chapter xii

of St. John’s _Revelation_, and comes from the Babylonian legends, without the smallest doubt, though the Babylonian story, in its turn, had its origin in the allegories of the Âryans. The fragment read by the late George Smith is sufficient to disclose the source of this chapter of the Apocalypse. Here it is as given by the eminent Assyriologist:

Our ... fragment refers to the creation of mankind, called Adam, as [the man] in the Bible; he is made perfect, ... but afterwards he joins with the dragon of the deep, the animal of Tiamat, the spirit of chaos, and offends against his god, who _curses him_, and calls down on his head all the evils and troubles of humanity.(883)

This is followed by a war between the dragon and the powers of evil, or chaos on one side and the gods on the other.

The gods have weapons forged for them,(884) and Merodach [the Archangel Michael in _Revelation_] undertakes to lead the heavenly host against the dragon. The war, which is described with spirit, ends of course in the triumph of the principles of good.(885)

This War of the Gods with the Powers of the Deep, refers also, in its last and terrestrial application, to the struggle between the Âryan Adepts of the nascent Fifth Race and the Sorcerers of Atlantis, the Demons of the Deep, the Islanders surrounded with water who disappeared in the Deluge.

The symbols of the “Dragon” and “War in Heaven” have, as already stated, more than one significance; religious, astronomical and geological events being included in the one common allegory. But they had also a cosmological meaning. In India the Dragon story is repeated in one of its forms in the battles of Indra with Vritra. In the _Vedas_ this Ahi‐Vritra is referred to as the Demon of Drought, the terrible hot Wind. Indra is shown to be constantly at war with him; and with the help of his thunder and lightning the God compels Ahi‐Vritra to pour down in rain on Earth, and then slays him. Hence, Indra is called the Vritra‐han or the “Slayer of Vritra,” as Michael is called the Conqueror and “Slayer of the Dragon.” Both these “Enemies” are then the “Old Dragon” precipitated into the depths of the Earth, in this one sense.

The Avestaic Amshaspands are a Host with a leader like St. Michael over them, and seem identical with the legions of Heaven, to judge from the account in the _Vendîdâd_. Thus in Fargard xix, Zarathushtra is told by Ahura Mazda to “invoke the Amesha Spentas who rule over the seven Karshvares(886) of the Earth”;(887) which Karshvares in their seven applications refer equally to the seven Spheres of our Planetary Chain, to the seven Planets, the seven Heavens, etc., according to whether the sense is applied to a physical, supra‐mundane, or simply a sidereal World. In the same Fargard, in his invocation against Angra Mainyu and his Host, Zarathushtra appeals to them in these words: “I invoke the seven bright Sravah with their sons and their flocks.”(888) The “Sravah”—a word which the Orientalists have given up as one “of unknown meaning”—means the same Amshaspands, but in their highest Occult meaning. The Sravah are the Noumenoi of the phenomenal Amshaspands, the Souls or Spirits of those _manifested_ Powers; and “their sons and their flocks” refer to the Planetary Angels and their sidereal flocks of stars and constellations. “Amshaspand” is the exoteric term used in terrestrial combinations and affairs only. Zarathushtra addresses Ahura Mazda constantly as the “maker of the _material_ world.” Ormazd is the father of our Earth (Spenta Ârmaiti), who is referred to, when personified, as “the fair daughter of Ahura Mazda,”(889) who is also the creator of the Tree (of Occult and Spiritual Knowledge and Wisdom) from which the mystic and mysterious Baresma is taken. But the Occult name of the bright God was never pronounced outside the temple.

Samael or Satan the seducing Serpent of _Genesis_, and one of the primeval Angels who rebelled, is the name of the “Red Dragon.” He is the Angel of Death, for the _Talmud_ says that “the Angel of Death and Satan are the same.” He is killed by Michael, and once more killed by St. George, who also is a Dragon Slayer. But see the transformations of this. Samael is identical with the Simoom, the hot wind of the desert, or again with the Vedic Demon of Drought, as Vritra. “Simoon is called Atabutos” or—Diabolos, the Devil.

Typhon, or the Dragon Apophis—the Accuser in the _Book of the Dead_—is worsted by Horus, who pierces his opponent’s head with a spear; and Typhon is the all‐destroying wind of the desert, the rebellious element that throws everything into confusion. As Set, he is the darkness of night, the murderer of Osiris, who is the light of day and the Sun. Archæology demonstrates that Horus is identical with Anubis,(890) whose effigy was discovered upon an Egyptian monument, with a cuirass and a spear, like Michael and St. George. Anubis is also represented as slaying a Dragon, that has the head and tail of a serpent.(891)

Cosmologically, then, all the Dragons and Serpents conquered by their “Slayers” are, in their origin, the turbulent confused principles in Chaos, brought to order by the Sun‐gods or _Creative_ Powers. In the _Book of the Dead_ those principles are called the “Sons of Rebellion.”(892)

In that night, the oppressor, the murderer of Osiris, otherwise called the _deceiving Serpent_ ... calls the Sons of Rebellion in _Air_, and when they arrive to the East of the Heavens, then there is War in Heaven and in the entire World.(893)

In the Scandinavian _Eddas_ the “War” of the Ases with the Hrimthurses or Frost giants, and of Asathor with the Jotuns, the Serpents and Dragons and the “Wolf” who comes out of “Darkness”—is the repetition of the same myth. The “Evil Spirits,”(894) who began by being simply the emblems of Chaos, have become euhemerized by the superstition of the rabble, until they have finally won the right of citizenship in what are claimed to be the most civilized and learned races of this globe _since its creation_, and have become a dogma with Christians. As George Smith has it:

The evil principles [Spirits], emblems of Chaos [in Chaldæa and Assyria as in Egypt, we see], ... resist this change and make war on the Moon, the eldest son of Bel, drawing over to their side the Sun, Venus and the atmospheric god Vul.(895)

This is only another version of the Hindû “War in Heaven,” between Soma, the Moon, and the Gods; Indra being the atmospheric Vul—which shows it plainly to be both a cosmogonical and an astronomical allegory, woven into and drawn from the earliest Theogony as taught in the Mysteries.

It is in the religious doctrines of the Gnostics that we can best see the real meaning of the Dragon, the Serpent, the Goat, and all those symbols of Powers now called Evil; for it is they who, in their teachings, divulged the Esoteric nature of the Jewish substitute for Ain Suph, the true meaning of which the Rabbins concealed, while the Christians, with a few exceptions, knew nothing of it. Surely Jesus of Nazareth would have hardly advised his apostles to show themselves as _wise_ as the serpent, had the latter been a symbol of the Evil One; nor would the Ophites, the learned Egyptian Gnostics of the “Brotherhood of the Serpent,” have reverenced a living snake in their ceremonies as the emblem of _Wisdom_, the divine Sophia, and a type of the All‐good, not the All‐bad, were that reptile so closely connected with Satan. The fact is, that even as a common ophidian it has ever been a dual symbol, and as a dragon it has never been anything else than a symbol of the Manifested Deity in its great Wisdom. The _draco volans_, the “flying dragon” of the early painters, may be an exaggerated picture of the real extinct antediluvian animal, and those who have faith in the Occult Teachings believe that in the days of old there were such creatures as flying dragons, a kind of Pterodactyl, and that it is those gigantic winged lizards that served as prototypes for the Seraph of Moses and his great Brazen Serpent.(896) The Jews formerly worshipped the latter _idol_ themselves, but, after the religious reforms brought about by Hezekiah, they turned round, and called that symbol of the Great or Higher God of every other nation a Devil, and their own usurper—the “One God.”(897)

The appellation Sa’tan, in Hebrew Sâtân, an “Adversary” (from the verb _shatana_, “to be adverse,” “to persecute”) belongs by right to the first and cruellest “Adversary” _of all the other Gods_—Jehovah; not to the Serpent, which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom, and is at the worst, even in the dogma, the “Adversary” _of men_. This dogma, based as it is on the third chapter of _Genesis_, is as illogical and unjust as it is paradoxical. For who was the first to _create_ that original and henceforward universal tempter of man—the woman? Not the Serpent surely, but the “Lord God” himself, who, saying, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” made woman, and “brought her unto the man.”(898) If the unpleasant little incident that followed _was_ and is still to be regarded as the “original sin,” then it exhibits the Creator’s divine foresight in a poor light indeed. It would have been far better for the first Adam of the first chapter to have been left either “male and female,” or “alone.” It is the Lord God, evidently, who was the real cause of all the mischief, the “_agent provocateur_,” and the Serpent—only a prototype of Azazel, “the scapegoat for the sin of [the God of] Israel,” the poor Tragos having to pay the penalty for his Master’s and Creator’s blunder. This, of course, is addressed only to those who accept the opening events of the drama of humanity in _Genesis_ in their dead‐letter sense. Those who read them Esoterically, are not reduced to fanciful speculations and hypotheses; they _know_ how to read the symbolism therein contained, and cannot err.

There is at present no need to touch upon the mystic and manifold meaning of the name Jehovah in its abstract sense, one independent of the Deity falsely called by that name. It was a “blind” purposely created by the Rabbins, a secret preserved by them with ten‐fold care after the Christians had despoiled them of this God‐name which was their own property.(899) The following statement, however, is now made. The personage who is named in the first four chapters of _Genesis_ variously as “God,” the “Lord God,” and “Lord” simply, is not one and the same person; certainly it is not Jehovah. There are three distinct classes or groups of the Elohim called Sephiroth in the _Kabalah_. Jehovah appears only in