chapter v

of the First Book of Moses be compared with the genealogies found in our Archaic Bible, the period from Adam unto Noah would be found noticed therein, though of course under different names, the respective years of the Patriarchs being turned into periods, and the whole being symbolical and allegorical. In the MS. under consideration many and frequent are the references to the great knowledge and civilization of the Atlantean nations, showing the polity of several of them and the nature of their arts and sciences. If the Third Root‐Race, the Lemuro‐Atlanteans, are already spoken of as having been drowned “with their high civilizations and Gods,”(993) how much more may the same be said of the Atlanteans!

It is from the Fourth Race that the early Âryans got their knowledge of “the bundle of wonderful things,” the Sabhâ and Mâyâsabhâ, mentioned in the _Mahâbhârata_, the gift of Mâyâsura to the Pândavas. It is from them that they learnt æronautics, Vimâna Vidyâ, the “knowledge of flying in air‐vehicles,” and, therefore, their great arts of Meteorography and Meteorology. It is from them, again, that the Âryans inherited their most valuable Science of the hidden virtues of precious and other stones, of Chemistry, or rather Alchemy, of Mineralogy, Geology, Physics and Astronomy.

Several times the writer has put to herself the question: Is the story of _Exodus_—in its details at least—as narrated in the _Old Testament_, original? Or is it, like the story of Moses himself and many others, simply another version of the legends told of the Atlanteans? For who, upon hearing the story told of the latter, will fail to perceive the great similarity of the fundamental features? Remember the anger of “God” at the obduracy of Pharaoh, his command to the “chosen” ones to spoil the Egyptians, before departing, of their “jewels of silver and jewels of gold,”(994) and finally the Egyptians and their Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea. Then read the following fragment of the earlier story from the Commentary:

_And the __“__Great King of the Dazzling Face__”__ the chief of all the Yellow‐faced, was sad, seeing the sins of the Black‐faced._

_He sent his air‐vehicles [Vimânas] to all his brother‐chiefs [chiefs of other nations and tribes] with pious men within, saying:_

“_Prepare. Arise, ye men of the Good Law, and cross the land while [yet] dry._

“_The Lords of the storm are approaching. Their chariots are nearing the land. One night and two days only shall the Lords of the Dark Face [the Sorcerers] live on this patient land. She is doomed, and they have to descend with her. The nether Lords of the Fires [the Gnomes and Fire Elementals] are preparing their magic Agnyastra [fire‐weapons worked by Magic]. But the Lords of the Dark Eye [__‘__Evil Eye__’__] are stronger than they [the Elementals] and they are the slaves of the mighty ones. They are versed in Astra [Vidyâ, the highest magical knowledge]._(_995_)_ Come and use yours_ [i.e., _your magic powers, in order to counteract those of the Sorcerers]. Let every Lord of the Dazzling Face [an Adept of the White Magic] cause the Vimâna of every Lord of the Dark Face to come into his hands [or possession], lest any [of the Sorcerers] should by its means escape from the waters, avoid the Rod of the Four [Karmic Deities], and save his wicked [followers, or people]._

“_May every Yellow Face send sleep from himself to [mesmerize?] every Black Face. May even they [the Sorcerers] avoid pain and suffering. May __ every man true to the Solar Gods bind [paralyze] every man under the Lunar Gods, lest he should suffer or escape his destiny._

“_And may every Yellow Face offer of his life‐water [blood] to the speaking animal of a Black Face, lest he awaken his master._(996)

“_The hour has struck, the black night is ready._

“_Let their destiny be accomplished. We are the servants of the Great Four._(_997_)_ May the Kings of Light return._”

_The great King fell upon his Dazzling Face and wept...._

_When the Kings assembled, the waters had already moved...._

_[But] the nations had now crossed the dry lands. They were beyond the water‐mark. Their Kings reached them in their Vimânas, and led them on to the lands of Fire and Metal [East and North]._

Still, in another passage, it is said:

_Stars [meteors] showered on the lands of the Black Faces; but they slept._

_The speaking beasts [the magic watchers] kept quiet._

_The nether Lords waited for orders, but they came not, for their masters slept._

_The waters arose, and covered the valleys from one end of the Earth to the other. High lands remained, the bottom of the Earth [the lands of the antipodes] remained dry. There dwelt those who escaped; the men of the Yellow Faces and of the straight eye [the frank and sincere people]._

_When the Lords of the Dark Faces awoke and bethought themselves of their Vimânas in order to escape from the rising waters, they found them gone._

Then a passage shows some of the more powerful Magicians of the “Dark Faces,” who awoke earlier than the others, pursuing those who had “spoilt them” and who were in the rear‐guard, for—“the nations that were led away were as thick as the stars of the milky way,” says a more modern Commentary, written in Sanskrit only.

_Like as a dragon‐snake uncoils slowly its body, so the Sons of Men, led on by the Sons of Wisdom, opened their folds, and spreading out, expanded like a running stream of sweet waters ... many of the faint‐hearted among them perished on their way. But most were saved._

Yet the pursuers, “whose heads and chests soared high above the water,” chased them “for three lunar terms” until finally reached by the rising waves, they perished to the last man, the soil sinking under their feet and the Earth engulfing those who had desecrated her.

This sounds a good deal like the original material upon which the similar story in _Exodus_ was built many hundred thousands of years later. The biography of Moses, the story of his birth, childhood and rescue from the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter, is now shown to have been adapted from the Chaldæan narrative about Sargon. And if so, the Assyrian tiles in the British Museum being a good proof of it, why not that of the Jews robbing the Egyptians of their jewels, the death of Pharaoh and his army, and so on? The gigantic Magicians of Ruta and Daitya, the “Lords of the Dark Face,” may, in the later narrative, have become the Egyptian Magi, and the yellow‐faced nations of the Fifth Race, the virtuous sons of Jacob, the “chosen people”! One more statement has to be made. There have been several Divine Dynasties—a series for every Root‐Race beginning with the Third, each series according and adapted to its Humanity. The last seven Dynasties referred to in the Egyptian and Chaldæan records belonged to the Fifth Race, which, though generally called Âryan, was not entirely so, as it was ever largely mixed up with races to which Ethnology gives other names. It would be impossible, in view of the limited space at our disposal, to go any further into the description of the Atlanteans, in whom the whole East believes as much as we believe in the ancient Egyptians, but whose existence the majority of the Western Scientists deny, as they have denied, before this, many a truth, from the existence of Homer down to that of the carrier pigeon. The civilization of the Atlanteans was greater than even that of the Egyptians. It is their degenerate descendants, the nation of Plato’s Atlantis, who built the first Pyramids in the country, and that certainty before the advent of the “Eastern Æthiopians,” as Herodotus calls the Egyptians. This may be well inferred from the statement made by Ammianus Marcellinus, who says of the Pyramids that:

There are also subterranean passages and winding retreats, which, it is said, men skilful in the ancient mysteries, by means of which they divined the coming of a flood, constructed in different places lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost.

These men who “divined the coming of floods” were not Egyptians, who never had any, except the periodical rising of the Nile. Who were they? The last remnants of the Atlanteans, we maintain; those races which are dimly suspected by Science, and thinking of which Mr. Charles Gould, the well‐ known Geologist, says:

Can we suppose that we have at all exhausted the great museum of nature? Have we, in fact, penetrated yet beyond its antechambers? Does the written history of man, comprising a few thousand years, embrace the whole course of his intelligent existence? or have we in the long mythical eras, extending over hundreds of thousands of years, and recorded in the chronologies of Chaldæa and of China, shadowy mementoes of pre‐historic man, handed down by tradition, and perhaps transported by a few survivors to existing lands from others, which, like the fabled (?) Atlantis of Plato, may have been submerged, or the scene of some great catastrophe which destroyed them with all their civilization.(998)

After this one can turn with more confidence to the words of a Master who wrote, several years before these words were penned by Mr. Gould:

_The Fourth Race had its periods of the highest civilization. Greek and Roman and even Egyptian civilizations are nothing compared to the civilizations that began with the Third Race [—after its separation]._

But if this civilization and the mastery of arts and sciences are denied to the Third and Fourth Races, no one will deny that between the great civilizations of antiquity, such as those of Egypt and India, there stretched the dark ages of crass ignorance and barbarism ever since the beginning of the Christian era up to our modern civilization, during which period all recollection of these traditions was lost. As said in _Isis Unveiled_:

Why should we forget that, ages before the prows of the adventurous Genoese clove the Western waters, the Phœnician vessels had circumnavigated the Globe, and spread civilization in regions now silent and deserted? What Archæologist will dare assert that the same hand which planned the Pyramids of Egypt, Karnak, and the thousand ruins now crumbling to oblivion on the sandy banks of the Nile, did _not_ erect the monumental Nagkon‐Wat of Cambodia; or trace the hieroglyphics on the obelisks and doors of the deserted Indian village, newly discovered in British Columbia by Lord Dufferin; or those on the ruins of Palenque and Uxmal, of Central America? Do not the relics we treasure in our museums—last mementoes of the long “lost arts”—speak loudly in favour of ancient civilization? And do they not prove, over and over again, that nations and continents that have passed away have buried along with them arts and sciences, which neither the first crucible ever heated in a mediæval cloister, nor the last cracked by a modern chemist, have revived, nor will—at least, in the present century.

And the same question may be put now that was put then; it may be once more asked:

How does it happen that the most advanced standpoint that has been reached in our times, only enables us to see in the dim distance up the Alpine path of knowledge the monumental proofs that earlier explorers have left to mark the plateaux they had reached and occupied?

If modern masters are so much in advance of the old ones, why do they not restore to us the lost arts of our postdiluvian forefathers? Why do they not give us the unfading colours of Luxor—the Tyrian purple, the bright vermilion, and dazzling blue which decorate the walls of this place, and are as bright as on the first day of their application; the indestructible cement of the pyramids and of ancient aqueducts; the Damascus blade, which can be turned like a corkscrew in its scabbard without breaking; the gorgeous, unparalleled tints of the stained glass that is found amid the dust of old ruins and beams in the windows of ancient cathedrals; and the secret of the true malleable glass? And if Chemistry is so little able to rival even the early mediæval ages in some arts, why boast of achievements which, according to strong probability, were perfectly known thousands of years ago. The more Archæology and Philology advance, the more humiliating to our pride are the discoveries which are daily made, the more glorious testimony do they bear in behalf of those who, perhaps on account of the distance of their remote antiquity, have been until now considered ignorant flounderers in the deepest mire of superstition.

Among other Arts and Sciences, the Ancients—ay, as an heirloom from the Atlanteans—had those of Astronomy and Symbolism, which included the knowledge of the Zodiac.

As already explained, the whole of Antiquity believed, with good reason, that humanity and its races are all intimately connected with the Planets, and these with the Zodiacal Signs. The whole world’s history is recorded in the latter. In the ancient temples of Egypt there is an example in the Dendera Zodiac; but except in an Arabic work, the property of a Sûfî, the writer has never met with a correct copy of these marvellous records of the past—and also of the _future_—history of our Globe. Yet the original records exist, most undeniably.

As Europeans are unacquainted with the real Zodiacs of India, and those they do happen to know of they fail to understand, as witness Bentley, the reader is advised, in order to verify the statement, to turn to the work of Denon(999) in which the two famous Egyptian Zodiacs can be found and examined. Having seen them personally, the writer has no longer need to trust to what other students—who have examined and studied both very carefully—have to say of them. The assertion of the Egyptian Priests to Herodotus, that the terrestrial Pole and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided, has been corroborated by Mackey, who states that the Poles are represented on the Zodiacs in both positions.

And in that which shows the Poles [polar axes] at right angles, there are marks which show, that it was not the last time they were in that position; _but the first_ [—after the Zodiacs had been traced]. Capricorn, is, therein, represented at the North Pole; and Cancer is divided, near its middle, at the South Pole; which is a confirmation that, originally they had their winter when the Sun was in Cancer. But the chief characteristics of its being a monument commemorating the _first time_ that the Pole had been in that position, are the Lion and the Virgin.(1000)

Broadly calculated, it is believed by Egyptologists that the Great Pyramid was built 3,350 B.C.;(1001) and that Menes and his Dynasty existed 750 years before the appearance of the Fourth Dynasty—during which the Pyramids are _supposed_ to have been built. Thus 4,100 years B.C. is the age assigned to Menes. Now Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson’s declaration that all the facts lead to the conclusion that the Egyptians had already—

Made very great progress in the arts of civilization _before the age of Menes, and perhaps before they immigrated into the valley of the Nile_—(1002)

is very suggestive, as destroying this hypothesis of the comparatively modern civilizing of Egypt. It points to a great civilization in _pre‐ historic_ times, and a still greater antiquity. The Schesoo‐Hor, the “servants of Horus,” were the people who had settled in Egypt; and, as M. Maspéro affirms, it is to this “pre‐historic race” that—

Belongs the honour of having constituted Egypt, such as we know it, from the commencement of the historic period.

And Staniland Wake adds:

They founded the principal cities of Egypt, and established the most important sanctuaries.(1003)

This was _before_ the Great Pyramid epoch, and when Egypt had hardly arisen from the waters. Yet:

They possessed the hieroglyphic form of writing special to the Egyptians, and must have been already considerably advanced in civilization.

As says Lenormant:

It was the country of the great pre‐historic sanctuaries, seats of the sacerdotal dominion, which played the most important part in the origin of civilization.

What is the date assigned to this people? We hear of 4,000, at the utmost of 5,000, years B.C. (Maspéro). Now it is claimed that it is by means of the Cycle of 25,868 years (the Sidereal Year) that the approximate year of the erection of the Great Pyramid can be ascertained.

Assuming that the long narrow downward passage leading from the entrance was directed towards the pole‐star of the pyramid builders, astronomers have shown that in the year 2,170 B.C. the passage pointed to Alpha Draconis, the then pole‐star.... Mr. Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer, after stating that the pole‐ star was in the required position about 3,350 B.C., as well as in 2,170 B.C., says: “either of these would correspond with the position of the descending passage in the Great Pyramid; but Egyptologists tell us there can absolutely be no doubt that the later epoch is far too late.”(1004)

But we are also told that:

This relative position of Alpha Draconis and Alcyone being an extraordinary one ... it could not occur again for a whole Sidereal Year.(1005)

This demonstrates that, since the Dendera Zodiac shows the passage of three Sidereal Years, the Great Pyramid must have been built 78,000 years ago, or in any case that this possibility deserves to be accepted at least as readily as the later date of 3,350 B.C.

Now on the Zodiac of a certain temple in far Northern India, the same characteristics of the signs as on the Dendera Zodiac are found. Those who know the Hindû symbols and constellations well, will be able to find out from the description of the Egyptian, whether the indications of time are correct or not. On the Dendera Zodiac, as preserved by the modern Egyptian Coptic and Greek Adepts, and explained a little differently by Mackey, the Dion stands upon the Hydra and his tail is almost straight, pointing downwards at an angle of forty or fifty degrees, this position agreeing with the _original_ conformation of these constellations. But adds Mackey:

In many places we see the Lion [Sinha], with his tail turned up over his back, and ending with a Serpent’s head; thereby, shewing that the Lion had been _inverted_: which, indeed, must have been the case with the whole Zodiac, and every other Constellation, when the Pole had been inverted.

Speaking of the _circular_ Zodiac, which is also given by Denon, he says:

There ... the Lion is standing _on_ the Serpent, and his tail forming a curve downward, from which we find that, _though six or seven hundred thousand years_ must have passed between the two positions, yet they had made but little or no difference in the Constellations of Leo and the Hydra; while Virgo is represented very differently in the two—in the circular Zodiac, the Virgin is _nursing her child_: but it seems that they had not had that idea when the Pole was first within the plane of the Ecliptic; for in _this_ Zodiac, as given by Denon, we see three Virgins between the Lion and the Scales, the last of which holds, in her hand, an ear of wheat. It is much to be lamented that, there is in this Zodiac a breach of the figures in the latter part of Leo and the beginning of Virgo, which has taken away one _Decan_ out of each sign.(1006)

Nevertheless, the meaning is plain, as the three Zodiacs belong to three different epochs; namely, to the last three family races of the fourth sub‐race of the Fifth Root‐Race, each of which must have lived approximately from 25,000 to 30,000 years. The first of these, the “Âryan‐ Asiatics,” witnessed the doom of the last of the populations of the Giant Atlanteans(1007) (the Ruta and Daitya Island‐Continents) who perished some 850,000 years ago, toward the close of the Miocene Age.(1008) The fourth sub‐race witnessed the destruction of the last remnant of the Atlanteans—the Âryo‐Atlanteans in the last island of Atlantis, namely, some 11,000 years ago. In order to understand this, the reader is asked to glance at the diagram of the Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Root‐ Race—generally, though hardly correctly, called the Âryan Race—and the explanations appended to it.

Let the reader remember well that which is said of the divisions of Root‐ Races and the evolution of Humanity in this work, and stated clearly and concisely in Mr. Sinnett’s _Esoteric Buddhism_.

1. There are seven Rounds in every Manvantara; this Round is the Fourth, and we are in the Fifth Root‐Race, at present.

2. Each Root‐Race has seven sub‐races.

3. Each sub‐race has, in its turn, seven ramifications, which may be called “branch” or “family” races.

4. The little tribes, shoots, and offshoots of the last‐named are countless, and depend on Karmic action.

Examine the Genealogical Tree hereto appended, and you will understand. The illustration is purely diagrammatic, and is only intended to assist the reader in obtaining a slight grasp of the subject, amidst the confusion which exists between the terms which have been used at different times for the divisions of Humanity. It is also here attempted to express in figures—but only within approximate limits, for the sake of comparison—the duration of time through which it is possible to definitely distinguish one division from another. It would only lead to hopeless confusion if any attempt were made to give accurate dates to a few; for the Races, sub‐races, etc., down to their smallest ramifications, overlap and are entangled with each other until it is nearly impossible to separate them.

[Illustration: Genealogical Tree of the Fifth Root‐Race.]

The Human Race has been compared to a tree, and this serves admirably as an illustration.

The main stem of a tree may be compared to the Root‐Race (A).

Its larger limbs to the various sub‐races; seven in number (B1, B2, etc.).

On each of these limbs are seven “branches,” or “family” races (C).

After this the cactus‐plant is a better illustration, for its fleshy “leaves” are covered with sharp spines, each of which may be compared to a nation or tribe of human beings.

Now our Fifth Root‐Race has already been in existence—as a Race _sui generis_ and quite free from its parent stem—about 1,000,000 years; therefore it must be inferred that each of the four preceding sub‐races has lived approximately 210,000 years; thus each family race has an average existence of about 30,000 years, and thus the European “family race” has still a good many thousand years to run, although the nations or the innumerable spines upon it, vary with each succeeding “season” of three or four thousand years. It is somewhat curious to mark the comparative approximation of duration between the lives of a “family race” and a Sidereal Year.

The knowledge of the foregoing, and the absolutely correct divisions of time, formed part and parcel of the Mysteries, where these Sciences were taught to the Disciples, and where they were transmitted by one Hierophant to another. Everyone is aware that the European Astronomers assign—arbitrarily enough—the date of the invention of the Egyptian Zodiac to the years 2,000 or 2,400 B.C. (Proctor); and insist that the date of this invention coincides with that of the erection of the Great Pyramid. This, to an Occultist and Eastern Astronomer, must appear quite absurd. The Cycle of the Kali Yuga is said to have begun between the 17th and 18th of February in the year 3,102 B.C. Now the Hindûs claim that in the year 20,400 before Kali Yugam, the origin of their Zodiac coincided with the Spring Equinox—there being at the time a conjunction of the Sun and Moon—and Bailly proved by a lengthy and careful computation of that date, that, even if fictitious, the epoch from which they had started to establish the beginning of their Kali Yuga was _very real_. That “epoch is the year 3,102 before our era,” he writes.(1009) The lunar eclipse arriving just a fortnight after the beginning of the Black Age—it took place in a point situated between the Wheat Ear of Virgo and the star Θ of the same constellation. One of their most esoteric Cycles is based upon certain conjunctions and respective positions of Virgo and the Pleiades (Krittika). Hence, as the Egyptians brought their Zodiac from Southern India and Lankâ,(1010) the esoteric meaning was evidently identical. The “three Virgins,” or Virgo in three different positions, meant, with both, the record of the first three “Divine or Astronomical Dynasties,” who taught the Third Root‐Race; and after having abandoned the Atlanteans to their doom, returned, or redescended rather, during the third sub‐race of the Fifth, in order to reveal to saved humanity the mysteries of their birth‐place—the Sidereal Heavens. The same symbolical record of the human Races and the three Dynasties (Gods, Manes—Semi‐divine Astrals of the Third and Fourth—and the Heroes of the Fifth Race) which preceded the purely human kings, was found in the distribution of the tiers and passages of the Egyptian Labyrinth. As the three inversions of the Poles of course changed the face of the Zodiac, a new one had to be constructed each time. In Mackey’s _Sphinxiad_ the speculations of the bold author must have horrified the orthodox portion of the population of Norwich, for he says, fantastically enough:

But, after all, the greatest length of time recorded by those monuments [the Labyrinth, the Pyramids and the Zodiacs] _does not exceed five millions of years_:(1011) which falls short of the records given us both by the [esoteric] Chinese and Hindoos: which latter nation has registered a knowledge of time for seven or eight millions of years:(1012) which I have seen upon a talisman of porcelain.(1013)

The Egyptian priests had the Zodiacs of the Atlantean Asura Maya, as the modern Hindûs still have. As stated in _Esoteric Buddhism_, the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and “Romans” some thousand years ago, were “remnants of the Atlanto‐Âryans”—the former, of the older, or the Ruta Atlanteans; the last‐named, the descendants of the last race of that island, whose sudden disappearance was narrated to Solon by the Egyptian Initiates. The _human_ Dynasty of the older Egyptians, beginning with Menes, had all the _knowledge_ of the Atlanteans, though there was no longer Atlantean blood in their veins. Nevertheless, they had preserved all their Archaic Records. All this has been shown long ago.(1014) And it is just because the Egyptian Zodiac is between 75,000 and 80,000 years old that the Zodiac of the Greeks is far later. Volney has correctly pointed out that it is only 16,984 years old, or up to the present date 17,082.(1015)

Conclusion.

Space forbids us to say anything more, and this part of _The Secret Doctrine_ has to be closed. The forty‐nine Stanzas and the few fragments from the Commentaries which have been given are all that can be published in these Volumes. These, with some still older Records—to which none but the highest Initiates have access—and a whole library of comments, glossaries, and explanations, form the synopsis of Man’s Genesis.

It is from these Commentaries that we have hitherto quoted and tried to explain the hidden meaning of some of the allegories, thus showing the true views of Esoteric Antiquity upon Geology, Anthropology, and even Ethnology. In the Part which follows we will endeavour to establish a still closer metaphysical connection between the earliest Races and their Creators, the _Divine_ Men from other Worlds; accompanying the statements proffered with the most important demonstrations of the same in Esoteric Astronomy and Symbolism.

The duration of the “periods” that separate, in space and time, the Fourth from the Fifth Race—in the historical(1016) or even the legendary beginnings of the latter—is too tremendous for us to offer, even to a Theosophist, any more detailed accounts of them. During the course of the Post‐diluvian Ages, which were marked at certain periodical epochs by the most terrible cataclysms, too many races and nations were born, and disappeared almost without leaving a trace, for anyone to offer any description of the slightest value concerning them. Whether the Masters of Wisdom have a full and consecutive history of our Race from its incipient stage down to the present times; whether they possess the uninterrupted record of man since he developed into a complete physical being, and became thereby the king of the animals and master on this Earth—is not for the writer to say. Most probably they have, and such is our own personal conviction. But if so, this knowledge is only for the highest Initiates, who do not take their students into their confidence. The writer can, therefore, give but what she has herself been taught, and no more, and even this will appear to the profane reader rather as a weird, fantastic dream, than as a possible reality.

This is only natural and as it should be, since for years such was the impression made upon the humble writer of these pages herself. Born and bred in European, matter‐of‐fact and presumably civilized, countries, she assimilated the foregoing with the utmost difficulty. But there are proofs of a certain character which become irrefutable and are undeniable in the long run, to every earnest and unprejudiced mind. For a series of years such were offered to her, and now she has the full certitude that our present Globe and its human Races must have been born, grown and developed in this, and in no other way.

But this is the personal view of the writer; and her orthodoxy cannot be expected to have any more weight than any other “doxy,” in the eyes of those to whom every fresh theory is heterodox until otherwise proved. Therefore are we Occultists fully prepared for such questions as these: How do we know that the writer has not invented the whole scheme? And supposing _she_ has not, how can one tell that the whole of the foregoing, as given in the Stanzas, is not the product of the imagination of the ancients? How could they have preserved the records of such an immense, such an incredible antiquity?

The answer that the history of this world since its formation and to its end is “written in the stars,” _i.e._, is recorded in the Zodiac and Universal Symbolism, whose keys are in the keeping of the Initiates, will hardly satisfy the doubters. The antiquity of the Zodiac in Egypt is much doubted, and it is denied point‐blank with regard to India. “Your conclusions are often excellent, but your premises are always doubtful,” the writer was once told by a profane friend. To this, the answer came that it was at least one point gained on scientific syllogisms, for, with the exception of a few problems from the domain of purely Physical Science, both the premises and conclusions of men of Science are as hypothetical as they are almost invariably erroneous. And if they do not so appear to the profane, the reason is simply this: the said profane are very little aware, taking as they do their scientific data on faith, that both premises and conclusions are generally the product of the same brains, which, however learned, are not infallible—a truism demonstrated daily by the shifting and re‐shifting of scientific theories and speculations.

However it may be, the records of the temples, zodiacal and traditional, as well as the ideographic records of the East, as read by the Adepts of the Sacred Science or Vidyâ, are not a whit more doubtful than the so‐ called ancient history of the European nations, now edited, corrected, and amplified by half a century of archæological discoveries, and the very problematical readings of the Assyrian tiles, cuneiform fragments, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Our data also are based upon the same “readings”—in addition to an almost inexhaustible number of secret works of which Europe knows nothing—_plus_ the perfect knowledge by the Initiates of the symbolism of every word so recorded. Some of these records belong to an immense antiquity. Every Archæologist and Palæontologist is acquainted with the ideographic productions of certain semi‐savage tribes, who from time immemorial have aimed at rendering their thoughts symbolically. This is the earliest mode of recording events and ideas. And how old this knowledge is in the human race may be inferred from some signs, evidently ideographic, found on hatchets of the Palæolithic period. The Red Indian tribes of America, only a few years ago, comparatively speaking, petitioned the President of the United States to grant them possession of four small lakes, the petition being written on the tiny surface of a piece of fabric, which was covered with barely a dozen representations of animals and birds. The American savages have a number of such different kinds of writing, but not one of our Scientists is yet familiar with, or even knows of, the early hieroglyphic cypher, still preserved in some Fraternities, and named in Occultism the Senzar. Moreover, all those who have decided to regard such modes of writing—_e.g._, the ideographs of the Red Indians, and even the Chinese characters—as “attempts of the early races of mankind to express their untutored thoughts,” will decidedly object to our statement, that writing was invented by the Atlanteans, and not at all by the Phœnicians. Indeed, such a claim as that writing was known to mankind many hundreds of millenniums ago, in the face of the Philologists who have decreed that writing was unknown in the days of Pânini, in India, as also to the Greeks in the time of Homer, will be met by general disapprobation, if not with silent scorn. All denial and ridicule notwithstanding, the Occultists will maintain the claim, and simply for this reason: from Bacon down to our modern Royal Society, we have too long a period full of the most ludicrous mistakes made by Science, to warrant our believing in modern scientific assumptions rather than in the statements of our Teachers. Writing, our Scientists say, was unknown to Pânini; and this Sage nevertheless composed a grammar which contains 3,996 rules, and is the most perfect of all the grammars that were ever made! Pânini is made out to have lived barely a few centuries B.C., by the most liberal; and the rocks in Iran and Central Asia—whence the Philologists and Historians show us the ancestors of the same Pânini, the Brâhmans, coming into India—are _covered with writing_, two and three thousand years old, at least, and twelve thousand, according to some fearless Palæontologists.

Writing was an _ars incognita_ in the days of Hesiod and Homer, agreeably to Grote, and was unknown to the Greeks so late as 770 B.C.; and the Phœnicians who had _invented_ it, and knew writing as far back as 1,500 B.C. at the earliest,(1017) were living among the Greeks, and elbowing them, all the time! All these scientific and contradictory conclusions disappeared, however, into thin air, when Schliemann discovered (_a_) the site of ancient Troy, whose actual existence had been so long regarded as a fable, and (_b_) excavated from that site earthenware vessels with inscriptions _in characters unknown_ to Palæontologists and the all‐ denying Sanskritists. Who will now deny Troy, or these archaic inscriptions? As Professor Virchow witnesses:

I was myself an eye‐witness of two such discoveries, and helped to gather the articles together. The slanderers have long since been silenced, who were not ashamed to charge the discoverer with an imposture.(1018)

Nor were truthful women spared any more than truthful men. Du Chaillu, Gordon Cumming, Madame Merian,(1019) Bruce, and a host of others were charged with lying.

Says the author of _Mythical Monsters_, who gives this information in the Introduction:(1020)

Madame Merian was accused of deliberate falsehood in reference to her description of a bird‐eating spider nearly two hundred years ago. But now‐a‐days ... reliable observers have confirmed it in regard to South America, India, and elsewhere.

Audubon was similarly accused by botanists of having invented the yellow water‐lily, which he figured in his _Birds of the South_ under the name of Nymphæa lutea, and after having lain under the imputation for years, was confirmed at last by the discovery of the long‐lost flower in Florida ... in ... 1876.(1021)

And, as Audubon was called a liar for this, and for his Haliætus Washingtonii,(1022) so Victor Hugo was ridiculed for his marvellous word‐ painting of the devil‐fish, and his description of a man becoming its helpless victim.

The thing was derided as a monstrous impossibility; yet within a few years were discovered, on the shores of Newfoundland, cuttle‐ fishes with arms extending to thirty feet in length, and capable of dragging a good‐sized boat beneath the surface; and their

## action has been reproduced _for centuries past_ ... by Japanese

artists.(1023)

And if Troy was denied, and regarded as a myth; the existence of Herculaneum and Pompeii declared a fiction; the travels of Marco Polo laughed at and called as absurd a fable as one of Baron Münchausen’s tales, why should the writer of _Isis Unveiled_ and of _The Secret Doctrine_ be any better treated? Mr. Charles Gould, the author of the above‐cited volume quotes, in his excellent work, a few lines from _Macmillan_ (1860), which are as true as life, and too much to the point not to be reproduced:

When a naturalist, either by visiting such spots of earth as are still out of the way, or by his good fortune, finds a very queer plant or animal, he is forthwith accused of inventing his game.... As soon as the creature is found to sin against preconception, the great (mis?) guiding spirit, _à priori_ by name, who furnishes philosophers with their omniscience _pro re natâ_, whispers that no such thing _can_ be, and forthwith there is a charge of hoax. The heavens themselves have been charged with hoaxes. When Leverrier and Adams predicted a planet by calculation, it was gravely asserted in some quarters that the planet which had been calculated was not _the_ planet but another which had clandestinely and improperly got into the neighbourhood of the true body. _The disposition to suspect hoax is stronger than the disposition to hoax._ Who was it that first announced that the classical writings of Greece and Rome were one huge hoax perpetrated by the monks in what the announcer would be as little or less inclined than Dr. Maitland to call the dark ages?(1024)

Thus let it be. No disbeliever who takes _The Secret Doctrine_ for a “hoax” is forced, or even asked, to credit our statements, which have already been proclaimed to be such by certain very clever American journalists even before the work went to press.(1025)

Nor, after all, is it necessary that any one should believe in the Occult Sciences and the Old Teachings, before he knows anything of, or even believes in his own Soul. No great truth has ever been accepted _à __ priori_, and generally a century or two has passed before it has begun to glimmer in the human consciousness as a possible verity, except in such cases as the positive discovery of the thing claimed as a fact. The truths of to‐day are the falsehoods and errors of yesterday, and _vice versà_. It is only in the twentieth century that portions, if not the whole, of the present work will be vindicated.

It is not destructive of our statements, therefore, even if Sir John Evans does affirm that writing was unknown in the Stone Age. For it may have been unknown during that period in the Fifth Âryan Race, and yet have been perfectly known to the Atlanteans of the Fourth, in the palmy days of their highest civilization. The cycles of the rise and fall of nations and races are there to account for it.

If told that there have been cases before now of forged pseudographs being palmed off on the credulous, and that our work may be classed with Jacolliot’s _Bible in India_—although, by the way, there are more truths mixed up with its errors than are found in the works of orthodox and recognized Orientalists—the charge and comparison will dismay us very little. We bide our time. Even the famous _Ezour Veda_ of the last century, considered by Voltaire “the most precious gift from the East to the West,” and by Max Müller “about the silliest book that can be read,” is not altogether without facts and truths in it. The cases when the _à priori_ negations of specialists have become justified by subsequent corroborations, form but an insignificant percentage of those that have been fully vindicated by subsequent discoveries and confirmed, to the great dismay of the learned objectors. _Ezour Veda_ was a very small bone of contention compared with the triumph of Sir William Jones, Anquetil du Perron, and others in the matter of Sanskrit and its literature. Such facts are recorded by Professor Max Müller himself, who, speaking of the discomfiture of Dugald Stewart and Co. in connection with this, states that:

If the facts about Sanskrit were true, Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from them were inevitable. He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanskrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanskrit had been put together after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch‐forgers and liars, the Brâhmans, and that the whole of Sanskrit literature was an imposition.(1026)

The writer is quite willing and feels proud to keep company with these Brâhmans, and other _historical_ “liars,” in the opinion of our modern Dugald Stewarts. She has lived too long, and her experience has been too varied and personal, for her not to know at least something of human nature. “When you doubt, abstain,” says the wise Zoroaster, whose prudent aphorism is found corroborated in every case by daily life and experience. Yet, like St. John the Baptist, this Sage of the past ages is found preaching in the desert, in company with a more modern Philosopher, namely Bacon, who offers the same priceless bit of practical wisdom, when saying:

In contemplation [in any question of knowledge, we add], if a man begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but _if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties_.

With this piece of advice from the father of English Philosophy to the representatives of British Scepticism we ought to close the debate, but our Theosophical readers are entitled to a final piece of Occult information.

Enough has been said to show that evolution in general, events, mankind, and everything else in Nature proceed in cycles. We have spoken of seven Races, five of which have nearly completed their earthly career, and have claimed that every Root‐Race, with its sub‐races and innumerable family divisions and tribes, was entirely distinct from its preceding and succeeding Race. This will be objected to, on the authority of uniform experience, in the question of Anthropology and Ethnology. Man—save in colour and type, and perhaps a difference in facial peculiarities and cranial capacity—has been ever the same under every climate and in every part of the world, say the Naturalists; ay, even in stature—this, while maintaining that man descends from the same unknown ancestor as the ape; a claim that is logically impossible without an infinite variation of stature and form from his first evolution into a biped. The very logical persons who maintain both propositions are welcome to their paradoxical views. Once more we address only those who, doubting the general derivation of myths from “the contemplation of the visible workings of external nature,” think it

Less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demi‐gods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions, are transformations, than to believe them to be inventions.

It is only such “transformations” in physical nature, as much as in the memory and conceptions of our present mankind, that the Secret Doctrine teaches. It confronts the purely speculative hypotheses of Modern Science, based upon the experience and exact observations of barely a few centuries, with the unbroken tradition and records of its Sanctuaries; and brushing away that tissue of cobweb‐like theories, spun in the darkness that covers a period of hardly a few millenniums, which Europeans call their “history,” the Old Science says to us: Listen, now, to my version of the memoirs of Humanity.

The Human Races are born one from the other, grow, develop, become old, and die. Their sub‐races and nations follow the same rule. If your all‐ denying Modern Science and so‐called Philosophy do not contest that the human family is composed of a variety of well‐defined types and races, it is only because the fact is undeniable; no one would say that there was no external difference between an Englishman, an African negro, and a Japanese or Chinaman. On the other hand, it is formally denied by most Naturalists that _mixed_ human races, _i.e._, the seeds for entirely new races, are any longer formed in our days, although indeed the latter is maintained on good grounds by De Quatrefages and some others.

Nevertheless our general proposition will not be accepted. It will be said that whatever forms man has passed through in the long pre‐historic past there are no more changes for him—save certain variations, as at present—in the future. Hence that our Sixth and Seventh Root‐Races are fictions.

To this it is again answered: How do you know? Your experience is limited to a few thousand years, to less than a day in the whole age of Humanity and to the present types of the actual continents and isles of our Fifth Race. How can you tell what will or will not be? Meanwhile, such is the prophecy of the Secret Books and their not uncertain statements.

Since the beginning of the Atlantean Race many million years have passed, yet we find the last of the Atlanteans still mixed up with the Âryan element, 11,000 years ago. This shows the enormous overlapping of one Race over the Race which succeeds it, though in characters and external type the elder loses its characteristics, and assumes the new features of the younger Race. This is proved in all the formations of mixed human races. Now, Occult Philosophy teaches that even now, under our very eyes, the new Race and races are preparing to be formed, and that it is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced.

Pure Anglo‐Saxons hardly three hundred years ago, the Americans of the United States have already become a nation apart, and, owing to a strong admixture of various nationalities and inter‐marriage, almost a race _sui generis_, not only mentally, but also physically. To quote from De Quatrefages:

Every mixed race, when uniform and settled, has been able to play the part of a primary race in fresh crossings. Mankind, in its present state, has thus been formed, certainly for the greatest part, by the successive crossing of a number of races _at present undetermined_.(1027)

Thus the Americans have become in only three centuries a “primary race,” temporarily, before becoming a race apart, and strongly separated from all other now existing races. They are, in short, the germs of the _sixth_ sub‐race, and in some few hundred years more, will become most decidedly the pioneers of that race which must succeed to the present European or fifth sub‐race, in all its new characteristics. After this, in about 25,000 years, they will launch into preparations for the seventh sub‐race; until, in consequence of cataclysms—the first series of those which must one day destroy Europe, and still later the whole Âryan Race (and thus affect both Americas), as also most of the lands directly connected with the confines of our continent and isles—the Sixth Root‐Race will have appeared on the stage of our Round. When shall this be? Who knows save the great Masters of Wisdom, perchance, and they are as silent upon the subject as the snow‐capped peaks that tower above them. All we know is, that it will silently come into existence; so silently, indeed, that for long millenniums will its pioneers—the peculiar children who will grow into peculiar men and women—be regarded as anomalous _lusûs naturæ_, abnormal oddities physically and mentally. Then, as they increase, and their numbers become with every age greater, one day they will awake to find themselves in a majority. Then the present men will begin to be regarded as exceptional mongrels, until they die out in their turn in civilized lands, surviving only in small groups on islands—the mountain peaks of to‐day—where they will vegetate, degenerate, and finally die out, perhaps millions of years hence, as the Aztecs have, as the Nyam‐Nyam and the dwarfish Moola Koorumba of the Nilghiri Hills are dying. All these are the remnants of once mighty races, the recollection of whose existence has entirely died out of the remembrance of modern generations, just as we shall vanish from the memory of the Sixth Race Humanity. The Fifth will overlap the Sixth Race for many hundreds of millenniums, changing with it more slowly than its new successor, still changing in stature, general physique, and mentality, just as the Fourth overlapped our Âryan Race, and the Third had overlapped the Atlanteans.

This process of preparation for the Sixth great Race must last throughout the whole sixth and seventh sub‐races.(1028) But the _last_ remnants of the Fifth Continent will not disappear until some time after the birth of the _new_ Race; when another and _new_ dwelling, the Sixth Continent, will have appeared above the _new_ waters on the face of the Globe, so as to receive the new stranger. To it also will emigrate and there will settle all those who will be fortunate enough to escape the general disaster. When this shall be—as just said—it is not for the writer to know. Only, as Nature no more proceeds by sudden jumps and starts, than man changes suddenly from a child into a mature man, the final cataclysm will be preceded by many smaller submersions and destructions both by wave and volcanic fires. The exultant pulse will beat high in the heart of the race now in the American zone, but there will be no more Americans when the Sixth Race commences; no more, in fact, than Europeans; for they will have now become a _new Race, and many new nations_. Yet the Fifth will not die, but will survive for a while; overlapping the new Race for many hundred thousands of years to come, it will, as we have just said, become transformed with it more slowly than its new successor—still getting entirely altered in mentality, general physique, and stature. Mankind will not grow again into giant bodies as in the case of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans; because while the evolution of the Fourth Race led the latter down to the very bottom of materiality in its physical development, the present Race is on its ascending arc; and the Sixth will be rapidly growing out of its bonds of matter, and even of flesh.

Thus it is the mankind of the New World, the senior by far of our Old one—a fact men had also forgotten—of Pâtâla (the Antipodes, or the Nether World, as America is called in India), whose mission and Karma it is, to sow the seeds for a forthcoming, grander, and far more glorious Race than any of those we know of at present. The Cycles of Matter will be succeeded by Cycles of Spirituality and a fully developed mind. On the law of parallel history and races, the majority of the future mankind will be composed of glorious Adepts. Humanity is the child of Cyclic Destiny, and not one of its Units can escape its unconscious mission, or get rid of the burden of its coöperative work with Nature. Thus will Mankind, race after race, perform its appointed Cyclic Pilgrimage. Climates will, and have already begun to, change, each Tropical Year after the other dropping one sub‐race, but only to beget another higher race on the ascending cycle; while a series of other less favoured groups—the failures of Nature—will, like some individual men, vanish from the human family without even leaving a trace behind.

Such is the course of Nature under the sway of Karmic Law; of Ever‐present and Ever‐becoming Nature. For, in the words of a Sage, known only to a few Occultists:

_The Present is the child of the Past; the Future, the begotten of the Present. And yet, O present moment! knowest thou not that thou hast no parent, nor canst thou have a child; that thou art ever begetting but thyself? Before thou hast even begun to say __“__I am the progeny of the departed moment, the child of the past,__”__ thou hast become that past itself. Before thou utterest the last syllable, behold! thou art no more the Present but verily that Future. Thus, are the Past, the Present, and the Future the Ever‐living Trinity in One—the Mahámâyâ of the Absolute __“__IS.__”_

## PART II. THE ARCHAIC SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD‐RELIGIONS.

The narratives of the Doctrine are its cloak. The simple look only at the garment—that is, upon the narrative of the Doctrine; more they know not. The instructed, however, see not merely the cloak, but what the cloak covers.—_Zohar_ (iii. 152; FRANCK, 119).

The Mysteries of the Faith (are) not to be divulged to all.... It is requisite to hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken.—_Stromateis_ (12; CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS).

Section I. Esoteric Tenets Corroborated in Every Scripture.

In view of the strangeness of the teachings, and of many a doctrine which from the modern scientific standpoint must seem absurd, some necessary and additional explanations have to be made. The theories contained in the Stanzas of Volume II are even more difficult to assimilate than those which are embodied in Volume I, on Cosmogony. Theology, therefore, has to be questioned here, in Part II, as Science will be in Part III, for since our doctrines differ so widely from the current ideas of both Materialism and Theology, the Occultists must be ever prepared to repel the attacks of either or of both.

The reader can never be too often reminded that, as the abundant quotations from various old Scriptures prove, these teachings are as old as the world; and that the present work is simply an attempt to render, in modern language and in a phraseology with which the scientific and educated student is familiar, archaic Genesis and History as taught in certain Asiatic centres of Esoteric Learning. These must be accepted or rejected on their own merits, fully or partially; but not before they have been carefully compared with the corresponding theological dogmas and the modern scientific theories and speculations.

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

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

So divided and personal are the opinions of Sanskritists as to the importance and intrinsic value of the _Rig Veda_, that these opinions become entirely biassed whichever way they incline. Thus Prof. Max Müller declares that:

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

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

As Barth says:

The poetry it [the _Rig Veda_] contains appears to me, on the contrary, to be of a singularly refined character and artificially elaborated, full of allusions and reticences, of pretensions [?] to mysticism and theosophic insight; and the manner of its expression is such as reminds one more frequently of the phraseology in use among certain small groups of initiated than the poetic language of a large community.(1030)

We will not stop to enquire of the critic what he can know of the phraseology in use among the “initiated,” or whether he belongs himself to such a group; for, in the latter case, he would hardly have used such language. But the above shows the remarkable disagreement between scholars even with regard to the _external_ character of the _Rig Veda_. What, then, can any of the modern Sanskritists know about its _internal_ or _esoteric_ meaning, beyond the correct inference of Barth, that this Scripture _has been compiled by Initiates_?

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

Nor is there any need of proselytizing. As remarked by the wise Cicero:

Time destroys the speculations of man, but it confirms the judgment of nature.

Let us bide our time. Meanwhile, it is not in the human constitution to witness in silence the destruction of one’s Gods, whether they be true or false. And as Theology and Materialism have combined together to destroy the old Gods of antiquity and seek to disfigure every old philosophical conception, it is but just that the lovers of the Old Wisdom should defend their position, by proving that the whole arsenal of the two is, at best, formed of new weapons made out of very old material.

Section II. Adam=Adami.

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

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

The lowest designation, or the Deity in Nature, the more general term Elohim, is translated God.(1031)

A curious work was translated in 1860 or thereabout, by the Orientalist Chwolsohn, and presented to ever‐incredulous and flippant Europe under the innocent title of _Nabathean Agriculture_. In the opinion of the translator that archaic volume _is a complete initiation_ into the mysteries of the Pre‐Adamite nations, on the authority of _undeniably authentic documents_. It is an invaluable compendium, the full epitome of the doctrines, arts and sciences, not only of the Chaldæans, but also of the Assyrians and Canaanites of the pre‐historic ages.(1032) These Nabatheans—as some critics thought—were simply the Sabæans, or Chaldæan star‐worshippers. The work is a retranslation from the Arabic, into which language it was at first translated from the Chaldæan.

Masoudi, the Arabian historian, speaks of these Nabatheans, and explains their origin in this wise:

After the Deluge [?] the nations established themselves in various countries. Among these were the Nabatheans, who founded the city of Babylon, and were those descendants of Ham who settled in the same province under the leadership of Nimrod, the son of Cush, who was the son of Ham and great‐grandson of Noah. This took place at the time when Nimrod received the governorship of Babylonia as the delegate of Dzahhak named Biourasp.(1033)

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

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

The details given by the God for the benefit and instruction of mortals, show periods of incalculable duration and a series of numberless kingdoms and Dynasties that preceded the appearance on Earth of Adami (the “red‐ earth”). These periods, as might have been expected, have roused the defenders of the chronology of the biblical dead‐letter meaning almost to fury. De Rougemont was the first to make a _levée_‐in‐arms against the translator. He reproaches him with _sacrificing_ Moses to anonymous authors.(1035) Berosus, he urges, however great were _his chronological errors_, was at least in perfect accord with the prophet with regard to the first men, since he speaks of Alorus‐Adam, of Xisuthrus‐Noah, and of Belus‐Nimrod, etc. Therefore, he adds, the work must be an _apocryphon_ to be ranged with its contemporaries—the _Fourth Book of Esdras_, the _Book of Enoch_, the _Sibylline Oracles_, and the _Book of Hermes_—_every one of these dating no further back than two or three centuries B.C._ Ewald came down still harder on Chwolsohn, and finally M. Renan, who in the _Revue Germanique_(1036) asks him to show reason why his _Nabathean Agriculture_ should not be the fraudulent work of some Jew of the third or fourth century of our era? It can hardly be otherwise—argues the romancer of the _Vie de Jésus_, since, in this _in‐folio_ on Astrology and Sorcery:

We recognize in the personages introduced Qû‐tâmy, all the patriarchs of the biblical legends, such as Adam‐Adami, Anouka‐ Noah, and his Ibrahim‐Abraham, etc.

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

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

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

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

The ancient Babylonians had an intercessor between men and the gods ... and Nebo, was the “proclaimer” or “prophet,” as he made known the desire of his father Merodach.(1040)

Nebo is a Creator, like Budha, of the Fourth, and also of the Fifth, Race. For the former starts a new race of Adepts, and the latter, the Solar‐ Lunar Dynasty, or the men of these Races and Round. Both are the Adams of their respective creatures. Adam‐Adami is a personation of the _dual_ Adam: of the paradigmatic Adam‐Kadmon, the Creator, and of the lower Adam, the terrestrial, who, as the Syrian Kabalists have it, had only Nephesh, the “breath of life,” but _no Living Soul_, until after his Fall.

If, therefore, Renan persists in regarding the Chaldæan Scriptures—or what remains of them—as apocryphal, it is quite immaterial to truth and fact. There are other Orientalists who may be of a different opinion; and even were they not, it would still really matter very little. These doctrines contain the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy, and this must suffice. To those who understand nothing of symbology it may appear astrolatry, pure and simple, or to him who would conceal the Esoteric Truth, even “heathenish foolishness.” Maimonides, however, while expressing scorn for the Esotericism in the religion of other nations, confessed Esotericism and Symbology in his own, preached silence and secrecy upon the true meaning of Mosaic sayings, and thus came to grief. The Doctrines of Qû‐tâmy, the Chaldæan, are, in short, the allegorical rendering of the religion of the earliest nations of the Fifth Race.

Why then should M. Renan treat the name “Adam‐Adami” with such academical contempt? The author of the _Origins of Christianity_ evidently knows nothing of the origins of Pagan symbolism or of Esotericism either, otherwise he would have known that the name Adam‐Adami was a form of a universal symbol, referring, _even with the Jews_, not to one man, but to four distinct humanities or mankinds. This is very easily proven.

The Kabalists teach the existence of four distinct Adams, or the transformation of four consecutive Adams, the emanations from the Dyooknah, or Divine Phantom, of the Heavenly Man, an ethereal combination of Neshamah, the highest Soul or Spirit; this Adam having, of course, neither a gross human body, nor a _body of desire_. This Adam is the Prototype (Tzure) of the second Adam. That they represent our Five Races, is certain, as everyone can see by their description in the _Kabalah_. The first is the Perfect Holy Adam, “a shadow that disappeared” (the Kings of Edom), produced from the divine Tzelem (Image); the second is called the Protoplastic Androgyne Adam of the future terrestrial and separated Adam; the third Adam is the man made of “dust” (the first, Innocent Adam); and the fourth, is the supposed forefather of our own race—the Fallen Adam. See, however, the admirably clear description of these in Isaac Myer’s _Qabbalah_. He gives only four Adams, because of the Kings of Edom, no doubt, and adds:

The fourth Adam ... was clothed with skin, flesh, nerves, etc. This answers to the Lower _Nephesh_ and _Guff_, _i.e._, body, united. He has the animal power of reproduction and continuance of species.(1041)

This is the _human_ Root‐Race.

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

Among the Qabbalists, the necessity to continued creation and existence is called the Balance.(1042)

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

This will be demonstrated in the following Section.

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

Section III. The “Holy of Holies.” Its Degradation.

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

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

When the esoteric meaning of this recess is made clear, however, the profane will be better able to understand why David danced “uncovered” before the _Ark_ of the Covenant, and was so anxious to appear _vile_ for the sake of his “Lord,” and _base_ in his own sight.(1046)

The Ark is the navi‐form Argha of the Mysteries. Parkhurst, who has a long dissertation upon it in his Greek dictionary, and who never breathes a word about it in his Hebrew lexicon, explains it thus:

Archê (Ἀρχὴ) in this application answers to the Hebrew Rasit or wisdom, ... a word which had the meaning of the emblem of the female generative power, the Arg or Arca, in which the germ of all nature was supposed to float or brood on the great abyss during the interval which took place after every mundane cycle.

Quite so; and the Jewish Ark of the Covenant had _precisely the same significance_; with the supplementary addition that, instead of a beautiful and chaste sarcophagus (the symbol of the Matrix of Nature and Resurrection), as in the Sanctum Sanctorum of the Pagans, they had the Ark made still more _realistic_ in its construction by the two Cherubs set up on the coffer or Ark of the Covenant, facing each other, with their wings spread in such a manner as to form a perfect Yoni (as now seen in India). Besides which, this generative symbol had its significance enforced by the four mystic letters of Jehovah’s name, namely, IHVH (יהוה); Jod (י) meaning the _membrum virile_; Hé (ה), the _womb_; Vau (ו), a crook or a hook, a nail, and Hé (ה) again, meaning also “an opening”; the whole forming the perfect _bisexual_ emblem or symbol or I(e)H(o)V(a)H, the male and female symbol.

Perhaps also, when people realize the true meaning of the office and title of the Kadesh Kadeshim, the “holy ones,” or “the consecrated to the _Temple of the Lord_”—the “Holy of Holies” of these “holy ones” may assume an aspect far from edifying.

Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic God.

“Who shall ascend into the hill [the high place] of the Lord?” asks the holy king David, “Who shall stand in the place of his Kadushu (קדשו)?”(1047) Kadesh may mean in one sense to “devote,” “hallow,” “sanctify,” and even to “initiate” or to “set apart”; but it also means the ministry of lascivious rites—the Venus‐ worship—and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in _Deuteronomy_, xxiii. 17; _Hosea_, iv. 14; and _Genesis_, xxxviii. 15‐22. The “holy” Kadeshim of the _Bible_ were identical, as to the duties of their office, with the Nautch‐girls of the later Hindû pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim, or Galli, lived “by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove,” or the bust of Venus‐Astarte.(1048)

The dance performed by David round the Ark was the “circle‐dance,” said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh,(1049) and the leaping of the prophets of Baal.(1050) It was simply a characteristic of the Sabæan worship, for it denoted the motion of the Planets round the Sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of Michal and the King’s reply are very expressive.(1051)

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

Mistaken is he who accepts the kabalistic works of to‐day, and the interpretations of the _Zohar_ by the Rabbis, for the genuine kabalistic lore of old!(1053) For no more to‐day than in the day of Frederick von Schelling does the _Kabalah_ accessible to Europe and America contain much more than

Ruins and fragments, much distorted, remnants still of that _primitive system which is the key to all religious systems_.(1054)

The oldest system and the Chaldæan _Kabalah_ were identical. The latest renderings of the _Zohar_ are those of the Synagogue in the early centuries—_i.e._, the Thorah (or Law), dogmatic and uncompromising.

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

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

This requires no proof. Astoreth was in one sense an impersonal symbol of Nature, the Ship of Life carrying throughout the boundless Sidereal Ocean the germs of all being. And when she was not identified with Venus, like every other “Queen of Heaven” to whom cakes and buns were offered in sacrifice, Astoreth became the reflection of the Chaldæan “Nuah, the Universal Mother” (the female Noah, considered as one with the Ark), and of the female Triad, Ana, Belita and Davkina; called, when blended into one, “Sovereign Goddess, Lady of the Nether Abyss, Mother of Gods, Queen of the Earth, and Queen of Fecundity.” Later, Belita or Tamtu(1057) (the sea), the Mother of the City of Erech (the great Chaldæan Necropolis), became Eve; and now she is Mary the Virgin, in the Latin Church, represented as standing on the Crescent Moon, and, at times on the Globe, to vary the programme. The Navis, or ship‐like form of the crescent, which blends in itself all those common symbols of the Ship of Life, such as Noah’s Ark, the Yoni of the Hindûs, and the Ark of the Covenant, is the female symbol of the Universal “Mother of the Gods,” and is now found under its Christian symbol in every Church, as the “nave” (from _navis_).(1058) The Navis, the Sidereal Vessel, is fructified by the Spirit of Life—the male God; or, as the learned Kenealy, in his _Apocalypse_, very appropriately calls it—the Holy Spirit. In Western religious symbology the crescent was the male, the full Moon the female, aspect of that universal Spirit. The mystic word ALM, which the prophet Mahomet prefixed to many chapters of the _Korân_, alludes to _her_ as the Alm, the Immaculate Virgin of the Heavens.(1059) And—the sublime ever falling into the ridiculous—it is from this root Alm that we have to derive the word Almeh—the Egyptian dancing‐girls. The latter are “virgins” of the same type as the Nautchees in India, and the (female) Kadeshim, the “holy ones” of the Jewish temples—consecrated to Jehovah, who represented both sexes—whose _holy_ functions in the Israelite fanes were _identical_ with those of the Nautchees.

Now Eustathius declares that IO (ΙΩ) means the Moon, in the dialect of the Argians; it was also one of the names of the Moon in Egypt. Says Jablonski:

ΙΩ, _Ioh, Ægyptiis Lunam significat neque habent illi, in communi sermonis usu, aliud nomen quo Lunam designent præter IO_.

The Pillar and Circle (IO), which with Pythagoras was the perfect number contained in the Tetraktys,(1060) became later a _preëminently phallic_ number—amongst the Jews, foremost of all, with whom it is the male and female Jehovah.

This is how a scholar explains it:

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

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

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

And now it may be as well to remind the reader of what we said of IAO in _Isis Unveiled_:

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

The above receives corroboration in a private letter from a very learned Kabalist. In our first volume,(1066) it is stated that exoterically Brahma (neuter), so flippantly and so often confused by the Orientalists with Brahmâ (the male), is sometimes called Kâla‐hansa, the “Swan in Eternity,” and the Esoteric meaning of Aham‐sa, is given as “I [am] he,” So‐ham being equal to Sah “he,” and Aham “I”—a mystic anagram and permutation. It is also the “four‐faced” Brahmâ, the Chatur‐mukham (the Perfect Cube) forming itself _within_, and _from_, the Infinite Circle; and again the use of the 1, 3, 5, and 7/7 = 14, as the Esoteric Hierarchy of the Dhyân Chohans, is explained. On this, the said correspondent comments in the following manner:

Of the 1, 3, 5, and twice 7, intending, and very especially, 13514, which on a circle may be read as 31415 (or π value), I think there cannot be a possibility of doubting; and especially when considered with symbol marks on Sacr’,(1067) “Chakra,” or Circle of Vishnu.

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

[Illustration: Slope of entrance to King’s Chamber]

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

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

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

That Adam was commanded by God that his dead body should be kept above ground till a fulness of time should come to commit it ... to the _middle of the earth_ by a priest of the Most High God....

Therefore,

Noah daily prayed in the Ark before the “Body of Adam”—(1074)

or before the Phallus in the Ark, or Holy of Holies, again. He who is a Kabalist and accustomed to the incessant permutation of biblical names, once they are interpreted numerically and symbolically, will understand what is meant.

The two words of which Jehovah is composed, make up the original idea of male‐female, as birth‐originator, for the י was the _membrum virile_ and _Hovah_ was _Eve_. So ... the _perfect one_, as originator of measures, takes also the form of _birth_ origin, as _hermaphrodite one_; hence, the phallic use of form.(1075)

Besides, the same author shows and demonstrates numerically and geometrically that (_a_) Arets, “earth,” Adam, “man,” and H‐adam‐h, are cognate with each other, and are _personified_ in the _Bible_ under one form, as the Egyptian and Hebrew Mars, God of Generation;(1076) and (_b_) that Jehovah, or Jah, is Noah, for _Jehovah is Noah_ in Hebrew would be ינח or literally in English, _Inch_.

The above affords, then, a key to the said traditions. Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed Saviour of Humanity, who carries in his Ark or Argha (the Moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the “Body of Adam,” which body is the image of the Creator, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the “Prophet of the Moon,” the Argha or “Holy of Holies” of the Yod (י). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses _is in the Moon_—_i.e._, the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are kabalistically once more permutations, as has been shown. Says the author of _The Source of Measures_:

There is one fact in regard to Moses and his works too important to be omitted. When he is instructed by the Lord as to his mission, the _power_ name assumed by the Deity is, _I am that I am_, the Hebrew words being

אהיה אשר אהיה ;

a various reading of יהוה. Now, Moses is משה, and equals

345.

Add the values of the _new form_ of the name Jehovah, 21 + 501 + 21 = 543, or, by a reverse reading, 345; thus showing Moses to be a form of Jehovah in this combination. 21 ÷ 2 = 105, or, reversed, 501, so that the _asher_ or the _that_ in _I am‐that‐I am_ is simply a guide to a use of 21 or 7 × 3.501^2 = 251 +, a very valuable pyramid number, etc.(1077)

For a clearer explanation for the benefit of Non‐Kabalists we put it thus: “I am that I am” is in Hebrew:

Âhiyé is ה י ה א, or 5 10 5 1.

Asher is ר ש א, or 200 300 1.

Âhiyé is ה י ה א, or 5 10 5 1.

Add the numbers of these separate words and you have:

אהיה (21) אשר (501) אהיה (21).

This relates to the process of descending in Fire on the Mount to make Man, etc., and is explained to be but a _check_ and use of the numbers of the mountains; for on one side we have 10 + 5 + 6 = 21, down the middle 501, and on the other side 6 + 5 + 10 = 21.(1078)

The “Holy of Holies,” both kabalistic and rabbinical, is thus shown as an international symbol, and common property. Neither had originated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of the half‐initiated Levites, the symbol had acquired with them a significance which it scarcely has with any other people to this day, and which it was originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingam and Yoni of the modern average Hindû is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the rabbinical “Holy of Holies”—but _it is no worse_; and this is a point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious Philosophies. For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and philosophy, the _spirit_ of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so‐called “Wisdom,” applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets are there, to show the walk in life of the chosen but “stiff‐ necked” people before, during, and after, the days of Moses. That they have had at one time the Wisdom‐Religion and the use of its universal language and symbols is proved by the same Esotericism existing to this day in India with regard to the “Holy of Holies.” This, as said above, was and still is the passage through the “Golden” Cow in the same _stooping position_ as was necessitated by the Gallery of the Pyramid, which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew Esotericism. The whole difference lies in the spirit of the interpretation. With the Hindûs as with the ancient Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with the Hebrews it was _realistic_ and _physiological_. It pointed to the first sexual separation of the human race—Eve giving birth to Cain‐Jehovah, as shown in _The Source of Measures_; to the consummation of terrestrial physiological union and conception—as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel’s blood, Habel being the feminine principle; and to child‐bearing—a process shown to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam’s Third Son, Seth, with whose Son Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah‐hovah, the male Jod and Havah or Eve, to wit, male and female beings.(1079) Thus the difference lies in the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judæan Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Âryan Dvijas. The worship of the “God in the Ark” dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old _Kabalah_ edited and reëdited, has become tainted with it.

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

Carlyle has wise words for both these nations. With the Hindû Âryan—the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth—religion has ever been, in his words,

An everlasting lode‐star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night around him.

The religion of the Hindû detaches him from this Earth; therefore, even now, the cow‐symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the “Masters” and “Lords” of European potencies, the Israelites, certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them

Religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on _mere calculation_—

and it was so from its beginnings. Having burdened themselves with it, Christian nations feel bound to defend and _poetize_ it, at the expense of all other religions.

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

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

We are told that it is just the same with our Brahmâ‐Prajâpati, with Osiris and all other _Creative_ Gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their _inner_ meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindû Lingam is identical with Jacob’s “Pillar”—most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in the fact that the Esoteric significance of the Lingam was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Âryan Hierophant and Brâhman, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval _nakedness_ under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose—that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the Heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate(1081)—a commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment, “Love one another.” Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same “Holy of Holies”—the lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol—the _bearer_ of its own seed and root of all. Virâj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from Androgyne Nature, one from Brahmâ and his female counterpart Vâch, the other, from Osiris and Isis—never from the One Infinite God. In the Judæo‐Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahmâ, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu’s Navel, the Central Point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile—all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the _Bible_. One is almost inclined to say that in the _esoteric_ they are _grosser and still more anthropomorphic_, than in their _exoteric_ rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application—the _lilies_ in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel.(1082) In Hindûism—the “Holy of Holies” is a universal abstraction, whose _dramatis personæ_ are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a _personal_ God, _outside_ of that Nature, and the human womb—Eve, Sarah, etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic God, and his image—man.

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

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

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

The Pentateuch arose out of the _primitive or older_ documents, by means of a _supplementary_ one.

The Elohistic texts were re‐written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the biblical chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar‐form, and as a symbol of the double‐sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name—the Yod, י or “phallus,” and Hé, ה, the “opening,” or the “womb,” according to kabalistic authority—is of a far later date than the Elohim‐symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan _exoteric_ rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingam and Yoni found on every roadside in India.

Just as the Iao of the Mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas, or Abrasax, of some Gnostic sects identical with the God of the Hebrews, who was the same as the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on “Heathen” as on the Gnostic “Christian” gems. In Matter’s collection of such gems there is a “Horus”—

Seated on the lotus, inscribed ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ ΙΑΩ (Abrasax Iao)—an address exactly parallel to the so frequent ΕΙΣ ΖΕΥΣ ΣΑΡΑΠΙ (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems, and therefore only to be translated by “Abraxas is the One Jehovah.”(1086)

But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows:

The numerical or Kabbalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refers to the Persian title of the god “Mithras,” Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao.(1087)

Thus, he was the Sun, in one aspect, the Moon or the Lunar Genius, in another, that Generative Deity whom the Gnostics saluted as “Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who shinest in the night‐time, holding _the second rank_, the first Lord of Death.”

It is only in his capacity of the Genius of the Moon—the latter being credited in the old cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth—that Jehovah could ever be regarded as the _Creator_ of our Globe and _its_ Heaven, namely, the Firmament.

The knowledge of all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously unjust words of Coleridge:

It is highly worthy of observation that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books _pretending to inspiration_, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent _recommendation of truth_ [!!].

Section IV. On the Myth of the “Fallen Angels” in its Various Aspects.

A. The Evil Spirit: Who, And What?

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

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

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

Now even the Materialists are quite harmless, and may be regarded as the friends of Theosophy, when compared to some fanatical “Christian”—as they call themselves, “Sectarian” as we call them—Kabalists, on the Continent. These read the _Zohar_, not to find in it ancient Wisdom, but, by mangling the texts and meaning, to discover in its verses Christian dogmas, where none could ever have been meant; and, having fished them out with the collective help of Jesuitical casuistry and learning, the supposed “Kabalists” proceed to write books and to mislead less far‐sighted students of the Kabalah.(1088)

May we not then be permitted to drag the deep rivers of the Past, and thus bring to the surface the root idea that led to the transformation of the Wisdom‐God, who had first been regarded as the Creator of everything that exists, into an Angel of Evil—a ridiculous horned biped, half goat and half monkey, with hoofs and a tail? We need not go out of the way to compare the Pagan Demons of either Egypt, India, or Chaldæa with the Devil of Christianity, for no such comparison is possible. But we may stop to glance at the biography of the Christian Devil, a piratical reprint from the Chaldæo‐Judæan mythology.

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

Whence the Christian idea that God cursed the Devil? The God of the Jews, whosoever he was, forbids cursing Satan. Philo Judæus and Josephus both state that the Law (the _Pentateuch_ and the _Talmud_) undeviatingly forbid one to curse the Adversary, and also the Gods of the Gentiles. “Thou shalt not revile the Gods,” quoth the God of Moses,(1090) for it is God who “hath divided [them] unto all nations”;(1091) and those who speak evil of “Dignities” (Gods) are called “filthy dreamers” by Jude.

For even Michael the Archangel ... durst not bring against him [the Devil] a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.(1092)

Finally the same is repeated in the _Talmud_:(1093)

Satan appeared one day to a man who used to curse him daily, and said to him: “Why dost thou this?” Consider that _God himself_ would not curse me, but merely said: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan.”(1094)

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

## active in us.

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

The Church positively accepts the tenet that Christ has his Ferouer as any other God or mortal has. Writes De Mirville:

Here we have the two heroes of the Old Testament, the _Verbum_ [?] (or _second_ Jehovah), and his _Face_ [“Presence,” as the Protestants translate], both making but one, and yet being two, a mystery which seemed to us unsolvable before we had studied the doctrine of the Mazdean _Ferouers_, and learnt that the _Ferouer_ was the spiritual potency, at once _image_, _face_, and _guardian_ of the Soul which finally assimilates the _Ferouer_.(1096)

This is _almost_ correct.

Among other absurdities, the Kabalists maintain that the word Metatron, being divided into _meta‐thronon_ (μετὰ, θρόνον), means “near the throne.”(1097) It means quite the reverse, as _meta_ means “beyond” and not “near.” This is of great importance in our argument. St. Michael, then, the “_quis ut Deus_,” is the translator, so to speak, of the invisible world into the visible and the objective.

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

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

The whole of the above is given on the authority of various works by Roman Catholics, and must, therefore, be orthodox. Some expressions are translated to show what subtle Theologians and Casuists mean by the term Ferouer,(1102) a word borrowed by some French writers from the _Zend Avesta_, as said, and utilized in Roman Catholicism for a purpose Zoroaster was very far from anticipating. In Fargard xix (verse 14), of the _Vendîdâd_ it is said:

Invoke, O Zarathushtra! my Fravarshi, who am Ahura Mazda, the greatest, the best, the fairest of all beings, the most solid, the most intelligent, ... and whose soul is the holy Word (Mâthra Spenta).(1103)

The French Orientalists translate _Fravarshi_ by _Ferouer_.

Now what is a Ferouer, or Fravarshi? In some Mazdean works it is plainly implied that Fravarshi is the _inner_, immortal Man, or the Ego which reïncarnates; that it existed before the physical body and survives all such bodies it happens to be clothed in.

Not only man was endowed with a Fravarshi, _but gods too_, and the sky, fire, waters, and plants.(1104)

This shows as plainly as can be shown that the Ferouer is the “spiritual counterpart” of either God, animal, plant, or even element, _i.e._, the refined and the _purer_ part of the grosser creation, the soul of the body, whatever the body may happen to be. Therefore does Ahura Mazda recommend Zarathushtra to invoke his Fravarshi and not himself (Ahura Mazda); that is to say, the impersonal and _true_ Essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster’s own Âtmâ (or Christos), not the _false_ and personal appearance. This is quite clear.

Now it is on this divine and ethereal prototype that the Roman Catholics have seized so as to build up the supposed difference between their God and Angels and the Deity and its aspects, or the Gods of the old religions. Thus, while calling Mercury, Venus, Jupiter (whether as Gods or Planets) Devils, they at the same time make of the same Mercury the Ferouer of their Christ. This fact is undeniable. Vossius(1105) proves that Michael is the Mercury of the Pagans, and Maury and other French writers corroborate him, and add that according to great Theologians _Mercury and the Sun are one_, (?) and no wonder, they think, since Mercury being so near the Wisdom and the Verbum (the Sun), must be absorbed by and confounded with him.(1106)

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

Now to all this the Roman Catholic Church tacitly consents, many of her writers even avowing it publicly. Unable to deny the flagrant “borrowing” of their Church, who “spoiled” her seniors of their symbols, as the Jews had “spoiled” the Egyptians of their jewels of silver and gold, they explain the fact quite coolly and seriously. Thus the writers who have hitherto been _timid_ enough to see, in this repetition by Christian dogmas of old Pagan ideas, “a _legendary plagiarism_ perpetrated by man,” are gravely assured that, far from such a simple solution of the almost perfect resemblance, it has to be attributed to quite another cause—“to a _pre‐historical_ plagiarism, of a _superhuman_ origin.”

If the reader would know how, he must again kindly turn to the same volume of De Mirville’s work.(1108) Please note that this author was the _official and recognized defender_ of the Roman Church, and was helped by the learning of all the Jesuits. There we read:

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

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

In revising the proof‐sheets of the Book of Enoch, we have been still further impressed by relationship with New Testament Scripture. Thus, the parable of the sheep, rescued by the good Shepherd from hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is _obviously borrowed_ by the fourth Evangelist from Enoch lxxxix, in which the author depicts the shepherds as killing and destroying the sheep before the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable—“All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers”—language in which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical shepherds of Enoch.(1109)

It is too late in the day to claim that it is Enoch who borrowed from the _New Testament_, instead of _vice versâ_. Jude (14, 15) quotes _verbatim_ from Enoch a long passage about the coming of the Lord with his ten thousand saints, and naming the prophet specifically _acknowledges_ the source.

In ... perfecting the parallelism between prophet and apostle, [we] have placed beyond controversy that, _in the eyes of the author of an Epistle accepted as Divine revelation_, the Book of Enoch _was the inspired production of an antediluvian patriarch_....

The cumulative coincidence of language and ideas in Enoch and the authors of New Testament Scripture, ... clearly indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the universal reign of righteousness under the eternal dominion of the Son of Man. This _evangelical plagiarism_ culminates in the Revelation of John, which adapts the visions of Enoch to Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime simplicity of the great master of apocalyptic prediction, who prophesied in the name of the antediluvian Patriarch.(1110)

“Antediluvian,” truly; but if the phraseology of the text dates hardly a few centuries or even millenniums before the historical era, then it is no longer the original _prediction_ of the events to come, but is, in its turn, a copy of some scripture of a pre‐historic religion.

In the Krita age, Vishnu, in the form of Kapila and other (inspired teachers) ... imparts ... true wisdom [as Enoch did]. In the Tretâ age he restrains the wicked, in the form of a universal monarch [Chakravartin, the “Everlasting King” of Enoch(1111)] and protects the three worlds [or Races]. In the Dvâpara age, in the person of Veda‐vyâsa, he divides the one Veda into four, and distributes it into hundreds (Shata) of branches.(1112)

Truly so; the Veda of the earliest Âryans, before it was written, went forth into every nation of the Atlanto‐Lemurians, and sowed the first seeds of all the now existing old religions. The off‐shoots of the never dying Tree of Wisdom have scattered their dead leaves even on Judæo‐ Christianity. And at the end of the Kali, our present Age, Vishnu, or the “Everlasting King,” will appear as Kalki, and reëstablish righteousness upon earth. The minds of those who live at that time shall be awakened, and become as pellucid as crystal.

The men who are thus changed by virtue of that peculiar time [the Sixth Race] _shall be as the seeds_ of other human beings, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita age of purity;

_i.e._, it shall be the Seventh Race, the Race of “Buddhas,” the “Sons of God,” born of _immaculate_ parents.

B. The Gods Of Light Proceed From The Gods Of Darkness.

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

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

The philosophy of that Law in Nature, which implants in man as well as in every beast a passionate, inherent, and instinctive desire for freedom and self‐guidance, pertains to Psychology and cannot be touched on now, for to demonstrate this feeling in higher Intelligences, to analyze and give a natural reason for it, would necessitate an endless philosophical explanation for which there here is no room. Perhaps the best synthesis of this feeling is found in three lines of Milton’s _Paradise Lost_. Says the “Fallen One”:

Here we may reign secure; and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in hell! Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven!

Better be man, the crown of terrestrial production and king over its _opus operatum_, than be lost among the will‐less Spiritual Hosts in Heaven.

We have said elsewhere that the dogma of the first Fall rested on a few verses in _Revelation_, which are now shown to be a plagiarism from Enoch by some scholars. These have given rise to endless theories and speculations, which have gradually acquired the importance of dogma and inspired tradition. Every one sought to explain the verse about the seven‐ headed dragon with his ten horns and seven crowns, whose tail “drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth,” and whose place, with that of his Angels, “was found no more in heaven.” What the seven heads of the Dragon (or Cycle) mean, and its _five_ wicked kings also, may be learned in the Addenda which close Part III of this Volume.

From Newton to Bossuet speculations were incessantly evolved in Christian brains with regard to these obscure verses. Says Bossuet:

The star that falls is the heresiarch Theodosius.... The clouds of smoke are the heresies of the Montanists.... The third part of the stars are the martyrs, and especially the doctors of divinity.

Bossuet ought to have known, however, that the events described in _Revelation_ were not original, and may, as shown, be found in other and Pagan traditions. There were no scholastics nor Montanists during Vedic times, nor yet far earlier in China. But Christian _Theology_ had to be _protected and saved_.

This is only natural. But why should truth be sacrificed in order to protect from destruction the lucubrations of Christian Theologians?

The “_princeps aeris hujus_,” the “Prince of the Air,” of St. Paul, is not the Devil, but the effects of the Astral Light, as Éliphas Lévi correctly explains. The Devil is not the “God _of this period_,” as he says, for it is the Deity of every age and period since Man appeared on Earth, and Matter in its countless forms and states had to fight for its evanescent existence against other disintegrating Forces.

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

Consistency does not seem to be a favourite virtue in any portion of Divine Revelation, so‐called—not as interpreted by Theologians, at any rate.

The Egyptians and the Chaldæans referred the birth of their Divine Dynasties to that period when creative Earth was in her last final throes in giving birth to her pre‐historic mountain ranges, which have since disappeared, her seas and her continents. Her face was covered with “deep Darkness and in that [Secondary] Chaos was the principle of all things” that developed on the Globe later on. Our Geologists have now ascertained that there was such a terrestrial conflagration in the early geological periods, several hundred millions of years ago.(1117) As to the tradition itself, every country and nation had it, each under its respective national form.

It is not alone Egypt, Greece, Scandinavia or Mexico, that had its Typhon, Python, Loki, and its “falling” Demon, but China also. The Celestials have a whole literature upon the subject. It is said that in consequence of the rebellion against Ti of a proud Spirit, who said he was Ti himself, seven Choirs of Celestial Spirits were exiled upon Earth, which “_brought a change in all Nature_, Heaven itself _bending_ down and uniting with Earth.”

In the _Y‐King_, one reads:

The flying Dragon, superb and rebellious, suffers now, and his pride is punished; he thought he would reign in Heaven, he reigns only on the Earth.

Again, the _Tchoon‐Tsieoo_ says allegorically:

One night the stars ceased shining in darkness, and deserted it, falling down like rain upon the Earth, _where they are now hidden_.

These stars are the Monads.

Chinese Cosmogonies have their “Lord of the Flame” and their “Celestial Virgin,” with little “Spirits to help and minister to her; and big Spirits to fight those who are the enemies of other Gods.” But all this does not prove that the said allegories are _presentments_ or _prophetic_ writings which all refer to Christian Theology.

The best proof one can offer to Christian Theologians that the Esoteric statements in the _Bible_—in both Testaments—are the assertion of the same idea as in our Archaic Teachings, to wit, that the “Fall of the Angels” referred simply to the Incarnation of Angels “who had broken through the Seven Circles”—is found in the _Zohar_. Now the _Kabalah_ of Simeon Ben Iochaï is the soul and essence of the allegorical narrative, as the later _Christian Kabalah_ is the “dark cloaked” Mosaic Pentateuch. And it says (in the Agrippa MSS.):

The Wisdom of the Kabalah rests in the Science of the Equilibrium and Harmony.

Forces that manifest without having been first equilibrized perish in Space [“equilibrized” meaning differentiated].

Thus perished the first Kings [the Divine Dynasties] of the Ancient World, the _self‐produced_ Princes of Giants. They fell like rootless trees, and were seen no more; for _they were the Shadow of the Shadow_ [to wit, the Chhâyâ of the Shadowy Pitris].(1118)

But those that came after them, who shooting down like falling stars were enshrined in the Shadows—prevailed to this day [Dhyânîs, who by incarnating in those “empty Shadows,” inaugurated the era of mankind].

Every sentence in the ancient Cosmogonies unfolds to him who can read between the lines the identity of the ideas, though under different garbs.

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

The Hebrew Elohim, called “God” in the translations, who create “Light,” are identical with the Âryan Asuras. They are also referred to as the “Sons of Darkness,” as a philosophical and logical contrast to Light Immutable and Eternal. The earliest Zoroastrians did not believe in Evil or Darkness being _coëternal_ with Good or Light, and they give the same interpretation. Ahriman is the manifested _Shadow_ of Ahura Mazda (Asura Mazda), himself issued from Zeruâna Âkerne, the “Boundless [Circle of] Time,” or the Unknown Cause. They say of the latter:

Its glory is too exalted, its light too resplendent for either human intellect or mortal eye to grasp and see.

Its primal emanation _is Eternal Light, which, from having been previously concealed in Darkness, was called to manifest itself and thus was formed Ormazd, the __“__King of Life.__”_ He is the “First‐born” in Boundless Time, but, like his own antetype (preëxisting spiritual idea), _has lived within Darkness from all Eternity_. The six Amshaspands—seven with himself, the Chief of all—the primitive _Spiritual Angels and Men_, are _collectively_ his Logos. The Zoroastrian Amshaspands create the World in six Days or periods also, and rest on the seventh; but in the Esoteric Philosophy, that _seventh_ is the _first_ period or “Day,” the so‐called _Primary Creation_ in Âryan Cosmogony. It is that intermediate Æon which is the _Prologue_ to Creation, and which stands on the borderland between the Uncreated Eternal Causation and the produced finite effects; a state of _nascent_ activity and energy as the first aspect of the Eternal Immutable Quiescence. In _Genesis_, on which no metaphysical energy has been spent, but only an extraordinary acuteness and ingenuity to veil the Esoteric Truth, Creation begins at the third stage of manifestation. “God” or the Elohim are the “Seven Regents” of _Pymander_. They are identical with all the other Creators. But even in _Genesis_ that period is hinted at by the abruptness of the picture, and the “Darkness” that was on the face of the Deep. The Elohim are shown to “create”—that is to say, to build or to produce the two Heavens or “double” Heaven (_not_ Heaven and Earth); which means, in so many words, that they separated the upper manifested (Angelic) Heaven, or plane of consciousness, from the lower or terrestrial plane; the (to us) Eternal and Immutable Æons from those Periods that are in space, time and duration; Heaven from Earth, the Unknown from the Known—to the profane. Such is the meaning of the sentence in _Pymander_, which says that:

Thought, the _divine_, which is Light and Life [Zeruâna Âkerne] produced through its Word, or first aspect, the other, _operating_ Thought, which being the God of Spirit and Fire, constructed Seven Regents enclosing within their Circle the World of Senses named “Fatal Destiny.”

The latter refers to Karma; the “Seven Circles” are the seven planets and planes, as also the seven Invisible Spirits, in the Angelic Spheres, whose visible symbols are the seven planets,(1119) the seven Rishis of the Great Bear and other glyphs. As said of the Âdityas by Roth:

They are neither sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor dawn, but the eternal sustainers of this luminous life which exists as it were behind all these phenomena.

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

Perchance, this is justified on the principle of the _scientific_ theory which teaches us as to the effect of two sound waves of equal length meeting:

If the two sounds be of the same intensity, their coincidence produces a sound four times the intensity of either, while their interference produces _absolute silence_.

While explaining some of the “heresies” of his day, Justin Martyr shows the identity of all the world religions at their starting points. The first _Beginning_ opens invariably with the _Unknown_ and _Passive_ Deity, from which emanates a certain Active Power or Virtue, the Mystery that is sometimes called Wisdom, sometimes the Son, very often God, Angel, Lord, and Logos.(1120) The latter is sometimes applied to the very first Emanation, but in several systems it proceeds from the first Androgyne or Double Ray produced at the beginning by the Unseen. Philo depicts this Wisdom as male and female. But though its first manifestation had a beginning—for it proceeded from Oulom(1121) (Aiôn, Time), the highest of the Æons when emitted from the Father—it had remained with the Father _before all creations_, for it is part of him.(1122) Therefore Philo Judæus calls Adam Kadmon by the name “Mind”—the Ennoia of Bythos in the Gnostic System. “The Mind, let it be named Adam.”(1123)

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

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

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

And the angels which kept not their first estate but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in _everlasting chains_ under _darkness_ unto the _judgment of the great day_.(1127)

And this means simply that the “Angels,” doomed to incarnation, are in the _chains_ of flesh and matter, under the _darkness_ of ignorance, till the “_Great Day_,” which will come as always after the Seventh Round, after the expiration of the “Week,” on the Seventh Sabbath, or in the Post‐ Manvantaric Nirvâna.

How truly Esoteric and consonant with the Secret Doctrine is Pymander, the Thought Divine, of Hermes, may be inferred from its original and primitive translations in Latin and Greek only. On the other hand how disfigured it has been later on by Christians in Europe, is seen from the remarks and unconscious _confessions_ made by De St. Marc, in his Preface and Letter to the Bishop of Ayre, in 1578. Therein, the whole cycle of transformations from a Pantheistic and Egyptian into a Mystic Roman Catholic treatise is given, and we see how _Pymander_ has become what it is now. Still, even in St. Marc’s translation, traces are found of the real Pymander—the “Universal Thought” or “Mind.” This is the translation from the old French translation, the original being given in the foot‐ note(1128) in its quaint old French:

Seven men [principles] were generated in Man.... The nature of the harmony of the Seven of the Father and of the Spirit. Nature ... produced seven men in accordance with the natures of the Seven Spirits ... having in them, potentially, the two sexes.

Metaphysically, the Father and the Son are the “Universal Mind” and the “Periodical Universe”; the “Angel” and the “Man.” It is the Son and the Father at one and the same time; in Pymander, the _active_ Idea and the _passive_ Thought that generates it; the radical keynote in Nature which gives birth to the seven notes—the septenary scale of the Creative Forces, and to the seven prismatic _aspects_ of colour, all born from the one White Ray, or Light—itself generated in Darkness.

C. The Many Meanings Of The “War In Heaven.”

The Secret Doctrine points out, as a self‐evident fact, that Mankind, collectively and individually, is with all manifested Nature the vehicle (_a_) of the Breath of One Universal Principle, in its primal differentiation; and (_b_) of the countless “breaths” proceeding from that One Breath in its secondary and further differentiations, as Nature with its many “mankinds” proceeds downwards toward the planes that are ever increasing in materiality. The Primary Breath informs the higher Hierarchies; the secondary—the lower, on the constantly descending planes.

Now there are many passages in the _Bible_ which prove on their face, _exoterically_, that this belief was at one time _universal_; and the two most convincing are _Ezekiel_, xxviii and _Isaiah_, xiv. Christian Theologians are welcome to interpret both as referring to the great War before Creation, the Epos of Satan’s Rebellion, etc., if they so choose, but the absurdity of the idea is too apparent. Ezekiel addresses his lamentations and reproofs to the King of Tyre; Isaiah—to King Ahaz, who indulged in the worship of idols, as did the rest of the nation with the exception of a few Initiates (the Prophets, so‐called), who tried to arrest it on its way to exotericism—or idolatry, which is the same thing. Let the student judge.

In _Ezekiel_, it is said:

Son of Man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord God [as we understand it, the “God” Karma]; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said I am a God, ... yet thou art a man.... Behold, therefore, I will bring strangers upon thee: ... and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, ... and they shall bring thee down to the pit [or Earth‐ life].(1129)

The origin of the “prince of Tyrus” is to be traced to the “Divine Dynasties” of the iniquitous Atlanteans, the Great Sorcerers. There is no metaphor in the words of Ezekiel, but actual _history_ this time. For the voice _in_ the prophet, the voice of the “Lord,” his own Spirit, which spake unto him, says:

Because ... thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God(s) [Divine Dynasties], in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man.... Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee: with thy wisdom ... thou hast increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches. Behold, therefore ... strangers ... shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom ... They shall bring thee down ... and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.(1130)

All such imprecations are not _prophecy_, but simply _reminders_ of the fate of the Atlanteans, the “Giants on Earth.”

What can be the meaning of this last sentence if it is not a narrative of the fate of the Atlanteans? Again, “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty,”(1131) may refer to the “Heavenly Man” in _Pymander_, or to the Fallen Angels, who are accused of having fallen through pride on account of the great beauty and wisdom which became their lot. There is no metaphor here, except in the preconceived ideas of our Theologians, perhaps. These verses relate to the Past and belong more to the Knowledge acquired at the Mysteries of Initiation than to retrospective clairvoyance! Says the voice, again:

Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God [in the Satya Yuga]; every precious stone was thy covering: ... the workmanship of thy tabrets and thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub; ... thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.... Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. Therefore I will cast thee ... out of the mountain of God, and ... destroy thee.(1132)

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

Therefore will I _bring forth a fire from the midst of thee_, it shall devour thee.(1133)

Surely it does not mean, as seems to be the case from the translated texts, that this fire was to be brought from the midst of the Prince of Tyrus, or his people, but from Mount Atlas, symbolizing the proud Race, learned in Magic and high in arts and civilization, whose last remnant was destroyed almost at the foot of the range of those once gigantic mountains.

Truly, “thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more”;(1134) as the very name of the Race and its fate is now annihilated from man’s memory. Bear in mind that almost every ancient king and priest was an Initiate; that from toward the close of the Fourth Race there had been a feud between the Initiates of the Right and those of the Left Path; finally, that the Garden of Eden is referred to by other personages than the Jews of the Adamic Race, since even Pharaoh is compared to the fairest tree of Eden by this same Ezekiel, who shows:

All the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, ... comforted in the nether parts of the earth. [For] they also went down into hell with him [Pharaoh](1135)

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

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

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

The whole history of that period is allegorized in the _Râmâyana_, which is the mystic narrative in epic form of the struggle between Râma—the first king of the Divine Dynasty of the early Âryans—and Râvana, the symbolical personation of the Atlantean (Lankâ) Race. The former were the incarnations of the Solar Gods; the latter, of the Lunar Devas. This was the great battle between Good and Evil, between White and Black Magic, for the supremacy of the divine forces over the lower terrestrial, or cosmic powers.

If the student would understand better the last statement, let him turn to the Anugîtâ episode of the _Mahâbhârata_, where the Brâhmana tells his wife:

I have perceived by means of the Self the seat abiding in the Self—(the seat) where dwells the Brahman free from the pairs of opposites, and the moon, together with the fire [or the sun], upholding (all) beings (as) the mover of the intellectual principle.(1140)

The Moon _is_ the deity of the mind (Manas) but only on the lower plane. Says a Commentary:

_Manas is dual—Lunar in the lower, Solar in its upper portion._

That is to say, it is attracted in its higher aspect towards Buddhi, and in its lower descends into, and listens to the voice of, its _animal_ Soul full of selfish and sensual desires; and herein is contained the mystery of an Adept’s and of a profane man’s life, as also that of the _post mortem_ separation of the divine from the animal Man. The _Mahâbhârata_—every line of which has to be read Esoterically—discloses in magnificent symbolism and allegory the tribulations of both Man and Soul. Says the Brâhmana in the _Anugîtâ_:

In the interior (within the body), in the midst of all these (life‐winds) [? principles], which move about in the body and swallow up one another,(1141) blazes the Vaishvânara fire(1142) sevenfold.(1143)

But the chief “Soul” is Manas or mind; hence, Soma, the Moon, is shown as making an alliance with the solar portion in it, personified as the Prachetasas. But of the seven keys that open the seven aspects of the _Râmâyana_, as of every other Scripture, this is only one—the metaphysical.

The symbol of the “Tree” standing for various Initiates was almost universal. Jesus is called the “Tree of Life,” as are also all the Adepts of the Good Law, while those of the Left Path are referred to as the “withering trees.” John the Baptist speaks of the “axe” which “is laid to the root of the trees”;(1144) and the king of Assyria’s armies are called “trees.”(1145)

The true meaning of the Garden of Eden has been sufficiently given in _Isis Unveiled_. Now the writer has more than once heard surprise expressed that _Isis Unveiled_ should contain so few of the doctrines now taught. This is quite erroneous. For the allusions to such teachings are plentiful, even if the teachings themselves were withheld. The time had not arrived then, as the hour has not struck even now, _to say all_. “No Atlanteans, or the Fourth Race which preceded our Fifth Race, are mentioned in _Isis Unveiled_,” wrote a critic on _Esoteric Buddhism_ one day. I, who wrote _Isis Unveiled_, maintain that the Atlanteans _are_ mentioned as our predecessors. For what can be plainer than the following statement, when speaking of the Book of Job:

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

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

In an old number of the _Revue Archéologique_, a French writer, M. Maury, remarks:

This universal strife between good and bad spirits seems to be only the reproduction of _another more ancient and more terrible strife_, which, according to an ancient myth, took place before the creation of the universe, between the faithful and the rebellious legions.(1147)

Once more, it is a simple question of priority. Had John’s _Revelation_ been written during the Vedic period, and were not one sure now of its being simply another version of the _Book of Enoch_ and the Dragon legends of Pagan antiquity—the grandeur and the beauty of the imagery might have biassed the critics’ opinion in favour of the Christian interpretation of that first War, whose battle‐field was starry Heaven, and the first slaughterers—the Angels. As the matter now stands, however, one has to trace _Revelation_, event by event, to other and far older visions. For the better comprehension of the apocalyptic allegories and of the Esoteric epos we ask the reader to turn to _Revelation_, and to read