The Secret Doctrine

The Zohar gives it very suggestively. When the “Holy One” (the Logos) desired to create man, he called the highest Host of Angels and spake unto them what he wanted, but they doubted the wisdom of this desire and answered: “Man will not continue one night in his glory”—for which they were burnt (annihilated?), by the “Holy” Lord. Then he called another, lower Host, and said the same. And they contradicted the “Holy One”: “What is the good of Man?”—they argued. Still Elohim created Man, and when Man sinned there came the Hosts of Uzza and Azael, and twitted God: “Here is the Son of Man that thou hast made”—they said. “Behold, he sinned!” Then the Holy One replied: “If you had been among them [Men] you would have been worse than they.” And he threw them from their exalted position in Heaven even down on to the Earth; and “they were changed [into Men] and sinned after the women of the earth.”(1126) This is quite plain. No mention is made in Genesis (vi) of these “Sons of God” receiving punishment. The only reference to it in the Bible is in Jude:

And the angels which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.(1127) And this means simply that the “Angels,” doomed to incarnation, are in the chains of flesh and matter, under the darkness of ignorance, till the “Great Day,” which will come as always after the Seventh Round, after the expiration of the “Week,” on the Seventh Sabbath, or in the Post‐ Manvantaric Nirvâna. How truly Esoteric and consonant with the Secret Doctrine is Pymander, the Thought Divine, of Hermes, may be inferred from its original and primitive translations in Latin and Greek only. On the other hand how disfigured it has been later on by Christians in Europe, is seen from the remarks and unconscious confessions made by De St. Marc, in his Preface and Letter to the Bishop of Ayre, in 1578. Therein, the whole cycle of transformations from a Pantheistic and Egyptian into a Mystic Roman Catholic treatise is given, and we see how Pymander has become what it is now. Still, even in St. Marc’s translation, traces are found of the real Pymander—the “Universal Thought” or “Mind.” This is the translation from the old French translation, the original being given in the foot‐ note(1128) in its quaint old French:

Seven men [principles] were generated in Man.... The nature of the harmony of the Seven of the Father and of the Spirit. Nature ... produced seven men in accordance with the natures of the Seven Spirits ... having in them, potentially, the two sexes. Metaphysically, the Father and the Son are the “Universal Mind” and the “Periodical Universe”; the “Angel” and the “Man.” It is the Son and the Father at one and the same time; in Pymander, the active Idea and the passive Thought that generates it; the radical keynote in Nature which gives birth to the seven notes—the septenary scale of the Creative Forces, and to the seven prismatic aspects of colour, all born from the one White Ray, or Light—itself generated in Darkness. C. The Many Meanings Of The “War In Heaven.” The Secret Doctrine points out, as a self‐evident fact, that Mankind, collectively and individually, is with all manifested Nature the vehicle (a) of the Breath of One Universal Principle, in its primal differentiation; and (b) of the countless “breaths” proceeding from that One Breath in its secondary and further differentiations, as Nature with its many “mankinds” proceeds downwards toward the planes that are ever increasing in materiality. The Primary Breath informs the higher Hierarchies; the secondary—the lower, on the constantly descending planes.

Now there are many passages in the Bible which prove on their face, exoterically, that this belief was at one time universal; and the two most convincing are Ezekiel, xxviii and Isaiah, xiv. Christian Theologians are welcome to interpret both as referring to the great War before Creation, the Epos of Satan’s Rebellion, etc., if they so choose, but the absurdity of the idea is too apparent. Ezekiel addresses his lamentations and reproofs to the King of Tyre; Isaiah—to King Ahaz, who indulged in the worship of idols, as did the rest of the nation with the exception of a few Initiates (the Prophets, so‐called), who tried to arrest it on its way to exotericism—or idolatry, which is the same thing. Let the student judge. In Ezekiel, it is said: Son of Man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord God [as we understand it, the “God” Karma]; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said I am a God, ... yet thou art a man.... Behold, therefore, I will bring strangers upon thee: ... and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, ... and they shall bring thee down to the pit [or Earth‐ life].(1129)

The origin of the “prince of Tyrus” is to be traced to the “Divine Dynasties” of the iniquitous Atlanteans, the Great Sorcerers. There is no metaphor in the words of Ezekiel, but actual history this time. For the voice in the prophet, the voice of the “Lord,” his own Spirit, which spake unto him, says: Because ... thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God(s) [Divine Dynasties], in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man.... Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee: with thy wisdom ... thou hast increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches. Behold, therefore ... strangers ... shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom ... They shall bring thee down ... and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.(1130) All such imprecations are not prophecy, but simply reminders of the fate of the Atlanteans, the “Giants on Earth.”

What can be the meaning of this last sentence if it is not a narrative of the fate of the Atlanteans? Again, “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty,”(1131) may refer to the “Heavenly Man” in Pymander, or to the Fallen Angels, who are accused of having fallen through pride on account of the great beauty and wisdom which became their lot. There is no metaphor here, except in the preconceived ideas of our Theologians, perhaps. These verses relate to the Past and belong more to the Knowledge acquired at the Mysteries of Initiation than to retrospective clairvoyance! Says the voice, again: Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God [in the Satya Yuga]; every precious stone was thy covering: ... the workmanship of thy tabrets and thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub; ... thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.... Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. Therefore I will cast thee ... out of the mountain of God, and ... destroy thee.(1132)

The “Mountain of God” means the “Mountain of the Gods” or Meru, whose representative in the Fourth Race was Mount Atlas, the last form of one of the divine Titans, so high in those days that the ancients believed that the Heavens rested on its top. Did not Atlas assist the Giants in their War against the Gods (Hyginus)? Another version shows the fable as arising from the fondness of Atlas, son of Iapetus and Clymene, for Astronomy, and from his dwelling for that reason on the highest mountain peaks. The truth is that Atlas, the “Mountain of the Gods,” and also the hero of that name, are the Esoteric symbols of the Fourth Race, and his seven daughters, the Atlantides, are the symbols of its seven sub‐races. Mount Atlas, according to all the legends, was three times as high as it is now; for it has sunk at two different times. It is of a volcanic origin, and therefore the voice within Ezekiel says: Therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee.(1133)

Surely it does not mean, as seems to be the case from the translated texts, that this fire was to be brought from the midst of the Prince of Tyrus, or his people, but from Mount Atlas, symbolizing the proud Race, learned in Magic and high in arts and civilization, whose last remnant was destroyed almost at the foot of the range of those once gigantic mountains. Truly, “thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more”;(1134) as the very name of the Race and its fate is now annihilated from man’s memory. Bear in mind that almost every ancient king and priest was an Initiate; that from toward the close of the Fourth Race there had been a feud between the Initiates of the Right and those of the Left Path; finally, that the Garden of Eden is referred to by other personages than the Jews of the Adamic Race, since even Pharaoh is compared to the fairest tree of Eden by this same Ezekiel, who shows: All the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, ... comforted in the nether parts of the earth. [For] they also went down into hell with him [Pharaoh](1135)

—unto the nether parts, which are in fact the bottom of the ocean, whose floor gaped wide to devour the lands of the Atlanteans and themselves. If one bears all this in mind and compares the various accounts, then one will find out that chapters xxviii and xxxi of Ezekiel do not relate to Babylon, Assyria, nor yet to Egypt, since none of these have been so destroyed, having simply fallen into ruins on the surface, not beneath the earth—but indeed to Atlantis and most of its nations. And he will see that the “Garden of Eden” of the Initiates was no myth, but a locality now submerged. Light will dawn upon him, and he will appreciate such sentences as these at their true Esoteric value: “Thou hast been in Eden; ... thou wast upon the holy mountain of God”(1136)—for every nation had and many still have holy mountains; some Himâlayan Peaks, others Parnassus and Sinai. They were all places of Initiation and the abodes of the Chiefs of the communities of ancient and even modern Adepts. And again:

Behold, the Assyrian [why not Atlantean, Initiate?] was a cedar in Lebanon; ... his height was exalted above all the trees.... The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him: ... so that all the trees of Eden ... envied him.(1137)

Throughout all Asia Minor, the Initiates were called the “Trees of Righteousness,” and the Cedars of Lebanon, as also were some kings of Israel. So were the great Adepts in India, but only the Adepts of the Left Hand. When Vishnu Purâna narrates that “the world was over‐run with trees,” while the Prachetasas, who “passed 10,000 years of austerity in the vast ocean,” were absorbed in their devotions, the allegory relates to the Atlanteans and the Adepts of the early Fifth Race—the Âryans. Other “trees [Adept Sorcerers] spread, and over‐shadowed the unprotected earth; and the people perished ... unable to labour for ten thousand years.” Then the Sages, the Rishis of the Âryan Race, called Prachetasas, are shown “coming forth from the deep,”(1138) and destroying by the wind and flame issuing from their mouths the iniquitous “Trees” and the whole vegetable kingdom; until Soma (the Moon), the sovereign of the vegetable world, pacifies them by making alliance with the Adepts of the Right Path, to whom he offers as bride Mârishâ, the “offspring of the trees.”(1139) This hints at the great struggle between the “Sons of God” and the Sons of the Dark Wisdom—our forefathers; or the Atlantean and the Âryan Adepts.

The whole history of that period is allegorized in the Râmâyana, which is the mystic narrative in epic form of the struggle between Râma—the first king of the Divine Dynasty of the early Âryans—and Râvana, the symbolical personation of the Atlantean (Lankâ) Race. The former were the incarnations of the Solar Gods; the latter, of the Lunar Devas. This was the great battle between Good and Evil, between White and Black Magic, for the supremacy of the divine forces over the lower terrestrial, or cosmic powers. If the student would understand better the last statement, let him turn to the Anugîtâ episode of the Mahâbhârata, where the Brâhmana tells his wife: I have perceived by means of the Self the seat abiding in the Self—(the seat) where dwells the Brahman free from the pairs of opposites, and the moon, together with the fire [or the sun], upholding (all) beings (as) the mover of the intellectual principle.(1140) The Moon is the deity of the mind (Manas) but only on the lower plane. Says a Commentary: Manas is dual—Lunar in the lower, Solar in its upper portion.

That is to say, it is attracted in its higher aspect towards Buddhi, and in its lower descends into, and listens to the voice of, its animal Soul full of selfish and sensual desires; and herein is contained the mystery of an Adept’s and of a profane man’s life, as also that of the post mortem separation of the divine from the animal Man. The Mahâbhârata—every line of which has to be read Esoterically—discloses in magnificent symbolism and allegory the tribulations of both Man and Soul. Says the Brâhmana in the Anugîtâ: In the interior (within the body), in the midst of all these (life‐winds) [? principles], which move about in the body and swallow up one another,(1141) blazes the Vaishvânara fire(1142) sevenfold.(1143) But the chief “Soul” is Manas or mind; hence, Soma, the Moon, is shown as making an alliance with the solar portion in it, personified as the Prachetasas. But of the seven keys that open the seven aspects of the Râmâyana, as of every other Scripture, this is only one—the metaphysical.

The symbol of the “Tree” standing for various Initiates was almost universal. Jesus is called the “Tree of Life,” as are also all the Adepts of the Good Law, while those of the Left Path are referred to as the “withering trees.” John the Baptist speaks of the “axe” which “is laid to the root of the trees”;(1144) and the king of Assyria’s armies are called “trees.”(1145) The true meaning of the Garden of Eden has been sufficiently given in Isis Unveiled. Now the writer has more than once heard surprise expressed that Isis Unveiled should contain so few of the doctrines now taught. This is quite erroneous. For the allusions to such teachings are plentiful, even if the teachings themselves were withheld. The time had not arrived then, as the hour has not struck even now, to say all. “No Atlanteans, or the Fourth Race which preceded our Fifth Race, are mentioned in Isis Unveiled,” wrote a critic on Esoteric Buddhism one day. I, who wrote Isis Unveiled, maintain that the Atlanteans are mentioned as our predecessors. For what can be plainer than the following statement, when speaking of the Book of Job:

In the original text, instead of “dead things,” it is written dead Rephaim (giants, or mighty primitive men), from whom “Evolution” may one day trace our present race.(1146)

It is invited to do so now, now that this hint is explained quite openly; but Evolutionists are as sure to decline nowadays as they did ten years ago. Science and Theology are against us: therefore we question both, and have to do so in self‐defence. On the strength of hazy metaphors scattered throughout the prophets, and in St. John’s Revelation, a grand but reëdited version of the Book of Enoch, on these insecure grounds Christian Theology has built its dogmatic Epos of the War in Heaven. It has done more: it has used the symbolical visions, intelligible only to the Initiates, as pillars upon which to support the whole bulky edifice of its religion; and now the pillars have been found very weak reeds, and the cunning structure is foundering. The entire Christian scheme rests upon this Jakin and Boaz—the two contrary forces of Good and Evil, Christ and Satan, αἱ ἀγαθαὶ καὶ αἱ κακαὶ δυνάμεις. Take away from Christianity its main prop of the Fallen Angels, and the Eden Bower vanishes, with its Adam and Eve, into thin air; and Christ, in the exclusive character of the One God and Saviour, and the Victim of Atonement for the sin of animal‐man, becomes forthwith a useless, meaningless myth.

In an old number of the Revue Archéologique, a French writer, M. Maury, remarks: This universal strife between good and bad spirits seems to be only the reproduction of another more ancient and more terrible strife, which, according to an ancient myth, took place before the creation of the universe, between the faithful and the rebellious legions.(1147) Once more, it is a simple question of priority. Had John’s Revelation been written during the Vedic period, and were not one sure now of its being simply another version of the Book of Enoch and the Dragon legends of Pagan antiquity—the grandeur and the beauty of the imagery might have biassed the critics’ opinion in favour of the Christian interpretation of that first War, whose battle‐field was starry Heaven, and the first slaughterers—the Angels. As the matter now stands, however, one has to trace Revelation, event by event, to other and far older visions. For the better comprehension of the apocalyptic allegories and of the Esoteric epos we ask the reader to turn to Revelation, and to read chapter xii, from verse 1 to verse 7.

This has several meanings, and much has been found out with regard to the astronomical and numerical keys of this universal myth. That which may be now given, is a fragment, a few hints as to its secret meaning, as embodying the record of a real war, the struggle between the Initiates of the two Schools. Many and various are the still existing allegories built on this same foundation stone. The true narrative—that which gives the full Esoteric meaning—is in the Secret Books, but the writer has had no access to these. In the exoteric works, however, the episode of the Târaka War, and some Esoteric Commentaries, may offer a clue perhaps. In every Purâna the event is described with more or less variations which show its allegorical character. In the Mythology of the earliest Vaidic Âryans as in the later Paurânic narratives, mention is made of Budha, the “Wise,” one “learned in the Secret Wisdom,” who is the planet Mercury in his euhemerization. The Hindû Classical Dictionary credits Budha with being the author of a hymn in the Rig Veda. Therefore, he can by no means be “a later fiction of the Brâhmans,” but is a very old personation indeed.

It is by enquiring into his genealogy, or theogony rather, that the following facts are disclosed. As a myth, he is the son of Târâ, the wife of Brihaspati, the “gold coloured,” and of Soma, the (male) Moon who, Paris‐like, carries this new Helen of the Hindû Sidereal Kingdom away from her husband. This causes a great strife and war in Svarga (Heaven). The episode brings on a battle between the Gods and the Asuras. King Soma finds allies in Ushanas (Venus), the leader of the Dânavas; and the Gods are led by Indra and Rudra, who side with Brihaspati. The latter is helped by Shankara (Shiva), who, having had for his Guru Brihaspati’s father, Angiras, befriends his son. Indra is here the Indian prototype of Michael, the Archistrategus and the slayer of the “Dragon’s” Angels—since one of his names is Jishnu, “leader of the celestial host.” Both fight, as some Titans did against other Titans in defence of revengeful Gods, the one party in defence of Jupiter Tonans (in India, Brihaspati is the planet Jupiter, which is a curious coincidence); the other in support of the ever‐thundering Rudra. During this war, Indra is deserted by his body‐ guard, the Storm‐Gods (Maruts). The story is very suggestive in some of its details.

Let us examine some of them, and seek to discover their meaning. The presiding Genius, or “Regent” of the planet Jupiter is Brihaspati, the wronged husband. He is the Instructor or Spiritual Guru of the Gods, who are the representatives of the Procreative Powers. In the Rig Veda, he is called Brahmanaspati, the name “of a deity in whom the action of the worshipped upon the gods is personified.” Hence Brahmanaspati represents the materialization of the “Divine Grace,” so to say, by means of ritual and ceremonies, or the exoteric worship. Târâ,(1148) his wife, is, on the other hand, the personification of the powers of one initiated into Gupta Vidyâ (Secret Knowledge), as will be shown.

Soma is the Moon astronomically; but in mystical phraseology it is also the name of the sacred beverage drunk by the Brâhmans and the Initiates during their mysteries and sacrificial rites. The Soma plant is the asclepias acida, which yields a juice from which that mystic beverage, the Soma drink, is made. Alone the descendants of the Rishis, the Agnihotris, or Fire‐priests, of the great Mysteries knew all its powers. But the real property of the true Soma was (and is) to make a “new man” of the Initiate, after he is “reborn,” namely once that he begins to live in his Astral Body;(1149) for, his spiritual nature overcoming the physical, he would soon snap it off and part even from that etherealized form.(1150)

Soma was never given in days of old to the non‐initiated Brâhman—the simple Grihasta, or priest of the exoteric ritual. Thus Brihaspati, “Guru of the Gods” though he was, still represented the dead‐letter form of worship. It is Târâ, his wife, the symbol of one who, though wedded to dogmatic worship, longs for true Wisdom, who is shown as initiated into his mysteries by King Soma, the giver of that Wisdom. Soma is thus made to carry her away in the allegory. The result of this is the birth of Budha, Esoteric Wisdom—Mercury, or Hermes, in Greece and Egypt. He is represented as “so beautiful,” that even the husband, though well aware that Budha is not the progeny of his dead‐letter worship—claims the “new‐ born” as his Son, the fruit of his ritualistic and meaningless forms.(1151) Such is, in brief, one of the meanings of the allegory. The War in Heaven refers to several events of this kind on various and different planes of being. The first is a purely astronomical and cosmical fact pertaining to Cosmogony. Mr. John Bentley thought that with the Hindûs the War in Heaven was only a figure referring to their calculations of time periods.(1152)

This served as a prototype, he thinks, for the Western nations to build their War of the Titans upon. The author is not quite wrong, but neither is he quite right. If the sidereal prototype refers indeed to a pre‐ manvantaric period, and rests entirely on the knowledge which the Âryan Initiates claim they have of the whole programme and progress of cosmogony,(1153) the War of the Titans is but a legendary and deified copy of the real war that took place in the Himâlayan Kailâsa (Heaven) instead of in the depths of cosmic interplanetary Space. It is the record of the terrible strife between the “Sons of God” and the “Sons of the Shadow” of the Fourth and the Fifth Races. It is on these two events, blended together by legends borrowed from the exoteric account of the War waged by the Asuras against the Gods, that every subsequent national tradition on the subject has been built.

Esoterically, the Asuras, transformed subsequently into evil Spirits and lower Gods, who are eternally at war with the Great Deities—are the Gods of the Secret Wisdom. In the oldest portions of the Rig Veda, they are the Spiritual and the Divine, the term Asura being used for the Supreme Spirit and being the same as the great Ahura of the Zoroastrians.(1154) There was a time when the Gods Indra, Agni, and Varuna themselves belonged to the Asuras.

In the Taittirîya Brâhmana, the Breath (Asu) of Brahmâ‐Prajâpati became alive, and from that Breath he created the Asuras. Later on, after the War, the Asuras are called the enemies of the Gods, hence—“A‐suras,” the initial a being a negative prefix—or “No‐Gods”; the “Gods” being referred to as Suras. This then connects the Asuras and their “Hosts,” enumerated further on, with the “Fallen Angels” of the Christian Churches, a Hierarchy of Spiritual Beings to be found in every Pantheon of ancient and even modern nations—from the Zoroastrian down to that of the Chinaman. They are the Sons of the primeval Creative Breath at the beginning of every new Mahâ Kalpa, or Manvantara, in the same rank as the Angels who had remained “faithful.” These were the allies of Soma (the parent of the Esoteric Wisdom) as against Brihaspati (representing ritualistic or ceremonial worship). Evidently they have been degraded in Space and Time into opposing Powers or Demons by the ceremonialists, on account of their rebellion against hypocrisy, sham‐worship, and the dead‐letter form. Now what is the real character of all those who fought along with them? They are: (1) Ushanas, or the “Host” of the Planet Venus, become now in Roman Catholicism Lucifer, the Genius of the “day star,”(1155) the Tsaba, or Army of “Satan.”

(2) The Daityas and Dânavas are the Titans, the Demons and Giants whom we find in the Bible(1156)—the progeny of the “Sons of God” and the “Daughters of Men.” Their generic name shows their alleged character, and discloses at the same time the secret animus of the Brâhmans; for they are the Kratu‐dvishas—the “enemies of the sacrifices” or exoteric shams. These are the “Hosts” that fought against Brihaspati, the representative of exoteric popular and national religions; and Indra—the God of the visible Heaven, the Firmament, who, in the early Veda, is the highest God of cosmic Heaven, the fit habitation for an extra‐cosmic and personal God, higher than whom no exoteric worship can ever soar.

(3) Then come the Nâgas,(1157) the Sarpas, Serpents or Seraphs. These, again, show their character by the hidden meaning of their glyph. In mythology they are semi‐divine beings with a human face and the tail of a dragon. They are therefore, undeniably, the Jewish Seraphim (compare Serapis, Sarpa, Serpent); the singular being Saraph, “burning, fiery.” Christian and Jewish angelology distinguishes between the Seraphim and the Cherubim or Cherubs, who come second in order: Esoterically, and kabalistically, they are identical; the Cherubim being simply the name for the images or likenesses of any of the divisions of the celestial Hosts. Now, as said before, the Dragons and Nâgas were the names given to the Initiate‐hermits, on account of their great Wisdom and Spirituality and their living in caves. Thus, when Ezekiel(1158) applies the adjective Cherub to the King of Tyre, and tells him that by his wisdom and his understanding there is no secret that can be hidden from him, he shows the Occultist that it is a “Prophet,” perhaps still a follower of exoteric worship, who fulminates against an Initiate of another school and not against an imaginary Lucifer, a fallen Cherub from the stars, and then from the Garden of Eden. Thus the so‐called “War” is, in one of its many meanings, also an allegorical record of the strife

between the two classes of Adepts—of the Right and of the Left Path. There were three classes of Rishis in India, who were the earliest Adepts known; the Royal, or Râjarshis, kings and princes, who adopted the ascetic life; the Divine, or Devarshis, or the sons of Dharma or Yoga; and the Brahmarshis, descendants of those Rishis who were the founders of Gotras of Brâhmans, or caste‐races. Now, leaving the mythical and astronomical keys for one moment aside, the secret teachings show many Atlanteans who belonged to these divisions; and there were strifes and wars between them, de facto and de jure. Nârada, one of the greatest Rishis, was a Devarshi; and he is shown in constant and everlasting feud with Brahmâ, Daksha, and other Gods and Sages. Therefore we may safely maintain that whatever the astronomical meaning of this universally accepted legend may be, its human phase is based on real and historical events, disfigured into a theological dogma only to suit ecclesiastical purposes. As above so below. Sidereal phenomena, and the behaviour of the celestial bodies in the Heavens, were taken as a model, and the plan was carried out below, on Earth. Thus, Space, in its abstract sense, was called the “realm of divine knowledge,” and by the Chaldees or Initiates Ab Soo, the habitat (or father,

i.e., the source) of knowledge, because it is in Space that dwell the intelligent Powers which invisibly rule the Universe.(1159)

In the same manner, and on the plan of the Zodiac in the upper Ocean or the Heavens, a certain realm on Earth, an inland sea, was consecrated and called the “Abyss of Learning”; twelve centres on it, in the shape of twelve small islands, representing the Zodiacal Signs—two of which remained for ages the “mystery Signs”(1160)—were the abodes of twelve Hierophants and Masters of Wisdom. This “Sea of Knowledge” or learning(1161) remained for ages there, where now stretches the Shamo or Gobi Desert. It existed until the last great glacial period, when a local cataclysm, which swept the waters South and West and so formed the present great desolate desert, left only a certain oasis, with a lake and one island in the midst of it, as a relic of the Zodiacal Ring on Earth. For ages the Watery Abyss—which, with the nations that preceded the later Babylonians, was the abode of the “Great Mother,” the terrestrial post‐ type of the “Great Mother Chaos” in Heaven, the parent of Ea (Wisdom), himself the early prototype of Oannes, the Man‐Fish of the Babylonians—for ages, then, the “Abyss” or Chaos was the abode of Wisdom and not of Evil. The struggle of Bel and then of Merodach, the Sun‐God, with Tiamat, the Sea and its Dragon—a “War” which ended in the defeat of the latter—has a purely cosmic and geological meaning, as well as a historical one. It is a page torn out of the history of the Secret and Sacred Sciences, their evolution, growth and death—for the profane masses.

It relates (a) to the systematic and gradual drying up of immense territories by the fierce Sun at a certain pre‐historic period, one of the terrible droughts which ended by a gradual transformation of once fertile lands abundantly watered into the sandy deserts which they are now; and (b) to the as systematic persecution of the Prophets of the Right Path by those of the Left. The latter, having inaugurated the birth and evolution of the sacerdotal castes, have finally led the world into all those exoteric religions, which have been invented to satisfy the depraved taste of the “hoi polloi” and the ignorant for ritualistic pomp and the materialization of the ever‐ immaterial and Unknowable Principle.

This was a certain improvement on the Atlantean sorcery, the memory of which lingers in the remembrance of all the literary and Sanskrit‐reading portion of India, as well as in the popular legends. Still it was a parody on, and the desecration of, the Sacred Mysteries and their Science. The rapid progress of anthropomorphism and idolatry led the early Fifth, as it had already led the Fourth Race, into sorcery once more, though on a smaller scale. Finally, even the four “Adams” (symbolizing, under other names, the four preceding Races) were forgotten, and, passing from one generation into another, each loaded with some additional myths, were at last drowned in that ocean of popular symbolism called the Pantheons. Yet they exist to this day in the oldest Jewish traditions: the first as the Tzelem, the “Shadow‐Adam,” the Chhâyâs of our doctrine; the second, the “Model” Adam, the copy of the first, and the “male and female” of the exoteric Genesis; the third, the “Earthly Adam” before the Fall, an androgyne; and the fourth, the Adam after his “fall,” i.e., separated into sexes, or the pure Atlantean. The Adam of the Garden of Eden, or the forefather of our Race—the fifth—is an ingenious compound of the above four. As stated in the Zohar, Adam, the first Man, is not found now on Earth, he “is not found in all Below.” For where does the lower Earth come from? “From the Chain of the Earth, and from the Heaven Above,” i.e., from the superior Globes, those which precede and are above our Earth.

And there came out from it [the Chain] creatures differing one from the other. Some of them in garments [solid] (skins), some in shells (Q’lippoth), ... some in red shells, some in black, some in white, and some from all the colours.(1162) As in the Chaldæan Cosmogony of Berosus and the Stanzas just given, some treatises on the Kabalah speak of creatures with two faces, some with four, and some with one face; for “the highest Adam did not come down in all the countries, or produce progeny and have many wives,” but is a mystery. So is the Dragon a mystery. Truly says Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochaï, that to understand the meaning of the Dragon is not given to the “companions” (students, or Chelâs), but only to the “little ones,” i.e., the perfect Initiates.(1163) The work of the beginning the companions understand; but it is only the little ones who understand the parable on the work in the Principium by the Mystery of the Serpent of the Great Sea.(1164)

And those Christians, who may happen to read this, will also understand by the light of the above sentence who their “Christ” was. For Jesus states repeatedly that he who “shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein”; and if some of his sayings have been meant to apply to children without any metaphor, most of the references to the “little ones” in the Gospels, relate to the Initiates, of whom Jesus was one. Paul (Saul) is referred to in the Talmud as the “little one.” The “Mystery of the Serpent” was this: Our Earth, or rather terrestrial life, is often referred to in the Secret Teachings as the Great Sea, the “Sea of Life” having remained to this day a favourite metaphor. The Siphra Dtzenioutha speaks of Primeval Chaos and the Evolution of the Universe after a Destruction (Pralaya), comparing it to an uncoiling serpent: Extending hither and thither, its tail in its mouth, the head twisting on its neck, it is enraged and angry.... It watches and conceals itself. Every thousand Days it is manifested.(1165) A commentary on the Purânas says:

Ananta‐Shesha is a form of Vishnu, the Holy Spirit of Preservation, and a symbol of the Universe, on which it is supposed to sleep during the intervals of the Days of Brahmâ. The seven heads of Shesha support the Universe. So the Spirit of God “sleeps,” or is “breathing” over the Chaos of Undifferentiated Matter, before each new “Creation,” says the Siphra Dtzenioutha. Now one Day of Brahmâ is composed, as already explained, of one thousand Mahâ Yugas; and as each Night, or period of rest, is equal in duration to this Day, it is easy to see what this sentence in the Siphra Dtzenioutha refers to—viz., that the Serpent manifests “once in a thousand days.” Nor is it more difficult to see whither the initiated writer of the Siphra is leading us, when he says: Its head is broken in the waters of the Great Sea, as it is written: Thou dividest the sea by thy strength, thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters.(1166)

It refers to the trials of the Initiates in this physical life, the “Sea of Sorrow,” if read with one key; it hints at the successive destruction of the seven Spheres of a Chain of Worlds in the Great Sea of Space, when read with another key; for every sidereal globe or sphere, every world, star, or group of stars, is called in symbolism a “Dragon’s Head.” But however it may read, the Dragon was never regarded as Evil, nor was the Serpent either—in antiquity. In the metaphors, whether astronomical, cosmical, theogonical or simply physiological (or phallic), the Serpent was always regarded as a divine symbol. When mention is made of “the [Cosmic] Serpent which runs with 370 leaps,”(1167) it means the cyclic periods of the great Tropical Year of 25,868 years, divided in the Esoteric calculation into 370 periods or cycles, as one solar year is divided into 365 days. And if Michael was regarded by the Christians as the Conqueror of Satan, the Dragon, it is because in the Talmud this fighting personage is represented as the Prince of Waters, who had seven subordinate Spirits under him—a good reason why the Latin Church made him the patron saint of every promontory in Europe. In the Siphra Dtzenioutha the Creative Force “makes sketches and spiral lines of his creation in the shape of a Serpent.” It “holds its tail in its mouth,” because it is the symbol of endless eternity and of cyclic periods. Its meanings, however, would require a volume, and we must end.

Thus the reader may now see for himself what are the several meanings of the “War in Heaven,” and of the “Great Dragon.” Thus the most solemn and dreaded of Church dogmas, the alpha and omega of the Christian faith, and the pillar of its Fall and Atonement, dwindles down to a Pagan symbol, in the many allegories of these pre‐historic struggles.

The subject is not yet exhausted, and has to be examined from still other aspects. Whether Milton’s grandiose description of the three days’ Battle of the Angels of Light against those of Darkness justifies the suspicion that he must have heard of the corresponding Eastern tradition—it is impossible to say. Nevertheless, if not himself in connection with some Mystic, then it must have been through some one who had obtained access to the secret works of the Vatican. Among these there is a tradition concerning the “Beni Shamash”—the “Children of the Sun”—relating to the Eastern allegory, with far more minute details in its triple version, than one can get either from the Book of Enoch, or the far more recent Revelation of St. John concerning the “Old Dragon” and his various Slayers, as has been just shown. It seems inexplicable to find, to this day, authors belonging to mystical societies who yet continue in their preconceived doubts as to the “alleged” antiquity of the Book of Enoch. Thus, while the author of the Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches is inclined to see in Enoch an Initiate converted to Christianity (!!),(1168) the English compiler of Éliphas Lévi’s works, The Mysteries of Magic, is also of a like opinion. He remarks that:

Outside the erudition of Dr. Kenealy, no modern scholarship attributes any more remote antiquity to the latter work [the Book of Enoch] than the fourth century B.C.(1169) Modern scholarship has been guilty of worse errors than this one. It seems but yesterday that the greatest literary critics in Europe denied the very authenticity of that work, together with the Orphic Hymns, and even the Book of Hermes or Thoth, until whole verses from the latter were discovered on Egyptian monuments and tombs of the earliest dynasties. The opinion of Archbishop Laurence is quoted elsewhere. The “Old Dragon” and Satan, which have now become singly and collectively the symbol of, and the theological term for, the “Fallen Angel,” are not so described either in the original Kabalah (the Chaldæan Book of Numbers) or in the modern. For the most learned, if not the greatest of modern Kabalists, namely Éliphas Lévi, describes Satan in the following glowing terms:

It is that Angel who was proud enough to believe himself God; brave enough to buy his independence at the price of eternal suffering and torture; beautiful enough to have adored himself in full divine light; strong enough to still reign in darkness amidst agony, and to have made himself a throne out of his inextinguishable pyre. It is the Satan of the republican and heretical Milton ... the prince of anarchy, served by a hierarchy of pure spirits(!!).(1170) This description—one which reconciles so cunningly Theological dogma and Kabalistic allegory, and even contrives to include a political compliment in its phraseology—is, when read in the right spirit, quite correct. Yes, indeed; it is this grandest of ideals, this ever‐living symbol—nay apotheosis—of self‐sacrifice for the intellectual independence of humanity; this ever Active Energy protesting against Static Inertia—the principle to which Self‐assertion is a crime, and Thought and the Light of Knowledge odious. As Éliphas says with unparalleled justice and irony: It is this pretended hero of tenebrous eternities, who, slanderously charged with ugliness, is decorated with horns and claws, which would fit far better his implacable tormentor.(1171)

It is he who has been finally transformed into a Serpent—the Red Dragon. But Éliphas Lévi was yet too subservient to his Roman Catholic authorities—one may add, too jesuitical—to confess that this Devil was mankind, and never had any existence on Earth outside of that mankind.(1172)

In this, Christian Theology, although following slavishly in the steps of Paganism, has only been true to its own time‐honoured policy. It had to isolate itself, and to assert its authority. Hence it could not do better than turn every Pagan Deity into a Devil. Every bright Sun‐God of antiquity—a glorious Deity by day, and its own Opponent and Adversary by night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was supposed to contain the germs of night and day—has now been turned into the antithetical Shadow of God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported authority of despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and shadow, all the Sun‐ and the Moon‐Gods, have been cursed, and thus the one God chosen out of the many and Satan have both been anthropomorphized. But Theology seems to have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating and finally analyzing all that is artificially forced upon its reverence. History shows in every race and even tribe, especially in the Semitic nations, the natural impulse to exalt its own tribal deity above all others to the hegemony of the Gods, and proves that the God of the Israelites was such a tribal God, and no more, even though the Christian Church, following the lead of the “chosen” people, is pleased to enforce the worship of that one particular deity, and to anathematize all the others. Whether originally a conscious or an unconscious blunder, nevertheless, it was one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only a God “among” other “Gods.”(1173) The Lord appears to Abraham, and while saying, “I am the Almighty God,” yet adds, “I will establish my covenant ... to be a God unto thee” (Abraham); and unto his seed after him(1174)—but not unto Âryan Europeans.

But, then, there was the grandiose and ideal figure of Jesus of Nazareth to be set off against a dark background, to gain in radiance by the contrast; and a darker one the Church could hardly invent. Lacking the Old Testament symbology, ignorant of the real connotation of the name of Jehovah—the Rabbinical secret substitute for the Ineffable and Unpronounceable Name—the Church mistook the cunningly fabricated shadow for the reality, the anthropomorphized generative symbol for the one Secondless Reality, the ever Unknowable Cause of All. As a logical sequence the Church, for purposes of duality, had to invent an anthropomorphic Devil—created, as taught by her, by God himself. Satan has now turned out to be the monster fabricated by the Jehovah‐ Frankenstein—his father’s curse and a thorn in the divine side, a monster, than whom no earthly Frankenstein could have fabricated a more ridiculous bogey. The author of New Aspects of Life describes the Jewish God very correctly from the kabalistic standpoint as: The Spirit of the Earth, which had revealed itself to the Jew as Jehovah.(1175)... It was that Spirit again who, after the death of Jesus, assumed his form and personated him as the risen Christ

—the doctrine of Cerinthus and several Gnostic sects with slight variation, as one can see. But the author’s explanations and deductions are remarkable: None knew ... better than Moses, ... [and] so well as he, how great was the power of those [Gods of Egypt] with whose priests he had contended, ... the gods of which Jehovah is claimed to be the God [by the Jews only]. Asks the author: What were these gods, these Achar of which Jehovah, the Achad, is claimed to be the God ... by overcoming them? To which our Occultism answers: Those whom the Church now calls the Fallen Angels and collectively Satan, the Dragon—overcome, if we have to accept her dictum, by Michael and his Host, that Michael being simply Jehovah himself, one of the subordinate Spirits at best. Therefore, the author is again right in saying:

The Greeks believed in the existence of ... daimons. But ... they were anticipated by the Hebrews, who held that there was a class of personating spirits which they designated demons, “personators.”... Admitting with Jehovah, who expressly asserts it, the existence of other gods, which ... were personators of the One God, were these other gods simply a higher class of personating spirits, ... which had acquired and exercised greater powers? And is not personation the key to the mystery of the spirit state? But once granting this position, how are we to know that Jehovah was not a personating spirit, a spirit which arrogated to itself that it was, and thus became, the personator of the one unknown and unknowable God? Nay, how do we know that the spirit calling itself Jehovah, in arrogating to itself his attributes did not thus cause its own designation to be imputed to the One who is in reality as nameless as incognizable?(1176) Then the author shows that “the spirit Jehovah is a personator” on its own admission. It acknowledged to Moses “that it had appeared to the patriarchs as the God Shaddai” and the “God Helion.”

With the same breath it assumed the name of Jehovah; and it is on the faith of the assertion of this personator that the names El, Eloah, Elohim, and Shaddai, have been read and interpreted in juxtaposition with Jehovah as the “Lord God Almighty.” [Then when] the name Jehovah became ineffable, the designation Adonai, “Lord,” was substituted for it, and ... it was owing to this substitution that the “Lord” passed from the Jewish to the Christian “Word” and World as a designation of God.(1177) And how are we to know, the author may add, that Jehovah was not many spirits personating even that seemingly one—Jod or Jod‐He? But if the Christian Church was the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma, it was because, as shown in Isis Unveiled, the Devil—the powerful Enemy of God (?!!) had to become the corner stone and pillar of the Church. For, as a Theosophist, M. Jules Baissac, truly observes in his Satan ou le Diable: Il fallait éviter de paraître autoriser le dogme du double principe en faisant de ce Satan créateur une puissance réelle, et pour expliquer le mal originel, on profère contre Manes l’hypothèse d’une permission de l’unique Tout‐Puissant.(1178)

The choice and policy were unfortunate, anyhow. Either the personator of the lower God of Abraham and Jacob ought to have been made entirely distinct from the mystic “Father” of Jesus, or—the “Fallen” Angels should have been left unslandered by further fictions. Every God of the Gentiles is connected with, and closely related to, Jehovah—the Elohim; for they are all One Host, whose units differ only in name in the Esoteric Teachings. Between the “Obedient” and the “Fallen” Angels there is no difference whatever, except in their respective functions, or rather in the inertia of some, and the activity of others, among those Dhyân Chohans, or Elohim, who were “commissioned to create,” i.e., to fabricate the manifested world out of the eternal material.

The Kabalists say that the true name of Satan is that of Jehovah turned upside down, for “Satan is not a black God but the negation of the white Deity,” or the Light of Truth. God is Light and Satan is the necessary Darkness or Shadow to set it off, without which pure Light would be invisible and incomprehensible.(1179) “For the Initiates,” says Éliphas Lévi, “the Devil is not a person but a creative Force, for Good as for Evil.” The Initiates represented this Force, which presides at physical generation, under the mysterious form of God Pan—or Nature; whence the horns and hoofs of that mythical and symbolic figure, as also the Christian “goat” of the “Witches’ Sabbath.” With regard to this too, Christians have imprudently forgotten that the “goat” was also the victim selected for the atonement of all the sins of Israel, that the scape‐goat was indeed the sacrificial martyr, the symbol of the greatest mystery on earth—the “fall into generation.” Only, the Jews have long forgotten the real meaning of their (to the non‐initiated) ridiculous hero, selected from the drama of life in the Great Mysteries enacted by them in the desert; and the Christians have never known it.

Éliphas Lévi seeks to explain the dogma of his Church by paradoxes and metaphors, but succeeds very poorly in the face of the many volumes written by pious Roman Catholic Demonologists under the approbation and auspices of Rome, in this nineteenth century of ours. For the true Roman Catholic, the Devil or Satan is a reality; the drama enacted in the Sidereal Light according to the seer of Patmos—who desired, perhaps, to improve upon the narrative in the Book of Enoch—is as real, and as historical a fact as any other allegory and symbolical event in the Bible. But the Initiates give an explanation which differs from that given by Éliphas Lévi, whose genius and crafty intellect had to submit to a certain compromise dictated to him from Rome.

Thus, the true and “uncompromising” Kabalists admit that, for all purposes of Science and Philosophy, it is enough that the profane should know that the Great Magic Agent—called by the followers of the Marquis de St. Martin, the Martinists, the Astral Light, by the mediæval Kabalists and Alchemists the Sidereal Virgin and the Mysterium Magnum, and by the Eastern Occultists Æther, the reflection of Âkâsha—is that which the Church calls Lucifer. That the Latin scholastics have succeeded in transforming the Universal Soul and Plerôma—the Vehicle of Light and the receptacle of all forms, a Force spread throughout the whole Universe, with its direct and indirect effects—into Satan and his works, is no news to any one. But now they are prepared to give out to the above‐mentioned profane even the secrets hinted at by Éliphas Lévi, without adequate explanation, for the latter’s policy of veiled revelations could only lead to further superstition and misunderstanding. What, indeed, can a student of Occultism, who is a beginner, gather from the following highly poetical sentences of Éliphas Lévi, which are as apocalyptic as the writings of any of the Alchemists?

Lucifer [the Astral Light] ... is an intermediate force existing in all creation; it serves to create and to destroy, and the Fall of Adam was an erotic intoxication which has rendered his generation a slave to this fatal Light, ... every sexual passion that overpowers our senses is a whirlwind of that Light which seeks to drag us towards the abyss of death. Madness, hallucinations, visions, extasies, are all forms of a very dangerous excitation due to this interior phosphorus[?]. Thus light, finally, is of the nature of fire, the intelligent use of which warms and vivifies, and the excess of which, on the contrary, dissolves and annihilates. Thus man is called upon to assume a sovereign empire over this [Astral] Light and conquer thereby his immortality, and is threatened at the same time with being intoxicated, absorbed, and eternally destroyed by it. This Light, therefore, inasmuch as it is devouring, revengeful, and fatal, would thus really be hell‐fire, the serpent of the legend; the tormented errors of which it is full, the tears and the gnashing of teeth of the abortive beings it devours, the phantom of life that escapes them, and seems to mock and insult their agony, all this would be the Devil or Satan indeed.(1180)

There is no false statement in all this; nothing save a superabundance of ill‐applied metaphors, as, for instance, in the application of the myth of Adam to the illustration of the astral effects. Âkâsha,(1181) the Astral Light, can be defined in a few words; it is the Universal Soul, the Matrix of the Universe, the Mysterium Magnum from which all that exists is born by separation or differentiation. It is the cause of existence; it fills all the infinite Space, is Space itself, in one sense, or both its sixth and seventh principles.(1182) But as the finite in the Infinite, as regards manifestation this Light must have its shadowy side—as already remarked. And as the Infinite can never be manifested, hence the finite world has to be satisfied with the shadow alone, which its actions draw upon humanity and which men attract and _force into __ activity_. Hence, while the Astral Light is the Universal Cause in its unmanifested unity and infinity, it becomes, with regard to mankind, simply the effects of the causes produced by men in their sinful lives. It is not its bright denizens—whether they are called Spirits of Light or Darkness—that produce Good or Evil, but mankind itself that determines the unavoidable action and reaction in the Great Magic Agent. It is mankind which has become the “Serpent of Genesis,” and thus causes daily and hourly the Fall and Sin of the “Celestial Virgin”—which thus becomes the Mother of Gods and Devils at one and the same time;

for she is the ever‐ loving, beneficent Deity to all those who stir her Soul and Heart, instead of attracting to themselves her shadowy manifested essence, called by Éliphas Lévi—the “fatal light” which kills and destroys. Humanity, in its units, can overpower and master its effects; but only by the holiness of their lives and by producing good causes. It has power only on the manifested lower principles—the shadow of the Unknown and Incognizable Deity in Space. But in antiquity and reality, Lucifer, or Luciferus, is the name of the Angelic Entity presiding over the Light of Truth as over the light of the day. In the great Valentinian Gospel Pistis Sophia it is taught that of the three Powers emanating from the Holy Names of the three Triple Powers (Τριδυνάμεις), that of Sophia (the Holy Ghost according to these Gnostics—the most cultured of all), resides in the planet Venus or Lucifer.

Thus to the profane, the Astral Light may be God and Devil at once—Demon est Deus inversus—that is to say, through every point of Infinite Space thrill the magnetic and electrical currents of animate Nature, the life‐ giving and death‐giving waves, for death on earth becomes life on another plane. Lucifer is divine and terrestrial Light, the “Holy Ghost” and “Satan,” at one and the same time, visible Space being truly filled with the differentiated Breath invisibly; and the Astral Light, the manifested effects of the two who are one, guided and attracted by ourselves, is the Karma of Humanity, both a personal and impersonal entity—personal, because it is the mystic name given by St. Martin to the Host of Divine Creators, Guides and Rulers of this Planet; impersonal, as the Cause and Effect of Universal Life and Death.

The Fall was the result of man’s knowledge, for his “eyes were opened.” Indeed, he was taught Wisdom and the Hidden Knowledge by the “Fallen Angel,” for the latter had become from that day his Manas, Mind and Self‐ consciousness. In each of us that golden thread of continuous Life—periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super‐sensuous in Devachan—is from the beginning of our appearance upon this Earth. It is the Sûtrâtmâ, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal Monadship, on which our earthly “lives” or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads—according to the beautiful expression of the Vedântic Philosophy.

And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the “Lord of Phôsphoros”—brimstone was a Theological improvement—and Lucifer, or “Light‐Bearer,” is in us: it is our Mind, our Tempter and Redeemer, our intelligent Liberator and Saviour from pure animalism. Without this principle—the emanation of the very essence of the pure divine principle Mahat (Intelligence), which radiates direct from the Divine Mind—we would be surely no better than animals. The first man Adam was made only a living soul (Nephesh), the last Adam was made a quickening spirit(1183)—says Paul, his words referring to the building or creation of man. Without this quickening spirit, or human mind or soul, there would be no difference between man and beast; as there is none, in fact, between animals with respect to their actions. The tiger and the donkey, the hawk and the dove, are each one as pure and as innocent as the other, because irresponsible. Each follows its instinct, the tiger and the hawk killing with the same unconcern as the donkey eats a thistle, or the dove pecks at a grain of corn. If the Fall had the significance given to it by Theology; if that Fall occurred as a result of an act never intended by Nature—a sin, how about the animals? If we are told that they procreate their species in consequence of that same “original sin,” for which God cursed the Earth—hence everything living on it—we will put another question. We are told by Theology, as also by Science, that the animal was on Earth far earlier than man. We ask the former: How did it procreate its species, before the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil had been plucked off? As said:

The Christians—far less clear‐sighted than the great Mystic and Liberator whose name they have assumed, whose doctrines they have misunderstood and travestied, and whose memory they have blackened by their deeds—took the Jewish Jehovah as he was, and of course strove vainly to reconcile the Gospel of Light and Liberty with the Deity of Darkness and Submission.(1184) But it is sufficiently proven now that all the soi‐disant evil Spirits who are credited with having made war on the Gods, are identical as personalities; that, moreover, all the ancient religions taught the same tenet, save the final conclusion, which differs from the Christian. The seven primeval Gods had all a dual state, one essential, the other accidental. In their essential state they were all the Builders or Fashioners, the Preservers and the Rulers of this World; and in the accidental state, clothing themselves in visible corporeality, they descended on the Earth and reigned on it as Kings and Instructors of the lower Hosts, who had incarnated once more upon it as men.

Thus, Esoteric Philosophy shows that man is truly the manifested deity in both its aspects—good and evil, but Theology cannot admit this philosophical truth. Teaching as it does the dogma of the Fallen Angels in its dead‐letter meaning, and having made of Satan the corner‐stone and pillar of the dogma of redemption—to do so would be suicidal. Having once shown the rebellious Angels distinct from God and the Logos in their personalities, to admit that the downfall of the disobedient Spirits means simply their fall into generation and matter, would be equivalent to saying that God and Satan were identical. For since the Logos, or God, is the aggregate of that once divine Host accused of having fallen, it would naturally follow that the Logos and Satan are one.

Yet such was the real philosophical view in antiquity of the now disfigured tenet. The Verbum, or the “Son,” was shown in a dual aspect by the Pagan Gnostics—in fact, he was a duality in full unity. Hence, the endless and various national versions. The Greeks had Jupiter, the son of Cronus, the Father, who hurls him down into the depths of Kosmos. The Âryans had Brahmâ (in later theology) precipitated by Shiva into the Abyss of Darkness, etc. But the Fall of all these Logoi and Demiourgoi from their primitive exalted position, contained in all cases one and the same Esoteric signification; the Curse, in its philosophical meaning, of being incarnated on this Earth; an unavoidable rung in the Ladder of Cosmic Evolution, a highly philosophical and fitting Karmic Law, without which the presence of Evil on Earth would have to remain for ever a closed mystery to the understanding of true Philosophy. To say, as the author of Esprits Tombés des Paiens does, that since— Christianity is made to rest on two pillars, that of evil (πουηροῦ), and of good (ἀγαθοῦ); on two forces, in short (ἀγαθαὶ καὶ κακαὶ δυνάμεις): hence, if we suppress the punishment of the evil forces, the protecting mission of the good powers will have neither value nor sense

—is to utter the most unphilosophical absurdity. If it fits in with, and explains, Christian dogma, it obscures the facts and truths of the primitive Wisdom of the ages. The cautious hints of Paul have all the true Esoteric meaning, and it took centuries of scholastic casuistry to give them the false colouring in their present interpretations. The Verbum and Lucifer are one in their dual aspect; and the “Prince of the Air” (princeps aeris hujus) is not the “God of that period,” but an everlasting principle. When the latter was said to be ever circling around the world (qui circumambulat terram), the great Apostle referred simply to the never‐ceasing cycles of human incarnations, in which evil will ever predominate unto the day when Humanity is redeemed by the true divine Enlightenment which gives the correct perception of things.

It is easy to disfigure vague expressions written in dead and long‐ forgotten languages, and palm them off on the ignorant masses as truths and revealed facts. The identity of thought and meaning is the one thing that strikes the student in all the religions which mention the tradition of the Fallen Spirits, and in those great religions there is not one that fails to mention and describe it in one or another form. Thus, Hoang‐ty, the Great Spirit, sees his Sons, who had acquired active wisdom, falling into the Valley of Pain. Their leader, the Flying Dragon, having drunk of the forbidden Ambrosia, fell to the Earth with his Host (Kings). In the Zend Avesta, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), surrounding himself with Fire (the “Flames” of the Stanzas), seeks to conquer the Heavens,(1185) when Ahura Mazda, descending from the solid Heaven he inhabits, to the help of the Heavens that revolve (in time and space, the manifested worlds of cycles including those of incarnation), and the Amshaspands, the “seven bright Sravah,” accompanied by their stars, fight Ahriman, and the vanquished Devas fall to the Earth along with him.(1186) In the Vendîdâd the Daêvas are called “evil‐doing,” and are shown to rush away “into the depths of the ... world of hell,” or Matter.(1187) This is an allegory which shows the Devas compelled to incarnate, once that they have separated themselves from their Parent Essence, or, in other words, after the Unit had become multiple, after differentiation and manifestation.

Typhon the Egyptian Python, the Titans, the Suras and the Asuras, all belong to the same legend of Spirits peopling the Earth. They are not “Demons commissioned to create and organize this visible universe,” but the Fashioners or “Architects” of the Worlds, and the Progenitors of Man. They are the Fallen Angels, metaphorically—the “true mirrors” of the “Eternal Wisdom.”

What is the complete truth as well as the Esoteric meaning about this universal myth? The whole essence of truth cannot be transmitted from mouth to ear. Nor can any pen describe it, not even that of the Recording Angel, unless man finds the answer in the sanctuary of his own heart, in the innermost depths of his divine intuition. It is the great Seventh Mystery of Creation, the first and the last; and those who read St. John’s Apocalypse may find its shadow lurking under the seventh seal. It can be represented only in its apparent, objective form, like the eternal riddle of the Sphinx. If the Sphinx threw herself into the sea and perished, it is not because Œdipus had unriddled the secret of the ages, but because, by anthropomorphizing the ever‐spiritual and the subjective, he had dishonoured the great truth for ever. Therefore, we can give it only from its philosophical and intellectual planes, unlocked with three keys respectively—for the last four keys of the seven that throw wide open the portals to the Mysteries of Nature are in the hands of the highest Initiates, and cannot be divulged to the masses at large—not in this century, at any rate.

The dead‐letter is everywhere the same. The dualism in the Mazdean religion was born from exoteric interpretation. The holy Airyaman, the “bestower of weal,”(1188) invoked in the prayer called Airyama‐ishyô, is the divine aspect of Ahriman, “the deadly, the Daêva of the Daêvas,”(1189) and Angra Mainyu is the dark material aspect of the former. “Keep us from our hater, O Mazda and Ârmaita Spenta,”(1190) has, as a prayer and invocation, an identical meaning with “Lead us not into temptation,” and is addressed by man to the terrible spirit of duality in man himself. For Ahura Mazda is the Spiritual, Divine, and Purified Man, and Ârmaita Spenta, the Spirit of the Earth or materiality, is the same as Ahriman or Angra Mainyu in one sense.

The whole of the Magian or Mazdean literature—or what remains of it—is magical, occult, hence allegorical and symbolical, even its “mystery of the law.”(1191) Now the Mobed and the Parsî keep their eye on the Baresma during the sacrifice—the divine twig off Ormazd’s “Tree” having been transformed into a bunch of metallic rods—and wonder why neither the Amesha Spentas, nor “the high and beautiful golden Haômas, nor even their Vohu‐Manô (good thoughts), nor their Râta (sacrificial offering),” help them much. Let them meditate on the “Tree of Wisdom,” and by study assimilate, one by one, the fruits thereof. The way to the Tree of Eternal Life, the white Haôma, the Gaokerena, is through one end of the Earth to the other; and Haôma is in Heaven as it is on Earth. But to become once more a priest of it, and a “healer,” man must heal himself, for this must be done before he can heal others.

This proves once more that, in order to be dealt with, with at least an approximate degree of justice, the so‐called “myths” have to be closely examined from all their aspects. In truth, every one of the seven keys has to be used in its right place, and never mixed with the others—if we would unveil the entire cycle of mysteries. In our day of dreary soul‐killing Materialism, the ancient Priest‐Initiates have become, in the opinion of our learned generations, the synonyms of clever impostors, kindling the fires of superstition in order to obtain an easier sway over the minds of men. This is an unfounded calumny, generated by scepticism and uncharitable thoughts. No one believed more than they did in Gods—or, we may call them, the spiritual and now invisible Powers, or Spirits, the Noumena of the phenomena; and they believed simply because they knew. And though after being initiated into the Mysteries of Nature, they were forced to withhold their knowledge from the profane, who would have surely abused it, such secrecy was undeniably less dangerous than the policy of their usurpers and successors. The former taught only that which they well knew. The latter, teaching what they do not know, have invented, as a secure haven for their ignorance, a jealous and cruel Deity, who forbids man to pry into his mysteries under the penalty of damnation; as well they may, for his mysteries can at best be only hinted at in polite ears, never described. Turn to King’s Gnostics and their Remains, and see for yourself what was the primitive Ark of the Covenant, according to the author, who says:

There is a Rabbinical tradition ... that the Cherubim placed over it were represented as male and female, in the act of copulation, in order to express the grand doctrine of the Essence of Form and Matter, the two principles of all things. When the Chaldeans broke into the Sanctuary and beheld this most astounding emblem, they naturally enough exclaimed, “Is this your God, of whom you boast, that He is such a lover of purity!”(1192) King thinks that this tradition “savours too much of Alexandrian philosophy to demand any credit,” to which we demur. The shape and form of the wings of the two Cherubim standing on the right and left sides of the Ark, these wings meeting over the “Holy of Holies,” are an emblem quite eloquent in itself, not to speak of the “holy” Jod within the Ark! The Mystery of Agathodæmon, whose legend states, “I am Chnumis, Sun of the Universe, 700,” can alone solve the mystery of Jesus, the number of whose name is “888.” It is not the key of St. Peter, or the Church dogma, but the Narthex—the Wand of the Candidate for Initiation—that has to be wrenched from the grasp of the long‐silent Sphinx of the ages. Meanwhile:

The augurs, who, upon meeting each other, have to thrust their tongues into their cheeks to suppress a fit of laughter, may be more numerous in our own age than they ever were in the day of Sylla.

His Origin In Ancient India. In our modern day there is not the slightest doubt in the minds of the best European symbologists that the name Prometheus possessed the greatest and most mysterious significance in antiquity. While giving the history of Deucalion, whom the Bœotians regarded as the ancestor of the human races, and who was the son of Prometheus, according to the significant legend, the author of the Mythologie de la Grèce Antique remarks: Thus Prometheus is something more than the archetype of humanity; he is its generator. In the same way that we saw Hephæstus moulding the first woman [Pandora] and endowing her with life, so Prometheus kneads the moist clay, of which he fashions the body of the first man whom he will endow with the soul‐spark.(1193) After the flood of Deucalion, Zeus, they said, had commanded Prometheus and Athena to call forth a new race of men from the mire left by the waters of the deluge,(1194) and, in the day of Pausanias, the slime which the hero had used for this purpose was still shown in Phocis.(1195) On several archaic monuments we still see Prometheus modelling a human body, either alone or with Athena’s help.(1196)

The same author reminds us of another equally mysterious personage, though one less generally known than Prometheus, whose legend offers remarkable analogies with that of the Titan. The name of this second ancestor and generator is Phoroneus, the hero of an ancient poem, now unfortunately no longer extant, the Phoroneidæ. His legend was localized in Argolis, where a perpetual flame was preserved on his altar as a reminder that he was the bringer of fire upon earth.(1197) A benefactor of men, like Prometheus, he had made them participators of every bliss on earth. Plato(1198) and Clemens Alexandrinus(1199) say that Phoroneus was the first man, or the “father of mortals.” His genealogy, which assigns to him the river Inachos as his father, reminds us of that of Prometheus, which makes that Titan the son of the Oceanid Clymene. But the mother of Phoroneus was the nymph Melia: a significant descent which distinguishes him from Prometheus.(1200)

Melia, Decharme thinks, is the personification of the “Ash‐tree,” whence, according to Hesiod, issued the race of the age of Bronze,(1201) and which with the Greeks is the celestial tree common to every Âryan mythology. This Ash is the Yggdrasil of Norse antiquity, which the Norns sprinkle daily with the waters from the fountain of Urd, that it may not wither. It remains verdant till the last days of the Golden Age. Then the Norns—the three sisters who gaze respectively into the Past, the Present, and the Future—make known the decree of Orlog or Fate (Karma), but men are conscious only of the Present. [But when] Gultweig (gold‐ore) comes, the bewitching enchantress ... who, thrice cast into the fire, arises each time more beautiful than before and fills the souls of gods and men with unappeasable longing, then the Norns ... enter into being, and the blessed peace of childhood’s dreams passes away, and sin comes into existence with all its evil consequences [and Karma].(1202) The thrice‐purified Gold is—Manas, the Conscious Soul.

With the Greeks, the Ash‐tree represented the same idea. Its luxuriant boughs are the Sidereal Heaven, golden by day and studded with stars by night—the fruits of Melia and Yggdrasil, under whose protecting shadow humanity lived during the Golden Age without desire as without fear. “That tree had a fruit, or an inflamed bough, which was lightning”—Decharme guesses. And here steps in the killing Materialism of the age, that peculiar twist in the modern mind, which, like a Northern blast, bends all on its way, and freezes every intuition, allowing it no hand in the physical speculations of the day. After having seen in Prometheus no more than “fire by friction,” the learned author of the Mythologie de la Grèce Antique perceives in this “fruit” a trifle more than an allusion to terrestrial fire and its discovery. It is no longer fire, owing to the fall of lightning setting some dry fuel in a blaze, and thus revealing all its priceless benefits to palæolithic men—but something more mysterious this time, though still as earthly!

A divine bird, nestled in the branches [of the celestial Ash‐ tree], stole that bough [or the fruit] and carried it down on the earth in its bill. Now the Greek word Φορώνευς is the rigid equivalent of the Sanskrit word bhuranyu, “the rapid,” an epithet of Agni, considered as the carrier of the divine spark. Phoroneus, son of Melia or of the celestial ash, thus corresponds to a conception far more ancient, probably, than that one which transformed the pramantha [of the old Âryan Hindûs] into the Greek Prometheus. Phoroneus is the [personified] bird, that brings the heavenly lightning to the earth. Traditions relating to the birth of the race of Bronze, and those which made of Phoroneus the father of the Argolians, are an evidence to us that this thunderbolt [or lightning], as in the legend of Hephæstus or Prometheus, was the origin of the human race.(1203)

This still affords us no more than the external meaning of the symbols and the allegory. It is now supposed that the name of Prometheus has been unriddled. But the modern Mythologists and Orientalists see in it no longer what their fathers saw on the authority of the whole of classical antiquity. They only find therein something far more appropriate to the spirit of the age, namely, a phallic element. But the name of Phoroneus, as well as that of Prometheus, bears not one, nor even two, but a series of esoteric meanings. Both relate to the seven Celestial Fires; to Agni Abhimânin, his three sons, and their forty‐five sons, constituting the Forty‐nine Fires. Do all these numbers relate only to the terrestrial mode of fire and to the flame of sexual passion? Did the Hindû Âryan mind never soar above such purely sensual conceptions; that mind which is declared by Prof. Max Müller to be the most spiritual and mystically inclined on the whole globe? The number of those fires alone ought to have suggested an inkling of the truth. We are told that one is no longer permitted, in this age of rational thought, to explain the name of Pro‐metheus as the old Greeks did. The latter, it seems:

Basing themselves on the apparent analogy of προμηθεύς with the verb προμανθύνειν, saw in him the type of the “foreseeing” man, to whom, for the sake of symmetry, a brother was added—Epi‐metheus, or “he who takes counsel after the event.”(1204) But now the Orientalists have decided otherwise. They know the real meaning of the two names better than those who invented them. The legend is based upon an event of universal importance. It was built to commemorate A great event which must have strongly impressed itself upon the imagination of the first witnesses, and its remembrance has never since faded out from popular memory.(1205)

What was this? Laying aside every poetical fiction, all those dreams of the Golden Age, let us imagine—argue the modern scholars—in all its gross realism, the first miserable state of humanity, the striking picture of which was traced for us after Æschylus by Lucretius, and the exact truth of which is now confirmed by Science; and then we may understand better that a new life really began for man, on that day when he saw the first spark produced by the friction of two pieces of wood, or from the veins of a flint. How could men help feeling gratitude to that mysterious and marvellous being which they were henceforth enabled to create at their will, and which was no sooner born, than it grew and expanded, developing with singular power.

This terrestrial flame, was it not analogous in nature to that which sent them from above its light and heat, or which frightened them in the thunderbolt? Was it not derived from the same source? And if its origin was in heaven, must it not have been brought down some day on earth? If so, who was the powerful being, the beneficent being, God or man, who had conquered it? Such are the questions which the curiosity of the Âryans offered in the early days of their existence, and which found their answer in the myth of Prometheus.(1206) The Philosophy of Occult Science finds two weak points in the above reflections, and proceeds to point them out. The miserable state of Humanity described by Æschylus and Lucretius was no more wretched then, in the early days of the Âryans, than it is now. That “state” was limited to the savage tribes; and the now‐existing savages are not a whit more happy or unhappy than their forefathers were a million years ago. It is an accepted fact in Science that “rude implements, exactly resembling those in use among existing savages,” are found in river‐ gravels and caves, geologically “implying an enormous antiquity.” So great is that resemblance that, as the author of The Modern Zoroastrian tells us:

If the collection in the Colonial Exhibition of stone celts and arrow‐heads used by the Bushmen of South Africa were placed side by side with one from the British Museum of similar objects from Kent’s Cavern or the Caves of Dordogne, no one but an expert could distinguish between them.(1207)

And if there are Bushmen existing now, in our age of the highest civilization, who are no higher intellectually than the race of men which inhabited Devonshire and Southern France during the Palæolithic age, why could not the latter have lived simultaneously with, and have been the contemporary of, other races as highly civilized for their day as we are for ours? That the sum of knowledge increases daily in mankind, “but that intellectual capacity does not increase with it,” is shown when the intellect, if not the physical knowledge, of the Euclids, Pythagorases, Pâninis, Kapilas, Platos, and Socrates, is compared with that of the Newtons, Kants, and the modern Huxleys and Hæckels. On comparing the results obtained by Dr. J. Barnard Davis, the Craniologist,(1208) with regard to the internal capacity of the skull—its volume being taken as the standard and test for judging of the intellectual capacities—Dr. Pfaff finds that this capacity among the French (certainly in the highest rank of mankind) is 88.4 cubic inches, being thus “perceptibly smaller than that of the Polynesians generally, which, even among many Papuans and Alfuras of the lowest grade, amounts to 89 and 89.7 cubic inches”; which shows that it is the quality and not the quantity of the brain that is the cause of intellectual capacity. The average index of skulls among various races having been now recognized to be “one of the most characteristic marks of difference between different races,” the following comparison is suggestive:

The index of breadth among the Scandinavians [is] at 75; among the English at 76; among Holsteiners at 77; in Bresgau at 80; Schiller’s skull shows an index of breadth even of 82 ... the Madurese also 82! Finally, the same comparison between the oldest skulls known and the European, brings to light the startling fact that: _Most of these old skulls, belonging to the stone period, are above rather than below the average of the brain of the now living man in volume._ Calculating the measures for the height, breadth, and length in inches from the average measurements of several skulls, the following sums are obtained: 1. Old Northern skulls of the stone age: 18.877 ins. 2. Average of 48 skulls of the same period from England: 18.858 ins. 3. Average of 7 skulls of the same period from Wales: 18.649 ins. 4. Average of 36 skulls of the stone age from France: 18.220 ins. The average of the now living Europeans is 18.579 inches; of Hottentots, 17.795 inches! These figures show plainly that: The size of the brain of the oldest populations known to us is not such as to place them on a lower level than that of the now living inhabitants of the Earth.(1209)

Besides which, they show the “missing link” vanishing into thin air. Of these, however, more anon: we must return to our direct subject.

As the “Prometheus Vinctus” of Æschylus tells us, the race which Jupiter so ardently desired “to quench, and plant a new one in its stead” (v. 241), suffered mental, not physical misery. The first boon Prometheus gave to mortals, as he tells the Chorus, was to hinder them “from foreseeing death” (v. 256); he “saved the mortal race from sinking blasted down to Hades’ gloom” (v. 244); and then only, “besides” that, he gave them fire (v. 260). This shows plainly the dual character at any rate of the Promethean myth, if Orientalists will not accept the existence of the seven keys taught in Occultism. This relates to the first opening of man’s spiritual perceptions, not to his first seeing or “discovering” fire. For fire was never discovered, but existed on Earth since its beginning. It existed in the seismic activity of the early ages, volcanic eruptions being as frequent and constant in those periods as fog is in England now. And if we are told that men appeared so late on Earth that all but a few volcanoes were already extinct, and that geological disturbances had made room for a more settled state of things, we answer: Let a new race of men—whether evolved from Angel or Gorilla—appear now on any uninhabited spot of the Globe, with the exception perhaps of the Sahara, and a thousand to one it would not be a year or two old before “discovering fire,” through lightning setting the grass or something else in flames. This assumption, that primitive man lived ages on Earth before he was made acquainted with fire, is one of the most painfully illogical of all. But old Æschylus was an Initiate, and knew well what he was giving out.(1210)

No Occultist acquainted with symbology and the fact that Wisdom came to us from the East, will for a moment deny that the myth of Prometheus has reached Europe from Âryâvarta. Nor is he likely to deny that in one sense Prometheus represents “fire by friction.” Therefore, he admires the sagacity of M. F. Baudry, who shows in “Les Mythes du Feu et du Breuvage Céleste”(1211) one of the aspects of Prometheus and his origin from India. He shows the reader the supposed primitive process to obtain fire, still in use to‐day in India to light the sacrificial flame. This is what he says:

This process, such as it is minutely described in the Vedic Sûtras, consists in rapidly turning a stick in a socket made in the centre of a piece of wood. The friction develops intense heat and ends by setting on fire the particles of wood in contact. The motion of the stick is not a continuous rotation, but a series of motions in contrary senses, by means of a cord fixed to the stick in its middle; the operator holds one of the ends in each hand and pulls them alternately.... The full process is designated in Sanskrit by the verb manthâmi, mathnáni, which means “to rub, agitate, shake and obtain by rubbing,” and is especially applied to rotatory friction, as is proved by its derivative mandala, which signifies a circle.... The pieces of wood serving for the production of fire have each their name in Sanskrit. The stick which turns is called pramantha; the discus which receives it is called arani and aranî: “the two aranis” designating the ensemble of the instrument.(1212)

It remains to be seen what the Brâhmans will say to this. But even supposing that Prometheus, in one of the aspects of his myth, was conceived as the producer of fire by means of the Pramantha, or as an animate and divine Pramantha, would this imply that the symbolism had no other than the phallic meaning attributed to it by modern symbologists? Decharme, at any rate, seems to have a correct glimmering of the truth; for he unconsciously corroborates all that the Occult Sciences teach with regard to the Mânasa Devas, who have endowed man with the consciousness of his immortal soul—that consciousness which hinders man “from foreseeing death,” and makes him know he is immortal.(1213) “How did Prometheus come into possession of the [divine] spark?” he asks. Fire having its abode in heaven, it is there he must have gone to find it before he could carry it down to men, and, to approach the gods, he must have been a god himself.(1214) The Greeks held that he was of the Divine Race, “the son of the Titan Iapetos”;(1215) the Hindûs, that he was a Deva.

But celestial fire belonged in the beginning to the gods alone; it was a treasure they reserved for themselves ... over which they jealously watched.... “The prudent son of Iapetus,” says Hesiod, “deceived Jupiter by stealing and concealing in the cavity of a narthex, the indefatigable fire of the resplendent glow.”(1216) ... Thus the gift made by Prometheus to men was a conquest made from heaven. Now according to Greek ideas [in this identical with those of the Occultists], this possession forced from Jupiter, this human trespassing upon the property of the gods, had to be followed by an expiation.... Prometheus, moreover, belongs to that race of Titans who had rebelled(1217) against the gods, and whom the master of Olympus had hurled down into Tartarus; like them, he is the genius of evil, doomed to cruel suffering.(1218)

What is most revolting in the explanations that follow, is the one‐sided view taken of this grandest of all myths. The most intuitional among modern writers cannot, or will not, rise in their conceptions above the level of the Earth and cosmic phenomena. It is not denied that the moral idea in the myth, as presented in the Theogony of Hesiod, plays a certain part in the primitive Greek conception. The Titan is more than a thief of the celestial fire. He is the representation of humanity—active, industrious, intelligent, but at the same time ambitious, which aims at equalling divine powers. Therefore it is humanity punished in the person of Prometheus, but it is only so with the Greeks. With them, Prometheus is not a criminal, save in the eyes of the Gods. In his relation with the Earth, he is, on the contrary, a God himself, a friend of mankind (φιλάνθρωπος), which he has raised to civilization and initiated into the knowledge of all the arts; a conception which found its most poetical expounder in Æschylus. But with all other nations Prometheus is—what? The Fallen Angel, Satan, as the Church would have it? Not at all. He is simply the image of the pernicious and dreaded effects of lightning. He is the “evil fire” (mal feu)(1219) and the symbol of the divine reproductive male organ.

Reduced to its simple expression, the myth we are trying to explain is then simply a [cosmic] genius of fire.(1220) It is the former idea (the phallic) which was preëminently Âryan, if we believe Adalbert Kuhn(1221) and F. Baudry. For: The fire used by man being the result of the action of pramantha in the arani, the Âryas must have ascribed [?] the same origin to celestial fire, and they must have(1222) imagined [?] that a god armed with the pramantha, or a divine pramantha, caused a violent friction in the bosom of the clouds, which gave birth to lightning and thunderbolts.(1223) This idea is supported by the fact that, according to Plutarch’s testimony,(1224) the Stoics thought that thunder was the result of the struggle of storm‐clouds, and lightning a conflagration due to friction; while Aristotle saw in the thunderbolt only the action of clouds which clashed with each other. What was this theory, if not the scientific translation of the production of fire by friction?... Everything leads us to think that, from the highest antiquity, and before the dispersion of the Âryas, it was believed that the pramantha lighted the fire in the storm‐cloud as well as in the aranis.(1225)

Thus, suppositions and idle hypotheses are made to stand for discovered truths. Defenders of the biblical dead‐letter could not help the writers of missionary tracts more effectually than do materialistic Symbologists in thus taking for granted that the ancient Âryans based their religious conceptions on no higher thought than the physiological. But it is not so, and the very spirit of Vedic Philosophy is against such an interpretation. For if, as Decharme himself confesses: This idea of the creative power of fire is explained ... by the ancient assimilation of the human soul to a celestial spark(1226) —as shown by the imagery often made use of in the Vedas when speaking of Arani, it would mean something higher than simply a gross sexual conception. A Hymn to Agni in the Veda is cited as an example: Here is the pramantha; the generator is ready. Bring the mistress of the race (the female aranî). Let us produce Agni by attrition, according to ancient custom.

This means no worse than an abstract idea expressed in the tongue of mortals. The female Aranî, the “mistress of the race,” is Aditi, the Mother of the Gods, or Shekinah, Eternal Light—in the World of Spirit, the “Great Deep” and Chaos; or Primordial Substance in its first remove from the Unknown, in the Manifested Kosmos. If, ages later, the same epithet is applied to Devakî, the Mother of Krishna, or the incarnated Logos; and if the symbol, owing to the gradual and irrepressible spread of exoteric religions, may now be regarded as having a sexual significance, this in no way mars the original purity of the image. The subjective had been transformed into the objective; Spirit had fallen into Matter. The universal kosmic polarity of Spirit‐Substance had become, in human thought, the mystic, but still sexual, union of Spirit and Matter, and had thus acquired an anthropomorphic colouring which it had never had in the beginning. Between the Vedas and the Purânas there is an abyss of which they are the poles, like as are the seventh principle, the Âtmâ, and the first or lowest principle, the Physical Body, in the septenary constitution of Man. The primitive and purely spiritual language of the Vedas, conceived many decades of millenniums earlier than the Paurânic accounts, found a purely human expression for the purpose of describing events which took place 5,000 years ago, the date of Krishna’s death, from which day the Kali Yuga, or Black Age, began for mankind.

As Aditi is called Surârani, the Matrix or “Mother” of the Suras or Gods, so Kuntî, the mother of the Pândavas, is called in the Mahâbhârata Pândavârani(1227)—and the term is now physiologized. But Devakî, the antetype of the Roman Catholic Madonna, is a later anthropomorphized form of Aditi. The latter is the Goddess‐mother, or Deva‐mâtri, of seven Sons (the six and the seven Âdityas of early Vedic times); the mother of Krishna, Devakî, has six embryos conveyed into her womb by Jagad‐dhâtri, the “Nurse of the World,” the seventh, Krishna, the Logos, being transferred to that of Rohinî. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the mother of seven children, of five sons and two daughters (a later transformation of sex), in Matthew’s Gospel.(1228) No one of the worshippers of the Roman Catholic Virgin would object to reciting in her honour the prayer addressed by the Gods to Devakî. Let the reader judge.

Thou art that Prakriti [essence], infinite and subtile, which formerly bore Brahmâ in its womb.... Thou, eternal being, comprising, in thy substance, the essence of all created things, wast identical with creation; thou wast the parent of the tri‐form sacrifice, becoming the germ of all things. Thou art sacrifice, whence all fruit proceeds; thou art the Aranî, whose attrition engenders fire.(1229) As Aditi, thou art the parent of the gods.... Thou art light [Jyotsnâ, the morning twilight],(1230) whence day is begotten. Thou art humility [Samnati, a daughter of Daksha], the mother of wisdom; thou art Niti, the parent of harmony (Naya);(1231) thou art modesty, the progenitrix of affection [Prashraya, explained by Vinaya]; thou art desire, of whom love is born.... Thou art ... the mother of knowledge [Avabodha]; thou art patience [Dhriti], the parent of fortitude [Dhairya].(1232) Thus Aranî is shown here to be the same as the Roman Catholic “Vase of Election.” As to its primitive meaning, it was purely metaphysical. No unclean thought traversed these conceptions in the ancient mind. Even in the Zohar—far less metaphysical in its symbology than any other symbolism—the idea is an abstraction and nothing more. Thus, when the Zohar says:

All that which exists, all that which has been formed by the ancient, whose name is holy, can only exist through a male and female principle.(1233) It means no more than that the divine Spirit of Life is ever coalescing with Matter. It is the Will of the Deity that acts; and the idea is purely Schopenhauerian. When Atteekah Kaddosha, the ancient and the concealed of the concealed, desired to form all things, it formed all things like male and female. This wisdom comprises all when it goeth forth. Hence Chokmah (male Wisdom) and Binah (female Consciousness or Intellect) are said to create all between the two—the active and the passive principles. As the eye of the expert jeweller discerns under the rough and uncouth oyster shell the pure immaculate pearl, enshrined within its bosom, his hand touching the shell but to get at its contents, so the eye of the true Philosopher reads between the lines of the Purânas the sublime Vedic truths, and corrects the form with the help of the Vedântic Wisdom. Our Orientalists, however, never perceive the pearl under the thick coating of the shell and—act accordingly.

From all that has been said in this Section, one sees clearly that, between the Serpent of Eden and the Devil of Christianity, there is an abyss. Alone the sledge hammer of Ancient Philosophy can kill this dogma.

The history of the evolution of the Satanic Myth would not be complete if we omitted to notice the character of the mysterious and cosmopolitan Enoch, variously called Enos, Hanoch, and finally Enoïchion by the Greeks. It is from his book that the first notions of the Fallen Angels were taken by the early Christian writers. The Book of Enoch is declared apocryphal. But what is an apocryphon? The very etymology of the term shows that it is simply a secret book, i.e., one that belonged to the catalogue of temple‐libraries under the guardianship of the Hierophants and Initiated Priests, and was never meant for the profane. Apocryphon comes from the verb crypto (κρύπτω), “to hide.” For ages the Enoïchion, the Book of the Seer, was preserved in the “city of letters” and secret works—the ancient Kirjath‐sepher, later on, Debir.(1234)

Some of the writers interested in the subject—especially Masons—have tried to identify Enoch with Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes, and even with the Latin Mercury. As individuals, all of these are distinct one from the other; professionally—if one may use this word, now so limited in its sense—one and all belong to the same category of sacred writers, of Initiators and Recorders of Occult and ancient Wisdom. Those who in the Korân(1235) are generically termed the Edris, or the “Learned,” the Initiated, bore in Egypt the name of “Thoth,” the inventor of Arts, Sciences, of writing or letters, of Music and Astronomy. Among the Jews Edris became “Enoch,” who, according to Bar‐Hebræus, “was the first inventor of writing,” books, Arts, and Sciences, the first who reduced to a system the progress of the planets.(1236) In Greece he was called Orpheus, and thus changed his name with every nation. The number seven being attached to, and connected with, each of those primitive Initiators,(1237) as well as the number 365, of the days in the year, astronomically, it identifies the mission, character, and the sacred office of all these men, but certainly not their personalities. Enoch is the seventh Patriarch; Orpheus is the possessor of the Phorminx, the seven‐stringed lyre, which is the seven‐fold mystery of Initiation. Thoth, with the seven‐rayed Solar Discus on his head, travels in the Solar Boat (the 365 degrees), jumping out every fourth (leap) year for one day. Finally, Thoth‐Lunus is the septenary God of the seven days, or the week. Esoterically and spiritually, Enoïchion means the “Seer of the Open Eye.”

The story about Enoch, told by Josephus, namely, that he had concealed his precious Rolls or Books under the pillars of Mercury or Seth, is the same as that told of Hermes, the “Father of Wisdom,” who concealed his Books of Wisdom under a pillar, and then, discovering the two pillars of stone, found the Science written thereon. Yet Josephus, notwithstanding his constant efforts in the direction of Israel’s unmerited glorification, and though he does attribute that Science (of Wisdom) to the Jewish Enoch—writes history. He shows these pillars as still existing during his own time.(1238) He tells us that they were built by Seth; and so they may have been, only neither by the Patriarch of that name, the fabled son of Adam, nor by the Egyptian God of Wisdom—Teth, Set, Thoth, Tat, Sat (the later Sat‐an), or Hermes, who are all one—but by the “Sons of the Serpent‐ God,” or “Sons of the Dragon,” the name under which the Hierophants of Egypt and Babylon were known before the Deluge, as were their forefathers, the Atlanteans.

What Josephus tells us, therefore, with the exception of the application made of it, must be true allegorically. According to his version the two famous pillars were entirely covered with hieroglyphics, which, after their discovery, were copied and reproduced in the most secret corners of the inner temples of Egypt, and thus became the source of its Wisdom and exceptional learning. These two “pillars,” however, are the prototypes of the two “tables of stones” hewn by Moses at the command of the “Lord.” Hence, in saying that all the great Adepts and Mystics of antiquity—such as Orpheus, Hesiod, Pythagoras and Plato—got the elements of their Theology from those hieroglyphics, he is right in one sense, and wrong in another. The Secret Doctrine teaches us that the Arts, Sciences, Theology, and especially the Philosophy of every nation which preceded the last universally known, but not universal, Deluge, had been recorded ideographically from the primitive oral records of the Fourth Race, and that these were the inheritance of the latter from the early Third Root‐ Race before the allegorical Fall. Hence, also, the Egyptian pillars, the tablets, and even the “white oriental porphyry stone” of the Masonic legend—which Enoch, fearing that the real and precious secrets would be lost, concealed before the Deluge in the bowels of the Earth—were simply the more

or less symbolical and allegorical copies from the primitive Records. The Book of Enoch is one of such copies, and is, moreover, a Chaldæan, and now very incomplete, compendium. As already said, Enoïchion means in Greek the “Inner Eye,” or the Seer; in Hebrew, with the help of Masoretic points, it means the “Initiator” and “Instructor” (חֲנוֹךּ). Enoch is a generic title; and, moreover, his legend is that of several other prophets, Jewish and Heathen, with changes of made‐up details, the root‐form being the same. Elijah is also taken up into Heaven “alive”; and the Astrologer, at the court of Isdubar, the Chaldæan Hea‐bani, is likewise raised to Heaven by the God Hea, who was his patron, as Jehovah was of Elijah, whose name means in Hebrew “God‐Jah,” Jehovah (אֶלְיָה),(1239) and again of Elihu, which has the same meaning. This kind of easy death, or euthanasia, has an Esoteric meaning. It symbolizes the “death” of any Adept who has reached the power and degree, and also the purification, which enable him to “die” in the Physical Body, and still live and lead a conscious life in his Astral Body. The variations on this theme are endless, but the secret meaning is ever the same. The Pauline expression,(1240) “that he should not see death” (ut non videret mortem), has thus an

Esoteric meaning, but nothing supernatural in it. The mangled interpretation given of some biblical hints to the effect that Enoch, “whose years will equal those of the world” (of the solar year, 365 days), will share with Christ and the prophet Elijah the honours and bliss of the last Advent and of the destruction of Antichrist(1241)—signify Esoterically, that some of the Great Adepts will return in the Seventh Race, when all Error will be made away with, and the advent of Truth will be heralded by those Shishta, the holy “Sons of Light.”