that case
man also [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 165 TO THE MONERON THE CREATOR.
the
"Boneless." This is the Second Root-Race, endowed by the preservers
(Rakshasas)* and the incarnating gods (Asuras and the Kumaras) with the first
primitive and weak spark (the germ of intelligence) . . And from these in turn
proceeds:--
3. The Third
Root-Race, the "Two-fold" (Androgynes). The first Races hereof are
shells, till the last is "inhabited" (i.e., informed) by the Dhyanis.
The Second Race,
as stated above, being also sexless, evolved out of itself, at its beginning,
the Third Androgyne Race by an analogous, but already more complicated process.
As described in the Commentary, the very earliest of that race were:--
"The 'Sons
of Passive Yoga.* They issued from the second Manushyas
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] has beyond a doubt (to the minds of Haeckel and his like)
arisen from the lower mammalia, apes and the earlier simian creatures, the
still earlier Marsupialia, Amphibia, Pisces, by progressive
transformations," all produced by "a series of natural forces working
blindly. . . . . . . . . aim, without design" (p. 36).
The above-quoted
passage bears its criticism on its own face. Science is made to teach that
which, up to the present time, "has never been actually observed."
She is made to deny the phenomenon of an intelligent nature and a vital force
independent of form and matter, and to find it more scientific to teach the
miraculous performance of "natural forces working blindly without aim or
design." If so, then we are led to think that the physico-mechanical
forces of the brains of certain eminent Scientists are leading them on as
blindly to sacrifice logic and common sense on the altar of mutual admiration.
Why should the protoplasmic Moneron producing the first living creature through
self-division be held as a very scientific hypothesis, and an ethereal
pre-human race generating the primeval men in the same fashion be tabooed as
unscientific superstition? Or has materialism obtained a sole monopoly in
Science?
* The Rakshasas,
regarded in Indian popular theology as demons, are called the
"Preservers" beyond the Himalayas. This double and contradictory
meaning has its origin in a philosophical allegory, which is variously rendered
in the Puranas. It is stated that when Brahma created the demons, Yakshas (from
Yaksh, to eat) and the Rakshasas, both of which kinds of demons, as soon as
born, wished to devour their creator, those among them that called out
"Not so! oh, let him be saved (preserved)" were named Rakshasas
(Vishnu Purana Book I. ch. v.). The Bhagavata Purana (III, 20, 19-21) renders
the allegory differently. Brahma transformed himself into night (or ignorance)
invested with a body, upon which the Yakshas and Rakshasas seized, exclaiming
"Do not spare it; devour it." Brahma then cried out, "Do not
devour me, spare me." This has an inner meaning of course. The "body
of Night" is the darkness of ignorance, and it is the darkness of silence
and secrecy. Now the Rakshasas are shown in almost every case to be Yogis,
pious Saddhus and Initiates, a rather unusual occupation for demons. The
meaning then is that while we have power to dispel the darkness of ignorance,
"devour it," we have to preserve the sacred truth from profanation.
"Brahma is for the Brahmins alone," says that proud caste. The moral
of the fable is evident.
** The gradual
evolution of man in the Secret Doctrine shows that all the later (to the
profane the earliest) Races have their physical origin in the early Fourth Race.
But it is the sub-race, which preceded the one that separated sexually, that is
to be [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Haeckel); then, after a few stages, the oviparous, as in the case of the
reptiles, which are followed by the birds; then, finally, the mammals with
their ovoviviparous modes of producing their young ones.
If the term
ovoviviparous is applied to some fish and reptiles, which hatch their eggs
within their bodies, why should it not be applied to female mammalians,
including woman? The ovule, in which, after impregnation, the development of
the foetus takes place, is an egg.
At all events,
this conception is more philosophical than that of Eve with a suddenly created
placenta giving birth to Cain, because of the Apple, when even the marsupial,
the earliest of mammals, is not placental yet.
Moreover, the
progressive order of the methods of reproduction, as unveiled by science, is a
brilliant confirmation of esoteric Ethnology. It is only necessary to tabulate
the data in order to prove our assertion. (Cf. especially Schmidt's
"Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," p. 39, et. seq., and Laing's
"A Modern Zoroastrian," pp. 102-111.)I
1. Fission:--
(a) As seen in
the division of the homogeneous speck of protoplasm, known as Moneron or
Amoeba, into two.
(b) As seen in
the division of the nucleated cell, in which the cell-nucleus splits into two
sub-nuclei, which either develop within the original cell-wall or burst it, and
multiply outside as independent entities. (Cf., the First Root-Race.)
II. Budding:--
A small portion
of the parent structure swells out at the surface and finally parts company,
growing to the size of the original organism; e.g., many vegetables, the
sea-anemone, etc. (Cf., the Second Root-Race.)*
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] regarded as the spiritual ancestors of our
present generations, and especially of the Eastern Aryan Races. Weber's idea that
the Indo-Germanic Race preceded the Aryan Vedic Race is, to the Occultist,
grotesque to the last degree.
* Every process
of healing and cicatrization in the higher animal groups -- even in the case of
reproduction of mutilated limbs with the Amphibians -- is effected by fission
and gemmation of the elementary morphological elements.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 167 MONADS AND ROUNDS.
III. Spores:--
A single cell
thrown off by the parent organism, which develops into a multicellular organism
reproducing the features of the latter, e.g., bacteria and mosses.
IV. Intermediate
Hermaphroditism:--
Male and female
organs inhering in the same individual; e.g., the majority of plants, worms,
and snails, etc.; allied to budding. (Cf. Second and early Third Root-Races.)
V. True sexual
union:--
(Cf. later Third
Root-Race.)
We now come to
an important point with regard to the double evolution of the human race. The
Sons of Wisdom, or the spiritual Dhyanis, had become "intellectual"
through their contact with matter, because they had already reached, during
previous cycles of incarnation, that degree of intellect which enabled them to
become independent and self-conscious entities, on this plane of matter. They
were reborn only by reason of Karmic effects. They entered those who were
"ready," and became the Arhats, or sages, alluded to above. This
needs explanation.
It does not mean
that Monads entered forms in which other Monads already were. They were
"Essences," "Intelligences," and conscious spirits;
entities seeking to become still more conscious by uniting with more developed
matter. Their essence was too pure to be distinct from the universal essence;
but their "Egos," or Manas (since they are called Manasaputra, born
of "Mahat," or Brahma) had to pass through earthly human experiences
to become all-wise, and be able to start on the returning ascending cycle. The
Monads are not discrete principles, limited or conditioned, but rays from that
one universal absolute Principle. The entrance into a dark room through the
same aperture of one ray of sunlight following another will not constitute two
rays, but one ray intensified. It is not in the course of 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol. 2, Page]] 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"* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The term here
means neither the dolicho-cephalic nor the brachyo-cephalic, nor yet skulls of
a smaller volume, but simply brains devoid of intellect generally. The theory
which would judge of the intellectual capacity of a man according to his
cranial capacity, seems absurdly illogical to one who has studied the subject.
The skulls of the stone period, as well as those of African Races (Bushmen included)
show that the first are above rather than below the average of the brain
capacity of the modern man, and the skulls of the last are on the whole (as in
the case of Papuans and Polynesians generally) larger by one cubic inch than
that of the average Frenchman. Again, the cranial capacity of the Parisian of
to-day represents an average of 1437 cubic centimetres compared to 1523 of the
Auvergnat.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 169 MONOGENISM OR POLYGENISM.
Let us, by
giving to Caesar what is Caesar's, examine, first of all, the chances for the
polygenetic theory among the men of science.
Now the majority
of the Darwinian evolutionists incline to a polygenetic explanation of the
origin of Races. On this particular question, however, scientists are, as in
many other cases, at sixes and sevens; they agree to disagree.
"Does man
descend from one single couple or from several groups -- monogenism or
polygenism? As far as one can venture to pronounce on what in the absence of
witnesses (?) will never be known (?), the second hypothesis is far the most
probable."* Abel Hovelacque, in his "Science of Language," comes
to a similar conclusion, arguing from the evidence available to a linguistic
enquirer.
In an address
delivered before the British Association, Professor W. H. Flower remarked on
this question:--
"The view
which appears best to accord with what is now known of the characters and distribution
of the races of man . . . . is a modification of the monogenistic hypothesis
(!). Without entering into the difficult question of the method of man's first
appearance upon the world, we must assume for it a vast antiquity, at all
events as measured by any historical standard. If we had any approach to a
complete palaeontological record, the history of Man could be re-constructed,
but nothing of the kind is forthcoming."
Such an
admission must be regarded as fatal to the dogmatism of the physical Evolutionists,
and as opening a wide margin to occult speculations. The opponents of the
Darwinian theory were, and still remain, polygenists. Such "intellectual
giants" as John Crawford and James Hunt discussed the problem and favoured
polygenesis, and in their day there was a far stronger feeling in favour of
than against this theory. It is only in 1864 that Darwinians began to be wedded
to the theory of unity, of which Messrs. Huxley and Lubbock became the first
coryphai.
As regards that
other question, of the priority of man to the animals in the order of
evolution, the answer is as promptly given. If man is really the Microcosm of
the Macrocosm, then the teaching has nothing so very impossible in it, and is
but logical. For, man becomes that Macrocosm for the three lower kingdoms under
him. Arguing from a physical standpoint, all the lower kingdoms, save the
mineral -- which is light itself, crystallised and immetallised -- from plants
to the creatures which preceded the first mammalians, all have been consolidated
in their physical structures by means of the "cast-off dust" of those
minerals, and the refuse of the human matter, whether from living or dead
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A. Lefevre,
"Philosophy," p. 498.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 animal crucibles through which it had
passed, owing to Nature's alchemical transmutations. There were animals in
those days of which our modern naturalists have never dreamed; and the stronger
became physical material man, the giants of those times, the more powerful were
his emanations. Once that Androgyne "humanity" separated into sexes,
transformed by Nature into child-bearing engines, it ceased to procreate its
like through drops of vital energy oozing out of the body. But while man was
still ignorant of his procreative powers on the human plane, (before his Fall,
as a believer in Adam would say,) all this vital energy, scattered far and wide
from him, was used by Nature for the production of the first mammal-animal
forms. Evolution is an eternal cycle of becoming, we are taught; and nature
never leaves an atom unused. Moreover, from the beginning of the Round, all in
Nature tends to become Man. All the impulses of the dual, centripetal and
centrifugal Force are directed towards one point -- MAN. The progress in the
succession of beings, says Agassiz, "consists in an increasing similarity
of the living fauna, and, among the vertebrates, especially, in the increasing
resemblance to man. Man is the end towards which all animal creation has tended
from the first appearance of the first palaeozoic fishes."*
Just so; but
"the palaeozoic fishes" being at the lower curve of the arc of the
evolution of forms, this Round began with astral man, the reflection of the
Dhyan Chohans, called the "Builders." Man is the alpha and the omega
of objective creation. As said in "Isis Unveiled," "all things
had their origin in spirit -- evolution having originally begun from above and
proceeding downwards, instead of the reverse, as taught in the Darwinian
theory."** Therefore, the tendency spoken of by the eminent naturalist
above quoted, is one inherent in every atom. Only, were one to apply it to both
sides of the evolution, the observations made would greatly interfere with the
modern theory, which has now almost become (Darwinian) law.
But in citing
the passage from Agassiz' work with approval, it must not be understood that
the occultists are making any concession to the theory, which derives man from
the animal kingdom. The fact that in this Round he preceded the mammalia is
obviously not impugned by the consideration that the latter (mammalia) follow
in the wake of man.
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Principles of Zoology," p. 206.
** Vol. I, p.
154.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 171 A SUGGESTIVE EXPLANATION.
25. HOW DID THE
MANASA, THE SONS OF WISDOM ACT? THEY REJECTED THE SELF-BORN, (the boneless).
THEY ARE NOT READY. THEY SPURNED THE (First) SWEAT-BORN.* THEY ARE NOT QUITE
READY. THEY WOULD NOT ENTER THE (First) EGG-BORN.**
To a Theist or a
Christian this verse would suggest a rather theological idea: that of the Fall
of the Angels through Pride. In the Secret Doctrine, however, the reasons for
the refusal to incarnate in half-ready physical bodies seem to be more
connected with physiological than metaphysical reasons. Not all the organisms
were sufficiently ready. The incarnating powers chose the ripest fruits and
spurned the rest.***
By a curious
coincidence, when selecting a familiar name for the continent on which the
first androgynes, the Third Root-Race, separated, the writer chose, on
geographical considerations, that of "Lemuria," invented by Mr. P. L.
Sclater. It is only later, that reading Haeckel's "Pedigree of Man,"
it was found that the German "Animalist" had chosen the name for his
late continent. He traces, properly enough, the centre of human evolution to
"Lemuria," but with a slight scientific variation. Speaking of it as
that "cradle of mankind," he pictures the gradual transformation of
the anthropoid mammal into the primeval savage!! Vogt, again, holds that in
America Man sprang from a branch of the platyrrhine apes, independently of the
origination of the African and Asian root-stocks from the old world
catarrhinians. Anthropologists are, as usual, at loggerheads on this question,
as on many others. We shall examine this claim in the light of esoteric
philosophy in Stanza VIII. Meanwhile, let us give a few moments of attention to
the various consecutive modes of procreation according to the laws of
Evolution.
Let us begin by
the mode of reproduction of the later sub-races of the Third human race, by
those who found themselves endowed with the sacred fire from the spark of
higher and then independent Beings, who were the psychic and spiritual parents
of Man, as the lower Pitar Devata (the Pitris) were the progenitors of his
physical body. That Third and holy Race consisted of men who, at their zenith,
were described
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This is
explained in the section which follows this series of Stanzas in the allegory
from the Puranas concerning Kandu, the holy sage, and Pramlocha, the nymph
alleged to have hypnotised him, (Vide § Il., Commentary after St.I.), a
suggestive allegory, scientifically, as the drops of perspiration, which she
exuded, are the symbols of the spores of science (Vide infra).
** This will be
explained as we proceed. This unwillingness to fashion men, or create, is
symbolized in the Puranas by Daksha having to deal with his opponent Narada,
the "strife-making ascetic."
*** Vide Verse
24.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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:--
-------
26. WHEN THE
SWEAT-BORN PRODUCED THE EGG-BORN, THE TWO-FOLD (androgyne Third Race*), THE
MIGHTY, THE POWERFUL WITH BONES, THE LORDS OF WISDOM SAID: "NOW SHALL WE
CREATE" (a).
Why
"now" -- and not earlier? This the following sloka explains.
-------
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
evolutionist Professor Schmidt alludes to "the fact of the separation of
sexes, as to the derivation of which from species once hermaphrodite all (the
believers in creation naturally excepted) are assuredly of one accord."
Such indeed is the incontestable evidence drawn from the presence of rudimentary
organs. (Cf., his "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," p. 159.) Apart
from such palpable traces of a primeval hermaphroditism, the fact may be noted
that, as Laing writes, "a study of embryology. . . . shows that in the
human higher animal species the distinction of sex is not developed until a
considerable progress has been made in the growth of the embryo." ("A
Modern Zoroastrian," p.106.) The Law of Retardation -- operative alike in
the case of human races, animal species, etc., when a higher type has once been
evolved -- still preserves hermaphroditism as the reproductive method of the
majority of plants and many lower animals.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 173 THE SONS OF KRIYASAKTI.
Kumaras of the
Hindu Pantheon and Puranas, those elder sons of Brahma, "Sanandana and the
other sons of Vedhas," who, previously created by him "without desire
or passion, remained chaste, full of holy wisdom and undesirous of
progeny?"*
The power, by
which they first created, is just that which has since caused them to be
degraded from their high status to the position of evil spirits, of Satan and
his Host, created in their turn by the unclean fancy of exoteric creeds. It was
by Kriyasakti, that mysterious and divine power latent in the will of every
man, and which, if not called to life, quickened and developed by
Yogi-training, remains dormant in 999,999 men out of a million, and gets
atrophied. This power is explained in the "Twelve Signs of the
Zodiac,"** as follows:--
(b)
"Kriyasakti -- the mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce
external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The
ancients held that any idea will manifest itself externally, if one's attention
(and Will) is deeply concentrated upon it; similarly, an intense volition will
be followed by the desired result. A Yogi generally performs his wonders by
means of Itchasakti (Will-power) and Kriyasakti."
The Third Race
had thus created the so-called SONS OF WILL AND YOGA, or the
"ancestors" (the spiritual forefathers) of all the subsequent and
present Arhats, or Mahatmas, in a truly immaculate way. They were indeed
created, not begotten, as were their brethren of the Fourth Race, who were
generated sexually after the separation of sexes, the Fall of Man. For creation
is but the result of will acting on phenomenal matter, the calling forth out of
it the primordial divine Light and eternal Life. They were the "holy
seed-grain" of the future Saviours of Humanity.
Here we have to
make again a break, in order to explain certain difficult points, of which
there are so many. It is almost impossible to avoid such interruptions. For
explanations and a philosophical account of the nature of those beings, which
are now viewed as the "Evil" and rebellious Spirits, the creators by
Kriyasakti, the reader is referred to the chapters on "The Fallen
Angels" and "The Mystic Dragons," in Part II. of this Volume.
The order of the
evolution of the human Races stands thus in the Fifth Book of the Commentaries,
and was already given:--
The First men
were Chhayas (1); the second, the "Sweat-born" (2), the Third,
"Egg-born," and the holy Fathers born by the power of Kriyasakti (3);
the Fourth were the children of the Padmapani (Chenresi) (4).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Vishnu Purana," Book I., ch. 7, para. 1.
** See
"Five Years of Theosophy," p. 777.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
1. Chhaya-birth,
or that primeval mode of sexless procreation, the first Race having oozed out,
so to say, from the bodies of the Pitris, is hinted at in a Cosmic allegory in
the Puranas.* It is the beautiful allegory and story of Sanjna, the daughter of
Viswakarman -- married to the Sun, who, "unable to endure the fervours of
her lord," gave him her chhaya (shadow, image, or astral body), while she
herself repaired to the jungle to perform religious devotions, or Tapas. The
Sun, supposing the "chhaya" to be his wife begat by her children,
like Adam with Lilith -- an ethereal shadow also, as in the legend, though an
actual living female monster millions of years ago.
But, perhaps,
this instance proves little except the exuberant fancy of the Puranic authors.
We have another proof ready. If the materialised forms, which are sometimes
seen oozing out of the bodies of certain mediums could, instead of vanishing,
be fixed and made solid -- the creation of the first Race would become quite
comprehensible. This kind of procreation cannot fail to be suggestive to the
student. Neither the mystery nor the impossibility of such a mode is certainly
any greater -- while it is far more comprehensible to the mind of the true
metaphysical thinker - than the mystery of the conception of the foetus, its
gestation and birth as a child, as we now know it.
Now to the
curious and little understood corroboration in the Puranas about the
"Sweat-born."
2. Kandu is a
sage and a Yogi, eminent in holy wisdom and pious austerities, which, finally,
awaken the jealousy of the gods, who are represented in the Hindu Scriptures as
being in never-ending strife with the ascetics. Indra, the "King of the
Gods,"** finally sends one of his female Apsarasas to tempt the sage. This
is no worse than Jehovah sending Sarah, Abraham's wife, to tempt Pharaoh; but
in truth it is those gods (and god), who are ever trying to disturb ascetics
and thus make them lose the fruit of their austerities, who ought to be
regarded as "tempting demons," instead of applying the term to the
Rudras, Kumaras, and Asuras, whose great sanctity and chastity seem a standing
reproach to the Don Juanic gods of the Pantheon. But it is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide
"Vishnu-Purana," Book III., chap. 2.
** In the oldest
MS. of "Vishnu-Purana" in the possession of an Initiate in Southern
India, the god is not Indra, but Kama, the god of love and desire. See text
further on.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 175 A SAINT -- HYPNOTISED.
the reverse that
we find in all the Puranic allegories, and not without good esoteric reason.
The king of the
gods (or Indra) sends a beautiful Apsarasas (nymph) named Pramlocha to seduce
Kandu and disturb his penance. She succeeds in her unholy purpose and "907
years six months and three days"* spent in her company seem to the sage as
one day. When this psychological or hypnotic state ends, the Muni curses
bitterly the creature who seduced him, thus disturbing his devotions.
"Depart, begone!" he cries, "vile bundle of illusions!" . .
. And Pramlocha, terrified, flies away, wiping the perspiration from her body
with the leaves of the trees as she passes through the air. She went from tree
to tree, and as, with the dusky shoots that crowned their summits, she dried
her limbs, the child she had conceived by the Rishi came forth from the pores
of her skin in drops of perspiration. The trees received the living dews; and
the winds collected them into one mass. "This," said Soma (the Moon),
"I matured by my rays; and gradually it increased in size, till the
exhalation that had rested on the tree tops became the lovely girl named
Marisha."**
Now Kandu stands
here for the First Race. He is a son of the Pitris, hence one devoid of mind,
which is hinted at by his being unable to discern a period of nearly one
thousand years from one day; therefore he is shown to be so easily deluded and
blinded. Here is a variant of the allegory in Genesis, of Adam, born an image
of clay, into which the "Lord-god" breathes the breath of life but
not of intellect and discrimination, which are developed only after he had
tasted of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; in other words when he has
acquired the first development of Mind, and had implanted in him Manas, whose
terrestrial aspect is of the Earth earthy, though its highest faculties connect
it with Spirit and the divine Soul. Pramlocha is the Hindu Lilith of the Aryan
Adam; and Marisha, the daughter born of the perspiration from her pores, is the
"sweat-born," and stands as a symbol for the Second Race of Mankind.
As remarked in
the foot note (vide supra) it is not Indra, who now figures in the Puranas, but
Kamadeva, the god of love and desire, who sends Pramlocha on Earth. Logic,
besides the esoteric doctrine, shows that it must be so. For Kama is the king
and lord of the Apsarasas, of whom Pramlocha is one; and, therefore, when
Kandu, in cursing her,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These are the
exoteric figures given in a purposely reversed and distorted way, being the
figure of the duration of the cycle between the first and second human race.
All Orientalists to the contrary, there is not a word in any of the Puranas
that has not a special esoteric meaning.
** "Vishnu
Purana," Book I., ch. 15. Cf. also Vivien's temptation of Merlin (Tennyson),
the same legend in Irish tradition.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 176 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
exclaims
"Thou hast performed the office assigned by the monarch of the gods,
go!" he must mean by that monarch Kama and not Indra, to whom the
Apsarasas are not subservient. For Kama, again, is in the Rig Veda (x. 129) the
personification of that feeling which leads and propels to creation. He was the
first movement that stirred the ONE, after its manifestation from the purely
abstract principle, to create, "Desire first arose in It, which was the
primal germ of mind; and which sages, searching with their intellect, have
discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity." A hymn
in the Atharva Veda exalts Kama into a supreme God and Creator, and says:
"Kama was born the first. Him, neither gods nor fathers (Pitara) nor men
have equalled." . . . . The Atharva Veda identifies him with Agni, but
makes him superior to that god. The Taittariya Brahmana makes him allegorically
the son of Dharma (moral religious duty, piety and justice) and of Sraddha
(faith). Elsewhere Kama is born from the heart of Brahma; therefore he is
Atma-Bhu "Self-Existent," and Aja, the "unborn." His
sending Promlocha has a deep philosophical meaning; sent by Indra -- the
narrative has none. As Eros was connected in early Greek mythology with the
world's creation, and only afterwards became the sexual Cupid, so was Kama in
his original Vedic character, (Harivansa making him a son of Lakshmi, who is
Venus). The allegory, as said, shows the psychic element developing the
physiological, before the birth of Daksha, the progenitor of real physical men,
made to be born from Marisha and before whose time living beings and men were
procreated "by the will, by sight, by touch and by Yoga," as will be
shown.
This, then, is
the allegory built on the mode of procreation of the Second or the
"Sweat-born." The same for the Third Race in its final development.
Marisha, through
the exertions of Soma, the Moon, is taken to wife by the Prachetasas, the
production of the "Mind-born" sons of Brahma also*, from whom they
beget the Patriarch Daksha, a son of Brahma
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The text
has:-- "From Brahma were born mind-engendered progeny, with forms and
faculties derived from his corporeal nature, embodied spirits produced from the
limbs (gatra) of Dhimat (all-wise deity). These beings were the abode of the
three qualities of deva-sarga (divine creation, which, as the five-fold
creation, is devoid of clearness of perception, without reflection, dull of
nature). But as they did not multiply themselves, Brahma created "other
mind-born sons like himself," namely, the Brahma-rishis, or the Prajapati
(ten and seven). Sanandana and the other sons of Vedhas (Brahma) were
previously created, but, as shown elsewhere, they were "without desire or
passion, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged from the universe and undesirous
of progeny" (Book I, ch. 7). These Sanandana and other Kumaras are then
the Gods, who after refusing to "create progeny" are forced to
incarnate in senseless men. The reader must pardon unavoidable repetitions in
view of the great number of the facts given.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 177 SWEAT-BORN AND ANDROGYNES.
also, in a
former Kalpa or life, explain and add the Puranas, in order to mislead, yet
speaking the truth.
(3.) The early
Third Race, then, is formed from drops of "sweat," which, after many
a transformation, grow into human bodies. This is not more difficult to imagine
or realise than the growth of the foetus from an imperceptible germ, which
foetus develops into a child, and then into a strong, heavy man. But this race
again changes its mode of procreation according to the Commentaries. It is said
to have emanated a vis formativa, which changed the drops of perspiration into
greater drops, which grew, expanded, and became ovoid bodies -- huge eggs. In
these the human foetus gestated for several years. In the Puranas, Marisha, the
daughter of Kandu, the sage, becomes the wife of the Prachetasas and the mother
of Daksha. Now Daksha is the father of the first human-like progenitors, having
been born in this way. He is mentioned later on. The evolution of man, the
microcosm, is analogous to that of the Universe, the macrocosm. His evolution stands
between that of the latter and that of the animal, for which man, in his turn,
is a macrocosm.
Then the race
becomes:--
(4.) The
androgyne, or hermaphrodite. This process of men-bearing explains, perhaps, why
Aristophanes* describes the nature of the old race as androgynous, the form of
every individual being rounded, "having the back and sides as in a
circle," whose "manner of running was circular . . . . terrible in
force and strength and with prodigious ambition." Therefore, to make them
weaker, "Zeus divided them (in the Third Root-Race) into two, and Apollo
(the Sun), under his direction, closed up the skin." The Madagascans (the
island belonged to Lemuria) have a tradition about the first man, who lived at
first without eating, and, having indulged in food, a swelling appeared in his
leg; this bursting, there emerged from it a female, who became the mother of
their race. Truly . . . "We have our sciences of Heterogenesis and
Parthenogenesis, showing that the field is yet open. . . . . The polyps . . . .
produce their offspring from themselves, like the buds and ramifications of a
tree. . . . " Why not the primitive human polyp? The very interesting
polyp Stauridium passes alternately from gemmation into the sex method of
reproduction. Curiously enough, though it grows merely as a polyp on a stalk,
it produces gemmules, which ultimately develop into a sea-nettle or Medusa. The
Medusa is utterly dissimilar to its parent-organism, the Stauridium. It also
reproduces itself differently, by sexual method, and from the resulting eggs
Stauridia once more put in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Plato's
"Banquet."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 law 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 Padmapani, may find its explanation in a
certain letter from the Inspirer of "Esoteric Buddhism" quoted on p.
68. "The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the Fourth
Root-Race -- the above-mentioned Chinamen and their off-shoots and branchlets.
(Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Hungarians, Finns, and even the Esquimaux are
all remnants of this last offshoot.)"
Padmapani, or
Avalokiteswara in Sanskrit, is, in Tibetan, Chenresi. Now, Avalokiteswara is
the great Logos in its higher aspect and in the divine regions. But in the
manifested planes, he is, like Daksha, the progenitor (in a spiritual sense) of
men. Padmapani-Avalokiteswara is called esoterically Bhodhisatva (or Dhyan
Chohan) Chenresi Vanchug, "the powerful and all-seeing." He is
considered now as the greatest protector of Asia in general, and of Tibet in
particular. In order to guide the Tibetans and Lamas in holiness, and preserve
the great Arhats in the world, this heavenly Being is credited with manifesting
himself from age to age in human form. A popular legend has it that whenever
faith begins to die out in the world, Padmapani Chenresi, the
"lotus-bearer," emits a brilliant ray of light, and forthwith
incarnates himself in one of the two great Lamas -- the Dalai and Teschu Lamas;
finally, it is believed that he will incarnate as "the most perfect
Buddha" in Tibet, instead of in India, where his predecessors, the great
Rishis and Manus had appeared in the beginning of our Race, but now appear no
longer. Even the exoteric appearance of Dhyani Chenresi is suggestive of the
esoteric teaching. He is evidently, like Daksha, the synthesis of all the
preceding Races and the progenitor of all the human Races after the Third, the
first complete one, and thus is represented as the culmination of the four
primeval races in his eleven-faced form. It is a column built in four rows,
each series having three faces or heads of different complexions: the three
faces for each race being typical of its three fundamental physiological
transformations. The first is white (moon-coloured); the second is yellow; the
third, red-brown; the fourth, in which are only two faces -- the third face
being left a blank -- (a reference to the untimely end of the Atlanteans) is
brown-black. Padmapani (Daksha) is seated on the column, and forms the apex. In
this reference
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 179 THE BIRTH-DAYS OF THE DHYANIS.
compare Stanza
39. The Dhyan Chohan is represented with four arms, another allusion to the
four races. For while two are folded, the third hand holds a lotus (Padmapani,
"the lotus-bearer"), this flower symbolizing generation, and the
fourth holds a serpent, emblem of the Wisdom in his power. On his neck is a
rosary, and on his head the sign of water [[diagram]] -- matter, deluge --
while on his brow rests the third eye (Siva's eye, that of spiritual insight).
His name is "Protector" (of Tibet), "Saviour of Humanity."
On other occasions when he has only two arms, he is Chenresi, the Dhyani and
Bhodisatva, Chakna-padmakarpo, "he who holds a lotus." His other name
is Chantong, "he of the 1,000 eyes," when he is endowed with a
thousand arms and hands, on the palm of each of which is represented an eye of
Wisdom, these arms radiating from his body like a forest of rays. Another of
his names is Lokapati and Lokanatha (Sanskrit) "Lord of the World";
and Jigtengonpo (Tibetan), "Protector and Saviour against evil" of
any kind.
Padmapani,
however, is the "lotus-bearer" symbolically only for the profane;
esoterically, it means the supporter of the Kalpas, the last of which, the
present Maha-Kalpa (the Varaha), is called Padma, and represents one half of
the life of Brahma. Though a minor Kalpa, it is called Maha, "great,"
because it comprises the age in which Brahma sprang from a lotus.
Theoretically, the Kalpas are infinite, but practically they are divided and
sub-divided in Space and Time, each division -- down to the smallest -- having
its own Dhyani as patron or regent. Padmapani (Avalokiteshwara) becomes, in
China, in his female aspect, Kwan-yin, "who assumes any form, at pleasure,
in order to save mankind." The knowledge of the astrological aspect of the
constellations on the respective "birth-days" of these Dhyanis --
Amitabha (the O-mi-to Fo, of China), included: e.g., on the 19th day of the
second month, on the 17th day of the eleventh month, and on the 7th day of the
third month, etc., etc. -- gives the Occultist the greatest facilities for
performing what are called "magic" feats. The future of an individual
is seen, with all its coming events marshalled in order, in a magic mirror
placed under the ray of certain constellations. But -- beware of the reverse of
the medal, SORCERY.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 180 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
STANZA VIII.
EVOLUTION OF THE
ANIMAL MAMMALIANS. -- THE
FIRST FALL.
-------
§§ (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.
---------------------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 181 MEN, THE PROGENITORS OF ANIMALS.
free from matter
and all its qualities as it was in the beginning; having gained in addition the
experience and wisdom, the fruition of all its personal lives, without their
evil and temptations.
This order of
evolution is found also in Genesis (ch. 1 and 2) if one reads it in its true
esoteric sense, for chapter i. contains the history of the first Three Rounds,
as well as that of the first Three Races of the Fourth, up to that moment when
Man is called to conscious life by the Elohim of Wisdom. In the first chapter,
animals, whales and fowls of the air, are created before the androgyne Adam.*
In the second, Adam (the sexless) comes first, and the animals only appear
after him. Even the state of mental torpor and unconsciousness of the first two
races, and of the first half of the Third Race, is symbolized, in the second
chapter of Genesis, by the deep sleep of Adam. It was the dreamless sleep of mental
inaction, the slumber of the Soul and Mind, which was meant by that
"sleep," and not at all the physiological process of differentiation
of sexes, as a learned French theorist (M. Naudin) imagined.
The Puranas, the
Chaldean and Egyptian fragments, and also the Chinese traditions, all show an
agreement with the Secret Doctrine as to the process and order of evolution. We
find in them the corroboration of almost all our teaching. For instance: the
statement concerning the oviparous mode of procreation of the Third Race, and
even a hint at a less innocent mode of the procreation of the first mammal
forms, "gigantic, transparent, dumb and monstrous they were," says
the Commentary. Study the stories of the several Rishis and their multifarious
progeny; e.g., Pulastya is the father of all the Serpents and Nagas -- the
oviparous brood; Kasyapa was grandsire, through his wife Tamra, of the birds
and of Garuda, king of the feathered tribe; while by his wife Surabhi, he was
the parent of cows and buffaloes, etc., etc.
In the Secret
Doctrine, the first Nagas -- beings wiser than Serpents -- are the "Sons
of Will and Yoga," born before the complete separation of the sexes,
"matured in the man-bearing eggs** produced by the power (Kriyasakti) of
the holy sages" of the early Third Race.***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* An allegorical
reference to the "Sacred Animals" of the Zodiac and other heavenly
bodies. Some Kabalists see in them the prototypes of the animals.
** In "Hesiod,"
Zeus creates his third race of men out of ash-trees. In the "Popol
Vuh" the Third Race of men is created out of the tree Tzita and the marrow
of the reed called Sibac. But Sibac means "egg" in the mystery
language of the Artufas (or Initiation caves). In a report sent in 1812 to the
Cortes by Don Baptista Pino it is said: "All the Pueblos have their
Artufas -- so the natives call subterranean rooms with only a single door where
they (secretly) assemble. . . . . These are impenetrable temples . . . . and
the doors are always closed to the Spaniards. . . . . They adore the Sun and
Moon . . . . fire and the great SNAKE (the creative power), whose eggs are
called Sibac."
*** There is a notable difference esoterically
between the words Sarpa and Naga, though [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Parasara, "There are a hundred
appellations of the immeasurably mighty Rudras."
Some of the
descendants of the primitive Nagas, the Serpents of Wisdom, peopled America,
when its continent arose during the palmy days of the great Atlantis, (America
being the Patala or Antipodes of Jambu-Dwipa, not of Bharata-Varsha).
Otherwise, whence the traditions and legends -- the latter always more true
than history, as says Augustin Thierry -- and even the identity in the names of
certain "medicine men" and priests, who exist to this day in Mexico?
We shall have to say something of the Nargals and the Nagals and also of Nagalism,
called "devil-worship" by the Missionaries.
In almost all
the Puranas, the story of the "Sacrifice of Daksha" is given, the
oldest account of which is to be found in Vayu Purana. Allegorical as it is,
there is more meaning and biological revelation in it to a Naturalist, than in
all the pseudo-scientific vagaries, which are regarded as learned theories and
hypotheses.
Daksha, who is
regarded as the Chief Progenitor, is, moreover, pointed out as the creator of
physical man in the "fable," which makes him lose his head from his
body in the general strife between the gods and the Raumas. This head, being
burnt in the fire, is replaced by the head of a ram (Kasi-Khanda). Now the
ram's head and horns are ever the symbol of generating power and of reproductive
force, and are phallic. As we have shown, it is Daksha who establishes the era
of men engendered by sexual intercourse. But this mode of procreation did not
occur suddenly, as one may think, and required long ages before it became the
one "natural" way. Therefore, his sacrifice to the gods is shown as
interfered with by Siva, the destroying deity, evolution and PROGRESS
personified, who is the regenerator at the same time; who destroys things under
one form but to recall them to life under another more perfect type. Siva-Rudra
creates the terrible Virabhadra (born of his breath) the "thousand-headed,
thousand-armed" (etc.) monster, and commissions him to destroy the
sacrifice prepared by Daksha. Then Virabhadra, "abiding in the region of
the ghosts (ethereal men) . . . .
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] they are both used indiscriminately. Sarpa
(serpent) is from the root Srip, serpo to creep; and they are called
"Ahi," from Ha, to abandon. "The sarpa was produced from
Brahma's hair, which, owing to his fright at beholding the Yakshas, whom he had
created horrible to behold, fell off from the head, each hair becoming a
serpent. They are called Sarpa from their creeping and Ahi because they had
deserted the head" (Wilson). But the Nagas, their serpent's tail
notwithstanding, do not creep, but manage to walk, run and fight in the
allegories.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 183 ARCHAIC ZOOLOGY.
created from the
pores of the skin (Romakupas), powerful Raumas,* (or Raumyas)." Now,
however mythical the allegory, the Mahabharata, which is history as much as is
the Iliad, shows** the Raumyas and other races, as springing in the same manner
from the Romakupas, hair or skin pores. This allegorical description of the
"sacrifice" is full of significance to the students of the Secret
Doctrine who know of the "Sweat-born."
In the Vayu
Purana's account of Daksha's sacrifice, moreover, it is said to have taken
place in the presence of creatures born from the egg, from the vapour,
vegetation, pores of the skin, and, finally only, from the womb.
Daksha typifies
the early Third Race, holy and pure, still devoid of an individual Ego, and
having merely the passive capacities. Brahma, therefore, commands him to create
(in the exoteric texts); when, obeying the command, he made "inferior and
superior" (avara and vara) progeny (putra), bipeds and quadrupeds; and by
his will, gave birth to females . . . . to the gods, the Daityas (giants of the
Fourth Race), the snake-gods, animals, cattle and the Danavas (Titans and demon
Magicians) and other beings."
. . . .
"From that period forward, living creatures were engendered by sexual
intercourse. Before the time of Daksha, they were variously propagated -- by
the will, by sight, by touch, and by Yoga-power."*** And now comes the
simply zoological teaching.
-------
29. ANIMALS WITH
BONES, DRAGONS OF THE DEEP AND FLYING SARPAS (serpents) WERE ADDED TO THE
CREEPING THINGS. THEY THAT CREEP ON THE GROUND GOT WINGS. THEY OF THE LONG
NECKS IN THE WATER, BECAME THE PROGENITORS OF THE FOWLS OF THE AIR (a).
(a) This is a
point on which the teachings and modern biological speculation are in perfect
accord. The missing links representing this transition process between reptile
and bird are apparent to the veriest bigot, especially in the ornithoscelidae,
hesperornis, and the archaeopteryx of Vogt.
-------
30. DURING THE
THIRD (Race), THE BONELESS ANIMALS GREW AND CHANGED: THEY BECAME ANIMALS WITH
BONES (a), THEIR CHHAYAS BECAME SOLID (also).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Wilson
translates the word as "demigods" (See his Vishnu Purana, p. 130);
but Raumas or Raumyas are simply a race, a tribe.
** xii. 10308.
*** "Vishnu
Purana"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 184 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
31. THE ANIMALS
SEPARATED THE FIRST (into mate and female) (b) . . . .
(a) Vertebrates,
and after that mammalians. Before that the animals were also ethereal
proto-organisms, just as man was.
(b) The fact of
former hermaphrodite mammals and the subsequent separation of sexes is now
indisputable, even from the stand-point of Biology. As Prof. Oscar Schmidt, an
avowed Darwinist, shows: "Use and disuse combined with selection elucidate
(?) the separation of the sexes, and the existence, totally incomprehensible,
of rudimentary sexual organs. In the Vertebrata especially, each sex possesses
such distinct traces of the reproductive apparatus characteristic of the other,
that even antiquity assumed hermaphroditism as a natural primeval form of
mankind. . . . The tenacity with which the rudiments of sexual organs are
inherited is remarkable. In the class of mammals, actual hermaphroditism is
unheard of, although through the whole period of their development they drag
along with them these residues born by their unknown ancestry, no one can say
how long ago."*
-------
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. . .
.
-------
32. AND THOSE
WHICH HAD NO SPARK (the "narrow-brained"** TOOK HUGE SHE-ANIMALS UNTO
THEM (a). THEY BEGAT UPON THEM DUMB RACES. DUMB THEY WERE (the
"narrow-brained") THEMSELVES. BUT THEIR TONGUES UNTIED (b). THE
TONGUES OF THEIR PROGENY REMAINED STILL. MONSTERS THEY BRED. A RACE OF CROOKED,
RED-HAIR-COVERED MONSTERS, GOING ON ALL FOURS.*** A DUMB RACE, TO KEEP THE
SHAME UNTOLD.****
(a) The animals
"separated the first," says Stanza 31. Bear in mind that at that
period men were different, even physiologically, from what
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Doctrine
of Descent and Darwinism," pp. 186-7. The "Unknown Ancestry"
referred to are the primeval astral prototypes. Cf. § II., p. 260 (a).
** See verse 24.
*** These
"animals," or monsters, are not the anthropoid or any other apes, but
verily what the Anthropologists might call the "missing link," the
primitive lower man; see infra.
**** The shame
of their animal origin which our modern scientists would emphasize if they
could.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
WHAT MAY BE THE
OBJECTIONS TO THE FOREGOING.
Thus Occultism
rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an
ancestor common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most
anthropoid species to the Third Race man of the early Atlantean period. As this
proposition will be maintained and defended elsewhere, a few words more are all
that are needed at present. For greater clearness, however, we shall repeat in
brief what was said previously in Book I., Stanza VI.
Our teachings
show that, while it is quite correct to say that nature had built, at one time,
around the human astral form an ape-like external shape, yet it is as correct
that this shape was no more that of the "missing link," than were the
coverings of that astral form, during the course of its natural evolution through
all the kingdoms of nature. Nor was it, as shown in the proper place, on this
Fourth Round planet that such evolution took place, but only during the First,
Second, and Third Rounds, when MAN was, in turn, "a stone, a plant, and an
animal" until he became what he was in the First Root-Race of present
humanity. The real line of evolution differs from the Darwinian, and the two
systems are irreconcilable, except when the latter is divorced from the dogma
of "Natural Selection" and the like. Indeed, between the Monera of
Haeckel and the Sarisripa of Manu, there lies an impassable chasm in the shape
of the Jiva; for the "human" Monad, whether immetallized in the
stone-atom, or invegetallized in the plant, or inanimalized in the animal, is
still and ever a divine, hence also a HUMAN Monad. It ceases to be human only
when it becomes absolutely divine. The terms "mineral,"
"vegetable" and "animal" monad are meant to create a
superficial distinction: there is no such thing as a Monad (jiva)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* "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"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide
"Esoteric Buddhism."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* The history of the embryo . . . . is a picture in little, and outline
of that of the race. This conception forms the gist of our fundamental
biogenetic law, which we are obliged to place at the head of the study of the
fundamental law of organic development."**
This modern
theory was known as a fact to, and far more philosophically expressed by, the
Sages and Occultists from the remotest ages. A passage from "Isis
Unveiled" may here be cited to furnish a few points of comparison. In Vol.
I., pp. 388-9, it was asked why, with all their great learning, physiologists
were unable to explain teratological phenomena? Any anatomist who has made the
development and growth of the embryo "a subject of special study,"
can tell, without much brain-work, what daily experience and the evidence of
his own eyes show him, viz., that up to a certain period, the human embryo is
facsimile of a young batrachian in its first remove from the spawn -- tadpole.
But no physiologist or anatomist seems to have had the idea of applying to the
development of the human being -- from the first
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "A very
strong argument in favour of variability is supplied by the science of Embryology.
Is not a man in the uterus . . . . . a simple cell, a vegetable with three or
four leaflets, a tadpole with branchiae, a mammal with a tail, lastly a primate
(?) and a biped? It is scarcely possible not to recognise in the embryonic
evolution a rapid sketch, a faithful summary, of the entire organic
series." (Lefevre, Philosophy, p. 484).
The summary
alluded to is, however, only that of the store of types hoarded up in man, the
microcosm. This simple explanation meets all such objections, as the presence
of the rudimentary tail in the foetus -- a fact triumphantly paraded by Haeckel
and Darwin as conclusively in favour of the Ape-Ancestor theory. It may also be
pointed out that the presence of a vegetable with leaflets in the embryonic
stages is not explained on ordinary evolutionist principles. Darwinists have
not traced man through the vegetable, but Occultists have. Why then this
feature in the embryo, and how do the former explain it?
** "The
Proofs of Evolution," a lecture by Haeckel.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 laminae or coats,
enclosing a liquid. The laminae approach each other at the lower end, and the
embryo hangs from the root of the umbilicus almost like the fruit from the
bough. The stone has now become changed, by "metempsychosis," into a
plant. Then the embryonic creature begins to shoot out, from the inside
outward, its limbs, and develops its features. The eyes are visible as two
black dots; the ears, nose, and mouth form depressions, like the points of a
pineapple, before they begin to project. The embryo develops into an
animal-like foetus -- the shape of a tadpole -- and, like an amphibious
reptile, lives in water and develops from it. Its Monad has not yet become
either human or immortal, for the Kabalists tell us that this only occurs at
the "fourth hour." One by one the foetus assumes the characteristics
of the human being, the first flutter of the immortal breath passes through its
being; it moves; and the divine essence settles in the infant frame, which it
will inhabit until the moment of physical death, when man becomes a spirit.
This mysterious process of a nine-months'
formation, the Kabalists call the completion of the "individual cycle of
evolution." As the foetus develops amidst the liquor amnii in the womb, so
the Earths germinate in the universal ether, or astral fluid, in the womb of
the Universe. These cosmic children, like their pigmy inhabitants, are at first
nuclei; then ovules; then gradually mature; and becoming
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 189 NATURALISTS INVENTING LINKS.
mothers, in
their turn, develop mineral, vegetable, animal, and human forms. From centre to
circumference, from the imperceptible vesicle to the uttermost conceivable
bounds of the Kosmos, those glorious thinkers, the Occultists, trace cycle
merging into cycle, containing and contained in an endless series. The embryo
evolving in its pre-natal sphere, the individual in his family, the family in
the state, the state in mankind, the Earth in our system, that system in its
central universe, the universe in the Kosmos, and the Kosmos in the ONE CAUSE .
. . thus runs their philosophy of evolution, differing as we see, from that of
Haeckel:--
"All are
but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body
Nature is, and (Parabrahm) the soul . . ."
These are the
proofs of Occultism, and they are rejected by Science. But how is the chasm between
the mind of man and animal to be bridged in this case? How, if the anthropoid
and Homo primigenius had, argumenti gratia, a common ancestor (in the way
modern speculation puts it), did the two groups diverge so widely from one
another as regards mental capacity? True, the Occultist may be told that in
every case Occultism does what Science repeats; it gives a common ancestor to
ape and man, since it makes the former issue from primeval man. Ay, but that
"primeval man" was man only in external form. He was mindless and
soulless at the time he begot, with a female animal monster, the forefather of
a series of apes. This speculation -- if speculation it be -- is at least
logical, and fills the chasm between the mind of man and animal. Thus it
accounts for and explains the hitherto unaccountable and inexplicable. The fact
that, in the present stage of evolution, Science is almost certain that no
issue can follow from the union of man and animal, is considered and explained
elsewhere.
Now what is the
fundamental difference between the accepted (or nearly so) conclusions, as
enunciated in "The Pedigree of Man," viz., that man and ape have a
common ancestor; and the teachings of Occultism, which deny this conclusion and
accept the fact that all things and all living beings have originated from one
common source? Materialistic science makes man evolve gradually to what he is
now, and, starting from the first protoplasmic speck called Moneron (which we
are told has, like the rest, "originated in the course of immeasurable
ages from a few, or from one simple, spontaneously arising original form, that
has obeyed one law of evolution"), pass through "unknown and
unknowable" types up to the ape, and thence to the human being. Where the
transitional shapes are discoverable we are not told; for the simple reason
that no "missing links" between man and the apes have ever yet been
found, though this fact in no way prevents men like Haeckel from inventing them
ad libitum.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Haeckel's Anthropogeny, which traces the pedigree of man 'from its protoplasmic
root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed before the oldest of the
fossiliferous rocks were deposited,' according to Professor Huxley's
exposition. We may believe the man (of the Third Round) evolved 'by gradual
modification of an (astral) mammal of ape-like organization' still easier when
we remember that (though in a more condensed and less elegant, but still as
comprehensible, phraseology) the same theory was said by Berosus to have been
taught many thousands of years before his time by the man-fish Oannes or Dagon,
the semi-demon of Babylonia* (though on somewhat modified lines).
"But what
lies back of the Darwinian line of descent? So far as he is concerned nothing
but 'unverifiable hypotheses.' For, as he puts it, he views all beings 'as the
lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of
the Silurian system was deposited.'** He does not attempt to show us who these
'few beings' were. But it answers our purpose quite as well, for, in the
admission of their existence at all, resort to the ancients for corroboration
and elaboration of the idea receives the stamp of scientific approbation. . . .
"
Truly, as also
said in our first work: "If we accept Darwin's theory of the development
of species, we find that his starting-point is placed in front of an open door.
We are at liberty with him, to either remain within, or cross the threshold,
beyond which lies the limitless and the incomprehensible, or rather the
Unutterable. If our mortal language is inadequate to express what our spirit
dimly foresees in the great 'Beyond' -- while on this earth -- it must realize
it at some point in the timeless Eternity." But what lies
"beyond" Haeckel's theory? Why Bathybius Haeckelii, and no more!
A further answer
is given in Part III. Addenda.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Cory:
"Ancient Fragments."
** "Origin
of Species," pp. 448, 489, first edition.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 191 THE CAUSE OF DEGENERATION.
STANZA IX.
THE FINAL
EVOLUTION OF MAN.
-------
§§ (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.
---------------------
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:--
-------
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. . . .
-------
35. THEN ALL
BECAME ENDOWED WITH MANAS (minds). THEY SAW THE SIN OF THE MINDLESS.
But they had
already separated before the ray of divine reason had enlightened the dark
region of their hitherto slumbering minds, and had sinned. That is to say, they
had committed evil unconsciously, by producing an effect which was unnatural.
Yet, like the other six primitive brother or fellow races, even so this
seventh, henceforth degenerated race, which will have to bide its time for its
final development on account of the sin committed, -- even this race will find
itself on the last day on one of the seven paths. For "the wise* guard the
home of nature's order, they assume excellent forms in secret."** But we
must see whether the "animals" tampered with, were of the same kind
as those known to zoology.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This verse in
the Veda (X. 5-6), "The seven wise ones (rays of wisdom, Dhyanis) fashion
seven paths (or lines as also Races in another sense). To one of these may the
distressed mortal come" -- which is interpreted solely from the
astronomical and cosmic aspect -- is one of the most pregnant in occult
meaning. The "paths" may mean lines (maryadah), but they are
primarily beams of light falling on the paths leading to wisdom. (See Rig Veda
IV. 5-13.) It means "ways" or paths. They are, in short, the seven
Rays which fall free from the macrocosmic centre, the seven principles in the
metaphysical, the seven Races in the physical sense. All depends upon the key
used.
** "Rig
Veda," X. 10, 5, 2.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 offspring, but begat various animals along with
Danavas (giants) on females of other species -- animals being as (or in a manner
of) Sons putative to them; and they (the human males) refusing in time to be
regarded as (putative) fathers of dumb creatures -- spoke truthfully and
wisely. Upon seeing this (state of things), the kings and Lords of the Last
Races (of the Third and the Fourth) placed the seal of prohibition upon the
sinful intercourse. It interfered with Karma, it developed new (Karma).* They
(the divine Kings) struck the culprits with sterility. They destroyed the Red
and Blue Races.**
In another we
find:--
"There were
blue and red-faced animal-men even in later times; not from actual intercourse
(between the human and animal species), but by descent."
And still
another passage mentions:--
"Red-haired,
swarthy men going on all-fours, who bend and unbend (stand erect and fall on
their hands again) who speak as their forefathers, and run on their hands as
their giant fore-mothers."
Perchance in
these specimens, Haeckelians might recognize, not the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is next to
impossible to translate verbally some of these old Commentaries. We are often
obliged to give the meaning only, and thus retranslate the verbatim
translations.
** Rudra, as a
Kumara, is Lilalohita -- red and blue.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, Haeckel's Catarrhini and Platyrrhini,
came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The orang-outang, the
gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical
evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely
human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid*
blood in his veins. Thus saith old Wisdom and universal tradition.
How was the
separation of sexes effected? it is asked. Are we to believe in the old Jewish
fable of the rib of Adam yielding Eve? Even such belief is more logical and
reasonable than the descent of man from the Quadrumana without any reservation;
as the former hides an esoteric truth under a fabulous version, while the
latter conceals no deeper fact than a desire to force upon mankind a
materialistic fiction. The rib is bone, and when we read in Genesis that Eve
was made out of the rib, it only means that the Race with bones was produced
out of a previous Race and Races, which were "boneless." This is an
esoteric tenet spread far and wide, as it is almost universal under its various
forms. A Tahitian tradition states that man was created out of Araea, "red
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This, regardless
of modern materialistic evolution, which speculates in this wise: "The
primitive human form, whence as we think all human species sprang, has perished
this long time." (This we deny; it has only decreased in size and changed
in texture.) "But many facts point to the conclusion that it was hairy and
dolichocephalic." (African races are even now dolichocephalic in a great
measure, but the palaeolithic Neanderthal skull, the oldest we know of, is of a
large size, and no nearer to the capacity of the gorilla's cranium than that of
any other now-living man). "Let us, for the time being, call this
hypothetical species Homo primigenius. . . . This first species, or the
Ape-man, the ancestor of all the others, PROBABLY arose in the tropical regions
of the old world from ANTHROPOID APES." Asked for proofs, the
evolutionist, not the least daunted, replies: "Of these NO FOSSIL REMAINS
ARE AS YET KNOWN TO US, BUT THEY WERE probably AKIN TO THE GORILLA AND ORANG OF
THE PRESENT DAY." And then the Papuan negro is mentioned as the probable
descendant in the first line (Pedigree of Man, p. 80).
Haeckel holds
fast to Lemuria, which with East Africa and South Asia also, he mentions as the
possible cradle of the primitive Ape-men; and so do many geologists. Mr. A. R. Wallace
admits its reality, though in a rather modified sense, in his
"Geographical Distribution of Animals." But let not Evolutionists
speak so lightly of the comparative size of the brains of man and the ape, for
this is very unscientific, especially when they pretend to see no difference
between the two, or very little at any rate. For Vogt himself showed that,
while the highest of the Apes, the gorilla, has a brain of only 30 to 51 cubic
inches, the brain of the lowest of the Australian aborigines amounts to 99.35
cubic inches. The former is thus "not half of the size of the brain of a
new-born babe," says Pfaff.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
Nevertheless,
whatever the allegory may mean, even its exoteric meaning necessitates a divine
Builder of man -- "a Progenitor." Do we then believe in such
"supernatural" beings? We say, No. Occultism has never believed in
anything, whether animate or inanimate, outside nature. Nor are we Cosmolators
or Polytheists for believing in "Heavenly Man" and divine men, for we
have the accumulated testimony of the ages, with its unvarying evidence on
every essential point, to support us in this; the Wisdom of the Ancients and
UNIVERSAL tradition. We reject, however, every groundless and baseless
tradition, which, having outgrown strict allegory and symbolism, has found
acceptance in exoteric creeds. But that which is preserved in unanimous
traditions, only the wilfully blind could reject. Hence we believe in races of
beings other than our own in far remote geological periods; in races of
ethereal, following incorporeal, "Arupa," men, with form but no solid
substance, giants who preceded us pigmies; in dynasties of divine beings, those
Kings and Instructors of the Third Race in arts and sciences, compared with
which our little modern science stands less chance than elementary arithmetic
with geometry.
No, certainly
not. We do not believe in the supernatural but only in the superhuman, or
rather interhuman, intelligences. One may easily appreciate the feeling of
reluctance that an educated person would have to being classed with the
superstitious and ignorant; and even realize the great truth uttered by Renan
when he says that: "The supernatural has become like the original sin, a
blemish that every one seems ashamed of -- even those most religious persons
who refuse in our day to accept even a minimum of Bible miracles in all their
crudeness, and who, seeking to reduce them to the minimum, hide and conceal it
in the furthermost corners of the past."**
But the
"supernatural" of Renan belongs to dogma and its dead letter. It has
nought to do with its Spirit nor with the reality of facts in Nature. If
theology asks us to believe that four or five thousand years ago men lived 900
years and more, that a portion of mankind, the enemies of the people of Israel
exclusively, was composed of giants
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Polynesian Researches," Ellis. Vol.II., p. 38.
Missionaries
seem to have pounced upon this name Ivi and made of it Eve. But, as shown by
Professor Max Muller, Eve is not the Hebrew name but an European transformation
of [[hebrew]], chavah, "life," or mother of all living; "while
the Tahitian Ivi and the Maori Wheva meant bone and bone only."
("False Analogies.")
** Chaire
d'Hebreu au college de France, p. 20.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* Darwin
notes such
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Of such
semi-animal creatures, the sole remnants known to Ethnology were the
Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China, the men
and women of which are entirely covered with hair. They were the last
descendants in a direct line of the semi-animal latter-day Lemurians referred
to. There are, however, considerable numbers of the mixed Lemuro-Atlantean
peoples produced by various [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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"* and mindless monster and a real human, though still as
mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a
physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of
further survival of the abnormal race. In no one point of the above is Science
prepared to believe as yet -- but it will have to in the long run. Esoteric
philosophy, let us remember, only fills the gaps made by science and corrects
her false premises.
Yet, in this
particular, geology and even botany and zoology support the esoteric teachings.
It has been suggested by many geologists that the Australian native --
co-existing as he does with an archaic fauna and flora -- must date back to an
enormous antiquity. The whole environment of this mysterious race, about whose
origin ethnology is silent, is a testimony to the truth of the esoteric
position.
"It is a
very curious fact," says Jukes,** "that not only these marsupial
animals (the mammals found in the Oxfordshire stone-field slates), but several
of the shells -- as for instance, the Trigonias and even some of the plants
found fossil in the Oolitic rocks -- much more nearly resemble those now living
in Australia than the living forms of any other part of the globe. This might
be explained on the supposition that, since the 0olitic (Jurassic) period, less
change has taken place in Australia than elsewhere, and that the Australian
flora and fauna consequently retain some-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] crossings with such semi-human stocks -- e.g.,
the wild men of Borneo, the Veddhas of Ceylon, classed by Prof. Flower among
Aryans (!), most of the remaining Australians, Bushmen, Negritos, Andaman
Islanders, etc.
The Australians
of the Gulf of St. Vincent and the neighbourhood of Adelaide are very hairy,
and the brown down on the skin of boys of five or six years of age assumes a
furry appearance. They are, however, degraded men -- not the closest
approximation to the "pithecoid man," as Haeckel so sweepingly
affirms. Only a portion of these men are a Lemurian relic. (Cf. "Esoteric
Buddhism," p.55.)
* In calling the
animal "Soulless," it is not depriving the beast, from the humblest
to the highest species, of a "soul," but only of a conscious
surviving Ego-soul, i.e., that principle which survives after a man, and
reincarnates in a like man. The animal has an astral body, that survives the
physical form for a short period; but its (animal) Monad does not re-incarnate
in the same, but in a higher species, and has no "Devachan" of
course. It has the seeds of all the human principles in itself, but they are
latent.
** "Manual
of Geology," p. 302.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 197 THE SEPARATION OF SEXES.
thing of the Oolitic
type, while it had been altogether supplanted and replaced on the rest of the
Globe." (! !)
Now why has less
change taken place in Australia than elsewhere? Where is the raison d'etre for
such a "curse of retardation"? It is simply because the nature of the
environment develops pari passu with the race concerned. Correspondences rule
in every quarter. The survivors of those later Lemurians, who escaped the
destruction of their fellows when the main continent was submerged, became the
ancestors of a portion of the present native tribes. Being a very low sub-race,
begotten originally of animals, of monsters, whose very fossils are now resting
miles under the sea floors, their stock has since existed in an environment
strongly subjected to the law of retardation. Australia is one of the oldest
lands now above the waters, and in the senile decrepitude of old age, its
"virgin soil" notwithstanding. It can produce no new forms, unless
helped by new and fresh races, and artificial cultivation and breeding.
To return,
however, once more to the history of the Third Race, the
"Sweat-Born," the "Egg-bearing," and the
"Androgyne." Almost sexless, in its early beginnings, it became
bisexual or androgynous; very gradually of course. The passage from the former
to the latter transformation required numberless generations, during which the
simple cell that issued from the earliest parent (the two in one), first
developed into a bisexual being; and then the cell, becoming a regular egg,
gave forth a unisexual creature. The Third-Race-mankind is the most mysterious
of all the hitherto developed five Races. The mystery of the "How" of
the generation of the distinct sexes must, of course, be very obscure here, as
it is the business of an embryologist and a specialist, the present work giving
only faint outlines of the process. But it is evident that the units of the
Third Race humanity began to separate in their pre-natal shells, or eggs,* and
to issue out of them as distinct male and female babes, ages after the appearance
of its early progenitors. And, as time rolled on its geological periods, the
newly born sub-races began to lose their natal capacities. Toward the end of
the fourth sub-race, the babe lost its faculty of walking as soon as liberated
from its shell, and by the end of the fifth, mankind was born under the same
conditions and by the same identical process as our historical generations.
This required, of course, millions of years. The
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The "fables"
and "myths" about Leda and Jupiter, and such like, could never have
sprung up in people's fancy, had not the allegory rested on a fact in nature.
Evolution, gradually transforming man into a mammal, did in his case only what
it did in that of other animals. But this does not prevent man from having
always stood at the head of the animal world and other organic species, and
from having preceded the former.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
36. THE FOURTH
RACE DEVELOPED SPEECH.
The Commentaries
explain that the first Race -- the ethereal or astral Sons of Yoga, also called
"Self-born" -- was, in our sense, speechless, as it was devoid of
mind on our plane. The Second Race had a "Sound-language," to wit,
chant-like sounds composed of vowels alone. The Third Race developed in the
beginning a kind of language which was only a slight improvement on the various
sounds in Nature, on the cry of gigantic insects and of the first animals,
which, however, were hardly nascent in the day of the "Sweat-born"
(the early Third Race). In its second half, when the "Sweat-born"
gave birth to the "Egg-born," (the middle Third Race); and when
these, instead of "hatching out" (may the reader pardon the rather
ridiculous expression when applied to human beings in our age) as androgynous
beings, began to evolve into separate males and females; and when the same law
of evolution led them to reproduce their kind sexually, an act which forced the
creative gods, compelled by Karmic law, to incarnate in mindless men; then only
was speech developed. But even then it was still no better than a tentative
effort. The whole human race was at that time of "one language and of one
lip." This did not prevent the last two Sub-Races of the Third Race* from
building cities, and sowing far and wide the first seeds of civilization under
the guidance of their divine instructors,** and their own already awakened
minds. Let the reader also bear in mind that, as each of the seven races is
divided into four ages -- the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Age -- so is
every smallest division of such races.*** Speech then developed, according to
occult teaching, in the following order:--
I. Monosyllabic
speech; that of the first approximately fully developed human beings at the
close of the Third Root-race, the "golden-coloured,"
yellow-complexioned men, after their separation into sexes, and the full
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* To avoid
confusion, let the reader remember that the term Root-Race applies to one of
the seven great Races, sub-Race to one of its great Branches, and Family-Race
to one of the sub-divisions, which include nations and large tribes.
** In the
Section on the Divine Dynasties, the nature of these "Instructors" is
explained.
*** Vide Section
attached to the "Divisions into Yugas."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 199 PRIMEVAL LANGUAGE.
awakening of
their minds. Before that, they communicated through what would now be called
"thought-transference," though, with the exception of the Race called
the "Sons of Will and Yoga" -- the first in whom the "Sons of
Wisdom" had incarnated -- thought was but very little developed in nascent
physical man, and never soared above a low terrestrial level. Their physical bodies
belonging to the Earth, their Monads remained on a higher plane altogether.
Language could not be well developed before the full acquisition and
development of their reasoning faculties. This monosyllabic speech was the
vowel parent, so to speak, of the monosyllabic languages mixed with hard
consonants, still in use amongst the yellow races which are known to the
anthropologist.*
II. These
linguistic characteristics developed into the agglutinative languages. The
latter were spoken by some Atlantean races, while other parent stocks of the
Fourth Race preserved the mother-language. And as languages have their cyclic
evolution, their childhood, purity, growth, fall into matter, admixture with
other languages, maturity, decay and finally death,** so the primitive speech
of the most civilized Atlantean races -- that language, which is referred to as
"Rakshasi Bhasa," in old Sanskrit works -- decayed and almost died
out. While the "cream" of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more
toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an
heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the inflectional, highly
developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary
fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The present
yellow races are the descendants, however, of the early branches of the Fourth
Race. Of the third, the only pure and direct descendants are, as said above, a
portion of the fallen and degenerated Australians, whose far distant ancestors
belonged to a division of the seventh Sub-race of the Third. The rest are of
mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. They have since then entirely changed in
stature and intellectual capacities.
** Language is
certainly coeval with reason, and could never have been developed before men
became one with the informing principles in them -- those who fructified and
awoke to life the manasic element dormant in primitive man. For, as Professor
Max Muller tells us in his "Science of Thought," "Thought and
language are identical." Yet to add to this the reflection that thoughts
which are too deep for words, do not really exist at all, is rather risky, as
thought impressed upon the astral tablets exists in eternity whether expressed
or not. Logos is both reason and speech. But language, proceeding in cycles, is
not always adequate to express spiritual thoughts. Moreover, in one sense, the
Greek Logos is the equivalent of the Sanscrit Vach, "the immortal (intellectual)
ray of spirit." And the fact that Vach (as Devasena, an aspect of
Saraswati, the goddess of hidden Wisdom) is the spouse of the eternal celibate
Kumara, unveils a suggestive, though veiled, reference to the Kumaras, those
"who refused to create," but who were compelled later on to complete
divine Man by incarnating in him. All this will be fully explained in the
sections that follow.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Ptolemy,
speaking in his ninth table of the Kabolitae (Kabul tribes), calls them
[[Aristophuloi]], the aristocratic or noble tribes. The Afghans call themselves
Ben-Issrael (children of Is(sa)rael), from Issa, "woman and also
earth," Sons of Mother Earth. But if you call an Afghan Yahoudi (Jew), he
will kill you. The subject is fully treated elsewhere. The names of the
supposed twelve tribes and the names of the real tribes, the same in number, of
the Afghans, are the same. The Afghans being far older (at any rate, their
Arabic stock) than the Israelites, no one need be surprised to find such tribal
names among them as Youssoufzic, "Sons of Joseph" in Punjcaure and
Boonere; the Zablistanee (Zebulon); Ben-manasseh (sons of Manasseh) among the
Khojar Tartars; Isaguri, or Issachar (now Ashnagor in Afghanistan), etc., etc.
The whole twelve names of the so-called twelve tribes are names of the signs of
the Zodiac, as is now well proven. At any rate, the names of the oldest Arabic
tribes, re-transliterated, yield the names of the zodiacal signs and of the
mythical sons of Jacob likewise. Where are the traces of the Jewish twelve
tribes? Nowhere. But there is a trace, and a good one, that the Jews have tried
to deceive people with the help of those names. For, see what happens ages
after the ten tribes had wholly disappeared from Babylon. Ptolemy Philadelphus,
desiring to have the Hebrew Law translated for him into Greek (the famous
Septuagint), wrote to the high priest of the Jews, Eleazar, to send him six men
from each of the twelve tribes; and the seventy-two representatives (of whom
sixty were ghosts apparently) came to the king in Egypt and translated the law
amid miracles and wonders. See Butler's "Horae Biblicae," Josephus,
and Philo Judaeus.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 201 THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE EARTH.
In these
red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection
between men and animals, the "Lords of Wisdom" did not incarnate, as
we see. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural
cross-breeding (unnatural "sexual selection"), originated in due course
of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the
fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which
developed into mammalian apes ages later.*
As to the
separation of sexes, it did not occur suddenly, as one may think. Nature
proceeds slowly in whatever she does.
-------
37. THE ONE
(androgyne) BECAME TWO; ALSO ALL THE LIVING AND CREEPING THINGS, THAT WERE
STILL ONE, GIANT-FISH, BIRDS, AND SERPENTS WITH SHELL-HEADS (a).
This relates
evidently to the so-called age of the amphibious reptiles, during which ages
science maintains that no man existed! But what could the ancients know of
antediluvian prehistoric animals and monsters! Nevertheless, in Book VI. of the
Commentaries is found a passage which says, freely translated:--
"When the
Third separated and fell into sin by breeding men-animals, these (the animals)
became ferocious, and men and they mutually destructive. Till then, there was
no sin, no life taken. After (the separation) the Satya (Yuga) was at an end.
The eternal spring became constant change and seasons succeeded. Cold forced
men to build shelters and devise clothing. Then man appealed to the superior
Fathers (the higher gods or angels). The Nirmanakaya of the Nagas, the wise
Serpents and Dragons of Light came, and the precursors of the Enlightened
(Buddhas). Divine Kings descended and taught men sciences and arts, for man
could live no longer in the first land (Adi-Varsha, the Eden of the first
Races), which had turned into a white frozen corpse."
The above is
suggestive. We will see what can be inferred from this brief statement. Some
may incline to think that there is more in it than is apparent at first sight.
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Commentary
explains that the apes are the only species, among the animals, which has
gradually and with every generation and variety tended more and more to return
to the original type of its male forefather -- the dark gigantic Lemurian and
Atlantean.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 202 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
EDENS, SERPENTS,
AND DRAGONS.
Whence the idea,
and the true meaning of the term "Eden"? Christians will maintain
that the Garden of Eden is the holy Paradise, the place desecrated by the sin
of Adam and Eve; the Occultist will deny this dead-letter interpretation, and
show the reverse. One need not believe and see in the Bible divine revelation
in order to say that this ancient book, if read esoterically, is based upon the
same universal traditions. What Eden was is partially shown in Isis Unveiled.*
It was said
that: "The Garden of Eden as a locality is no myth at all; it belongs to
those landmarks of history which occasionally disclose to the student that the
Bible is not all mere allegory. Eden, or the Hebrew [[hebrew]] Gan-Eden,
meaning the park or the garden of Eden, is an archaic name of the country
watered by the Euphrates and its many branches, from Asia and Armenia to the
Erythraean sea." (A. Wilder says that Gan-duniyas is a name of Babylonia.)
In the Chaldean "Book of Numbers," the location is designated in
numerals, and in the cypher Rosicrucian manuscript, left by Count St. Germain,
it is fully described. In the Assyrian Tablets it is rendered Ganduniyas.
"Behold," says the [[hebrew]] (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 [[hebrew]] 'Chitonuth our.' " The first Hebrew word,
"chiton," is the Greek [[Chiton]], Chiton. It became a Slavonic word
by adoption from the Bible, and means a coat, an upper garment.
"Though
containing the same substratum of esoteric truth as does every early Cosmogony,
the Hebrew Scripture wears on its face the marks of a double origin. Its
Genesis is purely a reminiscence of the Babylonian captivity. The names of
places, men and even objects, can be traced from the original text to the
Chaldeans and the Akkadians, the progenitors and Aryan instructors of the
former. It is strongly contested that the Akkad tribes of Chaldea, Babylonia
and Assyria were in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vol. I., pp.
575, et seq.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 203 THE GARDEN OF EDEN, A COLLEGE.
any way cognate
with the Brahmans of Hindostan; but there are more proofs in favour of this
opinion than otherwise. The Shemite or Assyrian ought, perchance, to have been
called the Turanian, and the Mongolians have been denominated Scyths. But if
the Akkadians ever existed, otherwise than in the imagination of some
ethnologists and philologists, they certainly would never have been a Turanian
tribe, as some Assyriologists have striven to make us believe. They were simply
emigrants on their way to Asia Minor from India, the cradle of humanity, and
their sacerdotal adepts tarried to civilize and initiate a barbarian people.
Halevy proved the fallacy of the Turanian mania in regard to Akkadian people,
and other scientists have proved that the Babylonian civilization was neither
born nor developed in that country. It was imported from India, and the
importers were Brahminical Hindus."
And now, ten
years after this was written, we find ourselves corroborated by Professor
Sayce, who says in his first Hibbert lecture that the culture of the Babylonian
city Eridu was of foreign importation. It came from India.
"Much of
the theology was borrowed by the Semites from the non-Semitic Akkadians or
proto-Chaldeans, whom they supplanted, and whose local cults they had neither
the will nor the power to uproot. Indeed, throughout a long course of ages the
two races, Semites and Akkadians, lived side by side, their notions and worship
of the gods blending insensibly together."
Here, the
Akkadians are called "non-Semitic," as we had insisted they were in
"Isis," which is another corroboration. And we are no less right in
always maintaining that the Jewish Biblical history was a compilation of
historical facts, arranged from other people's history in Jewish garb --
Genesis excluded, which is esotericism pure and simple. But it is really from
the Euxine to Kashmir and beyond, that science has to search for the cradle --
or rather one of the chief cradles -- of mankind and the sons of Ad-ah; and
especially in after times, when the Garden of Ed-en on the Euphrates became the
college of the astrologers and magi, the Aleim.
But this
"college" and this Eden belong to the Fifth Race, and are simply a
faint reminiscence of the Adi-varsha, of the primeval Third Race. What is the
etymological meaning of the word Eden? In Greek it is [hedone], signifying
voluptuousness. In this aspect it is no better than the Olympus of the Greeks,
Indra's heaven (Swarga) on Mount Meru, and even the paradise full of Houris,
promised by Mahomet to the faithful. The Garden of Eden was never the property
of the Jews; for China, which can hardly be suspected of having known anything
of the Jews 2,000 B.C., has such a primitive garden in Central Asia inhabited
by the "Dragons of Wisdom," the Initiates. And according to Klaproth,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 204 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the
hieroglyphical chart copied from a Japanese Cyclopaedia in the book of
Fo-kone-ky, places its "Garden of Wisdom" on the plateau of Pamir
between the highest peaks of the Himalayan ranges; and describing it as the
culminating point of Central Asia, shows the four rivers -- Oxus, Indus,
Ganges, and Silo -- flowing from a common source, the "Lake of the
Dragons."
But this is not
the Genetic Eden; nor is it the Kabalistical Garden of Eden. For the former --
Eden Illa-ah -- means in one sense Wisdom, a state like that of Nirvana, a
paradise of Bliss; while in another sense it refers to Intellectual man
himself, the container of the Eden in which grows the tree of Knowledge of good
and evil: man being the Knower thereof.
Renan and
Barthelemy St. Hilaire, basing themselves "on the most solid
inductions," think it impossible to doubt any longer, and both place the
cradle of humanity "on the region of the Timaus." Finally, the
Asiatic Journal* concludes that: "All the traditions of the human race
gathering its primitive families at the region of their birth-place, show them
to us grouped around the countries where Jewish tradition places the Garden of
Eden; where the Aryans (Zoroastrians) established their Airyana-vaego or the
Meru (?). They are hemmed in to the North by the countries which join the lake
Aral, and to the South by Baltistan, or Little Tibet. Everything concurs in
proving that there was the abode of that primitive humanity to which we have to
be traced."
That
"primitive humanity" was in its Fifth Race, when the
"four-mouthed Dragon," the lake, of which very few traces are now
left, was the abode of the "Sons of Wisdom," the first mind-born sons
of the Third Race. Yet it was neither the only one nor the primitive cradle of
humanity, though it was the copy of the cradle, verily, of the first thinking
divine man. It was the Paradesa, the highland of the first Sanskrit-speaking
people, the Hedone, the country of delight of the Greeks, but it was not the
"bower of voluptuousness" of the Chaldeans, for the latter was only
the reminiscence of it; and also because it was not there that the Fall of Man
occurred after the "separation." The Eden of the Jews was copied from
the Chaldean copy.
That the Fall of
man into generation occurred during the earliest portion of what science calls
the Mesozoic times, or the age of the reptiles, is evidenced by the Bible
phraseology concerning the serpent, the nature of which is explained in the
Zohar. The question is not whether Eve's incident with the tempting reptile is
allegorical or textual, for no one can doubt that it is the former, but to show
the antiquity of the symbolism on the very face of it, and that it was not only
a Jewish but an universal idea.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Journal
Asiatique," seventh year, 1855.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 205 FLYING CAMELS.
Now we find in
the Zohar a very strange assertion, one that is calculated to provoke the
reader to merry laughter by its ludicrous absurdity. It tells us that the
serpent, which was used by Shamael (the supposed Satan), to seduce Eve, was a
kind of flying camel [[kamelomorphon]].
A "flying
camel" is indeed too much for the most liberal-minded F.R.S. Nevertheless,
the Zohar, which can hardly be expected to use the language of a Cuvier, was
right in its description:* for we find it called in the old Zoroastrian MSS.
Aschmogh, which in the Avesta is represented as having lost after the Fall
"its nature and its name," and is described as a huge serpent with a
camel's neck.
"There are
no winged serpents, nor veritable dragons," asserts Salverte,** " . .
. grasshoppers are called by the Greeks winged serpents, and this metaphor may
have created several narratives on the existence of winged serpents."
There are none
now; but there is no reason why they should not have existed during the
Mesozoic age; and Cuvier, who has reconstructed their skeletons, is a witness
to "flying camels." Already, after finding simple fossils of certain
saurians, the great naturalist has written, that, "if anything can justify
the Hydra and other monsters, whose figures were so often repeated by mediaeval
historians, it is incontestably the Plesiosaurus."***
We are unaware
if Cuvier had added anything in the way of a further mea culpa. But we may well
imagine his confusion, for all his slanders against archaic veracity, when he
found himself in the presence of a flying saurian, "the Pterodactyl"
(found in Germany), "78 feet long, and carrying vigorous wings attached to
its reptilian body." That fossil is described as a reptile, the little
fingers of whose hands are so elongated as to bear a long membranous wing.
Here, then, the "flying camel" of the Zohar is vindicated. For
surely, between the long neck of the Plesiosaurus and the membranous wing of
the Pterodactyl, or still better the Mosasaurus, there is enough scientific
probability to build a "flying camel," or a long-necked dragon. Prof.
Cope, of Philadelphia, has shown that the Mosasaurus fossil in the chalk was a
winged serpent of this kind. There are characters in its vertebrae, which
indicate union with the Ophidia rather than with the Lacertilia.
And now to the
main question. It is well known that Antiquity has never claimed
palaeontography and paleontology among its arts and sciences; and it never had
its Cuviers. Yet on Babylonian tiles, and especially in old Chinese and
Japanese drawings, in the oldest Pagodas
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Moses
Maimonides, "More Nevochim."
** "Science
Occulte," p. 646.
***
"Revolution du Globe," vol. v., p. 464.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* Moreover, the prophets speak in the Bible of the flying fiery
serpents,** and Job mentions the Leviathan.*** Now the following questions are
put very directly:--
I. How could the
ancient nations know anything of the extinct monsters of the carboniferous and
Mesozoic times, and even represent and describe them orally and pictorially,
unless they had either seen those monsters themselves or possessed descriptions
of them in their traditions, which descriptions necessitate living and
intelligent eye-witnesses?
II. And if such
eye-witnesses are once admitted (unless retrospective clairvoyance is granted),
how can humanity and the first palaeolithic men be no earlier than about the
middle of the tertiary period? We must bear in mind that most of the men of
science will not allow man to have appeared before the Quaternary period, and
thus shut him out completely from the Cenozoic times. Here we have extinct
species of animals, which disappeared from the face of the Earth millions of
years ago, described by, and known to, nations whose civilization, it is said,
could hardly have begun a few thousand years ago. How is this? Evidently either
the Mesozoic time has to be made to overlap the Quaternary period, or man must
be made the contemporary of the Pterodactyl and the Plesiosaurus.
It does not
stand to reason, because the Occultists believe in and defend ancient wisdom
and science, even though winged saurians are called "flying camels"
in the translations of the Zohar, that we believe as readily in all the stories
which the middle ages give us of such dragons. Pterodactyls and Plesiosauri ceased
to exist with the bulk
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We read in the
"Memoire a l'Academie" of the "naive astonishment of Geoffrey
St. Hilaire, when M. de Paravey showed to him in some old Chinese works and
Babylonian tiles dragons, . . . . saurians and ornithorhynchuses (aquatic
animals found only in Australia), etc., extinct animals that he had thought
unknown on earth. . . . till his own day."
** See Isaiah,
xxx. 6: "The viper and the flying serpent unto the land of trouble and
anguish," and the fiery serpents conquered by the brazen serpent of Moses.
*** The fossils
reconstructed by science, which we know ought to be sufficient warrant for the
possibility of even a Leviathan, let alone Isaiah's flying serpents, or saraph
mehophep, which words are translated in all the Hebrew dictionaries as
"saraph," enflamed or fiery venom, and "mehophep," flying.
But, although Christian theology has always connected both (Leviathan and
saraph mehophep) with the devil, the expressions are metaphorical and have
nought to do with the "evil one." But the word Dracon has become a
synonym for the latter. In Bretagne the word Drouk now signifies
"devil," whence, as we are told by Cambry ("Monuments Celtiques,"
p. 299), the devil's tomb in England, Draghedanum sepulcrum. In Languedoc the
meteoric fires and will-o'-the-wisps are called Dragg, and in Bretagne Dreag,
Wraie (or wraith), the castle of Drogheda in Ireland meaning the devil's
castle.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 207 KIRCHER'S DRAGON.
of the Third
Race. When, therefore, we are gravely asked by Roman Catholic writers to credit
Christopher Scherer's and Father Kircher's cock-and-bull stories of their
having seen with their own eyes living fiery and flying dragons, respectively
in 1619 and 1669, we may be allowed to regard their assertions as either dreams
or fibs.* Nor shall we regard otherwise than as a poetical license that other
story told of Petrarch, who, while following one day his Laura in the woods and
passing near a cave, is credited with having found a dragon, whom he forthwith
stabbed with his dagger and killed, thus preventing the monster from devouring the
lady of his heart.** We would willingly believe the story had Petrarch lived in
the days of Atlantis, when such antediluvian monsters may still have existed.
We deny their existence in our present era. The sea-serpent is one thing, the
dragon quite another. The former is denied by the majority because it exists
and lives in the very depths of the ocean, is very scarce, and rises to the
surface only when compelled, perhaps, by hunger. Thus keeping invisible, it may
exist and still be denied. But if there was such a thing as a dragon of the
above description, how could it have ever escaped detection? It is a creature
contemporary with the earliest Fifth Race, and exists no more.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The ultramontane
writers accept the whole series of draconian stories given by Father Kircher
(Edipus AEgyptiacus, "De Genere Draconum,") quite seriously.
According to that Jesuit, he himself saw a dragon which was killed in 1669 by a
Roman peasant, as the director of the Museo Barberini sent it to him, to take
the beast's likeness, which Father Kircher did and had it published in one of
his in-folios. After this he received a letter from Christopher Scherer,
Prefect of the Canton of Soleure, Switzerland, in which that official certifies
to his having seen himself with his own eyes, one fine summer night in 1619, a
living dragon. Having remained on his balcony "to contemplate the perfect
purity of the firmament," he writes, "I saw a fiery, shining dragon
rise from one of the caves of Mount Pilatus and direct itself rapidly towards
Fluelen to the other end of the lake. Enormous in size, his tail was still
longer and his neck very extended. His head and jaws were those of a serpent.
In flying he emitted on his way numerous sparks (? !) . . . . I thought at
first I was seeing a meteor, but soon looking more attentively, I was convinced
by his flight and the conformation of his body that I saw a veritable dragon. I
am happy to be thus able to enlighten your Reverence on the very real existence
of those animals"; in dreams, the writer ought to have added, of long past
ages.
** As a
convincing proof of the reality of the fact, a Roman Catholic refers the reader
to the picture of that incident painted by Simon de Sienne, a friend of the
poet, on the portal of the Church Notre Dame du Don at Avignon; notwithstanding
the prohibition of the Sovereign Pontiff, who "would not allow this
triumph of love to be enthroned in the holy place"; and adds: "Time
has injured and rubbed out the work of art, but has not weakened its
tradition." De Mirville's "Dragon-Devils" of our era seem to
have no luck, as they disappear most mysteriously from the museums where they
are said to have been. Thus the dragon embalmed by Ulysses Aldobranda and presented
to the Musee du Senat, either in Naples or Bologna, "was there still in
1700, but is there no more." (Vol. 2, p. 427, "Pneumatologie.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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," "Naga," 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 quid pro quos and unjust
accusations. A couple of instances will suffice.
Sed et serpens?
aye: but what was the nature of the serpent? Mystics intuitionally see in the
serpent of Genesis an animal emblem and a high spiritual essence: a cosmic
force superintelligent, a "great fallen light," a spirit sidereal,
aerial and tellurian at the same time, "whose influence circumambulates
the globe (qui circumambulat terram), as a Christian fanatic of the dead-letter
(de Mirville) has it, and which only manifested itself under the physical
emblem, which was the most convenient "with respect to its moral and
intellectual coils": i.e. under the ophidian form.
But what will
Christians make of the Brazen Serpent, the "DIVINE HEALER," if the
serpent is to be regarded as the emblem of cunning and evil? The "Evil
One" itself? How can the line of demarcation ever be settled, when it is
traced arbitrarily in a sectarian theological spirit. For, if the followers of
the Roman Church are taught that Mercury and AEsculapius, or Asclepios, who
are, in truth, one, are "devils and sons of devils," and the wand and
serpent of the latter were "the devil's wand"; how about the
"brazen serpent" of Moses? Every scholar knows that both the heathen
wand and the Jewish "serpent" are one and the same, namely, the
Caduceus of Mercury, son of APOLLO-PYTHON. It is easy to comprehend why the
Jews adopted the ophidian shape for their "seducer." With them it was
purely physiological and phallic; and no amount of casuistical reasoning on the
part of the Roman Catholic Church can give it another meaning, once that the
mystery language is well studied, and that the Hebrew scrolls are read
numerically. The Occultists know that the serpent, the Naga, and the dragon
have each a septenary meaning; that the Sun, for instance, was the astronomical
and cosmic emblem of the two contrasted lights, and the two serpents of the
Gnostics, the good and the evil one; they also know that, when generalised, the
conclusions of both science and theology present two most ridiculous extremes.
For, when the former tells us that it is sufficient to trace the legends of the
serpents to their primal source, the astrological legend, and to meditate
seriously on the Sun, conqueror of Python, and the celestial virgin in the
Zodiac forcing back the devouring dragon, if we would have the key of all the
subsequent religious dogmas; it is easy to perceive that, instead of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 209 COBRAS AS SYMBOLS.
generalising,
the author simply has his eye on Christian religion and Revelation. We call
this one extreme. The other we see in this: when, repeating the famous decision
of the Council of Trent, theology seeks to convince the masses that "from
the fall of man until the hour of his baptism the devil has full power over
him, and possesses him by right (diabolum dominationem et potestatem super homines
habere et jure cos possidere)." To this Occult philosophy answers: Prove
first the existence of the devil as an entity, and then we may believe in such
congenital possession. A very small amount of observation and knowledge of
human nature may be sufficient to prove the fallacy of this theological dogma.
Had SATAN any reality, in the objective or even subjective world (in the
ecclesiastical sense), it is the poor devil who would find himself chronically
obsessed and even possessed by the wicked -- hence by the bulk of mankind. It
is humanity itself, and especially the clergy, headed by the haughty,
unscrupulous and intolerant Roman Church, which have begotten, given birth to,
and reared in love the evil one; but this is a digression.
"The whole
world of thought is reproached by the Church with having adored the serpent.
The whole of humanity 'incensed and at the same time stoned it.' The Zend
Avesta speaks of it as the Kings and Vedas do, as the Edda and the Bible. . . .
Everywhere the sacred serpent, the naga, and its shrine and its priest; in Rome
it is the Vestal who prepares its meal with the same care as she bestows on the
sacred fire. In Greece, AEsculapius cannot cure without its assistance, and
delegates to it his powers. Everyone has heard of the famous Roman embassy sent
by the Senate to the god of medicine and its return with the not less famous
serpent, which proceeded of its own will and by itself toward its Master's
temple on one of the islands of the Tiber. Not a Bacchante that did not wind it
(the serpent) in her hair, not an Augur but questioned it oracularly, not a
necromancer whose tomb is free from its presence! The Cainites and the Ophites
call it Creator, while recognizing, as Schelling did, that the serpent is 'evil
in substance and its personification.' "*
Yes, the author
is right, and if one would have a complete idea of the prestige which the
serpent enjoys to our own day, one ought to study the matter in India and learn
all that is believed about, and still attributed to, the Nagas (Cobras) in that
country; one should also visit the Africans of Whydah, the Voodoos of
Port-au-Prince and Jamaica, the Nagals of Mexico, and the Pa, or men-serpents
of China, &c. But why wonder that the serpent is "adored" and at
the same time cursed, since we
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Sacred
Serpents" on p. 432 of de Mirville's "Memoire."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 210 THE SECRET DOCTRINE
know that from
the beginning it was a symbol?* In every ancient language the word dragon
signified what it now does in Chinese -- (lang) i.e., "the being who
excels in intelligence" and in Greek [[drakon]], or "he who sees and
watches." And is it to the animal of that name that any of these epithets
can apply? Is it not evident, wherever superstition and oblivion of the
primitive meaning may have led savages now, that the said qualifications were
intended to apply to the human originals, who were symbolized by serpents and
dragons? These "originals" -- called to this day in China "the
Dragons of Wisdom" -- were the first disciples of the Dhyanis, who were
their instructors; in short, the primitive adepts of the Third Race, and later,
of the Fourth and Fifth Races. The name became universal, and no sane man
before the Christian era would ever have confounded the man and the symbol.
The symbol of
Chnouphis, or the soul of the world, writes Champollion, "is among others
that of an enormous serpent standing on human legs; this reptile, the emblem of
the good genius, is a veritable Agathodaemon. It is often represented bearded.
. . . . That sacred animal, identical with the serpent of the Ophites, is found
engraved on numerous Gnostic or Basilidean stones . . . . The serpent has
various heads, but is constantly inscribed with the letters
[[CHNOUBIS]]."** Agathodaemon was endowed "with the knowledge of good
and evil," i.e., with divine Wisdom, as without the former the latter is
impossible.*** Repeating Iamblichus, Champollion shows him to be "the
deity called [[Eichton]] (or the fire of the celestial gods -- the great ****
Thot-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is about
as just as though -- a few millenniums hence -- a fanatic of some future new
creed, who was bent on glorifying his religion at the expense of ancient
Christianity, were to say: "Everywhere the quadruped lamb was adored. The
nun placed it, calling it the Agnus, on her bosom; the priest laid it on the
altar. It figured in every paschal meal, and was glorified loudly in every
temple. And yet the Christians dreaded it and hated it, for they slew and
devoured it. . . ." Heathens, at any rate, do not eat their sacred
symbols. We know of no serpent, or reptile-eaters except in Christian civilized
countries, where they begin with frogs and eels, and must end with real snakes,
as they have begun with lamb and ended with horse-flesh.
**
"Pantheon," 3.
*** The solar
Chnouphis, or Agathodaemon, is the Christos of the Gnostics, as every scholar
knows. He is intimately connected with the seven sons of Sophia (Wisdom), the
seven sons of Aditi (universal Wisdom), her eighth being Martanda, the Sun,
which seven are the seven planetary regents or genii. Therefore Chnouphis was
the spiritual Sun of Enlightenment, of Wisdom, hence the patron of all the
Egyptian Initiates, as Bel-Merodach (or Bel-Belitanus) became later with the
Chaldeans.
**** Hermes, or
rather Thot, was a generic name. Abul Teda shows in "Historia
Anti-Islamitica" five Hermes, and the names of Hermes, Nebo, Thot were
given respectively in various countries to great Initiates. Thus Nebo, the son
of Merodach and Zarpanitu (whom Herodotus calls Zeus-Belos), gave his name to
all the great prophets, seers and Initiates. They were all "serpents of
Wisdom," as connected with the Sun astronomically, and with Wisdom
spiritually.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 211 TWO SCHOOLS OF MAGIC.
Hermes), to whom
Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of magic."*
The
"invention of magic!" A strange term to use, as though the unveiling of
the eternal and actual mysteries of nature could be invented! As well
attribute, millenniums hence, the invention instead of the discovery of radiant
matter to Prof. Crookes. Hermes was not the inventor, or even the discoverer,
for, as said in the foot-note, Thot-Hermes is a generic name, as is Enoch
(Enoichion, the "inner, spiritual eye"), Nebo, the prophet and seer,
etc. It is not the proper name of any one living man, but a generic title of
many adepts. Their connection in symbolic allegories with the serpent is due to
their enlightenment by the solar and planetary gods during the earliest
intellectual Race, the Third. They are all the representative patrons of the
Secret Wisdom. Asclepios is the son of the Sun-god Apollo -- and he is Mercury;
Nebo is the son of Bel-Merodach; Vaivasvata Manu, the great Rishi, is the son
of Vivisvat -- the Sun or Surya, etc., etc. And while, astronomically, the
Nagas along with the Rishis, the Gandharvas, Apsarasas, Gramanis (or Yakshas,
minor gods) Yatudhanas and Devas, are the Sun's attendants throughout the
twelve solar months; in theogony, and also in anthropological evolution, they
are gods and men -- when incarnated in the nether world. Let the reader be
reminded, in this connection, of the fact that Apollonius met in Kashmir
Buddhist Nagas -- which are neither serpents zoologically, nor yet the Nagas
ethnologically, but "wise men."
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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Pantheon," text 15.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 212 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
ments of cruelty
are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto
their assembly."* Now in the original, the words "their secret"
really are "their SOD."** And Sod was the name for the great
mysteries of Baal, Adonis and Bacchus, who were all sun-gods and had serpents
for symbols. The Kabalists explain the allegory of the fiery serpents by saying
that this was the name given to the tribe of Levi, to all the Levites, in
short, and that Moses was the chief of the Sodales.*** It is to the mysteries
that the original meaning of the "Dragon-Slayers" has to be traced,
and the question is fully treated of hereafter.
Meanwhile it
follows that, if Moses was the chief of the Mysteries, he was the Hierophant
thereof, and further, if, at the same time, we find the prophets thundering
against the "abominations" of the people of Israel, that there were
two schools. "Fiery serpents" was, then, simply the epithet given to
the Levites of the priestly caste, after they had departed from the good law,
the traditional teachings of Moses: and to all those who followed Black Magic.
Isaiah, when referring to the "rebellious children" who will have to
carry their riches into the land whence come "the viper and fiery flying
serpent" (xxx. 6), or Chaldea and Egypt, whose Initiates had already
greatly degenerated in his day (700 B.C.), meant the sorcerers of those
lands.**** But these must be carefully distinguished from the "Fiery
Dragons of Wisdom" and the "Sons of the Fire Mist."
In the
"Great Book of the Mysteries" we are told that: "Seven Lords
created Seven men; three Lords (Dhyan Chohans or Pitris) were holy and good,
four less heavenly and full of passion. . . . The chhayas (phantoms) of the
Fathers were as they."
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Genesis," ch. xlix.
** Dunlap, in
his introduction to "Sod, the Mysteries of Adonis," explains the word
"Sod" as arcanum, religious mystery, on the authority of Schindler's
"Penteglott." "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear
him," says Psalm xxv., 14. This is a mistranslation of the Christians, for
it ought to read "Sod Ihoh (the mysteries of Ihoh) are for those who fear
him" (Dunlap, "Mysteries of Adonis," xi). "Al (El) is
terrible in the great Sod of the Kadeshim (the priests, the holy, the Initiated),
Psalm lxxxix, 7" (ibid.). The Kadeshim were very far from holy. (Vide Part
II., "The Holy of Holies.")
*** "The
members of the priest-Colleges were called Sodales," says Freund's
"Latin Lexicon" (iv. 448). "Sodalities were constituted in the Idaean
Mysteries of the MIGHTY MOTHER," writes Cicero in de Senectute.
("Mysteries of Adonis.")
**** The priests
of Baal who jumped over the fires. But this was a Hebrew term and a local one.
"Saraph" -- "fiery or flaming venom."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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;* therefore
Set-Typhon could not be that evil. In the "Book of the Dead" it is
commanded (v. 13) that chapter clxiii. should be read "in the presence of
a serpent on two legs," which means a high Initiate, a Hierophant, for the
discus and ram's horns** that adorn his "serpent's" head in the
hieroglyphics of the title of the said chapter denote this. Over the
"serpent" are represented the two mystic eyes of Ammon,*** the hidden
"mystery god." This passage corroborates our assertion, and shows
what the word "serpent" meant in antiquity.
But as to the
Nagals and Nargals, whence came the similarity of names between the Indian
Nagas and the American Nagals?
"The Nargal
was the Chaldean and Assyrian chief of the Magi (Rab-Mag), and the Nagal was
the chief sorcerer of the Mexican Indians. Both derive their names from
Nergal-Serezer, the Assyrian god, and the Hindu Nagas. Both have the same
faculties and the power to have an attendant daemon, with whom they identify
themselves completely. The Chaldean and Assyrian Nargal kept his daemon, in the
shape of some animal considered sacred, inside the temple; the Indian Nagal
keeps his wherever he can -- in the neighbouring lake, or wood, or in the house
in the shape of some household animal."****
Such similarity
cannot be attributed to coincidence. A new world is discovered, and we find
that, for our forefathers of the Fourth Race,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Book of
the Dead" xxxix.
** The same
ram's horns are found on the heads of Moses which were on some old medals seen
by the writer in Palestine, one of which is in her possession. The horns, made
to form part of the shining aureole on the statue of Moses in Rome (Michael
Angelo), are vertical instead of being bent down to the ears, but the emblem is
the same; hence the Brazen Serpent.
*** But see
Harris's "Magic Papyrus" No. v.; and the ram-headed Ammon
manufacturing men on a potter's wheel.
**** Brasseur de
Bourbourg: "Mexique," pp. 135 and 574.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 214 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
it was already
an old one. That Arjuna, Krishna's companion and chela, is said to have descended
into Patala, the "antipodes," and therein married Ulupi,* a Naga (or
Nagini rather), the daughter of the king of the Nagas, Kauravya.**
And now it may
be hoped the full meaning of the serpent emblem is proven. It is neither that
of evil, nor, least of all, that of the devil; but is, indeed, the [[SEMES
EILAM ABRASAX]] ("the eternal Sun-Abrasax"), the central spiritual
sun of all the Kabalists, represented in some diagrams by the circle of
Tiphereth.
And here, again,
we may quote from our earlier volumes and enter into further explanations.
"From this
region of unfathomable depth (Bythos, Aditi, Shekinah, the veil of the unknown)
issues forth a circle formed of spirals. This is Tiphereth; which, in the
language of symbolism, means a grand cycle, composed of smaller ones. Coiled
within, so as to follow the spirals, lies the serpent -- emblem of Wisdom and
Eternity -- the dual Androgyne; the cycle representing Ennoia, or the divine
mind (a power which does not create but which must assimilate), and the
serpent, the Agathodaemon, the Ophis, the Shadow of the Light (non-eternal, yet
the greatest divine light on our plane). Both were the Logoi of the Ophites: or
the Unity as Logos manifesting itself as a double principle of Good and
Evil."
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Ulupi has an
entirely Atlantean ring about it. Like Atlantis, it is neither a Greek nor a
Sanskrit name, but reminds one of Mexican names.
**
"Mahabharata," Adiparva, Sloka, 7788, 7789. The "Bhagavata
Purana," ix., xx., 31, as explained by Sridhera, the commentator, makes
Ulupi the daughter of the king of Manipura; but the late Pundit Dayanand
Saraswati, certainly the greatest Sanskrit and Puranic authority in India on
such questions, personally corroborated that Ulupi was daughter of the king of
the Nagas at Patala, or America, 5000 years ago, and that the Nagas were
Initiates.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 215 BUDDHA'S GREAT MOUNTAIN.
of Knowledge of
Good and Evil. Therefore, we find Ophis urging the first human couple -- the
material production of Ilda-Baoth, but which owed its spiritual principle to
Sophia-Achamoth -- to eat of the forbidden fruit, although Ophis represents
divine Wisdom.
The serpent, the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the Tree of Life, are all symbols
transplanted from the soil of India. The Arasa-Maram, the banyan tree, so
sacred with the Hindus (since Vishnu during one of his incarnations, reposed
under its mighty shade and there taught human philosophy and sciences), is
called the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Under the protecting foliage
of this king of the forests, the Gurus teach their pupils their first lessons
on immortality and initiate them into the mysteries of life and death. The
Java-Aleim of the Sacerdotal College are said, in the Chaldean tradition, to
have taught the sons of men to become like one of them. To the present day
Foh-tchou,* who lives in his Foh-Maeyu, or temple of Buddha, on the top of the
"Kouin-long-sang,"** the great mountain, produces his greatest
religious miracles under a tree called in Chinese Sung-Ming-Shu, or the Tree of
Knowledge and the Tree of Life, for ignorance is death, and knowledge alone
gives immortality. This marvellous display takes place every three years, when
an immense concourse of Chinese Buddhists assembles in pilgrimage at the holy
place.
Now it may
become comprehensible why the earliest Initiates and Adepts, or the "Wise
Men," for whom it is claimed that they were initiated into the mysteries of
nature by the UNIVERSAL MIND, represented by the highest angels, were named the
"Serpents of Wisdom" and "Dragons;" as also how the first
physiologically complete couples -- after being initiated into the mystery of
human creation through Ophis, the manifested Logos and the androgyne, by eating
of the fruit of knowledge -- gradually began to be accused by the material
spirit of posterity of having committed Sin, of having disobeyed the "Lord
God," and of having been tempted by the Serpent.
So little have
the first Christians (who despoiled the Jews of their Bible) understood the
first four chapters of Genesis in their esoteric meaning, that they never
perceived that not only was no sin intended in this disobedience, but that
actually the "Serpent" was "the Lord God" himself, who, as
the Ophis, the Logos, or the bearer of divine creative wisdom, taught mankind
to become creators in their turn.*** They
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Foh-tchou,
literally, in Chinese meaning Buddha's lord, or the teacher of the doctrines of
Buddha-Foh.
** This mountain
is situated south-west of China, almost between China and Tibet.
*** Let the
reader be reminded that in the Zohar, and also in all the Kabalistic works, it
is maintained that "Metatron united to Shekinah" (or Shekinah as the
veil (grace) [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* The circle was separated from
its diameter line. "From the possession of the double principle in one,
that is the Androgyne condition, the separation of the dual principle was made,
presenting two opposites, whose destiny it was, for ever after, to seek reunion
into the original one condition. The curse was this, viz.: that nature,
impelling the search, evaded the desired result by the production of a new
being, distinct from that reunion or oneness desired, by which the natural
longing to recover a lost state was and is for ever being cheated. It is by
this tantalizing process of a continued curse that Nature lives."** (Vide
"Cross and Circle," Part II.)
The allegory of
Adam being driven away from the "Tree of Life" means, esoterically,
that the newly separated Race abused and dragged the mystery of Life down into
the region of animalism and bestiality. For, as the Zohar shows, that
Matronethah (Shekinah, the wife of Metatron symbolically) "is the way to
the great Tree of Life, the Mighty Tree," and Shekinah is divine grace. As
explained: This Tree reaches the heavenly vale and is hidden between three
mountains (the upper triad of principles, in man). From these three mountains,
the Tree ascends above (the adept's knowledge aspires heavenward) and then
redescends below (into the adept's Ego on Earth). This Tree is revealed in the
day time and is hidden during the night, i.e., revealed to an enlightened mind
and hidden to Ignorance, which is night. (See Zohar I., 172, a and b.)
"The Tree of the Knowledge of the Good and the Evil grows from the roots
of the Tree of Life." (Comm.) But then also: "In the Kabala it is plainly
to be found that "the 'Tree of Life' was
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of Ain-Soph), representing the Logos, is that
very Tree of Knowledge; while Shamael -- the dark aspect of the Logos --
occupies only the rind of that tree, and has the knowledge of EVIL alone. As
Lacour, who saw in the scene of the Fall (chap. iii., Genesis) an incident
pertaining to Egyptian Initiation, says:-- "The Tree of the Divination, or
of the Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . . is the science of Tzyphon, the genius
of doubt, Tzy to teach, and phon, doubt. Tzyphon is one of the Aleim; we shall
see him presently under the name of Nach, the tempter" (Les OEloim, Vol.
II., p. 218). He is now known to the symbologists under the name JEHOVAH.
* This is the
view taken and adopted by all the Church Fathers, but it is not the real
esoteric teaching. The curse did not begin with the formation of either man or
woman, for their separation was a natural sequence of evolution, but for
breaking the law (See supra).
** "By
which (human) nature lives," not even the animal -- but the misguided,
sensual and vicious nature, which men, not nature, created.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 217 "MYTHICAL" MONSTERS A REALITY.
the ansated
cross in its sexual aspect, and that the 'Tree of Knowledge' was the separation
and the coming together again to fulfil the fatal condition. To display this in
numbers the values of the letters composing the word Otz ( [[diagram]]), tree,
are 7 and 9, the seven being the holy feminine number and the nine the number
of the phallic or male energy. This ansated cross is the symbol of the Egyptian
female-male, Isis-Osiris, the germinal principle in all forms, based on the
primal manifestation applicable in all directions and in all senses."*
This is the
Kabalistic view of the Western Occultists, and it differs from the more
philosophical Eastern or Aryan views upon this subject.** The separation of the
sexes was in the programme of nature and of natural evolution; and the creative
faculty in male and female was a gift of Divine wisdom. In the truth of such
traditions the whole of antiquity, from the patrician philosopher to the
humblest spiritually inclined plebeian, has believed. And as we proceed, we may
successfully show that the relative truth of such legends, if not their
absolute exactness -- vouched for by such giants of intellect as were Solon,
Pythagoras, Plato, and others -- begins to dawn upon more than one modern
scientist. He is perplexed; he stands startled and confused before proofs that
are being daily accumulated before him; he feels that there is no way of
solving the many historical problems that stare him in the face, unless he
begins by accepting ancient traditions. Therefore, in saying that we believe
absolutely in ancient records and universal legends, we need hardly plead
guilty before the 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Source of Measures."
** Vide infra,
"The Septenary," in Part II.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 myth*
. . . For my part I doubt the general derivation of myths from 'the
contemplation of the visible workings of external nature.' It seems to me
easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled the utterance of these
oft-told tales until their original appearance is almost unrecognisable, than
that uncultured savages should possess powers of imagination and poetical
invention far beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of the
present day; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and
demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions are
transformations than to believe them to be inventions."**
It is shown by
the same geologist that man, "successively traced to periods variously
estimated from thirty thousand to one million years . . . . ., co-existed with
animals which have long since become extinct (p. 20)." These animals,
"weird and terrible," were, to give a few instances -- (1) "Of
the genus Cidastes, whose huge bones and vertebrae show them to have attained a
length of nearly two hundred feet . . . . . . " The remains of such
monsters, no less than ten in number, were seen by Professor Marsh in the
Mauvaises Terres of Colorado, strewn upon the plains. (2) The Titanosaurus
montanus, reaching fifty or sixty feet in length; (3) the Dinosaurians (in the
Jurassic beds of the Rocky Mountains), of still more gigantic proportions; (4)
the Atlanto-Saurus immanis, a femur of which alone is over six feet in length,
and which would be thus over one hundred feet in length! But even yet the line
has not been reached, and we hear of the discovery of remains of such titanic
proportions as to possess a thigh-bone over twelve feet in length (p. 37). Then
we read of the monstrous Sivatherium in the Himalayas, the four-horned stag, as
large as an elephant, and exceeding the latter in height; of the gigantic
Megatherium: of colossal flying lizards, Pterodactyli, with
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Unicorn: a Mythological Investigation," Robert Brown, jun., F.S.A.
** Pp. 3 and 4,
Introduction to "Mythical Monsters."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 219 THE FLYING DRAGONS.
crocodile jaws
on a duck's head, etc., etc. All these were co-existent with man, most probably
attacked man, as man attacked them; and we are asked to believe that the said
man was no larger then than he is now! Is it possible to conceive that,
surrounded in Nature with such monstrous creatures, man, unless himself a
colossal giant, could have survived, while all his foes have perished? Is it
with his stone hatchet that he had the best of a Sivatherium or a gigantic
flying saurian? Let us always bear in mind that at least one great man of
science, de Quatrefages, sees no good scientific reasons why man should not
have been "contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia and go back as far
as the Secondary Period."*
"It
appears," writes the very conservative Professor Jukes, "that the
flying dragons of romance had something like a real existence in former ages of
the world."** "Does the written history of man," the author goes
on to ask, "comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of
his intelligent existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over
hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldea and
China, shadowy mementoes of prehistoric man, handed down by tradition, and
perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands, from others which,
like the fabled Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of
some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization;"
(p. 17).
The few
remaining giant animals, such as elephants, themselves smaller than their
ancestors the Mastodons, and Hippopotami, are the only surviving relics, and
tend to disappear more entirely with every day. Even they have already had a
few pioneers of their future genus, and have decreased in size in the same
proportion as men did. For the remains of a pigmy elephant were found (E. Falconeri)
in the cave deposits of Malta; and the same author asserts that they were
associated with the remains of pigmy Hippopotami, the former being "only
two feet six inches high; or the still-existing Hippopotamus (Choeropsis)
Liberiensis, which M. Milne-Edwards figures as little more than two feet in
height."***
Sceptics may
smile and denounce our work as full of nonsense or fairy-tales. But by so doing
they only justify the wisdom of the Chinese philosopher Chuang, who said that
"the things that men do know can in no way be compared, numerically
speaking, to the things that are unknown";**** and thus they laugh only at
their own ignorance.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Human Species," p. 52.
** "Manual
of Geology," p. 301.
***
"Recherches sur les Mammiferes," plate I.
**** Preface to
"Wonders by Land and Sea," (Shan Hai King).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 220 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
THE "SONS
OF GOD" AND THE "SACRED ISLAND."
The legend given
in Isis in relation to a portion of the globe which science now concedes to
have been the cradle of humanity -- though it is but one of the seven cradles,
in truth -- ran, condensed, and now explained, as follows:--
"Tradition
says, and the records of the Great Book (the Book of Dzyan) explain, that long
before the days of Ad-am, and his inquisitive wife, He-va, where now are found but
salt lakes and desolate barren deserts, there was a vast inland sea, which
extended over Middle Asia, north of the proud Himalayan range, and its western
prolongation. An island, which for its unparalleled beauty had no rival in the
world, was inhabited by the last remnant of the race which preceded ours."
"The last
remnant" meant the "Sons of Will and Yoga," who, with a few
tribes, survived the great cataclysm. For it is the Third Race which inhabited
the great Lemurian continent, that preceded the veritable and complete human
races -- the fourth and the fifth. Therefore it was said in Isis that --
"This race
could live with equal ease in water, air, or fire, for it had an unlimited
control over the elements. These were the 'Sons of God'; not those who saw the
daughters of men, but the real Elohim, though in the oriental Kabala they have
another name. It was they who imparted Nature's most weird secrets to men, and
revealed to them the ineffable, and now lost 'word.' "
The
"Island," according to belief, exists to the present hour; now, as an
oasis surrounded by the dreadful wildernesses of the great Desert, the Gobi --
whose sands "no foot hath crossed in the memory of man."
"This word,
which is no word, has travelled once around the globe, and still lingers as a
far-off dying echo in the hearts of some privileged men. The hierophants of all
the Sacerdotal Colleges were aware of the existence of this island; but the
'word' was known only to the Java Aleim (Maha Chohan in another tongue), or
chief lord of every college, and was passed to his successor only at the moment
of death. There were many such colleges, and the old classic authors speak of
them.
"There was
no communication with the fair island by sea, but subterranean passages, known
only to the chiefs, communicated with it in all directions."*
Tradition
asserts, and archaeology accepts the truth of the legend that there is more
than one city now flourishing in India, which is built on
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There are
archaeologists, who, like Mr. James Fergusson, deny the great antiquity of even
one single monument in India. In his work, "Illustrations of the Rock-Cut
Temples of India," the author ventures to express the very extraordinary
opinion that "Egypt had ceased to be a nation before the earliest of the
cave-temples of India was excavated." In short, he does not admit the
existence of any cave anterior to the reign of Asoka, and seems anxious to
prove that most of these rock-cut temples were executed during a period
extending from the time of that pious Buddhist king until the destruction of
the Andhra dynasty of Maghada, in the beginning of the fifth century. We
believe such a claim perfectly arbitrary. Further discoveries will show that it
is erroneous and unwarranted.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 221 THE CONTINENT OF THE GODS.
several other
cities, making thus a subterranean city of six or seven stories high. Delhi is
one of them; Allahabad another -- examples of this being found even in Europe;
e.g., in Florence, which is built on several defunct Etruscan and other cities.
Why, then, could not Ellora, Elephanta, Karli, and Ajunta have been built on
subterranean labyrinths and passages, as claimed? Of course we do not allude to
the caves which are known to every European, whether de visu or through
hearsay, notwithstanding their enormous antiquity, though that is so disputed
by modern archaeology. But it is a fact, known to the Initiated Brahmins of
India and especially to Yogis, that there is not a cave-temple in the country
but has its subterranean passages running in every direction, and that those
underground caves and endless corridors have in their turn their caves and
corridors.
"Who can
tell that the lost Atlantis -- which is also mentioned in the Secret Book, but,
again, under another name, pronounced in the sacred language -- did not exist
yet in those days?" --
we went on to
ask. It did exist most assuredly, as it was fast approaching its greatest days
of glory and civilization when the last of the Lemurian continents went down.
"The great
lost continent might have, perhaps, been situated south of Asia, extending from
India to Tasmania?* If the hypothesis (now so much doubted, and positively
denied by some learned authors, who regard it as a joke of Plato's) is ever
verified, then, perhaps, will the scientists believe that the description of
the god-inhabited continent was not altogether a fable.** And they may then
perceive that Plato's guarded hints and his attributing the narrative to Solon
and the Egyptian priests, were but a prudent way of imparting the fact to the
world, and, by cleverly combining truth and fiction, so disconnecting himself
from a story which the obligations imposed at initiation forbade him to
divulge.
"To
continue the tradition, we have to add that the class of hierophants was
divided into two distinct categories:*** those who were instructed by the 'Sons
of God,' of the island, and who were initiated in the divine doctrine of pure
revelation; and others who inhabited the lost Atlantis -- if such must be its
name -- and who, being of another race, (born sexually but of divine parents),
were born with a sight, which embraced all living things, and was independent
of both distance and material obstacle. In short, they were the Fourth Race of
men mentioned in the Popol-Vuh, whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all
things at once."
In other words,
they were the Lemuro-Atlanteans, the first who had
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* America when
discovered, was called Atlanta by some native tribes.
** Since then
Donnelly's Atlantis has appeared, and soon its actual existence will have
become a scientific fact.
*** It is so
divided to this day, and theosophists and Occultists, who have learned
something of the Occult but undeniable power of Dugpaship at their own expense,
know this but too well.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 222 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
a dynasty of
Spirit-Kings, not of Manes, or "ghosts," as some believe (See
"Pneumatologie"), but of actual living Devas (or demi-gods or Angels,
again) who had assumed bodies to rule over them, and who, in their turn,
instructed them in arts and sciences. Only, as they were rupa or material
Spirits, these Dhyanis were not always good. Their King Thevetata was one of
the latter, and it is under the evil influence of this King-Demon that . . . .
the Atlantis-race became a nation of wicked magicians.
"In
consequence of this, war was declared, the story of which would be too long to
narrate; its substance may be found in the disfigured allegories of the race of
Cain, the giants, and that of Noah and his righteous family. The conflict came
to an end by the submersion of the Atlantis, which finds its imitation in the
stories of the Babylonian and Mosaic flood. The giants and magicians '. . . and
all flesh died . . . and every man.' All except Xisuthrus and Noah, who are
substantially identical with the great Father of the Thhnkithians in the
Popol-Vuh, or the sacred book of the Guatemaleans, which also tells of his
escaping in a large boat like the Hindu Noah -- Vaivasvata.
"If we
believe the tradition at all, we have to credit the further story that, from
the intermarrying of the progeny of the hierophants of the island and the
descendants of the Atlantean Noah, sprang up a mixed race of righteous and
wicked. On the one side the world had its Enochs, Moseses, various Buddhas, its
numerous 'Saviours,' and great hierophants; on the other hand, its 'natural
magicians' who, through lack of the restraining power of proper spiritual
enlightenment, . . . perverted their gifts to evil 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 223 THE MAGICIANS OF ATLANTIS.
tainous surface
of the Azores, the Canaries and Cape de Verdes, is not devoid of geographical
probability. The Greeks, who, moreover, never dared to pass beyond the pillars
of Hercules, on account of their dread of the mysterious ocean, appeared too
late in antiquity for the stories preserved by Plato to be anything else than
an echo of the Indian legend. Moreover, when we cast a look on a planisphere,
at the sight of the islands and islets strewn from the Malayan Archipelago to
Polynesia, from the straits of Sunda to Easter Island, it is impossible, upon
the hypothesis of continents preceding those which we inhabit, not to place there
the most important of all.
"A
religious belief, common to Malacca and Polynesia, that is to say, to the two
opposite extremes of the Oceanic world, affirms 'that all these islands once
formed two immense countries, inhabited by yellow men and black men, always at
war; and that the gods, wearied with their quarrels, having charged Ocean to
pacify them, the latter swallowed up the two continents, and, since, it has
been impossible to make him give up his captives. Alone, the mountain-peaks and
high plateaux escaped the flood, by the 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* the good and holy brothers of their wicked co-uterine brothers
generally, as Ravana, the giant King of Lanka was the brother of Kumbhakarna;
all descendants of the gods through the Rishis, and thus, like "Titan and
his enormous brood," all "heaven's first born." These
"Buddhas," though often spoilt by the symbolical representation of the
great pendent ears, show a suggestive difference, perceived at a glance,
between the expression of their faces and that of the Easter Isle statues. They
may be of one race -- but the former are "Sons of Gods"; the latter
the brood of mighty sorcerers. All these are re-incarnations, however, and
apart from unavoidable exaggerations in popular fancy and tradition, they are
historical characters.** When did they live? How long ago lived the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* An approach to
the statues at Bamian -- also a Buddha 200 feet high -- is found near a Jain
settlement in Southern India, and appears to be the only one that remains at
present.
** Even Wilson
admits that Rama and Ravana were personages founded on historical
facts:--"The traditions of Southern India uniformly ascribing its
civilization and the settlement of civilized Hindus (the Fifth Race) to the
conquest of Lanka by Rama" (Vishnu Purana, iii., p. 318) -- the victory of
the "Sons of God" over the Atlantean sorcerers, says the true
tradition.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 225 COCK AND BULL HYPOTHESES.
two races, the
Third and Fourth, and how long after did the various tribes of the Fifth begin
their strife, the wars between Good and Evil? We are assured by the
Orientalists that chronology is both hopelessly mixed and absurdly exaggerated
in the Puranas and other Hindu Scriptures. We feel quite prepared to agree with
the accusation. Yet, if Aryan writers did allow their chronological pendulum to
swing too far one way occasionally, beyond the legitimate limit of fact;
nevertheless, when the distance of that deviation is compared with the distance
of the Orientalists' deviation in the opposite direction, moderation will be
found on the Brahminical side. It is the Pundit who will in the long run be
found more truthful and nearer to fact than the Sanskritist. Surely, it is not
because the curtailing of the latter -- even when proven to have been resorted
to in order to fit a personal hobby -- is regarded by Western public opinion as
"a cautious acceptance of facts," whereas the Pundit is brutally
treated in print as a liar, that everyone has to see this in the same light. An
impartial observer may judge it otherwise. He may either proclaim both
unscrupulous historians, or justify both, each on his respective ground, and
say: Hindu Aryans wrote for their Initiates, who read truth between the lines,
not for the masses. If they did mix up events and confuse Ages intentionally,
it was not in view of deceiving any one, but to preserve their knowledge from
the prying eye of the foreigner. Otherwise, to him who can count the
generations from the Manus, and the series of incarnations specified in the
cases of some heroes,* the meaning and chronological order are very clear in
the Puranas. As for the Western Orientalist, he must be excused, on account of
his undeniable ignorance of the methods used by archaic Esotericism.
But such
existing prejudices will have to give way and disappear very soon before the
light of new discoveries. Already Dr. Weber's and Mr. Max Muller's favourite
theories -- namely, that writing was not known in India, even in the days of
Panini (!); that the Hindus had all their arts and sciences -- even to the
Zodiac and their architecture (Ferguson) -- from the Macedonian Greeks; these
and other such cock-and-bull hypotheses, are threatened with ruin. It is the
ghost of old Chaldea that comes to the rescue of truth. In his third Hibbert
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Thus we are
shown one hero, to give an instance, first born as the "unrighteous but
valiant monarch" (Purusha) of the Daityas, Hiranyakasipu, slain by the
Avatar Nara-Sinha (Man-lion). Then he was born as Ravana, the giant king of
Lanka, and killed by Rama; after which he is reborn as Sisupala, the son of
Rajarishi (King Rishi) Damaghosha, when he is again killed by Krishna, the last
incarnation of Vishnu. This parallel evolution of Vishnu (spirit) with a
Daitya, as men, may seem meaningless, yet it gives us the key not only to the
respective dates of Rama and Krishna but even to a certain psychological
mystery.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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!
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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).
-------
39. THE FIRST
(Race) ON EVERY ZONE WAS MOON-COLOURED (yellow-white); THE SECOND, YELLOW, LIKE
GOLD; THE THIRD, RED; THE FOURTH, BROWN, WHICH BECAME BLACK WITH SIN.* THE
FIRST SEVEN (human) SHOOTS WERE ALL OF ONE COMPLEXION IN THE BEGINNING. THE
NEXT (seven, the sub-races) BEGAN MIXING THEIR COLOURS (b).
(a) To
understand this verse 38, it must be read together with the three verses of
Stanza IX. Up to this point of evolution man belongs more to metaphysical than
physical nature. It is only after the so-called FALL, that the races began to
develop rapidly into a purely human shape. And, in order that he may correctly
comprehend the full meaning of the Fall, so mystic and transcendental is it in
its real significance, the student must be told at once the details which
preceded
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Strictly
speaking, it is only from the time of the Atlantean, brown and yellow giant
Races, that one ought to speak of MAN, since it was the Fourth race only which
was the first completely human species, however much larger in size than we are
now. In "Man" (by two chelas), all that is said of the Atlanteans is
quite correct. It is chiefly that race which became "black with sin"
that brought the divine names of the Asuras, the Rakshasas and the Daityas into
disrepute, and passed them on to posterity as the names of fiends. For, as
said, the Suras (gods) or Devas having incarnated in the wise men of Atlantis,
the names of Asuras and Rakshasas were given to the Atlanteans; which names,
owing to their incessant conflicts with the last remnants of the Third Race and
the "Sons of Will and Yoga," have led to the later allegories about
them in the Puranas. "Asura was the generic appellation of all the
Atlanteans who were the enemies of the spiritual heroes of the Aryans
(gods)." ("Man," p. 97.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 aeons
to come, because the bodies they had to inform had become defiled through their
own procrastination. (See verses 32, 36.)
This was the
"Fall of the angels," because of their rebellion against Karmic Law.
The "fall of man" was no fall, for he was irresponsible. But
"Creation" having been invented on the dualistic system as the
"prerogative of God alone," the legitimate attribute patented by
theology in the name of an infinite deity of their own making, this power had
to be regarded as "Satanic," and as an usurpation of divine rights.
Thus, the foregoing, in the light of such narrow views, must naturally be
considered as a terrible slander on man, "created in the image of
God," a still more dreadful blasphemy in the face of the dead-letter
dogma. "Your doctrine," the Occultists were already told, "makes
of man, created out of dust in the likeness of his God, a vehicle of the Devil,
from the first." "Why did you make of your god a devil -- both,
moreover, created in your own image?" is our reply. The esoteric
interpretation of the Bible, however, sufficiently refutes this slanderous
invention of theology; the Secret Doctrine must some day become the just Karma
of the Churches -- more anti-Christian than the representative assemblies of
the most confirmed Materialists and Atheists.
The old doctrine
about the true meaning of the "Fallen Angels," in its anthropological
and evolutionary sense, is contained in the Kabala,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."* But what is, in reality, the
"Book of Enoch" itself, from which the author of Revelation and even
the St. John of the Fourth Gospel have so profusely quoted? (e.g., verse 8, in
chapter 10, about all who have come before Jesus, being "thieves and robbers.")
Simply a Book of Initiation, giving out in allegory and cautious phraseology
the programme of certain archaic mysteries performed in the inner temples. The
author of the "Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches" very
justly suggests that the so-called "Visions" of Enoch relate to his
(Enoch's) experience at initiation, and what he learned in the mysteries; while
he very erroneously states his opinion that Enoch had learned them before being
converted
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In general,
the so-called orthodox Christian conceptions about the "fallen"
angels or Satan, are as remarkable as they are absurd. About a dozen could be
cited, of the most various character as to details, and all from the pen of
educated lay authors, "University graduates" of the present quarter
of our century. Thus, the author of "Earth's Earliest Ages," J. H.
Pember, M.A., devotes a thick volume to proving Theosophists, Spiritualists,
Metaphysicians, Agnostics, Mystics, poets, and every contemporary author on
oriental speculations, to be the devoted servants of the "Prince of the
Air," and irretrievably damned. He describes Satan and his Antichrist in
this wise:--
"Satan is
the 'Anointed Cherub' of old. . . . God created Satan, the fairest and wisest
of all his creatures in this part of His Universe, and made him Prince of the
World, and of the Power of the Air. . . . He was placed in an Eden, which was
both far anterior to the Eden of Genesis. . . . and of an altogether different
and more substantial character, resembling the New Jerusalem. Thus, Satan being
perfect in wisdom, and beauty, His vast empire is our earth, if not the whole
solar system. . . . Certainly no other angelic power of greater or even equal
dignity has been revealed to us. The Archangel Michael himself is quoted by
Jude as preserving towards the Prince of Darkness the respect due to a
superior, however wicked he may be, until God has formally commanded his
deposition." Then we are informed that "Satan was from the moment of
his creation surrounded by the insignia of royalty" (! !): that he
"awoke to consciousness to find the air filled with the rejoicing music of
those whom God had appointed . . . ." Then the Devil "passes from the
royalty to his priestly dignity" (! ! !) "Satan was also a priest of
the Most High," etc., etc. And now -- "Antichrist will be Satan
incarnate" (pp. 56-59). The Pioneers of the coming Apollyon have already
appeared -- they are the Theosophists, the Occultists, the authors of the
"Perfect Way," of "Isis Unveiled," of the "Mystery of
the Ages," and even of the "Light of Asia"! ! The author notes
the "avowed origin" (of Theosophy) from the "descending
angels," from the "Nephilim," or the angels of the VIth ch. of
Genesis, and the Giants. He ought to note his own descent from them also, as
the present Secret Doctrine endeavours to show -- unless he refuses to belong
to the present humanity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 fluens," was
credited with the possession of the Keys of the Empire of the Dead, [[tou
thanatus arche]] to that day, when Jesus saw it "falling like lightning
from heaven" (Luke x. 17, 18), the Roman Catholic interpretation of
cadebat ut fulgur to the contrary, notwithstanding; and it means indeed that
even "the devils are subject" to the Logos -- who is WISDOM, but who,
as the opponent of ignorance, is Satan or Lucifer at the same time. This remark
refers to divine Wisdom falling like lightning on, and quickening the
intellects of those who fight the devils of ignorance and superstition. Up to
the time when Wisdom, in the shape of the incarnating Spirits of MAHAT,
descended from on high to animate and call the Third Race to real conscious
life, humanity -- if it can be so called in its animal, senseless state --was
of course doomed to -- moral as well as to physical death. The Angels fallen
into generation are referred to metaphorically as Serpents and Dragons of
Wisdom. On the other hand, regarded in the light of the LOGOS, the Christian
Saviour, like Krishna, whether as man or logos, may be said to have saved those
who believed in the secret teachings from "eternal death," to have
conquered the Kingdom of Darkness, or Hell, as every Initiate does. This in the
human, terrestrial form of the Initiates, and also because the logos is
Christos, that principle of our inner nature which develops in us into the
Spiritual Ego -- the Higher-Self -- being formed of the indissoluble union of
Buddhi (the sixth) and the spiritual efflorescence of Manas, the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 231 SATANIC MYTHS.
fifth
principle.* "The Logos is passive Wisdom in Heaven and Conscious,
Self-Active Wisdom on Earth," we are taught. It is the Marriage of
"Heavenly man" with the "Virgin of the World" --Nature, as
described in Pymander; the result of which is their progeny -- immortal man. It
is this which is called in St. John's Revelation the marriage of the lamb with
his bride. (xix. 7.) That "wife" is now identified with the Church of
Rome owing to the arbitrary interpretations of her votaries. But they seem to
forget that her linen may be fine and white outwardly (like the "whitened
sepulchre"), but that the rottenness she is inwardly filled with, is not
"the righteousness of Saints" (v. 8. ibid), but rather the blood of
the Saints she has "slain upon the earth" (chap. xviii. 24.) Thus the
remark made by the great Initiate (in Luke x. 18) -- one that referred
allegorically to the ray of Enlightenment and reason, falling like lightning
from on high into the hearts and minds of the converts to that old
wisdom-religion then presented in a new form by the wise Galilean Adeptt** --
was distorted out of recognition (as was his own personality), and made to fit
in with one of the most cruel as the most pernicious of all theological dogmas.
(Vide at the end of Stanza XI. "SATANIC MYTHS.")
But if Western
theology alone holds the patent for, and copyright of SATAN -- in all the
dogmatic horror of that fiction -- other nationalities
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is not
correct to refer to Christ -- as some theosophists do -- as the sixth principle
in man -- Buddhi. The latter per se is a passive and latent principle, the
spiritual vehicle of Atman, inseparable from the manifested Universal Soul. It
is only in union and in conjunction with Self-consciousness that Buddhi becomes
the Higher Self and the divine, discriminating Soul. Christos is the seventh
principle, if anything.
** To make it
plainer, any one who reads that passage in Luke, will see that the remark
follows the report of the seventy, who rejoice that "even the devils (the
spirit of controversy and reasoning, or the opposing power, since Satan means
simply "adversary" or opponent) are subject unto us through thy
name." (Luke x. 17.) Now, "thy name" means the name of Christos,
or Logos, or the spirit of true divine wisdom, as distinct from the spirit of
intellectual or mere materialistic reasoning -- the HIGHER SELF in short. And
when Jesus remarks to this that he has "beheld Satan as lightning fall
from heaven," it is a mere statement of his clairvoyant powers, notifying
them that he already knew it, and a reference to the incarnation of the divine
ray (the gods or angels) which falls into generation. For not all men, by any
means, benefit by that incarnation, and with some the power remains latent and
dead during the whole life. Truly "No man knoweth who the Son is, but the
Father; and who the Father is, but the Son" as added by Jesus then and
there (Ibid v. 22) -- the Church "of Christ" less than any one else.
The Initiates alone understood the secret meaning of the term "Father and
the Son," and knew that it referred to Spirit and Soul on the Earth. For
the teachings of Christ were occult teachings, which could only be explained at
the initiation. They were never intended for the masses, for Jesus forbade the
twelve to go to the Gentiles and the Samaritans (Matt. x. 8), and repeated to
his disciples that the "mysteries of Heaven" were for them alone, not
for the multitudes (Mark iv. 11).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 232 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and religions
have committed equal errors in their misinterpretation of this tenet, which is
one of the most profoundly philosophical and ideal conceptions of ancient
thought. For they have both disfigured and hinted at the correct meaning of it
in their numerous allegories touching the subject. Nor have the
semi-esoteric
dogmas of Puranic Hinduism failed to evolve very suggestive symbols and
allegories concerning the rebellious and fallen gods. The Puranas teem with
them; and we find a direct hint at the truth in the frequent allusions of
Parasara (Vishnu Purana), to all those Rudras, Rishis, Asuras, Kumaras and
Munis, having to be born in every age, to re-incarnate in every Manvantara.
This (esoterically) is equivalent to saying that the FLAMES born of the
Universal Mind (Mahat), owing to the mysterious workings of Karmic Will and an
impulse of Evolutionary Law, had, as in Pymander -- without any gradual
transition -- landed on this Earth, having broken through the seven Circles of
fire, or the seven intermediate Worlds, in short.
There is an
eternal cyclic law of re-births, and the series is headed at every new
Manvantaric dawn by those who had enjoyed their rest from re-incarnations in
previous Kalpas for incalculable AEons -- by the highest and the earliest
Nirvanees. It was the turn of those "Gods" to incarnate in the
present Manvantara; hence their presence on Earth, and the ensuing allegories;
hence, also, the perversion of the original meaning.* The Gods who had fallen
into generation, whose mission it was to complete divine man, are found
represented later on as Demons, evil Spirits, and fiends, at feud and war with
Gods, or the irresponsible agents of the one Eternal law. But no conception of
such creatures as the devils and Satan of the Christian, Jewish, and Mahomedan
religions was ever intended under those thousand and one Aryan allegories.**
(See "The Fallen Angels" and "The Mystic Dragons" in Part
II.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* So, for instance,
in the Puranas, "Pulastya," a Prajapati, or son of Brahma -- the
progenitor of the Rakshasas, and the grandfather of Ravana, the Great King of
Lanka (see Ramayana) -- had, in a former birth, a son named Dattoli, "who
is now known as the sage Agastya" -- says Vishnu Purana. This name of
Dattoli alone, has six more variants to it, or seven meanings. He is called
respectively, Dattoi, Dattali, Dattotti, Dattotri, Dattobhri, Dambhobhi and
Dambholi -- which seven variants have each a secret sense, and refer in the
esoteric comments to various ethnological classifications, and also to
physiological and anthropological mysteries of the primitive races. For,
surely, the Rakshasas are not demons, but simply the primitive and ferocious
giants, the Atlanteans, who were scattered on the face of the globe as the
Fifth Race is now. Vasishta is a warrant to this, if his words addressed to
Parasara, who attempted a bit of JADOO (sorcery), which he calls
"sacrifice," for the destruction of the Rakshasas, mean anything. For
he says, "Let no more of these unoffending 'Spirits Darkness' be
destroyed." (see for details Adiparvan, s. 176, Mahabharata; also the
Linga Purana "Purvardha," s. 64.)
** We have a
passage from a Master's letter which has a direct bearing upon these [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 233 HOLY SATAN.
The true
esoteric view about "Satan," the opinion held on this subject by the
whole philosophic antiquity, is admirably brought out in an appendix, entitled
"The Secret of Satan," to the second edition of Dr. A. Kingsford's
"Perfect Way." No better and clearer indication of the truth could be
offered to the intelligent reader, and it is therefore quoted here at some
length:--
"1. And on
the seventh day (seventh creation of the Hindus),* there went forth from the
presence of God a mighty Angel, full of wrath and consuming, and God gave him
the dominion of the outermost sphere.**
2.
"Eternity brought forth Time; the Boundless gave birth to Limit; Being
descended into generation."***
4. "Among
the Gods is none like unto him, into whose hands are committed the kingdoms,
the power and the glory of the worlds:"
5. "Thrones
and empires, the dynasties of kings,**** the fall of nations, the birth of
churches, the triumph of Time."
For, as is said
in Hermes, "Satan is the door-keeper of the Temple of the King; he
standeth in Solomon's porch; he holdeth the key of the Sanctuary, that no man
enter therein, save the Anointed having the arcanum of Hermes" (v. 20 and
21).
These suggestive
and majestic verses had reference with the ancient Egyptians and other
civilized peoples of antiquity to the creative and generative light of the
Logos (Horus, Brahma, Ahura-Mazda, etc., etc., as primeval manifestations of
the ever-unmanifested Principle, e.g., Ain-Soph, Parabrahm, or Zeruana Akerne--
Boundless Time -- Kala), but the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] incarnating angels. Says the letter: "Now
there are, and there must be, failures in the ethereal races of the many
classes of Dhyan-Chohans, or Devas (progressed entities of a previous planetary
period), as well as among men. But still, as the failures are too far
progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back forcibly from Dhyan-Chohanship
into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through the lower Kingdoms, this
then happens. Where a new solar system has to be evolved these Dhyan-Chohans
are borne in by influx 'ahead' of the Elementals (Entities . . . to be
developed into humanity at a future time) and remain as a latent or inactive
spiritual force, in the aura of a nascent world . . . until the stage of human
evolution is reached. . . . Then they become an active force and commingle with
the Elementals, to develop little by little the full type of humanity."
That is to say, to develop in, and endow man with his Self-conscious mind, or Manas.
* When the earth
with its planetary chain and man were to appear.
** Our earth and
the physical plane of consciousness.
*** When the
pure, celestial Being (Dhyan Chohan) and the great Pitris of various classes were
commissioned -- the one to evolve their images (Chhaya), and make of them
physical man, the others to inform and thus endow him with divine intelligence
and the comprehension of the Mysteries of Creation.
**** The
"dynasties of the kings" who all regard themselves as the
"anointed," reigning "by the Grace of God," whereas in
truth, they reign by the grace of matter, the great Illusion, the Deceiver.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, the second -- to EROS, not the later god of material,
physiological love, but to the divine desire in the gods, as well as in all
nature, to create and give life to Beings. This, the Rays of the one
"dark," because invisible and incomprehensible, FLAME could achieve
only by themselves descending into matter. Therefore, as continued in the
APPENDIX:
12. "Many
names hath God given him (Satan), names of mystery, secret and terrible."
13. "The
Adversary, because matter opposeth Spirit. Time accuseth even the Saints of the
Lord."
28, 29, 31. "Stand in awe of him, and sin
not; speak his name with trembling . . . . For Satan is the magistrate of the
justice of God (Karma); he beareth the balance and the sword . . . . For to him
are committed Weight and Measure and Number."
Compare the last
sentence with what the Rabbi, who explains the Kabala to Prince Al-Chazari in
the Book of that name, says; and it will be found that the Weight and Measure
and Number are, in Sepher Jezirah, the attributes of the Sephiroth (the three
Sephrim, or figures, ciphers) covering the whole collective number of 10; and
that the Sephiroth are the collective Adam Kadmon, the "Heavenly Man"
or the Logos. Thus Satan and the anointed were identified in ancient thought.
Therefore,
33. "Satan
is the minister of God, Lord of the seven mansions of Hades" . . . .
The seven or
Saptaloka of the Earth with the Hindus; for Hades, or the Limbo of Illusion, of
which theology makes a region bordering on Hell, is simply our globe, the
Earth, and thus Satan is called --
33 ". . . . the angel of the manifest
Worlds."
It is "Satan
who is the god of our planet and the only god," and this without any
allusive metaphor to its wickedness and depravity. For he is one with the
Logos, "the first son, eldest of the gods," in the order
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Phoebus (the light of wisdom, also the Sun) is the
centre." The Gnostics were right, then, in calling the Jewish god "an
angel of matter," or he who breathed (conscious) life into Adam, and he
whose planet was Saturn.
34. "And
God hath put a girdle about his loins (the rings of Saturn), and the name of
the girdle is Death."
In anthropogony
this "girdle" is the human body with its two lower principles, which
three die, while the innermost man is immortal. And now we approach the
"Secret of Satan."
37, 38, 39.
" . . . Upon Satan only is the shame of generation. He hath lost his
virginal estate (so hath the Kumara by incarnating): uncovering heavenly
secrets, he hath entered into bondage. . . . He compasseth with bonds and
limits all things. . . ."
42, 43, 44.
"Twain are the armies of God: in heaven the hosts of Michael; in the abyss
(the manifested world) the legions of Satan. These are the unmanifest and the
manifest; the free and the bound (in matter): the virginal and the fallen. And
both are the Ministers of the Father, fulfilling the word Divine. . . ."
Therefore --
55. "Holy
is the Sabbath of god: blessed and sanctified is the name of the Angel of
Havas" -- SATAN.
For, "The
glory of Satan is the shadow of the Lord": God in the manifested world;
"the throne of Satan is the footstool of Adonai" -- that footstool
being the whole Kosmos. (Vide Part II., "Is Pleroma Satan's Lair?")
When the Church,
therefore, curses Satan, it curses the cosmic reflection of God; it
anathematizes God made manifest in matter or in the objective; it maledicts
God, or the ever-incomprehensible WISDOM, revealing itself as Light and Shadow,
good and evil in nature, in the only manner comprehensible to the limited
intellect of MAN.
This is the true
philosophical and metaphysical interpretation of Samael, or Satan, the
adversary in the Kabala; the same tenets and spirit being found in the
allegorical interpretations of every other ancient religion. This philosophical
view does not interfere, however, with the historical records connected with
it. We say "historical," because allegory and a mythical
ornamentation around the kernel of tradition, in no wise prevent that kernel
being a record of real events. Thus, the Kabala, repeating the time-honoured
revelations of the once universal history of our globe and the evolution of its
races, has presented it under the legendary form of the various records which
have formed the Bible. Its historical foundation is now offered, in however
imperfect a form, on these pages from the Secret Doctrine of the East; and thus
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
mythical* will one day become historical, those alone can tell who read the
decrees of Fate in the astral light.
As the tenets of
the Eastern doctrine, however, have always been kept secret, and as the reader
can hardly hope to be shown the original texts unless he becomes an accepted
disciple, let the Greek and Latin scholar turn to the original texts of
Hermetic literature. Let him, for one thing, read carefully the opening pages
of the Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus; and then he will see our doctrines
corroborated in it, however veiled its text. There also he will find the
evolution of the Universe, of our Earth (called "Nature" in Pymander)
as of everything else, from the "Moyst Principle" -- or the great
Deep, FATHER-MOTHER -- the first differentiation in the manifested Kosmos.
First the "Universal Mind," which the hand of the Christian
translator has metamorphosed in the earliest renderings into God, the Father:
then the "Heavenly Man,"** which is the great Total of that Host of
Angels, which was too pure for the creation of the inferior worlds or of the
men of our globe, but which fell nevertheless into matter by virtue of that
same evolution, as the second logos of the "Father."***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See the
"Primeval Manus of Humanity."
** The
"Heavenly Man" -- please mark again the word -- is "the
LOGOS" or the "Son" esoterically. Therefore, once that the title
was applied to Christ (declared God and the very God himself) Christian
theology had no choice. In order to support its dogma of the personal Trinity
it had to proclaim, as it does, that the Christian Logos is the only true one,
and that all the Logoi of other religions were false, and only the masquerading
Evil Principles, SATAN. Now see where this led Western theology to.
*** "For
the Mind, a deity abounding in both sexes, being Life and Life, brought forth
by its Word another Mind or Workman; which, being God of the Fire and the
Spirit, fashioned and formed seven other Governors, which in their circles
contain the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 237 MAHASURA AND SATAN.
Synthetically
every Creative Logos, or "the Son who is one with the Father," is the
Host of the Rectores Mundi in itself. Even Christian theology makes of the
seven "Angels of the Presence" the Virtues, or the personified
attributes of God, which, being created by him, as the Manus were by Brahma,
became Archangels. The Roman Catholic theodice itself recognising, in its
creative Verbum Princeps, the head of those angels -- caput angelorum -- and
the magni consilii Angelus (the Angel of the great Counsel), thus recognizes
the identity of Christ and those Angels.
"The Gods
became no-Gods, the Sura -- A-sura," says the text; i.e., gods became
fiends -- SATAN, when read literally. But Satan will now be shown, in the
teaching of the Secret Doctrine, allegorized as Good, and Sacrifice, a God of
Wisdom, under different names.
The Kabala
teaches that Pride and Presumption -- the two chief prompters of Selfishness
and Egotism -- are the causes that emptied heaven of one third of its divine
denizens -- mystically, and of one third of the stars -- astronomically; in
other words, the two statements are -- the first an allegory, and the second a
fact. The former, nevertheless, as shown, is intimately connected with
humanity.
In their turn
the Rosicrucians, who were well acquainted with the secret meaning of the
tradition, kept it to themselves, teaching merely that the whole of creation
was due to, and the result of, that legendary "War in Heaven" brought
on by the rebellion of the angels* against creative law, or the Demiurge. The
statement is correct, but the inner meaning is to this day a mystery. To elude
further explanation of the difficulty by appealing to divine mystery, or to the
sin of prying into its policy -- is to say nothing at all. It may prove
sufficient to
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Phenomenal World, and whose disposition is
called Fate or Destiny." (Section 9, ch. I, ed. of 1579).
Here it is
evident that "Mind" (the primeval universal Divine Thought) is
neither the Unknown unmanifested One, since it abounds in both sexes (is male
and female), nor yet the Christian Father, as the latter is a male and not an
androgyne. The fact is that the Father, Son, and Man are hopelessly mixed up in
the translations of Pymander.
* The allegory
of the fire of Prometheus is another version of the rebellion of the proud
Lucifer, who was hurled down to the bottomless pit, or simply unto our Earth,
to live as man. The Hindu Lucifer, the Mahasura, is also said to have become
envious of the Creator's resplendent light, and, at the head of inferior Asuras
(not gods, but spirits), to have rebelled against Brahma; for which Siva hurled
him down to Patala. But, as philosophy goes hand in hand with allegorical
fiction in Hindu myths, the devil is made to repent, and is afforded the
opportunity to progress: he is a sinful man esoterically, and can by yoga
devotion, and adeptship, reach his status of one with the deity, once more.
Hercules, the Sun-god, descends to Hades (the cave of Initiation) to deliver
the victims from their tortures, etc., etc. The Christian Church alone creates
eternal torment for the devil and the damned, that she has invented.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Mediaeval Ages, utter that* which in the sight of
orthodox theology was a terrible blasphemy, for it would have led them directly
through the "Holy" office of the Inquisition, to stake and rack. But
for our modern Kabalists and Freethinkers the case is different. With the
latter, we fear, it is merely human pride, vanity based on a loudly rejected
and as ineradicable superstition. Since the Church, in her struggle with
Manichaeism, invented the devil, and by placing
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Why should,
for instance, Eliphas Levi, the very fearless and outspoken Kabalist, have
hesitated to divulge the mystery of the Fallen Angels so-called? That he knew
the fact and real meaning of the allegory -- both in its religious and
mystical, as well as in its physiological sense -- is proved by his voluminous
writings and frequent allusions and hints. Yet Eliphas, after having alluded to
it a hundred times in his previous works, says in his latest "Histoire de
la Magie," p. 220 . . . "We protest with all our might against the
sovereignty and the ubiquity of Satan. We pretend neither to deny nor affirm
here the tradition on the Fall of the Angels . . . but if so, then the prince
of the Angelic Rebels can be at best the last and the most powerless among the
condemned -- now that he is separated from deity -- which is the principle of
every power. . . ." This is hazy and evasive enough; but see what Hargrave
Jennings writes in his weird, staccato-like style:--
"Both Saint
Michael and Saint George are types. They are sainted personages, or dignified
heroes, or powers apotheosized. They are each represented with their
appropriate faculties and attributes. These are reproduced and stand multiplied
-- distinguished by different names in all the mythologies . . . (including the
Christian). . . . The idea regarding each is a general one. This idea and
representative notion is that of the all-powerful champion -- child-like in his
'Virgin innocence' -- so powerful that this god-filled innocence (the Seraphim
'Know most,' the Cherubim 'love most') can shatter the world (articulated, so
to use the word -- in the magic of Lucifer, but condemned) in opposition to the
artful constructions (this 'side-life') of the magnificent apostate, the mighty
rebel, but yet at the same time the 'Light-bringer,' the Lucifer, the 'Morning
Star,' the 'Son of the morning' -- the very highest title 'out of heaven, 'for
in heaven it cannot be, but out of heaven it is everything. In an apparently
incredible side of his character -- qualities are of no sex -- this archangel,
St. Michael, is the invincible, sexless, celestial 'Energy' -- to dignify him
by his grand characteristics -- the invisible 'Virgin Combatant,' clothed . . .
and at the same time armed, in the denying mail of the Gnostic 'refusal to
create.' This is another . . . 'myth within myths' . . . a stupendous 'mystery
of mysteries,' because it is so impossible and contradictory. Unexplainable as
the Apocalypse. Unrevealable as the 'Revelation' "(p. 213).
Nevertheless,
this unexplainable and unrevealable mystery will now be explained and revealed
by the doctrines of the East. But as the very erudite, but still more puzzling
author of "Phallicism" gives it, of course, no uninitiated mortal
would ever understand the real drift of his remarks.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 239 THEOLOGICAL SNUFFERS.
a theological
extinguisher on the radiant star-god, Lucifer, the "Son of the
Morning," thus created the most gigantic of all her paradoxes -- a black
and tenebrous light -- the myth has struck its roots too deep in the soil of
blind faith to permit, in our age, even those, who do not acquiesce in her
dogmas and laugh at her horned and cloven-footed Satan, to come out bravely and
confess the antiquity of the oldest of all traditions. In a few brief words it
is this. Semi-exoterically, the "First-born" of the Almighty -- Fiat
Lux, -- or the angels of primordial light, were commanded to create; one third
of them rebelled and refused; while those who "obeyed as Fetahil did --
failed" most signally.
To realise the
refusal and failure in their correct physical meaning, one must study and
understand Eastern philosophy; one has to be acquainted with the fundamental
mystical tenets of the Vedantins, with regard to the utter fallacy of
attributing functional activity to the infinite and absolute deity. Esoteric
philosophy maintains that during the Sandhyas, the "Central Sun"
emits creative light -- passively so to say. Causality is latent. It is only
during the active periods of being that it gives rise to a stream of ceaseless
energy, whose vibrating currents acquire more activity and potency with every
rung of the hebdomadic ladder of Being which they descend. Hence it becomes
comprehensible how the process of creating, or rather of fashioning, the
organic Universe, with all its units of the seven kingdoms, necessitated
intelligent beings -- who became collectively a Being or creative God --
differentiated already from the one absolute Unity, unrelated as the latter is
to conditioned creation.*
Now the Vatican
MSS. of the Kabala -- a single copy of which (in Europe) is said to have been
in the possession of Count St. Germain -- contains the most complete exposition
of the doctrine, including the peculiar version accepted by the Luciferians**
and other Gnostics; and in that parchment the Seven Suns of Life are given in
the order they are found in the Saptasurya. Only four of these, however, are
mentioned in the editions of the Kabala which are procurable in the public
libraries, and that even in a more or less veiled phraseology. Nevertheless
even this reduced number is amply sufficient to show an identical origin, as it
refers to the quaternary group of the Dhyan-Chohans, and proves the speculation
to have had its origin in the Secret Doctrines of the Aryans.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Creation" -- out of pre-existent eternal substance, or matter, of
course, which substance, according to our teachings, is boundless,
ever-existing space.
** The
Luciferians -- the sect of the fourth century who are alleged to have taught
that the Soul was a carnal body transmitted to the child by its father; -- and
that other religious and still earlier sect of the second century A.D., the
Lucianists, who taught all this, and further, that the animal Soul was not
immortal, were philosophizing on the grounds of the real Kabalistic and Occult
teachings.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 sun* called the Earth into
being as a watery globe," whose tendency, "as the nucleus of a
planetary body, was to rush to the (central) Sun . . . . within the sphere of
whose attraction it had been created," "but the radiant energy,
similarly electrifying both, withheld the one from the other, and so changed
motion towards into motion round the centre of attraction, which the revolving
planet (earth) thus sought to reach.
"In the
organic cell the visible sun found its own proper matrix, and produced through
this the animal (while maturing the vegetable) Kingdom, finally placing man at
its head, in whom, through the animating action of that Kingdom, it originated
the psychic cell. But the man so placed at the head of the animal kingdom, at
the head of the creation, was the animal, the soul-less, the perishable man. .
. . Hence man, although apparently its crown, would, by his advent have marked
the close of creation; since creation, culminating in him, would at his death
have entered on its decline" . . . (p. 289).
This Kabalistic
view is here quoted, to show its perfect identity in spirit with the Eastern
doctrine. Explain, or complete the teaching of the seven Suns with the seven
systems of planes of being, of which the "Suns" are the central
bodies, and you have the seven angelic planes,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This
"central sun" of the Occultists, which even Science is obliged to
accept astronomically, for it cannot deny the presence in Sidereal Space of a
central body in the milky way, a point unseen and mysterious, the ever-hidden
centre of attraction of our Sun and system -- this "Sun" is viewed
differently by the Occultists of the East. While the Western and Jewish
Kabalists (and even some pious modern astronomers) claim that in this sun the
God-head is specially present -- referring to it the volitional acts of God --
the Eastern Initiates maintain that, as the supradivine Essence of the Unknown
Absolute is equally in every domain and place, the "Central Sun" is
simply the centre of Universal life-Electricity; the reservoir within which
that divine radiance, already differentiated at the beginning of every
creation, is focussed. Though still in a laya, or neutral condition, it is,
nevertheless, the one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, life Centre.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 principles* -- Manas and Kama rupa -- that contain the dual personality:
the real immortal Ego (if it assimilates itself to the two higher) and the
false and transitory personality, the mayavi or astral body, so-called, or the
animal-human Soul -- the two hav-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Fourth,
and the Fifth from below beginning by the physical body; the Third and the
Fourth, if we reckon from Atma.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, prana (life principle),
and linga sarira -- and, if it lacks its middle and fifth principles, you will
have created an idiot -- at best a beautiful, soul-less, empty and unconscious
appearance. "Cogito -- ergo sum" -- can find no room in the brain of
such a creature, not on this plane, at any rate.
There are
students, however, who have long ago understood the philosophical meaning
underlying the allegory -- so tortured and disfigured by the Roman Church -- of
the Fallen Angels. "The Kingdom of Spirits and spiritual action which
flows from and is the product of Spirit Volition, is outside and contrasted
with and in contradiction to the Kingdom of (divine) Souls and divine
action."* As said in the text:--
"Like
produces like and no more at the genesis of being, and evolution with its
limited conditioned laws comes later. The Self-Existentt are called CREATIONS,
for they appear in the Spirit Ray, manifested through the potency inherent in
its UNBORN Nature, which is beyond time and (limited or conditioned) Space.
Terrene products, animate and inanimate, including mankind, are falsely called
creation and creatures: they are the development (evolution) of the discrete
elements." (Com. xiv.) Again:--
"The
Heavenly rupa (Dhyan Chohan) creates (man) in his own form; it is a spiritual
ideation consequent on the first differentiation and awakening of the universal
(manifested) Substance; that form is the ideal shadow of Itself: and this is
THE MAN OF THE FIRST RACE."
To express it in
still clearer form, limiting the explanation to this earth only, it was the
duty of the first "differentiated Egos" -- the Church calls them
Archangels -- to imbue primordial matter with the evolutionary impulse and
guide its formative powers in the fashioning of its productions. This it is
which is referred to in the sentences both in the Eastern and Western tradition
--"the Angels were commanded to create." After the Earth had been
made ready by the lower and more material powers, and its three Kingdoms fairly
started on their way to be "fruitful and multiply," the higher
powers, the Archangels or Dhyanis, were compelled by the evolutionary Law to
descend on Earth, in order to construct the crown of its evolution -- MAN. Thus
the "Self-created"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "New
Aspects of Life."
** Angelic,
Spiritual Essences, immortal in their being because unconditioned in Eternity;
periodical and conditioned in their Manvantaric manifestations.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 243 MAN, THE PALE SHADOW OF GOD.
and the
"Self-existent" projected their pale shadows; but group the Third,
the Fire-Angels, rebelled and refused to join their Fellow Devas.
Hindu
exotericism represents them all as Yogins, whose piety inspired them to refuse
creating, as they desired to remain eternally Kumaras, "Virgin
Youths," in order to, if possible, anticipate their fellows in progress
towards Nirvana -- the final liberation. But, agreeably to esoteric
interpretation, it was a self-sacrifice for the benefit of mankind. The
"Rebels" would not create will-less irresponsible men, as the
"obedient" angels did; nor could they endow human beings with only
the temporary reflections of 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[Phosphoros]] of the astral fire
and light in the anima mundi -- (that element of which the German materialist
philosopher Moleschott said: "ohne phosphor kein gedanke," i.e.,
without phosphorus no thought), burning in the fierce flames of his terrestrial
passions; the conflagration fired by his Thought, discerning as it now does
good from evil, and yet a slave to the passions of its earthly Adam; feeling
the vulture of doubt and full consciousness gnawing at its heart -- a
Prometheus indeed, because a conscious, hence a responsible entity.* The curse
of life is great, yet how few are those men, outside some Hindu and Sufi
mystics, who would exchange all the tortures of conscious life, all the evils
of a responsible existence, for the unconscious perfection of a passive
(objectively) incorporeal being, or even the universal static Inertia
personified in Brahma during his "night's" rest. For, to quote from
an able article by one**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The history of
Prometheus, Karma, and human consciousness, is found further on.
** By an
Englishman whose erratic genius killed him. The son of a Protestant clergyman,
he became a Mahomedan, then a rabid atheist, and after meeting with a
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 245 SATAN, A CENTRIPETAL FORCE.
who, confusing
the planes of existence and consciousness, fell a victim to it:--
"Satan, or
Lucifer, represents the active, or, as M. Jules Baissac calls it, the
'Centrifugal Energy of the Universe' in a cosmic sense. He is Fire, Light,
Life, Struggle, Effort, Thought, Consciousness, Progress, Civilization,
Liberty, Independence. At the same time he is pain, which is the Re-action of
the pleasure of action, and death -- which is the revolution of life -- Satan,
burning in his own hell, produced by the fury of his own momentum -- the
expansive disintegration of the nebulae which is to concentrate into new
worlds. And fitly is he again and again baffled by the eternal Inertia of the
passive energy of the Kosmos -- the inexorable 'I AM' -- the flint from which
the sparks are beaten out. Fitly is he . . . and his adherents . . . consigned
to the 'sea of fire,' because it is the Sun (in one sense only in the Cosmic
allegory), the fount of life in our system, where they are purified
(disintegrated) and churned up to re-arrange them for another life (the
resurrection); that Sun which, as the origin of the active principle of our
Earth, is at once the Home and the Source of the Mundane Satan. . . ." To
demonstrate furthermore the accuracy of Baissac's general theory (in Le Diable
et Satan) cold is known to have a 'Centripetal' effect. "Under the
influence of cold everything contracts. . . . Under it life hybernates, or dies
out, thought congeals, and fire is extinguished. Satan is immortal in his own
Fire-Sea -- it is only in the 'Nifl-heim' (the cold Hell of the Scandinavian
Eddas) of the 'I AM' that he cannot exist. But for all that there is a kind of
Immortal Existence in the Nifl-heim, and that existence must be painless and
peaceful, because it is Unconscious and Inactive. In the Kingdom of Jehovah (if
this God were all that the Jews and Christians claim for him) there is no
Misery, no War, no marrying and giving in marriage, no change, no Individual
Consciousness.* All is absorbed in the spirit of the most Powerful. It is
emphatically a kingdom of Peace and loyal Submission as that of the
'Arch-Rebel' is one of War and Revolution. . . . . It (the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] master, a Guru, he became a mystic; then a
theosophist who doubted, despaired; threw up white for black magic, went insane
and joined the Roman Church. Then again turning round, anathematized her,
re-became an atheist, and died cursing humanity, knowledge, and God, in whom he
had ceased to believe. Furnished with all the esoteric data to write his
"War in Heaven," he made a semi-political article out of it, mixing
Malthus with Satan, and Darwin with the astral light. Peace be to his -- Shell.
He is a warning to the chelas who fail. His forgotten tomb may now be seen in
the Mussulman burial ground of the Joonagad, Kathiawar, in India.
* The author
talks of the active, fighting, damning Jehovah as though he were a synonym of
Parabrahm! We have quoted from this article to show where it dissents from
theosophic teachings; otherwise it would be quoted some day against us, as
everything published in the Theosophist generally is.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Kumaras, the "Virgin-Angels," (to whom Michael and
Gabriel, the Archangels, both belong), the divine "Rebels" -- called
by the all-materializing and positive Jews, the Nahash or "Deprived"
-- preferred the curse of incarnation and the long cycles of terrestrial
existence and rebirths, to seeing the misery (even if unconscious) of the
beings (evolved as shadows out of their Brethren) through the semi-passive
energy of their too spiritual Creators. If "man's uses of life should be
such as neither to animalize nor to spiritualize, but to humanize Self,"*
before he can do so, he must be born human not angelic. Hence, tradition shows
the celestial Yogis offering themselves as voluntary victims in order to redeem
Humanity -- created god-like and perfect at first -- and to endow him with
human affections and aspirations. To do this they had to give up their natural
status and, descending on our globe, take up their abode on it for the whole
cycle of the Mahayuga, thus exchanging their impersonal individualities for
individual personalities -- the bliss of sidereal existence for the curse of
terrestrial life. This voluntary sacrifice of the Fiery Angels, whose nature
was Knowledge and Love, was construed by the exoteric theologies into a
statement that shows "the rebel angels hurled down from 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Explaining the
Kabala, Dr. H. Pratt says, "Spirit was to man (to the Jewish Rabbin,
rather?) a bodiless, disembodied, or deprived, and degraded being, and hence
was termed by the ideograph Nahash 'Deprived;' represented as appearing to and
seducing the human race -- men through the Woman. . . . In the picture from
this Nahash, this spirit was represented by a serpent, because from its
destitution of bodily members, the Serpent was looked upon as a deprived and
depraved and degraded creature" ("New Aspects," p. 235). Symbol
for symbol there are those who would prefer that of the serpent -- the symbol
of wisdom and eternity, deprived of limbs as it is -- to the Jod ([[diagram]])
-- the poetical ideograph of Jehovah in the Kabala -- the god of the male
symbol of generation.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. (Zohar iii., 61, C.)
And let me explain
at once that our quarrel is not with the Zohar and the Kabala in their right
interpretation -- for the latter is ours -- but only with the gross,
pseudo-esoteric explanations of the later, and especially those of the
Christian Kabalists.
"Our earth
and man," says the Commentary, "being the products of the three
Fires" -- whose three names answer, in Sanskrit, to "the electric
fire, the Solar fire, and the fire produced by friction," -- these three
fires, explained on the Cosmic and human planes, are Spirit, Soul, and Body,
the three great Root groups, with their four additional divisions. These vary
with the Schools, and become -- according to their applications -- the upadhis
and the vehicles, or the noumena of these. In the exoteric accounts, they are
personified by the "three sons of surpassing brilliancy and
splendour" of Agni Abhimanin, the eldest son of Brahma, the Cosmic LOGOS,
by Swaha, one of Daksha's* daughters. In the metaphysical sense the "Fire
of friction" means the Union between Buddhi, the sixth, and Manas, the
fifth, principles, which thus are united or cemented together; the fifth
merging partially into and becoming part of the monad; in the physical, it
relates to the creative spark, or germ, which fructifies and generates the
human being. The three Fires, it is said (whose names are Pavaka, Pavamana and
Suchi) were condemned by a curse of Vasishta, the great sage, "to be born
over and over again." (Bhagavata-Purana iv. 24, 4.) This is clear enough.
Therefore, the
FLAMES, whose functions are confused in the exoteric books, and who are called
indifferently Prajapati, Pitris, Manus, Asuras,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Daksha, the
"intelligent, the competent." "This name generally carries with
it the idea of creative power." He is a son of Brahma, and of Aditi, and
agreeably to other versions, a self-born power, which, like Minerva, sprang
from his father's body. He is the chief of the Prajapati -- the Lords or
Creators of Being. In Vishnu Purana, Parasara says of him, "in every Kalpa
(or manvantara) Daksha and the rest are born and are again destroyed." And
the Rig-Veda says that "Daksha sprang from Aditi and Aditi from
Daksha," a reference to the eternal cyclic re-birth of the same divine
Essence.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 248 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Rishis, Kumaras,*
etc. etc., are said to incarnate personally in the Third Root-Race and thus
find themselves "reborn over and over again." In the Esoteric
doctrine they are generally named the Asuras, or the Asu-ra Devata or
Pitar-devata (gods) for, as said, they were first Gods -- and the highest --
before they became "no-gods," and had from Spirits of Heaven fallen
into Spirits of the Earth** -- exoterically, note well, in orthodox dogma.
No Theologian,
any more than an Orientalist, can ever understand the genealogies of the
Prajapati, the Manus, and the Rishis, nor the direct connection of these -- or
their correlation rather -- with the Gods, unless he has the key to the old
primitive Cosmogony and Theogony, which all the Nations originally had in
common. All these gods and demi-gods are found reborn on earth, in various
Kalpas and in as various characters; each, moreover, having his Karma
distinctly traced, and every effect assigned to its cause.
Before other
Stanzas could be explained, it was, as seen, absolutely necessary to show that
the sons of "Dark Wisdom," though identical with the Archangels which
Theology has chosen to call the "Fallen," are as divine and as pure
and more so than all the Michaels and Gabriels so glorified in the churches.
The "old Book" goes into various details of Astral life, which at
this juncture would be quite incomprehensible to the reader. It may, therefore,
be left for later explanations, and the First and Second Races can now only
receive bare notice. Not so for the Third Race -- the Root-Race which separated
into sexes, and which was the first to be endowed with reason. Men evolving
pari passu with the globe, and the latter having "incrustated" more
than a hundred million of years before -- the first human sub-race had already
begun to materialize or solidify, so to say. But, as the Stanza has it:
"the inner man (the conscious Entity) was not." This "Conscious
Entity" Occultism says, comes from, nay, in many cases is, the very entire
essence and esse of the high Intelligences condemned, by the undeviating law of
Karmic evolution, to reincarnate in this manvantara.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* No one of
these orders is distinct from the Pitris or Progenitors, as says Manu (iii.
284). "The wise call our fathers Vasus; our paternal grandfathers, Rudras;
our paternal great grandfathers, Adityas; agreeably to a text of the
Vedas," or "this is an everlasting Vedic text" in another
translation.
** As now
discovered by the late G. Smith in the Babylonian cylinder literature, it was
the same in Chaldean theogony. Ishtar, "eldest of Heaven and of
Earth." Below him the Igaga or Angels of Heaven, and the Anunnaki, or
angels of Earth. Below these again various classes of Spirits and "Genii"
called Sadu, Vadukku, Ekimu, Gallu -- of which some were good, some evil. (See
"Babylonian Mythology.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 249 SCIENTIFIC ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE PURANAS.
(b) This verse
(thirty-ninth) relates exclusively to the racial divisions. Strictly speaking,
esoteric philosophy teaches a modified polygenesis. For, while it assigns to
humanity a oneness of origin, in so far that its forefathers or
"Creators" were all divine beings -- though of different classes or
degrees of perfection in their hierarchy -- men were nevertheless born on seven
different centres of the continent of that period. Though all of one common
origin, yet for reasons given their potentialities and mental capabilities,
outward or physical forms, and future characteristics, were very different.* As
to their complexions, there is a suggestive allegory told in Linga Purana. The
Kumdra -- the Rudra gods, so called (see further), are described as
incarnations of Siva, the destroyer (of outward forms), named also Vamadeva.
The latter, as a Kumara, the "Eternal Celibate," the chaste Virgin
youth, springs from Brahma in each great Manvantara, and "again becomes
four"; a reference to the four great divisions of the human races, as
regards complexion and type -- and three chief variations of these. Thus in the
29th Kalpa -- in this case a reference to the transformation and evolution of
the human form which Siva ever destroys and remodels periodically, down to the
manvantaric great turning point about the middle of the Fourth (Atlantean) Race
-- in the 29th Kalpa, Siva, as Swetalohita, the root Kumara, becomes, from
moon-coloured, white; in his next transformation -- he is red (and in this the
exoteric version differs from the Esoteric teaching); in the third -- yellow;
in the fourth -- black.
Esotericism now
classes these seven variations, with their four great divisions, into only
three distinct primeval races -- as it does not take into consideration the
First Race, which had neither type nor colour, and hardly an objective, though
colossal form. The evolution of these races, their formation and development,
went pari passu and on parallel lines with the evolution, formation, and
development of three geological strata, from which the human complexion was as
much derived as it was determined by the climates of those zones. It names
three great divisions, namely, the RED-YELLOW, the BLACK, and the
BROWN-WHITE.** The Aryan races, for instance, now varying from dark brown,
almost black, red-brown-yellow, down to the whitest creamy colour, are yet all
of one and the same stock -- the Fifth Root-Race -- and spring
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Some superior,
others inferior, to suit the Karma of the various reincarnating Monads which
could not be all of the same degree of purity in their last births in other
worlds. This accounts for the difference of races, the inferiority of the
savage, and other human varieties.
** "There
are," says Topinard (English edition of "Anthropology," with
preface by Professor Broca), "THREE fundamental elements of colour in the
human organism -- namely, the red, the yellow, and the black, which, mixed in
variable quantities with the white of the tissues, give rise to those numerous
shades seen in the human family." Here is science unintentionally
supporting Occultism again.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Atlantis* (See
the Root and Seed Manus further on), and who is said to live even now in his
mankind. (Vide at the end of this Stanza, "THE PRIMEVAL MANUS OF
HUMANITY.") The light yellow is the colour of the first SOLID human race,
which appeared after the middle of the Third Root Race (after its fall into
generation -- as just explained), bringing on the final changes. For, it is
only at that period that the last transformation took place, which brought
forth man as he is now, only on a magnified scale. This Race gave birth to the
Fourth Race; "Siva" gradually transforming that portion of Humanity
which became "black with sin" into red-yellow (the red Indians and
the Mongolians being the descendants of these) and finally into Brown-white
races -- which now, together with the yellow Races, form the great bulk of
Humanity. The allegory in Linga Purana is curious, as showing the great
ethnological knowledge of the ancients.
When reading of
"the last transformation," let the reader consider at this juncture,
if that took place 18,000,000 years ago, how many millions more it must have
required to reach that final stage? And if man, in his gradual consolidation,
developed pari passu with the earth, how many millions of years must have
elapsed during the First, Second, and the first half of the Third Race? For the
Earth was in a comparatively ethereal condition before it reached its last
consolidated state; the archaic teachings, moreover, telling us that, during
the middle period of the Lemuro-Atlantean Race, three and a half Races after
the Genesis of man, the Earth, man, and everything on the Globe was of a still
grosser and more material nature, while such things as corals and some shells
were still in a semi-gelatinous, astral state. The cycles that intervened since
then, have already carried us onward, on the opposite ascending arc, some steps
toward our dematerialization, as the spiritualists would say. The Earth,
ourselves, and all things have softened since then -- aye, even our brains. But
it has been objected by some theosophists that an ethereal Earth even some 15,
or 20,000,000 years ago, does not square with Geology, which teaches us that
winds blew, rains fell, waves broke on the shore, sands shifted and
accumulated,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It must be
remembered that the "last remnants" here spoken of, refer to those
portions of the "great continent" which still remained, and not to
any of the numerous islands which existed contemporaneously with the continent.
Plato's "island" was, for instance, one of such remnants; the others
having sunk at various periods previously. An occult "tradition"
teaches that such submersions occur whenever there is an eclipse of the
"spiritual sun."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 251 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS.
etc., etc.,
that, in short, all natural causes now in operation were then in force,
"in the very earliest ages of geological time, aye, that of the oldest
palaeozoic rocks." To this the following answers are given. Firstly, what
is the date assigned by geology to those "oldest palaezoic rocks"?
And secondly, why could not the winds blow, rain fall, and waves (of carbonic
acid apparently, as science seems to imply) break on the shore, on an Earth semi-astral,
i.e., viscid? The word "astral" does not necessarily mean as thin as
smoke, in occult phraseology, but rather "starry," shining or
pellucid, in various and numerous degrees, from a quite filmy to a viscid
state, as just observed. But it is further objected: How could an astral Earth
have affected the other planets in this system? Would not the whole process get
out of gear now if the attraction of one planet was suddenly removed? The
objection is evidently invalid, since our system is composed of older and younger
planets, some dead (like the moon), others in process of formation, for all
astronomy knows to the contrary. Nor has the latter ever affirmed, so far as we
know, that all the bodies of our system have sprung into existence and
developed simultaneously. The Cis-Himalayan secret teachings differ from those
of India in this respect. Hindu Occultism teaches that the Vaivasvata Manu
Humanity is eighteen million and odd years old. We say, yes; but only so far as
physical, or approximately physical, man is concerned, who dates from the close
of the Third Root-Race. Beyond that period MAN, or his filmy image, may have
existed for 300 million years, for all we know; since we are not taught figures
which are and will remain secret with the Masters of Occult Science, as justly
stated in "Esoteric Buddhism." Moreover, whereas the Hindu Puranas
speak of one Vaivasvata Manu, we affirm that there were several, the name being
a generic one. (Vide supra).
We must now say
a few more words on the physical evolution of man.
-------
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 251 ANSWERS TO OBJECTIONS.
ARCHAIC
TEACHINGS IN THE PURANAS 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 Puranas on
the one hand, and the Jewish Scriptures on the other, are based on the same
scheme of evolution, which, read esoterically and expressed in modern language,
would be found to be quite as scientific as much of what now passes current as
the final word of recent discovery. The only difference between the two schemes
is, that
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 252 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Puranas,
giving as much, and perhaps more attention to the causes than to the effects, allude
to the pre-Cosmic and pre-Genetic periods rather than to those of so-called
Creation, whereas the Bible, saying only a few words of the former period,
plunges forthwith into material genesis, and, while nearly skipping the
pre-Adamic races, proceeds with its allegories concerning the Fifth Race.
Now, whatever
the onslaught made on the Order of creation in Genesis, and its dead letter
account certainly lends itself admirably to criticism,* he who reads the Hindu
Puranas -- its allegorical exaggerations notwithstanding -- will find them
quite in accordance with physical Science.
Even what
appears to be the, on the face of it, perfectly nonsensical allegory of Brahma
assuming the form of a Boar to rescue the Earth from under the waters, finds in
the Secret Commentaries a perfectly scientific explanation, relating as it does
to the many risings and sinkings, and the constant alternation of water and
land from the earliest to the latest geological periods of our globe; for
Science teaches us now that nine-tenths of the stratified formations of the
earth's crust have been gradually constructed beneath water, at the bottom of
the seas. The ancient Aryans are credited with having known nothing whatever of
natural history, geology, and so on. The Jewish race is, on the other hand,
proclaimed even by its severest critic, an uncompromising opponent of the
Bible, (See "Modern Science and Modern Thought," p. 337), to have the
merit of having conceived the idea of monotheism "earlier, and retained it
more firmly, than any of the less philosophical and more immoral religions (!
!) of the ancient world." Only, while we find in Biblical esotericism
physiological sexual mysteries symbolised, and very little
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Mr.
Gladstone's unfortunate attempt to reconcile the Genetic account with science
(see Nineteenth Century, "Dawn of Creation" and the "Proem to
Genesis," 1886) has brought upon him the Jovian thunderbolt hurled by Mr.
Huxley. The dead-letter account warranted no such attempt; and his fourfold
order, or division of animated creation, has turned into the stone which,
instead of killing the fly on the sleeping friend's brow, killed the man
instead. Mr. Gladstone killed Genesis for ever. But this does not prove that
there is no esotericism in the latter. The fact that the Jews and all the
Christians, the modern as well as the early sects, have accepted the narrative
literally for two thousand years, shows only their ignorance; and shows the
great ingenuity and constructive ability of the initiated Rabbis, who have
built the two accounts -- the Elohistic and the Jehovistic -- esoterically, and
have purposely confused the meaning by the vowelless glyphs or word-signs in
the original text. The six days -- yom -- of creation do mean six periods of
evolution, and the seventh that of culmination of perfection (not of rest), and
refer to the seven Rounds and the seven Races with a distinct
"creation" in each; though the use of the words boker, dawn or morning,
and crib, evening twilight -- which have esoterically the same meaning as
sandhya, twilight, in Sanskrit -- have led to a charge of the most crass
ignorance of the order of evolution.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 253 MR. GLADSTONE KILLS GENESIS.
more (something
for which very little real philosophy is requisite), in the Puranas one may
find the most scientific and philosophical "dawn of creation," which,
if impartially analyzed and rendered into plain language from its fairy
tale-like allegories, would show that modern zoology, geology, astronomy, and
nearly all the branches of modern knowledge, have been anticipated in the
ancient Science, and were known to the philosophers in their general features,
if not in such detail as at present!
Puranic
astronomy, with all its deliberate concealment and confusion for the purpose of
leading the profane off the real track, was shown even by Bentley to be a real
science; and those who are versed in the mysteries of Hindu astronomical
treatises, will prove that the modern theories of the progressive condensation
of nebulae, nebulous stars and suns, with the most minute details about the
cyclic progress of asterisms -- far more correct than Europeans have even now
-- for chronological and other purposes, were known in India to perfection.
If we turn to
geology and zoology we find the same. What are all the myths and endless
genealogies of the seven Prajapati, and their sons, the seven Rishis or Manus,
and of their wives, sons and progeny, but a vast detailed account of the
progressive development and evolution of animal creation, one species after the
other? Were the highly philosophical and metaphysical Aryans -- the authors of
the most perfect philosophical systems of transcendental psychology, of Codes
of Ethics, and such a grammar as Panini's, of the Sankhya and Vedanta systems,
and a moral code (Buddhism), proclaimed by Max Muller the most perfect on earth
-- such fools, or children, as to lose their time in writing fairy-tales; such
tales as the Puranas now seem to be in the eyes of those who have not the
remotest idea of their secret meaning? What is the fable, the genealogy and
origin of Kasyapa, with his twelve wives, by whom he had a numerous and
diversified progeny of nagas (serpents), reptiles, birds, and all kinds of
living things, and who was thus the father of all kinds of animals, but a
veiled record of the order of evolution in this round? So far, we do not see
that any Orientalist ever had the remotest conception of the truths concealed
under the allegories and personifications. "The Satapatha Brahmana,"
says one, "gives a not very intelligible account of Kasyapa's origin. . .
. He was the son of Marichi, the Son of Brahma, the father of Vivasvat, the
father of Manu, the progenitor of mankind. . . . Having assumed the form of a
tortoise, Prajapati created offspring. That which he created he made akarot,
hence the word kurma (tortoise). Kasyapa means tortoise; hence men say: 'All
creatures are descendants of Kasyapa,' etc., etc. (Hindu Class. Dict.)
He was all this;
he was also the father of Garuda, the bird, the "King
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas in general, and in the Book of Dzyan -- especially.
The only difference, a grave one, no doubt, -- as implying a spiritual and
divine nature of man independent of his physical body in this illusionary
world, in which the false personality and its cerebral basis alone is known to
orthodox psychology -- is as follows. Having been in all the so-called
"Seven creations," allegorizing the seven evolutionary changes, or
the sub-races, we may call them, of the First Root-race of Mankind -- MAN was
on earth in this Round from the beginning. Having passed through all the
kingdoms of nature in the previous three Rounds,* his physical frame -- one
adapted to the thermal conditions of 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Follow
the law of analogy" -- the Masters teach. Atma-Buddhi is dual and Manas is
triple; inasmuch as the former has two aspects, and the latter three, i.e., as
a principle per se, which gravitates, in its higher aspect, to Atma-Buddhi, and
follows, in its lower nature, Kama, the seat of terrestrial and animal desires
and passions. Now compare the evolution of the Races, the First and the Second
of which are of the nature of Atma-Buddhi, their passive Spiritual progeny, and
the Third Root-Race shows three distinct divisions or aspects physiologically
and psychically; the earliest, sinless; the middle portions awakening to
intelligence; and the third and last decidedly animal: i.e., Manas succumbs to
the temptations of Kama.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 amoeba to man,
received their monads, in which all the higher qualities are potential, all
have to remain dormant till each reaches its human form, before which stage
manas (mind) has no development in them.* In the animals every principle is
paralysed, and in a foetus-like state, save the second (vital) and the third
(the astral), and the rudiments of the fourth (Kama, which is desire, instinct)
whose intensity and development varies and changes with the species. To the
materialist wedded to the Darwinian theory, this will read like a fairy-tale, a
mystification; to the believer in the inner, spiritual man, the statement will
have nothing unnatural in it.
Now the writer
is certain to meet what will be termed insuperable objections. We shall be told
that the line of embryology, the gradual development of every individual life,
and the progress of what is known to take place in the order of progressive
stages of specialization -- that all this is opposed to the idea of man
preceding mammals. Man begins as the humblest and most primitive vermiform
creature, "from the primitive speck of protoplasm and the nucleated cell
in which all life originates," and "is developed through stages
undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile and mammal, until the cell
finally attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous, and
last of all, of the human type." (Laing, 335.)
This is
perfectly scientific, and we have nothing against that; for all this relates to
the shell of man -- his body, which in its growth is subject, of course, like
every other (once called) morphological unit, to such metamorphoses. It is not
those who teach the transformation of the mineral atom through crystallization
-- which is the same function, and bears the same relation to its inorganic
(so-called) upadhi (or basis) as the formation of cells to their organic
nuclei, through plant, insect and animal into man -- it is not they who will
reject this theory, as it will finally lead to the recognition of a Universal
Deity in nature, ever-present and as ever invisible, and unknowable, and of
intra-Cosmic gods, who all were men.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Men are
made complete only during their third, toward the fourth cycle (race). They are
made 'gods' for good and evil, and responsible only when the two arcs meet
(after 31/2 rounds towards the fifth Race). They are made so by the Nirmanakaya
(spiritual or astral remains) of the Rudra-Kumaras, 'cursed to be reborn on
earth again; meaning -- doomed in their natural turn to reincarnation in the
higher ascending arc of the terrestrial cycle.' (Commentary IX.)
** The whole
trouble is this: neither physiologists nor pathologists will recognize that the
cell-germinating substance (the cytoblastema) and the mother-lye from which
crystals originate, are one and the same essence, save in differentiation for
purposes.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
paleontologists from one period to another, the two solitary exceptions to the
general rule are those at the two opposite poles of life and type, namely --
MAN and the lower genera of being!
"Certain
well-marked forms of living beings have existed through enormous epochs,
surviving not only the changes of physical conditions, but persisting
comparatively unaltered, while other forms of life have appeared and
disappeared. Such forms may be termed 'persistent types' of life; and examples
of them are abundant enough in both the animal and the vegetable worlds"
(Huxley, "Proceed. of Roy. Inst.," vol. iii., p. 151).
Nevertheless, we
are not given any good reason why Darwin links together reptiles, birds,
amphibians, fishes, mollusca, etc., etc., as off-shoots of a moneric ancestry.
Nor are we told whether reptiles, for instance, are direct descendants of the
amphibian, the latter of fishes, and fishes of lower forms -- which they
certainly are. For the Monads have passed through all these forms of being up
to man, on every planet, in the Three preceding Rounds; every Round, as well as
every subsequent Globe, from A to G, having been, and still having to be the
arena of the same evolution, only repeated each time on a more solid material
basis. Therefore the question:-- "What relation is there between the Third
Round astral prototypes and ordinary physical development in the course of the
origination of pre-mammalian organic species?" -- is easily answered. One
is the shadowy prototype of the other, the preliminary, hardly defined, and
evanescent sketch on the canvas, of objects, which are destined to receive the
final and vivid
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. . . . . Subkingdoms of animals yield the same instances. The
globigerina of the Atlantic soundings is identical with the cretaceous species
of the same genus . . . the tabulate corals of the Silurian epoch are
wonderfully like the millepores of our own seas. . . . The arachnida, the
highest group of which, the scorpions, is represented in the coal by a genus
differing only from its living congeners only in . . . the eyes," etc.,
etc.; all of which may be closed with Dr. Carpenter's authoritative statement
about the Foraminifera. "There is no evidence," he says, "of any
fundamental modification or advance in the Foraminiferous type from the
palaeozoic period to the present time. . . . The Forminiferous Fauna of our own
series probably present a greater range of variety than existed at any previous
period; but there is no indication of any tendency to elevation towards a higher
type." ("Introduction to the study of the Forminifera," p. xi.)
Now, if there is
no indication of change in the Forminifera, a protozoon of the lowest type of
life, mouthless and eyeless, except its greater variety now than before, man,
who is on the uppermost rung of the ladder of being, indicates still less
change, as we have seen; the skeleton of his Palaeolithic ancestor being even
found
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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;" and
during that enormous lapse of time in the Oolitic period alone, the so-called
"age of reptiles," we find a most extraordinary variety and abundance
of Saurian forms, the Amphibian type reaching its highest developments. We
learn of Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri in the lakes and rivers, and of winged
crocodiles or lizards flying in the air. After which, in the Tertiary period
"we find the Mammalian type exhibiting remarkable divergences from
previously existing forms . . . . Mastodons, Megatheriums, and other unwieldy
denizens of the ancient forests and plains; and subsequently," are
notified of -- "the gradual modification of one of the ramifications of
the Quadrumanous order, into those beings from whom primeval man himself may
claim to have been evolved." ("The Beginnings of Life.")
He may; but no
one, except materialists, can see why he should; as there is not the slightest
necessity for it, nor is such an evolution warranted by facts, for those most
interested in the proofs thereof confess their utter failure to find one single
fact to support their theory. There is no need for the numberless types of life
to represent the members of one progressive series. They are "the products
of various and different evolutional divergences, taking place now in one
direction and now in another." Therefore it is far more justifiable to say
that the monkey evolved into the Quadrumanous order, than that primeval man,
who has remained stationary in his human specialization ever since his fossil
is found in the oldest strata, and of whom no variety is found save in colour
and facial type -- has developed from a common ancestor together with the ape.
That man
originates like other animals in a cell and develops "through stages
undistinguishable from those of fish, reptile, and mammal until the cell
attains the highly specialized development of the quadrumanous and at last the
human type," is an Occult axiom thousands of years old. The Kabalistic
axiom: "A stone becomes a plant; a plant a beast; a beast a man; a man a
God," holds good throughout the ages. Haeckel, in his Shopfungsgeschichte,
shows a double drawing representing two embryos -- that of a dog six weeks old,
and that of a man, eight weeks. The two, except the slight difference in the
head, larger and wider about the brain in the man, are
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Trans.
of Geolog. Soc. of Glasgow," vol. iii. Very strangely, however, he has
just changed his opinion. The sun, he says, is only 15,000,000 old.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 259 IDENTITY OF HUMAN AND ANIMAL EMBRYOS.
undistinguishable.
"In fact, we may say that every human being passes through the stage of
fish and reptile before arriving at that of mammal and finally of man. If we
take him up at the more advanced stage where the embryo has already passed the
reptilian form . . . for a considerable time, the line of development remains
the same as that of other mammalia. The rudimentary limbs are exactly similar,
the five fingers and toes develop in the same way, and the resemblance after
the first four weeks' growth between the embryo of a man and a dog is such that
it is scarcely possible to distinguish them. Even at the age of eight weeks the
embryo man is an animal with a tail hardly to be distinguished from an embryo
puppy" ("Modern Science," etc., p. 171).
Why, then, not
make man and dog evolve from a common ancestor, or from a reptile -- a Naga,
instead of coupling man with the quadrumana? This would be just as logical as
the other, and more so. The shape and the stages of the human embryo have not
changed since historical times, and these metamorphoses were known to
AEsculapius and Hippocrates as well as to Mr. Huxley. Therefore, since the
Kabalists had remarked it since prehistoric times, it is no new discovery. In
"Isis," Vol. I., 389, it is noticed and half explained.
As the embryo of
man has no more of the ape in it than of any other mammal, but contains in
itself the totality of the kingdoms of nature, and since it seems to be "a
persistent type" of life, far more so than even the Foraminifera, it seems
as illogical to make him evolve from the ape as it would be to trace his origin
to the frog or the dog. Both Occult and Eastern philosophies believe in
evolution, which Manu and Kapila* give with far more clearness than any
scientist does at present. No need to repeat that which was fully debated in
Isis Unveiled, as the reader may find all these arguments and the description
of the basis on which all the Eastern doctrines of Evolution rested, in our
earlier books.** But no Occultist can accept the unreasonable proposition that
all the now existing forms, "from the structureless Amoeba to man,"
are the direct lineal descendants of organisms which lived millions and
millions of years before the birth of man, in the pre-Silurian epochs, in the
sea or land-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Hence the
philosophy in the allegory of the 7, 10, and finally 21 Prajapati, Rishis,
Munis, etc., who all are made the fathers of various things and beings. The
order of the seven classes or orders of plants, animals, and even inanimate
things, given at random in the Puranas, is found in several commentaries in the
correct rotation. Thus, Prithu is the father of the Earth. He milks her, and
makes her bear every kind of grain and vegetable, all enumerated and specified.
Kasyapa is the father of all the reptiles, snakes, demons, etc., etc.
** See Vol. I.
152, et seq., about the tree of evolution -- The "Mundane Tree."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 260 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
mud. The
Occultists believe in an inherent law of progressive development.* Mr. Darwin
never did, and says so himself.
On page 145 of
the "Origin of Species" we find him stating that, since there can be
no advantage "to the infusorian animalcule or an intestinal worm . . . to
become highly organized," therefore, "natural selection," not
including necessarily progressive development -- leaves the animalcule and the
worm (the "persistent types") quiet.
There does not appear much uniform law in such
behaviour of Nature; and it looks more like the discriminative action of some
Super-Natural selection; perhaps, that aspect of Karma, which Eastern
Occultists would call the "Law of Retardation," may have something to
do with it.
But there is
every reason to doubt whether Mr. Darwin himself ever gave such an importance
to his law -- as is given to it now by his atheistic followers. The knowledge
of the various living forms in the geological periods that have gone by is very
meagre. The reasons given for this by Dr. Bastian are very suggestive: (1) On
account of the imperfect manner in which the several forms may be represented
in the strata pertaining to the period; (2) on account of the extremely limited
nature of the explorations which have been made in these imperfectly representative
strata; and (3) because so many parts of the record are absolutely inaccessible
to us -- nearly all beneath the Silurian system having been blotted out by
time, whilst those two-thirds of the earth's surface in which the remaining
strata are to be found are now covered over by seas. Hence Mr. Darwin says
himself:--
"For my
part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the geological record as a
history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of
this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three
countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been
preserved, and of each page only here and there a few lines."
It is not on
such meagre data, certainly, that the last word of Science can be said. Nor is
it on any ground of human pride or unreasonable belief in man's representing
even here on earth -- (in our period, perhaps) -- the highest type of life,
that Occultism denies that all the preceding forms of human life belonged to
types lower than our own, for it is not so. But simply because the
"missing link," such as to prove the existing theory undeniably, will
never be found by palaeontologists. Believing as we do that man has evolved
from, and passed through, (during the preceding Rounds) the lowest forms of
every life, vegetable and animal, on earth, there is nothing very degrading in
the idea of having the orangoutang as an ancestor of our physical form. Quite
the reverse; as it
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Checked and
modified, however, by the Law of Retardation, which imposes a restriction on
the advance of all species when a Higher Type makes its appearance.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 261 NATURE IS UNIFORM.
would forward
the Occult doctrine with regard to the final evolution of everything in
terrestrial nature into man, most irresistibly. One may even enquire how it is
that biologists and anthropologists, having once firmly accepted the theory of
the descent of man from the ape -- how it is that they have hitherto left
untouched the future evolution of the existing apes into man? This is only a
logical sequence of the first theory, unless Science would make of man a
privileged being, and his evolution a non-precedent in nature, quite a special
and unique case. And that is what all this leads physical Science to. The
reason, however, why the Occultists reject the Darwinian, and especially the
Haeckelian, hypothesis is because it is the ape which is, in sober truth, a
special and unique instance, not man. The pithecoid is an accidental creation,
a forced growth, the result of an unnatural process.
The occult
doctrine, is, we think, more logical. It teaches a cyclic, never varying law in
nature, the latter having no personal, "special design," but acting
on a uniform plan that prevails through the whole manvantaric period and deals
with the land worm as it deals with man. Neither the one nor the other have
sought to come into being, hence both are under the same evolutionary law, and
both have to progress according to Karmic law. Both have started from the same
neutral centre of Life and both have to re-merge into it at the consummation of
the cycle.
It is not denied
that in the preceding Round man was a gigantic apelike creature; and when we
say "man" we ought perhaps to say, the rough mould that was
developing for the use of man in this Round only -- the middle, or the
transition point of which we have hardly reached. Nor was man what he is now
during the first two and a half Root-races. That point he reached, as said
before, only 18,000,000 years ago, during the secondary period, as we claim.
Till then he
was, according to tradition and Occult teaching, "a god on earth who had
fallen into matter," or generation. This may or may not be accepted, since
the Secret Doctrine does not impose itself as an infallible dogma; and since,
whether its prehistoric records are accepted or rejected, it has nothing to do
with the question of the actual man and his inner nature, the Fall mentioned
above having left no original sin on Humanity. But all this has been
sufficiently dealt with.
Furthermore, we
are taught that the transformations through which man passed on the descending
arc -- which is centrifugal for spirit and centripetal for matter -- and those
he prepares to go through, henceforward, on his ascending path, which will
reverse the direction of the two forces -- viz., matter will become centrifugal
and spirit centripetal -- that all such transformations are next in store for
the anthropoid ape also, all those, at any rate, who have reached the remove
next to man in this
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 263 MILLIONS OF YEARS HENCE.
cataclysm that
puts an end to, or produces a turning point in the latter. In the Sixth
Root-Race the fossils of the Orang, the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee will be
those of extinct quadrumanous mammals; and new forms -- though fewer and ever
wider apart as ages pass on and the close of the Manvantara approaches -- will
develop from the "cast off" types of the human races as they revert
once again to astral, out of the mire of physical, life. There were none before
man, and they will be extinct before the Seventh Race develops. Karma will lead
on the monads of the unprogressed men of our race and lodge them in the newly
evolved human frames of the thus physiologically regenerated baboon. (But see
Part III., Addenda.)
This will take
place, of course, millions of years hence. But the picture of this cyclic
precession of all that lives and breathes now on earth, of each species in its
turn, is a true one, and needs no "special creation" or miraculous
formation of man, beast, and plant ex nihilo.
This is how
Occult Science explains the absence of any link between ape and man, and shows
the former evolving from the latter.
-------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 264 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Puranas, nor
anywhere else. But with simply one of the esoteric keys in hand it becomes an
easy task to identify these departed lands in the numberless "lands of the
gods," Devas and Munis described in the Puranas, in their Varshas, Dwipas,
and zones. Their Sweta-Dwipa, during the early day of Lemuria, stood out like a
giant-peak from the bottom of the sea; the area between Atlas and Madagascar
being occupied by the waters till about the early period of Atlantis (after the
disappearance of Lemuria), when Africa emerged from the bottom of the ocean,
and Atlas was half-sunk.
It is of course
impossible to attempt, within the compass of even several volumes, a
consecutive and detailed account of the evolution and progress of the first
three races -- except so far as to give a general view of it, as will be done
presently. Race the first had no history of its own. Of race the second the
same may be said. We shall have, therefore, to pay careful attention only to
the Lemurians and the Atlanteans before the history of our own race (the Fifth)
can be attempted.
What is known of
other continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the
early races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of materialistic
science is daubed with the contemptuous term "Superstition." The wise
men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato's "winged" and
hermaphrodite races, and his golden age, under the reign of Saturn and the
gods, are quietly brought back by Haeckel to their new place in nature: our divine
races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a
piece of sea slime.
Nevertheless, as
expressed by Faber, "the fictions of ancient poetry . . . . will be found
to comprehend some portion of historical truth." However one-sided the
efforts of the learned author of the "Mysteries of the Kabiri," --
efforts directed throughout his two volumes to constrain the classical myths
and symbols of old paganism, "to bear testimony to the truth of
Scripture," -- time and further research have avenged, partially at least,
that "truth" by showing it unveiled. Thus it is the clever
adaptations of Scripture, on the contrary, which are made to bear evidence to
the great wisdom of archaic paganism. This, notwithstanding the inextricable
confusion into which the truth about the Kabiri -- the most mysterious gods of
antiquity -- was thrown by the wild and contradictory speculations of Bishop
Cumberland, Dr. Shuckford, Cudworth, Vallancey, etc., etc., and finally by
Faber. Nevertheless, all, from first to last, of these scholars had to come to
a certain conclusion framed by the latter. "We have no reason to
think," he writes, "that the idolatry of the Gentile world was of a
merely arbitrary contrivance; on the contrary, it seems to have been built, almost
universally, upon a traditional remembrance of certain real events. These
events I apprehend to be the destruction of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 265 BAILLY AND FABER.
the first (the
fourth in esoteric teachings) Race of mankind by the waters of the
Deluge." (Chap. I. p. 9). To this, Faber adds:--
"I am
persuaded that the tradition of the sinking of the Phlegian isle is the very
same as that of the sinking of the island Atlantis. They both appear to me to
allude to one great event, the sinking of the whole world beneath the waters of
the deluge, or, if we suppose the arch of the earth to have remained in its
original position, the rising of the central water above it. M. Bailly, indeed,
in his work upon the Atlantis of Plato, the object of which is evidently to
depreciate the authority of Scriptural chronology, labours to prove that the
Atlanteans were a very ancient northern nation, long prior to the Hindoos, the
Phoenicians, and the Egyptians." ("A Dissertation on the
Kabiri," p. 284.)
In this Faber is
in agreement with Bailly, who shows himself more learned and intuitional than
those who accept Biblical chronology. Nor is the latter wrong when saying that
the Atlanteans were the same as the Titans and the giants. (See "Lettres
sur l'Atlantide.") Faber adopts the more willingly the opinion of his
French confrere, as Bailly mentions Cosmas Indico-Pleustes, who preserved an
ancient tradition about Noah -- that he "formerly inhabited the island
Atlantis" (ibid). This island, whether it was the "Poseidonis"
mentioned in "Esoteric Buddhism," or the Continent of Atlantis, does
not much matter. The tradition is there, recorded by a Christian.
No Occultist
would ever think of dispossessing Noah of his prerogatives, if he is claimed to
be an Atlantean; for this would simply show that the Israelites repeated the
story of Vaivasvata Manu, Xisuthrus, and so many others, and that they only
changed the name, to do which they had the same right as any other nation or
tribe. What we object to is the literal acceptation of Biblical chronology, as
it is absurd, and in accord with neither geological data nor reason. Moreover,
if Noah was an Atlantean, then he was a Titan, a giant, as Faber shows; and if
a giant, then why is he not shown as such in Genesis?*
Bailly's mistake
was to reject the submersion of Atlantis, and to call the Atlanteans simply a
Northern and post diluvian nation, which, however, as he says, certainly
"flourished before the foundation of the Hindu, the Egyptian, and the
Phoenician empires." In this, had
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is shown
by Faber, again a pious Christian, who says that "the Noetic family also .
. . bore the appellations of Atlanteans and Titans, and the great patriarch
himself was called by way of eminence Atlas and Titan." (Vol. II. p. 285).
And if so, then, according to the Bible, Noah must have been the progeny of the
Sons of God, the fallen angels, agreeably to the same authority, and of the
"daughters of men who were fair," (See Genesis, chap. vi.) And why
not, since his father Lamech slew a man, and was, with all his sons and
daughters (who perished in the Deluge), as bad as the rest of mankind?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Phoenicians came after the Atlanteans, for the
latter belonged to the Fourth, while the Aryans and their Semitic Branch are of
the Fifth Race. Plato, while repeating the story as narrated to Solon by the
priests of Egypt, intentionally confuses (as every Initiate would) the two
continents, and assigns to the small island which sunk last all the events
pertaining to the two enormous continents, the prehistoric and traditional.
Therefore, he describes the first couple, from whom the whole island was
peopled, as being formed of the Earth. In saying so, he means neither Adam and
Eve, nor yet his own Hellenic forefathers. His language is simply allegorical,
and by alluding to "Earth," he means "matter," as the
Atlanteans were really the first purely human and terrestrial race -- those
that preceded it being more divine and ethereal than human and solid.
Yet Plato must
have known, as would any other initiated adept, about the history of the Third
Race after its "Fall," though as one pledged to silence and secrecy
he never showed his knowledge in so many words. Nevertheless, it may become
easier now, after acquainting oneself with even the approximate chronology of
the Eastern nations -- all of which was based upon, and followed the early
Aryan calculations -- to realize the immense periods of time that must have
elapsed since the separation of the sexes, without mentioning the First or even
the Second Root-Races. As these must remain beyond the comprehension of minds
trained in Western thought, it is found useless to speak in detail of the First
and Second, and even of the Third Race in its earliest stage.* One has to begin
with the latter, when it reached its full human period, lest the uninitiated
reader should find himself hopelessly bewildered.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In that
wonderful volume of Donnelly's "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World,"
the author, speaking of the Aryan colonies from Atlantis, and of the arts and
sciences the legacy of our Fourth Race -- bravely announces that "the
roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene age." This
is an enormous allowance for a modern scholar to make; but civilization dates
still further back than the Miocene Atlanteans. "Secondary-period"
man will be discovered, and with him his long forgotten civilization.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 267 THE NATURAL "FALL."
The THIRD RACE
FELL -- and created no longer: it begot its progeny. Being still mindless at
the period of separation it begot, moreover, anomalous offspring, until its
physiological nature had adjusted its instincts in the right direction. Like
the "lords the gods" of the Bible ' the "Sons of Wisdom,"
the Dhyan-Chohans, had warned them to leave alone the fruit forbidden by
Nature: but the warning proved of no value. Men realized the unfitness -- we
must not say sin -- of what they had done, only when too late: after the
angelic monads from higher spheres had incarnated in, and endowed them with
understanding. To that day they had remained simply physical, like the animals
generated from them. For what is the distinction? The doctrine teaches that the
only difference between animate and inanimate objects on earth, between an
animal and a human frame, is that in some the various "fires" are
latent, and in others they are active. The vital fires are in all things and
not an atom is devoid of them. But no animal has the three higher principles
awakened in him; they are simply potential, latent, and thus non-existing. And
so would the animal frames of men be to this day, had they been left as they
came out from the bodies of their Progenitors, whose shadows they were, to
grow, unfolded only by the powers and forces immanent in matter. But as said in
PYMANDER:--
"This is a
Mystery that to this day was sealed and hidden. Nature* being mingled with
Man** brought forth a wondrous miracle; the harmonious commingling of the
essence of the Seven (Pitris, governors) and her own; the Fire and the Spirit
and Nature (the noumenon of matter); which (commingling) forthwith brought
forth seven men of opposite sexes (negative and positive) according to the
essences of the seven governors." (Divine Pymander, Chap. I., Sect. 16.)
Thus saith
Hermes, the thrice great Initiate,*** "the Power of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nature is the
natural body, the shadow of the Progenitors; and --
** MAN is the
"Heavenly man," as already stated.
*** The
"Pymander" of our museums and libraries is an abridgement of one of
the Books of Thoth, by a Platonist of Alexandria. In the Third Century it was
remodelled after old Hebrew and Phoenician MSS. by a Jewish Kabalist, and
called the "Genesis of Enoch." But even its disfigured remnants show
how closely its text agrees with the Archaic Doctrine, as is shown in the
creation of the Seven Creators and seven primitive men. As to Enoch, Thoth or
Hermes, Orpheus and Kadmus, these are all generic names, branches and offshoots
of the seven primordial sages (incarnated Dhyan Chohans or Devas, in illusive,
not mortal bodies) who taught Humanity all it knew, and whose earliest
disciples assumed their master's names. This custom passed from the Fourth to
the Fifth Race. Hence the sameness of the traditions about Hermes (of whom
Egyptologists count five) Enoch, etc., they are all inventors of letters; none
of them dies but still lives, and they are the first Initiators into, and
Founders of the Mysteries. The Genesis of Enoch disappeared only very lately
among the Kabalists. Guillaume [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 universal* (vide foot note infra), it must
have contained a great abstract
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] Postel saw it. It was most certainly in a great measure a
transcript from the books of Hermes, and far anterior to the Books of Moses, as
Eliphas Levi tells his readers.
* Uranos is a
modified Varuna, "the Universal encompasser," the all-embracer, and
one of the oldest of the Vedic deities -- SPACE, the maker of Heaven and Earth,
since both are manifested out of his (or its) seed. It is only later that
Varuna became the chief of the Adityas and a kind of Neptune riding on the
Leviathan -- Makara, now the most sacred and mysterious of the signs of the
Zodiac. Varuna, "without whom no creature can even wink," was
degraded like Uranos, and, like him, he fell into generation, his functions,
"the grandest cosmical functions," as Muir calls them, having been
lowered down from heaven to earth by exoteric anthropomorphism. As the same
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Grece Antique,
p. 7), who, however, renounces the attempt to explain it. Uranos has tried to
oppose an impediment to that development, or natural evolution, by destroying
all his children as soon as born. Uranos, who personifies all the creative
powers of, and in, Chaos (Space, or the unmanifested Deity) is thus made to pay
the penalty; for it is those powers which cause the Pitris to evolve primordial
men from themselves -- as, later on, these men evolve their progeny -- without
any sense or desire for procreation. The work of generation, suspended during a
moment, passes into the hands of Kronos,* time, who unites himself with Rhea
(the earth in esotericism -- matter in general), and thus produces, after
celestial -- terrestrial Titans. The whole of this symbolism relates to the
mysteries of Evolution.
This allegory is
the exoteric version of the esoteric doctrine given in this part of our work.
For in Kronos we see the same story repeated again. As Uranos destroyed his
children from Gaia (one, in the world of manifestation, with Aditi or the Great
Cosmic Deep) by confining them in the bosom of the Earth, Tythea, so Kronos at
this second stage of creation destroyed his children from Rhea -- by devouring
them. This is an allusion to the fruitless efforts of Earth or Nature alone to
create real human men. (See our Stanzas III. -- X., et seq., and also Berosus'
account of primeval creation.) Time swallows its own fruitless work. Then comes
Zeus -- Jupiter, who dethrones his father in his turn.** Jupiter the Titan, is
Prometheus, in one sense,*** and varies from Zeus, the Great
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Orientalist says, "The attributes ascribed
to Varuna (in the Vedas) impart to his character a moral elevation and sanctity
far surpassing that attributed to any other Vedic Deity." But to
understand correctly the reason of his fall, like that of Uranos, one has to
see in every exoteric religion the imperfect and sinful work of man's fancy,
and also to study the mysteries which Varuna is said to have imparted to
Vasishta. Only . . . "his secrets and those of Mitra are not to be
revealed to the foolish."
* Kronos is not
only [[Chronos]], time, but also, as Breal showed in his Hercule et Cacus (p.
57), comes from the root Kar, "to make, to create." Whether Breal and
Decharme, who quotes him, are as right in saying that in the Vedas Kronan is a
creative god, we have our doubts. Breal probably meant Karma, or rather Visva-Karma,
the creative god, the "Omnificent" and the "great Architect of
the world."
** The Titanic
struggle, in theogony at least, is the fight for supremacy between the children
of Uranos and Gaia (or Heaven and Earth in their abstract sense), the Titans,
against the children of Kronos, whose chief is Zeus. It is the everlasting
struggle going on to this day between the spiritual inner man and the man of
flesh, in one sense.
*** Just as the
"Lord God," or Jehovah, is Cain esoterically, and the "tempting
serpent" as well, the male portion of the androgynous Eve, before her
"Fall;" the female portion of Adam Kadmon; the left side or Binah of
the right side Chochmah in the first Sephirothal Triad.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* which present Hesiod calls "a fatal gift," or the first
woman. It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man "for the theft of
divine creative fire." Her apparition on earth is the signal of every kind
of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from
sickness and suffering -- as the same races are made to live under Yima's rule,
in the Mazdean Vendidad.
Two deluges may
also be traced in universal tradition by carefully comparing Hesiod, the Rig
Veda, the Zend-Avesta, etc., while no first man is ever mentioned in any of the
theogonies save the Bible.** Everywhere the man of our race appears after a
cataclysm of water, after which tradition mentions only the several
designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due
time.*** "Gods and mortals have one common origin" says Hesiod (ibid.
v. 108); and Pindar echoes the statement (Nem. VI., 1). Deucalion and Pyrrha,
who escape the Deluge by constructing an ark like Noah's (see Apollod., 1, 7,
2, and Ovid, Metam. I, 260, 899.), ask Jupiter to re-animate the human race
whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian Mythology
(Lithuanian legend, in Grimm, Deutsche Myth. 1, 545), all men were drowned, and
two old people, a man and his wife, alone remained. Then Pram-gimas (the
"master of all") advised them to jump seven times on the rocks of the
earth, and seven new races (couples) were born, from which came the nine
Lithuanian tribes. As well understood by the author of the Mythologie de la
Grece Antique -- the four ages
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
Egyptian legend, translated by M. Maspero (the ex-director of the Bulaq
Museum), called the "two Brothers," the original of Pandora is given.
Noum, the famous heavenly artist, creates a marvellous beauty, a girl which he
sends to Batoo, after which the happiness of the latter is destroyed. Batoo is
man, and the girl Eve, of course. (See Maspero's Egyptian Legends, and also
Decharme's "Mythologie de la Grece Antique.")
** Yima is not
the "first man" in the Vendidad, but only in the theories of the
Orientalists. -- See further on.
*** Boeotia,
then ancient Athens, and Eleusis were submerged.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 AEschylus), or under the walls of Troy.
Thus, the four
races being found mentioned by the oldest Greek poets, though very much
confused anachronistically, our doctrines are once more corroborated by the
classics. But this is all "Mythology" and poetry. What can modern
science have to say to such an euhemerization of old fictions? The verdict is
not difficult to foresee. Therefore an attempt must be made to answer by
anticipation, and prove that fictions and empirical speculations are so much of
the domain of that same science, that none of the men of learning have the
slightest right, with such a heavy beam in their own eye, to point to the speck
in the eye of the Occultist, even if that speck be not a figment of our
opponents' imagination.
---------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The name is
used here in the sense of, and as a synonym of "sorcerers." The
Atlantean races were many, and lasted in their evolution for millions of years:
all were not bad. They became so toward their end, as we (the fifth) are fast
becoming now.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 273 THE GOLDEN AGE.
them, and even
within themselves?* Was not their childhood passed with, nursed and tendered by
those who had given them life and called them forth to intelligent, conscious
life? We are assured it was so, and we believe it. For the evolution of Spirit
into matter could never have been achieved; nor would it have received its
first impulse, had not the bright Spirits sacrificed their own respective
super-ethereal essences to animate the man of clay, by endowing each of his
inner principles with a portion, or rather, a reflection of that essence. The
Dhyanis of the Seven Heavens (the seven planes of Being) are the NOUMENOI of
the actual and the future Elements, just as the Angels of the Seven Powers of
nature - the grosser effects of which are perceived by us in what Science is
pleased to call the "modes of motion" -- the imponderable forces and
what not -- are the still higher noumenoi of still higher Hierarchies.
It was the
"Golden Age" in those days of old, the age when the "gods walked
the earth, and mixed freely with the mortals." Since then, the gods
departed (i.e., became invisible), and later generations ended by worshipping
their kingdoms -- the Elements.
It was the
Atlanteans, the first progeny of semi-divine man after his separation into
sexes -- hence the first-begotten and humanly-born mortals -- who became the
first "Sacrificers" to the god of matter. They stand in the far-away
dim past, in ages more than prehistoric, as the prototype on which the great
symbol of Cain was built,** as the first anthropomorphists who worshipped form
and matter. That worship degenerated very soon into self-worship, thence led to
phallicism, or that which reigns supreme to this day in the symbolisms of every
exoteric religion of ritual, dogma, and form. Adam and Eve became matter, or
furnished the soil, Cain and Abel -- the latter the life-bearing soil, the
former "the tiller of that ground or field."
Thus the first
Atlantean races, born on the Lemurian Continent, separated from their earliest
tribes into the righteous and the unrighteous; into those who worshipped the
one unseen Spirit of Nature, the ray of which man feels within himself -- or
the Pantheists, and those who offered fanatical worship to the Spirits of the
Earth, the dark Cosmic, anthropomorphic Powers, with whom they made alliance.
These were the earliest Gibborim, "the mighty men of renown in those
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The "Gods
of the Elements" are by no means the Elementals. The latter are at best
used by them as vehicles and materials in which to clothe themselves. . . . .
** Cain was the
sacrificer, as shown at first in chap. iv. of Genesis, of "the fruit of
the ground," of which he was first tiller, while Abel "brought of the
firstlings of his flock" to the Lord. Cain is the symbol of the first
male, Abel of the first female humanity, Adam and Eve being the types of the
third race. (See "The Mystery of Cain and Abel.") The
"murdering" is blood-shedding, but not taking life.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 274 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
days" (Gen.
vi.); who become with the Fifth Race the Kabirim: Kabiri with the Egyptians and
the Phoenicians, Titans with the Greeks, and Rakshasas and Daityas with the
Indian races.
Such was the
secret and mysterious origin of all the subsequent and modern religions,
especially of the worship of the later Hebrews for their tribal god. At the
same time this sexual religion was closely allied to, based upon and blended,
so to say, with astronomical phenomena. The Lemurians gravitated toward the
North Pole, or the Heaven of their Progenitors (the Hyperborean Continent); the
Atlanteans, toward the Southern Pole, the pit, cosmically and terrestrially --
whence breathe the hot passions blown into hurricanes by the cosmic Elementals,
whose abode it is. The two poles were denominated, by the ancients, Dragons and
Serpents -- hence good and bad Dragons and Serpents, and also the names given
to the "Sons of God" (Sons of Spirit and Matter): the good and bad
Magicians. This is the origin of this dual and triple nature in man. The legend
of the "Fallen Angels" in its esoteric signification, contains the
key to the manifold contradictions of human character; it points to the secret
of man's self-consciousness; it is the angle-iron on which hinges his entire
life-cycle; -- the history of his evolution and growth.
On a firm grasp
of this doctrine depends the correct understanding of esoteric anthropogenesis.
It gives a clue to the vexed question of the Origin of Evil; and shows how man
himself is the separator of the ONE into various contrasted aspects.
The reader, therefore, will not be surprised
if so considerable space is devoted in each case to an attempt to elucidate
this difficult and obscure subject. A good deal must necessarily be said on its
symbological aspect; because, by so doing, hints are given to the thoughtful
student for his own investigations, and more light can thus be suggested than
it is possible to convey in the technical phrases of a more formal,
philosophical exposition. The "Fallen Angels," so-called, are
Humanity itself. The Demon of Pride, Lust, Rebellion, and Hatred, has never had
any being before the appearance of physical conscious man. It is man who has
begotten, nurtured, and allowed the fiend to develop in his heart; he, again,
who has contaminated the indwelling god in himself, by linking the pure spirit
with the impure demon of matter. And, if the Kabalistic saying, "Demon est
Deus inversus" finds its metaphysical and theoretical corroboration in
dual manifested nature, its practical application is found in Mankind alone.
Thus it has now
become self-evident that postulating as we do (a) the appearance of man before
that of other mammalia, and even before the ages of the huge reptiles; (b)
periodical deluges and glacial periods owing to the karmic disturbance of the
axis; and chiefly (c) the birth of man
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* The divine
man dwelt in the animal, and, therefore, when the physiological separation took
place in the natural course of evolution -- when also "all the animal
creation was untied," and males were attracted to females -- that race
fell: not because they had eaten of the fruit of Knowledge and knew good from
evil, but because they knew no better. Propelled by the sexless creative
instinct, the early sub-races had evolved an intermediate race in which, as
hinted in the Stanzas, the higher Dhyan-Chohans had incarnated.** "When we
have ascertained the extent of the Universe and learnt to know all that there
is in it, we will multiply our race," answer the Sons of Will and Yoga to
their brethren of the same race, who invite them to do as they do. This means
that the great Adepts and Initiated ascetics will "multiply," i.e.,
once more produce Mind-born immaculate Sons -- in the Seventh Root-Race.
It is so stated
in the Puranas; in Adi Parvan (p. 115) and Brahma Purana, etc. In one portion
of the Pushkara Mahatmya, moreover, the separation of the sexes is allegorized
by Daksha, who, seeing that his will-born progeny (the "Sons of passive
Yoga"), will not create men, "converts half himself into a female by
whom he begets daughters," the future females of the Third Race which
begat the giants of Atlantis,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is,
perhaps, with an eye to this degradation of the highest and purest Spirits, who
broke through the intermediate planes of lower consciousness (the "Seven
circles of fire" of Pymander), that St. James is made to say that
"this Wisdom (psuche in the original) descended not from above, but is
earthly, sensual, devilish"; and Psuche is Manas, the "human
soul," the Spiritual Wisdom or Soul being Buddhi. Yet Buddhi per se, being
so near the Absolute, is only latent consciousness.
** This is the
"undying race" as it is called in Esotericism, and exoterically the
fruitless generation of the first progeny of Daksha, who curses Narada, the
divine Rishi, alleged to have dissuaded the Haryaswas and the Sabalaswas, the
sons of Daksha, from procreating their species, by saying "Be born in the
womb; there shall not be a resting place for thee in all these regions";
after this Narada, the representative of that race of fruitless ascetics, is
said, as soon as he dies in one body, to be reborn in another.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 276 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Fourth Race,
so called. In the Vishnu Purana it is simply said that Daksha, the father of
mankind, established sexual intercourse as the means of peopling the world.
Happily for the
human race the "Elect Race" had already become the vehicle of
incarnation of the (intellectually and spiritually) highest Dhyanis before
Humanity had become quite material. When the last sub-races -- save some lowest
-- of the Third Race had perished with the great Lemurian Continent, "the
seeds of the Trinity of Wisdom" had already acquired the secret of
immortality on Earth, that gift which allows the same great personality to step
ad libitum from one worn-out body into another.
(b) The first
war that earth knew, the first human gore shed, was the result of man's eyes
and senses being opened; which made him see that the daughters of his Brethren
were fairer than his own, and their wives also. There were rapes committed
before that of the Sabines, and Menelauses robbed of their Helens before the
Fifth Race was born. Titans or giants were the stronger; their adversaries, the
wiser. This took place during the Fourth Race -- that of the giants.
For "there were
giants" in the days of old, indeed* and the evolutionary series of the
animal world is a warrant that the same thing took place within the human
races. Lower still in the order of creation we find witnesses for the same in
the flora going pari passu with the fauna in respect of size. The pretty ferns
we collect and dry among the leaves of our favourite volumes are the
descendants of the gigantic ferns which grew during the carboniferous period.
Scriptures, and
fragments of philosophical and scientific works -- in short, almost every
record that has come down to us from antiquity -- contain references to giants.
No one can fail to recognize the Atlanteans of the Secret Doctrine in the
Rakshasas of Lanka -- the opponents conquered by Rama. Are these accounts no
better than the production of empty fancy? Let us give the subject a few
moments of attention.
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The traditions
of every country and nation point to this fact. Donnelly quotes from Father
Duran's Historia Antigua de la Nueva Espana of 1885, in which a native of
Cholula, a centenarian, accounts for the building of the great pyramid of
Cholula, by saying as follows: "In the beginning, before the light of the
Sun had been created, this land (Cholula) was in obscurity and darkness . . . .
but immediately after the light of the Sun arose in the East, there appeared
gigantic men . . . . who built the said pyramid, its builders being scattered
after that to all parts of the Earth."
"A great
deal of the Central American history is taken up with the doings of an ancient
race of giants called Quinanes," says the author of "Atlantis"
(p. 204.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 277 THE GIANTS.
ARE GIANTS A
FICTION?
Here, again, we
come into collision with Science. The latter denies, so far, that man has ever
been much larger than the average of the tall and powerful men one meets with
occasionally now. Dr. Henry Gregor denounces such traditions as resting upon
ill-digested facts. Instances of mistaken judgments are brought forward. Thus,
in 1613, in a locality called from time immemorial the "Field of
Giants" in the Lower Dauphine (France, four miles from St. Romans)
enormous bones were found deeply buried in the sandy soil. They were attributed
to human remains, and even to Teutobochus, the Teuton chief slain by Marius.
But Cuvier's later research proved them to be the fossil remains of the
Dinotherium giganteum of the family of tapirs, 18 feet long. Ancient buildings
are pointed to as an evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger
than we are, the entrance doors being of no larger size then than they are now.
The tallest man of antiquity known to us was the Roman Emperor Maximus, we are
told, whose height was only seven and a half feet. Nevertheless, in our modern
day we see every year men taller than this. The Hungarian who exhibited himself
in the London Pavilion was nearly 9 feet high. In America a giant was shown 9
1/2 feet tall; the Montenegrin Danilo was 8 feet 7 inches. In Russia and
Germany one often sees men in the lower classes above 7 feet. And as the
ape-theorists are told by Mr. Darwin that the species of animals which result
from cross breeding "always betray a tendency to revert to the original
type," they ought to apply the same law to men. Had there been no giants
as a rule in ancient days, there would be none now.
All this applies
only to the historic period. And if the skeletons of the prehistoric ages have
failed so far (which is positively denied) to prove undeniably in the opinion
of science the claim here advanced, it is but a question of time. Moreover, as
already stated, human stature is little changed since the last racial cycle.
The Giants of old are all buried under the Oceans, and hundreds of thousands of
years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust and pulverize a
brazen, far more a human skeleton. But whence the testimony of well-known
classical writers, of philosophers and men who, otherwise, never had the
reputation for lying? Let us bear in mind, furthermore, that before the year
1847, when Boucher de Perthes forced it upon the attention of Science, almost
nothing was known of fossil man, for archaeology complacently ignored his
existence. Of Giants who were "in the earth in those days" of old,
the Bible alone had spoken to the wise men of the West, the Zodiac being the
solitary witness called upon to corroborate the statement in the persons of
Atlas or Orion, whose mighty shoulders are said to support the world.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, Liege, etc., etc. . . those skulls which remind all of the
negro type. . . and which by reason of that type might be mistaken for animals,
have all belonged to men of very high stature" . . . ("Histoire de la
Terre," p. 154) The same is repeated by Lartet, an authority, who
attributes a tall stature to those who were submerged in the deluge (not
necessarily "Noah's") and a smaller stature to the races which lived
subsequently.
As for the
evidence furnished by ancient writers, we need not stop at that of Tertullian,
who assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage --
for, before his testimony can be accepted, his own identity* and actual
existence would have to be proven. But we may turn to the scientific journals
of 1858, which spoke of a sarcophagus of giants found that year on the site of
that same city. As to the ancient pagan writers -- we have the evidence of
Philostratus, who speaks of a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as
of another of twelve cubits, seen by himself at Sigeus. This skeleton may
perhaps not have belonged, as believed by Protesilaus, to the giant killed by
Apollo at the siege of Troy; nevertheless, it was that of a giant, as well as
that other one discovered by Messecrates of Stire, at Lemnos -- "horrible
to behold," according to Philostratus (Heroica, p. 35). Is it possible
that prejudice would carry Science so far as to class all these men as either
fools or liars?
Pliny speaks of
a giant in whom he thought he recognised Orion, the son of Ephialtes (Nat.
Hist., vol. VII, ch. xvi.). Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of
Antaeus, the giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs
of Asterius and of Geryon, or Hillus, son of Hercules -- all giants, Titans and
mighty men. Finally the Abbe Pegues (cited in de Mirville's Pneumatologie)
affirms in his curious work on "The Volcanoes of Greece" that
"in the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera, giants with
enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of
which must have necessi-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There are
critics who, finding no evidence about the existence of Tertullian save in the
writings of Eusebius "the veracious," are inclined to doubt it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Abbe Pegues, the author wonders why in Bible and tradition
the Gibborim, (Giants, the mighty ones) the Rephaim, or the spectres
(Phantoms), the Nephilim, or the fallen ones -- (irruentes) -- are shown
"as if identical, though they are all men, since the Bible calls them the
primitive and the mighty ones" -- e.g., Nimrod. The "Doctrine"
explains the secret. These names, which belong by right only to the four
preceding races and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to
the first two Phantom (astral) races; to the fallen one -- the Third; and to
the race of the Atlantean Giants -- the Fourth, after which "men began to
decrease in stature."
Bossuet
(Elevations p. 56) sees the cause of subsequent universal idolatry in the
"original sin." "Ye shall be as gods," says the serpent of
Genesis to Eve, thus laying the first germ of the worship of false divinities.
Hence, he thinks, came idolatry, or the cult and adoration of images, of
anthropomorphized or human figures. But, if it is the latter that idolatry is
made to rest upon, then the two Churches, the Greek and the Latin especially,
are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.* It is only in the Fourth
Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body
worship, in other words to phallicism. Till then, they had been truly gods, as
pure and as divine as their progenitors, and the expression of the allegorical
serpent does not, as sufficiently shown in the preceding pages, refer at all to
the physiological fall of men, but to their acquiring the knowledge of good and
evil, which knowledge comes to them prior to their fall. It must not be
forgotten that it is only after his forced expulsion from Eden that "Adam
knew Eve his wife" (Genesis iv.). It is not, however, by the dead-letter
of the Hebrew Bible that we shall check the tenets of the Secret Doctrine; but
point out, rather, the great similarities between the two in their esoteric
meaning.
It is only after
his defection from the Neo-Platonists, that Clement
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And that,
notwithstanding the formal prohibition at the great Church Council of Elyrus in
A.D. 303, when it was declared that "the form of God, which is immaterial
and invisible, shall not be limited by figure or shape." In 692, the
council of Constantinople had similarly prohibited "to paint or represent
Jesus as a lamb," as also "to bow the knee in praying, as it is the
act of idolatry." But the council of Nicaea (787) brought this idolatry
back, while that of Rome (883) excommunicated John, the Patriarch of
Constantinople, for his showing himself a declared enemy of image worship.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 280 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
of Alexandria
began to translate gigantes by serpentes, explaining that "Serpents and
Giants signify Demons." (Genesis, chapter v.)*
We may be told
that, before we draw parallels between our tenets and those of the Bible, we
have to show better evidence of the existence of the giants of the Fourth Race
than the reference to them found in Genesis. We answer, that the proofs we give
are more satisfactory, at any rate they belong to a more literary and
scientific evidence, than those of Noah's Deluge will ever be. Even the
historical works of China are full of such reminiscences about the Fourth Race.
In Shoo-King (4th part, chap. XXVII, p. 291), anyone can read in the French
translation, "When the Mao-tse" ("that antediluvian and
perverted race," explains the Annotator, "which had retired in the
days of old to the rocky caves, and the descendants of whom are said to be
still found in the neighbourhood of Canton"),**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Treating of
the Chinese Dragon and the literature of China, Mr. Ch. Gould writes in his
"Mythical Monsters" on p. 212:-- "Its mythologies, histories,
religions, popular stories and proverbs, all teem with references to a
mysterious being who has a physical nature and spiritual attributes. Gifted
with an accepted form, which he has the supernatural power of casting off for
the assumption of others, he has the power of influencing the weather,
producing droughts or fertilizing rains at pleasure, of raising tempests and
allaying them. Volumes could be compiled from the scattered legends which
everywhere abound relating to this subject. . . . "
This
"mysterious being" is the mythical Dragon, i.e., the symbol of the
historical, actual Adept, the master and professor of occult sciences of old.
It is stated already elsewhere, that the great "magicians" of the
Fourth and Fifth Races were generally called the "Serpents" and the
"Dragons" after their progenitors. All these belonged to the
hierarchy of the so-called "Fiery Dragons of Wisdom," the Dhyan
Chohans, answering to the Agnishwatta Pitris, the Maruts and Rudras generally,
as the issue of Rudra their father, identified with the god of fire. More is
said in the text. Now Clement, an initiated Neo-Platonist, knew, of course, the
origin of the word "Dragon," and why the initiated Adepts were
so-called, as he knew the secret of Agathodaemon, the Christ, the
seven-vowelled Serpent of the Gnostics. He knew that the dogma of his new faith
required the transformation of all the rivals of Jehovah, the angels supposed
to have rebelled against that Elohim as the Titan-Prometheus rebelled against
Zeus, the usurper of his father's kingdom; and that "Dragon" was the
mystic appellation of the "Sons of Wisdom"; from this knowledge came
his definition, as cruel as it was arbitrary, "Serpents and Giants signify
Demons," i.e., not "Spirits," but Devils, in Church parlance.
** "What
would you say to our affirmation that the Chinese -- I speak of the inland, the
true Chinaman, not of the hybrid mixture between the Fourth and Fifth Races now
occupying the throne, the aborigines who belong in their unallied nationality
wholly to the highest and last branch of the Fourth Race -- reached their
highest civilization when the Fifth had hardly appeared in Asia" (Esoteric
Buddhism, p. 67). And this handful of the inland Chinese are all of a very high
stature. Could the most ancient MSS. in the Lolo language (that of the
aborigines of China) be got at and translated correctly, many a priceless piece
of evidence would be found. But they are as rare as their language is
unintelligible. So far, one or two European archaeologists only have been able
to procure such priceless works.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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!"**
"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 Kumaric
condition from the beginning; and tradition whispers, what the secret teachings
affirm, namely, that these Elect were the germ of a Hierarchy which never died
since that period:--
"The inner
man of the first * * * only changes his body from time to time; he is ever the
same, knowing neither rest nor Nirvana, spurning Devachan and remaining
constantly on Earth for the salvation of mankind. . . . . ." "Out of
the seven virgin-men (Kumara**) four sacrificed themselves for the sins of the
world and the instruction of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Remember the
same statement in the Book of Enoch, as also the ladder seen by Jacob in his
dream. The "two worlds" mean of course the "two planes of
Consciousness and Being." A seer can commune with beings of a higher plane
than the earth, without quitting his arm-chair.
** Vide supra
the Commentary on the Four Races -- and on the "Sons of Will and
Yoga," the immaculate progeny of the Androgynous Third Race.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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." . . . * (Catechism of the inner Schools.)
It is these
sacred "Four" who have been allegorized and symbolized in the
"Linga Purana," which states that Vamadeva (Siva) as Kumara is reborn
in each Kalpa (Race in this instance), as four youths -- four, white; four,
red; four, yellow; and four, dark or brown. Let us remember that Siva is
pre-eminently and chiefly an ascetic, the patron of all Yogis and Adepts, and
the allegory will become quite comprehensible. It is the spirit of Divine
Wisdom and chaste asceticism itself which incarnates 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the Kabala
the pronunciation of the four-lettered ineffable name is "a most secret
arcanum" --- "a secret of secrets."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* and in Hermes, in Puranas and Bible are taken
literally), when read esoterically means simply this:--
Sentences such
as: "In his (Satan's) ambition he raises his hand against the Sanctuary of
the God of Heaven" etc., ought to read: "Prompted by the law of
eternal evolution and Karma, the angel incarnated on earth in man; and as his
Wisdom and Knowledge are still divine, although his body is earthly, he is
(allegorically) accused of divulging the mysteries of Heaven." He combines
and uses the two for purposes of human, instead of super-human, procreation.
Henceforth, "man will beget, not create."** But as, by so doing, he
has to use
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Returning once
more to the most important subject in the archaic Cosmogony, it may be said
that even in the Norse legends, in the Sacred Scrolls of the goddess Saga, we
find Loki, the brother by blood of Odin (as Typhon, Ahriman, and others are
brothers of Osiris and Ormazd), becoming evil only later, when he has mixed too
long with humanity. Like all other fire or light gods -- fire burning and
destroying as well as warming and giving life -- he ended by being accepted in
the destructive sense of "fire." The name Loki, we learn
("Asgard and the Gods," p. 250), has been derived from the old word
"liechan," to enlighten. It has, therefore, the same origin as the Latin
"lux, light." Hence Loki is identical with Lucifer (light-bringer).
This title, given to the Prince of Darkness, is very suggestive and is a
vindication in itself against theological slander. But Loki is still more
closely related to Prometheus, as he is shown chained to a sharp rock, while
Lucifer, identified with Satan, was chained down in hell; a circumstance,
however, which prevented neither of them from acting in all freedom on Earth,
if we accept the theological paradox in its fulness. Loki is a beneficent,
generous and powerful god in the beginning of times, and the principle of good,
not of evil, in early Scandinavian theogony.
** The Greek mythos just alluded to a few
pages back, namely the mutilation of Uranos by his son Kronos in the Greek theogony,
is an allusion to this theft by the Son of the Earth and Heavens of the divine
creative fire. If Uranos, the personification of the celestial Powers, has to
stop creating (he is made impotent by Kronos, the god in time) so, in the
Egyptian Cosmogony it is Thot, the god of Wisdom, who regulates this fight
between Horus and Set, the latter being served by the former as Uranos is by
Kronos (see "Book of the Dead" ch. XVII. V. 26). In the Babylonian
account it is the god Zu, who strips "the father of the gods" of
umsimi -- the ideal creative organ not the crown (!) as G. Smith thought (see
pp. 115 and 116 Chaldean Account). For, in the fragment K. 3454 (British
Museum) it is said very clearly, that Zu having stripped the "venerable
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 mediaeval
Kabalists knew this well, since one of them did not fear to write: "The
Kabala was first taught by God himself to a select Company of Angels who formed
a theosophic school in Paradise. After the FALL the Angels most graciously
communicated this heavenly doctrine to the disobedient child of Earth, to
furnish the protoplasts with the means of returning to their pristine nobility
and felicity" (Quoted by Christian Ginsburg from the Kabala). This shows
how the event -- of the Sons of God, marrying and imparting the divine Secrets
of Heaven to the daughters of men -- allegorically told by Enoch and in the sixth
chapter of Genesis was interpreted by the Christian Kabalists. The whole of
this period may be regarded as the pre-human period, that of divine man, or as
plastic Protestant theology now has it -- the pre-adamite period. But even
Genesis begins its real history (chap. vi.) by the giants of "those
days" and the "Sons of god" marrying and teaching their wives --
the daughters of man.
This period is
the one described in the Puranas; and relating as it does to days lost in
archaic ages, hence pre-historic, how can any anthropologist feel certain
whether the mankind of that period was or was not as he knows it now? The whole
personnel of the Brahmanas and Puranas -- the Rishis, Prajapatis, Manus, their
wives and progeny -- belong to that pre-human period. All these are the Seed of
Humanity, so to speak. It is around these "Sons of God," the
"Mind born" astral children of Brahma, that our physical frames have
grown and developed to what they are now. For, the Puranic histories of all
those men are those of our Monads, in their various and numberless incarnations
on this and other spheres, events perceived by the "Siva eye" of the
ancient Seers, (the "third eye" of our Stanzas) and described
allegorically. Later on, they were disfigured for Sectarian purposes; mutilated,
but still left with a considerable ground-work of truth in them. Nor is the
philosophy less profound in such allegories for being so thickly veiled by the
overgrowth of fancy.
But with the
Fourth Race we reach the purely human period. Those who were hitherto
semi-divine Beings, self-imprisoned in bodies which were human only in
appearance, became physiologically changed and took unto themselves wives who
were entirely human and fair to look
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of Heaven" of his desire, he carried away
the umsimi of the gods, and burnt thereby the teroti (the power) of all the
other gods, thus "governing the seed of all the angels" (15). As the
umsimi was on the seat of Bel, it could hardly be the "crown." A
fourth version is in the Bible. Ham is the Chaldean Zu, and both are cursed for
the same allegorically described crime.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 285 THE TIBETAN LILITH.
at, but in whom
lower, more material, though sidereal, beings had incarnated. These beings in
female forms (Lilith is the prototype of these in the Jewish traditions) are called
in the esoteric accounts "Khado" (Dakini, in Sanskrit). Allegorical
legends call the chief of these Liliths, Sangye Khado, (Buddha Dakini, in
Sanskrit); all are credited with the art of "walking in the air," and
the greatest kindness to mortals; but no mind -- only animal instinct.*
(c) This is the
beginning of a worship which, ages later, was doomed to degenerate into
phallicism and sexual worship. It began by the worship of the human body --
that "miracle of miracles," as an English author calls it -- and
ended by that of its respective sexes. The worshippers were giants in stature;
but they were giants in knowledge and learning, though it came to them more
easily than it does to the men of our modern times. Their Science was innate in
them. The Lemuro-Atlantean had no need of discovering and fixing in his memory
that which his informing PRINCIPLE knew at the moment of its incarnation. Time
alone, and the ever-growing obtuseness of the matter in which the Principles
had 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These are the
beings whose legendary existence has served as a ground-work upon which to
build the rabbinical Lilith, and what the believers in the Bible would term the
antediluvian women, and the Kabalists the pre-Adamite races. They are no
fiction -- this is certain, however fantastic the exuberance of later growth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 287 THE RACES OF MEN NOT ALL HUMAN.
regard the
Veddhas of their jungles as speaking animals and no more, some British people
believe firmly, in their arrogance, that every other human family -- especially
the dark Indians -- is an inferior race. Moreover there are naturalists who
have sincerely considered the problem whether some savage tribes -- like the
Bushmen for instance -- can be regarded as men at all. The Commentary says, in
describing that species (or race) of animals "fair to look at" as a
biped:-- "Having human shape, but having the lower extremities, from the
waist down, covered with hair." Hence the race of the satyrs, perhaps.
If men existed
two million years ago, they must have been -- just as the animals were -- quite
different physically and anatomically from what they have become; and they were
nearer then to the type of pure mammalian animal than they are now. Anyhow, we
learn that the animal world breeds strictly inter se, i.e., in accordance with
genus and species -- only since the appearance on this earth of the Atlantean
race. As demonstrated by the author of that able work, "Modern Science and
Modern Thought," this idea of the refusal to breed with another species,
or that sterility is the only result of such breeding, "appears to be a
prima facie deduction rather than an absolute law" even now. He shows that
"different species, do, in fact, often breed together, as may be seen in
the familiar instance of the horse and ass. It is true that in this case the
mule is sterile. . . . but this rule is not universal, and recently one new
hybrid race, that of the leporine, or hare-rabbit, has been created which is
perfectly fertile." The progeny of wolf and dog is also instanced, as that
of several other domestic animals (p. 101); "like foxes and dogs again,
and the modern Swiss cattle shown by Rutimeyer as descended from three distinct
species of fossil-oxen, the Bos primigenius, Bos longifrons and Bos
frontosus." Yet some of those species, as the ape family, which so clearly
resembles man in physical structure, contain, we are told, "numerous
branches, which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ
more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series" -- the
gorilla and chimpanzee, for instance (see Addenda).
Thus Mr.
Darwin's remark -- or shall we say the remark of Linnaeus? -- natura non facit
saltum, is not only corroborated by Esoteric Science but would -- were there
any chance of the real doctrine being accepted by any others than its direct
votaries -- reconcile in more than one way, if not entirely, the modern
Evolution theory with facts, as also with the absolute failure of the
Anthropologists to meet with the "missing link" in our Fourth Round
geological formations.
We will show
elsewhere that, however unconsciously to itself, modern Science pleads our case
upon its own admissions, and that de Quatrefages is perfectly right, when he
suggests in his last work, that it is far more likely that the anthropoid ape
should be discovered to be
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Rakshasas (giant-demons) and Daityas
(Titans) of the "White Dwipa" (continent) spoiled his (the dumb
man's) Sires." (Commentary.)
Furthermore, as
we see, there are anthropologists who have traced man back to an epoch which
goes far to break down the apparent barrier that exists between the
chronologies of modern science and the Archaic Doctrine. It is true that English
scientists generally have declined to commit themselves to the sanction of the
hypothesis of even a Tertiary Man. They, each and all, measure the antiquity of
Homo primigenius by their own lights and prejudices. Huxley, indeed, ventures
to speculate on a possible Pliocene or Miocene Man. Prof. Seeman and Mr. Grant
Allen have relegated his advent to the Eocene, but, speaking generally, English
scientists consider that we cannot safely go beyond the quaternary.
Unfortunately, the facts do not accommodate the too cautious reserve of these
latter. The French school of anthropology, basing their views on the
discoveries of l'Abbe Bourgeois, Capellini, and others, has accepted, almost
without exception, the doctrine that the traces of our ancestors are certainly
to be found in the Miocene, while M. de Quatrefages now inclines to postulate a
Secondary-Age Man. Further on we shall compare such estimates with the figures
given in the Brahminical exoteric books which approximate to the esoteric
teaching.
(d) . . . .
Then, "the third eye acted no longer," says the Stanza, because MAN
had sunk too deep into the mire of matter.
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.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 289 THE "THIRD EYE."
THE RACES WITH
THE "THIRD EYE."
The subject is
so unusual, the paths pursued so intricate, so full of dangerous pitfalls
prepared by adverse theories and criticism, that good reasons have to be given
for every step taken. While turning the light of the bull's eye called
esotericism on almost every inch of the occult grounds travelled over, we have
also to use its lens to throw into stronger objectivity the regions explored by
exact science; this, not only in order to contrast the two, but to defend our
position.*
It may be
complained by some that too little is said of the physical, human side of the
extinct races, in this history of their growth and evolution. Much more might
be said assuredly, if simple prudence did not make us hesitate at the threshold
of every new revelation. That, which finds its possibility and landmarks in the
discoveries of modern science, is given; all that of which exact knowledge
knows nothing and upon which it is unable to speculate -- and therefore denies
as facts in nature -- is withheld.
But even such
statements as these -- e.g., that of all the mammalians, man was the earliest;
that it is man who is the indirect ancestor of the Ape; and that he was a kind
of a Cyclops in days of old -- will all be contested, yet, scientists will
never be able to prove -- except to their own satisfaction -- that it was not
so. Nor can they admit that the first two races of men were too ethereal and
phantom-like in their constitution, organism, and shape, even to be called
physical men. For, if they do, it will be found that this is one of the reasons
why their relics can never be expected to be exhumed among other fossils.
Nevertheless all this is maintained. Man was the store-house, so to speak, of
all the seeds of life
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For
suggestiveness, we would recommend a short article in the Theosophist of
August, 1887, "Esoteric Studies." Its author expounds therein quite
an occult theory, though to the world a new idea: "the progress of the
Monad concurring with the retrogression of Form" (666), i.e., "with
decrease of the vis formativa." He says, "Who knows what shape
vehicled the Ego in remote rings (Rounds, or races?) . . . ? May not man's type
have been that of the Simiadae in its variety? Might not the monkey-kingdom of
Ramayana fame rest on some far-off tradition relating to a period when that was
the common lot, or rather aspect, of man?" . . . and winds up a very
clever, though too short, exposition of his theory by saying that which every
true occultist will endorse: "With physico-ethereal man there must be
involution of sex. As physico-astral man depended on entities of the sub-human
class (evolved from animal prototypes) for rebirth, so will physico-ethereal
man find among the graceful, shapely orders issuing from the air-plane, one or
more which will be developed for his successive embodiments when procreated
forms are given -- a process which will include all mankind only very
gradually. The (pre?) Adamic and post-Adamic races were giants; their ethereal
counterparts may possibly be liliputians -- beauteous, luminous, diaphanous --
but will assuredly be giants in mind" (p. 671, art. by Visconde de
Figaniere, F.T.S.).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 290 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
for this Round,
vegetable and animal alike.* As En-Soph is "One, notwithstanding the
innumerable forms which are in him" (Zohar," i. 2la), so is man, on
Earth the microcosm of the macrocosm. "As soon as man appeared, everything
was complete. . . . for everything is comprised in man. He unites in himself
all forms (Ibid., iii. 48a)." "The mystery of the earthly man is
after the mystery of the Heavenly Man" (ii. 76a). The human form -- so
called, because it is the vehicle (under whatever shape) of the divine man --
is, as so intuitionally remarked by the author of "Esoteric
Studies,"** the new type, at the beginning of every Round, "as man
never can be, so he never has been, manifested in a shape belonging to the
animal kingdom in esse." The author proceeds, "he never formed part
of that kingdom. Derived, only derived, from the most finished class of the
latter, a new human form must always have been the new type of the cycle. The
human shape, in one ring (?), as I imagine, becomes cast-off clothes in the
next; it is then appropriated by the highest order in the servant-kingdom
below."
If the idea is
what we understand it to mean -- for the "rings" spoken of throw some
confusion upon it -- then it is the correct esoteric teaching. Having appeared
at the very beginning, and at the head of sentient and conscious life, man (the
astral, or the "Soul," for the Zohar, repeating the archaic teaching,
distinctly says that "the real man is the Soul, and his material frame no
part of him") -- man became the living and animal UNIT, from which the
"cast-off clothes" determined the shape of every life and animal in
this Round.***
Thus, he
"created" for ages the insects, reptiles, birds, and animals, unconsciously
to himself, from his remains and relics from the Third and the Fourth Rounds.
The same idea and teaching are as distinctly given in the Vendidad of the
Mazdeans, as they are in the Chaldean and the Mosaic allegory of the Ark, all
of which are the many national versions of the original legend given in the
Hindu Scriptures. It is found in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu and his Ark
with the Seven Rishis, as in that of the Rishis, each of whom is shown the
father and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It may be
objected that this is a contradiction. That, as the first Root-Race appeared
300,000,000 years after the vegetation had evolved, the seed of vegetable life
could not be in the First Race. We say it could; for up to man's appearance in
this Round, the vegetation was of quite another kind than it is now, and quite
ethereal, this for the simple reason that no grass or plants could have been
physical, before there were animal or other organisms to breathe out the
carbonic acid which vegetation has to imbibe for its development, its nutrition
and growth. They are inter-dependent in their physical and achieved forms.
**
"Visconde de Figaniere, F.T.S." (The Theosophist, Aug. 1887, page
676.)
*** It is stated
in the Zohar that the "primordial worlds" (sparks) could not continue
because man was not as yet. "The human form contains everything; and as it
did not as yet exist, the worlds were destroyed."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 291 MAZDEAN SYMBOLISM.
progenitor of
specified animals, reptiles, and even monsters (See Vishnu and other Puranas). Open
the Mazdean Vendidad, at Fargard ii., at verse 27 (73) and read the command of
Ormazd to Yima, a Spirit of the Earth, who symbolizes the three races, after
telling him to build a vara ("an enclosure," an argua or vehicle) . .
. .
"Thither
(into the vara) thou shalt bring the seeds of men and women, of the greatest,
best, and finest kinds on this earth; thither thou shalt bring the seeds of
every kind of cattle," etc., etc.; and v. 28 (74) . . . ."all those
seeds shalt thou bring, two of every kind, to be kept inexhaustible there, so
long as those men shall stay in the vara." Those "men" in the
"Vara" are the "Progenitors," the heavenly men or Dhyani,
the future Egos who are commissioned to inform mankind. For "Vara,"
or the "Ark" (or again the Vehicle) simply means MAN.* Verse 30 says:
. . . . "thou shalt seal up the vara (after filling it up with the seeds),
and thou shalt make a door and a window self-shining within," which is the
Soul. And when Yima inquires of Ahura Mazda how he shall manage to make that
vara, he is answered: "Crush the earth . . . and knead it with thy hands,
as the potter does when kneading the potter's clay" (31).
The Egyptian
ram-headed god makes man of clay on a potter's wheel, and so in Genesis do the
Elohim fashion him out of the same material.
When the
"Maker of the material world" (Ahura Mazda) is asked, furthermore,
what is to give light "to the Vara which Yima made," he is told that
"There are uncreated lights and created lights" and that
"there" (in Airyana Vaego, where Vara is built), "the stars, the
moon, and the Sun are only once (a year) seen to rise and set" and a year
seems only as a day (and night) a clear reference to the "land of the
Gods" or the (now) polar regions. Moreover another hint is contained in
this verse: a distinct allusion to the "uncreated lights" which
enlighten man within -- his principles. Otherwise, no sense or reason could be
found in Ahura Mazda's answer (V. 40), which is forthwith followed by Verse 41
saying that "Every fortieth year, to every couple (hermaphrodite) two are
born, a male and female,"** the latter being a distinct echo of the Secret
Doctrine, of a Stanza which says --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is the
meaning when the allegory and symbol are opened and read by means of the human
key, or the key to terrestrial anthroposophy. This interpretation of the
"ark" symbolism does not in the least interfere with its
astronomical, or even theogonic keys; nor with any of the other six meanings. Nor
does it seem less scientific than the modern theories about the origin of man.
As said, it has seven keys to it, like the rest.
** Vendidad
Sadah, See also Bund. XV.; and J. Darmesteter's translation of the Vendidad.
"Sacred Books of the East."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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" it is said of the
tree, which is the tree of knowledge of good and evil: "In its branches
(of the tree) the birds lodge and build their nests," or the Souls and the
Angels have their place!.* Therefore, with the Kabalists it was a like symbol. "Bird"
was a Chaldean, and has become a Hebrew synonym and symbol for Angel, a Soul, a
Spirit, or Deva; and the "Bird's Nest" was with both Heaven, and is
God's bosom in the Zohar. The perfect Messiah enters Eden "into that place
which is called the Bird's Nest" (Zohar, ii., 8b).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
"Kabbalah Unveiled" by S. McGregor Mathers, p. 104.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 293 ANGELS CALLED BIRDS.
"Like a
bird that is flying from its nest, and that is the Soul from which the
Shekeenah (divine wisdom or grace) does not move away" (Zohar, iii., 278a;
Myer's Qabbalah, 217). "The Nest of the eternal Bird, the flutter of whose
wings produces life, is boundless space," says the Commentary, meaning
Hansa, the bird of Wisdom.
It is Adam
Kadmon who is the (Sephirothal) tree, and it is he who becomes the "Tree
of knowledge of good and evil" esoterically. And that "tree hath
around it seven columns (seven pillars) of the world, or Rectores"; the
same "Progenitors" or "Sephiroth" again "operating
through the respective orders of Angels in the spheres of the seven planets,"
etc., one of which orders begets giants (Nephilim) on Earth.
It was the
belief of entire antiquity, Pagan and Christian, that the earliest mankind was
a race of giants. Certain excavations in America in mounds and in caves, have
already yielded in isolated cases groups of skeletons of nine and twelve feet
high.* These belong to tribes of the early Fifth Race, now degenerated to an
average size of between five and six feet. But we can easily believe that the
Titans and Cyclopes of old really belonged to the Fourth (Atlantean) Race, and that
all the subsequent legends and allegories found in the Hindu Puranas and the
Greek Hesiod and Homer, were based on the hazy reminiscences of real Titans --
men of a superhuman tremendous physical power, which enabled them to defend
themselves, and hold at bay the gigantic monsters of the Mesozoic and early
Cenozoic times -- and of actual Cyclopes -- three-eyed mortals.
It has been
often remarked by observant writers, that the "origin of nearly every
popular myth and legend could be traced invariably to a fact in Nature."
In these
fantastic creations of an exuberant subjectivism, there is always an element of
the objective and real. The imagination of the masses, disorderly and
ill-regulated as it may be, could never have conceived and fabricated ex nihilo
so many monstrous figures, such a wealth of extraordinary tales, had it not
had, to serve it as a central nucleus, those floating reminiscences, obscure
and vague, which unite the broken links of the chain of time to form with them
the mysterious, dream foundation of our collective consciousness.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Darwinian
Evolutionists who are so wont to refer to the evidence of reversion to type --
the full meaning of which, in the case of human monsters, is embraced in the
esoteric solution of the embryological problem -- as proof of their arguments,
would do well to inquire into those instances of modern giants who are often 8,
9, and even 11 feet high. Such reversions are imperfect, yet undeniable
reproductions of the original towering man of primeval times.
** See
"Mythical Monsters," by Ch. Gould, from whose interesting and
scientific volume a few passages are quoted further on. See in Mr. Sinnett's
"Occult World," the description of a cavern in the Himalayas filled
with relics of human and animal giant bones.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* A KALPA later (after the separation of the sexes) men having
fallen into matter, their spiritual vision became dim; and coordinately the
third eye commenced to lose its power. . . . When the Fourth (Race) arrived at
its middle age, the inner vision had to be awakened, and acquired by artificial
stimuli, the process of which was known to the old sages.** . . . The third
eye, likewise, getting gradually PETRIFIED,*** soon disappeared. The
double-faced became the one-faced, and the eye was drawn deep into the head and
is now buried under the hair. During the activity of the inner man (during
trances and spiritual visions) the eye swells and expands. The Arhat sees and
feels it, and regulates his action accordingly. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Viz., the
third eye was at the back of the head. The statement that the latest
hermaphrodite humanity was "four-armed," unriddles probably the
mystery of all the representations and idols of the exoteric gods of India. On
the Acropolis of Argos, there was a [[Zoanon]], a rudely carved wooden statue
(attributed to Daedalus), representing a three-eyed colossus, which was
consecrated to Zeus Triopas (three-eyed). The head of the "god" has
two eyes in its face and one above on the top of the forehead. It is considered
the most archaic of all the ancient statues (Schol. Vatic. ad Eurip. Troad.
14).
** The Inner
sight could henceforth be acquired only through training and initiation, save
in the cases of "natural and born magicians," sensitives and mediums,
as they are called now.
*** This
expression "petrified" instead of "ossified" is curious.
The "back eye," which is of course the pineal gland, now so-called,
the small pea-like mass of grey nervous matter attached to the back of the
third ventricle of the brain, is said to almost invariably contain mineral
concretions and sand, and "nothing more." (Vide Infra.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Haeckelian view that the vertebrate eye originated by changes in the epidermis?
If it started inside, the theory goes into the waste-basket. This seems to be
proved by embryology. Moreover, Professor Lankester's extraordinary suggestion
-- or shall we say admission? -- is rendered perhaps necessary by evolutionist
necessities. Occultism with its teaching as to the gradual development of
senses "FROM WITHIN WITHOUT," from astral prototypes, is far more
satisfactory: The third eye retreated inwards when its course was run --
another point in favour of Occultism.
The allegorical
expression of the Hindu mystics when speaking of the "eye of Siva,"
the Tri-bochana ("three-eyed"), thus receives its justification and
raison d'etre -- the transference of the pineal gland (once that "third
eye") to the forehead, being an exoteric licence. This throws also a light
on the mystery -- incomprehensible to some -- of the connection between abnormal,
or Spiritual Seership, and the physiological purity of the Seer. The question
is often asked, "Why should celibacy and chastity be a sine qua non rule
and condition of regular chelaship, or the development of psychic and occult
powers" The answer is contained in the Commentary. When we learn that the
"third eye" was once a physiological organ, and that later on, owing
to the gradual
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 vertebrata -- have a third eye, now atrophied,
but necessarily active in its origin.* The Hatteria species, a lizard of the
order Lacertilia, recently discovered in New Zealand (a part of ancient Lemuria
so called, mark well), presents this peculiarity in a most extraordinary
manner; and not only the Hatteria punctata, but the chameleon, certain
reptiles, and even fishes. It was thought, at first, that it was no more than
the prolongation of the brain ending with a small protuberance, called
epiphysis, a little bone separated from the main bone by a cartilage, and found
in every animal. But it was soon found to be more than this. It offered -- as
its development and anatomical structure showed -- such an analogy with that of
the eye, that it was found impossible to see in it any-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Deeply
placed within the head, covered by thick skin and muscles, true eyes that
cannot see are found in certain animals," also, says Haeckel:
"Vertebrate . . . blind moles and field mice, blind snakes and lizards. . .
. They shun daylight . . . dwelling under the ground. They were not originally
blind but have evolved from ancestors that lived in the light and had
well-developed eyes. The atrophied eye beneath the opaque skin may be found in
these blind beings in every stage of reversion." ("Sense
Organs," Haeckel.) And if two eyes could become so atrophied in lower
animals, why not one eye -- the pineal gland -- in man, who is but a higher
animal in his physical aspect?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 297 THE CYCLOPS, NO MYTH.
thing else.
There were and are paleontologists who feel convinced to this day that this
"third eye" has functioned in its origin, and they are certainly
right. For this is what is said of the pineal gland in Quain's Anatomy (Vol.
II. ninth edit., pp. 830-851. "Thalamencephalon" Interbrain):--
"It is from
this part, constituting at first the whole and subsequently the hinder part of
the anterior primary encephalic vesicle, that the optic vesicles are developed
in the earliest period, and the fore part is that in connection with which the
cerebral hemispheres and accompanying parts are formed. The thalamus opticus of
each side is formed by a lateral thickening of the medullary wall, while the
interval between, descending towards the base, constitutes the cavity of the
third ventricle with its prolongation in the infundibulum. The grey commissure
afterwards stretches across the ventricular cavity. . . . . The hinder part of
the roof is developed by a peculiar process, to be noticed later, into the
pineal gland, which remains united on each side by its pedicles to the
thalamus, and behind these a transverse band is formed as posterior commissure.
"The lamina
terminalis (lamina cinerea) continues to close the third ventricle in front,
below it the optic commissure forms the floor of the ventricle, and further
back the infundibulum descends to be united in the sella turcica with the tissue
adjoining the posterior lobe of the pituitary body.
"The two
optic thalami formed from the posterior and outer part of the anterior vesicle,
consist at first of a single hollow sac of nervous matter, the cavity of which
communicates on each side in front with that of the commencing cerebral
hemispheres, and behind with that of the middle cephalic vesicle (corpora
quadrigemina). Soon, however, by increased deposit taking place in their
interior, behind, below, and at the sides, the thalami become solid, and at the
same time a cleft or fissure appears between them above, and penetrates down to
the internal cavity, which continues open at the back part opposite the
entrance of the Sylvian aqueduct. This cleft or fissure is the third ventricle.
Behind, the two thalami continue united by the posterior commissure, which is
distinguishable about the end of the third month, and also by the peduncles of
the pineal gland. . . . .
"At an
early period the optic tracts may be recognised as hollow prolongations from the
outer part of the wall of the thalami while they are still vesicular. At the
fourth month these tracts are distinctly formed. They subsequently are
prolonged backwards into connection with the corpora quadrigemina.
"The
formation of the pineal gland and pituitary body presents some of the most
interesting phenomena which are connected with the development of the
Thalamencephalon."
The above is
specially interesting when it is remembered that, were it not for the development
of the hinder part of the cerebral hemispheres backwards, the pineal gland
would be perfectly visible on the removal of the parietal bones. It is very
interesting also to note the obvious connection to be traced between the
(originally) hollow optic tracts and the eyes anteriorly, the pineal gland and
its peduncles behind, and all
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Spirits* which cross the cavities of the skull in every sense."
Unscientific as
this may appear in our day of exact learning, Descartes was yet far nearer the
occult truth than is any Haeckel. For the pineal gland, as shown, is far more
connected with Soul and Spirit than with the physiological senses of man. Had
the leading Scientists a glimmer of the real processes employed by the
Evolutionary Impulse, and the winding cyclic course of this great law, they
would know instead of conjecturing; and feel as certain of the future physical
transformations of the human kind by the knowledge of its past forms. Then,
would they see the fallacy and all the absurdity of their modern
"blind-force" and mechanical processes of nature; realizing, in
consequence of such knowledge, that the said pineal gland, for instance, could
not but be disabled for physical use at this stage of our cycle. If the odd "eye"
in man is now atrophied, it is a proof that, as in the lower animal, it has
once been active; for nature never creates the smallest, the most insignificant
form without some definite purpose and use. It was an active organ, we say, at
that stage of evolution when the spiritual element in man reigned supreme over
the hardly nascent intellectual and psychic elements. And, as the cycle ran
down toward that point when the physiological senses were developed by, and
went pari passu with, the growth and consolidation of the physical man, the
interminable and complex vicissitudes and tribulations of zoological
development, that median "eye" ended by atrophying along with the
early spiritual and purely psychic characteristics in man. The eye is the
mirror and also the window of the soul, says popular wisdom,** and Vox populi
Vox Dei.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"Nervous Ether" of Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S. -- the nerve-aura of
occultism. The "animal spirits" (?) are equivalent to the currents of
nerve-auric compound circulation.
** Let us
remember that the First Race is shown in Occult sciences as spiritual within
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 299 THE EVOLUTION OF THE EYE.
In the
beginning, every class and family of living species was hermaphrodite and
objectively one-eyed. In the animal, whose form was as ethereal (astrally) as
that of man, before the bodies of both began to evolve their coats of skin,
viz., to evolve from within without the thick coating of physical substance or
matter with its internal physiological mechanism -- the third eye was
primarily, as in man, the only seeing organ. The two physical front eyes
developed* later on in both brute and man, whose organ of physical sight was,
at the commencement of the Third Race, in the same position as that of some of
the blind vertebrata, in our day, i.e., beneath an opaque skin.** Only the
stages of the odd, or primeval eye, in man and brute, are now inverted, as the
former has already passed that animal non-rational stage in the Third Round,
and is ahead of mere brute creation by a whole plane of consciousness. Therefore,
while the "Cyclopean" eye was, and still is, in man the organ of
spiritual sight, in the animal it was that of objective vision. And this eye,
having performed its function, was replaced, in the course of physical
evolution from the simple to the complex, by two eyes, and thus was stored and
laid aside by nature for further use in AEons to come.
This explains
why the pineal gland reached its highest development proportionately with the
lowest physical development. It is the vertebrata in which it is the most
prominent and objective, and in man it is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] and ethereal without; the second,
psycho-spiritual mentally, and ethero-physical bodily; the third, still bereft
of intellect in its beginning, is astro-physical in its body, and lives an
inner life, in which the psycho-spiritual element is in no way interfered with
as yet by the hardly nascent physiological senses. Its two front eyes look
before them without seeing either past or future. But the "third eye"
"embraces ETERNITY."
* But in a very
different manner to that pictured by Haeckel as an "evolution by natural
selection in the struggle for existence" ("Pedigree of Man."
"Sense Organs," p. 335). The mere "thermal sensibility of the
skin," to hypothetical light-waves, is absurdly incompetent to account for
the beautiful combination of adaptations present in the eye. It has, moreover,
been previously shown that "natural Selection" is a pure myth when
credited with the origination of variations (vide infra, Part III., on
Darwinian mechanical causation); as the "survival of the fittest" can
only take place after useful variations have sprung up, together with improved
organisms. Whence came the "useful variations," which developed the
eye? Only from "blind forces . . . without aim, without design?" The
argument is puerile. The true solution of the mystery is to be found in the
impersonal Divine Wisdom, in its IDEATION -- reflected through matter.
** Palaeontology
has ascertained that in the animals of the Cenozoic age -- the Saurians
especially, such as the antediluvian Labyrinthodon, whose fossil skull exhibits
a perforation otherwise inexplicable -- the third, or odd eye must have been
much developed. Several naturalists, among others E. Korscheldt, feel convinced
that whereas, notwithstanding the opaque skin covering it, such an eye in the
reptiles of the present period can only distinguish light from darkness (as the
human eyes do when bound with a handkerchief, or even tightly closed), in the
now extinct animals that eye functioned and was a real organ of vision.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,
EVOLUTION OF
ROOT RACES IN THE FOURTH ROUND
[[diagram]]
DOWNWARD CYCLE.
Evolution of
physical and intellectual nature and the gradual regression of Spirituality.
1st R. Race
II R. R.
III R. R.
MERIDIAN OF
RACES.
3 1/2
ASCENDING CYCLE.
Re-evolution or
reversion of Spirituality and the gradual decrease of materiality and mere
brain intellectuality.
IV R. R.
4 1/2
V R. R.
5 1/2
VI R. R.
6 1/2
VII ROOT RACE
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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 301 THE ODD EYE IS NOW A GLAND.
We are only in
the Fourth Round, and it is in the Fifth that the full development of Manas, as
a direct ray from the Universal MAHAT -- a ray unimpeded by matter -- will be
finally reached. Nevertheless, as every sub-race and nation have their cycles
and stages of developmental evolution repeated on a smaller scale, it must be
the more so in the case of a Root-Race. Our race then has, as a Root-race,
crossed the equatorial line and is cycling onward on the Spiritual side; but
some of our sub-races still find themselves on the shadowy descending arc of
their respective national cycles; while others again -- the oldest -- having
crossed their crucial point, which alone decides whether a race, a nation, or a
tribe will live or perish, are at the apex of spiritual development as
sub-races.
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Yu, they
may be found in another work, called the "Bamboo Books," and in a
third one, the "Rh Ya" -- "initiated according to tradition by
Chow Kung, uncle of Wu Wang, the first Emperor of the Chow Dynasty, B.C.,
1,122":-- says Mr. Ch. Gould in his "Mythical Monsters." The
Bamboo Books contain the ancient annals of China, found A.D. 279 at the opening
of the grave of King Seang of Wai, who died B.C. 295. Both these works mention
men with two faces on one head -- one in front and one behind (p. 27).
Now that which
the students of Occultism ought to know is that THE "THIRD EYE" IS
INDISSOLUBLY CONNECTED WITH KARMA. The tenet is so mysterious that very few
have heard of it.
The "eye of
Siva" did not become entirely atrophied before the close of the Fourth
Race. When spirituality and all the divine powers and attributes of the
deva-man of the Third had been made the hand-maidens of the newly-awakened
physiological and psychic passions of the physical man, instead of the reverse,
the eye lost its powers. But such was the law of Evolution, and it was, in
strict accuracy, no FALL. The sin was not in using those newly-developed
powers, but in misusing them; in making of the tabernacle, designed to contain
a god, the fane of every spiritual iniquity. And if we say "sin" it
is merely that everyone should understand our meaning; as the term Karma* would
be the right one to use in this case; while the reader who would feel perplexed
at the use of the term "spiritual" instead of "physical"
iniquity, is reminded of the fact that there can be no physical iniquity. The
body is simply the irresponsible organ, the tool of the psychic, if not of the
"Spiritual man." While in the case of the Atlanteans, it was
precisely the Spiritual being which sinned, the Spirit element being still the
"Master" principle in man, in those days. Thus it is in those days
that the heaviest Karma of the Fifth Race was generated by our Monads.
As this sentence
may again be found puzzling, it is better that it should be explained for the
benefit of those who are ignorant of the theosophical teachings.
Questions with
regard to Karma and re-births are constantly offered, and a great confusion
seems to exist upon this subject. Those who are born and bred in the Christian
faith, and have been trained in the idea
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Karma is a
word of many meanings, and has a special term for almost every one of its
aspects. It means, as a synonym of sin, the performance of some action for the
attainment of an object of worldly, hence selfish, desire, which cannot fail to
be hurtful to somebody else. Karman is action, the Cause; and Karma again is
"the law of ethical causation"; the effect of an act produced
egotistically, when the great law of harmony depends on altruism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 aeons already passed -- still, there
must be a limit. It was stated that Karma-Nemesis, whose bond-maid is Nature,
adjusted everything in the most harmonious manner; and that, therefore, the
fresh pouring-in, or arrival of new Monads, had ceased as soon as Humanity had
reached its full physical development. No fresh Monads have incarnated since
the middle-point of the Atlanteans. Hence, remembering that, save in the case
of young children, and of individuals whose lives were violently cut off by
some accident, no Spiritual Entity can re-incarnate before a period of many
centuries has elapsed, such gaps alone must show that the number of Monads is
necessarily finite and limited. Moreover, a reasonable time must be given to
other animals for their evolutionary progress.
Hence the
assertion that many of us are now working off the effects of the evil Karmic
causes produced by us in Atlantean bodies. The Law of KARMA is inextricably
interwoven with that of Re-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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
Of all the
terrible blasphemies and accusations virtually thrown on their God by the
Monotheists, none is greater or more unpardonable than that (almost always)
false humility which makes the presumably "pious" Christian assert,
in connection with every evil and undeserved blow, that "such is the will
of God."
Dolts and
hypocrites! Blasphemers and impious Pharisees, who speak in the same breath of the
endless merciful love and care of their God and creator for helpless man, and
of that God scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them
to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's
words:--
"But who
shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?" Logic and simple common sense, we
answer: if we are made to believe in the "original Sin," in one life,
on this Earth only, for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems
to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal
hell-fire (and this whether they are good or bad, says the Predestinarian),**
why should not every man endowed with reasoning powers condemn in his turn such
a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the
God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and
in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the
problem by addressing him as --
"Thou great
Mysterious Power, who hast involved
The pride of
human wisdom, to confound
The daring
scrutiny and prove the faith
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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Objectors to
the doctrine of Karma should recall the fact that it is absolutely out of the
question to attempt a reply to the Pessimists on other data. A firm grasp of
the principles of Karmic Law knocks away the whole basis of the imposing fabric
reared by the disciples of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.
** The doctrine
and theology of Calvinists. "The purpose of God from eternity respecting
all events" (which becomes fatalism and kills free will, or any attempt of
exerting it for good). . . . ." It is the pre-assignment or allotment of
men to everlasting happiness or misery" (Catechism). A noble and
encouraging Doctrine this!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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:"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Some
theosophists, in order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind,
as being better acquainted with the Greek than with Aryan philosophy, have made
an attempt to translate it by Nemesis. Had the latter been known to the profane
in antiquity, as it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the
term would be unobjectionable. As it is, it has been too much anthropomorphised
by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an elaborate explanation. With
the early Greeks, "from Homer to Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a
moral feeling rather," says Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality.
He who transgresses it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the gods, and is
pursued by Nemesis. But, with time, that "feeling" was deified, and
its personification became an ever-fatal and punishing goddess. Therefore, if
we would connect Karma with Nemesis, it has to be done in the triple character
of the latter, viz., as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while the latter is
the goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like Nemesis, is commissioned
to repress every excess, and keep man within the limits of Nature and righteousness
under severe penalty, Adrasteia -- "the inevitable" -- represents
Nemesis as the immutable effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as
the daughter of Dike, is the equitable goddess reserving her wrath for those
alone who are maddened with pride, egoism, and impiety. (See Mesomed. Hymn.
Nemes., V. 2. Brunck, Analecta II. p. 292; Mythol. de la Grece Antique, p.
304.) In short, while Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric goddess, or Power,
personified and anthropomorphised in its various aspects, Karma is a highly
philosophical truth, a most divine noble expression of the primitive intuition
of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which explains the origin of Evil,
and [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol. 2, Page]] 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.")
-------
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] ennobles our conceptions of what divine
immutable justice ought to be, instead of degrading the unknown and unknowable
Deity by making it the whimsical, cruel tyrant, which we call Providence.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 307 THE SEVEN AND FOURTEEN MANUS.
THE PRIMEVAL
MANUS OF HUMANITY.
Those who are
aware that the "great Flood," which was connected with the sinking of
an entire continent -- save what became a few islands -- could not have
happened so far back as 18,000,000 years ago; and that Vaivasvata Manu is the
Indian Noah connected with the Matsya (or the fish) Avatar of Vishnu -- may
feel perplexed at this discrepancy between facts stated and the chronology
previously given. But there is no discrepancy in truth. The reader is asked to
turn to the Theosophist of July, 1883, and after studying the article therein,
"The Septenary Principle in Esotericism," the whole question can be
explained to him. It is in this explanation, I believe, that the Occultists
differ from the Brahmins.
For the benefit
of those, however, who may not have "The Theosophist" of that month
and year to hand, a passage or two may now be quoted from it:
"Who was
Manu, the son of Swayambhuva? The secret doctrine tells us that this Manu was
no man, but the representation of the first human races evolved with the help of
the Dhyan-Chohans (Devas) at the beginning of the first round. But we are told
in his Laws (Book I. 80) that there are fourteen Manus for every Kalpa -- or
interval from creation to creation (read interval from one minor 'Pralaya' to
another*) -- and that in the present divine age, there have been as yet seven
Manus. Those who know that there are seven rounds, of which we have passed
three, and are now in the fourth; and who are
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Pralaya -- a
word already explained -- is not a term that applies only to every "Night
of Brahma," or the world's dissolution following every Manvantara, equal
to 71 Maha-yugas. It applies also to each "obscuration" as well, and
even to every Cataclysm that puts an end, by Fire or by Water in turn, to each
Root-Race. Pralaya is a term like that of "Manu" -- the generic name
for the Sishtas, who, under the appellation of "King," are shown in
the Puranas as preserved "with the seed of all things in an ark from the
waters of that flood" (or the fires of a general volcanic conflagration,
the commencement of which we already see for our Fifth-Race in the terrible
earthquakes and eruptions of these late years, and especially in the present
one) . . . . which in the season of a pralaya overspreads the world" (the
Earth). (See Preface, p. lxxxi., to Wilson's "Vishnu Purana.") Time
is only a form of "Vishnu" -- truly, as Parasara says in that Purana.
In the Hindu Yuga Kalpa, we have the regular descending series 4, 3, 2, with
ciphers multiplied as occasion requires for esoteric purposes, but not, as
Wilson and other Orientalists thought, for "sectarian
embellishments." A Kalpa may be an age, a "Day" of Brahma, or a
sidereal Kalpa, astronomical and earthly. Those calculations are found in all
the Puranas, but some differ -- as for instance, "the year of the seven
Rishis, 3,030 mortal years, and the year of Dhruva, 9,090 in the Linga
Purana," which are again esoteric, and which do represent actual (secret)
chronology. As said in the Brahma Vaivarta: "Chronologers compute a Kalpa
by the life of Brahma. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are
numerous." "Minor Kalpas" denote here every period of
destruction, as was well understood by Wilson himself, who explains the latter
as "those in which the Samvarta wind or other destructive agents
operate" (Vishnu Purana, p. 54, vol. I.).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 fittest*; a mystery divulged only to those who have passed
their third degree in initiation) -- those who have learned all that will be
better prepared to understand the meaning of the following. We are told in the
Sacred Hindu scriptures that the first Manu produced six other Manus (seven
primary Manus in all), and these produced in their turn each seven other
Manus** (Bhrigu I, 61-63) -- the production of the latter standing in the
occult treatises as 7 x 7. Thus it becomes clear that Manu -- the last one, the
progenitor of our Fourth Round Humanity -- must be the seventh, since we are on
our fourth Round,*** and there is a root-Manu at globe A and a seed Manu at
globe G. Just as each planetary Round commences with the appearance of a 'Root
Manu' (Dhyan Chohan) and closes with a 'Seed-Manu,' so a Root and a Seed Manu
appear respectively at the beginning and the termination of the human period on
any particular planet.**** It will be easily seen from the foregoing statement
that a Manu-antaric period means, as the term implies, the time between the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* An intuition
and a presentiment of the Sishtas may be found in Mr. Sinnett's "Esoteric
Buddhism," Fifth Edition. See in it Annotations -- the "Noah's Ark
Theory" pp. 146, 147.
** The fact that
Manu himself is made to declare that he was created by Viraj, and that he then
produced the ten Prajapatis, who again produced seven Manus, who in their turn
gave birth to seven other Manus (Manu, I, 33-36) relates to other still earlier
mysteries, and is at the same time a blind with regard to the doctrine of the
Septenary chain, and the simultaneous evolution of seven humanities, or MEN.
However, the present work is written on the records of Cis-Himalayan Secret
Teachings, and Brahmanical esoteric philosophy may now differ in form as the
Kabala does. But they were identical in hoary antiquity.
*** There is
another esoteric reason besides this one for it. A Vaivasvata is the seventh
Manu, because this our Round, although the Fourth, is in the preseptenary Manvantara,
and the Round itself is in its seventh stage of materiality or physicality. The
close of its middle racial point occurred during the Fourth Root Race, when man
and all nature reached their lowest state of gross matter. From that time,
i.e., from the end of the three and a half races, humanity and nature entered
on the ascending arc of their racial cycle.
**** The
interval that precedes each Yuga is called a Sandhya, composed of as many
hundreds of years as there are thousands in the yuga; and that which follows
the latter is named Sandhyamsa, and is of similar duration, we are told in
Vishnu Purana. "The interval between the Sandhya and the Sandhyamsa is the
yuga denominated Krita, Treta, etc., etc. The (four) Krita, Treta, Dwapara, and
Kali constitute a great age, or aggregate of four ages: a 1000 such aggregates
are a Day of Brahma; and 14 Manus reign within that term." Now had we to
accept this literally then there would be only one Manu for every 4,320,000,000
of years. As we are taught that it took 300,000,000 of years for the two lower
kingdoms to evolve, and that our humanity is just 18 and some odd millions old
-- where were the other Manus spoken of, unless the allegory means what the
esoteric doctrine teaches us about the 14 being each multiplied by 49.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 x 7 Manus, and that there are 49 root-races
on the seven planets during each Round, then every root-race has its Manu. The
present seventh Manu is called 'Vaivasvata' and stands in the exoteric texts
for that Manu who represents in India the Babylonian Xisuthrus and the Jewish
Noah. But in the esoteric books we are told that Manu Vaivasvata, the
progenitor of our Fifth race -- who saved it from the flood that nearly
exterminated the Fourth (Atlantis) -- is not the seventh Manu, mentioned in the
nomenclature of the Root, or primitive-Manus, but one of the 49 Manus emanated
from this Root-Manu.
"For
clearer comprehension we here give the names of the 14 Manus in their
respective order and relation to each Round:--
1st Round
1st (Root) Manu
on Planet A -- Swayambhuva.
1st (Seed) Manu
on Planet G -- Swarochi (or) Swarotisha.
2nd Round
2nd (R) M. on
Planet A -- Uttama.
2nd (S) M.
" G -- Thamasa.
3rd Round
3rd (R) M.
" A -- Raivata.
3rd (S) M.
" G -- Chackchuska.
4th Round
4th (R) M.
" A -- Vaivasvata (our progenitor)
4th (S) M. "
G -- Savarna
5th Round
5th (R) M.
" A -- Daksha Savarna.
5th (S) M.
" G -- Brahma Savarna.
6th Round
6th (R) M.
" A -- Dharma Savarna.
6th (S) M.
" G -- Rudra Savarna.
7th Round
7th (R) M.
" A -- Rouchya.
7th (S) M.
" G -- Bhoutya.
"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."*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The words
"creation," "dissolution," etc., do not render correctly
the right meaning of either Manvantara or Pralaya. The Vishnu Purana enumerates
several: The dissolution of all things is of four kinds, Parasara is made to
say:-- Naimittika (occasional), when Brahma slumbers (his night, when, "At
the end of this day occurs a re-coalescence of the Universe, called Brahma's
contingent re-coalescence," because Brahma is this universe itself);
"Prakritika (elemental), when the return of this universe to its original
nature is partial and physical; Atyantika (absolute), identification of the
embodied with the incorporeal Supreme spirit -- Mahatmic state, whether
temporary or until the following Maha Kalpa: also absolute obscuration -- as of
a whole [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 ago,
when physical, or the truly human man first appeared in his Fourth Round on
this earth; and of the other Vaivasvatas, e.g., the Manu of the Great Cosmic or
sidereal Flood (a mystery), or again the Manu Vaivasvata of the submerged
Atlantis, when the racial Vaivasvata saved the elect of Humanity, the Fifth
Race, from utter destruction. As the several (and quite different) events are
purposely blended in the Vishnu and other Puranas in one narrative, there may
yet be a great deal of perplexity left in the profane reader's mind. Therefore,
as constant elucidation is needed, we must be forgiven unavoidable repetitions.
The blinds which conceal the real mysteries of Esoteric philosophy are great
and puzzling, and even now the last word cannot be given. The veil, however,
may be a little more removed and some explanations, hitherto denied, may now be
offered to the earnest student.
As somebody --
Colonel Vans Kennedy, if we do not mistake -- remarked, "the first
principle in Hindu religious philosophy is Unity in diversity." If all
those Manus and Rishis are called by one generic name, this is due to the fact
that they are one and all the manifested Energies of one and the same LOGOS,
the celestial, as well as the terrestrial messengers and permutations of that
Principle which is ever in a state of activity; conscious during the period of
Cosmic evolution, unconscious (from our point of view) during Cosmic rest, as
the Logos sleepeth in the bosom of THAT which "sleepeth not," nor is
it ever awake -- for it is SAT or Be-ness, not a Being. It is from IT that issues
the great unseen Logos, who evolves all the other logoi, the primeval MANU who
gives being to the other Manus, who emanate the universe and all in it
collectively, and who represent in their aggregate the manifested Logos.* Hence
we learn in the "Commentaries" that while no Dhyan Chohan, not even
the highest, can realise completely "the condition of the preceding Cosmic
evolution," "the Manus retain a knowledge of their experiences of all
the Cosmic evolutions throughout Eternity." This is very plain: the first
Manu is called Swayambhuva,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] planetary chain, etc.; and Nitya (perpetual)
Mahapralaya for the Universe, death -- for man, nitya is the extinction of
life, like the extinction of a lamp," also "in sleep at night."
Nitya Sarga is "constant or perpetual creation," as Nitya pralaya is
"constant or perpetual destruction of all that is born." "That
which ensues after a minor dissolution is called ephemeral creation. . . . This
is Samyama" (production, existence, and dissolution) (Vishnu Purana, Book
I., ch. vii.) The subject is so difficult that we are obliged to repeat our
statements.
* But see the
superb definitions of Parabrahmam and the Logos in Mr. Subba Row's Lectures on
the Bhagavat Gita in the early numbers of the Theosophist of 1887, Feb., March,
April, and May.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 311 THE FOUR EARLIER RACES.
"the
Self-manifested," the Son of the unmanifested FATHER. The Manus are the
creators of the creators of our First Race -- the Spirit of mankind -- which
does not prevent the seven Manus from having been the first
"pre-Adamic" men on Earth.
Manu declares
himself created by Viraj,* or Vaiswanara, (the Spirit of Humanity),** which
means that his Monad emanates from the never resting Principle in the beginning
of every new Cosmic activity: that Logos or UNIVERSAL MONAD (collective Elohim)
that radiates from within himself all those Cosmic Monads that become the
centres of activity -- progenitors of the numberless Solar systems as well as
of the yet undifferentiated human monads of planetary chains as well as of
every being thereon. Each Cosmic Monad is "Swayambhuva," the
SELF-BORN, which becomes the Centre of Force, from within which emerges a
planetary chain (of which chains there are seven in our system), and whose
radiations become again so many Manus Swayambhuva (a generic name, mysterious
and meaning far more than appears), each of these becoming, as a Host, the
Creator of his own Humanity. (See "The Manus and the Manvantaras Explained
by a Western Mystic and Mathematician.")
As to the
question of the four distinct races of mankind that preceded our Fifth Race,
there is nothing mystical in it, except the ethereal bodies of the first races;
and it is a matter of legendary, nevertheless, very correct history. That
legend is universal. And if the Western savant pleases to see in it only a
myth, it does not make the slightest difference. The Mexicans had, and still
have, the tradition of the fourfold destruction of the world by fire and water,
just as the Egyptians had, and the Hindus have, to this day.
Trying to
account for the community of legends in the remote antiquity -- held by
Chinese, Chaldean, Egyptians, Indians and Greeks -- and for the absence of any
certain vestige of civilization more ancient than 5,000 years, the author of
"Mythical Monsters," remarks, that "we must not be surprised if
we do not immediately discover the vestiges of the people of ten, fifteen, or
twenty thousand years ago. With an ephemeral architecture (as in China), the
sites of vast cities may have become entirely lost to recollection in a few
thousands of years from natural decay . . . and how much more . . . if . . .
minor cataclysms have intervened, such as local inundations, earthquakes,
deposition of volcanic ashes, the spread of sandy deserts, destruction of life
by
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See preceding
foot-note.
** See Manu I.,
32, 33. Vaiswanara is, in another sense, the living magnetic fire that pervades
the manifested solar system. It is the most objective (to us the reverse) and
ever present aspect of the ONE LIFE, for it is the Vital Principle. (See
Theosophist, July, 1883, p. 249). It is also a name of Agni.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 crore* the mother (Earth) grows
opaque, and in the FOURTEENTH** the throes of adolescence take place. These
convulsions of nature (geological changes) last till her twentieth crore of
years, uninterruptedly, after which they become periodical, and at long
intervals."
The last change
took place nearly twelve crores of years ago (120,000,000). But the Earth with
everything on her face had become cool, hard and settled ages earlier.
(Commentary, xxii.)
Thus, if we are
to believe esoteric teaching, there have been no more universal geological
disturbances and changes for the last 120 millions of years, and the Earth was,
even before that time, ready to receive her human stock. The appearance of the
latter, however, in its full physical development, as already stated, took
place only about eighteen millions of years ago, after the first great failure
of nature to create beings alone, without the help of the divine
"Fashioners," had been followed by the successive evolution of the
first three races (See above 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This -- in the
period of Secondary creation, so called. Of the Primary, when Earth is in
possession of the three Elemental Kingdoms, we cannot speak for several
reasons, one of which is, that, unless one is a great seer, or naturally
intuitional, he will be unable to realise that which can never be expressed in
any existing terms.
** Hippocrates
said that number seven "By its occult virtues tended to the accomplishment
of all things, to be the dispenser of life and fountain of all its
changes." The life of man he divided into seven ages (Shakespeare), for
"As the moon changes her phases every seven days, this number influences
all sublunary beings," and even the Earth, as we know. With the child, it
is the teeth that appear in the seventh month and he sheds them at seven years;
at twice seven puberty begins, at three times seven all our mental and vital
powers are developed, at four times seven he is in his full strength, at five
times seven his passions are most developed, etc., etc. Thus for the Earth. It
is now in its middle age, yet very little wiser for it. The Tetragrammaton, the
four-lettered sacred name of the Deity, can be resolved on Earth only by
becoming Septenary through the manifest triangle proceeding from the concealed
Tetraktis. Therefore, the number seven has to be adopted on this plane. As
written in the Kabala "The greater Holy Assembly" v. 1161:--
"For assuredly there is no stability in those six, save (what they derive)
from the seventh. For all things depend from the SEVENTH."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 313 THE ESOTERIC MEANING OF "FISH."
Third Root-Race
appeared as an entirely new race physiologically. It is this
"destruction" which is called allegorically the great
"Vaivasvata Manu Deluge," when the account shows Vaivasvata Manu (or
"Humanity") remaining alone on Earth in the Ark of Salvation towed by
Vishnu in the shape of a monstrous fish, and the Seven Rishis "with
him." The allegory is very plain:--
In the Symbolism
of every nation, the "Deluge" stands for Chaotic unsettled matter --
Chaos itself: and the Water for the feminine principle -- the "Great
Deep." As the Greek Lexicon of Parkhurst gives it -- "Arche (ark)
answers to the Hebrew rasit, or Wisdom . . . . and (at the same time) to the
emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of
nature (and of mankind) floats or broods on the great Abyss of the waters,
during the interval which takes place after every mundane (or racial)
cycle." Ark is also the mystic name of the divine spirit of life which
broods over chaos. Now Vishnu is the divine Spirit, as an abstract principle,
and also as the Preserver and Generator, or Giver of life -- the third person
of the Trimurti (composed of Brahma, the Creator, Siva, the Destroyer, and
Vishnu, the Preserver). Vishnu is shown in the allegory as guiding, under the
form of a fish, the Ark of Vaivasvata Manu clean across the waters of the
Flood. There is no use in expatiating upon the esoteric meaning of the word
fish. (See Payne Knight, Inman, Gerald Massey, etc.) Its theological meanings
is phallic, but the metaphysical, divine. Jesus is called the "Fish,"
and so were Vishnu and Bacchus: [[Ies]], the "Saviour" of mankind,
being but the monogram of the god Bacchus called [[Ichthus]], the fish.* As to
the Seven Rishis in the Ark, they symbolised the seven principles, which became
complete in man only after he had separated, and become a human, and no longer
a divine creature. (See for further details, "The Seventh Manu.")
Nor have we many
details about the submersion of the continent inhabited by the Second Root
Race. But the history of the Third, "Lemuria," is given, as is that
of Atlantis, the others being only alluded to. Lemuria is said to have perished
about 700,000 years before the commencement of what is now called the Tertiary
age (the Eocene),** and it is during this Deluge also -- an actual geological
deluge this time -- that Vaivasvata Manu is again shown as saving mankind
(allegorically it is mankind, or a portion of it, the Fourth Race, which is
saved); so also he saves the Fifth Race during the destruction of the last
Atlanteans, the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says St.
Augustin of Jesus, "For he is a fish that lives in the midst of
waters." Christians called themselves little fishes -- pisciculi -- in
their sacred mysteries. "So many fishes bred in the water, and saved by
one great fish," says Tertullian of the Christians and Christ and the
Church.
**
"Esoteric Buddhism," p. 55.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 314 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
remnants that
perished 850,000 years ago,* after which there was no great submersion until
the day of Plato's Atlantis, or Poseidonis, known to the Egyptians only because
it happened in such relatively recent times.
It is the
submersion of the great Atlantis which is the most interesting. It is of this
cataclysm that the old records (See the "Book of Enoch") say that
"the ends of the Earth got loose;" and upon which the legends and
allegories of Vaivasvata, Xisuthrus, Noah, Deukalion and all the tutti quanti
of the Elect saved, have been built. Tradition, taking into no account the
difference between sidereal and geological phenomena, calls both indifferently
"deluges." Yet there is a great difference. The cataclysm which
destroyed the huge continent of which Australia is the largest relic, was due
to a series of subterranean convulsions and the breaking asunder of the ocean
floors. That which put an end to its successor -- the fourth continent -- was
brought on by successive disturbances in the axial rotation. It began during
the earliest tertiary periods, and, continuing for long ages, carried away
successively the last vestige of Atlantis, with the exception, perhaps, of
Ceylon and a small portion of what is now Africa. It changed the face of the
globe, and no memory of its flourishing continents and isles, of its
civilizations and sciences, remained in the annals of history, save in the
Sacred records of the East.
Hence, Modern
Science denies Atlantis and its existence. It even denies any violent shiftings
of the Earth's axis, and would attribute the reason for the change of climates
to other causes. But this question is still an open one. If Dr. Croll will have
it that all such alterations can be accounted for by the effects of nutation
and the precession of the equinoxes, there are other men of Science, such as
Sir H. James (Athenaeum, Aug. 25, 1860), and Sir John Lubbock (ibid), who feel
more inclined to accept the idea that they are due to a change in the position
of the axis of rotation. Against this the majority of the astronomers are again
arrayed. But then, what have they not denied before now, and what have they not
denounced -- only to accept it later on whenever the hypothesis became
undeniable fact?
How far our
figures agree, or rather disagree with modern Science will be seen further in
the Addenda to this Book, where the geology and anthropology of our modern day
are carefully compared with the same in Archaic Science. At any rate, the
period assigned in the Secret Doctrine for the sinking of Atlantis, does not
seem to disagree
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This event,
the destruction of the famous island of Ruta and the smaller one Daitya, which
occurred 850,000 years ago in the later Pliocene times, must not be confounded
with the submersion of the main continent of Atlantis during the Miocene
period. Geologists cannot place the Miocene only so short a way back as 850,000
years; whatever they do, it is several million years ago that the main Atlantis
perished.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 315 THE INNER MAN IN THE ZOHAR.
very much with
the calculations of Modern Science, which calls Atlantis "Lemuria," however,
whenever it accepts such a submerged continent. With regard to the pre-human
period, all that can be said, at present, is, that even up to the appearance of
the "Mindless" First Race, the Earth was not without its inhabitants.
More may be said: that which Science -- recognizing only physical man -- has a
right to regard as the prehuman period, may be conceded to have extended from
the First Race down to the first half of the Atlantean race, since it is only
then that man became the "complete organic being he is now." And this
would make Adamic man no older than a few million of years.*
The author of
the Qabbalah remarks truly that "Man to-day, as an individual, is only a
concatenation of the being-hood of precedent human life," or lives,
rather. "According to the Qabbalah, the soul sparks contained in Adam
(Rishoun), went into three principal classes corresponding to his three sons,
viz.: Hesed, Habel, Ge-boor-ah, Qai-yin and Ra'hmin Seth. These three were
divided into 70 species, called: the principal roots of the human race."
(p. 422.)
"Said Rabbi
Jehudah: 'How many garments (of the incorporeal man) are these which are
crowned' (from the day man was 'created')? Said R. El'eazar: 'The mountains of
the world (the great men of the generation) are in discussion upon it, but
there are three: one to clothe in that garment the Rua'h spirit, which is in
the garden (of Eden) on earth: one which is more precious than all, in which
the Neshamah is clothed in that Bundle of Life, between the angels of the Kings
. . . : and one outside garment, which exists and does not exist, is seen and
not seen. In that garment, the Nephesh is clothed, and she goes and flies in
it, to and fro in the world." (Zohar I., 119b. col. 475; Qabbalah, 412.)
This relates to
the races (their "garments," or degree of materiality) and to the
three principles of man in their three vehicles.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Mr. Huxley
divides those races into the quintuple group of Australioids, Negroids,
Mongoloids, Xanthochroics and Melanochroics -- all issuing from imaginary
Anthropoids. And yet, while protesting against those who say "that the
structural differences between man and apes are small and insignificant,"
and adding that "every bone of the gorilla bears a mark by which it can be
distinguished from a corresponding human bone," and that "in the
present state of creation, at least, no intermediary being fills the gap which
separates the man from the troglodyte" -- the great anatomist goes on speaking
of the Simian characteristics in Man! (See de Quatrefages' "The Human
Species," p. 113.)
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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;* --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is the
reason why, perhaps, even Easter Island with its wondrous gigantic statues -- a
speaking witness to a submerged continent with a civilized mankind on it -- is
hardly mentioned anywhere in the modern Encyclopaedias. Its mention is
carefully avoided except in some books of Travels; modem science has an
undeniable predilection for forcing upon the cultured public hypotheses, built
on personal hobbies, as well-established evidence, for offering it guesses
instead of Knowledge, and calling them "scientific conclusions." Its
specialists will evolve a thousand and one contradictory speculations rather
than confess an awkward self-evident fact -- pre-eminent among such specialists
being Haeckel and his English admirers and co-thinkers. Yet "they are
authorities" -- we are sternly reminded. What of that? The Pope of Rome is
also an AUTHORITY and an infallible one -- for his followers; whereas the
remarkable fallibility of Scientific speculations is being proven periodically
with every change of the moon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 317 PRESENTMENTS OF TRUTHS.
ay, men and
civilized nations, not Palaeolithic savages only; who, under the guidance of
their divine Rulers, built large cities, cultivated arts and sciences, and knew
astronomy, architecture and mathematics to perfection. This primeval civilization
did not, as one may think, immediately follow their physiological
transformation. Between the final evolution and the first city built, many
hundred thousands of years had passed. Yet, we find the Lemurians in their
sixth sub-race building their first rock-cities out of stone and lava.* One of
such great cities of primitive structure was built entirely of lava, some
thirty miles west from where Easter Island now stretches its narrow piece of
sterile ground, and was entirely destroyed by a series of volcanic eruptions.
The oldest remains of Cyclopean buildings were all the handiwork of the
Lemurians of the last sub-races; and an occultist shows, therefore, no wonder
on learning that the stone relics found on the small piece of land called
Easter Island by Captain Cook, are "very much like the walls of the Temple
of Pachacamac or the Ruins of Tia-Huanuco in Peru," ("The Countries
of the World," by Robert Brown, Vol. 4, p. 43); and that they are in the
CYCLOPEAN STYLE. The first large cities, however, appeared on that region of
the continent which is now known as the island of Madagascar. There were
civilized people and savages in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Our best
modern novelists, who are neither Theosophists nor Spiritualists, begin to
have, nevertheless, very psychological and suggestively Occult dreams: witness
Mr. Louis Stephenson and his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than which no grander
psychological essay on Occult lines exists. Has the rising novelist, Mr. Rider
Haggard, also had a prophetic or rather a retrospective clairvoyant dream
before he wrote "SHE"? His imperial Kor, the great city of the dead,
whose surviving living men sailed northwards after the plague had killed almost
a whole nation, seems to step out in its general outlines from the imperishable
pages of the old archaic records. Ayesha suggests "that those men who
sailed north may have been the fathers of the first Egyptians"; and then
seems to attempt a synopsis of certain letters of a MASTER quoted in
"Esoteric Buddhism." For, she says, "Time after time have
nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed
away, and been forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This (the nation
of Kor) is but one of several; for time eats up the work of man unless, indeed,
he digs in caves like the people of Kor, and then mayhap the sea swallows them,
or the earthquake shakes them in. . . . . Yet were not these people utterly
destroyed, as I think. Some few remained in the other cities, for their cities
were many. But the barbarians . . . came down upon them, and took their women
to wife, and the race of the Amahagger that is now is a bastard brood of the
mighty sons of Kor, and behold it dwelleth in the tombs with its fathers' bones.
. ." (pp. 180, 181.)
Here the clever
novelist seems to repeat the history of all the now degraded and down-fallen
races of humanity. The Geologists and Anthropologists would place at the head
of humanity as descendants of Homo primigenius, the ape-man, of which "NO
FOSSIL REMAINS ARE AS YET KNOWN TO US," but (which) "were PROBABLY
akin to the gorilla and orang of the present day" (Haeckel). In answer to
whose "probably," occultists point to another and a greater probability
-- the one given in our text. (See above.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
The Aryan nations could trace their descent through the Atlanteans from the
more spiritual races of the Lemurians, in whom the "Sons of Wisdom"
had personally incarnated.**
It is with the
advent of the divine Dynasties that the first civilizations were started. And
while, in some regions of the Earth, a portion of mankind preferred leading a
nomadic and patriarchal life, and in others savage man was hardly learning to
build a fire and to protect himself against the Elements, his brothers -- more
favoured than he by their Karma, and helped by the divine intelligence which
informed them -- built cities, and cultivated arts and sciences. Nevertheless,
and civilization notwithstand-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Stanza II,
ante. This would account for the great difference and variation between the
intellectual capacities of races, nations, and individual men. While
incarnating, and in other cases only informing the human vehicles evolved by
the first brainless (manasless) race, the incarnating Powers and Principles had
to make their choice between, and take into account, the past Karmas of the
Monads, between which and their bodies they had to become the connecting link.
Besides which, as correctly stated in "Esoteric Buddhism" (p. 30),
"the fifth principle, or human (intellectual) soul, in the majority of
mankind is not even yet fully developed."
** It is said by
Krishna, the Logos incarnate, in the Bhagavat-gita, "The seven great
Rishis, the four preceding Manus, partaking of my nature, were born from my
mind: from them sprang (emanated or was born) the human race and the
world," (Chap. X. Verse 6.)
Here, by the
seven great Rishis, the seven great rupa hierarchies or classes of Dhyan
Chohans, are meant. Let us bear in mind that the Saptarshi (the seven Rishis)
are the regents of the seven stars of the Great Bear, therefore, of the same
nature as the angels of the planets, or the seven great Planetary Spirits. They
were all reborn, all men on earth in various Kalpas and races. Moreover,
"the four preceding Manus" are the four classes of the originally
arupa gods -- the Kumaras, the Rudras, the Asuras, etc.: who are also said to
have incarnated. They are not the Prajapatis, as the first are, but their
informing principles -- some of which have incarnated in men, while others have
made other men simply the vehicles of their reflections. As Krishna truly says
--the same words being repeated later by another vehicle of the LOGOS --
"I am the same to all beings. . . . those who worship me (the 6th
principle or the intellectual divine Soul, Buddhi, made conscious by its union
with the higher faculties of Manas) are in me, and I am in them." (Ibid,
29.) The Logos, being no personality but the universal principle, is represented
by all the divine Powers born of its mind -- the pure Flames, or, as they are
called in Occultism, the "Intellectual Breaths" -- those angels who
are said to have made themselves independent, i.e., passed from the passive and
quiescent, into the active state of Self-Consciousness. When this is
recognised, the true meaning of Krishna becomes comprehensible. But see Mr.
Subba Row's excellent lecture on the Bhagavatgita, ("Theosophist,"
April 1887, p. 444.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 319 DEGENERATION OF MANKIND.
ing, while their
pastoral brethren enjoyed wondrous powers as their birthright, they, the
builders, could now obtain theirs only gradually; even these being generally
used for power over physical nature and selfish and unholy purposes.
Civilization has ever developed the physical and the intellectual at the cost
of the psychic and spiritual. The command and the guidance over his own psychic
nature, which foolish men now associate with the supernatural, were with early
Humanity innate and congenital, and came to man as naturally as walking and
thinking. "There is no such thing as magic" philosophises "SHE,"
the author forgetting that "magic" in her early day still meant the
great SCIENCE of WIDOM, and that Ayesha could not possibly know anything of the
modern perversion of thought -- "though there is such a thing as knowledge
of the Secrets of Nature." (p. 152). But they have become
"Secrets" only in our race, and were public property with the Third.
Gradually,
mankind went down in stature, for, even before the real advent of the Fourth or
Atlantean race, the majority of mankind had fallen into iniquity and sin, save
the hierarchy of the "Elect," the followers and disciples of the
"Sons of Will and Yoga" -- called later the "Sons of the Fire
Mist."
Then came the
Atlanteans; the giants whose physical beauty and strength reached their climax,
in accordance with evolutionary law, toward the middle period of their fourth
sub-race. But, as said in the Commentary:--
The last
survivors of the fair child of the White Island (the primitive Sveta-dwipa) had
perished ages before. Their (Lemuria's) elect, had taken shelter on the sacred
Island (now the "fabled" Shamballah, in the Gobi Desert), while some
of their accursed races, separating from the main stock, now lived in the
jungles and underground ("cave-men"), when the golden yellow race
(the Fourth) became in its turn "black with sin." From pole to pole
the Earth had changed her face for the third time, and was no longer inhabited
by the Sons of Sveta-dwipa, the blessed, and Adbhitanya, east and west, the
first, the one and the pure, had become corrupted. . . . The demi-gods of the Third
had made room for the semi-demons of the Fourth Race. Sveta-dwipa, whose
northern parts of the Toyambudhi the seven Kumaras (Sanaka, Sananda, Sanatana,
Sanatkumara, Jata, Vodhu, and Panchasikha) had visited, agreeably with exoteric
tradition (See the Uttara Khanda of the Padma Purana; Asiat. Researches also,
Vol. XI., pp. 99, 100); the White Island had veiled her face. Her children now
lived on the Black land, wherein, later on, Daityas from the seventh Dwipa
(Pushkara) and Rakshasas from the seventh
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas read as an absurd tissue of fairy
tales and no better. But if one reads chapters I., II. and III. from Book II.
(Vol. II.) of Vishnu Purana and accepts verbatim its geography, geodesy, and
ethnology, in the matter of Priyavrata's seven sons, among whom the father
divides the seven Dwipas (Continental Islands); and then proceeds to study how
the eldest son, the King of Jambu-dwipa, Agnidhra, apportioned Jambu-dwipa
among his nine sons; and then how Nabhi his son, who had a hundred sons and
apportioned all these in his turn -- then the reader is likely to throw the
book away and pronounce it a farrago of nonsense. But the esoteric student will
understand that, in the days when the Puranas were written, the true meaning
was clear only to the Initiated Brahmins, who wrote those works allegorically
and would not give the whole truth to the masses. And he will explain to the
Orientalists who, beginning with Colonel Wilford and ending with Professor
Weber, made and still are making such a mess of it, that the first three
chapters (See Wilson's trans. of Vishnu Purana Book II et seq.) purposely
confuse the following subjects and events:--
I. The series of
Kalpas or Ages (also of Races) are never taken into account; e.g., events which
have happened in one being allowed to stand along with those which took place
in another. The chronological order is entirely ignored. This is shown by
several of the Sanskrit commentators, who explain the incompatibility of events
and calculations in saying -- "Whenever any contradictions in different
Puranas are observed, they are ascribed . . . to differences of Kalpas and the
like" (Vishnu and Bhagavata Puranas).
II. The several
meanings of the words "Manvantara" and "Kalpa" or age, are
withheld, and the general one only given.
III. In the
genealogy and geography of the Kings and their Varshas (countries) and Dwipas,
they are all allowed to be regarded as terrestrial regions.
Now, the truth
is that, without entering into too minute details, it is easy and permissible
to show that:--
(a) The Seven
Dwipas apportioned to Priyavrata's septenary progeny refer to several
localities: first of all to our planetary chain. Jambu-dwipa alone representing
our globe, the six others are the (to us) invisible companion globes of this
earth. This is shown by the very nature of the allegorical and symbolic
descriptions. Jambu (dwipa) "is in the centre of all these (the so-called
insular continents) and is surrounded" by a sea of salt water (lavana),
whereas Plaksha, Salmalia,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 321 THE HINDU SYMBOLIZATION.
Kusa, Krauncha,
Saka 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) Bhaskara
Acharya, who uses expressions from the Secret Doctrine and its books, in his
description of the sidereal position of all these dwipas:-- "the sea of
milk and the sea of curds" etc., meaning the Milky Way, and the various
congeries of nebulae; the more so, since he names "the country to the
south of the equator Bhur-loka, that to the north Bhuva-loka, Swar, Mahar,
Jana, Tapo and Satya lokas"; and says: "Those lokas are gradually
attained by increasing religious merits," i.e., they are various
paradises. (See Bibliotheca Indica. Trans. of the Goladhyaya of the
Siddhanta-siromani III., 21-44).
(c) That this
geographical division of seven allegorical continents, islands, mountains, seas
and countries, does not belong only to our Round nor even to our races (the
name of Bharata Varsha (India) notwithstanding), is explained in the texts
themselves by the narrator of Vishnu Purana. For he closes the first chapter by
saying: "Bharata (the son of Nabhi, who gave his name to Bharata-Varsha or
India) consigned the Kingdom to his son Sumati . . . . and abandoned his life
at Salagrama. He was afterwards born again as a religious Brahman, in a
distinguished family of ascetics . . . . under these princes (Bharata's
descendants) Bharata Varsha was divided into nine portions, and their
descendants held successively possession of the country for seventy-one periods
of the aggregate of the four ages," or the reign of a Manu, representing a
Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years.
But having said
so much, Parasara suddenly explains that "this was the creation of
Swayambhuva Manu, by which the earth was peopled when he presided over the
first Manvantara, in the Kalpa of Varaha," i.e., the boar incarnation, or
Avatar. Now every Brahmin knows that it is only with Vaivasvata Manu that our
Humanity began on this Earth (or Round). And if the Western reader turns to the
sub-section on "The Primeval Manus of Humanity," he will see that
Vaivasvata is the seventh of the fourteen Manus who preside over our planetary
chain during its life cycle: i.e., that representing or standing in every Round
for two Manus of the same name (a Root and a Seed Manu), he is the Root Manu of
the Fourth Round, hence the seventh. Wilson finds in this only "an
incongruity" (see his Vishnu Purana, vol. II., p. 108, footnote), and
speculates that "the patriarchial genealogies are older than the
chronological system of Manvantaras and Kalpas," and thus "have been
rather clumsily distributed amongst the different periods." It is nothing
of the kind.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, Parasara, asked by Maitreya "to give him the descriptions of
the Earth," returns again to the enumeration of the same Dwipas with the
same seas, etc., as those he had described in the Swayambhuva Manvantara -- it
is simply a blind, yet, to him who reads between the lines, the Four great
Races and the Fifth are there, ay, with their sub-divisions, islands, and continents,
some of which were called by the names of celestial lokas, and by those of
other globes. Hence the confusion.
All these are
called by the Orientalists "mythical" and "fabulous"
islands and lands.* Very true, some are not of this earth, but they still
exist. The "White Island" and Atala, at all events, are no myths,
since the latter was the name contemptuously applied by the earliest pioneers
of the Fifth Race to the land of Sin -- Atlantis, in general, not to Plato's
island alone; and since the former was (a) the Sveta-dwipa of theogony, and (b)
Saka-dwipa, or Atlantis (its earliest portions) in its beginnings. This was
when it yet had its "seven holy rivers that washed away all sin," and
its "seven districts, wherein there was no dereliction of virtue, no
contention, no deviation from virtue," as it was then inhabited by the
caste of the Magas -- that caste which even the Brahmins acknowledged as not
inferior to their own -- and which was
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* In a lecture,
Professor Pengelly, F.R.S., quoting Professor Oliver, makes him say "that
the present Atlantic islands' Flora affords no substantial evidence of a former
direct communication with the mainland of the New World," but himself adds
that, at the same time, "at some period of the Tertiary epoch, N. E. Asia
was united to N. W. America, perhaps by the line where the Aleutian chain of
islands now extends." Thus Occult Science alone can reconcile the
contradictions and hesitations of modern Science. Moreover, surely the argument
for the existence of Atlantis does not rest on Botany alone.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Samba (the reputed) son of Krishna, who in reality had none. In
this the Puranas are historical --allegory notwithstanding -- and Occultism is
stating facts.
The whole story
is told in Bhavishya Purana. It is stated that, having been cured by Surya (the
Sun) of leprosy, Samba, having built a temple dedicated to the Sun, was looking
for pious Brahmins to perform the appointed rites in it, and receive donations
made to the God. But Narada (this virgin ascetic whom one finds in every age in
the Puranas) advised him not to do so, as Manu forbade the Brahmins to receive
emoluments for the performance of religious rites. He therefore referred Samba
to Gauramukha (white face), the Purohita or family priest of Hgrasena, King of
Mathura, who would tell him whom he could best employ. The priest directed
Samba to invite the Magas, the worshippers of Surya, to discharge the duty.
Ignorant of the place they lived in, it is Surya, the Sun himself, who directs
Samba to Sakadwipa beyond the salt water. Then Samba performs the journey,
using Garuda (Vishnu's and Krishna's vehicle, the great Bird) who lands him
among the Magas, etc.
Now Krishna, who
lived 5,000 years ago, and Narada, who is found reborn in every cycle (or
race), besides Garuda -- the symbol esoterically of the great cycle -- show the
allegory; yet the Magas are the Magi of Chaldea, and their class and worship
were born on the earlier Atlantis, in Saka-dwipa, the Sinless. All the
Orientalists are agreed that the Magas of Saka-dwipa are the forefathers of the
fire-worshipping Parsis. Our quarrel with them rests, as usual, on their
dwarfing hundreds of thousands to a few centuries this time: they carry the
event -- Narada and Samba notwithstanding -- to the days of the flight of the
Parsis to Gujerat, which is simply absurd, as that was in the VIIIth cent. of
our era. Though the Magas in the Bhavishya Purana are credited with still
living in Saka-dwipa in the day of Krishna's Son, yet the last of it -- Plato's
"Atlantis" -- had perished 6000 years before. They were Mag
"late of" Saka-Dwipa, and lived in those days in Chaldea. This is an
intentional confusion, again.
The earliest
pioneers of the Fourth Race were not Atlanteans, nor yet the human Asuras and
the Rakshasas which they became later. In those days large portions of the
future continent of Atlantis were yet part and parcel of the Ocean floors.
"Lemuria," as we have called the continent of the Third Race, was
then a gigantic land.* It covered
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As shown in
the Introduction, it stands to reason that neither the name of Lemuria nor even
Atlantis are the real archaic names of the lost continents, but have been
adopted by us for the sake of clearness. Atlantis was the name given to those [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] portions of the submerged Fourth-Race continent which were
"beyond the pillars of Hercules," and which happened to keep above
water after the general cataclysm. The last remnant of these -- Plato's
Atlantis, or the "Poseidon" (another substitute or rather a
translation of the real name) -- was the last of it some 11,000 years ago. Most
of the correct names of the countries and islands of both continents are given
in the Puranas; but to mention them specially, as found in other more ancient
works, such as the Surya Siddhanta, would necessitate too lengthy explanations.
If, in earlier writings, the two seem to have been too faintly disconnected,
this must be due to careless reading and want of reflection. If ages hence,
Europeans are referred to as Aryans, and a reader confuses them with the Hindus
and the latter with the Fourth Race, as they live (some of them) in ancient
Lanka -- the blame will not fall on the writer.
* See Professor
Dana's article, "American Journal of Science," III, v. 442-3; Prof.
Winchell's "World Life"; and other geological works.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 325 ATLANTIS -- OCEAN FLOOR.
the two ends,
and new lands arise in the middle belt (equatorial lands), while those at the
ends are subject to pralayas by submersion . . . ."
And again:--
. . . "Thus
the wheel (the Earth) is subject to, and regulated by, the Spirit of the Moon,
for the breath of its waters (tides). Toward the close of the age (Kalpa) of a
great (root) race, the regents of the moon (the Pitar fathers, or Pitris) begin
drawing harder, and thus flatten the wheel about its belt, when it goes down in
some places and swells in others, and the swelling running toward the
extremities (poles) new lands will arise and old ones be sucked in."
We have but to
read astronomical and geological works, to see the meaning of the above very
clearly. Scientists (modern Specialists) have ascertained the influence of the
tides on the geological distribution of land and water on the planets, and the
shifting of the oceans with a corresponding subsidence and rise of continents
and new lands. Science knows, or thinks it knows, that this occurs
periodically.* Professor Todd believes he can trace the series of oscillations
backward to the periods of the earth's first incrustation. (See "American
Naturalist," XVIII., 15 et seq.); therefore it seems easy for Science to
verify the Esoteric statements. We propose to treat of this at greater length
in the Addenda. (Vide § § V. and VI.)
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Speaking on
periodical elevation and subsidence of the equatorial and polar regions, and
ensuing changes of climate, Mr. Winchell (professor of Geology at Michigan)
says -- "As the movements here contemplated are cyclical, the same
conditions would recur again and again; and accordingly the same fauna might
return again and again to the same region, with intervals of occupation by
another fauna. Progressive sedimentation would preserve the records of such
faunal alterations; and there would be presented the phenomena of 'colonies'
're-apparitions' and other faunal dislocations in the vertical and horizontal
distributions of fossil remains. These phenomena are well known to the student
of geology." ("Effects of Astronomical Changes.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Surya
Siddhanta, the oldest astronomical work in the whole world, and in the works of
Asura Maya, the Atlantean astronomer whom Professor Weber has made out
re-incarnated in Ptolemy. Yet, it is a mistake to call these "sacred islands"
Atlantean -- as done by us; for, like everything else in the Hindu Sacred
Books, they are made to refer to several things. The heirloom left by
Priyavrata, the Son of Swayambhuva Manu, to his seven sons -- was not Atlantis,
even though one or two of these islands survived the subsidence of their
fellows, and offered shelter, ages later, to Atlanteans, whose continent had
been submerged in its turn. When originally mentioned by Parasara (Vishnu
Purana) the seven refer to an esoteric doctrine which is explained further on.
Of all the seven islands, Jambu-dwipa is the only one that is terrestrial, for
it is our globe. In the Puranas every reference to the North of Meru is
connected with that primeval Eldorado, now the North Polar region; which, when
the magnolia blossomed there where now we see an unexplored endless desert of
ice, was then a continent again. Science speaks of an ancient continent which
stretched from Spitzbergen down to the Straits of Dover. The Secret Doctrine
teaches that, in the earliest geological periods, these regions formed a
horse-shoe-like continent, whose one end, the Eastern, far more northward than
North Cornwall, included Greenland, and the other contained Behring Straits as
an inland piece of ground, and descended southward in its natural trend down to
the British Isles, which in those days must have been right under the lower
curve of the semi-circle. This continent was raised simultaneously with the
submersion of 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
"Leaflets from Esoteric History," pp. 338 and 340.) This was written
from the words of a MASTER -- a rather doubtful authority for the materialists
and the sceptics. But here we have one of their own flock, and a bird of the
same feather -- Ernest Haeckel, who, in his distribution of races, corroborates
the statement almost verbatim: . . . . "It would seem that the region on
the earth's surface where the evolution of these primitive men from the CLOSELY
RELATED CATARRHINE APES (! !) took place, must be sought either in Southern
Asia or Eastern Africa [which, by the bye, was not even in existence when the
Third Race flourished -- H.P.B.] or in Lemuria. Lemuria is an ancient continent
now sunk beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, which, lying to the South of
the Asia of to-day, stretched on the one hand eastwards to upper India and
Sunda Island, on the other westward as far as Madagascar and Africa." (See
supra and compare "The Pedigree of Man," p. 80-81.)
In the epoch we
are treating of, the Continent of "Lemuria," had already broken
asunder in many places, and formed new separate continents. There was,
nevertheless, neither Africa nor the Americas, still less Europe in those days,
all these slumbering yet on the Ocean floors. Nor was there much of present
Asia; for the cis-Himalayan regions were covered with seas, and beyond this
stretched the "lotus leaves" of Sveta-dwipa, the countries now called
Greenland, Eastern and Western Siberia, etc., etc. The immense Continent, which
had once reigned supreme over the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans, now
consisted of huge islands which were gradually disappearing one after the
other, until the final convulsion engulfed the last remains of it. Easter Isle,
for instance, belongs to the earliest civilisation of the Third
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. Haeckel, when speaking
of Blumenbach's brown or Malay race and the Australians and Papuans, remarks:--
"There is much likeness between these last and the Aborigines of
Polynesia, that Australian island-world, that seems to have been once on a time
a gigantic and continuous continent." ("Pedigree of Man," p. 82.
But see footnote supra and the Addenda.)
It certainly
was, since it stretched, during the Third Race, east and west, as far as where
the two Americas now lie, and since the present Australia is but a portion of
it, as are also a few surviving islands sown hither and thither on the face of
the Pacific and a large bit of California, which belonged to it. Funnily
enough, Haeckel, in his fantastic "Pedigree of Man," considers
"the Australians of to-day as the lineal descendants, almost unchanged (?
!), of that second branch of the primitive human race. . . that spread
northwards, at first chiefly in Asia, from the home of man's infancy, and seems
to have been the parent of all the other straight-haired races of men. . . .
The one, woolly-haired, migrated in part, westwards" . . . (i.e., to
Africa and northwards to New Guinea, which countries had then, as said, no
existence as yet) . . . "the other, straight-haired, was evolved farther
to the north in Asia . . . . and peopled Australia . . . " (p. 81).
"Behold," writes a MASTER, "the relics of that once great nation
(Lemuria of the Third Race) in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your
Australia" ("Esoteric Buddhism," p. 65). But they belong to the
last remnants of the Seventh Sub-race of the Third. Prof. Haeckel must also
have dreamt a dream and seen for once a true vision!
It is to this
period that we have to look for the first appearance of the Ancestors of those,
who are termed by us the most ancient peoples of the world -- now called respectively
the Aryan Hindus, the Egyptians, and the oldest Persians, on the one hand, and
the Chaldees and Phoenicians on the other. These were governed by the DIVINE
DYNASTIES, i.e., kings and rulers who had of mortal man only his physical
appearance as it was then, but who were Beings from spheres higher and more
celestial than our own sphere will be, long Manvantaras hence. It is useless of
course to attempt to force their existence on sceptics. Their greatest pride
consists in proving their patronymic denomination as catarrhinides; which fact
they try to demonstrate on the alleged
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Haeckel's surmise that "the evolution of
the primitive men took place . . . . in either Southern Asia or . . . .
Lemuria" -- Africa, whether Eastern or Western being out of question -- is
correct enough, if not entirely so. To be accurate, however, in the same way
that the evolution of the First Race (from the bodies of the pitars) took place
on seven distinctly separated regions of the (then) only Earth at the arctic
pole -- so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur: it began in
those northern regions, which have just been described a few pages back as
including Behring's Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central
Asia, when the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic regions and most
adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however,
has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of
man. The commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle
point of its development when:--
"The axle
of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over the heads of that
portion of the SWEAT BORN; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants,
and animals were dwarfed in their growth. Those that did not perish REMAINED AS
HALF-GROWN BABES* IN SIZE AND INTELLECT. This was the third pralaya of the
races.**
Which means
again, that our globe is subject to seven periodical entire changes which go
pari passu with the races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this
Round, there must be seven terrestrial pralayas, three occasioned by the change
in the inclination of the earth's axis. It is a law which acts at its appointed
time, and not at all blindly, as science may think, but in strict accordance
and harmony with Karmic law. In Occultism this inexorable law is referred to as
"the great ADJUSTER." Science confesses its ignorance of the cause
producing climatic vicissitudes and such changes in the axial direction, which
are always followed by these vicissitudes; nor does it seem so sure of the
axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared rather to
deny the axial phenomena altogether, than admit the intelligent Karmic hand and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Half-grown babes" in comparison with their giant Brethren on other
zones. So would we now.
** Relates to
Lemuria.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There are
other cycles, of course, cycles within cycles -- and this is just that which
creates such a difficulty in the calculations of racial events. The circuit of
the ecliptic is completed in 25,868 years. And, with regard to our Earth, it is
calculated that the equinoctial point falls back fifty minutes ten seconds,
annually. But there is another cycle within this one. It is said that "as
the apsis goes forward to meet it at the rate of eleven minutes twenty-four
seconds, annually," (see the article on Astronomy in Encyclopaedia
Britannica), "this would complete a revolution in one hundred and fifteen
thousand three hundred and two years (115,302). The approximation of the
equinox and the apsis is the sum of these motions, sixty-one minutes
thirty-four seconds, and hence the equinox returns to the same position in
relation to the apsis in 21,128 years." We have mentioned this cycle in
Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked
influence on its contemporary race.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 331 PRE-HISTORIC STATUES.
Our meaning is
very clear. Every sidereal year the tropics recede from the pole four degrees
in each revolution from the equinoctial points, as the equator rounds through
the Zodiacal constellations. Now, as every astronomer knows, at present the
tropic is only twenty-three degrees and a fraction less than half a degree from
the equator. Hence it has still 2 1/2 degrees to run before the end of the Sidereal
year; which gives humanity in general, and our civilized races in particular, a
reprieve of about 16,000 years.*
After the Great
Flood of the Third Race (the Lemurians) --
"Men
decreased considerably in stature, and the duration of their lives was diminished.
Having fallen down in godliness they mixed with animal races, and intermarried
among giants and Pigmies (the dwarfed races of the Poles) . . . Many acquired
DIVINE, more -- UNLAWFUL knowledge, and followed willingly the LEFT PATH."
(Commentary xxxiii.)
Thus were the
Atlanteans approaching destruction in their turn. How many geological periods
it took to accomplish this fourth destruction? Who can tell. . . . But we are
told that --
-------
(44.) THEY (the
Atlanteans) BUILT GREAT IMAGES, NINE YATIS HIGH (27 feet) -- THE SIZE OF THEIR
BODIES (a). LUNAR FIRES HAD DESTROYED THE LAND OF THEIR FATHERS (the
Lemurians). WATER THREATENED THE FOURTH (Race) (b).
(a) It is well
worth noticing that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island, a
portion of an undeniably submerged continent -- as also those found on the
outskirts of Gobi, a region which had been submerged for untold ages -- are all
between 20 and 30 feet high. The statues found by Cook on Easter Island
measured almost all twenty-seven feet in height, and eight feet across the
shoulders. (See § "Stones, Witnesses to Giants," at the end of this
Stanza.) The writer is well aware that the modern archaeologists have decided
now that "these statues are not very old," as declared by one of the
high officials of the British Museum, where some of them now are. But this is
one of those arbitrary decisions of modern science which does not carry much
weight.
We are told that
it is after the destruction of "Lemuria" by subterranean fires that
men went on steadily decreasing in stature -- a process already commenced after
their physical FALL -- and that finally, some millions of years after, they
reached between six and seven feet, and are now dwindling down (as the older
Asiatic races) to nearer five than
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See at the end
of this Stanza "On the Duration of Ages and Cycles."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 horse-shoe past Madagascar, round "South Africa" (then a
mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The
great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden -- which every geologist
regards as the mouth of a former great river -- is the bed of the main stream which
drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary Age. The former reality of this river
is a fact of science -- will its votaries acknowledge the necessity of
accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, which their data demand?
Professor Berthold Seeman not only accepted the reality of such a mighty
continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one
continent -- thus corroborating the whole "horse-shoe" doctrine
already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given,
than the fact that the ELEVATED RIDGE in the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in
height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point
near the British Islands, first slopes 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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";* and the latter points
to the fact that, "Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and
entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known
youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The
civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already
mature."** To this Professor R. Owen adds that, "Egypt is recorded to
have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes";
and Winchell ("Pre-Adamites," p. 120), that "at the epoch of
Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells
us that Athotis, the son of this first king Menes, built the palace of Memphis;
that he was a physician, and left anatomical books."
This is quite
natural if we have to believe the statements of Herodotus, who records in
Euterpe (cxlii.), that the written history of the Egyptian priests dated from
about 12,000 years before his time. But what are 12,000 or even 120,000 years
compared with the millions of years elapsed since the Lemurian period? The
latter, however, has not been left without witnesses, its tremendous antiquity,
notwithstanding. The complete records of the growth, development, social, and
even political life of the Lemurians, have been preserved in the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "History
of English Literature," p. 23.
** Quoted in
"Atlantis," etc., p. 132.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Rakshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her
colossal Heroes; Chaldea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of
the land of Moab, with the famous giants, Anakim (Numbers xiii. 33). Moses
speaks of Og, a king who was nine cubits high (15 ft. 4 in.) and four wide
(Deut. iii. 11), and Goliath was "six cubits and a span in height"
(or 10 ft. 7 in.). The only difference found between the "revealed
Scripture" and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus
Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, etc., etc., is this: While the
pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics
that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly
demand that geology and archaeology should believe, that several countries were
inhabited by such giants in the day of Moses; giants before whom the Jews were
as grasshoppers, and who still existed in the days of Joshua and David.
Unfortunately their own chronology is in the way. Either the latter or the giants
have to be given up. (But see Part III., Addenda, the closing chapter.)
Of still
standing witnesses to the submerged continents, and the colossal men that
inhabited them, there are still a few. Archaeology claims several such on this
globe, though beyond wondering "what these may be" -- it never made
any serious attempt to solve the mystery. Besides the Easter Island statues
mentioned already, to what epoch do the colossal statues, still erect and
intact near Bamian, belong? Archaeology assigns them to the first centuries of
Christianity (as usual), and errs in this as it does in many other
speculations. A few words of description will show the readers what are the
statues of both Easter Isle and Bamian. We will first examine what is known of
them to orthodox Science. In "The Countries of the World," by Robert
Brown, in Vol. IV., page 43, it is stated that --
"Teapi,
Rapa-nui, or Easter Island, is an isolated spot almost 2,000 miles from the
South American coast. . . . In length it is about twelve miles, in breadth four
. . . and there is an extinct crater 1,050 feet high in its centre. The island
abounds in craters, which have been extinct for so long that no tradition of
their activity remains. . . .
" . . . But
who made the great stone images (p. 44, etc.) which are now the chief
attraction of the island to visitors? No one knows" -- says the reviewer.
"It is more than likely that they were here when the present inhabitants
(a handful of Polynesian savages) arrived. . . . Their workmanship is
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 archaeology nor yet geology that is likely to
answer, though the latter recognizes in the Island a portion of a submerged
continent.
But who cut the
Bamian, still more colossal, statues, the tallest and the most gigantic in the
whole world, for Bartholdi's "Statue of Liberty" (now at New York) is
a dwarf when compared with the largest of the five images. Burnes, and several
learned Jesuits who have visited the place, speak of a mountain "all
honeycombed with gigantic cells," with two immense giants cut in the same
rock. They are referred to as the modern Miaotse (vide supra, quotation from
Shoo-King) the last surviving witnesses of the Miaotse who had "troubled
the earth"; the Jesuits are right, and the Archaeologists, who see Buddhas
in the largest of these statues, are mistaken. For all those numberless
gigantic ruins discovered one after the other in our day, all those immense
avenues of colossal ruins that cross North America along and beyond the Rocky
Mountains, are the work of the Cyclopes, the true and actual Giants of old.
"Masses of enormous human bones" were found "in America, near
Misorte," a celebrated modern traveller tells us, precisely on the spot
which local tradition points out as the landing
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.).*
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 metres high. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose
limbs passed easily the largest vessels of those days, measured only 120 to 130
feet in height. The second statue, cut out in the rock like the first one, is
only 120 feet (15 feet taller than the said "Liberty").** The third
statue is only 60 feet high -- the two others still smaller, the last one being
only a little larger than the average tall man of our present race. The first
and largest of the Colossi represents a man draped in a kind of toga; M. de
Nadeylac thinks (See infra) that the general appearance of the figure, the
lines of the head, the drapery, and especially the large hanging ears, point
out undeniably that Buddha was meant to be represented. But the above proves
nothing. Notwithstanding the fact
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See also
"Pneumatologie des Esprits" Vol. III., p. 55, de Mirville.
** The first and
second have, in common with Bartholdi's Statue, an entrance at the foot,
leading by a winding staircase cut in the rock up into the heads of the
statues. The eminent French archeologist and anthropologist, the Marquis de
Nadeylac, justly remarks in his work that there never was in ancient or in
modern times a sculptured human figure more colossal than the first of the two.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 persuade themselves to be of more sufficiencie than the vulgar sort.
" . . . But
reason hath taught me, that so resolutely to condemne a thing for false and
impossible, is to assume unto himself the advantage to have the bounds and
limits of God's will, and the power of our common Mother Nature tied to his
sleeve, and that there is no greater folly in the world than to reduce them to
the measure of our capacitie and bounds of our sufficiencie.
"If we term
those things monsters or miracles to which our reason cannot attain, how many
doe such daily present themselves unto our sight? Let us consider through what
cloudes, and how blinde-folde we are led to the knowledge of most things that
passe our hands; verily we shall finde it is rather custome than Science that
receiveth, the strangenesse of them from us: and that those things, were they
newly presented unto us, wee should doubtless deeme them as much or more unlikely
and incredible than any other." (Essays, chap. xxvi.)
A fair-minded
scholar should, before denying the possibility of our history and records,
search modern History, as well as the universal traditions scattered throughout
ancient and modern literature, for traces left by these marvellous early races.
Few among the unbelievers suspect the wealth of corroborative evidence which is
found scattered about and buried even in the British Museum alone. The
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 -- Memoires addressees a l'Academie des Sciences -- de Mirville, carrying
out the task of proving the reality of the devil and showing his abode in every
ancient and modern idol, has collected several hundred pages of
"historical evidence" that in the days of miracle -- Pagan and
Biblical -- the stones walked, spoke, delivered oracles, and even sung. That
finally, "Christ-stone," or Christ-Rock, "the spiritual
Rock" that followed "Israel" (I Corinth. x. 4) "became a
Jupiter lapis," swallowed by his father Saturn, "under the shape of a
stone."* We will not stop to discuss the evident misuse and
materialization of Biblical metaphors, simply for the sake of proving the
Satanism of idols, though a good deal might be said** on this subject. But
without claiming any such peripateticism and innate psychic faculties for our
stones, we may collect, in our turn, every available evidence on hand, to show
that (a) had there been no giants to move about such colossal rocks, there
could never have been a Stonehenge, a Carnac (Brittany) and other such
Cyclopean structures; and (b) were there no such thing as MAGIC, there could
never have been so many witnesses to oracular and speaking stones.
In the Achaica
(p. 81) we find Pausanias confessing that, in beginning his work, he had
regarded the Greeks as mighty stupid "for worshipping stones." But,
having reached Arcadia, he adds: "I have changed my way of thinking."
Therefore, without worshipping stones or stone idols and statues, which is the
same -- a crime Roman Catholics are unwise to reproach Pagans with, as they do
likewise -- one may be allowed to believe in what so many great philosophers
and holy men have believed in, without deserving to be called an
"idiot" by modern Pausaniases.
The reader is
referred to Volume VI. of the Academie des Inscriptions (Memoires, p. 518, et
seq.) if he would study the various properties of flints and pebbles from the
standpoint of Magic and psychic powers. In a poem on Stones attributed to
Orpheus, those stones are divided into ophites and siderites,
"serpent-stones" and "star-stones." "The 'Ophite'
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Pierres
Animees et parlantes., p. 283. Theologie de la Pierre, 270.
** Saturn is
Kronos -- "Time." His swallowing Jupiter lapis may turn out one day a
prophecy. "Peter (Cephas, lapis), is the stone on which the Church of Rome
is built" we are assured. But Kronos is as sure "to swallow it" one
day, as he has swallowed Jupiter-lapis and still greater characters.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Byblius, in referring to these betyles, call them "Animated
Stones." Photius repeats what Damascius, Asclepiades, Isidorus and the
physician Eusebius had asserted before him. The latter (Eusebius) never parted
with his ophites, which he carried in his bosom, and received oracles from
them, delivered in a small voice resembling a low whistling.* Arnobius (a holy
man who, "from a Pagan had become one of the lights of the Church,"
Christians tell their readers) confesses he could never meet on his passage
with one of such stones without putting it questions, "which is answered
occasionally in a clear and sharp small voice." Where is the difference
between the Christian and the Pagan ophites, we ask?
It is also known
that the famous stone at Westminster was called liafail -- "the speaking
stone," -- which raised its voice only to name the king that had to be
chosen. Cambry (Monuments Celtiques) says he saw it when it still bore the
inscription:--**
"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'abbe Bertrand; art. on words Heraclius and Betyles.)
De Mirville --
who seeks to justify the Bible -- inquires very pertinently, why the monstrous
stones of Stonehenge were called in days of old chior-gaur (from Cor,
"dance," whence chorea, and gaur, a GIANT), or the dance of giants?
And then he sends the reader to receive his reply from the Bishop of St.
Gildas. But the authors of the Voyage dans le Comte
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The same, of
course, as the "small voice" heard by Elijah after the earthquake at
the mouth of the cave. (I Kings xix. 12.)
** The rocking,
or Logan, stones bear various names. The Celts had their clacha-brath, the
"Destiny or judgment-stone"; the divining-stone, or "stone of
the ordeal" and the oracle stone; the moving or animated stone of the
Phoenicians; the rumbling stone of the Irish. Brittany has its "pierres
branlantes" at Huelgoat. They are found in the Old and the New Worlds: in
the British Islands, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, etc., as in North
America. (See Hodson's "Letters from North America," Vol. II., p.
440.) Pliny speaks of several in Asia (Hist. Nat. Lib. I., c. 96), and
Apollonius Rhodius expatiates on the rocking stones, and says that they are
"stones placed on the apex of a tumulus, and so sensitive as to be movable
by the mind" (Ackerman's Arth. Index, p. 34), referring no doubt to the
ancient priests who moved such stones by will-power and from a distance.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 343 THE "ROCKING-STONES" IN EUROPE.
de Cornouailles,
sur les traces des giants, and of various learned works on the ruins of
Stonehenge,* Carnac and West Hoadley, give far better and more reliable
information upon this particular subject. In those regions -- true forests of
rocks -- immense monoliths are found, "some weighing over 500,000
kilograms" (Cambry). These "hinging stones" of Salisbury Plain
are believed to be the remains of a Druidical temple. But the Druids were
historical men and not Cyclopes, nor giants. Who then, if not giants, could
ever raise such masses (especially those at Carnac and West Hoadley), range
them in such symmetrical order that they should represent the planisphere, and
place them in such wonderful equipoise that they seem to hardly touch the
ground, are set in motion at the slightest touch of the finger, and would yet
resist the efforts of twenty men who should attempt to displace them.
We say, that
most of these stones are the relics of the last Atlanteans. We shall be
answered that all the geologists claim them to be of a natural origin. That, a
rock when "weathering," i.e., losing flake after flake of its
substance under influence of weather, assumes this form. That, the
"tors" in West England exhibit curious forms, also produced by this
cause. That, finally, as all scientists consider the "rocking stones to be
of purely natural origin, wind, rain, etc., causing disintegration of rocks in
layers" -- our statement will be justly denied, especially as " we
see this process of rock-modification in progress around us to-day." Let
us examine the case.
But read what
Geology has to say, and you will learn that often these gigantic masses do not
even belong to the countries wherein they are now fixed; that their geological
congeners often pertain to strata unknown in those regions and to be found only
far beyond the seas. Mr. William Tooke (French trans., Sepulture des Tartares.
Arch. VII, p. 222), speculating upon the enormous blocks of granite which are
strewn over Southern Russia and Siberia, tells the reader that there, where
they now rest, there are neither rocks nor mountains; and that they must have
been brought over "from immense distances and with prodigious
efforts." Charton (Voyageurs Anciens et Modernes, Vol. I., p. 230) speaks
of a specimen of such rock "from Ireland," which had been submitted
to the analysis of an eminent English geologist, who assigned to it a foreign
origin, "most probably African."
This is a
strange coincidence, as Irish tradition attributes the origin of her circular
stones to a Sorcerer who brought them from Africa. De Mirville sees in that
sorcerer "an accursed Hamite." We see in him a
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See, among
others, "History of Paganism in Caledonia," by Dr. Th. A. Wise,
F.R.A.S., etc.
** Ham was no
more a Titan or Giant than Shem and Japhet. They are either all Arkite Titans,
as Faber shows them, or myths.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
"Men,"
says Cambry, naively, "have nothing to do with it . . . for never could
human power and industry undertake anything of this kind. Nature alone has
accomplished it all (!!) and Science will demonstrate it some day" (!!)
(p. 88). Nevertheless, it is a human, though gigantic power, which has
accomplished it, and no more "nature" alone than god or devil.
"Science,"
having undertaken to demonstrate that even the mind and Spirit of man are
simply the production of blind forces, is quite capable of accepting the task.
It may come out some fine morning, and seek to prove that nature alone has
marshalled the gigantic rocks of Stonehenge, traced their position with
mathematical precision, given them the form of the Dendera planisphere and of
the signs of the Zodiac, and brought stones weighing over one million of pounds
flying from Africa and Asia to England and Ireland!
It is true that
Cambry recanted later on. "I had believed for a long time," he says,
"that Nature alone could produce those wonders . . . . but I recant . . .
. chance is unable to create such marvellous combinations . . . . and those who
placed the said rocks in equipoise, are the same who have raised the moving
masses of the pond of Huelgoat, near Concarneau. . . . ." Dr. John Watson,
quoted by the same author "Antiquites Celtiques," p. 99, says, when speaking
of the moving rocks, or Rocking-Stones situated on the slope of Golcar (the
"Enchanter"): "The astonishing movement of those masses poised
in equilibrium made the Celts compare them to gods." . . . .
In
"Stonehenge" (Flinders Petrie) it is said that "Stonehenge is
built of the stone of the district, a red sandstone, or 'sarsen' stone, locally
called 'grey wethers.' But some of the stones, especially those which are said
to have been devoted to astronomical purposes, have been brought from a distance,
probably the North of Ireland."
To close, the
reflections of a man of Science, in an article upon the subject published in
1850 in the Revue Archeologique (p. 473), are worthy of being quoted. Says the
paper, concerning the rocking stones:--
"Every stone
is a block whose weight would try the most powerful machines. There are, in a
word, scattered throughout the globe, masses, before which the word materials
seems to remain inexplicable, at the sight of which imagination is confounded,
and that had to be endowed with a name as colossal as the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Diodorus
Siculus asserts that in the days of Isis, all men were of a vast stature, who
were denominated by the Hellenes Giants. [Gk chars] "[Oi d'en Aiguptoi
muthologousi kata ten Isidos helikian gegonenai tinas polusomatous]."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.' "*
For once we
agree with our friends and foes, the Roman Catholics, and ask whether such
prodigies of statics and equilibrium, applied to masses weighing millions of
pounds, can be the work of Palaeolithic savages, of cave-men, taller than the
average man in our century, yet ordinary mortals as we are? It is no use for
our purpose to refer to the various traditions attached to the rocking-stones.
Still, it may be as well to remind the English reader of Giraldus Cambrensis,
who speaks of such a stone on the Isle of Mona, which returned to its place,
every effort made to keep it elsewhere notwithstanding. At the time of the
conquest of Ireland by Henry II., a Count Hugo Cestrensis, desiring to convince
himself of the reality of the fact, tied the Mona stone to a far bigger one and
had them thrown into the sea. On the following morning it was found in its
accustomed place. . . The learned William of Salisbury warrants the fact by
testifying to its presence in the wall of a church where he had seen it in
1554. . . And this reminds one of what Pliny said of the stone left by the
Argonauts at Cyzicum, which the Cyzicans had placed in the Prytanea
"whence it ran away several times, which forced them to lead it" (Nat.
Hist., XXXVI., p. 592) . . . Here we have immense stones stated by all
antiquity to be "living, moving, speaking and self-perambulating."
They were also capable, it seems, of making people run away, since they have
been called routers ("to put to flight," to rout) and Des Mousseaux
shows them all to be prophetic stones and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "It is
difficult," writes Creuzer, "not to suspect in the structures of
Tiryns and Mycenae planetary forces supposed to be moved by celestial powers,
analogous to the famous Dactyles." (Pelasges et Cyclopes). To this day
Science is ignorant on the subject of the Cyclopes. They are supposed to have
built all the so-called "Cyclopean" works whose erection necessitated
several regiments of Giants, and -- they were only seventy-seven in all (about
one hundred, Creuzer thinks). They are called "Builders," and
Occultism calls them the INITIATORS, who, initiating some Pelasgians, thus laid
the foundation stone of true MASONRY. Herodotus associates the Cyclops with
Perseus "the son of an Assyrian demon" (I. VI. p. 54). Raoul Rochette
found that Palaemonius, the Cyclops, to whom a sanctuary was raised, "was
the Tyrian Hercules." Anyhow, he was the builder of the sacred columns of
Gadir, covered with mysterious characters to which Apollonius of Tyana was the
only one in his age to possess the key; and with figures which may still be
found on the walls of Ellora, the gigantic ruins of the temple of Viswakarma,
"the builder and artificer of the Gods."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, "Fetichisme")*
This is history,
the Past of prehistoric times, warranting the same in later ages. The
Dracontia, sacred to the moon and the serpent, were the more ancient
"Rocks of Destiny" of older nations, whose motion, or rocking, was a
code perfectly clear to the initiated priests, who alone had the key to this
ancient reading. Vormius and Olaius Magnus show that it was according to the
orders of the oracle, "whose voice spoke through the immense rocks raised
by the colossal powers of ancient giants," that the kings of Scandinavia
were elected. "In India and Persia," says Pliny, "it is she (the
Persian Oitzoe) whom the magi had to consult for the election of their
sovereigns" (Nat. Hist., lxxxvii., chap. LIV.); and he describes (in chap.
XXXVIII., 1. ii.) a rock overshadowing Harpasa, in Asia, and placed in such a
manner that "a single finger
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Messrs.
Richardson and Barth are said to have been amazed at finding in the Desert of
Sahara the same trilithic and raised stones they had seen in Asia, Circassia,
Etruria, and in all the North of Europe. Mr. Rivett-Carnac, B.C.S., of
Allahabad, the distinguished Archaeologist, shows the same amazement in finding
the description given by Sir J. Simpson of the cuplike markings on stones and
rocks in England, Scotland, and other Western countries -- "offering an
extraordinary resemblance" to "the marks on the trap Boulders which
encircle the Barrows near Nagpur" (the city of Snakes). The eminent
scholar saw in this "another and very extraordinary addition to the mass
of evidence. . . that a branch of the nomadic tribes, who swept at an early
date over Europe, penetrated into India also." We say Lemuria, Atlantis
and her giants, and the earliest races of the Fifth Root-Race had all a hand in
these betyles, lithoi, and "magic" stones in general. The cup marks
noticed by Sir J. Simpson, and the "holes scooped out on the face" of
rocks and monuments found by Mr. Rivett-Carnac "of different sizes varying
from six inches to an inch-and-a-half in diameter, and in depth from one to
one-and-a-half inch . . . . . . generally arranged in perpendicular lines
presenting many permutations in the number and size and arrangement of the
cups" -- are simply written RECORDS of the oldest races. Whosoever
examines with attention the drawings made of such marks in the
"Archaeological Notes on Ancient Sculpturing on Rocks in Kumaon, India,
etc.," will find in it the most primitive style of marking or recording;
something of the sort having been adopted by the American inventors of the
Morse code of telegraphic writing, which reminds us of the Ahgam writing, a
combination of Iong and short strokes, as Mr. Rivett-Carnac describes it
"cut on sandstone." Sweden, Norway, and Scandinavia are full of such
written records, the Runic characters having followed the cup-marks and long
and short strokes. In "Johannes Magnus' Infolio" one sees the
representation of the demi-god, the giant Starchaterus (Starkad, the pupil of
Kroszharsgrani, the Magician) who holds under each arm a huge stone covered
with Runic characters; and Starkad, according to Scandinavian legend, went to
Ireland and performed marvellous deeds in the North and South, East and West.
(See "Asgard and the Gods.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* As it is, we know that they were universally used during long
prehistoric ages, and all for the same purposes of prophecy and MAGIC. E. Biot,
a member of the Institute of France, published in his Antiquites de France,
Vol. ix., an article showing the Chatam peramba (the Field of Death, or ancient
burial ground in Malabar), to be identical with the old tombs at Carnac --
"a prominence and a central tomb." . . . "Bones are found in
them (the tombs)," he says, "and Mr. Hillwell tells us that some of
these are enormous, the natives (of Malabar) calling the tombs the dwellings of
Rakshasas (giants)." Several stone circles, "considered the work of
the Panch Pandava (five Pandus), as all such monuments are in India, so
numerous in that country," when opened by the direction of Rajah
Vasariddi, "were found to contain human bones of a very large size."
(T. A. Wise, in "History of Paganism in Caledonia," p. 36).
Again, de
Mirville is right in his generalization, if not in his conclusions. As the long
cherished theory that the Dracontia are mostly witnesses to "great natural
geological commotions" (Charlton), and "are the work of Nature"
(Cambry) is now exploded, his remarks are very just. "Before the
impossibility of such a theory is asserted, we advise Science to reflect . . .
. and, above all, no longer to class Titans and Giants among primitive legends:
for their works are there, under our eyes, and those rocking stones will
oscillate on their basis to the end of the world to help them to see clearer
and realise once for all, that one is not altogether a candidate for Charenton
for believing in wonders certified to by the whole of Antiquity"
("Fetichisme," p. 288).
It is just what
we can never repeat too often, though the voices of both Occultists and Roman
Catholics are raised in the desert. Nevertheless, no one can fail to see that
Science is as inconsistent, to say the least, in its modern speculations, as
was ancient and mediaeval theology in its interpretations of the so-called
Revelation. Science would have men descend from the pithecoid ape -- a
transformation requiring millions of years -- and yet fears to make mankind
older than 100,000 years! Science teaches the gradual transformation of
species,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Charton, the
Author of "Voyageurs anciens et modernes," quoted by de Mirville.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Haeckel that (objective) life on our globe "is a logical postulate of
Scientific natural history," but add that the rejection of a like
Spiritual involution, from within without, of invisible subjective Spirit-life
-- eternal and a Principle in Nature -- is more illogical, if possible, than to
say that the Universe and all in it has been gradually built by blind forces
inherent in matter, without any external help.
Suppose an
Occultist were to claim that the first grand organ of a cathedral had come
originally into being in the following manner. First, there was a progressive
and gradual elaboration in Space of an organizable material, which resulted in
the production of a state of matter named organic PROTEIN. Then, under the
influence of incident forces, those states having been thrown into a phase of
unstable equilibrium, they slowly and majestically evolved into and resulted in
new combinations of carved and polished wood, of brass pins and staples, of
leather and ivory, wind-pipes and bellows. After which, having adapted all its
parts into one harmonious and symmetrical machine, the organ suddenly pealed
forth Mozart's Requiem. This was followed by a Sonata of Beethoven, etc., ad
infinitum; its keys playing of themselves and the wind blowing into the pipes
by its own inherent force and fancy. . . . . What would Science say to such a
theory? Yet, it is precisely in such wise that the materialistic savants tell
us that the Universe was formed, with its millions of beings, and man, its
spiritual crown.
Whatever may
have been the real inner thought of Mr. Herbert Spencer, when writing on the
subject of the gradual transformation of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
45. THE FIRST
GREAT WATERS CAME. THEY SWALLOWED THE SEVEN GREAT ISLANDS (a).
-------
46. ALL HOLY
SAVED, THE UNHOLY DESTROYED. WITH THEM MOST OF THE HUGE ANIMALS PRODUCED FROM
THE SWEAT OF THE EARTH (b).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 . . . . ."
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 351 THE "GREAT DRAGONS" AND SERPENTS.
STANZA XII.
THE FIFTH RACE
AND ITS DIVINE INSTRUCTORS.
-------
§§ (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.
---------------------
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
[[proselenoi]] -- older than the moon -- and of the people of Attica, who
claimed that they had existed before the sun appeared in heaven, that we may
disparage, not their undeniable antiquity. Nor can we laugh at the universal
belief that we had giant ancestors. The fact that the bones of the mammoth and
mastodon, and, in one case, those of a gigantic salamander, have been mistaken
for human bones, does not make away with the difficulty that, of all the
mammalians, man is the only one whom science will not allow to have dwarfed
down, like all other animal frames, from the giant homo diluvii to the creature
between 5 and 6 feet that he is now.
But the
"Serpents of Wisdom" have preserved their records well, and the
history of the human evolution is traced in heaven as it is traced on
underground walls. Humanity and the stars are bound together indissolubly,
because of the intelligences that rule the latter.
Modern
symbologists may scoff at this and call it "fancy," but "it is
unquestionable that the Deluge has (ever) been associated in the legends of
some Eastern peoples not only with the Pyramids, but also with the
constellations," writes Mr. Staniland Wake ("The Great
Pyramid"). The "Old Dragon" is identical with the "great
Flood," says Mr. Proctor (in "Knowledge," Vol. I., p. 243):
"We know that in the past the constellation of the Dragon was at the pole,
or boss, of the celestial sphere. In stellar temples . . . the Dragon would be
the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, mediaeval, and modern works that have
treated of these subjects. All such evidence has now to be gathered in,
collated and brought together in better order, so as to compel the attention of
the reader to this wealth of historical proofs. And as the manifold meaning of
the weird symbol -- so often referred to and suggestive of the "tempter of
man" in the orthodox light of the church -- can never be too strongly
insisted upon, it seems more advisable to exhaust the subject by every
available proof at this juncture, even at the risk of repetition. The Titans
and Kabirs have been 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.
-------
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"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 AElianus, treating in his "De Natura Animalium" of these
Ophidean symbols, makes certain remarks which show that he understood well the
nature of this most ancient of symbols. Thus he most pertinently explains with
regard to the above Homeric verse -- "For the Dragon, while sacred and to
be worshipped, has within himself something still more of the divine nature of
which it is better (for others?) to remain in ignorance" (Book xi., ch.
17).
This
"Dragon" having a septenary meaning, the highest and the lowest may
be given. The former is identical with the "Self-born," the Logos
(the Hindu Aja). He was the second person of the Trinity, the SON, with the
Christian Gnostics called the Naasenians, or Serpent-Worshippers. His symbol
was the constellation of the Dragon.* Its seven "stars" are the seven
stars held in the hand of the "Alpha and Omega" in Revelation. In its
most terrestrial meaning, the term "Dragon" was applied to the Wise
men.
This portion of
the religious symbolism of antiquity is very abstruse and mysterious, and may
remain incomprehensible to the profane. In our modern day it so jars on the
Christian ear that it can hardly escape, all civilization notwithstanding,
being regarded as a direct denunciation of the most cherished Christian dogmas,
the subject of which required, to do it justice, the pen and genius of Milton,
whose poetical fiction has now taken root in the Church as a revealed dogma.
Did the allegory
of the Dragon and his supposed conqueror in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As shown by H.
Lizeray in the "Trinite Chretienne Devoilee" -- placed between the
immutable Father (the Pole, a fixed Point) and mutable matter, the Dragon
transmits to the latter the influences received by him from the Pole, whence
his name -- the Verbum.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------
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" (Peratae Gnostics); the
"Good and Perfect Serpent," the Messiah of the Naaseni, whose symbol
in Heaven is Draco.
But one ought to
discriminate between the characters of this symbol. For instance: Zoroastrian
Esotericism is identical with that of the Secret Doctrine; and when, as an
example, we read in the Vendidad complaints uttered against the
"Serpent," whose bites have transformed the beautiful, eternal spring
of Airyana-Vaego, changing it into winter, generating disease and death, at the
same time as mental and psychic consumption, every occultist knows that the
Serpent alluded to is the north pole, as also the pole of the heavens.* The
latter produces the seasons according to the angle at which it penetrates the
centre of the earth. The two axes were no more parallel; hence the eternal
spring of Airyana Vaego by the good river Daitya had disappeared, and "the
Aryan Magi had to emigrate to Sagdiani" -- say the exoteric accounts. But
the esoteric teaching states that the pole had passed through the equator, and
that the "land of bliss" of the Fourth Race, its inheritance from the
Third, had now become the region of desolation and woe. This alone ought to be
an incontrovertible proof of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian Scriptures.
The Neo-Aryans of the post-diluvian age could, of course, hardly recognise the
mountains, on the summits of which their forefathers had met before the Flood,
and conversed with the pure "Yazathas" (celestial Spirits of the
Elements), whose life and food they had once shared. As shown by Eckstein
(Revue Archeologique, 8th year, 1885), "the Vendidad seems to point out a
great change in the atmosphere of central Asia; strong volcanic eruptions and
the collapse of a whole range of mountains in the neighbourhood of the
Kara-Korum chain."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Symbolized by
the Egyptians under the form of a Serpent with a hawk's head.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Patala, the nether region, was supposed to lie in the South. As each symbol in
esoteric philosophy has seven keys, geographically, Meru and Patala have one
significance and represent localities; while astronomically, they have another,
and mean "the two poles," which meanings ended by their being often
rendered in exoteric sectarianism -- the "Mountain" and the
"Pit," or Heaven and Hell. If we hold at present only to the
astronomical and geographical significance, it may be found that the ancients
knew the topography and nature of the Arctic and Antarctic regions better than
any of our modern astronomers; they had reasons, and good ones for naming one
the "Mountain" and the other the "Pit." As the author just
quoted half explains, Helion and Acheron meant nearly the same: "Heli-on
is the Sun in the highest" (Helios, Heli-on, the "most high");
"and Acheron is 32 deg. above the pole, and 32 below it, the allegorical
river being thus supposed to touch the northern horizon in the latitude of 32
degrees. The vast concave, that is for ever hidden from our sight and which
surrounded the southern pole, being therefore called the PIT, while observing,
toward the Northern pole that a certain circuit in the heavens always appeared
above the horizon -- they called it the Mountain. As Meru is the high abode of
the Gods, these were said to ascend and descend periodically; by which
(astronomically) the Zodiacal gods were meant, the passing of the original
North Pole of the Earth to the South Pole of the heaven." "In that
age," adds the author of that curious work, the "Sphinxiad" and
of "Urania's Key to the Revelations" -- "at noon, the ecliptic
would be parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac would descend from
the North Pole to the north horizon; crossing the eight coils of the Serpent
(eight sidereal years, or over 200,000 solar years), which would seem like an
imaginary ladder with eight staves reaching from the earth up to the pole, i.e.,
the throne of Jove. Up this ladder, then, the Gods, i.e., the signs of the
Zodiac, ascended and descended. (Jacob's ladder and the angels) . . . . It is
more than 400,000 years since the Zodiac formed the sides of this ladder."
. . . .
This is an
ingenious explanation, even if it is not altogether free from occult heresy.
Yet it is nearer the truth than many of a more scientific
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 -- "Judaea gens, radix stultorum."
But the profane,
and especially the Christian fanatics, ever in search of scientific
corroboration for their dead-letter texts, will persist in seeing in the
celestial pole the true Serpent of Genesis, Satan, the Enemy of mankind,
instead of what it is -- a cosmic metaphor. When the gods are said to forsake
the earth, it does not only mean the gods, protectors and instructors, but also
the minor gods -- the regents of the Zodiacal signs. Yet, the former, as actual
and existing Entities which gave birth to, nursed, and instructed mankind in
its early youth, appear in every Scripture, in that of the Zoroastrians as much
as in the Hindu Gospels. Ormazd, or Ahura-Mazda, the "Lord of
Wisdom," is the synthesis of the Amshaspends (or Amesha-Spenta -- "Immortal
Benefactors"),* the "Word," however, or the Logos and its six
highest aspects in Mazdyanism. These "Immortal Benefactors" are
described in Zamyad yasht as the "Amesha-Spentas, the shining, having
efficacious eyes, great, helpful . . . . imperishable and pure which are all
seven of like mind, like speech, all seven doing alike . . . . which are the
creators and destroyers of the creatures of Ahura-Mazda, their creators and
overseers, their protectors and rulers . . . ."
These few lines
alone indicate the dual and even the triple character of the Amshaspends, our
Dhyan-Chohans or the "Serpents of Wisdom." They are identical with,
and yet separate from Ormazd (Ahura-Mazda). They are also the Angels of the
Stars of the Christians -- the Stary-azatas of the Zoroastrians -- or again the
seven planets (including the sun) of every religion.** The epithet -- "the
shining having efficacious eyes" -- proves it. This on the physical and
sidereal planes. On the spiritual, they are the divine powers of Ahura-Mazda;
but on the astral or psychic plane again, they are the "Builders,"
the "watchers," the Pitar (fathers), and the first Preceptors of
mankind.
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Also
translated as "blissful Immortals" by Dr. W. Geiger; but the first is
more correct.
** These
"seven" became the eight, the Ogdoad, of the later materialized
religions, the seventh, or the highest principle, being no longer the pervading
Spirit, the Synthesis, but becoming an anthropomorphic number, or additional
unit.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Narayana, and Gautama gives a series of his previous births; and why the
former, especially, being "the very supreme Brahma," is yet called
Amsamsavatara -- "a part of a part" only of the Supreme on Earth.
Finally, why Osiris is a great God, and at the same time a "prince on
Earth," who reappears in Thoth-Hermes, and why Jesus (in Hebrew, Joshua)
of Nazareth is recognised, cabalistically, in Joshua, the Son of Nun, as well
as in other personages. The esoteric doctrine explains it by saying that each
of these (as many others) had first appeared on earth as one of the seven
powers of the LOGOS, individualized as a God or "Angel" (messenger);
then, mixed with matter, they had re-appeared in turn as great sages and
instructors who "taught the Fifth Race," after having instructed the
two preceding races, had ruled during the Divine Dynasties, and had finally sacrificed
themselves, to be reborn under various circumstances for the good of mankind,
and for its salvation at certain critical periods; until in their last
incarnations they had become truly only "the parts of a part" on
earth, though de facto the One Supreme in Nature.
This is the
metaphysics of Theogony. And, as every "Power" among the SEVEN has
(once individualized) in his charge one of the elements of creation, and rules
over it,* hence the many meanings in every symbol, which, unless interpreted
according to the esoteric methods, generally lead to an inextricable confusion.
Does the Western
Kabalist -- generally an opponent of the Eastern Occultist -- require a proof?
Let him open Eliphas Levi's Histoire de la Magic," p. 53, and carefully
examine his "Grand Symbole Kabalistique" of the Zohar. He will find,
on the engraving given, a white man standing erect and a black woman upside
down, i.e., standing on her head, her legs passing under the extended arms of
the male figure, and protruding behind his shoulders, while their hands join at
an angle on each side. Eliphas Levi makes of it, God and Nature; or God,
"light," mirrored inversely in "Nature and Matter,"
darkness. Kabalistically and symbolically he is right; but only so far as
emblematical cosmogony goes. Nor has he invented the symbol any more
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These elements
are:-- The cosmic, the terrene, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, the
aqueous, and finally the human -- in their physical, spiritual, and psychic
aspects.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* But they represented also the poles inverted, in
consequence of the great inclination of the axis, bringing each time as a
result the displacement of the Oceans, the submersion of the polar lands, and
the consequent upheaval of new continents in the equatorial regions, and vice
versa. These Kabirim were the "Deluge" gods.
This may help us
to get at the key of the seemingly hopeless confusion among the numbers of
names and titles given to one and the same gods, and classes of gods. Faber
showed already, at the beginning of this century, the identity of the
Corybantes, Curetes, Dioscuri, Anactes, Dii Magni, Idei Dactyli, Lares,
Penates, Manes,** Titans, and Aletae with the KABIRI. And we have shown that
the latter were the same as the Manus, the Rishis and our Dhyan Chohans, who
incarnated in the Elect of the Third and Fourth Races. Thus, while in Theogony
the Kabiri-Titans were seven great gods: cosmically and astronomically the
Titans were called Atlantes, because, perhaps, as Faber says, they were
connected
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Who adds that
the Egyptians had various ways of representing the angles of the Poles. Also in
Perry's View of the Levant there is "a figure representing the South Pole
of the Earth in the constellation of the Harp," in which the poles appear
like two straight rods, surmounted with hawks' wings, but they were also often
represented as serpents with heads of hawks, one at each end.
** Faber and
Bishop Cumberland would make them all the later pagan personifications, as the
former writer has it, of "the Noetic Ark, and no other than the Patriarch
(Noah) and his family" (!) See his "Kabiri," Vol. I., 136;
because, we are told, "after the Deluge in commemoration of the event, the
pious Noachidae had established a religious festival, which was, later on,
corrupted by their impious descendants; demons or hero-gods; and at length
unblushing obscenity usurped the name and garb of religion" (Vol. I., p.
10.). Now this is indeed putting an extinguisher upon the human reasoning
powers, not only of antiquity, but even of our present generations. Reverse the
statement, and explain after the words "Noah and his family" that
what is meant by that patriarch and family is simply the Jewish version of a
Samothracian mystery, of Saturn, or Kronos-Sadic and his Sons, and then we may
say Amen.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 361 WHO WERE ENOCH AND THE OTHERS?
(a) with
At-al-as "the divine Sun," and (b) with tit "the deluge."
But this, if true, is only the exoteric version. Esoterically, the meaning of
their symbols depends on the appellation, or title, used. The seven mysterious,
awe-inspiring great gods -- the Dioscuri,* the deities surrounded with the
darkness of occult nature -- become the Idei (or Idaeic finger) with the
adept-healer by metals. The true etymology of the name lares (now signifying
"ghosts") must be sought in the Etruscan word "lars,"
"conductor," "leader." Sanchoniathon translates the word
Aletae as fire worshippers, and Tabor believes it derived from Al-Orit,
"the god of fire." Both are right, as in both cases it is a reference
to the Sun (the highest God), toward whom the planetary gods
"gravitate" (astronomically and allegorically) and whom they worship.
As Lares, they are truly the Solar Deities, though Faber's etymology, who says
that "lar" is a contraction of "El-Ar," the solar deity, is
not very correct. They are the "lares," the conductors and leaders of
men. As Aletae, they were the seven planets -- astronomically; and as Lares, the
regents of the same, our protectors and rulers -- mystically. For purposes of
exoteric or phallic worship, as also cosmically, they were the Kabiri, their
attributes being recognised in these two capacities by the name of the temples
to which they respectively belonged, and those of their priests. They all
belonged, however, to the Septenary creative and informing groups of Dhyan
Chohans. The Sabeans, who worshipped the "regents of the Seven
planets" as the Hindus do their Rishis, held Seth and his son Hermes
(Enoch or Enos) as the highest among the planetary gods. Seth and Enos were
borrowed from the Sabeans and then disfigured by the Jews (exoterically); but
the truth can still be traced about them even in Genesis.** Seth is the
"progenitor" of those early men of the Third Race in whom the
"Planetary" angels had incarnated -- a Dhyan Chohan himself, who
belonged to the informing gods; and Enos (Hanoch or Enoch) or Hermes, was said
to be his son -- because it was a generic name for all the early Seers
("Enoichion"). Thence the worship. The Arabic writer Soyuti says that
the earliest records mention Seth, or Set, as the founder of Sabeanism; and
therefore that the pyramids which embody the planetary system were regarded as
the place of sepulchre of both Seth and Idris (Hermes or Enoch), (See Vyse,
"Operations," Vol. II., p. 358); that thither Sabeans proceeded
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Who became
later on, with the Greeks, limited only to Castor and Pollux. But in the days
of Lemuria, the Dioscuri, the "Egg-born," were the Seven Dhyan
Chohans (Agnishwatta-Kumara) who incarnated in the Seven Elect of the Third
Race.
** Clement of
Alexandria recognized the astronomical significance of chapter xxv. et seq. of
Exodus. According to the Mosaic doctrine, he says that the seven planets help
in the generation of terrestrial things. The two cherubs standing on the two
sides of the sacred tetragrammaton represent the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Agathodaemon and the other of Hermes" (Vyse, Vol. II., p. 342).
"Agathodaemon was none other than Seth, and, according to some writers,
Hermes was his son," adds Mr. Staniland Wake in "The Great
Pyramid," p. 57.
Thus, while in
Samothrace and the oldest Egyptian temples they were the great Cosmic Gods (the
seven and the forty-nine Sacred Fires), in the Grecian fanes their rites became
mostly phallic, therefore to the profane, obscene. In the latter case they were
3 and 4, or 7 -- the male and female principles -- (the crux ansata); this
division showing why some classical writers held that they were only three,
while others named four. And these were -- the Kabiri -- Axieros (in his female
aspect, Demeter); Axio-Kersa (Persephone)*; Axiokersos (Pluto or Hades); and
Kadmos or Kadmilos (Hermes -- not the ithyphallic Hermes mentioned by Herodotus
(II. 51) but "he of the sacred legend," explained only during the
Samothracian mysteries). This identification, due, according to the Scholiast
Apollon (Rh. I. 217), to an indiscretion of Mnaseas, is none at all, as names
alone do not reveal much. There were still others again who maintained, being
as right in their way, that there were only two Kabiri. These were,
esoterically, the two Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, and exoterically, Jupiter
and Bacchus. The two personified the terrestrial poles, geodesically; the
terrestrial, and the pole of the heavens -- astronomically, as also the
physical and the spiritual man. The story of Semele and Jupiter and the birth
of Bacchus, the Bimater, with all the circumstances attending it, needs only to
be read esoterically to understand the allegory. The parts played in the event
by the fire, water, earth, etc., in the many versions, will show how "the
father of the gods"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is a
curious idea -- yet one not very far from the truth, perhaps -- that
speculation of Mackey, the self-made Adept of Norwich, found in his
"Mythological Astronomy." He says that the Kabiri named Axieros and
Axiokersa derived their names (a) from Kab or Cab, a measure, and from Urim,
the heavens: the Kabirim being thus "a measure of the heavens"; and
(b) that their distinctive names, implying the principle of generation,
referred to the sexes. For, "the word sex was formerly understood by aix;
which has now settled . . . . into sex." And he refers to
"Encyclopaedia Londinus" at the word "aspiration." Now if
we give the aspirated sound to Axieros, it would be Saxieros; and the other
pole would be Saxiokersa. The two poles would thus become the generators of the
other powers of nature -- they would be the parents: therefore the most
powerful gods.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 363 THE POLES, THE "HEAVENLY MEASURE."
and the
"merry God of the wine" were also made to personify the two
terrestrial Poles. The telluric, metalline, magnetic, electric and the fiery
elements are all so many allusions and references to the cosmic and astronomic
character of the diluvian tragedy. In astronomy, the poles are indeed the
"heavenly measure" (vide note supra); and so are the Kabiri Dioscuri,
as will be shown, and the Kabiri-Titans, to whom Diodorus ascribes the
invention of fire* and the art of manufacturing iron. Moreover, Pausanias shows
that the original Kabiric deity was Prometheus. (I. ix. p. 751.)
But the fact
that, astronomically, the Titans-Kabirim were also the generators and
regulators of the seasons, and cosmically the great Volcanic Energies, the gods
presiding over all the metals and terrestrial works, does not prevent them from
being, in their original divine characters, the beneficent Entities who,
symbolized in Prometheus, brought light to the world, and endowed humanity with
intellect and reason. They are pre-eminently in every theogony -- especially in
the Hindu -- the sacred divine fires, 3, 7, or 49, according as the allegory
demands it. Their very names prove it, as they are the Agni-putra (Sons of the
Fire) in India, and the genii of the fire under numerous names in Greece and
elsewhere. Welcker, Maury, and now Decharme, show the name Kabeiron meaning
"the powerful through fire," from the Greek word [[kaio]] "to
burn." The Semitic Kabirim, "the powerful, the mighty, and the
great," answering to the Greek [[megaloi dunatoi]], are later epithets.
They were universally worshipped, and their origin is lost in the night of
time. Yet whether propitiated in Phrygia, Phoenicia, the Troad, Thrace, Egypt,
Lemnos or Sicily, their cult was always connected with fire; their temples ever
built in the most volcanic localities, and in exoteric worship they belonged to
Chthonian divinities. Therefore Christianity has made of them infernal gods.
They are truly
"the great, beneficent and powerful Gods," as Cassius Hermone calls
them (See Macrob. Sat. I., iii., c. 4, p. 376). At Thebes, Kore and Demeter,
the Kabirim, had a sanctuary (Pausan. IX. 22; 5), and at Memphis, the Kabiri
had a temple so sacred, that none, excepting the priests, were suffered to
enter their holy precincts (Herodotus I. ii., c. 37). But we must not lose
sight, at the same time, of the fact that the title of Kabiri was a generic
one; that the Kabiri (the mighty gods as well as mortals), were of both sexes,
as also terrestrial, celestial and kosmic. That, while in their later capacity
of the Rulers of sidereal and terrestrial powers, a purely geological
phenomenon (as it is now
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The word
"guebra" comes from Kabiri, gabiri, and means Persian ancient
fire-worshippers, or Parsis. Kabiri became gabiri and then remained as an
appellation of the Zoroastrians in Persia. (See Hyde's "De Religio
Persarum," cap. 29.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Lu-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 Kaempfer and Faber spell "Maurigosima," for
some mysterious phonetic reasons of their own. Kaempfer, in his
"Japan" (Appendix, p. 13), gives the tradition: The island, owing to
the iniquity of its giants, sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Peiru-un, the
king, the Chinese Noah, escapes alone with his family owing to a warning of the
gods through two idols. It is that pious prince and his descendants who have
peopled China. The Chinese traditions speak of the divine dynasties of Kings as
much as those of any other nations.
At the same time
there is not an old fragment but shows belief in a multiform and even
multigeneric evolution -- spiritual, psychic, intellectual and physical -- of
human beings, just as given in the present work. A few of these claims have now
to be considered.
Our races --
they all show -- have sprung from divine races, by whatever name they are
called. Whether we deal with the Indian Rishis or Pitris; with the Chinese
Chim-nang and Tchan-gy -- their "divine man" and demi-gods; with the
Akkadian Dingir and Mul-lil -- the creative god and the "Gods of the
ghost-world"; with the Egyptian Isis-Osiris and Thot; with the Hebrew
Elohim, or again with Manco Capac and his Peruvian progeny -- the story varies
nowhere. Every nation has Amshaspends* (six exoterically), ten and seven
Chaldean Anedots,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
Amshaspends are six -- if Ormazd, their chief and Logos, is excluded. But in
the secret doctrine he is the seventh and highest, just as Phtah is the seventh
Kabir among the Kabiri.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 abode* and reign on Earth,
teaching mankind Astronomy, Architecture, and all the other sciences that have
come down to us. These Beings appear first as "gods" and Creators;
then they merge in nascent man, to finally emerge as "divine-Kings and Rulers."
But this fact has been gradually forgotten. As Bosuage shows, the Egyptians
themselves confessed that science flourished in their country only since
Isis-Osiris, whom they continue to adore as gods, "though they had become
Princes in human form." And he adds of Osiris-Isis (the divine
androgyne:-- "It is said that this Prince (Isis-Osiris) built cities in
Egypt, stopped the overflowing of the Nile; invented agriculture, the use of
the vine, music, astronomy, and geometry."
When Abul-Feda
says in his "Historia Anteislamitica" (Fleisher, p. 16) that the
Sabean language was established by Seth and Edris (Enoch) -- he means by
"Sabean language" astronomy. In the "Melelwa Nohil" (MS. 47
in Nic. Cat.) Hermes is called the disciple of Agathodaemon. And in another
account (See Col. Vyse's 2nd Vol. of the "Pyramids of Ghizeh," p.
364, MS. 785, Uri's Cat.) Agathodaemon is mentioned as a "King of
Egypt." Celepas Geraldinus gives curious traditions about Henoch. He calls
him the "divine giant." In the "Book of the various names of the
Nile," the same author (the historian Ahmed-Ben-Yusouf Eltiphas) tells us
of the belief among the Semitic Arabs that Seth (become later the Egyptian
Typhon, Set), had been one of the seven angels (or Patriarchs in the Bible):
then he became a mortal and Adam's son, after which he communicated the gift of
prophecy and astronomical science to Jared, who passed it to his son Henoch.
But Henoch (Idris) "the author of thirty books, was Sabaean by
origin" (i.e., belonging to the Saba, "a Host"); "having
established the rites and ceremonies of primitive worship, he went to the East,
where he constructed 140 cities, of which Edessa was the least important, then
returned to Egypt where he became its King." Thus, he is identified with
Hermes. But there were five Hermes -- or rather one, who appeared -- as some
Manus and Rishis did -- in several different characters. In the Burham-i-Kati
he is mentioned as "Hormig," a name of the planet Mercury or Budha;
and Wednes-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the Purana
it is identified with Vishnu's or Brahma's Sveta Dwipa of Mount Meru.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 367 HERMES IN ASTRONOMY AND ELSEWHERE.
day was sacred
both to Hermes and Thot. The Hermes of Oriental tradition, worshipped at
Phineata and said to have fled after the death of Argus into Egypt, civilized
it under the name of Thoth. But under whichever of these characters, he is
always credited with having transferred all the sciences from latent to active
potency, i.e., with having been the first to teach magic to Egypt and to
Greece, before the days of Magna Graecia, and when the Greeks were not even Hellenes.
Not only
Herodotus -- the "father of History" -- tells us of the marvellous
dynasties of gods that preceded the reign of mortals, followed by the dynasties
of demi-gods, Heroes, and finally men, but the whole series of classics support
him; Diodorus, Eratosthenes, Plato, Manetho, etc., etc., repeat the same, and
never vary the order given.
"It is,
indeed," as Creuzer shows:--
"From the
spheres of the stars wherein dwell the gods of light that wisdom descends to
the inferior spheres." "In the system of the ancient priests
(Hierophants and Adepts) all things without exception, gods, the genii, manes
(souls), the whole world, are conjointly developed in Space and duration. The
pyramid may be considered as the symbol of this magnificent hierarchy of
Spirits. . . . "*
There were more
efforts made by the modern historians (French Academicians, like Renan,
chiefly) to suppress truth by ignoring the ancient annals of divine Kings, than
is strictly consistent with honesty. But M. Renan could never be more unwilling
than was Eratosthenes 260 years B.C. to accept the unpalatable fact; and yet
the latter found himself obliged to recognise its truth. For this, the great
astronomer is treated with great contempt by his colleagues 2,000 years later. Manetho
became with them "a superstitious priest born and bred in the atmosphere
of other lying priests of Heliopolis" (Freret). "All those historians
and priests," justly remarks the demonologist, de Mirville, "so
veracious when repeating stories of human kings and men, suddenly become
extremely suspicious no sooner do they go back to their gods." . . . But
there is the synchronistic table of Abydos, which, thanks to the genius of
Champollion, has now vindicated the good faith of the priests of Egypt (Manetho's
above all), and that of Ptolemy. In the Turin papyrus, the most remarkable of
all, in the words of the Egyptologist, de Rouge:--
". . .
Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his own eyes the
whole truth. . . . It was the remains of a list of dynasties embracing the
furthest mythoic times, or the REIGN OF THE GODS AND HEROES. . . . At the very
outset of this curious
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Ch. iv. of
"Egypt," p. 441.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Chretienne, Vol. XXXII.,
p. 442).
The
synchronistic tables of Manetho, besides the fact that they were disfigured by
Eusebius for dishonest purposes, had never gone beyond Manetho. The chronology
of the divine Kings and Dynasties, like that of the age of humanity, has ever
been in the hands of the priests, and was kept secret from the profane
multitudes.
Africa, as a
continent, it is said, appeared before Europe did; nevertheless it appeared
later than Lemuria and even the earliest Atlantis. That the whole region of
what is now Egypt and the deserts was once upon a time covered with the sea,
was known firstly through Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and all the Greeks; and,
secondly, through geology. Abyssinia was once upon a time an island; and the
Delta was the first country occupied by the pioneer emigrants who came with
their gods from the North-east.
When was it?
History is silent upon the subject. Fortunately we have the Dendera Zodiac, the
planisphere on the ceiling of one of the oldest Egyptian temples, which records
the fact. This Zodiac, with its mysterious three Virgos between the Lion and
Libra, has found its OEdipus, who understood the riddle of these signs, and
justified the truthfulness of those priests who told Herodotus that:-- (a) The
poles of the Earth and the Ecliptic had formerly coincided; and (b) That even
since their first Zodiacal records were commenced, the Poles have been three
times within the plane of the Ecliptic, as the Initiates taught.
Bailly had not
sufficient words at his command to express his surprise at the sameness of all
such traditions about the divine races. "What are finally," he
exclaims, "all those reigns of Indian Devas and Persian Peris? . . . . Or,
those reigns and dynasties of the Chinese legends; those Tien-hoang or the
Kings of Heaven, quite distinct from the Ti-hoang, the Kings on Earth, and the
Gin-hoang the King's men, a distinction which is in perfect accord with that
other one made by the Greeks and the Egyptians, in enumerating their dynasties
of Gods, of demi-gods, and of mortals."*
"Now,"
says Panadoras, "it is before that time (Menes), that the reign of the
seven gods who rule the world took place. It was during that period that those
benefactors of humanity descended on Earth and taught
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Histoire de
l'Astronomie Ancienne.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 369 WHAT THE PRIESTS TOLD HERODOTUS.
men to calculate
the course of the sun and moon by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic."
Nearly five
hundred years before the actual era, Herodotus was shown by the priests of
Egypt the statues of their human Kings and Pontiffs-piromis (the archi-prophets
or Maha-Chohans of the temples), born one from the other (without the
intervention of woman) who had reigned before Menes, their first human King.
These statues, he says, were enormous colossi in wood, three hundred and
forty-five in number, each of which had his name, his history and his annals.
And they assured Herodotus* (unless the most truthful of historians, the
"Father of History," is now accused of fibbing, just in this
instance) that no historian could ever understand or write an account of these
superhuman Kings, unless he had studied and learned the history of the three
dynasties that preceded the human -- namely, the DYNASTIES OF THE GODS, that of
demi-gods, and of the Heroes, or giants. These "three dynasties" are
the three Races.**
Translated into
the language of the Esoteric doctrine, these three dynasties would also be
those of the Devas, of Kimpurushas, and of Danavas and Daityas -- otherwise
gods, celestial spirits, and giants or Titans. "Happy are those who are
born, even from the condition of gods, as men, in Bharata-Varsha!" exclaim
the incarnated gods themselves, during the Third Root-Race. Bharata is India,
but in this case it symbolized the chosen land in those days, and was considered
the best of the divisions of Jambu-dwipa, as it was the land of active
(spiritual) works par excellence; the land of initiation and of divine
knowledge.
Can one fail to
recognise in Creuzer great powers of intuition, when, being almost unacquainted
with the Aryan Hindu philosophies, little known in his day, he wrote:--
"We modern
Europeans feel surprised when hearing talk of the Spirits of the Sun, Moon,
etc. But we repeat again, the natural good sense and the upright
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See also
Memoires a l'Academie, etc., of de Mirville, Vol. III., for a mass of evidence.
** In
Vishnu-Purana, Book II., chap. 3, 4, et seq., may be found many corroborations
of the same, if one reads carefully. The reigns of gods, lower gods, and men
are all enumerated in the descriptions of the seven Islands, seven seas, seven
mountains, etc., etc., ruled by Kings. Each king is said invariably to have
seven sons, an allusion to the seven sub-races. One instance will do. The King
of Kusa dwipa had seven sons (follow names) . . . "after whom the seven
portions (Varsha) of the island were called. There reside mankind along with
Daityas and Danavas, as well as with spirits of Heaven (Gandharvas, Yakshas,
Kimpurushas, etc.) and gods." (Chapter iv.) There is but one exception in
the case of King Priyavrata, the son of the first Manu, Swayambhuva -- who had
ten sons. But of these, three -- Medha, Agnibahu, and Putra -- became ascetics,
and refused their portions. Thus Priyavrata divided the earth again into seven
continents.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* Materialists do not. They live on this
earth, just as, in the world of insects and even of fishes, some creatures live
surrounded by myriads of their own genus, without seeing, or so much as sensing
them.**
Plato is the
first sage among the classics who speaks at length of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As a general
rule, now that the very nature of the inner man has become as blind as his
physical nature, man is situated on this globe as the Amphioxus is in the
Ocean. Surrounded by shoals and millions of various other fishes and creatures
that see it, the Amphioxus species --having neither brain nor any of the senses
possessed by the other classes -- sees them not. Who knows whether, on the
Darwinian theory, these "Branchiostoma" are not the direct ancestors
of our Materialists.
** The
Occultists have been accused of worshipping gods or devils. We deny this. Among
the numberless hosts of spirits -- men that were, and those who will be men --
there are those immeasurably superior to the human race, higher and holier than
the highest Saint on Earth, and wiser than any mortal without exception. And
there are those again who are no better than we are, as some are far worse and
inferior to the lowest savage. It is the latter classes that command the
readiest communication with our earth, who perceive and sense us, as the
clairvoyants perceive and sense them. The close proximity of our respective
abodes and planes of perception are in favour of such inter-communication
unfortunately, as they are ever ready to interfere with our affairs for weal or
woe. If we are asked how it is that none but sensitive hysterical natures,
neuro- and psycho-pathic persons see and occasionally talk with
"Spirits," we answer the question by several other queries. We ask:
"Do you know the nature of hallucination, and can you define its psychic process?
How can you tell that all such visions are due merely to physical
hallucinations? What makes you feel so sure that mental and nervous diseases,
while drawing a veil over our normal senses (so-called) do not reveal at the
same time vistas unknown to the healthy man, by throwing open doors usually
closed against your scientific perceptions (?): or that a psycho-spiritual
faculty does not forthwith replace the loss, or the temporary atrophy, of a
purely physical sense? It is disease, or the exuberance of nervous fluid which
produces mediumship and visions --hallucinations, as you call them. But what
does Science know even of mediumship?" Truly were the [[Footnote continued
on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 371 A UNIVERSAL CORROBORATION.
divine
Dynasties, and locates them on a vast continent which he calls Atlantis. Bailly
was not the first nor last to believe the same, and he had been preceded and
anticipated in this theory by Father Kircher. This learned Jesuit writes in
"OEdipus AEgyptiacus" (Vol. I., p. 70):--
"I confess,
for a long time I had regarded all this (dynasties and the Atlantis) as pure
fables (meras nugas) to the day when, better instructed in Oriental languages,
I judged that all those legends must be, after all, only the development of a
great truth. . . . ."
As de Rougemont
shows, Theopompus, in his Meropis, made the priests of Phrygia and Asia Minor
speak exactly as the priests of Sais did when they revealed to Solon the
history and fate of Atlantis. According to Theopompus, it was a unique
continent of an indefinite size, and containing two countries inhabited by two
races -- a fighting, warrior race, and a pious, meditative race,* which
Theopompus symbolizes by two cities.** The pious "city" was
continually visited by the gods; the belligerent "city" was inhabited
by various beings invulnerable to iron, liable to be mortally wounded only by
stone and wood."*** De Rougemont treats this as a pure fiction of
Theopompus ("Peuple Primitif," vol. iii. 157) and even sees a fraud
(supercherie) in the assertion of the Saitic priests. This was denounced by the
"Demonologists" as illogical. In the words of De Mirville:-- "A
supercherie which was based on a belief, the product of faith of the whole
antiquity; a supposition which yet gave its name to a whole mountain chain (the
Atlas); which specified with the greatest precision a topographical region (by
placing some of its lands at a small distance from Cadiz and the strait of
Calpetus), which prophesied, 2,000 years before Columbus, the great
trans-oceanic land situated beyond that Atlantis and which "is
reached" it said -- "by the islands not of the blessed, but of the
good spirits [[eudaimonia]] (our 'Iles Fortunees') -- such a supposition can
never be an universal chimera." (A word on "Atlantis," p. 29.)
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] modern Charcots to pay attention to the delirium
of their patients from a more psychic standpoint, Science, and physiology
especially, might be more benefited than they are now, and truth have a wider
field of fact in its knowledge.
* These were the
early Aryans and the bulk of the Fourth Root Races -- the former pious and
meditative (yoga-contemplation), the latter -- a fighting race of sorcerers,
who were rapidly degenerating owing to their uncontrolled passions.
** The Northern
and Southern Divisions of Lemuria-Atlantis. The Hyperborean and the Equatorial
lands of the two continents. (See Sections about Lemuria and Atlantis in
History.)
*** This is
Occult and refers to the property of iron which, attracted by magnetic
elements, is repelled by others, which are made, by an occult process, as
impervious to it as water to a blow.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 372 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
about the third
great continent which perished some 850,000 years ago.* A continent inhabited
by two distinct races; distinct physically and especially morally; both deeply
versed in primeval wisdom and the secrets of nature; mutually antagonistic in
their struggle, during the course and progress of their double evolution.
Whence even the Chinese teachings upon the subject, if it is but a fiction?
Have they not recorded the existence once upon a time of a holy island beyond
the sun (Tcheou), and beyond which were situated the lands of the immortal men?
(See de Rougemont, ibid.) Do they not still believe that the remnants of those
immortal men -- who survived when the holy island had become black with sin and
perished -- have found refuge in the great desert of Gobi, where they still
reside invisible to all, and defended from approach by hosts of Spirits?
"If one has
to lend ear to traditions," writes the very unbelieving Boulanger,
("Regne des Dieux," Introduction) . . . "the latter place before
the reign of Kings, that of the Heroes and demi-gods; and still earlier and
beyond they place the marvellous reign of the gods and all the fables of the
golden age. . . . One feels surprised that annals so interesting should have
been rejected by almost all our historians. And yet the ideas communicated by
them were once universally admitted and revered by all the peoples; not a few revere
them still, making them the basis of their daily life. Such considerations seem
to necessitate a less hurried judgment. . . . The ancients, from whom we hold
these traditions, which we accept no longer because we do not understand them
now, must have had motives for believing in them furnished by their greater
proximity to the first ages, and which the distance that separates us from them
refuses to us . . . . Plato in his fourth book of Laws, says that, long before
the construction of the first cities, Saturn had established on earth a certain
form of government under which man was very happy. As it is the golden age he
refers to, or to that reign of gods so celebrated in 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The first
continent, or island, if so preferred, "the cap of the North Pole,"
has never perished; nor will it to the end of the Seven Races.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 373 WHEAT BROUGHT DOWN BY THE GODS.
produced those
revolutions, nor of the evil which directly followed them. Yet . . . . that
Evil is the principle one has to talk about, to be able to treat of royalty and
the origin of power. . . ."
That evil, Plato
seems to see in the sameness or consubstantiality of the natures of the rulers
and the ruled, for he says that long before man built his cities, in the golden
age, there was naught but happiness on earth, for there were no needs. Why?
Because Saturn, knowing that man could not rule man, without injustice filling
forthwith the universe through his whims and vanity, would not allow any mortal
to obtain power over his fellow creatures. To do this the god used the same
means we use ourselves with regard to our flocks. We do not place a bullock or
a ram over our bullocks and rams, but give them a leader, a shepherd, i.e., a
being of a species quite different from their own and of a superior nature. It
is just what Saturn did. He loved mankind and placed to rule over it no mortal
King or prince but -- "Spirits and genii [[daimones]] of a divine nature
more excellent than that of man."
It was god, the
Logos (the synthesis of the Host) who thus presiding over the genii, became the
first shepherd and leader of men.* When the world had ceased to be so governed
and the gods retired, "ferocious beasts devoured a portion of
mankind." "Left to their own resources and industry, inventors then
appeared among them successively and discovered fire, wheat, wine; and public
gratitude deified them . . . ."("De Legibus" 1, iv.; in Crit.
and in Politic).
And mankind was
right, as fire by friction was the first mystery of nature, the first and chief
property of matter that was revealed to man.
"Fruits and
grain, unknown to Earth to that day, were brought by the 'Lords of Wisdom' for
the benefit of those they ruled -- from other lokas (spheres). . . " say
the Commentaries. Now: "The earliest inventions (?) of mankind are the
most wonderful that the race has ever made. . . The first use of fire, and the
discovery of the methods by which it can be kindled; the domestication of
animals; and, above all, the processes by which the various cereals were first
developed out of some wild grasses (?) -- these are all discoveries with which,
in ingenuity and in importance, no subsequent discoveries may compare. They are
all unknown to history -- all lost in the light of an EFFULGENT DAWN."
("Unity 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Secret
Doctrine explains and expounds that which Plato says, for it teaches that those
"inventors" were gods and demi-gods (Devas and Rishis) who had become
-- some deliberately, some forced to by Karma -- incarnated in man.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.)* The reader is referred to Stanza
VII., Verse 3, Book I., wherein this verse is explained in another of its
meanings, and also to the "Book of the Dead," chap. cix., v. 4 and 5.
"I am the
Queen of these regions," says the Egyptian Isis; "I was the first to
reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn. . . . I am she who rises in
the constellation of the dog . . . (Dog-star) . . . . Rejoice, O Egypt! thou
who wert my nurse." (Book I., chap. XIV.**
Sirius was
called the dog-star. It was the star of Mercury or Budha, called the great
instructor of mankind, before other Buddhas.
The book of the
Chinese Y-King, attributes the discovery of agriculture to "the
instruction given to men by celestial genii."
"Woe, woe
to the men who know nought, observe nought, nor will they see. . . . They are
all blind*** since they remain ignorant how much the world is full of various
and invisible creatures which crowd even in the most sacred places"
(Zohar, Part I., col. 177.)
The "Sons
of God" have existed and do exist. From the Hindu Brahmaputras and
Manasaputras (Sons of Brahma and Mind-born sons) down to the B'ne-aleim of the
Jewish Bible, the faith of the centuries and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is a
direct reference to the esoteric division of man's principles symbolised by the
divine wheat. The legend which inscribes the third Registrar of the papyrus
(Chap. cx. of the "Book of the Dead") states: "This is the
region of the Manes (disembodied men) seven cubits high -- to wit: those just
translated and supposed to be still sevenfold with all their principles, even
the body represented astrally in the Kama-loka or Hades, before their
separation . . . . . " and, there is wheat three cubits high for mummies
in a state of perfection" (i.e., those already separated, whose three
higher principles are in Devachan "who are permitted to glean it."
This region (Devachan) is called "the land of the re-birth of gods,"
and shown to be inhabited by Scheo, Tefnant, and Seb. The "region for the
manes seven cubits high," (for the yet imperfect mummies), and the region
for those "in a state of perfection" who "glean wheat three
cubits high," is as clear as possible. The Egyptians had the same esoteric
philosophy which is now taught by the cis-Himalayan adepts, who, when buried,
have corn and wheat placed over them.
** There are
Egyptologists who have tried to identify Osiris with Menes, which is quite
erroneous. Bunsen assigns to Menes an antiquity of 5867 years B.C., and is
denounced for it by Christians. But "Isis-Osiris" reigned in Egypt
before the Dendera Zodiac was painted on the ceiling of that temple, and that
is over 75,000 years ago!
*** In the text,
"corked up" or "screwed up."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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).*
What does this
sentence "and also after that" signify unless it means when
explained: "There were giants in the earth BEFORE, i.e., before the
sinless sons of the Third Race; and also after that when other sons of God,
lower in nature, inaugurated sexual connection on earth (as Daksha did, when he
saw that his Manasaputras would not people the earth)"? And then comes a
long break in this chapter vi. of Genesis, between verses 4 and 5. For surely,
it was not in or through the wickedness of the "mighty men" . . . .
men of renown, among whom is placed Nimrod the "mighty hunter before the
Lord," that "god saw that the wickedness of man was great," nor
in the builders of Babel, for this was after the Deluge; but in the progeny of
the giants who produced monstra quaedam de genere giganteo, monsters from
whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on earth by a few
miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes.
And if we are
taken to task by theologians, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, we have
only to refer them to their own literal texts. The above quoted verse was ever
a dilemma, not alone for the men of science and Biblical scholars, but also for
priests. For, as the Rev. Father Peronne puts it:-- "Either they (the
B'ne-aleim) were good angels, and in such case how could they fall? Or they
were bad (angels) and in this case could not be called b'ne-aleim, the
"sons of God." (Praelectiones theol. ch. ii.) This Biblical riddle --
"the real sense of which no author has ever understood," as candidly
confessed by Fourmont** -- can only be explained by the Occult doctrine,
through the Zohar to the Western, and the Book of Dzyan to the Eastern. What
the former says we have seen; what the Zohar tells us is this: B'ne-aleim was a
name common to the Malachim (the good Messengers) and to the Ischin ("the
lower angels") (Rabbi Parcha).
We may add for
the benefit of the demonologists that their Satan,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Genesis vi.,
v. 4.
** Reflections
critiques sur l'origine des anciens peuples.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 376 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"the
adversary," is included in Job among the sons of God or b'ne-aleim who
visit their father." (Chapter i.) But of this later on.
Now the Zohar
says that the Ischin, the beautiful B'ne-aleim, were not guilty, but mixed
themselves with mortal men because they were sent on earth to do so. (Book of
Ruth and Schadash; fol. 63, col. 3; Amsterdam edition). Elsewhere the same
volume shows these b'ne-aleim belonging to the tenth sub-division of the
"Thrones" (Zohar, part iii., col. 113. But see also 1st vol. 184). It
also explains that the Ischin, "men-spirits," viri spirituales, now
that men can see them no longer, help magicians to produce, through their
science, homunculi which are not small men but "men smaller (in the sense
of inferiority) than men." Both show themselves under the form that the
Ischin had then, i.e., gaseous and ethereal. Their chief is Azazel.
But Azazel, whom
the Church dogma will associate with Satan, is nothing of the kind. Azazel is a
mystery, as explained elsewhere, and it is so expressed in Maimonides, "In
More Nevochim" (chapter xxvi., p. 8). "There is an impenetrable
mystery in the narrative concerning Azazel." And so there is, as Lanci, a
librarian to the Vatican and one who ought to know, says -- we have quoted him
before -- that "this venerable divine name (nome divino e venerabile) has
become through the pen of Biblical scholars, a devil, a wilderness, a mountain,
and a he-goat" (Sagra Scrittura). Therefore it seems foolish to derive the
name as Spencer does, from Ajal (separated) and El (god), hence "one separated
from God," the DEVIL. In the Zohar, Azazel is rather the Sacrificial
victim than the "formal adversary of Jehovah," as Spencer would have
it (II., pp. 14, 29).
The amount of
malicious fancy and fiction bestowed on that "Host" by various
fanatical writers is quite extraordinary. Azazel and his "host" are
simply the Hebrew "Prometheus," and ought to be viewed from the same
standpoint. The Zohar shows the Ischin chained on the mountain in the desert,
allegorically; thus simply alluding to those "spirits" as being
chained to the earth during the cycle of incarnation. Azazel (or Azaziel) is
one of the chiefs of the "transgressing" angels in Enoch, who
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?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 377 THE FALLACIES OF THE TWO CHURCHES.
It is the symbolical
representation of the great struggle between divine wisdom, nous, and its
earthly reflection, Psuche, or between Spirit and Soul, in Heaven and on Earth.
In Heaven --because the divine MONAD had voluntarily exiled itself therefrom,
to descend, for incarnating purposes, to a lower plane and thus transform the
animal of clay into an immortal god. For, as Eliphas Levi tells us, "the
angels aspire to become men; for the perfect man, the man-god, is above even
angels." On Earth -- because no sooner had Spirit descended than it was
strangled in the coils of matter.
Strange to say,
the Occult teaching reverses the characters; it is the anthropomorphous
archangel with the Christians, and the man-like God with the Hindus, which
represent matter in this case; and the Dragon, or Serpent, Spirit. Occult
symbolism furnishes the key to the mystery; theological symbolics conceal it
still more. For the former explains many a saying in the Bible and even in the
New Testament which have hitherto remained incomprehensible; while the latter,
owing to its dogma of Satan and his rebellion, has belittled the character and
nature of its would-be infinite, absolutely perfect god, and created the
greatest evil and curse on earth -- belief in a personal Devil. This mystery is
opened with the key to its metaphysical symbolism now restored; while that of
theological interpretation shows the gods and the archangels standing as
symbols for the dead letter or dogmatic religions, and as arrayed against the
pure truths of Spirit, naked and unadorned with fancy.
Many were the
hints thrown out in this direction in "Isis Unveiled," and a still
greater number of references to this mystery may be found scattered throughout
these volumes. To make the point clear once for all: that which the clergy of
every dogmatic religion -- pre-eminently the Christian -- points out as Satan,
the enemy of God, is in reality, the highest divine Spirit -- (occult Wisdom on
Earth) -- in its naturally antagonistic character to every worldly, evanescent
illusion, dogmatic or ecclesiastical religions included. Thus, the Latin
Church, intolerant, bigoted and cruel to all who do not choose to be its
slaves; the Church which calls itself the bride of Christ, and the trustee at
the same time of Peter, to whom the rebuke of the Master "get thee behind
me Satan" was justly addressed; and again the Protestant Church which,
while calling itself Christian, paradoxically replaces the New Dispensation by
the old "Law of Moses" which Christ openly repudiated: both these Churches
are fighting against divine Truth, when repudiating and slandering the Dragon
of esoteric (because divine) Wisdom. Whenever anathematizing the Gnostic Solar
Chnouphis -- the Agathodaemon -- Christos, or the theosophical Serpent of
Eternity, or even the Serpent of Genesis -- they
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas -- the exoteric
version thereof, and the purposely garbled account of the true Wisdom religion.
In the Rig Veda Indra is the highest and greatest of the Gods, and his
Soma-drinking is allegorical of his highly spiritual nature. In the Puranas
Indra becomes a profligate, and a regular drunkard on the Soma juice, in the
terrestrial way. He is the conqueror of all the "enemies of the gods"
-- the Daityas, Nagas (Serpents), Asuras, all the Serpent-gods, and of Vritri,
the Cosmic Serpent. Indra is the St. Michael of the Hindu Pantheon -- the chief
of the militant Host. Turning to the Bible, we find Satan, one of the
"Sons of God" (Job. i. 6), becoming in exoteric interpretation the
Devil, and the Dragon in its infernal, evil sense. But in the Kabala
("Book of Numbers") Samael, who is Satan, is shown to be identical
with St. Michael, the slayer of the Dragon. How is this? For it is said that
Tselem (the image) reflects alike Michael and Samael who are one. Both proceed,
it is taught, from Ruach (Spirit), Neschamah (Soul) and Nephesch (life). In the
"Chaldean Book of Numbers" Samael is the concealed (occult) Wisdom,
and Michael the higher terrestrial Wisdom, both emanating from the same source
but diverging after their issue from the mundane soul, which on Earth is Mahat
(intellectual understanding, or Manas (the seat of Intellect). They diverge,
because one (Michael) is influenced by Neschamah, while the other (Samael)
remains uninfluenced. This tenet was perverted by the dogmatic spirit of the
Church; which, loathing independent Spirit, uninfluenced by the external form
(hence by dogma), forthwith made of Samael-Satan (the most wise and spiritual
spirit of all) -- the adversary of its anthropomorphic God and sensual physical
man, the DEVIL!
--------
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;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 379 THE SECRET OF THE DRAGON.
but the cult is
now preserved mostly in China and the Buddhist countries, "Bel and the
Dragon being uniformly coupled together, and the priest of the Ophite religion
as uniformly assuming the name of his God" ("Archaeology," Vol.
xxv., p. 220, London). In the religions of the past, it is in Egypt we have to
seek for its Western origin. The Ophites adopted their rites from Hermes
Trismegistus, and heliolatrous worship crossed over with its Sun-gods into the
land of the Pharaohs from India. In the gods of Stonehenge we recognise the
divinities of Delphi and Babylon, and in those of the latter the devas of the
Vedic nations. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Krishna and Kaliya,
Osiris and Typhon are all one under many names -- the latest of which are
Michael and the Red Dragon, and St. George and his Dragon. As Michael is
"one as God," or his "Double," for terrestrial purposes,
and is one of the Elohim, the fighting angel, he is thus simply a permutation
of Jehovah. Whatever the Cosmic or astronomical event that first gave rise to
the allegory of the "War of Heaven," its earthly origin has to be
sought in the temples of Initiation and archaic crypts. The following are the
proofs:--
We find (a) the
priests assuming the name of the gods they served; (b) the "Dragons" held
throughout all antiquity as the symbols of Immortality and Wisdom, of secret
Knowledge and of Eternity; and (c) the hierophants of Egypt, of Babylon, and
India, styling themselves generally the "Sons of the Dragon" and
"Serpents"; thus the teachings of the Secret Doctrine are thereby
corroborated.
There were
numerous catacombs in Egypt and Chaldea, some of them of a very vast extent.
The most renowned of them were the subterranean crypts of Thebes and Memphis.
The former, beginning on the western side of the Nile, extended towards the
Lybian desert, and were known as the Serpent's catacombs, or passages. It was
there that were performed the sacred mysteries of the kuklos anagkes, the
"Unavoidable Cycle," more generally known as "the circle of
necessity"; the inexorable doom 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Phoenician Elon or Elion,
whom Abraham recognised as El Elion.* Besides the surname of serpents, they
were called the "builders," the "architects"; for the
immense grandeur of their temples and monuments was such that even now the
pulverised remains of them "frighten the mathematical calculations of our
modern engineers," says Taliesin.**
De Bourbourg
hints that the chiefs of the name of Votan, the Quetzo-Cohuatl, or Serpent
deity of the Mexicans, are the descendants of Ham and Canaan. "I am
Hivim," they say. "Being a Hivim, I am of the great race of the
Dragon (snake). I am a snake myself, for I am a Hivim."
("Cartas," 51; "Isis Unveiled," Vol. I., 553, et seq.)
Furthermore, the
"War in Heaven" is shown, in one of its significations, to have meant
and referred to those terrible struggles in store for the candidate for adeptship,
between himself and his (by magic) personified human passions, when the inner
enlightened man had to either slay them or fail. In the former case he became
the "Dragon-Slayer," as having happily overcome all the temptations;
and a "Son of the Serpent" and a Serpent himself, having cast off his
old skin and being born in a new body, becoming a Son of Wisdom and Immortality
in Eternity. (See Part II. on the Satanic Myth.)
Seth, the
reputed forefather of Israel, is only a Jewish travesty of Hermes, the God of
Wisdom, called also Thoth, Tat, Seth, Set, and Satan. He is also Typhon -- the
same as Apophis, the Dragon slain by Horus; for Typhon was also called Set. He
is simply the dark side of Osiris, his brother, as Angra Mainyu is the black
shadow of Ahura-mazda. Terrestrially, all these allegories were connected with
the trials of adeptship and initiation. Astronomically, they referred to the
Solar and Lunar eclipses, the mythical explanations of which we find to this
day in India and Ceylon, where any one can study the allegorical narratives and
traditions which have remained unchanged for many thousands of years.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See
Sanchoniathon in "Eusebius," Pr. Ev. 36; Genesis xiv.
** "Society
of Antiquaries of London," vol. xxv. p. 220.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 381 THE THEFT OF RAHU.
Rahu, mythologically
is a Daitya -- a giant, a Demi-god, the lower part of whose body ended in a
Dragon or Serpent's tail. During the churning of the Ocean, when the gods
produced amrita -- the water of Immortality -- he stole some of it, and
drinking, became immortal. The Sun and Moon, who had detected him in his theft,
denounced him to Vishnu, who placed him in the stellar spheres, the upper
portion of his body representing the Dragon's head and the lower (Ketu) the
Dragon's tail; the two being the ascending and descending nodes. Since then,
Rahu wreaks his vengeance on the Sun and Moon by occasionally swallowing them.
But this fable had another mystic meaning, since Rahu, the Dragon's head,
played a prominent part in the mysteries of the Sun's (Vikarttana's) initiation,
when the candidate and the Dragon had a supreme fight.
The caves of the
Rishis, the abodes of Tiresias and the Greek seers, were modelled on those of
the Nagas -- the Hindu King-Snakes, who dwelled in cavities of the rocks under
the ground. From Sesha, the thousand-headed Serpent, on which Vishnu rests,
down to Python, the dragon serpent oracle, all point to the secret meaning of
the myth. In India we find the fact mentioned in the earliest Puranas. The
children of Surasa are the "mighty Dragons." The Vayu Purana
replacing "Surasa" (of Vishnu Purana) by Danayas or Danavas -- the
descendants of Danu by the sage Kasyapa -- and those Danavas being the giants
(or Titans) who warred against the gods, they are thus shown identical with the
"Dragons" and "Serpents" of Wisdom.
By simply
comparing the Sun-gods of every country, one may find their allegories agreeing
perfectly with one another; and the more the allegorical symbol is occult the
more its corresponding symbol in other systems agrees with it. Thus, if from
three systems widely differing from each other in appearance -- the old Aryan,
the ancient Greek, and the modern Christian schemes -- we select several
Sun-gods and dragons at random, these will be found copied from each other.
Let us take Agni
the fire-god, Indra the firmament, and Karttikeya from the Hindus; the Greek
Apollo; and Mikael, the "Angel of the Sun," the first of the AEons,
called by the Gnostics "the saviour" -- and proceed in order.
(1) Agni -- the
fire-god -- is called in the Rig-Veda Vaiswanara. Now Vaisvanara is a Danava --
a giant-demon,* whose daughters Puloma and Kalaka are the mothers of numberless
Danavas (30 millions), by
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* He is thus
named and included in the list of the Danavas in Vayu Purana; the Commentator
of Bhagavata Purana calls him a son of Danu, but the name means also
"Spirit of Humanity."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 382 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Kasyapa,* and
live in Hiranyapura, "the golden city," floating in the air.
Therefore, Indra is, in a fashion, the step-son of these two as a son of
Kasyapa; and Kasyapa is, in this sense, identical with Agni, the fire-god, or
Sun (Kasyapa-Aditya). To this same group belongs Skanda or Karttikeya (god of
War, the six-faced planet Mars astronomically), a Kumara, or virgin-youth, born
of Agni** for the purpose of destroying Taraka, the Danava Demon, the grandson
of Kasyapa by Hiranyaksha, his son,*** whose (Taraka's) yogi austerities were
so extraordinary that they became formidable to the gods, who feared such a
rival in power.**** While Indra, the bright god of the Firmament, kills Vritra (or
Ahi), the Serpent-Demon -- for which feat he is called Vritra-han, "the
destroyer of Vritra"; he also leads the hosts of Devas (Angels or gods)
against other gods who rebel against Brahma, for which he is entitled Jishnu,
"leader of the celestial Host." Karttikeya is found bearing the same
titles. For killing Taraka, the Danava, he is Taraka-Jit, "Vanquisher of
Taraka,"***** "Kumara Guha," "the mysterious
Virgin-youth" "Siddha-Sena" -- "the leader of the
Siddhas"; and Saktidhara -- "Spear-holder."
(2.) Now take
Apollo, the Grecian sun-god, and by comparing the mythical accounts given of
him, see whether he does not answer both
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Kasyapa is
called the Son of Brahma, and is the "Self-Born" to whom a great part
of the work of creation is attributed. He is one of the seven Rishis;
exoterically, the son of Marichi, the son of Brahma; while Atharva-veda says,
"The Self-born Kasyapa sprang from Time"; and esoterically -- Time and
Space are forms of the One incognizable Deity. As an Aditya, Indra is son of
Kasyapa, as also Vaivasvata Manu, our progenitor. In the instance given in the
text, he is Kasyapa-Aditya, the Sun, and the Sun-god, from whom all the
"Cosmic" Demons, Dragons (nagas), Serpent, or Snake-gods, and
Danavas, the giants, are born. The meaning of the allegories given above is
purely astronomical and cosmical, but will serve to prove the identity of all.
** All such
stories differ in the exoteric texts. In the Mahabharata, Karttikeya, "the
six-faced Mars," is the son of Rudra or Siva, Self-born without a mother
from the seed of Siva cast into the fire. But Karttikeya is generally called
Agnibhu, "fire born."
*** Hiranyaksha
is the ruler or king of the fifth region of Patala, a Snake-god.
**** The Elohim
also feared the knowledge of Good and Evil for Adam, and therefore are shown as
expelling him from Eden or killing him spiritually.
***** The story
told is, that Taraka (called also Kalabhana), owing to his extraordinary
Yoga-powers, had obtained all the divine knowledge of yoga-vidya and occult
powers of the gods, who conspired against him. Here we see the
"obedient" Host of Archangels or minor gods conspiring against the
(future) Fallen angels, whom Enoch accuses of the great crime of disclosing to
the world all "the secret things done in heaven." It is Michael,
Gabriel, Raphael, Surgal and Uriel who denounced to the Lord God those of their
Brethren who were said to have pried into the divine mysteries and taught them
to men: by this means they themselves escaped a like punishment. Michael was
commissioned to fight the Dragon, and so was Karttikeya, and under the same
circumstances. Both are "leaders of the Celestial Host," both
Virgins, both "leaders of Saints," "Spear-holders"
(Saktidhara), etc., etc. Karttikeya is the original of Michael and St. George,
as surely as Indra is the prototype of Karttikeya.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 383 THE GODS, THE FACETS OF ONE GEM.
to Indra, Karttikeya, and even Kasyapa-Aditya,
and at the same time to Michael (as the Angelic form of Jehovah) the
"angel of the Sun," who is "like," and "one with,
God." Later ingenious interpretations for monotheistic purposes, elevated
though they be into not-to-be questioned Church dogmas, prove nothing, except
the abuse of human authority and power, perhaps.
Apollo is Helios
(the Sun), Phoibus-Apollo ("the light of life and of the World"*) who
arises out of the golden-winged cup (the sun); hence he is the sun-god par
excellence. At the moment of his birth he asks for his bow to kill Python, the
Demon Dragon, who attacked his mother before his birth,** and whom he is
divinely commissioned to destroy -- like Karttikeya, who is born for the
purpose of killing Taraka, the too holy and wise demon. Apollo is born on a
sidereal island called Asteria -- "the golden star island," the
"earth which floats in the air," which is the Hindu golden
Hiranyapura; "he is called the pure, [[agnos]], Agnus Dei (the Indian
Agni, as Dr. Kenealy thinks), and in the primal myth he is exempt "from
all sensual love" ("Book of God," p. 88). He is, therefore, a
Kumara, like Karttikeya, and as Indra was in his earlier life and biographies.
Python, moreover, the "red Dragon," connects Apollo with Michael, who
fights the Apocalyptic Dragon, who wants to attack the woman in child-birth
(See Revelation xii.), as Python attacks Apollo's mother. Can any one fail to
see the identity? Had the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who prides himself on his
Greek scholarship and understanding of the spirit of Homer's allegories, ever
had a real inkling of the esoteric meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey, he would
have understood St. John's "Revelation," and even the Pentateuch,
better than he does. For the way to the Bible lies through Hermes, Bel, and
Homer, as the way to these is through the Hindu and Chaldean religious symbols.
The repetition
of this archaic tradition is found in ch. xii. of St. John's Revelations, and
comes from the Babylonian legends without the smallest doubt, though the
Babylonian story had its origin in the allegories of the Aryans. The fragment
read by the late George Smith (See "The Chaldean account of Genesis,"
p. 304) is sufficient to disclose the source of the xii. chapter of the
Apocalypse. Here it is as given by the eminent Assyriologist:
"Our . . .
fragment refers to the creation of mankind, called Adam; as (the man) in the
Bible, he is made perfect . . . but afterwards joins
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The "life
and the light" of the material physical world, the delight of the senses
-- not of the soul. Apollo is pre-eminently the human god, the god of
emotional, pomp-loving and theatrical Church ritualism, with lights and music.
** See chap.
xii. in Revelation where we find Apollo's mother persecuted by that Python, the
Red Dragon, who is also Porphyrion, the scarlet or red Titan.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."*
"This is followed
by a war between the dragon and the powers of evil, or chaos on one side and
the gods on the other."
"The gods
have weapons forged for them,** and Merodach (the archangel Michael in
Revelation) undertakes to lead the heavenly host against the dragons. The war,
which is described with spirit, ends, of course, in the triumph of the
principles of Good. . . . ."***
This war of gods
with the powers of the Deep, refers also, in its last and terrestrial
application, to the struggle between the Aryan adepts of the nascent Fifth Race
and the Sorcerers of Atlantis, the Demons of the Deep, the Islanders surrounded
with water who disappeared in the Deluge. (See the last pages of Vol. I.,
"Isis Unveiled," Atlantis.)
The symbols of
the dragons and "War in Heaven" have, as already stated, more than
one significance; religious, astronomical and geological events being included
in the one common allegory. But it had also a Cosmological meaning. In India
the Dragon story is repeated in one of its forms in the battles of Indra with
Vritra. In the Vedas this Ahi-Vritra is referred to as the Demon of Drought,
the terrible hot Wind. Indra is shown to be constantly at war with him; and
with the help of his thunder and lightning the god compels Ahi-Vritra to pour
down in rain on Earth, and then slays him. Hence, Indra is called the
Vritra-Han or "the slayer of Vritra," as Michael is called the
Conqueror and "Slayer of the Dragon." Both these "Enemies"
are then the "Old Dragon" precipitated into the depths of the Earth,
in this one sense.
The Zend-Avestic
Amshaspends are a Host with a leader like St. Michael over them, and seem
identical with the legions of Heaven, when one reads the Vendidad. Thus in
Fargard XIX., ii. 13 (42), Zarathustra is told by Ahura Mazda to "invoke the
Amesha Spenta who rule over the seven Karshvares**** of the Earth"; which
Karshvares in their seven
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* No
"god" who curses his (supposed) own work, because he has made it
imperfect, can be the one infinite absolute wisdom, whether called Bel or
Jehovah.
** In the Indian
allegory of Tarakamaya, the war between the gods and the Asuras headed by Soma
(the moon, the King of Plants), it is Viswa-Karma, the artificer of the gods,
who forges, like Vulcan (Tubal-Kain), their weapons for them.
*** We have said
elsewhere that the "woman with child" of Revelation (xii.) was Aime,
the great mother, or Binah, the third Sephiroth, "whose name is
Jehovah"; and the "Dragon," who seeks to devour her coming child
(the Universe), is the Dragon of absolute Wisdom -- that Wisdom which,
recognising the non-separateness of the Universe and everything in it from the
Absolute ALL, sees in it no better than the great Illusion, Mahamaya, hence the
cause of misery and suffering.
**** The
"Seven Karshvares of the Earth" -- the seven spheres of our planetary
chain, [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. Saddh). The "Sravah" --
a word which the Orientalists have given up as one "of unknown
meaning" -- means the same Amshaspends, but in their highest occult
meaning. The "Sravah" are the noumenoi of the phenomenal Amshaspends,
the souls or spirits of those manifested Powers; and "their sons and their
flock" refers to the planetary angels and their sidereal flock of stars
and constellations. "Amshaspend" is the exoteric term used in
terrestrial combinations and affairs only. Zarathustra addresses Ahura Mazda
constantly as "thou, the maker of the material world." Ormazd is the
father of our earth (Spenta Armaiti), and she is referred to, when personified,
as "the fair daughter of Ahura Mazda" (Fargard, XIX. ii.), who is
also the creator of the Tree (of occult and spiritual knowledge and wisdom)
from which the mystic and mysterious Caresma is taken. But the occult name of
the bright God was never pronounced outside the temple.
Samael or Satan,
the seducing Serpent of Genesis, and one of the primeval angels who rebelled,
is the name of the "Red Dragon." He is the Angel of Death, the Talmud
saying that "the Angel of Death and Satan are the same," and, killed
by Michael, he is once more killed by St. George, who also is a Dragon Slayer;
but see the transformations of this. Samael is identical with the Simoom, the
hot wind of the desert, or again with the Vedic demon of drought, as Vritra;
"Simoom is called Atabutos" or -- Diabolos, the devil.
Typhon, or the
Dragon Aphophis -- the Accuser in the "Book of the Dead" -- is worsted
by Horus, who pierces his opponent's head with a spear; and Typhon is the
all-destroying wind of the desert, the rebellious element that throws
everything into confusion. As Set -- he is the darkness of night, the murderer
of Osiris, who is the light of day and the sun. Archaeology demonstrates that
Horus is identical with Anubis,* whose effigy was discovered upon an Egyptian
monument, with a cuirass and a spear, like Michael and St. George. Anubis is
also represented
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
§
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] the seven worlds -- also mentioned in the
Rig-Veda -- are fully referred to elsewhere. There are six rajamsi (worlds)
above prithivi -- the earth, or "this" (idam), as opposed to that
which is yonder (the six globes on the three other planes). (See Rig-Veda, I.,
34; III., 56; VII., 10411, and V., 60, 6. See § on Chronology.)
* Verse 62,
chap. xvii., "Book of the Dead": Anubis is Horus who melts in him who
is eyeless.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 386 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
as slaying a dragon, that has the head and
tail of a serpent. (See Lenoir's "Du Dragon de Metz.")
Cosmologically,
then, all the Dragons and Serpents conquered by their "Slayers" are,
in their origin, the turbulent confused principles in Chaos, brought to order
by the Sun-gods or creative powers. In the "Book of the Dead" those principles
are called "the Sons of Rebellion." (See also "Egyptian
Pantheon," pp. 20, 23.) "In that night, the oppressor, the murderer
of Osiris, otherwise called the deceiving Serpent (Verse 54) . . . . calls the
Sons of Rebellion in Air, and when they arrive to the East of Heavens, then
there is War in Heaven and in the entire World" (v. 49, "Book of the
Dead," xvii.).
In the
Scandinavian Eddas the "War" of the Ases with the Hrim-thurses
(frost-giants), and of Asathor with the Jotuns, the Serpents and Dragons and
the "wolf" who comes out of "Darkness" --- is the
repetition of the same myth. The "evil Spirits,"* having begun by
being simply the emblems of Chaos, became euhemerized by the superstition of
the rabble, until they have finally won the right of citizenship in the most
civilized and learned races of this globe -- since its creation as alleged --
and became a dogma with Christians. As George Smith has it: "The evil
principles (Spirits) emblems of Chaos" (in Chaldea and Assyria as in Egypt,
we see) . . "resist this change and make war on the Moon, the eldest son
of Bel, drawing over to their side the Sun, Venus and the atmospheric god
Vul." ("Assyrian Discoveries," p. 403.) This is only another
version of the Hindu "War in Heaven," between Soma, the moon, and the
gods -- Indra being the atmospheric Vul; which shows it plainly to be both a
Cosmogonical and an astronomical allegory, woven into and drawn from the
earliest theogony as taught in the Mysteries.
It is in the
religious doctrines of the Gnostics that the real meaning of the Dragon, the
Serpent, the Goat, and all those symbols of powers now called Evil, can be seen
the best; as it is they who divulged the esoteric nature of the Jewish
Substitute for AIN-SOPH in their teachings; of the true meaning of which, while
the Rabbins concealed it, the Christians, with a few exceptions, knew nothing.
Surely Jesus of Nazareth would have hardly advised his apostles to show
themselves as wise as the serpent, had the latter been a symbol of the Evil
one; nor would the Ophites, the learned Egyptian Gnostics of "the
Brotherhood of the Serpent," have reverenced a living snake in their
ceremonies as the emblem of WISDOM, the divine Sophia (and a type of the
all-good, not the all-bad), were that reptile so closely connected with Satan.
The fact is, that even as a common ophidian it has ever been a dual symbol; and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These
"evil Spirits" can by no means be identified with Satan or the Great
Dragon. They are the Elementals generated or begotten by ignorance -- Cosmic
and human passions -- or Chaos.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 387 WHO FIRST CREATED WOMAN?
as a Dragon it
had never been anything else than a symbol of the manifested Deity in its great
Wisdom. The Draco volans, the flying Dragon of the early painters, may be an
exaggerated picture of the real extinct antediluvian animal; but those who have
faith in the Occult teachings believe that in the days of old there were such
creatures as flying Dragons, or a kind of Pterodactyl, and that it is those
gigantic winged lizards that served as the prototypes for the Seraph of Moses and
his great Brazen Serpent.* The Jews had worshipped the latter idol themselves,
but, after the religious reforms brought about by Hezekiah, turned round, and
called that symbol of the great or Higher God of every other nation -- a Devil,
and their own usurper -- the "One God."**
The appellation
Sa'tan, in Hebrew satan, "an adversary" (from the verb shatana,
"to be adverse," to persecute) belongs by right to the first and
cruelest "adversary of all the other gods" -- Jehovah, not to the
Serpent, which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom, and is at the worst,
even in the dogma, "the adversary of men." This dogma, based as it is
on chapter iii. of Genesis, is as illogical and unjust as it is paradoxical.
For who was the first to create that original and hence-forward universal
tempter of man -- the woman? Not the serpent surely, but the "Lord
God" himself, who, saying:-- "It is not good that the man should be
alone" -- made woman, and "brought her unto the man" (18-22). If
the unpleasant little incident that followed was and is still to be regarded as
the "original sin," then it exhibits the Creator's divine foresight
in a poor light indeed. It would have been far better for the first Adam (of
chap. 1.) to have been left either "male and female," or
"alone." It is the Lord God, evidently, who was the real cause of all
the mischief, the "agent provocateur," and the Serpent -- only a
prototype of Azazel, "the scapegoat for the sin of (the God of)
Israel," the poor Tragos having to pay the penalty for his Master's and
Creator's blunder. This, of course, is addressed only to those who accept the
opening events of the drama of humanity in Genesis in their dead-letter sense.
Those who read them esoterically, are not reduced to fanciful
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Numbers
xxi. 8-9. God orders Moses to build a brazen Serpent "Saraph"; to
look upon which heals those bitten by the fiery serpents. The latter were the
Seraphim, each one of which, as Isaiah shows (vi. 2), "had six
wings"; they are the symbols of Jehovah, and of all the other Demiurgi who
produce out of themselves six sons or likenesses -- Seven with their Creator.
Thus, the Brazen Serpent is Jehovah, the chief of the "fiery
serpents." And yet, in 2 Kings xviii., it is shown that King Hezekiah,
who, like as David his father, "did that which was right in the sight of
the Lord" -- "brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made
. . . and called it Nehushtan," or piece of brass.
** And Satan
stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel (Chron. xxi. 1.)
"The anger of the Lord Jehovah was kindled against Israel," and he
moved David to say: "Go, number Israel" (2 Samuel, xxiv. 1). The two
are then identical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 388 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
speculations and
hypothesis; they know how to read the symbolism therein contained, and cannot
err.
There is at present
no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning of the name Jehovah in
its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity falsely called by that name.
It was a blind created purposely by the Rabbins, a secret preserved by them
with ten-fold care after the Christians had despoiled them of this God-name
which was their own property.* But the following statement is made. The
personage who is named in the first four chapters of Genesis variously as
"God," the "Lord God," and "Lord" simply, is not
one and the same person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct
classes or groups of the Elohim called Sephiroth in the Kabala, Jehovah
appearing only in chapter iv., in the first verse of which he is named Cain,
and in the last transformed into mankind -- male and female, jah-veh.** The
"Serpent," moreover, is not Satan, but the bright Angel, one of the
Elohim clothed in radiance and glory, who, promising the woman that if they ate
of the forbidden fruit "ye shall not surely die," kept his promise,
and made man immortal in his incorruptible nature. He is the Iao of the
mysteries, the chief of the Androgyne creators of men. Chapter iii. contains
(esoterically) the withdrawal of the veil of ignorance that closed the
perceptions of the Angelic Man, made in the image of the "Boneless"
gods, and the opening of his consciousness to his real nature; thus showing the
bright Angel (Lucifer) in the light of a giver of Immortality, and as the
"Enlightener"; while the real Fall into generation and matter is to be
sought in chapter iv. There, Jehovah-Cain, the male part of Adam the dual man,
having separated himself from Eve, creates in her "Abel," the first
natural woman,* and sheds the Virgin blood. Now Cain, being shown identical
with Jehovah, on the authority of the correct reading of verse i. (chapter iv.,
Genesis), in the original Hebrew text; and the Rabbins teaching that "Kin
(Cain), the Evil, was the Son of Eve by Samael, the devil who took Adam's
place"; and the Talmud adding that "the evil Spirit, Satan, and
Samael, the angel of Death, are the same" --(Babba Battra, 16a) -- it
becomes easy to see that Jehovah (mankind, or "Jah-hovah") and Satan
(therefore the tempting Serpent) are one and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Dozens of the
most erudite writers have sifted thoroughly the various meanings of the name
J'hovah (with, and without the masoretic points), and shown their multifarious
bearings. The best of such works is the "Source of Measures, the Hebrew
Egyptian Mystery."
** In the
above-mentioned work (p. 233 App.), verse 26 of the 4th chap. of Genesis is
correctly translated "then men began to call themselves Jehovah," but
less correctly explained, perhaps, as the last word ought to be written Jah
(male) Hovah (female), to show that from that time the race of distinctly
separate man and woman began.
*** See for
explanation the excellent pages of appendix vii. of the same work.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
He is the "adversary," allegorically, the "murderer," and
the great Enemy of all, because there is nothing in the whole universe that has
not two sides -- the reverses of the same medal. But in that case, light,
goodness, beauty, etc., may be called Satan with as much propriety as the
Devil, since they are the adversaries of darkness, badness, and ugliness. And
now the philosophy and the rationale of certain early Christian sects -- called
heretical and viewed as the abomination of the times -- will become more
comprehensible. We may understand how it was that the sect of SATANIANS came to
be degraded, and were anathematized without any hope of vindication in a future
day, since they kept their tenets secret. How, on the same principle, the
CAINITES came to be degraded, and even the (Judas) ISCARIOTES; the true
character of the treacherous apostle having never been correctly presented
before the tribunal of Humanity.
As a direct
consequence, the tenets of the Gnostic sects also become clear. Each of these
sects was founded by an Initiate, while their tenets were based on the correct
knowledge of the symbolism of every nation. Thus it becomes comprehensible why
Ilda-Baoth was regarded by most of them as the god of Moses, and was held as a
proud, ambitious, and impure spirit, who had abused his power by usurping the
place of the highest God, though he was no better, and in some respects far
worse than his brethren Elohim; the latter representing the all-embracing,
manifested deity only in their collectivity, since they were the fashioners of
the first differentiations of the primary Cosmic substance for the creation of
the phenomenal Universe. Therefore Jehovah was called by the Gnostics the
Creator of, and one with Ophiomorphos, the Serpent, Satan, or EVIL. (See
"Isis Unveiled," II, 184). They taught that Turbo and Adonai were
"names of Jao-Jehovah, who is an emanation of Ilda Baoth" (Codex
Nazaraeus). (See Part II., "The Fallen Angels.") This amounted in
their language to saying what the Rabbins expressed in a more veiled way, by
stating that -- "Cain had been generated by Samael or Satan."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In Demonology,
Satan is the leader of the opposition in Hell, the monarch of which was
Beelzebub. He belongs to the fifth kind or class of demons (of which there are
nine according to mediaeval demonology), and he is at the head of witches and
sorcerers. But see in the text the true meaning of Baphomet, the goat-headed
Satan, one with Azaziel, the scape goat of Israel. Nature is the god PAN.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Mahabharata. In the latest religion
of all, Christianity, all the Combatants, gods and demons, adversaries in both
the camps, are now transformed into Dragons and Satans, simply in order to
connect EVIL personified with the Serpent of Genesis, and thus prove the new
dogma.*
-------
NOAH WAS A
KABIR, HENCE HE MUST HAVE BEEN A DEMON.
It matters
little whether it is Isis, or Ceres -- the "Kabiria" -- or again the
Kabiri, who have taught men agriculture; but it is very important to prevent
fanatics from monopolising all the facts in history and legend, and from
fathering their distortions of truth, history, and legend upon one man. Noah is
either a myth along with the others, or one whose legend was built upon the
Kabirian or Titanic tradition, as taught in Samothrace; he has, therefore, no
claim to be monopolized by either Jew or Christian. If, as Faber tried to
demonstrate at such cost of learning and research, Noah is an Atlantean and a
Titan, and his family are the Kabiri or pious Titans, etc. -- then biblical
chronology falls by its own weight, and along with it all the patriarchs -- the
antediluvian and pre-Atlantean Titans. As now discovered and proven, Cain is
Mars, the god of power and generation, and of the first (sexual) bloodshed.**
Tubal-Cain is a Kabir, "an instructor of every artificer in brass and
iron"; or -- if this will please better -- he is one with Hephaestos or
Vulcan; Jabal is taken from the Kabiri -- instructors in agriculture,
"such as have cattle," and Jubal is "the father of all those who
handle the harp," he, or they who fabricated the harp for Kronos and the
trident for Poseidon.***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide for
further details upon the Satanic myth, Part II. on Symbolism, in this volume.
** As he is also
Vulcan or Vul-cain, the greatest god with the later Egyptians, and the greatest
Kabir. The god of time was Chium in Egypt, or Saturn, or Seth, and Chium is the
same as Cain.
*** See Strabo,
comparing them to the Cyclopes -- XIV. p. 653 et seq. (Callim in Del., 31 Stat.
Silo. IV., 6, 47; etc., etc.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 391 THE FLOOD LEGENDS.
The history or
"fables" about the mysterious Telchines -- fables echoing each and
all the archaic events of our esoteric teachings -- furnish us with a key to
the origin of Cain's genealogy (Genesis, ch. iii.); they give the reason why
the Roman Catholic Church identifies "the accursed blood" of Cain and
Ham with Sorcery, and makes it responsible for the Deluge. Were not the
Telchines -- it is argued -- the mysterious ironworkers of Rhodes; they who
were the first to raise statues to the gods, furnish them with weapons, and men
with magic arts? And is it not they who were destroyed by a deluge at the
command of Zeus, as the Cainites were by that of Jehovah?
The Telchines are
simply the Kabiri and the Titans, in another form. They are the Atlanteans
also. "Like Lemnos and Samothrace," says Decharme, "Rhodes, the
birth-place of the Telchines, is an island of volcanic formation." (Genii
of Fire, p. 271.) The island of Rhodes emerged suddenly out of the seas, after
having been previously engulfed by the Ocean, say the traditions. Like
Samothrace (of the Kabiri) it is connected in the memory of men with the Flood
legends. As enough has been said on this subject, however, it may be left for
the present.
But we may add a
few more words about Noah, the Jewish representative of nearly every pagan God
in one or another character. The Homeric songs contain, poetized, all the later
fables about the Patriarchs, who are all sidereal, cosmic, and numerical
symbols and signs. The attempt to disconnect the two genealogies -- those of
Seth and Cain* -- and the further attempt, as futile, to show them real,
historical men, has only led to more serious inquiries into the history of the
Past, and to discoveries which have damaged for ever the supposed revelation.
For instance, the identity of Noah and Melchizedek being established, the
further identity of Melchizedek, or Father Sadik, with Kronos-Saturn is proved
also.
That it is so
may be easily demonstrated. It is not denied by any of the Christian writers.
Bryant (See "Analysis of Ancient Mythology," Vol. II., p. 760)
concurs with all those who are of opinion, that Sydic, or
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nothing could
be more awkward and childish, we say, than this fruitless attempt to disconnect
the genealogies of Cain and of Seth, or to conceal the identity of names under
a different spelling. Thus, Cain has a Son ENOCH, and Seth a Son ENOCH also
(Enos, Ch'anoch, Hanoch; -- one may do what one likes with Hebrew unvowelled
names). In the Cainite line Enoch begets IRAD, Irad MEHUJAEL, the latter
METHUSAEL, and Methusael, Lamech. In the Sethite line, Enoch begets Cainan, and
this one MAHALEEL (a variation on Mehujael), who gives birth to JARAD (or
Irad); Jarad to ENOCH (Number 3), who produces Methuselah (from Methusael), and
finally Lamech closes the list. Now all these are symbols (Kabalistically) of
solar and lunar years, of astronomical periods, and of physiological (phallic)
functions, just as in any other pagan symbolical creed. This has been proven by
a number of writers.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[diagram]], Sadic, a JUST man, and perfect in his generation. All
science and every useful art were attributed to him, and through his sons
transmitted to posterity." (See New Encyclopaedia by Abraham Rees, F.R.S.)
Now it is
Sanchoniathon, who informs the world that the Kabiri were the Sons of Sydic or
Zedek (Melchizedek). True enough, this information, having descended to us
through Eusebius (Preparatio Evangelica), may be regarded with a certain amount
of suspicion, as it is more than likely that he dealt with Sanchoniathon's
works as he has with Manetho's Synchronistic Tables. But let us suppose that
the identification of Sydic, Kronos, or Saturn with Noah and Melchizedek, is
based on one of the Eusebian pious hypotheses. Let us accept it as such, along
with Noah's characteristic as a just man, and his supposed duplicate, the
mysterious Melchizedek, King of Salem, and priest of the high god, after
"his own order" (See Hebrews, ch. v. 6, and vii. 1, et seq.); and
finally, having seen what they all were spiritually, astronomically, psychically
and cosmically, let us now see what they became rabbinically and
KABALISTICALLY.
Speaking of
Adam, Kain, Mars, etc., as personifications, we find the author of "The
Source of Measures" enunciating our very esoteric teachings in his
Kabalistic researches. Thus he says:--
"Now Mars
was the lord of birth and of death, of generation and of destruction, of
ploughing, of building, of sculpture or stone-cutting, of Architecture . . . .
in fine, of all . . . . ARTS. He was the primeval principle, disintegrating
into the modification of two opposites for production. Astronomically, too,* he
held the birthplace of the day and year, the place of its increase of strength,
Aries, and likewise the place of its death, Scorpio. He held the house of
Venus, and that of the Scorpion. He, as birth, was good; as death, was Evil. As
good, he was light; as bad, he was night. As good, he was man; as bad, he was
woman. He held the cardinal points, and as Cain, or Vulcan,** or Pater Sadic,
or Melchizadek, he was lord of the Ecliptic, or
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The AEolian
name of Mars was [[Areus]], and the Greek Ares, [[Ares]], is a name over the
etymological significance of which, philologists and Indianists, Greek and
Sanskrit scholars have vainly worked to this day. Very strangely, Max Muller
connects both the names Mars and Ares with the Sanskrit root mar, whence he
traces their derivation, and from which, he says, the name of Maruts (the
storm-gods) comes. Welcker, however, offers more correct etymologies. (See
Griech. Gotterlehre, I., 415.) However it may be, etymologies of roots and
words alone will never yield the esoteric meaning fully, though they may help
to useful guesses.
** As the same
author shows: "The very name Vulcain appears in the reading; for in the
first words (of chap. iv. Genesis, 5) is to be found V'elcain, or V'ulcain,
agreeably to the deepened u sound of the letter vau. Out of its immediate
context, it may be [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 393 THE LEGENDS OF IRAN.
balance, or line
of adjustment, and therefore was THE JUST ONE. The ancients held to there being
seven planets, or great gods, growing out of eight, and Pater Sadik, the Just
or Right One, was lord of the eighth, which was Mater Terra. ("Source of
Measures," p. 186-70.)
This makes their
functions plain enough after they had been degraded, and establishes the
identity.
The Noachian
Deluge, as described in its dead letter and within the period of Biblical
chronology, 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:
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] read as "and the god Cain," or
Vulcain. If, however, anything is wanting to confirm the Cain-Vulcain idea,
Fuerst says: [[hebrew]], Cain, the iron point of a lance, a smith (blacksmith),
inventor of sharp iron tools and smith work" (p. 278).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 394 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Before the
creation of Adam, two races lived and succeeded each other on Earth; the Devs
who reigned 7,000 years, and the Peris (the Izeds) who reigned but 2,000,
during the existence of the former. The Devs were giants, strong and wicked;
the Peris were smaller in stature, but wiser and kinder.
Here we
recognize the Atlantean giants and the Aryans, or the Rakshasas of the Ramayana
and the children of Bharata Varsha, or India; the ante- and the post-diluvians
of the Bible.
Gyan (or rather
Gnan, true or occult Wisdom and knowledge), also called Gian-ben-Gian (or
Wisdom, son of Wisdom), was the king of the Peris.* He had a shield as famous
as that of Achilles, only instead of serving against an enemy in war, it served
as a protection against black magic, the sorcery of the Devs. Gian-ben-Gian had
reigned 2,000 years when Iblis, the devil, was permitted by God to defeat the
Devs and scatter them to the other end of the world. Even the magic shield,
which, produced on the principles of astrology, destroyed charms, enchantments,
and bad spells, could not prevail against Iblis, who was an agent of Fate (or
Karma).** They count ten kings in their last metropolis called Khanoom, and
make the tenth, Kaimurath, identical with the Hebrew Adam. These kings answer
to the ten antediluvian generations of kings as given by Berosus.
Distorted as
those legends are now found, one can hardly fail to identify them with the
Chaldean, Egyptian, Greek, and even Hebrew traditions. The latter, disdaining
in its exclusiveness to speak of pre-adamite nations, yet allows these to be
clearly inferred, by sending out Cain -- one of the two only living men on
earth -- into the land of Nod, where he gets married and builds a city (Gen.
iv.), etc.
Now if we compare
the 9,000 years mentioned by the Persian tales with the 9,000 years, which
Plato declared had passed since the submersion of the last Atlantis, a very
strange fact is made apparent. Bailly remarked, but distorted it by his
interpretation. The Secret Doctrine may restore the figures to their true
meaning. "First of all," we read in "Critias" that
"one must remember that 9,000 years have elapsed since the war of the
nations, which lived above and outside the Pillars of Hercules, and those which
peopled the lands on this side."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Some derive
the word from Paras which produced Pars, Persia, Pars; but it may be equally
derived from Pitar or Pitris, the Hindu progenitors of the Fifth Race -- the
Fathers of Wisdom or the Sons of "Will and Yoga" -- who were called
Pitar, as were the divine Pitars of the First Race.
** See for these
traditions the "Collection of Persian Legends," in Russian, Georgian,
Armenian, and Persian; Herbelot's narrative Legendes Persanes,
"Bibliotheque Orientale," p. 298, 387, etc., and Danville's Memoires.
We give in a condensed narrative that which is scattered in hundreds of volumes
in European and Asiatic languages, as well as in oral traditions.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 395 ESOTERIC CHRONOLOGY.
In
"Timaeus" Plato says the same. The Secret Doctrine declaring that
most of the later islander Atlanteans perished in the interval between 850,000
and 700,000 years ago, and that the Aryans were 200,000 years old when the
first great "island" or continent was submerged, there hardly seems
any reconciliation possible between the figures. But there is, in truth. Plato,
being an Initiate, had to use the veiled language of the Sanctuary, and so had
the Magi of Chaldea and Persia, through whose exoteric revelations the Persian
legends were preserved and passed to posterity. Thus, one finds the Hebrews
calling a week "seven days," and "a week of years" when
each of its days represents 360 solar years, and the whole "week" is
2,520 years, in fact. They had a Sabbatical week, a Sabbatical year, etc.,
etc., and their Sabbath lasted indifferently 24 hours or 24,000 years -- in
their secret calculations of the Sods. We of the present times call an age a
century. They of Plato's day, the initiated writers, at any rate, meant by a
millenium, not a thousand but 100,000 years; Hindus, more independent than any,
never concealed their chronology. Thus, when saying 9,000 years, the Initiates
will read 900,000 years, during which space of time -- i.e, from the first
appearance of the Aryan race, when the Pliocene portions of the once great
Atlantis began gradually sinking* and other continents to appear on the
surface, down to the final disappearance of Plato's small island of Atlantis,
the Aryan races had never ceased to fight with the descendants of the first
giant races. This war lasted till nearly the close of the age which preceded
the Kali Yug, and was the Mahabharatean war so famous in Indian History. Such
blending of the events and epochs, and the bringing down of hundreds of
thousands into thousands of years, does not interfere with the numbers of years
that had elapsed, according to the statement made by the Egyptian priests to
Solon, since the destruction of the last portion of Atlantis. The 9,000 years
were the correct figures given. The latter event has never been kept a secret,
and had only faded out of the memory of the Greeks. The Egyptians had their
records complete, because isolated; for, being surrounded by sea and desert,
they had been left untrammelled by other nations, till about a few millenniums
before our era.
History, for the
first time, catches a glimpse of Egypt and its great mysteries through
Herodotus, if we do not take into account the Bible, and its queer
chronology.** And how little Herodotus could tell is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The main
continent perished in the Miocene times, as already stated.
** From Bede
downwards all the chronologists of the Church have differed among themselves,
and contradicted each other. "The chronology of the Hebrew text has been
grossly altered, especially in the interval next after the Deluge":-- says
Whiston (Old Test., p. 20).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Thence King
Solomon, whose traces are nowhere to be found outside of the Bible, and the
description of whose magnificent palace and city dovetail with those of the
Persian tales; though they were unknown to all pagan travellers, even to
Herodotus.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 397 THE PERSIAN PHOENIX.
"Eternal
Wisdom," and even with having built the cities of Luz, Babylon and
Ispahan, though they were built ages later. But as modern Delhi is built on six
other older cities, so these just-named cities may be built on emplacements of
other cities of an immense antiquity. As to his date, it can only be inferred
from another legend.
In the same
tradition that wise prince is credited with having made war against the giants
on a twelve-legged horse, whose birth is attributed to the amours of a
crocodile with a female hippopotamus. This dodecaped was found on the "dry
island" or new continent; much force and cunning had to be used to secure
the wonderful animal, but no sooner had Huschenk mounted him, than he defeated
every enemy. No giants could withstand his tremendous power. Notwithstanding,
this king of kings was killed by an enormous rock thrown at him by the giants
from the great mountains of Damavend.*
Tahmurath is the
third king of Persia, the St. George of Iran, the knight who always has the
best of, and who kills, the Dragon. He is the great enemy of the Devs who, in
his day, dwelled in the mountains of Kaf, and occasionally made raids on the
Peris. The old French chronicles of the Persian folklore call him the Dev-bend,
the conqueror of the giants. He, too, is credited with having founded Babylon,
Nineveh, Diarbek, etc., etc. Like his grand-sire Huschenk, Tahmurath (Taimuraz)
also had his steed, only far more rare and rapid -- a bird called Simorgh-Anke.
A marvellous bird, in truth, intelligent, a polyglot, and even very religious.
(See Orient. Collect. ii., 119.) What says that Persian Phoenix? It complains
of its old age, for it is born cycles and cycles before the days of Adam (also
Kaimurath). It has witnessed the revolutions of long centuries. It has seen the
birth and the close of twelve cycles of 7,000 years each, which multiplied
esoterically will give us again 840,000 years.** (Orient. Collect. ii., 119 et
seq.) Simorgh is born with the last deluge of the pre-Adamites, says the
"romance of Simorgh and the good Khalif"! (Tales of Derbent.)
What says the
"Book of Numbers"? Esoterically, Adam Rishoon is the lunar Spirit
(Jehovah, in a sense, or the Pitris) and his three Sons -- Ka-yin, Habel, and
Seth -- represent the three races, as already explained. Noah-Xisuthrus
represents in his turn (in the cosmo-geological key) the 3rd Race separated,
and his three sons, its last three races; Ham, moreover, symbolizing that race
which uncovered the "nakedness" of the Parent Race, and of the
"Mindless," i.e., committed sin.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Orient. Trad.,
p. 454. See also Bailly's "Lettres sur l'Atlantide."
** Remember that
the Rabbins teach that there are to be seven successive renewals of the globe;
that each will last 7,000 years, the total duration being thus 49,000 years
(See Rabbi Parcha's "wheel"; also Kenealy's "Book of God,"
p. 176). This refers to 7 Rounds, 7 Root-races, and sub-races, the truly occult
figures, though sorely confused.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, Mergiana*, whom Demrusch had kept as a prisoner,
and takes her over to the dry island, i.e., the new continent of Europe.**
After him came Giamschid, who builds Esikekar, or Persepolis. This king reigns
700 years, and believes himself, in his great pride, immortal, and demands
divine honours. Fate punishes him, he wanders for 100 years in the world under
the name of Dhulkarnayn "the two horned." But this epithet has no
connection with the "two-horned" gentleman of the cloven foot. The
"two-horned" is the epithet given in Asia, uncivilized enough to know
nothing of the attributes of the devil, to those conquerors who have subdued
the world from the East to the West.
Then come the
usurper Zohac, and Feridan, one of the Persian heroes, who vanquishes the
former, and shuts him up in the mountains of Damavend. These are followed by
many others down to Kaikobad, who founded a new dynasty.
Such is the
legendary history of Persia, and we have to analyze it. What are the mountains
of Kaf to 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Mergain, or
Morgana, the fairy sister of King Arthur, is thus shown of Oriental descent.
** Where we find
her, indeed, in Great Britain, in the romance of the Knights of the Round
Table. Whence the identity of name and fairy-hood, if both heroines did not
symbolize the same historical event which had passed into a legend?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 399 THE ARCTIC CONTINENT.
Huschenk or the
winged Simorgh of Tahmurath (or Taimuraz), upon which to cross over the Arctic
Ocean.*
Nevertheless,
the wandering songsters of Persia and the Caucasus will maintain, to this day, that
far beyond the snow-capped summits of Kap, or Caucasus, there is a great
continent now concealed from all. That it is reached by those who can secure
the services of the twelvelegged progeny of the crocodile and the female
hippopotamus, whose legs become at will twelve wings**; or by those who have
the patience to wait for the good pleasure of Simorgh-anke, who promised that
before she dies she will reveal the hidden continent to all, and make it once
more visible and within easy reach, by means of a bridge, which the Ocean Devs
will build between that portion of the "dry island" and its severed
parts.*** This relates, of course, to the seventh race, Simorgh being the
Manvantaric cycle.
It is very
curious that Cosmas Indicopleustes, who lived in the sixth century A.D., should
have always maintained that man was born, and dwelt at first in a country
beyond the Ocean, a proof of which had been given him in India, by a learned
Chaldean (Cosmas Indicopleustes in Collect. nova Patrum, t. ii, p. 188; also see
Journ. des Savants, Suppl. 1707, p. 20.) He says: "The lands we live in
are surrounded by the ocean, but beyond that ocean there is another land which
touches the walls of the sky; and it is 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* To this day
the aborigines of Caucasus speak of their mountains as Kap-kaz, using the
consonant p instead of the usual v (Kavkaz or Caucasus). But their bards say
that it requires seven months for a swift horse to reach the "dry
land" beyond Kaf, holding north without ever deviating from one's way.
** Bailly
thought he saw in this horse a twelve-oared ship. The Secret Doctrine teaches that
the early Third Race built boats and flotillas before it built houses. But the
"horse," though a much later animal, has, nevertheless, a more occult
primitive meaning. The crocodile and the hippopotamus were held sacred and
represented divine symbols, both with the ancient Egyptians and with the
Mexicans. Poseidon is, in Homer, the God of the Horse, and assumes that form
himself to please Ceres. Arion, their progeny, is one of the aspects of that
"horse," which is a cycle.
*** The severed
parts must be Norway and other lands in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 400 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"In the
first beginnings of (human) life, the only dry land was on the Right end* of
the sphere, where it (the globe) is motionless.** The whole earth was one vast
watery desert, and the waters were tepid . . . . There man was born on the
seven zones of the immortal, the indestructible of the Manvantara.*** There was
eternal spring in darkness. (But) that which is darkness to the man of today,
was light to the man of his dawn. There, the gods rested, and Fohat**** reigns
ever since . . . . Thus the wise fathers say that man is born in the head of
his mother (earth), and that her feet at the left end generated (begot) the
evil winds that blow from the mouth of the lower Dragon . . . . Between the
first and second (races) the eternal central (land) was divided by the water of
life.*****
"It flows
around and animates her (mother earth's) body. Its one end issues from her
head; it becomes foul at her feet (the Southern Pole). It gets purified (on its
return) to her heart -- which beats under the foot of the sacred Shambalah,
which then (in the beginnings) was not yet born. For it is in the belt of man's
dwelling (the earth) that lies concealed the life and health of all that lives
and breathes.****** During the first and second (races) the belt was covered
with the great waters. (But) the great mother travailed under the waves and a
new land was joined to the first one which our wise men call the head-gear (the
cap). She travailed harder for the third (race) and her waist and navel
appeared above the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The two poles
are called the right and left ends of our globe -- the right being the North
Pole -- or the head and feet of the earth. Every beneficent (astral and cosmic)
action comes from the North; every lethal influence from the South Pole. They
are much connected with and influence "right" and "left"
hand magic.
** The more one
approaches the poles the less rotation is felt; at the poles proper, the
diurnal revolution is quite neutralized. Thence the expression that the sphere
is "motionless."
*** It is
averred in Occultism that the land or island, which crowns the North Pole like
a skull-cap, is the only one which prevails during the whole Manvantara of our
"Round." All the central continents and lands will emerge from the
sea bottom many times in turn, but this land will never change.
**** Bear in
mind that the Vedic and Avestian name of Fohat is Apam-Napat. In the Avesta he
stands between the fire-yazatas and the water-yazatas. The literal meaning is
"Son of the Waters," but these "waters" are not the liquid
we know, but Ether -- the fiery waters of space. Fohat is the "Son of
Ether" in its highest aspect, Akasa, the Mother-Father of the primitive
Seven, and of Sound or LOGOS. Fohat is the light of the latter. See Book I.
***** This
"water" is the blood or fluid of life which animates the earth,
compared here to a living body.
****** Occult
teaching corroborates the popular tradition which asserts the existence of a
fountain of life in the bowels of the earth and in the North Pole. It is the
blood of the earth, the electromagnetic current, which circulates through all
the arteries; and which is said to be found stored in the "navel" of
the earth.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 401 THE UNREACHABLE LAND.
water. It was
the belt, the sacred Himavat, which stretches around the world.* She broke
toward the setting sun from her neck** downward (to the south west), into many
lands and islands, but the eternal land (the cap) broke not asunder. Dry lands
covered the face of the silent waters to the four sides of the world. All these
perished (in their turn). Then appeared the abode of the wicked (the Atlantis).
The eternal land was now hid, for the waters became solid (frozen) under the
breath of her nostrils and the evil winds from the Dragon's mouth," etc.,
etc.
This shows that
Northern Asia is as old as the Second Race. One may even say that Asia is
contemporary with man, since from the very beginnings of human life its
root-continent, so to speak, already existed; that part of the world now known
as Asia being only cut off from it in a later age, and divided by the glacial
waters.
If, then, the
teaching is understood correctly, the first continent which came into existence
capped over the whole North Pole like one unbroken crust, and remains so to
this day, beyond that inland sea which seemed like an unreachable mirage to the
few arctic travellers who perceived it.
During the
Second Race more land emerged from under the waters as a continuation of the
"head" from the neck. Beginning on both hemispheres, on the line
above the most northern part of Spitzbergen*** on
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Occultism
points to the Himalayan chain as that "belt," and maintains that
whether under the water or above, it encircles the globe. The navel is
described as situated to the setting sun or to the west of the Himavat in which
lie the roots of Meru, which mountain is north of the Himalaya. Meru is not
"the fabulous mountain in the navel or centre of the earth," but its
roots and foundations are in that navel, though it is in the far north itself.
This connects it with the "central" land "that never
perishes"; the land in which "the day of the mortal lasts six months
and his night another six months." As the Vishnu Purana has it: "for
the North of Meru there is, therefore, always night during day in other
regions; for Meru is north of all the dwipas and varshas" (islands and
countries). (Book II., chap. viii.) Meru is therefore neither on Atlas as
Wilford suggests, nor, as Wilson tried to show, "absolutely in the centre
of the globe," only because "relatively with the inhabitants of the
several portions, to all of whom the East is that quarter where the sun first
appears."
** Even the
Commentaries do not refrain from Oriental metaphor. The globe is likened to the
body of a woman, "mother earth." From her neck downward, means from
the inland sea now beyond the impassable barrier of ice. The Earth, as Parasara
says: "is the mother and nurse, augmented with all creatures and their
qualities, the comprehender of all the worlds."
*** For the
Stanzas call this locality by a term translated in the commentary as a place of
no latitude (niraksha) the abode of the gods. As a scholiast says from the
Surya-Sidhanta:
"Above this
(the Siddha) goes the sun when situated at the equinoxes; they have neither
equinoctial shadow nor elevation of the pole (akshonnati, v. 42). In both
directions from these are two pole-stars (dhruvatara), fixed in the midst of
the sky; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 horse-shoe continent of which the commentary
speaks; of the two ends of which, one included Greenland with a prolongation
which crossed the 50th degree a little south west, and the other Kamschatka,
the two ends being united by what is now the northern fringe of the coasts of
Eastern and Western Siberia. This broke asunder and disappeared. In the early
part of the Third Race -- Lemuria was formed (Vide supra). When it was
destroyed in its turn, Atlantis appeared.
-------
WESTERN
SPECULATIONS,
FOUNDED ON THE
GREEK AND PURANIC TRADITIONS.
Thus it becomes
natural to find that, on even such meagre data as have reached the profane
historian, Rudbeck, a Swedish scientist, tried to prove about two centuries ago
that Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato. He thought, even, that he had found in
the configuration of ancient Upsala, the situation and measurements given by
the Greek sage of the capital of "Atlantis." As Bailly proved,
Rudbeck was mistaken; but so was Bailly likewise, and still more. For Sweden
and Norway had formed part and parcel of ancient Lemuria, and also of Atlantis
on the European side, just as Eastern and Western Siberia and Kamschatka had
belonged to it, on the Asiatic. Only, once more, when was it? We can find it
out approximately only by studying the Puranas, if we will have nought to do
with the Secret teachings.
Three quarters
of a century have already elapsed since Captain (now Colonel) Wilford brought
forward his fanciful theories about the British islands being the "White
Island," the Atala of the Puranas. This was sheer nonsense, as the Atala
is one of the seven dwipas, or islands, belonging to the nether lokas, one of
the seven regions of Patala (the antipodes). Moreover, as Wilford* shows, the
Puranas place it "on
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] to those who are situated in places of no
latitude (niraksha) both these have their place in the horizon. Hence there is
(on that land) no elevation of the poles, the two pole-stars being situated in
their horizon; but their degrees of colatitude (lumbaka) are 90; at Meru the
degrees of latitude (aksha) are of the same number." (43 and 44.)
* Wilford makes
many mistakes. He identifies, for instance, Sveta-dwipa (the white Island), the
"island in the northern part of Toyambhudi," with England, and then
tries to identify it with Atala (a nether region) and Atlantis. Now the former
is the abode of Vishnu, exoterically, and Atala is a hell. He also places it in
the Euxine or Icshu (Black) Sea, and then seems to connect it, in another
place, with Africa and Atlas.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 403 ORIENTALISTS IN THE WRONG BOX.
the seventh zone
or seventh climate," -- rather, on the seventh measure of heat: which thus
locates it between the latitudes of 24 and 28 degrees north. It is then to be
sought on the same degree as the Tropic of Cancer, whereas England is between
the 50th and 60th degrees of latitude. Wilford speaks of it as Atala, Atlantis,
the white island. And in vol. viii. of Journal of Asiatic Researches, p. 280,
its enemy is called the "White Devil," the demon of terror. For he
says: "In their (the Hindu and Mahomedan) romances, we see Kai-caus going to
the mountain of 'As-burj, at the foot of which the Sun sets,' to fight the
Dev-Sefid, or white devil, the Taradaitya of the Puranas, whose abode was on
the seventh stage of the world, answering to the seventh zone of the Buddhists,
or the White Island."
Now here the Orientalists
have been, and are still, facing the Sphinx's riddle, the wrong solution of
which will ever destroy their authority, if not their persons, in the eyes of
every Hindu scholar, even those who are not initiates. For there is not a
statement in the Puranas -- on the conflicting details of which Wilford based
his speculations -- which has not several meanings, and does not apply to both
the physical and the metaphysical worlds. If the old Hindus divided the face of
the globe geographically into seven zones, climates, dwipas, and into seven
hells and seven heavens, allegorically, that measure of seven did not apply in
both cases to the same localities. It is the north pole, the country of
"Meru," which is the seventh division, as it answers to the Seventh
principle (or fourth metaphysically), of the occult calculation, for it
represents the region of Atma, of pure soul, and Spirituality. Hence Pushkara
is shown as the seventh zone, or dwipa, which encompasses the Kshira Ocean, or
Ocean of milk (the ever-frozen white region) in the Vishnu (and other) Puranas
(Book II ch. iv.). And Pushkara, with its two Varshas, lies directly at the
foot of Meru. For it is said that "the two countries north and south of
Meru are shaped like a bow," . . and that "one half of the surface of
the earth is on the south of Meru and the other half on the north of Meru --
beyond which is half of Pushkara" (Vishnu Purana, Asiatic Researches,
etc.). Geographically, then, Pushkara is America, Northern and Southern; and
allegorically it is the prolongation of Jambu-dwipa* in the middle of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Every name in
the Puranas has to be examined at least under two aspects; geographically, and
metaphysically, in its allegorical application; e.g., Nila, the (blue) mountain
which is one of the boundaries to the north of Meru, is again to be sought
geographically in a mountain range in Orissa, and again in a mountain quite
different from the others (in Western Africa). Jambu-dwipa is Vishnu's dominion
-- the world, limited in the Puranas to our globe, the region which contains
Meru only, and again it is divided to contain Bharata-varsha (India), its best
division, and the fairest, says Parasara. Likewise with Pushkara and all
others.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Purana, Book II. ch. iv.). Wilford is inclined to see Meru in Mount
Atlas, and locates there also the Loka-lokas. Now Meru, we are told, which is
the Swar-loka, the abode of Brahma, of Vishnu, and the Olympus of Indian
exoteric religions, is described geographically as "passing through the
middle of the earth-globe, and protruding on either side" (Surya
Siddhanta, v. 5, Whitney's trans.). On its upper station are the gods, on the
nether (or South pole) is the abode of demons (hells). How can then Meru be
Mount Atlas? Besides which, Taradaitya, a demon, cannot be placed on the
seventh zone if the latter is identified with the "white" Island,
which is Sveta-dwipa, for reasons given in the foot-note. (Vide infra.)
Wilford accuses
the modern Brahmans "of having jumbled them (islands and countries) all
together" (A.R. III. 300); but he jumbled them still more. He believes
that as the Brahmanda and Vayu Puranas divide the old continent into seven
dwipas, said to be surrounded by a vast ocean, beyond which lie the regions and
mountains of Atala (ibid), hence "most probably the Greeks divided the
nation of Atlantis, which, as it could not be found after having once been
discovered, they conceived to have been destroyed by some shock of
nature."
Finding certain
difficulties in believing that the Egyptian priests, Plato, and even Homer, had
all built their notions of Atlantis on Atala -- a nether region located at the
Southern pole -- we prefer holding to the statements given in the secret books.
We believe in the seven "continents," four of which have already
lived their day, the fifth still exists, and two are to appear in the future.
We believe that each of these is not strictly a continent in the modern sense
of the word, but that each name, from Jambu down to Pushkara,* refers to the
geographical names given (i.) to the dry lands covering the face of the whole
earth during the period of a Root-Race, in general; and (ii.) to what remained
of these after a geological (race) Pralaya -- as "Jambu," for
instance: and (iii.) to those localities which will enter, after the future
cataclysms, into the formation of new universal "continents,"
peninsulas, or dwipas** -- each continent being, in one sense, a greater or
smaller region of dry land surrounded with water. Thus, that whatever
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Jambu,
Plaksha, Salmali, Kusa, Krauncha, Saka, and Pushkara.
** Such as Saka
and Pushkara, for instance, which do not yet exist, but into which will enter
such lands as some portions of America, of Africa, and Central Asia, with the
Gobi region. Let us bear in mind that Upadwipas means "root" islands,
or the dry land in general.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranic "islands" -- the sixth and
seventh "continents" -- are yet to come, nevertheless there were, or
there are, lands which will enter into the composition of the future dry lands,
of new earths whose geographical faces will be entirely changed, as were those
of the past. Therefore we find in the Puranas that Saka-dwipa is (or will be) a
continent, and that Sankha-dwipa, as shown in the Vayu Purana, is only "a
minor island," one of the nine divisions (to which Vayu adds six more) of
Bharata Varsha. Because Sankha-dwipa was peopled by "Mlechchhas (unclean
foreigners), who worshipped Hindu divinities," therefore they were
connected with India.* This accounts for Sankhasura, a King of a portion of
Sankha-dwipa, who was killed by Krishna; that King who resided in the palace
"which was an ocean shell, and whose subjects lived in shells also,"
says Wilford.
"On the
banks of the Nile** (?) there were frequent contests between the Devatas
(divine beings, demi-gods) and the Daityas (giants); but the latter tribe
having prevailed, their King, Sankhasura, who resided in the Ocean, made
frequent incursions in the night" (As. Res., Vol. III. 225.)
It is not on the
banks of the Nile, but on the coasts of Western Africa, south of where now lies
Morocco, that these battles took place. There was a time when the whole of the
Sahara desert was a sea, then a continent as fertile as the Delta, and then,
only after another temporary submersion, it became a desert similar to that
other wilderness, the desert of Shamo or Gobi. This is shown in Puranic
tradition, for on the same page as above cited, it is said: "The people
were between two fires; for, while Sankhasura was ravaging one side of the
continent, Krauncha (or Cracacha), King of Kraunch, used to desolate the other;
both armies . . . thus changed the most fertile regions into a savage
desert."
That not only
the last island of Atlantis, spoken of by Plato, but a large continent, first
divided, and then broken later on into seven peninsulas and islands (called
dwipas), preceded Europe, is sure. It covered the whole of the North and South
Atlantic regions, as well as portions of the North and South Pacific, and had
islands even in the Indian Ocean (relics of Lemuria). The claim is corroborated
by Indian Puranas, Greek writers, and Asiatic, Persian, and Mohammedan
traditions. Wilford, who confuses sorely the Hindu and the Mussulman legends,
shows this, however, clearly. (See Vol. VIII., X. and XI. of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* They were
called demons, Asuras, giants, and monsters, because of their wickedness; and
thus their country was likened to Atala -- a hell, because of that.
** Not on the
river Nile, surely, but near the Nila mountains of the Atlas range.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 406 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Asiatic
Researches.) And his facts and quotations from the Puranas give direct and
conclusive evidence that the Aryan Hindus and other ancient nations were
earlier navigators than the Phoenicians, who are now credited with having been
the first seamen that appeared in the post-diluvian times. This is what is
given in the Journal of the Asiatic Society, III., pp. 325, et seq.:--
"In their
distress the few nations who survived (in the war between Devatas and Daityas)
raised their hands to Bhagavan, 'Let him who can deliver us . . . be our King';
using the word I'T (a magic term not understood by Wilford, evidently) which
re-echoed through the whole country."
Then comes a
violent storm, the waters of the Kali are strangely agitated, "when there
appeared from the waves . . a man, afterwards called I'T, at the head of a
numerous army, saying abhayan, no fear" . . . and scattered the enemy.
"The King I'T," explains Wilford, "is a subordinate incarnation
of M'rira" (Mrida, a form of Rudra, probably?) who "re-established
peace and prosperity throughout all Sankha-dwipa, through Barbaradesa,
Hissast'han and Awasthan or Arabia . . " etc., etc.
Surely, if the
Hindu Puranas give a description of wars on continents and islands situated
beyond Western Africa in the Atlantic Ocean; if their writers speak of Barbaras
and other people such as Arabs -- they who were never known to navigate, or
cross the Kala pani (the black waters of the Ocean) in the days of Phoenician
navigation -- then their Puranas must be older than those Phoenicians (placed
at from 2,000 to 3,000 years B.C.). At any rate those traditions must have been
older;* as --
"In the
above accounts," writes an adept, "the Hindus speak of this island as
existing and in great power; it must, therefore, have been more than eleven
thousand years ago."
But another
calculation and proof may be adduced of the great antiquity of these Hindu
Aryans who knew of (because they had once dwelt in it) and described the last
surviving island of Atlantis -- or rather of that remnant of the Eastern
portion of that continent which had
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says Wilford
of the division of Atlantis and Bharata or India, confusing the two accounts
and Priyavrata with Medhatithi:-- "The division was made by Priyavrata. .
. . He had ten sons, and it was his intention to divide the whole world. In the
same manner Neptune divided Atlantis between his ten sons. . . . One of them
had . . . the extremity of the Atlantis" -- which "is probably the
old continent. . . . This Atlantis was overwhelmed by a flood. . . . and it
seems that by Atlantis we should understand the Antediluvian Earth over which ten
princes were born to rule according to the mythology of the West (and of the
East, also) but seven only of them sat upon the throne." (Vol. III. p.
286.) . . Some also are of opinion that of the seven dwipas six were destroyed
by a flood (Vol. VIII. p. 367). Wilford takes it to be "Gades which
included Spain," but it was Plato's island -- rather.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 407 THE PUZZLES OF ANTIQUITY.
perished soon
after the upheaval of the two Americas* -- the two Varshas of Pushkara. This
may be demonstrated, moreover, on an astronomical calculation by an adept who
criticises Wilford. For recalling what the Orientalist had brought forward
concerning the Mount Ashburj "at the foot of which the sun sets,"
where was the war between the Devatas and the Daityas,** he says:--
"We will
consider, then, the latitude and longitude of the lost island, and of the
remaining Mount Ashburj. It was on the seventh stage of the world, i.e., in the
seventh climate (which is between the latitude of 24 degrees and latitude 28
degrees north) . . . This island, the daughter of the Ocean, is frequently
described as lying in the West; and the sun is represented as setting at the
foot of its mountain (Ashburj, Atlas, Teneriffe or Nila, no matter the name),
and fighting the white Devil of the 'White Island.' "
Now, considering
this statement from its astronomical aspect, and knowing that Krishna is the
incarnated Sun (Vishnu), a solar God; and that he is said to have killed
Dev-Sefid, the white giant -- a possible personification of the ancient
inhabitants at the foot of the Atlas -- perchance Krishna may be only a
representation of the vertical beams of the Sun? Those inhabitants (the
Atlantides) are, we have seen, accused by Diodorus of daily cursing the Sun,
and ever fighting his influence. This is an astronomical interpretation of
course. But it will now be proved that Sankhasura, and Sancha dwipa, and all
their history, is also geographically and ethnologically Plato's
"Atlantis" in Hindu dress.
It was just
remarked that since, in the Puranic accounts, the island is still existing,
then those accounts must be older than the 11,000 years elapsed since Sancha
dwipa, or the Poseidonis of Atlantis, disappeared. Is it not barely possible
that Hindus should have known the island still earlier? Let us turn again to
astronomical demonstrations, which make this quite plain if one assumes, according
to the said adept, that "at the time when the summer tropical 'colure'
passed through the Pleiades, when cor-Leonis would be upon the equator; and
when Leo was vertical to Ceylon at sunset, then would Taurus be vertical to the
island of Atlantis at noon."
This explains,
perhaps, why the Singhalese, the heirs of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* America, the
"new" world -- is thus, though not much, older; still it is older
than Europe, the "old world."
** If Div or
Dev-Sefid's (the Taradaitya's) abode was on the seventh stage, it is because he
came from Pushkara, the Patala (antipodes) of India, or from America. The
latter touched the walls, so to say, of Atlantis, before the latter sank
finally. The word Patala, meaning both the antipodal countries and infernal
regions, thus became synonymous in ideas and attributes as well as in name.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 408 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Rakshasas and
Giants of Lanka, and the direct descendants of Singha, or Leo, became connected
with Sancha dwipa or Poseidonis (Plato's Atlantis). Only, as shown by Mackey's
"Sphinxiad," this must have occurred about 23,000 years ago,
astronomically; at which time the obliquity of the ecliptic must have been
rather more than 27 degrees, and consequently Taurus must have passed over
"Atlantis" or "Sancha dwipa." And that it was so is clearly
demonstrated.
"The sacred
bull Nandi was brought from Bharata to Sancha to meet Rishabha (Taurus) every
Kalpa. But when those of the White Island (who descended originally from Sveta
dwipa),* who had mixed with the Daityas (giants) of the land of iniquity, had
become black with Sin, then Nandi remained for ever in the "White
Island" (or Sveta dwipa.) "Those of the Fourth World (race) lost
AUM" -- say the Commentaries.
Asburj (or
Azburj), whether the peak of Teneriffe or not, was a volcano, when the sinking
of the "western Atala" (or hell) began, and those who were saved told
the tale to their children. Plato's Atlantis perished between water below and
fire above; the great mountain vomiting flames all the while. "The
'fire-vomiting Monster' survived alone out of the ruins of the unfortunate
island."
Do the Greeks,
accused of borrowing a Hindu fiction (Atala), and inventing from it another
(Atlantis), stand also accused of getting their geographical notions and the
number seven from them? (Vide in 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Neither
Atlantis, nor yet Sancha dwipa, was ever called "White Island." When tradition
says that "the White Island became black on account of the sins of
people" it only means the denizens of the "White Island," or
Siddhapura, or Sveta dwipa, who descended to the Atlantis of the Third and
Fourth races, to "inform the latter; and who, having incarnated, became
black with sin" -- a figure of speech. All the Avatars of Vishnu are said
to come originally from the White Island. According to Tibetan tradition the
White Island is the only locality which escapes the general fate of other dwipas
and can be destroyed by neither fire nor water, for -- it is the "eternal
land."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 409 WHAT MARCELLUS SAYS.
islands beyond,
which are not far from the firm land, near which is the true sea."
"These
seven dwipas (inaccurately rendered islands) constitute, according to
Marcellus, the body of the famous Atlantis," writes Wilford himself. . . .
. This evidently shows that Atlantis is the old continent. . . . The Atlantis
was destroyed after a violent storm (?): this is well known to the Puranics,
some of whom assert that in consequence of this dreadful convulsion of nature,
six of the dwipas disappeared" . . . (xi., 27).
Enough proofs
have now been given to satisfy the greatest sceptic. Nevertheless, direct
proofs based on exact science are also added. Volumes might be written,
however, to no purpose for those who will neither see nor hear, except through
the eyes and ears of their respective authorities.
Hence the
teaching of the Roman Catholic scholiasts, namely, that Hermon, the mount in
the land of Mizpeth -- meaning "anathema," "destruction" --
is the same as Mount Armon. As a proof of this, Josephus is often quoted, as
affirming that still in his own day enormous bones of giants were daily
discovered on it. But it was the land of Balaam the prophet, whom the
"Lord loved well"; and so mixed up are facts and personages in the
said scholiasts' brains, that, when the Zohar explains the "birds"
which inspired Balaam to mean "Serpents," to wit, the wise men and
adepts at whose school he had learnt the mysteries of prophecy -- the
opportunity is again taken of showing Mount Hermon inhabited by the
"winged dragons of Evil, whose chief is Samael" (the Jewish Satan).
"It is to
those unclean spirits chained on Mount Hermon of the Desert, that the scapegoat
of Israel, who assumed the name of one of them (Azaz(y)el), was sent"
(Spencer).
We say it is not
so. The Zohar has the following explanation on the practice of magic which is
called in Hebrew Nehhaschim, or the "Serpents' Works." It says (Part
III. col. 302):-- "It is called nehhaschim, because the magicians
(practical Kabalists) work surrounded by the light of the primordial serpent,
which they perceive in heaven as a luminous zone composed of myriads of small
stars" . . . which means simply the astral light, so called by the
Martinists, by Eliphas Levi, and now by all the modern Occultists. (Vide
Sections about.)
-------
THE
"CURSE" FROM A PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW.
The foregoing
teachings of the SECRET DOCTRINE, supplemented by universal traditions, must
now have demonstrated that the Brahmanas and Puranas, the Yathas and other
Mazdean Scriptures,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 411 THE ANCIENT AND THE MODERN MAN.
evolution of the
Fourth Race, there came enmity between its seed, and the "Serpent's"
seed, the seed or product of Karma and divine wisdom. For the seed of woman or
lust, bruised the head of the seed of the fruit of wisdom and knowledge, by
turning the holy mystery of procreation into animal gratification; hence the
law of Karma "bruised the heel" of the Atlantean race, by gradually
changing physiologically, morally, physically, and mentally, the whole nature
of the Fourth Race of mankind,* until, from the healthy King of animal creation
of the Third Race, man became in the Fifth, our race, a helpless, scrofulous
being, and has now become the wealthiest heir on the globe to constitutional
and hereditary diseases, the most consciously and intelligently bestial of all
animals!**
This is the real
CURSE from the physiological standpoint, almost the only one touched upon in
the Kabalistic esotericism. Viewed from this aspect, the curse is undeniable,
for it is evident. The intellectual evolution, in its progress hand-in-hand
with the physical, has certainly been a curse instead of a blessing -- a gift
quickened by the "Lords of Wisdom," who have poured on the human
manas the fresh dew of their own spirit and essence. The divine Titan has then
suffered in vain; and one feels inclined to regret his benefaction to mankind,
and sigh for those days so graphically depicted by AEschylus, in his
"Prometheus Bound," when, at the close of the first Titanic age (the
age that followed that of ethereal man, of the pious Kandu and Pramlocha), nascent,
physical mankind, still mindless and (physiologically) senseless, is described
as --
"Seeing,
they saw in vain;
Hearing, they
heard not; but like shapes in dreams,
Through the long
time all things at random mixed."
Our Saviours,
the Agnishwatta and other divine "Sons of the Flame of Wisdom"
(personified by the Greeks in Prometheus***), may well, in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* How wise and
grand, how far-seeing and morally beneficent are the laws of Manu on connubial
life, when compared with the licence tacitly allowed to man in civilized
countries. That those laws have been neglected for the last two millenniums
does not prevent us from admiring their forethought. The Brahmin was a
grihasta, a family man, till a certain period of his life, when, after
begetting a son, he broke with married life and became a chaste Yogi. His very
connubial life was regulated by his Brahmin astrologer in accordance with his
nature. Therefore, in such countries as the Punjab, for instance, where the
lethal influence of Mussulman, and later on of European, licentiousness, has
hardly touched the orthodox Aryan castes, one still finds the finest men -- so
far as stature and physical strength go -- on the whole globe; whereas the mighty
men of old have found themselves replaced in the Deccan, and especially in
Bengal, by men whose generation becomes with every century (and almost with
every year) dwarfed and weakened.
** Diseases and
over-population are facts that can never be denied.
*** In Mrs. Anna
Swanwick's volumes, "The Dramas of AEschylus," it is said of
"Prometheus Bound" (Vol. II., pp. 146, 147), that Prometheus truly
appears in it "as [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* It is this which hangs over humanity like a
heavy funereal pall. Thus arises the responsibility of free-will; the Titanic
passions which represent humanity in its darkest aspect; "the restless
insatiability of the lower passions and desires, when, with self-asserting
insolence, they bid defiance to the restraints of law."**
Prometheus
having endowed man, according to Plato's "Protagoras," with that
"wisdom which ministers to physical well-being," but the lower aspect
of manas of the animal (Kama) having remained unchanged,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] the champion and benefactor of mankind, whose
condition . . . . is depicted as weak and miserable in the extreme. . . . Zeus,
it is said, proposed to annihilate these puny ephemerals, and to plant upon the
earth a new race in their stead." We see the Lords of Being doing
likewise, and exterminating the first product of nature and the sea, in the
Stanzas (V, et seq.). . . . Prometheus represents himself as having frustrated
this design, and as being consequently subjected, for the sake of mortals, to
the most agonising pain, inflicted by the remorseless cruelty of Zeus. We have,
thus, the Titan, the symbol of finite reason and free will (of intellectual
humanity, or the higher aspect of Manas), depicted as the sublime
philanthropist, while Zeus, the supreme deity of Hellas, is portrayed as the
cruel and obdurate despot, a character peculiarly revolting to Athenian
sentiment." The reason for it is explained further on. The "Supreme
Deity" bears, in every ancient Pantheon -- including that of the Jews -- a
dual character, composed of light and shadow.
* The animal
world, having simple instinct to guide it, has its seasons of procreation, and
the sexes become neutralized during the rest of the year. Therefore, the free
animal knows sickness but once in its life -- before it dies.
** Introduction
to "Prometheus Bound," p. 152.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 413 THE TRAVESTY OF PROMETHEUS.
instead of
"an untainted mind, heaven's first gift" (AEschylus), there was
created the eternal vulture of the ever unsatisfied desire, of regret and
despair coupled with "the dreamlike feebleness that fetters the blind race
of mortals" (p. 556), unto the day when Prometheus is released by his
heaven-appointed deliverer, Herakles.
Now Christians
-- Roman Catholics especially -- have tried to prophetically connect this drama
with the coming of Christ. No greater mistake could be made. The true
theosophist, the pursuer of divine wisdom and worshipper of ABSOLUTE perfection
-- the unknown deity which is neither Zeus nor Jehovah -- will demur to such an
idea. Pointing to antiquity he will prove that there never was an original sin,
but only an abuse of physical intelligence -- the psychic being guided by the
animal, and both putting out the light of the spiritual. He will say, "All
ye who can read between the lines, study ancient wisdom in the old dramas --
the Indian and the Greek; read carefully the one just mentioned, one enacted on
the theatres of Athens 2,400 years ago, namely 'Prometheus Bound' " The
myth belongs to neither Hesiod nor AEschylus; but, as Bunsen says, it "is
older than the Hellenes themselves," for it belongs, in truth, to the dawn
of human consciousness. The Crucified Titan is the personified symbol of the
collective Logos, the "Host," and of the "Lords of Wisdom"
or the HEAVENLY MAN, who incarnated in Humanity. Moreover, as his name
Pro-me-theus, meaning "he who sees before him" or futurity, shows* --
in the arts he devised and taught to humanity, psychological insight was not
the least. For as he complains to the daughters of Oceanos:--
"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. . ."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* From [[pro
metis]] pro metis, "forethought." "Professor Kuhn," we are
told in the above-named volumes of "The Dramas of AEschylus,"
"considers the name of the Titan to be derived from the Sanskrit word
Pramantha, the instrument used for kindling fire. The root mand or manth,
implies rotatory motion, and the word manthami (used to denote the process of
fire kindling) acquired the secondary sense of snatching away; hence we find
another word of the same stock, pramatha, signifying theft." This is very
ingenious, but perhaps not altogether correct; besides, there is a very prosaic
element in it. No doubt in physical nature, the higher forms may develop from
the lower ones, but it is hardly so in the world of thought. And as we are told
that the word manthami passed into the Greek language and became the word
manthano, to learn; that is to say, to appropriate knowledge; whence
prometheia, fore-knowledge, fore-thought; we may find, in searching, a more
poetical origin for the "fire-bringer" than that displayed in its
Sanskrit origin. The Svastica, the sacred sign and the instrument for kindling
sacred fire, may explain it better. "Prometheus, the fire-bringer, is the
Pramantha personified," goes on the author; "he finds his prototype
in the Aryan [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
AEschylus' drama (the trilogy is lost) is known to all cultured readers. The
demi-god robs the gods (the Elohim) of their secret -- the mystery of the
creative fire. For this sacrilegious attempt he is struck down by KRONOS* and
delivered unto Zeus, the FATHER and creator of a mankind which he would wish to
have blind intellectually, and animal-like; a personal deity, which will not
see MAN "like one of us." Hence Prometheus, "the fire and
light-giver," is chained on Mount Caucasus and condemned to suffer torture.
But the triform Fates (Karma), whose decrees, as the Titan says, even Zeus:--
"E'en he
the fore-ordained cannot escape. . . "
-- ordain that
those sufferings will last only to that day when a son of Zeus --
"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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] Matarisvan, a divine . . . . personage, closely associated
with the fire god of the Veda, Agni. . . ." Mati, in Sanskrit, is
"understanding," and a synonym of MAHAT and manas, and must be of
some account in the origin of the name: Promati is the son of Fohat, and has
his story also.
* Kronos is
"time," and thus the allegory becomes very suggestive. (See closing
pages of this Sub-section.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 415 CHRIST CONNECTED WITH EPAPHOS.
ville amongst
others -- into a clear prophecy. Io -- "is the mother of God," we are
told, and "dark Epaphos" -- Christ. But, the latter has not dethroned
his father, except metaphorically, if one has to regard Jehovah as that
"Father"; nor has the Christian Saviour hurled his Father down into
Hades. Prometheus says, in verse 930, that Zeus will be humbled yet; as for
himself:--
" . . . .
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 . . . .
. . . . Then let
him sit
Confiding in his
lofty thunder-peals,
And wielding
with both hands the fiery bolt;
For these shall
not avail, but fail he shall,
A fall
disgraceful, not to be endured . . . . " (v. 980).
"Dark
Epaphos" was the Dionysos-Sabazius, the son of Zeus and of Demeter in the
Sabasian Mysteries, during which the "father of the gods," assuming
the shape of a Serpent, begot on Demeter, Dionysos, or the solar Bacchus. Io is
the moon, and at the same time the EVE of a new race, and so is Demeter -- in
the present case. The Promethean myth is a prophecy indeed; but it does not
relate to any of the cyclic Saviours who have appeared periodically in various
countries and among various nations, in their transitionary conditions of
evolution. It points to the last of the mysteries of cyclic transformations, in
the series of which mankind, having passed from the ethereal to the solid
physical state, from spiritual to physiological procreation, is now carried
onward on the opposite arc of the cycle, toward that second phase of its
primitive state, when woman knew no man, and human progeny was created, not
begotten.
That state will
return to it and to the world at large, when the latter shall discover and
really appreciate the truths which underlie this vast problem of sex. It will
be like "the light that never shone on sea or land," and has to come
to men through the Theosophical Society. That light will lead on and up to the
true spiritual intuition. Then (as expressed once in a letter to a
theosophist), "the world will have a race of Buddhas and Christs, for the
world will have discovered that individuals have it in their own powers to
procreate Buddha-like children -- or demons." "When that knowledge
comes, all dogmatic religions, and with these the demons, will die out."
If we reflect
upon the serial development of the allegory, and the character of the heroes,
the mystery may be unriddled. KRONOS is of course "time" in its
cyclic course. He swallows his children -- the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See, for
explanation of this curse, the last page of the present sub-section.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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 Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. After this
she will encounter "fierce northern blasts" and cross thither to the
land of the "Arimaspian host" (east of Herodotus' Scythia) to --
"Pluto's
gold-abounding flood. . . ."(825)
Which is rightly
conjectured by Professor Newman to have meant the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is
complained by the author of the version on, and translator of, "Prometheus
Bound" that in this tracing of Io's wanderings, "no consistency with
our known geography is attainable" (p. 191, Vol. II). There may be good
reason for it. First of all it is the journey and wandering from place to place
of the race from which the "tenth," or Kalki Avatar, so called, is to
issue. This he calls the "Kingly race born in Argos" (888). But Argos
has no reference here to Argos in Greece. It comes from Arg or arca -- the
female generative power symbolised in the moon -- the navi-formed Argha of the
mysteries, meaning the Queen of Heaven. Eustathius shows that, in the dialect
of the Arg-ians, Io signified the moon; while esotericism explains it as the
divine Androgyne, or the mystic 10; in Hebrew 10 is the perfect number, or
Jehovah. Arghya in Sanskrit is the libation cup, the navi-form or boat-shaped
vessel in which flowers and fruit are offered to the deities. Arghyanath is a
title of the Maha-Chohan, meaning "the Lord of Libations;" and Arghya
Varsha -- "the land of libations" -- is the mystery name of that
region which extends from Kailas mountain nearly to the Schamo Desert -- from
within which the Kalki Avatar is expected. The Airyana-Varsedya of the
Zoroastrians, as a locality, is identical with it. It is now said to have been
situated between the sea of Aral, Baltistan, and little Tibet; but in olden
times its area was far larger, as it was the birth-place of physical humanity,
of which Io is the mother and symbol.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 417 THE MISTAKE OF ARRIAN EXPLAINED.
Ural, the
Arimaspi of Herodotus being "the recognised inhabitants of this golden
region."
And here comes,
between verses 825 and 835, a puzzle to all the European interpreters. Says the
Titan:--
"To these
(Arimaspi and Grypes) approach not; a far border land
Thou next wilt
reach, where dwells a swarthy race
Near the Sun's
founts, where is the AEthiop "river";
Along its banks
proceed till thou attain
The mighty
rapids, where from Bybline heights
Pure draughts of
sacred water Neilos sends . . . "
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Encyclopaedias were
yet ready for them.
The race of IO,
"the cow-horned maid" is then simply the first pioneer race of the
AEthiopians brought by her from the Indus to the Nile (which received its name
in memory of the mother river of the colonists from India*). For does not
Prometheus say to Io** that the sacred Neilos (the god, not the river) --
. . . "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."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Alexander, who
was better acquainted with Attock than with India (where he never went) could
not have failed to hear the Indus near its very sources called Nil and Nilah.
Even if a mistake, it is thus easily accounted for.
** That Io is
identical allegorically with Isis and the moon is shown by her being
"cow-horned." The allegory undeniably reached Greece from India,
where Vach -- "the melodious cow" (Rig-Veda) "from whom mankind
was produced" (Bhagavata Purana) is shown in the Aitareya Brahmana as
pursued by her father Brahma, who was moved by an illicit passion, and changed
her into a deer. Hence Io, refusing to yield to Jupiter's passion, becomes
"horned." The cow was in every country the symbol of the passive
generative power of nature, Isis, Vach, Venus -- the mother of the prolific god
of love, Cupid, but, at the same time, that of the Logos whose symbol became
with the Egyptians and the Indians -- the bull -- as testified to by Apis and
the Hindu bulls in the most ancient temples. In esoteric philosophy the cow is
the symbol of creative nature, and the Bull (her calf) the spirit which
vivifies her, or "the Holy Spirit," as Mr. Kenealy shows. Hence the
symbol of the horns. These were sacred also with the Jews, who placed near the
altar horns of Shittim wood, by seizing which a criminal ensured his safety.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 419 WAS AESCHYLUS 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. Quaest. I, ii. No. 20) and by Clemens Alexandrinus
(Strom. I, ii., oper. tom. 1, p. 467 -- Ed. Potter's). The latter writers are
the only ones who attribute the fact that AEschylus was charged by the
Athenians with sacrilege and condemned to be stoned to death, to its true
cause. They say that having been himself uninitiated, AEschylus had profaned
the Mysteries by exposing them in his trilogies on a public stage.* But he
would have incurred the same condemnation had he been initiated -- which must
have been the case, as otherwise he must, like Socrates, have had a daimon to
reveal to him the secret and sacred allegorical drama of initiation. At all
events, it is not the "father of the Greek tragedy" who invented the
prophecy of Prometheus; for he only repeated in dramatic form that which was
revealed by the priests during the MYSTERIA of the Sabasia.** The latter,
however, is one of the oldest sacred festivals, whose origin is to this day
unknown to history. Mythologists connect it through Mithras (the Sun, called
Sabasius on some old monuments) with Jupiter and Bacchus. But it was never the
property of the Greeks, but dates from days immemorial.
The translators
of the drama wonder how AEschylus could become guilty of such "discrepancy
between the character of Zeus as portrayed in the 'Prometheus Bound' and that
depicted in the remaining dramas." (Mrs. A. Swanwick.) This is just
because AEschylus, like Shakespeare, was and will ever remain the intellectual
"Sphinx" of the ages. Between Zeus, the abstract deity of Grecian
thought, and the Olympic Zeus, there was an abyss. The latter represented during
the mysteries no higher a principle than the lower aspect of human physical
intelligence -- Manas wedded to Kama; Prometheus -- its divine aspect merging
into and aspiring to Buddhi -- the divine Soul. Zeus was the human soul and
nothing more, whenever shown yielding to his lower passions, -- the jealous
God, revengeful and cruel in its egotism or I-AM-NESS. Hence, Zeus is
represented as a serpent -- the intellectual tempter of man -- which,
nevertheless, begets in the course of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Herodotus and
Pausanias supposed that the cause of the condemnation was that AEschylus,
adopting the theogony of the Egyptians, made Diana, the daughter of Ceres, and
not of Latona. (See AElian Var. Hist. I, v. c. xviii., tom. 1, p. 433 Edition
Gronov.) But AEschyIus was initiated.
** Sabasia was a
periodical festival with mysteries enacted in honour of some gods, a variant on
the Mithraic Mysteries. The whole evolution of the races was performed in them.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Christos (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 Brahma, the Hindu deity; Ahura-Mazda
(Ormazd), the Zoroastrian; Zeus, the Greco-Olympian Don Juan; Jehovah, the
jealous, repenting, cruel, tribal God of the Israelites, and all their likes in
the universal Pantheon of human fancy -- vanish and disappear in thin air. And
along with these will vanish their shadows, the dark aspects of all those
deities, ever represented as their "twin brothers" and creatures, in
exoteric legend, their own reflection on earth -- in esoteric philosophy. The
Ahrimans and Typhons, the Samaels and Satans, must be all dethroned on that
day, when every dark evil passion will be subdued.
There is one
eternal Law in nature, one that always tends to adjust contraries and to
produce final harmony. It is owing to this law of spiritual development
superseding the physical and purely intellectual, that mankind will become
freed from its false gods, and find itself finally -- SELF-REDEEMED.
In its final
revelation, the old myth of Prometheus -- his proto- and anti-types being found
in every ancient theogony -- stands in each of them at the very origin of
physical evil, because at the threshold of human physical life. KRONOS is
"Time," whose first law is that the order of the successive and
harmonious phases in the process of evolution during cyclic development should
be strictly preserved -- under the severe penalty of abnormal growth with all
its ensuing results. It was not in the programme of natural development that
man -- higher animal though he may be -- should become at once --
intellectually, spiritually, and psychically -- the demi-god he is on earth,
while his physical frame remains weaker and more helpless and ephemeral than
that of almost any huge mammal. The contrast is too grotesque and violent; the
tabernacle much too unworthy of its indwelling god. The gift of Prometheus thus
became a CURSE -- though foreknown and foreseen by the HOST personified in that
personage, as his name well shows.* It is in this that rests, at one and the
same time,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide supra, a
foot-note concerning the etymology of [[prometis]] prometis or forethought.
Prometheus confesses it in the drama when saying:-- [[Footnote continued on
next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 421 ONE OF THE FUNCTIONS OF ZEUS.
its sin and its
redemption. For the Host that incarnated in a portion of humanity, though led
to it by Karma or Nemesis, preferred free-will to passive slavery, intellectual
self-conscious pain and even torture "while myriad time shall flow"
-- to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude. Knowing such an incarnation was
premature and not in the programme of nature, the heavenly host,
"Prometheus," still sacrificed itself to benefit thereby, at least,
one portion of mankind.* But while saving man from mental darkness, they
inflicted upon him the tortures of the self-consciousness of his responsibility
-- the result of his free will -- besides every ill to which mortal man and
flesh are heir to. This torture Prometheus accepted for himself, since the Host
became henceforward blended with the tabernacle prepared for them, which was
still unachieved at that period of formation.
Spiritual
evolution being incapable of keeping pace with the physical, once its
homogeneity was broken by the admixture, the gift thus became the chief cause,
if not the sole origin of Evil.** The allegory which shows KRONOS cursing Zeus
for dethroning him (in the primitive "golden" age of Saturn, when all
men were demi-gods), and for creating a physical race of men weak and helpless
in comparison; and then as delivering to his (Zeus') revenge the culprit, who
despoiled the gods of their prerogative of creation and who thereby raised man
to their level, intellectually and spiritually -- is highly philosophical. In
the case of Prometheus, Zeus represents the Host of the primeval progenitors,
of the PITAR, the "Fathers" who created man senseless
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]]
"Oh! holy
Ether, swiftly-winged gales . . . .
Behold what I, a
god, from gods endure
. . . . . . . .
.
And yet what say
I? Clearly I foreknew
All that must
happen . . . .
. . . . The
Destined it behoves,
As best I may,
to bear, for well I wot
How
incontestable the strength of Fate . . . . (105)
"Fate"
stands here for KARMA, or Nemesis.
* Mankind is
obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The
intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such
savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No
amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise
such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African
tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the
Turanians so called. The "sacred spark" is missing in them and it is
they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily -- owing to the
wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction -- fast dying out.
Verily mankind is "of one blood," but not of the same essence. We are
the hot-house, artificially quickened plants in nature, having in us a spark,
which in them is latent.
** The
philosophical view of Indian metaphysics places the Root of Evil in the
differentiation of the Homogeneous into the Heterogeneous, of the unit into
plurality.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 423 THE "BUDDHAS OF CONFESSION."
ADDITIONAL
FRAGMENTS FROM A COMMENTARY ON THE VERSES OF STANZA XII.
THE MS. from
which these additional explanations are taken belongs to the group called
"Tongshaktchi Sangye Songa," or the Records of the "Thirty-five
Buddhas of Confession," as they are exoterically called. These personages,
however, though called in the Northern Buddhist religion "Buddhas,"
may just as well be called Rishis, or Avatars, etc., as they are "Buddhas
who have preceded Sakyamuni" only for the Northern followers of the ethics
preached by Gautama. These great Mahatmas, or Buddhas, are a universal and
common property: they are historical sages -- at any rate, for all the
Occultists who believe in such a hierarchy of Sages, the existence of which has
been proved to them by the learned ones of the Fraternity. They are chosen from
among some ninety-seven Buddhas in one group, and fifty-three in another,*
mostly imaginary personages, who are really the personifications of the powers
of the first-named.** These "baskets" of the oldest writings on
"palm leaves" are kept very secret. Each MS. has appended to it a
short synopsis of the history of that sub-race to which the particular
"Buddha-Lha" belonged. The one special MS. from which the fragments
which follow are extracted, and then rendered into a more comprehensible
language, is said to have been copied from stone tablets which belonged to a
Buddha of the earliest day of the Fifth Race, who had witnessed the Deluge and
the submersion of the chief continents of the Atlantean race. The day when
much, if not all, of that which is given here from the archaic records, will be
found correct, is not far distant. Then the modern symbologists will acquire
the certitude that even Odin, or the god Woden, the highest god in the German
and Scandinavian mythology, is one of these thirty-five Buddhas; one of the
earliest, indeed, for the continent to which he and his race belonged, is also
one of the earliest. So early, in truth, that in the days when tropical nature
was to be found, where now lie eternal unthawing snows, one could cross almost
by dry land from Norway via Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present
surround Hudson's
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Gautama
Buddha, named Shakya Thub-pa, is the twenty-seventh of the last group, as most
of these Buddhas belong to the divine dynasties which instructed mankind.
** Of these
"Buddhas," or the "Enlightened," the far distant
predecessors of Gautama the Buddha, and who represent, we are taught, once
living men, great adepts and Saints, in whom the "Sons of Wisdom" had
incarnated, and who were, therefore, so to speak, minor Avatars of the Celestial
Beings -- eleven only belong to the Atlantean race, and 24 to the Fifth race,
from its beginnings. They are identical with the Tirtankaras of the Jainas.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 424 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Bay.* Just, as
in the palmy days of the Atlantean giants, the sons of the "giants from
the East," a pilgrim could perform a journey from what in our days is
termed the Sahara desert, to the lands which now rest in dreamless sleep at the
bottom of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. Events which
were never written outside the human memory, but which were religiously
transmitted from one generation to another, and from race to race, may have
been preserved by constant transmission "within the book volume of the
brain," and through countless aeons, with more truth and accuracy than
inside any written document or record. "That which is part of our souls is
eternal," says Thackeray; and what can be nearer to our souls than that
which happens at the dawns of our lives? Those lives are countless, but the
soul or spirit that animates us throughout these myriads of existences is the
same; and though "the book and volume" of the physical brain may
forget events within the scope of one terrestrial life, the bulk of collective
recollections can never desert the divine soul within us. Its whispers may be
too soft, the sound of its words too far off the plane perceived by our
physical senses; yet the shadow of events that were, just as much as the shadow
of the events that are to come, is within its perceptive powers, and is ever
present before its mind's eye.
It is this
soul-voice, perhaps, which tells those who believe in tradition more than in
written History, that what is said below is all true, and relates to
pre-historic facts.
This is what is
written in one passage:--
"THE KINGS
OF LIGHT HAVE DEPARTED IN WRATH. THE SINS OF MEN HAVE BECOME SO BLACK THAT
EARTH QUIVERS IN HER GREAT AGONY. . . . THE AZURE SEATS REMAIN EMPTY. WHO OF
THE BROWN, WHO OF THE RED, OR YET AMONG THE BLACK (races), CAN SIT IN THE SEATS
OF THE BLESSED, THE SEATS OF KNOWLEDGE AND MERCY! WHO CAN ASSUME THE FLOWER OF
POWER, THE PLANT OF THE GOLDEN STEM AND THE AZURE BLOSSOM?"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This may
account for the similarity of the artificial mounds in the U. S. of America,
and the tumuli in Norway. It is this identity that led some American archaeologists
to suggest that Norwegian mariners had discovered America some one thousand
years ago. (Vide Holmboe's Traces de Bouddhisme en Norvege, p. 23). There is no
doubt that America is that "far distant land into which pious men and
heavy storms had transferred the sacred doctrine," as a Chinese writer
suggested by his description to Neumann. But neither Professor Holmboe, of
Stockholm, nor the American archaeologists, have guessed the right age of the
mounds, or the tumuli. The fact that Norwegians may have re-discovered the land
that their long-forgotten forefathers believed to have perished in the general
submersion, does not conflict with that other fact that the Secret Doctrine of
the land which was the cradle of physical man, and of the Fifth Race, had found
its way into the so-called New World ages and ages before the "Sacred
Doctrine" of Buddhism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 425 THE OLDEST RECORDS ABOUT ATLANTIS.
The "Kings
of Light" is the name given in all old records to the Sovereigns of the
divine Dynasties. The "azure seats" are translated "celestial
thrones" in certain documents. The "flower of power" is now the
Lotus; what it may have been at that period, who can tell.
The writer
proceeds, like the later Jeremiah, to bewail the fate of his people. They had
become bereft of their "azure" (celestial) kings, and "they of
the Deva hue," the moon-like complexion, and "they of the refulgent
(golden) face" have gone "to the land of bliss, the land of metal and
fire"; or -- agreeably with the rules of symbolism -- to the lands lying
North and East, from whence "the great waters have been swept away, sucked
in by the earth and dissipated in the air." The wise races had perceived
"the black storm-dragons, called down by the dragons of wisdom" --
and "had fled, led on by the shining Protectors of the most Excellent
Land" -- the great ancient adepts, presumably; those the Hindus refer to
as their Manus and Rishis. One of them was Vaivasvata Manu.
They "of
the yellow hue" are the forefathers of those whom Ethnology now classes as
the Turanians, the Mongols, Chinese and other ancient nations; and the land
they fled to was no other than Central Asia. There entire new races were born;
there they lived and died until the separation of the nations. But this
"separation" did not take place either in the localities assigned for
it by modern science, nor in the way the Aryans are shown to have divided and
separated by Mr. Max Muller and other Aryanists. Nearly two-thirds of one
million years have elapsed since that period. The yellow-faced giants of the
post-Atlantean day, had ample time, throughout this forced confinement to one
part of the world, and with the same racial blood and without any fresh
infusion or admixture in it, to branch off during a period of nearly 700,000
years into the most heterogeneous and diversified types. The same is shown in
Africa; nowhere does a more extraordinary variability of types exist, from
black to almost white, from gigantic men to dwarfish races; and this only
because of their forced isolation. The Africans have never left their continent
for several hundred thousands of years. If to-morrow the continent of Europe
were to disappear and other lands to re-emerge instead; and if the African
tribes were to separate and scatter on the face of the earth, it is they who,
in about a hundred thousand years hence, would form the bulk of the civilized
nations. And it is the descendants of those of our highly cultured nations, who
might have survived on some one island, without any means of crossing the new
seas, that would fall back into a state of relative savagery. Thus the reason
given for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the
ground and becomes a fallacy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* Thus, while the Aryans are the
descendants of the yellow Adams, the gigantic and highly civilized tlanto-Aryan
race, the Semites -- and the Jews along with them -- are those of the red Adam;
and both de Quatrefages and the writers of the Mosaic Genesis are right. For,
could chapter v. of the First Book of Moses be compared with the genealogies
found in our Archaic Bible, the period from Adam unto Noah would be found
noticed therein, of course under different names, the respective years of the Patriarchs
being turned into periods, the whole being shown symbolical and allegorical. In
the MS. under consideration many and frequent are the references to the great
knowledge and civilization of the Atlantean nations, showing the polity of
several of them and the nature of their arts and sciences. If the Third
Root-Race, the Lemuro-Atlanteans, are already spoken of as having been drowned
"with their high civilizations and gods" ("Esoteric
Buddhism," p. 65), how much more may the same be said of the Atlanteans!
It is from the
Fourth Race that the early Aryans got their knowledge of "the bundle of
wonderful things," the Sabha and Mayasabha, mentioned in the Mahabharata,
the gift of Mayasur to the Pandavas. It is from them that they learnt
aeronautics, Viwan Vidya (the "knowledge of flying in air-vehicles"),
and, therefore, their great arts of meteorography and meteorology. It is from
them, again, that the Aryans inherited their most valuable science of the
hidden virtues of precious and other stones, of chemistry, or rather alchemy,
of mineralogy, geology, physics and astronomy.
Several times
the writer has put to herself the question: "Is the story of Exodus -- in
its details at least -- as narrated in the Old Testament, original? Or is it,
like the story of Moses himself and many others, simply another version of the
legends told of the Atlanteans?" For who, upon hearing the story told of
the latter, will fail to perceive the great similarity of the fundamental
features? The anger of "God" at the obduracy of Pharaoh, his command
to the "chosen" ones, to spoil the Egyptians, before departing, of
their "jewels of silver and jewels of gold" (Exod. xi.); and finally
the Egyptians and their Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea (xiv.). For here is a
fragment of the earlier story from the Commentary:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide the first
pages of Part III., SCIENCE AND THE SECRET DOCTRINE CONTRASTED.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 427 THE DOOM OF ATLANTIS.
. . . "And
the 'great King of the dazzling Face,' the chief of all the Yellow-faced, was
sad, seeing the sins of the Black-faced.
"He sent his
air-vehicles (Viwan) to all his brother-chiefs (chiefs of other nations and
tribes) with pious men within, saying: 'Prepare. Arise ye men of the good law,
and cross the land while (yet) dry.'
'The Lords of
the storm are approaching. Their chariots are nearing the land. One night and
two days only shall the Lords of the Dark Face (the Sorcerers) live on this
patient land. She is doomed, and they have to descend with her. The nether
Lords of the Fires (the Gnomes and fire Elementals) are preparing their magic
Agneyastra (fire-weapons worked by magic). But the Lords of the Dark Eye
("Evil Eye") are stronger than they (the Elementals) and they are the
slaves of the mighty ones. They are versed in Ashtar (Vidya, the highest
magical knowledge).* Come and use yours (i.e., your magic powers, in order to
counteract those of the Sorcerers). Let every lord of the Dazzling Face (an
adept of the White Magic) cause the Viwan of every lord of the Dark Face to
come into his hands (or possession), lest any (of the Sorcerers) should by its
means escape from the waters, avoid the rod of the Four, (Karmic deities) and
save his wicked' (followers, or people).
'May every
yellow face send sleep from himself (mesmerize?) to every black face. May even
they (the Sorcerers) avoid pain and suffering. May every man true to the Solar
Gods bind (paralyze) every man under the lunar gods, lest he should suffer or
escape his destiny.
'And may every
yellow face offer of his life-water (blood) to the speaking animal of a black
face, lest he awaken his master.**
'The hour has struck, the black night is
ready, etc., etc.
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
'Let their
destiny be accomplished. We are the servants of the great Four.*** May the
Kings of light return.' "
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Wrote the late
Brahmachari Bawa, a Yogi of great renown and holiness: "Extensive works on
Ashtar Vidya and such other sciences were at different times compiled in the
languages of the times. But the Sanskrit originals were lost at the time of the
partial deluge of our country." . . . (See Theosophist of June, 1880,
"Some Things the Aryans Knew.") For Agneyastra, see Wilson's
Specimens of the Hindu Theatre, I., p. 297.
** Some
wonderful, artificially-made beast, similar in some way to Frankenstein's
creation, which spoke and warned his master of every approaching danger. The
master was a "black magician," the mechanical animal was informed by
a djin, an Elemental, according to the accounts. The blood of a pure man alone
could destroy him. Vide Part II., xxvii., "Seven in Astronomy, Science,
and Magic."
*** The four
Karmic gods, called the Four Maharajahs in the Stanzas.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Viwans, and led them on to the lands of Fire and
Metal (East and North)."
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
Still, in
another passage, it is said:--
" . . . .
Stars (meteors) showered on the lands of the black Faces; but they slept.
"The
speaking beasts (the magic watchers) kept quiet.
"The nether
lords waited for orders, but they came not, for their masters slept.
"The waters
arose, and covered the valleys from one end of the Earth to the other. High
lands remained, the bottom of the Earth (the lands of the antipodes) remained
dry. There dwelt those who escaped; the men of the yellow-faces and of the
straight eye (the frank and sincere people).
"When the
Lords of the Dark Faces awoke and bethought themselves of their Viwans in order
to escape from the rising waters, they found them gone."
Then a passage
shows some of the more powerful magicians of the "Dark Face" -- who
awoke earlier than the others -- pursuing those who had "spoilt them"
and who were in the rear-guard, for -- "the nations that were led away,
were as thick as the stars of the milky way," says a more modern
Commentary, written in Sanskrit only.
"Like as a
dragon-snake uncoils slowly its body, so the Sons of men, led on by the Sons of
Wisdom, opened their folds, and spreading out, expanded like a running stream
of sweet waters. . . . . . many of the faint-hearted among them perished on
their way. But most were saved."
Yet the pursuers,
"whose heads and chests soared high above the water," chased them
"for three lunar terms" until finally reached by the rising waves,
they perished to the last man, the soil sinking under their feet and the earth
engulfing those who had desecrated her.
This sounds a
good deal like the original material upon which the similar story in Exodus was
built many hundred thousands of years later. The biography of Moses, the story
of his birth, childhood and rescue from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, is now
shown to have been adapted from the Chaldean narrative about Sargon. And if so,
the Assyrian tile in the British Museum being a good proof of it, why not that
of the Jews robbing the Egyptians of their jewels, the death of Pharaoh and his
army, and so on? The gigantic magicians of Ruta and Daitya, the "lords of
the Dark Face," may have become in the later narrative the Egyptian Magi,
and the yellow-faced nations of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 429 SHADOWY MEMENTOS OF THE PAST.
the Fifth Race,
the virtuous sons of Jacob, the "chosen people." . . . One more
statement has to be made: There have been several Divine Dynasties -- a series for
every Root Race beginning with the Third, each series according and adapted to
its Humanity. The last Seven Dynasties referred to in the Egyptian and Chaldean
records belong to the Fifth Race, which, though generally called Aryan, was not
entirely so, as it was ever largely mixed up with races to which Ethnology
gives other names. It would be impossible, in view of the limited space at our
disposal, to go any further into the description of the Atlanteans, in whom the
whole East believes as much as we believe in the ancient Egyptians, but whose
existence the majority of the Western Scientists deny, as they have denied,
before this, many a truth, from the existence of Homer down to that of the
carrier pigeon. The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater even than that
of the Egyptians. It is their degenerate descendants, the nation of Plato's
Atlantis, which built the first Pyramids in the country, and that certainly
before the advent of the "Eastern AEthiopians," as Herodotus calls
the Egyptians. This may be well inferred from the statement made by Ammianus
Marcellinus, who says of the Pyramids that "there are also subterranean
passages and winding retreats, which, it is said, men skilful in the ancient
mysteries, by means of which they divined the coming of a flood, constructed in
different places lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be
lost."
These men who
"divined the coming of floods" were not Egyptians, who never had any,
except the periodical rising of the Nile. Who were they? The last remnants of
the Atlanteans, we maintain. Those races which are dimly suspected by Science,
and thinking of which Mr. Ch. Gould, the well-known geologist, says: "Can
we suppose that we have at all exhausted the great museum of nature? Have we, in
fact, penetrated yet beyond its antechambers? Does the written history of man,
comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent
existence? Or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of
thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldea and of China,
shadowy mementos of pre-historic man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps
transported by a few survivors to existing lands from others, which, like the
fabled (?) Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some
great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization"
("Mythical Monsters," p. 19).
After this one
can turn with more confidence to the words of a Master who wrote, several years
before these words were penned by Mr. Gould:-- "The Fourth Race had its
periods of the highest civilization. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian
civilizations are nothing com-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Phoenician vessels had circumnavigated the globe, and spread civilization in
regions now silent and deserted? What archaeologist will dare assert that the
same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand ruins
now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did not erect the
monumental Nagkon-Wat of Cambodia? or trace the hieroglyphics on the obelisks
and doors of the deserted Indian village, newly discovered in British Columbia
by Lord Dufferin? or those on the ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central
America? Do not the relics we treasure in our museums -- last mementos of the
long 'lost arts' -- speak loudly in favour of ancient civilization? And do they
not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed
away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first
crucible ever heated in a mediaeval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern
chemist, have revived, nor will -- at least, in the present century."
And the same
question may be put now that was put then; it may be once more asked: "How
does it happen that the most advanced standpoint that has been reached in our
times, only enables us to see in the dim distance up the Alpine path of
knowledge the monumental proofs that earlier explorers have left to mark the
plateaux they had reached and occupied?
"If modern
masters are so much in advance of the old ones, why do they not restore to us
the lost arts of our postdiluvian forefathers? Why do they not give us the
unfading colours of Luxor -- the Tyrian purple; the bright vermilion and
dazzling blue which decorate the walls of this place, and are as bright as on
the first day of their application? The indestructible cement of the pyramids
and of ancient aqueducts; the Damascus blade, which can be turned like a
corkscrew in its scabbard without breaking; the gorgeous, unparalleled tints of
the stained glass that is found amid the dust of old ruins and beams in the
windows of ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And
if chemistry is so little able to rival even the early mediaeval ages in some
arts, why boast of achievements which, accord-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 431 MISTAKES OF THE EGYPTOLOGISTS.
ing to strong probability,
were perfectly known thousands of years ago? The more archeology and philology
advance, the more humiliating to our pride are the discoveries which are daily
made, the more glorious testimony do they bear in behalf of those who, perhaps
on account of the distance of their remote antiquity, have been until now
considered ignorant flounderers in the deepest mire of superstition."
Among other arts
and sciences, the ancients -- ay, as a heirloom from the Atlanteans -- had
those of astronomy and symbolism, which included the knowledge of the Zodiac.
As already
explained, the whole of antiquity believed, with good reason, that humanity and
its races are all intimately connected with the planets, and these with
Zodiacal signs. The whole world's History is recorded in the latter. In the
ancient temples of Egypt this was proved by the Dendera Zodiac; but except in
an Arabic work, the property of a Sufi, the writer has never met with a correct
copy of these marvellous records of the past, as also of the future, history of
our globe. Yet the original records exist, most undeniably.
As Europeans are
unacquainted with the real Zodiacs of India, nor do they understand those they
happen to know (witness Bentley), the reader is advised, in order to verify the
statement, to turn to the work of Denon (Travels in Egypt, Vol. II.) in which,
if understood, the two famous Egyptian Zodiacs, can be found and examined.
Having seen them personally, the writer has no longer need to trust to what
other students -- who have examined and studied both very carefully - have to
say of them. As asserted by the Egyptian Priests to Herodotus, who was informed
that the terrestrial Pole and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided,
thus was it found and corroborated by Mackey.* For he states that the Poles are
represented on the Zodiacs in both positions, "And in that which shows the
Poles (polar axes) at right angles, there are marks which prove that 'it was
not the last time they were in that position; but the first' -- after the
Zodiacs had been traced." "Capricorn," he adds, "is
represented at the North Pole, and Cancer is divided, near its middle, at the
South Pole; which is a confirmation that originally they had their winter when
the Sun was in Cancer; but the chief characteristics of its being a monument
commemorating the first time that the Pole had been in that position, are the
Lion and the Virgin." (See in Part II., §"A Mystery of the
Zodiac.")
Broadly
calculated, it is believed by the Egyptologists that the great Pyramid was
built 3,350 B.C. (See Proctor, Knowledge, Vol. I. pp. 242, 400); and that Menes
and his Dynasty existed 7 50 years before the Fourth
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated" by a strangely
intuitional symbologist and astronomer, a kind of a self-made adept of Norwich,
who lived in the first quarter of this century.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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),"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 433 THEORIES OF A SELF-MADE ADEPT.
Mackey adds,
"with his tail turned up over his back, and ending with a Serpent's head;
thereby showing that the Lion had been 'inverted'; which, indeed, must have
been the case with the whole Zodiac and every other Constellation, when the
Pole had been inverted."
Speaking of the
Circular Zodiac, given also by Denon, he says:-- There, "the Lion is
standing on the Serpent, and his tail forming a curve downward, from which it
is found that though six or seven hundred thousand years must have passed
between the two positions, yet they had made but little difference between in
the constellations of Leo and the Hydra; while Virgo is represented very
differently in the two. In the circular Zodiac, the Virgin is nursing her
child; but it seems that they had not had that idea when the pole was first
within the plane of the Ecliptic; for in this Zodiac, as given by Denon, we see
three Virgins between the Lion and the Scales, the last of which holds in her
hand an ear of wheat. It is much to be lamented that there is in this Zodiac a
breach of the figure in the latter part of Leo and the beginning of Virgo which
has taken away one Decan out of each sign."
Nevertheless,
the meaning is plain, as the three Zodiacs belong to three different epochs:
namely, to the last three family races of the fourth Sub-race of the Fifth
Root-race, each of which must have lived approximately from 25 to 30,000 years.
The first of these (the "Aryan-Asiatics") witnessed the doom of the
last of the populations of the "giant Atlanteans"* who perished some
850,000 years ago (the Ruta and Daitya Island-Continents) toward the close of
the Miocene Age.** The fourth sub-race witnessed the destruction of the last
remnant of the Atlanteans -- the Aryo-Atlanteans in the last island of
Atlantis, namely, some 11,000 years ago. In order to understand this the reader
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The term
"Atlantean" must not mislead the reader to regard these as one race
only, or even a nation. It is as though one said "Asiatics." Many,
multityped, and various were the Atlanteans, who represented several
humanities, and almost a countless number of races and nations, more varied
indeed than would be the "Europeans" were this name to be given
indiscriminately to the five existing parts of the world; which, at the rate
colonization is proceeding, will be the case, perhaps, in less than two or
three hundred years. There were brown, red, yellow, white and black Atlanteans;
giants and dwarfs (as some African tribes comparatively are, even now).
** Says a
teacher in "Esoteric Buddhism," on p. 64: "In the Eocene age,
even in its very first part, the great cycle of the fourth race men the
(Lemuro) Atlanteans had already reached its highest point (of civilization),
and the great continent, the father of nearly all the present continents,
showed the first symptoms of sinking. . . ." And on page 70, it is shown
that Atlantis as a whole perished during the Miocene period. To show how the
continents, races, nations and cycles overlap each other, one has but to think
of Lemuria, the last of whose lands perished about 700,000 years before the
beginning of the Tertiary period (see p. 65 of the same work), and the last of
"Atlantis" only 11,000 years ago; thus both overlapping -- one the
Atlantean period, and the other the Aryan.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
[[diagram]]
The main stem of
a tree may be compared to the ROOT-RACE (A).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 435 ILLUSTRATION OF THE RACES.
Its larger limbs
to the various SUB-RACES; seven in number (B1, B2).
On each of these
limbs are seven BRANCHES, OR FAMILY-RACES. (C).
After this the
cactus-plant is a better illustration, for its fleshy "leaves" are
covered with sharp spines, each of which may be compared to a nation or tribe
of human beings.
Now our Fifth
Root-Race has already been in existence -- as a race sui generis and quite free
from its parent stem -- about 1,000,000 years; therefore it must be inferred
that each of the four preceding Sub-Races has lived approximately 210,000
years; thus each Family-Race has an average existence of about 30,000 years.
Thus the European "Family Race" has still a good many thousand years
to run, although the nations or the innumerable spines upon it, vary with each
succeeding "season" of three or four thousand years. It is somewhat
curious to mark the comparative approximation of duration between the lives of
a "Family-Race" and a "Sidereal year."
The knowledge of
the foregoing, and the accurately correct division, formed part and parcel of
the Mysteries, where these Sciences were taught to the disciples, and where
they were transmitted by one hierophant to another. Everyone is aware that the
European astronomers assign (arbitrarily enough) the date of the invention of
the Egyptian Zodiac to the years 2000 or 2400 B.C. (Proctor); and insist that
this invention coincides in its date with that of the erection of the Great
Pyramid. This, to an Occultist and Eastern astronomer, must appear quite
absurd. The year of the Kaliyuga is said to have begun between the 17th and
18th of February in the year 3102 B.C. Now the Hindus claim that in the year
20400 before Kaliyugam, the origin of their Zodiac coincided with the spring
equinox -- there being at the time a conjunction of the Sun and Moon -- and
Bailly proved by a lengthy and careful computation of that date, that, even if
fictitious, the epoch from which they had started to establish the beginning of
their Kaliyug was very real. That "epoch is the year 3102 before our
era," he writes. (See Part III., Book I. "Hindu Astronomy defended by
an Academician".) The lunar eclipse arriving just a fortnight after the
beginning of the black Age -- it took place in a point situated between the
Wheat Ear of Virgo and the star [[theta]] of the same constellation. One of
their most esoteric Cycles is based upon certain conjunctions and respective
positions of Virgo and the Pleiades -- (Krittika). Hence, as the Egyptians
brought their Zodiac from Southern India and Lanka,* the esoteric meaning was
evidently identical. The three "Virgins," or Virgo in three different
positions, meant, with both, the record of the first three "divine or
astronomical Dynasties," who taught the Third
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Ceylon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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)*; which falls short of the records given us both by the (esoteric)
Chinese and Hindus; which latter nation has registered a knowledge of time for
seven or eight millions of years**; which I have seen upon a talisman of
porcelain. . . . "
The Egyptian
priests had the Zodiacs of the Atlantean Asura-Maya, as the modern Hindus still
have. As stated in "Esoteric Buddhism," the Egyptians, as well as the
Greeks and "Romans" some thousand years ago, were "remnants of
the Atlanto-Aryans," i.e., the former, of the older, or the Ruta
Atlanteans; the last-named, the descendants of the last race of that island,
whose sudden disappearance was narrated to Solon by the Egyptian Initiates. The
human Dynasty of the older Egyptians, beginning with Menes, had all the
knowledge of the Atlanteans, though there was no more Atlantean blood in their
veins. Nevertheless, they had preserved all their Archaic records. All this has
been shown long ago.*** And it is just because the Egyptian Zodiac is between
75 and 80,000 years old that the Zodiac of the Greeks is far later. Volney has
correctly pointed out in his "Ruins of Empires" (p. 360) that it is
only 16,984 years old, or up to the present date 17,082.****
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
forefathers of the Aryan Brahmins had their Zodiacal calculations and Zodiac
from those born by Kriyasakti power, the "Sons of Yoga"; the
Egyptians from the Atlanteans of Ruta.
** The former,
therefore, may have registered time for seven or eight millions of years, but
the Egyptians could not.
*** This
question was amply challenged, and as amply discussed and answered. See Five
Years of Theosophy. (Art. "Mr. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism," pp.
325-46).
**** Volney says
that, as Aries was in its 15th degree 1447 B.C., it follows that the first
degree of "Libra" could not have coincided with the vernal equinox
more lately than 15,194 years B.C., to which if you add 1790 since Christ, when
Volney wrote this, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since the (Greek
or rather Hellenic) origin of the Zodiac.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 437 MORE IN THE FORTHCOMING VOLUMES.
CONCLUSION.
Space forbids us
to say anything more, and this part of the "Secret Doctrine" has to
be closed. The forty-nine Stanzas and the few fragments from the Commentaries
just given are all that can be published in these volumes. These, with some
still older records -- to which none but the highest Initiates have access --
and a whole library of comments, glossaries, and explanations, form the
synopsis of Man's genesis.
It is from the
Commentaries that we have hitherto quoted and tried to explain the hidden
meaning of some of the allegories, thus showing the true views of esoteric
antiquity upon geology, anthropology, and even ethnology. We will endeavour in
the Part which follows, to establish a still closer metaphysical connection
between the earliest races and their Creators, the divine men from other
worlds; accompanying the statements proffered with the most important
demonstrations of the same in esoteric Astronomy and Symbolism.
In Volume III.
of this work (the said volume and the IVth being almost ready) a brief history
of all the great adepts known to the ancients and the moderns in their
chronological order will be given, as also a bird's eye view of the Mysteries,
their birth, growth, decay, and final death -- in Europe. This could not find
room in the present work. Volume IV. will be almost entirely devoted to Occult
teachings.
The duration of
the periods that separate, in space and time, the Fourth from the Fifth Race --
in the historical* or even the legendary beginnings of the latter -- is too
tremendous for us to offer, even to a Theosophist, any more detailed accounts
of them. During the course of the post-diluvian ages -- marked at certain
periodical epochs by the most terrible cataclysms -- too many races and nations
were born, and have disappeared almost without leaving a trace, for any one to
offer any description of the slightest value concerning them. Whether the
Masters of Wisdom have a consecutive and full history of our race from its
incipient stage down to the present times; whether they possess the
uninterrupted record of man since he became the complete physical being, and
became thereby the king of the animals and master on this earth -- is not for
the writer to say. Most probably they have,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The word
"historical" is used, because, although historians have dwarfed
almost absurdly the dates that separate certain events from our modern day,
nevertheless, once that they are known and accepted, they belong to history.
Thus the Trojan War is an historical event; and though even less than 1,000
years B.C. is the date assigned to it, yet in truth it is nearer 6,000 than
5,000 years B.C.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 archaeological discoveries, and the very problematical
readings of the Assyrian tiles, cuneiform fragments, and Egyptian
hieroglyphics. So are our data based upon the same readings, in addition to an
almost inexhaustible number of Secret works of which Europe knows nothing --
plus the perfect knowledge by the Initiates of the symbolism of every word so
recorded. Some of these records belong to an immense antiquity. Every
archaeologist and palaeontologist is acquainted with the ideographic
productions of certain semi-savage tribes, who from time immemorial have aimed
at rendering their thoughts symbolically. This is the earliest mode of
recording events and ideas. And how old this knowledge is in the human race may
be inferred from some signs, evidently ideographic, found on hatchets of the
Palaeolithic period. The red Indian tribes of America, only a few years ago
comparatively speaking, petitioned the President of the United States to grant
them possession of four small lakes, the petition being written on the tiny
surface of a piece of a fabric, which is covered with barely a dozen
representations of animals and birds. (See Lubbock.) The American savages have
a number of such different kinds of writing, but not one of our Scientists is
yet familiar, or even knows of the early hieroglyphic cypher, still preserved
in some Fraternities, and named in Occultism the Senzar. Moreover, all those
who have decided to regard such modes of writing -- e.g., the ideographs of the
Red Indians, and even the Chinese characters -- as "attempts of the early
races of mankind to express their untutored thoughts," will decidedly
object to our statement, that writing was invented by the Atlanteans, and not
at all by the Phoenicians. Indeed, such a claim as that writing was known to
mankind many hundreds of millenniums ago, in the face of the philologists who
have decreed that writing was unknown in the days of, and to Panini, in India,
as also to the Greeks in the time of Homer, will be met by general
disapprobation, if not with silent scorn. All denial and ridicule
notwithstanding, the Occultists will maintain the claim, and simply for this
reason: from Bacon down to our modern Royal Society, we have a too long period,
full of the most ludicrous mistakes made by Science, to warrant our believing
in modern scientific assumptions rather than in the denials of our Teachers.
Writing, our scientists say, was unknown to Panini; and this sage nevertheless
composed a grammar which contains 3,996 rules, and is the most perfect of all
the grammars that were ever made! Panini is made out to have lived barely a few
centuries B.C., by the most liberal; and the rocks in Iran and Central Asia
(whence the philologists and historians
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 440 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
show us the
ancestors of the same Panini, the Brahmins, coming into India) are covered with
writing, two and three thousand years old (12,000, according to some fearless
palaeontologists).
Writing was an
ars incognita in the days of Hesiod and Homer, agreeably to Grote, and unknown
to the Greeks so late as 770 B.C.; and the Phoenicians who had invented it, and
knew writing as far back as 1500 B.C., at the earliest,* were living among the
Greeks, and elbowing them, all the time! All these scientific and contradictory
conclusions disappeared, however, into thin air, when Schliemann discovered (a)
the site of ancient Troy, whose actual existence had been so long regarded as a
fable; and (b), excavated on that site earthenware vessels with inscriptions in
characters unknown to the paleontologists and the all-denying Sanskritists. Who
will now deny Troy, or these Archaic inscriptions? As Professor Virchow
witnesses:-- "I was myself an eye-witness of two such discoveries, and
helped to gather the articles together. The slanderers have long since been
silenced, who were not ashamed to charge the discoverer with an
imposture."** Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men.
Du Chaillu, Gordon-Cumming, Madame Merian,*** Bruce, and a host of others were
charged with lying.
Madame Merian --
says the author of "Mythical Monsters," who gives this information in
the Introduction -- was accused of deliberate falsehood in reference to her
description of a bird-eating spider nearly two hundred years ago. But
now-a-days reliable observers have confirmed it in regard to South America,
India, and elsewhere. Audubon was accused by botanists of having invented the
yellow water-lily, which he figured in his Birds of the South under the name of
Nymphaea lutea, and after having lain under the imputation for years, was
confirmed at last by the discovery of the long-lost flower in Florida in 1876
(Pop. Sci. Monthly, No. 60, April 1877). And, as Audubon was called a liar for
this, and for his Holiaetus Washingtonii,**** so Victor Hugo was ridiculed for
. . . . his marvellous word-painting of the devil-fish, and his description of
a man becoming its helpless victim. "The thing was derided as an
impossibility; yet within a few years were discovered, on the shores of
Newfoundland, cuttle fish with arms extending to thirty feet in length, and
capable of dragging a good-sized
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is an
historical fact that Sanchoniathon compiled and wrote in Phoenician characters
-- from annals and State documents in the archives of the older Phoenician
cities -- the full record of their religion in 1250 B.C.
** Prof.
Virchow, in Appendix I to Schliemann's Ilios. Murray, 1880.
*** Gosse writes
of the latter: "She is set down a thorough heretic, not at all to be
believed, a manufacturer of unsound natural history, an inventor of false facts
in science." ("Romance of Natural History," p. 227.)
**** Dr. Cover
writes: "That famous bird of Washington was a myth; either Audubon was
mistaken, or else, as some do not hesitate to affirm, he lied about it."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 441 A WHOLESALE DENIAL.
boat beneath the
surface; and their action has been reproduced for centuries past . . . . by
Japanese artists." ("Mythical Monsters," p. 11 Introd.).
And if Troy was
denied, and regarded as a myth; the existence of Herculaneum and Pompeii
declared a fiction; the travels of Marco Polo laughed at and called as absurd a
fable as one of Baron Munchausen's tales, why should the writer of "Isis
Unveiled" and of the "Secret Doctrine" be any better treated?
Mr. Charles Gould, the author of the above-cited volume quotes in his excellent
work a few lines from Macmillan (1860), which are as true as life, and too much
to the point not to be reproduced: "When a naturalist, either by visiting
such spots of earth as are still out of the way, or by his good fortune, finds
a very queer plant or animal, he is forthwith accused of inventing his game. .
. . . . As soon as the creature is found to sin against preconception, the
great (mis ?) guiding Spirit, a priori by name, who furnishes philosophers with
their omniscience pro re nata, whispers that no such thing can be, and
forthwith there is a charge of hoax. The heavens themselves have been charged
with hoaxes. When Leverrier and Adams predicted a planet by calculation, it was
gravely asserted in some quarters that the planet which had been calculated was
not the planet but another which had clandestinely and improperly got into the
neighbourhood of the true body. The disposition to suspect hoax is stronger
than the disposition to hoax. Who was it that first announced that the
classical writings of Greece and Rome were one huge hoax perpetrated by the monks
in what the announcer would be as little or less inclined than Dr. Maitland to
call the dark ages?" (p. 13).
Thus let it be.
No disbeliever who takes the "Secret Doctrine" for a "hoax"
is forced or even asked to credit our statements. These have already been
proclaimed to be such by certain very clever American journalists before even
the work went to press.*
Nor, is it after
all, necessary that any one should believe in the Occult Sciences and the old
teachings, before one knows anything or even
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* So far back as
July, 1888, at a time when the MSS. of this work had not yet left my writing
table, and the Secret Doctrine was utterly unknown to the world, it was already
being denounced as a product of my brain and no more. These are the flattering
terms in which the Evening Telegraph (of America) referred to this still
unpublished work in its issue of June 30, 1888: "Among the fascinating
books for July reading is Mme. Blavatsky's new book on Theosophy . . . (!) the
SECRET DOCTRINE. . . . But because she can soar back into the Brahmin ignorance
. . . (! ?) . . . is no proof that everything she says is true." And once
the prejudiced verdict given on the mistaken notion that my book was out, and
that the reviewer had read it, neither of which was or could be the case, now
that it is really out the critic will have to support his first statement,
whether correct or otherwise, and thus get out of it, probably by a more
slashing criticism than ever.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 442 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
believes in his
own soul. No great truth was ever accepted a priori, and generally a century or
two passed before it began to glimmer in the human consciousness as a possible
verity, except in such cases as the positive discovery of the thing claimed as
a fact. The truths of to-day are the falsehoods and errors of yesterday, and vice
versa. It is only in the XXth century that portions, if not the whole, of the
present work will be vindicated.
It is no fact
going against our statements, therefore, even if Sir John Evans does affirm
that writing was unknown in the stone age. For it may have been unknown during
that period in the Fifth Aryan race, and have been perfectly known to the
Atlanteans of the Fourth, in the palmy days of their highest civilization. The
cycles of the rise and fall of the nations and races are there to account for
it.
If told that
there have been cases before now of forged pseudographs being palmed off on the
credulous, and that our work may be classed with Jacolliot's "Bible in
India" (in which, by the way, there are more truths among its errors than
are found in the works of orthodox and recognized Orientalists) -- the charge
and comparison will dismay us very little. We bide our time. Even the famous
"Ezour-Veda" of the last century, considered by Voltaire "the
most precious gift from the East to the West," and by Max Muller
"about the silliest book that can be read," is not altogether without
facts and truths in it. The cases when the a priori negations of specialists
became justified by subsequent corroborations form but an insignificant
percentage of those that were fully vindicated by subsequent discoveries, and
confirmed to the great dismay of the learned objectors. "Ezour Veda,"
was a very small bone of contention compared with the triumph of Sir William
Jones, Anquetil de Perron, and others in the matter of Sanskrit and its
literature. Such facts are recorded by Professor Max Muller himself, who,
speaking of the discomfiture of Dugald Stewart and Co. in connection with this,
states that "if the facts about Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too
wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He
therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and
wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together after the
model of Greek and Latin, by those arch-forgers and liars, the Brahmans, and
that the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition" (Science of
Language, p. 168). The writer is quite willing and feels proud to keep company
with these Brahmans, and other historical "liars," in the opinion of
our modern Dugald Stewarts. She has lived too long, and her experience has been
too varied and personal, for her not to know at least something of human
nature. "When you doubt, abstain," says the wise Zoroaster,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 443 PARADOXES OF SCIENCE.
whose prudent
aphorism is found corroborated in every case by daily life and experience. Yet,
like St. John the Baptist, this sage of the past Ages is found preaching in the
desert, in company with a more modern philosopher, namely Bacon, who offers the
same priceless bit of practical Wisdom. "In contemplation," he says
(in any question of Knowledge, we add), "if a man begin with certainties,
he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he
shall end in certainties."
With this piece
of advice from the father of English Philosophy to the representatives of
British scepticism we ought to close the debate, but our theosophical readers
are entitled to a final piece of Occult information.
Enough was said
to show that evolution in general, events, mankind, and everything else in
Nature proceed in cycles. We have spoken of seven Races, five of which have
nearly completed their earthly career, and have claimed that every Root-Race,
with its sub-races and innumerable family divisions and tribes, was entirely
distinct from its preceding and succeeding race. This will be objected to, on
the authority of uniform experience in the question of Anthropology, and
Ethnology. Man was -- save in colour and type, and perhaps a difference in
facial peculiarities and cranial capacity -- ever the same under every climate
and in every part of the world, say the Naturalists: ay, even in stature. This,
while maintaining that man descends from the same unknown ancestor as the ape,
a claim that is logically impossible without an infinite variation of stature
and form, from his first evolution into a biped. The very logical persons who
maintain both propositions are welcome to their paradoxical views. Once more we
address only those who, doubting the general derivation of myths from "the
contemplation of the visible workings of external nature" . . . . think
it, "less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and
demi-gods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions,
are transformations, than to believe them to be inventions." It is only
such "transformations" in physical nature, as much as in the memory
and conceptions of our present mankind, that the Secret Doctrine teaches. It
confronts the purely speculative hypotheses of modern Science, based upon the
experience and exact observations of barely a few centuries, with the unbroken
tradition and records of its Sanctuaries; and brushing away that tissue of
cobweb-like theories, spun in the darkness that covers a period of hardly a few
millenniums back, and which Europeans call their "History," the Old
Science says to us: Listen, now, to my version of the memoirs of Humanity.
The human Races
are born one from the other, grow, develop, become
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 444 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
old, and die.
Their sub-races and nations follow the same rule. If your all-denying modern
science and so-called philosophy do not contest that the human family is
composed of a variety of well-defined types and races, it is only because the
fact is undeniable, no one would say that there was no external difference
between an Englishman, an African negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the
other hand it is formally denied by most naturalists that mixed human races, i.e.,
the seeds for entirely new races, are any longer formed in our days. But this
last is maintained on good grounds by de Quatrefages and some others.
Nevertheless our
general proposition will not be accepted. It will be said that whatever forms
man has passed through in the long pre-historic Past there are no more changes
for him (save certain variations, as at present) in the future. Hence that our
Sixth and Seventh Root Races are fictions.
To this it is
again answered: How do you know? Your experience is limited to a few thousand
years, to less than a day in the whole age of Humanity and to the present types
of the actual continents and isles of our Fifth Race. How can you tell what
will or will not be? Meanwhile, such is the prophecy of the Secret Books and
their no uncertain statements.
Since the
beginning of the Atlantean Race many million years have passed, yet we find the
last of the Atlanteans, still mixed up with the Aryan element, 11,000 years
ago. This shows the enormous overlapping of one race over the race which
succeeds it, though in character and external type the elder loses its
characteristics, and assumes the new features of the younger race. This is
proved in all the formations of mixed human races. Now, Occult philosophy
teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and Races are
preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will
take place, and has already silently commenced.
Pure
Anglo-Saxons hardly three hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States
have already become a nation apart, and, owing to a strong admixture of various
nationalities and inter-marriage, almost a race sui generis, not only mentally,
but also physically. "Every mixed race, when uniform and settled, has been
able to play the part of a primary race in fresh crossings," says de
Quatrefages. "Mankind, in its present state, has thus been formed,
certainly, for the greatest part, by the successive crossing of a number of
races at present undetermined" ("The Human Species," p. 274.)
Thus the
Americans have become in only three centuries a "primary race," pro
tem., before becoming a race apart, and strongly separated from all other now
existing races. They are, in short, the germs of the Sixth sub-race, and in
some few hundred years more, will become
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 445 THE COMING NEW RACE.
most decidedly
the pioneers of that race which must succeed to the present European or fifth
sub-race, in all its new characteristics. After this, in about 25,000 years,
they will launch into preparations for the seventh sub-race; until, in
consequence of cataclysms -- the first series of those which must one day
destroy Europe, and still later the whole Aryan race (and thus affect both
Americas), as also most of the lands directly connected with the confines of
our continent and isles -- the Sixth Root-Race will have appeared on the stage
of our Round. When shall this be? Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom,
perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow-capped peaks
that tower above them. All we know is, that it will silently come into existence;
so silently, indeed, that for long millenniums shall its pioneers -- the
peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and women -- be regarded as
anomalous lusus naturae, abnormal oddities physically and mentally. Then, as
they increase, and their numbers become with every age greater, one day they
will awake to find themselves in a majority. It is the present men who will
then begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until these die out in their
turn in civilised lands; surviving only in small groups on islands -- the
mountain peaks of to-day -- where they will vegetate, degenerate, and finally
die out, perhaps millions of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam-Nyam
and the dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. All these are
the remnants of once mighty races, the recollection of whose existence has
entirely died out of the remembrance of the modern generations, just as we
shall vanish from the memory of the Sixth Race Humanity. The Fifth will overlap
the Sixth Race for many hundreds of millenniums, changing with it slower than
its new successor, still changing in stature, general physique, and mentality,
just as the Fourth overlapped our Aryan race, and the Third had overlapped the
Atlanteans.
This process of
preparation for the Sixth great Race must last throughout the whole sixth and
seventh sub-races (vide supra, the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the
Fifth Race). But the last remnants of the Fifth Continent will not disappear
until some time after the birth of the new Race; when another and new dwelling,
the sixth continent, will have appeared above the new waters on the face of the
globe, so as to receive the new stranger. To it also will emigrate and settle
all those who shall be fortunate enough to escape the general disaster. When
this shall be -- as just said -- it is not for the writer to know. Only, as
nature no more proceeds by sudden jumps and starts, than man changes suddenly
from a child into a mature man, the final cataclysm will be preceded by many
smaller submersions and destructions both by wave and volcanic fires. The
exultant pulse will beat
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Patala (the Antipodes, or the Nether World, as America
is called in India), whose mission and Karma it is, to sow the seeds for a
forthcoming, grander, and far more glorious Race than any of those we know of
at present. The Cycles of Matter will be succeeded by Cycles of Spirituality
and a fully developed mind. On the law of parallel history and races, the
majority of the future mankind will be composed of glorious Adepts. Humanity is
the child of cyclic Destiny, and not one of its Units can escape its
unconscious mission, or get rid of the burden of its co-operative work with
nature. Thus will mankind, race after race, perform its appointed
cycle-pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun, to change, each
tropical year after the other dropping one sub-race, but only to beget another
higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured
groups -- the failures of nature -- will, like some individual men, vanish from
the human family without even leaving a trace behind.
Such is the
course of Nature under the sway of KARMIC LAW: of the ever present and the
ever-becoming Nature. For, in the words of a Sage, known only to a few
Occultists:-- "THE PRESENT IS THE CHILD OF THE PAST; THE FUTURE, THE
BEGOTTEN OF THE PRESENT. AND YET, O PRESENT MOMENT! KNOWEST THOU NOT THAT THOU HAST
NO PARENT, NOR CANST THOU HAVE A CHILD; THAT THOU ART EVER BEGETTING BUT
THYSELF? BEFORE THOU HAST EVEN BEGUN TO SAY 'I AM THE PROGENY OF THE DEPARTED
MOMENT, THE CHILD OF THE PAST,' THOU HAST BECOME THAT PAST ITSELF. BEFORE THOU
UTTEREST THE LAST SYLLABLE, BEHOLD! THOU ART NO MORE THE PRESENT BUT VERILY
THAT FUTURE. THUS, ARE THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE, THE EVER-LIVING
TRINITY IN ONE -- THE MAHAMAYA OF THE ABSOLUTE IS."
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 447]]
BOOK II., PART
II.
THE
ARCHAIC
SYMBOLISM OF THE
WORLD-RELIGIONS.
---------
"The
narratives of the Doctrine are its cloak. The simple look only at the garment --
that is, upon the narrative of the Doctrine; more they know not. The
instructed, however, see not merely the cloak, but what the cloak covers.
(The ZOHAR,
iii., 152; Franck, 119.)
"THE MYSTERIES
OF THE FAITH (are) NOT TO BE DIVULGED TO ALL. . . . . It is requisite to hide
in a mystery the wisdom spoken."
(Clem. Alex.,
"Strom." 12.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 448]]
CONTENTS.
--------
PAGE.
§ ESOTERIC
TENETS CORROBORATED IN EVERY SCRIPTURE ... 449
------
XVI. ADAM-ADAMI
... 452
------
XVII. THE
"HOLY OF HOLIES" -- ITS DEGRADATION ... 459
------
XVIII. ON THE MYTH
OF THE "FALLEN ANGEL," IN ITS VARIOUS PHASES ... 475
The Evil Spirit:
Who and What? ... 475
The Gods of
Light proceed from the Gods of Darkness ... 483
The Many
Meanings of the "War in Heaven" ... 492
-------
XIX. IS PLEROMA
SATAN'S LAIR? ... 506
-------
XX. PROMETHEUS,
THE TITAN ... 519
His Origin in
Ancient India ... 519
-------
XXI. ENOICHION
... 529
------
XXII. THE
SYMBOLISM OF THE MYSTERY-NAMES IAO AND JEHOVAH, WITH THEIR RELATION TO THE
CROSS AND CIRCLE ... 536
Cross and Circle
... 545
The Fall of the
Cross into Matter ... 553
------
XXIII. THE
UPANISHADS IN GNOSTIC LITERATURE ... 563
------
XXIV. THE CROSS
AND THE PYTHAGOREAN DECADE ... 573
-------
XXV. THE
MYSTERIES OF THE HEBDOMAD ... 590
Saptaparna ...
590
The Tetraktis in
relation to the Heptagon ... 598
The Septenary
Element in the Vedas. It corroborates the Occult Teaching concerning the Seven
Globes and the Seven Races ... 605
The Septenary in
the Exoteric Works ... 611
Seven in
Astronomy, Science and Magic ... 618
The Seven Souls
of the Egyptologists ... 630
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 449]]
BOOK II. -- PART
II.
--------
ESOTERIC TENETS
CORROBORATED IN EVERY SCRIPTURE.
IN view of the
strangeness of the teachings, and of many a doctrine which from the modern
scientific stand-point must seem absurd, some necessary and additional
explanations have to be made. The theories contained in the Second Part of the
Stanzas are even more difficult to assimilate than those which are embodied in
Vol. 1, on Cosmogony. Theology, therefore, has to be questioned here, as
Science will be in the Addenda (Part III.). Since our doctrines differ so
widely from the current ideas of both Materialism and Theology, the Occultists
must be ever prepared to repel the attacks of either or of both.
The reader can
never be too often reminded that, as the abundant quotations from various old
Scriptures prove, these teachings are as old as the world; and that the present
work is a simple attempt to render, in modern language and in a phraseology
with which the scientific and educated student is familiar, archaic Genesis and
History as taught in certain Asiatic centres of esoteric learning. They must be
accepted or rejected on their own merits, fully or partially; but not before
they have been carefully compared with the corresponding theological dogmas and
the modern scientific theories and speculations.
One feels a serious
doubt whether, with all its intellectual acuteness, our age is destined to
discover in each western nation even one solitary uninitiated scholar or
philosopher capable of fully comprehending the spirit of archaic philosophy.
Nor can one be expected to do so, before the real meaning of these terms, the
Alpha and the Omega of Eastern esotericism, the words Sat and Asat, -- so
freely used in the Rig-Veda, and elsewhere -- is thoroughly assimilated.
Without this key to the Aryan Wisdom, the Cosmogony of the Rishis and the
Arhats is in danger of remaining a dead letter to the average Orientalist. Asat
is not merely the negation of Sat, nor is it the "not yet existing";
for Sat is in itself neither the "existent," nor "being."
SAT is the immutable, the ever present, changeless and eternal root, from and
through which all proceeds. But it is far more than the potential force in the
seed, which propels onward the process of development, or what is now called
evolution. It is the ever becoming, though the never manifesting.* Sat
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Hegelian
doctrine, which identifies Absolute Being or "Be-ness" with
"non-Being," and represents the Universe as an eternal becoming, is
identical with the Vedanta philosophy.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 450 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
is born from
Asat, and ASAT is begotten by Sat: the perpetual motion in a circle, truly; yet
a circle that can be squared only at the supreme Initiation, at the threshold
of Paranirvana.
Barth started a
reflection on the Rig-Veda which was meant for a stern criticism, an unusual,
therefore, as was thought, an original view of this archaic volume. It so
happened, however, that, while criticising, that scholar revealed a truth,
without being himself aware of its full importance. He premises by saying that
"neither in the language nor in the thought of the Rig-Veda" has he
"been able to discover that quality of primitive natural simplicity, which
so many are fain to see in it." Barth had Max Muller in his mind's eye
when writing this. For the famous Oxford professor has throughout characterised
the hymns of the Rig Veda, as the unsophisticated expression of the religious
feeling of a pastoral innocent people. "In the Vedic hymns the ideas and
myths appear in their simplest and freshest form;" -- the Sanskrit scholar
thinks. Barth is of a different opinion, however.
So divided and
personal are the opinions of Sanskritists as to the importance and intrinsic
value of the Rig Veda, that those opinions become entirely biassed whichever
way they incline. Thus Mr. Max Muller declares that: "Nowhere is the wide
distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient
literature of Greece more clearly felt, than when we compare the growing myths
of the Veda with the full grown and decayed myths on which the poetry of Homer
is founded. The Veda is the real Theogony of the Aryan races, while that of
Hesiod is a distorted caricature of the original image." This is a
sweeping assertion, and perhaps rather unjust in its general application. But
why not try to account for it? Orientalists cannot do so, for they reject the
chronology of the Secret Doctrine, and could hardly admit the fact that between
the Rig-Vedic hymns and Hesiod's Theogony tens of thousands of years have
elapsed. So they fail to see that the Greek myths are no longer the primitive
symbolical language of the Initiates, the disciples of the gods-Hierophants,
the divine ancient "sacrificers," and that disfigured by the
distance, and encumbered by the exuberant growth of human profane fancy, they
now stand like distorted images of stars in running waves. But if Hesiod's
Cosmogony and Theogony are to be viewed as caricatures of the original images,
how much more so the 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 451 THE VEDAS WRITTEN BY INITIATES.
artificially
elaborated, full of allusions and reticences, of pretensions (?) to mysticism
and theosophic insight, and the manner of its expression is such as reminds one
more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small groups of
initiated, than the poetic language of a large community." ("The
Religions of India," p. xiii.)
We will not stop
to enquire of the critic what he can know of the phraseology in use among the
"initiated," or whether he belongs himself to such a group; for, in
the latter case, he would hardly have used such language. But the above shows
the remarkable disagreement between scholars even with regard to the external
character of the Rig Veda. What, then, can any of the modern Sanskritists know
about its internal or esoteric meaning, beyond the correct inference of Barth,
that this Scripture has been compiled by INITIATES?
The whole of the
present work is an endeavour to prove this truth. The ancient adepts have
solved the great problems of science, however unwilling modern materialism may
be to admit the fact. The mysteries of Life and Death were fathomed by the
great master-minds of antiquity; and if they have preserved them in secresy and
silence, it is because these problems formed part of the sacred mysteries; and,
secondly, because they must have remained incomprehensible to the vast majority
of men then, as they do now. If such teachings are still regarded as chimeras
by our opponents in philosophy, it may be a consolation to the Theosophists to
learn, on good proofs, that the speculations of modern psychologists -- whether
serious Idealists, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, or wool-gathering pseudo-Idealists
-- are far more chimerical. Indeed, instead of resting on the firm foundation
of facts in Nature, they are the unhealthy will-o'-the-wisps of materialistic
imagination, of the brains that evolved them -- and no more. While they deny,
we affirm; and our affirmation is corroborated by almost all the sages of
antiquity. Believing in Occultism and a host of invisible Potencies for good
reasons, we say: Certus sum, scio quod credidi; to which our critics reply:
Credat Judaeus Apella. Neither is converted by the other, nor does such result
affect even our little planet. E pur se muove!
Nor is there any
need of proselytizing. As remarked by the wise Cicero, "Time destroys the
speculations of man, but it confirms the judgment of nature." Let us bide
our time. Meanwhile, it is not in the human constitution to witness in silence
the destruction of one's gods, whether they be true or false. And as theology
and materialism have combined together to destroy the old gods of antiquity and
seek to disfigure every old philosophical conception, it is but just that the lovers
of old wisdom should defend their position, by proving that the whole arsenal
of the two is, at best, formed of new weapons made out of very old material.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 452 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ XVI.
ADAM-ADAMI.
NAMES such as
Adam-Adami, used by Mr. Chwolsohn in his "Nabathean Agriculture"* and
derided by M. Renan, may prove little to the profane. To the Occultist,
however, once that the term is found in a work of such immense antiquity as the
above cited, it proves a good deal: for instance that Adami was a manifold
symbol, originating with the Aryan people, as the root word shows, and having
been taken from them by the Semites and the Turanians -- as many other things
were.
"Adam-Adami"
is a generic compound name as old as languages are. The Secret Doctrine teaches
that Ad-i was the name given to the first speaking race of mankind -- in this
Round -- by the Aryans. Hence the Adonim and Adonai (the ancient plural form of
the word Adon), which the Jews applied to their Jehovah and angels, who were
simply the first spiritual and ethereal sons of the earth; and the god Adonis,
who in his many variations stood for the "First Lord." Adam is the
Sanskrit Ada-Nath, also meaning first Lord, as Ad-Iswara, or any Ad (the first)
followed by any adjective or substantive. The reason for this is that such
truths were a common inheritance. It was a revelation received by the first
mankind before that time which, in Biblical phraseology, is called "the
period of one lip and word," or speech; knowledge expanded by man's own
intuition later on, but still later hidden from profanation under an adequate
symbology. The author of the "Qabbalah, (according to), the philosophical
writings of Ibn Gebirol," shows the Israelite using "Adonai,"
(Lord) instead of Eh'yeh (I am) and YHVH, and adds that, while Adonai is
rendered "Lord" in the Bible, "the lowest designation, or the
Deity in Nature, the more general term Elohim, is translated God." (p.
175.)
A curious work
was translated in 1860 or thereabout, by the Orientalist Chwolsohn, and
presented to ever-incredulous and flippant Europe under the innocent title of
Nabathean Agriculture. In the opinion of the translator that archaic volume is
"a complete initiation into the mysteries of the pre-Adamite nations, on
the authority of undeniably authentic documents." It is "an
invaluable compendium, the full epitome of the Doctrines held, of the arts and
sciences, not only of the Chaldeans, but also of the Assyrians and Canaanites
of the prehistoric ages." These
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide infra.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 years* after the Deluge, may be left to the Karma of the author of
Genesis, whether he is called Moses or Ezra. That which is interesting in the
work noticed is its, the doctrines enunciated in it, which are again, if read
esoterically, almost all of them identical with the Secret Teachings.
Quatremere
suggested that this book might have been simply a copy made under
Nebuchadnezzar II., from some Hamitic treatise, "infinitely more
ancient," while the author maintains, on "internal and external
evidence," that its Chaldean original was written out from the oral
discourses and teachings of a wealthy Babylonian landowner, named Qu-tamy, who
had used for those lectures still more ancient materials. The first Arabic
translation is placed by Chwolsohn so far back as the XIII. cent. B.C. On the
first page of this "revelation," the author, or amanuensis, Qu-tamy,
declares that "the doctrines propounded therein, were originally told by
Saturn to the Moon, who communicated them to her idol, which idol revealed them
to her devotee, the writer -- the adept Scribe of that work -- Qu-tamy.
The details
given by the God for the benefit and instruction of mortals, show periods of
incalculable duration and a series of numberless kingdoms and Dynasties that
preceded the appearance on Earth of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Genesis
and the authorised Chronology. In Chapt. ix. "Noah leaveth the Ark"
"B.C. 2348." Chapter x. "Nimrod the first Monarch," stands
over "B.C. 1998."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 levee-in-arms against the
translator. He reproaches him* 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,"** the ex-pupil pulls down the authority of his master, by
asking him to show a reason why his Nabathean Agriculture should not be the
fraudulent work of some Jew of the third or fourth century of our era? It can
hardly be otherwise -- argues the romancer of the "Life of Jesus."
Since, in this in-folio on astrology and Sorcery we recognise in the personages
introduced by Qu-tamy, all the patriarchs of the Biblical legends, such as
Adam-Adami, Anouka-Noah, and his Ibrahim-Abraham etc., etc."
This is no
reason, since Adam and others are generic names. Meanwhile it is humbly
submitted that, all things considered, an apocrypha -- if even of the third
century A.D., instead of the thirteenth century B.C., as suggested by
Quatremere -- is old enough to appear genuine as a document, and so satisfy the
demands of the most exacting archaeologist and critic. For, even admitting, for
argument's sake, that this literary relic has been compiled by "some Jew
of the third century of our era" -- what of that? Leaving the credibility
of its doctrines for a moment aside, why should it be less entitled to a
hearing, or less instructive as reflecting older opinions, than any other
religious work, also a "compilation from old texts" or oral tradition
-- of the same or even a later age? In such case we should have to reject and
call "apocryphal" the Kuran -- 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Annales de
Philosophie, June 1860, p. 415.
** April 30,
1860.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 455 MANY VIEWS OF MANY MINDS.
With the
exception of M. Renan, an iconoclast by principle -- so pointedly called by
Jules Lemaitre "le Paganini du Neant" -- the worst fault found with
the work is, it would seem, that the "apocrypha" pretends to have
been communicated as a revelation to an adept by, and from, the "idol of
the moon," who received it from "Saturn." Hence, very naturally,
it is "a fairy tale all round." To this there is but one answer: it
is no more a fairy tale than the Bible, and if one falls, the other must follow
it. Even the mode of divination through "the idol of the moon" is the
same as practised by David, Saul, and the High Priests of the Jewish Tabernacle
by means of the Teraphim. In Volume III., Part II. of this present work, the
practical methods of such ancient divination will be found.
The
"Nabathean Agriculture" is a compilation indeed; it is no apocrypha,
but the repetition of the tenets of the Secret Doctrine under the exoteric
Chaldean form of national symbols, for the purpose of "cloaking" the
tenets, just as the Books of Hermes and the Puranas are Egyptian and Hindu
attempts at the same. The work was as well known in antiquity as it was during
the Middle Ages. Maimonides speaks of it, and refers more than once to this
Chaldeo-Arabic MS., calling the Nabatheans by their co-religionary name, i.e.,
"star-worshippers," or Sabeans, but yet failing to see in this disfigured
word "Nabatheans" the mystic name of the caste devoted to Nebo (god
of secret wisdom), which shows on its face that the Nabatheans were an occult
Brotherhood.* The Nabatheans who, according to the Persian Yezidi, originally
came to Syria from Busrah, were the degenerate members of that fraternity;
still their religion, even at that late day, was purely Kabalistic.** Nebo is
the deity of the planet Mercury, and Mercury is the god of Wisdom or Hermes,
and Budha, which the Jews called [[hebrew]] "the Lord on high, the
aspiring," . . . and the Greeks Nabo, [[Nabo]], hence Nabatheans.
Notwithstanding that Maimonides calls their doctrines "heathenish
foolishness" and their archaic literature "Sabaeorum foetum," he
places their "agriculture," the Bible of Qu-tamy, in the first rank
of Archaic literature; and Abarbinel
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "I will
mention to thee the writings . . . respecting the belief of the Sabeans,"
he says. "The most famous is the Book 'The Agriculture of the Nabatheans,'
which has been translated by Ibn Wahohijah. This book is full of heathenish
foolishness. . . . It speaks of preparations of TALISMANS, the drawing down of
the powers of the SPIRITS, MAGIC, DEMONS, and ghouls, which make their abode in
the desert." (Maimonides, quoted by Dr. D. Chwolsohn, "Die Ssabier
und der Ssabismus," II., p. 458.) The Nabatheans of Mount Lebanon believed
in the Seven Archangels, as their forefathers had believed in the Seven Great
Stars, the abodes and bodies of these Archangels, believed in to this day by
the Roman Catholics, as is shown elsewhere.
** See
"Isis Unveiled," Vol. II., p. 197.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 457 THE KABALISTIC FOUR ADAMS.
silence and
secresy upon the true meaning of Mosaic sayings, and thus came to grief. The
Doctrines of Qu-tamy, the Chaldean, are, in short, the allegorical rendering of
the religion of the earliest nations of the Fifth Race.
Why then should
M. Renan treat the name "Adam-Adami" with such academical contempt?
The author of the "Origins of Christianity" evidently knows nothing
of the "origins of pagan symbolism" or of Esotericism either,
otherwise he would have known that the name was a form of universal symbol,
referring, even with the Jews, not to one man, but to four distinct humanities
or mankinds. This is very easily proven.
The Kabalists
teach the existence of four distinct Adams, or the transformation of four consecutive
Adams, the emanations from the Dyooknah (divine phantom) of the Heavenly Man,
an ethereal combination of Neschamah, the highest Soul or Spirit: this Adam
having, of course, neither a gross human body, nor a body of desire. This
"Adam" is the prototype (tzure) of the second Adam. That they
represent our Five Races is certain, as everyone can see by their description
in the Kabala: the first being the "perfect, Holy Adam"; . . .
"a shadow that disappeared" (the Kings of Edom) produced from the
divine Tzelem (Image); the second is called the protoplastic androgyne Adam of
the future terrestrial and separated Adam; the third Adam is the man made of
"dust" (the first, innocent Adam); and the fourth, is the supposed
forefather of our own race -- the Fallen Adam. See, however, the admirably
clear description of these in Mr. Isaac Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 418, et
seq. He gives only four Adams, because of the Kings of Edom, no doubt.
"The fourth Adam," he writes, " . . . . was clothed with skin,
flesh, nerves, etc. This answers to the Lower Nephesch and Guff, i.e., body,
united. He has the animal power of reproduction and continuance of
species," and this is the human Root-Race.
It is just at
this point that the modern Kabalists -- led into error by the long generations
of Christian mystics who have tampered with the Kabalistic records wherever
they could -- diverge from the Occultists in their interpretations, and take
the later thought for the earlier idea. The original Kabala was entirely
metaphysical, and had no concern with animal, or terrestrial sexes; the later
Kabala has suffocated the divine ideal under the heavy phallic element. The
Kabalists say:-- "God made man male and female." "Among the
Qabbalists, the necessity to continued creation and existence is called the
Balance," says the author of Qabbalah; and being without this
"Balance," connected with Ma-qom (mysterious place),* even the First
Race is not,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Simply, the
womb, the "Holy of Holies" with the Semites.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Brahmacharya. Their dual symbols were to them but the poetical imagery
of the sublime correlation of creative Cosmic forces. And this ideal conception
is found beaming like a golden ray upon each idol, however coarse and
grotesque, in the crowded galleries of the sombre fanes of India and other
Mother lands of cults.
This will be
demonstrated in the following Section.
Meanwhile, it
may be added that, with the Gnostics, the second Adam also emanates from the
Primeval Man, the Ophite Adamas, in "whose image he is made"; the
third, from this second -- an Androgyne. The latter is symbolized in the 6th
and 7th pairs of the male-female AEons, --Amphian-Essumene, and Vannanin-Lamer
(Father and Mother; vide Valentinian Table, in Epiphanius) -- while the fourth
Adam, or Race, is represented by a Priapean monster. The latter -- a
post-Christian fancy -- is the degraded copy of the ante-Christian Gnostic
symbol of the "Good One," or "He, who created before anything existed,"
the Celestial Priapus -- truly born from Venus and Bacchus when that God
returned from his expedition into India, for Venus and Bacchus are the
post-types of Aditi and the Spirit. The later Priapus, one, however, with
Agathodaemon, the Gnostic Saviour, and even with Abraxas, is no longer the
glyph for abstract creative Power, but symbolizes the four Adams, or Races, the
fifth being represented by the five branches cut off from the Tree of Life on
which the old man 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!
---------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 459 THE "GOD" SUB ROSA.
§ 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 now*
-- in the course of their estrangement from the gods of their pagan neighbours,
consummated a national and levitical polity, by the device of setting forth
their Holy of Holies as the most solemn sign of their Monotheism --
exoterically; while seeing in it but a universal phallic symbol --
esoterically. While the Kabalists knew but Ain-Soph and the "gods" of
the Mysteries, the Levites had no tomb, no god in their adytum but the
"Sacred" Ark of the Covenant -- their "Holy of Holies."
When the
esoteric meaning of this recess is made clear, however, the profane will be better
able to understand why David danced "uncovered" before the ark of the
Covenant, and was so anxious to appear vile for the sake of his
"Lord," and base in his own sight. (See 2 Samuel vi. 16-22.)
The ark is the
navi-form Argha of the Mysteries. Parkhurst, who has
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* But it was not
so, in reality, witness their prophets. It is the later Rabbis and the Talmudic
scheme that killed out all spirituality from the body of their symbols; leaving
only their Scriptures -- a dead shell, from which the Soul has departed.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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:-- "[[Arche]] in this
application answers to the Hebrew rasit or wisdom . . . . a word which had the
meaning of the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which
the germ of all nature was supposed to float or brood on the great abyss during
the interval which took place after every mundane cycle." Quite so; and
the Jewish ark of the Covenant had precisely the same significance; with the
supplementary addition that, instead of a beautiful and chaste sarcophagus (the
symbol of the matrix of Nature and resurrection) as in the Sanctum sanctorum of
the pagans, they had the ark made still more realistic in its construction by
the two cherubs set up on the coffer or ark of the covenant, facing each other,
with their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect yoni (as now seen
in India). Besides which, this generative symbol had its significance enforced
by the four mystic letters of Jehovah's name, namely, [[hebrew]]; or [[hebrew]]
meaning Jod (membrum Virile, see Kabala); [[hebrew]] (the womb); [[hebrew]]
(Vau, a crook or a hook, a nail), and [[hebrew]] again, meaning also "an
opening"; the whole forming the perfect bisexual emblem or symbol or Y (e)
H (o) V (a) H, the male and female symbol.
Perhaps also,
when people realise the true meaning of the office and title of the Kadesh
Kadeshim, "the holy ones," or "the consecrated to the temple of
the Lord," -- the "Holy of Holies" of the latter may assume an
aspect far from edifying.
Iacchus again is
Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic god. "Who
shall ascend into the hill (the high place) of the Lord?" asks the holy
king David, "who shall stand in the place of his Kadushu [[hebrew]]?"
(Psalms xxiv. 3). Kadesh may mean in one sense to devote, hallow, sanctify, and
even to initiate or to set apart; but it also means the ministry of lascivious
rites (the Venus-worship) and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is
bluntly rendered in Deuteronomy xxiii. 17; Hosea iv. 14; and Genesis xxxvii.
from verses 15 to 22. The "holy" Kadeshuth of the Bible were
identical, as to the duties of their office, with the Nautch-girls of the later
Hindu pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim, or galli, lived "by the house of the
Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove," or the bust of
Venus-Astarte, says verse the seventh in the twenty-third chapter of 2 Kings.
The dance
performed by David round the ark was the "circle-dance." said to have
been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the
daughters of Shiloh (Judges xxi. 21, 23 et passim), and the leaping of the
prophets of Baal (I Kings xviii. 26). It was simply a characteristic of the
Sabean worship, for it denoted the motion of the planets round the sun. That
the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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!* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The author of
the "Qabbalah" makes several attempts to prove conclusively the
antiquity of the Zohar. Thus he shows that Moses de Leon could not be the
author or the forger of the Zoharic works in the XIIIth century, as he is
accused of being, since Ibn Gebirol gave out the same philosophical teaching
225 years before the day of Moses de Leon. No true Kabalist or scholar will
ever deny the fact. It is certain that Ibn Gebirol based his doctrines upon the
oldest Kabalistic sources, namely, the "Chaldean Book of Numbers," as
well as some no longer extant Midrashim, the same, no doubt, as those used by
Moses de Leon. But it is just the difference between the two ways of treating
the same esoteric subjects, which, while proving the enormous antiquity of the
esoteric system, points to a decided ring of Talmudistic and even Christian
sectarianism in the compilation and glossaries of the Zoharic system by Rabbi
Moses. Ibn Gebirol never quoted from the Scriptures to enforce the teachings
(vide I. Myer's Qabbalah, p. 7). Moses de Leon has made of the Zohar that which
it has remained to this day, "a running commentary on the . . . Books of
the Pentateuch" (ibid.), with a few later additions made by Christian
hands. One follows the archaic esoteric philosophy; the other, only that portion
which was adapted to the lost Books of Moses restored by Ezra. Thus, while the
system, or the trunk on which the primitive original Zohar was engrafted, is of
an immense antiquity many of the (later) Zoharic offshoots are strongly
coloured by the peculiar views held by Christian Gnostics (Syrian and
Chaldean), the friends and co-workers of Moses de Leon who, as shown by Munk,
accepted their interpretations.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[PISTIS SOPHIA]], the seven great gods, divided into two triads
and the highest God (the Sun) are: the lower [[Tridunameis]], whose powers
reside respectively in Mars, Mercury and Venus; and the higher Triad ("the
three unseen gods") who dwell in the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn; (vide §§
359 and 361 et seq).
This requires no
proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal symbol of nature, the ship of
Life carrying throughout the boundless Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being.
And when she was not identified with Venus, like every other "Queen of
Heaven" to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became
the reflection of the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 463 CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM
Chaldean
"Nuah, the Universal Mother" (female Noah, considered as one with the
ark), and of the female triad, Ana, Belita and Davikina; called, when blended
into one, "Sovereign goddess, lady of the Nether Abyss, Mother of gods,
Queen of the Earth, and Queen of fecundity." Later, Belita or Damti (the
sea), the Mother of the City of Erech (the great Chaldean Necropolis) became
Eve; and now she is Mary the Virgin, in the Latin Church, represented as
standing on the crescent-moon, and, at times on the Globe, to vary the
programme. The navi, or ship-like form of the crescent, which blends in itself
all those common symbols of the ship of life, such as Noah's ark, the Yoni of
the Hindus, and the ark of the Covenant, is the female symbol of the Universal
"Mothers of the gods," and is now found under its Christian symbol in
every Church, as the nave (from navis, the ship).* The navis -- the Sidereal
vessel -- is fructified by the Spirit of Life -- the male God; or, as the learned
Kenealy (in his Apocalypsis) calls it very appropriately -- the Holy Spirit. In
Western religious symbology the Crescent was the male, the full moon, the
female aspect of that universal Spirit. "The mystic word Alm, which the
prophet Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the Koran, alludes to her as the
Alm, the immaculate Virgin of the heavens. And -- the sublime ever falling into
the ridiculous -- it is from this root Alm that we have to derive the word
Almeh -- the Egyptian dancing-girls. The latter are "Virgins" of the
same type as the Nautchnis in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the Holy Ones
of the Jewish temples (those consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both
sexes), whose holy functions in the Israelite fanes were identical with those
of the Nautchnis.
Now Eustathius
declares that ([IO]) IO means the moon, in the dialect of the Argians; and it
was one of the names of the same in Egypt. Says Jablonski, "[[IO]], Ioh,
AEgyptiis LUNAM significat neque habent illi in communi sermonis usu, aliud
nomen quo Lunam, designent praeter IO." The pillar and Circle (IO), now
constituting the first decimal number, and which with Pythagoras was the
perfect number contained in the Tetractis,** became later a pre-eminently
phallic Number -- amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male
and female Jehovah.
This is how a
scholar explains it:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Timaeus, the
Locrian, speaking of Arka, calls her "the Principle of best things."
The word arcane, "hidden," or secret, is derived from Arka. "To
no one is the Arcane shown except to the most High" (Codex Nazareus),
alluding to nature the female, and Spirit, the male Power. All the Sun-Gods
were called Archagetos "born from the Arka," the divine Virgin-Mother
of the Heavens.
** Because
composed of ten dots arranged triangularly in four rows. It is the
Tetragrammaton of the Western Kabalists.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[diagram]] with [[diagram]] and [[diagram]] as determinatives
given, as the Coptic I O H, or I O H. The Hebrew [[hebrew]] may also be used as
I O H, for the letter yau, or [[hebrew]], was used for o and for u, and for v
or w. This, before the Massora, of which the . was used as [[hebrew]] = o,
[[hebrew]] = u, and [[hebrew]] = 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, Nofir-hotpoo
-- 'he who is in absolute repose'; and (2) as Khonsoo Iri-sokhroo, or 'Khonsoo,
who executes Destiny': the former preparing the events and conceiving them for
those born under his generative influence; the latter putting them into
action." (See Maspero's Definitions). Under theogonic permutations Ammon
becomes Horus, HOR-AMMON, and Mout(h)-Isis is seen suckling him in a statuette
of the Saitic period. (Abydos.) In his turn, in this transformed triad, Khonsoo
becomes Thot-Lunus, "he who operates salvation." His brow is crowned
with the head of an ibis decorated with the lunar disc and the diadem called
IO-tef.
Now all these
symbols are certainly found reflected in (some believe them identical with) the
Yave, or Jehovah of the Bible. This will be
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 465 THE "FOUR-FACED" BRAHMA.
made plain to
any one who reads "The Source of Measures," or "Hebrew Egyptian
Mystery," and understands the undeniable, clear, and mathematical proofs
that the esoteric foundations, or the system used in the building of the Great
Pyramid, and the architectural measurements in the Temple of Solomon (whether
the latter be mythical or real), Noah's ark, and the ark of the Covenant, are
the same. If anything in the world can settle the dispute that the old, as much
as the later, Jews (post-Babylonian), and especially the former, built their
theogony and religion on the very same foundation as all Pagans did, it is the
work in question.
And now it may
be as well to remind the reader of that which was said of I A O, in our work,
"Isis Unveiled."
"No other
deity affords such a variety of etymologies as Jaho, nor is there any name
which can be so variously pronounced. It is only by associating it with the
Masoretic points that the later Rabbins succeeded in making Jehovah read 'Adonai'
-- or Lord, as Philo Byblius spells it in Greek letters [[IEUO]] -- IEVO.
Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Jahe (yahra), and the Jews
Yaho; which would make it as we have shown, I -- Ah -- O. Diodorus states that
'among the Jews they relate that Moses called the god Iao.' It is on the
authority of the Bible itself, therefore, that we maintain that before his
initiation by Jethro, his father-in-law, Moses had never known the word
Jaho."*
The above
receives corroboration in a private letter from a very learned Kabalist. In
STANZA IV. and elsewhere it is stated that exoterically Brahma (neuter), so
flippantly and so often confused by the Orientalists with Brahma -- the male,
is sometimes called Kala-hansa (Swan in the eternity), and the esoteric meaning
of A-ham-sa, is given. (I -- am -- he, so ham being equal to sah
"he," and aham "I" -- a mystic anagram and permutation). It
is also the "four-faced" Brahma, the Chatur mukha (the perfect cube)
forming itself within, and from the infinite circle; and again the use of the
1, 3, 5, and [[diagram]] = 14, as the esoteric hierarchy of the Dhyan Chohans
is explained. On this, the said correspondent comments in this way:--
"Of the 1,
3, 5, and twice 7, intending and very especially 13,514, which on a circle may
be read as 31415 (or [[pi]] value), I think there cannot be a possibility of
doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on sacr,** 'Chakra,'
or Circle of Vishnu.
"But let me
carry your description a step further:-- You say 'The One from
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The student
must be aware that Jethro is called the "father-in-law" of Moses; not
because Moses was really married to one of his seven daughters. Moses was an
Initiate, if he ever existed, and as such an ascetic, a nazar, and could never
be married. It is an allegory like everything else. Zipporah (the shining) is
one of the personified Occult Sciences given by Revel-Jethro, the Midian priest
Initiator, to Moses, his Egyptian pupil. The "well" by which Moses
sat down in his flight from the Pharaoh symbolizes the "well of
Knowledge."
** In Hebrew the
phallic symbol lingham and Yoni.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 or Jave, or Jupiter, and by change of [[hebrew]] to
[[hebrew]] or h to n, then [[hebrew]] or the Latin Jun or Juno, the base of the
Chinese riddle, the key measuring numbers of Sni (Sinai) and Jehovah coming
down on that mount, which numbers (1,065) are but the use of our ratio of 113
to 355 because 1,065 = 355 x 3 which is circumference to a diameter of 113 x 3
= 339. Thus the first born of Brahma Prajapati (or any Demiurgos) indicates a
measuring use of a circular relation taken from the Chakra (or Vishnu) and, as
stated above, the Divine manifestation takes the form of life and the first
born."
"It is a
most singular thing: At the entrance passage to the King's chamber the
measurement from the surface of the Great Step* and the Grand Gallery to the
top of the said gallery, is by the very careful measures of Piazzi Smyth 339
inches.
[[diagram]]
Take A as a
centre and with this radius describe a circle; the diameter of that circle will
be 339 x 2 = 678, and these numbers are those of the expression and the raven,
in the 'Dove and raven' scenes or pictures of the Flood of Noah; (the radius is
taken to show division into two parts, which are 1,065 each) for 113 (man) x 6
= 678; and the diameter to a circumference of 1,065 x 2 -- so we have here an
indication of cosmic man on this high grade or step, at the entrance of the
King's Chamber (the Holy of Holies) -- which is the womb. Now this passage is
of such a height that a man to enter it must stoop. But a man upright is 113,
and broken, or stooping, he becomes 133 / 2 = 5.65 x 10, [[over]] [[hebrew]] or
Jehovah. That is, he personifies** him as entering the Holy of Holies. But by
Hebrew Esotericism the chief function of Jehovah was child giving, etc., and
that because, by the numbers of his name, he was the measure of the lunar year,
which cycle of time, because by its factor of 7 (seven) it ran so co-ordinately
with the periods of the quickening, viability, and gestation, was taken as the
causative of the generative action and therefore was worshipped and
besought."
This discovery
connects Jehovah still more with all the other creative and generative gods,
solar and lunar, and especially with "King" Soma, the Hindu Deus
Lunus, the moon, because of the esoteric influence attributed to this planet in
Occultism. There are other corroborations of it, however, in Hebrew tradition
itself. Adam is spoken of in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is on that
step that one arrives on the plane of the level or floor and open entrance to
the King's chamber, the Egyptian "Holy of Holies."
** The candidate
for initiation always personified the god of the temple he belonged to, as the
High Priest personified the god at all times; just as the Pope now personates
Peter and even Jesus Christ upon entering the inner altar -- the Christian
"Holy of Holies."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 467 THE ETYMOLOGY OF "SACRAMENT."
Maimonides (More
Nevochim, "The Guide of the Perplexed" -- truly!) in two aspects; as
a man, like all others born of a man and a woman, and -- as the prophet of the
Moon; the reason of which is now made apparent, and has to be explained.
Adam, as the
supposed great "Progenitor of the human race," is, as Adam Kadmon,
made in the image of God -- a priapic image, therefore. The Hebrew words sacr
and n'cabvah are, literally translated, lingham (phallus) and yoni,
notwithstanding their translation in the Bible (Genesis i. v. 27.) "male
and female." As said there "God creates 'Man in his own image'. . . .
. in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them,"
the androgyne Adam-Kadmon. Now this Kabalistic name is not that of a living
man, nor even of a human or divine Being, but of the two sexes or organs of
procreation, called in Hebrew with that usual sincerity of language
pre-eminently Biblical, sacr and n'cabvah*; these two being, therefore, the
image under which the "Lord God" appeared usually to his chosen
people. That this is so, is now undeniably proven by almost all the
symbologists and Hebrew scholars as well as by the Kabala. Therefore Adam is in
one sense Jehovah. This makes plain another general tradition in the East
mentioned in Gregorie's "Notes and Observations upon several passages in
Scripture" (1684. Vol. 1 pp. 120-21) and quoted by Hargrave Jennings in
his Phallicism: "That Adam was commanded by God that his dead body should
be kept above ground till committed to the middle of the earth by a priest of
the most High God." Therefore, "Noah daily prayed in the ark before
the BODY OF ADAM," or before the Phallus in the ark, or Holy of Holies,
again. He who is a Kabalist and accustomed to the incessant permutation of
Biblical names, once they are interpreted numerically and symbolically, will
understand what is meant. Jehovah, from the two words of which his name is
composed, "makes up the original idea of male-female as birth-originator,
for the [[diagram]] was the membrum virile and Houak was Eve." So . . .
"the perfect one, as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth
origin, as hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic use of form."
("Source of Measures," 159). Besides the same author shows and
demonstrates numerically and geometrically that (a) Arets, earth, Adam, man,
and H'Adam are cognate with each other, and are personified in the Bible under
one form, as the Egyptian and Hebrew Mars, god of the generation; and (b) that
Jehovah, or Jah, is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Jehovah says
to Moses "the Summation of my name is Sacr, the carrier of the germ"
-- phallus. "It is the vehicle of the annunciation, and the sacr has
passed down through ages to the sacr-factum of the Roman priest, and the
sacr-fice, and sacrament of the English speaking race." (Source of
Measures, p. 236) Thence marriage is a sacrament in the Greek and Roman
Churches.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 468 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Noah, or Jehovah
is Noah in Hebrew would be [[hebrew]], 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 [[hebrew]]
(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:--
[[hebrew]]
a various
reading of [[hebrew]]. Now, Moses is [[hebrew]], and equals 345. Add the values
of the new form of the name Jehovah, 21 + 501 + 21 = 543, or, by a reverse
reading, 345; thus showing Moses to be a form of Jehovah in this combination.
21 ÷ 2 = 10.5, or, reversed, 501, so that the asher or the that in I am that I
am is simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 x 3; 501 [[squared]] = 251 +, a very
valuable pyramid number, etc., etc.
For a clearer
explanation for the benefit of non-Kabalists we put it thus: "I am that I
am" is in Hebrew:--
Ahiye Asher
Ahiye
[[hebrew]]
[[hebrew]] [[hebrew]]
5, 10, 5, 1 200,
300, 1 5, 10, 5, 1
Add the numbers
of these separate words and you have:--
[[hebrew]]
[[hebrew]] [[hebrew]]
21 501 21
(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,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 469 THE OLD AND THE NEW JEHOVAH.
and which it was
originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingham and Yoni of
the modern average Hindu is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the
Rabbinical "Holy of Holies," -- but it is no worse; and this is a
point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious philosophies.
For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and
philosophy, the spirit of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative
value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so-called
"Wisdom," applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little
nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets
are there, to show the walk in life, before, during, and after the days of
Moses, of the chosen but "stiff-necked" people. That they have had at
one time the Wisdom-Religion and use of the universal language and its symbols
at their disposal and in their possession, is proved by the same esotericism
existing to this day in India with regard to the "Holy of Holies."
This, as said, was and still is the passage through the "golden" cow
in the same stooping position as the one shown in the gallery of the pyramid,
which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew esotericism. The whole difference
lies in the Spirit of Interpretation. With the Hindus as with the ancient
Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with
the Hebrews it was realistic and physiological. It pointed to the first sexual
separation of the human race (Eve giving birth to Cain-Jehovah, as shown in the
"Source of Measures"); to the consummation of terrestrial
physiological union and conception (as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel's
blood -- Habel, the feminine principle) and -- child-bearing; a process shown
to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam's THIRD son, Seth, with whose son
Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah-hovah, the male Jod and
Havah or Eve -- to wit, male and female beings.* Thus the difference lies in
the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is
no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judaean Tanaim, the inner sense of the
symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Aryan Dwijas. The
worship of the "god in the ark" dates only from David; and for a
thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old Kabala,
edited and re-edited, has become tainted with it.
With the ancient
Aryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime, and poetical, however much
the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The
ceremony of passing through
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the fourth
chapter of Genesis, v. 26, it is mis-translated, " . . . And he called his
name Enos (man); then began men to call upon the name of the Lord." --
which has no sense in it, since Adam and the others must have done the same.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 471]] THE CRAFT OF THE RABBINS.
million years
old; the other is a small sub-race some 8,000 years old and no more.*
But Phallic
worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner
meaning of religious symbols; and there was a day when the Israelites had
beliefs as pure as the Aryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on Phallic
worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a
religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves.
Philo Judaeus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The sacred Writings, he
says, prescribe what we ought to do . . . commanding us to hate the heathen and
their laws and institutions. They did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly,
but left its worst features to be followed secretly; and it is with the
Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of nature were the most profaned. With
them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading --
Geometry, the fifth divine Science ("fifth" -- because it is the
fifth key in the series of the Seven Keys to the Universal esoteric language
and symbology) was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most
terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and religion were
degraded.
We are told that
it is just the same with our Brahma-prajapati, with Osiris and all other
creative gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally;
the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindu Lingham
is identical with "Jacob's Pillar" -- most undeniably. But the
difference, as said, seems to consist in that the esoteric significance of the
Lingham was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and
the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of
the mob. Nor would the Aryan Hierophant and Brahmin, in their proud
exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of
concealing its primeval 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Strictly
speaking, the Jews are an artificial Aryan race, born in India, and belonging
to the Caucasian division. No one who is familiar with the Armenians and the
Parsis can fail to recognize in the three the same Aryan, Caucasian type. From
the seven primitive types of the Fifth Race there now remain on Earth but
three. As Prof. W. H. Flower aptly said in 1885, "I cannot resist the
conclusion so often arrived at by various anthropologists -- that the primitive
man, whatever he may have been, has in the course of ages diverged into three
extreme types, represented by the Caucasian of Europe, the Mongolian of Asia,
and the Ethiopian of Africa, and that all existing individuals of the species
can be ranged around these types. . . . " (The President's address at the
Anthrop. Inst. of Great Britain, etc.) Considering that our Race has reached
its Fifth Sub-race, how can it be otherwise?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 472 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
in his supposed
monotheism over the heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate.* A commandment
now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later
commandment -- "love each other." Both India and Egypt had and have
their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same "Holy of Holies" -- the
Lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol -- the bearer of its own
seed and root of all. Viraj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from
androgyne Nature, one from Brahma and his female counterpart Vach, the other,
from Osiris and Isis -- never from the One infinite God. In the Judaeo-Christian
systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahma, the Universe, is
shown growing out of Vishnu's navel, the Central point in the Waters of
Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile
-- all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially
concrete in the Bible: one is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they
are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering.
Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application; the
lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel (Luke i. 28). In Hinduism -- the
"Holy of Holies" is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personae
are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God,
outside of that Nature, and the human Womb -- Eve, Sarah, etc., etc.; hence, an
anthropomorphic phallic god, and his image -- man.
Thus it is
maintained, that with regard to the of
the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic
substitute -- Jehovah -- there was the unknown, incognizable Deity, the
Kabalistic Ain-Soph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning, no better than
the dead-letter Lingham-** worshippers of the India of to-day. We say it was
the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was
the same Pantheism that the Vedantin philosophers are reproached with to-day;
Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no
importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite priests and philosophers --
the Sadducees, the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Whenever such
analogies between the Gentiles and the Jews, and later the Christians, were
pointed out, it was the invariable custom of the latter to say that it was the
work of the Devil who forced the Pagans to imitate the Jews for the purpose of
throwing a slur on the religion of the one, true living God. To this Faber says
very justly "Some have imagined that the Gentiles were servile copyists of
the Israelites, and that each point of similitude was borrowed from the
Mosaical Institutes. But this theory will by no means solve the problem: both
because we find the very same resemblance in the ceremonies of nations far
different from Palestine, as we do in the rites of those who are in its
immediate vicinity, and because it seems incredible that all should have
borrowed from one which was universally disliked and despised." (Pagan
Idol. I., 104.)
** Their
consecrated pillars (unhewn stones) erected by Abraham and Jacob were LINGHI.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 473 THE ELOHISTIC AND JEHOVISTIC TEXTS.
most refined as
the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof with
their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the LAW. For how could those
who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors
who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular blind --
how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a NUMBER,
as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the Kabalistic works? How could
anyone worthy of the name of a philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning
of their "pillar of Jacob," their Bethel, oil-anointed phalli, and
their "Brazen Serpent," worship such a gross symbol, and minister
unto it, seeing in it their "Covenant" -- the Lord Himself! Let the
reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrin and judge. As various writers have shown, and
as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism (p. 67) "We know from
the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone. . . . that stone
was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah . . . which written
in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or JHVH (the H being merely
an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V
(in another form U); then if we place the I in the U we have the 'Holy of
Holies'; we also have the Lingha and Yoni and Argha of the Hindus, the Isvara
and 'supreme Lord'; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and
arc-celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni
(?) of the Ark of the Covenant."
The Biblical
Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David -- even admitting the
identity of the old genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls.
Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of prehistoric
darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do
so. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament
may be referred by the most lenient criticism, as the approximately correct
views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians
and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous
changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the "Book of
God," since it was found by Hilkiah (See "Introduction to the Old
Testament," and also Bishop Colenso's "Elohistic and Jehovistic
writers"); and that "the Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or
older documents, by means of a SUPPLEMENTARY One." The Elohistic texts
were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the
authority of the Bible chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the
deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar form, and as a
symbol of the double-sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his
name, or [[hebrew]] the Yodh (phallus), and [[hebrew]] He (the opening, or
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 road-side in India.
Just as the IAO
of the mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas of
some Gnostic sects identical with the god of the Hebrews, who was the same with
the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on "heathen" as on the
Gnostic "Christian" gems. In Matter's collection of such gems there
is a "Horus" seated on the lotus, inscribed [[ABRASAXIAO]] (Abraxas
Iao) -- an address exactly parallel to the so frequent [[EIS ZETS SARAPI]] (Eis
zets sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems; and therefore only to be translated
by "Abraxas is the One Jehovah" (King's Gnostics, p. 327). But who
was Abraxas? As the same author shows -- "the numerical or Kabalistic
value of the name Abraxas directly refer to the Persian title of the god
'Mithra,' Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the
appellation of Iao." Thus, the Sun, in one aspect, the moon or the Lunar
genius, in another, that generative deity whom the Gnostics saluted as
"Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who
shinest in the night-time, holding the second rank, the first Lord of
Death."
It is only in
his capacity of the genius of the moon, the latter being credited in the old
cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth, that Jehovah could ever be
regarded as the creator of our globe and its Heaven, namely, the Firmament.
The knowledge of
all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go
on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians
read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously
unjust words of Coleridge, "It is highly worthy of observation that the
inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other
books PRETENDING TO INSPIRATION, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even
from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recommendation of TRUTH (! !). . .
."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 475 NATURE, A STONE-COLD MOTHER.
§ XVIII.
ON THE MYTH OF
THE "FALLEN ANGEL," IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS.
-------
A.
THE EVIL SPIRIT:
WHO, AND WHAT?
OUR present
quarrel is exclusively with theology. The Church enforces belief in a personal
god and a personal devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief.
And though for the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists,
Nature is no better than "a comely mother, but stone cold" -- this is
true only so far as regards external physical nature. They both agree that, to
the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter-house
wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is
quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of
Nature's numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous
propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no
deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less
natural that the materialist and the physicist should imagine that everything
is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even
more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard physical nature
as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who
recognise in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant
procreation: a series of stages toward an ever-growing perfectibility, which is
visible in the silent influence of never-erring Karma, or abstract nature --
the Occultists, we say, view the great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live
without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates
without a change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate
suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the
deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external
nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?
If our modern
philosophers -- preceded by the medieval scholars -- have helped themselves to
more than one fundamental idea of antiquity, theologians have built their God
and his Archangels, their Satan and his Angels, along with the Logos and his
staff, entirely out of the dramatis personae of the old heathen Pantheons. They
would have been
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 succes d'estime, in general, even among those who are not
interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by
the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.
Now even the
Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of
Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical "Christian" (as they call
themselves, "Sectarian" as we call them) Kabalists, on the Continent.
These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but to discover in its
verses, by mangling the texts and meaning, Christian dogmas, where none could
ever have been meant; and, having fished them out with the collective help of
jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed "Kabalists" proceed
to write books and to mislead less far-sighted students of the Kabala.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Such a
pseudo-Kabalist was the Marquis de Mirville in France, who, having studied the
Zohar and other old remnants of Jewish Wisdom under the "Chevalier"
Drach, an ancient Rabbi Kabalist converted to the Romish Church -- wrote with
his help half a dozen volumes full of slander and calumnies against every
prominent Spiritualist and Kabalist. From 1848 up to 1860 he persecuted
unrelentingly the old Count d'Ourches, one of the earliest Eastern Occultists
in France, a man the scope of whose occult knowledge will never be appreciated
correctly by his survivors, because he screened his real beliefs and knowledge
under the mask of Spiritism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 477 THE GENESIS OF THE DEVIL.
May we not then
be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface
the root idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom-God, who had first
been regarded as the creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil
-- a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail?
We need not go out of the way to compare the pagan demons of either Egypt,
India, or Chaldea with the devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is
possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a
piratical reprint from the Chaldeo-Judaean mythology:--
The primitive
origin of this personification rests upon the Akkadian conception of the cosmic
powers -- the Heavens and the Earth -- in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos.
Their Silik-Muludag, "the God amongst all the Gods," the
"merciful guardian of men on Earth," was the Son of Hea (or Ea) the
great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebu. With both peoples -- as in
the case of the Hindu gods -- their deities were both beneficent and
maleficent. As Evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely
just retributive sense, so Evil was the servant of the good (Hibbert Lect.
1887, pp. 101-115). The reading of the Chaldeo-Assyrian tiles has now
demonstrated it beyond a shadow of doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar.
Satan was a Son, and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic nations, the Spirit
of the Earth was as much the Creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens.
They were twin brothers and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in
one. Nothing of that which we find in Genesis is absent from the
Chaldeo-Assyrian religious beliefs, even in the little that has hitherto been
deciphered. The great "Face of the Deep" of Genesis is traced in the
Tohu-bohu, "Deep," "Primeval Space," or Chaos of the
Babylonians. Wisdom (the Great Unseen God) -- called in Genesis chap. i. the
"Spirit of God" -- lived, for the older Babylonians as for the
Akkadians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus, this sea
became the visible waters on the face of the Earth -- the crystalline abode of
the great mother, the mother of Ea and all the gods, which became, still later,
the great Dragon Tiamat, the Sea Serpent. Its last stage of development was the
great struggle of Bel with the Dragon -- the Devil!
Whence the
Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whomsoever he
was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judaeus and Josephus both state that the Law
(the Pentateuch and the Talmud) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the
adversary, as also the gods of the gentiles. "Thou shalt not revile the
gods," quoth the god of Moses (Exodus xxii. 28), for it is God who
"hath divided (them) unto all nations" (Deut. iv. 19); and those who
speak evil of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol. 2, Page]] 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.* "Satan appeared one day to a man who used to curse him
daily, and said to him: 'Why dost thou this?' Consider that God himself would
not curse me, but merely said: 'The Lord rebuke thee, Satan.' "**
This bit of
Talmudic information shows plainly two things: (a) that St. Michael is called
"God" in the Talmud, and somebody else "the Lord"; and (b)
that Satan is a God, of whom even the "Lord" is in fear. All we read
in the Zohar and other Kabalistic works on Satan shows plainly that this
"personage" is simply the personification of the abstract evil, which
is the weapon of Karmic law and KARMA. It is our human nature and man himself,
as it is said that "Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with
man." It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.
It is a
well-known fact -- to learned Symbologists at all events -- that in every great
religion of antiquity, it is the Logos Demiurge (the second logos), or the
first emanation from the mind (Mahat), who is made to strike, so to say, the
key-note of that which may be called the correlation of individuality and
personality in the subsequent scheme of evolution. The Logos it is, who is
shown in the mystic symbolism of cosmogony, theogony, and anthropogony, playing
two parts in the drama of Creation and Being, i.e., that of the purely human
personality and the divine impersonality of the so-called Avatars, or divine
incarnations, and of the universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnostics, and
the Farvarshi (or Ferouer) of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean philosophy. On the
lower rungs of theogony the celestial Beings of lower Hierarchies had each a
Farvarshi, or a celestial "Double." It is the same, only a still more
mystic, reassertion of the Kabalistic axiom, "Deus est Demon
inversus"; the word "demon," however, as in the case of Socrates,
and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity,
standing for the guardian Spirit, an "Angel," not a devil of Satanic
descent, as theology will have it. The Roman Catholic Church shows its usual
logic and consistency by accepting, as the ferouer of Christ, St. Michael, who
was "his Angel Guardian," as proved by St. Thomas,*** while he calls
the prototypes of Michael and his synonyms, such as Mercury, for example,
devils
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Vide Isis
Unveiled, Vol. II., 487, et seq.
** Treat.
Kiddusheem, 81. But see the Qabbala by Mr. I. Myer, pp. 92, 94, and the Zohar,
quoted in his Volume.
*** In the work
of Marangone "Delle grandezze del Archangelo Sancto Mikaele," the
author exclaims: "O Star, the greatest of those that follow the Sun who is
Christ! . . . [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 479 GOD AND DEVIL, BOTH METATRONS.
The Church
accepts positively the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other god or
mortal has. Writes de Mirville: "Here we have the two heroes of the Old
Testament, the Verbum (?), or the second Jehovah, and his face ('Presence,' as
the Protestants translate) forming both but one, and yet being two, a mystery
which seemed to us unsolvable before we had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean
ferouers, and learnt that the ferouer was the spiritual potency, at once image,
face, and the guardian of the Soul which finally assimilates the ferouer."
(Memoires a l'Academie, Vol. v., p. 516.) This is almost correct.
Among other
absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word metatron being divided into
[[meta, thronon]], means near the throne. It means quite the reverse, as meta
means "beyond" and not "near." This is of great importance
in our argument. St. Michael, then, the quis ut Deus, is the translator, so to
speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.
They maintain,
furthermore, along with the Roman Catholic Church, that in the Biblical and
Christian theology there does not exist a "higher celestial personality,
after the Trinity, than that of the Archangel or the Seraphim, Michael."
According to them, the conqueror of the Dragon is "the archisatrap of the
sacred militia, the guardian of the planets, the King of the Stars, the slayer
of Satan and the most powerful Rector." In the mystic astronomy of these
gentlemen, he is "the conqueror of Ahriman, who having upset the sidereal
throne of the usurper, bathes in his stead in the solar fires"; and,
defender of the Christ-Sun, he approaches so near his Master, "that he
seems to become one with him . . . . Owing to this fusion with the WORD
(Verbum) the Protestants, and among them Calvin, ended by losing sight entirely
of the duality, and saw no Michael but only his Master," writes the Abbe
Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists, know better; and it
is they who explain to the world this duality, which affords to them the means
of glorifying the chosen ones of the Church, and of rejecting and
anathematizing all those Gods who may be in the way of their dogmas.
Thus the same
titles and the same names are given in turn to God and the Archangel. Both are
called Metatron, "both have the name of Jehovah applied to them when they
speak one in the other" (sic) as, according to the Zohar, the term
signifies equally "the Master and the Ambassador." Both are the Angel
of the Face, because, as we are informed, if, on the one hand, the
"Word" is called "the face (or the Presence) and the image of
the substance of God," on the other, "when
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] O living image of Divinity! O great
thaumaturgist of the old Testament! O invisible Vicar of Christ within his
Church! . . ." etc., etc. The work is in great honour in the Latin Church.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."* Elsewhere he (Michael) is called very plainly "the Prince
of the Faces of the Lord, the glory of the Lord." Both (Jehovah and
Michael) are "the guides of Israel** . . . chiefs of the armies of the
Lord, Supreme Judges of the souls and even Seraphs."***
The whole of the
above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must,
therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle
theologians and casuists mean by the term Ferouer,**** a word borrowed by some
French writers from the Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism
for a purpose Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard XIX. of the
Vendidad it is said (verse 14), "Invoke, O Zarathustra! my Farvarshi, who
am Ahura Mazda, the greatest, the best, the fairest of all beings, the most
solid, the most intelligent, . . . . and whose soul is the Holy Word"
(Mathra Spenta). The French Orientalists translate Farvarshi by
"Ferouer."
Now what is a
Ferouer, or Farvarshi? In some Mazdean works (e.g., Ormazd Ahriman, §§ 112,
113), it is plainly implied that Farvarshi is the inner, immortal man (or that
Ego which reincarnates); that it 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)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Isaiah, lxiii.
8-9.
** Metator and
[[hegemon]].
*** "La
Face et le Representant du Verbe," p. 18, de Mirville.
**** That which
is called in the Vendidad "Farvarshi," the immortal part of an
individual, that which outlives man -- the Higher Ego, say the Occultists, or
the divine Double.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 481 FRAUDULENT TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.
proves that
Michael is the Mercury of the pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate
him, and add that "according to great theologians Mercury and the Sun are
one," (?) and no wonder, they think, since "Mercury being so near the
Wisdom of the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with
him."
This
"pagan" view was accepted from the first century of our era, as shown
in the ORIGINAL Acts of the Apostles (the English translation being worthless).
So much is Michael the Mercury of the Greeks and other nations, that when the
inhabitants of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter --
"the gods have come down to us in the likeness of men," -- verse 12
(xiv.) adds: "And they called Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, Hermes (or
Mercury), because he was the leader of the WORD (Verbum)," and not
"the chief speaker," as erroneously translated in the authorised, and
repeated even in the revised, English Bible. Michael is the angel in the
Vision, the Son of God, "who was like unto a Son of Man." It is the
Hermes-Christos of the Gnostics, the Anubis-Syrius of the Egyptians, the Counsellor
of Osiris in Amenti, the Michael leontoid [[ophiomorphos]] of the Ophites, who
wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion head, like his father Ildabaoth. (See
King's Gnostics.)
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 droles), are of course demons whose manager is Satan.
Now this is the easiest and the most sublime and simple way of getting out of
the difficulty! The Rev. Dr. Lundy, a Protestant de Mirville, followed the
happy suggestion in his "Monumental Christianity," and so did Dr.
Sepp of Munich in his works written to prove the divinity of Jesus and the
Satanic origin of all other Saviours. So much greater the pity that a
systematic and collective plagiarism, which went on for several centuries on
the most gigantic scale, should be explained by another plagiarism, this time
in the fourth Gospel. For the sentence quoted from it, "All that ever came
before me, etc.," is a verbatim repetition of words written in the
"Book of Enoch" lxxxix. In the Introduction to Archbishop Lawrence's
translation of it from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor,
author of the "Evolution of Christianity," remarks:--
"In
revising the proof-sheets of the Book of Enoch . . . . . the parable of the
sheep, rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious
wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch, lxxxix., in
which the author depicts the shepherds as killing . . . the sheep before the
advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto
mysterious passage in the Johannine parable -- 'All that ever came before me
are thieves and robbers' -- language in which we now detect an obvious
reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch."
It is too late
in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament,
instead of vice versa. Jude (14-15) quotes verbatim from Enoch a long passage
about the coming of the Lord with his 10,000 saints, and naming specifically
the prophet, acknowledges the source. This "parallelism between prophet
and apostle, have placed beyond controversy that, in the eyes of the author of
an Epistle accepted as divine revelation, the Book of Enoch was the inspired
production of an antediluvian patriarch . . . " and further " . . .
the cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of
N.T. Scripture, . . . clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was
the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who
wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment,
immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness under the
eternal dominion of the Son of Man. This Evangelical plagiarism culminates in
the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 483 VEDAS, ONCE UNIVERSAL.
of Enoch to
Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the
great Master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the
antediluvian Patriarch." (INT. xxxv.)
"Antediluvian,"
truly; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even
millenniums before the historical era, then it is no more the original
prediction of the events to come, but, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of
a prehistoric religion. . . . . "In the Krita age, Vishnu, in the form of
Kapila and other (inspired sages) . . . imparts to the world true wisdom as
Enoch did. In the Treta age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal
monarch (the Chakravartin or the 'Everlasting King' of Enoch*) and protects the
three worlds (or races). In the Dwapara age, in the person of Veda-Vyasa, he
divides the one Veda into four, and distributes it into hundreds (Sata) of
branches." Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Aryans, before it was
written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto-Lemurians, and sowed the
first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off-shoots of the never
dying tree of wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on
Judaeo-Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present age, Vishnu, or
the "Everlasting King" will appear as Kalki, and re-establish
righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be
awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal. "The men who are thus changed
by virtue of that peculiar time (the sixth race) shall be as the seeds of other
human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the
Krita age of purity"; i.e., it shall be the seventh race, the race of
"Buddhas," the "Sons of God," born of immaculate parents.
-------
B.
THE GODS OF
LIGHT PROCEED FROM THE GODS OF DARKNESS.
Thus it is
pretty well established that Christ, the Logos, or the God in Space and the
Saviour on Earth, is but one of the echoes of the same antediluvian and sorely
misunderstood Wisdom. The history begins by the descent on Earth of the
"Gods" who incarnate in mankind, and this is the FALL. Whether Brahma
hurled down on Earth in the allegory by Bhagavant, or Jupiter by Kronos, all
are the symbols of the human races. Once landed on, and having touched this
planet of dense matter, no snow-white wings of the highest angel can remain
immaculate, or the Avatar (or incarnation) be perfect, as every such Avatar is
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Saith Uriel
(chap. xxvi. v. 3), in the "Book of Enoch" "all those who have received
mercy shall for ever bless God the everlasting King," who will reign over
them.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 485 THE SONS OF ETERNITY.
"drew the
third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth," and
whose place, with that of his angels, "was found no more in heaven."
What the seven heads of the Dragon (cycle) mean, and its five wicked kings
also, may be learned in the Addenda which close Part III. of this Volume.
From Newton to
Bossuet speculations were incessantly evolved in Christian brains with regard
to these obscure verses. . . . . "The star that falls, is the heresiarch
Theodosius" . . . . explains Bossuet. "The clouds of smoke, are the
heresies of the Montanists. . . . . The third part of the stars, are the
martyrs, and especially the doctors of divinity. . . . ."
Bossuet ought to
have known, however, that the events described in Revelation were not original,
and may, as shown, be found in other and pagan traditions. There were no
scholastics nor Montanists during Vedic times, nor yet far later in China. But
Christian theology had to be protected and saved.
This was only
natural. But why should truth be sacrificed in order to protect from
destruction the lucubrations of Christian theologians?
The princeps
aeris hujus, the "prince of the air" of St. Paul, is not the devil,
but the effects of the astral light, as Eliphas Levi correctly explains. The
Devil is not "the God of this period," as he says, for it is the
deity of every age and period, since man appeared on earth, and matter, in its
countless forms and states, had to fight for its evanescent existence against
other disintegrating Forces.
The
"Dragon" is simply the symbol of the cycle and of the "Sons of
Manvantaric Eternity," who had descended on earth during a certain epoch
of its formative period. The "clouds of smoke" are a geological
phenomenon. The "third part of the stars of heaven" cast down to the
earth -- refers to the divine Monads, (the Spirits of the Stars in Astrology)
that circumambulate our globe; i.e., the human Egos destined to perform the
whole cycle of incarnations. This sentence, qui circumambulat terram, however,
is again referred to the DEVIL in theology, the mythical father of Evil being
said to "fall like lightning." Unfortunately for this interpretation,
the "Son of Man," or Christ, is expected, on the personal testimony
of Jesus, to descend on earth likewise, "As the lightning cometh out of
the East,"* just in the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who
is seen "as lightning to fall from heaven."** All these metaphors and
figures of speech, pre-eminently Oriental in their character, must have their
origin searched for in the East. In all the ancient cosmogonies light comes
from darkness. In Egypt, as elsewhere, darkness was "the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Matthew xxiv.
27.
** Luke x. 18.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 486 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
principle of all
things." Hence Pymander, the "Thought divine," issues as light
from DARKNESS. Behemoth* is the principle of Darkness, or Satan, in Roman
Catholic Theology, and yet Job says of him that "Behemoth is the chief
(principle) of the ways of God" (xl. 19) -- "Principium viarum Domini
Behemoth!"
Consistency does
not seem to be a favourite virtue in any portion of divine Revelation,
so-called -- not as interpreted by theologians, at any rate.
The Egyptians
and the Chaldeans referred the birth of their divine Dynasties to that period
when creative Earth was in her last final throes, in giving birth to her
prehistoric mountain ranges, which have since disappeared, her seas and her
continents. Her face was covered with "deep Darkness and in that
(Secondary) Chaos was the principle of all things" that developed on the
globe later on. And our geologists have ascertained that there was such a
terrestrial conflagration in the early geological periods, several hundred
millions of years ago.** As to the tradition itself, every country and nation
had it, each under its respective national form.
It is not alone
Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia or Mexico, that had their Typhon, Python, Loki and
its "falling" Demon, but China, also. The Celestials have a whole
literature upon the subject. In King, it is said that in consequence of a
rebellion against Ti of a proud Spirit who said he was Ti himself, seven choirs
of celestial spirits were exiled upon earth, which "brought a change in
all nature, heaven itself bending down and uniting with earth."
And in the
"Y-King," one reads: "The flying Dragon, superb and rebellious,
suffers now, and his pride is punished; he thought he would reign in heaven, he
reigns only on the earth."
Again, the
Tchoon-Tsieoo says allegorically: "one night the stars ceased shining in
darkness, and deserted it, falling down like rain upon the earth, where they
are now hidden." These stars are the Monads.
Chinese
cosmogonies have their "Lord of the Flame" and their "Celestial
Virgin," with little "Spirits to help and minister to her; and big
Spirits to fight those who are the enemies of other gods." But all this
does not prove that the said allegories are presentments or prophetic writings
which all refer to Christian theology.
The best proof
one can offer to Christian Theologians that the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Protestant
Bible defines Behemoth innocently -- "The elephant as some think"
(See marginal note in Job xl. 19) in the authorised versions.
** Astronomy,
however, knows nothing of stars that have disappeared unless from visibility,
never from existence, since the Science of Astronomy became known. Temporary
stars are only variable stars, and it is believed even that the new stars of
Kepler and Tycho Brahe may still be seen.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 487 THE SHADOWS OF THE SHADOWS.
esoteric meaning
in the Bible -- in both Testaments -- was the assertion of the same idea as in
our Archaic teachings -- to wit, that the "Fall of the Angels"
referred simply to the incarnation of angels "who had broken through the
Seven Circles" -- is found in the Zohar. Now the Kabala of Simeon Ben
Iochai is the soul and essence of its allegory, as the later Christian Kabala
is the "dark cloaked" Mosaic Pentateuch. And it says (in the Agrippa
MSS.):
"The wisdom
of the Kabala rests in the science of the equilibrium and Harmony."
"Forces
that manifest without having been first equilibrized perish in space"
("equilibrized" meaning differentiated).
"Thus
perished the first Kings (the Divine Dynasties) of the ancient world, the
self-produced Princes of giants. They fell like rootless trees, and were seen
no more: for they were the Shadow of the Shadow"; to wit, the chhaya of
the Shadowy Pitris. (Vide about the "Kings of Edom.")
"But those that came after them, who
shooting down like falling stars were enshrined in the shadows -- prevailed and
to this day": Dhyanis, who by incarnating in those "empty
shadows," inaugurated the era of mankind.
Every sentence
in the ancient cosmogonies, unfolds to him who can read between the lines the
identity of the ideas, though under different garbs.
The first lesson
taught in Esoteric philosophy is, that the incognizable Cause does not put
forth evolution, whether consciously or unconsciously, but only exhibits
periodically different aspects of itself to the perception of finite Minds. Now
the collective Mind -- the Universal -- composed of various and numberless
Hosts of Creative Powers, however infinite in manifested Time, is still finite
when contrasted with the unborn and undecaying Space in its supreme essential
aspect. That which is finite cannot be perfect. Therefore there are inferior
Beings among those Hosts, but there never were any devils or "disobedient
Angels," for the simple reason that they are all governed by Law. The
Asuras who incarnated (call them by any other name), followed in this a law as
implacable as any 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 AEon which is the Prologue to creation, and
which stands on the borderland between the uncreated eternal Causation and the
produced finite effects; a state of nascent activity and energy as the first
aspect of the eternal immutable Quiescence. In Genesis, on which no metaphysical
energy has been spent, but only an extraordinary acuteness and ingenuity to
veil the esoteric Truth, "Creation" begins at the third stage of
manifestation. "God" or the Elohim are the "Seven Regents"
of Pymander. They are identical with all the other Creators.
But even in
Genesis that period is hinted at by the abruptness of the picture, and the
"darkness" that was on the face of the deep. The Alahim are shown to
"create" -- that is to say, to build or to produce the two or
"double heaven" (not Heaven and Earth); which means, in so many
words, that they separated the upper manifested (angelic) heaven, or plane of
consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane; the (to us) eternal and
immutable AEons from those periods that are in space, time and duration; Heaven
from Earth, the unknown from the KNOWN -- to the profane. Such is the meaning
of the sentence in Pymander, which says that: "THOUGHT, the divine, which
is LIGHT and LIFE (Zeruana Akerne) produced through its WORD, or first
aspect," the other, operating THOUGHT, which being the god of Spirit and
Fire, constructed seven Regents enclosing within their circle the world of
Senses, named "fatal destiny." The latter refers to Karma; the
"seven circles" are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven
invisible Spirits, in the angelic spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven
planets,* the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Another proof,
if any were needed, that the ancient Initiates knew of more than seven planets
is to be found in the Vishnu Purana, Book II., ch. xii., where, describing
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 489 THE ONE PASSIVE DEITY.
seven Rishis of
the great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Adityas by Roth: "they are
neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor dawn, but the eternal sustainers of this
luminous life which exists as it were behind all these phenomena."
It is they --
the "Seven Hosts" -- who, having "considered in their Father
(divine Thought) the plan of the operator," as says 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.* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] the chariots attached to Dhruva (the pole star),
Parasara speaks of "the chariots of the NINE planets," which are
attached by aerial cords.
* Justin:
"Cum. Trypho," p. 284.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 490 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
had a beginning,
for it proceeded from Oulom* (Aion, time), the highest of the AEons when
emitted from the Father, it had remained with him before all creations, for it
is part of him.** Therefore, Philo Judaeus calls Adam Kadmon "mind"
(the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic system). "The mind, let it be named
Adam.***
As the old
Magian books explain it, the whole event becomes clear. A thing can only exist
through its opposite -- Hegel teaches us, and only a little philosophy and
spirituality are needed to comprehend the origin of the later dogma, which is
so truly satanic and infernal in its cold and cruel wickedness. The Magians
accounted for the origin of evil in their exoteric teachings in this way.
"Light can produce nothing but light, and can never be the origin of
evil"; how then was the evil produced, since there was nothing co-equal or
like the Light in its production? Light, say they, produced several Beings, all
of them spiritual, luminous, and powerful. But a GREAT ONE (the "Great
Asura," Ahriman, Lucifer, etc., etc.) had an evil thought, contrary to the
Light. He doubted, and by that doubt he became dark.
This is a little
nearer to the truth, but still wide of the mark. There was no "EVIL
thought" that originated the opposing Power, but simply THOUGHT per se;
something which, being cogitative, and containing design and purpose, is
therefore finite, and must thus find itself naturally in opposition to pure
quiescence, the as natural state of absolute Spirituality and Perfection. It
was simply the law of Evolution that asserted itself; the progress of mental
unfolding, differentiated from spirit, involved and entangled already with
matter, into which it is irresistibly drawn. Ideas, in their very nature and
essence, as conceptions bearing relation to objects, whether true or imaginary,
are opposed to absolute THOUGHT, that unknowable ALL of whose mysterious
operations Mr. Spencer predicates that nothing can be said, but that "it
has no kinship of nature with Evolution" (Principles of Psychology,****
474) -- which it certainly has not.
The Zohar gives
it very suggestively. When the "Holy One" (the Logos) desired to
create man, he called the highest host of Angels and said to them what he
wanted, but they doubted the wisdom of this desire and answered: "Man will
not continue one night in his glory" -- for
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A division
indicative of time.
** Sanchoniathon
calls time the oldest AEon, Protogonos, the "first-born."
*** Philo
Judaeus: "Cain and his Birth," p. xvii.
**** It is
suggestive of that spirit of paradoxical negation so conspicuous in our day,
that while the evolution hypothesis has won its rights of citizenship in
science as taught by Darwin and Haeckel, yet both the eternity of the Universe
and the pre-existence of a universal consciousness, are rejected by the modern
psychologists. "Should the Idealist be right, the doctrine of evolution is
a dream," says Mr. Herbert Spencer. (See foot note, pp. 1 and 2, Book II.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 491 THE ZOHAR ON THE FALLEN ONES.
which they were
burnt (annihilated?), by the "Holy" Lord. Then he called another,
lower Host, and said the same. And they contradicted the "Holy One":
"What is the good of Man?" they argued. Still Elohim created man, and
when man sinned there came the hosts of Uzza and Azael, and twitted God:
"Here is the Son of Man that thou hast made," they said.
"Behold, he sinned!" Then the Holy One replied: "If you had been
among them (men) you would have been worse than they." And he threw them
from their exalted position in Heaven even down on the Earth; and "they
were changed (into men) and sinned after the women of the earth"; (Zohar,
9, b.). This is quite plain. No mention is made in Genesis of these "Sons
of God" (chap. vi.) having been punished for it. The only reference to it
in the Bible is in Jude (6). "And the angels which kept not their first
estate but left their habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under
darkness unto the judgment of the great day." And this means simply that
the "Angels," doomed to incarnation, are in the chains of flesh and
matter, under the darkness of ignorance, till the "Great Day," which
will come as always after the seventh round, after the expiration of the "Week,"
on the SEVENTH SABBATH, or in the post-Manvantaric Nirvana.
How truly
esoteric and consonant with the Secret Doctrine is "PYMANDER the Thought
Divine" of Hermes, may be inferred from its original and primitive
translations in Latin and Greek only. On the other hand how disfigured it has
been later on by Christians in Europe, is seen from the remarks and unconscious
confessions made by de St. Marc, in his Preface and letter to the Bishop of
Ayre, in 1578. Therein, the whole cycle of transformations from a Pantheistic
and Egyptian into a mystic Roman Catholic treatise is given, and we see how
PYMANDER has become what it is now. Still, even in St. Marc's translation,
traces are found of the real PYMANDER -- the "Universal Thought" or
"MIND." This is the verbatim translation from the old French
translation, the original being given in the foot-note* in its quaint old
French:--
"Seven men
(principles) were generated in Man." "The nature of the harmony of
the Seven of the Father and of the Spirit. Nature . . . .
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "SECTION
16 (chap. i., Mercure Trismegiste -- PIMANDRE . . . . " "Oh, ma
pensee, que s'ensuit il? car je desire grandement ce propos. Pimandre dict,
ceci est un mystere cele, jusques a ce jour d'hui. Car nature, soit mestant
avec l'home, a produit le miracle tres merveilleux, aiant celluy qui ie t'ay
dict, la nature de l'harmonie des sept du pere, et de l'esprit. Nature ne
s'arresta pas la, mais incontinent a produict sept homes, selon les natures des
sept gouverneurs en puissance des deux sexes et esleuez. . . . La generation de
ces sept s'est donnee en ceste maniere . . . ."
And a gap is
made in the translation, which can be filled partially by resorting to the
Latin text of Apuleius. The commentator, the Bishop, says: "Nature
produced in him (man) seven men" (seven principles).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 was created. . . Thou art the anointed cherub . . .
thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire . . . thou wast
perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was
found in thee. Therefore I will cast thee out of the mountain of God and
destroy thee. . . . "
The
"Mountain of God" means the "Mountain of the Gods" or Meru,
whose representative in the Fourth Race was Mount Atlas, the last form of one
of the divine Titans, so high in those days that the ancients believed that the
heavens rested on its top. Did not Atlas assist the giants in their war against
the gods? (Hyginus). Another version shows the fable as arising from the
fondness of Atlas, son of Iapetus and Clymene, for astronomy, and from his
dwelling for that reason on the highest mountain peaks. The truth is that
Atlas, "the mountain of the gods," and also the hero of that name, are
the esoteric symbols of the Fourth Race, and his seven daughters, the
Atlantides, are the symbols of its Seven Sub-races. Mount Atlas, according to
all the legends, was three times as high as it is now; having sunk at two
different times. It is of a volcanic origin, and therefore the voice
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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)* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The only
Pharaoh whom the Bible shows going down into the Red Sea was the king who
pursued the Israelites, and who remained unnamed, for very good reasons,
perhaps. The story was surely made up from the Atlantean legend.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 495 VARIOUS NAMES FOR INITIATES.
left hand. When
Vishnu Purana narrates that "the world was overrun with trees," while
the Prachetasas -- who "passed 10,000 years of austerity in the vast
ocean" -- were absorbed in their devotions, the allegory relates to the Atlanteans
and the adepts of the early Fifth Race -- the Aryans. Other "trees (adept
Sorcerers) spread, and overshadowed the unprotected earth; and the people
perished . . . unable to labour for ten thousand years." Then the sages,
the Rishis of the Aryan race, called Prachetasas, are shown "coming forth
from the deep,"* and destroying by the wind and flame issuing from their
mouths, the iniquitous "trees" and the whole vegetable kingdom; until
Soma (the moon), the sovereign of the vegetable world, pacifies them by making
alliance with the adepts of the Right Path, to whom he offers as bride Marisha,
"the offspring of the trees."** This means that which is given in the
Stanzas and Commentaries, and what is also given in Part II. of Vol. I., "The
Sacred Island." It hints at the great struggle between the "Sons of
God" and the Sons of the Dark Wisdom -- our forefathers; or the Atlantean
and the Aryan Adepts.
The whole
History of that period is allegorized in the Ramayana, which is the mystic
narrative in epic form of the struggle between Rama -- the first king of the
divine dynasty of the early Aryans -- and Ravana, the symbolical personation of
the Atlantean (Lanka) race. The former were the incarnations of the Solar Gods;
the latter, of the lunar Devas. This was the great battle between Good and
Evil, between white and black magic, for the supremacy of the divine forces, or
of the lower terrestrial or cosmic powers. If the student would understand
better the last statement, let him turn to the Anugita episode of the
Mahabharata, chapter v., where the Brahmana tells his wife, "I have
perceived by means of the Self the seat abiding in the Self -- (the seat) where
dwells the Brahman free from the pairs of opposites and the moon, together with
the fire (or the sun), upholding (all) beings (as), the mover of the
intellectual principle." The moon is the deity of the mind (Manas) but
only on the lower plane. "Manas is dual -- lunar in the lower, solar in
its upper portion," says a commentary. That is to say, it is attracted in
its higher aspect towards Buddhi, and in its
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vishnu Purana,
Book I., ch. xv.
** This is pure
allegory. The waters are a symbol of wisdom and of occult learning. Hermes
represented the sacred Science under the symbol of fire; the Northern
Initiates, under that of water. The latter is the production of Nara, the
"Spirit of God," or rather Paramatman, the "Supreme Soul,"
says Kulluka Bhatta, Narayana, meaning "he who abides in the deep" or
plunged in the Waters of Wisdom -- "water being the body of Nara"
(Vayu). Hence arises the statement that for 10,000 years they remained in
austerity "in the vast Ocean"; and are shown emerging from it. Ea,
the God of Wisdom, is the "Sublime Fish," and Dagon or Oannes is the
Chaldean man-fish, who emerges from the waters to teach wisdom.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* blazes
the Vaishvana fire** sevenfold, of which 'I' am the goal," says the
Brahmana.***
But the chief
"Soul" is Manas or mind; hence, Soma, the moon, is shown as making an
alliance with the solar portion in it, personified as the Prachetasas. But of
the seven keys that open the seven aspects of the Ramayana, as of every other
Scripture, this is only one -- the metaphysical.
The symbol of
the "Tree" standing for various Initiates was almost universal. Jesus
is called "the tree of Life," as also all the adepts of the good Law,
while those of the left Path are referred to as the "withering
trees." John the Baptist speaks of "the axe" which "is laid
to the root of the trees" (Matth. iii. 10); and the King of Assyria's
armies are called trees (Isaiah x. 19).
The true meaning
of the Garden of Eden was sufficiently given in "Isis Unveiled."
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is
explained by the able translator of Anugita in a foot-note (p. 258) in these
words: "The sense appears to be this; the course of worldly life is due to
the operations of the life-winds which are attached to the SELF, and lead to
its manifestations as individual souls.
**
"Vaisvanara (or Vaishvanara) is a word often used to denote the Self"
-- explains Nilakantha. *** Translated by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A.,
Bombay.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[agathai kai kakai
dunameis]]. Take away from Christianity its main prop of the Fallen Angels, and
the Eden Bower vanishes with its Adam and Eve into thin air; and Christ, in the
exclusive character of the One God and Saviour, and the victim of Atonement for
the Sin of animal-man, becomes forthwith a useless, meaningless myth.
In an old number
of the Revue Archaeologique for the year 1845 (p. 41), a French writer, M.
Maury, remarks:-- "This universal strife between good and bad spirits
seems to be only the reproduction of another more ancient and more terrible
strife, that, according to an ancient myth, took place before the creation of
the universe, between the faithful and the rebellious legions."
Once more, it is
a simple question of priority. Had John's Revelation been written during the
Vedic period, and were not one sure now of its being simply another version of
the Book of Enoch and the Dragon legends of pagan antiquity -- the grandeur and
the beauty of the imagery might have biased the critics' opinion in favour of
the Christian interpretation of that first war, whose battle field was starry
Heaven, and the first slaughterers -- the Angels. As the matter stands now,
however, one has to trace Revelation, event by event, to other and far older
visions. For the better comprehension of the Apocalyptic allegories and of the
esoteric epos we ask the reader to turn to Revelation, and to read chapter
xii., from verse 1 to verse 7.
This has several
meanings, most of which have been found out with regard to the astronomical and
numerical keys of this universal myth. That which may be given now, is a
fragment, a few hints as to its secret meaning, as embodying the record of a
real war, the struggle between the Initiates of the two schools. Many and various
are the still existing allegories built on that same foundation stone. The true
narrative, that which gives the full esoteric meaning, is in the Secret books,
but the writer has had no access to these.
In the exoteric
works, however, the episode of the Taraka war, and some esoteric commentaries,
may offer a clue perhaps. In every Purana
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranic narratives, mention is
made of Budha, the "Wise"; one "learned in the Secret
Wisdom," and who is the planet Mercury in his euhemerization. The Hindu
Classical Dictionary credits Budha with being the author of a hymn in the Rig
Veda. Therefore, he can by no means be "a later fiction of the
Brahmins," but is a very old personation indeed.
It is by
inquiring into his genealogy, or theogony, rather, that the following facts are
disclosed. As a myth, he is the son of Tara, the wife of Brihaspati the
"gold coloured," and of "Soma" the (male) Moon, who,
Paris-like, carries this new Helen of the Hindu sidereal Kingdom away from her
husband, which causes a great strife and war in Swarga (Heaven). The episode
brings on a battle between the gods and the Asuras: King Soma, finds allies in
Usanas (Venus), the leader of the Danavas; and the gods are led by Indra and
Rudra, who side with Brihaspati. The latter is helped by Sankara (Siva), who,
having had for his guru Brihaspati's father, Angiras, befriends his son. Indra
is here the Indian prototype of Michael, the Archistrategus and the slayer of
the "Dragon's" angels -- since one of his names is Jishnu
"leader of the (celestial) Host." Both fight, as some Titans did
against other Titans in defence of revengeful gods, one -- of Jupiter tonans
(in India, Brihaspati is the planet Jupiter, which is a curious coincidence);
the other, in support of the ever-thundering Rudra Sankara. During this war, he
is deserted by his body-guard, the storm-gods (Maruts). The story is very
suggestive in some of its details.
Let us examine
some of them, and seek to discover their meaning.
The presiding
genius, or "regent" of the planet Jupiter is Brihaspati, the wronged
husband. He is the instructor or spiritual guru of the gods, who are the
representatives of the procreative powers. In the Rig Veda, he is called
Brahmanaspati, a name meaning "the deity in whom the action of the
worshipped upon the gods is personified." Hence Brahmanaspati represents
the materialization of the divine grace, so to say, by means of ritual and
ceremonies, or the exoteric worship.
"TARA"*
-- his wife -- is on the other hand the personification of the powers of one
initiated into Gupta Vidya (secret knowledge), as will be shown.
SOMA is the moon
astronomically; but in mystical phraseology, it is also the name of the sacred
beverage drunk by the Brahmins and the Initiates during their mysteries and
sacrificial rites. The "Soma" plant is the asclepias acida, which
yields a juice from which that mystic beverage,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Dowson's Classical
Dictionary.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 499 ALLEGORIES ON THE "WAR IN HEAVEN."
the Soma drink,
is made. Alone the descendants of the Rishis, the Agnihotri (the fire priests)
of the great mysteries knew all its powers. But the real property of the true
Soma was (and is) to make a new man of the Initiate, after he is reborn, namely
once that he begins to live in his astral body (See "The Elixir of
Life"*); for, his spiritual nature overcoming the physical, he would soon
snap it off and part even from that etherealized form.**
Soma was never
given in days of old to the non-initiated Brahman -- the simple Grihasta, or
priest of the exoteric ritual. Thus Brihaspati -- "guru of the gods"
though he was -- still represented the dead-letter form of worship. It is Tara
his wife -- the symbol of one who, though wedded to dogmatic worship, longs for
true wisdom -- who is shown as initiated into his mysteries by King Soma, the
giver of that Wisdom. Soma is thus made in the allegory to carry her away. The
result of this is the birth of Budha -- esoteric Wisdom -- (Mercury, or Hermes
in Greece and Egypt). He is represented as "so beautiful," that even
the husband, though well aware that Budha is not the progeny of his dead-letter
worship -- claims the "new-born" as his Son, the fruit of his
ritualistic and meaningless forms.*** Such is, in brief, one of the meanings of
the allegory.
War in Heaven
refers to several events of that kind on various and different planes of being.
The first is a purely astronomical and cosmical fact pertaining to cosmogony.
Mr. John Bentley thought that with the Hindus war in Heaven is only a figure
referring to their calculations of time periods (see Bentley's Hindu
Astronomy).****
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See "Five
Years of Theosophy."
** The partaker
of Soma finds himself both linked to his external body, and yet away from it in
his spiritual form. The latter, freed from the former, soars for the time being
in the ethereal higher regions, becoming virtually "as one of the
gods," and yet preserving in his physical brain the memory of what he sees
and learns. Plainly speaking, Soma is the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
forbidden by the jealous Elohim to Adam and Eve or Yah-ve, "lest Man
should become as one of us."
*** We see the
same in the modern exoteric religions.
****
"Historical Views of Hindu Astronomy." Quoting from the work in
reference to Aryachatta, who is said to give a near approach to the true
relation among the various values for the computations of the value of [[pi]],
the author of the "Source of Measures" reproduces a curious
statement. Mr. Bentley, it is said, "was greatly familiar with the Hindu
astronomical and mathematical knowledge . . . this statement of his then may be
taken as authentic: the same remarkable trait, among so many Eastern and
ancient nations of sedulously concealing the arcana of this kind of knowledge,
is a marked one among the Hindus. That which was given out to be popularly
taught and to be exposed to public inspection, was but the approximate of a
more exact but hidden knowledge. And this very formulation of Mr. Bentley will
strangely exemplify the assertion; and explained, will show that it (the Hindu
exoteric astronomy and sciences) was derived from a system exact beyond the
European one, in which Mr. Bentley himself, of [[Footnote continued on next
page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* the war of the Titans is but a legendary and
deified copy of the real war that took place in the Himalayan Kailasa (heaven)
instead of in the depths of Cosmic interplanetary Space. It is the record of
the terrible strife between the "Sons of God" and the "Sons of
the Shadow" of the Fourth and the Fifth Races. It is on these two events,
blended together by legends borrowed from the exoteric account of the war waged
by the Asuras against the gods, that every subsequent national tradition on the
subject has been built.
Esoterically,
the Asuras, transformed subsequently into evil Spirits and lower gods, who are
eternally at war with the great deities -- are the gods of the Secret Wisdom.
In the oldest portions of the Rig Veda, they are the spiritual and the divine,
the term Asura being used for the Supreme Spirit and being the same as the
great Ahura of the Zoroastrians. (See Darmesteter's VENDIDAD). There was a time
when the gods Indra, Agni, and Varuna themselves belonged to the Asuras.
In the Aitareya Brahmana,
the breath (asu) of Brahma-Prajapati became alive, and from that breath he
created the Asuras. Later on, after the war, the Asuras are called the enemies
of the gods, hence -- "A-suras," the initial "A" being a
negative prefix -- or "no-gods" -- the "gods" being
referred to as "Suras." This then connects the Asuras and their
"Hosts," enumerated further on, with the "Fallen Angels" of
the Christian Churches, a hierarchy of spiritual Beings to be found in every
Pantheon of ancient and even modern nations -- from the Zoroastrian down to
that of the Chinaman. They are the sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the
beginning of every new Maha Kalpa, or Manvantara; in the same rank as the
Angels who had remained "faithful." These were the allies of Soma
(the parent of the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing
ritualistic or ceremonial
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] course, trusted as far in advance of the Hindu Knowledge,
at any time, in any generation."
Which is Mr.
Bentley's misfortune, and does not take away from the glory of the ancient
Hindu astronomers, who were all Initiates.
* The Secret
Doctrine teaches that every event of universal importance, such as geological
cataclysms at the end of one race and the beginning of a new one, involving a
great change each time in mankind, spiritual, moral and physical -- is
pre-cogitated and preconcerted, so to say, in the sidereal regions of our
planetary system. Astrology is built wholly upon this mystic and intimate
connection between the heavenly bodies and mankind; and it is one of the great
secrets of Initiation and Occult mysteries.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Nagas are
described by the Orientalists as a mysterious people whose landmarks are found
abundantly in India to this day, and who lived in Naga dwipa one of the Seven
continents or divisions of Bharatavarsha (old India), the town of Nagpur being
one of the most ancient cities in the country.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Brahma, Daksha, and other gods and sages.
Therefore we may safely maintain that whatever the astronomical meaning of this
universally accepted legend, its human phase is based on real and historical
events, disfigured into a theological dogma only to suit ecclesiastical
purposes. As above so below. Sidereal phenomena, and the behaviour of the
celestial bodies in the heavens, were taken as a model, and the plan was
carried out below, on earth. Thus, space, in its abstract sense, was called
"the realm of divine knowledge," and by the Chaldees or Initiates Ab
Soo, the habitat (or Father, i.e., the source) of knowledge, because it is in
space that dwell the intelligent Powers which invisibly rule the Universe.*
In the same
manner and on the plan of the Zodiac in the upper Ocean or the heavens, a
certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, was consecrated and called "the
Abyss of Learning"; twelve centres on it in the shape of twelve small
islands representing the Zodiacal signs -- two of which remained for ages the
"mystery signs"** and were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and
masters of wisdom. This "sea of knowledge" or learning*** remained
for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo, or Gobi desert. It existed until
the last great glacial period, when a
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Not less
suggestive are the qualities attributed to Rudra Siva, the great Yogi, the
forefather of all the Adepts -- in Esotericism one of the greatest Kings of the
Divine Dynasties. Called "the Earliest" and the "Last," he
is the patron of the Third, Fourth, and the Fifth Root-Races. For, in his
earliest character, he is the ascetic Dig-ambara, "clothed with the
Elements," Trilochana, "the three-eyed"; Pancha-anana, "the
five-faced," an allusion to the past four and the present fifth race, for,
though five-faced, he is only "four-armed," as the fifth race is
still alive. He is the "God of Time," Saturn-Kronos, as his damaru
(drum), in the shape of an hour-glass, shows; and if he is accused of having
cut off Brahma's fifth head, and left him with only four, it is again an
allusion to a certain degree in initiation, and also to the Races.
** G.
Seiffarth's idea that the signs of the Zodiac were in ancient times only ten is
erroneous. Ten only were known to the profane; the initiates, however, knew
them all, from the time of the separation of mankind into sexes, whence arose
the separation of Virgo-Scorpio into two; which, owing to a secret sign added
and the Libra invented by the Greeks, instead of the secret name which was not
given, made 12. (Vide Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 456.)
*** The above
is, perhaps, a key to the Dalai-Lama's symbolical name -- the "Ocean"
lama, meaning the Wisdom Ocean. Abbe Huc speaks of it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Zohar (iii., fol. 4, col.
14, Cremona Ed.) Adam, the FIRST man, is not found
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* "The
work of the beginning the companions understand; but it is only the little ones
who understand the parable on the work in the Principium by the mystery of the
serpent of the Great Sea."** And those Christians, who may happen to read
this, will also understand by the light of the above sentence who their
"Christ" was. For Jesus states repeatedly that he who "shall not
receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein";
and if some of his sayings have been meant to apply to children without any
metaphor, most of what relates to the "little ones" in the Gospels,
related to the Initiates, of whom Jesus was one. Paul (Saul) is referred to in
the Talmud as "the little one."
That
"Mystery of the Serpent" was this: Our Earth, or rather terrestrial
life, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the great Sea, "the
sea of life" having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The Siphrah
Dzeniouta speaks of primeval chaos and the evolution of the Universe after a
destruction (pralaya), comparing it to an uncoiling serpent:-- "Extending
hither and thither, its tail in its mouth, the head twisting on its neck, it is
enraged and angry. . . It watches and conceals itself. Every thousand Days it
is manifested." (I., § 16).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Such was the
name given in ancient Judea to the Initiates, called also the
"Innocents" and the "Infants," i.e., once more reborn. This
key opens a vista into one of the New Testament mysteries; the slaughter by Herod
of the 40,000 "Innocents." There is a legend to this effect, and the
event which took place almost a century B.C., shows the origin of the tradition
blended at the same time with that of Krishna and his uncle Kansa. In the case
of the N. T., Herod stands for Alexander Janneus (of Lyda), whose persecution
and murder of hundreds and thousands of Initiates led to the adoption of the
Bible story.
** Zohar ii.,
34.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 505 THE SACREDNESS OF THE SERPENT.
A commentary on
the Puranas says: "Ananta-Sesha is a form of Vishnu, the Holy Spirit of
Preservation, and a symbol of the Universe, on which it is supposed to sleep
during the intervals of the Days of Brahma. The seven heads of Sesha support
the Universe. . . . "
So the Spirit of
God "sleeps," is "breathing" (meracha' pheth') over the
Chaos of undifferentiated matter, before each new "Creation."
(Siphrah Dzeniouta). Now one "Day" of Brahma is composed, as already
explained, of one thousand Mahayugas; and as each "Night" or period
of rest is equal in duration to this "day," it is easy to see to what
this sentence in Siphrah Dzeniouta refers, viz.:-- that the serpent manifests
"once in a thousand days." Nor is it more difficult to see whither
the initiated writer of the Siphrah is leading us, when he says: "Its head
is broken in the waters of the great sea, as it is written: 'Thou dividest the
sea by thy strength, thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters'
" (lxxiv. 13). It refers to the trials of the Initiates in this physical
life, the "sea of sorrow," if read with one key; it hints at the
successive destruction of the seven spheres of a chain of worlds in the great
sea of space, when read with another key: for every sidereal globe or sphere,
every world, star, or group of stars, is called in symbolism "the Dragon's
head." But however it may read, the Dragon was never regarded as Evil, nor
was the Serpent either -- in antiquity. In the metaphors, whether astronomical,
cosmical, theogonical or simply physiological, i.e., phallic -- the Serpent was
always regarded as a divine symbol. When it is said "The (Cosmic) Serpent
which runs with 370 leaps" (Siphrah Dzeniouta, § 33) it means the cyclic
periods of the great Tropical year (25,868 years), divided in the esoteric
calculation into 370 periods or cycles, as one solar year is divided into 365
days. And if Michael was regarded by the Christians as the Conqueror of Satan,
the Dragon, it is because in the Talmud this fighting personage is represented
as the Prince of Waters, who had seven subordinate Spirits under him -- a good
reason why the Latin Church made him the patron Saint of every promontory in
Europe. In the Kabala (Siph. Dzen.) the creative Force "makes sketches and
spiral lines of his creation in the shape of a Serpent." It "holds
its tail in its mouth," because it is the symbol of endless eternity and
of cyclic periods. Its meanings, however, would require a volume, and we must
end.
Thus the reader
may now see for himself what are the several meanings of the "War in
Heaven," and of the "great dragon." The most solemn and dreaded
of church dogmas, the alpha and omega of Christian faith, and the pillar of its
FALL and ATONEMENT, dwindles down to a pagan symbol, in the many allegories
about those prehistoric struggles.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Quiches" is inclined to see in
Enoch an Initiate converted to Christianity (! !) (vide p. 16), the English compiler
of Eliphas Levi's works -- "The Mysteries of Magic" -- is also of a
like opinion. He remarks that: "Outside the erudition of Dr. Kenealy, no
modern scholarship attributes any more remote antiquity to the latter work (the
'Book of Enoch') than the fourth century B.C." (Biograph. and Critical
Essay, p. xxxviii.). Modern scholarship has been guilty of worse errors than
this one. It seems but yesterday that the greatest literary critics in Europe
denied the very authenticity of that work, together with the Orphic Hymns, and
even the Book of Hermes or Thot, until whole verses from the latter were
discovered on Egyptian monuments and tombs of the earliest dynasties. The
opinion of Archbishop Laurence is quoted elsewhere.
The "Old
Dragon" and Satan, now become singly and collectively the symbol of, and
the theological term for, the "Fallen Angel," is not so described
either in the original Kabala (the Chaldean "Book of Numbers") or in
the modern. For the most learned, if not the greatest of modern Kabalists,
namely Eliphas Levi, describes Satan in the following glowing terms:-- "It
is that Angel who was proud enough to believe himself God; brave enough to buy
his independence at the price of eternal suffering and torture; beautiful
enough to have adored
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Levi was yet too subservient to his Roman
Catholic authorities; one may add, too jesuitical, to confess that this devil
was mankind, and never had any existence on earth outside of that mankind.*
In this, Christian
theology, although following slavishly in the steps of Paganism, was only true
to its own time-honoured policy. It had to isolate itself, and to assert its
authority. Hence it could not do better than turn every pagan deity into a
devil. Every bright sun-god of antiquity -- a glorious deity by day, and its
own opponent and adversary by night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was
supposed to contain the germs of night and day -- has now been turned into the
antithetical shadow of God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported
authority of despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and
shadow, all the Sun and the Moon Gods, were cursed, and thus the one God chosen
out of the many, and Satan, were both anthropomorphised. But theology seems to
have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating and finally analysing
all that is artificially forced upon its reverence. History shows in every race
and even tribe, especially in the Semitic nations, the natural impulse to exalt
its own tribal deity above all others to the hegemony
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* What devil
could be possessed of more cunning, craft and cruelty than the
"Whitechapel murderer" "Jack the Ripper" of 1888, whose unparalleled
blood-thirsty and cool wickedness led him to slaughter and mutilate in cold
blood seven unfortunate and otherwise innocent women! One has but to read the
daily papers to find in those wife and child-beating, drunken brutes (husbands
and fathers!), a small percentage of whom is daily brought before the courts,
the complete personifications of the devils of Christian Hell!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 509 JEHOVAH, A PERSONATING SPIRIT.
there was a
class of personating spirits which they designated demons, 'personators.'
Admitting with Jehovah, who expressly asserts it, the existence of other gods,
which were personators of the One God, were these other gods simply a higher
class of personating spirits, which had acquired and exercised greater powers?
And is not personation the Key to the mystery of the Spirit state? But once
granting this position, how are we to know that Jehovah was not a personating
Spirit, a Spirit which arrogated to itself that it was, and thus became, the
personator of the one unknown and unknowable God? Nay, how do we know that the
Spirit calling itself Jehovah, in arrogating to itself his attributes did not
thus cause its own designation to be imputed to the One who is in reality as
nameless as incognizable?" (pp. 144-145.)
Then the author
shows "that the Spirit Jehovah is a personator" on its own admission.
It acknowledged to Moses "that it had appeared to the patriarchs as the
God Shaddai" . . . . and "the god Helion" . . . . With the same
breath it assumed the name of Jehovah; and it is on the faith of the assertion
of this personator that the names El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai, have been
read and interpreted in juxtaposition with Jehovah as "the Lord God
Almighty." Then when the name Jehovah became ineffable . . . . the
designation Adonai, "Lord" was substituted for it, and" . . . .
it was owing to this substitution that the 'Lord' passed from the Jewish to the
Christian 'Word' and 'World' as a designation of God" (p. 146). And how
are we to know, the author may add, that Jehovah was not many spirits
personating even that seemingly one -- Jod or Jod-He?
But if the
Christian Church was the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma, it was
because, as shown in Isis, the Devil -- the powerful enemy of God (? ! !) had
to become the corner stone of the pillar of the Church. For, as a Theosophist,
M. Jules Baissac, truly observes in his "Satan ou le Diable" (p. 9):
"Il fallait eviter de paraitre autoriser le dogme du double principe en
faisant de ce Satan createur une puissance reelle, et pour expliquer le mal
originel, on profere contre Manes l'hypothese d'une permission de l'unique tout
Puissant."* The choice and policy were unfortunate, anyhow. Either the
personator of the lower god of Abraham and Jacob ought to have been made
entirely distinct from the mystic "Father" of Jesus, or -- the
"Fallen" Angels should have been left unslandered by further
fictions.
Every god of the
Gentiles is connected with, and closely related to,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* After the
polymorphic Pantheism of some Gnostics came the esoteric dualism of Manes, who
was accused of personifying Evil and creating of the Devil a God -- rival of
God himself. We do not see that the Christian Church has so much improved on
that exoteric idea of the Manicheans, for she calls God her King of Light, and
Satan, the King of Darkness, to this day.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
"For the initiates," says Eliphas Levi, "the devil is not a
person but a creative Force, for Good as for Evil." They (the Initiates)
represented this Force, which presides at physical generation, under the
mysterious form of God Pan -- or Nature: whence the horns and hoofs of that
mythical and symbolic figure, as also the Christian "goat of the Witches'
Sabbath." With regard to this too, Christians have imprudently forgotten
that the goat was also the victim selected for the atonement of all the sins of
Israel, that the scape-goat was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of
the greatest mystery on earth -- the Fall into generation. Only the Jews have
long forgotten the real meaning of their (to the non-initiated) ridiculous
hero, selected from the drama of life in the great mysteries enacted by them in
the desert; and the Christians never knew it.
Eliphas Levi
seeks to explain the dogma of his Church by paradoxes and metaphors, but
succeeds very poorly in the face of the many volumes written by pious Roman
Catholic demonologists under the approbation and auspices of Rome, in this
nineteenth century of ours. For the true Roman Catholic, the devil or Satan is
a reality; the drama enacted in the sidereal light according to the seer of
Patmos -- who desired, perhaps, to improve upon the narrative in the "Book
of Enoch" -- is as real, and as historical a fact as any other allegory
and symbolical event in the Bible. But the Initiates give an explanation
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* To quote in
this relation Mr. Laing in his admirable work "Modern Science and Modern
Thought" (p. 222, 3rd Ed.): "From this dilemma (existence of evil in
the world) there is no escape, unless we give up altogether the idea of an
anthropomorphic deity, and adopt frankly the Scientific idea of a First Cause,
inscrutable and past finding out; and of a universe whose laws we can trace,
but of whose real essence we know nothing, and can only suspect, or faintly
discern a fundamental law which may make the polarity of good and evil a
necessary condition of existence." Were Science to know "the real
essence," instead of knowing nothing of it, the faint suspicion would turn
into the certitude of the existence of such a law, and the knowledge that this
law is connected with Karma.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 511 AKASA, THE "MYSTERIUM MAGNUM."
which differs
from that given by Eliphas Levi, whose genius and crafty intellect had to
submit to a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome.
Thus, the true
and uncompromising Kabalists admit that, for all purposes of Science and
philosophy, it is enough that the profane should know that the great magic
agent called by the followers of the Marquis de St. Martin -- the Martinists --
astral light, by the mediaeval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and
the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists AEther, the reflection of
Akasa -- is that which the Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin scholastics
have succeeded in transforming the universal soul and Pleroma, the vehicle of
Light and the receptacle of all the forms, a force spread throughout the whole
Universe, with its direct and indirect effects, into Satan and his works, is no
news to any one. But now they are prepared to give out to the above-mentioned
profane even the secrets hinted at by Eliphas Levi without adequate
explanation; for the latter's policy of veiled revelations could only lead to
further superstition and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a student of Occultism,
a beginner, gather from the following highly poetical sentences of Eliphas
Levi, as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the Alchemists?
"Lucifer,
the Astral Light . . . . is an intermediate force existing in all creation, it
serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall of Adam was an erotic
intoxication which has rendered his generation a slave to this fatal light . .
. every sexual passion that overpowers our senses is a whirlwind of that light
which seeks to drag us towards the abyss of death, Folly. Hallucinations,
visions, ecstasies are all forms of a very dangerous excitation due to this
interior phosphorus (?). Thus light, finally, is of the nature of fire, the
intelligent use of which warms and vivifies, and the excess of which, on the contrary,
dissolves and annihilates. Thus man is called upon to assume a sovereign empire
over that (astral) light and conquer thereby his immortality, and is threatened
at the same time with being intoxicated, absorbed, and eternally destroyed by
it. This light, therefore, inasmuch as it is devouring, revengeful, and fatal,
would thus really be hell-fire, the serpent of the legend; the tormented errors
of which it is full, the tears and the gnashing of teeth of the abortive beings
it devours, the phantom of life that escapes them, and seems to mock and insult
their agony, all this would be the devil or Satan indeed." (Histoire de la
Magie, p. 197).
There is no
wrong statement in all this; nothing save a superabundance of ill-applied
metaphors, as in the application of Adam -- a myth -- to the illustration of
the astral effects. Akasa -- the astral light* -- can be defined in a few
words; it is the universal Soul, the Matrix of the Universe, the
"Mysterium Magnum" from which all that exists is born by separation
or differentiation. It is the cause of existence; it
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Akasa is not
the Ether of Science, as some Orientalists translate it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 512 THE SECRET DOCTRINE
fills all the
infinite Space; is Space itself, in one sense, or both its Sixth and Seventh
principles.* But as the finite in the Infinite, as regards manifestation, this
light must have its shadowy side -- as already remarked. And as the infinite
can never be manifested, hence the finite world has to be satisfied with the
shadow alone, which its actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and
force to activity. Hence, while it is the universal Cause in its unmanifested
unity and infinity, the Astral light becomes, with regard to Mankind, simply
the effects of the causes produced by men in their sinful lives. It is not its
bright denizens --- whether they are called Spirits of Light or Darkness --
that produce Good or Evil, but mankind itself that determines the unavoidable
action and reaction in the great magic agent. It is mankind which has become
the "Serpent of Genesis," and thus causes daily and hourly the Fall
and sin of the "Celestial Virgin" -- which thus becomes the Mother of
gods and devils at one and the same time; for she is the ever-loving,
beneficent deity to all those who stir her Soul and heart, instead of attracting
to themselves her shadowy manifested essence, called by Eliphas Levi --
"the fatal light" which kills and destroys. Humanity, in its units,
can overpower and master its effects; but only by the holiness of their lives
and by producing good causes. It has power only on the manifested lower
principles -- the shadow of the Unknown and Incognizable Deity in Space. But in
antiquity and reality, Lucifer, or Luciferus, is the name of the angelic Entity
presiding over the light of truth as over the light of the day. In the great
Valentinian gospel Pistis Sophia (§ 361) it is taught that of the three Powers
emanating from the Holy names of the Three [[Tridunameis]], that of Sophia (the
Holy Ghost according to these gnostics -- the most cultured of all), resides in
the planet Venus or Lucifer.
Thus to the
profane, the Astral Light may be God and Devil at once --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says Johannes
Tritheim, the Abbot of Spanheim, the greatest astrologer and Kabalist of his
day:-- "The art of divine magic consists in the ability to perceive the
essence of things in the light of nature (astral light), and by using the
soul-powers of the spirit to produce material things from the unseen universe,
and in such operations the Above and the Below must be brought together and
made to act harmoniously. The spirit of Nature (astral light) is a unity,
creating and forming everything, and acting through the instrumentality of man
it may produce wonderful things. Such are accomplished, if you learn to know
yourself. You will know it by the power of the spirit that is in yourself, and
accomplish it by mixing your spirit with the essence that comes out of
yourself. If you wish to succeed in such a work you must know how to separate Spirit
and Life in Nature, and, moreover, to separate the astral soul in yourself and
to make it tangible, and then the substance of the soul will appear visibly and
tangibly rendered objective by the power of the spirit." -- (Quoted in Dr.
Hartman's "Paracelsus.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 513 MIND, THE QUICKENING SPIRIT.
Demon est Deus
inversus: that is to say, through every point of Infinite Space thrill the
magnetic and electrical currents of animate Nature, the life-giving and
death-giving waves, for death on earth becomes life on another plane. Lucifer
is divine and terrestrial light, the "Holy Ghost" and "Satan,"
at one and the same time, visible Space being truly filled with the
differentiated Breath invisibly; and the Astral Light, the manifested effects
of the two who are one, guided and attracted by ourselves, is the Karma of
humanity, both a personal and impersonal entity: personal, because it is the
mystic name given by St. Martin to the Host of divine Creators, guides and
rulers of this planet; impersonal, as the Cause and effect of universal Life
and Death.
The Fall was the
result of man's knowledge, for his "eyes were opened." Indeed, he was
taught Wisdom and the hidden knowledge by the "Fallen Angel," for the
latter had become from that day his Manas, Mind and Self-consciousness. In each
of us that golden thread of continuous life -- periodically broken into active
and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super-sensuous in
Devachan -- is from the beginning of our appearance upon this earth. It is the
Sutratma, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal monadship, on which our
earthly lives or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads -- according to
the beautiful expression of Vedantic philosophy.
And now it
stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the "Lord of
Phosphorus" (brimstone was a theological improvement), and Lucifer, or
"Light-Bearer," is in us: it is our Mind -- our tempter and Redeemer,
our intelligent liberator and Saviour from pure animalism. Without this
principle -- the emanation of the very essence of the pure divine principle
Mahat (Intelligence), which radiates direct from the Divine mind -- we would be
surely no better than animals. The first man Adam was made only a living soul
(nephesh), the last Adam was made a quickening Spirit*:-- says Paul, his words
referring to the building or Creation of man. Without this quickening spirit,
or human Mind or soul, there would be no difference between man and beast; as
there is none, in fact, between animals with respect to their actions. The
tiger and the donkey, the hawk and the dove, are each one as pure and as
innocent as the other, because irresponsible. Each follows its instinct, the
tiger and the hawk killing 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The real
original text of I Corinthians, rendered Kabalistically and esoterically would
read (in Chap. xv., verses 44 and 45): "It is sown a soul body (not
'natural' body), it is raised a spirit body." St. Paul was an Initiate,
and his words have quite a different meaning when read esoterically. The body
"is sown in weakness (passivity); it is raised in power" (43) -- or
in spirituality and intellect.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.")*
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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* By Godolphin
Mitford, later in life, Murad Ali Bey. Born in India, the son of a Missionary,
G. Mitford was converted to Islam, and died a Mahomedan in 1884. He was a most
extraordinary Mystic, of a great learning and remarkable intelligence. But he
left the Right Path and forthwith fell under Karmic retribution. As well shown
by the author of the article quoted "The followers of the defeated Elohim,
first massacred by the victorious Jews (the Jehovites), and then persuaded by
the victorious Christians and Mohamedans, continued nevertheless. . . Some of
these scattered sects have lost even the tradition of the true rationale of
their belief -- to worship in secrecy and mystery the Principle of Fire, Light,
and Liberty. Why do the Sabean Bedouins (avowedly Monotheists when dwelling in
the Mohamedan cities) in the solitude of the desert night yet invoke the starry
'Host of Heaven'? Why do the Yezidis, the 'Devil Worshippers,' worship the
'Muluk-Taoos' -- The 'Lord Peacock' -- the emblem of pride and of hundred-eyed
intelligence (and of Initiation also), which was expelled from heaven with
Satan, according to an old Oriental tradition? Why do the Gholaites and their
kindred Mesopotamo-Iranian Mohamedan Sects believe in the 'Noor Illahee' -- the
Light of the Elohim -- transmitted in anastasis through a hundred Prophet
Leaders? It is because they have continued in ignorant superstition the
traditional religion of the 'Light Deities whom Jahveh overthrew' (is said to
have overthrown rather); for by overthrowing them he would have overthrown
himself. The'Muluk-Taoos' -- is Maluk -- 'Ruler' as is shown in the foot-note.
It is only a new form of Moloch, Melek, Molech, MaIayak, and Malachim" --
Messengers, Angels, etc.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 515 THE LOGOS AND SATAN ARE ONE.
Thus, esoteric
philosophy shows that man is truly the manifested deity in both its aspects --
good and evil, but theology cannot admit this philosophical truth. Teaching the
dogma of the Fallen Angels in its dead-letter meaning, and having made of Satan
the corner-stone and pillar of the dogma of redemption -- to do so would be
suicidal. Having once shown the rebellious angels distinct from God and the
Logos in their personalities, the admission that the downfall of the
disobedient Spirits meant simply their fall into generation and matter, would
be equivalent to saying that God and Satan were identical. For since the LOGOS
(or God) is the aggregate of that once divine Host accused of having fallen, it
would follow that the Logos and Satan are one.
Yet such was the
real philosophical view of the now disfigured tenet in antiquity. The Verbum,
or the "Son," was shown in a dual aspect by the Pagan Gnostics -- in
fact, he was a duality in full unity. Hence, the endless and various national
versions. The Greeks had Jupiter, the son of Chronos, the Father, who hurls him
down into the depths of Kosmos. The Aryans had Brahma (in later theology)
precipitated by Siva into the Abyss of Darkness, etc., etc. But the fall of all
these Logoi and Demiurgi from their primitive exalted position, had in all
cases one and the same esoteric signification in it; the curse -- in its
philosophical meaning -- of being incarnated on this earth; an unavoidable rung
on the ladder of cosmic evolution, a highly philosophical and fitting Karmic
law, without which the presence of Evil on Earth would have to remain for ever
a closed mystery to the understanding of true philosophy. To say, as the author
of the Esprits Tombes des Paiens (p. 347) does, that since "Christianity
is made to rest on two pillars, that of evil ([[ponerou]]), and of good
[[Iagathou]]; on two forces, in short, [[Iagathau kai kakai dunomeis]]: hence,
if we suppress the punishment of the evil forces, the protecting mission of the
good Powers will have neither value nor sense" -- is to utter the most
unphilosophical absurdity. If it fits in with, and explains Christian dogma, it
obscures the facts and truths of the primitive wisdom of the ages. The cautious
hints of Paul have all the true esoteric meaning, and it took centuries of
scholastic casuistry to give them the present false colouring in their interpretation.
The verbum and Lucifer are one in their dual aspect; and the "Prince of
the Air" (princeps aeris hujus) is not the "God of that period,"
but an everlasting principle. If the latter was said to be ever circling around
the world -- qui circumambulat terram -- the great Apostle referred simply to
the never-ceasing cycles of human incarnations, in which evil will ever
predominate unto the day when Humanity is redeemed by the true divine
Enlightenment which gives the correct perception of things.
It is easy to
disfigure vague expressions written in dead and long-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* when Ahura Mazda, descending from the solid Heaven he inhabits, to
the help of the Heavens that revolve (in time and space, the manifested worlds
of cycles including those of incarnation), and the Amshaspends, "the seven
bright Sravah," accompanied by their stars, fight Ahriman, and the
vanquished Devas fall to the Earth along with him. (Acad. des Inscrip., Vol.
xxxix., p. 690; see Vendidad, Farg. xix., iii.) In the Vendidad the Daevas are
called "evil-doing," and shown to rush away "into the depths of
the world of hell," or matter. (47.) This is an allegory showing the Devas
compelled to incarnate, once that they have separated themselves from their
parent essence, or, in other words, after the unit had become a multiple, after
differentiation and manifestation.
Typhon the
Egyptian, Python, the Titans, the Suras and the Asuras, all belong to the same
legend of Spirits peopling the Earth. They are not "demons commissioned to
create and organize this visible universe," but fashioners (the
"architects") of the worlds, and the progenitors of man. They are the
Fallen angels, metaphorically -- "the true mirrors of the Eternal
Wisdom."
What is the
absolute and complete truth as well as the esoteric meaning about this
universal myth? The whole essence of truth cannot be transmitted from mouth to
ear. Nor can any pen describe it, not even that of the recording Angel, unless
man finds the answer in the sanctuary of his own heart, in the innermost depths
of his divine intuitions. It is the great SEVENTH MYSTERY of Creation, the
first and the last; and those who read St. John's Apocalypse may find its
shadow lurking under the seventh seal. . . . It can be represented only in its
apparent, objective form, like the eternal riddle of the Sphinx. If the latter
threw herself into the sea and perished, it is not because OEdipus had
unriddled the secret of the ages, but because, by anthropomorphizing the
ever-spiritual and the subjective, he had
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* So does every
Yogi and even Christian: one must take the Kingdom of heaven by violence -- we
are taught. Why should such a desire make of any one a devil?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 517 BARESMA, THE DIVINE TWIG.
dishonoured the
great truth for ever. Therefore, we can give it only from its philosophical and
intellectual planes, unlocked with three keys respectively -- for the last four
keys of the seven that throw wide open the portals to the mysteries of Nature
are in the hands of the highest Initiates, and cannot be divulged to the masses
at large -- not in this, our century, at any rate.
The dead letter
is everywhere the same. The dualism in the Mazdean religion, was born from
exoteric interpretation. The holy "Airyaman," "the bestower of
weal," invoked in the prayer called Airyama-ishyo, is the divine aspect of
Ahriman, "the deadly, the Dae of the Daevas" (Farg. xx., 43), and
Angra Mainyu is the dark material aspect of the former. "Keep us from the
Hater, O Mazda and Armaita Spenta" (Vendidad Sadah), has, as a prayer and
invocation, an identical meaning with "Lead us not into temptation,"
and is addressed by man to the terrible Spirit of duality in man himself. For
(Ahura) Mazda is the spiritual, divine, and purified man, and Armaita Spenta,
the Spirit of the Earth or materiality, is the same as Ahriman or Angra Mainyu
in one sense.
The whole of the
Magian or Mazdean literature -- or what remains of it -- is magical, occult,
hence allegorical and symbolical -- even its "mystery of the law"
(see the Gatha in Yasna XLIV.). Now the Mobed and the Parsi keep their eye on
the Baresma during the sacrifice, the divine twig off Ormazd's "tree"
having been transformed into a bunch of metallic rods; and wonder why neither
the Amesha-Spentas, nor "the high and beautiful golden Haomas, nor even
their Vohu-Mano (good thoughts), nor their Rata (sacrificial offering),"
help them much. Let them meditate on the "tree of Wisdom," and study,
assimilating one by one, the fruits thereof. The way to the tree of eternal
life, the white Homa, the Gaokerena, is through one end of the earth to the
other; and Haoma is in heaven as it is on earth. But to become once more a
priest of it, and a healer, man must heal himself before he can heal others.
This proves once
more that the so-called "myths," in order to be at least
approximately dealt with in any degree of justice, have to be closely examined
from all their aspects. In truth, every one of the seven Keys has to be used in
its right place, and never mixed with the others, if we would unveil the entire
cycle of mysteries. In our day of dreary soul-killing materialism, the ancient
priest Initiates have become, in the opinion of our learned generations, the
synonyms of clever impostors, kindling the fires of superstition in order to
obtain an easier sway over the minds of men. This is an unfounded calumny,
generated by scepticism and uncharitable thoughts. No one believed more in Gods
-- or, we may call them, the Spiritual and now invisible Powers, or Spirits,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Agathadaemon, whose
legend states, "I am Chnumis, Sun of the Universe, 700," can alone
solve the mystery of Jesus, the number of whose name is 888." It is not
the key of St. Peter, or the Church dogma, but the narthex -- the wand of the
candidate for initiation -- that has to be wrenched from the grasp of the
long-silent Sphinx of the ages. Meanwhile ----
The augurs, who,
upon meeting each other, have to thrust their tongues into their cheeks to
suppress a fit of laughter, may be more numerous in our own age than they ever
were in the day of Sylla.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 519 THE "FATHER OF MORTALS."
§ XX.
PROMETHEUS, THE
TITAN.
HIS ORIGIN IN
ANCIENT INDIA.
IN our modern
day there does not exist the slightest doubt in the minds of the best European
symbologists that the name Prometheus possessed the greatest and most mysterious
significance in antiquity. While giving the history of Deukalion, whom the
Boeotians regarded as the ancestor of the human races, and who was the Son of
Prometheus, according to the significant legend, the author of the Mythologie
de la Grece Antique remarks: "Thus Prometheus is something more than the
archetype of humanity; he is its generator. In the same way that we saw
Hephaestus moulding the first woman (Pandora) and endowing her with life, so
Prometheus kneads the moist clay, of which he fashions the body of the first
man whom he will endow with the soul-spark" (Apollodorus, I., 7, 1). After
the Flood of Deukalion, Zeus, it was taught, had commanded Prometheus and
Athena to call forth a new race of men from the mire left by the waters of the
deluge (Ovid, Metam. 1, 81. Etym. M. v. [[Prometheus]]); and in the day of
Pausanias the slime which the hero had used for this purpose was still shown in
Phocea (Paus. x, 4, 4). "On several archaic monuments one still sees
Prometheus modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena's help"
(Myth. Grece Ant. 246).
The same authors
remind the world of another equally mysterious personage, though one less
generally known than Prometheus, whose legend offers remarkable analogies with
that of the Titan. The name of this second ancestor and generator is Phoroneus,
the hero of an ancient poem, now unfortunately no longer extant -- the
Phoronidae. His legend was localized in Argolis, where a perpetual flame was
preserved on his altar as a reminder that he was the bringer of fire upon earth
(Pausanias, 11, 19, 5; Cf. 20, 3.) A benefactor of men as Prometheus was, he
had made them participators of every bliss on earth. Plato (Timaeus, p. 22),
and Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom. 1, p. 380) say that Phoroneus was the first
man, or "the father of mortals." His genealogy, which assigns to him
as his father Inachos, the river, reminds one of that of Prometheus, which
makes that Titan the son of the Oceanid Clymene. But the mother of Phoroneus
was the nymph Melia; a significant descent which distinguishes him from
Prometheus.
Melia, Decharme
thinks, is the personification of the ash-tree, whence,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 520 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
according to
Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze* (Opera et Dies, 142-145); and
which with the Greeks is the celestial tree common to every Aryan mythology.
This ash is the Yggdrasil of the Norse antiquity, which the Norns sprinkle
daily with the waters from the fountain of Urd, that it may not wither. It
remains verdant till the last days of the Golden Age. Then the Norns -- the
three sisters who gaze respectively into the Past, the Present, and the Future
-- make known the decree of Fate (Karma, Orlog), but men are conscious only of
the Present. But when Gultweig comes (the golden ore) "the bewitching
enchantress who, thrice cast into the fire, arises each time more beautiful,
and fills the souls of gods and men with unapproachable longing, then the Norns
. . . enter into being, and the blessed peace of childhood's dreams passes
away, and Sin comes into existence with all its evil consequences . . ."
and KARMA (See "Asgard and the Gods," p. 10-12). The thrice purified
Gold is -- Manas, the Conscious Soul.
With the Greeks,
the "ash-tree" represented the same idea. Its luxuriant boughs are
the sidereal heaven, golden by day and studded with stars by night -- the
fruits of Melia and Yggdrasil, under whose protecting shadow humanity lived
during the Golden Age without desire as without any fear . . . . "That
tree had a fruit, or an inflamed bough, which was lightning," Decharme
guesses.
And here steps
in the killing materialism of the age; that peculiar twist in the modern mind,
which, like a Northern blast, bends all on its way, and freezes every
intuition, allowing it no hand in the physical speculations of the day. After
having seen in Prometheus no better than fire by friction, the learned author
of the "Mythologie de la Grece Antique" perceives in this
"fruit" a trifle more than an allusion to terrestrial fire and its
discovery. It is no longer fire, owing to the fall of lightning setting some
dry fuel in a blaze, and thus revealing all its priceless benefits to
Palaeolithic men; -- but something more mysterious this time, though still as
earthly. . . . "A divine bird, nestled in the boughs of the celestial
ash-tree, stole that bough (or the fruit) and carried it down on the earth in
its bill. Now the Greek word [[Phoroneus]] is the rigid equivalent of the
Sanskrit word bhuranyu ('the rapid') an epithet of Agni, considered as the
carrier of the divine spark. Phoroneus, son of Melia or of the celestial ash,
thus corresponds to a conception far more ancient, probably, than that one
which transformed the pramantha (of the old Aryan Hindus) into the Greek
Prometheus. Phoroneus is the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* According to
the Occult teaching, three yugas passed away during the time of the Third
Root-Race, i.e., the Satya, the Treta, and the Dvapara yuga, answering to the
golden age of its early innocence: to the silver -- when it reached its
maturity: and to the Bronze age, when, separating into sexes, they became the
mighty demi-gods of old.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 521 THE POETRY OF MODERN ORIENTALISTS.
(personified)
bird, that brings the heavenly lightning to the Earth. Traditions relating to
the birth and origin of the race of Bronze, and those which made of Phoroneus
the father of the Argians, are an evidence to us that this thunderbolt (or
lightning), as in the legends of Hephaestus or Prometheus, was the origin of
the human race" (266).
This still
affords us no more than the external meaning of the symbols and the allegory.
It is now supposed that the name of Prometheus has been unriddled, and the
modern mythologists and Orientalists see in it no longer what their fathers saw
on the authority of the whole of classical antiquity. They only find therein
something far more appropriate to the spirit of the age, namely, a phallic
element. But the name of Phoroneus, as well as that of Prometheus, bears not
one, nor even two, but a series of esoteric meanings. Both relate to the seven
celestial fires; to Agni Abhimanin, his three sons, and their forty-five sons,
constituting the forty-nine fires. Do all these numbers relate only to the
terrestrial mode of fire and to the flame of sexual passion? Did the Hindu
Aryan mind never soar above such purely sensual conceptions? that mind which is
declared by Prof. Max Muller to be the most spiritual and mystically inclined
on the whole globe? The number of those fires alone ought to have suggested an
inkling of the truth.
We are told that
one is no longer permitted, in this age of rational thought, to explain the
name of Prometheus as the old Greeks did. The latter, it seems, "basing
themselves on the false analogy of [[prometheus]] with the verb
[[Promanthanein]], saw in him the type of the 'foreseeing' man, to whom, for
the sake of symmetry, a brother was added -- Epimetheus, or 'he who takes
counsel after the event.' " But now the Orientalists have decided
otherwise. They know the real meaning of the two names better than those who
invented them.
The legend is
based upon an event of universal importance. It was built "to commemorate
a great event which must have strongly impressed itself upon the imagination of
the first witnesses to it, and its remembrance has never since faded out from
popular memory." What is it? Laying aside every poetical fiction, all
those dreams of the golden age, let us imagine -- argue the modern scholars --
in all its gross realism, the first miserable state of humanity, the striking
picture of which was traced for us after AEschylus by Lucretius, and the exact
truth of which is now confirmed by science; and then one may understand better
that a new life really began for man, on that day when he saw the first spark
produced by the friction of two pieces of wood, or from the veins of a flint.
How could man help feeling gratitude to that mysterious and marvellous being
which they were henceforth enabled to create at their will, and which was no
sooner born, than it grew and expanded, developing with singular power.
"This terrestrial flame,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Grece 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 AEschylus and Prometheus
was no more wretched then, in the early days of the Aryans, than it is now.
That "state" was limited to the savage tribes; and the now-existing
savages are not a whit more happy or unhappy than their forefathers were a
million years ago.
It is an
accepted fact in Science that "rude implements, exactly resembling those
in use among existing savages," are found in river-gravels and caves
geologically "implying an enormous antiquity." So great is that
resemblance that, as the author of "The Modern Zoroastrian" tells us:
"If the collection in the Colonial Exhibition of stone celts and
arrow-heads used now by the Bushmen of South Africa were placed side by side
with one from the British Museum of similar objects from Kent's Cavern or the
Caves of Dordogne, no one but an expert could distinguish between them"
(p. 145). And if there are Bushmen existing now, in our age of the highest
civilization, who are no higher intellectually than the race of men which
inhabited Devonshire and Southern France during the Palaeolithic age, why could
not the latter have lived simultaneously with, and have been the contemporary
of, other races as highly civilized for their day as we are for ours? That the
sum of knowledge increases daily in mankind, "but that intellectual
capacity does not increase with it," is shown when the intellect, if not
the physical knowledge, of the Euclids, Pythagorases, Paninis, Kapilas, Platos,
and Socrates, is compared with that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modern
Huxleys and Haeckels. On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard
Davis, the Craniologist, worked out in 1868 (Trans. of the Royal Society of
London), with regard to the internal capacity of the skull -- its volume being
taken as the standard and test for judging of the intellectual capacities --
Dr. Pfaff finds that this capacity among the French (certainly in the highest
rank of mankind) is 88.4 cubic inches, being thus "perceptibly smaller
than that of the Polynesians generally, which, even among many Papuans and
Alfuras of the lowest grade, amounts to 89 and 89.7 cubic inches"; which
shows that it is the quality and not the quantity of the brain that is the
cause of intellectual capacity. The
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 523 THE BOON GIVEN BY PROMETHEUS.
average index of
skulls among various races having been now recognized to be "one of the
most characteristic marks of difference between different races," the
following comparison is suggestive: "The index of breadth among the
Scandinavians (is) at 75: among the English at 76; among Holsteiners at 77; in
Bresgau at 80; Schiller's skull shows an index of breadth even of 82 . . . the
Madurese also 82!" Finally, the same comparison between the oldest skulls
known and the European, brings to light the startling fact "that most of
these old skulls, belonging to the stone period, are above rather than below
the average of the brain of the now living man in volume." Calculating the
measures for the height, breadth, and length in inches from the average
measurements of several skulls, the following sums are obtained:--
1. Old Northern
skulls of the stone age . . . . . . . . . . . . 18.877 ins.
2. Average of 48
skulls of the same period from England . . . . 18.858 "
3. Average of 7
skulls of the same period from Wales . . . . .
18.649 "
4. Average of 36
skulls of the stone age from France . . . . .
18.220 "
The average of
the now living Europeans is 18.579 inches; of Hottentots, 17.795 inches!
Which figures
show plainly "that the size of the brain of the oldest populations known
to us is not such as to place them on a lower level than that of the now living
inhabitants of the Earth" ("The Age and Origin of Man"). Besides
which, they show the "missing link" vanishing into thin air. Of
these, however, more anon: we must return to our direct subject.
The race which
Jupiter so ardently desired "to quench, and plant a new one in its
stead" (AEsch.* 241), suffered mental, not physical misery. The first boon
Prometheus gave to mortals, as he tells the "Chorus," was to hinder
them "from foreseeing death" (256); he "saved the mortal race
from sinking blasted down to Hades' gloom" (244); and then only,
"besides" that, he gave them fire (260). This shows plainly the dual
character, at any rate of the Promethean myth, if Orientalists will not accept
the existence of the seven keys taught in Occultism. This relates to the first
opening of man's spiritual perceptions, not to his first seeing or discovering
fire. For fire was never "discovered," but existed on earth since its
beginning. It existed in the seismic activity of the early ages, volcanic
eruptions being as frequent and constant in those periods as fog is in England
now. And if we are told that men appeared so late on Earth that nearly all the
volcanoes, with the exception of a few, were already extinct, and that
geological disturbances had made room for a more settled state of things, we
answer: Let a new race of men -- whether evolved from angel or gorilla --
appear now on any uninhabited
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Prometheus
Vinctus.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 AEschylus was an initiate, and knew well
what he was giving out.*
No occultist
acquainted with symbology and the fact that Wisdom came to us from the East,
will deny for a moment that the myth of Prometheus has reached Europe from
Aryavarta. Nor is he likely to deny that in one sense Prometheus represents
fire by friction. Therefore, he admires the sagacity of M. F. Baudry, who shows
in his Les Mythes du feu et breuvage celeste (Revue germanique, 1861 p. 356)**
one of the aspects of Prometheus and his origin from India. He shows the reader
the supposed primitive process to obtain fire, still in use to-day in India to
light the sacrificial flame. This is what he says:--
"This
process, such as it is minutely described in the Vedic Sutras, consists in
rapidly turning a stick in a socket made in the centre of a piece of wood. The
friction develops intense heat and ends by setting on fire the particles of
wood in contact. The motion of the stick is not a continuous rotation, but a series
of motions in contrary senses, by means of a cord fixed to the stick in its
middle: the operator holds one of the ends in each hand and pulls them
alternately. . . . The full process is designated in Sanskrit by the verb
manthami, mathnani; which means 'to rub, agitate, shake and obtain by rubbing,'
and is especially applied to rotatory friction, as proved by its derivation
from mandala, which signifies a circle. . . . The pieces of wood serving for
the production of fire have each their name in Sanskrit. The stick which turns
is called pramantha; the discus which receives it is called arani and aranî:
"the two aranis" designating the ensemble of the instrument" (p.
358 et seq.).***
It remains to be
seen what the Brahmins will say to this. But supposing Prometheus has been
conceived in one of the aspects of his
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The modern
attempt of some Greek scholars (poor and pseudo scholars, they would have
appeared in the day of the old Greek writers!) to explain the real meaning of
the ideas of AEschylus, which, being an ignorant ancient Greek, he could not
express so well himself, is absurdly ludicrous!
** See also his
Memoires de la Societe de la Linguistique following the "Fire Myths,"
(Vol. I, p. 337, et seq.)
*** There is the
upper and nether piece of timber used to produce this sacred fire by attrition
at sacrifices, and it is the aranî which contains the socket. This is proven by
an allegory in the Vayu Purana and others, which tell us that Nemi, the son of
Ikshwaku, had left no successor, and that the Rishis, fearing to leave the
earth without a ruler, introduced the king's body into the socket of an aranî
-- like an upper aranî -- and produced
from it a prince named Janaka. "It was by reason of the peculiar way in
which he was engendered that he was called Janaka." (But see Goldstucker's
Sanskrit Dictionary at the word Arani.) Devaki, Krishna's mother, in prayer
addressed to her, is called "the aranî whose attrition engenders
fire."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 525 GREEK IDEAS MISUNDERSTOOD.
myth as the
producer of fire by means of pramantha, or as an animate and divine pramantha,
would this imply that the symbolism had no other than the phallic meaning
attributed to it by the modern symbologists? Decharme, at any rate, seems to
have a correct glimmering of the truth; for he unconsciously corroborates by
his remarks all that the Occult sciences teach with regard to the Manasa Devas,
who have endowed man with the consciousness of his immortal soul: that
consciousness which hinders man "from foreseeing death," and makes
him know he is immortal.* "How has Prometheus got into the possession of
the (divine) spark?" he asks. "Fire having its abode in heaven, it is
there he must have gone to find it before he could carry it down to men, and,
to approach the gods, he must have been a god himself." The Greeks held
that he was of the divine race; the Hindus, that he was a Deva. Hence
"with the Greeks he was the son of the Titan lapetos,"
[[Iapetonides]] (Theog. 528) . . . . "But celestial fire belonged in the
beginning to the gods alone; it was a treasure they reserved for themselves . .
. over which they jealously watched . . . 'The prudent son of Iapetus,' says
Hesiod, 'deceived Jupiter by stealing and concealing in the cavity of a
narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow' (Theog. 565) . . .
Thus the gift made by Prometheus to men was a conquest made from heaven. . .
" "Now according to Greek ideas," (identical in this with those
of the Occultists) "this possession forced from Jupiter, this human
trespassing upon the property of the gods, had to be followed by an expiation.
. . . Prometheus, moreover, belongs to that race of Titans who had rebelled**
against the gods, and whom the master of Olympus had hurled down into Tartarus;
like them, he is the genius of Evil, doomed to cruel suffering, etc.,
etc."
That which is
revolting in the explanations that follow, is the one-sided view taken of this
grandest of all the myths. The most intuitional among modern writers cannot or
will not rise in their conceptions above the level of the Earth and Cosmic
phenomena. It is not denied that the moral idea in the myth, as presented in
the Theogony of Hesiod, plays a certain part in the primitive Greek conception.
The Titan is more than a thief of the celestial fire. He is the representation
of humanity -- active, industrious, intelligent, but at the same time
ambitious, which aims at equalling divine powers. Therefore it is humanity
punished in the person of Prometheus, but it is only so with the Greeks. With
the latter, Prometheus is not a
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The monad of
the animal is as immortal as that of man, yet the brute knows nothing of this;
it lives an animal life of sensation just as the first human would have lived,
when attaining physical development in the Third Race, had it not been for the
Agnishwatta and the Manasa Pitris.
** The fallen
angels, therefore; the Asuras of the Indian Pantheon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 ([[philanthropos]]), which he has
raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the arts; a
conception which found its most poetical expounder in AEschylus. But with all
other nations Prometheus is -- what? The fallen Angel, Satan, as the Church
would have it? Not at all. He is simply the image of the pernicious and dreaded
effects of lightning. He is the "evil fire" (mal feu) and the symbol
of the divine reproductive male organ. "Reduced to its simple expression,
the myth we are trying to explain is then simply a (Cosmic) genius of
fire" (p. 261). It is the former idea (the phallic) which was
pre-eminently Aryan, if we believe Ad. Kuhn (in his Herabkunft des Feuers und
des Gottertranks) and Baudry. For --
"The fire
used by man being the result of the action of pramantha in the arani, the Aryas
must have ascribed (?) the same origin to celestial fire, and they must* have
imagined (?) that a god armed with pramantha, or a divine pramantha, exercised
in the bosom of the clouds a violent friction, which gave birth to lightning
and thunderbolts. . . . . This idea is supported by the fact that, according to
Plutarch's testimony (Philosoph. Plant., iii. 3), the Stoics thought that
thunder was the result of the struggle of storm-clouds and lightning -- a
conflagration due to friction; while Aristotle saw in the thunderbolt only the
action of clouds which clashed with each other. What was this theory, if not
the scientific translation of the production of fire by friction? . . . . . .
Everything leads us to think that, from the highest antiquity, and before the
dispersion of the Aryans, it was believed that the pramantha lighted fire in
the storm cloud as well as in the aranis." (Revue Germanique, p. 368.)
Thus,
suppositions and idle hypotheses are made to stand for discovered truths.
Defenders of the Bible dead-letter could never help the writers of missionary
tracts more effectually, than do materialistic Symbologists in thus taking for
granted that the ancient Aryans based their religious conceptions on no higher
thought than the physiological.
But it is not
so, and the very spirit of Vedic philosophy is against such an interpretation.
And if, as Decharme himself confesses, "this idea of the creative power of
fire is explained at once by the ancient assimilation of the human soul to a
celestial spark," as shown by the imagery often made use of in the Vedas
when speaking of Arani, it would mean something higher than simply a gross
sexual conception. A hymn to Agni in the Veda is cited as example:-- "Here
is the pramantha, the generator is ready. Bring the mistress of the race (the
female Arani). Let us produce Agni by attrition, according
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The italics
are ours; they show how assumptions are raised to laws in our day.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Arani," the mistress of the race, is
Aditi, the mother of the gods, or Shekinah, eternal light -- in the world of
Spirit, the "Great Deep" and CHAOS; or primordial Substance in its
first remove from the UNKNOWN, in the manifested Kosmos. If, ages later, the
same epithet is applied to Devaki, the mother of Krishna, or the incarnated
LOGOS; and if the symbol, owing to the gradual and irrepressible spread of
exoteric religions, may already be regarded as having a sexual significance,
this in no way mars the original purity of the image. The subjective had been
transformed into the objective; Spirit had fallen into matter. The universal
kosmic polarity of Spirit-Substance had become, in human thought, the mystic,
but still sexual union of Spirit and Matter, and had thus acquired an
anthropomorphic colouring which it had never had in the beginning. Between the
Vedas and the Puranas there is an abyss of which both are the poles, like the
seventh (atmic) and the first or lowest principle (the physical body) in the
Septenary constitution of man. The primitive, purely spiritual language of the
Vedas, conceived many decades of millenniums earlier, had found its purely
human expression for the purpose of describing events taking place 5,000 years
ago, the date of Krishna's death (from which day the Kali Yuga, or Black-Age,
began for mankind).
As Aditi is
called Surarani (the matrix or "mother" of the sura gods), so Kunti,
the mother of the Pandavas, is called in Mahabharata Pandavarani -- which term
is already physiologized. But Devaki, the antetype of the Roman Catholic
Madonna, is a later anthropomorphized form of Aditi. The latter is the goddess
mother, the "Deva-matri" of Seven Sons (the six and the seven Adityas
of early Vedic times); the mother of Krishna, Devaki, has six embryos conveyed
into her womb by Jagaddhatri (the "nurse of the world"), the seventh
(Krishna, the Logos,) being transferred to that Rohini. Mary, the mother of
Jesus, is the mother of seven children, of five sons and two daughters, (a
later transformation of sex) in Matthew's Gospel (xiii. 55-56). No one of the
worshippers of the Roman Catholic Virgin would object to reciting in her honour
the prayer addressed by the gods to Devaki. Let the reader judge.
"Thou art
that Prakriti (essence), infinite and subtile, which bore Brahma in its womb.
Thou eternal being, comprising in thy substance the essence of all created
things, wast identical with creation; thou wast the parent of the triform sacrifice,
becoming the germ of all. . . . Thou art sacrifice, whence all fruit proceeds;
thou art the arani whose attrition engenders fire" . . . . ("Womb of
Light," "holy Vessel," are the epithets of the Virgin). "As
Aditi, thou art the parent of the gods. . . . Thou art Jyotsna (the morning
twilight)." The Virgin
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 arani is
shown here as the Roman Catholic "vase of election" and no worse. As
to its primitive meaning, it was purely metaphysical. No unclean thought
traversed these conceptions in the ancient mind. Even in the Zohar -- far less
metaphysical than any other symbolism -- the idea is an abstraction and nothing
more. Thus, when the Zohar (iii., 290) says: "All that which exists, all
that which has been formed by the ancient, whose name is holy, can only exist
through a male and female principle," it means no more than this:
"The divine Spirit of Life is ever coalescing with matter." It is the
WILL of the Deity that acts; and the idea is purely Schopenhauerian. "When
Atteekah Kaddosha, the ancient and the concealed of the concealed, desired to
form all things, it formed all things like male and female. This wisdom cornprises
ALL when it goeth forth." Hence Chochmah (male wisdom) and Binah (female
consciousness or Intellect) are said to create all between the two -- the
active and the passive principles. As the eye of the expert jeweller discerns
under the rough and uncouth oyster shell the pure immaculate pearl, enshrined
within its bosom, his hand dealing with the former but to get at its, so the
eye of the true philosopher reads between the lines of the Puranas the sublime
Vedic truths, and corrects the form with the help of the Vedantic wisdom. Our
Orientalists, however, never perceive the pearl under the thick coating of the
shell, and -- act accordingly.
From all that
has been said in this section, one sees clearly that, between the Serpent of
Eden and the Devil of Christianity, there is an abyss. Alone the sledge hammer
of ancient philosophy can kill this dogma.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 529 WHO INVENTED WRITING?
§ XXI.
ENOICHION-HENOCH.
THE history of
the evolution of the Satanic myth would not be complete if we omitted to notice
the character of the mysterious and Cosmopolitan Enoch, variously called Enos,
Hanoch, and finally Enoichion by the Greeks. It is from his Book that the first
notions of the Fallen Angels were taken by the early Christian writers.
The "Book
of Enoch" is declared apocryphal. But what is an Apocrypha? The very
etymology of the term shows that it is simply a secret book, i.e., one that
belonged to the catalogue of temple libraries under the guardianship of the
Hierophants and initiated priests, and was never meant for the profane.
Apocrypha comes from the verb Crypto, [[krupto]], "to hide." For ages
the Enoichion (the Book of the SEER) was preserved in the "city of
letters" and secret works -- the ancient Kirjath-Sepher, later on, Debir
(see Joshua xv., 15).
Some of the
writers interested in the subject -- especially Masons -- have tried to
identify Enoch with Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes, and even with the Latin
Mercury. As individuals, all these are distinct one from the other;
professionally -- if one may use this word, now so limited in its sense -- they
belong one and all to the same category of sacred writers, of Initiators and
Recorders of Occult and ancient Wisdom. Those who in the Quran (see Surat XIX.)
are generically termed the Edris, or the "Learned" (the Initiated),
bore in Egypt the name of "Thoth," the inventor of arts, sciences,
writing or letters, of music and astronomy. Among the Jews the Edris became
"Enoch," who, according to Bar-Hebraeus, "was the first inventor
of writing," books, arts, and sciences, the first who reduced to a system
the progress of the planets. In Greece he was called Orpheus, and thus changed
his name with every nation. The number Seven being attached to, and connected
with, each of those primitive Initiators,* as well as the number 365, of the
days in the year, astronomically, it identifies the mission, character, and the
sacred office of all those men, but certainly not their personalities. Enoch is
the seventh Patriarch; Orpheus is the possessor of the phorminx, the 7-stringed
lyre, which is the seven-fold mystery of initiation. Thoth, with the
seven-rayed Solar Discus on his head, travels in the Solar boat, the 365
degrees, jumping out every fourth (leap) year for one day. Finally, Thoth-Lunus
is the septenary
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Khanoch, or
Hanoch, or Enoch means the "Initiator" and "teacher," as
well as the "Son of Man," Enos (vide Genesis iv., 26), esoterically.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 530 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
god of the seven
days, or the week. Esoterically and spiritually, Enoichion means the "Seer
of the Open Eye."
The story about
Enoch, told by Josephus, namely, that he had concealed under the pillars of
Mercury or Seth his precious rolls or books, is the same as that told of
Hermes, "the father of Wisdom," who concealed his books of Wisdom
under a pillar, and then, finding the two pillars of stone, found the science
written thereon. Yet Josephus, notwithstanding his constant efforts in the
direction of Israel's unmerited glorification, and though he does attribute
that science (of Wisdom) to the Jewish Enoch -- writes history. He shows those
pillars as still existing during his own time. He tells us that they were built
by Seth; and so they may have been, only neither by the Patriarch of that name,
the fabled son of Adam, nor by the Egyptian god of Wisdom -- Teth, Set, Thoth,
Tat, Sat (the later Sat-an), or Hermes, who are all one, -- but by the
"sons of the Serpent-god," or "Sons of the Dragon," the
name under which the Hierophants of Egypt and Babylon were known before the
Deluge, as were their forefathers, the Atlanteans.
What Josephus
tells us, therefore, must be allegorically true, with the exception of the
application made of it. According to his version the two famous pillars were
entirely covered with hieroglyphics, which, after the discovery, were copied
and reproduced in the most secret corners of the inner temples of Egypt, and
have thus become the source of its Wisdom and exceptional learning. These two
"pillars," however, are the prototypes of the two "tables of
stones" hewn by Moses at the command of the "Lord." Hence, in
saying that all the great adepts and mystics of antiquity -- like Orpheus,
Hesiod, Pythagoras and Plato -- got the elements of their theology from those
hieroglyphics, he is right in one sense, and wrong in another; for he errs in
accuracy. The Secret Doctrine teaches us that the arts, sciences, theology, and
especially the philosophy of every nation which preceded the last universally
known, but not universal Deluge, had been recorded ideographically from the
primitive oral records of the Fourth Race, and that these were the inheritance
of the latter from the early Third Root-Race before the allegorical Fall.
Hence, also, the Egyptian pillars, the tablets, and even the "white
Oriental porphyry stone" of the Masonic legend -- which Enoch, fearing
that the real and precious secrets would be lost, concealed before the Deluge
in the bowels of the Earth -- were simply the more or less symbolical and
allegorical copies from the primitive Records. The "Book of Enoch" is
one of such copies and is a Chaldean, now very incomplete compendium. As
already said, Enoichion means in Greek the "inner eye," or the Seer;
in Hebrew, and with the help of Masoretic points it means the initiator and
instructor, [[hebrew]]. It is a generic title; besides which his legend is
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, [[hebrew]]), 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; 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Midrashim 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 Midrash Pirkah R. Eliezar (cap. viii.),
referring to Henoch that which others did to Hermes Trismegistus, because the
two are identical in their esoteric meaning. "Hanokh" in this case,
and his "Wisdom," belong to the cycle of the Fourth Atlantean Race,*
and Noah to that of the Fifth.** In this case both represent the Root-Races,
the present one and the one that preceded it. In another sense, Enoch
disappeared, "he walked with God, and he was not, for God took him," the
allegory referring to the disappearance of the Sacred and Secret knowledge from
among men; for "God" (or Java Aleim -- the high hierophants, the
heads of the colleges of initiated priests***) took him; in other words, the
Enochs or the Enoichions, the Seers and their knowledge and wisdom, became
strictly
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Says the
Zohar, "Hanokh had a book which was one with the book of the generations
of Adam; this is the Mystery of Wisdom."
** Noah is heir
to the Wisdom of Enoch; in other words, the Fifth is heir to the Fourth Race.
*** Vide Isis
Unveiled, Vol. I, p. 575, et seq.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 533 WHAT ENOCH IS, ESOTERICALLY.
confined to the
Secret Colleges of the Prophets, with the Jews, and to the temples with the
Gentiles.
Interpreted with
the help of merely the symbolical key, Enoch is the type of the dual nature of
man -- spiritual and physical. Hence he occupies the centre of the astronomical
cross (given by Eliphas Levi from a secret work), which is a six-pointed star,
"the Adonai." In the upper triangle is the Eagle; in the left lower
triangle stands the lion; in the right, the bull: while between the bull and
the lion, over them and under the eagle, is the face of Enoch or man. (Vide
illustrated diagram in Isis Unveiled, Vol. II., p. 452). Now the figures on the
upper triangle represent the Four Races, leaving out the first -- the Chhayas
or Shadows -- and the "Son of Man," Enos or Enoch, is in the centre,
because he stands between the two (the Fourth and the Fifth) Races, as he
represents the Secret Wisdom of both. These are the four animals of Ezekiel and
of the Revelation. The same double triangle which in Isis, Vol. II, (p. 453),
faces the Hindu Adanari, is by far the best. For there, only the three (for us)
historical races are symbolized: the third, the androgynous, by Ada-nari; the
fourth, symbolized by the strong, powerful lion; and the fifth -- the Aryan --
by that which is its most sacred symbol to this day, the bull (and the cow).
A man of great
erudition -- a French savant -- M. de Sacy, finds several most singular
statements in the Book of Enoch, "worthy of the most serious
examination," he says. For instance, "the author (Enoch) makes the
solar year consist of 364 days, and seems to know periods of three, of five,
and of eight years, followed by four supplementary days, which, in his system,
appear to be those of the equinoxes and solstices."* . . . . To which he
adds, later on, "I see but one means to palliate them (these
'absurdities'), it is to suppose that the author expounds some fanciful system
which may have existed BEFORE THE ORDER OF NATURE HAD BEEN ALTERED AT THE
PERIOD OF THE UNIVERSAL DELUGE."
Precisely so;
and the Secret Doctrine teaches that that "order of nature" has been
thus altered, and the series of the Earth's humanities too. For, as the angel
Uriel tells Enoch: "Behold, I have showed thee all things, O Enoch; and
all things have I revealed to thee. Thou seest the Sun, the Moon, and those
which conduct the stars in Heaven, which cause all their operations, seasons,
and arrivals to return. In the days of sinners THE YEARS SHALL BE SHORTENED . .
. . the moon shall change its laws, etc." (chap. lxxix). In those days
also, years before the great Deluge that carried away the Atlanteans and
changed the face of the whole earth -- because "the earth (on its axis)
became inclined" --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Danielo's
criticisms upon De Sacy, in the Annales de Philosophic, p. 393.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. 1xiv. (Sect. xi.) . .
. . "And Noah cried with a bitter voice 'Hear me, hear me, hear me'; three
times. And he said 'The earth labours and is violently inclined; surely, I
shall perish with it.' "
This, by the
way, looks like one of those many "inconsistencies," if the Bible is read
literally. For, to say the least, this is a very strange fear in one who had
"found grace in the eyes of the Lord" and been told to build an ark!
But here we find the venerable Patriarch expressing as much fear as if, instead
of a "friend" of God, he had been one of the Giants doomed by the
wrathful deity. The earth has already inclined, and the deluge of waters has
become simply a question of time, and yet Noah seems to know nothing of his
intended salvation.
A decree had
come indeed; the decree of nature and the Law of Evolution, that the earth
should change its race, and that the Fourth Race should be destroyed to make
room for a better one. The Manvantara had reached its turning point of three
and a half Rounds, and gigantic physical Humanity had reached the acme of gross
materiality. Hence the apocalyptic verse that speaks of a commandment gone
forth that they may be destroyed, "that their end may be" (of the
race); for they knew truly "every secret of the angels, every oppressive and
secret power of the Satans, and every power of those who commit sorcery, as
well as of those who make molten images in the whole earth."
And now a
natural question. Who could have informed the apocryphal author of this
powerful vision (to whatever age he may be assigned before the day of Galileo)
that the Earth could occasionally incline her axis? Whence has he derived such
astronomical and geological knowledge if the Secret Wisdom, of which the
ancient Rishis and Pythagoras had drunk, is but a fancy, an invention of the
later ages? Has Enoch read prophetically perchance in Frederick Klee's work on
the Deluge (p. 79) these lines: "The position of the terrestrial globe
with reference to the Sun has evidently been, in primitive times, different
from what it is now; and this difference must have been caused by a
displacement of the axis of rotation of the Earth."?
This reminds one
of that other unscientific statement made by the Egyptian priests to Herodotus,
namely, that the Sun has not always risen where it arises now, and that in
former times the ecliptic had cut the equator at right angles.*
There are many
such "dark sayings" throughout Puranas, Bible and Mythology; and to
the occultist they divulge two facts: (a) that the ancients knew as well, and
better, perhaps, than the moderns
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Astronomie
Ancienne, Bailly, Vol. I., p. 203, and Vol. II., p. 216.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 resume, a compound of the main features of the History of
the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races; a very few prophecies from the present age
of the world; a long retrospective, introspective and prophetic summary of
universal and quite historical events -- geological, ethnological,
astronomical, and psychic -- with a touch of theogony out of the antediluvian
records. The Book of this mysterious personage is referred to and quoted
copiously in the Pistis Sophia, and also in the Zohar and its most ancient
Midrashim. Origen and Clement of Alexandria held it in the highest esteem. To
say, therefore, that it is a post-Christian forgery is to utter an absurdity
and to become guilty of an anachronism, since Origen, among others, lived in
the second century of the Christian era, yet he mentions it as an ancient and
venerable work. The secret and sacred name and its potency are well and clearly
though allegorically described in the old volume. From the XVIIIth to the Lth
chapter, the Visions of Enoch are all descriptive of the Mysteries of
Initiation, one of which is the Burning Valley of the "Fallen
Angels."
Perhaps St.
Augustine was quite right in saying that the Church rejected the BOOK OF ENOCH
out of her canon owing to its too great antiquity, ob nimiam antiquitatem.*
There was no room for the events noticed in it within the limit of the 4004
years B.C. assigned to the world from its "creation"!
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* City of God,
I. xv. ch. xxiii.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 536 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ XXII.
THE SYMBOLISM OF
THE MYSTERY-NAMES IAO AND JEHOVAH, WITH THEIR RELATION TO THE CROSS AND CIRCLE.
WHEN the Abbe
Louis Constant -- known as Eliphas Levi -- said in his Histoire de la Magie
that the "Sepher Jezirah, the Zohar, and the Apocalypse (of St. John) are
the master-pieces of the Occult Sciences," he ought, if he wanted to be
correct and clear, to have added, "in Europe." It is quite true that
these works contain "more significance than words"; and that
"its expression is poetical, while in numbers it is exact."
Unfortunately, before any one can appreciate the poetry of the expressions, or
the exactness of the numbers, he will have to learn the real significance and
meaning of the terms and symbols used. And man will never learn this so long as
he remains ignorant of the fundamental principle of the Secret Doctrine,
whether in Oriental Esotericism, or in the Kabalistical symbology:-- the key,
or value, in all their aspects, of the "God"-names,
"Angel"-names, and "Patriarchal" names in the Bible --
their mathematical or geometrical value, and their relations to manifested
nature.
Therefore, if,
on the one hand, the Zohar "astonishes (the mystic) by the profundity of
its views and the great simplicity of its images," on the other hand, that
work misleads the student by such expressions as those used with respect to
AIN-SOPH and Jehovah, notwithstanding the assurance that "the book is
careful to explain that the human form with which it clothes God is but an
image of the word, and that God should not be expressed by any thought, or any
form." It is well known that Origen, Clemens, and the Rabbis confessed,
with regard to the Kabala and the Bible, to their being veiled and secret
Books; but few know that the esotericism of the Kabalistic books in their
present re-edited form is simply another and still more cunning veil thrown
upon the primitive symbolism of these secret volumes.
The idea of
representing the hidden deity by the circumference of a Circle, and the
Creative Power (male and female, or the Androgynous WORD), by the diameter
across it, is one of the oldest symbols. It is upon this conception that every
great Cosmogony was built. With the old Aryans, the Egyptians, and the
Chaldeans, it was complete, as it embraced the idea of the eternal and immovable
Divine Thought in its absoluteness, separated entirely from the incipient stage
of (the so-called)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* 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
repeatedly stated in this work that every religious and philosophical symbol
had seven meanings attached to it, each pertaining to its legitimate plane of
thought, i.e., either purely metaphysical or astronomical; psychic or
physiological, etc., etc. These seven meanings and their applications are hard
enough to learn when taken by themselves; but the interpretation and the right
comprehension of them become tenfold more puzzling, when, instead of being
correlated, or made to flow consecutively out of and to follow each other,
each, or any one of these meanings is accepted as the one and sole explanation
of the whole symbolical idea. An instance may be given, as it admirably
illustrates the statement. Here are two interpretations given by two learned
Kabalists and scholars, of one and the same verse in Exodus, xxxiii, 18-23.
Moses beseeches the Lord to show him his "glory." Evidently it is not
the crude dead letter phraseology as found in the Bible that is to be accepted.
There are seven meanings in the Kabala, of which we may give two as interpreted
by the said two scholars. One of them quotes, while explaining: "Thou
canst not see my face . . . I will put thee in the cleft of the rock . . .
cover thee with my hand while I pass by. And then I will take away mine hand,
and thou shalt see my a'hoor, my back; . . " and tells us in a gloss,
"That is, I will show you 'My back,' i.e., my visible universe, my lower
manifestations, but, as a man still in the flesh, thou canst not
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* With the
Egyptian Gnostics it was Thoth (Hermes), who was chief of the Seven (Vide
"Book of the Dead"). Their names are given by Origen, as Adonai (of
the Sun) Iao (of the Moon), Eloi (Jupiter), Sabao (Mars), Orai (Venus),
Astapkoi (Mercury), and, finally, Ildabaoth (Saturn).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 539 A GROTESQUE VERSE EXPLAINED.
see my invisible
nature. So proceeds the Qabbalah." This is correct, and is the
cosmo-metaphysical explanation. And now speaks the other Kabalist, giving the
numerical meaning. As it involves a good many suggestive ideas, and is far more
fully given, we may allow it more space. This synopsis is from an unpublished
MS., and explains more fully what was given in § XVII, "The Holy of Holies,"
page 467.
The numbers of
the name Moses are those of "I AM THAT I AM," so that the names Moses
and Jehovah are at one in numerical harmony.
The word Moses
is [[hebrew]] [[over]] 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 ahiye asher ahiye, and in the value of the sums of
their letters stand thus:--
[[hebrew]]
[[hebrew]] [[hebrew]]
21 501 21
. . . This being
his (God's) name, the sum of the values composing it are 21, 501, 21 are 543,
or simply a use of the simple digit numbers in the name of Moses . . . but now
so ordered that the name of 345 is reversed, and reads 543. . . . So that when
Moses asks "Let me see Thy face or glory," the other rightly and
truly replies "Thou canst not see my face" . . . but thou shalt see
me behind -- (the true sense, though not the precise words); because the comer
and the behind of 543 is the face of 345 -- "for check and to keep a
strict use of a set of numbers to develop certain grand results, for the object
of which they are specifically employed." "In other uses," adds
the learned Kabalist, "of the number they saw each other face to face. It
is strange that if we add 345 to 543 we have 888, which was the gnostic
Kabalistic value of the name Christ, who was Jehoshua or Joshua. And so also
the division of the 24 hours of the day gives three eights as quotient. . . .
The chief end of all this system of number checks was to preserve in perpetuity
the exact value of the Lunar year in the natural measure of days."
This is the
astronomical and numerical meaning in the secret theogony of sidereo-cosmical
gods invented by the Chaldeo-Hebrews,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Qabbalah,
by Isaac Myer.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 540 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and two meanings
out of seven. The other five would astonish the Christians still more.
The series of
OEdipuses who have endeavoured to interpret the riddle of the Sphinx, is long indeed.
For many ages she has been devouring the brightest and the noblest intellects
of Christendom; but now the Sphinx is conquered. In the great intellectual
struggle which has ended in the complete victory of the OEdipuses of Symbolism,
it is not the Sphinx, however, who, burning with the shame of defeat, has had
to bury herself in the sea, but verily the many-sided symbol, named Jehovah,
whom Christians -- the civilized nations -- have accepted for their God. The
latter has collapsed under the too close analysis, and is -- drowned.
Symbologists have discovered with dismay that their adopted deity was only a
mask for many other gods, an Euhemerized extinct planet, at best, the genius of
the Moon and Saturn with the Jews, of the Sun and Jupiter, with early
Christians; that the Trinity was, in truth, only an astronomical triad --
unless they accepted the more abstract and metaphysical meanings given to it by
the Gentiles -- composed of the Sun (the Father), and the two planets Mercury
(the Son) and Venus (the Holy Ghost, Sophia, the Spirit of Wisdom, Love and
Truth, and Lucifer, as Christ, the bright and morning Star; vide
"Revelation," ch. xxii., 15). Because, if the Father is the Sun (the
elder Brother in the Eastern inner philosophy), the nearest planet to it is
Mercury (Hermes, Budha, Thot), the name of whose mother on Earth was Maia; the
planet which receives seven times more light than any other: which fact led the
Gnostics to call their Christos, and the Kabalists their Hermes (in the
astronomical meaning), the "seven-fold light" (vide at end of this
§). Finally, this God was Bel; the Sun being "Bel," with the Gauls,
"Helios" with the Greeks, "Baal," with the Phoenicians;
"El" in Chaldean, hence "EL-ohim," "Emanu-EL,"
El, "god," in Hebrew. But even the Kabalistic god has vanished in the
rabbinical workmanship, and one has now to turn to the innermost metaphysical
sense of the Zohar to find in it anything like Ain-Soph, the nameless deity and
the Absolute, so authoritatively and loudly claimed by the Christians. But it
is certainly not to be found in the Mosaic books, by those who try to read
without a Key to them. Ever since it was lost Jews and Christians have tried
their best to blend these two conceptions, but in vain. They have only
succeeded in finally robbing even the Universal Deity of ITS majestic character
and primitive meaning.
This is what was
said in "Isis Unveiled":--
It would seem,
therefore, but natural to make a difference between the mystery-god [[Iao]],
adopted from the highest antiquity by all who participated in the esoteric
knowledge of the priests, and his phonetic counterparts, whom we find treated
with so little reverence by the Ophites and other Gnostics.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 541 THE ANTIQUITY OF THE CROSS.
In the Ophite
gems of King ("Gnostics") we find the name of IAO repeated, and often
confounded with that of Jevo, while the latter simply represents one of the
genii antagonistic to Abraxas. But the name IAO neither originated with, nor
was it the sole property of the Jews. Even if it had pleased Moses to bestow
the name upon the tutelary "Spirit," the alleged protector and
national deity of the "chosen people of Israel," there is yet no
possible reason why other nationalities should receive Him as the Highest and
One-living God. But we deny the assumption altogether. Besides, there is the
fact that Jaho or Iao was a "Mystery name" from the beginning, for
[[hebrew]] and [[hebrew]] 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
[[hebrew]], 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 [[hebrew]], like the structures
erected by Hiram to Hercules and Venus, Adon and Astarte.
Says Furst:
"The very ancient name of God, Yaho, written in the Greek law, appears,
apart from its derivation, to have been an old mystic name of the Supreme deity
of the Shemites. Hence it was told to Moses when he was initiated at Hor-eb --
the cave -- under the direction of Jethro, the Kenite (or Cainite) priest of
Midian. In an old religion of the Chaldeans, whose remains are to be found
among the Neo-Platonists, the highest divinity, enthroned above the seven
heavens, representing the Spiritual Light-Principle . . . . and also conceived
of as Demiurgus,* was called [[Iao]]([[hebrew]]), who was, like the Hebrew
Yaha, mysterious and unmentionable, and whose name was communicated to the
Initiated. The Phoenicians had a Supreme God, whose name was trilateral and
secret, and he was [[Iao]]."** (Isis Unveiled), Vol. II., p. 298.)
The Cross, say
the Kabalists, repeating the lesson of the Occultists, is one of the most
ancient -- nay, perhaps, the most ancient of symbols. This is demonstrated at
the very beginning of the Proem (Vol. I.). The Eastern Initiates show it coeval
with the circle of Deific infinitude and the first differentiation of the
Essence, the union of spirit and matter. This was rejected, and the
astronomical allegory alone was accepted and made to fit into cunningly
imagined terrestrial events.
Let us
demonstrate this statement. In astronomy, as said, Mercury is the son of Coelus
and Lux -- of the sky and light, or the Sun; in mythology he is the progeny of
Jupiter and Maia. He is the "messenger" of his Father Jupiter, the
Messiah of the Sun; in Greek, his name "Hermes," means, among other
things, the "Interpreter" -- the "Word" by mouth; the
LOGOS, or VERBUM. Now, Mercury, besides being born on Mount Cyllene among
shepherds, is the patron of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* By very few
though, for the creators of the material universe were always considered as
subordinate gods to the Most High Deity.
** Lydus I., c.
Ledrenus, I. c.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* Every seventh day the priests anointed these termini with oil, and
once a year hung them with garlands, hence they were the anointed. Mercury,
when speaking through his oracles said, "I am he whom you call the Son of
the Father (Jupiter) and Maia. Leaving the King of Heaven (the Sun) I come to
help you, mortals." Mercury heals the blind and restores sight, mental and
physical.** He was often represented as three-headed and called
"Tricephalos," "Triplex," as one with the Sun and Venus.
Finally, Mercury, as Cornutus*** shows, was sometimes figured under a cubic
form, without arms, because "the power of speech and eloquence can prevail
without the assistance of arms or feet." It is this cubic form which
connects the termini directly with the cross, and the eloquence or the power of
speech of Mercury, which made the crafty Eusebius say "Hermes is the
emblem of the Word which creates and interprets all," for it is the
creative word; and he shows Porphyry teaching that the speech of Hermes, (now
interpreted "Word of God" (!) in Pymander) a creative speech
(Verbum), is the seminal principle scattered throughout the Universe.**** In
Alchemy "Mercury" is the radical Moyst, primitive or elementary
water, containing the seed of the Universe, fecundated by the solar fires. To
express this fecundating principle, a phallus was often added to the 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,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Montfaucon,
Antiquities. See plates in Vol. I., plate 77. The disciples of Hermes go after
their death to his planet, Mercury -- their Kingdom of Heaven.
** Cornutus.
*** Lydus de
Mensibus, iv.
**** Preparat,
Evang. I. iii. ch. 2.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 543 A PERSONAL, IS A FINITE GOD.
Visvakarma,
crucifying the "Sun-Initiate" on the cruciform lathe. As the same
author writes: "the attachment of a man to the cross . . . was made use of
in this very form of display by the Hindus"; but, made "to co-ordinate"
with the idea of the new rebirth of man by spiritual, not physical
regeneration. The candidate for initiation was attached to the tau or
astronomical cross with a far grander and nobler idea than that of the origin
of mere terrestrial life.
On the other
hand, the Semites seem to have had no other or higher purpose in life than that
of procreating their species. Thus, geometrically, and according to the reading
of the Bible by means of the numerical method, the author of the
"Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery" is quite correct. Their (the Jewish) entire
system --
"Seems to
have been anciently regarded as one resting in nature, and one which was
adopted by nature, or God, as the basis of law of the exertion practically of
creative power -- i.e., it was the creative design, of which creation was
practically the application. This seems to be established by the fact that,
under the system set forth, measures of planetary times serve coordinately as
measures of the size of planets, and of the peculiarity of their shapes --
i.e., in the extension of their equatorial and polar diameters" . . .
etc., etc. (p. 3). . . . "This system seems to underlie the whole Biblical
structure (that of creative design), as a foundation for its ritualism and for
its display of the works of the Deity in the way of architecture, by use of the
sacred unit of measure in the Garden of Eden, the Ark of Noah, the Tabernacle,
and the Temple of Solomon."
Thus, on the
very showing of the defenders of this system the Jewish Deity is proved to be, at
best, only the manifested duad, never the One absolute ALL. Geometrically
demonstrated, he is a NUMBER; symbolically, an euhemerized Priapus; and this
can hardly satisfy a mankind thirsting after the demonstration of real
spiritual truths, and the possession of a god with a divine, not
anthropomorphic, nature. It is strange that the most learned of modem Kabalists
can see in the cross and circle nothing but a symbol of the manifested creative
and androgyne deity in its relation to, and interference with, this phenomenal
world.* One author believes that "man (read the Jew and Rabbi) obtained
knowledge of the practical measure . . . . by which nature was thought to
adjust the planets in size to harmonize with the notation of their
movements" . . . . and adds: "it seems he did obtain it, and esteemed
its possession as the means of his realization of the Deity -- that is, he
approached so nearly to a conception of a Being having a mind like his own,
only infinitely more powerful, as to be able to realize a law of creation
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See the Zohar
and the two Qabbalahs (by Messrs. I. Myer and Mathers), with interpretations,
if the reader would satisfy himself of this.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Brahma." The
initiated Hindus know how to "square the circle" far better than any
European. But of this more anon. The fact is that the Western Mystics commence
their speculation only at that stage when the universe "falls into
matter," as the occultists say. Throughout the whole series of Kabalistic
books we have not met with one sentence that would hint in the remotest way at
the psychological and spiritual, as well as at the mechanical and physiological
secrets of "creation." Shall we, then, regard the evolution of the
Universe as simply a prototype, on a gigantic scale, of the act of procreation?
as "divine" Phallicism, and rhapsodize on it as the evilly-inspired
author of a late work of this name has done? The writer does not think so. And
she feels justified in saying so, since the most careful reading of the Old
Testament -- esoterically, as well as exoterically -- seems to have carried the
most enthusiastic enquirers no further than a certainty on mathematical grounds
that from the first to the last chapter of the Pentateuch every scene, every
character or event are shown connected, directly or indirectly, with the origin
of birth in its crudest and most
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 545 A PLAGIARISM BY PASCAL.
brutal form.
Thus, however interesting and ingenious the rabbinical methods, the writer, in
common with other Eastern Occultists, must prefer those of the Pagans.
It is not, then,
in the Bible that we have to search for the origin of the Cross and Circle, but
beyond the Flood. Therefore, returning to Eliphas Levi and the Zohar, we answer
for the Eastern Occultists and say that, applying practice to principle, they
agree entirely with Pascal, who says that "God is a circle, the centre of
which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere," whereas the Kabalists
say the reverse, and maintain it solely out of their desire to veil their
doctrine. By the way, the definition of Deity by the Circle is not Pascal's at
all, as E. Levi thought. It was borrowed by the French philosopher from either
Mercury Trismegistus or Cardinal Cusa's Latin work, De Docta Ignorantia, in
which he makes use of it. It is, moreover, disfigured by Pascal, who replaces
the words "Cosmic Circle," which stand symbolically in the original
inscription, by the word Theos. With the ancients both words were synonymous.
-------
A.
CROSS AND
CIRCLE.
Something of the
divine and the mysterious has ever been ascribed, in the minds of the ancient
philosophers, to the shape of the circle. The old world, consistent in its
symbolism with its pantheistic intuitions, uniting the visible and the
invisible Infinitudes into one, represented Deity and its outward VEIL alike --
by a circle. This merging of the two into a unity, and the name theos given
indifferently to both, is explained, and becomes thereby still more scientific
and philosophical. Plato's etymological definition of the word theos has been
shown elsewhere. He derives it from the verb [[theein]] (see Cratylus),
"to move," as suggested by the motion of the heavenly bodies which he
connects with deity. According to the Esoteric philosophy, this Deity is during
its "nights" and its "days" (i.e., cycles of rest or
activity) "the eternal perpetual motion," "the EVER-BECOMING, as
well as the ever universally present, and the ever Existing." The latter
is the root-abstraction, the former -- the only possible conception in human
mind, if it disconnects this deity from any shape or form. It is a perpetual,
never-ceasing evolution, circling back in its incessant progress through aeons
of duration into its original status -- ABSOLUTE UNITY.
It was only the
minor gods, who were made to carry the symbolical attributes of the higher
ones. Thus, the god Shoo, the personification of Ra, who appears as "the
great Cat of the Basin of Persea, in An"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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-tie [[diagram]]."
Nor was the
double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the Initiates. For
Raoul-Rochette shows (ibid) "the sign [[diagram]], occurring as the
reverse of a Phoenician coin, with a Ram as the obverse. . . . .The same sign,
sometimes called Venus' Looking-Glass, because it typified reproduction, was
employed to mark the hind-quarters of valuable brood mares of Corinthian and
other beautiful breeds of horses" (Raoul-Rochette, loc. cit. De La Croix
Ansee, Mem. de l'Academie des Sciences, pl. 2, Nos. 8, 9, also 16, 2, p. 320,
quoted in "Nat. Gen."), which proves that so far back as those early
days the cross had already become the symbol of human procreation, and that
oblivion of the divine origin of Cross and Circle had been forgotten.
Another form of
the cross is given from the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (vol. xviii.,
p. 393, pl. 4):--
"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 [[diagram]], which is here presented, as the cross of the two
equinoxes and the two solstices placed within the figure of the earth's path.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 547 VARIATIONS OF THE SYMBOLISM.
The same ovoid
or boat-shaped figure appears at times in the Hindu drawings with seven steps
at each end as a form or a mode of Meru."
This is the
astronomical aspect of the double glyph. There are six more aspects, however,
and an attempt may be made to interpret a few of these. The subject is so vast
that it would require in itself alone many volumes.
But the most
curious of these Egyptian symbols of Cross and Circle, spoken of in the above
cited work, is one which receives its full explanation and final colour from
Aryan symbols of the same nature. Says the author:--
"The
four-armed Cross is simply the cross of the four quarters, but the cross sign
is not always simple.* This is a type that was developed from an identifiable
beginning, which was adapted to the expression of various ideas afterwards. The
most sacred cross of Egypt that was carried in the hands of the gods, the
Pharaohs, and the mummied dead, is the Ankh [[diagram]] the sign of life, the
living, an oath, the covenant . . . The top of this is the hieroglyphic Ru
[[diagram]] 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 [[diagram]], 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
[[diagram]] and the Coptic Ro, P.** The Ro, was carried into the Greek cross
[[diagram]], which is formed of the Ro and Chi or R-K. . . . The Rak, or Ank,
was the sign of all beginning (Arche) on this account, and the Ank-tie is the
cross of the North, the hind part of Heaven. . . ."
Now this, again,
is entirely astronomical and phallic. The Puranic version in India gives the
whole another colour; and without, however,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Certainly not;
for very often there are symbols made to symbolize other symbols, and these are
in turn used in ideographs.
** The R of the
Slavonian and Russian alphabets (the Kyriletza) is also the Latin P.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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" [[diagram]] does not belong to Egypt alone. It exists
under the name of pasa, a cord which Siva holds in the hand of his right back
arm* (Siva having four arms). The Mahadeva is represented in the posture of an
ascetic, as Maha-Yogi, with his third eye [[diagram]], which is "the Ru,
[[diagram]],set upright on the Tau-Cross" in another form. The pasa is
held in the hand in such a way that it is the first finger and hand near the
thumb which make the cross, or loop and crossing. [[diagram]] Our Orientalists
would have it to represent a cord to bind refractory offenders with, because, forsooth,
Kali, Siva's consort, has the same as an attribute!
The pasa has
here a double significance, as also has Siva's trisula and every other divine
attribute. This significance lies in Siva, as Rudra has certainly the same
meaning as the Egyptian ansated cross in its cosmic and mystic meaning. In the
hand of Siva it becomes linga and yonic. That which is meant is this: Siva, as
said before, is unknown by that name in the Vedas; and it is in the white Yajur
Veda that he appears for the first time as the great god -- MAHADEVA -- whose
symbol is the lingham. In Rig Veda he is called Rudra, the "howler,"
the beneficent and the maleficent Deity at the same time, the Healer and the
Destroyer. In the Vishnu Purana, he is the god who springs from the forehead of
Brahma, who separates into male and female, and he is the parent of the Rudras
or Maruts, half of whom are brilliant and gentle, others, black and ferocious.
In the Vedas, he is the divine Ego aspiring to return to its pure, deific
state, and at the same time that divine ego imprisoned in earthly form, whose
fierce passions make of him the "roarer," the "terrible."
This is well shown in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, wherein the Rudras, the
progeny of Rudra, god of fire, are called the "ten vital breaths" (prana,
life) with manas, as eleventh, whereas as Siva, he is the Destroyer of that
life. Brahma calls him Rudra, and gives him, besides, seven other names, which
names are his seven forms of manifestation, also the seven powers of nature
which destroy but to recreate or regenerate.
Hence the
cruciform noose (pasa) in his hand, when he is represented as an ascetic, the
Mahayogin, has no phallic signification, and it, indeed, requires a strong
imagination bent in this direction to find such even in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Moor's
"Hindu Pantheon," plate xiii.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* The great
Circle of Time, on the face of which fancy in India has represented the
Tortoise (Kurma, or Sisumara, one of the Avatars of Vishnu), has the Cross
placed on it by nature in its division and localisation of stars, planets and
constellations. Thus in Bhagavata Purana V., xxx., it is said that "at the
extremity of the tail of that animal, whose head is directed toward the South
and whose body is in the shape of a ring (Circle), Dhruva (the ex-pole star) is
placed; and along that tail are the Prajapati, Agni, Indra, Dharma, etc.; and
across its loins the Seven Rishis." This is then the first and earliest
Cross and Circle, into the formation of which enters the Deity (symbolized by
Vishnu), the Eternal Circle of Boundless Time, Kala, on whose plane lie
crossways all the gods, creatures, and creations born in Space and Time; --
who, as the philosophy has it, all die at the Mahapralaya.
Meanwhile it is
they, the Seven Rishis, who mark the time and the duration of events in our
septenary life cycle. They are as mysterious as their supposed wives, the
Pleiades, of whom only one -- she who hides -- has proven virtuous. The
Pleiades (Krittika) are the nurses of Karttikeya, the God of War (Mars of the
Western Pagans), who is called the Commander of the celestial armies -- or
rather of the Siddhas (translated Yogis in heaven, and holy sages on the earth)
-- "Siddha-sena," which would make Karttikeya identical with Michael,
the "leader of the celestial hosts" and, like himself, a virgin
Kumara.** Verily he is the "Guha," the mysterious one, as much so as
are the Saptarshis and the Krittika (seven Rishis and the Pleiades), for the
interpretation of all these combined, reveal to the adept the greatest mysteries
of occult nature. One point is worth mention in this question of cross and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Described in
the "Mission des Juifs" by the Marquis St. Yves d'Alveydre, the
hierophant and leader of a large party of French Kabalists, as the Golden Age!
** The more so
since he is the reputed slayer of Tripurasura and the Titan Taraka. Michael is
the conqueror of the dragon, and Indra and Karttikeya are often made identical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, via Agni, who
dropped it into the Ganges. Thus he is born from fire and water -- a "boy
bright as the Sun and beautiful as the moon." Hence he is called Agnibhuva
(Agni's son) and Ganga-putra (Son of Ganges). Add to this the fact that the
Krittika, his nurses, as Matsya Purana shows, are presided over by Agni, or, in
the authentic words -- "The seven Rishis are on a line with the brilliant
Agni," and hence are called Agneya -- and the connection is easy to
follow.
It is, then, the
Rishis who mark the time and the periods of Kali-yuga, the age of sin and
sorrow. See in the Bhagavata Purana XII., II, 2, 6, 32, and Vishnu Purana. Says
the latter: "When the splendour of Vishnu (Krishna) departed for heaven,
then did the Kali Yug, during which men delight in sin, invade the world. . . .
. When the Seven Rishis were in Magha, the Kali Yug, comprising 1,200 (divine)
years (432,000 years of mortals), began; and when from Magha, they shall reach
Purvashadha, then will this Kali age attain its growth, under Nanda and his
successors."* This is the revolution of the Rishis "when the two
first stars of the Seven Rishis (of the Great Bear) rise in the heavens, and
some lunar asterism is seen at night, at an equal distance between them, then
the Seven Rishis continue stationary in that conjunction for a hundred
years," a hater of Nanda makes Parasara say. According to Bentley, it is
in order to show the quantity of the precession of the equinoxes that this
notion originated among the astronomers. It was done "by assuming an
imaginary line, or great circle, passing through the poles of the ecliptic and
the beginning of the fixed Magha, which circle was supposed to cut some of the
stars in the Great Bear. . . . The seven stars being called the Rishis, the
Circle so assumed was called the line of the Rishis . . . . and being
invariably fixed to the beginning of the lunar asterism Magha, the precession
would be noted by stating the degree . . . of any moveable lunar mansion cut by
that line or circle as an index" ("Historical View of the Hindu
Astronomy," p. 65).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nanda is the
first Buddhist Sovereign, Chandragupta, against whom all the Brahmins were so
arrayed; he of the Morya Dynasty, and the grandfather of Asoka. This is one of
those passages that do not exist in the earlier Puranic MSS. They were added by
the Vaishnavas, who interpolated almost as much, out of Sectarian spite, as the
Christian Fathers did.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 551 THE RISHIS AND THE PLEIADES.
There was, and
still exists, a seemingly endless controversy about the chronology of the
Hindus. Here is a point that could help to determine -- approximately at least
-- the age when the symbolism of the Seven Rishis and their connection with the
Pleiades began. When Karttikeya was delivered to them by the gods to be nursed,
the Krittika were only six -- whence Karttikeya is represented with six heads;
but when the poetical fancy of the early Aryan symbologists made of them the
consorts of the Seven Rishis, they were seven. Their names are given, and these
are Amba, Dula, Nitatui, Abrayanti, Maghayanti, Varshayanti, and Chupunika.
There are other sets of names which differ, however. Anyhow, the Seven Rishis
were made to marry the Seven Krittika before the disappearance of the seventh
Pleiad. Otherwise, how could the Hindu astronomers speak of that which, without
the help of the strongest telescopes, no one can see? This is why, perhaps, in
every such case the majority of the events described in the Hindu allegories is
fixed upon as "a very recent invention, certainly within the Christian
era"?
The oldest MSS.
in Sanskrit on astronomy, begin their series of Nakshatras (the 27 lunar
asterisms) with the sign of Krittika, and this can hardly make them earlier
than 2780 B.C., (see the "Vedic Calendar," accepted even by the
Orientalists); though they get out of the difficulty by saying that the said
Calendar does not prove that the Hindus knew anything of astronomy at that
date, and assure their readers that, Calendars notwithstanding, the Indian
pundits may have acquired their knowledge of the lunar mansions headed by
Krittika from the Phoenicians, etc. However that may be, the Pleiades are the
central group of the system of sidereal symbology. They are situated in the
neck of the constellation of Taurus, regarded by Madler and others, in
astronomy, as the central group of the system of The Milky Way, and in the
Kabala and Eastern Esotericism, as the sidereal septenate born from the first
manifested side of the upper triangle, the concealed [[diagram]]. This
manifested side is Taurus, the Symbol of ONE (the figure 1), or of the first
letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph [[hebrew]] (bull or ox) whose synthesis is
ten (10), or [[hebrew]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Scarabaeus of the
Egyptians, its very name being suggestive of the secret idea attached to it.
For the Scarabaeus is called in Egypt (in the papyri) Khopirron and Khopri from
the verb Khopron "to become," and has thus been made a symbol and an
emblem of human life and of the successive becomings of man, through the
various peregrinations and metempsychoses (reincarnations) of the liberated
Soul. This mystical symbol shows plainly that the Egyptians believed in
reincarnation and the successive lives and existences of the Immortal entity.
Being, however, an esoteric doctrine, revealed only during the mysteries by the
priest-hierophants and the Kings-Initiates to the candidates, it was kept
secret. The incorporeal intelligences (the Planetary Spirits, or Creative
Powers) were always represented under the form of circles. In the primitive
philosophy of the Hierophants these invisible circles were the prototypic
causes and builders of all the heavenly orbs, which were their visible bodies
or coverings, and of which they were the souls. It was certainly a universal
teaching in antiquity. (See Ezekiel, ch. 1.)
"Before the
mathematical numbers," says Proclus (in Quinto Libro, EUCLID), "there
are the Self-moving numbers; before the figures apparent -- the vital figures,
and before producing the material worlds which move in a Circle, the Creative
Power produced the invisible Circles."
Deus enim et circulus
est, says Pherecydes, in his hymn to Jupiter. It was a Hermetic axiom, and
Pythagoras prescribed such a circular prostration and posture during the hours
of contemplation. "The devotee must approach as much as possible the form
of a perfect circle," prescribes the Secret Book. Numa tried to spread
among the people the same custom, Pierius* tells his readers; and Pliny says:
"During our worship, we roll up, so to say, our body in a ring, totum
corpus circumagimur."** The vision of the prophet Ezekiel reminds one
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Pierius Vale.
** The goddess
Basht (or Pasht) was represented with the head of a cat. This animal was sacred
in Egypt for several reasons: as a symbol of the Moon "the eye of
Osiris" or the "Sun," during night. The cat was also sacred to
Sokhit. One of the mystic reasons was because of its body being rolled up in a
circle when asleep. The posture is prescribed for occult and magnetic purposes,
in order to regulate in a certain way the circulation of the vital fluid, with
which the cat is pre-eminently endowed. "The nine lives of a cat" is
a popular saying based on good physiological and occult reasons. Mr. G. Massey
gives also an astronomical reason for it which may be found in § I.
"SYMBOLISM." "The cat saw the Sun, had it in its eye by night
(was the eye [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 553 THE DEGRADATION OF THE SYMBOL.
forcibly of this
mysticism of the circle, when he beheld a whirl-wind from which came out
"one wheel upon the earth" whose work "was as it were a wheel in
the middle of a wheel" (ch. i. vv. 4-16). . . . "for the Spirit of
the living creature was in the wheels" (v. 20).
"Spirit
whirleth about continually and returneth again according to his circuits"
-- says Solomon (Eccles. i. 6), who is made in the English translation to speak
of the "Wind," and in the original text to refer both to the Spirit
and the Sun. But the Zohar, the only true glossary of the Kabalistic Preacher,
in explanation of this verse, which is, perhaps, rather hazy and difficult to
comprehend, says that "it seems to say that the sun moves in circuits,
whereas it refers to the Spirit under the Sun, called the holy Spirit, that
moves circularly, toward both sides, that they (It and the Sun) should be
united in the same Essence." . . . (Zohar, fol. 87, col. 346.)
The Brahmanical
"Golden Egg," from within which emerges Brahma, the creative deity,
is the "circle with the Central Point" of Pythagoras, and its fitting
symbol. In the Secret Doctrine the concealed UNITY -- whether representing
PARABRAHMAM, or the "GREAT EXTREME" of Confucius, or the Deity
concealed by PHTA, the Eternal Light, or again the Jewish EN-SOPH, is always
found to be symbolized by a circle or the "nought" (absolute No-Thing
and Nothing, because it is infinite and the ALL); while the god-manifested (by
its works) is referred to as the diameter of that circle. The symbolism of the
underlying idea is thus made evident: the right line passing through the centre
of a circle has, in the geometrical sense, length, but neither breadth or
thickness: it is an imaginary and feminine symbol, crossing eternity and made
to rest on the plane of existence of the phenomenal world. It is dimensional,
whereas its circle is dimensionless, or, to use an algebraical term, it is the
dimension of an equation. Another way of symbolizing the idea is found in the
Pythagorean sacred Decade which synthesizes, in the dual numeral Ten (the 1 and
a circle or cipher), the absolute ALL manifesting itself in the WORD or
generative Power of Creation.
-------
B.
THE FALL OF THE
CROSS INTO MATTER.
Those who would
feel inclined to argue upon this Pythagorean symbol by objecting that it is not
yet ascertained, so far, at what period of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of night), when it was otherwise unseen by men
(for as the moon reflects the light of the Sun, so the cat was supposed to
reflect it on account of its phosphorescent eyes) . . . We might say the moon
mirrored the solar light, because we have looking-glasses. With them the cat's
eye was the mirror."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 not acquainted with our modes of
calculation or Arabic figures -- though we know it was -- yet the circle and
diameter idea is there to show that it was the first symbol in cosmogony.
Before the trigrammes of Fo-hi, Yang, the Unity, and Yin, the binary, explained
cunningly enough by Eliphas Levi thus (Dogme et Rituel, Vol. I., p. 124):--
China had her Confucius, and her Tau-ists.* The former circumscribes the
"great extreme" within a circle with a horizontal line across; the
latter place three concentric circles beneath the great circle, while the Sung
Sages showed the "great Extreme" in an upper circle, and Heaven and
Earth in two lower and smaller circles. The Yangs and the Yins are a far later
invention. [[diagram]] Plato and his school never understood the Deity
otherwise, many epithets of his applied to the "God over all" ([[ho
epi pasi theos]]) notwithstanding. Plato having been initiated, could not
believe in a personal God -- a gigantic Shadow of Man. His epithets of
"monarch" and "Law-giver of the Universe" bear an abstract
meaning well understood by every Occultist, who, no less than any Christian,
believes in the One Law that governs the Universe, recognizing it at the same
time as immutable. "Beyond all finite existences," he says, "and
secondary causes, all laws, ideas and principles, there is an INTELLIGENCE or
MIND ([[nous]]), the first principle of all principles, the Supreme Idea on
which all other ideas are grounded . . . the ultimate substance from which all
things derive their being and essence, the first and efficient cause of all the
order, and harmony, and beauty and excellency, and goodness, which pervades the
Universe" -- who is called, by way of preeminence and excellence, the
Supreme** good "the god" ([[Theos]]), and "the god over
all." These words apply, as Plato himself shows, neither to the
"Creator" nor to the "Father" of our modern Monotheist, but
to the ideal and abstract cause. For, as he says, "this [gk char], the god
over all, is not the truth or the intelligence, but the FATHER of it," and
its Primal cause. Is it Plato, the greatest pupil of the archaic Sages, a sage
himself, for whom there was but a single object of attainment in this life --
REAL KNOWLEDGE -- who would have ever believed in a deity that curses and damns
men for ever, on the slightest provocation?*** Not he, who considered only
those to be
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Also in
T'sang-t-ung-ky, by Wei-Pa-Yang.
** Cocker's
"Christianity and Greek Philosophy," xi., p. 377.
*** The cry of
despair uttered by Count de Montlosier in his Mysteres de la Vie Humaine, p.
117, is a warrant that the Cause of "excellence and goodness,"
supposed by Plato to pervade the Universe is neither his Deity, nor our World.
"Au spectacle de tant [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 555 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION.
genuine
philosophers and students of truth who possessed the knowledge of the really existing
in opposition to mere seeming; of the always existing in opposition to the
transitory; and of that which exists permanently in opposition to that which
waxes, wanes, and is developed and destroyed alternately.* Speusippus and
Xenocrates followed in his footsteps. The ONE, the original, had no existence,
in the sense applied to it by mortal men. "The [[timion]] (honoured one)
dwells in the centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of
the Deity -- the world Soul"** -- the plane of the surface of the circle.
The Cross and Circle are a universal conception -- as old as human mind itself.
They stand foremost on the list of the long series of, so to say, international
symbols, which expressed very often great scientific truths, besides their
direct bearing upon psychological, and even physiological mysteries; and this
symbol is precisely one of this kind, and is based upon the oldest esoteric
cosmogony.
It is no
explanation to say, as Eliphas Levi does, that God, the universal Love, having
caused the male unit to dig an abyss in the female Binary, or chaos, produced
thereby the world. Besides being as gross a conception as any, it does not
remove the difficulty of conceiving it without losing one's veneration for the
rather too human-like ways of the Deity. It is to avoid such anthropomorphic
conceptions that the Initiates never use the epithet "God" to
designate the One and Secondless Principle in the Universe; and that --
faithful in this to the oldest traditions of the Secret Doctrine the world over
-- they deny that such imperfect and often not very clean work could ever be
produced by Absolute Perfection. There is no need to mention here other still
greater metaphysical difficulties. Between speculative Atheism and idiotic
anthropomorphism there must be a philosophical mean, and a reconciliation. The
Presence of the Unseen Principle throughout all nature, and the highest
manifestation of it on Earth -- MAN, can alone help to solve the Problem, which
is that of the mathematician whose x must ever elude the grasp of our
terrestrial algebra. The Hindus have tried to solve it by their avatars, the
Christians think
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] de grandeur oppose a celui de tant de misere,
l'esprit qui se met a observer ce vaste ensemble, se represente je ne sais
quelle grande diviniti qu'une diviniti, plus grande et plus pressante encore,
aurait comme brisee et mise en pieces en dispersant les debris dans tout l'Univers."
The "still greater and still more exacting divinity" than the god of
this world, supposed so "good" -- is KARMA. And this true Divinity
shows well that the lesser one, our inner God (personal for the time being),
has no power to arrest the mighty hand of this greater Deity, the CAUSE
awakened by our actions generating smaller causes, which is called the LAW OF
RETRIBUTION.
* See "Isis
Unveiled," Before the Veil, xii. (Vol. I.).
** Plato:
"Parmenides," 141, E.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 "[[diagram]]," 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 [[diagram]] now the Wan of the Buddhist Mongolian.* It implies that
the "Central point" is not limited to one individual, however
perfect. That the Principle (God) is in Humanity, and Humanity, as all the
rest, is in it, like drops of water are in the Ocean, the four ends being
toward the four cardinal points, hence losing themselves in infinity.
Isarim, an
Initiate, is said to have found at Hebron, on the dead body of Hermes, the well
known Smaragdine tablet, which, it is said, contained the essence of Hermetic
wisdom . . . . "Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the
gross . . . . Ascend from the earth to heaven and then descend again to
earth" was traced on it. The riddle of the cross is contained in these
words, and its double mystery is solved -- to the Occultist.
"The
philosophical cross, the two lines running in opposite directions, the
horizontal and the perpendicular, the height and breadth, which the geometrizing
Deity divides at the intersecting point, and which forms the magical as well as
the scientific quaternary, when it is inscribed within the perfect square, is
the basis of the occultist. Within its mystical precinct lies the master-key
which opens the door of every science, physical as well as spiritual. It
symbolizes our human existence, for the circle of life circum-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Swastica
is certainly one of the oldest symbols of the Ancient Races. In our century,
says Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie (Royal Masonic Cyclopeadia) it (the Swastica)
"has survived in the form of the mallet" in the Masonic Fraternity.
Among the many "meanings" the author gives of it, we do not find,
however, the most important one, masons evidently not knowing it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 557 THE PRIMITIVE CROSS
scribes the four
points of the cross, which represent in succession birth, life, death, and
IMMORTALITY.
" 'Attach
thyself,' say the alchemists, 'to the four letters of the tetragram disposed in
the following manner: The letters of the ineffable name are there, although
thou mayest not discern them at first. The incommunicable axiom is
kabalistically contained therein, and this is what is called the magic arcanum
by the masters.' " ("Isis Unveiled.")
Again:-- The
[[diagram]] (Tau), and the astronomical cross of Egypt [[diagram]] 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 [[diagram]], but in the original Egyptian hieroglyphics as
a perfect Christian cross [[diagram]] (Tat, the emblem of stability). In the
Revelation, also, the "Alpha and Omega" (spirit and matter), the first
and the last, stamps the name of his Father in the foreheads of the elect, (p.
323, Vol. II.) Moses, in Exodus xii. 22, orders his people to mark their
door-posts and lintels with blood, lest the "Lord God" should make a
mistake and smite some of his chosen people, instead of the doomed Egyptians.
And this mark is a tau! The identical Egyptian handled cross, with the half of
which talisman Horus raised the dead, as is shown on a sculptured ruin at
Philoe.
Enough was said
in the text about the Swastica and the Tau. Verily may the Cross be traced back
into the very depths of the unfathomable Archaic Ages! Its Mystery deepens
rather than clears, as we find it on the statues of Easter Island -- in old
Egypt, in Central Asia, engraved on rocks as Tau and Swastica, in pre-Christian
Scandinavia,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[hebrew]], 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 [[diagram]] (in Egypt) of a Svastika without the
four additional prolongations (thus: [[diagram]], not [[diagram]]) plunged in a
deep sleep (the "Sleep of Siloam" it is called to this day among the
Initiates in Asia Minor, in Syria, and even higher Egypt). He was allowed to
remain in this state for three days and three nights, during which time his
Spiritual Ego was said to confabulate with the "gods," descend into
Hades, Amenti, or Patala, (according to the country), and do works of charity
to the invisible beings, whether souls of men or Elemental Spirits; his body
remaining all the time in a temple crypt or subterranean cave. In Egypt it was
placed in the Sarcophagus in the King's Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, and
carried during the night of the approaching third day to the entrance of a
gallery, where at a certain hour the beams of the rising Sun struck full on the
face of the entranced candidate, who awoke to be initiated by Osiris, and Thoth
the God of Wisdom.
Let the reader
who doubts the statement consult the Hebrew originals before he denies. Let him
turn to some most suggestive Egyptian bas reliefs. One especially from the
temple of Philoe, represents a scene of initiation. Two Gods-Hierophants, one
with the head of a hawk (the Sun), the other ibis-headed (Mercury, Thoth, the
god of Wisdom and secret learning, the assessor of Osiris-Sun), are standing
over the body of a candidate just initiated. They are in the act of pouring on
his head a double stream of water (the water of life and new birth), which
stream is interlaced in the shape of a cross and full of small ansated crosses.
This is allegorical of the awakening of the candidate
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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-Aleare.
In this
extraordinary sculpture and painting one sees the disc of the Sun beaming upon
an ansated cross placed upon a cross of which those of the Calvary were perfect
copies. The ancient MSS. mention these as the "hard couches of those who
were in (spiritual) travail, the act of giving birth to themselves." A
quantity of such cruciform "couches," on which the candidate, thrown
into a dead trance at the end of his supreme initiation, was placed and
secured, were found in the underground halls of the Egyptian temples after
their destruction. The worthy and holy Fathers of the Cyril and Theophilus
types used them freely, believing they had been brought and concealed there by
some new converts. Alone Origen, and after him Clemens Alexandrinus and other
ex-initiates, knew better. But they preferred to keep silent.
Again, let the
reader read the Hindu "fables," as the Orientalists call them, and
remember the allegory of Visvakarma, the creative power, the great architect of
the world, called in the Veda "the all-seeing god," who
"sacrifices himself to himself" (the Spiritual Egos of mortals are
his own essence, one with him, therefore). Remember that he is called Deva
Vardhika "the builder of the gods" and that it is he who ties (the
Sun) Surya, his son-in-law, on his lathe, in the exoteric allegory; on the
Swastika, in esoteric tradition, as on earth he is the Hierophant Initiator,
and cuts away a portion of his brightness. Visvakarma, remember again, is the
Son of Yoga-Siddha, i.e., the holy power of Yoga, and the fabricator of the
"fiery weapon," the magic Agneyastra. The narrative is given more
fully elsewhere. The author of the Kabalistic work so often quoted from,
asks:--
"The theoretical
use of crucifixion must have been somehow connected with the personification of
this symbol (the structure of the garden of Paradise symbolized by a crucified
man). But how? And as showing what? The symbol was of the origin of measures,
shadowing forth creative law or design. What practically, as regards humanity,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[hebrew]] man was the
primordial word -- "the very first word possessed by the Hebrews, whoever
they were, to carry the idea by sound of a man. The essential of this word was
113 (the numerical value of that word) from the beginning, and carried with it
the elements of the cosmical system displayed."
This is
demonstrated by the Hindu Wittoba -- a form of Vishnu -- as said already. The
figure of Wittoba, even to the nail-marks on the feet,* is that of Jesus
crucified, in all its details save the Cross; and that MAN was meant is proved
to us further by the fact of the Initiate being reborn after his crucifixion on
the TREE OF LIFE. This "tree" has now become exoterically, through
its use by the Romans as an instrument of torture, and the ignorance of the
early Christian schemers, the tree of death!
Thus, one of the
seven esoteric meanings implied in this mystery of Crucifixion by the mystic
inventors of the system -- the original elaboration and adoption of which dates
back to the very establishment of the MYSTERIES -- is discovered in the
geometrical symbols containing the history of the evolution of man. The
Hebrews, whose prophet Moses was so learned in the esoteric Wisdom of Egypt,
and who adopted their numerical system from the Phoenicians, and later from the
Gentiles, from whom they borrowed most of their Kabalistic Mysticism, adapted,
most ingeniously, the Cosmic and anthropological symbols of the
"heathen" nations to their peculiar secret records. If Christian
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Moor's
Hindu Pantheon, where Wittoba's left foot bears the mark of the nail -- on the
figure of his idol.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Shanah "lunar year," so mystically connected
with the name of Jehovah, the supposed "father" of Jesus, and
embosomed the mystic idea in an astronomical value and formula.
The original
idea of "Man Crucified" in Space belongs certainly to the ancient
Hindus, and Muir shows it in his "Hindu Pantheon" in the engraving
that represents Wittoba. Plato adopted it in his decussated Cross in Space, the
[[diagram]], "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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. Levi: "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 Aeonas' -- a sign of the Cross,
absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism
made the militant and official Church completely lose." (Dogma et Ritual,
etc., Vol. II., p. 88.)
The
"militant and official Church" did more: having helped herself to
what had never belonged to her, she took only that which the "profane"
had, the Kabalistic meaning of the male and female Sephiroth. She never lost
the inner and higher meaning since she never had it -- E. Levi's pandering to
Rome, notwithstanding. The sign of the cross adopted by the Latin Church was
phallic from the beginning, while that of the Greeks was the cross of the
neophytes, the CHREST.
------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas,
"Sound" and "Speech," may be collated with the Gnostic "Vowels"
and the "Voices" of the Thunders and Angels in
"Revelation." The same will be found in Pistis Sophia, and other
ancient Fragments and MSS. This was remarked even by the matter-of-fact author
of "The Gnostics and their Remains."
Through
Hippolytus, an early Church Father, we learn what Marcus -- a Pythagorean
rather than a Christian Gnostic, and a Kabalist most certainly -- had received
in mystic revelation. It is said that "Marcus had it revealed unto him
that 'the seven heavens'* . . . . sounded each one vowel, which, all combined
together, formed a complete doxology"; in clearer words: "the Sound
whereof being carried down (from these seven heavens) to earth, became the
creator and parent of all things that be on earth." (See
"Hippolytus," vi., 48, and King's Gnostics, p. 200.) Translated from
the Occult phraseology into still plainer language this would read: "The
Sevenfold LOGOS having differentiated into seven Logoi, or creative potencies
(vowels) these (the second logos, or "Sound") created all on Earth.
Assuredly one
who is acquainted with Gnostic literature can hardly help seeing in St. John's
Apocalypse, a work of the same school of thought. For we find John saying
(chap. x. 3, 4), "Seven thunders uttered their voices . . . and I was
about to write . . . (but) I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, 'Seal up
those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.' " The
same injunction is given to Marcus, the same to all other semi and full
Initiates. Yet the sameness of equivalent expressions used, and of the
underlying ideas, always betrays a portion of the mysteries. We must always
seek for more than one meaning in every mystery allegorically revealed,
especially in those in which the number seven and its multiplication seven by
seven, or forty-nine, appear. Now when the Rabbi Jesus is requested (in Pistis
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"Heavens" are identical with "Angels," as already stated.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
([[diagram]]) making the perfect number ten.
Also, these
numbers applied equally to divisions of time, to cosmography metaphysical and
physical, as well as to man and everything else in visible nature. Thus these
Seven vowels with their forty-nine powers are identical with the three and the
Seven Fires of the Hindus and their forty-nine fires; identical with the
numerical mysteries of the Persian Simorgh; identical with those of the Jewish
Kabalists. The latter, dwarfing the numbers (their mode of blinds), made the
duration of each successive renewal (what we call in esoteric parlance Round)
of the seven renewals of the globe only of 7,000 years, instead of, as is more
likely, 7,000,000,000, and assigned to the total duration of the universe
49,000 years only. (Compare § "Chronology of the Brahmins.")
Now, the Secret
Doctrine furnishes a key which reveals to us on indisputable grounds of
comparative analogy that Garuda, the allegorical and monstrous half-man and
half-bird, -- the Vahan or vehicle on which Vishnu (who is Kala,
"time") is shown to ride -- is the origin of all other such
allegories. He is the Indian phoenix, the emblem of cyclic and periodical time,
the "man-lion" Singha, of whose representations the so-called
"gnostic gems" are so full.* "Over the seven rays of the lion's
crown, and corresponding to their points, stand, in many cases, the seven
vowels of the Greek alphabet [Gk char], testifying to the Seven Heavens."
This is the Solar lion and the emblem of the Solar cycle, as
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As confessed
by King, the great authority on Gnostic antiquities, these gnostic gems are not
the work of the Gnostics, but belong to pre-christian periods, and are the work
of magicians (p. 241).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 565 WHEN TIME BE NO LONGER.
Garuda* is that
of the great cycle, the "Maha-Kalpa" co-eternal with Vishnu, and
also, of course, the emblem of the Sun, and Solar cycle. This is shown by the
details of the allegory. At his birth, Garuda is mistaken for Agni, the God of
Fire, on account of his (Garuda's) "dazzling splendour," and called
thereupon Gaganeswara, "lord of the sky." Again, his being
represented as Osiris, and by many heads of allegorical monsters on the Abraxas
(gnostic) gems, with the head and beak of an eagle or a hawk (solar birds),
denotes Garuda's solar and cyclic character. His Son is Jatabu, the cycle of
60,000 years. As well remarked by C. W. King:-- "Whatever the primary
meaning (of the gem with the solar lion and vowels) it was probably imported in
its present shape from INDIA, that true fountain head of gnostic
iconography" (Gnostics, p. 218).
The mysteries of
the seven gnostic vowels, uttered by the thunders of St. John, can be unriddled
only by the primeval and original Occultism of Aryavarta, brought into India by
the primeval Brahmins, who had been initiated in Central Asia. And this is the
Occultism we study and try to explain, as much as is possible in these pages.
Our doctrine of seven Races and Seven Rounds of life and evolution around our
terrestrial chain of spheres, may be found even in Revelation.** When the seven
"thunders," or "sounds," or "vowels" -- one
meaning out of the seven for each such vowel relating directly to our own Earth
and its seven Root-Races in each Round -- "had uttered their voices"
-- but forbidden the Seer to write them, and made him "seal up those
things" -- what did the Angel "standing upon the sea and upon the
earth" do? He lifted his hand to heaven "and sware by him that liveth
for ever and ever . . . . that there should be time no longer." "But
in the days of the voice of the seventh angel when he shall begin to sound, the
Mystery of God (of the Cycle) should be finished" (x. 7), which means, in
theosophic phraseology, that when the Seventh Round is completed, then Time
will cease. "There shall be time no longer" very naturally, since
pralaya shall set in and there will remain no one on earth to keep a division
of time, during that periodical dissolution and arrest of conscious life.
Dr. Kenealy and
others believed this doctrine of the Rabbins (their calculations of cyclic
seven and forty-nine) to have been brought by
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The lack of
intuition in Orientalists and antiquarians past and present, is remarkable.
Thus, Wilson, the translator of Vishnu Purana, declares in his Preface that in
the Garuda Purana he found "no account of the birth of Garuda."
Considering that an account of "Creation" in general is given
therein, and that Garuda is co-eternal with Vishnu, the Maha Kalpa, or Great
Life-CycIe, beginning with and ending with the manifesting Vishnu, what other
account of Garuda's birth could be expected !
** Vide
Revelation xvii., verses 2 and 10; and Leviticus xxiii., verses 15 to 18; the
first passage speaking of the "Seven Kings," of whom five have gone;
and the second about the "Seven Sabbaths," etc.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas and Upanishads are a good proof of it. The latter have
passed entirely into Gnostic literature; and a Brahmin needs only to read
Pistis Sophia* to recognize his forefathers' property, even to the phraseology
and similes used. Compare: in Pistis Sophia the disciple says to Jesus:
"Rabbi, reveal unto us the Mysteries of the Light (i.e., the "Fire of
Knowledge or Enlightenment") . . . forasmuch as we have heard thee saying
that there is another baptism of smoke, and another baptism of the Spirit of
Holy Light," i.e., the Spirit of FIRE. "I baptize you with water, but
. . . . he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire," says John
of Jesus (Matt. iii. 2); meaning this esoterically. The real significance of
this statement is very profound. It means that he, John, a non-initiated
ascetic, can impart to his disciples no greater wisdom than the mysteries
connected with the plane of matter (water being a symbol of it). His gnosis was
that of exoteric and ritualistic dogma, of dead-letter orthodoxy; ** while the
wisdom which Jesus, an Initiate of the higher mysteries, would reveal to them,
was of a higher character, for it was the "FIRE" Wisdom of the true
gnosis or the real spiritual enlightment. One was FIRE, the other the SMOKE.
For Moses, the fire on Mount Sinai, and the spiritual wisdom imparted; for the
multitudes of the "people" below, for the profane, Mount Sinai in
(through) smoke, i.e., the exoteric husks of orthodox or sectarian ritualism.
Now, having the
above in view, read the dialogue between the sages Narada and Davamata in the
Anugita, the antiquity and importance of which MS. (an episode from the
Mahabharata) one can learn in the "Sacred Books of the East," edited
by Prof. Max Muller.** Narada is discussing upon the breaths or the
"life-winds," as they are called in
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Pistis Sophia
is an extremely important document, a genuine Evangel of the Gnostics, ascribed
at random to Valentinus, but much more probably a pre-Christian work in its
original. It was discovered in a Coptic MS. by Schwartze, in the British
Museum, quite accidentally, and translated by him into Latin; after which text
and (Latin) version were published by Petermann in the year 1853. In the text
itself the authorship of this Book is ascribed to Philip the Apostle, whom
Jesus bids to sit down and write the revelation. It is genuine and ought to be
as canonical as any other gospel. Unfortunately it remains to this day
untranslated.
** In the Cycle
of Initiation, which was very long, water represented the first and lower steps
toward purification, while trials connected with fire came last. Water could
regenerate the body of matter; FIRE alone, that of the inner Spiritual man.
*** See
Introduction by Kashinath Trimbak Telang, M.A.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 567 TRUTH BETWEEN TWO CONTRASTS.
the clumsy
translations of such words as Prana, Apana, etc., whose full esoteric meaning
and application to individual functions can hardly be rendered in English. He
says of this Science that "it is the teaching of the Veda that the fire verily
is all the deities, and knowledge of it arises among Brahmans, being
accompanied by intelligence." By "fire," says the Commentator,
he means the SELF. By "intelligence," the Occultist says, Narada
means neither "discussion" nor "argumentation," as Aruna
Misra believes, but "intelligence" truly, or the adaptation of the
fire of Wisdom to Exoteric Ritualism for the profane. This is the chief concern
of the Brahmans (who were the first to set the example to other nations who
thus anthropomorphized and carnalized the grandest metaphysical truths). Narada
makes it plain and is made to say: "The smoke of that fire, which is of
excellent glory, appears in the shape of darkness" (verily so!); "its
ashes (are) passion; and goodness is that in connection with it in which the
offering is thrown": i.e., that faculty in the disciple which apprehends
the subtle truth (the flame) which escapes heavenward, while the objective
sacrifice remains as a proof and evidence of piety only to the profane. For
what can Narada mean in teaching that "those who understand the sacrifice
understand the Samana and the Vyana as the principal (offering)"; and
"the Prana and Apana, but portions of the offering . . . and between them
is the fire . . . . that is the excellent seat of the Udana as understood by
Brahmanas. As to that which is distinct from these pairs, hear me speak about
that. Day and night are a pair, between them is the fire. . . That which exists
and that which does not exist are a pair, between them is the fire, etc.,"
and after every such contrast Narada adds "That is the excellent seat of
the Udana as understood by Brahmanas."
Now many people
do not know the full meaning of such terms as Samana and Vyana, Prana and
Apana, explained as being "life-winds" (we say "principles and
their respective faculties and senses"), being offered up to Udana, the
soi-disant principal "life wind," (?) said to act at all the joints.
Therefore the reader, who is ignorant that the word "fire" means in
these allegories both the "Self" and the higher divine knowledge,
will understand nothing in this; and will therefore entirely miss the point of
our argument, as its translators and even its editor the great Oxford
Sanskritist, Max Muller, has missed the true meaning of Narada's words. Exoterically,
all this enumeration of "life winds" means, of course, approximately,
that which is surmised in the foot-notes; namely, "The sense appears to be
this . . . . worldly life is due to the operations of the life-winds which are
attached to the SELF, and lead to its manifestations as individual souls (?).
Of these the Samana and Vyana are controlled and held under check by
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 568 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the Prana and
Apana. . . . The latter two are held in check and controlled by the Udana,
which thus controls all. And the control of this, which is the control of all
five . . . . leads to the Supreme Self" (p. 259, Anugita, "Sacred
Books of the East," Vol. VIII.)
The above is
given as an explanation of the text, which records the words of the Brahmana,
who narrates how he reached the ultimate Wisdom of Yogism, and had reached all
knowledge in this wise. Saying that he had "perceived by means of the SELF
the seat abiding in the SELF," where dwells the Brahman free from all; and
explaining that that indestructible principle was entirely beyond the
perception of senses (i.e., of the five "life-winds"), he adds that
"in the midst of an these (life-winds) which move about in the body and
swallow up one another, blazes the Vaisvanara fire sevenfold." This
"Fire," according to Nilakantha's Commentary, is identical with the
"I," the SELF, which is the goal of the ascetic (Vaisvanara being a
word often used for the Self). Then the Brahmana goes on to enumerate that
which is meant by the word "Sevenfold," and says, "The nose (or
smell), the tongue (taste), the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth,
the mind, and the understanding, these are the seven tongues of the blaze of
Vaisvanara,*. . . . . those are the seven (kinds of) fuel for me,**. . . . .
these are the seven great officiating priests."
These seven
priests are accepted by Arjuna Misra in the sense of meaning "the soul
distinguished as so many (souls, or principles) with reference to these several
powers"; and, finally, the translator seems to accept the explanation, and
reluctantly admits that "they may mean" this; though he himself takes
the sense to mean "the powers of hearing, etc. (the physical senses, in
short) which are presided over by the several deities." (Vide loc. cit.,
p. 259, f.n. 6.)
But whatever it
may mean, whether in scientific or orthodox interpretations, this passage on
page 259 explains Narada's statements on page 276, and shows them referring to
exoteric and esoteric methods and contrasting them. Thus the Samana and the
Vyana, though subject to the Prana and the Apana, and all the four to Udana in
the matter of acquiring the Pranayama (of the Hatha-Yogi, chiefly, or the
"lower" form of the Yoga) are yet referred to as the principal
offering, for, as rightly argued by the commentator, their "operations are
more practically important for vitality"; i.e., they are the grossest, and
are offered in the sacrifice, to disappear, so to speak, in the quality of
darkness of that fire or its SMOKE (mere exoteric ritualistic form). But
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
astronomical and cosmical key, Vaisvanara is Agni, son of the Sun, or
Viswanaras, but in the psycho-metaphysical symbolism it is the SELF, in the
sense of non-separateness, i.e., both divine and human.
** Here the
speaker personifies the said divine SELF.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 569 THE DIVINE SELF'S WISDOM.
Prana and Apana,
though shown as subordinate (because less gross or more purified), have the
FIRE between them: the Self and the secret knowledge possessed by that Self. So
for the good and evil, and for "that which exists and that which does not
exist"; all these "pairs"* have fire between them, i.e.,
esoteric knowledge, the Wisdom of the divine SELF. Let those who are satisfied
with the Smoke of the FIRE remain wherein they are, that is to say within the
Egyptian darkness of theological fictions and dead-letter interpretations.
The above is
written only for the Western students of Occultism and Theosophy. The writer
presumes to explain these things neither to the Hindus, who have their own
Gurus; nor to the Orientalists, who think they know more than all the Gurus and
Rishis, past and present, put together. These rather lengthy quotations and
examples cited are necessary, if even to point out to the student the works he
has to study so as to derive benefit and learning from comparison. Let him read
Pistis Sophia in the light of the Bhagavatgita, the Anugita and others; and
then the statement made by Jesus in the Gnostic Gospel will become clear, and
the dead letter blinds disappear at once. Read this and compare with the
explanation from the Hindu scriptures just given. . . . "And no name is
more excellent than all these (seven) vowels. A name wherein be contained all
names, all Lights, and all (the fortynine) powers, knowing it, if a man quits
this body of matter** no Smoke (i.e., no theological delusion),*** no darkness,
nor Ruler of the Sphere (no personal genius or planetary spirit called God), or
of Fate (karma) shall
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Compare with
these "pairs of opposites," in the Anugita, the "pairs" of
AEons, in the elaborate system of Valentinus, the most learned and profound
master of Gnosis. As the "pairs of opposites," male and female, are
all derived from Akasa (undeveloped and developed, differentiated and
undifferentiated, or SELF or Prajapati), so are the Valentinian
"pairs" of male and female AEons shown to emanate from Bythos, the
pre-existing eternal Depth, and in their secondary emanation from Ampsiu-Ouraan
(or sempiternal Depth and Silence), the second Logos. In the esoteric emanation
there are seven chief "pairs of opposites"; and so also in the
Valentinian system there were fourteen, or twice seven. Epiphanius, copying
incorrectly, "copied one pair twice over," Mr. C. W. King thinks,
"and thus adds one pair to the proper fifteen." ("The
Gnostics," etc., pp. 263-4.) Here King falls into the opposite error: the
pairs of AEons are not 15 (a blind) but 14, as the first AEon is that from
which others emanate, Depth and Silence being the first and only emanation from
Bythos. As Hippolytus shows: "The AEons of Valentinus are confessedly the
Six Radicals of Simon (Magus)," with the seventh, Fire, at their head. And
these are: Mind, Intelligence, Voice, Name, Reason and Thought subordinate to
FIRE, the higher self, or precisely the "Seven Winds" or the
"Seven Priests" of Anugita.
** Not necessarily
at death only, but during Samadhi or mystic trance.
*** All the
words and sentences between parenthetical marks, are the writer's. This is
translated directly from the Latin MS. of the British Museum. King's
translation in the Gnostics conforms too much to the gnosticism as explained by
the Church-Fathers.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* the Invisible God, and
the triple-powered Gods, so soon as he shall have uttered that name in those
places, they shall all be shaken and thrown one upon the other, so that they
shall be ready to melt, perish and disappear, and shall cry aloud, 'O, Light of
all Lights that art in the Boundless Light, remember us also and purify us!'
"
It is easy to
see who this Light and Name are: the light of Initiation and the name of the
"Fire-Self," which is no name, no action, but a Spiritual,
ever-living Power, higher even than the "Invisible God," as this
Power is ITSELF.
But if the able and learned author of the
"Gnostics and their Remains" has not sufficiently allowed for the
Spirit of allegory and mysticism in the fragments translated and quoted by him,
in the above named work, from Pistis Sophia -- other Orientalists have done far
worse. Having neither his intuitional perception of the Indian origin of the
Gnostic Wisdom still more than of their "gems," most of them,
beginning with Wilson and ending with the dogmatic Weber, have made most
extraordinary blunders with regard to almost every symbol. Sir M. Monier
Williams and others show a very decided contempt for the "Esoteric
Buddhists" as theosophists are now called; yet no Student of Occult
philosophy has ever mistaken a cycle for a living personage and vice versa, as
was very often the case with our learned Orientalists. An instance or two may
illustrate the statement more graphically. Let us choose the best known.
In the Ramayana,
Garuda is called "the maternal uncle of Sagara's 60,000 sons"; and
Ansumat, Sagara's grandson, "the nephew of the 60,000 uncles" reduced
to ashes by the look of Kapila, "the Purushottama" (or infinite
Spirit), who caused Sagara's horse for the Aswamedha sacrifice to disappear.
Again, Garuda's son** -- Garuda being himself the Maha-Kalpa or great cycle --
Jatayu, the king of the feathered tribe, when on the point of being slain by
Ravana who carries off Sita -- says, speaking of himself:
"It is
60,000 years O King, that I am born," after which turning his back on the
Sun -- he dies.
Jatayu is, of
course, the cycle of 60,000 years within the great cycle of GARUDA; hence he is
represented as his son, or nephew, ad libitum,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Barbelo is one
of the three "Invisible Gods," and, as C. W. King believes, includes
"the Divine Mother of the Saviour," or rather Sophia Achamoth (Vide
cap. 359).
** In other
Puranas Jatayu is the son of Aruna, Garuda's brother, both the Sons of Kasyapa.
But all this is external allegory.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 571 THE ANTIQUITY OF THE KAPILAS.
since the whole
meaning rests in his being placed on the line of Garuda's descendants. Then,
again, there is Diti -- the Mother of the Maruts -- whose descendants and
progeny belonged to the posterity of Hiranyaksha, "whose number was 77
crores (or 770 millions) of men." (See Padma Purana.) All such narratives
are pronounced meaningless fictions and absurdities. But -- Truth is the
daughter of Time, verily; and time will show.
Meanwhile, what
could be easier than an attempt, at least, to verify Puranic chronology? There
are many Kapilas; but the Kapila who slew King Sagara's progeny -- 60,000 men
strong -- was undeniably Kapila, the founder of the Sankhya philosophy, since
it is so stated in the Puranas; although one of them flatly denies the
imputation without explaining its esoteric meaning. It is the Bhagavata Purana
(IX. viii., 12 and 13), which says that "the report that the sons of the
King were reduced to ashes by the mere glance of the sage is not true."
"For," as it argues, "how can the quality of darkness, the
product of anger, exist in a sage whose goodness was the essence that purified
the world -- the earth's dust, as it were, attributed to Heavens! How should
mental perturbation distract that sage, identified with the Supreme Spirit, and
who has steered here (on earth) that solid vessel of the Sankhya (philosophy),
with the help of which he who desires to obtain liberation crosses the dreaded
ocean of existence, that path to death?"
The Purana is in
duty bound to speak as it does. It has a dogma to promulgate and a policy to
carry out -- that of great secrecy with regard to mystical divine truths
divulged for countless ages only at initiation. It is not in the Puranas,
therefore, that we have to look for an explanation of the mystery connected
with various transcendental states of being. That the story is an allegory is
seen upon its very face: the 60,000 Sons, brutal, vicious, and impious, are the
personification of the human passions that a "mere glance of the
sage" -- the SELF who represents the highest state of purity that can be
reached on earthreduces to ashes. But it has also other significations --
cyclic and chronological meanings, -- a method of marking the periods when
certain sages flourished, found also in other Puranas.
Now it is as
well ascertained as any tradition can be, that it was at Hardwar (or
Gangadwara, the "door or gate of the Ganges") at the foot of the
Himalayas, that Kapila sat in meditation for a number of years. Not far from
the Sewalik range, the "pass of Hardwar" is called to this day
"Kapila's Pass"; and the place, "Kapilasthen," by the
ascetics. It is there that Ganga (Ganges) emerging from its mountainous gorge,
begins its course over the sultry plains of India. And it is as clearly
ascertained by geological survey that the tradition which claims that the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Purana, Vol. III. p. 309).
Have geologists ever calculated the number of millenniums it has taken the sea
to recede to where it is now, from Hardwar, 1,024 feet above the level of the
sea at present? If they did, those Orientalists who show Kapila flourishing
from the 1st to the 9th cent. A.D., might change their opinions, if only for
one of two very good reasons: the true number of years elapsed since Kapila's
day is in the Puranas unmistakably, though the translators fail to see it. And
secondly -- the Kapila of the Satya, and the Kapila of the Kali-Yugas may be
one and the same INDIVIDUALITY, without being the same PERSONALITY.
Kapila, besides
being the name of a personage, of the once living Sage and the author of
Sankhya philosophy, is also the generic name of the Kumaras, the celestial
ascetics and virgins; therefore the very fact of Bhagavata Purana calling that
Kapila -- which it showed just before as a portion of Vishnu -- the author of
Sankhya philosophy, ought to have warned the reader of a blind containing an
esoteric meaning. Whether the Son of Vitatha, as Harivansa shows him to be, or
of anyone else, the author of Sankhya cannot be the same as the Sage of the
SatyaYuga -- at the very beginning of the Manvantara, when Vishnu is shown in
the form of Kapila, "imparting to all creatures true Wisdom"; for
this relates to that primordial period when "the Sons of God" taught
to the just created men the arts and sciences, which have been cultivated and
preserved since then in the sanctuaries by the Initiates. There are several
well-known Kapilas in the Puranas. First the primeval sage, then Kapila, one of
the three "Secret" Kumaras; and Kapila, son of Kasyapa and Kadru --
the "many-headed Serpent," (See Vayu Purana placing him on the list
of the forty renowned sons of Kasyapa), besides Kapila, the great sage and
philosopher of the Kali Yuga. Being an Initiate, "a Serpent of Wisdom,"
a Naga, the latter was purposely blended with the Kapilas of the former ages.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Sige (Silence), Bythos (depth), Nous
(Spiritual Soul or Mind), and Aletheia (Truth).
It is they who
were the first to introduce and reveal to the world that which had remained
concealed for ages: namely, the Tau, in the shape of a Procrustean bed, and
Christos as incarnating in Chrestos, he who became for certain purposes a
willing candidate for a series of tortures, mental and physical.
For them the
whole of the Universe, metaphysical and material, was contained within, and
could be expressed and described by the digits of Number 10, the Pythagorean
decade.
This Decade representing
the Universe and its evolution out of Silence and the unknown Depths of the
Spiritual Soul, or anima mundi, presented two sides or aspects to the student.
It could be, and was at first so used and applied to the Macrocosm, after which
it descended to the Microcosm, or Man. There was, then, the purely intellectual
and metaphysical, or the "inner Science," and the as purely
materialistic or "surface science," both of which could be expounded
by and contained in the Decade. It could be studied, in short, from the
Universals of Plato, and the inductive method of Aristotle. The former started
from a divine comprehension, when the plurality proceeded from unity, or the
digits of the decade appeared, but to be finally re-absorbed, lost in the
infinite Circle. The latter depended on sensuous perception alone, when the
Decade could be regarded either as the unity that multiplies, or matter which
differentiates, its study being limited to the plane surface; to the Cross, or
the Seven which proceeds from the ten -- or the perfect number, on Earth as in
heaven.
This dual system
was brought, together with the Decade, by Pythagoras from India. That it was
that of the Brachmans and Iranians, as they are called by the ancient Greek
philosophers, is warranted to us by the whole range of Sanskrit literature,
such as the Puranas and the laws of Manu. In these "Laws" or
"Ordinances of Manu," it is said that Brahma first creates "the
ten lords of Being," the ten Prajapati or creative Forces; which ten
produce "seven" other Manus, or, rather, as some MSS. have it, Munin,
instead of Manun = "devotees," or holy Beings, which are the Seven
Angels of the Presence in the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 574 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Western
religion. This mysterious number Seven, born from the upper triangle
[[diagram]], the latter itself born from the apex thereof, or the Silent Depths
of the unknown universal soul (Sige and Bythos), is the sevenfold Saptaparna
plant, born and manifested on the surface of the soil of mystery, from the
threefold root buried deep under that impenetrable soil. This idea is fully
elaborated in Vol. I. § "Primordial Substance and Divine Thought,"
which the reader has to notice carefully, if he would grasp the metaphysical
idea involved in the above symbol. In man as in nature, it is, according to the
cis-Himalayan esoteric philosophy (which is that of the original Manu
Cosmogony), the septenary division that is intended by Nature herself. The
seventh principle (purusha) alone is the divine SELF, strictly speaking; for,
as said in Manu, "He (Brahma) having pervaded the subtile parts of those
six of unmeasured brightness," created or called them forth to
"Self"-consciousness or the consciousness of that One SELF (V. 16,
ch. i. Manu). Of these six, five elements (or principles, or Tattva, as
Medhatithi, the commentator thinks) "are called the atomic destructible
elements" (v. 27); they are described in the above-named section.
We have now to
speak of the Mystery language, that of the prehistoric races. It is not a
phonetic, but a purely pictorial and symbolical tongue. It is known at present
in its fulness to the very few, having become with the masses for more than
5,000 years an absolutely dead language. Yet most of the learned Gnostics,
Greeks and Jews, knew it, and used it, though very differently. A few instances
may be given.
On the plane
above, the Number is no Number but a nought -- a CIRCLE. On the plane below, it
becomes one -- which is an odd number. Each letter of the ancient alphabets
having had its philosophical meaning and raison d'etre, the number I signified
with the Alexandrian Initiates a body erect, a living standing man, he being
the only animal that has this privilege. And, by adding to the I a head, it was
transformed into a P, a symbol of paternity, of the creative potency; while R
signified a "moving man," one on his way. Hence PATER ZEUS had
nothing sexual or phallic either in its sound or form of letters; nor had
[[pater Deus]] (vide Ragon). If we turn now to the Hebrew Alphabet, we shall
find that while I or aleph, [[hebrew]], has a bull or an Ox for its symbol, 10,
the perfect number, or One of the Kabala is a Yodh [[hebrew]] (y, i, or j); and
means, as the first letter of Jehovah, the procreative organ, et seq.
The odd numbers
are divine, the even numbers are terrestrial, devilish, and unlucky. The
Pythagoreans hated the binary. With them it was the origin of differentiation,
hence of contrasts, discord, or matter, the beginning of evil. In the
Valentinian theogony, Bythos and Sige (Depth, Chaos, matter born in Silence)
are the primordial binary.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 575 THE THREE SCIENCES.
With the early
Pythagoreans, however, the duad was that imperfect state into which the first
manifested being fell when it got detached from the Monad. It was the point
from which the two roads -- the Good and the Evil -- bifurcated. All that which
was double-faced or false was called by them "binary." ONE was alone
Good, and Harmony, because no disharmony can proceed from one alone. Hence the
Latin word Solus in relation to one and only God, the Unknown of Paul. Solus,
however, very soon became Sol -- the Sun.
The ternary is
thus the first of the odd numbers, as the triangle is the first of the
geometrical figures. This number is truly the number of mystery par excellence.
To study it on the exoteric lines one has to read Ragon's Cours Interpretatif
des Initiations; on the esoteric -- the Hindu symbolism of numerals; as the
combinations which were applied to it are numberless. It is on the occult properties
of the three equal lines or sides of the Triangle that Ragon based his studies
and founded the famous masonic society of the Trinosophists (those who study
three sciences; an improvement upon the ordinary three masonic degrees, given
to those who study nothing except eating and drinking at the meetings of their
lodges). "The first line of the triangle offered to the apprentice for
study," writes the founder, -- "is the mineral kingdom, symbolized by
Tubalc . . . (Tubal-cain). The second side on which the 'companion' has to
meditate, is the vegetable kingdom, symbolized by Schibb [[diagram]]
(Schibboleth). In this kingdom begins the generation of the bodies. This is why
the letter G is presented radiant before the eyes of the adept (? !). The third
side is left to the master mason, who has to complete his education by the
study of the animal kingdom. It is symbolized by Maoben [[diagram]] (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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The reason for
it is simple, and was given in "Isis Unveiled." In geometry, one line
fails to represent a perfect body or figure, nor can two lines constitute a
demonstratively perfect figure. The triangle alone is the first perfect figure.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 [[diagram]] placed over vowels which
have or have not to be aspirated. The first sign [[diagram]] is called 'Strong
Spirit' or superior Spirit, the spirit of God aspired (spiratus) and breathed
by man. The second sign [[diagram]] 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 [[diagram]] is the tenth
sign of the Zodiac into which the Sun enters at the winter solstice, about
December 21st. But very few are those who know -- even in India, unless they
are initiated -- the real mystic connection which seems to exist, as we are
told, between the names Makara and Kumara. The first means some amphibious
animal called flippantly 'crocodile,' as some Orientalists think, and the
second is the title of the great patrons of Yogins (See "Saiva
Puranas,") the Sons of, and even one with, Rudra (Siva); a Kumara himself.
It is through their connection with Man that the Kumaras are likewise connected
with the Zodiac. Let us try to find out what the word Makara means.
The word Makara,
says the author of "The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac," "contains
within itself the clue to its correct interpretation. The letter Ma is
equivalent to No. 5, and Kara means hand. Now in Sanskrit Thribhujam means a
triangle, bhujam or Karam (both synonyms) being understood to mean a side. So
Makaram or Panchakaram means a Pentagon" -- the five-pointed star or
pentagon representing the five limbs of man.* Under the old system, we are
told, Makara was the eighth instead of the tenth sign.** It is "intended
to represent the faces of the Universe, and indicates that the Universe is
bounded by Pentagons," as the Sanskrit writers "speak also of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* What is the
meaning and the reason of this figure? Because, Manas is the fifth principle,
and because the pentagon is the symbol of Man -- not only of the five-limbed,
but rather of the thinking, conscious MAN.
** The reason
for it becomes apparent when Egyptian symbology is studied. See further on.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 577 POSEION'S FIVE MINISTERS.
Ashtadisa or
eight faces bounding Space," referring thus to the loka-palas, the eight
points of the compass (the four cardinal and the four intermediate points) . .
. "From an objective point of view the Microcosm is represented by the
human body. Makaram may be taken to represent simultaneously both the microcosm
and the macrocosm, as external objects of perception." (pp. 113, 115).
But the true
esoteric sense of the word "Makara," does not mean
"crocodile," in truth, at all, even when it is compared with the
animal depicted on the Hindu Zodiac. For it has the head and the fore-legs of
an antelope and the body and tail of a fish. Hence the tenth sign of the Zodiac
has been taken variously to mean a shark, a dolphin, etc.; as it is the vahan
of Varuna, the Ocean God, and is often called, for this reason, Jala-rupa or
"water-form." The dolphin was the vehicle of Poseidon-Neptune with
the Greeks, and one with him, esoterically; and this "dolphin" is the
"sea-dragon" as much as the Crocodile of the Sacred Nile is the
vehicle of Horus, and Horus himself. "I am the fish and seat of the great
Horus of Kem-our," says the mummy-form God with the crocodile's head (ch.
lxxxviii., 2, "Book of the Dead"). With the Peratae Gnostics it is
Chozzar (Neptune), who converts into a sphere the dodecagonal pyramid,
"and paints its gate with many colours." He has FIVE androgyne
ministers -- he is Makara, the Leviathan.
The rising Sun
being considered the Soul of the Gods sent to manifest itself to men every day,
and the crocodile rising out of the water at the first sunbeam, that animal
came finally to personify a Solar-fire devotee in India, as it personified that
fire, or the highest soul with the Egyptians.
In the Puranas,
the number of the Kumaras changes according to the exigencies of the allegory.
For occult purposes their number is given in one place as seven, then as four,
then as five. In the Kurma Purana it is said of them: "These five
(Kumara), O Brahman, were Yogins who acquired entire exemption from
passion." Their very name shows their connection with the said
constellation -- the Makara, and with some other Puranic characters connected
with the Zodiacal signs. This is done in order to veil what was one of the most
suggestive glyphs of the primitive Temples. They are mixed up astronomically,
physiologically, and mystically, in general, with a number of Puranic
personages and events. Hardly hinted at in the "Vishnu," they figure
in various dramas and events throughout all the other Puranas and sacred
literature; so that the Orientalists, having to pick up the threads of
connection hither and thither, have ended by proclaiming the Kumaras "due
chiefly to the fancy of the Puranic writers." But --
Ma, -- we are
told by the author of the "Twelve Signs of the Zodiac" -- is Five;
kara, a hand with its five fingers, as also a five-sided sign or
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 578 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
a pentagon. The
Kumara (in this case an anagram for occult purposes) are five in esotericism,
as Yogis -- because the last two names have ever been kept secret; they are the
fifth order of Brahmadevas, and the fivefold Chohans, having the soul of the
five elements in them, Water and Ether predominating, and therefore their
symbols were both aquatic and fiery. "Wisdom lies concealed under the
couch of him who rests on the golden lotos (padma) floating on the water."
In India it is Vishnu (one of whose avatars was Budha, as claimed in days of
old). The Prachetasas, the worshippers of Narayana (who, like Poseidon moved or
dwelt over not under the waters), plunged into the depths of the ocean for
their devotions and remained therein 10,000 years; and the Prachetasas are ten
exoterically, but five, esoterically. "Prachetas" is in Sanskrit, the
name of Varuna, the water god, Nereus, an aspect of the same as Neptune, the
Prachetasas being thus identical with the "five ministers" of
[[CHOZZAR]] (Poseidon) of the Peratae Gnostics. These are respectively called
[[AOT, AOAI, OTO, OTOB]], "the fifth, a triple name (making Seven) being
lost"* -- i.e., kept secret. This much for the "aquatic" symbol;
the "fiery" connecting them with the fiery symbol -- spiritually. For
purposes of identity, let us remember that as the mother of the Prachetasas was
Savarna, the daughter of the Ocean, so was Amphitrite the mother of Neptune's
mystic "ministers."
Now the reader
is reminded that these "five ministers" are symbolized both in the
Dolphin, who had overcome the chaste Amphitrite's unwillingness to wed
Poseidon, and in Triton their son. The latter, whose body above the waist is
that of a man and below a dolphin, a fish, is, again, most mysteriously
connected with Oannes, the Babylonian Dag, and further also with the (fish)
Avatar of Vishnu, Matsya, both teaching mortals Wisdom. The Dolphin, as every
mythologist knows, was placed for his service by Poseidon among the
constellations, and became with the Greeks, Capricornus, the goat, whose hind
part is that of a dolphin, thus shown identical with Makara, whose head is also
that of an antelope and the body and tail those of a fish. This is why the sign
of the Makara was borne on the banner of Kama deva, the Hindu god of love,
identified, in Atharva Veda, with Agni (the fire-god), the son of Lakshmi, as
correctly given by Harivansa. For Lakshmi and Venus are one, and Amphitrite is
the early form of Venus. Now Kama (the Makara-ketu) is "Aja" (the
unborn), and "Atma-bhu" (the self-existent), and Aja is the LOGOS in
the Rig-Veda, as he is shown therein to be the first manifestation of the ONE:
"Desire first arose in IT, which was the primal
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* So is Brahma's
fifth head, said to be lost, burnt to ashes by Siva's "central eye";
Siva being also panchanana "five faced." Thus the number is preserved
and secresy maintained on the true esoteric meaning.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 579 THE PUZZLES OF SYMBOLISM.
germ of
mind," that "which connects entity with non-entity" (or Manas,
the fifth, with Atma, the seventh, esoterically) say the Sages. This is the
first stage. The second, on the following plane of manifestation, shows Brahma
(whom we select as a representative for all the other first gods of the
nations) as causing to issue from his body his mind-born sons, "Sanandana
and others," who, in the fifth "creation," and again in the
ninth (for purposes of blind) become the Kumara. Let us close by reminding the
reader that goats were sacrificed to Amphitrite and the Nereids on the
sea-shore, as goats are sacrificed to this day to Durga Kali, who is only the
black side of Lakshmi (Venus), the white side of Sakti; and by suggesting what
connection these animals may have with Capricornus, in which appear
twenty-eight stars in the form of a goat, which goat was transformed by the
Greeks into Amalthaea -- Jupiter's foster-mother. Pan, the god of Nature, had
goat's feet, and changed himself into a goat at the approach of Typhon. But
this is a mystery which the writer dares not dwell upon at length, not being
sure of being understood. Thus the mystical side of the interpretation must be
left to the intuition of the student. Let us note one more thing in relation to
the mysterious number five. It symbolizes at one and the same time the Spirit
of life eternal and the Spirit of life and love terrestrial -- in the human
compound; and, it includes divine and infernal magic, and the universal and the
individual quintessence of being. Thus, the five mystic words or vowels (vide
infra) uttered by Brahma at "creation," which forthwith became the
Panchadasa (certain Vedic hymns, attributed to that God) are in their creative
and magical potentiality, the white side of the black Tantrik five
"makaras," or the five m's. "Makara," the constellation, is
a seemingly meaningless and absurd name. Yet, even besides its anagrammatical
significance in conjunction with the term "Kumara," the numerical
value of its first syllable and its esoteric resolution into five has a very
great and occult meaning in the mysteries of nature.
Suffice it to
say, that as the sign of Makara is connected with the birth of the spiritual
"microcosm," and the death or dissolution of the physical Universe
(its passage into the realm of the Spiritual)*; so the Dhyan Chohans, called in
India Kumara, are connected with both. Moreover, in the exoteric religions,
they have become the synonyms of the Angels of Darkness. Mara is the God of
Darkness, the Fallen One, and Death**; and yet it is one of the names of Kama,
the first god in the Vedas, the Logos, from whom have sprung the Kumaras, and
this
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "When the
Sun passes away behind the 30th degree of Makara and will reach no more the
sign of the Meenam (pisces) then the night of Brahma has come." . . .
** Death of
every physical thing truly; but Mara is also the unconscious quickener of the
birth of the Spiritual.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 580 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
connects them
still more with our "fabulous" Indian Makara, and the
crocodile-headed God in Egypt.* The crocodiles in the Celestial Nile are Five,
and the God Toum, the primordial deity creating the heavenly bodies and the
living beings, calls forth these crocodiles in his fifth creation. When Osiris,
"the defunct Sun," is buried and enters into Amenti, the sacred
crocodiles plunge into the abyss of primordial Waters -- "the great Green
One." When the Sun of life rises, they re-emerge out of the sacred river.
All this is highly symbolical, and shows how primeval esoteric truths found
their expression in identical symbols. But, as Mr. T. Subba Row truly declares,
"The veil, that was dexterously thrown over certain portions of the
mystery connected with the (Zodiacal) signs by the ancient philosophers, will
never be fully lifted up for the amusement or edification of the uninitiated
public."
Nor was number
five less sacred with the Greeks. The five words (Panchadasa) of Brahma have
become with the Gnostics the "Five Words" written upon the akasic
(shining) garment of Jesus at his glorification: the words [[ZAMA ZAMA OZZA
PAXAMA, OZAI]], translated by the Orientalists "the robe, the glorious
robe of my strength." These words were, in their turn, the anagrammatic
blind of the five mystic powers represented on the robe of the
"resurrected" Initiate after his last trial of three days' trance;
the five becoming seven only after his death, when the Adept became the full
CHRISTOS, the full KRISHNA-VISHNU, i.e., merged in Nirvana. The E Delphicum, a
sacred symbol, was the numeral five, again; and how sacred it was is shown by
the fact that the Corinthians (according to Plutarch) replaced the wooden
numeral in the Delphic Temple by a bronze one; and this one was transmuted by
Livia Augusta into a fac-simile of gold.
It is easy to
recognize in the two spirits -- the Greek accents or signs ([[diagram]]) 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, [[diagram]], 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Osiris is
called in the "Book of the Dead" "Osiris, the double Crocodile."
(See Chapter "On the Names of Osiris," cxlii.) "He is the good
and the bad Principle; the Day, and the Night Sun, the God, and the mortal
man." Thus far the Macrocosm and the Microcosm.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 581 THE MASTER MASON'S GRIP.
every
multiplication. It is the sign of every circumference, since its value in
degrees is equal to 9, i.e., to 3 + 6 + 0. It is a bad number under certain
conditions, and very unlucky. If number 6 was the symbol of our globe ready to
be animated by a divine spirit, 9 symbolized our earth informed by a bad or
evil spirit.
Ten, or the
Decade, brings all these digits back to unity, and ends the Pythagorean table.
Hence this figure -- [[diagram]], 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,* thus introducing
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Reflecting on
the Cross, the author of the "Source of Measures" shows that this
candlestick in the temple "was so composed that counting on either side
there were four candle-sockets; while at the apex, there being one in common to
both sides, there were in fact three to be counted on the one side and four on
the other, making in all number 7 upon the self-same idea of one in common with
the cross display. Take a line of one unit in breadth by three units long, and
place it on an incline; take another of four units long, and lean it upon this
one, from an opposite incline, making the top unit of the four in length the
corner or apex of a triangle. This is the display of the candlestick. Now take
away the line of three units in length and cross it on the one of four units in
length, and the cross form results. The same idea is conveyed in the six days
of the week in Genesis, crowned by the seventh, which was used by itself as a base
of circular measure" (p. 51).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 582 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
the phallic
element into religion, the more spiritually-minded nations had made of the
cross (as 3, 4 = 7), their most sacred divine symbol. In fact, Circle, Cross,
and Seven -- the latter being made a base of circular measurement -- are the
first primordial symbols. Pythagoras, who brought his wisdom from India, left
to posterity a glimpse into this truth. His school regarded number 7 as a
compound of numbers 3 and 4, which they explained in a dual manner. On the
plane of the noumenal world, the triangle was, as the first conception of the
manifested Deity, its image: "Father-Mother-Son"; and the Quaternary,
the perfect number, was the noumenal, ideal root of all numbers and things on
the physical plane. Some students, in view of the sacredness of Tetraktis and
the Tetragrammaton, mistake the mystic meaning of the Quaternary. The latter
was with the ancients only a secondary "perfection," so to speak,
because it related only to the manifested planes. Whereas it is the Triangle,
the Greek delta, [[diagram]], which was the "vehicle of the unknown
Deity." A good proof of it lies with the name of the Deity beginning with
Delta. Zeus was written [[Deus]], by the Boeotians,* thence the Deus of the
Latins. This, in relation to the metaphysical conception, with regard to the
meaning of the Septenary in the phenomenal world, but for purposes of profane
or exoteric interpretation, the symbolism changed. Three became the ideograph
of the three material elements -- air, water, earth; and four became the
principle of all that which is neither corporeal nor perceptible. But this has
never been accepted by the real Pythagoreans. Viewed as a compound of 6 and 1,
the senary and the unity, number seven was the invisible centre, the spirit of
everything (see further the explanation of 6), as there exists no body with six
lines constituting its form without a seventh being found as the central point
in it (see crystals and snow-flakes in so-called inanimate nature). Moreover,
number seven, they said, has all the perfection of the UNIT -- the number of
numbers. For as absolute unity is uncreated, and impartite (hence number-less)
and no number can produce it, so is the seven: no digit contained within the
decade can beget or produce it. And it is 4, which affords an arithmetical
division between unity and seven, as it surpasses the former by the same number
(three), as it is itself surpassed by the seven, since four is by as many
numbers above one, as seven is above four. (From a MS. supposed to be by
"St. Germain.")
"With the
Egyptians number 7 was the symbol of life eternal," says Ragon, and adds
that this is why the Greek letter Z, which is but a double 7 is the initial
letter of Zao, "I live," and of Zeus, "the father of all
living."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Liddell's
Greek-English Lexicon.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 583 THE MYSTERY OF THE NUMBER SIX.
Moreover, figure
6 was the symbol of the Earth during the autumn and winter "sleeping"
months, and figure 7 during spring and summer, -- as the Spirit of life
animated her at that time -- the seventh or central informing Force. We find
the same in the Egyptian mythos and symbol of Osiris and Isis, personifying
Fire and Water metaphysically, and the Sun and the Nile physically. The number
of the Solar year, 365 in days, is the numerical value of the word Neilos
(Nile). This, together with the Bull, with the Crescent and the ansated cross
between its horns, and the Earth under its astronomical symbol -- [[diagram]]
-- are the most phallic symbols of later antiquity.
"The Nile
was the river of time with the number of a year, or year and a day (364 + 1 =
365). It represented the parturient water of Isis, or Mother Earth, the moon,
the woman, and the cow, also the workshop of Osiris, representing the T'sod
Olaum of the Hebrews. The ancient name of this river was Eridanus, or the
Hebrew Iardan, with the Coptic or old Greek suffix. This was the door of the
Hebrew word Jared, or 'Source,' or Descent . . . of the river Jordan, which had
the same mythical use with the Hebrews that the Nile had with the Egyptians,*
it was the source of descent, and held the waters of life" (Unpub. MS.) It
was, to put it plainly, the symbol of the personified Earth, or Isis, regarded
as the womb of that Earth. This is shown clearly enough; and Jordan -- the
river so sacred now to Christians -- held no more sublime or poetical meaning
in it than the parturient waters of the moon (Isis, or Jehovah in his female
aspect). Now, as shown by the same scholar, Osiris was the sun, and the river
Nile, and the tropical year of 365 days; while Isis was the moon, the bed of
that river, or the mother earth "for the parturient energies, of which
water was a necessity," as also the lunar year of 354 days, "the
time-maker of the periods of gestation." All this then is sexual and
phallic, and our modern scholars seem to find in these symbols nothing beyond a
physiological or phallic meaning. Nevertheless, the three figures 365, or the
number of days in a solar year, have but to be read with the Pythagorean Key to
find in them a highly philosophical and moral meaning. One instance will be
sufficient. It can read:
The Earth --
animated by -- the Spirit of Life.
3. 6. 5.
Simply because 3
is equivalent to the Greek gamma, or [[G]], which letter is the symbol of gaia
(the Earth); while the figure 6 is the symbol of the animating or informing
principle, and the 5 is the universal quintessence which spreads in every
direction and forms all matter. (St. Germain's MS.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It had no such
meaning in the beginnings; nor during the earlier dynasties.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 584 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The few
instances and examples brought forward reveal only one small portion of the
methods used to read the symbolical ideographs and numerals of antiquity. The
system being of an extreme and complex difficulty, very few, even among the
Initiates, could master all the seven keys. Is it to be wondered, then, that
the metaphysical gradually dwindled down into the physical nature; that the
Sun, once upon a time the symbol of DEITY, became, as aeons glided by, that of
its creative ardour only; and that thence it fell into a glyph of phallic
significance? But surely, it is not those whose method was (like Plato's) to
proceed from the universals down to the particulars, who could ever have begun
by symbolizing their religions by sexual emblems! It is quite true, though
uttered by that incarnated paradox, Eliphas Levi, that "man is God on
Earth, and God is man in Heaven." But this could not, and never did apply
to the One Deity, only to the Hosts of ITS incarnated beams, called by us Dhyan
Chohans, by the ancients, Gods; and now transformed by the Church into devils
on the left, and into the Saviour on the right side!
But all such
dogma grew out of the one root, the root of wisdom, which grows and thrives on
the Indian soil. There is not an Archangel that could not be traced back to its
prototype in the sacred land of Aryavarta. These "prototypes" are all
connected with the Kumaras who appear on the scene of action by refusing -- as
Sanatkumara and Sananda -- to "create progeny." Yet they are called
the "creators" of (thinking) man. More than once they are brought
into connection with Narada -- another bundle of apparent incongruities, yet a
wealth of philosophical tenets. Narada is the leader of the Gandharvas, the
celestial singers and musicians; esoterically, the reason for it is explained
by the fact that the latter (the Gandharvas) are "the instructors of men
in the secret sciences." It is they, who "loving the women of the
Earth," disclosed to them the mysteries of creation; or, as in the Veda --
the "heavenly Gandharva" is a deity who knew and revealed the secrets
of heaven and divine truths, in general. If we remember what is said of this
class of Angels in Enoch and in the Bible, then the allegory is plain: their
leader, Narada, while refusing to procreate, leads men to become gods.
Moreover, all of these, as stated in the Vedas, are Chhandaja (will-born) or
incarnated (in different Manvantaras) of their own will; -- and they are shown
in exoteric literature as existing age after age; some being "cursed to be
re-born," others, incarnating as a duty. Finally, as the Sanakadikas, the
seven Kumaras who went to visit Vishnu on the "White Island"
(Sveta-dwipa) the island inhabited by the Maha Yogins -- they are connected
with Sakadwipa and the Lemurians and Atlanteans of the Third and Fourth Races.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 585 SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS.
In Esoteric
Philosophy, the Rudras (Kumaras, Adityas, Gandharvas, Asuras, etc.) are the
highest Dhyan Chohans or Devas as regards intellectuality. They are those who,
owing to their having acquired by self-development the five-fold nature --
hence the sacredness of number five -- became independent of the pure Arupa
devas. This is a mystery very difficult to realize and understand correctly.
For, we see that those who were "obedient to law" are, equally with
the rebels, doomed to be reborn in every age. Narada, the Rishi, is cursed by
Brahma to incessant peripateticism on Earth, i.e., to be constantly reborn. He
is a rebel against Brahma, and yet has no worse fate than the Jayas -- the
twelve great creative gods produced by Brahma as his assistants in the
functions of creation. For the latter, lost in meditation, only forgot to
create; and for this, they are equally cursed by Brahma to be born in every
manvantara. And still they are termed -- together with the rebels --
Chhandajas, or those born of their own will in human form!
All this is very
puzzling to one who is unable to read and understand the Puranas except in
their dead letter sense.* Hence we find the Orientalists refusing to be
puzzled, and cutting the Gordian knot of perplexity by declaring the whole
scheme "figments" "of Brahminical fancy and love of
exaggeration." But to the student of occultism, the whole is pregnant with
deeply philosophical meaning. We willingly leave the rind to the Western
Sanskritist, but claim the essence of the fruit for ourselves. We do more: we
concede that in one sense much in these so-called "fables" refers to
astronomical allegories about constellations, asterisms, stars, and planets.
Yet, while the Gandharva of the Rig-Veda may there be made to personify the
fire of the Sun, the Gandharva devas are entities both of a physical and
psychic character; while the Apsarasas (with other Rudras) are both qualities
and quantities. In short, if ever unravelled, the theogony of the Vedic Gods
will reveal fathomless mysteries of Creation and being. Truly says Parasara:
"These thirty-three divinities exist age after age, and their appearance
and disappearance is in the same manner as the sun sets and rises again."
(Book I., xv.)
There was a
time, when the Eastern symbol of the Cross and Circle, the Swastica, was
universally adopted. With the esoteric (and, for the matter of that, exoteric)
Buddhist, the Chinaman and the Mongolian, it means "the 10,000
truths." These truths, they say, belong to the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Yet this
sense, if once mastered, will turn out to be the secure casket which holds the
keys to the Secret Wisdom. True, a casket so profusely ornamented that its
fancy work hides and conceals entirely any spring for opening it, and thus
makes the unintuitional believe it has not, and cannot have, any opening in it.
Still the Keys are there, deeply buried, yet ever present to him who searches
for them.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 586 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
mysteries of the
unseen Universe and primordial Cosmogony and Theogony. "Since Fohat
crossed the Circle like two lines of flame (horizontally and vertically), the
hosts of the Blessed Ones have never failed to send their representatives upon
the planets they are made to watch over from the beginning." This is why
the Swastica is always placed -- as the ansated Cross was in Egypt -- on the
breasts of the defunct mystics. It is found on the heart of the images and
statues of Buddha, in Tibet and Mongolia. It is the seal placed also on the
hearts of the living Initiates, burnt into the flesh, for ever, with some.
This, because they have to keep those truths inviolate and intact, in eternal
silence and secrecy to the day these are perceived and read by their chosen
successors -- new Initiates -- "worthy of being entrusted with the ten
thousand perfections." So degraded, however, has it now become, that it is
often placed on the headgear of the "gods," the hideous idols of the
sacrilegious Bhons, the Dugpas (Sorcerers) of the Tibetan borderlands; until
found out by a Galukpa and torn off together with the head of the
"god;" though it would be better were it that of the worshipper which
was severed from the sinful body. Still, it can never lose its mysterious
properties. Throw a retrospective glance, and see it used alike by the
Initiates and Seers, as by the priests of Troy (found by Schliemann on the site
of that old city). One finds it with the old Peruvians, the Assyrians,
Chaldeans, as well as on the walls of the old-world cyclopean buildings; in the
catacombs of the New world, and in those of the Old (?), at Rome, where,
because the first Christians are supposed to have concealed themselves and
their religion, it is called Crux Dissimulata.
"According
to de Rossi, the Swastica from an early period was a favourite form of the
cross employed with an occult signification, which shows the secret was not
that of the Christian cross. One Swastica cross in the catacombs is the sign of
an inscription which reads [['ZOTIKO ZOTIKE]],' 'Vitalis Vitalia,' or 'life of
life.' "*
But the best
evidence to the antiquity of the cross is that which is brought forward by the
author of Natural Genesis on page 433.
"The value
of the cross," says Mr. Massey, "as a Christian symbol, is supposed
to date from the time when Jesus Christ was crucified. And yet in the
'Christian' Iconography of the Catacombs no figure of a man appears upon the
Cross during the first six or seven centuries. There are all forms of the cross
except that -- the alleged starting-point of the new religion. That was not the
initial but the final form of the Crucifix.** During some six
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Quoted in
"The Natural Genesis" (p. 427, Vol. I.).
** With the
Christians, most undeniably. With the pre-Christian symbologists it was, as
said, the Bed or Couch of Torture during the Initiation Mystery, the
"Crucifix" being placed horizontally, on the ground, and not erect,
as at the time when it became the Roman gallows.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol. 2, Page]] 587 THE CROSS, A CHRISTIAN
AFTER-THOUGHT.
centuries after
the Christian era the foundation of the Christian religion in a crucified
Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! The earliest known form of the
human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great
to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst
no image of the Crucified is found in the Catacombs at Rome earlier than that
of San Giulio, belonging to the seventh or eighth century. . . . There is no
Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ even as the Stauros cross was
a type and a name of Horus, the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified,
is the essential object of representation in its art, and of adoration in its
religion. The germ of the whole growth and development can be traced to the
cross. And that cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen
different shapes. The cult began with the cross, and Julian was right in saying
he waged a 'Warfare with the X'; which he obviously considered had been adopted
by the A-Gnostics and Mytholators to convey an impossible significance.* During
centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a
living being. It was made divine at first, and humanized at last."
Few
world-symbols are more pregnant with real occult meaning than the Swastica. It
is symbolized by the figure 6; for, like that figure, it points in its concrete
imagery, as the ideograph of the number does, to the Zenith and the Nadir, to
North, South, West, and East; one finds the unit everywhere, and that unit
reflected in all and every unit. It is the emblem of the activity of Fohat, of
the continual revolution of the "wheels," and of the Four Elements,
the "Sacred Four," in their mystical, and not alone in their cosmical
meaning; further, its four arms, bent at right angles, are intimately related,
as shown elsewhere, to the Pythagorean and Hermetic scales. One initiated into
the mysteries of the meaning of the Swastica, say the Commentaries, "can
trace on it, with mathematical precision, the evolution of Kosmos and the whole
period of Sandhya." Also "the relation of the Seen to the
Unseen," and "the first procreation of man and species."
To the Eastern
Occultist the TREE of Knowledge in the Paradise of man's own heart, becomes the
Tree of Life eternal, and has nought to do with man's animal senses. It is an
absolute mystery that reveals itself only through the efforts of the imprisoned
Manas and the Ego to liberate themselves from the thraldom of sensuous
perception and see, in the light of the one eternal present Reality. To the
Western Kabalist, and now far more to the superficial Symbologist, nursed in
the lethal atmosphere of materialistic science, there is but one chief
explanation of the mysteries of the Cross -- its sexual element. Even the
otherwise spiritualistic modern commentator discerns in the Cross and Swastica,
this feature before all others.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* So it was, and
could not be otherwise. Julian (the Emperor) was an Initiate, and as such knew
well the "mystery-meaning," both metaphysical and physical.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 588 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"The cross
was used in Egypt as a protecting talisman and a symbol of saving power.
Typhon, or Satan, is actually found chained and bound to the cross. In the
Ritual, the Osirian cries, 'The Apophis is overthrown, their cords bind the
South, North, East, and West, their cords are on him. Har-ru-bah has knotted
him.'* These were the cords of the four Quarters, or the cross. Thor is said to
smite the head of the Serpent with his hammer . . . a form of Swastica or
four-footed Cross. . . . In the primitive sepulchres of Egypt the model of the
Chamber had the form of a Cross.** The pagoda of Mathura . . . the birth-place
of Krishna, was built in the form of a Cross . . . . ***
This is perfect
and no one can discern in this "sexual worship," with which the
Orientalists love to break the head of Paganism. But how about the Jews, and
the exoteric religions of some Hindu sects, especially the rites of the
Vallabacharyas? For, as said, the Lingham and Yoni of Siva-worship stand too
high philosophically, its modern degeneration notwithstanding, to be called a
simple phallic worship. But the tree or Cross-worship**** of the Jews, as
denounced by their own Prophets, can hardly escape the charge. The "Sons
of Sorcerers," "the seed of the adulterer," as Isaiah calls them
(lvii.), never lost an opportunity of "enflaming themselves with idols
under every green tree," which denotes no metaphysical recreation. It is
from these monotheistic Jews that the Christian nations have derived their
religion, their "God of gods, the One living God," while despising
and deriding the worship of the Deity of the ancient philosophers. Let such
believe in and worship the physical form of the Cross, by all means.
But to the
follower of the true Eastern archaic Wisdom, to him who worships in spirit nought
outside the Absolute Unity, that ever-pulsating great Heart that beats
throughout, as in every atom of nature, each such atom contains the germ from
which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits give life eternal and
not physical life alone. For him the Cross and Circle, the Tree or the Tau,
are, after every symbol relating to these has been applied to, and read one
after another, still a profound mystery in their Past, and it is to that Past
alone that he directs his eager gaze. He cares little whether it be the seed
from
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Apophis or
Apap is the Serpent of evil, symbol of human passions. The Sun (Osiris-Horus),
destroys him, when Apap is thrown down, bound and chained. The god Aker,
"the chief of the gate of the Abyss," of Aker, the realm of the Sun
(xv. 39) binds him. Apophis is the enemy of Ra (light), but the "great
Apap has fallen!" exclaims the defunct. "The Scorpion has hurt thy
mouth," he says to the conquered enemy (xxxix. v. 7). The Scorpion is the
"worm that never dies" of the Christians. Apophis is bound on the Tau
or Tat, "the emblem of stability." (See the erection of Tat in Tatoo,
Ritual xviii.).
** So have the
crypts in cis-Himalayan regions where Initiates live, and where their ashes are
placed for seven lunar years.
*** The Natural
Genesis, Vol. I. p. 432.
**** The Cross
and the Tree are identical and synonymous in symbolism.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 589 MAN, THE REVILER OF GOD.
which grows the
genealogical Tree of Being, called the Universe. Nor is it the Three in One,
the triple aspect of the seed -- its form, colour, and substance -- that
interest him, but rather the FORCE which directs its growth, the ever
mysterious, as the ever unknown. For this vital Force, that makes the seed
germinate, burst open and throw out shoots, then form the trunk and branches,
which, in their turn, bend down like the boughs of the Aswattha, the holy Tree
of Bodhi, throw their seed out, take root and procreate other trees -- this is
the only FORCE that has reality for him, as it is the never-dying breath of
life. The pagan philosopher sought for the Cause, the modern is content with
only the effects and seeks the former in the latter. What is beyond, he does
not know, nor does the modern A-gnostic care: thus rejecting the only knowledge
upon which he can with full security base his Science. Yet this manifested
Force has an answer for him who seeks to fathom it. He who sees in the cross,
the decussated circle of Plato, the Pagan, not the antitype of circumcision, as
Christian (St.) Augustine did,* is forthwith regarded by the Church as a
heathen: by Science, as a lunatic. This because, while refusing to worship the
god of physical generation, he confesses that he can know nothing of the Cause
which underlies the so-called First Cause, the causeless Cause of this Vital
Cause. Tacitly admitting the All-Presence of the boundless Circle and making of
it the universal Postulate upon which the whole of the manifested universe is
based, the Sage keeps a reverential silence concerning that upon which no
mortal men should dare to speculate. "The Logos of God is the revealer of
man, and the logos (the verb) of man is the revealer of God," says Eliphas
Levi in one of his paradoxes. To this, the Eastern Occultist would reply:--
"On this condition, however, that man should be dumb on the CAUSE that
produced both God and its logos. Otherwise, he becomes invariably the reviler,
not the 'revealers' of the incognizable Deity."
We have now to
approach a mystery -- the Hebdomad in nature. Perchance, all that we may say,
will be attributed to coincidence. We may be told that this number in nature is
quite natural (so we say too), and has no more significance than the illusion
of motion which forms the so-called "Strobic circles." No great
importance was given to these "singular illusions" when Professor
Sylvanus Thompson exhibited them at the meeting of the British Association in
1877. Nevertheless we should like to learn the scientific explanation why seven
should ever form itself as a pre-eminent number -- six concentric circles
around a seventh, and seven rings within one another round a central point,
etc., etc. -- in this illusion, produced by a swaying saucer, or any other
vessel. We give the solution refused by science in the section which follows.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Sermon the
160th.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Chhayas. . . . The fifth 'Seven' imprisoned their ESSENCE. . . . Thus man
became a Saptaparna." (Commentary.)
-------
A.
SAPTAPARNA.
Such is the name
given in Occult phraseology to man. It means as shown elsewhere, a seven-leaved
plant, and the name has a great significance in the Buddhist legends. So it
had, also, under disguise, in the Greek "myths." The T, or
[[diagram]] (tau), formed from the figure 7, and the Greek letter [[G]]
(gamma), was (see § "Cross and Circle") the symbol of life,
------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 591 THE MEANING OF THE DOUBLE TRIANGLE.
and of life eternal:
of earthly life, because [[G]] (gamma) is the symbol of the Earth (gaia)*; and
of "life eternal," because the figure 7 is the symbol of the same
life linked with divine life, the double glyph expressed in geometrical figures
being:--
[[diagram]]
a triangle and a
quaternary, the symbol of septenary MAN.
Now, the number
six has been regarded in the ancient mysteries as an emblem of physical nature.
For six is the representation of the six dimensions of all bodies: the six
lines which compose their form, namely, the four lines extending to the four
cardinal points, North, South, East, and West, and the two lines of height and
thickness that answer to the Zenith and the Nadir. Therefore, while the senary
was applied by the sages to physical man, the septenary was for them the symbol
of that man plus his immortal soul.
Ragon gives in
his Maconnerie Occulte a very good illustration of the "hieroglyphical
senary," as he calls our double equilateral triangle, [[diagram]]. 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 [[diagram]] with the apex downward, is the symbol of Vishnu,
the god of the moist principle and water ("Nara-yana," or the moving
Principle in Nara, water;**) while the triangle, with its apex upward,
[[diagram]] 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Hence the
Initiates in Greece called the Tau [[I]], son of gaia, "sprung from
earth," like Tityos in Odyssey 7, 324.
** See the
Mahabharata, e.g., III., 189, 3, where Vishnu says, "I called the name of
water nara in ancient times, and am hence called Narayana, for that was always
the abode I moved in" (Ayana). It is into the water (or chaos, the
"moist principle" of the Greeks and Hermes), that the first seed of
the Universe is thrown. "The 'Spirit of God' moves on the dark waters of
Space"; hence Thales makes of it the primordial element and prior to Fire,
which was yet latent in that Spirit.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 592 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Society -- that
produce the Septenary and the Triad at one and the same time, and are the
Decad, whatever way this sign [[diagram]] is examined, as all the ten numbers
are contained therein. For with a point in the middle or centre, thus
[[diagram]] it is a sevenfold sign; its triangles denote number 3; the two
triangles show the presence of the binary; the triangles with the central point
common to both yield the quaternary; the six points are the senary; and the
central point, the unit; the quinary being traced by combination, as a compound
of two triangles, the even number, and of three sides in each triangle, the
first odd number. This is the reason why Pythagoras and the ancients made the
number six sacred to Venus, since "the union of the two sexes, and the
spagyrisation of matter by triads are necessary to develop the generative
force, that prolific virtue and tendency to reproduction which is inherent in
all bodies."*
Belief in
"Creators," or the personified Powers of Nature, is in truth no
polytheism, but a philosophical necessity. Like all the other planets of our
system, the Earth has seven Logoi -- the emanating rays of the one
"Father-Ray" -- the PROTOGONOS, or the manifested "Logos"
-- he who sacrifices his Esse (or flesh, the Universe) that the world may live
and every creature therein have conscious being.
Numbers 3 and 4
are respectively male and female, Spirit and Matter, and their union is the
emblem of life eternal in spirit on its ascending arc, and in matter as the
ever resurrecting element -- by procreation and reproduction. The spiritual male
line is vertical [[diagram]]; the differentiated matter-line is horizontal; the
two forming the cross or [[diagram]]. The former (the 3), is invisible; the
latter (the 4), is on the plane of objective perception. This is why all the
matter of the Universe, when analyzed by science to its ultimates, can be
reduced to four elements only -- carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen: and
why the three primaries, the noumenoi of the four, or graduated Spirit or
Force, have remained a terra incognita and mere speculations, names, to exact
Science. Her servants must believe in and study first the primary causes,
before they can hope to fathom the nature and acquaint themselves with the
potentialities of the effects. Thus, while the men of Western learning had, and
still have, the four, or matter to toy with, the Eastern Occultists and their
disciples, the great alchemists the world over, have the whole septenate to
study from.** As those Alche-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"Potency of the Pythagorean Triangles" (Ragon).
** There are
learned Brahmins who have protested against our septenary division. They are
right from their own standpoint, as we are right from ours. Leaving the
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 593 SPIRITUAL AND PHYSICAL CORRESPONDENCES.
mists have it:--
"When the Three and the Four kiss each other, the Quaternary joins its
middle nature with that of the Triangle," (or Triad, i.e., the face of one
of its plane surfaces becoming the middle face of the other), "and becomes
a cube; then only does it (the cube unfolded) become the vehicle and the number
of LIFE, the Father-Mother SEVEN."
The following
diagram will perhaps assist the student to grasp these parallelisms.
HUMAN
PRINCIPLES. [[diagram]] PRINCIPLES OF PHYSICAL NATURE.
VII. . . . .
ATMA.
VI. . . . . BUDDHI.
V. . . . . .
MANAS.
IV. Kama-rupa,
the principle of animal desire, which burns fiercely during life in matter,
resulting in satiety: it is inseparable from animal existence.
HYDROGEN
The lightest of
all gases: it burns in oxygen giving off the most intense heat of any substance
in combustion, and forming Water, the most stable of compounds; Hydrogen enters
largely into all organic compounds.
III.
Linga-Sarira; the inert vehicle or form on which the body is moulded; the
vehicle of Life. It is dissipated very shortly after the disentigration of the
body.
NITROGEN
An inert gas;
the vehicle with which Oxygen is mixed to adapt the latter for animal
respiration; it also enters largely into all organic substances.
II. Prana, LIFE,
the active power producing all vital phenomena.
OXYGEN
The supporter of
combustion the life-giving gas; the active chemical agent in all organic life.
I. The gross
Matter of the body, the substance formed and moulded over the Liga-sarira
(Chhaya) by the action of Prana.
CARBON
The fuel par
excellence; the basis of all organic substances; the (chemical) element which
forms the largest variety of compounds.
Now we are
taught that all these earliest forms of organic life also appear in septenary
groups of numbers. From minerals or "soft
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] three aspects, or adjunct principles out of
calculation, they accept only four Upadhis (bases) including the Ego -- the
reflected image of the Logos in the "Karana Sarira" -- and even
"strictly speaking . . . . only three Upadhis." For purely
theoretical metaphysical philosophy, or purposes of meditation, these three may
be sufficient, as shown by the Taraka Yoga system; but for practical occult
teaching our septenary division is the best and easiest. It is, however, a
matter of school and choice.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 594 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
stones that
hardened" (Stanza) followed by the "hard plants that softened,"
which are the product of the mineral, for "it is from the bosom of the
stone that vegetation is born" (Commentary, Book IX., F. 19); and then to
man -- all the primitive models in every kingdom of nature begin by being
ethereal, transparent, films. This, of course, takes place only in the first
beginning of life. With the next period they consolidate, and at the seventh
begin to branch off into species, all except men, the first of the mammalian
animals* in the Fourth Round.
Virgil, versed
as every ancient poet was, more or less, in esoteric philosophy, sang evolution
in the following strains:--
Principio coelum
ac terras, camposque liquentes
Lucentemque
globum lunae, Titaniaque astra*
SPIRITUS intus
alit; totamque infusa per artus
MENS agitat
molem, et magno se corpore miscet
Inde Hominum
pecudumque genus, etc.** (AEneid VI. )
"First came
three, or the triangle." This expression has a profound meaning in Occultism,
and the fact is corroborated in mineralogy, botany, and even in geology, as was
demonstrated in the section on "Ancient Chronology," by the compound
number seven, the three and the four being in it. Salt in solution proves it.
For when its molecules, clustering together, begin to deposit themselves as a
solid, the first shape they assume is that of triangles, of small pyramids and
cones. It is the figure of fire, whence the word "pyramids"; while
the second geometrical figure in manifested Nature is a square or a cube, 4 and
6; for, "the particles of earth being cubical, those of fire are
pyramidal" truly -- (Enfield). The pyramidal shape is that assumed by the
pines -- the most primitive tree after the fern period. Thus the two opposites
in cosmic nature -- fire and water, heat and cold -- begin their metrographical
manifestations, one by a trimetric, the other by a hexagonal system. For the
stellate crystals of snow, viewed under a microscope, are all and each of them
a double or a treble six-pointed star, with a central nucleus, like a miniature
star within the larger one. Says Mr.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Protista are
not animals. The reader is asked to bear in mind that when we speak of
"animals," the mammalians alone are meant. Crustacea, fishes, and
reptiles are contemporary with, and most have preceded physical man in this
Round. All were bisexual, however, before the age of mammalia in the closing
portion of the secondary or Mesozoic ages, yet nearer to the Palaeozoic than
the Cenozoic ages. Smaller marsupial mammalia are contemporary with the huge
reptilian monsters of the Secondary.
** "First
Divine Spirit within sustains the Heavens, the earth and watery plains, the
moon's orb and shining stars and the Eternal Mind diffused through all the
parts of nature, actuates the whole stupendous frame and mingles with the vast
body of the universe. Thence proceed the race of men and beasts, the vital
principles of the flying kind and the monsters which the Ocean breeds under its
smooth crystal plane." "All proceeds from Ether and from its seven
natures" -- said the alchemists. Science knows these only in their
superficial effects.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 595 NOAH, AN ASPECT OF THE CREATOR.
Darwin, in his
"Descent of Man," p. 164. showing that the inhabitants of the
sea-shore are greatly affected by the tides:--
"The most
ancient progenitors in the Kingdom of the Vertebrata . . . apparently consisted
of a group of marine animals. . . . Animals living either about the mean
high-water mark, or about the mean low-water mark, pass through a complete
cycle of tidal changes in a fortnight. . . . Now it is a mysterious fact that
in the higher and now terrestrial Vertebrata . . . many normal and abnormal
processes have one or more weeks (septenates) as their periods . . . such as
gestation of mammals, the duration of fevers," etc. . . "The eggs of
the pigeon are hatched in two weeks (or 14 days); those of the fowl in three;
those of the duck in four: those of the goose in five; and those of the ostrich
in seven." (Bartlett's "Land and Water.")
This number is
closely connected with the moon, whose occult influence is ever manifesting
itself in septenary periods. It is the moon which is the guide of the occult
side of terrestrial nature, while the Sun is the regulator and factor of
manifested life; (See also Vol. I., Part II.), and this truth was ever evident
to the Seers and the adepts. Jacob Boehme, by insisting on the fundamental
doctrine of the seven properties of everlasting mother Nature, proved himself
thereby a great Occultist.
But to return to
the consideration of the septenary in ancient religious symbolism. To the
metrological key to the symbolism of the Hebrews, which reveals numerically the
geometrical relations of the Circle (All-Deity) to the Square, Cube, Triangle,
and all the integral emanations of the divine area, may be added the theogonic
Key. This Key explains that Noah, the deluge-Patriarch, is in one aspect the
permutation of the Deity (the Universal Creative Law), for the purpose of the
formation of our Earth, its population, and the propagation of life on it, in
general.
Now bearing in
mind the Septenary division in divine Hierarchies, as in Cosmic and human
constitutions, the student will readily understand that Jah-Noah is at the head
of, and is the synthesis of the lower Cosmic Quaternary. The upper Sephirothal
[[diagram]], triad -- of which Jehovah-Binah (Intelligence) is the left, female
angle -- emanates the [[diagram]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 596 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
reminder to
facilitate the comprehension of what follows. The question at issue is to show
that Jah-Noah, or the Jehovah of the Hebrew Bible, the alleged Creator of our
Earth, of man and all upon it, is:--
(a) The lowest
Septenary, the Creative Elohim -- in his Cosmic aspect.
(b) The
Tetragrammaton or the Adam-Kadmon, "the Heavenly Man" of the Four letters
-- in his theogonic and Kabalistic aspects.
(c) Noah --
identical with the Hindu Sishta, the human seed, left for the peopling of the
Earth from a previous creation or Manvantara, as expressed in the Puranas, or
the pre-diluvian period as rendered allegorically in the Bible -- in his Cosmic
character.
But whether a
Quaternary (Tetragrammaton) or a Triad, the Bible Creative God is not the
Universal 10, unless blended with AIN-SOPH (as Brahma with Parabrahm), but a
septenary, one of the many Septenaries of the Universal Septenate. In the
explanation of the question now in hand, his position and status as Noah may
best be shown by placing the 3, [[diagram]],and 4, [[diagram]] on parallel
lines with the "Cosmic" and "Human" principles. For the
latter, the old familiar classification is made use of. Thus:--
HUMAN ASPECTS,
OR PRINCIPLES.
COSMIC ASPECTS,
OR PRINCIPLES.
[[diagram]]
Triple aspect of
the Deity.
1. Universal
Spirit (Atma)
1. The
Unmanifested Logos
2. Spiritual
Soul (Buddhi)
2. Universal (latent)
Ideation*
3. Human Soul,
Mind (Manas)
3. Universal (or
Cosmic) active** Intelligence
[[diagram]]
Spirit of the
Earth.
Jehovah.***
4. Animal Soul
(Kama-Rupa)
4. Cosmic
(Chaotic) Energy
Noah.
5. Astral Body
(Linga Sarira)
5. Astral Ideation,
reflecting terrestrial things.
Space containing
Life -- the Waters of the Deluge.
6. Life Essence
(Prana)
6. Life Essence
or Energy
Mount
Ararat.****
7. Body (Sthula
Sarira)
7. The Earth.
As an additional
demonstration of the statement, let the reader turn to scientific works.
"Ararat = the mount of descent = [[hebrew]], Hor-Jared. Hatho mentions it
out of composition by Areth = [[hebrew]]. Editor
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
NOTE. -- For
footnotes, see next page.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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: [[hebrew]], for [[hebrew]]
(i.e., Ararat for Arath) EARTH, Aramaic reduplication.' Here it is seen that
Nork and Hatho make use of the same equivalent in Arath, with the meaning of
Earth."*****
Noah thus
symbolizing both the Root-Manu and the Seed-Manu, or the Power which developed
the planetary chain, and our earth, and the Seed Race (the Fifth) which was
saved while the last sub-races of the Fourth perished -- Vaivasvata Manu -- the
number Seven will be seen to recur at every step. It is he (Noah), who
represents, as Jehovah's permutation, the septenary Host of the Elohim, and is
thus the Father or Creator (the Preserver) of all animal life. Hence verses 2
and 3 of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Adwaitee
Vedantic philosophy classifies this as the highest trinity, or rather the
Trinitarian aspect of Chinmatra (Parabrahmam), explained by them as the
"bare potentiality of Pragna" -- the power or the capacity that gives
rise to perception; Chidakasam, the infinite field or plane of Universal
Consciousness; and Asath (Mulaprakriti), or undifferentiated matter. (See
"Personal and Impersonal God" in "Five Years of
Theosophy.")
**
Differentiated matter existing in the Solar System (let us not touch the whole
Kosmos) in seven different conditions, and Pragna, or the capacity of perception,
existing likewise in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven
conditions of matter, there must necessarily be seven states of consciousness
in man; and according to the greater or smaller development of these states,
the systems of religions and philosophies were schemed out.
*** Represented
as the jealous, angry, turbulent and ever active-god, revengeful, and kind only
to his chosen people when propitiated by them.
**** Noah and
his three Sons are the collective symbol of this Quaternary in many and various
applications, Ham being the Chaotic principle.
*****
"Source of Measures," p. 65. The author explains, "Note that in
Hebrew, Jared, the father of Enoch, is construed to be 'the mount of descent,'
and it is said to be the same with Ararat on which the cubical structure of
Noah, or foundation measure rested. Jared, in Hebrew, is [[hebrew]]. The root
derivations are the same with those of Ararat, of acre, of earth." As by
Hebrew metrology "Jared, [[hebrew]] is, literally in British Y R D; hence
in Jared is to be found literally our English word yard (and also [[hebrew]],
for Jah, or Jehovah, is rod). It is noteworthy that the son of Jared, viz.,
Enoch, lived 365 years, and it is said of him by rabbinical commentators, that
the year period of 365 days was discovered by him, thus bringing, again, time
and distance values together, i.e., year time descended by co-ordination,
through the yard, or jared, who thus was its father, in or through Enoch; and
truly enough, 1296 = yard (or jared) x 4 = 5184, the characteristic value of
the solar day, in thirds, which as stated may be styled the parent numerically,
of the solar year" (ibid. p. 65). This, however, by the astronomical and
numerical Kabalistic methods. Esoterically, Jared is the Third race and Enoch
the Fourth -- but as he is taken away alive he symbolizes also the Elect saved
in the Fourth, while Noah is the Fifth from the beginning -- the family saved
from the waters, eternally and physically.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."*
Being itself
entirely out of human reckoning or calculation, yet this "huge aggregation
of various states of consciousness" is a Septenate,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Five
Years of Theosophy," Art. "Personal and Impersonal God."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 599 THE ROOTS OF THINGS.
in its totality
entirely composed of Septenary groups; simply because "the capacity of
perception exists in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven
conditions of matter" (ibid), or the seven properties, or states, or
conditions of matter. And, therefore, number 1 down to number 7 begins in the
esoteric calculations with the first manifested principle, which is number one
if we commence from above, and the seventh when reckoning from below, or from
the lowest Principle.
The Tetrad is
esteemed in the Kabala, as it was by Pythagoras, the most perfect, or rather
sacred number, because it emanated from the one, the first manifested Unit, or
rather the three in one. Yet the latter has been ever impersonal, sexless,
incomprehensible, though within the possibility of the higher mental perceptions.
The first
manifestation of the eternal monad was never meant to stand as the symbol of
another symbol, the UNBORN for the Element-born, or the one LOGOS for the
Heavenly man. Tetragrammaton, or the Tetractys of the Greeks, is the Second
logos, the Demiurgos. The Tetrad, as Thomas Taylor thought (vide the
"Pythagorean Triangle"), "is the animal itself of Plato, who, as
Syrianus justly observes, was the best of the Pythagoreans; it subsists at the
extremity of the intelligible triad, as is most satisfactorily shown by Proclus
in the third book of his treatise on the theology of Plato. And between these
two triads (the double triangle), the one intelligible, and the other
intellectual, another order of gods exists which partakes of both
extremes." "The Pythagorean world," Plutarch tells us (in De
anim. procr., 1027) "consisted of a double quaternary." This
statement corroborates what is said about the choice, by the exoteric
theologies, of the lower Tetraktis. For:-- "The quaternary of the
intellectual world (the world of Mahat) is T'Agathon, Nous, Psyche, Hyle; while
that of the sensible world (of matter), which is properly what Pythagoras meant
by the word Kosmos -- is Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. The four elements are
called by the name of rizomata, the roots or principles of all mixed
bodies," i.e., the lower Tetraktis is the root of illusion of the world of
matter; and this is the tetragrammaton of the Jews, and the "mysterious
deity," over which the modern Kabalists make such a fuss!
"Thus
number four forms the arithmetical mean between the monad and the heptad, as
this contains all powers, both of the productive and produced numbers; for this
of all numbers under ten, is made of a certain number; the duad doubled makes a
tetrad, and the tetrad doubled or unfolded makes the hebdomad (the septenary).
Two multiplied into itself produces four; and retorted into itself makes the
first cube. This first cube is a fertile number, the ground of multitude and
variety, constituted of two and four (depending on the monad, the seventh).
Thus the two principles of temporal things, the pyramis and
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 600 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
cube, form and
matter, flow from one fountain, the tetragon (on earth) the monad (in heaven) .
. . . " (See Reuchlin, "Cabala" 1, ii.).
Here Reuchlin,
the great authority on the Kabala, shows the cube to be matter, whereas the
pyramid or the triad is "form." With the Hermesians the number four
becomes the symbol of truth only when amplified into a cube, which, unfolded,
makes seven, as symbolizing the male and female elements and the element of
LIFE.*
Some students
have been puzzled to account for the vertical line, which is male, becoming
(vide infra) in the cross a four-partitioned line -- four being a female
number, while the horizontal (the line of matter) becomes three-divisioned. But
this is easy of explanation. Since the middle face of the cube unfolded is
common to both the vertical and the horizontal bar, or double-line, it becomes
neutral ground so to say, and belongs to neither. The spirit line remains
triadic, and the matter line two-fold -- two being an even and therefore a
female number also. Moreover, according to Theon, the Pythagoreans who gave the
name of Harmony to the Tetraktis, "because it is a diatessaron in
sesquitertia" -- were of opinion that "the division of the canon of
the monochord was made by the tetraktis in the duad, triad, and tetrad; for it
comprehends a sesquitertia, a sesquialtera, a double, a triple, and a quadruple
proportion, the section of which is 27." "In the ancient musical
notation, the tetrachord consisted of three degrees or intervals, and four terms
of sounds called by the Greeks diatessaron, and by us a fourth." Moreover,
the quaternary though an even, therefore a female ("infernal")
number, varied according to its form. This is shown by Stanley (in Pythag. p.
61). The 4 was called by the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* In the
"Hebrew Egyptian Mystery, the Source of Measures," the Author shows
(on p. 50) that the figure of the cube unfolded in connection with the circle .
. . . "becomes . . a cross proper, or of the tau form, and the attachment
of the circle to this last gives the ansated cross of the Egyptians . . . .
while there are but 6 faces to a cube, the representation of the cross as the
cube unfolded, as to the cross-bars, displays one face of the cube as common to
two bars, counted as belonging to either . . . (i.e., once counted
horizontally, and once vertically)
(CUBE UNFOLDED)
[[diagram]]
. . . 4 for the
upright and 3 for the cross bar making seven in all," -- 4 for the
upright, and 3 for the -- adding -- "Here we have the famous 4, and 3, and
7." Esoteric philosophy explains that four is the symbol of the Universe
in its potential state, or chaotic matter, and that it requires Spirit to
permeate it actively, i.e., the primordial abstract triangle has to quit its
one dimensional quality and spread across that matter, thus forming a
manifested basis on the three dimensional space, in order that the Universe
should manifest intelligibly. This is achieved by the cube unfolded. Hence the
ansated cross [[diagram]] as the symbol of man, generation and life. In Egypt
ank signified soul, life and blood. It is the ensouled, living man, the
Septenary.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 601 THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES.
Pythagoreans the
Key-Keeper of Nature; but in union with the 3, which made it seven, it became
the most perfect and harmonious number -- nature herself. The four was
"the Masculine of Feminine Form," when forming the Cross; and Seven
is "the Master of the Moon," for this planet is forced to alter her
appearance every seven days. It is on number seven that Pythagoras composed his
doctrine on the Harmony and Music of the Spheres, calling "a tone" the
distance of the Moon from the Earth; from the Moon to Mercury half a tone, from
thence to Venus the same; from Venus to the Sun l 1/2 tones; from the Sun to
Mars a tone; from thence to Jupiter 1/2 a tone; from Jupiter to Saturn 1/2 a
tone; and thence to the Zodiac a tone; thus making seven tones -- the diapason
harmony. All the melody of nature is in those seven tones, and therefore is
called "the Voice of Nature."
Plutarch
explains (de Plac. Phil., p. 878) that the Achaean Greeks regarded the tetrad as
the root and principle of all things, since it was the number of the elements
which gave birth to all visible and invisible created things. With the brothers
of the Rosy Cross, the figure of the Cross, or Cube unfolded, formed the
subject of a disquisition in one of the theosophic degrees of Peuret, and was
treated according to the fundamental principles of light and darkness, or good
and evil.
"The
intelligible world proceeds out of the divine mind (or unit) after this manner.
The Tetraktis reflecting upon its own essence, the first unit, productrix of
all things, and on its own beginning, saith thus: Once one, twice two,
immediately ariseth a tetrad, having on its top the highest unit, and becomes a
Pyramis, whose base is a plain tetrad, answerable to a superficies, upon which
the radiant light of the divine unity produceth the form of incorporeal fire,
by reason of the descent of Juno (matter) to inferior things. Hence ariseth
essential light, not burning but illuminating. This is the creation of the middle
world, which the Hebrews call the Supreme, the world of the (their) deity. It
is termed Olympus, entirely light, and replete with separate forms, where is
the seat of the immortal gods, 'deum domus alta,' whose top is UNITY, its wall
trinity, and its superficies quaternity." (Reuchlin, Cabala, p. 689).
The
"superficies" has thus to remain a meaningless surface, if left by
itself. UNITY only "illuminating" quaternity; the famous lower four
has to build for itself also a wall from trinity, if it would be manifested.
Moreover, the tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus, is "Jehovah"
arrogating to himself very improperly the "Was, Is, Will be," now
translated into the "I am that I am," and interpreted as referring to
the highest abstract Deity, while esoterically and in plain truth, it means
only periodically chaotic, turbulent, and eternal MATTER with all its
potentialities. For the Tetragrammaton is one with Nature or Isis, and is the
exoteric series of androgyne gods such as Osiris-Isis, Jove-Juno, Brahma-Vach,
or the Kabalistic Jah-hovah; all male-females. Every anthropomorphic god, in
old nations, as Marcelinus Vicinus well observed,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Mohammedans, Abdi; the Greeks,
Theos; the ancient Turks, Esar; the Latins, Deus; to which J. Lorenzo Anania
adds the German Gott; the Sarmatian, Bouh, etc., etc.
The Monad being
one, and an odd number, the ancients therefore called the odd, the only perfect
numbers; and -- selfishly, perhaps, yet as a fact -- considered them all as
masculine and perfect, being applicable to the celestial gods, while even
numbers, such as two, four, six, and especially eight, as being female, were
regarded as imperfect, and given only to the terrestrial and infernal deities.
In his eighth eclogue, Virgil records the fact by saying, "Numero deus
impare gaudet," "Unequal numbers please the gods."
But number
seven, or the heptagon, the Pythagoreans considered to be a religious and
perfect number. It was called "Telesphoros," because by it all in the
Universe and mankind is led to its end, i.e., its culmination (Philo. de Mund.
opif.). Being under the rule of seven sacred planets,* the doctrine of the
Spheres shows, from Lemuria to Pythagoras, the seven powers of terrestrial and
sublunary nature, as well as the seven great Forces of the Universe, proceeding
and evolving in seven tones, which are the seven notes of the musical scale.
The heptad (our Septenary) was regarded "as the number of a virgin,
because it is unborn" (like the Logos or the "Aja" of the
Vedantins); "without a father or a mother, but proceeding directly from
the Monad, which is the origin and crown of all things." (Pythag.
Triangle, p. 174.) And if the heptad is made to proceed from the Monad
directly, then it is, as taught in the Secret Doctrine of the oldest schools,
the perfect and sacred number of this Maha-Manvantara of ours.
The septenary,
or heptad, was sacred indeed to several gods and goddesses; to Mars, with his
seven attendants, to Osiris, whose body was divided into seven and twice seven
parts; to Apollo (the Sun), between his seven planets, and playing the hymn to
the seven-rayed on his seven-stringed harp; to Minerva, the fatherless and the
motherless, and others.
Cis-Himalayan
Occultism with its sevening, and because of such sevening, must be regarded as
the most ancient, the original of all. It is opposed by some fragments left by
Neo-Platonists; and the admirers of the latter, who hardly understand what they
defend, say to us: "See, your forerunners believed only in triple man,
composed of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The seven
planets are not limited to this number because the ancients knew of no others,
but simply because they were the primitive or primordial houses of the seven
Logoi. There may be nine and ninety-nine other planets discovered -- this does
not alter the fact of these seven alone being sacred.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 603 THE SEPTENARY DEMONSTRATED.
Spirit, Soul,
and body. Behold, the Taraka Raja Yoga of India limits that division to 3, we,
to 4, and the Vedantins to 5 (koshas)." To this, we of the Archaic school,
ask:--
Why then does
the Greek poet say that "it is not four but SEVEN who sing the praise of
the Spiritual Sun," [[HEPTA ME]]? He says--
"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 Sheba is the Oath (the
Pythagorean Tetraktis) identical with number 7; or, as Mr. G. Massey has it,
"taking an oath was synonymous with 'to seven,' and the 10 expressed by
the letter Yod, was the full number of IAO-SABAOTH, the ten-lettered God"?
In Lucian's Auction, Pythagoras asks, "How do you reckon?" The reply
is, "One, Two, Three, Four." "Then, do you see," says
Pythagoras, "in what you conceive FOUR there are Ten; then, a perfect
triangle and our Oath (tetraktis, four!)," or Seven. Why does Proclus say
in Timaeus, c. iii. -- "The Father of the golden verses celebrates the
Tetractys as the fountain of perennial nature"?
Simply because
those Western Kabalists who quote the exoteric proofs against us have no idea
of the real esoteric meaning. Because all the ancient Cosmologies -- the oldest
Cosmographies of the two most ancient people of the Fifth Root Race, the Hindu
Aryans and the Egyptians, adding to them the early Chinese races (the remnants
of the Fourth or Atlantean Race) -- based the whole of their mysteries on
number 10: the higher triangle standing for the invisible and metaphysical
world, the lower three and four, or the Septenate, for the physical realm. It
is not the Jewish Bible that brought number seven into prominence. Hesiod used
the words "The seventh is the sacred day," before the Sabbath of
"Moses" was ever heard of. The use of number seven was never confined
to any one nation. This is well testified by the seven vases in the temple of
the Sun, near the ruins of Babion in Upper Egypt; the seven fires burning
continually for ages before the altars of Mithra; the seven holy fanes of the
Arabians; the seven peninsulas, the seven islands, seven seas, mountains, and
rivers of India; and of the Zohar (See Ibn Gebirol); the Jewish Sephiroth of
the Seven splendours; the seven Gothic deities, the seven worlds of the
Chaldeans and their seven Spirits; the seven constellations mentioned by Hesiod
and Homer; and all the interminable sevens which the Orientalists find in every
MS. they discover.
What we have to
say finally is this: Enough has been brought forward to show why the human
principles were and are divided in the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 604 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
esoteric schools
into seven. Make it four and it will either leave man minus his lower
terrestrial elements, or, if viewed from a physical stand-point, make of him a
soulless animal. The Quaternary must be the higher or the lower -- the
celestial or terrestrial Tetraktis: to become comprehensible, according to the
teachings of the esoteric ancient school man must be regarded as a Septenary.
This was so well understood, that even the so-called Christian Gnostics had
adopted this time-honoured system (Vide § on "The Seven Souls"). This
remained for a long time secret as, though suspected, no MSS. of that time
spoke of it clearly enough to satisfy the sceptic. But there comes to our
rescue the literary curiosity of our age -- the oldest and best preserved
gospel of the Gnostics, Pistis Sophia [[Pictic Cophia]]. To make the proof
absolutely complete, we shall quote from an authority (C. W. King) -- the only
archaeologist who had a faint glimmer of this elaborate doctrine, and the best
writer of the day on the Gnostics and their gems.
According to
this extraordinary piece of religious literature -- a true Gnostic fossil --
the human Entity is the Septenary ray from the One,* just as our school
teaches. It is composed of seven elements, four of which are borrowed from the
four Kabalistical manifested worlds. Thus "from Asia it gets the Nephesh
or seat of the physical appetites (vital breath, also); from Jezirah, the
Ruach, or seat of the passions (? !); from Briah, the Neshamah, and from
Aziluth it obtains the Chaiah, or principle of spiritual life;" (King).
"This looks like an adaptation of the Platonic theory of the Soul's
obtaining its respective faculties from the Planets in its downward progress
through their Spheres. But the Pistis-Sophia, with its accustomed boldness, puts
this theory into a much more poetical shape (§ 282)." The Inner Man is
similarly made up of four constituents, but these are supplied by the
rebellious AEons of the Spheres, being the Power -- a particle of the Divine
light ("Divinae particula aurae") yet left in themselves; the Soul
(the fifth) "formed out of the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their
torments; the [[Antimimon Prieumatos]], Counterfeit of the Spirit (seemingly
answering to our Conscience), (the sixth); and lastly the [[Moira]], Fate**
(Karmic Ego), whose
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Seven
Centres of Energy evolved, or rendered objective by the action of Fohat upon
the one element; or, in fact, the "Seventh Principle" of the Seven
Elements which exist throughout manifested Kosmos. We may here point out that
they are in truth the Sephiroth of the Kabalists; the "Seven gifts of the
Holy Ghost" in the Christian system; and in a mystical sense, the seven
children or sons of Devaki killed before the birth of Krishna by Kamsa. Our
seven principles symbolize all of these. We have to part or separate from them
before we reach the Krishna or Christ-state, that of a Jivanmukta, and centre
ourselves entirely in the highest, the Seventh or the ONE.
** [[Moira]] is
destiny, not "Fate," in this case, as it is an appellation, not a
proper noun. (See Wolf's transl. in Odyssey 22, 413). But Moira, the Goddess of
Fate, is a deity [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 605 THE VEDIC TEACHINGS.
whose business
it is to lead the man to the end appointed for him; if he hath to die by the
fire, to lead him into the fire, if he hath to die by a wild beast, to lead him
unto the wild beast, etc."* -- the SEVENTH!
-------
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 Surya (the Sun)
are made therein parallel to the Seven Worlds (of every planetary chain), to
the seven rivers of heaven and earth, the former being the seven creative
Hosts, and the latter the Seven men, or primitive human groups. The Seven
ancient Rishis -- the progenitors of all that lives and breathes on earth --
are the seven friends of Agni, his seven "horses," or seven
"HEADS." The human race has sprung from fire and water, it is
allegorically stated; fashioned by the FATHERS, or the ancestor-sacrificers,
from Agni; for Agni, the Aswins, the Adityas (Rig-Veda III., 54, 16, II., 29,
3, 4), are all synonymous with that "sacrificer," or the fathers,
variously called Pitar (Pitris, fathers), Angirases** (Ibid, 1, 31, 17, 139, et
seq.), the Sadhyas, "divine sacrificers," the most occult of all.
They are all called deva putra rishayah or "the Sons of God" (X., 62;
1, 4). The "sacrificers," moreover, are collectively the ONE
sacrificer, the father of the gods, Visvakarman, who performed the great
Sarva-Medha ceremony, and ended by sacrificing himself. (See Rig-Vedic Hymns.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] "who like [[Aisa]] gives to all their
portion of good and evil," and is therefore Karma (Vide Liddell). By this abbreviation,
however, the subject to Destiny or Karma is meant, the SELF or Ego, and that
which is reborn. Nor is [[Antimimon Pneumatos]] our conscience, but our Buddhi;
nor is it again the "counterfeit of Spirit" but "modelled after,"
or a counterpart of the Spirit -- which Buddhi is, as the vehicle of Atma (Vide
Ar. Theism, 17; and Liddell's definitions).
* C. W. King's
Gnostics, p. 38.
** Prof. Roth
(in Peter's Lexicon) defines the Angirases as an intermediate race of higher
beings between gods and men; while Prof. Weber, according to his invariable
custom of modernising and anthropomorphising the divine, sees in them the
original priests of the religion which was common to the Aryan Hindus and
Persians. Roth is right. "Angirases" was one of the names of the
Dhyanis, or Devas instructors ("guru-deva"), of the late Third, the
Fourth, and even of the Fifth Race Initiates.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 606 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
In these Hymns the "Heavenly Man" is
called purusha, "the Man," (X. 90, 1) from whom Viraj was born (X.
90, 5); and from Viraj, the (mortal) man. It is Varuna (now drawn from his
sublime position to be the chief of the lords-Dhyanis or Devas) who regulates
all natural phenomena, who "makes a path for the Sun, for him to
follow." The seven rivers of the sky (the descending creative gods) and
the seven rivers of the earth (the seven primitive mankinds) are under his control,
as will be seen. For he who breaks Varuna's laws (Vratani, "courses of
natural action," active laws) is punished by Indra (X. 113, 5), the Vedic
powerful god, whose Vrata (law or power) is greater than the Vratani of any
other god.
Thus, the Rig Veda,
the oldest of all the known ancient records, may be shown to corroborate the
occult teachings in almost every respect. Its hymns -- the records written by
the earliest Initiates of the Fifth (our race) concerning the primordial
teachings -- speak of the Seven Races (two still to come) allegorising them by
the "seven streams" (1, 35, 8); and of the Five Races ("panca
krishtayah") which have already inhabited this world (ibid) on the five
regions "panca pradicah" (IX, 86, 29), as also of the three continents
that were.*
It is those
scholars only who will master the secret meaning of the Purushasukta (in which
the intuition of the modern Orientalist has chosen to see "one of the very
latest hymns of the Rig-Veda"), who may hope to understand how harmonious
are its teachings and how corroborative of the Esoteric doctrines. One must
study in all the abstruseness of their metaphysical meaning the relations in it
between the (Heavenly) man "Purusha," SACRIFICED for the production
of the Universe and all in it (See Visvakarman), and the terrestrial mortal man
(Hymn X. 20, 1, 16), before one realizes the hidden philosophy of this verse:--
"15. He
("Man," purusha, or Visvakarman) had seven enclosing logs of fuel,
and thrice seven layers of fuel; when the gods performed the sacrifice, they
bound the Man as victim" . . . . This relates to the three Septenary
primeval Races, and shows the antiquity of the Vedas, who knew of no other,
probably in this earliest oral teachings; and also
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Three
submerged, or otherwise destroyed, continents -- the first
"continent" of the First Race prevailing to the last and existing to
this day -- are described in the occult Doctrine, the Hyperborean, the Lemurian
(adopting the name now known in Science), and the Atlantean. Most of Asia
issued from under the waters after the destruction of Atlantis; Africa came
still later, while Europe is the fifth and the latest -- portions of the two
Americas being far older. But of these, more anon. The Initiates who recorded
the Vedas -- or the Rishis of our Fifth Race -- wrote at a time when Atlantis
had already gone down. Atlantis is the fourth continent that appeared, but the
third that disappeared.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 607 THE SEVEN EARTHS AND THE SEVEN RACES.
to the seven
primeval groups of mankind, as Visvakarman represents divine humanity
collectively.*
The same
doctrine is found reflected in the other old religions. It may, and must have
come down to us disfigured and misinterpreted, as in the case of the Parsis,
who read it in their Vendidad and elsewhere, without understanding the
allusions they contain any better than the Orientalists do; yet the doctrine is
plainly mentioned in their old works. (See the enumeration of the seven spheres
--not the "Karshvare of the earth," as believed -- in Fargard XIX.,
30). But see further on.
Comparing the
esoteric teaching with the interpretations by James Darmesteter (the Vendidad,
edited by Prof. Max Muller), one may see at a glance where the mistake is made,
and the cause that produced it. The passage runs thus:--
"The Indo-Iranian
Asura (Ahura) was often conceived as seven-fold; by the play of certain
mythical (?) formulae and the strength of certain mythical (?) numbers, the
ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds,** and the
Supreme God was often made seven-fold, as well as the worlds over which he
ruled." (Vide the foot note). "The seven worlds became in Persia the
seven Karshvare of the earth: the earth is divided into seven Karshvare, only
one of which is known and accessible to man, the one on which we live, namely,
Hvaniratha; which amounts to saying that there are seven earths.*** Parsi
mythology knows also of seven heavens. Hvaniratha itself is divided into seven
climes. (Orm. Ahr. § 72. "Vendidad Introd. p. Lx.,)" and the same
division and doctrine is to be found in the oldest and most revered of the
Hindu
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nor is this
archaic teaching so very unscientific, since one of the greatest naturalists of
the age -- the late Professor Agassiz -- admitted the multiplicity of the
geographical origins of man, and supported it to the end of his life. The unity
of the human species was accepted by the illustrious Professor of Cambridge
(U.S.A.) in the same way as the Occultists do -- namely, in the sense of their
essential and original homogeneity and their origin from one and the same
source:-- e.g., Negroes, Aryans, Mongols, etc., have all originated in the same
way and from the same ancestors. The latter were all of one essence, yet
differentiated, because belonging to seven planes which differed in degree
though not in kind. That original physical difference was but little more
accentuated by that of geographical and climatic conditions, later on. This is
not the theory of Agassiz, of course, but the esoteric version. It is fully
discussed in the Addenda (Part III.).
** The seven
worlds are, as said, the seven spheres of the chain, each presided over by one
of the "Seven great gods" of every religion. When the latter became
degraded and anthropomorphized, and the metaphysical ideas nearly forgotten,
the synthesis or the highest, the seventh, was separated from the rest, and
that personification became the eighth god, whom monotheism tried to unify but
-- failed. In no exoteric religion is God really one, if analyzed
metaphysically.
*** The six
invisible globes of our chain are both "worlds" and
"earths" as is our own, albeit invisible. But where could be the Six
invisible earths on this globe?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 608 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
scriptures --
the Rig-veda. Mention is made therein of six worlds, besides our earth: the six
rajamsi above prithivi -- the earth, -- or "this" (idam) as opposed
to that which is yonder (i.e., the six globes on the three other planes or
worlds). (See Rig-veda I. 34, III. 56; VII 10, 411, and V., 60. 6).
The italics are
ours to point out the identity of the tenets with those of the esoteric
doctrine, and the mistake made. The Magi or Mazdeans only believed in what
other people believed in; namely, in seven "worlds" or globes of our
planetary chain, of which only one is accessible to man (at the present time),
our Earth; and in the successive appearance and destruction of seven continents
or earths on this our globe, each continent being divided, in commemoration of
the seven globes (one visible, six invisible), into seven islands or
continents, "seven climes," etc., etc. This was a common belief in
those days when the now Secret Doctrine was open to all. It is this
multiplicity of localities under Septenary division, that made the Orientalists
(led astray, moreover, by the oblivion of both the uninitiated Hindus and Parsis
of their primitive doctrines) feel so puzzled by this ever-recurring seven-fold
number, as to regard it as "mythical." It is that oblivion of the
first principles which has led the Orientalists off the right track and made
them commit the greatest blunders. The same failure is found in the definition
of the Gods. Those who are ignorant of the esoteric doctrine of the earliest
Aryans, can never assimilate or understand correctly the metaphysical meaning
contained in these BEINGS.
Ahura Mazda
(Ormazd) was the head and synthesis of the seven Amesha Spentas (or
Amshaspends), and, therefore, an Amesha Spenta himself. Just as
"Jehovah-Binah Arelim" was the head and synthesis of the Elohim and
no more; so Agni-Vishnu-Surya was the synthesis and head, or the focus whence
emanated in physics as in metaphysics, from the Spiritual as from the physical
Sun, the Seven Rays, the seven fiery tongues, the seven planets or gods. All
these became supreme gods and the ONE GOD, but only after the loss of the
primeval secrets, the sinking of Atlantis, or "the Flood," and the
occupation of India by the Brahmans, who sought safety on the summits of the
Himalayas, when even the high table-lands of what is now Tibet became submerged
for a time. Ahura Mazda is addressed only as "the Most Blissful Spirit,
Creator of the corporeal World" in the Vendidad. "Ahura Mazda"
in its literal translation means the "Wise Lord" (Ahura
"lord," and Mazda "wise"). Moreover, this name of Ahura, in
Sanskrit Asura, connects him with the Manasaputras, the Sons of Wisdom who
informed the mindless man, and endowed him with his mind (manas). Ahura (asura)
may be derived from the root ah "to be," but in its primal
signification it is what the Secret Teaching shows it to be.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 609 THE ZOROASTRIAN SEPTENARY.
When geology
shall have found out how many thousands of years ago the disturbed waters of
the Indian Ocean reached the highest plateaux of Central Asia, when the Caspian
Sea and the Persian Gulf made one with it, then only will they know the age of
the Aryan Brahminical nation, and the time of its descent into the plains of
Hindostan, which it did millenniums later.
Yima, the
so-called "first man" in the Vendidad, as much as his twin-brother
Yama, the Son of Vaivasvata Manu, belongs to two epochs of the Universal
History. He is the "Progenitor" of the Second human Race, hence the
personification of the shadows of the Pitris, and the father of the
postdiluvian Humanity. The Magi said "Yima," as we say
"man" when speaking of mankind. The "fair Yima," the first
mortal who converses with Ahura Mazda, is the first "man" who dies or
disappears, not the first who is born. The "Son of Vixanghat," was,
like the Son of Vaivasvata, the symbolical man, who stood in esotericism as the
representative of the first three races and the collective Progenitor thereof.
Of these races the first two never died* but only vanished, absorbed in their
progeny, and the third knew death only towards its close, after the separation
of the sexes and its "Fall" into generation. This is plainly alluded
to in the II. Fargard of the Vendidad. Yima refuses to become the bearer of the
law of Ahura Mazda, saying "I was not born, I was not taught to be the
preacher and the bearer of thy law." And then Ahura Mazda asks him to make
his men increase and "watch over his world" (3 and 4).
He refuses to
become the priest of Ahura Mazda, because he is his own priest and sacrificer,
but he accepts the second proposal. He is made to answer:--
"Yes! . . .
yes, I will rule and watch over thy world. There shall be, while I am King,
neither cold wind nor hot wind, neither disease nor death."
Then Ahura Mazda
brings him a golden ring and a poniard, the emblems of sovereignty, and under
the sway of Yima --
"Three
hundred winters passed away, and the earth was replenished with flocks and
herds, with men, and dogs, and birds, and with red blazing fires," etc.
(300 winters mean 300 periods or cycles.)
"Replenished,"
mark well, that is to say, all this had been on it before; and thus is proven
the knowledge of the doctrine about the successive destructions of the world
and its life cycles. Once the "300 winters" were over, Ahura Mazda
warns Yima that the earth is becoming too full, and men have nowhere to live.
Then Yima steps forward, and with the help of Spenta Armaita (the female
genius, or Spirit of the Earth) makes that earth stretch out and become larger
by
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Death came
only after man had become a physical creature, vide supra. The men of the First
Race and also of the Second, dissolved and disappeared in their progeny.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 610 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
one-third, after
which "new herds and flocks and men" appear upon it. Ahura Mazda
warns him again, and Yima makes the earth by the same magic power to become
larger by two-thirds. "Nine hundred winters" pass away, and Yima has
to perform the ceremony for the third time. The whole of this is allegorical.
The three processes of stretching the earth, refer to the three successive
continents and races issuing one after and from the other, as explained more
fully elsewhere. After the third time, Ahura Mazda warns Yima in an assembly of
"celestial gods and excellent mortals" that upon the material world
the fatal winters are going to fall, and all life will perish. This is the old
Mazdean symbolism for the "flood," and the coming cataclysm to
Atlantis, which sweeps away every race in its turn. Like Vaivasvata Manu and
Noah, Yima makes a vara (an enclosure, an ark) under the God's direction, and
brings thither the seed of every living creature, animals and
"fires."
It is of this
"earth" or new continent that Zarathustra became the law-giver and
ruler. This was the Fourth Race in its beginning, after the men of the Third
began to die out. Till then, as said (vide supra, foot note) there had been no
regular death, but only a transformation, for men had no personality as yet.
They had monads -- breaths of the ONE Breath, and as impersonal as the source
from which they proceeded. They had bodies, or rather shadows of bodies, which
were sinless, hence Karmaless. Therefore, as there was no Kamaloka -- least of
all Nirvana or even Devachan -- for the "souls" of men who had no
personal Egos, there could be no intermediate periods between the incarnations.
Like the Phoenix, primordial man resurrected out of his old into a new body.
Each time, and with each new generation, he became more solid, more physically
perfect, agreeably with the evolutionary law, which is the Law of Nature. Death
came with the complete physical organism, and with it -- moral decay.
This explanation
shows one more old religion agreeing in its symbology with the universal
Doctrine.
Elsewhere the
oldest Persian traditions, the relics of Mazdeism of the still older Magians,
are given, and some of them explained. Mankind did not issue from one solitary
couple. Nor was there ever a first man -- whether Adam or Yima -- but a first
mankind.
It may, or may
not be, "mitigated polygenism." Once that both creation ex-nihilo --
an absurdity -- and a superhuman Creator or creators -- a fact -- are made away
with by science, polygenism presents no more difficulties or inconveniences
(rather fewer from a scientific point of view) than monogenism does.
Nevertheless, it
is as scientific as any other claim. For in his Introduction to Nott's and
Gliddon's "Types of Mankind," Agassiz declares
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 611 THE SEPTENATE IN THE PURANAS.
his belief in an
indefinite number of "primordial races of men created separately";
and remarks that, "whilst in every zoological province animals are of
different species, man, in spite of the diversity of his races, always forms
one and the same human being."
Occultism
defines and limits the number of primordial races to seven, because of the
"seven progenitors," or prajapatis, the evolvers of beings. These are
neither gods, nor supernatural Beings, but advanced Spirits from another and
lower planet, reborn on this one, and giving birth in their turn in the present
Round to present Humanity. This doctrine is again corroborated by one of its
echoes -- the Gnostic. In their Anthropology and Genesis of man they taught
that "a certain company of Seven angels," formed the first men, who
were no better than senseless, gigantic, shadowy forms -- "a mere
wriggling worm" (!) writes Irenaeus (I., 24, 1), who takes, as usual, the
metaphor for reality.
-------
D.
THE SEPTENARY IN
THE EXOTERIC WORKS.
We may now
examine other ancient Scriptures and see whether they contain the septenary
classification, and, if so, to what degree.
As much, if not
much more, even than in the Jewish Bible, scattered about in the thousands of
Sanskrit texts, some still unopened, others yet unknown, as well as in all the
Puranas, the numbers seven and forty-nine (7 x 7) play a most prominent part.
They are found from the Seven creations in Chapter I., down to the seven rays
of the Sun at the final Pralaya, which expand into Seven Suns and absorb the
material of the whole Universe. Thus the Matsya Purana has: "For the sake
of promulgating the Vedas, Vishnu, in the beginning of a Kalpa, related to Manu
the story of Narasimha and the events of seven Kalpas." Then again the
same Purana shows that "in all the Manvantaras, classes of Rishis* appear
by seven and seven, and having established a code of law and morality depart to
felicity" -- the Rishis representing many other things besides living
Sages.
In Hymn xix.,
53, of Atharva Veda (Dr. Muir's translation) one reads:--
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "These
are the seven persons by whom in the several Manvantaras" -- says Parasara
-- "created beings have been protected. Because the whole world has been
pervaded by the energy of the deity, he is entitled Vishnu, from the root Vis
'to enter' or 'pervade,' for all the gods, the Manus, the Seven Rishis, the
Sons of the Manu, the Indras, all are but the impersonated potencies
(Vibhutayah) of Vishnu" (Vish. Purana). Vishnu is the Universe; and the
Universe itself is divided in the Rig Veda into seven regions -- which ought to
be sufficient authority, for the Brahmins, at all events.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Puranas insist on the identity of Vishnu with Time and Space*; and that
even the Rabbinical symbol for God is MAQOM, "Space," it becomes
clear why, for purposes of a manifesting Deity -- Space, Matter, and Spirit --
the one central point became the Triangle and Quaternary (the perfect Cube),
hence Seven. Even the Pravaha wind (the mystic and occult Force that gives the
impulse to, and regulates the course of the stars and planets) is septenary.
The Kurma and Linga Puranas enumerate seven principal winds of that name, which
winds are the principles of Cosmic Space. They are intimately connected with
Dhruva** (now Alpha), the Pole-Star, which is connected in its turn with the
production of various phenomena through cosmic forces.
Thus, from the
Seven Creations, seven Rishis, Zones, Continents, Principles, etc., etc. in the
Aryan Scriptures, the number has passed through Indian, Egyptian, Chaldaic,
Greek, Jewish, Roman, and finally Christian mystic thought, until it landed in
and remained impressed indelibly on every exoteric theology. The seven old
books stolen out of Noah's ark by Ham, and given to Cush, his son, and the
seven Brazen columns of Ham and Cheiron, are a reflection and a remem-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vishnu is all
-- the worlds, the stars, the seas, etc., etc. "Vishnu is all that is, all
that is not . . . . but is not Vastubhuta," "a substance"
(Vishnu Purana, Book II. ch. xii). "That which people call the highest God
is not a substance but the cause of it; not one that is here, there, or
elsewhere, not what we see, but that in which all is -- SPACE."
** Therefore it
is said in the Puranas that the view of Dhruva (the polar star) at night, and
of the celestial porpoise (Sisumara, a constellation) "expiates whatever
sin has been committed during the day." The fact is that the rays of the
four stars in the circle of perpetual apparition -- the Agni, Mahendra,
Kasyapa, and Dhruva, placed in the tail of Ursa Minor (Sisumara) -- focussed in
a certain way and on a certain object produce extraordinary results. The
astro-magians of India will understand what is meant.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 613 WHO ARE THE MARUTS?
brance of the
Seven primordial mysteries instituted according to the "Seven secret
emanations," the "Seven Sounds," and seven rays -- the spiritual
and sidereal models of the seven thousand times seven copies of them in later
aeons.
The mysterious
number is once more prominent in the no less mysterious Maruts. The Vayu Purana
shows, and Harivansa corroborates, that the Maruts -- the oldest as the most
incomprehensible of all the secondary or lower gods in the Rig Veda --
"are born in every manvantara (Round) seven times seven (or 49); that in
each Manvantara, four times seven (or twenty-eight) they obtain emancipation,
but their places are filled up by persons reborn in that character." What
are the Maruts in their esoteric meaning, and who those persons "reborn in
that character"? In the Rig and other Vedas, the Maruts are represented as
the storm gods and the friends and allies of Indra; they are the "Sons of
heaven and of earth." This led to an allegory that makes them the children
of Siva, the great patron of the Yogis, "the MAHA-YOGI, the great ascetic,
in whom is centred the highest perfection of austere penance and abstract
meditation, by which the most unlimited powers are obtained, marvels and
miracles are worked, the highest spiritual knowledge is acquired, and union
with the great spirit of the universe is eventually gained." In the Rig
Veda the name Siva is unknown, but the god is called Rudra, which is a word
used for Agni, the fire god, the Maruts being called therein his sons. In the
Ramayana and the Puranas, their mother, Diti -- the sister, or complement of,
and a form of Aditi -- anxious to obtain a son who would destroy Indra, is told
by Kasyapa the Sage, that "if, with thoughts wholly pious and person
entirely pure, she carrys the babe in her womb for a hundred years" she
will get such a son. But Indra foils her in the design. With his thunderbolt he
divides the embryo in her womb into seven portions, and then divides every such
portion into seven pieces again, which become the swift-moving deities, the
Maruts.* These deities are only another aspect, or a development of the
Kumaras, who are Rudras in their patronymic, like many others.**
Diti, being
Aditi, unless the contrary is proven to us, Aditi, we say, or Akasa in her
highest form, is the Egyptian seven-fold heaven. Every true Occultist will
understand what this means. Diti, we repeat, is the sixth
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In the
Ramayana it is Bala-Rama, Krishna's elder brother, who does it.
** With regard
to the origin of Rudra, it is stated in several Puranas that his (spiritual)
progeny, created in him by Brahma, was not confined to either the seven Kumaras
or the eleven Rudras, etc., but "comprehends infinite numbers of beings in
person and equipments like their (virgin) father. Alarmed at their fierceness,
numbers, and immortality, Brahma desires his son Rudra to form creatures of a
different and mortal nature." Rudra refusing to create, desists, etc.,
hence Rudra is the first rebel. (Linga, Vayu, Matsya, and other Puranas.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 614 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
principle of
metaphysical nature, the Buddhi of Akasa. Diti, the mother of the Maruts, is
one of her terrestrial forms, made to represent, at one and the same time, the
divine Soul in the ascetic, and the divine aspirations of mystic Humanity
toward deliverance from the webs of Maya, and final bliss in consequence.
Indra, now degraded, because of the Kali Yuga, when such aspirations are no
more general but have become abnormal through a general spread of Ahamkara (the
feeling of Egotism, Self, or I-AM-NESS) and ignorance -- was, in the beginning,
one of the greatest gods of the Hindu Pantheon, as the Rig Veda shows.
Sura-dhipa, "the chief of the gods," has fallen down from Jishnu,
"the leader of the celestial host," -- the Hindu St. Michael -- to an
opponent of asceticism, the enemy of every holy aspiration. He is shown married
to Aindri (Indrani), the personification of Aindri-yaka, the evolution of the
element of senses, whom he married "because of her voluptuous
attractions"; after which he began sending celestial female demons to excite
the passions of holy men, Yogis, and "to beguile them from the potent
penances which he dreaded." Therefore, Indra, now characterized as
"the god of the firmament, the personified atmosphere" -- is in
reality the cosmic principle Mahat, and the fifth human -- Manas in its dual
aspect: as connected with Buddhi; and as allowing himself to be dragged down by
his Kama-principle (the body of passions and desires). This is demonstrated by
Brahma telling the conquered god that his frequent defeats were due to Karma,
and were a punishment for his licentiousness, and the seduction of various
nymphs. It is in this latter character that he seeks, to save himself from
destruction, to destroy the coming "babe" destined to conquer him:--
the babe, of course, allegorizing the divine and steady will of the Yogi --
determined to resist all such temptations, and thus destroy the passions within
his earthly personality. Indra succeeds again, because flesh conquers spirit --
(Diti is shown frustrated in the Dvapara Yug, during that period when the
Fourth Race was flourishing). He divides the "Embryo" (of new divine
adeptship, begotten once more by the Ascetics of the Aryan Fifth Race), into
seven portions -- a reference not alone to the seven sub-races of the new
Root-Race, in each of which there will be a "Manu,"* but also to the
seven degrees of adeptship -- and then each
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
Notwithstanding the terrible, and evidently purposed, confusion of Manus,
Rishis, and their progeny in the Puranas, one thing is made clear: there have
been and there will be seven Rishis in every Root-Race (called also Manvantara
in the sacred books) as there are fourteen Manus in every Round, the
"presiding gods, the Rishis and Sons of the Manus" being identical.
(See Book III. ch. 1 of Vishnu Purana.) "Six" Manvantaras are given,
the Seventh being our own in the Vishnu Purana. The Vayu Purana furnishes the
nomenclature of the Sons of the fourteen Manus in every Manvantara, and the
Sons of the seven Sages or Rishis. The latter are the progeny [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Akasa's lower principles -- her body, or sthula sarira, representing
the terrestrial, lower, atmosphere of every inhabited globe -- this mystically
and sidereally; (c) actual conscious Existences, Beings of a cosmic and psychic
nature.
At the same time
"Maruts" is, in occult parlance, one of the names given to those EGOS
of great Adepts who have passed away, and who are known also as Nirmanakayas;
of those Egos for whom -- since they are beyond illusion -- there is no
Devachan, and who, having either voluntarily renounced it for the good of
mankind, or not yet reached Nirvana, remain invisible on earth. Therefore are
the Maruts* shown firstly -- as the sons of Siva-Rudra -- the "Patron
Yogi," whose "third eye," mystically, must be acquired by the
ascetic before he becomes an adept; then, in their cosmic character, as the
subordinates of Indra and his opponents -- variously. The "four times
seven" emancipations have a reference to the four Rounds, and the four
Races that preceded ours, in each of which Marut-Jivas (monads) have been
re-born, and have obtained final liberation, if they have only availed
themselves of it. Instead of which, preferring the good of mankind, which would
struggle still more hopelessly in the meshes of ignorance and misery, were it
not for this extraneous help -- they are re-born over and over again "in
that character," and thus "fill up their own places." Who they
are, "on earth" -- every student of Occult science knows. And he also
knows that the Maruts are Rudras, among whom also the family of Twashtri, a
synonym of Visvakarman -- the great patron of the Initiates -- is included.
This gives us an ample knowledge of their true nature.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] of the Progenitors of mankind. All the Puranas
speak of the seven Prajapatis of this period (Round).
*
"Chakshuba was the Manu of the sixth period (Third Round and Third Race),
in which Indra was Manojava" (Mantradruma in the Bhagavata Purana). As
there is a perfect analogy between the "great Round" (Mahakalpa),
each of the seven Rounds, and each of the seven great Races in every one of the
Rounds -- therefore, Indra of the sixth period, or Third Round, corresponds to
the close of the Third Race (at the time of the Fall or the separation of
sexes). Rudra, as the father of the Maruts, has many points of contact with
Indra, the Marutwan, or "lord of the Maruts." To receive a name Rudra
is said to have wept for it. Brahma called him Rudra; but he wept seven times
more and so obtained seven other names -- of which he uses one during each
"period."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 616 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The same for the
Septenary Division of Kosmos and human principles. The Puranas, along with
other sacred texts, teem with allusions to this. First of all, the mundane Egg
which contained Brahma, or the Universe, "was externally invested with
seven natural elements, at first loosely enumerated as Water, Air, Fire, Ether,
and three secret elements" (Book I.); then the "World" is said
to be "encompassed on every side" by seven elements, also within the
egg -- as explained, "the universe is encompassed on every side, above and
below by the Andakat'aha -- the shell of the egg of Brahma." . . . Around
the shell flows water, which is surrounded with fire; fire by air; air by
ether; ether by the origin of the elements (Ahamkara); the latter by Universal
Mind ("Intellect" in the Texts) (Book II., ch. VII. Vishnu Purana).
It relates to spheres of being as much as to principles. Prithivi is not our Earth,
but the World, the Solar system, and means the broad, the Wide. In the Vedas --
the greatest of all authorities, though needing the key to read it correctly --
three terrestrial and three celestial earths are mentioned as having been
called into existence simultaneously with Bhumi -- our earth. We have often
been told that six, not seven, appears to be the number of spheres, principles,
etc. We answer that there are, in fact, only six principles in man; since his
body is no principle, but the covering, the shell thereof. So with the
planetary chain; speaking of which, esoterically, the Earth (as well as the
seventh, or rather fourth plane, one that stands as the seventh if we count
from the first triple kingdom of the Elementals that begin the formation) may
be left out of consideration, being (to us) the only distinct body of the
seven. The language of occultism is varied. But supposing that three earths
only, instead of seven, are meant in the Vedas, what are those three, since we
still know of but one? Evidently there must be an occult meaning in the
statement under consideration. Let us see. The "Earth that floats" on
the Universal Ocean (of Space), which Brahma divides in the Puranas into seven
zones, is Prithivi, the world divided into seven principles; a cosmic division
looking metaphysical enough, but, in reality, physical in its occult effects.
Many Kalpas later, our Earth is mentioned, and, in its turn, is divided into
seven zones* on that same law of analogy that guided ancient philosophers. After
which one finds on it seven continents, seven isles, seven oceans, seven seas
and rivers, seven mountains, and seven climates, etc., etc., etc.**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See the
Puranas.
** In Vishnu
Purana, Book II., chap. iv., it is stated that the EARTH, "with its
continents, mountains, oceans, and exterior shell, is fifty crores (500
millions) of yojanas in extent," to which the commentator remarks that
"this comprises the planetary spheres; for the diameter of the seven zones
and oceans -- each ocean being of the same diameter as the continent it
encloses, and each successive continent being twice the [[Footnot continued on
next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 617 PERSIAN SYMBOLOGY.
Furthermore, it
is not only in the Hindu Scriptures and philosophy that one finds references to
the Seven Earths, but in the Persian, Phoenician, Chaldean, and Egyptian
Cosmogonies, and even in Rabbinical literature. The Phoenix* -- called by the
Hebrews Onech [Heb char] (from Phenoch, Enoch, symbol of a secret cycle and
initiation), and by the Turks, Kerkes -- lives a thousand years, after which, kindling
a flame, it is self-consumed; and then, reborn from itself -- it lives another
thousand years, up to seven times seven: (See "Book of Ali" --
Russian transl.), when comes the day of Judgment. The "seven times
seven," 49, are a transparent allegory, and an allusion to the forty-nine
"Manus," the Seven Rounds, and the seven times seven human cycles in
each Round on each globe. The Kerkes and the Onech stand for a race cycle, and
the mystical tree Ababel -- the "Father Tree" in the Kuran -- shoots
out new branches and vegetation at every resurrection of the Kerkes or Phoenix;
the "Day of judgment" meaning a "minor Pralaya" (See
"Esoteric Buddhism"). The author of the "Book of God" and
the "Apocalypse" believes that "the Phoenix is very plainly the
same as the Simorgh, the Persian roc, and the account which is given us of this
last bird, yet more decisively establishes the opinion that the death and
revival of the Phoenix exhibit the successive destruction and reproduction of
the world, which many believed to be effected by the agency of a fiery
deluge" -- (p. 175); and a watery one in turn. "When the Simorgh was
asked her age, she informed Caherman that this world is very ancient, for it
has been already seven times replenished with beings different from men, and
seven times depopulated;** that the age of the human race, in which we now are,
is to endure seven thousand numbers, and that she herself had seen twelve of
these revolutions, and knew not how many more she had to see." (Oriental
Collections, ii., 119.)
The above,
however, is no new statement. From Bailly, in the last century, down to Dr.
Kenealy, in this one, these facts have been noticed by several writers, but now
a connection can be established between
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] diameter of that which precedes it -- amounts to
but two crores or fifty-four lakhs etc. . . . Whenever any contradictions in
different Puranas occur, they have to be ascribed . . . to differences of
Kalpas and the like." "The like" ought to read "Occult
meaning," which explanation is withheld by the commentator, who wrote for
exoteric, sectarian purposes, and was misunderstood by the translator for
various other reasons, the least of which is -- ignorance of the esoteric
philosophy.
* The Phoenix, connected with the Solar Cycle
of 600 years (with ciphers taken out or with more added according to which
cycle is meant), the Western cycle of the Greeks and other nations -- is a
generic symbol for several kinds of cycles. Fuller details will be given in the
section on "Kalpas and Cycles."
** The tense is
the "past" because the book is allegorical, and has to veil the
truths contained.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Kumara, a
"virgin youth" again, generated in the fire from the Seed of Siva --
the holy spirit -- hence called Agni-bhu. The late Dr. Kenealy believed that,
in India, Karttikeya is the secret symbol of the cycle of Naros, composed of
600, 666, and 777 years, according to whether it is solar or lunar, divine or
mortal, years that are counted; and the six visible, or the seven actual
sisters, the Pleiades, are needed for the completion of this most secret and
mysterious of all the astronomical and religious symbols. Therefore, when made
to commemorate one particular event, Karttikeya appeared, of old, as a Kumara,
an ascetic, with six heads -- one for each century of the Naros. When the
symbolism was needed for another event, then, in conjunction with the seven
sidereal sisters, Karttikeya is seen accompanied by Kaumara (or Sena) his
female aspect. He is then riding on a peacock -- the bird of Wisdom and Occult
Knowledge, and the Hindu Phoenix, whose Greek relation with the 600 years of
Naros is well-known. A six-rayed star (double triangle) a Swastica, a six and
occasionally seven-pointed crown is on his brow; the peacock's tail represents
the sidereal heavens; and the twelve signs of the Zodiac are hidden on his
body; for which he is also called Dwadasa Kara," ("the twelve-handed"),
and Dwadasaksha, "twelve-eyed." It is as Sakti-dhara, however, the
"Spear-holder," and the conqueror of Taraka, "Taraka-jit,"
that he is shown most famous.
The years of the
Naros, being (in India) counted in two ways -- either "100 years of the
gods," (divine years) -- or 100 mortal years -- one can see the tremendous
difficulty for the non-initiated in comprehending correctly this cycle, which
plays such an important part in St. John's Revelation. It is the truly
apocalyptic Cycle; yet in none of the numerous speculations about it have we
found anything but a few approximate truths, because of its being of various
lengths and relating to various pre-historic events.
It has been
urged against the duration claimed by the Babylonians for their divine ages,
that Suidas shows the ancients counting, in their chronological computations,
days for years. Dr. Sepp in his ingenious plagiarism -- exposed elsewhere -- of
the Hindu 432 in thousands and millions of years (the duration of the Yugas)
which he dwarfed to 4,320 lunar years before the "birth of Christ" --
as "foreordained" in the sidereal (besides the invisible) heavens,
and proved "by the apparition of the Star of Bethlehem" -- appeals to
Suidas and his authority. But Suidas had no other warrant for it than his own
speculations, and he
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. [[Heelios]].) True, there are other ancient writers guilty of like
fallacious speculations -- Calisthenes, for instance, who assigns to the
astronomical observations of the Chaldeans only 1,903 years, whereas Epigenes
recognises 720,000 years (Pliny. Histor. Natur. Lib. VII. c. 56.) The whole of
these hypotheses made by profane writers are based upon and due to a
misunderstanding. The chronology of all the Western peoples, ancient Greeks and
Romans, was borrowed from India. Now, it is said in the Tamil edition of
Bagavadam that 15 solar days make a Paccham; two paccham (or 30 days) are a
month of the mortals, adding that such a month is only one day of the Pitar
Devata (Pitris). Again, two of these months constitute a roodoo, three roodoo
make an ayanam, and two ayanams a year -- which year of the mortals is but a
day of the gods. It is on such misunderstood teachings that some Greeks have
imagined that all the initiated priests had transformed days into years!
This mistake of
the ancient Greek and Latin writers became pregnant with results in Europe. At
the close of the past and the beginning of this century, relying upon the
purposely mutilated accounts of Hindu chronology, brought from India by certain
too zealous and as unscrupulous missionaries, Bailly, Dupuis, and others built
quite a fantastic theory upon the subject. Because the Hindus had made half a
revolution of the moon, a measure of time; and because a month composed of only
fifteen days -- of which Quint. Curtius speaks (Menses in quinos dies
descriperunt dies. Quint. Curt. LVIII., c. 9) -- is found mentioned in Hindu
literature, therefore, it is a verified fact that their year was only half a
year, when it was not called a day. The Chinese, too, divided their Zodiac into
twenty-four parts, hence their year into twenty-four fortnights, but such
computation did not, nor does it prevent their having an astronomical year just
the same as ours. And they have a period of sixty days -- the Southern Indian
Roodoo, to this day in some provinces. Moreover, Diodorus Siculus (Lib. I. §
26, p. 30) calls "thirty days an Egyptian year," or that period
during which the moon performs a complete revolution. Pliny and Plutarch both
speak of it (Hist. Nat. Lib. VII., c. 48, Vol. III., p. 185, and Life of Numa,
§ 16); but does it stand to reason that the Egyptians, who knew astronomy as
well as any other people did, made the lunar month consist of thirty days, when
it is only twenty-eight days with fractions? This lunary period had an occult
meaning surely as much as the Ayanam and the roodoo of the Hindus had. The year
of two months' duration, and the period of sixty days also,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 621 VARIOUS CYCLIC CALCULATIONS.
was a universal
measure of time in antiquity, as Bailly himself shows in his Traite de
l'Astronomie Orientale. The Chinamen, according to their own books, divided
their year into two parts, from one equinox to the other (Mem. Acad. Ins. T.
XVI., c. 48, Tom. III., p. 183); the Arabs anciently divided the year into six
seasons, each composed of two months; in the Chinese astronomical work called
Kioo-tche, it is said that two moons make a measure of time, and six measures a
year; and to this day the aborigines of Kamschatka have their years of six
months, as they had when visited by Abbe Chappe (Voyage to Siberia, Vol. III.,
p. 19). But is all this a reason to say that when the Hindu Puranas say "a
solar year" they mean one solar day! It is the knowledge of the natural
laws that make of seven the root nature-number, so to say, in the manifested
world -- at any rate in our present terrestrial life-cycle -- and the wonderful
comprehension of its workings, that unveiled to the ancients so many of the
mysteries of nature. It is these laws, again, and their processes on the
sidereal, terrestrial, and moral planes, which enabled the old astronomers to
calculate correctly the duration of the cycles and their respective effects on
the march of events; to record beforehand (prophecy, it is called) the
influence which they will have on the course and development of the human
races. The Sun, Moon, and planets being the never-erring time measurers, whose
potency and periodicity were well known, became thus the great Ruler and rulers
of our little system in all its seven domains, or "spheres of
action."*
This has been so
evident and remarkable, that even many of the modern men of Science,
Materialists as well as Mystics, had their attention called to this law.
Physicians and theologians, mathematicians and psychologists have drawn the
attention of the world repeatedly to this fact of periodicity in the behaviour
of "Nature." These numbers are explained in the
"Commentaries" in these words.
THE CIRCLE IS
NOT THE "ONE" BUT THE ALL.
IN THE HIGHER
[heaven] THE IMPENETRABLE RAJAH ["ad Mutant," see Atharva-Veda X.,
105], IT [the Circle] BECOMES ONE, BECAUSE [it is] THE INDIVISIBLE, AND THERE
CAN BE NO TAU IN IT.
IN THE SECOND
[of the three "Rajamsi" (tritiya), 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The spheres of
action of the combined Forces of Evolution and Karma are (1) the
Super-spiritual or noumenal; (2) the Spiritual; (3) the Psychic; (4) the
Astro-ethereal; (5) the Sub-astral; (6) the Vital; and (7) the purely physical
spheres.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 622 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
OBTAIN SEVEN,
THE SACRED NUMBER OF LIFE; BLEND [the latter] WITH THE MIDDLE RAJAH, AND THOU
WILT HAVE NINE, THE SACRED NUMBER OF BEING AND BECOMING."*
When the Western
Orientalists have mastered the real meaning of the Rig Vedic divisions of the
World -- the two-fold, three-fold, six and seven-fold, and especially the
nine-fold division, the mystery of the cyclic divisions applied to heaven and
earth, gods and men, will become clearer to them than it is now. For --
"THERE IS A
HARMONY OF NUMBERS IN ALL NATURE; in the force of gravity, in the planetary
movements, in the laws of heat, light, electricity, and chemical affinity, in
the forms of animals and plants, in the perception of the mind. The direction,
indeed, of modern natural and physical science, is towards a generalization
which shall express the fundamental laws of all, by one simple numerical ratio.
We would refer to Professor Whewell's 'Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,'
and to Mr. Hay's researches into the laws of harmonious colouring and form.
From these it appears that the number seven is distinguished in the laws
regulating the harmonious Perception of forms, colours, and sounds, and
probably of taste also, if we could analyse our sensations of this kind with
mathematical accuracy." ("Medical Review," July, 1844).
So much so,
indeed, that more than one physician has stood aghast at the periodical
septenary return of the cycles in the rise and fall of various complaints, and
naturalists have felt themselves at an utter loss to explain this law.
"The birth, growth, maturity, vital functions . . . . change, diseases,
decay and death, of insects, reptiles, fishes, birds, mammals, and even of man,
are more or less controlled by a law of completion in weeks," or seven
days.** Dr. Laycock (Lancet, 1842-3), writing on the Periodicity of Vital
Phenomena, records a "most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the
law in insects."***
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In Hinduism,
as understood by the Orientalists from the Atharvaveda, the three rajamsi refer
to the three strides of Vishnu; his ascending higher step, being taken in the
highest world (A. V., VII., 99, 1, cf. I 155, 5). It is the divo rajah, or the
"sky," as they take it. But it is something besides this in
Occultism. The sentence pareshu, guhyeshu, vrateshu, cf. I, 155, 3, and IX.,
75, 2; or again, verse X., 114, in Atharvaveda -- has yet to be explained.
** H. Grattan
Guinness, F.R.G.S., in his "Approaching End of the Age."
*** Having given
a number of illustrations from natural history, the doctor adds: "The
facts I have briefly glanced at are general facts, and cannot happen day after
day in so many millions of animals of every kind, FROM THE LARVA OR OVUM OF A
MINUTE INSECT UP TO MAN, at definite periods, from a mere chance or coincidence
. . . I think it impossible to come to any less general conclusion than this,
that in animals, changes occur every three and a half, seven, fourteen,
twenty-one, or twenty-eight days, or at some definite number of weeks" or
septenary cycles. Again, the same Dr. Laycock states that:-- "Whatever
type the fever may exhibit, there will be a paroxysm on the seventh day . . .
the fourteenth will be remarkable as a day of amendment . . . " (either
cure or death taking place). "If the fourth (paroxysm) be severe, and the
fifth less so, the disease will end at the seventh paroxysm, and . . . change
for the better . . . will be seen on the fourteenth day, [[Footnote continued
on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 mature a law of septiform periodicity, a law of
completion in weeks" (p. 269). Without accepting the conclusions, and
especially the premises of the learned Founder of "the East London Institute
for Home and Foreign Missions," the writer accepts and welcomes his
researches in the occult chronology of the Bible. Just as, while rejecting the
theories and hypotheses of modern Science and its generalizations, we bow
before its great achievements in the world of the physical, or in all the minor
details of material nature.
There is most
assuredly an occult "chronological system in Hebrew Scripture" -- the
Kabala being its warrant; there is in it "a system of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] namely, about three or four o'clock a.m., when
the system is most languid." (See "Approaching End of the Age,"
by Grattan Guinness, pp. 258 to 269, wherein this is quoted.)
This is pure
"sooth-saying" by cyclic calculations, and it is connected with
Chaldean astrolatry and astrology. Thus materialistic Science -- medicine, the
most materialistic of all -- applies our occult laws to diseases, studies
natural history with its help, recognizes its presence as a fact in nature, and
yet must needs pooh-pooh the same archaic knowledge when claimed by the
Occultists. For if the mysterious Septenary Cycle is a law in nature, and it is
one, as proven; if it is found controlling the evolution and involution (or
death) in the realms of entomology, icthyology and ornithology, as in the
Kingdom of the Animal, mammalia and man -- why cannot it be present and acting
in Kosmos, in general, in its natural (though occult) divisions of time, races,
and mental development? And why, furthermore, should not the most ancient
adepts have studied and thoroughly mastered these cyclic laws under all their
aspects? Indeed, Dr. Stratton states as a physiological and pathological fact,
that "in health the human pulse is more frequent in the morning than in
the evening for six days out of seven; and that on the seventh day it is
slower." (Ibid. Edinb. Med. and Surg. Journal, Jan. 1843.) Why, then,
should not an Occultist show the same in cosmic and terrestrial life in the
pulse of the planet and races? Dr. Laycock divides life by three great
septenary periods; the first and last, each stretching over 21 years, and the
central period or prime of life lasting 28 years, or four times seven. He
subdivides the first into seven distinct stages, and the other two into three
minor periods, and says that "The fundamental unit of the greater periods
is one week of seven days, each day being twelve hours"; and that
"single and compound multiples of this unit, determine the length of these
periods by the same ratio, as multiples of the unit of twelve hours determine
the lesser periods. This law binds all periodic vital phenomena together, and
links the periods observed in the lowest annulose animals, with those of man
himself, the highest of the vertebrate." If Science does this, why should
the latter scorn the Occult information, namely, that (speaking Dr. Laycock's
language) "one week of the manvantaric (lunar) fortnight, of fourteen days
(or seven manus), that fortnight of twelve hours in a day representing seven
periods or seven races -- is now passed?" This language of science fits
our doctrine admirably. We (mankind) have lived over "a week of seven
days, each day being twelve hours," since three and a half races are now
gone for ever, the fourth is submerged, and we are now in the Fifth Race.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 624 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
weeks" --
which is based on the archaic Indian system, which may still be found in the
old Jyotisha.* And there are in it cycles of "the week of days," of
the "week of months," of years, of centuries, and even of
millenniums, decamillenniums, and more, or "the week of years of
years."** But all this can be found in the archaic doctrine. And if this
common source of the chronology in every Scripture, however veiled, is denied
in the case of the Bible, then the six days, and a Sabbath, the seventh, can
hardly disconnect Genesis from the Puranic Cosmogonies. For the first
"Week of Creation" shows the septiformity of its chronology and thus
connects it with Brahma's "Seven Creations." The able volume from the
pen of Mr. Grattan Guinness, in which he has collected on some 760 pages every
proof of that septiform calculation, is good evidence. For if the Bible
chronology is, as he says, "regulated by the law of weeks," and if it
is septenary, whatever the measures of the creation week and the length of its
days; and if, finally, "the Bible system includes weeks on a great variety
of scales," then this system is shown to be identical with all the pagan
systems. Moreover, the attempt to show that 4,320 years (in lunar months)
elapsed between "Creation" and the Nativity, is a clear and
unmistakable connection with the 4,320,000 of the Hindu Yugas. Otherwise, why
make such efforts to prove that these figures, which are pre-eminently Chaldean
and Indo-Aryan, play such a part in the New Testament? We shall prove it now
still more forcibly.
Let the
impartial critic compare the two accounts -- the Vishnu Purana and the Bible --
and he will find that the "seven creations" of Brahma are at the
foundation of the "week" of creation in Genesis i. The two allegories
are different, but the systems are all built on the same foundation-stone. The
Bible can be understood only by the light of the Kabala. Take the Zohar, the
"Book of Concealed Mystery," however now disfigured, and compare. The
seven Rishis and the fourteen Manus of the seven Manvantaras -- issue from
Brahma's head; they are his "mind-born sons," and it is with them
that begins the division of mankind and its races from the Heavenly man,
"the Logos" (the manifested), who is Brahma Prajapati. Says (V. 70
in) the "Ha Idra Rabba Qadisha" (the Greater Holy Assembly) of the
skull (head)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See for the
length of such cycles or Yugas in Vriddha Garga and other ancient astronomical
Sections (Jyotisha). They vary from the cycle of five years -- which Colebrooke
calls "the cycle of the Vedas," specified in the institutes of
Parasara, "and the basis of calculation for larger cycles" (Miscell.
Essays, Vol. I., pp. 106 and 108) -- up to the Mahayuga or the famous cycle of
4,320,000 years.
** The Hebrew
word for "week" is Seven; and any length of time divided by Seven
would have been a "week" in their day, even 49,000,000 years, as it
is seven times seven millions. But their calculation is throughout septiform.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 625 THE HAIRY SYMBOL.
of
Macroprosopus, the ancient One* (Sanat, an appellation of Brahma), that in
every one of his hairs is a "hidden fountain issuing from the concealed
brain." "And it shineth and goeth forth through that hair unto the
hair of Microprosopus, and from it (which is the manifest QUATERNARY, the
Tetragrammaton) his brain is formed; and thence that brain goeth into THIRTY
and TWO paths" (or the triad and the duad, or again 432). And again: (V.
80) "Thirteen curls of hair exist on the one side and on the other of the
skull" -- i.e., six on one and six on the other, the thirteenth being also
the fourteenth, as it is male-female, "and through them commenceth the
division of the hair" (the division of things, Mankind and Races).
"We six are
lights which shine forth from a seventh (light)," saith Rabbi Abba;
"thou art the seventh light" (the synthesis of us all, he adds,
speaking of Tetragrammaton and his seven "companions," whom he calls
"the eyes of Tetragrammaton.")
TETRAGRAMMATON
is Brahma Prajapati, who assumed four forms, in order to create four kinds of
supernal creatures, i.e., made himself fourfold, or the manifest Quaternary
(see Vishnu Purana, Book I. ch. V.); and who, after that, is re-born in the
seven Rishis, his Manasaputras, "mind-born sons," who became later,
9, 21 and so on, who are all said to be born from various parts of Brahma**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Brahma creates
in the first Kalpa (day one) various "sacrificial animals" pasu -- or
the celestial bodies and the Zodiacal signs, and plants which he uses in
sacrifices at the opening of Treta Yuga. The esoteric meaning of it shows him
proceeding cyclically and creating astral prototypes on the descending
spiritual arc and then on the ascending physical arc. The latter is the
sub-division of a two-fold creation, subdivided again into seven descending and
seven ascending degrees of spirit falling, and of matter ascending -- the
inverse of what takes place (as in a mirror which reflects the right on the
left side) in this manvantara of ours. It is the same, esoterically, in the
Elohistic Genesis (chap. i.), and in the Jehovistic copy, as in Hindu
cosmogony.
** It is very
surprising to see theologians and Oriental scholars express indignation at the
"depraved taste of the Hindu mystics" who, not content with having
invented the "Mind-born" Sons of Brahma, make the Rishis, Manus, and
Prajapatis of every kind spring from various parts of the body of their primal
Progenitor -- Brahma (see Wilson's footnote in his Vishnu Purana, Vol. I., p.
102). Because the average public is unacquainted with the Kabala, the key to,
and glossary of, the much veiled Mosaic Books, therefore, the clergy imagines
the truth will never out. Let any one turn to the English, Hebrew, or Latin
texts of the Kabala, now so ably translated by several scholars, and he will
find that the Tetragrammaton, which is the Hebrew IHVH, is also both the
"Sephirothal Tree"-- i.e., it contains all the Sephiroth except
Kether, the crown -- and the united body of the "Heavenly man" (Adam
Kadmon) from whose limbs emanate the Universe and everything in it. Furthermore,
he will find that the idea in the Kabalistic Books (the chief of which in the
Zohar are the "Books of Concealed Mystery," of the
"Greater," and the "Lesser Holy Assembly") is entirely
phallic and far more crudely expressed than is the four-fold Brahma in any of
the Puranas. (See "Kabala Unveiled," by Mr. S. L. Mathers, Chap.
xxii., concerning the remaining members of Microprosopus). [[Footnote continued
on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 626 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
There are two
Tetragrammatons: the Macro and the Microprosopus. The first is the absolute perfect
Square, or the TETRACTIS within the Circle, both abstract conceptions, and is
therefore called AIN -- the Non-being, i.e., illimitable or absolute Be-ness.
But when viewed as Microprosopus, or the "Heavenly man," the
manifested Logos, he is the triangle in the square -- the sevenfold cube not
the fourfold, or the plane Square. For it is written in the same "Greater
Holy Assembly" -- (83): "And concerning this, the children of Israel
wished to know in their minds, like as it is written (Exod. xvii. 7.): 'Is the
Tetragrammaton in the midst of us, or the Negatively Existent One?'* (Where did
they distinguish between Microprosopus, who is called Tetragrammaton, and
between Macroprosopus, who is called AIN, Ain the negatively existent?)"**
Therefore, Tetragrammaton
is the THREE made four and the FOUR made three, and is represented on this
Earth by his seven "companions," or "Eyes" -- the
"Seven eyes of the Lord." Microprosopus is, at best, only a secondary
manifested Deity. For, verse 1,152 of the "Greater Holy Assembly"
(Kabala) says --
"We have
learned that there were ten (companions) who entered into the Sod, ('mysterious
assembly or mystery'), and that seven only came forth"*** (i.e., 10 for
the unmanifested, 7 for the manifested Universe.)
1,158. "And
when Rabbi Shimeon revealed the Arcana there were found none present there save
those (seven companions) . . . . 1,159. And Rabbi Shimeon called them the seven
eyes of Tetragrammaton, like as it is written, Zach. iii., 9, 'These are the
seven eyes (or principles) of Tetragrammaton," ' -- i.e., the four-fold
Heavenly man, or pure spirit, is resolved into Septenary man, pure matter and
Spirit.
Thus the Tetrad
is Microprosopus, and the latter is the male-female Chochmah-Binah, the 2d and
3d Sephiroth. The Tetragrammaton is the very essence of number Seven, in its
terrestrial significance. Seven stands between four and nine -- the basis and
foundation (astrally) of our physical world and man, in the kingdom of Malkuth.
For Christians
and believers, this reference to Zaccharias and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] For, this "Tree of Life" is also the
"tree of knowledge of good and evil," whose chief mystery is that of
human procreation. It is a mistake to regard the Kabala as explaining the
mysteries of Kosmos or Nature; it explains and unveils only a few allegories in
the Bible, and is more esoteric than is the latter.
* Simplified in
the English Bible to: "Is the Lord (! !) among us, or not?" (See
Exodus xvii. 7.)
** See Kabala
Denudata, by S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers, F.T.S., p. 121.
*** Translators
often render the word "companion" (angel, also adept) by
"Rabbi," as the Rishis are called gurus. The "Zohar" is, if
possible, more occult than the Books of Moses; to read the "Book of
Concealed Mystery" one requires the keys furnished by the genuine
"Chaldean Book of Numbers," which is not extant.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol. 2, Page]] 627 THE NUMBER SEVEN IN
CHEMISTRY.
especially to
the Epistle of Peter (I P. ii. 2-5) ought to be conclusive. In the old
symbolism, man, chiefly the inner Spiritual man is called "a stone."
Christ is the corner-stone, and Peter refers to all men as "lively"
(living) stones. Therefore a "stone with seven eyes" on it can only
mean what we say, i.e., a man whose constitution or ("principles,")
is septenary.
To demonstrate
more clearly the seven in Nature, it may be added that not only does the number
seven govern the periodicity of the phenomena of life, but that it is also
found dominating the series of chemical elements, and equally paramount in the
world of sound and in that of colour as revealed to us by the spectroscope.
This number is the factor, sine qua non, in the production of occult astral
phenomena.
Thus, if the
chemical elements are arranged in groups according to their atomic weights, they
will be found to constitute a series of groups of seven; the first, second,
etc., members of each group bearing a close analogy in all their properties to
the corresponding members of the next group. The following table, copied from
Hellenbach's Magie der Zahlen, exhibits this law and fully warrants the
conclusion he draws in the following words: "We thus see that chemical
variety, so far as we can grasp its inner nature, depends upon numerical
relations, and we have further found in this variety a ruling law for which we
can assign no cause; we find a law of periodicity governed by the number
seven."
[[diagram]]
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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 628 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
work, where it
is also shown that this classification is confirmed by the spectroscopic
peculiarities of the elements.
It is needless
to refer in detail to the number of vibrations constituting the notes of the
musical scale; they are strictly analogous to the scale of chemical elements,
and also to the scale of colour as unfolded by the spectroscope, although in
the latter case we deal with only one octave, while both in music and chemistry
we find a series of seven octaves represented theoretically, of which six are
fairly complete and in ordinary use in both sciences. Thus, to quote
Hellenbach:--
"It has
been established that, from the standpoint of phenomenal law, upon which all our
knowledge rests, the vibrations of sound and light increase regularly, that
they divide themselves into seven columns, and that the successive numbers in
each column are closely allied; i.e., that they exhibit a close relationship
which not only is expressed in the figures themselves, but also is practically
confirmed in chemistry as in music, in the latter of which the ear confirms the
verdict of the figures. . . . . . The fact that this periodicity and variety is
governed by the number seven is undeniable, and it far surpasses the limits of
mere chance, and must be assumed to have an adequate cause, which cause must be
discovered."
Verily, then, as
Rabbi Abbas said: "We are six lights which shine forth from a seventh
(light); thou (Tetragrammaton) art the seventh light (the origin) of us
all;" (V. 1,160) and -- "For assuredly there is no stability in those
six, save what they derive from the seventh. For ALL THINGS DEPEND FROM THE
SEVENTH." (V. 1,161. Kabala, "The Greater Holy Assembly.")
The (ancient and
modern) Western American Zuni Indians seem to have entertained similar views.
Their present-day customs, their traditions and records, all point to the fact
that, from time immemorial, their institutions -- political, social and
religious -- were (and still are) shaped according to the septenary principle.
Thus all their ancient towns and villages were built in clusters of six, around
a seventh. It is always a group of seven, or of thirteen, and always the six
surround the seventh. Again, their sacerdotal hierarchy is composed of six
"Priests of the House" seemingly synthesized in the seventh, who is a
woman, the "PRIESTESS MOTHER." Compare this with the "seven
great officiating priests" spoken of in Anugita, the name given to the
"seven senses," exoterically, and to the seven human principles,
esoterically. Whence this identity of symbolism? Shall we still doubt the fact
of Arjuna going over to Patala (the Antipodes, America) and there marrying
Ulupi, the daughter of the Naga (or rather Nargal) King? But to the Zuni
priests.
These receive an
annual tribute, to this day, of corn of seven colours. Undistinguished from
other Indians during the whole year, on a certain day, they come out (the six
priests and one priestess) arrayed in their
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 629 THE SEVEN PRIESTS OF THE ZUNIS.
priestly robes,
each of a colour sacred to the particular God whom the priest serves and
personifies; each of them representing one of the seven regions, and each
receiving corn of the colour corresponding to that region. Thus, the white
represents the East, because from the East comes the first Sun-light; the
yellow, corresponds to the North, from the colour of the flames produced by the
aurora borealis; the red, the South, as from that quarter comes the heat; the
blue stands for the West, the colour of the Pacific Ocean, which lies to the
West; black is the colour of the nether underground region -- darkness; corn
with grains of all colours on one ear represents the colours of the upper
region -- of the firmament, with its rosy and yellow clouds, shining stars,
etc. The "speckled" corn -- each grain containing all the colours -- is
that of the "Priestess-Mother": woman containing in herself the seeds
of all races past, present and future; Eve being the mother of all living.
Apart from these
was the Sun -- the Great Deity -- whose priest was the spiritual head of the
nation. These facts were ascertained by Mr. F. Hamilton Cushing, who, as many
are aware, became an Indian Zuni, lived with them, was initiated into their
religious mysteries, and has learned more about them than any other man now
living.
Seven is also the
great magic number. In the occult records the weapon mentioned in the Puranas
and the Mahabharata -- the Agneyastra or "fiery weapon" bestowed by
Aurva upon his chela Sagara -- is said to be built of seven elements. This
weapon -- supposed by some ingenious Orientalists to have been a
"rocket" (!) -- is one of the many thorns in the side of our modern
Sanskritists. Wilson exercises his penetration over it, on several pages in his
Specimens of the Hindu Theatre, and finally fails to explain it. He can make
nothing out of the Agneyastra.
"These
weapons," he argues, "are of a very unintelligible character. Some of
them are wielded as missiles; but, in general, they appear to be mystical
powers exercised by the individual -- such as those of paralysing an enemy, or
locking his senses fast in sleep, or bringing down storm, and rain, and fire,
from heaven. (Vide supra, pp. 427 and 428.) . . . . They assume celestial
shapes, endowed with human faculties. . . . . The Ramayana calls them the Sons
of Krisaswa" (p. 297).
The
Sastra-devatas, "gods of the divine weapons," are no more Agneyastra,
the weapon, than the gunners of modern artillery are the cannon they direct.
But this simple solution did not seem to strike the eminent Sanskritist.
Nevertheless, as he himself says of the armiform progeny of Krisaswa, "the
allegorical origin of the (Agneyastra) weapons is, undoubtedly, the more
ancient."* It is the fiery javelin of Brahma.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is. But
Agneyastra are fiery "missile weapons," not "edged"
weapons, as there is some difference between Sastra and Astra in Sanskrit.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 630 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The seven-fold
Agneyastra, like the seven senses and the "seven principles,"
symbolized by the seven priests, are of untold antiquity. How old is the
doctrine believed in by Theosophists, the following section will tell.
-------
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 Bohme's books finds much in them concerning these
Seven Fountain Spirits and primary powers, treated as seven properties of
nature in the alchemistic and astrological phase of the mediaeval mysteries;"*
and adds --
"The
followers of Bohme look on such matter as divine revelation of his inspired
Seership. They know nothing of the natural genesis, the history and persistence
of the Wisdom** of the past (or of the broken links), and are unable to
recognise the physical features of the ancient Seven Spirits beneath their
modern metaphysical or alchemist mask. A second connecting link between the
Theosophy of Bohme and the physical origins of Egyptian thought, is extant in
the fragments of Hermes Trismegistus.*** No matter whether these teachings are
called Illuminatist, Buddhist, Kabalist, Gnostic, Masonic, or Christian, the
elemental types can only be truly known in their beginnings.**** When the
prophets or visionary showmen of cloudland come to us claiming original
inspiration, and utter something new, we judge of its value by what it is in
itself. But if we find they bring us the ancient matter which they cannot
account for, and we can, it is natural that we should judge it by the primary
significations rather than the latest pretensions.***** It is useless for us to
read our
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Natural
Genesis, Vol. I.. pp, 318-319.
** Yet there are
some, who may know something of these, even outside the author's lines, wide as
they undeniably are.
*** This
connecting link, like others, was pointed out by the present writer nine years
before the appearance of the work from which the above is quoted, namely in
Isis Unveiled, a work full of such guiding links between ancient, mediaeval,
and modern thought, but, unfortunately, too loosely edited.
**** Ay; but how
can the learned writer prove that these "beginnings" were precisely
in Egypt, and nowhere else; and only 50,000 years ago?
***** Precisely:
and this is just what the Theosophists do. They have never claimed,"
(original inspiration," not even as mediums, but have always pointed, and
do now point to the "primary signification" of the symbols, which
they trace to other [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 631 THE SIDEREAL SEVEN.
later thought
into the earliest types of expression, and then say the ancients meant that.*
Subtilized interpretations which have become doctrines and dogmas in theosophy
have now to be tested by their genesis in physical phenomena, in order that we
may explode their false pretensions to supernatural origin or supernatural
knowledge.**
But the able
author of the "Book of the Beginnings" and of "The Natural
Genesis" does -- very fortunately, for us -- quite the reverse. He
demonstrates most triumphantly our Esoteric (Buddhist) teachings, by showing
them identical with those of Egypt. Let the reader judge from his learned
lecture on "The Seven Souls of Man."*** Says the author:--
"The first
form of the mystical SEVEN was seen to be figured in heaven by the Seven large
stars of the great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the
Mother of Time, and of the Seven Elemental Powers."
Just so, for the
Hindus place in the great Bear their seven primitive Rishis and call this
constellation the abode of the Saptarishi, Riksha and Chitra-Sikhandinas. But
whether it is only an astronomical myth or a primordial mystery, having a
deeper meaning than it bears on its surface, is what their adepts claim to
know. We are also told that "the Egyptians divided the face of the sky by
night into seven parts. The primary Heaven was seven-fold." So it was with
the Aryans. One has but read the Puranas about the beginnings of Brahma, and
his "Egg" to see it. Have the Aryans taken the idea from the
Egyptians? -- "The earliest forces," proceeds the lecturer,
"recognized in nature were reckoned as seven in number. These became seven
elementals, devils (?) or later, divinities. Seven properties were assigned to
nature, as
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] countries, older even than Egypt;
significations, moreover, which emanate from a hierarchy (or hierarchies, if
preferred) of living wise men, mortals, notwithstanding that Wisdom, who reject
every approach to supernaturalism.
* But where is
the proof that the ancients did not mean precisely that which the theosophists
claim? Records exist for what they say, just as other records exist for what
Mr. G. Massey says. His interpretations are very correct, but equally one-sided.
Surely nature has more than one physical aspect; for astronomy, astrology, and
so on, are all on the physical, not the spiritual plane.
** It is to be
feared that Mr. Massey has not succeeded. We have our followers as he has his
followers, and materialistic Science steps in and takes little account of both
his and our speculations!
*** The fact
that this learned Egyptologist does not recognise in the doctrine of the
"Seven Souls," as he terms our principles, or "metaphysical
concepts," but "the primitive biology or physiology of the
Soul," does not invalidate our argument. The lecturer touches on only two
keys, those that unlock the astronomical and the physiological mysteries of
esotericism, and leaves out the other five. Otherwise he would have promptly
understood that what he calls the physiological divisions of the living Soul of
man, are regarded by theosophists as also psychological and spiritual.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 632 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
matter,
cohesion, fluxion, coagulation, accumulation, station, and division and seven
elements or souls to man."
All this was
taught in the esoteric doctrine, but it was interpreted and its mysteries
unlocked, as already stated, with seven, not two, or at the utmost, three keys;
hence the causes and their effects worked in invisible or mystic as well as
psychic nature, and were made referable to metaphysics and psychology as much
as to physiology. "The principle of sevening" -- as the author says
-- "was introduced, and the number seven supplied a sacred type that could
be used for manifold purposes"; and it was so used. For "the seven
Souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. . . . Seven
Souls or principles in man were identified by our British Druids. . . . . The
Rabbins also ran the number of souls up to seven; so, likewise, do the Karens
of India. . . ."
And then, the
author tabulates the two teachings -- the Esoteric and the Egyptian, -- and
shows that the latter had the same series and in the same order.
(Esoteric)
Indian. Egyptian.
1. Rupa, body or
element of form. 1. Kha, body.
2. Prana, the
breath of life. 2. Ba, the Soul of Breath.
3. Astral body.
3. Khaba, the shade.
4. Manas -- or
Intelligence.* 4. Akhu, Intelligence or Perception.
5. Kama -- rupa,
or animal soul. 5. Seb, ancestral Soul.
6. Buddhi,
Spiritual Soul. 6. Putah, the first intellectual father.
7. Atma, pure
spirit. . . . 7. Atmu, a divine or eternal soul.
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-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This is a
great mistake made in the Esoteric enumeration. Manas is the fifth, not the
fourth; and Manas corresponds precisely with Seb, the Egyptian fifth principle,
for that portion of Manas, which follows the two higher principles, is the
ancestral soul, indeed, the bright, immortal thread of the higher Ego, to which
clings the Spiritual aroma of all the lives or births.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 633 THE "PRINCIPLES" IN THE EGYPTIAN METAPHYSICS.
pound unit of Matter
and Spirit, which together act on seven different planes of being and
consciousness. Elsewhere, Mr. G. Massey adds:-- "The seven souls (our
"Principles") are often mentioned in the Egyptian texts. The moon
god, Taht-Esmun, or the later sun god, expressed the seven nature-powers that
were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls (we say
"principles") . . . . The seven stars in the hand of Christ in the
Revelation, have the same significance," etc.
And a still
greater one, as these stars represent also the seven keys of the Seven Churches
or the SODALIAN MYSTERIES, cabalistically. However, we will not stop to
discuss, but add that other Egyptologists have also found out that the
septenary constitution of man was a cardinal doctrine with the old Egyptians.
In a series of remarkable articles in the "Sphinx" (Munich) Herr
Franz Lambert gives incontrovertible proof of his conclusions from the
"Book of the Dead" and other Egyptian records. For details the reader
must be referred to the articles themselves, but the following diagram, summing
up the author's conclusions, is demonstrative evidence of the identity of
Egyptian psychology with the septenary division in "Esoteric
Buddhism."
On the left hand
side the Kabalistic names of the corresponding human principles are placed, and
on the right the hieroglyphic names with their renderings as in the diagram of
F. Lambert.
Kabala.
Hieroglyphics.
[[diagram]]
Upper circle:
Tzelem of Neschamah.
Jeshida VII. Chu
-- Divine Spirit.
Chayah VI. Cheybi
-- Spiritual Soul.
Neschamah V. Bai
{Intellectual Soul, the intelligence.
Middle circle:
Tzelem of Ruach.
Ruach* IV. Ab
Hati {The Heart: Feeling: Animal Soul.
Lower circle:
Tzelem of Nephesch.
Nephesch III. Ka
{The Astral Body: Evestrum: Sidereal man.
Coach ha Guf.
II. Anch {Vital Force: Archaeus: Mumia.
Guf. I. Chat --
The Elementary Body.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There seems a
confusion -- lasting for many centuries -- in the minds of Western Kabalists. They
call Ruach (Spirit) what we call Kama-rupa; whereas, with us Ruach would be the
"Spiritual Soul" Buddhi, and Nephesh the 4th principle, the Vital,
Animal Soul. Eliphas Levi falls into the same error.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 634 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This is a very
fair representation of the number of the "principles" of Occultism,
but much confused; and this is what we call the 7 principles in man, and what
Mr. Massey calls "Souls," giving the same name to the Ego or the
Monad which reincarnates and resurrects, so to speak, at each rebirth, as the
Egyptians did, namely -- "the Renewed." But how can Ruach (Spirit) be
lodged in Kama-rupa? What does Bohme, the Prince of all the mediaeval Seers,
say?
"We find
Seven especial properties in nature whereby this only Mother works all
things" (which he calls -- fire, light, sound (the upper three) and
desire, bitterness, anguish, and substantiality, thus analysing the lower in
his own mystic way) . . . "whatever the six forms are spiritually, that
the seventh, the body (or substantiality), is essentially." These are the
seven forms of the Mother of all Beings from whence all that is in this world
is generated,* and again in Aurora xxiv. p. 27 (quoted in Natural Genesis) --
"The Creator hath in the body of this world generated himself as it were
creaturely in his qualifying Fountain Spirits, and all the stars are . . .
God's powers, and the whole body of the world consisteth in the seven
qualifying or Fountain Spirits."
This is
rendering in mystical language our theosophical doctrine. . . But how can we
agree with Mr. G. Massey when he states that --
"The Seven
Races of men that have been sublimated and made Planetary (?) by Esoteric
Buddhism,** may be met with in the Bundahish as (1) the earth-men; (2)
water-men; (3) breast-eared men; (4) breast-eyed men; (5) one-legged men; (6)
bat-winged men; (7) men with tails." . . . Each of these descriptions,
allegorical and even perverted in their later form -- is, nevertheless, an echo
of the Secret Doctrine teaching. They all refer to the pre-Human evolution of
the water-men "terrible and bad" by unaided Nature through millions
of years, as previously described. But we deny point blank the assertion made
that "these were never real races," and point to the Archaic Stanzas
for our answer. It is easy to infer and to say that our "instructors have
mistaken these shadows of the Past, for things human and spiritual"; but
that "they are neither, and never were either," it is less easy to
prove. The assertion must ever remain on a par with the Darwinian claim that
man and the ape had a common pithecoid ancestor. What the Lecturer takes for a
"mode of expression" and nothing more, in the Egyptian Ritual, we
take as having quite another and an important meaning. Here is one instance.
Says the Ritual, the "Book of the Dead" --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Signatura
rerum xiv. ps. 10, 15 et seq.
** This is
indeed news! It makes us fear that the Lecturer had never read "Esoteric
Buddhism" before criticising it, as there are too many such misconceptions
in his notices of it.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 635 MAN, THE PARENT OF ALL THE MAMMALS.
"I am the
mouse." "I am the hawk." "I am the ape." . . . "I
am the crocodile whose Soul Comes FROM MEN." "I am the Soul of the
Gods." Of these last two sentences, one: "whose soul comes from
men" -- is explained by the Lecturer, who says parenthetically, "that
is, as a type of intelligence," and the other: "I am the Soul of the
Gods," as meaning, "the Horus, or Christ, as the outcome of
all."
The occult
teaching answers: "It means far more." . . .
It gives first
of all a corroboration of the teaching that, while the human monad has passed
on globe A and others, in the First Round, through all the three kingdoms -- the
mineral, the vegetable, and the animal -- in this our Fourth Round, every
mammal has sprung from Man if the semi-ethereal, many-shaped creature with the
human Monad in it, of the first two races, can be regarded as Man. But it must
be so called; for, in the esoteric language, it is not the form of flesh,
blood, and bones, now referred to as Man, which is in any way the MAN, but the
inner divine MONAD with its manifold principles or aspects.
The lecture
referred to, however, much as it opposes "Esoteric Buddhism" and its
teachings, is an eloquent answer to those who have tried to represent the whole
as a newfangled doctrine. And there are many such, in Europe, America, and even
India. Yet, between the esotericism of the old Arhats, and that which has now
survived in India among the few Brahmins who have seriously studied their
Secret Philosophy, the difference does not appear so very great. It seems
centred in, and limited to, the question of the order of the evolution of
cosmic and other principles, more than anything else. At all events it is no
greater divergence than the everlasting question of the filioque dogma, which
since the XIIth. century has separated the Roman Catholic from the older Greek
Eastern Church. Yet, whatever the differences in the forms in which the
septenary dogma is presented, the substance is there, and its presence and
importance in the Brahminical system may be judged by what one of India's
learned metaphysicians and Vedantic scholars says of it:--
"The real
esoteric seven-fold classification is one of the most important, if not the
most important classification, which has received its arrangement from the
mysterious constitution of this eternal type. I may also mention in this
connection that the four-fold classification claims the same origin. The light
of life, as it were, seems to be refracted by the treble-faced prism of
Prakriti, having the three Gunams for its three faces, and divided into seven
rays, which develop in course of time the seven principles of this classification.
The progress of development presents some points of similarity to the gradual
development of the rays of the spectrum. While the four-fold classification is
amply
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 636 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
sufficient for
all practical purposes, this real seven-fold classification is of great
theoretical and scientific importance. It will be necessary to adopt it to
explain certain classes of phenomena noticed by occultists; and it is perhaps
better fitted to be the basis of a perfect system of psychology. It is not the
peculiar property of 'the trans-Himalayan esoteric doctrine.' In fact, it has a
closer connection with the Brahminical Logos than with the Buddhist Logos. In
order to make my meaning clear I may point out here that the Logos has seven
forms. In other words, there are seven kinds of Logoi in the Cosmos. Each of
these has become the central figure of one of the seven main branches of the
ancient Wisdom-religion. This classification is not the seven-fold
classification we have adopted. I make this assertion without the slightest
fear of contradiction. The real classification has all the requisites of a scientific
classification. It has seven distinct principles, which correspond with seven
distinct states of Pragna or consciousness. It bridges the gulf between the
objective and subjective, and indicates the mysterious circuit through which
ideation passes. The seven principles are allied to seven states of matter, and
to seven forms of force. These principles are harmoniously arranged between two
poles, which define the limits of human consciousness."*
The above is
perfectly correct, save, perhaps, one point. The "sevenfold
classification" in the esoteric system has never been claimed (to the
writer's knowledge) by any one belonging to it, as "the peculiar property
of the Trans-Himalayan esoteric doctrine"; but only as having survived in
that old school alone. It is no more the property of the trans, than it is of
the cis-Himalayan esoteric doctrine, but is simply the common inheritance of
all such schools, left to the sages of the Fifth Root Race by the great
Siddhas** of the Fourth. Let us remember that the Atlanteans became the
terrible sorcerers, now celebrated in so many of the oldest MSS. of India, only
toward their fall, the submersion of their continent having been brought on by
it. What is claimed is simply the fact that the wisdom imparted by the "Divine
Ones" -- born through the Kriyasakti powers of the Third Race before its
Fall and Separation into sexes -- to the adepts of the early Fourth Race, has
remained in all its pristine purity in a certain Brotherhood. The said
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
Theosophist, 1887 (Madras).
** According to
Svetasvatara-Upanishad (357) the Siddhas are those who are possessed from birth
of superhuman powers, as also of "knowledge and indifference to the
world." According to the Occult teachings, however, Siddhas are the
Nirmanakayas or the "spirits" (in the sense of an individual, or
conscious spirit) of great sages from spheres on a higher plane than our own,
who voluntarily incarnate in mortal bodies in order to help the human race in
its upward progress. Hence their innate knowledge, wisdom and powers.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 637 AN ALLEGORY IN THE ANUGITA.
School or
Fraternity being closely connected with a certain island of an inland sea,
believed in by both Hindus and Buddhists, but called "mythical" by
geographers and Orientalists, the less one talks of it, the wiser he will be.
Nor can one accept the said "sevenfold classification" as having
"a closer connection with the Brahminical Logos than with the Buddhist
Logos," since both are identical, whether the one "Logos" is
called Eswara or Avalokiteswara, Brahma or Padmapani. These are, however, very
small differences, more fanciful than real, in fact. Brahmanism and Buddhism,
both viewed from their orthodox aspects, are as inimical and as irreconcilable
as water and oil. Each of these great bodies, however, has a vulnerable place
in its constitution. While even in their esoteric interpretation both can agree
but to disagree, once that their respective vulnerable points are confronted,
every disagreement must fall, for the two will find themselves on common
ground. The "heel of Achilles" of orthodox Brahmanism is the Adwaita
philosophy, whose followers are called by the pious "Buddhists in
disguise"; as that of orthodox Buddhism is Northern mysticism, as
represented by the disciples of the philosophies of Aryasanga (the Yogacharya
School) and Mahayana, who are twitted in their turn by their correligionists as
"Vedantins in disguise." The esoteric philosophy of both these can be
but one if carefully analysed and compared, as Gautama Buddha and Sankaracharya
are most closely connected, if one believes tradition and certain esoteric
teachings. Thus every difference between the two will be found one of form
rather than of substance.
A most mystic
discourse, full of septenary symbology, may be found in the Anugita.* There the
Brahmana narrates the bliss of having crossed beyond the regions of illusion,
"in which fancies are the gadflies and mosquitoes, in which grief and joy
are cold and heat, in which delusion is the blinding darkness, avarice, the
beasts of prey and reptiles, and desire and anger are the obstructors." .
. . . The sage describes the entrance into and exit from the forest (a symbol
for man's life-time) and also that forest itself:**
"In that
forest are seven large trees (the Senses, Mind and Understanding, or Manas and
Buddhi included), seven fruits and seven guests; seven hermitages, seven (forms
of) concentration, and seven (forms of) initiation. This is the description of
the forest. That forest is filled with trees producing splendid flowers and
fruits of five colours."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Sacred Books of the East," vol. viii. Anugita, p. 284, et seq.
** I propose to
follow here the text and the editor's commentaries, who accepts Arjuna Misra and
Nilakantha's dead-letter explanations. Our Orientalists never trouble to think
that if a native commentator is a non-initiate, he could not explain correctly,
and if an Initiate, would not.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 638 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"The
senses," says the commentator, "are called trees, as being producers
of the fruits . . . . pleasures and pains; the guests are the powers of each
sense personified -- they receive the fruits above described; the hermitages
are the trees, in which the guests take shelter. The seven forms of
concentration are the exclusion from the self of the seven functions of the
seven senses, etc., already referred to; the seven forms of initiation refer to
the initiation into the higher life . . . by repudiating as not one's own the
actions of each member out of the group of seven." (See Khandagya, p. 219,
and Com.)
The explanation
is harmless, if unsatisfactory.
Says the
Brahmana continuing his description:--
"That
forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of four colours. That
forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of three colours, and
mixed. That forest is filled with trees producing flowers and fruits of two
colours, and of beautiful colours. That forest is filled with trees producing
flowers and fruits of one colour and fragrant. That forest is filled (instead
of seven) with two large trees producing numerous flowers and fruits of
undistinguished colours (mind and understanding -- the two higher senses, or
theosophically, 'Manas-Buddhi'). Here is one Fire (Self) here connected with
the Brahman* and having a good mind (or true knowledge, according to Arjuna
Misra). And there is fuel here, namely, the five senses (or human passions).
The Seven (forms of) emancipation from them are the Seven (forms of)
initiation. The qualities are the fruits. . . . There, the great Sages receive
hospitality. And when they have been worshipped and have disappeared, another
forest shines forth, in which intelligence is the tree, and emancipation the
fruit, and which possesses shade (in the form of) tranquillity, which depends
on Knowledge, which has contentment for its water, and the KSHETRAGNA (the
"Supreme SELF," says Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, p. 102 et seq.)
within for the Sun."
Now, all the
above is very plain, and no theosophist, even among the least learned, could
fail to understand the allegory. And yet, we see great Orientalists making a
perfect mess of it in their explanations. The "great sages" who
"receive hospitality" are explained as meaning the senses,
"which, having worked as unconnected with the self are finally absorbed
into it." But one fails to understand, if the senses are
"unconnected" with the "Higher Self," in what manner can
they be
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The English
editor explains here, saying, "I presume devoted to the Brahman."
This would be a very poor devotion, indeed, in the accomplishment of the
gradually emancipating process of Yoga. We venture to say that the
"Fire" or Self is the higher real SELF "connected with,"
that is to say one with Brahma, the One Deity. The "Self" separates
itself no longer from the universal Spirit.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 639 THE ALLEGORY EXPLAINED.
"absorbed
into it." One would think, on the contrary, that just because the personal
senses gravitate and strive to be connected with the impersonal Self, that the
latter, which is FIRE, burns the lower five and purifies thereby the higher
two, "mind and understanding" or the higher aspects of Manas* and
Buddhi. This is quite apparent from the text. The "great sages"
disappear after having "been worshipped." Worshipped by whom if they
(the presumed senses) are "unconnected with the self"? By MIND, of
course; by Manas (in this case merged in the sixth sense) which is not, and
cannot be, the Brahman, the SELF, or Kshetragna -- the soul's spiritual sun.
Into the latter, in time, Manas itself must be absorbed. It has worshipped
"great sages" and given hospitality to terrestrial wisdom: but once
that "another forest shone forth" upon it, it is Intelligence
(Buddhi, the 7th sense, but 6th principle) which is transformed into the tree
-- that tree whose fruit is emancipation -- which finally destroys the very
roots of the Aswattha tree, the symbol of life and of its illusive joys and
pleasures. And therefore, those who attain to that state of emancipation have,
in the words of the above-cited sage, "no fear afterwards." In this
state "the end cannot be perceived because it extends on all sides."
"There
always dwell seven females there," he goes on to say, carrying out the
imagery. These females, who, according to Arjuna Misra, are the Mahat, Ahamkara
and five Tanmatras, have always their faces turned downwards, as they are
obstacles in the way of spiritual ascension.
". . . . In
that same (Brahman, the 'Self') the Seven perfect Sages, together with their
chiefs, abide and again emerge from the same. Glory, brilliance and greatness,
enlightenment, victory, perfection and power -- these seven rays follow after
this same Sun (Kshetragna, the Higher Self). . . . Those whose wishes are
reduced (unselfish). . . . whose sins (passions) are burnt up by restraint,
merging the Self in the Self,** 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* As Mahat
(universal intelligence) is first born, or manifests, as Vishnu, and then, when
it falls into matter and develops self-consciousness, it becomes Egoism,
Selfishness, so Manas is of a dual nature. It is respectively under the sun and
moon, for as Sankaracharya says "The moon is the mind, and the sun the
understanding." The sun and moon are the deities of our planetary
Macrocosmos, and therefore Sankara adds that "the mind and the
understanding are the respective deities of the (human) organs" (vide
Brihadaranyaka, pp. 521, et seq.) This is perhaps why Arjuna Misra says that
the moon and the Fire (the self, the sun) constitute the universe.
** "The
body in the Soul," as Arjuna Misra is credited with saying, or rather the
"Soul in the Spirit," and on a still higher plane of development:
"the SELF or Atman in the Universal Self."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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, mediaeval, and modern
writers. What the former said, was well said; what the latter repeated, was
generally distorted. An instance: Read the "Pythagorean Fragments,"
and compare the Septenary man as given by the Rev. G. Oliver, the learned
mason, in his "Pythagorean Triangle" (ch. on "Science of
Numbers," p. 179).
He speaks as
follows:--
"The
Theosophic Philosophy counted SEVEN properties (or principles), in Man, viz.:--
(1.) The divine
golden Man;
(2.) The inward
holy body from fire and light, like pure silver;
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.
------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 642]]
[[blank]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 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?"
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 644]]
-------
§§ PAGE
I. ARCHAIC OR
MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY? ... 645
-------
II. THE
ANCESTORS MANKIND IS OFFERED BY SCIENCE ... 656
Plastidular Souls,
and Conscious Nerve-Cells ... 670
-------
III. THE FOSSIL
RELICS OF MAN AND THE ANTHROPOID APE ... 675
Western
Evolutionism: the comparative Anatomy of Man and Ape ... 680
Darwinism and
the Antiquity of Man: the Anthropoids and their Ancestry ... 685
-------
IV. ON THE
DURATION OF GEOLOGICAL PERIODS, RACE CYCLES, AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN ... 690
Modern
Scientific Speculations thereon ... 694
On Chains of
Planets and their Plurality ... 699
Esoteric
Geological Chronology ... 709
-------
V. ORGANIC
EVOLUTION -- CREATIVE CENTRES ... 731
The Origin and
Evolution of the Mammalia ... 734
The European
Palaeolithic Races ... 738
-------
VI. GIANTS,
CIVILIZATIONS, AND SUBMERGED CONTINENTS TRACED IN HISTORY ... 742
-------
VII. SCIENTIFIC
AND GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF SEVERAL SUBMERGED CONTINENTS ... 778
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 645 THE NEW MASTERS OF PROTESTANTISM.
ADDENDA TO BOOK
II.
§ I.
ARCHAIC, OR
MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY?
WHENEVER the
question of the origin of man is offered seriously to an unbiassed, honest, and
earnest man of science, the answer comes invariably:-- "WE DO NOT
KNOW." De Quatrefages, in his agnostic attitude, is one of such
anthropologists.
This does not
imply that the rest of the men of science are neither fair-minded nor honest,
as in such case our remark would be questionably discreet. But, it is estimated
that 75 per cent. of European Scientists are Evolutionists. Are these
representatives of modern thought all guilty of flagrant misrepresentation of
the facts? No one says this -- but there are a few very exceptional cases.
However, the Scientists in their anti-clerical enthusiasm and despair of any
alternative theory to Darwinism, except that of "special creation,"
are unconsciously insincere in "forcing" a hypothesis the elasticity
of which is inadequate, and which resents the severe strain to which it is now
subjected. Insincerity on the same subject is, however, patent in
ecclesiastical circles. Bishop Temple has come forward as a thorough-going
supporter of Darwinism in his "Religion and Science." This clerical
writer goes so far as to regard Matter -- after receiving its "primal
impress" -- as the unaided evolver of all cosmic phenomena. This view only
differs from that of Haeckel, in postulating a hypothetical deity at "the
back of beyont," a deity which stands entirely aloof from the interplay of
forces. Such a metaphysical entity is no more the Theological God than that of
Kant. Bishop Temple's truce with Materialistic Science is, in our opinion,
impolitic -- apart from the fact that it involves a total rejection of the
Biblical cosmogony. In the presence of this display of flunkeyism before the
materialism of our "learned" age, we Occultists can but smile. But
how about loyalty to the Masters such theological truants profess to serve,
Christ, and Christendom at large?
However, we have
no desire, for the present, to throw down the gauntlet to the clergy, our
business being now with materialistic Science alone. The latter answers to our
question, in the person of its best representatives "We do not know;"
-- yet the majority of these act as though Omniscience was their heirloom, and
they knew all things.
For, indeed,
this negative reply has not prevented the majority of Scientists from
speculating on that question, each seeking to have his
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 646 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
own special
theory accepted to the exclusion of all others. Thus, from Maillet in 1748 down
to Haeckel in 1870, theories on the origin of the human Race have differed as
much as the personalities of their inventors themselves. Buffon, Bory de St.
Vincent, Lamarck, E. G. St. Hilaire, Gaudry, Naudin, Wallace, Darwin, Owen,
Haeckel, Filippi, Vogt, Huxley, Agassiz, etc., etc., each evolved a more or
less scientific hypothesis of genesis. De Quatrefages arranges them in two
principal groups -- one holding to a rapid, and the other to a very gradual
transmutation; the former, favouring a new type (man) produced by a being
entirely different; the latter teaching the evolution of man by progressive
differentiation.
Strangely
enough, it is from the most scientific of these authorities that the most
unscientific of all the theories upon the subject of the origin of man has
hitherto emanated. This is so evident, that the hour is rapidly approaching
when the current teaching about the descent of man from an Ape-like mammal will
be regarded with less respect than the formation of Adam out of clay, and of
Eve out of Adam's rib. For --
"It is
evident, especially after the most fundamental principles of Darwinism, that an
organized being cannot be a descendant of another whose development is in an
inverse order to his own. . . . Consequently, in accordance with these
principles man cannot be considered as the descendant of any simian type
whatever."*
Lucae's argument
versus the Ape-theory, based on the different flexures of the bones
constituting the 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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
Human Species," p. 111, by de Quatrefages. The respective developments of
the human and Simian brains are referred to. "In the ape the
temporo-spheroidal convolutions, which form the middle lobe, make their
appearance and are completed before the anterior convolutions which form the
frontal lobe. In man, the frontal convolutions are, on the contrary, the first
to appear, and those of the middle lobe are formed later." (Ibid.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 647 THE FALLACIES OF MODERN SCIENTISTS.
Even
"Natural Selection" itself is with every day more threatened. The
deserters from the Darwinian camp are many, and those who were at one time its
most ardent disciples are, owing to new discoveries, slowly but steadily
preparing to turn over a new leaf. In the "Journal of the Royal
Microscopical Society" for October, 1886, one can read as follows:--
"PHYSIOLOGICAL
SELECTION. -- Mr. G. J. Romanes finds certain difficulties in regarding natural
selection as a theory for the origin of adaptive structures. He proposes to
replace it by what he calls physiological selection, or the segregation of the
fit. His view is based on the extreme sensitiveness of the reproductive system
to small changes in the conditions of life, and he thinks that variations in
the direction of greater or less sterility must frequently occur in wild species.
If the variation be such that the reproductive system, while showing some
degree of sterility with the parent form, continues to be fertile within the
limits of the varietal form, the variation would neither be swamped by
intercrossing nor die out on account of sterility. When a variation of this
kind occurs, the physiological barrier must divide the species into two parts.
. . . . The author, in fine, regards mutual sterility, not as one of the
effects of specific differentiation, but as the cause of it."*
An attempt is
made to show the above to be a complement of, and sequence to, the Darwinian
theory. This is a clumsy attempt at best. The public will soon be made to
believe that Mr. C. Dixon's "Evolution without Natural Selection" is
also Darwinism -- expanded, as the author certainly claims it to be!
But it is like
splitting the body of a man into three pieces or various portions of man, and
then 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* To this an
editorial remark adds that an "F.J.B.," in the Athenaeum -- (No.
3069, Aug. 21, 1886, pp. 242-3) points out that naturalists have long
recognised that there are "morphological" and
"physiological" species. The former have their origin in men's minds,
the latter in a series of changes sufficient to affect the internal as well as
the external organs of a group of allied individuals. The "physiological
selection" of morphological species is a confusion of ideas; that of
physiological species "a redundancy of terms."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 648 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
"Evolution
without a Natural Selection," or, in so many words, with Darwin's
fundamental idea knocked to atoms in it.
As to Natural
Selection itself, the utmost misconception prevails among many present-day
thinkers who tacitly accept the conclusions of Darwinism. It is, for instance,
a mere device of rhetoric to credit "Natural Selection" with the
power of originating species. "Natural Selection" is no Entity; but a
convenient phrase for describing the mode in which the survival of the fit and
the elimination of the unfit among organisms is brought about in the struggle
for existence. Every group of organisms tends to multiply beyond the means of
subsistence, the constant battle for life -- the "struggle to obtain
enough to eat and to escape being eaten" added to the environmental conditions
-- necessitating a perpetual weeding out of the unfit. The elite of any stock
thus sorted out, propagate the species and transmit their organic
characteristics to their descendants. All useful variations are thus
perpetuated, and a progressive improvement is effected. But Natural Selection,
in the writer's humble opinion, "Selection, as a Power," is in
reality a pure myth; especially when resorted to as an explanation of the
origin of species. It is merely a representative term expressive of the manner
in which "useful variations" are stereotyped when produced. Of
itself, "it" can produce nothing, and only operates on the rough
material presented to "it." The real question at issue is: what CAUSE
-- combined with other secondary causes -- produces the "variations"
in the organisms themselves. Many of these secondary causes are purely
physical, climatic, dietary, etc., etc. Very well. But beyond the secondary
aspects of organic evolution, a deeper principle has to be sought for. The
materialist's "spontaneous variations," and "accidental
divergencies" are self-contradictory terms in a universe of "Matter,
Force and NECESSITY." Mere variability of type, apart from the supervisory
presence of a quasi-intelligent impulse, is powerless to account for the
stupendous complexities and marvels of the human body for instance. The
insufficiency of the Darwinists' mechanical theory has been exposed at length
by Dr. Von Hartmann among other purely negative thinkers. It is an abuse of the
reader's intelligence to write, as does Haeckel, of blind indifferent cells,
"arranging themselves into organs." The esoteric solution of the
origin of animal species is given elsewhere.
Those purely
secondary causes of differentiation, grouped under the head of sexual
selection, natural selection, climate, isolation, etc., etc., mislead the
Western Evolutionist and offer no real explanation whatever of the
"whence" of the "ancestral types" which served as the
starting point for physical development. The truth is that the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 649 THE OCCULT AND THE MODERN DOCTRINES.
differentiating
"causes" known to modern science only come into operation after the
physicalization of the primeval animal root-types out of the astral. Darwinism
only meets Evolution at its midway point -- that is to say when astral
evolution has given place to the play of the ordinary physical forces with
which our present senses acquaint us. But even here the Darwinian Theory, even
with the "expansions" recently attempted, is inadequate to meet the
facts of the case. The underlying physiological variation in species -- one to
which all other laws are subordinate and secondary -- is a sub-conscious
intelligence pervading matter, ultimately traceable to a REFLECTION of the
Divine and Dhyan-Chohanic wisdom.* A not altogether dissimilar conclusion has
been arrived at by so well known a thinker as Ed. von Hartmann, who, despairing
of the efficacy of unaided Natural Selection, regards evolution as
intelligently guided by the UNCONSCIOUS (the Cosmic Logos of Occultism). But
the latter acts only mediately through FOHAT, or Dhyan-Chohanic energy, and not
quite in the direct manner which the great pessimist describes.
It is this
divergence among men of Science, their mutual, and often their
self-contradictions, that gave the writer of the present volumes the courage to
bring to light other and older teachings -- if only as hypotheses for future
scientific appreciation. Though not in any way very learned in modern sciences,
so evident, even to the humble recorder of this archaic clearing, are the said
scientific fallacies and gaps, that she determined to touch upon all these, in
order to place the two teachings on parallel lines. For Occultism, it is a
question of self-defence, and nothing more.
So far, the
"Secret Doctrine" has concerned itself with metaphysics, pure and
simple. It has now landed on Earth, and finds itself within the domain of
physical science and practical anthropology, or those branches of study which
materialistic Naturalists claim as their rightful domain, coolly asserting,
furthermore, that the higher and more perfect the working of the Soul, the more
amenable it is to the analysis and explanations of the zoologist and the
physiologist alone. (Haeckel on "Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells.") This
stupendous pretension comes from one, who, to prove his pithecoid descent, has
not hesitated to include among the ancestors of man the Lemuridae; which have
been promoted by him to the rank of Prosimiae, indeciduate mammals, to which he
very incorrectly attributes a decidua
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The
"principle of perfectibility" of Nageli; von de Baer's "striving
towards the purpose"; Braun's "Divine breath as the inward impulse in
the evolutionary history of Nature"; Professor Owen's "tendency to
perfectibility, etc.," are all veiled manifestations of the universal guiding
FOHAT, rich with the Divine and Dhyan-Chohanic thought.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 650 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
and a discoidal
placenta.* For this Haeckel was taken severely to task by de Quatrefages, and
criticised by his own brother materialists and agnostics, as great, if not
greater, authorities than himself, namely, by Virchow and du Bois-Reymond.**
Such opposition
notwithstanding, Haeckel's wild theories are, to this day, called scientific
and logical by some. The mysterious nature of Consciousness, of Soul, Spirit in
Man being now explained as a mere advance on the functions of the protoplasmic
molecules of the lively Protista, and the gradual evolution and growth of human
mind and "social instincts" toward civilization having to be traced
back to their origin in the civilization of ants, bees, and other creatures,
the chances left for an impartial hearing of the doctrines of archaic Wisdom,
are few indeed. The educated profane is told that "the social instincts of
the lower animals have, of late, been regarded as being clearly the origin of
morals, even of those of man" (!) and that our divine consciousness, our
soul, intellect, and aspirations have "worked their way up from the lower
stages of the simple cell-soul" of the gelatinous Bathybius -- (See
Haeckel's "Present Position of Evolution" Notes), -- and he seems to
believe it. For such men, the metaphysics of Occultism must produce the effect
that our grandest orchestral and vocal oratorios produce on the Chinaman: a
sound that jars upon their nerves.
Yet, are our
esoteric teachings about "angels," the first three pre-animal human
Races, and the downfall of the Fourth, on a lower level of fiction and self-delusion
than the Haeckelian "plastidular," or the inorganic "molecular
Souls of the Protista"? Between the evolution of the spiritual nature of
man from the above Amoebian Souls, and the alleged development of his physical
frame from the protoplastic dweller in the Ocean slime, there is an abyss which
will not be easily crossed by any man in the full possession of his
intellectual faculties. Physical evolution, as modern Science teaches it, is a
subject for open controversy; spiritual and moral development on the same lines
is the insane dream of a crass materialism.
Furthermore,
past as well as present daily experience teaches that no truth has ever been
accepted by the learned bodies unless it dovetailed
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Vide infra, M.
de Quatrefages' expose of Haeckel, in § ii., "The Ancestors Mankind is
offered by Science."
** Strictly
speaking du Bois-Reymond is an agnostic, and not a materialist. He has
protested most vehemently against the materialistic doctrine, which affirms
mental phenomena to be merely the product of molecular motion. The most
accurate physiological knowledge of the structure of the brain leaves us
"nothing but matter in motion," he asserts; "we must go further,
and admit the utterly incomprehensible nature of the psychical principle which
it is impossible to regard as a mere outcome of material causes."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 651 AN EXCHANGE OF MUTUAL COMPLIMENTS.
with the
habitual preconceived ideas of their professors. "The crown of the
innovator is a crown of thorns":-- said G. St. Hilaire. It is only that
which fits in with popular hobbies and accepted notions that as a general rule
gains ground. Hence the triumph of the Haeckelian ideas, notwithstanding their
being proclaimed by Virchow, du Bois-Reymond, and others as the
"testimonium paupertatis of natural Science."
Diametrically
opposed as may be the materialism of the German Evolutionists to the spiritual
conceptions of Esoteric philosophy, radically inconsistent as is their accepted
anthropological system with the real facts of nature, -- the pseudo-idealistic
bias now colouring English thought is almost more pernicious. The pure
materialistic doctrine admits of a direct refutation and appeal to the logic of
facts. The idealism of the present day, not only contrives to absorb, on the
one hand, the basic negations of Atheism, but lands its votaries in a tangle of
unreality, which culminates in a practical Nihilism. Argument with such writers
is almost out of the question. Idealists, therefore, will be still more
antagonistic to the Occult teachings now given than even the Materialists. But
as no worse fate can befall the exponents of Esoteric Anthropo-Genesis than
being openly called by their foes by their old and time-honoured names of
"lunatics" and "ignoramuses," the present archaic theories
may be safely added to the many modern speculations, and bide their time for
their full or even partial recognition. Only, as the existence itself of these
"archaic theories" will probably be denied, we have to give our best
proofs and stand by them to the bitter end.
In our race and
generation the one "temple in the Universe" is in rare cases --
within us; but our body and mind have been too defiled by both Sin and Science
to be outwardly now anything better than a fane of iniquity and error. And here
our mutual position -- that of Occultism and Modern Science -- ought to be once
for all defined.
We,
Theosophists, would willingly bow before such men of learning as the late Prof.
Balfour Stewart, Messrs. Crookes, Quatrefages, Wallace, Agassiz, Butlerof, and
several others, though we may not agree, from the stand-point of esoteric
philosophy, with all they say. But nothing could make us consent to even a show
of respect for the opinions of other men of science, such as Haeckel, Carl
Vogt, or Ludwig Buchner, in Germany; or even of Mr. Huxley and his co-thinkers
in materialism in England -- the colossal erudition of the first named,
notwithstanding. Such men are simply the intellectual and moral murderers of
future generations; especially Haeckel, whose crass materialism often rises to
the height of idiotic naivetes in his reasonings. One has but to read his
"Pedigree of Man, and Other Essays" (Aveling's transl.) to feel a
desire, in the words of Job, that his
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Buchner. A mechanical origin of the earliest
living form, was held as the necessary sequence to Darwin's teaching . . and we
are at present concerned with a single consequence of the theory, the natural
origin of the human race through ALMIGHTY EVOLUTION" (pp. 34, 37).
To which,
unabashed by this scientific farrago, Occultism replies: in the course of
Evolution, when the physical triumphed over, and nearly crushed under its
weight, spiritual and mental evolutions, the great gift of Kriyasakti* remained
the heirloom of only a few elect men in every age . . . . Spirit strove vainly
to manifest itself in its fulness in purely organic forms (as has been
explained in Part I. of this Volume), and the faculty, which had been a natural
attribute in the early humanity of the Third Race, became one of the class
regarded as simply phenomenal by the Spiritualists and Occultists, and as scientifically
impossible by the materialists.
In our modern
day the mere assertion that there exists a power which can create human forms
-- ready-made sheaths for the "conscious monads" or Nirmanakayas of past
Manvantaras to incarnate within -- is, of course, absurd, ridiculous! That
which is regarded as quite natural, on the other hand, is the production of a
Frankenstein's monster, plus moral consciousness, religious aspirations,
genius, and a feeling of one's own immortal nature within one's self -- by
"physico-chemical forces, guided by blind Almighty Evolution"
("Pedigree of Man").
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For
explanation of the term Kriyasakti, see Com. 2 in Stanza 26.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 653 SCIENCE IS SILENT ON EVERY PROBLEM.
As to the origin
of that man, not ex-nihilo, cemented by a little red clay, but from a living
divine Entity consolidating the astral body with surrounding materials -- this
conception is too absurd even to be mentioned in the opinion of the
materialists. Nevertheless, Occultists and Theosophists are ready to have their
claims and theories -- however unscientific and superstitious at first glance
-- compared as to their intrinsic value and probability, with those of the
modern evolutionists. Hence the esoteric teaching is absolutely opposed to the
Darwinian evolution, as applied to man, and partially so with regard to other
species.
It would be
interesting to obtain a glimpse of the mental representation of Evolution in
the Scientific brain of a materialist. What is EVOLUTION? If asked to define
the full and complete meaning of the term, neither Huxley nor Haeckel will be
able to do it any better than Webster does: "the act of unfolding; the
process of growth, development; as the evolution of a flower from a bud, or an
animal from the egg." Yet the bud must be traced through its parent-plant
to the seed, and the egg to the animal or bird that laid it; or at any rate to
the speck of protoplasm from which it expanded and grew. And both the seed and
the speck must have the latent potentialities in them for the reproduction and
gradual development, the unfolding of the thousand and one forms or phases of
evolution, through which they must pass before the flower or the animal are
fully developed? Hence, the future plan, if not a DESIGN, must be there.
Moreover, that seed has to be traced, and its nature ascertained. Have the
Darwinists been successful in this? Or will the Moneron be cast in our teeth?
But this atom of the Watery Abysses is not homogeneous matter; and there must
be something or somebody that had moulded and cast it into being.
Here Science is
once more silent. But since there is no Self-consciousness as yet in either
speck, seed, or germ, according to both Materialists and Psychologists of the
modern school -- Occultists agreeing in this for once with their natural
enemies -- what is it that guides the force or forces so unerringly in this
process of evolution? Blind force? As well call blind the brain which evolved
in Haeckel his "Pedigree of Man" and other lucubrations. We can
easily conceive that the said brain lacks an important centre or two. For,
whoever knows anything of the anatomy of the human, or even of any animal,
body, and is still an atheist and a materialist, must be "hopelessly
insane," according to Lord Herbert, who rightly sees in the frame of man's
body and the coherence of its parts, something so strange and paradoxical that
he holds it "to be the greatest miracle of nature." Blind forces,
"and no design" in anything under the Sun; when no sane man of
Science would hesitate to say that, even from the little he knows and has
hitherto discovered of the forces at work in Kosmos, he sees very plainly
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 -- Archaeus, or the life-Principle -- without naming it, as Dr.
Richardson has done in England in his "Nerve-Force," etc. The same
idea was recently developed in Germany by Baron Hellenbach, in his remarkable
work, "Individuality in the light of Biology and modern Philosophy."
We find the same
conclusions arrived at in still another excellent volume of another Russian deep
thinker, N. N. Strachof -- who says in his "Fundamental Conceptions of
Psychology and Physiology":-- "The most clear, as the most familiar,
type of development may be found in our own mental or physical evolution, which
has served others as a model to follow . . . . If organisms are entities . . .
then it is only just to conclude and assert that the organic life strives to
beget psychic life; but it would be still more correct and in accordance with
the spirit of these two categories of evolution to say, that the true cause of
organic life is the tendency of spirit to manifest in substantial forms, to
clothe itself in substantial reality. It is the highest form which contains the
complete explanation of the lowest, never the reverse." This is admitting,
as Bourges does in the Memoire above quoted, the identity of this mysterious,
integrally acting and organizing Principle with the Self-Conscious and Inner
Subject, which we call the EGO and the world at large -- the Soul. Thus,
gradually, all the best Scientists and Thinkers are approaching the Occultists
in their general conclusions.
But such
metaphysically inclined men of Science are out of court and will hardly be
listened to. Schiller, in his magnificent poem on
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 655 THE ONE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
the Veil of
Isis, makes the mortal youth who dared to lift the impenetrable covering fall down
dead after beholding naked Truth in the face of the stern goddess. Have some of
our Darwinians, so tenderly united in natural selection and affinity, also
gazed at the Saitic Mother bereft of her veils? One might almost suspect it
after reading their theories. Their great intellects must have collapsed while
gauging too closely the uncovered face of Nature, leaving only the grey matter
and ganglia in their brain, to respond to blind physico-chemical forces. At any
rate Shakespeare's lines apply admirably to our modem Evolutionist who
symbolizes that "proud man," who --
"Dress'd in
a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of
what he's most assured,
His glassy
essence -- like an angry ape,
Plays such
fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the
Angels weep! . . . . "
These have
nought to do with the "angels." Their only concern is the human
ancestor, the pithecoid Noah who gave birth to three sons -- the tailed
Cynocephalus, the tailless Ape, and the "arboreal" Palaeolithic man.
On this point, they will not be contradicted. Every doubt expressed is
immediately set down as an attempt to cripple scientific inquiry. The
insuperable difficulty at the very foundation of the 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.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 656 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ II.
THE ANCESTORS
MANKIND IS OFFERED BY SCIENCE.
---------------------
"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.
---------------------
THE world stands
divided this day, and hesitates between divine progenitors -- be they Adam and
Eve or the lunar Pitris -- and Bathybius Haeckelii, the gelatinous hermit of
the briny deep. Having explained the occult theory, it may now be compared with
that of the modem Materialism. The reader is invited to choose between the two
after having judged them on their respective merits.
We may derive some
consolation for the rejection of our divine ancestors, in finding that the
Haeckelian speculations receive no better treatment at the hands of strictly
exact Science than do our own. Haeckel's phylogenesis is no less laughed at by
the foes of his fantastic evolution, by other and greater Scientists, than our
primeval races will be. As du Bois-Reymond puts it, we may believe him easily
when he says that "ancestral trees of our race sketched in the
'Schopfungs-geschichte' are of about as much value as are the pedigrees of the
Homeric heroes in the eyes of the historical critic."
This settled,
everyone will see that one hypothesis is as good as another. And as we find
that German naturalist (Haeckel) himself confessing that neither geology (in
its history of the past) nor the ancestral history of organisms will ever
"rise to the position of a real exact Science,"* a large margin is
thus left to Occult Science to make its annotations and lodge its protests. The
world is left to choose between the teachings of Paracelsus, the "Father
of Modern Chemistry," and those of Haeckel, the Father of the mythical
Sozura. We demand no more.
Without
presuming to take part in the quarrel of such very learned naturalists as du
Bois-Reymond and Haeckel a propos of our blood relationship to "those
ancestors (of ours) which have led up from the unicellular classes, Vermes,
Acrania, Pisces, Amphibia, Reptilia to the Aves" -- one may put in a few
words, a question or two, for the information of our readers. Availing
ourselves of the opportunity, and bearing
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Pedigree
of Man." -- "The Proofs of Evolution," p. 273.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 657 AN UNVERIFIED CHARGE AGAINST THE ANCIENTS.
in mind Darwin's
theories of natural selection, etc., we would ask Science -- with regard to the
origin of the human and animal species -- which theory of evolution of the two
herewith described is the more scientific, or the more unscientific, if so
preferred.
(1). Is it that
of an Evolution which starts from the beginning with sexual propagation?
(2). Or that
teaching which shows the gradual development of organs; their solidification,
and the procreation of each species, at first by simple easy separation from
one into two or even several individuals. Then follows a fresh development --
the first step to a species of separate distinct sexes -- the hermaphrodite
condition; then again, a kind of Parthenogenesis, "virginal
reproduction," when the egg-cells are formed within the body, issuing from
it in atomic emanations and becoming matured outside of it; until, finally,
after a definite separation into sexes, the human beings begin procreating
through sexual connection?
Of these two,
the former "theory," -- rather, a "revealed fact" -- is
enunciated by all the exoteric Bibles (except the Puranas), preeminently by the
Jewish Cosmogony. The last one, is that which is taught by the Occult
philosophy, as explained all along.
An answer is
found to our question in a volume just published by Mr. S. Laing -- the best
lay exponent of Modern Science.* In chapter viii. of his latest work, "A
Modern Zoroastrian," the author begins by twitting "all ancient
religions and philosophies" for "assuming a male and female principle
for their gods." At first sight, he says "the distinction of sex
appears as fundamental as that of plant and animal." . . . . "The
Spirit of god brooding over Chaos and producing the world," he goes on to
complain, "is only a later edition, revised according to monotheistic
ideas, of the far older Chaldean legend which describes the creation of Kosmos
out of Chaos by the co-operations of great gods, male and female . . "
Thus, in the orthodox Christian creed we are taught to repeat "begotten,
not made," a phrase which is absolute nonsense, an instance of using words
like counterfeit notes, which have no solid value of an idea behind them. For
"begotten" is a very definite term which "implies the
conjunction of two opposite sexes to produce a new individual."
However we may
agree with the learned author as to the inadvisability of using wrong words,
and the terrible anthropomorphic and phallic element in the old Scriptures --
especially in the orthodox Christian Bible -- nevertheless, there may be two
extenuating circumstances in the case. Firstly, all these "ancient
philosophies" and "modern
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Author of
"Modern Science and Modern Thought."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* and the microscope and dissecting
knife of the naturalist introduce us to new and altogether unsuspected (?)
worlds of life. . . ."
So little
"unsuspected," indeed, that the original a-sexual "modes of
reproduction" must have been known -- to the ancient Hindus, at any rate
-- Mr. Laing's assertion to the contrary, notwithstanding. In view of the
statement in the Vishnu Purana, quoted by us elsewhere, that Daksha
"established sexual intercourse as the means of multiplication," only
after a series of other "modes," which are all enumerated therein,
(Vol. II., p. 12, Wilson's Transl.), it becomes difficult to deny the fact.
This assertion, moreover, is found, note well, in an EXOTERIC work. Then, Mr.
S. Laing goes on to tell us that:--
. . . . "By
far the larger proportion of living forms, in number . . . . have come into
existence, without the aid of sexual propagation." He then instances
Haeckel's monera . . . . "multiplying by self-division." The next
stage the author shows in the nucleated cell, "which does exactly the same
thing." The following stage is that in "which the organism does not
divide into two equal parts, but a small portion of it swells out . . . . and
finally parts company and starts on separate existence, which grows to the size
of the parent by its inherent faculty of manufacturing fresh protoplasm from
surrounding inorganic materials."**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide Part I.
of this volume, page 183, Stanza VIII.
** In this, as
shown in Part I., Modern Science was again anticipated, far beyond its own
speculations in this direction, by Archaic Science.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 659 VARIOUS MODES OF REPRODUCTION.
This is followed
by a many-celled organism which is formed by "germ-buds reduced to spores,
or single cells, which are emitted from the parent". . . . when "we
are at the threshold of that system of sexual propagation, which has (now)
become the rule in all the higher families of animals" . . . . It is when
an "organism, having advantages in the struggle for life, established
itself permanently" . . . . that special organs developed to meet the
altered condition . . . . . when a distinction "would be firmly
established of a female organ or ovary containing the egg or primitive cell
from which the new being was to be developed." . . . . "This is
confirmed by a study of embryology, which shows that in the HUMAN and higher
animal species the distinction of sex is not developed until a considerable
progress has been made in the growth of the embryo . . . . " In the great
majority of plants, and in some lower families of animals . . . the male and
female organs are developed within the same being . . . . . a hermaphrodite.
Moreover, in the "virginal reproduction -- germ-cells apparently similar
in all respects to egg-cells, develop themselves into new individuals without
any fructifying element," etc., etc. (pp. 103-107).
Of all which we
are as perfectly well aware as of this -- that the above was never applied by
the very learned English popularizer of Huxleyo-Haeckelian theories to the
genus homo. He limits this to specks of protoplasm, plants, bees, snails, and
so on. But if he would be true to the theory of descent, he must be as true to
ontogenesis, in which the fundamental biogenetic law, we are told, runs as
follows: "the development of the embryo (ontogeny) is a condensed and
abbreviated repetition of the evolution of the race (phylogeny). This
repetition is the more complete, the more the true original order of evolution
(palingenesis) has been retained by continual heredity. On the other hand, this
repetition is the less complete, the more by varying adaptations the later
spurious development (caenogenesis) has obtained." (Anthrop. 3rd edition,
p. 11.)
This shows to us
that every living creature and thing on earth, including man, evolved from one
common primal form. Physical man must have passed through the same stages of
the evolutionary process in the various modes of procreation as other animals
have: he must have divided himself; then, hermaphrodite, have given birth
parthenogenetically (on the immaculate principle) to his young ones; the next
stage would be the oviparous -- at first "without any fructifying
element," then "with the help of the fertilitary spore"; and
only after the final and definite evolution of both sexes, would he become a
distinct "male and female," when reproduction through sexual union
would grow into universal law. So far, all this is scientifically proven. There
remains but one thing to be ascertained: the plain and comprehensively
described
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.* The Monad had but to step into
the astral body of the progenitors, in order that the work of physical consolidation
should begin around the shadowy prototype.**
What would
Science say to this? It would answer, of course, that as man appeared on earth
as the latest of the mammalians, he had no need, no more than those mammals, to
pass through the primitive stages of procreation as above described. His mode
of procreation was already established on Earth when he appeared. In this case,
we may reply: since to this day not the remotest sign of a link between man and
the animal has yet been found, then (if the Occultist doctrine is to be
repudiated) he must have sprung miraculously in nature, like a fully armed
Minerva from Jupiter's brain. And in such case the Bible is right, along with
other national "revelations." Hence the scientific scorn, so freely
lavished by the author of "A Modern
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Theosophists
will remember that, according to Occult teaching, Cyclic pralayas so-called are
but obscurations, during which periods Nature, i.e., everything visible and
invisible on a resting planet -- remains in statu quo. Nature rests and
slumbers, no work of destruction going on on the globe even if no active work
is done. All forms, as well as their astral types, remain as they were at the
last moment of its activity. The "night" of a planet has hardly any
twilight preceding it. It is caught like a huge mammoth by an avalanche, and
remains slumbering and frozen till the next dawn of its new day -- a very short
one indeed in comparison to the "Day of Brahma."
** This will be
pooh-poohed, because it will not be understood by our modern men of science;
but every Occultist and theosophist will easily realize the process. There can
be no objective form on Earth (nor in the Universe either), without its astral
prototype being first formed in Space. From Phidias down to the humblest
workman in the ceramic art -- a sculptor has had to create first of all a model
in his mind, then sketch it in one and two dimensional lines, and then only can
he reproduce it in a three dimensional or objective figure. And if human mind
is a living demonstration of such successive stages in the process of evolution
-- how can it be otherwise when NATURE'S MIND and creative powers are
concerned?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 661 WHERE ARE THE "MISSING LINKS"?
Zoroastrian"
upon ancient philosophies and exoteric creeds, becomes premature and uncalled
for. Nor would the sudden discovery of a "missing-link" -- like
fossil mend matters at all. For neither one such solitary specimen nor the
scientific conclusions thereupon, could insure its being the long-sought-for
relic, i.e., that of an undeveloped, still a once speaking MAN. Something more
would be required as a final proof (vide infra, Note). Besides which, even
Genesis takes up man, her Adam of dust, only where the Secret Doctrine leaves
her "Sons of God and Wisdom" and picks up the physical man of the
THIRD Race. Eve is not "begotten," but is extracted out of Adam on
the manner of "Amoeba, A," contracting in the middle and splitting
into Amoeba B -- by division. (See p. 103, in "The Modern
Zoroastrian.") Nor has human speech developed from the various animal
sounds.
Haeckel's theory
that "speech arose gradually from a few simple, crude animal sounds . . .
." as such "speech still remains amongst a few races of lower
rank" (Darwinian theory in "Pedigree of Man," p. 22) is
altogether unsound, as argued by Professor Max Muller, among others. He
contends that no plausible explanation has yet been given as to how the
"roots" of language came into existence. A human brain is necessary
for human speech. And figures relating to the size of the respective brains of
man and ape show how deep is the gulf which separates the two. Vogt says that
the brain of the largest ape, the gorilla, measures no more than 30.51 cubic
inches; while the average brains of the flat-headed Australian natives -- the
lowest now in the human races -- amount to 99.35 cubic inches! Figures are
awkward witnesses and cannot lie. Therefore, as truly observed by Dr. F. Pfaff,
whose premises are as sound and correct as his biblical conclusions are
silly:-- "The brain of the apes most like man, does not amount to quite a third
of the brain of the lowest races of men: it is not half the size of the brain
of a new-born child." ("The Age and Origin of Man.") From the
foregoing it is thus very easy to perceive that in order to prove the
Huxley-Haeckelian theories of the descent of man, it is not one, but a great
number of "missing links" -- a true ladder of progressive
evolutionary steps -- that would have to be first found and then presented by
Science to thinking and reasoning humanity, before it would abandon belief in
gods and the immortal Soul for the worship of Quadrumanic ancestors. Mere myths
are now greeted as "axiomatic truths." Even Alfred Russel Wallace
maintains with Haeckel that primitive man was a speechless ape-creature. To
this Joly answers:-- "Man never was, in my opinion, this pithecanthropus
alalus whose portrait Haeckel has drawn as if he had seen and known him, whose
singular and completely hypothetical genealogy he has even given, from the mere
mass of living protoplasm to the man endowed with speech and a civilization
analo-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 662 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
gous to that of
the Australians and Papuans." ("Man before Metals," p. 320, N.
Joly. Inter. Scient. Series.)
Haeckel, among
other things, often comes into direct conflict with the Science of languages.
In the course of his attack on Evolutionism (1873, "Mr. Darwin's
Philosophy of Language"), Prof. Max Muller stigmatized the Darwinian
theory as "vulnerable at the beginning and at the end." The fact is,
that only the partial truth of many of the secondary "laws" of
Darwinism is beyond question -- M. de Quatrefages evidently accepting
"Natural Selection," the "struggle for existence" and
transformation within species, as proven not once and for ever, but pro. tem.
But it may not be amiss, perhaps, to condense the linguistic case against the
"Ape ancestor" theory:--
Languages have
their phases of growth, etc., like all else in nature. It is almost certain
that the great linguistic families pass through three stages.
(1) All words
are roots and merely placed in juxtaposition (Radical languages).
(2) One root
defines the other, and becomes merely a determinative element (Agglutinative).
(3) The
determinative element (the determinating meaning of which has long lapsed)
unites into a whole with the formative element (Inflected).
The problem then
is: Whence these ROOTS? Max Muller argues that the existence of these
ready-made materials of speech is a proof that man cannot be the crown of a
long organic series. This potentiality of forming roots is the great crux which
materialists almost invariably avoid.
Von Hartmann
explains it as a manifestation of the "Unconscious," and admits its
cogency versus mechanical Atheism. Hartmann is a fair representative of the
Metaphysician and Idealist of the present age.
The argument has
never been met by the non-pantheistic Evolutionists. To say with Schmidt:
"Forsooth are we to halt before the origin of language?" is an avowal
of dogmatism and of speedy defeat. (Cf. his "Doctrine of Descent and
Darwinism," p. 304.)
We respect those
men of science who, wise in their generation, say: "Prehistoric Past being
utterly beyond our powers of direct observation, we are too honest, too devoted
to the truth -- or what we regard as truth -- to speculate upon the unknown,
giving out our unproven theories along with facts absolutely established in
modern Science." . . . . "The borderland of (metaphysical) knowledge
is best left to time, which is the best test as to truth" (A Modern
Zoroastrian, p. 136).
This is a wise
and an honest sentence in the mouth of a materialist. But when a Haeckel, after
just saying that "historical events of
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 663 PROOFS OF OUR "NOBLE DESCENT."
past time . .
" having "occurred many millions of years ago,* . . . are for ever
removed from direct observation," and that neither geology nor phylogeny**
can or will "rise to the position of a real exact science," then
insists on the development of all organisms -- "from the lowest vertebrate
to the highest, from Amphioxus to man" -- we ask for a weightier proof
than he can give. Mere "empirical sources of knowledge," so extolled
by the author of "Anthropogeny" -- when he has to be satisfied with
the qualification for his own views -- are not competent to settle problems
lying beyond their domain; nor is it the province of exact science to place any
reliance on them.*** If "empirical" -- and Haeckel declares so
himself repeatedly -- then they are no better, nor any more reliable, in the
sight of exact research, when extended into the remote past, than our Occult
teachings of the East, both having to be placed on quite the same level. Nor
are his phylogenetic and palingenetic speculations treated in any better way by
the real scientists, than are our cyclic repetitions of the evolution of the
Great in the minor races, and the original order of evolutions. For the
province of exact, real Science, materialistic though it be, is to carefully
avoid anything like guess-work, speculation which cannot be verified; in short,
all suppressio veri and all suggestio falsi. The business of the man of exact
Science is to observe, each in his chosen department, the phenomena of nature;
to record, tabulate, compare and classify the facts, down to the smallest
minutiae which are presented to the observation of the senses with the help of
all the exquisite mechanism that modern invention supplies, not by the aid of
metaphysical flights of fancy. All that he has a legitimate right to do, is to
correct by the assistance of physical instruments the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It thus
appears that in its anxiety to prove our noble descent from the catarrhine
"baboon," Haeckel's school has pushed the times of pre-historic man millions
of years back. (See "Pedigree of Man," p. 273.) Occultists, render
thanks to science for such corroboration of our claims!
** This seems a
poor compliment to pay Geology, which is not a speculative but as exact a
science as astronomy -- save, perhaps its too risky chronological speculations.
It is mainly a "Descriptive" as opposed to an "Abstract"
Science.
*** Such
newly-coined words as "perigenesis of plastids," "plastidule
Souls" (!), and others less comely, invented by Haeckel, may be very learned
and correct in so far as they may express very graphically the ideas in his own
vivid fancy. As a fact, however, they remain for his less imaginative
colleagues painfully caenogenetic -- to use his own terminology; i.e., for true
Science they are spurious speculations so long as they are derived from
"empirical sources." Therefore, when he seeks to prove that "the
origin of man from other mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine ape, is
a deductive law that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the theory
of descent" ("Anthropogeny," p. 392) -- his no less learned foes
(du Bois-Reymond -- for one) have a right to see in this sentence a mere
jugglery of words; a "testimonium paupertatis of natural science" --
as he himself complains, calling them, in return, ignoramuses (see
"Pedigree of Man," Notes).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 side-way
path from this royal road becomes speculation.
Instead of
keeping to this, what does many a so-called man of science do in these days? He
rushes into the domains of pure metaphysics, while deriding it. He delights in
rash conclusions and calls it "a deductive law from the inductive
law" of a theory based upon and drawn out of the depths of his own
consciousness: that consciousness being perverted by, and honeycombed with,
one-sided materialism. He attempts to explain the "origin" of things,
which are yet embosomed only in his own conceptions. He attacks spiritual
beliefs and religious traditions millenniums old, and denounces everything,
save his own hobbies, as superstition. He suggests theories of the Universe, a
Cosmogony developed by blind, mechanical forces of nature alone, far more
miraculous and impossible than even one based upon the assumption of fiat lux
out of nihil -- and tries to astonish the world by such a wild theory; which,
being known to emanate from a scientific brain, is taken on blind faith as very
scientific and the outcome of SCIENCE.
Are those the
opponents Occultism would dread? Most decidedly not. For such theories are no
better treated by real (not empirical) Science than our own. Haeckel, hurt in
his vanity by du Bois-Reymond, never tires of complaining publicly of the
latter's onslaught on his fantastic theory of descent. Rhapsodizing on
"the exceedingly rich storehouse of empirical evidence," he calls
those "recognised physiologists" who oppose every speculation of his
drawn from the said "storehouse" -- ignorant men. "If many
men," he declares -- "and among them even some scientists of repute
-- hold that the whole of phylogeny is a castle in the air, and genealogical
trees (from monkeys?) are empty plays of phantasy, they only in speaking thus
demonstrate their ignorance of that wealth of empirical sources of knowledge to
which reference has already been made" ("Pedigree of Man," p.
273).
We open
Webster's Dictionary and read the definitions of the word
"empirical": "Depending upon experience or observation alone,
without due regard to modern science and theory." This applies to the
Occultists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc., etc. Again, "an Empiric -- One
who confines himself to applying the results of his own observations"
(only)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 665 MR. HUXLEY APPLIES AN "EXTINGUISHER."
(which is
Haeckel's case); "one wanting Science . . . . an ignorant and unlicensed
practitioner; a quack; a CHARLATAN."
No Occultist or
"magician," has ever been treated to any worse epithets. Yet the
Occultist remains on his own metaphysical grounds, and does not endeavour to
rank his knowledge, the fruits of his personal observation and experience,
among the exact sciences of modern learning. He keeps within his legitimate
sphere, where he is master. But what is one to think of a rank materialist,
whose duty is clearly traced before him, who uses such an expression as this:--
"The origin
of man from other mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine ape, is a
deductive law, that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the THEORY OF
DESCENT." ("Anthropogeny," p. 392).
A
"theory" is simply a hypothesis, a speculation, and no law. To say
otherwise is only one of the many liberties taken now-a-days by scientists.
They enunciate an absurdity, and then hide it behind the shield of Science. Any
deduction from theoretical speculation is no better than a speculation on a
speculation. Now Sir W. Hamilton has already shown that the word theory is now
used "in a very loose and improper sense" . . . . "that it is
convertible into hypothesis, and hypothesis is commonly used as another term
for conjecture, whereas the terms 'theory' and 'theoretical' are properly used
in opposition to the term practice and practical."
But modern Science
puts an extinguisher on the latter statement, and mocks at the idea.
Materialistic philosophers and Idealists of Europe and America may be agreed
with the Evolutionists as to the physical origin of man -- yet it will never
become a general truth with the true metaphysician, and the latter defies the
materialists to make good their arbitrary assumptions. That the ape-theory
theme* of Vogt and Darwin, on which the Huxley-Haeckelians have composed of
late such extraordinary variations, is far less scientific -- because clashing
with the fundamental laws of that theme itself -- than ours can ever be
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The mental
barrier between man and ape, characterized by Huxley as an "enormous gap,
a distance practically immeasurable"! ! is, indeed, in itself conclusive.
Certainly it constitutes a standing puzzle to the materialist, who relies on
the frail reed of "natural selection." The physiological differences
between Man and the Apes are in reality -- despite a curious community of
certain features -- equally striking. Says Dr. Schweinfurth, one of the most
cautious and experienced of naturalists:--
"In modern
times there are no animals in creation that have attracted more attention from
the scientific student than the great quadrumana (the anthropoids), bearing
such a striking resemblance to the human form as to have justified the epithet
of anthropomorphic being conferred on them. . . . But all investigation at
present only leads human intelligence to a confession of its insufficiency; and
nowhere is caution more to be advocated, nowhere is premature judgment more to
be deprecated than in the attempt to bridge over the MYSTERIOUS CHASM which
separates man and beast." "Heart of Africa" i., 520.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 foetus, was then prehensile, and our progenitors, no doubt,
were arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm forest-clad land, and the
males were provided with canine teeth which served as formidable weapons. . .
."*
Darwin connects
him with the type of the tailed catarrhines, "and consequently removes him
a stage backward in the scale of evolution. The English naturalist is not
satisfied to take his stand upon the ground of his own doctrines, and, like
Haeckel, on this point places himself in direct variance with one of the
fundamental laws which constitute the principal charm of Darwinism . . . "
And then the learned French naturalist proceeds to show how this fundamental
law is broken. "In fact," he says, "in the theory of Darwin,
transmutations do not take place, either by chance or in every direction. They
are ruled by certain laws which are due to the organization itself. If an
organism is once modified in a given direction, it can undergo secondary or
tertiary transmutations, but will still preserve the impress of the original.
It is the law of permanent characterization, which alone permits Darwin to
explain the filiation of groups, their characteristics, and their numerous
relations. It is by virtue of this law that all the descendants of the first
mollusc have been molluscs; all the descendants of the first vertebrate have
been vertebrates. It is clear that this constitutes one of the foundations of
the doctrine. . . . It follows that two beings belonging to two distinct types
can be referred to a common ancestor, but the one cannot be the descendant of
the other"; (p. 106).
"Now man
and ape present a very striking contrast in respect to type. Their organs . . .
correspond almost exactly term for term: but these
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A ridiculous
instance of evolutionist contradictions is afforded by Schmidt ("Doctrine
of Descent and Darwinism," on page 292). He says, "Man's kinship with
the apes is not impugned by the bestial strength of the teeth of the male orang
or gorilla." Mr. Darwin, on the contrary, endows this fabulous being with
teeth used as weapons!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 667 A WALKER OR A CLIMBER.
organs are
arranged after a very different plan. In man they are so arranged that he is
essentially a walker, while in apes they necessitate his being a climber. . . .
There is here an anatomical and mechanical distinction. . . . A glance at the
page where Huxley has figured side by side a human skeleton and the skeletons
of the most highly developed apes is a sufficiently convincing proof."
The consequence
of these facts, from the point of view of the logical application of the law of
permanent characterizations, is that man cannot be descended from an ancestor
who is already characterized as an ape, any more than a catarrhine tailless ape
can be descended from a tailed catarrhine. A walking animal cannot be descended
from a climbing one.
"Vogt, in
placing man among the primates, declares without hesitation that the lowest
class of apes have passed the landmark (the common ancestor), from which the
different types of this family have originated and diverged." (This
ancestor of the apes, occult science sees in the lowest human group during the
Atlantean period, as shown before.) . . . "We must, then, place the origin
of man beyond the last apes," goes on de Quatrefages, thus corroborating
our Doctrine, "if we would adhere to one of the laws most emphatically
necessary to the Darwinian theory. We then come to the prosimiae of Haeckel,
the loris, indris, etc. But those animals also are climbers; we must go
further, therefore, in search of our first direct ancestor. But the genealogy
by Haeckel brings us from the latter to the marsupials. . . . From men to the
Kangaroo the distance is certainly great. Now neither living nor extinct fauna
show the intermediate types which ought to serve as landmarks. This difficulty
causes but slight embarrassment to Darwin.* We know that he considers the want
of information upon similar questions as a proof in his favour. Haeckel
doubtless is as little embarrassed. He admits the existence of an absolutely
theoretical pithecoid man."
"Thus,
since it has been proved that, according to Darwinism itself, the origin of man
must be placed beyond the eighteenth stage, and since it becomes, in
consequence, necessary to fill up the gap between marsupials and man, will
Haeckel admit the existence of four unknown intermediate groups instead of
one?" asks de Quatrefages. "Will he complete his genealogy in this
manner? It is not for me to answer." ("The Human Species," p.
107-108.)
But see
Haeckel's famous genealogy, in "The Pedigree of Man," called by him
"Ancestral Series of Man." In the "Second Division"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* According even
to a fellow-thinker, Professor Schmidt, Darwin has evolved "a certainly
not flattering, and perhaps in many points an incorrect, portrait of our
presumptive ancestors in the dawn of humanity." ("Doctrine of Descent
and Darwinism," p. 284.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 668 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(Eighteenth
Stage) he describes "Prosimiae, allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis
(Lemur) as without marsupial bones and cloaca, but with placenta." And now
turn to de Quatrefages' "The Human Species," pp. 109, 110, and see
his proofs, based on the latest discoveries, to show that "the prosimiae
of Haeckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta." They cannot be the
ancestors of the apes even, let alone man, according to a fundamental law of
Darwin himself, as the great French Naturalist shows. But this does not dismay
the "animal theorists" in the least, for self-contradiction and
paradoxes are the very soul of modern Darwinism. Witness -- Mr. Huxley. Having
himself shown, with regard to fossil man and the "missing link," that
"neither in quaternary ages nor at the present time does any intermediary
being fill the gap which separates man from the Troglodyte"; and that to
"deny the existence of this gap would be as reprehensible as absurd,"
the great man of Science denies his own words in actu by supporting with all
the weight of his scientific authority that most "absurd" of all
theories -- the descent of man from an ape!
"This
genealogy," says de Quatrefages, "is wrong throughout, and is founded
on a material error." Indeed, Haeckel bases his descent of man on the 17th
and 18th stages (See Aveling's "Pedigree of Man," p. 77), the
marsupialia and prosimiae -- (genus Haeckelii?). Applying the latter term to
the Lemuridae -- hence making of them animals with a placenta -- he commits a
zoological blunder. For after having himself divided mammals according to their
anatomical differences into two groups: the indeciduata, which have no decidua
(or special membrane uniting the placentae), and the deciduata, those who
possess it: he includes the prosimiae in the latter group. Now we have shown
elsewhere what other men of science had to say to this. As de Quatrefages says,
"The anatomical investigations of . . . Milne Edwards and Grandidier upon
these animals . . . place it beyond all doubt that the prosimiae of Haeckel
have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They are indeciduata. Far from any
possibility of their being the ancestors of the apes, according to the
principles laid down by Haeckel himself, they cannot be regarded even as the
ancestors of the zonoplacental mammals . . . and ought to be connected with the
pachydermata, the edentata, and the cetacea"; (p. 110). And yet Haeckel's
inventions pass off with some as exact science!
The above
mistake, if indeed, one, is not even hinted at in Haeckel's "Pedigree of
Man," translated by Aveling. If the excuse may stand good that at the time
the famous "genealogies" were made, "the embryogenesis of the
prosimiae was not known," it is familiar now. We shall see whether the
next edition of Aveling's translation will have this important error rectified,
or if the 17th and 18th stages remain
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 669 A PITHECOID MAN WANTED.
as they are to
blind the profane, as one of the real intermediate links. But, as the French
naturalist observes -- "their (Darwin's and Haeckel's) process is always
the same, considering the unknown as a proof in favour of their theory."
(Ibid.)
It comes to
this. Grant to man an immortal Spirit and Soul; endow the whole animate and
inanimate creation with the monadic principle gradually evolving from the latent
and passive into active and positive polarity -- and Haeckel will not have a
leg to stand upon, whatever his admirers may say.
But there are
important divergences even between Darwin and Haeckel. While the former makes
us proceed from the tailed catarrhine, Haeckel traces our hypothetical ancestor
to the tailless ape, though, at the same time, he places him in a hypothetical
"stage" immediately preceding this: "Menocerca with tails"
(19th stage).
Nevertheless, we
have one thing in common with the Darwinian school: it is the law of gradual
and extremely slow evolution, embracing many million years. The chief quarrel,
it appears, is with regard to the nature of the primitive "Ancestor."
We shall be told that the Dhyan Chohan, or the "progenitor" of Manu,
is a hypothetical being unknown on the physical plane. We reply that it was
believed in by the whole of antiquity, and by nine-tenths of the present
humanity; whereas not only is the pithecoid man, or "ape-man," a
purely hypothetical creature of Haeckel's creation, unknown and untraceable on
this earth, but further its genealogy -- as invented by him -- clashes with
scientific facts and all the known data of modern discovery in Zoology. It is
simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de Quatrefages demonstrates in a few
words, Haeckel "admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical
pithecoid man" -- a hundred times more difficult to accept than any Deva
ancestor. And it is not the only instance in which he proceeds in a similar
manner in order to complete his genealogical table; and he admits very naively
his inventions himself. Does he not confess the non-existence of his sozura
(14th stage) -- a creature entirely unknown to science -- by confessing over
his own signature, that -- "The proof of its existence arises from the
necessity of an intermediate type between the 13th and the 14th stages"!
If so, we might
maintain with as much scientific right, that the proof of the existence of our
three ethereal races, and the three-eyed men of the Third and Fourth Root-Races
"arises also from the necessity of an intermediate type" between the
animal and the gods. What reason would the Haeckelians have to protest in this
special case?
Of course there
is a ready answer: "Because we do not grant the presence of the monadic
essence." The manifestation of the Logos as individual consciousness in
the animal and human creation is not accepted
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 than* any
"extravagant" esoteric doctrine can ever furnish. Even thinkers of
the school of Von Hartmann have become tainted with the general epidemic. They
accept the Darwinian Anthropology (more or less), though they also postulate
the individual Ego as a manifestation of the Unconscious (the Western presentation
of the Logos or Primeval Divine Thought). They say the evolution of the
physical man is from the animal, but that mind in its various phases is
altogether a thing apart from material facts, though organism (as an upadhi) is
necessary for ITS manifestation.
-------
PLASTIDULAR
SOULS, AND CONSCIOUS NERVE-CELLS.
But one can
never see the end of such wonders with Haeckel and his school, whom the
Occultists and Theosophists have every right to consider as materialistic
tramps trespassing on private metaphysical grounds. Not satisfied with the
paternity of Bathybius (Haeckelii), "plastidule souls,"** and
"atom-souls" are now invented by them, on the basis of purely blind
mechanical forces of matter. We are informed that "the study of the
evolution of soul-life shows that this has worked its way up from the lower
stages of the simple cell-soul, through an astonishing series of gradual stages
in evolution, up to the soul of man." ("Present Position of
Evolution," p. 266.)
"Astonishing"
-- truly, based as this wild speculation is on the Consciousness of the
"nerve cells." For as he tells us, "Little as we are in a
position, at the present time, to explain fully the nature of consciousness,***
yet the comparative and genetic observation of it clearly shows that it is only
a higher and more complex function of the nerve cells." (Ibid, note 22.)
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Of course the
Esoteric system of Fourth Round Evolution is much more complex than the
paragraph and quotations referred to categorically assert. It is practically a
reversal -- both in embryological inference and succession in time of species
-- of the current Western conception.
** According to
Haeckel, there are also cell-souls; "an inorganic molecular soul"
without, and a "plastidular soul with (or possessing) memory". What
are our esoteric teachings to this? The divine and human soul of the seven
principles in man must, of course, pale and give away before such a stupendous
revelation!
*** A valuable
confession, this. Only it makes the attempt to trace the descent of
Consciousness in man as well as of his physical body from Bathybius Haeckelii
still more humorous and empirical, in the sense of Webster's second definition.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 671 HAECKEL CREATES SOULS.
Mr. Herbert
Spencer's song on Consciousness -- is sung, it seems, and may henceforth be
safely stored up in the lumber room of obsolete speculations. Where, however,
do Haeckel's "complex functions" of his scientific
"nerve-cells" land him? Once more right into the Occult and mystic
teachings of the Kabala about the descent of souls as conscious and unconscious
atoms; among the Pythagorean MONAD and the monads of Leibnitz -- and the
"gods, monads, and atoms" of our esoteric teaching;* into the dead
letter of Occult teachings, left to the amateur Kabalists and professors of
ceremonial magic. For this is what he says, while explaining his newly-coined
terminology:--
"Plastidule-Souls;
the plastidules or protoplasmic molecules, the smallest, homogeneous parts of
the protoplasm are, on our plastic theory, to be regarded as the active factors
of all life-functions. The plastidular soul differs from the inorganic
molecular soul in that it possesses memory." ("Pedigree of Man,"
Note, p. 296.)
This he develops
in his mirific lecture on the "Perigenesis of the Plastidule, or the
wave-motions of living particles." It is an improvement on Darwin's theory
of "Pangenesis," and a further approach, a cautious move towards
"magic." The former is a conjecture that certain of the actual and
identical atoms which had belonged to ancestral bodies "are thus
transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation, so that
we are literally 'flesh of the flesh' of the primeval creature who has
developed into man in the later . . . period" -- explains the author of
"The Modern Zoroastrian" (in "Primitive Polarities," etc.).
The latter (Occultism) teaches that -- (a) the life-atoms of our (Prana)
life-principle are never entirely lost when a man dies. That the atoms best
impregnated with the life-principle (an independent, eternal, conscious factor)
are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity, and partially are
drawn once more together and become the animating principle of the new body in
every new incarnation of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Those who take
the opposite view and look upon the existence of the human soul, -- "as a
supernatural, a spiritual phenomenon, conditioned by forces altogether
different from ordinary physical forces," . . . "mock," he
thinks, "in consequence, all explanation that is simply scientific."
They have no right it seems, to assert that "psychology is, in part, or in
whole, a spiritual science, not a physical one." . . . The new discovery
by Haeckel (one taught for thousands of years in all the Eastern religions,
however), that the animals have souls, will, and sensation, hence
soul-functions, leads him to make of psychology the science of the zoologists.
The archaic teaching that the "Soul" (the animal and human souls, or
Kama and Manas) "has its developmental history" -- is claimed by Haekel
as his own discovery and innovation on an "untrodden (?) path"! He
(Haeckel) will work out the comparative evolution of the soul in man and in
other animals. . . . "The comparative morphology of the soul-organs, and
the comparative physiology of the soul-functions, both founded on Evolution,
thus become the psychological (really materialistic) problem of the scientific
man." (Cell-souls and Soul-cells, p. 137, "Pedigree of Man.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
To be just, and,
to say the least, logical, our modern Haeckelians ought to pass a resolution
that henceforth the "Perigenesis of the Plastidule," and like
lectures, should be bound up with those on "Esoteric Buddhism," and
"The Seven Principles in Man." Thus the public will have a chance, at
any rate, of judging after comparison which of the two teachings is the most or
the least ABSURD, even from the standpoint of materialistic and exact Science!
Now the
Occultists, who trace every atom in the universe, whether an aggregate or
single, to One Unity, or Universal Life; who do not recognize that anything in
Nature can be inorganic; who know of no such thing as dead matter -- the
Occultists are consistent with their doctrine of Spirit and Soul when speaking
of memory in every atom, of will and sensation. But what can a materialist mean
by the qualification? The law of biogenesis, in the sense applied to it by the
Haeckelians -- "is the result of the ignorance on the part of the man of
science of occult physics." We know and speak of "life-atoms" --
and of "sleeping-atoms" -- because we regard these two forms of energy
-- the kinetic and the potential -- as produced by one and the same force or
the ONE LIFE, and regard the latter as the source and mover of all. But what is
it that furnished with energy, and especially with memory, the
"plastidular souls" of Haeckel? The "wave motion of living particles"
becomes comprehensible on the theory of a Spiritual ONE LIFE, of a universal
Vital principle independent of our matter, and manifesting as atomic energy
only on our plane of consciousness. It is that which, individualized in the
human cycle, is transmitted from father to son.
Now Haeckel,
modifying Darwin's theory, suggests "most plausibly," as the author
of the "Modern Zoroastrian" thinks, "that not the identical
atoms, but their peculiar motions and mode of aggregation have been thus
transmitted" (by heredity).
If Haeckel, or
any other Scientist, knew more than any of them does of the nature of the atom,
he would not have improved the occasion in this way. For he only states, in a
more metaphysical language than Darwin, one and the same thing. The
life-principle, or life energy,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* (See
"Transmigration of the Life Atoms," "Five years of
Theosophy," p. 533-539). The collective aggregation of these atoms forms thus
the Anima Mundi of our Solar system, the soul of our little universe, each atom
of which is of course a soul, a monad, a little universe endowed with
consciousness, hence with memory (Vol. I., Part III., "Gods, Monads and
Atoms.")
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 673]] THE MEANING OF SOUL WITH HAECKEL.
which is
omnipresent, eternal, indestructible, is a force and a PRINCIPLE as noumenon,
atoms, as phenomenon. It is one and the same thing, and cannot be considered as
separate except in materialism.*
Further, Haeckel
enunciates concerning the Atom Souls that which, at first sight, appears as
occult as a Monad of Leibnitz. "The recent contest as to the nature of
atoms, which we must regard as in some form or other the ultimate factors in
all physical and chemical processes," he tells us -- "seems to be
capable of the easiest settlement, by the conception that these very minute masses
possess, as centres of force, a persistent soul, that every atom has sensation
and the power of movement."
He does not say
a word concerning the fact that this is Leibnitz's theory, and one
pre-eminently occult. Nor does he understand the term "Soul" as we
do; for, with Haeckel it is simply, along with consciousness, the production of
the grey matter of the brain, a thing which, as the "cell-soul, is as
indissolubly bound up with the protoplasmic body as is the human soul with the
brain and spinal cord." (Ibid.) He rejects the conclusions of Kant,
Herbert Spencer, of du Bois-Reymond and Tyndall. The latter expresses the
opinion of all the great men of science, as of the greatest thinkers of this
and the past ages, in saying that "the passage from the physics of the
brain to the corresponding facts of Consciousness is unthinkable. Were our
minds and senses so . . . illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very
molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all
their groupings . . . electric discharges . . . we should be as far as ever
from the solution of the problem . . . The chasm between the two classes of
Phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable." But the complex
function of the nerve-cells of the great German EMPIRIC, or, in other words,
his Consciousness, will not permit him to follow the conclusions of the
greatest thinkers of our globe. He is greater than they. He asserts this, and
protests against all. "No one has the right
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In "The
Transmigration of the Life-Atoms," we say, to explain better a position
which is but too often misunderstood:-- "It is omnipresent . . . . though
(on this plane of manifestation) often in a dormant state -- as in stone. The
definition which states that when this indestructible force is disconnected
with one set of atoms (molecules ought to have been said) it becomes
immediately attracted by others, does not imply that it entirely abandons the
first set (because the atoms themselves would then disappear), but only that it
transfers its vis viva, or life power -- the energy of motion, to another set.
But because it manifests itself in the next set as what is called Kinetic
energy, it does not follow that the first set is deprived of it altogether; for
it is still in it, as potential energy or life latent," etc., etc. Now
what can Haeckel mean by his "not identical atoms but their peculiar
motion and mode of aggregation," if it is not the same Kinetic energy we
have been explaining? He must have read Paracelsus and studied "Five Years
of Theosophy," without properly digesting the teachings, before evolving
such theories.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 674 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
to hold that in
the future we (Haeckel) shall not be able to pass beyond those limits of our
knowledge that to day seem impassable"; and he quotes from Darwin's
introduction to the "Descent of Man" these words, which he modestly
applies to his scientific opponents and himself: "It is always those who
know little, and not those who know much, that positively affirm that this or
that problem will never be solved by Science."
The world may
rest satisfied. That day is not far off when the "thrice great"
Haeckel will have shown (to his own satisfaction) that the consciousness of Sir
I. Newton was, physiologically speaking, but the reflex action (or minus
consciousness) caused by the peri-genesis of the plastidules of our common
ancestor and old friend, the Moneron Haeckelii. The fact that the said
"Bathybius" has been found out and exposed as a pretender simulating
the organic substance it was not; and since, among the children of men, Lot's wife
alone (and even this, only after her disagreeable metamorphosis into a salt
pillar) could claim the pinch of salt it is, as her forefather -- will not
dismay him at all. He will go on asserting, as coolly as he has always done,
that it was no more than the peculiar mode and motion of the ghost of the
long-vanished atoms of our "Father Bathybius," which, transmitted
across aeons of time into the cell-tissue of the grey matter of the brains of
every great man, caused Sophocles and AEschylus, as well as Shakespeare, to
write their tragedies, Newton, his "Principia," Humboldt, his
"Cosmos," etc. etc. It prompted Haeckel to invent Graeco-Latin names
three inches long, pretending to mean a good deal, and meaning -- nothing.
Of course we are
quite aware that the true, honest evolutionist agrees with us; and that he is
the first to say that not only is the geological record imperfect, but that
there are enormous gaps in the series of hitherto discovered fossils, which can
never be filled. He will tell us, moreover, that "no evolutionist assumes
that man is descended from any existing ape or any extinct ape either,"
but that man and apes originated probably aeons back, in some common root
stock. Still, as de Quatrefages points out, he will claim as an evidence corroborating
his (the evolutionist's) claim, even this wealth of absent proofs, saying that
"all living forms have not been preserved in the fossil series, the
chances of preservation being few and far between," even primitive man
"burying or burning his dead" (A. Wilson). This is just what we
ourselves claim. It is just as possible that future should have in store for us
the discovery of the giant skeleton of an Atlantean, 30ft. high, as the fossil
of a pithecoid "missing link": only the former is more probable.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
palaeontologist? Time will show . . . ." ("Man's Place in
Nature," p. 159).
It will --
undeniably -- and thus vindicate the anthropology of the Occultists. Meanwhile,
in his eagerness to vindicate Mr. Darwin's Descent of Man, Mr. Boyd Dawkins
believes he has all but found the "missing link" -- in theory. It was
due to theologians more than to geologists that, till nearly 1860, man had been
considered a relic no older than the Adamic orthodox 6,000 years. As Karma
would have it though, it was left to a French Abbe -- l'abbe Bourgeois -- to
give this easy-going theory even a worse blow than had been given to it by the
discoveries of Boucher de Perthes. Everyone knows that the Abbe discovered and
brought to light good evidence that man already existed during the Miocene
period; for flints of undeniably human making were excavated from Miocene
strata. In the words of the author of "Modern Science and Modern
Thought":--
"They must
either have been chipped by man, or, as Mr. Boyd Dawkins supposes, by the
Dryopithecus or some other anthropoid ape which had a dose of intelligence so
much superior to the gorilla, or chimpanzee, as to be able to fabricate tools.
But in this case the problem would be solved and the missing link discovered,
for such an ape might well have been the ancestor of Palaeolithic man."
Or -- the
descendant of Eocene Man, which is a variant offered to the theory. Meanwhile,
the Dryopithecus with such fine mental endowments is yet to be discovered. On
the other hand, Neolithic and even Palaeolithic man having become an absolute
certainty, -- and, as the same author justly observes: "If 100,000,000
years have elapsed since
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
causa that the (much more recent) higher apes then existed! This would allow
ample time to man and the modern apes to have diverged from the mythical
"ape more anthropoid," and even for the latter to have degenerated
into those that are found mimicking man in using "branches of trees as
clubs, and cracking cocoa-nuts with hammer and stones."* Some savage
tribes of hillmen in India build their abodes on trees, just as the gorillas
build their dens. The question, which of the two, the beast or the man, has
become the imitator of the other, is scarcely an open one, even granting Mr.
Boyd Dawkins' theory. The fanciful character of his hypothesis, is, however,
generally admitted. It is argued that while in the Pliocene and Miocene periods
there were true apes and baboons, and man was undeniably contemporaneous with
the former of those times -- though as we see orthodox anthropology still
hesitates in the teeth of facts to place him in the era of the Dryopithecus,
which latter "has been considered by some anatomists as in some respects
superior to the chimpanzee or the gorilla" -- yet, in the Eocene there
have been no other fossil primates unearthed and no pithecoid stocks found save
a few extinct lemurian forms. And we find it also hinted that the Dryopithecus
may have been the "missing link," though the brain of the creature no
more warrants the theory than does the brain of the modern gorilla. (Vide also
Gaudry's speculations.)
Now we would ask
who among the Scientists is ready to prove that there was no man in existence
in the early Tertiary period? What is it that prevented his presence? Hardly
thirty years ago his existence any farther back than 6, or 7,000 years was
indignantly denied. Now he is refused admission into the Eocene age. Next
century it may become a question whether man was not contemporary with the
"flying Dragons;" the pterodactyl, the plesiosaurus and iguanodon,
etc., etc. Let us listen, however, to the echo of Science.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This the way
primitive man must have acted? We do not know of men, not even of savages, in
our age, who are known to have imitated the apes who live side by side with
them in the forests of America and the islands. We do know of large apes who,
tamed and living in houses, will mimic men to the length of donning hats and
coats. The writer had personally a chimpanzee who, without being taught, opened
a newspaper and pretended to read in it. It is the descending generations, the
children, who mimic their parents -- not the reverse.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 brain* . . . . If he could survive, as we know he did, the
adverse conditions and extreme vicissitudes of the Glacial period, there is no
reason why he might not have lived in the semi-tropical climate of the Miocene
period, when a genial climate extended even to Greenland and Spitzbergen . . .
" ("Modern Science and Modern Thought," p. 152.)
While most of
the men of Science, who are uncompromising in their belief in the descent of
man from an "extinct anthropoid mammal," will not accept even the
bare tenability of any other theory than an ancestor common to man and the
Dryopithecus, it is refreshing to find in a work of real scientific value such
a margin for compromise. Indeed, it is as wide as it can be made under the
circumstances, i.e., without immediate danger of getting knocked off one's feet
by the tidal wave of "science-adulation." Believing that the
difficulty of accounting "for the development of intellect and morality by
evolution is not so great as that presented by the difference as to physical structure**
between man and the highest animal," the same author says:--
"But it is
not so easy to see how this difference of physical structure arose, and how a
being came into existence which had such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped
capabilities for an almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the
difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest
existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct
descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight
approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his brain less
capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than those of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It is asked,
whether it would change one iota of the scientific truth and fact contained in
the above sentence if it were to read: "the ape is simply an instance of
the biped type specialized for going on all fours, generally, and a smaller
brain." Esoterically speaking, this is the real truth, and not the
reverse.
** We cannot
follow Mr. Laing here. When avowed Darwinists like Huxley point to "the
great gulf which intervenes between the lowest ape and the highest man in
intellectual power," the "enormous gulf . . . between them," the
"immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the Human from the
Simian stirps" (Man's Place in Nature, pp. 102-3); when even the physical
basis of mind -- the brain -- so vastly exceeds in size that of the highest
existing apes; when men like Wallace are forced to invoke the agency of
extra-terrestrial intelligences in order to explain the rise of such a creature
as the Pithecanthropus alalus, or speechless savage of Haeckel, to the level of
the large-brained and moral man of to-day -- it is idle to dismiss Evolutionist
puzzles so lightly. If the structural evidence is so unconvincing and, taken as
a whole, so hostile to Darwinism, the difficulties as to the "how" of
the Evolution of the human mind by natural selection are tenfold greater.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 678 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
average European
man. Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the
chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or cretin, whose brain is no larger
and intelligence no greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man,
not an ape."
"If,
therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man and ape, we must
go back to some common ancestor from whom both may have originated . . . . But
to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that ancestral
form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it . . . . in
other words . . . . the missing link! Now it must be admitted that, hitherto,
not only have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human
sculls and skeletons which date from the Glacial period, and are probably at
least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approximation towards any such
pre-human type. On the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of
the sepulchral cave of Cro-Magnon,* is that of a fine race, tall in stature,
large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of the existing races of
mankind. The reply of course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and
the ape had a common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape,
certainly, and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such
ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared with which
the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance . . . . It may well make
us hesitate before we admit that man . . . is alone an exception. . . . This is
more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man (?) so closely resembles
. . . . contains numerous branches which graduate into one another, but the
extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape
series. If a special creation is required for man, must there not have been
special creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least
100 different species of ape and monkeys which are all built on the same
lines?" (p. 182, "Modern Science, etc.")
There was a
"special creation" for man, and a "special creation" for
the ape, his progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by Science.
Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot be regarded
as the crown of an ape-stock. When one finds that not only was the
"primeval savage" (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de
Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has left behind him were splintered by
fire in that remote epoch; when we learn that the Dryopithecus, alone of the
anthropoids, appears in those strata, what is the natural inference? That the
Darwinians are in a quandary. The very manlike Gibbon is still in the same low
grade of development, as it was when it co-existed with Man at the close of the
Glacial Period. It has not appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now
there is little to choose between the Dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids
-- gibbon, gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all-sufficient, how
are we to "explain" the evolution of this
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* A race which
MM. de Quatrefages and Hamy regard as a branch of the same stock whence the
Canary Island Guanches sprung -- offshoots of the Atlanteans, in short.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 679 MATERIALISM IS PUZZLED.
ape into Man
during the first half of the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a
theoretical transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in
species supervenes renders the thing inconceivable -- more especially on the
Natural Selection hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a
savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal
anthropoid, is too much to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a period.
Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding Eocene, if they
prefer to do so; let them even trace both Man and Dryopithecus to a common
ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has, nevertheless, to be faced that in
Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are as conspicuous by their absence, as is
the fabulous pithecanthropus of Haeckel. Is an exit out of this cul de sac to
be found by an appeal to the "unknown," and a reference with Darwin
to the "imperfection of the geological record"? So be it; but the
same right of appeal must be accorded equally to the Occultists, instead of
remaining the monopoly of puzzled materialism. Physical man, we say, existed
before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part
of the Tertiary Age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known
flourished at a period when the Haeckelian man-ape is conceived to have roamed
through the primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen's putative ancestor to have
swung himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths
of the Third Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days
of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no
respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean
giants, "blurred copies" of their bestial sires, and hence of modern
man (Huxley), now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist
of European Science.
Where did the
first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western Africa, some in Southern Asia,
others, again, believe in an independent origin of human stocks in Asia and
America from a Simian ancestry (Vogt). Haeckel, however, advances gaily to the
charge. Starting from his "prosimiae" . . . "the ancestor common
to all other catarrhini, including man" -- a "link" now,
however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries! -- he
endeavours to find a habitat for the primeval Pithecanthropus alalus. "In
all probability it (the transformation of animal into man) occurred in Southern
Asia, in which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original
home of the different species of men. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the
earliest cradle of the human race, but LEMURIA, a continent that lay to the
south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. (Vide
infra, "Scientific and geological proofs of the former existence of
several
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 aeons 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 Haeckel the "dumb ape-men," just removed from a brutal
mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait-statues, some of which are now
in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Haeckelian doctrines
"abominable, revolutionary, immoral" -- though materialism is the legitimate
outcome of the ape-ancestor myth -- they are simply too absurd to demand
disproof.
-------
B.
WESTERN
EVOLUTIONISM: THE COMPARATIVE ANATOMY OF MAN AND THE ANTHROPOID IN NO WAY A
CONFIRMATION OF DARWINISM.
We are told that
while every other heresy against modern science may be disregarded, this, our
denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to Man, will be the one
"unpardonable" sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the
evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and the man. The anatomical
evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it is bone for bone,
and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.
Well, what of
that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Ramayana,
the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanuman, the monkey-God,
"whose feats were great and Wisdom never rivalled," must have known
as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Haeckel or Huxley in our modern
day. Volumes upon volumes were written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in
more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new whatever given to the world
or to philosophy, in such volumes as Mivart's "Man and Apes," or
Messrs. Fiske and Huxley's defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial
proofs of man's descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is
not the true one -- we are told -- if man and ape do not descend from a common
ancestor, then we are called upon to explain the reason of:--
(I.) The similarity
of structure between the two; the fact that the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 681]] HUXLEY CALLS THE DARWINISTS TO ORDER.
higher animal
world -- man and beast -- is physically of one type or pattern.
(II.) The
presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now
atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had
any scope for employment, except for a semi-animal, semi-arboreal monster. Why,
again, do we find in Man those "rudimentary" organs (as useless as
its rudimentary wing is to the Apteryx of Australia), the vermiform appendix of
the coecum, the ear muscles,* the "rudimentary tail" (with which
children are still sometimes born), etc., etc.?
Such is the war
cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if
possible, than even that of the scientific Evolutionists themselves!
Furthermore, the
latter themselves -- with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent
zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others -- while defending the Darwinian theory,
are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its
final demonstration. And there are as great men of science as the above-named,
who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce
the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity. It
is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, of Owen, Pruner-Bey,
and finally, at the last great work of de Quatrefages, "Introduction a
l'Etude des Races humaines, Questions generales," to discover the fallacy
of the Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning such similarity
of structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring
and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley found himself forced to protest
against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great anatomist personally
who called the "smaller fry" to order, by declaring in one of his
articles that the differences in the structure of the human body and that of
the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only far from being trifling
and unimportant, but were, on the contrary, very great and suggestive:
"each of the bones of the gorilla has its own specific impress on it that
distinguishes it from a similar human bone." Among the existing creatures
there is not one single intermediate form that could fill the gap between man
and the ape. To ignore that gap, he added, "was as uncalled-for as it was
absurd."**
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Professor Owen
believes that these muscles -- the attollens, retrahens, and attrahens aurem --
were actively functioning in men of the Stone Age. This may or may not be the
case. The question falls under the ordinary "occult" explanation, and
involves no postulate of an "animal progenitor" to solve it.
** Quoted in the
Review of the "Introduction a l'Etude des Races Humaines," by de
Quatrefages. We have not Mr. Huxley's work at hand to quote from. Or to cite
another good authority:-- "We find one of the most man-like apes (gibbon),
in the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
versa. As proven by Gratiolet, with regard to the cavities of the brain of the
anthropoids, in which species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what
would be the case were the corresponding organs in man really the product of
the development of the said organs in the apes -- the size of the human skull
and its brain, as well as the cavities, increase with the individual
development of man. His intellect develops and increases with age, while his
facial bones and jaws diminish and straighten, thus being more and more
spiritualized: whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the
anthropoid is far more intelligent and good-natured, while with age it becomes
duller; and, as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial
bones and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely
back, to make with every day more room for the animal type. The organ of
thought -- the brain -- recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced
by that of the wild beast -- the jaw apparatus.
Thus, as wittily
remarked in the French work, a gorilla would have a perfect right to address an
Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from himself. It would say to him,
"We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure from the human type,
and therefore our development and evolution are expressed by a transition from
a human-like to an animal-like structure of organism; but in what way could
you, men, descend from us -- how can you form a continuation of our genus? For,
to make this possible, your organization would have to differ still more than ours
does from the human structure, it would have to approach still closer to that
of the beast than ours does; and in such a case justice demands that you should
give up to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you
insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind; for the structure of our
organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate forms
of a higher organization than our own."
This is where
the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatre-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] tertiary period, and this species is still in
the same low grade, and side by side with it at the end of the Ice-period, man
is found in the same high grade as to-day, the ape not having approximated more
nearly to the man, and modern man not having become further removed from the
ape than the first (fossil) man . . . these facts contradict a theory of
constant progressive development." (Pfaff.) When, according to Vogt, the
the average Australian brain = 99.35 cub. inches; that of the gorilla 30.51
cub. in., and that of the chimpanzee only 25.45, the giant gap to be bridged by
the advocate of "Natural" Selection becomes apparent.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 683 THE DARWINISTS AND THEIR OPPONENTS.
fages. Owing to
the very type of his development man cannot descend from either an ape or an
ancestor common to both, but shows his origin from a type far superior to
himself. And this type is the "Heavenly man" -- the Dhyan Chohans, or
the Pitris so-called, as shown in the first Part of this volume. On the other
hand, the pithecoids, the orang-outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can,
and, as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human
Root-Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal -- whose
remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality -- which
lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi-human monster is explained
in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the "Mind-less" races of
the middle Third Race period.
When it is borne
in mind that all forms which now people the earth, are so many variations on
basic types originally thrown off by the MAN of the Third and Fourth Round,
such an evolutionist argument as that insisting on the "unity of
structural plan" characterising all vertebrates, loses its edge. The basic
types referred to were very few in number in comparison with the multitude of
organisms to which they ultimately gave rise; but a general unity of type has,
nevertheless, been preserved throughout the ages. The economy of Nature does
not sanction the co-existence of several utterly opposed "ground
plans" of organic evolution on one planet. Once, however, that the general
drift of the occult explanation is formulated, inference as to detail may well
be left to the intuitive reader.
Similarly with
the important question of the "rudimentary" organs discovered by
anatomists in the human organism. Doubtless this line of argument, when wielded
by Darwin and Haeckel against their European adversaries, proved of great
weight. Anthropologists, who ventured to dispute the derivation of man from an
animal ancestry, were sorely puzzled how to deal with the presence of
gill-clefts, with the "tail" problem, and so on. Here again Occultism
comes to our assistance with the necessary data.
The fact is
that, as previously stated, the human type is the repertory of all potential
organic forms, and the central point from which these latter radiate. In this
postulate we find a true "Evolution" or "Unfolding" -- a
sense which cannot be said to belong to the mechanical theory of natural
selection. Criticising Darwin's inference from "rudiments," an able
writer remarks: "Why is it not just as probably a true hypothesis to
suppose that Man was created with the rudimentary sketches in his organization,
and that they became useful appendages in the lower animals into which man
degenerated, as to suppose that these parts existed in full development in the
lower animals out of which man was generated?" ("Creation or
Evolution?" Geo. T. Curtis, p. 76.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 684 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Read for
"into which Man degenerated," "the prototypes which man shed in
the course of his astral developments," and an aspect of the true esoteric
solution is before us. But a wider generalization is now to be formulated.
So far as our
present Fourth Round terrestrial period is concerned, the mammalian fauna are
alone to be regarded as traceable to prototypes shed by Man. The amphibia,
birds, reptiles, fishes, etc., are the resultants of the Third Round, astral
fossil forms stored up in the auric envelope of the Earth and projected into
physical objectivity subsequent to the deposition of the first Laurentian rocks.
"Evolution" has to deal with the progressive modifications, which
palaeontology shows to have affected the lower animal and vegetable kingdoms in
the course of geological time. It does not, and from the nature of things
cannot, touch on the subject of the pre-physical types which served as the
basis for future differentiation. Tabulate the general laws controlling the
development of physical organisms it certainly may, and to a certain extent it
has acquitted itself ably of the task.
To return to the
immediate subject of discussion. The mammalia, whose first traces are
discovered in the marsupials of the Triassic rocks of the Secondary Period,
were evolved from purely astral progenitors contemporary with the Second Race.
They are thus post-Human, and, consequently, it is easy to account for the
general resemblance between their embryonic stages and those of Man, who
necessarily embraces in himself and epitomizes in his development the features
of the group he originated. This explanation disposes of a portion of the
Darwinist brief. "But how to account for the presence of the gill-clefts
in the human foetus, which represent the stage through which the branchiae of
the fish are developed;* for the pulsating vessel corresponding to the heart of
the lower fishes, which constitutes the foetal heart; for the entire analogy
presented by the segmentation of the human ovum, the formation of the
blastoderm, and the appearance of the 'gastrula' stage, with corresponding
stages in lower vertebrate life and even among the sponges; for the various
types of lower animal life which the form of the future child shadows forth in
the cycle of its growth?" "How comes it to pass that stages in the
life of fishes, whose ancestors swam" -- aeons before the epoch of the
First Root-Race,
[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "At this
period," writes Darwin, "the arteries run in arch-like branches, as
if to carry the blood to branchiae which are not present in the higher
vertebrata, though the slits on the side of the neck still remain, marking
their former (?) position."
It is noteworthy
that, though gill-clefts are absolutely useless to all but amphibia and fishes,
etc., their appearance is regularly noted in the foetal development of
vertebrates. Even children are occasionally born with an opening in the neck
corresponding to one of the clefts.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 685 REVERSION FROM THE WRONG END.
-- "in the
seas of the Silurian period, as well as stages in that of the later amphibian,
reptilian fauna, are mirrored in the 'epitomized history' of human foetal
development?"
This plausible
objection is met by the reply that the Third Round terrestrial animal forms
were just as much referable to types thrown off by Third Round man, as that new
importation into our planet's area -- the mammalian stock -- is to the Fourth
Round Humanity of the Second Root-race. The process of human foetal growth
epitomizes not only the general characteristics of the Fourth, but of the Third
Round terrestrial life. The diapason of type is run through in brief.
Occultists are thus at no loss to "account for" the birth of children
with an actual caudal appendage, or for the fact that the tail in the human
foetus is, at one period, double the length of the nascent legs. The
potentiality of every organ useful to animal life is locked up in Man -- the
microcosm of the Macrocosm -- and abnormal conditions may not unfrequently
result in the strange phenomena which Darwinists regard as "reversion to
ancestral features."* Reversion, indeed, but scarcely in the sense
contemplated by our present-day empiricists!
-------
C
DARWINISM AND THE
ANTIQUITY OF MAN: THE ANTHROPOIDS AND THEIR ANCESTRY.
The public has
been notified by more than one eminent modern geologist and man of science,
that "all estimate of geological duration is not merely impossible, but
necessarily imperfect; for we are ignorant of the causes, though they must have
existed, which quickened or retarded the progress of the sedimentary
deposits."** And now another man of Science, as well known (Croll),
calculating that the tertiary age began either 15 or 2 1/2 million of years ago
-- the former being a more correct calculation, according to Esoteric doctrine,
than the latter there -- seems in this case, at least, no very great
disagreement. Exact Science, refusing to see in man "a special
creation" (to a certain degree the 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Those who with
Haeckel regard the gill-clefts with their attendant phenomena as illustrative
of an active function in our amphibian and piscine ancestors (Vide his XII. and
XIII. stages), ought to explain why the "Vegetable with leaflets"
(Lefevre) represented in foetal growth, does not appear in his 22 stages
through which the monera have passed in their ascent to Man. Haeckel does not
postulate a vegetable ancestor. The embryological argument is thus a two-edged
sword and here cuts its possessor.
**
"Physiology," Lefevre, p. 480.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 686 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
semi-human -- of
our teachings. But it can hardly do the same in the case of the Third at its
closing period, the Fourth, and the Fifth Races, since it already divides
mankind into Palaeolithic and Neolithic man.* The geologists of France place
man in the mid-miocene age (Gabriel de Mortillet), and some even in the
Secondary period, as de Quatrefages suggests; while the English savants do not
generally accept such antiquity for their species. But they may know better
some day. For "If we consider," says Sir Charles Lyell in
"Antiquity of Man," p. 246 --
"the absence
or extreme scarcity of human bones and works of art in all strata, whether
marine or fresh water, even in those formed in the immediate proximity of land
inhabited by millions of human beings, we shall be prepared for the general
dearth of human memorials in glacial formations, whether recent, Pleistocene,
or of more ancient date. If there were a few wanderers over lands covered with
glaciers, or over seas infested with icebergs, and if a few of them left their
bones or weapons in moraines or in marine drifts, the chances, after the lapse
of thousands of years, of a geologist meeting with one of them must be
infinitesimally small."
The men of
Science avoid pinning themselves down to any definite statement concerning the
age of man, as indeed they hardly could, and thus leave enormous latitude to
bolder speculations. Nevertheless, while the majority of the Anthropologists
carry back the existence of man only into the period of the post-glacial drift,
or what is called the Quaternary period, those of them who, as Evolutionists,
trace man to a common origin with that of the monkey, do not show great
consistency in their speculations. The Darwinian hypothesis demands, in
reality, a far greater antiquity for man, than is even dimly suspected by
superficial thinkers. This is proven by the greatest authorities on the
question -- Mr. Huxley, for instance. Those, therefore, who accept the
Darwinian evolution, ipso facto hold very tenaciously to an antiquity
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We confess to
not being able to see any good reasons for Mr. E. Clodd's certain statement in
Knowledge. Speaking of the men of Neolithic times, "concerning whom Mr.
Grant Allen has given . . . a vivid and accurate sketch," and who are
"the direct ancestors of peoples of whom remnants yet lurk in
out-of-the-way corners of Europe, where they have been squeezed or
stranded," he adds to this: "but the men of Palaeolithic times can be
identified with no existing races; they were savages of a more degraded type
than any extant; tall, yet barely erect, with short legs and twisted knees,
with prognathous, that is, projecting ape-like jaws, and small brains. Whence
they come we cannot tell, and their 'grave knoweth no man to this day.' "
Besides the possibility
that there may be men who know whence they came and how they perished -- it is
not true to say that the Palaeolithic men, or their fossils, are all found with
"small brains." The oldest skull of all those hitherto found, the
"Neanderthal skull," is of average capacity, and Mr. Huxley was
compelled to confess that it was no real approximation whatever to that of the
"missing link." There are aboriginal tribes in India whose brains are
far smaller and nearer to that of the ape than any hitherto found among the
skulls of Palaeolithic man.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 687 GRANT ALLEN'S ILLUSIONS.
of man so very
great, indeed, that it falls not so far short of the Occultist's estimate.* The
modest thousands of years of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the 100,000
years, to which Anthropology in general limits the age of Humanity, seem quite
microscopical when compared with the figures implied in Mr. Huxley's bold
speculations. The former, indeed, makes of the original race of men ape-like
cave-dwellers. The great English biologist, in his desire to prove man's
pithecoid origin, insists that the transformation of the primordial ape into a
human being must have occurred millions of years back. For in criticising the
excellent average cranial capacity of the Neanderthal skull, notwithstanding
his assertion that it is overlaid with "pithecoid bony walls,"
coupled with Mr. Grant Allen's assurances that this skull "possesses large
bosses on the forehead, strikingly (?) suggestive of those which give the
gorilla its peculiarly fierce appearance,"** (Fortnightly Review, 1882,)
still Mr. Huxley is forced to admit that, in the said skull, his theory is once
more defeated by the "completely human proportions of the accompanying
limb-bones, together with the fair development of the Engis skull." In
consequence of all this we are notified that those skulls, "clearly
indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has
proceeded, need no longer be sought by those who entertain any form of the
doctrine of progressive development in the newest Tertiaries; but that they may
be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS
than that is from us"*** (Huxley).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The actual
time required for such a theoretical transformation is necessarily enormous.
"If," says Professor Pfaff, "in the hundreds of thousands of
years which you (the Evolutionists) accept between the rise of palaeolithic man
and our own day, a greater distance of man from the brute is not demonstrable,
(the most ancient man was just as far removed from the brute as the now living
man), what reasonable ground can be advanced for believing that man has been
developed from the brute, and has receded further from it by infinitely small
gradations." . . . . "The longer the interval of time placed between
our times and the so-called palaeolithic men, the more ominous and destructive
for the theory of the gradual development of man from the animal kingdom is the
result stated." Huxley states ("Man's Place in Nature," p. 159)
that the most liberal estimates for the antiquity of Man must be still further
extended.
** The
baselessness of this assertion, as well as that of many other exaggerations of
the imaginative Mr. Grant Allen, was ably exposed by the eminent anatomist,
Professor R. Owen, in "Longman's Magazine," No. 1. Must it be
repeated, moreover, that the Cro-Magnon Palaeolithic type is superior to a very
large number of existing races?
*** It thus
stands to reason that science would never dream of a pre-tertiary man, and that
de Quatrefages' secondary man makes every Academician and "F.R.S."
faint with horror because, TO PRESERVE THE APE-THEORY, SCIENCE MUST MAKE MAN
POST-SECONDARY. This is just what de Quatrefages has twitted the Darwinists
with, adding, that on the whole there were more scientific reasons to trace the
ape from man than man from the anthropoid. With this exception science has not
one single valid argu- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 688 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
An untold
antiquity for man is thus, then, the scientific sine qua non in the question of
Darwinian Evolution, since the oldest Palaeolithic man shows as yet no
appreciable differentiation from his modern descendant. It is only of late that
modern Science began to widen with every year the abyss that now separates her
from old Science, that of the Plinies and Hippocrateses, none of whom would
have derided the archaic teachings with respect to the evolution of the human
races and animal species, as the present day Scientist -- geologist or
anthropologist -- is sure to do.
Holding, as we
do, that the mammalian type was a post-human Fourth Round product, the following
diagram -- as the writer understands the teaching -- may make the process
clear:--
[[diagram]]
[[text on
diagram:]]
Primeval Astral
Man
Second Astral
Race
Race Third Semi
Astral
Astral Mammals
Prototypes
3rd Race Man
Separation into
Sexes
4th Race M,
physical
5th Race Man
Lower (physical)
mammals
Lower Apes.
The unnatural
union was invariably fertile, because the then mammalian types were not remote
enough from their Root-type* -- Primeval Astral
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] ment to offer against the antiquity of man. But
in this case modern Evolution demands far more than the fifteen million years
of Croll for the Tertiary period, for two very simple but good reasons: (a) No
anthropoid ape has been found before the Miocene period: (b) man's flint relics
have been traced to the Pliocene and their presence suspected, if not accepted
by all, in the Miocene strata. Again, where is the "missing link" in
such case? And how could even a Palaeolithic Savage, a "Man of
Canstadt," evolve into thinking men from the brute Dryopithecus of the
Miocene in so short a time. One sees now the reason why Darwin rejected the
theory that only 60,000,000 years had elapsed since the Cambrian period.
"He judges from the small amount of organic changes since the glacial
epoch, and adds that the previous 140 million years can hardly be considered as
sufficient for the development of the varied forms of life which certainly
existed toward the close of the Cambrian period." (Ch. Gould.)
* Let us
remember in this connection the esoteric teaching which tells us of Man having
had in the Third Round a GIGANTIC APE-LIKE FORM on the astral plane. And
similarly at the close of the Third Race in this Round. Thus it accounts for
the human features of the apes, especially of the later anthropoids -- apart
from the fact that these latter preserve by Heredity a resemblance to their
Atlanto-Lemurian sires.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 689 THE INCUBUS OF ETHNOLOGY.
Man -- to
develop the necessary barrier. Medical science records such cases of monsters,
bred from human and animal parents, even in our own day. The possibility is,
therefore, only one of degree, not of fact. Thus it is that Occultism solves
one of the strangest problems presented to the consideration of the
anthropologist.
The pendulum of
thought oscillates between extremes. Having now finally emancipated herself
from the shackles of theology, Science has embraced the opposite fallacy; and
in the attempt to interpret Nature on purely materialistic lines, she has built
up that most extravagant theory of the ages -- the derivation of man from a
ferocious and brutal ape. So rooted has this doctrine, in one form or another,
now become, that the most Herculean efforts will be needed to bring about its
final rejection. The Darwinian anthropology is the incubus of the ethnologist,
a sturdy child of modem Materialism, which has grown up and acquired increasing
vigour, as the ineptitude of the theological legend of Man's
"creation" became more and more apparent. It has thriven on account
of the strange delusion that -- as a scientist of repute puts it -- "All
hypotheses and theories with respect to the rise of man can be reduced to two
(the Evolutionist and the Biblical exoteric account) . . . There is no other
hypothesis conceivable . . . " !! The anthropology of the secret volumes
is, however, the best possible answer to such a worthless contention.
The anatomical
resemblance between Man and the higher Ape, so frequently cited by Darwinists
as pointing to some former ancestor common to both, presents an interesting
problem, the proper solution of which is to be sought for in the esoteric
explanation of the genesis of the pithecoid stocks. We have given it as far as
was useful, by stating that the bestiality of the primeval mindless races
resulted in the production of huge man-like monsters -- the offspring of human
and animal parents. As time rolled on, 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.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 690 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ IV.
DURATION OF THE
GEOLOGICAL PERIODS, RACE CYCLES, AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
MILLIONS of
years have dropped into Lethe, leaving no more recollection in the memory of
the profane than the few millenniums of the orthodox Western chronology as to
the origin of Man and the history of the primeval races.
All depends on
the proofs found for the antiquity of the Human Race. If the still-debated man
of the Pliocene or even the Miocene period was the Homo primigenius, then science
may be right (argumenti causa) in basing its present anthropology -- as to the
date and mode of origin of "Homo sapiens" -- on the Darwinian
theory.* But if the skeletons of man should, at any time, be discovered in the
Eocene strata, but no fossil ape, thereby proving the existence of man prior to
the anthropoid -- then Darwinians will have to exercise their ingenuity in
another direction. And it is said in well-informed quarters that the XXth
century will be yet in its earliest teens, when such undeniable proof of Man's
priority will be forthcoming.
Even now
evidence is brought forward that the dates for the foundations of cities,
civilizations and various other historical events have been absurdly curtailed.
This was done as a peace-offering to Biblical chronology. "No date,"
writes the well-known Palaeontologist, Ed. Lartet, "is to be found in
Genesis, which assigns a time for the birth of primitive humanity"; but
chronologists have for fifteen centuries endeavoured to force the Bible facts
into agreement with their systems. Thus, no less than one hundred and forty
different opinions have been formed about the single date of
"Creation"; "and between the extreme variations there is a
discrepancy of 3,194 years, in the reckoning of the period between the
beginning of the world and the birth of Christ.** Within the last few years,
archaeologists have had to throw back by nearly 3,000 years also the beginnings
of Babylonian civilization. On the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* It may here be
remarked that those Darwinians, who with Mr. Grant Allen, place our "hairy
arboreal" ancestors so far back as the Eocene Age, are landed in rather an
awkward dilemma. No fossil anthropoid ape -- much less the fabulous common ancestor
assigned to Man and the Pithecoid -- appears in Eocene strata. The first
presentment of an anthropoid ape is Miocene.
** Ed. Lartet,
"Nouvelles Recherches sur la co-existence de l'homme et des Grands
Mammiferes Fossils de la derniere periode Geologique." Annales des Soc.
Nat., t. XV., p. 256.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 691 PROFESSOR SAYCE SKETCHES OUT CHRONOLOGY.
foundation cylinder
deposited by Nabonidus, the Babylonian king, conquered by Cyrus -- are found
the records of the former, in which he speaks of his discovery of the
foundation stone that belonged to the original temple built by Naram-Sin, son
of Sargon, of Accadia, the conqueror of Babylonia, who, says Nabonidus, lived
3,200 years before his own time."
We have shown in
Isis that those who based history on the Jewish Chronology (a race which had
none of its own and rejected the Western till the XIIth century) would lose
themselves, for the Jewish account could only be followed through Kabalistic
computation, and with a key to it in the hand. . . We had characterised the
late George Smith's chronology of the Chaldeans and Assyrians, made by him to
fit in with that of Moses, as quite fantastic. And now, in this respect at
least, later Assyriologists have corroborated our denial. For, whereas G. Smith
makes Sargon I. (the prototype of Moses in his legend) reign in the city of
Akkad about 1600 B.C. -- probably out of a latent respect for Moses, whom the
Bible makes to flourish 1571 B.C. -- we now learn from the first of the six
Hibbert lectures delivered by Professor A. H. Sayce, of Oxford, in 1887, that:
"Old views of the early annals of Babylonia and its religions have been
much modified by recent discovery. The first Semitic Empire, it is now agreed,
was that of Sargon of Accad, who established a great library, patronized
literature, and extended his conquests across the sea into Cyprus. It is now
known that he reigned as early as B.C. 3750." "The Accadian monuments
found by the French at Tel-loh must be even older, reaching back to about B.C.
4,000," in other words, to the fourth year of the World's creation
agreeably with Bible chronology, and when Adam was in his swaddling clothes.
Perchance, in a few years more, the 4,000 years may be further extended. The
well-known Oxford lecturer remarked during his disquisitions upon "The
origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Babylonian Religion"
that: "The difficulties of systematically tracing the origin and history
of the Babylonian Religion were considerable. The sources of our knowledge of
the subject were almost wholly monumental, very little help being obtainable
from classical or Oriental writers. Indeed, it was an undeniable fact that the
Babylonian priesthood intentionally swaddled up the study of the religious
texts in coils of almost insuperable difficulty." That they have confused
the dates, and especially the order of events "intentionally," is
undeniable, and for a very good reason: their writings and records were all
esoteric. The Babylonian priests did no more than the Priests of other ancient
nations. Their records were meant only for the Initiates and their disciples,
and it is only the latter who were furnished with the keys to the true meaning.
But Professor
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 paleontology have learned had not millions of works been destroyed! We
talk of the Alexandrian literary lore, which has been thrice destroyed, namely,
by Julius Caesar B.C. 48, in A.D. 390, and lastly in the year 640, A.D., by the
general of Kaliph Omar. What is this in comparison with the works and records
destroyed in the primitive Atlantean Libraries, wherein records are said to
have been traced on the tanned skins of gigantic antediluvian monsters? Or
again the destruction of the countless Chinese books by command of the founder
of the Imperial Tsin dynasty, Tsin Shi Hwang-ti, in 213 B.C.? Surely the
brick-clay tablets of the Imperial Babylonian Library, and the priceless
treasures of the Chinese collections could have never contained such
information as one of the aforesaid "Atlantean" skins would have
furnished to the ignorant world.
But even with
the extremely meagre data at hand, Science has been able to see the necessity
of throwing back nearly every Babylonian date, and has done so quite
generously. We learn from Professor Sayce that even the archaic statues at
Tel-loh, in Lower Babylonia, have suddenly been assigned a date contemporary
with the fourth dynasty in Egypt. Unfortunately, dynasties and Pyramids have
the fate of geological periods; their dates are arbitrary, and depend on the
respective whims of the men of science. Archaeologists know now, it is said,
that the afore-mentioned statues are fashioned out of green diorite, that can
only be got in the Peninsula of Sinai; and "they accord in the style of
art, and in the standard of measurement employed, with the similar diorite
statues of the pyramid builders of the third and fourth Egyptian dynasties. . .
. . Moreover, the only possible period for a Babylonian occupation of the
Sinaitic quarries must be placed shortly after the close of the epoch at which
the pyramids were built; and thus only can we understand how the name of Sinai
could have been derived from that of Sin, the primitive Babylonian
moon-god." This is very logical, but what is the date fixed for these
"dynasties"? Sanchoniathon's and Manetho's Synchronistic tables and
their figures have been rejected, or whatever
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 693 NO AGREEMENT BETWEEN SCIENTISTS.
remained of
these after holy Eusebius' handling of them; and still we have to remain
satisfied with the four or five thousand years B.C. so liberally allotted to
Egypt. At all events one point is gained. There is, at last, a city on the face
of the earth which is allowed, at least, 6,000 years, and it is Eridu. Geology
has found it out. According to Professor Sayce again, --
"They are
now also able to obtain time for the silting up of the head of the Persian
Gulf, which demands a lapse of between 5,000 and 6,000 years since the period
when Eridu, now twenty-five miles inland, was the seaport at the mouth of the
Euphrates, and the seat of Babylonian commerce with Southern Arabia and India.
More than all, the new chronology gives time for the long series of eclipses
recorded in the great astronomical work called 'The Observations of Bel'; and
we are also enabled to understand the otherwise perplexing change in the
position of the vernal equinox, which has occurred since our present zodiacal
signs were named by the Earliest Babylonian astronomers. When the Accadian
calendar was arranged and the Accadian months were named, the sun at the vernal
equinox was not, as now, in Pisces, or even in Aries, but in Taurus. The rate
of the precession of the equinoxes being known, we learn that at the vernal
equinox the sun was in Taurus from about 4,700 years B.C., and we thus obtain
astronomical limits of date which cannot be impugned."*
It may make our
position plainer if we state at once that we use Sir C. Lyell's nomenclature
for the ages and periods, and that when we talk of the Secondary and Tertiary
age, of the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene periods -- this is simply to make our
facts more comprehensible. Since these ages and periods have not yet been
allowed fixed and determined durations, 2 1/2 and 15 million years being
assigned at different times to one and the same age (the Tertiary) -- and since
no two geologists and naturalists seem to agree on this point -- Esoteric
teachings may remain quite indifferent to whether man is shown to appear in the
Secondary or the Tertiary age. If the latter age may be allowed even so much as
15 million years' duration -- well and good; for the Occult doctrine, jealously
guarding its real and correct figures as far as concerns the First, Second, and
two-thirds of the Third Root-Race -- gives clear information upon one point
only -- the age of "Vaivasvata Manu's humanity." (Vide Part I., Vol.
II., "Chronology of the Brahmins.")
Another definite
statement is this: It is during the so-called Eocene period that the continent
to which the Fourth Race belonged, and on which it lived and perished, showed
the first symptoms of sinking. And it was in the Miocene age, that it was
finally destroyed -- save the little island mentioned by Plato. It is these
points that have to be checked by the scientific data.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* From a Report
of the "Hibbert Lectures, 1887. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of
Religion, and Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians." By
A. H. Sayce. (London: Williams and Norgate.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 694 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
A.
MODERN
SCIENTIFIC SPECULATIONS ABOUT THE AGES OF THE GLOBE, ANIMAL EVOLUTION, AND MAN.
May we not be
permitted to throw a glance at the works of Specialists? The work on
"Comparative Geology: the World-Life," by Prof. A. Winchell,
furnishes us with curious data. Here we find an opponent of the Nebular theory,
a reverend gentleman, smiting with all the force of the hammer of his odium
theologicum on the rather contradictory hypothesis of the great stars of Science,
in the matter of sidereal and cosmical phenomena based on their respective
relations to terrestrial durations. The "too imaginative physicists and
naturalists" do not fare very easily under this shower of their own
speculative figures when placed side by side, and cut rather a sorry figure.
Thus he shows:--
"Sir
William Thomson, on the basis of the observed principles of cooling, concludes
that no more than ten million years (elsewhere he makes it 100,000,000) can
have elapsed since the temperature of the Earth was sufficiently reduced to
sustain vegetable life.* Helmholz calculates that twenty million years would
suffice for the original nebula to condense to the present dimensions of the
sun. Prof. S. Newcomb requires only ten millions to attain a temperature of 212
[[degrees]] Fahr.** Croll estimates seventy million years for the diffusion of
the heat, etc.*** Bischof calculates that 350 million years would be required
for the earth to cool from a temperature of 2,000 [[degrees]] to 200
[[degrees]] Centigrade. Read, basing his estimate on observed rates of
denudation, demands 500 million years since sedimentation began in Europe.****
Lyell ventured a rough guess of 240 million years; Darwin thought 300 million
years demanded by the organic transformations which his theory contemplates,
and Huxley is disposed to demand a 1,000 millions" (!!).
To this Prof.
Winchell observes that "some biologists . . . . seem to close their eyes
tight and leap at one bound into the abyss of millions of years, of which they
have no more adequate estimate than of infinity."***** Then he proceeds to
give what he takes to be more correct geological figures: a few will suffice.
According to Sir
W. Thomson "the whole incrusted age of the world is 80,000,000
years"; and agreeably with Prof. Houghton's calculations of a minimum
limit for the time since the elevation of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Nat. Philos.
App. D., Trans. Royal Soc., Edin.
** "Popular
Astronomy," p. 509.
*** "Climate
and Time," p. 335.
**** Read.
Address, "Liverpool Geolog. Society, 1876."
*****
"World-Life," p. 180.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 695 MATERIALISTS AT LOGGER-HEADS.
Europe and Asia,
three hypothetical ages for three possible and different modes of upheaval are
given: varying from the modest figures of 640,730 years, through 4,170,000
years to the tremendous figures of 27,491,000 years!!
This is enough,
as one can see, to cover our claims for the four continents and even the
figures of the Brahmins.
Further
calculations, the details of which the reader may find in Prof. Winchell's
work,* bring Houghton to an approximation of the sedimentary age of the globe
-- 11,700,000 years. These figures are found too small by the author, who
forthwith extends them to 37,000,000 years.
Again, according
to Croll,** 2,500,000 years "represents the time since the beginning of
the Tertiary age" in one work; and according to another modification of
his view, 15,000,000 only have elapsed since the beginning of the Eocene
period;*** which, being the first of the three Tertiary periods, leaves the
student suspended between 2 1/2 and 15 millions. But if one has to hold to the
former moderate figures, then the whole incrusted age of the world would be
131,600,000 years.****
As the last
glacial period extended from 240,000 to 80,000 years ago (Prof. Croll's view),
therefore, man must have appeared on earth from 100 to 120,000 years ago. But,
as says Prof. Winchell, with reference to the antiquity of the Mediterranean
race, "it is generally believed to have made its appearance during the
later decline of the continental glaciers." Yet, he adds, this "does
not concern, however, the antiquity of the Black and Brown races, since there
are numerous evidences of their existence in more southern regions, in times
remotely pre-glacial" (p. 379).
As a specimen of
geological certainty and agreement, these figures also may be added. Three
authorities -- Messrs. T. Belt, F.G.S.; J. Croll, F.R.S.; and Robert Hunt,
F.R.S., -- in estimating the time that has elapsed since the Glacial epoch,
give absolutely different figures, namely:--
Mr. Belt ...
20,000 years.
Mr. J. Croll ...
240,000 "
Mr. R. Hunt ...
80,000 "
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"World-Life," pp. 367-8.
** "Climate
and Time."
*** Quoted in
Mr. Ch. Gould's "Mythical Monsters," p. 84.
**** According
to Bischof, 1,004,177 years -- according to Chevandier's calculations 672,788
years -- were required for the so-called coal formation. "The tertiary
strata, about 1,000 feet in thickness, required for their development about
350,000 years." See "Force and Matter," Buchner, J. F.
Collingwood's edition.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 696 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(But see
"The Ice-Age Climate and Time," Popular Science Review, Vol. xiv., p.
242.)
No wonder if Mr.
Pengelly confesses that "it is at present and perhaps always will be
IMPOSSIBLE to reduce, even approximately, geological time into years or even
into millenniums" (Vide supra, foot-note). A wise word of advice from the
Occultists to the gentlemen geologists: they ought to imitate the cautious
example of Masons. As chronology, they say, cannot measure the era of the
creation, therefore, their "Ancient and Primitive Rite" uses 000,000,000
as the nearest approach to reality.
The same
uncertainty, contradictions and disagreement reign on all other subjects.
The scientific
authorities on the Descent of Man are again, for all practical purposes, a
delusion and a snare. There are many anti-Darwinists in the British
Association, and "Natural Selection" begins to lose ground. Though at
one time the saviour, which seemed to rescue the learned theorists from a final
intellectual collapse into the abyss of fruitless hypothesis, it begins to be
distrusted. Even Mr. Huxley is showing signs of truancy to
"Selection," and thinks "natural selection not the sole
factor":--
"We greatly
suspect that she (Nature) does make considerable jumps in the way of variation
now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which
appear to exist in the series of known forms" (Review of Kolliker's
Criticisms).
Again, in
"Fallacies of Darwinism," (p. 160), C. R. Bree, M.D., argues in this
wise in considering the fatal gaps in Mr. Darwin's theory:--
"It must be
again called to mind that the intermediate forms must have been vast in
numbers. . . . . Mr. St. George Mivart believes that change in evolution may
occur more quickly than is generally believed; but Mr. Darwin sticks manfully
to his belief, and again tells us 'natura non facit saltum' " -- wherein
the Occultists are at one with Mr. Darwin.
Esoteric
teaching fully corroborates the idea of nature's slowness and dignified
progression. "Planetary impulses" are all periodical. Yet this Darwinian
theory, correct as it is in minor particulars, agrees no more with Occultism
than with Mr. Wallace, who, in his "Contributions to the Theory of Natural
Selection," shows pretty conclusively that something more than
"natural selection" was requisite to produce physical man.
Let us,
meanwhile, examine the scientific objections to this scientific theory, and see
what they are.
Mr. St. George
Mivart is found arguing that --
. . . . ".
. . . it will be a moderate computation to allow 25,000,000 for the deposition
of the strata down to and including the Upper Silurian. If,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 697 MIVART'S BILLIONS OF YEARS.
then, the
evolutionary work done during this deposition only represents a hundredth part
of the sum total, we shall require 2,500,000,000 years for the complete
development of the whole animal Kingdom to its present state. Even one quarter
of this, however, would far exceed the time which physics and astronomy seem
able to allow for the completion of this process. Finally, a difficulty exists
as to the reason of the absence of 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 698 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
along with
other, and surely, on maturer consideration, no less absurd, suppositions, if
Occult theories have to be considered "absurd" at present, then every
difficulty would be made away with. Surely, Science ought to try and be more
logical than it now is, as it can hardly maintain the theory of man's descent
from an anthropoidal ancestor, and deny in the same breath any reasonable
antiquity to that man! Once Mr. Huxley talks of "the vast intellectual
chasm between the man and ape," and "the present enormous gulf
between the two,"* and if he admits the necessity of extending Scientific
allowances for the age of man on earth for such slow and progressive
development, then all those men of Science, who are of his way of thinking, at
any rate, ought to come to some approximate figures, at least, and agree upon
the probable duration of those Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene periods of which
so much is said, and about which nothing definite is known -- if they dare not
venture beyond. But no two scientists seem to agree. Every period seems to be a
mystery in its duration, and a thorn in the side of the geologists; and, as
just shown, they are unable to harmonize their conclusions even with regard to
the comparatively recent geological formations. Thus, no reliance can be placed
on their figures when they do give any, for with them it is all either millions
or simply thousands of years!
That which is
said may be strengthened by the confessions made by themselves and the synopsis
of it, found in that "Circle of Sciences," the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, which shows the mean accepted in the geological and anthropological
riddles. In that work the cream of the most authoritative opinions is skimmed
off; nevertheless, we find in it the refusal to assign any definite
chronological date, even to such, comparatively speaking, late epochs as the
Neolithic era, though, for a wonder, an age is established for the beginnings
of certain geological periods; at any rate of some few, the duration of which
could hardly be shortened any more, without an immediate conflict with facts.
Thus, it is
surmised in the great Encyclopaedia (Vol. X., art. "Geology," p.
227), that "100 million years have passed . . . . . since the
solidification of our Earth, when the earliest form of life appeared upon
it.**"
But it seems
quite as hopeless to try to convert the modern Geologists and Ethnologists as
it is to make Darwinian Naturalists perceive their mistakes. About the Aryan
Root-Race and its origins,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Man's
Place in Nature," p. 102, note.
**
"100,000,000 of years is probably amply sufficient for all the
requirements of Geology," says the text. In France, some savants do not
find it nearly "sufficient." Le Couturier claims for the same 350
million years; Buffon was satisfied with 34 millions -- but there are those in
the more modern schools who will not be content under 500 million years.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 699 THE ADEPT-ASTRONOMER.
Science knows as
little as of the men from other planets. With the exception of Flammarion and a
few mystics among astronomers, even the habitableness of other planets is
mostly denied. Yet such great adept astronomers were the Scientists of the
earliest races of the Aryan stock, that they seem to have known far more about
the races of Mars and Venus than the modern Anthropologist knows of those of
the early stages of the Earth.
Let us leave
modern Science aside for a moment and turn to ancient knowledge. As we are assured
by Archaic Scientists that all such geological cataclysms -- from the upheaval
of oceans, deluges, and shifting of continents, down to the present year's
cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and even
the extraordinary weather and seeming shifting of seasons which perplexes all
European and American meteorologists -- are due to, and depend on the moon and
planets; aye, that even modest and neglected constellations have the greatest
influence on the meteorological and cosmical changes, over, and within our
earth, let us give one moment's attention to our sidereal despots and rulers of
our globe and men. Modern Science denies any such influence; archaic Science
affirms it. We may see what both say with regard to this question.
-------
B.
ON CHAINS OF PLANETS AND THEIR PLURALITY.
Did the Ancients
know of worlds besides their own? What are the data of the Occultists in
affirming that every globe is a septenary chain of worlds -- of which only one
member is visible -- and that these are, were, or will be,
"man-bearing," just as every visible star or planet is? What do they
mean by "a moral and physical influence" of the sidereal worlds on
our globes?
Such are the
questions often put to us, and they have to be considered from every aspect. To
the first of the two queries the answer is:-- We believe it because the first
law in nature is uniformity in diversity, and the second -- analogy. "As
above, so below." That time is gone by for ever, when, although our pious
ancestors believed that our earth was in the centre of the universe, the church
and her arrogant servants could insist that we should regard as a blasphemy the
supposition that any other planet could be inhabited. Adam and Eve, the
Serpent, and the Original Sin followed by atonement through blood, have been
too long in the way, and thus was universal truth sacrificed to the insane
conceit of us little men.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 700 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Now what are the
proofs thereof? Except inferential evidence and logical reasoning, there are
none for the profane. To the Occultists, who believe in the knowledge acquired
by countless generations of Seers and Initiates, the data offered in the Secret
Books are all-sufficient. The general public needs other proofs, however. There
are some Kabalists and even some Eastern Occultists, who, failing to find
uniform evidence upon this point in all the mystic works of the nations,
hesitate to accept the teaching. Even such "uniform evidence" will be
forthcoming presently. Meanwhile, we may approach the subject from its general
aspect, and see whether belief in it is so very absurd, as some scientists along
with other Nicodemuses would have it. Unconsciously, perhaps, in thinking of a
plurality of inhabited "Worlds," we imagine them to be like the globe
we inhabit and peopled by beings more or less resembling ourselves. And in so
doing we are only following a natural instinct. Indeed, so long as the enquiry
is confined to the life-history of this globe we can speculate on this question
with some profit, and ask ourselves what were the "Worlds" spoken of
in all the ancient scriptures of Humanity, with some hope of at least asking an
intelligible question. But how do we know (a) what kind of Beings inhabit the
globes in general; and (b) whether those who rule planets superior to our own,
do not exercise the same influence on our earth consciously, that we may exercise
unconsciously -- say on the small planets (planetoids or asteroids) in the long
run, by our cutting the Earth to pieces, opening canals, and thereby entirely
changing our climates. Of course, like Caesar's wife, the planetoids cannot be
affected by our suspicion. They are too far, etc., etc. Believing in esoteric
astronomy, however, we are not so sure of that.
But when,
extending our speculations beyond our planetary chain, we try to cross the
limits of the solar system, then indeed we act as do presumptuous fools. For --
while accepting the old Hermetic axiom: "As above, so below" -- we
may well believe that as Nature on Earth displays the most careful economy,
utilizing every vile and waste thing in her marvellous transformations, and withal
never repeating herself -- we may justly conclude that there is no other globe
in all her infinite systems so closely resembling this earth that the ordinary
powers should be able to imagine and reproduce its semblance and containment.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We are taught
that the highest Dhyan Chohans, or Planetary Spirits (beyond the cognizance of
the law of analogy), are in ignorance of what lies beyond the visible planetary
systems, since their essence cannot assimilate itself to that of worlds beyond
our solar system. When they reach a higher stage of evolution these other
universes will be open to them; meanwhile they have complete knowledge of all
the worlds within and beneath the limits of our solar system.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 701 STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
And indeed we
find in the romances as in all the so-called scientific fictions and
spiritistic revelations from moon, stars, and planets, merely fresh
combinations or modifications of the men and things, the passions and forms of
life with which we are familiar, when even on the other planets of our own
system nature and life are entirely different from ours. Swedenborg was
pre-eminent in inculcating such an erroneous belief.
But even more.
The ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than
that to which the physical senses link him. Men dream; they sleep the profound
sleep which is too deep for dreams to impress the physical brain; and in these
states there must still be consciousness. How, then, while these mysteries
remain unexplored, can we hope to speculate with profit on the nature of globes
which, in the economy of nature, must needs belong to states of consciousness
other and quite different from any which man experiences here?
And this is true
to the letter. For even great adepts (those initiated of course), trained seers
though they are, can claim thorough acquaintance with the nature and appearance
of planets and their inhabitants belonging to our solar system only. They know
that almost all the planetary worlds are inhabited, but can have access to --
even in spirit -- only those of our system; and they are also aware how
difficult it is, even for them, to put themselves into full rapport even with
the planes of consciousness within our system, but differing from the states of
consciousness possible on this globe; i.e., on the three planes of the chain of
spheres beyond our earth. Such knowledge and intercourse are possible to them
because they have learned how to penetrate to planes of consciousness which are
closed to the perceptions of ordinary men; but were they to communicate their
knowledge, the world would be no wiser, because it lacks that experience of
other forms of perception which alone could enable them to grasp what was told
them.
Still the fact
remains that most of the planets, as the stars beyond our system, are
inhabited, a fact which has been admitted by the men of science themselves.
Laplace and Herschell believed it, though they wisely abstained from imprudent
speculation; and the same conclusion has been worked out and supported with an
array of scientific considerations by C. Flammarion, the well-known French
Astronomer. The arguments he brings forward are strictly scientific, and such
as to appeal even to a materialistic mind, which would remain unmoved by such
thoughts as those of Sir David Brewster, the famous physicist, who writes:--
"Those
'barren spirits' or 'base souls,' as the poet calls them, who might be led to
believe that the Earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, would have
no difficulty in conceiving the earth also to
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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"!*
Flammarion
shows, in addition, that all the conditions of life -- even as we know it --
are present on some at least of the planets, and points to the fact that these
conditions must be much more favourable on them than they are on our Earth.
Thus scientific
reasoning, as well as observed facts, concur with the statements of the seer
and the innate voice in man's own heart in declaring that life -- intelligent,
conscious life -- must exist on other worlds than ours.
But this is the
limit beyond which the ordinary faculties of man cannot carry him. Many are the
romances and tales, some purely fanciful, others bristling with scientific
knowledge, which have attempted to imagine and describe life on other globes.
But one and all, they give but some distorted copy of the drama of life around
us. It is either, with Voltaire, the men of our own race under a microscope,
or, with de Bergerac, a graceful play of fancy and satire; but we always find
that at bottom the new world is but the one we ourselves live in. So strong is
this tendency that even great natural, though non-initiated seers, when
untrained, fall a victim to it; witness Swedenborg, who goes so far as to dress
the inhabitants of Mercury, whom he meets with in the spirit-world, in clothes
such as are worn in Europe.
Commenting on
this tendency, Flammarion in his work "Sur la Pluralite des Mondes habites,"
says:-- "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.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Since no
single atom in the entire Kosmos is without life and consciousness, how much
more then its mighty globes? -- though they remain sealed books to us men who
can hardly enter even into the consciousness of the forms of life nearest us?
We do not know
ourselves, then how can we, if we have never been trained to it and initiated,
fancy that we can penetrate the consciousness of the smallest of the animals
around us?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 703 WORLDS MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE.
Those who have
written on this subject have allowed themselves to be dominated by terrestrial
ideas, and fell therefore into error." ("Pluralite des Mondes,"
p. 439.)
But Flammarion
himself falls into the very error which he here condemns, for he tacitly takes
the conditions of life on earth as the standard by which to determine the
degree to which other planets are adapted for habitation by "other
Humanities."
Let us, however,
leave these profitless and empty speculations, which, though they seem to fill
our hearts with a glow of enthusiasm and to enlarge our mental and spiritual
grasp, do but in reality cause a factitious stimulation, and blind us more and
more to our ignorance not only of the world we inhabit, but even of the
infinitude contained within ourselves.
When, therefore,
we find in the Bibles of Humanity "other worlds" spoken of, we may
safely conclude that they not only refer to other states of our planetary chain
and Earth, but also to other inhabited globes -- stars and planets; withal,
that the latter were never speculated upon. The whole of antiquity believed in
the Universality of life. But no really initiated seer of any civilized nation
has ever taught that life on other stars could be judged by the standard of
terrestrial life. That which is generally meant by "earths" and
worlds, relates (a) to the "rebirths" of our globe after each
manvantara and a long period of "obscuration"; and (b) to the
periodical and entire changes of the Earth's surface, when Continents
disappear, to make room for Oceans, and Oceans and Seas are violently displaced
and sent rolling to the poles, to cede their emplacements to new Continents.
We may begin
with the Bible -- the youngest of the World-Scriptures. In Ecclesiastes, chap.
i., we read these words of the King-Initiate:-- "One generation passeth
away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever," and
again, "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; 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.)*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This relates
to the Logos of every Cosmogony. The unknown Light -- with which he is said to
be co-eternal and coeval -- is reflected in the "First-Born," the
Protogonos; [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 704 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This
"Power" is Hokhmah or (Chochmah) the Wisdom and the Word. We shall
probably be told that by this term "worlds," the stars, heavenly
bodies, etc., were meant. But apart from the fact that "stars" were
not known as "worlds" to the ignorant editors of the Epistles, if
even they must have been known to Paul, who was an Initiate ("a
Master-Builder"), we can quote on this point an eminent theologian,
Cardinal Wiseman. In Vol. I, p. 309, of his work treating of the indefinite
period of the six days -- or shall we say "too definite" -- period of
the six days of creation and the 6,000 years, he confesses that we are in total
darkness upon the meaning of that statement of St. Paul, unless we are
permitted to suppose that allusion is made in it, i.e., the period which
elapsed between the first and second verses of chapter i. of Genesis -- to
those primitive revolutions, i.e., the destructions and the re-productions (of
the world) indicated in chapter i. of Ecclesiastes; or, to accept, with so many
others, and in its literal sense, the passage (Hebrews i. 1,) that speaks of
the creation of worlds -- in plural. . . . . It is very singular, he adds, that
all the cosmogonies should agree to suggest the same idea, and preserve the
tradition of a first series of revolutions, owing to which the world was
destroyed and again renewed.
Had the Cardinal
studied the Zohar his doubts would have changed to certitude. Thus saith Idra
Suta (in the "Zohar," iii., 292, c.): "There were old worlds
which perished as soon as they came into existence; worlds with and without
form called Scintillas -- for they were like the sparks under the Smith's
hammer, flying in all directions. Some were the primordial worlds which could
not continue long, because the 'aged' -- his name be sanctified -- had not as
yet assumed his form,* the workman was not yet the 'Heavenly man.' "**
Again in the Midrash, written long before the Kabala of Simeon Ben Iochai,
Rabbi Abahu explains:-- "The Holy One, blessed be his name, has
successively formed and destroyed sundry worlds before this one*** . . . Now
this refers both to the first races (the "Kings of Edom") and to the
worlds destroyed."**** "Destroyed" means here what we call
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] and the Demiurgos or the Universal Mind directs
his Divine Thought into the Chaos that under the fashioning of minor gods will
be divided into the seven oceans -- Sapta samudras. It is Purusha, Ahura Mazda,
Osiris, etc., and finally the gnostic Christos, who is in the Kabala, Hokhmah
or Wisdom the "Word."
* The form of
Tikkun or the Protogonos, the "first-born," i.e., the universal form
and idea, had not yet been mirrored in Chaos.
** The
"Heavenly man" is Adam Kadmon -- the synthesis of the Sephiroth, as
"Manu Swayambhuva" is the synthesis of the Prajapatis.
*** Bereshith
Rabba, Parsha IX.
**** This refers
to the three Rounds that preceded our fourth Round.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 705 WHO ARE THE KINGS OF EDOM?
"obscurations."
This becomes evident when one reads further on the explanation given:--
"Still when it is said that they (the worlds) perished, it is only meant
thereby that they (their humanities) lacked the true form, till the human (our)
form came into being, in which all things are comprised and which contains all
forms. . . . * -- it does not mean death, but only denotes a sinking down from
their status . . ." (that of worlds in activity).**
When, therefore,
we read of the destruction of the worlds, this word has many meanings, which
are very clear in several of the Commentaries on the Zohar and Kabalistic
treatises. As said elsewhere, it means not only the destruction of many worlds
which have ended their life-career, but also that of the several continents
which have disappeared, as also their decline and geographical change of place.
The mysterious
"Kings of Edom" are sometimes referred to as the "Worlds"
that had been destroyed; but it is a "cloak." The Kings who reigned
in Edom before there reigned a King in Israel, or the "Edomite
Kings," could never symbolize the "prior worlds," but only the
"attempts at men" on this globe: the "pre-Adamite races,"
of which the Zohar speaks, and which we explain as the First Root-Race. For,
as, speaking of the six Earths (the six "limbs" of Microprosopus) it
is said that the Seventh (our Earth) came not into the computation when the Six
were created (the six spheres above our globe in the terrestrial chain), so the
first seven Kings of Edom are left out of calculation in Genesis. By the law of
analogy and permutation, in the "Chaldean Book of Numbers," as also
in the "Books of Knowledge" and of "Wisdom," the
"seven primordial worlds" mean also the "seven primordial"
races (sub-races of the First Root-Race of the Shadows); and, again, the Kings
of Edom are the sons of "Esau the father of the Edomites" (Gen.
xxxvi. 43); i.e., Esau represents in the Bible the race which stands between
the Fourth and the Fifth, the Atlantean and the Aryan. "Two nations are in
thy womb," saith the Lord to Rebekah; and Esau was red and hairy. From
verse 24 to 34, ch. xxv. of Genesis contains the allegorical history of the
birth of the Fifth Race.
"And the
Kings of ancient days died and their chiefs (crowns) were found no more,"
says Siphrah Dzenioutha (3). . . . "The Head of a nation that has not been
formed at the beginning in the likeness of the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This sentence
contains a dual sense and a profound mystery in the occult sciences the secret
of which if, and when, known -- confers tremendous powers on the Adept to
change his visible form.
** Idra Suta,
Zohar, iii. 136, c. "A sinking down from their status" -- is plain;
from active worlds they have fallen into a temporary obscuration -- they rest,
and hence are entirely changed.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 706 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
White Head: its
people is not from this Form," states the Zohar (iii.). . . . "Before
it (the White Head, the Fifth Race or Ancient of the Ancients) arranged itself
in its (own, or present) Form . . . all worlds have been destroyed; therefore
it is written: And Bela, the Son of Beor, reigned in Edom" (Gen. xxxvi.).
Here the "worlds" stand for races. "And he (such or another King
of Edom) died, and another reigned in his stead" (ibid 31 et seq.).
No Kabalist who
has hitherto treated of the symbolism and allegory hidden under these
"Kings of Edom" seems to have perceived more than one aspect of it.
They are neither the "worlds that were destroyed," nor the
"Kings that died" -- alone; but both, and much more, to treat of
which there is no space at present. Therefore, leaving the mystic parables of
the Zohar, we will return to the hard facts of materialistic science; first,
however, citing a few from the long list of great thinkers who have believed in
the plurality of inhabited worlds in general, and in worlds that preceded our
own. These are, the great mathematicians Leibnitz and Bernouilli, Isaac Newton
himself, as can be read in his "Optics"; Buffon, the naturalist;
Condillac, the sceptic; Bailly, Lavater, Bernardin de St. Pierre, and, as a
contrast to the two last named -- suspected at least of mysticism -- Diderot
and most of the writers of the Encyclopaedia. Following these come Kant, the
founder of modern philosophy; the poet philosophers, Goethe, Krause, Schelling;
and many astronomers, from Bode, Fergusson and Herschell to Lalande and
Laplace, with their many disciples in more recent years.
A brilliant list
of honoured names indeed; but the facts of physical astronomy speak even more
strongly in favour of the presence of life, even organised life, on other
planets. Thus in four meteorites which fell respectively at Alais in France,
the Cape of Good Hope, in Hungary, and again in France, there was found, on
analysis, graphite, a form of carbon known to be invariably associated with
organic life on this earth of ours. And that the presence of this carbon is not
due to any action occurring within our atmosphere is shown by the fact that
carbon has been found in the very centre of a meteorite; while in one which
fell at Argueil, in the south of France, in 1857, there was found water and
turf, the latter being always formed by the decomposition of vegetable
substances.
And further,
examining the astronomical conditions of the other planets, it is easy to show
that several are far better adapted for the development of life and
intelligence -- even under the conditions with which men are acquainted -- than
is our earth. For instance, on the planet Jupiter the seasons, instead of
varying between wide limits as do ours, change by almost imperceptible degrees,
and last twelve times
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 707 WHAT FLAMMARION TELLS US.
as long as ours.
Owing to the inclination of its axis the seasons on Jupiter are due almost
entirely to the eccentricity of its orbit, and hence change slowly and
regularly. We shall be told, that no life is possible on Jupiter, as it is in
an incandescent state. But not all astronomers agree with this. For instance
what we say, is said by M. Flammarion: and he ought to know.
On the other hand
Venus would be less adapted for human life such as exists on earth, since its
seasons are more extreme and its changes of temperature more sudden; though it
is curious that the duration of the day is nearly the same on the four inner
planets, Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars.
On Mercury, the
Sun's heat and light are seven times what they are on the Earth, and astronomy
teaches that it is enveloped in a very dense atmosphere. And as we see that
life appears more active on earth in proportion to the light and heat of the
sun, it would seem more than probable that its intensity is far, far greater on
Mercury than here.
Venus, like
Mercury, has a very dense atmosphere, as also has Mars and the snows which
cover their poles, the clouds which hide their surface, the geographical
configuration of their seas and continents, the variations of seasons and
climates, are all closely analogous -- at least to the eye of the physical
astronomer. But such facts and the considerations to which they give rise, have
reference only to the possibility of the existence on these planets of human
life as known on earth. That some forms of life such as we know are possible on
these planets, has been long since abundantly demonstrated, and it seems
perfectly useless to go into detailed questions of the physiology, etc., etc.,
of these hypothetical inhabitants, since after all the reader can arrive only
at an imaginary extension of his familiar surroundings. It is better to rest
content with the three conclusions which M. C. Flammarion, whom we have so
largely quoted, formulates as rigorous and exact deductions from the known
facts and laws of science.
I. The various
forces which were active in the beginning of evolution gave birth to a great
variety of beings on the several worlds; both in the organic and inorganic
kingdoms.
II. The animated
beings were constituted from the first according to forms and organisms in
correlation with the physiological state of each inhabited globe.
III. The
humanities of other worlds differ from us, as much in their inner organization
as in their external physical type.
Finally the
reader who may be disposed to question the validity of these conclusions as
being opposed to the Bible, may be referred to an Appendix in M. Flammarion's
work dealing in detail with this question; since in a work like the present it
seems unnecessary to point out the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In that
learned and witty work, "God and his Book," by the redoubtable
"Saladin" of Agnostic repute, the amusing calculation that, if Christ
had ascended with the rapidity of a cannon ball, he would not have reached even
Sirius yet, reminds one vividly of the past. It raises, perhaps, a not
ill-founded suspicion that even our age of scientific enlightenment may be as
grossly absurd in its materialistic negations, as the men of the middle ages
were absurd and materialistic in their religious affirmations.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 709 SCIENCE AND OCCULTISM MAY YET AGREE.
Sciences -- then
the evolution of the preceding races is half proved. For where is that
physicist or geologist who is prepared to maintain that the Earth has not
changed scores of times, in the millions of years which have elapsed in the
course of its existence; and changing its "skin," as it is called in
Occultism, that the Earth has not had each time her special humanities adapted
to such atmospheric and climatic conditions as were entailed. And if so, why
should not our preceding four and entirely different mankinds have existed and
thrived before our Adamic (Fifth Root) Race?
Before closing
our debates, however, we have to examine the so-called organic evolution more
closely. Let us search well and see whether it is quite impossible to make our
Occult data and chronology agree up to a certain point with those of Science.
-------
C.
SUPPLEMENTARY
REMARKS ON ESOTERIC GEOLOGICAL CHRONOLOGY.
It seems,
however, possible to calculate the approximate duration of the geological
periods from the combined data of Science and Occultism now before us. Geology
is, of course, able to determine almost with certainty one thing -- the
thickness of the several deposits. Now, it also stands to reason that the time
required for the deposition of any stratum on a sea-bottom must bear a strict
proportion to the thickness of the mass thus formed. Doubtless the rate of
erosion of land and the sorting out of matter on to ocean beds has varied from
age to age, and cataclysmic changes of various kinds break the
"uniformity" of ordinary geological processes. Provided, however, we
have some definite numerical basis on which to work, our task is rendered less
difficult than it might at first sight appear to be. Making due allowance for
variations in the rate of deposit, Professor Lefevre gives us the relative
figures which sum up geological time. He does not attempt to calculate the
lapse of years since the first bed of the Laurentian rocks was deposited, but
postulating that time as = X, he presents us with the relative proportions in
which the various periods stand to it. Let us premise our estimate by stating
that, roughly speaking, the Primordial rocks are 70,000 ft., the Primary 42,000
ft., the Secondary 15,000 ft., the Tertiary 5,000 ft., and the Quaternary some
500 ft. in thickness:--
"Dividing into
an hundred parts the time, whatever its actual length, that has passed since
the dawn of life on this earth (lower Laurentian strata), we shall be led to
attribute to the primordial age more than half of the whole duration, say 53.5;
to the Primary 32.2; to the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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:--
ROUGH
APPROXIMATIONS.
Primordial
lasted 171,200,000 years.
Laurentian
Cambrian
Silurian
Primary lasted
103,040,000 years
Devonian
Coal
Permian
Secondary lasted
36,800,000 years
Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous
Tertiary lasted
7,360,000 years (probably in excess)
Eocene
Miocene
Pliocene
Quaternary lasted
1,600,000 years (probably in excess).
Such estimates
harmonise with the statements of Esoteric Ethnology in almost every particular.
The Tertiary Atlantean part-cycle, from the "apex of glory" of that
Race in the early Eocene to the great mid-Miocene cataclysm, would appear to
have lasted some 3 1/2 to four million years. If the duration of the Quaternary
is not rather (as seems likely) overestimated, the sinking of Ruta and Daitya
would be post-Tertiary. It is probable that the results here given allow
somewhat too long a period to both the Tertiary and Quaternary, as the Third
Race goes very far back into the Secondary Age. Nevertheless, the figures are
most suggestive.
But the argument
from geological evidence being only in favour of 100,000,000 years, let us
compare our claims and teachings with those of exact science.
Mr. Edward
Clodd,* in reviewing M. de Mortillet's work "Materiaux pour l'Histoire de
Homme," which places man in the mid-Miocene period,** remarks that
"it would be in defiance of all that the doctrine of evolu-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Knowledge,
March 31, 1882.
** And who yet,
in another work, "La Prehistorique Antiquite de l'Homme," some twenty
years ago, generously allowed only 230,000 years to our mankind. Since we learn
now that he places man "in the mid-Miocene period," we must say that
the much respected Professor of Prehistoric Anthropology (in Paris) is somewhat
contradictory and inconsistent, if not naif in his views.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 711 SECEDERS FROM DARWINISM.
tion teaches,
and moreover, win no support from believers in special creation and the fixity
of species, to seek for so highly specialized a mammalian as man at an early
stage in the life-history of the globe." To this, one could answer: (a)
the doctrine of evolution, as inaugurated by Darwin and developed by later
evolutionists, is not only the reverse of infallible, but it is repudiated by
several great men of science, e.g., de Quatrefages, in France, and Dr.
Weismann, an ex-evolutionist in Germany, and many others, the ranks of the
anti-Darwinists growing stronger with every year;* and (b) truth to be worthy
of its name, and remain truth and fact, hardly needs to beg for support from
any class or sect. For were it to win support from believers in special
creation, it would never gain the favour of the evolutionists, and vice versa.
Truth must rest upon its own firm foundations of facts, and take its chances
for recognition, when every prejudice in the way is disposed of. Though the
question has been already fully considered in its main aspects, it is,
nevertheless, advisable to combat every so-called "scientific"
objection as we go along, when making what are regarded as heretical and
"anti-scientific" statements.
Let us briefly
glance at the divergences between orthodox and esoteric science, on the
question of the age of the globe and of man. With the two respective
synchronistic tables before him, the reader will be enabled to see at a glance
the importance of these divergences; and to perceive, at the same time, that it
is not impossible -- nay, it is most likely -- that further discoveries in
geology and the finding of fossil remains of man will force science to confess
that it is esoteric philosophy which is right after all, or, at any rate,
nearer to the truth.
-------
PARALLELISM OF
LIFE.
[[First Column]]
SCIENTIFIC
HYPOTHESES.
Science divides
the period of the globe's history, since the beginning of life on earth (or the
Azoic age), into five main divisions or periods, according to Haeckel.**
[[First Column
continued on next page]]
[[Second
Column]]
ESOTERIC THEORY.
Leaving the
classification of the geological periods to Western Science, esoteric
philosophy divides only the life-periods on the globe. In the present
Manvantara the actual period is separated into seven Kalpas and seven great
human races. Its first Kalpa, answering to the "Primordial Epoch," is
the age of the --
[[Second Column
continued on next page]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The root and
basic idea of the origin and transformation of species -- the heredity (of acquired
faculties) seems to have found lately very serious opponents in Germany. Du
Bois-Reymond and Dr. Pffuger, the physiologists, besides other men of science
as eminent as any, find insuperable difficulties and even impossibilities in
the doctrine.
** History of
Creation, p. 20.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 712 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
[[First Column
continued from previous page]]
PRIMORDIAL EPOCH
(Laurentian System, Cambrian System, Silurian System)
The Primordial
Epoch is, science tells us, by no means devoid of vegetable and animal life. In
the Laurentian deposits are found specimens of the Eozoon Canadense -- a
chambered shell. In the Silurian are discovered sea-weeds (algae), molluscs,
crustacea, and lower marine organisms, also the first trace of fishes. The
primordial Epoch shows algae, molluscs, crustacea, polyps, and marine
organisms, etc., etc. Science teaches, therefore, that marine life was present
from the very beginnings of time, leaving us, however, to speculate for
ourselves as to how life appeared on earth. If it rejects the Biblical
"Creation" (as we do), why does it not give us another, approximately
plausible hypothesis?
PRIMARY
(Devonian***, Coal, Permian)
[[First Column
continued on next page]]
[[Second Column
continued from previous page]]
"PRIMEVAL"*
(Deva or Divine men, the "Creators" and Progenitors.**)
The Esoteric
Philosophy agrees with the statement made by science (see parallel column),
demurring, however, in one particular. The 300,000,000 years of vegetable life
(see "Brahminical Chronology") preceded the "Divine Men,"
or Progenitors. Also, no teaching denies that there were traces of life within
the Earth besides the Eozoon Canadense in the Primordial Epoch. Only, whereas
the said vegetation belonged to this Round, the zoological relics now found in
the Laurentian, Cambrian, and Silurian systems, so called, are the relics of
the Third Round. At first astral like the rest, they consolidated and
materialized pari passu with the NEW vegetation.
"PRIMARY"
-- Divine Progenitors, SECONDARY GROUPS, and the 2 1/2 races.
"Fern-forests, Sigillaria, Coniferae, fishes, first trace of
reptiles." Thus saith modern science; the esoteric doctrine repeats that
which was said above. These are all relics of the preceding Round.**** Once,
however, the prototypes are projected out of the astral envelope of the earth,
an indefinite amount of modification ensues.
[[Second Column
continued on next page]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The same names
are retained as those given by science, to make the parallels clearer. Our
terms are quite different.
** Let the
student remember that the Doctrine teaches that there are seven degrees of
Devas or "Progenitors," or seven classes, from the most perfect to
the less exalted.
*** It may be
said that we are inconsistent in not introducing into this table a [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 713 THE TWO SCIENCES CONTRASTED.
[[First Column
continued from previous page]]
SECONDARY (Triassic.
Jurassic. Chalk or Cretaceous.)
This is the age
of Reptiles, of the gigantic Megalosauri, Ichthyosauri, Plesiosauri, etc., etc.
Science denies the presence of man in that period. If so, it has to explain how
men came to know of these monsters and describe them before the age of Cuvier?
The old annals of China, India, Egypt, and even of Judea are full of them, as
demonstrated elsewhere. In this period also appear the first (marsupial)
mammals***** -- Insectivorous, carnivorous, phytophagous; and (as Prof. Owen
thinks) an herbivorous hoofed mammal.
Science does not
admit the appearance of man before the close of the
[[First Column
continued on next page]]
[[Second Column
continued from previous page]]
SECONDARY --
According to every calculation the Third Race had already made its appearance,
as during the Triassic there were already a few mammals, and it must have
separated.
This, then, is
the age of the Third Race, in which the origins of the early Fourth may be
perhaps also discoverable. We are, however, here left entirely to conjecture,
as no definite data are yet given out by the Initiates.
The analogy is
but a poor one, still it may be argued that, as the early Mammalia and
pre-mammalia are shown in their evolution merging from one kind into a higher
one, anatomically, so are the human races in their procreative processes. A
parallel might certainly be found between the Monotremata, the Didelphia (or
Marsupialia) and the placental Mammals, divided in their turn into three
orders******
[[Second Column
continued on next page]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Primary-Age Man. The parallelism of Races and
geological periods here adopted, is, so far as the origin of 1st and 2nd are
concerned, purely tentative, no direct information being available. Having
previously discussed the question of a possible Race in the Carboniferous Age,
it is needless to renew the debate.
**** During the
interim from one Round to another, the globe and everything on it remains in
statu quo. Remember, Vegetation began in its ethereal form before what is
called the Primordial, running through the Primary, and condensing in it, and
reaching its full physical life in the Secondary.
***** Geologists
tell us that "in the secondary epoch, the only mammals which have been
(hitherto) discovered in Europe are the fossil remains of a small marsupial or
pouch-bearer." (Knowledge, March 31, 1882, p 464.) Surely the marsupial or
didelphis (the only surviving animal of the family of those who were on earth
during the presence on it of androgyne man) cannot be the only animal that was
then on earth? Its presence speaks loudly for that of other (though unknown)
mammals, besides the monotremes and marsupials, and thus shows the appellation
of "mammalian age" given only to the Tertiary period to be misleading
and erroneous; as it allows one to infer that there were no mammals, but
reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fishes alone in the Mesozoic times -- the
Secondary.
****** These
Placentalia of the third sub-class are divided, it appears, into
Villiplacentalia (placenta composed of many separate scattered tufts), the
Zonoplacentalia (girdle-shaped placenta), and the discoplacentaIia (or discoid).
Haeckel sees in the Marsupialia Didelphia, one of the connecting links
genealogically between man and the Moneron!!
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 714 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
[[First Column
continued from previous page]]
Tertiary
period.* Why? Because man has to be shown younger than the higher mammals. But
Esoteric philosophy teaches us the reverse. And as science is quite unable to
come to anything like an approximate conclusion as to the age of man, or even
the geological periods, therefore, even accepted only as a hypothesis, the
occult teaching is more logical and reasonable.
No man is yet
allowed to have lived during this period:--
***Tertiary --
Eocene. Miocene. Pliocene.
Says Mr. E.
Clodd, in Knowledge:-- "Although the placental mammals and the order of
Primates to which man is related, appear in Tertiary times and the climate,
tropical in the Eocene age, warm in the Miocene and temperate in the Pliocene,
was favourable to his presence, the proofs of his existence in Europe before
the close of the Tertiary epoch . . . . are not generally accepted here."
[[First Column
continued on next page]]
[[Second Column
continued from previous page]]
like the First,
Second, and Third Root-Races of men.** But this would require more space than
can be now allotted to the subject.
Tertiary age --
The Third race has now almost utterly disappeared, carried away by the fearful
geological cataclysms of the Secondary age, leaving behind it but a few hybrid
races.
The Fourth, born
millions of years before**** the said cataclysm took place, perishes during the
Miocene period,****** when the Fifth (our Aryan race) had one million years of
independent existence. (See "Esoteric Buddhism," pp. 53-55. Fourth
Ed.) How much older it is from its origin -- who knows? As the
"Historical" Period has begun, with the Indian Aryans, with their
Vedas, for their multitudes,****** and far earlier in the Esoteric Records, it
is useless to establish here any parallels.
[[Second Column
continued on next page]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Those who feel
inclined to sneer at that doctrine of Esoteric Ethnology, which pre-supposes
the existence of Man in the Secondary Age, will do well to note the fact that
one of the most distinguished anthropologists of the day, M. de Quatrefages,
seriously argues in that direction. He writes: "There is nothing
impossible in the supposition that he (Man) may have appeared on the globe with
the first representatives of the type to which he belongs in virtue of his
organism." This statement approximates most closely to our fundamental
assertion that man preceded the other mammalia.
Professor
Lefevre admits that the "labours of Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Christy,
Bourgeois, Desnoyers, Broca, de Mortillet, Hamy, Gaudry, Capellini, and a
hundred others, have overcome all doubts and clearly established the
progressive development of the human organism and industries from the Miocene
epoch of the Tertiary age." ("Philosophy," p. 499, chapter on
Organic Evolution.) Why does he reject the possibility of a Secondary-Age man?
Simply because he is involved in the meshes of the Darwinian Anthropology!!
"The origin of man is bound up with that of the higher mammals;" he
appeared "only with the last types of his class"!! This is not
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 715 THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE "ANIMALISTS."
Geology has now
divided the periods and placed man in the --
[[First Column
continued from previous page]]
Quaternary
(Palaeolithic man. Neolithic man, and Historical Period.)
[[Second Column
continued from previous page]]
If the
Quaternary period is allowed 1,500,000 years, then only does our Fifth Race
belong to it.
[[End of
Columns]]
Yet, mirabile
dictu! -- while the non-cannibal Paleolithic man, who must have certainly
antedated cannibal Neolithic man by hundreds of thousands of years******* is
shown to be a remarkable artist, neolithic
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] argument, but dogmatism. Theory can never
excommunicate fact! Must everything give place to the mere working-hypotheses
of Western Evolutionists? Surely not.
** This
inclusion of the First Race in the Secondary is necessarily only a provisional
working-hypothesis -- the actual chronology of the First, Second, and Early
Third Races being closely veiled by the Initiates. For all that can be said on
the subject, the First Root-Race may have been Pre-Secondary, as is, indeed,
taught. (Vide supra.)
*** The above
parallels stand good only if Professor Croll's earlier calculations are
adopted, namely, of 15,000,000 years since the beginning of the Eocene period
(see Charles Gould's "Mythical Monsters," p. 84), not those in his
"Climate and Time," which allow only 2 1/2 million years', or at the
utmost three million years' duration to the Tertiary age. This, however, would
make the whole duration of the incrusted age of the world only 131,600,000
years according to Professor Winchell, whereas in the Esoteric doctrine,
sedimentation began in this Round approximately over 320 million years ago. Yet
his calculations do not clash much with ours with regard to the epochs of
glacial periods in the Tertiary age, which is called in our Esoteric books the
age of the "Pigmies." With regard to the 320 millions of years
assigned to sedimentation, it must be noted that even a greater time elapsed
during the preparation of this globe for the Fourth Round previous to
stratification.
**** Though we
apply the term "truly human," only to the Fourth Atlantean Root-Race,
yet the Third Race is almost human in its latest portion, since it is during
its fifth sub-race that mankind separated sexually, and that the first man was
born according to the now normal process. This "first man" answers in
the Bible (Genesis) to Enos or Henoch, son of Seth (ch. iv.).
***** Geology
records the former existence of a universal ocean, sheets of marine sediments
uniformly present everywhere testifying to it; but, it is not even the epoch
referred to in the allegory of Vaivasvata Manu. The latter is a Deva-Man (or
Manu) saving in an ark (the female principle) the germs of humanity, and also
the seven Rishis -- who stand here as the symbols for the seven human
principles -- of which allegory we have spoken elsewhere. The "Universal
Deluge" is the watery abyss of the Primordial Principle of Berosus. (See
Stanzas from 2 to 8 in Part I.). How, if Croll allowed fifteen million years to
have elapsed since the Eocene period (which we state on the authority of a
Geologist, Mr. Ch. Gould) only 60 millions are assigned by him "since the
beginning of the Cambrian period, in the Primordial Age" -- passes
comprehension. The Secondary strata are twice the thickness of the Tertiary,
and Geology thus shows the Secondary age alone to be of twice the length of the
Tertiary. Shall we then accept only 15 million years for both the Primary and
the Primordial? No wonder Darwin rejected the calculation.
****** We hope
that we have furnished all the Scientific data for it elsewhere.
******* It is
conceded by Geology to be "beyond doubt that a considerable period must
have supervened after the departure of Palaeolithic man and before the arrival
of his Neolithic successor." (See James Geikie's "Prehistoric Europe,"
and Ch. Gould's "Mythical Monsters," p. 98).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 716 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
man is made out
almost an abject savage, his lake dwellings notwithstanding.* For see what a
learned geologist, Mr. Charles Gould, tells the reader in his "Mythical
Monsters":--
"Palaeolithic
men were unacquainted with pottery and the art of weaving, and apparently had
no domesticated animals or system of cultivation; but the Neolithic
lake-dwellers of Switzerland had looms, pottery, cereals, sheep, horses,"
etc., etc.
Yet, though
"Implements of horn, bone, and wood were in common use among both races .
. . those of the older are frequently distinguished by their being sculptured
with great ability, or ornamented with life-like engravings of the various
animals living at the period; whereas there appears to have been a marked
absence of any similar artistic ability** on the part of Neolithic man."
Let us give the reasons for it.
(1) The oldest
fossil man, the primitive cave-men of the old Palaeolithic period, and of the
Pre-glacial period (of whatever length, and however far back), is always the
same genus man, and there are no fossil remains proving for him "what the
Hipparion and Anchitherium have proved for the genus horse -- that is, gradual
progressive specialization from a simple ancestral type to more complex
existing forms" ("Modern Science," p. 181).
(2) As to the
so-called Palaeolithic hatchet . . . "when placed side by side with the
rudest forms of stone hatchets actually used by the Australian and other
savages, it is difficult to detect any difference" (Ibid, p. 112). This
goes to prove that there have been savages at all times; and the inference
would be that there might have been civilized people in those days as well,
cultured nations contemporary with those rude savages. We see such a thing in
Egypt 7,000 years ago.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Resembling in
a manner the pile-villages of Northern Borneo.
** "The
most clever sculptor of modern times would probably not succeed very much
better, if his graver were a splinter of flint and stone and bone were the
materials to be engraved"!! (Prof. Boyd Dawkins' "Cave-Hunting,"
p. 344.) It is needless after such a concession to further insist on Huxley's,
Schmidt's, Laing's, and others' statements to the effect that Palaeolithic man
cannot be considered to lead us back in any way to a pithecoid human race; thus
demolishing the fantasies of many superficial evolutionists. The relic of
artistic merit here re-appearing in the Chipped-Stone-Age men, is traceable to
their Atlantean ancestry. Neolithic man was a fore-runner of the great Aryan invasion,
and immigrated from quite another quarter -- Asia, and in a measure Northern
Africa. (The tribes peopling the latter towards the North-West, were certainly
of an Atlantean origin -- dating back hundreds of thousands of years before the
Neolithic Period in Europe, -- but they had so diverged from the parent type as
to present no longer any marked characteristic peculiar to it.) As to the
contrast between Neolithic and Palaeolithic Man, it is a remarkable fact that,
as Carl Vogt remarks, the former was a cannibal, the much earlier man of the
Mammoth era not. Human manners and customs do not seem to improve with time,
then? Not in this instance at any rate.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 717 ONE SALVATION FOR SCIENCE.
(3) An obstacle
which is the direct consequence of the two preceding: Man, if no older than the
Palaeolithic period, could not possibly have had the actual time to get transformed
from the "missing link" into what he is known to have been even
during that remote geological time, i.e., even a finer specimen than many of
the now existing races.
The above lends
itself naturally to the following syllogism: (1) The primitive man (known to
Science) was, in some respects, even a finer man of his genus than he is now.
(2) The earliest monkey known, the lemur, was less anthropoid than the modern
pithecoid species. (3) Conclusion: even though a missing link were found, the
balance of evidence would remain more in favour of the ape being a degenerated
man made dumb by some fortuitous circumstances,* than tending to show that man
descends from a pithecoid ancestor. The theory cuts both ways.
On the other
hand, if the existence of Atlantis is accepted, and the statement is believed
that in the Eocene Age "even in its very first part, the great cycle of
the fourth race men, the Atlanteans had already reached its highest point . . .
." (Esoteric Buddhism, p. 64) then some of the present difficulties of
science might be easily made to disappear. The rude workmanship of the
Palaeolithic tools proves nothing against the idea that, side by side with
their makers, there lived nations highly civilized. We are told that "only
a very small portion of the earth's surface has been explored, and of this a
very small portion consists of ancient land surfaces or fresh water formations,
where alone we can expect to meet with traces of the higher forms of animal
life," . . . and that "even these have been so imperfectly explored,
that where we now meet with thousands and tens of thousands of undoubted human
remains lying almost under our feet, it is only within the last thirty years
that their existence has even been suspected" (p. 98). It is very suggestive
also that along with the rude haches of the lowest savage, explorers meet with
specimens of workmanship of such artistic merit as could hardly be found, or
expected, in a modern peasant belonging to any European country -- unless in
exceptional cases. The "portrait" of the "Reindeer
feeding," from the Thayngin grotto in Switzerland, and those of the man
running, with two horse's heads sketched close to him -- a work of the Reindeer
period, i.e., at least 50,000 years ago -- are pronounced by Mr. Laing not only
exceedingly well done, but, especially the reindeer feeding, as one that
"would do credit to any modern animal painter"
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* On the data
furnished by modern science, physiology, and natural selection, and without
resorting to any miraculous creation, two negro human specimens of the lowest
intelligence -- say idiots born dumb -- might by breeding produce a dumb
Pastrana species, which would start a new modified race, and thus produce in the
course of geological time the regular anthropoid ape.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 718 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
-- by no means
exaggerated praise, as anyone may see (Vide infra). Now, since side by side
with the modern Esquimaux, who also have a tendency, like their Palaeolithic
ancestors of the Reindeer period, the rude and savage human species, to be
constantly drawing with the point of their knives sketches of animals, scenes
of the chase, etc., we have our greatest painters of Europe, why could not the
same have happened in those days? Compared with the specimens of Egyptian
drawing and sketching -- "7,000 years ago" -- the "earliest portraits"
of men, horses' heads, and reindeer, made 50,000 years ago, are certainly
superior. Nevertheless, the Egyptians of those periods are known to have been a
highly civilized nation, whereas the Palaeolithic men are called savages of the
lower type. This is a small matter seemingly, yet extremely suggestive as
showing that every new geological discovery is made to fit in with current
theories, instead of the reverse. Yes; Mr. Huxley is right in saying,
"Time will show." It will, and must vindicate Occultism.
Meanwhile, the
most uncompromising materialists are driven by necessity into the most
occult-like admissions. Strange to say, it is the most materialistic -- those
of the German school -- who, with regard to physical development, come the
nearest to the teachings of the Occultists. Thus, Professor Baumgartner, who
believes that "the germs for the higher animals could only be the eggs of
the lower animals"; who thinks that "besides the advance of the
vegetable and animal world in development, there occurred in that period the
formation of new original germs," which formed the basis of new
metamorphoses, etc. -- thinks also that "the first men who proceeded from
the germs of animals beneath them, lived first in a larva state."
Just so, in a
larva state, we say, too; only from no "animal" germ, and that
"larva" was the soulless astral form of the pre-physical Races. And
we believe, as the German professor does, with several other men of Science in
Europe now, that the human races "have not descended from one pair, but
appeared immediately in numerous races"; (Anfange zu einer Physiologischen
Schopfungs-geschichte der Pflanzen und Thierwelt, 1885). Therefore, when we
read "Force and Matter," and find that Emperor of Materialists,
Buchner, repeating after Manu and Hermes, that "the plant passes
imperceptibly into the animal, and the animal into man" (p. 85), we need
only add "and man into a spirit," to complete the Kabalistic axiom.
The more so, since on page 82 of the same work we read the following admission:
. . . "Produced in the way of spontaneous generation . . . it is by the
aid of intense natural forces and endless periods of time (that) there has
progressively arisen that rich and infinitely modified organic world by which
we are at present surrounded." . . . And (page 84) "Spontaneous
generation played, no doubt,
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 719 BETWEEN TWO VOIDS.
a more important
part in the primeval epoch than at present; nor can it be denied that in this
way beings of a higher organization were produced than now,"* for this is
the claim of Occultism.
The whole difference
lies in this: Modern Science places her materialistic theory of primordial
germs on earth, and the last germ of life on this globe, of man, and everything
else, between two voids. Whence the first germ, if both spontaneous generation
and the interference of external forces, are absolutely rejected now? Germs of
organic life, we are told, by Sir W. Thomson, came to our earth in some meteor?
This helps in no way and only shifts the difficulty from this earth to the
supposed meteor.
These are our agreements
and disagreements with Science. About the endless periods we are, of course, at
one even with materialistic speculation; for we believe in Evolution, though on
different lines. Professor Huxley very wisely says: "If any form of
progressive development is correct, we must extend by long epochs the most
liberal estimate that has yet been made of the antiquity of man." But when
we are told that this man is a product of the natural forces inherent in
matter, force, according to modern views, being but a quality of matter, a
"mode of motion," etc.; and when we find Sir W. Thomson repeating in
1885 what was asserted by Buchner and his school thirty years ago, we fear all
our reverence for real Science is vanishing into thin air! One can hardly help
thinking that materialism is, in certain cases, a disease. For when men of
Science, in the face of the magnetic phenomena and the attraction of iron
particles through insulating substances, like glass, maintain that the said
attraction is due to "molecular motion," or to the "rotation of
the molecules of the magnet," then, whether the teaching comes from a
"credulous" Theosophist innocent of any notion of physics, or from an
eminent man of Science, it is equally ridiculous. The individual who asserts
such a theory in the teeth of fact, is only one more proof that "When
people have not a niche in their minds in which to shoot facts, so much the
worse for the facts."
As present the
dispute between the spontaneous generationists and their opponents is at rest,
having ended in the provisional victory of the latter. But even they are forced
to admit, as Buchner did, and Messrs. Tyndall and Huxley still do -- that
spontaneous generation must have occurred once, under "special thermal
conditions." Virchow refuses even to argue the question; it must have
taken place sometime in the history of our planet: and there's an end of it.
This seems to look more natural than Sir W. Thomson's hypothesis just quoted,
that the germs of organic life fell on our earth in some meteor; or that other
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Force
and Matter," by Dr. Louis Buchner, translated and edited by J. Frederick
Collingwood, F.R.S., F.G.S., 1864.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 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.
[[diagram]]
REINDEER
ENGRAVED ON ANTLER BY PALAEOLITHIC MAN. (After Geikie.)
Meanwhile, this
is a specimen of an engraving made by a Palaeolithic "savage":
Palaeolithic meaning the "earlier Stone-age" man, one supposed to
have been as savage and brutal as the brutes he lived with.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 721 THE PALAEOLITHIC LANDSEER.
Leaving the modern
South Sea Islander, or even any Asiatic race, aside, we defy any grown-up
schoolboy, or even a European youth, one who has never studied drawing, to
execute such an engraving or even a pencil sketch. Here we have the true
artistic raccourci, and correct lights and shadows without any plane model
before the artist, who copied direct from nature, thus exhibiting a knowledge
of anatomy and proportion. The artist who engraved this reindeer belonged, we
are asked to believe, to the primitive "semi-animal" savages
(contemporaneous with the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros), whom some
over-zealous Evolutionists once sought to picture to us as distinct
approximations to the type of their hypothetical "pithecoid man"!
This engraved
antler proves as eloquently as any fact can that the evolution of the races has
ever proceeded in a series of rises and falls, that man, perhaps, is as old as
incrustated Earth, and -- if we can call his Divine ancestor "Man" --
far older still.
Even de
Mortillet himself seems to experience a vague distrust of the conclusions of
modern archaeologists, when he writes:-- "The prehistoric is a new
science, far, very far, from having said its last word." ("Prehist.
Antiq. of Man," 1883.) According to Lyell, one of the highest authorities
on the subject, and the "Father" of Geology:-- "The expectation
of always meeting with a lower type of human skull, the older the formation in
which it occurs, is based on the theory of progressive development, and it may
prove to be sound; nevertheless we must remember that as yet we have no
distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the
inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of
the higher races." ("Antiq. of Man," p. 25.) Nor has such
evidence been found to this day. Science is thus offering for sale the skin of
a bear, which has hitherto never been seen by mortal eye!
This concession
of Lyell's reads most suggestively with the subjoined utterance of Professor
Max Muller, whose attack on the Darwinian Anthropology from the standpoint of
LANGUAGE has, by the way, never been satisfactorily answered:--
"What do we
know of savage tribes beyond the last chapter of their history?" (Cf. this
with the esoteric view of the Australians, Bushmen, as well as of Palaeolithic
European man, the Atlantean offshoots retaining a relic of a lost culture,
which throve when the parent Root-Race was in its prime.) "Do we ever get
an insight into their antecedents. . . . How have they come to be what they
are? . . . . Their language proves, indeed, that these so-called heathens, with
their complicated systems of mythology, their artificial customs, their
unintelligible whims and savageries, are not the creatures of to-day or
yesterday. Unless we admit a special creation for these savages, they must be
as old as the Hindus, the Greeks and Romans (far older). . . .
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 722 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
They may have
passed through ever so many vicissitudes, and what we consider as primitive,
may be, for all we know, a RELAPSE INTO SAVAGERY or a corruption of something
that was more rational and intelligible in former stages."
("India," 1883, F. Max Muller.)
"The
primeval savage is a familiar term in modern literature," remarks
Professor Rawlinson, "but there is no evidence that the primeval savage
ever existed. Rather all the evidence looks the other way." ("Antiq.
of Man Historically Considered.") In his "Origin of Nations,"
pp. 10-11, he rightly adds: "The mythical traditions of almost all nations
place at the beginning of human history a time of happiness and perfection, a
'golden age' which has no features of savagery or barbarism, but many of
civilization and refinement." How is the modern evolutionist to meet this
consensus of evidence?
We repeat the
question asked in "Isis Unveiled": "Does the finding of the
remains in the cave of Devon prove that there were no contemporary races then
who were highly civilized? When the present population of the earth have
disappeared, and some archaeologist belonging to the 'coming race' of the
distant future shall excavate the domestic implements of one of our Indian or
Andaman Island tribes, will he be justified in concluding that mankind in the
nineteenth century was 'just emerging from the Stone Age'?"
Another strange
inconsistency in scientific knowledge is that Neolithic man is shown as being
far more of a primitive savage than the Palaeolithic one. Either Lubbock's
"Pre-historic Man," or Evans' "Ancient Stone Implements"
must be at fault, or -- both. For this is what we learn from these works and
others:--
(1) As we pass
from Neolithic to Palaeolithic Man, the stone implements become, from
gracefully shaped and polished instruments, rude lumbering makeshifts. Pottery,
etc., disappear as we descend the scale. And yet the latter could engrave such
a reindeer!
(2) Palaeolithic
Man lived in caves which he shared with hyaenas and lions also,* whereas
Neolithic man dwelt in lake-villages and buildings.
Every one who
has followed even superficially the geological discoveries of our day, knows
that a gradual improvement in workmanship is found, from the clumsy chipping
and rude chopping of the early Palaeolithic haches, to the relatively graceful
stone celts of that part of the Neolithic period immediately preceding the use
of metals. But this is in Europe, a few portions only of which were barely
rising from the waters in the days
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* In such a case
Palaeolithic man must have been endowed in his day with thrice Herculean force
and magic invulnerability, or else the lion was as weak as a lamb at that
period, for both to share the same dwelling. We may as well be asked to believe
next that it is that lion or hyaena which has engraved the deer on the antler,
as be told that this bit of workmanship was done by a savage of such a kind.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 723 ENTRAPPED BY THE REINDEER.
of the highest
Atlantean civilizations. There were rude savages and highly civilized people
then, as there are now. If 50,000 years hence, pigmy Bushmen are exhumed from
some African cavern together with far earlier pigmy elephants, such as were
found in the cave deposits of Malta by Milne Edwards, will that be a reason to
maintain that in our age all men and all elephants were pigmies? Or if the
weapons of the Veddhas of Ceylon are found, will our descendants be justified
in setting us all down as Palaeolithic savages? All the articles which
geologists now excavate in Europe can certainly never date earlier than from
the close of the Eocene age, since the lands of Europe were not even above
water before that period. Nor can what we have said be in the least invalidated
by theorists telling us that these quaint sketches of animals and men by
Palaeolithic man, were executed only toward the close of the Reindeer period --
for this explanation would be a very lame one indeed, in view of the
geologists' ignorance of even the approximate duration of periods.
The Esoteric
Doctrine teaches distinctly the dogma of the risings and falls of civilization;
and now we learn that: "It is a remarkable fact that cannibalism seems to
have become more frequent as man advanced in civilization, and that while its
traces are frequent in Neolithic times they . . . . altogether disappear in the
age of the mammoth and the reindeer." ("Mod. Science and Mod.
Thought," p. 164.)
Another evidence
of the cyclic law and the truth of our teachings. Esoteric history teaches that
idols and their worship died out with the Fourth Race, until the survivors of
the hybrid races of the latter (Chinamen, African negroes, &c.) gradually
brought the worship back. The Vedas countenance no idols; all the modern Hindu
writings do.
"In the
early Egyptian tombs, and in the remains of the pre-historic cities excavated
by Dr. Schliemann, images of owl and ox-headed goddesses, and other symbolical
figures, or idols, are found in abundance. But when we ascend into Neolithic
times, such idols are no longer found . . . . the only ones which may be said
with some certainty to have been idols are one or two discovered by M. de Braye
in some artificial caves of the Neolithic period . . . which appear to be
intended for female figures of life size" . . . . (p. 199 Ibid.)
And these may
have been simply statues. Anyhow, all this is one among the many proofs of the
cyclic rise and fall of civilization and religion. The fact that no traces of
human relics or skeletons are so far found beyond post-tertiary or
"Quaternary" times -- though Abbe Bourgeois' flints may serve as a
warning* -- seems to point to the truth of another esoteric statement,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* More than
twenty specimens of fossil monkeys have been found in one locality alone, in
Miocene strata (Pikermi, near Athens). If man was not then, the period is
[[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 724 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
which runs thus:
"Seek for the remains of thy forefathers in the high places. The vales
have grown into mountains and the mountains have crumbled to the bottom of the
seas." . . . Fourth Race mankind, thinned after the last cataclysm by
two-thirds of its population, instead of settling on the new continents and
islands that reappeared while their predecessors formed the floors of new
Oceans -- deserted that which is now Europe and parts of Asia and Africa for
the summits of gigantic mountains, the seas that surrounded some of the latter
having since "retreated" and made room for the table lands of Central
Asia.
The most
interesting example of this progressive march is perhaps afforded by the
celebrated Kent's Cavern at Torquay. In that strange recess, excavated by water
out of the Devonian limestone, we find a most curious record preserved for us
in the geological memoirs of the earth. Under the blocks of limestone, which
heaped the floor of the cavern, were discovered, embedded in a deposit of black
earth, many implements of the Neolithic period of fairly excellent workmanship,
with a few fragments of pottery -- possibly traceable to the era of the Roman
colonization. There is no trace of Palaeolithic man here. No flints or traces
of the extinct animals of the Quaternary period. When, however, we penetrate
still deeper through the dense layer of stalagmite beneath the mould into the
red earth, which, of course, itself once formed the pavement of the retreat,
things assume a very different aspect. Not one implement fit to bear comparison
with the finely-chipped weapons found in the overlying stratum is to be seen;
only a host of the rude and lumbering little hatchets (with which the monstrous
giants of the animal world were subdued and killed by little man, we have to
think?) and scrapers of the Palaeolithic age, mixed up confusedly with the
bones of species now either extinct or emigrated, driven away by change of
climate. It is the artificer of these ugly little hatchets, you see, who
sculptured the reindeer over the brook, on the antler as shown above. In all
cases we meet with the same evidence that, from historic to Neolithic and from
Neolithic to Palaeolithic man, things slope downwards on an inclined plane from
the rudiments of civilization to the most abject barbarism -- in Europe again.
We are made also to face the "mammoth age" -- the extreme or earliest
division of the Palaeolithic age -- in which the great rudeness of implements
reaches its maximum, and the brutal (?) appearance of contemporary skulls, such
as the Neanderthal, point to a very low type of Humanity. But they may
sometimes point also to something besides; to a race of men quite distinct from
our (Fifth Race) Humanity.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued
from previous page]] too short for him to have been transformed -- stretch it
as you may. And if he was, and if no monkey is found earlier, what follows?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 725 STRANGE CONFESSIONS OF SCIENCE.
As said by an
anthropologist in "Modern Thought" (art. "The Genesis of
Man"): "The theory, scientifically based or not, of Peyrere may be
considered to be equivalent to that which divided man in two species. Broca,
Virey, and a number of the French anthropologists have recognised that the
lower race of man, comprising the Australian, Tasmanian, and Negro race,
excluding the Kaffirs and the Northern Africans, should be placed apart. The
fact that in this species, or rather sub-species, the third lower molars are
usually larger than the second, and the squamosal and frontal bones are
generally united by suture, places the Homo Afer on the level of being as good
a distinct species as many of the kinds of finches. I shall abstain on the
present occasion from mentioning the facts of hybridity, whereon the late
Professor Broca has so exhaustively commented. The history, in the past ages of
the world, of this race is peculiar. It has never originated a system of
architecture or a religion of its own" (Dr. C. Carter Blake). It is
peculiar, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the Tasmanians. However it
may be, fossil man in Europe can neither prove nor disprove the antiquity of
man on this Earth nor the age of his earliest civilizations.
It is time the
Occultists should disregard any attempts to laugh at them, scorning the heavy
guns of the satire of the men of science as much as the pop-guns of the
profane, since it is impossible, so far, to obtain either proof or disproof,
while their theories can stand the test better than the hypotheses of the
Scientists at any rate. As to the proof for the antiquity which they claim for
man, they have, moreover, Darwin himself and Lyell. The latter confesses that
they (the naturalists) "have already obtained evidence of the existence of
man at so remote a period that there has been time for many conspicuous
mammalia, once his contemporaries, to die out, and this even before the era of
the earliest historical records."* This is a statement made by one of
England's great authorities upon the question. The two sentences that follow
are as suggestive, and may well be remembered by the students of Occultism, for
with all others he says: "In spite of the long lapse of prehistoric ages
during which he (Man) must have flourished on Earth, there is no proof of any
perceptible change in his bodily structure. If, therefore, he ever diverged
from some unreasoning brute ancestor, we must suppose him to have existed at a
far more distant epoch, possibly on some continents or islands now submerged
beneath the Ocean."
Thus lost
continents are officially suspected. That worlds (also Races) are periodically
destroyed by fire (volcanoes and earthquakes) and water, in turn, and renewed,
is a doctrine as old as man. Manu, Hermes, the Chaldees, all antiquity believed
in this. Twice already
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
*
"Antiquity of Man," p. 530.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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[[degrees]] 20' and 70[[degrees]] 30' N. lat.; when
we learn that among them were two species found also at Bovey (Sequoia
couttsiae, Quercus Lyelli); when, to quote Professor Heer, we find that
"the 'splendid evergreen' (Magnolia Inglefieldi) 'ripened its fruits so
far north as on the parallel of 70 [[degrees]] ' " (Phil. Trans. clix.,
457, 1869); when also the number, variety, and luxuriance of the Greenland
Miocene plants are found to have been such that, had land continued so far,
some of them would in all probability have flourished at the Pole itself, the
problem of changes of climate is brought prominently into view, but only to be
dismissed apparently with the feeling that the time for its solution has not
yet arrived.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 further that the present Atlantic Islands' Flora affords
no substantial evidence of a former direct communication with the mainland of
the New World. . . . The consideration of these facts leads me to the opinion
that botanical evidence does not favour the hypothesis of an Atlantis. On the
other hand, it strongly favours the view that at some period of the Tertiary
epoch North-Eastern Asia was united to North-western America, perhaps by the
line where the Aleutian chain of islands now extends.' " (Nat. Hist. Rev.
ii. 164, 1862.) See, however, "Scientific and Geological Proofs of the
Reality of Several Submerged Continents."
But nothing
short of a pithecoid man, will ever satisfy the luckless searchers after the
thrice hypothetical "missing link." Yet, if beneath the vast floors
of the Atlantic, from the Teneriffe Pic to Gibraltar, the ancient emplacement
of the lost Atlantis, all the submarine strata were to be broken up miles deep,
no such skull as would satisfy the Darwinists would be found. As Dr. C. R. Bree
remarks ("Fallacies of Darwinism"), no missing links between man and
ape having been discovered in various gravels and formations above the tertiaries,
if they had gone down with the continents now covered with the sea, they
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 728 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
might still be
found "in those beds of contemporary geological strata which have not gone
down to the bottom of the sea." Yet they are as fatally absent from the
latter as from the former. Were not preconceptions to fasten vampire-like on
man's mind, the author of "Antiquity of Man" would have found a clue
to the difficulty in that same work of his, by going ten pages back (530) and
reading over a quotation of his own from Professor G. Rolleston's work. This
physiologist, he says, suggests that as there is considerable plasticity in the
human frame, not only in youth and during growth, but even in the adult, we
ought not always to take for granted, as some advocates of the development
theory seem to do, that each advance in physical power depends on an improvement
in bodily structure, for why may not the soul, or the higher intellectual and
moral faculties play the first instead of the second part 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 729 PALAEOLITHIC MAN, A CALIGRAPH!
work of the ape,
we say again, is the revival, the resuscitation by abnormal means of the actual
form of the Third-Round, and of the Fourth-Round Man as well, later on. Nothing
is lost in nature, not an atom: this latter is at least certain on scientific data.
Analogy would appear to demand that form should be equally endowed with
permanency.
And yet what do
we find:--
"It is
significant," says Sir W. Dawson, F.R.S., "that Professor Huxley in his
lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals, mainly on
the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no
certain evidence, avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of men from
the apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace
and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas in his recent lectures
('Nature,' 1876), admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian,
and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and that
Haeckel has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like
man, is absolutely unknown ('History of Creation.') . . . . The so-called
'tallies' found with the bones of Palaeocosmic men in European caves, and
illustrated in the admirable works of Christy and Lartet, show that the
rudiments even of writings were already in possession of the oldest race of men
known to archaeology or geology." (See Wilson's "Prehistoric
Man," op. cit., vol. ii., p. 54. "Origin of the World," p. 393.)
Again in Dr. C.
R. Bree's "Fallacies of Darwinism," on page 160, we read:--
"Mr. Darwin
justly says that the difference physically and, more especially mentally,
between the lowest form of man and the highest anthropomorphous ape, is
enormous. Therefore, the time -- which in Darwinian evolution must be almost
inconceivably slow -- must have been enormous also during man's development
from the monkey.* The chance, therefore, of some of these variations being
found in the different gravels or fresh-water formations above the tertiaries,
must be very great. And yet not one single variation, not one single specimen
of a being between a monkey and a man has ever been found. Neither in the
gravel, nor the drift-clay, nor the fresh-water beds, nor in the tertiaries
below them has there ever been discovered the remains of any member of the
missing families between the monkey and the man, as assumed to have existed by
Mr. Darwin. Have they gone down with the depression of the earth's surface and
are they now covered with the sea? If so, it is beyond all probability that
they should not, also be found in those beds of contemporary geological strata
which have not gone down to the bottom of the sea; still more improbable that
some portions should not be dredged from the ocean bed like the remains of the
mammoth and the rhinoceros which are also found in fresh-water beds and gravels
and drift! . . . . . . the celebrated Neanderthal skull, about which so much
has been said, belongs confessedly to this remote epoch (bronze and stone
ages), and yet presents, although it may have been the skull of an idiot,
immense differences from the highest known anthropomorphous ape."
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* And how much
more "enormous" if we reverse the subjects and say during the
monkey's development from the Third Race Man.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 730 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
Our globe being
convulsed each time that it reawakens for a new period of activity, like a
field which has to be ploughed and furrowed before fresh seed for its new crop
is thrown into it -- it does seem quite hopeless that fossils belonging to its
previous Rounds should be found in the beds of either its oldest or its latest
geological strata. Every new Manvantara brings along with it the renovation of
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.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 731 STILL GREATER DIFFICULTIES.
§ V.
ORGANIC EVOLUTION
AND CREATIVE CENTRES.
IT is argued
that the Universal Evolution, otherwise, the gradual development of species in
all the kingdoms of nature, works by uniform laws. This is admitted, and the
law enforced far more strictly in Esoteric than in modern Science. But we are
told also, that it is equally a law that "development works from the less
to the more perfect, and from the simpler to the more complicated, by incessant
changes, small in themselves, but constantly accumulating in the required direction."
It is from the infinitesimally small that the comparatively gigantic species
are produced.
Esoteric Science
agrees with it, but adds that this law applies only to what is known to it as
the Primary Creation -- the evolution of worlds from primordial atoms, and the
pre-primordial ATOM, at the first differentiation of the former; and that
during the period of cyclic evolution in space and time, this law is limited
and works only in the lower kingdoms. It did so work during the first
geological periods, from simple to complex, on the rough material surviving
from the relics of the Third Round, which relics are projected into objectivity
when terrestrial activity recommences.
No more than
Science, does esoteric philosophy admit design or "special creation."
It rejects every claim to the "miraculous," and accepts nothing
outside the uniform and immutable laws of Nature. But it teaches a cyclic law,
a double stream of force (or spirit) and of matter, which, starting from the
neutral centre of Being, develops in its cyclic progress and incessant
transformations. The primitive germ from which all vertebrate life has
developed throughout the ages, being distinct from the primitive germ from which
the vegetable and the animal life have evolved, there are side laws whose work
is determined by the conditions in which the materials to be worked upon are
found by them, and of which Science -- physiology and anthropology especially
-- seems to be little aware. Its votaries speak of that "primitive
germ," and maintain that it is shown beyond any doubt that the
"design" and the "designer," if there be any, in the case
of man, with the wonderful structure of his limbs, and his hand especially,
"must be placed very much farther back, and (the design) is, in fact,
involved in the primitive germ," from which not only all vertebrate life,
but, "probably all life, animal and vegetable, have been slowly
developed" (p. 94 of "Modern Science and Modern Thought").
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 732 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
This is as true
of the "primitive germ" as it is false that that "germ" is
only "very much farther back" than man is; for it is at an
immeasurable and inconceivable distance (in time, though not in space) from the
origin even of our Solar system. As the Hindu philosophy very justly teaches,
the "Aniyamsam Aniyasam," can be known only through false notions. It
is the "many" that proceed from the ONE -- the living spiritual germs
or centres of forces -- each in a septenary form, which first generate, and
then give the PRIMARY IMPULSE to the law of evolution and gradual slow
development.
Limiting the
teaching strictly to this, our earth, it may be shown that, as the ethereal
forms of the first Men are first projected on seven zones by seven
Dhyan-Chohanic centres of Force, so there are centres of creative power for
every ROOT or parent species of the host of forms of vegetable and animal life.
This is, again, no "special creation," nor is there any
"Design," except in the general "ground-plan" worked out by
the universal law. But there are certainly "designers," though these
are neither omnipotent nor omniscient in the absolute sense of the term. They
are simply Builders, or Masons, working under the impulse given them by the
ever-to-be-unknown (on our plane) Master Mason -- the ONE LIFE and Law.
Belonging to this sphere, they have no hand in, or possibility of working on
any other, during the present Manvantara, at any rate. That they work in cycles
and on a strictly geometrical and mathematical scale of progression, is what
the extinct animal species amply demonstrate; that they act by design in the
details of minor lives (of side animal issues, etc.) is what natural history
has sufficient evidence for. In the creation of new species, departing
sometimes very widely from the Parent stock, as in the great variety of the
genus Felis -- like the lynx, the tiger, the cat, etc. -- it is the
"designers" who direct the new evolution by adding to, or depriving
the species of certain appendages, either needed or becoming useless in the new
environments. Thus, when we say that Nature provides for every animal and
plant, whether large or small, we speak correctly. For, it is those terrestrial
spirits of Nature, who form the aggregated Nature; which, if it fails
occasionally in its design, is neither to be considered blind, nor to be taxed
with the failure; since, belonging to a differentiated sum of qualities and
attributes, it is in virtue of that alone conditioned and imperfect.
Were there no
such thing as evolutionary cycles, an eternal spiral progress into matter with
a proportionate obscuration of spirit -- though the two are one -- followed by
an inverse ascent into spirit and the defeat of matter -- active and passive by
turn -- how explain the discoveries of zoology and geology? How is it that, on
the dictum of authoritative science, one can trace the animal life from the
mollusc up
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 733 THE "TO BE OR NOT TO BE" OF SCIENCE.
to the great Sea
Dragon, from the smallest land-worm up again to the gigantic animals of the
Tertiary Period; and that the latter were once crossed is shown by the fact of
all those species decreasing, dwindling down and being dwarfed. If the seeming
process of development working from the less to the more perfect, and from the
simpler to the more complex, were a universal law indeed, instead of being a
very imperfect generalization of a mere secondary nature in the great Cosmic
process, and if there were no such cycles as those claimed, then the Mesozoic
fauna and flora ought to change places with the latest Neolithic. It is the
Plesiosauri and the Ichthyosauri that we ought to find developing from the
present sea and river reptiles, instead of giving place to their dwarfed modern
analogies. It is, again, our old friend, the good-tempered elephant, that would
be the fossil antediluvian ancestor, and the mammoth of the Pliocene age who
would be in the menagerie; the megalonyx and the gigantic megatherium would be
found instead of the lazy sloth in the forests of South America, in which the
colossal ferns of the carboniferous periods would take the place of moss and
present trees -- dwarfs, even the giants of California, in comparison with the
Titan-trees of past geological periods. Surely the organisms of the
megasthenian world of the Tertiary and the Mesozoic Ages must have been more
complex and perfect than those of the microsthenian plants and animals of the
present age? The Dryopithecus, for instance, is found more perfect anatomically,
more fit for a greater development of brain power, than the modern gorilla or
gibbon? How is this, then? Are we to believe that the constitution of all those
colossal land and sea-dragons, of the gigantic flying reptiles, was not far
more developed and complex than the anatomy of the lizards, turtles,
crocodiles, and even of the whales -- in short, all those animals we are
acquainted with?
Let us admit,
however, for argument's sake, that all those cycles, races, septenary forms of
evolution and the tutti quanti of esoteric teaching, are no better than a
delusion and a snare. Let us agree with Science and say that man, instead of
being an imprisoned "Spirit," and his vehicle, the shell or body, a
gradually perfected and now complete mechanism for material and terrestrial
uses, as claimed by the Occultists -- is simply a more developed animal, whose
primal form emerged from one and the same primitive germ on this earth, as the
flying dragon and the gnat, the whale and the amoeba, the crocodile and the frog,
etc., etc. In this case, he must have passed through the identical developments
and through the same process of growth as all the other mammals? If man is an
animal, and nothing more, a highly intellectual ex-brute, he should be
privileged, at least, and allowed to have been a gigantic mammal of his kind, a
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 734 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
meganthropos in
his day. It is just this, that esoteric science shows as having taken place in
the first three rounds, and in this, as in most other things, it is more
logical and consistent than modern science. It classifies the human body with
the brute creation, and maintains it in the path of animal evolution, from
first to last, while science leaves man a parentless orphan born of sires
unknown, an "unspecialized skeleton" truly! And this mistake is due
to a stubborn rejection of the doctrine of cycles.
-------
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,* are to be considered as
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Darwinian
theory has been so strained, that even Huxley was forced at one time to
deprecate its occasional degeneration into "fanaticism." Oscar
Schmidt presents a good instance of a thinker who unconsciously exaggerates the
worth of an hypothesis. He admits ("The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism,"
p. 158), that "natural selection" "is in some cases . . .
inadequate, . . . in others . . . not requisite, as the solution of the
formation of species is found in other natural conditions." He also
asserts the "intermediate grades are . . . wanting, which would entitle us
to infer with certainty the direct transition from unplacental to placental
mammals" (p. 271); that "we are referred entirely to conjecture and
inference for the origin of the mammals" (p. 268); and the repeated
failures of the framers of "hypothetical pedigrees," more especially
of Haeckel. Nevertheless he asserts on p. 194, that "what we have gained
by the Doctrine of Descent based on the theory of selection is the KNOWLEDGE of
the connection of organisms as 'consanguineous beings.' " Knowledge in the
face of the above-cited concessions, is, then, the synonym for conjecture and
theory only?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 735 CONJECTURES ARE NOT FACTS.
adequate to meet
the facts. The line of demarcation between etherospiritual, astral and physical
evolution must be drawn. Perhaps, if Darwinians deigned to consider the
possibility of the second process, they would no longer have to lament the fact
that "we are referred to conjecture and inference for the origin of the
Mammals"!! (The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism, p. 268, by Professor O.
Schmidt.) At present the admitted chasm between the systems of reproduction of
the oviparous vertebrates and mammalia, constitutes a hopeless crux to those
thinkers who, with the Evolutionists, seek to link all existing organic forms
in a continuous line of descent.
Let us take --
exempli gratia -- the case of the ungulate mammals. "In no other
division," it is said, "do we possess such abundant fossil
material." So much progress has been made in this direction, that in some
instances the intermediate links between the modern and Eocene ungulates have
been unearthed; a notable example being that of the complete proof of the
derivation of the present one-toed horse from the three-toed Anchitherium of
the old Tertiary. This standard of comparison between Western Biology and the
Eastern doctrine could not, therefore, be improved upon. The pedigree here
utilized, as embodying the views of scientists in general, is that of Schmidt
based on the exhaustive researches of Rutimeyer. Its approximate accuracy --
from the standpoint of evolutionism -- leaves little to be desired:--
UNGULATE
MAMMALS.
[[diagram]]
[[text in
diagram]]
ANOPLOTHERIDAE
Hippopotami
Pigs
Tragulidae
Deer
Antelopes
Oxen
PALAEOTHERIDAE
Rhinoceruses
Tapirs
Anchitherium
Hipparion
Horse
Maerauchenidae
(EOCENE)
(Tertiary)
(Recent)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 736 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The midway point
of evolution. Science comes to a standstill. "The root to which these two
families lead back IS UNKNOWN" (Schmidt).
[[diagram]]
[[text in
diagram]]
The
"ROOT" according to occultism.
II.
ANOPLOTHERIDAE.
PALAEOTHERIDAE.
One of the Seven
primeveal physico-astral and bi-sexual root-types of the Mammalian Kingdom
(animal). These were contemporaries of the early Lemurian races -- the
"UNKNOWN ROOTS" of Science.
No. I.
represents the realm explored by Western Evolutionists, the area in which
climatic influences, "natural selection," and all the other physical
causes of organic differentiation are present. Biology and palaeontology find
their province here in investigating the many physical agencies which
contribute so largely, as shown by Darwin, Spencer and others, to the
segregation of species. But even in this domain the sub-conscious workings of
the Dhyan-Chohanic wisdom are at the root of all the "ceaseless striving
towards perfection," though its influence is vastly modified by those
purely material causes which de Quatrefages terms the "milieux" and
Spencer the "Environment."
The "midway
point of evolution" is that stage where the astral prototypes definitely
begin to pass into the physical, and thus become subject to the differentiating
agencies now operative around us. Physical causation supervenes immediately on
the assumption of "coats of skin" -- i.e., the physiological
equipment in general. The forms of Men and mammalia previous to the separation
of sexes* are woven out of astral matter, and possess a structure utterly
unlike that of the physical organisms, which eat, drink, digest, etc., etc.,
etc. The known physiological contrivances in organisms were almost entirely
evolved subsequently to the incipient physicalization of the 7 Root-Types out
of the astral -- during the "midway halt" between the two planes of
existence. Hardly had the "ground-plan" of evolution been limned out
in these ancestral types, than the influence of the accessory terrestrial laws,
familiar to us, supervened, resulting in the whole crop of mammalian species.
AEons of slow differentiation were, however, required to effect this end.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Bear in mind,
please, that though the animals -- mammalians included -- have all been evolved
after and partially from man's cast-off tissues, still, as a far lower being,
the mammalian animal became placental and separated far earlier than man.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 737 THE UNITY OF TYPE.
No. II.
represents the domain of the purely astral prototypes previous to their descent
into (gross) matter. Astral matter, it must be noted, is fourth state matter,
having, like our gross matter, its own "protyle." There are several
"protyles" in Nature, corresponding to the various planes of matter.
The two sub-physical elemental kingdoms, the plane of mind (manas, the fifth
state matter), as also that of Buddhi (sixth state matter), are each and all
evolved from one of the six "protyles" which constitute the basis of
the Object-Universe. The three "states," so-called of our terrestrial
matter, known as the "solid," "liquid," and
"gaseous," are only, in strict accuracy, SUB-states. As to the former
reality of the descent into the physical, which culminated in physiological man
and animal, we have a palpable testimony in the fact of the so-called
spiritualistic "materializations."
In all these
instances a complete temporary mergence of the astral into the physical takes
place. The evolution of physiological Man out of the astral races of early
Lemurian age -- the Jurassic age of Geology -- is exactly paralleled by the
"materialization" of "spirits" (?) in the seance-room. In
the case of Professor Crookes' "Katie King," the presence of a
physiological mechanism -- heart, lungs, etc. -- was indubitably demonstrated!!
This, in a way,
is the ARCHETYPE of Goethe. Listen to his words: "Thus much we should have
gained . . . all the nine perfect organic beings . . . (are) formed according
to an archetype which merely fluctuates more or less in its very persistent
parts and, moreover, day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of
reproduction." This is a seemingly imperfect foreshadowing of the occult
fact of the differentiation of species from the primal astral root-types.
Whatever the whole posse comitatus of "natural selection," etc.,
etc., may effect, the fundamental unity of structural plan remains practically
unaffected by all subsequent modifications. The "Unity of Type"
common, in a sense, to all the animal and human kingdoms, is not, as Spencer
and others appear to hold, a proof of the 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.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 738 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
FACTORS
CONCERNED IN THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE.
BASIC ASTRAL
PROTOTYPES PASS INTO THE PHYSICAL.
-------
The Dhyan
Chohanic Impulse constituting Lamarck's "inherent and necessary" law
of development. It lies behind all minor agencies.{
1. Variation
transmitted by heredity.
2. Natural
Selection.
3. Sexual
Selection.
4. Physiological
Selection.
5. Isolation.
6. Correlation
of Growth.
7. Adaptation to
Environment. (Intelligent as opposed to mechanical causation.)
[[diagram]]
SPECIES.
-------
B.
THE EUROPEAN,
PALAEOLITHIC RACES. -- WHENCE, AND HOW DISTRIBUTED.
IS Science
against those who maintain that down to the Quaternary period the distribution
of the human races was widely different from what it is now? Is Science against
those who, further, maintain that the fossil men found in Europe -- although
having almost reached a plane of sameness and unity from the fundamental
physiological and anthropological aspects which continues till this day --
still differ, sometimes greatly, from the type of the now existing populations.
The late Littre confesses it in an article published by him on the Memoir
called Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes by Boucher de Perthes (1849) --
in the Revue des Deux Mondes (March 1,1859). He says in it (a) that in these
periods when the Mammoths, exhumed with the hatchets in Picardy, lived in the
latter region, there must have been an eternal spring reigning over all the
terrestrial globe*; nature was the contrary of what it is now -- thus leaving
an enormous margin for the antiquity of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Scientists now
admit that Europe enjoyed in the Miocene times a warm, in the Pliocene or later
Tertiary, a temperate climate. Littre's contention as to the balmy spring of
the Quaternary -- to which deposits M. de Perthes' discoveries of flint
implements are traceable (since when the Somme has worn down its valley many
scores of feet) -- must be accepted with much reservation. The Somme-valley
relics are post-glacial, and possibly point to the immigration of savages
during one of the more temperate periods intervening between minor ages of Ice.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 739 AFRICA IN EUROPE.
those
"periods" and then adds: (b) "Spring, professor of the Faculty
of Medicine at Liege, found in a grotto near Namur, in the mountain of
Chauvaux, numerous human bones 'of a race quite distinct from ours.' "
Skulls exhumed
in Austria offered a great analogy with those of African negro races, according
to Littre, while others, discovered on the shores of the Danube and the Rhine,
resembled the skulls of the Caribs and those of the ancient inhabitants of Peru
and Chili. Still, the Deluge, whether Biblical or Atlantean, was denied. But
further geological discoveries having made Gaudry write conclusively: "Our
forefathers were positively contemporaneous with the rhinoceros tichorrhinus, the
hippopotamus major"; and add that the soil called diluvial in geology
"was formed partially at least after man's apparition on earth" --
Littre pronounced himself finally. He then showed the necessity, before
"the resurrection of so many old witnesses," of rehandling all the
origins, all the durations, and added that there was AN AGE hitherto unknown to
study "either at the dawn of the actual epoch or, as I believe, at the
beginning of the epoch which preceded it."
The types of the
skulls found in Europe are of two kinds, as is well known: the orthognathous
and the prognathous, or the Caucasian and the negro types; such as are now
found only in the African and the lower savage tribes. Professor Heer -- who
argues that the facts of Botany necessitate the hypothesis of an Atlantis --
has shown that the plants of the Neolithic lake-villagers are mainly of African
origin. How did the latter come to be in Europe if there was no former point of
union between Africa and Europe? How many thousand years ago did the seventeen
men live whose skeletons were exhumed in the Department of the Haute Garonne,
in a squatting posture near the remains of a coal fire, with some amulets and
broken crockery around them, and in company with the bear spelaeus, the Elephas
primigenius, the aurochs (regarded by Cuvier as a distinct species), the
Megaceros hibernicus -- all antediluvian mammals? Certainly at a most distant
epoch, but not one which carries us further back than the Quaternary. A much
greater antiquity for Man has yet to be proved. Dr. James Hunt, the late
President of the Anthropological Society, makes it 9,000,000 years. This man of
science, at any rate, makes some approach to our esoteric computation, if we
leave the first two semi-human, ethereal races, and the early Third Race out of
the computation.
The question,
however, arises -- who were these Palaeolithic men of the European quaternary
epoch? 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?
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 740 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
The earliest
Palaeolithic men in Europe -- about whose origin Ethnology is silent, and whose
very characteristics are but imperfectly known, though expatiated on as
"ape-like" by imaginative writers such as Mr. Grant Allen -- were of
pure Atlantean and "Africo"-Atlantean stocks.* (It must be borne in
mind that by this time the Atlantis continent itself was a dream of the past.)
Europe in the quaternary epoch was very different from the Europe of to-day,
being then only in process of formation. It was united to N. Africa -- or
rather what is now N. Africa -- by a neck of land running across the present
Straits of Gibraltar -- N. Africa thus constituting a species of extension of
Spain, while a broad sea washed the great basin of the Sahara. Of the great
Atlantis, the main bulk of which sank in the Miocene, there remained only Ruta
and Daitya and a stray island or so. The Atlantean connections of the forefathers**
of the Palaeolithic cave-men are evidenced by the upturning of fossil skulls
(in Europe) reverting closely to the West Indian Carib and ancient Peruvian
type -- a mystery indeed to all those who refuse to sanction the
"hypothesis" of a former Atlantic continent to bridge the ocean (Cf.
"Scientific and geological proofs of the reality of several submerged
continents"). What are we also to make of the fact that while de
Quatrefages points to that "magnificent race," the TALL Cro-Magnon
cave-men and the Guanches of the Canary Islands as representatives of one type
-- Virchow also allies the Basques with the latter in a similar way? Professor
Retzius independently proves the relationship of the aboriginal American
dolichocephalous tribes and these same Guanches. The several links in the chain
of evidence are securely joined together. Legions of similar facts could be
adduced. As to the African tribes -- themselves diverging offshoots of
Atlanteans modified by climate and conditions -- they crossed into Europe over
the peninsula which made the Mediterranean an inland sea. Fine races were many
of these European cave-men; the Cro-Magnon, for instance. But, as was to be
expected, progress is almost non-existent through the whole of the vast period
allotted
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Whence
they (the old cave-men) came, we cannot tell" (Grant Allen).
"The
palaeolithic hunters of the Somme Valley did not originate in that inhospitable
climate, but moved into Europe from some more genial region -- (Dr. Southall
"Epoch of the Mammoth" p. 315).
** The pure
Atlantean stocks -- of which the tall quaternary cave-men were, in part, the
direct descendants -- immigrated into Europe long prior to the Glacial Period;
in fact as far back as the Pliocene and Miocene times in the Tertiary. The
worked Miocene flints of Thenay, and the traces of Pliocene man discovered by
Professor Capellini in Italy, are witnesses to the fact. These colonists were
portions of the once glorious race, whose cycle from the Eocene downwards had
been running down the scale.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 741 A TARDY ADMISSION.
by Science to
the Chipped Stone-Age.* The cyclic impulse downwards weighs heavily on the
stocks thus transplanted -- the incubus of the Atlantean Karma is upon them.
Finally, Palaeolithic man makes room for his successor -- and disappears almost
entirely from the scene. Professor Lefevre asks in this connection:--
"Has the
Polished succeeded the Chipped Stone-Age by an imperceptible transition, or was
it due to an invasion of brachycephalous Celts? But whether, again, the deterioration
produced in the populations of La Vezere was the result of violent crossings,
or of a general retreat northwards in the wake of the reindeer, is of little
moment to us." He continues:--
"Meantime
the bed of the ocean has been upheaved, Europe is now fully formed, her flora
and fauna fixed. With the taming of the dog begins the pastoral life. We enter
on those polished stone and bronze periods, which succeed each other at
irregular intervals, which even overlap one another in the midst of ethnical
fusions and migrations. . . . The primitive European populations are
interrupted in their special evolution and, without perishing, become absorbed
in other races, engulfed . . . by successive waves of migration overflowing
from Africa, possibly from a lost Atlantis [?? far too late by aeons of years]
and from prolific Asia . . . all FORERUNNERS OF THE GREAT ARYAN INVASION"
(Fifth Race).
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The artistic
skill displayed by the old cave-men renders the hypothesis which regards them
as approximations to the "pithecanthropus alalus" -- that very
mythical Haeckelian monster -- an absurdity requiring no Huxley or Schmidt to
expose it. We see in their skill in engraving a gleam of Atlantean culture
atavistically re-appearing. It will be remembered that Donnelly regards modern
European as a renaissance of Atlantean civilization. ("Atlantis," pp.
237-264.)
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 742 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ VI.
GIANTS,
CIVILIZATIONS, AND SUBMERGED CONTINENTS TRACED IN HISTORY.
WHEN statements
such as are comprised in the above heading are brought forward, the writer is,
of course, expected to furnish historical instead of legendary evidence in
support of such claims. Is this possible? Yes; for evidence of this nature is
plentiful, and has simply to be collected and brought together to become
overwhelming in the eyes of the unprejudiced.
Once the
sagacious student gets hold of the guiding thread he may find it out for
himself. We give facts and show land-marks: let the wayfarer follow them. What
is given here is amply sufficient for THIS Century.
In a letter to
Voltaire, Bailly finds it quite natural that the sympathies of the "grand
old invalid of Ferney" should be attracted to the "representatives of
knowledge and wisdom, the Brahmans of India." He then adds a curious
statement. "But," he says, "your Brahmans are very young in
comparison with their ancient instructors."*
Bailly, who knew
nought of the esoteric teachings, nor of Lemuria, believed, nevertheless,
unreservedly in the lost Atlantis, and also in several pre-historic and
civilized nations which had disappeared without leaving any undeniable trace.
He had studied the ancient classics and traditions extensively, and he saw that
the arts and sciences known to those we now call the "ancients," were
"not the achievements of any of the now or even then existing nations, nor
of any of the historical peoples of Asia." And that, notwithstanding the
learning of the Hindoos, their undeniable priority in the antiquity of their
race had to be referred to a people or a race still more ancient and more
learned than were even the Brahmans themselves.**
Voltaire, the
greatest sceptic of his day, the materialist par excellence, shared Bailly's
belief. He thought it quite likely "that long before the empires of China
and India, there had been nations cultured, learned, and powerful, which a
deluge of barbarians overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state
of ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure nature."
("Lettres sur l'Atlantide," p. 15).***
[[Footnote(s)]] -----------------------------------------------
* Lettres sur
l'Atlantide.
** Histoire de
l'Astronomie Ancienne, p. 25, et seq.
*** This
conjecture is but a half-guess. There were such "deluges of
barbarians" in the Fifth Race. With regard to the Fourth, it was a bond
fide deluge of water which swept it away. Neither Voltaire nor Bailly, however,
knew anything of the Secret Doctrine of the East.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 743 A MYSTERIOUS NATION.
That which with
Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly
"a question of historical facts." For "I make great case of
ancient traditions preserved through a long series of generations," he
wrote. (Ibid.) It was possible, he thought, that a foreign nation should, after
instructing another nation, so disappear that it should leave no traces behind.
When asked how it could have happened that this ancient, or rather archaic,
nation should not have left at least some recollection in the human mind, he
answered that Time was a pitiless devourer of facts and events. But, the
history of the Past was never entirely lost, for the Sages of old Egypt had
preserved it, and "it is so preserved to this day elsewhere."
"You do not know which was the best and most handsome generation of men
which has ever lived on this earth," said the priests of Sais to Solon,
according to Plato. "Only a weak seed of it, of which you (Greeks) are the
descendants,* is all that remains." "Their books," they added,
"preserved the records of a great nation, which emerging from the Atlantic
sea had invaded Europe and Asia (Timaeus). The Greeks were but the dwarfed and
weak remnant of that once glorious nation. . . ."**
What was this
nation? The secret doctrine teaches that it was the latest, seventh sub-race of
the Atlanteans, already swallowed up in one of the early sub-races of the Aryan
stock, one that had been gradually spreading over the continent and islands of
Europe, as soon as they had begun to emerge from the seas. Descending from the
high plateaux of Asia, where the two Races had sought refuge in the days of the
agony of Atlantis, it had been slowly settling and colonizing the freshly emerged
lands. The emigrant sub-race had rapidly increased and multiplied on that
virgin soil; had divided into many families, which in their turn divided into
nations. Egypt and Greece, the Phoenicians, and the Northern stocks, had thus
proceeded from that one sub-race. Thousands of years later, other races -- the
remnants of the Atlanteans -- "yellow and red, brown and black,"
began to invade the new continent. There were wars in which the new comers were
defeated; and they fled, some to Africa, others to remote countries. Some of
these lands became in course of time -- owing to new geological convulsions --
islands. Being thus forcibly
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For a full
discussion of the relations between the old Greeks and Romans, and the
Atlantean colonists, cf. "Five Years of Theosophy."
** The story
about Atlantis and all the traditions thereon were told, as all know, by Plato
in his "Timaeus and Critias." Plato, when a child, had it from his
grand-sire Critias, aged ninety, who in his youth had been told of it by Solon,
his father Dropidas' friend -- Solon, one of the Grecian Seven Sages. No more
reliable source could be found, we believe.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 744 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
separated from
the continents, the result was that the undeveloped tribes and families of the
Atlantean stock fell gradually into a still more abject and savage condition.
Did not the
Spaniards in the Cibola expeditions meet with WHITE savage chiefs; and has not
the presence of African negro types in Europe in the pre-historic ages been now
ascertained? It is this presence of a type associated with that of the negro,
and also with that of the Mongolian, which is the stumbling-block of
anthropology. The individual who lived at an incalculably distant period at La
Naulette, in Belgium (Vide Dr. Carter Blake's paper "On the Naudette
Jaw," Anthrop. Review, Sept., 1867), is an example. "The caves on the
banks of the Lesse, in South-Eastern Belgium," says this Anthropologist,
"afford evidence of what is, perhaps, the lowest man, as shown by the
Naulette jaw. Such man, however, had amulets of stone, perforated for the
purpose of ornament; these are made of a psammite now found in the basin of the
Gironde."
Thus Belgian man
was extremely ancient. That man who was antecedent to the great flood of waters
-- which covered the highlands of Belgium with a deposit of lehm or upland
gravel 30 metres above the level of the present rivers -- must have combined
the characters of the Turanian and the negro. The Canstadt, or La Naulette,
man, may have been black, and had nothing to do with the Aryan type whose
remains are contemporary with those of the cave bear at Engis. The denizens of
the Aquitaine bone-caves belong to a far later period of history, and may not
be as ancient as the former.
If the statement
is objected to on the ground that Science does not deny the presence of man on
earth from an enormous antiquity, though that antiquity cannot be determined,
since that presence is conditioned by the duration of geological periods, the
age of which is not ascertained; if it is argued that the Scientists object
most decidedly to the claim that man preceded the animals, for instance; or
that civilization dates from the earliest Eocene period, or, again, that there
have ever existed giants, three-eyed and four-armed and four-legged men,
androgynes, etc., then the objectors are asked in their turn, "How do you
know? What proof have you besides your personal hypotheses, each of which may
be upset any day by new discoveries?" And these future discoveries are
sure to prove that, whatever this earlier type of man known to Anthropologists
was in complexion, he was in no respect apish. The Canstadt man, the Engis man
alike possessed essentially human attributes. (Vide de Quatrefages and Hamy.
"Cranes des Races Humaines.") People have looked for the missing link
at the wrong end of the chain; and the Neander valley man has long since been
dismissed to the "limbo of all hasty blunders" (Ibid.). Disraeli
divided man into the associates of the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 745 REMARKABLE "COINCIDENCES."
apes and the
angels. Reasons are given in the text in favour of an "angelic
theory," -- as Christians would say -- at least as applicable to some of
the races of men. At all events, if man exists only since the Miocene period,
even then, humanity as a whole could not be composed of the abject savages of
the Palaeolithic age, as they are now represented by the Scientists. All they
say is mere arbitrary speculative guess-work, invented by them to answer to and
fit in with their own fanciful theories.
We speak of
events hundreds of thousands years old, nay, even millions -- if man dates from
the geological periods* -- not of any of those events which happened during the
few thousand years of the pre-historic margin allowed by timid and
ever-cautious history. Yet there are men of science who are almost of our way
of thinking. From the brave confession of the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg, who
says that:-- "Traditions, whose traces recur in Mexico, in Central
America, in Peru, and in Bolivia, suggest the idea that man existed in these
different countries at the time of the gigantic upheaval of the Andes, and that
he has retained the memory of it" -- down to the latest palaeontologists
and anthropologists, the majority of scientific men is in favour of just such
an antiquity. Apropos of Peru, has any satisfactory attempt been made to
determine the ethnological affinities and characteristics of the race which
reared those Cyclopean erections, the ruins of which display the relics of a
great civilization? At Cuelap, for instance, such are found, consisting
"of a wall of wrought stones, 3,600 feet long, 560 broad, and 150 feet
high, constituting a solid mass with a level summit. On this mass was another,
600 feet long, 500 broad, and 150 feet high, making an aggregate height of 300
feet. In it were rooms and cells." (Cf., the mass of evidence collected by
Donnelly to prove the Peruvian colony an offshoot of the Atlanteans.) A most
suggestive fact is the startling resemblance between the architecture of these
colossal buildings and that of the archaic European nations. Mr. Fergusson
regards the analogies between the ruins of "Inca" civilization and
the Cyclopean remains of the Pelasgians in Italy and Greece as a coincidence
"the most remarkable in the history of architecture." "It is
difficult to resist the conclusion that there may be some relation between
them." The "relation" is simply explained by the derivation of
the stocks,
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Haeckel's
"Man-ape" of the Miocene period is the dream of a monomaniac, which
de Quatrefages (see his "Human Species," pp. 105-113) has cleverly
disposed of. It is not clear why the world should accept the lucubrations of a
psychophobic materialist, (to accept whose theory necessitates the acceptance
on faith of various animals unknown to Science or Nature -- like the Sozura,
for instance, that amphibian which has never existed anywhere outside Haeckel's
imagination), rather than the traditions of antiquity.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 746 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
who devised
these erections, from a common centre in an Atlantic continent. The acceptance
of the latter can alone assist us to approach a solution of this and similar
problems in almost every branch of modern science.
Dr. Lartet,
treating upon the subject, settles the question by declaring that:-- "The
truth, so long contested, of the co-existence of man with the great extinct
species (Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorrhinus, Hyaena spelaea, Ursus
spelaeus, etc., etc.), appears to me to be henceforth unassailable and
definitely conquered by science." ("Cavernes de Perigord," p.
35.)
It is shown
elsewhere that such is also de Quatrefages' opinion. "Man has in all
probability seen Miocene times* and consequently the entire Pliocene
epoch," he says, and there are reasons for believing that "his traces
will be found further back still, . . . ." he adds ("The Human
Species," p. 152.)
Egypt is far
older than Europe as now traced on the map. Atlanto-Aryan tribes began to
settle on it, when the British Islands** and France were not even in existence.
It is well known that "the tongue of the AEgyptian Sea," or the Delta
of lower Egypt, became firm land very gradually, and followed the highlands of
Abyssinia; unlike the latter, which arose suddenly, comparatively speaking, it
was very slowly formed, through long ages, from successive layers of sea slime
and mud, deposited annually by the soil brought down by a large river, the
present Nile. Yet even the Delta as a firm and fertile land, has been inhabited
for more than 100,000 years. Later tribes, with still more Aryan blood in them
than their predecessors, arrived from the East, and conquered it from a people
whose very name is lost to posterity, except in Secret works. It is this
natural barrier of slime, which sucked in slowly and surely every boat that
approached these inhospitable shores, that was, till within a few thousand of
years B.C., the best safeguard of the later Egyptians, who had managed to reach
it through Arabia, Abyssinia, and Nubia, led on by Manu Vina in the day of
Visvamitra. (See in "Isis Unveiled," vol. 1, p. 627, what Kulluka
Bhatta says.)
So evident does the antiquity of man become
with every day that even the Church is preparing an honourable surrender and
retreat. The learned Abbe Fabre, professor at the Sorbonne, has categorically
declared
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The ingenious
author of "Atlantis, the Ante-diluvian World," in discussing the
origin of various Grecian and Roman institutions, expresses his conviction that
"the roots of the institutions of to-day reach back to the Miocene
Age." Ay, and further yet, as already stated.
** As we know
them, however. For not only does Geology prove that the British islands have
been four times submerged and re-elevated, but that the straits between them
and Europe were dry land at a remote former epoch.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 747 THE SEVEN SABBATHS.
that
pre-historic palaeontology and archaeology may, without any harm to the
Scriptures, discover in the tertiary beds . . . . . the traces of pre-adamite
man as much as they like. "Since it disregards all creations anterior to
the last deluge but one, (that which produced the diluvium, according to the
Abbe), Bible revelation leaves us free to admit the existence of man in the
grey diluvium, in Pliocene, and even Eocene strata. On the other hand, however,
geologists are not all agreed in regarding the men who inhabited the globe in
these primitive ages as our ancestors.*
The day when the
Church will find that its only salvation lies in the occult interpretation of the
Bible, may not be so far off as some imagine. Already many an abbe and
ecclesiastic has become an ardent Kabalist, and as many appear publicly in the
arena, breaking a lance with Theosophists and Occultists in support of the
metaphysical interpretation of the Bible. But they commence, unfortunately for
them, from the wrong end. They are advised, before they begin to speculate upon
the metaphysical in their Scriptures, to study and master that which relates to
the purely physical -- e.g., its geological and ethnological hints. For such
allusions to the Septenary constitution of the Earth and Man, to the seven
Rounds and Races, abound in the New as in the Old Testaments, and are as
visible as the sun in the heavens to him who reads both symbolically. What do
the laws in chapter xxiii., v. 15, of Leviticus apply to? What is the
philosophy of reason for all such hebdomadic offerings and symbolical
calculations as: "ye shall count . . . . from the morrow after the Sabbath
. . . . that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven Sabbaths shall be
completed" (15), "And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs
without blemish" (18), etc. etc. We shall be contradicted, no doubt, when
we say that all these "wave" and "peace" offerings were in
commemoration of the Seven "Sabbaths" of the mysteries, which
Sabbaths are seven pralayas, between seven manvantaras, or what we call Rounds
-- for "Sabbath" is an elastic word, meaning a period of Rest of
whatever nature, as explained elsewhere (Part II, "Sections on the Septenary.")
And if this is not sufficiently conclusive, then we may turn to the verse which
follows (16), and which adds, "even unto the morrow after the seventh
Sabbath shall ye number fifty days" (forty-nine, 7 x 7, stages of
activity, and forty-nine stages of rest, on the seven globes of the chain, and
then
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Les
origines de la terre et de l'homme," p. 454. To this, Professor N. Joly,
of Toulouse, who quotes the Abbe in his "Man before Metals,"
expresses the hope that M. Fabre will permit him "to differ from him on
this last point," p. 186. So do the Occultists; for though they claim a
vast difference in the physiology and outward appearance of the five races so
far evolved, still they maintain that the present human species has descended
from one and the same primitive stock, evolved from the "divine men"
-- our common ancestors and progenitors.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 748 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
comes the rest
of Sabbath, the fiftieth); after which "ye shall offer a new meat offering
unto the Lord," i.e., ye shall make an offering of your flesh or
"coats of skin," and, divesting yourselves of your bodies, ye shall
remain pure spirits. This law of offering, degraded and materialized with ages,
was an institution that dated from the earliest Atlanteans; it came to the
Hebrews via the "Chaldees," who were the "wise men" of a
caste, not of a nation, a community of great adepts come from their
"Serpent-holes," and who had settled in Babylonia ages before. And if
this interpretation from Leviticus (full of the disfigured laws of Manu) is
found too far-fetched, then turn to Revelation. Whatever interpretation profane
mystics may give to the famous Chapter xvii., with its riddle of the woman in
purple and scarlet; whether Protestants nod at the Roman Catholics, when
reading "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND
ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH," or Roman Catholics glare at the Protestants,
the Occultists pronounce, in their impartiality, that these words have applied
from the first to all and every exoteric Churchianity, that which was the
"ceremonial magic" of old, with its terrible effects, and is now the
harmless (because distorted) farce of ritualistic worship. The
"mystery" of the woman and of the beast, are the symbols of
soul-killing Churchianity and of SUPERSTITION. "The beast that was, and is
not, and yet is." "And here is the Mind which hath wisdom. The seven
heads are seven mountains (seven continents and seven races) on which the woman
sitteth," the symbol of all the exoteric, barbarous, idolatrous faiths
which have covered that symbol "with the blood of the saints and the blood
of the martyrs" who protested and do protest. "And there are seven
Kings (seven races); five are fallen (our fifth race included), and one is (the
fifth continues), and the other (the sixth and the seventh races) is not yet
come. . . . And when he (the race "King") cometh, he must continue a
short space" (v. 10). There are many such Apocalyptic allusions, but the
student has to find them out for himself. These five Kings were mentioned
before.
If the Bible
combines with archaeology and geology to show that human civilization has
passed through three more or less distinct stages, in Europe at least; and if
man, both in America and Europe, as much as in Asia, dates from geological
epochs -- why should not the statements of the Secret Doctrine be taken into
consideration? Is it more philosophical or logical and scientific too, to
disbelieve, with Mr. Albert Gaudry, in Miocene man, while believing that the
famous Thenay flints* "were carved by the Dryopithecus monkey"; or,
with the Occultist, that the anthro-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "The
flints of Thenay bear unmistakable trace of the work of human hands." (G.
de Mortillet, "Promenades au Musee de St. Germain," p. 76.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 749 THE APE LATER THAN MAN.
pomorphous
monkey came ages after man? For if it is once conceded, and even scientifically
demonstrated, that "there was not in the middle of the Miocene epoch a
single species of mammal identical with species now extant" (Albert Gaudry
"Les Enchainements du monde animal dans les temps geologiques" p.
240); and that man was then just as he is now; only taller, and more athletic
than we are,* -- then where is the difficulty? That they could hardly be the
descendants of monkeys, which are themselves not traced before the Miocene
epoch,** is, on the other hand, testified to by several eminent naturalists.
"Thus, in
the savage of quaternary ages who had to fight against the mammoth with stone
weapons, we find all those craniological characters generally considered as the
sign of great intellectual development" (de Quatrefages, "The Human
Species, p. 312.)
Unless man
emerged spontaneously, endowed with all his intellect and wisdom, from his
brainless catarrhine ancestor, he could not have acquired such brain within the
limits of the Miocene period, if we are to believe the learned Abbe Bourgeois
(Vide infra, footnote**).
As to the matter
of giants, though the tallest man hitherto found in Europe among fossils is the
"Mentone man" (6 ft. 8 in.), others may yet be excavated. Nilsson,
quoted by Lubbock, states that "in a tomb of the neolithic age . . . . a
skeleton of extraordinary size was found in 1807," and that it was
attributed to a king of Scotland, Albus McGaldus.
And if in our
own day we occasionally find men and women from 7 ft. to even 9 ft. and 11 ft.
high, this only proves -- on the law of atavism, or the reappearance of
ancestral features of character -- that there was a time when 9 ft. and 10 ft.
was the average height of humanity, even in our latest Indo-European race.
But as the
subject was sufficiently treated elsewhere, we may pass on to the Lemurians and
the Atlanteans, and see what the old Greeks knew of these early races and what
the moderns know now.
The great nation
mentioned by the Egyptian priests, from which descended the forefathers of the
Greeks of the age of Troy, and which, as averred, had been destroyed by the
Atlantic race, was then, as we see, assuredly no race of Palaeolithic savages.
Nevertheless, already in the days of Plato, with the exception of priests and
Initiates, no one seems
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Speaking of
the reindeer hunters of Perigord, Joly says of them that "they were of
great height, athletic, with a strongly built skeleton . . ." etc.
("Man before Metals," p. 353).
** "On the
shores of the lake of Beauce," says the Abbe Bourgeois, "man lived in
the midst of a fauna which completely disappeared (Aceratherium, Tapir,
Mastodon). With the fluviatile sands of Orleanais came the anthropomorphous
monkey (pliopithecus antiquus); therefore, later than man." (See Comptes
Rendus of the "Prehistoric Congress" of 1867 at Paris.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 750 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
to have
preserved any distinct recollection of the preceding races. The earliest
Egyptians had been separated from the latest Atlanteans for ages upon ages;
they were themselves descended from an alien race, and had settled in Egypt
some 400,000 years before,* but their Initiates had preserved all the records.
Even so late as the time of Herodotus, they had still in their possession the
statues of 341 kings who had reigned over their little Atlanto-Aryan Sub-race
(Vide about the latter "Esoteric Buddhism," p. 66, Fifth Edition.) If
one allows only twenty years as an average figure for the reign of each King,
the duration of the Egyptian Empire has to be pushed back, from the day of
Herodotus, about 17,000 years.
Bunsen allowed
the great Pyramid an antiquity of 20,000 years. More modern archaeologists will
not give it more than 5,000, or at the utmost 6,000 years; and generously
concede to Thebes with its hundred gates, 7,000 years from the date of its
foundation. And yet there are records which show Egyptian priests -- Initiates
-- journeying in a North-Westerly direction, by land, via what became later the
Straits of Gibraltar; turning North and travelling through the future
Phoenician settlements of Southern Gaul; then still further North, until
reaching Carnac (Morbihan) they turned to the West again and arrived, still
travelling by land, on the North-Western promontory of the New Continent.**
What was the
object of their long journey? And how far back must we place the date of such visits?
The archaic records show the Initiates of the Second Sub-race of the Aryan
family moving from one land to the other for the purpose of supervising the
building of menhirs and dolmens, of colossal Zodiacs in stone, and places of
sepulchre to serve as receptables for the ashes of generations to come. When
was it? The fact of their crossing from France to Great Britain by land may
give an idea of the date when such a journey could have been performed on terra
firma.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "In
making soundings in the stony soil of the Nile Valley two baked bricks were
discovered, one at the depth of 20, the other at 25 yards. If we estimate the
thickness of the annual deposit formed by the river at 8 inches per century
(more careful calculations have shown no more than from three to five per
century), we must assign to the first of these bricks 12,000 years, and to the
second 14,000 years. By means of analogous calculations, Burmeister supposes
72,000 years to have elapsed since the first appearance of man on the soil of
Egypt, and Draper attributes to the European man, who witnessed the last
glacial epoch, an antiquity of more than 250,000 years." ("Man before
Metals," p. 183.) Egyptian Zodiacs show more than 75,000 years of
observation! (See further.) Note well also that Burmeister speaks only of the
Delta population.
** Or on what
are now the British Islands, which were not yet detached from the main
continent in those days. "The ancient inhabitant of Picardy could pass
into Great Britain without crossing the Channel. The British Isles were united
to Gaul by an isthmus which has since been submerged." ("Man before
Metals," p. 184.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 751 DARWINIANS REJECT THE TRUTH.
It was --
"When the
level of the Baltic and of the North Sea was 400 feet higher than it is now;
when the valley of the Somme was not hollowed to the depth it has now attained;
when Sicily was joined to Africa, Barbary to Spain," when "Carthage,
the Pyramids of Egypt, the palaces of Uxmal and Palenque were not in existence,
and the bold navigators of Tyre and Sidon, who at a later date were to undertake
their perilous voyages along the coasts of Africa, were yet unborn. What we
know with certainty is that European man was contemporaneous with the extinct
species of the quaternary epoch . . . . that he witnessed the upheaval of the
Alps* and the extension of the glaciers, in a word that he lived for thousands
of years before the dawn of the remotest historical traditions . . . . It is
even possible that man was the contemporary of extinct mammalia of species yet
more ancient . . . . of the Elephas meridionalis of the sands of St. Prest . .
. and the Elephas antiquus, assumed to be prior to the elephas primigenius,
since their bones are found in company with carved flints in several English
caves, associated with those of the Rhinoceros hemitaechus and even of the
Machairodus latidens, which is of still earlier date . . . . M. E. Lartet is of
opinion that there is nothing really impossible in the existence of man as
early as the Tertiary period."**
If "there
is nothing impossible" scientifically in the idea, and it may be admitted
that man lived already as early as the Tertiary period, then it is just as well
to remind the reader that Mr. Croll places the beginning of that period
2,500,000 years back (See Croll's "Climate and Time"); but there was
a time when he assigned to it 15,000,000 years.
And if all this
may be said of European man, how great is the antiquity of the Lemuro-Atlantean
and of the Atlanto-Aryan man? Every educated person who follows the progress of
Science, knows how all vestiges of man during the Tertiary period are received.
The calumnies that were poured on Desnoyers in 1863, when he made known to the
Institute of France that he had made a discovery "in the undisturbed
pliocene sands of St. Prest near Chartres, proving the co-existence of man and
the Elephas meridionalis" -- were equal to the occasion. The later
discovery (in 1867) by the Abbe Bourgeois, that man lived in the Miocene epoch,
and the reception it was given at the Pre-historic Con-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* He witnessed
and remembered it too, as "the final disappearance of the largest
continent of Atlantis was an event coincident with the elevation of the
Alps," a master writes (See Esoteric Buddhism p. 70). Pari passu, as one
portion of the dry land of our hemisphere disappeared, some land of the new
continent emerged from the seas. It is on this colossal cataclysm, which lasted
during a period of 150,000 years, that traditions of all the
"Deluges" are built, the Jews building their version on an event
which took place later in "Poseidonis."
** The Antiquity
of the Human Race in "Men before Metals," by M. Joly, Professor at
the Science Faculty of Toulouse, p. 184.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 752 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
gress held at
Brussels in 1872, proves that the average man of Science will never see but
that which he wants to see.*
The modern archeologist,
though speculating ad infinitum upon the dolmens and their builders, knows, in
fact, nothing of them or their origin. Yet, these weird, and often colossal
monuments of unhewn stones -- which consist generally of four or seven gigantic
blocks placed together -- are strewn over Asia, Europe, America, and Africa, in
groups or rows. Stones of enormous size are found placed horizontally and
variously upon two, three, four, and as in Poitou, upon six and seven blocks.
People name them "devil's altars," druidic stones, and giant tombs.
The stones of Carnac in the Morbihan, Brittany -- nearly a mile in length and
numbering 11,000 ranged in eleven rows -- are twin sisters of those at
Stonehenge. The Conical menhir of Loch-Maria-ker in Morbihan, measures twenty
yards in length and nearly two yards across. The Menhir of Champ Dolent (near
St. Malo) rises thirty feet above the ground, and is fifteen feet in depth
below. Such dolmens and prehistoric monuments are met with in almost every
latitude. They are found in the Mediterranean basin; in Denmark (among the
local tumuli from twenty-seven to thirty-five feet in height); in Shetland, and
in Sweden, where they are called ganggriften (or tombs with corridors); in
Germany, where they are known as the giant tombs (Hunengraben); in Spain (see
the dolmen of Antiguera near Malaga), and Africa; in Palestine and Algeria; in
Sardinia (see the Nuraghi and Sepolture dei giganti, or tombs of giants); in
Malabar, in India, where they are called the tombs of the Daityas (giants) and
of the Rakshasas, the men-demons of Lanka; in Russia and Siberia, where they
are known as the Koorgan; in Peru and Bolivia, where they are termed the
chulpas or burial places, etc., etc., etc.
There is no
country from which they are absent. Who built them? Why are they all connected
with Serpents and Dragons, with Alligators and Crocodiles? Because remains of
"palaeolithic man" were, it is thought, found in some of them, and
because in the funeral mounds of America bodies of later races were discovered
with the usual paraphernalia of bone necklaces, weapons, stone and copper urns,
etc., hence they are declared ancient tombs. But surely the two famous mounds
-- one in the Mississippi valley and the other in Ohio -- known respectively as
"the Alligator Mound" and "the Great Serpent
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The scientific
"jury" disagreed, as usual; while de Quatrefages, de Mortillet,
Worsaae, Engelhardt, Waldemar, Schmidt, Capellini, Hamy, and Cartailhac, saw
upon the flints the traces of human handiwork, Steenstrup, Virchow and Desor
refused to do so. Still the majority, if we except some English Scientists, are
for Bourgeois.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 753 STILL MORE ASTOUNDING CONTRADICTIONS.
Mound,"
were never meant for tombs* (Vide infra). Yet one is told authoritatively that
the Mounds, and the Mound or Dolmen Builders, are all "Pelasgic" in
Europe, antecedent to the Incas, in America, yet of "not extremely distant
times." They are built by "no race of Dolmen Builders," which
never existed (opinion of De Mortillet, Bastian, and Westropp) save in the
earlier archeological fancy. Finally Virchow's opinion of the giant tombs of
Germany is now accepted as an axiom:-- "The tombs alone are gigantic, and
not the bones they contain" -- says that German biologist; and archaeology
has but to bow and submit to the decision.**
That no gigantic
skeletons have been hitherto found in the "tombs" is yet no reason to
say there never were the remains of giants in them. Cremation was universal
till a comparatively recent period -- some 80, or 100,000 years ago. The real
giants, moreover, were nearly all drowned with Atlantis. Nevertheless, the
classics, as shown elsewhere, often speak of giant skeletons still excavated in
their day. Besides this, human fossils may be counted on the fingers, as yet.
No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50, or 60,000 years,*** and
man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, ever since the third sub-race
of the Aryan stock, which sub-race -- born and developed in Europe and Asia
Minor under new climates and conditions -- had become European. Since then, as
said, it has steadily been decreasing. It is truer therefore to say, that the
tombs alone are archaic, and not necessarily the bodies of men occasionally
found in them; and that those tombs, since they are gigantic, must have
contained giants,**** or rather the ashes of generations of giants.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* We take the
following description from a scientific work. "The first of these animals
(the alligator) designed with considerable skill, is no less than 250 ft. long.
. . . . The interior is formed of a heap of stones, over which the form has
been moulded in fine stiff clay. The great serpent is represented with open
mouth, in the act of swallowing an egg of which the diameter is 100 ft. in the
thickest part; the body of the animal is wound in graceful curves and the tail
is rolled into a spiral. The entire length of the animal is 1,100 ft. This work
is unique . . . . and there is nothing on the old continent which offers any
analogy to it." Except its symbolism, however, of the Serpent -- the cycle
of Time -- swallowing Kosmos, the egg.
** It might be
better, perhaps, for FACT had we more Specialists in Science and fewer
"authorities" on universal questions. One never heard that Humboldt
gave authoritative and final decisions in the matter of polypi, or the nature
of an excrescence.
*** 57,000 years is the date assigned by Dr.
Dowler to the remains of the human skeleton, found buried beneath four ancient
forests at New Orleans on the banks of the Mississippi river.
**** Murray says
of the Mediterranean barbarians that they marvelled at the prowess of the
Atlanteans. "Their physical strength was extraordinary (witness indeed
their cyclopean buildings), the earth shaking sometimes under their tread. Whatever
they did, was done speedily. . . . . . They were wise and communicated their
wisdom to men" (Mythology p. 4).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Muller. Granting
that the Turanian races were typified by the dwarfs (Dwergar), and that a dark,
round-headed, and dwarfish race was driven northward by the fair-faced
Scandinavians, or AEsir, the gods being like unto men, there still exists
neither in history nor any other scientific work any anthropological proof
whatever of the existence in time or space of a race of giants. Yet that such
exist, relatively and de facto side by side with dwarfs, Schweinfurth can
testify. The Nyam-Nyam of Africa are regular dwarfs, while their next
neighbours (several tribes of comparatively fair-complexioned Africans) are
giants when confronted with the Nyam-Nyams, and very tall even among Europeans,
for their women are all above 6 1/2 feet high. (Vide Schweinfurth's latest
works.)
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)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 755 RACES OF GIANTS.
of old; and
their folklore, most of which has served for the foundation of national
histories, their oldest songs, and their most archaic traditions, speak of the
giants of old. Thus we may safely reject the modern theory that would make of
the Titans mere symbols standing for cosmic forces. They were real living men,
whether twenty or only twelve feet high. Even the Homeric heroes, who, of
course, belonged to a far more recent period in the history of the races,
appear to have wielded weapons of a size and weight beyond the strength of the
strongest men of modern times.
"Not twice
ten men the mighty bulk could raise,
Such men as live
in these degenerate days."
If the fossil footprints
from Carson, Indiana, U.S.A., are human, they indicate gigantic men. Of their
genuineness there can remain no doubt. It is to be deplored that the modem and
scientific evidence for gigantic men should rest on footprints alone. Over and
over again, the skeletons of hypothetical giants have been identified with
those of elephants and mastodons. But all such blunders before the days of
geology, and even the traveller's tales of Sir John Mandeville, who says that
he saw giants 56 feet high, in India, only show that belief in the existence of
giants has never, at any time, died out of the thoughts of men.
That which is
known and accepted is, that several races of gigantic men have existed and left
distinct traces. In the journal of the Anthropological Institute (Vol. 1871,
art. by Dr. C. Carter Blake) such a race is shown as having existed at Palmyra
and possibly in Midian, exhibiting cranial forms quite different from those of
the Jews. It is not improbable that another such race existed in Samaria, and
that the mysterious people who built the stone circles in Galilee, hewed
neolithic flints in the Jordan valley and preserved an ancient Semitic language
quite distinct from the square Hebrew character -- was of a very large stature.
The English translations of the Bible can never be relied upon, even in their
modern revised forms. They tell us of the Nephilim translating the word by
"giants," and further adding that they were "hairy" men,
probably the large and powerful prototypes of the later satyrs so eloquently
described by the patristic fancy; some of the Church Fathers assuring their
admirers and followers that they had themselves seen these "Satyrs"
-- some alive, others pickled and preserved. The 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Kala). Pliny
called them the "Magi of the Gauls and Britons." But they were more
than that. The author of "Indian Antiquities" finds much affinity
between the Druids and the Brahmins of India. Dr. Borlase points to a close
analogy between them and the Magi of Persia*; others will see an identity
between them and the Orphic priesthood of Thrace: simply because they were
connected, in their esoteric teachings, with the universal Wisdom Religion, and
thus presented affinities with the exoteric worship of all.
Like the Hindus,
the Greeks and Romans (we speak of the Initiates), the Chaldees and the
Egyptians, the Druids believed in the doctrine of a succession of worlds, as also
in that of seven "creations" (of new continents) and transformations
of the face of the earth, and in a seven-fold night and day for each earth or
globe (See "Esoteric Buddhism"). Wherever the Serpent with the egg is
found, there this tenet was surely present. Their Dracontia are a proof of it.
This belief was so universal that, if we seek for it in the esotericism of
various religions, we shall discover it in all. We shall find it among the
Aryan Hindus and Mazdeans, the Greeks, the Latins, and even among the old Jews
and early Christians, whose modern stocks
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* But the Magi
of Persia were never Persians -- not even Chaldeans. They came from a far-off
land, the Orientalists being of opinion that the said land was Media. This may
be so, but from what part of Media? To this we receive no answer.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 757 PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY AGREE.
hardly
comprehend now that which they read in their Scriptures. See what Seneca says
in Epistle 9, and Quaest. Nat. III., c., ult.: "The world being melted and
having re-entered the bosom of Jupiter, this god continues for some time to
remain absorbed in himself and concealed, wholly immersed in contemplation.
After which a new world springs from him. . . . An innocent race of men and
animals are produced anew . . . etc." Then again when speaking of periodical
mundane dissolution involving universal death, he (Seneca) says that "when
the laws of nature shall be buried in ruin, and the last day of the world shall
come, the southern pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa,
and the North pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. The
affrighted sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven falling to
decay shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution
shall equally seize upon all deities, who thus shall return into their original
chaos" (Quoted in "Book of God," p. 160.)
One might
imagine oneself reading the Puranic account by Parasara of the great Pralaya.
It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the
kind? It has, we say. Let the reader open any English Bible and read chapter
iii. of the Second Epistle of Peter, from verse iii. till the xivth, and he
will find there the same ideas. . . . "There shall come in the last days
scoffers . . . saying, 'where is the promise of his coming? . . . . Since the
fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of
creation.' For, they are ignorant . . . . that by the word of God the heavens
were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby
the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens
and the earth that are now, are reserved unto the fire . . . . wherein the
heavens . . . . shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent
heat . . . . we nevertheless look for new heavens and new earth, etc.,
etc." If the interpreters chose to see in this a reference to creation,
the deluge, and the promised coming of Christ, when they will live in a new
Jerusalem in heaven, this is no fault of "Peter." What the writer of
the Epistles meant was the destruction of this Fifth Race of ours by
subterranean fires and inundations, and the appearance of new continents for
the Sixth Root-Race. For the writers of these Epistles were all learned in
symbology if not in the sciences.
It was mentioned
elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our
"chain" was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from
the first Zarathustra. It is time to prove it to those Parsis who have lost the
key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the Avesta the earth is considered
septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. This is regarded by Dr.
Geiger, as an incongruity, for the following reasons, which he calls
discrepancies: the Avesta speaks
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."* 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 Gathas already speak of the "septempartite
earth." (Bumi haptaiti, Yasna, xxxii., 3.) For, "according to the
Parsee Scriptures, the seven Karshvars are to be considered as completely
disconnected parts of the earth," which they surely are. For,
"between them there flows the Ocean, so that it is impossible, as stated
in several passages, to pass from one Karshvar to another."** The
"Ocean" is space, of course, for the latter was called "Waters
of Space" before it was known as Ether. Moreover, the word Karshvar is
consistently rendered by Dwipa, and especially Qaniratha by Jambudwipa
("Neriosengh, the translator of the Yasna.")*** But this fact is not
taken into account by the Orientalists, and therefore we find even such a
learned Zoroastrian and Parsi by birth as the translator of Dr. Geiger's work
passing unnoticed and without a word of comment sundry remarks of the former on
the "incongruities" of this kind abounding in the Mazdean Scriptures.
One of such "incongruities" and "coincidences" concerns the
similarity of the Zoroastrian with the Indian tenet with regard to the seven
Dwipas (islands, or continents, rather) as met with in the Puranas, namely: "The
Dwipas form concentric rings, which, separated by the ocean, surround Jambu
Dvipa, which is situated in the centre" (p. 130, vol. I.), and,
"according to the Iranian view, the Karshvar Qaniratha is likewise
situated in the centre of the rest . . . . each of them (the other six
Karshvars) is a
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* p. 129,
"Civilization of the Eastern Iranians in Ancient Times."
** Cf., e.g.,
Vol. I., 4, of the Pahlavi Translation; Bdh. xxi., 2-3.
*** Footnote by
Darab Dastur Peshotan Sanjana, B.A., the translator of Dr. Wilhelm Geiger's
work on the "Civilization of the Eastern Iranians."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 759 THE MAZDEAN VIEW OF THE SEVEN EARTHS.
peculiar
individual space, and so they group themselves round (above) Qaniratha"
(Ibid. p. 131). Now Qaniratha is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator,
"the country inhabited by the Iranian tribes," and the other names do
not mean "the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South,
West, and East" (p. 132), but our globe or Earth. For that which is meant
by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that "two
Vorubarshti and Voru-Zarshti lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu and
Tradadhafshu, in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West," is
simply the very graphic and accurate description of the "chain" of
our planet, the Earth, represented in the book of Dzyan (11) thus:
[[diagram]]
[[text of
diagram]]
N
(North) (North)
(West) Arzahi W
E Savahi (East)
(South)
Tradadhafshu S Vidadhafshu (South)
Qaniratha.
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.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Dr. Kenealy
quotes, in his "Book of God," Vallancey, who says "I had not
been a week landed in Ireland from Gibraltar, where I had studied Hebrew and
Chaldaic under Jews of various countries, when I heard a peasant girl say to
boor standing by her "Teach an Maddin Nag" (Behold the morning star),
pointing to the planet Venus, the Maddena Nag of the Chaldeans."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
These tenets
came to the Fifth Race Aryans from their predecessors of the Fourth Race, the
Atlanteans. They had piously preserved the teachings, which told them how their
parent Root-Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the
acquisition of superhuman powers, had been gradually gliding toward its end.
Those records reminded them of the giant intellect of the preceding races as
well as of their giant size. One finds the repetition of those records in every
age of history, in almost every old fragment which has descended to us from
antiquity.
AElian preserved
an extract from Theophrastus written during the days of Alexander the Great. It
is a dialogue between Midas, the Phrygian, and Silenus. The former is told of a
continent that had existed in times of old, so immense, that Asia, Europe and
Africa seemed like poor islands compared with it. It was the last to produce
animals and plants of gigantic magnitudes. There, said Silenus, men grew to
double the size of the tallest man in his (the narrator's) time, and they lived
to twice as old an age. They had wealthy cities with temples, and one of such
(cities) held more than a million of inhabitants in it, gold and silver being
found there in great abundance. . . .
Grote's
suggestion that Atlantis was but a myth arisen from a mirage -- clouds on a
dazzling sky taking the appearance of islands on a golden sea -- is too
disingenuous to be even noticed.
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* There was a
time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion, and when
they were of "one lip." "All the religions of the Earth were at
first One and emanated from one centre," says Faber very truly.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 761 WHO, OR WHAT WILL BE DENIED NEXT?
event which he
located on one comparatively small island 3000 stadia long by 2000 wide; (or
about 350 miles by 200, which is about the size of Ireland), whereas the
priests spoke of Atlantis as a continent vast as "all Asia and Lybia"
put together. But, however altered in its general aspect, Plato's narrative
bears the impress of truth upon it.* It was not he who invented it, at any
rate, since Homer, who preceded him by many centuries, also speaks of the
Atlantes (who are our Atlanteans) and of their island in his Odyssey. Therefore
the tradition was older than the bard of Ulysses. The Atlantes and the
Atlantides of mythology are based upon the Atlantes and the Atlantides of
history. Both Sanchoniathon and Diodorus have preserved the histories of those
heroes and heroines, however much these accounts may have become mixed up with
the mythical element.
In our own day
we witness the stupendous fact that such comparatively recent personages as
Shakespeare and William Tell are all but denied, an attempt being made to show
one to be a nom de plume, and the other a person who never existed. What wonder
then, that the two powerful races -- the Lemurians and the Atlanteans -- have
been merged into and identified, in time, with a few half mythical peoples, who
all bore the same patronymic?
Herodotus speaks
of the Atlantes -- a people of Western Africa which gave its name to Mount
Atlas; who were vegetarians, and "whose sleep was never disturbed by
dreams"; and who, moreover, "daily cursed the sun at his rising and
at his setting because his excessive heat scorched and tormented them."
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Plato's
veracity has been so unwarrantably impeached by even such friendly critics as
Professor Jowett, when the "story of Atlantis" is discussed, that it
seems well to cite the testimony of a specialist on the subject. It is
sufficient to place mere literary cavillers in a very ridiculous position:--
"If our
knowledge of Atlantis was more thorough, it would no doubt appear that in every
instance wherein the people of Europe accord with the people of America, they
were both in accord with the people of Atlantis. . . . . It will be seen that
in every case where Plato gives us information in this respect as to Atlantis,
we find this agreement to exist. It existed in architecture, sculpture,
navigation, engraving, writing, an established priesthood, the mode of worship,
agriculture, and the construction of roads and canals; and it is reasonable to
suppose that the same correspondence extended down to all the minor
details." (Donnelly, "Atlantis," p. 194.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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,* Atlas is
said to have been compelled to leave the surface of the earth, and join his
brother Iapetos in the depths of Tartarus. Sir Theodore Martin is right in
interpreting this allegory as meaning, Atlas "standing on the solid floor
of the inferior hemisphere of the universe and thus carrying at the same time
the disc of the earth and the celestial vault -- the solid envelope of the
superior hemisphere" . . . (Memoires de l'Academie des
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Christians
ought not to object to this doctrine of the periodical destruction of
continents by fire and water; for St. Peter speaks of the earth "standing
out of the water, and in the water, which earth, being overflowed, perished,
but is now reserved unto fire"; (See also the "Lives of Alchemystical
Philosophers," p. 4, London, 1815).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]]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 Grece Antique, expresses a doubt as to the correctness of
Pierron's translation of the Homeric word [[echei]] by sustinet, as it is not
possible to see "how Atlas can support or bear at once several pillars
situated in various localities." If Atlas were an individual it would be
an awkward translation. But, as he personifies a continent in the west said to support
heaven and earth at once (AEschylus, "Prometheus Vinctus," 351, 429,
etc.) -- i.e., the feet of the giant tread the earth while his shoulders
support the celestial vault, an allusion to the gigantic peaks of the Lemurian
and Atlantean continents -- the epithet "supporter" becomes very
correct. The term "conservator" for the Greek word [[echei]], which
Decharme, following Sir Theodore Martin, understands as meaning [[phulassei]]
and [[epimeleitai]], does not render the same sense.
The conception
was certainly due to the gigantic mountain chain running along the terrestrial
border (or disc). These mountain peaks plunged their roots into the very bottom
of the seas, while they raised their heads heavenward, their summits being lost
in the clouds. The ancient continents had more mountains than valleys on them.
Atlas, and the Teneriffe Peak, now two of the dwarfed relics of the two lost
continents, were thrice as lofty during the day of Lemuria and twice as high in
that of Atlantis. Thus, the Lybians called Mount Atlas "the pillar of
Heaven," according to Herodotus (IV., 184), and Pindar qualified the later
AEtna as "the celestial pillar" (Pyth. 1, 20; Decharme, 315). Atlas
was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria, when the African continent
had not yet been raised. It is the sole Western relic which survives,
independent, of the continent on which the Third Race was born, developed and
fell,* for Australia is now part of the Eastern continent. Proud Atlas,
according to esoteric tradition, having sunk one third of its size into the
waters, its two parts remained as an heirloom of Atlantis.
This again was
known to the priests of Egypt and to Plato himself, the solemn oath of secrecy,
which extended even to the mysteries of Neo-Platonism, alone preventing the
whole truth from being told.** So
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* This does not
mean that Atlas is the locality where it fell, for this took place in Northern
and Central Asia; but that Atlas formed part of the continent.
** Had not
Diocletian burned the esoteric works of the Egyptians in 296, together with
their books on alchemy -- "[[peri chumeias kai chrusou]]"; Caesar
700,000 rolls at Alexandria, and Leo Isaurus 300,000 at Constantinople (viiith
cent.); and the Mahomedans all they could lay their sacrilegious hands on --
the world might know to-day more of Atlantis than it does. For Alchemy had its
birth-place in Atlantis during the Fourth Race, and had only its renaissance in
Egypt.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 Phoenicians as being the only
navigators in the seas which wash the Western coast of Africa; and who did it
with such mystery that very often they sunk their own vessels to make the too
inquisitive foreigners lose all trace of them.
There are those
Orientalists and historians -- and they form the majority -- who, while feeling
quite unmoved at the rather crude language of the Bible, and some of the events
narrated in it, show great disgust at the immorality in the pantheons of India
and Greece.* We may be told that before them Euripides, Pindar, and even Plato,
express the same; that they too felt irritated with the tales invented
--"those miserable stories of the poets," as Euripides expresses it
([[haoidon hoide dustenoi logoi]], Hercules furens, 1346, Dindorf's Edition).
But there may
have been another reason for this, perhaps. To those who knew that there was
more than one key to theogonic symbolism, it was a mistake to have expressed it
in a language so crude and misleading. For if the educated and learned
philosopher could discern the kernel of wisdom under the coarse rind of the
fruit, and knew that the latter concealed the greatest laws and truths of
psychic and physical nature, as well as the origin of all things -- not so with
the uninitiated profane. For him the dead letter was religion; the
interpretation -- sacrilege. And this dead letter could neither edify nor make
him more perfect, seeing that such an example was given him by his gods. But
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Professor Max
Muller's Lectures -- "on the Philosophy of Mythology" -- are before
us. We read his citations of Herakleitos (460 B.C.), declaring that Homer
deserved "to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged;" and of
Xenophanes "holding Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular
superstitions of Greece. . . . " and for ascribing "to the gods
whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men . . . unlawful acts, such as
theft, adultery, and fraud." Finally the Oxford Professor quotes from
Professor Jowett's translation of Plato, where the latter tells Adaimantos
(Republic) that "the young man (in the State) should not be told that in
committing the worst of crimes, he is far from doing anything outrageous, and
that he may chastise his father (as Zeus did with Kronos) . . in any manner
that he likes, and in this will only be following the example of the first and
greatest of the gods. . . In my opinion, these stories are not fit to be
repeated." To this Dr. Max Muller observes that "the Greek religion
was clearly a national and traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both
the advantages and disadvantages of this form of religious belief"; while
the Christian religion is "an historical and, to a great extent, an
individual religion, and it possesses the advantage of an authorised codex and
of a settled system of faith" (p. 349). So much the worse if it is
"historical," for surely Lot's incident with his daughters would only
gain, were it "allegorical."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 765 THE GOD-BEARING LAND.
to the
philosopher -- especially the Initiate -- Hesiod's theogony is as historical as
any history can be. Plato accepts it as such, and gives out as much of its
truths as his pledges permitted him.
The fact that
the Atlantes claimed Uranos for their first king, and that Plato commences his
story of Atlantis by the division of the great continent by Neptune, the
grandson of Uranos, shows that there were continents and kings before Atlantis.
For Neptune, to whose lot that continent fell, finds on a small island only one
human couple made of clay (i.e., the first physical human man, whose origin
began with the last sub-races of the Third Root-Race). It is their daughter
Clito that the god marries, and it is his eldest son Atlas who receives for his
part the mountain and the continent which was called by his name.
Now all the gods
of Olympus, as well as those of the Hindu Pantheon and the Rishis, were the
septiform personations (1) of the noumena of the intelligent Powers of nature;
(2) of Cosmic Forces; (3) of celestial bodies; (4) of gods or Dhyan Chohans;
(5) of psychic and spiritual powers; (6) of divine kings on earth (or the
incarnations of the gods); and (7) of terrestrial heroes or men. The knowledge
how to discern among these seven forms the one that is meant, belonged at all
times to the Initiates, whose earliest predecessors had created this symbolical
and allegorical system.
Thus while
Uranos (or the host representing this celestial group) reigned and ruled over
the Second Race and their (then) Continent; Kronos or Saturn governed the
Lemurians; and Jupiter, Neptune* and others fought in the allegory for
Atlantis, which was the whole earth in the day of the Fourth Race. Poseidonis,
or the (last) island of Atlantis "the third step of Idaspati" (or
Vishnu) in the mystic language of the secret books -- lasted till about 12,000
years ago.** The Atlantes of Diodorus were right in claiming that it was their
country, the region surrounding Mount Atlas, where "the gods were
born" -- i.e., "incarnated." But it was after their fourth
incarnation that they became, for the first time, human Kings and rulers.
Diodorus speaks
of Uranos as the first king of Atlantis, confusing, either consciously or
otherwise, the continents; but, as shown, Plato indirectly corrects the
statement. The first astronomical teacher of men was Uranos, because he is one
of the seven Dhyan Chohans of that second period or Race. Thus also in the
second Manvantara
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Neptune or
Poseidon is the Hindu Idaspati, identical with Narayana (the mover on the
waters) or Vishnu, and like this Hindu god he is shown crossing the whole
horizon in three steps. Idaspati means also "the master of the
waters."
** Bailly's
assertion that the 9,000 years mentioned by the Egyptian priests do not
represent "solar years" is groundless. Bailly knew nothing of geology
and its calculations; otherwise he would have spoken differently.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 766 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
(that of
Swarochisha), among the seven sons of the Manu, the presiding gods or Rishis of
that race, we find Jyotis,* the teacher of astronomy (Jyotisha), one of the
names of Brahma. And thus also the Chinese revere Tien (or the sky, Ouranos),
and name him as their first teacher of astronomy. Uranos gave birth to the
Titans of the Third Race, and it is they who (personified by Saturn-Kronos)
mutilated him. For as it is the Titans who fell into generation, when "creation
by will was superseded by physical procreation," they needed Uranos no
more.
And here a short
digression must be permitted and pardoned. In consequence of the last scholarly
production of Mr. Gladstone in the Nineteenth Century, "The Greater Gods
of Olympos," the ideas of the general public about Greek Mythology have
been still further perverted and biassed. Homer is credited with an inner
thought, which is regarded by Mr. Gladstone as "the true key to the
Homeric conception," whereas this "key" was merely a blind.
Poseidon "is indeed essentially of the earth earthy . . . . strong and
self-asserting, sensual and intensely jealous and vindictive," -- but this
is because he symbolises the Spirit of the Fourth Root-Race, the ruler of the
Seas, that race which lives above the surface of the seas ([[limne]], Il.
xxiv., 79), which is composed of the giants, the children of Eurymedon, the
race which is the father of Polyphemus, the Titan and one-eyed Cyclops. Though
Zeus reigns over the Fourth Race, it is Poseidon who rules, and who is the true
key to the triad of the Kronid Brothers and to our human races. Poseidon and
Nereus are one: the former the ruler or spirit of Atlantis before the beginning
of its submersion, the latter, after. Neptune is the titanic strength of the
living race; Nereus, its spirit reincarnated in the subsequent Fifth or Aryan
Race: and this is what the great Greek scholar of England has not yet
discovered, or even dimly perceived. And yet he makes many observations upon
the "artfulness" of Homer, who never names Nereus, at whose
designation we arrive . . . . only through the patronymic of the Nereids!
Thus the
tendency of even the most erudite Hellenists is to confine their speculations
to the exoteric images of mythology and to lose sight of their inner meaning:
and it is remarkably illustrated in the case of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone,
as we have shown. While almost the most conspicuous figure of our age as a
statesman, he is at the same time one of the most cultured scholars England has
given birth to. Grecian literature has been the loving study of his life, and
he has found time amid the bustle of public affairs to enrich contemporary
literature with contributions to Greek scholarship which will make his name
famous through coming generations. At the same time, as his sincere
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* See Matsya
Purana, which places him among the seven Prajapatis of the period.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Timaeus and Critias, Plato says, that the plain surrounding the city was itself
surrounded by mountain chains. . . . . And the plain was smooth and level, and
of an oblong shape, lying north and south, three thousand stadia in one direction
and two thousand in the other. . . . . They surrounded the plain by an enormous
canal or dike, 101 feet deep, 606 feet broad, and 1,250 miles in length.
Now in other
places the entire size of the island of Poseidonis is given as about the same
as that assigned here to the "plain around the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
Celaeno. This ethnologically, as they are credited with having married gods and
with having become the mothers of famous heroes, the founders of many nations
and cities. Astronomically, the Atlantides have become the seven Pleiades (?).
In occult science the two are connected with the destinies of nations, those
destinies being shaped by the past events of their early lives according to
Karmic law.
Three great
nations claimed in antiquity a direct descent from the kingdom of Saturn or
Lemuria (confused already several thousands of years before our era with
Atlantis): and these were the Egyptians, the Phoenicians (Vide Sanchoniathon),
and the old Greeks (Vide Diodorus, after Plato). But the oldest civilized
country of Asia -- India -- can be shown to claim the same descent likewise.
Sub-races guided by Karmic law or destiny repeat unconsciously the first steps
of their respective mother-races. As the comparatively fair Brahmins have come
-- when invading India with its dark-coloured Dravidians -- from the North, so
the Aryan Fifth Race must claim its origin from northern regions. The occult
sciences show that the founders (the respective groups of the seven Prajapatis)
of the Root Races have all been connected with the Pole Star. In the Commentary
we find:--
"He who
understands the age of Dhruva* who measures 9090 mortal years, will understand
the times of the pralayas, the final destiny of nations, O Lanoo."
Moreover there
must have been a good reason why an Asiatic nation should locate its great
progenitors and saints in the Ursa Major, a northern constellation. It is
70,000 YEARS, HOWEVER, SINCE THE POLE OF THE EARTH POINTED TO THE FURTHER END
OF URSA MINOR'S TAIL; and many more thousand years since the seven Rishis could
have been identified with the constellation of Ursa Major.
The Aryan race
was born and developed in the far north, though after the sinking of the
continent of Atlantis its tribes emigrated further south into Asia. Hence
Prometheus is son of Asia, and Deukalion, his son, the Greek Noah -- he who
created men out of the stones of mother
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The equivalent
of this name is given in the original.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 769 THE SONS OF COELUS 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.*
Greece had her
Hyperborean as well as her Southern Apollo. Thus nearly all the gods of Egypt,
Greece, and Phoenicia, as well as those of other Pantheons, are of a northern
origin and originated in Lemuria, towards the close of the Third Race, after
its full physical and physiological evolution had been completed.** All the
"fables" of Greece were built on historical facts, if that history
had only passed unadulterated by myths to posterity. The "one-eyed"
Cyclopes, the giants fabled as the sons of Coelus and Terra -- three in number,
according to Hesiod -- were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the
"one-eye" referring to the Wisdom eye***; for the two front eyes were
fully developed as physical organs only in the beginning of the Fourth Race.
The allegory of Ulysses, whose companions were devoured while the king of
Ithaca was saved by putting out with a fire-brand the eye of Polyphemus, is
based upon the psycho-physiological atrophy of the "third" eye.
Ulysses belongs to the cycle of the heroes of the Fourth Race, and, though a
"sage" in the sight of the latter, must have been a profligate in the
opinion of the pastoral Cyclopes.**** His adventure with the latter -- a savage
gigantic race, the antithesis of cultured civilization in the Odyssey -- is an
allegorical record of the gradual passage from the Cyclopean civilization of
stone and colossal buildings to the more sensual and physical culture of the
Atlanteans, which finally caused the last of
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Deukalion is
said to have brought the worship of Adonis and Osiris into Phoenicia. Now the
worship is that of the Sun, lost and found again in its astronomical
significance. It is only at the Pole where the Sun dies out for such a length
of time as six months, for in latitude 68 [[degrees]] it remains dead only for
forty days, as in the festival of Osiris. The two worships were born in the
north of Lemuria, or on that continent of which Asia was a kind of broken
prolongation, and which stretched up to the Polar regions. This is well shown
by de Gebelin's "Allegories d'Orient," p. 246, and by Bailly; though
neither Hercules nor Osiris are solar myths, save in one of their seven
aspects.
** The
Hyperboreans, now regarded as mythical, were described (Herod, IV., 33-35; Pausanias,
1, 31, 2; V., 7, 8; ad X., 5, 7, 8) as the beloved priests and servants of the
gods, and of Apollo chiefly.
*** The Cyclopes
are not the only "one-eyed" representatives in tradition. The
Arimaspes were a Scythian people, and were also credited with but one eye.
(Geographie ancienne, Vol. II, p. 321.) It is they whom Apollo destroyed with
his shafts. (See supra.)
**** Ulysses was
wrecked on the isle of AEaea, where Circe changed all his companions into pigs
for their voluptuousness; and after that he was thrown into Ogygia, the island
of Calypso, where for some seven years he lived with the nymph in illicit
connection (Odyssey and elsewhere). Now Calypso was a daughter of Atlas (Odys.
Book XII.), and all the traditional ancient versions, when speaking of the Isle
of Ogygia, say that it was very distant from Greece, and right in the middle of
the ocean: thus identifying it with Atlantis.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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. Poetique," Book ii. c. 15).
Cosmically and astronomically this Hyperborean god is the Sun personified,
which during the course of the sidereal year (25,868 y.) changes the climates
on the earth's surface, making of tropical, frigid regions, and vice versa.
Psychically and spiritually his significance is far more important. As Mr.
Gladstone pertinently remarks in his "Greater Gods of Olympos,"
"the qualities of Apollo (jointly with Athene) are impossible to be accounted
for without repairing to sources, which lie beyond the limit of the traditions
most commonly explored for the elucidation of the Greek mythology"
(Nineteenth Century, July, 1887.)
The history of
Latona (Leto), Apollo's mother, is most pregnant in various meanings. Astronomically,
Latona is the polar region and the night, giving birth to the Sun, Apollo,
Phoebus, etc. She is born in the Hyperborean countries wherein all the
inhabitants were priests of her son, celebrating his resurrection and descent
to their country every nineteen years at the renewal of the lunar cycle (Diod.
Sic. II. 307). Latona is the Hyperborean Continent, and its race --
geologically.*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* To make a difference
between Lemuria and Atlantis, the ancient writers referred to the latter as the
northern or Hyperborean Atlantis, and to the former as the southern. Thus
Apollodorus says (Mythology, Book II.): "The golden apples carried away by
Hercules are not, as some think, in Lybia; they are in the Hyperborean
Atlantis." The Greeks naturalised all the gods they borrowed and made
Hellenes of them, and the moderns helped them. Thus also the mythologists have
tried to make of Eridan the river Po, in Italy. In the myth of Phaeton it is
said that at his death his sisters dropped hot tears which fell into Eridan and
were changed into amber! Now amber is found only in the northern seas, in the
Baltic. Phaeton, meeting with his death while carrying heat to the frozen stars
of the boreal regions, awakening at the Pole the Dragon made rigid by cold, and
being hurled down into the Eridan, is an allegory referring directly to the
changes of climate in those distant times when, from a frigid zone, the polar
lands had become a country with a moderate and warm climate. The usurper of the
functions of the sun, Phaeton, being hurled into the Eridan by Jupiter's
thunderbolt, is an allusion to the second change that took place in those
regions when, once more, the land where "the magnolia blossomed"
became the desolate forbidding land of the farthest north and eternal ices.
This allegory covers then the events of two pralayas; and if well understood
ought to be a demonstration of the enormous antiquity of the human races.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 771 THE CHILDREN OF NIOBE.
When the
astronomical meaning cedes its place to the spiritual and divine -- Apollo and
Athene transforming themselves into the form of birds, the symbol and glyph of
the higher divinities and angels -- then the bright god assumes divine creative
powers. Apollo becomes the personification of Seership, when he sends the
astral double of AEneas to the battle field (II. 431-53), and has the gift of
appearing to his Seers without being visible to other persons present --
(Iliad, xvii., 322-36) -- a gift, however, shared by every high Adept.
The King of the
Hyperboreans, was, therefore, the son of Boreas, the north-wind, and the High
Priest of Apollo. The quarrel of Latona with Niobe (the Atlantean race) -- the
mother of seven sons and seven daughters personifying the seven sub-races of
the Fourth Race and their seven branches (see Apollodorus for this number) --
allegorizes the history of the two continents. The wrath of "the sons of
god," or of "Will and Yoga," at seeing the steady degradation of
the Atlanteans was great (See "The Sons of God and the Sacred Island");
and the destruction of the "children of Niobe" by the children of
Latona -- Apollo and Diana, the deities of light, wisdom and purity, or the Sun
and Moon astronomically, whose influence causes changes in the earth's axis,
deluges and other cosmic cataclysms -- is thus very clear.* The fable about the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* So occult and
mystic is one of the aspects of Latona that she is made to reappear even in
Revelation (xii.) as the woman clothed with the Sun (Apollo) and the Moon (Diana)
under her feet, who being with child "cries, travailing in birth, pained
to be delivered." A great red Dragon, etc., stands before the woman ready
to devour the child. She brings forth the man child who was to rule all nations
with a rod of iron, and who was caught unto the throne of God (the Sun). The
woman fled to the wilderness still pursued by the Dragon, who flees again, and
casts out of his mouth water as a flood, when the earth helped the woman and
swallowed the flood; and the Dragon went to make war with the remnant of her
seed who keep the commandment of God, etc. (See xii., 1, 17.) Anyone, who reads
the allegory of Latona pursued by the revenge of jealous Juno, will recognise
the identity of the two versions. Juno sends Python, the Dragon, to persecute
and destroy Latona and devour her babe. The latter is Apollo, the Sun, for
"the man-child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron" of
Revelation, is surely not the meek "Son of God," Jesus, but the
physical Sun, "who rules all nations"; the Dragon being the North
Pole, gradually chasing the early Lemurians from the lands which became more
and more Hyperborean and unfit to be inhabited by those who were fast
developing into physical men, for they now had to deal with the climatic
variations. The Dragon will not allow Latona "to bring forth" -- (the
Sun to appear). "She is driven from heaven, and finds no place where she
can bring forth," until Neptune (the ocean), moved with pity, makes
immovable the floating isle of Delos (the nymph Asteria, hitherto hiding from
Jupiter under the waves of the ocean) on which Latona finds refuge and where
the bright god [[Delios]] is born, the god, who no sooner appears than he kills
Python, the cold and frost of the Arctic region, in whose deadly coils all life
becomes extinct. In other words, Latona-Lemuria is transformed into
Niobe-Atlantis, over which her son Apollo, or the Sun, reigns -- with an iron
rod, truly, since Herodotus makes the Atlantes curse his too great heat. This
allegory is reproduced in its other mystic meaning (another of the seven keys)
in the [[Footnote continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 ash-wood and who had hearts harder than
diamond. Clad in bronze from head to foot they passed their lives in fighting.
Monstrous in size, endowed with a terrible strength, invincible arms and hands
descended from their shoulders, says the poet (Hesiod, in oper. and dieb. v.
143). Such were the giants of the first physical races. The Iranians have a
reference to the later Atlanteans in Yasna ix. 15. Tradition maintains that the
"Sons of God," or the great Initiates of the Sacred Island, took advantage
of the Deluge, to rid the earth of all the Sorcerers among the Atlanteans. The
said verse addresses Zoroaster as one of the "Sons of God." -- It
says: "Thou, O Zarathustra, didst make all demons (i.e., Sorcerers), who
before roamed the world in human forms, conceal themselves in the earth"
(i.e., helped them to get submerged).
The Lemurians,
as also the early Atlanteans, were divided into two distinct classes -- the
"Sons of Night" or Darkness, and the "Sons of the Sun," or
Light. The old books tell us of terrible battles between the two, when the
former, leaving their land of Darkness, from whence the Sun departed for long
months, descended from their inhospitable regions and "tried to wrench the
lord of light" from their better favoured brothers of the equatorial
regions. We may be told that the ancients knew nothing of the long night of six
months' duration in the Polar regions. Even Herodotus, more learned
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] chapter just cited of the Apocalypse. Latona
became a powerful goddess indeed, and saw her son receive worship (solar
worship) in almost every fane of antiquity. In his occult aspect Apollo is
patron of Number 7. He is born on the seventh of the month, and the swans of
Myorica swim seven times around Delos singing that event; he is given seven
chords to his Lyre -- the seven rays of the sun and the seven forces of nature.
But this only in the astronomical meaning, whereas the above is purely
geological.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 773 THE CYCLES OF TIME.
than the rest,
only mentions a people who slept for six months in the year, and remained awake
the other half. Yet the Greeks knew well that there was a country in the north
where the year was divided into a day and night of six months' duration each,
for Pliny says so in his Fourth Book, c. 12. They speak of the Cimmerians and
of the Hyperboreans, and draw a distinction between the two. The former
inhabited the Palus Maeotis (between 45 [[degrees]] and 50 [[degrees]]
latitude). Plutarch explains that they were but a small portion of a great
nation driven away by the Scythians, which nation stopped near Tanais, having
crossed Asia. "These warlike multitudes lived formerly on the ocean
shores, in dense forests, and under a tenebrous sky. There the pole is almost
touching the head, there long nights and days divide the year" (in Mario).
As to the Hyperboreans, these peoples, as expressed by Solinus Polyhistor (c.
16), "sow in the morning, reap at noon, gather their fruits in the
evening, and store them during the night in their caves."
Even the writers
of the Zohar knew of the fact (as shown in iii., fol. 10a), as it is written:
"In the Book of Hammannunah, the Old, we learn . . . . there are some
countries of the earth which are lightened, whilst others are in darkness;
these have the day, when for the former it is night; and there are countries in
which it is constantly day, or in which at least the night continues only some
instants." (Isaac Myer's "Qabbalah," p. 139).
The island of
Delos, the Asteria of the Greek mythology, was never in Greece, a country
which, in its day, was not yet in existence, not even in its molecular form.
Several writers have shown that it represented a country or an island, far
larger than the small dots of land which became Greece. Both Pliny and Diodorus
Siculus place it in the Northern seas. One calls it Basilea or
"royal" (Vol. II., p. 225 of Diod.); the other, Pliny, names it
Osericta (Book xxxvii, c. 2), a word, according to Rudbeck (Vol. I., p.
462-464), having had "a significance in the northern languages, equivalent
to the Island of the divine Kings or god-Kings," or again the "royal
island of the gods," because the gods were born there, i.e., the divine
dynasties of the kings of Atlantis proceeded from that place. Let geographers
and geologists seek for it among that group of islands discovered by
Nordenskiold on his Vega voyage in the arctic regions.* The secret books inform
us that the climate has changed in those regions more than once since the first
men inhabited those now almost inaccessible latitudes. They were a paradise
before they became hell;
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* These islands
were "found strewn with fossils of horses, sheep, oxen, etc., among
gigantic bones of elephants, mammoths, rhinoceroses," etc. If there was no
man on earth at that period "how came horses and sheep to be found in
company with the huge antediluvians?" asks a master in a letter.
("Esoteric Buddhism," 67). The reply is given above in the text.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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.*
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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* A good proof
that all the gods, and religious beliefs, and myths have come from the north,
which was also the cradle of physical man, lies in several suggestive words
which have originated and remain to this day among the northern tribes in their
primeval significance; but although there was a time when all the nations were
"of one lip," these words have received a different meaning with the
Greeks and Latins. One such word is Mann, Man, a living being, and Manes, dead
men. The Laplanders call their corpses to this day manee, (Voyage de Renard en
Laponie I., 184). Mannus is the ancestor of the German race; the Hindu Manu,
the thinking being, from man; the Egyptian Menes; and Minos, the King of Crete,
judge of the infernal regions after his death -- all proceed from the same root
or word.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 775 WHO WERE THE NEPHILIM?
Sinai, nor by a
divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through
tradition via pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was
repeating when he wrote upon the Titans -- the giants born of Heaven and Earth,
or, rather, born of the Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the
daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when
giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish
Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, which
race descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean
region which was the birth-place of the first giants. The Commentaries on the
sacred books explain that the said region was the far north, the polar lands
now, the pre-Lemurian earliest continent, embracing once upon a time the
present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.
But who were the
Nephilim of Genesis vi. 4? There were Palaeolithic and Neolithic men in
Palestine ages before the events recorded in the book of the Beginnings. The
theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with hairy men or Satyrs, the
latter being mythical in the Fifth Race and the former historical in both the
Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these
Satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlantean
race. What is the meaning of Poseidon's amours under such a variety of animal
forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram,
to deceive Theophane, etc., etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the
Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius
and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the word Nephilim and
explain very little. But Esoteric records show these hairy creatures to be the
last descendants of those Lemuro-Atlantean races, which begot children on
female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men,
"monsters," as the Stanzas have it.
Now mythology,
built upon Hesiod's Theogony, which is but a poetised record of actual traditions,
or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Kottos, and Gyges,
living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Kronos for their
rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with an hundred arms
and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and
tribes. Bearing in mind that in mythology every personage almost is a god or
derni-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect;* and
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Thus, for
instance, Gyges is a hundred-armed and fifty-headed monster, a demi-god in one
case, and a Lydian, the successor of Candaules, king of the country, in another
version. The same is found in the Indian Pantheon, where Rishis and the Sons of
Brahma are reborn as mortals.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 776 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
that both stand
as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and
sub-races, the esoteric Commentary will become comprehensible. It says that the
three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at
each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another.
The whole globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the
appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the
earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the arctic and
antarctic poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off
from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same.
Therefore northern Asia is called the "eternal or perpetual land,"
and the Antarctic the "ever living" and "the concealed";
while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and
reappear in turn, into and above the great waters.
From the first
appearance of the great continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants had been
imprisoned in their circle by Kronos. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of
bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon (or Neptune, hence
by the seas), which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where
eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. The Iliad (viii.,
13) makes of it the Tartaros. When the gods and Titans rebelled in their turn
against Zeus -- the deity of the Fourth Race -- the father of the gods
bethought himself of the imprisoned giants in order to conquer the gods and
Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have
Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to
make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn.* The
geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of
the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was
merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also,
the war between the Rakshasas of Lanka and the Bharateans, the melee of the
Atlanteans and Aryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the
Daevas 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The continents
perish in turn by fire and water: either through earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions, or by sinking and the great displacement of waters. Our continents
have to perish owing to the former cataclysmal process. The incessant
earthquakes of this and the past years may be a warning.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 777 MYTHOLOGY BUILT ON HISTORY.
thought of the
world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking
Humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.
But as it is now
the conviction of more than one Greek scholar -- as it was that of Bailly and
Voltaire -- that Hesiod's theogony was based upon historical facts (see
Decharme's Mythol. de la Grece Antique), it becomes easier for the occult
teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are
these passages from mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern
learning in this Addendum.
Such symbolisms
as are found in all the exoteric creeds, are so many landmarks of prehistoric
truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the earliest human
races, has become several times since then hyperborean and Saturnine*; thus
showing the Golden Age and reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was
many-sided in its character indeed -- climatically, ethnologically and morally.
For, the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early
androgynous and the later bi-sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling
places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into
life and death, purity and impurity. The Cycle of legends is ever being
transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the
dross it has picked up on its way through many nations and through the
countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original
facts. Leaving for a while the Greek interpretations we may seek for some more
corroborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Denis, the
geographer, tells us that the great sea North of Asia was called glacial, or
Saturnine (v. 35). Orpheus (v. 1077) and Pliny (Book IV., c. 16) corroborate
the statement by showing that it is its giant inhabitants who gave it the name.
And the Secret Doctrine explains both assertions by telling us that all the
continents were formed from North to South; and that as the sudden change of
climate dwarfed the race that had been born on it, arresting its growth, so,
several degrees southward, various conditions had always produced the tallest
men in every new humanity, or race. We see it to this day. The tallest men now
found are those in Northern countries, while the smallest are Southern
Asiatics, Hindus, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and
Punjabees, the Afghans, Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and
the English, with the inhabitants of central India and the average European on
the continent. Thus also the giants of Atlantis, and hence the Titans of
Hesiod, are all Northerners.
-------
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 778 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
§ VII.
SCIENTIFIC AND
GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF SEVERAL SUBMERGED CONTINENTS.
IT may not be
amiss -- for the benefit of those who resolve the tradition of a lost Miocene
Atlantis into an "antiquated myth," to append a few scientific
admissions on this point. Science, it is true, is largely indifferent to such
questions. But there are Scientists ready to admit that, in any case, a
cautious agnosticism as to geological problems concerning the remote past is
far more philosophical than a priori denial, or even hasty generalizations on insufficient
data.
Meanwhile two
very interesting instances, that have been lately met with, may be pointed out
as "confirming" certain passages in the letter of a Master, published
in "Esoteric Buddhism." The eminence of the authorities will not be
questioned:--
[[First Column]]
Extract from p.
61 of "Esoteric Buddhism."
No. 1.
"The sinking of the Atlantis (the group
of continents and islands) began during the Eocene period . . . . and it
culminated in the Miocene, first in the final disappearance of the largest, an
event coincident with the elevation of the Alps, and second in the sinking of
the last of the fair islands mentioned by Plato."
[[First Column
continued on next page]]
[[Second
Column]]
Extract from a
Lecture by W. Pengelly, F.R.S., F.G.S.
No. 1.
"Was there,
as some have believed, an Atlantis -- a continent or Archipelago of large
islands occupying the area of the North Atlantic? There is, perhaps, nothing
unphilosophical in the hypothesis. For since, as geologists state, 'The Alps
have acquired 4,000 and even in some places more than 10,000 feet of their
present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene epoch' (Lyell's
Principles 2nd Ed. p. 256.) -- a post-Miocene depression might have carried the
hypothetical Atlantis into almost abysmal depths."*
[[Second Column
continued on next page]]
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Having already
given several instances of the vagaries of Science, it is delightful to find
such agreement in this particular case. Read in connection with the scientific
admission (cited elsewhere) of the geologists' ignorance of even the
approximate duration of periods, the following passage is highly instructive:
"We are not yet able to assign an approximate date for the most recent
epoch at which our Northern Hemisphere was covered with glaciers. According to
Mr. Wallace, this epoch may have occurred seventy thousand years ago, while
others would assign to it an antiquity of at least two hundred thousand years,
and there are yet others who urge strong arguments on behalf of the opinion
that a million of years is barely enough to have produced the changes which
have taken place since that event." (Fiske, "Cosmic [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 779 GEOLOGY CORROBORATES OCCULTISM.
[[First Column
continued from previous page]]
No. 2.
"Lemuria
cannot any more be confounded with the Atlantis continent than Europe with
America. Both sank and were drowned with all their 'gods'; yet, between the two
catastrophes a short period of about some 700,000 years elapsed; Lemuria
flourishing and ending her career just about that trifling lapse of time before
the early Eocene Age, since its Race was the Third. Behold the relics of that
once great race in some of the flat-headed aborigines of your AUSTRALIA."
("Esoteric Buddhism," p. 55.)
[[Second Column
continued from previous page]]
No. 2.
"It would
be premature to say, because no evidence has yet been adduced, that men may not
have existed in the Eocene Age, especially as it can be shown that a race of
men, the lowest we know of, co-exists with that remnant of the Eocene flora
which still survives on the continent and islands of Australia." (Extract
from an article in "Popular Science Review," Vol. V. p. 18, by
Professor Seemann, Ph.D., F.L.S., P.A.S.).
Haeckel, who
fully accepts the reality of a former Lemuria, also regards the Australians as
direct descendants of the Lemurians. "Persistent forms (of both his
Lemurian stems,) are in all probability still surviving . . . Papuans and
Hottentots . . . Australians . . . one division of the Malays."
[[End of
Columns]]
With regard to a
former civilization, of which a portion of these degraded Australians are the
last surviving offshoot, the opinion of Gerland is strongly suggestive.
Commenting upon the religion and mythology of the tribes, he writes, "The
statement that the Australian civilization (?) indicates a higher grade, is
nowhere more clearly proved than here, where everything resounds like the
expiring voices of a previous and richer age. The idea that the Australians
have no religion or mythology is thoroughly false. But this religion is
certainly quite deteriorated." (Cited in Schmidt's "Doctrine of
Descent of Darwinism," pp. 301-2.) As to his other statement, namely, that
the Australians are a "division of the Malays" (Vide his ethnological
theories in the "Pedigree of Man"), Haeckel is in error, if he
classes the Australians with the rest. The Malays and Papuans are a mixed
stock, resulting from the intermarriages of the low Atlantean sub-races with
the Seventh sub-race of the Third Root-Race. Like the Hottentots, they are of
indirect Lemuro-Atlantean descent. It is a most suggestive fact -- to those
concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma -- that the lowest races
of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary
sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first
approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote
continued from previous page]] Philosophy," Vol. II., p. 304). Prof.
Lefevre, again, gives us as his estimate 100,000 years. Clearly, then, if
modern Science is unable to estimate the date of so comparatively recent an era
as the Glacial Epoch, it can hardly impeach the Esoteric Chronology of
Race-Periods and Geological Ages.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 780 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
place all over
the globe, among those races, whose "time is up" -- among just those
stocks, be it remarked, which esoteric philosophy regards as the senile
representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the
extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated
by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., etc., have done much; but
those who rely on such data as offering an all-sufficient explanation of the
crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed.
"Nothing," says even the materialist Lefevre, "can save those
that have run their course. . . . It would be necessary to extend their
destined cycle. . . . The peoples that have been most spared . . . Hawaiians or
Maories, have been no less decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by
European intrusion." ("Philosophy," p. 508.)
True; but is not
the phenomenon here confirmed of the operation of CYCLIC LAW difficult to
account for on materialist lines? Whence the "destined cycle" and the
order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out
certain races at their "appointed hour"? The answer that it is due to
a "mental disproportion" between the colonizing and aboriginal races
is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden "checks to
fertility" which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians,
for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will
sooner or later have to recognize with Occultists that the true solution has to
be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lefevre remarks,
"the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing 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-
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 781 TRADITION AS TRUE AS HISTORY.
Atlantic or
Pacific sea-bed as big as Europe, should have been uplifted as high as Mont
Blanc, and have subsided again, any time since the Palaeozoic epoch, if there
were any grounds for entertaining it."
That is to say,
then, that there is nothing which can militate against positive evidence to the
fact; nothing, therefore, against the geological postulates of the Esoteric
Philosophy. Dr. Seemann assures us in the "Popular Science Review"
(Vol. V., p. 18), article "Australia and Europe formerly one
Continent,"* that:--
"The facts
which botanists have accumulated for reconstructing these lost maps of the
globe are rather comprehensive; and they have not been backward in
demonstrating the former existence of large tracts of solid land in parts now
occupied by the great oceans. The many striking points of contact between the
present flora of the United States and Eastern Asia, induced them to assume
that, during the present order of things, there existed a continental
connection between South-Eastern Asia and Western America. The singular correspondence
of the present flora of the Southern United States with that of the lignite
flora of Europe induces them to believe that, in the Miocene period, Europe and
America were connected by a land passage, of which Iceland, Madeira, and the
other Atlantic islands are remnants; that, in fact, the story of an Atlantis,
which an Egyptian priest told to Solon, is not purely fictitious, but rests on
a solid historical basis. . . . Europe of the Eocene period received the plants
which spread over mountains and plains, valleys and river-banks (from Asia
generally), neither exclusively from the South nor from the East. The west also
furnished additions, and if at that period these were rather meagre, they show,
at all events, that the bridge was already building, which, at a late period,
was to facilitate communication between the two continents in such a remarkable
manner. At that time some plants of the Western Continent began to reach Europe
by means of the island of Atlantis, then probably just rising (?) above the
ocean."
And in another
number of the same review (Vol. I., p. 143) Mr. Duppa Crotch, M.A., F.L.S., in
an 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
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Undoubtedly a
fact and a confirmation of the esoteric conception of the Lemuria which
originally not only embraced great areas in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but
projected round South Africa into the North Atlantic. Its Atlantic portion
subsequently became the geological basis of the future home of the Fourth Race
Atlanteans.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 782 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
prove that, no
longer ago than the Miocene period, a sea rolled over what is now desert. The
voyage of the 'Challenger' has proved the existence of three long ridges* in
the Atlantic Ocean,** one extending for more than three thousand miles, and
lateral spurs may, by connecting these ridges, account for the marvellous
similarity of the fauna of the Atlantic islands.*** . . . . The submerged
continent of LEMURIA, in what is now the Indian Ocean, is considered to afford
an explanation of many difficulties in the distribution of organic life, and, I
think, the existence of a MIOCENE ATLANTIS will be found to have a strong
elucidative bearing on subjects of greater interest [Truly So!] than the
migration of the lemming. At all events, if it can be shown that land existed
in former ages where the North Atlantic now rolls, not only is a motive found
for these apparently suicidal migrations, but also a strong collateral proof
that what we call instincts are but the blind and sometimes even prejudicial
inheritance of previously acquired experiences."
(At certain
periods, we learn, multitudes of these animals swim to sea and perish. Coming,
as they do, from all parts of Norway, the powerful instinct which survives
throughout ages as an inheritance from their progenitors impels them to seek a
continent, once existing but now submerged beneath the ocean, and to court a
watery grave.)
In an article
containing a criticism of Mr. A. R. Wallace's "Island Life" -- a work
devoted largely to the question of the distribution of animals, etc. -- Mr.
Starkie Gardiner writes ("Subsidence and Elevation," Geological
Magazine, June, 1881):--
"By a
process of reasoning supported by a large array of facts of different kinds, he
arrives at the conclusion that the distribution of life upon the land as we now
see it, has been accomplished without the aid of important changes in the
relative positions of continents and seas. Yet if we accept his views, we must
believe that Asia and Africa, Madagascar and Africa, New Zealand and Australia,
Europe and America, have been united at some period not remote geologically,
and that seas to the depth of 1,000 fathoms have been bridged over; but we must
treat as utterly gratuitous and entirely opposed to
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Cf. the
published reports of the "Challenger" expedition; also Donnelly's
"Atlantis," p. 468 and pp. 46-56, chap. "The Testimony of the
Sea."
** Even the cautious
Lefevre speaks of the existence of Tertiary men on "upheaved lands,
islands and continents then flourishing, but since submerged beneath the
waters," and elsewhere introduces a "possible Atlantis" to
explain ethnological facts. Cf. his "Philosophy," Eng. Ed., pp. 478
and 504. Mr. Donnelly remarks with rare intuition that "modern
civilization is Atlantean . . . . the 'inventive' faculty of the present age is
taking up the delegated work of Creation where Atlantis left it thousands of
years ago" (Atlantis, p. 133). He also refers the origin of culture to the
Miocene times. It is, however, to be sought for in the teachings given to the
Third Race-men by their Divine Rulers -- at a vastly earlier period.
*** An equally
"curious" similarity is traced between some of the West Indian and
West African fauna.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 783 ATLANTIS, NECESSARY TO ETHNOLOGY.
all the evidences
at our command (!!), the supposition that temperate Europe and temperate
America, Australia, and South America, have ever been connected except by way
of the Arctic or Antarctic circles and that lands now separated by seas of more
than 1,000 fathoms depth have ever been united. Mr. Wallace, it must be
admitted, has succeeded in explaining the chief features of existing
life-distribution, without bridging the Atlantic or Pacific, except towards the
Poles, yet I cannot help thinking that some of the facts might perhaps be more
easily explained by admitting the former existence of the connection between
the coast of Chile and Polynesia* and Great Britain and Florida, shadowed by
the submarine banks which stretch between them. Nothing is urged that renders
the more direct connection impossible, and no physical reason is advanced why
the floor of the ocean should not be upheaved from any depth. The route by
which (according to the anti-Atlantean and Lemurian hypotheses of Wallace) the
floras of South America and Australia are supposed to have mingled, is beset by
almost insurmountable obstacles, and the apparently sudden arrival of a number
of sub-tropical American plants in our Eocene flora, necessitates a connection
more to the south than the present 1,000 fathom line . . . . forces are
unceasingly acting, and there is no reason why an elevating force once set in
action in the centre of an ocean should cease to act until a continent is
formed. They have acted and lifted out from the sea, in comparatively recent
geological times, the loftiest mountains on earth. Mr. Wallace himself admits
repeatedly that sea-beds have been elevated 1,000 fathoms and islands have
risen up from the depths of 3,000 fathoms; and to suppose that the upheaving
forces are limited in power, is, it seems to me, 'utterly gratuitous and
entirely opposed to all the evidences at our command.' "
The
"Father" of English Geology -- Sir Charles Lyell -- was an
Uniformitarian in his views of continental formation. On page 492 of his
"Antiquity of Man" we find him saying:--
"Professor
Unger (Die versunkene Insel Atlantis) and Heer (Flora Tertiaria Helvetiae) have
admitted on botanical grounds the former existence of an Atlantic Continent
during some part of the Tertiary Period, as affording the only plausible
explanation that can be imagined of the analogy between the Miocene flora of
central Europe, and the existing flora of Eastern America. Professor Oliver, on
the other hand, after showing how many of the American types found fossil in
Europe are common to Japan, inclines to the theory, first advanced by Dr. Asa
Gray, that the migration of species, to which the community of types in the
Eastern States of North America, and the Miocene flora of Europe is due, took
place when there was an overland communication from America to central Asia
between the fiftieth and sixtieth parallels of latitude, or south of Behring
Straits, following the direction of the Aleutian islands. By this course they
may have made their way, at any epoch, Miocene, Pliocene, or Pleistocene,
antecedently to the Glacial Epoch, to Amoorland, on the East coast of North
Asia."
The unnecessary
difficulties and complications here incurred in order to avoid the hypothesis
of an Atlantic Continent, are really too
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Pacific
portion of the giant Lemurian Continent christened by Dr. Carter Blake, the
anthropologist, "Pacificus."
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 784 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
apparent to
escape notice. If the botanical evidences stood alone, scepticism would be half
legitimate; but in this case all branches of science converge to one point.
Science has made blunders, and has exposed itself to greater errors than the
admission of our two now invisible continents, would lay it open to. It has
denied even the undeniable, from the days of the mathematician Laplace down to
our own, and that only a few years ago.* We have Professor Huxley's authority
for saying that there is no a priori improbability whatever against possible
evidences supporting the belief. (Vide supra.) But now that the POSITIVE
EVIDENCE is brought forward, will that eminent scientist admit the corollary?
Touching on the
problem in another place ("Principles of Geology," pp. 12-13), Sir
Charles Lyell tells us: "Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests,
we gather much information from writers of the Grecian sects, who borrowed
almost all their tenets from Egypt, and amongst others that of the former
successive destruction and renovation of the world. (Continental, not cosmic,
catastrophes.) We learn from Plutarch that this was the theme of one of the
hymns of Orpheus, so celebrated in the fabulous ages of Greece. It was brought
by him from the banks of the Nile; and we even find in his verses, as in the
Indian systems, a definite period assigned for the duration of every successive
World. The returns of great catastrophes were determined by the present period
of the Magnus Annus, or great year -- a cycle composed of the revolutions of
the sun, moon, and planets, and terminating when these return together to the
sign whence they were supposed at some remote epoch to set out. We learn
particularly from the Timaeus of Plato that the Egyptians believed the world to
be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges. The sect of the Stoics
adopted most fully the system of catastrophes destined at intervals to destroy
the world. These, they taught, were of two kinds -- the cataclysm, or
destruction by water, and the Ecpyrosis, or destruction by fire (submarine
volcanoes). From the Egyptians they derived the doctrine of the gradual
debasement of man from a state of innocence" (nascent simplicity of the
first sub-races of each Root-Race). "Towards the
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* When Howard
read, before the Royal Society of London, a paper on the first serious researches
that were made on the aerolites, the Geneva naturalist Pictet, who was present,
communicated, on his return to Paris, the facts reported to the French Academy
of Sciences. But he was forthwith interrupted by Laplace, the great astronomer,
who cried: "Stop! we have had enough of such fables, and know all about
them," thus making Pictet feel very small. Globular-shaped lightnings or
thunderbolts have been admitted by Science only since Arago demonstrated their
existence, says de Rochat ("Forces non-definies," p. 4): "Every
one remembers Dr. Bouilland's misadventure at the Academy of Medicine when he
had declared Edison's phonograph 'a trick of ventriloquism! ` "
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 785 ASTRAEA FALLS ON HER HEAD.
termination of
each era the gods could no longer bear with the wickedness of man, and a shock
of the elements, or a deluge, overwhelmed them; (vide degeneracy into magical
practices and gross animality of the Atlanteans) after which calamity, Astraea
again descended on the earth to renew the golden age." (Dawn of a new
Root-Race.)
Astraea, the
goddess of justice, is the last of the deities to forsake the earth, when the
gods are said to abandon it and be taken up into heaven by Jupiter again. But,
no sooner does Zeus carry away from earth Ganymedes (the object of lust,
personified) than the father of the gods throws down Astraea back on the earth
again, on which she falls upon her head. Astraea is Virgo, the constellation of
the Zodiac. Astronomically it has a very plain significance, and one which
gives the Key to the occult meaning. But it is inseparable from Leo, the sign
that precedes it, and from the Pleiades and their sisters, the Hyades, of which
Aldebaran is the brilliant leader. All of these are connected with the
periodical renovations of the earth, with regard to its continents -- even
Ganymedes, who in astronomy is Aquarius. It was already shown that while the
South Pole is the pit (or the infernal regions figuratively and
cosmologically), the North Pole is geographically the first continent; while
astronomically and metaphorically the celestial pole, with its pole star in
heaven, is Meru, or the seat of Brahma, the throne of Jupiter, etc. For in the
age when the gods forsook the earth and were said to ascend into heaven, the
ecliptic had become parallel with the meridian, and part of the Zodiac appeared
to descend from the north pole to the north horizon. Aldebaran was in
conjunction then with the Sun, as it was 40,000 years ago, at the great
festival in commemoration of that Magnus Annus, of which Plutarch was speaking.
Since that year (40,000 years ago) there has been a retrograde motion of the
equator, and about 31,000 years ago Aldebaran was in conjunction with the
vernal equinoctial point. The part assigned to Taurus, even in Christian
mysticism, is too well known to need repetition. The famous 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 786 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
heaven (or above
the horizon of the North Pole) Virgo or Astraea, who is Venus-Lucifer, descends
head downwards below the horizon of the South Pole, or the pit; which pit, or
the pole, is also the Great Dragon, or the Flood. Let the student exercise his
intuition by placing these facts together; no more can be said.
"The
connection," comments Lyell, "between the doctrine of successive
catastrophes and repeated deteriorations in the moral character of the human
race, is more intimate and natural than might at first be imagined. For, in a
rude state of society, all great calamities are regarded by the people as
judgments of God on the wickedness of man. . . . In like manner in the account
given to Solon by the Egyptian priests of the submersion of the island of
Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake,
we find that the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral depravity of the
inhabitants."
True; but was it
not owing to the fact that all esoteric truths were given out to the public by
the Initiates of the temples under the guise of allegories?
"Jupiter," is merely the personification of that immutable Cyclic
Law, which arrests the downward tendency of each Root-Race, after attaining the
zenith of its glory.* Unless we hold with Prof. John Fiske's singularly
dogmatic opinion** that every myth "is an explanation by the uncivilized
mind, of some natural phenomenon; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol, for
the ingenuity is wasted (! !) which strives to detect in myths the remnants of
a refined primeval science -- but an explanation. Primitive men had no profound
science to perpetuate by means of allegory [How does Mr. Fiske know?], nor were
they such sorry pedants as to talk in riddles when plain language would serve
their purpose." We venture to say the language of the Initiated few was
far more "plain," and their science-philosophy far more com-
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* The Cyclic Law
of Race-Evolution is most unwelcome to scientists. It is sufficient to mention
the fact of "primeval civilization" to excite the frenzy of
Darwinians; it being obvious that the further culture and science is pushed
back, the more precarious becomes the basis of the ape-ancestor theory. But as
Jacolliot says:-- "Whatever there may be in these traditions (submerged
continents, etc.), and whatever may have been the place where a civilization
more ancient than that of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, and of India, was
developed, it is certain that this civilization did exist, and it is highly
important for Science to recover its traces, however feeble and fugitive they
be." (Histoire des Vierges; les peuples et les continents disparus, p.
15.) Donnelly has proved the fact from the clearest premises, but the
Evolutionists will not listen. A Miocene civilization upsets the
"universal stone-age" theory, and that of a continuous ascent of man
from animalism! And yet Egypt, at least, runs counter to current hypotheses.
There is no stone-age visible there, but a more glorious culture is apparent,
the further back we are enabled to carry our retrospect. (Verb. Sap.)
** "Myths
and Myth-Makers," p. 21.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 787 INGENIOUS EXPLANATIONS.
prehensive and
satisfying alike to the physical and spiritual wants of man, than even the
terminology and system respectively elaborated by Mr. Fiske's Master -- Herbert
Spencer. What, however, is Sir Charles Lyell's "explanation" of the
"myth"? Certainly, he in no way countenances the idea of its
"astronomical" origin, as asserted by some writers.
The two
interpreters are entirely at variance with one another. Lyell's solution is as
follows. A disbeliever in cataclysmal changes, from the absence (?) of any
reliable historical data on the point, as well as from a strong bias to the
Uniformitarian conceptions of geologic changes,* he attempts to trace the
Atlantis "tradition" to the following sources:--
(1) Barbarous
tribes connect catastrophes with an avenging God, who is assumed in this way to
punish immoral races.
(2) Hence the
commencement of a new race is logically a virtuous one.
(3) The primary
source of the geologic basis of the tradition was Asia -- a continent subject
to violent earthquakes. Exaggerated accounts would thus be handed down the
ages.
(4) Egypt, being
herself free from earthquakes, nevertheless based her not inconsiderable
geologic knowledge on these cataclysmal traditions.
An ingenious
"explanation," as all such are. But proving a negative is
proverbially a difficult task. Students of esoteric science, who know what the
resources of the Egyptian priesthood really were, need no such laboured
hypothesis. Moreover, while an imaginative theorist is always able to furnish a
reasonable solution of problems which, in one branch of science, seem to
necessitate the hypothesis of periodical cataclysmic changes on the surface of
our planet, the impartial critic, who is not a
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Violent minor
cataclysms and colossal earthquakes are recorded in the annals of most nations
-- if not of all. Elevation and subsidence of continents is always in progress.
The whole coast of South America has been raised up 10 to 15 feet and settled
down again in an hour. Huxley has shown that the British islands have been four
times depressed beneath the ocean and subsequently raised again and peopled.
The Alps, Himalayas and Cordilleras were all the result of depositions drifted
on to sea-bottoms and upheaved by Titanic forces to their present elevation.
The Sahara was the basin of a Miocene sea. Within the last five or six thousand
years the shores of Sweden, Denmark and Norway have risen from 200 to 600 feet;
in Scotland there are raised beaches with outlying stacks and skerries
surmounting the shore now eroded by the hungry wave. The North of Europe is
still rising from the sea and South America presents the phenomenon of raised
beaches of over 1,000 miles in length, now at a height varying from 100 to
1,300 feet above the sea-level. On the other hand, the coast of Greenland is
sinking fast, so much so that the Greenlander will not build by the shore. All
these phenomena are certain. Why may not a gradual change have given place to a
violent cataclysm in remote epochs? -- such cataclysms occurring on a minor
scale even now (e.g., the case of Sunda island with 80,000 Malays).
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 788 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
specialist, will
recognise the immense difficulty of explaining away the cumulative evidences,
-- namely, the archaeological, ethnological, geological, traditional,
botanical, and even biological -- in favour of former continents now submerged.
When each science is fighting for its own hand, the cumulative force of the
evidence in its collectivity is almost invariably lost sight of.
In the
"Theosophist" (August, 1880), we wrote: "We have as evidences
the most ancient traditions of various and wide-separated peoples -- legends in
India, in ancient Greece, Madagascar, Sumatra, Java, and all the principal
isles of Polynesia, as well as the legends of both Americas. Among savages; and
in the traditions of the richest literature in the world -- the Sanskrit
literature of India -- there is an agreement in saying, that, ages ago, there
existed in the Pacific Ocean, a large Continent, which by a geological
cataclysm was engulfed by the sea,* (Lemuria). And it is our firm belief . . .
that most, if not all, of the islands from the Malayan archipelago to
Polynesia, are fragments of that once immense submerged Continent. Both Malacca
and Polynesia, which lie at the two extremities of the ocean, and which, since
the memory of man never had, and never could have any intercourse with, or even
a knowledge of each other, have yet a tradition common to all the islands and
islets, that their respective countries extended far, far into the Sea: that
there were in the world but two immense continents, one inhabited by yellow,
the other by dark men; and that the Ocean, by command of the gods, and to
punish them for their incessant quarrelling, swallowed them up. Notwithstanding
the geographical proof that New Zealand, the Sandwich and Easter Islands, are
at a distance from each other of between 800 and 1,000 leagues, and that, according
to every testimony, neither these nor any other intermediate islands, for
instance, the Marquesan, Society, Fiji, Tahitian, Samoan, and other islands,
could, since they became islands, ignorant as their people were of the compass,
have communicated with each other before the arrival of Europeans; yet they one
and all maintain that their respective countries extended far toward the West,
on the Asian side. Moreover, with very small differences, they all speak
dialects evidently of the same language; and understand each other with little
difficulty; have the same religious beliefs and superstitions; and pretty much
the same customs. And as few of the Polynesian islands were discovered earlier
than a century ago, the Pacific Ocean itself being unknown to Europe till the
days of Columbus, and as these islanders have never ceased repeating the same
old traditions since the Europeans first set
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For the
opinions of Jacolliot, after long travels through the Polynesian Islands and
his proofs of a former great geological cataclysm in the Pacific Ocean, see his
"Histoire des Vierges: Peuples et Continents disparus," p. 308.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 789 HAECKEL FOR ONCE IS RIGHT.
foot on their
shores, it seems to us a logical inference that our theory is nearer to the
truth than any other. "Chance would have to change its name and meaning,
were all this due but to chance alone."
"A great
series of animal-geographical facts," declares Professor Schmidt, writing
in defence of the hypothesis of a former Lemuria, "is explicable only on
the theory of the former existence of a Southern Continent of which Australia
is a remnant. . . . . " [the distribution of species] "points to the
vanished land of the South where perhaps the home of the progenitors of the
Maki of Madagascar may also be looked for."*
Mr. A. R. Wallace,
in his "Malay Archipelago," arrives at the following conclusion after
a review of the mass of evidence at hand:-- "The inference that we must
draw from these facts is undoubtedly that the whole of the islands eastwards
beyond Borneo and Sumatra do essentially form part of a former Australian or
Pacific Continent . . . This continent must have been broken up before the
extreme south-eastern portion of Asia was raised above the waters of the ocean,
for a great part of the land of Borneo and Java is known to be geologically of
quite recent formation."
According to
Haeckel:-- "Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human
race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the South of Asia, and sank later on
beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean." ("Pedigree of Man,"
Eng. Trans. p. 73.) In one sense Haeckel is right as to Lemuria -- the
"cradle of the Human race." That continent was the home of the first
physical Human Stock -- the later Third-Race Men. Previous to that epoch the
Races were far less consolidated and physiologically quite different. (Haeckel
makes Lemuria extend from Sunda Island to Africa and Madagascar and eastwards
to Upper India.)
Professor
Rutimeyer, the eminent Palaeontologist, asks:-- "Need the conjecture that
the almost exclusively graminivorous and insectivorous marsupials, sloths,
armadilloes, ant-eaters and ostriches, once possessed an actual point of union
in a Southern Continent of which the present flora of Terra del Fuego and
Australia must be the remains -- need this conjecture raise difficulties at a
moment when from their fossil remains, Heer restores to sight the ancient
forests of Smith's Sound and Spitzbergen." (Cited in Schmidt's
"Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," p. 237.)
Having now dealt
generally with the broad scientific attitude on the two questions, it will,
perhaps, conduce to an agreeable brevity, if we sum up the more striking
isolated facts in favour of that fundamental contention of Esoteric
Ethnologists -- the reality of Atlantis. Lemuria
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* "Doctrine
of Descent and Darwinism," p. 236. (Cf. also his lengthy arguments on the
subject, pp. 231-7.)
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 (Littre). Monuments have been exhumed in
Central America, which bear representations of undoubted negro heads and faces.
How are such facts to be accounted for except on the Atlantean hypothesis? What
is now N. W. Africa was once connected with Atlantis by a network of islands,
few of which now remain.
(3) According to
Farrar ("Families of Speech") the "isolated language" of the
Basques has no affinities with the other languages* of Europe, but with
"the aboriginal languages of the vast opposite continent (America) and
those alone." Professor Broca is also of the same opinion.
Palaeolithic
European man of the Miocene and Pliocene times was a pure Atlantean, as we have
previously stated. The Basques are, of course, of a much later date than this,
but their affinities, as here shown, go far to prove the original extraction of
their remote ancestors. The "mysterious" affinity between their
tongue and that of the Dravidian races of India will be understood by those who
have followed our outline of continental formations and shiftings.
(4) Stones have
been found in the Canary Islands bearing sculptured symbols similar to those
found on the shore of Lake Superior. Berthollet was induced
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* For further
facts as to the isolation of the Basques in Europe and their ethnological
relations, cf. Joly, "Man before Metals," p. 316. B. Davis is
disposed to concede, from an examination of the skulls of the Guanches of the
Canary Islands and modern Basques, that both belong to a race proper to those
ancient islands, of which the Canaries are the remains!! This is a step in
advance indeed. De Quatrefages and Hamy also both assign the Cro-Magnon men of
South France and the Guanches to one type -- a proposition which involves a
certain corollary which both these writers may not care to father.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 791 FINAL AND IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE.
by such evidence
to postulate the unity of race of the early men of Canary Islands and America
(Cf. Benjamin, the "Atlantic Islands," p. 130.)
The Guanches of
the Canary Islands were lineal descendants of the Atlanteans. This fact will
account for the great stature evidenced by their old skeletons, as well as by
those of their European congeners the Cro-Magnon Palaeolithic men.
(5) Any
experienced mariner has but to navigate the fathomless ocean along the Canary
Islands to ask himself the question when or how that group of volcanic and
rocky little islands has been formed, surrounded on every side by that vast watery
space. Such frequent questions led finally to the expedition of the famous
Leopold von Buch, which took place in the first quarter of the present century.
Some geologists maintained that the volcanic islands had been raised right from
the bottom of the ocean, the depth of which in the immediate vicinity of the
island varies from 6,000 to 18,000 feet. Others were inclined to see in these
groups, including Madeira, the Azores, and the islands of Cape de Verdes -- the
remnants of a gigantic but submerged continent which had once united Africa
with America. The latter men of science supported their hypothesis by a mass of
evidence in its favour, drawn from ancient "myths." Hoary
"superstitions," such as the fairy-like Atlantis of Plato, the Garden
of Hesperides, Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, all of them mythoi
connected with the peak of Teneriffe, did not go far with sceptical Science.
The identity of animal and vegetable species -- showing either a previous
connection between America and the remaining groups of the islands -- (the
hypothesis of their having been drifted from the New to the Old World by the
waves was too absurd to stand long) -- found more serious consideration. But it
is only quite lately, and after Donnelly's book had been published several
years, that the theory has greater chances than ever of becoming an accepted
fact. Fossils found on the Eastern Coast of South America have now been proved
to belong to the Jurassic formations, and are nearly identical with the
Jurassic fossils of Western Europe and Northern Africa. The geological
structure of both coasts is also almost identical; the resemblance between the
smaller marine animals dwelling in the more shallow waters of South America,
the Western African, and the South European coasts, is also very great. All
such facts are bound to bring naturalists to the conclusion that there has
been, in distant pre-historic ages, a continent which extended from the coast
of Venezuela, across the Atlantic Ocean, to the Canarese Islands and North
Africa, and from Newfoundland nearly to the coast of France.
(6) The great
resemblance between the Jurassic fossils of South
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 dolichocephalae of America, I entertain a hypothesis
still more bold, namely, that they are nearly related to the Guanches of the
Canary Islands, and to the Atlantic populations of Africa, the Moors, Tuaricks,
Copts, which Latham comprises under the name of Egyptian-Atlantidae. We find
one and the same form of skull in the Canary Islands, in front of the African
coast, and in the Carib islands, on the opposite coast which faces Africa. The
colour of the skin on both sides of the Atlantic is represented in these
populations as being of a reddish-brown." (Professor Retzius,
"Smithsonian Report," 1859, p. 266.)
If, then,
Basques and Cro-Magnon Cave-Men are of the same race as the Canarese Guanches, it
follows that the former are also allied to the aborigines of America. This is
the conclusion which the independent investigations of Retzius, Virchow, and de
Quatrefages necessitate. The Atlantean affinities of these three types become
patent.
(8) The sea-soundings
undertaken by H.M.S. "Challenger" and the "Dolphin," have
established the fact that a huge elevation some 3,000 miles in length,
projecting upwards from the abysmal depths of the
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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."*
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Donnelly,
"Atlantis; the Ante-Diluvian World," p. 480.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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 fall to leave their impress behind them. It is, then, by those
shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external
screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go
along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them. There
must be truth and fact in that which every people of antiquity accepted and
made the foundation of its religions and its faith. Moreover, as Haliburton
said, "Hear one side, and you will be in the dark; hear both sides, and
all will be clear." The public has hitherto had access to, and heard but
one side -- or rather the two one-sided views of two diametrically opposed
classes of men, whose prima facie propositions or respective premises differ
widely, but whose final conclusions are the same -- Science and Theology. And now
our
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 795 OLD MASONIC SYMBOLISM.
readers have an
opportunity to hear the other -- the defendants' -- justification on and learn
the nature of our arguments.
Were the public
to be left to its old opinions: namely, on one side, that Occultism, Magic, the
legends of old, etc., were all the outcome of ignorance and superstition; and
on the other, that everything outside the orthodox groove was the work of the
devil, what would be the result? In other words, had no theosophical and mystic
literature obtained a hearing for the few last years, the present work would
have had a poor chance of impartial consideration. It would have been
proclaimed -- and by many will still be so proclaimed -- a fairy tale woven out
of abstruse problems, poised in, and based on the air; built of soap bubbles,
bursting at the slightest touch of serious reflection, with no foundation, as
it would be alleged, to stand upon. Even "the ancient superstitious and
credulous classics" have no word of reference to it in clear and
unmistakable terms, and the symbols themselves fail to yield a hint at the
existence of such a system. Such would be the verdict of all. But when it
becomes undeniably proven that the claim of the modern Asiatic nations to a
Secret Science and an esoteric history of the world, is based on fact; that,
though hitherto unknown to the masses and a veiled mystery even to the learned,
(because they never had the key to a right understanding of the abundant hints
thrown out by the ancient classics), it is still no fairy tale, but an
actuality -- then the present work will become but the pioneer of many more
such books. The statement that hitherto even the keys discovered by some great
scholars have proved too rusty for use, and that they were but the silent
witnesses that there do exist mysteries behind the veil which are unreachable
without a new key -- is borne out by too many proofs to be easily dismissed. An
instance may be given as an illustration out of the history of Freemasonry.
In his
"Franc-maconnerie Occulte," rightly or wrongly, Ragon, an illustrious
and learned Belgian Mason, reproaches the English Masons with having
materialized and dishonoured Masonry, once based upon the Ancient Mysteries, by
adopting, owing to a mistaken notion of the origin of the craft, the name of
Free Masonry and Free Masons. The mistake is due, he says, to those who connect
Masonry with the building of Solomon's
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 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
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 years* (a
trifling difference, verily!): and the Anthropologists to vary their divergence
of opinion as to the appearance of man -- between 25,000 and 500,000 of years
-- what can one who studies the Occult doctrine do, but come out and bravely
present the esoteric calculations before the world?
But to do this,
corroboration by even a few "historical" proofs was necessary, though
all know the real value of the so-called "historical evidence." For,
whether man had appeared on earth 18,000 or 18,000,000 years ago, can make no difference
to profane History, since it begins hardly a couple of thousand years before
our era, and since, even then, it grapples hopelessly with the clash and din of
contradictory and mutually-destroying opinions around it. Nevertheless, in view
of the respect the average reader has been brought up in for exact science,
even that short Past would remain meaningless, unless the esoteric teachings
were corroborated and supported on the spot --
[[Footnote(s)]]
-------------------------------------------------
* Vide Sir W.
Thomson and Mr. Huxley.
----Cardiff Theosophical Society in
Wales, UK. CF24-1DL-----
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 797 THE PROLOGUE TO ESOTERIC TRUTH.
whenever
possible -- by references to historical names of a so-called historical period.
This is the only guide that can be given to the beginner before he is permitted
to start among the (to him) unfamiliar windings of that dark labyrinth called
the pre-historic ages. This necessity has been complied with. It is only hoped
that the desire to do so, which has led the writer to be constantly bringing
ancient and modern evidence as a corroboration of the Archaic and quite
unhistoric Past, will not bring on her the accusation of having sorely jumbled
up without order or method the various and widely-separated periods of history
and tradition. But literary form and method had to be sacrificed to the greater
clearness of the general exposition.
To accomplish
the proposed task, the writer had to resort to the rather unusual means of
dividing each volume or Book into three Parts; the first of which only is the
consecutive, though very fragmentary, history of the Cosmogony and the
Evolution of Man on this globe. But these two volumes had to serve as a PROLOGUE,
and prepare the reader's mind for those which shall now follow. In treating of
Cosmogony and then of the Anthropogenesis of mankind, it was necessary to show
that no religion, since the very earliest, has ever been entirely based on
fiction, as none was the object of special revelation; and that it is dogma
alone which has ever been killing primeval truth. Finally, that no human-born
doctrine, no creed, however sanctified by custom and antiquity, can compare in
sacredness with the religion of Nature. The Key of Wisdom that unlocks the
massive gates leading to the arcana of the innermost sanctuaries can be found
hidden in her bosom only: and that bosom is in the countries pointed to by the
great seer of the past century Emanuel Swedenborg. There lies the heart of
nature, that shrine whence issued the early races of primeval Humanity, and
which is the cradle of physical man.
Thus far have
proceeded the rough outlines of the beliefs and tenets of the archaic, earliest
Races contained in their hitherto secret Scriptural records. But our
explanations are by no means complete, 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
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page]] 798 THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
volumes should
form for the student a fitting prelude for Volumes III. and IV. Until the
rubbish of the ages is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom
these volumes are dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching
contained in the Third Volume should be understood. Consequently, it entirely
depends upon the reception with which Volumes I. and II. will meet at the hands
of Theosophists and Mystics, whether these last two volumes will ever be
published, though they are almost completed.
Satyat Nasti
paro dharmah.
THERE IS NO
RELIGION HIGHER THAN TRUTH.
End of Vol. II.
-------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales-------
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24-1DL
-
http://www.theosophycardiff.org[[Vol.
2, Page 799]]
----------Cardiff Theosophical Society in Wales----------------
Searchable Theosophical Texts
Theosophy House
Quick
Explanations with Links to More Detailed Info
What
is Theosophy ? Theosophy
Defined (More Detail)
Three
Fundamental Propositions Key
Concepts of Theosophy
Cosmogenesis Anthropogenesis Root Races
Ascended
Masters After Death
States
The
Seven Principles of Man Karma
Reincarnation Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky
Colonel
Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
The
Start of the Theosophical Society
History
of the Theosophical Society
Theosophical
Society Presidents
History
of the Theosophical Society in Wales
The
Three Objectives of the Theosophical Society
Explanation
of the Theosophical Society Emblem
The
Theosophical Order of Service (TOS)
Glossaries
of Theosophical Terms
/another-family-job-at-adyar.htm
/cvk-maithreya-manifesto.htm
/singapore-initiative.htm
/control-adyar-or-control-nothing.htm
/good-reason-for-silence.htm
/triumph-of-the-weak.htm
/preethi-muthiah-adyar-profile.htm
/abolitionofpresident.htm
/lack-of-representation.htm
/carry-on-creeping.htm
/preethi-muthiah-letters.htm
/attitude-of-the-theosophical-elite.htm
/international-rules.htm
/members-disqualified.htm
/does-silence-mean-game-over.htm
/gc-concerns-raised.htm
/make-way-for-the-messiahs.htm
/hidden-bad-news.htm
/something-wrong.htm
/gc-2012-minutes.htm
/adyar-internal-problems.htm
/beggars-at-the-door.htm
/cannot-change-will-not-change.htm
/new-committee-nov-7.htm
/victimisation-of-gc-member.htm
/hey-look-a-job-for-his-daughter.htm
/cvk-maithreya-manifesto.htm
/accountable-leadership-urgently-required.htm
President of
Nothing Ballast Open Election?
Adyar Adyar’s Slightly
International Convention
Will there be an
Adyar Free Future? An Extra Box on the Ballot Paper A Society Without
Members
Is the 2014 Adyar
Presidential Election Invalid? Radha Burnier
Employment Services
Don’t Just Do
Nothing Stand There Adyar, the Sole
Purpose of Adyar Western President
Save Radha’s House
Ignore the Voters
What an Insult to
Members International
Election Protocol
The Secrecy
Banging the Drum
for Theosophy Burnier Town Hall
The Great Election Rip-Off
Keeping the
International Headquarters at Adyar ABOLISHThe International President Bold Initiative
What is Behind the Attitude of the Theosophical Elite? Towards a New Model
for Theosophy
Choose a Stooge
SHUT UP & VOTE
Members No Longer
Members A Manifesto
Anybody There?
Now Here’s
Something Worth Keeping Quiet About Is There Hidden Bad News? Something Wrong?
Control Adyar or You Control Nothing Elected
Representation Not Representing Publicly Denounced
Make Way for the
Messiahs Does Silence Mean Game Over Accountable
Leadership Urgently Required
Can’t Change Won’t Change Beggars at the Door
From The Top Down
Who Owns Adyar?
New Committee?
The Royal Court of
Radha Burnier General Council
Meeting 2013 Minutes Adyar Theosophical Society International Rules
Disgraceful
Treatment of an Adyar Employee The Preethi Muthiah
Letters Concerns Raised General Council 2012 Meeting Minutes
Adyar Internal
Problems Is Adyar Still The
Headquarters? Creep On! General Council Good Campaign
Pitch, Mr Singhal
Adyar Prepares for
the Break-Up Profile of Adyar
Adyar Family
Appointment Another Family
Power Appointment
Triumph of the Weak Adyar Job News
No Stand For
Democracy Bent election?
A Society Without
Leadership
Who will Believe
It? Supporting Adyar?
Long Tradition of Bullying at Adyar Summary Dismissal
Trouble at t’Mill
True Purpose of the
2014 Election What Makes this
Election Invalid? Trouble Was Your Vote
Counted?
Not Being at Adyar
Democracy in the
Adyar Theosophical Society R.I.P. 11,432 Votes
No Right To
Complain
President’s
Inauguration Pray Silence
It’s Silence as
Usual Who Can Support The Leadership Now? Shut Up & Pay Up
President? Really? Adyar & the US
each have Half a President The White Lotus
Hi-Jack Don’t Anybody Ask Me Anything
Is this the Great Wheaton Rip-Off? Master of the Small
Event The Adyar Payments
Scam CVK Maithreya
Deserved Better Treatment
Staff Treatment At
Adyar Is Wheaton Set To
Support Adyar? CVK Maithreya is Presidential Why was Campaigning
Banned
Adyar Allegations Climate of Fear Police Action
Threatened QUICK The Prisoner of
Adyartraz Preethi’s
Allegations 2014 Election
One Man, One Vote
Poor Adyar Future
CVK Maithreya For Vice-President The General Council
Should Allow Visiting Adyar
D V Subramaniam’s
Posthumous Letter of Complaint The Amnesty International Paradox Did you get an
Invite?
Serious Concerns
Raised 2014 Election
Result? The Sundaram Nomination Sham Call for Emergency
Meeting
The Inauguration That Never Was Serious Concerns
Election Committee Ignores Misconduct Bent Election
Result