The Secret Doctrine

And well he might have “blushed,” the sincere and honest Father of early Christianity in its days of relative purity. But the Christians of this highly literary and civilised age of ours do not blush at all; they swallow, on the contrary, the “light” before the formation of the sun, the Garden of Eden, Jonah’s whale and all, notwithstanding that the same Origen asks in a very natural fit of indignation: What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days in which the evening is named and the morning, were without sun, moon, and stars, and the first day without a heaven? What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in Paradise, in Eden, like a husbandman, etc.? I believe that every man must hold these things for images, under which a hidden sense lies concealed?(82)

Yet millions of “such idiots” are found in our age of enlightenment and not only in the third century. When Paul’s unequivocal statement in Galatians, iv. 22‐25, that the story of Abraham and his two sons is all “an allegory,” and that “Agar is Mount Sinai” is added to this, then little blame, indeed, can be attached to either Christian or Heathen who declines to accept the Bible in any other light than that of a very ingenious allegory. Rabbi Simeon Ben‐“Jochai,” the compiler of the Zohar, never imparted the most important points of his doctrine otherwise than orally, and to a very limited number of disciples. Therefore, without the final initiation into the Mercavah, the study of the Kabalah will be ever incomplete, and the Mercavah can be taught only “in darkness, in a deserted place, and after many and terrific trials.” Since the death of that great Jewish Initiate this hidden doctrine has remained, for the outside world, an inviolate secret.

Among the venerable sect of the Tanaim, or rather the Tananim, the wise men, there were those who taught the secrets practically and initiated some disciples into the grand and final Mystery. But the Mishna Hagiga, 2nd Section, say that the table of contents of the Mercaba “must only be delivered to wise old ones.” The Gemara is still more dogmatic. “The more important secrets of the Mysteries were not even revealed to all priests. Alone the initiates had them divulged.” And so we find the same great secresy prevalent in every ancient religion.(83) What says the Kabalah itself? Its great Rabbis actually threaten him who accepts their sayings verbatim. We read in the Zohar:

Woe to the man who sees in the Thorah, i.e., Law, only simple recitals and ordinary words! Because if in truth it only contained these, we would even to‐day be able to compose a Thorah much more worthy of admiration. For if we find only the simple words, we would only have to address ourselves to the legislators of the earth,(84) to those in whom we most frequently meet with the most grandeur. It would be sufficient to imitate them, and make a Thorah after their words and example. But it is not so; each word of the Thorah contains an elevated meaning and a sublime mystery.... The recitals of the Thorah are the vestments of the Thorah. Woe to him who takes this garment for the Thorah itself.... The simple take notice only of the garments or recitals of the Thorah, they know no other thing, they see not that which is concealed under the vestment. The more instructed men do not pay attention to the vestment, but to the body which it envelops.(85)

Ammonius Saccas taught that the Secret Doctrine of the Wisdom‐Religion was found complete in the Books of Thoth (Hermes), from which both Pythagoras and Plato derived their knowledge and much of their Philosophy; and these Books were declared by him to be “identical with the teachings of the Sages of the remote East.” Professor A. Wilder remarks: As the name Thoth means a college or assembly, it is not altogether improbable that the books were so named as being the collected oracles and doctrines of the sacerdotal fraternity of Memphis. Rabbi Wise has suggested the same hypothesis in relation to the divine utterances recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures.(86) This is very probable. Only the “divine utterances” have never been, so far, understood by the profane. Philo Judæus, a non‐initiate, attempted to give their secret meaning and—failed. But Books of Thoth or Bible, Vedas or Kabalah, all enjoin the same secresy as to certain mysteries of nature symbolised in them. “Woe be to him who divulges unlawfully the words whispered into the ear of Manushi by the First Initiator.” Who that “Initiator” was is made plain in the Book of Enoch:

From them [the Angels] I heard all things, and understood what I saw; that which will not take place in this generation [Race], but in a generation which is to succeed at a distant period [the 6th and 7th Races] on account of the elect [the Initiates].(87) Again, it is said with regard to the judgment of those who, when they have learned “every secret of the angels,” reveal them, that: They have discovered secrets, and they are those who have been judged; but not thou, my son [Noah] ... thou art pure and good and free from the reproach of discovering [revealing] secrets.(88) But there are those in our century, who, having “discovered secrets” unaided and owing to their own learning and acuteness only, and who being, nevertheless, honest and straightforward men, undismayed by threats or warning since they have never pledged themselves to secresy, feel quite startled at such revelations. One of these is the learned author and discoverer of one “Key to the Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery.” As he says, there are “some strange features connected with the promulgation and condition” of the Bible.

Those who compiled this Book were men as we are. They knew, saw, handled and realized, through the key measure,(89) the law of the living, ever‐active God.(90) They needed no faith that He was, that He worked, planned, and accomplished, as a mighty mechanic and architect.(91) What was it, then, that reserved to them alone this knowledge, while first as men of God, and second as Apostles of Jesus the Christ, they doled out a blinding ritual service, and an empty teaching of faith and no substance as proof, properly coming through the exercise of just those senses which the Deity has given all men as the essential means of obtaining any right understanding? Mystery and parable, and dark saying, and cloaking of the true meanings are the burden of the Testaments, Old and New. Take it that the narratives of the Bible were purposed inventions to deceive the ignorant masses, even while enforcing a most perfect code of moral obligations: How is it possible to justify so great frauds, as part of a Divine economy, when to that economy, the attribute of simple and perfect truthfulness must, in the nature of things, be ascribed? What has, or what by possibility ought mystery to have, with the promulgation of the truths of God?(92)

Nothing whatever most certainly, if those mysteries had been given from the first. And so it was with regard to the first, semi‐divine, pure and spiritual Races of Humanity. They had the “truths of God,” and lived up to them, and their ideals. They preserved them, so long as there was hardly any evil, and hence scarcely a possible abuse of that knowledge and those truths. But evolution and the gradual fall into materiality is also one of the “truths” and also one of the laws of “God.” And as mankind progressed, and became with every generation more of the earth, earthly, the individuality of each temporary Ego began to assert itself. It is personal selfishness that develops and urges man on to abuse of his knowledge and power. And selfishness is a human building, whose windows and doors are ever wide open for every kind of iniquity to enter into man’s soul. Few were the men during the early adolescence of mankind, and fewer still are they now, who feel disposed to put into practice Pope’s forcible declaration that he would tear out his own heart, if it had no better disposition than to love only himself, and laugh at all his neighbours. Hence the necessity of gradually taking away from man the divine knowledge and power, which became with every new human cycle more dangerous as a double‐edged weapon, whose evil side was ever threatening one’s neighbour, and whose power for good was lavished freely only upon self. Those few “elect” whose inner natures had remained unaffected by their outward physical growth, thus became in time the sole guardians of the mysteries revealed, passing the knowledge to those most fit to receive it, and keeping it inaccessible to others. Reject this explanation from the Secret Teachings, and the very name of Religion will become synonymous with deception and fraud.

Yet the masses could not be allowed to remain without some sort of moral restraint. Man is ever craving for a “beyond” and cannot live without an ideal of some kind, as a beacon and a consolation. At the same time, no average man, even in our age of universal education, could be entrusted with truths too metaphysical, too subtle for his mind to comprehend, without the danger of an imminent reaction setting in, and faith in Gods and Saints making room for an unscientific blank Atheism. No real philanthropist, hence no Occultist, would dream for a moment of a mankind without one tittle of Religion. Even the modern day Religion in Europe, confined to Sundays, is better than none. But if, as Bunyan put it, “Religion is the best armour that a man can have,” it certainly is the “worst cloak”; and it is that “cloak” and false pretence which the Occultists and the Theosophists fight against. The true ideal Deity, the one living God in Nature, can never suffer in man’s worship if that outward cloak, woven by man’s fancy, and thrown upon the Deity by the crafty hand of the priest greedy of power and domination, is drawn aside. The hour has struck with the commencement of this century to dethrone the “highest God” of every nation

in favour of One Universal Deity—the God of Immutable Law, not charity; the God of Just Retribution, not mercy, which is merely an incentive to evil‐doing and to a repetition of it. The greatest crime that was ever perpetrated upon mankind was committed on that day when the first priest invented the first prayer with a selfish object in view. A God who may be propitiated by iniquitous prayers to “bless the arms” of the worshipper, and send defeat and death to thousands of his enemies—his brethren; a Deity that can be supposed not to turn a deaf ear to chants of laudation mixed with entreaties for a “fair propitious wind” for self, and as naturally disastrous to the selves of other navigators who come from an opposite direction—it is this idea of God that has fostered selfishness in man, and deprived him of his self‐ reliance. Prayer is an ennobling action when it is an intense feeling, an ardent desire rushing forth from our very heart, for the good of other people, and when entirely detached from any selfish personal object; the craving for a beyond is natural and holy in man, but on the condition of sharing that bliss with others. One can understand and well appreciate the words of the “heathen” Socrates, who declared in his profound

though untaught wisdom, that:

Our prayers should be for blessings on all, in general, for the Gods know best what is good for us. But official prayer—in favour of a public calamity, or for the benefit of one individual irrespective of losses to thousands—is the most ignoble of crimes, besides being an impertinent conceit and a superstition. This is the direct inheritance by spoliation from the Jehovites—the Jews of the Wilderness and of the Golden Calf. It is “Jehovah,” as will be presently shown, that suggested the necessity of veiling and screening this substitute for the unpronounceable name, and that led to all this “mystery, parables, dark sayings and cloaking.” Moses had, at any rate, initiated his seventy Elders into the hidden truths, and thus the writers of the Old Testament stand to a degree justified. Those of the New Testament have failed to do even so much, or so little. They have disfigured the grand central figure of Christ by their dogmas, and have led people ever since into millions of errors and the darkest crimes, in His holy name.

It is evident that with the exception of Paul and Clement of Alexandria, who had been both initiated into the Mysteries, none of the Fathers knew much of the truth themselves. They were mostly uneducated, ignorant people; and if such as Augustine and Lactantius, or again the Venerable Bede and others, were so painfully ignorant until the time of Galileo(93) of the most vital truths taught in the Pagan temples—of the rotundity of the earth, for example, leaving the heliocentric system out of question—how great must have been the ignorance of the rest! Learning and sin were synonymous with the early Christians. Hence the accusations of dealing with the Devil lavished on the Pagan Philosophers.

But truth must out. The Occultists, referred to as “the followers of the accursed Cain,” by such writers as De Mirville, are now in a position to reverse the tables. That which was hitherto known only to the ancient and modern Kabalists in Europe and Asia, is now published and shown as being mathematically true. The author of the Key to the Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery or the Source of Measures has now proved to general satisfaction, it is to be hoped, that the two great God‐names, Jehovah and Elohim, stood, in one meaning of their numerical values, for a diameter and a circumference value, respectively; in other words, that they are numerical indices of geometrical relations; and finally that Jehovah is Cain and vice versâ. This view, says the author, Helps also to take the horrid blemish off from the name of Cain, as a put‐up job to destroy his character; for even without these showings, by the very text, he [Cain] was Jehovah. So the theological schools had better be alive to making the amend honorable, if such a thing is possible, to the good name and fame of the God they worship.(94)

This is not the first warning received by the “theological schools,” which, however, no doubt knew it from the beginning, as did Clemens of Alexandria and others. But if it be so they will profit still less by it, as the admission would involve more for them than the mere sacredness and dignity of the established faith.

But, it may also be asked, why is it that the Asiatic religions, which have nothing of this sort to conceal and which proclaim quite openly the Esoterism of their doctrines, follow the same course? It is simply this: While the present, and no doubt enforced silence of the Church on this subject relates merely to the external or theoretical form of the Bible—the unveiling of the secrets of which would have involved no practical harm, had they been explained from the first—it is an entirely different question with Eastern Esoterism and Symbology. The grand central figure of the Gospels would have remained as unaffected by the symbolism of the Old Testament being revealed, as would that of the Founder of Buddhism had the Brâhmanical writings of the Purânas, that preceded his birth, all been shown to be allegorical. Jesus of Nazareth, moreover, would have gained more than he would have lost had he been presented as a simple mortal left to be judged on his own precepts and merits, instead of being fathered on Christendom as a God whose many utterances and acts are now so open to criticism. On the other hand the symbols and allegorical sayings that veil the grand truths of Nature in the Vedas, the Brâhmanas, the Upanishads and especially in the Lamaist Chagpa Thogmed and other works, are quite of a different nature, and far more complicated in their secret meaning. While the Biblical glyphs have nearly all a triune foundation, those of the Eastern books are worked on the septenary principle. They are as closely related to the mysteries of Physics and Physiology, as to Psychism and the transcendental nature of cosmic elements and Theogony; unriddled they would prove more than injurious to the uninitiated; delivered into the hands of the present generations in their actual state of physical and intellectual development, in the absence of spirituality and even of practical morality, they would become absolutely disastrous.

Nevertheless the secret teachings of the sanctuaries have not remained without witness; they have been made immortal in various ways. They have burst upon the world in hundreds of volumes full of the quaint, head‐ breaking phraseology of the Alchemist; they have flashed like irrepressible cataracts of Occult mystic lore from the pens of poets and bards. Genius alone had certain privileges in those dark ages when no dreamer could offer the world even a fiction without suiting his heaven and his earth to biblical text. To genius alone it was permitted, in those centuries of mental blindness, when the fear of the “Holy Office” threw a thick veil over every cosmic and psychic truth, to reveal unimpeded some of the grandest truths of Initiation. Whence did Ariosto, in his Orlando Furioso, obtain his conception of that valley in the Moon, where after our death we can find the ideas and images of all that exists on earth? How came Dante to imagine the many descriptions given in his Inferno—a new Johannine Apocalypse, a true Occult Revelation in verse—his visit and communion with the Souls of the Seven Spheres? In poetry and satire every Occult truth has been welcomed—none has been recognised as serious. The Comte de Gabalis is better known and appreciated than Porphyry and Iamblichus. Plato’s mysterious Atlantis is proclaimed a fiction, while Noah’s Deluge is to this day on the brain of certain Archæologists, who scoff at the archetypal world of Marcel Palingenius’ Zodiac, and would resent as a personal injury being asked to discuss the four worlds of Mercury Trismegistus—the Archetypal, the Spiritual, the Astral and the Elementary, with three others behind the opened scene.

Evidently civilised society is still but half prepared for the revelation. Hence, the Initiates will never give out the whole secret, until the bulk of mankind has changed its actual nature and is better prepared for truth. Clemens Alexandrinus was positively right in saying, “It is requisite to hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken”—which the “Sons of God” teach.

That Wisdom, as will be seen, relates to all the primeval truths delivered to the first Races, the “Mind‐born,” by the “Builders” of the Universe Themselves. There was in every ancient country having claims to civilisation, an Esoteric Doctrine, a system which was designated WISDOM,(95) and those who were devoted to its prosecution were first denominated sages, or wise men.... Pythagoras termed this system ἡ γνῶσις τῶν ὅντων, the Gnosis or Knowledge of things that are. Under the noble designation of WISDOM, the ancient teachers, the sages of India, the magians of Persia and Babylon, the seers and prophets of Israel, the hierophants of Egypt and Arabia, and the philosophers of Greece and the West, included all knowledge which they considered as essentially divine; classifying a part as esoteric and the remainder as exterior. The Rabbis called the exterior and secular series the Mercavah, as being the body or vehicle which contained the higher knowledge.(96) Later on, we shall speak of the law of the silence imposed on Eastern chelâs.

The fact that the Occult Sciences have been withheld from the world at large, and denied by the Initiates to Humanity, has often been made matter of complaint. It has been alleged that the Guardians of the Secret Lore were selfish in withholding the “treasures” of Archaic Wisdom; that it was positively criminal to keep back such knowledge—“if any”—from the men of Science, etc. Yet there must have been some very good reasons for it, since from the very dawn of History such has been the policy of every Hierophant and “Master.” Pythagoras, the first Adept and real Scientist in pre‐Christian Europe, is accused of having taught in public the immobility of the earth, and the rotatory motion of the stars around it, while he was declaring to his privileged Adepts his belief in the motion of the Earth as a planet, and in the heliocentric system. The reasons for such secresy, however, are many and were never made a mystery of. The chief cause was given in Isis Unveiled. It may now be repeated.

From the very day when the first mystic, taught by the first Instructor of the “divine Dynasties” of the early races, was taught the means of communication between this world and the worlds of the invisible host, between the sphere of matter and that of pure spirit, he concluded that to abandon this mysterious science to the desecration, willing or unwilling, of the profane rabble—was to lose it. An abuse of it might lead mankind to speedy destruction; it was like surrounding a group of children with explosive substances, and furnishing them with matches. The first divine Instructor initiated but a select few, and these kept silence with the multitudes. They recognised their “God” and each Adept felt the great “SELF” within himself. The Âtman, the Self, the mighty Lord and Protector, once that man knew him as the “I am,” the “Ego Sum,” the “Asmi,” showed his full power to him who could recognise the “still small voice.” From the days of the primitive man described by the first Vedic poet, down to our modern age, there has not been a philosopher worthy of that name, who did not carry in the silent sanctuary of his heart the grand and mysterious truth. If initiated, he learnt it as a sacred science; if otherwise, then, like Socrates, repeating to himself as well as his fellow‐men, the noble injunction, “O man, know thyself,” he succeeded in recognising his God within himself. “Ye are Gods,” the king‐psalmist tells us, and we find Jesus reminding the scribes that this expression was addressed to other mortal men, claiming for themselves the same privilege without any blasphemy. And as a faithful echo, Paul, while asserting that we are all “the temple of the living God,” cautiously remarked elsewhere that after all these things are only for the “wise,” and it is “unlawful” to speak of them.(97)

Some of the reasons for this secresy may here be given. The fundamental law and master‐key of practical Theurgy, in its chief applications to the serious study of cosmic and sidereal, of psychic and spiritual, mysteries was, and still is, that which was called by the Greek Neoplatonists “Theophania.” In its generally‐accepted meaning this is “communication between the Gods (or God) and those initiated mortals who are spiritually fit to enjoy such an intercourse.” Esoterically, however, it signifies more than this. For it is not only the presence of a God, but an actual—howbeit temporary—incarnation, the blending, so to say, of the personal Deity, the Higher Self, with man—its representative or agent on earth. As a general law, the Highest God, the Over‐soul of the human being (Âtma‐Buddhi), only overshadows the individual during his life, for purposes of instruction and revelation; or as Roman Catholics—who erroneously call that Over‐soul the “Guardian Angel”—would say, “It stands outside and watches.” But in the case of the theophanic mystery, it incarnates itself in the Theurgist for purposes of revelation. When the incarnation is temporary, during those mysterious trances or “ecstasy,” which Plotinus defined as The liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming one and identified with the Infinite,

this sublime condition is very short. The human soul, being the offspring or emanation of its God, the “Father and the Son” become one, “the divine fountain flowing like a stream into its human bed.”(98) In exceptional cases, however, the mystery becomes complete; the Word is made Flesh in real fact, the individual becoming divine in the full sense of the term, since his personal God has made of him his permanent life‐long tabernacle—“the temple of God,” as Paul says.

Now that which is meant here by the personal God of Man is, of course, not his seventh Principle alone, as per se and in essence that is merely a beam of the infinite Ocean of Light. In conjunction with our Divine Soul, the Buddhi, it cannot be called a Duad, as it otherwise might, since, though formed from Âtmâ and Buddhi (the two higher Principles), the former is no entity but an emanation from the Absolute, and indivisible in reality from it. The personal God is not the Monad, but indeed the prototype of the latter, what for want of a better term we call the manifested Kâranâtmâ(99) (Causal Soul), one of the “seven” and chief reservoirs of the human Monads or Egos. The latter are gradually formed and strengthened during their incarnation‐cycle by constant additions of individuality from the personalities in which incarnates that androgynous, half‐spiritual, half‐terrestrial principle, partaking of both heaven and earth, called by the Vedântins Jîva and Vijñânamaya Kosha, and by the Occultists the Manas (mind); that, in short, which uniting itself partially with the Monad, incarnates in each new birth. In perfect unity with its (seventh) Principle, the Spirit unalloyed, it is the divine Higher Self, as every student of Theosophy knows. After every new incarnation Buddhi‐Manas culls, so to say, the aroma of the flower called personality, the purely earthly residue of which—its dregs—is left to fade out as a shadow. This is the most difficult—because so transcendentally metaphysical—portion of the doctrine.

As is repeated many a time in this and other works, it is not the Philosophers, Sages, and Adepts of antiquity who can ever be charged with idolatry. It is they in fact, who, recognising divine unity, were the only ones, owing to their initiation into the mysteries of Esotericism, to understand correctly the ὑπόνοια (hyponéa), or under‐meaning of the anthropomorphism of the so‐called Angels, Gods, and spiritual Beings of every kind. Each, worshipping the one Divine Essence that pervades the whole world of Nature, reverenced, but never worshipped or idolised, any of these “Gods,” whether high or low—not even his own personal Deity, of which he was a Ray, and to whom he appealed.(100) The holy Triad emanates from the One, and is the Tetraktys; the gods, daimons, and souls are an emanation of the Triad. Heroes and men repeat the hierarchy in themselves.

Thus said Metrodorus of Chios, the Pythagorean, the latter part of the sentence meaning that man has within himself the seven pale reflections of the seven divine Hierarchies; his Higher Self is, therefore, in itself but the refracted beam of the direct Ray. He who regards the latter as an Entity, in the usual sense of the term, is one of the “infidels and atheists,” spoken of by Epicurus, for he fastens on that God “the opinions of the multitude”—an anthropomorphism of the grossest kind.(101) The Adept and the Occultist know that “what are styled the Gods are only the first principles” (Aristotle). None the less they are intelligent, conscious, and living “Principles,” the Primary Seven Lights manifested from Light unmanifested—which to us is Darkness. They are the Seven—exoterically four—Kumâras or “Mind‐Born Sons” of Brahmâ. And it is they again, the Dhyân Chohans, who are the prototypes in the æonic eternity of lower Gods and hierarchies of divine Beings, at the lowest end of which ladder of being are we—men.

Thus perchance Polytheism, when philosophically understood, may be a degree higher than even the Monotheism of the Protestant, say, who limits and conditions the Deity in whom he persists in seeing the Infinite, but whose supposed actions make of that “Absolute and Infinite” the most absurd paradox in Philosophy. From this standpoint Roman Catholicism itself is immeasurably higher and more logical than Protestantism, though the Roman Church has been pleased to adopt the exotericism of the heathen “multitude” and to reject the Philosophy of pure Esotericism.

Thus every mortal has his immortal counterpart, or rather his Archetype, in heaven. This means that the former is indissolubly united to the latter, in each of his incarnations, and for the duration of the cycle of births; only it is by the spiritual and intellectual Principle in him, entirely distinct from the lower self, never through the earthly personality. Some of these are even liable to break the union altogether, in case of absence in the moral individual of binding, viz., of spiritual ties. Truly, as Paracelsus puts it in his quaint, tortured phraseology, man with his three (compound) Spirits is suspended like a fœtus by all three to the matrix of the Macrocosm; the thread which holds him united being the “Thread‐Soul,” Sûtrâtmâ, and Taijasa (the “Shining”) of the Vedântins. And it is through this spiritual and intellectual Principle in man, through Taijasa—the Shining, “because it has the luminous internal organ as its associate”—that man is thus united to his heavenly prototype, never through his lower inner self or Astral Body, for which there remains in most cases nothing but to fade out.

Occultism, or Theurgy, teaches the means of producing such union. But it is the actions of man—his personal merit alone—that can produce it on earth, or determine its duration. This lasts from a few seconds—a flash—to several hours, during which time the Theurgist or Theophanist is that overshadowing “God” himself; hence he becomes endowed for the time being with relative omniscience and omnipotence. With such perfect (divine) Adepts as Buddha(102) and others such a hypostatical state of avatâric condition may last during the whole life; whereas in the case of full Initiates, who have not yet reached the perfect state of Jîvanmukta,(103) Theopneusty, when in full sway, results for the high Adept in a full recollection of everything seen, heard, or sensed. Taijasa has fruition of the supersensible.(104) For one less perfect it will end only in a partial, indistinct remembrance; while the beginner has to face in the first period of his psychic experiences a mere confusion, followed by a rapid and finally complete oblivion of the mysteries seen during this super‐hypnotic condition. The degree of recollection, when one returns to his waking state and physical senses, depends on his spiritual and psychic purification, the greatest enemy of spiritual memory being man’s physical brain, the organ of his sensuous nature.

The above states are described for a clearer comprehension of terms used in this work. There are so many and such various conditions and states that even a Seer is liable to confound one with the other. To repeat: the Greek, rarely‐used word, “Theophania,” meant more with the Neoplatonists than it does with the modern maker of dictionaries. The compound word, “Theophania” (from “theos,” “God,” and “phainomai,” “to appear”), does not simply mean “a manifestation of God to man by actual appearance”—an absurdity, by the way—but the actual presence of a God in man, a divine incarnation. When Simon the Magician claimed to be “God the Father,” what he wanted to convey was just that which has been explained, namely, that he was a divine incarnation of his own Father, whether we see in the latter an Angel, a God, or a Spirit; therefore he was called “that power of God which is called great,”(105) or that power which causes the Divine Self to enshrine itself in its lower self—man.

This is one of the several mysteries of being and incarnation. Another is that when an Adept reaches during his lifetime that state of holiness and purity that makes him “equal to the Angels,” then at death his apparitional or astral body becomes as solid and tangible as was the late body, and is transformed into the real man.(106) The old physical body, falling off like the cast‐off serpent’s skin, the body of the “new” man remains either visible or, at the option of the Adept, disappears from view, surrounded as it is by the Âkâshic shell that screens it. In the latter case there are three ways open to the Adept: (1.) He may remain in the earth’s sphere (Vâyu or Kâma‐loka), in that ethereal locality concealed from human sight save during flashes of clairvoyance. In this case his astral body, owing to its great purity and spirituality, having lost the conditions required for Âkâshic light (the nether or terrestrial ether) to absorb its semi‐material particles, the Adept will have to remain in the company of disintegrating shells—doing no good or useful work. This, of course, cannot be.

(2.) He can by a supreme effort of will merge entirely into, and get united with, his Monad. By doing so, however, he would (a) deprive his Higher Self of posthumous Samâdhi—a bliss which is not real Nirvâna—the astral, however pure, being too earthly for such state; and (b) he would thereby open himself to Karmic law; the action being, in fact, the outcome of personal selfishness—of reaping the fruits produced by and for oneself—alone. (3.) The Adept has the option of renouncing conscious Nirvâna and rest, to work on earth for the good of mankind. This he can do in a two‐fold way: either, as above said, by consolidating his astral body into physical appearance, he can reassume the self‐same personality; or he can avail himself of an entirely new physical body, whether that of a newly‐born infant or—as Shankarâchârya is reported to have done with the body of a dead Râjah—by “entering a deserted sheath,” and living in it as long as he chooses. This is what is called “continuous existence.” The Section entitled “The Mystery about Buddha” will throw additional light on this theory, to the profane incomprehensible, or to the generality simply absurd. Such is the doctrine taught, everyone having the choice of either fathoming it still deeper, or of leaving it unnoticed.

The above is simply a small portion of what might have been given in Isis Unveiled, had the time come then, as it has now. One cannot study and profit by Occult Science, unless one gives himself up to it—heart, soul, and body. Some of its truths are too awful, too dangerous, for the average mind. None can toy and play with such terrible weapons with impunity. Therefore it is, as St. Paul has it, “unlawful” to speak of them. Let us accept the reminder and talk only of that which is “lawful.”

The quotation on p. 56 relates, moreover, only to psychic or spiritual Magic. The practical teachings of Occult Science are entirely different, and few are the strong minds fitted for them. As to ecstasy, and such like kinds of self‐illumination, this may be obtained by oneself and without any teacher or initiation, for ecstacy is reached by an inward command and control of Self over the physical Ego; as to obtaining mastery over the forces of Nature, this requires a long training, or the capacity of one born a “natural Magician.” Meanwhile, those who possess neither of the requisite qualifications are strongly advised to limit themselves to purely spiritual development. But even this is difficult, as the first necessary qualification is an unshakable belief in one’s own powers and the Deity within oneself; otherwise a man would simply develop into an irresponsible medium. Throughout the whole mystic literature of the ancient world we detect the same idea of spiritual Esoterism, that the personal God exists within, nowhere outside, the worshipper. That personal Deity is no vain breath, or a fiction, but an immortal Entity, the Initiator of the Initiates, now that the heavenly or Celestial Initiators of primitive humanity—the Shishta of the preceding cycles—are no more among us. Like an under‐current, rapid and clear, it runs without mixing its crystalline purity with the muddy and troubled waters of dogmatism, an enforced anthropomorphic Deity and religious intolerance. We find this idea in the tortured and barbarous phraseology of the Codex Nazaræus, and in the superb Neoplatonic language of the Fourth Gospel of the later Religion, in the oldest Veda and in the Avesta, in the Abhidharma, in Kapila’s Sânkhya, and the Bhagavad Gîtâ.

We cannot attain Adeptship and Nirvâna, Bliss and the “Kingdom of Heaven,” unless we link ourselves indissolubly with our Rex Lux, the Lord of Splendour and of Light, our immortal God within us. “Aham eva param Brahman”—“I am verily the Supreme Brahman”—has ever been the one living truth in the heart and mind of the Adepts, and it is this which helps the Mystic to become one. One must first of all recognise one’s own immortal Principle, and then only can one conquer, or take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. Only this has to be achieved by the higher—not the middle, nor the third—man, the last one being of dust. Nor can the second man, the “Son”—on this plane, as his “Father” is the Son on a still higher plane—do anything without the assistance of the first, the “Father.” But to succeed one has to identify oneself with one’s divine Parent.

The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second [inner, our higher] man is the Lord from heaven.... Behold, I show you a mystery.(107) Thus says Paul, mentioning but the dual and trinitarian man for the better comprehension of the non‐initiated. But this is not all, for the Delphic injunction has to be fulfilled: man must know himself in order to become a perfect Adept. How few can acquire the knowledge, however, not merely in its inner mystical, but even in its literal sense, for there are two meanings in this command of the Oracle. This is the doctrine of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas pure and simple. Such is also the mystical sense of what was said by Paul to the Corinthians about their being the “temple of God,” for this meant Esoterically: Ye are the temple of [the, or your] God, and the Spirit of [a, or your] God dwelleth in you.(108)

This carries precisely the same meaning as the “I am verily Brahman” of the Vedântin. Nor is the latter assertion more blasphemous than the Pauline—if there were any blasphemy in either, which is denied. Only the Vedântin, who never refers to his body as being himself, or even a part of himself, or aught else but an illusory form for others to see him in, constructs his assertion more openly and sincerely than was done by Paul.

The Delphic command “Know thyself” was perfectly comprehensible to every nation of old. So it is now, save to the Christians, since, with the exception of the Mussulmans, it is part and parcel of every Eastern religion, including the Kabalistically instructed Jews. To understand its full meaning, however, necessitates, first of all, belief in Reincarnation and all its mysteries; not as laid down in the doctrine of the French Reincarnationists of the Allan Kardec school, but as they are expounded and taught by Esoteric Philosophy. Man must, in short, know who he was, before he arrives at knowing what he is. And how many are there among Europeans who are capable of developing within themselves an absolute belief in their past and future reincarnations, in general, even as a law, let alone mystic knowledge of one’s immediately precedent life? Early education, tradition and training of thought, everything is opposing itself during their whole lives to such a belief. Cultured people have been brought up in that most pernicious idea that the wide difference found between the units of one and the same mankind, or even race, is the result of chance; that the gulf between man and man in their respective social positions, birth, intellect, physical and mental capacities—every one of which qualifications has a direct influence on every human

life—that all this is simply due to blind hazard, only the most pious among them finding equivocal consolation in the idea that it is “the will of God.” They have never analysed, never stopped to think of the depth of the opprobrium that is thrown upon their God, once the grand and most equitable law of the manifold re‐births of man upon this earth is foolishly rejected. Men and women anxious to be regarded as Christians, often truly and sincerely trying to lead a Christ‐like life, have never paused to reflect over the words of their own Bible. “Art thou Elias?” the Jewish priests and Levites asked the Baptist.(109) Their Saviour taught His disciples this grand truth of the Esoteric Philosophy, but verily, if His Apostles comprehended it, no one else seems to have realised its true meaning. No; not even Nicodemus, who, to the assertion: “Except a man be born again(110) he cannot see the Kingdom of God,” answers: “How can a man be born when he is old?” and is forthwith reproved by the remark: “Art thou a master in Israel and knowest not these things?”—as no one had a right to call himself a “Master” and Teacher, without having been initiated into the mysteries (a) of a spiritual re‐ birth through water, fire and spirit, and (b)

of the re‐birth from flesh.(111) Then again what can be a clearer expression as to the doctrine of manifold re‐births than the answer given by Jesus to the Sadducees, “who deny that there is any resurrection,” i.e., any re‐birth, since the dogma of the resurrection in the flesh is now regarded as an absurdity even by the intelligent clergy:

They who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world [Nirvâna](112) ... neither marry ... neither can they die any more, which shows that they had already died, and more than once. And again: Now that the dead are raised even Moses shewed ... he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, for he is not a God of the dead but of the living.(113) The sentence “now that the dead are raised” evidently applied to the then actual re‐births of the Jacobs and the Isaacs, and not to their future resurrection; for in such case they would have been still dead in the interim, and could not be referred to as “the living.” But the most suggestive of Christ’s parables and “dark sayings” is found in the explanation given by him to his Apostles about the blind man: Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this [blind, physical] man sinned nor his parents; but that the works of [his] God should be made manifest in him.(114)

Man is the “tabernacle,” the “building” only, of his God; and of course it is not the temple but its inmate—the vehicle of “God”(115)—that had sinned in a previous incarnation, and had thus brought the Karma of cecity upon the new building. Thus Jesus spoke truly; but to this day his followers have refused to understand the words of wisdom spoken. The Saviour is shown by his followers as though he were paving, by his words and explanation, the way to a preconceived programme that had to lead to an intended miracle. Verily the Grand Martyr has remained thenceforward, and for eighteen centuries, the Victim crucified daily far more cruelly by his clerical disciples and lay followers than he ever could have been by his allegorical enemies. For such is the true sense of the words “that the works of God should be made manifest in him,” in the light of theological interpretation, and a very undignified one it is, if the Esoteric explanation is rejected.

Doubtless the above will be regarded as fresh blasphemy. Nevertheless there are a number of Christians whom we know—whose hearts go out as strongly to their ideal of Jesus, as their souls are repelled from the theological picture of the official Saviour—who will reflect over our explanation and find in it no offence, but perchance a relief.

Magic is a dual power: nothing is easier than to turn it into Sorcery; an evil thought suffices for it. Therefore while theoretical Occultism is harmless, and may do good, practical Magic, or the fruits of the Tree of Life and Knowledge,(116) or otherwise the “Science of Good and Evil,” is fraught with dangers and perils. For the study of theoretical Occultism there are, no doubt, a number of works that may be read with profit, besides such books as the Finer Forces of Nature, etc., the Zohar, Sepher Jetzirah, The Book of Enoch, Franck’s Kabalah, and many Hermetic treatises. These are scarce in European languages, but works in Latin by the mediæval Philosophers, generally known as Alchemists and Rosicrucians, are plentiful. But even the perusal of these may prove dangerous for the unguided student. If approached without the right key to them, and if the student is unfit, owing to mental incapacity, for Magic, and is thus unable to discern the Right from the Left Path, let him take our advice and leave this study alone; he will only bring on himself and on his family unexpected woes and sorrows, never suspecting whence they come, nor what are the powers awakened by his mind being bent on them. Works for advanced students are many, but these can be placed at the disposal of only sworn or “pledged” chelâs (disciples), those who have pronounced the ever‐binding oath, and who are, therefore, helped and protected. For all other purposes, well‐intentioned as such works may be, they can only mislead the unwary and guide him imperceptibly to Black Magic or Sorcery—if to nothing worse.

The mystic characters, alphabets and numerals found in the divisions and sub‐divisions of the Great Kabalah, are, perhaps, the most dangerous portions in it, and especially the numerals. We say dangerous, because they are the most prompt to produce effects and results, and this with or without the experimenter’s will, even without his knowledge. Some students are apt to doubt this statement, simply because after manipulating these numerals they have failed to notice any dire physical manifestation or result. Such results would be found the least dangerous: it is the moral causes produced and the various events developed and brought to an unforeseen crisis, that would testify to the truth of what is now stated had the lay students only the power of discernment. The point of departure of that special branch of the Occult teaching known as the “Science of Correspondences,” numerical or literal or alphabetical, has for its epigraph with the Jewish and Christian Kabalists, the two mis‐ interpreted verses which say that God ordered all things in number, measure and weight;(117) and: He created her in the Holy Ghost, and saw her, and numbered her, and measured her.(118)

But the Eastern Occultists have another epigraph: “Absolute Unity, x, within number and plurality.” Both the Western and the Eastern students of the Hidden Wisdom hold to this axiomatic truth. Only the latter are perhaps more sincere in their confessions. Instead of putting a mask on their Science, they show her face openly, even if they do veil carefully her heart and soul before the inappreciative public and the profane, who are ever ready to abuse the most sacred truths for their own selfish ends. But Unity is the real basis of the Occult Sciences—physical and metaphysical. This is shown even by Éliphas Lévi, the learned Western Kabalist, inclined as he is to be rather jesuitical. He says: Absolute Unity is the supreme and final reason of things. Therefore, that reason can be neither one person, nor three persons; it is Reason, and pre‐eminently Reason (raison par excellence).(119)

The meaning of this Unity in Plurality in “God” or Nature, can be solved only by the means of transcendental methods, by numerals, as by the correspondences between soul and the Soul. Names, in the Kabalah as in the Bible, such as Jehovah, Adam Kadmon, Eve, Cain, Abel, Enoch, are all of them more intimately connected, by geometrical and astronomical relations, with Physiology (or Phallicism) than with Theology or Religion. Little as people are as yet prepared to admit it, this will be shown to be a fact. If all those names are symbols for things hidden, as well as for those manifested, in the Bible as in the Vedas, their respective mysteries differ greatly. Plato’s motto “God geometrises” was accepted by both Âryans and Jews; but while the former applied their Science of Correspondences to veil the most spiritual and sublime truths of Nature, the latter used their acumen to conceal only one—to them the most divine—of the mysteries of Evolution, namely, that of birth and generation, and then they deified the organs of the latter.

Apart from this, every cosmogony, from the earliest to the latest, is based upon, interlinked with, and most closely related to, numerals and geometric figures. Questioned by an Initiate, these figures and numbers will yield numerical values based on the integral values of the Circle—“the secret habitat of the ever‐invisible Deity” as the Alchemists have it—as they will yield every other Occult particular connected with such mysteries, whether anthropographical, anthropological, cosmic, or psychical. “In reuniting Ideas to Numbers, we can operate upon Ideas in the same way as upon Numbers, and arrive at the Mathematics of Truth,” writes an Occultist, who shows his great wisdom in desiring to remain unknown. Any Kabalist well acquainted with the Pythagorean system of numerals and geometry can demonstrate that the metaphysical views of Plato were based upon the strictest mathematical principles. “True mathematics,” says the Magicon, “is something with which all higher sciences are connected; common mathematics is but a deceitful phantasmagoria, whose much praised infallibility only arises from this—that materials, conditions and references are made to foundation.” ...

The cosmological theory of numerals which Pythagoras learned in India, and from the Egyptian Hierophants, is alone able to reconcile the two units, matter and spirit, and cause each to demonstrate the other mathematically. The sacred numbers of the universe in their esoteric combination can alone solve the great problem, and explain the theory of radiation and the cycle of the emanations. The lower orders, before they develop into higher ones, must emanate from the higher spiritual ones, and when arrived at the turning‐point, be reäbsorbed into the infinite.(120)

It is upon these true Mathematics that the knowledge of the Kosmos and of all mysteries rests, and to one acquainted with them, it is the easiest thing possible to prove that both Vaidic and Biblical structures are based upon “God‐in‐Nature” and “Nature‐in‐God,” as the radical law. Therefore, this law—as everything else immutable and fixed in eternity—could find a correct expression only in those purest transcendental Mathematics referred to by Plato, especially in Geometry as transcendentally applied. Revealed to men—we fear not and will not retract the expression—in this geometrical and symbolical garb, Truth has grown and developed into additional symbology, invented by man for the wants and better comprehension of the masses of mankind that came too late in their cyclic development and evolution to have shared in the primitive knowledge, and would never have grasped it otherwise. If later on, the clergy—crafty and ambitious of power in every age—anthropomorphised and degraded abstract ideals, as well as the real and divine Beings who do exist in Nature, and are the Guardians and Protectors of our manvantaric world and period, the fault and guilt rests with those would‐be leaders, not with the masses.

But the day has come when the gross conceptions of our forefathers during the Middle Ages can no longer satisfy the thoughtful religionist. The mediæval Alchemist and Mystic are now transformed into the sceptical Chemist and Physicist; and most of them are found to have turned away from truth, on account of the purely anthropomorphic ideas, the gross Materialism, of the forms in which it is presented to them. Therefore, future generations have either to be gradually initiated into the truths underlying Exoteric Religions, including their own, or be left to break the feet of clay of the last of the gilded idols. No educated man or woman would turn away from any of the now called “superstitions” which they believe to be based on nursery tales and ignorance, if they could only see the basis of fact that underlies every “superstition.” But let them once learn for a certainty that there is hardly a claim in the Occult Sciences that is not founded on philosophical and scientific facts in Nature, and they will pursue the study of those Sciences with the same, if not with greater, ardour than that they have expended in shunning them. This cannot be achieved at once, for to benefit mankind such truths have to be revealed gradually and with great caution, the public mind

not being prepared for them. However much the Agnostics of our age may find themselves in the mental attitude demanded by Modern Science, people are always apt to cling to their old hobbies so long as the remembrance of them lasts. They are like the Emperor Julian—called the Apostate, because he loved truth too well to accept aught else—who, though in his last Theophany he beheld his beloved Gods as pale, worn‐out, and hardly discernible shadows, nevertheless clung to them. Let, then, the world cling to its Gods, to whatever plane or realm they may belong. The true Occultist would be guilty of high treason to mankind, were he to break for ever the old deities before he could replace them with the whole and unadulterated truth—and this he cannot do as yet. Nevertheless, the reader may be allowed to learn at least the alphabet of that truth. He may be shown, at any rate, what the Gods and Goddesses of the Pagans, denounced as demons by the Church, are not, if he cannot learn the whole and final truth as to what they are. Let him assure himself that the Hermetic “Tres Matres,” and the “Three Mothers” of the Sepher Jetzirah are one and the same thing; that they are no Demon‐Goddesses, but Light, Heat, and Electricity, and then,

perchance, the learned classes will spurn them no longer. After this, the Rosicrucian Illuminati may find followers even in the Royal Academies, which will be more prepared, perhaps, than they are now, to admit the grand truths of archaic Natural Philosophy, especially when their learned members shall have assured themselves that, in the dialect of Hermes, the “Three Mothers” stand as symbols for the whole of the forces or agencies which have a place assigned to them in the modern system of the “correlation of forces.”(121) Even the polytheism of the “superstitious” Brâhman and idolater shows its raison d’être, since the three Shaktis of the three great Gods, Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Shiva, are identical with the “Three Mothers” of the monotheistic Jew.

The whole of the ancient religious and mystical literature is symbolical. The Books of Hermes, the Zohar, the Ya‐Yakav, the Egyptian _Book __ of the Dead_, the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bible, are as full of symbolism as are the Nabathean revelations of the Chaldaic Qû‐tâmy; it is a loss of time to ask which is the earliest; all are simply different versions of the one primeval Record of prehistoric knowledge and revelation. The first four chapters of Genesis contain the synopsis of all the rest of the Pentateuch, being only the various versions of the same thing in different allegorical and symbolical applications. Having discovered that the Pyramid of Cheops with all its measurements is to be found contained in its minutest details in the structure of Solomon’s Temple; and having ascertained that the biblical names Shem, Ham and Japhet are determinative of pyramid measures, in connection with the 600‐year period of Noah and the 500‐year period of Shem, Ham and Japhet; ... the term “Sons of Elohim” and “Daughters” of H‐Adam, [are] for one thing astronomical terms,(122)

the author of the very curious work already mentioned—a book very little known in Europe, we regret to say—seems to see nothing in his discovery beyond the presence of Mathematics and Metrology in the Bible. He also arrives at most unexpected and extraordinary conclusions, such as are very little warranted by the facts discovered. His impression seems to be that because the Jewish biblical names are all astronomical, therefore the Scriptures of all the other nations can be “only this and nothing more.” But this is a great mistake of the erudite and wonderfully acute author of The Source of Measures, if he really thinks so. The “Key to the Hebrew‐ Egyptian Mystery” unlocks but a certain portion of the hieratic writings of these two nations, and leaves those of other peoples untouched. His idea is that the Kabalah “is only that sublime Science upon which Masonry is based”; in fact he regards Masonry as the substance of the Kabalah, and the latter as the “rational basis of the Hebrew text of Holy Writ.” About this we will not argue with the author. But why should all those who may have found in the Kabalah something beyond “the sublime Science” upon which Masonry is alleged to have been built, be held up to public contempt?

In its exclusiveness and one‐sidedness such a conclusion is pregnant with future misconceptions and is absolutely wrong. In its uncharitable criticism it throws a slur upon the “Divine Science” itself. The Kabalah is indeed “of the essence of Masonry,” but it is dependent on Metrology only in one of its aspects, the less Esoteric, as even Plato made no secret that the Deity was ever geometrising. For the uninitiated, however learned and endowed with genius they may be, the Kabalah, which treats only of “the garment of God,” or the veil and cloak of truth, is built from the ground upward with a practical application to present uses.(123) Or in other words represents an exact Science only on the terrestrial plane. To the initiated, the Kabalistic Lord descends from the primeval Race, generated spiritually from the “Mind‐born Seven.” Having reached the Earth the Divine Mathematics—a synonym for Magic in his day, as we are told by Josephus—veiled her face. Hence the most important secret yet yielded by her in our modern day is the identity of the old Roman measures and the present British measures, of the Hebrew‐Egyptian cubit and the Masonic inch.(124)

The discovery is most wonderful, and has led to further and minor unveilings of various riddles in reference to Symbology and biblical names. It is thoroughly understood and proven, as shown by Nachanides, that in the days of Moses the initial sentence in Genesis was made to read B’rash ithbara Elohim, or “In the head‐source [or Mûlaprakiti—the Rootless Root] developed [or evolved] the Gods [Elohim], the heavens and the earth;” whereas it is now, owing to the Massora and theological cunning, transformed into B’rashith bara Elohim, or, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—which word juggling alone has led to materialistic anthropomorphism and dualism. How many more similar instances may not be found in the Bible, the last and latest of the Occult works of antiquity? There is no longer any doubt in the mind of the Occultist, that, notwithstanding its form and outward meaning, the Bible—as explained by the Zohar or Midrash, the Yetzirah (Book of Creation) and the Commentary on the Ten Sephiroth (by Azariel Ben Manachem of the XIIth century)—is part and parcel of the Secret Doctrine of the Âryans, which explains in the same manner the Vedas and all other allegorical books. The Zohar, in teaching that the Impersonal One Cause manifests in the Universe through Its Emanations, the Sephiroth—that Universe being in its totality simply the veil woven from the Deity’s own substance—is undeniably the copy and faithful echo of the earliest Vedas. Taken by itself, without the additional help of the Vaidic and of Brâhmanical literature in general, the Bible will never yield the universal secrets of Occult Nature. The cubits, inches, and measures of this physical plane will never solve the problems of the world on the spiritual plane—for Spirit can neither be weighed nor measured. The working out of these problems is reserved for the “mystics and the dreamers” who alone are capable of accomplishing it.

Moses was an initiated priest, versed in all the mysteries and the Occult knowledge of the Egyptian temples—hence thoroughly acquainted with primitive Wisdom. It is in the latter that the symbolical and astronomical meaning of that “Mystery of Mysteries,” the Great Pyramid, has to be sought. And having been so familiar with the geometrical secrets that lay concealed for long æons in her strong bosom—the measurements and proportions of the Kosmos, our little Earth included—what wonder that he should have made use of his knowledge? The Esoterism of Egypt was that of the whole world at one time. During the long ages of the Third Race it had been the heirloom, in common, of the whole of mankind, received from their Instructors, the “Sons of Light,” the primeval Seven. There was a time also when the Wisdom‐Religion was not symbolical, for it became Esoteric only gradually, the change being necessitated by misuse and by the Sorcery of the Atlanteans. For it was the “misuse” only, and not the use, of the divine gift that led the men of the Fourth Race to Black Magic and Sorcery, and finally to become “forgetful of Wisdom”; while those of the Fifth Race, the inheritors of the Rishis of the Tretâ Yuga, used their powers to atrophise such gifts in mankind in general, and then, as the “Elect Root,” dispersed. Those who escaped the “Great Flood” preserved only its memory, and a belief founded on the knowledge of their direct fathers of one remove, that such a Science existed, and was now jealously guarded by the “Elect Root” exalted by Enoch. But there must again come a time when man shall once more become what he was during the second Yuga (age), when his probationary cycle shall be over and he shall gradually become what he was—semi‐corporeal and pure. Does not Plato, the Initiate, tell us in the Phædrus all that man once was, and that which he may yet again become:

Before man’s spirit sank into sensuality and became embodied through the loss of his wings, he lived among the Gods in the airy spiritual world where everything is true and pure.(125) Elsewhere he speaks of the time when men did not perpetuate themselves, but lived as pure spirits. Let those men of Science who feel inclined to laugh at this, themselves unravel the mystery of the origin of the first man.

Unwilling that his chosen people—chosen by him—should remain as grossly idolatrous as the profane masses that surrounded them, Moses utilised his knowledge of the cosmogonical mysteries of the Pyramid, to build upon it the Genesiacal Cosmogony in symbols and glyphs. This was more accessible to the minds of the hoi polloi than the abstruse truths taught to the educated in the sanctuaries. He invented nothing but the outward garb, added not one iota; but in this he merely followed the example of older nations and Initiates. If he clothed the grand truths revealed to him by his Hierophant under the most ingenious imagery, he did it to meet the requirements of the Israelites; that stiff‐necked race would accept of no God unless He were as anthropomorphic as those of the Olympus; and he himself failed to foresee the times when highly educated statesmen would be defending the husks of the fruit of wisdom that grew and developed in him on Mount Sinai, when communing with his own personal God—his divine Self. Moses understood the great danger of delivering such truths to the selfish, for he understood the fable of Prometheus and remembered the past. Hence, he veiled them from the profanation of public gaze and gave them out allegorically. And this is why his biographer says of him, that when he descended from Sinai,

Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone ... and he put a veil upon his face.(126) And so he “put a veil” upon the face of his Pentateuch; and to such an extent that, using orthodox chronology, only 3376 years after the event people begin to acquire a conviction that it is “a veil indeed.” It is not the face of God or even of a Jehovah shining through; not even the face of Moses, but verily the faces of the later Rabbis. No wonder if Clemens wrote in the Stromateis that: Similar, then, to the Hebrew enigmas in respect to concealment are those of the Egyptians also.(127)

It is more than likely, that the Protestants in the days of the Reformation knew nothing of the true origin of Christianity, or, to be more explicit and correct, of Latin Ecclesiasticism. Nor is it probable that the Greek Church knew much of it, the separation between the two having occurred at a time when, in the struggle for political power the Latin Church was securing, at any cost, the alliance of the highly educated, the ambitious and influential Pagans, while these were willing to assume the outward appearance of the new worship, provided they were themselves kept in power. There is no need to remind the reader here of the details of that struggle, well‐known to every educated man. It is certain that the highly cultured Gnostics and their leaders—such men as Saturnilus, an uncompromising ascetic, as Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, Menander and Cerinthus—were not stigmatised by the (now) Latin Church because they were heretics, nor because their tenets and practices were indeed “ob turpitudinem portentosam nimium et horribilem,” “monstrous, revolting abominations,” as Baronius says of those of Carpocrates; but simply because they knew too much of fact and truth. Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie correctly remarks:

They were stigmatised by the later Roman Church because they came into conflict with the purer Church of Christianity—the possession of which was usurped by the Bishops of Rome, but which original continues in its docility towards the founder, in the Primitive Orthodox Greek Church.(128)

Unwilling to accept the responsibility of gratuitous assumptions, the writer deems it best to prove this inference by more than one personal and defiant admission of an ardent Roman Catholic writer, evidently entrusted with the delicate task by the Vatican. The Marquis de Mirville makes desperate efforts to explain in the Catholic interest certain remarkable discoveries in Archæology and Palæography, though the Church is cleverly made to remain outside of the quarrel and defence. This is undeniably shown by his ponderous volumes addressed to the Academy of France between 1803 and 1865. Seizing the pretext of drawing the attention of the materialistic “Immortals” to the “epidemic of Spiritualism,” the invasion of Europe and America by a numberless host of Satanic forces, he directs his efforts towards proving the same, by giving the full Genealogies and the Theogony of the Christian and Pagan Deities, and by drawing parallels between the two. All such wonderful likenesses and identities are only “seeming and superficial,” he assures the reader. Christian symbols, and even characters, Christ, the Virgin, Angels and Saints, he tells them, were all personated centuries beforehand by the fiends of hell, in order to discredit eternal truth by their ungodly copies. By their knowledge of futurity the devils anticipated events, having “discovered the secrets of the Angels.” Heathen Deities, all the Sun‐Gods named Soters—Saviours—born of immaculate mothers and dying a violent death, were only Ferouers(129)—as they were called by the Zoroastrians—the demon‐ante‐dated copies (copies anticipées) of the Messiah to come.

The danger of recognition of such facsimiles had indeed lately become dangerously great. It had lingered threateningly in the air, hanging like a sword of Damocles over the Church, since the days of Voltaire, Dupuis and other writers on similar lines. The discoveries of the Egyptologists, the finding of Assyrian and Babylonian pre‐Mosaic relics bearing the legend of Moses(130) and especially the many rationalistic works published in England, such as Supernatural Religion made recognition unavoidable. Hence the appearance of Protestant and Roman Catholic writers deputed to explain the inexplicable; to reconcile the fact of Divine Revelation with the mystery that the divine personages, rites, dogmas and symbols of Christianity were so often identical with those of the several great heathen religions. The former—the Protestant defenders—tried to explain it, on the ground of “prophetic, precursory ideas”; the Latinists, such as De Mirville, by inventing a double set of Angels and Gods, the one divine and true, the other—the earlier—“copies ante‐dating the originals” and due to a clever plagiarism by the Evil One. The Protestant stratagem is an old one, that of the Roman Catholics is so old that it has been forgotten, and is as good as new. Dr. Lundy’s Monumental Christianity and A Miracle in Stone belong to the first attempts. De Mirville’s Pneumatologie to the second. In India and China, every such effort on the part of the Scotch and other missionaries ends in laughter, and does no harm; the plan devised by the Jesuits is more serious. De Mirville’s volumes are thus very important, as they proceed from a source which has undeniably the greatest learning of the age at its service, and this coupled with all the craft and casuistry that the sons of Loyola can furnish. The Marquis de Mirville was evidently helped by the acutest minds in the service of Rome.

He begins by not only admitting the justice of every imputation and charge made against the Latin Church as to the originality of her dogmas, but by taking a seeming delight in anticipating such charges; for he points to every dogma of Christianity as having existed in Pagan rituals in Antiquity. The whole Pantheon of Heathen Deities is passed in review by him, and each is shown to have had some point of resemblance with the Trinitarian personages and Mary. There is hardly a mystery, a dogma, or a rite in the Latin Church that is not shown by the author as having been “parodied by the Curvati”—the “Curved,” the Devils. All this being admitted and explained, the Symbologists ought to be silenced. And so they would be, if there were no materialistic critics to reject such omnipotency of the Devil in this world. For, if Rome admits the likenesses, she also claims the right of judgment between the true and the false Avatâra, the real and the unreal God, between the original and the copy—though the copy precedes the original by millenniums. Our author proceeds to argue that whenever the missionaries try to convert an idolater, they are invariably answered:

We had our Crucified before yours. What do you come to show us?(131) Again, what should we gain by denying the mysterious side of this copy, under the plea that according to Weber all the present Purânas are remade from older ones, since here we have in the same order of personages a positive precedence which no one would ever think of contesting.(132) And the author instances Buddha, Krishna, Apollo, etc. Having admitted all this he escapes the difficulty in this wise: The Church Fathers, however, who recognized their own property under all such sheep’s clothing ... knowing by means of the Gospel ... all the ruses of the pretended spirits of light; the Fathers, we say, meditating upon the decisive words, “all that ever came before me are robbers” (John, x. 8), did not hesitate in recognizing the Occult agency at work, the general and superhuman direction given beforehand to falsehood, the universal attribute and environment of all these false Gods of the nations; “omnes dii gentium dæmonia (elilim).” (Psalm xcv.)(133)

With such a policy everything is made easy. There is not one glaring resemblance, not one fully proven identity, that could not thus be made away with. The above‐quoted cruel, selfish, self‐glorifying words, placed by John in the mouth of Him who was meekness and charity personified, could never have been pronounced by Jesus. The Occultists reject the imputation indignantly, and are prepared to defend the man as against the God, by showing whence come the words plagiarised by the author of the Fourth Gospel. They are taken bodily from the “Prophecies” in the Book of Enoch. The evidence on this head of the learned biblical scholar, Archbishop Laurence, and of the author of the Evolution of Christianity, who edited the translation, may be brought forward to prove the fact. On the last page of the Introduction to the Book of Enoch is found the following passage:

The parable of the sheep rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch, lxxxix, in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing and destroying the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable—“All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers”—language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch. “Obvious” truly, and something else besides. For, if Jesus pronounced the words in the sense attributed to him, then he must have read the Book of Enoch—a purely Kabalistic, Occult work, and he therefore recognised the worth and value of a treatise now declared apocryphal by his Churches. Moreover, he could not have been ignorant that these words belonged to the oldest ritual of Initiation.(134) And if he had not read it, and the sentence belongs to John, or whoever wrote the Fourth Gospel, then what reliance can be placed on the authenticity of other sayings and parables attributed to the Christian Saviour?

Thus, De Mirville’s illustration is an unfortunate one. Every other proof brought by the Church to show the infernal character of the ante‐and‐anti‐ Christian copyists may be as easily disposed of. This is perhaps unfortunate, but it is a fact, nevertheless—Magna est veritas et prevalebit. The above is the answer of the Occultists to the two parties who charge them incessantly, the one with “Superstition,” and the other with “Sorcery.” To those of our Brothers who are Christians, and twit us with the secresy imposed upon the Eastern Chelâs, adding invariably that their own “Book of God” is “an open volume” for all “to read, understand, and be saved,” we would reply by asking them to study what we have just said in this Section, and then to refute it—if they can. There are very few in our days who are still prepared to assure their readers that the Bible had God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter. Could Locke be asked the question now, he would perhaps be unwilling to repeat again that the Bible is all pure, all sincere, nothing too much, nothing wanting.

The Bible, if it is not to be shown to be the very reverse of all this, sadly needs an interpreter acquainted with the doctrines of the East, as they are to be found in its secret volumes; nor is it safe now, after Archbishop Laurence’s translation of the Book of Enoch, to cite Cowper and assure us that the Bible ... gives a light to every age, It gives, but borrows none.

for it does borrow, and that very considerably; especially in the opinion of those who, ignorant of its symbolical meaning and of the universality of the truths underlying and concealed in it, are able to judge only from its dead‐letter appearance. It is a grand volume, a master‐piece composed of clever, ingenious fables containing great verities; but it reveals the latter only to those who, like the Initiates, have a key to its inner meaning; a tale sublime in its morality and didactics truly—still a tale and an allegory; a repertory of invented personages in its older Jewish portions, and of dark sayings and parables in its later additions, and thus quite misleading to anyone ignorant of its Esotericism. Moreover it is Astrolatry and Sabæan worship, pure and simple, that is to be found in the Pentateuch when it is read exoterically, and Archaic Science and Astronomy to a most wonderful degree, when interpreted—Esoterically.

CHRISTIANITY. While making a good deal of the Mercavah, the Jews, or rather their synagogues, rejected the Book of Enoch, either because it was not included from the first in the Hebrew Canon, or else, as Tertullian thought, it was Disavowed by the Jews like all other Scripture which speaks of Christ.(135) But neither of these reasons was the real one. The Synedrion would have nothing to do with it, simply because it was more of a magic than a purely kabalistic work. The present day Theologians of both Latin and Protestant Churches class it among apocryphal productions. Nevertheless the New Testament, especially in the Acts and Epistles, teems with ideas and doctrines, now accepted and established as dogmas by the infallible Roman and other Churches, and even with whole sentences taken bodily from Enoch, or the “pseudo‐Enoch,” who wrote under that name in Aramaic or Syro‐ Chaldaic, as asserted by Bishop Laurence, the translator of the Ethiopian text. The plagiarisms are so glaring that the author of The Evolution of Christianity, who edited Bishop Laurence’s translation, was compelled to make some suggestive remarks in his Introduction. On internal evidence(136) this book is found to have been written before the Christian period (whether two or twenty centuries does not matter). As correctly argued by the Editor, it is

Either the inspired forecast of a great Hebrew prophet, predicting with miraculous accuracy the future teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, or the Semitic romance from which the latter borrowed His conceptions of the triumphant return of the Son of man, to occupy a judicial throne in the midst of rejoicing saints and trembling sinners, expectant of everlasting happiness or eternal fire; and whether these celestial visions be accepted as human or Divine, they have exercised so vast an influence on the destinies of mankind for nearly two thousand years that candid and impartial seekers after religious truth can no longer delay enquiry into the relationship of the Book of Enoch with the revelation, or the evolution, of Christianity.(137) The Book of Enoch Also records the supernatural control of the elements, through the action of individual angels presiding over the winds, the sea, hail, frost, dew, the lightning’s flash, and reverberating thunder. The names of the principal fallen angels are also given, among whom we recognize some of the invisible powers named in the incantations [magical] inscribed on the terra‐cotta cups of Hebrew‐Chaldee conjurations.(138) We also find on these cups the word “Halleluiah,” showing that A word with which ancient Syro‐Chaldæans conjured has become, through the vicissitudes of language, the Shibboleth of modern Revivalists.(139)

The Editor proceeds after this to give fifty‐seven verses from various parts of the Gospels and Acts, with parallel passages from the Book of Enoch, and says: The attention of theologians has been concentrated on the passage in the Epistle of Jude, because the author specifically names the prophet; but the cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of the New Testament Scripture, as disclosed in the parallel passages which we have collated, clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness, under the eternal dominion of the Son of man. This evangelical plagiarism culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian patriarch.(140)

In fairness to truth, the hypothesis ought at least to have been suggested, that the Book of Enoch in its present form is simply a transcript—with numerous pre‐Christian and post‐Christian additions and interpolations—from far older texts. Modern research went so far as to point out that Enoch is made, in Chapter lxxi, to divide the day and night into eighteen parts, and to represent the longest day in the year as consisting of twelve out of these eighteen parts, while a day of sixteen hours in length could not have occurred in Palestine. The translator, Archbishop Laurence, remarks thus: The region in which the author lived must have been situated not lower than forty‐five degrees north latitude, where the longest day is fifteen hours and a‐half, nor higher perhaps than forty‐ nine degrees, where the longest day is precisely sixteen hours. This will bring the country where he wrote as high up at least as the northern districts of the Caspian and Euxine Seas ... the author of the Book of Enoch was perhaps a member of one of the tribes which Shalmaneser carried away, and placed “in Halah and in Habor by the river Goshen, and in the cities of the Medes.”(141) Further on, it is confessed that:

It cannot be said that internal evidence attests the superiority of the Old Testament to the Book of Enoch.... The Book of Enoch teaches the preëxistence of the Son of man, the Elect One, the Messiah, who “from the beginning existed in secret,(142) and whose name was invoked in the presence of the Lord of Spirits, before the sun and the signs were created.” The author also refers to the “other Power who was upon Earth over the water on that day”—an apparent reference to the language of Genesis, i. 2.(143) [We maintain that it applies as well to the Hindu Nârâyana—the “mover on the waters.”] We have thus the Lord of Spirits, the Elect One, and a third Power, seemingly foreshadowing this Trinity [as much as the Trimûrti] of futurity; but although Enoch’s ideal Messiah doubtless exercised an important influence on primitive conceptions of the Divinity of the Son of man, we fail to identify his obscure reference to another “Power” with the Trinitarianism of the Alexandrine school; more especially as “angels of power” abound in the visions of Enoch.(144) An Occultist would hardly fail to identify the said “Power.” The Editor concludes his remarkable reflections by adding:

Thus far we learn that the Book of Enoch was published before the Christian Era by some great Unknown of Semitic [?] race, who, believing himself to be inspired in a post‐prophetic age, borrowed the name of an antediluvian patriarch(145) to authenticate his own enthusiastic forecast of the Messianic kingdom. And as the contents of his marvellous book enter freely into the composition of the New Testament, it follows that if the author was not an inspired prophet, who predicted the teachings of Christianity, he was a visionary enthusiast whose illusions were accepted by Evangelists and Apostles as revelation—alternative conclusions which involve the Divine or human origin of Christianity.(146) The outcome of all of which is, in the words of the same Editor: The discovery that the language and ideas of alleged revelation are found in a preëxistent work, accepted by Evangelists and Apostles as inspired, but classed by modern theologians among apocryphal productions.(147) This accounts also for the unwillingness of the reverend librarians of the Bodleian Library to publish the Ethiopian text of the Book of Enoch.

The prophecies of the Book of Enoch are indeed prophetic, but they were intended for, and cover the records of, the five Races out of the seven—everything relating to the last two being kept secret. Thus the remark made by the Editor of the English translation, that: Chapter xcii. records a series of prophecies extending from Enoch’s own time to about one thousand years beyond the present generation,(148) is faulty. The prophecies extend to the end of our present Race, not merely to a “thousand years” hence. Very true that: In the system of [Christian] chronology adopted, a day stands [occasionally] for a hundred, and a week for seven hundred years.(149) But this is an arbitrary and fanciful system adopted by Christians to make Biblical chronology fit with facts or theories, and does not represent the original thought. The “days” stand for the undetermined periods of the Side‐Races, and the “weeks” for the Sub‐Races, the Root‐Races being referred to by an expression that is not even found in the English translation. Moreover the sentence at the bottom of page 150: Subsequently, in the fourth week ... the visions of the holy and the righteous shall be seen, the order of generation after generation shall take place,(150)

is quite wrong. It stands in the original: “the order of generation after generation had taken place on the earth,” etc.; that is, after the first human race procreated in the truly human way had sprung up in the Third Root‐Race; a change which entirely alters the meaning. Then all that is given in the translation—as very likely also in the Ethiopic text, since the copies have been sorely tampered with—as about things which were to happen in the future, is, we are informed, in the past tense in the original Chaldæan MSS., and is not prophecy, but a narrative of what had already come to pass. When Enoch begins “to speak from a book”(151) he is reading the account given by a great Seer, and the prophecies are not his own, but are from the Seer. Enoch or Enoichion means “internal eye” or Seer. Thus every Prophet and Adept may be called “Enoichion,” without becoming a pseudo‐Enoch. But here, the Seer who compiled the present Book of Enoch is distinctly shown as reading out from a book:

I have been born the seventh in the first week [the seventh branch, or Side‐Race, of the first Sub‐Race, after physical generation had begun, namely, in the third Root‐Race].... But after me, in the second week [second Sub‐Race] great wickedness shall arise [arose, rather] and in that week the end of the first shall take place, in which mankind shall be safe. But when the first is completed iniquity shall grow up.(152) As translated it has no sense. As it stands in the Esoteric text, it simply means, that the First Root‐Race shall come to an end during the second Sub‐Race of the Third Root‐Race, in the period of which time mankind will be safe; all this having no reference whatever to the biblical Deluge. Verse 10th speaks of the sixth week [sixth Sub‐Race of the Third Root‐Race] when All those who are in it shall be darkened, the hearts of all of them shall be forgetful of wisdom [the divine knowledge will be dying out] and in it shall a man ascend.

This “man” is taken by the interpreters, for some mysterious reasons of their own, to mean Nebuchadnezzar; he is in reality the first Hierophant of the purely human Race (after the allegorical Fall into generation) selected to perpetuate the dying Wisdom of the Devas (Angels or Elohim). He is the first “Son of Man”—the mysterious appellation given to the divine Initiates of the first human school of the Mânushi (men), at the very close of the Third Root‐Race. He is also called the “Saviour,” as it was He, with the other Hierophants, who saved the Elect and the Perfect from the geological conflagration, leaving to perish in the cataclysm of the Close(153) those who forgot the primeval wisdom in sexual sensuality. And during its completion [of the “sixth week,” or the sixth Sub‐ Race] he shall burn the house of dominion [the half of the globe or the then inhabited continent] with fire, and all the race of the elect root shall be dispersed.(154)

The above applies to the Elect Initiates, and not at all to the Jews, the supposed chosen people, or to the Babylonian captivity, as interpreted by the Christian theologians. Considering that we find Enoch, or his perpetuator, mentioning the execution of the “decree upon sinners” in several different weeks,(155) saying that “every work of the ungodly shall disappear from the whole earth” during this fourth time (the Fourth Race), it surely can hardly apply to the one solitary Deluge of the Bible, still less to the Captivity. It follows, therefore, that as the Book of Enoch covers the five Races of the Manvantara, with a few allusions to the last two, it does not contain “Biblical prophecies,” but simply facts taken out of the Secret Books of the East. The editor, moreover, confesses that: The preceding six verses, viz., 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th, are taken from between the 14th and 15th verses of the nineteenth chapter, where they are to be found in the MSS.(156)

By this arbitrary transposition, he has made confusion still more confused. Yet he is quite right in saying that the doctrines of the Gospels, and even of the Old Testament, have been taken bodily from the Book of Enoch, for this is as evident as the sun in heaven. The whole of the Pentateuch was adapted to fit in with the facts given, and this accounts for the Hebrews refusing to give the book a place in their Canon, just as the Christians have subsequently refused to admit it among their canonical works. The fact that the Apostle Jude and many of the Christian Fathers referred to it as a revelation and a sacred volume, is, however, an excellent proof that the early Christians accepted it; among these the most learned—as, for instance, Clement of Alexandria—understood Christianity and its doctrines in quite a different light from their modern successors, and viewed Christ under an aspect that Occultists only can appreciate. The early Nazarenes and Chrestians, as Justin Martyr calls them, were the followers of Jesus, of the true Chrestos and Christos of Initiation; whereas, the modern Christians, especially those of the West, may be Papists, Greeks, Calvinists, or Lutherans, but can hardly be called Christians, i.e., the followers of Jesus, the Christ.

Thus the Book of Enoch is entirely symbolical. It relates to the history of the human Races and of their early relation to Theogony, the symbols being interblended with astronomical and cosmic mysteries. One chapter is missing, however, in the Noachian records (from both the Paris and the Bodleian MSS.), namely, Chapter lviii. in Sect. X; this could not be remodelled, and therefore it had to disappear, disfigured fragments alone having been left of it. The dream about the cows, the black, red and white heifers, relates to the first Races, their division and disappearance. Chapter lxxxviii, in which one of the four Angels “went to the white cows and taught them a mystery,” after which, the mystery being born “became a man,” refers to (a) the first group evolved of primitive Âryans, and (b) to the “mystery of the Hermaphrodite” so called, having reference to the birth of the first human Races as they are now. The well‐known rite in India, one that has survived in that patriarchal country to this day, known as the passage, or rebirth through the cow—a ceremony to which those of lower castes who are desirous of becoming Brâhmans have to submit—has originated in this mystery. Let any Eastern Occultist read with careful attention the above‐named chapter in the Book of Enoch, and he will find that the “Lord of the Sheep,” in whom Christians and European Mystics see Christ, is the Hierophant Victim whose name in Sanskrit we dare not give. Again, that while the Western Churchmen see Egyptians and Israelites in the “sheep and wolves,” all these animals relate in truth to the trials of the Neophyte and the mysteries of initiation, whether in India or Egypt, and to that most terrible penalty incurred by the “wolves”—those who reveal indiscriminately that which is only for the knowledge of the Elect and the “Perfect.”

The Christians who, thanks to later interpolations,(157) have made out in that chapter a triple prophecy relating to the Deluge, Moses and Jesus, are mistaken, as in reality it bears directly on the punishment and loss of Atlantis and the penalty of indiscretion. The “Lord of the sheep” is Karma and the “Head of the Hierophants” also, the Supreme Initiator on earth. He says to Enoch, who implores him to save the leaders of the sheep from being devoured by the beasts of prey: I will cause a recital to be made before me ... how many they have delivered up to destruction, and ... what they will do; whether they will act as I have commanded them or not. Of this, however, they shall be ignorant; neither shalt thou make any explanation to them, neither shalt thou reprove them; but there shall be an account of all the destruction done by them in their respective seasons.(158) ... He looked in silence, rejoicing they were devoured, swallowed up, and carried off, and leaving them in the power of every beast for food....(159)

Those who labour under the impression that the Occultists of any nation reject the Bible, in its original text and meaning, are wrong. As well reject the Books of Thoth, the Chaldæan Kabalah or the Book of Dzyan itself. Occultists only reject the one‐sided interpretations and the human element in the Bible, which is an Occult, and therefore a sacred, volume as much as the others. And terrible indeed is the punishment of all those who transgress the permitted limits of secret revelations. From Prometheus to Jesus, and from Him to the highest Adept as to the lowest disciple, every revealer of mysteries has had to become a Chrestos, a “man of sorrow” and a martyr. “Beware,” said one of the greatest Masters, “of revealing the Mystery to those without”—to the profane, the Sadducee and the unbeliever. All the great Hierophants in history are shown ending their lives by violent deaths—Buddha,(160) Pythagoras, Zoroaster, most of the great Gnostics, the founders of their respective schools; and in our own more modern epoch a number of Fire‐Philosophers, of Rosicrucians and Adepts. All of these are shown—whether plainly or under the veil of allegory—as paying the penalty for the revelations they had made. This may seem to the profane reader only coincidence. To the Occultist, the death of every “Master” is significant, and appears pregnant with meaning. Where do we find in history that “Messenger” grand or humble, an Initiate or a Neophyte, who, when he was made the bearer of some hitherto concealed truth or truths, was not crucified and rent to shreds by the “dogs” of envy, malice and ignorance?

Such is the terrible Occult law; and he who does not feel in himself the heart of a lion to scorn the savage barking, and the soul of a dove to forgive the poor ignorant fools, let him give up the Sacred Science. To succeed, the Occultist must be fearless; he has to brave dangers, dishonour and death, to be forgiving, and to be silent on that which cannot be given. Those who have vainly laboured in that direction must wait in these days—as the Book of Enoch teaches—“until the evil‐doers be consumed” and the power of the wicked annihilated. It is not lawful for the Occultist to seek or even to thirst for revenge: let him

Wait until sin pass away; for their [the sinners’] names shall be blotted out of the holy books [the astral records], their seed shall be destroyed and their spirits slain.(161) Esoterically, Enoch is the “Son of man,” the first; and symbolically, the first Sub‐Race of the Fifth Root Race.(162) And if his name yields for purposes of numerical and astronomical glyphs the meaning of the solar year, or 365, in conformity to the age assigned to him in Genesis, it is because, being the seventh, he is, for Occult purposes, the personified period of the two preceding Races with their fourteen Sub‐Races. Therefore, he is shown in the Book as the great grandfather of Noah who, in his turn, is the personification of the mankind of the Fifth, struggling with that of the Fourth Root‐Race—the great period of the revealed and profaned Mysteries, when the “sons of God” coming down on Earth took for wives the daughters of men, and taught them the secrets of the Angels; in other words, when the “mind‐born” men of the Third Race mixed themselves with those of the Fourth, and the divine Science was gradually brought down by men to Sorcery.

The cosmogony of Hermes is as veiled as the Mosaic system, only it is upon its face far more in harmony with the doctrines of the Secret Sciences and even of Modern Science. Says the thrice great Trismegistus, “the hand that shaped the world out of formless pre‐existent matter is no hand”; to which Genesis is made to reply, “The world was created out of nothing,” although the Kabalah denies such a meaning in its opening sentences. The Kabalists have never, any more than have the Indian Âryans, admitted such an absurdity. With them, Fire, or Heat, and Motion(163) were chiefly instrumental in the formation of the world out of preëxisting Matter. The Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti of the Vedântins are the prototypes of the En Suph and Shekinah of the Kabalists. Aditi is the original of Sephira, and the Prajâpatis are the elder brothers of the Sephiroth. The nebular theory of Modern Science, with all its mysteries, is solved in the cosmogony of the Archaic Doctrine; and the paradoxical though very scientific enunciation, that “cooling causes contraction and contraction causes heat; therefore cooling causes heat,” is shown as the chief agency in the formation of the worlds, and especially of our sun and solar system.

All this is contained within the small compass of Sepher Jetzirah in its thirty‐two wonderful Ways of Wisdom, signed “Jah Jehovah Sabaoth,” for whomsoever has the key to its hidden meaning. As to the dogmatic or theological interpretation of the first verses in Genesis it is pertinently answered in the same book, where speaking of the Three Mothers, Air, Water and Fire, the writer describes them as a balance with The good in one scale, the evil in the other, and the oscillating tongue of the Balance between them.(164) One of the secret names of the One Eternal and Ever‐Present Deity, was in every country the same, and it has preserved to this day a phonetic likeness in the various languages. The Aum of the Hindus, the sacred syllable, had become the Ἀιών with the Greeks, and the Ævum with the Romans—the Pan or All. The “thirtieth way” is called in the Sepher Jetzirah the “gathering understanding,” because Thereby gather the celestial adepts judgments of the stars and celestial signs, and their observations of the orbits are the perfection of science.(165) The thirty‐second and last is called therein the “serving understanding,” and it is so‐called because it is A disposer of all those that are serving in the work of the Seven Planets, according to their Hosts.(166)

The “work” was Initiation, during which all the mysteries connected with the “Seven Planets” were divulged, and also the mystery of the “Sun‐ Initiate” with his seven radiances or beams cut off—the glory and triumph of the anointed, the Christos; a mystery that makes plain the rather puzzling expression of Clemens: For we shall find that very many of the dogmas that are held by such sects [of Barbarian and Hellenic Philosophy] as have not become utterly senseless, and are not cut out from the order of nature [“by cutting off Christ,”(167) or rather Chrestos] ... correspond in their origin and with the truth as a whole.(168)

In Isis Unveiled,(169) the reader will find fuller information than can be given here on the Zohar and its author, the great Kabalist, Simeon Ben Jochai. It is said there that on account of his being known to be in possession of the secret knowledge and of the Mercaba, which insured the reception of the “Word,” his very life was endangered, and he had to fly to the wilderness, where he lived in a cave for twelve years surrounded by faithful disciples, and finally died there amid signs and wonders.(170) His teachings on the origin of the Secret Doctrine, or, as he also calls it, the Secret Wisdom, are the same as those found in the East, with the exception that in place of the Chief of a Host of Planetary Spirits he puts “God,” saying that this Wisdom was first taught by God himself to a certain number of Elect Angels; whereas in the Eastern Doctrine the saying is different, as will be seen. Some synthetic and kabalistic studies on the sacred Book of Enoch and the Taro (Rota) are before us. We quote from the MS. copy of a Western Occultist, which is prefaced by these words:

There is but one Law, one Principle, one Agent, one Truth and one Word. That which is above is analogically as that which is below. All that which is, is the result of quantities and of equilibriums. The axiom of Éliphas Lévi and this triple epigraph show the identity of thought between the East and the West with regard to the Secret Science which, as the same MS. tells us, is: The key of things concealed, the key of the sanctuary. This is the Sacred Word which gives to the Adept the supreme reason of Occultism and its Mysteries. It is the Quintessence of Philosophies and of Dogmas; it is the Alpha and Omega; it is the Light, Life and Wisdom Universal. The Taro of the sacred Book of Enoch, or Rota, is prefaced, moreover, with this explanation:

The antiquity of this Book is lost in the night of time. It is of Indian origin, and goes back to an epoch long before Moses.... It is written upon detached leaves, which at the first were of fine gold and precious metals.... It is symbolical, and its combinations adapt themselves to all the wonders of the Spirit. Altered by its passage across the Ages, it is nevertheless preserved—thanks to the ignorance of the curious—in its types and its most important primitive figures.

This is the Rota of Enoch, now called Taro of Enoch, to which De Mirville alludes, as we saw, as the means used for “evil Magic,” the “metallic plates [or leaves] escaped from destruction during the Deluge” and which are attributed by him to Cain. They have escaped the Deluge for the simple reason that this Flood was not “Universal.” And it is said to be “of Indian origin,” because its origin is with the Indian Âryans of the first Sub‐Race of the Fifth Root‐Race, before the final destruction of the last stronghold of Atlantis. But, if it originated with the forefathers of the primitive Hindus, it was not in India that it was first used. Its origin is still more ancient and must be traced beyond and into the Himaleh,(171) the Snowy Range. It was born in that mysterious locality which no one is able to locate, and which is the despair of both Geographers and Christian Theologians—the region in which the Brâhman places his Kailâsa, the Mount Sumeru, and the Pârvatî Pamîr, transformed by the Greeks into Paropamisus.

Round this locality, which still exists, the traditions of the Garden of Eden were built. From these regions the Greeks obtained their Parnassus(172); and thence proceeded most of the biblical personages, some of them in their day men, some demi‐gods and heroes, some—though very few—myths, the astronomical doubles of the former. Abram was one of them—a Chaldæan Brâhman,(173) says the legend, transformed later, after he had repudiated his Gods and left his Ur (pur, “town”?) in Chaldæa, into A‐ brahm(174) (or A‐braham) “no‐brâhman” who emigrated. Abram becoming the “father of many nations” is thus explained. The student of Occultism has to bear in mind that every God and hero in ancient Pantheons (that of the Bible included), has three biographies in the narrative, so to say, running parallel with each other and each connected with one of the aspects of the hero—historical, astronomical and perfectly mythical, the last serving to connect the other two together and smooth away the asperities and discordancies in the narrative, and gathering into one or more symbols the verities of the first two. Localities are made to correspond with astronomical and even with psychic events. History was thus made captive by ancient Mystery, to become later on the great Sphynx of the nineteenth century. Only, instead of devouring her too dull querists who will unriddle

her whether she acknowledges it or not, she is desecrated and mangled by the modern Œdipus, before he forces her into the sea of speculations in which the Sphynx is drowned and perishes. This has now become self‐evident, not only through the Secret Teachings, parsimoniously as they may be given, but by earnest and learned Symbologists and even Geometricians. The Key to the Hebrew Egyptian Mystery, in which a learned Mason of Cincinnati, Mr. Ralston Skinner, unveils the riddle of a God, with such ungodly ways about him as the Biblical Jah‐ve, is followed by the establishment of a learned society under the presidentship of a gentleman from Ohio and four vice‐presidents, one of whom is Piazzi Smyth, the well‐known Astronomer and Egyptologist. The Director of the Royal Observatory in Scotland and author of The Great Pyramid, Pharaonic by name, Humanitarian by fact, its Marvels, Mysteries, and its Teachings, is seeking to prove the same problem as the American author and Mason: namely, that the English system of measurement is the same as that used by the ancient Egyptians in the construction of their Pyramid, or in Mr. Skinner’s own words that the Pharaonic “source of measures” originated the “British inch and the ancient cubit.” It “originated” much more than this, as will be fully demonstrated before the end of

the next century. Not only is everything in Western religion related to measures, geometrical figures, and time‐calculations, the principal period‐durations being founded on most of the historical personages,(175) but the latter are also connected with heaven and earth truly, only with the Indo‐Âryan heaven and earth, not with those of Palestine.

The prototypes of nearly all the biblical personages are to be sought for in the early Pantheon of India. It is the “Mind‐born” Sons of Brahmâ, or rather of the Dhyâni‐Pitara (the “Father‐Gods”), the “Sons of Light,” who have given birth to the “Sons of Earth”—the Patriarchs. For if the Rig Veda and its three sister Vedas have been “milked out from fire, air and sun,” or Agni, Indra, and Sûrya, as Manu‐Smriti tells us, the Old Testament was most undeniably “milked out” of the most ingenious brains of Hebrew Kabalists, partly in Egypt and partly in Babylonia—“the seat of Sanskrit literature and Brâhman learning from her origin,” as Colonel Vans Kennedy truly declared. One of such copies was Abram or Abraham, into whose bosom every orthodox Jew hopes to be gathered after death, that bosom being localised as “heaven in the clouds” or Abhra.(176)