chapter ii

, of _Genesis_: “Igitur perfecti sunt cœli et terra et omnis ornatus eorum:” and that the Vulgate has peremptorily substituted for the Hebrew word “tsaba” (“host”) that of “ornament;” Munck shows the mistake of substitution and the derivation of the compound title, “Tsabaoth‐Elohim,” from “tsaba.” Moreover, Cornelius à Lapide, “the master of all Biblical commentators,” says de Mirville, shows us that such was the real meaning. Those Angels are stars.

All this, however, teaches us very little as to the true functions of this celestial army, and nothing at all as to its place in evolution and its relation to the earth we live on. For an answer to the question, “Who are the true Creators?” we must go to the Esoteric Doctrine, since there only can the key be found which will render intelligible the Theogonies of the various world‐religions.

There we find that the real creator of the Kosmos, as of all visible Nature—if not of all the invisible hosts of Spirits not yet drawn into the “Cycle of Necessity,” or evolution—is “the Lord—the Gods,” or the “Working Host,” the “Army” collectively taken, the “One in many.”

The One is infinite and unconditioned. It cannot create, for It can have no relation to the finite and conditioned. If everything we see, from the glorious suns and planets down to the blades of grass and the specks of dust, had been created by the Absolute Perfection and were the direct work of even the _First_ Energy that proceeded from It,(389) then every such thing would have been perfect, eternal, and unconditioned, like its author. The millions upon millions of imperfect works found in Nature testify loudly that they are the products of finite, conditioned beings—though the latter were and are Dhyân Chohans, Archangels, or what ever else they may be named. In short, these imperfect works are the unfinished production of evolution, under the guidance of the imperfect Gods. The _Zohar_ gives us this assurance as well as the Secret Doctrine. It speaks of the auxiliaries of the “Ancient of Days,” the “Sacred Aged,” and calls them Auphanim, or the living Wheels of the celestial orbs, who

## participate in the work of the creation of the Universe.

Thus it is not the “Principle,” One and Unconditioned, nor even Its reflection, that creates, but only the “Seven Gods” who fashion the Universe out of the eternal Matter, vivified into objective life by the reflection into it of the One Reality.

The Creator is they—“God the Host”—called in the Secret Doctrine the Dhyân Chohans; with the Hindus the Prajâpatis; with the Western Kabalists the Sephiroth; and with the Buddhist the Devas—impersonal because blind forces. They are the Amshaspends with the Zoroastrians, and while with the Christian Mystic the “Creator” is the “Gods of the God,” with the dogmatic Churchman he is the “God of the Gods,” the “Lord of lords,” etc.

“Jehovah” is only the God who is greater than all Gods in the eyes of Israel.

I know, that the Lord [of Israel] is great and that our Lord is above all gods.(390)

And again:

For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens.(391)

The Egyptian Neteroo, translated by Champollion “_the other Gods_” are the Elohim of the Biblical writers, behind which stands concealed the One God, considered in the diversity of his powers.(392) This One is not Parabrahman, but the Unmanifested Logos, the Demiurgos, the real Creator or Fashioner, that follows him, standing for the Demiurgi collectively taken. Further on the great Egyptologist adds:

We see Egypt concealing and hiding, so to say, _the_ God of Gods behind the _agents_ she surrounds him with; she gives the precedence to her great gods before the one and sole Deity, so that the attributes of that God become their property. Those great Gods proclaim themselves uncreate.... Neith is “_that which is_,” as Jehovah;(393) Thoth is self‐created(394) without having been begotten, etc. Judaism annihilating these potencies before the grandeur of its God, they cease to be simply Powers, like Philo’s Archangels, like the Sephiroth of the _Kabalah_, like the Ogdoades of the Gnostics—they merge together and become transformed into God himself.(395)

Jehovah is thus, as the _Kabalah_ teaches, at best but the “Heavenly Man,” Adam Kadmon, used by the self‐created Spirit, the Logos, as a chariot, a vehicle in His descent towards manifestation in the phenomenal world.

Such are the teachings of the Archaic Wisdom, nor can they be repudiated even by the orthodox Christian, if he be sincere and open‐minded in the study of his own Scripture. For if he reads St. Paul’s _Epistles_ carefully he will find that the Secret Doctrine and the _Kabalah_ are fully admitted by the “Apostle of the Gentiles.” The Gnosis which he appears to condemn is no less for him than for Plato “the supreme knowledge of the truth and of the One Being;”(396) for what St. Paul condemns is not the true, but only the false, Gnosis and its abuses: otherwise how could he use the language of a Platonist _pur sang_? The Ideas, types (Archai), of the Greek Philosopher; the Intelligences of Pythagoras; the Æons or Emanations of the Pantheist; the Logos or Word, Chief of these Intelligences; the Sophia or Wisdom; the Demiurgos, the Builder of the world under the direction of the Father, the Unmanifested Logos, from which He emanates; Ain‐Suph, the Unknown of the Infinite; the angelic Periods; the _Seven_ Spirits who are the representatives of the _Seven_ of all the older cosmogonies—are all to be found in his writings, recognized by the Church as canonical and divinely inspired. Therein, too, may be recognized the Depths of Ahriman, Rector of this our World, the “God of this World;” the Pleroma of the Intelligences; the Archontes of the air; the Principalities, the Kabalistic Metatron; and they can easily be identified again in the Roman Catholic writers when read in the original Greek and Latin texts, English translations giving but a very poor idea of the real contents of these.

SECTION XXIII. WHAT THE OCCULTISTS AND KABALISTS HAVE TO SAY.

The _Zohar_, an unfathomable store of hidden wisdom and mystery, is very often appealed to by Roman Catholic writers. A very learned Rabbi, now the Chevalier Drach, having been converted to Roman Catholicism, and being a great Hebraist, thought fit to step into the shoes of Picus de Mirandola and John Reuchlin, and to assure his new co‐religionists that the _Zohar_ contained in it pretty nearly all the dogmas of Catholicism. It is not our province to show here how far he has succeeded or failed; only to bring one instance of his explanations and preface it with the following:

The _Zohar_, as already shown, is not a genuine production of the Hebrew mind. It is the repository and compendium of the oldest doctrines of the East, transmitted orally at first, and then written down in independent treatises during the Captivity at Babylon, and finally brought together by Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochai, toward the beginning of the Christian era. As Mosaic cosmogony was born under a new form in Mesopotamian countries, so the _Zohar_ was a vehicle in which were focussed rays from the light of Universal Wisdom. Whatever likenesses are found between it and the Christian teachings, the compilers of the _Zohar_ never had Christ in their minds. Were it otherwise there would not be one single Jew of the Mosaic law left in the world by this time. Again, if one is to accept literally what the _Zohar_ says, then any religion under the sun may find corroboration in its symbols and allegorical sayings; and this, simply because this work is the echo of the primitive truths, and every creed is founded on some of these; the _Zohar_ being but a veil of the Secret Doctrine. This is so evident that we have only to point to the said ex‐ Rabbi, the Chevalier Drach, to prove the fact.

In Part III, fol. 87 (col. 346th) the _Zohar_ treats of the Spirit guiding the Sun, its Rector, explaining that it is not the Sun itself that is meant thereby, but the Spirit “on, or _under_” the Sun. Drach is anxious to show that it was Christ who was meant by that “Sun,” or the Solar Spirit therein. In his comment upon that passage which refers to the Solar Spirit as “that stone which the builders rejected,” he asserts most positively that this

Sun‐stone (_pierre soleil_) is identical with Christ, who was that stone,

and that therefore

The sun is undeniably (_sans contredit_) the second hypostasis of the Deity,(397) or Christ.

If this be true, then the Vaidic or pre‐Vaidic Âryans, Chaldæans and Egyptians, like all Occultists past, present, and future, Jews included, have been Christians from all eternity. If this be not so, then modern Church Christianity is Paganism pure and simple exoterically, and transcendental and practical Magic, or Occultism, Esoterically.

For this “stone” has a manifold significance, a dual existence, with gradations, a regular progression and retrogression. It is a “mystery” indeed.

The Occultists are quite ready to agree with St. Chrysostom, that the infidels—the _profane_, rather—

Being blinded by sun‐light, thus lose sight of the true Sun in the contemplation of the false one.

But if that Saint, and along with him now the Hebraist Drach, chose to see in the _Zohar_ and the Kabalistic Sun “the _second_ hypostasis,” this is no reason why all others should be blinded by them. The mystery of the Sun is the grandest perhaps, of all the innumerable mysteries of Occultism. A Gordian knot, truly, but one that cannot be severed with the double‐edged sword of scholastic casuistry. It is a true _deo dignus vindice nodus_, and can be untied only by the _Gods_. The meaning of this is plain, and every Kabalist will understand it.

_Contra solem ne loquaris_ was not said by Pythagoras with regard to the visible Sun. It was the “Sun of Initiation” that was meant, in its triple form—two of which are the “Day‐Sun” and the “Night‐Sun.”

If behind the physical luminary there were no mystery that people sensed instinctively, why should every nation, from the primitive peoples down to the Parsîs of to‐day, have turned towards the Sun during prayers? The Solar Trinity is not Mazdean, but is universal, and is as old as man. All the temples in Antiquity were invariably made to face the Sun, their portals to open to the East. See the old temples of Memphis and Baalbec, the Pyramids of the Old and of the New (?) Worlds, the Round Towers of Ireland, and the Serapeum of Egypt. The Initiates alone could give a philosophical explanation of this, and a reason for it—its mysticism notwithstanding—were only the world ready to receive it, which alas! it is not. The last of the Solar Priests in Europe was the Imperial Initiate, Julian, now called the Apostate.(398) He tried to benefit the world by revealing at least a portion of the great mystery of the τρεπλασιος and—_he died_. “There are three in one,” he said of the Sun—the central Sun(399) being a precaution of Nature: the first is the universal cause of all, Sovereign Good and perfection; the Second Power is paramount Intelligence, having dominion over all reasonable beings, νοεροῖς; the third is the visible Sun. The pure energy of solar intelligence proceeds from the luminous seat occupied by our Sun in the centre of heaven, that pure energy being the Logos of our system; the “Mysterious Word Spirit produces all through the Sun, and never operates through any other medium,” says Hermes Trismegistus. For it is _in_ the Sun, more than in any other heavenly body that the [unknown] Power placed the seat of its habitation. Only neither Hermes Trismegistus nor Julian (an initiated Occultist), nor any other, meant by this Unknown Cause Jehovah, or Jupiter. They referred to the cause that produced all the manifested “great Gods” or Demiurgi (the Hebrew God included) of our system. Nor was our visible, _material_ Sun meant, for the latter was only the manifested symbol. Philolaus the Pythagorean, explains and completes Trismegistus by saying:

The Sun is a mirror of fire, the splendour of whose flames by their reflection in that mirror [the Sun] is poured upon us, and that splendour we call image.

It is evident that Philolaus referred to the central spiritual Sun, whose beams and effulgence are only mirrored by our central Star, the Sun. This is as clear to the Occultists as it was to the Pythagoreans. As for the profane of pagan antiquity, it was, of course, the physical Sun that was the “highest God” for them, as it seems—if Chevalier Drach’s view be accepted—to have now virtually become for the modern Roman Catholics. If words mean anything, the statement made by the Chevalier Drach that “this sun is, undeniably, the second hypostasis of the Deity,” imply what we say; as “this Sun” refers to the Kabalistic Sun, and “hypostasis” means substance or subsistence of the Godhead or Trinity—distinctly personal. As the author, being an ex‐Rabbi, thoroughly versed in Hebrew, and in the mysteries of the _Zohar_, ought to know the value of words; and as, moreover, in writing this, he was bent upon reconciling “the seeming contradictions,” as he puts it, between Judaism and Christianity—the fact becomes quite evident.

But all this pertains to questions and problems which will be solved naturally and in the course of the development of the doctrine. The Roman Catholic Church stands accused, not of worshipping under other names the Divine Beings worshipped by all nations in antiquity, but of declaring idolatrous, not only the Pagans ancient and modern, but every Christian nation that has freed itself from the Roman yoke. The accusation brought against herself by more than one man of Science, of worshipping the stars like true Sabæans of old, stands to this day uncontradicted, yet no star‐ worshipper has ever addressed his adoration to the material stars and planets, as will be shown before the last page of this work is written; none the less is it true that those Philosophers alone who studied Astrology and Magic knew that the last word of those sciences was to be sought in, and expected from, the Occult forces emanating from those constellations.

SECTION XXIV. MODERN KABALISTS IN SCIENCE AND OCCULT ASTRONOMY.

There is a physical, an astral, and a super‐astral Universe in the three chief divisions of the _Kabalah_; as there are terrestrial, super‐ terrestrial, and spiritual Beings. The “Seven Planetary Spirits” may be ridiculed by Scientists to their hearts’ content, yet the need of intelligent ruling and guiding Forces is so much felt to this day that scientific men and specialists, who will not hear of Occultism or of ancient systems, find themselves obliged to generate in their inner consciousness some kind of semi‐mystical system. Metcalf’s “sun‐force” theory, and that of Zaliwsky, a learned Pole, which made Electricity the Universal Force and placed its storehouse in the Sun,(400) were revivals of the Kabalistic teachings. Zaliwsky tried to prove that Electricity, producing “the most powerful, attractive, calorific, and luminous effects,” was present in the physical constitution of the Sun and explained its peculiarities. This is very near the Occult teaching. It is only by admitting the gaseous nature of the Sun‐reflector, and the powerful Magnetism and Electricity of the solar attraction and repulsion, that one can explain (_a_) the evident absence of any waste of power and luminosity in the Sun—inexplicable by the ordinary laws of combustion; and (_b_) the behaviour of the planets, so often contradicting every accepted rule of weight and gravity. And Zaliwsky makes this “solar electricity” “_differ from anything known on earth_.”

Father Secchi may be suspected of having sought to introduce

_Forces of quite a new order_ and quite foreign to gravitation, which he had discovered in Space,(401)

in order to reconcile Astronomy with theological Astronomy. But Nagy, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was no clerical, and yet he develops a theory on the necessity of intelligent Forces whose complacency “would lend itself to all the whims of the comets.” He suspects that:

Notwithstanding all the actual researches on the rapidity of light—that _dazzling product of an unknown force_ ... which we see too frequently to understand—_that light is motionless_ in reality.(402)

C. E. Love, the well‐known railway builder and engineer in France, tired of blind forces, made all the (then) “imponderable agents”—now called “forces”—subordinates of Electricity, and declares the latter to be an

Intelligence—albeit molecular in nature and material.(403)

In the author’s opinion these Forces are atomistic agents, endowed with intelligence, spontaneous will, and motion,(404) and he thus, like the Kabalists, makes the causal Forces substantial, while the Forces that act on this plane are only the effects of the former, as with him matter is eternal, and the Gods also;(405) so is the Soul likewise, though it has inherent in itself a still higher Soul [Spirit], preëxistent, endowed with memory, and superior to Electric Force; the latter is subservient to the higher Souls, those superior Souls forcing it to act according to the eternal laws. The concept is rather hazy, but is evidently on the Occult lines. Moreover, the system proposed is entirely pantheistic, and is worked out in a purely scientific volume. Monotheists and Roman Catholics fall foul of it, of course; but one who believes in the Planetary Spirits and who endows Nature with living Intelligences, must always expect this.

In this connection, however, it is curious that after the moderns have so laughed at the ignorance of the ancients,

Who, knowing only of seven planets [yet having an ogdoad which _did not_ include the earth!], invented therefore seven Spirits to fit in with the number,

Babinet should have vindicated the “superstition” unconsciously to himself. In the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ this eminent French Astronomer writes:

The ogdoad of the Ancients included the earth [which is an error], _i.e._, eight or seven according to whether or not the earth was comprised in the number.(406)

De Mirville assures his readers that:

M. Babinet was telling me but a few days ago that we had in reality only eight big planets, including the earth, and so many small ones between Mars and Jupiter.... Herschel offering to call all those beyond the seven primary planets asteroids!(407)

There is a problem to be solved in this connection. How do Astronomers know that Neptune is a planet, or even that it is a body belonging to our system? Being found on the very confines of our Planetary World, so called, the latter was arbitrarily expanded to receive it; but what really mathematical and infallible proof have Astronomers that it is (_a_) a planet, and (_b_) one of _our_ planets? None at all! It is at such an immeasurable distance from us, the

Apparent diameter of the sun being to Neptune but one‐fortieth of the sun’s apparent diameter to us,

and it is so dim and hazy when seen through the best telescope that it looks like an astronomical romance to call it one of our planets. Neptune’s heat and light are reduced to 1/900 part of the heat and light received by the earth. His motion and that of his satellites have always looked suspicious. They do not agree—in appearance, at least—with those of the other planets. His system is retrograde, etc. But even the latter abnormal fact resulted only in the creation of new hypotheses by our Astronomers, who forthwith suggested a probable overturn of Neptune, his collision with another body, etc. Was Adams’ and Leverrier’s discovery so welcomed because Neptune was as necessary as was Ether to throw a new glory upon astronomical prevision, upon the certitude of modern scientific data, and principally upon the power of mathematical analysis? It would so appear. A new planet that widens our planetary domain by more than four hundred million leagues is worthy of annexation. Yet, as in the case of terrestrial annexation, scientific authority may be proved “right” only because it has “might.” Neptune’s motion happens to be dimly perceived: Eureka! it is a planet! A mere motion, however, proves very little. It is now an ascertained fact in Astronomy that there are no absolutely fixed stars in Nature,(408) even though such stars should continue to exist in astronomical parlance, while they have passed from the scientific imagination. Occultism, however, has a strange theory of its own with regard to Neptune.

Occultism says that if several hypotheses resting on mere assumption—which have been accepted only because they have been taught by eminent men of learning—are taken away from the Science of Modern Astronomy, to which they serve as props, then even the presumably universal law of gravitation will be found to be contrary to the most ordinary truths of mechanics. And really one can hardly blame Christians—foremost of all the Roman Catholics—however scientific some of these may themselves be, for refusing to quarrel with their Church for the sake of scientific beliefs. Nor can we even blame them for accepting in the secresy of their hearts—as some of them do—the theological “Virtues” and “Archons” of Darkness, instead of all the blind forces offered them by Science.

Never can there be intervention of any sort in the marshalling and the regular precession of the celestial bodies! The law of gravitation is the law of laws; who ever witnessed a stone rising in the air against gravitation? The permanence of the universal law is shown in the behaviour of the sidereal worlds and globes eternally faithful to their primitive orbits; never wandering beyond their respective paths. Nor is there any intervention needed, as it could only be disastrous. Whether the first sidereal incipient rotation took place owing to an intercosmic chance, or to the spontaneous development of latent primordial forces; or again, whether that impulse was given once for all by God or Gods—it does not make the slightest difference. At this stage of cosmic evolution no intervention, superior or inferior, is admissible. Were any to take place, the universal clock‐work would stop, and Kosmos would fall into pieces.

Such are stray sentences, pearls of wisdom, fallen from time to time from scientific lips, and now chosen at random to illustrate a query. We lift our diminished heads and look heavenward. Such seems to be the fact: worlds, suns, and stars, the shining myriads of the heavenly hosts, remind the Poet of an infinite, shoreless ocean, whereon move swiftly numberless squadrons of ships, millions upon millions of cruisers, large and small, crossing each other, whirling and gyrating in every direction; and Science teaches us, that though they be without rudder or compass or any beacon to guide them, they are nevertheless secure from collision—almost secure, at any rate, save in chance accidents—as the whole celestial machine is built upon and guided by an immutable, albeit blind, law, and by constant and accelerating force or forces. “Built upon” by whom? “By self‐evolution,” is the answer. Moreover, as dynamics teach that

A body in motion tends to continue in the same state of relative rest or motion unless acted upon by some external force,

this force has to be regarded as self‐generated—even if not eternal, since this would amount to the recognition of perpetual motion—and so well self‐ calculated and self‐adjusted as to last from the beginning to the end of Kosmos. But “self‐generation” has still to generate from something, generation _ex‐nihilo_ being as contrary to reason as it is to Science. Thus we are placed once more between the horns of a dilemma: are we to believe in perpetual motion or in self‐generation _ex‐nihilo_? And if in neither, who or what is that something, which first produced that force or those forces?

There are such things in mechanics as superior levers, which give the impulse and act upon secondary or inferior levers. The former, however, need an impulse and occasional renovation, otherwise they would themselves very soon stop and fall back into their original status. What is the external force which puts and retains them in motion? Another dilemma!

As to the law of cosmical _non‐intervention_, it could be justified only in one case, namely, if the celestial mechanism were perfect; but it is not. The so‐called unalterable motions of celestial bodies alter and change incessantly; they are very often disturbed, and the wheels of even the sidereal locomotive itself occasionally jump off their invisible rails, as may be easily proved. Otherwise why should Laplace speak of the probable occurrence at some future time of an out‐and‐out reform in the arrangement of the planets;(409) or Lagrange maintain the gradual narrowing of the orbits; or our modern Astronomers, again, declare that the fuel in the sun is slowly disappearing? If the laws and forces which govern the behaviour of the celestial bodies are immutable, such modifications and wearing‐out of substance or fuel, of force and fluids, would be impossible; yet they are not denied. Therefore one has to suppose that such modifications will have to rely upon the laws of forces, which will have to self‐regenerate themselves once more on such occasions, thus producing an astral antinomy, and a kind of physical palinomy, since, as Laplace says, one would then see fluids disobeying themselves and reäcting in a way contrary to all their attributes and properties.

Newton felt very uncomfortable about the moon. Her behaviour in progressively narrowing the circumference of her orbit around the earth made him nervous, lest it should end one day in our satellite falling upon the earth. The world, he confessed, needed repairing, and that very often.(410) In this he was corroborated by Herschel.(411) He speaks of real and quite considerable deviations, besides those which are only apparent, but gets some consolation from his conviction that somebody or something will probably see to things.

We may be answered that the personal beliefs of some pious Astronomers, however great they may be as scientific characters, are no proofs of the actual existence and presence in space of intelligent supramundane Beings, of either Gods or Angels. It is the behaviour of the stars and planets themselves that has to be analysed and inferences must be drawn therefrom. Renan asserts that nothing that we know of the sidereal bodies warrants the idea of the presence of any Intelligence, whether internal or external to them.

Let us see, says Reynaud, if this is a fact, or only one more empty scientific assumption.

The orbits traversed by the planets are far from being immutable. They are, on the contrary, subject to perpetual mutation in position, as in form. Elongations, contractions, and orbital widenings, oscillations from right to left, slackening and quickening of speed ... and all this on a plane which seems to vacillate.(412)

As is very pertinently observed by des Mousseux:

Here is a path having little of the mathematical and mechanical precision claimed for it; for we know of no clock which, having gone slow for several minutes should catch up the right time _of itself_ and _without a turn of the key_.

So much for blind law and force. As for the physical impossibility—a miracle indeed in the sight of Science—of a stone raised in the air against the law of gravitation, this is what Babinet—the deadliest enemy and opponent of the phenomena of levitation—(cited by Arago) says:

Everyone knows the theory of _bolides_ [meteors] and aerolithes.... In Connecticut an immense aerolith was seen [a mass of eighteen hundred feet in diameter], bombarding a whole American zone and returning to the spot [in mid‐air] from which it had started.(413)

Thus we find in both of the cases above cited—that of self‐correcting planets and of meteors of gigantic size flying back into the air—a “blind force” regulating and resisting the natural tendencies of “blind matter,” and even occasionally repairing its mistakes and correcting its failures. This is far more miraculous and even “extravagant,” one would say, than any “Angel‐guided” Element.

Bold is he who laughs at the idea of Von Haller, who declares that:

The stars are perhaps an abode of glorious Spirits; as here Vice reigns, there is Virtue master.(414)

SECTION XXV. EASTERN AND WESTERN OCCULTISM.

In _The Theosophist_ for March, 1886,(415) in an answer to the “Solar Sphinx,” a member of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society wrote as follows:

We hold and believe that the revival of Occult Knowledge now in progress will some day demonstrate that the Western system represents ranges of perceptions which the Eastern—at least as expounded in the pages of _The Theosophist_—has yet to attain.(416)

The writer is not the only person labouring under this erroneous impression. Greater Kabalists than he had said the same in the United States. This only proves that the knowledge possessed by Western Occultists of the true Philosophy, and the “ranges of perceptions” and thought of the Eastern doctrines, is very superficial. This assertion will be easily demonstrated by giving a few instances, instituting comparisons between the two interpretations of one and the same doctrine—the Hermetic Universal Doctrine. It is the more needed since, were we to neglect bringing forward such comparisons, our work would be left incomplete.

We may take the late Éliphas Lévi, rightly referred to by another Western Mystic, Mr. Kenneth Mackenzie, as “one of the greatest representatives of modern Occult Philosophy,”(417) as presumably the best and most learned expounder of the Chaldæan _Kabalah_, and compare his teaching with that of Eastern Occultists. In his unpublished manuscripts and letters, lent to us by a Theosophist, who was for fifteen years his pupil, we had hoped to find that which he was unwilling to publish. What we do find, however, disappoints us greatly. We will take these teachings, then, as containing the essence of Western or Kabalistic Occultism, analyzing and comparing them with the Eastern interpretation as we go on.

Éliphas Lévi teaches correctly, though in language rather too rhapsodically rhetorical to be sufficiently clear to the beginner, that

Eternal life is Motion equilibrated by the alternate manifestations of force.

But why does he not add that this perpetual motion is independent of the manifested Forces at work? He says:

Chaos is the Tohu‐vah‐bohu of perpetual motion and the sum total of primordial matter;

and he fails to add that Matter is “primordial” only at the beginning of every new reconstruction of the Universe, matter _in abscondito_, as it is called by the Alchemists, is eternal, indestructible, without beginning or end. It is regarded by Eastern Occultists as the eternal Root of all, the Mûlaprakriti of the Vedântin, and the Svabhâvat of the Buddhist, the Divine Essence, in short, or Substance; the radiations from This are periodically aggregated into graduated forms, from pure Spirit to gross Matter; the Root, or Space, is in its abstract presence the Deity Itself, the Ineffable and Unknown One Cause.

Ain‐Suph with him also is the Boundless, the infinite and One Unity, secondless and causeless as Parabrahman. Ain‐Suph is the indivisible point, and therefore, as “being everywhere and nowhere,” is the absolute All. It is also “Darkness” because it is absolute Light, and the Root of the seven fundamental Cosmic Principles. Yet Éliphas Lévi, by simply stating that “Darkness was upon the face of the Earth,” fails to show (_a_) that “Darkness” in this sense is Deity Itself, and he is therefore withholding the only philosophical solution of this problem for the human mind; and (_b_) he allows the unwary student to believe that by “Earth” our own little globe—an atom in the Universe—is meant. In short, this teaching does not embrace the Occult Cosmogony, but deals simply with Occult Geology and the formation of our cosmic speck. This is further shown by his making a _résumé_ of the Sephirothal Tree in this wise:

God is harmony, the astronomy of Powers and Unity outside of the World.

This seems to suggest (_a_) that he teaches the existence of an extra‐ cosmic God, thus limiting and conditioning both the Kosmos and the divine Infinity and Omnipresence, which cannot be extraneous to or outside of one single atom; and (_b_) that by skipping the whole of the pre‐cosmic period—the manifested Kosmos here being meant—the very root of Occult teaching, he explains only the Kabalistic meaning of the dead‐letter of the _Bible_ and _Genesis_, leaving its spirit and essence untouched. Surely the “ranges of perception” of the Western mind will not be greatly enlarged by such a limited teaching.

Having said a few words on Tohu‐vah‐bohu—the meaning of which Wordsworth rendered graphically as “higgledy‐piggledy”—and having explained that this term denoted Cosmos, he teaches that:

Above the dark abyss [Chaos] were the Waters; ... the earth [_la terre!_] was Tohu‐vah‐bohu, _i.e._, in confusion, and darkness covered the face of the Deep, and vehement Breath moved on the Waters when the Spirit exclaimed [?], “Let there be light,” and there was light. Thus the earth [our globe, of course] was in a state of cataclysm; _thick_ vapours veiled the immensity of the sky, the earth was covered with waters and a violent wind was agitating this dark ocean, when at a given moment the equilibrium revealed itself and light reäppeared; the letters that compose the Hebrew word “Bereshith” (the first word of _Genesis_) are “Beth,” the binary, the verb manifested by the act, a _feminine_ letter; then “Resch,” the Verbum and Life, number 20, the disc multiplied by 2; and “Aleph,” the spiritual principle, the Unit, a masculine letter.

Place these letters in a triangle and you have the absolute Unity, that without being included into numbers creates the number, the first manifestation, which is 2, and these two united by harmony resulting from the analogy of contraries [opposites], make 1, only. This is why God is called Elohim (plural).

All this is very ingenious, but is very puzzling, besides being incorrect. For owing to the first sentence, “Above the dark abyss were the Waters,” the French Kabalist leads the student away from the right track. This an Eastern Chela will see at a glance, and even one of the profane may see it. For if the Tohu‐vah‐bohu is “under” and the Waters are “above,” then these two are quite distinct from each other, and this is not the case. This statement is a very important one, inasmuch as it entirely changes the spirit and nature of Cosmogony, and brings it down to a level with exoteric _Genesis_—perhaps it was so stated with an eye to this result. The Tohu‐vah‐bohu is the “Great Deep” and is identical with “the Waters of Chaos,” or the primordial Darkness. By stating the fact otherwise it makes both “the Great Deep” and the “Waters”—which cannot be separated except in the phenomenal world—limited as to space and conditioned as to their nature. Thus Éliphas in his desire to conceal the last word of Esoteric Philosophy, fails—whether intentionally or otherwise does not matter—to point out the fundamental principle of the one true Occult Philosophy, namely, the unity and absolute homogeneity of the One Eternal Divine Element, and he makes of the Deity a male God. Then he says:

Above the Waters was the powerful Breath of the Elohim [the creative Dhyân Chohans]. Above the Breath appeared the Light, and above the Light the Word ... that created it.

Now the fact is quite the reverse of this: it is the Primeval Light that creates the Word or Logos, Who in His turn creates physical light. For the Secret Doctrine teaches us that the reconstruction of the Universe takes place in this wise: At the periods of new generation, perpetual Motion becomes Breath; from the Breath comes forth primordial Light, through whose radiance manifests the Eternal Thought concealed in darkness, and this becomes the Word (Mantra).(418) It is _That_ (the Mantra or Word) from which all This (the Universe) sprang into being.

Further on Éliphas Lévi says:

This [the concealed Deity] radiated a ray into the Eternal Essence [Waters of Space] and, fructifying thereby the primordial germ, the Essence expanded,(419) giving birth to the Heavenly Man from whose mind were born all forms.

The _Kabalah_ states very nearly the same. To learn what it really teaches one has to reverse the order in which Éliphas Lévi gives it, replacing the word “above” by that of “in,” as there cannot surely be any “above” or “under” in the Absolute. This is what he says:

Above the waters the powerful breath of the Elohim; above the Breath the Light; above Light the Word, or the Speech that created it. We see here the spheres of evolution: the souls [?] driven from the dark centre (Darkness) toward the luminous circumference. At the bottom of the lowest circle is the Tohu‐vah‐bohu, or the chaos which precedes all manifestation [_Naissances_—generation]; then the region of Water; then Breath; then Light; and, lastly, the Word.

The construction of the above sentences shows that the learned Abbé had a decided tendency to anthropomorphize creation, even though the latter has to be shaped out of preëxisting material, as the _Zohar_ shows plainly enough.

This is how the “great” Western Kabalist gets out of the difficulty: he keeps silent on the first stage of evolution and imagines a second Chaos. Thus he says:

The Tohu‐vah‐bohu is the Latin Limbus, or twilight of the morning and evening of life.(420) It is in perpetual motion,(421) it decomposes continually,(422) and the work of putrefaction accelerates, because the world is advancing towards regeneration.(423) The Tohu‐vah‐bohu of the Hebrews is not exactly the confusion of things called Chaos by the Greeks, and which is found described in the commencement of the Metamorphosis of Ovid; it is something greater and more profound; it is the foundation of religion, it is the philosophical affirmation of the immateriality of God.

Rather an affirmation of the materiality of a personal God. If a man has to seek his Deity in the Hades of the ancients—for the Tohu‐vah‐bohu, or the Limbus of the Greeks, is the Hall of Hades—then one can wonder no longer at the accusations brought forward by the Church against the “witches” and sorcerers versed in Western Kabalism, that they adored the goat Mendes, or the devil personified by certain spooks and Elementals. But in face of the task Éliphas Lévi had set before himself—that of reconciling Jewish Magic with Roman ecclesiasticism—he could say nothing else.

Then he explains the first sentence in _Genesis_:

Let us put on one side the vulgar translation of the sacred texts and see what is hidden in the first chapter of _Genesis_.

He then gives the Hebrew text quite correctly, but transliterates it:

Bereschith Bara Eloim uth aschamam ouatti aares ouares ayete Tohu‐ vah‐bohu.... Ouimas Eloim rai avur ouiai aour.

And he then explains:

The first word, “Bereschith,” signifies “genesis,” a word equivalent to “nature.”

“The act of generation or production,” we maintain; not “nature.” He then continues:

The phrase, then, is incorrectly translated in the _Bible_. It is not “in the beginning,” for it should be at the stage of the _generating force_,(424) which would thus exclude every idea of the _ex‐nihilo_ ... as _nothing_ cannot produce something. The word “Eloim” or “Elohim” signifies the generating Powers, and such is the Occult sense of the first verse.... “Bereschith” (“nature” or “genesis”), “Bara” (“created”) “Eloim” (“the forces”) “Athat‐ ashamaim” (“heavens”) “ouath” and “oaris” (“the earth”); that is to say, “The generative potencies created indefinitely (eternally(425)) those forces that are the equilibrated opposites that we call heaven and earth, meaning the space and the bodies, the volatile and the fixed, the movement and the weight.”

Now this, if it be correct, is too vague to be understood by any one ignorant of the Kabalistic teaching. Not only are his explanations unsatisfactory and misleading—in his published works they are still worse—but his Hebrew transliteration is entirely wrong: it precludes the student, who would compare it for himself with the equivalent symbols and numerals of the words and letters of the Hebrew alphabet, from finding anything of that he might have found were the words correctly spelt in the French transliteration.

Compared even with exoteric Hindu Cosmogony, the philosophy which Éliphas Lévi gives out as Kabalistic is simply mystical Roman Catholicism adapted to the Christian _Kabalah_. His _Histoire de la Magie_ shows it plainly, and reveals also his object, which he does not even care to conceal. For, while stating with his Church, that

The Christian religion has imposed silence on the lying oracles of the Gentiles and put an end to the prestige of the false gods,(426)

he promises to prove in his work that the real Sanctum Regnum, the great Magic Art, is in that Star of Bethlehem which led the three Magi to adore the Saviour of the World. He says:

We will prove that the study of the sacred Pentagram had to lead all the Magi to know the new name which should be raised above all names, and before which every being capable of worship has to bend his knee.(427)

This shows that Lévi’s _Kabalah_ is mystic Christianity, and not Occultism; for Occultism is universal and knows no difference between the “Saviours” (or great Avatâras) of the several old nations. Éliphas Lévi was not an exception in preaching Christianity under a disguise of Kabalism. He was undeniably “the greatest representative of modern Occult Philosophy,” as it is studied in Roman Catholic countries generally, where it is fitted to the preconceptions of Christian students. But he never taught the real universal _Kabalah_, and least of all did he teach Eastern Occultism. Let the student compare the Eastern and Western teaching, and see whether the philosophy of the _Upanishads_ “has yet to attain the ranges of perception” of this Western system. Everyone has the right to defend the system he prefers, but in doing this, there is no need to throw slurs upon the system of one’s brother.

In view of the great resemblance between many of the fundamental “truths” of Christianity and the “myths” of Brâhmanism, there have been serious attempts made lately to prove that the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_ and most of the _Brâhmanas_ and the _Purânas_ are of a far later date than the Mosaic Books and even than the _Gospels_. But were it possible that an enforced success should be obtained in this direction, such argument cannot achieve its object, since the _Rig Veda_ remains. Brought down to the most modern limits of the age assigned to it, its date cannot be made to overlap that of the _Pentateuch_, which is admittedly later.

The Orientalists know well that they cannot make away with the landmarks, followed by all subsequent religions, set up in that “Bible of Humanity” called the _Rig Veda_. It is there that at the very dawn of intellectual humanity were laid the foundation‐stones of all the faiths and creeds, of every fane and church built from first to last; and they are still there. Universal “myths,” personifications of Powers divine and cosmic, primary and secondary, and historical personages of all the now‐existing as well as of extinct religions are to be found in the seven chief Deities and their 330,000,000 correlations of the _Rig Veda_, and those Seven, with the odd millions, are the Rays of the one boundless Unity.

But to THIS can never be offered profane worship. It can only be the “object of the most abstract meditation, which Hindus practise in order to obtain absorption in it.” At the beginning of every “dawn” of “Creation,” eternal Light—which is darkness—assumes the aspect of so‐called Chaos: chaos to the human intellect; the eternal Root to the superhuman or spiritual sense.

“Osiris is a black God.” These were the words pronounced at “low breath” at Initiation in Egypt, because Osiris Noumenon is darkness to the mortal. In this Chaos are formed the “Waters,” Mother Isis, Aditi, etc. They are the “Waters of Life,” in which primordial germs are created—or rather reäwakened—by the primordial Light. It is Purushottama, or the Divine Spirit, which in its capacity of Nârâyana, the Mover on the Waters of Space, fructifies and infuses the Breath of life into that germ which becomes the “Golden Mundane Egg,” in which the male Brahmâ is created;(428) and from this the first Prajâpati, the Lord of Beings, emerges, and becomes the progenitor of mankind. And though it is not he, but the Absolute, that is said to contain the Universe in Itself, yet it is the duty of the male Brahmâ to manifest it in a visible form. Hence he has to be connected with the procreation of species, and assumes, like Jehovah and other male Gods in subsequent anthropomorphism, a phallic symbol. At best every such male God, the “Father” of all, becomes the “Archetypal Man.” Between him and the Infinite Deity stretches an abyss. In the theistic religions of personal Gods the latter are degraded from abstract Forces into physical potencies. The Water of Life—the “Deep” of Mother Nature—is viewed in its terrestrial aspect in anthropomorphic religions. Behold, how holy it has become by theological magic! It is held sacred and is deified now as of old in almost every religion. But if Christians use it as a means of spiritual purification in baptism and prayer; if Hindus pay reverence to their sacred streams, tanks, and rivers; if Pârsî, Mahommedan and Christian alike believe in its efficacy, surely that element must have some great and Occult significance. In Occultism it stands for the Fifth Principle of Kosmos, in the lower septenary: for the whole visible Universe was built by Water, say the Kabalists who know the difference between the two waters—the “Waters of Life” and those of Salvation—so confused together in dogmatic religions. The “King‐Preacher” says of himself:

I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem, and I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all _things_ that are done under heaven.(429)

Speaking of the great work and glory of the Elohim(430)—unified into the “Lord God” in the English _Bible_, whose garment, he tells us, is light and heaven the curtain—he refers to the builder

Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters,(431)

that is, the divine Host of the Sephiroth, who have constructed the Universe out of the Deep, the Waters of Chaos. Moses and Thales were right in saying that only earth and water can bring forth a living Soul, water being on this plane the principle of all things. Moses was an Initiate, Thales a Philosopher—_i.e._, a Scientist, for the words were synonymous in his day.

The secret meaning of this is that water and earth stand in the Mosaic Books for the prima materia and the creative (feminine) Principle on our plane. In Egypt Osiris was Fire, and Isis was the Earth or its synonym Water; the two opposing elements—just because of their opposite properties—being necessary to each other for a common object: that of procreation. The earth needs solar heat and rain to make her throw out her germs. But these procreative properties of Fire and Water, or Spirit and Matter, are symbols but of physical generation. While the Jewish Kabalists symbolized these elements only in their application to manifested things, and reverenced them as the emblems for the production of terrestrial life, the Eastern Philosophy noticed them only as an illusive emanation from their spiritual prototypes, and no unclean or unholy thought marred its Esoteric religious symbology.

Chaos, as shown elsewhere, is Theos, which becomes Kosmos: it is Space, the container of everything in the Universe. As Occult Teachings assert, it is called by the Chaldæans, Egyptians, and every other nation Tohu‐vah‐ bohu, or Chaos, Confusion, because Space is the great storehouse of Creation, whence proceed not forms alone, but also ideas, which could receive their expression only through the Logos, the Word, Verbum, or Sound.

_The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 are the successive emanations from Mother [Space] as she forms running downward her garment, spreading it upon the seven steps of Creation._(_432_)_ The roller returns upon itself, as one end joins the other __ in infinitude, and the numbers 4, 3, and 2 are displayed, as it is the only side of the veil that we can perceive, the first number being lost in its inaccessible solitude._

... _Father, which is Boundless Time, generates Mother, which is infinite Space, in Eternity; and Mother generates Father in Manvantaras, which are divisions of durations, that Day when that world becomes one ocean. Then the Mother becomes Nârâ [Waters—the Great Deep] for Nara [the Supreme Spirit] to rest—or move—upon, when, it is said, that 1, 2, 3, 4 descend and abide in the world of the unseen, while the 4, 3, 2, become the limits in the visible world to deal with the manifestations of Father [Time]._(433)

This relates to the Mahâyugas which in figures become 432, and with the addition of noughts, 4,320,000.

Now it is surpassingly strange, if it be a mere coincidence, that the numerical value of Tohu‐vah‐bohu, or “Chaos,” in the _Bible_—which Chaos, of course, is the “Mother” Deep, or the Waters of Space—should yield the same figures. For this is what is found in a Kabalist manuscript:

It is said of the Heavens and the Earth in the second verse of _Genesis_ that they were “Chaos and Confusion”—that is, they were “Tohu‐vah‐bohu;” “and _darkness_ was upon the face of the deep,” _i.e._, “the perfect material out of which construction was to be made lacked organization.” The order of the digits of these words as they stand—_i.e._,(434) the letters rendered by their numerical value—is 6,526,654 and 2,386. By art speech these are key‐working numbers loosely shuffled together, the germs and keys of construction, but to be recognized, one by one, as used and required. They follow symmetrically in the work as immediately following the first sentence of grand enunciation: “In Rash developed itself Gods, the heavens and the earth.”

Multiply the numbers of the letters of “Tohu‐vah‐bohu” together continuously from right to left, placing the consecutive single products as we go, and we will have the following series of values, _viz._, (_a_) 30, 60, 360, 2,160, 10,800, 43,200, or as by the characterizing digits; 3, 6, 36, 216, 108, and 432; (_b_) 20, 120, 720, 1,440, 7,200, or 2, 12, 72, 144, 72, 432, the series closing in 432, one of the most famous numbers of antiquity, and which, though obscured, crops out in the chronology up to the Flood.(435)...

This shows that the Hebrew usage of play upon the numbers must have come to the Jews from India. As we have seen, the final series yields, besides many another combination, the figures 108 and 1008—the number of the names of Vishnu, whence the 108 grains of the Yogî’s rosary—and close with 432, the truly “famous” number in Indian and Chaldæan antiquity, appearing in the cycle of 4,320,000 years in the former, and in the 432,000 years, the duration of the Chaldæan divine dynasties.

SECTION XXVI. THE IDOLS AND THE TERAPHIM.

The meaning of the “fairy‐tale” told by the Chaldæan Qû‐tâmy is easily understood. His _modus operandi_ with the “idol of the moon” was that of all the Semites, before Terah, Abraham’s father, made images—the Teraphim, called after him—or the “chosen people” of Israel ceased divining by them. These teraphim were just as much “idols” as is any pagan image or statue.(436) The injunction “Thou shalt not bow to a graven image,” or teraphim, must have either come at a later date, or have been disregarded, since the bowing‐down to and the divining by the teraphim seem to have been so orthodox and general that the “Lord” actually threatens the Israelites, through Hosea, to deprive them of their teraphim.

For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, ... without a sacrifice, and without an image.

Matzebah, or statue, or pillar, is explained in the _Bible_ to mean “without an ephod and without teraphim.”(437)

Father Kircher supports very strongly the idea that the statue of the Egyptian Serapis was identical in every way with those of the seraphim, or teraphim, in the temple of Solomon. Says Louis de Dieu:

They were, perhaps, images of angels, or statues dedicated to the angels, the presence of one of these spirits being thus attracted into a teraphim and answering the inquirers [consultans]; and even in this hypothesis the word “teraphim” would become the equivalent of “seraphim” by changing the “t” into “s” in the manner of Syrians.(438)

What says the _Septuagint_? The teraphim are translated successively by ἐίδωλα—forms in someone’s likeness; eidolon, an “astral body;” γλυπτὰ—the sculptured; κενοτάφια—sculptures in the sense of containing something hidden, or receptacles; θὴλους—manifestations; ἀλήθειας—truths or realities; μορφώματα or φωτισμοὺς—luminous, shining likenesses. The latter expression shows plainly what the teraphim were. The _Vulgate_ translates the term by “annuntientes,” the “messengers who announce,” and it thus becomes certain that the teraphim were the oracles. They were the animated statues, the Gods who revealed themselves to the masses through the Initiated Priests and Adepts in the Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, and other temples.

As to the way of divining, or learning one’s fate, and of being instructed by the teraphim,(439) it is explained quite plainly by Maimonides and Seldenus. The former says:

The worshippers of the teraphim claimed that the light of the principal stars [planets], penetrating into and filling the carved statue through and through, the angelic virtue [of the regents, or animating principle in the planets] conversed with them, teaching them many most useful arts and sciences.(440)

In his turn Seldenus explains the same, adding that the teraphim(441) were built and fashioned in accordance with the position of their respective planets, each of the teraphim being consecrated to a special “star‐angel,” those that the Greeks called stoichæ, as also according to figures located in the sky and called the “tutelary Gods”:

Those who traced out the στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματικοὶ [or the diviners by the planets] and the στοιχεῖα.(442)

Ammianus Marcellinus states that the ancient divinations were always accomplished with the help of the “spirits” of the elements (spiritus elementorum), or as they are called in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων. Now the latter are not the “spirits” of the stars (planets), nor are they divine Beings; they are simply the creatures inhabiting their respective elements, called by the Kabalists, elementary spirits, and by the Theosophists elementals.(443) Father Kircher, the Jesuit, tells the reader:

Every god had such instruments of divination to speak through. Each had his speciality.

Serapis gave instruction on agriculture; Anubis taught sciences; Horus advised upon psychic and spiritual matters; Isis was consulted on the rising of the Nile, and so on.(444)

This historical fact, furnished by one of the ablest and most erudite among the Jesuits, is unfortunate for the prestige of the “Lord God of Israel” with regard to his claims to priority and to his being the _one_ living God. Jehovah, on the admission of the _Old Testament_ itself, conversed with his elect in no other way, and this places him on a par with every other Pagan God, even of the inferior classes. In _Judges_, xvii., we read of Micah having an ephod and a teraphim fabricated, and consecrating them to Jehovah (see the _Septuagint_ and the _Vulgate_); these objects were made by a founder from the two hundred shekels of silver given to him by his mother. True, King James’ “Holy Bible” explains this little bit of idolatry by saying:

In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Yet the act must have been orthodox, since Micah, after hiring a priest, a diviner, for his ephod and teraphim, declares: “Now know I that the Lord will do me good.” And if Micah’s act—who

Had an house of Gods, and made an ephod and teraphim and consecrated one of his sons

to their service, as also to that of the “graven image” dedicated “unto the Lord” by his mother—now seems prejudicial, it was not so in those days of one religion and one lip. How can the Latin Church blame the act, since Kircher, one of her best writers, calls the teraphim “the holy instruments of primitive revelations;” since _Genesis_ shows us Rebecca going “to enquire of the Lord,”(445) and the Lord answering her (certainly through his teraphim), and delivering to her several prophecies? And if this be not sufficient, there is Saul, who deplores the silence of the ephod,(446) and David who consults the thummim, and receives oral advice from the Lord as to the best way of killing his enemies.

The thummim and urim, however—the object in our days of so much conjecture and speculation—was not an invention of the Jews, nor had it originated with them, despite the minute instruction given about it by Jehovah to Moses. For the priest‐hierophant of the Egyptian temples wore a breastplate of precious stones, in every way similar to that of the high priest of the Israelites.

The high‐priests of Egypt wore suspended on their necks an image of sapphire, called _Truth_, the manifestation of truth becoming evident in it.

Seldenus is not the only Christian writer who assimilates the Jewish to the Pagan teraphim, and expressed a conviction that the former had borrowed them from the Egyptians. Moreover, we are told by Döllinger, a preëminently Roman Catholic writer:

The teraphim were used and remained in many Jewish families to the days of Josiah.(447)

As to the personal opinion of Döllinger, a Papist, and of Seldenus, a Protestant—both of whom trace Jehovah in the teraphim of the Jews and “evil spirits” in those of the Pagans—it is the usual one‐sided judgment of _odium theologicum_ and sectarianism. Seldenus is right, however, in arguing that in the days of old, all such modes of communication had been primarily established for purposes of divine and angelic communications only. But

The holy Spirit (spirits, rather) spake [not] to the children of Israel [alone] by urim and thummim, while the tabernacle remained,

as Dr. A. Cruden would have people believe. Nor had the Jews alone need of a “tabernacle” for such a kind of theophanic, or divine communication; for no Bath‐Kol (or “Daughter of the divine Voice”), called thummim, could be heard whether by Jew, Pagan, or Christian, were there not a fit tabernacle for it. The “tabernacle” was simply the archaic telephone of those days of Magic when Occult powers were acquired by Initiation, just as they are now. The nineteenth century has replaced with an electric telephone the “tabernacle” of specified metals, wood, and special arrangements, and has natural mediums instead of high priests and hierophants. Why should people wonder, then, that instead of reaching Planetary Spirits and Gods, believers should now communicate with no greater beings than elementals and animated shells—the demons of Porphyry? Who these were, he tells us candidly in his work _On the Good and Bad Demons_:

They whose ambition is to be taken for Gods, and whose leader demands to be recognized as the Supreme God.

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

One would really say that the warning in Clement’s _Stromateis_ has been given in vain, though he is supposed to quote words pronounced by St. Peter. He says:

Do not adore God as the Jews do, who think they are the only ones to know Deity and fail to perceive that, instead of God, they are worshipping angels, the lunar months, and the moon.(448)

Who after reading the above can fail to feel surprise that, notwithstanding such understanding of the Jewish mistake, the Christians are still worshipping the Jewish Jehovah, the Spirit who spoke through his teraphim! That this is so, and that Jehovah was simply the “tutelary genius,” or spirit, of the people of Israel—only one of the pneumata tōn stoicheiōn (or “great spirits of the elements”), not even a high “Planetary”—is demonstrated on the authority of St. Paul and of Clemens Alexandrinus, if the words they use have any meaning. With the latter, the word στοιχεῖα signifies not only elements, but also

Generative cosmological principles, and notably the signs [or constellations] of the Zodiac, of the months, days, the sun and the moon.(449)

The expression is used by Aristotle in the same sense. He says, τῶν ἀστρῶν στοιχεῖα,(450) while Diogenes Laertius calls δώδεκα στοιχεία, the twelve signs of the Zodiac.(451) Now having the positive evidence of Ammianus Marcellinus to the effect that

Ancient divination was always accomplished with the help of the spirits of the elements,

or the same πνεάματα τῶν στοιχείων, and seeing in the _Bible_ numerous passages that (_a_) the Israelites, including Saul and David, resorted to the same divination, and used the same means; and (_b_) that it was their “Lord”—namely, Jehovah—who answered them, what else can we believe Jehovah to be than a “spiritus elementorum”?

Hence one sees no great difference between the “idol of the moon”—the Chaldæan teraphim through which spoke Saturn—and the idol of urim and thummim, the organ of Jehovah. Occult rites, scientific at the beginning—and forming the most solemn and sacred of sciences—have fallen through the degeneration of mankind into Sorcery, now called “superstition.” As Diogenes explains in his _History_:

The Kaldhi, having made long observations on the planets and knowing better than anyone else the meaning of their motions and their influences, predict to people their futurity. They regard their doctrine of the _five_ great orbs—which they call interpreters, and we, planets—as the most important. And though they allege that it is the _sun_ that furnishes them with most of the predictions for great forthcoming events, yet they worship more particularly Saturn. Such predictions made to a number of kings, especially to Alexander, Antigonus, Seleucus, Nicanor, etc., ... have been so marvellously realised that people were struck with admiration.(452)

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

SECTION XXVII. EGYPTIAN MAGIC.

Few of our students of Occultism have had the opportunity of examining Egyptian papyri—those living, or rather re‐arisen witnesses that Magic, good and bad, was practised many thousands of years back into the night of time. The use of the papyrus prevailed up to the eighth century of our era, when it was given up, and its fabrication fell into disuse. The most curious of the exhumed documents were immediately purchased and taken away from the country. Yet there are a number of beautifully‐preserved papyri at Bulak, Cairo, though the greater number have never been yet properly read.(453)

Others—those that have been carried away and may be found in the museums and public libraries of Europe—have fared no better. In the days of the Vicomte de Rougé, some twenty‐five years ago, only a few of them “were two‐thirds deciphered;” and among those some most interesting legends, inserted parenthetically and for purposes of explaining royal expenses, are in the Register of the Sacred Accounts.

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

## action.” Now what was the Khou? Simply the astral body, or the aerial

simulacrum of the corpse or the mummy—that which in China is called the Hauen, and in India the Bhût.

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

Ligneous matter from a shrub, the pellicles of which superposed one over the other formed a kind of writing‐paper;

but that the shrub itself, the implements and tools for fabricating the parchment, etc., were all previously subjected to a process of magical preparation—according to the ordinance of the Gods, who had taught that art, as they had all others, to their Priest‐Hierophants.

There are, however, some modern Orientalists who seem to have an inkling of the true nature of such things, and especially of the analogy and the relations that exist between the Magic of old and our modern‐day phenomena. Chabas is one of these, for he indulges, in his translation of the “Harris” papyrus, in the following reflections:

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

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

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

The following is extracted from general descriptions. It will show how the moderns understand and interpret Egyptian (and other) Symbology.

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

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

Nevertheless,

This grand and dignified language [in the _Book of the Dead_], these pictures full of majesty, this orthodoxy of the whole evidently proving a very precise doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul and its personal survival,

as shown by De Rougé and the Abbé Van Drival, have charmed some Orientalists. The psychostasy (or judgment of the Soul) is certainly a whole poem to him who can read it correctly and interpret the images therein. In that picture we see Osiris, the horned, with his sceptre hooked at the end—the original of the pastoral bishop’s crook or crosier—the Soul hovering above, encouraged by Tmei, daughter of the Sun of Righteousness and Goddess of Mercy and Justice; Horus and Anubis, weighing the deeds of the soul. One of these papyri shows the Soul found guilty of gluttony sentenced to be re‐born on earth as a hog; forthwith comes the learned conclusion of an Orientalist, “This is an indisputable proof of belief in _metempsychosis_, of transmigration _into animals_,” etc.

Perchance the Occult law of Karma might explain the sentence otherwise. It may, for all our Orientalists know, refer to the physiological vice in store for the Soul when re‐incarnated—a vice that will lead that personality into a thousand and one scrapes and misadventures.

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

argues De Mirville, in his work on the Satanic character of the Gods of Egypt.(458) Again, a simple suggestion may throw on this a great light. Are the Orientalists quite sure they have read correctly the “metempsychosis during 3,000 years”? The Occult Doctrine teaches that Karma waits at the threshold of Devachan (the Amenti of the Egyptians) for 3,000 years; that then the eternal _Ego_ is reincarnated _de novo_, to be punished in its new temporary personality for sins committed in the preceding birth, and the suffering for which, in one shape or another, will atone for past misdeeds. And the hawk, the lotus‐flower, the heron, serpent, or bird—every object in Nature, in short—had its symbolical and manifold meaning in ancient religious emblems. The man who all his life acted hypocritically and passed for a good man, but had been in sober reality watching like a bird of prey his chance to pounce upon his fellow‐ creatures, and had deprived them of their property, will be sentenced by Karma to bear the punishment for hypocrisy and covetousness in a future life. What will it be? Since every human unit has ultimately to progress in its evolution, and since that “man” will be reborn at some future time as a good, sincere, well‐meaning man, his sentence to be re‐incarnated as a hawk may simply mean that he will then be regarded metaphorically as such. That, notwithstanding his real, good, intrinsic qualities, he will, perhaps during a long life, be unjustly and falsely charged with and suspected of greed and hypocrisy and of secret exactions, all of which will make him suffer more than he can bear. The law of retribution can never err, and yet how many such innocent victims of false appearance and human malice do we not meet in this world of incessant illusion, of mistake and deliberate wickedness. We see them every day, and they may be found within the personal experience of each of us. What Orientalist can say with any degree of assurance that he has understood the religions of old? The metaphorical language of the priests has never been more than superficially revealed, and the hieroglyphics have been very poorly mastered to this day.(459)

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

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

This is all Magic when once the details are given; and it relates at the same time to the evolution of our seven Root‐Races, each with the characteristics of its special guardian or “God,” and his Planet. The astral body of each Initiate, after death, had to reënact in its funeral mystery the drama of the birth and death of each Race—the past and the future—and pass through the seven “planetary chambers,” which, as said above, typified also the seven spheres of our Chain.

The mystic doctrine of Eastern Occultism teaches that

_“__The Spiritual Ego [not the astral Khou] has to revisit, before it incarnates into a new body, the scenes it left at its last disincarnation. It __ has to see for itself and take cognizance of all the effects produced by the causes [the Nidânas] generated by its actions in a previous life; that, seeing, it should recognize the justice of the decree, and help the law of Retribution [Karma] instead of impeding it.__”_(461)

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

The most interesting of all those documents, however, is the “Harris” papyrus, called in France “_le papyrus magique_ de Chabas,” as it was first translated by the latter. It is a manuscript written in hieratic characters, translated, commented upon, and published in 1860 by M. Chabas, but purchased at Thebes in 1855 by Mr. Harris. Its age is given at between twenty‐eight and thirty centuries. We quote a few extracts from these translations:

Calendar of lucky and unlucky days: ... He who makes a bull work on the 20th of the month of Pharmuths will surely die; he who on the 24th day of the same month pronounces the name of Seth aloud will see trouble reigning in his house from that day; ... he who on the 5th day of Patchous leaves his house falls sick and dies.

Exclaims the translator, whose cultured instincts are revolted:

If one had not these words under our eyes, one could never believe in such servitude at the epoch of the Ramessides.(463)

We belong to the nineteenth century of the Christian era, and are therefore at the height of civilization, and under the benign sway and enlightening influence of the Christian Church, instead of being subject to the Pagan Gods of old. Nevertheless we personally know dozens, and have heard of hundreds, of educated, highly‐intellectual persons who would as soon think of committing suicide as of starting on any business on a Friday, of dining at a table where thirteen sit down, or of beginning a long journey on a Monday. Napoleon the Great became pale when he saw three candles lit on a table. Moreover, we may gladly concur with De Mirville in this, at any rate, that such “superstitions” are “the outcome of observation and experience.” If the former had never agreed with facts, the authority of the _Calendar_, he thinks, would not have lasted for a week. But to resume:

_Genethliacal influences_: The child born on the 5th day of Paophi will be killed by a bull; on the 27th by a serpent. Born on the 4th of the month of Athyr, he will succumb to blows.

This is a question of horoscopic predictions; judiciary astrology is firmly believed in in our own age, and has been proven to be scientifically possible by Kepler.

Of the Khous two kinds were distinguished: first, the justified Khous, _i.e._, those who had been absolved from sin by Osiris when they were brought before his tribunal; these lived a second life. Secondly, there were the guilty Khous, “the Khous dead a second time;” these were the damned. Second death did not annihilate them, but they were doomed to wander about and to torture people. Their existence had phases analogous to those of the living man, a bond so intimate between the dead and the living that one sees how the observation of religious funeral rites and exorcisms and prayers (or rather magic incantations) should have become necessary.(464) Says one prayer:

Do not permit that the venom should master his limbs [of the defunct], ... that he should be penetrated by any male dead, or any female dead; or that the shadow of any spirit should haunt him (or her).(465)

M. Chabas adds:

These Khous were beings of that kind to which human beings belong after their death; they were exorcised in the name of the god Chons.... The Manes then could enter the bodies of the living, haunt and obsess them. Formulæ and talismans, and especially statues or _divine figures_, were used against such _formidable_ invasions.(466)... They were combated by the help of the divine power, the god Chons being famed for such deliverances. The Khou, in obeying the orders of the god, none the less preserved the precious faculty inherent in him of accommodating himself in any other body at will.

The most frequent formula of exorcism is as follows. It is very suggestive:

Men, gods, elect, dead spirits, amous, negroes, menti‐u, do not look at this soul to show cruelty toward it.

This is addressed to all who were acquainted _with Magic_.

“Amulets and mystic names.” This chapter is called “very mysterious,” and contains invocations to Penhakahakaherher and Uranaokarsankrobite, and other such easy names. Says Chabas:

We have proofs that mystic names similar to these were in common use during the stay of the Israelites in Egypt.

And we may add that, whether got from the Egyptians or the Hebrews, these are sorcery names. The student can consult the works of Éliphas Lévi, such as his _Grimoire des Sorciers_. In these exorcisms Osiris is called Mamuram‐Kahab, and is implored to prevent the twice‐dead Khou from attacking the justified Khou and his next of kin, since the accursed (astral spook)

Can take any form he likes and penetrate at will into any locality or body.

In studying Egyptian papyri, one begins to find that the subjects of the Pharaohs were not very much inclined to the Spiritism or Spiritualism of their day. They dreaded the “blessed spirit” of the dead more than a Roman Catholic dreads the devil!

But how uncalled‐for and unjust is the charge against the Gods of Egypt that they are these “devils,” and against the priests of exercising their magic powers with the help of “the fallen angels,” may be seen in more than one papyrus. For one often finds in them records of Sorcerers sentenced to the death penalty, as though they had been living under the protection of the holy Christian Inquisition. Here is one case during the reign of Ramses III., quoted by De Mirville from Chabas.

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

M. Chabas remarks:

Documents of this kind abound, but the task of analysing them all cannot be attempted with the limited means we possess.(467)

Then there is an inscription taken in the temple of Khous, the God who had power over the elementaries, at Thebes. It was presented by M. Prisse d’Avenne to the Imperial—now National—Library of Paris, and was translated first by Mr. S. Birch. There is in it a whole romance of Magic. It dates from the day of Ramses XII.(468) of the twentieth dynasty; it is from the rendering of M. de Rougé as quoted by De Mirville, that we now translate it.

This monument tells us that one of the Ramses of the twentieth dynasty, while collecting at Naharain the tributes paid to Egypt by the Asiatic nations, fell in love with a daughter of the chief of Bakhten, one of his tributaries, married her and, bringing her to Egypt with him, raised her to the dignity of Queen, under the royal name of Ranefrou. Soon afterwards the chief of Bakhten dispatched a messenger to Ramses, praying the assistance of Egyptian science for Bent‐Rosh, a young sister of the queen, attacked with illness in all her limbs.

The messenger asked expressly that a “wise‐man” [an Initiate—Reh‐ Het] should be sent. The king gave orders that all the hierogrammatists of the palace and the guardians of the secret books of the Khen should be sent for, and choosing from among them the royal scribe Thoth‐em‐Hebi, an intelligent man, well versed in writing, charged him to examine the sickness.

Arrived at Bakhten, Thoth‐em‐Hebi found that Bent‐Rosh was possessed by a Khou (Em‐seh‐’eru ker h’ou), but declared himself too weak to engage in a struggle with him.(469)

Eleven years elapsed, and the young girl’s state did not improve. The chief of Bakhten again sent his messenger, and on his formal demand Khons‐peiri‐Seklerem‐Zam, one of the divine forms of Chons—God the Son in the Theban Trinity—was dispatched to Bakhten....

The God [incarnate] having saluted (_besa_) the patient, she felt immediately relieved, and the Khou who was in her manifested forthwith his intention of obeying the orders of the God. “O great God, who forcest the phantom to vanish,” said the Khou, “I am thy slave and I will return whence I came!”(470)

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

In the Papyrus Anastasi, which teems with various formulæ for the evocation of Gods, and with exorcisms against Khous and the elementary demons, the seventh paragraph shows plainly the difference made between the real Gods, the Planetary Angels, and those shells of mortals which are left behind in Kâma‐loka, as though to tempt mankind and to puzzle it the more hopelessly in its vain search after the truth, outside the Occult Sciences and the veil of Initiation. This seventh verse says with regard to such divine evocations or theomantic consultations:

One must invoke that divine and great name(473) only in cases of absolute necessity, and when one feels absolutely pure and irreproachable.

Not so in the formula of black Magic. Reuvens, speaking of the two rituals of Magic of the Anastasi collection, remarks that they

Undeniably form the most instructive commentary upon the _Egyptian mysteries_ attributed to Jamblichus, and the best pendant to that classical work, for understanding the thaumaturgy of the philosophical sects, thaumaturgy based on ancient Egyptian religion. According to Jamblichus, thaumaturgy was exercised by the ministry of secondary genii.(474)

Reuvens closes with a remark which is very suggestive and is very important to the Occultists who defend the antiquity and genuineness of their documents, for he says:

All that he [Jamblichus] gives out as theology we find as history in our papyri.

But then how deny the authenticity, the credibility, and, beyond all, the trustworthiness of those classical writers, who all wrote about Magic and its Mysteries in a most worshipful spirit of admiration and reverence? Listen to Pindarus, who exclaims:

Happy he who descends into the grave thus initiated, for he knows the end of his life and the kingdom(475) given by Jupiter.(476)

Or to Cicero:

Initiation not only teaches us to feel happy in this life, but also to die with better hope.(477)

Plato, Pausanias, Strabo, Diodorus and dozens of others bring their evidence as to the great boon of Initiation; all the great as well as the

## partially‐initiated Adepts, share the enthusiasm of Cicero.

Does not Plutarch, thinking of what he had learned in his initiation, console himself for the loss of his wife? Had he not obtained the certitude at the Mysteries of Bacchus that “the soul [spirit] remains incorruptible, and that there is a hereafter”?... Aristophanes went even farther: “All those who participated in the Mysteries,” he says, “led an innocent, calm, and holy life; they died looking for the light of the Eleusinian Fields [Devachan], while the rest could never expect anything but eternal darkness [ignorance?].

“... And when one thinks about the importance attached by the States to the principle and the correct celebration of the Mysteries, to the stipulations made in their treaties for the security of their celebration, one sees to what degree those Mysteries had so long occupied their first and their last thought.

“It was the greatest among public as well as private preoccupations, and this is only natural, since according to Döllinger, ‘the Eleusinian Mysteries were viewed as the efflorescence of all the Greek religion, as the purest essence of all its conceptions.’ ”(478)

Not only conspirators were refused admittance therein, but those who had not denounced them; traitors, perjurers, debauchees,(479) ... so that Porphyry could say that: “Our soul has to be at the moment of death as it was during the Mysteries, _i.e._, exempt from any blemishes, passion, envy, hatred, or anger.”(480)

Truly,

Magic was considered a Divine Science which led to a participation in the attributes of the Divinity itself.(481)

Herodotus, Thales, Parmenides, Empedocles, Orpheus, Pythagoras, all went, each in his day, in search of the wisdom of Egypt’s great Hierophants, in the hope of solving the problems of the universe.

Says Philo:

The Mysteries were known to unveil the secret operations of Nature.(482)

The prodigies accomplished by the priests of theurgic magic are so well authenticated and the evidence—if human testimony is worth anything at all—is so overwhelming that, rather than confess that the pagan theurgists far outrivalled the Christians in miracles, Sir David Brewster conceded to the former the greatest proficiency in physics and everything that pertains to natural philosophy. Science finds herself in a very disagreeable dilemma....

“Magic,” says Psellus, “formed the last part of the sacerdotal science. It investigated the nature, power, and quality of everything sublunary; of the elements and their parts, of animals, of various plants and their fruits, of stones and herbs. In short, it explored the essence and power of everything. From hence, therefore, it produced its effects. And it formed _statues_ [magnetized] which procure health, and made all various figures and things [talismans], which could equally become the instruments of disease as well as of health. Often, too, celestial fire is made to appear through magic, and then statues laugh and lamps are spontaneously enkindled.”(483)

This assertion of Psellus that Magic “made statues which procure health,” is now proven to the world to be no dream, no vain boast of a hallucinated Theurgist. As Reuvens says, it becomes “history.” For it is found in the _Papyrus Magique_ of Harris and on the votive stele just mentioned. Both Chabas and De Rougé state that:

On the eighteenth line of this very mutilated monument is found the formula with regard to the acquiescence of the God (Chons) who made his consent known by a motion he imparted to his statue.(484)

There was even a dispute over it between the two Orientalists. While M. de Rougé wanted to translate the word “Han” by “favour” or “grace,” M. Chabas insisted that “Han” meant a “movement” or “_a sign_” made by the statue.

Excesses of power, abuse of knowledge and personal ambition very often led selfish and unscrupulous Initiates to black Magic, just as the same causes led to precisely the same thing among Christian popes and cardinals; and it was black Magic that led finally to the abolition of the Mysteries, and not Christianity, as is often erroneously thought. Read Mommsen’s _Roman History_, vol. i., and you will find that it was the Pagans themselves who put an end to the desecration of the Divine Science. As early as 560 B.C. the Romans had discovered an Occult association, a school of black Magic of the most revolting kind; it celebrated mysteries brought from Etruria, and very soon the moral pestilence had spread all over Italy

More than seven thousand Initiates were prosecuted, and most of them were sentenced to death....

Later on, Titus‐Livius shows us another three thousand Initiates sentenced during a single year for the crime of poisoning.(485)

And yet black Magic is derided and denied!

Paulthier may or may not be too enthusiastic in saying that India appears to him as

The grand and primitive hearth of human thought, that has ended by embracing the whole ancient world,

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

All that is, of course, derided Magic, the outcome of primitive knowledge and of revelation, though it was practised in such ungodly ways by the Atlantean Sorcerers that it has since become necessary for the subsequent Race to draw a thick veil over the practices which were used to obtain so‐ called magical effects on the psychic and on the physical planes. In the letter no one in our century will believe the statements, with the exception of the Roman Catholics, and these will give the acts a satanic origin. Nevertheless, Magic is so mixed up with the history of the world, that if the latter is ever to be written it has to rely upon the discoveries of Archæology, Egyptology, and hieratic writings and inscriptions; if it insists that they must be free from that “superstition of the ages” it will never see the light. One can well imagine the embarrassing position in which serious Egyptologists, Assyriologists, savants and academicians find themselves. Forced to translate and interpret the old papyri and the archaic inscriptions on stelæ and Babylonian cylinders, they find themselves compelled from first to last to face the distasteful, and to them repulsive, subject of Magic, with its incantations and paraphernalia. Here they find sober and grave narratives from the pens of learned scribes, made up under the direct supervision of Chaldæan or Egyptian Hierophants, the most learned among the Philosophers of antiquity. These statements were written at the solemn hour of the death and burial of Pharaohs, High Priests, and other mighty ones of the land of Chemi; their purpose was the introduction of the newly‐born, Osirified Soul before the awful‐tribunal of the “Great Judge” in the region of Amenti—there where a _lie_ was said to outweigh the greatest crimes. Were the Scribes and Hierophants, Pharaohs, and King‐Priests all fools or frauds to have either believed in, or tried to make others believe in, such “cock‐and bull stories” as are found in the most respectable papyri? Yet there is no help for it. Corroborated by Plato and Herodotus, by Manetho and Syncellus, as by all the greatest and most trustworthy authors and philosophers who wrote upon the subject, those papyri note down—as seriously as they note any history, or any fact so well known and accepted as to need no commentary—whole royal dynasties of Manes, to wit, of shadows and phantoms (astral bodies), and such feats of magic skill and such Occult phenomena, that the most credulous Occultist of our own times would hesitate to believe them to be true.

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

SECTION XXVIII. THE ORIGIN OF THE MYSTERIES.

All that is explained in the preceding Sections and a hundredfold more was taught in the Mysteries from time immemorial. If the first appearance of those institutions is a matter of historical tradition with regard to some of the later nations, their origin must certainly be assigned to the time of the Fourth Root Race. The Mysteries were imparted to the elect of that Race when the average Atlantean had begun to fall too deeply into sin to be trusted with the secrets of Nature. Their establishment is attributed in the Secret Works to the King‐Initiates of the divine dynasties, when the “Sons of God” had gradually allowed their country to become Kookarma‐ des (the land of vice).

The antiquity of the Mysteries may be inferred from the history of the worship of Hercules in Egypt. This Hercules, according to what the priests told Herodotus, was not Grecian, for he says:

Of the Grecian Hercules I could in no part of Egypt procure any knowledge: ... the name was never borrowed by Egypt from Greece.... Hercules, ... as they [the priests] affirm, is one of the twelve (great Gods), who were reproduced from the earlier eight Gods 17,000 years before the year of Amasis.

Hercules is of Indian origin, and—his Biblical chronology put aside—Colonel Tod was quite right in his suggestion that he was Balarâma or Baladeva. Now one must read the _Purânas_ with the Esoteric key in one’s hand in order to find out how on almost every page they corroborate the Secret Doctrine. The ancient classical writers so well understood this truth that they unanimously attributed to Asia the origin of Hercules.

A section of the Mahâbhârata is devoted to the history of the Hercûla, of which race was Vyasa.... Diodorus has the same legend with some variety. He says: “Hercules was born amongst the Indians and, like the Greeks, they furnish him with a club and lion’s hide.” Both [Krishna and Baladeva] are (lords) of the race (cûla) of Heri (Heri‐cul‐es) of which the Greeks might have made the compound Hercules.(486)

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

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

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

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

This is a plain allusion to the Third and Fourth Races—to the Atlantean giants and the successive incarnations of the “Sons of the Flame” and other orders of Dhyân Chohans in the heroes and kings of mankind, down to the Kali Yuga, or Black Age, the beginning of which is within historical times. Another _coincidence_: Thebes is the city of a hundred gates, and Dvârakâ is so called from its many gateways or doors, from the word “Dvâra,” “gateway.” Both Hercules and Baladeva are of a passionate, hot temper, and both are renowned for the fairness of their white skins. There is not the slightest doubt that Hercules is Baladeva in Greek dress. Arrian notices the great similarity between the Theban and the Hindu Hercules, the latter being worshipped by the Suraseni who built Methorea, or Mathûrâ, Krishna’s birthplace. The same writer places Sandracottus (Chandragupta, the grandfather of King Asoka, of the clan of Morya) in the direct line of the descendants of Baladeva.

There were no Mysteries in the beginning, we are taught. Knowledge (Vidyâ) was common property, and it reigned universally throughout the Golden Age (Satya Yuga). As says the Commentary:

_Men had not created evil yet in those days of bliss and purity, for they were of God‐like more than of human nature._

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

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

## acting powers. While the One and Universal Cause has to remain for ever

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

Henceforward the knowledge of the primeval truths remained entirely in the hands of the Initiates.

The Mysteries had their weak points and their defects, as every institution welded with the human element must necessarily have. Yet Voltaire has characterised their benefits in a few words:

In the chaos of popular superstitions there existed an institution which has ever prevented man from falling into absolute brutality: it was that of the Mysteries.

Verily, as Ragon puts it of Masonry;

Its temple has Time for duration, the Universe for space.... “Let us divide that we may rule,” have said the crafty; “Let us unite to resist,” have said the first Masons.(490)

Or rather, the Initiates whom the Masons have never ceased to claim as their primitive and direct Masters. The first and fundamental principle of moral strength and power is association and solidarity of thought and purpose. “The Sons of Will and Yoga” united in the beginning to resist the terrible and ever‐growing iniquities of the left‐hand Adepts, the Atlanteans. This led to the foundation of still more Secret Schools, temples of learning, and of Mysteries inaccessible to all except after the most terrible trials and probations.

Anything that might be said of the earliest Adepts and their divine Masters would be regarded as fiction. It is necessary, therefore, if we would know something of the primitive Initiates to judge of the tree by its fruits; to examine the bearing and the work of their successors in the Fifth Race as reflected in the works of the classic writers and the great Philosophers. How were Initiation and the Initiates regarded during some 2,000 years by the Greek and Roman writers? Cicero informs his readers in very clear terms. He says:

An Initiate must practise all the virtues in his power: justice, fidelity, liberality, modesty, temperance; these virtues cause men to forget the talents that he may lack.(491)

Ragon says:

When the Egyptian priests said: “All for the people, nothing through the people,” they were right: in an ignorant nation truth must be revealed only to trustworthy persons.... We have seen in our days, “all through the people, nothing for the people,” a false and dangerous system. The real axiom ought to be: “All for the people and _with_ the people.”(492)

But in order to achieve this reform the masses have to pass through a dual transformation: (_a_) to become divorced from every element of exoteric superstition and priestcraft, and (_b_) to become educated men, free from every danger of being enslaved whether by a man or an idea.

This, in view of the preceding, may seem paradoxical. The Initiates were “priests,” we may be told—at any rate, all the Hindu, Egyptian, Chaldæan, Greek, Phœnician, and other Hierophants and Adepts were priests in the temples, and it was they who invented their respective exoteric creeds. To this the answer is possible: “The cowl does not make the friar.” If one may believe tradition and the unanimous opinion of ancient writers, added to the examples we have in the “priests” of India, the most conservative nation in the world, it becomes quite certain that the Egyptian priests were no more priests in the sense we give to the word than are the temple Brâhmans. They could never be regarded as such if we take as our standard the European clergy. Laurens observes very correctly that:

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

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

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

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

The great modern writer on the Mysteries of Egyptian Initiation—one, however, who knew nothing of those in India—the late Ragon, has not exaggerated in maintaining that:

All the notions possessed by Hindustan, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Chaldæa, Sydonia, and the priests of Babylonia, [on the secrets of Nature], was known to the Egyptian priests. It is thus Indian philosophy, without mysteries, which, having penetrated into Chaldæa and ancient Persia, gave rise to the doctrine of Egyptian Mysteries.(498)

The Mysteries preceded the hieroglyphics.(499) They gave birth to the latter, as permanent records were needed to preserve and commemorate their secrets. It is primitive Philosophy(500) that has served as the foundation‐stone for modern Philosophy; only the progeny, while perpetuating the features of the external body, has lost on its way the Soul and Spirit of its parent.

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

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

The Initiates are sure to come into the company of the Gods.

In the same work the great Athenian Sage is made to say:

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

Said Clemens Alexandrinus, referring to the Mysteries:

Here ends all teaching. One sees Nature and all things.

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

“The world being melted and having reëntered the bosom of Jupiter [or Parabrahman], this God continues for some time totally concentred in himself and remains concealed, as it were, wholly immersed in the contemplation of his own ideas. Afterwards we see a new world spring from him.... An innocent race of men is formed.” And again, speaking of a mundane dissolution as involving the destruction or death of all, he [Seneca] teaches us that when the laws of Nature shall be buried in ruin and the last day of the world shall come, the Southern Pole shall crush, as it falls, all the regions of Africa; and the North Pole shall overwhelm all the countries beneath its axis. _The affrighted sun shall be deprived of its light_; the palace of heaven, falling to decay, shall produce at once both life and death, and some kind of dissolution shall equally seize upon all the deities, who thus shall return to their original chaos.(503)

One might fancy oneself reading the Purânic account by Parâshara of the great Pralaya. It is nearly the same thing, idea for idea. Has Christianity nothing of the kind? Let the reader open any English _Bible_ and read