The Secret Doctrine

One feels serious doubt whether, with all its intellectual acuteness, our age is destined to discover in each Western nation even one solitary uninitiated Scholar or Philosopher capable of fully comprehending the spirit of Archaic Philosophy. Nor can either be expected to do so, before the real meaning of the Alpha and the Omega of Eastern Esotericism, the terms Sat and Asat—so freely used in the Rig Veda and elsewhere—is thoroughly assimilated. Without this key to Âryan Wisdom, the Cosmogony of the Rishis and the Arhats is in danger of remaining a dead letter to the average Orientalist. Asat is not merely the negation of Sat, nor is it the “not yet existing”; for Sat is in itself neither the “existent,” nor “being.” Sat is the immutable, the ever‐present, changeless, and eternal Root, from and through which all proceeds. But it is far more than the potential force in the seed, which propels onward the process of development, or what is now called evolution. It is the ever becoming, though the never manifesting.(1029) Sat is born from Asat, and Asat is begotten by Sat—perpetual motion in a circle, truly; yet a circle that can be squared only at the Supreme Initiation, at the threshold of Parinirvâna.

Barth started a reflection on the Rig Veda which was meant for a stern criticism, an unusual, therefore, as was thought, an original, view of this archaic volume. It so happened, however, that, in his criticism, this scholar revealed a truth, without being himself aware of its full importance. He premises by saying that “neither in the language nor in the thought of the Rig Veda” has he “been able to discover that quality of primitive natural simplicity, which so many are fain to see in it.” Barth had Max Müller in his mind’s eye when writing this. For the famous Oxford professor has throughout characterized the hymns of the Rig Veda, as the unsophisticated expression of the religious feeling of a pastoral innocent people. “In the Vedic hymns the ideas and myths appear in their simplest and freshest form”—the Sanskrit scholar thinks. Barth is of a different opinion, however. So divided and personal are the opinions of Sanskritists as to the importance and intrinsic value of the Rig Veda, that these opinions become entirely biassed whichever way they incline. Thus Prof. Max Müller declares that:

Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece more clearly felt, than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda with the full grown and decayed myths on which the poetry of Homer is founded. The Veda is the real Theogony of the Aryan races, while that of Hesiod is a distorted caricature of the original image.

This is a sweeping assertion, and perhaps rather unjust in its general application. But why not try to account for it? Orientalists cannot do so, for they reject the chronology of the Secret Doctrine, and can hardly admit the fact that between the Rig Vedic hymns and Hesiod’s Theogony tens of thousands of years have elapsed. So they fail to see that the Greek myths are no longer the primitive symbolical language of the Initiates, the Disciples of the Gods‐Hierophants, the divine ancient “Sacrificers,” and that disfigured by the distance, and encumbered by the exuberant growth of human profane fancy, they now stand like distorted images of stars in running waves. But if Hesiod’s Cosmogony and Theogony are to be viewed as caricatures of the original images, how much more so the myths in the Hebrew Genesis, in the sight of those for whom they are no more divine revelation or the word of God, than is Hesiod’s Theogony for Mr. Gladstone. As Barth says:

The poetry it [the Rig Veda] contains appears to me, on the contrary, to be of a singularly refined character and artificially elaborated, full of allusions and reticences, of pretensions [?] to mysticism and theosophic insight; and the manner of its expression is such as reminds one more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small groups of initiated than the poetic language of a large community.(1030) We will not stop to enquire of the critic what he can know of the phraseology in use among the “initiated,” or whether he belongs himself to such a group; for, in the latter case, he would hardly have used such language. But the above shows the remarkable disagreement between scholars even with regard to the external character of the Rig Veda. What, then, can any of the modern Sanskritists know about its internal or esoteric meaning, beyond the correct inference of Barth, that this Scripture has been compiled by Initiates?

The whole of the present work is an endeavour to prove this truth. The ancient Adepts have solved the great problems of Science, however unwilling modern Materialism may be to admit the fact. The mysteries of Life and Death were fathomed by the great master‐minds of antiquity; and if they have preserved them in secresy and silence, it is because these problems formed part of the Sacred Mysteries, which must have remained incomprehensible to the vast majority of men then, as they do now. If such teachings are still regarded as chimeras by our opponents in Philosophy, it may be a consolation to Theosophists to learn, on good proof, that the speculations of modern Psychologists—whether serious Idealists, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, or wool‐gathering Pseudo‐idealists—are far more chimerical. Indeed, instead of resting on the firm foundation of facts in Nature, they are the unhealthy will‐o’‐the‐wisps of materialistic imagination, of the brains that evolved them—and no more. While they deny, we affirm; and our affirmation is corroborated by almost all the Sages of antiquity. Believing in Occultism and a host of invisible Potencies for good reasons, we say, Certus sum, scio quod credidi; to which our critics reply, Credat Judæus Apella. Neither is converted by the other, nor does such result affect even our little planet. E pur se muove!

Nor is there any need of proselytizing. As remarked by the wise Cicero: Time destroys the speculations of man, but it confirms the judgment of nature. Let us bide our time. Meanwhile, it is not in the human constitution to witness in silence the destruction of one’s Gods, whether they be true or false. And as Theology and Materialism have combined together to destroy the old Gods of antiquity and seek to disfigure every old philosophical conception, it is but just that the lovers of the Old Wisdom should defend their position, by proving that the whole arsenal of the two is, at best, formed of new weapons made out of very old material.

Names such as Adam‐Adami, used by Dr. Chwolsohn in his Nabathean Agriculture and derided by M. Renan, may prove little to the profane. To the Occultist, however, once that the term is found in a work of such immense antiquity as that above cited, it proves a good deal. It proves, for instance, that Adami was a manifold symbol, originating with the Âryan people, as the root word shows, and having been taken from them by the Semites and the Turanians—as many other things were.

Adam‐Adami is a generic compound name as old as language is. The Secret Doctrine teaches that Ad‐i was the name given by the Âryans to the first speaking race of mankind, in this Round. Hence the terms Adonim and Adonai (the ancient plural form of the word Adon), which the Jews applied to their Jehovah and Angels, who were simply the first spiritual and ethereal sons of the Earth, and the God Adonis, who in his many variations stood for the “First Lord.” Adam is the Sanskrit Âdi‐Nâth, also meaning First Lord, as Âd‐Îshvara, or any Ad (the First) prefixed to an adjective or substantive. The reason for this is that such truths were a common inheritance. It was a revelation received by the first mankind before that time which, in biblical phraseology, is called “the period of one lip and word,” or speech; knowledge expanded by man’s own intuition later on, still later hidden from profanation under an adequate symbology. The author of the Qabbalah, according to the philosophical writings of Ibn Gebirol, shows the Israelites using Ad‐onaï (A Do Na Y), “Lord,” instead of Eh’yeh, “I am,” and YHVH, and adds that, while Adonaï is rendered “Lord” in the Bible, The lowest designation, or the Deity in Nature, the more general term Elohim, is translated God.(1031)

A curious work was translated in 1860 or thereabout, by the Orientalist Chwolsohn, and presented to ever‐incredulous and flippant Europe under the innocent title of Nabathean Agriculture. In the opinion of the translator that archaic volume is a complete initiation into the mysteries of the Pre‐Adamite nations, on the authority of undeniably authentic documents. It is an invaluable compendium, the full epitome of the doctrines, arts and sciences, not only of the Chaldæans, but also of the Assyrians and Canaanites of the pre‐historic ages.(1032) These Nabatheans—as some critics thought—were simply the Sabæans, or Chaldæan star‐worshippers. The work is a retranslation from the Arabic, into which language it was at first translated from the Chaldæan. Masoudi, the Arabian historian, speaks of these Nabatheans, and explains their origin in this wise: After the Deluge [?] the nations established themselves in various countries. Among these were the Nabatheans, who founded the city of Babylon, and were those descendants of Ham who settled in the same province under the leadership of Nimrod, the son of Cush, who was the son of Ham and great‐grandson of Noah. This took place at the time when Nimrod received the governorship of Babylonia as the delegate of Dzahhak named Biourasp.(1033)

The translator, Chwolsohn, finds that the assertions of this historian are in perfect accord with those of Moses in Genesis; while more irreverent critics might express the opinion that for this very reason their truth should be suspected. It is useless, however, to argue the point, which is of no value in the present question. The weather‐beaten, long‐since‐buried problem, and the difficulty of accounting, on any logical ground, for the phenomenal derivation of millions of people of various races, of many civilized nations and tribes, from three couples—Noah’s sons and their wives—in 346 years(1034) after the Deluge, may be left to the Karma of the author of Genesis, whether he is called Moses or Ezra. That which is interesting in the work under notice, however, are its contents, the doctrines enunciated in it, which are again, if read Esoterically, almost all of them identical with the Secret Teachings.

Quatremère suggested that this book might have been simply a copy made under Nebuchadnezzar II from some Hamitic treatise, “infinitely more ancient,” while the author maintains, on internal and external evidence, that its Chaldæan original was written out from the oral discourses and teachings of a wealthy Babylonian landowner, named Qû‐tâmy, who had used for those lectures still more ancient materials. The first Arabic translation is placed by Chwolsohn so far back as the thirteenth century B.C. On the first page of this “revelation,” the author, or amanuensis, Qû‐tâmy, declares that “the doctrines propounded therein, were originally told by Saturn ... to the Moon, who communicated them to her idol,” and the idol revealed them to her devotee, the writer—the Adept Scribe of that work—Qû‐tâmy.

The details given by the God for the benefit and instruction of mortals, show periods of incalculable duration and a series of numberless kingdoms and Dynasties that preceded the appearance on Earth of Adami (the “red‐ earth”). These periods, as might have been expected, have roused the defenders of the chronology of the biblical dead‐letter meaning almost to fury. De Rougemont was the first to make a levée‐in‐arms against the translator. He reproaches him with sacrificing Moses to anonymous authors.(1035) Berosus, he urges, however great were his chronological errors, was at least in perfect accord with the prophet with regard to the first men, since he speaks of Alorus‐Adam, of Xisuthrus‐Noah, and of Belus‐Nimrod, etc. Therefore, he adds, the work must be an apocryphon to be ranged with its contemporaries—the Fourth Book of Esdras, the Book of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Book of Hermes—every one of these dating no further back than two or three centuries B.C. Ewald came down still harder on Chwolsohn, and finally M. Renan, who in the Revue Germanique(1036) asks him to show reason why his Nabathean Agriculture should not be the fraudulent work of some Jew of the third or fourth century of our era? It can hardly be otherwise—argues the romancer of the Vie de Jésus, since, in this in‐folio on Astrology and Sorcery:

We recognize in the personages introduced Qû‐tâmy, all the patriarchs of the biblical legends, such as Adam‐Adami, Anouka‐ Noah, and his Ibrahim‐Abraham, etc. But this is no reason, since Adam and others are generic names. Meanwhile it is humbly submitted that, all things considered, an apocryphon—if even of the third century A.D., instead of the thirteenth century B.C., is old enough to appear genuine as a document, and so satisfy the demands of the most exacting archæologist and critic. For even admitting, for argument’s sake, that this literary relic has been compiled by “some Jew of the third century of our era”—what of that? Leaving the credibility of its doctrines for a moment aside, why should it be less entitled to a hearing, or less instructive as reflecting older opinions, than any other religious work, also a “compilation from old texts” or oral tradition—of the same or even a later age? In such case we should have to reject and call “apocryphal” the Kurân—three centuries later, though we know it to have sprung, Minerva‐like, direct from the brain of the Arabian prophet; and we should have to pooh‐pooh all the information we can get from the Talmud, which, in its present form, was also compiled from older materials, and is not earlier than the ninth century of our era.

This curious “Bible” of the Chaldæan Adept and the various criticisms upon it (as in Chwolsohn’s translation) are noticed, because it has an important bearing upon a great portion of the present work. With the exception of the contention of M. Renan, an iconoclast on principle—so pointedly called by Jules Lemaître “le Paganini du néant”—the worst fault found with the work is, it would seem, that the apocryphon pretends to have been communicated as a revelation to an Adept by, and from, the “idol of the Moon,” who received it from “Saturn.” Hence, very naturally, it is “a fairy tale all round.” To this there is but one answer: It is no more a fairy tale than the Bible, and if one falls, the other must follow it. Even the mode of divination through “the idol of the Moon” is the same as that practised by David, Saul and the High Priests of the Jewish Tabernacle by means of the Teraphim.

The Nabathean Agriculture is a compilation indeed; it is no apocryphon, but the repetition of the tenets of the Secret Doctrine under the exoteric Chaldæan form of national symbols, for the purpose of “cloaking” the tenets, just as the Books of Hermes and the Purânas are like attempts by Egyptians and Hindûs. The work was as well known in antiquity as it was during the Middle Ages. Maimonides speaks of it, and refers more than once to this Chaldæo‐Arabic MS., calling the Nabatheans by the name of their co‐religionists, the “star‐worshippers,” or Sabæans, but yet failing to see in the disfigured word “Nabathean” the mystic name of the caste devoted to Nebo, the God of Secret Wisdom, which shows on its face that the Nabatheans were an Occult Brotherhood.(1037) The Nabatheans who, according to the Persian Yezidi, originally came to Syria from Busrah, were the degenerate members of that fraternity; still their religion, even at that late day, was purely kabalistic.(1038) Nebo is the Deity of the Planet Mercury, and Mercury is the God of Wisdom, or Hermes, or Budha, which the Jews called Kokab (ככב), “the Lord on high, the aspiring,” and the Greeks Nabo (Ναβώ), hence Nabatheans. Notwithstanding that Maimonides calls their doctrines “heathenish foolishness” and their archaic literature “Sabæorum fœtum,” he places their “agriculture,” the Bible of Qû‐tâmy, in the first rank of archaic literature; and Abarbanel praises it in unmeasured terms. Spencer,(1039) quoting the latter, speaks of it as that “most excellent oriental work,” adding that by Nabatheans, the Sabæans, the Chaldæans, and the Egyptians, in short all those nations against whom the laws of Moses were most severely enacted, have to be understood.

Nebo, the oldest God of Wisdom of Babylonia and Mesopotamia, was identical with the Hindû Budha and the Hermes‐Mercury of the Greeks. A slight change in the sexes of the parents is the only alteration. As Budha was the Son of Soma (the Moon) in India, and of the wife of Brihaspati (Jupiter), so Nebo was the son of Zarpanitu (the Moon) and of Merodach, who became Jupiter, after having been a Sun‐god. As Mercury the Planet, Nebo was the “overseer” among the seven Gods of the Planets; and as the personification of the Secret Wisdom he was Nabin, a seer and a prophet. Moses is made to die and disappear on the mount sacred to Nebo. This shows him to have been an Initiate, and a priest of that God under another name; for this God of Wisdom was the great Creative Deity, and was worshipped as such. And this not only at Borsippa in his gorgeous Temple, or Planet‐tower; he was likewise adored by the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Assyrians, and throughout the whole of Palestine. Then why not by the Israelites? “The planetary temple of Babylon” had its “Holy of Holies” within the shrine of Nebo, the Prophet‐God of Wisdom. We are told in the Hibbert Lectures:

The ancient Babylonians had an intercessor between men and the gods ... and Nebo, was the “proclaimer” or “prophet,” as he made known the desire of his father Merodach.(1040) Nebo is a Creator, like Budha, of the Fourth, and also of the Fifth, Race. For the former starts a new race of Adepts, and the latter, the Solar‐ Lunar Dynasty, or the men of these Races and Round. Both are the Adams of their respective creatures. Adam‐Adami is a personation of the dual Adam: of the paradigmatic Adam‐Kadmon, the Creator, and of the lower Adam, the terrestrial, who, as the Syrian Kabalists have it, had only Nephesh, the “breath of life,” but no Living Soul, until after his Fall.

If, therefore, Renan persists in regarding the Chaldæan Scriptures—or what remains of them—as apocryphal, it is quite immaterial to truth and fact. There are other Orientalists who may be of a different opinion; and even were they not, it would still really matter very little. These doctrines contain the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy, and this must suffice. To those who understand nothing of symbology it may appear astrolatry, pure and simple, or to him who would conceal the Esoteric Truth, even “heathenish foolishness.” Maimonides, however, while expressing scorn for the Esotericism in the religion of other nations, confessed Esotericism and Symbology in his own, preached silence and secrecy upon the true meaning of Mosaic sayings, and thus came to grief. The Doctrines of Qû‐tâmy, the Chaldæan, are, in short, the allegorical rendering of the religion of the earliest nations of the Fifth Race. Why then should M. Renan treat the name “Adam‐Adami” with such academical contempt? The author of the Origins of Christianity evidently knows nothing of the origins of Pagan symbolism or of Esotericism either, otherwise he would have known that the name Adam‐Adami was a form of a universal symbol, referring, even with the Jews, not to one man, but to four distinct humanities or mankinds. This is very easily proven.

The Kabalists teach the existence of four distinct Adams, or the transformation of four consecutive Adams, the emanations from the Dyooknah, or Divine Phantom, of the Heavenly Man, an ethereal combination of Neshamah, the highest Soul or Spirit; this Adam having, of course, neither a gross human body, nor a body of desire. This Adam is the Prototype (Tzure) of the second Adam. That they represent our Five Races, is certain, as everyone can see by their description in the Kabalah. The first is the Perfect Holy Adam, “a shadow that disappeared” (the Kings of Edom), produced from the divine Tzelem (Image); the second is called the Protoplastic Androgyne Adam of the future terrestrial and separated Adam; the third Adam is the man made of “dust” (the first, Innocent Adam); and the fourth, is the supposed forefather of our own race—the Fallen Adam. See, however, the admirably clear description of these in Isaac Myer’s Qabbalah. He gives only four Adams, because of the Kings of Edom, no doubt, and adds: The fourth Adam ... was clothed with skin, flesh, nerves, etc. This answers to the Lower Nephesh and Guff, i.e., body, united. He has the animal power of reproduction and continuance of species.(1041) This is the human Root‐Race.

It is just at this point that the modern Kabalists—led into error by the long generations of Christian Mystics who have tampered with the kabalistic records wherever they could—diverge from the Occultists in their interpretations, and take the later thought for the earlier idea. The original Kabalah was entirely metaphysical, and had no concern with animal, or terrestrial, sexes; the later Kabalah has suffocated the divine ideal under the heavy phallic element. The Kabalists say: “God made man male and female.” Says the author of the Qabbalah: Among the Qabbalists, the necessity to continued creation and existence is called the Balance.(1042)

And being without this “Balance,” connected with Maqom (the mysterious “Place”),(1043) even the First Race is not, as we have seen, recognized by the Sons of the Fifth Adam. From the highest Heavenly Man, the Upper Adam who is “male‐female” or Androgyne, down to the Adam of dust, these personified symbols are all connected with sex and procreation. With the Eastern Occultists it is entirely the reverse. The sexual relation they consider as a “Karma” pertaining only to the mundane relation of man, who is dominated by Illusion, a thing to be put aside, the moment that the person becomes “wise.” They considered it a most fortunate circumstance if the Guru (teacher) found in his pupil an aptitude for the pure life of Brahmâchârya. Their dual symbols were to them but the poetical imagery of the sublime correlation of creative cosmic forces. And this ideal conception is found beaming like a golden ray upon each idol, however coarse and grotesque, in the crowded galleries of the sombre fanes of India and other mother‐lands of cults. This will be demonstrated in the following Section.

Meanwhile, it may be added that, with the Gnostics, the second Adam also emanates from the Primeval Man, the Ophite Adamas, in “whose image he is made”; the third, from this second—an Androgyne. The latter is symbolized in the sixth and seventh pairs of the male‐female Æons, Amphain‐Essumen (Ἀμφαὶν Ἐσσουμὲν), and Vananin‐Lamertade (Οὐανανίν Λαμερτάδε)—Father and Mother(1044)—while the fourth Adam, or Race, is represented by a Priapean monster. The latter—a Post‐Christian fancy—is the degraded copy of the Ante‐Christian Gnostic symbol of the “Good One,” or “He, who created before anything existed,” the Celestial Priapus—truly born from Venus and Bacchus when that God returned from his expedition into India, for Venus and Bacchus are the post‐types of Aditi and the Spirit. The later Priapus, one, however, with Agathodæmon, the Gnostic Saviour, and even with Abraxas, is no longer the glyph for abstract creative Power, but symbolizes the four Adams, or Races, the fifth being represented by the five branches cut off from the Tree of Life on which the old man stands in the Gnostic gems. The number of the Root‐Races was recorded in the ancient Greek temples by the seven vowels, of which five were framed in a panel in the Initiation Halls of the Adyta. The Egyptian glyph for it was a hand with five fingers spread out, the fifth or little finger being only half‐grown, and also five “N’s”—hieroglyphs standing for that letter. The Romans used the five vowels A E I O V in their fanes; and this archaic symbol was adopted during the Middle Ages as a motto by the House of the Hapsburgs. Sic transit gloria!

The Sanctum Sanctorum of the Ancients, also called the Adytum—the recess at the West end of the Temple which was enclosed on three sides by blank walls and had its only aperture or door hung over with a curtain—was common to all ancient nations.

A great difference is now found between the secret meaning of this symbolical place as given in the Esotericism of the Pagans and in that of the later Jews, though its symbology was originally identical throughout the ancient races and nations. The Gentiles placed in the Adytum a sarcophagus, or a tomb (taphos), in which was the Solar God to whom the temple was consecrated, holding it, as Pantheists, in the greatest veneration. They regarded it, in its Esoteric meaning, as the symbol of resurrection, cosmic, solar, or diurnal, and human. It embraced the wide range of periodical, and (in time) punctual, Manvantaras, or the reäwakenings of Kosmos, Earth, and Man to new existences; the Sun being the most poetical and also the most grandiose symbol of such Cycles in Heaven, and man—in his reïncarnations—on Earth. The Jews—whose realism, if judged by the dead‐letter, was as practical and gross in the days of Moses as it is now(1045)—in the course of their estrangement from the Gods of their Pagan neighbours, consummated a national and levitical polity, by the device of setting forth their Holy of Holies as the most solemn sign of their Monotheism—exoterically, while seeing in it but a universal phallic symbol—esoterically. While the Kabalists knew but Ain Suph and the “Gods” of the Mysteries, the Levites had no tomb, no God in their Adytum but the “Sacred” Ark of the Covenant—their “Holy of Holies.”

When the esoteric meaning of this recess is made clear, however, the profane will be better able to understand why David danced “uncovered” before the Ark of the Covenant, and was so anxious to appear vile for the sake of his “Lord,” and base in his own sight.(1046) The Ark is the navi‐form Argha of the Mysteries. Parkhurst, who has a long dissertation upon it in his Greek dictionary, and who never breathes a word about it in his Hebrew lexicon, explains it thus: Archê (Ἀρχὴ) in this application answers to the Hebrew Rasit or wisdom, ... a word which had the meaning of the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of all nature was supposed to float or brood on the great abyss during the interval which took place after every mundane cycle.

Quite so; and the Jewish Ark of the Covenant had precisely the same significance; with the supplementary addition that, instead of a beautiful and chaste sarcophagus (the symbol of the Matrix of Nature and Resurrection), as in the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Pagans, they had the Ark made still more realistic in its construction by the two Cherubs set up on the coffer or Ark of the Covenant, facing each other, with their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect Yoni (as now seen in India). Besides which, this generative symbol had its significance enforced by the four mystic letters of Jehovah’s name, namely, IHVH (יהוה); Jod (י) meaning the membrum virile; Hé (ה), the womb; Vau (ו), a crook or a hook, a nail, and Hé (ה) again, meaning also “an opening”; the whole forming the perfect bisexual emblem or symbol or I(e)H(o)V(a)H, the male and female symbol. Perhaps also, when people realize the true meaning of the office and title of the Kadesh Kadeshim, the “holy ones,” or “the consecrated to the Temple of the Lord”—the “Holy of Holies” of these “holy ones” may assume an aspect far from edifying. Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic God.

“Who shall ascend into the hill [the high place] of the Lord?” asks the holy king David, “Who shall stand in the place of his Kadushu (קדשו)?”(1047) Kadesh may mean in one sense to “devote,” “hallow,” “sanctify,” and even to “initiate” or to “set apart”; but it also means the ministry of lascivious rites—the Venus‐ worship—and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in Deuteronomy, xxiii. 17; Hosea, iv. 14; and Genesis, xxxviii. 15‐22. The “holy” Kadeshim of the Bible were identical, as to the duties of their office, with the Nautch‐girls of the later Hindû pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim, or Galli, lived “by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove,” or the bust of Venus‐Astarte.(1048) The dance performed by David round the Ark was the “circle‐dance,” said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh,(1049) and the leaping of the prophets of Baal.(1050) It was simply a characteristic of the Sabæan worship, for it denoted the motion of the Planets round the Sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of Michal and the King’s reply are very expressive.(1051)

The Ark, in which are preserved the germs of all living things necessary to repeople the Earth, represents the survival of life, and the supremacy of Spirit over Matter, through the conflict of the opposing powers of Nature. In the Astro‐theosophic chart of the Western Rite, the Ark corresponds with the navel, and is placed at the sinister side, the side of the woman (the Moon), one of whose symbols is the left pillar of Solomon’s Temple—Boaz. The umbilicus is connected (through the placenta) with the receptacle in which are fructified the embryos of the race. The Ark is the sacred Argha of the Hindûs, and thus the relation in which it stands to Noah’s Ark may be easily inferred when we learn that the Argha was an oblong vessel, used by the high priests as a sacrificial chalice in the worship of Isis, Astarte, and Venus‐ Aphrodite, all of whom were Goddesses of the generative powers of Nature, or of Matter—hence representing symbolically the Ark containing the germs of all living things.(1052)

Mistaken is he who accepts the kabalistic works of to‐day, and the interpretations of the Zohar by the Rabbis, for the genuine kabalistic lore of old!(1053) For no more to‐day than in the day of Frederick von Schelling does the Kabalah accessible to Europe and America contain much more than Ruins and fragments, much distorted, remnants still of that primitive system which is the key to all religious systems.(1054) The oldest system and the Chaldæan Kabalah were identical. The latest renderings of the Zohar are those of the Synagogue in the early centuries—i.e., the Thorah (or Law), dogmatic and uncompromising.

The “King’s Chamber” in Cheops’ Pyramid is thus an Egyptian “Holy of Holies.” On the days of the Mysteries of Initiation, the Candidate, representing the Solar God, had to descend into the Sarcophagus, and represent the energizing ray, entering into the fecund womb of Nature. Emerging from it on the following morning, he typified the resurrection of Life after the change called Death. In the Great Mysteries his figurative “death” lasted two days, when with the Sun he arose on the third morning, after a last night of the most cruel trials. While the Postulant represented the Sun—the all‐vivifying orb that “resurrects” every morning but to impart life to all—the Sarcophagus was symbolic of the female principle. This, in Egypt; its form and shape changed with every country, provided it remained a vessel, a symbolic “navis” or boat‐shaped vehicle, and a “container,” symbolically, of germs or the germ of life. In India, it is the “Golden” Cow through which the Candidate for Brâhmanism has to pass if he desires to be a Brâhman, and to become Dvi‐ja, “born a second time.” The crescent‐form Argha of the Greeks was the type of the Queen of Heaven—Diana, or the Moon. She was the Great Mother of all Existences, as the Sun was the Father. The Jews, previous to, as well as after, their metamorphosis of Jehovah into a male God, worshipped Astoreth, which made Isaiah declare: “Your new moons and ... feasts my soul hateth”;(1055) in saying which, he was evidently unjust. Astoreth and the New Moon (the crescent Argha) Festivals, had no worse significance as a form of public worship than had the hidden meaning of the Moon in general, which was kabalistically connected directly with, and sacred to, Jehovah, as is well known; with the sole difference, however, that one was the female and the other the male aspect of the Moon, and of the star Venus.

The Sun (the Father), the Moon (the Mother), and Mercury‐Thoth (the Son), were the earliest Trinity of the Egyptians, who personified them in Osiris, Isis, and Thoth (Hermes). In the Gnostic Gospel Pistis Sophia, the seven Great Gods, divided into two Triads and the highest God (the Sun), are the lower Triple Powers (Τριδυνάμεις), whose powers reside respectively in Mars, Mercury and Venus; and the higher Triad—the three “Unseen Gods,” who dwell in the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn.(1056)

This requires no proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal symbol of Nature, the Ship of Life carrying throughout the boundless Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being. And when she was not identified with Venus, like every other “Queen of Heaven” to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became the reflection of the Chaldæan “Nuah, the Universal Mother” (the female Noah, considered as one with the Ark), and of the female Triad, Ana, Belita and Davkina; called, when blended into one, “Sovereign Goddess, Lady of the Nether Abyss, Mother of Gods, Queen of the Earth, and Queen of Fecundity.” Later, Belita or Tamtu(1057) (the sea), the Mother of the City of Erech (the great Chaldæan Necropolis), became Eve; and now she is Mary the Virgin, in the Latin Church, represented as standing on the Crescent Moon, and, at times on the Globe, to vary the programme. The Navis, or ship‐like form of the crescent, which blends in itself all those common symbols of the Ship of Life, such as Noah’s Ark, the Yoni of the Hindûs, and the Ark of the Covenant, is the female symbol of the Universal “Mother of the Gods,” and is now found under its Christian symbol in every Church, as the “nave” (from navis).(1058) The Navis, the Sidereal Vessel, is fructified by the Spirit of Life—the male God; or, as the learned Kenealy, in his Apocalypse, very appropriately calls it—the Holy Spirit.

In Western religious symbology the crescent was the male, the full Moon the female, aspect of that universal Spirit. The mystic word ALM, which the prophet Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the Korân, alludes to her as the Alm, the Immaculate Virgin of the Heavens.(1059) And—the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous—it is from this root Alm that we have to derive the word Almeh—the Egyptian dancing‐girls. The latter are “virgins” of the same type as the Nautchees in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the “holy ones” of the Jewish temples—consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both sexes—whose holy functions in the Israelite fanes were identical with those of the Nautchees.

Now Eustathius declares that IO (ΙΩ) means the Moon, in the dialect of the Argians; it was also one of the names of the Moon in Egypt. Says Jablonski: ΙΩ, Ioh, Ægyptiis Lunam significat neque habent illi, in communi sermonis usu, aliud nomen quo Lunam designent præter IO. The Pillar and Circle (IO), which with Pythagoras was the perfect number contained in the Tetraktys,(1060) became later a preëminently phallic number—amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male and female Jehovah. This is how a scholar explains it:

I find, on the Rosetta stone of Uhlemann, the word mooth (also in Seiffarth), the name of the moon, used as a cycle of time, hence the lunar month, from the hieroglyph [Symbol: half circle], with [Symbol: five‐pointed star] and [Symbol: circle with middle dot] as determinatives, given as the Coptic I O H, or I O H. The Hebrew הוי may also be used as I O H, for the letter vau (ו) was used for o and for u, and for v or w. This, before the Massora, of which the point (·) was used as וֹ = o, וּ = u, and ו = v or w. Now I had worked it out by original search that the great distinctive function of the god‐name Jehovah was designative of the influence of the moon as the causative of generation, and as of its exact value as a lunar year in the natural measure of days, as you will fully see,... And here comes this linguistic same word from a source far more ancient; viz., the Coptic, or rather from the old Egyptian in time of the Coptic.(1061)

This is the more remarkable when Egyptology compares this with the little which it knows about the Theban Triad—composed of Ammon, Mooth (or Moot), and their son Khonsoo. This Triad was, when united, contained in the Moon as their common symbol; and when separated, it was Khonsoo who was the God Lunus, being thus confounded with Thoth and Phtah. His mother Moot—the name signifying “Mother,” by the bye, and not the Moon, which was only her symbol—is called the “Queen of Heaven,” the “Virgin,” etc., as she is an aspect of Isis, Hathor, and other Mother Goddesses. She was less the wife than the mother of Ammon, whose distinct title is the “husband of his mother.” In a statuette at Boulaq, Cairo, this Triad is represented as a mummy‐god holding in his hand three different sceptres, and bearing the lunar disk on his head, the characteristic tress of hair showing the design of representing it as that of an infant God, or the “Sun,” in the Triad. He was the God of Destinies in Thebes, and appears under two aspects (1) as Khonsoo, the Lunar God, and Lord of Thebes, Nofir‐hotpoo, “he who is in absolute repose,” and (2) as “Khonsoo p. iri‐sokhroo,” or “Khonsoo, who executes Destiny”; the former preparing the events and conceiving them for those born under his generative influence, the latter putting them into action.(1062) Under theogonic permutations Ammon becomes Horus, Hor‐Ammon, and Moot(h)‐Isis is seen suckling him in a statuette of the Saïtic period.(1063) In his turn, in this transformed Triad, Khonsoo becomes Thoth‐Lunus, “he who operates salvation.” His brow is crowned with the head of an ibis decorated with the lunar disk and the diadem called Io‐tef (IO‐tef).(1064)

Now all these symbols are certainly found reflected in (some believe them identical with) the Yave, or Jehovah of the Bible. This will be made plain to anyone who reads The Source of Measures, or “The Hebrew‐ Egyptian Mystery,” and understands its undeniable, clear, and mathematical proofs that the esoteric foundations, or the system used in the building of the Great Pyramid, and the architectural measurements in the Temple of Solomon (whether the latter be mythical or real), Noah’s Ark, and the Ark of the Covenant, are the same. If anything in the world can settle the dispute that the old, as much as the later Post‐Babylonian, Jews, and especially the former, built their Theogony and Religion on the very same foundation as did all the Pagans, it is the work in question. And now it may be as well to remind the reader of what we said of IAO in Isis Unveiled:

No other deity affords such a variety of etymologies as Iaho, nor is there any name which can be so variously pronounced. It is only by associating it with the Masoretic points that the later Rabbins succeeded in making Jehovah read “Adonaï”—or Lord. Philo Byblus spells it in Greek letters ΙΕΥΩ—IEVO. Theodoret says that the Samaritans pronounced it Iabé (Yahva), and the Jews Yaho; which would make it as we have shown, I—Ah—O. Diodorus states that “among the Jews they relate that Moses called the God IAO.” It is on the authority of the Bible itself, that we maintain that, before his initiation by Jethro, his father‐in‐law, Moses had never known the word Iaho.(1065)

The above receives corroboration in a private letter from a very learned Kabalist. In our first volume,(1066) it is stated that exoterically Brahma (neuter), so flippantly and so often confused by the Orientalists with Brahmâ (the male), is sometimes called Kâla‐hansa, the “Swan in Eternity,” and the Esoteric meaning of Aham‐sa, is given as “I [am] he,” So‐ham being equal to Sah “he,” and Aham “I”—a mystic anagram and permutation. It is also the “four‐faced” Brahmâ, the Chatur‐mukham (the Perfect Cube) forming itself within, and from, the Infinite Circle; and again the use of the 1, 3, 5, and 7/7 = 14, as the Esoteric Hierarchy of the Dhyân Chohans, is explained. On this, the said correspondent comments in the following manner: Of the 1, 3, 5, and twice 7, intending, and very especially, 13514, which on a circle may be read as 31415 (or π value), I think there cannot be a possibility of doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on Sacr’,(1067) “Chakra,” or Circle of Vishnu.

But let me carry your description a step further: You say, “The One from the Egg, the Six, and the Five,(1068) give the numbers 1065, the value of the First‐born.” If it be so, then in 1065 we have the famous Jehovah’s name, the Jve or Jave, or Jupiter, and by change of ה to נ, or h to n, then נוי or the Latin Jun or Juno, the base of the Chinese riddle, the key measuring numbers of Sni (Sinai) and Jehovah coming down on that Mount, which numbers (1065) are but the use of our ratio of 113 to 355, because 1065 = 355 × 3 which is circumference to a diameter of 113 × 3 = 339. Thus the first born of Brahmâ‐Prajâpati (or any Demiurgus) indicates a measuring use of a circular relation taken from the Chakra (or Vishnu) and, as stated above, the Divine Manifestation takes the form of Life and the First‐born. [Illustration: Slope of entrance to King’s Chamber]

It is a most singular thing: At the entrance passage to the King’s Chamber the measurement from the surface of the Great Step(1069) and the Grand Gallery to the top of the said Gallery is, by the very careful measures of Piazzi Smyth, 339 inches. Take a as a centre and with this radius describe a circle; the diameter of that circle will be 339 × 2 = 678, and these numbers are those of the expression and the raven, in the “dove and raven” scenes or pictures of the Flood of Noah; (the radius is taken to show division into two parts, which are 1065 each) for 113 (man) × 6 = 678, and the diameter to a circumference of 1065 × 2—so we have here an indication of cosmic man on this high grade or step, at the entrance of the King’s Chamber (the Holy of Holies)—which is the womb. Now this passage is of such a height that a man to enter it must stoop. But a man upright is 113, and broken, or stooping, he becomes 113/2 = 56·5 or 5·65 x 10 (יהוה), or Jehovah. That is, he personifies(1070) him as entering the Holy of Holies. But by Hebrew Esotericism the chief function of Jehovah was child giving, etc., and that because, by the numbers of his name, he was the measure of the lunar year, which cycle of time—because by its factor of 7 (seven) it ran so coördinately with the periods of the quickening, viability, and gestation—was taken as the causative of the generative action and therefore was worshipped and besought.

This discovery connects Jehovah still more with all the other Creative and Generative Gods, Solar and Lunar, and especially with “King” Soma, the Hindû Deus Lunus, the Moon, because of the Esoteric influence attributed to this Planet in Occultism. There are other corroborations of this, however, in Hebrew tradition itself. Adam is spoken of in the More Nevochim (or “Guide of the Perplexed”—truly!) of Maimonides in two aspects; as a man, like all others born of a man and a woman, and—as the Prophet of the Moon; the reason of which is now made apparent, and has to be explained.

Adam, as the supposed great “Progenitor of the Human Race,” is, as Adam Kadmon, made in the image of God—a priapic image, therefore. The Hebrew words Sacr’ and N’cabvah are, literally translated, Lingam (Phallus) and Yoni (Cteïs), notwithstanding their translation in the Bible “male and female.”(1071) As said there, “God creates ‘man in his own image,’ in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”—the androgyne Adam Kadmon. Now this kabalistic name is not that of a living man, nor even of a human or divine Being, but of the two sexes or organs of procreation, called in Hebrew with that usual sincerity of language preëminently biblical, Sacr’ and N’cabvah(1072); these two being, therefore, the image under which the “Lord God” appeared usually to his chosen people. That this is so, is now undeniably proven by almost all the symbologists and Hebrew scholars as well as by the Kabalah. Therefore Adam is in one sense Jehovah. This makes plain another general tradition in the East mentioned in Gregorie’s Notes and Observations upon several Passages in Scripture,(1073) and quoted by Hargrave Jennings in his Phallicism:

That Adam was commanded by God that his dead body should be kept above ground till a fulness of time should come to commit it ... to the middle of the earth by a priest of the Most High God.... Therefore, Noah daily prayed in the Ark before the “Body of Adam”—(1074) or before the Phallus in the Ark, or Holy of Holies, again. He who is a Kabalist and accustomed to the incessant permutation of biblical names, once they are interpreted numerically and symbolically, will understand what is meant. The two words of which Jehovah is composed, make up the original idea of male‐female, as birth‐originator, for the י was the membrum virile and Hovah was Eve. So ... the perfect one, as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth origin, as hermaphrodite one; hence, the phallic use of form.(1075) Besides, the same author shows and demonstrates numerically and geometrically that (a) Arets, “earth,” Adam, “man,” and H‐adam‐h, are cognate with each other, and are personified in the Bible under one form, as the Egyptian and Hebrew Mars, God of Generation;(1076) and (b) that Jehovah, or Jah, is Noah, for Jehovah is Noah in Hebrew would be ינח or literally in English, Inch.

The above affords, then, a key to the said traditions. Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed Saviour of Humanity, who carries in his Ark or Argha (the Moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the “Body of Adam,” which body is the image of the Creator, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the “Prophet of the Moon,” the Argha or “Holy of Holies” of the Yod (י). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses is in the Moon—i.e., the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are kabalistically once more permutations, as has been shown. Says the author of The Source of Measures: There is one fact in regard to Moses and his works too important to be omitted. When he is instructed by the Lord as to his mission, the power name assumed by the Deity is, I am that I am, the Hebrew words being אהיה אשר אהיה ; a various reading of יהוה. Now, Moses is משה, and equals

Add the values of the new form of the name Jehovah, 21 + 501 + 21 = 543, or, by a reverse reading, 345; thus showing Moses to be a form of Jehovah in this combination. 21 ÷ 2 = 105, or, reversed, 501, so that the asher or the that in I am‐that‐I am is simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 × 3.501^2 = 251 +, a very valuable pyramid number, etc.(1077) For a clearer explanation for the benefit of Non‐Kabalists we put it thus: “I am that I am” is in Hebrew: Âhiyé is ה י ה א, or 5 10 5 1. Asher is ר ש א, or 200 300 1. Âhiyé is ה י ה א, or 5 10 5 1. Add the numbers of these separate words and you have: אהיה (21) אשר (501) אהיה (21). This relates to the process of descending in Fire on the Mount to make Man, etc., and is explained to be but a check and use of the numbers of the mountains; for on one side we have 10 + 5 + 6 = 21, down the middle 501, and on the other side 6 + 5 + 10 = 21.(1078)

The “Holy of Holies,” both kabalistic and rabbinical, is thus shown as an international symbol, and common property. Neither had originated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of the half‐initiated Levites, the symbol had acquired with them a significance which it scarcely has with any other people to this day, and which it was originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingam and Yoni of the modern average Hindû is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the rabbinical “Holy of Holies”—but it is no worse; and this is a point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious Philosophies. For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and philosophy, the spirit of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so‐called “Wisdom,” applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets are there, to show the walk in life of the chosen but “stiff‐ necked” people before, during, and after, the days of Moses. That they have had at one time the Wisdom‐Religion and the use of its universal language and symbols is proved by the same Esotericism existing to this

day in India with regard to the “Holy of Holies.” This, as said above, was and still is the passage through the “Golden” Cow in the same stooping position as was necessitated by the Gallery of the Pyramid, which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew Esotericism. The whole difference lies in the spirit of the interpretation. With the Hindûs as with the ancient Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with the Hebrews it was realistic and physiological. It pointed to the first sexual separation of the human race—Eve giving birth to Cain‐Jehovah, as shown in The Source of Measures; to the consummation of terrestrial physiological union and conception—as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel’s blood, Habel being the feminine principle; and to child‐bearing—a process shown to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam’s Third Son, Seth, with whose Son Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah‐hovah, the male Jod and Havah or Eve, to wit, male and female beings.(1079) Thus the difference lies in the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judæan Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Âryan Dvijas. The worship of the “God in the

Ark” dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old Kabalah edited and reëdited, has become tainted with it.

With the ancient Âryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime and poetical, however much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The ceremony of passing through the Holy of Holies—now symbolized by the Cow, but in the beginning through the temple Hiranya‐garbha, the Radiant Egg, in itself a symbol of Universal, Abstract Nature—meant spiritual conception and birth, or rather the re‐birth of the individual and his regeneration; the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to pass through the Matrix of Mother Nature, or the physical creature ready to re‐become the original Spiritual Being, pre‐natal MAN. With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into Matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man. For the Âryan, the symbol represented the divorce of Spirit from Matter, its merging into and return to its primal Source; for the Semite, the wedlock of Spiritual Man with Material Female Nature, the physiological taking preëminence over the psychological and the purely immaterial. The Âryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from, and were preëminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day—gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality. They had made a bargain, through their father Jacob, with their tribal deity, self‐exalted above all others, and a covenant that his “seed shall be as the dust of the earth”; and that deity could have no better image henceforth than that of the symbol of generation, and as representation a number and numbers.

Carlyle has wise words for both these nations. With the Hindû Âryan—the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth—religion has ever been, in his words, An everlasting lode‐star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night around him. The religion of the Hindû detaches him from this Earth; therefore, even now, the cow‐symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the “Masters” and “Lords” of European potencies, the Israelites, certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them Religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation— and it was so from its beginnings. Having burdened themselves with it, Christian nations feel bound to defend and poetize it, at the expense of all other religions.

But it was not so with the ancient nations. For them the passage‐entrance and the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber meant regeneration—not generation. It was the most solemn symbol, a Holy of Holies, indeed, wherein were created Immortal Hierophants and “Sons of God”—never mortal men and sons of lust and flesh, as now in the hidden sense of the Semite Kabalist. The reason for the difference in the views of the two races is easy to account for. The Âryan Hindû belongs to the oldest races now on Earth; the Semite Hebrew to the latest. The former is nearly one million years old; the latter is a small sub‐race some 8,000 years of age and no more.(1080)

But phallic worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner meaning of religious symbols, and there was a day when the Israelites had beliefs as pure as the Âryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside itself. Philo Judæus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The Sacred Writings, he says, prescribe what we ought to do, commanding us to hate the heathen and their laws and institutions. True, they did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly, but left its worst features to be followed secretly. It is with the Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of Nature were the most profaned. With them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading, Geometry, the fifth Divine Science—“fifth” in the series of the Seven Keys to the universal Esoteric Language and Symbology—was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and Religion were degraded.

We are told that it is just the same with our Brahmâ‐Prajâpati, with Osiris and all other Creative Gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindû Lingam is identical with Jacob’s “Pillar”—most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in the fact that the Esoteric significance of the Lingam was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Âryan Hierophant and Brâhman, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose—that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the Heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate(1081)—a commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment, “Love one another.” Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same “Holy of Holies”—the lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol—the bearer of its own seed and root of all. Virâj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from Androgyne Nature, one from Brahmâ and his female counterpart Vâch, the other, from Osiris and Isis—never from the One Infinite God.

In the Judæo‐Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahmâ, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu’s Navel, the Central Point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile—all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the Bible. One is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application—the lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel.(1082) In Hindûism—the “Holy of Holies” is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personæ are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human womb—Eve, Sarah, etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic God, and his image—man.

Thus it is maintained, that with regard to the contents of the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic substitute Jehovah, there was the Unknown, Incognizable Deity, the kabalistic Ain Suph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning no better than the dead‐letter Lingam‐worshippers(1083) of the India of to‐day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedântin Philosophers are reproached with to‐day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite Priests and Philosophers—the Sadducees, the most refined and the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof of it, with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the Law. For how could those who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular “blind”—how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a number, as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the kabalistic works? How could anyone worthy of the name of a Philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning of their “Pillar of Jacob,” their Bethels, oil‐anointed Phalli, and their “Brazen Serpent,” worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their “Covenant”—the Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrim and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings’ Phallicism:

We know from the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone; and if it can be demonstrated that that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah or Yehovah, which, written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J‐E‐V‐E or J‐H‐V‐H (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (or in another of its forms U); then if we place the I in the U we have the “Holy of Holies”; we also have the Linga and Yoni and Argha of the Hindûs, the Iswarra [Îshvara] or “supreme Lord”; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and arc‐celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni [?] of the Ark of the Covenant.(1084)

The biblical Jews of to‐day do not date from Moses but from David—even admitting the identity of the old and genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of pre‐historic darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the “Book of God,” since it was found by Hilkiah,(1085) and since The Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or older documents, by means of a supplementary one.

The Elohistic texts were re‐written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the biblical chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar‐form, and as a symbol of the double‐sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name—the Yod, י or “phallus,” and Hé, ה, the “opening,” or the “womb,” according to kabalistic authority—is of a far later date than the Elohim‐symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan exoteric rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingam and Yoni found on every roadside in India. Just as the Iao of the Mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas, or Abrasax, of some Gnostic sects identical with the God of the Hebrews, who was the same as the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on “Heathen” as on the Gnostic “Christian” gems. In Matter’s collection of such gems there is a “Horus”— Seated on the lotus, inscribed ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ ΙΑΩ (Abrasax Iao)—an address exactly parallel to the so frequent ΕΙΣ ΖΕΥΣ ΣΑΡΑΠΙ (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems, and therefore only to be translated by “Abraxas is the One Jehovah.”(1086) But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows:

The numerical or Kabbalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refers to the Persian title of the god “Mithras,” Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao.(1087) Thus, he was the Sun, in one aspect, the Moon or the Lunar Genius, in another, that Generative Deity whom the Gnostics saluted as “Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who shinest in the night‐time, holding the second rank, the first Lord of Death.” It is only in his capacity of the Genius of the Moon—the latter being credited in the old cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth—that Jehovah could ever be regarded as the Creator of our Globe and its Heaven, namely, the Firmament. The knowledge of all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously unjust words of Coleridge: It is highly worthy of observation that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books pretending to inspiration, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recommendation of truth [!!].

A. The Evil Spirit: Who, And What?

Our present quarrel is exclusively with Theology. The Church enforces belief in a Personal God and a Personal Devil, while Occultism shows the fallacy of such a belief. For the Pantheists and Occultists, as much as for the Pessimists, “Nature” is no better than “a comely mother, but stone cold”; but this is true only so far as regards external Physical Nature. They both agree that, to the superficial observer, she is no better than an immense slaughter‐house wherein butchers become victims, and victims executioners in their turn. It is quite natural that the pessimistically inclined profane, once convinced of Nature’s numerous shortcomings and failures, and especially of her autophagous propensities, should imagine this to be the best evidence that there is no Deity in abscondito within Nature, nor anything divine in her. Nor is it less natural that the Materialist and the Physicist should imagine that everything is due to blind force and chance, and to the survival of the strongest, even more often than of the fittest. But the Occultists, who regard Physical Nature as a bundle of most varied illusions on the plane of deceptive perceptions; who recognize in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation; a series of stages toward an ever‐growing perfectibility, which is visible in the silent influence of never‐erring Karma, or Abstract Nature—the Occultists, we say, view the Great Mother otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?

If our modern Philosophers—preceded by the mediæval scholars—have helped themselves to more than one fundamental idea of antiquity, Theologians have built their God and his Archangels, their Satan and his Angels, along with the Logos and his staff, entirely out of the dramatis personæ of the old heathen Pantheons. They would have been welcome to these, had they not cunningly distorted the original characters, perverted the philosophical meaning, and, taking advantage of the ignorance of Christendom—the result of long ages of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy—tossed every symbol into the most inextricable confusion. One of their most sinful achievements in this direction, was the transformation of the divine Alter Ego into the grotesque Satan of their Theology.

As the whole philosophy of the problem of evil hangs upon the correct comprehension of the constitution of the Inner Being of Nature and Man, of the divine within the animal, and hence also the correctness of the whole system as given in these pages, with regard to the crown piece of evolution—Man—we cannot take sufficient precautions against theological subterfuges. When the good St. Augustine and the fiery Tertullian call the Devil the “monkey of God,” we can attribute it to the ignorance of the age they lived in. It is more difficult to excuse our modern writers on the same ground. The translation of Mazdean literature has afforded Roman Catholic writers the pretext for proving their point in the same direction once more. They have taken advantage of the dual nature of Ahura Mazda and of his Amshaspands in the Zend Avesta and the Vendîdâd, to emphasize still further their wild theories. Satan is the plagiarist and the copyist by anticipation of the religion which came ages later. This was one of the master strokes of the Latin Church, its best trump‐card after the appearance of Spiritualism in Europe. Though only a succès d’estime, in general, even among those who are not interested in either Theosophy or Spiritualism, yet the weapon is often used by the Christian (Roman Catholic) Kabalists against the Eastern Occultists.

Now even the Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical “Christian”—as they call themselves, “Sectarian” as we call them—Kabalists, on the Continent. These read the Zohar, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but, by mangling the texts and meaning, to discover in its verses Christian dogmas, where none could ever have been meant; and, having fished them out with the collective help of Jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed “Kabalists” proceed to write books and to mislead less far‐sighted students of the Kabalah.(1088) May we not then be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface the root idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom‐God, who had first been regarded as the Creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil—a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail? We need not go out of the way to compare the Pagan Demons of either Egypt, India, or Chaldæa with the Devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldæo‐Judæan mythology.

The primitive origin of this personification rests upon the Akkadian conception of the Cosmic Powers—the Heavens and the Earth—in eternal feud and struggle with Chaos. Their Silik‐Muludag (? Murudug), “the God amongst all the Gods,” the “merciful guardian of men on Earth,” was the son of Hea (or Ea) the great God of Wisdom, called by the Babylonians Nebo. With both peoples, as also in the case of the Hindû Gods, their deities were both beneficent and maleficent. As evil and punishment are the agents of Karma, in an absolutely just retributive sense, so Evil was the servant of the Good.(1089) The reading of the Chaldæo‐Assyrian tiles has now demonstrated this beyond a shadow of doubt. We find the same idea in the Zohar. Satan was a Son and an Angel of God. With all the Semitic nations, the Spirit of the Earth was as much the Creator in his own realm as the Spirit of the Heavens. They were twin brothers and interchangeable in their functions, when not two in one. Nothing of that which we find in Genesis is absent from the Chaldæo‐Assyrian religious beliefs, even in the little that has hitherto been deciphered. The great “Face of the Deep” of Genesis is traced in the Tohu Bohu (“Deep” or “Primeval Space”), or Chaos, of the Babylonians. Wisdom, the Great Unseen God—called in Genesis the “Spirit of God”—lived, for the older Babylonians as for the Akkadians, in the Sea of Space. Toward the days described by Berosus, this Sea became the Visible Waters on the face of the Earth—the crystalline abode of the Great Mother, the Mother of Ea and all the Gods, which became, still later, the great Dragon Tiamat, the Sea Serpent. Its last stage of development was the great struggle of Bel with the Dragon—the Devil!

Whence the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whosoever he was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judæus and Josephus both state that the Law (the Pentateuch and the Talmud) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the Adversary, and also the Gods of the Gentiles. “Thou shalt not revile the Gods,” quoth the God of Moses,(1090) for it is God who “hath divided [them] unto all nations”;(1091) and those who speak evil of “Dignities” (Gods) are called “filthy dreamers” by Jude. For even Michael the Archangel ... durst not bring against him [the Devil] a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.(1092) Finally the same is repeated in the Talmud:(1093) Satan appeared one day to a man who used to curse him daily, and said to him: “Why dost thou this?” Consider that God himself would not curse me, but merely said: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan.”(1094)

This piece of Talmudic information shows plainly (a) that St. Michael is called “God” in the Talmud, and somebody else the “Lord,” and (b) that Satan is a God, of whom even the “Lord” is in fear. All we read in the Zohar and other kabalistic works on Satan shows plainly that this “personage” is simply the personification of the abstract Evil, which is the weapon of Karmic Law and Karma. It is our human nature and man himself, as it is said that “Satan is always near and inextricably interwoven with man.” It is only a question of that Power being latent or active in us.

It is a well‐known fact—to learned Symbologists at all events—that in every great religion of antiquity, it is the Logos Demiurge—the Second Logos, or the first emanation from the Mind, Mahat—who is made to strike, so to say, the key‐note of that which may be called the correlation of Individuality and Personality in the subsequent scheme of evolution. It is the Logos who is shown, in the mystic symbolism of Cosmogony, Theogony, and Anthropogony, playing two parts in the drama of Creation and Being—that of the purely human Personality and the divine Impersonality of the so‐called Avatâras, or divine Incarnations, and of the Universal Spirit, called Christos by the Gnostics, and the Fravarshi (or Ferouer) of Ahura Mazda in the Mazdean Philosophy. On the lower rungs of Theogony the Celestial Beings of lower Hierarchies had each a Fravarshi, or a Celestial “Double.” It is the same, only still more mystic, reässertion of the kabalistic axiom, “Deus est Demon inversus”; the word “Demon,” however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of the meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity, standing for the Guardian Spirit, an “Angel,” not a Devil of Satanic descent as Theology would have it. The Roman Catholic Church shows its usual logic and consistency by accepting St. Michael as the Ferouer of Christ. This Ferouer was his “Angel Guardian,” as proved by St. Thomas,(1095) who, however, calls the prototypes and synonyms of Michael, such as Mercury for example, Devils!

The Church positively accepts the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other God or mortal has. Writes De Mirville: Here we have the two heroes of the Old Testament, the Verbum [?] (or second Jehovah), and his Face [“Presence,” as the Protestants translate], both making but one, and yet being two, a mystery which seemed to us unsolvable before we had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean Ferouers, and learnt that the Ferouer was the spiritual potency, at once image, face, and guardian of the Soul which finally assimilates the Ferouer.(1096) This is almost correct. Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word Metatron, being divided into meta‐thronon (μετὰ, θρόνον), means “near the throne.”(1097) It means quite the reverse, as meta means “beyond” and not “near.” This is of great importance in our argument. St. Michael, then, the “quis ut Deus,” is the translator, so to speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.

They maintain, furthermore, along with the Roman Catholic Church, that in the Biblical and Christian Theology there does not exist a “higher celestial personality, after the Trinity, than that of the Archangel, or the Seraphim, Michael.” According to them, the conqueror of the Dragon is the Archisatrap of the Sacred Militia, the Guardian of the Planets, the King of the Stars, the Slayer of Satan and the Powerful Rector. In the mystic Astronomy of these gentlemen, he is the Conqueror of Ahriman, who having upset the Sidereal Throne of the usurper, bathes in his stead in the Solar Fires; and, Defender of the Christ‐Sun, he approaches so near his Master, “that he seems to become one with him.”(1098) Owing to this fusion with the Word (Verbum) the Protestants, and among them Calvin, ended by losing sight entirely of the duality, and saw no Michael “but only his Master,” writes the Abbé Caron. The Roman Catholics, and especially their Kabalists, know better; and it is they who explain to the world this duality, which affords them the means of glorifying the chosen ones of the Church, and of rejecting and anathematizing all those Gods who may be in the way of their dogmas.

Thus the same titles and the same names are given in turn to God and the Archangel. Both are called Metatron, “both have the name of Jehovah applied to them when they speak one in the other” (sic), for, according to the Zohar, the term signifies equally the Master and the Ambassador. Both are the Angel of the Face, because, as we are informed, if on the one hand the “Word” is called “the Face [or the Presence] and the Image of the Substance of God,” on the other, “when speaking of the Saviour to the Israelites, Isaiah [?] tells them” that “the Angel of his Presence saved them in their affliction”—“so he was their Saviour.”(1099) Elsewhere Michael is called very plainly the “Prince of the Faces of the Lord,” the “Glory of the Lord.” Both Jehovah and Michael are the “Guides of Israel(1100) ... Chiefs of the Armies of the Lord, Supreme Judges of the Souls and even Seraphs.”(1101)

The whole of the above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must, therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle Theologians and Casuists mean by the term Ferouer,(1102) a word borrowed by some French writers from the Zend Avesta, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard xix (verse 14), of the Vendîdâd it is said: Invoke, O Zarathushtra! my Fravarshi, who am Ahura Mazda, the greatest, the best, the fairest of all beings, the most solid, the most intelligent, ... and whose soul is the holy Word (Mâthra Spenta).(1103) The French Orientalists translate Fravarshi by Ferouer. Now what is a Ferouer, or Fravarshi? In some Mazdean works it is plainly implied that Fravarshi is the inner, immortal Man, or the Ego which reïncarnates; that it existed before the physical body and survives all such bodies it happens to be clothed in. Not only man was endowed with a Fravarshi, but gods too, and the sky, fire, waters, and plants.(1104)

This shows as plainly as can be shown that the Ferouer is the “spiritual counterpart” of either God, animal, plant, or even element, i.e., the refined and the purer part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda recommend Zarathushtra to invoke his Fravarshi and not himself (Ahura Mazda); that is to say, the impersonal and true Essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster’s own Âtmâ (or Christos), not the false and personal appearance. This is quite clear. Now it is on this divine and ethereal prototype that the Roman Catholics have seized so as to build up the supposed difference between their God and Angels and the Deity and its aspects, or the Gods of the old religions. Thus, while calling Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (whether as Gods or Planets) Devils, they at the same time make of the same Mercury the Ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius(1105) proves that Michael is the Mercury of the Pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate him, and add that according to great Theologians Mercury and the Sun are one, (?) and no wonder, they think, since Mercury being so near the Wisdom and the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with him.(1106)

This “Pagan” view was accepted from the first century of our era, as shown in the original Acts of the Apostles (the English translation being worthless). So much is Michael the Mercury of the Greeks and other nations, that when the inhabitants of Lystra mistook Paul and Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter, saying, “The Gods have come down to us in the likeness of men”—the text adds: “And they called Barnabas Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the leader of the Word (Logos),” and not “the chief speaker,” as erroneously translated in the Authorized, and repeated even in the Revised, English Bible. Michael is the Angel of the vision in Daniel, the Son of God, “who was like unto a Son of Man.” It is the Hermes‐Christos of the Gnostics, the Anubis‐Syrius of the Egyptians, the Counsellor of Osiris in Amenti, the Leontoid Michael‐Ophiomorphos (ὀφιομόρφος) of the Ophites, who wears on certain Gnostic jewels a lion’s head, like his father Ildabaoth.(1107)

Now to all this the Roman Catholic Church tacitly consents, many of her writers even avowing it publicly. Unable to deny the flagrant “borrowing” of their Church, who “spoiled” her seniors of their symbols, as the Jews had “spoiled” the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold, they explain the fact quite coolly and seriously. Thus the writers who have hitherto been timid enough to see, in this repetition by Christian dogmas of old Pagan ideas, “a legendary plagiarism perpetrated by man,” are gravely assured that, far from such a simple solution of the almost perfect resemblance, it has to be attributed to quite another cause—“to a pre‐historical plagiarism, of a superhuman origin.” If the reader would know how, he must again kindly turn to the same volume of De Mirville’s work.(1108) Please note that this author was the official and recognized defender of the Roman Church, and was helped by the learning of all the Jesuits. There we read:

We have pointed out several demi‐gods, and also “very historical” heroes of the Pagans, who were predestined from the moment of their birth, to ape, while at the same time they dishonoured, the nativity of the hero, who was quite God, before whom the whole earth had to bow; we have traced them being born as he was, from an immaculate mother; we have seen them strangling serpents in their cradles, fighting against demons, performing miracles, dying as martyrs, descending to the nether world and rising again from the dead. And we have bitterly deplored that timid and shy Christians should feel compelled to explain all such identities on the ground of coincidence of myth and symbol. They forget apparently these words of the Saviour, all that came before me are thieves and robbers—a word which explains all without any absurd negation and which I have commented on in these words, “The Evangel is a sublime drama, parodied and played before its appointed time by ruffians.”

The “ruffians” (les drôles), are of course Demons whose manager is Satan. Now this is the easiest and the most sublime and simple way of getting out of the difficulty! The Rev. Dr. Lundy, a Protestant De Mirville, followed the happy suggestion in his Monumental Christianity, and so did Dr. Sepp of Munich in his works written to prove the divinity of Jesus and the Satanic origin of all other Saviours. So much greater the pity that a systematic and collective plagiarism which went on for several centuries on the most gigantic scale, should be explained by another plagiarism, this time in the fourth Gospel. For the sentence quoted from it, “All that ever came before me,” etc., is a verbatim repetition of words written in the Book of Enoch. In the Introduction to Archbishop Laurence’s translation from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library, the editor, author of the Evolution of Christianity, remarks:

In revising the proof‐sheets of the Book of Enoch, we have been still further impressed by relationship with New Testament Scripture. Thus, the parable of the sheep, rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch lxxxix, in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing and destroying the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable—“All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers”—language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch.(1109) It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the New Testament, instead of vice versâ. Jude (14, 15) quotes verbatim from Enoch a long passage about the coming of the Lord with his ten thousand saints, and naming the prophet specifically acknowledges the source. In ... perfecting the parallelism between prophet and apostle, [we] have placed beyond controversy that, in the eyes of the author of an Epistle accepted as Divine revelation, the Book of Enoch was the inspired production of an antediluvian patriarch....

The cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of New Testament Scripture, ... clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness under the eternal dominion of the Son of Man. This evangelical plagiarism culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian Patriarch.(1110) “Antediluvian,” truly; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even millenniums before the historical era, then it is no longer the original prediction of the events to come, but is, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of a pre‐historic religion.

In the Krita age, Vishnu, in the form of Kapila and other (inspired teachers) ... imparts ... true wisdom [as Enoch did]. In the Tretâ age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch [Chakravartin, the “Everlasting King” of Enoch(1111)] and protects the three worlds [or Races]. In the Dvâpara age, in the person of Veda‐vyâsa, he divides the one Veda into four, and distributes it into hundreds (Shata) of branches.(1112) Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Âryans, before it was written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto‐Lemurians, and sowed the first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off‐shoots of the never dying Tree of Wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judæo‐ Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present Age, Vishnu, or the “Everlasting King,” will appear as Kalki, and reëstablish righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time [the Sixth Race] shall be as the seeds of other human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age of purity;

i.e., it shall be the Seventh Race, the Race of “Buddhas,” the “Sons of God,” born of immaculate parents. B. The Gods Of Light Proceed From The Gods Of Darkness.

Thus it is pretty well established that Christ, the Logos, or the God in Space and the Saviour on Earth, is but one of the echoes of this same antediluvian and sorely misunderstood Wisdom. Its history begins by the descent on Earth of the “Gods” who incarnate in mankind, and this is the “Fall.” Whether Brahmâ hurled down on Earth by Bhagavân in the allegory, or Jupiter by Cronus, all are the symbols of the human races. Once having touched this Planet of dense Matter, the snow‐white wings of even the highest Angel can no longer remain immaculate, or the Avatâra (or incarnation) be perfect, as every such Avatâra is the fall of a God into generation. Nowhere is the metaphysical truth more clear, when explained Esoterically, or more hidden from the average comprehension of those who instead of appreciating the sublimity of the idea can only degrade it—than in the Upanishads, the Esoteric glossaries of the Vedas. The Rig Veda, as Guignault characterized it, “is the most sublime conception of the great highways of humanity.” The Vedas are, and will remain for ever, in the Esotericism of the Vedânta and the Upanishads, “the mirror of the Eternal Wisdom.”

For upwards of sixteen centuries the new masks, forced over the faces of the old Gods, have screened them from public curiosity, but they have finally proved a misfit. Yet the metaphorical Fall, and the as metaphorical Atonement and Crucifixion, have led Western Humanity through roads knee‐deep in blood. Worse than all, they have led it to believe in the dogma of the Evil Spirit distinct from the Spirit of all Good, whereas the former lives in all Matter and preëminently in man. Finally it has created the God‐slandering dogma of Hell and eternal perdition; it has spread a thick film between the higher intuitions of man and divine verities; and, most pernicious result of all, it has made people remain ignorant of the fact that there were no fiends, no dark demons in the Universe before man’s own appearance on this, and probably on other Earths. Hence the people have been led to accept, as the problematical consolation for this world’s sorrows, the thought of original sin.

The philosophy of that Law in Nature, which implants in man as well as in every beast a passionate, inherent, and instinctive desire for freedom and self‐guidance, pertains to Psychology and cannot be touched on now, for to demonstrate this feeling in higher Intelligences, to analyze and give a natural reason for it, would necessitate an endless philosophical explanation for which there here is no room. Perhaps the best synthesis of this feeling is found in three lines of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Says the “Fallen One”: Here we may reign secure; and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in hell! Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven! Better be man, the crown of terrestrial production and king over its opus operatum, than be lost among the will‐less Spiritual Hosts in Heaven.

We have said elsewhere that the dogma of the first Fall rested on a few verses in Revelation, which are now shown to be a plagiarism from Enoch by some scholars. These have given rise to endless theories and speculations, which have gradually acquired the importance of dogma and inspired tradition. Every one sought to explain the verse about the seven‐ headed dragon with his ten horns and seven crowns, whose tail “drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” and whose place, with that of his Angels, “was found no more in heaven.” What the seven heads of the Dragon (or Cycle) mean, and its five wicked kings also, may be learned in the Addenda which close Part III of this Volume. From Newton to Bossuet speculations were incessantly evolved in Christian brains with regard to these obscure verses. Says Bossuet: The star that falls is the heresiarch Theodosius.... The clouds of smoke are the heresies of the Montanists.... The third part of the stars are the martyrs, and especially the doctors of divinity.

Bossuet ought to have known, however, that the events described in Revelation were not original, and may, as shown, be found in other and Pagan traditions. There were no scholastics nor Montanists during Vedic times, nor yet far earlier in China. But Christian Theology had to be protected and saved. This is only natural. But why should truth be sacrificed in order to protect from destruction the lucubrations of Christian Theologians? The “princeps aeris hujus,” the “Prince of the Air,” of St. Paul, is not the Devil, but the effects of the Astral Light, as Éliphas Lévi correctly explains. The Devil is not the “God of this period,” as he says, for it is the Deity of every age and period since Man appeared on Earth, and Matter in its countless forms and states had to fight for its evanescent existence against other disintegrating Forces.

The “Dragon” is simply the symbol of the Cycle and of the “Sons of Manvantaric Eternity,” who had descended on Earth during a certain epoch of its formative period. The “clouds of smoke” are geological phenomena. The “third part of the stars of heaven,” cast down to the Earth, refers to the Divine Monads—the Spirits of the Stars in Astrology—that circumambulate our Globe; i.e., the human Egos destined to perform the whole Cycle of Incarnations. The sentence, “qui circumambulat terram,” however, is again referred to the Devil in Theology, the mythical Father of Evil being said to “fall like lightning.” Unfortunately for this interpretation, the “Son of Man,” or Christ, is expected, on the personal testimony of Jesus, to descend on Earth likewise, “as the lightning cometh out of the East,”(1113) just in the same shape and under the same symbol as Satan, who is seen to fall “as lightning ... from heaven.”(1114) All these metaphors and figures of speech, preëminently Oriental in their character, must have their origin searched for in the East. In all the ancient Cosmogonies Light comes from Darkness. In Egypt, as elsewhere, Darkness was “the principle of all things.” Hence Pymander, the “Thought Divine,” issues as Light from Darkness. Behemoth(1115) is the principle of Darkness, or Satan, in Roman Catholic Theology, and yet Job says of him that Behemoth is “the chief [principle] of the ways of God”—“Principium viarum Domini Behemoth!”(1116)

Consistency does not seem to be a favourite virtue in any portion of Divine Revelation, so‐called—not as interpreted by Theologians, at any rate. The Egyptians and the Chaldæans referred the birth of their Divine Dynasties to that period when creative Earth was in her last final throes in giving birth to her pre‐historic mountain ranges, which have since disappeared, her seas and her continents. Her face was covered with “deep Darkness and in that [Secondary] Chaos was the principle of all things” that developed on the Globe later on. Our Geologists have now ascertained that there was such a terrestrial conflagration in the early geological periods, several hundred millions of years ago.(1117) As to the tradition itself, every country and nation had it, each under its respective national form. It is not alone Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia or Mexico, that had its Typhon, Python, Loki, and its “falling” Demon, but China also. The Celestials have a whole literature upon the subject. It is said that in consequence of the rebellion against Ti of a proud Spirit, who said he was Ti himself, seven Choirs of Celestial Spirits were exiled upon Earth, which “brought a change in all Nature, Heaven itself bending down and uniting with Earth.” In the Y‐King, one reads:

The flying Dragon, superb and rebellious, suffers now, and his pride is punished; he thought he would reign in Heaven, he reigns only on the Earth. Again, the Tchoon‐Tsieoo says allegorically: One night the stars ceased shining in darkness, and deserted it, falling down like rain upon the Earth, where they are now hidden. These stars are the Monads. Chinese Cosmogonies have their “Lord of the Flame” and their “Celestial Virgin,” with little “Spirits to help and minister to her; and big Spirits to fight those who are the enemies of other Gods.” But all this does not prove that the said allegories are presentments or prophetic writings which all refer to Christian Theology. The best proof one can offer to Christian Theologians that the Esoteric statements in the Bible—in both Testaments—are the assertion of the same idea as in our Archaic Teachings, to wit, that the “Fall of the Angels” referred simply to the Incarnation of Angels “who had broken through the Seven Circles”—is found in the Zohar. Now the Kabalah of Simeon Ben Iochaï is the soul and essence of the allegorical narrative, as the later Christian Kabalah is the “dark cloaked” Mosaic Pentateuch. And it says (in the Agrippa MSS.): The Wisdom of the Kabalah rests in the Science of the Equilibrium and Harmony.

Forces that manifest without having been first equilibrized perish in Space [“equilibrized” meaning differentiated]. Thus perished the first Kings [the Divine Dynasties] of the Ancient World, the self‐produced Princes of Giants. They fell like rootless trees, and were seen no more; for they were the Shadow of the Shadow [to wit, the Chhâyâ of the Shadowy Pitris].(1118) But those that came after them, who shooting down like falling stars were enshrined in the Shadows—prevailed to this day [Dhyânîs, who by incarnating in those “empty Shadows,” inaugurated the era of mankind]. Every sentence in the ancient Cosmogonies unfolds to him who can read between the lines the identity of the ideas, though under different garbs.

The first lesson taught in Esoteric Philosophy is, that the Incognizable Cause does not put forth evolution, whether consciously or unconsciously, but only exhibits periodically different aspects of Itself to the perception of finite minds. Now the Collective Mind—the Universal—composed of various and numberless Hosts of Creative Powers, however infinite in Manifested Time, is still finite when contrasted with the Unborn and Undecaying Space in its supreme essential aspect. That which is finite cannot be perfect. Therefore there are inferior Beings among those Hosts, but there never have been any Devils or “disobedient Angels,” for the simple reason that they are all governed by Law. The Asuras (call them by any other name you will) who incarnated, followed in this a law as implacable as any other. They had manifested prior to the Pitris, and as Time (in Space) proceeds in Cycles, their turn had come—hence the numerous allegories. The name “Asura” was first given by the Brâhmans indiscriminately to those who opposed their mummeries and sacrifices, as did the great Asura called Asurendra. It is to those ages, probably, that the origin of the idea of the Demon, as opposer and adversary, has to be traced.

The Hebrew Elohim, called “God” in the translations, who create “Light,” are identical with the Âryan Asuras. They are also referred to as the “Sons of Darkness,” as a philosophical and logical contrast to Light Immutable and Eternal. The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness being coëternal with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested Shadow of Ahura Mazda (Asura Mazda), himself issued from Zeruâna Âkerne, the “Boundless [Circle of] Time,” or the Unknown Cause. They say of the latter: Its glory is too exalted, its light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eye to grasp and see.

Its primal emanation _is Eternal Light, which, from having been previously concealed in Darkness, was called to manifest itself and thus was formed Ormazd, the __“__King of Life.__”_ He is the “First‐born” in Boundless Time, but, like his own antetype (preëxisting spiritual idea), has lived within Darkness from all Eternity. The six Amshaspands—seven with himself, the Chief of all—the primitive Spiritual Angels and Men, are collectively his Logos. The Zoroastrian Amshaspands create the World in six Days or periods also, and rest on the seventh; but in the Esoteric Philosophy, that seventh is the first period or “Day,” the so‐called Primary Creation in Âryan Cosmogony. It is that intermediate Æon which is the Prologue to Creation, and which stands on the borderland between the Uncreated Eternal Causation and the produced finite effects; a state of nascent activity and energy as the first aspect of the Eternal Immutable Quiescence. In Genesis, on which no metaphysical energy has been spent, but only an extraordinary acuteness and ingenuity to veil the Esoteric Truth, Creation begins at the third stage of manifestation. “God” or the Elohim are the “Seven Regents” of Pymander. They are identical with all the other Creators. But even in Genesis that period is hinted at by the abruptness of the picture, and the “Darkness” that was on the face of the Deep. The Elohim are shown to “create”—that is to say, to build or to produce the two Heavens or “double” Heaven (not Heaven and Earth); which means, in so many words, that they separated the upper manifested (Angelic) Heaven, or plane of consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane; the (to us) Eternal and Immutable Æons from those Periods that are in space, time and duration; Heaven from Earth, the Unknown from the Known—to the profane. Such is the meaning of the sentence in Pymander, which says that:

Thought, the divine, which is Light and Life [Zeruâna Âkerne] produced through its Word, or first aspect, the other, operating Thought, which being the God of Spirit and Fire, constructed Seven Regents enclosing within their Circle the World of Senses named “Fatal Destiny.” The latter refers to Karma; the “Seven Circles” are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven Invisible Spirits, in the Angelic Spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven planets,(1119) the seven Rishis of the Great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Âdityas by Roth: They are neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor dawn, but the eternal sustainers of this luminous life which exists as it were behind all these phenomena.

It is they—the “Seven Hosts”—who, having “considered in their Father [Divine Thought] the plan of the operator,” as says Pymander, desired to operate (or build the world with its creatures) likewise; for, having been born “within the Sphere of Operation”—the manifesting Universe—such is the Manvantaric Law. And now comes the second portion of the passage, or rather of two passages merged into one to conceal the full meaning. Those who were born within the Sphere of Operation were “the brothers who loved him well.” The latter—the “him”—were the Primordial Angels; the Asuras, the Ahriman, the Elohim, or “Sons of God,” of whom Satan was one—all those Spiritual Beings who were called the “Angels of Darkness,” because that Darkness is absolute Light, a fact now neglected if not entirely forgotten in Theology. Nevertheless, the spirituality of those much abused “Sons of Light” which is Darkness, must be evidently as great, in comparison with that of the Angels next in order, as the ethereality of the latter would be when contrasted with the density of the human body. The former are the “First‐born,” and therefore so near to the confines of Pure Quiescent Spirit as to be merely the “privations”—in the Aristotelian sense—the Ferouers or the ideal types of those who followed. They could not create material, corporeal things; and, therefore, were said in process of time to have “refused” to create, as “commanded” by “God”—otherwise, to have “rebelled.”

Perchance, this is justified on the principle of the scientific theory which teaches us as to the effect of two sound waves of equal length meeting: If the two sounds be of the same intensity, their coincidence produces a sound four times the intensity of either, while their interference produces absolute silence. While explaining some of the “heresies” of his day, Justin Martyr shows the identity of all the world religions at their starting points. The first Beginning opens invariably with the Unknown and Passive Deity, from which emanates a certain Active Power or Virtue, the Mystery that is sometimes called Wisdom, sometimes the Son, very often God, Angel, Lord, and Logos.(1120) The latter is sometimes applied to the very first Emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first Androgyne or Double Ray produced at the beginning by the Unseen. Philo depicts this Wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation had a beginning—for it proceeded from Oulom(1121) (Aiôn, Time), the highest of the Æons when emitted from the Father—it had remained with the Father before all creations, for it is part of him.(1122) Therefore Philo Judæus calls Adam Kadmon by the name “Mind”—the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic System. “The Mind, let it be named Adam.”(1123)

As the old Magian books explain it, the whole event becomes clear. A thing can only exist through its opposite—Hegel teaches us; and only a little philosophy and spirituality are needed to comprehend the origin of the later dogma, which is so truly satanic and infernal in its cold and cruel wickedness. The Magians accounted for the Origin of Evil in their exoteric teachings in this way. “Light can produce nothing but Light, and can never be the origin of Evil”; how then was Evil produced, since there was nothing coëqual or like the Light in its production? Light, say they, produced several Beings, all of them spiritual, luminous, and powerful. But a Great One (the “Great Asura,” Ahriman, Lucifer, etc.) had an evil thought, contrary to the Light. He doubted, and by that doubt he became dark.

This is a little nearer to the truth, but still wide of the mark. There was no “evil thought” that originated the opposing Power, but simply Thought per se; something which, being cogitative, and containing design and purpose, is therefore finite, and must thus find itself naturally in opposition to pure Quiescence, the as natural state of absolute Spirituality and Perfection. It was simply the Law of Evolution that asserted itself; the progress of Mental Unfolding, differentiated from Spirit, involved and entangled already with Matter, into which it is irresistibly drawn. Ideas, in their very nature and essence, as conceptions bearing relation to objects, whether true or imaginary, are opposed to Absolute Thought, that Unknowable All of whose mysterious operations Mr. Spencer predicates that nothing can be said, but that “it has no kinship of nature with Evolution”(1124)—which it certainly has not.(1125)