The Secret Doctrine

Most decidedly—and it is not the Theosophists who will ever deny the fact—there are good as well as bad spirits, beneficent and malevolent “Gods” in all ages. The whole trouble was, and still is, to know which is which. And this, we maintain, the Christian Church knows no more than her profane flock. If anything proves this, it is, most decidedly, the numberless theological blunders made in this direction. It is idle to call the Gods of the heathen “devils,” and then to copy their symbols in such a servile manner, enforcing the distinction between the good and the bad with no weightier proof than that they are respectively Christian and Pagan. The planets—the elements of the Zodiac—have not figured only at Heliopolis as the twelve stones called the “mysteries of the elements” (elementorum arcana). On the authority of many an orthodox Christian writer they were found also in Solomon’s temple, and may be seen to this day in several old Italian churches, and even in Notre Dame of Paris. One would really say that the warning in Clement’s Stromateis has been given in vain, though he is supposed to quote words pronounced by St. Peter. He says:

Do not adore God as the Jews do, who think they are the only ones to know Deity and fail to perceive that, instead of God, they are worshipping angels, the lunar months, and the moon.(448) Who after reading the above can fail to feel surprise that, notwithstanding such understanding of the Jewish mistake, the Christians are still worshipping the Jewish Jehovah, the Spirit who spoke through his teraphim! That this is so, and that Jehovah was simply the “tutelary genius,” or spirit, of the people of Israel—only one of the pneumata tōn stoicheiōn (or “great spirits of the elements”), not even a high “Planetary”—is demonstrated on the authority of St. Paul and of Clemens Alexandrinus, if the words they use have any meaning. With the latter, the word στοιχεῖα signifies not only elements, but also Generative cosmological principles, and notably the signs [or constellations] of the Zodiac, of the months, days, the sun and the moon.(449) The expression is used by Aristotle in the same sense. He says, τῶν ἀστρῶν στοιχεῖα,(450) while Diogenes Laertius calls δώδεκα στοιχεία, the twelve signs of the Zodiac.(451) Now having the positive evidence of Ammianus Marcellinus to the effect that Ancient divination was always accomplished with the help of the spirits of the elements,

or the same πνεάματα τῶν στοιχείων, and seeing in the Bible numerous passages that (a) the Israelites, including Saul and David, resorted to the same divination, and used the same means; and (b) that it was their “Lord”—namely, Jehovah—who answered them, what else can we believe Jehovah to be than a “spiritus elementorum”? Hence one sees no great difference between the “idol of the moon”—the Chaldæan teraphim through which spoke Saturn—and the idol of urim and thummim, the organ of Jehovah. Occult rites, scientific at the beginning—and forming the most solemn and sacred of sciences—have fallen through the degeneration of mankind into Sorcery, now called “superstition.” As Diogenes explains in his History: The Kaldhi, having made long observations on the planets and knowing better than anyone else the meaning of their motions and their influences, predict to people their futurity. They regard their doctrine of the five great orbs—which they call interpreters, and we, planets—as the most important. And though they allege that it is the sun that furnishes them with most of the predictions for great forthcoming events, yet they worship more particularly Saturn. Such predictions made to a number of kings, especially to Alexander, Antigonus, Seleucus, Nicanor, etc., ... have been so marvellously realised that people were struck with admiration.(452)

It follows from the above that the declaration made by Qû‐tâmy, the Chaldæan Adept—to the effect that all that he means to impart in his work to the profane had been told by Saturn to the moon, by the latter to her idol, and by that idol, or teraphim, to himself, the scribe—no more implied idolatry than did the practice of the same method by King David. One fails to perceive in it, therefore, either an apocrypha or a “fairy‐ tale.” The above‐named Chaldæan Initiate lived at a period far anterior to that ascribed to Moses, in whose day the Sacred Science of the sanctuary was still in a flourishing condition. It began to decline only when such scoffers as Lucian had been admitted, and the pearls of the Occult Science had been too often thrown to the hungry dogs of criticism and ignorance.

Few of our students of Occultism have had the opportunity of examining Egyptian papyri—those living, or rather re‐arisen witnesses that Magic, good and bad, was practised many thousands of years back into the night of time. The use of the papyrus prevailed up to the eighth century of our era, when it was given up, and its fabrication fell into disuse. The most curious of the exhumed documents were immediately purchased and taken away from the country. Yet there are a number of beautifully‐preserved papyri at Bulak, Cairo, though the greater number have never been yet properly read.(453) Others—those that have been carried away and may be found in the museums and public libraries of Europe—have fared no better. In the days of the Vicomte de Rougé, some twenty‐five years ago, only a few of them “were two‐thirds deciphered;” and among those some most interesting legends, inserted parenthetically and for purposes of explaining royal expenses, are in the Register of the Sacred Accounts.

This may be verified in the so‐called “Harris” and Anastasi collections, and in some papyri recently exhumed; one of these gives an account of a whole series of magic feats performed before the Pharaohs Ramses II. and III. A curious document, the first‐mentioned, truly. It is a papyrus of the fifteenth century B.C., written during the reign of Ramses V., the last king of the eighteenth dynasty, and is the work of the scribe Thoutmes, who notes down some of the events with regard to defaulters occurring on the twelfth and thirteenth days of the month of Paophs. The document shows that in those days of “miracles” in Egypt the taxpayers were not found among the living alone, but every mummy was included. All and everything was taxed; and the Khou of the mummy, in default, was punished “by the priest‐exorciser, who deprived it of the liberty of action.” Now what was the Khou? Simply the astral body, or the aerial simulacrum of the corpse or the mummy—that which in China is called the Hauen, and in India the Bhût.

Upon reading this papyrus to‐day, an Orientalist is pretty sure to fling it aside in disgust, attributing the whole affair to the crass superstition of the ancients. Truly phenomenal and inexplicable must have been the dullness and credulity of that otherwise highly philosophical and civilized nation if it could carry on for so many consecutive ages, for thousands of years, such a system of mutual deception! A system whereby the people were deceived by the priests, the priests by their King‐ Hierophants, and the latter themselves were cheated by the ghosts, which were, in their turn, but “the fruits of hallucination.” The whole of antiquity, from Menes to Cleopatra, from Manu to Vikramaditya, from Orpheus down to the last Roman augur, were hysterical, we are told. This must have been so, if the whole were not a system of fraud. Life and death were guided by, and were under the sway of, sacred “conjuring.” For there is hardly a papyrus, though it be a simple document of purchase and sale, a deed belonging to daily transactions of the most ordinary kind, that has not Magic, white or black, mixed up in it. It looks as though the sacred scribes of the Nile had purposely, and in a prophetic spirit of race‐ hatred, carried out the (to them) most unprofitable task of deceiving and puzzling the generations of a future white race of unbelievers yet unborn! Anyhow, the papyri are full of Magic, as are likewise the stelæ. We learn, moreover, that the papyrus was not merely a smooth‐surfaced parchment, a fabric made of

Ligneous matter from a shrub, the pellicles of which superposed one over the other formed a kind of writing‐paper; but that the shrub itself, the implements and tools for fabricating the parchment, etc., were all previously subjected to a process of magical preparation—according to the ordinance of the Gods, who had taught that art, as they had all others, to their Priest‐Hierophants. There are, however, some modern Orientalists who seem to have an inkling of the true nature of such things, and especially of the analogy and the relations that exist between the Magic of old and our modern‐day phenomena. Chabas is one of these, for he indulges, in his translation of the “Harris” papyrus, in the following reflections:

Without having recourse to the imposing ceremonies of the wand of Hermes, or to the obscure formulæ of an unfathomable mysticism, a mesmerizer in our own day will, by means of a few passes, disturb the organic faculties of a subject, inculcate the knowledge of foreign languages, transport him to a far‐distant country, or into secret places, make him guess the thoughts of those absent, read in closed letters, etc.... The antre of the modern sybil is a modest‐looking room, the tripod has made room for a small round table, a hat, a plate, a piece of furniture of the most vulgar kind; only the latter is even superior to the oracle of antiquity [how does M. Chabas know?], inasmuch as the latter only spoke,(454) while the oracle of our day writes its answers. At the command of the medium the spirits of the dead descend to make the furniture creak, and the authors of bygone centuries deliver to us works written by them beyond the grave. Human credulity has no narrower limits to‐day than it had at the dawn of historical times.... As teratology is an essential part of general physiology now, so the pretended Occult Sciences occupy in the annals of humanity a place which is not without its importance, and deserve for more than one reason the attention of the philosopher and the historian.(455)

Selecting the two Champollions, Lenormand, Bunsen, Vicomte de Rougé, and several other Egyptologists to serve as our witnesses, let us see what they say of Egyptian Magic and Sorcery. They may get out of the difficulty by accounting for each “superstitious belief” and practice by attributing them to a chronic psychological and physiological derangement, and to collective hysteria, if they like; still facts are there, staring us in the face, from the hundreds of these mysterious papyri, exhumed after a rest of four, five, and more thousands of years, with their magical containments and evidence of antediluvian Magic.

A small library, found at Thebes, has furnished fragments of every kind of ancient literature, many of which are dated, and several of which have thus been assigned to the accepted age of Moses. Books or manuscripts on ethics, history, religion and medicine, calendars and registers, poems and novels—everything—may be had in that precious collection; and old legends—traditions of long forgotten ages (please to remark this: legends recorded during the Mosaic period)—are already referred to therein as belonging to an immense antiquity, to the period of the dynasties of Gods and Giants. Their chief contents, however, are formulæ of exorcisms against black Magic, and funeral rituals: true breviaries, or the vade mecum of every pilgrim‐traveller in eternity. These funeral texts are generally written in hieratic characters. At the head of the papyrus is invariably placed a series of scenes, showing the defunct appearing before a host of Deities successively, who have to examine him. Then comes the judgment of the Soul, while the third act begins with the launching of that Soul into the divine light. Such papyri are often forty feet long.(456) The following is extracted from general descriptions. It will show how the moderns understand and interpret Egyptian (and other) Symbology.

The papyrus of the priest Nevo‐loo (or Nevolen), at the Louvre, may be selected for one case. First of all there is the bark carrying the coffin, a black chest containing the defunct’s mummy. His mother, Ammenbem‐Heb, and his sister, Hooissanoob, are near; at the head and feet of the corpse stand Nephtys and Isis clothed in red, and near them a priest of Osiris clad in his panther’s skin, his censer in his right hand, and four assistants carrying the mummy’s intestines. The coffin is received by the God Anubis (of the jackal’s head), from the hands of female weepers. Then the Soul rises from its mummy and the Khou (astral body) of the defunct. The former begins its worship of the four genii of the East, of the sacred birds, and of Ammon as a ram. Brought into the “Palace of Truth,” the defunct is before his judges. While the Soul, a scarabæus, stands in the presence of Osiris, his astral Khou is at the door. Much laughter is provoked in the West by the invocations to various Deities, presiding over each of the limbs of the mummy, and of the living human body. Only judge: in the papyrus of the mummy Petamenoph “the anatomy becomes theographical,” “astrology is applied to physiology,” or rather “to the anatomy of the human body, the heart and the soul.” The defunct’s “hair belongs to the Nile, his eyes to Venus (Isis), his ears to Macedo, the guardian of the tropics; his nose to Anubis, his left temple to the Spirit dwelling in the sun.... What a series of intolerable absurdities and ignoble prayers ... to Osiris, imploring him to give the defunct in the other world, geese, eggs, pork, etc.”(457)

It might have been prudent, perhaps, to have waited to ascertain whether all these terms of “geese, eggs, and pork” had not some other Occult meaning. The Indian Yogî who, in an exoteric work, is invited to drink a certain intoxicating liquor till he loses his senses, was also regarded as a drunkard representing his sect and class, until it was found that the Esoteric sense of that “spirit” was quite different: that it meant divine light, and stood for the ambrosia of Secret Wisdom. The symbols of the dove and the lamb which abound now in Eastern and Western Christian Churches may also be exhumed long ages hence, and speculated upon as objects of present‐day worship. And then some “Occidentalist” in the forthcoming ages of high Asiatic civilization and learning, may write karmically upon the same as follows: “The ignorant and superstitious Gnostics and Agnostics of the sects of ‘Pope’ and ‘Calvin’ (the two monster Gods of the Dynamite‐Christian period) adored a pigeon and a sheep!” There will be portable hand‐fetishes in all and every age for the satisfaction and reverence of the rabble, and the Gods of one race will always be degraded into devils by the next one. The cycles revolve within the depths of Lethe, and Karma shall reach Europe as it has Asia and her religions.

Nevertheless, This grand and dignified language [in the Book of the Dead], these pictures full of majesty, this orthodoxy of the whole evidently proving a very precise doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul and its personal survival, as shown by De Rougé and the Abbé Van Drival, have charmed some Orientalists. The psychostasy (or judgment of the Soul) is certainly a whole poem to him who can read it correctly and interpret the images therein. In that picture we see Osiris, the horned, with his sceptre hooked at the end—the original of the pastoral bishop’s crook or crosier—the Soul hovering above, encouraged by Tmei, daughter of the Sun of Righteousness and Goddess of Mercy and Justice; Horus and Anubis, weighing the deeds of the soul. One of these papyri shows the Soul found guilty of gluttony sentenced to be re‐born on earth as a hog; forthwith comes the learned conclusion of an Orientalist, “This is an indisputable proof of belief in metempsychosis, of transmigration into animals,” etc. Perchance the Occult law of Karma might explain the sentence otherwise. It may, for all our Orientalists know, refer to the physiological vice in store for the Soul when re‐incarnated—a vice that will lead that personality into a thousand and one scrapes and misadventures.

Tortures to begin with, then metempsychosis during 3,000 years as a hawk, an angel, a lotus‐flower, a heron, a stork, a swallow, a serpent, and a crocodile: one sees that the consolation of such a progress was far from being satisfactory,

argues De Mirville, in his work on the Satanic character of the Gods of Egypt.(458) Again, a simple suggestion may throw on this a great light. Are the Orientalists quite sure they have read correctly the “metempsychosis during 3,000 years”? The Occult Doctrine teaches that Karma waits at the threshold of Devachan (the Amenti of the Egyptians) for 3,000 years; that then the eternal Ego is reincarnated de novo, to be punished in its new temporary personality for sins committed in the preceding birth, and the suffering for which, in one shape or another, will atone for past misdeeds. And the hawk, the lotus‐flower, the heron, serpent, or bird—every object in Nature, in short—had its symbolical and manifold meaning in ancient religious emblems. The man who all his life acted hypocritically and passed for a good man, but had been in sober reality watching like a bird of prey his chance to pounce upon his fellow‐ creatures, and had deprived them of their property, will be sentenced by Karma to bear the punishment for hypocrisy and covetousness in a future life. What will it be? Since every human unit has ultimately to progress in its evolution, and since that “man” will be reborn at some future time as a good, sincere, well‐meaning man, his sentence to be re‐incarnated as a hawk may simply mean that he will then be regarded metaphorically as such. That, notwithstanding his real, good, intrinsic qualities, he will, perhaps during a long life, be unjustly and falsely charged with and suspected of greed and hypocrisy and of secret exactions, all of which will make him suffer more than he can bear.

The law of retribution can never err, and yet how many such innocent victims of false appearance and human malice do we not meet in this world of incessant illusion, of mistake and deliberate wickedness. We see them every day, and they may be found within the personal experience of each of us. What Orientalist can say with any degree of assurance that he has understood the religions of old? The metaphorical language of the priests has never been more than superficially revealed, and the hieroglyphics have been very poorly mastered to this day.(459)

What says Isis Unveiled on this question of Egyptian rebirth and transmigration, and does it clash with anything that we say now?

It will be observed that this philosophy of cycles, which was allegorized by the Egyptian Hierophants in the “cycle of necessity,” explains at the same time the allegory of the “Fall of Man.” According to the Arabian descriptions, each of the seven chambers of the pyramids—those grandest of all cosmic symbols—was known by the name of a planet. The peculiar architecture of the pyramids shows in itself the drift of the metaphysical thought of their builders. The apex is lost in the clear blue sky of the land of the Pharaohs, and typifies the primordial point lost in the unseen Universe from whence started the first race of the spiritual prototypes of man. Each mummy from the moment that it was embalmed lost its physical individuality in one sense: it symbolised the human race. Placed in such a way as was best calculated to aid the exit of the “Soul,” the latter had to pass through the seven planetary chambers before it made its exit through the symbolical apex. Each chamber typified, at the same time, one of the seven spheres [of our Chain] and one of the seven higher types of physico‐spiritual humanity alleged to be above our own. Every 3000 years the soul, representative of its race, had to return to its primal point of departure before it underwent another evolution into a more perfected spiritual and physical transformation. We must go deep indeed into the abstruse metaphysics of Oriental mysticism before we can realise fully the infinitude of the subjects that were embraced at one sweep by the majestic thought of its exponents.(460)

This is all Magic when once the details are given; and it relates at the same time to the evolution of our seven Root‐Races, each with the characteristics of its special guardian or “God,” and his Planet. The astral body of each Initiate, after death, had to reënact in its funeral mystery the drama of the birth and death of each Race—the past and the future—and pass through the seven “planetary chambers,” which, as said above, typified also the seven spheres of our Chain. The mystic doctrine of Eastern Occultism teaches that _“__The Spiritual Ego [not the astral Khou] has to revisit, before it incarnates into a new body, the scenes it left at its last disincarnation. It __ has to see for itself and take cognizance of all the effects produced by the causes [the Nidânas] generated by its actions in a previous life; that, seeing, it should recognize the justice of the decree, and help the law of Retribution [Karma] instead of impeding it.__”_(461)

The translations by Vicomte de Rougé of several Egyptian papyri, imperfect as they may be, give us one advantage: they show undeniably the presence in them of white, divine Magic, as well as of Sorcery, and the practice of both throughout all the dynasties. The Book of the Dead, far older than Genesis(462) or any other book of the Old Testament, shows it in every line. It is full of incessant prayers and exorcisms against the Black Art. Therein Osiris is the conqueror of the “aerial demons.” The worshipper implores his help against Matat, “from whose eye proceeds the invisible arrow.” This “invisible arrow” that proceeds from the eye of the Sorcerer (whether living or dead) and that “circulates throughout the world,” is the evil eye—cosmic in its origin, terrestrial in its effects on the microcosmical plane. It is not the Latin Christians whom it behoves to view this as a superstition. Their Church indulges in the same belief, and has even a prayer against the “arrow circulating in darkness.”

The most interesting of all those documents, however, is the “Harris” papyrus, called in France “le papyrus magique de Chabas,” as it was first translated by the latter. It is a manuscript written in hieratic characters, translated, commented upon, and published in 1860 by M. Chabas, but purchased at Thebes in 1855 by Mr. Harris. Its age is given at between twenty‐eight and thirty centuries. We quote a few extracts from these translations: Calendar of lucky and unlucky days: ... He who makes a bull work on the 20th of the month of Pharmuths will surely die; he who on the 24th day of the same month pronounces the name of Seth aloud will see trouble reigning in his house from that day; ... he who on the 5th day of Patchous leaves his house falls sick and dies. Exclaims the translator, whose cultured instincts are revolted: If one had not these words under our eyes, one could never believe in such servitude at the epoch of the Ramessides.(463)

We belong to the nineteenth century of the Christian era, and are therefore at the height of civilization, and under the benign sway and enlightening influence of the Christian Church, instead of being subject to the Pagan Gods of old. Nevertheless we personally know dozens, and have heard of hundreds, of educated, highly‐intellectual persons who would as soon think of committing suicide as of starting on any business on a Friday, of dining at a table where thirteen sit down, or of beginning a long journey on a Monday. Napoleon the Great became pale when he saw three candles lit on a table. Moreover, we may gladly concur with De Mirville in this, at any rate, that such “superstitions” are “the outcome of observation and experience.” If the former had never agreed with facts, the authority of the Calendar, he thinks, would not have lasted for a week. But to resume: Genethliacal influences: The child born on the 5th day of Paophi will be killed by a bull; on the 27th by a serpent. Born on the 4th of the month of Athyr, he will succumb to blows. This is a question of horoscopic predictions; judiciary astrology is firmly believed in in our own age, and has been proven to be scientifically possible by Kepler.

Of the Khous two kinds were distinguished: first, the justified Khous, i.e., those who had been absolved from sin by Osiris when they were brought before his tribunal; these lived a second life. Secondly, there were the guilty Khous, “the Khous dead a second time;” these were the damned. Second death did not annihilate them, but they were doomed to wander about and to torture people. Their existence had phases analogous to those of the living man, a bond so intimate between the dead and the living that one sees how the observation of religious funeral rites and exorcisms and prayers (or rather magic incantations) should have become necessary.(464) Says one prayer: Do not permit that the venom should master his limbs [of the defunct], ... that he should be penetrated by any male dead, or any female dead; or that the shadow of any spirit should haunt him (or her).(465) M. Chabas adds:

These Khous were beings of that kind to which human beings belong after their death; they were exorcised in the name of the god Chons.... The Manes then could enter the bodies of the living, haunt and obsess them. Formulæ and talismans, and especially statues or divine figures, were used against such formidable invasions.(466)... They were combated by the help of the divine power, the god Chons being famed for such deliverances. The Khou, in obeying the orders of the god, none the less preserved the precious faculty inherent in him of accommodating himself in any other body at will. The most frequent formula of exorcism is as follows. It is very suggestive: Men, gods, elect, dead spirits, amous, negroes, menti‐u, do not look at this soul to show cruelty toward it. This is addressed to all who were acquainted with Magic. “Amulets and mystic names.” This chapter is called “very mysterious,” and contains invocations to Penhakahakaherher and Uranaokarsankrobite, and other such easy names. Says Chabas: We have proofs that mystic names similar to these were in common use during the stay of the Israelites in Egypt.

And we may add that, whether got from the Egyptians or the Hebrews, these are sorcery names. The student can consult the works of Éliphas Lévi, such as his Grimoire des Sorciers. In these exorcisms Osiris is called Mamuram‐Kahab, and is implored to prevent the twice‐dead Khou from attacking the justified Khou and his next of kin, since the accursed (astral spook) Can take any form he likes and penetrate at will into any locality or body. In studying Egyptian papyri, one begins to find that the subjects of the Pharaohs were not very much inclined to the Spiritism or Spiritualism of their day. They dreaded the “blessed spirit” of the dead more than a Roman Catholic dreads the devil! But how uncalled‐for and unjust is the charge against the Gods of Egypt that they are these “devils,” and against the priests of exercising their magic powers with the help of “the fallen angels,” may be seen in more than one papyrus. For one often finds in them records of Sorcerers sentenced to the death penalty, as though they had been living under the protection of the holy Christian Inquisition. Here is one case during the reign of Ramses III., quoted by De Mirville from Chabas.

The first page begins with these words: “From the place where I am to the people of my country.” There is reason to suppose, as one will see, that the person who wrote this, in the first personal pronoun, is a magistrate making a report, and attesting it before men, after an accustomed formula, for here is the main part of this accusation: “This Hai, a bad man, was an overseer [or perhaps keeper] of sheep: he said: ‘Can I have a book that will give me great power?’... And a book was given him with the formulæ of Ramses‐Meri‐Amen, the great God, his royal master; and he succeeded in getting a divine power enabling him to fascinate men. He also succeeded in building a place and in finding a very deep place, and produced men of Menh [magical homunculi?] and ... love‐writings ... stealing them from the Khen [the occult library of the palace] by the hand of the stonemason Atirma, ... by forcing one of the supervisors to go aside, and acting magically on the others. Then he sought to read futurity by them and succeeded. All the horrors and abominations he had conceived in his heart, he did them really, he practised them all, and other great crimes as well, such as the horror [?] of all the Gods and Goddesses. Likewise let the prescriptions great [severe?] unto death be done unto him, such as the divine words order to be done to him.” The accusation does not stop there, it specifies the crimes. The first line speaks of a hand paralysed by means of the men of Menh, to whom it is simply said, “Let such an effect be produced,” and it is produced. Then come the great abominations, such as deserve death.... The judges who had examined him (the culprit) reported saying, “Let him die according to the order of Pharaoh, and according to what is written in the lines of the divine language.”

M. Chabas remarks: Documents of this kind abound, but the task of analysing them all cannot be attempted with the limited means we possess.(467) Then there is an inscription taken in the temple of Khous, the God who had power over the elementaries, at Thebes. It was presented by M. Prisse d’Avenne to the Imperial—now National—Library of Paris, and was translated first by Mr. S. Birch. There is in it a whole romance of Magic. It dates from the day of Ramses XII.(468) of the twentieth dynasty; it is from the rendering of M. de Rougé as quoted by De Mirville, that we now translate it. This monument tells us that one of the Ramses of the twentieth dynasty, while collecting at Naharain the tributes paid to Egypt by the Asiatic nations, fell in love with a daughter of the chief of Bakhten, one of his tributaries, married her and, bringing her to Egypt with him, raised her to the dignity of Queen, under the royal name of Ranefrou. Soon afterwards the chief of Bakhten dispatched a messenger to Ramses, praying the assistance of Egyptian science for Bent‐Rosh, a young sister of the queen, attacked with illness in all her limbs.

The messenger asked expressly that a “wise‐man” [an Initiate—Reh‐ Het] should be sent. The king gave orders that all the hierogrammatists of the palace and the guardians of the secret books of the Khen should be sent for, and choosing from among them the royal scribe Thoth‐em‐Hebi, an intelligent man, well versed in writing, charged him to examine the sickness. Arrived at Bakhten, Thoth‐em‐Hebi found that Bent‐Rosh was possessed by a Khou (Em‐seh‐’eru ker h’ou), but declared himself too weak to engage in a struggle with him.(469) Eleven years elapsed, and the young girl’s state did not improve. The chief of Bakhten again sent his messenger, and on his formal demand Khons‐peiri‐Seklerem‐Zam, one of the divine forms of Chons—God the Son in the Theban Trinity—was dispatched to Bakhten.... The God [incarnate] having saluted (besa) the patient, she felt immediately relieved, and the Khou who was in her manifested forthwith his intention of obeying the orders of the God. “O great God, who forcest the phantom to vanish,” said the Khou, “I am thy slave and I will return whence I came!”(470)

Evidently Khons‐peiri‐Seklerem‐Zam was a real Hierophant of the class named the “Sons of God,” since he is said to be one of the forms of the God Khons; which means either that he was considered as an incarnation of that God—an Avatâra—or that he was a full Initiate. The same text shows that the temple to which he belonged was one of those to which a School of Magic was attached. There was a Khen in it, or that portion of the temple which was inaccessible to all but the highest priest, the library or depository of secret works, to the study and care of which special priests were appointed (those whom all the Pharaohs consulted in cases of great importance), and wherein they communicated with the Gods and obtained advice from them. Does not Lucian tell his readers in his description of the temple of Hierapolis, of “Gods who manifest their presence independently?”(471) And further on that he once travelled with a priest from Memphis, who told him he had passed twenty‐three years in the subterranean crypts of his temple, receiving instructions on Magic from the Goddess Isis herself. Again we read that it was by Mercury himself that the great Sesostris (Ramses II.) was instructed in the Sacred Sciences. On which Jablonsky remarks that we have here the reason why Amun (Ammon)—whence he thinks our “Amen” is derived—was a real evocation to the light.(472)

In the Papyrus Anastasi, which teems with various formulæ for the evocation of Gods, and with exorcisms against Khous and the elementary demons, the seventh paragraph shows plainly the difference made between the real Gods, the Planetary Angels, and those shells of mortals which are left behind in Kâma‐loka, as though to tempt mankind and to puzzle it the more hopelessly in its vain search after the truth, outside the Occult Sciences and the veil of Initiation. This seventh verse says with regard to such divine evocations or theomantic consultations: One must invoke that divine and great name(473) only in cases of absolute necessity, and when one feels absolutely pure and irreproachable. Not so in the formula of black Magic. Reuvens, speaking of the two rituals of Magic of the Anastasi collection, remarks that they Undeniably form the most instructive commentary upon the Egyptian mysteries attributed to Jamblichus, and the best pendant to that classical work, for understanding the thaumaturgy of the philosophical sects, thaumaturgy based on ancient Egyptian religion. According to Jamblichus, thaumaturgy was exercised by the ministry of secondary genii.(474) Reuvens closes with a remark which is very suggestive and is very important to the Occultists who defend the antiquity and genuineness of their documents, for he says:

All that he [Jamblichus] gives out as theology we find as history in our papyri. But then how deny the authenticity, the credibility, and, beyond all, the trustworthiness of those classical writers, who all wrote about Magic and its Mysteries in a most worshipful spirit of admiration and reverence? Listen to Pindarus, who exclaims: Happy he who descends into the grave thus initiated, for he knows the end of his life and the kingdom(475) given by Jupiter.(476) Or to Cicero: Initiation not only teaches us to feel happy in this life, but also to die with better hope.(477) Plato, Pausanias, Strabo, Diodorus and dozens of others bring their evidence as to the great boon of Initiation; all the great as well as the partially‐initiated Adepts, share the enthusiasm of Cicero. Does not Plutarch, thinking of what he had learned in his initiation, console himself for the loss of his wife? Had he not obtained the certitude at the Mysteries of Bacchus that “the soul [spirit] remains incorruptible, and that there is a hereafter”?... Aristophanes went even farther: “All those who participated in the Mysteries,” he says, “led an innocent, calm, and holy life; they died looking for the light of the Eleusinian Fields [Devachan], while the rest could never expect anything but eternal darkness [ignorance?].

“... And when one thinks about the importance attached by the States to the principle and the correct celebration of the Mysteries, to the stipulations made in their treaties for the security of their celebration, one sees to what degree those Mysteries had so long occupied their first and their last thought. “It was the greatest among public as well as private preoccupations, and this is only natural, since according to Döllinger, ‘the Eleusinian Mysteries were viewed as the efflorescence of all the Greek religion, as the purest essence of all its conceptions.’ ”(478) Not only conspirators were refused admittance therein, but those who had not denounced them; traitors, perjurers, debauchees,(479) ... so that Porphyry could say that: “Our soul has to be at the moment of death as it was during the Mysteries, i.e., exempt from any blemishes, passion, envy, hatred, or anger.”(480) Truly, Magic was considered a Divine Science which led to a participation in the attributes of the Divinity itself.(481) Herodotus, Thales, Parmenides, Empedocles, Orpheus, Pythagoras, all went, each in his day, in search of the wisdom of Egypt’s great Hierophants, in the hope of solving the problems of the universe. Says Philo: The Mysteries were known to unveil the secret operations of Nature.(482)

The prodigies accomplished by the priests of theurgic magic are so well authenticated and the evidence—if human testimony is worth anything at all—is so overwhelming that, rather than confess that the pagan theurgists far outrivalled the Christians in miracles, Sir David Brewster conceded to the former the greatest proficiency in physics and everything that pertains to natural philosophy. Science finds herself in a very disagreeable dilemma.... “Magic,” says Psellus, “formed the last part of the sacerdotal science. It investigated the nature, power, and quality of everything sublunary; of the elements and their parts, of animals, of various plants and their fruits, of stones and herbs. In short, it explored the essence and power of everything. From hence, therefore, it produced its effects. And it formed statues [magnetized] which procure health, and made all various figures and things [talismans], which could equally become the instruments of disease as well as of health. Often, too, celestial fire is made to appear through magic, and then statues laugh and lamps are spontaneously enkindled.”(483)

This assertion of Psellus that Magic “made statues which procure health,” is now proven to the world to be no dream, no vain boast of a hallucinated Theurgist. As Reuvens says, it becomes “history.” For it is found in the Papyrus Magique of Harris and on the votive stele just mentioned. Both Chabas and De Rougé state that: On the eighteenth line of this very mutilated monument is found the formula with regard to the acquiescence of the God (Chons) who made his consent known by a motion he imparted to his statue.(484) There was even a dispute over it between the two Orientalists. While M. de Rougé wanted to translate the word “Han” by “favour” or “grace,” M. Chabas insisted that “Han” meant a “movement” or “a sign” made by the statue.

Excesses of power, abuse of knowledge and personal ambition very often led selfish and unscrupulous Initiates to black Magic, just as the same causes led to precisely the same thing among Christian popes and cardinals; and it was black Magic that led finally to the abolition of the Mysteries, and not Christianity, as is often erroneously thought. Read Mommsen’s Roman History, vol. i., and you will find that it was the Pagans themselves who put an end to the desecration of the Divine Science. As early as 560 B.C. the Romans had discovered an Occult association, a school of black Magic of the most revolting kind; it celebrated mysteries brought from Etruria, and very soon the moral pestilence had spread all over Italy More than seven thousand Initiates were prosecuted, and most of them were sentenced to death.... Later on, Titus‐Livius shows us another three thousand Initiates sentenced during a single year for the crime of poisoning.(485) And yet black Magic is derided and denied! Paulthier may or may not be too enthusiastic in saying that India appears to him as The grand and primitive hearth of human thought, that has ended by embracing the whole ancient world,

but he was right in his idea. That primitive thought led to Occult knowledge, which in our Fifth Race is reflected from the earliest days of the Egyptian Pharaohs down to our modern times. Hardly a hieratic papyrus is exhumed with the tightly swathed‐up mummies of kings and high priests that does not contain some interesting information for the modern students of Occultism.

All that is, of course, derided Magic, the outcome of primitive knowledge and of revelation, though it was practised in such ungodly ways by the Atlantean Sorcerers that it has since become necessary for the subsequent Race to draw a thick veil over the practices which were used to obtain so‐ called magical effects on the psychic and on the physical planes. In the letter no one in our century will believe the statements, with the exception of the Roman Catholics, and these will give the acts a satanic origin. Nevertheless, Magic is so mixed up with the history of the world, that if the latter is ever to be written it has to rely upon the discoveries of Archæology, Egyptology, and hieratic writings and inscriptions; if it insists that they must be free from that “superstition of the ages” it will never see the light. One can well imagine the embarrassing position in which serious Egyptologists, Assyriologists, savants and academicians find themselves. Forced to translate and interpret the old papyri and the archaic inscriptions on stelæ and Babylonian cylinders, they find themselves compelled from first to last to face the distasteful, and to them repulsive, subject of Magic, with its incantations and paraphernalia. Here they find sober and grave narratives from the pens of learned scribes, made up under the direct supervision of Chaldæan or Egyptian Hierophants, the most learned among the Philosophers of antiquity. These statements were written at the solemn hour of the death and burial of Pharaohs, High Priests, and other mighty ones of the land of Chemi;

their purpose was the introduction of the newly‐born, Osirified Soul before the awful‐tribunal of the “Great Judge” in the region of Amenti—there where a lie was said to outweigh the greatest crimes. Were the Scribes and Hierophants, Pharaohs, and King‐Priests all fools or frauds to have either believed in, or tried to make others believe in, such “cock‐and bull stories” as are found in the most respectable papyri? Yet there is no help for it. Corroborated by Plato and Herodotus, by Manetho and Syncellus, as by all the greatest and most trustworthy authors and philosophers who wrote upon the subject, those papyri note down—as seriously as they note any history, or any fact so well known and accepted as to need no commentary—whole royal dynasties of Manes, to wit, of shadows and phantoms (astral bodies), and such feats of magic skill and such Occult phenomena, that the most credulous Occultist of our own times would hesitate to believe them to be true.

The Orientalists have found a plank of salvation, while yet publishing and delivering the papyri to the criticism of literary Sadducees: they generally call them “romances of the days of Pharaoh So‐and‐So.” The idea is ingenious, if not absolutely fair.

All that is explained in the preceding Sections and a hundredfold more was taught in the Mysteries from time immemorial. If the first appearance of those institutions is a matter of historical tradition with regard to some of the later nations, their origin must certainly be assigned to the time of the Fourth Root Race. The Mysteries were imparted to the elect of that Race when the average Atlantean had begun to fall too deeply into sin to be trusted with the secrets of Nature. Their establishment is attributed in the Secret Works to the King‐Initiates of the divine dynasties, when the “Sons of God” had gradually allowed their country to become Kookarma‐ des (the land of vice). The antiquity of the Mysteries may be inferred from the history of the worship of Hercules in Egypt. This Hercules, according to what the priests told Herodotus, was not Grecian, for he says: Of the Grecian Hercules I could in no part of Egypt procure any knowledge: ... the name was never borrowed by Egypt from Greece.... Hercules, ... as they [the priests] affirm, is one of the twelve (great Gods), who were reproduced from the earlier eight Gods 17,000 years before the year of Amasis.

Hercules is of Indian origin, and—his Biblical chronology put aside—Colonel Tod was quite right in his suggestion that he was Balarâma or Baladeva. Now one must read the Purânas with the Esoteric key in one’s hand in order to find out how on almost every page they corroborate the Secret Doctrine. The ancient classical writers so well understood this truth that they unanimously attributed to Asia the origin of Hercules. A section of the Mahâbhârata is devoted to the history of the Hercûla, of which race was Vyasa.... Diodorus has the same legend with some variety. He says: “Hercules was born amongst the Indians and, like the Greeks, they furnish him with a club and lion’s hide.” Both [Krishna and Baladeva] are (lords) of the race (cûla) of Heri (Heri‐cul‐es) of which the Greeks might have made the compound Hercules.(486)

The Occult Doctrine explains that Hercules was the last incarnation of one of the seven “Lords of the Flame,” as Krishna’s brother, Baladeva. That his incarnations occurred during the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Root‐Races, and that his worship was brought into Egypt from Lanka and India by the later immigrants. That he was borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians is certain, the more so as the Greeks place his birth at Thebes, and only his twelve labours at Argos. Now we find in the Vishnu Purâna a complete corroboration of the statement made in the Secret Teachings, of which Purânic allegory the following is a short summary:

Raivata, a grandson of Sharyâti, Manu’s fourth son, finding no man worthy of his lovely daughter, repaired with her to Brahmâ’s region to consult the God in this emergency. Upon his arrival, Hâhâ Hûhû, and other Gandharvas were singing before the throne, and Raivata, waiting till they had done, imagined that but one Muhûrta (instant) had passed, whereas long ages had elapsed. When they had finished Raivata prostrated himself and explained his perplexity. Then Brahmâ asked him whom he wished for a son‐ in‐law, and upon hearing a few personages named, the Father of the World smiled and said: “Of those whom you have named the third and fourth generation [Root‐Races] no longer survive, for many successions of ages [Chatur‐Yuga, or the four Yuga cycles] have passed away while you were listening to our songsters. Now on earth the twenty‐eighth great age of the present Manu is nearly finished and the Kali period is at hand. You must therefore bestow this virgin‐gem upon some other husband. For you are now alone.”

Then the Râja Raivata is told to proceed to Kushasthalî, his ancient capital, which was now called Dvârakâ, and where reigned in his stead a portion of the divine being (Vishnu) in the person of Baladeva, the brother of Krishna, regarded as the seventh incarnation of Vishnu whenever Krishna is taken as a full divinity.

“Being thus instructed by the Lotus‐born [Brahmâ], Raivata returned with his daughter to earth, where he found the race of men dwindled in stature [see what is said in the Stanzas and Commentaries of the races of mankind gradually decreasing in stature]; ... reduced in vigour, and enfeebled in intellect. Repairing to the city of Kushasthalî, he found it much altered,” because, according to the allegorical explanation of the commentator, “Krishna had reclaimed from the sea a portion of the country,” which means in plain language that the continents had all been changed meanwhile—and “had renovated the city”—or rather built a new one, Dvârakâ; for one reads in the Bhagavad Purâna(487) that Kushasthalî was founded and built by Raivata within the sea; and subsequent discoveries showed that it was the same, or on the same spot, as Dvârakâ. Therefore it was on an island before. The allegory in Vishnu Purâna shows King Raivata giving his daughter to “the wielder of the ploughshare”—or rather “the plough‐bannered”—Baladeva, who “beholding the damsel of excessively lofty height ... shortened her with the end of his ploughshare, and she became his wife.”(488)

This is a plain allusion to the Third and Fourth Races—to the Atlantean giants and the successive incarnations of the “Sons of the Flame” and other orders of Dhyân Chohans in the heroes and kings of mankind, down to the Kali Yuga, or Black Age, the beginning of which is within historical times. Another coincidence: Thebes is the city of a hundred gates, and Dvârakâ is so called from its many gateways or doors, from the word “Dvâra,” “gateway.” Both Hercules and Baladeva are of a passionate, hot temper, and both are renowned for the fairness of their white skins. There is not the slightest doubt that Hercules is Baladeva in Greek dress. Arrian notices the great similarity between the Theban and the Hindu Hercules, the latter being worshipped by the Suraseni who built Methorea, or Mathûrâ, Krishna’s birthplace. The same writer places Sandracottus (Chandragupta, the grandfather of King Asoka, of the clan of Morya) in the direct line of the descendants of Baladeva. There were no Mysteries in the beginning, we are taught. Knowledge (Vidyâ) was common property, and it reigned universally throughout the Golden Age (Satya Yuga). As says the Commentary: Men had not created evil yet in those days of bliss and purity, for they were of God‐like more than of human nature.

But when mankind, rapidly increasing in numbers, increased also in variety of idiosyncrasies of body and mind, then incarnated Spirit showed its weakness. Natural exaggerations, and along with these superstitions, arose in the less cultured and healthy minds. Selfishness was born out of desires and passions hitherto unknown, and but too often knowledge and power were abused, until finally it became necessary to limit the number of those who knew. Thus arose Initiation.

Every separate nation now arranged for itself a religious system, according to its enlightenment and spiritual wants. Worship of mere form being discarded by the wise men, these confined true knowledge to the very few. The need of veiling truth to protect it from desecration becoming more apparent with every generation, a thin veil was used at first, which had to be gradually thickened according to the spread of personality and selfishness, and this led to the Mysteries. They came to be established in every country and among every people, while to avoid strife and misunderstanding exoteric beliefs were allowed to grow up in the minds of the profane masses. Inoffensive and innocent in their incipient stage—like a historical event arranged in the form of a fairy tale, adapted for and comprehensible to the child’s mind—in those distant ages such beliefs could be allowed to grow and make the popular faith without any danger to the more philosophical and abstruse truths taught in the sanctuaries. Logical and scientific observation of the phenomena in Nature, which alone leads man to the knowledge of eternal truths—provided he approaches the threshold of observation unbiassed by preconception and sees with his spiritual eye before he looks at things from their physical aspect—does not lie within the province of the masses. The marvels of the One Spirit of Truth, the ever‐concealed and inaccessible Deity, can be unravelled and assimilated only through Its manifestations by the secondary “Gods,” Its acting powers.

While the One and Universal Cause has to remain for ever in abscondito, Its manifold action may be traced through the effects in Nature. The latter alone being comprehensible and manifest to average mankind, the Powers causing those effects were allowed to grow in the imagination of the populace. Ages later in the Fifth, the Âryan, Race some unscrupulous priests began to take advantage of the too‐easy beliefs of the people in every country, and finally raised those secondary Powers to the rank of God and Gods, thus succeeding in isolating them altogether from the One Universal Cause of all causes.(489)

Henceforward the knowledge of the primeval truths remained entirely in the hands of the Initiates. The Mysteries had their weak points and their defects, as every institution welded with the human element must necessarily have. Yet Voltaire has characterised their benefits in a few words: In the chaos of popular superstitions there existed an institution which has ever prevented man from falling into absolute brutality: it was that of the Mysteries. Verily, as Ragon puts it of Masonry; Its temple has Time for duration, the Universe for space.... “Let us divide that we may rule,” have said the crafty; “Let us unite to resist,” have said the first Masons.(490) Or rather, the Initiates whom the Masons have never ceased to claim as their primitive and direct Masters. The first and fundamental principle of moral strength and power is association and solidarity of thought and purpose. “The Sons of Will and Yoga” united in the beginning to resist the terrible and ever‐growing iniquities of the left‐hand Adepts, the Atlanteans. This led to the foundation of still more Secret Schools, temples of learning, and of Mysteries inaccessible to all except after the most terrible trials and probations.

Anything that might be said of the earliest Adepts and their divine Masters would be regarded as fiction. It is necessary, therefore, if we would know something of the primitive Initiates to judge of the tree by its fruits; to examine the bearing and the work of their successors in the Fifth Race as reflected in the works of the classic writers and the great Philosophers. How were Initiation and the Initiates regarded during some 2,000 years by the Greek and Roman writers? Cicero informs his readers in very clear terms. He says: An Initiate must practise all the virtues in his power: justice, fidelity, liberality, modesty, temperance; these virtues cause men to forget the talents that he may lack.(491) Ragon says: When the Egyptian priests said: “All for the people, nothing through the people,” they were right: in an ignorant nation truth must be revealed only to trustworthy persons.... We have seen in our days, “all through the people, nothing for the people,” a false and dangerous system. The real axiom ought to be: “All for the people and with the people.”(492)

But in order to achieve this reform the masses have to pass through a dual transformation: (a) to become divorced from every element of exoteric superstition and priestcraft, and (b) to become educated men, free from every danger of being enslaved whether by a man or an idea. This, in view of the preceding, may seem paradoxical. The Initiates were “priests,” we may be told—at any rate, all the Hindu, Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, Phœnician, and other Hierophants and Adepts were priests in the temples, and it was they who invented their respective exoteric creeds. To this the answer is possible: “The cowl does not make the friar.” If one may believe tradition and the unanimous opinion of ancient writers, added to the examples we have in the “priests” of India, the most conservative nation in the world, it becomes quite certain that the Egyptian priests were no more priests in the sense we give to the word than are the temple Brâhmans. They could never be regarded as such if we take as our standard the European clergy. Laurens observes very correctly that:

The priests of Egypt were not, strictly speaking, ministers of religion. The word “priest,” which translation has been badly interpreted, had an acceptation very different from the one that is applied to it among us. In the language of antiquity, and especially in the sense of the initiation of the priests of ancient Egypt, the word “priest” is synonymous with that of “philosopher.”... The institution of the Egyptian priests seems to have been really a confederation of sages gathered to study the art of ruling men, to centre the domain of truth, modulate its propagation, and arrest its too dangerous dispersion.(493)

The Egyptian Priests, like the Brâhmans of old, held the reins of the governing powers, a system that descended to them by direct inheritance from the Initiates of the great Atlantis. The pure cult of Nature in the earliest patriarchal days—the word “patriarch” applying in its first original sense to the Progenitors of the human race,(494) the Fathers, Chiefs, and Instructors of primitive men—became the heirloom of those alone who could discern the noumenon beneath the phenomenon. Later, the Initiates transmitted their knowledge to the human kings, as their divine Masters had passed it to their forefathers. It was their prerogative and duty to reveal the secrets of Nature that were useful to mankind—the hidden virtues of plants, the art of healing the sick, and of bringing about brotherly love and mutual help among mankind. No Initiate was one if he could not heal—aye, recall to life from apparent death (coma) those who, too long neglected, would have indeed died during their lethargy.(495) Those who showed such powers were forthwith set above the crowds, and were regarded as Kings and Initiates. Gautama Buddha was a King‐Initiate, a healer, and recalled to life those who were in the hands of death. Jesus and Apollonius were healers, and were both addressed as Kings by their followers. Had they failed to raise those who were to all intents and purposes the dead, none of their names would have passed down to posterity; for this was the first and crucial test, the certain sign that the Adept had upon Him the invisible hand of a primordial divine Master, or was an incarnation of one of the “Gods.”

The later royal privilege descended to our Fifth Race kings through the kings of Egypt. The latter were all initiated into the mysteries of medicine, and they healed the sick, even when, owing to the terrible trials and labours of final Initiation, they were unable to become full Hierophants. They were healers by privilege and by tradition, and were assisted in the healing art by the Hierophants of the temples, when they themselves were ignorant of Occult curative Science. So also in far later historical times we find Pyrrhus curing the sick by simply touching them with his foot; Vespasian and Hadrian needed only to pronounce a few words taught to them by their Hierophants, in order to restore sight to the blind and health to the cripple. From that time onward history has recorded cases of the same privilege conferred on the emperors and kings of almost every nation.(496)

That which is known of the Priests of Egypt and of the ancient Brâhmans, corroborated as it is by all the ancient classics and historical writers, gives us the right to believe in that which is only traditional in the opinion of sceptics. Whence the wonderful knowledge of the Egyptian Priests in every department of Science, unless they had it from a still more ancient source? The famous “Four,” the seats of learning in old Egypt, are more historically certain than the beginnings of modern England. It was in the great Theban sanctuary that Pythagoras upon his arrival from India studied the Science of Occult numbers. It was in Memphis that Orpheus popularized his too‐abstruse Indian metaphysics for the use of Magna Grecia; and thence Thales, and ages later Democritus, obtained all they knew. It is to Saïs that all the honour must be given of the wonderful legislation and the art of ruling people, imparted by its Priests to Lycurgus and Solon, who will both remain objects of admiration for generations to come. And had Plato and Eudoxus never gone to worship at the shrine of Heliopolis, most probably the one would have never astonished future generations with his ethics, nor the other with his wonderful knowledge of mathematics.(497)

The great modern writer on the Mysteries of Egyptian Initiation—one, however, who knew nothing of those in India—the late Ragon, has not exaggerated in maintaining that: All the notions possessed by Hindustan, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Chaldæa, Sydonia, and the priests of Babylonia, [on the secrets of Nature], was known to the Egyptian priests. It is thus Indian philosophy, without mysteries, which, having penetrated into Chaldæa and ancient Persia, gave rise to the doctrine of Egyptian Mysteries.(498) The Mysteries preceded the hieroglyphics.(499) They gave birth to the latter, as permanent records were needed to preserve and commemorate their secrets. It is primitive Philosophy(500) that has served as the foundation‐stone for modern Philosophy; only the progeny, while perpetuating the features of the external body, has lost on its way the Soul and Spirit of its parent.

Initiation, though it contained neither rules and principles, nor any special teaching of Science—as now understood—was nevertheless Science, and the Science of sciences. And though devoid of dogma, of physical discipline, and of exclusive ritual, it was yet the one true Religion—that of eternal truth. Outwardly it was a school, a college, wherein were taught sciences, arts, ethics, legislation, philanthropy, the cult of the true and real nature of cosmic phenomena; secretly, during the Mysteries, practical proofs of the latter were given. Those who could learn truth on all things—i.e., those who could look the great Isis in her unveiled face and bear the awful majesty of the Goddess—became Initiates. But the children of the Fifth Race had fallen too deeply into matter always to do so with impunity. Those who failed disappeared from the world, without leaving a trace behind. Which of the highest kings would have dared to claim any individual, however high his social standing, from the stern priests, once that the victim had crossed the threshold of their sacred Adytum?

The noble precepts taught by the Initiates of the early races passed to India, Egypt, and Greece, to China and Chaldæa, and thus spread all over the world. All that is good, noble, and grand in human nature, every divine faculty and aspiration, were cultured by the Priest‐Philosophers who sought to develop them in their Initiates. Their code of ethics, based on altruism, has become universal. It is found in Confucius, the “atheist,” who taught that “he who loves not his brother has no virtue in him,” and in the Old Testament precept, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”(501) The greater Initiates became like unto Gods, and Socrates, in Plato’s Phædo, is represented as saying: The Initiates are sure to come into the company of the Gods. In the same work the great Athenian Sage is made to say:

It is quite apparent that those who have established the Mysteries, or the secret assemblies of the Initiates, were no mean persons, but powerful genii, who from the first ages had endeavoured to make us understand under those enigmas that he who will reach the invisible regions unpurified will be hurled into the abyss [the Eighth Sphere of the Occult Doctrine; that is, he will lose his personality for ever], while he who will attain them purged of the maculations of this world, and accomplished in virtues, will be received in the abode of the Gods. Said Clemens Alexandrinus, referring to the Mysteries: Here ends all teaching. One sees Nature and all things.

A Christian Father of the Church speaks then as did the Pagan Pretextatus, the pro‐consul of Achaia (fourth century A.D.), “a man of eminent virtues,” who remarked that to deprive the Greeks of “the sacred Mysteries which bind in one the whole of mankind,” was to render their very lives worthless to them. Would the Mysteries have ever obtained the highest praise from the noblest men of antiquity had they not been of more than human origin? Read all that is said of this unparalleled institution, as much by those who had never been initiated, as by the Initiates themselves. Consult Plato, Euripides, Socrates, Aristophanes, Pindar, Plutarch, Isocrates, Diodorus, Cicero, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, not to name dozens of other famous Sages and writers. That which the Gods and Angels had revealed, exoteric religions, beginning with that of Moses, reveiled and hid for ages from the sight of the world. Joseph, the son of Jacob, was an Initiate, otherwise he would not have married Aseneth, the daughter of Petephre (“Potiphar”—“he who belongs to Phre,” the Sun‐ God), priest of Heliopolis and governor of On.(502) Every truth revealed by Jesus, and which even the Jews and early Christians understood, was reveiled by the Church that pretends to serve Him. Read what Seneca says, as quoted by Dr. Kenealy:

“The world being melted and having reëntered the bosom of Jupiter [or Parabrahman], this God continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas. Afterwards we see a new world spring from him.... An innocent race of men is formed.” And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he [Seneca] teaches us that when the laws of Nature shall be buried in ruin and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa; and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. The affrighted sun shall be deprived of its light; the palace of heaven, falling to decay, shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return to their original chaos.(503) One might fancy oneself reading the Purânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? Let the reader open any English Bible and read chapter iii. of the Second Epistle of Peter, and he will find there the same ideas.

There shall come in the last days scoffers, ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are ... reserved unto fire, ... in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.... Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth. If the interpreters chose to see in this a reference to a creation, a deluge, and a promised coming of Christ, when they will live in a New Jerusalem in heaven, that is no fault of Peter. What he meant was the destruction of the Fifth Race and the appearance of a new continent for the Sixth Race.

The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore when all the fires were extinguished on the 1st of November their sacred and inextinguishable fire remained alone to illumine the horizon like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrian. And like the early Fifth Race and the later Chaldæans and Greeks, and again like the Christians (who do it to this day without suspecting the real meaning), they greeted the “Morning‐ Star,” the beautiful Venus‐Lucifer.(504) Strabo speaks of an island near Britannia where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace, and this was the sacred Ierna, where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not, as Lucian explains, That the same Spirit shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world, but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men after a determinate period would pass into other bodies.(505) These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their ancestors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They piously preserved the teachings, while their parent Root‐Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, were gradually approaching their end.

We will begin with the ancient Mysteries—those received from the Atlanteans by the primitive Âryans—whose mental and intellectual state Professor Max Müller has described with such a masterly hand, yet left so incomplete withal.

He says: We have in it [in the Rig Veda] a period of the intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any other part of the world. In the hymns of the Veda we see man left to himself to solve the riddle of this world.... He invokes the gods around him, he praises, he worships them. But still with all these gods ... beneath him, and above him, the early poet seems ill at rest within himself. There, too, in his own breast, he has discovered a power that is never mute when he prays, never absent when he fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers and yet to listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to support him and all around him. The only name he can find for this mysterious power is “Brahman;” for brahman meant originally force, will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation. But this impersonal brahman too, as soon as it is named, grows into something strange and divine. It ends by being one of many gods, one of the great triad, worshipped to the present day. And still the thought within him has no real name; that power which is nothing but itself, which supports the gods, the heavens, and every living being, floats before his mind, conceived but not expressed. At last he calls it “Âtman,” for âtman, originally breath or spirit, comes to mean Self and Self alone, Self, whether divine or human;

Self, whether creating or suffering; Self, whether One or All; but always Self, independent and free. “Who has seen the first‐born?” says the poet, “when he who had no bones (i.e., form) bore him that had bones? Where was the life, the blood, the Self of the world? Who went to ask this from any one who knew it? (Rig Veda, I, 164, 4.) This idea of a divine Self once expressed, everything else must acknowledge its supremacy; Self is the Lord of all things; it is the King of all things; as all the spokes of a wheel are contained in the nave and circumference, all things are contained in this Self; all selves are contained in this Self.” (Brihadâranyaka, IV. v. 15).(506)

This Self, the highest, the one, and the universal, was symbolised on the plane of mortals by the Sun, its life‐giving effulgence being in its turn the emblem of the Soul—killing the terrestrial passions which have ever been an impediment to the re‐union of the Unit Self (the Spirit) with the All‐Self. Hence the allegorical mystery, only the broad features of which may be given here. It was enacted by the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist” and of “Light.” The second Sun (the “second hypostasis” of Rabbi Drach) appeared as put on his trial, Vishvakarma, the Hierophant, cutting off seven of his beams, and replacing them with a crown of brambles, when the “Sun” became Vikarttana, shorn of his beams or rays. After that, the Sun—enacted by a neophyte ready to be initiated—was made to descend into Pâtâla, the nether regions, on a trial of Tantalus. Coming out of it triumphant, he emerged from this region of lust and iniquity, to re‐become Karmasâkshin, witness of the Karma of men,(507) and arose once more triumphant in all the glory of his regeneration, as the Graha‐Râjah, King of the Constellations, and was addressed as Gabhastiman, “re‐possessed of his rays.”

The “fable” in the popular Pantheon of India, founded upon, and born out of the poetical mysticism of the Rig‐Veda—the sayings of which were mostly all dramatised during the religious Mysteries—grew in the course of its exoteric evolution into the following allegory. It may be found now in several of the Purânas and in other Scriptures. In the Rig‐Veda and its Hymns, Vishvakarma, a Mystery‐God, is the Logos, the Demiurgos, one of the greatest Gods, and spoken of in two of the hymns as the highest. He is the Omnificent (Vishvakarma), called the “Great Architect of the Universe,” the All seeing God, ... the father, the generator, the disposer, who gives the gods their names, and is beyond the comprehension of mortals, as is every Mystery‐God. Esoterically, He is the personification of the creative manifested Power: and mystically He is the seventh principle in man, in its collectivity. For He is the son of Bhuvana, the self‐created, luminous Essence, and of the virtuous, chaste and lovely Yoga‐Siddhâ, the virgin Goddess, whose name speaks for itself, since it personified Yoga‐ power, the “chaste mother” that creates the Adepts. In the Rig‐Vaidic Hymns, Vishvakarma performs the “great sacrifice,” i.e., sacrifices himself for the world; or, as the Nirukta is made to say, translated by the Orientalists:

Vishvakarma first of all offers up all the world in a sacrifice, and then ends by sacrificing himself. In the mystical representations of his character, Vishvakarma is often called Vittoba, and is pictured as the “Victim,” the “Man‐God,” or the Avatâra crucified in space.

[Of the true Mysteries, the real Initiations, nothing of course can be said in public; they can be known only to those who are able to experience them. But a few hints can be given of the great ceremonial Mysteries of Antiquity, which stood to the public as the real Mysteries, and into which candidates were initiated with much ceremony and display of Occult Arts. Behind these, in silence and darkness, were the true Mysteries, as they have always existed and continue to exist. In Egypt, as in Chaldæa and later in Greece, the Mysteries were celebrated at stated times, and the first day was a public holiday, on which, with much pomp, the candidates were escorted to the Great Pyramid and passed thereinto out of sight. The second day was devoted to ceremonies of purification, at the close of which the candidate was presented with a white robe; on the third day](508) he was tried and examined as to his proficiency in Occult learning. On the fourth day, after another ceremony symbolical of purification, he was sent alone to pass through various trials, finally becoming entranced in a subterranean crypt, in utter darkness, for two days and two nights. In Egypt, the entranced neophyte was placed in an empty sarcophagus in the Pyramid, where the initiatory rites took place. In India and Central Asia, he was bound on a lathe, and when his body had become like that of one dead (entranced), he was carried into the crypt. Then the Hierophant kept watch over him “guiding the apparitional soul (astral body) from this world of Samsâra (or delusion) to the nether kingdoms, from which, if successful, he had the right of releasing seven suffering souls” (Elementaries). Clothed with his Anandamayakosha, the body of bliss—the Srotâpanna remained there where we have no right to follow him, and upon returning—received the Word, with or without the “heart’s blood” of the Hierophant.(509)

Only in truth the Hierophant was never killed—neither in India nor elsewhere, the murder being simply feigned—unless the Initiator had chosen the Initiate for his successor and had decided to pass to him the last and supreme Word, after which he had to die—only one man in a nation having the right to know that word. Many are those grand Initiates who have thus passed out of the world’s sight, disappearing As mysteriously from the sight of men as Moses from the top of Mount Pisgah (Nebo, oracular Wisdom), after he had laid his hands upon Joshua, who thus became “full of the spirit of wisdom,” i.e., initiated. But he died, he was not killed. For killing, if really done, would belong to black, not to divine Magic. It is the transmission of light, rather than a transfer of life, of life spiritual and divine, and it is the shedding of Wisdom, not of blood. But the uninitiated inventors of theological Christianity took the allegorical language à la lettre; and instituted a dogma, the crude, misunderstood expression of which horrifies and repels the spiritual “heathen.”

All these Hierophants and Initiates were types of the Sun and of the Creative Principle (spiritual potency) as were Vishvakarma and Vikarttana, from the origin of the Mysteries. Ragon, the famous Mason, gives curious details and explanations with regard to the Sun rites. He shows that the biblical Hiram, the great hero of Masonry (the “widow’s son”) a type taken from Osiris, is the Sun‐God, the inventor of arts, and the “architect,” the name Hiram meaning the elevated, a title belonging to the Sun. Every Occultist knows how closely related to Osiris and the Pyramids are the narratives in Kings concerning Solomon, his Temple and its construction; he knows also that the whole of the Masonic rite of Initiation is based upon the Biblical allegory of the construction of that Temple, Masons conveniently forgetting, or perhaps ignoring, the fact that the latter narrative is modelled upon Egyptian and still earlier symbolisms. Ragon explains it by showing that the three companions of Hiram, the “three murderers,” typify the three last months of the year; and that Hiram stands for the Sun—from its summer solstice downwards, when it begins decreasing—the whole rite being an astronomical allegory.

During the summer solstice, the Sun provokes songs of gratitude from all that breathes; hence Hiram, who represents it, can give to whomsoever has the right to it, the sacred Word, that is to say life. When the Sun descends to the inferior signs all Nature becomes mute, and Hiram can no longer give the sacred Word to the companions, who represent the three inert months of the year. The first companion strikes Hiram feebly with a rule twenty‐four inches long, symbol of the twenty‐four hours which make up each diurnal revolution; it is the first distribution of time, which after the exaltation of the mighty star, feebly assails his existence, giving him the first blow. The second companion strikes him with an iron square, symbol of the last season, figured by the intersections of two right lines, which would divide into four equal parts the Zodiacal circle, whose centre symbolises Hiram’s heart, where it touches the point of the four squares representing the four seasons: second distribution of time, which at that period strikes a heavier blow at the solar existence. The third companion strikes him mortally on his forehead with a heavy blow of his mallet, whose cylindrical form symbolises the year, the ring or circle: third distribution of time, the accomplishment of which deals the last blow to the existence of the expiring Sun. From this interpretation it has been inferred that Hiram, a founder of metals, the hero of the new legend with the title of architect, is Osiris (the Sun) of modern initiation; that Isis, his widow, is the Lodge, the emblem of the Earth (loka in Sanskrit, the world) and that Horus, son of Osiris (or of light) and the widow’s son, is the free Mason, that is to say, the Initiate who inhabits the terrestrial lodge (the child of the Widow, and of Light.)(510)

And here again, our friends the Jesuits have to be mentioned, for the above rite is of their making. To give one instance of their success in throwing dust into the eyes of ordinary individuals to prevent their seeing the truths of Occultism, we will point out what they did in what is now called Freemasonry. This Brotherhood does possess a considerable portion of the symbolism, formulæ, and ritual of Occultism, handed down from time immemorial from the primeval Initiations. To render this Brotherhood a mere harmless negation, the Jesuits sent some of their most able emissaries into the Order, who first made the simple brethren believe that the true secret was lost with Hiram Abiff; and then induced them to put this belief into their formularies. They then invented specious but spurious higher degrees, pretending to give further light upon this lost secret, to lead the candidate on and amuse him with forms borrowed from the real thing but containing no substance, and all artfully contrived to lead the aspiring Neophyte to nowhere. And yet men of good sense and abilities, in other respects, will meet at intervals, and with solemn face, zeal and earnestness, go through the mockery of revealing “substituted secrets” instead of the real thing.

If the reader turns to a very remarkable and very useful work called The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, Art. “Rosicrucianism,” he will find its author, a high and learned Mason, showing what the Jesuits have done to destroy Masonry. Speaking of the period when the existence of this mysterious Brotherhood (of which many pretend to know “something” if not a good deal, and know in fact nothing) was first made known, he says:

There was a dread among the great masses of society in byegone days of the unseen—a dread, as recent events and phenomena show very clearly, not yet overcome in its entirety. Hence students of Nature and mind were forced into an obscurity not altogether unwelcome.... The Kabalistic reveries of a Johann Reuchlin led to the fiery action of a Luther, and the patient labours of Trittenheim produced the modern system of diplomatic cipher writing.... It is very worthy of remark, that one particular century, and that in which the Rosicrucians first showed themselves, is distinguished in history as the era in which most of these efforts at throwing off the trammels of the past [Popery and Ecclesiasticism] occurred. Hence the opposition of the losing party, and their virulence against anything mysterious or unknown. They freely organised pseudo‐Rosicrucian and Masonic societies in return; and these societies were instructed to irregularly entrap the weaker brethren of the True and Invisible Order, and then triumphantly betray anything they might be so inconsiderate as to communicate to the superiors of these transitory and unmeaning associations. Every wile was adopted by the authorities, fighting in self‐defence against the progress of truth, to engage, by persuasion, interest or terror, such as might be cajoled into receiving the Pope as Master—when gained, as many converts to that faith know, but dare not own, they are treated with neglect, and left to fight the battle of life as best they may, not even being admitted to the knowledge of such miserable aporrheta as the Romish faith considers itself entitled to withhold.

But if Masonry has been spoiled, none is able to crush the real, invisible Rosicrucian and the Eastern Initiate. The symbolism of Vishvakarma and Sûrya Vikarttana has survived, where Hiram Abiff was indeed murdered, and we will now return to it. It is not simply an astronomical, but is the most solemn rite, an inheritance from the Archaic Mysteries that has crossed the ages and is used to this day. It typifies a whole drama of the Cycle of Life, of progressive incarnations, and of psychic as well as of physiological secrets, of which neither the Church nor Science knows anything, though it is this rite that has led the former to the greatest of its Christian Mysteries.

The antiquity of the Secret Doctrine may be better realised when it is shown at what point of history its Mysteries had already been desecrated, by being made subservient to the personal ambition of despot‐ruler and crafty priest. These profoundly philosophical and scientifically composed religious dramas, in which were enacted the grandest truths of the Occult or Spiritual Universe and the hidden lore of learning, had become subject to persecution long before the days when Plato and even Pythagoras flourished. Withal, primal revelations given to Mankind have not died with the Mysteries; they are still preserved as heirlooms for future and more spiritual generations.

It has been already stated in Isis Unveiled,(511) that so far back as in the days of Aristotle, the great Mysteries had already lost their primitive grandeur and solemnity. Their rites had fallen into desuetude, and they had to a great degree degenerated into mere priestly speculations and had become religious shams. It is useless to state when they first appeared in Europe and Greece, since recognised history may almost be said to begin with Aristotle, everything before him appearing to be in an inextricable chronological confusion. Suffice it to say, that in Egypt the Mysteries had been known since the days of Menes, and that the Greeks received them only when Orpheus introduced them from India. In an article “Was writing known before Pânini?”(512) it is stated that the Pândus had acquired universal dominion and had taught the “sacrificial” Mysteries to other races as far back as 3,300 B.C. Indeed, when Orpheus, the son of Apollo or Helios, received from his father the phorminx—the seven‐stringed lyre, symbolical of the sevenfold mystery of Initiation—these Mysteries were already hoary with age in Central Asia and India. According to Herodotus it was Orpheus who brought them from India, and Orpheus is far anterior to Homer and Hesiod. Thus even in the days of Aristotle few were the true Adepts left in Europe and even in Egypt. The heirs of those who had been dispersed by the conquering swords of various invaders of old Egypt had been dispersed in their turn.

As 8,000 or 9,000 years earlier the stream of knowledge had been slowly running down from the tablelands of Central Asia into India and towards Europe and Northern Africa, so about 500 years B.C. it had begun to flow backward to its old home and birthplace. During the two thousand subsequent years the knowledge of the existence of great Adepts nearly died out in Europe. Nevertheless, in some secret places the Mysteries were still enacted in all their primitive purity. The “Sun of Righteousness” still blazed high on the midnight sky; and, while darkness was upon the face of the profane world, there was the eternal light in the Adyta on the nights of Initiation. The true Mysteries were never made public. Eleusinia and Agræ for the multitudes; the God Εὐβουλῆ “of the good counsel,” the great Orphic Deity, for the neophyte.

This mystery God—mistaken by our Symbologists for the Sun—who was He? Everyone who has any idea of the ancient Egyptian exoteric faith is quite aware that for the multitudes Osiris was the Sun in Heaven, “the Heavenly King,” Ro‐Imphab; that by the Greeks the Sun was called the “Eye of Jupiter,” as for the modern orthodox Pârsî he is “the Eye of Ormuzd:” that the Sun, moreover, was addressed as the “All‐seeing God” (πολυόφθαλμος) as the “God Saviour,” and the “saving God” (Αἴτιον τῆς σωτηρίας). Read the papyrus of Papheronmes at Berlin, and the stela as rendered by Mariette Bey,(513) and see what they say: Glory to thee, O Sun, divine child! ... thy rays carry life to the pure and to those ready.... The Gods [the “Sons of God”] who approach thee tremble with delight and awe.... Thou art the first born, the Son of God, the Word.(514)

The Church has now seized upon these terms and sees presentments of the coming Christ in these expressions in the initiatory rites and prophetic utterances of the Pagan Oracles. They are nothing of the kind, for they were applied to every worthy Initiate. If the expressions that were used in hieratic writings and glyphs thousands of years before our era are now found in the laudatory hymns and prayers of Christian Churches, it is simply because they have been unblushingly appropriated by the Latin Christians, in the full hope of never being detected by posterity. Everything that could be done had been done to destroy the original Pagan manuscripts and the Church felt secure. Christianity has undeniably had her great Seers and Prophets, like every other religion; but their claims are not strengthened by denying their predecessors. Listen to Plato: Know then, Glaucus, that when I speak of the production of good, it is the Sun I mean. The Son has a perfect analogy with his Father.

Iamblichus calls the Sun “the image of divine intelligence or Wisdom.” Eusebius, repeating the words of Philo, calls the rising Sun (ἀνατολὴ) the chief Angel, the most ancient, adding that the Archangel who is polyonymous (of many names) is the Verbum or Christ. The word Sol (Sun) being derived from solus, the One, or the “He alone,” and its Greek name Helios meaning the “Most High,” the emblem becomes comprehensible. Nevertheless, the Ancients made a difference between the Sun and its prototype. Socrates saluted the rising Sun as does a true Pârsî or Zoroastrian in our own day; and Homer and Euripides, as Plato did after them several times, mention the Jupiter‐Logos, the “Word” or the Sun. Nevertheless, the Christians maintain that since the oracle consulted on the God Iao answered: “It is the Sun,” therefore The Jehovah of the Jews was well known to the Pagans and Greeks;(515)

and “Iao is our Jehovah.” The first part of the proposition has nothing, it seems, to do with the second part, and least of all can the conclusion be regarded as correct. But if the Christians are so anxious to prove the identity, Occultists have nothing against it. Only, in such case, Jehovah is also Bacchus. It is very strange that the people of civilised Christendom should until now hold on so desperately to the skirts of the idolatrous Jews—Sabæans and Sun worshippers as they were,(516) like the rabble of Chaldæa—and that they should fail to see that the later Jehovah is but a Jewish development of the Ja‐va, or the Iao, of the Phœnicians; that this name, in short, was the secret name of a Mystery‐God, one of the many Kabiri. “Highest God” as He was for one little nation, he never was so regarded by the Initiates who conducted the Mysteries; for them he was but a Planetary Spirit attached to the visible Sun; and the visible Sun is only the central Star, not the central spiritual Sun. And the Angel of the Lord said unto him [Manoah] “Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret.”(517)

However this may be, the identity of the Jehovah of Mount Sinai with the God Bacchus is hardly disputable, and he is surely—as already shown in Isis Unveiled—Dionysos.(518) Wherever Bacchus was worshipped there was a tradition of Nyssa,(519) and a cave where he was reared. Outside Greece, Bacchus was the all‐powerful “Zagreus, the highest of Gods,” in whose service was Orpheus, the founder of the Mysteries. Now, unless it be conceded that Moses was an initiated Priest, an Adept, whose actions are all narrated allegorically, then it must be admitted that he personally, together with his hosts of Israelites, worshipped Bacchus. And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it Jehovah Nissi [or, Iao‐nisi, or again Dionisi].(520) To strengthen the statement we have further to remember that the place where Osiris, the Egyptian Zagreus or Bacchus, was born, was Mount Sinai, which is called by the Egyptians Mount Nissa. The brazen serpent was a nis, כהש, and the month of the Jewish Passover is Nisan.

The earliest Mysteries recorded in history are those of Samothrace. After the distribution of pure Fire, a new life began. This was the new birth of the Initiate, after which, like the Brâhmans of old in India, he became a dwija—a “twice born,” Initiated into that which may be rightly called the most blessed of all Mysteries ... being ourselves pure,(521) says Plato. Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon the Phœnician—the oldest of Historians—say that these Mysteries originated in the night of time, thousands of years probably before the historical period. Iamblichus informs us that Pythagoras Was initiated in all the Mysteries of Byblus and Tyre, in the sacred operations of the Syrians, and in the Mysteries of the Phœnicians.(522) As was said in Isis Unveiled: When men like Pythagoras, Plato and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behoves our modern critics to judge them [and their Initiates] upon their merely external aspect.

Yet this is what has been done until now, especially by the Christian Fathers. Clement Alexandrinus stigmatises the Mysteries as “indecent and diabolical” though his words, showing that the Eleusinian Mysteries were identical with, and even, as he would allege, borrowed from, those of the Jews, are quoted elsewhere in this work. The Mysteries were composed of two parts, of which the Lesser were performed at Agræ, and the Greater at Eleusis, and Clement had been himself initiated. But the Katharsis, or trials of purification, have ever been misunderstood. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation ought to be perfectly satisfactory, at any rate for every unprejudiced mind. He says:— Exhibitions of this kind in the Mysteries were designed to free us from licentious passions, by gratifying the sight, and at the same time vanquishing all evil thought, through the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied. Dr. Warburton remarks: The wisest and best men in the Pagan world are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means.

Although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take part in the Mysteries, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final Initiation in these celebrated rites. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. The perfective rite, precedes in order the initiation Telete, Muesis, and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse [revelation]. Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts:

The first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; but there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier ... since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications: but after purification the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is (the investiture) the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns(523) ... whether after this he [the initiated person] becomes a torchbearer, or an hierophant of the Mysteries, or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God. And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.(524)

The chief objects of the Mysteries, represented as diabolical by the Christian Fathers and ridiculed by modern writers, were instituted with the highest and the most moral purpose in view. There is no need to repeat here that which has been already described in Isis Unveiled(525) that whether through temple Initiation or the private study of Theurgy, every student obtained the proof of the immortality of his Spirit, and the survival of his Soul. What the last epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phædrus: Being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries ... we were freed from the molestations of evils, which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immoveable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light.(526) This veiled confession shows that the Initiates enjoyed Theophany—saw visions of Gods and of real immortal Spirits. As Taylor correctly infers: The most sublime part of the epopteia or final revealing, consisted in beholding the Gods [the high Planetary Spirits] themselves, invested with a resplendent light.(527) The statement of Proclus upon the subject is unequivocal:

In all the Initiations and Mysteries, the Gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes; and sometimes indeed a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape.(528) Again we have Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and shadow of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing [the prototype of the Soul‐Spirit] remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. When that resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth [from the latter] to a distance. Again that light is the shadow of something more resplendent than itself.(529) Thus speaks the Desatir, in the Book of Shet (the prophet Zirtusht), thereby showing the identity of its Esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek Philosophers. The second statement of Plato confirms the view that the Mysteries of the Ancients were identical with the Initiations practised even now among the Buddhist and the Hindu Adepts. The higher visions, the most truthful, were produced through a regular discipline of gradual Initiations, and the development of psychical powers. In Europe and Egypt the Mystæ were brought into close union with those whom Proclus calls “mystical natures,” “resplendent Gods,” because, as Plato says:

[We] were ourselves pure and immaculate, being liberated from this surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell.(530) As to the East, The doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees.(531) The word Pitris may now be explained and something else added. In India the chela of the third degree of Initiation has two Gurus: One, the living Adept; the other the disembodied and glorified Mahâtmâ, Who remains the adviser or instructor of even the high Adepts. Few are the accepted chelas who even see their living Master, their Guru, till the day and hour of their final and for ever binding vow. It is this that was meant in Isis Unveiled, when it was stated that few of the fakirs (the word chela being unknown to Europe and America in those days) however

Pure, and honest, and self‐devoted, have yet ever seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the Guru, and just before the vatou‐fakir [the just initiated chela] is despatched into the world of the living, with his seven‐knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE [of his Pitar or Father, the glorified invisible Master, or disembodied Mahâtmâ]. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation, for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The Initiate, says Éliphas Lévi, knows; therefore, “he dares all and keeps silent.” Says the great French Kabalist:

You may see him often sad, never discouraged or desperate; often poor, never humbled or wretched; often persecuted, never cowed down or vanquished. For he remembers the widowhood and the murder of Orpheus, the exile and solitary death of Moses, the martyrdom of the prophets, the tortures of Apollonius, the Cross of the Saviour. He knows in what forlorn state died Agrippa, whose memory is slandered to this day; he knows the trials that broke down the great Paracelsus, and all that Raymond Lully had to suffer before he arrived at a bloody death. He remembers Swedenborg having to feign insanity, and losing even his reason before his knowledge was forgiven to him; St. Martin, who had to hide himself all his life; Cagliostro, who died forsaken in the cells of the Inquisition(532); Cazotte, who perished on the guillotine. Successor of so many victims, he dares, nevertheless, but understands the more the necessity to keep silent.(533)

Masonry—not the political institution known as the Scotch Lodge, but real Masonry, some rites of which are still preserved in the Grand Orient of France, and that Elias Ashmole, a celebrated English Occult Philosopher of the XVIIth century, tried in vain to remodel, after the manner of the Indian and Egyptian Mysteries—Masonry rests, according to Ragon, the great authority upon the subject, upon three fundamental degrees: the triple duty of a Mason is to study whence he comes, what he is, and whither he goes; the study that is, of God, of himself, and of the future transformation.(534) Masonic Initiation was modelled on that in the lesser Mysteries. The third degree was one used in both Egypt and India from time immemorial, and the remembrance of it lingers to this day in every Lodge, under the name of the death and resurrection of Hiram Abiff, the “Widow’s Son.” In Egypt the latter was called “Osiris;” in India “Loka‐chakshu” (Eye of the World), ind “Dinakara” (day‐maker) or the Sun—and the rite itself was everywhere named the “gate of death.” The coffin, or sarcophagus, of Osiris, killed by Typhon, was brought in and placed in the middle of the Hall of the Dead, with the Initiates all around it and the candidate near by. The latter was asked whether he had participated in the murder, and notwithstanding his denial, and after sundry and very hard trials, the Initiator feigned to strike him on the head with a hatchet; he was thrown down, swathed in bandages like a mummy, and wept over. Then came lightning and thunder, the supposed corpse was surrounded with fire, and was finally raised.

Ragon speaks of a rumour that charged the Emperor Commodus—when he was at one time enacting the part of the Initiator—with having played this part in the initiatory drama so seriously that he actually killed the postulant when dealing him the blow with the hatchet. This shows that the lesser Mysteries had not quite died out in the second century A.D. The Mysteries were carried into South and Central America, Northern Mexico and Peru by the Atlanteans in those days when A pedestrian from the North [of what was once upon a time also India] might have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the future Gulf of Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller, furnished with a canoe and starting from the South, could have walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged into any part of the continent of South America.(535)

They continued to exist down to the day of the Spanish invaders. These destroyed the Mexican and Peruvian records, but were prevented from laying their desecrating hands upon the many Pyramids—the lodges of an ancient Initiation—whose ruins are scattered over Puente Nacional, Cholula, and Teotihuacan. The ruins of Palenque, of Ococimgo in Chiapas, and others in Central America are known to all. If the pyramids and temples of Guiengola and Mitla ever betray their secrets, the present Doctrine will then be shown to have been a forerunner of the grandest truths in Nature. Meanwhile they have all a claim to be called Mitla, “the place of sadness” and “the abode of the (desecrated) dead.”

Says the Royal Masonic Cyclopædia, art. “Sun:” In all times, the Sun has necessarily played an important part as a symbol, and especially in Freemasonry. The W.M. represents the rising sun, the J.W. the sun at the meridian, and the S.W. the setting sun. In the Druidical rites, the Arch‐Druid represented the sun, and was aided by two other officers, one representing the Moon in the West, and the other the Sun at the South in its meridian. It is quite unnecessary to enter into any lengthened discussion on this symbol.