The Secret Doctrine

Owing to circumstances still unknown [Karmic provision] 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(450) 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._(451)

It is barely possible that the minds of the present generations are not quite ripe for the reception of Occult truths. Such perchance 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 present Volumes, however, show, 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 law are opposed, not so much to our claims, as to facts in nature. The hour has now struck to ascertain whether the 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 Occult teachings, while revealing some of the hitherto secret tenets of the latter. 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.(452) And again, from the Rules of Initiation. _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._ 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.

Is not a symbol 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, and preëminently in 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, at any time, been 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 more than additional proof of the superstitious bent of mind of the Ancients, and who believe that all mythologies sprang from, and are built upon, solar myths. Such superficial thinkers have been 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 our work, as it echoes so well our own feelings, expressed openly so far back as 1875, when Isis Unveiled was written.

For thirty years past Professor Max Müller has been teaching in his books and lectures, in the Times, Saturday Review, 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 mental aberration.

“We know,” says Renouf, echoing Max Müller, in his Hibbert lectures, “We know that mythology is the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture.” Such is the shallow explanation of the non‐evolutionists, and such explanations are still accepted by the British public, that gets its thinking done for it by proxy. Professor Max Müller, Cox, Gubernatis, and other propounders of the Solar Mythos, have portrayed the primitive myth‐maker for us as a sort of Germanised‐Hindû 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 experiences into him, like the griding 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’s 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.(453) 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!(454)

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 cat in Egyptian is mau, which denotes the seer, from mau, to see. One writer on mythology asserts that the Egyptians “imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the pupil of the cat’s eye.” But this imagining is all modern. It is the Müllerite stock in trade. The moon, as cat, was the eye of the sun, because it reflected the solar light, and because the eye gives back the image in its mirror. In the form of the goddess Pasht, the cat keeps watch for the sun, with her paw holding down and bruising the head of the serpent of darkness, called his eternal enemy!

This is a very correct exposition of the lunar mythos from its astronomical aspect. Selenography, however, is the least esoteric of the divisions of lunar Symbology. To master thoroughly—if one is permitted to coin a new word—Selenognosis, one must become proficient in more than its astronomical meaning. The Moon is intimately related to the Earth, as shown in the Stanzas, 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.(455) The untiring researches of Western, especially German, symbologists, during the last and the present centuries, have induced the most unprejudiced students, and of course every Occultist, 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 olla, no Assyrian tile, no Hebrew scroll, should be read and interpreted literally.

This every scholar now knows. The able lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey alone are sufficient 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 fact to which even the most truth‐loving and truth‐searching Orientalists—whether Âryanists or Egyptologists—seem to remain blind, is that every symbol on papyrus or olla is a many‐faced diamond, each of whose facets not only includes several interpretations, but also relates to several sciences. This is instanced in the just quoted interpretation of the cat symbolizing the moon—an example of sidereo‐ terrestrial imagery; for the moon has with other nations many other meanings besides.

As a learned Mason and Theosophist, the late Kenneth Mackenzie, has shown in his Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, there is a great difference between emblem and symbol. The former “comprises a larger series of thoughts than a symbol, which may be said rather to illustrate some single special idea.” Hence, the symbols—lunar, or solar, for example—of several countries, each illustrating such a special idea, or series of ideas, form collectively an esoteric emblem. The latter is “a concrete visible picture or sign representing principles, or a series of principles, recognizable by those who have received certain instructions [Initiates].” To put it still plainer, an emblem is usually a series of graphic pictures viewed and explained allegorically, and unfolding an idea in panoramic views, one after the other. Thus the Purânas are written emblems. So are the Mosaic and Christian Testaments, or the Bible, and all other exoteric Scriptures. As the same authority shows:

All esoteric societies have made use of emblems and symbols, such as the Pythagorean Society, the Eleusinia, 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 sigilla, being founded on certain principles of number, 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 recognize 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 (as being dangerous in ignorant hands) than any of the so‐called “Masonic Secrets,” which have now become those of Polichinelle, as the French say! 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. For though an Adept is compelled to refuse to impart the conditions and means that lead to any correlation of Elements—whether psychic or physical—which may produce harmful as well as beneficent results; yet he is ever ready to impart to the earnest student the secret of the ancient thought, in anything that has respect to history concealed under mythological symbolism, and thus to furnish a few more land‐marks for a retrospective view of the past, in so far as it furnishes useful information with regard to the origin of man, the evolution of the Races and geognosy. And yet it is the crying complaint to‐day, not only among Theosophists, but also among the few profane interested in the subject: Why do not the Adepts reveal that which they know? To this, one might answer: Why should they, since one knows beforehand that no man of Science will accept it, even as a hypothesis, much less as a theory or axiom.

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 has been given, been ridiculed and derided, and made to face the “animal‐” and “ape‐theory” of Huxley and Hæckel, on the one hand, and the rib of Adam and the apple on the other? Notwithstanding such an unenviable prospect, however, a mass of facts is given in the present work, and the origin of man, the evolution of the Globe and the Races, human and animal, are as fully treated as the writer is able to treat them.

The proofs brought forward in corroboration of the old teachings are scattered widely throughout the old scriptures of ancient civilizations. The Purânas, the Zend Avesta, and the old classics, are full of such facts; but no one has ever taken the trouble of collecting and collating them together. The reason for this is that all such events were recorded symbolically; and that the best scholars, the most acute minds, among our Âryanists and Egyptologists, have been too often darkened by one or another preconception, and 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 just as a moral was ever drawn from a parable, such moral being an actual truth and fact in human life, so a historical, real event was deduced, by those versed in the hieratic sciences, from 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 literally 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 not only unknown to, but even unsuspected and naturally 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 the 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 real events of any kind, in so many unmistakable words, lest the Powers connected with the event should be once more attracted. Such events were narrated only during 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 by degrees was the Chinese Alphabet created, as just before it the hieratic symbols were fixed upon in old Egypt. In the Chinese language, the characters of which may be read in any language, and which, as just said, is only a little less ancient than the Egyptian alphabet of Thoth, every word has its corresponding symbol in a pictorial form. This language possesses many thousands of such symbol‐letters, or logograms, each conveying the meaning of a whole word; for letters proper, or an alphabet as we understand it, do not exist in

the Chinese language, any more than they did in the Egyptian, till a far later period.

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 their writing is symbolical. 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 at least the metaphysical symbols. 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, strongly interwoven with metrology, one of the keys to the once universal Mystery Language. Mr. Ralston Skinner, of Cincinnati, the author of The Key to the Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery in 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 have certainly been 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 geometrical ratio [the integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle] 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 was 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 meanings 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 constructions.

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 uttered shall 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 separated 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 coördinating subjects, 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 the one with the other. 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?(456)

“Divine origin” does not here mean 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 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? All this may have been the experience of the Past, and these strange records lie embedded in the “Mystery Language” of the pre‐historic ages, the language now called SYMBOLISM.

Recent discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest 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 appropriate, 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, and the Indianists and Egyptologists in particular, experience in interpreting the allegorical writings of the Âryans 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 understandable to men of every 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 reëstablish 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 Kabalah,” 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 these, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the Christian Church; for instance, 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 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 confined to 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. From the fall of Memphis, Egypt began to lose these keys one by one, and Chaldæa 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 the human, and especially the physiological functions. They never had the higher keys. M. Gaston Maspero, the great French Egyptologist and the successor of Mariette Bey, writes:

Every time I hear people talking of the religion of Egypt, I am tempted to ask which of the Egyptian religions they are talking about? Is it of the Egyptian religion of the fourth dynasty, or of the Egyptian religion of the Ptolemaic period? Is it of the religion of the rabble, or of that of the learned? Of the religion such as was taught in the schools of Heliopolis, or of that which was in the minds and conceptions of the Theban sacerdotal class? For, between the first Memphite tomb, which bears the cartouche of a king of the third dynasty, and the last stones engraved at Esneh under Cæsar Philippus, the Arabian, there is an interval of at least five thousand years. Leaving aside the invasion of the Shepherds, the Ethiopian and Assyrian dominions, the Persian conquest, Greek colonization, and the thousand revolutions of its political life, Egypt had 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 by a few copies of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties. Every one of the verses composing it was already interpreted in three or four different ways; so different, indeed, that according to this or another school, the Demiurge became either the solar fire—Ra‐ shoo, or the primordial water. Fifteen centuries later, the number of readings had increased considerably. Time, in its course, had modified their ideas about the universe and the forces that ruled it. In the short eighteen centuries that Christianity has existed, it has worked up, developed and transformed most of its dogmas; how many times, then, might not the Egyptian priesthood have altered their dogmas during those fifty centuries that separate Theodosius from the King Builders of the Pyramids.(457)

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 had forgotten much, they altered nothing. The loss of a great part 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 in 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 Chapter of the Book of the Dead, mentioned by Maspero, we find (1) Osiris saying he is Toom—the creative force in Nature, giving form to all beings, spirits and men, self‐generated and self‐ existent—issued from Noon, 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, the solar force, on the Stairway in the City of the Eight (the two squares of Good and Evil), and he has annihilated the Children of Rebellion, the evil principles in Noon (Chaos). (3) He is the Fire and Water, Noon the Primordial Parent, and he created the Gods out of his Limbs—fourteen 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, the Bennoo, or Phœnix, the Bird of Resurrection in Eternity, in whom Night follows Day, and Day Night—an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and human reïncarnation. For what else can this mean? “The Wayfarer who crosses millions of years is the name of one, and the Great Green [Primordial Water or Chaos] the name of the other,” 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, Osiris, who confers justice, 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; but that which the Church got from both, is still more misinterpreted.

Yet the system of the former, in this special department of symbology—the key, namely, to the mysteries of astronomy as connected with those of generation and conception—is now proven identical with those ideas in ancient religions which have developed the phallic element of theology. The Jewish system of sacred measures, applied to religious symbols, is the same, so far as geometrical and numerical combinations go, as those of Greece, Chaldæa and Egypt, for it was adopted by the Israelites during the centuries of their slavery and captivity among the two latter nations.(458) What was this 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 similarly. 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 Ralston Skinner, in The Source of Measures.

The author of this very extraordinary work has discovered it, he says, in the use of the integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, discovered by John A. Parker, of New York. This ratio is 6561 for diameter, and 20612 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 discovered that there was a modified form of the ratio, viz., 113 to 355; and that while this last ratio pointed through its origin to the exact integral pi, or to 6561 to 20612, 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 seen 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 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 revelation. 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,” he says: These coincidences [which “would still remain if the Pyramid had no existence,”] are altogether more curious than any coincidence between the Pyramid and astronomical numbers: the former are as close and remarkable as they are real; 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.(459) On this Mr. C. Staniland Wake justly observes: 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.(460)

They had it assuredly; and it is on this “knowledge” that the programme of the Mysteries and of the series of Initiations was based: hence, the construction of the Pyramid, 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 the 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 formulæ derived from this Sidereal Cycle, symbolized by the form and measurements of the Tabernacle, which 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 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 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 only 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 also as certain, if not more so. For, as just shown, it is not so certain whether the measures of the Great Pyramid adopted by the Biblical Pyramidalists are beyond suspicion. A proof of this is to be found in the work called The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, by Mr. F. Petrie, and also in other works written quite recently to oppose the said calculations, which their authors call “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 theorists 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 way: “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. A. 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 on mathematical, considerations, and is logically inconclusive.

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.

the one on which Mr. Parker’s Quadrature mainly rests. It states that: 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 a 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 premisses, why must we conclude that, if the equilateral 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 premisses 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 may 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 primarily 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 of the symbolic religion of the Âryans, in the construction of their temples, in the figures given in the Purânas, and especially in their chronology, their astronomical symbols, the duration of the cycles, and other computations, were, or were not, the same as those used in the Biblical measurements and glyphs. For this will prove that the Jews, unless they took their sacred cubit and measurements from the Egyptians—Moses being an Initiate of their Priests—must have got those notions from India. At any rate they passed them on 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 was this system of measures which led to the invention of the God‐names Elohim and Jehovah, and to their adaptation to Phallicism, and that Jehovah is a not very flattering 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, 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 Section; but we have yet to agree as to the nature and character of the divine “Revealer.” The former hypothesis as to priority will for the profane, of course depend on (a) the internal and external evidence of the revelation, and (b) on each scholar’s individual preconceptions. 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 at both Kabalists and Occultists indifferently. But the 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.

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 was “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, which had just been published at that time. Then the New York press arose in arms (the Sun and the World newspapers chiefly) against our presuming to correct or find fault with such a star of learning. In that work, 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.(461) 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, although we had never heard of that writer. And now, six or seven years later (1882), this is what Mr. Staniland Wake writes:

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 final stage of the Sacred Mysteries_.(462) 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;(463) and that it was of this gate in the Initiation Temple, that the writer, who recorded the words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking.

Thus the greatest scholars of Science, instead of pooh‐poohing that supposed “farrago of absurd fiction and superstitions,” as the Brâhmanical 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, since 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. 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 though we may suppose that the entire cycle of the universal Mystery Language will not be mastered for centuries to come, yet even the little which has hitherto been discovered in the Bible by some scholars, is quite sufficient to demonstrate the claim—mathematically. As Judaism availed itself of two keys out of the seven, and as these two keys have now been re‐discovered, it becomes no longer a matter of individual speculation and hypothesis, least of all of “coincidence,” but one of a correct reading of the Biblical texts, just as anyone acquainted with arithmetic reads and verifies an addition sum. In fact, all we have said in Isis Unveiled is now found corroborated in the Egyptian Mystery, or The Source of Measures, by such readings of the Bible with the numerical and geometrical keys.

A few years longer, and this system will kill the dead‐letter reading 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, and will, moreover, entirely change 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 on Biology and Physiology.

Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of Nature and man will, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries, 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. In the beginning, such symbols were but natural, 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 the sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn. If later races, especially the “chosen people,” have degraded them, this does not affect the origin of the symbols. This little Semitic tribe—one of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the fourth and fifth sub‐races, the Mongolo‐Turanian and the so‐called Indo‐European, 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. And, perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, the symbology was not so crude as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole Pentateuch. To take an instance, 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, was not primarily composed for, or by, Moses. It was anticipated in the fragments found on the Babylonian tiles, in the story of King Sargon, who lived far earlier than Moses.

In his Assyrian Antiquities,(464) 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 Archeology.”(465) The capital of Sargon the Babylonian Moses, “was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semites Akkad—mentioned in Genesis(466) as the capital of Nimrod.... Akkad lay near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of Babylon.”(467) Another strange “coincidence” is found in the fact that the name of the neighbouring City of Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of Moses—Zipporah.(468) Of course the story is a clever addition by Ezra, who could not have been ignorant of the original. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows: 1. Sargina, 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 Azupiranu, which by the side of the river Euphrates is situated, 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.(469) And now let us compare the Bible narrative in Exodus: 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.(470) Mr. G. Smith then continues: The story is supposed to have happened about 1600 B.C., rather earlier than the supposed age of Moses; and, as we know that the fame of Sargon reached Egypt, it is quite likely that this account had a connection with the events related in Exodus II, for every action, when once performed, has a tendency to be repeated. But now that 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. The confession is suggestive, but the figures lack a cypher or two.

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, and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that Exodus was never written by Moses, but was re‐fabricated from old materials by Ezra. And if so, then why should not other symbols and glyphs far more crude in their phallic element have been added by this adept in the later Chaldean and Sabæan phallic worship? We are taught that the primeval faith of the Israelites was quite different from that which was developed centuries later by the Talmudists, and before them by David and Hezekiah.

All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two Testaments, is quite sufficient to class the Bible among esoteric works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of Biblical glyphs and numbers, as suggested by astronomical observations—Astronomy and Theology being closely connected—is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric, systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the planets, their aspects and nodes—the last term having now passed even into our modern Botany—are known in Astronomy as Sextiles, Quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and æons by the archaic nations, and in one sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence, the most archaic symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a square, a pentagon, and a hexagon, and other 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, even without the help of their divine instructors, could have taught primeval mankind the first principles of a numerical and geometrical symbol‐ language.(471) Hence we find numbers and figures used as an expression and a record of thought in every archaic symbolical Scripture. They are ever the same, with certain variations only, arising from 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 square, up to number 9, when it was synthesized by the first line and a circle—the Pythagorean mystic Decad, the sum of all, involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire Kosmos; mysteries recorded a hundred times more fully in the Hindû system than elsewhere, for him who can understand its mystic language. The numbers 3 and 4, in their combination 7, and also 5, 6, 9, and 10, are the very corner‐stones of Occult Cosmogonies. This Decad and its thousand combinations are found in every portion of the globe. One recognizes it in the caves and rock‐cut temples of Hindûstan and Central Asia; in the Pyramids and Lithoi of Egypt and America; in the Catacombs of Ozimandyas; in the mounds of the snow‐capped Caucasian 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 square, or the universal male and female glyphs, showing the first aspect of the evolving deity, are stamped for ever in the Southern Cross in the Heavens, as in the Egyptian Crux Ansata. As well expressed by the author of The Source of Measures:

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.(472) This kind of measure was made to coördinate 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, in the section which he rightly calls the “Primordial Vestiges of these Symbols,” to show the identity of symbols and their esoteric meaning all over the globe.

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 backs 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 (about 36), 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,(473) 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....

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.... Atwater, 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 were decorated with hieroglyphical sculptures and small niches, arranged with great symmetry. The number of these niches seem to allude to the 318 simple and compound signs of the days of their civil calendar.” 318 is the Gnostic value of Christ, and the famous number of the trained or circumcized servants of Abram. When it is considered 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 a civil calendar becomes manifest.

Identical glyphs, numbers and esoteric symbols are found in Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Easter Island, India, Chaldæa, 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 existent—only because that day, when all the Seven Keys shall be delivered unto Science, or rather the men of learning and research in the department of symbology, 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. Or rather, some of its defenders must have lost their reason. For what can one think when, in the face of the dead‐letter absurdities of the Bible, these are still publicly supported, and as fiercely as ever, and one finds the 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”!!!(474)

Hence we have no choice but either to blindly accept the deductions of Science, or to cut ourselves adrift from it, and withstand it fearlessly to its face, stating what the Secret Doctrine teaches us, and 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 unconsciously give us a helping hand. Ethnology, on the confession of some of its most 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 Adam and a yellow Adam.”(475) Were they Hindûs enumerating the rebirths of Vâmadeva, from the Linga Purâna, they could say little more. For, enumerating the repeated births of Shiva, they show him in one Kalpa of a white complexion, in another of a black colour, in still another of a red colour, after which the Kumâra becomes “four youths of a yellow colour.” This strange “coincidence,” as Mr. Proctor would say, speaks only in favour of scientific intuition, as Shiva‐Kumâra simply represents, allegorically, the human Races during the genesis of man. But it has 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(476) created upon this earth.” The exhumed relics of pre‐Adamic man, “instead of shaking our confidence in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity.”(477) 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 coërce them by the fear of heresy.” This must be a relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir Charles 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.(478) 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 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!... 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!(479)

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 now‐a‐days before her gay modern lovers—might even derive a moral lesson from this daughter of Satan, created 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 Charles 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 not dared to sign with his own, or even a borrowed, name. For, his pre‐Adamic Races—not Satanic but simply Atlantean, and the Hermaphrodites before the latter—are mentioned in the Bible, if read esoterically, as they are in the Secret Doctrine. The Seven Keys open the mysteries, past and future, of the seven great Root‐Races, and of the seven Kalpas. Though the genesis of man, and even the geology, of Esotericism will surely be rejected by Science, just as much as the Satanic and pre‐Adamic Races, yet if the Scientists, having no other way out of their difficulties, are compelled 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.

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 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, L.L.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 (Âkâsha, in Sanskrit), one of the dreams of old, which has now again become the dream of Modern Science. It is the greatest, as it is the boldest, of the surviving speculations of ancient philosophers. For the Occultists, however, both Ether and the Primordial Substance are realities. To put it plainly, Ether is the Astral Light, and the Primordial Substance is Âkâsha, the Upâdhi 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 in allegory. In the oldest Âryan race, the Hindû, the worship of the intellectual classes at no time ever consisted in an adoration of marvellous form and art, however fervent, as with the Greeks; an adoration, which led later on to anthropomorphism. But while the Greek philosopher adored form, and the Hindû 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 is it 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 unmistakably as there is one 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 each are but 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.

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 coeternal aspect of the One Reality, Cosmic Ideation, is absolutely omitted from consideration, and as to its Noumenon, it seems non‐existent in the mind of the great thinker. Without doubt, this one‐sided mode of dealing with the problem is due largely to the pernicious Western practice of subordinating Consciousness to Matter, or regarding it as a “bye‐product” of molecular motion. 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 publicly to raise an altar to the “Unknown God.” Whatever St. Paul may have had in his profound mind, when declaring to the Athenians that this “Unknown,” which they ignorantly worshipped, was the true God announced by himself—that Deity was not “Jehovah,” 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.”(480)

Divine Thought cannot be defined, nor can its meaning be 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, having in hand for deducing the true value of its terms only a number of unknown quantities. Its place is found in the old primitive symbolic charts, in which, as already shown, it is represented by a boundless darkness, on the ground of which appears the first central point in white—thus symbolizing coëval and coëternal Spirit‐Matter making its appearance in the phenomenal world, before its first differentiation. When “the One becomes Two,” it may then be referred to as Spirit and Matter. To “Spirit” is referable every manifestation of Consciousness, reflective or direct, and of “unconscious purposiveness”—to adopt a modern expression used in Western philosophy, so‐called—as evidenced in the Vital Principle, and Nature’s submission to the majestic sequence of immutable Law. “Matter” must be regarded as objectivity in its purest abstraction, the self‐existing basis, whose septenary manvantaric differentiations constitute the objective reality underlying the phenomena of each phase of conscious existence. During the period of Universal Pralaya, Cosmic Ideation is non‐existent; and the variously differentiated states of Cosmic Substance are resolved back again into the primary state of abstract potential objectivity.

Manvantaric impulse commences with the reäwakening 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, whereas Âryan antiquity named them the Seven Prakritis, or Natures—serving, severally, as the relatively homogeneous bases, 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. 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 substance, 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 our Seven Protyles. It is the last of these that Mr. Crookes is in search of, having recently detected the possibility of its existence on our plane.

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 a 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 interdependent. In strict accuracy, to avoid confusion and misconception, the term “Matter” ought to be applied to the aggregate of objects of possible perception, and the term “Substance” to Noumena; for inasmuch as the phenomena of our plane are the creations 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 coöperation 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 coöperation 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 (Mâyâ). But the illusion of him who is in himself an illusion differs on every plane of consciousness; and we have no more right to dogmatize 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. Cosmic Ideation focussed in a Principle, or Upâdhi (Basis), results as the consciousness of the individual Ego. Its manifestation varies with the degree of the Upâdhi. For instance, through that known as Manas, it wells up as Mind‐ Consciousness; through the more finely differentiated fabric (sixth state of matter) of Buddhi—resting on the experience of Manas as its Basis—as a stream of Spiritual Intuition.

The pure Object apart from consciousness is unknown to us, while living on the plane of our three‐dimensional world, for 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, so long as we enjoy our five senses and no more, and do not know how to divorce our all‐perceiving Ego 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 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 Nirvânic State—negation, again, only from our plane—not until then, 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 Dhyân Chohan must bow in silence and ignorance—the Unspeakable Mystery of that which is called by the Vedântins, Parabrahman.

Therefore, such being the case, all those who have 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 was the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre‐differentiation? Even that is the All of 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 Upâdhi, or Vehicle, of every possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. In the opening sentences of Genesis, and in the Chaldean Cosmogony; in the Purânas of India, and in the Book of the Dead of Egypt; everywhere it opens the cycle of manifestation. It is termed Chaos, and the Face of the Waters, incubated by the Spirit, proceeding from the Unknown, whatever that Spirit’s name may be.

The authors of the Sacred Scriptures in India go deeper into the origin of the evolution of things than does Thales or Job, for they say: From Intelligence [called Mahat, in the Purânas], associated with Ignorance [Îshvara, 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.(481)

It thus becomes evident that it is not this Ether—sprung at the fourth remove from an emanation of “Intelligence, associated with Ignorance”—which is the high Principle, the deific Entity worshipped by the Greeks and Latins under the name of “Pater, Omnipotens Æther,” and “Magnus Æther,” in its collective aggregate. The septenary gradation, and the innumerable sub‐divisions 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,” but now about to be rejected—have 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; Cosmocratores, the “World Bearers,” according to Bossuet; Mundi Tenentes, the “World Holders,” as Tertullian calls them; Mundi Domini, “World Dominations,” or rather Dominators; the Curbati, or “Curved,” etc.; thus making of the stars and celestial orbs in their courses—Devils!

For it is thus that the Church has interpreted the verse: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.”(482) Further, St. Paul mentions the spiritual malices (“wickedness,” in English texts), in the Air—spiritualia nequitiæ cœlestibus—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, semi‐conscious and unconscious entities; only the church has less power over them than over invisible microbes or mosquitoes. The difference made between the seven states of Ether—itself one of the Seven Cosmic Principles, whereas the Æther of the ancients is Universal Fire—may be seen in the injunctions by Zoroaster and Psellus, respectively. The former said: “Consult it only when it is without form or figure”—absque formâ et figurâ—which means, without flames or burning coals. “When it has a form, heed it not”; teaches Psellus, “but when it is formless, obey it, for it is then sacred fire, and all it will reveal thee shall be true.”(483) This proves that Ether, itself an aspect of Âkâsha, has in its turn several aspects or “principles.”

All the ancient nations deified Æther in its imponderable aspect and potency. Virgil calls Jupiter, Pater Omnipotens Æther, and the “Great Æther.”(484) The Hindûs have also placed it among their deities, under the name of Âkâsha, the synthesis of Ether. And the author of the Homœomerian System of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless Æther, where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned—an Occult teaching. It thus becomes clear that it is from Æther, in its highest synthetic aspect, once anthropomorphized, that sprang the first idea of a personal Creative Deity. With the philosophical Hindûs the Elements are tâmasa, 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 Âkâsha, incorrectly translated Ether, and also with Mâyâ, Illusion, of which Îshvara 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 “sprang from the Primordial Chaos.”

For “what is the primordial Chaos but Æther?”—it is asked, in Isis Unveiled. Not the modern Ether; not such as is recognized now, but such as was known to the ancient philosophers long before the time of Moses—Æther, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in itself the germs of universal creation. The Upper Æther, or Âkâsha, is the Celestial Virgin and Mother of every existing form and being, from whose bosom, as soon as “incubated” by the Divine Spirit, are called into existence Matter and Life, Force and Action. Æther is the Aditi of the Hindûs, and it is Âkâsha. Electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and chemical action are so little understood even now, that fresh facts are constantly widening the range of our knowledge. Who knows where ends the power of this protean giant—Æther; or whence its mysterious origin? Who, we mean, that denies the Spirit that works in it, and evolves out of it all visible forms?

It will be an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the world are based on a knowledge among the Ancients of those sciences, which have, in our days, allied themselves in support of the doctrine of evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that these 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; whereas 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 ... account clashes with the definite exegesis of “Exact Science.”(485) If we turn to the Ordinances of Manu, we find 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, Nârâyana, etc.] became 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.” Whence this Self‐existent Lord? It is called This, and is spoken of as “Darkness, imperceptible, without definite qualities, undiscoverable, unknowable, as if wholly in sleep.” Having dwelt in that Egg for a whole Divine Year, he “who is called in the world Brahmâ,” splits that Egg in two, and from the upper portion he forms the heaven, from the lower the earth, and from the middle the sky and “the perpetual place of waters.”(486)

Directly following these verses, however, there is something more important for us, as it entirely corroborates our Esoteric teachings. From verse 14 to 36, evolution is given in the order described in the Esoteric Philosophy. This cannot be easily gainsaid. Even Medhâtithi, the son of Virasvâmin, and the author of the Commentary, the Manubhâsya, whose date, according to the western Orientalists, is 1,000 A.D., helps us with his remarks to the elucidation of the truth. He shows himself either unwilling to give out more, because he knew what had to be kept from the profane, or else he was really puzzled. Still, what he does give out makes the septenary principle in man and Nature plain enough. Let us begin with Chapter I of the Ordinances, or “Laws,” after the Self‐existent Lord, the Unmanifesting Logos of the Unknown “Darkness,” becomes manifested in the Golden Egg. It is from this Egg, from 11. “That which is the undiscrete [undifferentiated] Cause, eternal, which is and is not, from It issued that Male who is called in the world Brahmâ.”

Here, as in all genuine philosophical systems, we find even the “Egg,” or the Circle, or Zero, Boundless Infinity, referred to as “It,”(487) and Brahmâ, the first Unit only, referred to as the “Male” God, i.e., the fructifying Principle. It is [circle split by vertical line], or 10 (ten), the Decad. On the plane of the Septenary, or our World, only, it is called Brahmâ. On that of the Unified Decad, in the realm of Reality, this male Brahmâ is an Illusion. 14. “From Self (Âtmanah) he created Mind, which is and is not; and from Mind, Ego‐ism [Self‐Consciousness] (a), the ruler (b), the Lord.”

(a) The Mind is Manas. Medhâtithi, the commentator, justly observes here that it is the reverse of this, and shows already interpolation and rearranging; for it is Manas that springs from Ahamkâra or (Universal) Self‐Consciousness, as Manas in the microcosm springs from Mahat, or Mahâ‐Buddhi (Buddhi, in man). For Manas is dual. As shown and translated by Colebrooke, “Mind, serving both for sense and action, is an organ by affinity, being cognate with the rest”;(488) “the rest” here meaning 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 Âtmâ‐Buddhi and with the lower Four Principles. Hence, our teaching: namely, that Manas follows Âtmâ‐Buddhi to Devachan, and that the Lower Manas, that is to say, the dregs or residue of Manas, remains with Kâma Rûpa, in Limbus, or Kâma Loka, the abode of the “Shells.” (b) Medhâtithi translates this as “the one conscious of the I,” or Ego, not “the ruler,” as do the Orientalists. Thus also they translate the following shloka: 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 (âtmamâtrâsu), created all beings.”

When, according to Medhâtithi, it ought to read mâtrâbhih instead of âtmamâtrâsu, and thus would read: “He having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of unmeasured brightness, by elements of self, created all beings.” The latter reading must be the correct one, since He, the Self, is what we call Âtmâ, and thus constitutes the seventh principle, the synthesis of the “six.” Such is also the opinion of the editor of the Mânava Dharma Shâstra, who seems to have intuitionally entered far deeper into the spirit of the philosophy than has the translator, the late Dr. Burnell; for he hesitates little between the text of Kullûka Bhatta and the commentary of Medhâtithi. Rejecting the tanmâtra, or subtile elements, and the âtmamâtra of Kullûka Bhatta, 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 those six with the spiritual element [the seventh] he (thus) created all existing things;’ ... âtmamâtra is therefore the spiritual atom as opposed to the elementary, not reflexive ‘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 the wise call his form Sharîra.”

And he adds that “elements” mean here portions, or parts (or principles), which reading is borne out by verse 19, which says: “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 emendation of Medhâtithi, the editor remarks: “the five elements plus mind [Manas] and self‐consciousness [Ahamkâra](489) are probably meant; ‘subtile elements,’ as before [meaning] ‘fine portions of form’ [or principles].” Verse 20 shows this, when saying of these five elements, or “fine portions of form” (Rûpa plus Manas and Self‐Consciousness) that they constitute the “Seven Purusha,” or Principles, called in the Purânas 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,” and which are, therefore, “distinct from the atoms of the Nyâya.”

This creative Brahmâ, issuing from the Mundane or Golden Egg, unites in himself both the male and female principles. He is, in short, the same as all the creative Protologoi. Of Brahmâ, however, it could not be said, as of Dionysos, “πρωτόγονον διφυῆ τρίγονον βακχεῖον Ἅνακτα Ἄγριον ἀρρητὸν κρύφιον δικέρωτα δίμορφον”—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 Vallabâchâryas 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? Impossible! Each and all are one of the rungs of that septenary ladder of Divine Consciousness, Pagan as Christian. Ain Suph is said to manifest through the Seven Letters of the Name of Jehovah who, having usurped the place of the Unknown Limitless, was given by his devotees his Seven Angels of the Presence—his Seven Principles. But, indeed, they are mentioned in almost every school. In the pure Sânkhya philosophy Mahat, Ahamkâra and the five Tanmâtras are called the Seven Prakritis, or Natures, and are counted from Mahâ‐Buddhi, or Mahat, down to Earth.(490)

Nevertheless, however disfigured by Ezra for Rabbinical purposes is the original Elohistic version, however repulsive at times is even the esoteric meaning in the Hebrew scrolls, far more so indeed 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 Kabalah, one finds a matchless temple of Occult truths, a well of deeply concealed beauty, hidden under a structure, the visible architecture of which, notwithstanding its apparent symmetry, is unable to stand the criticism of cold reason, or to reveal the age of its hidden truth, for it belongs to all the ages. There is more Wisdom concealed under the exoteric fables of the Purânas and Bible than in all the exoteric facts and science in the literature of the world, and more Occult true Science, than there is of exact knowledge in all the academies. Or, in plainer and stronger language, there is as much esoteric wisdom in some portions of the exoteric Purânas and Pentateuch, as there is of nonsense and of designedly childish fancy, when read only in the dead‐letter and murderous interpretations of the great dogmatic religions, and especially of their sects.

Let anyone read the first verses of Genesis and reflect upon them. There, “God” commands another “God,” who does his bidding—even in the cautious English Protestant authorized translation of King James I. In the “beginning”—the Hebrew language having no word to express the idea of eternity(491)—“God” fashions the Heaven and the Earth; and the latter is “without form and void,” while the former is in fact not Heaven, but the “Deep,” Chaos, with darkness upon its face.(492) “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters,” or the Great Deep of the Infinite Space. And this Spirit is Nârâyana, or Vishnu.

“And God said, Let there be a firmament....” And “God,” the second, obeyed and “made the firmament.” “And God said let there be light.” And “there was light.” Now the latter does not mean light at all, but, as in the Kabalah, 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 coëfficient 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 Dhyân Chohans, or the Auphanim as Ezekiel does.

“The one Universal Light, which to man is Darkness, is ever existent,” says the Chaldean Book of Numbers. From it proceeds periodically the Energy, which is reflected in the Deep, or Chaos, the store‐house of future Worlds, and, once awakened, stirs up and fructifies the latent Forces, which are the ever present eternal potentialities in it. Then awake anew the Brahmâs and Buddhas—the co‐eternal Forces—and a new Universe springs into being.

In the Sepher Yetzirah, 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.(493) “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.”(494) And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized 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 Air; Ether or Fire completes the Mystic Four, the Arbo‐al.(495) When the Concealed of the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a Point [the Primordial Point, or the first Sephira, 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.(496) “He maketh the Wind His messengers, flaming Fire His servants”;(497) says the Yetzirah, showing the cosmical character of the later euhemerized Elements, and that Spirit permeates every atom in Kosmos.

Paul calls the invisible Cosmic Beings the “Elements.” 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 is Ether also. As we said in Isis Unveiled: 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 these 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 Mr. William 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!