The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4 / The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Date: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Theosophy

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Title: The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4

Author: H. P. Blavatsky

Release date: June 1, 2017 [eBook #54824]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SECRET DOCTRINE, VOL. 1 OF 4 ***

The Secret Doctrine

The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy

By

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Author of “Isis Unveiled.”

Third and Revised Edition.

SATYÂT NÂSTI PARO DHARMAH.

“There is no Religion higher than Truth.”

Volume I.

Cosmogenesis

The Theosophical Publishing House

London

1893

Contents

Preface To The First Edition.

Preface To The Third And Revised Edition.

Introductory.

Proem: Pages From A Pre-Historic Record.

Part I. Cosmic Evolution.

Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan”

Stanza I.

Stanza II.

Stanza III.

Stanza IV.

Stanza V.

Stanza VI.

Stanza VII.

Commentaries On The Seven Stanzas And Their Terms, According To Their Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.

Stanza I.

Stanza II.

Stanza III.

Stanza IV.

Stanza V.

Stanza VI.

A Digression.

A Few Early Misconceptions Concerning Planets, Rounds, And Man.

The Septenary Division In Different Indian Systems.

Additional Facts And Explanations Concerning The Globes And The Monads.

Stanza VI.—Continued.

Stanza VII.

Summing Up.

Extracts From An Eastern Private Commentary, Hitherto Secret.

Part II. The Evolution Of Symbolism.

Section I. Symbolism and Ideographs.

Section II. The Mystery Language and Its Keys.

Section III. Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.

Section IV. Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.

Section V. On the Hidden Deity, Its Symbols and Glyphs.

Section VI. The Mundane Egg.

Section VII. The Days and Nights of Brahmâ.

Section VIII. The Lotus, as a Universal Symbol.

Section IX. The Moon; Deus Lunus, Phœbe.

Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.

Section XI. Demon est Deus Inversus.

Section XII. The Theogony of the Creative Gods.

Section XIII. The Seven Creations.

Section XIV. The Four Elements.

Section XV. On Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin.

Part III. Addenda. On Occult And Modern Science.

Section I. Reasons for These Addenda.

Section II. Modern Physicists are Playing at Blind Man's Buff.

“An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?”

Section III. Is Gravitation a Law?

Section IV. The Theories of Rotation in Science.

Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation.

Hypotheses of the Origin of Planets and Comets.

Section V. The Masks of Science. Physics Or Metaphysics?

Section VI. An Attack on the Scientific Theory of Force by a Man of Science.

Section VII. Life, Force, or Gravity.

Section VIII. The Solar Theory.

Section IX. The Coming Force. Its Possibilities And Impossibilities.

Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.

Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.

Section XII. Scientific and Esoteric Evidence for, and Objections to, the Modern Nebular Theory.

Section XIII. Forces—Modes of Motion or Intelligences?

Section XIV. Gods, Monads and Atoms.

Section XV. Cyclic Evolution and Karma.

Section XVI. The Zodiac and its Antiquity.

Section XVII. Summary of the Position.

Footnotes

[Transcriber's Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]

[pg i]

This Work
I Dedicate to all True Theosophists,
In every Country,
And of every Race,

For they called it forth, and for them it was recorded.

[pg xix]

Preface To The First Edition.

The author—the writer, rather—feels it necessary to apologize for the long delay which has occurred in the appearance of this work. It has been occasioned by ill-health and the magnitude of the undertaking. Even the two volumes now issued do not complete the scheme, nor do these treat exhaustively of the subjects dealt with in them. A large quantity of material has already been prepared, dealing with the history of Occultism as contained in the lives of the great Adepts of the Âryan Race, and showing the bearing of Occult Philosophy upon the conduct of life, as it is and as it ought to be. Should the present volumes meet with a favourable reception, no effort will be spared to carry out the scheme of the work in its entirety.

This scheme, it must be added, was not in contemplation when the preparation of the work was first announced. As originally announced, it was intended that The Secret Doctrine should be an amended and enlarged version of Isis Unveiled. It was, however, soon found that the explanations which could be added to those already put before the world, in the last-named and other works dealing with Esoteric Science, were such as to require a different method of treatment; and consequently the present volumes do not contain, in all, twenty pages extracted from Isis Unveiled.

The author does not feel it necessary to ask the indulgence of her readers and critics for the many defects of literary style, and the [pg xx] imperfect English which may be found in these pages. She is a foreigner, and her knowledge of the language was acquired late in life. The English tongue is employed because it offers the most widely-diffused medium for conveying the truths which it had become her duty to place before the world.

These truths are in no sense put forward as a revelation; nor does the author claim the position of a revealer of mystic lore, now made public for the first time in the world's history. For what is contained in this work is to be found scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying the Scriptures of the great Asiatic and early European religions, hidden under glyph and symbol, and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil. What is now attempted is to gather the oldest tenets together and to make of them one harmonious and unbroken whole. The sole advantage which the writer has over her predecessors, is that she need not resort to personal speculations and theories. For this work is a partial statement of what she herself has been taught by more advanced students, supplemented, in a few details only, by the results of her own study and observation. The publication of many of the facts herein stated has been rendered necessary by the wild and fanciful speculations in which many Theosophists and students of Mysticism have indulged, during the last few years, in their endeavour, as they imagined, to work out a complete system of thought from the few facts previously communicated to them.

It is needless to explain that this book is not the Secret Doctrine in its entirety, but a select number of fragments of its fundamental tenets, special attention being paid to some facts which have been seized upon by various writers, and distorted out of all resemblance to the truth.

But it is perhaps desirable to state unequivocally that the teachings, [pg xxi] however fragmentary and incomplete, contained in these volumes, do not belong to the Hindû, the Zoroastrian, the Chaldæan, or the Egyptian religion, nor to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism or Christianity exclusively. The Secret Doctrine is the essence of all these. Sprung from it in their origins, the various religious schemes are now made to merge back into their original element, out of which every mystery and dogma has grown, developed, and become materialized.

It is more than probable that the book will be regarded by a large section of the public as a romance of the wildest kind; for who has ever even heard of the Book of Dzyan?

The writer, therefore, is fully prepared to take all the responsibility for what is contained in this work, and even to face the charge of having invented the whole of it. That it has many shortcomings she is fully aware; all that she claims for it is that, romantic as it may seem to many, its logical coherence and consistency entitle this new Genesis to rank, at any rate, on a level with the “working hypotheses” so freely accepted by Modern Science. Further, it claims consideration, not by reason of any appeal to dogmatic authority, but because it closely adheres to Nature, and follows the laws of uniformity and analogy.

The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the Occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.

If this is in any degree accomplished, the writer is content. It is [pg xxii] written in the service of humanity, and by humanity and the future generations it must be judged. Its author recognizes no inferior court of appeal. Abuse she is accustomed to; calumny she is daily acquainted with; at slander she smiles in silent contempt.

De minimis non curat lex.

H. P. B.

London, October, 1888.

[pg xxiii]

Preface To The Third And Revised Edition.

In preparing this edition for the press, we have striven to correct minor points of detail in literary form, without touching at all more important matters. Had H. P. Blavatsky lived to issue the new edition, she would doubtless have corrected and enlarged it to a very considerable extent. That this is not done is one of the many minor losses caused by the one great loss.

Awkward phrases, due to imperfect knowledge of English, have been corrected; most of the quotations have been verified, and exact references given—a work involving great labour, as the references in the previous editions were often very loose; a uniform system of transliteration for Sanskrit words has been adopted. Rejecting the form most favoured by Western Orientalists as being misleading to the general reader—we have given to the consonants not present in our English alphabet combinations that approximately express their sound-values, and we have carefully inserted quantities, wherever they occur, on the vowels. In a few instances we have incorporated notes in the text, but this has been very sparingly done, and only when they obviously formed part of it.

We have added a copious Index for the assistance of students, and have bound it separately, so that reference to it may be facilitated. For the great labour in this we, and all students, are the debtors of Mr. A. J. Faulding.

Annie Besant.

G. R. S. Mead.

London, 1893.

[pg 001]

Introductory.

Gently to hear, kindly to judge.

Shakespeare.

Since the appearance of Theosophical literature in England, it has become customary to call its teachings “Esoteric Buddhism.” And, having become a habit—as an old proverb based on daily experience has it—“Error runs down an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.”

Old truisms are often the wisest. The human mind can hardly remain entirely free from bias, and decisive opinions are often formed before a thorough examination of a subject from all its aspects has been made. This is said with reference to the prevailing double mistake (a) of limiting Theosophy to Buddhism; and (b) of confounding the tenets of the religious philosophy preached by Gautama, the Buddha, with the doctrines broadly outlined in Esoteric Buddhism. Any thing more erroneous than this could hardly be imagined. It has enabled our enemies to find an effective weapon against Theosophy, because, as an eminent Pâli scholar very pointedly expressed it, there was in the volume named “neither Esotericism nor Buddhism.” The esoteric truths, presented in Mr. Sinnett's work, ceased to be esoteric from the moment they were made public; nor did the book contain the religion of Buddha, but simply a few tenets from a hitherto hidden teaching, which are now explained and supplemented by many more in the present volumes. And even the latter, though giving out many fundamental tenets from the Secret Doctrine of the East, raise but a small corner of the dark veil. For no one, not even the greatest living Adept, would be permitted to, or could—even if he would—give out promiscuously to a mocking, unbelieving world that which has been so effectually concealed from it for long æons and ages.

Esoteric Buddhism was an excellent work with a very unfortunate title, though it meant no more than does the title of this work, The [pg 002]Secret Doctrine. It proved unfortunate, because people are always in the habit of judging things by their appearance rather than by their meaning, and because the error has now become so universal, that even most of the Fellows of the Theosophical Society have fallen victims to the same misconception. From the first, however, protests were raised by Brâhmans and others against the title; and, in justice to myself, I must add that Esoteric Buddhism was presented to me as a completed volume, and that I was entirely unaware of the manner in which the author intended to spell the word “Budh-ism.”

This has to be laid directly at the door of those who, having been the first to bring the subject under public notice, neglected to point out the difference between “Buddhism”—the religious system of ethics preached by the Lord Gautama, and so named from his title of Buddha, the “Enlightened”—and “Budhism,” from Budha, Wisdom, or Knowledge (Vidyâ), the faculty of cognizing, from the Sanskrit root Budh, to know. We Theosophists of India are ourselves the real culprits, although, at the time, we did our best to correct the mistake.1 To avoid this deplorable misnomer was easy; the spelling of the word had only to be altered, and by common consent both pronounced and written “Budhism,” instead of “Buddhism.” Nor is the latter term correctly spelt and pronounced, as it ought to be called, in English, Buddhaïsm, and its votaries “Buddhaïsts.”

This explanation is absolutely necessary at the beginning of a work like the present. The Wisdom-Religion is the inheritance of all the nations, the world over, in spite of the statement made in Esoteric Buddhism2 that “two years ago (i.e., in 1883), neither I, nor any other European living, knew the alphabet of the Science, here for the first time put into a scientific shape,” etc. This error must have crept in through inadvertence. The present writer knew all that is “divulged” in Esoteric Buddhism, and much more, many years before it became her duty (in 1880) to impart a small portion of the Secret Doctrine to two European gentlemen, one of whom was the author of Esoteric Buddhism; and surely the present writer has the undoubted, though to her, rather equivocal, privilege of being a European by birth and education. Moreover, a considerable part of the philosophy expounded by Mr. Sinnett was taught in America, even before Isis Unveiled was published, to two Europeans and to my colleague, Colonel H. S. Olcott. Of the three teachers the latter gentleman has had, the first was a Hungarian [pg 003] Initiate, the second an Egyptian, the third a Hindû. As permitted, Colonel Olcott has given out some of this teaching in various ways; if the other two have not, it has been simply because they were not allowed, their time for public work having not yet come. But for others it has, and the appearance of Mr. Sinnett's several interesting books is a visible proof of the fact. Moreover, it is above everything important to keep in mind that no Theosophical book acquires the least additional value from pretended authority.

Âdi, or Âdhi Budha, the One, or the First, and Supreme Wisdom, is a term used by Âryâsanga in his secret treatises, and now by all the mystic Northern Buddhists. It is a Sanskrit term, and an appellation given by the earliest Âryans to the Unknown Deity; the word “Brahmâ” not being found in the Vedas and the early works. It means the Absolute Wisdom, and Âdibhûta is translated by Fitzedward Hall, “the primeval uncreated cause of all.” Æons of untold duration must have elapsed, before the epithet of Buddha was so humanized, so to speak, as to allow of the term being applied to mortals, and finally appropriated to one whose unparalleled virtues and knowledge caused him to receive the title of the “Buddha of Wisdom Unmoved.” Bodha means the innate possession of divine intellect or understanding; Buddha, the acquirement of it by personal efforts and merit; while Buddhi is the faculty of cognizing, the channel through which divine knowledge reaches the Ego, the discernment of good and evil, also divine conscience, and the Spiritual Soul, which is the vehicle of Âtmâ. “When Buddhi absorbs our Ego-tism (destroys it) with all its Vikâras, Avalokiteshvara becomes manifested to us, and Nirvâna, or Mukti, is reached,” Mukti being the same as Nirvana, i.e., freedom from the trammels of Mâyâ or Illusion. Bodhi is likewise the name of a particular state of trance-condition, called Samâdhi, during which the subject reaches the culmination of spiritual knowledge.

Unwise are those who, in their blind and, in our age, untimely hatred of Buddhism, and, by reäction, of Budhism, deny its esoteric teachings, which are those also of the Brâhmans, simply because the name suggests what to them, as Monotheists, are noxious doctrines. Unwise is the correct term to use in their case. For in this age of crass and illogical materialism, the Esoteric Philosophy alone is calculated to withstand the repeated attacks on all and everything man holds most dear and sacred in his inner spiritual life. The true philosopher, the student of Esoteric Wisdom, entirely loses sight of personalities, [pg 004] dogmatic beliefs and special religions. Moreover, Esoteric Philosophy reconciles all religions, strips every one of its outward human garments, and shows the root of each to be identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity of a Divine Absolute Principle in Nature. It denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ens. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever-Unknowable. Furthermore, the records we mean to place before the reader embrace the esoteric tenets of the whole world since the beginning of our humanity, and Buddhistic Occultism occupies therein only its legitimate place, and no more. Indeed, the secret portions of the Dan or Janna (Dhyâna)3 of Gautama's metaphysics—grand as they appear to one unacquainted with the tenets of the Wisdom-Religion of antiquity—are but a very small portion of the whole. The Hindû reformer limited his public teachings to the purely moral and physiological aspect of the Wisdom-Religion, to ethics and man alone. Things “unseen and incorporeal,” the mysteries of Being outside our terrestrial sphere, the great Teacher left entirely untouched in his public lectures, reserving the Hidden Truths for a select circle of his Arhats. The latter received their Initiation at the famous Saptaparna Cave (the Sattapanni of Mahâvansa) near Mount Baibhâr (the Webhâra of the Pâli MSS.). This cave was in Râjâgriha, the ancient capital of Magadha, and was the Cheta Cave of Fa-hian, as is rightly suspected by some archaeologists.4

Time and human imagination made short work of the purity and philosophy of these teachings, once that they were transplanted from the secret and sacred circle of the Arhats, during the course of their work of proselytism, into a soil less prepared for metaphysical conceptions than India; i.e., once they were transferred into China, Japan, Siam, and Burmah. How the pristine purity of these grand revelations was dealt with may be seen in studying some of the so-called “esoteric” Buddhist schools of antiquity in their modern garb, not only in China [pg 005] and other Buddhist countries in general, but even in not a few schools of Tibet, which have been left to the care of uninitiated Lamas and Mongolian innovators.

Thus the reader is asked to bear in mind the very important difference between orthodox Buddhism—i.e., the public teachings of Gautama, the Buddha—and his esoteric Budhism. His Secret Doctrine, however, differed in no wise from that of the initiated Brahmans of his day. The Buddha was a child of Âryan soil, a born Hindû, a Kshatriya and a disciple of the Twice-born (the initiated Brâhmans) or Dvîjas. His teachings, therefore, could not be different from their doctrines, for the whole Buddhist reform consisted merely in giving out a portion of that which had been kept secret from every man outside of the “enchanted” circle of ascetics and Temple-Initiates. Unable, owing to his pledges, to teach all that had been imparted to him, though the Buddha taught a philosophy built upon the ground-work of the true esoteric knowledge, he gave to the world only its outward material body and kept its soul for his Elect. Many Chinese scholars among Orientalists have heard of the “Soul-Doctrine.” None seem to have understood its real meaning and importance.

That doctrine was preserved secretly—too secretly, perhaps—within the sanctuary. The mystery that shrouded its chief dogma and aspiration—Nirvâna—has so tried and irritated the curiosity of those scholars who have studied it, that, unable to solve it logically and satisfactorily by untying its Gordian knot, they have cut it through by declaring that Nirvâna means absolute annihilation.

Toward the end of the first quarter of this century a distinct class of literature appeared in the world, which with every year became more defined in its tendency. Being based, soi-disant, on the scholarly researches of Sanskritists and Orientalists in general, it was considered scientific. Hindû, Egyptian, and other ancient religions, myths, and emblems were made to yield anything the symbologist wanted them to yield, and thus often the rude outward form was given out in place of the inner meaning. Works, most remarkable for their ingenious deductions and speculations, circulo vicioso—foregone conclusions generally taking the place of premisses in the syllogisms of more than one Sanskrit and Pâli scholar—appeared rapidly in succession, over-flooding the libraries with dissertations on phallic and sexual worship rather than on real symbology, and each contradicting the other.

This is the true reason, perhaps, why the outline of a few fundamental [pg 006] truths from the Secret Doctrine of the Archaic Ages is now permitted to see the light, after long millenniums of the most profound silence and secrecy. I say advisedly “a few truths,” because that which must remain unsaid could not be contained in a hundred such volumes, nor could it be imparted to the present generation of Sadducees. But even the little that is now given is better than complete silence upon these vital truths. The world of to-day, in its mad career towards the unknown, which the Physicist is too ready to confound with the unknowable, whenever the problem eludes his grasp, is rapidly progressing on the reverse plane to that of spirituality. It has now become a vast arena, a true valley of discord and of eternal strife, a necropolis, wherein lie buried the highest and the most holy aspirations of our Spirit-Soul. That soul becomes with every new generation more paralyzed and atrophied. The “amiable infidels and accomplished profligates” of Society, spoken of by Greeley, care little for the revival of the dead sciences of the past; but there is a fair minority of earnest students who are entitled to learn the few truths that may be given to them now; and now much more than ten years ago, when Isis Unveiled appeared, or even when the later attempts to explain the mysteries of esoteric science were published.

One of the greatest and perhaps the most serious objection to the correctness and reliability of the whole work will be the preliminary Stanzas. How can the statements contained in them be verified? True, though a great portion of the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Mongolian works quoted in the present volumes is known to some Orientalists, yet the chief work—that one from which the Stanzas are given—is not in the possession of European Libraries. The Book of Dzyan (or Dzan) is utterly unknown to our Philologists, or at any rate was never heard of by them under its present name. This is, of course, a great drawback to those who follow the methods of research prescribed by official Science; but to students of Occultism, and to every genuine Occultist, this will be of little moment. The main body of the doctrines given, however, is found scattered throughout hundreds and thousands of Sanskrit MSS., some already translated—disfigured in their interpretations, as usual—others still waiting their turn. Every scholar, therefore, has an opportunity of verifying the statements herein made, and of checking most of the quotations. A few new facts, new to the profane Orientalist only, and passages quoted from the Commentaries will be found difficult to trace. Several of the [pg 007] teachings also have hitherto been transmitted orally, yet even these in every instance are hinted at in the almost countless volumes of Brâhmanical, Chinese and Tibetan temple-literature.

However it may be, and whatsoever is in store for the writer through malevolent criticism, one fact is quite certain. The members of several esoteric schools—the seat of which is beyond the Himâlayas, and whose ramifications may be found in China, Japan, India, Tibet, and even in Syria, and also South America—claim to have in their possession the sum total of sacred and philosophical works in MSS. and print, all the works, in fact, that have ever been written, in whatever language or character, since the art of writing began, from the ideographic hieroglyphs down to the alphabet of Cadmus and the Devanâgari.

It has been constantly claimed that, ever since the destruction of the Alexandrian Library,5 every work of a character that might lead the profane to the ultimate discovery and comprehension of some of the mysteries of the Secret Science, owing to the combined efforts of the members of these Brotherhoods, has been diligently searched for. It is added, moreover, by those who know, that once found all such works were destroyed, save three copies of each which were preserved and safely stored away. In India, the last of these precious manuscripts were secured and hidden during the reign of the Emperor Akbar.

Prof. Max Müller shows that no bribes or threats of Akbar could extort the original text of the Vedas from the Brâhmans, and yet boasts that European Orientalists have it.6 That Europe has the complete text is exceedingly doubtful, and the future may have very disagreeable surprises in store for the Orientalists.

It is maintained, furthermore, that every sacred book of this kind, the text of which was not sufficiently veiled in symbolism, or which had any direct references to the ancient mysteries, was first carefully copied in cryptographic characters, such as to defy the art of the best and cleverest palæographer, and then destroyed to the last copy. During Akbar's reign, some fanatical courtiers, displeased at the Emperor's sinful prying into the religions of the infidels, themselves helped the Brâhmans to conceal their MSS. Such was Badáoní, [pg 008] who had an undisguised horror of Akbar's mania for idolatrous religions.

Badáoní, in his Muntakhab at Tawarikh, writes:

As they [the Shramana and Brâhmans] surpass other learned men in their treatises on morals and on physical and religious sciences, and reach a high degree in their knowledge of the future, in spiritual power, and human perfection, they brought proofs based on reason and testimony, ... and inculcated their doctrines so firmly ... that no man ... could now raise a doubt in his Majesty even if mountains were to crumble to dust, or the heavens were to tear asunder.... His Majesty relished inquiries into the sects of these infidels, who cannot be counted, so numerous they are, and who have no end of revealed books.7

This work “was kept secret and, was not published till the reign of Jahángír.”

Moreover in all the large and wealthy Lamasaries, there are subterranean crypts and cave-libraries, cut in the rock, whenever the Gonpa and Lhakhang are situated in the mountains. Beyond the Western Tsaydam, in the solitary passes of Kuen-lun there are several such hiding-places. Along the ridge of Altyn-tag, whose soil no European foot has ever trodden so far, there exists a certain hamlet, lost in a deep gorge. It is a small cluster of houses, a hamlet rather than a monastery, with a poor-looking temple in it, and one old Lama, a hermit, living near by to watch it. Pilgrims say that the subterranean galleries and halls under it contain a collection of books, the number of which, according to the accounts given, is too large to find room even in the British Museum.

According to the same tradition the now desolate regions of the waterless land of Tarim—a veritable wilderness in the heart of Turkestan—were in days of old covered with flourishing and wealthy cities. At present, a few verdant oases only relieve its dread solitude. One such, carpeting the sepulchre of a vast city buried under the sandy soil of the desert, belongs to no one, but is often visited by Mongolians and Buddhists. The tradition also speaks of immense subterranean abodes, of large corridors filled with tiles and cylinders. It may be an idle rumour, and it may be an actual fact.

All this will very likely provoke a smile of doubt. But before the reader rejects the truthfulness of the reports, let him pause and reflect over the following well-known facts. The collective researches of Orientalists, and especially of late years the labours of students of Comparative Philology and the Science of Religion, have enabled them [pg 009] to ascertain that an incalculable number of MSS., and even of printed works known to have existed, are now to be no more found. They have disappeared without leaving the slightest trace behind them. Were they works of no importance they might, in the natural course of time, have been left to perish, and their very names would have been obliterated from human memory. But this is not so, for, as now ascertained, most of them contained the true keys to works still extant, and now entirely incomprehensible, for the greater portion of their readers, without these additional volumes of commentaries and explanations.

Such, for instance, are the works of Lao-tse, the predecessor of Confucius. He is said to have written nine hundred and thirty books on ethics and religions, and seventy on magic, one thousand in all. His great work, however, the Tao-te-King, the heart of his doctrine and the sacred scripture of the Tao-sse, has in it, as Stanislas Julien shows, only “about 5,000 words,”8 hardly a dozen of pages; yet Professor Max Müller finds that “the text is unintelligible without commentaries, so that M. Julien had to consult more than sixty commentators for the purpose of his translation, the earliest going back as far as the year 163 b.c.”, and not earlier, as we see. During the four centuries and a half that preceded this “earliest” of the commentators there was ample time to veil the true Lao-tse doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The Japanese, among whom are now to be found the most learned of the priests and followers of Lao-tse, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of European Chinese scholars; and tradition affirms that the commentaries to which our Western Sinologues have access are not the real occult records, but intentional veils, and that the true commentaries, as well as almost all the texts, have long disappeared from the eyes of the profane.

Of the works of Confucius we read:

If we turn to China, we find that the religion of Confucius is founded on the Five King and the Four Shu books—in themselves of considerable extent and surrounded by voluminous Commentaries, without which even the most learned scholars would not venture to fathom the depth of their sacred canon.9

But they have not fathomed it; and this is the complaint of the Confucianists, as a very learned member of that body, in Paris, complained in 1881.

[pg 010]

If our scholars turn to the ancient literature of the Semitic religions, to the Scriptures of Chaldea, the elder sister and instructress, if not the fountain-head of the Mosaic Bible, the basis and starting-point of Christianity, what do they find? To perpetuate the memory of the ancient religions of Babylon, to record the vast cycle of astronomical observations of the Chaldean Magi, to justify the tradition of their splendid and preëminently occult literature, what now remains? Only a few fragments, which are said to be by Berosus.

These, however, are almost valueless, even as a clue to the character of what has disappeared, for they passed through the hands of his Reverence, the Bishop of Cæsarea—that self-constituted censor and editor of the sacred records of other men's religions—and they doubtless to this day bear the mark of his eminently veracious and trustworthy hand. For what is the history of this treatise on the once grand religion of Babylon?

It was written in Greek for Alexander the Great, by Berosus, a priest of the temple of Belus, from the astronomical and chronological records preserved by the priests of that temple—records covering a period of 200,000 years—and is now lost. In the first century b.c. Alexander Polyhistor made a series of extracts from it, which are also lost. Eusebius (270-340 a.d.) used these extracts in writing his Chronicon. The points of resemblance—almost of identity—between the Jewish and the Chaldean scriptures,10 made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in his rôle of defender and champion of the new faith which had adopted the former scriptures and together with them an absurd chronology.

Now it is pretty certain that Eusebius did not spare the Egyptian synchronistic tables of Manetho—so much so that Bunsen11 charges him with mutilating history most unscrupulously, and Socrates, a historian of the fifth century, and Syncellus, vice-patriarch of Constantinople in the beginning of the eighth, denounce him as the most daring and desperate forger. Is it likely, then, that he dealt more tenderly with the Chaldean records, which were already menacing the new religion, so rashly accepted?

[pg 011]

So that, with the exception of these more than doubtful fragments, the entire Chaldean sacred literature has disappeared from the eyes of the profane as completely as the lost Atlantis. A few facts that were contained in the Berosian History are given later on, and may throw great light on the true origin of the Fallen Angels, personified by Bel and the Dragon.

Turning now to the oldest specimen of Âryan literature, the Rig Veda, the student if he strictly follows in this the data furnished by the Orientalists themselves, will find that although the Rig Veda contains only about 10,580 verses, or 1,028 hymns, yet in spite of the Brâhmanas and the mass of glosses and commentaries, it is not understood correctly to this day. Why is this so? Evidently because the Brâhmanas, “the scholastic and oldest treatises on the primitive hymns,” themselves require a key, which the Orientalists have failed to secure.

What, again, do the scholars say of Buddhist literature? Do they possess it in its completeness? Assuredly not. Notwithstanding the 325 volumes of the Kanjur and Tanjur of the Northern Buddhists, each volume, we are told, “weighing from four to five pounds,” nothing, in truth, is known of real Lamaïsm. Yet the sacred canon is said in the Saddharmâlankâra12 to contain 29,368,000 letters, or, exclusive of treatises and commentaries, five or six times the amount of the matter contained in the Bible, which, as Professor Max Müller states, rejoices in only 3,567,180 letters. Notwithstanding, then, these 325 volumes (in reality there are 333, the Kanjur comprising 108, and Tanjur 225 volumes), “the translators, instead of supplying us with correct versions, have interwoven them with their own commentaries, for the purpose of justifying the dogmas of their several schools.”13 Moreover, “according to a tradition preserved by the Buddhist schools, both of the South and of the North, the sacred Buddhist Canon comprised originally 80,000 or 84,000 tracts, but most of them were lost, so that there remained but 6,000”—as the Professor tells his audience. Lost, as usual—for Europeans. But who can be quite sure that they are likewise lost for Buddhists and Brâhmans?

Considering the reverence of the Buddhists for every line written upon Buddha and the Good Law, the loss of nearly 76,000 tracts does [pg 012] seem miraculous. Had it been vice versâ, every one acquainted with the natural course of events would subscribe to the statement that, of these 76,000, 5,000 or 6,000 treatises might have been destroyed during the persecutions in, and emigrations from, India. But as it is well ascertained that the Buddhist Arhats began their religious exodus, for the purpose of propagating the new faith beyond Kashmir and the Himâlayas, as early as the year 300 before our era,14 and reached China in the year 61 a.d.,15 when Kashyapa, at the invitation of the Emperor Ming-ti, went there to acquaint the “Son of Heaven” with the tenets of Buddhism, it does seem strange to hear the Orientalists speaking of such a loss as though it were really possible. They do not seem to allow for one moment the possibility that the texts may be lost only for the West and for themselves, or that the Asiatic people should have the unparalleled boldness to keep their most sacred records out of the reach of foreigners, thus refusing to deliver them to the profanation and misuse even of races so “vastly superior” to themselves.

Judging by the expressed regrets and numerous confessions of almost every one of the Orientalists,16 the public may feel sufficiently sure, (a) that the students of ancient religions have indeed very few data upon which to build such final conclusions as they generally do about the old faiths, and (b) that such lack of data does not in the least prevent them from dogmatizing. One would imagine that, thanks to the numerous records of the Egyptian theogony and mysteries, preserved in the classics and in a number of ancient writers, the rites and dogmas of Pharaonic Egypt, at least, ought to be well understood; better, at any rate, than the too abstruse philosophies and Pantheism of India, of whose religion and language Europe had hardly any idea before the beginning of the present century. Along the Nile and on the face of the whole country, there stand to this hour, yearly and daily exhumed, ever fresh relics which eloquently tell their own history. Still it is not so. The learned Oxford Philologist himself confesses the truth by saying:

We see still standing the pyramids, and the ruins of temples and labyrinths, their walls covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and with the strange pictures of gods and goddesses. On rolls of papyrus, which seem to defy the ravages of time, [pg 013]we have even fragments of what may be called the sacred books of the Egyptians. Yet, though much has been deciphered in the ancient records of the mysterious race, the mainspring of the religion of Egypt and the original intention of its ceremonial worship are far from being fully disclosed to us.17

Here again the mysterious hieroglyphic documents remain, but the keys by which alone they become intelligible have disappeared.

In fact so little acquainted are our greatest Egyptologists with the funerary rites of the Egyptians and the outward marks of the difference of sex on the mummies, that it has led to the most ludicrous mistakes. Only a year or two ago, one of this kind was discovered at Boulaq, Cairo. The mummy of what was considered the wife of an unimportant Pharaoh, has, thanks to an inscription found on an amulet hung round its neck, turned out to be that of Sesostris—the greatest King of Egypt!

Nevertheless, having found that “there is a natural connection between language and religion”; and that “there was a common Âryan religion before the separation of the Âryan race; a common Semitic religion before the separation of the Semitic race; and a common Turanic religion before the separation of the Chinese and the other tribes belonging to the Turanian class”; having, in fact, discovered only “three ancient centres of religion” and “three centres of language”; and though as entirely ignorant of those primitive religions and languages as of their origin—the Professor does not hesitate to declare “that a truly historical basis for a scientific treatment of the principal religions of the world” has been gained!

A “scientific treatment” of a subject is no guarantee for its “historical basis”; and with such scarcity of data on hand, no Philologist, even among the most eminent, is justified in giving out his own conclusions for historical facts. No doubt, the eminent Orientalist has thoroughly proved to the world's satisfaction that, according to the phonetic rules of Grimm's law, Odin and Buddha are two different personages, quite distinct from each other, and has proved it scientifically. When, however, he takes the opportunity of saying in the same breath that Odin “was worshipped as the supreme deity during a period long anterior to the age of the Veda and of Homer,”18 he has not the slightest “historical basis” for it, but makes history and fact subservient to his own conclusions, which may be very “scientific” in the sight of Oriental scholars, but yet very wide of the mark of actual [pg 014] truth. The conflicting views of the various eminent Philologists and Orientalists, from Martin Haug down to Prof. Max Müller himself, on the subject of chronology, in the case of the Vedas, are an evident proof that the statement has no “historical” basis to stand upon, “internal evidence” being very often a Jack-o'-lantern, instead of a safe beacon to follow. Nor has the Science of modern Comparative Mythology any better argument to bring forward to crush the contention of those learned writers who have insisted for the last century or so that there must have been “fragments of a primeval revelation, granted to the ancestors of the whole race of mankind ... preserved in the temples of Greece and Italy.” For this is what all the Eastern Initiates and Pandits have been proclaiming to the world from time to time. And while a prominent Singhalese priest assured the writer that it was well known that the most important tracts, belonging to the Buddhist sacred canon, were stored away in countries and places inaccessible to the European Pandits, the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî, the greatest Sanskritist of his day in India, assured some members of the Theosophical Society of the same fact with regard to ancient Brâhmanical works. When told that Professor Max Müller had declared to the audiences of his Lectures that the theory “that there was a primeval preternatural revelation granted to the fathers of the human race, finds but few supporters at present”—the holy and learned man laughed. His answer was suggestive. “If Mr. ‘Moksh Mooller’ [as he pronounced the name], were a Brâhman, and came with me, I might take him to a gupa cave [a secret crypt] near Okhee Math, in the Himâlayas, where he would soon find out that what crossed the Kâlapani [the black waters of the ocean] from India to Europe were only the bits of rejected copies of some passages from our sacred books. There was a ‘primeval revelation,’ and it still exists; nor will it ever be lost to the world, but will reäppear; though the Mlechchhas will of course have to wait.”

Questioned further on the point, he would say no more. This was at Meerut, in 1880.

No doubt the mystification played by the Brâhmans upon Colonel Wilford and Sir William Jones, in the last century, at Calcutta, was cruel, but it had been well deserved, and no one was more to blame in that affair than the missionaries and Colonel Wilford himself. The former, on the testimony of Sir William Jones himself,19 were silly enough to maintain that “the Hindûs were even now almost Christians, [pg 015] because their Brahmâ, Vishnu and Mahesha were no other than the Christian trinity.”20 It was a good lesson. It made the Oriental scholars doubly cautious; but perchance it has also made some of them too shy and, in its reäction, has caused the pendulum of foregone conclusions to swing too much the other way. For “that first supply from the Brâhmanical market,” in answer to the demand of Colonel Wilford, has now created an evident necessity and desire in the Orientalists to declare nearly every archaic Sanskrit manuscript so modern as to give the missionaries full justification for availing themselves of their opportunity. That they do so and to the full extent of their mental powers, is shown by the absurd attempts of late to prove that the whole Purânic story about Krishna was plagiarized by the Brâhmans from the Bible! But the facts cited by the Oxford Professor in his Lectures concerning the now famous interpolations, for the benefit, and later on to the sorrow, of Colonel Wilford, do not at all interfere with the conclusions to which one who studies the Secret Doctrine must unavoidably come. For, if the results show that neither the New nor even the Old Testament borrowed anything from the more ancient religion of the Brâhmans and Buddhists, it does not follow that the Jews have not borrowed all they knew from the Chaldean records, the latter being mutilated later on by Eusebius. As to the Chaldeans, they assuredly got their primitive learning from the Brâhmans, for Rawlinson shows an undeniably Vedic influence in the early mythology of Babylon; and Colonel Vans Kennedy has long ago justly declared that Babylonia was, from her origin, the seat of Sanskrit and Brâhman learning. But all such proofs must lose their value, in the presence of the latest theory worked out by Prof. Max Müller. What it is everyone knows. The code of phonetic laws has now become a universal solvent for every identification and “connection” between the gods of many nations. Thus, though the Mother of Mercury (Budha, Thot-Hermes, etc.) was Maia, the mother of Gautama Buddha, also Mâyâ, and the mother of Jesus, likewise Mâyâ (Illusion, for Mary is Mare, the Sea, the great Illusion symbolically)—yet these three characters have no connection, nor can they have any, since Bopp has “laid down his code of phonetic laws.”

In their efforts to collect together the many skeins of unwritten [pg 016] history, it is a bold step for our Orientalists to take, to deny à priori everything that does not dove-tail with their special conclusions. Thus, while new discoveries are daily made of great arts and sciences having existed far back in the night of time, yet even the knowledge of writing is refused to some of the most ancient nations, and they are credited with barbarism instead of culture. Nevertheless traces of an immense civilization, even in Central Asia, are still to be found. This civilization is undeniably prehistoric. And how can there be civilization without a literature in some form, without annals or chronicles? Common sense alone ought to supplement the broken links in the history of departed nations. The gigantic and unbroken wall of the mountains that hem in the whole table-land of Tibet, from the upper course of the river Khuan-Khé down to the Karakorum hills, witnessed a civilization during millenniums of years, and should have strange secrets to tell mankind. The eastern and central portions of these regions—the Nan-chan and the Altyn-tag—were once upon a time covered with cities that could well vie with Babylon. A whole geological period has swept over the land, since those cities breathed their last, as the mounds of shifting sand and the sterile and now dead soil of the immense central plains of the basin of Tarim testify. The borderlands alone are superficially known to the traveller. Within those table-lands of sand there is water, and fresh oases are found blooming there, wherein no European foot has ever yet ventured, or trodden the now treacherous soil. Among these verdant oases there are some which are entirely inaccessible even to the profane native traveller. Hurricanes may “tear up the sands and sweep whole plains away,” they are powerless to destroy that which is beyond their reach. Built deep in the bowels of the earth, the subterranean stores are secure; and as their entrances are concealed, there is little fear that anyone would discover them, even should several armies invade the sandy wastes where—

Not a pool, not a bush, not a house is seen,

And the mountain-range forms a rugged screen

Round the parch'd flats of the dry, dry desert....

But there is no need to send the reader across the desert, when the same proofs of ancient civilization are found even in comparatively populated regions of the same country. The oasis of Tchertchen, for instance, situated about 4,000 feet above the level of the river Tchertchen-Darya, is now surrounded in every direction by the ruins [pg 017] of archaic towns and cities. There, some 3,000 human beings represent the relics of about a hundred extinct nations and races, the very names of which are now unknown to our ethnologists. An anthropologist would feel more than embarrassed to class, divide and subdivide them; the more so, as the respective descendants of all these antediluvian races and tribes themselves know as little of their own forefathers as if they had fallen from the moon. When questioned about their origin, they reply that they know not whence their fathers had come, but had heard that their first, or earliest, men were ruled by the great Genii of these deserts. This may be put down to ignorance and superstition, yet in view of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine, the answer may be based upon primeval tradition. Alone the tribe of Khoorassan claims to have come from what is now known as Afghanistan, long before the days of Alexander, and brings legendary lore to that effect in corroboration. The Russian traveller Colonel (now General) Prjevalsky found quite close to the oasis of Tchertchen the ruins of two enormous cities, the oldest of which, according to local tradition, was destroyed 3,000 years ago by a hero and giant, and the other by Mongolians in the tenth century of our era.

The emplacement of the two cities is now covered, owing to shifting sands and the desert wind, with strange and heterogeneous relics; with broken china and kitchen utensils and human bones. The natives often find copper and gold coins, melted silver ingots, diamonds, and turquoises, and what is the most remarkable—broken glass.... Coffins of some undecaying wood, or material, also, within which beautifully preserved embalmed bodies are found.... The male mummies are all extremely tall powerfully built men with long wavy hair.... A vault was found with twelve dead men sitting in it. Another time, in a separate coffin, a young girl was discovered by us. Her eyes were closed with golden discs, and the jaws held firm by a golden circlet running from under the chin across the top of the head. Clad in a narrow woollen garment, her bosom was covered with golden stars, the feet being left naked.21

To this, the famous traveller adds that all along their way on the river Tchertchen they heard legends about twenty-three towns buried ages ago by the shifting sands of the deserts. The same tradition exists on the Lob-nor and in the oasis of Kerya.

The traces of such civilization, and these and like traditions, give us the right to credit other legendary lore, warranted by well educated and learned natives of India and Mongolia who speak of immense libraries [pg 018] reclaimed from the sand, together with various relics of ancient Magic Lore, which have all been safely stowed away.

To recapitulate. The Secret Doctrine was the universally diffused religion of the ancient and prehistoric world. Proofs of its diffusion, authentic records of its history, a complete chain of documents, showing its character and presence in every land, together with the teaching of all its great Adepts, exist to this day in the secret crypts of libraries belonging to the Occult Fraternity.

This statement is rendered more credible by a consideration of the following facts: the tradition of the thousands of ancient parchments saved when the Alexandrian library was destroyed; the thousands of Sanskrit works which disappeared in India in the reign of Akbar; the universal tradition in China and Japan that the true ancient texts with the commentaries, which alone make them comprehensible, amounting to many thousands of volumes, have long passed out of the reach of profane hands; the disappearance of the vast sacred and occult literature of Babylon; the loss of those keys which alone could solve the thousand riddles of the Egyptian hieroglyphic records; the tradition in India that the real secret commentaries which alone make the Vedas intelligible, though no longer visible to profane eyes, still remain for the Initiate, hidden in secret caves and crypts; and an identical belief among the Buddhists, with regard to their secret books.

The Occultists assert that all these exist, safe from Western spoliating hands, to reäppear in some more enlightened age, for which, in the words of the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî, “the Mlechchhas [outcasts, savages, those beyond the pale of Âryan civilization] will have to wait.”

For it is not the fault of the Initiates that these documents are now “lost” to the profane; nor was their policy dictated by selfishness, or any desire to monopolise the life-giving sacred lore. There were portions of the Secret Science that for incalculable ages had to remain concealed from the profane gaze. But this was because the imparting to the unprepared multitude secrets of such tremendous importance was equivalent to giving a child a lighted candle in a powder magazine.

The answer to a question which has frequently arisen in the minds of students, when meeting with statements such as this, may well be outlined here.

We can understand, they say, the necessity for concealing from the herd such secrets as the Vril, or the rock-destroying force, discovered [pg 019] by J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia, but we cannot understand how any danger could arise from the revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine, for instance, as the evolution of the Planetary Chains.

The danger was that such doctrines as the Planetary Chain, or the seven Races, at once give a clue to the seven-fold nature of man, for each principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race, and the human principles are, on every plane, correlated to seven-fold occult forces, those of the higher planes being of tremendous power. So that any septenary division at once gives a clue to tremendous occult powers, the abuse of which would cause incalculable evil to humanity; a clue which is, perhaps, no clue to the present generation—especially to Westerns, protected as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic disbelief in the occult—but a clue which would, nevertheless, have been very real in the early centuries of the Christian era to people fully convinced of the reality of Occultism, and entering a cycle of degradation which made them rife for abuse of occult powers and sorcery of the worst description.

The documents were concealed, it is true, but the knowledge itself and its actual existence was never made a secret of by the Hierophants of the Temples, wherein the MYSTERIES have ever been made a discipline and stimulus to virtue. This is very old news, and was repeatedly made known by the great Adepts, from Pythagoras and Plato down to the Neo-Platonists. It was the new religion of the Nazarenes that wrought a change for the worse in the policy of centuries.

Moreover, there is a well-known fact—a very curious one, corroborated to the writer by a reverend gentleman attached for years to a Russian Embassy—that there are several documents in the St. Petersburg Imperial Libraries to show that, even so late as the days when Freemasonry and Secret Societies of Mystics flourished without hindrance in Russia, namely at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, more than one Russian Mystic travelled to Tibet viâ the Ural Mountains in search of knowledge and initiation in the unknown crypts of Central Asia. And more than one returned years later, with a rich store of information such as could never have been given him anywhere in Europe. Several cases could be cited and well-known names brought forward, but for the fact that such publicity might annoy the surviving relatives of the late Initiates referred to. Let any one look over the annals and history of Freemasonry in the [pg 020] archives of the Russian metropolis, and he will assure himself of the fact above stated.

This is a corroboration of what has been stated many times before, unfortunately, too indiscreetly. Instead of benefiting humanity, the virulent charges of deliberate invention and imposture with a purpose, hurled at those who asserted a veritable, even if a little known fact, have only generated bad Karma for the slanderers. But now the mischief is done, and truth should no longer be denied, whatever the consequences.

Is Theosophy a new religion, we are asked? By no means; it is not a “religion,” nor is its philosophy “new”; for, as already stated, it is as old as thinking man. Its tenets are not now published for the first time, but have been cautiously given out to, and taught by, more than one European Initiate—especially by the late Ragon.

More than one great scholar has stated that there never was a religious founder, whether Âryan, Semitic or Turanian, who had invented a new religion, or revealed a new truth. These founders were all transmitters, not original teachers. They were the authors of new forms and interpretations, while the truths upon which their teachings were based were as old as mankind. Thus out of the many truths revealed orally to man in the beginning, preserved and perpetuated in the Adyta of the temples through initiation, during the Mysteries and by personal transmission, they selected one or more of such grand verities—actualities visible only to the eye of the real Sage and Seer, and revealed them to the masses. Thus every nation received in its turn some of the said truths, under the veil of its own local and special symbolism, which, as time went on, developed into a more or less philosophical cultus, a Pantheon in mythical disguise. Therefore is Confucius, a very ancient legislator in historical chronology, though a very modern sage in the world's history, shown by Dr. Legge22 to be emphatically a transmitter, not a maker. As he himself says, “I only hand on: I cannot create new things. I believe in the ancients and therefore I love them.”23

The writer loves them too, and therefore believes in these ancients, and the modern heirs to their Wisdom. And believing in both, she now transmits that which she has received and learnt herself, to all those who will accept it. As to those who may reject her testimony—the great majority—she will bear them no malice, for they will be as right in [pg 021] their way in denying, as she is right in hers in affirming, since they look at Truth from two entirely different stand-points. Agreeably with the rules of critical scholarship, the Orientalist has to reject à priori whatever evidence he cannot fully verify for himself. And how can a Western scholar accept on hearsay that which he knows nothing about? Indeed, that which is given in these volumes is selected from oral, as much as from written teachings. This first instalment of the esoteric doctrines is based upon Stanzas, which are the records of a people unknown to ethnology. They are written, it is claimed, in a tongue absent from the nomenclature of languages and dialects with which philology is acquainted; are said to emanate from a source repudiated by Science—to-wit, Occultism; and finally they are offered through an agency, incessantly discredited before the world by all those who hate unwelcome truths, or have some special hobby of their own to defend. Therefore, the rejection of these teachings may be expected, and must be expected beforehand. No one styling himself a “scholar,” in whatever department of exact Science, will permit himself to regard these teachings seriously. They will be derided and rejected à priori in this century, but only in this one. For in the twentieth century of our era scholars will begin to recognize that the Secret Doctrine has neither been invented nor exaggerated, but, on the contrary, simply outlined; and finally that its teachings antedate the Vedas. This is no pretension to prophecy, but simply a statement based on the knowledge of facts. Every century an attempt is being made to show the world that Occultism is no vain superstition. Once the door is permitted to remain a little ajar, it will be opened wider with every new century. The times are ripe for a more serious knowledge than hitherto permitted, though still, even now, very limited.

For have not even the Vedas been derided, rejected and called “a modern forgery” even so recently as fifty years ago? Was not Sanskrit proclaimed at one time the progeny of, and a dialect derived from, the Greek, according to Lemprière and other scholars? About 1820, as Prof. Max Müller tells us, the sacred books of the Brâhmans, of the Magians, and of the Buddhists, “were all but unknown, their very existence was doubted, and there was not a single scholar who could have translated a line of the Veda ... of the Zend Avesta, or ... of the Buddhist Tripitaka, and now the Vedas are proved to be the work of the highest antiquity, whose ‘preservation amounts almost to a marvel’.”

[pg 022]

The same will be said of the Secret Archaic Doctrine, when undeniable proofs are given of its existence and records. But it will be centuries before much more is given from it. Speaking of the keys to the Zodiacal Mysteries as being almost lost to the world, it was remarked by the writer some ten years ago in Isis Unveiled that: “The said key must be turned seven times before the whole system is divulged. We will give it but one turn, and thereby allow the profane one glimpse into the mystery. Happy he, who understands the whole!”

The same may be said of the whole Esoteric System. One turn of the key, and no more, was given in Isis Unveiled. Much more is explained in these volumes. In those days the writer hardly knew the language in which the work was written, and the disclosure of many things, freely spoken about now, was forbidden. In Century the Twentieth, some disciple more informed, and far better fitted, may be sent by the Masters of Wisdom to give final and irrefutable proofs that there exists a Science called Gupta Vidyâ; and that, like the once mysterious sources of the Nile, the source of all religions and philosophies now made known to the world has been for many ages forgotten and lost to men, but it is at last found.

Such a work as this has to be introduced with no simple preface, but with a volume rather—one that would give facts, not mere disquisitions, since The Secret Doctrine is not a treatise, or a series of vague theories, but contains all that can be given out to the world in this century.

It would be worse than useless to publish in these pages even those portions of the esoteric teachings that have now escaped from confinement, unless the genuineness and authenticity, or at any rate the probability, of the existence of such teachings were first established. Such statements as will now be made, have to be shown as warranted by various authorities, such as ancient philosophers, classical writers and even certain learned Church Fathers, some of whom knew these doctrines because they had studied them, had seen and read works written upon them; and some of whom had even been personally initiated into the ancient Mysteries, during the performance of which the arcane doctrines were allegorically enacted. The writer will have to give historical and trustworthy names, and to cite well-known authors, ancient and modern, of recognized ability, good judgment, and truthfulness, as also to name some of the famous proficients in the secret arts and science, together with the mysteries of the latter, as they [pg 023] are divulged, or rather partially presented before the public in their strange archaic form.

How is this to be done; what is the best way for achieving such an object, has been the ever-recurring question. To make our plan clearer, an illustration may be attempted. When a tourist, coming from a well-explored country, suddenly reaches the borderland of a terra incognita, hedged in, and shut out from view by a formidable barrier of impassable rocks, he may still refuse to acknowledge himself baffled in his exploratory plans. Ingress beyond is forbidden. But if he cannot visit the mysterious region personally, he may still find a means of examining it from as short a distance as can be arrived at. Helped by his knowledge of the landscapes left behind, he can get a general and pretty correct idea of the transmural view, if he will only climb to the loftiest summit of the altitudes in front of him. Once there, he can gaze at it at his leisure, comparing that which he dimly perceives with that which he has just left below, now that he is, thanks to his own efforts, beyond the line of the mists and the cloud-capped cliffs.

Such a point of preliminary observation, cannot in these two volumes be offered to those who would like to get a more correct understanding of the mysteries of the pre-archaic periods given in the texts. But if the reader has patience, and will glance at the present state of beliefs and creeds in Europe, compare and check it with what is known to history of the ages directly preceding and following the Christian era, then he will find all this in a future volume of the present work.

In the latter volume a brief recapitulation will be made of all the principal Adepts known to history, and the downfall of the Mysteries will be described, after which began the disappearance and the systematic and final elimination from the memory of men of the real nature of Initiation and the Sacred Science. From that time its teachings became occult, and Magic sailed but too often under the venerable but frequently misleading name of Hermetic Philosophy. As real Occultism had been prevalent among the Mystics during the centuries that preceded our era, so Magic, or rather Sorcery, with its Occult Arts, followed the beginning of Christianity.

However great and zealous the fanatical efforts, during these early centuries, to obliterate every trace of the mental and intellectual labour of the Pagans, they were a failure; but the same spirit of the dark demon of bigotry and intolerance has ever since systematically perverted every bright page written in the pre-Christian periods. Even [pg 024] history, in her uncertain records, has preserved enough of that which has survived to throw an impartial light upon the whole. Let, then, the reader tarry a little while with the writer on the spot of observation selected. He is asked to give all his attention to that millennium of the pre-Christian and the post-Christian periods, divided by the year One of the Nativity. This event—whether historically correct or not—has nevertheless been made to serve as a first signal for the erection of manifold bulwarks against any possible return of, or even a glimpse into, the hated religions of the Past; hated and dreaded, because throwing such a vivid light on the novel and intentionally veiled interpretation of what is now known as the “New Dispensation.”

However superhuman the efforts of the early Christian Fathers to obliterate the Secret Doctrine from the very memory of man, they all failed. Truth can never be killed; hence the failure to sweep away entirely from the face of the earth every vestige of that ancient Wisdom, and to shackle and gag every witness who testified to it. Let one only think of the thousands, perhaps millions, of MSS. burnt; of monuments, with their too indiscreet inscriptions and pictorial symbols, pulverized to dust; of the bands of early hermits and ascetics roaming about among the ruined cities of Upper and Lower Egypt, in desert and mountain, valley and highland, seeking for and eager to destroy every obelisk and pillar, scroll or parchment they could lay their hands on, if only it bore the symbol of the Tau, or any other sign borrowed and appropriated by the new faith—and he will then see plainly how it is that so little has remained of the records of the past. Verily, the fiendish spirit of fanaticism of early and mediæval Christianity and of Islam has loved from the first to dwell in darkness and ignorance; and both have made

... the sun like blood, the earth a tomb,

The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom!

Both creeds have won their proselytes at the point of the sword; both have built their churches on heaven-kissing hecatombs of human victims. Over the gateway of Century I of our era, the ominous words “The Karma of Israel,” fatally glowed. Over the portals of our own, the future seer may discern other words, that will point to the Karma for cunningly made-up history, for events purposely perverted, and for great characters slandered by posterity, mangled out of recognition, between the two cars of Jagannâtha—Bigotry and Materialism; one accepting too much, the other denying all. Wise is he who holds to the golden mid-point, who believes in the eternal justice of things. [pg 025] Says Faizi Díwán, the “witness to the wonderful speeches of a freethinker who belongs to a thousand sects”:

In the assembly of the day of resurrection, when past things shall be forgiven, the sins of the Ka'bah will be forgiven for the sake of the dust of Christian churches.

To this, Professor Max Müller replies:

The sins of Islam are as worthless as the dust of Christianity; on the day of resurrection both Muhammadans and Christians will see the vanity of their religious doctrines. Men fight about religion on earth; in heaven they shall find out that there is only one true religion—the worship of God's Spirit.24

In other words, “There is No Religion [or Law] Higher Than Truth”—(Satyât Nâsti Paro Dharmah)—the motto of the Mahârâjah of Benares, adopted by the Theosophical Society.

As already said in the Preface, The Secret Doctrine is not a version of Isis Unveiled, as originally intended. It is rather a volume explanatory of the latter, and, though entirely independent of the earlier work, an indispensable corollary to it. Much of what was in the former work could hardly be understood by Theosophists in those days. The Secret Doctrine will now throw light on many a problem left unsolved in the first work, especially on the opening pages, which have never been understood.

As it was concerned simply with the philosophies within historical times and the respective symbolism of the fallen nations, only a hurried glance could be thrown at the panorama of Occultism in the two volumes of Isis. In the present work, detailed cosmogony and the evolution of the four Races that preceded our fifth-race Humanity are given, and now two large volumes explain that which was stated only on the first page of Isis Unveiled alone, and in a few allusions scattered hither and thither throughout that work. Nor can the vast catalogue of the Archaic Sciences be attempted in the present volumes, before we have disposed of such tremendous problems as cosmic and planetary Evolution, and the gradual development of the mysterious humanities and races that preceded our Adamic Humanity. Therefore, the present attempt to elucidate some mysteries of the Esoteric Philosophy has, in truth, nothing to do with the earlier work. The writer must be allowed to illustrate what is said by an instance.

Volume I of Isis begins with a reference to an “old book”:

So very old that our modern antiquarians might ponder over its pages an indefinite time, and still not quite agree as to the nature of the fabric upon which it is written. It is the only original copy now in existence. The most ancient Hebrew [pg 026]document on occult learning—the Siprah Dzeniouta—was compiled from it, and that at a time when the former was already considered in the light of a literary relic. One of its illustrations represents the Divine Essence emanating from Adam25 like a luminous arc proceeding to form a circle; and then, having attained the highest point of its circumference, the ineffable Glory bends back again, and returns to earth, bringing a higher type of humanity in its vortex. As it approaches nearer and nearer to our planet, the Emanation becomes more and more shadowy, until upon touching the ground it is as black as night.

This very old book is the original work from which the many volumes of Kiu-ti were compiled. Not only the latter and the Siphrah Dzeniouta, but even the Sepher Jetzirah26—the work attributed by the Hebrew Kabalists to their Patriarch Abraham (!), the Shu-king, China's primitive Bible, the sacred volumes of the Egyptian Thoth-Hermes, the Purânas in India, the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch itself, are all derived from that one small parent volume. Tradition says, that it was taken down in Senzar, the secret sacerdotal tongue, from the words of Divine Beings, who dictated it to the Sons of Light, in Central Asia, at the very beginning of our Fifth Race; for there was a time when its language (the Senzar) was known to the Initiates of every nation, when the forefathers of the Toltec understood it as easily as the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis, who inherited it, in their turn, from the sages of the Third Race, the Mânushis, who learnt it direct from the Devas of the Second and First Races. The illustration spoken of in Isis relates to the evolution of these Races and of our fourth- and fifth-race Humanity in the Vaivasvata Manvantara, or Round; each Round being composed of the Yugas of the seven periods of Humanity; four of which are now passed in our Life-Cycle, the middle point of the fifth being nearly reached. This illustration is symbolical, as every one can well understand, and covers the ground from the beginning. The old book, having described cosmic evolution and explained the origin of everything on earth, including physical man, after giving the true history of the Races, from the First down to our own Fifth Race, goes no further. It stops short at the beginning of the Kali Yuga, just 4,989 years ago, at the death of Krishna, the bright Sun-god, the once living hero and reformer.

[pg 027]

But there exists another book. None of its possessors regard it as very ancient, as it was born with, and is only as old as the Black Age, namely, about 5,000 years. In about nine years hence, the first cycle of the first five millenniums, that began with the great cycle of the Kali Yuga, will end. And then the last prophecy contained in that book—the first volume of the prophetic record for the Black Age—will be accomplished. We have not long to wait, and many of us will witness the dawn of the New Cycle, at the end of which not a few accounts will be settled and squared between the races. Volume II of the prophecies is nearly ready, having been in preparation since the time of Buddha's grand successor, Shankarâchârya.

One more important point must be noticed, one that stands foremost in the series of proofs given of the existence of one primeval, universal Wisdom—at any rate for Christian Kabalists and students. The teachings were, at least, partially known to several of the Fathers of the Church. It is maintained, on purely historical grounds, that Origen, Synesius, and even Clemens Alexandrinus, had themselves been initiated into the Mysteries before adding to the Neo-Platonism of the Alexandrian school that of the Gnostics, under the Christian veil. More than this, some of the doctrines of the secret schools, though by no means all, were preserved in the Vatican, and have since become part and parcel of the Mysteries, in the shape of disfigured additions made to the original Christian programme by the Latin Church. Such is the now materialised dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This accounts for the great persecutions set on foot by the Roman Catholic Church against Occultism, Masonry, and heterodox Mysticism generally.

The days of Constantine were the last turning-point in history, the period of the supreme struggle, that ended in the Western world throttling the old religions in favour of the new one, built on their bodies. From thence the vista into the far distant past, beyond the Deluge and the Garden of Eden, began to be forcibly and relentlessly shut out by every fair and unfair means from the indiscreet gaze of posterity. Every issue was blocked up, every record upon which hands could be laid, destroyed. Yet there remains enough, even among such mutilated records, to warrant us in saying that there is in them every requisite evidence of the actual existence of a Parent Doctrine. Fragments have survived geological and political cataclysms, to tell the story; and every survival shows evidence that the now secret Wisdom was once the one fountain head, the ever-flowing perennial source, [pg 028] from which were fed all the streamlets—the later religions of all nations—from the first down to the last. This period, beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and finishing with the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light streaming from the æons of times gone by, unobscured by the hand of bigotry and fanaticism.

This accounts for the necessity under which the writer has laboured of ever explaining the facts given from the hoariest past by evidence gathered from the historical period, even at the risk of being once more charged with a lack of method and system. No other means was at hand. The public must be made acquainted with the efforts of many world-adepts, of initiated poets and writers in the classics of every age, to preserve in the records of humanity the knowledge at least of the existence of such a philosophy, if not actually of its tenets. The Initiates of 1888 would indeed remain incomprehensible and even a seemingly impossible myth, were not like Initiates shown to have lived in every other age of history. This could be done only by naming chapter and verse where mention may be found of these great characters, who were preceded and followed by a long and interminable line of other famous antediluvian and postdiluvian Masters in the arts. Thus only could it be shown, on semi-traditional and semi-historical authority, that occult knowledge and the powers it confers on man, are not altogether fictions, but that they are as old as the world itself.

To my judges, past and future, therefore—whether they are serious literary critics, or those howling dervishes in literature who judge a book according to the popularity or unpopularity of the author's name, who, hardly glancing at its contents, fasten like lethal bacilli on the weakest points of the body—I have nothing to say. Nor shall I condescend to notice those crack-brained slanderers—fortunately very few in number—who, hoping to attract public attention by throwing discredit on every writer whose name is better known than their own, foam and bark at their very shadows. These, having first maintained for years that the doctrines taught in the Theosophist, and which culminated in Esoteric Buddhism, had been all invented by the present writer, have finally turned round, and denounced Isis Unveiled and the rest as a plagiarism from Éliphas Lévi (!), Paracelsus (!!), and, mirabile dictu, Buddhism and Brâhminism (!!!). As well charge Renan with having stolen his Vie de Jésus from the Gospels, and Max Müller his [pg 029] Sacred Books of the East or his Chips from the philosophies of the Brâhmans and of Gautama, the Buddha. But to the public in general and the readers of The Secret Doctrine I may repeat what I have stated all along, and which I now clothe in the words of Montaigne:

Gentlemen, “I have here made only a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them.”

Pull the “string” to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will. As for the nosegay of facts—you will never be able to make away with these. You can only ignore them, and no more.

We may close with a parting word concerning this first volume. In an introduction prefacing chapters dealing chiefly with cosmogony, certain subjects brought forward may be deemed out of place, but one more consideration added to those already given has led me to touch upon them. Every reader will inevitably judge the statements made from the stand-point of his own knowledge, experience, and consciousness, basing his judgment on what he has already learnt. This fact the writer is constantly obliged to bear in mind; hence, also the frequent references in this first volume to matters which, properly speaking, belong to a later part of the work, but which could not be passed by in silence, lest the reader should look upon it as a fairy tale indeed—a fiction of some modern brain.

Thus, the Past shall help to realize the Present, and the latter to better appreciate the Past. The errors of the day must be explained and swept away, yet it is more than probable—nay in the present case it amounts to certitude—that once more the testimony of long ages and of history will fail to impress any but the very intuitional—which is equal to saying the very few. But in this as in all like cases, the true and the faithful may console themselves by presenting the sceptical modern Sadducee with the mathematical proof and memorial of his obdurate obstinacy and bigotry. There still exists somewhere in the archives of the French Academy, the famous law of probabilities worked out by certain mathematicians for the benefit of sceptics by an algebraical process. It runs thus: If two persons give their evidence to a fact, and thus impart to it each of them 5/6 of certitude; that fact will have then 35/36 of certitude; i.e., its probability will bear to its improbability the ratio of 35 to 1. If three such evidences are joined together the certitude will become 215/216. The agreement of ten persons giving each 1/2 of certitude will produce 1023/1024, etc., etc. The Occultist may remain satisfied with such certitude, and care for no more.

[pg 031]

Proem: Pages From A Pre-Historic Record.

An archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire, and air, by some specific and unknown process—is before the writer's eye. On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull black ground. On the following page, the same disk, but with a central point. The first, the student knows, represents Kosmos in Eternity, before the reäwakening of still slumbering Energy, the Emanation of the World in later systems. The point in the hitherto immaculate disk, Space and Eternity in Pralaya, denotes the dawn of differentiation. It is the Point in the Mundane Egg, the Germ within it which will become the Universe, the All, the boundless, periodical Kosmos—a Germ which is latent and active, periodically and by turns. The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns: its circumference—a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind—indicates the abstract, ever incognizable Presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one. Only, the face of the disk being white, and the surrounding ground black, clearly shows that its plane is the sole knowledge, dim and hazy though it still is, that is attainable by man. It is on this plane that the manvantaric manifestations begin; for it is in this Soul, that slumbers, during the Pralaya, the Divine Thought,27 wherein lies concealed the plan of every future cosmogony and theogony.

[pg 032]

It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations—between which periods reigns the dark mystery of Non-Being; unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness, unrealizable, yet the one self-existing Reality; truly, “a Chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.” Its one absolute attribute, which is Itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the Great Breath,28 which is the perpetual motion of the Universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present Space. That which is motionless cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the Universal Soul.

Almost five centuries b.c. Leucippus, the instructor of Democritus, maintained that Space was eternally filled with atoms actuated by a ceaseless motion, which, in due course of time, as they aggregated, generated rotatory motion, through mutual collisions producing lateral movements. Epicurus and Lucretius taught the same doctrine, adding however to the lateral motion of the atoms the idea of affinity—an Occult teaching.

From the beginning of man's inheritance, from the first appearance of the architects of the globe he lives on, the unrevealed Deity was recognized and considered under its only philosophical aspect—Universal Motion, the thrill of the creative Breath in Nature. Occultism sums up the One Existence thus: “Deity is an arcane, living [or moving] Fire, and the eternal witnesses to this unseen Presence, are Light, Heat, Moisture,”—this trinity including, and being the cause of, every phenomenon in Nature.29 Intra-cosmic motion is eternal and ceaseless; cosmic motion—the visible, or that which is subject to perception—is finite and periodical. As an eternal abstraction it is the Ever-Present; [pg 033] as a manifestation, it is finite both in the coming direction and the opposite, the two being the Alpha and Omega of successive reconstructions. Kosmos—the Noumenon—has nought to do with the causal relations of the phenomenal World. It is only with reference to the intra-cosmic Soul, the ideal Kosmos in the immutable Divine Thought, that we may say: “It never had a beginning nor will it have an end.” With regard to its body or cosmic organization, though it cannot be said that it had a first, or will ever have a last construction, yet at each new Manvantara, its organization may be regarded as the first and the last of its kind, as it evolves every time on a higher plane.

A few years ago only, it was stated that:

The esoteric doctrine, like Buddhism and Brâhmanism, and even Kabalism, teaches that the one infinite and unknown Essence exists from all eternity, and in regular and harmonious successions is either passive or active. In the poetical phraseology of Manu these conditions are called the Days and the Nights of Brahmâ. The latter is either “awake” or “asleep.” The Svâbhâvikas, or philosophers of the oldest school of Buddhism, which still exists in Nepaul, speculate only upon the active condition of this “Essence,” which they call Svabhâvat, and deem it foolish to theorize upon the abstract and “unknowable” power in its passive condition. Hence they are called Atheists by both Christian theologians and modern scientists, for neither of the two are able to understand the profound logic of their philosophy. The former will allow of no other God than the personified secondary powers which have worked out the visible universe, and which becomes with them the anthropomorphic God of the Christians—the male Jehovah, roaring amid thunder and lightning. In its turn, rationalistic science greets the Buddhists and the Svâbhâvikas as the “Positivists” of the archaic ages. If we take a one-sided view of the philosophy of the latter, our materialists may be right in their own way. The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator, but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable—hence not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being, yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism, except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this Divine Essence from without inwardly and from within outwardly, occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of the Divine Essence takes place, and the previous work of creation is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and “darkness” solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the “deep.” To use a metaphor from the secret books, which will convey the idea still more clearly, an out-breathing of the [pg 034] “unknown essence” produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning and will have no end.30

This passage will be explained, as far as it is possible, in the present work. Though it contains nothing new to the Orientalist, as it now stands, its esoteric interpretation may contain a good deal which has hitherto remained entirely unknown to the Western student.

The first illustration is a plain disk, [circle]. The second in the archaic symbol shows a disk with a point in it, [circle with dot]—the first differentiation in the periodical manifestations of the ever-eternal Nature, sexless and infinite, “Aditi in That,”31 or potential Space within abstract Space. In its third stage the point is transformed into a diameter, [circle with line]. It now symbolizes a divine immaculate Mother-Nature within the all-embracing absolute Infinitude. When the horizontal diameter is crossed by a vertical one, [circle with cross], it becomes the Mundane Cross. Humanity has reached its Third Root-Race; it is the sign for the origin of human Life. When the circumference disappears and leaves only the [cross], it is a sign that the fall of man into matter is accomplished, and the Fourth Race begins. The cross within a circle symbolizes pure Pantheism; when the cross is left uninscribed, it becomes phallic. It had the same and yet other meanings as a Tau inscribed within a circle, [circle with lines (Tau)]; or as a Thor's Hammer—the so-called Jaina cross, or Svastika, within a circle, [circle with swastika].

By the third symbol—the circle divided in two by a horizontal diameter—was meant the first manifestation of creative Nature—still passive, because feminine. The first shadowy perception of man connected with procreation is feminine, because man knows his mother more than his father. Hence female deities were more sacred than male. Nature is therefore feminine, and, to a degree, objective and tangible, and the Spirit Principle which fructifies it, is concealed.32 By adding to the horizontal line in the circle, a perpendicular, the [pg 035] Tau was formed, [T], the oldest form of the letter. It was the glyph of the Third Root-Race to the day of its symbolical Fall—i.e., when the separation of sexes by natural evolution took place—when the figure became [circle with vertical line], or sexless life modified or separated—a double glyph or symbol. With the sub-races of our Fifth Race it became in symbology the Sacr', and in Hebrew N'cabvah, of the first-formed Races;33 then it changed into the Egyptian emblem of life, [Ankh], and still later into the sign of Venus, [female symbol]. Then comes the Svastika (Thor's Hammer, now the Hermetic Cross), entirely separated from its circle, thus becoming purely phallic. The esoteric symbol of Kali Yuga is the five-pointed star reversed, with its two points (horns) turned heavenward, thus [five-pointed star], the sign of human sorcery, a position every Occultist will recognize as one of the “left-hand,” and used in ceremonial magic.

It is hoped that during the perusal of this work the erroneous ideas of the public in general with regard to Pantheism will be modified. It is wrong and unjust to regard the Buddhists and Advaitin Occultists as Atheists. If not all of them philosophers, they are, at any rate, all logicians, their objections and arguments being based on strict reasoning. Indeed, if the Parabrahman of the Hindûs may be taken as a representative of the hidden and nameless deities of other nations, this absolute Principle will be found to be the prototype from which all the others were copied. Parabrahman is not “God,” because It is not a God. “It is that which is supreme, and not supreme (paravara).”34 It is supreme as cause, not supreme as effect. Parabrahman is simply, as a Secondless Reality, the all-inclusive Kosmos—or rather the infinite Cosmic Space—in the highest spiritual sense, of course. Brahman (neuter) being the unchanging, pure, free, undecaying supreme Root, the “One true Existence, Paramârthika,” and the absolute Chit and Chaitanya (Intelligence, Consciousness), cannot be a cognizer, “for That can have no subject of cognition.” Can the Flame be called the Essence of Fire? This Essence is “the Life and Light of the Universe, the visible fire and flame are destruction, death, and evil.” “Fire and Flame destroy the body of an Arhat, their essence makes him immortal.”35 “The knowledge of the absolute Spirit, like the effulgence [pg 036] of the sun, or like heat in fire, is naught else than the absolute Essence itself,” says Shankarâchârya. It—is “the Spirit of the Fire,” not Fire itself; therefore, “the attributes of the latter, Heat or Flame, are not the attributes of the Spirit, but of that of which that Spirit is the unconscious cause.” Is not the above sentence the true key-note of later Rosicrucian philosophy? Parabrahman is, in short, the collective aggregate of Kosmos in its infinity and eternity, the “That” and “This” to which distributive aggregates can not be applied.36 “In the beginning This was the Self, one only;”37 and the great Shankarâchârya explains that “This” refers to the Universe (Jagat); the words, “in the beginning,” meaning before the reproduction of the phenomenal Universe.

Therefore, when the Pantheists echo the Upanishads, which state, as in the Secret Doctrine, that “This” cannot create, they do not deny a Creator, or rather a collective aggregate of creators; they simply refuse, very logically, to attribute “creation” and especially formation—something finite—to an Infinite Principle. With them, Parabrahman is a passive because an absolute Cause, the unconditioned Mukta. It is only limited omniscience and omnipotence that are refused to the latter, because these are still attributes, reflected in man's perceptions; and because Parabrahman, being the Supreme All, the ever invisible Spirit and Soul of Nature, changeless and eternal, can have no attributes, the term Absoluteness very naturally precluding any idea of the finite or conditioned from being connected with it. And if the Vedântins postulate attributes as belonging simply to its emanation, calling it Îshvara plus Mâyâ, and Avidyâ (Agnosticism and Nescience rather than Ignorance), it is difficult to find any Atheism in this conception.38 Since there can be neither two Infinites nor two Absolutes in a Universe supposed to be boundless, this Self-Existence can hardly be conceived of as creating personally. To the senses and in the perceptions of finite beings, That is Non-Being, in the sense that it is the One Be-ness; for, in this All lies concealed its coëternal and coëval emanation [pg 037] or inherent radiation, which, becoming periodically Brahmâ (the male-female Potency), expands itself into the manifested Universe. “Nârâyana moving on the [abstract] Waters of Space,” is transformed into the Waters of concrete substance moved by him, who now becomes the manifested Word or Logos.

The orthodox Brâhmans, those who rise the most against the Pantheists and Advaitins, calling them Atheists, are forced, if Manu is any authority in this matter, to accept the death of Brahmâ, the Creator, at the expiration of every Age of this deity—100 Divine Years, a period which in our years requires fifteen figures to express. Yet no philosopher among them will view this “death” in any other sense than as a temporary disappearance from the manifested plane of existence, or as a periodical rest.

The Occultists are, therefore, at one with the Advaita Vedântin philosophers as to the above tenet. They show, on philosophical grounds, the impossibility of accepting the idea of the absolute All creating or even evolving the Golden Egg, into which it is said to enter in order to transform itself into Brahmâ, the Creator, who later expands himself into the Gods and all the visible Universe. They say that absolute Unity cannot pass to Infinity, for Infinity presupposes the limitless extension of something, and the duration of that something; and the One All—like Space, which is its only mental and physical representation on this earth, or our plane of existence—is neither an object of, nor a subject to, perception. If one could suppose the eternal infinite All, the omnipresent Unity, instead of being in Eternity, becoming through periodical manifestation a manifold Universe or a multiple Personality, that Unity would cease to be one. Locke's idea, that “pure space is capable of neither resistance nor motion,” is incorrect. Space is neither a “limitless void,” nor a “conditioned fulness,” but both. Being—on the plane of absolute abstraction—the ever-incognizable Deity, which is void only to finite minds,39 and on that of mâyâvic perception, the Plenum, the absolute Container of all that is, whether manifested or unmanifested, it is, therefore, that Absolute All. There is no difference between the Christian Apostle's “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and the Hindû Rishi's [pg 038] “the Universe lives in, proceeds from, and will return to, Brahmâ”: for Brahman (neuter), the unmanifested, is that Universe in abscondito, and Brahmâ, the manifested, is the Logos, made male-female40 in the symbolical orthodox dogmas, the God of the Apostle-Initiate and of the Rishi being both the Unseen and the Visible Space. Space is called, in esoteric symbolism, the “Seven-Skinned Eternal Mother-Father.” From its undifferentiated to its differentiated surface it is composed of seven layers.

“What is that which was, is, and will be, whether there is a Universe or not; whether there be gods or none?” asks the esoteric Senzar Catechism. And the answer made is—“Space.”

It is not the One unknown ever-present God in Nature, or Nature in abscondito, that is rejected, but the “God” of human dogma, and his humanized “Word.” Man, in his infinite conceit and inherent pride and vanity, shaped it himself with his sacrilegious hand out of the material he found in his own small brain-fabric, and forced it upon his fellows as a direct revelation from the one unrevealed Space.41 The Occultist accepts revelation as coming from divine yet still finite Beings, the manifested Lives, never from the unmanifestable One Life; from those Entities, called Primordial Man, Dhyâni-Buddhas, or Dhyân Chohans, the Rishi-Prajâpati of the Hindus, the Elohim or [pg 039] Sons of God of the Jews, the Planetary Spirits of all nations, who have become Gods for men. The Occultist also regards the Âdi-Shakti—the direct emanation of Mûlaprakriti, the eternal Root of That, and the female aspect of the Creative Cause, Brahmâ, in her âkâshic form of the Universal Soul—as philosophically a Mâyâ, and cause of human Mâyâ. But this view does not prevent him from believing in its existence so long as it lasts, to wit, for one Mahâmanvantara; nor from applying Âkâsha, the radiation of Mûlaprakriti,42 to practical purposes, connected as this World-Soul is with all natural phenomena known or unknown to Science.

The oldest religions of the world—exoterically, for the esoteric root or foundation is one—are the Indian, the Mazdean, and the Egyptian. Next comes the Chaldean, the outcome of these, now entirely lost to the world, except in its disfigured Sabeanism as at present rendered by the archæologists. Then, passing over a number of religions that will be mentioned later, comes the Jewish, esoterically following in the line of Babylonian Magism, as in the Kabalah; exoterically, a collection of allegorical legends, as in Genesis and the Pentateuch. Read by the light of the Zohar, the four initial chapters of Genesis are the fragment of a highly philosophical page in the world's cosmogony. Left in their symbolical disguise, they are a nursery tale, an ugly thorn in the side of science and logic, an evident effect of Karma. To let them serve as a prologue to Christianity was a cruel revenge on the part of the Rabbis, who knew better what their Pentateuch meant. It was a silent protest against their spoliation, and the Jews have now certainly the better of their traditional persecutors. The above-named exoteric creeds will be explained in the light of the universal doctrine as we proceed.

The Occult Catechism contains the following questions and answers:

What is it that ever is?—Space, the eternal Anupâdaka [Parentless]. What is it that ever was?—The Germ in the Root. What is it that is ever coming and going?—The Great Breath. Then, there are three Eternals?—No, [pg 040]the three are one. That which ever is is one, that which ever was is one, that which is ever being and becoming is also one: and this is Space.

Explain, O Lanoo [disciple].—The One is an unbroken Circle [Ring] with no circumference, for it is nowhere and everywhere; the One is the boundless Plane of the Circle, manifesting a Diameter only during the manvantaric periods; the One is the indivisible Point found nowhere, perceived everywhere during those periods; it is the Vertical and the Horizontal, the Father and the Mother, the summit and base of the Father, the two extremities of the Mother, reaching in reality nowhere, for the One is the Ring as also the Rings that are within that Ring. Light in Darkness and Darkness in Light: the “Breath which is eternal.” It proceeds from without inwardly, when it is everywhere, and from within outwardly, when it is nowhere—(i.e., Mâyâ,43 one of the Centres).44 It expands and contracts [exhalation and inhalation]. When it expands, the Mother diffuses and scatters; when it contracts, the Mother draws back and ingathers. This produces the periods of Evolution and Dissolution, Manvantara and Pralaya. The Germ is invisible and fiery; the Root [the Plane of the Circle] is cool; but during Evolution and Manvantara her garment is cold and radiant. Hot Breath is the Father who devours the progeny of the many-faced Element [heterogeneous], and leaves the single-faced ones [homogeneous]. Cool Breath is the Mother, who conceives, forms, brings forth, and receives them back into her bosom, to reform them at the Dawn [of the Day of Brahmâ, or Manvantara].

For clearer understanding on the part of the general reader, it must be stated that Occult Science recognizes seven Cosmic Elements—four entirely physical, and the fifth (Ether) semi-material, which will become visible in the Air towards the end of our Fourth Round, to reign supreme over the others during the whole of the Fifth. The remaining two are as yet absolutely beyond the range of human perception. They [pg 041] will, however, appear as presentments during the Sixth and Seventh Races of this Round, and will be fully known in the Sixth and Seventh Rounds respectively.45 These seven Elements with their numberless sub-elements, which are far more numerous than those known to Science, are simply conditional modifications and aspects of the One and only Element. This latter is not Ether,46 not even Âkâsha, but the source of these. The Fifth Element, now quite freely advocated by Science, is not the Ether hypothesized by Sir Isaac Newton—although he calls it by that name, having probably associated it in his mind with Æther, the “Father-Mother” of antiquity. As Newton intuitionally says, “Nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, fixed things out of volatile, and volatile out of fixed, subtile out of gross, and gross out of subtile.... Thus, perhaps, may all things be originated from Ether.”47

The reader has to bear in mind that the Stanzas treat only of the cosmogony of our own planetary system and of what is visible around it, after a Solar Pralaya. The secret teachings with regard to the evolution of the Universal Kosmos cannot be given, since they could not be understood by even the highest minds in this age, and there seem to be very few Initiates, even among the greatest, who are allowed to speculate upon this subject. Moreover the Teachers say openly that not even the highest Dhyâni-Chohans have ever penetrated the mysteries beyond those boundaries that separate the milliards of solar systems from the Central Sun, as it is called. Therefore, that which is given relates only to our visible Cosmos, after a Night of Brahmâ.

[pg 042]

Before the reader proceeds to the consideration of the Stanzas from the Book of Dzyan which form the basis of the present work, it is absolutely necessary that he should be made acquainted with the few fundamental conceptions which underlie and pervade the entire system of thought to which his attention is invited. These basic ideas are few in number, but on their clear apprehension depends the understanding of all that follows; therefore no apology is required for asking the reader to make himself familiar with these first, before entering on the perusal of the work itself.

The Secret Doctrine then, establishes three fundamental propositions:

I. An Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless and Immutable Principle, on which all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human conception and can only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude. It is beyond the range and reach of thought—in the words of the Mândûkya, “unthinkable and unspeakable.”

To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with the postulate that there is One Absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned Being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause—dimly formulated in the “Unconscious” and “Unknowable” of current European philosophy—is the Rootless Root of “all that was, is, or ever shall be.” It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being. It is “Be-ness” rather than Being, Sat in Sanskrit, and is beyond all thought or speculation.

This Be-ness is symbolized in the Secret Doctrine under two aspects. On the one hand, absolute Abstract Space, representing bare subjectivity, the one thing which no human mind can either exclude from any conception, or conceive of by itself. On the other, absolute Abstract Motion representing Unconditioned Consciousness. Even our Western thinkers have shown that consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change, and motion best symbolizes change, its essential characteristic. This latter aspect of the One Reality, is also symbolized by the term the Great Breath, a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute Be-ness—symbolized by finite intelligence as the theological Trinity.

It may, however, assist the student if a few further explanations are here given.

[pg 043]

Herbert Spencer has of late so far modified his Agnosticism, as to assert that the nature of the “First Cause,”48 which the Occultist more logically derives from the Causeless Cause, the “Eternal,” and the “Unknowable,” may be essentially the same as that of the consciousness which wells up within us: in short, that the impersonal Reality pervading the Kosmos is the pure noumenon of thought. This advance on his part brings him very near to the Esoteric and Vedântin tenet.49

Parabrahman, the One Reality, the Absolute, is the field of Absolute Consciousness, i.e., that Essence which is out of all relation to conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.

Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two symbols or aspects of the Absolute, Parabrahman, which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.

Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all manifestation, the Great Breath assumes the character of Pre-cosmic Ideation. It is the fons et origo of Force and of all individual Consciousness, and supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast scheme of cosmic Evolution. On the other hand, Pre-cosmic Root-Substance (Mûlaprakriti) is that aspect of the Absolute which underlies all the objective planes of Nature.

Just as Pre-cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual Consciousness, so Pre-cosmic Substance is the substratum of Matter in the various grades of its differentiation.

Hence it will be apparent that the contrast of these two aspects of the Absolute is essential to the existence of the Manifested Universe. Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual Consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle (upâdhi) of matter that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary to focus a Ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity. Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance [pg 044] would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of Consciousness could ensue.

The Manifested Universe, therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its Ex-istence as Manifestation. But just as the opposite poles of Subject and Object, Spirit and Matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the Manifested Universe, there is “that” which links Spirit to Matter, Subject to Object.

This something, at present unknown to Western speculation, is called by Occultists Fohat. It is the “bridge” by which the Ideas existing in the Divine Thought are impressed on Cosmic Substance as the Laws of Nature. Fohat is thus the dynamic energy of Cosmic Ideation; or, regarded from the other side, it is the intelligent medium, the guiding power of all manifestation, the Thought Divine transmitted and made manifest through the Dhyân Chohans,50 the Architects of the visible World. Thus from Spirit, or Cosmic Ideation, comes our Consciousness, from Cosmic Substance the several Vehicles in which that Consciousness is individualized and attains to self—or reflective—consciousness; while Fohat, in its various manifestations, is the mysterious link between Mind and Matter, the animating principle electrifying every atom into life.

The following summary will afford a clearer idea to the reader.

(1.) Absoluteness: the Parabrahman of the Vedântins or the One Reality, Sat, which is, as Hegel says, both Absolute Being and Non-Being.

(2.) The First Logos: the impersonal, and, in philosophy, Unmanifested Logos, the precursor of the Manifested. This is the “First Cause,” the “Unconscious” of European Pantheists.

(3.) The Second Logos: Spirit-Matter, Life; the “Spirit of the Universe,” Purusha and Prakriti.

(4.) The Third Logos: Cosmic Ideation, Mahat or Intelligence, the Universal World-Soul; the Cosmic Noumenon of Matter, the basis of the intelligent operations in and of Nature, also called Mahâ-Buddhi.

The One Reality: its dual aspects in the conditioned Universe.

Further, the Secret Doctrine affirms:

II. The Eternity of the Universe in toto as a boundless plane; periodically “the playground of numberless Universes incessantly manifesting and disappearing,” called the “Manifesting Stars,” and [pg 045] the “Sparks of Eternity.” “The Eternity of the Pilgrim51 is like a wink of the Eye of Self-Existence,” as the Book of Dyzan puts it. “The appearance and disappearance of Worlds is like a regular tidal ebb of flux and reflux.”

This second assertion of the Secret Doctrine is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature. An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental Laws of the Universe.

Moreover, the Secret Doctrine teaches:

III. The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul, the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root; and the obligatory pilgrimage for every Soul—a spark of the former—through the Cycle of Incarnation, or Necessity, in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic Law, during the whole term. In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (Divine Soul) can have an independent conscious existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth Principle—or the Over-Soul—has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts, checked by its Karma, thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest Archangel (Dhyâni-Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric Philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reïncarnations. This is why the Hindûs say that the Universe is Brahman and Brahmâ, for Brahman is in every atom of the universe, the six Principles in Nature being all the outcome—the variously differentiated aspects—of the Seventh and One, the only Reality in the Universe whether cosmic or micro-cosmic; and also why the permutations, psychic, spiritual and physical, on the plane of manifestation [pg 046] and form, of the Sixth (Brahmâ the vehicle of Brahman) are viewed by metaphysical antiphrasis as illusive and mâyâvic. For although the root of every atom individually and of every form collectively, is that Seventh Principle or the One Reality, still, in its manifested phenomenal and temporary appearance, it is no better than an evanescent illusion of our senses.

In its absoluteness, the One Principle under its two aspects, Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti, is sexless, unconditioned and eternal. Its periodical manvantaric emanation, or primal radiation, is also One, androgynous and phenomenally finite. When the radiation radiates in its turn, all its radiations are also androgynous, to become male and female principles in their lower aspects. After Pralaya, whether the Great or Minor Pralaya—the latter leaving the worlds in statu quo52—the first that reäwakes to active life is the plastic Âkâsha, Father-Mother, the Spirit and Soul of Ether, or the Plane of the Circle. Space is called the Mother before its cosmic activity, and Father-Mother at the first stage of reäwakening. In the Kabalah it is also Father-Mother-Son. But whereas in the Eastern Doctrine, these are the Seventh Principle of the Manifested Universe, or its Atmâ-Buddhi-Manas (Spirit-Soul-Intelligence), the Triad branching off and dividing into seven cosmical and seven human Principles, in the Western Kabalah of the Christian Mystics it is the Triad or Trinity, and with their Occultists, the male-female Jehovah, Jah-Havah. In this lies the whole difference between the Esoteric and the Christian Trinities. The Mystics and the Philosophers, the Eastern and Western Pantheists, synthesize their pregenetic Triad in the pure divine abstraction. The orthodox, anthropomorphize it. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara—the three Hypostases of the manifesting “Spirit of the Supreme Spirit,” by which title Prithivî, the Earth, greets Vishnu in his first Avatâra—are the purely metaphysical abstract qualities of Formation, Preservation, and Destruction, and are the three divine Avasthâs (Hypostases) of that which “does not perish with created things,” Achyuta, a name of Vishnu; whereas the orthodox Christian separates his Personal Creative Deity into the three Personages of the Trinity, and admits of no higher Deity. The latter, in Occultism, is the abstract Triangle; with the orthodox, the perfect Cube. The creative [pg 047] god or the aggregate gods are regarded by the Eastern philosopher as Bhrântidarshanatah, “false appearances,” something “conceived of, by reason of erroneous appearances, as a material form,” and explained as arising from the illusive conception of the egotistic personal and human Soul (lower Fifth Principle). It is beautifully expressed in a revised translation in Fitzedward Hall's notes to Wilson's translation of the Vishnu Purâna. “That Brahma in its totality, has essentially the aspect of Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved [Mûlaprakriti], and also the aspect of Spirit and the aspect of Time. Spirit, O twice born, is the leading aspect of the Supreme Brahma.53 The next is a two-fold aspect,—Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved, and Time is the last.” Cronus is shown in the Orphic Theogony also as being a generated god or agent.

At this stage of the reäwakening of the Universe, the sacred symbolism represents it as a perfect Circle with the Point (Root) in the centre. This sign was universal, therefore we find it in the Kabalah also. The Western Kabalah, however, now in the hands of Christian Mystics, ignores it altogether, though it is plainly shown in the Zohar. These sectarians begin at the end, and give, as the symbol of pregenetic Kosmos, [cross], calling it the “Union of the Rose and Cross,” the great mystery of occult generation, from whence the name—Rosicrucian (Rose Cross)! This may be seen from one of the most important and best known of their symbols, one which has never been hitherto understood even by modern Mystics. It is that of the Pelican tearing open its breast to feed its seven little ones—the real creed of the Brothers of the Rosie-Cross and a direct outcome from the Eastern Secret Doctrine.

Brahman (neuter) is called Kâlahamsa, meaning, as explained by Western Orientalists, the Eternal Swan (or goose), and so is Brahmâ, the Creator. A great mistake is thus brought under notice; it is Brahman (neuter) which ought to be referred to as Hamsa-vâhana (that which uses the Swan as its Vehicle), and not Brahmâ, the Creator, who is the real Kâlahamsa; while Brahman (neuter) is Hamsa, and A-hamsa, as will be explained in the Commentaries. Let it be understood [pg 048] that the terms Brahmâ and Parabrahman are not used here because they belong to our Esoteric nomenclature, but simply because they are more familiar to the students in the West. Both are the perfect equivalents of our one, three, and seven vowelled terms, which stand for the One All, and the One “All in All.”

Such are the basic conceptions on which the Secret Doctrine rests.

It would not be in place here to enter upon any defence or proof of their inherent reasonableness; nor can I pause to show how they are, in fact, contained—though too often under a misleading guise—in every system of thought or philosophy worthy of the name.

Once that the reader has gained a clear comprehension of them and realized the light which they throw on every problem of life, they will need no further justification in his eyes, because their truth will be to him as evident as the sun in heaven. I pass on, therefore, to the subject matter of the Stanzas as given in this volume, adding a skeleton outline of them, in the hope of thereby rendering the task of the student more easy, by placing before him in a few words the general conception therein explained.

The history of Cosmic Evolution, as traced in the Stanzas, is, so to say, the abstract algebraical formula of that evolution. Hence the student must not expect to find there an account of all the stages and transformations which intervene between the first beginnings of Universal Evolution and our present state. To give such an account would be as impossible as it would be incomprehensible to men who cannot grasp the nature of even the plane of existence next to that to which, for the moment, their consciousness is limited.

The Stanzas, therefore, give an abstract formula which can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to all evolution: to that of our tiny Earth, to that of the Chain of Planets of which that Earth forms one, to the Solar Universe to which that Chain belongs and so on, in an ascending scale, till the mind reels and is exhausted in the effort.

The seven Stanzas given in this volume represent the seven terms of this abstract formula. They refer to, and describe, the seven great stages of the evolutionary process, which are spoken of in the Purânas as the “Seven Creations,” and in the Bible as the “Days” of Creation.

Stanza I describes the state of the One All during Pralaya, before the first flutter of reäwakening Manifestation.

A moment's thought shows that such a state can only be symbolized; to describe it is impossible. Nor can it be symbolized except in negatives; [pg 049] for, since it is the state of Absoluteness per se, it can possess none of those specific attributes which serve us to describe objects in positive terms. Hence that state can only be suggested by the negatives of all those most abstract attributes which men feel rather than conceive, as the remotest limits attainable by their power of conception.

Stanza II describes a stage which, to a Western mind, is so nearly identical with that mentioned in Stanza I, that to express the idea of its difference would require a treatise in itself. Hence it must be left to the intuition and the higher faculties of the reader to grasp, as far as he can, the meaning of the allegorical phrases used. Indeed it must be remembered that all these Stanzas appeal to the inner faculties rather than to the ordinary comprehension of the physical brain.

Stanza III describes the Reäwakening of the Universe to life after Pralaya. It depicts the emergence of the Monads from their state of absorption within the One, the earliest and highest stage in the formation of Worlds—the term Monad being one which may apply equally to the vastest Solar System or the tiniest atom.

Stanza IV shows the differentiation of the “Germ” of the Universe into the Septenary Hierarchy of conscious Divine Powers, which are the active manifestations of the One Supreme Energy. They are the framers, shapers, and ultimately the creators of all the manifested Universe, in the only sense in which the name “creator” is intelligible; they inform and guide it; they are the intelligent Beings who adjust and control evolution, embodying in themselves those manifestations of the One Law, which we know as the “Laws of Nature.”

Generically, they are known as the Dhyân Chohans, though each of the various groups has its own designation in the Secret Doctrine.

This stage of evolution is spoken of in Hindû mythology as the “Creation of the Gods.”

Stanza V describes the process of world-formation. First, diffused Cosmic Matter, then the “Fiery Whirlwind,” the first stage in the formation of a nebula. This nebula condenses, and after passing through various transformations, forms a Solar Universe, a Planetary Chain, or a single Planet, as the case may be.

Stanza VI indicates the subsequent stages in the formation of a “World” and brings the evolution of such a World down to its fourth great period, corresponding to the period in which we are now living.

Stanza VII continues the history, tracing the descent of life down to the appearance of Man; and thus closes the First Book of the Secret Doctrine.

[pg 050]

The development of “Man” from his first appearance on this earth in this Round to the state in which we now find him will form the subject of Book II.

The Stanzas which form the thesis of every section are given throughout in their modern translated version, as it would be worse than useless to make the subject still more difficult by introducing the archaic phraseology of the original, with its puzzling style and words. Extracts are given from the Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit translations of the original Senzar Commentaries and Glosses on the Book of Dzyan—now rendered for the first time into a European language. It is almost unnecessary to state that only portions of the seven Stanzas are here given. Were they published complete they would remain incomprehensible to all save a few high Occultists. Nor is there any need to assure the reader that no more than most of the profane, does the writer, or rather the humble recorder, understand those forbidden passages. To facilitate the reading, and to avoid the too frequent reference to foot-notes, it was thought best to blend together texts and glosses, using the Sanskrit and Tibetan proper names whenever these could not be avoided, in preference to giving the originals: the more so as the said terms are all accepted synonyms, the latter only being used between a Master and his Chelâs (or Disciples).

Thus, were one to translate into English, using only the substantives and technical terms as employed in one of the Tibetan and Senzar versions, shloka 1 would read as follows:

Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not; Dharmakâya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in night of Sun-chan and Yong-Grub [Paranishpanna], etc., etc.

This would sound like pure Abracadabra.

As this work is written for the instruction of students of Occultism, and not for the benefit of Philologists, we may well avoid such foreign terms wherever it is possible to do so. The untranslateable terms alone, incomprehensible unless their meanings are explained, are left, but all such terms are rendered in their Sanskrit form. Needless to remind the reader that these are, in almost every case, the late developments of the latter language, and pertain to the Fifth Root-Race. Sanskrit, as now known, was not spoken by the Atlanteans, and most of the philosophical terms used in the systems of the India of the [pg 051] Post-Mahâbhâratan period are not found in the Vedas, nor are they to be met with in the original Stanzas, but only their equivalents. The reader who is not a Theosophist, is once more invited to regard all that follows as a fairy tale, if he likes; at best as one of the yet unproven speculations of dreamers; and, at the worst, as an additional hypothesis to the many scientific hypotheses past, present and future, some exploded, others still lingering. It is not in any sense less scientific than are many of the so-called scientific theories; and it is in every case more philosophical and probable.

In view of the abundant comments and explanations required, the references to the footnotes are marked in the usual way, while the sentences to be commented upon are marked with letters. Additional matter will be found in the Chapters on Symbolism, which are often more full of information than the Commentaries.

[pg 053]

Part I. Cosmic Evolution.

Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan,” With Commentaries.

[pg 054]

Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright sky

Was not, nor heaven's broad roof outstretched above.

What covered all? What sheltered? What concealed?

Was it the water's fathomless abyss?

There was no death—yet there was nought immortal,

There was no confine betwixt day and night;
The only One breathed breathless by Itself,
Other than It there nothing since has been.

Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled

In gloom profound—an ocean without light.

The germ that still lay covered in the husk

Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.

Who knows the secret? Who proclaimed it here?

Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?

The Gods themselves came later into being—

Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?

That, whence all this great creation came,
Whether Its will created or was mute,
The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,
He knows it—or perchance even he knows not.

Gazing into eternity

Ere the foundations of the earth were laid.

Thou wert. And when the subterranean flame
Shall burst its prison and devour the frame,
Thou shalt be still as thou wert before

And know no change, when time shall be no more.

O, endless thought, divine Eternity.

Rig Veda (Colebrooke).

[pg 055]

Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan”

Stanza I.

1. The Eternal Parent, wrapped in her Ever-Invisible Robes, had slumbered once again for Seven Eternities.

2. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.

3. Universal Mind was not, for there were no Ah-hi to contain it.

4. The Seven Ways to Bliss were not. The Great Causes of Misery were not, for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them.

5. Darkness alone filled the Boundless All, for Father, Mother and Son were once more one, and the Son had not yet awakened for the new Wheel and his Pilgrimage thereon.

[pg 056]

6. The Seven Sublime Lords and the Seven Truths had ceased to be, and the Universe, the Son of Necessity, was immersed in Paranishpanna, to be outbreathed by that which is, and yet is not. Naught was.

7. The Causes of Existence had been done away with; the Visible that was, and the Invisible that is, rested in Eternal Non-Being—the One Being.

8. Alone, the One Form of Existence stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in Dreamless Sleep; and Life pulsated unconscious in Universal Space, throughout that All-Presence, which is sensed by the Opened Eye of Dangma.

9. But where was Dangma when the Âlaya of the Universe was in Paramârtha, and the Great Wheel was Anupâdaka?

Stanza II.

1. ... Where were the Builders, the Luminous Sons of Manvantaric Dawn?... In the Unknown Darkness in their Ah-hi Paranishpanna. The Producers of Form from No-Form—the Root of the World—the Devamâtri and Svabhâvat, rested in the Bliss of Non-Being.

2. ... Where was Silence? Where the ears to sense it? No, there was neither Silence nor Sound; naught save Ceaseless Eternal Breath, which knows itself not.

[pg 057]

3. The Hour had not yet struck; the Ray had not yet flashed into the Germ; the Mâtripadma had not yet swollen.

4. Her Heart had not yet opened for the One Ray to enter, thence to fall, as Three into Four, into the Lap of Mâyâ.

5. The Seven were not yet born from the Web of Light. Darkness alone was Father-Mother, Svabhâvat; and Svabhâvat was in Darkness.

6. These Two are the Germ, and the Germ is One. The Universe was still concealed in the Divine Thought and the Divine Bosom.

Stanza III.

1. ... The last Vibration of the Seventh Eternity thrills through Infinitude. The Mother swells, expanding from within without, like the Bud of the Lotus.

2. The Vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift Wing the whole Universe and the Germ that dwelleth in Darkness, the Darkness that breathes over the slumbering Waters of Life.

3. Darkness radiates Light, and Light drops one solitary Ray into the Waters, into the Mother-Deep. The Ray shoots [pg 058] through the Virgin Egg, the Ray causes the Eternal Egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal Germ, which condenses into the World-Egg.

4. The Three fall into the Four. The Radiant Essence becomes Seven inside, Seven outside. The Luminous Egg, which in itself is Three, curdles and spreads in milk-white Curds throughout the Depths of Mother, the Root that grows in the Depths of the Ocean of Life.

5. The Root remains, the Light remains, the Curds remain, and still Oeaohoo is One.

6. The Root of Life was in every Drop of the Ocean of Immortality, and the Ocean was Radiant Light, which was Fire, and Heat, and Motion. Darkness vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own Essence, the Body of Fire and Water, of Father and Mother.

7. Behold, O Lanoo, the Radiant Child of the Two, the unparalleled refulgent Glory—Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, who emerges from the Depths of the great Dark Waters. It is Oeaohoo, the Younger, the ——. He shines forth as the Sun, he is the Blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom; the Eka is Chatur, and Chatur takes to itself Tri, and the Union produces the Sapta, in whom are the Seven, which become the Tridasha, the Hosts and the Multitudes. Behold him lifting the Veil, and [pg 059] unfurling it from East to West. He shuts out the Above, and leaves the Below to be seen as the Great Illusion. He marks the places for the Shining Ones, and turns the Upper into a shoreless Sea of Fire, and the One Manifested into the Great Waters.

8. Where was the Germ, and where was now Darkness? Where is the Spirit of the Flame that burns in thy Lamp, O Lanoo? The Germ is That, and That is Light, the White Brilliant Son of the Dark Hidden Father.

9. Light is Cold Flame, and Flame is Fire, and Fire produces Heat, which yields Water—the Water of Life in the Great Mother.

10. Father-Mother spin a Web, whose upper end is fastened to Spirit, the Light of the One Darkness, and the lower one to its shadowy end, Matter; and this Web is the Universe, spun out of the Two Substances made in One, which is Svabhâvat.

11. It expands when the Breath of Fire is upon it; it contracts when the Breath of the Mother touches it. Then the Sons dissociate and scatter, to return into their Mother's Bosom, at the end of the Great Day, and re-become one with her. When it is cooling, it becomes radiant. Its Sons expand and contract through their own Selves and Hearts; they embrace Infinitude.

[pg 060]

12. Then Svabhâvat sends Fohat to harden the Atoms. Each is a part of the Web. Reflecting the “Self-Existent Lord,” like a Mirror, each becomes in turn a World.

Stanza IV.

1. ... Listen, ye Sons of the Earth, to your Instructors—the Sons of the Fire. Learn, there is neither first nor last; for all is One Number, issued from No-Number.

2. Learn what we, who descend from the Primordial Seven, we, who are born from the Primordial Flame, have learnt from our Fathers....

3. From the Effulgency of Light—the Ray of the Ever-Darkness—sprang in Space the reäwakened Energies; the One from the Egg, the Six, and the Five. Then the Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five—the Twice Seven, the Sum Total. And these are the Essences, the Flames, the Elements, the Builders, the Numbers, the Arûpa, the Rûpa, and the Force or Divine Man, the Sum Total. And from the Divine Man emanated the Forms, the Sparks, the Sacred Animals, and the Messengers of the Sacred Fathers within the Holy Four.

4. This was the Army of the Voice, the Divine Mother of the Seven. The Sparks of the Seven are subject to, and the servants of, the First, the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the [pg 061] Fifth, the Sixth, and the Seventh of the Seven. These are called Spheres, Triangles, Cubes, Lines and Modellers; for thus stands the Eternal Nidâna—the Oi-Ha-Hou.

5. The Oi-Ha-Hou, which is Darkness, the Boundless, or the No-Number, Âdi-Nidâna Svabhâvat, the [circle]:

I. The Âdi-Sanat, the Number, for he is One.

II. The Voice of the Word, Svabhâvat, the Numbers, for he is One and Nine.

III. The “Formless Square.”

And these Three, enclosed within the [circle], are the Sacred Four; and the Ten are the Arûpa Universe. Then come the Sons, the Seven Fighters, the One, the Eighth left out, and his Breath which is the Light-Maker.

6. ... Then the Second Seven, who are the Lipika, produced by the Three. The Rejected Son is One. The “Son-Suns” are countless.

Stanza V.

1. The Primordial Seven, the First Seven Breaths of the Dragon of Wisdom, produce in their turn from their Holy Circumgyrating Breaths the Fiery Whirlwind.

2. They make of him the Messenger of their Will. The Dzyu becomes Fohat: the swift Son of the Divine Sons, whose [pg 062] Sons are the Lipika, runs circular errands. Fohat is the Steed, and the Thought is the Rider. He passes like lightning through the fiery clouds; takes Three, and Five, and Seven Strides through the Seven Regions above, and the Seven below. He lifts his Voice, and calls the innumerable Sparks, and joins them together.

3. He is their guiding spirit and leader. When he commences work, he separates the Sparks of the Lower Kingdom, that float and thrill with joy in their radiant dwellings, and forms therewith the Germs of Wheels. He places them in the Six Directions of Space, and One in the middle—the Central Wheel.

4. Fohat traces spiral lines to unite the Sixth to the Seventh—the Crown. An Army of the Sons of Light stands at each angle; the Lipika, in the Middle Wheel. They say: “his is good.” The first Divine World is ready; the First, the Second. Then the “Divine Arûpa” reflects itself in Chhâyâ Loka, the First Garment of Anupâdaka.

5. Fohat takes five strides, and builds a winged wheel at each corner of the square for the Four Holy Ones ... and their Armies.

6. The Lipika circumscribe the Triangle, the First One, the Cube, the Second One, and the Pentacle within the Egg. It [pg 063] is the Ring called “Pass Not” for those who descend and ascend; who during the Kalpa are progressing towards the Great Day “Be With Us.”... Thus were formed the Arûpa and the Rûpa: from One Light, Seven Lights; from each of the Seven, seven times Seven Lights. The Wheels watch the Ring....

Stanza VI.

1. By the power of the Mother of Mercy and Knowledge, Kwan-Yin—the Triple of Kwan-Shai-Yin, residing in Kwan-Yin-Tien—Fohat, the Breath of their Progeny, the Son of the Sons, having called forth, from the lower Abyss, the Illusive Form of Sien-Tchan and the Seven Elements.

2. The Swift and the Radiant One produces the seven Laya Centres, against which none will prevail to the Great Day “Be With Us”; and seats the Universe on these Eternal Foundations, surrounding Sien-Tchan with the Elementary Germs.

3. Of the Seven—first One manifested, Six concealed; Two manifested, Five concealed; Three manifested, Four concealed; Four produced, Three hidden; Four and One Tsan revealed, Two and One-Half concealed; Six to be manifested, One laid [pg 064] aside. Lastly, Seven Small Wheels revolving: one giving birth to the other.

4. He builds them in the likeness of older Wheels, placing them on the Imperishable Centres.

How does Fohat build them? He collects the Fiery-Dust. He makes Balls of Fire, runs through them, and round them, infusing life thereïnto, then sets them into motion; some one way, some the other way. They are cold, he makes them hot. They are dry, he makes them moist. They shine, he fans and cools them. Thus acts Fohat from one Twilight to the other, during Seven Eternities.

5. At the Fourth, the Sons are told to create their Images. One-Third refuses. Two obey.

The Curse is pronounced. They will be born in the Fourth, suffer and cause suffering. This is the First War.

6. The Older Wheels rotated downward and upward.... The Mother's Spawn filled the whole. There were Battles fought between the Creators and the Destroyers, and Battles fought for Space; the Seed appearing and reäppearing continuously.

7. Make thy calculations, O Lanoo, if thou wouldst learn the correct age of thy Small Wheel. Its Fourth Spoke is our Mother. Reach the Fourth Fruit of the Fourth Path of Knowledge [pg 065] that leads to Nirvana, and thou shalt comprehend, for thou shalt see....

Stanza VII.

1. Behold the beginning of sentient formless Life.

First, the Divine, the One from the Mother-Spirit; then, the Spiritual; the Three from the One, the Four from the One, and the Five, from which the Three, the Five and the Seven. These are the Three-fold and the Four-fold downward; the Mind-born Sons of the First Lord, the Shining Seven. It is they who are thou, I, he, O Lanoo; they who watch over thee and thy mother, Bhûmî.

2. The One Ray multiplies the smaller Rays. Life precedes Form, and Life survives the last atom. Through the countless Rays the Life-Ray, the One, like a Thread through many Beads.

3. When the One becomes Two, the Threefold appears, and the Three are One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant called Saptaparna.

4. It is the Root that never dies; the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks. The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame shot out by the Seven—their Flame—the Beams and Sparks of one Moon reflected in the running Waves of all the Rivers of Earth.

[pg 066]

5. The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ. It stops in the First, and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second, and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through seven changes and becomes a Sacred Animal. From the combined attributes of these, Manu, the Thinker, is formed. Who forms him? The Seven Lives and the One Life. Who completes him? The Fivefold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin, and Soma....

6. From the First-born the Thread between the Silent Watcher and his Shadow becomes more strong and radiant with every Change. The morning Sunlight has changed into noon-day glory....

7. “This is thy present Wheel,” said the Flame to the Spark. “Thou art myself, my image and my shadow. I have clothed myself in thee, and thou art my Vâhan to the Day ‘Be With Us,’ when thou shalt re-become myself and others, thyself and me.” Then the Builders, having donned their first Clothing, descend on radiant Earth and reign over Men—who are themselves....

[Thus ends this portion of the archaic narrative, dark, confused, almost incomprehensible. An attempt will now be made to throw light into this darkness, to make sense out of this apparent non-sense.]

[pg 067]

Commentaries On The Seven Stanzas And Their Terms, According To Their Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.

Stanza I.

1. The Eternal Parent,54 wrapped in her Ever-invisible Robes, had slumbered once again for Seven Eternities.

The “Parent,” Space, is the eternal, ever-present Cause of all—the incomprehensible Deity, whose “Invisible Robes” are the mystic Root of all Matter, and of the Universe. Space is the one eternal thing that we can most easily imagine, immovable in its abstraction and uninfluenced by either the presence or absence in it of an objective Universe. It is without dimension, in every sense, and self-existent. Spirit is the first differentiation from “That,” the Causeless Cause of both Spirit and Matter. As taught in the Esoteric Catechism, it is neither “limitless void,” nor “conditioned fulness,” but both. It was and ever will be.

Thus, the “Robes” stand for the noumenon of undifferentiated Cosmic Matter. It is not matter as we know it, but the spiritual essence of matter, and is coëternal and even one with Space in its abstract sense. Root-Nature is also the source of the subtile invisible properties in visible matter. It is the Soul, so to say, of the One Infinite Spirit. The Hindûs call it Mûlaprakriti, and say that it is the primordial Substance, which is the basis of the Upâdhi or Vehicle of every phenomenon, whether physical, psychic or mental. It is the source from which Âkâsha radiates.

By the “Seven Eternities,” æons or periods are meant. The word Eternity, as understood in Christian theology, has no meaning to the [pg 068] Asiatic ear, except in its application to the One Existence; nor is the term “sempiternity,” the eternal only in futurity, anything better than a misnomer.55 Such words do not and cannot exist in philosophical metaphysics, and were unknown till the advent of ecclesiastical Christianity. The Seven Eternities mean the seven periods, or a period answering in its duration to the seven periods, of a Manvantara, extending throughout a Mahâkalpa or “Great Age” (100 Years of Brahmâ), making a total of 311,040,000,000,000 of years; each Year of Brahmâ being composed of 360 Days, and of the same number of Nights of Brahmâ (reckoning by the Chandrâyana or lunar year); and a Day of Brahmâ consisting of 4,320,000,000 of mortal years. These Eternities belong to the most secret calculations, in which, in order to arrive at the true total, every figure must be 7x, x varying according to the nature of the cycle in the subjective or real world; and every figure relating to, or representing, the different cycles—from the greatest to the smallest—in the objective or unreal world, must necessarily be multiples of seven. The key to this cannot be given, for herein lies the mystery of esoteric calculations, and for the purposes of ordinary calculation it has no sense. “The number seven,” says the Kabalah, “is the great number of the Divine Mysteries”; number ten is that of all human knowledge (the Pythagorean Decad); 1,000 is the number ten to the third power, and therefore the number 7,000 is also symbolical. In the Secret Doctrine the figure 4 is the male symbol only on the highest plane of abstraction; on the plane of matter the 3 is the masculine and the 4 the feminine—the upright and the horizontal in the fourth stage of symbolism, when the symbols become the glyphs of the generative powers on the physical plane.

2. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.

“Time” is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through Eternal Duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced, [pg 069] but “lies asleep.” The Present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of Eternal Duration which we call the Future, from that part which we call the Past. Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second; and the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of Time known as the Present, comes from the blurring of the momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals, which we call the Future, to the region of memories that we name the Past. In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in material form to its disappearance from earth. It is these “sum-totals” that exist from eternity in the Future, and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the Past. No one would say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean. Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the “to be” into the “has been,” out of the Future into the Past—present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves, as they pass through Time and Space (as Matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two eternities constitute that Duration in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it.

3. Universal Mind was not, for there were No Ah-hi56 to contain it.57

“Mind” is a name given to the sum of the States of Consciousness, grouped under Thought, Will and Feeling. During deep sleep ideation ceases on the physical plane, and memory is in abeyance; thus for the time-being “Mind is not,” because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily [pg 070] ceased to function. A noumenon can become a phenomenon on any plane of existence only by manifesting on that plane through an appropriate basis or vehicle; and during the long Night of rest called Pralaya, when all the Existences are dissolved, the “Universal Mind” remains as a permanent possibility of mental action, or as that abstract absolute Thought, of which Mind is the concrete relative manifestation. The Ah-hi (Dhyân Chohans) are the collective hosts of spiritual Beings—the Angelic Hosts of Christianity, the Elohim and “Messengers” of the Jews—who are the Vehicle for the manifestation of the Divine or Universal Thought and Will. They are the Intelligent Forces that give to, and enact in, Nature her “Laws,” while they themselves act according to Laws imposed upon them in a similar manner by still higher Powers; but they are not the “personifications” of the Powers of Nature, as erroneously thought. This Hierarchy of spiritual Beings, through which the Universal Mind comes into action, is like an army—a host, truly—by means of which the fighting power of a nation manifests itself, and which is composed of army-corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, and so forth, each with its separate individuality or life, and its limited freedom of action and limited responsibilities; each contained in a larger individuality, to which its own interests are subservient, and each containing lesser individualities in itself.

4. The Seven Ways to Bliss58 were not (a). The Great Causes of Misery59 were not, for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them (b).

(a) There are “Seven Paths” or “Ways” to the “Bliss” of Non-Existence, which is absolute Being, Existence and Consciousness. They were not, because the Universe, so far, was empty, and existed only in the Divine Thought.

(b) For it is ... the Twelve Nidânas, or Causes of Being. Each is the effect of its antecedent cause, and a cause, in its turn, to its successor; the sum total of the Nidânas being based on the Four Truths, a doctrine especially characteristic of the Hînayâna System.60 They belong to the [pg 071] theory of the stream of catenated law which produces merit and demerit, and finally brings Karma into full sway. It is a system based upon the great truth that reïncarnation is to be dreaded, as existence in this world entails upon man only suffering, misery and pain; death itself being unable to deliver man from it, since death is merely the door through which he passes to another life on earth after a little rest on its threshold—Devachan. The Hînayâna System, or School of the Little Vehicle, is of very ancient growth; while the Mahâyâna, or School of the Great Vehicle, is of a later period, having originated after the death of Buddha. Yet the tenets of the latter are as old as the hills that have contained such schools from time immemorial, and the Hînayâna and Mahâyâna Schools both teach the same doctrine in reality. Yâna, or Vehicle, is a mystic expression, both “Vehicles” inculcating that man may escape the sufferings of rebirth and even the false bliss of Devachan, by obtaining Wisdom and Knowledge, which alone can dispel the Fruits of Illusion and Ignorance.

Mâyâ, or Illusion, is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition. To the untrained eye of the savage, a painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of colour, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape. Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute Existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The Existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyân Chohans, are, comparatively, like the shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless screen. Nevertheless all things are relatively real, for the cognizer is also a reflection, and the things cognized are therefore as real to him as himself. Whatever reality things possess, must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; for we cannot cognize any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. But as we rise in the scale of development, we perceive that in the stages through which we have passed, we mistook shadows for realities, and that the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached “reality”; but only [pg 072] when we shall have reached absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Mâyâ.

5. Darkness alone filled the Boundless All (a), for Father, Mother and Son were once more one, and the Son had not yet awakened for the new Wheel61 and his Pilgrimage Thereon (b).

(a) “Darkness is Father-Mother: Light their Son,” says an old Eastern proverb. Light is inconceivable except as coming from some source which is the cause of it: and as, in the case of Primordial Light, that source is unknown, though so strongly demanded by reason and logic, therefore it is called “Darkness” by us, from an intellectual point of view. As to borrowed or secondary light, whatever its source, it can be only of a temporary mâyâvic character. Darkness, then, is the Eternal Matrix in which the Sources of Light appear and disappear. Nothing is added to darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our plane. They are interchangeable; and, scientifically, light is but a mode of darkness and vice versâ. Yet both are phenomena of the same noumenon—which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray twilight to the perception of the average Mystic, though to that of the spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light. How far we discern the light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision. What is light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness. When the whole Universe was plunged in sleep—had returned to its one primordial element—there was neither centre of luminosity, nor eye to perceive light, and darkness necessarily filled the “Boundless All.”

(b) The “Father” and “Mother” are the male and female principles in Root-Nature, the opposite poles that manifest in all things on every plane of Kosmos—or Spirit and Substance, in a less allegorical aspect, the resultant of which is the Universe, or the “Son.” They are “once more one,” when in the Night of Brahmâ, during Pralaya, all in the objective Universe has returned to its one primal and eternal cause, to [pg 073] reäppear at the following Dawn—as it does periodically. Kârana—Eternal Cause—was alone. To put it more plainly: Kârana is alone during the Nights of Brahmâ. The previous objective Universe has dissolved into its one primal and eternal Cause, and is, so to say, held in solution in Space, to differentiate again and crystallize out anew at the following Manvataric Dawn, which is the commencement of a new Day or new activity of Brahmâ—the symbol of a Universe. In esoteric parlance, Brahmâ is Father-Mother-Son, or Spirit, Soul and Body at once; each personage being symbolical of an attribute, and each attribute or quality being a graduated efflux of Divine Breath in its cyclic differentiation, involutionary and evolutionary. In the cosmico-physical sense, it is the Universe, the Planetary Chain and the Earth; in the purely spiritual, the Unknown Deity, Planetary Spirit, and Man—the son of the two, the creature of Spirit and Matter, and a manifestation of them in his periodical appearances on Earth during the “Wheels,” or the Manvantaras.

6. The Seven Sublime Lords and the Seven Truths had ceased to be, (a) and the Universe, the Son of Necessity, was immersed In Paranishpanna,62 (b) To be outbreathed by that which is, and yet is not. naught was (c).

(a) The “Seven Sublime Lords” are the Seven Creative Spirits, the Dhyân Chohans, who correspond to the Hebrew Elohim. It is the same Hierarchy of Archangels to which St. Michael, St. Gabriel, and others belong, in Christian Theogony. Only while St. Michael, for instance, is allowed in dogmatic Latin Theology to watch over all the promontories and gulfs, in the Esoteric System the Dhyânis watch successively over one of the Rounds and the great Root-Races of our Planetary Chain. They are, moreover, said to send their Bodhisattvas, the human correspondents of the Dhyâni-Buddhas during every Round and Race. Out of the “Seven Truths” and Revelations, or rather revealed secrets, four only have been handed to us, as we are still in the Fourth Round, and the world also has had only four Buddhas, so far. This is a very complicated question, and will receive more ample treatment later on.

So far “there are only Four Truths, and Four Vedas”—say the [pg 074] Buddhists and Hindûs. For a similar reason Irenæus insisted on the necessity of Four Gospels. But as every new Root-Race at the head of a Round must have its revelation and revealers, the next Round will bring the Fifth, the following the Sixth, and so on.

(b) “Paranishpanna” is the Absolute Perfection to which all Existences attain at the close of a great period of activity, or Mahâmanvantara, and in which they rest during the succeeding period of repose. In Tibetan it is called “Yong-Grub.” Up to the day of the Yogâchârya School the true nature of Paranirvâna was taught publicly, but since then it has become entirely esoteric; hence so many contradictory interpretations of it. It is only a true Idealist who can understand it. Everything has to be viewed as ideal, with the exception of Paranirvâna, by him who would comprehend that state, and acquire a knowledge of how Non-Ego, Voidness, and Darkness are Three in One, and alone self-existent and perfect. It is absolute, however, only in a relative sense, for it must give room to still further absolute perfection, according to a higher standard of excellence in the following period of activity—just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit, if such a mode of expression may be permitted.

The Secret Doctrine teaches the progressive development of everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end. Our “Universe” is only one of an infinite number of Universes, all of them “Sons of Necessity,” because links in the great cosmic chain of Universes, each one standing in the relation of an effect as regards its predecessor, and of a cause as regards its successor.

The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of the “Great Breath,” which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three symbols of the Absolute—Abstract Space and Duration being the other two. When the Great Breath is projected, it is called the Divine Breath, and is regarded as the breathing of the Unknowable Deity—the One Existence—which breathes out a thought, as it were, which becomes the Kosmos. So also is it that when the Divine Breath is inspired, the Universe disappears into the bosom of the Great Mother, who then sleeps “wrapped in her Ever-Invisible Robes.”

(c) By “that which is, and yet is not” is meant the Great Breath itself, which we can only speak of as Absolute Existence, but cannot picture [pg 075] to our imagination as any form of Existence that we can distinguish from Non-Existence. The three periods—the Present, the Past and the Future—are in Esoteric Philosophy a compound time; for the three are a composite number only in relation to the phenomenal plane, but in the realm of noumena have no abstract validity. As said in the Scriptures: “The Past Time is the Present Time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is,” according to a precept in the Prasanga Madhyamika teaching, whose dogmas have been known ever since it broke away from the purely esoteric schools.63 Our ideas, in short, on duration and time are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of association. Inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge, they nevertheless can have no existence except in the experience of the individual Ego, and perish when its evolutionary march dispels the Mâyâ of phenomenal existence. What is time, for instance, but the panoramic succession of our states of consciousness? In the words of a Master, “I feel irritated at having to use these three clumsy words—Past, Present, and Future—miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole, they are about as ill-adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.” One has to acquire Paramârtha lest one should become too easy a prey to Samvriti—is a philosophical axiom.64

7. The Causes of Existence had been done away with; (a) the Visible that was, and the Invisible that is, rested in Eternal Non-being—the One Being (b).

(a) “The Causes of Existence” mean not only the physical causes known to Science, but the metaphysical causes, the chief of which is the desire to exist, an outcome of Nidâna and Mâyâ. This desire for a sentient life shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun, and is a reflection of the Divine Thought propelled into objective existence, into a law that the Universe should exist. According to Esoteric teaching, the real cause of that supposed desire, and of all existence, [pg 076] remains for ever hidden, and its first emanations are the most complete abstractions mind can conceive. These abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the material Universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect, and must underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of Nature, which have been anthropomorphized and worshipped as “God” and “gods” by the common herd of every age. It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause; the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank. This is virtually the condition to which the mind must come at last when we try to trace back the chain of causes and effects, but both Science and Religion jump to this condition of blankness much more quickly than is necessary, for they ignore the metaphysical abstractions which are the only conceivable causes of physical concretions. These abstractions become more and more concrete as they approach our plane of existence, until finally they phenomenalize in the form of the material Universe, by a process of conversion of metaphysics into physics, analogous to that by which steam can be condensed into water, and water frozen into ice.

(b) The idea of “Eternal Non-Being,” which is the “One Being,” will appear a paradox to anyone who does not remember that we limit our ideas of Being to our present consciousness of Existence; making it a specific, instead of a generic term. An unborn infant, could it think in our acceptation of that term, would necessarily in a similar manner limit its conception of Being to the intra-uterine life which alone it knows; and were it to endeavour to express to its consciousness the idea of life after birth (death to it), it would, in the absence of data to go upon, and of faculties to comprehend such data, probably express that life as “Non-Being which is Real Being.” In our case the One Being is the noumenon of all the noumena which we know must underlie phenomena, and give them whatever shadow of reality they possess, but which we have not the senses or the intellect to cognize at present. The impalpable atoms of gold scattered through the substance of a ton of auriferous quartz may be imperceptible to the naked eye of the miner, yet he knows that they are not only present there, but that they alone give his quartz any appreciable value; and this relation of the gold to the quartz may faintly shadow forth that of the noumenon to the phenomenon. Only the miner knows what the gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated from the Mâyâ which [pg 077] veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the “Eye of Dangma” toward the essence of things on which no Mâyâ can have any influence. It is here that the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy in relation to the Nidânas and the Four Truths become of the greatest importance; but they are secret.

8. Alone, the One Form of Existence (a) stretched boundless, infinite, causeless, in Dreamless sleep (b); and Life pulsated unconscious in Universal Space, throughout that All-Presence, which is sensed by the Opened Eye of Dangma.65

(a) The tendency of modern thought is to recur to the archaic idea of a homogeneous basis for apparently widely different things—heterogeneity developed from homogeneity. Biologists are now searching for their homogeneous protoplasm and Chemists for their protyle, while Science is looking for the force of which electricity, magnetism, heat, and so forth, are the differentiations. The Secret Doctrine carries this idea into the region of metaphysics, and postulates a “One Form of Existence” as the basis and source of all things. But perhaps the phrase, the “One Form of Existence,” is not altogether correct. The Sanskrit word is Prabhavâpyaya, “the place [or rather plane] whence is the origination, and into which is the resolution of all things,” as a commentator says. It is not the “Mother of the World,” as translated by Wilson;66 for Jagad Yoni, as shown by Fitzedward Hall, is scarcely so much the “Mother of the World,” or the “Womb of the World,” as the “Material Cause of the World.” The Purânic commentators explain it by Kârana, “Cause,” but Esoteric Philosophy, by the ideal spirit of that cause. In its secondary stage, it is the Svabhâvat of the Buddhist philosopher, the Eternal Cause and Effect, omnipresent yet abstract, the self-existent plastic Essence and the Root of all things, viewed in the same dual light as the Vedântin views his Parabrahman [pg 078] and Mûlaprakriti, the one under two aspects. It seems indeed extraordinary to find great scholars speculating on the possibility of the Vedânta, and the Uttara Mîmânsâ especially, having been “evoked by the teachings of the Buddhists”; whereas, on the contrary, it is Buddhism, the teaching of Gautama Buddha, that was “evoked” and entirely upreared on the tenets of the Secret Doctrine, of which a partial sketch is here attempted, and on which, also, the Upanishads are made to rest.67 According to the teachings of Shrî Shankarâchârya our contention is undeniable.68

(b) “Dreamless Sleep” is one of the seven states of consciousness known in Oriental Esotericism. In each of these states a different portion of the mind comes into action; or as a Vedântin would express it, the individual is conscious in a different plane of his being. The term “Dreamless Sleep,” in this case, is applied allegorically to the Universe to express a condition somewhat analogous to that state of consciousness in man, which, not being remembered in a waking state, seems a blank, just as the sleep of the mesmerized subject seems to him an unconscious blank when he returns to his normal condition, although he has been talking and acting as a conscious individual would.

9. But where was Dangma when the Âlaya of the Universe69was in Paramârtha (a),70 and the Great Wheel was Anupâdaka (b)?

(a) Here we have before us the subject of centuries of scholastic disputations. The two terms “Âlaya,” and “Paramârtha,” have been the causes of dividing schools and splitting the truth into more [pg 079] different aspects than any other mystic words. Âlaya is the Soul of the World or Anima Mundi—the Over-Soul of Emerson—which according to esoteric teaching changes its nature periodically. Âlaya, though eternal and changeless in its inner essence on the planes which are unreachable by either men or cosmic gods (Dhyâni-Buddhas), changes during the active life-period with respect to the lower planes, ours included. During that time not only the Dhyâni-Buddhas are one with Âlaya in Soul and Essence, but even the man strong in Yoga (Mystic Meditation) “is able to merge his soul with it,” as Aryâsanga, of the Yogâchârya school, says. This is not Nirvâna, but a condition next to it. Hence the disagreement. Thus, while the Yogâchâryas of the Mahâyâna School say that Âlaya (Nyingpo and Tsang in Tibetan) is the personification of the Voidness, and yet Âlaya is the basis of every visible and invisible thing, and that, though it is eternal and immutable in its essence, it reflects itself in every object of the Universe “like the moon in clear tranquil water”; other schools dispute the statement. The same for Paramârtha. The Yogâchâryas interpret the term as that which is also dependent upon other things (paratantra); and the Madhyamikas say that Paramârtha is limited to Paranishpanna or Absolute Perfection; i.e., in the exposition of these “Two Truths” of the Four, the former believe and maintain that, on this plane, at any rate, there exists only Samvritisatya or relative truth; and the latter teach the existence of Paramârthasatya, Absolute Truth.71 “No Arhat, O mendicants, can reach absolute knowledge before he becomes one with Paranirvâna. Parikalpita and Paratantra are his two great enemies.”72 Parikalpita (in Tibetan Kun-tag) is error, made by those unable to realize the emptiness and illusionary nature of all; who believe something to exist which does not—e.g., the Non-Ego. And Paratantra is that, whatever it is, which exists only through a dependent or causal connection, and which has to disappear as soon as the cause from which it proceeds is removed—e.g., the flame of a wick. Destroy or extinguish it, and light disappears.

Esoteric Philosophy teaches that everything lives and is conscious, but not that all life and consciousness are similar to those of human or even animal beings. Life we look upon as the One Form of [pg 080] Existence, manifesting in what is called Matter; or what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter in man. Matter is the Vehicle for the manifestation of Soul on this plane of existence, and Soul is the Vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of Spirit, and these three are a Trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all. The idea of Universal Life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic Theology. Science, it is true, contents itself with tracing or postulating the signs of Universal Life, but has not yet been bold enough to even whisper “Anima Mundi”! The idea of “crystalline life,” now familiar to Science, would have been scouted half a century ago. Botanists are now searching for the nerves of plants; not that they suppose that plants can feel or think as animals do, but because they believe that some structure, bearing the same relation functionally to plant life that nerves bear to animal life, is necessary to explain vegetable growth and nutrition. It seems hardly possible that Science, by the mere use of terms such as “force” and “energy,” can disguise from itself much longer the fact that things that have life are living things, whether they be atoms or planets.

But what is the belief of the inner Esoteric Schools, the reader may ask. What are the doctrines taught on this subject by the Esoteric “Buddhists”? With them, we answer, Âlaya has a double and even a threefold meaning. In the Yogâchârya system of the contemplative Mahâyâna School, Âlaya is both the Universal Soul, Anima Mundi, and the Self of a progressed Adept. “He who is strong in the Yoga can introduce at will his Âlaya by means of meditation into the true nature of Existence.” “The Âlaya has an absolute eternal existence,” says Aryâsanga, the rival of Nâgârjuna.73 In one sense it is Pradhâna, which is explained in Vishnu Purâna as, “that which is the unevolved cause, is emphatically called, by the most eminent sages, Pradhâna, original base, which is subtile Prakriti, viz., that which is eternal, and which at once is [or comprehends what is] and [what] is not, or is mere process.”74 “The indiscrete cause which is uniform, and both cause and effect, and which those who are acquainted with first [pg 081] principles, call Pradhâna and Prakriti, is the incognizable Brahma who was before all,”75 i.e., Brahma does not put forth evolution itself or create, but only exhibits various aspects of itself, one of which is Prakriti, an aspect of Pradhâna. “Prakriti,” however, is an incorrect word, and Âlaya would explain it better; for Prakriti is not the “uncognizable Brahma.” It is a mistake of those who know nothing of the universality of the Occult doctrines from the very cradle of the human races, and especially so of those scholars who reject the very idea of a “primordial revelation,” to teach that the Anima Mundi, the One Life or Universal Soul, was made known only by Anaxagoras, or during his age. This philosopher brought the teaching forward simply to oppose the too materialistic conceptions of Democritus on cosmogony, based on the exoteric theory of blindly driven atoms. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, however, was not its inventor, but only its propagator, as was also Plato. That which he called Mundane Intelligence, Nous (Νοῦς), the principle that according to his views is absolutely separated and free from matter and acts with design, was called Motion, the One Life, or Jîvâtmâ, in India, ages before the year 500 b.c. Only the Âryan philosophers never endowed this principle, which with them is infinite, with the finite “attribute of thinking.”76

This leads naturally to the “Supreme Spirit” of Hegel and the German Transcendentalists—a contrast that it may be useful to point out. The schools of Schelling and Fichte have diverged widely from the primitive archaic conception of an Absolute Principle, and have mirrored an aspect only of the basic idea of the Vedânta. Even the “Absoluter Geist” shadowed forth by von Hartmann in his pessimistic philosophy of the “Unconscious,” while it is, perhaps, the closest approximation made by European speculation to the Hindû Advaitin doctrines, yet similarly falls far short of the reality.

According to Hegel, the “Unconscious” would never have undertaken the vast and laborious task of evolving the Universe, except in the hope of attaining clear Self-Consciousness. In this connection it is to be borne in mind that in designating Spirit, a term which the European Pantheists use as equivalent to Parabrahman, as Unconscious, they do not attach to the expression the connotation it usually bears. It is employed in the absence of a better term to symbolize a profound mystery.

[pg 082]

The “Absolute Consciousness behind phenomena,” they tell us, which is only termed unconsciousness in the absence of any element of personality, transcends human conception. Man, unable to form a single concept except in terms of empirical phenomena, is powerless from the very constitution of his being to raise the veil that shrouds the majesty of the Absolute. Only the liberated Spirit is able to faintly realize the nature of the source whence it sprung and whither it must eventually return. As the highest Dhyân Chohan, however, can but bow in ignorance before the awful mystery of Absolute Being; and since, even in that culmination of conscious existence—“the merging of the individual in the universal consciousness,” to use a phrase of Fichte's—the Finite cannot conceive the Infinite, nor can it apply to it its own standard of mental experiences, how can it be said that the Unconscious and the Absolute can have even an instinctive impulse or hope of attaining clear Self-Consciousness?77 A Vedântin, moreover, would never admit this Hegelian idea; and the Occultist would say that it applies perfectly to the awakened Mahat, the Universal Mind already projected into the phenomenal world as the first aspect of the changeless Absolute, but never to the latter. “Spirit and Matter, or Purusha and Prakriti, are but the two primeval aspects of the One and Secondless,” we are taught.

The matter-moving Nous, the animating Soul, immanent in every atom, manifested in man, latent in the stone, has different degrees of power; and this Pantheistic idea of a general Spirit-Soul pervading all Nature is the oldest of all the philosophical notions. Nor was the Archæus a discovery either of Paracelsus or of his pupil Van Helmont; for this same Archæus is “Father-Æther,” the manifested basis and source of the innumerable phenomena of life—localized. The whole series of the numberless speculations of this kind are but variations on the same theme, the key-note of which was struck in this “primeval revelation.”

(b) The term “Anupâdaka,” parentless, or without progenitors, is a mystical designation having several meanings in our philosophy. By this name Celestial Beings, the Dhyân Chohans or Dhyâni-Buddhas, are generally meant. These correspond mystically to the human Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, known as the Mânushi (Human) Buddhas, which latter are also designated Anupâdaka, once that their whole personality is merged in their compound Sixth and Seventh Principles, [pg 083] or Âtmâ-Buddhi, and they have become the “Diamond-Souled” (Vajrasattvas78), or full Mahâtmâs. The “Concealed Lord” (Sangbai Dag-po), “the one merged with the Absolute,” can have no parents since he is Self-Existent, and one with the Universal Spirit (Svayambhû),79 the Svabhâvat in its highest aspect. The mystery of the Hierarchy of the Anupâdaka is great, its apex being the universal Spirit-Soul, and the lower rung the Mânushi-Buddha: and even every soul-endowed man also is an Anupâdaka in a latent state. Hence—when speaking of the Universe in its formless, eternal, or absolute condition, before it was fashioned by the Builders—the expression, “the great Wheel [Universe] was Anupâdaka.”

Stanza II.

1. ... Where were the Builders, the Luminous Sons Of Manvantaric Dawn?... (a) In the Unknown Darkness in their Ah-hi80 Paranishpanna. The Producers of Form81 from No-Form82—the Root of the World—the Devâmatri83 and Svabhâvat, rested in the Bliss of Non-being (b).

(a) The “Builders,” the “Sons of Manvantaric Dawn,” are the real creators of the Universe; and in this doctrine, which deals only with our Planetary System, they, as the architects of the latter, are also called the “Watchers” of the Seven Spheres, which exoterically are the seven planets, and esoterically the seven earths or spheres (Globes) of our Chain also. The opening sentence of Stanza I, when mentioning “Seven Eternities,” applies both to the Mahâkalpa or “the (Great) [pg 084] Age of Brahmâ,” as well as to the Solar Pralaya and subsequent resurrection of our Planetary System on a higher plane. There are many kinds of Pralaya (dissolution of a thing visible), as will be shown elsewhere.

(b) “Paranishpanna,” remember, is the summum bonum, the Absolute, hence the same as Paranirvâna. Besides being the final state, it is that condition of subjectivity which has no relation to anything but the One Absolute Truth (Paramârthasatya) on its own plane. It is that state which leads one to appreciate correctly the full meaning of Non-Being, which, as explained, is Absolute Being. Sooner or later, all that now seemingly exists, will be in reality and actually in the state of Paranishpanna. But there is a great difference between conscious and unconscious Being. The condition of Paranishpanna, without Paramârtha, the Self-analysing Consciousness (Svasamvedâna), is no bliss, but simply extinction for Seven Eternities. Thus, an iron ball placed under the scorching rays of the sun will get heated through, but will not feel or appreciate the warmth, while a man will. It is only “with a mind clear and undarkened by Personality, and an assimilation of the merit of manifold Existences devoted to Being in its collectivity [the whole living and sentient Universe],” that one gets rid of personal existence, merging into, becoming one with, the Absolute,84 and continuing in full possession of Paramârtha.

2. ... Where was Silence? Where the ears To Sense It? No, there was neither Silence nor Sound (a); naught save Ceaseless Eternal Breath,85 which knows itself not (b).

(a) The idea that things can cease to exist and still be, is a fundamental one in Eastern psychology. Under this apparent contradiction in terms, there rests a fact of Nature, to realize which in the mind, rather than to argue about words, is the important thing. A familiar instance of a similar paradox is afforded by chemical combination. The question whether hydrogen and oxygen cease to exist, when they [pg 085] combine to form water, is still a moot one; some arguing that since they are found again when the water is decomposed, they must be there all the while; others contending that as they actually turn into something totally different, they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being; but neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition of a thing, which has become something else and yet has not ceased to be itself. Existence as water for oxygen and hydrogen may be said to be a state of Non-Being, which is more real Being than their existence as gases; and it may faintly symbolize the condition of the Universe when it goes to sleep, or ceases to be, during the Nights of Brahmâ—to awaken or reäppear again, when the dawn of the new Manvantara recalls it to what we call existence.

(b) The “Breath” of the One Existence is only used in application to the spiritual aspect of Cosmogony by Archaic Esotericism; in other cases, it is replaced by its equivalent on the material plane—Motion. The One Eternal Element, or element-containing Vehicle, is Space, dimensionless in every sense; coëxistent with which are Endless Duration, Primordial (hence Indestructible) Matter, and Motion—Absolute “Perpetual Motion,” which is the “Breath” of the One Element. This Breath, as seen, can never cease, not even during the Pralayic Eternities.

But the Breath of the One Existence does not, all the same, apply to the One Causeless Cause or the All-Be-ness, in contradistinction to All-Being, which is Brahmâ, or the Universe. Brahmâ, the four-faced god, who, after lifting the Earth out of the waters, “accomplished the creation,” is held to be only the Instrumental, and not, as clearly implied, the Ideal Cause. No Orientalist, so far, seems to have thoroughly comprehended the real sense of the verses in the Purânas, that treat of “creation.”

Therein Brahmâ is the cause of the potencies that are to be generated subsequently for the work of “creation.” For instance, in the Vishnu Purâna,86 the translation, “and from him proceed the potencies to be created, after they have become the real cause,” would perhaps be more correctly rendered, “and from IT proceed the potencies that will create as they become the real cause [on the material plane].” Save that One Causeless Ideal Cause there is no other to which the Universe can be referred. “Worthiest of ascetics, through its potency—i.e., through the potency of that cause—every created thing comes by its inherent or [pg 086] proper nature.” If, “in the Vedânta and Nyâya, nimitta is the efficient cause, as contrasted with upâdâna, the material cause, [and] in the Sânkhya, pradhâna implies the functions of both”; in the Esoteric Philosophy, which reconciles all these systems, and the nearest exponent of which is the Vedânta as expounded by the Advaita Vedântists, none but the upâdâna can be speculated upon. That which is, in the minds of the Vaishnavas (the Visishthadvaitas), as the ideal in contradistinction to the real—or Parabrahman and Îshvara—can find no room in published speculations, since that ideal even is a misnomer, when applied to that of which no human reason, even that of an Adept, can conceive.

To know itself or oneself, necessitates consciousness and perception to be cognized—both limited faculties in relation to any subject except Parabrahman. Hence the “Eternal Breath which knows itself not.” Infinity cannot comprehend Finiteness. The Boundless can have no relation to the Bounded and the Conditioned. In the Occult teachings, the Unknown and the Unknowable Mover, or the Self-Existing, is the Absolute Divine Essence. And thus being Absolute Consciousness, and Absolute Motion—to the limited senses of those who describe this indescribable—it is unconsciousness and immovableness. Concrete consciousness cannot be predicated of abstract consciousness, any more than the quality wet can be predicated of water—wetness being its own attribute and the cause of the wet quality in other things. Consciousness implies limitations and qualifications; something to be conscious of, and someone to be conscious of it. But Absolute Consciousness contains the cognizer, the thing cognized and the cognition, all three in itself and all three one. No man is conscious of more than that portion of his knowledge which happens to be recalled to his mind at any particular time, yet such is the poverty of language that we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of, from knowledge we are unable to recall to memory. To forget is synonymous with not to remember. How much greater must be the difficulty of finding terms to describe, and to distinguish between, abstract metaphysical facts or differences! It must not be forgotten, also, that we give names to things according to the appearances they assume for ourselves. We call Absolute Consciousness “unconsciousness,” because it seems to us that it must necessarily be so, just as we call the Absolute, “Darkness,” because to our finite understanding it appears quite impenetrable; yet we recognize fully that our perception [pg 087] of such things does not do them justice. We involuntarily distinguish in our minds, for instance, between unconscious Absolute Consciousness, and unconsciousness, by secretly endowing the former with some indefinite quality that corresponds, on a higher plane than our thoughts can reach, with what we know as consciousness in ourselves. But this is not any kind of consciousness that we can manage to distinguish from what appears to us as unconsciousness.

3. The Hour had not yet struck; the Ray had not yet Flashed into the Germ (a); the Mâtripadma87 had not yet swollen (b).88

(a) The “Ray” of the “Ever Darkness” becomes, as it is emitted, a Ray of effulgent Light or Life, and flashes into the “Germ”—the Point in the Mundane Egg, represented by Matter in its abstract sense. But the term “Point” must not be understood as applying to any particular point in Space, for a germ exists in the centre of every atom, and these collectively form the “Germ;” or rather, as no atom can be made visible to our physical eye, the collectivity of these (if the term can be applied to something which is boundless and infinite) forms the noumenon of eternal and indestructible Matter.

(b) One of the symbolical figures for the Dual Creative Power in Nature (matter and force on the material plane) is “Padma,” the water-lily of India. The Lotus is the product of heat (fire) and water (vapour or ether); fire standing in every philosophical and religious system, even in Christianity, as a representation of the Spirit of Deity, the active, male, generative principle; and ether, or the soul of matter, the light of the fire, for the passive female principle, from which everything in this Universe emanated. Hence, ether or water is the Mother, and fire is the Father. Sir William Jones—and before him archaic botany—showed that the seeds of the Lotus contain—even before they germinate—perfectly formed leaves, with the miniature shape of what one day, as perfect plants, they will become: nature thus giving us a specimen of the preformation of its production ... the seeds of all phanerogamous plants bearing proper flowers containing an embryo plantlet ready formed.89 This explains the sentence, “The [pg 088] Mâtri-Padma had not yet swollen”—the form being usually sacrificed to the inner or root idea in archaic symbology.

The Lotus, or Padma, is, moreover, a very ancient and favourite symbol for the Cosmos itself, and also for man. The popular reasons given are, firstly, the fact just mentioned, that the Lotus-seed contains within itself a perfect miniature of the future plant, which typifies the fact that the spiritual prototypes of all things exist in the immaterial world, before these things become materialized on earth. Secondly, the fact that the Lotus-plant grows up through the water, having its root in the Ilus, or mud, and spreading its flower in the air above. The Lotus thus typifies the life of man and also that of the Cosmos; for the Secret Doctrine teaches that the elements of both are the same, and that both are developing in the same direction. The root of the Lotus sunk in the mud represents material life, the stalk passing up through the water typifies existence in the astral world, and the flower floating on the water and opening to the sky is emblematical of spiritual being.

4. Her Heart had not yet opened for the One Ray to enter, thence to fall, as Three into Four, into the Lap of Mâyâ.

The Primordial Substance had not yet passed out of its precosmic latency into differentiated objectivity, or even become the (to man, so far) invisible Protyle of Science. But, as the “Hour strikes” and it becomes receptive of the Fohatic impress of the Divine Thought—the Logos, or the male aspect of the Anima Mundi, Alaya—its “Heart” opens. It differentiates, and the Three (Father, Mother, Son) are transformed into Four. Herein lies the origin of the double mystery of the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception. The first and fundamental dogma of Occultism is Universal Unity (or Homogeneity) under three aspects. This leads to a possible conception of Deity, which as an absolute Unity must remain forever incomprehensible to finite intellects.

If thou wouldest believe in the Power which acts within the root of a plant, or imagine the root concealed under the soul, thou hast to think of its stalk or trunk, and of its leaves and flowers. Thou canst not imagine that Power independently of these objects. Life can be known only by the Tree of Life....90

[pg 089]

The idea of Absolute Unity would be broken entirely in our conception, had we not something concrete before our eyes to contain that Unity. And the Deity being absolute, must be omnipresent; hence not an atom but contains It within itself. The roots, the trunk, and its many branches, are three distinct objects, yet they are one tree. Say the Kabalists: “The Deity is one, because It is infinite. It is triple, because It is ever manifesting.” This manifestation is triple in its aspects, for it requires, as Aristotle has it, three principles for every natural body to become objective: privation, form, and matter.91 Privation meant in the mind of the great philosopher that which the Occultists call the prototypes impressed in the Astral Light—the lowest plane and world of Anima Mundi. The union of these three principles depends upon a fourth—the Life which radiates from the summits of the Unreachable, to become a universally diffused Essence on the manifested planes of Existence. And this Quaternary (Father, Mother, Son, as a Unity, and a Quaternary—as a living manifestation) has been the means of leading to the very archaic idea of Immaculate Conception, now finally crystallized into a dogma of the Christian Church, which has carnalized this metaphysical idea beyond any common sense. For one has but to read the Kabalah and study its numerical methods of interpretation to find the origin of the dogma. It is purely astronomical, mathematical, and preëminently metaphysical: the Male Element in Nature (personified by the male deities and Logoi—Virâj, or Brahmâ, Horus, or Osiris, etc., etc.) is born through, not from, an immaculate source, personified by the “Mother,” for—the Abstract Deity being sexless, and not even a Being but Be-ness, or Life itself—that Male having a “Mother” cannot have a “Father.” Let us render this in the mathematical language of the author of The Source of Measures. Speaking of the “Measure of a Man” and his numerical (Kabalistic) value, he writes that in Genesis, iv. 1—

It is called the “Man even Jehovah” Measure, and this is obtained in this way, viz.: 113 x 5 = 565, and the value 565 can be placed under the form of expression 56.5 x 10 = 565. Here the Man-number 113 becomes a factor of 56.5 x 10, and the [pg 090](Kabalistic) reading of this last numbered expression is Jod, He, Vau, He, or Jehovah.... The expansion of 565 into 56·5 x 10 is purposed to show the emanation of the male (Jod) from the female (Eva) principle; or, so to speak, the birth of a male element from an immaculate source, in other words, an immaculate conception.

Thus is repeated on earth the mystery enacted, according to the Seers, on the divine plane. The Son of the Immaculate Celestial Virgin (or the Undifferentiated Cosmic Protyle, Matter in its infinitude) is born again on earth as the Son of the terrestrial Eve, our mother Earth, and becomes Humanity as a total—past, present, and future—for Jehovah, or Jod-Hé-Vau-Hé, is androgyne, or both male and female. Above, the Son is the whole Kosmos; below, he is Mankind. The Triad or Triangle becomes Tetraktys, the sacred Pythagorean number, the perfect Square, and a six-faced Cube on earth. The Macroprosopus (the Great Face) is now Microprosopus (the Lesser Face); or, as the Kabbalists have it, the Ancient of Days, descending on Adam Kadmon whom he uses as his vehicle to manifest through, gets transformed into Tetragrammaton. It is now in the “Lap of Mâyâ,” the Great Illusion, and between itself and the Reality has the Astral Light, the Great Deceiver of man's limited senses, unless Knowledge through Paramârthasatya comes to the rescue.

5. The Seven92 were not yet born from the Web of Light, Darkness alone was Father-Mother, Svabhâvat; and Svabhâvat was in Darkness.

The Secret Doctrine, in the Stanzas here given, occupies itself chiefly, if not entirely, with our Solar System, and especially with our Planetary Chain. The “Seven Sons,” therefore, are the creators of the latter. This teaching will be explained more fully hereafter.

Svabhâvat, the “Plastic Essence” that fills the Universe, is the root of all things. Svabhâvat is, so to say, the Buddhistic concrete aspect of the abstraction called in Hindû philosophy Mûlaprakriti. It is the body of the Soul, and that which Ether would be to Âkâsha, the latter being the informing principle of the former. Chinese mystics have made of it the synonym of “Being.” In the Chinese translation of the Ekashloka-Shâstra of Nâgârjuna (the Lung-shu of China), called the Yih-shu-lu-kia-lun, it is said that the term “Being,” or “Subhâva,” [pg 091] (Yeu in Chinese) means “the Substance giving substance to itself”; it is also explained by him as meaning “without action and with action,” “the nature which has no nature of its own.” Subhâva, from which Svabhâvat, is composed of two words: su fair, handsome, good; sva, self, and bhâva, being or states of being.

6. These Two are the Germ, and the Germ is One. The Universe was still concealed in the Divine Thought and the Divine Bosom.

The “Divine Thought” does not imply the idea of a Divine Thinker. The Universe, not only past, present and future—a human and finite idea expressed by finite thought—but in its totality, the Sat (an untranslateable term), Absolute Being, with the Past and Future crystallized in an eternal Present, is that Thought itself reflected in a secondary or manifested cause. Brahman (neuter), as the Mysterium Magnum of Paracelsus, is an absolute mystery to the human mind. Brahmâ, the male-female, the aspect and anthropomorphic reflection of Brahman, is conceivable to the perceptions of blind faith, though rejected by human intellect when it attains its majority.

Hence the statement that during the prologue, so to say, of the drama of creation, or the beginning of cosmic evolution, the Universe, or the Son, lies still concealed “in the Divine Thought,” which had not yet penetrated into the “Divine Bosom.” This idea, note well, is at the root, and forms the origin, of all the allegories about the “Sons of God” born of immaculate virgins.

Stanza III.

1. ... The last Vibration of the Seventh Eternity thrills through Infinitude (a). The Mother swells, expanding from within without, like the Bud of the Lotus (b).

(a) The seemingly paradoxical use of the term, “Seventh Eternity,” thus dividing the indivisible, is sanctified in Esoteric Philosophy. The latter divides boundless Duration into unconditionally eternal and universal Time (Kâla); and conditioned Time (Khandakâla). One is the abstraction or noumenon of infinite Time, the other its phenomenon appearing periodically, as the effect of Mahat—the [pg 092] Universal Intelligence, limited by manvantaric duration. With some schools, Mahat is the first-born of Pradhâna (undifferentiated Substance, or the periodical aspect of Mûlaprakriti, the Root of Nature), which (Pradhâna) is called Mâyâ, Illusion. In this respect, I believe, Esoteric teaching differs from the Vedântin doctrines of both the Advaita and the Visishthadvaita schools. For it says that, while Mûlaprakriti, the noumenon, is self-existing and without any origin—is, in short, parentless, Anupâdaka, as one with Brahman—Prakriti, its phenomenon, is periodical and no better than a phantasm of the former; so Mahat, the first-born of Jñâna (or Gnôsis), Knowledge, Wisdom or the Logos—is a phantasm reflected from the Absolute Nirguna (Parabrahman), the One Reality, “devoid of attributes and qualities”; while with some Vedântins Mahat is a manifestation of Prakriti, or Matter.

(b) Therefore, the “last Vibration of the Seventh Eternity” was “fore-ordained”—by no God in particular, but occurred in virtue of the eternal and changeless Law which causes the great periods of Activity and Rest, called so graphically, and at the same time so poetically, the Days and Nights of Brahmâ. The expansion “from within without” of the Mother, called elsewhere the “Waters of Space,” “Universal Matrix,” etc., does not allude to an expansion from a small centre or focus, but means the development of limitless subjectivity into as limitless objectivity, without reference to size or limitation or area. “The ever [to us] invisible and immaterial Substance present in eternity, threw its periodical Shadow from its own plane into the Lap of Mâyâ.” It implies that this expansion, not being an increase in size—for infinite extension admits of no enlargement—was a change of condition. It expanded “like the Bud of the Lotus”; for the Lotus plant exists not only as a miniature embryo in its seed (a physical characteristic), but its prototype is present in an ideal form in the Astral Light from “Dawn” to “Night” during the manvantaric period, like everything else, as a matter of fact, in this objective Universe; from man to mite, from giant trees to the tiniest blades of grass.

All this, teaches the Hidden Science, is but the temporary reflection, the shadow of the eternal ideal prototype in Divine Thought; the word “Eternity,” note well again, standing here only in the sense of “Æon,” as lasting throughout the seemingly interminable, but still limited cycle of activity, called by us Manvantara. For what is the real esoteric meaning of Manvantara, or rather a Manu-antara? It means, literally, “between two Manus,” of whom there are fourteen in every [pg 093] Day of Brahmâ, such a Day consisting of 1,000 aggregates of four Ages, 1,000 “Great Ages” or Mahâyugas. Let us now analyse the word or name Manu. Orientalists in their dictionaries tell us that the term “Manu” is from the root man, “to think”; hence “the thinking man.” But, esoterically, every Manu, as an anthropomorphized patron of his special cycle (or Round), is but the personified idea of the “Thought Divine” (as the Hermetic Pymander); each of the Manus, therefore, being the special god, the creator and fashioner of all that appears during his own respective cycle of being or Manvantara. Fohat runs the Manus' (or Dhyân Chohans') errands, and causes the ideal prototypes to expand from within without—that is, to cross gradually, on a descending scale, all the planes, from the noumenal to the lowest phenomenal, to bloom finally on the last into full objectivity—the acme of Illusion, or the grossest matter.

2. The Vibration sweeps along, touching93 with its swift Wing the whole Universe and the Germ that dwelleth in Darkness, the Darkness that breathes94 over the slumbering Waters of Life.

The Pythagorean Monas is also said to dwell in solitude and “Darkness” like the “Germ.” The idea of the Breath of Darkness moving over “the slumbering Waters of Life,” which is Primordial Matter with the latent Spirit in it, recalls the first chapter of Genesis. Its original is the Brâhmanical Nârâyana (the Mover on the Waters), who is the personification of the Eternal Breath of the unconscious All (or Parabrahaman) of the Eastern Occultists. The Waters of Life, or Chaos—the female principle in symbolism—are the vacuum (to our mental sight), in which lie the latent Spirit and Matter. This it was that made Democritus assert, after his instructor Leucippus, that the primordial principles of all were atoms and a vacuum, in the sense of space, but not of empty space, for “Nature abhors a vacuum,” according to the Peripatetics and every ancient philosopher.

In all Cosmogonies “Water” plays the same important part. It is the base and source of material existence. Scientists, mistaking the word for the thing, understand by it the definite chemical combination of oxygen and hydrogen, thus giving a specific meaning to a term used [pg 094] by Occultists in a generic sense, and which is employed in Cosmogony with a metaphysical and mystical meaning. Ice is not water, neither is steam, although all three have precisely the same chemical composition.

3. Darkness radiates Light, and Light drops one solitary Ray into the Waters, into the Mother-Deep. The Ray shoots through the Virgin egg, the Ray causes the Eternal Egg to thrill, and drop the non-eternal Germ,95 which condenses into the World-Egg.

The “solitary Ray” dropping into the “Mother-Deep” may be taken to mean Divine Thought, or Intelligence, impregnating Chaos. This, however, occurs on the plane of metaphysical abstraction, or rather the plane whereon that which we call a metaphysical abstraction, is a reality. The “Virgin-Egg,” being in one sense the abstract of all ova, or the power of becoming developed through fecundation, is eternal and for ever the same. And just as the fecundation of an egg takes place before it is dropped; so the non-eternal periodical Germ, which later becomes in symbolism the Mundane Egg, contains in itself, when it emerges from the said symbol, “the promise and potency” of all the Universe. Though the idea per se is, of course, an abstraction, a symbolical mode of expression, it is a true symbol, for it suggests the idea of infinity as an endless circle. It brings before the mind's eye the picture of Kosmos emerging from and in boundless Space, a Universe as shoreless in magnitude, if not as endless in its objective manifestation. The symbol of an egg also expresses the fact taught in Occultism that the primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to globe, from man to angel, is spheroidal, the sphere being with all nations the emblem of eternity and infinity—a serpent swallowing its tail. To realize the meaning, however, the sphere must be thought of as seen from its centre. The field of vision, or of thought, is like a sphere whose radii proceed from one's self in every direction, and extend out into space, opening up boundless vistas all around. It is the symbolical circle of Pascal and the Kabalists, “whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”—a conception which enters into the compound idea of this emblem.

The “World-Egg” is, perhaps, one of the most universally adopted [pg 095] symbols, highly suggestive as it is, equally in the spiritual, physiological, and cosmological sense. Therefore, it is found in every world-theogony, where it is largely associated with the serpent symbol, the latter being everywhere, in philosophy as in religious symbolism, an emblem of eternity, infinitude, regeneration, and rejuvenation, as well as of wisdom. The mystery of apparent self-generation and evolution through its own creative power, repeating in miniature, in the egg, the process of cosmic evolution—both due to heat and moisture under the efflux of the unseen creative spirit—fully justified the selection of this graphic symbol. The “Virgin-Egg” is the microcosmic symbol of the macrocosmic prototype, the “Virgin Mother”—Chaos or the Primeval Deep. The male creator (under whatever name) springs forth from the virgin female, the Immaculate Root fructified by the Ray. Who, if versed in astronomy and natural sciences, can fail to see its suggestiveness? Kosmos, as receptive Nature, is an egg fructified—yet left immaculate; for once regarded as boundless, it could have no other representation than a spheroid. The Golden Egg was surrounded by seven natural Elements, “four ready [ether, fire, air, water], three secret.” This may be found stated in Vishnu Purâna, where elements are translated “envelopes,” and a secret one is added—Ahamkâra.96 The original text has no Ahamkâra; it mentions seven Elements without specifying the last three.

4. The Three97 fall into the Four98. The Radiant Essence becomes Seven inside, Seven outside (a). The Luminous Egg,99which in itself is Three,100 curdles and spreads in milk-white Curds throughout the Depths of Mother, the Root that grows in the Depths of the Ocean of Life (b).

The use of geometrical figures and the frequent allusions to figures in all ancient scriptures, as in the Purânas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and even the Bible—must be explained. In the Book of Dzyan, as in the Kabalah, there are two kinds of numerals to be studied—the Figures, often simple blinds, and the Sacred Numbers, the values of which are [pg 096] all known to the Occultists through Initiation. The former are but conventional glyphs; the latter, the basic symbols of all. That is to say, the one are purely physical, the other purely metaphysical, the two standing in relation to each other as Matter stands to Spirit—the extreme poles of the One Substance.

As Balzac, the unconscious Occultist of French literature, says somewhere, the Number is to Mind the same as it is to Matter, “an incomprehensible agent.” Perhaps so to the profane, never to the initiated mind. Number is, as the great writer thought, an Entity, and, at the same time, a Breath emanating from what he called God and what we call the All, the Breath which alone could organize the physical Cosmos, “where naught obtains its form but through the Deity, which is an effect of Number.” It is instructive to quote Balzac's words upon this subject:

The smallest as the most immense creations, are they not to be distinguished from each other by their quantities, their qualities, their dimensions, their forces and attributes, all begotten by Number? The infinitude of Numbers is a fact proven to our mind, but of which no proof can be physically given. The mathematician will tell us that the infinitude of Numbers exists but is not to be demonstrated. God is a Number endowed with motion, which is felt but not demonstrated. As Unity, it begins the Numbers, with which it has nothing in common.... The existence of Numbers depends on Unity, which without a single Number, begets them all.... What! unable either to measure the first abstraction yielded to you by the Deity, or to get hold of it, you still hope to subject to your measurements the mystery of the Secret Sciences which emanate from that Deity? .... And what would you feel, were I to plunge you into the abysses of Motion, the Force which organizes the Numbers? What would you think, were I to add that Motion and Number101 are begotten by the Word, the Supreme Reason of the Seers and Prophets, who, in days of old, sensed the mighty Breath of God, a witness to which is the Apocalypse?

(b) “The Radiant Essence curdles and spreads throughout the Depths” of Space. From an astronomical point of view this is easy of explanation: it is the Milky Way, the World-Stuff, or Primordial Matter in its first form. It is more difficult, however, to explain it in a few words, or even lines, from the standpoint of Occult Science and Symbolism, as it is the most complicated of glyphs. Herein are enshrined more than a dozen symbols. To begin with, it contains the whole pantheon of mysterious objects,102 every one of them having some [pg 097] definite Occult meaning, extracted from the Hindû allegorical “Churning of the Ocean” by the Gods. Besides Amrita, the water of life or immortality, Surabhi, the “cow of plenty,” called “the fountain of milk and curds,” was extracted from this “sea of milk.” Hence the universal adoration of the cow and bull, one the productive, the other the generative power in Nature: symbols connected with both the solar and the cosmic deities. The specific properties, for Occult purposes, of the “fourteen precious things,” being explained only at the Fourth Initiation, cannot be given here; but the following may be remarked. In the Shatapatha Brâhmana it is stated that the Churning of the Ocean of Milk took place in the Satya Yuga, the first Age which immediately followed the “Deluge.” As, however, neither the Rig Veda nor Manu—both preceding Vaivasvata's “Deluge,” that of the bulk of the Fourth Race—mention this Deluge, it is evident that it is neither the Great Deluge, nor that which carried away Atlantis, nor even the Deluge of Noah, which is here meant. This “Churning” relates to a period before the earth's formation, and is in direct connection with another universal legend, the various and contradictory versions of which culminated in the Christian dogma of the “War in Heaven,” and the “Fall of the Angels.” The Brâhmanas, reproached by the Orientalists with their versions on the same subjects often clashing with each other, are preëminently occult works, hence used purposely as blinds. They are allowed to survive for public use and property only because they were and are absolutely unintelligible to the masses. Otherwise they would have disappeared from circulation as long ago as the days of Akbar.

5. The Root remains, the Light remains, the Curds remain, and still Oeaohoo is One.

“Oeaohoo” is rendered “Father-Mother of the Gods” in the Commentaries, or the “Six in One,” or the Septenary Root from which all proceeds. All depends upon the accent given to these seven vowels, which may be pronounced as one, three, or even seven syllables, by adding an e after the final o. This mystic name is given out, because without a thorough mastery of the triple pronunciation it remains for ever ineffectual.

[pg 098]

“Is One” refers to the Non-Separateness of all that lives and has its being, whether in an active or passive state. In one sense, Oeaohoo is the Rootless Root of All; hence, one with Parabrahman: in another sense it is a name for the manifested One Life, the eternal living Unity. The “Root” means, as already explained, Pure Knowledge (Sattva),103 eternal (nitya) unconditioned Reality, or Sat (Satya), whether we call it Parabrahman or Mûlaprakriti, for these are but the two symbols of the One. The “Light” is the same Omnipresent Spiritual Ray, which has entered and now fecundated the Divine Egg, and calls cosmic matter to begin its long series of differentiations. The “Curds” are the first differentiation, and probably also refer to that cosmic matter which is supposed to be the origin of the Milky Way—the matter we know. This “matter,” which, according to the revelation received from the primeval Dhyâni-Buddhas, is, during the periodical Sleep of the Universe, of the ultimate tenuity conceivable to the eye of the perfect Bodhisattva—this matter, radiant and cool, becomes, at the first reawakening of cosmic motion, scattered through Space; appearing, when seen from the Earth, in clusters and lumps, like curds in thin milk. These are the seeds of the future worlds, the “star-stuff.”

6. The Root of Life was in every Drop of the Ocean of Immortality,104and the Ocean was Radiant Light, which was Fire, and Heat, and Motion. Darkness vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own Essence, the Body of Fire and Water, of Father and Mother.

The Essence of Darkness being Absolute Light, Darkness is taken as the appropriate allegorical representation of the condition of the Universe during Pralaya, or the term of Absolute Rest, or Non-Being, as it appears to our finite minds. The “Fire, and Heat, and Motion,” here spoken of, are, of course, not the fire, heat, and motion of Physical Science, but the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the soul, of [pg 099] the essence of these material manifestations—the “things in themselves,” which, as Modern Science confesses, entirely elude the instruments of the laboratory, and which even the mind cannot grasp, although it can equally as little avoid the conclusion that these underlying essences of things must exist. “Fire and Water, or Father and Mother,” may be taken here to mean the divine Ray and Chaos. “Chaos, from this union with Spirit obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos [the first-born Light],” says a fragment of Hermas. Damascius calls it Dis, the “disposer of all things.”105

According to the Rosicrucian tenets, as handled and explained by the profane for once correctly, if only partially, “Light and Darkness are identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind”; and according to Robert Fludd, “Darkness adopted illumination in order to make itself visible.”106 According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism, Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of Light, without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is Matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute Light; while the latter in all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an Illusion, or Mâyâ.

Even in the mind-baffling and science-harassing Genesis,107 light is created out of darkness—“and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—and not vice versâ. “In him [in darkness] was life; and the life was the light of men.”108 A day may come when the eyes of men will be opened; and then they may comprehend better than they do now the verse in the Gospel of John that says, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not.” They will see then that the word “darkness” does not apply to man's spiritual eyesight, but indeed to Darkness, the Absolute, that comprehendeth not (cannot cognize) transient Light, however transcendent to human eyes. Demon est Deus inversus. The Devil is now called “darkness” by the Church, whereas in the Bible, in the Book of Job, he is called the “Son of God,” the bright star of the early morning, Lucifer. There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Chaos, was called Lux (Lucifer), the luminous “Son of the Morning,” or Manvantaric Dawn. He has [pg 100] been transformed by the Church into Lucifer or Satan, because he is higher and older than Jehovah, and had to be sacrificed to the new dogma.

7. Behold, O Lanoo,109 the Radiant Child of the Two, the unparalleled refulgent Glory—Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, who emerges from the Depths of the great Dark Waters. It is Oeaohoo, the Younger, the —— 110 (a). He shines forth as the Sun, he is the Blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom; the Eka111 is Chatur, and Chatur takes to itself Tri, and the Union produces the Sapta, in whom are the Seven, which become the Tridasha,112 the Hosts and the Multitudes (b). Behold him lifting the Veil, and unfurling it from East To West. He shuts out the Above, and leaves the Below to be seen as the Great Illusion. He marks the places for the Shining Ones,113and turns the Upper114 into a shoreless Sea of Fire (c), and the One Manifested115 into the Great Waters.

(a) “Bright Space, Son of Dark Space,” corresponds to the Ray dropped at the first thrill of the new Dawn into the great Cosmic Depths, from which it reëmerges differentiated as “Oeaohoo, the Younger” (the “New Life”), to be to the end of the Life-Cycle the Germ of all things. He is “the Incorporeal Man who contains in himself the Divine Idea,” the generator of Light and Life, to use an expression of Philo Judæus. He is called the “Blazing Dragon of Wisdom,” because, firstly, he is that which the Greek philosophers called the Logos, the Verbum of the Thought Divine; and secondly, because in Esoteric Philosophy this first manifestation, being the synthesis or the aggregate of Universal Wisdom, Oeaohoo, the “Son of the Sun,” contains in himself the Seven Creative Hosts (Sephiroth), [pg 101] and is thus the essence of manifested Wisdom. “He who bathes in the Light of Oeaohoo will never be deceived by the Veil of Mâyâ.”

“Kwan-Shai-Yin” is identical with, and an equivalent of the Sanskrit Avalokiteshvara, and as such is an androgynous deity, like the Tetragrammaton and all the Logoi of antiquity. It is only by some sects in China that he is anthropomorphized, and represented with female attributes; under his female aspect becoming Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, called the “Divine Voice.”116 The latter is the patron deity of Tibet and of the island of Puto in China, where both deities have a number of monasteries.117

The higher gods of antiquity are all “Sons of the Mother” before they become “Sons of the Father.” The Logoi, like Jupiter or Zeus, son of Cronus-Saturn, “Infinite Time” (Kâla), in their origin were represented as male-female. Zeus is said to be the “beautiful virgin,” and Venus is made bearded. Apollo was originally bisexual, so is Brahmâ-Vâch in Manu and the Purânas. Osiris is interchangeable with Isis, and Horus is of both sexes. Finally in St. John's vision in Revelation, the Logos, who is now connected with Jesus, is hermaphrodite, for he is described as having female breasts. So also is Tetragrammaton, or Jehovah. But there are two Avalokiteshvaras in Esotericism; the First and the Second Logos.

No religious symbol can escape profanation and even derision in our days of politics and science. In Southern India the writer has seen a converted native making pûjâ with offerings before a statue of Jesus clad in woman's clothes and with a ring in its nose. On asking the meaning of this masquerade, we were answered that it was Jesu-Maria blended in one, and that it was done by the permission of the Padre, as the zealous convert had no money to purchase two statues, or “idols” as they, very properly, were called by a witness, another but a non-converted Hindû. Blasphemous this will appear to a dogmatic Christian, but the Theosophist and the Occultist must award the palm of logic to the converted Hindû. The esoteric Christos in the Gnôsis is, of course, sexless, but in exoteric Theology he is male and female.

[pg 102]

(b) The “Dragon of Wisdom” is the One, the “Eka” or Saka. It is curious that Jehovah's name in Hebrew should also be One, Achad. “His name is Achad,” say the Rabbins. The Philologists ought to decide which of the two is derived from the other, linguistically and symbolically; surely, not the Sanskrit. The “One” and the “Dragon” are expressions used by the ancients in connection with their respective Logoi. Jehovah—esoterically Elohim—is also the Serpent or Dragon that tempted Eve; and the Dragon is an old glyph for the Astral Light (Primordial Principle), “which is the Wisdom of Chaos.” Archaic philosophy, recognizing neither Good nor Evil as a fundamental or independent power, but starting from the Absolute All (Universal Perfection eternally), traces both through the course of natural evolution to pure Light condensing gradually into form, and hence becoming Matter or Evil. It was left with the early and ignorant Christian Fathers to degrade the philosophical and highly scientific idea of this emblem into the absurd superstition called the “Devil.” They took this from the later Zoroastrians, who saw Devils or Evil in the Hindû Devas, and the word Evil has become by a double transmutation D'Evil (Diabolos, Diable, Diavolo, Teufel). But the Pagans have always shown a philosophical discrimination in their symbols. The primitive symbol of the serpent symbolized divine Wisdom and Perfection, and has always stood for psychical Regeneration and Immortality. Hence, Hermes calling the serpent the most spiritual of all beings; Moses, initiated into the Wisdom of Hermes, following suit in Genesis; the Gnostic Serpent with the seven vowels over its head, being the emblem of the Seven Hierarchies of the Septenary or Planetary Creators. Hence, also, the Hindû serpent Shesha or Ananta, the Infinite, a name of Vishnu, and his first Vâhana, or Vehicle, on the Primordial Waters. Like the Logoi and the Hierarchies of Powers, however, these serpents have to be distinguished one from the other. Shesha or Ananta, the “Couch of Vishnu,” is an allegorical abstraction, symbolizing infinite Time in Space, which contains the Germ and throws off periodically the efflorescence of this Germ, the Manifested Universe; whereas, the Gnostic Ophis contains the same triple symbolism in its seven vowels as the one, three and seven-syllabled Oeaohoo of the archaic doctrine; i.e., the First Unmanifested Logos, the Second Manifested, the Triangle concreting into the Quaternary or Tetragrammaton, and the Rays of the latter on the material plane.

[pg 103]

Yet they all made a difference between the good and the bad Serpent (the Astral Light of the Kabalists)—between the former, the embodiment of divine Wisdom in the region of the Spiritual, and the latter, Evil, on the plane of Matter. For the Astral Light, or the Ether, of the ancient Pagans—the name Astral Light is quite modern—is Spirit-Matter. Beginning with the pure spiritual plane, it becomes grosser as it descends, until it becomes Mâyâ, or the tempting and deceitful Serpent on our plane.

Jesus accepted the serpent as a synonym of Wisdom, and this formed part of his teaching: “Be ye wise as serpents,” he says. “In the beginning, before Mother became Father-Mother, the Fiery Dragon moved in the Infinitudes alone.”118 The Aitareya Brahmana calls the Earth Sarparâjni, the “Serpent Queen,” and the “Mother of all that moves.” Before our globe became egg-shaped (and the Universe also), “a long trail of cosmic dust [or fire-mist] moved and writhed like a serpent in Space.” The “Spirit of God moving on Chaos” was symbolized by every nation in the shape of a fiery serpent breathing fire and light upon the primordial waters, until it had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth—which symbolizes not only eternity and infinitude, but also the globular shape of all the bodies formed within the Universe from that fiery mist. The Universe, as also the Earth and Man, serpent-like, periodically cast off their old skins, to assume new ones after a time of rest. The serpent is surely not a less graceful or a more unpoetical image than the caterpillar and chrysalis from which springs the butterfly, the Greek emblem of Psyche, the human soul! The Dragon was also the symbol of the Logos with the Egyptians, as with the Gnostics. In the Book of Hermes, Pymander, the oldest and the most spiritual of the Logoi of the Western Continent, appears to Hermes in the shape of a Fiery Dragon of “Light, Fire, and Flame.” Pymander, the “Thought Divine” personified, says:

The Light is I, I am the Nous [the Mind or Manu], I am thy God, and I am far older than the human principle which escapes from the shadow [Darkness, or the concealed Deity]. I am the germ of thought, the resplendent Word, the Son of God. All that thus sees and hears in thee is the Verbum of the Master; it is the Thought [Mahat] which is God, the Father.119 The celestial Ocean, the Æther, [pg 104] ... is the Breath of the Father, the life-giving principle, the Mother, the Holy Spirit, ... for these are not separated, and their union is Life.

Here we find the unmistakable echo of the archaic Secret Doctrine, as now expounded. Only the latter does not place at the head of the Evolution of Life the “Father,” who comes third and is the “Son of the Mother,” but the “Eternal and Ceaseless Breath of the All.” Mahat (Understanding, Universal Mind, Thought, etc.), before it manifests itself as Brahmâ or Shiva, appears as Vishnu, says the Sânkhya Sâra.120 Hence it has several aspects, just as the Logos has. Mahat is called the Lord, in the Primary Creation, and is, in this sense, Universal Cognition or Thought Divine; but, “that Mahat which was first produced is (afterwards) called Ego-ism, when it is born as (the feeling itself) ‘I,’ that is said to be the Secondary Creation.”121 And the translator (an able and learned Brâhman, not a European Orientalist) explains in a foot-note, “i.e., when Mahat develops into the feeling of Self-Consciousness—I—then it assumes the name of Egoism,” which, translated into our Esoteric phraseology, means—when Mahat is transformed into the human Manas (or even that of the finite gods), and becomes Aham-ship. Why it is called the Mahat of the Secondary Creation (or the Ninth, the Kaumâra in Vishnu Purâna), will be explained hereafter.

(c) The “Sea of Fire” is, then, the Super-Astral (i.e., Noumenal) Light, the first radiation from the Root Mûlaprakriti, Undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which becomes Astral Matter. It is also called the “Fiery Serpent,” as above described. If the student bears in mind that there is but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying and that all the rest—as in the world of phenomena—are but so many various differentiated aspects and transformations (correlations, they are now called) of that One, from macrocosmical down to microcosmical effects, from super-human down to human and sub-human beings, the totality, in short, of objective existence—then the first and chief difficulty will disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered. Thus in the Egyptian also as in the Indian Theogony there was a Concealed Deity, the One, and a creative, androgynous god; Shoo being the god of creation, and Osiris in his original primary form, the god “whose name is unknown.”122

All the Kabalists and Occultists, Eastern and Western, recognize (a) [pg 105] the identity of “Father-Mother” with Primordial Æther, or Âkâsha (Astral Light); and (b) its homogeneity before the evolution of the “Son,” cosmically Fohat, for it is Cosmic Electricity. “Fohat hardens and scatters the Seven Brothers”;123 which means that the Primordial Electric Entity—for the Eastern Occultists insist that Electricity is an Entity—electrifies into life, and separates primordial stuff or pregenetic matter into atoms, themselves the source of all life and consciousness. “There exists a universal agent unique of all forms and of life, that is called Od, Ob, and Aour,124 active and passive, positive and negative, like day and night: it is the first light in Creation” (Éliphas Lévi)—the “first light” of the primordial Elohim, the Adam, “male and female,” or (scientifically) Electricity and Life.

The ancients represented it by a serpent, for “Fohat hisses as he glides hither and thither,” in zigzags. The Kabalah figures it with the Hebrew letter Teth, ט, whose symbol is the serpent which played such a prominent part in the Mysteries. Its universal value is nine, for it is the ninth letter of the alphabet, and the ninth door of the fifty portals, or gateways, that lead to the concealed mysteries of being. It is the magical agent par excellence, and designates in Hermetic philosophy “Life infused into Primordial Matter,” the essence that composes all things, and the spirit that determines their form. But there are two secret Hermetical operations, one spiritual, the other material, correlative and for ever united. As Hermes says:

Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the solid ... that which ascends from earth to heaven and descends again from heaven to earth. It [the subtile light] is the strong force of every force, for it conquers every subtile thing and penetrates into every solid. Thus was the world formed.

It was not Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, alone, who taught that the Universe evolves, and its primary substance is transformed from the state of fire into that of air, then into that of water, etc. Heraclitus of Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in Nature is fire. The intelligence that moves the Universe is fire, and fire is intelligence. And while Anaximenes said the same of air, and Thales of Miletus (600 years b.c.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine [pg 106] reconciles all these philosophers, by showing that though each was right, the system of none was complete.

8. Where was the Germ, and where was now Darkness? Where is the Spirit of the Flame that burns in thy Lamp, O Lanoo? The Germ is That, and That is Light, the White Brilliant Son of the Dark Hidden Father..

The answer to the first question, suggested by the second, which is the reply of the teacher to the pupil, contains in a single phrase one of the most essential truths of Occult Philosophy. It indicates the existence of things imperceptible to our physical senses which are of far greater importance, more real and more permanent, than those that appeal to these senses themselves. Before the Lanoo can hope to understand the transcendentally metaphysical problem contained in the first question, he must be able to answer the second; while the very answer he gives to the second will furnish him with the clue to the correct reply to the first.

In the Sanskrit Commentary on this Stanza, the terms used for the concealed and the unrevealed Principle are many. In the earliest MSS. of Indian literature this Unrevealed Abstract Deity has no name. It is generally called “That” (Tad, in Sanskrit), and means all that is, was, and will be, or that can be so received by the human mind.

Among such appellations given—of course, only in Esoteric Philosophy—as the “Unfathomable Darkness,” the “Whirlwind,” etc., it is also called the “It of the Kâlahansa,” the “Kâla-ham-sa,” and even the “Kâli Hamsa” (Black Swan). Here the m and the n are convertible, and both sound like the nasal French an or am. As in the Hebrew so also in the Sanskrit many a mysterious sacred name conveys to the profane ear no more than some ordinary, and often vulgar word, because it is concealed anagrammatically or otherwise. This word Hansa, or Hamsa, is just such a case. Hamsa is equal to “A-ham-sa”—three words meaning “I am He”; while divided in still another way it will read “So-ham,” “He [is] I.” In this single word is contained, for him who understands the language of wisdom, the universal mystery, the doctrine of the identity of man's essence with god-essence. Hence the glyph of, and the allegory about, Kâlahansa (or Hamsa), and the name given to Brahman (neuter), later on to the male Brahmâ, of [pg 107] Hamsa-vâhana, “he who uses the Hamsa as his vehicle.” The same word may be read “Kâlaham-sa,” or “I am I, in the eternity of time,” answering to the Biblical, or rather Zoroastrian, “I am that I am.” The same doctrine is found in the Kabalah, as witness the following extract from an unpublished MS. by Mr. S. Liddell McGregor Mathers, the learned Kabalist:

The three pronouns, הוא, אתה, אני, Hua, Ateh, Ani—He, Thou, I—are used to symbolize the ideas of Macroposopus and Microprosopus in the Hebrew Qabalah. Hua, “He,” is applied to the hidden and concealed Macroprosopus; Ateh, “Thou,”to Microprosopus; and Ani, “I,” to the latter when He is represented as speaking. (See Lesser Holy Assembly, 204 et seq.) It is to be noted that each of these names consists of three letters, of which the letter Aleph א, A, forms the conclusion of the first word Hua, and the commencement of Atah and Ani, as if it were the connecting link between them. But א is the symbol of the Unity and consequently of the unvarying Idea of the Divine operating through all these. But behind the א in the name Hua are the letters ו and ה, the symbols of the numbers Six and Five, the Male and the Female, the Hexagram and the Pentagram. And the numbers of these three words, Hua, Ateh, Ani, are 12, 406, and 61, which are resumed in the key numbers of 3, 10, and 7, by the Qabalah of the Nine Chambers which is a form of the exegetical rule of Temura.

It is useless to attempt to explain the mystery in full. Materialists and the men of Modern Science will never understand it, since, in order to obtain clear perception of it, one has first of all to admit the postulate of a universally diffused, omnipresent, eternal Deity in Nature; secondly, to have fathomed the mystery of electricity in its true essence; and thirdly, to credit man with being the septenary symbol, on the terrestrial plane, of the One Great Unit, the Logos, which is Itself the seven-vowelled sign, the Breath crystallized into the Word.125 He who believes in all this, has also to believe in the multiple combination of the seven planets of Occultism and of the Kabalah, with the twelve zodiacal signs; and attribute, as we do, to each planet and to each constellation an influence which, in the words of Mr. Ely Star (a French astrologer), “is proper to it, beneficent or maleficent, and this, after the planetary spirit which rules it, who, in his turn, is capable of influencing men and things which are found in harmony with him and with which he has any affinity.” For these reasons, and since few believe in the foregoing, all that can now be given is that in both cases [pg 108] the symbol of Hansa (whether I, He, Goose or Swan) is an important symbol, representing, among other things, Divine Wisdom, Wisdom in Darkness beyond the reach of men. For all exoteric purposes, Hansa, as every Hindû knows, is a fabulous bird which, when (in the allegory) given milk mixed with water for its food, separated the two, drinking the milk and leaving the water; thus showing inherent wisdom—milk standing symbolically for spirit, and water for matter.

That this allegory is very ancient and dates from the very earliest archaic period, is shown by the mention, in the Bhâgavata Purâna, of a certain caste named Hamsa or Hansa, which was the “one caste” par excellence; when far back in the mists of a forgotten past there was among the Hindûs only “One Veda, One Deity, One Caste.” There is also a range in the Himâlayas, described in the old books as being situated north of Mount Meru, called Hamsa, and connected with episodes pertaining to the history of religious mysteries and initiations. As to Kâlahansa being the supposed Vehicle of Brahmâ-Prajâpati, in the exoteric texts and translations of the Orientalists, it is quite a mistake. Brahman, the neuter, is called by them Kâla-hansa, and Brahmâ, the male, Hansa-vâhana, because, forsooth, “his vehicle is a swan or goose.”126 This is a purely exoteric gloss. Esoterically and logically, if Brahman, the infinite, is all that is described by the Orientalists, and, agreeably with the Vedântic texts, is an abstract deity, in no way characterized by the ascription of any human attributes, and at the same time it is maintained that he or it is called Kâlahansa—then how can it ever become the Vâhan of Brahmâ, the manifested finite god? It is quite the reverse. The “Swan or Goose” (Hansa) is the symbol of the male or temporary deity, Brahmâ, the emanation of the primordial Ray, which is made to serve as a Vâhan or Vehicle for the Divine Ray, which otherwise could not manifest itself in the Universe, being, antiphrastically, itself an emanation of Darkness—for our human intellect, at any rate. It is Brahmâ, then, who is Kâlahansa, and the Ray, Hansa-vâhana.

As to the strange symbol thus chosen, it is equally suggestive; the true mystic significance being the idea of a Universal Matrix, figured by the Primordial Waters of the Deep, or the opening for the reception, and subsequently for the issuing, of that One Ray (the Logos) which contains in itself the other Seven Procreative Rays or Powers (the Logoi or Builders). Hence the choice by the Rosecroix of the aquatic [pg 109] fowl—whether swan or pelican127—with seven young ones, for a symbol, modified and adapted to the religion of every country. Ain Suph is called the “Fiery Soul of the Pelican” in the Book of Numbers.128 Appearing with every Manvantara as Nârâyana, or Svâyambhuva, the Self-Existent, and penetrating into the Mundane Egg, it emerges from it at the end of the divine incubation as Brahmâ, or Prajâpati, the progenitor of the future Universe, into which he expands. He is Purusha (Spirit), but he is also Prakriti (Matter). Therefore it is only after separating itself into two halves—Brahmâ-Vâch (the female) and Brahmâ-Virâj (the male)—that the Prajâpati becomes the male Brahmâ.

9. Light is Cold Flame, and Flame is Fire, and Fire produces Heat, which yields Water—the Water of Life in the Great Mother.129

It must be remembered that the words “Light,” “Flame” and “Fire,” have been adopted by the translators from the vocabulary of the old “Fire Philosophers,”130 in order to render more clearly the meaning of the archaic terms and symbols employed in the original. Otherwise they would have remained entirely unintelligible to a European reader. To a student of the Occult, however, the above terms will be sufficiently clear.

All these—“Light,” “Flame,” “Cold,” “Fire,” “Heat,” “Water,” and “Water of Life”—are, on our plane, the progeny, or, as a modern Physicist would say, the correlations of Electricity. Mighty word, and a still mightier symbol! Sacred generator of a no less sacred progeny; of Fire—the creator, the preserver and the destroyer; of [pg 110] Light—the essence of our divine ancestors; of Flame—the soul of things. Electricity, the One Life at the upper rung of Being, and Astral Fluid, the Athanor of the Alchemists, at the lower; God and Devil, Good and Evil.

Now, why is Light called “Cold Flame”? In the order of Cosmic Evolution (as taught by the Occultist), the energy that actuates matter, after its first formation into atoms, is generated on our plane by Cosmic Heat; and before that period Cosmos, in the sense of dissociated matter, was not. The first Primordial Matter, eternal and coëval with Space, “which has neither a beginning nor an end, [is] neither hot nor cold, but is of its own special nature,” says the Commentary. Heat and cold are relative qualities and pertain to the realms of the manifested worlds, which all proceed from the manifested Hyle, which, in its absolutely latent aspect, is referred to as the “Cold Virgin,” and when awakened to life, as the “Mother.” The ancient Western cosmogonic myths state that at first there was only cold mist (the Father) and the prolific slime (the Mother, Ilus or Hyle), from which crept forth the Mundane Snake (Matter).131 Primordial Matter, then, before it emerges from the plane of the never-manifesting, and awakens to the thrill of action under the impulse of Fohat, is but “a cool radiance, colourless, formless, tasteless, and devoid of every quality and aspect.” Even such are her First-born, the “Four Sons,” who “are One, and become Seven,”—the Entities, by whose qualifications and names the ancient Eastern Occultists called the four of the seven primal “Centres of Force,” or Atoms, that develop later into the great Cosmic “Elements,” now divided into the seventy or so sub-elements, known to Science. The four “Primal Natures” of the first Dhyân Chohans are the so-called (for want of better terms) Âkâshic, Ethereal, Watery and Fiery. They answer, in the terminology of practical Occultism, to the scientific definitions of gases, which—to convey a clear idea to both Occultists and laymen—may be defined as parahydrogenic,132 paraoxygenic, oxyhydrogenic, and ozonic, or perhaps nitrozonic; the latter forces, or gases (in Occultism, supersensuous, yet atomic substances), being the most effective and active when energizing on the plane of more grossly differentiated matter. These elements are both electro-positive and electro-negative. These and many more are probably the missing links of Chemistry. They are known by other names in Alchemy and to Occultists who practise phenomenal powers. It is by combining and recombining, or dissociating, the “Elements” [pg 111] in a certain way, by means of Astral Fire, that the greatest phenomena are produced.

10. Father-Mother spin a Web, whose upper end is fastened to Spirit,133 the Light of the One Darkness, and the lower one to its shadowy end, Matter;134 and this Web is the Universe spun out of the Two Substances made in One, which is Svabhâvat.

In the Mândukya Upanishad135 it is written, “As a spider throws out and retracts its web, as herbs spring up in the ground ... so is the Universe derived from the undecaying one,” Brahmâ, for the “Germ of unknown Darkness,” is the material from which all evolves and develops, “as the web from the spider, as foam from the water,” etc. This is only graphic and true, if the term Brahmâ, the “Creator,” is derived from the root brih, to increase or expand. Brahmâ “expands,” and becomes the Universe woven out of his own substance.

The same idea has been beautifully expressed by Goethe, who says:

Thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,

And weave for God the garment thou see'st Him by.

11. It136 expands when the Breath of Fire137 is upon it; It contracts when the Breath of the Mother138 touches it. Then the Sons139 dissociate and scatter, to return into their Mother's Bosom, at the end of the Great Day, and re-become one with her. When it140 is cooling, it becomes radiant. Its Sons expand and contract through their own Selves and Hearts; they embrace Infinitude.

The expanding of the Universe, under the “Breath of Fire,” is very suggestive in the light of the fire-mist period, of which Modern Science speaks so much, and knows in reality so little.

Great heat breaks up the compound elements and resolves the [pg 112] heavenly bodies into their Primeval One Element, explains the Commentary.

“Once disintegrated into its primal constituent, by getting within the attraction and reach of a focus, or centre of heat [energy], of which many are carried about to and fro in space, a body, whether alive or dead, will be vapourized, and held in the ‘Bosom of the Mother,’ until Fohat, gathering a few of the clusters of Cosmic Matter [nebulæ], will, by giving it an impulse, set it in motion anew, develop the required heat, and then leave it to follow its own new growth.”

The expanding and contracting of the “Web” i.e., the world-stuff, or atoms—express here the pulsatory movement; for it is the regular contraction and expansion of the infinite and shoreless Ocean, of that which we may call the noumenon of Matter, emanated by Svabhâvat, which causes the universal vibration of atoms. But it is also suggestive of something else. It shows that the ancients were acquainted with that which is now the puzzle of many Scientists and especially of Astronomers—the cause of the first ignition of matter, or world-stuff, the paradox of the heat produced by refrigerative contraction, and other such cosmic riddles—for it points unmistakably to a knowledge by the ancients of such phenomena. “There is heat internal and heat external in every atom,” say the MSS. Commentaries, to which the writer has had access, “the Breath of the Father [Spirit], and the Breath [or Heat] of the Mother [Matter]”; and they give explanations which show that the modern theory of the extinction of the solar fires, by loss of heat through radiation, is erroneous. The assumption is false even on the Scientists' own admission. For, as Professor Newcomb141 points out, “by losing heat a gaseous body contracts, and the heat generated by the contraction exceeds that which it had to lose in order to produce the contraction.” This paradox, that a body gets hotter, as the shrinking produced by its getting colder is greater, has led to long disputes. The surplus of heat, it is argued, is lost by radiation, and to assume that the temperature is not lowered pari passu with a decrease of volume under a constant pressure, is to set at naught the law of Charles. Contraction develops heat, it is true; but contraction (from cooling) is incapable of developing the whole amount of heat at any time existing in the mass, or even of maintaining a body at a constant temperature, etc. Professor Winchell tries to reconcile the paradox—only a seeming one in fact, as J. Homer Lane142 proved—by suggesting “something [pg 113] besides heat.” “May it not be,” he asks, “simply a repulsion among the molecules, which varies according to some law of the distance”?143 But even this will be found irreconcilable, unless this “something besides heat” is ticketed “Causeless Heat,” the “Breath of Fire,” the all-creative Force plus Absolute Intelligence, which Physical Science is not likely to accept.

However it may be, the reading of this Stanza, notwithstanding its archaic phraseology, shows it to be more scientific than even Modern Science.

12. Then Svabhâvat sends Fohat to harden the Atoms. Each144is a part of the Web.145 Reflecting the “Self-Existent Lord,”146like a Mirror, each becomes in turn a World.147

Fohat hardens the Atoms; i.e., by infusing energy into them, he scatters the “Atoms,” or Primordial Matter. “He scatters himself while scattering Matter into Atoms.”

It is through Fohat that the ideas of the Universal Mind are impressed upon Matter. Some faint idea of the nature of Fohat may be gathered from the appellation “Cosmic Electricity,” sometimes applied to it; but, in this case, to the commonly known properties of electricity, must be added others, including intelligence. It is of interest to note that Modern Science has come to the conclusion, that all cerebration and brain-activity are attended by electrical phenomena.

Stanza IV.

1. ... Listen, ye Sons of the Earth, to your Instructors—the Sons of the Fire (a). Learn there is neither first nor last; for all is One Number, issued from No-Number (b).

(a) The terms, the “Sons of the Fire,” the “Sons of the Fire-Mist,” and the like, require explanation. They are connected with a great primordial and universal mystery, and it is not easy to make it clear. There is a passage in the Bhagavadgîtâ, wherein Krishna, speaking symbolically and esoterically, says:

[pg 114]

I will state the times [conditions] ... at which devotees departing [from this life] do so never to return [be reborn], or to return [to incarnate again]. The fire, the flame, the day, the bright [lucky] fortnight, the six months of the northern solstice, departing [dying] ... in these, those who know the Brahman [Yogîs] go to the Brahman. Smoke, night, the dark [unlucky] fortnight, the six months of the southern solstice, (dying) in these, the devotee goes to the lunar light [or mansion, the Astral Light also] and returns [is reborn]. These two paths, bright and dark, are said to be eternal in this world [or Great Kalpa (Age)]. By the one (a man) goes never to return, by the other he comes back.148

Now these terms “fire,” “flame,” “day,” the “bright fortnight,” etc., “smoke,” “night,” and so on, leading only to the end of the Lunar Path, are incomprehensible without a knowledge of Esotericism. These are all names of various deities which preside over the cosmo-psychic Powers. We often speak of the Hierarchy of “Flames,” of the “Sons of Fire,” etc. Shankarâchârya, the greatest of the Esoteric Masters of India, says that Fire means a deity which presides over Time (Kâla). The able translator of the Bhagavadgîtâ, Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A., of Bombay, confesses he has “no clear notion of the meaning of these verses.” It seems quite clear, on the contrary, to him who knows the Occult doctrine. With these verses the mystic sense of the solar and lunar symbols are connected. The Pitris are Lunar Deities and our Ancestors, because they created the physical man. The Agnishvatta, the Kumâras (the Seven Mystic Sages), are Solar Deities, though they are Pitris also; and these are the “Fashioners of the Inner Man.” They are “The Sons of Fire,” because they are the first Beings, called “Minds,” in the Secret Doctrine, evolved from Primordial Fire. “The Lord ... is a consuming fire.”149 “The Lord shall be revealed ... with his mighty angels in flaming fire.”150 The Holy Ghost descended on the Apostles as “cloven tongues like as of fire”;151 Vishnu will return on Kalkî, the White Horse, as the last Avatâra, amid fire and flames; and Sosiosh will also descend on a White Horse in a “tornado of fire.” “And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him ... and his name is called the Word of God,”152 amid flaming Fire. Fire is Æther in its purest form, and hence is not regarded as matter, but is the unity of Æther—the second, manifested deity—in its universality. But there [pg 115] are two “Fires,” and a distinction is made between them in the Occult teachings. The first, or the purely formless and invisible Fire, concealed in the Central Spiritual Sun, is spoken of as Triple (metaphysically); while the Fire of the Manifested Cosmos is Septenary, throughout both the Universe and our Solar System. “The fire of knowledge burns up all action on the plane of illusion,” says the Commentary. “Therefore, those who have acquired it and are emancipated, are called ‘Fires’.” Speaking of the seven senses, symbolized as Hotris, or Priests, Nârada says in Anugitâ: “Thus these seven [senses, smell and taste, and colour, and sound, etc.,] are the causes of emancipation”; and the translator adds: “It is from these seven from which the Self is to be emancipated. ‘I’ [in the sentence, ‘I am ... devoid of qualities’] must mean the Self, not the Brâhmana who speaks.”153

(b) The expression, “all is One Number, issued from No-Number,” relates again to that universal and philosophical tenet just explained in the commentary on Shloka 4 of Stanza III. That which is absolute, is of course No-Number; but in its later significance it has an application both in Space and in Time. It means that not only every increment of time is part of a larger increment, up to the most indefinitely prolonged duration conceivable by the human intellect, but also that no manifested thing can be thought of except as part of a whole: the total aggregate being the One Manifested Universe that issues from the Unmanifested or Absolute—called Non-Being, or “No-Number,” to distinguish it from Being, or the “One Number.”

2. Learn what we, who descend from the Primordial Seven, we, who are born from the Primordial Flame, have learnt from our Fathers....

This is explained in Book II, and the term, “Primordial Flame,” corroborates what is said in the first paragraph of the preceding commentary on Stanza IV.

The distinction between the “Primordial” and the subsequent Seven Builders is that the former are the Ray and direct emanation of the first “Sacred Four,” the Tetraktys, that is, the eternally Self-Existent [pg 116] One—eternal in essence note well, not in manifestation, and distinct from the Universal One. Latent, during Pralaya, and active, during Manvantara, the “Primordial” proceed from “Father-Mother” (Spirit-Hyle, or Ilus); whereas the other Manifested Quaternary and the Seven proceed from the Mother alone. It is the latter who is the immaculate Virgin-Mother, who is overshadowed, not impregnated, by the Universal Mystery—when she emerges from her state of Laya, or undifferentiated condition. In reality, they are, of course, all one; but their aspects on the various planes of Being are different.

The first Primordial are the highest Beings on the Scale of Existence. They are the Archangels of Christianity, those who refuse to create or rather to multiply—as did Michael in the latter system, and as did the eldest “Mind-born Sons” of Brahmâ (Vedhâs).

3. From the Effulgency of Light—the Ray of the Ever-Darkness—sprang in Space the reäwakened Energies;154 the One from the Egg, the Six, and the Five (a). Then the Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five—the Twice Seven, the Sum Total (b). And these are the Essences, the Flames, the Elements, the Builders, the Numbers (c), the Arûpa,155 the Rûpa,156 and the Force, or Divine Man—the Sum Total. And from the Divine Man emanated the Forms, the Sparks, the Sacred Animals (d), and the Messengers of the Sacred Fathers157within the Holy Four.158

(a) This relates to the Sacred Science of the Numerals; so sacred, indeed, and so important in the study of Occultism that the subject can hardly be skimmed, even in such a large work as the present. It is on the Hierarchies and the correct numbers of these Beings—invisible (to us) except upon very rare occasions—that the mystery of the whole Universe is built. The Kumâras, for instance, are called the “Four”—though in reality seven in number—because Sanaka, Sananda, Sanâtana and Sanatkumâra are the chief Vaidhâtra (their patronymic name), [pg 117] who sprang from the “four-fold mystery.” To make the whole clearer, we have to turn for our illustrations to tenets more familiar to some of our readers, namely the Brâhmanical.

According to Manu, Hiranyagarbha is Brahmâ, the first male, formed by the undiscernible Causeless Cause, in a “Golden Egg resplendent as the Sun,” as states the Hindû Classical Dictionary; Hiranyagarbha meaning the Golden, or rather the Effulgent, Womb or Egg. The meaning tallies awkwardly with the epithet “male.” Surely the esoteric meaning of the sentence is clear enough! In the Rig Veda it is said—“That, the one Lord of all beings ... the one animating principle of gods and men,” arose, in the beginning, in the Golden Womb, Hiranyagarbha—which is the Mundane Egg, or Sphere of our Universe. That Being is surely androgynous, and the allegory of Brahmâ separating into two, and creating in one of his halves (the female Vâch) himself as Virâj, is a proof of it.

“The One from the Egg, the Six and the Five,” give the number 1065, the value of the First-born (later on the male and female Brahmâ-Prajâpati), who answers to the numbers 7, and 14, and 21 respectively. The Prajâpati, like the Sephiroth are only seven, including the synthetic Sephira of the Triad from which they spring. Thus from Hiranyagarbha, or Prajâpati, the Triune (the primeval Vedic Trimûrti, Agni, Vâyu, and Sûrya), emanate the other seven, or again ten, if we separate the first three which exist in one, and one in three; all, moreover, being comprehended within that one “Supreme,” Parama, called Guhya or “Secret,” and Sarvâtman, the “Super-Soul.” “The seven Lords of Being lie concealed in Sarvâtman like thoughts in one brain.” So with the Sephiroth. They are either seven when counting from the upper Triad, headed by Kether, or ten—exoterically. In the Mahâbhârata, the Prajâpati are 21 in number, or ten, six, and five (1065), thrice seven.159

(b) “The Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five,” in their total—Twice Seven, represent 31415—the numerical Hierarchy of the Dhyân [pg 118] Chohans of various orders, and of the inner or circumscribed world.160 Placed on the boundary of the great Circle, “Pass Not”—called also the Dhyânipâsha, the “Rope of the Angels,” the “Rope” that hedges off the phenomenal from the noumenal Cosmos, which does not fall within the range of our present objective consciousness—this number, when not enlarged by permutation and expansion, is ever 31415, anagrammatically and Kabalistically, being both the number of the Circle and the mystic Svastika, the “Twice Seven” once more; for whatever way the two sets of figures are counted, when added separately, one figure after another, whether crossways from right, or from left, they will always yield fourteen. Mathematically they represent the well-known mathematical formula, that the ratio of the diameter of a circle to the circumference is as 1 to 3.1415, or the value of π (pi), as it is called. This set of figures must have the same meaning, since the 1:314,159 and again 1:3.1415927 are worked out in the secret calculations to express the various cycles and ages of the “First-born,” or 311,040,000,000,000 with fractions, and yield the same 1.3415 by a process we are not concerned with at present. And it may be shown that Mr. Ralston Skinner, the author of The Source of Measures, reads the Hebrew word Alhim in the same number values—by omitting, as said, the ciphers, and by permutation—13514: since א (a) is 1; ל (l) is 3 (30); ה (h) is 5; י (i) is 1 (10); and מ (m) is 4 (40); and anagrammatically—31415, as explained by him.

Thus, while in the metaphysical world, the Circle with the one central Point in it has no number, and is called Anupâdaka—parentless and numberless, for it can fall under no calculation; in the manifested world, the Mundane Egg or Circle is circumscribed within the groups called the Line, the Triangle, the Pentagram, the second Line and the Square (or 13514); and when the Point has generated a Line, and thus becomes a diameter which stands for the androgynous Logos, then the figures become 31415, or a triangle, a line, a square, a second line, and a pentagram. “When the Son separates from the Mother he becomes the Father,” the diameter standing for Nature, or the feminine principle. Therefore it is said: “In the World of Being, the One Point fructifies the Line, the Virgin Matrix of Kosmos [the egg-shaped zero], and the immaculate Mother gives birth to the Form that combines all forms.” Prajâpati is called the first procreating male, and “his mother's [pg 119] husband.”161 This gives the key-note to all the later “Divine Sons” from “Immaculate Mothers.” It is strongly corroborated by the significant fact that Anna, the name of the Mother of the Virgin Mary, now represented by the Roman Catholic Church as having given birth to her daughter in an immaculate way (“Mary conceived without sin”), is derived from the Chaldean Ana, Heaven, or Astral Light, Anima Mundi; whence Anaitia, Devî-Durgâ, the wife of Shiva, is also called Annapurna, and Kanyâ, the Virgin; Umâ-Kanyâ being her esoteric name, and meaning the “Virgin of Light,” Astral Light in one of its multitudinous aspects.

(c) The Devas, Pitris, Rishis; the Suras and the Asuras; the Daityas and Âdityas; the Dânavas and Gandharvas, etc., etc., have all their synonyms in our Secret Doctrine, as well as in the Kabalah and Hebrew Angelology; but it is useless to give their ancient names, as it would only create confusion. Many of these may be now also found even in the Christian Hierarchy of divine and celestial Powers. All those Thrones and Dominions, Virtues and Principalities, Cherubs, Seraphs and Demons, the various denizens of the Sidereal World, are the modern copies of archaic prototypes. The very symbolism in their names, when transliterated and arranged, in Greek and Latin, are sufficient to show it, as will be proved in several cases further on.

(d) The “Sacred Animals” are found in the Bible as well as in the Kabalah, and they have their meaning—a very profound one, too—on the page of the origins of Life. In the Sepher Jetzirah it is stated that: “God engraved in the Holy Four the Throne of his Glory, the Auphanim [the Wheels or World-Spheres], the Seraphim, and the Sacred Animals, as Ministering Angels, and from these [Air, Water, and Fire or Ether] he formed his habitation.”

The following is the literal translation from the IXth and Xth Sections:

Ten numbers without what? One: the Spirit of the living God ... who liveth in eternities! Voice and Spirit and Word, and this is the Holy Spirit. Two: Air out of Spirit. He designed and hewed therewith twenty-two letters of foundation, three mothers, and seven double and twelve single, and one Spirit out of them. Three: Water out of Spirit; he designed and hewed with them the barren and the void, mud and earth. He designed them as a flower-bed, hewed them as a [pg 120]wall, covered them as a paving. Four: Fire out of Water. He designed and hewed therewith the throne of glory and the wheels, and the seraphim and the holy animals as ministering angels, and of the three He founded his dwelling, as it is said, He makes his angels spirits, and his servants fiery flames!

The words “founded his dwelling” show clearly that in the Kabalah, as in India, the Deity was considered as the Universe, and was not, in his origin, the extra-cosmic God he now is.

Thus was the world made “through Three Seraphim—Sepher, Saphar, and Sipur,” or “through Number, Numbers, and Numbered.” With the astronomical key, these “Sacred Animals” become the signs of the Zodiac.

4. This was the Army of the Voice, the Divine Mother of the Seven. The Sparks of the Seven are subject to, and the servants of, the First, the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, and the Seventh of the Seven (a). These162 are called Spheres, Triangles, Cubes, Lines and Modellers; for thus stands the Eternal Nidâna—the Oi-Ha-Hou (b).163

(a) This Shloka gives again a brief analysis of the Hierarchies of the Dhyân Chohans, called Devas (Gods) in India, or the Conscious Intelligent Powers in Nature. To this Hierarchy correspond the actual types into which Humanity may be divided; for Humanity, as a whole, is in reality a materialized, though as yet imperfect, expression thereof. The “Army of the Voice” is a term closely connected with the mystery of Sound and Speech, as an effect and corollary of the Cause—Divine Thought. As beautifully expressed by P. Christian, the learned author of Histoire de la Magie and L'Homme Rouge des Tuileries, the words spoken by, as well as the name of, every individual largely determine his future fate. Why? Because:

When our soul [mind] creates or evokes a thought, the representative sign of that thought is self-engraved upon the astral fluid, which is the receptacle and, so to say, the mirror of all the manifestations of being.

[pg 121]

The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the [hidden or occult] virtue of the sign.

To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic potency of human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being [an Entity], but to place it under, and condemn it through the emission of the Word [Verbum] to the influence of, one or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it [the Word] makes them while naming them. The Word [Verbum] or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a blessing or a curse; this is why our present ignorance about the properties and attributes of the idea, as well as about the attributes and properties of matter, is often fatal to us.

Yes, names [and words] are either beneficent or maleficent; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health-giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the letters which compose them, and the numbers correlative to these letters.

This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its rationale: it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause, and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The Mantras (magical rather than religious invocations, esoterically) are chanted by the Brâhmans, and so are the rest of the Vedas and other Scriptures.

The “Army of the Voice” is the prototype of the “Host of the Logos,” or the “Word,” of the Sepher Jetzirah, called in the Secret Doctrine the “One Number issued from No-Number”—the One Eternal Principle. The Esoteric Theogony begins with the One Manifested (therefore not eternal in its presence and being, if eternal in its essence), the Number of the Numbers and Numbered—the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vâch, “of the hundred forms,” Shatarûpâ, or Nature. It is from this Number, 10, or Creative Nature, the Mother (the Occult cypher, or “0,” ever procreating and multiplying in union with the unit “1,” or the Spirit of Life), that the whole Universe proceeds.

In the Anugîtâ,164 a conversation is given between a Brâhmana and his wife on the origin of Speech and its Occult properties. The wife asks how Speech came into existence, and which was prior to the other, Speech or Mind. The Brâhmana tells her that the Apâna (inspirational [pg 122]breath) becoming lord, changes that intelligence, which does not understand Speech or Words, into the state of Apâna, and thus opens the Mind. Thereupon he tells her a story, a dialogue between Speech and Mind. Both went to the Self of Being (i.e., to the individual Higher Self, as Nîlakantha thinks; to Prajâpati, according to the commentator Arjuna Mishra), and asked him to destroy their doubts, and decide which of them preceded and was superior to the other. To this the Lord said: “Mind (is superior).” But Speech answered the Self of Being, by saying: “I verily yield (you) your desires,” meaning that by Speech he acquired what he desired. Thereupon again, the Self told her that there are two Minds, the “movable” and the “immovable.” “The immovable is with me,” he said, “the movable is in your dominion” (i.e. of Speech), on the plane of matter. “To that you are superior.”

But inasmuch, O beautiful one, as you came personally to speak to me (in the way you did, i.e. proudly), therefore, O Sarasvatî! you shall never speak after (hard) exhalation. The goddess Speech [Sarasvatî, a later form or aspect of Vâch, the goddess also of secret learning, or Esoteric Wisdom], verily, dwelt always between the Prâna and the Apâna. But, O noble one! going with the Apâna wind [vital air], though impelled, ... without the Prâna [expirational breath], she ran up to Prajâpati [Brahmâ], saying, “Be pleased, O venerable sir!” Then the Prâna appeared again nourishing Speech. And, therefore, Speech never speaks after (hard) exhalation. It is always noisy or noiseless. Of these two, the noiseless is the superior to the noisy (Speech).... The (Speech) which is produced in the body by means of the Prâna, and which then goes [is transformed] into Apâna and then becoming assimilated with the Udâna [physical organs of Speech] ... then finally dwells in the Samâna [“at the navel in the form of sound, as the material cause of all words,” says Arjuna Mishra]. So Speech formerly spoke. Hence the Mind is distinguished by reason of its being immovable, and the Goddess (Speech) by reason of her being movable.

The above allegory is at the root of the Occult law, which prescribes silence upon the knowledge of certain secret and invisible things, perceptible only to the spiritual mind (the sixth sense), and which cannot be expressed by “noisy” or uttered speech. This chapter of Anugîtâ explains, says Arjuna Mishra, Prânâyâma, or regulation of the breath in Yoga practices. This mode, however, without the previous acquisition of, or at least full understanding of, the two higher senses (of which there are seven, as will be shown), pertains rather to the lower Yoga. The Hatha so called was and still is discountenanced by the Arhats. It is injurious to the health, and alone can never develop [pg 123] into Râja Yoga. This story is quoted to show how inseparably connected in the metaphysics of old, are intelligent beings, or rather “intelligences,” with every sense or function, whether physical or mental. The Occult claim that there are seven senses in man, and in nature, as there are seven states of consciousness, is corroborated in the same work, Chapter vii, on Pratyâhâra (the restraint and regulation of the senses, Prânâyâma being that of the “vital winds” or breath). The Brâhmana, speaking of the institution of the seven sacrificial Priests (Hotris), says: “The nose and the eye, and the tongue, and the skin and the ear as the fifth [or smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing], mind and understanding are the seven sacrificial priests separately stationed,” which “dwelling in a minute space (still) do not perceive each other,” on this sensuous plane, none of them except mind. For mind says: “The nose smells not without me, the eye does not take in colour, etc., etc. I am the eternal chief among all elements [i.e., senses]. Without me, the senses never shine, like an empty dwelling, or like fires the flames of which are extinct. Without me, all beings, like fuel half dried and half moist, fail to apprehend qualities or objects even with the senses exerting themselves.”165

This, of course, only with regard to mind on the sensuous plane. Spiritual Mind, the upper portion or aspect of the impersonal Manas, takes no cognizance of the senses in physical man. How well the ancients were acquainted with the correlation of forces, and all the recently discovered phenomena of mental and physical faculties and functions, and with many more mysteries also—may be found in reading Chapters vii and viii of this priceless work in philosophy and mystic learning. See the quarrel of the senses about their respective superiority and their taking the Brahman, the Lord of all creatures, for their arbiter. “You are all greatest and not greatest [or superior to objects, as Arjuna Mishra says, none being independent of the other]. You are all possessed of one another's qualities. All are greatest in their own spheres and all support one another. There is one unmoving [life-wind or breath, the yoga-inhalation, so called, which is the breath of the One or Higher Self]. That one is my own Self, accumulated in numerous (forms).”

This Breath, Voice, Self or Wind (Pneuma?), is the Synthesis of the [pg 124] Seven Senses, noumenally all minor deities, and esoterically—the Septenary and the “Army of the Voice.”

(b) Next we see Cosmic Matter scattering and forming itself into Elements; grouped into the mystic Four within the fifth Element—Ether, the “lining” of Âkâsha, the Anima Mundi, or Mother of Cosmos. “Dots, Lines, Triangles, Cubes, Circles” and finally “Spheres”—why or how? Because, says the Commentary, such is the first law of Nature, and because Nature geometrizes universally in all her manifestations. There is an inherent law—not only in the primordial, but also in the manifested matter of our phenomenal plane—by which Nature correlates her geometrical forms, and later, also, her compound elements, and in which also there is no place for accident or chance. It is a fundamental law in Occultism, that there is no rest or cessation of motion in Nature.166 That which seems rest is only the change of one form into another, the change of substance going hand in hand with that of form—so at least we are taught in Occult physics, which thus seem to have anticipated the discovery of the “conservation of matter” by a considerable time. Says the ancient Commentary167 to Stanza IV:

The Mother is the fiery Fish of Life. She scatters her Spawn and the Breath [Motion] heats and quickens it. The Grains [of Spawn] are soon attracted to each other and form the Curds in the Ocean [of Space]. The larger lumps coalesce and receive new Spawn—in fiery Dots, Triangles and Cubes, which ripen, and at the appointed time some of the lumps detach themselves and assume spheroidal form, a process which they effect only when not interfered with by the others. After which, Law No. —— comes into operation. Motion [the Breath] becomes the Whirlwind and sets them into rotation.168

[pg 125]

5. The Oi-Ha-Hou, which is Darkness, the Boundless, or the No-Number, Âdi-Nidâna Svabhâvat, the [circle]:169

I. The Âdi-Sanat, the Number, for he is One (a).

II. The Voice of the Word, Svabhâvat, the Numbers, for he is One and Nine.170

III. The “Formless Square”.171

And these Three, enclosed within the [circle],172 are the Sacred Four; and the Ten are the Arûpa 173 Universe (b). Then come the Sons, the Seven Fighters, the One, the Eighth left out, and his Breath which is the Light-Maker (c).174

(a) “Âdi-Sanat,” translated literally, is the First or “Primeval Ancient,” a name which identifies the Kabalistic “Ancient of Days” and the “Holy Aged” (Sephira and Adam Kadmon) with Brahmâ, the Creator, called also Sanat among his other names and titles.

“Svabhâvat” is the mystic Essence, the plastic Root of physical Nature—“Numbers” when manifested; the “Number,” in its Unity of Substance, on the highest plane. The name is of Buddhist use and a synonym for the four-fold Anima Mundi, the Kabalistic Archetypal World, from whence proceed the Creative, Formative, and Material Worlds; and the Scintillæ or Sparks—the various other worlds contained in the last three. The Worlds are all subject to Rulers or Regents—Rishis and Pitris with the Hindûs, Angels with the Jews and Christians, Gods with the Ancients in general.

(b) “[circle].” This means that the “Boundless Circle,” the zero, becomes a number, only when one of the other nine figures precedes it, and thus manifests its value and potency; the “Word” or Logos, in union with “Voice” and Spirit175 (the expression and source of Consciousness), [pg 126] standing for the nine figures, and thus forming, with the cypher, the Decad which contains in itself all the Universe. The Triad forms the Tetraktys, or “Sacred Four,” within the Circle, the Square within the Circle being the most potent of all the magical figures.

(c) The “One Rejected” is the Sun of our system. The exoteric version may be found in the oldest Sanskrit Scriptures. In the Rig Veda, Aditi, the “Boundless” or Infinite Space—translated by Prof. Max Müller, “the visible infinite, visible by the naked eye (!!); the endless expanse beyond the earth, beyond the clouds, beyond the sky”—is the equivalent of “Mother-Space,” coëval with “Darkness.” She is very properly called the “Mother of the Gods,” Deva-Mâtri, as it is from her cosmic matrix that all the heavenly bodies of our system were born—sun and planets. Thus she is described, allegorically, in this wise: “Eight sons were born from the body of Aditi; she approached the gods with seven, but cast away the eighth, Mârttânda,” our sun. The seven sons called the Adityas are, cosmically or astronomically, the seven planets; and the sun being excluded from their number shows plainly that the Hindûs may have known, and in fact knew, of a seventh planet, without calling it Uranus.176 But esoterically and theologically, so to say, the Adityas, in their primitive most ancient meanings, are the eight, and twelve great gods of the Hindû Pantheon. “The Seven allow the mortals to see their dwellings, but show themselves only to the Arhats,” says an old proverb; “their dwellings” standing here for the planets. The ancient Commentary gives the following allegory and explains it:

Eight houses were built by Mother: eight houses for her eight Divine Sons; four large and four small ones. Eight brilliant Suns, according to their age and merits. Bal-i-lu [Mârttânda] was not satisfied, though his house was the largest. He began [to work] as the huge elephants do. He breathed [drew in] into his stomach the vital airs of his brothers. He sought to devour them. The larger four were far away; far, on the margin [pg 127]of their kingdom.177 They were not robbed [affected], and laughed. Do your worst, Sir, you cannot reach us, they said. But the smaller wept. They complained to the Mother. She exiled Bal-i-lu to the centre of her kingdom, from whence he could not move. [Since then] he [only] watches and threatens. He pursues them, turning slowly round himself; they turning swiftly from him, and he following from afar the direction in which his brothers move on the path that encircles their houses.178 From that day he feeds on the sweat of the Mother's body. He fills himself with her breath and refuse. Therefore, she rejected him.

Thus the “Rejected Son” being our Sun, evidently, as shown above, the “Son-Suns” refer not only to our planets but to the heavenly bodies in general. Sûrya, himself only a reflection of the Central Spiritual Sun, is the prototype of all those bodies that evolved after him. In the Vedas he is called Loka-Chakshuh, the “Eye of the World” (our planetary world), and he is one of the three chief deities. He is called indifferently the Son of Dyaus or of Aditi, because no distinction is made with reference to, or scope allowed for, the esoteric meaning. Thus he is depicted as drawn by seven horses, and by one horse with seven heads; the former referring to his seven planets, the latter to their one common origin from the One Cosmic Element. This “One Element” is called figuratively “Fire.” The Vedas teach that “fire verily is all the deities.”179

The meaning of the allegory is plain, for we have both the Dzyan Commentary and Modern Science to explain it, though the two differ in more than one particular. The Occult Doctrine rejects the hypothesis born of the Nebular Theory, that the (seven) great planets have evolved from the Sun's central mass, of this our visible Sun, at any rate. The first condensation of cosmic matter of course took place about a central nucleus, its parent Sun; but our Sun, it is taught, merely detached itself earlier than all the others, as the rotating mass contracted, and is their elder, bigger “brother” therefore, not their “father.” The eight Adityas, the “gods,” are all formed from the eternal substance (cometary matter180—the Mother), or the “world-stuff,” [pg 128] which is both the fifth and the sixth Cosmic Principle, the Upâdhi, or Basis, of the Universal Soul, just as in man, the Microcosm, Manas181 is the Upâdhi of Buddhi.182

There is a whole poem on the pregenetic battles fought by the growing planets before the final formation of Cosmos, thus accounting for the seemingly disturbed position of the systems of several planets; the plane of the satellites of some (of Neptune and Uranus, for instance, of which the ancients knew nothing, it is said) being tilted over, thus giving them an appearance of retrograde motion. These planets are called the Warriors, the Architects, and are accepted by the Roman Church as the leaders of the heavenly Hosts, thus showing the same traditions. Having evolved from Cosmic Space, the Sun, we are taught—before the final formation of the primaries and the annulation of the planetary nebulæ—drew into the depths of his mass all the cosmic vitality he could, threatening to engulf his weaker “Brothers,” before the law of attraction and repulsion was finally adjusted; after which, he began feeding on “the Mother's refuse and sweat”; in other words, on those portions of Æther (the “Breath of the Universal Soul”), of the existence and constitution of which Science is as yet absolutely ignorant. As a theory of this kind has been propounded by Sir William Grove,183 who theorizes that the systems “are gradually changing by atmospheric additions or subtractions, or by accretions and diminutions arising from nebular substance,” and again that “the sun may condense gaseous matter as it travels in space, and so heat may be produced”—the archaic teaching seems scientific enough, even in this age.184 Mr. W. Mattieu Williams suggested that the diffused matter or Ether, which is the recipient of the heat radiations of the Universe, is thereby drawn into the depths of the solar mass; expelling thence the previously condensed and thermally exhausted Ether, it becomes compressed and gives up its heat, to be in turn itself driven out in a rarefied and cooled state, to absorb a fresh supply of heat, which he supposes to be in this way taken up by the Ether, and again concentrated and redistributed by the Suns of the Universe.

This is about as close an approximation to the Occult teachings as [pg 129] Science ever imagined; for Occultism explains it by the “dead breath,” given back by Mârttânda, and his feeding on the “sweat and refuse” of “Mother Space.” What could affect Neptune,185 Saturn and Jupiter, but little, would have killed such comparatively small “Houses” as Mercury, Venus and Mars. As Uranus was not known before the end of the eighteenth century, the name of the fourth planet mentioned in the allegory must remain to us, so far, a mystery.

The “Breath” of all the “Seven” is said to be Bhâskara, the Light-Maker, because they (the planets) were all comets and suns in their origin. They evolve into manvantaric life from Primeval Chaos (now the noumenon of irresolvable nebulæ), by aggregation and accumulation of the primary differentiations of eternal Matter, according to the beautiful expression in the Commentary, “Thus the Sons of Light clothed themselves in the fabric of Darkness.” They are called allegorically the “Heavenly Snails,” on account of their (to us) formless Intelligences inhabiting unseen their starry and planetary homes, and so to speak, carrying them, as the snails do, along with themselves in their revolution. The doctrine of a common origin for all the heavenly bodies and planets was, as we see, inculcated by the archaic astronomers, before Kepler, Newton, Leibnitz, Kant, Herschel and Laplace. Heat (the “Breath”), Attraction and Repulsion—the three great factors of Motion—are the conditions under which all the members of this primitive family are born, develop, and die; to be reborn after a Night of Brahmâ, during which eternal Matter relapses periodically into its primary undifferentiated state. The most attenuated gases can give no idea of its nature to the modern Physicist. Centres of Forces at first, the invisible Sparks, or primordial Atoms, differentiate into Molecules, and become Suns—passing gradually into objectivity—gaseous, radiant, cosmic, the one “Whirlwind” (or Motion) finally giving the impulse to the form, and the initial motion, regulated and sustained by the never-resting “Breaths”—the Dhyân Chohans.

6. ... Then the Second Seven, who are the Lipika, produced by the Three.186 The Rejected Son is One. The “Son-Suns”are countless.

[pg 130]

The “Lipika,” from the word lipi, “writing,” means literally the “Scribes.”187 Mystically, these Divine Beings are connected with Karma, the Law of Retribution, for they are the Recorders, or Annalists, who impress on the (to us) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, “the great picture-gallery of eternity”—a faithful record of every act, and even thought, of man; of all that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal Universe. As said in Isis Unveiled, this divine and unseen canvas is the Book of Life. As it is the Lipika who project into objectivity from the passive Universal Mind the ideal plan of the Universe, upon which the “Builders” reconstruct the Kosmos after every Pralaya, it is they who stand parallel to the Seven Angels of the Presence, whom the Christians recognize in the Seven “Planetary Spirits,” or the “Spirits of the Stars”; and thus it is they who are the direct amanuenses of the Eternal Ideation—or, as Plato calls it, the “Divine Thought.” The Eternal Record is no fantastic dream, for we meet with the same records in the world of gross matter. As Dr. Draper says:

A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a permanent trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes.... The portraits of our friends or landscape-views may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or a glassy surface, until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments, where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.188

Drs. Jevons and Babbage believe that every thought displaces the particles of the brain and, setting them in motion, scatters them throughout the universe: they also think that “each particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened.”189 Thus the ancient doctrine has begun to acquire rights of citizenship in the speculations of the scientific world.

The forty “Assessors,” who stand in the region of Amenti as the accusers of the Soul before Osiris, belong to the same class of deities as the Lipika, and might stand as parallels, were not the Egyptian gods so little understood in their esoteric meaning. The Hindû Chitragupta who reads out the account of every Soul's life from his register, called [pg 131] Agra-Sandhânî; the Assessors who read theirs from the Heart of the Defunct, which becomes an open book before either Yama, Minos, Osiris, or Karma—are all so many copies of, and variants from, the Lipika and their Astral Records. Nevertheless, the Lipika are not deities connected with Death, but with Life Eternal.

Connected as the Lipika are with the destiny of every man, and the birth of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light—not fatalistically, but only because the Future, like the Past, is ever alive in the Present—they may also be said to exercise an influence on the Science of Horoscopy. We must admit the truth of the latter whether we will or not. For, as observed by one of the modern professors of Astrology:

Now that photography has revealed to us the chemical influence of the sidereal system, by fixing on the sensitized plate of the apparatus milliards of stars and planets that had hitherto baffled the efforts of the most powerful telescopes to discover, it becomes easier to understand how our solar system can, at the birth of a child, influence his brain—virgin of any impression—in a definite manner and according to the presence on the zenith of such or another zodiacal constellation.190

Stanza V.

1. The Primordial Seven, the First Seven Breaths of the Dragon of Wisdom, produce in their turn from their Holy Circumgyrating Breaths the Fiery Whirlwind.

This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all the Stanzas to explain. Its language is comprehensible only to him who is thoroughly versed in Eastern allegory, and its purposely obscure phraseology. The question will surely be asked: Do the Occultists believe in all these “Builders,” “Lipika,” and “Sons of Light,” as Entities, or are they merely imagery? To this the answer is given as plainly: After due allowance for the imagery of personified Powers, we must admit the existence of these Entities, if we would not reject the existence of Spiritual Humanity within physical mankind. For the hosts of these Sons of Light, the Mind-born Sons of the first manifested Ray of the Unknown All, are the very root of Spiritual Man. Unless we want to believe the unphilosophical dogma of a specially created soul for every human birth—a fresh supply of these pouring in daily, since “Adam”—we have to admit the Occult teachings. This will be explained in its place. Let us see, now, what may be the meaning of this Occult Stanza.

[pg 132]

The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious God—aye, even the highest—the Spiritual Primeval Intelligences must pass through the human stage. And when we say human, this does not apply merely to our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world, i.e., to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate equilibrium between matter and spirit, as we have now, ever since the middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the Fourth Round was passed. Each Entity must have won for itself the right of becoming divine, through self-experience. Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or sensed intuitionally this truth, when he said, that the Unconscious evolved the Universe only “in the hope of attaining clear self-consciousness,” in other words, of becoming Man; for this is also the secret meaning of the oft recurring Purânic phrase, of Brahmâ being constantly “moved by the desire to create.” This explains also the hidden Kabalistic meaning of the saying: “The Breath becomes a stone; the stone, a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.” The Mind-born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc., were all Men—of whatever forms and shapes—in other worlds and in preceding Manvantaras.

This subject being so very mystical, it is most difficult to explain it in all its details and bearings; for the whole mystery of evolutionary creation is contained therein. A sentence or two in the Shloka vividly recalls to mind similar sentences in the Kabalah and the phraseology of the King Psalmist.191 Both, when speaking of God, show him making the wind his messenger and his “ministers a flaming fire.” But in the Esoteric Doctrine it is used figuratively. The “Fiery Whirl-wind” is the incandescent cosmic dust which only follows magnetically, as the iron filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the “Creative Forces.” Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in the Universe has the potentiality of self-consciousness in it, and is, like the Monads of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and for itself. It is an atom and an angel.

In this connection it should be noted that one of the luminaries of the modern Evolutionist School, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of “natural selection” as the sole factor in the development of physical man, practically concedes the whole point here discussed. He holds that the evolution of man was directed and [pg 133] furthered by superior Intelligences, whose agency is a necessary factor in the scheme of Nature. But once the operation of these Intelligences is admitted in one place, it is only a logical deduction to extend it still further. No hard and fast line can be drawn.

2. They make of him the Messenger of their Will (a). The Dzyu becomes Fohat: the swift Son of the Divine Sons, whose Sons are the Lipika,192 runs circular errands. Fohat is the Steed, and the Thought is the Rider.193 He passes like lightning through the fiery clouds194 (b); takes Three, and Five, and Seven Strides through the Seven Regions above, and the Seven below.195 He lifts his Voice, and calls the innumerable Sparks,196 and joins them together (c).

(a) This shows the “Primordial Seven” using for their Vehicle, (Vâhana, or the manifested subject which becomes the symbol of the Power directing it) Fohat, called in consequence, the “Messenger of their Will”—the “Fiery Whirlwind.”

(b) “Dzyu becomes Fohat”—the expression itself shows it. Dzyu is the one Real (Magical) Knowledge, or Occult Wisdom; which, dealing with eternal truths and primal causes, becomes almost omnipotence when applied in the right direction. Its antithesis is Dzyu-mi, that which deals with illusions and false appearances only, as in our exoteric modern sciences. In this case, Dzyu is the expression of the collective Wisdom of the Dhyâni-Buddhas.

As the reader is supposed not to be acquainted with the Dhyâni-Buddhas, it is as well to say at once that, according to the Orientalists, there are five Dhyânis who are the Celestial Buddhas, of whom the Human Buddhas are the manifestations in the world of form and matter. Esoterically, however, the Dhyâni-Buddhas are seven, of whom five only have hitherto manifested,197 and two are to come in the Sixth and Seventh Root-Races. They are, so to speak, the eternal prototypes of the Buddhas who appear on this earth, each of whom has [pg 134] his particular divine prototype. So, for instance, Amitâbha is the Dhyâni-Buddha of Gautama Shâkyamuni, manifesting through him whenever this great Soul incarnates on earth as He did in Tzonkha-pa.198 As the synthesis of the seven Dhyâni-Buddhas, Avalokiteshvara was the first Buddha (the Logos), and Amitâbha is the inner “God” of Gautama, who, in China, is called Amida (Buddha). They are, as Prof. Rhys Davids correctly states, “the glorious counterparts in the mystic world, free from the debasing conditions of this material life,” of every earthly mortal Buddha—the liberated Mânushi-Buddhas appointed to govern the Earth in this Round. They are the “Buddhas of Contemplation,” and are all Anupâdaka (parentless), i.e., self-born of the divine essence. The exoteric teaching—which says that every Dhyâni-Buddha has the faculty of creating from himself an equally celestial son, a Dhyâni-Bodhisattva, who, after the decease of the Mânushi-Buddha, has to carry out the work of the latter—rests on the fact that, owing to the highest Initiation performed by one overshadowed by the “Spirit of Buddha”—who is credited by the Orientalists with having created the five Dhyâni-Buddhas!—a candidate becomes virtually a Bodhisattva, created such by the High Initiator.

(c) Fohat, being one of the most, if not the most important character in Esoteric cosmogony, should be minutely described. As in the oldest Grecian cosmogony, which differed widely from the later mythology, Eros is the third person in the primeval trinity, Chaos, Gæa, Eros—answering to the Kabalistic Trinity, Ain Suph, the Boundless All (for Chaos is Space, from χαίνω, to open wide, to be void), Shekinah and the Ancient of Days, or the Holy Ghost—so Fohat is one thing in the yet Unmanifested Universe, and another in the phenomenal and Cosmic World. In the latter, he is that occult, electric, vital power, which, under the Will of the Creative Logos, unites and brings together all forms, giving them the first impulse, which in time becomes law. But in the Unmanifested Universe, Fohat is no more this, than Eros is the later brilliant winged Cupid, or Love. Fohat has naught to do with Cosmos yet, since Cosmos is not born, and the Gods still sleep in the bosom of “Father-Mother.” He is an abstract philosophical idea. He produces nothing yet by himself; he is simply that potential creative Power, in virtue of whose action the Noumenon of all future phenomena [pg 135] divides, so to speak, but to reunite in a mystic supersensuous act, and emit the creative Ray. When the “Divine Son” breaks forth, then Fohat becomes the propelling force, the active Power which causes the One to become Two and Three—on the cosmic plane of manifestation. The triple One differentiates into the Many, and then Fohat is transformed into that force which brings together the elemental atoms, and makes them aggregate and combine. We find an echo of this primeval teaching in early Greek mythology. Erebus and Nux are born out of Chaos, and, under the action of Eros, give birth in their turn to Æther and Hemera, the light of the superior and the light of the inferior, or terrestrial, regions. Darkness generates light. Compare in the Purânas Brahmâ's Will or “Desire” to create; and in the Phœnician cosmogony of Sanchuniathon the doctrine that Desire, πόθος, is the principle of creation.

Fohat is closely related to the “One Life.” From the Unknown One, the Infinite Totality, the Manifested One, or the periodical, Manvantaric Deity, emanates; and this is the Universal Mind, which, separated from its Fountain-Source, is the Demiurge or the Creative Logos of the Western Kabalists, and the Four-faced Brahmâ of the Hindû religion. In its totality, viewed, in the Esoteric doctrine, from the standpoint of manifested Divine Thought, it represents the Hosts of the higher Creative Dhyân Chohans. Simultaneously with the evolution of the Universal Mind, the Concealed Wisdom of Adi-Buddha—the One Supreme and Eternal—manifests itself as Avalokiteshvara (or Manifested Îshvara), which is the Osiris of the Egyptians, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Heavenly Man of the Hermetic philosophers, the Logos of the Platonists, and the Âtman of the Vedântins.199 By the action of the Manifested Wisdom, or Mahat—represented by these innumerable centres of spiritual energy in the Kosmos—the Reflection of the Universal Mind, which is Cosmic Ideation and the Intellectual Force accompanying such Ideation, becomes objectively the Fohat of the Buddhist esoteric philosopher. Fohat, running along the seven principles of Âkâsha, acts upon manifested Substance, or the One Element, as declared above, and, by differentiating it into various centres of energy, sets in motion the law of Cosmic Evolution, which, in obedience to the Ideation of the Universal Mind, brings into existence all the various states of being in the manifested Solar System.

[pg 136]

The Solar System, brought into existence by these agencies, consists of Seven Principles, like everything else within these centres. Such is the teaching of the Trans-Himâlayan Esotericism. Every philosophy, however, has its own way of dividing these principles.

Fohat, then, is the personified electric vital power, the transcendental binding unity of all cosmic energies, on the unseen as on the manifested planes, the action of which resembles—on an immense scale—that of a living Force created by Will, in those phenomena where the seemingly subjective acts on the seemingly objective, and propels it to action. Fohat is not only the living Symbol and Container of that Force, but is looked upon by the Occultists as an Entity; the forces it acts upon being cosmic, human and terrestrial, and exercising their influence on all these planes respectively. On the earthly plane, its influence is felt in the magnetic and active force generated by the strong desire of the magnetizer. On the cosmic, it is present in the constructive power that, in the formation of things—from the planetary system down to the glow-worm and simple daisy—carries out the plan in the mind of Nature, or in the Divine Thought, with regard to the development and growth of a particular thing. It is, metaphysically, the objectivized Thought of the Gods, the “Word made flesh” on a lower scale, and the messenger of cosmic and human Ideation; the active force in Universal Life. In its secondary aspect, Fohat is the Solar Energy, the electric vital fluid, and the preserving Fourth Principle, the Animal Soul of Nature, so to say, or—Electricity.

In 1882, the President of the Theosophical Society, Col. Olcott, was taken to task for asserting in one of his lectures that Electricity is matter. Such, nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine. “Force,” “Energy,” may be better names for it, so long as European Science knows so little about its true nature; yet matter it is, as much as Ether is matter, since it is as atomic, though indeed several removes from Ether. It seems ridiculous to argue that because a thing is imponderable to Science, therefore it cannot be called matter. Electricity is “immaterial,” in the sense that its molecules are not subject to perception and experiment; yet it may be—and Occultism says it is—atomic; therefore it is matter. But even supposing it were unscientific to speak of it in such terms, once Electricity is called in Science a source of Energy, Energy simply, and a Force—where is that Force or that Energy which can be thought of without thinking of matter? Maxwell, a mathematician and one of the greatest authorities [pg 137] upon Electricity and its phenomena, said, years ago, that Electricity was matter, not motion merely. “If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.”200 We will go further than this, and assert that Electricity is not only Substance, but that it is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world, according to the eternal Law of Karma.

To return to Fohat, it is connected with Vishnu and Sûrya in the early character of the former God; for Vishnu is not a high God in the Rig Veda. The name Vishnu is from the root vish, “to pervade,” and Fohat is called the “Pervader” and the Manufacturer, because he shapes the atoms from crude material.201 In the sacred texts of the Rig Veda, Vishnu is also “a manifestation of the Solar Energy, and is described as striding through the seven regions of the Universe in three steps,” the Vedic God having little in common with the Vishnu of later times. Therefore the two are identical in this particular feature, and one is the copy of the other.

The Three and Seven “Strides” refer to the seven spheres inhabited by man, in the Esoteric Doctrine, as well as to the seven regions of the Earth. Notwithstanding the frequent objections made by would-be Orientalists, the Seven Worlds, or Spheres, of our Planetary Chain are distinctly referred to in the exoteric Hindû scriptures. But how strangely all these numbers are connected with like numbers in other cosmogonies and with their symbols, can be seen from the comparisons and parallelisms made by students of old religions. The “three strides of Vishnu,” through the “seven regions of the Universe,” of the Rig Veda, have been variously explained by commentators as meaning fire, lightning and the sun, cosmically, and as having been taken in the earth, the atmosphere, and the sky; more philosophically—and in the astronomical sense, very correctly—they are explained by Aurnavâbha as being the various positions of the sun, rising, noon, and setting. Esoteric Philosophy alone explains it clearly, though the Zohar has laid it down very philosophically and comprehensively. It is plainly demonstrated therein that in the beginning the Elohim (Alhim) were called Achad, “One,” or the “Deity, One in Many,” a very simple idea [pg 138] in a pantheistic conception—pantheistic in its philosophical sense, of course. Then came the change, “Jehovah is Elohim,” thus unifying the multiplicity and taking the first step towards Monotheism. Now to the query, “How is Jehovah Elohim?” the answer is, “By Three Steps” from below. The meaning is plain. The Steps are symbols, and emblematic, mutually and correlatively, of Spirit, Soul and Body (Man); of the Circle, transformed into Spirit, the Soul of the World and its Body (or Earth). Stepping out of the Circle of Infinity, that no man comprehendeth, Ain Suph—the Kabalistic synonym for Parabrahman, for the Zeroâna Akerne, of the Mazdeans, or for any other “Unknowable”—becomes “One” (the Achad, the Eka, the Ahu); then he (or it) is transformed by evolution into the “One in Many,” the Dhyâni-Buddhas or the Elohim, or again the Amshaspends, his third Step being taken into the generation of the flesh, or Man. And from Man, or Jah-Hovah, “male-female,” the inner divine entity becomes, on the metaphysical plane, once more the Elohim.

The numbers 3, 5, and 7 are prominent in speculative Masonry, as shown in Isis Unveiled. A Mason writes:

There are the 3, 5, and 7 steps to show a circular walk. The three faces of 3, 3; 5, 3; and 7, 3; etc., etc. Sometimes it comes in this form: 753/2 = 376.5, and 7535/2 = 3817.5, and the ratio of 20612/6561 feet for cubit measure gives the Great Pyramid measures.

Three, five and seven are mystical numbers, and the last and the first are as greatly honoured by Masons as by Parsis—the Triangle being a symbol of Deity everywhere.202 As a matter of course, Doctors of Divinity—Cassel, for instance—show the Zohar explaining and supporting the Christian Trinity(!). It is the latter, however, that had its origin from the [triangle], in the archaic Occultism and Symbology of the Heathen. The Three Strides relate metaphysically to the descent of Spirit into Matter, of the Logos falling as a ray into the spirit, then into the soul, and finally into the human physical form of man, in which it becomes Life.

The Kabalistic idea is identical with the Esotericism of the archaic period. This Esotericism is the common property of all, and belongs neither to the Âryan Fifth Race, nor to any of its numerous sub-races. It cannot be claimed by the Turanians, so-called, the Egyptians, Chinese, Chaldeans, or by any of the seven divisions of the Fifth Root Race, but really belongs to the Third and Fourth Root Races, [pg 139] whose descendants we find in the Seed of the Fifth, the earliest Âryans. The Circle was with every nation the symbol of the Unknown—“Boundless Space,” the abstract garb of an ever present abstraction—the Incognizable Deity. It represents limitless Time in Eternity. The Zeroâna Akerne is also the “Boundless Circle of Unknown Time,” from which Circle issues the radiant Light—the Universal Sun, or Ormazd203—and the latter is identical with Cronus, in his Æolian form, that of a Circle. For the Circle is Sar and Saros, or Cycle. It was the Babylonian God whose circular horizon was the visible symbol of the invisible, while the Sun was the One Circle from which proceeded the cosmic orbs, of which he was considered the leader. Zeroâna, is the Chakra, or Circle, of Vishnu, the mysterious emblem which is, according to the definition of a Mystic, “a curve of such a nature that as to any, the least possible, part thereof, if the curve be protracted either way, it will proceed and finally reënter upon itself, and form one and the same curve—or that which we call the circle.” No better definition could thus be given of the natural symbol and the evident nature of Deity, which having its circumference everywhere (the boundless) has, therefore, its central point also everywhere; in other words, is in every point of the Universe. The invisible Deity is thus also the Dhyân Chohans, or the Rishis, the primitive seven, and the nine, without, and ten, including, their synthetical unit, from which It steps into Man.

Returning to Commentary 4 of Stanza IV, the reader now will understand why, while the Trans-Himâlayan Chakra has inscribed within it [triangle] [square] [5-point star with middle dot]—triangle, first line, square, second line, and a pentacle with a point in the centre, either thus [5-point star with middle dot] or some other variation—the Kabalistic Circle of the Elohim reveals, when the letters of the word אלהים (Alhim or Elohim) are read numerically, the famous numerals 13514, or anagrammatically 31415—the astronomical π (pi), or the hidden meaning of the Dhyâni-Buddhas, of the Gebers, the Giburim, the Kabeiri, and the Elohim, all signifying “Great Men,” “Titans,” “Heavenly Men,” and, on earth, “Giants.”

The Seven was a Sacred Number with every nation; but none applied it to more physiologically materialistic uses than the Hebrews. With them 7 was preëminently the generative number, and 9 the male causative one, forming as shown by the Kabalists the otz, עצ (90, 70), or “the Tree of the Garden of Eden,” the “double hermaphrodite rod” [pg 140] of the Fourth Race. This was the symbol of the “Holy of Holies,” the 3 and the 4 of sexual separation. Nearly every one of the 22 Hebrew letters are merely phallic symbols. Of the two letters—as shown above—one, the ayin, is a negative female letter, symbolically an eye; the the other a male letter, tzâ, a fish-hook or dart. Whereas with the Hindûs and Âryans generally, the significance was manifold, and related almost entirely to purely metaphysical and astronomical truths. Their Rishis and Gods, their Demons and Heroes, have historical and ethical meanings.

Yet we are told by a Kabalist, who, in a work not yet published, contrasts the Kabalah and Zohar with Âryan Esotericism, that:

The Hebrew clear, short, terse and exact, modes far and beyond measure surpass the toddling word-talk of the Hindûs—just as by parallelisms the Psalmist says, “My mouth speaks with my tongue, I know not thy numbers” (lxxi., 15).... The Hindû glyph shows by its insufficiency in the large admixture of adventitious sides the same borrowed plumage that the Greeks (the lying Greeks) had, and that Masonry has: which, in the rough monosyllabic (and apparent) poverty of the Hebrew, shows the latter to have come down from a far more remote antiquity than any of these, and to have been the source [! ?], or nearer the old original source than any of them.

This is entirely erroneous. Our learned brother and correspondent judges the Hindû religious systems apparently by their Shâstras and Purânas, probably the latter, and in their modern translations moreover, which disfigure them out of all recognition. It is to their philosophical systems that we have to turn, to their esoteric teaching, if we would make a point of comparison. No doubt the symbology of the Pentateuch, and even of the New Testament, comes from the same source. But surely the Pyramid of Cheops, whose measurements are all found, by Professor Piazzi Smyth, repeated in Solomon's alleged and mythical Temple, is not of a later date than the Mosaic books? Hence, if there is any such great identity as is claimed, it must be due to servile copying on the part of the Jews, not on that of the Egyptians. The glyphs of the Jews—and even their language, the Hebrew—are not original. They are borrowed from the Egyptians, from whom Moses got his Wisdom; from the Coptic, the probable kinsman, if not parent, of the old Phœnician and from the Hyksos, their (alleged) ancestors, as Josephus shows.204 Aye; but who are the Hyksos shepherds? And who the Egyptians? History knows nothing of the question, and speculates and theorizes out of the depths of the respective consciousnesses [pg 141] of her historians.205 “Khamism, or old Coptic, is from Western Asia, and contains some germ of the Semitic, thus bearing witness to the primitive cognate unity of the Âryan and Semitic races,” says Bunsen, who places the great events in Egypt 9,000 years b.c. The fact is that in archaic Esotericism and Âryan thought we find a grand philosophy, whereas in the Hebrew records we find only the most surprising ingenuity in inventing apotheoses for phallic worship and sexual theogony.

That the Âryans never made their religion rest solely on physiological symbols, as the old Hebrews have done, may be seen in the exoteric Hindû Scriptures. That these accounts, also, are blinds is shown by their contradicting each other, a different explanation being found in almost every Purâna and epic poem. Read esoterically, however, they will all yield the same meaning. Thus one account enumerates seven worlds, exclusive of the nether worlds, also seven in number; these fourteen upper and nether worlds have nothing to do with the classification of the Septenary Chain and belong to the purely ethereal, invisible worlds. These will be noticed elsewhere. Suffice it for the present to show that they are purposely referred to as though they belonged to the Chain. “Another enumeration calls the seven worlds earth, sky, heaven, middle region, place of birth, mansion of the blest, and abode of truth; placing the Sons of Brahmâ in the sixth division, and stating the fifth, or Jana-loka, to be that where animals destroyed in the general conflagration are born again.”206 Some real Esoteric teaching is given in the subsequent chapters on Symbolism. He who is prepared for it will understand the hidden meaning.

3. He is their guiding spirit and leader. When he commences work, he separates the Sparks of the Lower Kingdom,207 That float and thrill with joy in their radiant dwellings,208 and forms therewith the Germs of Wheels. He places them in the Six Directions of Space, and One in the middle—the Central Wheel.

“Wheels,” as already explained, are the centres of force, around which primordial cosmic matter expands, and, passing through all the [pg 142] six stages of consolidation, becomes spheroidal and ends by being transformed into globes or spheres. It is one of the fundamental dogmas of Esoteric cosmogony, that during the Kalpas (or Æons) of Life, Motion, which, during the periods of Rest, “pulsates and thrills through every slumbering atom”—assumes an evergrowing tendency, from the first awakening of Kosmos to a new “Day,” to circular movement. “The Deity becomes a Whirlwind.” It may be asked, as the writer has not failed to ask: Who is there to ascertain the difference in that Motion, since all Nature is reduced to its primal essence, and there can be no one—not even one of the Dhyâni-Chohans, who are all in Nirvâna—to see it? The answer to this is: Everything in Nature has to be judged by analogy. Though the highest Deities (Archangels or Dhyâni-Buddhas) are unable to penetrate the mysteries which lie too far beyond our Planetary System and the visible Cosmos, yet there were great seers and prophets in olden times who were enabled to perceive the mystery of Breath and Motion retrospectively, when the systems of Worlds were at rest and plunged in their periodic sleep.

The Wheels are also called Rotæ—the moving wheels of the celestial orbs participating in the world's creation—when the meaning refers to the animating principle of the stars and planets; for, in the Kabalah, they are represented by the Auphanim, the Angels of the Spheres and Stars, of which they are the informing Souls.209

This law of vortical movement in primordial matter is one of the oldest conceptions of Greek philosophy, whose first historical sages were nearly all Initiates of the Mysteries. The Greeks had it from the Egyptians, and the latter from the Chaldeans, who had been the pupils of Brâhmans of the Esoteric school. Leucippus, and Democritus of Abdera—the pupil of the Magi—taught that this gyratory movement of the atoms and spheres existed from eternity.210 Hicetas, Heraclides, Ecphantus, Pythagoras, and all his pupils, taught the rotation of the earth; and Âryabhata of India, Aristarchus, Seleucus, and Archimedes [pg 143] calculated its revolution as scientifically as the Astronomers do now; while the theory of Elemental Vortices was known to Anaxagoras, and maintained by him 500 years b.c., or nearly 2,000 before it was taken up by Galileo, Descartes, Swedenborg, and finally, with slight modifications, by Sir W. Thomson.211 All such knowledge, if justice be only done, is an echo of the archaic doctrine, an attempt to explain which is now being made. How men of the last few centuries have come to the same ideas and conclusions that were taught as axiomatic truths in the secrecy of the Adyta, dozens of millenniums ago, is a question that is treated separately. Some were led to it by the natural progress in Physical Science and by independent observation; others—such as Copernicus, Swedenborg, and a few more—their great learning notwithstanding, owed their knowledge far more to intuitive than to acquired ideas, developed in the usual way by a course of study. That Swedenborg, who could not possibly have known anything of the esoteric ideas of Buddhism, independently came near the Occult teaching in his general conceptions, is shown by his essay on the Vortical Theory. In Clissold's translation of it, quoted by Prof. Winchell,212 we find the following résumé:

The first cause is the infinite or unlimited. This gives existence to the first finite or limited. [The Logos in its manifestation and the Universe.] That which produces a limit is analogous to motion. [See Stanza I supra.] The limit produced is a point, the essence of which is motion; but being without parts, this essence is not actual motion, but only a conatus to it. [In our doctrine it is not a “conatus,” but a change from Eternal Vibration, in the unmanifested, to Vortical Motion, in the phenomenal or manifested World.] From this first proceed extension, space, figure, and succession, or time. As in geometry a point generates a line, a line a surface, and a surface a solid, so here the conatus of the point tends towards lines, surfaces and solids. In other words, the Universe is contained in ovo in the first natural point.

The Motion toward which the conatus tends is circular, since the circle is the most perfect of all figures.... “The most perfect figure of the motion above described must be the perpetually circular; that is to say, it must proceed from the centre to the periphery and from the periphery to the centre.”213

This is Occultism pure and simple.

By the “Six Directions of Space” is here meant the “Double Triangle,” the junction and blending together of pure Spirit and Matter, of the Arûpa and the Rûpa, of which the Triangles are a Symbol. This Double Triangle is a sign of Vishnu; it is Solomon's Seal, and the Shrî-Antara of the Brâhmans.

[pg 144]

4. Fohat traces spiral lines to unite the Sixth to the Seventh—the Crown (a). An Army of the Sons of Light stands at each angle; the Lipika, in the Middle Wheel (b). They214say: “This is good.” The first Divine World is ready; the First, the Second.215 Then the “Divine Arûpa”216 reflects itself in Chhâyâ Loka,217 the First Garment of Anupâdaka (c).

(a) This tracing of “spiral lines” refers to the evolution of Man's as well as of Nature's Principles; an evolution which takes place gradually, as does everything else in Nature. The Sixth Principle in Man (Buddhi, the Divine Soul), though a mere breath, in our conceptions, is still something material when compared with Divine Spirit (Âtmâ), of which it is the carrier or vehicle. Fohat, in his capacity of Divine Love (Eros), the electric power of affinity and sympathy, is shown, allegorically, trying to bring the pure Spirit, the Ray inseparable from the One Absolute, into union with the Soul, the two constituting in Man the Monad, and in Nature the first link between the ever-unconditioned and the manifested. “The First is now the Second [World]”—of the Lipikas—has reference to the same.

(b) The “Army” at each angle is the Host of Angelic Beings (Dhyân Chohans), appointed to guide and watch over each respective region, from the beginning to the end of a Manvantara. They are the “Mystic Watchers” of the Christian Kabalists and Alchemists, and relate, symbolically as well as cosmogonically, to the numerical system of the Universe. The numbers with which these Celestial Beings are connected, are extremely difficult to explain, as each number refers to several groups of distinct ideas, according to the particular group of “Angels” which it is intended to represent. Herein lies the nodus in the study of symbology, with which so many scholars, unable to untie it, have preferred dealing as Alexander dealt with the Gordian knot; hence erroneous conceptions and teachings, as a direct result.

(c) The “First is the Second,” because the “First” cannot really be numbered or regarded as such, for the First is the realm of noumena in its primary manifestation, the threshold to the World of Truth, or Sat, through which the direct energy that radiates from the One Reality—the [pg 145] Nameless Deity—reaches us. Here again, the untranslateable term Sat (Be-ness) is likely to lead to an erroneous conception, since that which is manifested cannot be Sat, but is something phenomenal, not everlasting, nor, in truth, even sempiternal. It is coëval and coëxistent with the One Life, “Secondless,” but as a manifestation it is still a Mâyâ—like the rest. This “World of Truth,” in the words of the Commentary, can be described only as “a bright star dropped from the Heart of Eternity; the beacon of hope on whose Seven Rays hang the Seven Worlds of Being.” Truly so; since these are the Seven Lights whose reflections are the human immortal Monads—the Âtmâ, or the irradiating Spirit of every creature of the human family. First, this Septenary Light; then the “Divine World”—the countless lights lit at the primeval Light—the Buddhis, or formless Divine Souls, of the last Arûpa (Formless) World, the “Sum Total,” in the mysterious language of the old Stanza.

In the Catechism, the Master is made to ask the pupil:

“Lift thy head, O Lanoo; dost thou see one, or countless lights above thee, burning in the dark midnight sky?”

“I sense one Flame, O Gurudeva, I see countless undetached sparks shining in it.”

“Thou sayest well. And now look around and into thyself. That light which burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in anywise from the light that shines in thy brother-men?”

“It is in no way different, though the prisoner is held in bondage by Karma, and though its outer garments delude the ignorant into saying, ‘Thy Soul and My Soul’.”

The radical unity of the ultimate essence of each constituent part of compounds in Nature—from star to mineral atom, from the highest Dhyân Chohan to the smallest infusorium, in the fullest acceptation of the term, and whether applied to the spiritual, intellectual, or physical worlds—this unity is the one fundamental law in Occult Science. “The Deity is boundless and infinite expansion,” says an Occult axiom: hence, the name of Brahmâ, as previously remarked.218

There is a deep philosophy underlying the earliest worship in the world, the worship of the Sun and of Fire. Of all the Elements known to Physical Science, Fire is that which has ever eluded definite analysis. [pg 146] It is confidently asserted that air is a mixture containing the gases oxygen and nitrogen. We view the Universe and the Earth as matter composed of definite chemical molecules. We speak of the primitive ten earths, endowing each with a Greek or Latin name. We say that water is, chemically, a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. But what is Fire? It is the effect of combustion, we are gravely answered. It is heat and light and motion, and a correlation of physical and chemical forces in general. And this scientific definition is philosophically supplemented by a theological one in Webster's Dictionary, which explains fire as “the instrument of punishment, or the punishment of the impenitent in another state”—the “state,” by the bye, being supposed to be spiritual; but, alas! the presence of fire would seem to be a convincing proof of its material nature. Yet, speaking of the illusion of regarding phenomena as simple, because they are familiar, Professor Bain says:

Very familiar facts seem to stand in no need of explanation themselves and to be the means of explaining whatever can be assimilated to them. Thus, the boiling and evaporation of a liquid is supposed to be a very simple phenomenon requiring no explanation, and a satisfactory explanation of rarer phenomena. That water should dry up is, to the uninstructed mind, a thing wholly intelligible: whereas to the man acquainted with physical science the liquid state is anomalous and inexplicable. The lighting of a fire by a flame is a great scientific difficulty, yet few people think so.219

What says the Esoteric teaching with regard to Fire? “Fire is the most perfect and unadulterated reflection, in Heaven as on Earth, of the One Flame. It is Life and Death, the origin and the end of every material thing. It is divine Substance.” Thus, not only the Fire-Worshipper, the Parsi, but even the wandering savage tribes of America, which proclaim themselves “born of fire,” show more science in their creeds and truth in their superstitions, than all the speculations of modern physics and learning. The Christian who says, “God is a living Fire,” and speaks of the Pentecostal “Tongues of Fire” and of the “Burning Bush” of Moses, is as much a fire-worshipper as any other “Heathen.” Among the Mystics and Kabalists, the Rosicrucians were those who defined Fire in the most correct way. Procure a sixpenny lamp, keep it only supplied with oil, and you will be able to light at its flame the lamps, candles, and fires of the whole globe without diminishing that flame. If the Deity, the radical One, is an eternal and infinite Substance never consumed (“the Lord thy God is a consuming fire”), [pg 147] then it does not seem reasonable that the Occult teaching should be held as unphilosophical when it says: “Thus were formed the Arûpa and Rûpa [Worlds]: from One Light Seven Lights; from each of the Seven, seven times Seven” etc., etc.

5. Fohat takes five strides220 (a), and builds a winged wheel at each corner of the square for the Four Holy Ones ... and their Armies221 (b).

(a) The “Strides,” as already explained in the last Commentary, refer to both the cosmic and the human Principles—the latter of which consist, in the exoteric division, of three (Spirit, Soul and Body), and, in the esoteric calculation, of seven Principles—three Rays of the Essence and four Aspects.222 Those who have studied Mr. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism will easily grasp the nomenclature. There are two Esoteric schools beyond the Himâlayas, or rather one school, divided into two sections—one for the inner Lanoos, the other for the outer or semi-lay Chelâs; the first teaching a septenary, the other a six-fold division of the human Principles.

From a cosmic point of view, Fohat taking “Five Strides” refers here to the five upper planes of Consciousness and Being, the sixth and the seventh (counting downwards) being the astral and the terrestrial, or the two lower planes.

(b) Four “Winged Wheels at each corner ... for the Four Holy Ones and their Armies (Hosts).” These are the “Four Mahârâjahs,” or great Kings, of the Dhyân Chohans, the Devas, who preside each over one of the four cardinal points. They are the Regents, or Angels, who rule over the Cosmical Forces of North, South, East and West, Forces having each a distinct Occult property. These Beings are also connected with Karma, as the latter needs physical and material agents to carry out its decrees, such as the four kinds of winds, for instance, professedly admitted by Science to have their respective evil and beneficent influences upon the health of mankind and every living thing. There is Occult philosophy in the Roman Catholic doctrine which traces the various public calamities, such as epidemics of disease, [pg 148] and wars, and so on, to the invisible “Messengers” from North and West. “The glory of God comes from the way of the East,” says Ezekiel; while Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalmist assure their readers that all the evil under the Sun comes from the North and the West—which, when applied to the Jewish nation, sounds like an undeniable prophecy. And this accounts also for St. Ambrose223 declaring that it is precisely for this reason that “we curse the North Wind, and that during the ceremony of baptism we begin by turning towards the West [Sidereal], to renounce the better him who inhabits it; after which we turn to the East.”

Belief in the Four Mahârâjahs—the Regents of the four cardinal points—was universal and is now that of Christians, who call them, after St. Augustine, “Angelic Virtues” and “Spirits,” when enumerated by themselves, and “Devils,” when named by Pagans. But where is the difference between the Pagans and the Christians in this case? Says the scholarly Vossius:

Though St. Augustine has said that every visible thing in this world had an angelic virtue as an overseer near it, it is not individuals but entire species of things that must be understood, each such species having indeed its particular angel to watch it. He is at one in this with all the philosophers ... For us these angels are spirits separated from the objects.... whereas for the [Pagan] philosophers they were gods.224

Considering the Ritual for the “Spirits of the Stars,” established by the Roman Catholic Church, these look suspiciously like “gods,” but they were no more honoured or worshipped by the ancient, nor are they by the modern, Pagan rabble than they are now at Rome by the highly cultured Catholic Christians.

Following Plato, Aristotle explained that the term στοιχεῖα was understood only as meaning the incorporeal principles placed at each of the four great divisions of our cosmical world, to supervise them. Thus, no more than Christians do Pagans adore and worship the Elements and the (imaginary) cardinal points, but the “gods” that respectively rule over them. For the Church, there are two kinds of Sidereal Beings, Angels and Devils. For the Kabalist and Occultist, there is but one class, and neither Occultist nor Kabalist makes any difference between the “Rectors of Light” and the “Rectores Tenebrarum,” or Cosmocratores, whom the Roman Church imagines and discovers in the “Rectors of Light,” as soon as any one of them is called by another name than the one she addresses him by. It is not the Rector, or [pg 149] Mahârâjah, who punishes or rewards, with or without “God's” permission or order, but man himself—his deeds, or Karma, attracting individually and collectively (as in the case of whole nations, sometimes) every kind of evil and calamity. We produce Causes, and these awaken the corresponding powers in the Sidereal World, which are magnetically and irresistibly attracted to—and reäct upon—those who produce such causes; whether such persons are practically the evil-doers, or simply “thinkers” who brood mischief. For thought is matter, we are taught by Modern Science; and “every particle of the existing matter must be a register of all that has happened,” as Messrs. Jevons and Babbage in their Principles of Science tell the profane. Modern Science is every day drawn more into the maëlstrom of Occultism; unconsciously, no doubt, still very sensibly.

“Thought is matter”: not of course, however, in the sense of the German Materialist Moleschott, who assures us that “thought is the movement of matter”—a statement of almost unparalleled absurdity. Mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted as such. But that does not affect the position that every thought, in addition to its physical accompaniment (brain-change), exhibits an objective—though to us supersensuously objective—aspect on the astral plane.225

The two main theories of Science as to the relations between Mind and Matter are Monism and Materialism. These two cover the whole ground of negative psychology with the exception of the quasi-occult views of the German Pantheistic schools.

The views of our present-day scientific thinkers as to the relations between mind and matter may be reduced to the following two hypotheses. These show that both views equally exclude the possibility of an independent soul, distinct from the physical brain through which it functions. They are:

(1.) Materialism, the theory which regards mental phenomena as the product of molecular change in the brain; i.e., as the outcome of a transformation of motion into feeling (!). The cruder school once went so far as to identify mind with a “peculiar mode of motion” (!!), but this view is now happily regarded as absurd by most of the men of Science themselves.

(2.) Monism, or the Single Substance doctrine, is the more subtle form of negative psychology, which one of its advocates, Professor Bain, ably terms “guarded materialism.” This doctrine, which commands a [pg 150] very wide assent, counting among its upholders such men as Lewes, Spencer, Ferrier, and others, while positing thought and mental phenomena generally as radically contrasted with matter, regards them as the two sides, or aspects, of one and the same substance in some of its conditions. Thought as thought, they say, is utterly contrasted with material phenomena, but it must be also regarded as only “the subjective side of nervous motion”—whatever our learned men may mean by this.

To return to the commentary on the Four Mahârâjahs, however, in the Egyptian temples, according to Clemens Alexandrinus, an immense curtain separated the tabernacle from the place for the congregation. The Jews had the same. In both, the curtain was drawn over five pillars (the Pentacle), symbolizing our five senses and five Root Races esoterically, while the four colours of the curtain represented the four cardinal points and the four terrestrial elements. The whole was an allegorical symbol. It is through the four high Rulers over the four points and elements that our five senses may become cognizant of the hidden truths of Nature; and not at all, as Clemens would have it, that it is the elements per se that furnished the Pagans with Divine Knowledge or the Knowledge of God.226 While the Egyptian emblem was spiritual, that of the Jews was purely materialistic, and, indeed, honoured only the blind elements and the imaginary “points.” For what was the meaning of the square Tabernacle raised by Moses in the wilderness, if it had not the same cosmical significance? “Thou shalt make an hanging ... of blue, purple, and scarlet ... five pillars of shittim wood for the hanging ... four brazen rings in the four corners thereof ... boards of fine wood for the four sides, North, South, West, and East ... of the Tabernacle ... with Cherubims of cunning work.”227 The Tabernacle and the square courtyard, Cherubim and all, were precisely the same as those in the Egyptian temples. The square form of the Tabernacle meant just the same thing as it still means, to this day, in the exoteric worship of the Chinese and Tibetans—the four cardinal points signifying that which the four sides of the pyramids, obelisks, and other such square erections mean. Josephus takes care to explain the whole thing. He declares that the Tabernacle pillars were the same as those raised at Tyre to the four elements, which were placed on pedestals whose four [pg 151] angles faced the four cardinal points; adding that “the angles of the pedestals had the four figures of the Zodiac” on them, which represented the same orientation.228

The idea may be traced in the Zoroastrian caves, in the rock-cut temples of India, and in all the sacred square buildings of antiquity that have survived to this day. This is shown definitely by Layard, who finds the four cardinal points, and the four primitive elements, in the religion of every country, under the shape of square obelisks, the four sides of the pyramids, etc., etc. Of these elements and their points the Four Mahârâjahs were the regents and directors.

If the student would know more of them, he has but to compare the Vision of Ezekiel (ch. i.) with what is known of Chinese Buddhism, even in its exoteric teachings, and examine the outward shape of these “Great Kings of the Devas.” In the opinion of the Rev. Joseph Edkins, “they preside each over one of the four continents into which the Hindûs divide the world.... Each leads an army of spiritual beings to protect mankind and Buddhism.”229 With the exception of favouritism towards Buddhism, the four Celestial Beings are precisely this. The Hindûs, however, happen to divide the world into seven continents, exoterically as well as esoterically; and their four Cosmic Devas are eight, presiding over the eight points of the compass and not over the continents.

The “Four” are the protectors of mankind and also the agents of Karma on Earth, whereas the Lipika are concerned with Humanity's hereafter. At the same time they are the four living creatures, “who have the likeness of a man,” of Ezekiel's vision, called by the translators of the Bible, “Cherubim,” “Seraphim,” etc.; by the Occultists, “Winged Globes,” “Fiery Wheels”; and in the Hindû Pantheon, by a number of different names. All these Gandharvas, the “Sweet Songsters,” the Asuras, Kinnaras, and Nâgas, are the allegorical descriptions of the Four Mahârâjahs. The Seraphim are the fiery Serpents of Heaven which we find in a passage, describing Mount Meru as “the exalted mass of glory, the venerable haunt of gods and heavenly choristers ... not to be reached by sinful men ... because guarded by Serpents.” They are called the Avengers, and the “Winged Wheels.”

Their mission and character being explained, let us see what the Christian bible-interpreters say of the Cherubim. “The word signifies [pg 152] in Hebrew, fulness of knowledge; these angels are so called from their exquisite Knowledge, and were therefore used for the punishment of men who affected divine Knowledge.” (Interpreted by Cruden in his Concordance, from Genesis iii. 24.) Very well; and vague as the information is, it shows that the Cherub placed at the gate of the Garden of Eden, after the “Fall,” suggested to the venerable interpreters the idea of punishment connected with forbidden Science or divine Knowledge—one that generally leads to another “Fall,” that of the gods or “God,” in man's estimation. But as the good old Cruden knew nought of Karma, he may be forgiven. Yet the allegory is suggestive. From Meru, the abode of gods, to Eden, the distance is very small, and from the Hindû Serpents to the Ophite Cherubim, the third out of the seven of which was the Dragon, the separation is still smaller, for both watched the entrance to the realm of Secret Knowledge. Ezekiel, moreover, plainly describes the four Cosmic Angels:

I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind, ... a ... cloud and a fire infolding it ... also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures ... they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces and ... four wings ... the face of a man,230 and the face of a lion ... the face of an ox, and ... the face of an eagle.... Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the Earth ... with his four faces ... as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel ... for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheel.231

There are three chief Groups of Builders, and as many of the Planetary Spirits and the Lipika, each Group being again divided into seven sub-groups. It is impossible, even in such a large work as this, to enter into a minute examination of even the three principal Groups, as it would demand an extra volume. The Builders are the representatives of the first “Mind-Born” Entities, therefore of the primeval Rishi-Prajâpati; also of the Seven great Gods of Egypt, of which Osiris is the chief; of the Seven Amshaspends of the Zoroastrians, with Ormazd at their head; of the “Seven Spirits of the Face”; of the Seven Sephiroth separated from the first Triad, etc., etc.232 They build, [pg 153] or rather rebuild, every “System” after the “Night.” The Second Group of the Builders is the Architect of our Planetary Chain exclusively; and the Third, the Progenitor of our Humanity—the macrocosmic prototype of the microcosm.

The Planetary Spirits are the informing spirits of the Stars in general, and of the Planets especially. They rule the destinies of men who are all born under one or other of their constellations; the Second and Third Groups pertaining to other systems have the same functions, and all rule various departments in Nature. In the Hindû exoteric Pantheon they are the guardian deities who preside over the eight points of the compass—the four cardinal and the four intermediate points—and are called Lokapâlas, “Supporters or Guardians of the World” (in our visible Cosmos), of which Indra (East), Yama (South), Varuna (West), and Kuvera (North) are the chief; their elephants and spouses pertaining of course to fancy and afterthought, though all of them have an Occult significance.

The Lipika, a description of whom is given in Commentary 6 of Stanza IV, are the Spirits of the Universe, whereas the Builders are only our own planetary deities. The former belong to the most Occult portion of cosmogenesis, which cannot be given here. Whether the Adepts—even the highest—know this angelic order in the completeness of its triple degrees, or only the lower one connected with the records of our world, is something which the writer is unprepared to say, and she would rather incline to the latter supposition. Of its highest grade one thing only is taught: the Lipika are connected with Karma—being its direct Recorders. The Symbol for Sacred and Secret Knowledge in antiquity was universally a Tree, by which a Scripture or a Record was also meant. Hence the word Lipika, the Writers or Scribes; the Dragons, symbols of Wisdom, who guard the Trees of Knowledge; the “golden” Apple-Tree of the Hesperides; the “Luxuriant Trees” and vegetation of Mount Meru, guarded by Serpents. Juno's giving Jupiter, on her marriage, a Tree with golden fruit, is another form of Eve offering Adam the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

6. The Lipika circumscribe the Triangle, the First One,233 the Cube, the Second One, and the Pentacle within the Egg234 (a).

[pg 154]

It is the Ring called “Pass Not” for those who descend and ascend;235 who during the Kalpa are progressing towards the Great Day “Be With Us” (b).... Thus were formed the Arûpa and the Rûpa:236 from One Light, Seven Lights; from each of the Seven, seven times Seven Lights. The Wheels watch the Ring....

The Stanza proceeds with a minute classification of the Orders of the Angelic Hierarchy. From the Group of Four and Seven emanates the Mind-Born Groups of Ten, of Twelve, of Twenty-one, etc., all these divided again into sub-groups of Heptads, Enneads, Dodecads, and so on, until the mind is lost in this endless enumeration of celestial Hosts and Beings, each having its distinct task in the ruling of the visible Cosmos during its existence.

(a) The Esoteric meaning of the first sentence of the Shloka is, that those who have been called Lipikas, the Recorders of the Karmic Ledger, make an impassible barrier between the personal Ego and the impersonal Self, the Noumenon and Parent-Source of the former. Hence the allegory. They circumscribe the manifested world of matter within the Ring “Pass Not.” This world is the objective symbol of the One divided into the Many, on the planes of Illusion, of Adi (the “First”) or of Eka (the “One”); and this One is the collective aggregate, or totality, of the principal Creators or Architects of this visible Universe. In Hebrew Occultism their name is both Achath, feminine, “One,” and Achad, “One” again, but masculine. The Monotheists have taken, and are still taking, advantage of the profound esotericism of the Kabalah, to apply the name by which the One Supreme Essence is known, to its manifestation, the Sephiroth-Elohim, and call it Jehovah. But this is quite arbitrary and against all reason and logic, as the term Elohim is a plural noun, identical with the plural word Chiim, often compounded with it. The sentence in the Sepher Yetzirah and elsewhere, “Achath-Ruach-Elohim-Chiim,” denotes the Elohim as androgynous at best, the feminine element almost predominating, as it would read: “One is She the Spirit of the Elohim of Life.” As said, Achath (or Echath) is feminine, and Achad (or Echad) masculine, both meaning One.

Moreover, in Occult metaphysics, there are, properly speaking, two “Ones”—the One on the unreachable plane of Absoluteness and Infinity, [pg 155] on which no speculation is possible; and the second One on the plane of Emanations. The former can neither emanate nor be divided, as it is eternal, absolute, and immutable; but the second, being, so to speak, the reflection of the first One (for it is the Logos, or Îshvara, in the Universe of Illusion), can do so. It emanates from itself—as the upper Sephirothal Triad emanates the lower seven Sephiroth—the seven Rays or Dhyân Chohans; in other words, the Homogeneous becomes the Heterogeneous, the Protyle differentiates into the Elements. But these, unless they return into their primal Element, can never cross beyond the Laya, or zero-point. This metaphysical tenet can hardly be better described than in T. Subba Row's Bhagavadgîtâ Lectures:

Mûlaprakriti [the veil of Parabrahman] acts as the one energy through the Logos [or Îshvara]. Now Parabrahman ... is the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy, which I shall for the present call the Logos.... It is called the Verbum ... by the Christians, and it is the divine Christos who is eternal in the bosom of his Father. It is called Avalokiteshvara by the Buddhists.... In almost every doctrine, they have formulated the existence of a centre of spiritual energy which is unborn and eternal, and which exists in the bosom of Parabrahman at the time of Pralaya, and starts as a centre of conscious energy at the time of cosmic activity....237

For, as the lecturer premised by saying, Parabrahman is not this or that, it is not even consciousness, as it cannot be related to matter or anything conditioned. It is not Ego nor is it Non-Ego, nor even Âtmâ, but verily the one source of all manifestations and modes of existence.

Thus in the allegory, the Lipika separate the world (or plane) of pure Spirit from that of Matter. Those who “descend and ascend”—the incarnating Monads, and men striving towards purification and “ascending,” but still not having quite reached the goal—may cross the Circle of “Pass Not,” only on the Day “Be With Us”; that day when man, freeing himself from the trammels of ignorance, and recognizing fully the non-separateness of the Ego within his Personality—erroneously regarded as his own—from the Universal Ego (Anima Supra-Mundi), merges thereby into the One Essence, to become not only one with “Us,” the manifested universal Lives which are one Life, but that very Life itself.

Astronomically, the Ring “Pass Not” that the Lipika trace round “the Triangle, the First One, the Cube, the Second One, and the Pentacle,” to [pg 156] circumscribe these figures, is thus again shown to contain the symbols of 31415, or the coëfficient constantly used in mathematical tables, the value π (pi), the geometrical figures standing here for numerical figures. According to the general philosophical teachings, this Ring is beyond the region of what are called nebulæ in astronomy. But this is as erroneous a conception as that of the topography and descriptions, given in Purânic and other exoteric Scriptures, about the 1008 worlds of the Deva-loka worlds and firmaments. There are worlds, of course, in the esoteric as well as in the profane scientific teachings, at such incalculable distances that the light of the nearest of them, though it has only just reached our modern “Chaldees,” may have left its luminary long before the day on which the words, “Let there be Light,” were pronounced; but these are not worlds on the Devalokic plane, but in our Cosmos.

The Chemist goes to the laya or zero-point of the plane of matter with which he deals, and then stops short. The Physicist or the Astronomer counts billions of miles beyond the nebulæ, and then he also stops short. The semi-initiated Occultist also will represent this laya-point to himself as existing on some plane which, if not physical, is still conceivable to the human intellect. But the full Initiate knows that the Ring “Pass Not” is neither a locality, nor can it be measured by distance, but that it exists in the absoluteness of Infinity. In this “Infinity” of the full Initiate, there is neither height, breadth nor thickness, but all is fathomless profundity, reaching down from the physical to the “para-metaphysical.” In using the word “down,” essential depth—“nowhere and everywhere”—is meant, not depth of physical matter.

If one carefully searches through the exoteric and grossly anthropomorphic allegories of popular religions, even in these the doctrine embodied in the Circle of “Pass Not,” guarded by the Lipika, may be dimly perceived. Thus one finds it even in the teachings of the Vedântin sect of the Visishthadvaita, the most tenaciously anthropomorphic in all India. For we read of the released soul that, after reaching Moksha—a state of bliss meaning “release from Bandha,” or bondage—bliss is enjoyed by it in a place called Paramapada, which place is not material, but made of Suddasattva, the essence, of which the body of Îshvara—the “Lord”—is formed. There, Muktas or Jîvâtmâs (Monads) who have attained Moksha, are never again subject to the qualities of either matter or Karma. “But if they choose, for the [pg 157]sake of doing good to the world, they may incarnate on earth.”238 The way to Paramapada, or the immaterial worlds, from this world, is called Devayâna. When a person has attained Moksha and the body dies:

The Jîva (Soul) goes with Sûkshma Sharira239 from the heart of the body to the Brahmarandra in the crown of the head, traversing Sushumna, a nerve connecting the heart with the Brahmarandra. The Jiva breaks through the Brahmarandra and goes to the region of the Sun (Sûryamandala) through the solar rays. Then it goes, through a dark spot in the Sun, to Paramapada.... The Jîva is directed on its way ... by the Supreme Wisdom acquired by Yoga.240 The Jîva thus proceeds to Paramapada by the aid of Athivâhikas (bearers in transit), known by the names of Archi Ahas ... Âditya, ... Prajâpati, etc. The Archis, etc., here mentioned, are certain pure Souls, etc., etc.241

No Spirits except the “Recorders” (Lipika) have ever crossed the forbidden line of this Ring, nor will any do so until the day of the next Pralaya, for it is the boundary that separates the Finite—however infinite in man's sight—from the truly Infinite. The Spirits referred to, therefore, as those who “ascend and descend,” are the “Hosts” of what are loosely called “Celestial Beings.” But they are, in fact, nothing of the kind. They are Entities of higher worlds in the Hierarchy of Being, so immeasurably high that, to us, they must appear as Gods, and collectively—God. But so must we, mortal men, appear to the ant, which reasons on the scale of its special capacities. The ant may also, for all we know, see the avenging finger of a Personal God in the hand of the urchin who, under the impulse of mischief, destroys, in one moment, its ant-hill, the labour of many weeks—long years in the chronology of insects. The ant, feeling it acutely, may also, like man, attribute the undeserved calamity to a combination of providence and sin, and see in it the result of the sin of its first parent. Who knows, and who can affirm or deny? The refusal to admit, in the whole Solar System, of any other reasonable and intellectual beings than ourselves on the human plane, is the greatest conceit [pg 158] of our age. All that Science has a right to affirm, is that there are no invisible Intelligences living under the same conditions as we do. It cannot deny point-blank the possibility of there being worlds within worlds, under conditions totally different to those that constitute the nature of our world; nor can it deny that there may be a certain limited communication between some of these worlds and our own. The greatest philosopher of European birth, Emmanuel Kant, assures us that such a communication is in no way improbable.

I confess I am much disposed to assert the existence of immaterial natures in the world, and to place my own soul in the class of these beings. It will hereafter, I know not where, or when, yet be proved that the human soul stands even in this life in indissoluble connection with all immaterial natures in the spirit-world, that it reciprocally acts upon these and receives impressions from them.242

To the highest of these worlds, we are taught, belong the seven Orders of the purely divine Spirits; to the six lower ones belong Hierarchies that can occasionally be seen and heard by men, and that do communicate with their progeny of the Earth; a progeny which is indissolubly linked with them, each Principle in man having its direct source in the nature of these great Beings, who furnish us respectively with the invisible elements in us. Physical Science is welcome to speculate upon the physiological mechanism of living beings, and to continue her fruitless efforts in trying to resolve our feelings, our sensations, mental and spiritual, into functions of their organic vehicles. Nevertheless, all that will ever be accomplished in this direction has already been done, and Science can go no farther. She is before a dead wall, on the face of which she traces, as she imagines, great physiological and psychic discoveries, every one of which will be shown later on to be no better than cobwebs, spun by her scientific fancies and illusions. The tissues of our objective framework alone are subservient to the analysis and researches of Physiological Science. The six higher Principles in them will evade for ever the hand that is guided by an animus, which purposely ignores and rejects the Occult Sciences. All that modern physiological research in connection with psychological problems has, and owing to the nature of things could have shown, is that every thought, sensation, and emotion is attended with a re-marshalling of the molecules of certain nerves. The inference drawn by scientists of the type of Büchner, Vogt, and others, that [pg 159] thought is molecular motion, necessitates the fact of our subjective consciousness being made a complete abstraction.

The Great Day “Be With Us,” then, is an expression, the only merit of which lies in its literal translation. Its significance is not so easily revealed to a public, unacquainted with the mystic tenets of Occultism, or rather of Esoteric Wisdom or “Budhism.” It is an expression peculiar to the latter, and as hazy for the profane as that of the Egyptians, who called the same the Day “Come To Us,” which is identical with the former—though the word “be,” in this sense, might be still better replaced with either of the two terms “remain” or “rest with us,” as it refers to that long period of Rest which is called Paranirvâna. “Le Jour de ‘Viens à nous’! C'est le jour où Osiris a dit au Soleil: Viens! Je le vois rencontrant le Soleil dans l'Amenti.”243 The Sun here stands for the Logos (or Christos, or Horus), as the central Essence synthetically, and as a diffused essence of radiated Entities, different in substance, but not in essence. As expressed by the Bhagavadgîtâ lecturer, “it must not be supposed that the Logos is but a single centre of energy which is manifested by Parabrahman. There are innumerable others. Their number is almost infinite, in the bosom of Parabrahman.” Hence the expressions, “The Day of Come to Us” and “The Day of Be With Us,” etc. Just as the Square is the Symbol of the Four sacred Forces or Powers—Tetraktys—so the Circle shows the boundary within the Infinity that no man, even in spirit, or Deva or Dhyân Chohan can cross. The Spirits of those who “descend and ascend,” during the course of cyclic evolution, shall cross the “iron-bound world,” only on the day of their approach to the threshold of Paranirvâna. If they reach it, they will rest in the bosom of Parabrahman, or the “Unknown Darkness,” which shall then become for all of them Light, during the whole period of Mahâpralaya, the “Great Night,” namely, 311,040,000,000,000 years of absorption in Brahman. The Day of “Be With Us” is this period of Rest, or Paranirvâna. It corresponds to the Day of the Last Judgment of the Christians, which has been sorely materialized in their religion.244

As in the exoteric interpretation of the Egyptian rites, the soul of every defunct person—from the Hierophant down to the sacred bull Apis—became an Osiris, was Osirified (the Secret Doctrine, however, [pg 160] teaching that the real Osirification was the lot of every Monad only after 3,000 cycles of Existences); so in the present case. The Monad, born of the nature and the very Essence of the “Seven” (its highest Principle becoming immediately enshrined in the Seventh Cosmic Element), has to perform its septenary gyration throughout the Cycle of Being and Forms, from the highest to the lowest; and then again from man to God. At the threshold of Paranirvâna, it reässumes its primeval Essence and becomes the Absolute once more.

Stanza VI.

1. By the power of the Mother of Mercy and Knowledge (a), Kwan-Yin—the Triple of Kwan-Shai-Yin, residing in Kwan-Yin-Tien (b)—Fohat, the Breath of their Progeny, the Son of the Sons, having called forth, from the lower Abyss,245the Illusive Form of Sien-Tchan246 and the Seven Elements.

This Stanza is translated from the Chinese text, and the names given as the equivalents of the original terms are preserved. The real Esoteric nomenclature cannot be given, as it would only confuse the reader. The Brâhmanical doctrine has no equivalents for these. Vâch seems, in many an aspect, to approach the Chinese Kwan-Yin, but there is no regular worship of Vâch under this name in India, as there is of Kwan-Yin in China. No exoteric religious system has ever adopted a female Creator, and thus, from the first dawn of popular religions, woman has been regarded and treated as inferior to man. It is only in China and Egypt that Kwan-Yin and Isis are placed on a par with the male gods. Esotericism ignores both sexes. Its highest Deity is as sexless as it is formless, neither Father nor Mother; and its first manifested beings, celestial and terrestrial alike, become only gradually androgynous to finally separate into distinct sexes.

(a) “The Mother of Mercy and Knowledge” is called the “Triple” of Kwan-Shai-Yin, because in her correlations, metaphysical and cosmical, she is the “Mother, the Wife and the Daughter” of the Logos, just as in the later theological translations she became the “Father, Son and (female) Holy Ghost”—the Shakti or Energy—the Essence of the Three. Thus in the Esotericism of the Vedântins, Daiviprakriti, the Light manifested through Îshvara, the Logos,247 is at one and the same time the Mother and also the Daughter of the Logos, or Verbum of Parabrahman; while in that of the Trans-Himâlayan [pg 161] teachings, it is—in the Hierarchy of their allegorical and metaphysical theogony—the “Mother,” or abstract ideal Matter, Mûlaprakriti, the Root of Nature; from the metaphysical standpoint, a correlation of Adi-Budha, manifested in the Logos, Avalokiteshvara; and from the purely Occult and cosmical, Fohat, the “Son of the Son,” the androgynous energy resulting from this “Light of the Logos,” which manifests in the plane of the objective Universe as the hidden, as much as the revealed, Electricity—which is Life. Says T. Subba Row:

Evolution is commenced by the intellectual energy of the Logos, ... not merely on account of the potentialities locked up in Mûlaprakriti. This Light of the Logos is the link ... between objective matter and the subjective Thought of Îshvara [or Logos]. It is called in several Buddhist books Fohat. It is the one instrument with which the Logos works.248

(b) “Kwan-Yin-Tien” means the “Melodious Heaven of Sound,” the Abode of Kwan-Yin, or the “Divine Voice.” This “Voice” is a synonym of the Verbum or Word, “Speech,” as the expression of Thought. Thus may be traced the connection with, and even the origin of, the Hebrew Bath-Kol, the “Daughter of the Divine Voice,” or Verbum, or the male and female Logos, the “Heavenly Man,” or Adam Kadmon, who is at the same time Sephira. The latter was surely anticipated by the Hindû Vâch, the goddess of Speech, or of the Word. For Vâch—the daughter and the female portion, as is stated, of Brahmâ, one “generated by the gods”—is, in company with Kwan-Yin, with Isis (also the daughter, wife and sister of Osiris) and other goddesses, the female Logos, so to speak, the goddess of the active forces in Nature, the Word, Voice or Sound, and Speech. If Kwan-Yin is the “Melodious Voice,” so is Vâch “the melodious cow who milked forth sustenance and water [the female principle] ... who yields us nourishment and sustenance,” as Mother-Nature. She is associated in the work of creation with Prajâpati. She is male and female ad libitum, as Eve is with Adam. And she is a form of Aditi—the principle higher than Æther—of Âkâsha, the synthesis of all the forces in Nature. Thus Vâch and Kwan-Yin are both the magic potency of Occult Sound in Nature and Æther—which “Voice” calls forth Sien-Tchan, the illusive form of the Universe out of Chaos and the Seven Elements.

Thus, in Manu, Brahmâ (the Logos also) is shown dividing his body into two parts, male and female, and creating in the latter, who is [pg 162] Vâch, Virâj, who is himself, or Brahmâ again. A learned Vedântin Occultist speaks of this “goddess” as follows, explaining the reason why Îshvara (or Brahmâ) is called Verbum or Logos; why in fact it is called Sabda Brahman:

The explanation I am going to give you will appear thoroughly mystical; but if mystical, it has a tremendous significance when properly understood. Our old writers said that Vâch is of four kinds. [See Rig Veda and the Upanishads.] Vaikharî Vâch is what we utter. Every kind of Vaikharî Vâch exists in its Madhyama, further in its Pashyanti, and ultimately in its Para form.249 The reason why this Pranava is called Vâch is this, that the four principles of the great cosmos correspond to these four forms of Vâch. Now the whole manifested solar system exists in its Sûkshma form in the light or energy of the Logos, because its energy is caught up and transferred to cosmic matter ... the whole cosmos in its objective form is Vaikharî Vâch, the light of the Logos is the Madhyama form, and the Logos itself the Pashyanti form, and Parabrahman the Para aspect of that Vâch. It is by the light of this explanation that we must try to understand certain statements made by various philosophers to the effect that the manifested cosmos is the Verbum manifested as cosmos.250

2. The Swift and the Radiant One produces the seven Laya251Centres (a), against which none will prevail to the Great Day “Be With Us”; and seats the Universe on these Eternal Foundations, surrounding Sien-Tchan with the Elementary Germs (b).

(a) The seven Laya Centres are the seven zero-points, using the term zero in the same sense that Chemists do. It indicates, in Esotericism, a point at which the reckoning of differentiation begins. From these Centres—beyond which Esoteric Philosophy allows us to perceive the dim metaphysical outlines of the “Seven Sons” of Life and Light, the Seven Logoi of the Hermetic and all other philosophers—begins the differentiation of the Elements which enter into the constitution of our Solar System. It has often been asked what is the exact definition of Fohat and his powers and functions, for he seems to exercise those of a Personal God as understood in the popular religions. The answer has just been given in the Commentary on Stanza V. As well said in the Bhagavadgîtâ Lectures, “The whole cosmos must necessarily exist in the one source of energy [pg 163] from which this light [Fohat] emanates.” Whether we count the principles in cosmos and man as seven or only as four, the forces of, and in, physical Nature are Seven; and it is stated by the same authority that, “Prajnâ, or the capacity of perception, exists in seven different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of matter.” For, “just as a human being is composed of seven principles, differentiated matter in the solar system exists in seven different conditions.”252 So does Fohat. Fohat has several meanings, as already shown. He is called the “Builder of the Builders,” the Force that he personifies having formed our Septenary Chain. He is One and Seven, and on the cosmic plane is behind all such manifestations as light, heat, sound, adhesion, etc., etc., and is the “spirit” of electricity, which is the Life of the Universe. As an abstraction, we will call it the One Life; as an objective and evident Reality, we speak of a septenary scale of manifestation, which begins at the upper rung with the One Unknowable Causality, and ends as Omnipresent Mind and Life, immanent in every atom of Matter. Thus, while Science speaks of its evolution through brute matter, blind force, and senseless motion, the Occultists point to Intelligent Law and Sentient Life, and add that Fohat is the guiding Spirit of all this. Yet he is no personal god at all, but the emanation of those other Powers behind him, whom the Christians call the “Messengers” of their God (in reality, of the Elohim, or rather one of the Seven Creators called Elohim), and we the Messenger of the primordial Sons of Life and Light.

(b) The “Elementary Germs,” with which he fills Sien-Tchan (the Universe) from Tien-Sin (the “Heaven of Mind,” or that which is absolute), are the Atoms of Science and the Monads of Leibnitz.

3. Of the Seven253—first One manifested, Six concealed; Two manifested, Five concealed; Three manifested, Four concealed; Four produced, Three hidden; Four and One Tsan254revealed, Two and One Half concealed; Six to be manifested, One laid aside (a). Lastly, Seven Small Wheels revolving; one giving birth to the other (b).

(a) Although these Stanzas refer to the whole Universe after a [pg 164] Mahâpralaya (Universal Dissolution), yet this sentence, as any student of Occultism may see, refers also by analogy to the evolution and final formation of the primitive (though compound) seven Elements on our Earth. Of these, four Elements are now fully manifested, while the fifth—Ether—is only partially so, as we are hardly in the second half of the Fourth Round, and consequently the fifth Element will manifest fully only in the Fifth Round. The Worlds, including our own, as germs, were of course primarily evolved from the One Element in its second stage—“Father-Mother,” the Differentiated World's Soul, not what is termed the “Over-Soul” by Emerson—whether we call it, with Modern Science, cosmic dust and fire-mist, or with Occultism, Âkâsha, Jîvâtmâ, Divine Astral Light, or the “Soul of the World.” But this first stage of Evolution was in due course of time followed by the next. No World, and no heavenly body, could be constructed on the objective plane, had not the Elements been already sufficiently differentiated from their primeval Ilus, resting in Laya. The latter term is a synonym of Nirvâna. It is, in fact, the Nirvânic dissociation of all substances, merged after a Life-Cycle into the latency of their primary conditions. It is the luminous but bodiless shadow of the Matter that was, the realm of negativeness—wherein lie latent during their period of rest the active Forces of the Universe.

Now, speaking of Elements, it is made the standing reproach of the Ancients, that they “supposed their elements simple and undecomposable.” The shades of our pre-historic ancestors might return the compliment to modern Physicists, now that new discoveries in Chemistry have led Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., to admit, that Science is yet a thousand leagues from a knowledge of the compound nature of the simplest molecule. From him we learn that such a thing as a really simple molecule entirely homogeneous is terra incognita in Chemistry. “Where are we to draw the line?” he asks; “is there no way out of this perplexity? Must we either make the elementary examinations so stiff that only 60 or 70 candidates can pass, or must we open the examination doors so wide that the number of admissions is limited only by the number of applicants?” And then the learned chemist gives striking instances. He says:

Take the case of yttrium. It has its definite atomic weight, it behaved in every respect as a simple body, an element, to which we might indeed add, but from which we could not take away. Yet this yttrium, this supposed homogeneous whole, on being submitted to a certain method of fractionation, is resolved into [pg 165]portions not absolutely identical among themselves, and exhibiting a gradation of properties. Or take the case of didymium. Here was a body betraying all the recognized characters of an element. It had been separated with much difficulty from other bodies which approximated closely to it in their properties, and during this crucial process it had undergone very severe treatment and very close scrutiny. But then came another chemist, who, treating this assumed homogeneous body by a peculiar process of fractionation, resolved it into the two bodies praseodymium and neodymium, between which certain distinctions are perceptible. Further, we even now have no certainty that neodymium and praseodymium are simple bodies. On the contrary, they likewise exhibit symptoms of splitting up. Now, if one supposed element on proper treatment is thus found to comprise dissimilar molecules, we are surely warranted in asking whether similar results might not be obtained in other elements, perhaps in all elements, if treated in the right way. We may even ask where the process of sorting-out is to stop—a process which of course presupposes variations between the individual molecules of each species. And in these successive separations we naturally find bodies approaching more and more closely to each other.255

Once more this reproach against the Ancients is an unwarrantable statement. Their initiated philosophers at any rate, can hardly come under such an imputation, since it is they who have invented allegories and religious myths from the beginning. Had they been ignorant of the Heterogeneity of their Elements they would have had no personifications of Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Æther; their cosmic gods and goddesses would never have been blessed with such posterity, with so many sons and daughters, elements born from and within each respective Element. Alchemy and Occult phenomena would have been a delusion and a snare, even in theory, had the Ancients been ignorant of the potentialities and correlative functions and attributes, of every element that enters into the composition of Air, Water, Earth, and even Fire—the latter a terra incognita to this day to Modern Science, which is obliged to call it motion, evolution of light and heat, state of ignition—defining it by its outward aspects in short, in ignorance of its nature.

But what Modern Science seems to fail to perceive, is that, differentiated as may have been those simple chemical atoms—which archaic philosophy called “the creators of their respective parents,” fathers, brothers, husbands of their mothers, and these mothers the daughters of their own sons, like Aditi and Daksha, for example—differentiated as these elements were in the beginning, still, they were not the compound bodies known to Science, as they are now. Neither Water, Air, [pg 166] nor Earth (a synonym for solids generally) existed in their present form, representing the only three states of matter recognized by Science; for all these and even Fire are productions already recombined by the atmospheres of completely formed globes, so that in the first periods of the earth's formation they were something quite sui generis. Now that the conditions and laws ruling our Solar System are fully developed, and that the atmosphere of our earth, as of every other globe, has become, so to say, a crucible of its own, Occult Science teaches that there is a perpetual exchange taking place, in space, of molecules, or rather of atoms, correlating, and thus changing their combining equivalents on every planet. Some men of Science, and these among the greatest Physicists and Chemists, begin to suspect this fact, which has been known for ages to the Occultists. The spectroscope shows only the probable similarity (on external evidence) of terrestrial and sidereal substance; it is unable to go any farther, or to show whether or not atoms gravitate towards one another in the same way, and under the same conditions, as they are supposed to do on our planet, physically and chemically. The scale of temperature, from the highest degree to the lowest that can be conceived of, may be imagined to be one and the same in and for the whole Universe; nevertheless, its properties, other than those of dissociation and reässociation, differ on every planet; and thus atoms enter into new forms of existence, undreamed of, and incognizable to, Physical Science. As already expressed in Five Years of Theosophy,256 the essence of cometary matter, for instance, “is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest Chemists and Physicists of the earth are acquainted.” And even that matter, during rapid passage through our atmosphere, undergoes a certain change in its nature.

Thus not only the elements of our planet, but even those of all its sisters in the Solar System, differ in their combinations as widely from each other, as from the cosmic elements beyond our solar limits. This is again corroborated by the same man of Science in the lecture referred to above, who quotes Clerk Maxwell, saying “that the elements are not absolutely homogeneous.” He writes:

It is difficult to conceive of selection and elimination of intermediate varieties, for where can these eliminated molecules have gone to, if, as we have reason to believe, the hydrogen, etc., of the fixed stars is composed of molecules identical in [pg 167]all respects with our own.... In the first place we may call in question this absolute molecular identity, since we have hitherto had no means for coming to a conclusion save the means furnished by the spectroscope, while it is admitted that, for accurately comparing and discriminating the spectra of two bodies, they should be examined under identical states of temperature, pressure, and all other physical conditions. We have certainly seen, in the spectrum of the sun, rays which we have not been able to identify.

Therefore, the elements of our planet cannot be taken as a standard for comparison with the elements in other worlds. In fact each world has its Fohat, which is omnipresent in its own sphere of action. But there are as many Fohats as there are worlds, each varying in power and degree of manifestation. The individual Fohats make one universal, collective Fohat—the aspect-entity of the one absolute Non-Entity, which is absolute Be-ness, Sat. “Millions and billions of worlds are produced at every Manvantara”—it is said. Therefore there must be many Fohats, whom we consider as conscious and intelligent Forces. This, no doubt, to the disgust of scientific minds. Nevertheless the Occultists, who have good reasons for it, consider all the forces of Nature as veritable, though supersensuous, states of Matter; and as possible objects of perception to beings endowed with the requisite senses.

Enshrined in its pristine, virgin state within the Bosom of the Eternal Mother, every atom born beyond the threshold of her realm is doomed to incessant differentiation. “The Mother sleeps, yet is ever breathing.” And every breath sends out into the plane of manifestation her protean products, which, carried on by the wave of efflux, are scattered by Fohat, and driven toward or beyond this or another planetary atmosphere. Once caught by the latter, the atom is lost; its pristine purity is gone for ever, unless fate dissociates it by leading it to a “current of efflux” (an Occult term meaning quite a different process from that which the ordinary word implies), when it may be carried once more to the borderland where it had previously perished, and taking its flight, not into Space above but into Space within, be brought under a state of differential equilibrium and happily reabsorbed. Were a truly learned Occultist-Alchemist to write the “Life and Adventures of an Atom,” he would secure thereby the supreme scorn of the modern Chemist, though perchance also his subsequent gratitude. Indeed, if such an imaginary Chemist happened to be intuitional, and would for a moment step out of the habitual groove of strictly “Exact Science,” as the Alchemists of old did, he might be repaid [pg 168] for his audacity. However it may be, “The Breath of the Father-Mother issues cold and radiant, and gets hot and corrupt, to cool once more and be purified in the eternal bosom of inner Space,” says the Commentary. Man absorbs cold pure air on the mountain-top, and throws it out impure, hot and transformed. Thus, the higher atmosphere of every globe, being its mouth, and the lower its lungs, the man of our planet breathes only the “refuse of Mother;” therefore, “he is doomed to die thereon.” He who would allotropize sluggish oxygen into ozone to a measure of alchemical activity, reducing it to its pure essence (for which there are means), would discover thereby a substitute for an “Elixir of Life” and prepare it for practical use.

(b) The process referred to as the “Small Wheels, one giving birth to the other,” takes place in the sixth region from above, and on the plane of the most material world of all in the manifested Kosmos—our terrestrial plane. These “Seven Wheels” are our Planetary Chain. By “Wheels” the various spheres and centres of forces are generally meant; but in this case they refer to our septenary Ring.

4. He builds them in the likeness of older Wheels,257 Placing them on the Imperishable Centres (a).

How does Fohat build them? He collects the Fiery-Dust. He makes Balls of Fire, runs through them, and round them, infusing life thereinto, then sets them into motion; some one way, some the other way. They are cold, he makes them hot. They are dry, he makes them moist. They shine, he fans and cools them (b). Thus acts Fohat from one Twilight to the other, during Seven Eternities.258

(a) The Worlds are built “in the likeness of older Wheels”—i.e., of those that had existed in preceding Manvantaras and went into Pralaya; for the Law for the birth, growth, and decay of everything in Kosmos, from the Sun to the glow-worm in the grass, is One. There is an everlasting work of perfection with every new appearance, but the Substance-Matter and Forces are all one and the same. And this Law acts on every planet through minor and varying laws.

The “Imperishable [Laya] Centres” have a great importance, and [pg 169] their meaning must be fully understood, if we would have a clear conception of the Archaic Cosmogony, whose theories have now passed into Occultism. At present, one thing may be stated. The Worlds are built neither upon, nor over, nor in the Laya Centres, the zero-point being a condition, not a mathematical point.

(b) Bear in mind that Fohat, the constructive Force of Cosmic Electricity, is said, metaphorically, to have sprung, like Rudra from the head of Brahmâ, “from the Brain of the Father and the Bosom of the Mother,” and then to have metamorphosed himself into a male and a female, i.e., polarized himself into positive and negative electricity. He has Seven Sons who are his Brothers. Fohat is forced to be born, time after time, whenever any two of his “Son-Brothers” indulge in too close contact—whether an embrace or a fight. To avoid this, he unites and binds together those of unlike nature, and separates those of similar temperaments. This, as any one can see, relates, of course, to electricity generated by friction, and to the law of attraction between two objects of unlike, and repulsion between those of like polarity. The Seven Son-Brothers, however, represent and personify the seven forms of cosmic magnetism, called in Practical Occultism the “Seven Radicals,” whose coöperative and active progeny are, among other energies, Electricity, Magnetism, Sound, Light, Heat, Cohesion, etc. Occult Science defines all these as super-sensuous effects in their hidden behaviour, and as objective phenomena in the world of sense; the former requiring abnormal faculties to perceive them, the latter cognizable by our ordinary physical senses. They all pertain to, and are the emanations of, still more supersensuous spiritual qualities, not personated by, but belonging to, real and conscious Causes. To attempt a description of such Entities would be worse than useless. The reader must bear in mind that, according to our teaching which regards this phenomenal Universe as a Great Illusion, the nearer a body is to the Unknown Substance, the more it approaches Reality, as being the farther removed from this world of Mâyâ. Therefore, though the molecular constitution of these bodies is not deducible from their manifestations, on this plane of consciousness, they nevertheless, from the standpoint of the Adept Occultist, possess a distinctive objective if not material structure, in the relatively noumenal—as opposed to the phenomenal—Universe. Men of science may term them force or forces generated by matter, or “modes of its motion,” if they will; Occultism sees in these effects Elementals (Forces), and, in the direct causes [pg 170] producing them, intelligent Divine Workmen. The intimate connection of these Elementals, guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers, with the elements of pure Matter—their correlation we might call it—results in our terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc. Of course we shall never agree with the American Substantialists259 who call every force and energy—whether light, heat, electricity or cohesion—an “entity”; for this would be equivalent to calling the noise produced by the rolling of the wheels of a vehicle an entity—thus confusing and identifying that “noise” with the “driver” outside, and the guiding “Master Intelligence” within the vehicle. But we do certainly give that name to the “drivers” and to these guiding “Intelligences,” the ruling Dhyân Chohans, as has been shown. The Elementals, the Nature-Forces, are the acting, though invisible, or rather imperceptible, secondary causes, and in themselves the effects of primary causes behind the veil of all terrestrial phenomena. Electricity, light, heat, etc., have been aptly termed the “Ghosts or Shadows of Matter in Motion,” i.e., supersensuous states of Matter whose effects only we are able to cognize. To expand, then, the simile given above. The sensation of light is like the sound of the rolling wheels—a purely phenomenal effect, having no existence outside the observer. The proximate exciting cause of the sensation is comparable to the driver—a supersensuous state of matter in motion, a Nature-Force or Elemental. But, behind this—just as the owner of the carriage directs the driver from within—stands the higher and noumenal cause, the Intelligence from whose essence radiate these States of “Mother,” generating the countless milliards of Elementals, or Psychic Nature-Spirits, just as every drop of water generates its physical infinitesimal Infusoria. It is Fohat who guides the transfer of the principles from one planet to the other, from one star to another child-star. When a planet dies, its informing principles are transferred to a laya or sleeping centre, with potential but latent energy in it, which is thus awakened into life and begins to form itself into a new sidereal body.

It is most remarkable that, while honestly confessing their entire ignorance of the true nature of even terrestrial matter—primordial substance being regarded more as a dream than as a sober reality—the [pg 171] Physicists should, nevertheless, set themselves up as judges of that matter, and claim to know what it is able and is not able to do, in various combinations. Scientists know this matter hardly skin-deep, and yet they will dogmatize. It is “a mode of motion” and nothing else! But the “force” that is inherent in a living person's breath, when blowing a speck of dust from the table, is also, undeniably, “a mode of motion.” It is as undeniably not a quality of the matter, or the particles of the speck, and it emanates from the living and thinking Entity that breathed, whether the impulse originated consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, to endow matter—something of which nothing is so far known—with an inherent quality called force, of the nature of which still less is known, is to create a far more serious difficulty than that which lies in the acceptation of the intervention of our “Nature-Spirits” in every natural phenomenon.

The Occultists—who, if they would express themselves correctly, do not say that matter, but only the substance or essence of matter, (i.e., Mûlaprakriti, the Root of all) is indestructible and eternal—assert that all the so-called Forces of Nature, electricity, magnetism, light, heat, etc., etc., far from being modes of motion of material particles, are in esse, i.e., in their ultimate constitution, the differentiated aspects of that Universal Motion which is discussed and explained in the first pages of this volume. When Fohat is said to produce Seven Laya Centres, it means that, for formative or creative purposes, the Great Law—Theists may call it God—stays, or rather modifies, its perpetual motion on seven invisible points within the area of the Manifested Universe. “The Great Breath digs through Space seven holes into Laya, to cause them to circumgyrate during Manvantara,” says the Occult Catechism. We have said that Laya is what Science may call the zero-point or line; the realm of absolute negativeness, or the one real absolute Force, the noumenon of the Seventh State of that which we ignorantly call and recognize as “Force”; or again the noumenon of Undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which is itself an unreachable and unknowable object for finite perception; the root and basis of all states of objectivity and also subjectivity; the neutral axis, not one of the many aspects, but its centre. It may serve to elucidate the meaning, if we try to imagine a “neutral centre”—the dream of those who would discover perpetual motion. A “neutral centre” is, in one aspect, the limiting point of any given set of senses. Thus, imagine two consecutive planes of matter; each of these corresponding to an appropriate [pg 172] set of perceptive organs. We are forced to admit that between these two planes of matter an incessant circulation takes place; and if we follow the atoms and molecules of, say, the lower in their transformation upwards, they will come to a point where they pass altogether beyond the range of the faculties we are using on the lower plane. In fact, for us the matter of the lower plane there vanishes from our perception—or rather, it passes on to the higher plane, and the state of matter corresponding to such a point of transition must certainly possess special, and not readily discoverable, properties. Seven such “Neutral Centres,”260 then, are produced by Fohat, who, when, as Milton has it:

Fair foundations (are) laid whereon to build ...

quickens matter into activity and evolution.

The Primordial Atom (Anu) cannot be multiplied either in its pregenetic state, or its primogeneity; therefore it is called the “Sum Total,” of course, figuratively, as that “Sum Total” is boundless. That which is the abyss of nothingness to the Physicist, who knows only the world of visible causes and effects, is the boundless Space of the Divine Plenum to the Occultist. Among many other objections to the doctrine of an endless evolution and involution, or reäbsorption of the Kosmos, a process which, according to the Brâhmanical and Esoteric Doctrine, is without beginning or end, the Occultist is told that it cannot be, since “by all the admissions of modern scientific philosophy it is a necessity of nature to run down.” If the tendency of nature “to run down” is to be considered so forcible an objection to Occult Cosmogony, how, we may ask, do your Positivists and Free-thinkers and Scientists account for the phalanx of active stellar systems around us? They had eternity to “run down” in; why, then, is not the Kosmos a huge inert mass? Even the moon is only hypothetically believed to be a dead planet, “run down,” and Astronomy does not seem to be acquainted with many such dead planets.261 The query is unanswerable. But apart from this, it must be noted that the idea of the amount of “transformable energy” in our [pg 173] little system coming to an end, is based purely on the fallacious conception of a “white-hot, incandescent sun,” perpetually radiating away its heat without compensation into space. To this we reply that nature runs down and disappears from the objective plane, only to reëmerge after a time of rest out of the subjective, and to reäscend once more. Our Kosmos and Nature will run down only to reäppear on a more perfect plane after every Pralaya. The Matter of the Eastern philosophers is not the “matter” and Nature of the Western metaphysicians. For what is Matter? And above all, what is our scientific philosophy but that which was so justly and so politely defined by Kant as the “science of the limits to our knowledge?” To what have the many attempts made by Science to bind, connect, and define all the phenomena of organic life, by mere physical and chemical manifestations, brought it? To speculation generally—mere soap-bubbles, that have burst one after the other before the men of Science were permitted to discover real facts. All this would have been avoided, and the progress of knowledge would have proceeded with gigantic strides, had only Science and its philosophy abstained from accepting hypotheses merely on the one-sided knowledge of their “matter.” The behaviour of Uranus and Neptune—whose satellites, four and one in number respectively, revolved, it was thought, in their orbits from East to West, whereas all the other satellites rotate from West to East—is a very good instance, as showing how unreliable are all à priori speculations, even when based on the strictest mathematical analysis. The famous hypothesis of the formation of our Solar System out of nebulous rings, put forward by Kant and Laplace, was chiefly based on the assumed fact that all the planets revolved in the same direction. Laplace, relying on this mathematically demonstrated fact in his own time, and calculating on the theory of probabilities, offered to bet three milliards to one that the next planet discovered would have in its system the same peculiarity of motion eastward. The immutable laws of scientific mathematics got “worsted by further experiments and observations.” This idea of Laplace's mistake prevails generally to this day; but some Astronomers have finally succeeded in demonstrating (?) that the error has been in accepting Laplace's assertion for a mistake; and steps to correct the bévue, without attracting general attention, are now being taken. Many such unpleasant surprises are in store for hypotheses of even a purely physical character. What further disillusions, then, may there not be [pg 174] in questions concerning a transcendental, Occult Nature? At any rate, Occultism teaches that the so-called “reverse rotation” is a fact.

If no physical intellect is capable of counting the grains of sand covering a few miles of sea-shore, or of fathoming the ultimate nature and essence of these grains, when palpable and visible on the palm of the Naturalist, how can any Materialist limit the laws which govern the changes in the conditions and being of the atoms in Primordial Chaos, or know anything certain about the capabilities and potency of the atoms and molecules, before and after their formation into worlds? These changeless and eternal molecules—far more numberless in space than the grains on the ocean shore—may differ in their constitution along the lines of their planes of existence, as the soul-substance differs from its vehicle, the body. Each atom has seven planes of being or existence, we are taught; and each plane is governed by its specific laws of evolution and absorption. Ignorant of any, even approximate, chronological data from which to start, in attempting to decide the age of our planet or the origin of the solar system, Astronomers, Geologists, and Physicists, with each new hypothesis, are drifting farther and farther away from the shores of fact into the fathomless depths of speculative ontology.262 The Law of Analogy, in the plan of structure between the trans-solar systems and the solar planets, does not necessarily bear upon the finite conditions, to which every visible body is subject, in this our plane of being. In Occult Science, this Law of Analogy is the first and most important key to cosmic physics; but it has to be studied in its minutest details, and “turned seven times,” before one comes to understand it. Occult Philosophy is the only science that can teach it. How, then, can anyone hang the truth or the untruth of the Occultist's proposition, “the Kosmos is eternal in its unconditioned collectivity, and finite only in its conditioned manifestations,” on this one-sided physical enunciation that “it is a necessity of Nature to run down”?263

A Digression.

With this Shloka ends that portion of the Stanzas relating to the [pg 175] cosmogony of the Universe after the last Mahâpralaya, or Universal Dissolution, which, when it comes, sweeps out of Space every differentiated thing, gods as well as atoms, like so many dry leaves. From this verse onwards, the Stanzas are only concerned with our Solar System in general, with the Planetary Chains therein inferentially, and with the history of our Globe (the Fourth and its Chain) especially. All the verses which follow in this Volume refer only to the evolution of, and on, our Earth. With regard to the latter, a strange tenet—strange from the modern scientific standpoint only, of course—is held, which ought to be made known.

But before entirely new and somewhat startling theories are presented to the reader, they must be prefaced by a few words of explanation. This is absolutely necessary, as these theories clash not only with Modern Science, but, on certain points, contradict earlier statements264 made by other Theosophists, who claim to base their explanations and renderings of these teachings on the same authority as we do.

This may give rise to the idea that there is a decided contradiction between the expounders of the same doctrine; whereas the difference, in reality, arises from the incompleteness of the information given to earlier writers, who thus drew some erroneous conclusions and indulged in premature speculations, in their endeavour to present a complete system to the public. Thus the reader, who is already a student of Theosophy, must not be surprised to find in these pages the rectification of certain statements made in various Theosophical works, and also the explanation of certain points which have remained obscure, because they were necessarily left incomplete. Many are the questions upon which even the author of Esoteric Buddhism, the best and most accurate of all such works, has not touched. On the other hand, even he has introduced several mistaken notions, which must now be presented in their true mystic light, as far as the present writer is capable of so doing.

Let us then make a short break between the Shlokas just explained and those which follow, for the cosmic periods which separate them are of immense duration. This will afford us ample time to take a bird's-eye view of some points pertaining to the Secret Doctrine, which [pg 176] have been presented to the public under a more or less uncertain and sometimes mistaken light.

A Few Early Misconceptions Concerning Planets, Rounds, And Man.

Among the eleven Stanzas omitted, there is one which gives a full description of the formation of the Planetary Chains one after another, after the first cosmic and atomic differentiation had commenced in the primitive Acosmism. It is idle to speak of “laws arising when Deity prepares to create,” for “laws,” or rather Law, are eternal and uncreated; and again Deity is Law, and vice versà. Moreover, the one eternal Law unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested Nature on a sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular Chains of Worlds, composed of seven Globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the World of Formation, the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe. Out of these seven only one, the lowest and the most material of these Globes, is within our plane or means of perception, the six others lying outside it and being therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye. Every such Chain of Worlds is the progeny and creation of another, lower, and dead Chain—its reïncarnation, so to say. To make it clearer: we are told that each of the planets—of which seven only were called sacred, as being ruled by the highest Regents or Gods, and not at all because the Ancients knew nothing of the others265—whether known or unknown, is a septenary, as also is the Chain to which the Earth belongs. For instance, all such planets as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc., etc., or our Earth, are as visible to us as our Globe, probably, is to the inhabitants, if any, of the other planets, because they are all on the same plane; while the superior fellow-globes of these planets are on other planes quite outside that of our terrestrial senses. As their relative positions are given further on, and also in the diagram appended to the comments on Shloka 6 of Stanza VI, a few words of explanation is all that is needed at present. These invisible companions correspond curiously to that which we call the “principles” in man. The seven are on three material planes and one spiritual plane, answering to the three Upâdhis (Material Bases), and one spiritual Vehicle (Vâhana), of our seven Principles in the human division. If, for the sake of a clearer mental conception, we imagine [pg 177] the human Principles to be arranged as in the following scheme, we shall obtain the following diagram of correspondences:

As we are proceeding here from Universals to Particulars, instead of using the inductive or Aristotelean method, the numbers are reversed. Spirit is enumerated the first instead of seventh, as is usually done, but in truth, ought not to be done.

The Principles, as usually named after the manner of Esoteric Buddhism and other works, are: 1, Âtmâ; 2, Buddhi (Spiritual Soul); 3, Manas (Human Soul); 4, Kâma Rûpa (Vehicle of Desires and Passions); 5, Prâna; 6, Linga Sharîra; 7, Sthûla Sharîra.

The dark horizontal lines of the lower planes are the Upâdhis in the case of the human Principles, and the planes in the case of the Planetary Chain. Of course, as regards the Human Principles, the diagram does not place them quite in order, yet it shows the correspondence and analogy to which attention is now drawn. As the reader will see, it is a case of descent into matter, the adjustment—in both the mystic [pg 178] and the physical sense—of the two, and their interblending for the great coming “struggle for life” that awaits both Entities. “Entity” may be thought a strange term to use in the case of a Globe, but the ancient philosophers, who saw in the Earth a huge “animal,” were wiser in their generation than our modern geologists are in theirs; and Pliny, who called the Earth our kind nurse and mother, the only Element which is not inimical to man, spoke more truly than Watts, who fancied that he saw in her the footstool of God. For Earth is only the footstool of man in his ascension to higher regions; the vestibule—

... to glorious mansions,

Through which a moving crowd for ever press.

But this only shows how admirably Occult Philosophy fits every thing in Nature, and how much more logical are its tenets than the lifeless hypothetical speculations of Physical Science.

Having learned thus much, the Mystic will be better prepared to understand the Occult teaching, though every formal student of Modern Science may, and probably will, regard it as preposterous nonsense. The student of Occultism, however, holds that the theory at present under discussion is far more philosophical and probable than any other. It is more logical, at any rate, than the theory recently advanced which made of the Moon the projection of a portion of our Earth, extruded when the latter was a globe in fusion, a molten plastic mass.

Says Mr. Samuel Laing, the author of Modern Science and Modern Thought:

The astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so uncertain, that while in some cases they give results incredibly short, like that of 15 millions of years for the whole past process of formation of the solar system, in others they give results almost incredibly long, as in that which supposes the moon to have been thrown off when the earth was rotating in three hours, while the utmost actual retardation obtained from observation would require 600 millions of years to make it rotate in twenty-three hours instead of twenty-four.266

And if Physicists persist in such speculations, why should the chronology of the Hindûs be laughed at as exaggerated?

It is said, moreover, that the Planetary Chains having their Days and their Nights—i.e., periods of activity or life, and of inertia or death—behave in heaven as do men on earth: they generate their likes, grow old, and become personally extinct, their spiritual principles only living in their progeny as a survival of themselves.

[pg 179]

Without attempting the very difficult task of giving out the whole process in all its cosmic details, enough may be said to give an approximate idea of it. When a Planetary Chain is in its last Round, its Globe A, before finally dying out, sends all its energy and principles into a neutral centre of latent force, a laya centre, and thereby informs a new nucleus of undifferentiated substance or matter, i.e., calls it into activity or gives it life. Suppose such a process to have taken place in the Lunar Planetary Chain; suppose again, for argument's sake—though Mr. Darwin's theory quoted below has lately been upset, even if the fact has not yet been ascertained by mathematical calculation—that the Moon is far older than the Earth. Imagine the six fellow-globes of the Moon—æons before the first Globe of our seven was evolved—just in the same position in relation to each other as the fellow-globes of our Chain now occupy in regard to our Earth.267 And now it will be easy to imagine further Globe A of the Lunar Chain informing Globe A of the Terrestrial Chain, and—dying; next Globe B of the former sending its energy into Globe B of the new Chain; then Globe C of the Lunar creating its progeny Sphere C of the Terrene Chain; then the Moon (our satellite) pouring forth into the lowest Globe of our Planetary Chain—Globe D, our Earth—all its life, energy and powers; and, having transferred them to a new centre, becoming virtually a dead planet, in which since the birth of our Globe rotation has almost ceased. The Moon is the satellite of our Earth, undeniably, but this does not invalidate the theory that she has given to the Earth all but her corpse. For Darwin's theory to hold good, besides the hypothesis just upset, other still more incongruous speculations had to be invented. The Moon, it is said, has cooled nearly six times as rapidly as the Earth.268 “The Moon, if the earth is 14,000,000 years old since its incrustation, is only eleven and two-thirds millions of years old since that stage ...” etc. And if our Moon is but a splash from our Earth, why can no similar inference be established for the Moons of other planets? The Astronomers “do not know.” Why should Venus and Mercury have no satellites, and by what, when they exist, were they formed? The Astronomers do not know, because, we say, Science has only one key—the key of matter—to open the mysteries of Nature, while Occult Philosophy has seven keys and explains that which Science fails to see. Mercury and [pg 180] Venus have no satellites, but they had “parents” just as the Earth had. Both are far older than the Earth, and, before the latter reaches her Seventh Round, her mother Moon will have dissolved into thin air, as the Moons of the other planets have, or have not, as the case may be, since there are planets which have several Moons—a mystery again which no Œdipus of Astronomy has solved.

The Moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her living powers and principles are transfused. She now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to attract her progeny. Constantly vampirized by her child, she revenges herself on it, by soaking it through and through with the nefarious, invisible and poisoned influence which emanates from the occult side of her nature. For she is a dead, yet a living body. The particles of her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life, although the body which they had formed, is soulless and lifeless. Therefore its emanations are at the same time beneficent and maleficent—a circumstance finding its parallel on earth, in the fact that the grass and plants are nowhere more juicy and thriving than on graves; while at the same time it is the graveyard, or corpse-emanations, which kill. And like all ghouls or vampires, the Moon is the friend of the sorcerers and the foe of the unwary. From the archaic æons and the later times of the witches of Thessaly, down to some of the present Tântrikas of Bengal, her nature and properties have been known to every Occultist, but have remained a closed book for Physicists.

Such is the Moon from the astronomical, geological, and physical standpoints. As to her metaphysical and psychic nature, it must remain an occult secret in this work, as it was in the volume entitled Esoteric Buddhism, notwithstanding the rather sanguine statement made therein, that “there is not much mystery left now in the riddle of the eighth sphere.”269 These are topics, indeed, “on which the Adepts are very reserved in their communications to uninitiated pupils,” and since they have, moreover, never sanctioned or permitted any published speculations upon them, the less said the better.

Yet, without treading upon the forbidden ground of the “eighth sphere,” it may be useful to state some additional facts with regard to the ex-monads of the Lunar Chain—the “Lunar Ancestors”—as they play a leading part in the coming Anthropogenesis. This brings us [pg 181] directly to the Septenary Constitution of man; and as some discussion has arisen of late about the best classification to be adopted for the division of the microcosmic entity, two systems are now appended with a view to facilitate comparison. The subjoined short article is from the pen of Mr. T. Subba Row, a learned Vedântin scholar. He prefers the Brâhmanical division of the Râja Yoga, and from a metaphysical point of view he is quite right. But, as it is a question of simple choice and expediency, we hold in this work to the time-honoured classification of the Trans-Himâlayan “Arhat Esoteric School.” The following table and its explanatory text are reprinted from the Theosophist, and are also contained in Five Years of Theosophy.270

The Septenary Division In Different Indian Systems.

We give below in a tabular form the classifications adopted by the Buddhist and Vedântic teachers of the principles of man:

“Esoteric Buddhism.” | Vedânta. | Târaka Râja Yoga.
1. Sthûla Sharîra. | Annamayakosha.271 | Sthûlopâdhi.272
2. Prâna.273 | Prânamayakosha. | Sthûlopâdhi.
3. The Vehicle of Prâna.274 | Prânamayakosha. | Sthûlopâdhi.
4. Kâma Rûpa. | Mânomayakosha. | Sûkshmopâdhi.
5. Mind (Volitions and feelings); Vijñânam. | Mânomayakosha. | Sûkshmopâdhi.
6. Spiritual Soul.275 | Ânandamayakosha. | Kâranopâdhi.
7. Âtmâ. | Âtmâ. | Âtmâ.

From the foregoing table it will be seen that the third principle in the Buddhist classification is not separately mentioned in the Vedântic division, as it is merely the vehicle of Prâna. It will also be seen that the fourth principle is included in the third Kosha (Sheath), as the same principle is but the vehicle of will-power, which is but an energy of the mind. It must also be noticed that the Vijñânamayakosha is considered to be distinct from the Mânomayakosha, as a division is made [pg 182] after death between the lower part of the mind, as it were, which has a closer affinity with the fourth principle than with the sixth and its higher part, which attaches itself to the latter, and which is, in fact, the basis for the higher spiritual individuality of man.

We may also here point out to our readers that the classification mentioned in the last column is, for all practical purposes, connected with Râja Yoga, the best and simplest. Though there are seven principles in man, there are but three distinct Upâdhis (Bases), in each of which his Âtmâ may work independently of the rest. These three Upâdhis can be separated by an Adept without killing himself. He cannot separate the seven principles from each other without destroying his constitution.

The student will now be better prepared to see that between the three Upâdhis of the Râja Yoga and its Atmâ, and our three Upâdhis, Âtmâ, and the additional three divisions, there is in reality but very little difference. Moreover, as every Adept in Cis-Himâlayan or Trans-Himâlayan India, of the Patanjali, the Âryâsanga or the Mahâyâna schools, has to become a Râja Yogî, he must, therefore, accept the Târaka Râja classification in principle and theory, whatever classification he resorts to for practical and Occult purposes. Thus, it matters very little whether one speaks of the three Upâdhis, with their three Aspects, and Âtmâ, the eternal and immortal synthesis, or calls them the “Seven Principles.”

For the benefit of those who may not have read, or, if they have, may not have clearly understood, in Theosophical writings, the doctrine of the septenary Chains of Worlds in the Solar Cosmos, the teaching is briefly as follows.

1. Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is septenary. Hence every sidereal body, every planet, whether visible or invisible, is credited with six companion Globes. The evolution of life proceeds on these seven Globes or bodies, from the First to the Seventh, in Seven Rounds or Seven Cycles.

2. These Globes are formed by a process which the Occultists call the “rebirth of Planetary Chains (or Rings).” When the Seventh and last Round of one of such Rings has been entered upon, the highest or first Globe, A, followed by all the others down to the last, instead of entering upon a certain time of rest—or “Obscuration,” as in the previous Rounds—begins to die out. The Planetary Dissolution (Pralaya) is at hand, and its hour has struck; each Globe has to transfer its life and energy to another planet.276

[pg 183]

3. Our Earth, as the visible representative of its invisible superior fellow-globes, its “Lords” or “Principles,” has to live, as have the others, through seven Rounds. During the first three, it forms and consolidates; during the fourth, it settles and hardens; during the last three, it gradually returns to its first ethereal form: it is spiritualized, so to say.

4. Its Humanity develops fully only in the Fourth—our present Round. Up to this Fourth Life-Cycle, it is referred to as “Humanity” only for lack of a more appropriate term. Like the grub which becomes chrysalis and butterfly, Man, or rather that which becomes Man, passes through all the forms and kingdoms during the First Round, and through all the human shapes during the two following Rounds. Arrived on our Earth at the commencement of the Fourth, in the present series of Life-Cycles and Races, Man is the first form that appears thereon, being preceded only by the mineral and vegetable kingdoms—even the latter having to develop and continue its further evolution through man. This will be explained in Volume II. During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the Globe on which it lives, will be ever tending to reässume its primeval form, that of a Dhyân Chohanic Host. Man tends to become a God and then—God, like every other Atom in the Universe.

Beginning so early as with the Second Round, Evolution proceeds already on quite a different plan. It is only during the first Round that (Heavenly) Man becomes a human being on Globe A, (rebecomes) a mineral, a plant, an animal, on Globe B and C, etc. The process changes entirely from the Second Round; but you have learned prudence ... and I advise you to say nothing before the time for saying it has come....277

5. Every Life-Cycle on Globe D (our Earth)278 is composed of seven Root-Races. They commence with the ethereal and end with the spiritual, on the double line of physical and moral evolution—from the beginning of the Terrestrial Round to its close. One is a “Planetary Round” from Globe A to Globe G, the seventh; the other, the “Globe Round,” or the Terrestrial.

This is very well described in Esoteric Buddhism, and needs no further elucidation for the time being.

6. The First Root-Race, i.e., the first “Men” on earth (irrespective of form), were the progeny of the “Celestial Men,” rightly called in Indian [pg 184] philosophy the “Lunar Ancestors” or the Pitris, of which there are seven Classes or Hierarchies. As all this will be sufficiently explained in the following sections and in Volume II, no more need be said of it here.

But the two works already mentioned, both of which treat of subjects from the Occult doctrine, need particular notice. Esoteric Buddhism is too well known in Theosophical circles, and even to the outside world, for it to be necessary to enter at length upon its merits here. It is an excellent book, and has done still more excellent work. But this does not alter the fact that it contains some mistaken notions, and that it has led many Theosophists and lay-readers to form an erroneous conception of the Eastern Secret Doctrine. Moreover it seems, perhaps, a little too materialistic.

Man, which came later, was an attempt to present the archaic doctrine from a more ideal standpoint, to translate some visions in and from the Astral Light, to render some teachings partly gathered from a Master's thoughts, but unfortunately misunderstood. This work also speaks of the evolution of the early Races of men on Earth, and contains some excellent pages of a philosophical character. But so far it is only an interesting little mystical romance. It has failed in its mission, because the conditions required for a correct translation of these visions were not present. Hence the reader must not wonder if our volumes contradict these earlier descriptions in several particulars.

Esoteric cosmogony in general, and the evolution of the human Monad especially, differ so essentially in these two books, and in other Theosophical works written independently by beginners, that it becomes impossible to proceed with the present work without special mention of these two earlier volumes, for both have a number of admirers—Esoteric Buddhism especially. The time has arrived for the explanation of some matters in this direction. Mistakes have now to be checked by the original teachings, and corrected. If one of the said works has too pronounced a bias toward materialistic Science, the other is decidedly too idealistic, and at times is fantastic.

From the doctrine—rather incomprehensible to Western minds—which deals with the periodical Obscurations and successive Rounds of the Globes, along their circular Chains, were born the first perplexities and misconceptions. One of such has reference to the “Fifth-” and even “Sixth-Rounders.” Those who knew that a Round was preceded [pg 185] and followed by a long Pralaya, a pause of rest, which created an impassable gulf between two Rounds until the time came for a renewed cycle of life, could not understand the “fallacy” of talking about “Fifth and Sixth-Rounders” in our Fourth Round. Gautama Buddha, it was held, was a “Sixth-Rounder,” Plato and some other great philosophers and minds, “Fifth-Rounders.” How could it be? One Master taught and affirmed that there were such “Fifth-Rounders” even now on Earth; and though understood to say that mankind was yet in the Fourth Round, in another place he seemed to say that we were in the Fifth. To this an “apocalyptic answer” was returned by another Teacher: “A few drops of rain do not make a monsoon, though they presage it.”... “No, we are not in the Fifth Round, but Fifth Round men have been coming in for the last few thousand years.” This was worse than the riddle of the Sphinx! Students of Occultism subjected their brains to the wildest work of speculation. For a considerable time they tried to outvie Œdipus and reconcile the two statements. And as the Masters kept as silent as the stony Sphinx herself, they were accused of “inconsistency,” “contradiction,” and “discrepancies.” But they were simply allowing the speculations to go on, in order to teach a lesson which the Western mind sorely needs. In their conceit and arrogance, and in their habit of materializing every metaphysical conception and term, without allowing any margin for Eastern metaphor and allegory, the Orientalists had made a jumble of the Hindû exoteric philosophy, and the Theosophists were now doing the same with regard to Esoteric teachings. To this day it is evident that the latter have utterly failed to understand the meaning of the term “Fifth and Sixth-Rounders.” But it is simply this: every Round brings about a new development, and even an entire change, in the mental, psychic, spiritual and physical constitution of man; all these principles evolving on an ever ascending scale. Hence it follows that those persons who, like Confucius and Plato, belonged psychically, mentally and spiritually to the higher planes of evolution, were in our Fourth Round as the average man will be in the Fifth Round, whose mankind is destined to find itself, on this scale of evolution, immensely higher than is our present humanity. Similarly, Gautama Buddha—Wisdom incarnate—was still higher and greater than all the men we have mentioned who are called “Fifth-Rounders,” and so Buddha and Shankarâchârya are termed “Sixth Rounders,” allegorically. Hence again the concealed wisdom of the remark, pronounced at the time [pg 186] “evasive”—“a few drops of rain do not make a monsoon, though they presage it.”

And now the truth of the following remark, in Esoteric Buddhism, will be fully apparent:

It is impossible, when the complicated facts of an entirely unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained minds for the first time, to put them forward with all their appropriate qualifications ... and abnormal developments.... We must be content to take the broad rules first and deal with the exceptions afterwards, and especially is this the case with a study, in connection with which the traditional methods of teaching, generally followed, aim at impressing every fresh idea on the memory by provoking the perplexity it at last relieves.

As the author of the remark was himself, as he says, “an untrained mind” in Occultism, his own inferences, and his better knowledge of modern astronomical speculations than of archaic doctrines, led him, quite naturally, and unconsciously to himself, to commit a few mistakes of detail rather than of any “broad rule.” One such will now be noticed. It is a trifling one, still it is calculated to lead many a beginner into erroneous conceptions. But as the mistaken notions of the earlier editions were corrected in the annotations of the fifth edition, so the sixth may be revised and perfected. There were several reasons for such mistakes. They were due to the necessity, under which the Teachers laboured, of giving what were considered as “evasive answers”; the questions being too persistently pressed to be left unnoticed, while, on the other hand, they could only be partially answered. This position notwithstanding, the confession that “half a loaf is better than no bread” was but too often misunderstood, and hardly appreciated as it ought to have been. As a result thereof gratuitous speculations were sometimes indulged in by the European lay-chelâs. Among such were the “Mystery of the Eighth Sphere” in its relation to the Moon, and the erroneous statement that two of the superior Globes of the Terrestrial Chain were two of our well-known planets; “besides the earth ... there are only two other worlds of our chain which are visible ... Mars and Mercury....”279

This was a great mistake. But the blame for it is to be attached as much to the vagueness and incompleteness of the Master's answer as to the question of the learner itself, which was equally vague and indefinite.

It was asked: “What planets, of those known to ordinary Science, [pg 187] besides Mercury, belong to our system of worlds?” Now if by “system of worlds” our Terrestrial Chain, or “String,” was intended, in the mind of the querist, instead of the “Solar System of Worlds,” as it should have been, then of course the answer was likely to have been misunderstood. For the reply was: “Mars, etc., and, four other planets of which Astronomy knows nothing. Neither A, B, nor Y, Z, are known, nor can they be seen through physical means, however perfected.” This is plain: (a) Astronomy as yet knows nothing in reality of the planets, neither the ancient ones, nor those discovered in modern times. (b) No companion planets from A to Z, i.e., no upper Globes of any Chain in the Solar System, can be seen; with the exception of course of all the planets which come fourth in number, as our Earth, the Moon, etc., etc. As to Mars, Mercury, and “the four other planets,” they bear a relation to Earth of which no Master or high Occultist will ever speak, much less explain the nature.

In this same letter the impossibility is distinctly stated by one of the Teachers to the author of Esoteric Buddhism: “Try to understand that you are putting me questions pertaining to the highest Initiation; that I can give you (only) a general view, but that I dare not, nor will I, enter into details....” Copies of all the letters ever received, or sent, with the exception of a few private ones—“in which there was no teaching,” the Master says—are with the writer. As it was her duty, in the beginning, to answer and explain certain points not touched upon, it is more than likely that, notwithstanding the many annotations on these copies, the writer, in her ignorance of English and her fear of saying too much, may have bungled the information given. She takes the whole blame for it upon herself in any and every case. But it is impossible for her to allow students to remain any longer under erroneous impressions, or to believe that the fault lies with the Esoteric system.

Let it then be now distinctly stated that the theory broached is impossible, with or without the additional evidence furnished by modern Astronomy. Physical Science can supply corroborative, though still very uncertain, evidence, but only as regards heavenly bodies on the same plane of materiality as our objective Universe. Mars and Mercury, Venus and Jupiter, like every hitherto discovered planet, or those still to be discovered, are all, per se, the representatives on our plane of such Chains. As distinctly stated in one of the numerous letters of Mr. Sinnett's Teacher: “there are other and innumerable [pg 188]manvantaric Chains of Globes which bear intelligent Beings, both in and outside our Solar System.” But neither Mars nor Mercury belong to our Chain. They are, along with other planets, septenary Units in the great host of Chains of our System, and all are as visible as their upper Globes are invisible.

If it is still argued that certain expressions in the Teacher's letters were liable to mislead, the answer comes: Amen; so they were. The author of Esoteric Buddhism understood it well when he wrote that such are “the traditional modes of teaching ... by provoking the perplexity,” they do or do not relieve—as the case may be. At all events, if it is urged that this might have been explained earlier, and the true nature of the planets given out as they now are, the answer comes that: It was not found expedient to do so at the time, as it would have opened the way to a series of additional questions which could never be answered on account of their Esoteric nature, and thus would only become embarrassing. It had been declared from the first, and has been repeatedly asserted since: (1) That no Theosophist, not even as an accepted Chelâ, let alone lay students, could expect to have the secret teachings explained to him thoroughly and completely, before he had irretrievably pledged himself to the Brotherhood and passed through at least one Initiation, because no figures and numbers could be given to the public, for figures and numbers are the key to the Esoteric system. (2) That what was revealed was merely the Esoteric lining of that which is contained in almost all the exoteric scriptures of the world-religions—preëminently in the Brâhmanas and the Upanishads of the Vedas, and even in the Purânas. It was a small portion of what is divulged far more fully now in the present volumes; and even this is very incomplete and fragmentary.

When the present work was commenced, the writer, feeling sure that the speculation about Mars and Mercury was a mistake, applied to the Teachers by letter for an explanation and an authoritative version. Both came in due time, and verbatim extracts from these are now given.

“... It is quite correct that Mars is in a state of obscuration at present, and Mercury just beginning to get out of it. You might add that Venus is in her last Round.... If neither Mercury nor Venus have satellites, it is because of the reasons ... and also because Mars has two satellites to which he has no right.... Phobos, the supposed ‘inner’ satellite, is no satellite at all. Thus, this remark of long ago by Laplace and now by Faye do not agree, you see. (Read ‘Comptes Rendus,’ [pg 189]Tome XC, p. 569.) Phobos keeps a too short periodic time, and therefore there ‘must exist some defect in the mother idea of the theory,’ as Faye justly observes.... Again, both [Mars and Mercury] are septenary Chains, as independent of the Earth's sidereal lords and superiors as you are independent of the ‘principles’ of Däumling [Tom Thumb]—which were perhaps his six brothers, with or without night-caps.... ‘Gratification of curiosity is the end of knowledge for some men,’ was said by Bacon, who was as right in postulating this truism, as those who were familiar with it before him, were right in hedging off Wisdom from Knowledge, and tracing limits to that which is to be given out at one time.... Remember:

... knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men,
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own....”

“You can never impress it too profoundly on the minds of those to whom you impart some of the Esoteric teachings.”

Here are more extracts from another letter written by the same authority. This time it is in answer to some objections laid before the Teachers. They are based upon extremely scientific, and as futile, reasonings about the advisability of trying to reconcile the Esoteric theories with the speculations of Modern Science, were written by a young Theosophist as a warning against the “Secret Doctrine,” and in reference to the same subject. He had declared that if there were such companion Earths, “they must be only a wee bit less material than our globe.” How then was it that they could not be seen? The answer was:

“... Were psychic and spiritual teachings more fully understood, it would become next to impossible to even imagine such an incongruity. Unless less trouble is taken to reconcile the irreconcilable—that is to say, the metaphysical and spiritual sciences with physical or natural philosophy, ‘natural’ being a synonym to them [men of Science] of that matter which falls under the perception of their corporeal senses—no progress can be really achieved. Our Globe, as taught from the first, is at the bottom of the arc of descent, where the matter of our perceptions exhibits itself in its grossest form.... Hence it only stands to reason that the Globes which overshadow our Earth, must be on different and superior planes. In short, as Globes, they are in coädunition but not in consubstantiality with our Earth, and thus pertain to quite another state of consciousness. Our planet (like all those we see) is adapted to the peculiar state of its human stock, that state which enables us to see with our naked eye the sidereal bodies [pg 190]which are coëssential with our terrene plane and substance, just as their respective inhabitants, the Jovians, Martians and others, can perceive our little world; because our planes of consciousness, differing as they do in degree, but being the same in kind, are on the same layer of differentiated matter.... What I wrote was: ‘The minor Pralaya concerns only our little Strings of Globes. (We called Chains “Strings” in those days of lip-confusion.)... To such a String our Earth belongs.’ This ought to have shown plainly that the other planets were also ‘Strings,’ or Chains.... If he [meaning the objector] would perceive even the dim silhouette of one of such ‘planets’ on the higher planes, he has to first throw off even the thin clouds of the astral matter that stand between him and the next plane.”

It thus becomes patent why we could not perceive, even with the help of the best telescopes, that which is outside our world of matter. Those alone, whom we call Adepts, who know how to direct their mental vision and to transfer their consciousness—both physical and psychic—to other planes of being, are able to speak with authority on such subjects. And they tell us plainly:

“Lead the life necessary for the acquisition of such knowledge and powers, and Wisdom will come to you naturally. Whenever you are able to attune your consciousness to any of the seven chords of ‘Universal Consciousness,’those chords that run along the sounding-board of Kosmos, vibrating from one Eternity to another; when you have studied thoroughly the ‘Music of the Spheres,’ then only will you become quite free to share your knowledge with those with whom it is safe to do so. Meanwhile, be prudent. Do not give out the great Truths that are the inheritance of the future Races, to our present generation. Do not attempt to unveil the secret of Being and Non-Being to those unable to see the hidden meaning of Apollo's Heptachord, the lyre of the radiant god, in each of the seven strings of which dwelleth the Spirit, Soul and Astral Body of the Kosmos, whose shell only has now fallen into the hands of modern Science.... Be prudent, we say, prudent and wise, and above all take care what those who learn from you believe in; lest by deceiving themselves they deceive others, ... for such is the fate of every truth with which men are, as yet, unfamiliar.... Let rather the Planetary Chains and other super- and sub-cosmic mysteries remain a dreamland for those who can neither see, nor yet believe that others can.”

It is to be regretted that few of us have followed the wise advice, and that many a priceless pearl, many a jewel of wisdom, has been [pg 191] cast to an enemy, unable to understand its value, who has turned round and rent us.

“Let us imagine”—wrote the same Master to his two “lay chelâs,” as he called the author of Esoteric Buddhism and another gentleman, his co-student for some time—“let us imagine that our earth is one of a group of seven planets or man-bearing worlds.... [The ‘seven planets’ are the sacred planets of antiquity, and are all septenary.] Now the life-impulse reaches A, or rather that which is destined to become A, and which so far is but cosmic dust [a laya-centre] ...” etc.

In these early letters, in which terms had to be invented and words coined, the “Rings” very often became “Rounds,” and the “Rounds,” “Life-Cycles,” and vice versâ. To a correspondent who called a “Round” a “World-Ring,” the Teacher wrote: “I believe this will lead to a further confusion. A Round we are agreed to call the passage of a Monad from Globe A to Globe G or Z.... The ‘World-Ring’ is correct.... Advise Mr. ... strongly, to agree upon a nomenclature before going any further.”

Notwithstanding this agreement, many mistakes, owing to this confusion, crept into the earliest teachings. The “Races” even were occasionally mixed up with the “Rounds” and “Rings,” and led to similar mistakes in Man: Fragments of Forgotten Truth. From the first the Master had written:

“Not being permitted to give you the whole truth, or divulge the number of isolated fractions, ... I am unable to satisfy you.”

This in answer to the questions: “If we are right, then the total existence prior to the man-period is 637,” etc., etc. To all the queries relating to figures, the reply was: “Try to solve the problem of 777 incarnations.... Though I am obliged to withhold information, ... yet if you should work out the problem by yourself, it will be my duty to tell you so.”

But it never was so worked out, and the results were—never-ceasing perplexity and mistakes.

Even the teaching about the septenary constitution of the sidereal bodies and of the macrocosm—from which the septenary division of the microcosm, or man—has until now been among the most esoteric. In olden times it used to be divulged only at Initiation together with the most sacred figures of the cycles. Now, as stated in one of the Theosophical journals,280 the revelation of the whole system of cosmogony had not been contemplated, nor even thought for one moment possible, [pg 192] at a time when a few scraps of information were sparingly given out, in answer to letters, written by the author of Esoteric Buddhism, in which he put forward a multiplicity of questions. Among these were questions on such problems as no Master, however high and independent he might be, would have the right to answer, and thus divulge to the world the most time-honoured and archaic of the mysteries of the ancient college-temples. Hence only a few of the doctrines were revealed in their broad outlines, while details were constantly withheld, and all the efforts made to elicit more information about them were systematically eluded from the beginning. This was perfectly natural. Of the four Vidyâs, out of the seven branches of Knowledge mentioned in the Purânas—namely, Yajna Vidyâ, the performance of religious rites in order to produce certain results; Mahâ Vidyâ, the great (magic) knowledge, now degenerated into Tântrika worship; Guhya Vidyâ, the science of Mantras and their true rhythm or chanting, of mystical incantations, etc.; Âtmâ Vidyâ, or the true spiritual and divine Wisdom—it is only the last which can throw final and absolute light upon the teachings of the three first named. Without the help of Âtmâ Vidyâ, the other three remain no better than surface sciences, geometrical magnitudes having length and breadth, but no thickness. They are like the soul, limbs and mind of a sleeping man, capable of mechanical motions, of chaotic dreams and even sleep-walking, of producing visible effects, but stimulated only by instinctual not intellectual causes, least of all by fully conscious spiritual impulses. A good deal can be given out and explained from the three first-named sciences. But unless the key to their teachings is furnished by Âtmâ Vidyâ, they will remain for ever like the fragments of a mangled text-book, like the adumbrations of great truths, dimly perceived by the most spiritual, but distorted out of all proportion by those who would nail every shadow to the wall.

Then, again, another great perplexity was created in the minds of students by the incomplete exposition of the doctrine of the evolution of the Monads. To be fully realized, both this process and that of the birth of the Globes must be examined far more from their metaphysical aspect, than from what one might call a statistical standpoint, involving figures and numbers which are rarely permitted to be widely used. Unfortunately, there are few who are inclined to handle these doctrines only metaphysically. Even the best of the Western writers upon our doctrine declares in his work, when speaking of the evolution of the [pg 193] Monads, that “on pure metaphysics of that sort we are not now engaged.”281 And in such case, as the Teacher remarks in a letter to him: “Why this preaching of our doctrines, all this uphill work and swimming ‘in adversum flumen’? Why should the West ... learn ... from the East ... that which can never meet the requirements of the special tastes of the æsthetics?” And he draws his correspondent's attention “to the formidable difficulties encountered by us [the Adepts] in every attempt we make to explain our metaphysics to the Western mind.”

And well he may; for outside of metaphysics, no Occult philosophy, no Esotericism is possible. It is like trying to explain the aspirations and affections, love and hatred, the most private and sacred workings in the soul and mind of a living man, by an anatomical description of the thorax and brain of his dead body.

Let us now examine two tenets mentioned above, but hardly alluded to in Esoteric Buddhism, and supplement them as far as lies in our power.

Additional Facts And Explanations Concerning The Globes And The Monads.

Two statements made in the above work must be noticed and the author's opinions quoted. The first is as follows:

The spiritual Monads ... do not fully complete their mineral existence on Globe A, then complete it on Globe B, and so on. They pass several times round the whole circle as minerals, and then again several times round as vegetables, and several times as animals. We purposely refrain for the present from going into figures, etc., etc.282

That was a wise course to adopt in view of the great secrecy maintained with regard to figures and numbers. This reticence is now partially relinquished; but it would perhaps have been better had the real numbers concerning Rounds and evolutional gyrations been either entirely divulged at the time, or entirely withheld. Mr. Sinnett understood this difficulty well when saying:

For reasons which are not easy for the outsider to divine, the possessors of Occult knowledge are especially reluctant to give out numerical facts relating to cosmogony, though it is hard for the uninitiated to understand why they should be withheld.283

[pg 194]

That there were such reasons is evident. Nevertheless, it is to this reticence that most of the confused ideas of some Eastern as well as Western pupils are due. The difficulties in the way of the acceptance of the particular tenets under consideration seemed great, just because of the absence of any data to go upon. But there it was. For, as the Masters have many times declared, the figures belonging to the Occult calculations cannot be given—outside the circle of pledged Chelâs, and not even these can break the rules.

To make things plainer, without touching upon the mathematical aspects of the doctrine, the teaching given may be expanded and some obscure points solved. As the evolution of the Globes and that of the Monads are so closely interblended, we will make of the two teachings one. In reference to the Monads, the reader is asked to bear in mind that Eastern philosophy rejects the Western theological dogma of a newly-created soul for every baby born, a dogma as unphilosophical as it is impossible in the economy of Nature. There must be a limited number of Monads, evolving and growing more and more perfect, through their assimilation of many successive Personalities, in every new Manvantara. This is absolutely necessary in view of the doctrines of Rebirth and Karma, and of the gradual return of the human Monad to its source—Absolute Deity. Thus, although the hosts of more or less progressed Monads are almost incalculable, they are still finite, as is everything in this Universe of differentiation and finiteness.

As shown in the double diagram of the human Principles and the ascending Globes of the World-Chains,284 there is an eternal concatenation of causes and effects, and a perfect analogy which runs through, and links together, all the lines of evolution. One begets the other—Globes as Personalities. But, let us begin at the beginning.

The general outline of the process by which the successive Planetary Chains are formed has just been given. To prevent future misconceptions, some further details may be offered which will also throw light on the history of Humanity on our own Chain, the progeny of that of the Moon.

In the accompanying diagram, Fig. 1 represents the Lunar Chain of seven Globes at the outset of its seventh or last Round; while Fig. 2 represents the Earth Chain which will be, but is not yet in existence. The seven Globes of each Chain are distinguished in their cyclic order [pg 195] by the letters A to G, the Globes of the Earth Chain being further marked by a cross, the symbol of the Earth.

Now, it must be remembered that the Monads cycling round any septenary Chain are divided into seven Classes or Hierarchies, according to their respective stages of evolution, consciousness and merit. Let us follow, then, the order of their appearance on Globe A, in the First Round. The time-spaces between the appearances of these Hierarchies on any one Globe are so adjusted, that when Class 7, the last, appears on Globe A, Class 1, the first, has just passed on to Globe B; and so on, step by step, all round the Chain.

Again, in the Seventh Round of the Lunar Chain, when Class 7, the last, quits Globe A, that Globe, instead of falling asleep, as it had done in previous Rounds, begins to die (to go into its Planetary Pralaya);285 and in dying it transfers successively, as just said, its principles, or life-elements and energy, etc., one after the other, to a new laya-centre, which commences the formation of Globe A of the Earth Chain. A similar process takes place for each of the Globes of the Lunar Chain, one after the other, each forming a fresh Globe of the Earth Chain. [pg 196] Our Moon was the fourth Globe of the series, and was on the same plane of perception as our Earth. But Globe A of the Lunar Chain is not fully “dead,” till the first Monads of the first Class have passed from Globe G or Z, the last of the Lunar Chain, into the Nirvâna which awaits them between the two Chains; and similarly for all the other Globes as stated, each giving birth to the corresponding Globe of the Earth Chain.

Further, when Globe A of the new Chain is ready, the first Class or Hierarchy of Monads from the Lunar Chain incarnate upon it in the lowest kingdom, and so on successively. The result of this is, that it is only the first Class of Monads which attains the human state of development during the first Round, since the second Class, on each Globe, arriving later, has not time to reach that stage. Thus the Monads of Class 2 reach the incipient human stage only in the Second Round, and so on up to the middle of the Fourth Round. But at this point—and on this Fourth Round in which the human stage will be fully developed—the “door” into the human kingdom closes; and henceforward the number of “human” Monads, i.e., Monads in the human stage of development, is complete. For the Monads which had not reached the human stage by this point, will, owing to the evolution of Humanity itself, find themselves so far behind, that they will reach the human stage only at the close of the Seventh and last Round. They will, therefore, not be men on this Chain, but will form the Humanity of a future Manvantara, and be rewarded by becoming “men” on a higher Chain altogether, thus receiving their Karmic compensation. To this there is but one solitary exception, and for very good reasons, of which we shall speak farther on. But this accounts for the difference in the Races.

It thus becomes apparent how perfect is the analogy between the processes of Nature in the cosmos and in the individual man. The latter lives through his life-cycle, and dies. His higher principles, corresponding in the development of a Planetary Chain to the cycling Monads, pass into Devachan, which corresponds to the Nirvâna and states of rest intervening between two Chains. The man's lower principles are disintegrated in time, and are used by Nature again for the formation of new human principles; the same process also taking place in the disintegration and formation of Worlds. Analogy is thus the surest guide to the comprehension of the Occult teachings.

This is one of the “seven mysteries of the moon,” and it is now [pg 197] revealed. The seven “mysteries” are called by the Japanese Yamabooshis, the mystics of the Lao-Tze sect and the ascetic monks of Kioto, the Dzenodoo—the “Seven Jewels”; only, the Japanese and the Chinese Buddhist ascetics and Initiates are, if possible, even more reticent in giving out their “Knowledge” than are the Hindûs.

But the reader must not be allowed to lose sight of the Monads, and must be enlightened as to their nature, as far as permitted, without trespassing upon the highest mysteries, of which the writer does not in any way pretend to know the last or final word.

The Monadic Host may be roughly divided into three great Classes:

1. The most developed Monads—the Lunar Gods or “Spirits,” called, in India, the Pitris—whose function it is to pass in the First Round through the whole triple cycle of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, in their most ethereal, filmy, and rudimentary forms, in order to clothe themselves in, and assimilate, the nature of the newly formed Chain. They are those who first reach the human form—if there can be any form in the realm of the almost subjective—on Globe A, in the First Round. It is they, therefore, who lead and represent the human element during the Second and Third Rounds, and finally evolve their shadows at the beginning of the Fourth Round for the second Class, or those who come behind them.

2. Those Monads that are the first to reach the human stage during the three and a half Rounds, and to become “men.”

3. The laggards, the Monads which are retarded, and which will not reach, by reason of Karmic impediments, the human stage at all during this Cycle or Round, save one exception which will be spoken of elsewhere, as already promised.

We are forced to use above the misleading word “men,” and this is a clear proof of how little any European language is adapted to express these subtle distinctions.

It stands to reason that these “men” did not resemble the men of to-day, either in form or nature. Why then, it may be asked, call them “men” at all? Because there is no other term, in any Western language, which approximately conveys the idea intended. The word “men” at least indicates that these beings were “manus,” thinking entities, however they differed in form and intellection from ourselves. But in reality they were, in respect of spirituality and intellection, rather “gods” than “men.”

The same difficulty of language is met with in describing the [pg 198] “stages” through which the Monad passes. Metaphysically speaking, it is of course an absurdity to talk of the “development” of a Monad, or to say that it becomes “man.” But any attempt to preserve metaphysical accuracy of language, in the use of such a tongue as the English, would necessitate at least three extra volumes of this work, and would entail an amount of verbal repetition which would be wearisome in the extreme. It stands to reason that a Monad cannot either progress or develop, or even be affected by the changes of state it passes through. It is not of this world or plane, and may only be compared to an indestructible star of divine light and fire, thrown down on to our Earth, as a plank of salvation for the Personalities in which it indwells. It is for the latter to cling to it; and thus partaking of its divine nature, obtain immortality. Left to itself the Monad will cling to no one; but, like the plank, be drifted away to another incarnation, by the unresting current of evolution.

Now the evolution of the external form, or body, round the astral, is produced by the terrestrial forces, just as in the case of the lower kingdoms; but the evolution of the internal, or real, Man is purely spiritual. It is now no more a passage of the impersonal Monad through many and various forms of matter—endowed at best with instinct and consciousness on quite a different plane—as in the case of external evolution, but a journey of the “Pilgrim-Soul” through various states of not only matter, but of self-consciousness and self-perception, or of perception from apperception.

The Monad emerges from its state of spiritual and intellectual unconsciousness; and, skipping the first two planes—too near the Absolute to permit of any correlation with anything on a lower plane—it gets directly into the plane of Mentality. But there is no plane in the whole universe with a broader margin, or a wider field of action, in its almost endless gradations of perceptive and apperceptive qualities, than this plane, which has in its turn an appropriate smaller plane for every “form,” from the Mineral Monad up to the time when that Monad blossoms forth by evolution into the Divine Monad. But all the time it is still one and the same Monad, differing only in its incarnations, throughout its ever succeeding cycles of partial or total obscuration of spirit, or partial or total obscuration of matter—two polar antitheses—as it ascends into the realms of mental spirituality, or descends into the depths of materiality.

To return to Esoteric Buddhism. The second statement is with [pg 199] regard to the enormous period intervening between the mineral epoch, on Globe A, and the man epoch, the term “man epoch” being used because of the necessity of giving a name to that fourth kingdom which follows the animal, though in truth the “man” on Globe A, during the First Round, is no man, but only his prototype, or dimensionless image, from the astral regions. The statement runs as follows:

The full development of the mineral epoch on Globe A, prepares the way for the vegetable development, and, as soon as this begins, the mineral life-impulse overflows into Globe B. Then, when the vegetable development on Globe A is complete and the animal development begins, the vegetable life-impulse overflows to Globe B, and the mineral impulse passes on to Globe C. Then finally comes the human life impulse on Globe A.286

And so it goes on for three Rounds, when it slackens, and finally stops at the threshold of our Globe, in the Fourth Round; because the human period (of the true physical men to be), the seventh, is now reached. This is evident, for as said:

... There are processes of evolution which precede the mineral kingdom, and thus a wave of evolution, indeed several waves of evolution, precede the mineral wave in its progress round the spheres.287

And now we have to quote from another article, “The Mineral Monad,” in Five Years of Theosophy:

There are seven kingdoms. The first group comprises three degrees of elementals, or nascent centres of forces—from the first stage of differentiation of [from] Mûlaprakriti [or rather Pradhâna, Primordial Homogeneous Matter] to its third degree—i.e., from full unconsciousness to semi-perception; the second or higher group embraces the kingdoms from vegetable to man; the mineral kingdom thus forming the central or turning point in the degrees of the “Monadic Essence,” considered as an evolving energy. Three stages [sub-physical] on the elemental side; the mineral kingdom; three stages on the objective physical288 side—these are the [first or preliminary] seven links of the evolutionary chain.289

“Preliminary” because they are preparatory, and though belonging in fact to the natural, they would be more correctly described as the sub-natural evolution. This process makes a halt in its stages at the third, at the threshold of the fourth stage, when it becomes, on the plane of natural evolution, the first really manward stage, thus forming [pg 200] with the three elemental kingdoms, the ten, the Sephirothal number. It is at this point that begins:

A descent of spirit into matter equivalent to an ascent in physical evolution; a reäscent from the deepest depths of materiality (the mineral) towards its status quo ante, with a corresponding dissipation of concrete organism—up to Nirvâna, the vanishing point of differentiated matter.290

Therefore it becomes evident, why that which is pertinently called in Esoteric Buddhism “wave of evolution,” and “mineral, vegetable, animal and man-impulse,” stops at the door of our Globe, at its Fourth Cycle or Round. It is at this point that the Cosmic Monad (Buddhi) will be wedded to, and become the vehicle of, the Âtmic Ray; i.e., Buddhi will awaken to an apperception of it (Âtman), and thus enter on the first step of a new septenary ladder of evolution, which will lead it eventually to the tenth, counting from the lowest upwards, of the Sephirothal Tree, the Crown.

Everything in the Universe follows analogy. “As above, so below”; Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane, repeats itself on the cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual. Thus, corresponding to the Sephirothal Crown, or Upper Triad, there are the three elemental kingdoms, which precede the mineral,291 and which, using the language of the Kabalists, answer in the cosmic differentiation to the Worlds of Form and Matter, from the Super-Spiritual to the Archetypal.

Now what is a Monad? And what relation does it bear to an Atom? The following reply is based upon the explanations given in answer to these questions in the above-cited article, “The Mineral Monad,” written by the author. To the second question it is answered:

None whatever to the atom or molecule as at present existing in the scientific conception. It can neither be compared with the microscopic organisms, once classed among polygastric infusoria, and now regarded as vegetable, and classed among algæ; nor is it quite the monas of the Peripatetics. Physically or constitutionally the Mineral Monad differs, of course, from the Human Monad, which is not physical, nor can its constitution be rendered by chemical symbols and elements.292

In short, as the Spiritual Monad is One, Universal, Boundless and Impartite, whose Rays, nevertheless, form what we, in our ignorance, call the “Individual Monads” of men, so the Mineral Monad—being at the opposite curve of the circle—is also One, and from it proceed the [pg 201] countless physical atoms, which Science is beginning to regard as individualized.

Otherwise how could one account for, and explain mathematically, the evolutionary and spiral progress of the four kingdoms? The Monad is the combination of the last two principles in man, the sixth and the seventh, and, properly speaking, the term “Human Monad” applies only to the Dual Soul (Âtmâ-Buddhi), not to its highest spiritual vivifying principle, Âtmâ, alone. But since the Spiritual Soul, if divorced from the latter (Âtmâ), could have no existence, no being, it has thus been called.... Now the Monadic, or rather Cosmic, Essence, if such a term be permitted, in the mineral, vegetable and animal, though the same throughout the series of cycles, from the lowest elemental up to the Deva kingdom, yet differs in the scale of progression. It would be very misleading to imagine a Monad as a separate Entity, trailing its slow way in a distinct path through the lower kingdoms, and after an incalculable series of transformations flowering into a human being; in short, that the Monad of a Humboldt dates back to the Monad of an atom of hornblende. Instead of saying a “Mineral Monad,” the more correct phraseology in Physical Science, which differentiates every atom, would of course have been to call it “the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called ‘the Mineral Kingdom’.”The atom, as represented in the ordinary scientific hypothesis, is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined after æons to blossom into a man. But it is a concrete manifestation of the Universal Energy, which itself has not yet become individualized; a sequential manifestation of the one Universal Monas. The Ocean of Matter does not divide into its potential and constituent drops, until the sweep of the life-impulse reaches the evolutionary stage of man-birth. The tendency towards segregation into individual Monads is gradual, and in the higher animals comes almost to the point. The Peripatetics applied the word Monas to the whole Kosmos, in the pantheistic sense; and the Occultists, while accepting this thought for convenience sake, distinguish the progressive stages of the evolution of the concrete from the abstract, by terms of which the “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal Monad,” etc., are examples. The term merely means that the tidal wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit. The “Monadic Essence” begins to imperceptibly differentiate towards individual consciousness in the vegetable kingdom. As the Monads are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the Spiritual Essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation, which properly constitutes the Monad—not the atomic aggregation, which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and the higher degrees of intelligence.293

Leibnitz conceived of the Monads as elementary and indestructible units, endowed with the power of giving and receiving with respect to other units, and thus of determining all spiritual and physical phenomena. It is he who invented the term apperception, which together with nerve- (not perception, but rather) sensation, expresses the [pg 202] state of the Monadic consciousness through all the kingdoms up to Man.

Thus it may be wrong, on strictly metaphysical lines, to call Âtmâ-Buddhi a Monad, since in the materialistic view it is dual and therefore compound. But as Matter is Spirit, and vice versâ; and since the Universe and the Deity which informs it are unthinkable apart from each other; so in the case of Âtmâ-Buddhi. The latter being the vehicle of the former, Buddhi stands in the same relation to Âtmâ, as Adam-Kadmon, the Kabalistic Logos, does to Ain Suph, or Mûlaprakriti to Parabrahman.

And now a few words more on the Moon.

What, it may be asked, are the “Lunar Monads,” just spoken of? The description of the seven Classes of Pitris will come later, but now some general explanations may be given. It must be plain to everyone that they are Monads, who, having ended their Life-Cycle on the Lunar Chain, which is inferior to the Terrestrial Chain, have incarnated on the latter. But there are some further details which may be added, though they border too closely on forbidden ground to be treated of fully. The last word of the mystery is divulged only to Adepts, but it may be stated that our satellite is only the gross body of its invisible principles. Seeing then that there are seven Earths, so there are seven Moons, the last alone being visible; the same for the Sun, whose visible body is called a Mâyâ, a reflection, just as man's body is. “The real Sun and the real Moon are as invisible as the real man,” says an Occult maxim.

And it may be remarked, en passant, that those Ancients were not so foolish after all who first started the idea of “Seven Moons.” For though this conception is now taken solely as an astronomical measure of time, in a very materialized form, yet underlying the husk there can still be recognized the traces of a profoundly philosophical idea.

In reality the Moon is the satellite of the Earth in one respect only, viz., that physically the Moon revolves round the Earth. But in every other respect, it is the Earth which is the satellite of the Moon, and not vice versâ. Startling as the statement may seem, it is not without confirmation from scientific knowledge. It is evidenced by the tides, by the cyclic changes in many forms of disease, which coincide with the lunar phases; it can be traced in the growth of plants, and is very marked in the phenomena of human conception and gestation. The importance of the Moon and its influence on the Earth were recognized in every ancient religion, notably the Jewish, and have been remarked [pg 203] by many observers of psychical and physical phenomena. But, so far as Science knows, the Earth's action on the Moon is confined to the physical attraction, which causes her to circle in her orbit. And should an objector insist, that this fact alone is sufficient evidence that the Moon is truly the Earth's satellite on other planes of action, one may reply by asking whether a mother, who walks round and round her child's cradle, keeping watch over the infant, is the subordinate of her child or dependent upon it? Though in one sense she is its satellite, yet she is certainly older and more fully developed than the child she watches.

It is, then, the Moon that plays the largest and most important part, as well in the formation of the Earth itself, as in the peopling thereof with human beings. The Lunar Monads, or Pitris, the ancestors of man, become in reality man himself. They are the Monads, who enter on the cycle of evolution on Globe A, and who, passing round the Chain of Globes, evolve the human form, as has just been shown. At the beginning of the human stage of the Fourth Round on this Globe, they “ooze out” their astral doubles, from the “ape-like” forms which they had evolved in the Third Round. And it is this subtle, finer form, which serves as the model round which Nature builds physical man. These Monads, or Divine Sparks, are thus the Lunar Ancestors, the Pitris themselves; for these Lunar Spirits have to become “men,” in order that their Monads may reach a higher plane of activity and self-consciousness, i.e., the plane of the Mânasa-Putras, those who endow the “senseless” shells, created and informed by the Pitris, with “mind,” in the latter part of the Third Root-Race.

In the same way, the Monads, or Egos, of the men of the Seventh Round of our Earth, after our own Globes A, B, C, D, etc., parting with their life-energy, will have informed, and thereby called to life, other laya-centres, destined to live and act on a still higher plane of being—in the same way will the Terrene Ancestors create those who will become their superiors.

It now becomes plain, that there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary scheme for the formation of the three periodical Upâdhis; or rather three separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point. These are the Monadic (or Spiritual), the Intellectual, and the Physical Evolutions. These three are the finite aspects, or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion, of Âtmâ, the seventh, the One Reality.

[pg 204]

1. The Monadic, as the name implies, is concerned with the growth and development into still higher phases of activity of the Monads, in conjunction with:

2. The Intellectual, represented by the Mânasa-Dhyânis (the Solar Devas, or the Agnishvatta Pitris), the “givers of intelligence and consciousness” to man, and:

3. The Physical, represented by the Chhâyâs of the Lunar Pitris, round which Nature has concreted the present physical body. This body serves as the vehicle for the “growth,” to use a misleading word, and the transformations—through Manas, and owing to the accumulation of experiences—of the Finite into the Infinite, of the Transient into the Eternal and Absolute.

Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and guided by different sets of the highest Dhyânis or Logoi. Each is represented in the constitution of Man, the Microcosm of the great Macrocosm; and it is the union of these three streams in him, which makes him the complex being he now is.

Nature, the physical evolutionary Power, could never evolve Intelligence unaided; she can only create “senseless forms,” as will be seen in our Anthropogenesis. The Lunar Monads cannot progress, for they have not yet had sufficient touch with the forms created by “Nature,” to allow of their accumulating experiences through its means. It is the Mânasa-Dhyânis who fill up the gap, and they represent the evolutionary power of Intelligence and Mind, the link between Spirit and Matter—in this Round.

Also it must be borne in mind that the Monads which enter upon the evolutionary cycle upon Globe A, in the first Round, are in very different stages of development. Hence the matter becomes somewhat complicated. Let us recapitulate.

The most developed, the Lunar Monads, reach the human germ-stage in the First Round; become terrestrial, though very ethereal, human beings towards the end of the Third Round, remaining on the Globe through the “obscuration” period, as the seed for future mankind in the Fourth Round, and thus become the pioneers of Humanity at the beginning of this, the present Fourth Round. Others reach the human stage only during later Rounds, i.e., in the second, third or first half of the Fourth Round. And finally the most retarded of all—i.e., those still occupying animal forms after the middle turning-point of the Fourth Round—will not become men at all during this Manvantara. [pg 205] They will reach to the verge of Humanity only at the close of the Seventh Round, to be, in their turn, ushered into a new Chain, after Pralaya, by older pioneers, the progenitors of Humanity, or the Seed-Humanity (Shishta), viz., the men who will be at the head of all at the end of these Rounds.

The student scarcely needs any further explanation on the part played by the Fourth Globe and the Fourth Round in the scheme of evolution.

From the preceding diagrams, which are applicable, mutatis mutandis, to Rounds, Globes or Races, it will be seen that the fourth member of a series occupies a unique position. Unlike the others, the Fourth has no “sister” Globe on the same plane as itself, and it thus forms the fulcrum of the “balance” represented by the whole Chain. It is the sphere of final evolutionary adjustments, the world of the Karmic scales, the Hall of Justice, where the balance is struck which determines the future course of the Monad during the remainder of its incarnations in the Cycle. And therefore is it that, after this central turning-point has been passed in the Great Cycle—i.e., after the middle point of the Fourth Race in the Fourth Round on our Globe—no more Monads can enter the human kingdom. The door is closed for this Cycle, and the balance struck. For were it otherwise—had there been a new soul created for each of the countless milliards of human beings that have passed away, and had there been no reïncarnation—it would become difficult indeed to provide room for the disembodied “spirits”; nor could the origin and cause of suffering ever be accounted for. It is the ignorance of the Occult tenets, and the enforcement of false conceptions under the guise of religious education, which have created Materialism and Atheism as a protest against the asserted divine order of things.

The only exceptions to the rule just stated are the “dumb races,” whose Monads are already within the human stage, in virtue of the fact that these “animals” are later than, and even half descended from, man; their last descendants being the anthropoid and other apes. These “human presentments” are in truth only the distorted copies of the early humanity. But this will receive full attention in the next volume.

As the Commentary, broadly rendered, says:

1. Every Form on earth, and every Speck [atom] in Space strives in its efforts towards self-formation to follow the model placed for it in the “Heavenly Man.”... Its (the atom's) involution and evolution, its [pg 206]external and internal growth and development, have all one and the same object—Man; Man, as the highest physical and ultimate form on this Earth; the “Monad,” in its absolute totality and awakened condition—as the culmination of the divine incarnations on Earth.

2. The Dhyânis [Pitris] are those who have evolved their Bhuta [Doubles] from themselves, which Rûpa [Form] has become the vehicle of Monads [Seventh and Sixth principles] that had completed their cycle of transmigration in the three preceding Kalpas [Rounds]. Then, they [the Astral Doubles] became the men of the first Human Race of the Round. But they were not complete, and were senseless.

This will be explained in the sequel. Meanwhile man—or rather his Monad—has existed on Earth from the very beginning of this Round. But, up to our own Fifth Race, the external shapes which covered those divine Astral Doubles, have changed and consolidated with every sub-race; the form and physical structure of the fauna changing at the same time, as they had to be adapted to the ever-changing conditions of life on this Globe, during the geological periods of its formative cycle. And thus will they go on changing with every Root-Race, and every chief sub-race, down to the last one of the Seventh in this Round.

3. The inner, now concealed, man, was then [in the beginnings] the external man. The progeny of the Dhyânis [Pitris], he was “the son like unto his father.” Like the lotus, whose external shape assumes gradually the form of the model within itself, so did the form of man in the beginning evolve from within without. After the cycle in which man began to procreate his species after the fashion of the present animal kingdom, it became the reverse. The human fœtus follows now in its transformations all the forms that the physical frame of man assumed, throughout the three Kalpas [Rounds], during the tentative efforts at plastic formation around the Monad, by senseless, because imperfect, matter, in her blind wanderings. In the present age, the physical embryo is a plant, a reptile, an animal, before it finally becomes man, evolving within himself his own ethereal counterpart, in his turn. In the beginning it was that counterpart [astral man] which, being senseless, got entangled in the meshes of matter.

But this “man” belongs to the Fourth Round. As shown, the Monad had passed through, journeyed and been imprisoned in, every transitional form, throughout every kingdom of nature, during the three preceding Rounds. But the Monad which becomes human, is not the Man. In this Round—with the exception of the highest mammals after man, [pg 207] the anthropoids destined to die out in this our race, when their Monads will be liberated and pass into the astral human forms, or the highest elementals, of the Sixth and the Seventh Races, and then into the lowest human forms in the Fifth Round—no units of any of the kingdoms are animated any longer by Monads destined to become human in their next stage, but only by the lower elementals of their respective realms. These “elementals” will become human Monads, in their turn, only at the next great planetary Manvantara.

And in fact the last human Monad incarnated before the beginning of the Fifth Root-Race. Nature never repeats herself; therefore the anthropoids of our day have not existed at any time since the middle of the Miocene period, when, like all cross breeds, they began to show a tendency, more and more marked as time went on, to return to the type of their first parent, the gigantic black and yellow Lemuro-Atlantean. To search for the “missing link” is useless. To the Scientists of the closing Sixth Root-Race, millions and millions of years hence, our modern races, or rather their fossils, will appear as those of small insignificant apes—an extinct species of the genus homo.

Such anthropoids form an exception because they were not intended by Nature, but are the direct product and creation of “senseless” man. The Hindûs attribute a divine origin to the apes and monkeys, because the men of the Third Race were gods from another plane, who had become “senseless” mortals. This subject had already been touched upon in Isis Unveiled, twelve years ago, as plainly as was then possible. The reader is there referred to the Brâhmans, if he would know the reason of the regard they have for the monkeys.

He [the reader] would perhaps learn—were the Brâhman to judge him worthy of an explanation—that the Hindû sees in the ape but what Manu desired he should: the transformation of species most directly connected with that of the human family—a bastard branch engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the latter. He might learn, further, that in the eyes of the educated “heathen”the spiritual or inner man is one thing, and his terrestrial physical casket another. That physical nature, that great combination of correlations of physical forces, ever creeping on towards perfection, has to avail herself of the material at hand; she models and remodels as she proceeds, and, finishing her crowning work in man, presents him alone as a fit tabernacle for the overshadowing of the Divine Spirit.294

Moreover, a German scientific work is mentioned in a footnote on the same page. It says that:

A Hanoverian Scientist has recently published a work entitled, Ueber die [pg 208]Auflösung der Arten durch Natürliche Zucht-wahl, in which he shows, with great ingenuity, that Darwin was wholly mistaken in tracing man back to the ape. On the contrary, he maintains that it is the ape which is evolved from man. He shows that, in the beginning, mankind were, morally and physically, the types and prototypes of our present race and of our human dignity, by their beauty of form, regularity of feature, cranial development, nobility of sentiments, heroic impulses, and grandeur of ideal conceptions. This is a purely Brâhmanic, Buddhistic and Kabalistic doctrine. His book is copiously illustrated with diagrams, tables, etc. It asserts that the gradual debasement and degradation of man, morally and physically, can be readily traced throughout ethnological transformations down to our time. And, as one portion has already degenerated into apes, so the civilized man of the present day will at last, under the action of the inevitable law of necessity, be also succeeded by like descendants. If we may judge of the future by the actual present, it certainly does seem possible that so unspiritual and materialistic a race should end as Simia rather than as Seraphs.

But though the apes descend from man, it is certainly not the fact that the human Monad, which has once reached the level of humanity, ever incarnates again in the form of an animal.

The cycle of “metempsychosis” for the human Monad is closed, for we are in the Fourth Round and the Fifth Root-Race. The reader will have to bear in mind—at any rate one who has made himself acquainted with Esoteric Buddhism—that the Stanzas which follow in this volume and the next speak of the evolution in our Fourth Round only. The latter is the cycle of the turning-point, after which, matter, having reached its lowest depths, begins to strive onward and to become spiritualized, with every new race and with every fresh cycle. Therefore the student must take care not to see contradiction where there is none, for in Esoteric Buddhism Rounds are spoken of in general, while here only the Fourth, or our present Round, is meant. Then it was the work of formation; now it is that of reformation and evolutionary perfection.

Finally, to close this digression anent various, but unavoidable, misconceptions, we must refer to a statement in Esoteric Buddhism, which has produced a very fatal impression upon the minds of many Theosophists. One unfortunate sentence, from the work just referred to, is constantly brought forward to prove the materialism of the doctrine. The author, referring to the progress of organisms on the Globes, says that:

The mineral kingdom will no more develop the vegetable ... than the Earth was able to develop man from the ape, till it received an impulse.295

[pg 209]

Whether this sentence renders the thought of the author literally, or is simply, as we believe it is, a lapsus calami, may remain an open question.

It is really with surprise that we have ascertained the fact, that Esoteric Buddhism was so little understood by some Theosophists, as to have led them into the belief that it thoroughly supported Darwinian evolution, and especially the theory of the descent of man from a pithecoid ancestor. As one member writes: “I suppose you realize that three-fourths of Theosophists and even outsiders imagine that, as far as the evolution of man is concerned, Darwinism and Theosophy kiss one another.” Nothing of the kind was ever realized, nor is there any great warrant for it, so far as we know, in Esoteric Buddhism. It has been repeatedly stated, that evolution as taught by Manu and Kapila was the groundwork of the modern teachings, but neither Occultism nor Theosophy has ever supported the wild theories of the present Darwinists—least of all the descent of man from an ape. Of this, more hereafter. But one has only to turn to p. 47 of the work named, to find the statement that:

Man belongs to a kingdom distinctly separate from that of the animals.

With such a plain and unequivocal statement before him, it is very strange that any careful student should have been so misled, unless he is prepared to charge the author with a gross contradiction.

Every Round repeats the evolutionary work of the preceding Round, on a higher scale. With the exception of some higher anthropoids, as just mentioned, the Monadic inflow, or inner evolution, is at an end till the next Manvantara. It can never be too often repeated that the full-blown human Monads have to be first disposed of, before the new crop of candidates appears on this Globe at the beginning of the next Cycle. Thus there is a lull; and this is why, during the Fourth Round, man appears on Earth earlier than any animal creation, as will be described.

But it is still urged that the author of Esoteric Buddhism has “preached Darwinism” all along. Certain passages would undoubtedly seem to lend countenance to this inference. Besides which, the Occultists themselves are ready to concede partial correctness to the Darwinian hypothesis, in later details, bye-laws of evolution, and after the midway point of the Fourth Race. Of that which has taken place, Physical Science can really know nothing, for such matters lie entirely outside of its sphere of investigation. But what the Occultists have never admitted, nor will they ever admit, is that man was an ape in [pg 210]this or any other Round; or that he ever could be one, however much he may have been “ape-like.” This is vouched for by the very authority from whom the author of Esoteric Buddhism got his information.

Thus to those who confront the Occultists with these lines from the above-named volume:

It is enough to show that we may as reasonably—and that we must, if we would talk about these matters at all—conceive a life-impulse giving birth to mineral forms, as of the same sort of impulse concerned to raise a race of apes into a race of rudimentary men.

To those who bring this passage forward as showing “decided Darwinism,” the Occultists answer by pointing to the explanation of the Master, Mr. Sinnett's Teacher, which would contradict these lines, were they written in the spirit attributed to them. A copy of this letter was sent to the writer, together with others, two years ago (1886), with additional marginal remarks, to quote from, in the Secret Doctrine.

It begins by considering the difficulty experienced by the Western student, in reconciling some facts, previously given, with the evolution of man from the animal, i.e., from the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, and advises the student to hold to the doctrine of analogy and correspondences. Then it touches upon the mystery of the Devas, and even Gods, having to pass through states, which it was agreed to refer to as “Immetallization, Inherbation, Inzoönization and finally Incarnation,” and explains this by hinting at the necessity of failures even in the ethereal races of Dhyân Chohans. Concerning this it says:

“These ‘failures’ are too far progressed and spiritualized to be thrown back forcibly from Dhyân Chohanship into the vortex of a new primordial evolution through the lower kingdoms....”

After which, a hint only is given about the mystery contained in the allegory of the fallen Asuras, which will be expanded and explained in Volume II. When Karma has reached them at the stage of human evolution:

“They will have to drink it to the last drop in the bitter cup of retribution. Then they become an active force and commingle with the elementals, the progressed entities of the pure animal kingdom, to develop little by little the full type of humanity.”

These Dhyân Chohans, as we see, do not pass through the three kingdoms as do the lower Pitris; nor do they incarnate in man until the Third Root Race. Thus, as the teaching stands:

“Round I. Man in the First Round and First Race on Globe D, our [pg 211]Earth, was an ethereal being (a Lunar Dhyâni, as man), non-intelligent but super-spiritual; and correspondingly, on the law of analogy, in the First Race of the Fourth Round. In each of the subsequent races and sub-races, ... he grows more and more into an encased or incarnate being, but still preponderatingly ethereal.... He is sexless, and, like the animal and vegetable, he develops monstrous bodies correspondential with his coarser surroundings.

“Round II. He [man] is still gigantic and ethereal, but growing firmer and more condensed in body; a more physical man yet still less intelligent than spiritual (1), for mind is a slower and more difficult evolution than is the physical frame....

“Round III. He has now a perfectly concrete or compacted body, at first the form of a giant-ape, and now more intelligent, or rather cunning, than spiritual. For, on the downward arc, he has now reached a point where his primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent mentality (2). In the last half of the Third Round, his gigantic stature decreases, and his body improves in texture, and he becomes a more rational being, though still more an ape than a Deva.... [All this is almost exactly repeated in the Third Root-Race of the Fourth Round.]

“Round IV. Intellect has an enormous development in this Round. The [hitherto] dumb races acquire our [present] human speech on this Globe, on which, from the Fourth Race, language is perfected and knowledge increases. At this half-way point of the Fourth Round [as of the Fourth, or Atlantean, Root-Race], humanity passes the axial point of the minor manvantaric cycle ... the world teeming with the results of intellectual activity and spiritual decrease....”

This is from the authentic letter; what follows are the later remarks and additional explanations traced by the same hand in the form of footnotes.

“(1) ... The original letter contained general teaching—a ‘bird's-eye view’—and particularized nothing.... To speak of ‘physical man,’while limiting the statement to the early Rounds, would be drifting back to the miraculous and instantaneous ‘coats of skin.’... The first ‘Nature,’ the first ‘body,’ the first ‘mind’ on the first plane of perception, on the first Globe in the first Round, is what was meant. For Karma and evolution have:

‘... centred in our make such strange extremes,

From different Natures296 marvellously mixed ...’

“(2) Restore: he has now reached the point [by analogy, and as the [pg 212]Third Root Race in the Fourth Round], where his [the angel-man's] primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent human mentality, and you have the true version on your thumb-nail....”

These are the words of the Teacher; text, words and sentences in brackets, and explanatory footnotes. It stands to reason that there must be an enormous difference in such terms as “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” “materiality” and “spirituality,” when the same terms are applied to different planes of being and perception. All this must be taken in its relative sense. And therefore there is little to be wondered at, if, left to his own speculations, an author who, however eager to learn, was yet quite inexperienced in these abstruse teachings, has fallen into an error. Nor was the difference between the Rounds and the Races sufficiently defined in the letters received, since nothing of the kind had been required before, as the ordinary Eastern disciple would have found out the difference in a moment. Moreover, to quote from a letter of the Master:

“The teachings were imparted under protest.... They were, so to say, smuggled goods ... and when I remained face to face with only one correspondent, the other, Mr. ... had so far tossed all the cards into confusion, that little remained to be said without trespassing upon law.”

Theosophists “whom it may concern” will understand what is meant.

The outcome of all this is, that nothing had ever been said in the letters to warrant the assurance, that the Occult doctrine has ever taught, or any Adept believed in, unless metaphorically, the preposterous modern theory of the descent of man from a common ancestor with the ape—an anthropoid of the actual animal kind. To this day the world is more full of ape-like men than the woods are of men-like apes. The ape is sacred in India because its origin is well known to the Initiates, though concealed under a thick veil of allegory. Hanumâna is the son of Pavana (Vâyu, “God of the wind”) by Anjanâ, wife of a monster called Kesarî, though his genealogy varies. The reader who bears this in mind, will find in Volume II, passim, the whole explanation of this ingenious allegory. The “men” of the Third Race (who separated) were “Gods,” by their spirituality and purity, though senseless, and as yet destitute of mind, as men.

These “men” of the Third Race, the ancestors of the Atlanteans, were just such ape-like, intellectually senseless, giants as were those beings, who, during the Third Round, represented Humanity. Morally irresponsible, it was these Third Race “men” who, through promiscuous [pg 213] connection with animal species lower than themselves, created that missing link which became ages later (in the Tertiary period only), the remote ancestor of the real ape, as we find it now in the pithecoid family.

And if this is found clashing with the statement which shows the animal later than man, then the reader is asked to bear in mind that the placental mammal only is meant. In those days, there were animals of which Zoölogy does not even dream in our own; and the modes of reproduction were not identical with the notions which modern Physiology has upon the subject. It is not altogether convenient to touch upon such questions in public, but there is no contradiction or impossibility in this whatever.

Thus the earlier teachings, however unsatisfactory, vague and fragmentary, did not teach the evolution of “man” from the “ape.” Nor does the author of Esoteric Buddhism assert it anywhere in his work in so many words; but, owing to his inclination towards Modern Science, he uses language which might perhaps justify such an inference. The man who preceded the Fourth, the Atlantean, Race, however much he may have looked physically like a “gigantic ape”—“the counterfeit of man who hath not the life of a man”—was still a thinking and already a speaking man. The Lemuro-Atlantean was a highly civilized Race, and if one accepts tradition, which is better history than the speculative fiction which now passes under that name, he was higher than we are with all our sciences and the degraded civilization of the day: at any rate, the Lemuro-Atlantean of the closing Third Race was so.

And now we may return to the Stanzas.

Stanza VI.—Continued.

5. At the Fourth297 (a), the Sons are told to create their Images. One Third refuses. Two298 obey.

The Curse is pronounced (b); they will be born in the Fourth,299 suffer and cause suffering. This is the First War (c).

The full meaning of this Shloka can only be fully comprehended after reading the additional detailed explanations, in the Anthropogenesis and its Commentaries, in Volume II. Between this Shloka and Shloka 4, extend long ages; and there now gleams the dawn and [pg 214] sunrise of another æon. The drama enacted on our planet is at the beginning of its fourth act; but for a clearer comprehension of the whole play the reader will have to turn back before he can proceed onward. For this verse belongs to the general Cosmogony given in the archaic volumes, whereas Volume II will give a detailed account of the “creation,” or rather formation, of the first human beings, followed by the second humanity, and then by the third; or, as they are called, the First, Second, and the Third Root-Races. As the solid Earth began by being a ball of liquid fire, of fiery dust and its protoplasmic phantom, so did man.

(a) That which is meant by the qualification the “Fourth,” is explained as the Fourth Round, only on the authority of the Commentaries. It can equally mean Fourth Eternity as Fourth Round, or even our Fourth Globe. For, as will repeatedly be shown, the latter is the fourth sphere, on the fourth or lowest plane of material life. And it so happens that we are in the Fourth Round, at the middle point of which the perfect equilibrium between Spirit and Matter had to take place.

It was, as we shall see, at this period—during the highest point of civilization and knowledge, and also of human intellectuality, of the Fourth, Atlantean Race—that, owing to the final crisis of the physiologico-spiritual adjustment of the races, humanity branched off into two diametrically opposite paths: the Right- and the Left-hand Paths of Knowledge or Vidyâ. In the words of the Commentary:

Thus were the germs of the White and the Black Magic sown in those days. The seeds lay latent for some time, to sprout only during the early period of the Fifth [our Race].

Says the Commentary explaining the Shloka:

The Holy Youths [the Gods] refused to multiply and create species after their likeness, after their kind. “They are not fit Forms [Rûpas] for us. They have to grow.” They refuse to enter the Chhâyâs [Shadows or Images] of their inferiors. Thus had selfish feeling prevailed from the beginning, even among the Gods, and they fell under the eye of the Karmic Lipikas.

They had to suffer for it in later births. How the punishment reached the Gods will be seen in Volume II.

It is a universal tradition that, before the physiological “Fall,” propagation of one's kind, whether human or animal, took place through the Will of the Creators, or of their progeny. This was the [pg 215] Fall of Spirit into generation, not the Fall of mortal Man. It has already been stated that, to become self-conscious, Spirit must pass through every cycle of being, culminating in its highest point on earth in Man. Spirit per se is an unconscious negative abstraction. Its purity is inherent, not acquired by merit; hence, as already shown, to become the highest Dhyân Chohan, it is necessary for each Ego to attain to full self-consciousness as a human, i.e., conscious, being, which is synthesized for us in Man. The Jewish Kabalists, arguing that no Spirit can belong to the divine Hierarchy unless Ruach (Spirit) is united to Nephesh (Living Soul), only repeat the Eastern Esoteric teaching:

A Dhyâni has to be an Âtmâ-Buddhi; once the Buddhi-Manas breaks loose from the immortal Âtmâ, of which it (Buddhi) is the vehicle, Âtman passes into Non-Being, which is Absolute Being.

This means that the purely Nirvânic state is a passage of Spirit back to the ideal abstraction of Be-ness, which has no relation to the plane on which our Universe is accomplishing its cycle.

(b) “The Curse is pronounced” does not mean, in this instance, that any Personal Being, God, or Superior Spirit, pronounced it, but simply that the cause, which could but create bad results, had been generated; and that the effects of this Karmic cause could lead the Beings that counteracted the laws of Nature, and thus impeded her legitimate progress, only to bad incarnations, hence to suffering.

(c) “There were many Wars,” all referring to struggles of adjustment, spiritual, cosmical and astronomical, but chiefly to the mystery of the evolution of man, as he is now. The Powers or pure Essences that were “told to create,” relate to a mystery explained, as already said, elsewhere. It is not only one of the most hidden secrets of Nature—that of generation, over whose solution the Embryologists have vainly put their heads together—but likewise a divine function which involves that great religious, or rather dogmatic, mystery, the so-called “Fall” of the Angels. Satan and his rebellious host, when the meaning of the allegory is explained, will thus prove to have refused to create physical man, only to become the direct Saviours and Creators of divine Man. The symbolical teaching is more than mystical and religious, it is purely scientific, as will be seen later on. For, instead of remaining a mere blind functioning medium, impelled and guided by fathomless Law, the “rebellious” Angel claimed and enforced his right of independent judgment and will, his right of free-agency [pg 216] and responsibility, since Man and Angel are alike under Karmic Law.

Explaining Kabalistic views, the author of New Aspects of Life says of the Fallen Angels that:

According to the symbolical teaching, Spirit, from being simply a functionary agent of God, became volitional in its developed and developing action; and, substituting its own will for the divine desire in its regard, so fell. Hence the kingdom and reign of spirits and spiritual action, which flow from and are the product of spirit-volition, are outside, and contrasted with, and in contradiction to, the kingdom of souls and divine action.300

So far, so good; but what does the author mean by saying:

When man was created, he was human in constitution, with human affections, human hopes and aspirations. From this state he fell—into the brute and savage.

This is diametrically opposite to our Eastern teaching, and even to the Kabalistic notion, so far as we understand it, and to the Bible itself. This looks like Corporealism and Substantialism colouring Positive Philosophy, though it is rather difficult to feel quite sure of the author's meaning. A fall, however, “from the natural into the supernatural and the animal”—supernatural meaning the purely spiritual in this case—implies what we suggest.

The New Testament speaks of one of these “Wars,” as follows:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon; and the Dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And the great Dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.301

The Kabalistic version of the same story is given in the Codex Nazaræus, the scripture of the Nazarenes, the real mystic Christians of John the Baptist, and the Initiates of Christos. Bahak Zivo, the “Father of the Genii,” is ordered to construct creatures—to “create.” But, as he is “ignorant of Orcus,” he fails to do so, and calls in Fetahil, a still purer spirit, to his aid, who fails still worse. This is a repetition of the failure of the “Fathers,” the Lords of Light, who fail one after the other.302

We will now quote from our earlier volumes:303

Then steps on the stage of creation the Spirit304 (of the Earth so-called, or the [pg 217]Soul, Psyche, which St. James calls “devilish”), the lower portion of the Anima Mundi or Astral Light. [See the close of this Shloka.] With the Nazarenes and the Gnostics this Spirit was feminine. Thus the Spirit of the Earth, perceiving that for Fetahil,305 the newest man (the latest), the splendour was “changed,” and that for splendour existed “decrease and damage,” she awakes Karabtanos,306 “who was frantic and without sense and judgment,” and says to him: “Arise, see, the Splendour (Light) of the Newest Man (Fetahil) has failed (to produce or create men), the decrease of this Splendour is visible. Rise up, come with thy Mother (the Spiritus) and free thee from limits by which thou art held, and those more ample than the whole world.” After which, follows the union of the frantic and blind matter, guided by the insinuations of the Spirit (not the Divine Breath but the AstralSpirit, which by its double essence is already tainted with matter); and the offer of the Mother being accepted, the Spiritus conceives “Seven Figures,” and the Seven Stellars (Planets), which represent also the seven capital sins, the progeny of an Astral Soul, separated from its divine source (spirit), and matter, the blind demon of concupiscence. Seeing this, Fetahil extends his hand towards the abyss of matter, and says: “Let the earth exist, just as the abode of the Powers has existed.” Dipping his hand in the chaos, which he condenses, he creates our planet.

Then the Codex proceeds to tell how Bahak Zivo was separated from the Spiritus, and the Genii or Angels from the Rebels.307 Then (the greatest) Mano,308 who dwells with the greatest Ferho, calls Kebar Zivo (known also by the name of Nebat Iavar bar Iufin Ifafin), the Helm and Vine of the Food of Life309—he being the third Life, and commiserating the rebellious and foolish Genii, on account of the magnitude of their ambition, says: “Lord of the Genii310 (Æons), see what the Genii (the Rebellious Angels) do, and about what they are consulting.311 They say: ‘Let us call forth the world, and let us call the “Powers” into existence. The Genii are the Princes (Principes), the Sons of Light, but Thou art the Messenger of Life’.”

And in order to counteract the influence of the seven “badly disposed” principles the progeny of Spiritus, Kebar Zivo (or Cabar Zio), the mighty Lord of Splendour, produces seven other lives (the cardinal virtues), who shine in their own form and light “from on high,”312 and thus reëstablish the balance between good and evil, light and darkness.

Here one finds a repetition of the early allegorical dual systems, such [pg 218] as the Zoroastrian, and detects a germ of the dogmatic and dualistic religions of the future, a germ which has grown into such a luxuriant tree in ecclesiastical Christianity. It is already the outline of the two “Supremes”—God and Satan. But in the Stanzas no such idea exists.

Most of the Western Christian Kabalists—preëminently Éliphas Lévi—in their desire to reconcile the Occult Sciences with Church Dogmas, did their best to make of the “Astral Light” only and preeminently the Plerôma of the early Church Fathers, the abode of the Hosts of the Fallen Angels, of the Archôns and Powers. But the Astral Light, though only the lower aspect of the Absolute, is still dual. It is the Anima Mundi, and ought never to be viewed otherwise, except for Kabalistic purposes. The difference which exists between its “Light” and its “Living Fire,” ought ever to be present in the mind of the Seer and the Psychic. The higher aspect of this “Light,” without which only creatures of matter can be produced, is this Living Fire, and its Seventh Principle. It is stated in Isis Unveiled, in a complete description of it:

The Astral Light or Anima Mundi is dual and bi-sexual. The (ideal) male part of it is purely divine and spiritual, it is Wisdom, it is Spirit or Purusha; while the female portion (the Spiritus of the Nazarenes) is tainted, in one sense, with matter, is indeed matter, and therefore is evil already. It is the life-principle of every living creature, and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic perisprit, to men, animals, fowls of the air, and everything living. Animals have only the latent germ of the highest immortal soul in them. This latter will develop only after a series of countless evolutions; the doctrine of which evolutions is contained in the Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; a beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.313”

The seven principles of the Eastern Initiates had not been explained when Isis Unveiled was written, but only the three Kabalistic Faces of the semi-exoteric Kabalah.314 But these contain the description of the mystic natures of the first Group of Dhyân Chohans in the regimen ignis, the region and “rule (or government) of fire,” divided into three classes, synthesized by the first, which makes four or the “Tetraktys.” If one studies the commentaries attentively, he will find the same progression in the angelic natures, viz., from the passive down to the active; the last of these Beings are as near to the Ahamkâra Element—the region or plane wherein Egoship, or the feeling of I-am-ness, is beginning to be defined—as the first are near to the undifferentiated [pg 219] Essence. The former are Arûpa, incorporeal; the latter, Rûpa, corporeal.

In Volume II of the same work,315 the philosophical systems of the Gnostics and the primitive Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes and the Ebionites, are fully considered. They show the views held in those days, outside the circle of Mosaic Jews, about Jehovah. He was identified by all the Gnostics with the evil, rather than with the good principle. For them, he was Ilda-Baoth, the “Son of Darkness,” whose mother, Sophia Achamôth, was the daughter of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom—the female Holy Ghost of the early Christians—Âkâsha; Sophia Achamôth personifying the Lower Astral Light or Ether. The Astral Light stands in the same relation to Âkâsha and Anima Mundi, as Satan stands to the Deity. They are one and the same thing seen from two aspects, the spiritual and the psychic—the super-ethereal, or connecting link between matter and pure spirit—and the physical.316 Ilda-Baoth—a compound name, made up of Ilda (ילד), child, and Baoth; the latter from בהוצ an egg, and בהות, chaos, emptiness, void, or desolation; or the Child born in the Egg of Chaos, like Brahmâ—or Jehovah, is simply one of the Elohim, the Seven Creative Spirits, and one of the lower Sephiroth. Ilda-Baoth produces from himself seven other Gods, “Stellar Spirits,” or the Lunar Ancestors,317 for they are all the same.318 They are all in his own image, the “Spirits of the Face,” and the reflections one of the other, who become darker and more material, as they successively recede from their originator. They also inhabit seven regions disposed like a stair, for its steps mount and descend the scale of spirit and matter.319 With Pagans and Christians, with Hindûs and Chaldeans, with Greek as with Roman Catholics—the texts varying slightly in their interpretations—they all were the Genii of the seven planets, and of the seven planetary spheres of our septenary Chain, of which Earth is the lowest. This connects the “Stellar” and “Lunar” Spirits with the higher planetary Angels, and the Saptarshis, the Seven Rishis of the Stars, [pg 220] of the Hindûs—as subordinate Angels, or Messengers, to these Rishis, their emanations, on the descending scale. Such, in the opinion of the philosophical Gnostics, were the God and the Archangels now worshipped by the Christians! The “Fallen Angels” and the legend of the “War in Heaven” are thus purely pagan in their origin, and come from India, viá Persia and Chaldea. The only reference to them in the Christian canon is found in Revelation xii, as quoted a few pages back.

Thus “Satan,” once he ceases to be viewed in the superstitious, dogmatic, unphilosophical spirit of the Churches, grows into the grandiose image of one who makes of a terrestrial, a divine Man; who gives him, throughout the long cycle of Mahâkalpa, the law of the Spirit of Life, and makes him free from the Sin of Ignorance, hence of Death.

6. The Older Wheels rotated downward and upward (a).... The Mother's Spawn filled the whole.320 There were Battles fought between the Creators and the Destroyers, and Battles fought for Space; the Seed appearing and reäppearing continuously (b).321

(a) Here, having finished for the time being with our side-issues—which, however they may break the flow of the narrative, are necessary for the elucidation of the whole scheme—we must return once more to Cosmogony. The phrase “Older Wheels” refers to the Worlds, or Globes, of our Chain as they were during the previous Rounds. The present Stanza, when explained esoterically, is found embodied entirely in Kabalistic works. Therein will be found the very history of the evolution of those countless Globes, which evolve after a periodical Pralaya, rebuilt from old material into new forms. The previous Globes disintegrate and reäppear, transformed and perfected for a new phase of life. In the Kabalah, worlds are compared to sparks which fly from under the hammer of the great Architect—Law, the Law which rules all the smaller Creators.

The following comparative diagram shows the identity between the two systems, the Kabalistic and the Eastern. The three upper are the three higher planes of consciousness, revealed and explained in both [pg 221] schools only to the Initiates; the lower represent the four lower planes—the lowest being our plane, or the visible Universe.

These seven planes correspond to the seven states of consciousness in man. It remains with him to attune the three higher states in himself to the three higher planes in Kosmos. But before he can attempt to attune, he must awaken the three “seats” to life and activity. And how many are capable of bringing themselves to even a superficial comprehension of Âtmâ Vidyâ (Spirit-Knowledge), or what is called by the Sufis, Rohanee!322

[pg 222]

(b) “The Seed appearing and reäppearing continuously.” Here “Seed” stands for the “World-Germ,” viewed by Science as material particles in a highly attenuated condition, but in Occult Physics as “spiritual particles,” i.e., supersensuous matter existing in a state of primeval differentiation. To see and appreciate the difference—the immense gulf that separates terrestrial matter from the finer grades of supersensuous matter—every Astronomer, every Chemist and Physicist ought to be a Psychometer, to say the least; he ought to be able to sense for himself that difference in which he now refuses to believe. Mrs. Elizabeth Denton, one of the most learned, and also one of the most materialistic and sceptical women of her age—the wife of Professor Denton, the well-known American Geologist, and the author of The Soul of Things—was, in spite of her scepticism, one of the most wonderful psychometers. This is what she describes in one of her experiments. A particle of a meteorite was placed on her forehead, in an envelope, and the lady, not being aware of what it contained, said:

What a difference between that which we recognize as matter here and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the elements are so coarse and so angular, I wonder that we can endure it at all, much more that we can desire to continue our present relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined, they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which characterize the elements here, that I can but regard that as by so much the more than this the real existence.323

In Theogony, every Seed is an ethereal organism, from which evolves later on a celestial Being, a God.

In the “Beginning,” that which is called in mystic phraseology “Cosmic Desire” evolves into Absolute Light. Now light without any shadow would be absolute light; in other words, absolute darkness, as Physical Science tries to prove. This “shadow” appears under the form of primordial matter, allegorized—if you will—in the shape of the Spirit of Creative Fire or Heat. If, rejecting the poetical form and allegory, Science chooses to see in this the primordial “fire-mist,” it is welcome to do so. Whether one way or the other, whether Fohat or the famous Force of Science, nameless and as difficult of definition as our Fohat himself, that Something “caused the Universe to move with circular motion,” as Plato has it; or, as the Occult teaching expresses it:

The Central Sun causes Fohat to collect primordial dust in the form of balls, to impel them to move in converging lines and finally to approach [pg 223]each other and aggregate.... Being scattered in Space, without order or system, the World-Germs come into frequent collision until their final aggregation, after which they become Wanderers [Comets]. Then the battles and struggles begin. The older [bodies] attract the younger, while others repel them. Many perish, devoured by their stronger companions. Those that escape become worlds.324

When carefully analyzed and reflected upon, this will be found as scientific as Science can make it, even at our late period.

We have been assured, that there exist several modern works of speculative fancy upon such struggles for life in sidereal heaven, especially in the German language. We rejoice to hear it, for ours is an Occult teaching lost in the darkness of archaic ages. We have treated of it fully in Isis Unveiled,325 and the idea of Darwinian-like evolution, of struggle for life and supremacy, and of the “survival of the fittest,” among the Hosts above as of the Hosts below, runs throughout both the volumes of our earlier work, written in 1876. But the idea is not ours, it is that of antiquity. Even the Purânic writers have ingeniously interwoven allegory with cosmic facts and human events. Any symbologist may discern their astro-cosmical allusions, even though he be unable to grasp the whole meaning. The great “wars in heaven,” in the Purânas; the wars of the Titans, in Hesiod and other classical writers; the “struggles” also between Osiris and Typhon, in the Egyptian myth; and even those in the Scandinavian legends; all refer to the same subject. Northern Mythology refers to it as the battle of the Flames, the sons of Muspel who fought on the field of Wigred. All these relate to Heaven and Earth, and have a double, and often even a triple, meaning and esoteric application to things above as to things below. They severally relate to astronomical, theogonical and human struggles; to the adjustment of orbs, and the supremacy among nations and tribes. The “struggle for existence” and the “survival of the fittest” reigned supreme from the moment that Kosmos manifested into being, and could hardly escape the observant eye of the ancient Sages. Hence the incessant fights of Indra, the God of the Firmament, with the Asuras—degraded from high Gods into cosmic Demons—and with Vritra or Ahi; the battles fought between stars and constellations, between moons and planets—later on incarnated as kings and mortals. Hence also the War in Heaven of Michael and his Host against the Dragon—Jupiter and Lucifer Venus—when [pg 224] a third of the stars of the rebellious Host was hurled down into Space, and “its place was found no more in Heaven.” As we wrote long ago:

This is the basic and fundamental stone of the secret cycles. It shows that the Brâhmans and Tanaïm ... speculated on the creation and development of the world quite in a Darwinian way, both anticipating him and his school in the natural selection, gradual development and transformation of species.326

There were old worlds that perished, conquered by the new, etc., etc. The assertion that all the worlds (stars, planets, etc.)—as soon as a nucleus of primordial substance, in the laya (undifferentiated) state, is informed by the freed principles of a just deceased sidereal body—become first comets, and then suns, to cool down to inhabitable worlds, is a teaching as old as the Rishis.

Thus the Secret Books, as we see, distinctly teach an astronomy that would not be rejected even by modern speculation, could the latter thoroughly understand its teachings.

For archaic astronomy and the ancient physical and mathematical sciences expressed views identical with those of Modern Science, and many of far more momentous import. A “struggle for life” and a “survival of the fittest,” in the worlds above and on our planet here below, are distinctly taught. This teaching, however, although it would not be entirely rejected by Science, is sure to be repudiated as an integral whole. For it avers that there are only seven self-born primordial “Gods,” emanated from the trinitarian One. In other words, it means that all the worlds, or sidereal bodies—always on strict analogy—are formed one from the other, after the primordial manifestation at the beginning of the Great Age is accomplished.

The birth of the celestial bodies in space is compared to a multitude of pilgrims at the Festival of the Fires. Seven ascetics appear on the threshold of the temple with seven lighted sticks of incense. At the light of these the first row of pilgrims light their incense sticks. After which, every ascetic begins whirling his stick around his head in space, and furnishes the rest with fire. Thus with the heavenly bodies. A laya-centre is lighted and awakened into life by the fires of another “pilgrim,” after which, the new “centre” rushes into space and becomes a comet. It is only after losing its velocity, and hence its fiery tail, that the Fiery Dragon settles down into quiet and steady life, as a regular respectable citizen of the sidereal family. Therefore it is said:

[pg 225]

Born in the unfathomable depths of Space, out of the homogeneous Element called the World-Soul, every nucleus of cosmic matter, suddenly launched into being, begins life under the most hostile circumstances. Through a series of countless ages, it has to conquer for itself a place in the infinitudes. It circles round and round, between denser and already fixed bodies, moving by jerks, and pulling towards some given point or centre that attracts it, and, like as a ship drawn into a channel dotted with reefs and sunken rocks, trying to avoid other bodies that draw and repel it in turn. Many perish, their mass disintegrating through stronger masses, and, when born within a system, chiefly within the insatiable stomachs of various Suns. Those which move slower, and are propelled into an elliptic course, are doomed to annihilation sooner or later. Others, moving in parabolic curves, generally escape destruction, owing to their velocity.

Some very critical readers will perhaps imagine that this teaching, as to the cometary stage passed through by all heavenly bodies, is in contradiction with the statements just made as to the Moon being the mother of the Earth. They will perhaps fancy that intuition is needed to harmonize the two. But no intuition is in truth required. What does Science know of comets, their genesis, growth, and ultimate behaviour? Nothing—absolutely nothing! And what is there so impossible in that a laya-centre—a lump of cosmic protoplasm, homogeneous and latent—when suddenly animated or fired up, should rush from its bed in space, and whirl throughout the abysmal depths, in order to strengthen its homogeneous organism by an accumulation and addition of differentiated elements? And why should not such a comet settle in life, live, and become an inhabited globe?

“The abodes of Fohat are many”—it is said. “He places his Four Fiery [electro-positive] Sons in the Four Circles”; these Circles are the equator, the ecliptic, and the two parallels of declination, or the tropics, to preside over the climates of which are placed the Four Mystical Entities. Then again: “Other Seven [Sons] are commissioned to preside over the seven hot, and seven cold Lokas [the Hells of the orthodox Brâhmans] at the two ends of the Egg of Matter [our Earth and its poles].” The seven Lokas are elsewhere also called the “Rings” and the “Circles.” The Ancients made the polar circles seven instead of two, as do the Europeans; for Mount Meru, which is the North Pole, is said to have seven gold and seven silver steps leading to it.

The strange statements, in one of the Stanzas, that “The Songs of [pg 226]Fohat and his Sons were radiant as the noon-tide Sun and the Moon combined,” and that the Four Sons, on the middle Four-fold Circle, “SAW their Father's Songs and heard his solar-selenic Radiance,” are explained, in the Commentary, in these words: “The agitation of the Fohatic Forces at the two cold ends [North and South Poles] of the Earth, which results in a multicoloured radiance at night, has in it several of the properties of Âkâsha [Ether], Colour and Sound as well.”

“Sound is the characteristic of Âkâsha [Ether]: it generates Air, the property of which is Touch; which [by friction] becomes productive of Colour and Light.”327

Perhaps the above will be regarded as archaic nonsense, but it will be better comprehended, if the reader remembers the Aurora Borealis and Australis, both of which take place at the very centres of terrestrial electric and magnetic forces. The two Poles are said to be the store-houses, the receptacles and liberators, at the same time, of cosmic and terrestrial Vitality (Electricity), from the surplus of which the Earth, had it not been for these two natural safety-valves, would have been rent to pieces long ago. At the same time it is a theory that has lately become an axiom, that the phenomenon of the polar lights is accompanied by, and productive of, strong sounds, like whistling, hissing and cracking. See Professor Humboldt's works on the Aurora Borealis, and his correspondence regarding this moot question.

7. Make thy calculations, O Lanoo, if thou wouldst learn the correct age of thy Small Wheel.328 Its Fourth Spoke is our Mother329 (a). Reach the Fourth Fruit of the Fourth Path of Knowledge that leads to Nirvâna, and thou shalt comprehend, for thou shalt see (b)....

(a) The “Small Wheel” is our Chain of Spheres, and the “Fourth Spoke” is our Earth, the fourth in the Chain. It is one of those on which the “hot [positive] breath of the Sun” has a direct effect.

The seven fundamental transformations of the Globes or heavenly Spheres, or rather of their constituent particles of matter, are described as follows: (1) homogeneous; (2) aëriform and radiant—gaseous; (3) curd-like (nebulous); (4) atomic, ethereal—beginning of motion, hence of differentiation; (5) germinal, fiery—differentiated, but composed of the [pg 227] germs only of the Elements, in their earliest states, they having seven states, when completely developed on our earth; (6) four-fold, vapoury—the future Earth; (7) cold—and depending on the Sun for life and light.

To calculate its age, however, as the pupil is asked to do in the Stanza, is rather difficult, since we are not given the figures of the Great Kalpa, and are not allowed to publish those of our small Yugas, except as to the approximate duration of these. “The older Wheels rotated for one Eternity and one-half of an Eternity,” it says. We know that by “Eternity” the seventh part of 311,040,000,000,000 years, or an Age of Brahmâ is meant. But what of that? We also know that, to begin with, if we take for our basis the above figures, we have first of all to eliminate from the 100 Years of Brahmâ, or 311,040,000,000,000 years, two Years taken up by the Sandhyâs (Twilights), which leaves 98, as we have to bring it to the mystical combination 14 x 7. But we have no knowledge at what time precisely the evolution and formation of our little Earth began. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate its age, unless the time of its birth is given—which the Teachers refuse to do, so far. At the close of this Volume and in Volume II, however, some chronological hints will be given. We must remember, moreover, that the law of analogy holds good for the worlds, as it does for man; and that as “The One [Deity] becomes Two [Deva or Angel], and Two becomes Three [or Man],” etc., so we are taught that the Curds (World-Stuff) become Wanderers (Comets); these become stars; and the stars (the centres of vortices), our sun and planets—to put it briefly. This cannot be so very unscientific, since Descartes also thought that “the planets rotate on their axes, because they were once lucid stars, the centres of vortices.”

(b) There are four grades of Initiation mentioned in exoteric works, which are known respectively in Sanskrit as Srotâpanna, Sakridâgâmin, Anâgâmin, and Arhan; the Four Paths to Nirvâna, in this our Fourth Round, bearing the same appellations. The Arhan, though he can see the Past, the Present and the Future, is not yet the highest Initiate; for the Adept himself, the initiated candidate, becomes Chelâ (Pupil) to a higher Initiate. Three higher grades have still to be conquered by the Arhan who would reach the apex of the ladder of Arhatship. There are those who have reached it even in this Fifth Race of ours, but the faculties necessary for the attainment of these higher grades will be fully developed, in the average ascetic, only at the end of this Root-Race, and in the Sixth and Seventh. Thus, there will always [pg 228] be Initiates and the Profane until the end of this minor Manvantara, the present Life-Cycle. The Arhats of the “Fire-Mist,” of the Seventh Rung, are but one remove from the Root-Base of their Hierarchy, the highest on Earth and our Terrestrial Chain. This “Root-Base” has a name which can only be translated into English by several compound words—the “Ever-Living-Human-Banyan.” This “Wondrous Being” descended from a “high region,” they say, in the early part of the Third Age, before the separation of sexes in the Third Race.

This Third Race is sometimes called collectively the “Sons of Passive Yoga,” i.e., it was produced unconsciously by the Second Race, which, as it was intellectually inactive, is supposed to have been constantly plunged in a kind of blank or abstract contemplation, as required by the conditions of the Yoga state. In the first or earlier portion of the existence of this Third Race, while it was yet in its state of purity, the “Sons of Wisdom,” who, as will be seen, incarnated in this Root-Race, produced by Kriyâshakti a progeny, called the “Sons of Ad,” or of the “Fire-Mist,” the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” etc. They were a conscious production, as a portion of the Race was already animated with the divine spark of spiritual, superior intelligence. This progeny was not a race. It was at first a Wondrous Being, called the “Initiator,” and after him a group of semi-divine and semi-human Beings. “Set apart” in archaic genesis for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated the highest Dhyânis—“Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras”—to form the nursery for future human Adepts, on this Earth and during the present Cycle. These “Sons of Will and Yoga,” born, so to speak, in an immaculate way, remained, it is explained, entirely apart from the rest of mankind.

The “Being” just referred to, who has to remain nameless, is the Tree from which, in subsequent ages, all the great historically known Sages and Hierophants, such as the Rishi Kapila, Hermes, Enoch, Orpheus, etc., have branched off. As objective man, he is the mysterious (to the profane—the ever invisible, yet ever present) Personage, about whom legends are rife in the East, especially among the Occultists and the students of the Sacred Science. It is he who changes form, yet remains ever the same. And it is he, again, who holds spiritual sway over the initiated Adepts throughout the whole world. He is, as said, the “Nameless One” who has so many names, and yet whose names and whose very nature are unknown. He is the “Initiator,” called the “Great Sacrifice.” For, sitting at the Threshold [pg 229] of Light, he looks into it from within the Circle of Darkness, which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post till the last Day of this Life-Cycle. Why does the Solitary Watcher remain at his self-chosen post? Why does he sit by the Fountain of Primeval Wisdom, of which he drinks no longer, for he has naught to learn which he does not know—aye, neither on this Earth, nor in its Heaven? Because the lonely, sore-footed Pilgrims, on their journey back to their Home, are never sure, to the last moment, of not losing their way, in this limitless desert of Illusion and Matter called Earth-Life. Because he would fain show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he is a voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in liberating himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in short, he has sacrificed himself for the sake of Mankind, though but a few elect may profit by the Great Sacrifice.

It is under the direct, silent guidance of this Mahâ-Guru that all the other less divine Teachers and Instructors of Mankind became, from the first awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity. It is through these “Sons of God” that infant Humanity learned its first notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge; and it is They who laid the first foundation-stone of those ancient civilizations that so sorely puzzle our modern generation of students and scholars.

Let those who doubt this statement, explain, on any other equally reasonable grounds, the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge possessed by the Ancients—who, some pretend, developed from lower and animal-like savages, the “cave-men” of the palæolithic age! Let them turn, for instance, to such works as those of Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age, on architecture, in which all the rules of proportion are those anciently taught at Initiations, if they would acquaint themselves with this truly divine art, and understand the deep esoteric significance hidden in every rule and law of proportion. No man descended from a palæolithic cave-dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated Rishis and Devas of the Third Root Race who handed on their knowledge, from one generation to another, to Egypt and to Greece with her now lost canon of proportion; just as the disciples of the Initiates of the Fourth, the Atlanteans, handed it over to their Cyclopes, the “Sons of Cycles” or of the “Infinite,” from whom the name passed to the still later generations of Gnostic priests.

[pg 230]

It is owing to the divine perfection of these architectural proportions that the Ancients could build these wonders of all the subsequent ages, their Fanes, Pyramids, Cave-Temples, Cromlechs, Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers of machinery and a knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a child's play, and which that skill refers to itself as the “works of hundred-handed giants.”330

Modern architects may not have altogether neglected these rules, but they have superadded enough empirical innovations to destroy the just proportions. It is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of construction of the Grecian temples erected to the immortal Gods; and the ten books of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short, who was an Initiate, can only be studied esoterically. The Druidical Circles, the Dolmens, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers, and the 127 towns in Europe which were found “Cyclopean in origin” by the French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest-Architects, the descendants of those first taught by the “Sons of God,” and justly called the “Builders.” This is what appreciative posterity says of these descendants:

They used neither mortar nor cement, nor steel, nor iron to cut the stones with; and yet they were so artificially wrought that in many places the joints are hardly seen, though many of the stones, as in Peru, are 38 feet long, 18 feet broad, and 6 feet thick, and in the walls of the fortress of Cuzco there are stones of a still greater size.331

Again:

The well of Syene, made 5,400 years ago, when that spot was exactly under the tropic, which it has now ceased to be, was ... so constructed, that at noon, at the precise moment of the solar solstice, the entire disk of the sun was seen reflected on its surface—a work which the united skill of all the astronomers in Europe would not now be able to effect.332

Although these matters were barely hinted at in Isis Unveiled, it will be well to remind the reader of what was said there333 concerning a certain Sacred Island in Central Asia, and to refer him for further details to the Section, entitled “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island,” attached to Stanza IX of Volume II. A few more explanations, however, though thrown out in a fragmentary form, may help the student to obtain a glimpse into the present mystery.

To state at least one detail concerning these mysterious “Sons of God” in plain words: it is from them, these Brahmaputras, that the high Dvijas, the initiated Brâhmans of old, claimed descent, while the modern Brâhman would have the lower castes believe literally that they (the Brâhmans) issued direct from the mouth of Brahmâ. Such is [pg 231] the Esoteric teaching; and it adds moreover that, although those descended (spiritually, of course) from the “Sons of Will and Yoga” became in time divided into opposite sexes, as their “Kriyâshakti” progenitors did themselves later on; yet even their degenerate descendants have, down to the present day, retained a veneration and respect for the creative function, and still regard it in the light of a religious ceremony, whereas the more civilized nations consider it as a mere animal function. Compare the Western views and practice in these matters with the Institutions of Manu, in regard to the laws of Grihastha, or married life. The true Brâhman is, thus, indeed “he whose seven forefathers have drunk the juice of the Moon-plant (Soma),” and who is a “Trisuparna,” for he has understood the secret of the Vedas.

And, to this day, such Brâhmans know that, during the early beginnings of this Race, psychic and physical intellect being dormant and consciousness still undeveloped, its spiritual conceptions were quite unconnected with its physical surroundings; that divine man dwelt in his animal—though externally human—form; that, if there was instinct in him, no self-consciousness came to enlighten the darkness of the latent Fifth Principle. When the Lords of Wisdom, moved by the law of evolution, infused into him the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual creators. As the child's first feeling is for its mother and nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who were yet outside, and independent of him. Devotion arose out of that feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature; for it is the only one which is natural in his heart, which is innate in him, and which we find alike in the human babe and the young of the animal. This feeling of irrepressible, instinctive aspiration in primitive man is beautifully, and one may say intuitionally, described by Carlyle, who exclaims:

The great antique heart—how like a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth! Heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the earth; making all the earth a mystic temple to him, the earth's business all a kind of worship. Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover, doing God's messages among men.... Wonder, miracle, encompass the man; he lives in an element of miracle.334... A great law of [pg 232]duty, high as these two infinitudes (heaven and hell), dwarfing all else, annihilating all else—it was a reality, and it is one: the garment only of it is dead; the essence of it lives through all times and all eternity!

It lives undeniably, and has settled in all its ineradicable strength and power in the Asiatic Âryan heart, from the Third Race direct, through its first Mind-born Sons, the fruits of Kriyâshakti. As time rolled on, the holy caste of Initiates produced, but rarely, from age to age, such perfect creatures; beings apart, inwardly, though the same as those who produced them, outwardly.

In the infancy of the Third primitive Race:

A creature of a more exalted kind

Was wanting yet, and therefore was designed;

Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,

For empire formed and fit to rule the rest.

It was called into being, a ready and perfect vehicle for the incarnating denizens of higher spheres, who took forthwith their abodes in these forms, born of Spiritual Will and the natural divine power in man. It was a child of pure spirit, mentally unalloyed with any tincture of earthly element. Its physical frame alone was of time and of life, for it drew its intelligence direct from above. It was the Living Tree of Divine Wisdom; and may therefore be likened to the Mundane Tree of the Norse Legends, which cannot wither and die until the last battle of life shall be fought, while its roots are all the time gnawed by the dragon Nidhogg. For even so, the first and holy Son of Kriyâshakti had his body gnawed by the tooth of time, but the roots of his inner being remained for ever undecaying and strong, because they grew and expanded in heaven, and not on earth. He was the first of the First, and he was the Seed of all the others. There were other Sons of Kriyâshakti produced by a second spiritual effort, but the first one has remained to this day the Seed of Divine Knowledge, the One and the Supreme among the terrestrial “Sons of Wisdom.” Of this subject we can say no more, except to add that in every age—aye, even in our own—there have been great intellects who have understood the problem correctly.

But how comes our physical body to the state of perfection it is now found in? Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through, or from, animals, as taught by Materialism. For, as Carlyle says:

... The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself “I,”—ah, what words have we for such things?—is a breath of Heaven; the Highest Being [pg 233]reveals himself in man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that Unnamed?

The “breath of Heaven,” or rather the breath of Life, called in the Bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck and in every mineral atom. But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that “Highest Being,”335 as none has that divine harmony in its form, which man possesses. It is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle:

There is but one temple in the Universe, and that is the Body of Man. Nothing is holier than that high form.... We touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body! This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression ... of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles—the great inscrutable Mystery....336

Stanza VII.

1. Behold the beginning of sentient formless Life (a).

First, the Divine337 (b), the One from the Mother-Spirit;338then, the Spiritual339 (c); 340the Three from the One (d), the Four from the One (e), and the Five (f), from which the Three, the Five and the Seven (g). These are the Three-fold and the Four-fold downward; the Mind-born Sons of the First Lord,341 the Shining Seven.342 It is they who are thou, I, he, O Lanoo; they who watch over thee and thy mother, Bhûmi.343

(a) The Hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided esoterically into Seven (four and three), within the Twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve signs of the Zodiac; the Seven of the manifesting scale being connected, moreover, with the Seven Planets. All these are subdivided into numberless Groups of divine spiritual, semi-spiritual, and ethereal Beings.

[pg 234]

The chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary, or the “four bodies and the three faculties,” exoterically, of Brahmâ and the Panchâsya, the five Brahmâs, or the five Dhyâni-Buddhas in the Buddhist system.

The highest Group is composed of the Divine Flames, so called, also spoken of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose esotericism is securely hidden in the zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the nucleole of the superior Divine World. They are the Formless Fiery Breaths, identical in one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the Kabalists in the Archetypal World.

The same Hierarchy, with the same numbers, is found in the Japanese system, in the “Beginnings,” as taught by both the Shinto and the Buddhist sects. In this system, Anthropogenesis precedes Cosmogenesis, as the divine merges into the human, and creates—midway in its descent into matter—the visible Universe; the legendary personages, remarks reverentially Omoie, “having to be understood as the stereotyped embodiment of the higher [secret] doctrine, and its sublime truths.” To state this old system at full length would occupy too much of our space; a few words on it, however, cannot be out of place. The following is a short synopsis of this Anthropo-Cosmogenesis, and shows how closely the most separated nations echoed one and the same archaic teaching.

When all was as yet Chaos (Kon-ton), three spiritual Beings appeared on the stage of future creation: (1) Ame no ani naka nushi no Kami, “Divine Monarch of the Central Heaven”; (2) Taka mi onosubi no Kami, “Exalted, Imperial Divine Offspring of Heaven and Earth”; and (3) Kamu mi musubi no Kami, “Offspring of the Gods,” simply.

These were without form or substance—our Arûpa Triad—as neither the celestial nor the terrestrial substance had yet differentiated, “nor had the essence of things been formed.”

(b) In the Zohar—which, as now arranged and reëdited by Moses de Leon, with the help of Syrian and Chaldean Christian Gnostics, in the XIIIth century, and corrected and revised still later by many Christian hands, is only a little less exoteric than the Bible itself—this “Divine [Vehicle]” no longer appears as it does in the Chaldean Book of Numbers. True enough, Ain Suph, the Absolute Endless No-thing, uses also the form of the One, the manifested “Heavenly Man” (the First Cause), as its Chariot (Mercabah, in Hebrew; Vâhana, in Sanskrit) or Vehicle, to descend into, and manifest itself in, the phenomenal [pg 235] world. But the Kabalists neither make it plain how the Absolute can use anything, or exercise any attribute whatever, since, as the Absolute, it is devoid of attributes; nor do they explain that in reality it is the First Cause (Plato's Logos), the original and eternal Idea, that manifests through Adam Kadmon, the Second Logos, so to speak. In the Book of Numbers, it is explained that Ain (En, or Aiôr) is the only self-existent, whereas its “Depth,” the Bythos of the Gnostics, called Propatôr, is only periodical. The latter is Brahmâ, as differentiated from Brahman or Parabrahman. It is the Depth, the Source of Light, or Propatôr, which is the Unmanifested Logos, or the abstract Idea, and not Ain Suph, whose Ray uses Adam Kadmon—“male and female”—or the Manifested Logos, the objective Universe, as a Chariot, through which to manifest. But in the Zohar we read the following incongruity: “Senior occultatus est, et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus.”344 This is a fallacy, since Microprosopus, or the Microcosm, can only exist during its manifestations, and is destroyed during the Mahâpralayas. Rosenroth's Kabbala is no guide, but very often a puzzle.

The First Order are the Divine. As in the Japanese system, in the Egyptian, and every old cosmogony—at this divine Flame, the “One,” are lit the Three descending Groups. Having their potential being in the higher Group, they now become distinct and separate Entities. These are called the Virgins of Life, the Great Illusion, etc., etc., and collectively the six-pointed star. The latter, in almost every religion, is the symbol of the Logos as the first emanation. It is the sign of Vishnu in India, the Chakra, or Wheel; and the glyph of the Tetragrammaton, “He of the Four Letters,” in the Kabalah, or metaphorically the “Limbs of Microprosopus,” which are ten and six respectively.

The later Kabalists, however, especially the Christian Mystics, have played sad havoc with this magnificent symbol. Indeed, the Microprosopus—who is, philosophically speaking, quite distinct from the unmanifested eternal Logos, “one with the Father”—has finally been brought, by centuries of incessant efforts of sophistry and of paradoxes, to be considered as one with Jehovah, or the one living God (!), whereas Jehovah is no better than Binah, a female Sephira. This fact cannot be too frequently impressed upon the reader. For the “Ten Limbs” of the Heavenly Man are the ten Sephiroth; but the first Heavenly Man [pg 236] is the unmanifested Spirit of the Universe, and ought never to be degraded into Microprosopus, the Lesser Face or Countenance, the prototype of man on the terrestrial plane. The Microprosopus is, as just said, the Logos manifested, and of such there are many. Of this, however, later on. The six-pointed star refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles, etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the star. All these, the upper and lower Hierarchies included, emanate from the Heavenly or Celestial Virgin, the Great Mother in all religions, the Androgyne, the Sephira Adam Kadmon. Sephira is the Crown, Kether, in the abstract principle only, as a mathematical x, the unknown quantity. On the plane of differentiated nature, she is the female counterpart of Adam Kadmon, the first Androgyne. The Kabalah teaches that the words “Fiat Lux”345 referred to the formation and evolution of the Sephiroth, and not to light as opposed to darkness. Rabbi Simeon says:

O companions, companions, man as an emanation was both man and woman, Adam Kadmon verily, and this is the sense of the words, “Let there be Light, and there was Light.” And this is the two-fold man.346

In its Unity, Primordial Light is the seventh, or highest, principle, Daiviprakriti, the Light of the Unmanifested Logos. But in its differentiation, it becomes Fohat, or the “Seven Sons.” The former is symbolized by the central point in the Double Triangle; the latter by the Hexagon itself, or the “Six Limbs” of Microprosopus, the Seventh being Malkuth, the “Bride” of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth. Hence the expressions:

The first after the One is Divine Fire; the second, Fire and Ether; the third is composed of Fire, Ether and Water; the fourth of Fire, Ether, Water, and Air. The One is not concerned with Man-bearing Globes, but with the inner, invisible Spheres. The First-Born are the Life, the Heart and Pulse of the Universe; the Second are its Mind or Consciousness.

These Elements of Fire, Air, etc., are not our compound elements; and this “Consciousness” has no relation to our consciousness. The Consciousness of the “One Manifested,” if not absolute, is still unconditioned. Mahat, the Universal Mind, is the first production of the Brahmâ-Creator, but also of Pradhâna, Undifferentiated Matter.

(c) The Second Order of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Ether, corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, whose names are legion, are still formless, but more definitely “substantial.” They are [pg 237] the first differentiation in the Secondary Evolution or “Creation”—a misleading word. As the name shows, they are the Prototypes of the incarnating Jîvas or Monads, and are composed of the Fiery Spirit of Life. It is through these that passes, like a pure solar beam, the Ray which is furnished by them with its future Vehicle, the Divine Soul, Buddhi. These are directly concerned with the Hosts of the higher World of our System. From these Two-fold Units emanate the “Three-fold.”

In the cosmogony of Japan, when, out of the chaotic mass, an egg-like nucleus appears, having within itself the germ and potency of all universal as well as of all terrestrial life, it is the Three-fold just named, which differentiate. The male ethereal principle (Yo) ascends, and the female grosser or more material principle (In) is precipitated into the universe of substance, when a separation occurs between the celestial and the terrestrial. From this, the female, the Mother, the first rudimentary objective being is born. It is ethereal, without form or sex, and yet it is from it and the Mother that the Seven Divine Spirits are born, from whom will emanate the seven “creations”; just as in the Codex Nazaræus from Karabtanos and the Mother Spiritus the seven “evilly disposed” (material) spirits are born. It would be too long to give here the Japanese names, but in translation they stand in this order:

(1.) The “Invisible Celibate,” which is the Creative Logos of the non-creating “Father,” or the creative potentiality of the latter made manifest.

(2.) The “Spirit [or God] of the rayless Depths [Chaos],” which becomes differentiated matter, or the world-stuff; also the mineral realm.

(3.) The “Spirit of the Vegetable Kingdom,” of the “Abundant Vegetation.”

(4.) The “Spirit of the Earth” and “the Spirit of the Sands”; a Being of dual nature, the former containing the potentiality of the male element, the latter that of the female element. These two were one, as yet unconscious of being two.

In this duality were contained (a) Isu no gai no Kami, the male, dark and muscular Being; and (b) Eku gai no Kami, the female, fair and weaker or more delicate Being. Then:

(5 and 6.) The Spirits who were androgynous or dual-sexed.

(7.) The Seventh Spirit, the last emanated from the “Mother,” appears as the first divine human form distinctly male and female. [pg 238] It was the seventh “creation,” as in the Purânas, wherein man is the seventh creation of Brahmâ.

These, Tsanagi-Tsanami, descended into the Universe by the Celestial Bridge, the Milky Way, and “Tsanagi, perceiving far below a chaotic mass of cloud and water, thrust his jewelled spear into the depths, and dry land appeared. Then the two separated to explore Onokoro, the newly-created island-world.” (Omoie.)

Such are the Japanese exoteric fables, the rind that conceals the kernel of the same one truth of the Secret Doctrine.

(d) The Third Order correspond to Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas, Spirit, Soul and Intellect; and are called the “Triads.”

(e) The Fourth Order are substantial Entities. This is the highest Group among the Rûpas (Atomic Forms). It is the nursery of the human, conscious, spiritual Souls. They are called the “Imperishable Jîvas,” and constitute, through the Order below their own, the first Group of the first Septenary Host—the great mystery of human, conscious and intellectual Being. For the latter is the field wherein lies concealed, in its privation, the Germ that will fall into generation. That Germ will become the spiritual potency in the physical cell, that guides the development of the embryo, and that is the cause of the hereditary transmission of faculties, and all the inherent qualities in man. The Darwinian theory, however, of the transmission of acquired faculties is neither taught nor accepted in Occultism. Evolution, in the latter, proceeds on quite other lines; the physical, according to Esoteric teaching, evolving gradually from the spiritual, mental, and psychic. This inner soul of the physical cell—the “spiritual plasm” that dominates the germinal plasm—is the key that must open one day the gates of the terra incognita of the Biologist, now called the dark mystery of Embryology. It is worthy of notice that Modern Chemistry, while rejecting, as a superstition of Occultism and Religion as well, the theory of substantial and invisible Beings, called Angels, Elementals, etc.—without, of course, having ever looked into the philosophy of these incorporeal Entities, or thought over them—should, owing to observation and discovery, have been unconsciously forced to recognize and adopt the same ratio of progression and order, in the evolution of chemical atoms, as Occultism does for both its Dhyânis and Atoms—analogy being its first law. As seen above, the very first Group of the Rûpa Angels is quaternary, an element being added to each in descending order. So also are the atoms, in the phraseology of [pg 239] Chemistry, monatomic, diatomic, triatomic, tetratomic, etc., progressing downwards.

Let it be remembered that the Fire, Water, and Air of Occultism, or the “Elements of Primary Creation” so-called, are not the compound elements they are on earth, but noumenal homogeneous Elements—the Spirits of the former. Then follow the Septenary Groups or Hosts. Placed on parallel lines with the atoms in a diagram, the natures of these Beings would be seen to correspond, in their downward scale of progression, to composite elements in a mathematically identical manner as to analogy. This refers, of course, only to diagrams made by Occultists; for were the scale of Angelic Beings to be placed on parallel lines with the scale of the chemical atoms of Science—from the hypothetical Helium down to Uranium—they would of course be found to differ. For the latter have, as correspondents on the Astral Plane, only the four lowest orders—the three higher principles in the atom, or rather molecule, or chemical element, being perceptible to the initiated Dangma's eye alone. But then, if Chemistry desired to find itself on the right path, it would have to correct its tabular arrangement by that of the Occultists—which it might refuse to do. In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds to, and depends on, its higher noumenon—the Being to whose essence it belongs; and, above as below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the Psycho-mental from the Spiritual—tainted from its lower plane by the Astral—the whole animate and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on parallel lines, and drawing its attributes from above as well as below.

The number seven, as applied to the term Septenary Host, above mentioned, does not imply only seven Entities, but seven Groups or Hosts, as explained before. The highest Group, the Asuras born in Brahmâ's first body, which turned into “Night,” are septenary, i.e., divided like the Pitris into seven Classes, three of which are bodiless (arûpa) and four with bodies.347 They are in fact more truly our Pitris (Ancestors) than the Pitris who projected the first physical man.

(f) The Fifth Order is a very mysterious one, as it is connected with the microcosmic pentagon, the five-pointed star, representing man. In India and Egypt, these Dhyânis were connected with the Crocodile, and their abode is in Capricornus. But these are convertible terms in Indian Astrology, for the tenth sign of the Zodiac, which is called Makara, is loosely translated “Crocodile.” The word itself is occultly [pg 240] interpreted in various ways, as will be shown further on. In Egypt, the Defunct—whose symbol is the pentagram, or the five-pointed star, the points of which represent the limbs of a man—was shown emblematically transformed into a crocodile. Sebekh, or Sevekh (or “Seventh”), as Mr. Gerald Massey says, showing it to be the type of intelligence, is a dragon in reality, not a crocodile. He is the “Dragon of Wisdom,” or Manas, the Human Soul, Mind, the Intelligent Principle, called in our Esoteric Philosophy the Fifth Principle.

Says the defunct “Osirified,” in the Book of the Dead, or Ritual, under the glyph of a mummiform God with a crocodile's head:

I am the crocodile presiding at the fear, I am the God-crocodile, at the arrival of his Soul among men. I am the God-crocodile brought for destruction.

An allusion to the destruction of divine spiritual purity when man acquires the knowledge of good and evil; also to the “fallen” Gods, or Angels of every theogony.

I am the fish of the great Horus. [As Makara is the “Crocodile,” the Vehicle of Varuna.] I am merged in Sekhem.348

This last sentence gives the corroboration, and repeats the doctrine of esoteric “Buddhism,” for it alludes directly to the Fifth Principle (Manas), or the most spiritual part of its essence rather, which merges into, is absorbed by, and made one with Âtmâ-Buddhi, after the death of man. For Sekhem is the residence, or Loka, of the God Khem (Horus-Osiris, or Father and Son); hence the Devachan of Âtmâ-Buddhi. In the Book of the Dead, the Defunct is shown entering into Sekhem, with Horus-Thot, and “emerging from it as pure spirit.” Thus the Defunct says:

I see the forms of [myself, as various] men transforming eternally.... I know this [chapter]. He who knows it ... takes all kinds of living forms.349

And addressing in magic formula that which is called, in Egyptian Esotericism, the “ancestral heart,” or the reïncarnating principle, the permanent Ego, the Defunct says:

O my heart, my ancestral heart, necessary for my transformations, ... do not separate thyself from me before the guardian of the scales. Thou art my personality within my breast, divine companion watching over my fleshes [bodies].350

It is in Sekhem that lies concealed the “Mysterious Face,” or the real Man concealed under the false personality, the triple-crocodile of Egypt, the symbol of the higher Trinity, or human Triad, Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas.

One of the explanations of the real though hidden meaning of this [pg 241] Egyptian religious glyph is easy. The crocodile is the first to await and meet the devouring fires of the morning sun, and very soon came to personify the solar heat. When the sun arose, it was like the arrival on earth, and among men, of the “divine soul which informs the Gods.” Hence the strange symbolism. The mummy donned the head of a crocodile to show that it was a Soul arriving from the earth.

In all the ancient papyri, the crocodile is called Sebekh (Seventh); water also symbolizes the fifth principle esoterically; and, as already stated, Mr. Gerald Massey shows that the crocodile was the “seventh Soul, the supreme one of seven—the Seer unseen.” Even exoterically Sekhem is the residence of the God Khem, and Khem is Horus avenging the death of his father Osiris, hence punishing the sins of man, when he becomes a disembodied Soul. Thus the defunct Osirified became the God Khem, who “gleans the field of Aanroo”; that is, he gleans either his reward or punishment, for that field is the celestial locality (Devachan), where the Defunct is given wheat, the food of divine justice. The Fifth Group of Celestial Beings is supposed to contain in itself the dual attributes of both the spiritual and physical aspects of the Universe; the two poles, so to say, of Mahat, the Universal Intelligence, and the dual nature of man, the spiritual and the physical. Hence its number Five, doubled and made into Ten, connecting it with Makara, the tenth sign of the Zodiac.

(g) The Sixth and Seventh Orders partake of the lower qualities of the Quaternary. They are conscious ethereal Entities, as invisible as Ether, which are shot out, like the boughs of a tree, from the first central Group of the Four, and shoot out in their turn numberless side Groups, the lower of which are the Nature-Spirits, or Elementals, of countless kinds and varieties; from the formless and unsubstantial—the ideal Thoughts of their creators—down to atomic, though, to human perception, invisible organisms. The latter are considered as the “spirits of atoms,” for they are the first remove (backwards) from the physical atom—sentient, if not intelligent creatures. They are all subject to Karma, and have to work it out through every cycle. For, as the Doctrine teaches, there are no such privileged Beings in the Universe, whether in our own or in other Systems, in the outer or the inner Worlds,351 as the Angels of the Western Religion and the Judean. [pg 242] A Dhyân Chohan has to become one; he cannot be born or appear suddenly on the plane of life as a full-blown Angel. The Celestial Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will find itself transferred, in the next Circle of Life, into higher superior Worlds, and will make room for a new Hierarchy, composed of the elect ones of our mankind. Being is an endless cycle within the One Absolute Eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned. Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being Gods. Such a class of Beings—perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature inherent in them—in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and even of the lower creation, would be the symbol of an eternal injustice quite Satanic in character, an ever present crime. It is an anomaly and an impossibility in Nature. Therefore the “Four” and the “Three” have to incarnate as all other beings have. This Sixth Group, moreover, remains almost inseparable from man, who draws from it all but his highest and lowest principles, or his spirit and body; the five middle human principles being the very essence of those Dhyânis. Paracelsus calls them the Flagæ; the Christians, the Guardian Angels; the Occultists, the Ancestors, the Pitris. They are the Six-fold Dhyân Chohans, having the six spiritual Elements in the composition of their bodies—in fact, men, minus the physical body.

Alone, the Divine Ray, the Âtman, proceeds directly from the One. When asked how this can be? How is it possible to conceive that these “Gods,” or Angels, can be at the same time their own emanations and their personal selves? Is it in the same sense as in the material world, where the son is, in one way, his father, being his blood, the bone of his bone and the flesh of his flesh? To this the Teachers answer: Verily it is so. But one has to go deep into the mystery of Being, before one can fully comprehend this truth.

2. The One Ray multiplies the smaller Rays. Life precedes Form, and Life survives the last Atom.352 Through the countless Rays the Life-Ray, the One, Like a Thread through many Beads.353

This shloka expresses the conception—a purely Vedântic one, as already explained elsewhere—of a Life-Thread, Sûtrâtmâ, running [pg 243] through successive generations. How, then, can this be explained? By resorting to a simile, to a familiar illustration, though necessarily imperfect, as all our available analogies must be. Before resorting to it, however, I would ask, whether it seems unnatural, least of all “supernatural,” to any one of us, when we consider the process of the growth and development of a fœtus into a healthy baby weighing several pounds? Evolving from what? From the segmentation of an infinitesimally small ovum and a spermatozoön! And afterwards we see the baby develop into a six-foot man! This refers to the atomic and physical expansion, from the microscopically small into something exceedingly large; from the unseen, to the naked eye, into the visible and objective. Science has provided for all this; and, I dare say, her theories, embryological, biological and physiological, are correct enough, so far as exact observation of the material goes. Nevertheless, the two chief difficulties of the science of Embryology—namely, what are the forces at work in the formation of the fœtus, and the cause of “hereditary transmission” of likeness, physical, moral or mental—have never been properly answered; nor will they ever be solved, till the day when Scientists condescend to accept the Occult theories. But if this physical phenomenon astonishes no one, except in so far as it puzzles the Embryologists, why should our intellectual and inner growth, the evolution of the Human-Spiritual to the Divine-Spiritual, be regarded as, or seem, more impossible than the other?

The Materialists and the Evolutionists of the Darwinian school would be ill-advised to accept the newly worked-out theories of Professor Weissmann, the author of Beiträge zur Descendenzlehre, with regard to one of the two mysteries of Embryology, as above specified, which he seems to think he has solved; for, when it is fully solved, Science will have stepped into the domain of the truly Occult, and passed for ever out of the realm of transformation, as taught by Darwin. The two theories are irreconcilable, from the standpoint of Materialism. Regarded from that of the Occultists, however, the new theory solves all these mysteries. Those who are not acquainted with the discovery of Professor Weissmann—at one time a fervent Darwinist—ought to hasten to repair the deficiency. The German embryologist-philosopher—stepping over the heads of the Greek Hippocrates and Aristotle, right back into the teachings of the old Âryans—shows one infinitesimal cell, out of millions of others at work in the formation of an organism, alone and unaided determining, [pg 244] by means of constant segmentation and multiplication, the correct image of the future man, or animal, in its physical, mental and psychic characteristics. It is this cell which impresses on the face and form of the new individual the features of the parents, or of some distant ancestor; it is this cell, again, which transmits to him the intellectual and mental idiosyncracies of his sires, and so on. This Plasm is the immortal portion of our bodies, developing by means of a process of successive assimilations. Darwin's theory, viewing the embryological cell as the essence or extract from all other cells, is set aside; it is incapable of accounting for hereditary transmission. There are but two ways of explaining the mystery of heredity: either the substance of the germinal cell is endowed with the faculty of crossing the whole cycle of transformations that lead to the construction of a separate organism, and then to the reproduction of identical germinal cells; or, these germinal cells do not have their genesis at all in the body of the individual, but proceed directly from the ancestral germinal cell passed from father to son through long generations. It is the latter hypothesis that Weissmann has adopted and worked upon, and it is to this cell that he traces the immortal portion of man. So far, so good; and when this almost correct theory is accepted, how will Biologists explain the first appearance of this everlasting cell? Unless man “grew” like the immortal “Topsy,” and was not born at all, but fell from the clouds, how was that embryological cell generated in him?

Complete the Physical Plasm, mentioned above, the “Germinal Cell” of man with all its material potentialities, with the “Spiritual Plasm,” so to say, or the fluid that contains the five lower principles of the Six-principled Dhyâni—and you have the secret, if you are spiritual enough to understand it.

Now to the promised simile.

When the seed of the animal man is cast into the soil of the animal woman, that seed cannot germinate unless it has been fructified by the five virtues [the fluid of, or the emanation from, the principles] of the Six-fold Heavenly Man. Wherefore the Microcosm is represented as a Pentagon, within the Hexagon Star, the Macrocosm.354

The functions of Jiva on this Earth are of a five-fold character. In the mineral atom, it is connected with the lowest principles of the Spirits of the Earth (the Six-fold Dhyânis); in the vegetable particle, with their [pg 245]second—the Prâna (Life); in the animal, with all these plus the third and the fourth; in man, the germ must receive the fruitage of all the five. Otherwise he will be born no higher than an animal.355

Thus in man alone the Jîva is complete. As to his seventh principle, it is but one of the Beams of the Universal Sun, for each rational creature receives the temporary loan only of that which has to return to its source. As to his physical body, it is shaped by the lowest terrestrial Lives, through physical, chemical and physiological evolution; “the Blessed Ones have nought to do with the purgations of matter,” says the Kabalah in the Chaldean Book of Numbers.

It comes to this: Mankind, in its first prototypal, shadowy form, is the offspring of the Elohim of Life, or Pitris; in its qualitative and physical aspect, it is the direct progeny of the “Ancestors,” the lowest Dhyânis, or Spirits of the Earth; for its moral, psychic and spiritual nature, it is indebted to a Group of divine Beings, the name and characteristics of which will be given in Volume II. Collectively, men are the handiwork of Hosts of various Spirits; distributively, the tabernacles of those Hosts; and occasionally and individually, the vehicles of some of them. In our present all-material Fifth Race, the earthly Spirit of the Fourth is still strong in us; but we are approaching the time when the pendulum of evolution will direct its swing decidedly upwards, bringing Humanity back on a parallel line with the primitive Third Root-Race in spirituality. During its childhood, mankind was wholly composed of that Angelic Host, who were the indwelling Spirits that animated the monstrous and gigantic tabernacles of clay of the Fourth Race, built by and composed of countless myriads of Lives, as our bodies are also now. This sentence will be explained later on in the present Commentary. Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them only occasional and abnormal visitors, to which diseases are attributed. Occultism—which discerns a Life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water—affirms that our whole body is built of such Lives; the smallest bacterium under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria.

The “tabernacles” mentioned above have improved in texture and symmetry of form, growing and developing with the Globe that bears them; but the physical improvement has taken place at the expense of [pg 246] the spiritual Inner Man and of Nature. The three middle principles, in earth and man, became with every Race more material; the Soul stepping back to make room for the Physical Intellect; the essence of the Elements becoming the material and composite elements now known.

Man is not, nor could he ever be, the complete product of the “Lord God”; but he is the child of the Elohim, so arbitrarily changed into the singular number and masculine gender. The first Dhyânis, commissioned to “create” man in their image, could only throw off their Shadows, as a delicate model for the Nature Spirits of matter to work upon. Man is, beyond any doubt, formed physically out of the dust of the Earth, but his creators and fashioners were many. Nor can it be said that the “Lord God breathed into his nostrils the Breath of Life,” unless that God is identified with the “One Life,” omnipresent though invisible, and unless the same operation is attributed to “God” on behalf of every “Living Soul,” which is the Vital Soul (Nephesh), and not the Divine Spirit (Ruach) which ensures to man alone a divine degree of immortality, that no animal, as such, could ever attain in this cycle of incarnation. It is owing to the inadequate distinctions made by the Jews, and now by our Western metaphysicians, who are unable to understand, and hence to accept, more than a triune man—Spirit, Soul, Body—that the “Breath of Life” has been confused with the immortal “Spirit.” This applies also directly to the Protestant theologians, who in translating a certain verse in the Fourth Gospel356 have entirely perverted its meaning. This mistranslation runs, “the wind bloweth where it listeth,” instead of “the spirit goeth where it willeth,” as in the original, and also in the translation of the Greek Eastern Church.

The learned and very philosophical author of New Aspects of Life would impress upon his reader that the Nephesh Chiah (Living Soul), according to the Hebrews:

Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.

The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is developed. Considered functionally and from the standpoint [pg 247] of activity, the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of Mâyâ. The Soul, he says, “is ultimately produced from the animated body of man.” Thus the author identifies “Spirit” (Âtmâ) with the “Breath of Life” simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having a suspicious relation.

This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle-field for deciding this question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical, matter-of-fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist-Positivist, whereas the Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind, they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that it has any relation to, or connection with it.

Thus the philosophy of man's psychic, spiritual and mental relations with his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles. Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other. No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the “Seven Souls of Man.” The Book of the Dead gives a complete list of the “transformations” that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself, one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the “Soul” (the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity: it is immortal, “coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,” that is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This “Soul” emerges from the Tiaou, the Realm of the Cause of Life, and joins the living on Earth [pg 248] by day, to return to Tiaou every night. This expresses the periodical existences of the Ego.357

The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated, “devoured by the Uræus,”358 the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul-Bird, “the Divine Swallow, and the Uræus of Flame” (Manas and Âtmâ-Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for they are their mother's husbands.

Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the “Lunar Ancestors” of men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon-God, Taht-Esmun, the first human ancestor.

This Moon-God “expressed the Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven, by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental Powers.”359

As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.

Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis) give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.

For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in the Book of the Dead contains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night-Sun, the inferior hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on the concealed side of the Moon. The human being, in their Esotericism, came out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then returned to his birth-place, before issuing from it again. Thus the Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life [pg 249] and reproduction, inhabits the Moon. Plutarch360 shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called “The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.” In the Ritual,361 life is promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the patronage of Osiris-Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life-renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and reäppearance every month. In the Dankmoe,362 it is said: “O Osiris-Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.” And Sabekh says to Seti I:363 “Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.” It is still better explained in a Louvre papyrus:364 “Couplings and conceptions abound when he [Osiris-Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.” Says Osiris: “O sole radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what I have to do amongst the living”365—i.e., to produce conceptions.

Osiris was “God manifest in generation,” because the ancients knew, far better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a “King,” and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later, when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana, Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.

If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the Bible, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far, at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers [pg 250] and sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to-day, which are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult influences.

But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their effects, so to say, tangible, psychic and physiological deities—the Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and humanity; hence they were regarded as one, though two as personified Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post-diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often, moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and spiritual element belonged to the Mysteries and Initiation. There were things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.

Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was “of one lip and of one knowledge,” and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call Dhyân Chohans.

As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us that:

The Kabalah says expressly that Elohim is a “general abstraction”; what we call in mathematics “a constant coëfficient,” or a “general function,” entering into all [pg 251]construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to 31415, the [Astro-Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.

To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the other, since that which is the surviving Entity in us, is partly the direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entities themselves. One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them against the “stiff-necked race.” But even the Kabalah plainly shows the direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.

Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub-occult, meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a “one living God,” is a single number, a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that the Zohar, as witnessed by the Book of Numbers, at any rate, gave out originally, before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels, just as in Pymander, the Thought Divine.

3. When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears (a). The Three are366 One; and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man-Plant, called Saptaparna (b).

(a) “When the One becomes Two, the Three-fold appears”: to wit, when the One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation, [pg 252] that reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words of the Book of the Dead: “Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.” Chaos becomes male-female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three-fold Being issues as its “First-born.” “Ra [or Osiris-Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,” during the Cycle.367 The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha, “concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”

This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two, and then being transformed into the Three-fold, the student has to make himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers to Esoteric Buddhism—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our Chain,368 with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole period of a Life-Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a “Day of Brahmâ.” It is, in short, one revolution of the “Wheel” (our Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate “Wheels,” in another sense this time. When evolution has run [pg 253] downward into matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the fourth revolution, which is our present Round, “Evolution has reached its acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit-ward.” All this needs little repetition, as it is well explained in Esoteric Buddhism. That which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its legitimate place, in Volume II.

Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three higher planes.369 On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all, bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—plus, every time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it becomes clear that the “origin of man,” so-called, in this our present Round, or Life-Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so-called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the various Dhyân Chohans.

“Creators” is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even Parabrahman, believes in creation ex nihilo, as Christians and Jews do, but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.

The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to “create” men is a special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third [pg 254] Round. But as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form, build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than the future man's shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or “Crocodile,” in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a “function of the brain.” Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.

To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than remind the reader of like cases in so-called “Spiritualism”; though such cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so-called “spirits” that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied Personalities. Such “spirits” can only be either Elementaries, or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be seen in their “double” in one place, while their body is many miles away; so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.

Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid-like ancestor of the Third Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of existence, the “Ego Sum,” necessitates self-consciousness, and an animal can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body two Lives, independent of each other. In the New Aspects of Life, the author states the Kabalistic teaching:

They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding opacity and [pg 255]density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated, digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the Spirit-world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state; while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its satellite.370

This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter-Etheric Intelligent Forces, or “Angels” as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the “Elementals” so-called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the Esoteric teaching.

The Soul, whose body-vehicle is the astral, ethereo-substantial envelope, could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the “Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds, while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine, especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are the soulless men among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists as well as in persons “who advance in holiness and never turn back.”

Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual society in “Spiritualism,” as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches, which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence of the universality of [pg 256] this doctrine, for he says: “In these Oracles, the seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World-Pillars’], mentioned likewise by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch over the worlds of matter.” Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the Archontes.371

The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces their “Doubles” as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the “Demon is the inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a lower “Double,” immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.

This identity between the Spirit and its material “Double”—in man it is the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root- and the Seed-Manus. Not only these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught, has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen, the Root-Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed-Manu its Effect; and from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or Rishis become twenty-one in number.

(b) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the belief and the doctrine that man is seven-fold in his constitution. The “Thread” of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his [pg 257] Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the Thread on which moreover all his “Spirits” are strung, is spun from the essence of the Three-fold, the Four-fold and the Five-fold which contain all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably to Padma Purâna,372 is one of the seven Kumâras who go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall see, further on, what connection there is between the “celibate” and chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse “to multiply,” and terrestrial mortals. Meanwhile, it is evident that the “Man-Plant, Saptaparna,” thus refers to the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven-leaved plant, which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in the Book of the Dead, that relates to the “reward of the Soul,” is as suggestive of our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life, the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo-field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,373 the Deceased is either destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence of the “seven times seventy-seven lives” passed, or to be passed, on Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the “fruit of our actions” is very graphic.

4. It is the Root that never dies, the Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks (a)... The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three-tongued Flame,374 shot out by the Seven, their Flame; the Beams and Sparks of One Moon, reflected in the Running Waves of all the Rivers of the Earth375 (b).

(a) The “Three-tongued Flame that never dies” is the immortal spiritual Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last, assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The “Four Wicks,” that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four lower principles, including the body.

“I am the Three-wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,” says the Defunct. “I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose [pg 258] hand sows the seed of action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [i.e., got rid of the sin-creating Four Wicks].”376

“The Three-tongued Flame of the Four Wicks” corresponds to the four Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.

(b) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean, above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad-Ego—twinkle and dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks produced by the moon-beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night radiates her lustre on the “Running Waves” of Life, the period of a Manvantara; and then they disappear, the “Beams”—symbols of our eternal Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were before, one with the Mother-Source.

5. The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest Thread of Fohat. It journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ (a). It stops in the first,377 and is a Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second,378 and behold—a Plant; the Plant whirls through Seven Forms and becomes a Sacred Animal379 (b).

From the combined attributes of these, Manu,380 the Thinker, is formed.

Who forms him? The Seven Lives, and the One Life (c). Who completes him? The Five-fold Lha. And who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin and Soma381 (d).

(a) The phrase, “through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,” refers here to the seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty-nine stations of active existence that are before the “Spark,” or Monad, at the beginning of every Great Life-Cycle, or Manvantara. The “Thread of Fohat” is the Thread of Life before referred to.

This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied [pg 259] by Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations, whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity—

yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.

What is that “Spark” which “hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into the One itself; an endless and boundless Circle.

As says the Zohar:

The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through the ten Sephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... For tenequal seven: the Decad contains four Unities and three Binaries.

The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.

When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of the sevenmillions of skies, and my ten Splendours were his Limbs.

But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in the Siphra Dtzenioutha, the “Book of the Concealed Mystery”:

In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the “Sons of Light and Life,” or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.

The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth382 on its plane, and [pg 260] the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The Chaldean Book of Numbers contains a detailed explanation of all this.

The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes of the seven 383] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.

The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are: “1. Kether (the Crown), represented by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by the left shoulder.” Then come the seven Limbs, or Sephiroth, on the planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the “four-lettered” Mystery. “The seven manifested and the three concealed Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”

Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both the seventh and the fourth World; the former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud, “Foundation,” or, as said in the Book of Numbers, “by Yezud, He [Adam Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].” Rendered in mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the Spiritual Logos, i.e., in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after the regeneration, on the day of “Sabbath.” For the “Seventh Day” again has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.

When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become one body.384

“Become one body” means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or Undifferentiated Substance. “Sabbath” means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not the “seventh day” after six days, but a period the duration of which equals that of the seven “days,” or any period made up of seven parts. Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof. [pg 261] They should work one week of seven days and rest seven days. That the word “Sabbath” had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for the Sabbath day, and by what is said in Luke.385 Sabbath is there taken for the whole week. See the Greek text where the week is called “Sabbath.” Literally, “I fast twice in the Sabbath.” Paul, an Initiate, knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as Sabbath:386 “and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be [one] with the Lord, and will enjoy an eternal Sabbath.”387

The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking the Kabalah as contained in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, not as misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, the Kabalah of the Christian Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both curves the six Globes, three on each side. The Zohar, on the other hand, calls the Earth the lower, or the seventh, adding that upon the six depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The “Smaller Face [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed of six Sephiroth,” says the same work. “Seven Kings come and die in the thrice-destroyed World [Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be broken up.”388 This relates to the Seven Races, five of which have already appeared, and two more have still to appear in this Round.

The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in Japan, hint at the same belief.

Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:

The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton) the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo) the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between the two. The first man was called Kuni-to ko tatchino-mikoto, and five other names were given to him, and then the human race appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.

These “Gods” are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two kinds of “Ancestors,” the two preceding Races which give birth to animal and to rational man.

[pg 262]

It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven “the key to the Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.” He shows the Kabalah faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram he gives in his Clef des Grands Mystères389 is septenary. This may be seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One needs also only to look at the diagram, the “Formation of the Soul,” in Mathers' Kabbalah Unveiled,390 from the above mentioned, work of Lévi, to find the same, though with a different interpretation.

Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:

Lévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, and vice versâ. Nephesh is the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life, [pg 263] instinctual in the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the “Breath of (animal) Life” breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the “Reasoning Soul,” or Mind, which in Lévi's diagram is miscalled Nephesh, Âtmâ-Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points of agreement.

We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and Occult Pneumatics.

Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist: | Say the Theosophists:
Kabalistic Pneumatics. | Esoteric Pneumatics.
1. The Soul (or Ego) is a clothed light; and this light is triple. | 1. The same; for it is Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas.
2. Neshamah—pure Spirit. | 2. The same391.
3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit. | 3. Spiritual Soul.
4. Nephesh—Plastic Mediator.392 | 4. Mediator between Spirit and Man, the Seat of Reason, the Mind, in man.
5. The garment of the Soul is the rind [body] of the Image [Astral Soul]. | 5. Correct.

6. The Image is double, because it reflects the good and the bad.

6. Too uselessly apocalyptic. Why not say that the Astral reflects the good as well as the bad man; man, who is ever tending to the upper Triad, or else disappears with the Quaternary.

7. [Image—Body.] | 7. The Earthly Image.

[pg 264]

Occult Pneumatics. | Occult Pneumatics.
(As given by Éliphas Lévi.) | (As given by the Occultists.)

1. Nephesh is immortal, because it renews its life by the destruction of forms. [But Nephesh, the “Breath of Life,” is a misnomer, and a useless puzzle to the student.]

1. Manas is immortal, because after every new incarnation it adds to Âtmâ-Buddhi something of itself; and thus, assimilating itself to the Monad, shares its immortality.

2. Ruach progresses by the evolution of ideas (!?). | 2. Buddhi becomes conscious by the accretions it gets from Manas, on the death of man after every new incarnation.

3. Neshamah is progressive, without oblivion and destruction.

3. Âtmâ neither progresses, forgets, nor remembers. It does not belong to this plane; it is but the Ray of Light eternal which shines upon, and through, the darkness of matter—when the latter is willing.

4. The Soul has three dwellings.

4. The Soul—collectively, as the Upper Triad—lives on three planes, besides its fourth, the terrestrial sphere; and it is eternally on the highest of the three.

5. These dwellings are: the Plane of Mortals; the Superior Eden; and the Inferior Eden.

5. These dwellings are: Earth for the physical man, or Animal Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the Limbo) for the disembodied man, or his Shell; Devachan for the Higher Triad.

[pg 265]

6. The Image [man] is a sphinx that offers the riddle of birth. | 6. Correct.

7. The fatal Image [the Astral] endows Nephesh with its aptitudes; but Ruach is able to substitute for it the Image conquered in accordance with the inspirations of Neshamah.

7. The Astral, through Kâma (Desire), is ever drawing Manas down into the sphere of material passions and desires. But if the better Man, or Manas, tries to escape the fatal attraction, and turns its aspirations to Âtmâ (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach) conquers, and carries Manas with it to the realm of eternal Spirit.

It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:

1. The Body is the mould of Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of Ruach; Ruach the mould of the garment of Neshamah.

1. The Body follows the whims, good or bad, of Manas; Manas tries to follow the Light of Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi is the mould of the “garments” of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or shape, or anything, and because Buddhi is only figuratively its Vehicle.

2. Light [the Soul] personifies itself in clothing itself [with a Body]; and personality endures only when the garment is perfect.

2. The Monad becomes a personal Ego when it incarnates; and something remains of that Personality through Manas, when the latter is perfect enough to assimilate Buddhi.

3. The Angels aspire to become men; a Perfect Man, a Man-God, is above all the Angels. | 3. Correct.

4. Every 14,000 years the soul rejuvenates, and rests in the jubilean sleep of oblivion.

4. Within a period, a Great Age, or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus reign; after which comes Pralaya, when all the Souls (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.

[pg 266]

Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in the Kabalah.

But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.

(b) The well-known Kabalistic aphorism runs: “A stone becomes a plant; a plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.” The “Spark” animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is all the difference in the world. Genesis begins its anthropology at the wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory chapters of Genesis were never meant to represent even a remote allegory of the creation of our Earth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is plainly stated in the Zohar:

There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith, when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions. The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.393

Had Genesis begun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the Celestial Logos, the “Heavenly Man,” which evolves as a Compound Unit of Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their totality as the first “Male and Female,” or Adam Kadmon, the “Fiat Lux” of the Bible, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths of the first differentiation of the eternal Root-Matter. On our nascent Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said in Isis Unveiled,394 is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased in the stone, [pg 267] or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the Monad, or Jîva, per se, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a Breath of the Absolute, or the Absoluteness rather; and the Absolute Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and (b) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are the sentient Life of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas), “the principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,” to receive which, he has to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower Dhyân Chohans—are evolving, pari passu with it, on a higher and more spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter, and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce that terrestrial symbol of the “Heavenly Man” in space—Perfect Man. In the Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone, is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated. Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual Substance. [pg 268] Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the Root-Principle of the Universe.

Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti's shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the first Two and a Half Races being only the first, gradually evolving into the most perfect, of mammals—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane, and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for the two “creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call “doubles,” or “astral forms,” in their own likeness.395 This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. But Man is still incomplete. From Svâyambhuva Manu,396 from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis, each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to the Codex Nazaræus, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter, begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its impress on every archaic scripture.

“Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives. Sin397 and the Moon.” Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man, the real and non-dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the “One Life,” or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined to fully vindicate the theory.

It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science, [pg 269] “inorganic substance,” means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules of so-called “inert matter,” is incognizable. All is Life, and every atom of even mineral dust is a Life, though beyond our comprehension and perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who reject Occultism. “The very atoms,” says Tyndall, “seem instinct with a desire for life.” Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency “to run into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the teachings of Occult Science?

The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone is One, on the plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being, its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named the “Devourers.” ... Every visible thing in this Universe was built by such Lives, from conscious and divine primordial man down to the unconscious agents that construct matter.... From the One Life, formless and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced rotation. Then came the first manifested Material Fire, the hot Flames, the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery Wheels [Matter Globes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters. These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an aqueous mist, which yields the third World-Element—Water; and from the breath of all [atmospheric] Air is born. These four are the four Lives of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will follow.

The Commentary first speaks of the “numberless and countless crores of Lives.” Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence [pg 270] of that gas? “I would add,” continues Pasteur, “that the evolution of the germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists. Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary, killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls them ærobes, living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by Science “dead matter”), and anærobes. The one kind binds oxygen, and contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on, into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or rather annihilates, the so-called organic substance; ultimate decay being impossible without their participation. Certain germ-cells, such as those of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and stimulate fermentation. “Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case, manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell form, in this case, an exception?” asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as the fruit-cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur's idea of the formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact that urea increases in the blood during strangulation. Life therefore is everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the atom.

“Bhûmi appears with six sisters,” says the Commentary. It is a Vedic teaching that “there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.” This is the explanation given by our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion to it in the Vedas, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain; “three Earths” on the descending arc, and “three [pg 271] Heavens,” which are three Earths or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc. By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point, so to say, and containing, potentially, as much of Spirit as it does of Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.

The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into constituents. If Nature is the “Ever-Becoming” on the manifested plane, then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.

Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be so de facto, “one-dimensional space.”

The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth; and its humanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men, was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the only way in which it can be used correctly—a “two-dimensional” species.

The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes of two, three, and four or more dimensional space; but, in passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of that398—the use of the modern expression, the “fourth dimension of space.” To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the “fourth dimension of matter, in Space.”399 But even thus expanded, it is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress of [pg 272] evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the moment “Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we may call “Normal Clairvoyance.” Thus, when some bold thinkers have been thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been in want of a sixth characteristic of matter. The three dimensions belong really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term “dimension” itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot-rules within the resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the sun's “rising” or “setting.”

We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be figuratively referred to as two-dimensional. But here another caveat must be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire, [pg 273] Air, Water, Earth. We are only in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was right when he spoke of the “Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth, such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The Globe, says the Commentary, was “fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal men and animals, during the First Round”—a contradiction or paradox in the opinion of our present Science—“luminous and more dense and heavy, during the Second Round; watery during the Third.” Thus are the Elements reversed.

The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element, Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to the data furnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime-stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms, even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader's attention.

Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present transformation.

In short, none of the so-called Elements were, in the three preceding Rounds, as they are now. For all we know, Fire may have been pure Âkâsha, the First Matter of the “Magnum Opus” of the Creators and [pg 274] Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in one breath the “Body of the Holy Ghost,” and in the next “Baphomet,” the “Androgyne Goat of Mendes”; Air, simply Nitrogen, the “Breath of the Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,” as the Mahometan Mystics call it; Water, that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a “Living Soul.” And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and unscientific statements found in Genesis. Separate the first from the second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely, Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the first chapter (the Elohistic), “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” is a mistranslation; it is not “the heaven and the earth,” but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, the upper and the lower Heavens, or the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of the invisible (to the senses), and the visible to our perceptions. “God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament (Air). “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters,” i.e., “the waters which were under the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which were above the firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].” In the second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before water, just as in the first, light is produced before the sun. “God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plants were created before they were in the earth—for there was no earth then such as it is now; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as it does now, in the Fourth Round.

Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the “Primordial Fire” mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the “Astral Light”: with him it is the “Grand Agent Magique.” Undeniably it is so, but—only so far as Black Magic is concerned, and on the lowest planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The “Astral Light” is simply the older “Sidereal Light” of Paracelsus; and to say that “everything which exists has been evolved from it, and [pg 275] it preserves and reproduces all forms,” as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was evolved through (or viâ) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the latter is not the container of all things but, at best, only the reflector of this all. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it “a force in Nature,” by means of which “a single man who can master it ... might throw the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the “Great Arcanum of transcendent Magic.” Quoting the words of the great Western Kabalist in their translated form,400 we may, perhaps, the better explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject. The author says of the great Magic Agent:

This ambient and all-penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the [Central or Spiritual] Sun's splendour ... fixed by the weight of the atmosphere [?!] and the power of central attraction ... the Astral Light, this electro-magnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of Isis, which twines round two poles ... and in ancient theogonies by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn [emblem of infinity, immortality, and Cronus—Time—not the God Saturn or the planet]. It is the winged dragon of Medea, the double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau ... lastly, it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind force [it is not blind, and Lévi knew it], which souls must conquer, in order to detach themselves from the chains of Earth; for if they should not, they will be absorbed by the same power which first produced them, and will return to the central and eternal fire.

This great Archæus is now publicly discovered by, and for, only one man—J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia. For others, however, it is discovered, yet must remain almost useless. “So far shalt thou go....”

All the above is as practical as it is correct, save one error, which we have explained. Éliphas Lévi commits a great blunder in always identifying the Astral Light with what we call Âkâsha. What it really is will be expounded in Volume II.

Éliphas Lévi further writes:

The great Magic Agent is the fourth emanation of the life principle [we say—it is the first in the inner, and the second in the outer (our) Universe], of which the Sun is the third form ... for the day-star [the Sun] is only the reflection and material shadow of the Central Sun of truth, which illuminates the intellectual [invisible] world of Spirit, and which itself is but a gleam borrowed from the Absolute.

So far he is right enough. But when the great authority of the [pg 276] Western Kabalists adds that, nevertheless, “it is not the immortal Spirit, as the Indian Hierophants have imagined”—we answer, that he slanders the said Hierophants, as they have said nothing of the kind; for even the Purânic exoteric writings flatly contradict the assertion. No Hindû has ever mistaken Prakriti—the Astral Light being only above the lowest plane of Prakriti, the Material Kosmos—for the “immortal Spirit.” Prakriti is ever called Mâyâ, Illusion, and is doomed to disappear with the rest, the Gods included, at the hour of the Pralaya. As it is shown that Âkâsha is not even the Ether, least of all then, we imagine, can it be the Astral Light. Those unable to penetrate beyond the dead letter of the Purânas, have occasionally confused Âkâsha with Prakriti, with Ether, and even with the visible Sky! It is true also that those who have invariably translated the term Âkâsha by “Ether”—Wilson, for instance—finding it called “the material cause of sound” possessing, moreover, this one single property, have ignorantly imagined it to be “material,” in the physical sense. True, again, that if the characteristics are accepted literally, then, since nothing material or physical, and therefore conditioned and temporary, can be immortal—according to metaphysics and philosophy—it would follow that Âkâsha is neither infinite nor immortal. But all this is erroneous, since both the words Pradhâna, Primeval Matter, and Sound, as a property, have been misunderstood; the former term (Pradhâna) being certainly synonymous with Mûlaprakriti and Âkâsha, and the latter (Sound) with the Verbum, the Word or the Logos. This is easy to demonstrate; for it is shown in the following sentence from Vishnu Purâna.401 “There was neither day nor night, nor sky, nor earth, nor darkness, nor light, nor any other thing, save only One, unapprehensible by intellect, or that which is Brahman, and Pums, [Spirit] and Pradhâna [Primordial Matter].”

Now, what is Pradhâna, if it is not Mûlaprakriti, the Root of All, in another aspect? For though Pradhâna is said, further on, to merge into the Deity, as everything else does, in order to leave the One absolute during the Pralaya, yet is it held as infinite and immortal. The literal translation is given as: “One Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit: That was”; and the Commentator interprets the compound term as a substantive, not as a derivative word used attributively, i.e., like something “conjoined with Pradhâna.” The student has to note, moreover, that the Purânic is a dualistic system, not evolutionary, and that, in this [pg 277] respect, far more will be found, from an Esoteric standpoint, in the Sânkhya, and even in the Mânava-Dharma-Shâstra, however much the latter differs from the former. Hence Pradhâna, even in the Purânas, is an aspect of Parabrahman, not an evolution, and must be the same as the Vedântic Mûlaprakriti. “Prakriti, in its primary state, is Âkâsha,” says a Vedântin scholar.402 It is almost abstract Nature.

Âkâsha, then, is Pradhâna in another form, and as such cannot be Ether, the ever-invisible agent, courted even by Physical Science. Nor is it Astral Light. It is, as said, the noumenon of the seven-fold differentiated Prakriti403—the ever immaculate “Mother” of the fatherless “Son,” who becomes “Father” on the lower manifested plane. For Mahat is the first product of Pradhâna, or Âkâsha; and Mahat—Universal Intelligence, “whose characteristic property is Buddhi”—is no other than the Logos, for he is called Îshvara, Brahmâ, Bhâva, etc.404 He is, in short, the “Creator,” or the Divine Mind in creative operation, “the Cause of all things.” He is the “First-Born,” of whom the Purânas tell us that “Earth and Mahat are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe,” or, in our language, the negative and the positive poles of dual Nature (abstract and concrete), for the Purâna adds:

In this manner—as were the seven forms [principles] of Prakriti reckoned from Mahat to Earth—so at the (time of elemental) dissolution (pratyâhâra), these seven successively reënter into each other. The Egg of Brahmâ (Sarva-mandala) is dissolved, with its seven zones (dvîpa), seven oceans, seven regions, etc.405

These are the reasons why the Occultists refuse to give the name of Astral Light to Âkâsha, or to call it Ether. “In my Father's house are many mansions,” may be contrasted with the Occult saying, “In our Mother's house are seven mansions,” or planes, the lowest of which is above and around us—the Astral Light.

The Elements, whether simple or compound, could not have remained [pg 278] the same since the commencement of the evolution of our Chain. Everything in the Universe progresses steadily in the Great Cycle, while incessantly going up and down in the smaller Cycles. Nature is never stationary during Manvantara, as it is ever becoming,406 not simply being; and mineral, vegetable, and human life are always adapting their organisms to the then reigning Elements; and therefore those Elements were then fitted for them, as they are now for the life of present humanity. It will only be in the next, or Fifth, Round that the fifth Element, Ether—the gross body of Âkâsha, if it can be called even that—will, by becoming a familiar fact of Nature to all men, as Air is familiar to us now, cease to be, as at present, hypothetical and an “agent” for so many things. And only during that Round will those higher senses, the growth and development of which Âkâsha subserves, be susceptible of a complete expansion. As already indicated, a partial familiarity with the characteristic of matter—Permeability—which should be developed concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected to develop at the proper period in this Round. But with the next Element added to our resources, in the next Round, Permeability will become so manifest a characteristic of matter, that the densest forms of this Round will seem to man's perceptions as obstructive to him as a thick fog, and no more.

Let us now return to the Life-Cycle. Without entering at length upon the description given of the Higher Lives, we must direct our attention, at present, simply to the earthly Beings and the Earth itself. The latter, we are told, is built up for the First Round by the “Devourers,” which disintegrate and differentiate the germs of other Lives in the Elements; pretty much, it must be supposed, as in the present stage of the world, the ærobes do, when, undermining and loosening the chemical structure in an organism, they transform animal matter, and generate substances that vary in their constitutions. Thus Occultism disposes of the so-called Azoic Age of Science, for it shows that there never was a time when the Earth was without life upon it. Wherever there is an atom of matter, a particle, or a molecule, even in its most gaseous condition, there is life in it, however latent and unconscious.

Whatsoever quits the Laya State, becomes active Life; it is drawn into the vortex of Motion [the Alchemical Solvent of Life]; Spirit and Matter are [pg 279]the two States of the One, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, both being the Absolute Life, latent.... Spirit is the first differentiation of [and in] Space; and Matter the first differentiation of Spirit. That, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, That is IT—the Causeless Cause of Spirit and Matter, which are the Cause of Kosmos. And THAT we call the One Life, or the Intra-Cosmic Breath.407

Once more we say—like must produce like. Absolute Life cannot produce an inorganic atom, whether single or complex, and there is life even in Laya, just as a man in a profound cataleptic state—to all appearance a corpse—is still a living being.

When the “Devourers”—in whom the men of Science are invited to see, with some show of reason, atoms of the Fire-Mist, if they will, as the Occultist will offer no objection to this—when the “Devourers,” we say, have differentiated the “Fire Atoms,” by a peculiar process of segmentation, the latter become Life-Germs, which aggregate according to the laws of cohesion and affinity. Then the Life-Germs produce Lives of another kind, which work on the structure of our Globes.

Thus, in the First Round, the Globe, having been built by the primitive Fire-Lives—i.e., formed into a sphere—had no solidity, no qualifications, save a cold brightness, no form, no colour; it is only towards the end of the First Round that it developed one Element, which, from its inorganic, so to say, or simple Essence, has become now, in our Round, the fire we know throughout the System. The Earth was in her first Rûpa, the essence of which is the Âkâshic Principle named ——, that which is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light, which Éliphas Lévi calls the “Imagination of Nature,” probably to avoid giving it its correct name, as others do.

Speaking of it, in his Preface to the Histoire de la Magie, Éliphas Lévi says:

It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly communicate with each other; from it—that sympathy and antipathy are born; from it—that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena of second sight and extra-natural visions take place.... Astral Light [acting under the impulsion of powerful wills] ... destroys, coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers in all things.... God created it on that day when he said: “Fiat Lux!” ... It is directed by the Egregores, i.e., the chiefs of the souls, who are the spirits of energy and action.408

Éliphas Lévi ought to have added that the Astral Light, or Primordial Substance, if matter at all, is that which, called Light, Lux esoterically [pg 280] explained, is the body of those Spirits themselves, and their very essence. Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane, and the reflected radiance, of the Divine Light, emanating from the collective Body of those who are called the “Lights” and the “Flames.” But no other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction on the other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence, and in such flowing language, as Éliphas Lévi. He leads his reader through the most lovely valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren rock.

Says the Commentary:

It is through and from the radiations of the seven Bodies of the seven Orders of Dhyânis, that the seven Discrete Quantities [Elements], whose Motion and harmonious Union produce the manifested Universe of Matter, are born.

The Second Round brings into manifestation the second Element—Air; an element, the purity of which would ensure continuous life to him who would use it. In Europe there have been two Occultists only who have discovered and even partially applied it in practice, though its composition has always been known among the highest Eastern Initiates. The ozone of the modern Chemists is poison compared with the real Universal Solvent, which could never be thought of unless it existed in Nature.

From the Second Round, Earth—hitherto a fœtus in the matrix of Space—began its real existence: it had developed individual sentient Life, its second Principle. The second corresponds to the sixth [Principle]; the second is Life continuous, the other, temporary.

The Third Round developed the third Principle—Water; while the Fourth transformed the gaseous fluids and plastic form of our Globe into the hard, crusted, grossly material sphere we are living on. Bhûmi has reached her fourth Principle. To this it may be objected that the law of analogy, so much insisted upon, is broken. Not at all. Earth will reach her true ultimate form—her body shell—inversely in this to man, only toward the end of the Manvantara, after the Seventh Round. Eugenius Philalethes was right when he assured his readers, “on his word of honour,” that no one had yet seen the “Earth,” i.e., Matter in its essential form. Our Globe is, so far, in its Kâmarûpic state—the Astral Body of Desires of Ahamkâra, dark Egotism, the progeny of Mahat, on the lower plane.

It is not molecularly constituted matter, least of all the human Body, [pg 281] Sthûla Sharîra, that is the grossest of all our “Principles,” but verily the middle Principle, the real Animal Centre, whereas our Body is but its shell, the irresponsible factor and medium through which the beast in us acts all its life. Every intellectual Theosophist will understand my real meaning. Thus the idea that the human tabernacle is built by countless Lives, just in the same way as was the rocky crust of our Earth, has nothing repulsive in it for the true Mystic. Nor can Science oppose the Occult teaching, for it is not because the microscope will ever fail to detect the ultimate living atom or life, that it can reject the doctrine.

(c) Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead organisms of both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various kinds; that from without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with every breath we draw, and from within by leucomaines, ærobes, anærobes, and what not. But Science has never yet gone so far as to assert with the Occult doctrine, that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and stones, are themselves altogether built up of such beings; which, with the exception of the larger species, no microscope can detect. So far as regards the purely animal and material portion of man, Science is on its way to discoveries that will go far towards corroborating this theory. Chemistry and Physiology are the two great magicians of the future, which are destined to open the eyes of mankind to great physical truths. With every day, the identity between the animal and physical man, between the plant and man, and even between the reptile and its nest, the rock, and man—is more and more clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents of all being found to be identical, Chemical Science may well say that there is no difference between the matter which composes the ox, and that which forms man. But the Occult doctrine is far more explicit. It says: Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible Lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant and of the tree which shelters it from the sun. Each particle—whether you call it organic or inorganic—is a Life. Every atom and molecule in the Universe is both life-giving and death-giving to such forms, inasmuch as it builds by aggregation universes, and the ephemeral vehicles ready to receive the transmigrating soul, and as eternally destroys and changes the forms, and expels the souls from their temporary abodes. It creates and kills; it is self-generating and self-destroying; it brings [pg 282] into being, and annihilates, that mystery of mysteries, the living body of man, animal, or plant, every second in time and space; and it generates equally life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and bad, and even the agreeable and disagreeable, the beneficent and maleficent sensations. It is that mysterious Life, represented collectively by countless myriads of Lives, that follows in its own sporadic way the hitherto incomprehensible law of Atavism; that copies family resemblances, as well as those it finds impressed in the Aura of the generators of every future human being; a mystery, in short, that will receive fuller attention elsewhere. For the present, one instance may be cited in illustration. Modern Science is beginning to find out that ptomaine, the alkaloid poison generated by decaying corpses and matter—a Life also, extracted with the help of volatile ether, yields a smell as strong as that of the freshest orange-blossoms; but that free from oxygen, such alkaloids yield either a most sickening, disgusting smell, or a most agreeable aroma, which recalls that of the most delicately scented flowers; and it is suspected that such blossoms owe their agreeable smell to the poisonous ptomaine. The venomous essence of certain fungi, also, is nearly identical with the venom of the cobra of India, the most deadly of serpents. The French savants Arnaud, Gautier, and Villiers, have found in the saliva of living men the same venomous alkaloid as in that of the toad, the salamander, the cobra, and the trigonocephalus of Portugal. It is proven that venom of the deadliest kind, whether called ptomaine, or leucomaine, or alkaloid, is generated by living men, animals and plants. Gautier also discovered an alkaloid in the fresh carcase and brains of an ox, and a venom which he calls xanthocreatinine, similar to the substance extracted from the poisonous saliva of reptiles. It is the muscular tissues, the most active organs in the animal economy, that are suspected of being the generators or factors of venoms, which have the same importance as carbonic acid and urea in the functions of life, and are the ultimate products of inner combustion. And though it is not yet fully determined whether poisons can be generated by the animal systems of living beings, without the participation and interference of microbes, it is ascertained that the animal does produce venomous substances in its physiological or living state.

Thus, having discovered the effects, Science has to find their primary causes; and this it can never do without the help of the old sciences, of Alchemy, Occult Botany and Physics. We are taught that every physiological change, in addition to pathological phenomena, diseases—nay, [pg 283] life itself, or rather the objective phenomena of life, produced by certain conditions and changes in the tissues of the body, which allow and force life to act in that body—that all this is due to those unseen “Creators” and “Destroyers,” which are called, in such a loose and general way, microbes. It might be supposed that these Fiery Lives and the microbes of Science are identical. This is not true. The Fiery Lives are the seventh and highest sub-division of the plane of matter, and correspond in the individual with the One Life of the Universe, though only on that plane of matter. The microbes of Science are the first and lowest sub-division on the second plane—that of material Prâna, or Life. The physical body of man undergoes a complete change of structure every seven years, and its destruction and preservation are due to the alternate functions of the Fiery Lives, as Destroyers and Builders. They are Builders by sacrificing themselves, in the form of vitality, to restrain the destructive influence of the microbes, and, by supplying the microbes with what is necessary, they compel them under that restraint to build up the material body and its cells. They are Destroyers also, when that restraint is removed, and the microbes, unsupplied with vital constructive energy, are left to run riot as destructive agents. Thus, during the first half of a man's life, the first five periods of seven years each, the Fiery Lives are indirectly engaged in the process of building up man's material body; Life is on the ascending scale, and the force is used in construction and increase. After this period is passed, the age of retrogression commences, and, the work of the Fiery Lives exhausting their strength, the work of destruction and decrease also commences.

An analogy between cosmic events in the descent of Spirit into Matter, for the first half of a Manvantara (planetary as well as human), and its ascent, at the expense of Matter, in the second half, may here be traced. These considerations have to do solely with the plane of matter, but the restraining influence of the Fiery Lives on the lowest sub-division of the second plane, the microbes, is confirmed by the fact mentioned in the theory of Pasteur above referred to, that the cells of the organs, when they do not find sufficient oxygen for themselves, adapt themselves to that condition and form ferments, which, by absorbing oxygen from substances which come in contact with them, produce their destruction. Thus the process is commenced by one cell robbing its neighbour of the source of its vitality, when the supply is insufficient; and the destruction so commenced steadily progresses.

[pg 284]

Such experimenters as Pasteur are the best friends and helpers of the Destroyers, and the worst enemies of the Creators—if the latter were not at the same time Destroyers also. However it may be, one thing is certain in this: the knowledge of these primary causes, and of the ultimate essence of every Element, of its Lives, their functions, properties, and conditions of change—constitutes the basis of Magic. Paracelsus was, perhaps, the only Occultist in Europe, during the latter centuries of the Christian era, who was versed in this mystery. Had not a criminal hand put an end to his life years before the time allotted him by Nature, physiological Magic would have fewer secrets for the civilized world than it now has.

(d) But what has the Moon to do in all this, we may be asked. What have “Fish, Sin and Soma [Moon],” in the apocalyptic sentence of the Stanza, to do in company with the Life-microbes? With the latter nothing, except that they avail themselves of the tabernacle of clay prepared by them; with divine perfect Man everything, since “Fish, Sin and Moon” conjointly compose the three symbols of the immortal Being.

This is all that can be given. Nor does the writer pretend to know more of these strange symbols than may be inferred about them from exoteric religions—from the mystery, perhaps, which underlies the Matsya (Fish) Avatâra of Vishnu, the. Chaldean Oannes, the Man-Fish, recorded in the imperishable sign of the Zodiac, Pisces, and running throughout the two Testaments in the personages of Joshua “Son of Nun (the Fish)” and Jesus; from the allegorical “Sin,” or Fall of Spirit into Matter; and from the Moon—in so far as it relates to the Lunar Ancestors, the Pitris.

For the present, it may be as well to remind the reader, that while the Moon-Goddesses were connected in every mythology, especially the Grecian, with child-birth, because of the influence of the Moon on women and conception, the Occult and actual connection of our satellite with fecundation is to this day unknown to Physiology, which regards every popular practice in this connection as gross superstition. As it is useless to discuss these in detail, we can only stop for the present to notice the lunar symbology casually, to show that the said superstition belongs to the most ancient beliefs, and even to Judaism—the basis of Christianity. With the Israelites, the chief function of Jehovah was child-giving, and the Esotericism of the Bible, interpreted kabalistically, shows undeniably that the Holy of Holies in the Temple was simply [pg 285] the symbol of the womb. This is now proven beyond doubt and cavil, by the numerical reading of the Bible in general, and of Genesis especially. This idea must certainly have been borrowed by the Jews from the Egyptians and Indians, whose Holy of Holies is symbolized by the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid and the Yoni symbols of exoteric Hindûism. To make the matter clearer, and to show at the same time the enormous difference in the spirit of interpretation and the original meaning of the same symbols between the ancient Eastern Occultists and the Jewish Kabalists, we refer the reader to the Section on “The Holy of Holies,” in the second Volume.

Phallic worship has developed only with the loss of the keys to the true meaning of the symbols. It was the last and most fatal turning from the highway of truth and divine knowledge into the side path of fiction, raised into dogma through human falsification and hierarchic ambition.

6. From the First-Born,409 the Thread between the Silent Watcher and his Shadow becomes more strong and radiant with every Change.410 The morning sun-light has changed into noon-day glory....

This sentence, “the Thread between the Silent Watcher and his Shadow [Man] becomes more strong with every Change,” is another psychological mystery, that will find its explanation in Volume II. For the present, it will suffice to say that the “Watcher” and his “Shadows”—the latter numbering as many as there are reïncarnations for the Monad—are one. The Watcher, or the Divine Prototype, is at the upper rung of the Ladder of Being; the Shadow, at the lower. Withal, the Monad of every living being, unless his moral turpitude breaks the connection, and he runs loose and astray into the “Lunar Path”—to use the Occult expression—is an individual Dhyân Chohan, distinct from others, with a kind of spiritual Individuality of its own, during one special Manvantara. Its Primary, the Spirit (Âtman), is one, of course, with the One Universal Spirit (Paramâtmâ), but the Vehicle (Vâhan) it is enshrined in, the Buddhi, is part and parcel of that Dhyân-Chohanic Essence; and it is in this that lies the mystery of that [pg 286] ubiquity, which was discussed a few pages back. “My Father, that is in Heaven, and I—are one,” says the Christian Scripture; and in this, at any rate, it is the faithful echo of the Esoteric tenet.

7. “This is thy present Wheel”—said the Flame to the Spark. “Thou art myself, my Image and my Shadow. I have clothed myself in thee, and thou art my Vâhan,411 to the Day ‘Be With Us,’ when thou shalt re-become myself and others, thyself and I” (a). Then the Builders, having donned their first Clothing, descend on radiant Earth, and reign over Men—who Are themselves (b).

(a) The Day when the Spark will re-become the Flame, when Man will merge into his Dhyân Chohan, “myself and others, thyself and I,” as the Stanza has it, means that in Paranirvâna—when Pralaya will have reduced not only material and psychical bodies, but even the spiritual Egos, to their original principle—the Past, Present, and even Future Humanities, like all things, will be one and the same. Everything will have reëntered the Great Breath. In other words, everything will be “merged in Brahman,” or the Divine Unity.

Is this annihilation, as some think? Or atheism, as other critics—the worshippers of a personal deity, and believers in an unphilosophical paradise—are inclined to suppose? Neither. It is worse than useless to return to the question of implied atheism, in that which is spirituality of a most refined character. To see in Nirvâna annihilation, amounts to saying of a man plunged in a sound dreamless sleep—one that leaves no impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper's Higher Self is then in its original state of Absolute Consciousness—that he, too, is annihilated. The latter simile answers to one side of the question only—the most material; since reäbsorption is by no means such a “dreamless sleep,” but, on the contrary, Absolute Existence, an unconditioned unity, or a state, to describe which human language is absolutely and hopelessly inadequate. The only approach to anything like a comprehensive conception of it can be attempted solely in the panoramic visions of the Soul, through spiritual ideations of the divine Monad. Nor is the Individuality—nor even the essence of the Personality, if any be left behind—lost, because reäbsorbed. For, however limitless [pg 287] from a human standpoint, the paranirvânic state, yet it has a limit in Eternity. Once reached, the same Monad will reëmerge therefrom, as a still higher being, on a far higher plane, to recommence its cycle of perfected activity. The human mind, in its present stage of development, cannot transcend, scarcely can it reach this plane of thought. It totters here, on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity.

(b) The “Watchers” reign over men during the whole period of Satya Yuga and the smaller subsequent Yugas, down to the beginning of the Third Root Race; after which it is the Patriarchs, Heroes, and the Manes, as in the Egyptian Dynasties enumerated by the priests to Solon, the incarnated Dhyânis of a lower order, up to King Menes and the human Kings of other nations. All were carefully recorded. In the views of symbologists this Mythopœic Age is of course regarded as only a fairy tale. But since traditions and even chronicles of such Dynasties of Divine Kings, of Gods reigning over men, followed by Dynasties of Heroes or Giants, exist in the annals of every nation, it is difficult to understand how all the peoples under the sun, some of whom are separated by vast oceans and belong to different hemispheres, such as the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans, as well as the Chaldeans, could have worked out the same “fairy tales” in the same order of events.412 However, as the Secret Doctrine teaches history—which, although esoteric and traditional, is, none the less, more reliable than profane history—we are entitled to our beliefs as much as anyone else, whether religionist or sceptic. And that Doctrine says that the Dhyâni-Buddhas of the two higher Groups, namely, the Watchers or the Architects, furnished the many and various races with divine kings and leaders. It is the latter who taught humanity their arts and sciences, and the former who revealed to the incarnated Monads that had just shaken off their Vehicles of the lower Kingdoms, and who had, therefore, lost every recollection of their divine origin, the great spiritual truths of the transcendental Worlds.

Thus, as expressed in the Stanza, the Watchers “descend on radiant Earth and reign over men, who are themselves.” The reigning Kings had finished their cycle on Earth and other Worlds, in the preceding Rounds. In the future Manvantaras they will have risen to higher [pg 288] Systems than our planetary World; and it is the Elect of our Humanity, the Pioneers on the hard and difficult path of Progress, who will take the places of their predecessors. The next great Manvantara will witness the men of our own Life-Cycle becoming the instructors and guides of a Mankind whose Monads may now be still imprisoned—semi-conscious—in the most intellectual of the animal kingdom, while their lower principles may be animating, perhaps, the highest specimens of the vegetable world.

Thus proceed the cycles of the septenary evolution, in Seven-fold Nature; the spiritual or divine; the psychic or semi-divine; the intellectual; the passional, the instinctual, or cognitional; the semi-corporeal; and the purely material or physical natures. All these evolve and progress cyclically, passing from one into another, in a double, centrifugal and centripetal, way, one in their ultimate essence, seven in their aspects. The lowest, of course, is that depending upon and subservient to our five physical senses, which are in truth seven, as shown later, on the authority of the oldest Upanishads. Thus far, for individual, human, sentient, animal and vegetable life, each the microcosm of its higher macrocosm. The same for the Universe, which manifests periodically, for purposes of the collective progress of the countless Lives, the outbreathings of the One Life; in order that, through the Ever-Becoming, every cosmic atom in this infinite Universe, passing from the formless and the intangible, through the mixed natures of the semi-terrestrial, down to matter in full generation, and then back again, reäscending at each new period higher and nearer the final goal; that each atom, we say, may reach, through individual merits and efforts, that plane where it re-becomes the One Unconditioned All. But between the Alpha and the Omega there is the weary “Road,” hedged in by thorns, that goes down first, then—

Winds up hill all the way;

Yes, to the very end....

Starting upon the long journey immaculate, descending more and more into sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested Space—the Pilgrim, having struggled through, and suffered in, every form of Life and Being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half through his cycle, when he has identified himself with collective Humanity. This, he has made in his own image. In order to progress upwards and homewards, the “God” has now to ascend the weary uphill path of the Golgotha of Life. It is the martyrdom [pg 289] of self-conscious existence. Like Vishvakarman, he has to sacrifice himself to himself, in order to redeem all creatures, to resurrect from the Many into the One Life. Then he ascends into Heaven indeed; where, plunged into the incomprehensible Absolute Being and Bliss of Paranirvâna, he reigns unconditionally, and whence he will re-descend again, at the next “Coming,” which one portion of humanity expects in its dead-letter sense as the “Second Advent,” and the other as the last “Kalkî Avatâra.”

[pg 290]

Summing Up.

The History of Creation and of this World, from its beginning up to the present time, is composed of seven chapters. The seventh chapter is not yet written.

T. Subba Row.413

The first of these “seven chapters” has been attempted and is now finished. However incomplete and feeble as an exposition, it is, at any rate, an approximation—using the word in a mathematical sense—to that which is the oldest basis for all subsequent cosmogonies. The attempt to render in a European tongue the grand panorama of the ever periodically recurring Law, impressed upon the plastic minds of the first Races endowed with Consciousness, by those who reflected the same from the Universal Mind, is daring; for no human language, save the Sanskrit—which is that of the Gods—can do so with any degree of adequacy. But the failures in this work must be forgiven for the sake of the motive.

As a whole, neither the foregoing nor what follows can be found in full anywhere. It is not taught in any of the six Indian schools of philosophy, for it pertains to their synthesis, the seventh, which is the Occult Doctrine. It is not traced on any crumbling papyrus of Egypt, nor is it any longer graven on Assyrian tile or granite wall. The Books of the Vedânta—the “last word of human knowledge”—give out but the metaphysical aspect of this world-cosmogony; and their priceless thesaurus, the Upanishads—Upa-ni-shad being a compound word, expressing the conquest of ignorance by the revelation of secret, spiritual knowledge—now requires the additional possession of a master-key, to enable the student to get at their full meaning. The reason for this I venture to state here as I learned it from a Master.

The name Upanishad, is usually translated “esoteric doctrine.” These treatises form part of Shruti, or “revealed” Knowledge, Revelation in short, and are generally attached to the Brâhmana portion of the Vedas, as their third division.

[pg 291]

[Now] the Vedas have a distinct dual meaning—one expressed by the literal sense of the words, the other indicated by the metre and the svara (intonation), which are as the life of the Vedas.... Learned pandits and philologists of course deny that svara has anything to do with philosophy or ancient esoteric doctrines; but the mysterious connection between svara and light is one of its most profound secrets.414

There are over 150 Upanishads enumerated by Orientalists, who credit the oldest with being written probably about 600 years b.c.; but of genuine texts there does not exist a fifth of the number. The Upanishads are to the Vedas what the Kabalah is to the Jewish Bible. They treat of and expound the secret and mystic meaning of the Vedic texts. They speak of the origin of the Universe, the nature of Deity, and of Spirit and Soul, as also of the metaphysical connection of Mind and Matter. In a few words: They contain the beginning and the end of all human knowledge, but they have ceased to reveal it, since the days of Buddha. If it were otherwise, the Upanishads could not be called esoteric, since they are now openly attached to the Sacred Brâhmanical Books, which have, in our present age, become accessible even to the Mlechchhas (out-castes) and the European Orientalists. One thing in them—and this, in all the Upanishads—invariably and constantly points to their ancient origin, and proves (a) that they were written, in some of their portions, before the caste system became the tyrannical institution which it still is; and (b) that half of their contents have been eliminated, while some of them have been rewritten and abridged. “The great Teachers of the higher Knowledge and the Brâhmans are continually represented as going to Kshatriya [military-caste] kings to become their pupils.” As Professor Cowell pertinently remarks, the Upanishads “breathe an entirely different spirit [from other Brâhmanical writings], a freedom of thought unknown in any earlier work, except in the Rig Veda hymns themselves.” The second fact is explained by a tradition recorded in one of the MSS. on Buddha's life. It says that the Upanishads were originally attached to their Brâhmanas after the beginning of a reform, which led to the exclusiveness of the present caste system among the Brâhmans, a few centuries after the invasion of India by the “Twice-born.” They were complete in those days, and were used for the instruction of the Chelâs who were preparing for Initiation.

This lasted so long as the Vedas and the Brâhmanas remained in the [pg 292] sole and exclusive keeping of the temple-Brâhmans—while no one else had the right to study or even read them outside of the sacred caste. Then came Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu. After learning the whole of the Brâhmanical wisdom in the Rahasya, or the Upanishads, and finding that the teachings differed little, if at all, from those of the “Teachers of Life” inhabiting the snowy ranges of the Himâlayas,415 the disciple of the Brâhmans, feeling indignant because the Sacred Wisdom was thus withheld from all but Brâhmans, determined, by popularizing it, to save the whole world. Then it was that the Brâhmans, seeing that their Sacred Knowledge and Occult Wisdom was falling into the hands of the Mlechchhas, abridged the texts of the Upanishads, which originally contained thrice the matter of the Vedas and the Brâhmanas together, without altering, however, one word of the texts. They simply detached from the MSS. the most important portions, containing the last word of the Mystery of Being. The key to the Brâhmanical secret code remained henceforth with the Initiates alone, and the Brâhmans were thus in a position to publicly deny the correctness of Buddha's teaching by appealing to their Upanishads, silenced for ever on the chief questions. Such is the esoteric tradition beyond the Himâlayas.

Shrî Shankarâchârya, the greatest Initiate living in the historical ages, wrote many a Bhâshya (Commentary) on the Upanishads. But his original treatises, as there are reasons to suppose, have not yet fallen into the hands of the Philistines, for they are too jealously preserved in his monasteries (mathams). And there are still weightier reasons to believe that the priceless Bhâshyas on the Esoteric Doctrine of the Brâhmans, by their greatest expounder, will remain for ages still a dead letter to most of the Hindûs, except the Smârtava Brâhmans. This sect, founded by Shankarâchârya, which is still very powerful in Southern India, is now almost the only one to produce students who have preserved sufficient knowledge to comprehend the dead letter of the Bhâshyas. The reason for this, I am informed, is that they alone have occasionally real Initiates at their head in their mathams, as for instance, in the Shringa-giri, in the Western Ghâts of Mysore. On the other hand, there is no sect, in that desperately exclusive [pg 293] caste of the Brâhmans, more exclusive than is the Smârtava; and the reticence of its followers, to say what they may know of the Occult sciences and the Esoteric Doctrine, is only equalled by their pride and learning.

Therefore the writer of the present statement must be prepared beforehand to meet with great opposition, and even the denial of such statements as are brought forward in this work. Not that any claim to infallibility, or to perfect correctness in every detail of all which is herein written, has ever been put forward. Facts are there, and they can hardly be denied. But, owing to the intrinsic difficulties of the subjects treated of, and the almost insurmountable limitations of the English tongue, as of all other European languages, to express certain ideas, it is more than probable that the writer has failed to present the explanations in the best and the clearest form; yet all that could be done, under every adverse circumstance, has been done, and this is the utmost that can be expected of any writer.

Let us recapitulate and, by the vastness of the subjects expounded, show how difficult, if not impossible, it is to do them full justice.

(1) The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate of all systems, even as veiled in the exotericism of the Purânas. But such is the mysterious power of Occult symbolism, that the facts which have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, set down and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The flashing gaze of those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there, where an ordinary profane observer, however learned, would have perceived but the external work of form. But Modern Science believes not in the “soul of things,” and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony. It is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals; that it is an uninterrupted record, covering thousands of generations of seers, whose respective experiences were made to test and verify the traditions, passed on orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted Beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity; that for long ages, the “Wise Men” of the Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued from the last cataclysm and the shifting of continents, passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered: [pg 294] by checking, testing, and verifying, in every department of Nature, the traditions of old, by the independent visions of great Adepts; that is to say, men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organizations, to the utmost possible degree. No vision of one Adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions—so obtained as to stand as independent evidence—of other Adepts, and by centuries of experience.

(2) The fundamental law in that system, the central point from which all emerges, around and towards which all gravitates, and upon which is hung all its philosophy, is the One Homogeneous Divine Substance-Principle, the One Radical Cause.

... Some few, whose lamps shone brighter, have been led

From cause to cause to nature's secret head,

And found that one first Principle must be....

It is called “Substance-Principle,” for it becomes “Substance” on the plane of the manifested Universe, an Illusion, while it remains a “Principle” in the beginningless and endless abstract, visible and invisible, Space. It is the omnipresent Reality; impersonal, because it contains all and everything. Its Impersonality is the fundamental conception of the System. It is latent in every atom in the Universe, and is the Universe itself.

(3) The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute Essence. To call it “Essence,” however, is to sin against the very spirit of the philosophy. For though the noun may be derived in this case from the verb esse, “to be,” yet It cannot be identified with a “being” of any kind, that can be conceived by human intellect. It is best described as neither Spirit nor Matter, but both. Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti are One, in reality, yet Two in the universal conception of the Manifested, even in the conception of the One Logos, the first “Manifestation,” to which, as the able lecturer shows, in the “Notes on the Bhagavadgîtâ,” It appears from the objective standpoint as Mûlaprakriti, and not as Parabrahman; as its Veil, and not the One Reality hidden behind, which is unconditioned and absolute.

(4) The Universe, with everything in it, is called Mâyâ, because all is temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a fire-fly to that of the sun. Compared to the eternal immutability of the One, and the changelessness of that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent ever-changing forms, must be necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher, no [pg 295] better than a will-o'-the-wisp. Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

(5) Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because we do not perceive any signs of consciousness which we can recognize, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind” matter, as there is no “blind” or “unconscious” Law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult Philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal Essences have more reality than their objective counterparts; wherein it resembles the system of the mediæval Nominalists, for whom it was the universals that were the realities, and the particulars which existed only in name and human fancy.

(6) The Universe is worked and guided, from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man, the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm, is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man's external body, can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named, so with the external or manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform, and who—whether we give them one name or another, whether we call them Dhyân Chohans or Angels—are “Messengers,” in the sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary infinitely in their respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence; and to call them all pure Spirits, without any of the earthly alloy “which time is wont to prey upon,” is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each of these Beings either was, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the present, then in a past or a coming Manvantara. They are perfected, when not incipient, men; and in their higher, less material, spheres differ morally from terrestrial human beings only in that they are devoid of the feeling of personality, and of the human emotional nature—two purely earthly characteristics. The [pg 296] former, or the “perfected,” have become free from these feelings, because (a) they have no longer fleshly bodies—an ever-numbing weight on the Soul; and (b), the pure spiritual element being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by Mâyâ than man can ever be, unless he is an Adept who keeps his two personalities—the spiritual and the physical—entirely separated. The incipient Monads, having never yet had terrestrial bodies, can have no sense of personality or Ego-ism. That which is meant by “personality” being a limitation and a relation, or, as defined by Coleridge, “individuality existing in itself but with a nature as a ground,” the term cannot of course be applied to non-human Entities; but, as a fact insisted upon by generations of Seers, none of these Beings, high or low, have either individuality or personality as separate Entities, i.e., they have no individuality in the sense in which a man says, “I am myself and no one else”; in other words, they are conscious of no such distinct separateness as men and things have on earth. Individuality is the characteristic of their respective Hierarchies, not of their units; and these characteristics vary only with the degree of the plane to which these Hierarchies belong: the nearer to the region of Homogeneity and the One Divine, the purer and the less accentuated is that individuality in the Hierarchy. They are finite in all respects, with the exception of their higher principles—the immortal Sparks reflecting the Universal Divine Flame, individualized and separated only on the spheres of Illusion, by a differentiation as illusive as the rest. They are “Living Ones,” because they are the streams projected on the cosmic screen of Illusion from the Absolute Life; Beings in whom life cannot become extinct, before the fire of ignorance is extinct in those who sense these “Lives.” Having sprung into being under the quickening influence of the uncreated Beam, the reflection of the great Central Sun that radiates on the shores of the River of Life, it is the Inner Principle in them which belongs to the Waters of Immortality, while its differentiated clothing is as perishable as man's body. Therefore Young was right in saying that

Angels are men of a superior kind ...

and no more. They are neither “ministering” nor “protecting” Angels, nor are they “Harbingers of the Most High”; still less the “Messengers of Wrath” of any God such as man's fancy has created. To appeal to their protection is as foolish as to believe that their sympathy may be secured by any kind of propitiation; for they are, as [pg 297] much as man himself is, the slaves and creatures of immutable Karmic and Cosmic Law. The reason for this is evident. Having no elements of personality in their essence, they can have no personal qualities, such as are attributed by men, in exoteric religions, to their anthropomorphic God—a jealous and exclusive God, who rejoices and feels wrathful, is pleased with sacrifice, and is more despotic in his vanity than any finite foolish man. Man, being a compound of the essences of all these celestial Hierarchies, may succeed in making himself, as such, superior, in one sense, to any Hierarchy or Class, or even combination of them. “Man can neither propitiate nor command the Devas,” it is said. But, by paralyzing his lower personality, and arriving thereby at the full knowledge of the non-separateness of his Higher Self from the One Absolute Self, man can, even during his terrestrial life, become as “one of us.” Thus it is, by eating of the fruit of knowledge, which dispels ignorance, that man becomes like one of the Elohim, or the Dhyânis; and once on their plane, the spirit of Solidarity and perfect Harmony, which reigns in every Hierarchy, must extend over him, and protect him in every particular.

The chief difficulty which prevents men of Science from believing in divine as well as in nature spirits is their Materialism. The main impediment before the Spiritualist which hinders him from believing in the same, while preserving a blind belief in the “Spirits” of the Departed, is the general ignorance of all—except some Occultists and Kabalists—about the true essence and nature of Matter. It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious Beings, besides the Spirits of the Dead. It is on the right comprehension of the primeval Evolution of Spirit-Matter, and its real Essence, that the student has to depend for the further elucidation in his mind of the Occult Cosmogony, and for the only sure clue which can guide his subsequent studies.

In sober truth, as just shown, every so-called “Spirit” is either a disembodied or a future man. As from the highest Archangel (Dhyân Chohan) down to the last conscious Builder (the inferior Class of Spiritual Entities), all such are men, having lived æons ago, in other Manvantaras, on this or other Spheres; so the inferior, semi-intelligent and non-intelligent Elementals are all future men. The fact alone, that a Spirit is endowed with intelligence, is a proof to the Occultist that such a Being must have been a man, and acquired his knowledge [pg 298] and intelligence throughout the human cycle. There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole Kosmos, which has no bounds, and which people call Space, considered independently of anything contained in it. But the first differentiation of its reflection in the Manifested World is purely spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of. They can have no human consciousness or intelligence before they have acquired such, personally and individually. This may be a mystery, yet it is a fact in Esoteric Philosophy, and a very apparent one too.

The whole order of Nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution, with its endless adaptations, is a proof of this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to make room for the strong, and which ensure the “survival of the fittest,” though so cruel in their immediate action, all are working toward the grand end. The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called “unconscious Nature” is in reality an aggregate of forces, manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals), guided by High Planetary Spirits (Dhyân Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the Manifested Verbum of the Unmanifested Logos, and constitutes one and the same time the Mind of the Universe and its immutable Law.

For Nature, taken in its abstract sense, cannot be “unconscious,” as it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect on the manifested plane of, the Absolute Consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own? All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.

Three distinct representations of the Universe, in its three distinct aspects, are impressed upon our thoughts by the Esoteric Philosophy: the Pre-existing, evolved from the Ever-existing, and the Phenomenal—the world of illusion, the reflection, and shadow thereof. During the great mystery and drama of life, known as the Manvantara, real Kosmos is like the objects placed behind the white screen upon which shadows are thrown. The actual figures and things remain invisible, while the wires of evolution are pulled by unseen hands. Men and [pg 299] things are thus but the reflections, on the white field, of the realities behind the snares of Mahâmâyâ, or the Great Illusion. This was taught in every philosophy, in every religion, ante- as well as post-diluvian, in India and Chaldea, by the Chinese as by the Grecian Sages. In the former countries these three Universes were allegorized, in exoteric teachings, by the three Trinities, emanating from the central eternal Germ, and forming with it a Supreme Unity: the initial, the manifested, and the creative Triad, or the Three in One. The last is but the symbol, in its concrete expression, of the first ideal two. Hence Esoteric Philosophy passes over the necessarianism of this purely metaphysical conception, and calls the first one, only, the Ever-Existing. This is the view of every one of the six great schools of Indian philosophy—the six principles of that unit body of Wisdom of which the Gnôsis, the hidden Knowledge, is the seventh.

The writer hopes that, however superficially the comments on the Seven Stanzas may have been handled, enough has been given, in this cosmogonic portion of the work, to show the archaic teachings to be on their very face more scientific (in the modern sense of the word) than any other ancient Scriptures left to be judged on their exoteric aspect. Since, however, as before confessed, this work withholds far more than it gives out, the student is invited to use his own intuitions. Our chief care is to elucidate that which has already been given out, and, to our regret, very incorrectly at times; to supplement the knowledge hinted at—whenever and wherever possible—by additional matter; and to bulwark our doctrines against the too strong attacks of modern Sectarianism, and more especially against those of our latter-day Materialism, very often miscalled Science, whereas, in reality, the words “Scientists” and “Sciolists” ought alone to bear the responsibility for the many illogical theories offered to the world. In its great ignorance, the public, while blindly accepting everything that emanates from “authorities,” and feeling it to be its duty to regard every dictum coming from a man of Science as a proven fact—the public, we say, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from “heathen” sources. Therefore, as materialistic Scientists can be fought solely with their own weapons—those of controversy and argument—an Addendum is added to each Volume contrasting the respective views, and showing how even great authorities may often err. We believe that this can be done effectually, by showing the weak points of our opponents, and by proving their too frequent sophisms, which are made to pass for scientific [pg 300] dicta, to be incorrect. We hold to Hermes and his “Wisdom,” in its universal character; they—to Aristotle, as against intuition and the experience of the Ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As Hermes says: “Knowledge differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but Knowledge is the end of sense”—i.e., of the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect; thus emphasizing the contrast between the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses and Mind (Manas), and the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual Divine Soul (Buddhi).

Whatever may be the destiny of these actual writings in a remote future, we hope to have so far proven the following facts:

(1) The Secret Doctrine teaches no Atheism, except in the sense underlying the Sanskrit word Nâstika, a rejection of idols, including every anthropomorphic God. In this sense every Occultist is a Nâstika.

(2) It admits a Logos, or a Collective “Creator” of the Universe; a Demiurge, in the sense implied when one speaks of an “Architect” as the “Creator” of an edifice, whereas that Architect has never touched one stone of it, but, furnishing the plan, has left all the manual labour to the masons; in our case the plan was furnished by the Ideation of the Universe, and the constructive labour was left to the Hosts of intelligent Powers and Forces. But that Demiurge is no personal deity—i.e., an imperfect extra-cosmic God, but only the aggregate of the Dhyân Chohans and the other Forces.

(3) The Dhyân Chohans are dual in their character; being composed of (a) the irrational brute Energy, inherent in Matter, and (b) the intelligent Soul, or cosmic Consciousness, which directs and guides that Energy, and which is the Dhyân Chohanic Thought, reflecting the Ideation of the Universal Mind. This results in a perpetual series of physical manifestations and moral effects on Earth, during manvantaric periods, the whole being subservient to Karma. As that process is not always perfect; and since, however many proofs it may exhibit of a guiding Intelligence behind the veil, it still shows gaps and flaws, and even very often results in evident failures—therefore, neither the collective Host (Demiurge), nor any of the working Powers individually, are proper subjects for divine honours or worship. All are entitled to the grateful reverence of humanity, however, and man ought to be ever striving to help the divine evolution of Ideas, by becoming, to the best of his ability, a co-worker with Nature, in the cyclic task. The ever [pg 301] unknowable and incognizable Kârana alone, the Causeless Cause of all causes, should have its shrine and altar on the holy and ever untrodden ground of our heart—invisible, intangible, unmentioned, save through the “still small voice” of our spiritual consciousness. Those who worship before it, ought to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of their Souls; making their Spirit the sole mediator between them and the Universal Spirit, their good actions the only priests, and their sinful intentions the only visible and objective sacrificial victims to the Presence.

“When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are ... but enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.”416 Our Father is within us “in secret,” our Seventh Principle in the “inner chamber” of our soul-perception. “The Kingdom of God” and of Heaven is within us, says Jesus, not outside. Why are Christians so absolutely blind to the self-evident meaning of the words of wisdom they delight in mechanically repeating?

(4) Matter is Eternal. It is the Upâdhi, or Physical Basis, for the One Infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations. Therefore, the Esotericists maintain that there is no inorganic or “dead” matter in Nature, the distinction between the two made by Science being as unfounded as it is arbitrary and devoid of reason. Whatever Science may think, however—and exact Science is a fickle dame, as we all know by experience—Occultism knows and teaches differently, as it has done from time immemorial, from Manu and Hermes down to Paracelsus and his successors.

Thus, Hermes, the Thrice Great, says:

Oh, my son, matter becomes; formerly it was; for matter is the vehicle of becoming. Becoming is the mode of activity of the uncreate and foreseeing God. Having been endowed with the germ of becoming, [objective] matter is brought into birth, for the creative force fashions it according to the ideal forms. Matter not yet engendered had no form; it becomes, when it is put into operation.417

To this the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, the able translator and compiler of the Hermetic Fragments, remarks in a footnote:

Dr. Ménard observes that in Greek the same word signifies to be born and to become. The idea here is, that the material of the world is in its essence eternal, but that before creation or “becoming” it is in a passive and motionless condition. Thus it “was” before being put into operation; now it “becomes,” that is, it is mobile and progressive.

[pg 302]

And she adds the purely Vedântic doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy that:

Creation is thus the period of activity [Manvantara] of God, who, according to Hermetic thought [or which, according to the Vedântin], has two modes—Activity or Existence, God evolved (Deus explicitus); and Passivity of Being [Pralaya], God involved (Deus implicitus). Both modes are perfect and complete, as are the waking and sleeping states of man. Fichte, the German philosopher, distinguished Being (Seyn) as One, which we know only through existence (Daseyn) as the Manifold. This view is thoroughly Hermetic. The “Ideal Forms” ... are the archetypal or formative ideas of the Neo-Platonists; the eternal and subjective concepts of things subsisting in the Divine Mind, prior to “creation” or becoming.

Or, as in the philosophy of Paracelsus:

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort.... There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.418

(5) The Universe was evolved out of its ideal plan, upheld through Eternity in the Unconsciousness of that which the Vedântins call Parabrahman. This is practically identical with the conclusions of the highest Western philosophy, “the innate, eternal, and self-existing Ideas” of Plato, now reflected by Von Hartmann. The “Unknowable” of Herbert Spencer bears but a faint resemblance to that transcendental Reality believed in by Occultists, often appearing merely a personification of a “force behind phenomena”—an infinite and eternal Energy, from which all things proceed, whereas the author of the Philosophy of the Unconscious has come (in this respect only) as near to a solution of the great Mystery as mortal man can. Few have been those, whether in ancient or mediæval philosophy, who have dared to approach the subject or even hint at it. Paracelsus mentions it inferentially, and his ideas are admirably synthesized by Dr. F. Hartmann, F.T.S., in his Paracelsus, from which we have just quoted.

All the Christian Kabalists understood well the Eastern root idea. The active Power, the “Perpetual Motion of the great Breath,” only awakens Cosmos at the dawn of every new Period, setting it into motion by means of the two contrary Forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal Forces, which are male and female, positive and negative, physical and spiritual, the two being the one Primordial Force, and thus causing it to become objective on the plane of Illusion. In other words, that dual motion transfers Cosmos from the plane of the Eternal [pg 303] Ideal into that of finite manifestation, or from the noumenal to the phenomenal plane. Everything that is, was, and will be, eternally IS, even the countless Forms, which are finite and perishable only in their objective, but not in their ideal form. They existed as Ideas, in the Eternity, and, when they pass away, will exist as reflections. Occultism teaches that no form can be given to anything, either by Nature or by man, whose ideal type does not already exist on the subjective plane: more than this; that no form or shape can possibly enter man's consciousness, or evolve in his imagination, which does not exist in prototype, at least as an approximation. Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or stone, has ever been “created”; and it is only on this plane of ours that it commenced “becoming,” that is to say, objectivizing into its present materiality, or expanding from within outwards, from the most sublimated and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance. Therefore our human forms have existed in the Eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes; according to which models, the Spiritual Beings, or Gods, whose duty it was to bring them into objective being and terrestrial life, evolved the protoplasmic forms of the future Egos from their own essence. After which, when this human Upâdhi, or basic mould, was ready, the natural terrestrial Forces began to work on these supersensuous moulds, which contained, besides their own, the elements of all the past vegetable and future animal forms of this Globe. Therefore, man's outward shell passed through every vegetable and animal body, before it assumed the human shape. But as this will be fully described in Volume II, in the Commentaries, there is no need to say more of it here.

According to the Hermetico-Kabalistic philosophy of Paracelsus, it is Yliaster—the ancestor of the just-born Protyle, introduced by Mr. Crookes into Chemistry—or primordial Protomateria, that evolved out of itself the Cosmos.

When creation [evolution] took place, the Yliaster divided itself; it, so to say, melted and dissolved, developed out of [from within] itself the Ideos or Chaos (Mysterium Magnum, Iliados, Limbus Major, or Primordial Matter). This Primordial Essence is of a monistic nature, and manifests itself not only as vital activity, a spiritual force, an invisible, incomprehensible, and indescribable power, but also as vital matter of which the substance of living beings consists. In this Limbus or Ideos of primordial matter, ... the only matrix of all created things, the substance of all things is contained. It is described by the ancients as the Chaos ... out of which the Macrocosmos, and afterwards, by division and evolution in [pg 304]Mysteria Specialia,419 each separate being came into existence. All things and all elementary substances were contained in it in potentiâ but not in actu.420

This makes the translator, Dr. F. Hartmann, justly observe that “it seems that Paracelsus anticipated the modern discovery of the ‘potency of matter’ three hundred years ago.”

The Magnus Limbus, then, or Yliaster, of Paracelsus is simply our old friend “Father-Mother,” within, before it appeared in Space. It is the Universal Matrix of Kosmos, personified in the dual character of Macrocosm and Microcosm, or the Universe and our Globe,421 by Aditi-Prakriti, spiritual and physical Nature. For we find it explained in Paracelsus that:

The Magnus Limbus is the nursery out of which all creatures have grown, in the same sense as a tree may grow out of a small seed; with the difference, however, that the great Limbus takes its origin from the Word of God, while the Limbus minor (the terrestrial seed or sperm) takes it from the earth. The great Limbus is the seed out of which all beings have come, and the little Limbus is each ultimate being that reproduces its form, and that has itself been produced by the great. The little Limbus possesses all the qualifications of the great one, in the same sense as a son has an organization similar to that of his father.... As ... Yliaster dissolved, Ares, the dividing, differentiating, and individualizing power [Fohat, another old friend] ... began to act. All production took place in consequence of separation. There were produced out of the Ideos the elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, whose birth, however, did not take place in a material mode, or by simple separation, but spiritually and dynamically [not even by complex combinations—e.g., mechanical mixture as opposed to chemical combination], just as fire may come out of a pebble, or a tree out of a seed, although there is originally no fire in the pebble, nor a tree in the seed. “Spirit is living, and Life is Spirit, and Life and Spirit [Prakriti, Purusha (?)] produce all things, but they are essentially one and not two.” ... The elements, too, have each one its own Yliaster, because all the activity of matter in every form is only an effluvium of the same fountain. But as from the seed grow the roots with their fibres, afterwards the stalk with its branches and leaves, and lastly the flowers and seeds; likewise all beings were born from the elements, and consist of elementary substances out of which other forms may come into existence, bearing the characteristics of their parents.422 The elements as the mothers of all creatures are of an [pg 305]invisible, spiritual nature, and have souls.423 They all spring from the Mysterium Magnum.

Compare this with Vishnu Purâna.

From Pradhâna [Primordial Substance] presided over by Kshetrajna [“embodied spirit” (?)] proceeds the unequal development [Evolution] of those qualities.... From the great principle (Mahat) [Universal] Intellect [or Mind] ... is produced the origin of the subtle elements and of the organs of sense.424 ...

Thus it may be shown that all the fundamental truths of Nature were universal in antiquity, and that the basic ideas upon Spirit, Matter and the Universe, or upon God, Substance and Man, were identical. Taking the two most ancient religious philosophies on the globe, Hindûism and Hermeticism, from the Scriptures of India and Egypt, the identity of the two is easily recognizable.

This becomes apparent to one who reads the latest translation and rendering of the “Hermetic Fragments” just mentioned, by our late lamented friend, Dr. Anna Kingsford. Disfigured and tortured as these have been in their passage through sectarian Greek and Christian hands, the translator has most ably and intuitionally seized the weak points and tried to remedy them by means of explanations and footnotes. She says:

The creation of the visible world by the “working gods” or Titans, as agents of the Supreme God,425 is a thoroughly Hermetic idea, recognizable in all religious systems, and in accordance with modern scientific research [?], which shows us everywhere the Divine Power operating through natural Forces.

To quote from the translation:

That Universal Being, that contains all, and which is all, puts into motion the soul and the world, all that nature comprises. In the manifold unity of universal life, the innumerable individualities distinguished by their variations are, nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and that everything proceeds from Unity.426

And again from another translation:

God is not a mind, but the cause that the Mind is; not a spirit, but the cause that the Spirit is; not light, but the cause that the Light is.427

The above shows plainly that the “Divine Pymander,” however [pg 306] much distorted in some passages by Christian “smoothing,” was nevertheless written by a philosopher, while most of the so-called “Hermetic Fragments” are the production of sectarian pagans with a tendency towards an anthropomorphic Supreme Being. Yet both are the echo of the Esoteric Philosophy and the Hindû Purânas.

Compare two invocations, one to the Hermetic “Supreme All,” the other to the “Supreme All” of the later Âryans. Says a Hermetic Fragment cited by Suidas:

I adjure thee, Heaven, holy work of the great God; I adjure thee, Voice of the Father, uttered in the beginning when the universal world was framed; I adjure thee by the Word, only Son of the Father Who upholds all things; be favourable, be favourable.428

This is preceded by the following:

Thus the Ideal Light was before the Ideal Light, and the luminous Intelligence of Intelligence was always, and its unity was nothing else than the Spirit enveloping the Universe. Out of Whom [Which] is neither God nor Angels, nor any other essentials, for He [It] is the Lord of all things and the Power and the Light; and all depends on Him [It] and is in Him [It].

A passage contradicted by the very same Trismegistus, who is made to say:

To speak of God is impossible. For the corporeal cannot express the incorporeal.... That which has not any body nor appearance, nor form, nor matter, cannot be apprehended by sense. I understand, Tatios, I understand, that which it is impossible to define—that is God.429

The contradiction between the two passages is evident; and this shows (a) that Hermes was a generic nom de plume used by a series of generations of Mystics of every shade, and (b) that great discernment has to be used before accepting a Fragment as esoteric teaching only because it is undeniably ancient. Let us now compare the above with a like invocation in the Hindû Scriptures—undoubtedly as old, if not far older. Here it is. Parâshara, the Âryan “Hermes,” instructs Maitreya, the Indian Asclepios, and calls upon Vishnu in his triple hypostasis:

Glory to the unchangeable, holy, eternal, supreme Vishnu, of one universal nature, the mighty over all; to him who is Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara [Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Shiva], the creator, the preserver, and destroyer of the world; to Vâsudeva, the liberator (of his worshippers); to him whose essence is both single and manifold; who is both subtile and corporeal, indiscrete and discrete; to Vishnu, [pg 307]the cause of final emancipation. Glory to the supreme Vishnu, the cause of the creation, existence, the end of this world; who is the root of the world, and who consists of the world.430

This is a grand invocation, with a deep philosophical meaning underlying it; but, for the profane masses, as suggestive as is the Hermetic prayer of an anthropomorphic Being. We must respect the feeling that dictated both; but we cannot help finding it in full disharmony with its inner meaning, even with that which is found in the same Hermetic treatise where it is said:

Trismegistus: Reality is not upon the earth, my son, and it cannot be thereon.... Nothing on earth is real, there are only appearances.... He [man] is not real, my son, as man. The real consists solely in itself and remains what it is.... Man is transient, therefore he is not real, he is but appearance, and appearance is the supreme illusion.

Tatios: Then the celestial bodies themselves are not real, my father, since they also vary?

Trismegistus: That which is subject to birth and to change is not real ... there is in them a certain falsity, seeing that they too are variable....

Tatios: And what then is the primordial Reality, O my Father?

Trismegistus: He Who [That Which] is one and alone, O Tatios; He Who [That Which] is not made of matter, nor in any body. Who [Which] has neither colour nor form, Who [Which] changes not nor is transmitted, but Who [Which] always Is.431

This is quite consistent with the Vedântic teaching. The leading thought is Occult; and many are the passages in the Hermetic Fragments that belong bodily to the Secret Doctrine.

This Doctrine teaches that the whole Universe is ruled by intelligent and semi-intelligent Forces and Powers, as stated from the very beginning. Christian Theology admits and even enforces belief in such, but makes an arbitrary division and refers to them as “Angels” and “Devils.” Science denies the existence of both, and ridicules the very idea. Spiritualists believe in the “Spirits of the Dead,” and outside these deny entirely any other kind or class of invisible beings. The Occultists and Kabalists are thus the only rational expounders of the ancient traditions, which have now culminated in dogmatic faith on the one hand, and dogmatic denial on the other. For both belief and unbelief each embrace but one small corner of the infinite horizons of spiritual and physical manifestations: and thus both are right from their respective standpoints, yet both are wrong in believing that they can circumscribe the whole within their own special and narrow [pg 308] barriers, for—they can never do so. In this respect, Science, Theology, and even Spiritualism show little more wisdom than the ostrich, when it hides its head in the sand at its feet, feeling sure that there can be thus nothing beyond its own point of observation and the limited area occupied by its foolish head.

As the only works now extant upon the subject under consideration, within reach of the profane of the Western “civilized” races, are the above-mentioned Hermetic Books, or rather Hermetic Fragments, we may contrast them in the present case with the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy. To quote for this purpose from any other would be useless, since the public knows nothing of the Chaldean works, which are translated into Arabic and preserved by some Sufi Initiates. Therefore the “Definitions of Asclepios,” as lately compiled and glossed by Dr. Anna Kingsford, F.T.S., some of which sayings are in remarkable agreement with the Eastern Esoteric Doctrine, have to be resorted to for comparison. Though not a few passages bear a strong impression of some later Christian hand, yet on the whole the characteristics of the Genii and Gods are those of Eastern teachings, although concerning other things there are passages which differ widely in our doctrines.

As to the Genii, the Hermetic philosophers called Theoi (Gods), Genii and Daimones, those Entities whom we call Devas (Gods), Dhyân Chohans, Chitkala (the Kwan-Yin, of the Buddhists), and various other names. The Daimones are—in the Socratic sense, and even in the Oriental and Latin theological sense—the guardian spirits of the human race; “those who dwell in the neighbourhood of the immortals, and thence watch over human affairs,” as Hermes has it. In Esoteric parlance, they are called Chitkala, some of which are those who have furnished man with his fourth and fifth Principles from their own essence, and others the so-called Pitris. This will be explained when we come to the production of the complete man. The root of the name is Chit, “that by which the consequences of acts and species of knowledge are selected for the use of the soul,” or conscience, the inner voice in man. With the Yogins, Chit is a synonym of Mahat, the first and divine Intellect; but in Esoteric Philosophy Mahat is the root of Chit, its germ; and Chit is a quality of Manas in conjunction with Buddhi, a quality that attracts to itself by spiritual affinity a Chitkala, when it develops sufficiently in man. This is why it is said that Chit is a voice acquiring mystic life and becoming Kwan-Yin.

[pg 309]

Extracts From An Eastern Private Commentary, Hitherto Secret.432
xvii. The Initial Existence, in the first Twilight of the Mahâmanvantara [after the Mahâpralaya that follows every Age of Brahmâ], is a Conscious Spiritual Quality. In the Manifested Worlds [Solar Systems], it is, in its Objective Subjectivity, like the film from a Divine Breath to the gaze of the entranced seer. It spreads as it issues from Laya433 throughout Infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid. It is on the Seventh Plane, and in its Seventh State, in our Planetary World.434
xviii. It is Substance to our spiritual sight. It cannot be called so by men in their Waking State; therefore they have named it in their ignorance “God-Spirit.”

xix. It exists everywhere and forms the first Upâdhi [Foundation] on which our World [Solar System] is built. Outside the latter, it is to be found in its pristine purity only between [the Solar Systems or] the Stars of the Universe, the Worlds already formed or forming; those in Laya resting meanwhile in its bosom. As its substance is of a different kind from that known on Earth, the inhabitants of the latter, seeing through it, believe in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space. There is not one finger's breadth [angula] of void Space in the whole Boundless [Universe]....

xx. Matter or Substance is septenary within our World, as it is so beyond it. Moreover, each of its states or principles is graduated into seven degrees of density. Sûrya [the Sun], in its visible reflection, exhibits the first or lowest state of the seventh, the highest state of the Universal Presence, the pure of the pure, the first manifested Breath of the Ever-Unmanifested Sat [Be-ness]. All the central physical or objective Suns are in their substance the lowest state of the first principle of the Breath. Nor are any of these any more than the Reflections of their Primaries, which are concealed from the gaze of all but the Dhyân Chohans, whose corporeal substance belongs to the fifth division of the seventh principle of the Mother-Substance, and is, therefore, four degrees higher than the solar reflected substance. As there are seven Dhâtu [principal substances in the human body], so there are seven Forces in Man and in all Nature.

xxi. The real substance of the Concealed [Sun] is nucleus of [pg 310]Mother-Substance.435 It is the Heart and Matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our Solar Universe. It is the Kernel from which proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the Powers that set in action the Atoms, in their functional duties, and the Focus within which they again meet in their Seventh Essence every eleventh year. He who tells thee he has seen the Sun, laugh at him,436 as if he had said that the Sun moves really onward in his diurnal path....

xxiii. It is on account of his septenary nature, that the Sun is spoken of by the ancients as one who is driven by seven horses equal to the metres of the Vedas; or, again, that, though he is identified with the seven Gana [Classes of Being] in his orb, he is distinct from them,437 as he is, indeed; as also that he has Seven Rays, as indeed he has....

xxv. The Seven Beings in the Sun are the Seven Holy Ones, self-born from the inherent power in the Matrix of Mother-Substance. It is they who send the seven principal Forces, called Rays, which at the beginning of Pralaya will centre into seven new Suns for the next Manvantara. The energy, from which they spring into conscious existence in every Sun, is what some people call Vishnu, which is the Breath of the Absoluteness.

We call it the One Manifested life—itself a reflection of the Absolute....

xxvii. The latter must never be mentioned in words or speech, lest it should take away some of our spiritual energies that aspire towards its state, gravitating ever toward unto It spiritually, as the whole physical universe gravitates towards its manifested centre—cosmically.

xxviii. The former—the Initial Existence—which may be called, while in this state of being, the One Life, is, as explained, a Film for creative or formative purposes. It manifests in seven states, which, with their septenary sub-divisions, are the Forty-nine Fires mentioned in sacred books....

xxix. The first is the ... “Mother” [Prima Materia]. Separating itself into its primary seven states, it proceeds down cyclically; when having consolidated itself in its last principle, as gross matter,438 it revolves around itself and informs, with the seventh emanation of the last, the first and the lowest element [the serpent biting its own tail]. In a Hierarchy, or Order of Being, the seventh emanation of her last principle is:

[pg 311]

(a) In the Mineral, the Spark that lies latent in it, and is called to its evanescent being by the Positive awakening the Negative [and so forth]....

(b) In the Plant, it is that vital and intelligent Force which informs the seed and develops it into the blade of grass, or the root and sapling. It is the germ which becomes the Upâdhi of the seven principles of the thing it resides in, shooting them out as the latter grows and develops.

(c) In every Animal, it does the same. It is its Life-Principle and vital power; its instinct and qualities; its characteristics and special idiosyncrasies....

(d) To Man, it gives all that it bestows on all the rest of the manifested units in Nature; but develops, furthermore, the reflection of all its “Forty-nine Fires” in him. Each of his seven principles is an heir in full to, and a partaker of, the seven principles of the “Great Mother.” The breath of her first principle is his Spirit [Âtmâ]. Her second principle is Buddhi [Soul]. We call it, erroneously, the seventh. The third furnishes him with the Brain Stuff on the physical plane, and with the Mind that moves it [which is the Human Soul.—H. P. B.]—according to his organic capacities.

(e) It is the guiding Force in the cosmic and terrestrial Elements. It resides in the Fire provoked out of its latent into active being; for the whole of the seven sub-divisions of the ... principle reside in the terrestrial Fire. It whirls in the breeze, blows with the hurricane, and sets the air in motion, which element participates in one of its principles also. Proceeding cyclically, it regulates the motion of the water, attracts and repels the waves,439according to fixed laws, of which its seventh principle is the informing soul.

(f) Its four higher principles contain the Germ that develops into the Cosmic Gods; its three lower ones breed the Lives of the Elements [Elementals].

(g) In our Solar World, the One Existence is Heaven and Earth, the Root and the Flower, the Action and the Thought. It is in the Sun, and is as present in the glow-worm. Not an atom can escape it. Therefore, the ancient Sages have wisely called it the manifested God in Nature....

It may be interesting, in this connection, to remind the reader of what T. Subba Row said of the Forces—mystically defined.

[pg 312]

Kanyâ [the sixth sign of the Zodiac, or Virgo] means a virgin, and represents Shakti or Mahâmâyâ. The sign in question is the sixth Râshi or division, and indicates that there are six primary forces in Nature [synthesized by the Seventh]....

These Shaktis stand as follows:

(1) Parâshakti.—Literally the great or supreme force or power. It means and includes the powers of light and heat.

(2) Jñânashakti.—Literally the power of intellect, of real wisdom or knowledge. It has two aspects:

I. The following are some of its manifestations when placed under the influence or control of material conditions. (a) The power of the mind in interpreting our sensations. (b) Its power in recalling past ideas (memory) and raising future expectation. (c) Its power as exhibited in what are called by modern psychologists “the laws of association,” which enables it to form persisting connections between various groups of sensations and possibilities of sensations, and thus generate the notion or idea of an external object. (d) Its power in connecting our ideas together by the mysterious link of memory, and thus generating the notion of self or individuality.

II. The following are some of its manifestations when liberated from the bonds of matter:

(a) Clairvoyance. (b) Psychometry.

(3) Ichchhâshakti.—Literally the power of the will. Its most ordinary manifestationis the generation of certain nerve currents, which set in motion such muscles as are required for the accomplishment of the desired object.

(4) Kriyâshakti.—The mysterious power of thought which enables it to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. The ancients held that any idea will manifest itself externally if one's attention is deeply concentrated upon it. Similarly an intense volition will be followed by the desired result.

A Yogi generally performs his wonders by means of Ichchhâshakti and Kriyâshakti.

(5) Kundalinî Shakti.—The power or force which moves in a serpentine or curved path. It is the universal life-principle which everywhere manifests in Nature. This force includes the two great forces of attraction and repulsion. Electricity and magnetism are but manifestations of it. This is the power which brings about that “continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations,” which is the essence of life according to Herbert Spencer, and that “continuous adjustment of external relations to internal relations,” which is the basis of transmigration of souls, Punarjanman (Re-birth), in the doctrines of the ancient Hindû philosophers.

A Yogi must thoroughly subjugate this power or force, before he can attain Moksha....

(6) Mantrikâshakti.—Literally the force or power of letters, speech or music. The whole of the ancient Mantra Shâstra has this force or power in all its manifestations for its subject matter.... The influence of its music is one of its ordinary manifestations. The power of the mirific ineffable name is the crown of this Shakti.

[pg 313]

Modern Science has but partly investigated the first, second and fifth of the forces or powers above named, but is altogether in the dark as regards the remaining powers.... The six forces are in their unity represented by the Astral Light [Daiviprakriti, the seventh, the Light of the Logos].440

The above is quoted to show the real Hindû ideas on the subject. It is all esoteric, though not covering the tenth part of what might be said. For one thing, the six names of the six Forces mentioned are those of the six Hierarchies of Dhyân Chohans, synthesized by their Primary, the seventh—who personify the Fifth Principle of Cosmic Nature, or of the “Mother” in its mystical sense. The enumeration alone of the Yoga Powers would require ten volumes. Each of these Forces has a living Conscious Entity at its head, of which Entity it is an emanation.

But let us compare with the Commentary above cited the words of Hermes, the Thrice Great:

The creation of life by the sun is as continuous as his light; nothing arrests or limits it. Around him, like an army of satellites, are innumerable choirs of Genii. These dwell in the neighbourhood of the Immortals, and thence watch over human things. They fulfil the will of the Gods [Karma] by means of storms, tempests, transitions of fire and earthquakes; likewise by famines and wars, for the punishment of impiety.441 ...

It is the sun who preserves and nourishes all creatures; and, even as the Ideal World, which environs the sensible world, fills this last with the plenitude and universal variety of forms, so also the sun, enfolding all in his light, accomplishes everywhere the birth and development of creatures.... “Under his orders is the choir of the Genii, or rather the choirs, for there are many and diverse, and their number corresponds to that of the stars. Every star has its Genii, good and evil by nature, or rather by their operation, for operation is the essence of the Genii....All these Genii preside over mundane affairs,442 they shake and overthrow the constitution of states and of individuals; they imprint their likeness on our souls, they are present in our nerves, our marrow, our veins, our arteries, and our very brain-substance.... At the moment when each of us receives life and being, he is taken in charge by the Genii [Elementals] who preside over births,443 and who are [pg 314]classed beneath the astral powers [superhuman astral Spirits]. Perpetually they change, not always identically, but revolving in circles.444 They permeate by the body two parts of the soul, that it may receive from each the impress of his own energy. But the reasonable part of the soul is not subject to the Genii; it is designed for the reception of [the] God,445 who enlightens it with a sunny ray. Those who are thus illumined are few in number, and from them the Genii abstain: for neither Genii nor Gods have any power in the presence of a single ray of God.446But all other men, both soul and body, are directed by Genii, to whom they cleave, and whose operations they affect.... The Genii have then the control of mundane things and our bodies serve them as instruments.”447

The above, save a few sectarian points, represents that which was a universal belief, common to all nations, till about a century or so back. It is still as orthodox in its broad outlines and features among Pagans and Christians alike, if one excepts a handful of Materialists and men of Science.

For whether one calls the Genii of Hermes and his “Gods,” “Powers of Darkness” and “Angels,” as in the Greek and Latin Churches; or “Spirits of the Dead,” as in Spiritualism; or, again, Bhûts and Devas, Shaitan or Djin, as they are still called in India and Mussulman countries—they are all one and the same thing—Illusion. Let not this, however, be misunderstood in the sense into which the great philosophical doctrine of the Vedântists has been lately perverted by Western schools.

All that which is, emanates from the Absolute, which, by reason of this qualification alone, stands as the One and Only Reality—hence, everything extraneous to this Absolute, the generative and causative Element, must be an Illusion, most undeniably. But this is only so from the purely metaphysical view. A man who regards himself as mentally sane, and is so regarded by his neighbours, calls the visions of an insane brother—hallucinations which make the victim either happy or supremely wretched, as the case may be—likewise illusions and fancies. But, where is that madman for whom the hideous shadows in his deranged mind, his illusions, are not, for the time being, as actual and as real as the things which his physician or keeper may see? [pg 315] Everything is relative in this Universe, everything is an Illusion. But the experience of any plane is an actuality for the percipient being, whose consciousness is on that plane, though the said experience, regarded from the purely metaphysical standpoint, may be conceived to have no objective reality. But it is not against Metaphysicians, but against Physicists and Materialists that Esoteric teaching has to fight; and for these latter Vital Force, Light, Sound, Electricity, even to the objectively drawing force of Magnetism, have no objective being, and are said to exist merely as “modes of motion,” “sensations and affections of matter.”

Neither the Occultists generally, nor the Theosophists, reject, as erroneously believed by some, the views and theories of the Modern Scientists only because these views are opposed to Theosophy. The first rule of our Society is to render unto Cæsar what is Cæsar's. Theosophists, therefore, are the first to recognize the intrinsic value of Science. But when its high priests resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in Nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being unphilosophical, self-contradictory, and simply absurd, from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the Occult aspect of the Esoteric Knowledge.

For truly the Astral Light of the derided Kabalists has strange and weird secrets for him who can see in it; and the mysteries concealed within its incessantly disturbed waves are there, the whole body of Materialists and scoffers notwithstanding.

The Astral Light of the Kabalists is by some very incorrectly translated “Ether,” the latter is confused with the hypothetical Ether of Science, and both are referred to by some Theosophists as synonymous with Âkâsha. This is a great mistake.

The author of A Rational Refutation writes, thus unconsciously helping Occultism:

A characterization of Âkâsha will serve to show how inadequately it is represented by “ether.” In dimension it is ... infinite; it is not made up of parts; and colour, taste, smell, and tangibility do not appertain to it. So far forth it corresponds exactly to time, space, Îshvara [the “Lord,” but rather creative potency and soul—Anima Mundi] and soul. Its speciality, as compared therewith, consists in its being the material cause of sound. Except for its being so, one might take it to be one with vacuity.448

It is vacuity, no doubt, especially for Rationalists. At any rate [pg 316] Âkâsha is sure to produce vacuity in the brain of a Materialist. Nevertheless, though Âkâsha is certainly not the Ether of Science—not even the Ether of the Occultist who defines the latter as one of the principles of Âkâsha only—it is as certainly, together with its primary, the cause of sound, a psychical and spiritual, not a material cause by any means. The relations of Ether to Âkâsha may be defined by applying to both Âkâsha and Ether the words used of the God in the Vedas, “So himself was indeed (his own) son,” one being the progeny of the other and yet itself. This may be a difficult riddle to the profane, but very easy to understand for any Hindû—even though not a Mystic.

These secrets of the Astral Light, along with many other mysteries, will remain non-existent to the Materialists of our age, in the same way as America was a non-existent myth for Europeans during the early part of the mediæval ages, whereas Scandinavians and Norwegians had actually reached and settled in that very old “New World” several centuries before. But, as a Columbus was born to re-discover, and to force the Old World to believe in antipodal countries, so will there be born Scientists who will discover the marvels now claimed by Occultists to exist in the regions of Ether, with their varied and multiform denizens and conscious Entities. Then, nolens volens, Science will have to accept the old “superstition,” as it has several others. And having been once forced to accept it, its learned professors in all probability—judging from past experience, as in the case of Mesmerism and Magnetism, now re-baptized Hypnotism—will father the thing and reject the name. The choice of the new appellation will, in its turn, depend on the “modes of motion”—the new name for the older “automatic physical processes among the nerve fibrils of the [scientific] brain” of Moleschott—and also, most likely, upon the last meal of the namer, since, according to the founder of the new Hylo-Idealistic Scheme, “cerebration is generically the same as chylification.”449 Thus, were one to believe this preposterous proposition, the new name of the archaic truth would have to take its chance on the inspiration of the namer's liver, and then only would these truths have a chance of becoming scientific!

But, Truth, however distasteful to the generally blind majority, has always had her champions ready to die for her, and it is not the Occultists who will protest against its adoption by Science under whatever [pg 317] new name. But until absolutely forced on the notice and acceptance of Scientists, many an Occult truth will be tabooed, as the phenomena of the Spiritualists and other psychic manifestations were, to be finally appropriated by its ex-traducers without the least acknowledgment or thanks. Nitrogen has added considerably to chemical knowledge, but its discoverer, Paracelsus, is to this day called a “quack.” How profoundly true are the words of H. T. Buckle, in his admirable History of Civilization, when he says:

Owing to circumstances still unknown [Karmic provision] there appear from time to time great thinkers, who, devoting their lives to a single purpose, are able to anticipate the progress of mankind, and to produce a religion or a philosophy by which important effects are eventually brought about. But if we look into history we shall clearly see that, although the origin of a new opinion may be thus due to a single man, the result which the new opinion produces will depend on the condition of the people among whom it is propagated. If either a religion or a philosophy is too much in advance of a nation, it can do no present service, but must bide its time450 until the minds of men are ripe for its reception.... Every science, every creed has had its martyrs. According to the ordinary course of affairs, a few generations pass away, and then there comes a period when these very truths are looked upon as commonplace facts, and a little later there comes another period in which they are declared to be necessary, and even the dullest intellect wonders how they could ever have been denied.451

It is barely possible that the minds of the present generations are not quite ripe for the reception of Occult truths. Such perchance will be the retrospect furnished to the advanced thinkers of the Sixth Root-Race of the history of the acceptance of Esoteric Philosophy—fully and unconditionally. Meanwhile the generations of our Fifth Race will continue to be led away by prejudice and preconceptions. Occult Sciences will have the finger of scorn pointed at them from every street-corner, and everyone will seek to ridicule and crush them in the name, and for the greater glory, of Materialism and its so-called Science. The present Volumes, however, show, in an anticipatory answer to several of the forthcoming Scientific objections, the true and mutual positions of the defendant and plaintiff. The Theosophists and Occultists stand arraigned by public opinion, which still holds high the banner of the inductive Sciences. The latter have, then, to be examined; and it must be shown how far their achievements and discoveries in the realm of natural law are opposed, not so much to our claims, as [pg 318] to facts in nature. The hour has now struck to ascertain whether the walls of the modern Jericho are so impregnable, that no blast of the Occult trumpet is ever likely to make them crumble.

The so-called “Forces,” with Light and Electricity heading them, and the constitution of the Solar orb must be carefully examined; as also Gravitation and the Nebular theories. The natures of Ether and of other Elements must be discussed; thus contrasting Scientific with Occult teachings, while revealing some of the hitherto secret tenets of the latter.

Some fifteen years ago, the writer was the first to repeat, after the Kabalists, the wise Commandments in the Esoteric Catechism.

Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of this [the mystery], and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the object of our alliance.452

And again, from the Rules of Initiation.

This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst reveal it to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape from it and fall outside.

A few years later, a corner of the Veil of Isis had to be lifted; and now another and a larger rent is made.

But old and time-honoured errors—such as become with every day more glaring and self-evident—stand arrayed in battle-order now, as they did then. Marshalled by blind conservatism, conceit and prejudice, they are constantly on the watch, ready to strangle every truth, which, awakening from its age-long sleep, happens to knock for admission. Such has been the case ever since man became an animal. That this proves in every case moral death to the revealers who bring to light any of these old, old truths, is as certain as that it gives life and regeneration to those who are fit to profit even by the little that is now revealed to them.

[pg 319]

Part II. The Evolution Of Symbolism.

[pg 321]

Section I. Symbolism and Ideographs.

Is not a symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like?... Through all ... there glimmers something of a Divine Idea. Nay, the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the cross itself, had no meaning, save an accidental extrinsic one.

Carlyle.

The study of the hidden meaning in every religious and profane legend, of whatsoever nation, large or small, and preëminently in the traditions of the East, has occupied the greater portion of the present writer's life. She is one of those who feel convinced that no mythological story, no traditional event in the folk-lore of a people, has ever, at any time, been pure fiction, but that every one of such narratives has an actual historical lining to it. In this the writer disagrees with those symbologists, however great their reputation, who find in every myth nothing more than additional proof of the superstitious bent of mind of the Ancients, and who believe that all mythologies sprang from, and are built upon, solar myths. Such superficial thinkers have been admirably disposed of by Mr. Gerald Massey, the poet and Egyptologist, in a lecture on “Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern.” His pointed criticism is worthy of reproduction in this part of our work, as it echoes so well our own feelings, expressed openly so far back as 1875, when Isis Unveiled was written.

For thirty years past Professor Max Müller has been teaching in his books and lectures, in the Times, Saturday Review, and various magazines, from the platform [pg 322]of the Royal Institution, the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, and his chair at Oxford, that mythology is a disease of language, and that the ancient symbolism was a result of something like a primitive mental aberration.

“We know,” says Renouf, echoing Max Müller, in his Hibbert lectures, “We know that mythology is the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture.” Such is the shallow explanation of the non-evolutionists, and such explanations are still accepted by the British public, that gets its thinking done for it by proxy. Professor Max Müller, Cox, Gubernatis, and other propounders of the Solar Mythos, have portrayed the primitive myth-maker for us as a sort of Germanised-Hindû metaphysician, projecting his own shadow on a mental mist, and talking ingeniously concerning smoke, or, at least, cloud; the sky overhead becoming like the dome of dreamland, scribbled over with the imagery of aboriginal nightmares! They conceive the early man in their own likeness, and look upon him as perversely prone to self-mystification, or, as Fontenelle has it, “subject to beholding things that are not there”! They have misrepresented primitive or archaic man as having been idiotically misled from the first by an active but untutored imagination into believing all sorts of fallacies, which were directly and constantly contradicted by his own daily experience; a fool of fancy in the midst of those grim realities that were grinding his experiences into him, like the griding icebergs making their imprints upon the rocks submerged beneath the sea. It remains to be said, and will one day be acknowledged, that these accepted teachers have been no nearer to the beginnings of mythology and language than Burns's poet Willie had been near to Pegasus. My reply is, 'Tis but a dream of the metaphysical theorist that mythology was a disease of language, or of anything else except his own brain. The origin and meaning of mythology have been missed altogether by these solarites and weather-mongers! Mythology was a primitive mode of thinking the early thought. It was founded on natural facts, and is still verifiable in phenomena. There is nothing insane, nothing irrational in it, when considered in the light of evolution, and when its mode of expression by sign-language is thoroughly understood. The insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation.453 Mythology is the repository of man's most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this—when truly interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth!454

In modern phraseology a statement is sometimes said to be mythical in proportion to its being untrue; but the ancient mythology was not a system or mode of falsifying in that sense. Its fables were the means of conveying facts; they were neither forgeries nor fictions.... For example, when the Egyptians portrayed the moon as a cat, they were not ignorant enough to suppose that the moon was a cat; nor did their wandering fancies see any likeness in the moon to a cat; nor was a cat-myth any mere expansion of verbal metaphor; nor had they any intention of [pg 323]making puzzles or riddles.... They had observed the simple fact that the cat saw in the dark, and that her eyes became full-orbed, and grew most luminous by night. The moon was the seer by night in heaven, and the cat was its equivalent on the earth; and so the familiar cat was adopted as a representative, a natural sign, a living pictograph of the lunar orb.... And so it followed that the sun which saw down in the under-world at night could also be called the cat, as it was, because it also saw in the dark. The name of the cat in Egyptian is mau, which denotes the seer, from mau, to see. One writer on mythology asserts that the Egyptians “imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the pupil of the cat's eye.” But this imagining is all modern. It is the Müllerite stock in trade. The moon, as cat, was the eye of the sun, because it reflected the solar light, and because the eye gives back the image in its mirror. In the form of the goddess Pasht, the cat keeps watch for the sun, with her paw holding down and bruising the head of the serpent of darkness, called his eternal enemy!

This is a very correct exposition of the lunar mythos from its astronomical aspect. Selenography, however, is the least esoteric of the divisions of lunar Symbology. To master thoroughly—if one is permitted to coin a new word—Selenognosis, one must become proficient in more than its astronomical meaning. The Moon is intimately related to the Earth, as shown in the Stanzas, and is more directly concerned with all the mysteries of our Globe than is even Venus-Lucifer, the occult sister and alter ego of the Earth.455

The untiring researches of Western, especially German, symbologists, during the last and the present centuries, have induced the most unprejudiced students, and of course every Occultist, to see that without the help of symbology—with its seven departments, of which the moderns know nothing—no ancient Scripture can ever be correctly understood. Symbology must be studied from every one of its aspects, for each nation had its own peculiar methods of expression. In short, no Egyptian papyrus, no Indian olla, no Assyrian tile, no Hebrew scroll, should be read and interpreted literally.

This every scholar now knows. The able lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey alone are sufficient to convince any fair-minded Christian that to accept the dead-letter of the Bible is equivalent to falling into a grosser error and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage South Sea Islander. But the fact to which even the most truth-loving and truth-searching Orientalists—whether Âryanists or Egyptologists—seem to remain blind, is that every symbol on papyrus or olla is a many-faced diamond, each of whose facets not only includes several interpretations, but also relates to several sciences. [pg 324] This is instanced in the just quoted interpretation of the cat symbolizing the moon—an example of sidereo-terrestrial imagery; for the moon has with other nations many other meanings besides.

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

All esoteric societies have made use of emblems and symbols, such as the Pythagorean Society, the Eleusinia, the Hermetic Brethren of Egypt, the Rosicrucians, and the Freemasons. Many of these emblems it is not proper to divulge to the general eye, and a very minute difference may make the emblem or symbol differ widely in its meaning. The magical sigilla, being founded on certain principles of number, partake of this character, and although monstrous or ridiculous in the eyes of the uninstructed, convey a whole body of doctrine to those who have been trained to recognize them.

The above enumerated societies are all comparatively modern, none dating back earlier than the Middle Ages. How much more proper, then, that the students of the oldest archaic school should be careful not to divulge secrets of far more importance to humanity (as being dangerous in ignorant hands) than any of the so-called “Masonic Secrets,” which have now become those of Polichinelle, as the French say! But this restriction can apply only to the psychological or rather psycho-physiological and cosmical significance of symbol and emblem, and even to that only partially. For though an Adept is compelled to refuse to impart the conditions and means that lead to any correlation of Elements—whether psychic or physical—which may produce harmful as well as beneficent results; yet he is ever ready to impart to the earnest student the secret of the ancient thought, in anything that has respect to history concealed under mythological symbolism, and thus to furnish a few more land-marks for a retrospective view of the past, [pg 325] in so far as it furnishes useful information with regard to the origin of man, the evolution of the Races and geognosy. And yet it is the crying complaint to-day, not only among Theosophists, but also among the few profane interested in the subject: Why do not the Adepts reveal that which they know? To this, one might answer: Why should they, since one knows beforehand that no man of Science will accept it, even as a hypothesis, much less as a theory or axiom. Have you so much as accepted or believed in the A B C of the Occult Philosophy contained in the Theosophist, Esoteric Buddhism, and other works and periodicals? Has not even the little which has been given, been ridiculed and derided, and made to face the “animal-” and “ape-theory” of Huxley and Hæckel, on the one hand, and the rib of Adam and the apple on the other? Notwithstanding such an unenviable prospect, however, a mass of facts is given in the present work, and the origin of man, the evolution of the Globe and the Races, human and animal, are as fully treated as the writer is able to treat them.

The proofs brought forward in corroboration of the old teachings are scattered widely throughout the old scriptures of ancient civilizations. The Purânas, the Zend Avesta, and the old classics, are full of such facts; but no one has ever taken the trouble of collecting and collating them together. The reason for this is that all such events were recorded symbolically; and that the best scholars, the most acute minds, among our Âryanists and Egyptologists, have been too often darkened by one or another preconception, and still oftener, by one-sided views of the secret meaning. Yet even a parable is a spoken symbol: a fiction or a fable, as some think; an allegorical representation, we say, of life-realities, events, and facts. And just as a moral was ever drawn from a parable, such moral being an actual truth and fact in human life, so a historical, real event was deduced, by those versed in the hieratic sciences, from emblems and symbols recorded in the ancient archives of the temples. The religious and esoteric history of every nation was embedded in symbols; it was never expressed literally in so many words. All the thoughts and emotions, all the learning and knowledge, revealed and acquired, of the early Races, found their pictorial expression in allegory and parable. Why? Because the spoken word has a potency not only unknown to, but even unsuspected and naturally disbelieved in, by the modern “sages.” Because sound and rhythm are closely related to the four Elements of the Ancients; and because such or another vibration in the air is sure to awaken the corresponding [pg 326] Powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as the case may be. No student was ever allowed to recite historical, religious, or real events of any kind, in so many unmistakable words, lest the Powers connected with the event should be once more attracted. Such events were narrated only during Initiation, and every student had to record them in corresponding symbols, drawn out of his own mind and examined later by his Master, before they were finally accepted. Thus by degrees was the Chinese Alphabet created, as just before it the hieratic symbols were fixed upon in old Egypt. In the Chinese language, the characters of which may be read in any language, and which, as just said, is only a little less ancient than the Egyptian alphabet of Thoth, every word has its corresponding symbol in a pictorial form. This language possesses many thousands of such symbol-letters, or logograms, each conveying the meaning of a whole word; for letters proper, or an alphabet as we understand it, do not exist in the Chinese language, any more than they did in the Egyptian, till a far later period.

Thus a Japanese who does not understand one word of Chinese, meeting with a Chinaman who has never heard the language of the former, will communicate in writing with him, and they will understand each other perfectly—because their writing is symbolical.

The explanation of the chief symbols and emblems is now attempted, as Book II, which treats of Anthropogenesis, would be most difficult to understand without a preparatory acquaintance with at least the metaphysical symbols.

Nor would it be just to enter upon an esoteric reading of symbolism, without giving due honour to one who has rendered it the greatest service in this century, by discovering the chief key to ancient Hebrew symbology, strongly interwoven with metrology, one of the keys to the once universal Mystery Language. Mr. Ralston Skinner, of Cincinnati, the author of The Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures, has our thanks. A Mystic and a Kabalist by nature, he has laboured for many years in this direction, and his efforts have certainly been crowned with great success. In his own words:

The writer is quite certain that there was an ancient language which modernly and up to this time appears to have been lost, the vestiges of which, however, abundantly exist.... The author discovered that this geometrical ratio [the integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle] was the very ancient, and probably the divine origin of ... linear measures.... It appears almost proven that the same system of geometry, numbers, ratio, and measures [pg 327]was known and made use of on the continent of North America, even prior to the knowledge of the same by the descending Semites....

The peculiarity of this language was that it could be contained in another, concealed and not to be perceived, save through the help of special instruction; letters and syllabic signs possessing at the same time the powers or meanings of numbers, of geometrical shapes, pictures, or ideographs and symbols, the designed scope of which would be determinatively helped out by parables in the shape of narratives or parts of narratives; while also it could be set forth separately, independently, and variously, by pictures, in stone work, or in earth constructions.

To clear up an ambiguity as to the term language: Primarily the word means the expression of ideas by human speech; but, secondarily, it may mean the expression of ideas by any other instrumentality. This old language is so composed in the Hebrew text, that by the use of the written characters, which uttered shall be the language first defined, a distinctly separated series of ideas may be intentionally communicated, other than those ideas expressed by the reading of the sound-signs. This secondary language sets forth, under a veil, series of ideas, copies in imagination of things sensible, which may be pictured, and of things which may be classed as real without being sensible: as, for instance, the number 9 may be taken as a reality, though it has no sensible existence, so also a revolution of the moon, as separated from the moon itself by which that revolution has been made, may be taken as giving rise to, or causing a real idea, though such a revolution has no substance. This idea-language may consist of symbols restricted to arbitrary terms and signs, having a very limited range of conceptions, and quite valueless, or it may be a reading of nature in some of her manifestations of a value almost immeasurable, as regards human civilization. A picture of something natural may give rise to ideas of coördinating subjects, radiating out in various and even opposing directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and producing natural realities in departments very foreign to the apparent tendency of the reading of the first or starting picture. Notion may give rise to connected notion, but if it does, then, however apparently incongruous, all resulting ideas must spring from the original picture and be harmonically connected, or related the one with the other. Thus with a pictured idea radical enough, the imagination of the cosmos itself, even in its details of construction, might result. Such a use of ordinary language is now obsolete, but it has become a question with the writer whether at one time, far back in the past, it, or such, was not the language of the world and of universal use, possessed, however, as it became more and more moulded into its arcane forms, by a select class or caste. By this I mean that the popular tongue or vernacular commenced even in its origin to be made use of as the vehicle of this peculiar mode of conveying ideas. Of this the evidences are very strong; and, indeed, it would seem that in the history of the human race there happened, from causes which at present, at any rate, we cannot trace, a lapse or loss from an original perfect language and a perfect system of science—shall we say perfect because they were of divine origin and importation?456

[pg 328]

“Divine origin” does not here mean a revelation from an anthropomorphic God on a mount amidst thunder and lightning; but, as we understand it, a language and a system of science imparted to early mankind by a more advanced mankind, so much higher as to be divine in the sight of that infant humanity: by a “mankind,” in short, from other spheres; an idea which contains nothing supernatural in it, but the acceptance or rejection of which depends upon the degree of conceit and arrogance in the mind of him to whom it is stated. For, if the professors of modern knowledge would only confess that, though they know nothing of the future of the disembodied man—or rather will accept nothing—yet this future may be pregnant with surprises and unexpected revelations to them, once their Egos are rid of their gross bodies—then materialistic unbelief would have fewer chances than it has. Who of them knows, or can tell, what may happen when once the Life-Cycle of this Globe is run down, and our mother Earth herself falls into her last sleep? Who is bold enough to say that the divine Egos of our mankind—at least the elect out of the multitudes passing on to other spheres—will not become in their turn the “divine” instructors of a new mankind generated by them on a new Globe, called to life and activity by the disembodied “principles” of our Earth? All this may have been the experience of the Past, and these strange records lie embedded in the “Mystery Language” of the pre-historic ages, the language now called Symbolism.

[pg 329]

Section II. The Mystery Language and Its Keys.

Recent discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest down to the latest, has sprung, not only from a common source of abstract beliefs, but from one universal Esoteric, or Mystery, Language. These scholars hold the key to the universal language of old, and have turned it successfully, though only once, in the hermetically closed door leading to the Hall of Mysteries. The great archaic system known from prehistoric ages as the sacred Wisdom-Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every old as well as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal language—suspected by the Mason Ragon—the language of the Hierophants, which has seven “dialects,” so to speak, each referring, and being specially appropriate, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature. Each had its own symbolism. Nature could thus be either read in its fulness, or viewed from one of its special aspects.

The proof of this lies, to this day, in the extreme difficulty which the Orientalists in general, and the Indianists and Egyptologists in particular, experience in interpreting the allegorical writings of the Âryans and the hieratic records of old Egypt. This is because they will never remember that all the ancient records were written in a language which was universal and known to all nations alike in days of old, but which is now intelligible only to the few. Like the Arabic figures which are understandable to men of every nation, or like the English word and, which becomes et for the Frenchman, und for the German, and so on, yet which may be expressed for all civilized nations in the simple sign &—so all the words of that Mystery Language signified the same thing [pg 330] to each man, of whatever nationality. There have been several men of note who have tried to reëstablish such a universal and philosophical tongue, Delgarme, Wilkins, Leibnitz; but Demaimieux, in his Pasigraphie, is the only one who has proven its possibility. The scheme of Valentinius, called the “Greek Kabalah,” based on the combination of Greek letters, might serve as a model.

The many-sided facets of the Mystery Language have led to the adoption of widely varied dogmas and rites in the exotericism of the Church rituals. It is these, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the Christian Church; for instance, the seven Sacraments, the Trinity, the Resurrection, the seven Capital Sins and the seven Virtues. The Seven Keys to the Mystery Tongue, however, having always been in the keeping of the highest among the initiated Hierophants of antiquity; it is only the partial use of a few out of the seven which passed, through the treason of some early Church Fathers—ex-Initiates of the Temples—into the hands of the new sect of the Nazarenes. Some of the early Popes were Initiates, but the last fragments of their knowledge have now fallen into the power of the Jesuits, who have turned them into a system of sorcery.

It is maintained that India—not confined to its present limits, but including its ancient boundaries—is the only country in the world which still has among her sons Adepts, who have the knowledge of all the seven sub-systems and the key to the entire system. From the fall of Memphis, Egypt began to lose these keys one by one, and Chaldæa had preserved only three in the days of Berosus. As for the Hebrews, in all their writings they show no more than a thorough knowledge of the astronomical, geometrical and numerical systems of symbolizing the human, and especially the physiological functions. They never had the higher keys.

M. Gaston Maspero, the great French Egyptologist and the successor of Mariette Bey, writes:

Every time I hear people talking of the religion of Egypt, I am tempted to ask which of the Egyptian religions they are talking about? Is it of the Egyptian religion of the fourth dynasty, or of the Egyptian religion of the Ptolemaic period? Is it of the religion of the rabble, or of that of the learned? Of the religion such as was taught in the schools of Heliopolis, or of that which was in the minds and conceptions of the Theban sacerdotal class? For, between the first Memphite tomb, which bears the cartouche of a king of the third dynasty, and the last stones engraved at Esneh under Cæsar Philippus, the Arabian, there is an interval of at least five thousand years. Leaving aside the invasion of the Shepherds, the [pg 331]Ethiopian and Assyrian dominions, the Persian conquest, Greek colonization, and the thousand revolutions of its political life, Egypt had passed during those five thousand years through many vicissitudes of life, moral and intellectual. Chapter XVII of the Book of the Dead, which seems to contain the exposition of the system of the world, as it was understood at Heliopolis during the time of the first dynasties, is known to us by a few copies of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties. Every one of the verses composing it was already interpreted in three or four different ways; so different, indeed, that according to this or another school, the Demiurge became either the solar fire—Ra-shoo, or the primordial water. Fifteen centuries later, the number of readings had increased considerably. Time, in its course, had modified their ideas about the universe and the forces that ruled it. In the short eighteen centuries that Christianity has existed, it has worked up, developed and transformed most of its dogmas; how many times, then, might not the Egyptian priesthood have altered their dogmas during those fifty centuries that separate Theodosius from the King Builders of the Pyramids.457

Here we believe the eminent Egyptologist is going too far. The exoteric dogmas may often have been altered, the esoteric never. He does not take into account the sacred immutability of the primitive truths, revealed only during the mysteries of Initiation. The Egyptian priests had forgotten much, they altered nothing. The loss of a great part of the primitive teaching was due to the sudden deaths of the great Hierophants, who passed away before they had time to reveal all to their successors, mostly in the absence of worthy heirs to the knowledge. Yet they have preserved in their rituals and dogmas the principal teachings of the Secret Doctrine.

Thus, in the Chapter of the Book of the Dead, mentioned by Maspero, we find (1) Osiris saying he is Toom—the creative force in Nature, giving form to all beings, spirits and men, self-generated and self-existent—issued from Noon, the celestial river, called Father-Mother of the Gods, the primordial deity, which is Chaos or the Deep, impregnated by the unseen Spirit. (2) He has found Shoo, the solar force, on the Stairway in the City of the Eight (the two squares of Good and Evil), and he has annihilated the Children of Rebellion, the evil principles in Noon (Chaos). (3) He is the Fire and Water, Noon the Primordial Parent, and he created the Gods out of his Limbs—fourteen Gods (twice seven), seven dark and seven light Gods—the seven Spirits of the Presence of the Christians, and the seven dark Evil Spirits.

(4) He is the Law of Existence and Being, the Bennoo, or Phœnix, the Bird of Resurrection in Eternity, in whom Night follows Day, and Day Night—an allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and [pg 332] human reïncarnation. For what else can this mean? “The Wayfarer who crosses millions of years is the name of one, and the Great Green [Primordial Water or Chaos] the name of the other,” one begetting millions of years in succession, the other engulfing them, to restore them back. (5) He speaks of the Seven Luminous Ones who follow their Lord, Osiris, who confers justice, in Amenti.

All this is now shown to have been the source and origin of Christian dogmas. That which the Jews had from Egypt, through Moses and other Initiates, was confused and distorted enough in later days; but that which the Church got from both, is still more misinterpreted.

Yet the system of the former, in this special department of symbology—the key, namely, to the mysteries of astronomy as connected with those of generation and conception—is now proven identical with those ideas in ancient religions which have developed the phallic element of theology. The Jewish system of sacred measures, applied to religious symbols, is the same, so far as geometrical and numerical combinations go, as those of Greece, Chaldæa and Egypt, for it was adopted by the Israelites during the centuries of their slavery and captivity among the two latter nations.458 What was this system? It is the intimate conviction of the author of The Source of Measures that: “the Mosaic Books were intended, by a mode of art-speech, to set forth a geometrical and numerical system of exact science, which should serve as an origin of measures.” Piazzi Smyth believes similarly. This system and these measures are found by some scholars to be identical with those used in the construction of the Great Pyramid: but this is only partially so. “The foundation of these measures was the Parker ratio,” says Ralston Skinner, in The Source of Measures.

The author of this very extraordinary work has discovered it, he says, in the use of the integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, discovered by John A. Parker, of New York. This ratio is 6561 for diameter, and 20612 for circumference. Furthermore, that this geometrical ratio was the very ancient and probably the divine origin of what have now become, through exoteric handling [pg 333] and practical application, the British linear measures, “the underlying unit of which, viz., the inch, was likewise the base of one of the royal Egyptian cubits, and of the Roman foot.”

He also discovered that there was a modified form of the ratio, viz., 113 to 355; and that while this last ratio pointed through its origin to the exact integral pi, or to 6561 to 20612, it also served as a base for astronomical calculations. The author discovered that a system of exact science, geometrical, numerical, and astronomical, founded on these ratios, and to be seen in use in the construction of the Great Egyptian Pyramid, was in part the burden of this language, as contained in, and concealed under, the verbiage of the Hebrew text of the Bible. The inch and the two-foot rule of 24 inches, interpreted for use through the elements of the circle and the ratios mentioned, were found to be at the basis or foundation of this natural, and Egyptian, and Hebrew system of science; while, moreover, it seems evident enough that the system itself was looked upon as of divine origin, and of divine revelation.

But let us see what is said by the opponents of Prof. Piazzi Smyth's measurements of the Pyramid.

Mr. Petrie seems to deny them, and to have made short work altogether of Piazzi Smyth's calculations in their Biblical connection. So does Mr. Proctor, the champion “Coincidentalist” for many years past in every question of ancient arts and sciences. Speaking of “the multitude of relations independent of the Pyramid, which have turned up while the Pyramidalists have been endeavouring to connect the Pyramid with the solar system,” he says:

These coincidences [which “would still remain if the Pyramid had no existence,”] are altogether more curious than any coincidence between the Pyramid and astronomical numbers: the former are as close and remarkable as they are real; the latter, which are only imaginary (?), have only been established by the process which schoolboys call “fudging,” and now new measures have left the work to be done all over again.459

On this Mr. C. Staniland Wake justly observes:

They must, however, have been more than mere coincidences, if the builders of the Pyramid had the astronomical knowledge displayed in its perfect orientation and in its other admitted astronomical features.460

They had it assuredly; and it is on this “knowledge” that the programme of the Mysteries and of the series of Initiations was based: hence, the construction of the Pyramid, the everlasting record and the indestructible symbol of these Mysteries and Initiations on Earth, as the courses of the stars are in Heaven. The cycle of Initiation was a [pg 334] reproduction in miniature of that great series of cosmic changes to which astronomers have given the name of the Tropical or Sidereal Year. Just as, at the close of the cycle of the Sidereal Year (25,868 years), the heavenly bodies return to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the close of the cycle of Initiation the Inner Man has regained the pristine state of divine purity and knowledge from which he set out on his cycle of terrestrial incarnation.

Moses, an Initiate into the Egyptian Mystagogy, based the religious mysteries of the new nation which he created, upon the same abstract formulæ derived from this Sidereal Cycle, symbolized by the form and measurements of the Tabernacle, which he is supposed to have constructed in the Wilderness. On these data, the later Jewish High Priests constructed the allegory of Solomon's Temple—a building which never had a real existence, any more than had King Solomon himself, who is as much a solar myth as is the still later Hiram Abif of the Masons, as Ragon has well demonstrated. Thus, if the measurements of this allegorical Temple, the symbol of the cycle of Initiation, coincide with those of the Great Pyramid, it is due to the fact that the former were derived from the latter through the Tabernacle of Moses.

That our author has undeniably discovered one and even two of the keys, is fully demonstrated in the work just quoted. One has only to read it, to feel a growing conviction that the hidden meaning of the allegories and parables of both Testaments is now unveiled. But that he owes this discovery far more to his own genius than to Parker and Piazzi Smyth, is also as certain, if not more so. For, as just shown, it is not so certain whether the measures of the Great Pyramid adopted by the Biblical Pyramidalists are beyond suspicion. A proof of this is to be found in the work called The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, by Mr. F. Petrie, and also in other works written quite recently to oppose the said calculations, which their authors call “biassed.” We gather that nearly every one of Piazzi Smyth's measurements differs from the later and more carefully made measurements of Mr. Petrie, who concludes the Introduction to his work with this sentence:

As to the results of the whole investigation, perhaps many theorists will agree with an American who was a warm believer in Pyramid theories when he came to Gizeh. I had the pleasure of his company there for a couple of days, and at our last meal together he said to me in a saddened way: “Well, sir! I feel as if I had been to a funeral. By all means let the old theories have a decent burial, though we should take care that in our haste none of the wounded ones are buried alive.”

As regards the late J. A. Parker's calculation in general, and his [pg 335] third proposition especially, we have consulted some eminent mathematicians, and this is the substance of what they say:

Parker's reasoning rests on sentimental, rather than on mathematical, considerations, and is logically inconclusive.

Proposition III, namely, that:

The circle is the natural basis or beginning of all area, and the square being made so in mathematical science, is artificial and arbitrary.

—is an illustration of an arbitrary proposition, and cannot safely be relied upon in mathematical reasoning. The same observation applies, even more strongly, to Proposition VII, which states that:

Because the circle is the primary shape in nature, and hence the basis of area; and because the circle is measured by, and is equal to the square only in ratio of half its circumference by the radius, therefore, circumference and radius, and not the square of diameter, are the only natural and legitimate elements of area, by which all regular shapes are made equal to the square, and equal to the circle.

Proposition IX is a remarkable example of faulty reasoning, though it is the one on which Mr. Parker's Quadrature mainly rests. It states that:

The circle and the equilateral triangle are opposite to one another in all the elements of their construction, and hence the fractional diameter of one circle, which is equal to the diameter of one square, is in the opposite duplicate ratio to the diameter of an equilateral triangle whose area is one, etc., etc.

Granting, for the sake of argument, that a triangle can be said to have a radius, in the sense in which we speak of the radius of a circle—for what Parker calls the radius of the triangle, is the radius of a circle inscribed in a triangle, and therefore not the radius of the triangle at all—and granting for the moment the other fanciful and mathematical propositions united in his premisses, why must we conclude that, if the equilateral triangle and circle are opposite in all the elements of their construction, the diameter of any defined circle is in the opposite duplicate ratio of the diameter of any given equivalent triangle? What necessary connection is there between the premisses and the conclusion? The reasoning is of a kind not known in geometry, and would not be accepted by strict mathematicians.

Whether the archaic Esoteric system originated the British inch or not, is of little consequence, however, to the strict and true metaphysician. Nor does Mr. Ralston Skinner's esoteric reading of the Bible become incorrect, merely because the measurements of the Pyramid may not be found to agree with those of Solomon's Temple, the [pg 336] Ark of Noah, etc., or because Mr. Parker's Quadrature of the Circle is rejected by mathematicians. For Mr. Skinner's reading depends primarily on the Kabalistic methods and the Rabbinical value of the Hebrew letters. But it is extremely important to ascertain whether the measures used in the evolution of the symbolic religion of the Âryans, in the construction of their temples, in the figures given in the Purânas, and especially in their chronology, their astronomical symbols, the duration of the cycles, and other computations, were, or were not, the same as those used in the Biblical measurements and glyphs. For this will prove that the Jews, unless they took their sacred cubit and measurements from the Egyptians—Moses being an Initiate of their Priests—must have got those notions from India. At any rate they passed them on to the early Christians. Hence, it is the Occultists and Kabalists who are the true heirs to the Knowledge, or the Secret Wisdom, which is still found in the Bible; for they alone now understand its real meaning, whereas profane Jews and Christians cling to the husks and dead letter thereof. That it was this system of measures which led to the invention of the God-names Elohim and Jehovah, and to their adaptation to Phallicism, and that Jehovah is a not very flattering copy of Osiris, is now demonstrated by the author of the Source of Measures. But the latter and Mr. Piazzi Smyth both seem to labour under the impression that (a) the priority of the system belongs to the Israelites, the Hebrew language being the divine language, and that (b) this universal language belongs to direct revelation!

The latter hypothesis is correct only in the sense shown in the last paragraph of the preceding Section; but we have yet to agree as to the nature and character of the divine “Revealer.” The former hypothesis as to priority will for the profane, of course depend on (a) the internal and external evidence of the revelation, and (b) on each scholar's individual preconceptions. This, however, cannot prevent either the Theistic Kabalist, or the Pantheistic Occultist, from believing each in his way; neither of the two convincing the other. The data furnished by history are too meagre and unsatisfactory for either of them to prove to the sceptic which of them is right.

On the other hand, the proofs afforded by tradition are too constantly rejected for us to hope to settle the question in our present age. Meanwhile, Materialistic Science will be laughing at both Kabalists and Occultists indifferently. But the vexed question of priority once laid [pg 337] aside, Science, in its departments of Philology and Comparative Religion, will find itself finally taken to task, and be compelled to admit the common claim.

One by one the claims become admitted, as one Scientist after another is compelled to recognize the facts given out from the Secret Doctrine; though he rarely, if ever, recognizes that he has been anticipated in his statements. Thus, in the palmy days of Mr. Piazzi Smyth's authority on the Pyramid of Gizeh, his theory was, that the porphyry sarcophagus of the King's Chamber was “the unit of measure for the two most enlightened nations of the earth, England and America,” and was no better than a “corn-bin.” This was vehemently denied by us in Isis Unveiled, which had just been published at that time. Then the New York press arose in arms (the Sun and the World newspapers chiefly) against our presuming to correct or find fault with such a star of learning. In that work, we had said, that Herodotus, when treating of that Pyramid:

... might have added that, externally it symbolized the creative principle of Nature, and illustrated also the principles of geometry, mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre recesses were performed the Mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the initiation-scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry sarcophagus, which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of Scotland, degrades into a corn-bin, was the baptismal font, upon emerging from which the neophyte was “born again” and became an adept.461

Our statement was laughed at in those days. We were accused of having got our ideas from the “craze” of Shaw, an English writer who had maintained that the sarcophagus had been used for the celebration of the Mysteries of Osiris, although we had never heard of that writer. And now, six or seven years later (1882), this is what Mr. Staniland Wake writes:

The so-called King's Chamber, of which an enthusiastic pyramidist says, “The polished walls, fine materials, grand proportions, and exalted place, eloquently tell of glories yet to come,” if not “the chamber of perfections” of Cheops' tomb, was probably the place to which the initiant was admitted after he had passed through the narrow upward passage and the grand gallery, with its lowly termination, which gradually prepared him for the final stage of the Sacred Mysteries.462

Had Mr. Staniland Wake been a Theosophist, he might have added that the narrow upward passage leading to the King's Chamber had a “narrow gate” indeed; the same “strait gate” which “leadeth unto [pg 338] life,” or the new spiritual re-birth alluded to by Jesus in Matthew;463 and that it was of this gate in the Initiation Temple, that the writer, who recorded the words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking.

Thus the greatest scholars of Science, instead of pooh-poohing that supposed “farrago of absurd fiction and superstitions,” as the Brâhmanical literature is generally termed, will endeavour to learn the symbolical universal language, with its numerical and geometrical keys. But here, again, they will hardly be successful, if they share the belief that the Jewish Kabalistic system contains the key to the whole mystery; for it does not. Nor does any other Scripture at present possess it in its entirety, since even the Vedas are not complete. Every old religion is but a chapter or two of the entire volume of archaic primeval mysteries; Eastern Occultism alone being able to boast that it is in possession of the full secret, with its seven keys. Comparisons will be instituted, and as much as possible will be explained in this work; the rest is left to the student's personal intuition. In saying that Eastern Occultism has the secret, it is not as if a “complete” or even an approximate knowledge was claimed by the writer, which would be absurd. What I know, I give out; that which I cannot explain, the student must find out for himself.

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

A few years longer, and this system will kill the dead-letter reading of the Bible, as it will that of all the other exoteric faiths, by showing the dogmas in their real, naked meaning. And then this undeniable meaning, however incomplete, will unveil the mystery of Being, and will, moreover, entirely change the modern scientific systems of Anthropology, [pg 339] Ethnology and especially that of Chronology. The element of Phallicism, found in every God-name and narrative in the Old, and to some degree in the New, Testament, may also in time considerably change modern materialistic views on Biology and Physiology.

Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of Nature and man will, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries, unveil the evolutions of the human mind and show how natural was such a course of thought. The so-called phallic symbols have become offensive only because of the element of materiality and animality in them. In the beginning, such symbols were but natural, as they originated with the archaic races, which, issuing to their personal knowledge from an androgyne ancestry, were the first phenomenal manifestations in their own sight of the separation of the sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn. If later races, especially the “chosen people,” have degraded them, this does not affect the origin of the symbols. This little Semitic tribe—one of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the fourth and fifth sub-races, the Mongolo-Turanian and the so-called Indo-European, after the sinking of the great Continent—could only accept its symbology in the spirit which was given to it by the nations from which it was derived. And, perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, the symbology was not so crude as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole Pentateuch. To take an instance, the glyph of Pharaoh's daughter (the woman), the Nile (the Great Deep and Water), and the baby-boy found floating therein in the ark of rushes, was not primarily composed for, or by, Moses. It was anticipated in the fragments found on the Babylonian tiles, in the story of King Sargon, who lived far earlier than Moses.

In his Assyrian Antiquities,464 Mr. George Smith says: “In the palace of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik, I found another fragment of the curious history of Sargon ... published in my translation in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archeology.”465 The capital of Sargon the Babylonian Moses, “was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semites Akkad—mentioned in Genesis466 as the capital of Nimrod.... Akkad lay near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of Babylon.”467 Another strange “coincidence” is found in the fact that the name of the neighbouring City of Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of Moses—Zipporah.468 Of course the story is a [pg 340] clever addition by Ezra, who could not have been ignorant of the original. This curious story is found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows:

1. Sargina, the powerful king, the king of Akkad am I.

2. My mother was a princess, my father I did not know; a brother of my father ruled over the country.

3. In the city of Azupiranu, which by the side of the river Euphrates is situated,

4. My mother, the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she brought me forth;

5. She placed me in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she sealed up;

6. She launched me in the river, which did not drown me.

7. The river carried me, to Akki, the water-carrier, it brought me.

8. Akki, the water-carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted me.469

And now let us compare the Bible narrative in Exodus:

And when she [Moses' mother] could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.470

Mr. G. Smith then continues:

The story is supposed to have happened about 1600 b.c., rather earlier than the supposed age of Moses; and, as we know that the fame of Sargon reached Egypt, it is quite likely that this account had a connection with the events related in ExodusII, for every action, when once performed, has a tendency to be repeated.

But now that Professor Sayce has had the courage to push back the dates of the Chaldean and Assyrian Kings by two thousand years more, Sargon must have preceded Moses by 2,000 years at the least. The confession is suggestive, but the figures lack a cypher or two.

Now, what is the logical inference? Most assuredly, that which gives us the right to say that the story told of Moses by Ezra had been learned by him while at Babylon, and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that Exodus was never written by Moses, but was re-fabricated from old materials by Ezra.

And if so, then why should not other symbols and glyphs far more crude in their phallic element have been added by this adept in the later Chaldean and Sabæan phallic worship? We are taught that the primeval faith of the Israelites was quite different from that which was developed centuries later by the Talmudists, and before them by David and Hezekiah.

All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two Testaments, is quite sufficient to class the Bible among esoteric [pg 341] works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of Biblical glyphs and numbers, as suggested by astronomical observations—Astronomy and Theology being closely connected—is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric, systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the planets, their aspects and nodes—the last term having now passed even into our modern Botany—are known in Astronomy as Sextiles, Quartiles and so on, and have been used for ages and æons by the archaic nations, and in one sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence, the most archaic symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a square, a pentagon, and a hexagon, and other plane figures with various sides and angles. This shows the knowledge and use of geometrical symbology to be as old as the world.

Starting from this, it becomes easy to understand how Nature herself, even without the help of their divine instructors, could have taught primeval mankind the first principles of a numerical and geometrical symbol-language.471 Hence we find numbers and figures used as an expression and a record of thought in every archaic symbolical Scripture. They are ever the same, with certain variations only, arising from the first figures. Thus the evolution and correlation of the mysteries of Kosmos, of its growth and development—spiritual and physical, abstract and concrete—were first recorded in geometrical changes of shape. Every Cosmogony began with a circle, a point, a triangle and a square, up to number 9, when it was synthesized by the first line and a circle—the Pythagorean mystic Decad, the sum of all, involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire Kosmos; mysteries recorded a hundred times more fully in the Hindû system than elsewhere, for him who can understand its mystic language. The numbers 3 and 4, in their combination 7, and also 5, 6, 9, and 10, are the very corner-stones of Occult Cosmogonies. This Decad and its thousand combinations are found in every portion of the globe. One recognizes it in the caves and rock-cut temples of Hindûstan and [pg 342] Central Asia; in the Pyramids and Lithoi of Egypt and America; in the Catacombs of Ozimandyas; in the mounds of the snow-capped Caucasian fastnesses; in the ruins of Palenque; in Easter Island; everywhere whither the foot of ancient man has ever journeyed. The 3 and the 4, the triangle and the square, or the universal male and female glyphs, showing the first aspect of the evolving deity, are stamped for ever in the Southern Cross in the Heavens, as in the Egyptian Crux Ansata. As well expressed by the author of The Source of Measures:

The Cube unfolded is in display a cross of the Tau, or Egyptian form, or of the Christian cross-form.... A circle attached to the first, gives the Ansated Cross ... numbers 3 and 4, counted on the cross, showing a form of the [Hebrew] golden candlestick [in the Holy of Holies], and of the 3 + 4 = 7, and 6 + 1 = 7, days in the circle of the week, as 7 lights of the sun. So also as the week of 7 lights gave origin to the month and year, so it is the time-marker of birth.... The cross-form being shown, then, by the connected use of the form 113:355, the symbol is completed by the attachment of a man to the cross.472 This kind of measure was made to coördinate with the idea of the origin of human life, and hence the phallic form.

The Stanzas show the cross and these numbers playing a prominent part in archaic Cosmogony. Meanwhile we may profit by the evidence collected by the same author, in the section which he rightly calls the “Primordial Vestiges of these Symbols,” to show the identity of symbols and their esoteric meaning all over the globe.

Under the general view taken of the nature of the number-forms ... it becomes a matter of research of the utmost interest as to when and where their existence and their use first became known. Has it been a matter of revelation in what we know as the historic age—a cycle exceedingly modern when the age of the human race is contemplated? It seems, in fact, as to the date of its possession by man, to have been farther removed, in the past, from the old Egyptians than are the old Egyptians from us.

The Easter Isles in “mid Pacific” present the feature of the remaining peaks of the mountains of a submerged continent, for the reason that these peaks are thickly studded with cyclopean statues, remnants of the civilization of a dense and cultivated people, who must have, of necessity, occupied a widely extended area. On the backs of these images is to be found the “ansated cross” and the same modified to the outlines of the human form. A full description, with plate showing the land with the thickly planted statues, also with copies of the images, is to be found in the January number, 1870, of the London Builder....

In the Naturalist, published at Salem, Massachusetts, in one of the early numbers (about 36), is to be found a description of some very ancient and curious carving [pg 343]on the crest walls of the mountains of South America, older by far, it is averred, than the races now living. The strangeness of these tracings is in that they exhibit the outlines of a man stretched out on a cross,473 by a series of drawings, by which from the form of a man that of a cross springs, but so done that the cross may be taken as the man, or the man as the cross....

It is known that tradition among the Aztecs has handed down a very perfect account of the deluge.... Baron Humboldt says that we are to look for the country of Aztalan, the original country of the Aztecs, as high up, at least, as the 42nd parallel north; whence journeying, they at last arrived in the vale of Mexico. In that vale the earthen mounds of the far north become the elegant stone pyramidal, and other structures, whose remains are now found. The correspondences between the Aztec remains and those of the Egyptians are well known.... Atwater, from examination of hundreds of them, is convinced that they had a knowledge of astronomy. As to one of the most perfect of the pyramidal structures among the Aztecs, Humboldt gives a description to the following effect:

“The form of this pyramid [of Papantla] which has seven stories, is more tapering than any other monument of this kind yet discovered, but its height is not remarkable, being but 57 feet, its base but 25 feet on each side. However, it is remarkable on one account: it is built entirely of hewn stones, of an extraordinary size, and very beautifully shaped. Three staircases lead to the top, the steps of which were decorated with hieroglyphical sculptures and small niches, arranged with great symmetry. The number of these niches seem to allude to the 318 simple and compound signs of the days of their civil calendar.”

318 is the Gnostic value of Christ, and the famous number of the trained or circumcized servants of Abram. When it is considered that 318 is an abstract value, and universal, as expressive of a diameter value to a circumference of unity, its use in the composition of a civil calendar becomes manifest.

Identical glyphs, numbers and esoteric symbols are found in Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Easter Island, India, Chaldæa, and Central Asia—Crucified Men, and symbols of the evolution of races from Gods—and yet behold Science repudiating the idea of a human race other than one made in our image; Theology clinging to its 6,000 years of Creation; Anthropology teaching our descent from the ape; and the Clergy tracing it from Adam 4,004 years b.c.!!

Shall one, for fear of incurring the penalty of being called a superstitious fool, and even a liar, abstain from furnishing proofs—as good as any existent—only because that day, when all the Seven Keys shall be delivered unto Science, or rather the men of learning and research in the department of symbology, has not yet dawned? In the face of the crushing discoveries of Geology and Anthropology with regard to the antiquity of man, shall we—in order to avoid the usual penalty that [pg 344] awaits every one who strays outside the beaten paths of either Theology or Materialism—hold to the 6,000 years and “special creation” or accept in submissive admiration our genealogy and descent from the ape? Not so, as long as it is known that the Secret Records hold the said Seven Keys to the mystery of the genesis of man. Faulty, materialistic, and biassed as the scientific theories may be, they are a thousand times nearer the truth than the vagaries of Theology. The latter are in their death agony for every one but the most uncompromising bigot and fanatic. Or rather, some of its defenders must have lost their reason. For what can one think when, in the face of the dead-letter absurdities of the Bible, these are still publicly supported, and as fiercely as ever, and one finds the Theologians maintaining that though “the Scriptures carefully refrain [?] from making any direct contribution to scientific knowledge, they have never stumbled upon any statement which will not abide the light of Advancing Science”!!!474

Hence we have no choice but either to blindly accept the deductions of Science, or to cut ourselves adrift from it, and withstand it fearlessly to its face, stating what the Secret Doctrine teaches us, and being fully prepared to bear the consequences.

But let us see whether Science, in its materialistic speculations, and even Theology, in its death-rattle and supreme struggle to reconcile the 6,000 years since Adam with Sir Charles Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, do not themselves unconsciously give us a helping hand. Ethnology, on the confession of some of its most learned votaries, finds it already impossible to account for the varieties in the human race, unless the hypothesis of the creation of several Adams be accepted. They speak of “a white Adam and a black Adam, a red Adam and a yellow Adam.”475 Were they Hindûs enumerating the rebirths of Vâmadeva, from the Linga Purâna, they could say little more. For, enumerating the repeated births of Shiva, they show him in one Kalpa of a white complexion, in another of a black colour, in still another of a red colour, after which the Kumâra becomes “four youths of a yellow colour.” This strange “coincidence,” as Mr. Proctor would say, speaks only in favour of scientific intuition, as Shiva-Kumâra simply represents, allegorically, the human Races during the genesis of man. But it has led to another intuitional phenomenon—in [pg 345] the theological ranks this time. The unknown author of Primeval Man, in a desperate effort to screen the Divine Revelation from the merciless and eloquent discoveries of Geology and Anthropology, remarking that “it would be unfortunate if the defenders of the Bible should be driven into the position of either surrendering the inspiration of Scripture, or denying the conclusions of Geologists”—finds a compromise. Nay, he devotes a thick volume to proving this fact: “Adam was not the first man476 created upon this earth.” The exhumed relics of pre-Adamic man, “instead of shaking our confidence in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity.”477 How so? In the simplest way imaginable; for the author argues that, henceforth “we [the clergy] are enabled to leave scientific men to pursue their studies without attempting to coërce them by the fear of heresy.” This must be a relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir Charles Lyell!

The Bible narrative does not commence with creation, as is commonly supposed, but with the formation of Adam and Eve, millions of years after our planet had been created. Its previous history, so far as Scripture is concerned, is yet unwritten.... There may have been not one, but twenty different races upon the earth before the time of Adam, just as there may be twenty different races of men on other worlds.478

Who, then, or what were those races, since the author still maintains that Adam is the first man of our race? It was the Satanic Race and Races! “Satan [was] never in heaven, Angels and men [being] one species.” It was the pre-Adamic race of “Angels that sinned.” Satan was the “first prince of this world,” we read. Having died in consequence of his rebellion, he remained on earth as a disembodied Spirit, and tempted Adam and Eve.

The earlier ages of the Satanic race, and more especially during the life-time of Satan [!!!], may have been a period of patriarchal civilization and comparative repose—a time of Tubal-Cains and Jubals, when both sciences and arts attempted to strike their roots into the accursed ground.... What a subject for an epic!... There are inevitable incidents which must have occurred. We see before us ... the gay primeval lover wooing his blushing bride at dewy eve under the Danish oaks, that then grew where now no oaks will grow ... the grey primeval patriarch ... the primeval offspring innocently gambolling by his side.... A thousand such pictures rise before us!479

[pg 346]

The retrospective glance at this Satanic “blushing bride,” in the days of Satan's innocence, does not lose in poetry as it gains in originality. Quite the reverse. The modern Christian bride—who does not often blush now-a-days before her gay modern lovers—might even derive a moral lesson from this daughter of Satan, created in the exuberant fancy of her first human biographer. These pictures—and to appreciate them at their true value they must be examined in the volume that describes them—are all suggested with a view to reconcile the infallibility of revealed Scripture with Sir Charles Lyell's Antiquity of Man, and other damaging scientific works. But this does not prevent truth and fact appearing at the foundation of these vagaries, which the author has not dared to sign with his own, or even a borrowed, name. For, his pre-Adamic Races—not Satanic but simply Atlantean, and the Hermaphrodites before the latter—are mentioned in the Bible, if read esoterically, as they are in the Secret Doctrine. The Seven Keys open the mysteries, past and future, of the seven great Root-Races, and of the seven Kalpas. Though the genesis of man, and even the geology, of Esotericism will surely be rejected by Science, just as much as the Satanic and pre-Adamic Races, yet if the Scientists, having no other way out of their difficulties, are compelled to choose between the two, we feel certain that—Scripture notwithstanding—once the Mystery Language is approximately mastered, it is the archaic teaching that will be accepted.

[pg 347]

Section III. Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.

As it would seem irrational to affirm that we already know all existing causes, permission must be given to assume, if need be, an entirely new agent.

Assuming, what is not strictly accurate as yet, that the undulatory hypothesis accounts for all the facts, we are called on to decide whether the existence of an undulating ether is thereby proved. We cannot positively affirm that no other supposition will explain the facts. Newton's corpuscular hypothesis is admitted to have broken down on interference; and there is, at the present day, no rival. Still, it is extremely desirable in all such hypotheses to find some collateral confirmation, some evidence aliunde, of the supposed Ether.... Some hypotheses consist of assumptions as to the minute structure and operations of bodies. From the nature of the case, these assumptions can never be proved by direct means. Their only merit is their suitability to express the phenomena. They are representative fictions.

Logic, by Alexander Bain, L.L.D., Part II, p. 133.

Ether—this hypothetical Proteus, one of the “representative fictions” of Modern Science, which, nevertheless, was so long accepted—is one of the lower “principles” of what we call Primordial Substance (Âkâsha, in Sanskrit), one of the dreams of old, which has now again become the dream of Modern Science. It is the greatest, as it is the boldest, of the surviving speculations of ancient philosophers. For the Occultists, however, both Ether and the Primordial Substance are realities. To put it plainly, Ether is the Astral Light, and the Primordial Substance is Âkâsha, the Upâdhi of Divine Thought.

In modern language, the latter would be better named Cosmic Ideation, Spirit; the former, Cosmic Substance, Matter. These, the Alpha and the Omega of Being, are but the two facets of the one Absolute Existence. The latter was never addressed, or even mentioned, by any name in antiquity, except in allegory. In the oldest Âryan race, the Hindû, the worship of the intellectual classes at no time ever consisted in an adoration of marvellous form and art, however fervent, as with the Greeks; an adoration, which led later on to anthropomorphism. But while the Greek philosopher adored form, and the [pg 348] Hindû sage alone “perceived the true relation of earthly beauty and eternal truth”—the uneducated of every nation understood neither, at any time.

They do not understand it even now. The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man's own intellectual evolution. So true is it that the noblest ideal to which the religious spirit of one age can soar, will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch! The philosophers themselves had to be initiated into perceptive mysteries, before they could grasp the correct idea of the Ancients in relation to this most metaphysical subject. Otherwise—outside such Initiation—for every thinker there will be a “thus far shalt thou go and no farther” mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and as unmistakably as there is one for the progress of any nation or race in its cycle by the law of Karma. Outside of Initiation, the ideals of contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped, and remain unable to soar higher; for idealistic, as well as realistic, thinkers, and even free-thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural product of their respective environments and periods. The ideals of each are but the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its collectivity, has attained. Hence, as already remarked, the highest flights of modern Western metaphysics have fallen far short of the truth. Much of current Agnostic speculation on the existence of the “First Cause” is little better than veiled Materialism—the terminology alone being different. Even so great a thinker as Mr. Herbert Spencer speaks of the “Unknowable” occasionally in terms that demonstrate the lethal influence of materialistic thought, which, like the deadly Sirocco, has withered and blighted all current ontological speculation.

For instance, when he terms the “First Cause” the “Unknowable,” a “power manifesting through phenomena,” and “an infinite eternal energy,” it is clear that he has grasped solely the physical aspect of the Mystery of Being—the Energies of Cosmic Substance only. The coeternal aspect of the One Reality, Cosmic Ideation, is absolutely omitted from consideration, and as to its Noumenon, it seems non-existent in the mind of the great thinker. Without doubt, this one-sided mode of dealing with the problem is due largely to the pernicious Western practice of subordinating Consciousness to Matter, or regarding it as a “bye-product” of molecular motion.

[pg 349]

From the early ages of the Fourth Race, when Spirit alone was worshipped and the Mystery was made manifest, down to the last palmy days of Grecian art, at the dawn of Christianity, the Hellenes alone had dared publicly to raise an altar to the “Unknown God.” Whatever St. Paul may have had in his profound mind, when declaring to the Athenians that this “Unknown,” which they ignorantly worshipped, was the true God announced by himself—that Deity was not “Jehovah,” nor was he “the maker of the world and all things.” For it is not the “God of Israel” but the “Unknown” of the ancient and modern Pantheist that “dwelleth not in temples made with hands.”480

Divine Thought cannot be defined, nor can its meaning be explained, except by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance, in which the former is sensed spiritually by those who can do so. To say this, after having defined it as the Unknown Deity, abstract, impersonal, sexless, which must be placed at the root of every Cosmogony and its subsequent evolution, is equivalent to saying nothing at all. It is like attempting a transcendental equation of conditions, having in hand for deducing the true value of its terms only a number of unknown quantities. Its place is found in the old primitive symbolic charts, in which, as already shown, it is represented by a boundless darkness, on the ground of which appears the first central point in white—thus symbolizing coëval and coëternal Spirit-Matter making its appearance in the phenomenal world, before its first differentiation. When “the One becomes Two,” it may then be referred to as Spirit and Matter. To “Spirit” is referable every manifestation of Consciousness, reflective or direct, and of “unconscious purposiveness”—to adopt a modern expression used in Western philosophy, so-called—as evidenced in the Vital Principle, and Nature's submission to the majestic sequence of immutable Law. “Matter” must be regarded as objectivity in its purest abstraction, the self-existing basis, whose septenary manvantaric differentiations constitute the objective reality underlying the phenomena of each phase of conscious existence. During the period of Universal Pralaya, Cosmic Ideation is non-existent; and the variously differentiated states of Cosmic Substance are resolved back again into the primary state of abstract potential objectivity.

Manvantaric impulse commences with the reäwakening of Cosmic Ideation, the Universal Mind, concurrently with, and parallel to, the primary emergence of Cosmic Substance—the latter being the manvantaric [pg 350] vehicle of the former—from its undifferentiated pralayic state. Then, Absolute Wisdom mirrors itself in its Ideation; which, by a transcendental process, superior to and incomprehensible by human Consciousness, results in Cosmic Energy, Fohat. Thrilling through the bosom of inert Substance, Fohat impels it to activity, and guides its primary differentiations on all the seven planes of Cosmic Consciousness. There are thus Seven Protyles—as they are now called, whereas Âryan antiquity named them the Seven Prakritis, or Natures—serving, severally, as the relatively homogeneous bases, which in the course of the increasing heterogeneity, in the evolution of the Universe, differentiate into the marvellous complexity presented by phenomena on the planes of perception. The term “relatively” is used designedly, because the very existence of such a process, resulting in the primary segregations of undifferentiated Cosmic Substance into its septenary bases of evolution, compels us to regard the Protyle of each plane as only a mediate phase assumed by Substance in its passage from abstract, into full objectivity. The term Protyle is due to Mr. Crookes, the eminent Chemist, who has given that name to pre-matter, if one may so call primordial and purely homogeneous substance, suspected, if not actually yet found, by Science in the ultimate composition of the atom. But the incipient segregation of primordial matter into atoms and molecules takes its rise subsequent to the evolution of our Seven Protyles. It is the last of these that Mr. Crookes is in search of, having recently detected the possibility of its existence on our plane.

Cosmic Ideation is said to be non-existent during pralayic periods, for the simple reason that there is no one, and nothing, to perceive its effects. There can be no manifestation of consciousness, semi-consciousness, or even “unconscious purposiveness,” except through a vehicle of Matter; that is to say, on this our plane, wherein human consciousness, in its normal state, cannot soar beyond what is known as transcendental metaphysics, it is only through some molecular aggregation, or fabric, that Spirit wells up in a stream of individual or sub-conscious subjectivity. And as Matter existing apart from perception is a mere abstraction, both of these aspects of the Absolute—Cosmic Substance and Cosmic Ideation—are mutually interdependent. In strict accuracy, to avoid confusion and misconception, the term “Matter” ought to be applied to the aggregate of objects of possible perception, and the term “Substance” to Noumena; for inasmuch as the phenomena of our plane are the creations of the perceiving Ego—the [pg 351] modifications of its own subjectivity—all the “states of matter representing the aggregate of perceived objects” can have but a relative and purely phenomenal existence for the children of our plane. As the modern Idealists would say, the coöperation of Subject and Object results in the sense-object, or phenomenon.

But this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is the same on all other planes; that the coöperation of the two, on the planes of their septenary differentiation, results in a septenary aggregate of phenomena which are likewise non-existent per se, though concrete realities for the Entities of whose experience they form a part, in the same manner as the rocks and rivers around us are real from the stand-point of a Physicist, though unreal illusions of sense from that of the Metaphysician. It would be an error to say, or even conceive, such a thing. From the stand-point of the highest metaphysics, the whole Universe, Gods included, is an Illusion (Mâyâ). But the illusion of him who is in himself an illusion differs on every plane of consciousness; and we have no more right to dogmatize about the possible nature of the perceptive faculties of an Ego on, say, the sixth plane, than we have to identify our perceptions with, or make them a standard for, those of an ant, in its mode of consciousness. Cosmic Ideation focussed in a Principle, or Upâdhi (Basis), results as the consciousness of the individual Ego. Its manifestation varies with the degree of the Upâdhi. For instance, through that known as Manas, it wells up as Mind-Consciousness; through the more finely differentiated fabric (sixth state of matter) of Buddhi—resting on the experience of Manas as its Basis—as a stream of Spiritual Intuition.

The pure Object apart from consciousness is unknown to us, while living on the plane of our three-dimensional world, for we know only the mental states it excites in the perceiving Ego. And, so long as the contrast of Subject and Object endures—to wit, so long as we enjoy our five senses and no more, and do not know how to divorce our all-perceiving Ego from the thraldom of these senses—so long will it be impossible for the personal Ego to break through the barrier which separates it from a knowledge of “things in themselves,” or Substance.

That Ego, progressing in an arc of ascending subjectivity, must exhaust the experience of every plane. But not till the Unit is merged in the All, whether on this or any other plane, and Subject and Object alike vanish in the absolute negation of the Nirvânic State—negation, again, only from our plane—not until then, is scaled that peak of Omniscience, [pg 352] the Knowledge of Things-in-themselves, and the solution of the yet more awful riddle approached, before which even the highest Dhyân Chohan must bow in silence and ignorance—the Unspeakable Mystery of that which is called by the Vedântins, Parabrahman.

Therefore, such being the case, all those who have sought to give a name to the Incognizable Principle have simply degraded it. Even to speak of Cosmic Ideation—save in its phenomenal aspect—is like trying to bottle up primordial Chaos, or to put a printed label on Eternity.

What, then, is the “Primordial Substance,” that mysterious object of which Alchemy was ever talking, and which was the subject of philosophical speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its phenomenal pre-differentiation? Even that is the All of manifested Nature and—nothing to our senses. It is mentioned under various names in every cosmogony, referred to in every philosophy, and shown to be, to this day, the ever grasp-eluding Proteus in Nature. We touch and do not feel it; we look at it without seeing it; we breathe it and do not perceive it; we hear and smell it without the smallest cognition that it is there; for it is in every molecule of that which, in our illusion and ignorance, we regard as Matter in any of its states, or conceive as a feeling, a thought, an emotion. In short, it is the Upâdhi, or Vehicle, of every possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. In the opening sentences of Genesis, and in the Chaldean Cosmogony; in the Purânas of India, and in the Book of the Dead of Egypt; everywhere it opens the cycle of manifestation. It is termed Chaos, and the Face of the Waters, incubated by the Spirit, proceeding from the Unknown, whatever that Spirit's name may be.

The authors of the Sacred Scriptures in India go deeper into the origin of the evolution of things than does Thales or Job, for they say:

From Intelligence [called Mahat, in the Purânas], associated with Ignorance [Îshvara, as a personal deity], attended by its projective power, in which the quality of dulness [tamas, insensibility] predominates, proceeds Ether—from ether, air; from air, heat; from heat, water; and from water, earth with everything on it.

“From This, from this same Self, was the Ether produced,” says the Veda.481

It thus becomes evident that it is not this Ether—sprung at the fourth remove from an emanation of “Intelligence, associated with Ignorance”—which is the high Principle, the deific Entity worshipped by the Greeks and Latins under the name of “Pater, Omnipotens [pg 353] Æther,” and “Magnus Æther,” in its collective aggregate. The septenary gradation, and the innumerable sub-divisions and differences, made by the Ancients between the powers of Ether collectively—from its outward fringe of effects, with which our Science is so familiar, up to the “Imponderable Substance,” once admitted as the “Ether of Space,” but now about to be rejected—have been ever a vexing riddle for every branch of knowledge. The Mythologists and Symbologists of our day, confused by this incomprehensible glorification on the one hand, and degradation on the other, of the same deified Entity and in the same religious systems, are often driven to the most ludicrous mistakes. The Church, firm as a rock in each and all of her early errors of interpretation, has made of Ether the abode of her Satanic legions. The whole Hierarchy of the “Fallen” Angels is there; Cosmocratores, the “World Bearers,” according to Bossuet; Mundi Tenentes, the “World Holders,” as Tertullian calls them; Mundi Domini, “World Dominations,” or rather Dominators; the Curbati, or “Curved,” etc.; thus making of the stars and celestial orbs in their courses—Devils!

For it is thus that the Church has interpreted the verse: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.”482 Further, St. Paul mentions the spiritual malices (“wickedness,” in English texts), in the Air—spiritualia nequitiæ cœlestibus—the Latin texts giving various names to these “malices,” the innocent “Elementals.” But the Church is right this time, though wrong in calling them all Devils. The Astral Light, or lower Ether, is full of conscious, semi-conscious and unconscious entities; only the church has less power over them than over invisible microbes or mosquitoes.

The difference made between the seven states of Ether—itself one of the Seven Cosmic Principles, whereas the Æther of the ancients is Universal Fire—may be seen in the injunctions by Zoroaster and Psellus, respectively. The former said: “Consult it only when it is without form or figure”—absque formâ et figurâ—which means, without flames or burning coals. “When it has a form, heed it not”; teaches Psellus, “but when it is formless, obey it, for it is then sacred fire, and all it will reveal thee shall be true.”483 This proves that Ether, itself an aspect of Âkâsha, has in its turn several aspects or “principles.”

All the ancient nations deified Æther in its imponderable aspect and [pg 354] potency. Virgil calls Jupiter, Pater Omnipotens Æther, and the “Great Æther.”484 The Hindûs have also placed it among their deities, under the name of Âkâsha, the synthesis of Ether. And the author of the Homœomerian System of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, firmly believed that the spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be found in the boundless Æther, where they were generated, whence they evolved, and whither they returned—an Occult teaching.

It thus becomes clear that it is from Æther, in its highest synthetic aspect, once anthropomorphized, that sprang the first idea of a personal Creative Deity. With the philosophical Hindûs the Elements are tâmasa, i.e., “unenlightened by intellect, which they obscure.”

We have now to exhaust the question of the mystical meaning of Primordial Chaos and of the Root-Principle, and show how they were connected in the ancient philosophies with Âkâsha, incorrectly translated Ether, and also with Mâyâ, Illusion, of which Îshvara is the male aspect. We shall speak further on of the Intelligent Principle, or rather of the invisible immaterial properties, in the visible and material elements, that “sprang from the Primordial Chaos.”

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

It will be an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the world are based on a knowledge among the Ancients of those sciences, which have, in our days, allied themselves in support of the doctrine of evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that these Ancients were far better acquainted with the fact of evolution [pg 355] itself, embracing both its physical and spiritual aspects, than we are now.

With the old philosophers, evolution was a universal theorem, a doctrine embracing the whole, and an established principle; whereas our modern evolutionists are enabled to present us merely with speculative theoretics; with particular, if not wholly negative theorems. It is idle for the representatives of our modern wisdom to close the debate and pretend that the question is settled, merely because the obscure phraseology of the Mosaic ... account clashes with the definite exegesis of “Exact Science.”485

If we turn to the Ordinances of Manu, we find the prototype of all these ideas. Mostly lost, to the Western world, in their original form, disfigured by later interpolations and additions, they have, nevertheless, preserved quite enough of their ancient spirit to show its character.

“Removing the darkness, the Self-existent Lord [Vishnu, Nârâyana, etc.] became manifest; and, wishing to produce beings from his Essence, created, in the beginning, water alone. In that he cast seed. That became a Golden Egg.”

Whence this Self-existent Lord? It is called This, and is spoken of as “Darkness, imperceptible, without definite qualities, undiscoverable, unknowable, as if wholly in sleep.” Having dwelt in that Egg for a whole Divine Year, he “who is called in the world Brahmâ,” splits that Egg in two, and from the upper portion he forms the heaven, from the lower the earth, and from the middle the sky and “the perpetual place of waters.”486

Directly following these verses, however, there is something more important for us, as it entirely corroborates our Esoteric teachings. From verse 14 to 36, evolution is given in the order described in the Esoteric Philosophy. This cannot be easily gainsaid. Even Medhâtithi, the son of Virasvâmin, and the author of the Commentary, the Manubhâsya, whose date, according to the western Orientalists, is 1,000 a.d., helps us with his remarks to the elucidation of the truth. He shows himself either unwilling to give out more, because he knew what had to be kept from the profane, or else he was really puzzled. Still, what he does give out makes the septenary principle in man and Nature plain enough.

Let us begin with Chapter I of the Ordinances, or “Laws,” after the Self-existent Lord, the Unmanifesting Logos of the Unknown “Darkness,” [pg 356] becomes manifested in the Golden Egg. It is from this Egg, from

11. “That which is the undiscrete [undifferentiated] Cause, eternal, which is and is not, from It issued that Male who is called in the world Brahmâ.”

Here, as in all genuine philosophical systems, we find even the “Egg,” or the Circle, or Zero, Boundless Infinity, referred to as “It,”487 and Brahmâ, the first Unit only, referred to as the “Male” God, i.e., the fructifying Principle. It is [circle split by vertical line], or 10 (ten), the Decad. On the plane of the Septenary, or our World, only, it is called Brahmâ. On that of the Unified Decad, in the realm of Reality, this male Brahmâ is an Illusion.

14. “From Self (Âtmanah) he created Mind, which is and is not; and from Mind, Ego-ism [Self-Consciousness] (a), the ruler (b), the Lord.”

(a) The Mind is Manas. Medhâtithi, the commentator, justly observes here that it is the reverse of this, and shows already interpolation and rearranging; for it is Manas that springs from Ahamkâra or (Universal) Self-Consciousness, as Manas in the microcosm springs from Mahat, or Mahâ-Buddhi (Buddhi, in man). For Manas is dual. As shown and translated by Colebrooke, “Mind, serving both for sense and action, is an organ by affinity, being cognate with the rest”;488 “the rest” here meaning that Manas, our Fifth Principle (the fifth, because the body was named the first, which is the reverse of the true philosophical order), is in affinity both with Âtmâ-Buddhi and with the lower Four Principles. Hence, our teaching: namely, that Manas follows Âtmâ-Buddhi to Devachan, and that the Lower Manas, that is to say, the dregs or residue of Manas, remains with Kâma Rûpa, in Limbus, or Kâma Loka, the abode of the “Shells.”

(b) Medhâtithi translates this as “the one conscious of the I,” or Ego, not “the ruler,” as do the Orientalists. Thus also they translate the following shloka:

16. “He also, having made the subtile parts of those six [the great Self and the five organs of sense], of unmeasured brightness, to enter into the elements of self (âtmamâtrâsu), created all beings.”

When, according to Medhâtithi, it ought to read mâtrâbhih instead of âtmamâtrâsu, and thus would read:

[pg 357]

“He having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of unmeasured brightness, by elements of self, created all beings.”

The latter reading must be the correct one, since He, the Self, is what we call Âtmâ, and thus constitutes the seventh principle, the synthesis of the “six.” Such is also the opinion of the editor of the Mânava Dharma Shâstra, who seems to have intuitionally entered far deeper into the spirit of the philosophy than has the translator, the late Dr. Burnell; for he hesitates little between the text of Kullûka Bhatta and the commentary of Medhâtithi. Rejecting the tanmâtra, or subtile elements, and the âtmamâtra of Kullûka Bhatta, he says, applying the principles to the Cosmic Self:

“The six appear rather to be the manas plus the five principles of ether, air, fire, water, earth; ‘having united five portions of those six with the spiritual element [the seventh] he (thus) created all existing things;’ ... âtmamâtra is therefore the spiritual atom as opposed to the elementary, not reflexive ‘elements of himself’.”

Thus he corrects the translation of verse 17:

“As the subtile elements of bodily forms of this One depend on these six, so the wise call his form Sharîra.”

And he adds that “elements” mean here portions, or parts (or principles), which reading is borne out by verse 19, which says:

“This non-eternal (Universe) arises then from the Eternal, by means of the subtile elements of forms of those seven very glorious Principles (Purusha).”

Commenting upon which emendation of Medhâtithi, the editor remarks: “the five elements plus mind [Manas] and self-consciousness [Ahamkâra]489 are probably meant; ‘subtile elements,’ as before [meaning] ‘fine portions of form’ [or principles].” Verse 20 shows this, when saying of these five elements, or “fine portions of form” (Rûpa plus Manas and Self-Consciousness) that they constitute the “Seven Purusha,” or Principles, called in the Purânas the “Seven Prakritis.”

Moreover, these “five elements,” or “five portions,” are spoken of in verse 27 as “those which are called the atomic destructible portions,” and which are, therefore, “distinct from the atoms of the Nyâya.”

This creative Brahmâ, issuing from the Mundane or Golden Egg, unites in himself both the male and female principles. He is, in short, [pg 358] the same as all the creative Protologoi. Of Brahmâ, however, it could not be said, as of Dionysos, “πρωτόγονον διφυῆ τρίγονον βακχεῖον Ἅνακτα Ἄγριον ἀρρητὸν κρύφιον δικέρωτα δίμορφον”—a lunar Jehovah, Bacchus truly, with David dancing nude before his symbol in the ark—because no licentious Dionysia were ever established in his name and honour. All such public worship was exoteric, and the great universal symbols were distorted universally, as those of Krishna are now by the Vallabâchâryas of Bombay, the followers of the “infant” God. But are these popular Gods the true Deity? Are they the apex and synthesis of the sevenfold creation, man included? Impossible! Each and all are one of the rungs of that septenary ladder of Divine Consciousness, Pagan as Christian. Ain Suph is said to manifest through the Seven Letters of the Name of Jehovah who, having usurped the place of the Unknown Limitless, was given by his devotees his Seven Angels of the Presence—his Seven Principles. But, indeed, they are mentioned in almost every school. In the pure Sânkhya philosophy Mahat, Ahamkâra and the five Tanmâtras are called the Seven Prakritis, or Natures, and are counted from Mahâ-Buddhi, or Mahat, down to Earth.490

Nevertheless, however disfigured by Ezra for Rabbinical purposes is the original Elohistic version, however repulsive at times is even the esoteric meaning in the Hebrew scrolls, far more so indeed than its outward veil or cloaking may be—once the Jehovistic portions are eliminated, the Mosaic Books are found full of purely Occult and priceless knowledge, especially in the first six chapters.

Read by the aid of the Kabalah, one finds a matchless temple of Occult truths, a well of deeply concealed beauty, hidden under a structure, the visible architecture of which, notwithstanding its apparent symmetry, is unable to stand the criticism of cold reason, or to reveal the age of its hidden truth, for it belongs to all the ages. There is more Wisdom concealed under the exoteric fables of the Purânas and Bible than in all the exoteric facts and science in the literature of the world, and more Occult true Science, than there is of exact knowledge in all the academies. Or, in plainer and stronger language, there is as much esoteric wisdom in some portions of the exoteric Purânas and Pentateuch, as there is of nonsense and of designedly childish fancy, when read only in the dead-letter and murderous interpretations of the great dogmatic religions, and especially of their sects.

[pg 359]

Let anyone read the first verses of Genesis and reflect upon them. There, “God” commands another “God,” who does his bidding—even in the cautious English Protestant authorized translation of King James I.

In the “beginning”—the Hebrew language having no word to express the idea of eternity491—“God” fashions the Heaven and the Earth; and the latter is “without form and void,” while the former is in fact not Heaven, but the “Deep,” Chaos, with darkness upon its face.492

“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters,” or the Great Deep of the Infinite Space. And this Spirit is Nârâyana, or Vishnu.

“And God said, Let there be a firmament....” And “God,” the second, obeyed and “made the firmament.” “And God said let there be light.” And “there was light.” Now the latter does not mean light at all, but, as in the Kabalah, the androgyne Adam Kadmon, or Sephira (Spiritual Light), for they are one; or, according to the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the secondary Angels, the first being the Elohim, who are the aggregate of that “fashioning” God. For to whom are those words of command addressed? And who is it who commands? That which commands is the Eternal Law, and he who obeys, the Elohim, the known quantity acting in and with x, or the coëfficient of the unknown quantity, the Forces of the One Force. All this is Occultism, and is found in the archaic Stanzas. It is perfectly immaterial whether we call these “Forces” the Dhyân Chohans, or the Auphanim as Ezekiel does.

“The one Universal Light, which to man is Darkness, is ever existent,” says the Chaldean Book of Numbers. From it proceeds periodically the Energy, which is reflected in the Deep, or Chaos, the store-house of future Worlds, and, once awakened, stirs up and fructifies the latent Forces, which are the ever present eternal potentialities [pg 360] in it. Then awake anew the Brahmâs and Buddhas—the co-eternal Forces—and a new Universe springs into being.

In the Sepher Yetzirah, the Kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has evidently repeated the words of Manu. In it, the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.493 “One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be Its name, which liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit.”494 And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Christian Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air (the Father), the creative Element; and then number Three, Water (the Mother), proceeded from Air; Ether or Fire completes the Mystic Four, the Arbo-al.495 When the Concealed of the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a Point [the Primordial Point, or the first Sephira, Air, or Holy Ghost,] shaped into a sacred Form, [the Ten Sephiroth, or the Heavenly Man,] and covered it with a rich and splendid Garment, that is the World.496

“He maketh the Wind His messengers, flaming Fire His servants”;497 says the Yetzirah, showing the cosmical character of the later euhemerized Elements, and that Spirit permeates every atom in Kosmos.

Paul calls the invisible Cosmic Beings the “Elements.” But now the Elements are degraded into, and limited to, atoms of which nothing is known so far, and which are only “children of necessity,” as is Ether also. As we said in Isis Unveiled:

The poor primordial Elements have long been exiled, and our ambitious Physicists run races, to determine who shall add one more to the fledgling brood of the sixty and odd elementary substances.

Meanwhile there rages a war in modern Chemistry about terms. We are denied the right to call these substances “chemical elements,” for these are not “primordial principles of self-existing essences, out of which the universe was fashioned,” according to Plato. Such ideas associated with the word “element” were good enough for the old Greek Philosophy, but Modern Science rejects them; for, as Mr. [pg 361] William Crookes says: “they are unfortunate terms,” and experimental Science will have “nothing to do with any kind of essences except those which it can see, smell, or taste. It leaves others to the metaphysicians....” We must feel grateful even for so much!

This “Primordial Substance” is called by some Chaos. Plato and the Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World, after it had been impregnated by the Spirit of that which broods over the Primeval Waters, or Chaos. It is by being reflected in it, say the Kabalists, that the brooding Principle “created” the phantasmagoria of a visible, manifested Universe. Chaos before, Ether after this “reflection,” it is still the Deity that pervades Space and all things. It is the invisible, imponderable Spirit of things, and the invisible, but only too tangible, fluid that radiates from the fingers of the healthy magnetizer, for it is Vital Electricity—Life itself. Called in derision, by the Marquis de Mirville, the “Nebulous Almighty,” it is to this day termed by the Theurgists and Occultists the “Living Fire”; and there is not a Hindû who practises at dawn a certain kind of meditation but knows its effects. It is the “Spirit of Light” and Magnes. As truly expressed by an opponent, Magus and Magnes are two branches growing from the same trunk and shooting forth the same resultants. And in this appellation of “Living Fire” we may also discover the meaning of the puzzling sentence in the Zend Avesta: there is “a Fire that gives knowledge of the future, science and amiable speech”; that is to say, which develops an extraordinary eloquence in the sibyl, the sensitive, and even some orators. Writing upon this subject, in Isis Unveiled, we said:

The Chaos of the ancients, the Zoroastrian Sacred Fire, or the Atash-Behram of the Parsîs; the Hermes-fire, the Elmes-fire of the ancient Germans; the Lightning of Cybele; the Burning Torch of Apollo; the Flame on the altar of Pan; the Inextinguishable Fire in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the Fire-flame of Pluto's helm; the brilliant Sparks on the caps of the Dioscuri, on the Gorgon's head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff of Mercury; the Egyptian Ptah-Ra; the Grecian Zeus Cataibates (the Descending) of Pausanias; the Pentecostal Fire-tongues; the Burning Bush of Moses; the Pillar of Fire of Exodus, and the Burning Lamp of Abram; the Eternal Fire of the “bottomless pit”; the Delphic oracular vapours; the Sidereal Light of the Rosicrucians; the Âkâsha of the Hindû Adepts; the Astral Light of Éliphas Lévi; the Nerve-Aura and the Fluid of the Magnetists; the Od of Reichenbach; the Psychod and Ectenic Force of Thury; the “Psychic Force” of Sergeant Cox, and the atmospheric magnetism of some Naturalists; galvanism; and finally, electricity—all these are but various names for many different manifestations or effects of the same mysterious, all-pervading Cause, the Greek Archæus.

[pg 362]

We now add—it is all this and much more.

This “Fire” is spoken of in all the Hindû Sacred Books, as also in the Kabalistic works. The Zohar explains it as the “White Hidden Fire, in the Risha Havurah,” the White Head, whose Will causes the fiery fluid to flow in 370 currents in every direction of the Universe. It is identical with the “Serpent that runs with 370 leaps” of the Siphrah Dtzenioutha, the Serpent, which, when the “Perfect Man,” the Metatron, is raised, that is to say, when the Divine Man indwells in the animal man, becomes three Spirits, or Âtmâ-Buddhi-Manas, in our Theosophical phraseology.

Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance—one of whose “principles” is Ether—are one, and include the Elements, in the sense St. Paul attaches to them. These Elements are the veiled Synthesis standing for Dhyân Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels, etc. The Ether of Science—the Ilus of Berosus, or the Protyle of Chemistry—constitutes, so to speak, the rude material, relatively, out of which the above-named Builders, following the plan traced out for them eternally in the Divine Thought, fashion the Systems in the Kosmos. They are “myths,” we are told. No more so than Ether and the Atoms, we answer. The two latter are absolute necessities of Physical Science, and the Builders are as absolute a necessity of Metaphysics. We are twitted with the objection: You never saw them. And we ask the Materialists: Have you ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your Force? Moreover, one of the greatest Western Evolutionists of our modern day, co-“discoverer” with Darwin, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of Natural Selection alone accounting for the physical form of Man, admits the guiding action of “higher intelligences” as a “necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe.”498

These “higher intelligences” are the Dhyân Chohans of the Occultists.

Indeed, there are few myths in any religious system worthy of the name, but have a historical as well as a scientific foundation. “Myths,” justly observes Pococke, “are now proved to be fables, just in proportion as we misunderstand them; truths, in proportion as they were once understood.”

The most distinct and the one prevailing idea, found in all ancient teaching, with reference to Cosmic Evolution and the first “creation” [pg 363] of our Globe with all its products, organic and inorganic—strange word for an Occultist to use!—is that the whole Kosmos has sprung from the Divine Thought. This Thought impregnates Matter, which is co-eternal with the One Reality; and all that lives and breathes evolves from the Emanations of the One Immutable, Parabrahman-Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal One-Root. The former of these, in its aspect of the Central Point turned inward, so to say, into regions quite inaccessible to human intellect, is Absolute Abstraction; whereas, in its aspect as Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal Root of all, it gives one at least some hazy comprehension of the Mystery of Being.

Therefore, it was taught in the inner temples that this visible Universe of Spirit and Matter is but the concrete Image of the ideal Abstraction; it was built on the Model of the first Divine Idea. Thus our Universe existed from eternity in a latent state. The Soul animating this purely spiritual Universe is the Central Sun, the highest Deity Itself. It was not the One who built the concrete form of the idea, but the First-Begotten; and, as it was constructed on the geometrical figure of the dodecahedron,499 the First-Begotten “was pleased to employ 12,000 years in its creation.”The latter number is expressed in the Tyrrhenian Cosmogony,500 which shows man created in the sixth millennium. This agrees with the Egyptian theory of 6,000 “years,”501 and with the Hebrew computation. But it is the exoteric form of it. The secret computation explains that the “12,000 and the 6,000 years” are Years of Brahmâ, one Day of Brahmâ being equal to 4,320,000,000 years. Sanchuniathon, in his Cosmogony,502 declares that when the Wind (Spirit) became enamoured of its own principles (Chaos), an intimate union took place, which connection was called Pothos (ποθος), and from this sprang the seed of all. And the Chaos knew not its own production, for it was senseless; but from its embrace with the Wind was generated Môt, or the Ilus (Mud).503 From this proceeded the spores of creation and the generation of the Universe.504

Zeus-Zên (Æther), and Chthonia (Chaotic Earth) and Metis (Water), his wives; Osiris—also representing Æther, the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light—and Isis-Latona, the Goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras,505 the rock-born God, the symbol of the male Mundane Fire, or the personified Primordial Light, and Mithra, the Fire-Goddess, at once his mother and his wife—the pure element of Fire, the active or male principle, regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth and Water, or matter, the female, or passive, element of cosmical generation—Mithras who is the son of Bordj, the Persian [pg 364]mundane mountain,506 from which he flashed out as a radiant ray of light; Brahmâ, the Fire-God, and his prolific consort; and the Hindû Agni, the refulgent Deity from whose body issue a thousand streams of glory and seven tongues of flame, and in whose honour certain Brâhmans to this day maintain a perpetual fire; Shiva, personated by Meru, the mundane mountain of the Hindûs, the terrific Fire-God, who is said in the legend to have descended from heaven, like the Jewish Jehovah, “in a pillar of fire”; and a dozen other archaic double-sexed Deities—all loudly proclaim their hidden meaning. And what could be the dual meaning of these myths but the psycho-chemical principle of primordial creation; the First Evolution, in its triple manifestation of Spirit, Force and Matter; the divine correlation, at its starting point, allegorized as the marriage of Fire and Water, the products of electrifying Spirit—the union of the male active principle with the female passive element—which become the parents of their tellurian child, Cosmic Matter, the Prima Materia, whose Soul is Æther, and whose Shadow is the Astral Light!507

But the fragments of the cosmogonical systems that have reached us are now rejected as absurd fables. Nevertheless, Occult Science—which has survived even the Great Flood that submerged the Antediluvian Giants and with them their very memory, save the record preserved in the Secret Doctrine, the Bible and other Scriptures—still holds the Key to all the world problems.

Let us, then, apply this Key to the rare fragments of long-forgotten Cosmogonies, and by means of their scattered portions endeavour to reestablish the once Universal Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine. The Key fits them all. No one can seriously study ancient philosophies without perceiving that the striking similitude of conception in all of them, in their exoteric form very frequently, and in their hidden spirit invariably, is the result of no mere coincidence, but of a concurrent design; and that, during the youth of mankind, there was but one language, one knowledge, one universal religion, when there were no churches, no creeds or sects, but when every man was a priest unto himself. And, if it is shown that already in those early ages which are shut out from our sight by the exuberant growth of tradition, human religious thought developed in uniform sympathy in every portion of the globe; then, it becomes evident that that thought, born under whatever latitude, in the cold North or the burning South, in the East or West, was inspired by the same revelations, and that man was nurtured under the protecting shadow of the same Tree of Knowledge.

[pg 365]

Section IV. Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.

These three are the containment of Space; or, as a learned Kabalist has defined it: “Space, the all-containing uncontained, is the primary embodiment of simple Unity ... boundless extension.”508 But, he asks again: “boundless extension of what?”—and makes the correct reply: “The Unknown Container of All, the Unknown First Cause.” This is a most correct definition and answer; most esoteric and true, from every aspect of Occult Teaching.

Space, which, in their ignorance and with their iconoclastic tendency to destroy every philosophic idea of old, the modern wiseacres have proclaimed “an abstract idea” and a “void,” is, in reality, the Container and the Body of the Universe in its Seven Principles. It is a Body of limitless extent, whose Principles, in Occult phraseology—each being in its turn a septenary—manifest in our phenomenal World only the grossest fabric of their sub-divisions. “No one has ever seen the Elements in their fulness,” the Doctrine teaches. We have to search for our Wisdom in the original expressions and synonyms of the primeval peoples. Even the Jews, the latest of these, show the same idea, in their Kabalistic teachings, when they speak of the seven-headed Serpent of Space, called the “Great Sea.”

In the beginning, the Alhim created the Heavens and the Earth; the Six [Sephiroth].... They created Six, and on these all things are based. And these [Six] depend upon the seven forms of the Cranium up to the Dignity of all Dignities.509

Now Wind, Air and Spirit have ever been synonymous in every nation. Pneuma (Spirit) and Anemos (Wind), with the Greeks, Spiritus [pg 366] and Ventus, with the Latins, were convertible terms, even if dissociated from the original idea of the Breath of Life. In the “Forces” of Science we see but the material effect of the spiritual effect of one or other of the four primordial Elements, transmitted to us by the Fourth Race just as we shall transmit Æther, or rather its gross sub-division, in its fulness to the Sixth Root-Race.

Chaos was called senseless by the Ancients, because—Chaos and Space being synonymous—it represented and contained in itself all the Elements in their rudimentary, undifferentiated State. They made Æther, the fifth Element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Æther of the Greek philosophers was not its Dregs, although indeed they knew more than Science does now of these Dregs (Ether), which are rightly enough supposed to act as an agent for many Forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was the Âkâsha of the Hindûs; the Ether accepted in Physics is but one of its sub-divisions, on our plane, the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all its evil as well as its good effects.

Seeing that the Essence of Æther, or the Unseen Space, was considered divine, as being the supposed Veil of Deity, it was regarded as the Medium between this life and the next. The Ancients considered that when the directing active Intelligences—the Gods—retired from any portion of Æther in our Space, or the four realms which they superintend, then that particular region was left in the possession of evil, so called by reason of the absence from it of good.

The existence of Spirit in the common Mediator, the Ether, is denied by Materialism; while Theology makes of it a Personal God. But the Kabalist holds that both are wrong, saying that in Ether, the elements represent only Matter, the blind Cosmic Forces of Nature; while Spirit represents the Intelligence which directs them. The Âryan, Hermetic, Orphic, and Pythagorean cosmogonical doctrines, as well as those of Sanchuniathon and Berosus, are all based upon one irrefutable formula, viz., that Æther and Chaos, or, in the Platonic language, Mind and Matter, were the two primeval and eternal principles of the Universe, utterly independent of anything else. The former was the all-vivifying intellectual principle, while Chaos was a shapeless liquid principle, without “form or sense”; from the union of which two sprang into existence the Universe, or rather the Universal World, the first Androgynous Deity—Chaotic Matter becoming its Body, and Ether its Soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of Hermeias: “Chaos, from this union with Spirit, obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced Protogonos the (First-Born) Light.”510 This is the universal Trinity, based on the metaphysical conceptions of the Ancients, who, reasoning by analogy, made of man, who [pg 367]is a compound of Intellect and Matter, the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, or Great Universe.511

“Nature abhors Vacuum” said the Peripatetics, who though Materialists in their way, comprehended perhaps why Democritus, with his instructor Leucippus, taught that the first principles of all things contained in the Universe were Atoms and a Vacuum. The latter means simply latent Force or Deity, which, before its first manifestation—when it became Will, communicating the first impulse to these Atoms—was the great Nothingness, Ain Suph, or No-Thing; and, therefore, to every sense, a Void, or Chaos.

This Chaos, however, became the “Soul of the World,” according to Plato and the Pythagoreans. According to Hindû teaching, Deity, in the shape of Æther or Âkâsha, pervades all things. It was called, therefore, by the Theurgists the “Living Fire,” the “Spirit of Light,” and sometimes “Magnes.” According to Plato, the highest Deity itself built the Universe in the geometrical form of the dodecahedron, and its “First-Begotten” was born of Chaos and Primordial Light—the Central Sun. This First-Born, however, was only the aggregate of the Host of the Builders, the first Constructive Forces, who are called in ancient Cosmogonies, the Ancients, born of the Deep or Chaos, and the First Point. He is the Tetragrammaton, so-called, at the head of the Seven lower Sephiroth. This was also the belief of the Chaldeans. Philo, the Jew, speaking very flippantly of the first instructors of his ancestors, writes as follows:

These Chaldeans were of opinion that the Kosmos, among the things that exist [?], is a single Point, either being itself God [Theos] or that in it is God, comprehending the Soul of all things.512

Chaos, Theos, Kosmos are but the three symbols of their synthesis—Space. One can never hope to solve the mystery of this Tetraktys, by holding to the dead-letter even of the old philosophies as now extant. But even in these, Chaos, Theos, Kosmos and Space are identified in all Eternity, as the One Unknown Space, the last word on which will never, perhaps, be known, before our Seventh Round. Nevertheless, the allegories and metaphysical symbols about the primeval and perfect Cube, are remarkable, even in the exoteric Purânas.

There, also, Brahmâ is Theos, evolving out of Chaos, or the Great Deep, the Waters, over which Spirit or Space—the Spirit moving over the face of the future boundless Kosmos—is silently hovering, in the [pg 368] first hour of reäwakening. It is also Vishnu, sleeping on Ananta-Shesha, the great Serpent of Eternity, of which Western Theology, ignorant of the Kabalah, the only key that opens the secrets of the Bible, has made—the Devil. It is the first Triangle or the Pythagorean Triad, the “God of the three Aspects,” before it is transformed, through the perfect quadrature of the Infinite Circle, into the “four-faced” Brahmâ. “Of him who is and yet is not, from Non-Being, the Eternal Cause, is born the Being, Purusha,” says Manu, the legislator.

In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed God, is represented by a snake-emblem of Eternity encircling a water urn, with its head hovering over the waters, which it incubates with its breath. In this case, the Serpent is the Agathodaimôn, the Good Spirit; in its opposite aspect, it is the Kakodaimôn, the Evil Spirit. In the Scandinavian Eddas, the honey-dew, the fruit of the Gods, and of the creative busy Yggdrasil bees, falls during the hours of night, when the atmosphere is impregnated with humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as the passive principle of creation, it typifies the creation of the Universe out of Water. This dew is the Astral Light in one of its combinations, and possesses creative as well as destructive properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oannes or Dagon, the man-fish, instructing the people, shows the infant World created out of Water, and all beings originating from this Prima Materia. Moses teaches that only Earth and Water can bring into existence a Living Soul: and we read in the Scriptures that herbs could not grow until the Eternal caused it to rainupon Earth. In the Mexican Popol Vuh, man is created out of mud or clay (terre glaise), taken from under the Water. Brahmâ creates the great Muni, or first man, seated on his Lotus, only after having called spirits into being, who thus enjoyed over mortals a priority of existence; and he creates him out of Water, Air and Earth. Alchemists claim that the primordial or pre-adamic Earth, when reduced to its first substance, is in its second stage of transformation like clear Water, the first being the Alkahest proper. This primordial substance is said to contain within itself the essence of all that goes to make up man; it contains not only all the elements of his physical being, but even the “breath of life” in a latent state, ready to be awakened. This it derives from the “incubation” of the “Spirit of God”upon the face of the Waters—Chaos. In fact, this substance is Chaos itself. From this it was that Paracelsus claimed to be able to make his Homunculi; and this is why Thales, the great natural philosopher, maintained that Water was the principle of all things in nature.513... Job says that dead things are formed from under the Waters, and the inhabitants thereof.514 In the original text, instead of “dead things,” it is written dead Rephaim, Giants or mighty Primitive Men, from whom Evolution may one day trace our present race.515

[pg 369]

“In the primordial state of the creation,” says Polier's Mythologie des Indous, “the rudimental Universe, submerged in Water, reposed in the bosom of Vishnu. Sprung from this Chaos and Darkness, Brahmâ, the Architect of the World, poised on a lotus-leaf, floated [moved] upon the waters, unable to discern anything but water and darkness.” Perceiving such a dismal state of things, Brahmâ soliloquizes in consternation: “Who am I? Whence came I?” Then he hears a voice:516 “Direct your thoughts to Bhagavat.” Brahmâ, rising from his natatory position, seats himself upon the lotus, in an attitude of contemplation, and reflects upon the Eternal, who, pleased with this evidence of piety, disperses the primeval darkness and opens his understanding. “After this Brahmâ issues from the Universal Egg [Infinite Chaos] as Light, for his understanding is now opened, and he sets himself to work. He moves on the eternal Waters, with the Spirit of God within himself; and in his capacity of Mover of the Waters he is Vishnu, or Nârâyana.”

This is, of course, exoteric; yet, in its main idea, it is as identical as possible with the Egyptian Cosmogony, which, in its opening sentences, shows Athtor,517 or Mother Night, representing Illimitable Darkness, as the Primeval Element which covered the Infinite Abyss, animated by Water and the Universal Spirit of the Eternal, dwelling alone in Chaos. Similarly in the Jewish Scriptures, the history of the creation opens with the Spirit of God and his creative Emanation—another Deity.518

The Zohar teaches that it is the Primordial Elements—the trinity of Fire, Air and Water—the Four Cardinal Points, and all the Forces of Nature, which form collectively the Voice of the Will, Memrab, or the Word, the Logos of the Absolute Silent All. “The indivisible Point, limitless and unknowable,” spreads itself over space, and thus forms a Veil, the Mûlaprakriti of Parabrahman, which conceals this Absolute Point.

In the Cosmogonies of all the nations it is the Architects, synthesized by the Demiurge, in the Bible the Elohim, or Alhim, who fashion Kosmos out of Chaos, and who are the collective Theos, male-female, Spirit and Matter. “By a series (yom) of foundations (hasoth), the Alhim caused earth and heaven to be.”519 In Genesis, it is first Alhim, [pg 370] then Jahva-Alhim, and finally Jehovah—after the separation of the sexes in the fourth chapter. It is noticeable that nowhere, except in the later, or rather the last, Cosmogonies of our Fifth Race does the ineffable and unutterable Name520—the symbol of the Unknown Deity, which was used only in the Mysteries—occur in connection with the “Creation” of the Universe. It is the Movers, the Runners, the Theoi (from θέειν to run), who do the work of formation, the Messengers of the Manvantaric Law, who have now become in Christianity simply the “Messengers” (Malachim). This seems to be also the case in Hindûism or early Brâhmanism. For in the Rig Veda, it is not Brahmâ who creates, but the Prajâpatis, the “Lords of Being,” who are also the Rishis; the term Rishi, according to Professor Mahadeo Kunte, being connected with the word to move, to lead on, applied to them in their terrestrial character, when, as Patriarchs, they lead their Hosts on the Seven Rivers.

Moreover, the very word “God,” in the singular, embracing all the Gods, or Theoi, came to the “superior” civilized nations from a strange source, one as entirely and preëminently phallic as the sincere outspokenness of the Indian Lingham. The attempt to derive God from the Anglo-Saxon synonym Good is an abandoned idea, for in no other language, from the Persian Khoda down to the Latin Deus, has an instance been found of the name for God being derived from the attribute of Goodness. To the Latin races it comes from the Âryan Dyaus (the Day); to the Slavonian, from the Greek Bacchus (Bagh-bog); and to the Saxon races directly from the Hebrew Yod, or Jod. The latter is י the number-letter 10, male and female, and Yod is the phallic hook. Hence the Saxon Godh, the Germanic Gott, and the English God. This symbolic term may be said to represent the Creator of Physical Humanity, on the terrestrial plane; but surely it had nothing to do with the Formation, or “Creation,” of either Spirit, Gods, or Kosmos?

Chaos-Theos-Kosmos, the Triple Deity, is all in all. Therefore, it is said to be male and female, good and evil, positive and negative; the whole series of contrasted qualities. When latent, in Pralaya, it is incognizable and becomes the Unknowable Deity. It can be known only in its active functions; hence as Matter-Force and living Spirit, the correlations and outcome, or the expression, on the visible plane, of the ultimate and ever-to-be unknown Unity.

[pg 371]

In its turn this Triple Unit is the producer of the Four Primary Elements,521 which are known, in our visible terrestrial Nature, as the seven (so far the five) Elements, each divisible into forty-nine—seven times seven—sub-elements, with about seventy of which Chemistry is acquainted. Every Cosmical Element, such as Fire, Air, Water, Earth, partaking of the qualities and defects of its Primaries, is in its nature Good and Evil, Force or Spirit, and Matter, etc.; and each, therefore, is at one and the same time Life and Death, Health and Disease, Action and Reaction. They are ever forming Matter, under the never-ceasing impulse of the One Element, the Incognizable, represented in the world of phenomena by Æther. They are “the immortal Gods who give birth and life to all.”

In The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol, in treating of the structure of the Universe, it is said:

R. Yehudah began, it is written: “Elohim said: Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.” Come, see! At the time that the Holy ... created the World, He created 7 heavens Above. He created 7 earths Below, 7 seas, 7 days, 7 rivers, 7 weeks, 7 years, 7 times, and 7,000 years that the World has been. The Holy is in the seventh of all.522

This, besides showing a strange identity with the Cosmogony of the Purânas,523 corroborates all our teachings with regard to number seven, as briefly given in Esoteric Buddhism.

The Hindûs have an endless series of allegories to express this idea. In the Primordial Chaos, before it became developed into the Sapta Samudra, or Seven Oceans—emblematical of the Seven Gunas, or conditioned Qualities, composed of Trigunas (Sattva, Rajas and Tamas)—lie latent both Amrita, or Immortality, and Visha, or Poison, Death, Evil. This is to be found in the allegorical Churning of the Ocean by the Gods. Amrita is beyond any Guna, for it is unconditioned, per se; but when once fallen into phenomenal creation, it became mixed with Evil, Chaos, with latent Theos in it, before Kosmos was evolved. Hence we find Vishnu, the personification of Eternal Law, periodically calling forth Kosmos into activity, or, in allegorical phraseology, churning out of the Primitive Ocean, or Boundless Chaos, the Amrita of Eternity, reserved only for the Gods and Devas; and in the task he has [pg 372] to employ Nâgas and Asuras, or Demons in exoteric Hindûism. The whole allegory is highly philosophical, and indeed we find it repeated in every ancient system of philosophy. Thus we find it in Plato, who having fully embraced the ideas which Pythagoras had brought from India, compiled and published them in a form more intelligible than the original mysterious numerals of the Samian Sage. Thus the Kosmos is the “Son” with Plato, having for his Father and Mother Divine Thought and Matter.524

“The Egyptians,” says Dunlap, “distinguish between an older and younger Horus; the former the brother of Osiris, the latter the son of Osiris and Isis.”525 The first is the Idea of the World remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in Darkness before the Creation of the World.” The second Horus is this Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with Matter, and assuming an actual existence.526

The Chaldean Oracles speak of the “Mundane God, eternal, boundless, young and old, of winding form.”527 This “winding form” is a figure to express the vibratory motion of the Astral Light, with which the ancient priests were perfectly well acquainted, though the name “Astral Light” was invented by the Martinists.

Cosmolatry has the finger of scorn pointed at its superstitions by Modern Science. Science, however, before laughing at it, ought, as advised by a French savant, “to entirely remodel its own system of cosmo-pneumatological education.” Satis eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parum! Cosmolatry, like Pantheism, in its ultimate expression, may be made to express itself in the same words in which the Purâna describes Vishnu:

He is only the ideal cause of the potencies to be created in the work of creation; and from him proceed the potencies to be created, after they have become the real cause. Save that one ideal cause, there is no other to which the world can be referred.... Through the potency of that cause, every created thing comes by its proper nature.528

[pg 373]

Section V. On the Hidden Deity, Its Symbols and Glyphs.

The Logos, or Creative Deity, the “Word made Flesh,” of every religion, has to be traced to its ultimate source and essence. In India, it is a Proteus of 1,008 divine names and aspects in each of its personal transformations, from Brahmâ-Purusha, through the Seven Divine Rishis and Ten Semi-divine Prajâpatis (also Rishis), down to the Divine-human Avatâras. The same puzzling problem of the “One in Many,” and the Multitude in One, is found in other Pantheons; in the Egyptian, the Greek and the Chaldeo-Judaic, the latter having made confusion still more confused by presenting its Gods as euhemerizations, in the shapes of Patriarchs. And these Patriarchs are now accepted by those who reject Romulus as a myth, and are represented as living and historical Entities. Verbum satis sapienti!

In the Zohar, Ain Suph is also the One, the Infinite Unity. This was known to the very few learned Fathers of the Church, who were aware that Jehovah was no “highest” God, but a third-rate Potency. But while complaining bitterly of the Gnostics, and saying: “our Heretics hold ... that Propatôr is known but to the Only-begotten Son529 [who is Brahmâ], that is to the Mind [Nous],” Irenæus failed to mention that the Jews did the same in their real secret books. Valentinus, “the profoundest doctor of the Gnosis,” held that “there was a perfect Aiôn who existed before Bythos [the first Father of unfathomable nature, which is the Second Logos], called Propatôr.” It is this Aiôn who springs as a Ray from Ain Suph, which does not create, and Aiôn who creates, or through whom, rather, everything is created, or evolves. For, as the Basilidians taught, “there was a Supreme God, [pg 374] Abrasax, by whom was created Mind [Mahat, in Sanskrit; Nous, in Greek]. From Mind proceeded the Word, Logos; from the Word, Providence [Divine Light, rather]; then from it Virtue and Wisdom in Principalities, Powers, Angels, etc.” By these Angels the 365 Æons were created. “Amongst the lowest, indeed, and those who made this world, he [Basilides] sets last of all the God of the Jews, whom he denies to be God [and very rightly], affirming he is one of the Angels.”

Here, then, we find the same system as in the Purânas, wherein the Incomprehensible drops a Seed, which becomes the Golden Egg, from which Brahmâ is produced. Brahmâ produces Mahat, etc. True Esoteric Philosophy, however, speaks neither of “creation,” nor of “evolution,” in the sense in which the exoteric religions do. All these personified Powers are not evolutions from one another, but so many aspects of the one and sole manifestation of the Absolute All.

The same system as that of the Gnostic Emanations prevails in the Sephirothic aspects of Ain Suph, and, as these aspects are in Space and Time, a certain order is maintained in their successive appearances. Therefore, it becomes impossible not to take notice of the great changes that the Zohar has undergone under the handling of generations of Christian Mystics. For, even in the metaphysics of the Talmud, the Lower Face or Lesser Countenance, or Microprosopus, could never be placed on the same plane of abstract ideals as the Higher, or Greater Countenance, Macroprosopus. The latter is, in the Chaldean Kabalah, a pure abstraction, the Word or Logos, or Dabar in Hebrew; which Word, though it becomes in fact a plural number, or Words, D(a)B(a)R(i)M, when it reflects itself, or falls into the aspect of a Host of Angels, or Sephiroth—the “Number”—is still collectively One, and on the ideal plane a nought, [circle], “Nothing.” It is without form or being, “with no likeness with anything else.”530 And even Philo calls the Creator, the Logos who stands next God, the “Second God,” when he speaks of “the Second God, who is his [the Highest God's] Wisdom.”531 Deity is not God. It is No-thing, and Darkness. It is nameless, and therefore called Ain Suph, the word “Ayin meaning nothing.”532 The “Highest God,” the Unmanifested Logos, is Its Son.

Nor are most of the Gnostic systems which have come down to us, mutilated as they are by the Church Fathers, anything better than the distorted shells of the original speculations. Nor were they, moreover, ever open to the public or general reader; for had their hidden meaning [pg 375] or esotericism been revealed, it would have been no more an esoteric teaching, and this could never have been. Marcus, the chief of the Marcosians, who flourished in the middle of the second century, and taught that Deity had to be viewed under the symbol of four syllables, gave out more of the esoteric truths than any other Gnostic. But even he was never well understood. For it is only on the surface or dead-letter of his Revelation that it appears that God is a Quaternary, to wit, “the Ineffable, the Silence, the Father, and Truth,” since in reality it is quite erroneous, and divulges only one more esoteric riddle. This teaching of Marcus was that of the early Kabalists and is ours. For he makes of Deity the Number 30, in four syllables, which, translated esoterically, means a Triad or Triangle, and a Quaternary or a Square, in all seven, which, on the lower plane, made the seven divine or Secret Letters of which the God-name is composed. This requires demonstration. In his Revelation, speaking of divine mysteries expressed by means of letters and numbers, Marcus narrates how the Supreme “Tetrad came down” unto him “from the region which cannot be seen nor named, in a female form, because the world would have been unable to bear her appearing in a male figure,” and revealed to him “the generation of the universe, untold before to either Gods or men.”

The first sentence already contains a double meaning. Why should the apparition of a female figure be more easily borne, or listened to, by the world than a male figure? On the face of it, this appears nonsensical. But to one who is acquainted with the Mystery Language, it is quite clear and simple. Esoteric Philosophy, or the Secret Wisdom, was symbolized by a female form, while a male figure stood for the Unveiled Mystery. Hence, the world, not being ready to receive it, could not bear it, and the Revelation of Marcus had to be given allegorically. Thus he writes:

When first its Father [sc. of the Tetrad] ... the Inconceivable, the Beingless, Sexless [the Kabalistic Ain Suph], desired that Its Ineffable [the First Logos, or Æon] should be born, and Its Invisible should be clothed with form, Its mouth opened and uttered the Word like unto Itself. This Word [Logos] standing near showed It what It was, manifesting itself in the form of the Invisible One. Now the uttering of the [Ineffable] Name [through the Word] came to pass in this manner. It [the Supreme Logos] uttered the first Word of its Name, ... which, was a combination [syllable] of four elements [letters]. Then the second combination was added, also of four elements. Then the third, composed of ten elements; and after this the fourth was uttered, which contained twelve elements. The utterance of the whole Name consisted thus of thirty elements and of four combinations. [pg 376]Each element has its own letters and peculiar character, and pronunciation, and groupings and similitudes; but none of them perceives the form of that of which it is the element, nor understands the utterance of its neighbour, but, what each sounds forth itself, as sounding forth all [it can], that it thinks good to call the whole.... And these sounds are they which manifest in form the Beingless and Ingenerable Æon, and these are the forms which are called Angels, perpetually beholding the Face of the Father,533 the Logos, the “Second God,” who stands next God the “Inconceivable,” according to Philo.534

This is as plain as ancient esoteric secresy could make it. It is as Kabalistic though less veiled than the Zohar, in which the mystic names, or attributes, are also four syllabled, twelve, forty-two, and even seventy-two syllabled words! The Tetrad shows to Marcus the Truth in the shape of a naked woman, and letters every limb of that figure, calling her head Α Ω, her neck Β Ψ, shoulders and hands Γ Χ, etc. In this, Sephira is easily recognized; the head, or Crown, Kether, being numbered 1; the brain, or Chokmah, 2; the Heart, or Intelligence, Binah, 3; and the other seven Sephiroth representing the limbs of the body. The Sephirothic Tree is the Universe, and Adam Kadmon personifies it in the West, as Brahmâ represents it in India.

Throughout, the Ten Sephiroth are represented as divided into the Three higher, or the spiritual Triad, and the lower Septenary. The true esoteric meaning of the sacred number Seven though cleverly veiled, in the Zohar, is betrayed by the double way of writing the term, “in the Beginning,” or Be-rasheeth, and Be-raishath, the latter the “Higher, or Upper Wisdom.” As shown by S. L. MacGregor Mathers535 and Isaac Myer,536 both of these Kabalists being supported by the best ancient authorities, these words have a dual and secret meaning. Braisheeth barah Elohim means, that the six, over which stands the seventh Sephira, belong to the lower material class, or, as the author says: “Seven ... are applied to the Lower Creation, and Three to the Spiritual Man, the Heavenly Prototypic or First Adam.”

When the Theosophists and Occultists say that God is no Being, for It is Nothing, No-Thing, they are more reverential and religiously respectful to the Deity than those who call God He, and thus make of Him a gigantic Male.

He who studies the Kabalah will soon find the same idea in the ultimate thought of its authors, the earlier and great Hebrew Initiates, [pg 377] who got this Secret Wisdom in Babylonia from the Chaldean Hierophants, just as Moses got his in Egypt. The Zoharic system cannot very well be judged by its translations into Latin and other tongues, when all its ideas were softened and made to fit in with the views and policy of its Christian arrangers; for its original ideas are identical with those of all other religious systems. The various Cosmogonies show that the Universal Soul was considered by every archaic nation as the Mind of the Demiurgic Creator; and that it was called the Mother, Sophia, or the female Wisdom, with the Gnostics; the Sephira, with the Jews; Sarasvatî or Vâch, with the Hindûs; the Holy Ghost also being a female Principle.

Hence, the Kurios, or Logos, born from it, was, with the Greeks, the God, Mind (Nous). “Now Koros [Kurios] ... signifies the pure and unmixed nature of Intellect—Wisdom,” says Plato, in Cratylus;537 and Kurios is Mercury (Mercurius, Mar-kurios), the Divine Wisdom, and “Mercury is Sol [the Sun],”538 from whom Thot-Hermes received this Divine Wisdom. While, then, the Logoi of all countries and religions are correlative, in their sexual aspects, with the female Soul of the World or the Great Deep, the Deity, from which these Two in One have their being, is ever concealed and called the Hidden One, and is connected only indirectly with “Creation,”539 as it can act only through the Dual Force emanating from the Eternal Essence. Even Æsculapius, called the “Saviour of all,” is identical, according to ancient classical writers, with the Egyptian Ptah, the Creative Intellect, or Divine Wisdom, and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis and Hercules:540 and Ptah, in one of its aspects, is the Anima Mundi; the Universal Soul of Plato; the Divine Spirit of the Egyptians; the Holy Ghost of the early Christians and Gnostics; and the Âkâsha of the Hindûs, and even, in its lower aspect, the Astral Light. For Ptah was originally the God of the Dead, he into whose bosom they were received, hence the Limbus of the Greek Christians, or the Astral Light. It was far later that Ptah was classed with the Sun-Gods, his name signifying “he who opens,” as he is shown to be the first to unveil the face of the dead mummy, to call the Soul to life in his bosom. Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed, is represented by the snake-emblem of eternity encircling a water-urn, [pg 378] with its head hovering over the “Waters,” which it incubates with its breath—another form of the one original idea of “Darkness,” with its Ray moving on the Waters, etc. As the Logos-Soul, this permutation is called Ptah; as the Logos-Creator, he becomes Imhotep, his Son, the “God of the handsome face.” In their primitive characters, these two were the first Cosmic Duad, Noot, Space or “Sky,” and Noon, the “Primordial Waters,” the Androgyne Unity, above whom was the Concealed Breath of Kneph. And all of them had the aquatic animals and plants sacred to them, the ibis, the swan, the goose, the crocodile, and the lotus.

Returning to the Kabalistic Deity, this Concealed Unity is then Ain Suph (אין סוף, τὸ πάν, τό ἄπειρον), Endless, Boundless, Non-Existent (אין), so long as the Absolute is within Oulom,541 the Boundless and Termless Time; as such, Ain Suph cannot be the Creator or even the Modeller of the Universe, nor can It be Aur (Light). Therefore Ain Suph is also Darkness. The immutably Infinite, and the absolutely Boundless, can neither will, think, nor act. To do this, it has to become Finite, and it does so by its Ray penetrating into the Mundane Egg, or Infinite Space, and emanating from it as a Finite God. All this is left to the Ray latent in the One. When the period arrives, the Absolute Will expands naturally the Force within it, according to the Law of which it is the inner and ultimate Essence. The Hebrews did not adopt the Egg as a symbol, but they substituted for it the “Duplex Heavens,” for, translated correctly, the sentence “God made the heavens and the earth” would read: “In and out of his own Essence, as a Womb [the Mundane Egg], God created the Two Heavens.” The Christians, however, have chosen the Dove, the bird and not the egg, as the symbol of their Holy Ghost.

“Whoever acquaints himself with Hud, the Mercabah and the Lahgash [secret speech or incantation], will learn the secret of secrets.” Lahgash is nearly identical in meaning with Vâch, the hidden power of the Mantras.

When the active period has arrived, from within the Eternal Essence of Ain Suph, comes forth Sephira, the Active Power, called the Primordial Point and the Crown, Kether. It is only through her that the “Un-bounded Wisdom” could give a Concrete Form to the Abstract [pg 379] Thought. Two sides of the Upper Triangle, by which the Ineffable Essence and its Manifested Body, the Universe, are symbolized, the right side and the base, are composed of unbroken lines; the third, the left side, is dotted. It is through the latter that emerges Sephira. Spreading in every direction, she finally encompasses the whole Triangle. In this emanation the triple Triad is formed. From the invisible Dew falling from the higher Uni-triad, the “Head,”—thus leaving 7 Sephiroth only—Sephira creates Primeval Waters, or in other words, Chaos takes shape. It is the first stage towards the solidification of Spirit which, through various modifications, will produce Earth. “It requires Earth and Water to make a Living Soul,” says Moses. It requires the image of an aquatic bird to connect it with Water, the female element of procreation, with the egg and the bird that fecundates it.

When Sephira emerges as an Active Power from within the Latent Deity, she is female; when she assumes the office of a Creator, she becomes a male; hence, she is androgyne. She is the “Father and Mother, Aditi,” of the Hindû Cosmogony and of the Secret Doctrine. If the oldest Hebrew scrolls had been preserved, the modern Jehovah-worshipper would have found that many and uncomely were the symbols of the “Creative God.” The frog in the moon, typical of his generative character, was the most frequent. All the birds and animals now called “unclean” in the Bible have been the symbols of this Deity, in days of old. A mask of uncleanness was placed over them, in order to preserve them from destruction, because they were so sacred. The brazen serpent is not a bit more poetical than the goose or swan, if symbols are to be accepted à la lettre.

In the words of the Zohar:

The Indivisible Point, which has no limit and cannot be comprehended because of Its purity and brightness, expanded from without, forming a brightness that served the Indivisible Point as a Veil; [yet the latter also] could not be viewed inconsequence of its immeasurable Light. It too expanded from without, and this expansion was its Garment. Thus through a constant upheaving [motion] finally the world originated.542

The Spiritual Substance sent forth by the Infinite Light is the First Sephira or Shekinah. Sephira, exoterically, contains all the other nine Sephiroth in her: esoterically, she contains but two, Chokmah or Wisdom, “a masculine, active potency whose divine name is Jah (יה),” and [pg 380] Binah, or Intelligence, a feminine passive potency, represented by the divine name Jehovah (יהוה); which two potencies form, with Sephira the third, the Jewish Trinity or the Crown, Kether. These two Sephiroth, called Abba, Father, and Amona, Mother, are the Duad, or the double-sexed Logos, from which issued the other seven Sephiroth. Thus, the first Jewish Triad, Sephira, Chokmah and Binah, is the Hindû Trimûrti.543 However veiled even in the Zohar, and still more in the exoteric Pantheon of India, every particular connected with one is reproduced in the other. The Prajâpatis are the Sephiroth. Ten with Brahmâ, they dwindle to seven when the Trimûrti, or the Kabalistic Triad, are separated from the rest. The seven Builders, or “Creators,” become the seven Prajâpati, or the seven Rishis, in the same order as the Sephiroth become the Creators, then the Patriarchs, etc. In both Secret Systems, the One Universal Essence is incomprehensible and inactive, in its Absoluteness, and can be connected with the Building of the Universe only in an indirect way. In both, the primeval Male-female, or Androgynous, Principle and its ten and seven Emanations—Brahmâ-Virâj and Aditi-Vâch, on the one hand; and the Elohim-Jehovah, or Adam-Adami (Adam Kadmon) and Sephira-Eve, on the other; with their Prajâpatis and Sephiroth—in their totality, represent primarily the Archetypal Man, the Protologos; and it is only in their secondary aspect that they become cosmic powers, and astronomical or sidereal bodies. If Aditi is the Mother of the Gods, Deva-Mâtri, Eve is the Mother of All Living; both are the Shakti, or Generative Power, in their female aspect, of the Heavenly Man, and they are both compound Creators. Says a Guptâ Vidyâ Sûtra:

In the beginning, a Ray, issuing from Paramârthika [the one and only True Existence], became manifested in Vyâvahârika [Conventional Existence], which was used as a Vâhana to descend with into the Universal Mother, and to cause her to expand [swell, brih].

And in the Zohar it is stated:

The Infinite Unity, formless and without similitude, after the Form of the Heavenly Man was created, used it. The Unknown Light544 [Darkness] used the Heavenly Form (אדם עילאה—Adam Oilah) as a Chariot (מרכבה—Mercabah), [pg 381]through which to descend, and wished to be called by this Form, which is the sacred name Jehovah.

As the Zohar again says:

In the beginning was the Will of the King, prior to any other existence.... It [the Will] sketched the forms of all things that had been concealed but now came into view. And there went forth as a sealed secret, from the head of Ain Suph, a nebulous spark of matter, without shape or form.... Life is drawn from below, and from above the source renews itself, the sea is always full and spreads its waters everywhere.

Thus the Deity is compared to a shoreless sea, to Water which is “the fountain of life.”545 “The seventh palace, the fountain of life, is the first in the order from above.”546 Hence the Kabalistic tenet on the lips of the very Kabalistic Solomon, who says in Proverbs: “Wisdom hath builded her house; it hath hewn out its seven pillars.”547

Whence, then, all this identity of ideas, if there were no primeval Universal Revelation? The few points so far brought out are like a few straws in a stack, in comparison to that which will be disclosed as the work proceeds. If we turn to the Chinese Cosmogony, the most hazy of all, even there the same idea is found. Tsi-tsai, the Self-Existent, is the Unknown Darkness, the Root of the Wu-liang-sheu, Boundless Age; Amitâbha, and Tien, Heaven, come later on. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius gives the same idea, his “straws” notwithstanding. The latter are a source of great amusement to the missionaries, who laugh at every “heathen” religion, despise and hate that of their brother Christians of other denominations, and yet one and all accept their own Genesis, literally.

If we turn to the Chaldean we find in it Anu, the Concealed Deity, the One, whose name, moreover, shows it to be of Sanskrit origin; for Anu in Sanskrit means Atom, Anîyâmsam-anîyasâm, smallest of the small, being a name of Parabrahman, in the Vedântic philosophy, in which Parabrahman is described as smaller than the smallest atom, and greater than the greatest sphere or universe, Anagrânîyas and Mahatoruvat. In the first verses of the Akkadian Genesis, as found in the cuneiform texts on the Babylonian tiles or Lateres Coctiles, and as translated by George Smith, we find Anu, the Passive Deity, or Ain Suph; Bel, the Creator, the Spirit of God, or Sephira, moving on the Face of the Waters, hence Water itself; and Hea, the Universal Soul, or Wisdom of the Three combined.

[pg 382]

The first eight verses read as follows:

1. When above, were not raised the heavens:

2. and below on the earth a plant had not grown up;

3. the abyss had not broken open their boundaries.

4. The Chaos (or Water) Tiamat (the Sea) was the producing-mother of the whole of them. [This is the Cosmical Aditi and Sephira.]

5. Those waters at the beginning were ordained; but

6. a tree had not grown, a flower had not unfolded.

7. When the Gods had not sprung up, any one of them;

8. a plant had not grown, and order did not exist.548

This was the Chaotic or Ante-genetic Period; the double Swan, and the Dark Swan which becomes white, when Light is created.549

The symbol chosen for the majestic ideal of the Universal Principle may perhaps seem little calculated to answer its sacred character. A goose, or even a swan, will, no doubt, be thought an unfit symbol to represent the grandeur of the Spirit. Nevertheless, it must have had some deep Occult meaning, since it figures not only in every Cosmogony and World-religion, but was also chosen by the Crusaders, among the mediæval Christians, as the Vehicle of the Holy Ghost, which was supposed to be leading the army to Palestine, to wrench the tomb of the Saviour from the hands of the Saracen. If we are to credit Professor Draper's statement, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, the Crusaders, under Peter the Hermit, were preceded, at the head of the army, by the Holy Ghost, under the shape of a white gander in the company of a goat. Seb, the Egyptian God of Time, carries a goose on his head; Jupiter assumes the form of a swan, and so also does Brahmâ; and the root of all this is that mystery of mysteries—the Mundane Egg. One should learn the reason of a symbol before depreciating it. The dual element of Air and Water is that of the ibis, swan, goose and pelican, of crocodiles and frogs, lotus flowers and water lilies, etc.; and the result is the choice of the most unseemly symbols by the modern as much as by the ancient Mystics. Pan, the great God of Nature, was generally figured in company with aquatic birds, geese especially, and so were other Gods. If later on, with the gradual degeneration of religion, the Gods to whom geese were sacred, became priapic deities, it does not, therefore, follow that water-fowls were made sacred to Pan and other [pg 383] phallic deities, as some scoffers even of antiquity would have it,550 but that the abstract and divine power of Procreative Nature had become grossly anthropomorphized. Nor does the swan of Leda show “priapic doings and her enjoyment thereof,” as Mr. Hargrave Jennings chastely expresses it; for the myth is but another version of the same philosophical idea of Cosmogony. Swans are frequently found associated with Apollo, as they are the emblems of Water and Fire, and also of the Sun-light, before the separation of the Elements.

Our modern symbologists might profit by some remarks made by a well-known writer, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, who says:

From time immemorial an emblem has been worshipped in Hindûstan as the type of creation, or the origin of life.... Shiva, or the Mahâdeva, being not only the reproducer of human forms, but also the fructifying principle, the generative power that pervades the Universe. The maternal emblem is likewise a religious type. This reverence for the production of life introduced into the worship of Osiris the sexual emblems. Is it strange that they regarded with reverence the great mystery of human birth? Were they impure thus to regard it? Or are weimpure that we do not so regard it? But no clean and thoughtful mind could so regard them.... We have travelled far, and unclean have been the paths, since those old anchorites first spoke of God and the soul in the solemn depths of their first sanctuaries. Let us not smile at their mode of tracing the infinite and the incomprehensible Cause throughout all the mysteries of nature, lest by so doing we cast the shadow of our own grossness on their patriarchal simplicity.551

[pg 384]

Section VI. The Mundane Egg.

Whence this universal symbol? The Egg was incorporated as a sacred sign in the Cosmogony of every people on the earth, and was revered both on account of its form and of its inner mystery. From the earliest mental conceptions of man, it has been known as that which represented most successfully the origin and secret of Being. The gradual development of the imperceptible germ within the closed shell; the inward working, without any apparent outward interference of force, which from a latent nothing produced an active something, needing naught save heat; and which, having gradually evolved into a concrete, living creature, broke its shell, appearing to the outward senses of all as a self-generated and self-created being; all this must have been a standing miracle from the beginning.

The Secret Teaching explains the reason for this reverence by the symbolism of the prehistoric races. In the beginnings, the “First Cause” had no name. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg became the Universe. Hence Brahmâ was called Kâlahansa, the “Swan in [Space and] Time.” Becoming the Swan of Eternity, Brahmâ, at the beginning of each Mahâmanvantara, lays a Golden Egg, which typifies the great Circle, or [circle] itself a symbol for the Universe and its spherical bodies.

A second reason for the Egg having been chosen as the symbolical representation of the Universe, and of our Earth, was its form. It was a Circle and a Sphere; and the ovi-form shape of our Globe must have been known from the beginning of symbology, since it was so universally adopted. The first manifestation of the Kosmos in the form of an Egg was the most widely diffused belief of Antiquity. As Bryant [pg 385] shows,552 it was a symbol adopted among the Greeks, the Syrians, Persians, and Egyptians. In the Egyptian Ritual, Seb, the God of Time and of the Earth, is spoken of as having laid an Egg, or the Universe, an “Egg conceived at the hour of the Great One of the Dual Force.”553

Ra is shown like Brahmâ gestating in the Egg of the Universe. The Deceased is “resplendent in the Egg of the Land of Mysteries.”554 For, this is “the Egg to which is given Life among the Gods.”555 “It is the Egg of the great clucking Hen, the Egg of Seb, who issues from it like a hawk.”556

Among the Greeks the Orphic Egg is described by Aristophanes, and was part of the Dionysiac and other Mysteries, during which the Mundane Egg was consecrated and its significance explained; Porphyry also shows it to be a representation of the world: “Ἑρμηνεύει δὲ τὸ ὠὸν τὸν κόσμον.” Faber and Bryant have tried to show that the Egg typified the Ark of Noah—a wild belief, unless the latter is accepted as purely allegorical and symbolical. It can only have typified the Ark as a synonym of the Moon, the Argha which carries the universal seed of life; but had surely nothing to do with the Ark of the Bible. Anyhow, the belief that the Universe existed in the beginning in the shape of an Egg was general. And as Wilson says:

A similar account of the first aggregation of the elements in the form of an Egg is given in all the Purânas, with the usual epithet Haima or Hiranya, “golden,” as it occurs in Manu, I. 9.557

Hiranya, however, means “resplendent,” “shining,” rather than “golden,” as is proven by the great Indian scholar, the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî, in his unpublished polemics with Professor Max Müller. As said in the Vishnu Purâna:

Intellect [Mahat] ... the [unmanifested] gross elements inclusive, formed an Egg ... and the Lord of the Universe himself abided in it, in the character of Brahmâ. In that Egg, O Brâhmana, were the continents, and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of the planets, the gods, the demons and mankind.558

Both in Greece and in India the first visible male Being, who united in himself the nature of either sex, abode in the Egg and issued from it. This “First-born of the World” was Dionysus, with some Greeks; [pg 386] the God who sprang from the Mundane Egg, and from whom the Mortals and Immortals were derived. The God Ra is shown, in the Book of the Dead, beaming in his Egg [the Sun], and the stars off as soon as the God Shoo [the Solar Energy] awakens and gives him the impulse.559 “He is in the Solar Egg, the Egg to which is given Life among the Gods.”560 The Solar God exclaims: “I am the Creative Soul of the Celestial Abyss. None sees my Nest, none can break my Egg, I am the Lord!”561

In view of this circular form, the “[vertical bar]” issuing from the “[circle],” or the Egg, or the male from the female in the androgyne, it is strange to find a scholar saying, on the ground that the most ancient Indian MSS. show no trace of it, that the ancient Âryans were ignorant of the decimal notation. The 10, being the sacred number of the Universe, was secret and esoteric, both as regards the unit and cipher, or zero, the circle. Moreover, Professor Max Müller tells that “the two words cipher and zero, which are but one, are sufficient to prove that our figures are borrowed from the Arabs.”562 Cipher is the Arabic cifron, and means “empty,” a translation of the Sanskrit sunyan, or “nought,” says the Professor.563 The Arabs had their figures from Hindûstan, and never claimed the discovery for themselves. As to the Pythagoreans, we need but turn to the ancient manuscripts of Boethius' treatise, De Arithmetica, composed in the sixth century, to find among the Pythagorean numerals the “1” and the “0,” as the first and final figures.564 And Porphyry, who quotes from the Pythagorean Moderatus,565 says that the numerals of Pythagoras were “hieroglyphical symbols, by means whereof he explained ideas concerning the nature of things,” or the origin of the Universe.

Now, if, on the one hand, the most ancient Indian MSS. show as yet no trace of decimal notation in them, and Max Müller states very clearly that until now he has found but nine letters, the initials of the Sanskrit numerals; on the other hand, we have records as ancient, to supply the wanted proof. We speak of the sculptures and the sacred [pg 387] imagery in the most ancient temples of the far East. Pythagoras derived his knowledge from India; and we find Professor Max Müller corroborating this statement, at least so far as to allow that the Neo-Pythagoreans were the first teachers of “ciphering,” among the Greeks and Romans; that they “at Alexandria, or in Syria, became acquainted with the Indian figures, and adapted them to the Pythagorean Abacus.” This cautious admission implies that Pythagoras himself was acquainted with only nine figures. Thus we might reasonably answer that, although we possess no certain proof, exoterically, that the decimal notation was known to Pythagoras, who lived at the very close of the archaic ages,566 yet we have sufficient evidence to show that the full numbers, as given by Boethius, were known to the Pythagoreans, even before Alexandria was built.567 This evidence we find in Aristotle, who says that “some philosophers hold that ideas and numbers are of the same nature, and amount to ten in all.”568 This, we believe, will be sufficient to show that the decimal notation was known among them at least as early as four centuries b.c., for Aristotle does not seem to treat the question as an innovation of the Neo-Pythagoreans.

But we know more than this; we know that the decimal system must have been used by the mankind of the earliest archaic ages, since the whole astronomical and geometrical portion of the secret sacerdotal language was built upon the number 10, or the combination of the male and female principles, and since the “Pyramid of Cheops,” so-called, is built upon measures of this decimal notation, or rather upon the digits and their combinations with the nought. Of this, however, sufficient has been said in Isis Unveiled, and it is useless to repeat it.

The symbolism of the Lunar and Solar Deities is so inextricably mixed up, that it is next to impossible to separate from each other such glyphs as the Egg, the Lotus, and the “Sacred” Animals. The Ibis, for instance, was held in the greatest veneration in Egypt. It was sacred to Isis, who is often represented with the head of that bird, and also sacred to Mercury or Thoth, who is said to have assumed its form while escaping from Typhon. There were two kinds of Ibises in Egypt, Herodotus569 tells us; one quite black, the other black and white. The former is credited with fighting and exterminating the winged serpents which came every spring from Arabia, and infested the country. [pg 388] The other was sacred to the Moon, because the latter planet is white and brilliant on her external side, dark and black on that side which she never turns to the Earth. Moreover, the Ibis kills land serpents, and makes the most terrible havoc amongst the eggs of the crocodile, and thus saves Egypt from having the Nile over-infested by those horrible saurians. The bird is credited with doing this in the moonlight, and thus being helped by Isis, whose sidereal symbol is the Moon. But the more correct esoteric truth underlying these popular myths is, that Hermes, as shown by Abenephius,570 watched over the Egyptians under the form of that bird, and taught them the Occult arts and sciences. This simply means that the ibis religiosa had, and has, “magical” properties in common with many other birds, the albatross preëminently, and the mythical white swan, the Swan of Eternity or Time, the Kâlahansa.

Were it otherwise, indeed, why should all the ancient peoples, who were no more fools than we are, have had such a superstitious dread of killing certain birds? In Egypt, he who killed an Ibis, or the Golden Hawk, the symbol of the Sun and Osiris, risked death, and could hardly escape it. The veneration of some nations for birds was such that Zoroaster, in his precepts, forbids their slaughter as a heinous crime. In our age, we laugh at every kind of divination. Yet why should so many generations have believed in divination by birds, and even in Oömancy, which is said by Suidas to have been imparted by Orpheus, who taught how, under certain conditions, to perceive in the yolk and white of an egg, that which the bird born from it would have seen around it during its short life. This Occult art, which, 3,000 years ago, demanded the greatest learning and the most abstruse mathematical calculations, has now fallen into the depths of degradation; and to-day it is the old cooks and fortune-tellers who read the future for servant-girls in search of husbands, from the white of an egg in a glass.

Nevertheless, even Christians have to this day their sacred birds; for instance, the Dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost. Nor have they neglected the sacred animals; and the evangelical zoölatry, with its Bull, Eagle, Dion, and Angel—in reality the Cherub, or Seraph, the fiery-winged Serpent—is as much Pagan as that of the Egyptians or the Chaldeans. These four animals are, in reality, the symbols of the four Elements, and of the four lower Principles in man. Nevertheless, they correspond physically and materially to the four constellations [pg 389] that form, so to speak, the suite or cortège of the Solar God, and which, during the winter solstice, occupy the four cardinal points of the zodiacal circle. These four “animals” may be seen in many of the Roman Catholic New Testaments in which the “portraits” of the Evangelists are given. They are the animals of Ezekiel's Mercabah.

As truly stated by Ragon:

The ancient Hierophants have combined so cleverly the dogmas and symbols of their religious philosophies, that these symbols can be fully explained only by the combination and knowledge of all the keys.

They can be only approximately interpreted, even if one discovers three out of these seven systems, viz., the anthropological, the psychic and the astronomical. The two chief interpretations, the highest and the lowest, the spiritual and the physiological, were preserved in the greatest secrecy, until the latter fell into the dominion of the profane. Thus far, with regard only to the pre-historic Hierophants, with whom that which has now become purely—or impurely—phallic, was a science as profound and as mysterious as Biology and Physiology are now. This was their exclusive property, the fruit of their studies and discoveries. The other two were those which dealt with the Creative Gods, or Theogony, and with creative man; that is to say, with the ideal and the practical Mysteries. These interpretations were so cleverly veiled and combined, that many were those who, while arriving at the discovery of one meaning, were baffled in understanding the significance of the others, and could never unriddle them sufficiently to commit dangerous indiscretions. The highest, the first and the fourth—Theogony in relation to Anthropogony—were almost impossible to fathom. We find the proofs of this in the Jewish “Holy Writ.”

It is owing to the serpent being oviparous, that it became a symbol of Wisdom and an emblem of the Logoi, or the Self-Born. In the temple of Philæ, in Upper Egypt, an egg was artificially prepared of clay mixed with various incenses. This was hatched by a peculiar process, and a cerastes or horned viper was produced. The same was done in the Indian temples, in antiquity, in the case of the cobra. The Creative God emerges from the Egg that issues from the mouth of Kneph, as a winged Serpent, for the Serpent is the symbol of the All-Wisdom. With the Hebrews the same Deity is glyphed by the Flying or “Fiery Serpents” of Moses in the Wilderness; and with the Alexandrian Mystic she becomes the Orphio-Christos, the Logos of the Gnostics. [pg 390] The Protestants try to show that the allegory of the Brazen Serpent and of the Fiery Serpents has a direct reference to the mystery of the Christ and the Crucifixion, whereas, in truth, it has a far nearer relation to the mystery of generation, when dissociated from the Egg with the Central Germ, or the Circle with its Central Point. Protestant Theologians would have us believe their interpretation only because the Brazen Serpent was lifted on a pole! Whereas it had rather a reference to the Egyptian Egg standing upright supported by the sacred Tau; since the Egg and the Serpent are in-separable in the old worship and symbology of Egypt, and since both the Brazen and Fiery Serpents were Seraphs, the burning “Fiery” Messengers, or the Serpent Gods, the Nâgas of India. Without the Egg it was a purely phallic symbol, but when associated therewith, it related to cosmic creation. The Brazen Serpent had no such holy meaning as the Protestants would ascribe to it; nor was it, in fact, glorified above the Fiery Serpents, for the bite of which it was only a natural remedy; the symbological meaning of the word “Brazen” being the feminine principle, and that of “Fiery,” or “Gold,” the masculine principle.

Brass was a metal symbolizing the nether world ... that of the womb where life should be given.... The word for serpent in Hebrew was Nachash, but this is also the term for brass.

It is said in Numbers that the Jews complained of the Wilderness where there was no water,571 after which “the Lord sent fiery serpents” to bite them, and then, to oblige Moses, he gave him as a remedy the Brazen Serpent on a pole for them to look at; after which “any man when he beheld the serpent of brass ... lived” (?). After that the “Lord,” gathering the people together at the well of Beer, gave them water, and grateful Israel sang this song, “Spring up, O well.” When, after studying symbology, the Christian reader comes to understand the innermost meaning of these three symbols, Water, Brazen, and Serpent, and a few more, in the sense given to them in the Holy Bible, he will hardly like to connect the sacred name of his Saviour with the Brazen Serpent incident. The Seraphim (שרפים) or Fiery Winged Serpents, are no doubt connected with, and inseparable from, the idea of the “Serpent of Eternity—God,” as explained in Kenealy's Apocalypse; but the word Cherub also meant Serpent, in one sense, though its direct meaning is different, for the Cherubim and the Persian [pg 391] Winged Griffins (Γρύπες), the guardians of the Golden Mountain, are the same, and the compound name of the former shows their character, as it is formed of kr (כר), a circle, and aub or ob (אוב), a serpent, and therefore means a “serpent in a circle.” And this settles the phallic character of the Brazen Serpent, and justifies Hezekiah for breaking it.572 Verbum satis sapienti!

In the Book of the Dead, as just shown,573 reference is often made to the Egg. Ra, the Mighty One, remains in his Egg, during the struggle between the “Children of the Rebellion” and Shoo, the Solar Energy and the Dragon of Darkness. The Deceased is resplendent in his Egg when he crosses to the Land of Mystery. He is the Egg of Seb. The Egg was the symbol of Life in Immortality and Eternity; and also the glyph of the generative matrix; whereas the Tau, which was associated with it, was only the symbol of life and birth in generation. The Mundane Egg was placed in Khoom, the Water of Space, or the feminine abstract Principle; Khoom becoming, with the “fall” of mankind into generation and phallicism, Ammon the Creative God. When Ptah, the “Fiery God,” carries the Mundane Egg in his hand, then the symbolism becomes quite terrestrial and concrete in its significance. In conjunction with the Hawk, the symbol of Osiris-Sun, the symbol is dual, and relates to both Lives—the mortal and the immortal. The engraving of a papyrus in Kircher's Œdipus Egyptiacus,574 shows an egg floating above the mummy. This is the symbol of hope and the promise of a Second Birth for the Osirified Dead; his Soul, after due purification in the Amenti, will gestate in this Egg of Immortality, to be reborn therefrom into a new life on earth. For this Egg, in the Esoteric Doctrine, is Devachan, the Abode of Bliss; the Winged Scarabæus also being another symbol of it. The Winged Globe is but another form of the Egg, and has the same significance as the Scarabæus, the Khopiroo—from the Root khoproo, to become, to be reborn—which relates to the rebirth of man, as well as to his spiritual regeneration.

In the Theogony of Mochus, we find Æther first, and then Air, the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (Νοητὸς) Deity, the visible Universe of Matter, is born, out of the Mundane Egg.575

In the Orphic Hymns, Eros-Phanes evolves from the Divine Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” or rather the “Spirit of the Unknown Darkness”—the Divine Idea of Plato—which is said to move in Æther.576 In the Hindû Kathopanishad, [pg 392] Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, “from whose union springs the Great Soul of the World,” Mahâ-Âtmâ, Brahmâ, the Spirit of Life,577 etc.; the latter appellations being all identical with Anima Mundi, or the “Universal Soul,” the Astral Light of the Kabalist and the Occultist, or the “Egg of Darkness.” Besides this there are many charming allegories on this subject, scattered through the Sacred Books of the Brâhmans. In one place, it is the female creator who is first a germ, then a drop of heavenly dew, a pearl, and then an Egg. In such cases, of which there are too many to enumerate separately, the Egg gives birth to the four Elements within the fifth, Æther, and is covered with seven coverings, which become later on the seven upper and the seven lower worlds. Breaking in two, the shell becomes the Heaven, and the contents the Earth, the white forming the Terrestrial Waters. Then, again, it is Vishnu who emerges from within the Egg, with a Lotus in his hand. Vinatâ, a daughter of Daksha and wife of Kashyapa, “the Self-born, sprung from Time,” one of the seven “Creators” of our World, brought forth an Egg from which was born Garuda, the Vehicle of Vishnu; the latter allegory having a relation to our Earth, as Garuda is the Great Cycle.

The Egg was sacred to Isis; and therefore the priests of Egypt never ate eggs.

Isis is almost always represented holding a Lotus in one hand, and in the other a Circle and a Cross (crux ansata).

Diodorus Siculus states that Osiris was born from an Egg, like Brahmâ. From Leda's Egg, Apollo and Latona were born, and also Castor and Pollux, the bright Gemini. And though the Buddhists do not attribute the same origin to their Founder, yet, no more than the ancient Egyptians or the modern Brâhmans, do they eat eggs, lest they should destroy the germ of life latent in them, and thereby commit sin. The Chinese believe that their First Man was born from an Egg, which Tien dropped down from Heaven to Earth into the Waters.578 This egg-symbol is still regarded by some as representing the idea of the origin of life, which is a scientific truth, though the human ovum is invisible to the naked eye. Therefore we see respect shown to it from the remotest antiquity, by the Greeks, Phœnicians, Romans, the [pg 393] Japanese, and the Siamese, the North and South American tribes, and even the savages of the remotest islands.

With the Egyptians, the Concealed God was Ammon or Mon, the “Hidden”, the Supreme Spirit. All their Gods were dual—the scientific Reality for the sanctuary; its double, the fabulous and mythical Entity, for the masses. For instance, as observed in the Section “Chaos, Theos, Kosmos,” the Elder Horus was the Idea of the World remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in Darkness before the Creation of the World”; the Second Horus was the same Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with matter and assuming an actual existence.579 Horus, the “Elder,” or Haroiri, is an ancient aspect of the Solar God, contemporary with Ra and Shoo; Haroiri is often mistaken for Hor (Horsusi), Son of Osiris and Isis. The Egyptians very often represented the rising Sun under the form of Hor, the Elder, rising from a full-blown Lotus, the Universe, when the solar disk is always found on the hawk-head of that God. Haroiri is Khnoom. The same with Khnoom and Ammon, both are represented as ram-headed, and both are often confused, though their functions are different. Khnoom is the “modeller of men,” fashioning men and things out of the Mundane Egg, on a potter's wheel; Ammon-Ra, the Generator, is the secondary aspect of the Concealed Deity. Khnoom was adored at Elephanta and Philæ,580 Ammon at Thebes. But it is Emepht, the One, Supreme Planetary Principle, who blows the Egg out of his mouth, and who is, therefore, Brahmâ. The Shadow of the Deity, Kosmic and Universal, of that which broods over and permeates the Egg with its vivifying Spirit, until the Germ contained in it is ripe, was the Mystery God whose name was unpronounceable. It is Ptah, however, “he who opens,” the opener of Life and Death,581 who proceeds from the Egg of the World to begin his dual work.582

According to the Greeks, the phantom form of the Chemis (Chemi, ancient Egypt) which floats on the Ethereal Waves of the Empyrean Sphere, was called into being by Horus-Apollo, the Sun-God, who caused it to evolve out of the Mundane Egg.

The Brahmânda Purâna contains fully the mystery about Brahmâ's Golden Egg; and this is why, perhaps, it is inaccessible to the Orientalists, [pg 394] who say that this Purâna, like the Skanda, is “no longer procurable in a collective body,” but “is represented by a variety of Khandas and Mâhâtmyas professing to be derived from it.” The Brahmânda Purâna is described as “that which has declared in 12,200 verses, the magnificence of the Egg of Brahmâ, and in which an account of the future Kalpas is contained, as revealed by Brahmâ.”583 Quite so, and much more, perchance.

In the Scandinavian Cosmogony, placed by Professor Max Müller, in point of time, as “far anterior to the Vedas,” in the poem of Wöluspa, the Song of the Prophetess, the Mundane Egg is again discovered in the Phantom-Germ of the Universe, which is represented as lying in the Ginnungagap, the Cup of Illusion, Mâyâ, the Boundless and Void Abyss. In this World's Matrix, formerly a region of night and desolation, Nefelheim, the Mist-Place, the nebular, as it is called now, in the Astral Light, dropped a Ray of Cold Light which overflowed this cup and froze in it. Then the Invisible blew a scorching Wind which dissolved the frozen Waters and cleared the Mist. These Waters (Chaos), called the Streams of Eliwagar, distilling in vivifying drops, fell down and created the Earth and the Giant Ymir, who had only the “semblance of man” (the Heavenly Man), and the Cow, Audumla (the “Mother,” Astral Light or Cosmic Soul), from whose udder flowed four streams of milk—the four cardinal points; the four heads of the four rivers of Eden, etc.—which “four” are symbolized by the Cube in all its various and mystical meanings.

The Christians—especially the Greek and Latin Churches—have fully adopted the symbol, and see in it a commemoration of life eternal, of salvation and of resurrection. This is found in, and corroborated by, the time-honoured custom of exchanging “Easter Eggs.” From the Anguinum, the “Egg” of the Pagan Druid, whose name alone made Rome tremble with fear, to the red Easter Egg of the Slavonian peasant, a cycle has passed. And yet, whether in civilized Europe, or among the abject savages of Central America, we find the same archaic, primitive thought, if we will only search for it, and do not—in the haughtiness of our fancied mental and physical superiority—disfigure the original idea of the symbol.

[pg 395]

Section VII. The Days and Nights of Brahmâ.

This is the name given to the Periods called Manvantara (Manuantara, or between the Manus) and Pralaya, or Dissolution; one referring to the Active Periods of the Universe; the other to its times of relative and complete Rest, whether they occur at the end of a Day or an Age, or Life, of Brahmâ. These Periods, which follow each other in regular succession, are also called Small and Great Kalpas, the Minor and the Mahâ Kalpas; though, properly speaking, the Mahâ Kalpa is never a Day, but a whole Life or Age of Brahmâ, for it is said in the Brahma Vaivarta: “Chronologers compute a Kalpa by the Life of Brahmâ. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the rest, are numerous.” In sober truth they are infinite; for they have never had a commencement; or, in other words, there never was a first Kalpa, nor will there ever be a last, in Eternity.

One Parârdha, or half of the existence of Brahmâ, in the ordinary acceptation of this measure of time, has already expired in the present Mahâ Kalpa; the last Kalpa was the Padma, or that of the Golden Lotus; the present one is the Varâha,584 the “Boar” Incarnation, or Avatâra.

[pg 396]

One thing is to be especially noted by the scholar who studies the Hindû religion from the Puranâs. He must never take the statements found therein literally, and in one sense only; and those especially, which concern the Manvantaras, or Kalpas, have to be understood in their several references. Thus these Ages relate, in the same language, to both the great and the small periods, to Mahâ Kalpas and to Minor Cycles. The Matsya, or Fish Avatâra, happened before the Varâha or Boar Avatâra; the allegories, therefore, must relate to both the Padma and the present Manvantara, and also to the Minor Cycles which have occurred since the reäppearance of our Chain of Worlds and the Earth. And as the Matsya Avatâra of Vishnu and Vaivasvata's Deluge are correctly connected with an event that happened on our Earth during this Round, it is evident that, while it may relate to pre-cosmic events, pre-cosmic in the sense of our Cosmos, or Solar System, it has reference, in our case, to a distant geological period. Not even Esoteric Philosophy can claim to know, except by analogical inference, that which took place before the reäppearance of our Solar System, and previous to the last Mahâ Pralaya. But it teaches distinctly, that after the first geological disturbance of the Earth's axis, which ended in the sweeping down to the bottom of the seas of the whole Second Continent, with its primeval races—of which successive Continents, or “Earths,” Atlantis was the fourth—there came another disturbance owing to the axis again resuming its previous degree of inclination as rapidly as it had changed it: when the Earth was indeed once more raised out of the waters—as above, so below, and vice versâ. There were “Gods” on Earth in those days; Gods, and not men, as we know them now, says the tradition. As will be shown in Volume II, the computation of periods, in exoteric Hindûism, refers to both the great cosmic and the small terrestrial events and cataclysms, and the same may be demonstrated in respect to names. For instance, the name Yudishthira—the first king of the Sacae or Shakas, who opens the Kali Yuga Era, which has to last 432,000 years, “an actual king who lived 3,102 years b.c.”—applies also to the Great Deluge, at the time of the first sinking of Atlantis. He is the “Yudishthira,585 born on the mountain of the hundred peaks, at the extremity of the world, beyond which nobody can [pg 397]go” and “immediately after the flood.”586 We know of no “Flood” 3,102 years b.c., not even that of Noah, for, agreeably with Judæo-Christian chronology, it took place 2,349 years b.c.

This relates to an esoteric division of time and a mystery explained elsewhere, and may therefore be left aside for the present. Suffice it to remark, at this juncture, that all the efforts of imagination of the Wilfords, Bentleys, and other would-be Œdipuses of esoteric Hindû Chronology, have sadly failed. No computation of either the Four Ages, or the Manvantaras, has ever yet been unriddled by our very learned Orientalists, who have therefore cut the Gordian Knot by proclaiming the whole “a figment of the Brâhmanical brain.” So be it, and may the great scholars rest in peace! This “figment” is given at the end of the Commentaries on Stanza II of the Anthropogenesis, in Volume II, with Esoteric additions.

Let us see, however, what were the three kinds of Pralayas, and what is the popular belief about them. For once it agrees with Esotericism.

Of the Pralaya, before which fourteen Manvantaras elapse, having over them as many presiding Manus, and at whose close occurs the Incidental, or Brahmâ's Dissolution, it is said in Vishnu Purâna, in condensed paraphrase:

At the end of a thousand Periods of Four Ages, which complete a day of Brahmâ, the earth is almost exhausted. The Eternal (Avyaya) Vishnu then assumes the character of Rudra, the Destroyer (Shiva), and reünites all his creatures to himself. He enters the Seven Rays of the Sun and drinks up all the Waters of the Globe; he causes the moisture to evaporate, thus drying up the whole Earth. Oceans and rivers, torrents and small streams, are all exhaled. Thus fed with abundant moisture the Seven Solar Rays become Seven Suns, by dilation, and they finally set the World on fire. Hari, the destroyer of all things, who is the Flame of Time, Kâlâgni, finally consumes the Earth. Then Rudra, becoming Janârdana, breathes clouds and rain.587

There are many kinds of Pralaya, but three chief periods are specially mentioned in old Hindû books. The first of these, as Wilson shows, is called Naimittika,588 “Occasional” or “Incidental,” caused by the intervals of Brahmâ's Days; it is the destruction of creatures, of all that lives and has a form, but not of the substance, which remains in [pg 398] statu quo till the new Dawn after that Night. The second is called Prâkritika, and occurs at the end of the Age or Life of Brahmâ, when everything that exists is resolved into the Primal Element, to be remodelled at the end of that longer Night. The third, Âtyantika, does not concern the Worlds, or the Universe, but only the Individualities of some people. It is thus the Individual Pralaya, or Nirvâna, after having reached which, there is no more future existence possible, no rebirth till after the Mahâ Pralaya. The latter Night—lasting as it does 311,040,000,000,000 years, with the possibility also of being almost doubled in the case of the lucky Jîvanmukta who reaches Nirvâna at an early period of a Manvantara—is long enough to be regarded as eternal, if not endless. The Bhâgavata Purâna589 speaks of a fourth kind of Pralaya, the Nitya, or Constant Dissolution, and explains it as the change which takes place imperceptibly in everything in this Universe from the globe down to the atom, without cessation. It is growth and decay—life and death.

When the Mahâ Pralaya arrives, the inhabitants of Svar-loka, the Upper Sphere, disturbed by the conflagration, seek refuge “with the Pitris, their Progenitors, the Manus, the Seven Rishis, the various orders of Celestial Spirits and the Gods, in Mahar-loka.” When the latter is reached also, the whole of the above enumerated beings migrate in their turn from Mahar-loka, and repair to Jana-loka, “in their subtile forms, destined to become reëmbodied, in similar capacities as their former, when the world is renewed at the beginning of the succeeding Kalpa.”590

Clouds, mighty in size, and loud in thunder, fill up all Space [Nabhas-tala]. Showering down torrents of water, these clouds quench the dreadful fires, ... and then they rain uninterruptedly for a hundred [divine] Years, and deluge the whole World [Solar System]. Pouring down, in drops as large as dice, these rains overspread the Earth, and fill the Middle Region (Bhuvo-loka) and inundate Heaven. The World is now enveloped in darkness; and all things, animate or inanimate, having perished, the clouds continue to pour down their Waters, ... and the Night of Brahmâ reigns supreme over the scene of desolation.591

This is what we call in the Esoteric Doctrine a Solar Pralaya. When the Waters have reached the region of the Seven Rishis, and the World, our Solar System, is one Ocean, they stop. The Breath of Vishnu becomes a strong Wind, which blows for another hundred Divine Years until all clouds are dispersed. The wind is then reäbsorbed: and That—

[pg 399]

Of which all things are made, the Lord by whom all things exist, He who is inconceivable, without beginning, the beginning of the Universe, reposes, sleeping upon Shesha [the Serpent of Infinity] in the midst of the Deep. The Creator [(?) Âdikrit] Hari, sleeps upon the Ocean [of Space] in the form of Brahmâ—glorified by Sanaka592 and the Saints (Siddhas) of Jana-loka, and contemplated by the holy denizens of Brahma-loka, anxious for final liberation—involved in mystic slumber, the celestial personification of his own illusions.... This is the Dissolution [(?) Pratisanchara] termed Incidental because Hari is its Incidental [Ideal] Cause.593 When the Universal Spirit wakes, the World revives; when he closes his eyes, all things fall upon the bed of mystic slumber. In like manner, as a thousand Great Ages constitute a Day of Brahmâ [in the original it is Padmayoni, the same as Abjayoni, “Lotus-born,” not Brahmâ], so his Night consists of the same period.... Awaking at the end of his Night, the Unborn ... creates the Universe anew.594

This is “Incidental” Pralaya; what is the Elemental (Prâkritika) Dissolution? Parâshara describes it to Maitreya as follows:

When, by dearth and fire all the Worlds and Pâtâlas [Hells] are withered up595 ... the progress of Elemental Dissolution is begun. Then, first, the Waters swallow up the property of Earth (which is the rudiment of Smell), and Earth deprived of this property proceeds to destruction ... and becomes one with Water.... When the Universe is, thus, pervaded by the waves of the watery Element, its rudimentary flavour is licked up by the Element of Fire ... and the Waters themselves are destroyed ... and become one with Fire; and the Universe is, therefore, entirely filled with [ethereal] Flame, which ... gradually overspreads the whole World. While Space is [one] Flame, ... the Element of Wind seizes upon the rudimental property, or form, which is the Cause of Light, and that being withdrawn (pralîna), all becomes of the nature of Air. The rudiment of form being destroyed, and Fire [(?) Vibhâvasu] deprived of its rudiment, Air extinguishes Fire and spreads ... over Space, which is deprived of Light, when Fire merges into Air. Air, then, accompanied by Sound, which is the source of Ether, extends everywhere throughout the ten regions ... until Ether seizes upon Contact [(?) Sparsha, Cohesion—Touch?], its rudimental property, by the loss of which, Air is destroyed, and Ether [(?) Kha] remains unmodified; devoid of Form, Flavour, Touch (Sparsha), and Smell, it exists [un]embodied [mûrttimat] and vast, and pervades the whole of Space. Ether [Âkâsha], whose characteristic property and rudiment is Sound [the “Word”] exists alone, occupying all the vacuity of Space [or rather, occupying the whole containment of Space]. Then the Origin [Noumenon?] of the Elements (Bhûtâdi) devours Sound [the collective [pg 400]Demiurgos]; [and the hosts of Dhyân Chohans] and all the [existing] Elements596are, at once, merged into their original. This Primary Element is Consciousness, combined with the Property of Darkness [Tâmasa—Spiritual Darkness rather], and is, itself, swallowed up [disintegrated] by Mahat [the Universal Intellect], whose characteristic property is Intelligence [Buddhi], and Earth and Mahat are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe. In this manner, as [in the Beginning] were the seven forms of Nature [Prakriti] reckoned from Mahat to Earth, so ... these seven successively reënter into each other.597

The Egg of Brahmâ (Sarva-mandala) is dissolved in the Waters that surround it, with its seven zones (dvîpas), seven oceans, seven regions, and their mountains. The investure of Water is drunk by Fire; the (stratum of) Fire is absorbed by (that of) Air; Air blends itself with Ether [Âkâsha]; the Primary Element [Bhûtâdi, the origin, or rather the cause, of the Primary Element] devours the Ether, and is (itself) destroyed by Intellect [Mahat, the Great, the Universal Mind], which, along with all these, is seized upon by Nature [Prakriti] and disappears. This Prakriti is, essentially, the same, whether discrete or indiscrete; only that which is discrete is, finally, lost or absorbed in the indiscrete. Spirit [Pums] also, which is one, pure, imperishable, eternal, all-pervading, is a portion of that Supreme Spirit which is all things. That Spirit [Sarvesha] which is other than (embodied) Spirit, and in which there are no attributes of name, species [nâman and jâti, or rûpa, hence body rather than species], or the like ... [remains] as the (sole) Existence [Sattâ]. Nature [Prakriti] and Spirit [Purusha] both resolve [finally] into Supreme Spirit.598

This is the final Pralaya599—the Death of Kosmos; after which its Spirit rests in Nirvâna, or in That for which there is neither Day nor Night. All the other Pralayas are periodical, and follow the Manvantaras in regular succession, as the night follows the day of every human creature, animal, and plant. The Cycle of Creation of the Lives of Kosmos is run down; the energy of the Manifested “Word” having its growth, culmination, and decrease, as have all things temporary, however long their duration. The Creative Force is Eternal as noumenal; as a phenomenal manifestation, in its aspects, it has a [pg 401] beginning and must, therefore, have an end. During that interval, it has its Periods of Activity and its Periods of Rest. And these are the Days and Nights of Brahmâ. But Brahman, the Noumenon, never rests, as It never changes, but ever is, though It cannot be said to be anywhere.

The Jewish Kabalists felt the necessity of this immutability in an eternal, infinite Deity, and therefore applied the same thought to the anthropomorphic God. The idea is poetical, and very appropriate in its application. In the Zohar we read as follows:

As Moses was keeping a vigil on Mount Sinai, in company with the Deity, who was concealed from his sight by a cloud, he felt a great fear overcome him, and suddenly asked: “Lord, where art thou ... sleepest thou, O Lord? ...”And the Spirit answered him; “I never sleep: were I to fall asleep for a moment before my time, all the creation would crumble into dissolution in one instant.”

“Before my time” is very suggestive. It shows the God of Moses to be only a temporary substitute, like Brahmâ, the male, a substitute and an aspect of That which is immutable, and which, therefore, can take no part in the Days, or Nights, nor have any concern whatever with reäction or dissolution.

While the Eastern Occultists have seven modes of interpretation, the Jews have only four; namely, the real-mystical, the allegorical, the moral, and the literal or Pashut. The latter is the key of the exoteric Churches and not worth discussion. Here are several sentences, which, read in the first, or mystical key, show the identity of the foundations of construction in every Scripture. They are given in Isaac Myer's excellent book on the Kabalistic works, which he seems to have well studied. I quote verbatim.

“B'raisheeth barah elohim ath hashama' yem v'ath haa'retz, i.e., ‘In the beginning the God(s) created the heavens and the earth’; (the meaning of which is;) the six (Sephiroth of Construction),600 over which B'raisheeth stands, all belong Below. It created six, (and) on these stand (exist) all Things. And those depend upon the seven forms of the Cranium up to the Dignity of all Dignities. And the second 'Earth' does not come into calculation, therefore it has been said: ‘And from it (that Earth) which underwent the curse; came it forth.’ ... ‘It (the Earth) was without form and void; and darkness was over the face of the Abyss, and the Spirit of Elohim ... was breathing (me'racha'pheth, i.e., hovering, brooding over, moving, ...) over the waters.’ Thirteen depend on thirteen (forms) of the most worthy Dignity. Six thousand years hang (are referred to) in the first six words. The seventh (thousand, the millennium) above it (the cursed Earth) is that [pg 402]which is strong by Itself. And it was rendered entirely desolate during twelve hours (one ... day ...). In the thirteenth, It (the Deity) shall restore them ... and everything shall be renewed as before; and all those six shall continue.”601

The “Sephiroth of Construction” are the six Dhyân Chohans, or Manus, or Prajâpatis, synthesized by the seventh “B'raisheeth,” the First Emanation, or Logos, and who are called, therefore, the Builders of the Lower or Physical Universe, all belonging Below. These Six [6-pointed star with middle dot], whose essence is of the Seventh, are the Upâdhi, the Base or Fundamental Stone, on which the Objective Universe is built, the Noumenoi of all things. Hence they are, at the same time, the Forces of Nature; the Seven Angels of the Presence; the Sixth and Seventh Principles in Man; the spirito-psycho-physical Spheres of the Septenary Chain, the Root Races, etc. They all “depend upon the Seven Forms of the Cranium” up to the Highest. The “Second ‘Earth’ does not come into calculation,” because it is no Earth, but the Chaos, or Abyss of Space, in which rested the Paradigmatic, or Model Universe, in the Ideation of the Over-Soul, brooding over it. The term “Curse” is here very misleading, for it means simply Doom or Destiny, or that fatality which sent it forth into the objective state. This is shown by that “Earth,” under the “Curse,” being described as “without form and void,” in whose abysmal depths the “Breath” of the Elohim, or collective Logoi, produced, or so to say photographed, the first Divine Ideation of the things to be. This process is repeated after every Pralaya before the beginnings of a new Manvantara, or Period of sentient individual Being. “Thirteen depend on thirteen Forms,” refers to the thirteen Periods, personified by the thirteen Manus, with Svâyambhuva, the fourteenth—13, instead of 14, being an additional veil—those fourteen Manus who reign within the term of a Mahâ Yuga, a Day of Brahmâ. These thirteen-fourteen of the objective Universe depend on the thirteen-fourteen paradigmatic, ideal Forms. The meaning of the “six thousand Years” which “hang in the first six Words,” has again to be sought in the Indian Wisdom. They refer to the primordial six (seven) “Kings of Edom,” who typify the Worlds, or Spheres, of our Chain, during the First Round, as well as the primordial men of this Round. They are the septenary pre-Adamic First Root-Race, or they who existed before the Third, Separated Race. As they were Shadows, and senseless, for they had not yet eaten of the [pg 403] fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they could not see the Parzuphim, or “Face could not see Face”; that is to say, primeval men were “unconscious.” “Therefore, the primordial (seven) Kings died,” i.e., were destroyed.602 Now, who are these Kings? They are the Kings who are the “Seven Rishis, certain (secondary) divinities, Indra [Shakra], Manu, and the Kings his Sons [who] are created and perish at one period” as Vishnu Purâna tells us.603 For the seventh “thousand,” which is not the millennium of exoteric Christianity, but that of Anthropogenesis, represents both the “Seventh Period of Creation,” that of physical man, according to Vishnu Purâna, and the Seventh Principle, both macrocosmic and microcosmic, and also the Pralaya after the Seventh Period, the Night, which has the same duration as the Day, of Brahmâ. “It was rendered entirely desolate during twelve hours.” It is in the Thirteenth (twice six and the synthesis) that everything shall be restored, and the “six shall continue.”

Thus, the author of the Qabbalah remarks quite truly that:

Long before his [Ibn Gebirol's] time ... many centuries before the Christian era, there was in Central Asia a “Wisdom Religion”, fragments of which subsequently existed among the learned men of the archaic Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, Hindûs, etc.... [And that] the Qabbalah most likely originally came from Âryan sources, through Central Asia, Persia, India and Mesopotamia, for from Ur and Haran came Abraham and many others, into Palestine.604

Such was also the firm conviction of C. W. King, the author of The Gnostics and Their Remains.

Vâmadeva Modelyar describes the coming Night most poetically. Though it is given in Isis Unveiled, it is worthy of repetition.

Strange noises are heard, proceeding from every point.... These are the precursors of the Night of Brahmâ; dusk rises at the horizon, and the Sun passes away behind the thirteenth degree of Makara [the tenth sign of the Zodiac], and will reach no more the sign of the Mîna [the Zodiacal sign Pisces, or the Fish]. The Gurus of the Pagodas, appointed to watch the Râshichakram [Zodiac], may now break their circle and instruments, for they are henceforth useless.

Gradually light pales, heat diminishes, uninhabited spots multiply on the earth, the air becomes more and more rarefied; the springs of waters dry up, the great rivers see their waves exhausted, the ocean shows its sandy bottom and plants die. Men and animals decrease in size daily. Life and motion lose their force, planets can hardly gravitate in space; they are extinguished one by one, like a lamp which the hand of the Chokra [servant] neglects to replenish. Sûrya [the Sun] flickers and goes out, matter falls into Dissolution [Pralaya], and Brahmâ merges back into [pg 404]Dyaus, the Unrevealed God, and, his task being accomplished, he falls asleep. Another Day is passed, Night sets in, and continues until the future Dawn.

And now again reënter into the Golden Egg of his Thought the germs of all that exist, as the divine Manu tells us. During His peaceful rest, the animated beings, endowed with the principles of action, cease their functions, and all feeling [Manas] becomes dormant. When they are all absorbed in the Supreme Soul, this Soul of all the beings sleeps in complete repose, till the Day when it resumes its form, and awakes again from its primitive darkness.605

As the Satya Yuga is always the first in the series of the Four Ages or Yugas, so the Kali ever comes the last. The Kali Yuga now reigns supreme in India, and it seems to coincide with that of the Western Age. Anyhow, it is curious to see how prophetic in almost all things was the writer of Vishnu Purâna, when foretelling to Maitreya some of the dark influences and sins of this Kali Yuga. For after saying that the “barbarians” will be masters of the banks of the Indus, of Chandrabhâgâ and Kâshmîra, he adds:

There will be contemporary monarchs, reigning over the earth, kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women, children, and cows; they will seize upon the property of their subjects [or, according to another reading, be intent upon the wives of others]; they will be of limited power ... their lives will be short, their desires insatiable.... People of various countries intermingling with them will follow their example; and, the barbarians being powerful [in India] in the patronage of the princes, whilst pure tribes are neglected, the people will perish [or, as the Commentator has it: “the Mlechchhas will be in the centre, and the Âryas in the end”].606Wealth and piety will decrease day by day, until the world will be wholly depraved.... Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation; and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification.... External types will be the only distinction of the several orders of life; dishonesty [anyâya] will be the (universal) means of subsistence; weakness the cause of dependence; menace and presumption will be substituted for learning; liberality will be devotion; a man if rich will be reputed pure; mutual assent will be marriage; fine clothes will be dignity.... He who is the strongest will reign ... the people, unable to bear the heavy burthens [khara-bhâra, load of taxes], will take refuge among the valleys.... Thus, in the Kali Age, will decay constantly proceed, until the human race approaches its annihilation [pralaya]. When ... the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that divine Being which exists, of its own spiritual nature [Kalkî Avatâra] ... shall descend upon Earth, ... endowed with the eight superhuman faculties.... He will reëstablish righteousness upon earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of Kali Yuga shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal. The [pg 405]men who are, thus, changed ... shall be as the seeds of human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita Age (or Age of Purity). As it is said: “When the Sun and Moon and (the Lunar Asterism) Tishya, and the planet Jupiter are in one mansion, the Krita [or Satya] Age shall return....”607

Two persons, Devâpi, of the race of Kuru, and Maru [Moru], of the family of Ikshvâku, ... continue alive throughout the Four Ages, residing at ... Kalâpa.608 They will return hither, in the beginning of the Krita Age609 ... Maru [Moru]610 the son of Shîghra, through the power of devotion (Yoga) is still living ... and will be the restorer of the Kshattriya race of the Solar Dynasty.611

Whether right or wrong with regard to the latter prophecy, the “blessings” of Kali Yuga are well described, and fit in admirably even with that which one sees and hears in Europe and other civilized and Christian lands in the full XIXth, and at the dawn of the XXth century of our great “Era of Enlightenment.”

[pg 406]

Section VIII. The Lotus, as a Universal Symbol.

There are no ancient symbols without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to them, their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity. Such is the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to Nature and her Gods, and represents the Abstract and the Concrete Universes, standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both Spiritual and Physical Nature. It was held as sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Âryan Hindûs, the Egyptians, and by the Buddhists after them. It was revered in China and Japan, and adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches, who made of it a messenger, as do now the Christians, who have replaced it with the water-lily.

In the Christian religion, in every picture of the Annunciation, Gabriel, the Archangel, appears to the Virgin Mary, holding in his hand a spray of water-lilies. This spray, typifying Fire and Water, or the idea of creation and generation, symbolizes precisely the same idea as the Lotus, in the hand of the Bodhisattva who announces to Mahâ-Mâyâ, Gautama's mother, the birth of Buddha, the world's Saviour. Thus also, were Osiris and Horus constantly represented by the Egyptians in association with the Lotus-flower, both being Sun-Gods or Gods of Fire; just as the Holy Ghost is still typified by “tongues of fire,” in the Acts.

It had, and still has, its mystic meaning, which is identical in every nation on earth. We refer the reader to Sir William Jones.612 With the Hindûs, the Lotus is the emblem of the productive power of Nature, through the agency of Fire and Water, or Spirit and Matter. “O Thou [pg 407] Eternal! I see Brahm, the Creator, enthroned in thee above the Lotus!” says a verse in the Bhagavad Gîtâ. And Sir W. Jones shows, as already noted in the Stanzas, that the seeds of the Lotus, even before they germinate, contain perfectly-formed leaves, the miniature shapes of what they will become one day, as perfected plants. The Lotus, in India, is the symbol of prolific Earth and, what is more, of Mount Meru. The four Angels or Genii of the four quarters of Heaven, the Mahârâjahs of the Stanzas, stand each on a Lotus. The Lotus is the two-fold type of the Divine and Human Hermaphrodite, being so to say, of dual sex.

With the Hindûs, the Spirit of Fire or Heat—which stirs up, fructifies, and develops into concrete form, from its ideal prototype, everything which is born of Water, or Primordial Earth—evolved Brahmâ. The Lotus-flower, represented as growing out of Vishnu's navel, the God who rests in the Waters of Space on the Serpent of Infinity, is the most graphic symbol ever yet made. It is the Universe evolving from the Central Sun, the Point, the ever-concealed Germ. Lakshmî, who is the female aspect of Vishnu, and who is also called Padma, the Lotus, in the Râmâyana, is likewise shown floating on a Lotus-flower, at the “Creation,” and during the “Churning of the Ocean” of Space, as also springing from the “Sea of Milk,” like Venus-Aphrodite from the Foam of the Ocean.

... Then, seated on a lotus,
Beauty's bright Goddess, peerless Shrî, arose
Out of the waves ...

sings an English Orientalist and poet, Sir Monier Williams.

The underlying idea, in this symbol, is very beautiful, and, furthermore, shows an identical parentage in all the religious systems. Whether as the Lotus or water-lily, it signifies one and the same philosophical idea; namely, the Emanation of the Objective from the Subjective, Divine Ideation passing from the abstract into the concrete, or visible form. For, as soon as Darkness, or rather that which is “Darkness” for ignorance, has disappeared in its own realm of Eternal Light, leaving behind itself only its Divine Manifested Ideation, the Creative Logoi have their understanding opened, and they see in the Ideal World, hitherto concealed in the Divine Thought, the archetypal forms of all, and proceed to copy and build, or fashion, upon these models, forms evanescent and transcendent.

At this stage of Action, the Demiurge is not yet the Architect. [pg 408] Born in the Twilight of Action, he has yet to first perceive the Plan, to realize the Ideal Forms, which lie buried in the Bosom of Eternal Ideation, just as the future lotus-leaves, the immaculate petals, are concealed within the seed of that plant.

In Esoteric Philosophy the Demiurge, or Logos, regarded as the Creator, is simply an abstract term, an idea, like the word “army.” As the latter is the all-embracing term for a body of active forces, or working units—soldiers, so is the Demiurge the qualitative compound of a multitude of Creators or Builders. Burnouf, the great Orientalist, seized the idea perfectly, when he said that Brahmâ does not create the Earth, any more than the rest of the Universe.

Having evolved himself from the Soul of the World, once separated from the First Cause, he evaporates with, and emanates, all Nature out of himself. He does not stand above it, but is mixed up with it; Brahmâ and the Universe form one Being, each particle of which is in its essence Brahmâ himself, who proceeded out of himself.

In a chapter of the Book of the Dead, called “Transformation into the Lotus,” the God, figured as a head emerging from this flower, exclaims:

I am the pure Lotus, emerging from the Luminous Ones.... I carry the messages of Horus. I am the pure Lotus which comes from the Solar Fields.613

The lotus-idea may be traced even in the Elohistic first chapter of Genesis, as stated in Isis Unveiled. It is to this idea that we must look for the origin and explanation of the verse in the Jewish Cosmogony which reads: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth ... the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.”614 In all the primitive religions, the Creative God is the “Son of the Father,” that is to say, his Thought made visible; and before the Christian era, from the Trimûrti of the Hindûs down to the three Kabalistic Heads of the scriptures, as explained by the Jews, the Triune Godhead of each nation was fully defined and substantiated, in its allegories.

Such is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the Eastern peoples. But when applied to practical and exoteric worship, which had also its esoteric symbology, the Lotus, in time, became the carrier and container of a more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has ever escaped having the sexual element in it; and to this day it soils the moral beauty of the root idea of symbology. The [pg 409] following is quoted from the same Kabalistic MS. which we have already cited on several occasions:

Pointing to like signification was the Lotus growing in the waters of the Nile. Its mode of growth peculiarly fitted it as a symbol of the generative activities. The flower of the Lotus, which is the bearer of the seed for reproduction, as the result of its maturing, is connected by its placenta-like attachment to mother-earth, or the womb of Isis, through the water of the womb, that is, the river Nile, by the long cord-like stalk, the umbilicus. Nothing can be plainer than the symbol, and to make it perfect in its intended signification, a child is sometimes represented as seated in or issuing from the flower.615 Thus Osiris and Isis, the children of Cronus, or time without end, in the development of their nature-forces, in this picture become the parents of man under the name Horus.

We cannot lay too great stress upon the use of this generative function as a basis for a symbolical language, and a scientific art-speech. Thought upon the idea leads at once to reflection upon the subject of creative cause. In its workings Nature is observed to have fashioned a wonderful piece of living mechanism, governed by an added living soul; the life development and history of which soul, as to its whence, its present, and its whither, surpass all efforts of the human intellect.616 The new-born is an ever-recurring miracle, an evidence that within the workshop of the womb an intelligent creative power has intervened to fasten a living soul to a physical machine. The amazing wonderfulness of the fact attaches a holy sacredness to all connected with the organs of reproduction, as the dwelling and place of evident constructive intervention of deity.

This is a correct rendering of the underlying ideas of old, of the purely pantheistic conceptions, impersonal and reverential, of the archaic philosophers of the prehistoric ages. It is not so, however, when applied to sinful humanity, to the gross ideas attached to personality. Therefore, no pantheistic philosopher would fail to find the remarks that follow the above, and which represent the anthropomorphism of Judean symbology, other than dangerous for the sacredness of true religion, and fitting only for our materialistic age, which is the direct outcome and result of that anthropomorphic character. For this is the key-note to the entire spirit and essence of the Old [pg 410]Testament, as the MS. states, treating of the symbolism of the art-speech of the Bible:

Therefore the locality of the womb is to be taken as the Most Holy Place, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and the veritable Temple of the Living God.617 With man, the possession of the woman has always been considered as an essential part of himself, to make one out of two, and jealously guarded as sacred. Even the part of the ordinary house or home consecrated to the dwelling of the wife was called the penetralia, the secret or sacred, and hence the metaphor of the Holy of Holies, of sacred constructions taken from the idea of the sacredness of the organs of generation. Carried to the extreme of description618 by metaphor, this part of the house is described in the Sacred Books as the “between the thighs of the house,”and sometimes the idea is carried out constructively in the great door-opening of Churches placed inward between flanking buttresses.

No such thought, “carried to the extreme,” ever existed among the old primitive Âryans. This is proven by the fact that, in the Vedic period, their women were not placed apart from men in penetralia, or Zenanas. This seclusion began when the Mahommedans—the next heirs to Hebrew symbolism, after Christian ecclesiasticism—had conquered the land and gradually enforced their ways and customs upon the Hindûs. The pre- and post-Vedic woman was as free as man; and no impure terrestrial thought was ever mixed with the religious symbology of the early Âryans. The idea and application are purely Semitic. This is corroborated by the writer of the said intensely learned and Kabalistic revelation, when he closes the above-quoted passages by adding:

If to these organs as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of the origin of measures as well as of time-periods can be attached, then indeed, in the constructions of the Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as the Holy of Holies, or the Most Holy Place, should borrow its title from the recognized sacredness of the generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative cause. With the ancient wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no symbol of a First Cause.

Most decidedly not. Rather never give a thought to it and leave it for ever nameless, as the early Pantheists did, than degrade the sacredness of that Ideal of Ideals, by dragging down its symbols into such [pg 411] anthropomorphic forms! Here again one perceives the immense chasm between Âryan and Semitic religious thought, the two opposite poles, Sincerity and Concealment. With the Brâhmans, who have never invested the natural procreative functions of mankind with an “original sin” element, it is a religious duty to have a son. A Brâhman, in days of old, having accomplished his mission of human creator, retired to the jungle, and passed the rest of his days in religious meditation. He had accomplished his duty to nature, as mortal man and its co-worker, and henceforth gave all his thoughts to the spiritual and immortal portion of himself, regarding the terrestrial as a mere illusion, an evanescent dream—which, indeed it is. With the Semite, it was different. He invented a temptation of flesh in a garden of Eden, and showed his God—esoterically, the Tempter and the Ruler of Nature—cursing for ever an act, which was in the logical programme of that Nature.619 All this exoterically, as in the cloak and dead-letter of Genesis and the rest. At the same time, esoterically, he regarded the supposed sin and fall as an act so sacred, as to choose the organ, the perpetrator of the original sin, as the fittest and most sacred symbol to represent that God, who is shown as branding its entering into function as disobedience and everlasting sin!

Who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind! And this paradoxical element, minus its innermost significance, has now passed entirely into Christian theology and dogma!

Whether the early Fathers of the Church knew the esoteric meaning of the Hebrew Testament, or whether only a few of them were aware of it, while the others remained ignorant of the secret, is for posterity to decide. One thing, at any rate, is certain. As the Esotericism of the New Testament agrees perfectly with that of the Hebrew Mosaic Books; and since, at the same time, a number of purely Egyptian symbols and Pagan dogmas in general—the Trinity, for example—have been copied by, and incorporated into, the Synoptics and St. John, it becomes evident that the identity of those symbols was known to the writers of the New Testament, whoever they may have been. They must have been also aware of the priority of the Egyptian Esotericism, since they have adopted several symbols which typify purely Egyptian conceptions and beliefs, in their outward and inward meaning, and which are not to be [pg 412] found in the Jewish Canon. One of these is the water-lily in the hands of the Archangel, in the early representations of his appearance to the Virgin Mary; and these symbolical images are preserved to this day in the iconography of the Greek and Roman Churches. Thus Water, Fire and the Cross, as well as the Dove, the Lamb and other Sacred Animals, with all their combinations, esoterically yield an identical meaning, and must have been accepted as an improvement upon Judaism pure and simple.

For the Lotus and Water are among the oldest symbols, and in their origin are purely Âryan, though they became common property during the branching off of the Fifth Race. To give an example; letters, as well as numbers, were all mystic, whether in combination, or taken separately. The most sacred of all is the letter M. It is both feminine and masculine, or androgyne, and is made to symbolize Water in its origin, the Great Deep. It is a mystic letter in all languages, Eastern and Western, and stands as a glyph for the waves, thus [three triangles]. In the Âryan Esotericism, as in the Semitic, this letter has always stood for the Waters. In Sanskrit, for instance, Makara, the tenth sign of the Zodiac, means a Crocodile, or rather an aquatic monster associated always with Water. The letter Ma is equivalent to, and corresponds with, the number 5, which is composed of a Binary, the symbol of the two sexes separated, and of the Ternary, the symbol of the Third Life, the progeny of the Binary. This, again, is often symbolized by a Pentagon, the latter being a sacred sign, a divine Monogram. Maitreya is the secret name of the Fifth Buddha, and the Kalkî Avatâra of the Brâhmans, the last Messiah who will come at the culmination of the Great Cycle. It is also the initial letter of the Greek Metis, or Divine Wisdom; of Mimra, the Word, or Logos; and of Mithras, the Mihr, the Monad Mystery. All these are born in, and from, the Great Deep, and are the Sons of Mâyâ, the “Mother”; in Egypt, Moot; in Greece, Minerva, Divine Wisdom; of Mary, or Miriam, Myrrha, etc., the Mother of the Christian Logos; and of Mâyâ, the Mother of Buddha. Mâdhava and Mâdhavî are the titles of the most important Gods and Goddesses of the Hindû Pantheon. Finally, Mandala is, in Sanskrit, a “Circle,” or an Orb, also the ten divisions of the Rig Veda. The most sacred names in India generally begin with this letter, from Mahat, the first manifested Intellect, and Mandara, the great mountain used by the Gods to churn the Ocean, down to Mandâkinî, the heavenly Gangâ, or Ganges, Manu, etc., etc.

[pg 413]

Will this be called a coincidence? A strange one is it then, indeed, when we see even Moses, found in the Water of the Nile, with the symbolical consonant in his name. And Pharaoh's daughter “called his name Moses; and she said, Because I drew him out of the Water.”620 Besides which, the Hebrew sacred name of God, applied to this letter M, is Meborach, the “Holy” or the “Blessed,” and the name for the Water of the Flood is Mbul. A reminder of the “Three Maries” at the Crucifixion, and their connection with Mare, the Sea, or Water, may close these examples. This is why, in Judaism and Christianity, the Messiah is always connected with Water, Baptism; and also with the Fishes, the sign of the Zodiac called Mînam in Sanskrit, and even with the Matsya (Fish) Avatâra, and the Lotus, the symbol of the womb, or with the water-lily, which has the same signification.

In the relics of ancient Egypt, the greater the antiquity of the votive symbols and emblems of the objects exhumed, the oftener are Lotus-flowers and Water found in connection with the Solar Gods. The God Khnoom, the Moist Power, or Water, as Thales taught, being the principle of all things, sits on a throne enshrined in a Lotus. The God Bes stands on a Lotus, ready to devour his progeny. Thot, the God of Mystery and Wisdom, the sacred Scribe of Amenti, wearing the solar disk as head gear, sits with a bull's head—the sacred bull of Mendes being a form of Thot—and a human body, on a full blown Lotus. Finally, it is the Goddess Hiqit, under her shape of a frog, who rests on the Lotus, thus showing her connection with water. And it is from the unpoetical shape of this frog-symbol, undeniably the glyph of the most ancient of the Egyptian Deities, that the Egyptologists have been vainly trying to unravel the mystery and functions of the Goddess. Its adoption in the Church, by the early Christians, shows that they knew it better than our modern Orientalists. The “frog or toad Goddess” was one of the chief Cosmic Deities connected with Creation, on account of this animal's amphibious nature, and chiefly because of its apparent resurrection, after long ages of solitary life, enshrined in old walls, in rocks, etc. She not only participated in the organization of the World, together with Khnoom, but was also connected with the dogma of resurrection.621 There must have been some very profound and [pg 414] sacred meaning attached to this symbol, since, notwithstanding the risk of being charged with a disgusting form of zoölatry, the early Egyptian Christians adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad, enshrined in a Lotus-flower, or simply without the latter emblem, was the form chosen for the Church-lamps, on which were engraved the words, “Ἐγώ εἰμι ἀναστάσις”—I am the resurrection.622 These frog-Goddesses are also found on all the mummies.

[pg 415]

Section IX. The Moon; Deus Lunus, Phœbe.

This archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most philosophical. The ancient Greeks brought it into prominence, and the modern poets have worn it threadbare. The Queen of Night, riding in the majesty of her peerless light in Heaven, throwing all, even Hesperus, into darkness, and spreading her silver mantle over the whole Sidereal World, has ever been a favourite theme with all the poets of Christendom, from Milton and Shakespeare down to the latest versifier. But the refulgent lamp of night, with her suite of stars unnumbered, spoke only to the imagination of the profane. Until lately, Religion and Science had nought to do with the beautiful mythos. Yet, the cold chaste Moon, she, who, in the words of Shelley:

... makes all beautiful on which she smiles,

That wandering shrine of soft, yet icy flame

Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,

And warms not, but illumes....

stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun is the Giver of Life to the whole Planetary System; the Moon is the Giver of Life to our Globe; and the early races understood and knew it, even in their infancy. She is the Queen, and she is the King. She was King Soma before she became transformed into Phœbe and the chaste Diana. She is preëminently the Deity of the Christians, through the Mosaic and Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of the fact for long ages; in fact, ever since the last initiated Father of the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the Pagan Temples. For such Fathers as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus, the Moon was Jehovah's living symbol; the Giver of Life and the Giver of Death, the Disposer of Being—in our World. For, if Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and, with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child-birth and life; [pg 416] with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the Goddess of Death, who ruled over magic and enchantments. More than this; as the personified Moon, whose phenomena are triadic, Diana-Hecate-Luna is the three in one. For she is Diva triformis, tergemina, triceps, three heads on one neck,623 like Brahmâ-Vishnu-Shiva. Hence she is the prototype of our Trinity, which has not always been entirely male. The number seven, so prominent in the Bible, so sacred in the seventh day, or Sabbath, came to the Jews from antiquity, deriving its origin from the four-fold number 7 contained in the 28 days of the lunar month, each septenary portion thereof being typified by one quarter of the Moon.

It is worth the trouble of presenting, in this work, a bird's-eye view of the origin and development of the lunar myth and worship, in historical antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by exact Science, which rejects all tradition; while for Theology, which, under the guidance of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment of literature that does not bear the imprimatur of the Church of Rome, its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Âryan Hindû religious philosophy is the more ancient—the Secret Doctrine says it is the latter—does not much matter, in this instance, as the Lunar and Solar “worship” are the most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and prevail to this day throughout the whole world; with some openly, with others—as, for instance, in Christian symbology—secretly. The cat, a lunar symbol, was sacred to Isis, who was the Moon in one sense, just as Osiris was the Sun, and is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of the Goddess. This animal was held in great veneration in the city of Bubastis, which went into deep mourning on the death of the sacred cats, because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in that city of mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been given in Section I, and no one has better described it than Mr. Gerald Massey, in his Lectures and in The Natural Genesis. The eye of the cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in their growth and decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence the mythological allegory which shows Diana hiding in the Moon, under the shape of a cat, when she was seeking, in company with other Deities, to escape the pursuit of Typhon, as related in the [pg 417] Metamorphoses of Ovid. The Moon, in Egypt, was both the “Eye of Horns” and the “Eye of Osiris,” the Sun.

The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed ape was a glyph to symbolize the Sun and Moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is really more a Hermetic than a religious symbol. For it is the hieroglyph of Mercury, the planet, and of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers, who say that:

Mercury has to be ever near Isis, as her minister, for without Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can accomplish anything in the Great Work.

The Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the caduceus, the crescent, or the lotus, is a glyph of the “philosophical” Mercury; but when seen with a reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and adviser of Isis, as Hanumâna filled the same office with Râma.

Though the regular Sun-Worshippers, the Parsîs, are few, yet not only is the bulk of the Hindû mythology and history based upon, and interblended with, these two worships, but so is even the Christian religion itself. From their origin down to our modern day, it has coloured the theologies of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. Indeed, the difference between the Aryan Hindû and the Âryan European faiths is very small, if only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into consideration. Hindûs are proud of calling themselves Sûryavanshas and Chandravanshas, of the Solar and Lunar Dynasties. The Christians pretend to regard this as idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion entirely based upon Solar and Lunar worship. It is vain and useless for the Protestants to exclaim against the Roman Catholics for their “Mariolatry,” based on the ancient cult of lunar Goddesses, when they themselves worship Jehovah, preëminently a lunar God; and when both Churches have accepted in their theologies the Sun-Christ and the Lunar Trinity.

What is known of Chaldean Moon-Worship, of the Babylonian God, Sin, called by the Greeks Deus Lunus, is very little; and that little is apt to mislead the profane student, who fails to grasp the esoteric significance of the symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and writers—for those who were initiated were pledged to silence—the Chaldeans were the worshippers of the Moon under her, and his, various names, just as were the Jews, who came after them.

In the unpublished MS. on the Art-Speech, already mentioned, [pg 418] giving a key to the formation of the ancient symbolical language, a logical raison d'être is brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a wonderfully well-informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in the comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, forcibly becomes a proven fact in the history of religious evolution in human thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient symbology. Thus, he says:

One of the first occupations among men, connected with those of actual necessity, would be the perception of time periods,624 marked on the vaulted arch of the heavens, sprung and rising over the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of still water. These would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the phases of the moon, of its stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the period of the solar year with recurrence of the seasons, and with the application to such periods of the natural measure of day or night, or of the day divided into the light and the dark. It would also be discovered that there was a longest and shortest solar day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within the period of the solar year; and the points in the year of these could be marked with the greatest precision in the starry groups of the heavens or the constellations, subject to that retrograde movement thereof, which in time would require a correction by intercalation, as was the case in the description of the Flood, where correction of 150 days was made for a period of 600 years, during which confusion of landmarks had increased.... This would naturally come to pass with all races in all time; and such knowledge must be taken to have been inherent in the human race, prior to what we call the historic period as during the same.

On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function, possessed in common by the human race, and connected with the periodical manifestations, such that “the connection between the two kinds of phenomena ... became fixed in common or popular usage.” He finds it in:

(a) The feminine physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28 days, or 4 weeks of 7 days each, so that 13 occurrences of the period should happen in 364 days, which is the solar week-year of 52 weeks of 7 days each. (b) The quickening of the fœtus is marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (c) That period which is called “the period of viability” is one of 210 days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each. (d) The period of parturition is accomplished in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks of 7 days each, or 10 lunar months of 28 days each, or of 9 calendar months of 31 days each, counting on the royal arch of heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the darkness of the womb to the light and glory of conscious existence, that continuing inscrutable mystery and miracle.... Thus [pg 419]the observed periods of time marking the workings of the birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical calculation.... We may almost affirm ... that this was the mode of reckoning among all nations, either independently, or intermediately and indirectly by tuition. It was the mode with the Hebrews, for even to-day they calculate the calendar by means of the 354 and 355 of the lunar year, and we possess a special evidence that it was the mode with the ancient Egyptians, as to which this is the proof:

The basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself,625 and that man was his image, man including woman.... The place of the man and woman with the Hebrews was among the Egyptians occupied by the bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis,626 who were represented, respectively, by a man having a bull's head, and a woman having the head of a cow; which symbols were worshipped. Notoriously Osiris was the Sun and the river Nile, the tropical year of 365 days, which number is the value of the word Neilos, and the bull, as he was also the principle of fire and of life-giving force; while Isis was the moon, the bed of the river Nile, or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water was a necessity, the lunar year of 354-364 days, the time-maker of the periods of gestation, and the cow marked by, or with, the crescent new moon....

But the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the woman of the Hebrews was not intended as of any radical difference of signification, but a concurrence in the teaching, intended, and merely as the substitution of a symbol of common import, which was this, viz., the period of parturition with the cow and the woman was held to be the same, or 280 days, or ten lunar months of 4 weeks each. And in this period consisted the essential value of this animal symbol, whose mark was that of the crescent moon.627... These parturient and natural periods are found to have been subjects of symbolism all over the world. They were thus used by the Hindûs, and are found to be most plainly set forth by the ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the Palenque Cross and elsewhere, and manifestly lay at the base of the formation of the calendar forms of the Mayas of Yucatan, the Hindûs, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as well as the Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols ... would be either the phallus or the phallus and yoni, ... male and female. Indeed, the words translated by the generalizing terms male and female, in the 27th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are ... sacr and n'cabvah or, literally, phallus and yoni.628 While the representation of the phallic emblems would barely indicate the genital members of the human body, when their functions and the development of the seed-vesicles emanating from them were considered, there would come into indication a mode of measures of lunar time, and through lunar, of solar time.

This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. [pg 420] The key that opens the mystery of Theogony, or the evolution of the manvantaric Gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it. There, all is mystical and divine. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah directly with the Moon as a generative God, preferred to ignore the higher Hierarchies, and have made their Patriarchs of some of these zodiacal constellations and planetary Gods, thus euhemerizing the purely theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity. The MS., from which the above is extracted, explains very clearly to what Hierarchy of Gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish God was; for it shows, in clear language, that which the writer has always insisted upon, namely, that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves, was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative faculty in Nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret God of the Kabalists, Ain Suph, a conception as grand as Parabrahman in the earliest Kabalistic and mystical ideas. But it is not the Kabalah of Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Shimeon Ben Yochaï, which were as metaphysical and philosophical as any could be. And how many are there among the students of the Kabalah who know anything of them except in their distorted Latin translations? Let us glance at the idea which led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the Ever-Unknowable, and which has misled the Christians into mistaking the substitute for the reality.

If to these organs [phallus and yoni] as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea of ... time periods can be attached, then, indeed, in the construction of Temples as Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as the Holy of Holies, or The Most Holy Place, should borrow its title from the recognized sacredness of the generative organs, considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative cause.

With the ancient Wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no symbol, of a First Cause.629 With the Hebrews, the indirect conception of such was couched in a term of negation of comprehension, viz., Ain Suph, or the Without Bounds. But the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation was the conception of a circle with its diameter line, to at once carry a geometric, phallic, and astronomic idea; ... for the one takes its birth from the 0, or the circle, without which it could not be, and from the 1, or primal one, spring the 9 digits, and, geometrically, all plane shapes. So in Kabalah this circle, with its diameter line, is the picture of the 10 Sephiroth, or Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, or the Archetypal Man, [pg 421]the creative origin of all things.... This idea of connecting the picture of the circle and its diameter line, that is, the number 10, with the signification of the reproductive organs, and the Most Holy Place ... was carried out constructively in the King's Chamber, or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid, in the Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon.... It is the picture of a double womb, for in Hebrew the letter Hé (ה) is at the same time the number 5, and the symbol of the womb, and twice 5 is 10, or the phallic number.

This “double womb” also shows the duality of the idea carried from the highest or spiritual down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and limited by the Jews to the latter. With them, therefore, the number seven has acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of external forms and empty rituals; take, for instance, their Sabbath, the seventh day sacred to their Deity, the Moon, symbolical of the generative Jehovah. But, with other nations, the number seven was typical of theogonic evolution, of Cycles, Cosmic Planes, and the Seven Forces and Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a Boundless Whole, whose first upper Triangle was unreachable to the finite intellect of man. While other nations, therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred this number solely in the Moon, and based all their sacred calculations thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MS. just quoted, remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews, that:

If 20,612 be multiplied by 4/3, the product will afford a base for the ascertainment of the mean revolution of the moon; and if this product be again multiplied by 4/3, this continued product will afford a base for finding the exact period of the mean solar year, ... this form ... becoming, for the finding of astronomical periods of time, of very great service.

This double number—male and female—is symbolized also in some well-known idols; for instance:

Ardhanârî-Îshvara, the Isis of the Hindûs, Eridanus, or Ardan, or the Hebrew Jordan, or source of descent. She is standing on a lotus-leaf floating on the water. But the signification is, that it is androgyne or hermaphrodite, that is phallus and yoni combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter Yod (י), the containment of Jehovah. She, or rather she-he, gives the minutes of the same circle of 360 degrees.

“Jehovah,” in its best aspect is Binah, the “Upper mediating Mother, the Great Sea or Holy Spirit,” and therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, than of his Father; that “Mother, being the Latin Mare,” the Sea, is here, also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or “Star of the Sea.”

[pg 422]

The ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians—the Chandravanshas or Indovanshas, the Lunar Kings, whom tradition shows reigning at Prayâga (Allahabad), ages before our era—had come from India, and brought with them the worship of their forefathers, of Soma, and his son Budha, which afterwards became that of the Chaldeans. Yet such adoration, apart from popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in no sense idolatry. No more, at any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which connects the Virgin Mary, the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks, with the Moon.

Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud, and loudly confess to it. In a Mémoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville says:

It is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon-Râ should be his mother's husband, since the Magna Mater of the Christians is precisely the spouse of that son she conceives.... We [Christians] can understand now why Neïth throws radiance on the Sun, while remaining the Moon, since the Virgin, who is the Queen of Heaven, as was Neïth, clothes the Christ-Sun, as does Neïth, and is clothed by him; “Tu vestis solem et te sol vestit” [as is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service].

We [Christians] understand also how it is that the famous inscription at Saïs should have stated that “none has ever lifted my veil [peplum],” considering that this sentence, literally translated, is the summary of what is sung in the Church on the Day of the Immaculate Conception.630

Surely nothing could be more sincere than this! It justifies entirely what Mr. Gerald Massey has said in his Lecture on “Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern”:

The man in the moon [Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar Twins] is often charged with bad conduct.... In the lunar phenomena the moon was one, as the moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in character, as mother, child, and adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort of his own mother! It could not be helped if there was to be any reproduction. He was compelled to be his own father! These relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and the primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet in its latest, most inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the grossest superstition the world has seen, for these lunar phenomena and their humanly represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the very foundations of the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism, the simple representation of early time has become the most profound religious mystery in modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the proof, portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at [pg 423]her feet, holding the lunar infant in her arms—as child and consort of the mother moon! The mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental....

In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified mythology, and legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in the Old Testament and the New, as divine revelation uttered by the very voice of God.631

A charming allegory is found in the Zohar, one which unveils better than anything else ever did the true character of Jehovah, or YHVH, in the primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the philosophy of Ibn Gebirol's Kabalah, translated by Isaac Myer.

In the introduction written by R. 'Hiz'qee-yah, which is very old, and forms part of our Brody edition of the Zohar (1. 5b. sq.) is an account of a journey taken by R. El'azar, son of R. Shim-on b. Yo'haï, and R. Abbah.... They met a man bearing a heavy burden.... They conversed together ... and the explanations of the Thorah, by the man with the burden, were so wonderful, that they asked him for his name; he replied: “Do not ask me who I am; but we will all proceed with the explanation of the Thorah [Law].” They asked: “Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy load?” He answered: “The letter י (Yod, which = 10, and is the symbolical letter of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy Name יהוה, YHVH) made war, etc.”.... They said to him: “If thou wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss the dust of thy feet.”He replied: “... As to my father, he had his dwelling in the Great Sea, and was a fish therein [like Vishnu and Dagon or Oannes]; which [first] destroyed the Great Sea ... and he was great and mighty and ‘Ancient of Days,’ until he swallowed all the other fishes in the (Great) Sea.” ... R. El'azar listened to his words and said to him: “Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou art the Son of Rab Ham-'nun-ah Sabah (the old) [the fish in Aramaic or Chaldee is nun (noon)], thou art the Son of the Light of the Thorah [Dharma], etc.”632

Then the author explains that the feminine Sephira, Binah, is termed by the Kabalists the Great Sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the Female Power, the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out later by Christian Theology to be the Serpent and the Devil. She-He (Yah-hovah) is the supernal Hé, and Eve. This Yah-hovah then, or Jehovah, is identical with our Chaos—Father, Mother, Son—on the material plane, and in the purely physical World; Deus and Demon, at one and the same time; the Sun and Moon, Good and Evil, God and Demon.

Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as well as physically. And if, astronomically, the Moon is one of the seven planets of the Ancient World, in Theogony she is one of the Regents thereof—with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the [pg 424] former referring to her under the name of one of their Archangels, and the latter under that of one of their Gods.

Therefore the meaning of the “fairy tale,” translated by Chwolsohn from the Arabic translation of an old Chaldean MS., of Qû-tâmy being instructed by the idol of the Moon, is easily understood. Seldenus tells us the secret, as well as Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed.633 The worshippers of the Teraphim, or the Jewish Oracles, “carved images, and claimed that the light of the principal stars [planets] permeating these through and through, the Angelic Virtues [or the Regents of the stars and planets] conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and arts.” And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called στοιχεῖα, and according to figures that were located in the sky, and called ἀλεξητήριοι, or the Tutelary Gods. Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματικοί, or diviners by the στοιχεῖα.634

It is such sentences, however, in the Nabathean Agriculture, which have frightened the men of Science, and made them proclaim the work “either an apocryphon, or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician.” At the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants metaphorically tore it to pieces; the former because “it described the worship of demons,” the latter because it was “ungodly.” Once more, all are wrong. It is not a fairy tale; and, as far as the pious Churchmen are concerned, the same worship may be shown in their Scriptures, however disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship and also the worship of the Stars and Elements can be traced, and figure in Christian Theology. These are defended by Papists, and can be stoutly denied by the Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.

Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the Spirits of the Elements (Spiritus Elementorum, and in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων).635

But it is found now that the Planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were figured not only at Heliopolis by the twelve stones called “Mysteries of the Elements” (Elementorum Arcana), but also in Solomon's Temple, and, as pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and even at Notre Dame de Paris, where they can be seen to this day.

[pg 425]

No symbol, even including the Sun, was more complex in its manifold meanings than the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it was male; as, for instance, the Hindû “King Soma,” and the Chaldean Sin; with other nations it was female, the beauteous Goddesses Diana-Luna, Ilithyia, Lucina. With the Tauri, human victims were sacrificed to Artemis, a form of the lunar Goddess; the Cretans called her Dictynna, and the Medes and Persians Anaïtis, as shown by an inscription of Colœ: Ἀρτέμιδι Ἀνάειτι. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste and pure of the virgin Goddesses, Luna-Artemis, to whom Pamphôs was the first to give the surname of Καλλίστη, and of whom Hippolytus wrote: Καλλίστα πολὺ παρθένων.636 This Artemis-Lochia, the Goddess that presided at conception and childbirth, is, in her functions and as the triple Hecate, the Orphic Deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins and pre-Christian Kabalists, and his lunar type. The Goddess Τρίμορφος was the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented by the Moon in each of her three phases; and this interpretation was already that of the Stoics,637 while the Orpheans explained the epithet Τρίμορφος by the three kingdoms of Nature over which she reigned. Jealous, bloodthirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate-Luna is a worthy counterpart of the “jealous God” of the Hebrew prophets.

The whole riddle of the Solar and Lunar worship, as now traced in the churches, hangs indeed on this world-old mystery of lunar phenomena. The correlative forces in the “Queen of Night,” that lie latent for Modern Science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern Adepts, explain well the thousand and one images under which the Moon was represented by the Ancients. It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the Selenic Mysteries were the Ancients than are now our modern Astronomers. The whole Pantheon of the lunar Gods and Goddesses, Nephtys or Neïth, Proserpina, Melitta, Cybele, Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one hand, and Apollo, Dionysus, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc., on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles—those of “Sons” and “Husbands” of their “Mothers”—their identity with the Christian Trinity. In every religious system, the Gods were made to merge their functions, as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the Goddesses were identified as Wife, Mother, and Sister of the male God; the former synthesizing the human attributes as the “Sun, the [pg 426] Giver of Life,” the latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maia, Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced derivation, has come to mean with the Greeks, “mother,” from the root ma (nurse), and even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all these Goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.638 Its primitive meaning, however, was Mâyâ, Durgâ, translated by the Orientalists as “inaccessible,” but meaning in truth the “unreachable,” in the sense of illusion and unreality, as being the source and cause of spells, the personification of illusion.

In religious rites, the Moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a female Goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male God in allegory and symbol, in Occult Philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the initiated Âryans, Chaldeans, Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute is the lyre, and the bearded Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris-Lunus and Thot-Lunus,639 were the Occult potencies of the Moon. But whether male or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the Occult Mystery of Mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good. Her seven phases, in the original Esoteric division, are divided into three astronomical phenomena and four purely psychic phases. That the Moon was not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which the death of the Moon-God—the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance—was allegorized by the Moon standing for the Genius of Evil that, for the time, triumphs over the Light and Life-giving God, the Sun; and all the skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic were required to turn this triumph into a defeat.

It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the Third Race of our Round, the Hermaphrodites, in which the male Moon became sacred, when, after the so-called Fall, the sexes had become separated. Deus Lunus then became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to finally serve, for purposes of sorcery, as a dual power for the Fourth Root Race, the Atlanteans. With the Fifth, our own Race, the Lunar-solar worship divided the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events described æons later in the Mahâbhâratan War, which to the [pg 427] Europeans is the fabulous, to the Hindûs and Occultists the historical, strife between the Sûryavanshas and the Indovanshas. Originating in the dual aspect of the Moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively, it ended in distinct Solar and Lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the Sun was for a very long time feminine and the Moon masculine; the latter notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The Moon was called the “Lord of the Sun,” Bel-Shemesh, before the Shemesh worship. The ignorance of the incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of Occult principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic idol-worship. During that period which is absent from the Mosaic books, viz., from the exile from Eden to the allegorical Flood, the Jews, with the rest of the Semites, worshipped Dayanisi, דינאישי, the “Ruler of Men,” the “Judge,” or the Sun. Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the Sun to become the “Lord God” and “Jehovah” in the Bible, yet the same Bible is full of indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah, the Sun, and Astoreth, the Moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present metaphorical element given to it. God is a “consuming fire,” appears in, and “is encompassed by fire.” It was not only in vision that Ezekiel saw the Jews “worshipping the Sun.”640 The Baal of the Israelites—the Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites—was the identical “Sun-Jehovah,” and he is till now the “King of the Host of Heaven,” the Sun, as much as Astoreth was the “Queen of Heaven,” or the Moon. The “Sun of Righteousness” has only now become a metaphorical expression. But the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called “God.” The very establishment of such worship shows, in its details and rites, that the philosophers who evolved such systems of Nature, subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were acquainted with many facts of a scientific nature. For besides being purely Occult, the rites of Lunar worship were based, as just shown, upon a knowledge of Physiology—quite a modern science with us—Psychology, sacred Mathematics, Geometry and Metrology, in their right applications to symbols and figures, which are but glyphs recording observed natural and scientific facts; in short upon a most minute and profound knowledge of Nature. As we have just said, lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it; and Soma embodies [pg 428] the triple power of the Trimûrti, though it remains unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory that makes Soma, the Moon, produced by the Churning of the Ocean of Life (Space) by the Gods in another Manvantara, that is, in the pre-genetic day of our Planetary System, and the myth, which represents “the Rishis milking the Earth, whose calf was Soma, the Moon,” have a deep cosmographical meaning; for it is neither our Earth which is milked, nor was the Moon which we know the calf.641 Had our wise men of Science known as much of the mysteries of Nature as the ancient Âryans did, they would surely never have imagined that the Moon was projected from the Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in Theogony, the Son becoming his own Father and the Mother generated by the Son, has to be remembered and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the Ancients is to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the Orientalists as simply “the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture!”—as Renouf gravely observes.

The Ancients taught the auto-generation, so to speak, of the Gods: the One Divine Essence, unmanifested, perpetually begetting a Second-Self, manifested, which Second-Self, androgynous in its nature, gives birth, in an immaculate way, to everything macrocosmical and microcosmical in this Universe. This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the Sacred Ten (10), a few pages back.

But our Orientalists, notwithstanding their extreme desire to discover one homogeneous Element in Nature, will not see it. Cramped in their researches by such ignorance, the Âryanists and Egyptologists are constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rougé is unable to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of Ammon-Ra saying to King Amenophes, who is supposed to be Memnon: “Thou art my Son, I have begotten thee.” And, finding the same idea in many a text and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally compelled to exclaim:

For this idea to have entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there must have been in their religion a more or less defined doctrine, indicating as a possible fact that might come to pass, a divine and immaculate incarnation under a human form.

[pg 429]

Precisely. But why throw the explanation on to an impossible prophecy, when the whole secret is explained by the later religion copying the earlier?

This doctrine was universal, nor was it the mind of any one hierogrammatist that evolved it; for the Indian Avatâras are a proof to the contrary. After which, having come “to realize more clearly”642 what the “Divine Father and Son” were with the Egyptians, de Rougé still fails to account for, and to perceive what were the functions attributed to, the feminine Principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it in the Goddess Neïth, of Saïs. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to Cambyses, when introducing that king into the Saïtic temple: “I made known to his Majesty the dignity of Saïs, which is the abode of Neïth, the great [female] producer, genitrix of the Sun, who is the first-born, and who is not begotten, but only brought forth”—and hence is the fruit of an Immaculate Mother.

How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical—for whoever is able to understand and appreciate it—is the real distinction made between the Immaculate Virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception. With the former, the ever-youthful Mother Nature, the antitype of her prototypes, the Sun and Moon, generates and brings forth her “mind-born” Son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male-female deities, fructify the Earth, the microcosmical Mother, and the latter conceives and brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, the “First-born” (primogenitus) is indeed generated, i.e., begotten (genitus, non factus), and positively conceived and brought forth: “Virgo pariet,” explains the Latin Church. Thus does that Church drag down the noble spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making her “of the earth earthy,” degrades the ideal she portrays to the lowest of the anthropomorphic Goddesses of the rabble.

Truly, Neïth, Isis, Diana, etc., by whatever name she was called, was “a demiurgical Goddess, at once visible and invisible, having her place in Heaven, and helping on the generation of species”—the Moon, in short. Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the Moon becomes with the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis,643 and both of these Goddesses are shown suckling Horus. Behold in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh [pg 430] Thotmes, who stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from Karnac. The same Goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne: “The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven”; also the “Morning Star,” and the “Light of the Sea”—Stella Matutina and Lux Maris. All the Lunar Goddesses had a dual aspect; one divine, the other infernal. All were the Virgin Mothers of an immaculately born Son—the Sun. Raoul Rochette shows the Moon-Goddess of the Athenians, Pallas, or Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana, holding her child-son on her lap, invoked in her festivals as Μονογενὴς θεοῦ, the “One Mother of God,” sitting on a lion, and surrounded by twelve personages; in whom the Occultist recognizes the twelve great Gods, and the pious Christian Orientalist the Apostles, or rather the Grecian Pagan prophecy thereof.

They are both right, for the Immaculate Goddess of the Latin Church is a faithful copy of the older Pagan Goddesses; the number of the Apostles is that of the twelve Tribes, and the latter are a personification of the twelve great Gods, and of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Almost every detail in the Christian dogma is borrowed from the Heathens. Semele, the Wife of Jupiter and Mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus, also “carried,” or made to ascend to Heaven after her death, where she presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the “Queen of the World,” or the Universe, πανβασίλεια; “at the name of which,” as at the names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal Goddesses, “all the demons tremble.”644

“Σεμέλην τρέμουσι δαίμονες.” This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced on a stone that was found by Beger, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville tells us, informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an impudent “plagiarism” of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church, perpetrated by the Demon. Whether so, or vice versâ, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is the perfect identity between the archaic copy and the modern original.

Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when they are made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury's remark that “the Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and Venus, and that the Pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in [pg 431] honour of those Goddesses, were in a great measure transferred to the Mother of Christ,”645 the advocate of Rome answers, that such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be, and quite natural.

As the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri, and cylinders hardly posterior to the Deluge, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a first ante-historical [Roman] Catholicism of which our own is but the faithful continuation.... [But while the former was the culmination, the “summumof the impudence of demons and goëtic necromancy” ... the latter is divine.] If in our [Christian] Revelation [l'Apocalypse], Mary, clothed with the Sun and having the Moon under her feet, has no longer anything in common with the humble servant [servante] of Nazareth [sic], it is because she has now become the greatest of theological and cosmological powers in our universe.646

Verily so, since Pindar thus sings of her “assumption”: “She sits at the right hand of her Father [Jupiter], ... and is more powerful than all the other (Angels or) Gods”647—a hymn likewise applied to the Virgin. St. Bernard also, quoted by Cornelius à Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this wise: “The Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him.”648

Again the Virgin is admitted to be the Moon by the same unsophisticated holy man. Being the Lucina of the Church, in childbirth the verse of Virgil, “Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo,” is applied to her. “Like the Moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven,” adds the innocent saint.649

This settles the question. According to such writers as De Mirville, the more similarity there exists between the Pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic form. The unbelieving Scientists and Academicians who think they see in the Latin Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in the Satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are severely taken to task. But then “they believe in nothing and reject even the Nabathean Agriculture as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense,” complains the memorialist. “In their perverted opinion Qû-tâmy's ‘idol of the Moon’ and the statue of the Madonna are one!” A noble Marquis, twenty-five [pg 432] years ago, wrote six huge volumes, or, as he calls them “Mémoires to the French Academy,” with the sole object of proving Roman Catholicism to be an inspired and revealed faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the entire Ancient World, ever since the Deluge, had, with the help of the Devil, been systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the future Holy Church, which was to be born ages later. What would that faithful son of Rome have said had he heard his co-religionist, M. Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British Museum, declaring in one of his learned lectures, that neither “Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt”?

But perhaps M. Renouf intended to say that it was the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Âryans, who borrowed their ideas from the Latin Church? And if so, why, in the name of logic, do the Papists reject the additional information which the Occultists may give them on Moon-worship, since it all tends to show that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church is as old as the world—of Sabæanism and Astrolatry?

The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic Astrolatry, or the symbolical worship of Sun and Moon, a worship identical with that of the Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the “Sun-worship” of the Zoroastrians, is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption by the Latin Church of such symbols as Water, Fire, Sun, Moon and Stars, and many others, is simply a continuation by the early Christians of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus, Odin got his wisdom, power, and knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline Waters of which increased his knowledge daily. “Mimir drew the highest knowledge from the fountain, because the World was born of Water; hence primeval Wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element.” The eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be “the Sun, which enlightens and penetrates all things; his other eye being the Moon, whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks into the Ocean.”650 But it is something more than this. Loki, the Fire-God, is said to have hidden in the Water, as well as in the Moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he found therein. This belief that the Fire finds refuge in the Water was not limited to [pg 433] the old Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally adopted by the early Christians, who symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “cloven tongues like as of fire”—the breath of the Father-Sun. This Fire descends also into the Water, or the Sea—Mare, Mary. The Dove was the symbol of the Soul with several nations; it was sacred to Venus, the Goddess born from the sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or Holy Spirit.

One of the most occult chapters in the Book of the Dead is that entitled, “The transformation into the God giving Light to the Path of Darkness,” wherein “Woman-Light of the Shadow” serves Thot in his retreat in the Moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested Logos of its light side; the concealed Deity or “Dark Wisdom” when he is supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the Moon calls herself repeatedly: “The Light which shineth in Darkness,” the “Woman-Light.” Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin-Mother Goddesses. As the wicked “evil” Spirits warred against the Moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without, however, being able to prevail against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the Moon. Hence, also, the Moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan Theogonies with the Dragon, her eternal enemy. The Virgin, or Madonna, stands on the mythical Satan thus symbolized, who lies crushed and powerless, under her feet. This, because the head and tail of the Dragon, which, to this day in Eastern Astronomy, represent the ascending and descending nodes of the Moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the Babe in his Virgin-Mother's arms. As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection:

All such symbols figured their own facts from the first, and did not pre-figure others of a totally different order. The iconography [and dogmas, too] had survived in Rome from a period remotely pre-Christian. There was neither forgery nor interpolation of types; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a perversion of its meaning.

[pg 434]

Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.

Object of horror or of adoration, men have for the serpent an implacable hatred, or prostrate themselves before its genius. Lie calls it, Prudence claims it, Envy carries it in its heart, and Eloquence on its caduceus. In Hell it arms the whip of the Furies; in Heaven Eternity makes of it its symbol.

De Châteaubriand.

The Ophites asserted that there were several kinds of Genii, from God to man; that the relative superiority of these was decided by the degree of Light that was accorded to each; and they maintained that the Serpent had to be constantly called upon and to be thanked for the signal service it had rendered humanity. For it taught Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his Being immensely by the learning and wisdom he would thus acquire. Such was the exoteric reason given.

It is easy to see whence is the primal idea of the dual, Janus-like character of the Serpent—the good and the bad. This symbol is one of the most ancient, because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the mammal. Hence the belief, or rather the superstition, of the savage tribes who think that the souls of their ancestors live under this form, and the general association of the Serpent with the Tree. The legends about the various meanings it represents are numberless; but, as most of them are allegorical, they have now passed into the class of fables based on ignorance and dark superstition. For instance, when Philostratus narrates that the natives of India and Arabia fed on the heart and liver of Serpents in order to learn the language of all the animals, the Serpent being credited with that faculty, he certainly never meant his words to be accepted literally.651 As will be found more than once as we proceed, Serpent and Dragon were names given [pg 435] to the Wise Ones, the Initiated Adepts of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured or assimilated by their followers, whence the allegory. When the Scandinavian Sigurd is fabled to have roasted the heart of Fafnir, the Dragon, whom he had slain, and thence to have become the wisest of men, the meaning is the same. Sigurd had become learned in the runes and magical charms; he had received the “Word” from an Initiate of the name of Fafnir, or from a sorcerer, after which the latter died, as do many, after “passing the word.” Epiphanius lets out a secret of the Gnostics in trying to expose their “heresies.” The Gnostic Ophites, he says, had a reason for honouring the Serpent: it was because he taught the primeval men the Mysteries.652 Verily so; but they did not have Adam and Eve in the Garden in their minds when teaching this dogma, but simply that which is stated above. The Nâgas of the Hindû and Tibetan Adepts were human Nâgas (Serpents), not reptiles. Moreover, the Serpent has ever been the type of consecutive or serial rejuvenation, of Immortality and Time.

The numerous and extremely interesting readings, the interpretations and facts about Serpent worship, given in Mr. Gerald Massey's Natural Genesis, are very ingenious and scientifically correct. But they are far from covering the whole of the meanings implied. They divulge only the astronomical and physiological mysteries, with the addition of some cosmic phenomena. On the lowest plane of materiality, the Serpent was, no doubt, the “great emblem of Mystery in the Mysteries,” and was, very likely, “adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and self-renewal.” It was so, however, only with regard to mysteries concerning terrestrial animal life, for as the symbol of “re-clothing and re-birth in the [universal] mysteries,” its “final phase,”653 or shall we rather say its incipient and culminating phases, was not of this plane. These phases were generated in the pure realm of Ideal Light, and having accomplished the round of the whole cycle of adaptations and symbolism, the Mysteries returned from whence they had come, into the essence of immaterial causality. They belonged to the highest Gnôsis. And surely this could have never obtained its name and fame solely on account of its penetration into physiological and especially feminine functions!

As a symbol, the Serpent had as many aspects and occult meanings as the Tree itself; the “Tree of Life,” with which it was emblematically [pg 436] and almost indissolubly connected. Whether viewed as a metaphysical or a physical symbol, the Tree and Serpent, jointly, or separately, have never been so degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this our age of the breaking of idols, not for truth's sake, but to glorify the most gross matter. The revelations and interpretations in General Forlong's Rivers of Life would have astounded the worshippers of the Tree and Serpent in the days of archaic Chaldean and Egyptian wisdom; and even the early Shaivas would have recoiled in horror at the theories and suggestions of the author of the said work. “The notion of Payne Knight and Inman that the Cross or Tau is simply a copy of the male organs in a triadic form is radically false,” writes Mr. G. Massey, who proves what he says. But this is a statement that could be as justly applied to almost all the modern interpretations of ancient symbols. The Natural Genesis, a monumental work of research and thought, the most complete on that subject that has ever been published, covering as it does a wider field, and explaining much more than all the Symbologists who have hitherto written, does not yet go beyond the “psycho-theistic” stage of ancient thought. Nor were Payne Knight and Inman altogether wrong; except in entirely failing to see that their interpretations of the Tree of Life, as the Cross and Phallus, fitted the symbol only in the lowest and latest stage of the evolutionary development of the idea of the Giver of Life. It was the last and the grossest physical transformation of Nature, in animal, insect, bird and even plant; for bi-une, creative magnetism, in the form of the attraction of contraries, or sexual polarization, acts in the constitution of reptile and bird as it does in that of man. Moreover, the modern Symbologists and Orientalists, from first to last, being ignorant of the real Mysteries revealed by Occultism, can necessarily see but this last stage. If told that this mode of procreation, which the whole world of being has now in common on this Earth, is but a passing phase, a physical means of furnishing the conditions to and producing the phenomena of life, and that it will alter with this and disappear with the next Root-Race, they would laugh at such a superstitious and unscientific idea. But the most learned Occultists assert this because they know it. The universe of living beings, of all those which procreate their species, is the living witness to the various modes of procreation in the evolution of animal and human species and races; and the Naturalist ought to sense this truth intuitionally, even though he is yet unable to demonstrate [pg 437] it. How could he, indeed, with the present modes of thought! The landmarks of the archaic history of the Past are few and scarce, and those that men of Science come across are mistaken for finger-posts of our little era. Even so-called “universal (?) history” embraces but a tiny field in the almost boundless space of the unexplored regions of our latest, Fifth Root-Race. Hence, every fresh sign-post, every new glyph of the hoary Past that is discovered, is added to the old stock of information, to be interpreted on the same lines of preëxisting conceptions, and without any reference to the special cycle of thought which that particular glyph may belong to. How can Truth ever come to light if this method is never changed!

Thus, in the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal Being, the Tree and Serpent were divine imagery, truly. The Tree was reversed, and its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of the Rootless Root of All-Being. Its trunk grew and developed; crossing the planes of the Plerôma, it shot out crossways its luxuriant branches, first on the plane of hardly differentiated matter, and then downward till they touched the terrestrial plane. Thus, the Ashvattha Tree of Life and Being, whose destruction alone leads to immortality, is said in the Bhagavadgîtâ to grow with its roots above and its branches below.654 The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the Logos; but one has to go beyond those roots to unite oneself with Krishna, who, says Arjuna, is “greater than Brahman, and First Cause ... the indestructible, that which is, that which is not, and what is beyond them.”655 Its boughs are Hiranyagarbha (Brahmâ or Brahman in its highest manifestations, say Shrîdhara Svâmin and Madhusûdana), the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas. The Vedas are its leaves. He only who goes beyond the roots shall never return; that is to say, shall reïncarnate no more during this Age of Brahmâ.

It is only when its pure boughs had touched the terrestrial mud of the Garden of Eden, of our Adamic Race, that this Tree became soiled by the contact and lost its pristine purity; and that the Serpent of Eternity, the Heaven-Born Logos, was finally degraded. In days of old, of the Divine Dynasties on Earth, the now dreaded reptile was regarded as the first beam of light that radiated from the abyss of Divine Mystery. Various were the forms which it was made to assume, and numerous the natural symbols adapted to it, as it crossed the æons of Time; as from Infinite Time (Kâla) itself it fell into the space and [pg 438] time evolved out of human speculation. These forms were cosmic and astronomical, theistic and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon and the Southern Cross, the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the Hindû-Buddhist Dragon, which ever threatens, yet never swallows the Sun during its eclipses. Till then, the Tree remained ever green, for it was sprinkled by the Waters of Life; the Great Dragon remained ever divine, so long as it was kept within the precincts of the sidereal fields. But the Tree grew and its lower boughs at last touched the Infernal Regions—our Earth. Then the Great Serpent Nidhögg—he who devours the corpses of the evil-doers in the “Hall of Misery” (human life), so soon as they are plunged into Hwergelmir, the roaring cauldron (of human passions)—gnawed the reversed World-Tree. The worms of materiality covered the once healthy and mighty roots, and are now ascending higher and higher along the trunk; while the Midgard Snake coiled at the bottom of the Seas, encircles the Earth, and, through its venomous breath, makes her powerless to defend herself.

The Dragons and Serpents of Antiquity are all seven-headed—one head for each Race, and “every head with seven hairs on it,” as the allegory has it. Aye, from Ananta, the Serpent of Eternity, which carries Vishnu through the Manvantara; from the original primordial Shesha, whose seven heads become “one thousand heads” in the Purânic fancy, down to the seven-headed Akkadian Serpent. This typifies the Seven Principles throughout Nature and in man; the highest or middle head being the seventh. It is not of the Mosaic, Jewish Sabbath that Philo speaks, in his Creation of the World, when saying that the world was completed “according to the perfect nature of number 6.” For:

When that Reason [Nous] which is holy in accordance with the number 7, has entered the soul [the living body rather], the number 6 is thus arrested and all the mortal things which that number makes.

And again:

Number 7 is the festival day of all the earth, the birthday of the world. I know not whether any one would be able to celebrate the number 7 in adequate terms.656

The author of The Natural Genesis thinks that:

The septenary of stars seen in the Great Bear [the Saptarshis] and seven-headed Dragon furnished a visible origin for the symbolic seven of time above. The goddess of the seven stars was the mother of time, as Kep; whence Kepti and Sebti [pg 439]for the two times and number 7. So this is the star of the Seven by name. Sevekh (Kronus), the son of the goddess, has the name of the seven or seventh. So has Sefekh Abu who builds the house on high, as Wisdom (Sophia) built hers with seven pillars.... The primary kronotypes were seven, and thus the beginning of time in heaven is based on the number and the name of seven, on account of the starry demonstrators. The seven stars as they turned round annually kept pointing, as it were, with the forefinger of the right hand, and describing a circle in the upper and lower heaven.657 The number 7 naturally suggested a measure by seven, that led to what may be termed Sevening, and to the marking and mapping out of the circle in seven corresponding divisions which were assigned to the seven great constellations; and thus was formed the celestial heptanomis of Egypt in the heavens.

When the stellar heptanomis was broken up and divided into four quarters, it was multiplied by four, and the twenty-eight signs took the place of the primary seven constellations; the lunar zodiac of twenty-eight signs being the registered result of reckoning twenty-eight days to the moon, or a lunar month.658 In the Chinese arrangement, the four sevens are given to four Genii that preside over the four cardinal points,659 or rather the seven northern constellations make up the Black Warrior; the seven eastern (Chinese autumn) constitute the White Tiger; the seven southern are the Vermilion Bird; and the seven western (called vernal) are the Azure Dragon. Each of these four spirits presides over its heptanomis during one lunar week. The genitrix of the first heptanomis (Typhon of the seven stars) now took a lunar character.... In this phase we find the goddess Sefekh, whose name signifies number 7, is the feminine word, or logos in place of the mother of time, who was the earlier Word, as goddess of the Seven Stars.660

The author shows that it was the Goddess of the Great Bear and Mother of Time who was in Egypt from the earliest times the “Living Word,” and that Sevekh-Kronus, whose type was the Crocodile-Dragon, the pre-planetary form of Saturn, was called her son and consort; he was her Word-Logos.661

The above is quite plain, but it was not the knowledge of astronomy only that led the Ancients to the process of Sevening. The primal cause goes far deeper and will be explained in its place.

The above quotations are no digressions. They are brought forward as showing (a) the reason why a full Initiate was called a Dragon, a Snake, a Nâga; and (b) that our septenary division was used by the priests of the earliest dynasties in Egypt, for the same reason, and on [pg 440] the same basis, as by us. This needs further elucidation, however. As already stated, what Mr. Gerald Massey calls the Four Genii of the four cardinal points; and the Chinese, the Black Warrior, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, and Azure Dragon, are called in the Secret Books, the “Four Hidden Dragons of Wisdom” and the “Celestial Nâgas.” Now, the seven-headed or septenary Dragon-Logos is shown to have, in course of time, been split up, so to speak, into four heptanomic parts or twenty-eight portions. Each week has a distinct Occult character in the lunar month; each day of the twenty-eight has its special characteristics; for each of the twelve constellations, whether separately or in combination with other signs, has an Occult influence either for good or for evil. This represents the sum of knowledge that men can acquire on this earth; yet few are those who acquire it, and still fewer are the wise men who get to the root of knowledge symbolized by the great Root-Dragon, the Spiritual Logos of these visible signs. But those who do, receive the name of Dragons, and they are the “Arhats of the Four Truths of the Twenty-eight Faculties,” or attributes, and have always been so called.

The Alexandrian Neo-Platonists asserted that to become real Chaldees or Magi, one had to master the science or knowledge of the periods of the Seven Rectors of the World, in whom is all wisdom. And Jamblichus is credited with another version, which does not, however, alter the meaning, for he says:

The Assyrians have not only preserved the records of seven and twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.662

The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage, point to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the Serpents. They are “charmers.” They hypnotize the bird with their eye, and man himself very often does not overcome their fascinating influence; therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.

The Crocodile is the Egyptian Dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the Sun in a Ship as its pilot, this ship being carried along by a Crocodile, “to show the motion of the Sun in the Moist (Space).”663 The Crocodile was, moreover, the symbol of Lower Egypt herself, the Lower being the more swampy of the two [pg 441] countries. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the Sun in the Ship on the Ether of Space meant that the Hermetic Matter is the principle, or basis, of Gold, or again the philosophical Sun; the Water, within which the Crocodile is swimming, is that Water, or Matter, made liquid; the Ship herself, finally, representing the Vessel of Nature, in which the Sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle, acts as a pilot, because it is the Sun which conducts the work by his action upon the Moist or Mercury. The above is only for the Alchemists.

The Serpent became the type and symbol of evil, and of the Devil, only during the Middle Ages. The early Christians as well as the Ophite Gnostics, had their dual Logos: the Good and the Bad Serpent, the Agathodæmon and the Kakodæmon. This is demonstrated by the writings of Marcus, Valentinus, and many others, and especially in Pistis-Sophia—certainly a document of the earliest centuries of Christianity. On the marble sarcophagus of a tomb, discovered in 1852 near the Porta Pia, one sees the scene of the adoration of the Magi, “or else,” remarks the late C. W. King, in The Gnostics and their Remains, “the prototype of that scene, the ‘Birth of the New Sun’.” The mosaic floor exhibited a curious design which might have represented either Isis suckling the babe Harpocrates, or the Madonna nursing the infant Jesus. In the smaller sarcophagi that surrounded the larger one, many leaden plates rolled like scrolls were found, eleven of which can still be deciphered. The contents of these ought to be regarded as final proof of a much-vexed question, for they show that either the early Christians, up to the VIth Century, were bonâ fide Pagans, or that dogmatic Christianity was borrowed wholesale, and passed in full into the Christian Church—Sun, Tree, Serpent, Crocodile and all.

On the first is seen Anubis ... holding out a scroll; at his feet are two female busts: below all are two serpents entwined about ... a corpse swathed up like a mummy. In the second scroll ... is Anubis, holding out a cross, the “Sign of Life.” Under his feet lies the corpse encircled in the numerous folds of a huge serpent, the Agathodæmon, guardian of the deceased.... In the third scroll ... the same Anubis bears on his arm an oblong object, ... held so as to convert the outline of the figure into a complete Latin cross. ... At the god's foot is a rhomboid, the Egyptian “Egg of the World,” towards which crawls a serpent coiled into a circle.... Under the ... busts ... is the letter ω, repeated seven times in a line, reminding one of the “Names.”... Very remarkable also is the line of characters, apparently Palmyrene, upon [pg 442]the legs of the first Anubis. As for the figure of the serpent, supposing these talismans to emanate not from the Isiac but the newer Ophite creed, it may well stand for that “True and perfect Serpent,” who “leads forth the souls of all that put their trust in him out of the Egypt of the body, and through the Red Sea of Death into the Land of Promise, saving them on their way from the Serpents of the Wilderness, that is, from the Rulers of the Stars.”664

And this “true and perfect Serpent” is the seven-lettered God who is now credited with being Jehovah, and Jesus one with him. To this seven-vowelled God the candidate for Initiation is sent by the “First Mystery,” in the Pistis-Sophia, a work earlier than St. John's Revelation, and evidently of the same school. “The (Serpent of the) Seven Thunders uttered these seven vowels,” but “seal up those things which the Seven Thunders uttered, and write them not,” says Revelation. “Do ye seek after these mysteries?”—inquires Jesus in Pistis-Sophia. “No mystery is more excellent than they [the seven vowels]; for they shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights”—i.e., true Wisdom. “Nothing, therefore, is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the mystery of the Seven Vowels and their forty and nine Powers, and the numbers thereof.”

In India, it was the mystery of the Seven Fires and their Forty-nine Fires or aspects, or “the numbers thereof.”

These Seven Vowels are represented by the Svastika signs on the crowns of the seven heads of the Serpent of Eternity, in India, among Esoteric “Buddhists,” in Egypt, in Chaldæa, etc., and among the Initiates of every other country. They are the Seven Zones of post mortem ascent, in the Hermetic writings, in each of which the “Mortal” leaves one of his Souls, or Principles; until arrived on the plane above all Zones, he remains as the great Formless Serpent of Absolute Wisdom, or the Deity Itself. The seven-headed Serpent has more than one signification in the arcane teachings. It is the seven-headed Draco, each of whose heads is a star of the Lesser Bear; but it was also, and preëminently, the Serpent of Darkness, inconceivable and incomprehensible, whose seven heads were the seven Logoi, the reflections of the one and first-manifested Light—the Universal Logos.

[pg 443]

Section XI. Demon est Deus Inversus.

This symbolical sentence, in its many-sided forms, is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions, or rather theologies, and especially so in the light of Christianity. Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan. As an “Adversary,” the opposing Power required by the equilibrium and harmony of things in Nature, as Shadow is required to make still brighter the Eight, as Night to bring into greater relief the Day, and as Cold to make one appreciate the more the comfort of Heat, so has Satan ever existed. Homogeneity is one and indivisible. But if the homogeneous One and Absolute is no mere figure of speech, and if Heterogeneity, in its dualistic aspect, is its offspring, its bifurcous shadow or reflection, then even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil. If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in Nature and its Universe, whence comes Evil or D'Evil if not from the same Golden Womb of the Absolute? Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodæmon and Kakodæmon, as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!

Having to trace the origin of the idea to the very beginnings of the human mind, it is but just, meanwhile, to give his due even to the proverbial Devil. Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely bad “God of evil.” Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born from the same mother—Nature; so soon as that thought ceased to be archaic, Wisdom passed into Philosophy. In the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; later their types were chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical cosmic phenomena—the Day and [pg 444] Night, or the Sun and Moon. Then the Hosts of the Solar and Lunar Deities were made to represent them, and the Dragon of Darkness was contrasted with the Dragon of Light. The Host of Satan is a Son of God, no less than the Host of the B'ne Alhim, the Children of God who came to “present themselves before the Lord,” their Father.665 “The Sons of God” become the “Fallen Angels” only after perceiving that the daughters of men were fair.666 In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are among the earliest and the brightest Gods, and become Asuras only when dethroned by Brâhmanical fancy, Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a “one living personal God,” had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity. A screen was needed; a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy and goodness were claimed. This was the first Karmic effect of abandoning a philosophical and logical Pantheism, to build, as a prop for lazy man, “a merciful Father in Heaven,” whose daily and hourly actions, as Natura Naturans, the “comely Mother but stone cold,” belie the assumption. This led to the primal twins, Osiris-Typhon, Ormazd-Ahriman, and finally Cain-Abel and the tutti quanti of contraries.

Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God,” the Creator, ended by being made its author. Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly by saying:

Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, in order to show that she is only his image.

The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric ages, the more philosophical does the prototypic figure of the later Satan appear. The first “Adversary,” in individual human form, that one meets with in old Purânic literature, is one of her greatest Rishis and Yogis—Nârada, surnamed the “Strife-maker.”

And he is a Brahmaputra, a son of Brahmâ, the male. But of him later on. Who the great “Deceiver” really is, one can ascertain by searching for him, with open eyes and an unprejudiced mind, in every old Cosmogony and Scripture.

It is the anthropomorphized Demiurge, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, when separated from the collective Hosts of his Fellow-Creators, whom, so to speak, he represents and synthesizes. It is now the God of Theologies. “The wish is father to the thought.” Once upon a [pg 445] time, a philosophical symbol left to perverse human fancy; afterwards, fashioned into a fiendish, deceiving, cunning, and jealous God.

As the Dragons and other Fallen Angels are described in other parts of this work, a few words upon the much-slandered Satan will be sufficient. The student will do well to remember that, with every people, except the Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the opposite aspect, in the dual nature of the so-called Creator. This is only natural. One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from Evil. As there is far more Evil than Good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include Evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to Absoluteness. The Ancients understood this so well that their philosophers, now followed by the Kabalists, defined Evil as the “lining” of God or Good; Demon est Deus inversus, being a very old adage. Indeed, Evil is but an antagonizing blind force in Nature; it is reäction, opposition, and contrast—evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se; only the Shadow of Light, without which Light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If Evil disappeared, Good would disappear along with it from Earth. The “Old Dragon” was pure Spirit before he became Matter, passive before he became active. In the Syro-Chaldean Magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac in the sign of the Androgyne Virgo-Scorpio. Before its fall on earth the Serpent was Ophis-Christos, and after its fall it became Ophiomorphos-Chrestos. Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of Evil as a Force, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which it could never have otherwise. There would be no Life possible (in the mâyâvic sense) without Death; no regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will, and his aspiring towards that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light. Good is infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other. Few are those Theists, believers in a Personal God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God; or who, confounding both, do not believe they have a right to pray to their idol, asking its help and protection for the exercise of and immunity for [pg 446] their evil and cruel deeds. “Lead us not into temptation” is addressed daily to “our Father, in Heaven,” and not to the Devil, by millions of Christian hearts. This they do, repeating the very words put into the mouth of their Saviour, and yet do not give one thought to the fact that their meaning is contradicted point blank by James, “the brother of the Lord”:

Let do man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.667

Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches us, on the authority of Christ, that it is God who does so? Open any pious volume in which the word “temptation” is defined in its theological sense, and forthwith you find two definitions:

(1) Those afflictions and troubles whereby God tries his people; (2) Those means and enticements which the Devil makes use of to ensnare and allure mankind.668

Accepted literally, the teachings of Christ and James contradict each other, and what dogma can reconcile the two if the Occult meaning is rejected?

Between the alternative allurements, wise will be that philosopher who will be able to decide where God disappears to make room for the Devil! Therefore, when we read that “the Devil is a liar and the father of it,” that is an incarnate lie, and are also told in the same breath that Satan, the Devil, was a Son of God and the most beautiful of his Archangels, rather than believe that Father and Son are a gigantic, personified and eternal Lie, we prefer to turn to Pantheism and to Pagan philosophy for information.

Once that the key to Genesis is in our hands, the scientific and symbolical Kabalah unveils the secret. The Great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the “Lord God” are identical, and so are Jehovah and Cain—that Cain who is referred to in Theology as the “murderer” and the Liar to God! Jehovah tempts the King of Israel to number the people, and Satan tempts him to do the same in another place. Jehovah turns into the Fiery Serpents to bite those he is displeased with; and Jehovah informs the Brazen Serpent that heals them.

These short, and seemingly contradictory, statements in the Old Testament—contradictory because the two Powers are separated instead of being regarded as the two faces of one and the same thing—are the echoes, distorted out of recognition by exotericism and theology, of the universal and philosophical dogmas in Nature, so well understood [pg 447] by the primitive Sages. We find the same groundwork in several personifications in the Purânas, only far more ample and philosophically suggestive.

Thus Pulastya, a “Son of God,” one of the first progeny, is made the progenitor of Demons, the Râkshasas, the tempters and the devourers of men. Pishâchâ, a female Demon, is a daughter of Daksha, a “Son of God” too, and a God, and the mother of all the Pishâchas.669 The Demons, so-called in the Purânas, are very extraordinary Devils when judged from the standpoint of European and orthodox views, since all of them, Dânavas, Daityas, Pishâchas, and Râkshasas, are represented as extremely pious, following the precepts of the Vedas, some of them even being great Yogins. But they oppose the clergy and ritualism, sacrifices and forms, just as the head Yogins do to this day in India, and are no less respected for it, though they are permitted to follow neither caste nor ritual; hence all those Purânic Giants and Titans are called Devils. The missionaries, ever on the watch to show, if they can, that the Hindû traditions are nothing better than a reflection of the Jewish Bible, have evolved a whole romance on the alleged identity of Pulastya with Cain, and of the Râkshasas with the Cainites, the “Accursed,” the cause of the “Noachian” Deluge. (See the work of Abbé Gorresio, who “etymologizes” Pulastya's name as meaning the “rejected,” hence Cain, if you please). Pulastya dwells in Kedara, he says, which means a “dug-up place,” a “mine,” and Cain is shown, in tradition and the Bible, as the first worker in metals and a miner thereof!

While it is very probable that the Gibborim, or Giants, of the Bible are the Râkshasas of the Hindûs, it is still more certain that both are Atlanteans, and belong to the submerged races. However it may be, no Satan could be more persistent in slandering his enemy, or more spiteful in his hatred, than the Christian Theologians are in cursing him as the father of every evil. Compare their vituperation and their opinions about the Devil with the philosophical views of the Purânic Sages and their Christ-like mansuetude. When Parâshara, whose father was devoured by a Râkshasa, was preparing himself to destroy, by magic arts, the whole race, his grandsire, Vasishtha, after showing the irate Sage, on his own confession, that there is Evil and Karma, but no “evil Spirits” speaks the following suggestive words:

Let thy wrath be appeased: the Râkshasas are not culpable; thy father's death [pg 448] was the work of Destiny [Karma]. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains ... and prevents the attainment ... of emancipation. The ... sages shun wrath: be not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of those unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed; let this thy sacrifice cease. Mercy is the might of the righteous.670

Thus, every such “sacrifice” or prayer to God for help is no better than an act of Black Magic. That which Parâshara prayed for, was the destruction of the Spirits of Darkness, for his personal revenge. He is called a Pagan, and the Christians have doomed him, as such, to Eternal Hell. Yet, in what respect is the prayer of sovereigns and generals, who pray before every battle for the destruction of their enemy, any better? Such a prayer is in every case Black Magic of the worst kind, concealed like a demon “Mr. Hyde” under a sanctimonious “Dr. Jekyll.”

In human nature, evil denotes only the polarity of Matter and Spirit, a “struggle for life” between the two manifested Principles in Space and Time, which Principles are one per se, inasmuch as they are rooted in the Absolute. In Cosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which, being mutually inter-dependent, are necessary to each other, “in order that both should live.” If one should be arrested, the action of the other would become immediately self-destructive.

Since the personification called Satan has been amply analyzed from its triple aspect, in the Old Testament, Christian Theology and the ancient Gentile attitude of thought, those who would learn more of the subject are referred to Isis Unveiled671 and the Second Part of Volume II of the present work. The subject is here touched upon, and fresh explanations are attempted, for a very good reason. Before we can approach the evolution of Physical and Divine Man, we have first to master the idea of Cyclic Evolution, to acquaint ourselves with the philosophies and beliefs of the four Races which preceded our present Race, and to learn what were the ideas of those Titans and Giants—Giants, verily, mentally, as well as physically. The whole of antiquity was imbued with that philosophy which teaches the involution of Spirit into Matter, the progressive, downward cyclic descent, or active, self-conscious evolution. The Alexandrian Gnostics have sufficiently [pg 449] divulged the secrets of Initiations, and their records are full of the “falling down of the Æons,” in their double qualification of Angelic Beings and Periods; the one the natural evolution of the other. On the other hand, Oriental traditions on both sides of the “Black Water,” the Oceans that separate the two “Easts,” are equally full of allegories about the downfall of the Plerôma, or that of the Gods and Devas. One and all, they allegorized and explained the Fall as the desire to learn and acquire knowledge—the desire to know. This is the natural sequence of mental evolution, the Spiritual becoming transmuted into the Material or Physical. The same law of descent into Materiality and of reäscent into Spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the reäction having only stopped just now, in our own special Sub-race.

That which was allegorized in Pymander, perhaps ten millenniums ago, for a triune mode of interpretation, and intended for a record of an astronomical, anthropological, and even alchemical fact, namely, the allegory of the Seven Rectors breaking through the Seven Circles of Fire, was dwarfed into one material and anthropomorphic interpretation—the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels. The multivocal, profoundly philosophical narrative, under its poetical form of the “Marriage of Heaven with Earth,” the love of Nature for Divine Form, and the Heavenly Man enraptured with his own beauty mirrored in Nature, that is to say, Spirit attracted into Matter, has now become, under theological handling, the Seven Rectors disobeying Jehovah, self-admiration generating Satanic pride, followed by their Fall, Jehovah permitting no worship to be lost save upon himself. In short, the beautiful Planet-Angels, the glorious Cyclic Æons of the Ancients, have become synthesized in their most orthodox shape in Samael, the Chief of the Demons in the Talmud, “that Great Serpent with Twelve Wings that draws down after himself, in his Fall, the Solar System, or the Titans.” But Schemal—the alter ego and the Sabean type of Samael—in his philosophical and esoteric aspect, meant the “Year,” in its astrological evil aspect, with its twelve months or “Wings” of unavoidable evils, in Nature. In Esoteric Theogony both Schemal and Samael represented a particular divinity.672 With the Kabalists they are the “Spirit of the Earth,” the Personal God that governs it, and therefore de facto identical with Jehovah. For the Talmudists themselves admit that Samael is a god-name of one of the seven Elohim. The [pg 450] Kabalists, moreover, show the two, Schemal and Samael, as a symbolical form of Saturn, Cronus; the “Twelve Wings” standing for the twelve months, and the symbol in its collectivity representing a racial cycle. Jehovah and Saturn are also glyphically identical.

This leads, in its turn, to a very curious deduction from a Roman Catholic dogma. Many renowned writers belonging to the Latin Church admit that a difference exists, and should be made, between the Uranian Titans, the antediluvian Giants, who were also Titans, and those post-diluvian Giants, in whom the Roman Catholics persist in seeing the descendants of the mythical Ham. In clearer words, there is a difference to be made between the cosmic, primordial opposing Forces, guided by Cyclic Law, the Atlantean human Giants, and the post-diluvian great Adepts, whether of the Right or the Left-hand. At the same time they show that Michael, “the generalissimo of the fighting Celestial Host, the bodyguard of Jehovah,” as it would seem, according to de Mirville, is also a Titan, only with the adjective of “divine” before the cognomen. Thus those “Uranides” who are called everywhere “Divine Titans”—and who, having rebelled against Cronus, or Saturn, are therefore also shown to be the enemies of Samael, also one of the Elohim, and synonymous with Jehovah in his collectivity—are identical with Michael and his Host. In short, the rôles are reversed, all the combatants are confused, and no student is able to distinguish clearly which is which. Esoteric explanation may, however, bring some order into this confusion, in which Jehovah becomes Saturn, and Michael and his Army, Satan and the Rebellious Angels, owing to the indiscreet endeavours of the too faithful zealots to see a Devil in every Pagan God. The true meaning is far more philosophical, and the legend of the first “Fall” of the Angels assumes a scientific colouring when correctly understood.

Cronus stands for endless, and hence immovable Duration, without beginning, without end, beyond divided Time and beyond Space. Those Angels, Genii, or Devas, who were born to act in space and time, that is, to break through the Seven Circles of the super-spiritual planes into the phenomenal, or circumscribed, super-terrestrial regions, are said allegorically to have rebelled against Cronus, and fought the Lion who was then the one living and highest God. When Cronus, in his turn, is represented as mutilating Uranus, his father, the meaning of the allegory is very simple. Absolute Time is made to become the finite and conditioned; a portion is robbed from the whole, thus [pg 451] showing that Saturn, the Father of the Gods, has been transformed from Eternal Duration into a limited period. Cronus with his scythe cuts down even the longest and, to us, seemingly endless cycles, which, for all that, are limited in Eternity, and with the same scythe destroys the mightiest rebels. Aye, not one will escape the scythe of Time! Praise the God or Gods, or flout one or both, that scythe will not tremble one millionth of a second in its ascending or descending course.

The Titans of Hesiod's Theogony were copied in Greece from the Suras and Asuras of India. These Hesiodic Titans, the Uranides, which were once upon a time numbered as only six, have been recently discovered, in an old fragment relating to the Greek myth, to be seven, the seventh being called Phoreg. Thus their identity with the Seven Rectors is fully demonstrated. The origin of the War in Heaven and the Fall has, in our mind, to be traced unavoidably to India, and perhaps far earlier than the Purânic accounts thereof. For the Târakâmaya was in a later age, and there are accounts of three distinct Wars to be traced in almost every Cosmogony.

The first War happened in the night of time, between the Gods and (A)-suras, and lasted for the period of one Divine Year.673 On this occasion the Deities were defeated by the Daityas, under the leadership of Hrâda. But afterwards, owing to a device of Vishnu, to whom the conquered Gods applied for help, the latter defeated the Asuras. In the Vishnu Purâna no interval is found between the two Wars. In the Esoteric Doctrine, however, one War takes place before the building of the Solar System; another, on Earth, at the “creation” of man; and a [pg 452] third War is mentioned as taking place at the close of the Fourth Race, between its Adepts and those of the Fifth Race; that is, between the Initiates of the “Sacred Island” and the Sorcerers of Atlantis. We shall notice the first contest, as recounted by Parâshara, and endeavour to separate the two accounts, which are purposely blended together.

It is there stated that as the Daityas and Asuras were engaged in the duties of their respective Orders (Varnas) and followed the paths prescribed by holy writ, practising also religious penance—a queer employment for Demons if they are identical with our Devils, as it is claimed—it was impossible for the Gods to destroy them. The prayers addressed by the Gods to Vishnu are curious, as showing the ideas involved in an anthropomorphic Deity. Having, after their defeat, “fled to the northern shore of the Milky Ocean [Atlantic Ocean],”674 the discomfited Gods address many supplications “to the first of Beings, the divine Vishnu,” and among others the following:

Glory to thee, who art one with the Saints, whose perfect nature is ever blessed, and traverses, unobstructed, all permeable elements. Glory to thee, who art one with the Serpent-Race, double-tongued, impetuous, cruel, insatiate of enjoyment and abounding with wealth.... Glory to thee, ... O Lord, who hast neither colour nor extension, nor bulk (ghana), nor any predicable qualities, and whose essence (rûpa), purest of the pure, is appreciable only by holy Paramarshis [the greatest of Sages or Rishis]. We bow to thee, in the nature of Brahma, uncreated, undecaying (avyaya); who art in our bodies, and in all other bodies, and in all living creatures; and beside whom nothing exists. We glorify that Vâsudeva, the lord (of all), who is without soil, the seed of all things, exempt from dissolution, unborn, eternal; being, in essence, Paramapadâtmavat [beyond the condition of Spirit], and, in substance (rûpa), the whole of this (Universe).675

The above is quoted as an illustration of the vast field offered by the Purânas to adverse and erroneous criticism, by every European bigot who forms an estimate of an alien religion on mere external evidence. Any man accustomed to subject what he reads to thoughtful analysis, will see at a glance the incongruity of addressing the accepted “Unknowable,” the formless, and attributeless Absolute, such as the Vedântins define Brahman, as being “one with the Serpent-Race, double-tongued, cruel and insatiable,” thus associating the abstract with the concrete, and bestowing adjectives on that which is free from any limitations, and conditionless. Even Professor Wilson, who, after living surrounded by Brâhmans and Pandits in India for so many [pg 453] years, ought to have known better—even that scholar lost no opportunity of criticizing the Hindû Scriptures on this account. Thus, he exclaims:

The Purânas constantly teach incompatible doctrines! According to this passage,676 the Supreme Being is not the inert cause of creation only, but exercises the functions of an active providence. The Commentator quotes a text of the Vedain support of this view: “Universal Soul entering into men, governs their conduct.”Incongruities, however, are as frequent in the Vedas as in the Purânas.

Less frequent, in sober truth, than in the Mosaic Bible. But prejudice is great in the hearts of our Orientalists, especially in those of “reverend” scholars. Universal Soul is not the inert Cause of Creation or (Para) Brahman, but simply that which we call the Sixth Principle of Intellectual Kosmos, on the manifested plane of being. It is Mahat, or Mahâbuddhi, the Great Soul, the Vehicle of Spirit, the first primeval reflection of the formless Cause, and that which is even beyond Spirit. So much for Professor Wilson's uncalled-for fling at the Purânas. As for the apparently incongruous appeal to Vishnu by the defeated Gods, the explanation is there, in the text of Vishnu Purâna, if Orientalists would only notice it. There is Vishnu as Brahmâ, and Vishnu in his two aspects, philosophy teaches. There is but one Brahman, “essentially Prakriti and Spirit.”

This ignorance is truly and beautifully expressed in the praise of the Yogins to Brahmâ, “the upholder of the earth,” when they say:

Those who have not practised devotion conceive erroneously of the nature of the world. The ignorant, who do not perceive that this Universe is of the nature of Wisdom, and judge of it as an object of perception only, are lost in the ocean of spiritual ignorance. But they who know true Wisdom, and whose minds are pure, behold this whole world as one with Divine Knowledge, as one with thee, O God! Be favourable, O universal Spirit!677

Therefore, it is not Vishnu, “the inert cause of creation,” which exercised the functions of an Active Providence, but the Universal Soul, that which, in its material aspect, Éliphas Lévi calls Astral Light. And this Soul is, in its dual aspect of Spirit and Matter, the true anthropomorphic God of the Theists; for this God is a personification of that Universal Creative Agent, both pure and impure, owing to its manifested condition and differentiation in this Mâyâvic World—God and Devil, truly. But Professor Wilson failed to see how Vishnu, in [pg 454] this character, closely resembles the Lord God of Israel, “especially in his policy of deception, temptation, and cunning.”

In the Vishnu Purâna this is made as plain as can be. For it is said there, that:

At the conclusion of their prayers (stotra) the Gods beheld the Sovereign Deity Hari (Vishnu) armed with the shell, the discus, and the mace, riding on Garuda.

Now Garuda is the Manvantaric Cycle, as will be shown in its place. Vishnu, therefore, is the Deity in Space and Time, the peculiar God of the Vaishnavas. Such Gods are called in Esoteric Philosophy tribal or racial; that is to say, one of the many Dhyânis or Gods, or Elohim, one of whom was generally chosen for some special reason by a nation or a tribe, and thus became gradually a “God above all Gods,”678 the “highest God,” as Jehovah, Osiris, Bel, or any other of the Seven Regents.

“The tree is known by its fruit”; the nature of a God by his actions. We must either judge these actions by the dead-letter narratives, or must accept them allegorically. If we compare the two—Vishnu, as the defender and champion of the defeated Gods; and Jehovah, the defender and champion of the “chosen” people, so called by antiphrasis, no doubt, as it is the Jews who had chosen that “jealous” God—we shall find that both use deceit and cunning. They do so on the principle of “the end justifying the means,” in order to have the best of their respective opponents and foes—the Demons. Thus while, according to the Kabalists, Jehovah assumes the shape of the tempting Serpent in the Garden of Eden, sends Satan with a special mission to tempt Job, harasses and wearies Pharaoh with Saraï, Abraham's wife, and “hardens” another Pharaoh's heart against Moses, lest there should be no opportunity for plaguing his victims “with great plagues,” Vishnu is made in his Purâna to resort to a trick no less unworthy of any respectable God.

The defeated Gods addressed Vishnu as follows:

Have compassion upon us, O Lord, and protect us, who have come to thee for succour from the Daityas (Demons)! They have seized upon the three worlds, and appropriated the offerings which are our portion, taking care not to transgress the precepts of the Veda. Although we, as well as they, are parts of thee679 ... engaged [as they are] ... in the paths prescribed by the holy writ ... it is impossible for us to destroy them. Do thou, whose wisdom is immeasurable [pg 455](Ameyâtman) instruct us in some device by which we may be able to exterminate the enemies of the Gods!

When the mighty Vishnu heard their request, he emitted from his body an illusory form (Mâyâmoha, the “deluder by illusion”) which he gave to the Gods and thus spake: “This Mâyâmoha shall wholly beguile the Daityas, so that, being led astray from the path of the Vedas, they may be put to death.... Go then and fear not. Let this delusive vision precede you. It shall this day be of great service unto you, O Gods!”

After this, the great Delusion (Mâyâmoha) having proceeded (to earth), beheld the Daityas, engaged in ascetic penances, and approaching them, in the semblance of a Digambara (naked mendicant) with his head shaven ... he thus addressed them, in gentle accents: “Ho, lords of the Daitya race, wherefore is it that you practise these acts of penances?” etc.680

Finally the Daityas were seduced by the wily talk of Mâyâmoha, as Eve was seduced by the advice of the Serpent. They became apostates to the Vedas. As Dr. Muir translates the passage:

The great Deceiver, practising illusion, next beguiled other Daityas, by means of many other sorts of heresy. In a very short time, these Asuras (Daityas), deluded by the Deceiver [who was Vishnu] abandoned the entire system founded on the ordinances of the triple Veda. Some reviled the Vedas; others, the ceremonial of sacrifice; and others, the Brâhmans. This (they exclaimed), is a doctrine which will not bear discussion: the slaughter (of animals, in sacrifice), is not conducive to religious merit. (To say, that) oblations of butter consumed in the fire produce any future reward, is the assertion of a child.... If it be a fact that a beast slain in sacrifice is exalted to heaven, why does not the worshipper slaughter his own father?... Infallible utterances do not, great Asuras, fall from the skies; it is only assertions founded on reasoning that are accepted by me and by other [intelligent] persons like yourselves! Thus by numerous methods the Daityas were unsettled by the great Deceiver [Reason].... When the Daityas had entered on the path of error, the Deities mustered all their energies and approached to battle. Then followed a combat between the Gods and the Asuras; and the latter, who had abandoned the right road, were smitten by the former. In previous times they had been defended by the armour of righteousness which they bore; but, when that had been destroyed, they, also, perished.681

Whatever may be thought of the Hindûs, no enemy of theirs can regard them as fools. A people, whose holy men and sages have left to the world the greatest and most sublime philosophies that ever emanated from the minds of men, must have known the difference between right and wrong. Even a savage can discern white from black, good from bad, and deceit from sincerity and truthfulness. Those who had narrated this event in the biography of their God, must [pg 456] have seen that in this case it was that God who was the Arch-Deceiver, and the Daityas, who “never transgressed the precepts of the Vedas,” who had the sunny side in the transaction, and who were the true “Gods.” Thence there must have been, and there is a secret meaning hidden under this allegory. In no class of society, in no nation, are deceit and craft considered as divine virtues—except perhaps in the clerical classes of Theologians and modern Jesuitism.

The Vishnu Purâna,682 like all other works of this kind, passed at a later period into the hands of the Temple-Brâhmans, and the old MSS. have, no doubt, been further tampered with by sectarians. But there was a time when the Purânas were esoteric works, and so they are still for the Initiates who can read them with the key that is in their possession.

Whether the Brâhman Initiates will ever give out the full meaning of these allegories, is a question with which the writer is not concerned. The present object is to show that, while honouring the Creative Powers in their multiple forms, no philosopher could have, or ever has, accepted the allegory for its true spirit, except, perhaps, some philosophers belonging to the present “superior and civilized” Christian races. For, as shown, Jehovah is not one whit the superior of Vishnu on the plane of ethics. This is why the Occultists, and even some Kabalists, whether or not they regard those creative Forces as living and conscious Entities—and one does not see why they should not be so accepted—will never confuse the Cause with the Effect, and accept the Spirit of the Earth for Parabrahman, or Ain Suph. At all events they know well the true nature of what was called by the Greeks Father-Æther, Jupiter-Titan, etc. They know that the Soul of the Astral Light is divine, and its Body—the Light-waves on the lower planes—infernal. This Light is symbolized by the “Magic Head” in the Zohar, the Double Face on the Double Pyramid; the black Pyramid rising against a pure white ground, with a white Head and Face within its black Triangle; the White Pyramid, inverted—the reflection of the first in the dark Waters—showing the black reflection of the white Face.

This is the Astral Light, or Demon est Deus Inversus.

[pg 457]

Section XII. The Theogony of the Creative Gods.

To thoroughly comprehend the idea underlying every ancient Cosmology necessitates the study and comparative analysis of all the great religions of antiquity; for it is only by this method that the root-idea can be made plain. Exact Science, could it soar so high, in tracing the operations of Nature to their ultimate and original sources, would call this idea the Hierarchy of Forces. The original, transcendental and philosophical conception was one. But as systems began to reflect more and more with every age the idiosyncrasies of nations, and as the latter, after separating, settled into distinct groups, each evolving along its own national or tribal groove, the main idea gradually became veiled by the overgrowth of human fancy. While in some countries the Forces, or rather the intelligent Powers of Nature, received divine honours to which they were hardly entitled, in others—as now in Europe and the other civilized lands—the very thought of such Forces being endowed with intelligence seems absurd, and is proclaimed unscientific. Therefore one finds relief in such statements as are found in the Introduction to Asgard and the Gods; “Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors,” edited by W. S. W. Anson, who says:

Although in Central Asia, or on the banks of the Indus, in the Land of the Pyramids, and in the Greek and Italian peninsulas, and even in the North, whither Kelts, Teutons and Slavs wandered, the religious conceptions of the people have taken different forms, yet their common origin is still perceptible. We point out this connection between the stories of the Gods, and the deep thought contained in them, and their importance, in order that the reader may see that it is not a magic world of erratic fancy which opens out before him, but that ... Life and Natureformed the basis of the existence and action of these divinities.683

[pg 458]

And though it is impossible for any Occultist or student of Eastern Esotericism to concur in the strange idea that, “the religious conceptions of the most famous nations of antiquity are connected with the beginnings of civilization amongst the Germanic races,”684 he is yet glad to find such truths expressed as that: “These fairy tales are not senseless stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound religion of our forefathers.”685

Precisely so. Not only their Religion, but likewise their History. For a myth, in Greek μῦθος, means oral tradition, passed from mouth to mouth from one generation to the other; and even in the modern etymology the term stands for a fabulous statement conveying some important truth; a tale of some extraordinary personage whose biography has become overgrown, owing to the veneration of successive generations, with rich popular fancy, but which is no wholesale fable. Like our ancestors, the primitive Âryans, we believe firmly in the personality and intelligence of more than one phenomenon-producing Force in Nature.

As time rolled on, the archaic teaching grew dimmer; and the nations more or less lost sight of the Highest and One Principle of all things, and began to transfer the abstract attributes of the Causeless Cause to the caused effects, which became in their turn causative, the Creative Powers of the Universe; the great nations thus acted from fear of profaning the Idea; the smaller, because they either failed to grasp it, or lacked the power of philosophic conception needed to preserve it in all its immaculate purity. But one and all, with the exception of the latest Âryans, now become Europeans and Christians, show this veneration in their Cosmogonies. As Thomas Taylor,686 the most intuitional of all the translators of the Greek Fragments, shows, no nation has ever conceived the One Principle as the immediate creator of the visible Universe, for no sane man would credit a planner and architect with having built with his own hands the edifice he admires. On the testimony of Damascius in his work, On First Principles (Περὶ Πρώτων Ἀρχῶν), they referred to it as the “Unknown Darkness.” The Babylonians passed over this principle in silence. “To that God,” says Porphyry, in his On Abstinence (Περί ἀποχῆς τῶν ἐμψύχων), “who is above all things, neither external speech ought to be addressed, nor yet that which is inward.” Hesiod begins his [pg 459] Theogony with the words, “Chaos of all things was the first produced,”687 thus allowing the inference that its Cause or Producer must be passed over in reverential silence. Homer in his poems ascends no higher than Night, which he represents Zeus as reverencing. According to all the ancient theologists, and the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato, Zeus, or the immediate Artificer of the Universe, is not the highest God; any more than Sir Christopher Wren in his physical, human aspect is the Mind in him which produced his great works of art. Homer, therefore, is not only silent with respect to the First Principle, but likewise with respect to those two Principles immediately posterior to the First, the Æther and Chaos of Orpheus and Hesiod, and the Bound and Infinity of Pythagoras and Plato.688 Proclus says of this Highest Principle that it is “the Unity of Unities, and beyond the first Adyta ... more ineffable than all Silence, and more occult than all Essence ... concealed amidst the intelligible Gods.”689

To what was written by Thomas Taylor in 1797—namely, that the “Jews appear to have ascended no higher ... than the immediate Artificer of the Universe,” as “Moses introduces a darkness on the face of the deep, without even insinuating that there was any cause of its existence,”690 one might add something more. Never have the Jews in their Bible—a purely esoteric, symbolical work—so profoundly degraded their metaphorical deity as have the Christians, by accepting Jehovah as their one living yet personal God.

This First, or rather One, Principle was called the “Circle of Heaven,” symbolized by the hierogram of a Point within a Circle or Equilateral Triangle, the Point being the Logos. Thus, in the Rig Veda, wherein Brahmâ is not even named. Cosmogony is preluded with the Hiranyagarbha, the “Golden Egg,” and Prajâpati (later on Brahmâ), from whom emanate all the Hierarchies of “Creators.” The Monad, or Point, is the original and is the Unit from which follows the entire numeral system. This Point is the First Cause, but That from which it emanates, or of which, rather, it is the expression, the Logos, is passed over in silence. In its turn, the universal symbol, the Point [pg 460]within the Circle, was not yet the Architect, but the Cause of that Architect; and the latter stood to it in precisely the same relation as the Point itself stood to the Circumference of the Circle, which cannot be defined, according to Hermes Trismegistus. Porphyry shows that the Monad and the Duad of Pythagoras are identical with Plato's Infinite and Finite, in Philebus, or what Plato calls the ἄπειρον and πέρας. It is the latter only, the Mother, which is substantial, the former being the “Cause of all Unity and measure of all things”;691 the Duad, Mûlaprakriti, the Veil of Parabrahman, being thus shown to be the Mother of the Logos and, at the same time, his Daughter—that is to say, the object of his perception—the produced producer and the secondary cause of it. With Pythagoras, the Monad returns into Silence and Darkness, as soon as it has evolved the Triad, from which emanate the remaining 7 numbers of the 10 numbers which are at the base of the Manifested Universe.

In the Norse Cosmogony it is again the same.

In the beginning was a great Abyss (Chaos), neither Day nor Night existed; the Abyss was Ginnungagap, the yawning gulf, without beginning, without end. All-Father, the Uncreated, the Unseen, dwelt in the Depth of the Abyss (Space) and willed, and what was willed came into being.692

As in the Hindû Cosmogony, the evolution of the Universe is divided into two acts, which are called in India the Prâkrita and Pâdma Creations. Before the warm rays pouring from the Home of Brightness awaken life in the Great Waters of Space, the Elements of the First Creation come into view, and from them is formed the Giant Ymir, or Örgelmir (literally, Seething Clay), Primordial Matter differentiated from Chaos. Then comes the Cow Audumla, the Nourisher,693 from whom is born Buri, the Producer, whose son Bör (Born), by Bestla, the daughter of the Frost-Giants, the sons of Ymir, had three sons, Odin, Willi and We, or Spirit, Will, and Holiness. This was when Darkness still reigned throughout Space, when the Ases, the Creative Powers, or Dhyân Chohans, were not yet evolved, and the Yggdrasil, the Tree of the Universe of Time and of Life, had not yet grown, and there was, as yet, no Walhalla, or Hall of Heroes. The Scandinavian legends of Creation, of our Earth and World, begin with Time and human Life. All that precedes it is for them Darkness, [pg 461] wherein All-Father, the Cause of all, dwells. As observed by the editor of Asgard and the Gods, though these legends have in them the idea of that All-Father, the original cause of all, “he is scarcely more than mentioned in the poems,” not, as he thinks, because before the preaching of the Gospel, the idea “could not rise to distinct conceptions of the Eternal,” but on account of its deep esoteric character. Therefore, all the Creative Gods, or Personal Deities, begin at the secondary stage of Cosmic Evolution. Zeus is born in, and out of Cronus—Time. So is Brahmâ the production and emanation of Kâla, “Eternity and Time,” Kâla being one of the names of Vishnu. Hence we find Odin, the Father of the Gods and of the Ases, as Brahmâ is the Father of the Gods and of the Asuras; and hence also the androgyne character of all the chief Creative Gods, from the second Monad of the Greeks down to the Sephira Adam Kadmon, the Brahmâ or Prajâpati-Vâch of the Vedas, and the androgyne of Plato, which is but another version of the Indian symbol.

The best metaphysical definition of primeval Theogony, in the spirit of the Vedântins, may be found in the “Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ”, by T. Subba Row. Parabrahman, the Unknown and the Incognizable, as the lecturer tells his audience:

Is not Ego, it is not Non-Ego, nor is it consciousness ... it is not even Âtmâ ... but though not itself an object of knowledge, it is yet capable of supporting and giving rise to every kind of object and every kind of existence which becomes an object of knowledge.... [It is] the one essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy ... [which he calls the Logos].694

This Logos is the Shabda Brahman of the Hindûs, which he will not even call Îshvara (the “Lord” God), lest the term should create confusion in the people's minds. It is the Avalokiteshvara of the Buddhists, the Verbum of the Christians in its real esoteric meaning, not in its theological disfigurement.

It is, the first Jñâta, or the Ego in the Kosmos, and every other Ego ... is but its reflection and manifestation.... It exists in a latent condition in the bosom of Parabrahman, at the time of Pralaya.... [During Manvantara] it has a consciousness and an individuality of its own.... [It is a centre of energy, but] such centres of energy are almost innumerable in the bosom of Parabrahman. It must not be supposed, that [even] this Logos is [theCreator, or that it is] but a single centre of energy.... Their number is almost infinite.... [This] is the first Ego that appears in Kosmos, and is the end of all evolution. [It is the abstract Ego].... This is the first manifestation [or [pg 462]aspect] of Parabrahman.... When once it starts into existence as a conscious being, ... from its objective standpoint, Parabrahman appears to it as Mûlaprakriti. Please bear this in mind ... for here is the root of the whole difficulty about Purusha and Prakriti felt by the various writers on Vedântic philosophy.... This Mûlaprakriti is material to it [the Logos], as any material object is material to us. This Mûlaprakriti is no more Parabrahman than the bundle of attributes of a pillar is the pillar itself; Parabrahman is an unconditioned and absolute reality, and Mûlaprakriti is a sort of veil thrown over it. Parabrahman by itself cannot be seen as it is. It is seen by the Logos with a veil thrown over it, and that veil is the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter.... Parabrahman, after having appeared on the one hand as the Ego, and on the other as Mûlaprakriti, acts as the one energy through the Logos.695

And the lecturer explains what he means by this acting of Something which is Nothing, though it is the All, by a fine simile. He compares the Logos to the Sun through which light and heat radiate, but whose energy, light and heat, exist in some unknown condition in Space and are diffused in Space only as visible light and heat, the Sun being only the agent thereof. This is the first triadic hypostasis. The quaternary is made up by the energizing light shed by the Logos.

The Hebrew Kabalists stated it in a manner which is esoterically identical with the Vedântic. Ain Suph, they taught, could not be comprehended, could not be located, nor named, though the Causeless Cause of all. Hence its name, Ain Suph, is a term of negation, “the Inscrutable, the Incognizable, and the Unnameable.” They made of it, therefore, a Boundless Circle, a Sphere, of which human intellect, with the utmost stretch, could only perceive the vault. In the words of one who has unriddled much in the Kabalistical system most thoroughly, in one of its meanings, in its numerical and geometrical esotericism:

Close your eyes, and from your own consciousness of perception try and think outward to the extremest limits in every direction. You will find that equal lines or rays of perception extend out evenly in all directions, so that the utmost effort of perception will terminate in the vault of a sphere. The limitation of this sphere will, of necessity, be a great Circle, and the direct rays of thought in any and every direction must be right line radii of the circle. This, then, must be, humanly speaking, the extremest all-embracing conception of the Ain Suph manifest, which formulates itself as a geometrical figure, viz., of a circle, with its elements of curved circumference and right line diameter divided into radii. Hence, a geometrical shape is the first recognizable means of connection between the Ain Suph and the intelligence of man.696

[pg 463]

This Great Circle, which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the Point within the Boundless Circle, is the Avalokiteshvara, the Logos, or Verbum, of which T. Subba Row speaks. But this Circle or manifested God is as unknown to us, except through its manifested Universe, as is the One, though easier, or rather more possible to our highest conceptions. This Logos which sleeps in the bosom of Parabrahman, during Pralaya, as our “Ego is latent [in us] at the time of Sushupti,” or sleep, which cannot cognize Parabrahman otherwise than as Mûlaprakriti—the latter being a Cosmic Veil which is “the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter”—is thus only an organ in Cosmic Creation, through which radiate the Energy and Wisdom of Parabrahman, unknown to the Logos, as it is to ourselves. Moreover, as the Logos is as unknown to us as Parabrahman is unknown in reality to the Logos, both Eastern Esotericism and the Kabalah, in order to bring the Logos within the range of our conceptions, have resolved the abstract synthesis into concrete images; viz., into the reflections or multiplied aspects of that Logos, or Avalokiteshvara, Brahmâ Ormazd, Osiris, Adam Kadmon, call it by any of such names you will; which aspects, or manvantaric emanations, are the Dhyân Chohans, the Elohim, the Devas, the Amshaspends, etc. Metaphysicians explain the root and germ of the latter, according to T. Subba Row, as the first manifestation of Parabrahman, “the highest trinity that we are capable of understanding,” which is Mûlaprakriti, the Veil, the Logos, and the Conscious Energy of the latter, or its Power and Light, called in the Bhagavad Gîtâ, Daiviprakriti; or “Matter, Force and the Ego, or the one root of Self, of which every other kind of self is but a manifestation or a reflection.” It is then only in this Light of consciousness, of mental and physical perception, that practical Occultism can throw the Logos into visibility by geometrical figures, which, when closely studied, will yield not only a scientific explanation of the real, objective, existence697 of the “Seven Sons of the Divine Sophia,” which is this Light of the Logos, but will show, by means of other yet undiscovered keys, that, with regard to Humanity, these “Seven Sons” and their numberless emanations, centres of energy personified, are an absolute necessity. Make away with them, and the Mystery of Being and Mankind will never be unriddled, nor even closely approached.

It is through this Light that everything is created. This Root of mental Self is also the root of physical Self, for this Light is the permutation, [pg 464] in our manifested world, of Mûlaprakriti, called Aditi in the Vedas. In its third aspect it becomes Vâch,698 the Daughter and the Mother of the Logos, as Isis is the Daughter and the Mother of Osiris, who is Horns, and Moot, the Daughter, Wife, and Mother, of Ammon, in the Egyptian Moon-glyph. In the Kabalah, Sephira is the same as Shekinah, and is, in another synthesis, the Wife, Daughter, and Mother of the Heavenly Man, Adam Kadmon, and is even identical with him, just as Vâch is identical with Brahmâ, and is called the female Logos. In the Rig Veda, Vâch is “Mystic Speech,” by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are communicated to man, and thus Vâch is said to have “entered the Rishis.” She is “generated by the Gods”; she is the Divine Vâch, the “Queen of Gods”; and she is associated, like Sephira with the Sephiroth, with the Prajâpatis in their work of creation. Moreover, she is called the “Mother of the Vedas,” “since it is through her powers, [as Mystic Speech] that Brahmâ revealed them, and also owing to her power that he produced the Universe”; that is to say, through Speech, and words, synthesized by the “Word” and numbers.699

But when Vâch is also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha, “the God who lives in all the Kalpas,” her mâyâvic character is shown; during the Pralaya she disappears, absorbed in the One, all-devouring Ray.

But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and Western, in all these personations of the female Power in Nature, or Nature the noumenal and the phenomenal. One is its purely metaphysical aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his “Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ”; the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time divine from the stand-point of practical human conception and Occultism. They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the Great Deep, or the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable Veil between the Incognizable and the Logos of Creation. “Connecting himself through his mind with Vâch, Brahmâ [the Logos] created the Primordial Waters.” In the Katha Upanishad it is stated still more clearly:

Prajâpati was this Universe. Vâch was a second to him. He associated with her ... she produced these creatures and again reëntered Prajâpati.

[pg 465]

This connects Vâch and Sephira with the Goddess Kwan-Yin, the “Merciful Mother,” the Divine Voice of the Soul, even in exoteric Buddhism, and with the female aspect of Kwan-Shai-Yin, the Logos, the Verbum of Creation, and at the same time with the Voice that speaks audibly to the Initiate, according to Esoteric Budhism. Bath Kol, the Filia Vocis, the Daughter of the Divine Voice of the Hebrews, responding from the Mercy Seat within the Veil of the Temple is—a result.

And here we may incidentally point out one of the many unjust slurs thrown by the “good and pious” missionaries in India on the religion of the land. The allegory, in the Shatapatha Brâhmana, that Brahmâ, as the Father of men, performed the work of procreation by incestuous intercourse with his own daughter Vâch, also called Sandhyâ, Twilight, and Shatarûpâ, of a hundred forms, is incessantly thrown in the teeth of the Brâhmans, as condemning their “detestable, false religion.” Besides the fact, conveniently forgotten by the Europeans, that the Patriarch Lot is shown guilty of the same crime under the human form, whereas it was under the form of a buck that Brahmâ, or rather Prajâpati, accomplished the incest with his daughter, who had that of a hind (rohit), the esoteric reading of the third chapter of Genesis shows the same. Moreover, there is certainly a cosmic, and not a physiological, meaning attached to the Indian allegory, since Vâch is a permutation of Aditi and Mûlaprakriti, or Chaos, and Brahmâ a permutation of Nârâyana, the Spirit of God entering into, and fructifying Nature; and, therefore, there is nothing phallic in the conception at all.

As already stated, Aditi-Vâch is the female Logos, or Verbum, the Word; and Sephira in the Kabalah is the same. These feminine Logoi are all correlations, in their noumenal aspect, of Light, and Sound, and Æther, showing how well-informed were the Ancients both in Physical Science, as now known to the moderns, and also as to the birth of that Science in the Spiritual and Astral spheres.

Our old writers said that Vâch is of four kinds. These are called Parâ, Pashyantî, Madhyamâ, Vaikharî. This statement you will find in the Rig Veda itself and in several of the Upanishads. Vaikharî Vâch is what we utter.

It is Sound, Speech, that again which becomes comprehensive and objective to one of our physical senses and may be brought under the laws of perception. Hence:

Every kind of Vaikharî Vâch exists in its Madhyamâ ... Pashyantî and [pg 466]ultimately in its Parâ form.... The reason why this Pranava700 is called Vâch is this, that these four principles of the great Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vâch.... The whole Kosmos in its objective form is Vaikharî Vâch; the Light of the Logos is the Madhyamâ form; and the Logos itself the Pasyantî form; while Parabrahman is the Parâ [beyond the Noumenon of all Noumena] aspect of that Vâch.701

Thus Vâch, Shekinah, or the “Music of the Spheres” of Pythagoras, are one, if we take for our example instances in the three most (apparently) dissimilar religious philosophies in the world, the Hindû, the Greek and the Chaldean Hebrew. These personations and allegories may be viewed under four chief and three lesser aspects, or seven in all, as in Esotericism. The Parâ form is the ever subjective and latent Light and Sound, which exist eternally in the bosom of the Incognizable; when transferred into the ideation of the Logos, or its latent Light, it is called Pasyantî, and when it becomes that Light expressed, it is Madhyamâ.

Now the Kabalah gives the definition thus:

There are three kinds of Light, and that [the fourth] which interpenetrates the others; (1) the clear and the penetrating, the objective Light, (2) the reflected Light, and (3) the abstract Light.

The ten Sephiroth, the Three and the Seven, are called in the Kabalah the Ten Words, dbrim (Dabarim), the Numbers and the Emanations of the Heavenly Light, which is both Adam Kadmon and Sephira, Prajâpati-Vâch, or Brahmâ. Light, Sound, Number, are the three factors of creation in the Kabalah. Parabrahman cannot be known except through the luminous Point, the Logos, which knows not Parabrahman but only Mûlaprakriti. Similarly Adam Kadmon knew only Shekinah, though he was the Vehicle of Ain Suph. And, as Adam Kadmon, he is, in the Esoteric interpretation, the total of the Number Ten, the Sephiroth, himself being a Trinity, or the three attributes of the Incognizable Deity in One.702 “When the Heavenly [pg 467] Man (or Logos) first assumed the form of the Crown703 [Kether] and identified himself with Sephira, he caused Seven splendid Lights to emanate from it [the Crown],” which made in their totality Ten; so Brahmâ-Prajâpati, once he became separated from, yet identical with Vâch, caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajâpatis, to issue from that Crown. In exotericism one will always find 10 and 7, of either Sephira or Prajâpati; in esoteric rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also 10. Only when divided, in the manifested sphere, into 3 and 7, they form [circle with vertical line], the androgyne, and [circle containing an X], or the figure X manifested and differentiated.

This will help the student to understand why Pythagoras esteemed the Deity, the Logos, to be the Centre of Unity and Source of Harmony. We say this Deity was the Logos, not the Monad that dwelleth in Solitude and Silence, because Pythagoras taught that Unity being indivisible is no number. And this is also why it was required of the candidate, who applied for admittance into his school, that he should have already studied as a preliminary step, the sciences of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry and Music, which were held to be the four divisions of Mathematics.704 Again, this explains why the Pythagoreans asserted that the doctrine of Numbers, the chief of all in Esotericism, had been revealed to man by the Celestial Deities; that the World had been called forth out of Chaos by Sound, or Harmony, and constructed according to the principles of musical proportion; that the seven planets which rule the destiny of mortals have a harmonious motion and, as Censorinus says:

Intervals corresponding to musical diastemes, rendering various sounds, so perfectly consonant, that they produce the sweetest melody, which is inaudible to us, only by reason of the greatness of the sound, which our ears are incapable of receiving.

In the Pythagorean Theogony, the Hierarchies of the Heavenly Host and Gods were numbered, and also expressed numerically. Pythagoras had studied Esoteric Science in India; therefore we find his pupils saying:

The Monad [the manifested One] is the principle of all things. From the Monad and the indeterminate Duad (Chaos), Numbers; from Numbers, Points; from Points, Lines; from Lines, Superficies; from Superficies, Solids; from these, Solid Bodies, [pg 468]whose elements are four, Fire, Water, Air, Earth; of all which transmuted [correlated], and totally changed, the World consists.705

And this, if it does not unriddle the mystery altogether, may at any rate lift a corner of the veil off those wondrous allegories that have been thrown over Vâch, the most mysterious of all the Brâhmanical Goddesses; she who is termed “the melodious Cow who milked forth sustenance and Water”—the Earth with all her mystic powers; and again she “who yields us nourishment and sustenance”—the physical Earth. Isis is also mystic Nature and also Earth; and her cow's horns identify her with Vâch, who, after being recognized in her highest form as Parâ, becomes, at the lower or material end of creation, Vaikharî. Hence she is mystic, though physical, Nature, with all her magic ways and properties.

Again, as Goddess of Speech and of Sound, and a permutation of Aditi, she is Chaos, in one sense. At any rate, she is the “Mother of the Gods,” and it is from Brahmâ, Îshvara or the Logos, and Vâch, as from Adam Kadmon and Sephira, that the real manifested Theogony has to start. Beyond, all is Darkness and abstract speculation. With the Dhyân Chohans or the Gods, the Seers, the Prophets and the Adepts in general are on firm ground. Whether as Aditi, or the Divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics, she is the mother of the Seven Sons, the Angels of the Face, of the Deep, or the Great Green One of the Book of the Dead. Says the Book of Dzyan, or Real Knowledge, obtained through meditation:

The Great Mother lay with the [triangle], and the |, and the [square], the second | and the [five-pointed star],706 in her Bosom, ready to bring them forth, the valiant Sons of the [square] [triangle] || [or 4,320,000, the Cycle], whose two Elders are the [circle] [Circle] and the · [Point].

At the beginning of every Cycle of 4,320,000, the Seven, or as some nations had it Eight, Great Gods, descend to establish the new order of things and to give the impetus to the new cycle. That eighth God was the unifying Circle, or Logos, separated and made distinct from its Host, in exoteric dogma, just as the three divine hypostases of the ancient Greeks are now considered in the Churches as three distinct personæ. As a Commentary says:

The Mighty Ones perform their great works, and leave behind them [pg 469]everlasting monuments to commemorate their visit, every time they penetrate within our mâyâvic veil [atmosphere].707

Thus we are taught that the great Pyramids were built under their direct supervision, “when Dhruva [the then Pole-star], was at his lowest culmination, and the Krittikâs [Pleiades] looked over his head [were on the same meridian but above] to watch the work of the Giants.” Thus, as the first Pyramids were built at the beginning of a Sidereal Year, under Dhruva (Alpha Polaris), it must have been over 31,000 years (31,105) ago. Bunsen was right in admitting for Egypt an antiquity of over 21,000 years, but this concession hardly exhausts truth and fact in this question. As Mr. Gerald Massey says:

The stories told by Egyptian priests and others of time-keeping in Egypt are now beginning to look less like lies in the sight of all who have escaped from biblical bondage. Inscriptions have lately been found at Sakkarah, making mention of two Sothiac cycles ... registered at that time, now some 6,000 years ago. Thus when Herodotus was in Egypt, the Egyptians had—as now known—observed at least five different Sothiac cycles of 1,461 years....

The priests informed the Greek enquirer that time had been reckoned by them for so long that the sun had twice risen where it then set, and twice set where it then arose. This ... can only be realized as a fact in nature by means of two cycles of Precession, or a period of 51,736 years.708

Mor Isaac709 shows the ancient Syrians defining their World of the “Rulers” and “Active Gods” in the same way as the Chaldeans. The lowest World was the Sublunary—our own—watched by the Angels of the first or lower order; the one that came next in rank, was Mercury, ruled by the Archangels: then came Venus, whose Gods were the Principalities; the fourth was that of the Sun, the domain and region of the highest and mightiest Gods of our system, the solar Gods of all nations; the fifth was Mars, ruled by the Virtues; the sixth, that of Bel or Jupiter, was governed by the Dominions; the seventh, the World of Saturn, by the Thrones. These are the Worlds of Form. Above come the Four higher ones, making Seven again, since the Three highest are “unmentionable and unpronounceable.” The eighth, composed of 1,122 stars, is the domain of the Cherubs; the ninth, belonging to the walking and numberless stars on account of their [pg 470] distance, has the Seraphs; as to the tenth, Kircher, quoting Mor Isaac, says that it is composed “of invisible stars that could be taken, they said, for clouds, so massed are they in the zone that we call Via Straminis, the Milky Way”; and he hastens to explain that “these are the stars of Lucifer, engulfed with him in his terrible shipwreck.” That which comes after and beyond the ten Worlds (our Quaternary), or the Arûpa World, the Syrians could not tell. “All they knew was that it is there that begins the vast and incomprehensible Ocean of the Infinite, the abode of the True Divinity, without boundary or end.”

Champollion shows the same belief among the Egyptians. Hermes having spoken of the Father-Mother and Son, whose Spirit—collectively the Divine Fiat—shapes the Universe, says: “Seven Agents [Media] were also formed, to contain the Material [or manifested] Worlds within their respective Circles, and the action of these Agents was named Destiny.” He further enumerates seven and ten and twelve orders, but it would take too long to detail them here.

As the Rig Vidhâna together with the Brahmânda Purâna and all such works, whether describing the magic efficacy of the Rig Vedic Mantras, or the future Kalpas, are declared by Dr. Weber and others to be modern compilations “belonging probably only to the time of the Purânas,” it is useless to refer the reader to their mystic explanations; and one may as well simply quote from the archaic books utterly unknown to the Orientalists. These works explain that which so puzzles the scholars, namely that the Saptarshis, the “Mind-born Sons” of Brahmâ, are referred to in the Shatapatha Brâhmana under one set of names; in the Mahâbhârata under another set; and that the Vâyu Purâna makes even nine instead of seven Rishis, by adding the names of Bhrigu and Daksha to the list. But the same occurs in every exoteric Scripture. The Secret Doctrine gives a long genealogy of Rishis, but separates them into many classes. Like the Gods of the Egyptians, who were divided into seven, and even twelve, Classes, so are the Indian Rishis in their Hierarchies. The first three Groups are the Divine, the Cosmical and the Sublunary. Then come the Solar Gods of our System, the Planetary, the Submundane, and the purely Human—the Heroes and the Mânushi.

At present, however, we are only concerned with the Pre-cosmic, Divine Gods, the Prajâpatis, or the Seven Builders. This Group is found unmistakably in every Cosmogony. Owing to the loss of [pg 471] Egyptian archaic documents, since, according to M. Maspero, “the materials and historical data on hand to study the history of the religious evolution in Egypt are neither complete nor very often intelligible,” the ancient Hymns and inscriptions on the tombs must be appealed to, in order to have the statements brought forward from the Secret Doctrine partially and indirectly corroborated. One such shows that Osiris, like Brahmâ-Prajâpati, Adam Kadmon, Ormazd, and so many other Logoi, was the chief and synthesis of the Group of “Creators” or Builders. Before Osiris became the “One” and the Highest God of Egypt, he was worshipped at Abydos as the Head, or Leader, of the Heavenly Host of the Builders belonging to the higher of the three Orders. The Hymn engraved on the votive stele of a tomb from Abydos (3rd register) addresses Osiris thus:

Salutations to thee, O Osiris, elder son of Seb; thou the greatest over the six Gods issued from the Goddess Noo [Primordial Water], thou the great favourite of thy father Ra; Father of Fathers, King of Duration, Master in the Eternity ... who, as soon as these issued from thy Mother's Bosom, gathered all the Crowns and attached the Uræus [serpent or naja]710 on thy head; multiform God, whose name is unknown and who has many names in towns and provinces.

Coming out from the Primordial Water crowned with the Uræus, which is the serpent-emblem of Cosmic Fire, and himself the seventh over the six Primary Gods, issued from Father-Mother, Noo and Noot, the Sky, who can Osiris be, but the chief Prajâpati, the chief Sephira, the chief Amshaspend, Ormazd! That this latter Solar and Cosmic God stood, in the beginning of religious evolution, in the same position as the Archangel, “whose name was secret,” is certain. This Archangel was Michael, the representative on earth of the Hidden Jewish God; in short, it is his “Face” that is said to have gone before the Jews like a “Pillar of Fire.” Burnouf says: “The seven Amshaspends, who are most assuredly our Archangels, designate also the personifications of the Divine Virtues.”711 And these Archangels, therefore, are as certainly the Saptarshis of the Hindus, though it is next to impossible to class each with its Pagan prototype and parallel, since, as in the case of Osiris, they have all so “many names in towns and provinces.” Some of the most important, however, will be shown in their order.

[pg 472]

One thing is thus undeniably proven. The more we study their Hierarchies and find out their identity, the more proofs we acquire that there is not one of the past or present personal Gods, known to us from the earliest days of history, that does not belong to the third stage of cosmic manifestation. In every religion we find the Concealed Deity forming the ground work; then the Ray therefrom, that falls into primordial Cosmic Matter, the first manifestation; then the Androgyne result, the dual Male and Female abstract Force personified, the second stage; this finally separates itself, in the third, into Seven Forces, called the Creative Powers by all the ancient religions, and the Virtues of God by the Christians. The later explanations and abstract metaphysical qualifications have not prevented the Roman and Greek Churches from worshipping these “Virtues” under the personifications and distinct names of the Seven Archangels. In the Book of Druschim,712 in the Talmud, a distinction between these groups is given which is the correct Kabalistical explanation. It says:

There are three Groups (or Orders) of Sephiroth. 1st. The Sephiroth called the “Divine Attributes” [abstract]. 2nd. The Physical or Sidereal Sephiroth [personal]—one group of seven, the other of ten. 3rd. The metaphysical Sephiroth, or periphrasis of Jehovah, who are the first three Sephiroth [Kether, Chokmah and Binah], the rest of the seven being the (personal) seven Spirits of the Presence [also of the planets].

The same division has to be applied to the primary, secondary and tertiary evolution of Gods in every Theogony, if one wishes to translate the meaning esoterically. We must not confuse the purely metaphysical personifications of the abstract attributes of Deity, with their reflection—the Sidereal Gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the objective expression of the abstraction; living Entities and the models formed on that divine Prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical Sephiroth, or the “periphrasis of Jehovah,” are not Jehovah. It is the latter himself, with the additional titles of Adonai, Elohim, Sabbaoth, and the numerous names lavished on him, who is the periphrasis of the Shaddai (שדי), the Omnipotent. The name is a circumlocution, indeed, a too abundant figure of Jewish rhetoric, and has always been denounced by the Occultists. To the Jewish Kabalists, and even the Christian Alchemists and Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient screen, unified by the folding of its many panels, and adopted [pg 473] as a substitute; one name of an individual Sephira being as good as another name, for those who had the secret. The Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable, the Sidereal “Sum Total,” was invented for no other purpose than to mislead the profane and to symbolize life and generation.713 The real secret and unpronounceable Name, the “Word that is no word,” has to be sought in the seven names of the first Seven Emanations, or the “Sons of the Fire,” in the secret Scriptures of all the great nations, and even in the Zohar, the Kabalistic lore of the smallest of all of them, viz., the Jewish. This word, composed of seven letters in every tongue, is found embodied in the architectural remains of every great sacred building in the world; from the Cyclopean remains on Easter Island—part of a Continent buried under the seas nearer 4,000,000 years ago714 than 20,000—down to the earliest Egyptian pyramids.

We shall have to enter more fully into this subject later on, and to bring practical illustrations to prove the statements made in the text.

For the present it is sufficient to show, by a few instances, the truth of what has been asserted at the beginning of this work, namely, that no Cosmogony, the world over, with the sole exception of the Christian, has ever attributed to the One Highest Cause, the Universal Deific Principle, the immediate creation of our earth, or man, or anything connected with these. This statement holds as well for the Hebrew or Chaldean Kabalah as it does for Genesis, had the latter been ever thoroughly understood and, what is still more important, correctly [pg 474] translated.715 Everywhere there is either a Logos—a “Light shining in Darkness,” truly—or the Architect of the Worlds is esoterically in the plural number. The Latin Church, paradoxical as ever, while applying the epithet of Creator to Jehovah alone, adopts a whole Kyriel of names for the working Forces of the latter, names which betray the secret. For if the said Forces had nought to do with “Creation” so-called, why call them Elohim (Alhim), a plural word; Divine Workmen and Energies (Ἐνέργειαι), incandescent celestial stones (lapides igniti cœlorum); and especially Supporters of the World (Κοσμοκράτορες), Governors or Rulers of the World (Rectores Mundi), Wheels of the World (Rotæ), Auphanim, Flames and Powers, Sons of God (B'ne Alhim), Vigilant Counsellors, etc.?

It is often asserted, and unjustly, as usual, that China, nearly as old a country as India, had no Cosmogony. It was unknown to Confucius, and the Buddhists extended their Cosmogony without introducing a Personal God,716 it is complained. The Yi-King, “the very essence of ancient thought and the combined work of the most venerated sages,” fails to show a distinct Cosmogony. Nevertheless, one existed, and a very distinct one. Only as Confucius did not admit of a future life717 and the Chinese Buddhists reject the idea of One Creator, accepting one Cause and its numberless effects, they are misunderstood by the believers in a Personal God. The “Great Extreme,” as the commencement of “changes” (transmigrations), is the shortest and, perhaps, the most suggestive of all Cosmogonies for those who, like the Confucianists, love virtue for its own sake and try to do good unselfishly without [pg 475] perpetually looking to reward and profit. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius produces “Two Figures.” These Two produce in their turn the “Four Images”; these again the “Eight Symbols.” It is complained that though the Confucianists see in them “heaven, earth and man in miniature,” we can see in them anything we like. No doubt, and so it is with regard to many symbols, especially those of the latest religions. But they who know something of Occult numerals, see in these “Figures” the symbol, however rude, of a harmonious progressive Evolution of Kosmos and its Beings, both Heavenly and Terrestrial. And any one who has studied the numerical evolution in the primeval Cosmogony of Pythagoras—a contemporary of Confucius—can never fail to find in his Triad, Tetraktys and Decad, emerging from the One and solitary Monad, the same idea. Confucius is laughed at by his Christian biographer for “talking of divination,” before and after this passage, and is represented as saying:

The eight symbols determine good and ill fortune, and these lead to great deeds. There are no imitable images greater than heaven and earth. There are no changes greater than the four seasons [meaning North, South, East and West, etc.]. There are no suspended images brighter than the sun and moon. In preparing things for use, there is none greater than the sage. In determining good and ill-luck there is nothing greater than the divining straws and the tortoise.718

Therefore, the “divining straws” and the “tortoise,” the “symbolic sets of lines,” and the great sage who looks at them as they become one and two, and two become four, and four become eight, and the other sets “three and six,” are laughed to scorn, only because his wise symbols are misunderstood.

So the author of the volume cited and his colleagues will no doubt scoff at the Stanzas given in our text, for they represent precisely the same idea. The old archaic map of Cosmogony is full of lines in the Confucian style, of concentric circles and dots. Yet all these represent the most abstract and philosophical conceptions of the Cosmogony of our Universe. At all events it may, perhaps, answer better to the requirements and the scientific purposes of our age, than the cosmogonical essays of St. Augustine and the Venerable Bede, though these were published over a millennium later than the Confucian.

Confucius, one of the greatest sages of the ancient world, believed [pg 476] in ancient magic, and practised it himself, “if we take for granted the statements of Kià-yü” and “he praised it to the skies in the Yi-king,” we are told by his reverend critic. Nevertheless, even in his age, 600 b.c., Confucius and his school taught the sphericity of the earth and even the heliocentric system; while, at about thrice 600 years after the Chinese philosopher, the Popes of Rome threatened and even burnt “heretics” for asserting the same. He is laughed at for speaking of the “Sacred Tortoise.” No unprejudiced person can see any great difference between a Tortoise and a Lamb as candidates for sacredness, as both are symbols and no more. The Ox, the Eagle,719 and the Lion, and occasionally the Dove are the “sacred animals” of the Western Bible; the first three are found grouped round the Evangelists; the fourth, associated with these, a human face, is a Seraph, i.e., a “fiery serpent,” the Gnostic Agathodæmon probably.

The choice is curious, and shows how paradoxical were the first Christians in their selections. For why should they have chosen these symbols of Egyptian Paganism, when the Eagle is never mentioned in the New Testament save once, when Jesus refers to it as a carrion eater,720 and in the Old Testament it is called unclean; when the Lion is made a point of comparison with Satan, both roaring for men to devour; and the Oxen are driven out of the Temple? On the other hand the Serpent, brought in as an exemplar of wisdom, is now regarded as the symbol of the Devil. The esoteric pearl of Christ's religion, degraded into Christian theology, may indeed be said to have chosen a strange and unfitting shell to be born in and evolved from.

As explained, the Sacred Animals and the Flames or Sparks, within the Holy Four, refer to the Prototypes of all that is found in the Universe in the Divine Thought, in the Root, which is the Perfect Cube, or the Foundation of the Kosmos, collectively and individually. [pg 477] They have all an occult reference to primordial Cosmic Forms, and the first concretions, work, and evolution of Kosmos.

In the earliest Hindû exoteric Cosmogonies, it is not even the Demiurge who creates. For it is said in one of the Purânas:

The great Architect of the World gives the first impulse to the rotatory motion of our planetary system by stepping in turn over each planet and body.

It is this action “that causes each sphere to turn around itself, and all around the Sun.” After which action, “it is the Brahmândika,” the Solar and Lunar Pitris, the Dhyân Chohans, “who take charge of their respective spheres [earths and planets], to the end of the Kalpa.” The Creators are the Rishis, most of whom are credited with the authorship of the Mantras, or Hymns, of the Rig Veda. They are sometimes seven, sometimes ten, when they become Prajâpati, the Lord of Beings; then they rebecome the seven and the fourteen Manus, as the representatives of the seven and fourteen Cycles of Existence, or Days of Brahmâ, thus answering to the seven Æons, when, at the end of the first stage of Evolution, they are transformed into the seven stellar Rishis, the Saptarshis; while their human Doubles appear as Heroes, Kings and Sages on this earth.

The Esoteric Doctrine of the East having thus furnished and struck the key-note, which, under its allegorical garb, is, as may be seen, as scientific as it is philosophical and poetical, every nation has followed its lead. It is from the exoteric religions that we have to dig out the root-idea before we turn to esoteric truths, lest the latter should be rejected. Furthermore, every symbol, in every national religion, may be read esoterically; and the proof of its being correctly read when transliterated into its corresponding numerals and geometrical forms, may be obtained from the extraordinary agreement of all glyphs and symbols, however much they may externally vary among themselves. For in the origin those symbols were all identical. Take, for instance, the opening sentences in various Cosmogonies; in every case it is a Circle, an Egg, or a Head. Darkness is always associated with this first symbol and surrounds it, as is shown in the Hindû, the Egyptian, the Chaldeo-Hebrew and even the Scandinavian systems. Hence black ravens, black doves, black waters and even black flames; the seventh tongue of Agni, the Fire-God being called Kâlî, the “Black,” since it was a black flickering flame. Two “black” doves flew from Egypt and, settling on the oaks of Dodona, gave their names to the Grecian Gods. Noah sends out a “black” raven after the Deluge, which [pg 478] is a symbol for the Cosmic Pralaya, after which began the real creation or evolution of our Earth and Humanity. Odin's “black” ravens fluttered round the Goddess Saga and “whispered to her of the past and of the future.” Now what is the inner meaning of all those black birds? It is that they are all connected with the primeval Wisdom, which flows out of the pre-cosmic Source of All, symbolized by the Head, the Circle or the Egg; and they all have an identical meaning and relate to the primordial Archetypal Man, Adam Kadmon, the Creative Origin of all things, which is composed of the Host of Cosmic Powers—the Creative Dhyân Chohans, beyond which all is Darkness.

Let us enquire of the wisdom of the Kabalah, even veiled and distorted as it now is, to explain in its numerical language an approximate meaning, at least of the word “raven.” This is its number value as given in the Source of Measures:

The term Raven is used but once, and taken as Eth-h' orebv את־הערב=678, or 113 × 6; while the Dove is mentioned five times. Its value is 71, and 71 × 5=355. Six diameters, or the Raven, crossing, would divide the circumference of a circle of 355 into 12 parts or compartments; and 355 subdivided for each unit by 6, would equal 213-0, or the Head [“beginning”] in the first verse of Genesis. This divided, or subdivided, after the same fashion, by 2, or the 355 by 12, would give 213-2, or the word B'râsh, ב־ראש, or the first word of Genesis, with its prepositional prefix, signifying the same concreted general form, astronomically, with the one here intended.

Now the secret reading of the first verse in Genesis being: “In Râsh (B'râsh) or Head, developed Gods, the Heavens and the Earth”—it is easy to comprehend the esoteric meaning of the Raven, once that the like meaning of the Flood, or Noah's Deluge, is ascertained. Whatever the many other meanings of this emblematical allegory may be, its chief meaning is that of a new Cycle and a new Round—our Fourth Round.721 The Raven, or the Eth-h' orebv, yields the same numerical value as the Head, and returned not to the Ark, while the Dove returned, carrying the olive-branch; when Noah, the new man of the new Race—whose prototype is Vaivasvata Manu, prepared to leave the Ark, the Womb, or Argha, of terrestrial Nature, he is the symbol of the purely spiritual, sexless and androgyne man of the first three Races, [pg 479] who vanished from Earth for ever. Numerically, in the Kabalah, Jehovah, Adam, Noah, are one. At best, then, it is Deity descending on Ararat and later, on Sinai, to incarnate henceforth in man, his image, through the natural process, the mother's womb, whose symbols are the Ark, the Mount (Sinai), etc., in Genesis. The Jewish allegory is astronomical and physiological, rather than anthropomorphic.

And here lies the abyss between the Âryan and Semitic systems, though both are built on the same foundation. As shown by an expounder of the Kabalah:

The basic idea underlying the philosophy of the Hebrews was that God contained all things within himself and that man was his image; man, including woman [as androgynes; and that] geometry (and numbers and measures applicable to astronomy) are contained in the terms man and woman; and the apparent incongruity of such a mode was eliminated by showing the connection of man and woman with a particular system of numbers and measures and geometry, by the parturient time-periods, which furnished the connecting link between the terms used and the facts shown, and perfected the mode used.722

It is argued that, the primal cause being absolutely incognizable, “the symbol of its first comprehensible manifestation was the conception of a circle with its diameter line, so as at once to carry the idea of geometry, phallicism, and astronomy”; and this was finally applied to the “signification of simply human generative organs.” Hence the whole cycle of events from Adam and the Patriarchs down to Noah is made to apply to phallic and astronomical uses, the one regulating the other, as the lunar periods, for instance. Hence, too, the Genesis of the Hebrews begins after their coming out of the Ark, and the end of the Flood, i.e., at the Fourth Race. With the Aryan people it is different.

Eastern Esotericism has never degraded the One Infinite Deity, the Container of all things, to such uses; and this is shown by the absence of Brahmâ from the Rig Veda and the modest positions occupied therein by Rudra and Vishnu, who became the powerful and great Gods, the “Infinites” of the exoteric creeds, ages later. But even they, “Creators” as they all three maybe, are not the direct “Creators” and “forefathers of men.” The latter are shown occupying a still lower scale, and are called the Prajâpatis, the Pitris, our Lunar Ancestors, etc., but never the One Infinite God. Esoteric Philosophy shows only physical man as created in the image of the Deity; which Deity, however, is only the “minor Gods.” It is the Higher-Self, the real Ego, who alone is divine and God.

[pg 480]

Section XIII. The Seven Creations.

There was neither day nor night, nor sky nor earth, nor darkness nor light, nor any other thing save only One, unapprehensive by intellect, or That which is Brahma and Pums (Spirit) and Pradhâna ([crude] Matter).723

Vishnu Purâna (I. ii.)

In Vishnu Purâna, Parâshara says to Maitreya, his pupil:

I have thus explained to you, excellent Muni, six creations ... the creation of the Arvâksrotas beings was the seventh, and was that of man.724

Then he proceeds to speak of two additional and very mysterious creations, variously interpreted by the commentators.

Origen, commenting upon the books written by Celsus, his Gnostic opponent—books which were all destroyed by the prudent Church Fathers—evidently answers the objections of his contradictor and reveals his system at the same time. This was clearly septenary. But the theogony of Celsus, the genesis of the stars or planets, and of sound and colour, found as an answer satire, and no more. Celsus, you see, “desiring to exhibit his learning,” speaks of a ladder of creation with seven gates, and on the top of it the eighth, ever closed. The mysteries of the Persian Mithras are explained and “musical reasons, moreover, are added.” And to these again he strives “to add a second explanation connected also with musical considerations,”725 that is to say with the seven notes of the scale, the seven Spirits of the Stars, etc.

Valentinus expatiates upon the power of the great Seven, who were summoned to bring forth this universe after Ar(r)hetos, or the Ineffable, whose name is composed of seven letters, had represented the first Hebdomad. The name Ar(r)hetos indicates the sevenfold nature [pg 481] of the One, the Logos. “The Goddess Rhea,” says Proclus, “is a Monad, Duad, and Heptad,” comprehending in herself all the Titanidæ, “who are seven.”726

The Seven Creations are found in almost every Purâna. They are all preceded by what Wilson translates as the “Indiscrete Principle,” Absolute Spirit, independent of any relation with objects of sense.

They are: (1) Mahattattva, the Universal Soul, Infinite Intellect, or Divine Mind; (2) Tanmâtras, Bhûta or Bhûtasarga, Elemental Creation the first differentiation of Universal Indiscrete Substance; (3) Indriya or Aindriyaka, Organic Evolution. “These three were the Prâkrita Creations, the developments of indiscrete nature, preceded by the Indiscrete Principle”; (4) Mukhya, “the Fundamental Creation (of perceptible things) was that of inanimate bodies”;727 (5) Tairyagyonya or Tiryaksrotas, was that of animals; (6) Ûrdhvasrotas, or that of divinities(?);728 (7) Arvâksrotas, was that of man.729

This is the order given in the exoteric texts. According to esoteric teaching there are seven Primary, and seven Secondary “Creations”; the former being the Forces self-evolving from the one causeless Force; the latter showing the manifested Universe emanating from the already differentiated divine Elements.

Esoterically, as well as exoterically, all the above enumerated Creations stand for the seven periods of Evolution, whether after an Age or a Day of Brahmâ. This is the teaching par excellence of Occult Philosophy, which, however, never uses the term “creation,” nor even that of evolution, with regard to Primary “Creation”; but calls all such Forces the “aspects of the Causeless Force.” In the Bible, the seven periods are dwarfed into the six Days of Creation and the seventh Day of Rest, and the Westerns adhere to the letter. In the Hindû Philosophy, when the active Creator has produced the World of Gods, the Germs of all the undifferentiated Elements, and the Rudiments of future Senses—the World of Noumena, in short—the Universe remains unaltered for a Day of Brahmâ, a period of 4,320,000,000 years. This is the seventh passive Period, or the “Sabbath” of Eastern Philosophy, [pg 482] following six periods of active evolution. In the Shatapatha Brâhmana, Brahma (neuter), the Absolute Cause of all Causes, radiates the Gods. Having radiated the Gods, through its inherent nature, the work is interrupted. In the First Book of Manu it is said:

At the expiration of each Night (Pralaya), Brahma, having been asleep, awakes, and, through the sole energy of the motion, causes to emanate from itself the Spirit [or mind], which in its essence is, and yet is not.

In the Sepher Yetzirah, the Kabalistic “Book of Creation,” the author has evidently reëchoed the words of Manu. In it the Divine Substance is represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.

One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be his Name, who liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit.730

And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air, the creative element; and then number Three, Water, proceeded from the Air; Ether or Fire completes the mystic Four, the Arba-il. In the Eastern doctrine, Fire is the first Element—Ether, synthesizing the whole, since it contains all of them.

In the Vishnu Purâna, the whole seven periods are given; and the progressive Evolution of the “Spirit-Soul,” and of the seven Forms of Matter, or Principles, is shown. It is impossible to enumerate them in this work. The reader is asked to peruse one of the Purânas.

R. Yehudah began, it is written: “Elohim said: Let there be a firmament, in the midst of waters.” Come, see! At the time that the Holy ... created the world, He [they] created 7 heavens Above. He created 7 earths Below, 7 seas, 7 days, 7 rivers, 7 weeks, 7 years, 7 times, and 7,000 years that the world has been, ... the seventh of all (the millennium).... So here are 7 earths Below, they are all inhabited except those which are above, and those which are below. And ... between each earth, a heaven (firmament) is spread out between each other.... And there are in them [these earths] creatures who look different one from the other; ... but if you object and say that all the children of the world came out from Adam, it is not so.... And the lower earths, where do they come from? They are from the chain of the earth, and from the Heaven above.731

Irenæus also is our witness—and a very unwilling one—that the Gnostics taught the same system, veiling very carefully the true esoteric meaning. This “veiling,” however, is identical with that of the Vishnu Purâna and others. Thus Irenæus writes of the Marcosians:

[pg 483]

They maintain that first of all the four elements, fire, water, earth and air, were produced after the image of the primary Tetrad above, and that then if we add their operations, namely, heat, cold, moisture and dryness, an exact likeness of the Ogdoad is presented.732

Only this “likeness” and the Ogdoad itself is a blind, just as in the seven creations of the Vishnu Purâna, to which two more are added, of which the eighth, termed Anugraha, “possesses both the qualities of goodness and darkness,” a Sânkhyan more than a Purânic idea. For Irenæus says again, that:

They [the Gnostics] had a like eighth creation which was good and bad, divine and human. They affirm that man was formed on the eighth day. Sometimes they affirm that he was made on the sixth day, and at others on the eighth; unless, perchance, they mean that his earthly part was formed on the sixth day and his fleshly part [?] on the eighth day; these two being distinguished by them.733

They were so “distinguished,” but not as Irenæus gives it. The Gnostics had a superior, and an inferior Hebdomad in Heaven; and a third terrestrial Hebdomad, on the plane of matter. Iaô, the Mystery God and the Regent of the Moon, as given in Origen's Chart, was the chief of these superior “Seven Heavens,”734 hence identical with the chief of the Lunar Pitris, that name being given by them to the Lunar Dhyân Chohans. “They affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent, and speak of them as being angels,” writes the same Irenæus; and adds that on this account they termed Iaô Hebdomas, while his mother was called Ogdoas, because, as he explains, “she preserved the number of the first begotten and primary Ogdoad of the Plerôma.”735

This “first begotten Ogdoad” was in Theogony the Second Logos, the Manifested, because it was born of the Seven-fold First Logos, hence it is the eighth on this manifested plane; and in Astrolatry, it was the Sun, Mârttânda, the eighth Son of Aditi, whom she rejects while preserving her Seven Sons, the planets. For the Ancients have never regarded the Sun as a planet, but as a central and fixed Star. This, then, is the second Hebdomad born of the Seven-rayed One, Agni, the Sun and what not, only not the seven planets, which are Sûrya's Brothers, not his Sons. With the Gnostics, these Astral Gods were the Sons of Ialdabaoth736 (from ilda, child, and baoth egg), the Son of Sophia Achamôth, the daughter of Sophia or Wisdom, whose region [pg 484] is the Plerôma. Ialdabaoth produces from himself these six stellar Spirits: Iaô (Jehovah), Sabaôth, Adoneus, Eloæus, Oreus, Astaphæus,737 and it is they who are the second, or inferior Hebdomad. As to the third, it is composed of the seven primeval men, the shadows of the Lunar Gods, projected by the first Hebdomad. In this the Gnostics did not, as seen, differ much from the Esoteric Doctrine, except that they veiled it. As to the charge made by Irenæus, who was evidently ignorant of the true tenets of the “Heretics,” with regard to man being created on the sixth day, and man being created on the eighth, this relates to the mysteries of the inner man. It will become comprehensible to the reader only after he has read Volume II, and understood well the Anthropogenesis of the Esoteric Doctrine.

Ialdabaoth is a copy of Manu, who boasts:

O best of twice-born men! Know that I (Manu) am he, the creator of all this world, whom that male Virâj ... spontaneously produced.738

He first creates the ten Lords of Being, the Prajâpatis, who, as verse 36 tells us, “produce seven other Manus.” Ialdabaoth boasts likewise: “I am Father and God, and there is no one above me,” he exclaims. For which his Mother coolly puts him down by saying: “Do not lie, Ialdabaoth, for the Father of all, the First Man (Anthrôpos) is above thee, and so is Anthrôpos, the Son of Anthrôpos.”739 This is a good proof that there were three Logoi—besides the Seven born of the First—one of these being the Solar Logos. And, again, who was that Anthrôpos himself, so much higher than Ialdabaoth? The Gnostic records alone can solve this riddle. In Pistis-Sophia the four-vowelled name Ieou is generally accompanied by the epithet of “the Primal, or First Man.” This shows again that the Gnôsis was but an echo of our Archaic Doctrine. The names answering to Parabrahman, to Brahmâ, and Manu, the first thinking Man, are composed of one-vowelled, three-vowelled and seven-vowelled sounds. Marcus, whose philosophy was certainly more Pythagorean than anything else, speaks of a revelation to him of the seven Heavens sounding each one vowel, as they pronounced the seven names of the seven Angelic Hierarchies.

When Spirit has permeated every minutest atom of the Seven Principles of Kosmos, then the Secondary Creation, after the above-mentioned period of rest, begins.

[pg 485]

“The Creators [Elohim] outline in the second ‘Hour’ the shape of man,” says Rabbi Simeon in The Nuchthemeron of the Hebrews. “There are twelve hours in the day,” says the Mishna, “and it is during these that creation is accomplished.” The “twelve hours of the day” are again the dwarfed copy, the faint, yet faithful, echo of primitive Wisdom. They are like the 12,000 Divine Years of the Gods, a cyclic blind. Every Day of Brahmâ has 14 Manus, which the Hebrew Kabalists, following, however, in this the Chaldeans, have disguised into 12 “Hours.”740 The Nuchthemeron of Apollonius of Tyana is the same thing. “The Dodecahedron lies concealed in the perfect Cube,” say the Kabalists. The mystic meaning of this is, that the twelve great transformations of Spirit into Matter—the 12,000 Divine Years—take place during the four great Ages, or the first Mahâyuga. Beginning with the metaphysical and the supra-human, it ends in the physical and purely human natures of Kosmos and Man. Eastern Philosophy can give the number of mortal years that run along the line of spiritual and physical evolutions of the seen and the unseen, if Western Science fails to do so.

Primary Creation is called the Creation of Light (Spirit); and the Secondary, that of Darkness (Matter).741 Both are found in Genesis.742 The first is the emanation of self-born Gods (Elohim); the second of physical Nature.

This is why it is said in the Zohar:

Oh, companions, companions, man as emanation was both man and woman; as well on the side of the Father as on the side of the Mother. And this is the sense of the words: And Elohim spake: “Let there be Light and it was Light!” ... And this is the “two-fold Man”!

Light, however, on our plane, is Darkness in the higher spheres.

“Man and woman ... on the side of the Father” (Spirit) refers to Primary Creation; and on the side of the Mother (Matter), to the Secondary. The two-fold Man is Adam Kadmon, the male and female abstract prototype and the differentiated Elohim. Man proceeds from the Dhyân Chohan, and is a “Fallen Angel,” a God in exile, as will be shown.

In India these creations were described as follows:743

[pg 486]

(I) The First Creation: Mahattattva Creation, so-called because it was the primordial self-evolution of that which had to become Mahat, the “Divine Mind, conscious and intelligent”; esoterically, the “Spirit of the Universal Soul.”

Worthiest of ascetics, through its potency (the potency of that cause), every producedcause comes by its proper nature.

And again:

Seeing that the potencies of all beings are understood only through the knowledge of That (Brahma), which is beyond reasoning, creation, and the like, such potencies are referable to Brahma.

That, then precedes the manifestation. “The first was Mahat,” says Linga Purâna; for the One (the That) is neither first nor last, but all. Exoterically, however, this manifestation is the work of the “Supreme One”—a natural effect, rather, of an Eternal Cause; or, as the Commentator says, it might have been understood to mean that Brahmâ was then created (?), being identified with Mahat, active intelligence, or the operating will of the Supreme. Esoteric Philosophy renders it the “operating Law.”

It is on the right comprehension of this tenet in the Brâhmanas and Purânas that hangs, we believe, the apple of discord between the three Vedântin Sects: the Advaita, Dvaita, and the Vishishthâdvaita. The first argues rightly that Parabrahman, having no relation, as the absolute All, to the manifested World, the Infinite having no connection with the Finite, can neither will nor create; that, therefore, Brahmâ, Mahat, Îshvara, or whatever name the Creative Power may be known by, Creative Gods and all, are simply an illusive aspect of Parabrahman in the conception of the conceivers; while the other sects identify the Impersonal Cause with the Creator, or Îshvara.

Mahat, or Mahâ-Buddhi, is, with the Vaishnavas, however, Divine Mind, in active operation, or, as Anaxagoras has it, “an ordering and disposing Mind, which was the cause of all things”—Νοῦς ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων ἀίτιος.

Wilson saw at a glance the suggestive connection between Mahat and the Phœnician Môt, or Mut, who was female with the Egyptians, the Goddess Moot, the Mother, “which, like Mahat,” he says, “was the first product of the mixture(?) of Spirit and Matter, and the first rudiment of Creation.” “Ex connexione autem ejus Spiritus prodidit Môt.... Hinc ... seminium omnis creaturæ et omnium rerum [pg 487] creatio,” says Brucker,744 giving it a still more materialistic and anthropomorphic colouring.

Nevertheless, the esoteric sense of the doctrine is seen, through every exoteric sentence, on the very face of the old Sanskrit texts that treat of primordial Creation.

The Supreme Soul, the All-permeant (Sarvaga) Substance of the World, having entered [been drawn] into Matter [Prakriti] and Spirit [Purusha], agitated the mutable and the immutable principles, the season of Creation [Manvantara] being arrived.

The Nous of the Greeks, which is (spiritual or divine) Mind, or Mens, Mahat, operates upon Matter in the same way; it “enters into” and “agitates” it:

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,

Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

In the Phœnician Cosmogony also, “Spirit mixing with its own principles gives rise to creation”;745 the Orphic Triad shows an identical doctrine; for there Phanes, or Erôs, Chaos, containing crude undifferentiated Cosmic Matter, and Chronos, Time, are the three co-operating principles, emanating from the Concealed and Unknowable Point, which produce the work of “Creation.” And they are the Hindû Purusha (Phanes), Pradhâna (Chaos) and Kâla (Chronos). The good Professor Wilson does not like the idea, as no Christian clergyman, however liberal, would. He remarks that: “the mixture [of the Supreme Spirit or Soul with its own principles] is not mechanical; it is an influence or effect exerted upon intermediate agents which produce effects.” The sentence in Vishnu Purâna, “as fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, and not from any immediate operation upon mind itself, so the Supreme influenced the elements of creation,” the reverend and erudite Sanskritist correctly explains by: “as perfumes do not delight the mind by actual contact, but by the impression they make upon the sense of smelling, which communicates it to the mind”; adding, “the entrance of the Supreme ... into Spirit, as well as Matter, is less intelligible than the view elsewhere taken of it, as the infusion of Spirit, identified with the Supreme, into Prakriti or Matter alone.” He prefers the verse in Pâdma Purâna: “He who is called the male (spirit) of Prakriti ... that same divine Vishnu entered into Prakriti.” This view is certainly more akin to the plastic character of certain verses in the Bible concerning the Patriarchs, such [pg 488] as Lot and even Adam,746 and others of a still more anthropomorphic nature. But it is just that which led Humanity to Phallicism; the Christian religion being honeycombed with it, from the first chapter of Genesis down to the Revelation.

The Esoteric Doctrine teaches that the Dhyân Chohans are the collective aggregate of Divine Intelligence or Primordial Mind, and that the first Manus, the seven “mind-born” Spiritual Intelligences, are identical with the former. Hence the Kwan-Shi-Yin, the “Golden Dragon in whom are the Seven,” of Stanza III, is the Primordial Logos, or Brahmâ, the first manifested Creative Power; and the Dhyânic Energies are the Manus, or Manu Svâyambhuva collectively. The direct connection, moreover, between the Manus and Mahat is easy to see. Manu is from the root man, to think; and thinking proceeds from the mind. It is, in Cosmogony, the Pre-nebular Period.

(II) The Second Creation, Bhûta, was of the Rudimental Principles or Tanmâtras; thence termed the Elemental Creation or Bhûtasarga. It is the period of the first breath of the differentiation of the Pre-cosmic Elements, or Matter. Bhûtâdi means the “origin of the Elements,” and precedes Bhûtasarga, the “creation,” or differentiation, of those Elements in Primordial Âkâsha, Chaos or Vacuity.747 In the Vishnu Purâna it is said to proceed along, and belong to, the triple aspect of Ahankâra, translated Egotism, but meaning rather that untranslatable term “I-am-ness,” that which first issues from Mahat, or Divine Mind; the first shadowy outline of Self-hood, for “pure” Ahankâra becomes “passionate” and finally “rudimental” or initial: it is “the origin of conscious as of all unconscious being,” though the Esoteric school rejects the idea of anything being “unconscious,” save on our plane of illusion and ignorance. At this stage of the Second Creation, the Second Hierarchy of the Manus appear, the Dhyân Chohans or Devas, who are the origin of Form (Rûpa), the Chitrashikhandinas, “Bright-crested,” or Rikshas; those Rishis who have become the informing Souls of the Seven Stars (of the Great Bear).748 In astronomical and cosmogonical language, this Creation [pg 489] relates to the Fire-Mist Period, the first stage of Cosmic Life, after its Chaotic state,749 when Atoms issue from Laya.

(III) The Third Creation: the Third or Indriya Creation was the modified form of Ahankâra, the conception of “I” (from Aham, “I”), termed the Organic Creation, or Creation of the Senses, Aindriyaka. “These three were the Prâkrita Creation, the [discrete] developments of indiscrete nature preceded by the indiscrete principle.” “Preceded by,” ought to be replaced here with “beginning with Buddhi”; for the latter is neither a discrete nor an indiscrete quantity, but partakes of the nature of both, in man as in Kosmos. A unit or human Monad on the plane of illusion, when once freed from the three forms of Ahankâra and liberated from its terrestrial Manas, Buddhi indeed becomes a continued quantity, both in duration and extension, for it is eternal and immortal. Earlier it is stated, that the Third Creation “abounding with the quality of goodness,” is termed Ûrdhvasrotas; and a page or two further the Ûrdhvasrotas Creation is referred to as “the sixth creation ... or that of the divinities.” This shows plainly that earlier as well as later Manvantaras have been purposely confused, to prevent the profane from perceiving the truth. This is called “incongruity” and “contradictions” by the Orientalists. “The three creations beginning with Intelligence are elemental, but the six creations which proceed from the series of which Intellect is the first, are the work of Brahmâ.”750 Here “creations” mean everywhere stages of evolution. Mahat, “Intellect” or Mind, which corresponds with Manas, the former being on the cosmic, and the latter on the human plane, stands here, too, lower than Buddhi or supra-divine Intelligence. Therefore, when we read in Linga Purâna that “the first Creation was that of Mahat, Intellect being the first in manifestation,” we must refer that (specified) creation to the first evolution of our System or even our Earth, none of the preceding ones being discussed in the Purânas, but only occasionally hinted at.

[pg 490]

This Creation of the first Immortals, or Devasarga, is the last of the series, and has a universal meaning; it refers, namely, to Evolution in general, and not specifically to our Manvantara, which begins with the same over and over again, thus showing that it refers to several distinct Kalpas. For it is said “at the close of the past [Pâdma] Kalpa the divine Brahmâ awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the Universe void.” Then Brahmâ is shown going once more over the “Seven Creations,” in the secondary stage of evolution, repeating the first three on the objective plane.

(IV) The Fourth Creation: the Mukhya or Primary, as it begins the series of four. Neither the term “inanimate” bodies nor “immovable things,” as translated by Wilson, gives a correct idea of the Sanskrit words used. Esoteric Philosophy is not alone in rejecting the idea of any atom being “inorganic,” for it is found also in orthodox Hindûism. Moreover, Wilson himself says: “All the Hindû systems consider vegetable bodies as endowed with life.”751 Charâchara, or the synonymous sthâvara and jangama, is, therefore, inaccurately rendered by “animate and inanimate,” “sentient beings” and “unconscious,” or “conscious and unconscious beings,” etc. “Locomotive and fixed” would be better, “since trees are considered to possess souls.” The Mukhya is the “creation,” or rather organic evolution, of the vegetable kingdom. In this Secondary Period, the three degrees of the elemental or rudimental kingdoms are evolved in this World, corresponding, inversely in order, to the three Prâkritic Creations, during the Primary Period of Brahmâ's activity. As in that Period, in the words of Vishnu Purâna, “the first creation was that of Mahat or Intellect.... The second was that of the Rudimental Principles (Tanmâtras).... The third was ... the creation of the senses (Aindriyaka)”; so in this one, the order of the Elemental Forces stands thus: (1) the nascent Centres of Force, intellectual and physical; (2) the Rudimentary Principles, nerve force, so to say; and (3) nascent Apperception, which is the Mahat of the lower kingdoms, and is especially developed in the third order of Elementals; these are succeeded by the objective kingdom of minerals, in which this “apperception” is entirely latent, to re-develop only in the plants. The Mukhya Creation, then, is the middle point between the three lower and the three higher kingdoms, which represent the seven esoteric kingdoms of Kosmos, and of Earth.

[pg 491]

(V) The Fifth Creation: the Tiryaksrotas or Tairyagyonya Creation,752 that of the “(sacred) animals,” corresponding on Earth only to the dumb animal creation. That which is meant by “animals,” in the Primary Creation, is the germ of awakening consciousness, or of “apperception,” that which is faintly traceable in some sensitive plants on Earth and more distinctly in the protistic Monera.753 On our Globe, during the First Round, animal “creation” precedes that of man, while the mammalian animals evolve from man in our Fourth Round, on the physical plane. In the First Round, the animal atoms are drawn into a cohesion of human physical form; while in the Fourth, the reverse occurs according to magnetic conditions developed during life. And this is “metempsychosis.”754 This fifth Stage of Evolution, called exoterically “Creation,” may be viewed in both the Primary and Secondary Periods, one as the spiritual and cosmic, the other as the material and terrestrial. It is archebiosis, or life-origination; “origination,” so far, of course, as the manifestation of life on all the seven planes is concerned. It is at this period of evolution that the absolutely eternal universal motion, or vibration, that which is called in Esoteric language the “Great Breath,” differentiates into the primordial, first manifested Atom. More and more, as chemical and physical sciences progress, does this Occult axiom find its corroboration in the world of knowledge; the scientific hypothesis, that even the simplest elements of matter are identical in their nature, and differ from each other only in consequence of the various distributions of atoms in the molecule or speck of substance, or of the modes of its atomic vibration, gains more ground every day.

Thus, as the differentiation of the primordial germ of life has to precede the evolution of the Dhyân Chohan of the Third Group or Hierarchy of Being in Primary Creation, before those Gods can become embodied in their first ethereal form (rûpa), so animal creation has for the same reason to precede “divine man” on Earth. And this is why we find in the Purânas, “the fifth, the Tairyagyonya Creation, was that of animals.”

(VI) The Sixth Creation: the Ûrdhvasrotas Creation, or that of [pg 492] Divinities. But these Divinities are simply the Prototypes of the First Race, the Fathers of their “mind-born” progeny with the “soft bones.” It is these who became the Evolvers of the “Sweat-born”—an expression explained in Volume II.

“Created beings,” explains the Vishnu Purâna, “although they are destroyed [in their individual forms] at the periods of dissolution, yet being affected by the good or evil acts of former existences, are never exempted from their consequences. And when Brahmâ produces the world anew, they are the progeny of his will.”

“Collecting his mind into itself [yoga-willing], Brahmâ creates the four Orders of Beings, termed Gods, Demons, Progenitors, and Men”; Progenitors here meaning the Prototypes and Evolvers of the first Root-Race of men. The Progenitors are the Pitris, and are of Seven Classes. They are said, in exoteric mythology, to be born of “Brahmâ's side,” like Eve from the rib of Adam.

Finally, the Sixth Creation is followed, and “Creation” in general closed by:

(VII) The Seventh Creation: the evolution of the Arvâksrotas Beings, “which was ... that of man.”

The “Eighth Creation” mentioned is no Creation at all: it is a “blind,” for it refers to a purely mental process, the cognition of the “Ninth Creation,” which, in its turn, is an effect, manifesting in the Secondary, of that which was a “Creation” in the Primary (Prâkrita) Creation.755 The Eighth, then, called Anugraha, the Pratyayasarga or Intellectual Creation of the Sânkhyas,756 is “the creation of which we have a notion [in its esoteric aspect], or to which we give intellectual assent (Anugraha), in contradistinction to organic creation.” It is the correct perception of our relations to the whole range of “Gods,” and especially of those we bear to the Kumâras, the so-called “Ninth Creation,” which is in reality an aspect, or reflection, of the Sixth in our Manvantara (the Vaivasvata). “There is a ninth, the Kaumâra Creation, which is both primary and secondary,” says the Vishnu Purâna, the oldest of such texts.757 As an Esoteric text explains:

[pg 493]

The Kumâras, are the Dhyânis, derived immediately from the Supreme Principle, who reäppear in the Vaivasvata Manu period, for the progress of mankind.758

The translator of the Vishnu Purâna corroborates it, by remarking that “these sages ... live as long as Brahmâ; and they are only created by him in the First Kalpa, although their generation is very commonly, but inconsistently, introduced in the [Secondary] Vârâha, or Pâdma Kalpa.” Thus, the Kumâras are, exoterically, “the creation of Rudra or Nîlalohita, a form of Shiva, by Brahmâ ... and of certain other mind-born sons of Brahmâ.” But, in the Esoteric teaching, they are the Progenitors of the true spiritual Self in the physical man, the higher Prajâpatis, while the Pitris, or lower Prajâpatis, are no more than the Fathers of the model, or type of his physical form, made “in their image.” Four (and occasionally five) are mentioned freely in the exoteric texts, three of the Kumâras being secret.

“The four Kumâras [are] the mind-born Sons of Brahmâ. Some specify seven.”759 All these seven Vaidhâtra, the patronymic of the Kumâras, the “Maker's Sons,” are mentioned and described in Îshvara Krishna's Sânkhya Kârikâ with the Commentary of Gaudapâdâchârya (Shankarâchvrya's Paraguru) attached to it. It discusses the nature of the Kumâras, though it refrains from mentioning by name all the seven Kumâras, but calls them instead the “seven sons of Brahmâ,” which they are, as they are created by Brahmâ in Rudra. The list of names it gives us is: Sanaka, Sanandana, Sanâtana, Kapila, Ribhu, and Panchashikha. But these again are all aliases.

The exoteric four are Sanatkumâra, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanâtana; and the esoteric three Sana, Kapila, and Sanatsujâta. Special attention is once more drawn to this class of Dhyân Chohans, for herein lies the mystery of generation and heredity hinted at in the Commentary on Stanza VII, in treating of the Four Orders of Angelic Beings. Volume II explains their position in the Divine Hierarchy. Meanwhile, let us see what the exoteric texts say about them.

They say little; and to him who fails to read between the lines—nothing. “We must have recourse, here, to other Purânas for the elucidation of this term,” remarks Wilson, who does not suspect for one [pg 494] moment that he is in the presence of the “Angels of Darkness,” the mythical “great enemy” of his Church. Therefore, he contrives to “elucidate” no more than that “these [Divinities] declining to create progeny, [and thus rebelling against Brahmâ], remained, as the name of the first [Sanatkumâra] implies, ever boys, Kumâras; that is, ever pure and innocent, whence their creation is called the Kaumâra.” The Purânas, however, may afford a little more light. “Being ever as he was born, he is here called a youth; and hence his name is well known as Sanatkumâra.”760 In the Shaiva Purânas, the Kumâras are always described as Yogins. The Kurma Purâna, after enumerating them, says: “These five, O Brâhmans, were Yogins, who acquired entire exemption from passion.” They are five, because two of the Kumâras fell.

So untrustworthy are some translations of the Orientalists that in the French translation of the Hari Vamsha, it is said: “The seven Prajâpati, Rudra, Skanda (his son) and Sanatkumâra proceeded to create beings.” Whereas, as Wilson shows, the original is: “These seven ... created progeny; and so did Rudra, but Skanda and Sanatkumâra, restraining their power, abstained (from creation).” The “four orders of beings” are referred to sometimes as Ambhâmsi, which Wilson renders as “literally Waters” and believes it “a mystic term.” It is one, no doubt; but he evidently failed to catch the real Esoteric meaning. “Waters” and “Water” stand as the symbol for Âkâsha, the “Primordial Ocean of Space,” on which Nârâyana, the self-born Spirit, moves, reclining on that which is its progeny.761 “Water is the body of Nara; thus we have heard the name of Water explained. Since Brahmâ rests on the Water, therefore he is termed Nârâyana.”762 “Pure, Purusha created the Waters pure.” At the same time Water is the Third Principle in material Kosmos, and the third in the realm of the Spiritual: Spirit of Fire, Flame, Âkâsha, Ether, Water, Air, Earth, are the cosmic, sidereal, psychic, spiritual and mystic principles, preëminently occult, on every plane of being. “Gods, Demons, Pitris and Men,” are the four orders of beings to whom the term Ambhâmsi is applied, because they are all the product of Waters (mystically), of the Âkâshic Ocean, and of the Third principle in Nature. In the Vedas it is a synonym of Gods. Pitris and Men on Earth are the [pg 495] transformations or rebirths of Gods and Demons (Spirits) on a higher plane. Water is, in another sense, the feminine principle. Venus Aphrodite is the personified Sea, and the Mother of the God of Love, the Generatrix of all the Gods, as much as the Christian Virgin Mary is Mare, the Sea, the Mother of the Western God of Love, Mercy and Charity. If the student of Esoteric Philosophy thinks deeply over the subject, he is sure to find out all the suggestiveness of the term Ambhâmsi, in its manifold relations to the Virgin in Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the Alchemists, and even to the “Waters of Grace” of the modern Baptist.

Of all the seven great divisions of Dhyân Chohans, or Devas, there is none with which humanity is more concerned than with the Kumâras. Imprudent are the Christian Theologians who have degraded them into Fallen Angels, and now call them Satan and Demons; as among these heavenly denizens who “refuse to create,” the Archangel Michael, the greatest patron Saint of the Western and Eastern Churches, under his double name of St. Michael and his supposed copy on earth, St. George conquering the Dragon, has to be given one of the most prominent places.

The Kumâras, the Mind-born Sons of Brahmâ-Rudra, or Shiva, mystically the howling and terrific destroyer of human passions and physical senses, which are ever in the way of the development of the higher spiritual perceptions and the growth of the inner eternal man, are the progeny of Shiva, the Mahâyogî, the great patron of all the Yogîs and Mystics of India.

Shiva-Rudra is the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the Preserver; and both are the Regenerators of spiritual as well as of physical Nature. To live as a plant, the seed must die. To live as a conscious entity in the Eternity, the passions and senses of man must die before his body does. “That to live is to die and to die is to live,” has been too little understood in the West. Shiva, the Destroyer, is the Creator and the Saviour of Spiritual Man, as he is the good gardener of Nature. He weeds out the plants, human and cosmic, and kills the passions of the physical, to call to life the perceptions of the spiritual, man.

The Kumâras, themselves then, being the “virgin ascetics,” refuse to create the material being Man. Well may they be suspected of a direct connection with the Christian Archangel Michael, the “virgin combatant” of the Dragon Apophis, whose victim is every Soul united too loosely to its immortal Spirit, the Angel who, as shown by the Gnostics, [pg 496] refused to create just as the Kumâras did. Does not that patron Angel of the Jews preside over Saturn (Shiva or Rudra), and the Sabbath, the day of Saturn? Is he not shown of the same essence with his Father (Saturn), and called the Son of Time, Cronus, or Kâla, a form of Brahmâ (Vishnu and Shiva)? And is not Old Time of the Greeks, with its scythe and sand-glass, identical with the Ancient of Days of the Kabalists; the latter “Ancient” being one with the Hindû Ancient of Days, Brahmâ, in his triune form, whose name is also Sanat, the Ancient? Every Kumâra bears the prefix of Sanat and Sana. And Shanaishchara is Saturn, the planet Shani, the King Saturn, whose Secretary in Egypt was Thot-Hermes the first. They are thus identified both with the planet and the God (Shiva), who are, in their turn, shown to be the prototypes of Saturn, who is the same as Bel, Baal, Shiva, and Jehovah Sabbaoth, the Angel of the Face of whom is Mikael—מיכאל, “who [is] as God.” He is the patron, and guardian Angel of the Jews, as Daniel tells us; and, before the Kumâras were degraded, by those who were ignorant of their very name, into Demons and Fallen Angels, the Greek Ophites, the occultly inclined predecessors and precursors of the Roman Catholic Church after its secession and separation from the primitive Greek Church, had identified Michael with their Ophiomorphos, the rebellious and opposing spirit. This means nothing more than the reverse aspect, symbolically, of Ophis, the Divine Wisdom or Christos. In the Talmud, Mikael is “Prince of Water” and the chief of the Seven Spirits, for the same reason that one of his many prototypes, Sanatsujâta, the chief of the Kumâras, is called Ambhâmsi, “Waters,” according to the commentary on Vishnu Purâna. Why? Because the Waters is another name of the Great Deep, the Primordial Waters of Space, or Chaos, and also means Mother, Ambâ, meaning Aditi and Akâsha, the Celestial Virgin-Mother of the visible Universe. Furthermore, the “Waters of the Flood” are also called the “Great Dragon,” or Ophis, Ophiomorphos.

The Rudras will be noticed in their septenary character of “Fire-Spirits” in the “Symbolism” attached to the Stanzas in Volume II. There we shall also consider the Cross (3 + 4) under its primeval and later forms, and shall use for purposes of comparison the Pythagorean numbers side by side with Hebrew metrology. The immense importance of the number seven will thus become evident, as the root number of Nature. We shall examine it from the standpoint of the Vedas and [pg 497] the Chaldean Scriptures; as it existed in Egypt thousands of years b.c., and as treated in the Gnostic records; we shall show how its importance as a basic number has gained recognition in Physical Science; and we shall endeavour to prove that the importance attached to the number seven throughout all antiquity was due to no fanciful imaginings of uneducated priests, but to a profound knowledge of Natural Law.

[pg 498]

Section XIV. The Four Elements.

Metaphysically and esoterically, there is but One Element in Nature, and at the root of it is the Deity; and the so-called seven Elements, of which five have already manifested and asserted their existence, are the garment, the veil, of that Deity, direct from the essence whereof comes Man, whether considered physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually. Four Elements only are generally spoken of in later antiquity, while five only are admitted in philosophy. For the body of Ether is not fully manifested yet, and its noumenon is still the “Omnipotent Father Æther,” the synthesis of the rest. But what are these Elements, whose compound bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry and Physics to contain numberless sub-elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer embrace the whole number suspected? Let us follow their evolution from the historical beginnings, at any rate.

The Four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they were that “which composes and decomposes the compound bodies.” Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetichism which adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but looked ever to the Noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits, the Cosmic Gods, to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple, but respectful, recognition by the wiser. In their turn, the phenomenal subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so-called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades.

In the Theogony of Môchus, we find Ether first, and then the Air; [pg 499] the two principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (νοητὸς) God, the visible Universe of Matter, is born.763

In the Orphic hymns, the Erôs-Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” which is said to move in Æther, “brooding over the Chaos,” the Divine Idea. In the Hindû Kathopanishad, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, and from their union springs the great Soul of the World, “Mahâ-Âtmâ, Brahman, the Spirit of Life”;764 these latter appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima Mundi; the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists being its last and lowest division.

The Elements (στοιχεῖα) of Plato and Aristotle were thus the incorporeal principles attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and it is with justice that Creuzer defines these primitive beliefs as “a species of magism, a psychic paganism, and a deification of potencies; a spiritualization which placed the believers in a close community with these potencies.”765 So close, indeed, that the Hierarchies of these Potencies, or Forces, have been classified on a graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are septenary, not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension, but in their real cosmic gradation, from their chemical, or physical, to their purely spiritual composition. Gods with the ignorant masses; Gods independent and supreme; Demons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as they often may be, are unable to understand the spirit of the philosophical sentence, in pluribus unum. With the Hermetic philosopher they are Forces relatively “blind” or “intelligent,” according to which of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums before they found themselves finally, in our cultured age, degraded into simple chemical elements.

At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants, ought to show more reverence for the Four Elements, if they would maintain any for Moses. For the Bible manifests the consideration and mystic significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver, on every page of the Pentateuch. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies was a Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four cardinal points, and Ether. Josephus shows it built in white, the colour of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and the Hebrew temples, according to Clemens [pg 500] Alexandrinus,766 a gigantic curtain, supported by five pillars, separated the sanctum sanctorum—now represented by the altar in Christian churches—wherein the priests alone were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its four colours this curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and with the five pillars signified the knowledge of the divine that the five senses can enable man to acquire with the help of the four Elements.

In Cory's Ancient Fragments, one of the “Chaldean Oracles” expresses ideas about the elements and Ether in language singularly like that of The Unseen Universe, written by two eminent Scientists of our day.

It states that from Ether have come all things, and to it all will return; that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it is the store-house of the germs, or of the remains of all visible forms, and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our “simple-minded ancestors.”

Whence came the Four Elements and the Malachim of the Hebrews? They have been made to merge, by a theological sleight of hand on the part of the Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church, into Jehovah, but their origin is identical with that of the Cosmic Gods of all other nations. Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or again, in the pampas of America—their symbols, we repeat, when traced to their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian, Âryan or Semitic, the Genius Loci, the Local God, embraced in its unity all Nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The Genius Loci, a very late afterthought of the last sub-races of the Fifth Root-Race, when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost, was ever the representative, in his accumulated titles, of all his colleagues. It was the God of Fire, symbolized by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the God of Water, symbolized by the fluvial bull, or some sacred river or fountain, as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the God of Air, manifesting in the hurricane and tempest, as Vâyu and Indra; and the God or Spirit of the Earth, who appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.

[pg 501]

These were the Cosmic Gods, ever synthesizing all in one, as found in every cosmogony or mythology. Thus, the Greeks had their Dodonean Jupiter, who included in himself the four Elements and the four cardinal points, and who was recognized, therefore, in old Rome under the pantheistic title of Jupiter Mundus; and who now, in modern Rome, has become the Deus Mundus, the one Mundane God, who is made to swallow all others, in the latest theology, by the arbitrary decision of his special ministers.

As Gods of Fire, Air, and Water, they were Celestial Gods; as Gods of the Lower Region, they were Infernal Deities; the latter adjective applying simply to the Earth. They were “Spirits of the Earth” under their respective names of Yama, Pluto, Osiris, the “Lord of the Lower Kingdom,” etc., and their tellurial character sufficiently proves it. The Ancients knew of no worse abode after death than the Kâma Loka, the Limbus on this Earth.767 If it is argued that the Dodonean Jupiter was identified with Dis, or the Roman Pluto with the Dionysus Chthonius, the Subterranean, and with Aïdoneus, the King of the Subterranean World, wherein, according to Creuzer,768 oracles were rendered, then it will become the pleasure of the Occultists to prove that both Aïdoneus and Dionysus are the bases of Adonaï, or Iurbo-Adonaï, as Jehovah is called in the Codex Nazaræus. “Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who is named Adonaï, whose name is also Kadush and El-El,”769 and also “Lord Bacchus.” Baal-Adonis of the Sôds, or Mysteries, of the pre-Babylonian Jews became the Adonaï by the Massorah, the later vowelled Jehovah. Hence the Roman Catholics are right. All these Jupiters are of the same family; but Jehovah has to be included therein to make it complete. The Jupiter Aërius or Pan, the Jupiter-Ammon, and the Jupiter-Bel-Moloch, are all correlations and one with Iurbo-Adonaï, because they are all one Cosmic Nature. It is that Nature and Power which creates the specific terrestrial symbol, and the physical and material fabric of the latter, which proves the Energy manifesting through it as extrinsic.

For primitive religion was something better than simple preöccupation about physical phenomena, as remarked by Schelling; and principles, [pg 502] more elevated than we modern Sadducees know of, “were hidden under the transparent veil of such merely natural divinities as thunder, the winds, and rain.” The Ancients knew and could distinguish the corporeal from the spiritual Elements in the Forces of Nature.

The four-fold Jupiter, as the four-faced Brahmâ, the aërial, the fulgurant, the terrestrial, and the marine God, the lord and master of the four Elements, may stand as a representative for the great Cosmic Gods of every nation. Although deputing power over the fire to Hephæstus-Vulcan, over the sea to Poseidon-Neptune, and over the Earth to Pluto-Aïdoneus, the Aërial Jove was still all these; for Æther, from the first, had preëminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the Elements.

Tradition tells of a grotto, a vast cave in the deserts of Central Asia, whereinto light pours, through four seemingly natural apertures, or clefts placed crossways at the four cardinal points. From noon till an hour before sunset the light streams in, of four different colours, as averred, red, blue, orange-gold, and white, owing to some either natural or artificially prepared conditions of vegetation and soil. The light converges in the centre round a pillar of white marble with a globe upon it, which represents our earth. It is named the “Grotto of Zarathustra.”

Included under the arts and sciences of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans, the phenomenal manifestation of the Four Elements, which were justly attributed by these believers to the intelligent interference of the Cosmic Gods, assumed a scientific character. The Magic of the ancient priests consisted, in those days, in addressing their Gods in their own language.

The speech of the men of the Earth cannot reach the Lords. Each must be addressed in the language of his respective Element.

So says The Book of Rules, in a sentence which will be shown pregnant with meaning, adding as an explanation of the nature of that element-language:

It is composed of Sounds, not words; of sounds, numbers and figures. He who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the superintending Power [the Regent-God of the specific Element needed].

Thus this “language” is that of incantations or of mantras, as they are called in India; sound being the most potent and effectual magic agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication between Mortals and Immortals. He who believes in the words and [pg 503] teachings of St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only which he chooses to accept, to the rejection of others; and St. Paul teaches most undeniably the existence of Cosmic Gods and their presence among us. Paganism preached a dual and simultaneous evolution, a “creation” spiritualem ac mundanum, as the Roman Church has it, ages before the advent of that Roman Church. Exoteric phraseology has changed little with respect to Divine Hierarchies since the most palmy days of Paganism, or “Idolatry.” Names alone have changed, together with claims which have now become false pretences. For when, for instance, Plato put in the mouth of the Highest Principle (Father Æther or Jupiter) the words, “the Gods of the Gods of whom I am the maker, as I am the father of all their works,” he knew the spirit of this sentence as fully, we suspect, as St. Paul did, when saying: “For though there be that are called Gods, whether in Heaven or in Earth, as there be Gods many and Lords many....”770 Both knew the sense and the meaning of what they put forward in such guarded terms.

We cannot be taken to task by the Protestants for interpreting the verse from the Corinthians as we do; for, if the translation in the English Bible is made ambiguous, it is not so in the original texts, and the Roman Catholic Church accepts the words of the Apostle in their true sense. For a proof see St. Dionysius, the Areopagite, who was “directly inspired by the Apostle,” and “who wrote under his dictation,” as we are assured by the Marquis de Mirville, whose works are approved by Rome, and who says, commenting on that special verse: “And, though there are (in fact) they who are called Gods, for it seems there are really several Gods, withal and for all that, the God-Principle and the Superior God ceases not to remain essentially one and indivisible.”771 Thus spoke the old Initiates also, knowing that the worship of minor Gods could never affect the “God Principle.” 772

Says Sir W. Grove, F.R.S., speaking of the correlation of forces:

The ancients when they witnessed a natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power.... Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently they became invested with a more material character; and the same words πνεῦμα, spirit, etc., were used to signify the soul or [pg 504]a gas; the very word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmutation of a spiritual into a physical conception.773

This, the great man of Science, in his preface to the sixth edition of his work, considers to be the only concern of exact Science, which has no business to meddle with the causes.

Cause and effect are, therefore, in their abstract relation to these forces, words solely of convenience. We are totally unacquainted with the ultimate generating power of each and all of them, and probably shall ever remain so; we can only ascertain the normal of their actions; we must humbly refer their causation to one omnipresent influence, and content ourselves with studying their effects and developing, by experiment, their mutual relations.774

This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above-quoted words, namely, the spirituality of the “ultimate generating power,” it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognize this quality which is inherent in the material elements, or rather, in their compounds, as present in the fire, air, water or earth. The Ancients knew these powers so well, that, while concealing their true nature under various allegories, for the benefit, or to the detriment, of the uneducated rabble, they never departed from the multiple object in view, while inverting them. They contrived to throw a thick veil over the nucleus of truth concealed by the symbol, but they ever tried to preserve the latter as a record for future generations, sufficiently transparent to allow their wise men to discern the truth behind the fabulous form of the glyph or allegory. These ancient sages are accused of superstition and credulity; and this too by the very nations, which, though learned in all the modern arts and sciences, and cultured and wise in their generation, accept to this day as their one living and infinite God, the anthropomorphic “Jehovah” of the Jews!

What were some of these alleged “superstitions”? Hesiod believed, for instance, that “the winds were the sons of the Giant Typhôeus,” who were chained and unchained at will by Æolus, and the polytheistic Greeks accepted it along with Hesiod. Why should they not, since the monotheistic Jews had the same beliefs, with other names for their dramatis personæ, and since Christians believe in the same to this day? The Hesiodic Æolus, Boreas, etc., were named Kedem, Tzephum, Derum, and Ruach Hayum by the “chosen people” of Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference? While the Hellenes were taught that Æolus tied and untied the winds, the Jews believed as fervently [pg 505] that their Lord God, with “smoke” coming “out of his nostrils and fire out of his mouth, ... rode upon a cherub and did fly; and he was seen upon the wings of the wind”.775 The expressions of the two nations are either both figures of speech, or both superstitions. We think they are neither; but only arise from a keen sense of oneness with Nature, and a perception of the mysterious and the intelligent behind every natural phenomenon, which the moderns no longer possess. Nor was it “superstitious” in the Greek Pagans to listen to the oracle of Delphi, when, at the approach of the fleet of Xerxes, that oracle advised them to “sacrifice to the winds,” if the same has to be regarded as divine worship in the Israelites, who sacrificed as often to the wind and also especially to the fire. Do they not say that their “God is a consuming fire,”776 who appeared generally as fire and “encompassed by fire”? and did not Elijah seek for the “Lord” in the “great strong wind, and in the earthquake”? Do not the Christians repeat the same after them? Do not they, moreover, sacrifice to this day, to the same “God of Wind and Water”? They do; because special prayers for rain, dry weather, trade-winds and the calming of storms on the seas, exist to this hour in the prayer-books of the three Christian Churches; and the several hundred sects of the Protestant religion offer them to their God upon every threat of calamity. The fact that they are no more answered by Jehovah, than they were, probably, by Jupiter Pluvius, does not alter the fact of these prayers being addressed to the Power, or Powers, supposed to rule over the Elements, or of these Powers being identical in Paganism and Christianity; or have we to believe that such prayers are crass idolatry and absurd “superstition” only when addressed by a Pagan to his “idol,” and that the same superstition is suddenly transformed into “praiseworthy piety” and “religion” whenever the name of the celestial addressee is changed? But the tree is known by its fruit. And the fruit of the Christian tree being no better than that of the tree of Paganism, why should the former command more reverence than the latter?

Thus, when we are told by the Chevalier Drach, a converted Jew, and by the Marquis de Mirville, a Roman Catholic fanatic of the French aristocracy, that in Hebrew “lightning” is a synonym of “fury,” and is always handled by the “evil” Spirit; that Jupiter Fulgur or Fulgurans is also called by the Christians Elicius, and [pg 506] denounced as the “soul of lightning,” its Dæmon;777 we have either to apply the same explanation and definitions to the “Lord God of Israel,” under the same circumstances, or renounce our right of abusing the Gods and creeds of other nations.

The foregoing statements, emanating as they do from two ardent and learned Roman Catholics, are, to say the least, dangerous, in the presence of the Bible and its prophets. Indeed, if Jupiter, the “chief Dæmon of the Pagan Greeks,” hurled his deadly thunder-bolts and lightnings at those who excited his wrath, so did the Lord God of Abraham and Jacob. For we read that:

The Lord thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his voice. And he sent out arrows [thunder-bolts] and scattered them [Saul's armies]; lightning, and discomfited them.778

The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this “Dæmon” is charged with having submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having become so furious that all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract him by offering contra-sacrifices to Thetis.779 Very fortunately, no authenticated instance is on the records of Christian wars, showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet, owing to the “prayers” of its enemy—another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers? What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one's own next-of-kin, say of one's father, is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour's parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.

So far the “blessings of Christianity” do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.

The above is not a defence of Pagan Gods, nor is it an attack on the [pg 507] Christian Deity, nor does it mean belief in either. The writer is quite impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of both, neither praying to, believing in, nor dreading any such “personal” and anthropomorphic God. The parallels are brought forward simply as one more curious exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the civilized theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the two beliefs, and there is none in their respective effects upon morality, or spiritual nature. The “light of Christ” shines upon as hideous features of the animal man now, as the “light of Lucifer” did in days of old. Says the missionary Lavoisier, in the Journal des Colonies:

These unfortunate heathens in their superstition regard even the Elements as something that has comprehension!... They still have faith in their idol Vâyu—the God or, rather, Demon of the Wind and Air ... they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and in the powers of their Brâhmans over the winds and storms.

In reply to this, we may quote from Luke: “And he [Jesus] arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there was a calm.”780 And here is another quotation from a Prayer Book: “O Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves.” This prayer of the Neapolitan and Provençal sailors, is copied textually from that of the Phœnician mariners to their Virgin-Goddess Astarte. The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the missionary, is that the commands of the Brâhmans to their Element-Gods not remaining “ineffectual,” the power of the Brâhmans is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the “Virgin of the Sea” of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be “Devils” in theological fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown to be as immoral and as wicked as the Pagans ever were, what benefit has Humanity derived from its change of Gods and Idols?

That which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes in simple mortals a crime, if successful. Sorcery and incantations are now regarded as fables; yet from the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws of England and America against witchcraft—obsolete [pg 508] but not repealed to this day—such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as criminal. Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the Emperor, sentencing to death the philosopher Sopatrus for “unchaining the winds,” and thus preventing ships laden with grain from arriving in time to put an end to famine. Pausanias is derided when he affirms that he saw with his own eyes “men who by simple prayers and incantations” stopped a strong hail-storm. This does not prevent modern Christian writers from advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its efficacy. Hoppo and Stadlein, two magicians and sorcerers, were sentenced to death for “throwing charms on fruit” and transferring a harvest by magic arts from one field to another, hardly a century ago, if we can believe Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: “Qui fruges excantassent segetem pellicentes incantando.”

Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth, in spiritual and material, in visible and invisible Nature, and that Science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For if, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the “ultimate generating power” of every Force, the “one omnipresent influence,” then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the Ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. “Ethereal Fire is the emanation of the Kabir proper; the Aërial is but the union [correlation] of the former with Terrestrial Fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity”—an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the same may be said of every Cosmic Element.

No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces, magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental, in fact of every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral, the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upâdhis, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are [pg 509] now regarded and recognized as perfectly natural, even by Science. Why should man be the only exception in Nature, and why cannot even the Elements have their Vehicles, their Vâhanas, in what we call the Physical Forces? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the religions of old?

[pg 510]

Section XV. On Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin.

Like Avalokiteshvara, Kwan-Shi-Yin has passed through several transformations, but it is an error to say of him that he is a modern invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he has been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that: “He who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before Reäbsorption [Pralaya]”. Thus the Logoi of all nations, from the Vedic Vishvakarman of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilized nations, are the “Word” who was in the “Beginning,” or the reäwakening of the energizing Powers of Nature, with the One Absolute. Born of Fire and Water, before these became distinct Elements, It was the “Maker,” the fashioner or modeller, of all things. “Without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men,” who finally may be called as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of Manifested Nature. “The great Dragon of Wisdom is born of Fire and Water, and into Fire and Water will all be reäbsorbed with him.”781 As this Bodhisattva is said “to assume any form he pleases,” from the beginning of a Manvantara to its end, though his special birthday, or memorial day, is celebrated according to the Kin-kwang-ming-King, or “Luminous Sûtra of Golden Light,” in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of Maitreya Buddha, in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one. He will appear as Maitreya Buddha, the last of the Avatâras and Buddhas, in the Seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal throughout the East. Only it is not in the Kali Yuga, our present terrifically materialistic age of Darkness, the “Black Age,” that a new Saviour of Humanity can ever appear. The Kali Yuga is “l'Age d'Or” (!) only in the mystic writings of some French pseudo-Occultists.782

[pg 511]

Hence the ritual in the exoteric worship of this Deity was founded on magic. The Mantras are all taken from special books kept secret by the priests, and each is said to work a magical effect; as the reciter or reader, by simply chanting them, produces a secret causation which results in immediate effects. Kwan-Shi-Yin is Avalokiteshvara, and both are forms of the Seventh Universal Principle; while in its highest metaphysical character this Deity is the synthetic aggregation of all the Planetary Spirits, Dhyân Chohans. He is the “Self-Manifested”; in short, the “Son of the Father.” Crowned with seven dragons, above his statue there appears the inscription Pu-tsi-k'iun-ling, “the universal Saviour of all living beings.”

Of course the name given in the archaic volume of the Stanzas is quite different, but Kwan-Yin is a perfect equivalent. In a temple of P'u-to, the sacred island of the Buddhists in China, Kwan-Shi-Yin is represented floating on a black aquatic bird (Kâlahamsa), and pouring on the heads of mortals the elixir of life, which, as it flows, is transformed into one of the chief Dhyâni-Buddhas, the Regent of a star called the “Star of Salvation.” In his third transformation Kwan-Yin is the informing Spirit or Genius of Water. In China the Dalaï-Lama is believed to be an incarnation of Kwan-Shi-Yin, who in his third terrestrial appearance was a Bodhisattva, while the Teshu Lama is an incarnation of Amitâbha Buddha, or Gautama.

It may be remarked en passant that a writer must indeed have a diseased imagination to discover phallic worship everywhere, as do McClatchey and Hargrave Jennings. The first discovers “the old phallic gods, represented under two evident symbols, the Kheen or Yang, which is the membrum virile, and the Khw-an or Yin, the pudendum muliebre.”783 Such a rendering seems the more strange as Kwan-Shi-Yin (Avalokiteshvara) and Kwan-Yin, besides being now the patron Deities of the Buddhist ascetics, the Yogîs of Tibet, are the Gods of chastity, and are, in their esoteric meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr. Rhys Davids' Buddhism: “The name Avalokiteshvara ... means ‘the Lord who looks down from on high’.”784 Nor is Kwan-Shi-Yin the “Spirit of the Buddhas present in the Church,” but, literally interpreted, it means “the Lord that is seen.” and in one sense, “the Divine Self perceived by Self”—the human Self—that is, the Âtman or Seventh Principle, merged in the Universal, perceived by, or the object of perception to, [pg 512] Buddhi, the Sixth Principle, or Divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense, Avalokiteshvara-Kwan-Shi-Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal Principle, is the Logos perceived by the Universal Buddhi, or Soul, as the synthetic aggregate of the Dhyâni-Buddhas; and is not the “Spirit of Buddha present in the Church,” but the Omnipresent Universal Spirit manifested in the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that of Yoginî, which, we are told by Mr. Hargrave Jennings, is a Sanskrit word, “in the dialects pronounced Jogi or Zogee (!), and is ... equivalent with Sena, and exactly the same as Duti or Dutica,” i.e., a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni or Shakti.785 “The books of morality [in India] direct a faithful wife to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as Sacti.”786 Nothing should surprise us after this. And it is, therefore, with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted about “Budh,” as being a name “which signifies not only the sun as the source of generation but also the male organ.”787 Max Müller, in treating of “False Analogies,” says that “the most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat ... maintains that the three syllables I Hi Wei [in the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-King] were meant for Je-ho-vah”;788 and again, Father Amyot “felt certain that the three persons of the Trinity could be recognized” in the same work. And if Abel Rémusat, why not Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognize the absurdity of ever seeing in Budh, the “enlightened” and the “awakened,” a “phallic symbol.”

Kwan-Shi-Yin, then, is “the Son identical with his Father,” mystically, or the Logos, the Word. He is called the “Dragon of Wisdom,” in Stanza III, for all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are connected with, and symbolized by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, “he who unites the doubles,” was represented as a serpent on human legs, either with or without arms. This was the Astral Light reüniting by its dual physiological and spiritual potency the Divine-Human to its purely Divine Monad, the Prototype in “Heaven” or Nature. It was the emblem of the resurrection of Nature; of Christ with the Ophites; and of Jehovah as the brazen serpent healing those who looked at him. The serpent was also an emblem of Christ with [pg 513] the Templars, as is shown by the Templar degree in Masonry. The symbol of Knooph (Khnoom also), or the Soul of the World, says Champollion, “is represented among other forms under that of a huge serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the emblem of the Good Genius and the veritable Agathodæmon, is sometimes bearded.”789 This sacred animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured on a great number of engraved stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems. It appears with various heads, human and animal, but its gems are always found inscribed with the name ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ (ChNOUBIS). This symbol is identical with one which; according to Jamblichus and Champollion, was called the “First of the Celestial Gods,” the God Hermes, or Mercury, with the Greeks, to which God Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of, and the first initiation of men into, Magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom, Enlightenment, or “Reäwakening” into the divine Science.

To close, Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin are the two aspects, male and female, of the same principle in Kosmos, Nature and Man, of Divine Wisdom and Intelligence. They are the Christos-Sophia of the mystic Gnostics, the Logos and its Shakti. In their longing for the expression of some mysteries never to be wholly comprehended by the profane, the Ancients, knowing that nothing could be preserved in human memory without some outward symbol, have chosen the, to us, often ridiculous images of the Kwan-Yins to remind man of his origin and inner nature. To the impartial, however, the Madonnas in crinolines and the Christs in white kid gloves must appear far more absurd than the Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin in their dragon-garb. The subjective can hardly be expressed by the objective. Therefore, since the symbolic formula attempts to characterize that which is above scientific reasoning, and is as often far beyond our intellects, it must needs go beyond that intellect in some shape or other, or else it will fade out from human remembrance.

[pg 515]

Part III. Addenda. On Occult And Modern Science.

[pg 516]

The knowledge of this nether world—

Say, friend, what is it, false or true?

The false, what mortal cares to know?

The true, what mortal ever knew?

[pg 517]

Section I. Reasons for These Addenda.

Many of the doctrines contained in the foregoing seven Stanzas and Commentaries having been studied and critically examined by some Western Theosophists, certain of the Occult Teachings have been found wanting from the ordinary stand-point of modern scientific knowledge. They seemed to encounter insuperable difficulties in the way of their acceptance, and to require reconsideration in view of scientific criticism. Some friends have already been tempted to regret the necessity of so often calling in question the assertions of Modern Science. It appeared to them—and I here repeat only their arguments—that “to run counter to the teachings of its most eminent exponents, was to court a premature discomfiture in the eyes of the Western World.”

It is, therefore, desirable to define, once and for all, the position which the writer, who does not in this agree with her friends, intends to maintain. So far as Science remains what in the words of Prof. Huxley it is, viz., “organized common sense”; so far as its inferences are drawn from accurate premisses, its generalizations resting on a purely inductive basis, every Theosophist and Occultist welcomes respectfully and with due admiration its contributions to the domain of cosmological law. There can be no possible conflict between the teachings of Occult and so-called exact Science, wherever the conclusions of the latter are grounded on a substratum of unassailable fact. It is only when its more ardent exponents, over-stepping the limits of [pg 518] observed phenomena in order to penetrate into the arcana of Being, attempt to wrench the formation of Kosmos and its living Forces from Spirit, and to attribute all to blind Matter, that the Occultists claim the right of disputing and calling in question their theories. Science cannot, owing to the very nature of things, unveil the mystery of the Universe around us. Science can, it is true, collect, classify, and generalize upon phenomena; but the Occultist, arguing from admitted metaphysical data, declares that the daring explorer, who would probe the inmost secrets of Nature, must transcend the narrow limitations of sense, and transfer his consciousness into the region of Noumena and the sphere of Primal Causes. To effect this, he must develop faculties which, save in a few rare and exceptional cases, are absolutely dormant, in the constitution of the off-shoots of our present Fifth Root-Race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable manner collect the facts on which to base his speculations. Is this not apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?

On the other hand, whatever the writer may do, she will never be able to satisfy both Truth and Science. To offer the reader a systematic and uninterrupted version of the Archaic Stanzas is impossible. A gap of 43 verses or shlokas has to be left between the 7th, already given, and the 51st, which is the subject of Book II, though the latter are made to run as from 1 onwards, for easier reading and reference. The mere appearance of man on Earth occupies an equal number of Stanzas, which minutely describe his primal evolution from the human Dhyân Chohans, the state of the Globe at that time, etc., etc. A great number of names referring to chemical substances and other compounds, which have now ceased to combine together, and are therefore unknown to the later offshoots of our Fifth Race, occupy a considerable space. As they are simply untranslatable, and would remain in every case inexplicable, they are omitted, along with those which cannot be made public. Nevertheless, even the little that is given will irritate every follower and defender of dogmatic materialistic Science who happens to read it.

In view of the criticism offered, it is proposed, before proceeding to the remaining Stanzas, to defend those already given. That they are not in perfect accord or harmony with Modern Science, we all know. But had they been as much in agreement with the views of modern knowledge as is a lecture by Sir William Thomson, they would have been rejected all the same. For they teach belief in conscious Powers [pg 519] and Spiritual Entities; in terrestrial, semi-intelligent, and highly intellectual Forces on other planes;790 and in Beings that dwell around us in spheres imperceptible, whether through telescope or microscope. Hence the necessity of examining the beliefs of materialistic Science, of comparing its views about the “Elements” with the opinions of the Ancients, and of analysing the physical Forces as they exist in modern conceptions, before the Occultists admit themselves to be in the wrong. We shall touch upon the constitution of the Sun and planets, and the Occult characteristics of what are called Devas and Genii, and are now termed by Science, Forces, or “modes of motion,” and see whether Esoteric belief is defensible or not. Notwithstanding the efforts made to the contrary, an unprejudiced mind will discover that under Newton's “agent, material or immaterial,”791 the agent which causes gravity, and in his personal working God, there is just as much of the metaphysical Devas and Genii, as there is in Kepler's Angelus Rector conducting each planet, and in the species immateriata by which the celestial bodies were carried along in their courses, according to that Astronomer.

In Volume II, we shall have to openly approach dangerous subjects. We must bravely face Science and declare, in the teeth of materialistic learning, of Idealism, Hylo-Idealism, Positivism and all-denying modern Psychology, that the true Occultist believes in “Lords of Light”; that he believes in a Sun, which—far from being simply a “lamp of day” moving in accordance with physical law, and far from being merely one of those Suns, which, according to Richter, “are sun-flowers of a higher light”—is, like milliards of other Suns, the dwelling or the vehicle of a God, and of a host of Gods.

In this dispute, of course, it is the Occultists who will be worsted. They will be considered, on the primâ facie aspect of the question, to be ignoramuses, and will be labelled with more than one of the usual epithets given to those whom the superficially judging public, itself ignorant of the great underlying truths in Nature, accuses of believing in mediæval superstitions. Let it be so. Submitting beforehand to every criticism in order to go on with their task, they only claim the privilege of showing that the Physicists are as much at loggerheads among themselves in their speculations, as these speculations are with the teachings of Occultism.

[pg 520]

The Sun is Matter, and the Sun is Spirit. Our ancestors, the “Heathen,” like their modern successors, the Parsîs, were, and are, wise enough in their generation to see in it the symbol of Divinity, and at the same time to sense within, concealed by the physical symbol, the bright God of Spiritual and Terrestrial Light. Such belief can be regarded as a superstition only by rank Materialism, which denies Deity, Spirit, Soul, and admits no intelligence outside the mind of man. But if too much wrong superstition bred by “Churchianity,” as Laurence Oliphant calls it, “renders a man a fool,” too much scepticism makes him mad. We prefer the charge of folly in believing too much, to that of a madness which denies everything, as do Materialism and Hylo-Idealism. Hence, the Occultists are fully prepared to receive their dues from Materialism, and to meet the adverse criticism which will be poured on the author of this work, not for writing it, but for believing in that which it contains.

Therefore the discoveries, hypotheses, and unavoidable objections which will be brought forward by the scientific critics must be anticipated and disposed of. It has also to be shown how far the Occult Teachings depart from Modern Science, and whether the ancient or the modern theories are the more logically and philosophically correct. The unity and mutual relations of all parts of Kosmos were known to the Ancients, before they became evident to modern Astronomers and Philosophers. And even if the external and visible portions of the Universe, and their mutual relations, cannot be explained in Physical Science, in any other terms than those used by the adherents of the mechanical theory of the Universe, it does not follow that the Materialist, who denies that the Soul of Kosmos (which appertains to Metaphysical Philosophy) exists, has the right to trespass upon that metaphysical domain. That Physical Science is trying to, and actually does, encroach upon it, is only one more proof that “might is right”; it does not justify the intrusion.

Another good reason for these Addenda is this. Since only a certain portion of the Secret Teachings can be given out in the present age, the doctrines would never be understood even by Theosophists, if they were published without any explanations or commentary. Therefore they must be contrasted with the speculations of Modern Science. Archaic Axioms must be placed side by side with Modern Hypotheses, and the comparison of their value must be left to the sagacious reader.

On the question of the “Seven Governors”—as Hermes calls the [pg 521] “Seven Builders,” the Spirits which guide the operations of Nature, the animated atoms of which are the shadows, in their own world, of their Primaries in the Astral Realms—this work will, of course, have every Materialist against it, as well as the men of Science. But this opposition can, at most, be only temporary. People have laughed at everything unusual, and have scouted every unpopular idea at first, and have then ended by accepting it. Materialism and Scepticism are evils that must remain in the world so long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one he had during the First and Second Races of this Round. Unless Scepticism and our present natural ignorance are equilibrated by Intuition and a natural Spirituality, every being afflicted with such feelings will see in himself nothing better than a bundle of flesh, bones, and muscles, with an empty garret inside, which serves the purpose of storing his sensations and feelings. Sir Humphrey Davy was a great Scientist, as deeply versed in Physics as any theorist of our day, yet he loathed Materialism. He says:

I heard with disgust, in the dissecting-rooms, the plan of the Physiologist, of the gradual secretion of matter, and its becoming endued with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary, by its own inherent forces, and at last rising into intellectual existence.

Nevertheless, Physiologists are not those who should be most blamed for speaking of that only which they can see by, and estimate on the evidence of, their physical senses. Astronomers and Physicists are, we consider, far more illogical in their materialistic views than are even Physiologists, and this has to be proved. Milton's

... Light

Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,

has become with the Materialists only

... Prime cheerer, light,

Of all material beings, first and best.

For the Occultists it is both Spirit and Matter. Behind the “mode of motion,” now regarded as the “property of matter” and nothing more, they perceive the radiant Noumenon. It is the “Spirit of Light,” the first-born of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy, or emanation, is stored in the Sun, the great Life-Giver of the Physical World, as the hidden concealed Spiritual Sun is the Light- and Life-Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic Realms. Bacon was one of the first to strike the key-note of Materialism, not only by his inductive method—renovated from ill-digested Aristotle—but by the general [pg 522] tenor of his writings. He inverts the order of mental Evolution when saying:

The first creation of God was the light of the sense; the last was the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the illumination of the Spirit.

It is just the reverse. The light of Spirit is the eternal Sabbath of the Mystic or Occultist, and he pays little attention to that of mere sense. That which is meant by the allegorical sentence, “Fiat Lux,” is, when esoterically rendered, “Let there be the ‘Sons of Light’,” or the Noumena of all phenomena. Thus the Roman Catholics rightly interpret the passage as referring to Angels, but wrongly as meaning Powers created by an anthropomorphic God, whom they personify in the ever thundering and punishing Jehovah.

These beings are the “Sons of Light,” because they emanate from, and are self-generated in, that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure Spirit lost in the absoluteness of Non-Being, and the other pole, the Matter in which it condenses, “crystallizing” into a more and more gross type as it descends into manifestation. Therefore Matter, though it is, in one sense, but the illusive dregs of that Light whose Rays are the Creative Forces, yet has in it the full presence of the Soul thereof, of that Principle, which none—not even the “Sons of Light,” evolved from its Absolute Darkness—will ever know. The idea is as beautifully, as it is truthfully, expressed by Milton, who hails the holy Light, which is the

... Offspring of Heaven, first-born,
Or of th' Eternal coëternal beam;
... Since God is Light,
And never but in unapproached Light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

[pg 523]

Section II. Modern Physicists are Playing at Blind Man's Buff.

And now Occultism puts to Science the question: Is light a body, or is it not? Whatever the answer of the latter, the former is prepared to show that, to this day, the most eminent Physicists have no real knowledge on the subject. To know what light is, and whether it is an actual substance or a mere undulation of the “ethereal medium,” Science has first to learn what Matter, Atom, Ether, Force, are in reality. Now, the truth is, that it knows nothing of any of these, and admits its ignorance. It has not even agreed what to believe in, as dozens of hypotheses on the same subject, emanating from various and very eminent Scientists, are antagonistic to each other and often self-contradictory. Thus their learned speculations may, with a stretch of good-will, be accepted as “working hypotheses” in a secondary sense, as Stallo puts it. But being radically inconsistent with each other, they must finally end by mutually destroying themselves. As declared by the author of Concepts of Modem Physics:

It must not be forgotten that the several departments of science are simply arbitrary divisions of science at large. In these several departments the same physical object may be considered under different aspects. The physicist may study its molecular relations, while the chemist determines its atomic constitution. But when they both deal with the same element or agent, it cannot have one set of properties in physics, and another set contradictory of them, in chemistry. If the physicist and chemist alike assume the existence of ultimate atoms absolutely invariable in bulk and weight, the atom cannot be a cube or oblate spheroid for physical, and a sphere for chemical purposes. A group of constant atoms cannot be an aggregate of extended and absolutely inert and impenetrable masses in a crucible or retort, and a system of mere centres of force as part of a magnet or of a Clamond battery. The universal æther cannot be soft and mobile to please the [pg 524]chemist, and rigid-elastic to satisfy the physicist; it cannot be continuous at the command of Sir William Thomson and discontinuous on the suggestion of Cauchy or Fresnel.792

The eminent Physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted as saying the same thing in the 43rd Volume of the Mémoires de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, which we translate from the French, as cited:

When one sees the assurance with which to-day are affirmed doctrines which attribute the collectivity, the universality of the phenomena to the motions alone of the atom, one has a right to expect to find likewise unanimity in the qualities assigned to this unique being, the foundation of all that exists. Now, from the first examination of the particular systems proposed, one finds the strangest deception; one perceives that the atom of the chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the metaphysician, and that of the mathematician ... have absolutely nothing in common but the name! The inevitable result is the existing subdivision of our sciences, each of which, in its own little pigeon-hole, constructs an atom which satisfies the requirements of the phenomena it studies, without troubling itself in the least about the requirements proper to the phenomena of the neighbouring pigeon-hole. The metaphysician banishes the principles of attraction and repulsion as dreams; the mathematician, who analyses the laws of elasticity and those of the propagation of light, admits them implicitly, without even naming them.... The chemist cannot explain the grouping of the atoms, in his often complicated molecules, without attributing to his atoms specific distinguishing qualities; for the physicist and the metaphysician, partisans of the modern doctrines, the atom is, on the contrary, always and everywhere the same. What am I saying? There is no agreement even in one and the same science as to the properties of the atom. Each constructs an atom to suit his own fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he is particularly concerned.793

The above is the photographically correct image of Modern Science and Physics. The “pre-requisite of that incessant play of the 'scientific imagination',” which is so often found in Professor Tyndall's eloquent discourses, is vivid indeed, as is shown by Stallo, and for contradictory variety it leaves far behind it any “phantasies” of Occultism. However that may be, if physical theories are confessedly “mere formal, explanatory, didactic devices,” and if, to use the words of a critic of Stallo, “atomism is only a symbolical graphic system,”794 then the Occultist can hardly be regarded as assuming too much, when he places alongside of these “devices” and “symbolical systems” of Modern Science, the symbols and devices of Archaic Teachings.

[pg 525]

“An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?”

Most decidedly light is not a body, we are told. Physical Sciences say light is a force, a vibration, the undulation of Ether. It is the property or quality of Matter, or even an affection thereof—never a body!

Just so. For this discovery, the knowledge, whatever it may be worth, that light or caloric is not a motion of material particles, Science is chiefly, if not solely indebted, to Sir William Grove. It was he who in a lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, was the first to show that “heat, light,795 may be considered as affections of matter itself, and not of a distinct ethereal, ‘imponderable,’ fluid [a state of matter now] permeating it.”796 Yet, perhaps, for some Physicists—as for Œrsted, a very eminent Scientist—Force and Forces were tacitly “Spirit [and hence Spirits] in Nature.” What several rather mystical Scientists taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc., were not the final Causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary motion, but were themselves the secondary effects of other Causes, for which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism believes; for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no Adepts?

Sir Isaac Newton held to the Pythagorean corpuscular theory, and was also inclined to admit its consequences; which made the Comte de Maistre hope, at one time, that Newton would ultimately lead Science back to the recognition of the fact that Forces and the Celestial Bodies were propelled and guided by Intelligences.797 But de Maistre counted without his host. The innermost thoughts and ideas of Newton were [pg 526] perverted, and of his great mathematical learning only the mere physical husk was turned to account.

According to one atheistic Idealist, Dr. Lewins:

When Sir Isaac, in 1687 ... showed mass and atom acted upon ... by innate activity ... he effectually disposed of Spirit, Anima, or Divinity, as supererogatory.

Had poor Sir Isaac foreseen to what use his successors and followers would apply his “gravity,” that pious and religious man would surely have quietly eaten his apple, and never have breathed a word about any mechanical ideas connected with its fall.

Great contempt is shown by Scientists for Metaphysics generally and for Ontological Metaphysics especially. But whenever the Occultists are bold enough to raise their diminished heads, we see that Materialistic, Physical Science is honey-combed with Metaphysics;798 that its most fundamental principles, while inseparably wedded to transcendentalism, are nevertheless, in order to show Modern Science divorced from such “dreams,” tortured and often ignored in the maze of contradictory theories and hypotheses. A very good corroboration of this charge lies in the fact that Science finds itself absolutely compelled to accept the “hypothetical” Ether, and to try to explain it on the materialistic grounds of atomo-mechanical laws. This attempt has led directly to the most fatal discrepancies and radical inconsistencies [pg 527] between the assumed nature of Ether and its physical behaviour. A second proof is found in the many contradictory statements made about the Atom—the most metaphysical object in creation.

Now, what does the modern science of Physics know of Ether, the first concept of which belongs undeniably to ancient Philosophers, the Greeks having borrowed it from the Âryans, and the origin of modern Ether being found in, and disfigured from, Âkâsha? This disfigurement is claimed as a modification and refinement of the idea of Lucretius. Let us then examine the modern concept, from several scientific volumes containing the admissions of the Physicists themselves.

As Stallo shows, the existence of Ether is accepted in Physical Astronomy, in ordinary Physics, and in Chemistry.

By the astronomers, this æther was originally regarded as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility, offering no sensible resistance to the motions of celestial bodies, and the question of its continuity or discontinuity was not seriously mooted. Its main function in modern astronomy has been to serve as a basis for hydro-dynamical theories of gravitation. In physics this fluid appeared for some time in several rôles in connection with the “imponderables” [so cruelly put to death by Sir William Grove], some physicists going so far as to identify it with one or more of them.799

Stallo then points out the change caused by the kinetic theories; that from the date of the dynamical theory of heat, Ether was chosen in Optics as a substratum for luminous undulations. Next, in order to explain the dispersion and polarization of light, Physicists had to resort once more to their “scientific imagination,” and forthwith endowed the Ether with (a) atomic or molecular structure, and (b) with an enormous elasticity, “so that its resistance to deformation far exceeded that of the most rigid elastic bodies.” This necessitated the theory of the essential discontinuity of Matter, hence of Ether. After having accepted this discontinuity, in order to account for dispersion and polarization, theoretical impossibilities were discovered with regard to such dispersion. Cauchy's “scientific imagination” saw in Atoms “material points without extension,” and he proposed, in order to obviate the most formidable obstacles to the undulatory theory (namely, some well-known mechanical theorems which stood in the way), to assume that the ethereal medium of propagation, instead of being continuous, should consist of particles separated by sensible distances. Fresnel rendered the same service to the phenomena of polarization. E. B. Hunt upset the theories of both.800 There are now men of Science [pg 528] who proclaim them “materially fallacious,” while others—the “atomo-mechanicalists”—cling to them with desperate tenacity. The supposition of an atomic or molecular constitution of Ether is upset, moreover, by thermo-dynamics, for Clerk Maxwell showed that such a medium would be simply gas.801 The hypothesis of “finite intervals” is thus proven of no avail as a supplement to the undulatory theory. Besides, eclipses fail to reveal any such variation of colour as is supposed by Cauchy, on the assumption that the chromatic rays are propagated with different velocities. Astronomy has pointed out more than one phenomenon absolutely at variance with this doctrine.

Thus, while in one department of Physics the atomo-molecular constitution of the Ether is accepted in order to account for one special set of phenomena, in another department such a constitution is found to be quite subversive of a number of well-ascertained facts; and Hirn's charges are thus justified. Chemistry deemed it

Impossible to concede the enormous elasticity of the æther without depriving it of those properties, upon which its serviceableness in the construction of chemical theories mainly depended.

This ended in a final transformation of Ether.

The exigencies of the atomo-mechanical theory have led distinguished mathematicians and physicists to attempt a substitution for the traditional atoms of matter, of peculiar forms of vortical motion in a universal, homogeneous, incompressible, and continuous material medium [Ether].802

The present writer—claiming no great scientific education, but only a tolerable acquaintance with modern theories, and a better one with Occult Sciences—picks up weapons against the detractors of the Esoteric Teaching in the very arsenal of Modern Science. The glaring contradictions, the mutually-destructive hypotheses of world-renowned Scientists, their disputes, their accusations and denunciations of each other, show plainly that, whether accepted or not, the Occult Theories have as much right to a hearing as any of the so-called learned and academical hypotheses. Thus, whether the followers of the Royal Society choose to accept Ether as a continuous or as a discontinuous fluid matters little, and is indifferent for the present purpose. It simply points to one certainty: Official Science knows nothing to this day of the constitution of Ether. Let Science call it Matter, if it likes; only [pg 529] neither as Âkâsha, nor as the one sacred Æther of the Greeks, is it to be found in any of the states of Matter known to modern Physics. It is Matter on quite another plane of perception and being, and it can neither be analyzed by scientific apparatus, nor appreciated or even conceived by the “scientific imagination,” unless the possessors thereof study the Occult Sciences. That which follows proves this statement.

It is clearly demonstrated by Stallo as regards the crucial problems of modern Physics, as was done by De Quatrefages and several others in those of Anthropology, Biology, etc., that, in their efforts to support their individual hypotheses and systems, most of the eminent and learned Materialists very often utter the greatest fallacies. Let us take the following case. Most of them reject actio in distans—one of the fundamental principles in the question of Æther or Âkâsha in Occultism—while, as Stallo justly observes, there is no physical action “which, on close examination, does not resolve itself into actio in distans”; and he proves it.

Now, metaphysical arguments, according to Professor Lodge,803 are “unconscious appeals to experience.” And he adds that if such an experience is not conceivable, then it does not exist. In his own words:

If a highly-developed mind or set of minds, find a doctrine about some comparatively simple and fundamental matter absolutely unthinkable, it is an evidence ... that the unthinkable state of things has no existence.

And thereupon, toward the end of his lecture, the Professor indicates that the explanation of cohesion, as well as of gravity, “is to be looked for in the vortex-atom theory of Sir William Thomson.”

It is needless to stop to inquire whether it is to this vortex-atom theory, also, that we have to look for the dropping down on earth of the first life-germ by a passing meteor or comet—Sir William Thomson's hypothesis. But Prof. Lodge might be reminded of the wise criticism on his lecture in Stallo's Concepts of Modem Physics. Noticing the above-quoted declaration by the Professor, the author asks

Whether ... the elements of the vortex-atom theory are familiar, or even possible, facts of experience? For, if they are not, clearly that theory is obnoxious to the same criticism which is said to invalidate the assumption of actio in distans.804

And then the able critic shows clearly what the Ether is not, nor can ever be, notwithstanding all scientific claims to the contrary. And thus he opens widely, if unconsciously, the entrance door to our Occult Teachings. For, as he says:

[pg 530]

The medium in which the vortex-movements arise is, according to Professor Lodge's own express statement (Nature, vol. xxvii. p. 305), “a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, continuous body, incapable of being resolved into simple elements or atoms; it is, in fact, continuous, not molecular.” And after making this statement Professor Lodge adds: “There is no other body of which we can say this, and hence the properties of the æther must be somewhat different from those of ordinary matter.” It appears, then, that the whole vortex-atom theory, which is offered to us as a substitute for the “metaphysical theory” of actio in distans, rests upon the hypothesis of the existence of a material medium which is utterly unknown to experience, and which has properties somewhat different805 from those of ordinary matter. Hence this theory, instead of being, as is claimed, a reduction of an unfamiliar fact of experience to a familiar fact, is, on the contrary, a reduction of a fact which is perfectly familiar, to a fact which is not only unfamiliar, but wholly unknown, unobserved and unobservable. Furthermore, the alleged vortical motion of, or rather in, the assumed ethereal medium is ... impossible, because “motion in a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, and therefore continuous fluid, is not sensible motion.”... It is manifest, therefore ... that, wherever the vortex-atom theory may land us, it certainly does not land us anywhere in the region of physics, or in the domain of veræ causæ.806 And I may add that, inasmuch as the hypothetical undifferentiated807 and undifferentiable medium is clearly an involuntary reïfication of the old ontological concept pure being, the theory under discussion has all the attributes of an inapprehensible metaphysical phantom.808

A “phantom,” indeed, which can be made apprehensible only by Occultism. From such scientific Metaphysics to Occultism there is hardly one step. Those Physicists who hold the view that the atomic constitution of Matter is consistent with its penetrability, need not go far out of their way to be able to account for the greatest phenomena of Occultism, now so derided by Physical Scientists and Materialists. Cauchy's “material points without extension” are Leibnitz's Monads, and at the same time are the materials out of which the “Gods” and other invisible Powers clothe themselves in bodies. The disintegration and reïntegration of “material” particles without extension, as a chief factor in phenomenal manifestations, ought to suggest themselves very easily as a clear possibility, at any rate to those few scientific minds [pg 531] which accept M. Cauchy's views. For, disposing of that property of Matter which they call impenetrability, by simply regarding the Atoms as “material points exerting on each other attractions and repulsions which vary with the distances that separate them,” the French theorist explains that:

From this it follows that, if it pleased the author of nature simply to modify the laws according to which the atoms attract or repel each other, we might instantly see the hardest bodies penetrating each other, the smallest particles of matter occupying immense spaces, or the largest masses reducing themselves to the smallest volumes, the entire universe concentrating itself, as it were, in a single point.809

And that “point,” invisible on our plane of perception and matter, is quite visible to the eye of the Adept who can follow and see it present on other planes. For the Occultists, who say that the author of Nature is Nature itself, something indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it follows that those who are conversant with the Occult laws of Nature, and know how to change and provoke new conditions in Ether, may—not modify the laws, but work and do the same in accordance with these immutable laws.

[pg 532]

Section III. Is Gravitation a Law?

The corpuscular theory has been unceremoniously put aside; but gravitation—the principle that all bodies attract each other with a force proportional directly to their masses, and inversely to the squares of the distances between them—survives to this day and reigns, supreme as ever, in the alleged ethereal waves of Space. As a hypothesis, it had been threatened with death for its inadequacy to embrace all the facts presented to it; as a physical law, it is the King of the late and once all-potent “Imponderables.” “It is little short of blasphemy ... an insult to Newton's grand memory to doubt it!”—is the exclamation of an American reviewer of Isis Unveiled. Well; what is finally that invisible and intangible God in whom we should believe on blind faith? Astronomers who see in gravitation an easy-going solution for many things, and a universal force which allows them to calculate planetary motions, care little about the Cause of Attraction. They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all; and then it will follow the corpuscular theory of light, and be consigned to rest for many scientific æons in the archives of all exploded speculations. Has not Newton himself expressed grave doubts about the nature of Force and the corporeality of the “Agents,” as they were then called? So has Cuvier, another scientific light shining in the night of research. He warns his readers, in the Révolution du Globe, about the doubtful nature of the so-called Forces, saying that “it is not so sure whether those agents were not after all Spiritual Powers [des agents spirituels].” At the outset of his Principia, Sir Isaac Newton took the greatest care to impress upon his school that he did not use the word “attraction,” with regard to the mutual action of bodies in a physical sense. To him it was, he said, a purely mathematical conception, involving no [pg 533] consideration of real and primary physical causes. In a passage of his Principia,810 he tells us plainly that, physically considered, attractions are rather impulses. In Section xi (Introduction), he expresses the opinion that “there is some subtle spirit by the force and action of which all movements of matter are determined”;811 and in his Third Letter to Bentley he says:

It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter, without mutual contact, as it must do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it.... That gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else by and through which their action may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial I have left to the consideration of my readers.

At this, even Newton's contemporaries got frightened—at the apparent return of Occult Causes into the domain of Physics. Leibnitz called his principle of attraction “an incorporeal and inexplicable power.” The supposition of an attractive faculty and a perfect void was characterized by Bernoulli as “revolting,” the principle of actio in distans finding then no more favour than it does now. Euler, on the other hand, thought the action of gravity was due to either a Spirit or some subtle medium. And yet Newton knew of, if he did not accept, the Ether of the Ancients. He regarded the intermediate space between the sidereal bodies as vacuum. Therefore he believed in “subtle Spirit” and Spirits as we do, guiding the so-called attraction. The above-quoted words of the great man have produced poor results. The “absurdity” has now become a dogma in the case of pure Materialism, which repeats: “No Matter without Force, no Force without Matter; Matter and Force are inseparable, eternal and indestructible [true]; there can be no independent Force, since all Force is an inherent and necessary property of Matter [false]; consequently, there is no immaterial Creative Power.” Oh, poor Sir Isaac!

If, leaving aside all the other eminent men of Science who agreed in opinion with Euler and Leibnitz, the Occultists claim as their authorities and supporters Sir Isaac Newton and Cuvier only, as above cited, they need fear little from Modern Science, and may loudly and proudly [pg 534] proclaim their beliefs. But the hesitation and doubts of the above cited authorities, and of many others, too, whom we could name, did not in the least prevent scientific speculation from wool-gathering in the fields of brute matter just as before. First it was matter and an imponderable fluid distinct from it; then came the imponderable fluid so much criticized by Grove; then Ether, which was at first discontinuous and then became continuous; after which came the “mechanical” Forces. These have now settled in life as “modes of motion,” and the Ether has become more mysterious and problematical than ever. More than one man of Science objects to such crude materialistic views. But then, from the days of Plato, who repeatedly asks his readers not to confuse incorporeal Elements with their Principles—the transcendental or spiritual Elements; from those of the great Alchemists, who, like Paracelsus, made a great difference between a phenomenon and its cause, or the Noumenon; to Grove, who, though he sees “no reason to divest universally diffused matter of the functions common to all matter,” yet uses the term Forces where his critics, “who do not attach to the word any idea of a specific action,” say Force; from those days to this, nothing has proved competent to stem the tide of brutal Materialism. Gravitation is the sole cause, the acting God, and Matter is its prophet, said the men of Science only a few years ago.

They have changed their views several times since then. But do the men of Science understand the innermost thought of Newton, one of the most spiritual-minded and religious men of his day, any better now than they did then? It is certainly to be doubted. Newton is credited with having given the death-blow to the Elemental Vortices of Descartes—the idea of Anaxagoras, resurrected, by the bye—though the last modern “vortical atoms” of Sir William Thomson do not, in truth, differ much from the former. Nevertheless, when his disciple Forbes wrote in the Preface to the chief work of his master a sentence declaring that “attraction was the cause of the system,” Newton was the first to solemnly protest. That which in the mind of the great mathematician assumed the shadowy, but firmly rooted image of God, as the Noumenon of all,812 was called more philosophically by ancient and [pg 535] modern Philosophers and Occultists—“Gods,” or the creative fashioning Powers. The modes of expression may have been different, and the ideas more or less philosophically enunciated by all sacred and profane Antiquity; but the fundamental thought was the same.813 For Pythagoras the Forces were Spiritual Entities, Gods, independent of planets and Matter as we see and know them on Earth, who are the rulers of the Sidereal Heaven. Plato represented the planets as moved by an intrinsic Rector, one with his dwelling, like “a boatman in his boat.” As for Aristotle, he called those rulers “immaterial substances”;814 though as one who had never been initiated, he rejected the Gods as Entities.815 But this did not prevent him from recognizing the fact that the stars and planets “were not inanimate masses but acting and living bodies indeed.” As if sidereal spirits were the “diviner portions of their phenomena (τὰ θειότερα τῶν φανερῶν).”816

If we look for corroboration in more modern and scientific times, we find Tycho Brahe recognizing in the stars a triple force, divine, spiritual and vital. Kepler, putting together the Pythagorean sentence, “the Sun, guardian of Jupiter,” and the verses of David, “He placed his throne in the Sun,” and “the Lord is the Sun,” etc., said that he understood perfectly how the Pythagoreans could believe that all the Globes disseminated through Space were rational Intelligences (facultates ratiocinativæ), circulating round the Sun, “in which resides a pure spirit of fire; the source of the general harmony.”817

When an Occultist speaks of Fohat, the energizing and guiding Intelligence in the Universal Electric or Vital Fluid, he is laughed at. [pg 536] Withal, as now shown, the nature neither of electricity, nor of life, nor even of light, is to this day understood. The Occultist sees in the manifestation of every force in Nature, the action of the quality, or the special characteristic of its Noumenon; which Noumenon is a distinct and intelligent Individuality on the other side of the manifested mechanical Universe. Now the Occultist does not deny—on the contrary he will support the view—that light, heat, electricity and so on are affections, not properties or qualities, of Matter. To put it more clearly: Matter is the condition, the necessary basis or vehicle, a sine quâ non, for the manifestation of these Forces, or Agents, on this plane.

But in order to gain the point, the Occultists have to examine the credentials of the law of gravity, first of all, of “Gravitation, the King and Ruler of Matter,” under every form. To do so effectually, the hypothesis, in its earliest appearance, has to be recalled to mind. To begin with, is it Newton who was the first to discover it? The Athenæum of Jan. 26, 1867, has some curious information upon this subject. It says:

Positive evidence can be adduced that Newton derived all his knowledge of Gravitation and its laws from Bœhme, with whom Gravitation or Attraction is the first property of Nature.... For with him, his [Bœhme's] system shows us the inside of things, while modern physical science is content with looking at the outside.

Then again:

The science of electricity, which was not yet in existence when he [Bœhme] wrote, is there anticipated [in his writings]; and not only does Bœhme describe all the now known phenomena of that force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and birth of electricity, itself.

Thus Newton, whose profound mind easily read between the lines, and fathomed the spiritual thought of the great Seer, in its mystic rendering, owes his great discovery to Jacob Bœhme, the nursling of the Genii, Nirmânakâyas who watched over and guided him, of whom the author of the article in question so truly remarks:

Every new scientific discovery goes to prove his profound and intuitive insight into the most secret workings of Nature.

And having discovered gravity, Newton, in order to render possible the action of attraction in space, had, so to speak, to annihilate every physical obstacle capable of impeding its free action; Ether among others, though he had more than a presentiment of its existence. Advocating the corpuscular theory, he made an absolute vacuum between the heavenly bodies. Whatever may have been his suspicions and [pg 537] inner convictions about Ether; however many friends he may have unbosomed himself to—as in the case of his correspondence with Bentley—his teachings never showed that he had any such belief. If he was “persuaded that the power of attraction could not be exerted by matter across a vacuum,”818 how is it that so late as 1860, French astronomers, Le Couturier, for instance, combated “the disastrous results of the theory of vacuum established by the great man”? Le Couturier says:

Il n'est plus possible aujourd'hui, de soutenir comme Newton, que les corps célestes se mouvent au milieu du vide immense des espaces.... Parmi les conséquences de la théorie du vide établie par Newton, il ne reste plus debout que le mot “attraction.”... Nous voyous venir le jour ou le mot attraction disparaîtra du vocabulaire scientifique.819

Professor Winchell writes:

These passages [Letter to Bentley] show what were his views respecting the nature of the interplanetary medium of communication. Though declaring that the heavens “are void of sensible matter,” he elsewhere excepted “perhaps some very thin vapours, steams, and effluvia, arising from the atmospheres of the earth, planets, and comets, and from such an exceedingly rare ethereal medium as we have elsewhere described.”820

This only shows that even such great men as Newton have not always the courage of their opinions. Dr. T. S. Hunt

Called attention to some long-neglected passages in Newton's works, from which it appears that a belief in such universal, intercosmical medium gradually took root in his mind.821

But such attention was never called to the said passages before Nov. 28, 1881, when Dr. Hunt read his “Celestial Chemistry, from the time of Newton.” As Le Couturier says:

Till then the idea was universal, even among the men of Science, that Newton had, while advocating the corpuscular theory, preached a void.

The passages had been “long neglected,” no doubt because they contradicted and clashed with the preconceived pet theories of the day, till finally the undulatory theory imperiously required the presence of an “ethereal medium” to explain it. This is the whole secret.

Anyhow, it is from this theory of Newton of a universal void, taught, if not believed in by himself, that dates the immense scorn now shown by modern Physics for ancient. The old sages had maintained that “Nature abhorred a vacuum,” and the greatest mathematicians of the [pg 538] world—read of the Western races—had discovered the antiquated “fallacy” and exposed it. And now Modern Science, however ungracefully, vindicates Archaic Knowledge, and has, moreover, to vindicate Newton's character and powers of observation at this late hour, after having neglected, for one century and a half, to pay any attention to such very important passages—perchance, because it was wiser not to attract any notice to them. Better late than never!

And now Father Æther is re-welcomed with open arms and wedded to gravitation, linked to it for weal or woe, until the day when it, or both, shall be replaced by something else. Three hundred years ago it was plenum everywhere, then it became one dismal vacuity; later still the sidereal ocean-beds, dried up by Science, rolled onward once more their ethereal waves. Recede ut procedas must become the motto of exact Science—“exact,” chiefly, in finding itself inexact every leap-year.

But we will not quarrel with the great men. They had to go back to the earliest “Gods of Pythagoras and old Kanâda” for the very backbone and marrow of their correlations and “newest” discoveries, and this may well afford good hope to the Occultists for their minor Gods. For we believe in Le Couturier's prophecy about gravitation. We know the day is approaching when an absolute reform will be demanded in the present modes of Science by the Scientists themselves, as was done by Sir William Grove, F.R.S. Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation were dethroned to-morrow, the Scientists would discover some other new mode of mechanical motion the day after.822 Rough and up-hill is the path of true Science, and its days are full of vexation of spirit. But in the face of its “thousand” contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations of physical phenomena, there has been no better hypothesis than “motion”—however paradoxically interpreted by Materialism. As may be found in the first pages of this Volume, Occultists have nothing to say against Motion,823 the Great Breath of Mr. Herbert Spencer's “Unknowable.” [pg 539] But, believing that everything on Earth is the shadow of something in Space, they believe in smaller “Breaths,” which, living, intelligent and independent of all but Law, blow in every direction during manvantaric periods. These Science will reject. But whatever may be made to replace attraction, alias gravitation, the result will be the same. Science will be as far then from the solution of its difficulties as it is now, unless it comes to some compromise with Occultism, and even with Alchemy—a supposition which will be regarded as an impertinence, but remains, nevertheless, a fact. As Faye says:

Il manque quelque chose aux géologues pour faire la géologie de la Lune; c'est d'être astronomes. À la vérité, il manque aussi quelque chose aux astronomes pour aborder avec fruit cette étude, c'est d'être géologues.824

But he might have added, with still more pointedness:

Ce qui manque à tous les deux, c'est l'intuition du mystique.

Let us remember Sir William Grove's wise “concluding remarks,” on the ultimate structure of Matter, or the minutiæ of molecular actions, which, he thought, man will never know.

Much harm has already been done by attempting hypothetically to dissect matter and to discuss the shapes, sizes, and numbers of atoms, and their atmospheres of heat, ether, or electricity. Whether the regarding electricity, light, magnetism, etc., as simply motions of ordinary matter, be or be not admissible, certain it is that all past theories have resolved, and all existing theories do resolve, the action of these forces into motion. Whether it be that, on account of our familiarity with motion, we refer other affections to it, as to a language which is most easily construed, and most capable of explaining them, or whether it be that it is in reality the only mode in which our minds, as contra-distinguished from our senses, are able to conceive material agencies, certain it is that since the period at which the mystic notions of spiritual or preternatural powers were applied to account for physical phenomena, all hypotheses framed to explain them have resolved them into motion.

And then the learned gentleman states a purely Occult tenet:

The term perpetual motion, which I have not infrequently used in these pages, is itself equivocal. If the doctrines here advanced be well founded, all motion is, in one sense, perpetual. In masses, whose motion is stopped by mutual concussion, heat or motion of the particles is generated; and thus the motion continues, so that if we could venture to extend such thoughts to the universe, we should assume the same amount of motion affecting the same amount of matter for ever.825

This is precisely what Occultism maintains, and on the same principle, that:

Where force is made to oppose force, and produce static equilibrium, the balance of preëxisting equilibrium is affected, and fresh motion is started equivalent to that which is withdrawn into a state of abeyance.

[pg 540]

This process finds intervals in the Pralaya, but is eternal and ceaseless as the “Breath,” even when the manifested Kosmos rests.

Thus, supposing attraction or gravitation should be given up in favour of the Sun being a huge magnet—a theory already accepted by some Physicists—a magnet that acts on the planets as attraction is now supposed to do, whereto, or how much farther, would it lead the Astronomers from where they are now? Not an inch farther. Kepler came to this “curious hypothesis” nearly 300 years ago. He had not discovered the theory of attraction and repulsion in Kosmos, for it was known from the days of Empedocles, by whom the two opposite forces were called “love” and “hate”—words implying the same idea. But Kepler gave a pretty fair description of cosmic magnetism. That such magnetism exists in Nature, is as certain as that gravitation does not; not at any rate, in the way in which it is taught by Science, which has never taken into consideration the different modes in which the dual Force, that Occultism calls attraction and repulsion, may act within our Solar System, the Earth's atmosphere and beyond in the Kosmos.

As the great Humboldt writes:

Trans-solar space has not hitherto shown any phenomenon analogous to our solar system. It is a peculiarity of our system, that matter should have condensed within it in nebulous rings, the nuclei of which condense into earths and moons. I say again, heretofore, nothing of the kind has ever been observed beyond our planetary system.826

True, that since 1860 the Nebular Theory has sprung up, and being better known, a few identical phenomena were supposed to be observed beyond the Solar System. Yet the great man is quite right; and no earths or moons can be found, except in appearance, beyond, or of the same order of Matter as found in, our System. Such is the Occult Teaching.

This was proven by Newton himself; for there are many phenomena in our Solar System, which he confessed his inability to explain by the law of gravitation; “such were the uniformity in the directions of planetary movements, the nearly circular forms of the orbits, and their remarkable conformity to one plane.”827 And if there is one single exception, then the law of gravitation has no right to be referred to as a universal law. “These adjustments,” we are told, “Newton, in his general Scholium, pronounces to be ‘the work of an intelligent and [pg 541] all-powerful Being’.” Intelligent that “Being” may be; as to “all-powerful,” there would be every reason to doubt the claim. A poor “God” he, who would work upon minor details and leave the most important to secondary forces! The poverty of this argument and logic is surpassed only by that of Laplace, who, seeking very correctly to substitute Motion for Newton's “all-powerful Being,” and ignorant of the true nature of that Eternal Motion, saw in it a blind physical law. “Might not those arrangements be an effect of the laws of motion?” he asks, forgetting, as do all our modern Scientists, that this law and this motion are a vicious circle, so long as the nature of both remains unexplained. His famous answer to Napoleon: “Dieu est devenu une hypothèse inutile,” could be correctly made only by one who adhered to the philosophy of the Vedântins. It becomes a pure fallacy, if we exclude the interference of operating, intelligent, powerful (never “all-powerful”) Beings, who are called “Gods.”

But we would ask the critics of the mediæval Astronomers, why should Kepler be denounced as most unscientific, for offering just the same solution as did Newton, only showing himself more sincere, more consistent and even more logical? Where may be the difference between Newton's “all-powerful Being” and Kepler's Rectores, his Sidereal and Cosmic Forces, or Angels? Kepler again is criticized for his “curious hypothesis which made use of a vortical movement within the solar system,” for his theories in general, and for favouring Empedocles' idea of attraction and repulsion, and “solar magnetism” in particular. Yet several modern men of Science, as will be shown—Hunt, if Metcalfe is to be excluded, Dr. Richardson, etc.—very strongly favour the same idea. He is half excused, however, on the plea that:

To the time of Kepler no interaction between masses of matter had been distinctly recognized which was generically different from magnetism.828

Is it distinctly recognized now? Does Professor Winchell claim for Science any serious knowledge whatever of the nature of either electricity or magnetism—except that both seem to be the effects of some result arising from an undetermined cause.

The ideas of Kepler, when their theological tendencies are weeded out, are purely Occult. He saw that:

(I) The Sun is a great Magnet.829 This is what some eminent modern Scientists and also the Occultists believe in.

[pg 542]

(II) The Solar substance is immaterial.830 In the sense, of course, of Matter existing in states unknown to Science.

(III) For the constant motion and restoration of the Sun's energy and planetary motion, he provided the perpetual care of a Spirit, or Spirits. The whole of Antiquity believed in this idea. The Occultists do not use the word Spirit, but say Creative Forces, which they endow with intelligence. But we may call them Spirits also. We shall be taken to task for contradiction. It will be said that while we deny God, we admit Souls and operative Spirits, and quote from bigoted Roman Catholic writers in support of our argument. To this we reply: We deny the anthropomorphic God of the Monotheists, but never the Divine Principle in Nature. We combat Protestants and Roman Catholics on a number of dogmatic theological beliefs of human and sectarian origin. We agree with them in their belief in Spirits and intelligent operative Powers, though we do not worship “Angels” as the Roman Latinists do.

This theory is tabooed a great deal more on account of the “Spirit” that is given room in it, than of anything else. Herschell, the elder, believed in it likewise, and so do several modern Scientists. Nevertheless Professor Winchell declares that “a hypothesis more fanciful, and less in accord with the requirements of physical principles, has not been offered in ancient or modern times.”831

The same was said, once upon a time, of the universal Ether, and now it is not only accepted perforce, but is advocated as the only possible theory to explain certain mysteries.

Grove's ideas, when he first enunciated them in London about 1840, were denounced as unscientific; nevertheless, his views on the Correlation of Forces are now universally accepted. It would, very likely, require one more conversant with Science than is the writer, to combat with any success some of the now prevailing ideas about gravitation and other similar “solutions” of cosmic mysteries. But, let us recall a few objections that came from recognized men of Science; from Astronomers and Physicists of eminence, who rejected the theory of rotation, as well as that of gravitation. Thus one reads in the French Encyclopædia that “Science agrees, in the face of all its representatives, that it is impossible to explain the physical origin of the rotatory motion of the solar system.”

If the question is asked: “What causes rotation?” We are answered: [pg 543] “It is the centrifugal force.” “And this force, what is it that produces it?” “The force of rotation,” is the grave answer.832 It will be well, perhaps, to examine both these theories as being directly or indirectly connected.

[pg 544]

Section IV. The Theories of Rotation in Science.

Considering that “final cause is pronounced a chimera, and the First Great Cause is remanded to the sphere of the Unknown,” as a reverend gentleman justly complains, the number of hypotheses put forward, a nebula of them, is most remarkable. The profane student is perplexed, and does not know in which of the theories of exact Science he has to believe. We give below hypotheses enough for every taste and power of brain. They are all extracted from a number of scientific volumes.

Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation.

Rotation has originated:

(a) By the collision of nebular masses wandering aimlessly in Space; or by attraction, “in cases where no actual impact takes place.”

(b) By the tangential action of currents of nebulous matter (in the case of an amorphous nebula) descending from higher to lower levels,833 or simply by the action of the central gravity of the mass.834

“It is a fundamental principle in physics that no rotation could be generated in such a mass by the action of its own parts. As well attempt to change the course of a steamer by pulling at the deck railing,” remarks on this Prof. Winchell in World-Life.835

Hypotheses of the Origin of Planets and Comets.

(a) We owe the birth of the planets (1) to an explosion of the Sun—a parturition of its central mass;836 or (2) to some kind of disruption of the nebular rings.

[pg 545]

(b) “The comets are strangers to the planetary system.”837 “The comets are undeniably generated in our solar system.”838

(c) The “fixed stars are motionless,” says one authority. “All the stars are actually in motion,” answers another authority. “Undoubtedly every star is in motion.”839

(d) “For over 350,000,000 years, the slow and majestic movement of the sun around its axis has never for a moment ceased.”840

(e) “Maedler believes that ... our sun has Alcyone in the Pleiades for the centre of its orbit, and consumes 180,000,000 of years in completing a single revolution.”841

(f) “The sun has existed no more than 15,000,000 of years, and will emit heat for no longer than 10,000,000 years more.”842

A few years ago this eminent Scientist was telling the world that the time required for the Earth to cool from incipient incrustation to its present state, could not exceed 80,000,000 years.843 the encrusted age of the world is only 40,000,000, or half the duration once allowed, and the Sun's age is only 15,000,000, have we to understand that the Earth was at one time independent of the Sun?

Since the ages of the Sun, of the planets, and of the Earth, as they are stated in the various scientific hypotheses of the Astronomers and Physicists, are given elsewhere below, we have said enough to show the disagreement between the ministers of Modern Science. Whether we accept the fifteen million years of Sir William Thomson or the thousand millions of Mr. Huxley, for the rotational evolution of our Solar System, it will always come to this; that by accepting self-generated rotation for the heavenly bodies composed of inert Matter and yet moved by their own internal motion, for millions of years, this teaching of Science amounts to:

(a) An evident denial of that fundamental physical law, which states that “a body in motion tends constantly to inertia, i.e., to continue in the same state of motion or rest, unless it is stimulated into further action by a superior active force.”

[pg 546]

(b) An original impulse, which culminates in an unalterable motion, within a resisting Ether that Newton had declared incompatible with that motion.

(c) Universal gravity, which, we are taught, always tends to a centre in rectilinear descent—alone the cause of the revolution of the whole Solar System, which is performing an eternal double gyration, each body around its axis and orbit. Another occasional version is:

(d) A magnet in the Sun; or, that the said revolution is due to a magnetic force, which acts, just as gravitation does, in a straight line, and varies inversely as the square of the distance.844

(e) The whole acting under invariable and changeless laws, which are, nevertheless, often shown variable, as during some well-known freaks of planets and other bodies, as also when the comets approach or recede from the Sun.

(f) A Motor Force always proportionate to the mass it is acting upon; but independent of the specific nature of that mass, to which it is proportionate; which amounts to saying, as Le Couturier does, that:

Without that force independent from, and of quite another nature than, the said mass, the latter, were it as huge as Saturn, or as tiny as Ceres, would always fall with the same rapidity.845

A mass, furthermore, which derives its weight from the body on which it weighs.

Thus neither Laplace's perceptions of a solar atmospheric fluid, which would extend beyond the orbits of the planets, nor Le Couturier's electricity, nor Foucault's heat,846 nor this, nor the other, can ever help any of the numerous hypotheses about the origin and permanency of rotation to escape from this squirrel's wheel, any more than can the theory of gravity itself. This mystery is the Procrustean bed of Physical Science. If Matter is passive, as we are now taught, the simplest movement cannot be said to be an essential property of Matter—the latter being considered simply as an inert mass. How, then, can such a complicated movement, compound and multiple, harmonious and equilibrated, lasting in the eternities for millions and millions of years, be attributed simply to its own inherent force, unless the latter is an Intelligence? A physical will is something new—a conception that the Ancients would never have entertained, indeed! For over a century all distinction between body and force has been made away with. “Force is but the property of a body in motion,” say the [pg 547] Physicists; “life—the property of our animal organs—is but the result of their molecular arrangement,” answer the Physiologists. As Littré teaches:

In the bosom of that aggregate which is named planet, are developed all the forces immanent in matter ... i.e., that matter possesses in itself and through itself the forces that are proper to it ... and which are primary, not secondary. Such forces are the property of weight, the property of electricity, of terrestrial magnetism, the property of life.... Every planet can develop life ... as earth, for instance, which had not always mankind on it, and now bears (produit) men.847

An Astronomer says:

We talk of the weight of the heavenly bodies, but since it is recognized that weight decreases in proportion to the distance from the centre, it becomes evident that, at a certain distance, that weight must be forcibly reduced to zero. Were there any attraction there would be equilibrium.... And since the modern school recognizes neither a beneath nor an above in universal space, it is not clear what should cause the earth to fall, were there even no gravitation, nor attraction.848

Methinks the Count de Maistre was right in solving the question in his own theological way. He cuts the Gordian knot by saying:—“The planets rotate because they are made to rotate ... and the modern physical system of the universe is a physical impossibility.”849 For did not Herschell say the same thing when he remarked that there is a Will needed to impart a circular motion, and another Will to restrain it?850 This shows and explains how a retarded planet is cunning enough to calculate its time so well as to hit off its arrival at the fixed minute. For, if Science sometimes succeeds, with great ingenuity, in explaining some of such stoppages, retrograde motions, angles outside the orbits, etc., by appearances resulting from the inequality of their progress and ours in the course of our mutual and respective orbits, we still know that there are others, and “very real and considerable deviations,” according to Herschell, “which cannot be explained except by the mutual and irregular action of those planets and by the perturbing influence of the sun.”

We understand, however, that there are, besides those little and accidental perturbations, continuous perturbations called “secular”—because of the extreme slowness with which the irregularity increases and affects the relations of the elliptic movement—and that these perturbations can be corrected. From Newton, who found that this world needed repairing very often, down to Reynaud, all say the same. In his Ciel et Terre, the latter says:

[pg 548]

The orbits described by the planets are far from immutable, and are, on the contrary, subject to a perpetual mutation in their position and form.851

Proving gravitation and the peripatetic laws to be as negligent as they are quick to repair their mistakes. The charge as it stands seems to be that:

These orbits are alternately widening and narrowing, their great axis lengthens and diminishes, or oscillates at the same time from right to left around the sun, the plane itself, in which they are situated, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting around itself with a kind of tremor.

To this, De Mirville, who believes in intelligent “workmen” invisibly ruling the Solar System—as we do—observes very wittily:

Voilà, certes, a voyage which has little in it of mechanical precision; at the utmost, one could compare it to a steamer, pulled to and fro and tossed on the waves, retarded or accelerated, all and each of which impediments might put off its arrival indefinitely, were there not the intelligence of a pilot and engineers to catch up the time lost, and to repair the damages.852

The law of gravity, however, seems to be becoming an obsolete law in starry heaven. At any rate those long-haired sidereal Radicals, called comets, appear to be very poor respecters of the majesty of that law, and to beard it quite impudently. Nevertheless, and though presenting in nearly every respect “phenomena not yet fully understood,” comets and meteors are credited by the believers in Modern Science with obeying the same laws and consisting of the same Matter, “as the suns, stars and nebulæ,” and even “the earth and its inhabitants.”853

This is what one might call taking things on trust, aye, even to blind faith. But exact Science is not to be questioned, and he who rejects the hypotheses imagined by her students—gravitation, for instance—would be regarded as an ignorant fool for his pains; yet we are told by the just cited author a queer legend from the scientific annals.

The comet of 1811 had a tail 120 millions of miles in length and 25 millions of miles in diameter at the widest part, while the diameter of the nucleus was about 127,000 miles, more than ten times that of the earth.

He tells us that:

In order that bodies of this magnitude, passing near the earth, should not affect its motion or change the length of the year by even a single second, their actual substance must be inconceivably rare.

It must be so indeed, yet:

[pg 549]

The extreme tenuity of a comet's mass is also proved by the phenomenon of the tail, which, as the comet approaches the sun, is thrown out sometimes to a length of 90 millions of miles in a few hours. And what is remarkable, this tail is thrown out against the force of gravity by some repulsive force, probably electrical, so that it always points away from the sun [!!!].... And yet, thin as the matter of comets must be, it obeys the common Law of Gravity [!?], and whether the comet revolves in an orbit within that of the outer planets, or shoots off into the abysses of space, and returns only after hundreds of years, its path is, at each instant, regulated by the same force as that which causes an apple to fall to the ground.854

Science is like Cæsar's wife, and must not be suspected—this is evident. But it can be respectfully criticized, nevertheless, and at all events, it may be reminded that the “apple” is a dangerous fruit. For the second time in the history of mankind, it may become the cause of the Fall—this time, of “exact” Science. A comet whose tail defies the law of gravity right in the Sun's face can hardly be credited with obeying that law.

In a series of scientific works on Astronomy and the Nebular Theory, written between 1865 and 1866, the present writer, a poor tyro in Science, has counted in a few hours, no less than thirty-nine contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations for the self-generated, primitive rotatory motion of the heavenly bodies. The writer is no Astronomer, no Mathematician, no Scientist; but she was obliged to examine these errors in defence of Occultism, in general, and what is still more important, in order to support the Occult Teachings concerning Astronomy and Cosmology. Occultists were threatened with terrible penalties for questioning scientific truths. But now they feel braver; Science is less secure in its “impregnable” position than they were led to expect, and many of its strongholds are built on very shifting sands.

Thus, even this poor and unscientific examination of it has been useful, and it has certainly been very instructive. We have learned a good many things, in fact, having especially studied with particular care those astronomical data, that would be the most likely to clash with our heterodox and “superstitious” beliefs.

Thus, for instance, we have found there, concerning gravitation, the axial and orbital motions, that synchronous movement having been once overcome, in the early stage, this was enough to originate a rotatory motion till the end of Manvantara. We have also come to know, in all the aforesaid combinations of possibilities with regard to [pg 550] incipient rotation, most complicated in every case, some of the causes to which it may have been due, as well as some others to which it ought and should have been due, but, in some way or other, was not. Among other things, we are informed that incipient rotation may be provoked with equal ease in a mass in igneous fusion, and in one that is characterized by glacial opacity.855 That gravitation is a law which nothing can overcome, but which is, nevertheless, overcome, in and out of season, by the most ordinary celestial or terrestrial bodies—the tails of impudent comets, for instance. That we owe the universe to the holy Creative Trinity, called Inert Matter, Senseless Force and Blind Chance. Of the real essence and nature of any of these three, Science knows nothing, but this is a trifling detail. Ergo, we are told that, when a mass of cosmic or nebular Matter—whose nature is entirely unknown, and which may be in a state of fusion (Laplace), or dark and cold (Thomson), for “this intervention of heat is itself a pure hypothesis” (Faye)—decides to exhibit its mechanical energy under the form of rotation, it acts in this wise. It (the mass) either bursts into spontaneous conflagration, or it remains inert, tenebrous, and frigid, both states being equally capable of sending it, without any adequate cause, spinning through Space for millions of years. Its movements may be retrograde, or they may be direct, about a hundred various reasons being offered for both motions, in about as many hypotheses; anyhow, it joins the maze of stars, whose origin belongs to the same miraculous and spontaneous order—for:

The nebular theory does not profess to discover the origin of things, but only a stadium in material history.856

Those millions of suns, planets, and satellites, composed of inert matter, will whirl on in most impressive and majestic symmetry round the firmament, moved and guided only, notwithstanding their inertia, “by their own internal motion.”

Shall we wonder, after this, if learned Mystics, pious Roman Catholics, and even such learned Astronomers as were Chaubard and Godefroy,857 have preferred the Kabalah and the ancient systems to the modern dreary and contradictory exposition of the Universe? The Zohar makes a distinction, at any rate, between “the Hajaschar [the [pg 551] ‘Light Forces’], the Hachoser [‘Reflected Lights’], and the simple phenomenal exteriority of their spiritual types.”858

The question of “gravity” may now be dismissed, and other hypotheses examined. That Physical Science knows nothing of “Forces” is clear. We may close the argument, however, by calling to our help one more man of Science—Professor Jaumes, Member of the Academy of Medicine at Montpellier. Says this learned man, speaking of Forces:

A cause is that which is essentially acting in the genealogy of phenomena, in every production as in every modification. I said that activity (or force) was invisible.... To suppose it corporeal and residing in the properties of matterwould be a gratuitous hypothesis.... To reduce all the causes to God, ... would amount to embarrassing oneself with a hypothesis hostile to many verities. But to speak of a plurality of forces proceeding from the Deity and possessing inherent powers of their own, is not unreasonable, ... and I am disposed to admit phenomena produced by intermediate agents called Forces or Secondary Agents. The distinction of Forces is the principle of the division of Sciences; so many real and separate Forces, so many mother-Sciences.... No; Forces are not suppositions and abstractions, but realities, and the only acting realities whose attributes can be determined with the help of direct observation and induction.859

[pg 552]

Section V. The Masks of Science. Physics Or Metaphysics?

If there is anything like progress on earth, Science will some day have to give up, nolens volens, such monstrous ideas as her physical, self-guiding laws, void of Soul and Spirit, and will then have to turn to the Occult Teachings. It has already done so, however altered may be the title-pages and revised editions of the Scientific Catechism. It is now over half a century since, in comparing modern with ancient thought, it was found that, however different our Philosophy may appear from that of our ancestors, it is, nevertheless, composed only of additions and subtractions taken from the old Philosophy and transmitted drop by drop through the filter of antecedents.

This fact was well known to Faraday, and to other eminent men of Science. Atoms, Ether, Evolution itself—all come to Modern Science from ancient notions, all are based on the conceptions of the archaic nations. “Conceptions” for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths taught during the Initiations to the Elect, which truths have been partially divulged through Greek writers and have descended to us. This does not mean that Occultism has ever had the same views on Matter, Atoms and Ether as may be found in the exotericism of the classical Greek writers. Yet, if we may believe Mr. Tyndall, even Faraday was an Aristotelean, and was more an Agnostic than a Materialist. In his Faraday, as a Discoverer,860 the author shows the great Physicist using “old reflections of Aristotle” which are “concisely found in some of his works.” Faraday, Boscovitch, and all others, however, who see, in the Atoms and molecules, “centres of force,” and in the corresponding element, Force, an Entity by itself, are far nearer the truth, perchance, than those, who, denouncing them, denounce at the same time the “old corpuscular Pythagorean theory”—one, [pg 553] by the way, which never passed to posterity as the great Philosopher really taught it—on the ground of its “delusion that the conceptual elements of matter can be grasped as separate and real entities.”

The chief and most fatal mistake and fallacy made by Science, in the view of the Occultists, lies in the idea of the possibility of such a thing existing in Nature as inorganic, or dead Matter. Is anything dead or inorganic which is capable of transformation or change?—Occultism asks. And is there anything under the sun which remains immutable or changeless?

For a thing to be dead implies that it had been at some time living. When, at what period of cosmogony? Occultism says that in all cases Matter is the most active, when it appears inert. A wooden or a stone block is motionless and impenetrable to all intents and purposes. Nevertheless, and de facto, its particles are in ceaseless eternal vibration which is so rapid that to the physical eye the body seems absolutely devoid of motion; and the spacial distance between those particles in their vibratory motion is—considered from another plane of being and perception—as great as that which separates snow flakes or drops of rain. But to Physical Science this will be an absurdity.

This fallacy is nowhere better illustrated than in the scientific work of a German savant, Professor Philip Spiller. In this cosmological treatise, the author attempts to prove that:

No material constituent of a body, no atom, is in itself originally endowed with force, but that every such atom is absolutely dead, and without any inherent power to act at a distance.861

This statement, however, does not prevent Spiller from enunciating an Occult doctrine and principle. He asserts the independent substantiality of Force, and shows it as an “incorporeal stuff” (unkörperlicher Stoff) or Substance. Now Substance is not Matter in Metaphysics, and for argument's sake it may be granted that it is a wrong expression to use. But this is due to the poverty of European languages, and especially to the paucity of scientific terms. Then this “stuff” is identified and connected by Spiller with the Æther. Expressed in Occult language it might be said with more correctness that this “Force-Substance” is the ever-active phenomenal positive Ether—Prakriti; while the omnipresent all-pervading Æther is the Noumenon of the former, the substratum of all, or Âkâsha. Nevertheless, Stallo falls foul of [pg 554] Spiller, as he does of the Materialists. He is accused of “utter disregard of the fundamental correlation of Force and Matter,” of neither of which Science knows anything certain. For this “hypostasized half-concept” is, in the view of all other Physicists, not only imponderable, but destitute of cohesive, chemical, thermal, electric, and magnetic forces, of all of which forces—according to Occultism—Æther is the Source and Cause.

Therefore Spiller, with all his mistakes, exhibits more intuition than does any other modern Scientist, with the exception, perhaps, of Dr. Richardson, the theorist on “Nerve-Force,” or Nervous Ether, also on “Sun-Force and Earth-Force.”862 For Æther, in Esotericism, is the very quintessence of all possible energy, and it is certainly to this Universal Agent (composed of many agents) that are due all the manifestations of energy in the material, psychic and spiritual worlds.

What, in fact, are electricity and light? How can Science know that one is a fluid and the other a “mode of motion”? Why is no reason given why a difference should be made between them, since both are considered as force-correlations? Electricity is a fluid, we are told, immaterial and lion-molecular—though Helmholtz thinks otherwise—and the proof of it is that we can bottle it up, accumulate it and store it away. Then, it must be simply Matter, and no peculiar “fluid.” Nor is it only “a mode of motion,” for motion could hardly be stored in a Leyden jar. As for light, it is a still more extraordinary “mode of motion”; since, “marvellous as it may appear, light [also] can actually be stored up for use,” as was demonstrated by Grove nearly half a century ago.

Take an engraving which has been kept for some days in the dark, expose it to full sunshine—that is, insulate it for 15 minutes; lay it on sensitive paper in a dark place, and at the end of 24 hours it will have left an impression of itself on the sensitive paper, the whites coming out as blacks.... There seems to be no limit for the reproduction of engravings.863

What is it that remains fixed, nailed, so to say, on the paper? It is a Force certainly that fixed the thing, but what is that thing, the residue of which remains on the paper?

Our learned men will get out of this by some scientific technicality; but what is it that is intercepted, so as to imprison a certain quantity of it on glass, paper, or wood? Is it “Motion” or is it “Force”? Or shall we be told that what remains behind is only the effect of the [pg 555] Force or Motion? Then what is this Force? Force or Energy is a quality; but every quality must belong to a something, or a somebody. In Physics, Force is defined as “that which changes or tends to change any physical relation between bodies, whether mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, magnetic, etc.” But it is not that Force or that Motion which remains behind on the paper, when the Force or Motion has ceased to act; and yet something, which our physical senses cannot perceive, has been left there, to become a cause in its turn and to produce effects. What is it? It is not Matter, as defined by Science—i.e., Matter in any of its known states. An Alchemist would say it was a spiritual secretion—and he would be laughed at. But yet, when the Physicist said that electricity, stored up, is a fluid, or that light fixed on paper is still sunlight—that was Science. The newest authorities have, indeed, rejected these explanations as “exploded theories,” and have now deified “Motion” as their sole idol. But, surely, they and their idol will one day share the fate of their predecessors! An experienced Occultist, one who has verified the whole series of Nidânas, of causes and effects, that finally project their last effect on to this our plane of manifestations, one who has traced Matter back to its Noumenon, holds the opinion that the explanation of the Physicist is like calling anger, or its effects—the exclamation provoked by it—a secretion or a fluid, and man, the cause of it, its material conductor. But, as Grove prophetically remarked, the day is fast approaching when it will be confessed that the Forces we know are but the phenomenal manifestations of Realities we know nothing about—but which were known to the Ancients, and by them worshipped.

He made one still more suggestive remark which ought to have become the motto of Science, but has not. Sir William Grove said that: “Science should have neither desires nor prejudices. Truth should be her sole aim.”

Meanwhile, in our days, Scientists are more self-opinionated and bigoted than even the Clergy. For they minister to, if they do not actually worship, “Force-Matter,” which is their Unknown God. And how unknown it is, may be inferred from the many confessions of the most eminent Physicists and Biologists, with Faraday at their head. Not only, he said, could he never presume to pronounce whether Force was a property or function of Matter, but he actually did not know what was meant by the word Matter.

There was a time, he added, when he believed he knew something of [pg 556] Matter. But the more he lived, and the more carefully he studied it, the more he became convinced of his utter ignorance of the nature of Matter.864

This ominous confession was made, we believe, at a Scientific Congress at Swansea. Faraday held a similar opinion, however, as stated by Tyndall:

What do we know of the atom apart from its force? You imagine a nucleus which maybe called a and surround it by forces which may be called m; to my mind the a or nucleus vanishes and the substance consists of the powers m. And, indeed, what notion can we form of the nucleus independent of its powers? What thought remains on which to hang the imagination of an a independent of the acknowledged forces?

The Occultists are often misunderstood because, for lack of better terms, they apply to the Essence of Force, under certain aspects, the descriptive epithet of Substance. Now the names for the varieties of Substance on different planes of perception and being are legion. Eastern Occultism has a special appellation for each kind; but Science—like England, in the recollection of a witty Frenchman, blessed with thirty-six religions and only one fish-sauce—has but one name for all, namely “Substance.” Moreover, neither the orthodox Physicists nor their critics seem to be very certain of their premisses, and are as apt to confuse the effects as they are the causes. It is incorrect, for instance, to say, as Stallo does, that “Matter can no more be realized or conceived as mere positive spatial presence than as a concretion of forces,” or that “Force is nothing without mass, and mass is nothing without force”—for one is the Noumenon and the other the phenomenon. Again; Schelling, when saying that

It is a mere delusion of the phantasy that something, we know not what, remains after we have denuded an object of all the predicates belonging to it,865

could never have applied the remark to the realm of transcendental Metaphysics. It is true that pure Force is nothing in the world of Physics; it is All in the domain of Spirit. Says Stallo:

If we reduce the mass upon which a given force, however small, acts to its limit zero—or, mathematically expressed, until it becomes infinitely small—the consequence is that the velocity of the resulting motion is infinitely great, and that the “thing” ... is at any given moment neither here nor there, but everywhere—that there is no real presence; it is impossible, therefore, to construct matter by a synthesis of forces.866

This may be true in the phenomenal world, inasmuch as the illusive reflection of the One Reality of the supersensual world may appear true to the dwarfed conceptions of a Materialist. It is absolutely incorrect [pg 557] when the argument is applied to things in what the Kabalists call the supermundane spheres. Inertia, so-called, is Force, according to Newton,867 and for the student of Esoteric Sciences the greatest of the Occult Forces. A body can only conceptually, only on this plane of illusion, be considered divorced from its relations with other bodies—which, according to the physical and mechanical sciences, give rise to its attributes. In fact, it can never be so detached; death itself being unable to detach it from its relation with the Universal Forces, of which the One Force, or Life, is the synthesis: the inter-relation simply continues on another plane. But what, if Stallo is right, can Dr. James Croll mean when, in speaking “On the Transformation of Gravity,” he brings forward the views advocated by Faraday, Waterston, and others? For he says very plainly that gravity

Is a force pervading Space external to bodies, and that, on the mutual approach of the bodies, the force is not increased, as is generally supposed, but the bodies merely pass into a place where the force exists with greater intensity.868

No one will deny that a Force, whether gravity, electricity, or any other Force, which exists outside bodies and in open Space—be it Ether or a vacuum—must be something, and not a pure nothing, when conceived apart from a mass. Otherwise it could hardly exist in one place with a greater and in another with reduced “intensity.” G. A. Hirn declares the same in his Théorie Mécanique de l'Univers. He tries to demonstrate:

That the atom of the chemists is not an entity of pure convention, or simply an explicative device, but that it exists really, that its volume is unalterable, and that consequently it is not elastic [!!]. Force, therefore, is not in the atom; it is in the space which separates the atoms from each other.

The above-cited views, expressed by two men of Science of great eminence in their respective countries, show that it is not in the least unscientific to speak of the substantiality of the so-called Forces. Subject to some future specific name, this Force is Substance of some kind, and can be nothing else; and perhaps one day Science will be the first to reädopt the derided name of phlogiston. Whatever may be the future name given to it, to maintain that Force does not reside in the Atoms, but only in the “space between them,” may be scientific enough; nevertheless it is not true. To the mind of an Occultist it is like saying that water does not reside in the drops of which the ocean is composed, but only in the space between those drops!

[pg 558]

The objection that there are two distinct schools of Physicists, by one of which

This force is assumed to be an independent substantial entity, which is not a property of matter nor essentially related to matter,869

is hardly likely to help the profane to any clearer understanding. It is, on the contrary, more calculated to throw the question into still greater confusion than ever. For Force is, then, neither this nor the other. By viewing it as “an independent substantial entity,” the theory extends the right hand of fellowship to Occultism, while the strange contradictory idea that it is not “related to Matter otherwise than by its power to act upon it,”870 leads Physical Science to the most absurd contradictory hypotheses. Whether “Force” or “Motion” (Occultism, seeing no difference between the two, never attempts to separate them), it cannot act for the adherents of the atomo-mechanical theory in one way, and for those of the rival school in another. Nor can the Atoms be, in one case, absolutely uniform in size and weight, and in another, vary in their weight (Avogadro's law). For, in the words of the same able critic:

While the absolute equality of the primordial units of mass is thus an essential part of the very foundations of the mechanical theory, the whole modern science of chemistry is based upon a principle directly subversive of it—a principle of which it has recently been said that “it holds the same place in chemistry that the law of gravitation does in astronomy.”871 This principle is known as the law of Avogadro or Ampère.872

This shows that either modern Chemistry, or modern Physics, is entirely wrong in the respective fundamental principles. For if the assumption of Atoms of different specific gravities is deemed absurd, on the basis of the atomic theory in Physics; and if Chemistry, nevertheless, on this very assumption, meets with “unfailing experimental verification,” in the formation and transformation of chemical compounds; then it becomes apparent that it is the atomo-mechanical theory which [pg 559] is untenable. The explanation of the latter, that “the differences of weight are only differences of density, and differences of density are differences of distance between the particles contained in a given space,” is not really valid, because, before a Physicist can argue in his defence that “as in the atom there is no multiplicity of particles and no void space, hence differences of density or weight are impossible in the case of atoms,” he must first know what an Atom is, in reality, and that is just what he cannot know. He must bring it under the observation of at least one of his physical senses—and that he cannot do: for the simple reason that no one has ever seen, smelt, heard, touched or tasted an Atom. The Atom belongs wholly to the domain of Metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction—at any rate for Physical Science—and has nought to do with Physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. The mechanical conception, therefore, becomes a jumble of the most conflicting theories and dilemmas, in the minds of the many Scientists who disagree on this, as on other subjects; and its evolution is beheld with the greatest bewilderment by the Eastern Occultist, who follows this scientific strife.

To conclude, on the question of gravity. How can Science presume to know anything certain of it? How can it maintain its position and its hypotheses against those of the Occultists, who see in gravity only sympathy and antipathy, or attraction and repulsion, caused by physical polarity on our terrestrial plane, and by spiritual causes outside its influence? How can they disagree with the Occultists before they agree among themselves? Indeed one hears of the Conservation of Energy, and in the same breath of the perfect hardness and inelasticity of the Atoms; of the kinetic theory of gases being identical with “potential energy,” so called, and, at the same time, of the elementary units of mass being absolutely hard and inelastic! An Occultist opens a scientific work and reads as follows:

Physical atomism derives all the qualitative properties of matter from the forms of atomic motion. The atoms themselves remain as elements utterly devoid of quality.873

And further:

Chemistry in its ultimate form must be atomic mechanics.874

And a moment after he is told that:

Gases consist of atoms which behave like solid, perfectly elastic spheres.875

Finally, to crown all, Sir W. Thomson is found declaring that:

[pg 560]

We are forbidden by the modern theory of the conservation of energy to assume inelasticity, or anything short of perfect elasticity of the ultimate molecules whether of ultra-mundane or mundane matter.876

But what do the men of true Science say to all this? By the “men of true Science” we mean those who care too much for truth and too little for personal vanity to dogmatize on anything, as do the majority. There are several among them—perhaps more than dare openly publish their secret conclusions, for fear of the cry “Stone him to death!”—men, whose intuitions have made them span the abyss that lies between the terrestrial aspect of Matter, and the, to us, on our plane of illusion, subjective, i.e., transcendentally objective Substance, and have led them to proclaim the existence of the latter. Matter, to the Occultist, it must be remembered, is that totality of existences in the Kosmos, which falls within any of the planes of possible perception. We are but too well aware that the orthodox theories of sound, heat and light, are against the Occult Doctrines. But, it is not enough for the men of Science, or their defenders, to say that they do not deny dynamic power to light and heat, and to urge, as a proof, the fact that Mr. Crookes' radiometer has unsettled no views. If they would fathom the ultimate nature of these Forces, they have first to admit their substantial nature, however supersensuous that nature may be. Neither do the Occultists deny the correctness of the vibratory theory.877 Only they limit its functions to our Earth—declaring its inadequacy on other planes than ours, since Masters in the Occult Sciences perceive the Causes that produce ethereal vibrations. Were all these only the fictions of the Alchemists, or dreams of the Mystics, such men as Paracelsus, Philalethes, Van Helmont, and so many others, would have to be regarded as worse than visionaries; they would become impostors and deliberate mystificators.

The Occultists are taken to task for calling the Cause of light, heat, sound, cohesion, magnetism, etc., etc., a Substance.878 Mr. Clerk Maxwell has stated that the pressure of strong sunlight on a square mile is about 3-¼ lbs. It is, they are told, “the energy of the myriad ether [pg 561] waves”; and when they call it a Substance impinging on that area, their explanation is proclaimed unscientific.

There is no justification for such an accusation. In no way—as already more than once stated—do the Occultists dispute the explanations of Science, as affording a solution of the immediate objective agencies at work. Science only errs in believing that, because it has detected in vibratory waves the proximate cause of these phenomena, it has, therefore, revealed all that lies beyond the threshold of Sense. It merely traces the sequence of phenomena on a plane of effects, illusory projections from the region that Occultism has long since penetrated. And the latter maintains that those etheric tremors are not set up, as asserted by Science, by the vibrations of the molecules of known bodies, the Matter of our terrestrial objective consciousness, but that we must seek for the ultimate Causes of light, heat, etc., in Matter existing in supersensuous states—states, however, as fully objective to the spiritual eye of man, as a horse or a tree is to the ordinary mortal. Light and heat are the ghost or shadow of Matter in motion. Such states can be perceived by the Seer or the Adept during the hours of trance, under the Sushumnâ Ray—the first of the Seven Mystic Rays of the Sun.879

Thus, we put forward the Occult teaching which maintains the reality of a supersubstantial and supersensible essence of that Âkâsha—not Ether, which is only an aspect of the latter—the nature of which cannot be inferred from its remoter manifestations, its merely phenomenal phalanx of effects, on this terrene plane. Science, on the contrary, informs us that heat can never be regarded as Matter in any conceivable state. To cite a most impartial critic, one whose authority no one can call in question, as a reminder to Western dogmatists, that the question cannot be in any way considered as settled:

There is no fundamental difference between light and heat ... each is merely a metamorphosis of the other.... Heat is light in complete repose. Light is heat in rapid motion. Directly light is combined with a body, it becomes heat; but when it is thrown off from that body it again becomes light.880

[pg 562]

Whether this is true or false we cannot tell, and many years, perhaps many generations, will have to elapse before we shall be able to tell.881 We are also told that the two great obstacles to the fluid (?) theory of heat undoubtedly are:

(1) The production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motion.

(2) The conversion of heat into mechanical motion.

The answer given is: There are fluids of various kinds. Electricity is called a fluid, and so was heat quite recently, but it was on the supposition that heat was some imponderable substance. This was during the supreme and autocratic reign of Matter. When Matter was dethroned, and Motion was proclaimed the sole sovereign ruler of the Universe, heat became a “mode of motion.” We need not despair; it may become something else to-morrow. Like the Universe itself, Science is ever becoming, and can never say, “I am that I am.” On the other hand, Occult Science has its changeless traditions from prehistoric times. It may err in particulars; it can never become guilty of a mistake in questions of Universal Law, simply because that Science, justly referred to by Philosophy as the Divine, was born on higher planes, and was brought to Earth by Beings who were wiser than man will be, even in the Seventh Race of his Seventh Round. And that Science maintains that Forces are not what modern learning would have them; e.g., magnetism is not a “mode of motion”; and, in this particular case, at least, exact Modern Science is sure to come to grief some day. Nothing, at the first blush, can appear more ridiculous, more outrageously absurd than to say, for instance: The Hindû initiated Yogî knows really ten times more than the greatest European Physicist of the ultimate nature and constitution of light, both solar and lunar. Yet why is the Sushumnâ Ray believed to be that Ray which furnishes the Moon with its borrowed light? Why is it “the Ray cherished by the initiated Yogî”? Why is the Moon considered as the Deity of the Mind, by those Yogîs? We say, because light, or rather all its Occult properties, every combination and correlation of it with other forces, mental, psychic, and spiritual, was perfectly known to the old Adepts.

Therefore, although Occult Science may be less well-informed than modern Chemistry as to the behaviour of compound elements in various cases of physical correlation, yet it is immeasurably higher [pg 563] in its knowledge of the ultimate Occult states of Matter, and of the true nature of Matter, than all the Physicists and Chemists of our modern day put together.

Now, if we state the truth openly and in full sincerity, namely, that the ancient Initiates had a far wider knowledge of Physics, as a Science of Nature, than is possessed by our Academies of Science, all taken together, the statement will be characterized as an impertinence and an absurdity; for Physical Sciences are considered to have been carried in our age to the apex of perfection. Hence, the twitting query: Can the Occultists meet successfully the two points, namely (a) the production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motion; and (b) the conversion of heat into mechanical force, if they hold to the old exploded theory of heat being a substance or a fluid?

To answer the question, it must first be observed that the Occult Sciences do not regard either electricity, or any of the Forces supposed to be generated by it, as Matter in any of the states known to Physical Science; to put it more clearly, none of these Forces, so-called, is a solid, gas, or fluid. If it did not look pedantic, an Occultist would even object to electricity being called a fluid—as it is an effect and not a cause. But its Noumenon, he would say, is a Conscious Cause. The same in the cases of “Force” and the “Atom.” Let us see what an eminent Academician, Butlerof, the Chemist, had to say about these two abstractions. This great man of Science argues:

What is Force? What is it from a strictly scientific stand-point, and as warranted by the law of conservation of energy? Conceptions of Force are resumed by our conceptions of this, that, or another mode of motion. Force is thus simply the passage of one state of motion into another state of the same; of electricity into heat and light, of heat into sound or some mechanical function, and so on.882 The first time electric fluid was produced by man on earth it must have been by friction; hence, as well known, it is heat that produces it by disturbing its zero state,883and electricity exists no more on earth per se than heat or light, or any other force. They are all correlations, as Science says. When a given quantity of heat, assisted by a steam engine, is transformed into mechanical work, we speak of steam power (or force). When a falling body strikes an obstacle in its way, thereby generating heat and sound—we call it the power of collision. When electricity decomposes water or heats a platinum wire, we speak of the force of the electric fluid. When the rays of the sun are intercepted by the thermometer bulb and its quicksilver expands, we speak of the calorific energy of the sun. In short, when one state of [pg 564]a determined quantity of motion ceases, another state of motion equivalent to the preceding takes its place, and the result of such a transformation or correlation is—Force. In all cases where such a transformation, or the passage of one state of motion into another, is entirely absent, there no force is possible. Let us admit for a moment an absolutely homogeneous state of the Universe, and our conception of Force falls down to nought.

Therefore it becomes evident that the Force, which Materialism considers as the cause of the diversity that surrounds us, is in sober reality only an effect, a result of that diversity. From such point of view Force is not the cause of motion, but a result, while the cause of that Force, or forces, is not the Substance or Matter, but Motion itself. Matter thus must be laid aside, and with it the basic principle of Materialism, which has become unnecessary, as Force brought down to a state of motion can give no idea of the Substance. If Force is the result of motion, then it becomes incomprehensible why that motion should become witness to Matter and not to Spirit or a Spiritual essence. True, our reason cannot conceive of a motion minus something moving (and our reason is right); but the nature or esse of that something moving remains to Science entirely unknown; and the Spiritualist, in such case, has as much right to attribute it to a “Spirit,” as a Materialist to creative and all-potential Matter. A Materialist has no special privileges in this instance, nor can he claim any. The law of the conservation of energy, as thus seen, is shown to be illegitimate in its pretensions and claims in this case. The “great dogma”—no force without matter and no matter without force—falls to the ground, and loses entirely the solemn significance with which Materialism has tried to invest it. The conception of Force still gives no idea of Matter, and compels us in no way to see in it “the origin of all origins.”884

We are assured that Modern Science is not Materialistic; and our own conviction tells us that it cannot be so, when its learning is real. There is good reason for this, well defined by some Physicists and Chemists themselves. Natural Sciences cannot go hand in hand with Materialism. To be at the height of their calling, men of Science have to reject the very possibility of Materialistic doctrines having aught to do with the Atomic Theory; and we find that Lange, Butlerof, Du Bois Reymond—the last probably unconsciously—and several others, have proved it. And this is, furthermore, demonstrated by the fact, that Kanâda in India, and Leucippus and Democritus in Greece, and after them Epicurus—the earliest Atomists in Europe—while propagating their doctrine of definite proportions, believed in Gods or supersensuous Entities, at the same time. Their ideas upon Matter thus differed from those now prevalent. We must be allowed to make our statement clearer by a short synopsis of the ancient and modern [pg 565] views of Philosophy upon Atoms, and thus prove that the Atomic Theory kills Materialism.

From the standpoint of Materialism, which reduces the beginnings of all to Matter, the Universe consists, in its fulness, of Atoms and vacuity. Even leaving aside the axiom taught by the Ancients, and now absolutely demonstrated by telescope and microscope, that Nature abhors a vacuum, what is an Atom? Professor Butlerof writes:

It is, we are answered by Science, the limited division of Substance, the indivisible particle of Matter. To admit the divisibility of the atom, amounts to an admission of an infinite divisibility of Substance, which is equivalent to reducing Substance to nihil, or nothingness. Owing to a feeling of self-preservation alone, Materialism cannot admit infinite divisibility; otherwise, it would have to bid farewell for ever to its basic principle and thus sign its own death-warrant.885

Büchner, for instance, like a true dogmatist in Materialism declares that:

To accept infinite divisibility is absurd, and amounts to doubting the very existence of Matter.

The Atom is indivisible then, saith Materialism? Very well. Butlerof answers:

See now what a curious contradiction this fundamental principle of the Materialists is leading them into. The atom is indivisible, and at the same time we know it to be elastic. An attempt to deprive it of elasticity is unthinkable; it would amount to an absurdity. Absolutely non-elastic atoms could never exhibit a single one of those numerous phenomena that are attributed to their correlations. Without any elasticity, the atoms could not manifest their energy, and the Substance of the Materialists would remain weeded of every force. Therefore, if the Universe is composed of atoms, then those atoms must be elastic. It is here that we meet with an insuperable obstacle. For, what are the conditions requisite for the manifestation of elasticity? An elastic ball, when striking against an obstacle, is flattened and contracts, which it would be impossible for it to do, were not that ball to consist of particles, the relative position of which experiences at the time of the blow a temporary change. This may be said of elasticity in general; no elasticity is possible without change with respect to the position of the compound particles of an elastic body. This means that the elastic body is changeful and consists of particles, or, in other words, that elasticity can pertain only to those bodies that are divisible. And the atom is elastic.886

This is sufficient to show how absurd are the simultaneous admissions of the non-divisibility and of the elasticity of the Atom. The Atom is elastic, ergo, the Atom is divisible, and must consist of particles, or of sub-atoms. And these sub-atoms? They are either non-elastic, [pg 566] and in such case they represent no dynamic importance, or, they are elastic also; and in that case, they, too, are subject to divisibility. And thus ad infinitum. But infinite divisibility of Atoms resolves Matter into simple centres of Force, i.e., precludes the possibility of conceiving Matter as an objective substance.

This vicious circle is fatal to Materialism. It finds itself caught in its own nets, and no issue out of the dilemma is possible for it. If it says that the Atom is indivisible, then it will have Mechanics asking it the awkward question:

How does the Universe move in this case, and how do its forces correlate? A world built on absolutely non-elastic atoms, is like an engine without steam, it is doomed to eternal inertia.887

Accept the explanations and teachings of Occultism, and—the blind inertia of Physical Science being replaced by the intelligent active Powers behind the veil of Matter—motion and inertia become subservient to those Powers. It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of Matter, and the infinite divisibility of the Atom, that the whole Science of Occultism is built. It opens limitless horizons to Substance, informed by the divine breath of its Soul in every possible state of tenuity, states still undreamed of by the most spiritually disposed Chemists and Physicists.

The above views were enunciated by an Academician, the greatest Chemist in Russia, and a recognized authority even in Europe, the late Professor Butlerof. True, he was defending the phenomena of the Spiritualists, the materializations, so-called, in which he believed, as Professors Zöllner and Hare did, as Mr. A. Russel Wallace, Mr. W. Crookes, and many another Fellow of the Royal Society, do still, whether openly or secretly. But his argument with regard to the nature of the Essence that acts behind the physical phenomena of light, heat, electricity, etc., is no less scientific and authoritative for all that, and applies admirably to the case in hand. Science has no right to deny to the Occultists their claim to a more profound knowledge of the so-called Forces, which, they say, are only the effects of causes generated by Powers, substantial, yet supersensuous, and beyond any kind of Matter with which Scientists have hitherto become acquainted. The most Science can do is to assume and to maintain the attitude of Agnosticism. Then it can say: Your case is no more proven than is ours; but we confess to knowing nothing in reality either about [pg 567] Force or Matter, or about that which lies at the bottom of the so-called correlation of Forces. Therefore, time alone can prove who is right and who is wrong. Let us wait patiently, and meanwhile show mutual courtesy, instead of scoffing at each other.

But to do this requires a boundless love of truth and the surrender of that prestige—however false—of infallibility, which the men of Science have acquired among the ignorant and flippant, though cultured, masses of the profane. The blending of the two Sciences, the Archaic and the Modern, requires first of all the abandonment of the actual Materialistic lines. It necessitates a kind of religious Mysticism and even the study of old Magic, which our Academicians will never take up. The necessity is easily explained. Just as in old Alchemical works the real meaning of the Substances and Elements mentioned is concealed under the most ridiculous metaphors, so are the physical, psychic, and spiritual natures of the Elements (say of Fire) concealed in the Vedas;, and especially in the Purânas, under allegories comprehensible only to the Initiates. Had they no meaning, then indeed all these long legends and allegories about the sacredness of the three types of Fire, and the Forty-Nine original Fires—personified by the Sons of Daksha's Daughters and the Rishis, their Husbands, “who with the first Son of Brahmâ and his three descendants constitute the Forty-nine Fires”—would be idiotic verbiage and no more. But it is not so. Every Fire has a distinct function and meaning in the worlds of the physical and the spiritual. It has, moreover, in its essential nature a corresponding relation to one of the human psychic faculties, besides its well determined chemical and physical potencies when coming in contact with terrestrially differentiated Matter. Science has no speculations to offer upon Fire per se; Occultism and ancient religious Science have. This is shown even in the meagre and purposely veiled phraseology of the Purânas, where, as in the Vâyu Purâna, many of the qualities of the personified Fires are explained. Thus, Pâvaka is Electric Fire, or Vaidyuta; Pavamâna, the Fire produced by Friction, or Nirmathya: and Shuchi is Solar Fire, or Saura888—all these three being the sons of Abhimânin, the Agni (Fire), eldest son of Brahmâ and of Svâhâ. Pâvaka, moreover, is made parent to Kavyavâhana, the Fire of the Pitris: Shuchi to Havyaváhana, the Fire of the Gods; and Pavamâna to Saharaksha, the Fire of the Asuras. Now all this shows that the writers of the Purânas were perfectly conversant [pg 568] with the Forces of Science and their correlations, as well as with the various qualities of the latter in their bearing upon those psychic and physical phenomena which receive no credit and are now unknown to Physical Science. Very naturally, when an Orientalist, especially one with materialistic tendencies, reads that these are only appellations of Fire employed in the invocations and rituals, he calls this “Tântrika superstition and mystification”; and he becomes more careful to avoid errors in spelling than to give attention to the secret meaning attached to the personifications, or to seek their explanation in the physical correlations of Forces, so far as these are known. So little credit, indeed, is given to the ancient Âryans for knowledge, that even such glaring passages as that in Vishnu Purâna, are left without any notice. Nevertheless, what can this sentence mean?

Then ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with the properties of sound and the rest, existed as distinguishable according to their qualities, ... but, possessing many and various energies and being unconnected, they could not, without combination, create living beings, not having blended with each other. Having combined therefore with one another, they assumed through their mutual association, the character of one mass of entire unity; and, from the direction of Spirit, etc.889

This means, of course, that the writers were perfectly acquainted with correlation, and were well posted about the origin of Kosmos from the “Indiscrete Principle,” Avyaktânugrahena, as applied to Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti conjointly, and not to “Avyakta, either First Cause, or Matter,” as Wilson gives it. The old Initiates knew of no “miraculous creation,” but taught the evolution of Atoms, on our physical plane, and their first differentiation from Laya into Protyle, as Mr. Crookes has suggestively named Matter, or primordial substance, beyond the zero-line—there where we place Mûlaprakriti, the Root-Principle of the World-Stuff and of all in the World.

This can be easily demonstrated. Take, for instance, the newly-published catechism of the Vishishthâdvaita Vedântins, an orthodox and exoteric system, yet fully enunciated and taught in the XIth century890 at a time when European “Science” still believed in the squareness and flatness of the Earth of Cosmas Indicopleustes of the VIth century. It teaches that before Evolution began, Prakriti, Nature, was in a condition of Laya, or of absolute homogeneity, as “Matter exists in two conditions, the Sûkshma, or latent and undifferentiated, and the Sthûla, or differentiated, condition.” Then it became Anu, [pg 569] atomic. It teaches of Suddasattva—“a substance not subject to the qualities of Matter, from which it is quite different,” and adds that out of that Substance the bodies of the Gods, the inhabitants of Vaikunthaloka, the Heaven of Vishnu, are formed. That every particle or atom of Prakriti contains Jîva (divine life), and is the Sharîra (body) of that Jîva which it contains, while every Jîva is in its turn the Sharîra of the Supreme Spirit, as “Parabrahman pervades every Jîva, as well as every particle of Matter.” Dualistic and anthropomorphic as may be the philosophy of the Vishishthâdvaita, when compared with that of the Advaita—the non-dualists—it is yet supremely higher in logic and philosophy than the Cosmogony accepted either by Christianity or by its great opponent, Modern Science. The followers of one of the greatest minds that ever appeared on Earth, the Advaita Vedântins are called Atheists, because they regard all save Parabrahman, the Secondless, or the Absolute Reality as an illusion. Yet the wisest Initiates came from their ranks, as also the greatest Yogîs. The Upanishads show that they most assuredly knew not only what is the causal substance in the effects of friction, and that their forefathers were acquainted with the conversion of heat into mechanical force, but that they were also acquainted with the Noumenon of every spiritual as well as of every cosmic phenomenon.

Truly the young Brâhman who graduates in the Universities and Colleges of India with the highest honours; who starts in life as an M.A. and an LL.B., with a tail initialed from Alpha to Omega after his name, and a contempt for his national Gods proportioned to the honours received in his education in Physical Science; truly he has but to read in the light of the latter, and with an eye to the correlation of physical Forces, certain passages in his Purânas, if he would learn how much more his ancestors knew than he will ever know—unless he becomes an Occultist. Let him turn to the allegory of Purûravas and the celestial Gandharva,891 who furnished the former with a vessel full [pg 570] of heavenly fire. The primeval mode of obtaining fire by friction has its scientific explanation in the Vedas, and is pregnant with meaning for him who reads between the lines. The Tretâgni (sacred triad of fires) obtained by the attrition of sticks made of the wood of the Ashvattha tree, the Bo-tree of Wisdom and Knowledge, sticks “as many finger-breadths long as there are syllables in the Gâyatrî,” must have a secret meaning, or else the writers of the Vedas and Purânas were no sacred writers but mystificators. That it has such a meaning, the Hindu Occultists are a proof, and they alone are able to enlighten Science, as to why and how the Fire, that was primevally One, was made three-fold (tretâ) in our present Manvantara, by the Son of Ilâ (Vâch), the Primeval Woman after the Deluge, the wife and daughter of Vaivasvata Manu. The allegory is suggestive, in whatever Purâna it may be read and studied.

[pg 571]

Section VI. An Attack on the Scientific Theory of Force by a Man of Science.

The wise words of several English men of Science have now to be quoted in our favour. Ostracized for “principle's sake” by the few, they are tacitly approved of by the many. That one of them preaches almost Occult doctrines—in some things identical with, and often amounting to a public recognition of, our “Fohat and his seven Sons,” the Occult Gandharva of the Vedas—will be recognized by every Occultist, and even by some profane readers.

If such readers will open Volume V of the Popular Science Review,892 they will find in it an article on “Sun-Force and Earth-Force,” by Dr. E. W. Richardson, F.R.S., which reads as follows:

At this moment, when the theory of mere motion as the origin of all varieties of force is again becoming the prevailing thought, it were almost heresy to reöpen a debate, which for a period appears, by general consent, to be virtually closed; but I accept the risk, and shall state, therefore, what were the precise views of the immortal heretic, whose name I have whispered to the readers, (Samuel Metcalfe,) respecting Sun-Force. Starting with the argument on which nearly all physicists are agreed, that there exist in nature two agencies—matter which is ponderable, visible, and tangible, and a something which is imponderable, invisible, and appreciable only by its influence on matter—Metcalfe maintains that the imponderable and active agency which he calls “caloric” is not a mere form of motion, not a vibration amongst the particles of ponderable matter, but itself a material substance flowing from the sun through space,893 filling the voids between the particles of solid bodies, and conveying by sensation the property called heat. The nature of caloric, or Sun-Force, is contended for by him on the following grounds:

(i) That it may be added to, and abstracted from other bodies and measured with mathematical precision.

[pg 572]

(ii) That it augments the volume of bodies, which are again reduced in size by its abstraction.

(iii) That it modifies the forms, properties, and conditions of all other bodies.

(iv) That it passes by radiation through the most perfect vacuum894 that can be formed, in which it produces the same effects on the thermometer as in the atmosphere.

(v) That it exerts mechanical and chemical forces which nothing can restrain, as in volcanoes, the explosion of gunpowder, and other fulminating compounds.

(vi) That it operates in a sensible manner on the nervous system, producing intense pain; and when in excess, disorganization of the tissues.

As against the vibratory theory, Metcalfe further argues that if caloric were a mere property or quality, it could not augment the volume of other bodies; for this purpose it must itself have volume, it must occupy space, and it must, therefore, be a material agent. If caloric were only the effect of vibratory motion amongst the particles of ponderable matter, it could not radiate from hot bodies without the simultaneous transition of the vibrating particles; but the fact stands out that heat can radiate from material ponderable substance without loss of weight of such substance.... With this view as to the material nature of caloric or sun-force; with the impression firmly fixed on his mind that “everything in Nature is composed of two descriptions of matter, the one essentially active and ethereal, the other passive and motionless,”895 Metcalfe based the hypothesis that the sun-force, or caloric, is a self-active principle. For its own particles, he holds, it has repulsion; for the particles of all ponderable matter it has affinity; it attracts the particles of ponderable matter with forces which vary inversely as the squares of the distance. It thus acts through ponderable matter. If universal space were filled with caloric, sun-force, alone (without ponderable matter), caloric would also be inactive and would constitute a boundless ocean of powerless or quiescent ether, because it would then have nothing on which to act, while ponderable matter, however inactive of itself, has “certain properties by which it modifies and controls the actions of caloric, both of which are governed by immutable laws that have their origin in the mutual relations and specific properties of each.”

And he lays down a law which he believes is absolute, and which is thus expressed:

“By the attraction of caloric for ponderable matter, it unites and holds together all things; by its self-repulsive energy it separates and expands all things.”

This, of course, is almost the Occult explanation of cohesion. Dr. Richardson continues:

As I have already said, the tendency of modern teaching is to rest upon the hypothesis [pg 573]... that heat is motion, or, as it would, perhaps, be better stated, a specific force or form of motion.896

But this hypothesis, popular as it is, is not one that ought to be accepted to the exclusion of the simpler views of the material nature of sun-force, and of its influence in modifying the conditions of matter. We do not yet know sufficient to be dogmatic.897

The hypothesis of Metcalfe respecting sun-force and earth-force is not only very simple, but most fascinating.... Here are two elements in the universe, the one is ponderable matter.... The second element is the all-pervading ether, solar fire. It is without weight, substance, form, or colour; it is matter infinitely divisible, and its particles repel each other; its rarity is such that we have no word, except ether,898 by which to express it. It pervades and fills space, but alone it too is quiescent—dead.899 We bring together the two elements, the inert matter, the self-repulsive ether [?] and thereupon dead [?] ponderable matter is vivified; [Ponderable matter may be inert but never dead—this is Occult Law.] ... through the particles of the ponderable substance the ether [Ether's second principle] penetrates, and, so penetrating, it combines with the ponderable particles and holds them in mass, holds them together in bond of union; they are dissolved in the ether.

This distribution of solid ponderable matter through ether extends, according to the theory before us, to everything that exists at this moment. The ether is all-pervading. The human body itself is charged with the ether [Astral Light rather]; its minute particles are held together by it; the plant is in the same condition; the most solid earth, rock, adamant, crystal, metal, all are the same. But there are differences in the capacities of different kinds of ponderable matter to receive sun-force, and upon this depends the various changing conditions of matter; the solid, the liquid, the gaseous condition. Solid bodies have attracted caloric in excess over fluid bodies, and hence their firm cohesion; when a portion of molten zinc is poured upon a plate of solid zinc, the molten zinc becomes as solid because there is a rush of caloric from the liquid to the solid, and in the equalization the particles, previously loose or liquid, are more closely brought together.... Metcalfe himself, dwelling on the above-named phenomena, and accounting for them by the unity of principle of action, which has already been explained, sums up his argument in very clear terms, in a comment on the densities of various bodies. “Hardness and softness,” he says, “solidity and liquidity, are not essential conditions of bodies, [pg 574]but depend on the relative proportions of ethereal and ponderable matter of which they are composed. The most elastic gas may be reduced to the liquid form by the abstraction of caloric, and again converted into a firm solid, the particles of which would cling together with a force proportional to their augmented affinity for caloric. On the other hand, by adding a sufficient quantity of the same principle to the densest metals, their attraction for it is diminished when they are expanded into the gaseous state, and their cohesion is destroyed.”

Having thus quoted at length the heterodox views of the great “heretic”—views that to be correct, need only a little alteration of terms here and there—Dr. Richardson, undeniably an original and liberal thinker, proceeds to sum up these views, and continues:

I shall not dwell at great length on this unity of sun-force and earth-force, which this theory implies. But I may add that out of it, or out of the hypothesis of mere motion as force, and of virtue without substance, we may gather, as the nearest possible approach to the truth on this, the most complex and profound of all subjects, the following inferences:

(a) Space, inter-stellary, inter-planetary, inter-material, inter-organic, is not a vacuum, but is filled with a subtle fluid or gas, which for want of a better term900 we may still call, as the ancients did, Aith-ur—Solar Fire—Æther. This fluid, unchangeable in composition, indestructible, invisible,901 pervades everything and all [ponderable] matter,902 the pebble in the running brook, the tree overhanging, the man looking on, is charged with the ether in various degrees; the pebble less than the tree, the tree less than man. All in the planet is in like manner so charged! A world is built up in ethereal fluid, and moving through a sea of it.

(b) The ether, whatever its nature is, is from the sun and from the suns:903 the suns are the generators of it, the store-houses of it, the diffusers of it.904

(c) Without the ether there could be no motion; without it particles of ponderable matter could not glide over each other; without it there could be no impulse to excite those particles into action.

(d) Ether determines the constitution of bodies. Were there no ether there could be no change of constitution in substance; water, for instance, could only [pg 575]exist as a substance, compact and insoluble beyond any conception we could form of it. It could never even be ice, never fluid, never vapour, except for ether.

(e) Ether connects sun with planet, planet with planet, man with planet, man with man. Without ether there could be no communication in the Universe; no light, no heat, no phenomenon of motion.

Thus we find that Ether and elastic Atoms are, in the alleged mechanical conception of the Universe, the Spirit and Soul of Kosmos, and that the theory—put it in any way and under any disguise—always leaves a more widely opened issue for men of Science to speculate upon beyond the line of modern Materialism905 than the majority avails itself of. Atoms, Ether, or both, modern speculation cannot get out of the circle of ancient thought; and the latter was soaked through with archaic Occultism. Undulatory or corpuscular theory—it is all one. It is speculation from the aspects of phenomena, not from the knowledge of the essential nature of the cause and causes. When Modern Science has explained to its audience the late achievements of Bunsen and Kirchoff; when it has shown the seven colours, the primary of a ray which is decomposed in a fixed order on a screen; and has described the respective lengths of luminous waves, what has it proved? It has justified its reputation for exactness in mathematical achievement by measuring even the length of a luminous wave—“varying from about seven hundred and sixty millionths of a millimètre at the red end of the spectrum to about three hundred and ninety-three millionths of a millimètre at the violet end.” But when the exactness of the calculation with regard to the effect on the light-wave is thus vindicated, Science is forced to admit that the Force, which is the supposed cause, is believed to produce “inconceivably minute undulations” in some medium—“generally regarded as identical with the ethereal medium”906—and that medium itself is still only—a “hypothetical agent”!

Auguste Comte's pessimism with respect to the possibility of knowing some day the chemical composition of the Sun, has not, as has been averred, been belied thirty years later by Kirchoff. The [pg 576] spectroscope has helped us to see that the elements, with which the modern Chemist is familiar, must in all probability be present in the Sun's outward “robes”—not in the Sun itself; and, taking these “robes,” the solar cosmic veil, for the Sun itself, the Physicists have declared its luminosity to be due to combustion and flame, and mistaking the vital principle of that luminary for a purely material thing, have called it “chromosphere.”907 We have only hypotheses and theories so far, not law—by any means.

[pg 577]

Section VII. Life, Force, or Gravity.

The imponderable fluids have had their day; mechanical Forces are less talked about; Science has put on a new face for this last quarter of a century; but gravitation has remained, owing its life to new combinations after the old ones had nearly killed it. It may answer scientific hypotheses very well, but the question is whether it answers as well to truth, and represents a fact in nature. Attraction by itself is not sufficient to explain even planetary motion; how can it then presume to explain the rotatory motion in the infinitudes of Space? Attraction alone will never fill all the gaps, unless a special impulse is admitted for every sidereal body, and the rotation of every planet with its satellites is shown to be due to some one cause combined with attraction. And even then, says an Astronomer,908 Science would have to name that cause.

Occultism has named it for ages, and so have all the ancient Philosophers; but then all such beliefs are now proclaimed exploded superstitions. The extra-cosmic God has killed every possibility of belief in intra-cosmic intelligent Forces; yet who, or what, is the original “pusher” in that motion? Says Francœur:909

When we have learned the cause, unique et speciale, that pushes, we will be ready to combine it with the one which attracts.

And again:

Attraction between the celestial bodies is only repulsion: it is the sun that drives them incessantly onward; for otherwise, their motion would stop.

If ever this theory of the Sun-Force being the primal cause of all life on earth, and of all motion in heaven, is accepted, and if that other far bolder theory of Herschell, about certain organisms in the Sun, is accepted even as a provisional hypothesis, then will our teachings be vindicated, and Esoteric allegory will be shown to have anticipated [pg 578] Modern Science by millions of years, probably, for such are the Archaic Teachings. Mârttânda, the Sun, watches and threatens his seven brothers, the planets, without abandoning the central position to which his Mother, Aditi, relegated him. The Commentary910 says:

He pursues them, turning slowly around himself, ... following from afar the direction in which his brothers move, on the path that encircles their houses—or the orbit.

It is the sun-fluids or emanations that impart all motion, and awaken all into life, in the Solar System. It is attraction and repulsion, but not as understood by modern Physics or according to the law of gravity, but in harmony with the laws of manvantaric motion designed from the early Sandhyâ, the Dawn of the rebuilding and higher reformation of the System. These laws are immutable; but the motion of all the bodies—which motion is diverse and alters with every minor Kalpa—is regulated by the Movers, the Intelligences within the Cosmic Soul. Are we so very wrong in believing all this? Well, here is a great and modern man of Science who, speaking of vital electricity, uses language far more akin to Occultism than to modern Materialistic thought. We refer the sceptical reader to an article on “The Source of Heat in the Sun,” by Robert Hunt, F.R.S.,911 who, speaking of the luminous envelope of the Sun and its “peculiar curdy appearance,” says:

Arago proposed that this envelope should be called the Photosphere, a name now generally adopted. By the elder Herschell, the surface of this photosphere was compared to mother-of-pearl.... It resembles the ocean on a tranquil summer-day, when its surface is slightly crisped by a gentle breeze.... Mr. Nasmyth has discovered a more remarkable condition than any that had previously been suspected, ... objects which are peculiarly lens-shaped ... like “willow leaves,” ... different in size ... not arranged in any order, ... crossing each other in all directions ... with an irregular motion among themselves.... They are seen approaching to and receding from each other, and sometimes assuming new angular positions, so that the appearance ... has been compared to a dense shoal of fish, which, indeed, they resemble in shape.... The size of these objects gives a grand idea of the gigantic scale upon which physical (?) operations are carried out in the sun. They cannot be less than 1,000 miles in length, and from two to three hundred miles in breadth. The most probable conjecture which has been offered respecting those leaf or lens-like objects, is that the photosphere912 is an immense ocean of gaseous matter [what kind [pg 579]of “matter”?] ... in a state of intense [apparent] incandescence, and that they are perspective projections of the sheets of flame.

Solar “flames” seen through telescopes are reflections, says Occultism. But the reader has already seen what Occultists have to say to this.

Whatever they [those sheets of flame] may be, it is evident they are the immediate sources of solar heat and light. Here we have a surrounding envelope of photogenic matter,913 which pendulates with mighty energies, and by communicating its motion to the ethereal medium in stellar space, produces heat and light in far distant worlds. We have said that those forms have been compared to certain organisms, and Herschell says, “Though it would be too daring to speak of such organizations as partaking of life [why not?],914 yet we do not know that vital action is competent to develop heat, light, and electricity.”... Can it be that there is truth in this fine thought? May the pulsing of vital matter in the central sun of our system be the source of all that life which crowds the earth, and without doubt overspreads the other planets, to which the sun is the mighty minister?

Occultism answers these queries in the affirmative; and Science will find this to be the case, one day.

Again, Mr. Hunt writes:

But regarding Life—Vital Force—as a power far more exalted than either light, heat, or electricity, and indeed capable of exerting a controlling power over them all [this is absolutely Occult] ... we are certainly disposed to view with satisfaction that speculation which supposes the photosphere to be the primary seat of vital power, and to regard with a poetic pleasure that hypothesis which refers the solar energies to Life.915

Thus, we have an important scientific corroboration for one of our fundamental dogmas—namely, that (a) the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and (b) that it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, that issue those life-currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth. For see what another eminent Physician says, who calls this, our life-fluid, “Nervous Ether.” Change a few sentences in the article, extracts from which now follow, and you have another quasi-Occult treatise on Life-Force. It is again Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S., who gives his views as follows on “Nervous Ether,” as he has on “Sun-Force” and “Earth-Force”:

The idea attempted to be conveyed by the theory is, that between the molecules of the matter, solid or fluid, of which the nervous organisms, and, indeed, of which [pg 580]all the organic parts of a body are composed, there exists a refined subtle medium, vaporous or gaseous, which holds the molecules in a condition for motion upon each other, and for arrangement and reärrangement of form; a medium by and through which all motion is conveyed; by and through which the one organ or part of the body is held in communion with the other parts, by which and through which the outer living world communicates with the living man; a medium, which, being present, enables the phenomena of life to be demonstrated, and which, being universally absent, leaves the body actually dead.

And the whole Solar System falls into Pralaya—the author might have added. But let us read further:

I use the word ether in its general sense as meaning a very light, vaporous or gaseous matter; I use it, in short, as the astronomer uses it when he speaks of the ether of Space, by which he means a subtle but material medium.... When I speak of a nervous ether, I do not convey that the ether is existent in nervous structure only: I believe truly that it is a special part of the nervous organization; but, as nerves pass into all structures that have capacities for movement and sensibilities, so the nervous ether passes into all such parts; and as the nervous ether is, according to my view, a direct product from blood, so we may look upon it as a part of the atmosphere of the blood.... The evidence in favour of the existence of an elastic medium pervading the nervous matter and capable of being influenced by simple pressure is all-convincing.... In nervous structure there is, unquestionably, a true nervous fluid, as our predecessors taught.916 The precise chemical (?)917 composition of this fluid is not yet well known; the physical characters of it have been little studied. Whether it moves in currents, we do not know; whether it circulates, we do not know; whether it is formed in the centres and passes from them to the nerves, or whether it is formed everywhere where blood enters nerve, we do not know. The exact uses of the fluid we do not consequently know. It occurs to my mind, however, that the veritable fluid of nervous matter is not of itself sufficient to act as the subtle medium that connects the outer with the inner universe of man and animal. I think—and this is the modification I suggest to the older theory—there must be another form of matter present during life; a matter which exists in the condition of vapour or gas, which pervades the whole nervous organism, surrounds as an enveloping atmosphere918 each molecule of nervous structure, and is the medium of all motion, communicated to and from the nervous centres.... When it is once fairly presented to the mind that during life there is in the animal body a finely diffused form of matter, a vapour filling every part—and even stored in some parts; a matter constantly renewed by the vital chemistry; a matter as easily disposed of as the breath, after it has served its purpose—a new flood of light breaks on the intelligence.919

A new flood of light is certainly thrown on the wisdom of ancient [pg 581] and mediæval Occultism and its votaries. For Paracelsus wrote the same thing more than three hundred years ago, in the sixteenth century, as follows:

The whole of the Microcosm is potentially contained in the Liquor Vitæ, a nerve fluid ... in which is contained the nature, quality, character, and essence of beings.920

The Archæus is an essence that is equally distributed in all parts of the human body.... The Spiritus Vitæ takes its origin from the Spiritus Mundi. Being an emanation of the latter, it contains the elements of all cosmic influences, and is therefore the cause by which the action of the stars [cosmic forces] upon the invisible body of man [his vital Linga Sharîra] may be explained.921

Had Dr. Richardson studied all the secret works of Paracelsus, he would not have been obliged to confess so often, “we do not know,” “it is not known to us,” etc. Nor would he ever have written the following sentence, recanting the best portions of his independent rediscovery.

It may be urged that in this line of thought is included no more than the theory of the existence of the ether ... supposed to pervade space.... It may be said that this universal ether pervades all the organism of the animal body as from without, and as part of every organization. This view would be Pantheism physically discovered, if it were true [!!]. It fails to be true because it would destroy the individuality of every individual sense.922

We fail to see this, and we know it is not so. Pantheism may be “physically rediscovered.” It was known, seen, and felt by the whole of antiquity. Pantheism manifests itself in the vast expanse of the starry heavens, in the breathing of the seas and oceans, and in the quiver of life of the smallest blade of grass. Philosophy rejects one finite and imperfect God in the universe, the anthropomorphic deity of the Monotheist as represented by his followers. It repudiates, in its name of Philo-theo-sophia, the grotesque idea that Infinite, Absolute Deity should, or rather could, have any direct or indirect relation to finite illusive evolutions of Matter, and therefore it cannot imagine a universe outside that Deity, or the absence of that Deity from the smallest speck of animate or inanimate Substance. This does not mean that every bush, tree or stone is God or a God; but only that every speck of the manifested material of Kosmos belongs to, and is the Substance of, God, however low it may have fallen in its cyclic [pg 582] gyration through the Eternities of the Ever-Becoming; and also that every such speck individually, and Kosmos collectively, is an aspect and a reminder of that universal One Soul—which Philosophy refuses to call God, thus limiting the eternal and ever-present Root and Essence.

Why either the Ether of Space or “Nervous Ether” should “destroy the individuality of every sense,” seems incomprehensible to one acquainted with the real nature of that “Nervous Ether” under its Sanskrit, or rather Esoteric and Kabalistic name. Dr. Richardson agrees that:

If we did not individually produce the medium of communication between ourselves and the outer world, if it were produced from without and adapted to one kind of vibration alone, there were fewer senses required than we possess: for, taking two illustrations only—ether of light is not adapted for sound, and yet we hear as well and see; while air, the medium of motion of sound, is not the medium of light, and yet we see and hear.

This is not so. The opinion that Pantheism “fails to be true because it would destroy the individuality of every individual sense” shows that all the conclusions of the learned doctor are based on the modern physical theories, though he would fain reform them. But he will find it impossible to do this unless he allows the existence of spiritual senses to replace the gradual atrophy of the physical. “We see and hear,” in accordance (of course, in Dr. Richardson's mind) with the explanations of the phenomena of sight and hearing, afforded by that same Materialistic Science which postulates that we cannot see and hear otherwise. The Occultists and Mystics know better. The Vedic Âryans were as familiar with the mysteries of sound and colour on the physical plane as are our Physiologists, but they had also mastered the secrets of both on planes inaccessible to the Materialist. They knew of a double set of senses; spiritual and material. In a man who is deprived of one or more senses, the remaining senses become the more developed; for instance, the blind man will recover his sight through the senses of touch, of hearing, etc., and he who is deaf will be able to hear through sight, by seeing audibly the words uttered by the lips and mouth of the speaker. But these are cases that belong to the world of Matter still. The spiritual senses, those that act on a higher plane of consciousness, are rejected à priori by Physiology, because the latter is ignorant of the Sacred Science. It limits the action of Ether to vibrations, and, dividing it from air—though air is [pg 583] simply differentiated and compound Ether—makes it assume functions to fit in with the special theories of the Physiologist. But there is more real Science in the teachings of the Upanishads, when these are correctly understood, than the Orientalists, who do not understand them at all, are ready to admit. Mental as well as physical correlations of the seven senses—seven on the physical and seven on the mental planes—are clearly explained and defined in the Vedas, and especially in the Upanishad called Anugîtâ:

The indestructible and the destructible, such is the double manifestation of the Self. Of these the indestructible is the existent [the true essence or nature of Self, the underlying principles], the manifestation as an individual (entity) is called the destructible.923

Thus speaks the Ascetic in the Anugîtâ, and also:

Every one who is twice-born [initiated] knows such is the teaching of the ancients.... Space is the first entity.... Now Space [Âkâsha, or the Noumenon of Ether] has one quality ... and that is stated to be sound only ... [and the] qualities of sound [are] Shadja, Rishabha, together with Gândhâra, Madhyama, Panchama, and beyond these [should be understood to be] Nishâda and Dhaivata [the Hindû gamut].924

These seven notes of the scale are the principles of sound. The qualities of every Element, as of every sense, are septenary, and to judge and dogmatize on them from their manifestation on the material or objective plane—likewise sevenfold in itself—is quite arbitrary. For it is only by the Self emancipating itself from these seven causes of illusion, that we can acquire the knowledge (Secret Wisdom) of the qualities of objects of sense on their dual plane of manifestation, the visible and the invisible. Thus it is said:

Hear me ... state this wonderful mystery.... Hear also the assignment of causes exhaustively. The nose, and the tongue, and the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth [organ of sense] mind and understanding,925 these seven [senses] should be understood to be the causes of (the knowledge of) qualities. Smell, and taste, and colour, sound, and touch as the fifth, the object of the mental operation, [pg 584]and the object of the understanding [the highest spiritual sense or perception], these seven are causes of action. He who smells, he who eats, he who sees, he who speaks, and he who hears as the fifth, he who thinks, and he who understands, these seven should be understood to be the causes of the agents. These [the agents] being possessed of qualities (sattva, rajas, tamas), enjoy their own qualities, agreeable and disagreeable.926

The modern commentators, failing to comprehend the subtle meaning of the ancient Scholiasts, take the sentence, “causes of the agents,” to mean “that the powers of smelling, etc., when attributed to the Self, make him appear as an agent, as an active principle” (!), which is entirely fanciful. These “seven” are understood to be the causes of the agents, because “the objects are causes, as their enjoyment causes an impression.” It means esoterically that they, these seven senses, are caused by the agents, which are the “deities,” for otherwise what does, or can, the following sentence mean? “Thus,” it is said, “these seven [senses] are the causes of emancipation”—i.e., when these causes are made ineffectual. And, again, the sentence, “among the learned [the wise Initiates] who understand everything, the qualities which are in the position [in the nature, rather] of the deities, each in its place,” etc., means simply that the “learned” understand the nature of the Noumena of the various phenomena; and that “qualities,” in this instance, mean the qualities of the high Planetary or Elementary Gods or Intelligences, which rule the elements and their products, and not at all the “senses,” as the modern commentator thinks. For the learned do not suppose their senses to have aught to do with them, any more than with their Self.

Then we read in the Bhagavadgîtâ of Krishna, the Deity, saying:

Only some know me truly. Earth, water, fire, air, space [or Âkâsha, Æther], mind, understanding and egoism [or the perception of all the former on the illusive plane], ... this is a lower form of my nature. Know (that there is) another (form of my) nature, and higher than this, which is animate, O you of mighty arms! and by which this universe is upheld.... All this is woven upon me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread.927 I am the taste in the water, O son of Kuntî! I am the light of the sun and moon. I am ... sound (“i.e., the occult essence which underlies all these and the other qualities of the various things mentioned”—Transl.), in space ... the fragrant smell in the earth, refulgence in the fire ... etc.928

Truly, then, one should study Occult Philosophy before one begins [pg 585] to seek for and verify the mysteries of Nature on its surface alone, as he alone “who knows the truth about the qualities of Nature, who understands the creation of all entities ... is emancipated” from error. Says the Preceptor:

Accurately understanding the great (tree) of which the unperceived [Occult Nature, the root of all] is the sprout from the seed [Parabrahman], which consists of the understanding [Mahat, or the Universal Intelligent Soul] as its trunk, the branches of which are the great egoism,929 in the holes of which are the sprouts, namely, the senses, of which the great [occult, or invisible] elements are the flower-bunches,930the gross elements [the gross objective matter], the smaller boughs, which are always possessed of leaves, always possessed of flowers ... which is eternal and the seed of which is the Brahman [the Deity]; and cutting it with that excellent sword—knowledge [Secret Wisdom]—one attains immortality and casts off birth and death.931

This is the Tree of Life, the Ashvattha tree, after the cutting of which only, Man, the slave of life and death, can be emancipated.

But the men of Science know nought, nor will they hear of the “Sword of Knowledge” used by the Adepts and Ascetics. Hence the one-sided remarks of even the most liberal among them, based on and flowing from undue importance given to the arbitrary divisions and classification of Physical Science. Occultism heeds them very little, and Nature heeds them still less. The whole range of physical phenomena proceeds from the Primary of Æther—Âkâsha, as dual-natured Âkâsha proceeds from undifferentiated Chaos, so-called, the latter being the primary aspect of Mûlaprakriti, the Root-Matter and the first abstract Idea one can form of Parabrahman. Modern Science may divide its hypothetically conceived Ether in as many ways as it likes; the real Æther of Space will remain as it is throughout. It has its seven “principles,” as all the rest of Nature has, and where there was no Æther there would be no “sound,” as it is the vibrating sounding-board in Nature in all its seven differentiations. This is the first mystery the Initiates of old have learned. Our present normal physical senses were, from our present point of view, abnormal in those days of slow and progressive downward evolution and fall into Matter. And there was a day when all that in our modern times is regarded as exceptional, so puzzling to the Physiologists now compelled to believe in them—such as thought-transference, clairvoyance, clairaudience, [pg 586] etc.; in short, all that is now called “wonderful and abnormal”—when all that and much more belonged to the senses and faculties common to all humanity. We are, however, cycling back and cycling forward; that is to say, that having lost in spirituality what we acquired in physical development until almost the end of the Fourth Race, we are now as gradually and imperceptibly losing in the physical all that we regain once more in the spiritual reëvolution. This process must go on, until the period which will bring the Sixth Root-Race on a line parallel with the spirituality of the Second Race, a long extinct mankind.

But this will hardly be understood at present. We must return to Dr. Richardson's hopeful, though somewhat incorrect hypothesis about “Nervous Ether.” Under the misleading translation of the word as “Space,” Âkâsha has just been shown in the ancient Hindû system as the “first born” of the One, having but one quality, “Sound,” which is septenary. In Esoteric language this One is the Father-Deity, and Sound is synonymous with the Logos, Verbum, or Son. Whether consciously or otherwise, it must be the latter; and Dr. Richardson, while preaching an Occult doctrine, chooses the lowest form of the septenary nature of that Sound, and speculates upon it, adding:

The theory, I offer, is that the nervous ether is an animal product. In different classes of animals it may differ in physical quality so as to be adapted to the special wants of the animal, but essentially it plays one part in all animals, and is produced, in all, in the same way.

Herein lies the nucleus of error leading to all the resultant mistaken views. This “Nervous Ether” is the lowest principle of the Primordial Essence which is Life. It is Animal Vitality diffused in all Nature, and acting according to the conditions it finds for its activity. It is not an “animal product,” but the living animal, the living flower and plant, are its products. The animal tissues only absorb it according to their more or less morbid or healthy state—as do physical materials and structures (in their primogenial state, nota bene)—and, from the moment of the birth of the Entity, are regulated, strengthened, and fed by it. It descends in a larger supply to vegetation in the Sushumnâ Sun-Ray which lights and feeds the Moon, and it is through her beams that it pours its light upon, and penetrates man and animal, more during their sleep and rest, than when they are in full activity. Therefore Dr. Richardson errs again in stating that:

The nervous ether is not, according to my idea of it, in itself active, nor an excitant of animal motion in the sense of a force; but it is essential as supplying the conditions [pg 587]by which the motion is rendered possible. [It is just the reverse.].... It is the conductor of all vibrations of heat, of light, of sound, of electrical action, of mechanical friction.932 It holds the nervous system throughout in perfect tension, during states of life [true]. By exercise it is disposed of [rather generated] ... and when demand for it is greater than the supply, its deficiency is indicated by nervous collapse or exhaustion.933 It accumulates in the nervous centres during sleep, bringing them, if I may so speak, to their due tone, and therewith raising the muscles to awakening and renewed life.

Just so; this is quite correct and comprehensible. Therefore:

The body fully renewed by it, presents capacity for motion, fulness of form, life. The body bereft of it presents inertia, the configuration of shrunken death, the evidence of having lost something physical that was in it when it lived.

Modern Science denies the existence of a “vital principle.” This extract is a clear proof of its grand mistake. But this “physical something,” that we call life-fluid—the Liquor Vitæ of Paracelsus—has not deserted the body, as Dr. Richardson thinks. It has only changed its state from activity to passivity, and has become latent, owing to the too morbid state of the tissues, on which it has hold no longer. Once the rigor mortis is absolute, the Liquor Vitæ will reäwaken into action, and will begin its work on the atoms chemically. Brahmâ-Vishnu, the Creator and the Preserver of Life, will have transformed himself into Shiva the Destroyer.

Lastly Dr. Richardson writes:

The nervous ether may be poisoned; it may, I mean, have diffused through it, by simple gaseous diffusion, other gases or vapours derived from without; it may derive from within products of substances swallowed and ingested, or gases of decomposition produced during disease in the body itself.934

And the learned gentleman might have added on the same Occult principle: That the “Nervous Ether” of one person can be poisoned by the “Nervous Ether” of another person or by his “auric emanations.” But see what Paracelsus said of this “Nervous Ether”:

The Archæus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repulses other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same plane. The less power of resistance for astral influences a person possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences. The vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates [within and] around [pg 588]him like a luminous sphere [aura] and it may be made to act at a distance.... It may poison the essence of life [blood] and cause diseases, or it may purify it after it has been made impure, and restore the health.935

That the two, “Archæus” and “Nervous Ether,” are identical, is shown by the English Scientist, who says that generally the tension of it may be too high or too low; that it may be so:

Owing to local changes in the nervous matter it invests.... Under sharp excitation it may vibrate as if in a storm and plunge every muscle under cerebral or spinal control into uncontrolled motion—unconscious convulsions.

This is called nervous excitation, but no one, except the Occultist, knows the reason of such nervous perturbation, or explains the primary causes of it. The principle of Life may kill when too exuberant, as much as when there is too little of it. But this “principle” on the manifested plane, that is to say, our plane, is but the effect and the result of the intelligent action of the “Host,” or collective Principle, the manifesting Life and Light. It is itself subordinate to, and emanates from, the ever-invisible, eternal and Absolute One Life, in a descending and reäscending scale of hierarchic degrees, a true septenary ladder, with Sound, the Logos, at the upper end, and the Vidyâdharas936, the inferior Pitris, at the lower.

Of course, the Occultists are fully aware of the fact that the vitalist “fallacy,” so derided by Vogt and Huxley, is, nevertheless, still countenanced [pg 589] in very high scientific quarters, and, therefore, they are happy to feel that they do not stand alone. Thus, Professor de Quatrefages writes:

It is very true that we do not know what life is; but no more do we know whatthe force is that set the stars in motion.... Living beings are heavy, and therefore subject to gravitation; they are the seat of numerous and various physico-chemical phenomena which are indispensable to their existence, and which must be referred to the action of etherodynamy [electricity, heat, etc.]. But these phenomena are here manifested under the influence of another force.... Life is not antagonistic to the inanimate forces, but it governs and rules their action by its laws.937

[pg 590]

Section VIII. The Solar Theory.

A SHORT ANALYSIS OF THE COMPOUND AND SINGLE ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE AS AGAINST THE OCCULT TEACHINGS. HOW FAR THIS THEORY, AS GENERALLY ACCEPTED, IS SCIENTIFIC.

In his reply to Dr. Gull's attack on the theory of Vitality, which is inseparably connected with the Elements of the Ancients in the Occult Philosophy, Professor Beale, the great Physiologist, has a few words as suggestive as they are beautiful:

There is a mystery in life—a mystery which has never been fathomed, and which appears greater, the more deeply the phenomena of life are studied and contemplated. In living centres—far more central than the centres seen by the highest magnifying powers, in centres of living matter, where the eye cannot penetrate, but towards which the understanding may tend—proceed changes of the nature of which the most advanced physicists and chemists fail to afford us the conception: nor is there the slightest reason to think that the nature of these changes will ever be ascertained by physical investigation, inasmuch as they are certainly of an order or nature totally distinct from that to which any other phenomenon known to us can be relegated.

This “mystery,” or the origin of the Life Essence, Occultism locates in the same Centre as the nucleus of prima materia of our Solar System, for they are one.

As says the Commentary:

The Sun is the heart of the Solar World [System] and its brain is hidden behind the [visible] Sun. Thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve-centre of the great body, and the waves of the life-essence flow into each artery and vein.... The planets are its limbs and pulses.

It has been stated elsewhere938 that Occult philosophy denies that the Sun is a globe in combustion, but defines it simply as a world, a glowing [pg 591] sphere, the real Sun being hidden behind, and the visible Sun being only its reflection, its shell. The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir John Herschell for “solar inhabitants,” are the reservoirs of solar vital energy; “the vital electricity that feeds the whole system; the sun in abscondito being thus the storehouse of our little Cosmos, self-generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out,” and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real solar palace and presence, which, however, shews without distortion the interior work.

Thus, during the manvantaric solar period, or life, there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our System, of which the Sun is the heart—like the circulation of the blood in the human body; the Sun contracting as rhythmically as the human heart does at every return of it. Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years to circulate, and a whole year to pass through its auricle and ventricle before it washes the lungs, and passes thence back to the great arteries and veins of the System.

This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases,939 the increase being due to the contraction of the Solar Heart. The Universe, our World in this case, breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the Earth; and as our Globe itself breathes every twenty-four hours. The dark region is not due to the “absorption exerted by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun, and interposed between the observer and the photosphere,” as Father Secchi would have it,940 nor are the spots formed “by the matter [heated gaseous matter] itself which the irruption projects upon the solar disk.” The phenomenon is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen, such as is used by lecturers on Astronomy to show the moon, for instance, then every one would see the sun-spot phenomena repeated every [pg 592] second, and that they were due to contraction and the rushing of the blood.

We read in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that:

All the recognized chemical elements will one day be found but modifications of a single material element.941

Occult Philosophy has taught this since the existence of human speech and language, adding, however, on the principle of the immutable law of analogy, “as it is above, so it is below,” another of its axioms, that there is neither Spirit nor Matter, in reality, but only numberless aspects of the One ever-hidden Is, or Sat. The homogeneous primordial Element is simple and single, only on the terrestrial plane of consciousness and sensation, since Matter, after all, is nothing more than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition. Even on the next higher plane, that single element which is defined on our Earth by current Science, as the ultimate undecomposable constituent of some kind of Matter, would be pronounced in the world of a higher spiritual perception to be something very complex indeed. Our purest water would be found to yield, instead of its two declared simple elements of oxygen and hydrogen, many other constituents, undreamed of by our modern terrestrial Chemistry. As in the realm of Matter, so in the realm of Spirit, the shadow of that which is cognized on the plane of objectivity exists on that of pure subjectivity. The speck of the perfectly homogeneous Substance, the sarcode of the Hæckelian Moneron, is now viewed as the archebiosis of terrestrial existence (Mr. Huxley's protoplasm)942; and Bathybius Hæckelii has to be traced to its pre-terrestrial archebiosis. This is first perceived by the Astronomers at its third stage of evolution, and in the “secondary creation,” so-called. But the students of Esoteric Philosophy understand well the secret meaning of the Stanza:

Brahmâ ... has essentially the aspect of Prakriti, both evolved and unevolved.... Spirit, O Twice-born [Initiate], is the leading aspect of Brahmâ. The next is a two-fold aspect [of Prakriti and Purusha] ... both evolved and unevolved; and Time is the last!943

Anu is one of the names of Brahmâ, as distinct from Brahman, [pg 593] and it means “atom”; anîyâmsam anîyasâm, “the most atomic of the atomic,” the “immutable and imperishable (achyuta) Purushottama.”

Surely, then, the elements now known to us—be their number whatever it may—as they are understood and defined at present, are not, nor can they be, the primordial Elements. Those were formed from “the curds of the cold radiant Mother” and “the fire-seed of the hot Father,” who “are one,” or, to express it in the plainer language of Modern Science, those Elements had their genesis in the depths of the primordial Fire-mist, the masses of incandescent vapour of the irresolvable nebulæ; for, as Professor Newcomb shows,944 resolvable nebulæ do not constitute a class of proper nebulæ. More than half of those, he thinks, which were at first mistaken for nebulæ, are what he calls “starry clusters.”

The elements now known have arrived at their state of permanency in this Fourth Round and Fifth Race. They have a short period of rest before they are propelled once more on their upward spiritual evolution, when the “living fire of Orcus” will dissociate the most irresolvable, and scatter them again into the primordial One.

Meanwhile the Occultist goes further, as has been shown in the Commentaries on the Seven Stanzas. Hence he can hardly hope for any help or recognition from Science, which will reject both his “anîyâmsam anîyasâm,” the absolutely spiritual Atom, and his Mânasaputras or Mind-born Men. In resolving the “single material element” into one absolute irresolvable Element, Spirit, or Root-Matter, thus placing it at once outside the reach and province of Physical Philosophy—he has, of course but little in common with the orthodox men of Science. He maintains that Spirit and Matter are two Facets of the unknowable Unity, their apparently contrasted aspects depending, (a) on the various degrees of differentiation of Matter, and (b) on the grades of consciousness attained by man himself. This is, however, Metaphysics, and has little to do with Physics—however great in its own terrestrial limitation that physical Philosophy may now be.

Nevertheless, once that Science admits, if not the actual existence, at any rate, the possibility of the existence, of a Universe with its numberless forms, conditions, and aspects built out of a “single [pg 594] Substance,”945 it has to go further. Unless it also admits the possibility of One Element, or the One Life of the Occultists, it will have to hang up that “single Substance,” especially if limited to only the solar nebulæ, in mid air, like the coffin of Mahomet, though minus the attractive magnet that sustained that coffin. Fortunately for the speculative Physicists, if we are unable to state with any degree of precision what the nebular theory does imply, we have, thanks to Professor Winchell, and several dissident Astronomers, been able to learn what it does not imply.

Unfortunately, this is far from clearing even the most simple of the problems that have vexed, and do still vex, the men of learning in their search after truth. We have to proceed with our enquiries, starting with the earliest hypotheses of Modern Science, if we would discover where and why it sins. Perchance it may be found that Stallo is right, after all, and that the blunders, contradictions and fallacies made by the most eminent men of learning are simply due to their abnormal attitude. They are, and want to remain Materialistic quand même, and yet “the general principles of the atomo-mechanical theory—the basis of modern Physics—are substantially identical with the cardinal doctrines of ontological Metaphysics.” Thus, “the fundamental errors of ontology become apparent in proportion to the advance of physical science.”946 Science is honeycombed with metaphysical conceptions, but the Scientists will not admit the charge, and fight desperately to put atomo-mechanical masks on purely incorporeal and spiritual laws in Nature, on our plane—refusing to admit their [pg 595] substantiality even on other planes, the bare existence of which they reject à priori.

It is easy to show, however, how Scientists, wedded to their materialistic views, have, ever since the days of Newton, endeavoured to put false masks on fact and truth. But their task is becoming every year more difficult; and every year also, Chemistry, beyond all the other sciences, approaches nearer and nearer the realm of the Occult in Nature. It is assimilating the very truths taught by the Occult Sciences for ages, but hitherto bitterly derided. “Matter is eternal,” says the Esoteric Doctrine. But the Matter the Occultists conceive of in its laya, or zero state, is not the matter of Modern Science, not even in its most rarefied gaseous state. Mr. Crookes' “radiant matter” would appear Matter of the grossest kind in the realm of the beginnings, as it becomes pure Spirit before it returns back even to its first point of differentiation. Therefore, when the Adept or Alchemist adds that, though Matter is eternal, for it is Pradhâna, yet Atoms are born at every new Manvantara, or reconstruction of the universe, it is no such contradiction as a Materialist, who believes in nothing beyond the Atom, might think. There is a difference between manifested and unmanifested Matter, between Pradhâna, the beginningless and endless cause, and Prakriti, or the manifested effect. Says the Shloka:

That which is the unevolved cause is emphatically called by the most eminent sages, Pradhâna, original base, which is subtile Prakriti, viz., that which is eternal and which at once is, and is not, a mere process.947

That which in modern phraseology is referred to as Spirit and Matter, is one in eternity as the Perpetual Cause, and it is neither Spirit nor Matter, but it—rendered in Sanskrit by Tad, “that”—all that is, was, or will be, all that the imagination of man is capable of conceiving. Even the exoteric Pantheism of Hindûism renders it as no monotheistic Philosophy ever did, for in superb phraseology its Cosmogony begins with the well-known words:

There was neither day nor night, neither heaven nor earth, neither darkness nor light. And there was not aught else apprehensible by the senses or by the mental faculties. There was then, however, one Brahma, essentially Prakriti [Nature] and Spirit. For the two aspects of Vishnu which are other than his supreme essential aspect are Prakriti and Spirit, O Brâhman. When these two other aspects of his no longer subsist, but are dissolved, then that aspect whence form and the rest, i.e., creation, proceed anew, is denominated time, O twice-born.

[pg 596]

It is that which is dissolved, or the illusionary dual aspect of That, the essence of which is eternally One, that we call Eternal Matter, or Substance, formless, sexless, inconceivable, even to our sixth sense or mind,948 in which, therefore, we refuse to see that which Monotheists call a personal, anthropomorphic God.

How are these two propositions—that “Matter is eternal,” and that “the Atom is periodical, and not eternal”—viewed by exact Modern Science? The materialistic Physicist will criticize and laugh them to scorn. The liberal and progressive man of Science, however, the true and earnest scientific searcher after truth, such as the eminent Chemist, Mr. Crookes, will corroborate the probability of the two statements. For hardly had the echo of his lecture on the “Genesis of the Elements” died away—the lecture which, delivered by him before the Chemical Section of the British Association, at the Birmingham meeting in 1887, so startled every evolutionist who heard or read it—than there came another in March, 1888. Once more the President of the Chemical Society brought before the world of Science and the public the fruits of some new discoveries in the realm of Atoms, and these discoveries justified the Occult Teachings in every way. They are more startling even than the statements made by him in the first lecture, and well deserve the attention of every Occultist, Theosophist, and Metaphysician. This is what he says in his “Elements and Meta-Elements,” thus justifying Stallo's charges and prevision, with the fearlessness of a scientific mind which loves Science for truth's sake, regardless of any consequences to his own glory and reputation. We quote his own words:

Permit me, gentlemen, now to draw your attention for a short time to a subject which concerns the fundamental principles of chemistry, a subject which may lead us to admit the possible existence of bodies which, though neither compounds nor mixtures, are not elements in the strictest sense of the word—bodies which I venture to call “meta-elements.” To explain my meaning it is necessary for me to revert to our conception of an element. What is the criterion of an element? Where are we to draw the line between distinct existence and identity? No one doubts that oxygen, sodium, chlorine, sulphur are separate elements; and when we come to such groups as chlorine, bromine, iodine, etc., we still feel no doubt, although were degrees of “elementicity” admissible—and to that we may ultimately have to come—it might be allowed that chlorine approximates much more closely to bromine than to oxygen, sodium, or sulphur. Again, nickel and cobalt are near to each other, very near, though no one questions their claim to rank as distinct elements. Still I cannot help asking what would have been the prevalent [pg 597]opinion among chemists had the respective solutions of these bodies and their compounds presented identical colours, instead of colours which, approximately speaking, are mutually complementary. Would their distinct nature have even now been recognized? When we pass further and come to the so-called rare earths the ground is less secure under our feet. Perhaps we may admit scandium, ytterbium, and others of the like sort to elemental rank; but what are we to say in the case of praseo- and neo-dymium, between which there may be said to exist no well-marked chemical difference, their chief claim to separate individuality being slight differences in basicity and crystallizing powers, though their physical distinctions, as shown by spectrum observations, are very strongly marked? Even here we may imagine the disposition of the majority of chemists would incline toward the side of leniency, so that they would admit these two bodies within the charmed circle. Whether in so doing they would be able to appeal to any broad principle is an open question. If we admit these candidates how in justice are we to exclude the series of elemental bodies or meta-elements made known to us by Krüss and Nilson? Here the spectral differences are well marked, while my own researches on didymium show also a slight difference in basicity between some at least of these doubtful bodies. In the same category must be included the numerous separate “elements”—commonly so-called—have been and are being split up. Where then are we to draw the line? The different groupings shade off so imperceptibly the one into the other that it is impossible to erect a definite boundary between any two adjacent bodies and to say that the body on this side of the line is an element, while the one on the other side is non-elementary, or merely something which simulates or approximates to an element. Wherever an apparently reasonable line might be drawn it would no doubt be easy at once to assign most bodies to their proper side, as in all cases of classification the real difficulty comes in when the border-line is approached. Slight chemical differences, of course, are admitted, and, up to a certain point, so are well-marked physical differences. What are we to say, however, when the only chemical difference is an almost imperceptible tendency for the one body—of a couple or of a group—to precipitate before the other? Again, there are cases where the chemical differences reach the vanishing point, although well-marked physical differences still remain. Here we stumble on a new difficulty: in such obscurities what is chemical and what is physical? Are we not entitled to call a slight tendency of a nascent amorphous precipitate to fall down in advance of another a “physical difference”? And may we not call coloured reactions depending on the amount of some particular acid present and varying, according to the concentration of the solution and to the solvent employed, “chemical differences”? I do not see how we can deny elementary character to a body which differs from another by well-marked colour, or spectrum-reactions, while we accord it to another body whose only claim is a very minute difference in basic powers. Having once opened the door wide enough to admit some spectrum differences, we have to inquire how minute a difference qualifies the candidate to pass? I will give instances from my own experience of some of these doubtful candidates.

[pg 598]

Here the great Chemist gives several cases of the very extraordinary behaviour of molecules and earths, apparently the same, but which yet, when examined very closely, were found to exhibit differences which, however minute, still show that none of them are simple bodies, and that the 60 or 70 elements accepted in chemistry can no longer cover the ground. Their name, apparently, is legion, but as the so-called “periodic theory” stands in the way of an unlimited multiplication of elements, Mr. Crookes is obliged to find some means of reconciling the new discovery with the old theory. “That theory,” he says:

Has received such abundant verification that we cannot lightly accept any interpretation of phenomena which fails to be in accordance with it. But if we suppose the elements reïnforced by a vast number of bodies slightly differing from each other in their properties, and forming, if I may use the expression, aggregations of nebulæ where we formerly saw, or believed we saw, separate stars, the periodic arrangement can no longer be definitely grasped. No longer, that is, if we retain our usual conception of an element. Let us, then, modify this conception. For “element” read “elementary group”—such elementary groups taking the place of the old elements in the periodic scheme—and the difficulty falls away. In defining an element, let us take not an external boundary, but an internal type. Let us say, e.g., the smallest ponderable quantity of yttrium is an assemblage of ultimate atoms almost infinitely more like each other than they are to the atoms of any other approximating element. It does not necessarily follow that the atoms shall all be absolutely alike among themselves. The atomic weight which we ascribed to yttrium, therefore, merely represents a mean value around which the actual weights of the individual atoms of the “element” range within certain limits. But if my conjecture is tenable, could we separate atom from atom, we should find them varying within narrow limits on each side of the mean. The very process of fractionation implies the existence of such differences in certain bodies.

Thus fact and truth have once more forced the hand of “exact” Science, and compelled it to enlarge its views and change its terms, which, masking the multitude, reduced them to one body—like the Septenary Elohim and their hosts transformed by the materialistic religionists into one Jehovah. Replace the chemical terms “molecule,” “atom,” “particle,” etc., by the words “Hosts,” “Monads,” “Devas,” etc., and one might think the genesis of Gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric intelligent Forces, was being described. But the learned lecturer adds to his descriptive remarks something still more suggestive; whether consciously or unconsciously, who knoweth? For he says:

Until lately such bodies passed muster as elements. They had definite properties, chemical and physical; they had recognized atomic weights. If we take a [pg 599]pure dilute solution of such a body, yttrium for instance, and if we add to it an excess of strong ammonia, we obtain a precipitate which appears perfectly homogeneous. But if instead we add very dilute ammonia in quantity sufficient only to precipitate one-half of the base present, we obtain no immediate precipitate. If we stir up the whole thoroughly so as to insure a uniform mixture of the solution and the ammonia, and set the vessel aside for an hour, carefully excluding dust, we may still find the liquid clear and bright, without any vestige of turbidity. After three or four hours, however, an opalescence will declare itself, and the next morning a precipitate will have appeared. Now let us ask ourselves, What can be the meaning of this phenomenon? The quantity of precipitant added was insufficient to throw down more than half the yttria present, therefore a process akin to selection has been going on for several hours. The precipitation has evidently not been effected at random, those molecules of the base being decomposed which happened to come in contact with a corresponding molecule of ammonia, for we have taken care that the liquids should be uniformly mixed, so that one molecule of the original salt would not be more exposed to decomposition than any other. If, further, we consider the time which elapses before the appearance of a precipitate, we cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that the action which has been going on for the first few hours is of a selective character. The problem is not why a precipitate is produced, but what determines or directs some atoms to fall down and others to remain in solution. Out of the multitude of atoms present, what power is it that directs each atom to choose the proper path? We may picture to ourselves some directive force passing the atoms one by one in review, selecting one for precipitation and another for solution till all have been adjusted.

The italics in the above passage are ours. Well may a man of Science ask himself: What power is it that directs each Atom? and what is the meaning of its character being selective? Theists would solve the question by answering “God”; and would thereby solve nothing philosophically. Occultism answers on its own Pantheistic grounds, and teaches the student about Gods, Monads, and Atoms. The learned lecturer sees in it that which is his chief concern: the finger-posts and the traces of a path which may lead to the discovery, and the full and complete demonstration, of an homogeneous element in Nature. He remarks:

In order that such a selection can be effected there evidently must be some slight differences between which it is possible to select, and this difference almost certainly must be one of basicity, so slight as to be imperceptible by any test at present known, but susceptible of being nursed and encouraged to a point when the difference can be appreciated by ordinary tests.

Occultism, which knows of the existence and presence in Nature of the One Eternal Element, at the first differentiation of which the roots of the Tree of Life are periodically struck, needs no scientific proofs. It [pg 600] says: Ancient Wisdom has solved the problem ages ago. Aye; earnest, as well as mocking reader, Science is slowly but surely approaching our domains of the Occult. It is forced by its own discoveries to adopt nolens volens our phraseology and symbols. Chemical Science is now compelled, by the very force of things, to accept even our illustration of the evolution of the Gods and Atoms, so suggestively and undeniably figured in the Caduceus of Mercury, the God of Wisdom, and in the allegorical language of the Archaic Sages. Says a Commentary in the Esoteric Doctrine:

The trunk of the Asvattha (the tree of Life and Being, the rod of the Caduceus) grows from and descends at every Beginning (every new Manvantara) from the two dark wings of the Swan (Hansa) of Life. The two Serpents, the ever-living and its illusion (Spirit and matter) whose two heads grow from the one head between the wings, descend along the trunks interlaced in close embrace. The two tails join on earth (the manifested Universe) into one, and this is the great illusion, O Lanoo!

Every one knows what the Caduceus is, modified considerably by the Greeks. The original symbol—with the triple head of the serpent—became altered into a rod with a knob, and the two lower heads were separated, thus disfiguring somewhat the original meaning. Yet it is as good an illustration as can be for our purpose, this laya rod, entwined by two serpents. Verily the wonderful powers of the magic Caduceus were sung by all the ancient poets, with a very good reason for those who understood the secret meaning.

Now what says the learned President of the Chemical Society of Great Britain, in that same lecture, which has any reference to, or bearing upon, our above-mentioned doctrine? Very little; only this—and nothing more:

In the Birmingham address already referred to I asked my audience to picture the action of two forces on the original protyle—one being time, accompanied by a lowering of temperature; the other, swinging to and fro like a mighty pendulum, having periodic cycles of ebb and swell, rest and activity, being intimately connected [pg 601]with the imponderable matter, essence, or source of energy we call electricity. Now, a simile like this effects its object if it fixes in the mind the particular fact it is intended to emphasize, but it must not be expected necessarily to run parallel with all the facts. Besides the lowering of temperature with the periodic ebb and flow of electricity, positive or negative, requisite to confer on the newly-born elements their particular atomicity, it is evident that a third factor must be taken into account. Nature does not act on a flat plane; she demands space for her cosmogenic operations, and if we introduce space as the third factor, all appears clear. Instead of a pendulum, which, though to a certain extent a good illustration, is impossible as a fact, let us seek some more satisfactory way of representing what I conceive may have taken place. Let us suppose the zigzag diagram not drawn upon a plane, but projected in space of three dimensions. What figure can we best select to meet all the conditions involved? Many of the facts can be well explained by supposing the projection in space of Professor Emerson Reynolds' zigzag curve to be a spiral. This figure is, however, inadmissible, inasmuch as the curve has to pass through a point neutral as to electricity and chemical energy twice in each cycle. We must, therefore, adopt some other figure. A figure of eight (8), or lemniscate, will foreshorten into a zigzag just as well as a spiral, and it fulfils every condition of the problem.

A lemniscate for the evolution downward, from Spirit into Matter; another form of a spiral, perhaps, in its reinvolutionary path onward, from Matter into Spirit; and the necessary gradual and final reabsorption into the laya state, that which Science calls, in her own way, “the point neutral as to electricity,” or the zero point. Such are the Occult facts and statement. They may be left with the greatest security and confidence to Science, to be justified some day. Let us hear some more, however, about this primordial genetic type of the symbolical Caduceus.

Such a figure will result from three very simple simultaneous motions. First, a simple oscillation backwards and forwards (suppose east and west); secondly, a simple oscillation at right angles to the former (suppose north and south) of half the periodic time—i.e., twice as fast; and thirdly, a motion at right angles to these two (suppose downwards), which, in its simplest form, would be with unvarying velocity. If we project this figure in space we find on examination that the points of the curves, where chlorine, bromine, and iodine are formed, come close under each other; so also will sulphur, selenium, and tellurium; again, phosphorus, arsenic, and antimony; and in like manner other series of analogous bodies. It may be asked whether this scheme explains how and why the elements appear in this order? Let us imagine a cyclical translation in space, each evolution witnessing the genesis of the group of elements which I previously represented as produced during one complete vibration of the pendulum. Let us suppose that one cycle has thus been completed, the centre of the unknown creative force in its mighty journey through space having scattered along its track the primitive atoms—the [pg 602]seeds, if I may use the expression—which presently are to coalesce and develop into the groupings now known as lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, and chlorine. What is most probably the form of track now pursued? Were it strictly confined to the same plane of temperature and time, the next elementary groupings to appear would again have been those of lithium, and the original cycle would have been eternally repeated, producing again and again the same 14 elements. The conditions, however, are not quite the same. Space and electricity are as at first, but temperature has altered, and thus, instead of the atoms of lithium being supplemented with atoms in all respects analogous with themselves, the atomic groupings which come into being when the second cycle commences form, not lithium, but its lineal descendant, potassium. Suppose, therefore, the vis generatrixtravelling to and fro in cycles along a lemniscate path, as above suggested, while simultaneously temperature is declining and time is flowing on—variations which I have endeavoured to represent by the downward sink—each coil of the lemniscate track crosses the same vertical line at lower and lower points. Projected in space, the curve shows a central line neutral as far as electricity is concerned, and neutral in chemical properties—positive electricity on the north, negative on the south. Dominant atomicities are governed by the distance east and west from the neutral centre line, monatomic elements being one remove from it, diatomic two removes, and so on. In every successive coil the same law holds good.

And, as if to prove the postulate of Occult Science and Hindû philosophy, that, at the hour of the Pralaya, the two aspects of the Unknowable Deity, “the Swan in darkness,” Prakriti and Purusha, Nature or Matter in all its forms and Spirit, no longer subsist but are absolutely dissolved, we learn the conclusive scientific opinion of the great English Chemist, who caps his proofs by saying:

We have now traced the formation of the chemical elements from knots and voids in a primitive, formless fluid. We have shown the possibility, nay, the probability that the atoms are not eternal in existence, but share with all other created beings the attributes of decay and death.

Occultism says amen to this, as the scientific “possibility” and “probability” are for it facts, demonstrated beyond the necessity for further proof, or for any extraneous physical evidence. Nevertheless, it repeats with as much assurance as ever: “matter is eternal, becoming atomic (its aspect) only periodically.” This is as sure as that the other proposition, which is almost unanimously accepted by Astronomers and Physicists—namely, that the wear and tear of the body of the Universe is steadily going on, and that it will finally lead to the extinction of the Solar Fires and the destruction of the Universe—is quite erroneous on the lines traced by men of Science. There will be, as there ever were in time and eternity, periodical dissolutions of [pg 603] the manifested Universe, such as a partial Pralaya after every Day of Brahmâ; and a Universal Pralaya—the Mahâ-Pralaya—only after the lapse of every Age of Brahmâ. But the scientific causes for such dissolution, as brought forward by exact Science, have nothing to do with the true causes. However that may be, Occultism is once more justified by Science, for Mr. Crookes said:

We have shown, from arguments drawn from the chemical laboratory, that in matter which has responded to every test of an element, there are minute shades of difference which may admit of selection. We have seen that the time-honoured distinction between elements and compounds no longer keeps pace with the developments of chemical science, but must be modified to include a vast array of intermediate bodies—“meta-elements.” We have shown how the objections of Clerk-Maxwell, weighty as they are, may be met; and finally, we have adduced reasons for believing that primitive matter was formed by the act of a generative force, throwing off at intervals of time atoms endowed with varying quantities of primitive forms of energy. If we may hazard any conjectures as to the source of energy embodied in a chemical atom, we may, I think, premise that the heat radiations propagated outwards through the ether from the ponderable matter of the universe, by some process of nature not yet known to us, are transformed at the confines of the universe into the primary—the essential—motions of chemical atoms, which, the instant they are formed, gravitate inwards, and thus restore to the universe the energy which otherwise would be lost to it through radiant heat. If this conjecture be well founded, Sir William Thomson's startling prediction of the final decrepitude of the universe through the dissipation of its energy falls to the ground. In this fashion, gentlemen, it seems to me that the question of the elements may be provisionally treated. Our slender knowledge of these first mysteries is extending steadily, surely, though slowly.

By a strange and curious coincidence even our Septenary doctrine seems to force the hand of Science. If we understand rightly, Chemistry speaks of fourteen groupings of primitive atoms—lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur and chlorine; and Mr. Crookes, speaking of the “dominant atomicities,” enumerates seven groups of these, for he says:

As the mighty focus of creative energy goes round, we see it in successive cycles sowing in one tract of space seeds of lithium, potassium, rubidium, and cæsium; in another tract, chlorine, bromine, and iodine; in a third, sodium, copper, silver, and gold; in a fourth, sulphur, selenium, and tellurium; in a fifth, beryllium, calcium, strontium, and barium; in a sixth, magnesium, zinc, cadmium, and mercury; in a seventh, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, and bismuth [which makes seven groupings on the one hand. And after showing] ... in other tracts the other elements—namely, aluminium, gallium, indium, and thallium; silicon, germanium, and tin; carbon, titanium, and zirconium ... [he adds] while a natural position [pg 604]near the neutral axis is found for the three groups of elements relegated by Professor Mendeleeff to a sort of Hospital for Incurables—his eighth family.

It might be interesting to compare these seven, and the eighth family of “incurables,” with the allegories concerning the seven primitive sons of “Mother, Infinite Space,” or Aditi, and the eighth son rejected by her. Many a strange coincidence may thus be found between “those intermediate links ... named meta-elements” or elementoids, and those whom Occult Science names their Noumenoi, the intelligent Minds and Rulers of those groupings of Monads and Atoms. But this would lead us too far. Let us be content with finding the confession of the fact that:

This deviation from absolute homogeneity should mark the constitution of these molecules or aggregations of matter which we designate elements and will perhaps be clearer if we return in imagination to the earliest dawn of our material universe, and, face to face with the Great Secret, try to consider the processes of elemental evolution.

Thus finally Science, in the person of its highest representatives, in order to make itself clearer to the profane, adopts the phraseology of such old Adepts as Roger Bacon, and returns to the “protyle.” All this is hopeful and suggestive of the “signs of the times.”

Indeed these “signs” are many and multiply daily; but none are more important than those just quoted. For now the chasm between the Occult “superstitious and unscientific” teachings and those of “exact” Science is completely bridged, and one, at least, of the few eminent Chemists of the day is in the realm of the infinite possibilities of Occultism. Every new step he will take will bring him nearer and nearer to that mysterious Centre, from which radiate the innumerable paths that lead down Spirit into Matter, and which transform the Gods and the living Monads into man and sentient Nature.

But we have something more to say on this subject in the following Section.

[pg 605]

Section IX. The Coming Force. Its Possibilities And Impossibilities.

Shall we say that Force is “moving Matter,” or “Matter in motion,” and a manifestation of Energy; or that Matter and Force are the phenomenal differentiated aspects of the one primary, undifferentiated Cosmic Substance?

This query is made with regard to that Stanza which treats of Fohat and his “Seven brothers or Sons,” in other words, of the cause and the effects of Cosmic Electricity, the Brothers or Sons of Occult parlance being the seven primary forces of Electricity, whose purely phenomenal, and hence grossest, effects are alone cognizable by Physicists on the cosmic and especially on the terrestrial plane. These include, among other things, Sound, Light, Colour, etc. Now what does Physical Science tell us of these “Forces”? Sound, it says, is a sensation produced by the impact of atmospheric molecules on the tympanum, which, by setting up delicate tremors in the auditory apparatus, thus communicate their vibrations to the brain. Light is the sensation caused by the impact of inconceivably minute vibrations of ether on the retina of the eye.

So, too, say we. But these are simply the effects produced in our atmosphere and its immediate surroundings, all, in fact, which falls within the range of our terrestrial consciousness. Jupiter Pluvius sent his symbol in drops of rain, of water composed, as is believed, of two “elements,” which Chemistry dissociates and recombines. The compound molecules are in its power, but their atoms still elude its grasp. Occultism sees in all these Forces and manifestations a ladder, the lower rungs of which belong to exoteric Physics, and the higher are traced to a living, intelligent, invisible Power, which is, as a rule, the unconcerned, but, exceptionally, the conscious, Cause of the sense-born phenomena designated as this or that natural law.

[pg 606]

We say and maintain that Sound, for one thing, is a tremendous Occult power; that it is a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality when directed with Occult Knowledge. Sound may be produced of such a nature that the pyramid of Cheops would be raised in the air, or that a dying man, nay, one at his last breath, would be revived and filled with new energy and vigour.

For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements that produce an ozone the fabrication of which is beyond Chemistry, but is within the limits of Alchemy. It may even resurrect a man or an animal whose astral “vital body” has not been irreparably separated from the physical body by the severance of the magnetic or odic chord. As one saved thrice from death by that power, the writer ought to be credited with personally knowing something about it.

And if all this appears too unscientific to be even noticed, let Science explain to what mechanical and physical laws, known to it, are due the recently produced phenomena of the so-called Keely motor. What is it that acts as the formidable generator of invisible but tremendous force, of that power which is not only capable of driving an engine of 25 horse-power, but has even been employed to bodily lift the machinery? Yet this is done simply by drawing a fiddle-bow across a tuning fork, as has been repeatedly proven. For the Etheric Force, discovered by John Worrell Keely, of Philadelphia, well-known in America and Europe, is no hallucination. Notwithstanding his failure to utilize it—a failure prognosticated and maintained by some Occultists from the first—the phenomena exhibited by the discoverer during the last few years have been wonderful, almost miraculous, not in the sense of the supernatural949 but of the superhuman. Had Keely been permitted to succeed, he might have reduced a whole army to atoms in the space of a few seconds, as easily as he reduced a dead ox to that condition.

The reader is now asked to give serious attention to that newly-discovered [pg 607] potency, which the discoverer has named Inter-Etheric Force, and Forces.

In the humble opinion of the Occultists, as of his immediate friends, Mr. Keely was, and still is, at the threshold of some of the greatest secrets of the Universe; of that chiefly on which is built the whole mystery of physical Forces, and the Esoteric significance of the “Mundane Egg” symbolism. Occult Philosophy, viewing the manifested and the unmanifested Kosmos as a unity, symbolizes the ideal conception of the former by that “Golden Egg” with two poles in it. It is the positive pole that acts in the manifested World of Matter, while the negative loses itself in the unknowable Absoluteness of sat—Be-ness.950 Whether this agrees with the philosophy of Mr. Keely, we cannot tell, nor does it really much matter. Nevertheless, his ideas about the ethero-material construction of the Universe look strangely like our own, being in this respect nearly identical. This is what we find him saying in an able pamphlet compiled by Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, an American lady of wealth and position, whose incessant efforts in the pursuit of truth can never be too highly appreciated:

Mr. Keely, in explanation of the working of his engine, says: “In the conception of any machine heretofore constructed, the medium for inducing a neutral centre has never been found. If it had, the difficulties of perpetual-motion seekers would have ended, and this problem would have become an established and operating fact. It would only require an introductory impulse of a few pounds, on such a device, to cause it to run for centuries. In the conception of my vibratory engine, I did not seek to attain perpetual motion; but a circuit is formed that actually has a neutral centre, which is in a condition to be vivified by my vibratory ether, and, while under operation by said substance, is really a machine that is virtually independent of the mass (or globe),951 and it is the wonderful velocity of the vibratory circuit which makes it so. Still, with all its perfection, it requires to be fed with the vibratory ether to make it an independent motor.... All structures require a foundation in strength according to the weight of the mass they have to carry, but the foundations of the universe rest on a vacuous point far more minute than a molecule; in fact, to express this truth properly, on an inter-etheric point, which requires an infinite mind to understand it. To look down into the depths of an etheric centre is precisely the same as it would be to search into the broad space of heaven's ether to find the end, with this difference: that one is the positive field, while the other is the negative field.”

[pg 608]

This is, as may easily be seen, precisely the Eastern Doctrine. Mr. Keely's inter-etheric point is the laya-point of the Occultists; this, however, does not require “an infinite mind to understand it,” but only a specific intuition and ability to trace its hiding-place in this World of Matter. Of course, the laya centre cannot be produced, but an inter-etheric vacuum can be—as is proved by the production of bell-sounds in space. Mr. Keely speaks as an unconscious Occultist, nevertheless, when he remarks, in his theory of planetary suspension:

As regards planetary volume, we would ask in a scientific point of view, How can the immense difference of volume in the planets exist without disorganizing the harmonious action that has always characterized them? I can only answer this question properly by entering into a progressive analysis, starting on the rotating etheric centres that were fixed by the Creator952 with their attractive or accumulative power. If you ask what power it is that gives to each etheric atom its inconceivable velocity of rotation (or introductory impulse), I must answer that no finite mind will ever be able to conceive what it is. The philosophy of accumulation is the only proof that such a power has been given. The area, if we can so speak, of such an atom presents to the attractive or magnetic, the elective or propulsive, all the receptive force and all the antagonistic force that characterize a planet of the largest magnitude; consequently, as the accumulation goes on, the perfect equation remains the same. When this minute centre has once been fixed, the power to rend it from its position would necessarily have to be so great as to displace the most immense planet that exists. When this atomic neutral centre is displaced, the planet must go with it. The neutral centre carries the full load of any accumulation from the start, and remains the same, for ever balanced in the eternal space.

Mr. Keely illustrates his idea of “a neutral centre” in this way:

We will imagine that, after an accumulation of a planet of any diameter, say, 20,000 miles, more or less, for the size has nothing to do with the problem, there should be a displacement of all the material, with the exception of a crust 5,000 miles thick, leaving an intervening void between this crust and a centre of the size of an ordinary billiard ball, it would then require a force as great to move this small central mass as it would to move the shell of 5,000 miles thickness. Moreover, this small central mass would carry the load of this crust for ever, keeping it equidistant; and there could be no opposing power, however great, that could bring them together. The imagination staggers in contemplating the immense load which bears upon this point of centre, where weight ceases.... This is what we understand by a neutral centre.

And this is what Occultists understand by a laya centre.

The above is pronounced to be “unscientific” by many. But so is everything that is not sanctioned and kept on the strictly orthodox lines of Physical Science. Unless the explanation given by the inventor [pg 609] himself is accepted—and his explanations, being quite orthodox from the Spiritual and the Occult standpoints, if not from that of materialistic speculative Science, called exact, are therefore ours in this particular—what can Science answer to facts already seen, which it is no longer possible for anyone to deny? Occult Philosophy divulges few of its most important vital mysteries. It drops them like precious pearls, one by one, far and wide apart, and even this only when forced to do so by the evolutionary tidal wave that carries on Humanity slowly, silently, but steadily, toward the dawn of the Sixth Race mankind. For once out of the safe custody of their legitimate heirs and keepers, those mysteries cease to be Occult: they fall into the public domain, and have to run the risk of becoming curses more often than blessings in the hands of the selfish—of the Cains of the human race. Nevertheless, whenever such individuals as the discoverer of Etheric Force are born, men with peculiar psychic and mental capacities,953 they are generally and more frequently helped, than allowed to go unassisted, groping on their way; if left to their own resources, they very soon fall victims to martyrdom or become the prey of unscrupulous speculators. But they are helped only on the condition that they should not become, whether consciously or unconsciously, an additional peril to their age: a danger to the poor, now offered in daily holocaust by the less wealthy to the very wealthy.954 This necessitates a short digression and an explanation.

Some twelve years back, during the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the writer, in answering the earnest queries of a Theosophist, one of the earliest admirers of Mr. Keely, repeated to him what she had heard in quarters, information from which she could never doubt.

It had been stated that the inventor of the “Self-Motor” was what is called, in the jargon of the Kabalists, a “natural-born magician.” That he was and would remain unconscious of the full range of his powers, and would work out merely those which he had found out and ascertained in his own nature—firstly, because, attributing them to a [pg 610] wrong source, he could never give them full sway; and secondly, because it was beyond his power to pass to others that which was a capacity inherent in his own special nature. Hence, the whole secret could not be made over permanently to anyone, for practical purposes or use.955

Individuals born with such a capacity are not very rare. That they are not heard of more frequently is due to the fact that they live and die, in almost every case, in utter ignorance that they are possessed of abnormal powers. Mr. Keely possesses powers which are called abnormal, just because they happen to be as little known, in our day, as was the circulation of the blood before Harvey's time. Blood existed, and it behaved as it does at present in the first man born from woman; and so exists and has existed in man that principle which can control and guide etheric vibratory Force. At any rate, it exists in all those mortals whose Inner Selves are primordially connected, by reason of their direct descent, with that group of Dhyân-Chohans who are called “the first-born of Æther.” Mankind, psychically considered, is divided into various groups, each group being connected with one of the Dhyânic Groups that first formed psychic man (see paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the Commentary to Stanza VII.). Mr. Keely—being greatly favoured in this respect, and besides his psychic temperament, being, moreover, intellectually a genius in mechanics—may achieve most wonderful results. He has achieved some already—more than any mortal man, not initiated into the final Mysteries, has achieved in this age up to the present day. What he has done is—as his friends justly say of him—certainly quite sufficient “to demolish with the hammer of Science the idols of Science”—the idols of matter with the feet of clay. Nor would the writer for a moment think of contradicting Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore, when, in her paper on “Psychic Force and Etheric Force,” she states that Mr. Keely, as a Philosopher:

Is great enough in soul, wise enough in mind, and sublime enough in courage to overcome all difficulties, and to stand at last before the world as the greatest discoverer and inventor in the world.

And again she writes:

Should Keely do no more than lead scientists from the dreary realms where they are groping into the open field of elemental force, where gravity and cohesion are disturbed in their haunts and diverted to use; where, from unity of origin, emanates [pg 611]infinite energy in diversified forms, he will achieve immortal fame. Should he demonstrate, to the destruction of materialism, that the universe is animated by a mysterious principle to which matter, however perfectly organized, is absolutely subservient, he will be a greater spiritual benefactor to our race than the modern world has yet found in any man. Should he be able to substitute, in the treatment of disease, the finer forces of nature for the grossly material agencies which have sent more human beings to their graves than war, pestilence and famine combined, he will merit and receive the gratitude of mankind. All this and more will he do, if he and those who have watched his progress, day by day for years, are not too sanguine in their expectations.

The same lady, in her pamphlet, Keely's Secrets,956 brings forward the following passage from an article, written in the Theosophist a few years ago, by the writer of the present volume:

The author of No. 5 of the pamphlets issued by the Theosophical Publication Society, What is Matter and What is Force, says therein: “The men of science have just found out ‘a fourth state of matter,’ whereas the Occultists have penetrated years ago beyond the sixth, and therefore do not infer, but know of, the existence of the seventh, the last.” This knowledge comprises one of the secrets of Keely's so-called “compound secret.” It is already known to many that his secret includes “the augmentation of energy,” the insulation of the ether, and the adaptation of dynaspheric force to machinery.

It is just because Keely's discovery would lead to a knowledge of one of the most Occult secrets, a secret which can never be allowed to fall into the hands of the masses, that his failure to push his discoveries to their logical end seems certain to Occultists. But of this more presently. Even in its limitations this discovery may prove of the greatest benefit. For:

Step by step, with a patient perseverance which some day the world will honour, this man of genius has made his researches, overcoming the colossal difficulties which again and again raised up in his path what seemed to be (to all but himself) insurmountable barriers to further progress: but never has the world's index finger so pointed to an hour when all is making ready for the advent of the new form of force that mankind is waiting for. Nature, always reluctant to yield her secrets, is listening to the demands made upon her by her master, necessity. The coal mines of the world cannot long afford the increasing drain made upon them. Steam has reached its utmost limits of power, and does not fulfil the requirements of the age. It knows that its days are numbered. Electricity holds back, with bated breath, dependent upon the approach of her sister colleague. Air ships are riding at anchor, as it were, waiting for the force which is to make aërial navigation something more than a dream. As easily as men communicate with their offices from their homes by means of the telephone, so will the inhabitants of separate continents talk across the ocean. Imagination is palsied when seeking to foresee the [pg 612]grand results of this marvellous discovery, when once it is applied to art and mechanics. In taking the throne which it will force steam to abdicate, dynaspheric force will rule the world with a power so mighty in the interests of civilization, that no finite mind can conjecture the results. Laurence Oliphant, in his preface to Scientific Religion, says: “A new moral future is dawning upon the human race—one, certainly, of which it stands much in need.” In no way could this new moral future be so widely, so universally, commenced as by the utilizing of dynaspheric force to beneficial purposes in life.

The Occultists are ready to admit all this with the eloquent writer. Molecular vibration is, undeniably, “Keely's legitimate field of research,” and the discoveries made by him will prove wonderful—yet only in his hands and through himself. The world so far will get but that with which it can be safely entrusted. The truth of this assertion has, perhaps, not yet quite dawned upon the discoverer himself, since he writes that he is absolutely certain that he will accomplish all that he has promised, and that he will then give it out to the world; but it must dawn upon him, and at no very far distant date. And what he says in reference to his work is a good proof of it:

In considering the operation of my engine, the visitor, in order to have even an approximate conception of its modus operandi, must discard all thought of engines that are operated upon the principle of pressure and exhaustion, by the expansion of steam or other analogous gas which impinges upon an abutment, such as the piston of a steam-engine. My engine has neither piston nor eccentrics, nor is there one grain of pressure exerted in the engine, whatever may be the size or capacity of it. My system, in every part and detail, both in the developing of my power and in every branch of its utilization, is based and founded on sympathetic vibration. In no other way would it be possible to awaken or develop my force, and equally impossible would it be to operate my engine upon any other principle.... This, however, is the true system; and henceforth all my operations will be conducted in this manner—that is to say, my power will be generated, my engines run, my cannon operated, through a wire. It has been only after years of incessant labour, and the making of almost innumerable experiments, involving not only the construction of a great many most peculiar mechanical structures, and the closest investigation and study of the phenomenal properties of the substance “ether,” per se, produced, that I have been able to dispense with complicated mechanism, and to obtain, as I claim, mastery over the subtle and strange force with which I am dealing.

The passages underlined by us, are those which bear directly on the Occult side of the application of the vibratory Force, that which Mr. Keely calls “sympathetic vibration.” The “wire” is already a step below, or downward from the pure Etheric plane into the Terrestrial. The discoverer has produced marvels—the word “miracle” is not too [pg 613] strong—when acting through the inter-etheric Force alone, the fifth and sixth principles of Âkâsha. From a generator six feet long, he has come down to one “no larger than an old-fashioned silver watch”; and this by itself is a miracle of mechanical, but not of spiritual, genius. As was well said by his great patroness and defender, Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore:

The two forms of force which he has been experimenting with, and the phenomena attending them, are the very antithesis of each other.

One was generated and acted upon by and through himself. No one, who should have repeated the thing done by himself, could have produced the same results. It was truly Keely's Ether that acted, while Smith's or Brown's Ether would have remained for ever barren of results. For Keely's difficulty has hitherto been to produce a machine which would develop and regulate the Force without the intervention of any “will power” or personal influence of the operator, whether conscious or unconscious. In this he has failed, so far as others were concerned, for no one but himself could operate on his “machines.” Occultly this was a far more advanced achievement than the “success” which he anticipates from his wire, but the results obtained from the fifth and sixth planes of the Etheric, or Astral, Force, will never be permitted to serve for purposes of commerce and traffic. That Keely's organism is directly connected with the production of his marvellous results is proven by the following statement, emanating from one who knows the great discoverer intimately.

At one time the shareholders of the “Keely Motor Co.” put a man in his workshop for the express purpose of discovering his secret. After six months of close watching, he said to J. W. Keely one day: “I know how it is done, now.” They had been setting up a machine together, and Keely was manipulating the stop-cock which turned the force on and off. “Try it, then,” was the answer. The man turned the cock, and nothing came. “Let me see you do it again,” the man said to Keely. The latter complied, and the machinery operated at once. Again the other tried, but without success. Then Keely put his hand on his shoulder and told him to try once more. He did so, with the result of an instantaneous production of the current.

This fact, if true, settles the question.

We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity “as a certain form of atomic vibration.” In this he is quite right; but this is Electricity on the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. He estimates—

[pg 614]

Molecular vibrations at 100,000,000 per second.

Inter-molecular vibrations at 300,000,000 per second.

Atomic vibrations at 900,000,000 per second.

Inter-atomic vibrations at 2,700,000,000 per second.

Ætheric vibrations at 8,100,000,000 per second.

Inter-Ætheric vibrations at 24,300,000,000 per second.

This proves our point. There are no vibrations that could be counted or even estimated at an approximate rate beyond “the realm of the fourth Son of Fohat,” to use an Occult phrase, or that motion which corresponds to the formation of Mr. Crookes' radiant matter, lightly called some years ago the “fourth state of matter”—on this our plane.

If the question is asked why Mr. Keely was not allowed to pass a certain limit, the answer is easy; it was because that, which he has unconsciously discovered, is the terrible sidereal Force, known to, and named by the Atlanteans Mash-mak, and by the Âryan Rishis in their Astra Vidyâ by a name that we do not like to give. It is the Vril of Bulwer Lytton's Coming Race, and of the coming Races of our mankind. The name Vril may be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact, as little doubted in India as is the existence of the Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret books.

It is this vibratory Force, which, when aimed at an army from an Agni-ratha, fixed on a flying vessel, a balloon, according to the instructions found in Astra Vidyâ, would reduce to ashes 100,000 men and elephants, as easily as it would a dead rat. It is allegorized in the Vishnu Purâna, in the Râmâyana and other works, in the fable about the sage Kapila whose “glance made a mountain of ashes of King Sagara's 60,000 sons,” and which is explained in the Esoteric Works, and referred to as the Kapilâksha—Kapila's Eye.

And is it this Satanic Force that our generations are to be allowed to add to their stock of Anarchist's baby-toys, known as melenite, dynamite clock-work, explosive oranges, “flower baskets,” and such other innocent names? Is it this destructive agency, which, once in the hands of some modern Attila, a bloodthirsty Anarchist, for instance, would in a few days reduce Europe to its primitive chaotic state, with no man left alive to tell the tale—is it this Force which is to become the common property of all men alike?

What Mr. Keely has already done is grand and wonderful in the extreme; there is enough work before him in the demonstration of his new system to “humble the pride of those scientists who are materialistic, [pg 615] by revealing those mysteries which lie behind the world of matter,” without, nolens volens, revealing it to all. For surely Psychics and Spiritualists, of whom there are a good number in European armies, would be the first to personally experience the fruits of the revelation of such mysteries. Thousands of them would speedily find themselves in blue Ether, perhaps with the populations of whole countries to keep them company, were such a Force to be even entirely discovered, let alone made publicly known. The discovery in its completeness is by several thousand—or shall we say hundred thousand—years too premature. It will be in its appointed place and time only when the great roaring flood of starvation, misery, and underpaid labour ebbs back again—as it will when the just demands of the many are at last happily attended to; when the proletariat exists but in name, and the pitiful cry for bread, that rings unheeded throughout the world, has died away. This may be hastened by the spread of learning, and by new openings for work and emigration, with better prospects than now exist, and on some new continent that may appear. Then only will Keely's Motor and Force, as originally contemplated by himself and his friends, be in demand, because it will then be more needed by the poor than by the wealthy.

Meanwhile the Force he has discovered will work through wires, and, if he succeeds, this will be quite sufficient to make of him the greatest discoverer of the age in the present generation.

What Mr. Keely says of Sound and Colour is also correct from the Occult standpoint. Hear him talk as though he were the nursling of the “Gods-Revealers,” and as if he had gazed all his life into the depths of Father-Mother Æther.

In comparing the tenuity of the atmosphere with that of the etheric flows, obtained by his invention for breaking up the molecules of air by vibration, Keely says:

It is as platinum to hydrogen gas. Molecular separation of air brings us to the first sub-division only; inter-molecular, to the second; atomic, to the third; inter-atomic, to the fourth; etheric, to the fifth; and inter-etheric, to the sixth sub-division, or positive association with luminiferous ether.957 In my introductory argument I have contended that this is the vibratory envelope of all atoms. In my definition of atom I do not confine myself to the sixth sub-division where this luminiferous ether is developed in its crude form, as far as my researches prove.958 [pg 616]I think this idea will be pronounced by the physicists of the present day, a wild freak of the imagination. Possibly, in time, a light may fall upon this theory that will bring its simplicity forward for scientific research. At present I can only compare it to some planet in a dark space, where the light of the sun of science has not yet reached it.... I assume that sound, like odour, is a real substance of unknown and wonderful tenuity, emanating from a body where it has been induced by percussion and throwing out absolute corpuscles of matter, inter-atomic particles, with velocity of 1,120 feet per second; in vacuo 20,000. The substance which is thus disseminated is a part and parcel of the mass agitated, and, if kept under this agitation continuously, would, in the course of a certain cycle of time, become thoroughly absorbed by the atmosphere; or, more truly, would pass through the atmosphere to an elevated point of tenuity corresponding to the condition of sub-division that governs its liberation from its parent body.... The sounds from vibratory forks, set so as to produce etheric chords, while disseminating their tones (compound), permeate most thoroughly all substances that come under the range of their atomic bombardment. The clapping of a bell in vacuo liberates these atoms with the same velocity and volume as one in the open air; and were the agitation of the bell kept up continuously for a few millions of centuries it would thoroughly return to its primitive element; and, if the chamber were hermetically sealed, and strong enough, the vacuous volume surrounding the bell would be brought to a pressure of many thousands of pounds to the square inch, by the tenuous substance evolved. In my estimation, sound truly defined is the disturbance of atomic equilibrium, rupturing actual atomic corpuscles; and the substance thus liberated must certainly be a certain order of etheric flow. Under these conditions, is it unreasonable to suppose that, if this flow were kept up, and the body thus robbed of its element, it would in time disappear entirely? All bodies are formed primitively from this highly tenuous ether, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and they are only returned to their high gaseous condition when brought under a state of differential equilibrium.... As regards odour, we can only get some definite idea of its extreme and wondrous tenuity by taking into consideration that a large area of atmosphere can be impregnated for a long series of years from a single grain of musk; which, if weighed after that long interval, will be found to be not appreciably diminished. The great paradox attending the flow of odorous particles is that they can be held under confinement in a glass vessel! Here is a substance of much higher tenuity than the glass that holds it, and yet it cannot escape. It is as a sieve with its meshes large enough to pass marbles, and yet holding fine sand which cannot pass through; in fact, a molecular vessel holding an atomic substance. This is a problem that would confound those who stop to recognize it. But infinitely tenuous as odour is, it holds a very crude relation to the substance of sub-division that governs a magnetic flow (a flow of sympathy, if you please to call it so). This sub-division comes next to sound, but is above sound. The action of the flow of a magnet coincides somewhat to the receiving and distributing portion of the human brain, giving off at all times a depreciating ratio of the amount received. It is a grand illustration of the control of mind over matter, which gradually depreciates the physical till dissolution takes place. The [pg 617]magnet on the same ratio gradually loses its power and becomes inert. If the relations that exist between mind and matter could be equated and so held, we would live on in our physical state eternally, as there would be no physical depreciation. But this physical depreciation leads, at its terminus, to the source of a much higher development—viz., the liberation of the pure ether from the crude molecular; which, in my estimation, is to be much desired.959

It may be remarked that, save for a few small divergencies, no Adept nor Alchemist could have better explained these theories, in the light of Modern Science, however much the latter may protest against these novel views. In all its fundamental principles, if not in its details, this is Occultism pure and simple; and moreover, it is modern Natural Philosophy as well.

This new Force, or whatever Science may call it, the effects of which are undeniable—as is admitted by more than one Naturalist and Physicist who has visited Mr. Keely's laboratory and personally witnessed its tremendous effects—what is it? Is it a “mode of motion,” also, in vacuo, since there is no Matter to generate it except Sound—another “mode of motion,” no doubt, a sensation caused, like Colour, by vibrations? Fully as we believe in these vibrations as the proximate, the immediate, cause of such sensations, we as absolutely reject the one-sided scientific theory that there is no factor to be considered as external to us, other than etheric or atmospheric vibrations.

In this case the American Substantialists are not wrong, though they are too anthropomorphic and material in their views for these to be accepted by Occultists, when they argue through Mrs. M. S. Organ, M.D., that:

There must be positive entitative properties in objects which have a constitutional relation to the nerves of animal sensations, or there can be no perception. No impression of any kind can be made upon brain, nerve, or mind—no stimulus to action—unless there is an actual and direct communication of a substantial force. [“Substantial” as far as it appears, in the usual sense of the word, in this universe of Illusion and Mâyâ, of course; not in reality.] That force may be the most refined and sublimated immaterial Entity [?]. Yet it must exist; for no sense, element, or faculty of the human being can have a perception, or be stimulated into action, without some substantial force coming in contact with it. This is the fundamental law pervading the whole organic and mental world. In the true philosophical sense there is no such thing as independent action: for every force or substance is correlated to some other force or substance. We can with just as much truth and reason assert that no substance possesses any inherent gustatory property or any olfactory property—that taste and odour are simply sensations caused by vibrations; and hence mere illusions of animal perceptions.

[pg 618]

There is a transcendental set of causes put in motion, so to speak, in the occurrence of these phenomena, which, not being in relation to our narrow range of cognition, can only be understood and traced to their source and their nature, by the spiritual faculties of the Adept. They are, as Asclepios puts it to the King, “incorporeal corporealities,” such as “appear in the mirror,” and “abstract forms” that we see, hear, and smell, in our dreams and visions. What have the “modes of motion,” light, and ether to do with these? Yet we see, hear, smell and touch them, ergo they are as much realities to us in our dreams, as any other thing on this plane of Mâyâ.

[pg 619]

Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.

When the Occultist speaks of Elements, and of human Beings who lived during those geological ages, the duration of which it is found as impossible to determine—according to the opinion of one of the best English Geologists960—as the nature of Matter, it is because he knows what he is talking about. When he says Man and Elements, he means neither man in his present physiological and anthropological form, nor the elemental Atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, existing at present in scientific minds, the entitative abstractions of Matter in its highly attenuated state; nor, again, does he mean the compound Elements of Antiquity. In Occultism the word Element in every case means Rudiment. When we say “Elementary Man,” we mean either the proëmial, incipient sketch of man, in its unfinished and undeveloped condition, hence in that form which now lies latent in physical man during his life-time, and takes shape only occasionally and under certain conditions; or, that form which for a time survives the material body, and which is better known as an Elementary.961 With regard to Element, when the term is used metaphysically, it means, in distinction to the mortal, the incipient Divine Man; and, in its physical usage, it means inchoate Matter in its first undifferentiated condition, or in the Laya state, the eternal and normal condition of Substance, which differentiates only periodically; during that differentiation, Substance is really in an abnormal state—in other words, it is but a transitory illusion of the senses.

As to the Elemental Atoms, so-called, the Occultists refer to them by that name with a meaning analogous to that which is given by [pg 620] the Hindû to Brahmâ, when he calls him Anu, the Atom. Every Elemental Atom, in search of which more than one Chemist has followed the path indicated by the Alchemists, is, in their firm belief, when not knowledge, a Soul; not necessarily a disembodied Soul, but a Jîva, as the Hindûs call it, a centre of Potential Vitality, with latent intelligence in it, and, in the case of compound Souls, an intelligent active Existence, from the highest to the lowest order, a form composed of more or less differentiations. It requires a Metaphysician—and an Eastern Metaphysician—to understand our meaning. All those Atom-Souls are differentiations from the One, and are in the same relation to it as is the Divine Soul, Buddhi, to its informing and inseparable Spirit, Âtmâ.

Modern Physics, in borrowing from the Ancients their Atomic Theory, forgot one point, the most important point of the doctrine; hence they have got only the husks and will never be able to get the kernel. In adopting physical Atoms, they omitted the suggestive fact that, from Anaxagoras to Epicurus, to the Roman Lucretius, and finally even to Galileo, all these Philosophers believed more or less in animated Atoms, not in invisible specks of so-called “brute” matter. According to them, rotatory motion was generated by larger (read, more divine and pure) Atoms forcing other Atoms downwards; the lighter ones being simultaneously thrust upward. The Esoteric meaning of this is the ever cyclic curve of differentiated Elements downward and upward through intercyclic phases of existence, until each again reaches its starting-point or birthplace. The idea was metaphysical as well as physical; the hidden interpretation embracing Gods or Souls, in the shape of Atoms, as the causes of all the effects produced on Earth by the secretions from the divine bodies.962 No Ancient Philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists, ever dissociated Spirit from Matter, or Matter from Spirit. Everything originated in the One, and, proceeding from the One, must finally return to the One.

Light becomes heat, and consolidates into fiery particles; which, from being ignited, become cold, hard particles, round and smooth. And this is called Soul, imprisoned in its robe of matter.963

Atoms and Souls were synonymous in the language of the Initiates. The doctrine of “whirling Souls,” Gilgoolem, in which so many learned Jews have believed,964 had no other meaning esoterically. The [pg 621] learned Jewish Initiates never meant Palestine alone by the Promised Land, but they meant the same Nirvâna as do the learned Buddhist and Brahman—the bosom of the Eternal One, symbolized by that of Abraham, and by Palestine as its substitute on Earth.

Surely no educated Jew ever believed this allegory in its literal sense, that the bodies of Jews contain within them a principle of Soul which cannot rest, if the bodies are deposited in a foreign land, until, by a process called the “whirling of the Soul” the immortal particle reaches once more the sacred soil of the “Promised Land.”965 The meaning of this is evident to an Occultist. The process was supposed to be accomplished by a kind of metempsychosis, the psychic spark being conveyed through bird, beast, fish, and the most minute insect.966 The allegory relates to the Atoms of the body, each of which has to pass through every form, before all reach the final state, which is the first starting-point of the departure of every Atom—its primitive Laya state. But the primitive meaning of Gilgoolem, or the “Revolution of Souls,” was the idea of the reïncarnating Souls or Egos. “All the Souls go into the Gilgoolah,” into a cyclic or revolving process; i.e., they all proceed on the cyclic path of re-births. Some Kabalists interpret this doctrine to mean only a kind of purgatory for the souls of the wicked. But this is not so.

The passage of the Soul-Atom “through the seven Planetary Chambers” had the same metaphysical and physical meaning. It had the latter when it was said to dissolve into Ether. Even Epicurus, the model Atheist and Materialist, knew so much and believed so much in the ancient Wisdom, that he taught that the Soul—entirely distinct from immortal Spirit, when the former is enshrined latent in it, as it is in every atomic speck—was composed of a fine, tender essence, formed from the smoothest, roundest, and finest atoms.967

And this shows that the ancient Initiates, who were followed more or less closely by all profane Antiquity, meant by the term Atom, a Soul, a Genius or Angel, the first-born of the ever-concealed Cause of all causes; and in this sense their teachings become comprehensible. They asserted, as do their successors, the existence of Gods and Genii, Angels or Demons, not outside, nor independent of, the Universal Plenum, but within it. Only this Plenum, during the life-cycles, is infinite. They admitted and taught a good deal of that which modern Science now teaches—namely, the existence of a primordial World-Stuff [pg 622] or Cosmic Substance, eternally homogeneous, except during its periodic existence; then, universally diffused throughout infinite Space, it differentiates, and gradually forms sidereal bodies from itself. They taught the revolution of the Heavens, the Earth's rotation, the Heliocentric System, and the Atomic Vortices—Atoms being in reality Souls and Intelligences. These “Atomists” were spiritual, most transcendental, and philosophical Pantheists. It is not they who would have ever conceived or dreamed that monstrous contrasted progeny, the nightmare of our modern civilized race: inanimate material and self-guiding Atoms, on the one hand, and an extra-cosmic God on the other.

It may be useful to show what the Monad was, and what its origin, in the teachings of the old Initiates.

Modern exact Science, as soon as it began to grow out of its teens, perceived the great, and to it hitherto esoteric, axiom, that nothing, whether in the spiritual, psychic, or physical realm of Being, could come into existence out of nothing. There is no cause in the manifested Universe without its adequate effects, whether in Space or Time; nor can there be an effect without its primal cause, which itself owes its existence to a still higher one—the final and absolute Cause having to remain to man for ever an incomprehensible Causeless Cause. But even this is no solution, and must be viewed, if at all, from the highest philosophical and metaphysical standpoints, otherwise the problem had better be left unapproached. It is an abstraction, on the verge of which human reason—however trained in metaphysical subtleties—trembles, threatening to collapse. This may be demonstrated to any European, who would undertake to solve the problem of existence, by the articles of faith of the true Vedântin for instance. Let him read and study the sublime teachings of Shankarâchârya, on the subject of Soul and Spirit, and the reader will realize what is now said.968

While the Christian is taught that the human Soul is a breath of God, being created by him for sempiternal existence, having a beginning, but no end—and therefore never to be called eternal—the Occult Teaching says: Nothing is created, it is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in this Universe—from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought—that was not in the Universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal is; as everything on the objective plane is an ever-becoming—because all is transitory.

[pg 623]

The Monad—a truly “indivisible thing,” as defined by Good, who did not give it the sense we now do—is here rendered as the Âtmâ, in conjunction with Buddhi and the higher Manas. This trinity is one and eternal, the latter being absorbed in the former at the termination of all conditioned and illusive life. The Monad, then, can be traced through the course of its pilgrimage and in its changes of transitory vehicles, only from the incipient stage of the manifested Universe. In Pralaya, the intermediate period between two Manvantaras, it loses its name, as it loses it when the real One Self of man merges into Brahman, in cases of high Samâdhi (the Turîya state), or final Nirvâna; in the words of Shankara:

When the disciple having attained that primeval consciousness, absolute bliss, of which the nature is truth, which is without form and action, abandons this illusive body that has been assumed by the Âtmâ just as an actor (abandons) the dress (put on).

For Buddhi, the Anandamaya Sheath, is but a mirror which reflects absolute bliss; and, moreover, that reflection itself is yet not free from ignorance, and is not the Supreme Spirit, since it is subject to conditions, is a spiritual modification of Prakriti, and is an effect; Âtmâ alone is the one real and eternal substratum of all, the Essence and Absolute Knowledge, the Kshetrajña. Now that the Revised Version of the Gospels has been published and the most glaring mistranslations of the old versions are corrected, one can understand better the words in 1 John v. 6: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth.” The words that follow in the mistranslated version about the “three witnesses,” hitherto supposed to stand for “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost,” show the real meaning of the writer very clearly, thus still more forcibly identifying his teaching in this respect with that of Shankarâchârya. For what can the sentence mean, “there are three that bear witness ... the Spirit and the Water and the Blood”—if it bears no relation to, nor connection with, the more philosophical statement of the great Vedântin teacher, who, speaking of the Sheaths—the principles in man—Jîva, Vijñânamaya, etc., which are, in their physical manifestation, “Water and Blood” or Life, adds that Âtmâ, Spirit, alone is what remains after the subtraction of the Sheaths and that it is the Only Witness, or synthesized unity. The less spiritual and philosophical school, solely with an eye to a Trinity, made three witnesses out of “one,” thus connecting it more with Earth than with Heaven. It is called in Esoteric Philosophy the “One [pg 624] Witness,” and, while it rests in Devachan, is referred to as the “Three Witnesses to Karma.”

Âtmâ, our seventh principle, being identical with the Universal Spirit, and man being one with it in his essence, what is then the Monad proper? It is that homogeneous spark which radiates in millions of rays from the primeval Seven;—of which Seven something will be said further on. It is the emanating Spark from the uncreated Ray—a mystery. In the esoteric, and even exoteric Buddhism of the North, Âdi-Buddha (Chogi Dangpoi Sangye), the One Unknown, without beginning or end, identical with Parabrahman and Ain Suph, emits a bright Ray from its Darkness.

This is the Logos, the First, or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha, also called Dorjechang. As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest, but sends into the world of manifestation his Heart—the “Diamond Heart,” Vajrasattva or Dorjesempa. This is the Second Logos of Creation, from whom emanate the seven—in the exoteric blind the five—Dhyâni-Buddhas, called the Anupâdaka, the “Parentless.” These Buddhas are the primeval Monads from the World of Incorporeal Being, the Arûpa World, wherein the Intelligences (on that plane only) have neither shape nor name, in the exoteric system, but have their distinct seven names in the Esoteric Philosophy. These Dhyâni-Buddhas emanate, or create from themselves, by virtue of Dhyâna, celestial Selves—the super-human Bodhisattvas. These, incarnating at the beginning of every human cycle on Earth as mortal men, become occasionally, owing to their personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the Sons of Humanity, after which they may reäppear as Mânushi, or Human, Buddhas. The Anupâdaka, or Dhyâni-Buddhas, are thus identical with the Brâhmanical Mânasaputra, Mind-born Sons—whether of Brahmâ, or of either of the other two Trimûrtian Hypostases; they are identical also with the Rishis and Prajâpatis. Thus, a passage is found in Anugîtâ, which, read esoterically, shows plainly, though under another imagery, the same idea and system. It says:

Whatever entities there are in this world, moveable or immoveable, they are the very first to be dissolved [at Pralaya]; and next the developments produced from the elements [from which the visible universe is fashioned]; and (after) these developments [evolved entities], all the elements. Such is the upward gradation among entities. Gods, Men, Gandharvas, Pishâchas, Asuras, Râkshasas, all have been created by Nature [Svabhâva, or Prakriti, plastic Nature], not by actions, nor by a cause [not by any physical cause]. These Brâhmanas [the Rishi Prajâpati?], the creators of the world, are born here (on earth) again and again. [pg 625]And whatever is produced from them is dissolved in due time in those very five great elements [the five, or rather seven, Dhyâni-Buddhas, also called “Elements”of Mankind], like billows in the ocean. These great elements are in every way (beyond) the elements that make up the world [the gross elements]. And he who is released, even from these five elements [the Tanmâtras],969 goes to the highest goal. The Lord Prajâpati [Brahmâ] created all this by the mind only [by Dhyâna, or abstract meditation and mystic powers, like the Dhyâni-Buddhas].970

Evidently then, these Brâhmanas are identical with the terrestrial Bodhisattvas of the heavenly Dhyâni-Buddhas. Both, as primordial, intelligent “Elements,” become the Creators or the Emanators of the Monads destined to become human in that cycle; after which they evolve themselves, or, so to say, expand into their own Selves as Bodhisattvas or Brâhmanas, in heaven and earth, to become at last simple men. “The creators of the world are born here, on earth again and again”—truly. In the Northern Buddhist system, or the popular exoteric religion, it is taught that every Buddha, while preaching the Good Law on Earth, manifests himself simultaneously in three Worlds: in the Formless World as a Dhyâni-Buddha, in the World of Forms as a Bodhisattva, and in the World of Desire, the lowest or our World, as a man. Esoterically the teaching differs. The divine, purely Âdi-Buddhic Monad manifests as the universal Buddhi, the Mahâ-Buddhi or Mahat, in Hindû philosophies, the spiritual, omniscient and omnipotent Root of divine Intelligence, the highest Anima Mundi or the Logos. This descends “like a flame spreading from the eternal Fire, immoveable, without increase or decrease, ever the same to the end” of the cycle of existence, and becomes Universal Life on the Mundane Plane. From this Plane of conscious Life shoot out, like seven fiery tongues, the Sons of Light, the Logoi of Life; then the Dhyâni-Buddhas of contemplation, the concrete forms of their formless Fathers, the Seven Sons of Light, still themselves, to whom maybe applied the Brâhmanical mystic phrase: “Thou art That”—Brahman. It is from these Dhyâni-Buddhas that emanate their Chhâyâs or Shadows, the Bodhisattvas of the celestial realms, the prototypes of the super-terrestrial Bodhisattvas, and of the terrestrial Buddhas, and finally of men. The Seven Sons of Light are also called Stars.

[pg 626]

The star under which a human Entity is born, says the Occult Teaching, will remain for ever its star, throughout the whole cycle of its incarnations in one Manvantara. But this is not his astrological star. The latter is concerned and connected with the Personality; the former with the Individuality. The Angel of that Star, or the Dhyâni-Buddha connected with it, will be either the guiding, or simply the presiding, Angel, so to say, in every new rebirth of the Monad, which is part of his own essence, though his vehicle, man, may remain for ever ignorant of this fact. The Adepts have each their Dhyâni-Buddha, their elder “Twin-Soul,” and they know it, calling it “Father-Soul,” and “Father-Fire.” It is only at the last and supreme Initiation, however, when placed face to face with the bright “Image” that they learn to recognize it. How much did Bulwer Lytton know of this mystic fact, when describing, in one of his highest inspirational moods, Zanoni face to face with his Augoeides?

The Logos, or both the unmanifested and the manifested Word, is called by the Hindûs, Îshvara, the Lord, though the Occultists give it another name. Îshvara, say the Vedântins, is the highest consciousness in Nature. “This highest consciousness,” answer the Occultists, “is only a synthetic unit in the World of the manifested Logos—or on the plane of illusion; for it is the sum total of Dhyân Chohanic consciousness.” “O wise man, remove the conception that Not-Spirit is Spirit”—says Shankarâchârya. Âtmâ is Not-Spirit in its final Parabrahmic state; Îshvara, or Logos, is Spirit; or, as Occultism explains, it is a compound unity of manifested living Spirits, the parent-source and nursery of all the mundane and terrestrial Monads, plus their divine Reflection, which emanate from, and return into, the Logos, each in the culmination of its time. There are seven chief Groups of such Dhyân Chohans, which groups will be found and recognized in every religion, for they are the primeval Seven Rays. Humanity, Occultism teaches us, is divided into seven distinct Groups, with their sub-divisions, mental, spiritual, and physical. Hence there are seven chief planets, the spheres of the indwelling seven Spirits, under each of which is born one of the human Groups which is guided and influenced thereby. There are only seven planets specially connected with Earth, and twelve houses, but the possible combinations of their aspects are countless. As each planet can stand to each of the others in twelve different aspects, their combinations must be almost infinite; as infinite, in fact, as the spiritual, psychic, mental, and physical [pg 627] capacities in the numberless varieties of the genus homo, each of which varieties is born under one of the seven planets and one of the said countless planetary combinations.971

The Monad, then, viewed as One, is above the seventh principle in Kosmos and man; and as a Triad, it is the direct radiant progeny of the said compound Unit, not the Breath of “God,” as that Unit is called, nor creating out of nihil; for such an idea is quite unphilosophical, and degrades Deity, dragging It down to a finite, attributive condition. As well expressed by the translator of the Crest-Jewel of Wisdom—though Îshvara is “God.”

Unchanged in the profoundest depths of Pralayas and in the intensest activity of Manvantaras, [still] beyond [him] is âtmâ, round whose pavilion is the darkness of eternal mâyâ.972

The “Triads” born under the same Parent-Planet, or rather the Radiations of one and the same Planetary Spirit or Dhyâni-Buddha are, in all their after lives and rebirths, sister, or “twin” souls, on this Earth. The idea is the same as that of the Christian Trinity, the “Three in One,” only it is still more metaphysical: the Universal “Over-Spirit,” manifesting on the two higher planes, those of Buddhi and Mahat. These are the three Hypostases, metaphysical, but never personal.

This was known to every high Initiate in every age and in every country: “I and my Father are one,” said Jesus.973 When he is made to say, elsewhere: “I ascend to my Father and your Father,”974 it meant that which has just been stated. The identity, and at the same time the illusive differentiation of the Angel-Monad and the Human-Monad is shown in the sentences: “My Father is greater than I”;975 “Glorify your Father which is in Heaven”;976 “Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (not our Father).977 So [pg 628] again Paul asks: “Know ye not ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?”978 All this was simply meant to show that the group of disciples and followers attracted to him belonged to the same Dhyâni-Buddha, Star, or Father, and that this again belonged to the same planetary realm and division as he did. It is the knowledge of this Occult Doctrine that found expression in the review of The Idyll of the White Lotus, when T. Subba Row wrote:

Every Buddha meets at his last Initiation all the great Adepts who reached Buddhahood during the preceding ages ... every class of Adepts has its own bond of spiritual communion which knits them together.... The only possible and effectual way of entering into such brotherhood ... is by bringing oneself within the influence of the Spiritual light which radiates from one's own Logos. I may further point out here ... that such communion is only possible between persons whose souls derive their life and sustenance from the same divine Ray, and that, as seven distinct Rays radiate from the “Central Spiritual Sun,” all Adepts and Dhyân Chohans are divisible into seven classes, each of which is guided, controlled, and overshadowed by one of the seven forms or manifestations of the divine Wisdom.979

It is then the Seven Sons of Light,—called after their planets and often identified with them by the rabble, namely, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and presumably the Sun and Moon, for the modern critic, who goes no deeper than the surface of old religions980—which are, according to the Occult Teachings, our heavenly Parents, or synthetically our “Father.” Hence, as already remarked, Polytheism is really more philosophical and correct, as to fact and Nature, than is anthropomorphic Monotheism. Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, the four exoteric planets, and the three others, which must remain unnamed, were the heavenly bodies in direct astral and psychic communication, morally and physically, with the Earth, its Guides, and Watchers; the visible orbs furnishing our Humanity with its outward and inward characteristics, and their Regents or Rectors with our [pg 629] Monads and spiritual faculties. In order to avoid creating new misconceptions, let it be stated that among the three Secret Orbs, or Star-Angels, neither Uranus nor Neptune were included; not only because they were unknown under these names to the ancient Sages, but because they, like all other planets, however many there may be, are the Gods and Guardians of other septenary Chains of Globes within our System.

Nor do the two great planets last discovered depend entirely on the Sun, as do the rest of the planets. Otherwise, how can we explain the fact that Uranus receives 1/390th part of the light received by our Earth, while Neptune receives only 1/900th part; and that their satellites show a peculiarity of inverse rotation found in no other planets of the Solar System? At any rate, what we say applies to Uranus, though the fact has again been disputed recently.

This subject will, of course, be considered as a mere vagary, by all those who confuse the universal order of Being with their own systems of classification. Here, however, simple facts from Occult Teachings are stated, to be either accepted or rejected, as the case may be. There are details which, on account of their great metaphysical abstraction, cannot be entered upon. Hence, we merely state that only seven of our planets are as intimately related to our Globe, as the Sun is to all the bodies subject to him in his System. Of these bodies the poor little number of primary and secondary planets known to Astronomy, looks wretched enough, in truth.981 Therefore, it stands to reason that there are a great number of planets, small and large, that have not been discovered yet, but of the existence of which ancient Astronomers—all of them initiated Adepts—must certainly have been aware. But, as the relation of these to the Gods was sacred, it had to remain arcane, as did also the names of various other planets and stars.

Besides this, even the Roman Catholic Theology speaks of “seventy planets that preside over the destinies of the nations of this globe;” and, save the erroneous application, there is more truth in this tradition than in exact modern Astronomy. The seventy planets are connected [pg 630] with the seventy elders of the people of Israel,982 and the Regents of these planets are meant, not the orbs themselves; the word seventy is a play and a blind upon the 7 × 7 of the subdivisions. Each people and nation, as we have already said, has its direct Watcher, Guardian and Father in Heaven—a Planetary Spirit. We are willing to leave their own national God, Jehovah, to the descendants of Israel, the worshippers of Sabaoth or Saturn; for, indeed, the Monads of the people chosen by him are his own, and the Bible has never made any secret of it. Only the text of the Protestant English Bible is, as usual, in disagreement with those of the Septuagint and the Vulgate. Thus, while in the former we read:

When the Most High [not Jehovah] divided to the nations their inheritance ... he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.983

In the Septuagint the text reads “according to the number of the Angels,” Planet-Angels, a version more concordant with truth and fact. Moreover, all the texts agree that “the Lord's [Jehovah's] portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance”;984 and this settles the question. The “Lord” Jehovah took Israel for his portion; what have other nations to do with that particular national Deity? Let then, the “Angel Gabriel” watch over Iran and “Mikael-Jehovah” over the Hebrews. These are not the Gods of other nations, and it is difficult to see why Christians should have selected a God against whose commandments Jesus was the first to rise in rebellion.

The planetary origin of the Monad, or Soul, and of its faculties was taught by the Gnostics. On its way to the Earth, as on its way back from the Earth, each soul born in, and from, the “Boundless Light,”985 had to pass through the seven planetary regions either way. The pure Dhyâni and Devas of the oldest religions had become, in course of time, with the Zoroastrians, the Seven Devs, the ministers of Ahriman, “each chained to his planet”;986 with the Brâhmans, the Asuras and some of the Rishis—good, bad and indifferent; among the Egyptian Gnostics it was Thoth, or Hermes, who was the chief of the Seven [pg 631] whose names are given by Origen as Adonai, genius of the Sun; Tao, of the Moon; Eloi, of Jupiter; Sabaoth, of Mars; Orai, of Venus; Astaphai, of Mercury; and Ildabaoth (Jehovah), of Saturn. Finally, the Pistis-Sophia, which the greatest modern authority on exoteric Gnostic beliefs, the late Mr. C. W. King, refers to as “that precious monument of Gnosticism”—this old document echoes the archaic belief of the ages, while distorting it to suit sectarian purposes. The Astral Rulers of the Spheres, the planets, create the Monads, or Souls, from their own substance out of “the tears of their eyes, and the sweat of their torments,” endowing the Monads with a spark of their substance which is the Divine Light. It will be shown in Volume II why these “Lords of the Zodiac and Spheres” have been transformed by sectarian Theology into the Rebellious Angels of the Christians, who took them from the Seven Devs of the Magi, without understanding the significance of the allegory.987

As usual, that which is, and was from its beginning, divine, pure, and spiritual in its earliest unity, became—by reason of its differentiation through the distorted prism of man's conceptions—human and impure, as reflecting man's own sinful nature. Thus, in time, the planet Saturn became reviled by the worshippers of other Gods. The nations born under Saturn—the Jewish, for instance, with whom he became Jehovah, after being considered as a son of Saturn, or Ilda-Baoth, by the Ophites, and in the Book of Jasher—were eternally fighting with those born under Jupiter, Mercury, or any other planet, except Saturn-Jehovah; genealogies and prophecies notwithstanding, Jesus the Initiate (or Jehoshua)—the type from whom the “historical” Jesus was copied—was not of pure Jewish blood, and thus recognized no Jehovah; nor did he worship any planetary God beside his own “Father,” whom he knew, and with whom he communed, as every high Initiate does, “Spirit to Spirit and Soul to Soul.” This can hardly be taken exception to, unless the critic explains to every one's satisfaction the strange sentences put into the mouth of Jesus during his disputes with the Pharisees by the author of the Fourth Gospel:

I know that ye are Abraham's seed988.... I speak that which I have seen with my Father; and ye do that which ye have seen with your Father.... Ye do the deeds of your Father.... Ye are of your Father, the Devil.... He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth [pg 632]in him. When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it.989

This “Father” of the Pharisees was Jehovah, for he was identical with Cain, Saturn, Vulcan, etc.—the planet under which they were born, and the God whom they worshipped. Evidently there must be an Occult meaning sought in these words and admonitions, however mistranslated, since they are pronounced by one who threatened with hell-fire anyone who says to his brother simply Raca, fool.990 And evidently, again, the planets are not merely spheres, twinkling in Space, and made to shine for no purpose, but they are the domains of various Beings with whom the uninitiated are so far unacquainted, but who have, nevertheless, a mysterious, unbroken, and powerful connection with men and globes. Every heavenly body is the temple of a God, and these Gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown “Not Spirit.” There is nothing profane in the Universe. All Nature is a consecrated place, as Young says:

Each of these Stars is a religious house.

Thus can all exoteric religions be shown to be the falsified copies of the Esoteric Teaching. It is the priesthood which has to be held responsible for the reaction of our day in favour of Materialism. It is by worshipping and enforcing on the masses the worship of the shells of pagan ideals—personified for purposes of allegory—that the latest exoteric religion has made of Western lands a Pandemonium, in which the higher classes worship the golden calf, and the lower and ignorant masses are made to worship an idol with feet of clay.

[pg 633]

Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.

Modern Science is Ancient Thought distorted, and no more. We have seen, however, what intuitional Scientists think, and are busy about; and now the reader shall be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.

With regard to Cosmogony and primeval matter, modern speculations are undeniably ancient thought, “improved” by contradictory theories of recent origin. The whole foundation belongs to Grecian and Indian Archaic Astronomy and Physics, in those days called always Philosophy. In all the Âryan and Greek speculations, we meet with the conception of an all-pervading, unorganized, and homogeneous Matter, or Chaos, re-named by modern Scientists “nebular condition of the world-stuff.” What Anaxagoras called Chaos in his Homoiomeria is now called “primitive fluid” by Sir William Thomson. The Hindû and Greek Atomists—Kanâda, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.—are now reflected, as in a clear mirror, in the supporters of the Atomic Theory of our modern days, beginning with Leibnitz's Monads, and ending with the Vortical Atoms of Sir William Thomson.991 True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected, and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is, whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be dethroned like its predecessor? Light, from its metaphysical aspect, has been fully treated in Isis Unveiled:

Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist [and the Kabalist]. Both are electricity—the life principle, the Anima Mundi—pervading the Universe, the electric vivifier of all things. [pg 634]Light is the great Protean magician, and under the divine Will of the Architect992[or rather the Architects, the “Builders,” called One collectively], its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring Matter and Spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its Primordial Point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies. It was at the ray of this First Mother, one in three, that “God,” according to Plato, “lighted a Fire which we now call the Sun,”993 and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the Rays of the Primordial Light become materialized, are concentrated upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces.994

This is the Ether, as just explained in the views of Metcalfe, repeated by Dr. Richardson, save for the submission of the former to some details of the modern undulatory theory. We do not say that we deny the theory; we assert only that it needs completion and reärrangement. But the Occultists are by no means the only heretics in this respect; for Mr. Robert Hunt, F.R.S. finds that:

The undulatory theory does not account for the results of his experiments.995 Sir David Brewster, in his Treatise on Optics, showing “that the colours of vegetable life arise ... from a specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise over the differently-coloured rays of light,” and that “it is by the light of the sun that the coloured juices of plants are elaborated, that the colours of bodies are changed, etc.,” remarks that it is not easy to allow “that such effects can be produced by the mere vibration of an ethereal medium.” And he is forced, he says, “by this class of facts, to reason as if light was material” [?]. Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University, says that he “cannot agree ... with those who regard the wave-theory of light as an established principle of science.”996Herschell's doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of each undulation, “is inversely as the square of the distance from the luminous body,” if correct, damages a good deal, if it does not kill, the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved repeatedly by experiments with photometers; and though it begins to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive.997

To this remark of Sir David Brewster—“forced to reason as if light was material”—there is a good deal to reply. Light, in one sense, is [pg 635] certainly as material as is electricity itself. And if electricity is not material, if it is only a “mode of motion,” how is it that it can be stored up in Faure's accumulators? Helmholtz says that electricity must be as atomic as matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view in his address at Birmingham, in 1886, to the Chemical Section of the British Association, of which he was President. This is what Helmholtz says:

If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.998

Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section VIII, that there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research into the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto Occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—Chemistry, as it now stands reformed. There is no other, not excluding Astronomy, that can so unerringly guide scientific intuition, as can Chemistry. Two proofs of this are to be found in the world of Science—two great Chemists, each among the greatest in his own country, namely, Mr. Crookes and the late Professor Butlerof: the one is a thorough believer in abnormal phenomena; the other was as fervid a Spiritualist, as he was great in the natural sciences. It becomes evident that, while pondering over the ultimate divisibility of Matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase after the element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained mind of the Chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those ever-shrouded worlds, to that mysterious Beyond, whose measureless depths seem to close against the approach of the too materialistic hand that would fain draw aside its veil. “It is the unknown and the ever-unknowable,” warns the Monist-Agnostic. “Not so,” answers the persevering Chemist. “We are on the track and we are not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region which ignorance tickets unknown.”

In his Presidential Address at Birmingham Mr. Crookes said:

There is but one unknown—the ultimate substratum of Spirit [Space]. That which is not the Absolute and the One is, in virtue of that very differentiation, however far removed from the physical senses, always accessible to the spiritual human mind, which is a coruscation of the undifferentiable Integral.

Two or three sentences, at the very close of his lecture on the Genesis of the Elements, showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road [pg 636] to the greatest discoveries. He has been for some time overshadowing “the original protyle,” and he has come to the conclusion that “he who grasps the Key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of creation.” Protyle, as the great Chemist explains:

... is a word analogous to protoplasm, to express the idea of the original primal matter existing before the evolution of the chemical elements. The word I have ventured to use for this purpose is compounded of πρὸ (earlier than) and ὕλη (the stuff of which things are made). The word is scarcely a new coinage, for 600 years ago Roger Bacon wrote in his Arte Chymiae, “The elements are made out of ὕλη and every element is converted into the nature of another element.”

The knowledge of Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old magician999 by inspiration, but because he studied ancient works on Magic and Alchemy, and had a key to the real meaning of their language. But see what Mr. Crookes says of Protyle, next neighbour to the unconscious Mûlaprakriti of the Occultists:

Let us start at the moment when the first element came into existence. Before this time, matter, as we know it, was not. It is equally impossible to conceive of matter without energy, as of energy without matter; from one point of view both are convertible terms. Before the birth of atoms, all those forms of energy, which become evident when matter acts upon matter, could not have existed1000—they were locked up in the protyle as latent potentialities only. Coincident with the creation of atoms, all those attributes and properties, which form the means of discriminating one chemical element from another, start into existence fully endowed with energy.1001

With every respect due to the great knowledge of the lecturer, the Occultist would put it otherwise. He would say that no Atom is ever “created,” for the Atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One Atom—“the Atom of Atoms”—viewed during Manvantara as the Jagad-Yoni, the material causative womb of the World. Pradhâna, unmodified Matter—that which is the first form of Prakriti, or material, visible, [pg 637] as well as invisible Nature—and Purusha, Spirit, are eternally one; and they are Nirupâdhi, without adventitious qualities or attributes, only during Pralaya, and when beyond any of the planes of consciousness of existence. The Atom, as known to modern science, is inseparable from Purusha, which is Spirit, but is now called “energy” in Science. The Protyle Atom has not been comminuted or subtilized: it has simply passed into that plane, which is no plane, but the eternal state of everything beyond the planes of illusion. Both Purusha and Pradhâna are immutable and unconsumable, or Aparinâmin and Avyaya, in eternity; and both may be referred to during the Mâyâvic periods as Vyaya and Parinâmin, or that which can expand, pass away and disappear, and which is “modifiable.” In this sense Purusha, must, of course, be held distinct in our conceptions from Parabrahman. Nevertheless that, which is called “energy” or “force” in Science, and which has been explained as a dual force by Metcalfe, is never, in fact, and cannot be, energy alone; for it is the Substance of the World, its Soul, the All-permeant, Sarvaga, in conjunction with Kâla, Time. The three are the trinity in one, during Manvantara, the all-potential Unity, which acts as three distinct things on Mâyâ, the plane of illusion. In the Orphic philosophy of ancient Greece they were called Phanes, Chaos, and Chronos—the triad of the Occult Philosophers of that period.

But see how closely Mr. Crookes brushes the “Unknowable,” and what potentialities there are for the acceptance of Occult truths in his discoveries. He continues, speaking of the evolution of Atoms:

Let us pause at the end of the first complete vibration and examine the result. We have already found the elements of water, ammonia, carbonic acid, the atmosphere, plant and animal life, phosphorus for the brain, salt for the seas, clay for the solid earth ... phosphates and silicates sufficient for a world and inhabitants not so very different from what we enjoy at the present day. True the human inhabitants would have to live in a state of more than Arcadian simplicity, and the absence of calcic phosphate would be awkward as far as the bone is concerned.1002... At the lower end of our curve ... we see a great hiatus.... This oasis, and the blanks which precede and follow it, may be referred with much probability to the particular way in which our earth developed into a member of our solar system. If this be so, it may be that on our earth only these blanks occur, and not generally throughout the universe.

This justifies several assertions in the Occult works.

[pg 638]

Firstly, that neither the stars nor the Sun can be said to be constituted of those terrestrial elements with which the Chemist is familiar, though they are all present in the Sun's outward robes—as well as a host more of elements so far unknown to Science.

Secondly, that our globe has its own special laboratory on the far-away outskirts of its atmosphere, crossing which, every Atom and molecule changes and differentiates from its primordial nature.

And thirdly, that though no element present on our Earth could ever possibly be found wanting in the Sun, there are many others there which have either not reached, or not as yet been discovered on our globe.

Some may be missing in certain stars and heavenly bodies in the process of formation; or, though present in them, these elements, on account of their present state, may not respond as yet to the usual scientific tests.1003

Mr. Crookes speaks of helium, an element of still lower atomic weight than hydrogen, an element purely hypothetical as far as our earth is concerned, though existing in abundance in the chromosphere of the Sun. Occult Science adds that not one of the elements regarded as such by Chemistry really deserves the name.

Again we find Mr. Crookes speaking with approbation of

Dr. Carnelly's weighty argument in favour of the compound nature of the so-called elements, from their analogy to the compound radicles.

Hitherto, Alchemy alone, within the historical period, and in the so-called civilized countries, has succeeded in obtaining a real element, or a particle of homogeneous Matter, the Mysterium Magnum of Paracelsus. But then that was before Lord Bacon's day.1004

... Let us now turn to the upper portion of the scheme. With hydrogen of atomic weight = 1, there is little room for other elements, save, perhaps, for hypothetical Helium. But what if we get “through the looking-glass,” and cross the zero line in search of new principles—what shall we find on the other side of zero? Dr. Carnelly asks for an element of negative atomic weight; here is ample room and verge enough for a shadow series of such unsubstantialities. Helmholtz says that electricity is probably as atomic as matter; is electricity one of the [pg 639]negative elements, and the luminiferous ether another? Matter, as we now know it, does not here exist; the forms of energy which are apparent in the motions of matter are as yet only latent possibilities. A substance of negative weight is not inconceivable.1005 But can we form a clear conception of a body which combines with other bodies in proportions expressible by negative qualities?1006

A genesis of the elements such as is here sketched out would not be confined to our little solar system, but would probably follow the same general sequence of events in every centre of energy now visible as a star.

Before the birth of atoms to gravitate towards one another, no pressure could be exercised; but at the outskirts of the fire-mist sphere, within which all is protyle—at the shell on which the tremendous forces involved in the birth of a chemical element exert full sway—the fierce heat would be accompanied by gravitation sufficient to keep the newly-born elements from flying off into space. As temperature increases, expansion and molecular motion increase, molecules tend to fly asunder, and their chemical affinities become deadened; but the enormous: pressure of the gravitation of the mass of atomic matter, outside what I may for brevity call the birth-shell, would counteract the action of heat.

Beyond the birth-shell would be a space in which no chemical action could take place, owing to the temperature there being above what is called the dissociation-point for compounds. In this space the lion and the lamb would lie down together: phosphorus and oxygen would mix without union; hydrogen and chlorine would show no tendency to closer bonds; and even fluorine, that energetic gas which chemists have only isolated within the last month or two, would float about free and uncombined.

Outside this space of free atomic matter would be another shell, in which the formed chemical elements would have cooled down to the combination point, and the sequence of events so graphically described by Mr. Mattieu Williams in The Fuel of the Sun would now take place, culminating in the solid earth and the commencement of geological time (p. 19).

This is, in strictly scientific, but beautiful language, the description of the evolution of the differentiated Universe in the Secret Teachings. The learned gentleman closes his address in words, every sentence of which is like a flash of light from beyond the dark veil of materiality, hitherto thrown upon the exact sciences, and is a step forward towards the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Occult. Thus he says:

We have glanced at the difficulty of defining an element; we have noticed, too, the revolt of many leading physicists and chemists against the ordinary acceptation of the term element; we have weighed the improbability of their eternal existence,1007 or their origination by chance. As a remaining alternative, we have suggested their origin [pg 640]by a process of evolution like that of the heavenly bodies according to Laplace, and the plants and animals of our globe according to Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace.1008In the general array of the elements, as known to us, we have seen a striking approximation to that of the organic world.1009 In lack of direct evidence of the decomposition of any element, we have sought and found indirect evidence.... We have next glanced at the view of the genesis of the elements; and lastly we have reviewed a scheme of their origin suggested by Professor Reynolds' method of illustrating the periodic classification1010.... Summing up all the above considerations we cannot, indeed, venture to assert positively that our so-called elements have been evolved from one primordial matter; but we may contend that the balance of evidence, I think, fairly weighs in favour of this speculation.

[pg 641]

Thus inductive Science, in its branches of Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry, while advancing timidly towards the conquest of Nature's secrets in her final effects on our terrestrial plane, recedes to the days of Anaxagoras and the Chaldees in its discoveries of (a) the origin of our phenomenal world, and (b) the modes of formation of the bodies that compose the Universe. And having, for their cosmogonical hypotheses to turn back to the beliefs of the earliest philosophers, and the systems of the latter—systems that were all based on the teachings of a universal Secret Doctrine with regard to primeval Matter, with its properties, functions, and laws—have we not the right to hope that the day is not far off when Science will show a better appreciation of the Wisdom of the Ancients than it has hitherto done?

No doubt Occult Philosophy could learn a good deal from exact Modern Science; but the latter, on the other hand, might profit by ancient learning in more than one way, and chiefly in Cosmogony. It might learn, for instance, the mystical signification, alchemical and transcendental, of the many imponderable substances that fill interplanetary space, and which, interpenetrating each, are the direct cause, at the lower end, of the production of natural phenomena manifesting through so-called vibration. The knowledge of the real, not the hypothetical, nature of Ether, or rather of the Âkâsha, and other mysteries, in short, can alone lead to the knowledge of Forces. It is that Substance against which the Materialistic school of the Physicists rebels with such fury, especially in France,1011 and which exact Science has to advocate notwithstanding. They cannot make away with it without incurring the risk of pulling down the pillars of the Temple of Science, like a modern Samson, and of getting buried under its roof.

The theories built upon the rejection of Force, outside and independent of Matter pure and simple, have all been shown to be fallacious. They do not, and cannot, cover the ground, and many of the scientific data are thus proved to be unscientific. “Ether produced Sound” is said in the Purânas, and the statement is laughed at. Sound is the result of the vibrations of the air, we are corrected. And what is air? Could it exist if there were no etheric medium in Space to buoy up its molecules? The case stands simply thus. Materialism cannot admit [pg 642] the existence of anything outside Matter, because with the acceptance of an imponderable Force—the source and head of all the physical Forces—other intelligent Forces would have to be virtually admitted, and that would lead Science very far. For it would have to accept as a sequel the presence in Man of a still more spiritual power—entirely independent, for once, of any kind of Matter about which Physicists know anything. Hence, apart from a hypothetical Ether of Space and gross physical bodies, the whole sidereal and unseen Space is, in the sight of Materialists, one boundless void in Nature—blind, unintelligent, useless.

And now the next question is: What is that Cosmic Substance, and how far can one go in suspecting its nature or in wrenching from it its secrets, thus feeling justified in giving it a name? How far, especially, has Modern Science gone in the direction of those secrets, and what is it doing to solve them? The latest hobby of Science, the Nebular Theory, may afford us some answer to this question. Let us then examine the credentials of this Nebular Theory.

[pg 643]

Section XII. Scientific and Esoteric Evidence for, and Objections to, the Modern Nebular Theory.

Of late, Esoteric Cosmogony has been frequently opposed by the phantom of this theory and its ensuing hypotheses. “Can this most scientific teaching be denied by your Adepts?” it is asked. “Not entirely,” is the reply, “but the admissions of the men of Science themselves kill it; and there remains nothing for the Adepts to deny.”

To make of Science an integral whole necessitates, indeed, the study of spiritual and psychic, as well as of physical, Nature. Otherwise it will ever be like the anatomy of man, discussed of old by the profane from the point of view of his shell-side, and in ignorance of the interior work. Even Plato, the greatest Philosopher of his country, was guilty, before his Initiation, of such statements as that liquids pass into the stomach through the lungs. Without metaphysics, as Mr. H. J. Slack says, real Science is inadmissible.

The nebulæ exist; yet the Nebular Theory is wrong. A nebula exists in a state of entire elemental dissociation. It is gaseous and—something else besides, which can hardly be connected with gases as these are known to Physical Science; and it is self-luminous. But that is all. The sixty-two “coincidences” enumerated by Professor Stephen Alexander,1012 confirming the Nebular Theory, may all be explained by Esoteric Science; though, as this is not an astronomical work, the refutations are not attempted at present. Laplace and Faye come nearer to the correct theory than any; but of the speculations of [pg 644] Laplace there remains little in the present theory beyond its general features.

Nevertheless, says John Stuart Mill:

There is in Laplace's theory nothing hypothetical; it is an example of legitimate reasoning from present effect to its past cause; it assumes nothing more than that objects which really exist obey the laws which are known to be obeyed by all terrestrial objects resembling them.1013

From such an eminent logician as was Mill, this would be valuable, if it could only be proved that “terrestrial objects resembling” celestial objects at such a distance as are the nebulæ, resemble those objects in reality, and not only in appearance.

Another of the fallacies, from the Occult standpoint, embodied in the modern theory as it now stands, is the hypothesis that the Planets were all detached from the Sun; that they are bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh; whereas the Sun and the Planets are only co-uterine brothers, having the same nebular origin, but in a different mode from that postulated by modern Astronomy.

The many objections raised by some opponents of the modern Nebular Theory against the homogeneity of original diffuse Matter, on the ground of the uniformity in the composition of the fixed Stars, do not affect the question of that homogeneity at all, but only the theory itself. Our solar nebula may not be completely homogeneous, or, rather, it may fail to reveal itself as such to the Astronomers, and yet be de facto homogeneous. The Stars do differ in their constituent materials, and even exhibit elements quite unknown on Earth; nevertheless, this does not affect the point that Primeval Matter—Matter as it appeared even in its first differentiation from its laya-condition1014—is yet to this day homogeneous, at immense distances, in the depths of infinitude, and likewise at points not far removed from the outskirts of our Solar System.

Finally, there does not exist one single fact brought forward by the learned objectors against the Nebular Theory (false as it is, and hence, illogically enough, fatal to the hypothesis of the homogeneity of Matter), that can withstand criticism. One error leads to another. A false premiss will naturally lead to a false conclusion, although an inadmissible inference does not necessarily affect the validity of the major proposition of the syllogism. Thus, one may leave every side-issue and inference from the evidence of spectra and lines, as simply [pg 645] provisional for the present, and abandon all matters of detail to Physical Science. The duty of the Occultist lies with the Soul and Spirit of Cosmic Space, not merely with its illusive appearance and behaviour. That of official Physical Science is to analyze and study its shell—the Ultima Thule of the Universe and Man, in the opinion of Materialism.

With the latter, Occultism has nought to do. It is only with the theories of such men of learning as Kepler, Kant, Oersted, and Sir William Herschell, who believed in a Spiritual World, that Occult Cosmogony might treat, and attempt a satisfactory compromise. But the views of those Physicists differed vastly from the latest modern speculations. Kant and Herschell had in their mind's eye speculations upon the origin and the final destiny, as well as upon the present aspect, of the Universe, from a far more philosophical and psychic standpoint; whereas modern Cosmology and Astronomy now repudiate anything like research into the mysteries of Being. The result is what might be expected: complete failure and inextricable contradictions in the thousand and one varieties of so-called Scientific Theories, and in this Theory as in all others.

The nebular hypothesis, involving the theory of the existence of a Primeval Matter, diffused in a nebulous condition, is of no modern date in Astronomy, as everyone knows. Anaximenes, of the Ionian school, had already taught that the sidereal bodies were formed through the progressive condensation of a primordial pregenetic Matter, which had almost a negative weight, and was spread out through Space in an extremely sublimated condition.

Tycho Brahé, who viewed the Milky Way as an ethereal substance, thought the new star that appeared in Cassiopeia, in 1572, had been formed out of that Matter.1015 Kepler believed that the star of 1606 had likewise been formed out of the ethereal substance that fills the universe.1016 He attributed to that same Ether the apparition of a luminous ring round the Moon, during the total eclipse of the Sun observed at Naples in 1605.1017 Still later, in 1714 the existence of a self-luminous Matter was recognized by Halley in the Philosophical Transactions. Finally, the journal of this name published in 1811 the famous hypothesis of the eminent Astronomer, Sir William Herschell, [pg 646] on the transformation of the nebulæ into Stars,1018 and after this the Nebular Theory was accepted by the Royal Academies.

In Five Years of Theosophy, on p. 245, may be read an article headed, “Do the Adepts deny the Nebular Theory?” The answer there given is:

No; they do not deny its general propositions, nor the approximative truth of the scientific hypotheses. They only deny the completeness of the present, as well as the entire error of the many so-called “exploded” old theories, which, during the last century, have followed each other in such rapid succession.

This was asserted at the time to be “an evasive answer.” Such disrespect to official Science, it was argued, must be justified by the replacement of the orthodox speculation by another theory more complete, and having a firmer ground to stand upon. To this there is but one reply: It is useless to give out isolated theories with regard to things embodied in a complete and consecutive system, for, when separated from the main body of the teaching, they would necessarily lose their vital coherence and would thus do no good when studied independently. To be able to appreciate and accept the Occult views on the Nebular Theory, we must study the whole Esoteric cosmogonical system. And the time has hardly arrived for the Astronomers to be asked to accept Fohat and the Divine Builders. Even the undeniably correct surmises of Sir William Herschell, which had nothing “supernatural” in them, as to the Sun's being called a “globe of fire,” perhaps metaphorically, and his early speculations about the nature of that which is now called the Nasmyth Willow-leaf Theory, only caused that most eminent of all Astronomers to be smiled at by other, far less eminent, colleagues, who saw and now see in his ideas purely “imaginative and fanciful theories.” Before the whole Esoteric System could be given out and appreciated by the Astronomers, the latter would have to return to some of those “antiquated ideas,” not only to those of Herschell, but also to the dreams of the oldest Hindû Astronomers, and thus abandon their own theories, which are none the less “fanciful” because they have appeared nearly eighty years later than the one, and many thousands of years later than the others. Foremost of all they would have to repudiate their ideas of the Sun's solidity and incandescence; the Sun “glowing” most undeniably, but not “burning.” Then the Occultists state, with regard to the “willow-leaves,” [pg 647] that those “objects,” as Sir William Herschell called them, are the immediate sources of the solar light and heat. And though the Esoteric Teaching does not regard these as he did—namely, as “organisms” partaking of the nature of life, for the Solar “Beings” will hardly place themselves within telescopic focus—yet it asserts that the whole Universe is full of such “organisms,” conscious and active according to the proximity or distance of their planes to, or from, our plane of consciousness; and finally that the great Astronomer was right while speculating on those supposed “organisms,” in saying that “we do not know that vital action is incompetent to develop at once heat, light, and electricity.” For, at the risk of being laughed at by the whole world of Physicists, the Occultists maintain that all the “Forces” of the Scientists have their origin in the Vital Principle, the One Life collectively of our Solar System—that “Life” being a portion, or rather one of the aspects, of the One Universal Life.

We may, therefore—as in the article under consideration, wherein, on the authority of the Adepts, it was maintained that it is “sufficient to make a résumé of what the solar Physicists do not know”—we may, we maintain, define our position with regard to the modern Nebular Theory and its evident incorrectness, by simply pointing out facts diametrically opposed to it in its present form. And to begin with, what does it teach?

Summarizing the aforesaid hypotheses, it becomes plain that Laplace's theory—now made quite unrecognizable, moreover—was an unfortunate one. He postulates in the first place Cosmic Matter, existing in a state of diffuse nebulosity “so fine that its presence could hardly have been suspected.” No attempt is made by him to penetrate into the Arcana of Being, except as regards the immediate evolution of our small Solar System.

Consequently, whether one accepts or rejects his theory in its bearing upon the immediate cosmological problems presented for solution, he can only be said to have thrown back the mystery a little further. To the eternal query: “Whence Matter itself; whence the evolutionary impetus determining its cyclic aggregations and dissolutions; whence the exquisite symmetry and order into which the primeval Atoms arrange and group themselves?” no answer is attempted by Laplace. All we are confronted with, is a sketch of the probable broad principles on which the actual process is assumed to be based. Well, and what is this now celebrated note on the said process? [pg 648] What has he given so wonderfully new and original, that its ground-work, at any rate, should have served as a basis for the modern Nebular Theory? The following is what one gathers from various astronomical works.

Laplace thought that, in consequence of the condensation of the atoms of the primeval nebula, according to the “law” of gravity, the now gaseous, or perhaps, partially liquid mass, acquired a rotatory motion. As the velocity of this rotation increased, it assumed the form of a thin disc; finally, the centrifugal force overpowering that of cohesion, huge rings were detached from the edge of the whirling incandescent masses, and these rings contracted necessarily by gravitation (as accepted) into spheroidal bodies, which would necessarily still continue to preserve the orbit previously occupied by the outer zone from which they were separated.1019 The velocity of the outer edge of each nascent planet, he said, exceeding that of the inner, there results a rotation on its axis. The more dense bodies would be thrown off last; and finally, during the preliminary state of their formation, the newly-segregated orbs in their turn throw off one or more satellites. In formulating the history of the rupture and planetation of rings Laplace says:

Almost always each ring of vapours must have broken up into numerous masses, which, moving with a nearly uniform velocity, must have continued to circulate at the same distance around the sun. These masses must have taken a spheroidal form with a motion of rotation in the same direction as their revolution, since the inner molecules (those nearest the sun) would have less actual velocity than the exterior ones. They must then have formed as many planets in a state of vapour. But, if one of them was sufficiently powerful to unite successively, by its attraction, all the others around its centre, the ring of vapours must have been thus transformed into a single spheroidal mass of vapours circulating around the sun with a rotation in the same direction as its revolution. The latter case has been the more common, but the solar system presents us the first case, in the four small planets which move between Jupiter and Mars.

While few will be found to deny the “magnificent audacity of this hypothesis,” it is impossible not to recognize the insurmountable difficulties with which it is attended. Why, for instance, do we find that the satellites of Neptune and Uranus display a retrograde motion? [pg 649] Why, in spite of its closer proximity to the Sun, is Venus less dense than the Earth? Why, again, is the more distant Uranus denser than Saturn? How is it that there are so many variations in the inclination of their axes and orbits in the supposed progeny of the central orb; that such startling variations in the size of the Planets are noticeable; that the satellites of Jupiter are more dense by ·288 than their primary; that the phenomena of meteoric and cometary systems still remain unaccounted for? To quote the words of a Master:

They [the Adepts] find that the centrifugal theory of Western birth is unable to cover all the ground. That, unaided, it can neither account for every oblate spheroid, nor explain away such evident difficulties as are presented by the relative density of some planets. How, indeed, can any calculation of centrifugal force explain to us, for instance, why Mercury, whose rotation is, we are told, only “about one-third that of the Earth, and its density only about one-fourth greater than the Earth,” should have a polar compression more than ten times greater than the latter? And again, why Jupiter, whose equatorial rotation is said to be “twenty-seven times greater, and its density only about one-fifth that of the Earth” should have its polar compression seventeen times greater than that of the Earth? Or why Saturn, with an equatorial velocity fifty-five times greater than Mercury for centripetal force to contend with, should have its polar compression only three times greater than Mercury's? To crown the above contradictions, we are asked to believe in the Central Forces, as taught by Modern Science, even when told that the equatorial matter of the Sun, with more than four times the centrifugal velocity of the Earth's equatorial surface, and only about one-fourth part of the gravitation of the equatorial matter, has not manifested any tendency to bulge at the solar equator, nor shown the least flattening at the poles of the solar axis. In other and clearer words, the Sun, with only one-fourth of our Earth's density for the centrifugal force to work upon, has no polar compression at all! We find this objection made by more than one astronomer, yet never explained away satisfactorily, so far as the “Adepts” are aware.

Therefore, do they [the Adepts] say, that the great men of Science of the West, knowing ... next to nothing either about cometary matter, centrifugal and centripetal forces, the nature of the nebulæ, or the physical constitution of the Sun, the Stars, or even the Moon, are imprudent to speak so confidently as they do about the “central mass of the Sun,”whirling out into space planets, comets, and what not.... We maintain that it [the Sun] evolves out only the life-principle, the Soul of these [pg 650]bodies, giving and receiving it back, in our little Solar System, as the “Universal Life-Giver” ... in the Infinitude and Eternity; that the Solar System is as much the Microcosm of the One Macrocosm as man is the former when compared with his own little Solar Cosmos.1020

The essential power of all the cosmic and terrestrial Elements to generate within themselves a regular and harmonious series of results, a concatenation of causes and effects, is an irrefutable proof that they are either animated by an Intelligence, ab extrâ or ab intrâ, or conceal such within or behind the “manifested veil.” Occultism does not deny the certainty of the mechanical origin of the Universe; it only claims the absolute necessity of mechanicians of some sort behind or within those Elements—a dogma with us. It is not the fortuitous assistance of the Atoms of Lucretius, as he himself knew well, that built the Kosmos and all in it. Nature herself contradicts such a theory. Celestial Space, containing Matter so attenuated as Ether, cannot be called on, with or without attraction, to explain the common motion of the sidereal hosts. Although the perfect accord of their inter-revolution indicates clearly the presence of a mechanical cause in Nature, Newton, who of all men had most right to trust to his deductions, was nevertheless forced to abandon the idea of ever explaining the original impulse given to the millions of orbs, by merely the laws of known Nature and its material Forces. He recognized fully the limits that separate the action of natural Forces from that of the Intelligences that set the immutable laws in order and action. And if a Newton had to renounce such hope, which of the modern materialistic pigmies has the right of saying: “I know better?”

A cosmogonical theory, to become complete and comprehensible, has to start with a Primordial Substance diffused throughout boundless Space, of an intellectual and divine nature. That Substance must be the Soul and Spirit, the Synthesis and Seventh Principle of the manifested Kosmos, and, to serve as a spiritual Upâdhi to this, there must be the sixth, its vehicle—Primordial Physical Matter, so to speak, though its nature must escape for ever our limited normal senses. It is easy for an Astronomer, if endowed with an imaginative faculty, to build a theory of the emergence of the Universe out of Chaos, by simply applying to it the principles of mechanics. But such a Universe will always prove a Frankenstein's monster with respect to its scientific human creator; it will lead him into endless perplexities. [pg 651] The application of mechanical laws only can never carry the speculator beyond the objective world; nor will it unveil to men the origin and final destiny of Kosmos. This is whither the Nebular Theory has led Science. In sober fact and truth this Theory is twin sister to that of Ether, and both are the offspring of necessity; one is as indispensable to account for the transmission of light, as is the other to explain the problem of the origin of the Solar Systems. The question with Science is, how the same homogeneous Matter1021 could, obeying the laws of Newton, give birth to bodies—Sun, Planets, and their satellites—subject to conditions of identity of motion, and formed of such heterogeneous elements.

Has the Nebular Theory helped to solve the problem, even if applied solely to bodies considered as inanimate and material? We say: most decidedly not. What progress has it made since 1811, when first Sir William Herschell's paper, with its facts based on observation and showing the existence of nebular matter, made the sons of the Royal Society “shout for joy”? Since then a still greater discovery, through spectrum analysis, has permitted the verification and corroboration of Sir William Herschell's conjecture. Laplace demanded some kind of primitive “world-stuff” to prove the idea of progressive world-evolution and growth. Here it is, as offered two millenniums ago.

The “world-stuff,” now called nebulæ, was known from the highest antiquity. Anaxagoras taught that, upon differentiation, the resulting commixture of heterogeneous substances remained motionless and unorganized, until finally the “Mind”—the collective body of Dhyân Chohans, we say—began to work upon, and communicated to, them motion and order.1022 This theory is now taken up, so far as concerns its first portion; the last, that of any “Mind” interfering, being rejected. Spectrum analysis reveals the existence of nebulæ formed entirely of gases and luminous vapours. Is this the primitive nebular Matter? The spectra reveal, it is said, the physical conditions of the Matter which emits cosmic light. The spectra of the resolvable and the irresolvable nebulæ are shown to be entirely different, the spectra of the [pg 652] latter showing their physical state to be that of glowing gas or vapour. The bright lines of one nebula reveal the existence of hydrogen, and of other material substances known and unknown. The same as to the atmospheres of the Sun and Stars. This leads to the direct inference that a Star is formed by the condensation of a nebula; hence that even the metals themselves are formed on earth by the condensation of hydrogen or of some other primitive matter, some ancestral cousin to helium, perhaps, or some yet unknown stuff. This does not clash with the Occult Teachings. And this is the problem that Chemistry is trying to solve; and it must succeed sooner or later in the task, accepting nolens volens, when it does, the Esoteric Teaching. But when this does happen, it will kill the Nebular Theory as it now stands.

Meanwhile Astronomy cannot accept in any way, if it is to be regarded as an exact Science, the present theory of the filiation of Stars—even if Occultism does so in its own way, seeing that it explains this filiation differently—because Astronomy has not one single physical datum to show for it. Astronomy could anticipate Chemistry in proving the existence of the fact, if it could show a planetary nebula exhibiting a spectrum of three or four bright lines, gradually condensing and transforming into a Star, with a spectrum all covered with a number of dark lines. But

The question of the variability of the nebulæ, even as to their form, is yet one of the mysteries of Astronomy. The data of observation possessed so far are of too recent an origin, too uncertain, to permit us to affirm anything.1023

Since its discovery, the magic power of the spectroscope has revealed to its adepts only one single transformation of a Star of this kind; and even that showed directly the reverse of what is needed as proof in favour of the Nebular Theory; for it revealed a Star transforming itself into a planetary nebula. As related in The Observatory,1024 the temporary Star, discovered by J. F. J. Schmidt in the constellation Cygnus, in November, 1876, exhibited a spectrum broken by very brilliant lines. Gradually, the continuous spectrum and most of the lines disappeared, leaving finally one single brilliant line, which appeared to coincide with the green line of the nebula.

Though this metamorphosis is not irreconcileable with the hypothesis of the nebular origin of the Stars, nevertheless this single solitary case rests on no observation whatever, least of all on direct observation. [pg 653] The occurrence may have been due to several other causes. Since Astronomers are inclined to think our Planets are tending toward precipitation into the Sun, why should not that Star have blazed up owing to a collision of such precipitated Planets, or, as many suggest, the appulse of a Comet? Be that as it may, the only known instance of star-transformation since 1811 is not favourable to the Nebular Theory. Moreover, on the question of this Theory, as on all others, Astronomers disagree.

In our own age, and before Laplace ever thought of it, Buffon, being very much struck by the identity of motion in the Planets, was the first to propose the hypothesis that the Planets and their satellites originated in the bosom of the Sun. Forthwith and for this purpose, he invented a special Comet, supposed to have torn out, by a powerful oblique blow, the quantity of matter necessary for their formation. Laplace gave its dues to the “Comet” in his Exposition du Système du Monde.1025 But the idea was seized and even improved upon by a conception of the alternate evolution, from the Sun's central mass, of Planets apparently without weight or influence on the motion of the visible Planets—and as evidently without any more existence than the likeness of Moses in the Moon.

But the modern theory is also a variation on the systems elaborated by Kant and Laplace. The idea of both was that, at the origin of things, all that Matter which now enters into the composition of the planetary bodies was spread over all the space comprized in the Solar System—and even beyond. It was a nebula of extremely small density, and its condensation gradually gave birth, by a mechanism that has hitherto never been explained, to the various bodies of our System. This is the original Nebular Theory, an incomplete yet faithful repetition—a short chapter out of the large volume of universal Esoteric Cosmogony—of the teachings of the Secret Doctrine. And both systems, Kant's and Laplace's, differ greatly from the modern Theory, redundant with conflicting sub-theories and fanciful hypotheses. Say the Teachers:

The essence of cometary matter [and of that which composes the Stars] ... is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest Chemists and Physicists of the earth are familiar.... While the spectroscope has shown the probable similarity[owing to the chemical action of terrestrial light upon the intercepted [pg 654]rays] of terrestrial and sidereal substance, the chemical actions peculiar to the variously progressed orbs of space, have not been detected, nor proven to be identical with those observed on our own planet.1026

Mr. Crookes says almost the same in the fragment quoted from his lecture, Elements and Meta-Elements. C. Wolf, Member of the Institute, Astronomer of the Observatory, Paris, observes:

At the utmost the nebular hypothesis can only show in its favour, with W. Herschell, the existence of planetary nebulæ in various degrees of condensation, and of spiral nebulæ, with nuclei of condensation on the branches and centre.1027But, in fact, the knowledge of the bond that unites the nebulæ to the stars is yet denied to us; and lacking as we do direct observation, we are even debarred from establishing it on the analogy of chemical composition.1028

Even if the men of Science—leaving aside the difficulty arising out of such undeniable variety and heterogeneity of matter in the constitution of nebulæ—did admit, with the Ancients, that the origin of all the visible and invisible heavenly bodies must be sought for in one primordial homogeneous world-stuff, in a kind of Pre-Protyle,1029 it is evident that this would not put an end to their perplexities. Unless they admit also that our actual visible Universe is merely the Sthûla Sharîra, the gross body, of the sevenfold Kosmos, they will have to face another problem; especially if they venture to maintain that its now visible bodies are the result of the condensation of that one and single Primordial Matter. For mere observation shows them that the operations which produced the actual Universe are far more complex than could ever be embraced in that theory.

First of all, there are two distinct classes of “irresolvable” nebulæ, as Science itself teaches.

The telescope is unable to distinguish between these two classes, but the spectroscope can do so, and notices an essential difference between their physical constitutions.

The question of the resolvability of the nebulæ has been often presented in too affirmative a manner and quite contrary to the ideas expressed by the illustrious [pg 655]experimenter with the spectra of these constellations—Mr. Huggins. Every nebula whose spectrum contains only bright lines is gaseous, it is said, and hence is irresolvable; every nebula with a continuous spectrum must end by resolving into stars with an instrument of sufficient power. This assumption is contrary at once to the results obtained, and to spectroscopic theory. The “Lyra” nebula, the “Dumb-bell” nebula, the central region of the nebula of Orion, appear resolvable, and show a spectrum of bright lines; the nebula of Canes Venatici is not resolvable, and gives a continuous spectrum. Because, indeed, the spectroscope informs us of the physical state of the constituent matter of the stars, but affords us no notions of their modes of aggregation. A nebula formed of gaseous globes (or even of nuclei, faintly luminous, surrounded by a powerful atmosphere) would give a spectrum of lines and be still resolvable; such seems to be the state of Huggins' region in the Orion nebula. A nebula formed of solid or fluidic particles in a state of incandescence, a true cloud, will give a continuous spectrum and will be irresolvable.

Some of these nebulæ, Wolf tells us,

Have a spectrum of three or four bright lines, others a continuous spectrum. The first are gaseous, the others formed of a pulverulent matter. The former must constitute a veritable atmosphere: it is among these that the solar nebula of Laplace has to be placed. The latter form an ensemble of particles that may be considered as independent, and the rotation of which obeys the laws of internal weight: such are the nebulæ adopted by Kant and Faye. Observation allows us to place the one as the other at the very origin of the planetary world. But when we try to go beyond and ascend to the primitive chaos which has produced the totality of the heavenly bodies, we have first to account for the actual existence of these two classes of nebulæ. If the primitive chaos were a cold luminous gas,1030 one could understand how the contraction resulting from attraction could have heated it and made it luminous. We have to explain the condensation of this gas to the state of incandescent particles, the presence of which is revealed to us in certain nebulæ by the spectroscope. If the original chaos was composed of such particles, how did certain of their portions pass into the gaseous state, while others have preserved their primitive condition?

Such is the synopsis of the objections and difficulties in the way of the acceptance of the Nebular Theory, brought forward by the French savant, who concludes this interesting argument by declaring that:

The first part of the cosmogonical problem—what is the primitive matter of chaos; and how did that matter give birth to the sun and stars?—thus remains to this day in the domain of romance and of mere imagination.1031

[pg 656]

If this is the last word of Science upon the subject, whither then should we turn in order to learn what the Nebular Theory is supposed to teach? What, in fact, is this theory? What it is, no one seems to know for certain. What it is not—we learn from the erudite author of World-Life. He tells us that it:

i. Is not a theory of the evolution of the Universe. It is primarily a genetic explanation of the phenomena of the solar system, and accessorily a co-ordination in a common conception of the principal phenomena in the stellar and nebular firmament, as far as human vision has been able to penetrate.

ii. It does not regard the comets as involved in that particular evolution which has produced the Solar System. [The Esoteric Doctrine does, because it, too, “recognizes the comets as forms of cosmic existence co-ordinated with earlier stages of nebular evolution”; and it actually assigns to them chiefly the formation of all worlds.]

iii. It does not deny an antecedent history of the luminous fire mist—[the secondarystage of evolution in the Secret Doctrine] [and] ... makes no claim to having reached an absolute beginning. [And even it allows that this] fire mist may have previously existed in a cold, non-luminous and invisible condition.

iv. [And that finally] it does not profess to discover the origin of things, but only a stadium in material history.... [leaving] the philosopher and the theologian as free as they ever were to seek the origin of the modes of being.1032

But this is not all. Even the greatest philosopher of England—Mr. Herbert Spencer—arrayed himself against this fantastic theory by saying that (a) “The problem of existence is not resolved” by it; (b) the nebular hypothesis “throws no light upon the origin of diffused matter”; and (c) that “the nebular hypothesis (as it now stands) implies a First Cause.”1033

The latter, we are afraid, is more than our modern Physicists have bargained for. Thus, it seems that the poor “hypothesis” can hardly expect to find help or corroboration even in the world of the Metaphysicians.

Considering all this, the Occultists believe they have a right to present their Philosophy, however misunderstood and ostracized it may be at present. And they maintain that this failure of the Scientists to discover the truth is entirely due to their Materialism and their contempt for transcendental Sciences. Yet although the scientific minds in our century are as far from the true and correct doctrine of Evolution as ever, there may be still some hope left for the future, for even now we find another Scientist giving us a faint glimmer of it.

[pg 657]

In an article in the Popular Science Review on “Recent Researches in Minute Life,” we find Mr. H. J. Slack, F.C.S., Sec. R.M.S., saying:

There is an evident convergence of all sciences, from physics to chemistry and physiology, toward some doctrine of evolution and development, of which the facts of Darwinism will form part, but what ultimate aspect this doctrine will take, there is little, if any, evidence to show, and perhaps it will not be shaped by the human mind until metaphysical as well as physical inquiries are much more advanced.1034

This is a happy forecast indeed. The day may come, then, when “Natural Selection,” as taught by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer, will, in its ultimate modification, form only a part of our Eastern doctrine of Evolution, which will be Manu and Kapila Esoterically explained.

[pg 658]

Section XIII. Forces—Modes of Motion or Intelligences?

This is, then, the last word of Physical Science up to the present year, 1888. Mechanical laws will never be able to prove the homogeneity of Primeval Matter, except inferentially and as a desperate necessity, when there will remain no other issue—as in the case of Ether. Modern Science is secure only in its own domain and region; within the physical boundaries of our Solar System, beyond which everything, every particle of Matter, is different from the Matter it knows, and where Matter exists in states of which Science can form no idea. This Matter, which is truly homogeneous, is beyond human perception, if perception is tied down merely to the five senses. We feel its effects through those Intelligences which are the results of its primeval differentiation, whom we name Dhyân Chohans, called in the Hermetic works the “Seven Governors”; those to whom Pymander, the “Thought Divine,” refers as the “Building Powers,” and whom Asklepios calls the “Supernal Gods.” This Matter—the real Primordial Substance, the Noumenon of all the “matter” we know of—some of our Astronomers even have been led to believe in, for they despair of the possibility of ever accounting for rotation, gravitation, and the origin of any mechanical physical laws, unless these Intelligences be admitted by Science. In the above-quoted work upon Astronomy by Wolf,1035 the author endorses fully the theory of Kant, and the latter theory, if not in its general aspect, at any rate in some of its features, reminds one strongly of certain Esoteric Teachings. Here we have the world's system “reborn from its ashes,” through a nebula—the emanation from the bodies, dead and dissolved in Space, resultant of the incandescence of the Solar Centre—reänimated by the combustible matter of the Planets. In this theory, generated and developed in the [pg 659] brain of a young man hardly twenty-five years of age, who had never left his native place, Königsberg, a small town of Northern Prussia, one can hardly fail to recognize either the presence of an inspiring external power, or an evidence of the reïncarnation which the Occultists see in it. It fills a gap which Newton, with all his genius, failed to bridge. And surely it is our Primeval Matter, Âkâsha, that Kant had in view, when he postulated a universally pervading primordial Substance, in order to solve Newton's difficulty, and his failure to explain, by natural forces alone, the primitive impulse imparted to the Planets. For, as he remarks in Chapter viii, if it is once admitted that the perfect harmony of the Stars and Planets and the coincidence of their orbital planes prove the existence of a natural Cause, which would thus be the Primal Cause, “that Cause cannot really be the matter which fills to-day the heavenly spaces.” It must be that which filled Space—was Space—originally, whose motion in differentiated Matter was the origin of the actual movements of the sidereal bodies; and which, “in condensing itself in those very bodies, thus abandoned the space that is to-day found void.” In other words, it is of that same Matter that are now composed the Planets, Comets, and the Sun himself, and that Matter, having originally formed itself into those bodies, has preserved its inherent quality of motion; which quality, now centred in their nuclei, directs all motion. A very slight alteration of words in this is needed, and a few additions, to make of it our Esoteric Doctrine.

The latter teaches that it is this original, primordial Prima Materia, divine and intelligent, the direct emanation of the Universal Mind, the Daiviprakriti—the Divine Light1036 emanating from the Logos—which formed the nuclei of all the “self-moving” orbs in Kosmos. It is the informing, ever-present moving-power and life-principle, the Vital Soul of the Suns, Moons, Planets, and even of our Earth; the former latent, the latter active—the invisible Ruler and Guide of the gross body attached to, and connected with, its Soul, which is the spiritual emanation, after all, of these respective Planetary Spirits.

Another quite Occult Doctrine is the theory of Kant, that the Matter of which the inhabitants and the animals of other Planets are formed is of a lighter and more subtle nature and of a more perfect conformation, in proportion to their distance from the Sun. The latter is too full of Vital Electricity, of the physical, life-giving principle. Therefore, the men [pg 660] on Mars are more ethereal than we are, while those on Venus are more gross, though far more intelligent, if less spiritual.

The last doctrine is not quite ours—yet these Kantian theories are as metaphysical, and as transcendental as any Occult Doctrines; and more than one man of Science would, if he but dared speak his mind, accept them as Wolf does. From this Kantian Mind and Soul of the Suns and Stars to the Mahat (Mind) and Prakriti of the Purânas there is but a step. After all, the admission of this by Science would be only the admission of a natural cause, whether it would or would not stretch its belief to such metaphysical heights. But then Mahat, the Mind, is a “God,” and Physiology admits “mind” only as a temporary function of the material brain, and no more.

The Satan of Materialism now laughs at all alike, and denies the visible as well as the invisible. Seeing in light, heat, electricity, and even in the phenomenon of life, only properties inherent in Matter, it laughs whenever life is called the Vital Principle, and derides the idea of its being independent of and distinct from the organism.

But here again scientific opinions differ as in everything else, and there are several men of Science who accept views very similar to ours. Consider, for instance, what Dr. Richardson, F.R.S. (elsewhere quoted at length) says of that “Vital Principle,” which he calls “Nervous Ether”:

I speak only of a veritable material agent, refined, it may be, to the world at large, but actual and substantial: an agent having quality of weight and of volume, an agent susceptible of chemical combination, and thereby of change of physical state and condition, an agent passive in its action, moved always, that is to say, by influences apart from itself,1037 obeying other influences, an agent possessing no initiative power, no vis or energeia naturæ,1038 but still playing a most important, if not a primary part in the production of the phenomena resulting from the action of the energeia upon visible matter.1039

As Biology and Physiology now deny, in toto, the existence of a Vital Principle, this extract, together with De Quatrefages' admission, is a clear confirmation that there are men of Science who take the same views about “things Occult” as do Theosophists and Occultists. These recognize a distinct Vital Principle independent of the organism—material, [pg 661] of course, as physical Force cannot be divorced from Matter, but of a Substance existing in a state unknown to Science. Life for them is something more than the mere interaction of molecules and atoms. There is a Vital Principle without which no molecular combinations could ever have resulted in a living organism, least of all in the so-called “inorganic” Matter of our plane of consciousness.

By “molecular combinations” are meant, of course, those of the Matter of our present illusive perceptions, which Matter energizes only on this, our plane. And this is the chief point at issue.1040

Thus the Occultists are not alone in their beliefs. Nor are they so foolish, after all, in rejecting even the “gravity” of Modern Science along with other physical laws, and in accepting instead attraction and repulsion. They see, moreover, in these two opposite Forces only the two aspects of the Universal Unit, called Manifesting Mind; in which aspects, Occultism, through its great Seers, perceives an innumerable Host of operative Beings: cosmic Dhyân Chohans, Entities, whose essence, in its dual nature, is the Cause of all terrestrial phenomena. For that essence is con-substantial with the universal Electric Ocean, which is Life; and being dual, as said—positive and negative—it is the emanations of that duality that act now on Earth under the name of “modes of motion”; even Force having now become objectionable as a word, for fear it should lead someone, even in thought, to separate it from Matter! It is, as Occultism says, the dual effects of that dual essence, which have now been called centripetal and centrifugal forces, now negative and positive poles, or polarity, heat and cold, light and darkness, etc.

And it is further maintained that even the Greek and Roman Catholic Christians are wiser in believing, as they do—even if blindly connecting and tracing them all to an anthropomorphic God—in Angels, Archangels, Archons, Seraphs, and Morning Stars, in all those theological deliciæ humani generis, in short, that rule the Cosmic Elements, than Science is, in disbelieving in them altogether, and in [pg 662] advocating its mechanical Forces. For these act very often with more than human intelligence and pertinency. Nevertheless, that intelligence is denied and attributed to blind chance. But, as De Maistre was right in calling the law of gravitation merely a word which replaced “the thing unknown,” so are we right in applying the same remark to all the other Forces of Science. And if it is objected that the Count was an ardent Roman Catholic, then we may cite Le Couturier, as ardent a Materialist, who said the same thing, as did also Herschell and many others.1041

From Gods to men, from Worlds to atoms, from a Star to a rush-light, from the Sun to the vital heat of the meanest organic being—the world of Form and Existence is an immense chain, the links of which are all connected. The Law of Analogy is the first key to the world-problem, and these links have to be studied coördinately in their Occult relations to each other.

When, therefore, the Secret Doctrine—postulating that conditioned or limited space (location) has no real being except in this world of illusion, or, in other words, in our perceptive faculties—teaches that every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is interblended with our own objective world; that millions of things and beings are, in point of localization, around and in us, as we are around, with, and in them; this is no mere metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature, however incomprehensible to our senses.

But one has to understand the phraseology of Occultism before criticizing what it asserts. For example, the Doctrine refuses—as Science does, in one sense—to use the words “above” and “below,” “higher” and “lower,” in reference to invisible spheres, since here they are without meaning. Even the terms “East” and “West” are merely conventional, necessary only to aid our human perceptions. For though the Earth has its two fixed points in the poles, North and South, yet both East and West are variable relatively to our own position on the Earth's surface, and in consequence of its rotation from West to East. Hence, when “other worlds” are mentioned—whether better or worse, more spiritual or still more material, though both invisible—the Occultist does not locate these spheres either outside or inside our Earth, as the theologians and the poets do; for their location is nowhere in the space known to, or conceived by, the profane. They are, as it were, blended with our world—interpenetrating [pg 663] it and interpenetrated by it. There are millions and millions of worlds and firmaments visible to us; there are still greater numbers beyond those visible to the telescope, and many of the latter kind do not belong to our objective sphere of existence. Although as invisible as if they were millions of miles beyond our Solar System, they are yet with us, near us, within our own world, as objective and material to their respective inhabitants as ours is to us. But, again, the relation of these worlds to ours is not that of a series of egg-shaped boxes enclosed one within the other, like the toys called Chinese nests; each is entirely under its own special laws and conditions, having no direct relation to our sphere. The inhabitants of these, as already said, may be, for all we know, or feel, passing through and around us as if through empty space, their very habitations and countries being interblended with ours, though not disturbing our vision, because we have not yet the faculties necessary for discerning them. Yet by their spiritual sight the Adepts, and even some seers and sensitives, are always able to discern, whether in a greater or smaller degree, the presence and close proximity to us of Beings pertaining to other spheres of life. Those of the spiritually higher worlds communicate only with those terrestrial mortals who ascend to them, through individual efforts, on to the higher plane they are occupying.

The sons of Bhûmi [Earth] regard the Sons of Deva-lokas [Angel-spheres] as their Gods; and the Sons of lower kingdoms look up to the men of Bhûmi as to their Devas [Gods]; men remaining unaware of it in their blindness.... They [men] tremble before them while using them [for magical purposes].... The First Race of Men were the “Mind-born Sons” of the former. They [the Pitris and Devas] are our progenitors.1042

“Educated people,” so-called, deride the idea of Sylphs, Salamanders, Undines, and Gnomes; the men of Science regard any mention of such superstitions as an insult; and with a contempt of logic and common good sense, that is often the prerogative of “accepted authority,” they allow those, whom it is their duty to instruct, to labour under the absurd impression that in the whole Kosmos, or at any rate in our own atmosphere, there are no other conscious, intelligent beings, save ourselves.1043 Any other humanity (composed of distinct human beings) save a mankind with two legs, two arms, and a head with [pg 664] man's features on it, would not be called human; though the etymology of the word would seem to have little to do with the general appearance of a creature. Thus, while Science sternly rejects even the possibility of there being such (to us, generally) invisible creatures, Society, while believing in it all secretly, is made to deride the idea openly. It hails with mirth such works as the Comte de Gabalis, and fails to understand that open satire is the securest mask.

Nevertheless, such invisible worlds do exist. Inhabited as thickly as is our own, they are scattered throughout apparent Space in immense numbers; some far more material than our own world, others gradually etherealizing until they become formless and are as “breaths.” The fact that our physical eye does not see them, is no reason for disbelieving in them. Physicists cannot see their Ether, Atoms, “modes of motion,” or Forces. Yet they accept and teach them.

If we find, even in the natural world with which we are acquainted, Matter affording a partial analogy to the difficult conception of such invisible worlds, there seems little difficulty in recognizing the possibility of such a presence. The tail of a Comet, which, though attracting our attention by virtue of its luminosity, yet does not disturb or impede our vision of objects, which we perceive through and beyond it, affords the first stepping-stone toward a proof of the same. The tail of a Comet passes rapidly across our horizon, and we should neither feel it, nor be cognizant of its passage, but for the brilliant coruscation, often perceived only by a few interested in the phenomenon, while everyone else remains ignorant of its presence and of its passage through, or across, a portion of our globe. This tail may, or may not, be an integral portion of the being of the Comet, but its tenuity subserves our purpose as an illustration. Indeed, it is no question of superstition, but simply a result of transcendental Science, and of logic still more, to admit the existence of worlds formed of even far more attenuated Matter than the tail of a Comet. By denying such a possibility, Science has for the last century played into the hands of neither Philosophy nor true Religion, but simply into those of Theology. To be able to dispute the better the plurality of even material worlds, a belief thought by many churchmen incompatible with the teachings and doctrines of the Bible,1044 Maxwell had to calumniate the [pg 665] memory of Newton, and to try and convince his public that the principles contained in the Newtonian philosophy are those “which lie at the foundation of all atheistical systems.”1045

“Dr. Whewell disputed the plurality of worlds by appeal to scientific evidence,” writes Professor Winchell.1046 And if even the habitability of physical worlds, of Planets, and distant Stars which shine in myriads over our heads is so disputed, how little chance is there for the acceptance of invisible worlds within the apparently transparent space of our own!

But, if we can conceive of a world composed of Matter still more attenuated to our senses than the tail of a Comet, hence of inhabitants in it who are as ethereal, in proportion to their Globe, as we are in comparison with our rocky, hard-crusted Earth, no wonder if we do not perceive them, nor sense their presence or even existence. Only, in what is the idea contrary to Science? Cannot men and animals, plants and rocks, be supposed to be endowed with quite a different set of senses from those we possess? Cannot their organisms be born, develop, and exist, under other laws of being than those that rule our little world? Is it absolutely necessary that every corporeal being should be clothed in “coats of skin” like those that Adam and Eve were provided with in the legend of Genesis? Corporeality, we are told, however, by more than one man of Science, “may exist under very divergent conditions.” Professor A. Winchell—arguing upon the plurality of worlds—makes the following remarks:

It is not at all improbable that substances of a refractory nature might be so mixed with other substances, known or unknown to us, as to be capable of enduring vastly greater vicissitudes of heat and cold than is possible with terrestrial organisms. The tissues of terrestrial animals are simply suited to terrestrial conditions. Yet even here we find different types and species of animals adapted to the trials of extremely dissimilar situations.... That an animal should be a quadruped or a biped is something not depending on the necessities of organization, or instinct, or intelligence. That an animal should possess just five senses is not a necessity of percipient existence. There may be animals on the earth with neither smell nor taste. There may be beings on other worlds, and even on this, who possess more numerous senses than we. The possibility of this is apparent when we consider the high probability that other properties and other modes of existence lie among the resources of the Cosmos, and even of terrestrial matter. There are animals which subsist where rational man would perish—in the soil, in [pg 666]the river, and the sea ... [and why not human beings of different organizations, in such case?].... Nor is incorporated rational existence conditioned on warm blood, nor on any temperature which does not change the forms of matter of which the organism may be composed. There may be intelligences corporealized after some concept not involving the processes of injection, assimilation, and reproduction. Such bodies would not require daily food and warmth. They might be lost in the abysses of the ocean, or laid up on a stormy cliff through the tempests of an Arctic winter, or plunged in a volcano for a hundred years, and yet retain consciousness and thought. It is conceivable. Why might not psychic natures be enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum? These substances are no further from the nature of intelligence than carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and lime. But, not to carry the thought to such an extreme [?], might not high intelligence be embodied in frames as indifferent to external conditions as the sage of the western plains, or the lichens of Labrador, the rotifers which remain dried for years, or the bacteria which pass living through boiling water.... These suggestions are made simply to remind the reader how little can be argued respecting the necessary conditions of intelligent, organized existence, from the standard of corporeal existence found upon the earth. Intelligence is, from its nature, as universal and as uniform as the laws of the universe. Bodies are merely the local fitting of intelligence to particular modifications of universal matter or force.1047

Do not we know through the discoveries of that same all-denying Science that we are surrounded by myriads of invisible lives? If these microbes, bacteria and the tutti quanti of the infinitesimally small, are invisible to us by virtue of their minuteness, cannot there be, at the other pole, beings as invisible owing to the quality of their texture or matter—to its tenuity, in fact? Conversely, as to the effects of cometary matter, have we not another example of a half visible form of Life and Matter? The ray of sunlight entering our apartment reveals in its passage myriads of tiny beings living their little life and ceasing to be, independent and heedless of whether they are or are not perceived by our grosser materiality. And so again, of the microbes and bacteria and such-like unseen beings in other elements. We passed them by, during those long centuries of dreary ignorance, after the lamp of knowledge in the heathen and highly philosophical systems had ceased to throw its bright light on the ages of intolerance and bigotry of early Christianity; and we would fain pass them by again now.

And yet these lives surrounded us then as they do now. They have worked on, obedient to their own laws, and it is only as they have been gradually revealed by Science that we have begun to take cognizance of them and of the effects produced by them.

[pg 667]

How long has it taken the world to become what it now is? If it can be said that even up to the present day cosmic dust, “which has never belonged to the earth before,”1048 reaches our Globe, how much more logical is it to believe—as the Occultists do—that through the countless millions of years that have rolled away since that dust aggregated and formed the Globe we live in round its nucleus of intelligent Primeval Substance, many humanities—differing from our present mankind as greatly as the humanity which will evolve millions of years hence will differ from our races—appeared but to disappear from the face of the Earth, as will our own. These primitive and far-distant humanities are denied, because, as Geologists think, they have left no tangible relics of themselves. All trace of them is swept away, and therefore they have never existed. Yet their relics—though very few of them, truly—are to be found, and they must be discovered by geological research. But, even if they were never to be met with, there would be no reason to say that no men could have ever lived in the geological periods to which their presence on earth is assigned. For their organisms needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, no feeding; the author of World-Life is right, and there is no extravagance in believing as we do, that as, on scientific hypotheses, there may be to this day “psychic natures enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum,” so there were psychic natures enshrined in forms of equally indestructible Primeval Matter—the real forefathers of our Fifth Race.

When, therefore, as in Volume II, we speak of men who inhabited this Globe 18,000,000 years ago, we have in mind neither the men of our present races, nor the present atmospheric laws, thermal conditions, etc. The Earth and Mankind, like the Sun, Moon, and Planets, all have their growth, changes, development, and gradual evolution in their life-periods; they are born, become infants, then children, adolescent, grown-up, they grow old, and finally die. Why should not Mankind be also under this universal law? Says Uriel to Enoch:

Behold, I have showed thee all things, O Enoch.... Thou seest the sun, the moon, and those which conduct the stars of heaven, which cause all their operations, seasons, and arrivals to return. In the days of sinners the years shall be shortened ... everything done on earth shall be subverted ... the moon shall change its laws.1049

[pg 668]

The “days of sinners” meant the days when Matter would be in its full sway on Earth, and man would have reached the apex of physical development in stature and animality. That came to pass during the period of the Atlanteans, about the middle point of their Race, the Fourth, which was drowned, as prophesied by Uriel. Since then man has been decreasing in physical stature, strength, and years, as will be shown in Volume II. But as we are at the mid-point of our sub-race of the Fifth Root-Race—the acme of materiality in each—the animal propensities, though more refined, are none the less developed; and this is most marked in civilized countries.

[pg 669]

Section XIV. Gods, Monads and Atoms.

Some years ago we remarked that:

The Esoteric Doctrine may well be called ... the “Thread Doctrine,” since, like Sûtrâtmâ [in the Vedânta Philosophy]1050, it passes through and strings together all the ancient philosophical religious systems, and ... reconciles and explains them.1051

We now say it does more. It not only reconciles the various and apparently conflicting systems, but it checks the discoveries of modern exact Science, showing some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are found corroborated in the Ancient Records. All this will, no doubt, be regarded as terribly impertinent and disrespectful, a veritable crime of lèse-science; nevertheless, it is a fact.

Science is, undeniably, ultra-materialistic in our days; but it finds, in one sense, its justification. Nature behaving ever esoterically in actu, and being, as the Kabalists say, in abscondito, can only be judged by the profane through her appearance, and that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane. On the other hand, the Naturalists refuse to blend Physics with Metaphysics, the Body with its informing Soul and Spirit. They prefer to ignore the latter. This is a matter of choice with some, while the minority very sensibly strive to enlarge the domain of Physical Science by trespassing on the forbidden grounds of Metaphysics, so distasteful to some Materialists. These Scientists are wise in their generation. For all their wonderful discoveries will go for nothing, and remain for ever headless bodies, unless they lift the veil of Matter and strain their eyes to see beyond. Now that they have studied Nature in the length, breadth, and thickness of her physical frame, it is time to remove the skeleton to the second [pg 670] plane, and search within the unknown depths for the living and real entity, for its sub-stance—the noumenon of evanescent Matter.

It is only by acting along such lines that some truths, now called “exploded superstitions,” will be discovered to be facts, and the relics of ancient knowledge and wisdom.

One of such “degrading” beliefs—degrading in the opinion of the all-denying Sceptic—is found in the idea that Kosmos, besides its objective planetary inhabitants, its humanities in other inhabited worlds, is full of invisible, intelligent Existences. The so-called Arch-Angels, Angels and Spirits, of the West, copies of their prototypes, the Dhyân Chohans, the Devas and Pitris, of the East, are not real Beings, but fictions. On this point materialistic Science is inexorable. To support its position, it upsets its own axiomatic law of uniformity and of continuity in the laws of Nature, and all the logical sequence of analogies in the evolution of Being. The masses of the profane are asked, and are made to believe that the accumulated testimony of History—which shows even the “Atheists” of old, such men as Epicurus and Democritus, as believers in Gods—is false; and that Philosophers like Socrates and Plato, asserting such existences, were mistaken enthusiasts and fools. If we hold our opinions merely on historical grounds, on the authority of legions of the most eminent Sages, Neo-Platonists, and Mystics in all ages, from Pythagoras down to the eminent Scientists and Professors of the present century, who, if they reject “Gods,” believe in “Spirits,” are we to consider such authorities to be as weak-minded and foolish as any Roman Catholic peasant, who believes in and prays to his once human Saint, or the Archangel St. Michael? But is there no difference between the belief of the peasant and that of the Western heirs of the Rosicrucians and Alchemists of the Middle Ages? Is it the Van Helmonts, the Khunraths, the Paracelsuses and Agrippas, from Roger Bacon down to St. Germain, who were all blind enthusiasts, hysteriacs or cheats, or is it the handful of modern Sceptics—the “leaders of thought”—who are struck with the cecity of negation? The latter is the case, we opine. It would indeed be a miracle, quite an abnormal fact in the realm of probabilities and logic, were that handful of negators to be the sole custodians of truth, while the million-strong hosts of believers in Gods, Angels, and Spirits—in Europe and America alone—namely, Greek and Latin Christians, Theosophists, Spiritualists, Mystics, etc., should be no better than deluded fanatics and hallucinated mediums, and [pg 671] often no higher than the victims of deceivers and impostors! However varying in their external presentations and dogmas, beliefs in the Hosts of invisible Intelligences of various grades have all the same foundation. Truth and error are mixed in all. The exact extent, depth, breadth, and length of the mysteries of Nature are to be found only in Eastern Esoteric Science. So vast and so profound are these that scarcely even a few, a very few of the highest Initiates—those whose very existence is known but to a small number of Adepts—are capable of assimilating the knowledge. Yet it is all there, and one by one facts and processes in Nature's workshops are permitted to find their way into exact Science, while mysterious help is given to rare individuals in unravelling its arcana. It is at the close of great Cycles, in connection with racial development, that such events generally take place. We are at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Âryan Kali Yuga; and between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic Science will receive a death-blow.

Without throwing any discredit upon time-honoured beliefs, in any direction, we are forced to draw a marked line between blind faith, evolved by theologies, and knowledge due to the independent researches of long generations of Adepts; between, in short, faith and Philosophy. There have been, in all ages, undeniably learned and good men who, having been reared in sectarian beliefs, died in their crystallized convictions. For Protestants, the garden of Eden is the primeval point of departure in the drama of Humanity, and the solemn tragedy on the summit of Calvary is the prelude to the hoped-for Millennium. For Roman Catholics, Satan is at the foundation of Kosmos, Christ in its centre, and Antichrist at its apex. For both, the Hierarchy of Being begins and ends within the narrow frames of their respective theologies: one self-created personal God, and an empyrean ringing with the Hallelujas of created Angels; the rest, false Gods, Satan and fiends.

Theo-Philosophy proceeds on broader lines. From the very beginning of æons—in time and space in our Round and Globe—the mysteries of Nature (at any rate, those which it is lawful for our Races to know) were recorded by the pupils of those same, now invisible, “Heavenly Men,” in geometrical figures and symbols. The keys thereto passed from one generation of “Wise Men” to another. Some of the symbols thus passed from the East to the West, brought from the Orient by Pythagoras, who was not the inventor of his famous [pg 672] “Triangle.” The latter figure, along with the square and circle, are more eloquent and scientific descriptions of the order of the evolution of the Universe, spiritual and psychic, as well as physical, than volumes of descriptive Cosmogonies and revealed “Geneses.” The ten Points inscribed within that “Pythagorean Triangle” are worth all the theogonies and angelologies ever emanated from the theological brain. For he who interprets these seventeen points (the seven Mathematical Points hidden)—on their very face, and in the order given—will find in them the uninterrupted series of the genealogies from the first Heavenly to Terrestrial Man. And, as they give the order of Beings, so they reveal the order in which were evolved the Kosmos, our Earth, and the primordial Elements by which the latter was generated. Begotten in the invisible “Depths,” and in the Womb of the same “Mother” as its fellow-globes—he who masters the mysteries of our own Earth will have mastered those of all others.

Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary, Esoteric Cosmology can be shown to be inseparably connected with both Philosophy and Modern Science. The Gods and Monads of the Ancients—from Pythagoras down to Leibnitz—and the Atoms of the present materialistic schools (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists) are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which begins with body and ends with Spirit. In the Occult Sciences they can be studied separately, but they can never be mastered unless they are viewed in their mutual correlations during their life-cycle, and as a Universal Unity during Pralayas.

La Pluche shows sincerity, but gives a poor idea of his philosophical capacities, when declaring his personal views on the Monad or the Mathematical Point. He says:

A point is enough to put all the schools in the world in a combustion. But what need has man to know that point, since the creation of such a small being is beyond his power? À fortiori, philosophy acts against probability when, from that point which absorbs and disconcerts all her meditations, she presumes to pass on to the generation of the world.

Philosophy, however, could never have formed its conception of a logical, universal, and absolute Deity, if it had had no Mathematical Point within the Circle upon which to base its speculations. It is only the manifested Point, lost to our senses after its pregenetic appearance in the infinitude and incognizability of the Circle, that makes a reconciliation [pg 673] between Philosophy and Theology possible—on condition that the latter should abandon its crude materialistic dogmas. And it is because Christian theology has so unwisely rejected the Pythagorean Monad and geometrical figures, that it has evolved its self-created human and personal God, the monstrous Head whence flow in two streams the dogmas of Salvation and Damnation. This is so true, that even those clergymen who are Masons, and who would be Philosophers, have, in their arbitrary interpretations, fathered upon the Ancient Sages the queer idea that:

The Monad represented [with them] the throne of the Omnipotent Deity, placed in the centre of the empyrean to indicate T.G.A.O.T.U. [read the “Great Architect of the Universe”].1052

A curious explanation this, more Masonic than strictly Pythagorean.

Nor did the “Hierogram within a Circle, or equilateral Triangle,” ever mean “the exemplification of the unity of the divine Essence”; for this was exemplified by the plane of the boundless Circle. What it really meant was the triune coëqual Nature of the first differentiated Substance, or the con-substantiality of the (manifested) Spirit, Matter and the Universe—their “Son”—which proceeds from the Point, the real, Esoteric Logos, or Pythagorean Monad. For the Greek Monas signifies “Unity” in its primary sense. Those unable to seize the difference between the Monad—the Universal Unit—and the Monads or the manifested Unity, as also between the ever-hidden and the revealed Logos, or the Word, ought never to meddle with Philosophy, let alone with the Esoteric Sciences. It is needless to remind the educated reader of Kant's Thesis to demonstrate his second Antinomy.1053 Those who have read and understood it will see clearly the line we draw between the absolutely ideal Universe and the invisible though manifested Kosmos. Our Gods and Monads are not the Elements of extension itself, but only those of the invisible Reality which is the basis of the manifested Kosmos. Neither Esoteric Philosophy, nor Kant, to say nothing of Leibnitz, would ever admit that extension can be composed of simple or unextended parts. But theologian-philosophers will not grasp this. The Circle and the Point—the latter retiring into and merging with the former, after having emanated the first three Points and connected them with lines, thus forming the first noumenal basis of the Second Triangle in the Manifested World—have [pg 674] ever been an insuperable obstacle to theological flights into dogmatic empyreans. On the authority of this Archaic Symbol, a male, personal God, the Creator and Father of all, becomes a third-rate emanation, the Sephira standing fourth in descent, and on the left hand of Ain Suph, in the Kabalistic Tree of Life. Hence, the Monad is degraded into a Vehicle—a “Throne”!

The Monad—the emanation and reflection only of the Point, or Logos, in the phenomenal World—becomes, as the apex of the manifested equilateral Triangle, the “Father.” The left side or line is the Duad, the “Mother,” regarded as the evil, counteracting principle;1054 the right side represents the “Son,” “his Mother's Husband” in every Cosmogony, as being one with the apex; the base line is the universal plane of productive Nature, unifying on the phenomenal plane Father-Mother-Son, as these were unified in the apex, in the supersensuous World.1055 By mystic transmutation they became the Quaternary—the Triangle became the Tetraktys.

This transcendental application of geometry to cosmic and divine theogony—the Alpha and the Omega of mystical conception—was dwarfed after Pythagoras by Aristotle. By omitting the Point and the Circle, and taking no account of the apex, he reduced the metaphysical value of the idea, and thus limited the doctrine of magnitude to a simple Triad—the line, the surface, and the body. His modern heirs, who play at Idealism, have interpreted these three geometrical figures as Space, Force, and Matter—“the potencies of an interacting Unity.” Materialistic Science, perceiving but the base line of the manifested Triangle—the plane of Matter—translates it practically as (Father)-Matter, (Mother)-Matter, and (Son)-Matter, and theoretically as Matter, Force, and Correlation.

But to the average Physicist, as remarked by a Kabalist:

Space, and Force, and Matter, are what signs in Algebra are to the Mathematician, merely conventional symbols, or Force as Force, and Matter as Matter, are as absolutely unknowable as is the assumed empty space in which they are held to interact.1056

[pg 675]

Symbols represent abstractions, and on these

The physicist bases reasoned hypotheses of the origin of things ... he sees three needs in what he terms creation: A place wherein to create. A medium by which to create. A material from which to create. And in giving a logical expression to this hypothesis through the terms space, force, matter, he believes he has proved the existence of that which each of these represents as he conceives it to be.1057

The Physicist who regards Space merely as a representation of our mind, or extension unrelated to things in it, which Locke defined as capable of neither resistance nor motion; the paradoxical Materialist, who would have a void there, where he can see no Matter, would reject with the utmost contempt the proposition that Space is

A substantial though [apparently an absolutely] unknowable living Entity.1058

Such is, nevertheless, the Kabalistic teaching, and it is that of Archaic Philosophy. Space is the real World, while our world is an artificial one. It is the One Unity throughout its infinitude: in its bottomless depths as on its illusive surface; a surface studded with countless phenomenal Universes, Systems and mirage-like Worlds. Nevertheless, to the Eastern Occultist, who is an objective Idealist at bottom, in the real World, which is a Unity of Forces, there is “a connection of all Matter in the Plenum,” as Leibnitz would say. This is symbolized in the Pythagorean Triangle.

It consists of Ten Points inscribed pyramid-like (from one to four) within its three sides, and it symbolizes the Universe in the famous Pythagorean Decad. The upper single point is a Monad, and represents a Unit-Point, which is the Unity whence all proceeds. All is of the same essence with it. While the ten points within the equilateral Triangle represent the phenomenal world, the three sides enclosing the pyramid of points are the barriers of noumenal Matter, or Substance, that separate it from the world of Thought.

Pythagoras considered a point to correspond in proportion to unity; a line to 2; a superfice to 3; a solid to 4; and he defined a point as a monad having position, and the beginning of all things; a line was thought to correspond with duality, because it was produced by the first motion from indivisible nature, and formed the junction of two points. A superfice was compared to the number three because it is the first of all causes that are found in figures; for a circle, which is the principal of all round figures, comprises a triad, in centre—space—circumference. But a triangle, which is the first of all rectilineal figures, is included in a ternary, and receives its form according to that number; and was considered by [pg 676]the Pythagoreans to be the author of all sublunary things. The four points at the base of the Pythagorean triangle correspond with a solid or cube, which combines the principles of length, breadth, and thickness, for no solid can have less than four extreme boundary points.1059

It is argued that “the human mind cannot conceive an indivisible unit short of the annihilation of the idea with its subject.” This is an error, as the Pythagoreans have proved, and a number of Seers before them, although there is a special training needed for the conception, and although the profane mind can hardly grasp it. But there are such things as “Meta-mathematics” and “Meta-geometry.” Even Mathematics pure and simple proceed from the universal to the particular, from the mathematical indivisible point to solid figures. The teaching originated in India, and was taught in Europe by Pythagoras, who, throwing a veil over the Circle and the Point—which no living man can define except as incomprehensible abstractions—laid the origin of the differentiated cosmic Matter in the base of the Triangle. Thus the latter became the earliest of geometrical figures. The author of New Aspects of Life, dealing with the Kabalistic Mysteries, objects to the objectivization, so to speak, of the Pythagorean conception and the use of the equilateral triangle, and calls it a “misnomer.” His argument that a solid equilateral body—

One whose base, as well as each of its sides, form equal triangles—must have four co-equal sides or surfaces, while a triangular plane will as necessarily possess five,1060

—demonstrates on the contrary the grandeur of the conception in all its Esoteric application to the idea of the pregenesis, and the genesis of Kosmos. Granted, that an ideal Triangle, depicted by mathematical, imaginary lines,

Can have no sides at all, being simply a phantom of the mind to which, if sides be imputed, these must be the sides of the object it constructively represents.1061

But in such case most of the scientific hypotheses are no better than “phantoms of the mind”; they are unverifiable, except on inference, and have been adopted merely to answer scientific necessities. Furthermore, the ideal Triangle—“as the abstract idea of a triangular body, and, therefore, as the type of an abstract idea”—accomplished and carried out to perfection the double symbolism intended. As an emblem applicable to the objective idea, the simple triangle became a solid. When repeated in stone, facing the four cardinal points, it [pg 677] assumed the shape of the Pyramid—the symbol of the phenomenal merging into the noumenal Universe of thought, at the apex of the four triangles; and, as an “imaginary figure constructed of three mathematical lines,” it symbolized the subjective spheres—these lines “enclosing a mathematical space—which is equal to nothing enclosing nothing.” And this because, to the senses and the untrained consciousness of the Profane and the Scientist, everything beyond the line of differentiated Matter—i.e., outside of, and beyond the realm of even the most Spiritual Substance—has to remain for ever equal to nothing. It is the Ain Suph—the No Thing.

Yet these “phantoms of the mind” are in truth no greater abstractions than the abstract ideas in general as to evolution and physical development—e.g., Gravity, Matter, Force, etc.—on which the exact Sciences are based. Our most eminent Chemists and Physicists are earnestly pursuing the not hopeless attempt of finally tracing to its hiding-place the Protyle, or the basic line of the Pythagorean Triangle. The latter is, as we have said, the grandest conception imaginable, for it symbolizes both the ideal and the visible universes.1062 For if

The possible unit is only a possibility as an actuality of nature, as an individual of any kind, [and as] every individual natural object is capable of division, and by division loses its unity, or ceases to be a unit,1063

this is true only of the realm of exact Science in a world as deceptive as it is illusive. In the realm of Esoteric Science the Unit divided ad infinitum, instead of losing its unity, approaches with every division the planes of the only eternal Reality. The eye of the Seer can follow it and behold it in all its pregenetic glory. This same idea of the reality of the subjective, and the unreality of the objective Universe, is found at the bottom of the Pythagorean and Platonic Teachings—limited to the Elect alone; for Porphyry, speaking of the Monad and the Duad, says that the former only was considered substantial and real, “that most simple Being, the cause of all unity and the measure of all things.”

But the Duad, although the origin of Evil, or Matter—hence unreal in Philosophy—is still Substance during Manvantara, and is often called the Third Monad, in Occultism, and the connecting line as between two Points, or Numbers, which proceeded from That, “which [pg 678] was before all Numbers,” as expressed by Rabbi Barahiel. And from this Duad proceeded all the Scintillas of the three Upper and the four Lower Worlds or Planes—which are in constant interaction and correspondence. This is a teaching which the Kabalah has in common with Eastern Occultism. For in the Occult Philosophy there is the “One Cause” and the “Primal Cause,” the latter thus becoming, paradoxically, the Second, as is clearly expressed by the author of the Qabbalah, from the Philosophical Writings of Ibn Gabirol, who says:

In the treatment of the Primal Cause, two things must be considered, the Primal Cause per se, and the relation and connection of the Primal Cause with the visible and unseen universe.1064

Thus he shows the early Hebrews, as the later Arabians, following in the steps of the Oriental Philosophy, such as the Chaldean, Persian, Hindû, etc. Their Primal Cause was designated at first,

By the triadic שדי Shaddaï, the [triune] Almighty, subsequently by the Tetragrammaton, יהוה, YHVH symbol of the Past, Present, and Future,1065

and, let us add, of the eternal IS, or the I AM. Moreover, in the Kabalah the name YHVH (or Jehovah) expresses a He and a She, male and female, two in one, or Chokmah and Binah, and his, or rather their Shekinah or synthesizing Spirit (or Grace), which again makes of the Duad a Triad. This is demonstrated in the Jewish Liturgy for Pentecost, and the prayer:

“In the name of Unity, of the Holy and Blessed Hû [He], and His She'keenah, the Hidden and Concealed Hû, blessed be YHVH [the Quaternary] for ever.” Hû is said to be masculine and YaH feminine, together they make the יהוה אחד i.e., one YHVH. One, but of a male-female nature. The She'keenah is always considered in the Qabbalah as feminine.1066

And so it is considered in the exoteric Purânas, for Shekinah is no more than Shakti—the female double of any God—in such case. And so it was with the early Christians, whose Holy Spirit was feminine, as Sophia was with the Gnostics. But in the transcendental Chaldean Kabalah, or Book of Numbers, Shekinah is sexless, and the purest abstraction, a state, like Nirvâna, neither subject nor object, nor anything except an absolute Presence.

Thus it is only in the anthropomorphized systems—such as the Kabalah has now for the most part become—that Shekinah-Shakti is feminine. As such she becomes the Duad of Pythagoras, the two straight lines which can form no geometrical figure and are the symbol [pg 679] of Matter. Out of this Duad, when united in the basic line of the Triangle on the lower plane (the upper Triangle of the Sephirothal Tree), emerge the Elohim, or Deity in Cosmic Nature, with the true Kabalists the lowest designation, translated in the Bible “God.”1067 Out of these (the Elohim) issue the Scintillas.

The Scintillas are the “Souls,” and these Souls appear in the three-fold form of Monads (Units), Atoms and Gods—according to our Teaching. As says the Esoteric Catechism:

Every Atom becomes a visible complex unit [a molecule], and once attracted into the sphere of terrestrial activity, the Monadic Essence, passing through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, becomes man.

Again:

God, Monad, and Atom are the correspondences of Spirit, Mind, and Body [Âtmâ, Manas, and Sthûla Sharîra] in man.

In their septenary aggregation they are the “Heavenly Man,” in the Kabalistic sense; thus, terrestrial man is the provisional reflection of the Heavenly. Once again:

The Monads [Jîvas] are the Souls of the Atoms; both are the fabric in which the Chohans [Dhyânîs, Gods] clothe themselves when a form is needed.

This relates to cosmic and sub-planetary Monads, not to the super-cosmic Monads, the Pythagorean Monad, as it is called, in its synthetic character, by the Pantheistical Peripatetics. The Monads of the present dissertation are treated, from the standpoint of their individuality, as Atomic Souls, before these Atoms descend into pure terrestrial form. For this descent into concrete Matter marks the medial point of their own individual pilgrimage. Here, losing in the mineral kingdom their individuality, they begin to ascend through the seven states of terrestrial evolution to that point where a correspondence is firmly established between the human and Deva (divine) consciousness. At present, however, we are not concerned with their terrestrial metamorphoses and tribulations, but with their life and behaviour in Space, [pg 680] on planes wherein the eye of the most intuitional Chemist and Physicist cannot reach them—unless, indeed, he develops in himself highly clairvoyant faculties.

It is well known that Leibnitz came very near the truth several times, but he defined Monadic Evolution incorrectly, a thing not to be wondered at, since he was not an Initiate, nor even a Mystic, but only a very intuitional Philosopher. Yet no Psycho-physicist ever came nearer than has he to the Esoteric general outline of evolution. This evolution—viewed from its several standpoints, i.e., as the Universal and the Individualized Monad, and the chief aspects of the Evolving Energy after differentiation, the purely Spiritual, the Intellectual, the Psychic and the Physical—may be thus formulated as an invariable law: a descent of Spirit into Matter, equivalent to an ascent in physical evolution; a reäscent from the depths of materiality towards its status quo ante, with a corresponding dissipation of concrete form and substance up to the Laya-state, or what Science calls the “zero-point,” and beyond.

These states—once the spirit of Esoteric Philosophy is grasped—become absolutely necessary from simple logical and analogical considerations. Physical Science having now ascertained, through its department of Chemistry, the invariable law of this evolution of Atoms—from their “protylean” state down to that of a physical and then a chemical particle, or molecule—cannot well reject these states as a general law. And once it is forced by its enemies—Metaphysics and Psychology1068—out of its alleged impregnable strongholds, it will find it more difficult than it now appears to refuse room in the Spaces of Space to Planetary Spirits (Gods), Elementals, and even the Elementary Spooks or Ghosts, and others. Already Figuier and Paul D'Assier, two Positivists and Materialists, have succumbed before this logical necessity. Other and still greater Scientists will follow in that intellectual “Fall.” They will be driven out of their position not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily and will still be opening before them, as one discovery follows the other, until they are finally knocked off their feet by the ninth wave of simple common sense.

[pg 681]

We may take as an example, Mr. W. Crookes' latest discovery of what he has named Protyle. In the Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ, by one of the best metaphysicians and Vedântic scholars in India, the lecturer, referring cautiously to “things Occult” in that great Indian Esoteric work, makes a remark as suggestive as it is strictly correct. He says:

Into the details of the evolution of the solar system itself, it is not necessary for me to enter. You may gather some idea as to the way in which the various elements start into existence from these three principles into which Mûlaprakriti [the Pythagorean Triangle] is differentiated, by examining the lecture delivered by Professor Crookes a short time ago upon the so-called elements of modern chemistry. This lecture will give you some idea of the way in which these so-called elements spring from Vishvânara,1069 the most objective of these three principles, which seems to stand in the place of the protyle mentioned in that lecture. Except in a few particulars, this lecture seems to give the outlines of the theory of physical evolution on the plane of Vishvânara, and is, so far as I know, the nearest approach made by modern investigators to the real occult theory on the subject.1070

These words will be reëchoed and approved by every Eastern Occultist. Much from the lectures by Mr. Crookes has already been quoted in Section XI. A second lecture has been delivered by him, as remarkable as the first, on the “Genesis of the Elements,”1071 and also a third one. Here we have almost a corroboration of the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy concerning the mode of primeval evolution. It is, indeed, as near an approach, made by a great scholar and specialist in Chemistry,1072 to the Secret Doctrine, as could be made apart from the application of the Monads and Atoms to the dogmas of pure transcendental Metaphysics, and their connection and correlation with “Gods and intelligent conscious Monads.” But Chemistry is now on its ascending plane, thanks to one of its highest European representatives. It is impossible for it to go back to that day when Materialism regarded its sub-elements as absolutely simple and homogeneous bodies, which it had raised, in its blindness, to the rank of Elements. [pg 682] The mask has been snatched off by too clever a hand for there to be any fear of a new disguise. And after years of pseudology, of bastard molecules parading under the name of Elements, behind and beyond which there could be nought but void, a great professor of Chemistry asks once more:

What are these elements, whence do they come, what is their signification?... These elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us—mocking, mystifying, and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities.1073

Those who are heirs to primeval revelations have taught these “possibilities” in every century, but have never found a fair hearing. The truths inspired into Kepler, Leibnitz, Gassendi, Swedenborg, etc., were ever alloyed with their own speculations in one or another predetermined direction—hence were distorted. But now one of the great truths has dawned upon an eminent professor of exact Modern Science, and he fearlessly proclaims as a fundamental axiom that Science has not made itself acquainted, so far, with real simple Elements. For Mr. Crookes tells his audience:

If I venture to say that our commonly received elements are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance or have not been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been evolved from simpler matters—or perhaps, indeed, from one sole kind of matter—I do but give formal utterance to an idea which has been, so to speak, for some time “in the air” of science. Chemists, physicists, philosophers of the highest merit, declare explicitly their belief that the seventy (or thereabouts) elements of our text-books are not the pillars of Hercules which we must never hope to pass.... Philosophers in the present as in the past—men who certainly have not worked in the laboratory—have reached the same view from another side. Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer records his conviction that “the chemical atoms are produced from the true or physical atoms by processes of evolution under conditions which chemistry has not yet been able to produce.”... And the poet has forestalled the philosopher. Milton (Paradise Lost, Book V.) makes the Archangel Raphael say to Adam instinct with the evolutionary idea, that the Almighty had created

... “One first matter, all
Indued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance.”

Nevertheless, the idea would have remained crystallized “in the air of Science,” and would not have descended into the thick atmosphere of Materialism and profane mortals for years to come, perhaps, had not Mr. Crookes bravely and fearlessly reduced it to its simple constituents, [pg 683] and thus publicly forced it on scientific notice. Says Plutarch:

An idea is a Being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and becomes the cause of the manifestation.1074

The revolution produced in old Chemistry by Avogadro was the first page in the volume of “New Chemistry.” Mr. Crookes has now turned the second page, and is boldly pointing to what may be the last. For Protyle once accepted and recognized—as invisible Ether was, both being logical and scientific necessities—Chemistry will have virtually ceased to live: it will reäppear in its reïncarnation as—“New Alchemy,” or “Meta-chemistry.” The discoverer of radiant matter will have vindicated in time the Archaic Âryan works on Occultism, and even the Vedas and Purânas. For what are the manifested “Mother,” the “Father-Son-Husband” (Aditi and Daksha, a form of Brahmâ, as Creators), and the “Son”—the three “First-born”—but simply Hydrogen, Oxygen, and that which in its terrestrial manifestation is called Nitrogen. Even the exoteric descriptions of the “First-born” Triad give all the characteristics of these three “gases.” Priestley, the “discoverer” of Oxygen, or of that which was known in the highest antiquity!

Yet all the ancient, mediæval, and modern Poets and Philosophers have been anticipated even in the exoteric Hindû books as to the Elemental Vortices inaugurated by the Universal Mind—Descartes' “Plenum” of Matter differentiated into particles; Leibnitz's “ethereal fluid”; and Kant's “primitive fluid” dissolved into its elements; Kepler's solar vortex and systemic vortices; in short, through Anaxagoras, down to Galileo, Torricelli, and Swedenborg, and after them to the latest speculations by European Mystics—all this is found in the Hindû Hymns, or Mantras, to the “Gods, Monads and Atoms,” in their Fulness, for they are inseparable. In Esoteric Teachings, the most transcendental conceptions of the Universe and its mysteries, as also the most seemingly materialistic speculations, are found reconciled, because these Sciences embrace the whole scope of evolution from Spirit to Matter. As declared by an American Theosophist:

The Monads [of Leibnitz] may from one point of view be called force, from another matter. To Occult Science, force and matter are only two sides of the same substance.1075

Let the reader remember these “Monads” of Leibnitz, every one of [pg 684] which is a living mirror of the Universe, every Monad reflecting every other, and compare this view and definition with certain Sanskrit Shlokas translated by Sir William Jones, in which it is said that the creative source of the Divine Mind,

Hidden in a veil of thick darkness, formed mirrors of the atoms of the world, and cast reflection from its own face on every atom.

When, therefore, Mr. Crookes declares that:

If we can show how the so-called chemical elements might have been generated we shall be able to fill up a formidable gap in our knowledge of the universe,

the answer is ready. The theoretical knowledge is contained in the Esoteric meaning of every Hindû cosmogony in the Purânas; the practical demonstration thereof—is in the hands of those who will not be recognized in this century, save by the very few. The scientific possibilities of various discoveries, that must inexorably lead exact Science into the acceptation of Eastern Occult views, which contain all the requisite material for the filling of those “gaps,” are, so far, at the mercy of Modern Materialism. It is only by working in the direction taken by Mr. William Crookes that there is any hope for the recognition of a few, hitherto Occult, truths.

Meanwhile, any one thirsting to have a glimpse at a practical diagram of the evolution of primordial Matter—which, separating and differentiating under the impulse of cyclic law, divides itself on a general view into a septenary gradation of Substance—can do no better than examine the plates attached to Mr. Crookes' lecture, Genesis of the Elements, and ponder well over some passages of the text. In one place he says:

Our notions of a chemical element have expanded. Hitherto the molecule has been regarded as an aggregate of two or more atoms, and no account has been taken of the architectural design on which these atoms have been joined. We may consider that the structure of a chemical element is more complicated than has hitherto been supposed. Between the molecules we are accustomed to deal with in chemical reactions and ultimate atoms as first created, come smaller molecules or aggregates of physical atoms; these sub-molecules differ one from the other, according to the position they occupy in the yttrium edifice.

Perhaps this hypothesis can be simplified if we imagine yttrium to be represented by a five-shilling piece. By chemical fractionation I have divided it into five separate shillings, and find that these shillings are not counterparts, but like the carbon atoms in the benzol ring, have the impress of their position, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, stamped on them.... If I throw my shillings into the melting-pot or dissolve them chemically, the mint stamp disappears and they all turn out to be silver.1076

This will be the case with all the Atoms and molecules when they [pg 685] have separated from their compound forms and bodies—when Pralaya sets in. Reverse the case, and imagine the dawn of a new Manvantara. The pure “silver” of the absorbed material will once more separate into Substance, which will generate “Divine Essences” whose “Principles”1077 are the Primary Elements, the Sub-elements, the Physical Energies, and subjective and objective Matter; or, as these are epitomized—Gods, Monads, and Atoms. If leaving for one moment the metaphysical or transcendental side of the question—dropping out of the present consideration the supersensuous and intelligent Beings and Entities believed in by the Kabalists and Christians—we turn to the theory of atomic evolution, the Occult Teachings are still found corroborated by exact Science and its confessions, so far, at least, as regards the supposed “simple” Elements, now suddenly degraded into poor and distant relatives, not even second cousins to the latter. For we are told by Mr. Crookes that:

Hitherto, it has been considered that if the atomic weight of a metal, determined by different observers, setting out from different compounds, was always found to be constant ... then such metal must rightly take rank among the simple or elementary bodies. We learn ... that this is no longer the case. Again, we have here wheels within wheels. Gadolinium is not an element but a compound. ... We have shown that yttrium is a complex of five or more new constituents. And who shall venture to gainsay that each of these constituents, if attacked in some different manner, and if the result were submitted to a test more delicate and searching than the radiant-matter test, might not be still further divisible? Where, then, is the actual ultimate element? As we advance it recedes like the tantalizing mirage lakes and groves seen by the tired and thirsty traveller in the desert. Are we in our quest for truth to be thus deluded and baulked? The very idea of an element, as something absolutely primary and ultimate, seems to be growing less and less distinct.1078

In Isis Unveiled, we said:

This mystery of first creation, which was ever the despair of Science, is unfathomable unless we accept the doctrine of Hermes. Could he [Darwin] remove his quest from the visible universe into the invisible, he might find himself on the right path. But then, he would be following in the footsteps of the Hermetists.1079

Our prophecy begins to assert itself.

But between Hermes and Huxley there is a middle course and point. Let the men of Science only throw a bridge half-way, and think seriously over the theories of Leibnitz. We have shown our [pg 686] theories with regard to the evolution of Atoms—their last formation into compound chemical molecules being produced within our terrestrial workshops in the Earth's atmosphere and not elsewhere—as strangely agreeing with the evolution of Atoms shown on Mr. Crookes' plates. Several times already it has been stated in this volume that Mârttânda, the Sun, had evolved and aggregated, together with his seven smaller Brothers, from his Mother Aditi's bosom, that bosom being Prima Mater-ia—the lecturer's primordial Protyle. Esoteric Doctrines teach the existence of

An antecedent form of energy having periodic cycles of ebb and swell, rest and activity.1080

And behold a great scholar in Science now asking the world to accept this as one of his postulates! We have shown the “Mother,” fiery and hot, becoming gradually cool and radiant, and this same Scientist claims as his second postulate—a scientific necessity, it would seem—

An internal action, akin to cooling, operating slowly in the protyle.

Occult Science teaches that the “Mother” lies stretched in Infinity, during Pralaya, as the great Deep, the “dry Waters of Space,” according to the quaint expression in the Catechism, and becomes wet only after the separation and the moving over its face of Nârâyana, the

Spirit which is invisible Flame, which never burns, but sets on fire all that it touches, and gives it life and generation.1081

And now Science tells us that “the first-born element ... most nearly allied to protyle” would be “hydrogen ... which for some time would be the only existing form of matter” in the Universe. What says Old Science? It answers: Just so; but we would call Hydrogen (and Oxygen), which—in the pre-geological and even pre-genetic ages—instils the fire of life into the “Mother” by incubation, the spirit, the noumenon, of that which becomes in its grossest form Oxygen and Hydrogen and Nitrogen on Earth—Nitrogen being of no divine origin, but merely an earth-born cement for uniting other gases and fluids, and serving as a sponge to carry in itself the Breath of Life, pure air.1082 Before these gases and fluids become what they are in our atmosphere, they are interstellar Ether; still earlier and on a deeper plane—something else, and so on in infinitum. The eminent and learned gentleman must pardon an Occultist for quoting him at such [pg 687] length; but such is the penalty of a Fellow of the Royal Society who approaches so near the precincts of the Sacred Adytum of Occult Mysteries as virtually to overstep the forbidden boundaries.

But it is time to leave Modern Physical Science and turn to the psychological and metaphysical side of the question. We would only remark that to the “two very reasonable postulates” required by the eminent lecturer, “to get a glimpse of some few of the secrets so darkly hidden” behind “the door of the Unknown,” a third should be added1083—lest no battering at it should avail; the postulate that Leibnitz stood on a firm groundwork of fact and truth in his speculations. The admirable and thoughtful synopsis of these speculations—as given by John Theodore Mertz in his “Leibnitz”—shows how nearly he has brushed the hidden secrets of Esoteric Theogony in his Monadologie. And yet this philosopher has hardly risen in his speculations above the first planes, the lower principles of the Cosmic Great Body. His theory soars to no loftier heights than those of the manifested life, self-consciousness and intelligence, leaving the regions of the earlier post-genetic mysteries untouched, as his ethereal fluid is post-planetary.

But this third postulate will hardly be accepted by the modern men of Science; and, like Descartes, they will prefer keeping to the properties of external things, which, like extension, are incapable of explaining the phenomenon of motion, rather than accept the latter as an independent Force. They will never become anti-Cartesian in this generation; nor will they admit that:

This property of inertia is not a purely geometrical property; that it points to the existence of something in external bodies which is not extension merely.

This is Leibnitz's idea as analyzed by Mertz, who adds that he called this “something” Force, and maintained that external things were endowed with Force, and that in order to be the bearers of this Force they must have a Substance, for they are not lifeless and inert masses, but the centres and bearers of Form—a purely Esoteric claim, since Force was with Leibnitz an active principle—the division between Mind and Matter disappearing by this conclusion.

The mathematical and dynamical enquiries of Leibnitz would not have led to the same result in the mind of a purely scientific enquirer. But Leibnitz was not a scientific man in the modern sense of the word. Had he been so, he might have worked out the conception of energy, defined mathematically the ideas of force and [pg 688]mechanical work, and arrived at the conclusion that even for purely scientific purposes it is desirable to look upon force, not as a primary quantity, but as a quantity derived from some other value.

But, luckily for truth:

Leibnitz was a philosopher; and as such he had certain primary principles, which biassed him in favour of certain conclusions, and his discovery that external things were substances endowed with force was at once used for the purpose of applying these principles. One of these principles was the law of continuity, the conviction that all the world was connected, that there were no gaps and chasms which could not be bridged over. The contrast of extended thinking substances was unbearable to him. The definition of the extended substances had already become untenable: it was natural that a similar enquiry was made into the definition of mind, the thinking substance.

The divisions made by Leibnitz, however incomplete and faulty from the standpoint of Occultism, show a spirit of metaphysical intuition to which no man of Science, not Descartes, not even Kant, has ever reached. With him there existed ever an infinite gradation of thought. Only a small portion of the contents of our thoughts, he said, rises into the clearness of apperception, “into the light of perfect consciousness.” Many remain in a confused or obscure state, in the state of “perceptions”; but they are there. Descartes denied soul to the animal. Leibnitz, as do the Occultists, endowed “the whole creation with mental life, this being, according to him, capable of infinite gradations.” And this, as Mertz justly observes:

At once widened the realm of mental life, destroying the contrast of animate and inanimate matter; it did yet more—it reäcted on the conception of matter, of the extended substance. For it became evident that external or material things presented the property of extension to our senses only, not to our thinking faculties. The mathematician, in order to calculate geometrical figures, had been obliged to divide them into an infinite number of infinitely small parts, and the physicist saw no limit to the divisibility of matter into atoms. The bulk through which external things seemed to fill space was a property which they acquired only through the coarseness of our senses.... Leibnitz followed these arguments to some extent, but he could not rest content in assuming that matter was composed of a finite number of very small parts. His mathematical mind forced him to carry out the argument in infinitum. And what became of the atoms then? They lost their extension and they retained only their property of resistance; they were the centres of force. They were reduced to mathematical points.... But if their extension in space was nothing, so much fuller was their inner life. Assuming that inner existence, such as that of the human mind, is a new dimension, not a geometrical but a metaphysical dimension, ... having reduced the geometrical extension of the atoms to nothing, Leibnitz endowed them with an infinite extension in the [pg 689]direction of their metaphysical dimension. After having lost sight of them in the world of space, the mind has, as it were, to dive into a metaphysical world to find and grasp the real essence of what appears in space merely as a mathematical point.... As a cone stands on its point, or a perpendicular straight line cuts a horizontal plane only in one mathematical point, but may extend infinitely in height and depth, so the essences of things real have only a punctual existence in this physical world of space; but have an infinite depth of inner life in the metaphysical world of thought.1084

This is the spirit, the very root of Occult doctrine and thought. The “Spirit-Matter” and “Matter-Spirit” extend infinitely in depth, and like the “essence of things” of Leibnitz, our essence of things real is at the seventh depth; while the unreal and gross matter of Science and the external world, is at the lowest extreme of our perceptive senses. The Occultist knows the worth or worthlessness of the latter.

The student must now be shown the fundamental distinction between the system of Leibnitz1085 and that of Occult Philosophy, on the question of the Monads, and this may be done with his Monadologie before us. It may be correctly stated that were Leibnitz' and Spinoza's systems reconciled, the essence and spirit of Esoteric Philosophy would be made to appear. From the shock of the two—as opposed to the Cartesian system—emerge the truths of the Archaic Doctrine. Both oppose the Metaphysics of Descartes. His idea of the contrast of two Substances—Extension and Thought—radically differing from each other and mutually irreducible, is too arbitrary and too un-philosophical for them. Thus Leibnitz made of the two Cartesian Substances two attributes of one universal Unity, in which he saw God. Spinoza recognized but one universal indivisible Substance, an absolute All, like Parabrahman. Leibnitz, on the contrary, perceived the existence of a plurality of Substances. There was but One for Spinoza; for Leibnitz an infinitude of Beings, from, and in, the One. Hence, though both admitted but One Real Entity, while Spinoza made it impersonal and indivisible, Leibnitz divided his personal Deity into a number of divine and semi-divine Beings. Spinoza was a subjective, Leibnitz an objective Pantheist, yet both were great Philosophers in their intuitive perceptions.

Now, if these two teachings were blended together and each corrected [pg 690] by the other—and foremost of all the One Reality weeded of its personality—there would remain as sum total a true spirit of Esoteric Philosophy in them; the impersonal, attributeless, absolute Divine Essence, which is no “being” but the root of all Being. Draw a deep line in your thought between that ever-incognizable Essence, and the as invisible, yet comprehensible Presence, Mûlaprakriti or Shekinah, from beyond and through which vibrates the Sound of the Verbum, and from which evolve the numberless Hierarchies of intelligent Egos, of conscious as of semi-conscious, “apperceptive” and “perceptive” Beings, whose Essence is spiritual Force, whose Substance is the Elements, and whose Bodies (when needed) are the Atoms—and our Doctrine is there. For, says Leibnitz:

The primitive element of every material body being force, which has none of the characteristics of [objective] matter—it can be conceived but can never be the object of any imaginative representation.

That which was for him the primordial and ultimate element in everybody and object was thus not the material atoms, or molecules, necessarily more or less extended, as those of Epicurus and Gassendi, but, as Mertz shows, immaterial and metaphysical Atoms, “mathematical points,” or real souls—as explained by Henri Lachelier (Professeur Agrégé de Philosophie), his French biographer.

That which exists outside of us in an absolute manner, are Souls whose essence is force.1086

Thus, reality in the manifested world is composed of a unity of units, so to say, immaterial—from our standpoint—and infinite. These Leibnitz calls Monads, Eastern Philosophy Jîvas, while Occultism, with the Kabalists and all the Christians, gives them a variety of names. With us, as with Leibnitz, they are “the expression of the universe,”1087 and every physical point is but the phenomenal expression of the noumenal, metaphysical Point. His distinction between “perception” and “apperception” is the philosophical though dim expression of the Esoteric Teachings. His “reduced universes,” of which “there are as many as there are Monads”—is the chaotic representation of our Septenary System with its divisions and sub-divisions.

As to the relation his Monads bear to our Dhyân Chohans, Cosmic Spirits, Devas, and Elementals, we may reproduce briefly the opinion [pg 691] of a learned and thoughtful Theosophist, Mr. C. H. A. Bjerregaard, on the subject. In an excellent paper, “On the Elementals, the Elementary Spirits, and the Relationship between Them and Human Beings,” read by him before the Âryan Theosophical Society of New York, Mr. Bjerregaard thus distinctly formulates his opinion:

To Spinoza, substance is dead and inactive, but to Leibnitz's penetrating powers of mind everything is living activity and active energy. In holding this view, he comes infinitely nearer the Orient than any other thinker of his day, or after him. His discovery that an active energy forms the essence of substance is a principle that places him in direct relationship to the Seers of the East.1088

And the lecturer proceeds to show that to Leibnitz Atoms and Elements are Centres of Force, or rather “spiritual beings whose very nature it is to act,” for the

Elementary particles are vital forces, not acting mechanically, but from an internal principle. They are incorporeal spiritual units [“substantial,” however, but not “immaterial” in our sense] inaccessible to all change from without ... [and] indestructible by any external force. Leibnitz' monads differ from atoms in the following particulars, which are very important for us to remember, otherwise we shall not be able to see the difference between Elementals and mere matter. Atoms are not distinguished from each other, they are qualitatively alike; but one monad differs from every other monad qualitatively; and every one is a peculiar world to itself. Not so with the atoms; they are absolutely alike quantitatively and qualitatively, and possess no individuality of their own.1089 Again, the atoms [molecules, rather] of materialistic philosophy can be considered as extended and divisible, while the monads are mere “metaphysical points” and indivisible. Finally, and this is a point where these monads of Leibnitz closely resemble the Elementals of mystic philosophy, these monads are representative beings. Every monad reflects every other. Every monad is a living mirror of the Universe within its own sphere. And mark this, for upon it depends the power possessed by these monads, and upon it depends the work they can do for us; in mirroring the world, the monads are not mere passive reflective agents, but spontaneously self active; they produce the images spontaneously, as the soul does a dream. In every monad, therefore, the adept may read everything, even the future. Every monad—or Elemental—is a looking-glass that can speak.

[pg 692]

It is at this point that Leibnitz's philosophy breaks down. There is no provision made, nor any distinction established, between the “Elemental” Monad and that of a high Planetary Spirit, or even the Human Monad or Soul. He even goes so far as to sometimes doubt whether

God has ever made anything but monads or substances without extension.1090

He draws a distinction between Monads and Atoms,1091 because, as he repeatedly states:

Bodies with all their qualities are only phenomenal, like the rainbow. Corpora omnia cum omnibus qualitatibus suis non sunt aliud quam phenomena bene fundata, ut Iris.1092

But soon after he finds a provision for this in a substantial correspondence, a certain metaphysical bond between the Monads—vinculum substantiale. Esoteric Philosophy, teaching an objective Idealism—though it regards the objective Universe and all in it as Mâyâ, Temporary Illusion—draws a practical distinction between Collective Illusion, Mahâmâyâ, from the purely metaphysical standpoint, and the objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this Illusion lasts. The Adept, therefore, may read the future in an Elemental Monad, but he has to draw together for this object a great number of them, as each Monad represents only a portion of the Kingdom it belongs to.

It is not in the object, but in the modification of the cognition of the object that the monads are limited. They all tend (confusedly) to the infinite, to the whole, but they are limited and distinguished by the degrees of distinctness in their perception.1093

And as Leibnitz explains:

All the portions of the universe are distinctly represented in the monads, but some are reflected in one monad, some in another.

A number of Monads could represent simultaneously the thoughts of the two million inhabitants of Paris.

But what say the Occult Sciences to this, and what do they add?

They say that what is called collectively Monads by Leibnitz—roughly viewed, and leaving every subdivision out of calculation, for [pg 693] the present—may be separated into three distinct Hosts,1094 which, counted from the highest planes, are, firstly, “Gods,” or conscious, spiritual Egos; the intelligent Architects, who work after the plan in the Divine Mind. Then come the Elementals, or “Monads,” who form collectively and unconsciously the grand Universal Mirrors of everything connected with their respective realms. Lastly, the “Atoms,” or material molecules, which are informed in their turn by their “perceptive” Monads, just as every cell in a human body is so informed. There are shoals of such informed Atoms which, in their turn, inform the molecules; an infinitude of Monads, or Elementals proper, and countless spiritual Forces—Monadless, for they are pure incorporealities,1095 except under certain laws, when they assume a form—not necessarily human. Whence the substance that clothes them—the apparent organism they evolve around their centres? The Formless (Arûpa) Radiations, existing in the harmony of Universal Will, and being what we term the collective or the aggregate of Cosmic Will on the plane of the subjective Universe, unite together an infinitude of Monads—each the mirror of its own Universe—and thus individualize for the time being an independent Mind, omniscient and universal; and by the same process of magnetic aggregation they create for themselves objective, visible bodies, out of the interstellar Atoms. For Atoms and Monads, associated or dissociated, simple or complex, are, from the moment of the first differentiation, but the “principles,” corporeal, psychic and spiritual, of the “Gods”—themselves the Radiations of Primordial Nature. Thus, to the eye of the Seer, the higher Planetary Powers appear under two aspects: the subjective—as influences, and the objective—as mystic forms, which, under Karmic law, become a Presence, Spirit and Matter being One, as repeatedly stated. Spirit is Matter on the seventh plane; Matter is Spirit at the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both are—Mâyâ.

[pg 694]

Atoms are called Vibrations in Occultism; also Sound—collectively. This does not interfere with Mr. Tyndall's scientific discovery. He traced, on the lower rung of the ladder of monadic being, the whole course of the atmospheric Vibrations—and this constitutes the objective part of the process in Nature. He has traced and recorded the rapidity of their motion and transmission; the force of their impact; their setting up vibrations in the tympanum and their transmission of these to the otoliths, etc., till the vibration of the auditory nerve commences—and a new phenomenon now takes place: the subjective side of the process or the sensation of sound. Does he perceive or see it? No; for his specialty is to discover the behaviour of Matter. But why should not a Psychic see it, a spiritual Seer, whose inner Eye is opened, one who can see through the veil of Matter? The waves and undulations of Science are all produced by Atoms propelling their molecules into activity from within. Atoms fill the immensity of Space, and by their continuous vibration are that Motion which keeps the wheels of Life perpetually going. It is that inner work that produces the natural phenomenon called the correlation of Forces. Only, at the origin of every such “Force,” there stands the conscious guiding Noumenon thereof—Angel or God, Spirit or Demon, ruling powers, yet the same.

As described by Seers—those who can see the motion of the interstellar shoals, and follow them clairvoyantly in their evolution—they are dazzling, like specks of virgin snow in radiant sunlight. Their velocity is swifter than thought, quicker than any mortal physical eye can follow, and, as well as can be judged from the tremendous rapidity of their course, the motion is circular. Standing on an open plain, on a mountain summit especially, and gazing into the vast vault above and the spatial infinitudes around, the whole atmosphere seems ablaze with them, the air soaked through with these dazzling coruscations. At times, the intensity of their motion produces flashes like the Northern Lights in the Aurora Borealis. The sight is so marvellous, that, as the Seer gazes into this inner world, and feels the scintillating points shoot past him, he is filled with awe at the thought of other, still greater mysteries, that lie beyond, and within, this radiant ocean.

However imperfect and incomplete this explanation on “Gods, Monads and Atoms,” it is hoped that some students and Theosophists, at least, will feel that there may indeed be a close relation between Materialistic Science and Occultism, which is the complement and missing soul of the former.

[pg 695]

Section XV. Cyclic Evolution and Karma.

It is the spiritual evolution of the inner, immortal Man that forms the fundamental tenet of the Occult Sciences. To realize even distantly such a process, the student has to believe (a) in the One Universal Life, independent of Matter (or what Science regards as Matter); and (b) in the individual Intelligences that animate the various manifestations of this Principle. Mr. Huxley does not believe in Vital Force; others Scientists do. Dr. J. H. Hutchinson Stirling's work As regards Protoplasm has made no small havoc of this dogmatic negation. Professor Beale's decision also is in favour of a Vital Principle; and Dr. B. W. Richardson's lectures on Nervous Ether have been sufficiently quoted. Thus, opinions are divided.

The One Life is closely related to the One Law which governs the World of Being—Karma. Exoterically, this is simply and literally “action,” or rather an “effect-producing cause.” Esoterically, it is quite a different thing in its far-reaching moral effects. It is the unerring Law of Retribution. To say to those ignorant of the real significance, characteristics, and awful importance of this eternal immutable Law, that no theological definition of a Personal Deity can give an idea of this impersonal, yet ever present and active Principle, is to speak in vain. Nor can it be called Providence. For Providence, with the Theists—the Protestant Christians, at any rate—rejoices in a personal male gender, while with the Roman Catholics it is a female potency. “Divine Providence tempers His blessings to secure their better effects,” Wogan tells us. Indeed “He” tempers them, which Karma—a sexless principle—does not.

Throughout the first two Parts, it has been shown that, at the first flutter of renascent life, Svabhâvat, “the Mutable Radiance of the Immutable Darkness unconscious in Eternity,” passes, at every new rebirth of Kosmos, from an inactive state into one of intense activity; that it [pg 696] differentiates, and then begins its work through that differentiation. This work is Karma.

The Cycles are also subservient to the effects produced by this activity.

The one Cosmic Atom becomes seven Atoms on the plane of Matter, and each is transformed into a centre of energy; that same Atom becomes seven Rays on the plane of Spirit; and the seven creative Forces of Nature, radiating from the Root-Essence ... follow, one the right, the other the left path, separate till the end of the Kalpa, and yet in close embrace. What unites them? Karma.

The Atoms emanated from the Central Point emanate in their turn new centres of energy, which, under the potential breath of Fohat, begin their work from within without, and multiply other minor centres. These, in the course of evolution and involution, form in their turn the roots or developing causes of new effects, from worlds and “man-bearing” globes, down to the genera, species, and classes of all the seven kingdoms, of which we know only four. For as says the Book of the Aphorisms of Tson-ka-pa:

The blessed workers have received the Thyan-kam, in the eternity.

Thyan-kam is the power or knowledge of guiding the impulses of Cosmic Energy in the right direction.

The true Buddhist, recognizing no “personal God,” nor any “Father” and “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” still believes in an Absolute Consciousness, Adi-Buddhi; and the Buddhist Philosopher knows that there are Planetary Spirits, the Dhyân Chohans. But though he admits of “Spiritual Lives,” yet, as they are temporary in eternity, even they, according to his Philosophy, are “the Mâyâ of the Day,” the Illusion of a “Day of Brahmâ,” a short Manvantara of 4,320,000,000 years. The Yin-Sin is not for the speculations of men, for the Lord Buddha has strongly prohibited all such enquiry. If the Dhyân Chohans and all the Invisible Beings—the Seven Centres and their direct Emanations, the minor centres of Energy—are the direct reflex of the One Light, yet men are far removed from these, since the whole of the visible Kosmos consists of “self-produced beings, the creatures of Karma.” Thus regarding a personal God “as only a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the imagination of ignorant men,”1096 they teach that only “two things are [objectively] [pg 697] eternal, namely Âkâsha and Nirvâna”; and that these are one in reality, and but a Mâyâ when divided.

Everything has come out of Âkâsha [or Svabhâvat on our earth] in obedience to a law of motion inherent in it, and after a certain existence passes away. No thing ever came out of nothing. We do not believe in miracles; hence we deny creation and cannot conceive of a creator.1097

If a Vedântic Brahman of the Advaita Sect, were asked whether he believed in the existence of God, he would probably answer, as Jacolliot was answered—“I am myself ‘God’;” while a Buddhist (a Sinhalese especially) would simply laugh, and say in reply, “There is no God; no Creation.” Yet the root Philosophy of both Advaita and Buddhist scholars is identical, and both have the same respect for animal life, for both believe that every creature on Earth, however small and humble, “is an immortal portion of the immortal Matter”—Matter having with them quite another significance from that which it has with either Christian or Materialist—and that every creature is subject to Karma.

The answer of the Brâhman would have suggested itself to every ancient Philosopher, Kabalist, and Gnostic of the early days. It contains the very spirit of the Delphic and Kabalistic commandments, for Esoteric Philosophy solved, ages ago, the problem of what man was, is, and will be; his origin, life-cycle—interminable in its duration of successive incarnations or rebirths—and his final absorption into the Source from which he started.

But it is not Physical Science that we can ever ask to read man for us, as the riddle of the Past, or of the Future; since no Philosopher can tell us even what man is, as known to both Physiology and Psychology. In doubt whether man was a God or a beast, Science has now connected him with the latter and derives him from an animal. Certainly the task of analyzing and classifying the human being as a terrestrial animal may be left to Science, which Occultists, of all men, regard with veneration and respect. They recognize its ground and the wonderful work it has done, the progress achieved in Physiology, and even—to a degree—in Biology. But man's inner, spiritual, psychic, or even moral, nature cannot be left to the tender mercies of an ingrained Materialism; for not even the higher psychological Philosophy of the West is able, in its present incompleteness and tendency towards a decided Agnosticism, to do justice to the inner man; especially to his higher capacities and perceptions, and to those states of consciousness, [pg 698] across the road to which such authorities as Mill draw a strong line, saying “So far, and no farther shalt thou go.”

No Occultist would deny that man—together with the elephant and the microbe, the crocodile and the lizard, the blade of grass and the crystal—is, in his physical formation, the simple product of the evolutionary forces of Nature through a numberless series of transformations; but he puts the case differently.

It is not against zoölogical and anthropological discoveries, based on the fossils of man and animal, that every Mystic and believer in a Divine Soul inwardly revolts, but only against the uncalled-for conclusions built on preconceived theories and made to fit in with certain prejudices. The premisses of Scientists may or may not be always true; and as some of these theories live but a short life, the deductions therefrom must ever be one-sided with materialistic Evolutionists. Yet it is on the strength of such very ephemeral authority, that most of the men of Science frequently receive honours where they deserve them the least.1098

To make the working of Karma—in the periodical renovations of the Universe—more evident and intelligible to the student when he arrives at the origin and evolution of man, he has now to examine with us the Esoteric bearing of the Karmic Cycles upon Universal Ethics. The question is, do those mysterious divisions of time, called Yugas and Kalpas by the Hindûs, and so very graphically, κύκλοι, cycles, rings [pg 699] or circles, by the Greeks, have any bearing upon, or any direct connection with, human life? Even exoteric Philosophy explains that these perpetual circles of time are ever returning on themselves, periodically and intelligently, in Space and Eternity. There are “Cycles of Matter,”1099 and there are “Cycles of Spiritual Evolution,” and racial, national, and individual Cycles. May not Esoteric speculation allow us a still deeper insight into their workings?

This idea is beautifully expressed in a very clever scientific work.

The possibility of rising to a comprehension of a system of coördination so far outreaching in time and space all range of human observations, is a circumstance which signalizes the power of man to transcend the limitations of changing and inconsistent matter, and assert his superiority over all insentient and perishable forms of being. There is a method in the succession of events, and in the relation of coëxistent things, which the mind of man seizes hold of; and by means of this as a clue, he runs back or forward over æons of material history of which human experience can never testify. Events germinate and unfold. They have a past which is connected with their present, and we feel a well-justified confidence that a future is appointed which will be similarly connected with the present and the past. This continuity and unity of history repeat themselves before our eyes in all conceivable stages of progress. The phenomena furnish us the grounds for the generalization of two laws which are truly principles of scientific divination, by which alone the human mind penetrates the sealed records of the past and the unopened pages of the future. The first of these is the law of evolution, or, to phrase it for our purpose, the law of correlated successiveness or organized history in the individual, illustrated in the changing phases of every single maturing system of results.... These thoughts summon into our immediate presence the measureless past and the measureless future of material history. They seem almost to open vistas through infinity, and to endow the human intellect with an existence and a vision exempt from the limitations of time and space and finite causation, and lift it up towards a sublime apprehension of the Supreme Intelligence whose dwelling place is eternity.1100

According to the teachings, Mâyâ—the illusive appearance of the marshalling of events and actions on this Earth—changes, varying with nations and places. But the chief features of one's life are always in accordance with the “Constellation” under which one is born, or, we should say, with the characteristics of its animating principle or the Deity that presides over it, whether we call it a Dhyân Chohan, as in Asia, or an Archangel, as with the Greek and Latin Churches. In ancient Symbolism it was always the Sun—though the Spiritual, not the visible, Sun was meant—that was supposed to send forth the chief [pg 700] Saviours and Avatâras. Hence the connecting link between the Buddhas, the Avatâras, and so many other incarnations of the highest Seven. The closer the approach to one's Prototype, in “Heaven,” the better for the mortal whose Personality was chosen, by his own personal Deity (the Seventh Principle), as its terrestrial abode. For, with every effort of will toward purification and unity with that “Self-God,” one of the lower Rays breaks, and the spiritual entity of man is drawn higher and ever higher to the Ray that supersedes the first, until, from Ray to Ray, the Inner Man is drawn into the one and highest Beam of the Parent-Sun. Thus, “the events of humanity do run coördinately with the number forms,” since the single units of that humanity proceed one and all from the same source—the Central Sun and its shadow, the visible. For the equinoxes and solstices, the periods and various phases of the solar course, astronomically and numerically expressed, are only the concrete symbols of the eternally living verity, though they do seem abstract ideas to uninitiated mortals. And this explains the extraordinary numerical coincidences with geometrical relations, shown by several authors.

Yes; “our destiny is written in the stars”! Only, the closer the union between the mortal reflection Man and his celestial Prototype, the less dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reïncarnations—which neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. This is not superstition, least of all is it fatalism. The latter implies a blind course of some still blinder power, but man is a free agent during his stay on earth. He cannot escape his ruling Destiny, but he has the choice of two paths that lead him in that direction, and he can reach the goal of misery—if such is decreed to him—either in the snowy white robes of the martyr, or in the soiled garments of a volunteer in the iniquitous course; for there are external and internal conditions which affect the determination of our will upon our actions, and it is in our power to follow either of the two. Those who believe in Karma have to believe in Destiny, which, from birth to death, every man weaves thread by thread round himself, as a spider his web; and this Destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the invisible Prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate astral, or inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity called man. Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and implacable Law of Compensation steps in and takes its course, faithfully following [pg 701] the fluctuations of the fight. When the last strand is woven, and man is seemingly enwrapped in the network of his own doing, then he finds himself completely under the empire of this self-made Destiny. It then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or carries him away like a feather in a whirlwind raised by his own actions, and this is—Karma.

A Materialist, treating of the periodical creations of our globe, has expressed it in a single sentence:

The whole past of the earth is nothing but an unfolded present.

The writer was Büchner, who little suspected that he was repeating an axiom of the Occultists. It is quite true also, as Burmeister remarks, that:

The historical investigation of the development of the earth has proved that nowand then rest upon the same base; that the past has been developed in the same manner as the present rolls on; and that the forces which were in action ever remained the same.1101

The Forces—their Noumena rather—are the same, of course; therefore, the phenomenal Forces must be the same also. But how can any one feel so sure that the attributes of Matter have not altered under the hand of Protean Evolution? How can any Materialist assert with such confidence, as is done by Rossmassler, that:

This eternal conformity in the essence of phenomena renders it certain that fire and water possessed at all times the same powers and ever will possess them.

Who are they “that darken counsel with words without knowledge,” and where were the Huxleys and Büchners when the foundations of the Earth were laid by the Great Law? This same homogeneity of Matter and immutability of natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by Materialism, are a fundamental principle of the Occult Philosophy; but this unity rests upon the inseparability of Spirit from Matter, and, if the two were once divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into Chaos and Non-being. Therefore, it is absolutely false, and but an additional demonstration of the great conceit of our age, to assert, as men of Science do, that all the great geological changes and terrible convulsions of the past have been produced by ordinary and known physical Forces. For these Forces were but the tools and final means for the accomplishment of certain purposes, acting periodically, and apparently mechanically, through an inward impulse mixed up [pg 702] with, but beyond their material nature. There is a purpose in every important act of Nature, whose acts are all cyclic and periodical. But spiritual Forces having been usually confused with the purely physical, the former are denied by, and therefore, because left unexamined, have to remain unknown to Science.1102 Says Hegel:

The history of the World begins with its general aim, the realization of the Idea of Spirit—only in an implicit form (an sich), that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden unconscious instinct, and the whole process of History ... is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one. Thus appearing in the form of merely natural existence, natural will—that which has been called the subjective side—physical craving, instinct, passion, private interest, as also opinion and subjective conception—spontaneously present themselves at the very commencement. This vast congeries of volitions, interests and activities constitute the instruments and means of the World-Spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness and realizing it. And this aim is none other than finding itself—coming to itself—and contemplating itself in concrete actuality. But that those manifestations of vitality on the part of individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes, are at the same time the means and instruments of a higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing—which they realize unconsciously—might be made a matter of question; rather has been questioned ... on this point I announced my view at the very outset, and asserted our hypothesis ... and our belief that Reason governs the World and has consequently governed its history. In relation to this independently universal and substantial existence—all else is subordinate, subservient to it, and the means for its development.1103

No Metaphysician or Theosophist could demur to these truths, which are all embodied in Esoteric Teachings. There is a predestination in the geological life of our globe, as in the history, past and future, of races and nations. This is closely connected with what we call Karma, and what Western Pantheists called Nemesis and Cycles. The law of evolution is now carrying us along the ascending arc of our cycle, when the effects will be once more re-merged into, and re-become the now neutralized causes, and all things affected by the former will have regained their original harmony. This will be the cycle of our special Round, a moment in the duration of the Great Cycle, or Mahâyuga.

The fine philosophical remarks of Hegel are found to have their [pg 703] application in the teachings of Occult Science, which shows Nature ever acting with a given purpose, whose results are always dual. This was stated in our first Occult volumes, in the following words:

As our Planet revolves once every year around the Sun, and at the same time turns once in every twenty-four hours upon its own axis, thus traversing minor circles within a larger one, so is the work of the smaller cyclic periods accomplished and recommenced within the Great Saros. The revolution of the physical world, according to the ancient doctrine, is attended by a like revolution in the world of intellect—the spiritual evolution of the world proceeding in cycles, like the physical one. Thus we see in history a regular alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the culmination of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with the same law by which they ascended; till, having reached the lowest point, humanity reässerts itself and mounts up once more, the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from which it had before descended.1104

But these cycles—wheels within wheels, so comprehensively and ingeniously symbolized by the various Manus and Rishis in India, and by the Kabiri in the West1105—do not affect all mankind at one and the same time. Hence, as we see, the difficulty of comprehending, and of discriminating between them, with regard to their physical and spiritual effects, without having thoroughly mastered their relations with, and action upon, the respective positions of nations and races, in their destiny and evolution. This system cannot be comprehended if the spiritual action of these periods—preördained, so to say, by Karmic law—is separated from their physical course. The calculations of the best Astrologers would fail, or at any rate remain imperfect, unless this dual action is thoroughly taken into consideration and mastered upon these lines. And this mastery can be achieved only through Initiation.

The Grand Cycle includes the progress of mankind from the appearance of primordial man of ethereal form. It runs through the inner Cycles of man's progressive evolution from the ethereal down to the semi-ethereal and purely physical; down to the redemption of man [pg 704] from his “coat of skin” and matter, after which it continues running its course downward and then upward again, to meet at the culmination of a Round, when the Manvantaric Serpent “swallows its tail” and seven Minor Cycles are passed. These are the great Racial Cycles which affect equally all the nations and tribes included in that special Race; but there are minor and national, as well as tribal, Cycles within these, which run their course independently of each other. They are called in Eastern Esotericism the Karmic Cycles. In the West—since Pagan Wisdom has been repudiated as having grown from and been developed by the Dark Powers, supposed to be at constant war with and in opposition to the little tribal Jehovah—the full and awful significance of the Greek Nemesis, or Karma, has been entirely forgotten. Otherwise Christians would have better realized the profound truth that Nemesis is without attributes; that while the dreaded Goddess is absolute and immutable as a Principle, it is we ourselves—nations and individuals—who propel it to action and give the impulse to its direction. Karma-Nemesis is the creator of nations and mortals, but once created, it is they who make of her either a Fury or a rewarding Angel. Yea—

Wise are they who worship Nemesis1106

—as the Chorus tells Prometheus. And as unwise they, who believe that the Goddess may be propitiated by any sacrifices and prayers, or have her wheel diverted from the path it has once taken. “The triform Fates and ever mindful Furies” are her attributes only on Earth, and begotten by ourselves. There is no return from the paths she cycles over; yet those paths are of our own making, for it is we, collectively or individually, who prepare them. Karma-Nemesis is the synonym of Providence, minus design, goodness, and every other finite attribute and qualification, so unphilosophically attributed to the latter. An Occultist or a Philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying it with Karma-Nemesis, he will nevertheless teach that it guards the good and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes the evil-doer—aye, even to his seventh rebirth—so long, indeed, as the effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in the Infinite World of Harmony has not been finally reädjusted. For the only decree of Karma—an eternal and immutable decree—is absolute Harmony in the [pg 705] world of Matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we who reward or punish ourselves, according as we work with, through and along with Nature, abiding by the laws on which that harmony depends, or—breaking them.

Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of these ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism, and a third, simple Chance, with neither Gods nor Devils to guide them—would surely disappear, if we would but attribute all of them to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbours would no more work to hurt us than we would think of harming them, two-thirds of the world's evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our midst of every element of strife and opposition, and the division of races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the “ways of Providence.” We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then we complain because these windings are so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life. If one breaks the laws of Harmony, or, as a theosophical writer expresses it, the “laws of life,” one must be prepared to fall into the chaos oneself has produced. For, according to the same writer:

The only conclusion one can come to is that these laws of life are their own avengers; and consequently that every avenging angel is only a typified representation of their reäction.

Therefore, if any one is helpless before these immutable laws, it is not ourselves, the artificers of our destinies, but rather those Angels, the guardians of Harmony. Karma-Nemesis is no more than the spiritual dynamical effect of causes produced, and forces awakened into activity, by our own actions. It is a law of Occult dynamics that [pg 706] “a given amount of energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective plane of existence.”

This condition of things will last till man's spiritual intuitions are fully opened, and this will not be until we fairly cast off our thick coats of Matter; until we begin acting from within, instead of ever following impulses from without, impulses produced by our physical senses and gross selfish body. Until then the only palliatives for the evils of life are union and harmony—a Brotherhood in actu, and Altruism not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad cause will suppress not one, but many bad effects. And if a Brotherhood, or even a number of Brotherhoods, may not be able to prevent nations from occasionally cutting each other's throats, still unity in thought and action, and philosophical research into the mysteries of being, will always prevent some persons, who are trying to comprehend that which has hitherto remained to them a riddle, from creating additional causes of mischief in a world already so full of woe and evil. Knowledge of Karma gives the conviction that if

... virtue in distress, and vice in triumph

Make atheists of mankind,1107

it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that man is himself his own saviour and his own destroyer. He need not accuse Heaven and the Gods, Fates and Providence, of the apparent injustice that reigns in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and repeat this fragment of Grecian wisdom, which warns man to forbear accusing That which

Just, though mysterious, leads us on unerring

Through ways unmark'd from guilt to punishment;

and such are now the ways on which the great European nations move onward. Every nation and tribe of the Western Âryans, like their Eastern brethren of the Fifth Race, has had its Golden and its Iron Age, its period of comparative irresponsibility, or its Satya Age of purity, and now, several of them have reached their Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, an age black with horrors.

On the other hand, it is true that the exoteric Cycles of every nation have been rightly derived from, and shown to depend on, sidereal motions. The latter are inseparably blended with the destinies of [pg 707] nations and men. But, in the purely physical sense, Europe knows of no Cycles other than the astronomical, and it makes its computations accordingly. Nor will it hear of any other than imaginary circles or circuits in the starry heavens that gird them,

With centric and eccentric scribbled o'er

Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.

But with the Pagans—of whom Coleridge rightly says, “Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the Deity,” that “Deity” manifesting coördinately with, and only through, Karma, and being that Karma-Nemesis itself—the Cycles meant something more than a mere succession of events, or a periodical space of time of more or less prolonged duration. For they were generally marked with recurrences of a more varied and intellectual character than are exhibited in the periodical return of seasons or of certain constellations. Modern wisdom is satisfied with astronomical computations and prophecies, based on unerring mathematical laws. Ancient Wisdom added to the cold shell of Astronomy the vivifying elements of its soul and spirit—Astrology. And, as the sidereal motions do regulate and determine other events on Earth besides potatoes and the periodical diseases of that useful vegetable—a statement which, not being amenable to scientific explanation, is merely derided, while none the less accepted—these events have to submit to predetermination, by simple astronomical computations. Believers in Astrology will understand our meaning, sceptics will laugh at the belief and mock the idea. Thus they shut their eyes, ostrich-like, to their own fate.1108

This because their little historical period, so called, allows them no margin for comparison. Sidereal heaven is before them; and though their spiritual vision is still unopened, and the atmospheric dust of terrestrial origin seals their sight and chains it within the limits of [pg 708] physical systems, still they do not fail to perceive the movements and note the behaviour of meteors and comets. They record the periodical advents of those wanderers and “flaming messengers,” and prophesy, in consequence, earthquakes, meteoric showers, the apparition of certain stars, comets, etc. Are they, then, soothsayers after all? No; they are learned Astronomers.

Why, then, should Occultists and Astrologers, as learned as these Astronomers, be disbelieved when they prophesy the return of some cyclic event on the same mathematical principles? Why should the claim that they know this return be ridiculed? Their forefathers and predecessors, having recorded the recurrence of such events in their time and day, throughout a period embracing hundreds of thousands of years, the conjunction of the same constellations must necessarily produce, if not quite the same, at any rate similar, effects. Are the prophecies to be derided, because of the claim made for hundreds of thousands of years of observation, and for millions of years for the human Races? In its turn, Modern Science is laughed at by those who hold to Biblical chronology, for its far more modest geological and anthropological figures. Thus Karma adjusts even human laughter, at the mutual expense of sects, learned societies, and individuals. Yet in the prognostication of such future events, at any rate, all foretold on the authority of cyclic recurrences, no psychic phenomenon is involved. It is neither prevision, nor prophecy; any more than is the signalling of a comet or star, several years before its appearance. It is simply knowledge, and mathematically correct computations, which enable the Wise Men of the East to foretell, for instance, that England is on the eve of such or another catastrophe; that France is nearing such a point of her Cycle; and that Europe in general is threatened with, or rather is on the eve of, a cataclysm, to which her own Cycle of racial Karma has led her. Our view of the reliability of the information depends, of course, on our acceptation or rejection of the claim for a tremendous period of historical observation. Eastern Initiates maintain that they have preserved records of racial development and of events of universal import ever since the beginning of the Fourth Race—their knowledge of events preceding that epoch being traditional. Moreover, those who believe in Seership and in Occult Powers will have no difficulty in crediting the general character, at least, of the information given, even if it be traditional, once the tradition is checked and corrected by clairvoyance and Esoteric Knowledge. But [pg 709] in the present case no such metaphysical belief is claimed as our chief dependence, for proof is given—on what, to every Occultist, is quite scientific evidence—the records preserved through the Zodiac for incalculable ages.

It is now amply proved that even horoscopes and judiciary Astrology are not quite based on fiction, and that Stars and Constellations, consequently, have an occult and mysterious influence on, and connection with, individuals. And if with the latter, why not with nations, races, and mankind as a whole? This, again, is a claim made on the authority of the Zodiacal records. We shall then enquire how far the Zodiac was known to the Ancients, and how far it is forgotten by the Moderns.

[pg 710]

Section XVI. The Zodiac and its Antiquity.

“All men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understanding, and to be tenacious of the opinions they profess,” said Jordan, justly adding to this—“and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others, not by their own; and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget, their opinions.”

This is doubly true in regard to scientific opinions upon hypotheses offered for consideration—the prejudice and preconceptions of “authorities,” so called, often deciding upon questions of the most vital importance for history. There are several such predetermined opinions held by our learned Orientalists, and few are more unjust or illogical than the general error with regard to the antiquity of the Zodiac. Thanks to the hobby of some German Orientalists, English and American Sanskritists have accepted Professor Weber's opinion that the peoples of India had no idea or knowledge of the Zodiac prior to the Macedonian invasion, and that it is from the Greeks that the ancient Hindûs imported it into their country. We are further told, by several other “authorities,” that no Eastern nation knew of the Zodiac before the Hellenes kindly acquainted their neighbours with their invention. And this, in the face of the Book of Job, which is declared, even by themselves, to be the oldest in the Hebrew canon, and certainly prior to Moses; a book which speaks of the making of “Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades [Osh, Kesil, and Kimah] and the chambers of the South”1109; of Scorpio and the Mazaruth—the twelve signs1110; words which, if they mean anything, imply knowledge of the Zodiac even among the nomadic Arabian tribes. The Book of Job is alleged to have preceded Homer and Hesiod by at least one thousand years—the two Greek poets having themselves flourished some eight centuries before the Christian era (!!). Though, by the bye, one who prefers to believe [pg 711] Plato—who shows Homer flourishing far earlier—could point to a number of Zodiacal signs mentioned in the Iliad and Odyssey, in the Orphic poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock-and-bull hypothesis of some modern critics that, so far from Orpheus, not even Homer or Hesiod has ever existed, it would seem time lost to mention these archaic authors at all. The Arabian Job will suffice; unless, indeed, his volume of lamentations, along with the poems of the two Greeks, to which we may add those of Linus, should now also be declared to be the patriotic forgery of the Jew Aristobulus. But if the Zodiac was known in the days of Job, how could the civilized and philosophical Hindûs have remained ignorant of it?

Risking the arrows of modern criticism—rather blunted by misuse—the reader may make himself acquainted with Bailly's learned opinion upon the subject. Inferred speculations may be shown to be erroneous. Mathematical calculations stand on more secure grounds. Taking as a starting point several astronomical references in Job, Bailly devised a very ingenious means of proving that the earliest founders of the Science of the Zodiac belonged to an antediluvian, primitive people. The fact that he seems willing to see some of the Biblical patriarchs in Thoth, Seth, and in the Chinese Fohi, does not interfere with the validity of his proof as to the antiquity of the Zodiac.1111 Even accepting, for argument's sake, his cautious 3700 years b.c. as the correct age of the Zodiacal Science, this date proves in the most irrefutable way that it was not the Greeks who invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason that they did not exist as a nation thirty-seven centuries b.c.—at any rate not as a historical race admitted by the critics. Bailly then calculated the period at which the constellations manifested the atmospheric influence called by Job the “sweet influences of the Pleiades,”1112 in Hebrew Kimah; that of Orion, Kesil; and that of the desert rains with reference to Scorpio, the eighth constellation; and found that in presence of the eternal conformity of these divisions of the Zodiac, and of the names of the Planets applied in the same order everywhere and always, and in presence of the impossibility of attributing it all to chance and “coincidence”—“which never creates such similarities”—a very great antiquity indeed must be allowed for the Zodiac.1113

[pg 712]

Again, if the Bible is supposed to be an authority on any matter—and there are some who still regard it as such, whether from Christian or Kabalistical considerations—then the Zodiac is clearly mentioned in II Kings, xxiii. 5. Before the “book of the law” was “found” by Hilkiah, the high priest, the signs of the Zodiac were known and worshipped. These were held in the same adoration as the Sun and Moon, since the

priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense ... unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven,

or to the “twelve signs or constellations,” as the marginal note in the English Bible explains, had followed the injunction for centuries. They were stopped in their idolatry only by King Josiah, 624 b.c.

The Old Testament is full of allusions to the twelve zodiacal signs, and the whole scheme is built upon it—heroes, personages, and events. Thus in the dream of Joseph, who saw eleven “Stars” bowing to the twelfth, which was his “Star,” the Zodiac is referred to. The Roman Catholics have discovered in it, moreover, a prophecy of Christ, who is that twelfth Star, they say, and the others the eleven apostles; the absence of the twelfth being also regarded as a prophetic allusion to the treachery of Judas. The twelve sons of Jacob, again, are a reference to the same, as is justly pointed out by Villapandus.1114 Sir James Malcolm, in his History of Persia,1115 shows the Dabistan echoing all such traditions about the Zodiac. He traces the invention of it to the palmy days of the Golden Age of Iran, remarking that one of the said traditions maintains that the Genii of the Planets are represented under the same shapes and figures they had assumed when they showed themselves to several holy prophets, and thus led to the establishment of the rites based on the Zodiac.

Pythagoras, and after him Philo Judæus, held the number 12 as very sacred.

This duodenary number is perfect. It is that of the signs of the Zodiac, which the sun visits in twelve months, and it is to honour that number that Moses divided his nation into twelve tribes, established the twelve cakes of the shew-bread, and placed twelve precious stones upon the breast-plate of the pontiffs.1116

According to Seneca, Berosus taught prophecy of every future event and cataclysm by the Zodiac; and the times fixed by him for the conflagration [pg 713] of the World—Pralaya—and for a deluge, are found to answer to the times given in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. Such a catastrophe comes at every renewal of the cycle of the Sidereal Year of 25,868 years. The names of the Akkadian months were called by, and derived from, the names of the signs of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians are far earlier than the Chaldæans. Mr. Proctor shows, in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy, that the ancient Astronomers had acquired a system of the most accurate Astronomy 2,400 years b.c.; the Hindûs date their Kali Yuga from a great periodical conjunction of the Planets thirty-one centuries b.c.; but, withal, it was the Greeks, belonging to the expedition of Alexander the Great, who were the instructors of the Âryan Hindûs in Astronomy!

Whether the origin of the Zodiac is Âryan or Egyptian, it is still of an immense antiquity. Simplicius, in the sixth century a.d., writes that he had always heard that the Egyptians had kept astronomical observations and records for a period of 630,000 years. This statement appears to frighten Mr. Gerald Massey, who remarks on it that:

If we read this number of years by the month which Euxodus said the Egyptians termed a year, i.e., a course of time, that would still yield the length of two cycles of precession [51,736 years].1117

Diogenes Laërtius carried back the astronomical calculations of the Egyptians to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great.1118 Martianus Capella corroborates this by telling posterity that the Egyptians had secretly studied Astronomy for over 40,000 years, before they imparted their knowledge to the world.1119

Several valuable quotations are made in Natural Genesis with the view of supporting the author's theories, but they justify the teaching of the Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his Life of Sulla, saying:

One day when the sky was serene and clear, there was heard in it the sound of a trumpet, so loud, shrill, and mournful, that it affrighted and astonished the world. The Tuscan sages said that it portended a new race of men, and a renovation of the world; for they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men, all being different in life and manners; and that Heaven had allotted each its time, which was limited by the circuit of the great year [25,868 years].1120

This reminds one strongly of our Seven Races of men, and of the [pg 714] eighth—the “animal man”—descended from the later Third Race; as also of the successive submersions and destruction of the continents which finally disposed of almost all that Race. Says Iamblichus:

The Assyrians have not only preserved the memorials of seven-and-twenty myriads of years [270,000 years], as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.1121

This is as nearly as possible the calculation of the Esoteric Doctrine. For 1,000,000 years are allowed for our present Root-Race (the Fifth), and about 850,000 years have passed since the submersion of the last large island—part of the continent of Atlantis—the Ruta of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans; while Daitya, a small island inhabited by a mixed race, was destroyed about 270,000 years ago, during the Glacial Period or thereabouts. But the Seven Rulers, or the seven great Dynasties of the Divine Kings, belong to the traditions of every great people of antiquity. Wherever twelve are mentioned, they are invariably the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

So patent is this fact, that the Roman Catholic writers—especially among the French Ultramontanes—have tacitly agreed to connect the twelve Jewish Patriarchs with the Signs of the Zodiac. This is done in a kind of prophetico-mystic way, which sounds to pious and ignorant ears like a portentous token, a tacit divine recognition of the “chosen people of God,” whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. For instance, curiously enough, these writers, De Mirville among others, recognize all the characteristics of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, in the words addressed by the dying Jacob to his Sons, and in his definitions of the future of each Tribe.1122 Moreover, the respective banners of the same tribes are said to have exhibited the same symbols and the same names as the Signs, repeated in the twelve stones of the Urim and Thummim, and on the twelve wings of the two Cherubs. Leaving to the said Mystics the proof of exactitude in the alleged correspondence, we quote it as follows: Man, or Aquarius, is in the sphere of Reuben, who is declared as “unstable as water” (the Vulgate has it, “rushing like water”); Gemini, in that of Simeon and Levi, because of their strong fraternal association; Leo, in that of Judah, “the strong Lion” of his tribe, “the lion's whelp”; Pisces, in Zabulon, who “shall dwell at the haven of the sea”; Taurus, in Issachar, because he is “a strong ass couching down,” etc., and therefore associated with the stables; [pg 715] (Virgo-) Scorpio, in Dan, who is described as “a serpent, an adder in the path that biteth,” etc.; Capricornus in Naphtali, who is “a hind (a deer) let loose”; Cancer, in Benjamin, for he is “ravenous”; Libra, the Balance, in Asher, whose “bread shall be fat”; Sagittarius in Joseph, because “his bow abode in strength.” To make up for the twelfth Sign, Virgo, made independent of Scorpio, we have Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob. Tradition shows the alleged tribes carrying the twelve signs on their banners. But indeed the Bible, in addition to the above, is filled with theo-cosmological and astronomical symbols and personifications.

It remains to wonder, and to query—if the actual, living Patriarchs' destiny was so indissolubly wound up with the Zodiac—how it is that, after the loss of the ten tribes, the ten signs also out of the twelve have not miraculously disappeared from the sidereal fields? But this is of no great concern. Let us rather busy ourselves with the history of the Zodiac itself.

The reader may be reminded of some opinions expressed as to the Zodiac by several of the highest authorities in Science.

Newton believed that the invention of the Zodiac could be traced as far back as the expedition of the Argonauts; and Dulaure fixed its origin at 6,500 years b.c., just 2,496 years before the creation of the world, according to the Bible chronology.

Creuzer thought that it was very easy to show that most of the Theogonies were intimately connected with religious calendars, and were related to the Zodiac as to their prime origin; if not to the Zodiac known to us now, then to something very analogous with it. He felt certain that the Zodiac and its mystic relations are at the bottom of all the mythologies, under one form or another, and that it had existed in the old form for ages, before it was brought out in the present defined astronomical garb, owing to some singular coördination of events.1123

Whether the “genii of the planets,” our Dhyân Chohans of supra-mundane spheres, showed themselves to “holy prophets,” or not, as claimed in the Dabistan, it would seem that great laymen and warriors were favoured in the same way in days of old in Chaldæa, when astrological Magic and Theophania went hand in hand.

Xenophon, no ordinary man, narrates of Cyrus ... that at the moment of his death he thanked the Gods and heroes, for having so often instructed him themselves about the signs in heaven—ἐν οὐρανίοις σημείοις.1124

[pg 716]

Unless the Science of the Zodiac is admitted to be of the highest antiquity and universality, how can we account for its Signs being traced in the oldest Theogonies? Laplace is said to have felt struck with amazement at the idea of the days of Mercury (Wednesday), Venus (Friday), Jupiter (Thursday), Saturn (Saturday), and others, being related to the days of the week in the same order and with the same names in India as in Northern Europe.

Try, if you can, with the present system of autochthonous civilizations, so much in fashion in our day, to explain how nations with no ancestry, no traditions or birthplace in common, could have succeeded in inventing a kind of celestial phantasmagoria, a veritable imbroglio of sidereal denominations, without sequence or object, having no figurative relation with the constellations they represent, and still less, apparently, with the phases of our terrestrial life they are made to signify,

—had there not been a general intention and a universal cause and belief, at the root of all this!1125 Most truly has Dupuis asserted the same:

Il est impossible de découvrir le moindre trait de ressemblance entre les parties du ciel et les figures que les astronomes y ont arbitrairement tracées; et de l'autre côté, le hasard est impossible.1126

Most certainly chance is “impossible.” There is no “chance” in Nature, wherein everything is mathematically coördinate, and inter-related in its units. Says Coleridge:

Chance is but the pseudonym of God [or Nature], for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His sign manual.

Replace the word “God” by Karma, and it will become an Eastern axiom. Therefore, the sidereal “prophecies” of the Zodiac, as they are called by Christian Mystics, never point to any one particular event, however solemn and sacred it may be for some one portion of humanity, but to ever-recurrent, periodical laws in Nature, understood only by the Initiates of the Sidereal Gods themselves.

No Occultist, no Astrologer of Eastern birth, will ever agree with Christian Mystics, or even with Kepler's mystical Astronomy, his great science and erudition notwithstanding; and this because, if his premisses are quite correct, his deductions therefrom are one-sided and biassed by Christian preconceptions. Where Kepler finds a prophecy directly pointing to the Saviour, other nations see a symbol of an eternal law, decreed for the actual Manvantara. Why see in Pisces a direct reference to Christ—one of the several world-reformers, a Saviour for his direct followers, but only a great and glorious Initiate [pg 717] for all the rest—when that constellation shines as a symbol of all the past, present, and future Spiritual Saviours, who dispense light and dispel mental darkness? Christian symbologists have tried to prove that this sign belonged to Ephraim, Joseph's son, the elect of Jacob, and that therefore, it was at the moment of the Sun's entering into the sign of Pisces, the Fish, that the “Elect Messiah,” the Ἰχθὺς of the first Christians, had to be born. But if Jesus of Nazareth was that Messiah, was he really born at that “moment,” or was his birth-hour thus fixed by the adaptation of Theologians, who sought only to make their preconceived ideas fit in with sidereal facts and popular belief? Everyone is aware that the real time and year of the birth of Jesus are totally unknown. And it is the Jews—whose forefathers made the word Dag signify both “Fish” and “Messiah” during the forced development of their rabbinical language—who are the first to deny this Christian claim. And what of the further facts that Brâhmans connect their “Messiah,” the eternal Avatâra Vishnu, with a Fish and the Deluge, and that the Babylonians also made a Fish and a Messiah of their Dag-On, the Man-Fish and Prophet?

There are learned iconoclasts among Egyptologists, who say that:

When the Pharisees sought a “sign from heaven,” Jesus said, “there shall no sign be given .... but the sign of the prophet Jonas.” (Mat., xvi. 4.).... The sign of Jonas is that of the Oan or Fish-Man of Nineveh.... Assuredly there was no other sign than that of the Sun reborn in Pisces. The voice of the Secret Wisdom says those who are looking for signs can have no other than that of the returning Fish-Man Ichthys, Oannes, or Jonas—who could not be made flesh.

It would appear that Kepler maintained it as a positive fact that, at the moment of the “incarnation,” all the planets were in conjunction in the sign Pisces, called by the Jewish Kabbalists the “constellation of the Messiah.” Kepler averred:

It is in this constellation that the star of the Magi is to be found.

This statement, quoted from Dr. Sepp1127 by De Mirville, emboldened the latter to remark that:

All the Jewish traditions, while announcing that star that many nations have seen [!],1128 further added that it would absorb the seventy planets that preside over [pg 718]the destinies of various nations on this globe.1129 “In virtue of those natural prophecies,” says Dr. Sepp, “it was written in the stars of the firmament that the Messiah would be born in the lunar year of the world 4320, in that memorable year when the entire choir of the planets would be celebrating its jubilee.”1130

There was indeed a rage, at the beginning of the present century, for claiming restoration from the Hindûs for an alleged robbery from the Jews of their “Gods,” patriarchs, and chronology. It was Wilford who recognized Noah in Prithî and in Satyavrata, Enos in Dhruva, and even Assur in Îshvara. After being residents for so many years in India, some Orientalists, at least, ought to have known that it was not the Brâhmans alone who had these figures, or who had divided their Great Age into four minor ages. Nevertheless writers in the Asiatic Researches indulged in the most extravagant speculations. S. A. Mackey, the Norwich “philosopher, astronomer, and shoemaker,” argues very pertinently:

Christian theologians think it their duty to write against the long periods of Hindû chronology, and in them it may be pardonable: but when a man of learning crucifies the names and the numbers of the ancients, and wrings and twists them into a form, which means something quite foreign to the intention of the ancient authors; but which, so mutilated, fits in with the birth of some maggot preëxisting in his own brain with so much exactness that he pretends to be amazed at the discovery, I cannot think him quite so pardonable.1131

This is intended to apply to Captain (later Colonel) Wilford, but the words may fit more than one of our modern Orientalists. Colonel Wilford was the first to crown his unlucky speculations on Hindû chronology and the Purânas by connecting the 4,320,000 years with biblical chronology, by simply dwarfing the figures to 4,320 years—the supposed lunar year of the Nativity—and Dr. Sepp has simply plagiarized the idea from this gallant officer. Moreover, he persisted in seeing in them Jewish property, as well as Christian prophecy, thus accusing the Âryans of having helped themselves to Semitic revelation, whereas the reverse was the case. The Jews, moreover, need not be accused of directly despoiling the Hindûs, of whose figures Ezra probably knew nothing. They had evidently and undeniably borrowed them from the Chaldeans, along with the Chaldean Gods. They turned [pg 719] the 432,000 years of the Chaldean Divine Dynasties1132 into 4,320 lunar years from the world's creation to the Christian era; as to the Babylonian and Egyptian Gods, they quietly and modestly transformed them into Patriarchs. Every nation was more or less guilty of such refashioning and adaptation of a Pantheon—once common to all—of universal into national and tribal Gods and Heroes. It was Jewish property in its new Pentateuchal garb, and no one of the Israelites has ever forced it upon any other nation—least of all upon the European.

Without stopping to notice this very unscientific chronology more than is necessary, we may yet make a few remarks that may be found to the point. The 4,320 lunar years of the world—in the Bible the solar years are used—are not fanciful, as such, even if their application is quite erroneous; for they are only the distorted echo of the primitive Esoteric, and later of the Brâhmanical doctrine concerning the Yugas. A Day of Brahmâ equals 4,320,000,000 years, as also does a Night of Brahmâ, or the duration of Pralaya, after which a new “sun” rises triumphantly over a new Manvantara, for the Septenary Chain it illuminates. The teaching had penetrated into Palestine and Europe centuries before the Christian era,1133 and was present in the minds of the Mosaic Jews, who based upon it their small Cycle, though it received full expression only through the Christian chronologers of the Bible, who adopted it, as also the 25th of December, the day on which all the solar Gods were said to have been incarnated. What wonder, then, that the Messiah was made to be born in “the lunar year of the world 4,320”? The “Sun of Righteousness and Salvation” had once more arisen and had dispelled the pralayic darkness of Chaos and Nonbeing on the plane of our objective little Globe and Chain. Once the [pg 720] subject of the adoration was settled upon, it was easy to make the supposed events of his birth, life, and death, fit in with the Zodiacal exigencies and the old traditions, though they had to be somewhat remodelled for the occasion.

Thus what Kepler said, as a great Astronomer, becomes comprehensible. He recognized the grand and universal importance of all such planetary conjunctions, “each of which”—as he has well said—“is a climacteric year of Humanity.”1134 The rare conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars has its significance and importance on account of its certain great results, in India and China as much as it has in Europe, for the respective Mystics of these countries. And it is certainly now no better than a mere assumption to maintain that Nature had only Christ in view, in building her (to the profane) fantastic and meaningless constellations. If it is claimed that it was no hazard that could lead the archaic architects of the Zodiac, thousands of years ago, to mark the figure of Taurus with the asterisk a, with no better or more valid proof of it being prophetic of the Verbum or Christ than that the aleph of Taurus means the “one” and the “first,” and that Christ was also the alpha or the “one,” then this “proof” may be shown to be strangely invalidated in more than one way. To begin with, the Zodiac existed before the Christian era, at all events; further, all the Sun-Gods—Osiris, for instance—had been mystically connected with the constellation Taurus and were all called by their respective votaries the “First.” Further, the compilers of the mystical epithets given to the Christian Saviour were all more or less acquainted with the significance of the Zodiacal signs; and it is easier to suppose that they should have arranged their claims so as to match the mystic signs, than that the latter should have shone as a prophecy for one portion of humanity, for millions of years, taking no heed of the numberless generations that had gone before, and of those that were to be born hereafter.

We are told:

It is not simple chance that, in certain spheres, has placed on a throne the head of this bull [Taurus] trying to push back a Dragon with the ansated cross; we [pg 721]should know that this constellation of Taurus was called “the great city of God and the mother of revelations,” and also “the interpreter of the divine voice,” the Apis Pacis of Hermontis, in Egypt, which [as the patristic fathers would assure the world] is said to have proffered oracles that related to the birth of the Saviour.1135

To this theological assumption there are several answers. Firstly, the ansated Egyptian cross, or Tau, the Jaina cross, or Svastika, and the Christian cross, have all the same meaning. Secondly, no peoples or nations except the Christians gave the significance to the Dragon that is given to it now. The Serpent was the symbol of Wisdom; and the Bull, Taurus, the symbol of physical or terrestrial generation. Thus the Bull, pushing off the Dragon, or spiritual Divine Wisdom, with the Tau, or Cross—which is esoterically “the foundation and framework of all construction”—would have an entirely phallic, physiological meaning, had it not had yet another significance unknown to our Biblical scholars and symbologists. At any rate, it has no special reference to the Verbum of St. John, except, perhaps, in a general sense. The Taurus—which, by the way, is no lamb, but a bull—was sacred in every Cosmogony, with the Hindûs as with the Zoroastrians, with the Chaldees as with the Egyptians. So much, every schoolboy knows.

It may perhaps help to refresh the memory of our Theosophists if we refer them to what was said of the Virgin and the Dragon, and the universality of periodical births and re-births of World-Saviours—Solar Gods—in Isis Unveiled,1136 with regard to certain passages in Revelation.

In 1853, the savant known as Erard-Mollien read before the Institute of France a paper tending to prove the antiquity of the Indian Zodiac, in the signs of which were found the root and philosophy of all the most important religious festivals of that country; the lecturer tried to demonstrate that the origin of these religious ceremonies goes back into the night of time to at least 3,000 b.c. The Zodiac of the Hindûs, he thought, was long anterior to the Zodiac of the Greeks, and differed from it much in some particulars. In it one sees the Dragon on a Tree, at the foot of which the Virgin, Kanyâ-Durgâ, one of the most ancient Goddesses, is placed on a Lion dragging after it the solar car. He said:

This is the reason why this Virgin Durgâ is not the simple memento of an astronomical fact, but verily the most ancient divinity of the Indian Olympus. She is evidently the same whose return was announced in all the Sibylline books—the source of the inspiration of Virgil—an epoch of universal renovation.... [pg 722]And why, since the months are still named after this Indian solar Zodiac, by the Malayalim-speaking people [of southern India], should that people have abandoned it to take that of the Greeks? Everything proves, on the contrary, that these zodiacal figures were transmitted to the Greeks by the Chaldeans, who got them from the Brâhmans.1137

But all this is very poor testimony. Let us, however, remember also that which was said and accepted by the contemporaries of Volney, who remarks that as Aries was in its fifteenth degree 1,447 b.c., it follows that the first degree of Libra could not have coincided with the vernal equinox later than 15,194 years b.c.; if we add to this, he argues, the 1,790 years that have passed since the birth of Christ, it appears that 16,984 years must have elapsed since the origin of the Zodiac.1138

Dr. Schlegel, moreover, in his Uranographie Chinoise, assigns to the Chinese Astronomical Sphere an antiquity of 18,000 years.1139

Nevertheless, as opinions quoted without adequate proofs are of little avail, it may be more useful to turn to scientific evidence. M. Bailly, the famous French Astronomer of the last century, Member of the Academy, etc., asserts that the Hindû systems of Astronomy are by far the oldest, and that from them the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews derived their knowledge. In support of these views he says:

The astronomers who preceded the epoch 1491 are, first, the Alexandrian Greeks; Hipparchus, who flourished 125 years before our era, and Ptolemy, 260 years after Hipparchus. Following these were the Arabs, who revived the study of astronomy in the ninth century. These were succeeded by the Persians and the Tartars, to whom we owe the tables of Nassireddin in 1269, and those of Ulug-beg in 1437. Such is the succession of events in Asia as known prior to the Indian epoch 1491. What, then, is an epoch? It is the observation of the longitude of a star at a given moment, the place in the sky where it was seen, and which serves as a point of reference, a starting-point from which to calculate both the past and future positions of the star from its observed motion. But an epoch is useless unless the motion of the star has been determined. A people, new to science and obliged to borrow a foreign astronomy, finds no difficulty in fixing an epoch, since the only observation needed is one which can be made at any moment. But what it needs above all, what it is obliged to borrow, are those elements which depend on accurate determination, and which require continuous observation; above all, those motions which depend on time, and which can only be accurately determined by centuries of observation. These motions, then, must be borrowed from a nation which has made such observations, and has behind it the labours of centuries. We conclude, [pg 723]therefore, that a new people will not borrow the epochs of an ancient one, without also borrowing from them the “average motions.” Starting from this principle we shall find that the Hindû epochs 1491 and 3102 could not have been derived from those of either Ptolemy or Ulug-beg.

There remains the supposition that the Hindûs, comparing their observations in 1491 with those previously made by Ulug-beg and Ptolemy, used the intervals between these observations to determine the average motions. The date of Ulug-beg is too recent for such a determination; while those of Ptolemy and Hipparchus were barely remote enough. But if the Hindû motions had been determined from these comparisons, the epochs would be connected together. Starting from the epochs of Ulug-beg and Ptolemy we should arrive at all those of the Hindûs. Hence foreign epochs were either unknown or useless to the Hindûs.1140

We may add to this another important consideration. When a nation is obliged to borrow from its neighbours the methods or the average motions of its astronomical tables, it has even greater need to borrow, besides these, the knowledge of the inequalities of the motions of the heavenly bodies, the motions of the apogee, of the nodes, and of the inclination of the ecliptic; in short, all those elements the determination of which requires the art of observing, some instrumental appliances, and great industry. All these astronomical elements, differing more or less with the Greeks of Alexandria, the Arabs, the Persians and the Tartars, exhibit no resemblance whatever with those of the Hindûs. The latter, therefore, borrowed nothing from their neighbours.

If the Hindûs did not borrow their epoch, they must have possessed a real one of their own, based on their own observations; and this must be either the epoch of the year 1491 after, or that of the year 3102 before our era, the latter preceding by 4,592 years the epoch 1491. We have to choose between these two epochs and to decide which of them is based on observation. But before stating the arguments which can and must decide the question, we may be permitted to make a few remarks to those who may be inclined to believe that it is modern observations and calculations which have enabled the Hindûs to determine the past positions of the heavenly bodies. It is far from easy to determine the celestial movements with sufficient accuracy to ascend the stream of time for 4,592 years, and to describe the phenomena which must have occurred at that period. We possess to-day excellent instruments; exact observations have been made for some two or three centuries, which already permit us to calculate with considerable accuracy the average motions of the Planets; we have the observations of the Chaldeans, of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy, which, owing to their remoteness from the present time, permit us to fix these motions with greater certainty. Still we cannot undertake to represent with invariable accuracy the observations throughout the long period intervening between the Chaldeans and ourselves; and still less can we undertake to determine with exactitude events occurring 4,592 years before our day. Cassini and Maier have each determined the secular motion of the moon, and they differ by 3m. 43s. This difference would give rise in forty-six centuries to an uncertainty [pg 724]of nearly three degrees in the moon's place. Doubtless one of these determinations is more accurate than the other; and it is for observations of very great antiquity to decide between them. But in very remote periods, where observations are lacking, it follows that we are uncertain as to the phenomena. How, then, could the Hindûs have calculated back from the year 1491 a.d. to the year 3102 before our era, if they were only recent students of Astronomy?

The Orientals have never been what we are. However high an opinion of their knowledge we may form from the examination of their Astronomy, we cannot suppose them ever to have possessed that great array of instruments which distinguishes our modern observatories, and which is the product of simultaneous progress in various arts, nor could they have possessed that genius for discovery, which has hitherto seemed to belong exclusively to Europe, and which, supplying the place of time, causes the rapid progress of science and of human intelligence. If the Asiatics have been powerful, learned and wise, it is power and time which have produced their merit and success of all kinds. Power has founded or destroyed their empires; now it has erected edifices imposing by their bulk, now it has reduced them to venerable ruins; and while these vicissitudes alternated with each other, patience accumulated knowledge; and prolonged experience produced wisdom. It is the antiquity of the nations of the East which has erected their scientific fame.

If the Hindûs possessed in 1491 a knowledge of the heavenly motions sufficiently accurate to enable them to calculate backwards for 4592 years, it follows that they could only have obtained this knowledge from very ancient observations. To grant them such knowledge, while refusing them the observations from which it is derived, is to suppose an impossibility; it would be equivalent to assuming that at the outset of their career they had already reaped the harvest of time and experience. While on the other hand, if their epoch of 3102 is assumed to be real, it would follow that the Hindûs had simply kept pace with successive centuries down to the year 1491 of our era. Thus, time itself was their teacher; they knew the motions of the heavenly bodies during these periods, because they had seen them; and the duration of the Hindû people on earth is the cause of the fidelity of its records and the accuracy of its calculations.

It would seem that the problem as to which of the two epochs of 3102 and 1491 is the real one ought to be solved by one consideration, viz., that the ancients in general, and particularly the Hindûs, as we may see by the arrangement of their Tables, calculated, and therefore observed, eclipses only. Now, there was no eclipse of the sun at the moment of the epoch 1491; and no eclipse of the moon either fourteen days before or after that moment. Therefore the epoch 1491 is not based on an observation. As regards the epoch 3102, the Brâhmans of Tirvaloor place it at sunrise on February 18th. The sun was then in the first point of the Zodiac according to its true longitude. The other Tables show that at the preceding midnight the moon was in the same place, but according to its average longitude. The Brâhmans tell us also that this first point, the origin of their Zodiac, was, in the year 3102, 54 degrees behind the equinox. It follows that the origin—the first point of their Zodiac—was therefore in the sixth degree of Aquarius.

[pg 725]

There occurred, therefore, about this time and place an average conjunction; and indeed this conjunction is given in our best Tables: La Caille's for the sun and Maier's for the moon. There was no eclipse of the sun, the moon being too distant from her node; but fourteen days later, the moon having approached the node, must have been eclipsed. Maier's tables, used without correction for acceleration, give this eclipse; but they place it during the day when it could not have been observed in India. Cassini's tables give it as occurring at night, which shows that Maier's motions are too rapid for distant centuries, when the acceleration is not allowed for; and which also proves that in spite of the improvement of our knowledge we can still be uncertain as to the actual aspect of the heavens in past times.

Therefore we believe that, as between the two Hindû epochs, the real one is the year 3102, because it was accompanied by an eclipse which could be observed, and which must have served to determine it. This is a first proof of the truth of the longitude assigned by the Hindûs to the sun and the moon at this instant; and this proof would perhaps be sufficient, were it not that this ancient determination becomes of the greatest importance for the verification of the motions of these bodies, and must therefore be borne out by every possible proof of its authenticity.

We notice, 1st, that the Hindûs seem to have combined two epochs together into the year 3102. The Tirvaloor Brâhmans reckon primarily from the first moment of the Kali Yuga; but they have a second epoch placed 2d. 3h. 32m. 30s. later. The latter is the true astronomical epoch, while the former seems to be a civil era. But if this epoch of the Kali Yuga had no reality, and was the mere result of a calculation, why should it be thus divided? Their calculated astronomical epoch would have become that of the Kali Yuga, which would have been placed at the conjunction of the sun and the moon, as is the case with the epochs of the three other Tables. They must have had some reason for distinguishing between the two; and this reason can only be due to the circumstances and the time of the epoch; which therefore could not be the result of calculation. This is not all; starting from the solar epoch determined by the rising of the sun on February 18th, 3102, and tracing back events 2d. 3h. 32m. 30s., we come to 2h. 27m. 30s. a.m. of February 16th, which is the instant of the beginning of Kali Yuga. It is curious that this age has not been made to commence at one of the four great divisions of the day. It might be suspected that the epoch should be midnight, and that the 2h. 27m. 30s. are a meridian correction. But whatever may have been the reason for fixing on this moment, it is plain that were this epoch the result of calculation, it would have been just as easy to carry it back to midnight, so as to make the epoch correspond to one of the chief divisions of the day, instead of placing it at a moment fixed by the fraction of a day.

2nd. The Hindûs assert that at the first moment of Kali Yuga there was a conjunction of all the planets; and their Tables show this conjunction while ours indicate that it might actually have occurred. Jupiter and Mercury were in exactly the same degree of the ecliptic; Mars being 8° and Saturn 17° distant from it. It follows that about this time, or some fifteen days after the commencement of Kali Yuga, and as the sun advanced in the Zodiac, the Hindûs saw four planets emerge successively from the Sun's rays; first Saturn, then Mars, then [pg 726]Jupiter and Mercury, and these planets appeared united in a somewhat small space. Although Venus was not among them, the taste for the marvellous caused it to be called a general conjunction of all the planets. The testimony of the Brâhmans here coïncides with that of our Tables; and this evidence, the result of a tradition, must be founded on actual observation.

3rd. We may remark that this phenomenon was visible about a fortnight after the epoch, and exactly at the time when the eclipse of the moon must have been observed, which served to fix the epoch. The two observations mutually confirm each other; and whoever made the one must have made the other also.

4th. We may believe also that the Hindûs made at the same time a determination of the place of the moon's node; this seems indicated by their calculation. They give the longitude of this point of the lunar orbit for the time of their epoch, and to this they add as a constant 40m., which is the node's motion in 12d. 14h. It is as if they stated that this determination was made thirteen days after their epoch, and that to make it correspond to that epoch, we must add the 40m. through which the node has retrograded in the interval. This observation is, therefore, of the same date as that of the lunar eclipse; thus giving three observations, which are mutually confirmatory.

5th. It appears from the description of the Hindû Zodiac given by M. C. Gentil, that on it the places of the stars named the Eye of Taurus and the Wheat-ear of Virgo, can be determined for the commencement of the Kali Yuga. Now, comparing these places with the actual positions, reduced by our precession of the equinoxes to the moment in question, we see that the point of origin of the Hindû Zodiac must lie between the fifth and sixth degree of Aquarius. The Brâhmans, therefore, were right in placing it in the sixth degree of that sign, the more so since this small difference may be due to the proper motion of the stars, which is unknown. Thus it was yet another observation which guided the Hindûs in this fairly accurate determination of the first point of their movable Zodiac.

It does not seem possible to doubt the existence in antiquity of observations of this date. The Persians say that four beautiful stars were placed as guardians at the four corners of the world. Now it so happens that at the commencement of Kali Yuga, 3,000 or 3,100 years before our era, the Eye of the Bull and the Heart of the Scorpion were exactly at the equinoctial points, while the Heart of the Lion and the Southern Fish were pretty near the solstitial points. An observation of the rising of the Pleiades in the evening, seven days before the autumnal equinox, also belongs to the year 3000 before our era. This and similar observations are collected in Ptolemy's calendars, though he does not give their authors; and these, which are older than those of the Chaldeans, may well be the work of the Hindûs. They are well acquainted with the constellation of the Pleiades, and while we call it vulgarly the “Poussinière,” they name it Pillaloo-codi—the “Hen and chickens.” This name has, therefore, passed from people to people, and comes to us from the most ancient nations of Asia. We see that the Hindûs must have observed the rising of the Pleiades, and have made use of it to regulate their years and their months; for this constellation is also called Krittikâ. Now they have a month of the same name, and this coïncidence can only be due to the [pg 727]fact that this month was announced by the rising or setting of the constellation in question.

But what is even more decisive as showing that the Hindûs observed the stars, and in the same way that we do, marking their position by their longitude, is a fact mentioned by Augustinus Riccius that, according to observations attributed to Hermes, and made 1,985 years before Ptolemy, the brilliant star in the Lyre and that in the heart of the Hydra were each seven degrees in advance of their respective positions as determined by Ptolemy. This determination seems very extraordinary. The stars advance regularly with respect to the equinox: and Ptolemy ought to have found the longitudes 28 degrees in excess of what they were 1,985 years before his time. Besides, there is a remarkable peculiarity about this fact, the same error or difference being found in the positions of both stars; therefore the error was due to some cause affecting both stars equally. It was to explain this peculiarity that the Arab Thebith imagined the stars to have an oscillatory movement, causing them to advance and recede alternately. This hypothesis was easily disproved; but the observations attributed to Hermes remained unexplained. Their explanation, however, is found in Hindû Astronomy. At the date fixed for these observations, 1,985 years before Ptolemy, the first point of the Hindû Zodiac was 35 degrees in advance of the equinox; therefore the longitudes reckoned for this point are 35 degrees in excess of those reckoned from the equinox. But after the lapse of 1,985 years the stars would have advanced 28 degrees, and there would remain a difference of only 7 degrees between the longitudes of Hermes and those of Ptolemy, and the difference would be the same for the two stars, since it is due to the difference between the starting-points of the Hindû Zodiac and that of Ptolemy, which reckons from the equinox. This explanation is so simple and natural that it must be true. We do not know whether Hermes, so celebrated in antiquity, was a Hindû, but we see that the observations attributed to him are reckoned in the Hindû manner, and we conclude that they were made by the Hindûs, who, therefore, were able to make all the observations we have enumerated, and which we find noted in their Tables.

6th. The observation of the year 3102, which seems to have fixed their epoch, was not a difficult one. We see that the Hindûs, having once determined the moon's daily motion of 13° 10´ 35´´, made use of it to divide the Zodiac into 27 constellations, related to the period of the moon, which takes about 27 days to describe it.

It was by this method that they determined the positions of the stars in this Zodiac; it was thus they found that a certain star of the Lyre was in 8s 24°, the Heart of the Hydra in 4s 7°, longitudes which are ascribed to Hermes, but which are calculated on the Hindû Zodiac. Similarly, they discovered that the Wheat-ear of Virgo forms the commencement of their fifteenth constellation, and the Eye of Taurus the end of the fourth; these stars being the one in 6s 6° 40´, the other in 1s 23° 20´ of the Hindû Zodiac. This being so, the eclipse of the moon which occurred fifteen days after the Kali Yuga epoch, took place at a point between the Wheat-ear of Virgo and the star θ of the same constellation. These stars are very approximately a constellation apart, the one beginning the fifteenth, the other the sixteenth. Thus it would not be difficult to determine the moon's place by [pg 728]measuring her distance from one of these stars; from this they deduced the position of the sun, which is opposite to the moon, and then, knowing their average motions, they calculated that the moon was at the first point of the Zodiac according to her average longitude at midnight on the 17th-18th February of the year 3102 before our era, and that the sun occupied the same place six hours later according to his true longitude; an event which fixes the commencement of the Hindû year.

7th. The Hindûs state that 20,400 years before the age of Kali Yuga, the first point of their Zodiac coincided with the vernal equinox, and that the sun and moon were in conjunction there. This epoch is obviously fictitious;1141 but we may enquire from what point, from what epoch, the Hindûs set out in establishing it. Taking the Hindû values for the revolution of the sun and moon, viz., 363d. 6h. 12m. 30s., and 27d. 7h. 43m. 13s., we have—

20,400 revolutions of the sun = 7,451,277d. 2h.

272,724 revolutions of the moon = 7,451,277d. 7h.

Such is the result obtained by starting from the Kali Yuga epoch; and the assertion of the Hindûs, that there was a conjunction at the time stated, is founded on their Tables; but if, using the same elements, we start from the era of the year 1491, or from another placed in the year 1282, of which we shall speak later, there will always be a difference of almost one or two days. It is both just and natural, in verifying the Hindû calculations, to take those among their elements which give the same result as they had themselves arrived at, and to set out from that one among their epochs which enables us to arrive at the fictitious epoch in question. Hence, since to make this calculation they must have set out from their real epoch, the one which was founded on an observation and not from any of those which were derived by this very calculation from the former, it follows that their real epoch was that of the year 3102 before our era.

8th. The Tirvaloor Brâhmans give the moon's motion as 7s 20° 0´ 7´´ on the movable Zodiac, and as 9k 7° 45´ 1´´ as referred to the equinox in a great period of 1,600,984 days, or 4,386 years and 94 days. We believe this motion to have been determined by observation; and we must state at the outset that this period is of an extent which renders it but ill suited to the calculation of the mean motions.

In their astronomical calculations the Hindûs make use of periods of 248, 3,031, and 12,372 days; but, apart from the fact that these periods, though much too short, do not present the inconvenience of the former, they contain an exact number of revolutions of the moon referred to its apogee. They are in reality mean motions. The great period of 1,600,984 days is not a sum of accumulated revolutions; there is no reason why it should contain 1,600,984 rather than 1,600,985 days. It would seem that observation alone must have fixed the number of days and marked the beginning and end of the period. This period ends on the 21st of May, 1282 of our era, at 5h. 15m. 30s. at Benares. The moon was then in apogee, according to the

Hindûs, and her longitude was .. 7B 13° 45´ 1´´

Maier gives the longitude as .. 7 13 53 48

And places the apogee at .. .. 7 14 6 54

[pg 729]

The determination of the moon's place by the Brâhmans thus differs only by nine minutes from ours, and that of the apogee by twenty-two minutes, and it is very evident that they could only have obtained this agreement with our best Tables and this exactitude in the celestial positions by observation. If then, observation fixed the end of this period, there is every reason to believe that it determined its commencement. But then this motion, determined directly, and from nature, would of necessity be in close agreement with the true motions of the heavenly bodies.

And in fact the Hindû motion during this long period of 4,883 years, does not differ by a minute from that of Cassini, and agrees equally with that of Maier. Thus two peoples, the Hindûs and the Europeans, placed at the two extremities of the world, and perhaps as distant by their institutions, have obtained precisely the same results as regards the moon's motions; and an agreement which would be inconceivable, if it were not based on the observation and mutual imitation of nature. We must remark that the four Tables of the Hindûs are all copies of the same Astronomy. It cannot be denied that the Siamese Tables existed in 1687, when they were brought from India by M. de la Loubère. At that time the tables of Cassini and Maier were not in existence, and thus the Hindûs were already in possession of the exact motion contained in these Tables, while we did not yet possess it. It must, therefore, be admitted that the accuracy of this Hindû motion is the point of observation. It is exact throughout this period of 4,383 years, because it was taken from the sky itself; and if observation determined its close, it fixed its commencement also. It is the longest period which has been observed and of which the recollection is preserved in the annals of Astronomy. It has its [pg 730]origin in the epoch of the year 3102 b.c., and it is a demonstrative proof of the reality of that epoch.1142

Bailly is referred to at such length, as he is one of the few scientific men who have tried to do full justice to the Astronomy of the Âryans. From John Bentley down to Burgess' Sûrya-Siddhânta, not one Astronomer has been fair enough to the most learned people of Antiquity. However distorted and misunderstood the Hindû Symbology may be, no Occultist can fail to do it justice once that he knows something of the Secret Sciences; nor will he turn away from their metaphysical and mystical interpretation of the Zodiac, even though the whole Pleiades of Royal Astronomical Societies rise in arms against their mathematical rendering of it. The descent and reäscent of the Monad or Soul cannot be disconnected from the Zodiacal signs, and it looks more natural, in the sense of the fitness of things, to believe in a mysterious sympathy between the metaphysical Soul and the bright constellations, and in the influence of the latter on the former, than in the absurd notion that the creators of Heaven and Earth have placed in Heaven the types of twelve vicious Jews. And if, as the author of The Gnostics and their Remains asserts, the aim of all the Gnostic schools and the later Platonists

was to accommodate the old faith to the influence of Buddhistic theosophy, the very essence of which was that the innumerable gods of the Hindû mythology were but names for the Energies of the First Triad in its successive Avatârs or manifestations unto man,

whither can we better turn to trace these theosophic ideas to their very root, than to the old Indian wisdom? We say again: Archaic Occultism would remain incomprehensible to all, if it were to be rendered otherwise than through the more familiar channels of Buddhism and Hindûism. For the former is the emanation of the latter; and both are children of one mother—ancient Lemuro-Atlantean Wisdom.

[pg 731]

Section XVII. Summary of the Position.

The reader has had the whole case presented to him from both sides, and it remains with him to decide whether its summary stands in our favour or not. If there were such a thing as a void, a vacuum in Nature, one ought to find it produced, according to a physical law, in the minds of helpless admirers of the “lights” of Science, who pass their time in mutually destroying their teachings. If ever the theory that “two lights make darkness” found its application it is in this case, where one-half of the “lights” imposes its forces and “modes of motion” on the belief of the faithful, and the other half opposes the very existence of the same. “Ether, Matter, Energy”—the sacred hypostatical trinity, the three principles of the truly unknown God of Science, called by them Physical Nature!

Theology is taken to task and ridiculed for believing in the union of three persons in one Godhead—one God as to substance, three persons as to individuality; and we are laughed at for our belief in unproved and unprovable doctrines, in Angels and Devils, Gods and Spirits. And, indeed, that which made the Scientists win the day over Theology in the Great “Conflict between Religion and Science,” was precisely the argument that neither the identity of that substance, nor the triple individuality claimed—after having been conceived, invented, and worked out in the depths of Theological Consciousness—could be proved to exist by any scientific inductive process of reasoning, least of all by the evidence of our senses. Religion must perish, it is said, because it teaches “mysteries.” “Mystery is the negation of Common Sense,” and Science repels it. According to Mr. Tyndall, Metaphysics is “fiction,” like poetry. The man of Science “takes nothing on trust”; rejects everything “that is not proven to him,” while the Theologian accepts “everything on blind faith.” The Theosophist and the [pg 732] Occultist, who take nothing on trust, not even exact Science, the Spiritualist who denies dogma but believes in Spirits and in invisible but potent influences, all share in the same contempt. Very well, then; what we have to do now, is to examine for the last time whether exact Science does not act precisely in the same way as do Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Theology.

In a work by Mr. S. Laing, considered a standard book on Science, Modern Science and Modern Thought, the author of which, according to the laudatory review of the Times, “exhibits with much power and effect the immense discoveries of Science, and its numerous victories over old opinions, whenever they have the rashness to challenge conclusions with it,” we read as follows:

What is the material universe composed of? Ether, Matter, Energy.

We stop to ask, What is Ether? And Mr. Laing answers in the name of Science:

Ether is not actually known to us by any test of which the senses can take cognizance, but is a sort of mathematical substance which we are compelled to assume in order to account for the phenomena of light and heat.1143

And what is Matter? Do you know more about it than you do about the “hypothetical” agent, Ether?

In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigations can tell us ... nothing directly of the composition of living matter, and ... it is also in strictness true, that we know nothing about the compositions of any [material] body whatever as it is.1144

And Energy? Surely you can define the third person of the Trinity of your Material Universe? We can take the answer from any book on Physics:

Energy is that which is only known to us by its effects.

Pray explain, for this is rather hazy.

[In mechanics there is actual and potential energy: work actually performed, and the capacity for performing it. As to the nature of molecular Energy or Forces], the various phenomena which bodies present show that their molecules are under the influence of two contrary forces, one which tends to bring them together, and the other to separate them.... The first force ... is called molecular attraction ... the second force is due to the vis viva, or moving force.1145

Just so: it is the nature of this moving force, of this vis viva, that we want to know. What is it?

[pg 733]

“We do not know!” is the invariable answer. “It is an empty shadow of my imagination,” explains Mr. Huxley in his Physical Basis of Life.

Thus the whole structure of Modern Science is built on a kind of “mathematical abstraction,” on a Protean “Substance which eludes the senses” (Dubois Reymond), and on effects, the shadowy and illusive will-o'-the wisps of a something entirely unknown to, and beyond the reach of, Science. “Self-moving” Atoms! Self-moving Suns, Planets, and Stars! But who, then, or what are they all, if they are self-endowed with motion? Why then should you, Physicists, laugh at and deride our “Self-moving Archæus”? Mystery is rejected and scorned by Science, and as Father Felix has truly said:

She cannot escape it. Mystery is the fatality of Science.

The language of the French preacher is ours, and we quote it in Isis Unveiled. Who—he asks—who of you, men of Science:

Has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body, the generation of a single atom? What is there, I will not say at the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom? Who has sounded to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand? The grain of sand, gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science; she has turned and returned it; she divides it and subdivides it; she torments it with her experiments; she vexes it with her questions to snatch from it the final word as to its secret constitution; she asks it, with an insatiable curiosity: “Shall I divide thee infinitesimally?” Then suspended over this abyss, science hesitates, she stumbles, she feels dazzled, she becomes dizzy, and in despair says: “i do not know.”

But if you are so fatally ignorant of the genesis and hidden nature of a grain of sand, how should you have an intuition as to the generation of a single living being? Whence in the living being does life come? Where does it commence? What is the life principle?1146

Do the men of Science deny all these charges? By no means: for here is a confession of Tyndall, which shows how powerless is Science, even over the world of Matter.

The first marshalling of the atoms, on which all subsequent action depends, baffles a keener power than that of the microscope.... Through pure excess of complexity, and long before observation can have any voice in the matter, the most highly trained intellect, the most refined and disciplined imagination, retires in bewilderment from the contemplation of the problem. We are struck dumb by an astonishment which no microscope can relieve, doubting not only the [pg 734]power of our instrument, but even whether we ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature.

How little is known of the material Universe, indeed, has now been suspected for years, on the very admissions of these men of Science themselves. And now there are some Materialists who would even make away with Ether—or whatever Science calls the infinite Substance, the noumenon of which the Buddhists call Svabhâvat—as well as with Atoms, too dangerous both on account of their ancient philosophical, and their present Christian and theological, associations. From the earliest Philosophers, whose records passed to posterity, down to our present age—which, if it denies Invisible Beings in Space, can never be so insane as to deny a Plenum of some sort—the Fulness of the Universe has been an accepted belief. And what it was said to contain, one learns from Hermes Trismegistus (in Dr. Anna Kingsford's able rendering), who is made to say:

Concerning the void ... my judgment is that it does not exist, that it never has existed, and that it never will exist, for all the various parts of the universe are filled, as the earth also is complete and full of bodies, differing in quality and in form, having their species and their magnitude, one larger, one smaller, one solid, one tenuous. The larger ... are easily perceived; the smaller ... are difficult to apprehend, or altogether invisible. We know only of their existence by the sensation of feeling, wherefore many persons deny such entities to be bodies, and regard them as simply spaces,1147 but it is impossible there should be such spaces. For if indeed there should be anything outside the universe ... then it would be a space occupied by intelligible beings analogous to its [the universe's] Divinity.... I speak of the genii, for I hold they dwell with us, and of the heroes who dwell above us, between the earth and the higher airs; wherein are neither clouds nor any tempest.1148

And we “hold” it too. Only, as already remarked, no Eastern Initiate would speak of spheres “above us, between the earth and the airs,” even the highest, as there is no such division or measurement in Occult speech, no above, as no below, but an eternal within, within two other withins, or the planes of subjectivity merging gradually into that of terrestrial objectivity—this being for man the last one, his own [pg 735] plane. This necessary explanation may be closed here by giving, in the words of Hermes, the belief on this particular point of the whole world of Mystics:

There are many orders of the Gods; and in all there is an intelligible part. It is not to be supposed they do not come within the range of our senses; on the contrary, we perceive them, better even than those which are called visible.... There are then Gods, superior to all appearances; after them come the Gods whose principle is spiritual; these Gods being sensible, in conformity with their double origin, manifest all things by a sensible nature, each of them illuminating his works one by another.1149 The supreme Being of heaven, or of all that is comprehended under this name, is Zeus, for it is by heaven that Zeus gives life to all things. The supreme Being of the sun is light, for it is by the disk of the sun that we receive the benefit of the light. The thirty-six horoscopes of the fixed stars have for supreme Being, or prince, him whose name is Pantomorphos, or having all forms, because he gives divine forms to divers types. The seven planets, or wandering spheres, have for supreme Spirits Fortune and Destiny, who uphold the eternal stability of the laws of Nature throughout incessant transformation and perpetual agitation. The ether is the instrument or medium by which all is produced.1150

This is quite philosophical and in accordance with the spirit of Eastern Esotericism: for all the Forces, such as Light, Heat, Electricity, etc., are called the “Gods”—Esoterically.

This, indeed, must be so, since the Esoteric Teachings in Egypt and India were identical. And, therefore, the personification of Fohat, synthesizing all the manifesting Forces in Nature is a legitimate result. Moreover, as will be shown later, the real and Occult Forces in Nature only now begin to be known—and even in this case, by heterodox, not orthodox, Science,1151 though their existence, in one instance at any rate, is corroborated and certified by an immense number of educated people, and even by some official men of Science.

The statement, moreover, in Stanza VI—that Fohat sets in motion the primordial World-Germs, or the aggregation of Cosmic Atoms and Matter, “some one way, some the other way,” in the opposite direction—looks orthodox and scientific enough. For there is, at all events, in support of this position, one fact fully recognized by Science, and it is this. The meteoric showers, periodical in November and [pg 736] August, belong to a system moving in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The aphelion of this ring is 1,732 millions of miles beyond the orbit of Neptune, its plane is inclined to the Earth's orbit at an angle of 64° 3´, and the direction of the meteoric swarm moving round this orbit is contrary to that of the Earth's revolution.

This fact, recognized only in 1833, shows it to be the modern rediscovery of what was very anciently known. Fohat turns with his two hands in contrary directions the “seed” and the “curds,” or Cosmic Matter; in clearer language, is turning particles in a highly attenuated condition, and nebulæ.

Outside the boundaries of the Solar System, it is other Suns, and especially the mysterious Central Sun—the “Abode of the Invisible Deity” as some reverend gentlemen have called it—that determines the motion and the direction of bodies. That motion serves also to differentiate the homogeneous Matter, round and between the several bodies, into Elements and Sub-elements unknown to our Earth, and these are regarded by Modern Science as distinct individual Elements, whereas they are merely temporary appearances, changing with every small cycle within the Manvantara, some Esoteric works calling them “Kalpic Masks.”

Fohat is the key in Occultism which opens and unriddles the multiform symbols and allegories in the so-called mythology of every nation; demonstrating the wonderful Philosophy and the deep insight into the mysteries of Nature, contained in the Egyptian and Chaldean as well as in the Âryan religions. Fohat, shown in his true character, proves how deeply versed were all those prehistoric nations in every Science of Nature, now called the physical and chemical branches of Natural Philosophy. In India, Fohat is the scientific aspect of both Vishnu and Indra, the latter older and more important in the Rig Veda than his sectarian successor; while in Egypt, Fohat was known as Toom issued of Noot,1152 or Osiris in his character of a primordial God, creator of heaven and of beings.1153 For Toom is spoken of as the Protean God who generates other Gods and gives himself the form he likes; the “Master of Life, giving their vigour to the Gods.”1154 He is the overseer of the Gods, and he “who creates spirits and gives them shape and [pg 737] life”; he is “the North Wind and the Spirit of the West”; and finally the “Setting Sun of Life,” or the vital electric force that leaves the body at death; wherefore the Defunct begs that Toom should give him the breath from his right nostril (positive electricity) that he might live in his second form. Both the hieroglyph, and the text of chapter xlii in the Book of the Dead, show the identity of Toom and Fohat. The former represents a man standing erect with the hieroglyph of the breaths in his hands. The latter says:

I open to the chief of An (Heliopolis). I am Toom. I cross the water spilt by Thot-Hapi, the lord of the horizon, and am the divider of the earth [Fohat divides Space and, with his Sons, the Earth into seven zones]....

I cross the heavens; I am the two Lions. I am Ra, I am Aam, I eat my heir.1155.... I glide on the soil of the field of Aanroo,1156 given me by the master of limitless eternity. I am a germ of eternity. I am Toom, to whom eternity is accorded.

The very words used by Fohat in the XIth Book, and the very titles given him. In the Egyptian Papyri the whole Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine is found scattered about in isolated sentences, even in the Book of the Dead. Number seven is quite as much insisted upon and emphasized therein as in the Book of Dzyan. “The Great Water [the Deep or Chaos] is said to be seven cubits deep”—“cubits” standing here of course for divisions, zones, and principles. Therein, “in the great Mother, all the Gods, and the Seven Great Ones are born.” Both Fohat and Toom are addressed as the “Great Ones of the Seven Magic Forces,” who, “conquer the Serpent Apap” or Matter.1157

No student of Occultism, however, ought to be betrayed, by the usual phraseology used in the translations of Hermetic Works, into believing that the ancient Egyptians or Greeks spoke of, and referred, monk-like, at every moment in conversation, to a Supreme Being, God, [pg 738] the “One Father and Creator of all,” etc., in the way found on every page of such translations. No such thing indeed; and those texts are not the original Egyptian texts. They are Greek compilations, the earliest of which does not go beyond the early period of Neo-Platonism. No Hermetic work written by Egyptians—as we may see by the Book of the Dead—would speak of the one universal God of the Monotheistic systems; the one Absolute Cause of all, was as unnameable and unpronounceable in the mind of the ancient Philosopher of Egypt, as it is for ever Unknowable in the conception of Mr. Herbert Spencer. As for the Egyptian in general, as M. Maspero well remarks, whenever he

Arrived at the notion of divine Unity, the God One was never “God” simply. M. Lepage-Renouf very justly observed that the word Nouter, Nouti, “God” had never ceased to be a generic name to become a personal one.

Every God was the “one living and unique God” with them. Their

Monotheism was purely geographical. If the Egyptian of Memphis proclaimed the Unity of Phtah to the exclusion of Ammon, the Thebeian Egyptian proclaimed the unity of Ammon to the exclusion of Phtah [as we now see done in India in the case of the Shaivas and the Vaishnavas]. Ra, the “One God” at Heliopolis is not the same as Osiris, the “One God” at Abydos, and can be worshipped side by side with him, without being absorbed by him. The one God is but the God of the nome or the city, Nouter Nouti, and does not exclude the existence of the one God of the neighbouring town or nome. In short, whenever we are speaking of Egyptian Monotheism, we ought to speak of the Gods One of Egypt, and not of the One God.1158

It is by this feature, preëminently Egyptian, that the authenticity of the various so-called Hermetic Books, ought to be tested; and it is totally absent from the Greek fragments known under this name. This proves that a Greek Neo-Platonic, or perhaps a Christian hand, had no small share in the editing of such works. Of course the fundamental Philosophy is there, and in many a place—intact. But the style has been altered and smoothed in a monotheistic direction, as much, if not more than that of the Hebrew Genesis in its Greek and Latin translations. They may be Hermetic works, but not works written by either of the two Hermes—or rather, by Thot Hermes, the directing Intelligence of the Universe1159 or by Thot his terrestrial incarnation called Trismegistus, of the Rosetta stone.

But all is doubt, negation, iconoclasm and brutal indifference, in our [pg 739] age of a hundred “isms” and no religion. Every idol is broken save the Golden Calf.

Unfortunately, no nation or nations can escape their Karmic fate, any more than can units and individuals. History itself is dealt with by the so-called historians as unscrupulously as legendary lore. For this, Augustin Thierry has made the amende honorable, if one may believe his biographers. He deplored the erroneous principle that made all the would-be historiographers lose their way, and each presume to correct tradition, “that vox populi which nine times out of ten is vox Dei”; and he finally admitted that in legend alone rests real history; for he adds:

Legend is living tradition, and three times out of four it is truer than what we call History.1160

While Materialists deny everything in the Universe, save Matter, Archæologists are trying to dwarf Antiquity, and seek to destroy every claim of Ancient Wisdom by tampering with Chronology. Our present-day Orientalists and historical writers are to Ancient History that which the white ants are to the buildings in India. More dangerous even than those Termites, the modern Archæologists—the “authorities” of the future in the matter of Universal History—are preparing for the history of past nations the fate of certain edifices in tropical countries. As said Michelet:

History will tumble down and break into atoms in the lap of the twentieth century, devoured to its foundations by her annalists.

Very soon, indeed, under their combined efforts, it will share the fate of those ruined cities in both Americas, which lie deeply buried under impassable virgin forests. Historical facts will remain concealed from view by the inextricable jungles of modern hypotheses, denials and scepticism. But very happily actual History repeats herself, for she proceeds, like everything else, in cycles; and dead facts, and events deliberately drowned in the sea of modern scepticism, will ascend once more and reappear on the surface.

In Volume II, the very fact that a work with pretensions to Philosophy, which is also an exposition of the most abstruse problems, has to be commenced by tracing the evolution of mankind from what are regarded as supernatural beings—Spirits—will arouse the most malevolent criticism. Believers in, and the defenders of, the Secret Doctrine, [pg 740] however, will have to bear the accusation of madness and worse, as philosophically as for long years already the writer has done. Whenever a Theosophist is taxed with insanity, he ought to reply by quoting from Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes:

By opening so freely their lunatic asylums to their supposed madmen, men only seek to assure each other that they are not themselves mad.

[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected.]

Footnotes

1.

See Theosophist, June, 1883.

2.

Preface to the original edition.

3.

Dan, in modern Chinese and Tibetan phonetics Chhan, is the general term for the esoteric schools and their literature. In the old books, the word Janna is defined as “reforming one's self by meditation and knowledge,” a second inner birth. Hence Dzan, Djan phonetically; the Book of Dzyan. See Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, p. 129, note.

4.

Mr. Beglor, the chief engineer at Buddhagâya, and a distinguished archæologist, was the first, we believe, to discover it.

5.

See Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 27.

6.

Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. 23.

7.

Ain í Akbari, translated by Dr. Blochmann, quoted by Max Müller, op. cit.

8.

Tao-te-King, p. xxvii.

9.

Max Müller, op. cit., p. 114.

10.

Found out and proven only now, through the discoveries made by George Smith (see his Chaldean Account of Genesis), and which, thanks to this Armenian forger, have misled all the “civilized nations” for over 1,500 years into accepting Jewish derivations for direct Divine Revelation.

11.

Egypt's Place in History, i. 200.

12.

Spence Hardy, The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists, p. 66.

13.

E. Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet, p. 77.

14.

Lassen (Ind. Althersumkunde, II, 1,072) shows a Buddhist monastery erected in the Kailâs. Range in 137 b.c.; and General Cunningham, one earlier than that.

15.

Rev. J. Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, p. 87.

16.

See, for example, Max Müller's Lectures.

17.

Op. cit., p. 118.

18.

Op. cit., p. 318.

19.

Asiatic Researches, I, 272.

20.

See Max Müller, op. cit., pp. 288 et seq. This relates to the clever forgery, on leaves inserted in old Purânic MSS., and written in correct and archaic Sanskrit, of all that the Pandits had heard from Colonel Wilford about Adam and Abraham, Noah and his three sons, etc., etc.

21.

From a lecture by N. M. Prjevalsky.

22.

Lün-Yü (§ I a); Schott, Chinesische Literatur, p. 7; quoted by Max Müller.

23.

Life and Teachings of Confucius, p. 96.

24.

Op. cit., p. 257.

25.

The name is used in the sense of the Greek word ἅνθρωπς.

26.

Rabbi Jehoshua Ben Chananea, who died about a.d. 72, openly declared that he had performed “miracles” by means of the book Sepher Jetzirah, and challenged every sceptic. Franck, quoting from the Babylonian Talmud, names two other thaumaturgists, Rabbis Chanina and Oshoi. (See Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, c. 7, etc.; and Franck, Die Kabbalah, pp. 55, 56). Many of the mediæval Occultists, Alchemists, and Kabalists have made the same claim; and even the late modern Magus, Éliphas Lévi, publicly asserts it in his books on Magic.

27.

It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the term Divine Thought, like that of Universal Mind, must not be regarded as even vaguely shadowing forth an intellectual process akin to that exhibited by man. The “Unconscious,” according to von Hartmann, arrived at the vast creative, or rather evolutionary plan, “by a clairvoyant wisdom superior to all consciousness,” which in Vedântic language would mean absolute Wisdom. Only those who realize how far intuition soars above the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought can form the faintest conception of that absolute Wisdom which transcends the ideas of Time and Space. Mind, as we know it, is resolvable into states of consciousness, of varying duration, intensity, complexity, etc., all, in the ultimate, resting on sensation, which is again Mâyâ. Sensation, again, necessarily postulates limitation. The Personal God of orthodox Theism perceives, thinks, and is affected by emotion; he repents and feels “fierce anger.” But the notion of such mental states clearly involves the unthinkable postulate of the externality of the exciting stimuli, to say nothing of the impossibility of ascribing changelessness to a being whose emotions fluctuate with events in the worlds he presides over. The conceptions of a Personal God as changeless and infinite are thus unpsychological and, what is worse, unphilosophical.

28.

Plato proves himself an Initiate, when saying in Cratylus that θεός is derived from θέειν, to move, to run, for the first astronomers who observed the motions of the heavenly bodies called the planets θεοί, gods. Later the word produced another term, ἀλήθεια—the breath of God.

29.

Nominalists, arguing with Berkeley that “it is impossible ... to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving” (Principles of Human Knowledge, Introd., par. 10), may put the question, What is that body, the producer of that motion? Is it a substance? Then you are believers in a Personal God? etc., etc. This will be answered farther on, in a further part of this work; meanwhile, we claim our rights of Conceptionalists as against Roscelini's materialistic views of Realism and Nominalism. “Has science,” says one of its ablest advocates, Edward Clodd, “revealed anything that weakens or opposes itself to the ancient words in which the essence of all religion, past, present, and to come, is given; to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly before thy God?” And we agree, provided we connote by the word God, not the crude anthropomorphism which is still the backbone of our current theology, but the symbolic conception of that which is the Life and Motion of the Universe, to know which in the physical order is to know time past, present, and to come, in the existence of successions of phenomena; to know which, in the moral, is to know what has been, is, and will be, within human consciousness. (See Science and the Emotions, a Discourse delivered at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, London, December 27th, 1885.)

30.

Isis Unveiled, II, 264-5.

31.

Rig Veda.

32.

We are told by the Western mathematicians and some American Kabalists, that in the Kabalah also “the value of the Jehovah name is that of the diameter of a circle.” Add to this the fact that Jehovah is the third of the Sephiroth, Binah, a feminine word, and you have the key to the mystery. By certain Kabalistic transformations this name, which is androgynous in the first chapters of Genesis, becomes in its transformations entirely masculine, Cainite and phallic. The choosing of a deity among the pagan gods and making of it a special national God, to call upon it as the “One Living God,” the “God of Gods,” and then proclaiming this worship monotheistic, does not change it into the One Principle whose “Unity admits not of multiplication, change, or form,” especially in the case of a priapic deity, as Jehovah is now demonstrated to be.

33.

See that suggestive work, The Source of Measures, where the author explains the real meaning of the word Sacr' from which “sacred,” “sacrament,” are derived, words which have now become synonyms of holiness, though purely phallic!

34.

Mândûkya Upanishad, I. 28.

35.

Bodhimür, Book II.

36.

See the Vedânta Sâra, by Major G. A. Jacob; and also The Aphorisms of Shândilya, translated by Cowell, p. 42.

37.

Aitareya Upanishad.

38.

Nevertheless, prejudiced and rather fanatical Christian Orientalists would like to prove this to be pure Atheism. For proof of this, compare Major Jacob's Vedânta Sâra. Yet, the whole of antiquity echoes the thought:

Omnis enim per se divom natura necesse est
Immortali ævo summa cum pace fruatur—
as Lucretius has it—a purely Vedântic conception.

39.

The very names of the two chief deities, Brahmâ and Vishnu, ought to have long ago suggested their esoteric meanings. Brahman, or Brahm, is derived by some from the root brih, to grow or to expand (see Calcutta Review, vol. lxvi., p. 14); Vishnu, from the root vish, to pervade, to enter into the nature of the essence; Brahmâ-Vishnu thus being infinite Space, of which the Gods, the Rishis, the Manus, and all in this Universe are simply the Potencies (Vibhûtayah).

40.

See Manu's account of Brahmâ separating his body into male and female, the latter the female Vâch, in whom he creates Virâj, and compare this with the esotericism of Chapters II, III, and IV of Genesis.

41.

Occultism is indeed “in the air” at the close of this our century. Among many other works recently published, we would recommend especially to students of theoretical Occultism who would not venture beyond the realm of our special human plane, New Aspects of Life and Religion, by Henry Pratt, M.D. It is full of esoteric dogmas and philosophy, the latter, however, in the concluding chapters, rather limited by what seems to be a spirit of conditioned positivism. Nevertheless, what is said of Space as “the Unknown First Cause,” merits quotation.

“This unknown something, thus recognized as, and identified with, the primary embodiment of Simple Unity, is invisible and impalpable [as abstract space, granted]: and because invisible and impalpable, therefore incognizable. And this incognizability has led to the error of supposing it to be a simple void, a mere receptive capacity. But, even viewed as an absolute void, space must be admitted to be either self-existent, infinite, and eternal, or to have had a first cause outside, behind, and beyond itself.

“And yet could such a cause be found and defined, this would only lead to the transferring thereto of the attributes otherwise accruing to space, and thus merely throw the difficulty of origination a step farther back, without gaining additional light as to primary causation.” (Op. cit., p. 5.)

This is precisely what has been done by the believers in an anthropomorphic creator, an extra-cosmic, instead of an intra-cosmic God. Many of Dr. Pratt's subjects—most of them we may say—are old Kabalistic ideas and theories which he presents in quite a new garb—“New Aspects” of the Occult in Nature, indeed. Space, however, viewed as a Substantial Unity—the living Source of Life—is, as the Unknown Causeless Cause, the oldest dogma in Occultism, millenniums earlier than the Pater-Æther of the Greeks and Latins. So are “Force and Matter, as Potencies of Space, inseparable, and the unknown revealers of the Unknown.” They are all found in Âryan philosophy personified as Vishvakarman, Indra, Vishnu, etc., etc. Still they are expressed very philosophically, and under many unusual aspects, in the work referred to.

42.

In contradistinction to the manifested Universe of matter, the term Mûlaprakriti (from mûla, root, and prakriti, nature), or the unmanifested primordial Matter—called by Western Alchemists Adam's Earth—is applied by the Vedântins to Parabrahman. Matter is dual in religious metaphysics, and in esoteric teachings septenary, like everything else in the Universe. As Mûlaprakriti, it is undifferentiated and eternal: as Vyakta, it becomes differentiated and conditioned, according to Shvetâshvatara Upanishad, I, 8, and Devî Bhâgavata Purâna. The author of the Four lectures on the Bhagavad Gîtâ, in speaking of Mûlaprakriti, says: “From its [the Logos'] objective standpoint, Parabrahman appears to it as Mûlaprakriti.... Of course this Mûlaprakriti is material to it, as any material object is material to us.... Parabrahman is an unconditioned and absolute reality, and Mûlaprakriti is a sort of veil thrown over it.” (Theosophist, VIII, 304.)

43.

Esoteric Philosophy, regarding every finite thing as Mâyâ (or the illusion of ignorance), must necessarily view in the same light every intra-cosmic planet and body, seeing that it is something organized, hence finite. The sentence, therefore, “it proceeds from without inwardly, etc.”, in its first clause, refers to the dawn of the Mahâmanvantara, or the great reëvolution after one of the complete periodical dissolutions of every compound form in Nature, from planet to molecule, into its ultimate essence or element; and in its second clause, to the partial or local Manvantara, which may be a solar or even a planetary one.

44.

By Centre, a centre of energy or a cosmic focus is meant; when the so-called “creation,” or formation, of a planet, is accomplished by that force which is designated by Occultists Life and by Science Energy, then the process takes place from within outwardly, every atom being said to contain in itself the creative energy of the divine Breath. And, whereas after an Absolute Pralaya, when the preëxisting material consists but of One Element, and Breath “is everywhere,” the latter acts from without inwardly; after a Minor Pralaya, when everything having remained in statu quo—in a refrigerated state, so to say, like the moon—then at the first flutter of Manvantara, the planet or planets begin their resurrection to life from within outwardly.

45.

In the evolutionary cycles of ideas, it is curious to notice how ancient thought seems to be reflected in modern speculation. Had Mr. Herbert Spencer read and studied ancient Hindû philosophers when he wrote a certain passage in his First Principles (p. 482)? Or is it an independent flash of inner perception that made him say half correctly, half incorrectly, “motion as well as matter, being fixed in quantity [?], it would seem that the change in the distribution of matter which motion effects, coming to a limit in whichever direction it is carried [?], the indestructible motion thereupon necessitates a reverse distribution. Apparently, the universally coëxistent forces of attraction and repulsion which, as we have seen, necessitate rhythm in all minor changes throughout the Universe, also necessitate rhythm in the totality of its changes—produce now an immeasurable period during which the attracting forces predominating, cause universal concentration, and then an immeasurable period, during which the repulsive forces predominating, cause universal diffusion—alternate eras of evolution and dissolution.”

46.

Whatever the news of Physical Science upon the subject, Occult Science has been teaching for ages that Âkâsha (of which Ether is the grossest form), the Fifth universal cosmic Principle—to which corresponds and from which proceeds human Manas—is, cosmically, a radiant, cool, diathermanous plastic matter, creative in its physical nature, correlative in its grossest aspects and portions, immutable in its higher principles. In the creative condition it is called the Sub-Root; and in conjunction with radiant heat, it recalls “dead worlds to life.” In its higher aspect it is the Soul of the World; in its lower—the Destroyer.

47.

Hypoth., 1675.

48.

The “First” presupposes necessarily something which is the “first brought forth,” “the first in time, space, and rank”—and therefore finite and conditioned. The “first” cannot be Absolute for it is a manifestation. Therefore, Eastern Occultism calls the Abstract All the One Causeless Cause, the Rootless Root, and limits the “First Cause” to the Logos, in the sense that Plato gives to this term.

49.

See T. Subba Row's four able lectures on the Bhagavad Gîtâ, in The Theosophist, Feb. 1887.

50.

Called by Christian theology, Archangels, Seraphs, etc., etc.

51.

“Pilgrim” is the appellation given to our Monad (the Two in one) during its cycle of incarnations. It is the only immortal and eternal Principle in us, being an indivisible part of the integral whole—the Universal Spirit, from which it emanates, and into which it is absorbed at the end of the cycle. When it is said to emanate from the One Spirit, an awkward and incorrect expression has to be used for lack of appropriate words in English. The Vedântins call it Sûtrâtmâ (Thread-Soul), but their explanation differs somewhat from that of the Occultists; to explain which difference, however, is left to the Vedântins themselves.

52.

It is not the physical organisms that remain in statu quo, least of all their psychic principles, during the great Cosmic or even Solar Pralayas, but only their âkâshic or astral “photographs.” But during the Minor Pralayas, once overtaken by the “Night,” the planets remain intact, though dead, just as a huge animal, caught and embedded in the polar ice, remains the same for ages.

53.

Thus Spencer, who, nevertheless, like Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, only reflects an aspect of the old esoteric philosophers, and hence lands his readers on the bleak shore of Agnostic despair—reverently formulates the grand mystery; “that which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible appearances which the Universe presents to us, is an unknown and unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognize as without limit in Space and without beginning or end in Time.” It is only daring Theology—never Science or Philosophy—which seeks to gauge the Infinite and unveil the Fathomless and Unknowable.

54.

Space.

55.

It is stated in Book II, ch. viii, of Vishnu Purâna: “By immortality is meant existence to the end of the Kalpa”; and Wilson, the translator, remarks in a foot-note: “This, according to the Vedas, is all that is to be understood of the immortality [or eternity] of the gods; they perish at the end of universal dissolution [or Pralaya].” And Esoteric Philosophy says: “They ‘perish’ not, but are reäbsorbed.”

56.

Celestial Beings.

57.

And hence to manifest it.

58.

Nirvâna. Nippang in Chinese; Neibban in Burmese; Moksha in India.

59.

Nidâna and Mâyâ. The “Twelve” Nidânas (in Tibetan Ten-brel Chug-nyi) are the chief causes of existence, effects generated by a concatenation of causes produced.

60.

See Wassilief, Der Buddhismus, pp. 97-128.

61.

The term “Wheel” is the symbolical expression for a world or globe, which shows that the ancients were aware that our Earth was a revolving globe, not a motionless square as some Christian Fathers taught. The “Great Wheel” is the whole duration of our Cycle of Being, or Mahâkalpa, i.e., the whole revolution of our special Chain of seven Globes or Spheres from beginning to end; the “Small Wheels” meaning the Rounds, of which there are also seven.

62.

Absolute Perfection, Paranirvâna, which is Yong-Grub.

63.

See Dzungarian Mani Kumbum, the “Book of the 10,000 Precepts.” Also consult Wassilief's Der Buddhismus, pp. 327 and 357, etc.

64.

In clearer words: One has to acquire true Self-Consciousness in order to understand Samvriti, or the “origin of delusion.” Paramârtha is the synonym of the term Svasamvedanâ, or the “reflection which analyses itself.” There is a difference in the interpretation of the meaning of Paramârtha between the Yogâchâryas and the Madhyamikas, neither of whom, however, explain the real and true esoteric sense of the expression.

65.

In India it is called the “Eye of Shiva,” but beyond the Great Range it is known in Esoteric phraseology as “Dangma's Opened Eye.” Dangma means a purified soul, one who has become a Jîvanmukta, the highest Adept, or rather a Mahâtmâ so-called. His “Opened Eye” is the inner spiritual eye of the seer; and the faculty which manifests through it, is not clairvoyance as ordinarily understood, i.e., the power of seeing at a distance, but rather the faculty of spiritual intuition, through which direct and certain knowledge is obtainable. This faculty is intimately connected with the “third eye,” which mythological tradition ascribes to certain races of men.

66.

Vishnu Purâna, I. 21.

67.

And yet, one, claiming authority, namely, Sir Monier Williams, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, has just denied the fact. This is what he taught his audience, on June the 4th, 1888, in his annual address before the Victoria Institute of Great Britain: “Originally, Buddhism set its face against all solitary asceticism ... to attain sublime heights of knowledge. It had no occult, no esoteric system of doctrine ... withheld from ordinary men” (!!). And, again: “... When Gautama Buddha began his career, the later and lower form of Yoga seems to have been little known.” And then, contradicting himself, the learned lecturer forthwith informs his audience that “we learn from Lalita-Vistara that various forms of bodily torture, self-maceration, and austerity were common in Gautama's time.” (!!) But the lecturer seems quite unaware that this kind of torture and self-maceration is precisely the lower form of Yoga, Hatha Yoga, which was “little known” and yet so “common” in Gautama's time.

68.

It is even argued that all the Six Darshanas, or Schools of Philosophy, show traces of Buddha's influence, being either taken from Buddhism or due to Greek teaching! (See Weber, Max Müller, etc.) We labour under the impression that Colebrooke, “the highest authority” in such matters, had long ago settled the question by showing that “the Hindûs were in this instance the teachers, not the learners.”

69.

Soul, as the basis of all, Anima Mundi.

70.

Absolute Being and Consciousness, which are Absolute Non-Being and Unconsciousness.

71.

“Paramârthasatya” is self-consciousness; Svasamvedanâ, or self-analyzing reflection—from parama, above everything, and artha, comprehension; satya meaning absolute true being, or esse. In Tibetan Paramârthasatya is Dondampaidenpa. The opposite of this absolute reality, or actuality, is Samvritisatya—the relative truth only—Samvriti meaning “false conception” and being the origin of Illusion, Mâyâ; in Tibetan Kundzabchidenpa, “illusion-creating appearance.”

72.

Aphorisms of the Bodhisattvas.

73.

Âryâsanga was a pre-Christian Adept and founder of a Buddhist esoteric school, though Csoma de Körös places him, for some reasons of his own, in the seventh century a.d. There was another Aryâsanga, who lived during the first centuries of our era, and the Hungarian scholar most probably confuses the two.

74.

Vâyu Purâna.

75.

Vishnu Purâna, Wilson, I. 20.

76.

Finite self-consciousness, I mean. For how can the Absolute attain this otherwise than simply as an aspect, the highest of which aspects known to us is human consciousness?

77.

See Schwegler's Handbook of the History of Philosophy, in Sterling's translation, p. 28.

78.

Vajrapâni or Vajradhara means the diamond-holder; in Tibetan Dorjesempa, sempa meaning the soul; its adamantine quality referring to its indestructibility in the hereafter. The explanation with regard to the Anupâdaka given in the Kâla Chakra, the first in the Gyut division of the Kanjur, is half esoteric. It has misled the Orientalists into erroneous speculations with respect to the Dhyâni-Buddhas and their earthly correspondencies, the Mânushi-Buddhas. The real tenet is hinted at in a subsequent volume, and will be more fully explained in its proper place.

79.

To quote Hegel again, who with Schelling practically accepted the Pantheistic conception of periodical Avatâras (special incarnations of the World-Spirit in Man, as seen in the case of all the great religious reformers): “The essence of man is spirit ... only by stripping himself of his finiteness and surrendering himself to pure self-consciousness does he attain the truth. Christ-man, as man in whom the Unity of God-man [identity of the individual with the universal Consciousness as taught by the Vedântins and some Advaitees] appeared, has, in his death and history generally, himself presented the eternal history of Spirit—a history which every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as Spirit.”—Philosophy of History, Sibree's English Translation, p. 340.

80.

Chohanic, Dhyâni-Buddhic.

81.

Rûpa.

82.

Arûpa.

83.

“Mother of the Gods,” Aditi, or Cosmic Space. In the Zohar, she is called Sephira, the Mother of the Sephiroth, and Shekinah in her primordial form, in abscondita.

84.

Hence Non-Being is “Absolute Being,” in Esoteric Philosophy. In the tenets of the latter even Âdi-Buddha (the First or Primeval Wisdom) is, while manifested, in one sense an Illusion, Mâyâ, since all the gods, including Brahmâ, have to die at the end of the Age of Brahmâ; the abstraction called Parabrahman—whether we call it Ain Suph, or with Herbert Spencer the Unknowable—alone being the One Absolute Reality. The One Secondless Existence is Advaita, “Without a Second,” and all the rest is Mâyâ, so teaches the Advaita Philosophy.

85.

Motion.

86.

Wilson, I. iv.

87.

Mother-Lotus.

88.

An unpoetical term, yet still very graphic.

89.

Gross, The Heathen Religion, p. 195.

90.

Precepts for Yoga.

91.

A Vedântin of the Visishthadvaita Philosophy would say that, though the only independent Reality, Parabrahman is inseparable from His Trinity. That He is three, “Parabrahman, Chit, and Achit,” the last two being dependent Realities unable to exist separately; or, to make it clearer, Parabrahman is the Substance—changeless, eternal, and incognizable—and Chit (Âtmâ) and Achit (Anâtmâ) and its qualities, as form and colour are the qualities of any object. The two are the garment, or body, or rather aspect (sharîra) of Parabrahman. But an Occultist would find much to say against this claim, and so would the Advaiti Vedântin.

92.

Sc., Sons.

93.

Simultaneously.

94.

Moves.

95.

Periodical.

96.

Wilson, Vishnu Purâna, I. 40.

97.

Triangle.

98.

Quaternary.

99.

Hiranyagarbha.

100.

The three hypostases of Brahmâ, or Vishnu, the three Avasthâs.

101.

Number, truly; but never Motion. It is Motion which begets the Logos, the Word, in Occultism.

102.

The “fourteen precious things.” The narrative or allegory is found in the Shatapatha Brâmanah and others. The Japanese Secret Science of the Buddhist Mystics, the Yamabooshi, has “seven precious things.” We will speak of them, hereafter.

103.

“The original for Understanding is Sattva, which Shankara renders Antaskarana. ‘Refined,’ he says, ‘by sacrifices and other sanctifying operations.’ In the Katha, at p. 148, Sattva is rendered by Shankara to mean Buddhi—a common use of the word.” (Bhagavadgîtâ, etc., translated by Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A.; edited by Max Müller, p. 193.) Whatever meaning various schools may give the term, Sattva is the name given among Occult students of the Âryâsanga School to the dual Monad, or Âtmâ-Buddhi, and Âtmâ-Buddhi on this plane corresponds to Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti on the higher plane.

104.

Amrita.

105.

Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 314.

106.

On Rosenkranz.

107.

i. 2.

108.

John, i. 4.

109.

Lanoo is a student, a Chelâ who studies practical Esotericism.

110.

“Whom thou knowest now as Kwan-Shai-Yin.”—Comment.

111.

Eka is One; Chatur, Four; Tri, Three; and Sapta, Seven.

112.

“Tridasha,” or Thirty, three times ten, alludes to the Vedic deities in round numbers, or more accurately 33—a sacred number. They are the 12 Âdityas, the 8 Vasus, the 11 Rudras, and the 2 Ashvins—the twin sons of the Sun and Sky. This is the root-number of the Hindû Pantheon, which enumerates 33 crores, or three hundred and thirty millions of gods and goddesses.

113.

Stars.

114.

The Upper Space.

115.

Element.

116.

The Gnostic Sophia, “Wisdom,” who is the “Mother” of the Ogdoad (Aditi, in a certain sense, with her eight sons), is the Holy Ghost and the Creator of all, as in the ancient systems. The “Father” is a far later invention. The earliest manifested Logos was female everywhere—the mother of the seven planetary powers.

117.

See Chinese Buddhism, by the Rev. Joseph Edkins, who always gives correct facts, although his conclusions are very frequently erroneous.

118.

Book of Sarparâjni.

119.

By “God, the Father,” the seventh principle in Man and Kosmos are here unmistakably meant, this principle being inseparable in its Esse and Nature from the seventh cosmic principle. In one sense it is the Logos of the Greeks and the Avalokiteshvara of the Esoteric “Buddhists.”

120.

Fitzedward Hall's edition, in the Bibliotheca Indica, p. 16.

121.

Anugîtâ, ch. xxvi, K. T. Telang's Translation, p. 333.

122.

See Mariette's Abydos, II. 63, and III. 413, 414, No. 1,122.

123.

Book of Dzyan, III.

124.

Od is the pure life-giving Light, or magnetic fluid; Ob the messenger of death used by sorcerers, the nefarious evil fluid; Aour is the synthesis of the two, Astral Light proper. Can the Philologists tell why Od—a term used by Reichenbach to denominate the vital fluid—is also a Tibetan word meaning light, brightness, radiancy? It also means “sky” in an Occult sense. Whence the root of the word? But Âkâsha is not quite Ether, but far higher than that, as will be shown.

125.

This is again similar to the doctrine of Fichte and German Pantheists. The former reveres Jesus as the great teacher who inculcated the unity of the spirit of man with the God-Spirit or Universal Principle (the Advaita doctrine). It is difficult to find a single speculation in Western metaphysics which has not been anticipated by archaic Eastern philosophy. From Kant to Herbert Spencer, it is all a more or less distorted echo of the Dvaita, Advaita, and Vedântic doctrines generally.

126.

Compare Dowson's Dictionary of Hindû Mythology, p. 57.

127.

Whether the genus of the bird be cygnus, anser, or pelecanus, it is no matter, as it is an aquatic bird floating or moving on the waters like the Spirit, and then issuing from those waters to give birth to other beings. The true significance of the symbol of the Eighteenth Degree of the Rosecroix is precisely this, though it was later on poetised into the motherly feeling of the pelican rending its bosom to feed its seven little ones with its blood.

128.

The reason why Moses forbids eating the pelican and swan (Deuteronomy, xiv. 16, 17), classing the two among the unclean fowls, and permits eating “the bald locusts, beetles, and the grasshopper after his kind” (Leviticus xi. 22.), is a purely physiological one, and has to do with mystic symbology only in so far as the word “unclean,” like every other word, ought not to be understood literally; for it is esoteric like all the rest, and may as well mean “holy” as not. It is a very suggestive blind in connection with certain superstitions—e.g., that of the Russian people, who will not use the pigeon for food; not because it is “unclean” but because the “Holy Ghost” is credited with having appeared under the form of a dove.

129.

Chaos.

130.

Not the Mediæval Alchemists, but the Magi and Fire-Worshippers, from whom the Rosicrucians, or the Philosophers per ignem, the successors of the Theurgists, borrowed all their ideas concerning Fire, as a mystic and divine element.

131.

Isis Unveiled, I. 146.

132.

“Para” gives the force of beyond, outside.

133.

Purusha.

134.

Prakriti.

135.

I, I. 7.

136.

The Web.

137.

The Father.

138.

The Root of Matter.

139.

The Elements, with their respective Powers, or Intelligences.

140.

The Web.

141.

Popular Astronomy, pp. 507, 508.

142.

American Journal of Science, July, 1870.

143.

Winchell, World-Life, pp. 83-5.

144.

Of the Atoms.

145.

The Universe.

146.

Primeval Light.

147.

This is said in view of the fact that the flame from a fire is inexhaustible, and that the lights of the whole Universe could be lit from one simple rush-light without diminishing the flame.

148.

Chap. viii., p. 80, Telang's Translation.

149.

Deuteronomy, iv 24.

150.

Thess., i. 7, 8.

151.

Acts, ii. 3.

152.

Rev., xix. 13.

153.

Telang's Translation, Sacred Books of the East, viii. 278.

154.

Dhyân Chohans.

155.

Formless.

156.

With Bodies.

157.

Pitris.

158.

The Four, represented in the Occult numerals by the Tetraktys, the Sacred or Perfect Square, is a Sacred Number with the Mystics of every nation and race. It has one and the same significance in Brâhmanism, Buddhism, in Kabalism and in the Egyptian, Chaldean and other numerical systems.

159.

In the Kabalah, the same numbers, viz., 1065 are a value of Jehovah, since the numerical values of the three letters which compose his name—Jod, Vau and twice Hé—are respectively 10 (י), 6 (ו) and 5 (ה); or again thrice seven, 21. “Ten is the Mother of the Soul, for Life and Light are therein united,” says Hermes. “For number one is born of the Spirit and the number ten from Matter [Chaos, feminine]; the unity has made the ten, the ten the unity.” (Book of the Keys.) By means of Temura, the anagrammatical method of the Kabalah, and the knowledge of 1065 (21), a universal science may be obtained regarding Cosmos and its mysteries (Rabbi Yogel). The Rabbis regard the numbers 10, 6, and 5 as the most sacred of all.

160.

The reader may be told that an American Kabalist has now discovered the same number for the Elohim. It came to the Jews from Chaldæa. See “Hebrew Metrology,” in The Masonic Review, July, 1885, McMillan Lodge, No. 141.

161.

We find the same expression in Egypt. Mout signifies, for one thing, “Mother,” and shows the character assigned to her in the triad of that country. She was no less the mother than the wife of Ammon, one of the principal titles of the god being “the husband of his mother.” The goddess Mout, or Mût, is addressed as “Our Lady,” the “Queen of Heaven” and “of the Earth,” thus “sharing these titles with the other mother goddesses, Isis, Hathor, etc.” (Maspero).

162.

The Sparks.

163.

The permutation of Oeaohoo. The literal signification of the word is, among the Eastern Occultists of the North, a circular wind, whirlwind; but in this instance, it is a term to denote the ceaseless and eternal Cosmic Motion, or rather the Force that moves it, which Force is tacitly accepted as the Deity, but never named. It is the eternal Kârana, the ever-acting Cause.

164.

vi. 15. The Anugîtâ forms part of the Ashvamedha Parvan of the Mahâbhârata. The translator of the Bhagavadgîtâ, edited by Max Müller, regards it as a continuation of the Bhagavadgîtâ. Its original is one of the oldest Upanishads.

165.

This shows the modern metaphysicians, added to all past and present Hegels, Berkeleys, Schopenhauers, Hartmanns, Herbert Spencers, and even the modern Hylo-Idealists to boot, no better than the pale copyists of hoary antiquity.

166.

It is the knowledge of this law that permits and helps the Arhat to perform his Siddhis, or various phenomena, such as the disintegration of matter, the transport of objects from one place to another, etc.

167.

These are ancient Commentaries attached with modern Glossaries to the Stanzas, for the Commentaries in their symbolical language are usually as difficult to understand as the Stanzas themselves.

168.

In a polemical scientific work, The Modern Genesis (p. 48), the Rev. W. B. Slaughter, criticizing the position assumed by the astronomers, says: “It is to be regretted that the advocates of this [nebular] theory have not entered more largely into the discussion of it [the beginning of rotation] No one condescends to give us the rationale of it. How does the process of cooling and contracting the mass impart to it a rotatory motion?” (Quoted by Winchell, World-Life, p. 94.) It is not materialistic Science that can ever solve it. “Motion is eternal in the unmanifested, and periodical in the manifest,” says an Occult teaching. It is “when heat caused by the descent of Flame into primordial matter causes its particles to move, which motion becomes the Whirlwind.” A drop of liquid assumes a spheroidal form owing to its atoms moving around themselves in their ultimate, unresolvable, and noumenal essence; unresolvable for Physical Science, at any rate. The question is amply treated later on.

169.

The x, the unknown quantity.

170.

Which makes Ten, or the perfect number, applied to the “Creator,” the name given to the totality of the Creators blended by the Monotheists into One, as the “Elohim,” Adam Kadmon or Sephira, the Crown—are the androgyne synthesis of the ten Sephiroth, who stand for the symbol of the manifested Universe in the popularized Kabalah. The Esoteric Kabalists, however, following the Eastern Occultists, divide the upper Sephirothal triangle (or Sephira, Chokmah and Binah) from the rest, which leaves seven Sephiroth. As for Svabhâvat, the Orientalists explain the term as meaning the universal plastic matter diffused through space, with, perhaps, half an eye to the Ether of Science. But the Occultists identify it with “Father-Mother” on the mystic plane.

171.

Arûpa.

172.

Boundless Circle.

173.

Subjective, Formless.

174.

Bhâskara.

175.

This refers to the Abstract Thought and concrete Voice, or the manifestation thereof, the effect of the Cause. Adam Kadmon, or Tetragrammaton, is the Logos in the Kabalah. Therefore this Triad answers in the latter to the highest Triangle of Kether, Chokmah and Binah, the last a female potency, and at the same time the male Jehovah, as partaking of the nature of Chokmah, or the male Wisdom.

176.

The Secret Doctrine teaches that the Sun is a central star and not a planet. Yet the ancients knew of and worshipped seven great gods, excluding the Sun and Earth. Which was that “Mystery God” they set apart? Of course not Uranus, only discovered by Herschel in 1781. But could it not be known by another name? Says Ragon: “Occult Sciences having discovered through astronomical calculations that the number of the planets must be seven, the ancients were led to introduce the Sun into the scale of the celestial harmonies, and make him occupy the vacant place. Thus, every time they perceived an influence that pertained to none of the six planets known, they attributed it to the Sun.... The error seems important, but was not so in practical results, if the astrologers replaced Uranus by the Sun, which ... is a central Star relatively motionless, turning only on its axis and regulating time and measure; and which cannot be turned aside from its true functions.” (Maçonnerie Occulte, p. 447.) The nomenclature of the days of the week is also faulty. “The Sun-day ought to be Uranus-day (Urani dies, Urandi),” adds the learned writer.

177.

Planetary System.

178.

“The Sun rotates on its axis always in the same direction in which the planets revolve in their respective orbits,” astronomy teaches us.

179.

See Anugîtâ, Telang, x. 9; and Aitareya Brâhmana, Haug, p. 1.

180.

This essence of cometary matter, Occult Science teaches, is totally different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which Modern Science is acquainted. It is homogeneous in its primitive form beyond the Solar Systems, and differentiates entirely once it crosses the boundaries of our Earth's region; vitiated by the atmospheres of the planets and the already compound matter of the interplanetary stuff, it is heterogeneous only in our manifested world.

181.

Manas—the Mind-Principle, or the Human Soul.

182.

Buddhi—the Divine Soul.

183.

See Correlation of Physical Forces, 1843, p. 81; and Address to the British Association, 1866.

184.

Very similar ideas were those of W. Mattieu Williams, in The Fuel of the Sun; of Dr. C. William Siemens, On the Conservation of Solar Energy (Nature, XXV, 440-444, March 9, 1882); and also of Dr. P. Martin Duncan in an Address, as the President of the Geological Society, London, May, 1877. See World-Life, by Alexander Winchell, LL.D., p. 53, et seq.

185.

When we speak of Neptune, it is not as an Occultist but as a European. The true Eastern Occultist will maintain that, whereas there are many yet undiscovered planets in our system, Neptune does not really belong to it, in spite of its apparent connection with our Sun and the influence of the latter upon it. This connection is mâyâvic, imaginary, they say.

186.

Word, Voice and Spirit.

187.

These are the four “Immortals,” which are mentioned in the Atharva Veda as the “Watchers” or Guardians of the four quarters of the sky. (See Ch. lxxvi., 1-4, et seq.)

188.

Conflict between Religion and Science, pp. 132 and 133.

189.

Principles of Science, II. 455.

190.

Les Mystères de l'Horoscope, Ely Star, p. xi.

191.

Psalms, civ. 4.

192.

The difference between the Builders, the Planetary Spirits, and the Lipika must not be lost sight of. (See Shlokas 5 and 6 of this Commentary.)

193.

That is, he is under the influence of their guiding thought.

194.

Cosmic mists.

195.

The World to be.

196.

Atoms.

197.

See A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, 5th annotated edition, pp. 171-173.

198.

The first and greatest Tibetan Reformer who founded the “Yellow-Caps,” Gelukpas. He was born in the year 1355 a.d., in the district of Amdo, and was the Avatâra of Amitâbha, the celestial name of Gautama Buddha.

199.

T. Subba Row seems to identify him with, and to call him, the Logos. (See his Lectures on the Bhagavadgîtâ, in the Theosophist, vol. ix.)

200.

Helmholtz, Faraday Lecture, 1881.

201.

It is well known that sand, when placed on a metal plate in vibration, assumes a series of regular figures of various descriptions. Can Science give a complete explanation of this fact?

202.

See The Masonic Cyclopædia, Mackenzie; and The Pythagorean Triangle, Oliver.

203.

Ormazd is the Logos, the “First Born,” and the Sun.

204.

Against Apion, I, 25.

205.

See Isis Unveiled, II., 430-438.

206.

See Dowson's Hindû Classical Dictionary.

207.

The mineral atoms.

208.

Gaseous clouds.

209.

See Kabbalah Denudata, “De Anima,” p. 113.

210.

“The doctrine of the rotation of the earth about an axis was taught by the Pythagorean Hicetas, probably as early as 500 b.c. It was also taught by his pupil Ecphantus, and by Heraclides, a pupil of Plato. The immobility of the sun and the orbital rotation of the earth were shown by Aristarchus of Samos as early as 281 b.c. to be suppositions accordant with facts of observation. The heliocentric theory was also taught about 150 b.c., by Seleucus of Seleucia on the Tigris. [It was taught 500 b.c. by Pythagoras.—H.P.B.] It is said also that Archimedes, in a work entitled Psammites, inculcated the heliocentric theory. The sphericity of the earth was distinctly taught by Aristotle, who appealed for proof to the figure of the earth's shadow on the moon in eclipses. (Aristotle, De Cælo, lib. II., cap, XIV.) The same idea was defended by Pliny. (Nat. Hist., II., 65.) These views seem to have been lost from knowledge for more than a thousand years....” (Winchell, World-Life, 551-2.)

211.

On Vortex Atoms.

212.

Op. cit., 567.

213.

Abridged from Principia Rerum Naturalium.

214.

The Lipika.

215.

That is: the First is now the Second World.

216.

The Formless Universe of Thought.

217.

The Shadowy World of Primal Form, or the Intellectual.

218.

In the Rig Veda, we find the names Brahmanaspati and Brihaspati alternating with, and equivalent to, each other. Also see Brihadâranyaka Upanishad; Brihaspati is a deity called the “Father of the Gods.”

219.

Logic, II. 125.

220.

Having already taken the first three.

221.

Hosts.

222.

The four Aspects are the body, its life or vitality, and the “double” of the body—the triad which disappears with the death of the person—and the Kâma Rûpa which disintegrates in Kâma Loka.

223.

On Amos, iv.

224.

Theol. Cir., I. vii.

225.

See The Occult World, pp. 89, 90.

226.

Thus the sentence, “Natura Elementorum obtinet revelationem Dei” (Clemens, Stromata, IV. 6), is applicable to both or neither. Consult the Zends, II. 228, and Plutarch De Iside, as compared by Layard, Académie des Inscriptions, 1854, Vol. XV.

227.

Exodus xxvi, xxvii.

228.

Antiquities, I. VIII, ch. xxii.

229.

Chinese Buddhism, p. 216.

230.

“Man” was here substituted for “Dragon.” Compare the Ophite Spirits. The Angels recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, who correspond to these “Faces,” were with the Ophites: Dragon—Raphael; Lion—Michael; Bull, or Ox—Uriel; and Eagle—Gabriel. The four keep company with the four Evangelists, and preface the Gospels.

231.

Ezekiel, i.

232.

The Jews, save the Kabalists, having no names for East, West, South, and North, expressed the idea by words signifying before, behind, right and left, and very often confounded the terms exoterically, thus making the blinds in the Bible more confused and difficult to interpret. Add to this the fact that out of the forty-seven translators of King James' Bible “only three understood Hebrew, and of these two died before the Psalms were translated” (Royal Masonic Cyclopædia), and one may easily understand what reliance can be placed on the English version of the Bible. In this work the Douay Roman Catholic version is generally followed.

233.

The vertical line or the figure 1.

234.

Circle.

235.

Also for those who, etc.

236.

The Formless World and the World of Forms.

237.

Theosophist, Feb., 1877, p. 303.

238.

These voluntary reïncarnations are referred to in our Doctrine as Nirmânakâyas—the surviving spiritual principles of men.

239.

Sûkshma Sharîra, “dream-like” illusive body, with which are clothed the inferior Dhyânis of the celestial Hierarchy.

240.

Compare this Esoteric tenet with the Gnostic doctrine found in Pistis-Sophia (Knowledge-Wisdom), in which treatise Sophia (Achamôth) is shown lost in the waters of Chaos (Matter), on her way to the Supreme Light, and Christos delivering and helping her on the right Path. Note well, that “Christos” with the Gnostics meant the Impersonal Principle, the Âtman of the Universe, and the Âtmâ within every man's soul—and not Jesus; though in the old Coptic MS., in the British Museum, “Christos” is replaced by “Jesus” and other terms.

241.

A Catechism of the Visishthadvaita Philosophy, by N. Bhâshiyacharya, F.T.S., late Pandit of the Adyar Library.

242.

Träume eines Geistersehers, quoted by C. C. Massey, in his preface to Von Hartmann's Spiritismus.

243.

Le Livre des Morts, Paul Pierret, Chap. xvii. p. 61.

244.

See also for other data on this peculiar expression, the Day of “Come To Us,” The Funerary Ritual of the Egyptians, by Viscount de Rougé.

245.

Chaos.

246.

Our Universe.

247.

The Theosophist, Feb., 1887, p. 305.

248.

Op. cit., p. 306.

249.

Madhya is said of something whose commencement and end are unknown, and Para means infinite. These expressions all relate to infinitude and to division of time.

250.

Op. cit., p. 307.

251.

From the Sanskrit Laya, the point of matter where every differentiation has ceased.

252.

Five Years of Theosophy, Art., “Personal and Impersonal God,” p. 200.

253.

Elements.

254.

Fraction.

255.

Presidential Address before the Royal Society of Chemists, March, 1888.

256.

P. 242.

257.

Worlds.

258.

A period of 311,040,000,000,000 years, according to Brâhmanical calculations.

259.

See the Scientific Arena, a monthly journal devoted to current philosophical teaching and its bearing upon the religious thought of the age. New York: A. Wilford Hall, Ph.D., LL.D., Editor, July, August, and September, 1886.

260.

Such, we believe, is the name applied to what he also calls “Etheric Centres,” by J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia, the inventor of the famous “Motor”—destined, as his admirers have hoped, to revolutionize the motor power of the world.

261.

The moon is dead only so far as regards her inner principles—i.e., psychically and spiritually, however absurd the statement may seem. Physically, she is only as a semi-paralysed body may be. She is aptly referred to in Occultism as the “Insane Mother,” the great sidereal lunatic.

262.

Occultists, however, having the most perfect faith in their own exact records, astronomical and mathematical, calculate the age of humanity, and assert that men (as separate sexes) have existed in this Round just 18,618,727 years, as the Brâhmanical teachings and even some Hindû calendars declare.

263.

The commentaries on the Stanzas are resumed on p. 213.

264.

In Esoteric Buddhism and Man: Fragments of Forgotten History.

265.

Many more planets are enumerated in the Secret Books than in modern astronomical works.

266.

p. 48.

267.

See, in Esoteric Buddhism, “The Constitution of Man,” and the “Planetary Chain.”

268.

Winchell's World-Life.

269.

P. 113 (5th edition).

270.

pp. 185-6.

271.

Kosha is “sheath” literally, the sheath of every principle.

272.

Sthûla-upâdhi, or basis of the principle.

273.

Life.

274.

The Astral Body, or Linga Sharîra.

275.

Buddhi.

276.

See Diagram II, p. 195.

277.

Extract from the Teacher's letters on various topics.

278.

We are not concerned with the other Globes in this work except incidentally.

279.

Esoteric Buddhism, p. 136.

280.

Lucifer, May, 1888.

281.

Esoteric Buddhism (5th ed.), p. 46.

282.

Op. cit., p. 49.

283.

Op. cit., p. 140.

284.

p. 177 supra.

285.

Occultism divides the periods of Rest (Pralaya) into several kinds: there is the Individual Pralaya of each Globe, as humanity and life pass on to the next—seven minor Pralayas in each Round; the Planetary Pralaya, when seven Rounds are completed; the Solar Pralaya, when the whole system is at an end; and finally the Universal Pralaya, Mahâ or Brahmâ Pralaya, at the close of the Age of Brahmâ. These are the chief Pralayas or “destruction periods.” There are many other minor ones, but with these we are not concerned at present.

286.

Pp. 48, 49.

287.

Ibid.

288.

“Physical” here means differentiated for cosmical purposes and work; that “physical side,” nevertheless, if objective to the apperception of beings from other planes, is yet quite subjective to us on our plane.

289.

Pp. 276 et seq.

290.

Ibid.

291.

See diagram, op. cit., p. 277.

292.

Op. cit., pp. 273-4.

293.

Op. cit., p. 274-5.

294.

II. 278-9.

295.

P. 48.

296.

The Natures of the seven Hierarchies or Classes of Pitris and Dhyân Chohans which compose our nature and bodies are here meant.

297.

Round, or revolution of Life and Being round the seven smaller Wheels.

298.

Thirds.

299.

Race.

300.

P. 235.

301.

Rev., xii. 7-9.

302.

See Vol. II, Shloka 17.

303.

Isis Unveiled, I. 299, 300. Compare also Dunlap, Sôd: the Son of the Man, pp. 51 et seq.

304.

On the authority of Irenæus, of Justin Martyr and of the Codex itself, Dunlap shows that the Nazarenes regarded “Spirit” as a female and evil Power, in its connection with our Earth.

305.

Fetahil is identical with the host of the Pitris, who “created man” as a “shell” only. He was, with the Nazarenes, the King of Light, and the Creator; but in this instance he is the unlucky Prometheus, who fails to get hold of the Living Fire necessary for the formation of the Divine Soul, as he is ignorant of the secret name, the ineffable or incommunicable name of the Kabalists.

306.

The spirit of Matter and Concupiscence; Kâma Rûpa minus Manas, Mind.

307.

Codex Nazaræus, ii. 233.

308.

This Mano of the Nazarenes strangely resembles the Hindû Manu, the Heavenly Man of the Rig Veda.

309.

“I am the true Vine, and my father is the husbandman.” (John, xv. 1.)

310.

With the Gnostics, Christ, as well as Michael who is identical with him in some respects, was the “Chief of the Æons.”

311.

Codex Nazaræus, i. 135.

312.

See the Cosmogony of Pherecydes.

313.

I. 301, note.

314.

They are found, however, in the Chaldean Book of Numbers.

315.

Op. cit., II. 183 et seq.

316.

For the difference between nous, the higher divine Wisdom, and psyche, the lower and terrestrial, see St. James, iii. 15-17.

317.

Jehovah's connection with the Moon in the Kabalah is well known to students.

318.

For the Nazarenes, see Isis Unveiled, II. 131 and 132. The true followers of the true Christos were all Nazarenes and Christians, and were the opponents of the later Christians.

319.

See the diagram of the Lunar Chain of seven worlds, p. 195, where, as in our own or any other Chain, the upper worlds are spiritual, while the lowest, whether Moon, Earth, or any other planet, is dark with matter.

320.

The whole Kosmos. The reader is reminded that in the Stanzas Kosmos often means only our own Solar System, not the Infinite Universe.

321.

This is purely astronomical.

322.

For a clearer explanation of the above, see “Saptaparna” in the Index.

323.

Op. cit., III. 346.

324.

Book of Dzyan.

325.

See Index, at the words “Evolution,” “Darwin,” “Kapila,” “Battle of Life,” etc.

326.

Isis Unveiled, II. 260.

327.

Vishnu Purâna.

328.

Chain.

329.

Earth.

330.

Kenealy, Book of God, p. 118.

331.

Acosta, vi. 14.

332.

Kenealy, Ibid.

333.

I, 587-93.

334.

That which was natural in the sight of primitive man, has only now become miracle to us; and that which was to him a miracle, could never be expressed in our language.

335.

There is no nation in the world in which the feeling of devotion, or of religious mysticism, is more developed and prominent than in the Hindû people. See what Max Müller says of this idiosyncrasy and national feature in his works. This is a direct inheritance from the primitive conscious men of the Third Race.

336.

Lectures on Heroes.

337.

Vehicle.

338.

Âtman.

339.

Âtmâ-Buddhi, Spirit-Soul. This relates to the cosmic principles.

340.

Again.

341.

Avalokiteshvara.

342.

Builders. The seven creative Rishis, now connected with the constellation of the Great Bear.

343.

Earth.

344.

Rosenroth, Liber Mysterii IV. 1.

345.

Genesis i.

346.

Auszüge aus dem Zohar, pp. 13-15.

347.

See Vishnu Purâna, Book I.

348.

Ch. lxxxviii.

349.

Ch. lxiv. 29, 30.

350.

Ibid., 34, 35.

351.

A World, when called a “higher World,” is not higher by reason of its location, but because it is superior in quality or essence. Yet such a World is generally understood by the profane as “Heaven,” and located above our heads.

352.

Of Form, the Sthûla Sharîra, External Body.

353.

Pearls.

354.

Ἄνθρωπος, a work on Occult Embryology, Book I.

355.

Namely, a congenital idiot.

356.

John iii, 8.

357.

Ch. cxlviii.

358.

Ibid., cxlix. 51.

359.

The Seven Souls of Man, p. 2; a Lecture by Gerald Massey.

360.

De Iside et Osiride, xliii.

361.

Ch. xli.

362.

iv. 5.

363.

Mariette's Abydos, plate 51.

364.

P. Pierret, Études Égyptologiques.

365.

Ritual, ch. ii.

366.

Linked into.

367.

Op. cit., xvii. 4.

368.

Several inimical critics are anxious to prove that no Seven Principles of Man, or Septenary Constitution of our Chain, were taught in our earlier volumes, Isis Unveiled. Though in that work the doctrine could only be hinted at, there are many passages, nevertheless, in which the Septenary Constitution of both Man and the Chain is openly mentioned. Speaking of the Elohim (II. 420), it is said: “They remain over the seventh heaven (or spiritual world), for it is they who, according to the Kabalists, formed in succession the six material worlds, or rather, attempts at worlds, that preceded our own, which, they say, is the seventh.” Our Globe, in the diagram representing the Chain, is, of course, the seventh and lowest; though, as the evolution on these Globes is cyclic, it is the fourth, on the descending arc of matter. And again (II. 367) it is written: “In the Egyptian notions, as in those of all other faiths founded on philosophy, man was not merely ... a union of soul and body; he was a trinity, when spirit was added to it. Besides, that doctrine made him consist of ... body, ... astral form, or shadow, ... animal soul, ... the higher soul, and ... terrestrial intelligence ... [and] a sixth principle, etc., etc.”—the seventh—Spirit. So clearly are these principles mentioned, that even in the Index (II. 683), one finds “Six Principles of Man,” the seventh being, in strict truth, the synthesis of the six, and not a principle but a ray of the Absolute All.

369.

See Diagram III, p. 221.

370.

pp. 340-351, “Genesis of the Soul.”

371.

De Mysteriis, ii. 3.

372.

Asiatic Researches, xi. 99, 100.

373.

Ch. xxxii. 9.

374.

Their Upper Triad.

375.

Bhûmi or Prithivî.

376.

Book of the Dead, i. 7. Compare also Mysteries of Rostan.

377.

Kingdom.

378.

Kingdom.

379.

The first Shadow of the Physical Man.

380.

Man.

381.

The Moon.

382.

See Mantuan Codex.

383.

The formation of the “Living Soul,” or Man, would render the idea more clearly. A “Living Soul” is a synonym of Man in the Bible. These are our seven “Principles.”

384.

Ha Idra Zuta Kadisha, xxii. 746.

385.

xviii. 12.

386.

Hebrews, iv.

387.

Cruden, sub voce.

388.

Book of Numbers, 1. viii. 3.

389.

p. 389.

390.

Plate VII. p. 37.

391.

Esotericism teaches the same. But Manas is not Nephesh; nor is the latter the Astral, but the Fourth Principle, and also the Second, Prâna, for Nephesh is the “Breath of Life” in man, as in beast or insect; of physical, material life, which has no spirituality in it.

392.

Éliphas Lévi, whether purposely or otherwise, has confused the numbers: with us his No. 2 is No. 1 (Spirit); and by making of Nephesh both the Plastic Mediator and Life, he thus makes in reality only six principles, because he repeats the first two.

393.

Zohar, “Idra Suta,” Book iii., p. 292b.

394.

1. 302.

395.

Read, in Isis Unveiled (ii. 297-303), the doctrine of the Codex Nazaræus. Every tenet of our teaching is found there under a different form and allegory.

396.

Manu, Bk. I.

397.

The word “Sin” is curious, but has a particular Occult relation to the Moon, besides being its Chaldean equivalent.

398.

Professor Zöllner's theory has been more than welcomed by several Scientists, who are also Spiritualists; Professors Butlerof and Wagner, of St. Petersburg, for instance.

399.

“The giving reality to abstractions is the error of Realism. Space and Time are frequently viewed as separated from all the concrete experiences of the mind, instead of being generalizations of these in certain aspects.” (Bain, Logic, Part II. p. 389.)

400.

The Mysteries of Magic, by A. E. Waite.

401.

Wilson, I. 23, 24.

402.

Five Years of Theosophy, p. 169.

403.

In the Sânkhya philosophy, the seven Prakritis, or “productive productions,” are Mahat, Ahamkâra, and the five Tanmâtras. See Sânkhya Kârikâ, III., and the Commentary thereon.

404.

See Linga Purâna, Prior Section, lxx. 12 et seq.; and Vâyu Purâna, ch. iv., but especially the former Purâna—Prior Section, viii. 67-74.

405.

Vishnu Purâna, Book vi., ch. iv. No use to say so to the Hindûs, who know their Purânas by heart, but very useful to remind our Orientalists and those Westerns who regard Wilson's translations as authoritative, that, in his English translation of the Vishnu Purâna, he is guilty of the most ludicrous contradictions and errors. So on this identical subject of the seven Prakritis, or the seven zones of Brahmâ's Egg, the two accounts differ totally. In Vol. i. p. 40, the Egg is said to be externally invested by seven envelopes. Wilson comments: “by Water, Air, Fire, Ether, and Ahamkâra”—which last word does not exist in the Sanskrit texts. And in Vol. v. p. 198, of the same Purâna, it is written: “in this manner were the seven forms of nature (Prakriti) reckoned from Mahat to Earth” (?). Between Mahat, or Mahâ-Buddhi, and “Water, etc.”, the difference is very considerable.

406.

According to the great metaphysician Hegel also. For him Nature was a perpetual becoming. A purely Esoteric conception. Creation or Origin, in the Christian sense of the term, is absolutely unthinkable. As the above-quoted thinker said: “God (the Universal Spirit) objectivizes himself as Nature, and again rises out of it.”

407.

Book of Dzyan, Comm. III, par. 18.

408.

P. 19.

409.

Primitive, or First Man.

410.

Reïncarnation.

411.

Vehicle.

412.

See, for example, Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the Quichés, by Augustus le Plongeon, who shows the identity between the Egyptian rites and beliefs and those of the people he describes. The ancient hieratic alphabets of the Mayas and the Egyptians are almost identical.

413.

In The Theosophist, 1881.

414.

T. Subba Row, Five Years of Theosophy, p. 154.

415.

Also called the “Sons of Wisdom” and of the “Fire-Mist,” and the “Brothers of the Sun,” in the Chinese records. Si-dzang (Tibet) is mentioned, in the MSS. of the sacred library of the province of Fo-Kien, as the great seat of Occult learning from time immemorial, ages before Buddha. The Emperor Yu, the “Great” (2,207 b.c.), a pious Mystic and great Adept, is said to have obtained his Knowledge from the “Great Teachers of the Snowy Range” in Si-dzang.

416.

Matt. vi. 5, 6.

417.

The Virgin of the World, pp. 134-5.

418.

Paracelsus, Franz Hartmann, M.D., p. 44.

419.

This word is explained by Dr. Hartmann, from the original texts of Paracelsus before him, as follows. According to this great Rosicrucian; “Mysterium is everything out of which something may be developed, which is only germinally contained in it. A seed is the ‘Mysterium’ of a plant, an egg that of a living bird, etc.”

420.

Op. cit., pp. 41, 42.

421.

It is only the mediæval Kabalists who, following the Jewish and one or two Neo-Platonists, applied the term Microcosm to man. Ancient philosophy called the Earth the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, and man the outcome of the two.

422.

“This doctrine, preached 300 years ago,” remarks the translator, “is identical with the one that has revolutionized modern thought, after having been put into new shape and elaborated by Darwin. It is still more elaborated by Kapila in the Sânkhya philosophy.”

423.

The Eastern Occultist says that they are guided and informed by Spiritual Beings, the Workmen in the invisible Worlds, and behind the veil of Occult Nature, or Nature in abscondito.

424.

Wilson, I. ii., (Vol. I. 35).

425.

A frequent expression in the said “Fragments,” to which we take exception. The Universal Mind is not a Being or “God.”

426.

The Virgin of the World, p. 47. “Asclepios,” Pt. I.

427.

Divine Pymander, ix. 64.

428.

The Virgin of the World, p. 153.

429.

Op. cit., pp. 139, 140. Fragments from the “Physical Eclogues” and “Florilegium” of Stobæus.

430.

Vishnu Purâna, I. ii, Wilson, I. 13-15.

431.

Op. cit., pp. 135-138.

432.

This teaching does not refer to Prakriti-Purusha beyond the boundaries of our small universe.

433.

The ultimate quiescent state; the Nirvânic condition of the Seventh Principle.

434.

The teaching is all given from our plane of consciousness.

435.

Or the “dream of Science,” the primeval really homogeneous matter, which no mortal can make objective in this Race, or Round either.

436.

“Vishnu, in the form of his active energy, neither ever rises nor sets, and is at once, the seven-fold sun and distinct from it,” says Vishnu Purâna, II. xi., (Wilson, II. 296).

437.

“In the same manner as a man approaching a mirror placed upon a stand, beholds in it his own image, so the energy (or reflection) of Vishnu [the Sun] is never disjoined but remains ... in the Sun (as in a mirror), that is there stationed.” (Ibid., loc. cit.)

438.

Compare the Hermetic “Nature” “going down cyclically into matter when she meets the ‘Heavenly Man’.”

439.

The writers of the above knew perfectly well the physical cause of the tides, of the waves, etc. It is the informing Spirit of the whole cosmic solar body that is meant here, and which is referred to whenever such expressions are used from the mystic point of view.

440.

Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 110, 111, art., “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac.”

441.

See Stanzas III and IV, and the Commentaries thereupon, and especially compare the comments on Stanza IV, concerning the Lipika and the four Mahârâjahs, the agents of Karma.

442.

And “Gods” or Dhyânis, too, not only the Genii or “guided Forces.”

443.

The meaning of this is that as man is composed of all the Great Elements—Fire, Air, Water, Earth and Ether—the Elementals which respectively belong to these Elements feel attracted to man by reason of their coëssence. That Element which predominates in a certain constitution will be the ruling Element throughout life. For instance, if man has a preponderance of the earthly, gnomic Element, the Gnomes will lead him towards assimilating metals—money and wealth, and so on. “Animal man is the son of the animal elements out of which his Soul [life] was born, and animals are the mirrors of man,” says Paracelsus. (De Fundamento Sapientiæ.) Paracelsus was cautious, and wanted the Bible to agree with what he said, and therefore did not say all.

444.

Cyclic progress in development.

445.

The God in man and often the incarnation of a God, a highly Spiritual Dhyân Chohan in him, besides the presence of his own Seventh Principle.

446.

Now, what “God” is meant here? Not God the “Father,” the anthropomorphic fiction; for that God is the Elohim collectively, and has no being apart from the Host. Besides, such a God is finite and imperfect. It is the high Initiates and Adepts who are meant here by the “few in number.” And it is precisely such men who believe in “Gods”, and know no “God” but one Universal unrelated and unconditioned Deity.

447.

The Virgin of the World, pp. 104-5, “The Definitions of Asclepios.”

448.

P. 120.

449.

National Reformer, January 9th, 1887. Article “Phreno-Kosmo-Biology,” by Dr. Lewins.

450.

This is Cyclic law; but this law itself is often defied by human stubbornness.

451.

Vol. I. p. 256.

452.

Sepher Jetzirah.

453.

As far as “Divine Revelation” is concerned, we agree. Not so with regard to “human history.” For there is “history” in most of the allegories and “myths” of India; and events, real actual events, are concealed under them.

454.

When the “false theologies” disappear, then true prehistoric realities will be found, contained especially in the mythology of the Âryans and ancient Hindûs, and even the pre-Homeric Hellenes.

455.

See Section VII, “Deus Lunus.”

456.

From an MS.

457.

Guide au Musée de Boulaq, pp. 148, 149.

458.

As we said in Isis Unveiled (II. 438-9): “To the present moment, in spite of all controversies and researches, History and Science remain as much as ever in the dark as to the origin of the Jews. They may as well be the exiled Chandâlas of old India, the ‘bricklayers’ mentioned by Veda-Vyâsa and Manu, as the Phœnicians of Herodotus, or the Hyksos of Josephus, or the descendants of Pali shepherds, or a mixture of all these. The Bible names the Tyrians as a kindred people and claims dominion over them.... Yet whatever they may have been, they became a hybrid people, not long after the time of Moses, for the Bible shows them freely intermarrying not alone with the Canaanites, but with every other nation or race they came in contact with.”

459.

Knowledge, Vol. I; see also Petrie's letter to The Academy, Dec. 17, 1881.

460.

The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid, p. 9.

461.

Op. cit., I. 519.

462.

The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid, p. 93.

463.

vii. 13 et seq.

464.

P. 224.

465.

Vol. I. Part I. 46.

466.

x. 10.

467.

See Isis Unveiled, II. 442-3.

468.

Exodus, 11. 21.

469.

George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, pp. 299, 300.

470.

II. 3.

471.

As a reminder how the esoteric religion of Moses was crushed several times, and the worship of Jehovah, as reëstablished by David, put in its place, by Hezekiah for instance, compare Isis Unveiled (II. 436-42). Surely there must have been some very good reasons why the Sadducees, who furnished almost all the High Priests of Judæa, held to the Laws of Moses and spurned the alleged “Books of Moses,” the Pentateuch of the Synagogue and the Talmud?

472.

Once more, remember the Hindû Wittoba crucified in space; the significance of the “sacred sign,” the Svastika; Plato's Decussated Man in Space, etc.

473.

See farther on the description given of the early Âryan Initiation: of Vishvakarman crucifying the Sun, Vikarttana, shorn of his beams—on a cruciform lathe.

474.

Primeval Man Unveiled; or the Anthropology of the Bible, by the author (unknown) of The Stars and the Angels, 1870, p. 14.

475.

Op. cit., p. 195.

476.

Especially in the face of the evidence furnished by the authorized Bible itself in Genesis (iv. 16, 17), which shows Cain going to the land of Nod and there marrying a wife.

477.

Ibid., p. 194.

478.

Ibid., p. 55.

479.

Ibid., pp. 206-7.

480.

Acts, xvii. 23, 24.

481.

Taittirîyaka Upanishad, Second Vallî, First Anuvâka.

482.

Ephesians, vi, 12.

483.

Oracles of Zoroaster, “Effatum,” xvi.

484.

Georgica, Book II. 325.

485.

Isis Unveiled.

486.

Op. cit., I. 5-13, Burnell's translation.

487.

The ideal apex of the Pythagorean Triangle.

488.

See A. Coke Burnell's translation, edited by Ed. W. Hopkins, Ph. D.

489.

Ahamkâra, as universal Self-Consciousness, has a triple aspect, as has also Manas. For this “conception of I,” or the Ego, is either sattva, “pure quietude,” or appears as rajas, “active,” or remains tamas, “stagnant,” in darkness. It belongs to Heaven and Earth, and assumes the properties of Ether.

490.

See Sânkhya Kârikâ III, and Commentaries.

491.

The word “eternity,” by which Christian theologians interpret the term “for ever and ever,” does not exist in the Hebrew tongue. “Oulam,” says Le Clerc, only imports a time when beginning or end is not known. It does not mean “infinite duration,” and the term “for ever,” in the Old Testament, only signifies a “long time.” Nor is the word “eternity” used in the Christian sense in the Purânas. For in Vishnu Purâna, it is clearly stated that by “eternity” and “immortality” only “existence to the end of the Kalpa” is meant. (Book II. chap. viii.)

492.

Orphic Theogony is purely Oriental and Indian in its spirit. The successive transformations it has undergone, have now separated it widely from the spirit of ancient Cosmogony, as may be seen by comparing it even with Hesiod's Theogony. Yet the truly Âryan Hindû spirit breaks forth everywhere in both the Hesiodic and Orphic systems. (See the remarkable work of James Darmesteter, “Cosmogonies Âryennes,” in his Essais Orientaux.) Thus the original Greek conception of Chaos is that of the Secret Wisdom Religion. In Hesiod, therefore, Chaos is infinite, boundless, endless and beginningless in duration, an abstraction and a visible presence at the same time, Space filled with darkness, which is primordial matter in its pre-cosmic state. For in its etymological sense, Chaos is Space, according to Aristotle, and Space is the ever Unseen and Unknowable Deity, in our philosophy.

493.

The manifested Spirit: Absolute, Divine Spirit is one with absolute Divine Substance; Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti are one in essence. Therefore, Cosmic Ideation and Cosmic Substance, in their primal character, are one also.

494.

Sepher Yetzirah, Chap. I. Mishna ix.

495.

Ibid. It is from “Arba” that Abram is derived.

496.

Zohar, I. 2a.

497.

Sepher Yetzirah, Mishna ix. 10.

498.

Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection.

499.

Plato, Timæus.

500.

Suidas, sub voc. “Tyrrhenia.” See Cory's Ancient Fragments, p. 309, 2nd ed.

501.

The reader will understand that by “years” is meant “ages,” not mere periods of 13 lunar months each.

502.

See the Greek translation by Philon Byblius.

503.

Cory, Op. cit., p. 3.

504.

Isis Unveiled, I. 342.

505.

Mithras was regarded among the Persians as the theos ek petras—the God from the rock.

506.

Bordj is called a fire-mountain, a volcano: therefore it contains fire, rock, earth and water; the male, or active, and the female, or passive, elements. The myth is suggestive.

507.

Op. cit., I. 156.

508.

Henry Pratt, M.D., New Aspects of Life.

509.

Siphrah Dtzenioutha, i. 16.

510.

Damascius, in his Theogony, calls it Dis, “the disposer of all things.” Cory, Ancient Fragments, p. 314.

511.

Isis Unveiled, I. 341.

512.

“Migration of Abraham,” 32.

513.

With the Greeks, the River-Gods, all of them the Sons of the Primeval Ocean—Chaos, in its masculine aspect—were the respective ancestors of the Hellenic races. For them the Ocean was the Father of the Gods; and thus in this connection they had anticipated the theories of Thales, as rightly observed by Aristotle. (Metaph. I. 3-5.)

514.

xxvi. 5.

515.

Isis Unveiled, I. 133-4.

516.

The Spirit, or hidden voice of the Mantras; the active manifestation of the latent force, or Occult potency.

517.

Orthography of the Archaic Dictionary.

518.

We do not mean the current or accepted Bible, but the real Jewish Scripture, now kabatistically explained.

519.

See Genesis, ii. 4.

520.

It is “unutterable” for the simple reason that it is non-existent. It never was either a name, or any word at all, but an idea that could not be expressed. A substitute was created for it in the century preceding our era.

521.

The Cosmic Tabernacle of Moses, erected by him in the Desert, was square, representing the four Cardinal Points and the four Elements, as Josephus tells his readers. (Antiq. I. viii. ch. xxii.) The idea was taken from the pyramids in Egypt, and also in Tyre, where the pyramids became pillars. The Genii, or Angels, have their abodes in these four points respectively.

522.

Isaac Myer's Qabbalah, published 1888, p. 415.

523.

As, for instance, in Vishnu Purâna, Bk. I.

524.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, lvi.

525.

Spirit History of Man, p. 88.

526.

Movers, Phoinizer, 268.

527.

Cory, Ancient Fragments, 240.

528.

Vishnu Purâna, Bk. I. Ch. iv., Fitzedward Hall's rendering.

529.

Just as Mûlaprakriti is known only to Îshvara, the Logos, as he is called by T. Subba Row.

530.

Franck, Die Kabbala, 126.

531.

Philo, Quæst. et Solut.

532.

Franck, Op. cit., 153.

533.

The “Seven Angels of the Face,” with the Christians.

534.

Philosophumena, vi. 42.

535.

The Kabbalah Unveiled, 47.

536.

Qabbalah, 233.

537.

p. 79.

538.

Arnobius, VI. xii.

539.

We employ the term as one accepted and sanctioned by use, and therefore more comprehensible to the reader.

540.

See Dunlap, Sôd: the Mysteries of Adoni, 23.

541.

With the ancient Jews, as shown by Le Clerc, the word Oulom meant simply a time whose beginning or end was not known. The term “Eternity,” properly speaking, did not exist in the Hebrew tongue with the meaning applied by Vedântins to Parabrahman, for instance.

542.

Zohar, Part I. fol. 20a.

543.

In the Indian Pantheon the double-sexed Logos is Brahmâ, the Creator, whose seven “Mind-born” Sons are the primeval Rishis—the Builders.

544.

Says Rabbi Simeon: “Oh, companions, companions, man as an emanation was both man and woman, as well on the side of the ‘Father’ as on the side of the ‘Mother.’ And this is the sense of the words: ‘And Elohim spake, Let there be Light, and it was Light’; ... and this is the two-fold man.” (Auszüge ans dem Sohar, 13, 15.) Light, then, in Genesis, stood for the Androgyne Ray, or “Heavenly Man.”

545.

Zohar, iii. 290.

546.

Op. cit., ii. 261.

547.

ix. 1.

548.

Chaldean Account of Genesis, 62, 63.

549.

The Seven Swans that are believed to descend from Heaven on Lake Mânsarovara, are in the popular fancy the Seven Rishis of the Great Bear, who assume that form to visit the locality where the Vedas were written.

550.

See Petronius, Satyricon, cxxxvi.

551.

Progress of Religious Ideas, I. 17 et seq.

552.

iii. 165.

553.

Ch. liv. 3.

554.

Ch. xxii. 1.

555.

Ch. xlii. 13.

556.

Ch. liv. 1, 2; ch. lxxvii. i.

557.

Vishnu Purâna, I. 39.

558.

Op. cit., ibid.

559.

Ch. xvii. 50, 51.

560.

Ch. xlii. 13.

561.

Ch. lxxx. 9.

562.

See Max Müller's “Our Figures.”

563.

A Kabalist would be rather inclined to believe that as the Arabic cifron was taken from the Indian sunyan, nought, so the Jewish Kabalistic Sephiroth (Sephrim) were taken from the word cipher, not in the sense of emptiness, but in that of creation by number and degrees of evolution. And the Sephiroth are 10 or [circle split by vertical line].

564.

See King's Gnostics and their Remains, 370 (2nd ed.).

565.

De Vita Pithag.

566.

The year of his birth is given as 608 b.c.

567.

That is to say 332 b.c.

568.

Metaphysics, vii., F.

569.

Euterpe, 75, 76.

570.

De Cultu Egypt.

571.

xxi. 5 et seq.

572.

II Kings, xviii. 4.

573.

Supra, pp. 386, 387.

574.

III. 124.

575.

Movers, Phoinizer, 282.

576.

See Isis Unveiled, I. 56.

577.

Weber, Akad-Vorles, 213, et seq.

578.

The Chinese seem to have thus anticipated Sir William Thomson's theory that the first living germ had dropped to the earth from some passing comet. Query: Why should this be called scientific and the Chinese idea a superstitious, foolish theory?

579.

Compare Movers, Phoinizer, 268.

580.

His triadic Goddesses are Sati and Anouki.

581.

Ptah was originally the god of Death, of Destruction, like Shiva. He is a Solar God only by virtue of the Sun's fire killing as well as vivifying. He was the national God of Memphis, the radiant and “fair-faced” God.

582.

Book of Numbers.

583.

Wilson, Vishnu Purâna, I. Pref. lxxxiv-v.

584.

There is a curious piece of information in the Buddhist esoteric traditions. The exoteric or allegorical biography of Gautama Buddha shows this great Sage dying of an indigestion of “pork and rice”; a very prosaic end, indeed, with little of the solemn element in it! This is explained as an allegorical reference to his having been born in the “Boar” or Varâha Kalpa, when Vishnu assumed the form of that animal to raise the Earth out of the “Waters of Space.” Now as the Brâhmans descend direct from Brahmâ and are, so to speak, identified with him; and as they are at the same time the mortal enemies of Buddha and Buddhism, we have this curious allegorical hint and combination. The Brâhmanism of the Boar or Varâha Kalpa has slaughtered the religion of Buddha in India, swept it from its face. Therefore Buddha, who is identified with his philosophy, is said to have died from the effects of eating of the flesh of a wild hog. The very idea of one who established the most rigorous vegetarianism and respect for animal life—even to refusing to eat eggs as being vehicles of latent life—dying of an indigestion of meat, is absurdly contradictory and has puzzled more than one Orientalist. But the present explanation, however, unveils the allegory, and makes clear all the rest. The Varâha, however, is no simple Boar, but seems to have meant at first some antediluvian lacustrine animal “delighting to sport in water.” (Vâyu Purâna.)

585.

According to Colonel Wilford, the conclusion of the “Great War” took place in 1370 b.c., (Asiatic Researches, xi. 116.); according to Bentley, 575 b.c.!! We may yet hope, before the end of this century, to see the Mahâbhâratan epic proclaimed identical with the wars of the great Napoleon.

586.

See Royal Asiat. Soc. ix. 364.

587.

Bk. vi. ch. iii.

588.

In the Vedânta and Nyâya, Nimitta, from which Naimittika, is rendered as the Efficient Cause, when antithesized with Upâdâna, the Physical or Material Cause. In the Sânkhya, Pradhâna is a cause inferior to Brahmâ, or rather Brahmâ being himself a cause, is superior to Pradhâna. Hence “Incidental” is a wrong translation, and ought to be rendered, as shown by some scholars, “Ideal” Cause: even Real Cause would have been better.

589.

XII. iv, 35.

590.

Vâyu Purâna.

591.

Wilson, Vishnu Purâna, VI, iii.

592.

The chief Kumâra, or Virgin-God, a Dhyân Chohan who refuses to create. A prototype of St. Michael, who also refuses to do so.

593.

See concluding lines in Section, “Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.”

594.

Ibid., iv.

595.

This prospect would hardly suit Christian theology, which prefers an eternal, everlasting Hell for its followers.

596.

The term “Elements” must be here understood to mean not only the visible and physical elements, but also that which St. Paul calls Elements—the Spiritual, Intelligent Potencies—Angels and Demons in their manvantaric forms.

597.

When this description is correctly understood by Orientalists, in its esoteric significance, then it will be found that this cosmic correlation of World-Elements may explain the correlation of physical forces better than those now known. At any rate, Theosophists will perceive that Prakriti has seven forms, or principles, “reckoned from Mahat to Earth.” The “Waters” mean here the mystic “Mother”; the Womb of Abstract Nature, in which the Manifested Universe is conceived. The seven “zones” have reference to the Seven Divisions of that Universe, or the Noumena of the Forces that bring it into being. It is all allegorical.

598.

Vishnu Purâna, Bk. VI. Ch. iv., Wilson's mistakes being corrected and the original terms put in brackets.

599.

As it is the Mahâ, the Great, or so-called Final, Pralaya which is here described, every thing is reäbsorbed into its original One Element; the “Gods themselves, Brahmâ and the rest” being said to die and disappear during that long “Night.”

600.

The “Builders” of the Stanzas.

601.

From the Siphra Dtzenioutha, c. i. § 16 et seq.; as quoted in Myer's Qabbalah, 232-3.

602.

Compare the Siphra Dtzenioutha.

603.

Bk. I. Ch. iii.

604.

pp. 219, 221.

605.

See Jacolliot's Les Fils de Dieu, and L'Inde des Brahmes, p. 230.

606.

If this is not prophetic, what is?

607.

Wilson, Vishnu Purâna, Bk. IV. Ch. xxiv.

608.

The Matsya Purâna gives Katâpa.

609.

Vishnu Purâna, Ibid.

610.

Max Müller translates the name as Morya, of the Morya dynasty, to which Chandragupta belonged. (See History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature). In Matsya Purâna, chapter cclxxii, the dynasty of ten Moryas, or Maureyas, is spoken of. In the same chapter, it is stated that the Moryas will one day reign over India, after restoring the Kshattriya race many thousand years hence. Only that reign will be purely spiritual and “not of this world.” It will be the kingdom of the next Avatâra. Colonel Tod believes the name Morya, or Maurya, a corruption of Mori, a Rajpût tribe, and the commentary on the Mahâvanso thinks that some princes have taken their name Maurya from their town called Mori, or as Professor Max Müller gives it, Morya-Nâgara, which is more correct, after the original Mahâvanso. The Sanskrit Encyclopedia, Vâchaspattya, we are informed by our Brother, Devan Bâdhâdur R. Ragoonath Rao, of Madras, places Katâpa (Kalâpa) on the northern side of the Himâlayas, hence in Tibet. The same is stated in the Bhâgavata Purâna, Skanda xii.

611.

Ibid., ch. iv. The Vayu Purâna declares that Moru will reëstablish the Kshattriyas in the Nineteenth coming Yuga. (See Five Years of Theosophy, 483, art. “The Moryas and Koothoomi.”)

612.

See Dissertations Relating to Asia.

613.

Ch. lxxxi.

614.

I. 11.

615.

In the Indian Purânas, it is Vishnu, the First, and Brahmâ, the Second Logos, or the Ideal and Practical Creators, who are respectively represented, one as manifesting the Lotus, the other as issuing from it.

616.

Not the efforts, however, of the trained psychic faculties of an Initiate into Eastern Metaphysics, and the Mysteries of Creative Nature. It is the Profane of the past ages, who have degraded the pure ideal of cosmic creation into an emblem of mere human reproduction and sexual functions: it is the Esoteric Teachings, and the Initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be, to redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception, so sadly profaned by its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and personations, by theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The silent worship of abstract or noumenal Nature, the only divine manifestation, is the one ennobling religion of Humanity.

617.

Surely the words of the old Initiate into the primitive Mysteries of Christianity, “Know ye not ye are the Temple of God” (1 Corinth, iii. 16), could not be applied in this sense to men; though the meaning was, undeniably, so stated, in the minds of the Hebrew compilers of the Old Testament. And here is the abyss that lies between the symbolism of the New Testament and the Jewish canon. This gulf would have remained, and have ever widened, had not Christianity, especially and most glaringly the Latin Church, thrown a bridge over it. Modern Popery has now spanned it entirely, by its dogma of the two immaculate conceptions, and the anthropomorphic and, at the same time idolatrous, character it has conferred upon the Mother of its God.

618.

It was so carried only in the Hebrew Bible, and its servile copyist, Christian theology.

619.

The same idea is carried out exoterically in the incidents of the exodus from Egypt. The Lord God tempts Pharaoh sorely, and “plagues him with great plagues,” lest the king should escape punishment, and thus afford no pretext for one more triumph to his “chosen people.”

620.

Exodus, ii. 10. Even to the seven daughters of the Midianite priest, who came to draw water, and whom Moses helped to water their flock; for which service the Midian gives Moses his daughter Zipporah, or Sippara, the shining Wave, as wife. (Exod. ii. 16-21.) All this has the same secret meaning.

621.

With the Egyptians it was the resurrection in rebirth, after 3,000 years of purification, either in Devachan or the “Fields of Bliss.”

622.

Such “frog-Goddesses” may be seen at Boulak, in the Cairo Museum. For the statement about the Church-lamps and inscriptions, the learned ex-director of the Boulak Museum, M. Gaston Maspero, must be held responsible. (See his Guide au Musée de Boulaq, p. 146.)

623.

The Goddess Τρίμορφος in the statuary of Alcamenes.

624.

Ancient Mythology includes ancient Astronomy as well as Astrology. The planets were the hands pointing out, on the dial of our Solar System, the hours of certain periodical events. Thus, Mercury was the messenger, appointed to keep time during the daily solar and lunar phenomena, and was otherwise connected with the God and Goddess of Light.

625.

A caricatured and dwarfed Vedântin notion of Parabrahman containing within itself the whole Universe, as being that boundless Universe itself, and nothing existing outside of itself.

626.

Just as they are to this day in India; the bull of Shiva, and the cow representing several Shaktis or Goddesses.

627.

Hence the worship of the Moon by the Hebrews.

628.

“Male and female, created he them.”

629.

Because it was too sacred. It is referred to as That in the Vedas. It is the “Eternal Cause,” and cannot, therefore, be spoken of as a “First Cause,” a term implying the absence of Cause, at one time.

630.

Pneumatologie: Des Esprits, tom. III. p. 117; “Archéologie de la Vierge Mère.”

631.

p. 23.

632.

Myer's Qabbalah, 335-6.

633.

Moreh Nebhuchim, III. xxx.

634.

See De Diis Syriis, Teraph., II. Synt. p. 31.

635.

I. i. 21.

636.

See Pausanias, viii. 35-8.

637.

Cornutus, De Natura Deorum, xxxiv. 1.

638.

The Roman Catholics are indebted for the idea of consecrating the month of May to the Virgin to the pagan Plutarch, who shows that “May is sacred to Maia (Μαῖα) or Vesta” (Aulus Gellius, sub voc. Maia), our mother-earth, our nurse and nourisher, personified.

639.

Thot-Lunus is the Budha-Soma of India, or Mercury and the Moon.

640.

Ezekiel, viii. 16.

641.

The Earth flees for her life, in the allegory, before Prithu, who pursues her. She assumes the shape of a cow, and, trembling with terror, runs away and hides even in the regions of Brahmâ. Therefore, it is not our Earth. Again, in every Purâna, the calf changes name. In one it is Manu Svâyambhuva, in another Indra, in a third the Himavat (Himâlayas) itself, while Meru was the milker. This is a deeper allegory than one may be inclined to think.

642.

His clear realization is, that the Egyptians prophesied Jehovah (!) and his incarnated Redeemer (the good serpent), etc.; even to identifying Typhon with the wicked dragon of the garden of Eden. And this passes as serious and sober science!

643.

Hathor is the infernal Isis, the Goddess preëminently of the West or the Nether World.

644.

This is from De Mirville, who proudly confesses the similarity, and he ought to know. See “Archéologie de la Vierge Mère,” in his Des Esprits, pp. 111-113.

645.

Magie, p. 153.

646.

De Mirville, Ibid., pp. 116 and 119.

647.

Hymns to Minerva, p. 19.

648.

Sermon sur la Sainte Vierge.

649.

Apoc., ch. xii.

650.

Wägner and McDowall, Asgard and the Gods, p. 86.

651.

See De Vitâ Apollionii, I. xiv.

652.

Adv. Hæres. xxxvii.

653.

Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis, I. 340.

654.

Ch. xv.

655.

Ch. xi.

656.

De Mundi Opif., Par., pp. 30 and 419.

657.

For the same reason the division of the principles in man into seven is thus reckoned, as they describe the same circle in the higher and lower human nature.

658.

Thus the septenary division is the oldest and preceded the four-fold division. It is the root of archaic classification.

659.

In Chinese Buddhism and Esotericism, the Genii are represented by four Dragons—the Mahârâjahs of the Stanzas.

660.

Op. cit., II. 312-13.

661.

Ibid., I. 321.

662.

Proclus, Tim., I.

663.

Prep. Evang., I. iii. 3.

664.

Op. cit., pp. 366-8.

665.

Job, ii.

666.

Genesis, vi.

667.

James, i. 13.

668.

James, i. 2, 12; Matth., vi. 13. See Cruden, sub voc.

669.

Padma Purâna.

670.

Vishnu Purâna, I. i.

671.

Vol. II. ch. x.

672.

See Chwolsohn, Nabathean Agriculture, II. 217.

673.

One Day of Brahmâ lasts 4,320,000,000 years—multiply this by 360! The A-suras (No-gods, or Demons) are here still Suras, Gods higher in hierarchy than such secondary Gods as are not even mentioned in the Vedas. The duration of the War shows its significance, and also shows that the combatants are only the personified Cosmic Powers. It is evidently for sectarian purposes and out of odium theologicum that the illusive form Mâyâmoha, assumed by Vishnu, was attributed in later reärrangements of old texts to Buddha and the Daityas, as in the Vishnu Purâna, unless it was a fancy of Wilson himself. He also fancied he found an allusion to Buddhism in the Bhagavadgîtâ, whereas, as proved by K. T. Telang, he had only confused the Buddhists and the older Chârvâka materialists. The version exists nowhere in other Purânas if the inference does, as Professor Wilson claims, in the Vishnu Purâna; the translation of which, especially of Book III. ch. xviii, where the reverend Orientalist arbitrarily introduces Buddha, and shows him teaching Buddhism to Daityas, led to another “great war” between himself and Col. Vans Kennedy. The latter charged him publicly with wilfully distorting Purânic texts. “I affirm,” wrote the Colonel at Bombay, in 1840, “that the Purânas do not contain what Professor Wilson has stated is contained in them; ... until such passages are produced I may be allowed to repeat my former conclusions that Professor Wilson's opinion, that the Purânas as now extant are compilations made between the eighth and seventeenth centuries [a.d.!], rests solely on gratuitous assumptions and unfounded assertions, and that his reasoning in support of it is either futile, fallacious, contradictory, or improbable.” (See Vishnu Purâna, trans. by Wilson, edit, by Fitzedward Hall, Vol. V, Appendix.)

674.

This statement belongs to the third War, since the terrestrial continents, seas and rivers are mentioned in connection with it.

675.

Vishnu Purâna, III. xvii (Wilson, Vol. III. 204-5).

676.

Book I. chap. xvii (Wilson, Vol. II. 36), in the story of Prahlâda—the Son of Hiranyakashipu, the Purânic Satan, the great enemy of Vishnu, and the King of the Three Worlds—into whose heart Vishnu entered.

677.

Ibid., I. iv (Wilson, Vol. I. 64).

678.

II Chronicles, ii. 5.

679.

“There was a day when the Sons of God came before the Lord, and Satan came with his brothers, also before the Lord.” (Job ii., Abyss., Ethiopic text.)

680.

Ibid., Vol. III. 205-7.

681.

Journal of the Royal Asiat. Society, xix. 302.

682.

Wilson's opinion that the Vishnu Purâna is a production of our era, and that in its present form it is not earlier than between the VIIIth and the XVIIth (!!) century, is absurd beyond noticing.

683.

P. 3.

684.

Ibid., p. 2.

685.

Ibid., p. 21.

686.

See The Monthly Magazine, for April, 1797.

687.

Ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γ'eνετ᾽ (l. 166); γένετο being considered in antiquity as meaning: “was generated” and not simply “was.” (See Taylor's “Introd. to the Parmenides of Plato,” p. 260.)

688.

It is the confusion between the “Bound,” and the “Infinite,” that Kapila overwhelms with sarcasms in his disputations with the Brâhman Yogis, who claim in their mystical visions to see the “Highest One.”

689.

Ibid.

690.

See T. Taylor's article in his Monthly Magazine, quoted in the Platonist of Feb., 1887, edited by T. M. Johnson, F.T.S., Osceola, Missouri.

691.

Vit. Pythag., p. 47.

692.

Asgard and the Gods, 22.

693.

Vâch—the “melodious cow, who milks sustenance and Water,” and yields us “nourishment and sustenance,” as described in the Rig Veda.

694.

The Theosophist, Feb., 1887, pp. 302-3.

695.

Ibid., p. 304.

696.

The Masonic Review, June, 1886.

697.

Objective—in the world of Mâyâ, of course; still as real as we are.

698.

“In the course of cosmic manifestation, this Daiviprakriti, instead of being the Mother of the Logos, should, strictly speaking, be called his Daughter.” (“Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ,” op. cit., p. 305.)

699.

The wise men who, like Stanley Jevons amongst the moderns, invented a method to make the incomprehensible assume a tangible form, could only do so by resorting to numbers and geometrical figures.

700.

The Pranava, Om, is a mystic term pronounced by the Yogis during meditation; of the terms called, according to exoteric commentators, Vyâkritis, or Aum, Bhûh, Bhuvah, Svah, (Om, Earth, Sky, Heaven), Pranava is, perhaps, the most sacred. They are pronounced with breath suppressed. See Manu II. 76-81, and Mitakshara commenting on the Yâjnavâkhya-Smriti, I. 23. But the esoteric explanation goes a great deal further.

701.

“Lectures on the Bhagavad Gîtâ,” ibid., p. 307.

702.

It is this Trinity that is allegorized by the “Three Steps of Vishnu,” which mean—Vishnu being considered as the Infinite in exotericism—that from Parabrahman issued Mûlaprakriti, Purusha (the Logos) and Prakriti; the four forms—with itself, the synthesis—of Vâch. And in the Kabalah, Ain Suph, Shekinah, Adam Kadmon and Sephira, the four, or the three, emanations being distinct—yet One.

703.

Chaldean Book of Numbers. In the current Kabalah the name Jehovah replaces that of Adam Kadmon.

704.

Justin Martyr tells us that, owing to his ignorance of these four sciences, he was rejected by the Pythagoreans as a candidate for admission into their school.

705.

Diogenes Laërtius, in Vit. Pythag.

706.

31415, or π, the synthesis, or the Host unified in the Logos and the Point, called in Roman Catholicism the “Angel of the Face,” and in Hebrew, Michael, מיכאל, “who [is like unto, or the same] as God,” the manifested representation.

707.

Appearing at the beginning of Cycles, as also of every Sidereal Year, of 25,868 years. Therefore, the Kabeira or Kabarim received their name in Chaldæa, for it means the Measures of Heaven, from Kob, “measure of,” and Urim, “Heavens.”

708.

The Natural Genesis, II. 316.

709.

See Kircher's Œdipus Ægypt., II. 423.

710.

This Egyptian word Naja reminds one a good deal of the Indian Nâga, the Serpent-God. Brahmâ and Shiva and Vishnu are all crowned and connected with Nâgas—a sign of their cyclic and cosmic character.

711.

Comment. on the Yashna, 174.

712.

First Treatise, p. 59.

713.

Says the translator of Avicebron's Qabbalah of this “Sum Total”: “The letter of Kether is י (Yod), of Binah ה (Heh), together YaH, the feminine Name; the third letter, that of 'Hokhmah, is ו (Vav), making together יהו YHV of יהוה YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, and really the complete symbols of its efficaciousness. The last ה (Heh) of this Ineffable Name being always applied to the Six Lower and the last, together the Seven remaining Sephiroth.” (Myer's Qabbalah, p. 263). Thus the Tetragrammaton is holy only in its abstract synthesis. As a Quaternary containing the lower Seven Sephiroth, it is phallic.

714.

The statement will, of course, be found preposterous and absurd, and simply laughed at. But if one believes in the final submersion of Atlantis, 850,000 years ago, as taught in Esoteric Buddhism—the gradual first sinking having begun during the Eocene Age—one has also to accept the statement for the so-called Lemuria, the continent of the Third Root-Race, which was first nearly destroyed by combustion, and then submerged. As the Commentary teaches: “The First Earth having been purified by the Forty-nine Fires, her people, born of Fire and Water, could not die ...; the Second Earth [with its Race] disappeared as vapour vanishes in the air ...; the Third Earth had everything consumed on it after the Separation, and went down into the lower Deep [the Ocean]. This was twice eighty-two Cyclic Years ago.” Now a Cyclic Year is what we call a Sidereal Year, and is founded on the Precession of the Equinoxes. The length of this Sidereal Year is 25,868 years, and the period mentioned in the Commentary is, therefore, in all equal to 4,242,352 years. More details will be found in Volume II. Meanwhile, this doctrine is embodied in the “Kings of Edom.”

715.

The same reserve is found in the Talmud and in every national system of religion whether monotheistic or exoterically polytheistic. From the superb religious poem by the Kabalist Rabbi Solomon ben Yehudah Ibn Gabirol, the “Kether Malchuth,” we select a few definitions given in the prayers of Kippûr: “Thou art One, the beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all edifices; Thou art One, and in the secret of Thy unity the wisest of men are lost, because they know it not. Thou art One, and Thy Unity is never diminished, never extended, and cannot be changed. Thou art One, but not as an element of numeration; for Thy Unity admits not of multiplication, change or form. Thou art Existent; but the understanding and vision of mortals cannot attain to thy existence, nor determine for thee the Where, the How, and the Why. Thou art Existent, but in thyself alone, there being none other that can exist with thee. Thou art Existent, before all time and without place. Thou art Existent, and thy existence is so profound and secret that none can penetrate and discover thy secrecy. Thou art living, but within no time that can be fixed or known; Thou art living, but not by a spirit or a soul, for Thou art Thyself, the Soul of all Souls.” There is a distance between this Kabalistical Deity and the Biblical Jehovah, the spiteful and revengeful God of Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, who tempted the first and wrestled with the last. No Vedântin but would repudiate such a Parabrahman!

716.

Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, ch. xx. And very wisely have they acted.

717.

If he rejected it, it was on the ground of what he calls the “changes,” in other words, rebirths of man, and constant transformations. He denied immortality to the Personality of man, as we do, not to Man.

718.

He may be laughed at by the Protestants; but the Roman Catholics have no right to mock him, without becoming guilty of blasphemy and sacrilege. For it is over 200 years since Confucius was canonized as a Saint in China by the Roman Catholics, who have thereby obtained many converts among the ignorant Confucianists.

719.

The animals regarded as sacred in the Bible are by no means few in number; as, for instance, the Goat, the Azaz-el, or God of Victory. As Aben Ezra says: “If thou art capable of comprehending the mystery of Azazel, thou wilt learn the mystery of His [God's] name, for it has similar associates in Scriptures. I will tell thee by allusion one portion of the mystery; when thou shalt have thirty three years of age thou wilt comprehend me.” So with the mystery of the Tortoise. Rejoicing over the poetry of biblical metaphors, associating “incandescent stones,” “sacred animals,” etc., with the name of Jehovah, and quoting from the Bible de Vence (XIX. 318) a pious French writer says: “Indeed all of them are Elohim, like their God”; for, these Angels, “ ‘assume,’ through a holy usurpation, ‘the very divine name of Jehovah each time they represent him’.” (De Mirville, Des Esprits.) No one ever doubted that the Name must have been assumed, when under the guise of the Infinite, One Incognizable, the Malachim, or Messengers, descended to eat and drink with men. But if the Elohim and even lower Beings, assuming the God-name, were and are still worshipped, why should the same Elohim be called Devils, when appearing under the names of other Gods?

720.

Matth., xxiv. 28.

721.

Bryant is right in saying “Druid bardism says of Noah that when he came out of the ark (the birth of a new cycle), after a stay therein of a year and a day, that is 364 + 1=365 days, he was congratulated by Neptune upon his birth from the waters of the Flood, who wished him a Happy New Year.” The “Year,” or cycle, esoterically, was the new race of men, born from woman, after the Separation of the Sexes, which is the secondary meaning of the allegory; its primary meaning being the beginning of the Fourth Round, or the new Creation.

722.

From an unpublished MS.

723.

Or literally: “One Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit: That was.” The “Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit” is Mûlaprakriti and Parabrahman.

724.

Wilson, Vishnu Purâna, I. 73-5.

725.

Origen, Contra Celsum, VI. xxii.

726.

Timæus.

727.

“And the fourth creation is here the primary, for things immovable are emphatically known as primary”—according to a commentary translated by Fitzedward Hall in his editing of Wilson's translation.

728.

How can “divinities” have been created after the animals? The esoteric meaning of the expression “animals” is the germs of all animal life, including man. Man is called a sacrificial animal, that is, the only one among the animal creation who sacrifices to the Gods. Moreover, by “sacred animals” the twelve Signs of the Zodiac are often meant in the sacred texts, as already stated.

729.

Vishnu Purâna, ibid.

730.

Op. cit., I. ix.

731.

Myer's Qabbalah, 415-16.

732.

Contra Hær., I. xvii. 1.

733.

Ibid., I. xxx.

734.

Superior to the Spirits, or “Heavens,” of the Earth only.

735.

Ibid., I. v. 2.

736.

See Isis Unveiled, II. 183.

737.

See also King's Gnostics and their Remains, p. 97. Other sects regarded Jehovah as Ialdabaoth himself. King identifies him with Saturn.

738.

Ordinances of Manu, I. 33.

739.

Irenæus, op. cit., I. xxx. 6.

740.

Elsewhere, however, the identity is revealed. See supra the quotation from Iba Gabirol and his 7 heavens, 7 earths, etc.

741.

This must not be confused with precosmic “Darkness,” the Divine All.

742.

I. 2; and also at the beginning of II.

743.

The quotations that follow in treating of the seven Creations, except when otherwise stated, are all from Vishnu Purâna, Bk. I. Ch. i-v.

744.

I. 240.

745.

Brucker, ibid.

746.

Compare Genesis xix. 34-8 and iv. 1.

747.

Vishnu is both Bhûtesha, “Lord of the Elements,” and of all things, and Vishvarûpa, “Universal Substance” or Soul.

748.

Compare, for their “post-types,” the Treatise written by Trithemius, Agrippa's master, in the sixteenth century, “Concerning the Seven Secondaries, or Spiritual Intelligences, who, after God, actuate the Universe,” which, in addition to secret cycles and several prophecies, discloses certain facts and beliefs about the Genii, or the Elohim, which preside over and guide the septenary stages of the World's Course.

749.

From the first, the Orientalists have found themselves beset with great difficulties in regard to any possible order in the Purânic “Creations.” Brahman is very often confused by Wilson with Brahmâ, for which he is criticized by his successors. The Original Sanscrit Texts are preferred by Mr. Fitzedward Hall for the translation of the Vishnu Purâna, to the text used by Wilson. “Had Professor Wilson enjoyed the advantages which are now at the command of the student of Indian philosophy, unquestionably he would have expressed himself differently,” says the editor of his work. This reminds one of the answer given by one of Thomas Taylor's admirers to those scholars who criticized his translations of Plato: “Taylor might have known less Greek than his critics, but he knew more Plato.” Our present Orientalists disfigure the mystic sense of the Sanskrit texts far more than Wilson ever did, though the latter is undeniably guilty of very gross errors.

750.

Vâyu Purâna.

751.

Collected Works, III. 381.

752.

Professor Wilson translates as though animals were higher in the scale of “creation” than divinities, or angels, although the truth about the Devas is very plainly stated further on. This “Creation,” says the text, is both Primary (Prâkrita) and Secondary (Vaikrita). It is the Secondary, as regards the origin of the Gods from Brahmâ, the personal anthropomorphic creator of our material universe; it is the Primary as affecting Rudra, who is the immediate production of the First Principle. The term Rudra is not only a title of Shiva, but embraces agents of creation, angels and men, as will be shown further on.

753.

Neither plant nor animal, but an existence between the two.

754.

Five Years of Theosophy, p. 276, art., “Mineral Monad.”

755.

“These notions,” remarks Professor Wilson, “the birth of Rudra and the saints, seem to have been borrowed from the Shaivas, and to have been awkwardly engrafted upon the Vaishnava system.” The esoteric meaning ought to have been consulted before venturing such a hypothesis.

756.

See Sânkhya Kârikâ, v. 46. p. 146.

757.

Parâshara, the Vedic Rishi, who received the Vishnu Purâna from Pulastya and taught it to Maitreya, is placed by the Orientalists at various epochs. As correctly observed, in the Hindû Classical Dictionary: “Speculations as to his era differ widely, from 575 b.c. to 1391 b.c., and cannot be trusted.” Quite so; but they are no more untrustworthy than any other date, as assigned by the Sanskritists, so famous in the department of arbitrary fancy.

758.

They may indeed mark a “special” or extra “creation,” since it is they who, by incarnating themselves within the senseless human shells of the two first Root-Races, and a great portion of the Third Root-Race, create, so to speak, a new race: that of thinking, self-conscious and divine men.

759.

Hindû Classical Dictionary.

760.

Linga Purâna, Prior Section, lxx. 174.

761.

See Manu, I. 10.

762.

See Linga, Vâyu and Mârkandeya Purânas.

763.

Movers, Phoinizer, 282.

764.

Weber, Akad. Vorles, 213, 214, etc.

765.

IX. 850.

766.

Stromata, I. v. 6.

767.

The Gehenna of the Bible was a valley near Jerusalem, where the monotheistic Jews immolated their children to Moloch, if the word of the prophet Jeremiah is to be believed. The Scandinavian Abode of Hel or Hela was a frigid region—Kâma Loka again—and the Egyptian Amenti a place of purification. (See Isis Unveiled, II. 11.)

768.

I. vi. i.

769.

Cod. Naz., I. 47; see also Psalms, lxxxix. 18.

770.

I Cor., viii. 5.

771.

Concerning Divine Names, traduction Darboy, 364.

772.

See de Mirville, Des Esprits, ii. 322.

773.

The Correlation of Physical Forces, p. 89.

774.

Ibid., xiv.

775.

II Sam., xxii. 9, 11.

776.

Deut., iv. 24.

777.

Op. cit., III. 415.

778.

II Sam., xxii. 14, 15.

779.

Herodotus, Polymnia, 190, 191.

780.

viii. 24.

781.

Fa-hwa-King.

782.

See La Mission des Juifs.

783.

China Revealed, as quoted in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism, p. 273.

784.

p. 202.

785.

Op. cit., p. 60.

786.

Ibid.

787.

O'Brien, Round Towers of Ireland, p. 61, quoted by Hargrave Jennings in his Phallicism, p. 246.

788.

Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. 332.

789.

Pantheon, text 3.

790.

Their intellection, of course, being of quite a different nature to any we can conceive of on Earth.

791.

See his Third Letter to Bentley.

792.

Concepts of Modern Physics, pp. xi, xii, Introd. to 2nd Ed.

793.

“Recherches expérimentales sur la relation qui existe entre la résistance de l'air et sa température,” p. 68, translated from Stallo's quotation.

794.

From the criticism of Concepts of Modern Physics, in Nature. See Stallo's work, p. xvi of Introduction.

795.

Mr. Robert Ward, discussing the questions of Heat and Light in the November Journal of Science, 1881, shows us how utterly ignorant is Science about one of the commonest facts of Nature—the heat of the Sun. He says: “The question of the temperature of the sun has been the subject of investigation with many scientists: Newton, one of the first investigators of this problem, tried to determine it, and after him all the scientists who have been occupied with calorimetry have followed his example. All have believed themselves successful, and have formulated their results with great confidence. The following, in the chronological order of the publication of the results, are the temperatures (in centigrade degrees) found by each of them: Newton, 1,699,300°; Pouillet, 1,461°; Tollner, 102,200°; Secchi, 5,344,840°; Ericsson, 2,726,700°; Fizeau, 7,500°; Waterston, 9,000,000°; Spoëren, 27,000°; Deville, 9,500°; Soret, 5,801,846°; Vicaire, 1,500°; Rosetti, 20,000°. The difference is as 1,400° against 9,000,000°, or no less than 8,998,600°!! There probably does not exist in science a more astonishing contradiction than that revealed in these figures.” And yet without doubt if an Occultist were to give out an estimate, each of these gentlemen would vehemently protest in the name of “exact” Science at the rejection of his special result.

796.

See Correlation of the Physical Forces, Preface.

797.

Soirées, vol. ii.

798.

Stallo's above-cited work, Concepts of Modern Physics, a volume which has called forth the liveliest protests and criticisms, is recommended to anyone inclined to doubt this statement. “The professed antagonism of science to metaphysical speculation,” he writes, “has led the majority of scientific specialists to assume that the methods and results of empirical research are wholly independent of the control of the laws of thought. They either silently ignore, or openly repudiate, the simplest canons of logic, including the laws of non-contradiction, and ... resent with the utmost vehemence every application of the rule of consistency to their hypotheses and theories ... and they regard an examination (of them) ... in the light of these laws as an impertinent intrusion of ‘à priori principles and methods’ into the domains of empirical science. Persons of this cast of mind find no difficulty in holding that atoms are absolutely inert, and at the same time asserting that these atoms are perfectly elastic; or in maintaining that the physical universe, in its last analysis, resolves itself into ‘dead’ matter and motion, and yet denying that all physical energy is in reality kinetic; or in proclaiming that all phenomenal differences in the objective world are ultimately due to the various motions of absolutely simple material units, and, nevertheless, repudiating the proposition that these units are equal.” (p. xix.) The blindness of eminent Physicists to some of the most obvious consequences of their own theories is marvellous. “When Prof. Tait, in conjunction with Prof. Stewart, announces that ‘matter is simply passive’ (The Unseen Universe, sec. 104), and then, in connection with Sir William Thomson, declares that ‘matter has an innate power of resisting external influences’ (Treat. on Nat. Phil., Vol. I. sec. 216), it is hardly impertinent to inquire how these statements are to be reconciled. When Prof. Du Bois Reymond ... insists upon the necessity of reducing all the processes of nature to motions of a substantial, indifferent substratum, wholly destitute of quality (Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 5), having declared shortly before in the same lecture that ‘resolution of all changes in the material world into motions of atoms caused by their constant central forces would be the completion of natural science,’ we are in a perplexity from which we have the right to be relieved.” (Pref. xliii.)

799.

Stallo, loc. cit., p. x.

800.

Silliman's Journal, vol. viii. pp. 364 et seq.

801.

See Clerk Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity, and compare with Cauchy's Mémoire sur la Dispersion de la Lumière.

802.

Stallo, loc. cit., p. x.

803.

Nature, vol. xxvii. p. 304.

804.

Op. cit., p. xxiv.

805.

“Somewhat different!” exclaims Stallo. “The real import of this ‘somewhat’ is, that the medium in question is not, in any intelligible sense, material at all, having none of the properties of matter.” All the properties of matter depend upon differences and changes, and the “hypothetical” Ether here defined is not only destitute of differences, but incapable of difference and change—in the physical sense let us add. This proves that if Ether is “matter,” it is so only as something visible, tangible and existing, for spiritual senses alone; that it is a Being indeed—but not of our plane—Pater Æther, or Âkâsha.

806.

Veræ causæ for Physical Science are mâyâvic or illusionary causes for the Occultist, and vice versâ.

807.

Very much “differentiated,” on the contrary, since the day it left its laya condition.

808.

Op. cit., pp. xxiv-xxvi.

809.

Sept Leçons de Physique Générale, p. 38, et seq., Ed. Moigno.

810.

Defin. 8, B. I. Prop. 69, “Scholium.”

811.

See Modern Materialism, by the Rev. W. F. Wilkinson.

812.

“Attraction,” Le Couturier, a Materialist, writes, “has now become for the public that which it was for Newton himself—a simple word, an Idea” (Panorama des Mondes), since its cause is unknown. Herschell virtually says the same, when remarking, that whenever studying the motion of the heavenly bodies, and the phenomena of attraction, he feels penetrated at every moment with the idea of “the existence of causes that act for us under a veil, disguising their direct action.” (Musée des Sciences, August, 1856.)

813.

If we are taken to task for believing in operating Gods and Spirits while rejecting a personal God, we answer to the Theists and Monotheists: Admit that your Jehovah is one of the Elohim, and we are ready to recognize him. Make of him, as you do, the Infinite, the One and the Eternal God, and we will never accept him in this character. Of tribal Gods there were many; the One Universal Deity is a principle, an abstract Root-Idea, which has nought to do with the unclean work of finite Form. We do not worship the Gods, we only honour Them, as beings superior to ourselves. In this we obey the Mosaic injunction, while Christians disobey their Bible—missionaries foremost of all. “Thou shalt not revile the Gods,” says one of them—Jehovah—in Exodus, xxii. 28; but at the same time in verse 20 it is commanded: “He that sacrificeth to any God, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” Now in the original texts it is not “God” but Elohim—and we challenge contradiction—and Jehovah is one of the Elohim, as proved by his own words in Genesis, iii. 22, when “the Lord God said: Behold the Man is become as one of us.” Hence both those who worship and sacrifice to the Elohim, the Angels, and to Jehovah, and those who revile the Gods of their fellowmen, are far greater transgressors than the Occultists or than any Theosophist. Meanwhile many of the latter prefer believing in some one “Lord” or other, and are quite welcome to do as they like.

814.

To liken the “immateriate species to wooden iron,” and to laugh at Spiller for referring to them as “incorporeal matter” does not solve the mystery. (See Concepts of Modern Physics, p. 165 et infra.)

815.

See Vossius, Vol. II. p. 528.

816.

De Carlo, I. 9.

817.

De Motibus Planetarum Harmonicis, p. 248.

818.

World-Life, Prof. Winchell, LL.D., pp. 49 and 50.

819.

Panorama des Mondes, pp. 47 and 53.

820.

Newton, Optics, III. Query 28, 1704; quoted in World-Life, p. 50.

821.

Ibid.

822.

When read in a fair and unprejudiced spirit, Sir Isaac Newton's works are an ever ready witness to show how he must have hesitated between gravitation and attraction, impulse, and some other unknown cause, to explain the regular course of the planetary motion. But see his Treatise on Colour (Vol. III. Question 31). We are told by Herschell that Newton left with his successors the duty of drawing all the scientific conclusions from his discovery. How Modern Science has abused the privilege of building its newest theories upon the law of gravitation, may be realized when one remembers how profoundly religious was that great man.

823.

The materialistic notion that because, in Physics, real or sensible motion is impossible in pure space or vacuum, therefore, the eternal Motion of and in Cosmos—regarded as infinite Space—is a fiction, only shows once more that such expressions of Eastern metaphysics as “pure Space,” “pure Being,” the “Absolute” etc., have never been understood in the West.

824.

From Winchell's World-Life, p. 379.

825.

Correl. Phys. Forces, p. 173.

826.

See Revue Germanique of the 31st Dec. 1860, art., “Lettres et Conversations d'Alexandre Humboldt.”

827.

Prof. Winchell.

828.

World-Life, p. 553.

829.

But see Astronomie du Moyen Age, by Delambre.

830.

See Isis Unveiled, I. 270, 271.

831.

World-Life, 554.

832.

Godefroy, Cosmogonie de la Révélation.

833.

The terms “high” and “low” being only relative to the position of the observer in Space, any use of those terms tending to convey the impression that they stand for abstract realities, is necessarily fallacious.

834.

Jacob Ennis, The Origin of the Stars.

835.

P. 99, note.

836.

If such is the case, how does Science explain the comparatively small size of the planets nearest the Sun? The theory of meteoric aggregation is only a step farther from truth than the nebular conception, and has not even the quality of the latter—its metaphysical element.

837.

Laplace, Système du Monde, p. 414, ed. 1824.

838.

Faye, Comptes Rendus, t. xc. pp. 640-2.

839.

Wolf.

840.

Panorama des Mondes, Le Couturier.

841.

World-Life, Winchell, p. 140.

842.

Sir William Thomson's lecture on “The latent dynamical theory regarding the probable origin, total amount of heat, and duration of the Sun,” 1887.

843.

Thomson and Tait, Natural Philosophy. And even on these figures Bischof disagrees with Thomson, and calculates that 350,000,000 years would be required for the Earth to cool from a temperature of 20,000° to 200° centigrade. This is, also, the opinion of Helmholtz.

844.

Coulomb's Law.

845.

Musée des Sciences, 15 August, 1857.

846.

Panorama des Mondes, p. 55.

847.

Revue des Deux Mondes, July 15, 1860.

848.

Cosmographie.

849.

Soirées.

850.

Discours, 165.

851.

p. 28.

852.

Des Esprits, III. 155, Deuxième Mémoire.

853.

Laing's Modern Science and Modern Thought.

854.

Ibid., p. 17.

855.

Heaven and Earth.

856.

Winchell, World-Life, p. 196.

857.

L'Univers expliqué par la Révélation, and Cosmogonie de la Révélation. But see De Mirville's Deuxième Mémoire. The author, a terrible enemy of Occultism, was yet one who wrote great truths.

858.

See Kabbala Denudata, II. 67.

859.

“Sur la Distinction des Forces,” published in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Sciences de Montpellier, Vol. II. fasc. i, 1854.

860.

P. 123.

861.

Der Weltæther als Kosmische Kraft, p. 4.

862.

See Popular Science Review, Vol. V. pp. 329-34.

863.

See Correlation of Physical Forces, p. 110.

864.

See Buckwell's Electric Science.

865.

Schelling, Ideen, etc., p. 18.

866.

Op. cit., p. 161.

867.

Princ., Def. iii.

868.

Philosophical Magazine, Vol. II. p. 252.

869.

Concepts of Modern Physics, xxxi., Introductory to the 2nd Edition.

870.

Loc. cit.

871.

J. P. Cooke, The New Chemistry, p. 13.

872.

“It imports that equal volumes of all substances, when in the gaseous state, and under like conditions of pressure and temperature, contain the same number of molecules—whence it follows that the weights of the molecules are proportional to the specific gravities of the gases; that therefore, these being different, the weights of the molecule are different also; and inasmuch as the molecules of certain elementary substances are monatomic (consist of but one atom each) while the molecules of various other substances contain the same number of atoms, that the ultimate atoms of such substances are of different weights.” (Concepts of Modern Physics, p. 34.) As shown further on in the same volume, this cardinal principle of modern theoretical chemistry is in utter and irreconcilable conflict with the first proposition of the atomo-mechanical theory—namely, the absolute equality of the primordial units of mass.

873.

Wundt, Die Theorie der Materie, p. 381.

874.

Nazesmann, Thermochemie, p. 150.

875.

Krœnig, Clausius, Maxwell, etc., Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XIX. p. 18.

876.

Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XIV. p. 321.

877.

Referring to the “Aura,” one of the Masters says in the Occult World: “How could you make yourself understood by, command in fact, those semi-intelligent Forces, whose means of communication with us are not through spoken words, but through sounds and colours in correlation between the vibrations of the two.” It is this “correlation” that is unknown to Modern Science, although it has been many times explained by the Alchemists.

878.

The Substance of the Occultist, however, is to the most refined Substance of the Physicist, what Radiant Matter is to the leather of the Chemist's boots.

879.

The names of the Seven Rays—which are, Sushumnâ, Harikesha, Vishvakarman, Vishvatryarchâs, Sannaddha, Sarvâvasu and Svarâj—are all mystical, and each has its distinct application in a distinct state of consciousness, for Occult purposes. The Sushumnâ, which, as said in the Nirukta (11, 6), is only to light up the Moon, is the Ray nevertheless cherished by the initiated Yogîs. The totality of the Seven Rays spread through the Solar System constitutes, so to say, the physical Upâdhi (Basis) of the Ether of Science; in which Upâdhi, light, heat, electricity, etc., the Forces of orthodox Science, correlate to produce their terrestrial effects. As psychic and spiritual effects, they emanate from, and have their origin in, the supra-solar Upâdhi, in the Æther of the Occultist—or Âkâsha.

880.

Leslie's Fluid Theory of Light and Heat.

881.

Buckle's History of Civilization, Vol. III. p. 384.

882.

On the plane of manifestation and illusionary matter it may be so; not that it is nothing more, for it is vastly more.

883.

Neutral, or Laya.

884.

Scientific Letters, Professor Butlerof.

885.

Ibid.

886.

Ibid.

887.

Ibid.

888.

Called the “drinker of waters,” solar heat causing water to evaporate.

889.

I. ii. (Wilson, I. 38.)

890.

Its founder, Râmânujâchârya, was born a.d. 1017.

891.

The Gandharva of the Veda is the deity who knows and reveals the secrets of heaven and divine truths to mortals. Cosmically, the Gandharvas are the aggregate Powers of the Solar Fire, and constitute its Forces; psychically, the Intelligence residing in the Sushumnâ, the Solar Ray, the highest of the Seven Rays; mystically, the Occult Force in the Soma, the Moon, or lunar plant, and the drink made of it; physically, the phenomenal, and spiritually, the noumenal, causes of Sound and the “Voice of Nature.” Hence, they are called the 6,333 heavenly singers, and musicians of Indra's Loka, who personify, even in number, the various and manifold sounds in Nature, both above and below. In the later allegories they are said to have mystic power over women, and to be fond of them. The Esoteric meaning is plain. They are one of the forms, if not the prototypes, of Enoch's Angels, the Sons of God, who saw that the daughters of men were fair (Gen., vi.), who married them, and taught the daughters of Earth the secrets of Heaven.

892.

Pp. 329-334.

893.

Not only “through space,” but filling every point of our Solar System, for it is the physical residue, so to say, of Ether, its “lining” (envelope) on our plane; Ether having to serve other cosmic and terrestrial purposes besides being the “agent” for transmitting light. It is the Astral Fluid or Light of the Kabalists, and the Seven Rays of Sun-Vishnu.

894.

What need, then, of etheric waves for the transmission of light, heat, etc., if this substance can pass through vacuum.

895.

And how can it be otherwise? Gross ponderable matter is the body, the shell, of Matter or Substance, the female passive principle; and this Fohatic Force is the second principle, Prâna—the male and the active. On our globe this Substance is the second principle of the septenary Element—Earth; in the atmosphere, it is that of Air, which is the cosmic gross body; in the Sun it becomes the Solar Body and that of the Seven Rays; in Sidereal Space it corresponds with another principle, and so on. The whole is a homogeneous Unity alone, the parts are all differentiations.

896.

Or the reverberation, and for Sound repercussion, on our plane of that which is a perpetual motion of that Substance on higher planes. Our world and senses are ceaselessly victims of Mâyâ.

897.

An honest admission, this.

898.

Yet it is not Ether, but only one of the principles of Ether, the latter being itself one of the principles of Âkâsha.

899.

And so does Prâna (Jîva) pervade the whole living body of man; but alone, without having an atom to act upon, it would be quiescent—dead; i.e., would be in Laya, or, as Mr. Crookes has it, “locked in Protyle.” It is the action of Fohat upon a compound or even upon a simple, body that produces life. When a body dies, it passes into the same polarity as its male energy, and repels therefore the active agent, which, losing hold of the whole, fastens on the parts or molecules, this action being called chemical. Vishnu, the Preserver, transforms himself into Rudra-Shiva, the Destroyer—a correlation seemingly unknown to Science.

900.

Verily, unless the Occult terms of the Kabalists are adopted!

901.

“Unchangeable” only during manvantaric periods, after which it merges once more into Mûlaprakriti; “invisible” for ever, in its own essence, but seen in its reflected coruscations, called the Astral Light by the modern Kabalists. Yet, conscious and grand Beings, clothed in that same Essence, move in it.

902.

One has to add ponderable, to distinguish it from that Ether which is Matter still, though a substratum.

903.

The Occult Sciences reverse the statement, and say that it is the Sun, and all the Suns that are from it, which emanate at the manvantaric dawn from the Central Sun.

904.

Here, we decidedly beg to differ from the learned gentleman. Let us remember that this Ether—whether Âkâsha, or its lower principle, Ether, is meant by the term—is septenary. Âkâsha is Aditi in the allegory, and the mother of Mârttânda, the Sun, the Devamâtri, Mother of the Gods. In the Solar System, the Sun is her Buddhi and Vâhana, the Vehicle, hence the sixth principle; in Kosmos all the Suns are the Kâma Rûpa of Âkâsha and so is ours. It is only when regarded as an individual Entity in his own Kingdom, that Sûrya, the Sun, is the seventh principle of the great body of Matter.

905.

To be more correct, let us rather call it Agnosticism. Brutal but frank Materialism is more honest than Janus-faced Agnosticism in our days. Western Monism, so-called, is the Pecksniff of modern Philosophy, turning a pharisaical face to Psychology and Idealism, and its natural face of a Roman Augur, swelling his cheek with his tongue, to Materialism. Such Monists are worse than Materialists; because, while looking at the Universe and at psycho-spiritual man from the same negative stand-point, the latter put their case far less plausibly than do sceptics of Mr. Tyndall's or even of Mr. Huxley's stamp. Herbert Spencer, Bain and Lewes are more dangerous to universal truths than is Büchner.

906.

Geology, by Professor A. Winchell.

907.

See Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 245-262—Arts. “Do the Adepts deny the Nebular Theory?” and “Is the Sun merely a Cooling Mass?”—for the true Occult teaching.

908.

Philosophie Naturelle, art. 142.

909.

Astronomie, p. 342.

910.

Commentary on Stanza IV, ante, pp. 126-7.

911.

Popular Science Review, Vol. IV. p. 148.

912.

And the central mass, too, as will be found, or rather the centre of the reflection.

913.

This “matter” is just like the reflection in a mirror of the flame from a “photogenic” lamp-wick.

914.

See Five Years of Theosophy, p. 258, for an answer to this speculation of Herschell.

915.

Ibid., p. 156.

916.

Paracelsus for one, who called it Liquor Vitæ, and Archæus.

917.

Alchemical “composition,” rather.

918.

“This vital force ... radiates around man like a luminous sphere,” says Paracelsus in Paragranum.

919.

Popular Science Review, Vol. X. pp. 380-3.

920.

De Generatione Hominis.

921.

De Viribus Membrorum. See Life of Paracelsus, by Franz Hartmann, M.D., F.T.S.

922.

P. 384.

923.

Ch. xiii; Telang's translation, p. 292.

924.

Ibid., ch. xxxvi; p. 385.

925.

The division of the physical senses into five, comes to us from a great antiquity. But while adopting the number, no modern Philosopher has asked himself how these senses could exist, i.e., be perceived and used in a self-conscious way, unless there were the sixth sense, mental perception, to register and record them; and—this for the Metaphysicians and Occultists—the seventh to preserve the spiritual fruitage and remembrance thereof, as in a Book of Life which belongs to Karma. The Ancients divided the senses into five, simply because their teachers, the Initiates, stopped at hearing, as being that sense which developed on the physical plane, or rather, got dwarfed and limited to this plane, only at the beginning of the Fifth Race. The Fourth Race already had begun to lose the spiritual condition, so preëminently developed in the Third Race.

926.

Ibid., ch. x: pp. 277, 278.

927.

Mundakopanishad, p. 298.

928.

Bhagavadgîtâ, ch. vii; ibid., pp. 73, 74.

929.

Ahamkâra, I suppose, that “Egoship,” or “Ahamship,” which leads to every error.

930.

The Elements are the five Tanmâtras of earth, water, fire, air and ether, the producers of the grosser elements.

931.

Anugîtâ, ch. xx; ibid., p. 313.

932.

The conductor in the sense of Upâdhi—a material or physical basis; but, as the second principle of the universal Soul and Vital Force in Nature, it is intelligently guided by the fifth principle thereof.

933.

And too great an exuberance of it in the nervous system leads as often to disease and death. If it were the animal system which generated it, such would not be the case, surely. Hence, the latter emergency shows its independence of the system, and its connection with the Sun-Force, as Metcalfe and Hunt explain.

934.

P. 387.

935.

Paragranum; Life of Paracelsus, by Dr. F. Hartmann.

936.

In a recent work on Symbolism in Buddhism and Christianity—in Buddhism and Roman Catholicism, rather, many later rituals and dogmas in Northern Buddhism, in its popular exoteric form, being identical with those of the Latin Church—some curious facts are to be found. The author of this volume, with more pretensions than erudition, has indiscriminately crammed into his work ancient and modern Buddhist teachings, and has sorely confused Lamaïsm with Buddhism. On page 404 of this volume, called Buddhism in Christendom, or Jesus the Essene, our pseudo-Orientalist devotes himself to criticizing the “Seven Principles” of the “Esoteric Buddhists,” and attempts to ridicule them. On page 405, the closing page, he speaks enthusiastically of the Vidyâdharas, “the seven great legions of dead men made wise.” Now, these Vidyâdharas, whom some Orientalists call “demi-gods,” are in fact, exoterically, a kind of Siddhas, “affluent in devotion,” and, esoterically, they are identical with the seven classes of Pitris, one class of which endow man in the Third Race with Self-consciousness, by incarnating in the human shells. The “Hymn to the Sun,” at the end of his queer volume of mosaic, which endows Buddhism with a Personal God (!!), is an unfortunate thrust at the very proofs so elaborately collected by the unlucky author.

Theosophists are fully aware that Mr. Rhys Davids has likewise expressed his opinion on their beliefs. He said that the theories propounded by the author of Esoteric Buddhism “were not Buddhism, and were not esoteric.” The remark is the result of (a) the unfortunate mistake of writing “Buddhism” instead of “Budhaïsm,” or “Budhism,” i.e., of connecting the system with Gautama's religion instead of with the Secret Wisdom taught by Krishna, Shankarâchârya, and many others, as much as by Buddha; and (b) of the impossibility of Mr. Rhys Davids knowing anything of the true Esoteric Teachings. Nevertheless as he is the greatest Pâli and Buddhist scholar of the day, whatever he may say is entitled to respectful hearing. But when one who knows no more of exoteric Buddhism on Scientific and Materialistic lines, than he knows of Esoteric Philosophy, defames those whom he honours with his spite, and assumes with the Theosophists the airs of a profound scholar, one can only smile or—heartily laugh at him.

937.

The Human Species, pp. 10, 11.

938.

The Theosophist.

939.

Not only does it not deny the occurrence, though attributing it to a wrong cause, as always, each theory contradicting every other (see the theories of Secchi, of Faye, and of Young), the spots depending on the superficial accumulation of vapours cooler than the photosphere (?), etc., etc., but we have men of Science who astrologize upon the spots. Professor Jevons attributes all the great periodical commercial crises to the influence of the sun-spots every eleventh cyclic year. (See his Investigations into Currency and Finance.) This is worthy of praise and encouragement surely.

940.

Le Soleil, II. 184.

941.

World-Life, p. 48.

942.

Unfortunately, as these pages are being written, the “archebiosis of terrestrial existence” has turned, under a somewhat stricter chemical analysis, into a simple precipitate of sulphate of lime—hence, from the scientific standpoint, not even an organic substance! Sic transit gloria mundi!

943.

Vishnu Purâna, Wilson, I. 16, Fitzedward Hall's rendering.

944.

Popular Astronomy, p. 444.

945.

In his World-Life (page 48), in the appended footnotes, Professor Winchell says, “It is generally admitted that at excessively high temperatures matter exists in a state of dissociation—that is, no chemical combination can exist”; and, to prove the unity of Matter, would appeal to the spectrum, which in every case of homogeneity will show a bright line, whereas in the case of several molecular arrangements existing—in the nebulæ say, or a star—“the spectrum should consist of two or three bright lines”! This would be no proof either way to the Physicist-Occultist, who maintains that beyond a certain limit of visible Matter, no spectrum, no telescope and no microscope are of any use. The unity of Matter, of that which is real cosmic Matter to the Alchemist, or “Adam's Earth” as the Kabalists call it, can hardly be proved or disproved, by either the French savant Dumas, who suggests “the composite nature” of the “elements” on “certain relations of atomic weights,” or even by Mr. Crookes' “radiant matter,” though his experiments may seem “to be best understood on the hypothesis of the homogeneity of the elements of matter, and the continuity of the states of matter.” For all this does not go beyond material Matter, so to say, even in what is shown by the spectrum, that modern “eye of Shiva” of physical experiments. It is only of this Matter, that H. St. Claire Deville could say that “when bodies, deemed to be simple, combine with one another, they vanish, they are individually annihilated”; simply because he could not follow those bodies in their further transformation in the world of spiritual cosmic Matter. Verily Modern Science will never be able to dig deep enough into the cosmological formations to find the Roots of the World-Stuff or Matter, unless she works on the same lines of thought as the mediæval Alchemist did.

946.

Concepts of Modern Physics, p. vi.

947.

Book I. ch. II. p. 25. Vishnu Purâna, Fitzedward Hall's Translation.

948.

Vide in preceding Section VII., “Life, Force, or Gravity,” quotation from Anugitâ.

949.

The word “supernatural” implies above or outside nature. Nature and Space are one. Now Space for the metaphysician exists outside any act of sensation, and is a purely subjective representation, notwithstanding the contention of Materialism, which would connect it forcibly with one or another datum of sensation. For our senses, it is fairly subjective when independent of anything within it. How then can any phenomenon, or anything else, step outside, or be performed beyond, that which has no limits? But when spatial extension becomes simply conceptual, and is thought of in an idea connected with certain actions, as by the Materialists and the Physicists, then again they have hardly a right to define and claim that which can, or cannot, be produced by Forces generated within even limited spaces, as they have not even an approximate idea of what those Forces are.

950.

It is not correct, when speaking of Idealism, to show it based upon “the old ontological assumptions that things or entities exist independently of each other, and otherwise than as terms of relations” (Stallo). At any rate, it is incorrect to say so of Idealism in Eastern Philosophy and its cognition, for it is just the reverse.

951.

Independent, in a certain sense, but not disconnected with it.

952.

“By Fohat, more likely,” would be an Occultist's reply.

953.

The reason for such psychic capacities is given farther on.

954.

The above was written in 1886, at a time when hopes of success for the “Keely Motor” were at their highest. Every word then said by the writer proved true, and now only a few remarks are added with regard to the failure of Mr. Keely's expectations, so far, a failure now admitted by the discoverer himself. Though, however, the word failure is here used, the reader should understand it in a relative sense, for, as Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore explains: “What Mr. Keely does admit is that, baffled in applying vibratory force to mechanics, upon his first and second lines of experimental research, he was obliged either to confess a commercial failure, or to try a third departure from his base or principle, seeking success through another channel.” And this “channel” is on the physical plane.

955.

We learn that these remarks are not applicable to Mr. Keely's latest discovery; time alone can show the exact limit of his achievements.

956.

Theosophical Siftings, No. 9.

957.

This is also the division made by the Occultists, under other names.

958.

Quite so, since there is the seventh beyond, which begins the same enumeration from the first to the last, on another and higher plane.

959.

From Mrs. Bloomfield-Moore's paper, The New Philosophy.

960.

In answer to a friend, that eminent Geologist writes: “I can only say, in reply to your letter, that it is at present, and perhaps always will be, impossible to reduce, even approximately, geological time into years, or even into millenniums.” (Signed, William Pengelly, F.R.S.)

961.

Plato, in speaking of the irrational, turbulent Elements, “composed of fire, air, water, and earth,” means Elementary Dæmons. (See Timæus.)

962.

Plato in the Timæus uses the word “secretions” of turbulent Elements.

963.

Valentinus' Esoteric Treatise on the Doctrine of Gilgul.

964.

See Mackenzie's Royal Masonic Cyclopædia.

965.

See Isis Unveiled, II. 152.

966.

See Mackenzie, ibid., sub voc.

967.

Isis Unveiled, I. 317.

968.

Viveka Chudamani, translated by Mohini M. Chatterji, as “The Crest Jewel of Wisdom.” See Theosophist, July and August, 1886.

969.

The Tanmâtras are literally the type or rudiment of an element devoid of qualities; but esoterically, they are the primeval Noumena of that which becomes in the progress of evolution, a Cosmic Element, in the sense given to the term in Antiquity, not in that of Physics. They are the Logoi, the seven emanations or rays of the Logos.

970.

Ch. xxxvi; Telang's translation, pp. 387-8.

971.

See Theosophist, August, 1886.

972.

The now universal error of attributing to the Ancients the knowledge of only seven planets, simply because they mentioned no others, is based on the same general ignorance of their Occult doctrines. The question is not whether they were, or were not, aware of the existence of the later discovered planets; but whether the reverence paid by them to the four exoteric and three secret Great Gods—the Star-Angels, had not some special reason. The writer ventures to say there was such a reason, and it is this. Had they known of as many planets as we do now—and this question can hardly be decided at present, either way—they would still have only connected the seven with their religious worship, because these seven are directly and specially connected with our Earth, or, using esoteric phraseology, with our septenary Ring of Spheres.

973.

John, x. 30.

974.

Ibid., xx. 17.

975.

Ibid., xiv. 28.

976.

Matt., v. 16.

977.

Ibid., xiii. 43.

978.

1 Cor., iii. 16.

979.

Theosophist, Aug., 1886.

980.

These are planets accepted for purposes of Judicial Astrology only. The astro-theogonical division differed from the above. The Sun, being a central star and not a planet, stands, with its seven planets, in more occult and mysterious relations to our Globe than is generally known. The Sun was, therefore, considered the great Father of all the Seven “Fathers,” and this accounts for the variations found between the Seven and Eight Great Gods of Chaldean and other countries. Neither the Earth, nor the Moon, its satellite, nor yet the stars, for another reason, were anything more than substitutes used for Esoteric purposes. Yet, even with the exclusion of the Sun and the Moon from the calculation, the Ancients seem to have known of seven planets. How many more are known to us, so far, if we throw out the Earth and Moon? Seven, and no more: Seven primary or principal planets, the rest planetoids rather than planets.

981.

When one remembers that under the powerful telescope of Sir William Herschell, that eminent Astronomer—gauging merely that portion of heaven in the equatorial plane, the approximate centre of which is occupied by our Earth—saw in one quarter of an hour, 16,000 stars pass; and applying this calculation to the totality of the “Milky Way” he found in it no less than eighteen millions of Suns, one wonders no longer that Laplace, in conversation with Napoleon I, should have called God a hypothesis—perfectly useless to speculate upon for exact Physical Science, at any rate. Occult Metaphysics and transcendental Philosophy will alone be able to lift the smallest corner of the impenetrable veil in this direction.

982.

Numb., xi. 16.

983.

Deut., xxxii. 8, 9.

984.

Ibid., 9.

985.

C. W. King in The Gnostics and their Remains (p. 344), identifies it with “that summum bonum of Oriental aspiration, the Buddhist Nirvâna, ‘perfect repose, the Epicurean Indolentia’;” a view that looks flippant enough in its expression, though not quite untrue.

986.

See Origen's Copy of the Chart, or Diagramma of the Ophites.

987.

See also Section XIV.

988.

Abraham and Saturn are identical in astro-symbology, and he is the forefather of the Jehovistic Jews.

989.

John, viii. 37, 38, 41, 44.

990.

Matthew, v. 22.

991.

The Elemental Vortices inaugurated by the “Mind” have not been improved by their modern transformation.

992.

I have often been taken to task for using expressions in Isis denoting belief in a personal and anthropomorphic God. This is not my idea. Kabalistically speaking, the “Architect” is the generic name for the Sephiroth, the Builders of the Universe, as the “Universal Mind” represents the collectivity of the Dhyân Chohanic Minds.

993.

Timæus.

994.

I. 258.

995.

Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations.

996.

Modern Chemistry.

997.

Isis Unveiled, I. 137.

998.

Faraday Lectures, 1881.

999.

Thus, what the writer of the present work said ten years ago in Isis Unveiled was, it seems, prophetic. These are the words: “Many of these mystics, by following what they were taught by some treatises, secretly preserved from one generation to another, achieved discoveries which would not be despised even in our modern days of exact sciences. Roger Bacon, the friar, was laughed at as a quack, and is now generally numbered among ‘pretenders’ to magic art; but his discoveries were nevertheless accepted, and are now used by those who ridicule him the most. Roger Bacon belonged by right, if not by fact, to that Brotherhood which includes all those who study the Occult Sciences. Living in the thirteenth century, almost a contemporary, therefore, of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, his discoveries—such as gunpowder and optical glasses, and his mechanical achievements—were considered by everyone as so many miracles. He was accused of having made a compact with the Evil One.” (Vol. I, pp. 64, 65.)

1000.

Just so; “those forms of energy ... which become evident ...” in the laboratory of the Chemist and Physicist; but there are other forms of energy wedded to other forms of matter, which are supersensuous, yet are known to the Adepts.

1001.

Presidential Address, p. 16.

1002.

It is just the existence of such worlds on other planes of consciousness that is asserted by the Occultist. The Secret Science teaches that the primitive race was boneless, and that there are worlds invisible to us, peopled as our own, besides the populations of Dhyân Chohans.

1003.

Five Years of Theosophy, p. 258 et seq.

1004.

Says Mr. Crookes in the same address: “The first riddle which we encounter in chemistry is: ‘What are the elements?’ Of the attempts hitherto made to define or explain an element, none satisfy the demands of the human intellect. The text books tell us that an element is ‘a body which has not been decomposed;’ that it is ‘a something to which we can add, but from which we can take nothing,’ or ‘a body which increases in weight with every chemical change.’ Such definitions are doubly unsatisfactory: they are provisional, and may cease to-morrow to be applicable in any given case. They take their stand, not on any attribute of the things to be defined, but on the limitations of human power: they are confessions of intellectual impotence.”

1005.

And the lecturer quotes Sir George Airy, who says (in Faraday's Life and Letters, Vol. II., p. 354): “I can easily conceive that there are plenty of bodies about us not subject to this intermutual action, and therefore not subject to the law of gravitation.”

1006.

The Vedântic philosophy conceives of such; but then it is not physics, but metaphysics, called by Mr. Tyndall “poetry” and “fiction.”

1007.

In the form they are now, we conceive?

1008.

And to Kapila and Manu—especially and originally.

1009.

Here is a scientific corroboration of the eternal law of correspondences and analogy.

1010.

This method of illustrating the periodic law in the classification of elements is, in the words of Mr. Crookes, proposed by Professor Emerson Reynolds, of Dublin University, who ... “points out that in each period, the general properties of the elements vary from one to another, with approximate regularity until we reach the seventh member, which is in more or less striking contrast with the first element of the same period, as well as with the first of the next. Thus chlorine, the seventh member of Mendeleef's third period, contrasts sharply with both sodium, the first member of the same series, and with potassium, the first member of the next series; whilst on the other hand, sodium and potassium are closely analogous. The six elements, whose atomic weights intervene between sodium and potassium, vary in properties, step by step, until chlorine, the contrast to sodium, is reached. But from chlorine to potassium, the analogue of sodium, there is a change in properties per saltum..... If we thus recognize a contrast in properties—more or less decided—between the first and the last members of each series, we can scarcely help admitting the existence of a point of mean variation within each system. In general the fourth element of each series possesses the property we might expect a transition-element to exhibit.... Thus for the purpose of graphic translation, Professor Reynolds considers that the fourth member of a period—silicon, for example—may be placed at the apex of a symmetrical curve, which shall represent for that particular period, the direction in which the properties of the series of elements vary with rising atomic weights.”

Now, the writer humbly confesses complete ignorance of modern Chemistry and its mysteries. But she is pretty well acquainted with the Occult Doctrine with regard to correspondences of types and antetypes in nature, and to perfect analogy as a fundamental law in Occultism. Hence she ventures on a remark which will strike every Occultist, however it may be derided by orthodox Science. This method of illustrating the periodic law in the behaviour of elements, whether or not still a hypothesis in Chemistry, is a law in Occult Sciences. Every well-read Occultist knows that the seventh and fourth members—whether in a septenary chain of worlds, the septenary hierarchy of angels, or in the constitution of man, animal, plant, or mineral atom—that the seventh and fourth members, we say, in the geometrically and mathematically uniform workings of the immutable laws of Nature, always play a distinct and specific part in the septenary system. From the stars twinkling high in heaven, to the sparks flying asunder from the rude fire built by the savage in his forest; from the hierarchies and the essential constitution of the Dhyân Chohans—organized for diviner apprehensions and a loftier range of perception than the greatest Western Psychologist ever dreamed of, down to Nature's classification of species among the humblest insects; finally from Worlds to Atoms, everything in the Universe, from great to small, proceeds in its spiritual and physical evolution, cyclically and septennially, showing its seventh and fourth number (the latter the turning point) behaving in the same way as is shown in that periodic law of Atoms. Nature never proceeds per saltum. Therefore, when Mr. Crookes remarks on this that he does not “wish to infer that the gaps in Mendeleef's table, and in this graphic representation of it [the diagram showing the evolution of Atoms] necessarily mean that there are elements actually existing to fill up the gaps; these gaps may only mean that at the birth of the elements there was an easy potentiality of the formation of an element which would fit into the place”—an Occultist would respectfully remark to him that the latter hypothesis can only hold good, if the septenary arrangement of Atoms is not interfered with. This is the one law, and an infallible method that must always lead one who follows it to success.

1011.

A group of electricians has just protested against the new theory of Clausius, the famous professor of the University of Bonn. The character of the protest is shown in the signature, which has “Jules Bourdin, in the name of the group of Electricians, which had the honour of being introduced to Professor Clausius in 1881, and whose war-cry (cri de ralliement) is À bas l'Ether”—down with Ether, even; they want Universal Void, you see!

1012.

Smithsonian Contributions, xxi., Art. 1. pp. 79-97.

1013.

System of Logic, p. 229.

1014.

Beyond the zero-line of action.

1015.

Progymnasmata, p. 795.

1016.

De Stellâ Novâ in Pede Serpentarii, p. 115.

1017.

Hypothèses Cosmogoniques, p. 2, C. Wolf, 1886.

1018.

See Philosophical Transactions, p. 269, et seq.

1019.

Laplace conceived that the external and internal zones of the ring would rotate with the same angular velocity, which would be the case with a solid ring; but the principle of equal areas requires the inner zones to rotate more rapidly than the outer. (World-Life, p. 121.) Prof. Winchell points out a good many mistakes of Laplace; but as a geologist he is not infallible himself in his “astronomical speculations.”

1020.

Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 249-251, Art. “Do the Adepts deny the Nebular Theory?”

1021.

Had Astronomers, in their present state of knowledge, merely held to the hypothesis of Laplace, which was simply the formation of the Planetary System, it might in time have resulted in something like an approximate truth. But the two parts of the general problem—that of the formation of the Universe, or the formation of the Suns and Stars from the Primitive Matter, and then the development of the Planets round their Sun—rest on quite different facts in Nature and are even so viewed by Science itself. They are at the opposite poles of Being.

1022.

Aristotle's Physica, viii. 1.

1023.

Hypothèses Cosmogoniques, p. 3, Wolf.

1024.

Vol. I., p. 185, quoted by Wolf, p. 3. Wolf's argument is here summarised.

1025.

Note vii. Summarized from Wolf, p. 6.

1026.

Five Years of Theosophy, pp. 241, 242, and 239.

1027.

But the spectra of these nebulæ have never yet been ascertained. When they are found with bright lines, then only may they be cited.

1028.

Hypothèses Cosmogoniques, p. 3.

1029.

Mr. Crookes' Protyle must not be regarded as the primary stuff, out of which the Dhyân Chohans, in accordance with the immutable laws of Nature, wove our Solar System. This Protyle cannot even be the Prima Materia of Kant, which that great mind saw used up in the formation of the worlds, and thus existing no longer in a diffused state. Protyle is a mediate phase in the progressive differentiation of Cosmic Substance from its normal undifferentiated state. It is, then, the aspect assumed by Matter in its middle passage into full objectivity.

1030.

See Stanza III, Commentary 9, (p. 109) about “Light,” or “Cold Flame,” where it is explained that the “Mother”—Chaos—is a cold Fire, a cool Radiance, colourless, formless, devoid of every quality. “Motion as the One Eternal is, and contains the potentialities of every quality in the Manvantaric Worlds,” it is said.

1031.

Hypothèses Cosmogoniques, pp. 4, 5.

1032.

World-Life, p. 196.

1033.

Westminster Review, XX., July 27, 1868.

1034.

Vol. XIV. p. 252.

1035.

Hypothèses Cosmogoniques.

1036.

Which “Light” we call Fohat.

1037.

This is a mistake, which implies a material agent, distinct from the influences which move it, i.e., blind matter and perhaps “God” again, whereas this One Life is the very God and Gods “Itself.”

1038.

The same error.

1039.

Popular Science Review, Vol. X.

1040.

“Is the Jîva a myth, as Science says, or is it not?” ask some Theosophists, wavering between materialistic and idealistic Science. The difficulty of really grasping Esoteric problems concerning the “ultimate state of Matter” is again the old crux of the objective and the subjective. What is Matter? Is the Matter of our present objective consciousness anything but our sensations? True, the sensations we receive come from without, but can we really—except in terms of phenomena—speak of the “gross matter” of this plane as an entity apart from and independent of us? To all such arguments Occultism answers: True, in reality Matter is not independent of, or existent outside, our perceptions. Man is an illusion: granted. But the existence and actuality of other, still more illusive, but not less actual, entities than we are, is not a claim which is lessened, but rather strengthened, by this doctrine of Vedântic and even Kantian Idealism.

1041.

See Musée des Sciences, August, 1856.

1042.

Book II. of the Commentary on the Book of Dzyan.

1043.

Even the question of the plurality of worlds inhabited by sentient creatures is rejected, or is approached with the greatest caution! And yet see what the great astronomer, Camille Flammarion, says in his Pluralité des Mondes.

1044.

Nevertheless, it may be shown on the testimony of the Bible itself, and of such good Christian theologians as Cardinal Wiseman, that this plurality is taught in both the Old and the New Testaments.

1045.

See Plurality of Worlds, Vol. II.

1046.

See on this La Pluralité des Mondes Habités, par C. Flammarion, wherein is given a list of the many men of Science who have written to prove the theory.

1047.

World-Life, pp. 496-498, et seq.

1048.

World-Life.

1049.

The Book of Enoch. Trans. by Archbishop Laurence, Ch. LXXIX.

1050.

The Âtmâ, or Spirit, the Spiritual Self, passing like a thread through the five Subtle Bodies, or Principles, Koshas, is called “Thread-soul,” or Sûtrâtmâ in Vedântic Philosophy.

1051.

“The Septenary Principle,” Five Years of Theosophy, p. 197.

1052.

Pythagorean Triangle, by the Rev. G. Oliver, p. 36.

1053.

See Kant's Critique de la Raison Pure, Barui's transl., II. 54.

1054.

Plutarch, De Placitis Philosophorum.

1055.

In the Greek and Latin Churches—which regard marriage as one of the sacraments—the officiating priest during the marriage ceremony represents the apex of the triangle; the bride, its left feminine side, and the bridegroom the right side, while the base line is symbolized by the row of witnesses, the bridesmaids and best men. But behind the priest there is the Holy of Holies, with its mysterious containments and symbolic meaning, inside of which no one but the consecrated priests should enter. In the early days of Christianity the marriage ceremony was a mystery and a true symbol. Now, however, even the Churches have lost the true meaning of this symbolism.

1056.

New Aspects of Life and Religion, by Henry Pratt, M.D., p. 7. Ed. 1886.

1057.

Ibid., pp. 7, 8.

1058.

Ibid., p. 9.

1059.

Pythagorean Triangle, by the Rev. G. Oliver, pp. 18, 19.

1060.

P. 387.

1061.

P. 387.

1062.

In the World of Form, symbolism finding expression in the Pyramids, has in them both triangle and square, four co-equal triangles or surfaces, four basic points, and the fifth—the apex.

1063.

Pp. 385, 386.

1064.

Op. cit. By Isaac Myer. P. 174.

1065.

P. 175.

1066.

P. 175.

1067.

“The lowest designation, or the Deity in Nature, the more general term Elohim, is translated God.” (P. 175.) Such recent works as the Qabbalah of Mr. Isaac Myer, and of Mr. S. L. MacGregor Mathers, fully justify our attitude towards the Jehovistic Deity. It is not the transcendental, philosophical, and highly metaphysical abstraction of the original Kabalistic thought—Ain-Suph-Shekinah-Adam-Kadmon, and all that follows—that we oppose, but the crystallization of all these into the highly unphilosophical, repulsive, and anthropomorphic Jehovah, the androgynous and finite deity, for which eternity, omnipotence, and omniscience are claimed. We do not war against the Ideal Reality, but the hideous theological Shadow.

1068.

Let not the word “Psychology” cause the reader, by association of ideas, to carry his thought to modern “Psychologists,” so-called, whose Idealism is another name for uncompromising Materialism, and whose pretended Monism is no better than a mask to conceal the void of final annihilation—even of consciousness. Here spiritual Psychology is meant.

1069.

“Vishvânara is not merely the manifested objective world, but the one physical basis [the horizontal line of the triangle] from which the whole objective world starts into existence.” And this is the Cosmic Duad, the Androgynous Substance. Only beyond this is the true Protyle.

1070.

T. Subba Row. See Theosophist, Feb. 1887.

1071.

By W. Crookes, F.R.S., V.P.C.S., delivered at the Royal Institution, London, on Friday, February 18th, 1887.

1072.

How true it is will be fully demonstrated only on that day when Mr. Crookes' discovery of radiant matter will have resulted in a further elucidation with regard to the true source of light, and will have revolutionized all the present speculations. Further familiarity with the northern streamers of the aurora borealis may help the recognition of this truth.

1073.

Genesis of the Elements, p. 1.

1074.

De Placit. Philos.

1075.

The Path, I. 10, p. 297.

1076.

P. 11.

1077.

Corresponding on the cosmic scale with the Spirit, Soul, Mind, Life, and the three Vehicles—the Astral, the Mâyâvic and the Physical Bodies (of mankind), whatever division is made.

1078.

Ibid. p. 16.

1079.

Vol. I, p. 429.

1080.

Ibid., p. 21.

1081.

“The Lord is a consuming fire.” “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

1082.

Which if separated alchemically would yield the Spirit of Life, and its Elixir.

1083.

Foremost of all, the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic substances or bodies. Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical “atoms” are simply organic units in profound lethargy. Their coma has an end and their inertia becomes activity.

1084.

Ibid., p. 144.

1085.

The orthography of the name—as spelt by himself—is Leibniz. He was of Slavonian descent though born in Germany.

1086.

Monadologie, Introd.

1087.

“Leibnitz's dynamism,” says Professor Lachelier, “would offer but little difficulty if, with him, the monad had remained a simple atom of blind force. But....” One perfectly understands the perplexity of Modern Materialism!

1088.

The Path, I. 10, p. 297.

1089.

Leibnitz was an absolute Idealist in maintaining that “material atoms are contrary to reason.” (Système Nouveau, Erdmann, p. 126, col. 2.) For him Matter was a simple representation of the Monad, whether human or atomic. Monads, he thought (as do we), are everywhere. Thus the human soul is a Monad, and every cell in the human body has its Monad, as has every cell in animal, vegetable, and even in the so-called inorganic bodies. His Atoms are the molecules of modern Science, and his Monads those simple atoms that Materialistic Science takes on faith, though it will never succeed in interviewing them—except in imagination. But Leibnitz is rather contradictory in his views about Monads. He speaks of his “Metaphysical Points” and “Formal Atoms,” at one time as realities, occupying space; at another as pure spiritual ideas; then he again endows them with objectivity and aggregates and positions in their co-relations.

1090.

Examen des Principes du P. Malebranche.

1091.

The Atoms of Leibnitz have, in truth, nothing but the name in common with the atoms of the Greek Materialists, or even the molecules of Modem Science. He calls them “Formal Atoms,” and compares them to the “Substantial Forms” of Aristotle. (See Système Nouveau, § 3.)

1092.

Letter to Father Desbosses, Correspondence, xviii.

1093.

Monadologie, § 60. Leibnitz, like Aristotle, calls the “created” or emanated Monads (the Elementals issued from Cosmic Spirits or Gods)—Entelechies, Ἐντελέχειαι, and “incorporeal automata.” (Monadologie § 18.)

1094.

These three “rough divisions” correspond to Spirit, Mind (or Soul), and Body, in the human constitution.

1095.

Brother C. H. A. Bjerregaard, in the lecture already mentioned, warns his audience not to regard the Sephiroth too much as individualities, but to avoid at the same time seeing in them abstractions. “We shall never arrive at the truth,” he says, “much less the power of associating with these celestials, until we return to the simplicity and fearlessness of the primitive ages, when men mixed freely with the gods, and the gods descended among men and guided them in truth and holiness.” (P. 296.) “There are several designations for ‘angels’ in the Bible, which clearly show that beings like the elementals of the Kabbala and the monads of Leibnitz, must be understood by that term rather than that which is commonly understood. They are called ‘morning stars,’ ‘flaming fires,’ ‘the mighty ones,’ and St. Paul sees them in his cosmogonic vision as ‘Principalities and Powers.’ Such names as these preclude the idea of personality, and we find ourselves compelled to think of them as impersonal existences ... as an influence, a spiritual substance, or conscious force.” (Pp. 321, 322.)

1096.

Buddhist Catechism, by H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society, p. 51.

1097.

Ibid. 51, 52.

1098.

We refer those who would regard the statement as an impertinence or irreverence levelled at accepted Science, to Dr. James Hutchinson Stirling's work As regards Protoplasm, which is a defence of a Vital Principle versus the Molecularists—Huxley, Tyndall, Vogt, and Co.—and request them to examine whether it is true or not to say that, though the scientific premisses may not be always correct, they are, nevertheless, accepted, to fill up a gap or a hole in some beloved materialistic hobby. Speaking of protoplasm and the organs of man, as “viewed by Mr. Huxley,” the author says: “Probably then, in regard to any continuity in protoplasm of power, of form, or of substance, we have seen lacunæ enow. Nay, Mr. Huxley himself can be adduced in evidence on the same side. Not rarely do we find in his essay admissions of probability, where it is certainty that is alone in place. He says, for example: ‘It is more than probable that when the vegetable world is thoroughly explored we shall find all plants in possession of the same powers.’ When a conclusion is decidedly announced, it is rather disappointing to be told, as here, that the premisses are still to collect [!!].... Again, here is a passage in which he is seen to cut his own ‘basis’ from beneath his own feet. After telling us that all forms of protoplasm consist of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen ‘in very complex union,’ he continues: ‘To this complex combination, the nature of which has never been determined with exactness [!!], the name of protein has been applied.’ This, plainly, is an identification, on Mr. Huxley's own part, of protoplasm and protein; and what is said of one, being necessarily true of the other, it follows that he admits the nature of protoplasm never to have been determined with exactness, and that even in his eyes the lis is still sub judice. This admission is strengthened by the words, too, ‘If we use this term (protein) with such caution as may properly arise out of our comparative ignorance of the things for which it stands’ ” ... etc. (pp. 33 and 34, ed. 1872, in reply to Mr. Huxley in Yeast).

This is the eminent Huxley, the king of physiology and biology, who is proven playing at blind man's buff with premisses and facts! What may not the “smaller fry” of Science do after this!

1099.

“The Cycles of Matter,” a name given by Professor Winchell to an Essay written in 1860.

1100.

World-Life, pp. 535, 548.

1101.

Quoted in Büchner's Force and Matter.

1102.

Men of Science will say: We deny, because nothing of the kind has ever come within the scope of our experience. But, as argued by Charles Richet, the Physiologist: “So be it, but have you at least demonstrated the contrary?... Do not, at any rate, deny à priori. Actual Science is not sufficiently advanced to give you such right.”—La Suggestion Mentale et le Calcul des Probabilités.

1103.

Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 26. Sibree's Eng. Transl.

1104.

Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, p. 34.

1105.

This symbolism does not prevent these now seemingly mythic personages from having ruled the Earth once upon a time under the human form of actual living, though truly divine and god-like Men. The opinion of Colonel Vallancey—and also of Count de Gebelin—that the “names of the Kabiri appear to be all allegorical, and to have signified no more [?] than an almanac of the vicissitudes of the seasons—calculated for the operations of agriculture” (Collect. de Reb. Hibern., No. 13, Præf. Sect. 5), is as absurd as his assertion that Æon, Cronus, Saturn and Dagon are all one, namely, the “Patriarch Adam.” The Kabiri were the instructors of mankind in agriculture, because they were the Regents over the seasons and Cosmic Cycles. Hence it was they who regulated, as Planetary Spirits or Angels (Messengers), the mysteries of the art of agriculture.

1106.

“Who dread Karma-Nemesis,” would be better.

1107.

Dryden.

1108.

Not all, however, for there are men of Science awakening to truth. This is what we read: “Whatever way we turn our eyes we encounter a mystery ... all in Nature for us is the unknown.... Yet they are numerous, those superficial minds for whom nothing can be produced by natural forces outside of facts observed long ago, consecrated in books and grouped more or less skilfully with the help of theories whose ephemeral duration ought, by this time, to have demonstrated their insufficiency, .... I do not pretend to contest the possibility of invisible beings, of a nature different from ours and capable of moving matter to action. Profound philosophers have admitted this in all epochs, as a consequence of the great law of continuity which rules the universe. That intellectual life, which we see starting in some way from non-being (néant) and gradually reaching man, can it stop abruptly at man to reäppear only in the infinite, in the sovereign regulator of the world? This is little probable.” Therefore, “I no more deny the existence of spirits than I deny soul, while I yet try to explain certain facts without this hypothesis.” The Non-Defined Forces, Historical and Experimental Researches, p. 3. (Paris, 1877.) The author is A. de Rochas, a well-known man of Science in France, and his work is one of the signs of the time.

1109.

ix. 9.

1110.

xxxviii. 31, 32.

1111.

Astronomie Antique.

1112.

The Pleiades, as all know, are the seven stars beyond the Bull, which appear at the beginning of spring. They have a very Occult meaning in the Hindû Esoteric Philosophy, and are connected with Sound and other mystic principles in Nature.

1113.

See Astronomie Antique, pp. 63 to 74.

1114.

Temple de Jerusalem, Vol. II, Part II, Chap. xxx.

1115.

Ch. vii.

1116.

Quoted by De Mirville, Des Esprits, iv. p. 58.

1117.

Natural Genesis, ii. p. 318.

1118.

Proœm, 2.

1119.

Astronomy of the Ancients, Lewis, p. 264.

1120.

Natural Genesis, ii. p. 319.

1121.

Proclus, In Timæum, i.

1122.

Genesis, xlix.

1123.

Creuzer, iii. p. 930.

1124.

Cyropædia, viii. p. 7, as quoted in Des Esprits, iv. p. 55.

1125.

Des Esprits, iv. pp. 59, 60.

1126.

Origine de tous les Cultes, “Zodiaque.”

1127.

Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, I. p. 9.

1128.

Whether many nations have seen that identical star, or not, we all know that the sepulchres of the “three Magi”—who rejoice in the quite Teutonic names of Kaspar and Melchior, Balthazar being the only exception, and the two having little of the Chaldean ring in them—are shown by the priests in the famous cathedral of Cologne, where the Magian bodies are not only supposed, but firmly believed to have been buried.

1129.

This tradition about the “seventy planets” that preside over the destinies of nations, is based on the Occult cosmogonical teaching that besides our own septenary chain of World-Planets, there are many more in the Solar System.

1130.

Des Esprits, iv. p. 67.

1131.

The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated; Part the Second, or The Key of Urania: pp. 23, 24. Ed. 1823.

1132.

Every scholar is aware, of course, that the Chaldeans claimed the same digits (432), or 432,000, for their Divine Dynasties as the Hindûs do for their Mahâyuga, namely 4,320,000. Therefore has Dr. Sepp, of Munich, undertaken to support Kepler and Wilford in their charge that the Hindûs borrowed them from the Christians, and the Chaldeans from the Jews, who, it is claimed, expected their Messiah in the lunar year of the world 4,320!!! As these figures, according to ancient writers, were based by Berosus on the 120 Saroses—each of the divisions meaning six Neroses of 600 years each, making a sum total of 432,000 years—they would appear to be peremptory, remarks De Mirville (Des Esprits, iii. p. 24). So the pious professor of Munich undertook to explain them in the correct way. He claims to have solved the riddle by showing that “the saros being composed, according to Pliny, of 222 synodial months, to wit, 18 years 6/10,” the calculator naturally fell back on the figures “given by Suidas,” who affirmed that the “120 saroses made 2,222 sacerdotal and cyclic years, which equalled 1,656 solar years.” (Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, ii. p. 417.)

But Suidas said nothing of the kind; and, even supposing he had, he would prove little, if anything, by such a statement. The Neroses and Saroses were the same thorn in the side of uninitiated ancient writers as the apocalyptic 666 of the “Great Beast” is in that of the modern, and the former figures have found their unlucky Newtons, as have the latter.

1133.

See Isis Unveiled, ii. p. 132.

1134.

The reader has to bear in mind that the phrase “climacteric year” has more than the usual significance, when used by Occultists and Mystics. It is not only a critical period, during which some great change is periodically expected, whether in human or cosmic constitution, but it likewise pertains to universal spiritual changes. The Europeans called every 63rd year the “grand climacteric,” and perhaps justly supposed those years to be the years produced by multiplying 7 into the odd numbers 3, 5, 7 and 9. But 7 is the real scale of Nature, in Occultism, and 7 has to be multiplied in quite a different way and method than is as yet known to European nations.

1135.

Des Espirits; iv. p. 61.

1136.

ii. p. 490.

1137.

See Recueil de l'Académie des Inscriptions, 1853, quoted in Des Esprits, iv. p. 62.

1138.

Ruins of Empires, p. 360.

1139.

See pp. 54, 196, et seqq.

1140.

For a detailed scientific proof of this conclusion, see page 121 of M. Bailly's work, where the subject is discussed technically.

1141.

Why it should be “fictitious” can never be made plain by European Scientists.

1142.

Bailly's Traité de l'Astronomie Indienne et Orientale, pp. xx. et seq. Ed. 1787.

1143.

Ch. III. “On Matter.”

1144.

Lecture on Protoplasm, by Mr. Huxley.

1145.

Ganot's Physics, p. 68, Atkinson's Translation.

1146.

See Vol. I. pp. 338, 339, quoted from Le Mystère et la Science, Conférences, Père Félix de Notre Dame.

1147.

Behold the work of Cycles and their periodical return! Those who denied such “Entities” (Forces) to be bodies, and called them “Spaces,” were the prototypes of our modern “science-struck” public, and their official teachers, who speak of the Forces of Nature as the imponderable energy of Matter and as modes of motion, and yet hold electricity, for one, as being as atomic as Matter itself—(Helmholtz). Inconsistency and contradiction reign as much in official as in heterodox Science.

1148.

The Virgin of the World of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, rendered into English by Dr. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Pp. 83, 84.

1149.

“Hermes here includes as Gods the sensible Forces of Nature, the elements and phenomena of the Universe,” remarks Dr. A. Kingsford in a foot-note explaining it very correctly. So does Eastern Philosophy.

1150.

Ibid., pp. 64, 65.

1151.

See also Section IX, The Coming Force.

1152.

“O Toom, Toom! issued from the great [female] which is in the bosom of the waters [the great Deep or Space], luminous through the two Lions,” the dual Force, or power of the two solar eyes, or the electro-positive and the electro-negative forces. See Book of the Dead, ch. iii.

1153.

See Book of the Dead, chapter xvii.

1154.

Chapter lxxix.

1155.

An image expressing the succession of divine functions, the transmutation of one form into another, or the correlation of forces. Aam is the electro-positive force, devouring all others, as Saturn devoured his progeny.

1156.

Aanroo is in the domain of Osiris, a field divided into fourteen sections, “surrounded with an iron enclosure, within which grows the corn of life seven cubits high,” the Kâma Loka of the Egyptians. Those only of the dead, who know the names of the janitors of the “seven halls,” will be admitted into Amenti for ever; i.e., those who have passed through the Seven Races of each Round—otherwise they will rest in the lower fields; and it represents also the seven successive Devachans, or Lokas. In Amenti one becomes pure spirit for the eternity (xxx. 4); while in Aanroo the “soul of the spirit,” or the Defunct, is devoured each time by Uræus—the Serpent, Son of the Earth (in another sense the primordial vital principles in the Sun), i.e., the Astral Body of the deceased or the “Elementary” fades out and disappears in the “Son of the Earth,” limited time. The soul quits the fields of Aanroo and goes on earth under any shape it likes to assume. (See chapter xcix., Book of the Dead.)

1157.

See Book of the Dead, chapter cviii. 4.

1158.

Maspero in the Guide au Musée de Boulaq, p. 152. Ed. 1883.

1159.

See Book of the Dead, ch. xciv.

1160.

Revue des Deux Mondes, 1865, pp. 157 and 158.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface To The First Edition.

Preface To The Third And Revised Edition.

Introductory.

Proem: Pages From A Pre-Historic Record.

Part I. Cosmic Evolution.

- Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan”

- Stanza I.

- Stanza II.

- Stanza III.

- Stanza IV.

- Stanza V.

- Stanza VI.

- Stanza VII.

- Commentaries On The Seven Stanzas And Their Terms, According To Their Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.

- Stanza I.

- Stanza II.

- Stanza III.

- Stanza IV.

- Stanza V.

- Stanza VI.

- A Digression.

- A Few Early Misconceptions Concerning Planets, Rounds, And Man.

- The Septenary Division In Different Indian Systems.

- Additional Facts And Explanations Concerning The Globes And The Monads.

- Stanza VI.—Continued.

- Stanza VII.

- Summing Up.

- Extracts From An Eastern Private Commentary, Hitherto Secret.432

Part II. The Evolution Of Symbolism.

- Section I. Symbolism and Ideographs.

- Section II. The Mystery Language and Its Keys.

- Section III. Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.

- Section IV. Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.

- Section V. On the Hidden Deity, Its Symbols and Glyphs.

- Section VI. The Mundane Egg.

- Section VII. The Days and Nights of Brahmâ.

- Section VIII. The Lotus, as a Universal Symbol.

- Section IX. The Moon; Deus Lunus, Phœbe.

- Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.

- Section XI. Demon est Deus Inversus.

- Section XII. The Theogony of the Creative Gods.

- Section XIII. The Seven Creations.

- Section XIV. The Four Elements.

- Section XV. On Kwan-Shi-Yin and Kwan-Yin.

Part III. Addenda. On Occult And Modern Science.

- Section I. Reasons for These Addenda.

- Section II. Modern Physicists are Playing at Blind Man's Buff.

- “An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?”

- Section III. Is Gravitation a Law?

- Section IV. The Theories of Rotation in Science.

- Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation.

- Hypotheses of the Origin of Planets and Comets.

- Section V. The Masks of Science. Physics Or Metaphysics?

- Section VI. An Attack on the Scientific Theory of Force by a Man of Science.

- Section VII. Life, Force, or Gravity.

- Section VIII. The Solar Theory.

- Section IX. The Coming Force. Its Possibilities And Impossibilities.

- Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.

- Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.

- Section XII. Scientific and Esoteric Evidence for, and Objections to, the Modern Nebular Theory.

- Section XIII. Forces—Modes of Motion or Intelligences?

- Section XIV. Gods, Monads and Atoms.

- Section XV. Cyclic Evolution and Karma.

- Section XVI. The Zodiac and its Antiquity.

- Section XVII. Summary of the Position.

Footnotes

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