# The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 3 of 4

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> The Secret Doctrine
> 
>             The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
> 
>                                     By
> 
>                         Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
> 
>                         Author of “Isis Unveiled.”
> 
>                         Third and Revised Edition.
> 
>                         SATYÂT NÂSTI PARO DHARMAH.
> 
>                 “There is no Religion higher than Truth.”
> 
>                                Volume III.
> 
>                     The Theosophical Publishing House
> 
>                                   London
> 
>                                    1897
> 
> CONTENTS
> 
> Preface.
> Introductory.
> Section I. Preliminary Survey.
> Section II. Modern Criticism and the Ancients.
> Section III. The Origin of Magic.
> Section IV. The Secresy of Initiates.
> Section V. Some Reasons for Secresy.
> Section VI. The Dangers of Practical Magic.
> Section VII. Old Wine in New Bottles.
> Section VIII. The Book of Enoch the Origin and the Foundation of
> Christianity.
> Section IX. Hermetic and Kabalistic Doctrines.
> Section X. Various Occult Systems of Interpretations of Alphabets and
> Numerals.
> Section XI. The Hexagon with the Central Point, or the Seventh Key.
> Section XII. The Duty of the True Occultist toward Religions.
> Section XIII. Post‐Christian Adepts and their Doctrines.
> Section XIV. Simon and his Biographer Hippolytus.
> Section XV. St. Paul the real Founder of present Christianity.
> Section XVI. Peter a Jewish Kabalist, not an Initiate.
> Section XVII. Apollonius of Tyana.
> Section XVIII. Facts underlying Adept Biographies.
> Section XIX. St. Cyprian of Antioch.
> Section XX. The Eastern Gupta Vidya & the Kabalah.
> Section XXI. Hebrew Allegories.
> Section XXII. The “Zohar” on Creation and the Elohim.
> Section XXIII. What the Occultists and Kabalists have to say.
> Section XXIV. Modern Kabalists in Science and Occult Astronomy.
> Section XXV. Eastern and Western Occultism.
> Section XXVI. The Idols and the Teraphim.
> Section XXVII. Egyptian Magic.
> Section XXVIII. The Origin of the Mysteries.
> Section XXIX. The Trial of the Sun Initiate.
> Section XXX. The Mystery “Sun of Initiation.”
> Section XXXI. The Objects of the Mysteries.
> Section XXXII. Traces of the Mysteries.
> Section XXXIII. The Last of the Mysteries in Europe.
> Section XXXIV. The Post‐Christian Successors to the Mysteries.
> Section XXXV. Symbolism of Sun and Stars.
> Section XXXVI. Pagan Sidereal Worship, or Astrology.
> Section XXXVII. The Souls of the Stars—Universal Heliolatry.
> Section XXXVIII. Astrology and Astrolatry.
> Section XXXIX. Cycles and Avataras.
> Section XL. Secret Cycles.
> Section XLI. The Doctrine of Avataras.
> Section XLII. The Seven Principles.
> Section XLIII. The Mystery of Buddha.
> Section XLIV. “Reincarnations” of Buddha.
> Section XLV. An Unpublished Discourse of Buddha.
> Section XLVI. Nirvana‐Moksha.
> Section XLVII. The Secret Books of “Lam‐Rin” and Dzyan.
> Section XLVIII. Amita Buddha Kwan‐Shai‐yin, and Kwan‐yin.—What the “Book
> of Dzyan” and the Lamaseries of Tsong‐Kha‐pa say.
> Section XLIX. Tsong‐Kha‐pa.—Lohans in China.
> Section L. A few more Misconceptions Corrected.
> Section LI. The “Doctrine of the Eye” & the “Doctrine of the Heart,” or
> the “Heart’s Seal.”
> Some Papers On The Bearing Of Occult Philosophy On Life.
>    Paper I. A Warning.
>    Paper II. An Explanation.
>    Paper III. A Word Concerning the Earlier Papers.
>    Appendix. Notes on Papers I., II. and III.
>    Notes On Some Oral Teachings.
> Footnotes
> 
>                                [Cover Art]
> 
> [Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
> at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
> 
>     As for what thou hearest others say, who persuade the many that
>     the soul when once freed from the body neither suffers ... evil
>     nor is conscious, I know that thou art better grounded in the
>     doctrines received by us from our ancestors and in the sacred
>     orgies of Dionysus than to believe them; for the mystic symbols
>     are well known to us who belong to the Brotherhood.
> 
>     PLUTARCH.
> 
>     The problem of life is man. Magic, or rather Wisdom, is the
>     evolved knowledge of the potencies of man’s interior being, which
>     forces are divine emanations, as intuition is the perception of
>     their origin, and initiation our induction into that knowledge....
>     We begin with instinct; the end is omniscience.
> 
>     A. WILDER.
> 
> PREFACE.
> 
> The task of preparing this volume for the press has been a difficult and
> anxious one, and it is necessary to state clearly what has been done. The
> papers given to me by H. P. B. were quite unarranged, and had no obvious
> order: I have, therefore, taken each paper as a separate Section, and have
> arranged them as sequentially as possible. With the exception of the
> correction of grammatical errors and the elimination of obviously un‐
> English idioms, the papers are as H. P. B. left them, save as otherwise
> marked. In a few cases I have filled in a gap, but any such addition is
> enclosed within square brackets, so as to be distinguished from the text.
> In “The Mystery of Buddha” a further difficulty arose; some of the
> Sections had been written four or five times over, each version containing
> some sentences that were not in the others; I have pieced these versions
> together, taking the fullest as basis, and inserting therein everything
> added in any other versions. It is, however, with some hesitation that I
> have included these Sections in the _Secret Doctrine_. Together with some
> most suggestive thought, they contain very numerous errors of fact, and
> many statements based on exoteric writings, not on esoteric knowledge.
> They were given into my hands to publish, as part of the Third Volume of
> the _Secret Doctrine_, and I therefore do not feel justified in coming
> between the author and the public, either by altering the statements, to
> make them consistent with fact, or by suppressing the Sections. She says
> she is acting entirely on her own authority, and it will be obvious to any
> instructed reader that she makes—possibly deliberately—many statements so
> confused that they are mere blinds, and other statements—probably
> inadvertently—that are nothing more than the exoteric misunderstandings of
> esoteric truths. The reader must here, as everywhere, use his own
> judgment, but feeling bound to publish these Sections, I cannot let them
> go to the public without a warning that much in them is certainly
> erroneous. Doubtless, had the author herself issued this book, she would
> have entirely re‐written the whole of this division; as it was, it seemed
> best to give all she had said in the different copies, and to leave it in
> its rather unfinished state, for students will best like to have what she
> said as she said it, even though they may have to study it more closely
> than would have been the case had she remained to finish her work.
> 
> The quotations made have been as far as possible found, and correct
> references given; in this most laborious work a whole band of earnest and
> painstaking students, under the guidance of Mrs. Cooper‐Oakley, have been
> my willing assistants. Without their aid it would not have been possible
> to give the references, as often a whole book had to be searched through,
> in order to find a paragraph of a few lines.
> 
> This volume completes the papers left by H. P. B., with the exception of a
> few scattered articles that yet remain and that will be published in her
> own magazine _Lucifer_. Her pupils are well aware that few will be found
> in the present generation to do justice to the occult knowledge of H. P.
> B. and to her magnificent sweep of thought, but as she can wait to future
> generations for the justification of her greatness as a teacher, so can
> her pupils afford to wait for the justification of their trust.
> 
> ANNIE BESANT.
> 
> INTRODUCTORY.
> 
> “Power belongs to him who knows;” this is a very old axiom. Knowledge—the
> first step to which is the power of comprehending the truth, of discerning
> the real from the false—is for those only who, having freed themselves
> from every prejudice and conquered their human conceit and selfishness,
> are ready to accept every and any truth, once it is demonstrated to them.
> Of such there are very few. The majority judge of a work according to the
> respective prejudices of its critics, who are guided in their turn by the
> popularity or unpopularity of the author, rather than by its own faults or
> merits. Outside the Theosophical circle, therefore, the present volume is
> certain to receive at the hands of the general public a still colder
> welcome than its two predecessors have met with. In our day no statement
> can hope for a fair trial, or even hearing, unless its arguments run on
> the line of legitimate and accepted enquiry, remaining strictly within the
> boundaries of official Science or orthodox Theology.
> 
> Our age is a paradoxical anomaly. It is preëminently materialistic and as
> preëminently pietistic. Our literature, our modern thought and progress,
> so called, both run on these two parallel lines, so incongruously
> dissimilar and yet both so popular and so very orthodox, each in its own
> way. He who presumes to draw a third line, as a hyphen of reconciliation
> between the two, has to be fully prepared for the worst. He will have his
> work mangled by reviewers, mocked by the sycophants of Science and Church,
> misquoted by his opponents, and rejected even by the pious lending
> libraries. The absurd misconceptions, in so‐called cultured circles of
> society, of the ancient Wisdom‐Religion (Bodhism) after the admirably
> clear and scientifically‐presented explanations in _Esoteric Buddhism_,
> are a good proof in point. They might have served as a caution even to
> those Theosophists who, hardened in an almost life‐long struggle in the
> service of their Cause, are neither timid with their pen, nor in the least
> appalled by dogmatic assumption and scientific authority. Yet, do what
> Theosophical writers may, neither Materialism nor doctrinal pietism will
> ever give their Philosophy a fair hearing. Their doctrines will be
> systematically rejected, and their theories denied a place even in the
> ranks of those scientific ephemera, the ever‐shifting “working hypotheses”
> of our day. To the advocate of the “animalistic” theory, our
> cosmogenetical and anthropogenetical teachings are “fairy‐tales” at best.
> For to those who would shirk any moral responsibility, it seems certainly
> more convenient to accept descent from a common simian ancestor and see a
> brother in a dumb, tailless baboon, than to acknowledge the fatherhood of
> Pitris, the “Sons of God,” and to have to recognise as a brother a
> starveling from the slums.
> 
> “Hold back!” shout in their turn the pietists. “You will never make of
> respectable church‐going Christians Esoteric Buddhists!”
> 
> Nor are we, in truth, in any way anxious to attempt the metamorphosis. But
> this cannot, nor shall it, prevent Theosophists from saying what they have
> to say, especially to those who, in opposing to our doctrine Modern
> Science, do so not for her own fair sake, but only to ensure the success
> of their private hobbies and personal glorification. If we cannot prove
> many of our points, no more can they; yet we may show how, instead of
> giving historical and scientific facts—for the edification of those who,
> knowing less than they, look to Scientists to do their thinking and form
> their opinions—the efforts of most of our scholars seem solely directed to
> killing ancient facts, or distorting them into props to support their own
> special views. This will be done in no spirit of malice or even criticism,
> as the writer readily admits that most of those she finds fault with stand
> immeasurably higher in learning than herself. But great scholarship does
> not preclude bias and prejudice, nor is it a safeguard against self‐
> conceit, but rather the reverse. Moreover, it is but in the legitimate
> defence of our own statements, _i.e._, the vindication of Ancient Wisdom
> and its great truths, that we mean to take our “great authorities” to
> task.
> 
> Indeed, unless the precaution of answering beforehand certain objections
> to the fundamental propositions in the present work be adopted—objections
> which are certain to be made on the authority of this, that, or another
> scholar concerning the Esoteric character of all the archaic and ancient
> works on Philosophy—our statements will be once more contradicted and even
> discredited. One of the main points in this Volume is to indicate in the
> works of the old Âryan, Greek, and other Philosophers of note, as well as
> in all the world‐scriptures, the presence of a strong Esoteric allegory
> and symbolism. Another of the objects is to prove that the key of
> interpretation, as furnished by the Eastern Hindu‐Buddhistic canon of
> Occultism—fitting as well the Christian Gospels as it does archaic
> Egyptian, Greek, Chaldæan, Persian, and even Hebrew‐Mosaic Books—must have
> been one common to all the nations, however divergent may have been their
> respective methods and exoteric “blinds.” These claims are vehemently
> denied by some of the foremost scholars of our day. In his Edinburgh
> Lectures, Prof. Max Müller discarded this fundamental statement of the
> Theosophists by pointing to the Hindu Shâstras and Pandits, who know
> nothing of such Esotericism.(1) The learned Sanskrit scholar stated in so
> many words that there was no hidden meaning, no Esoteric element or
> “blinds,” either in the _Purânas_ or the _Upanishads_. Considering that
> the word “Upanishad” means, when translated, the “Secret Doctrine,” the
> assertion is, to say the least, extraordinary. Sir M. Monier Williams
> again holds the same view with regard to Buddhism. To hear him is to
> regard Gautama, the Buddha, as an enemy of every pretence to Esoteric
> teachings. He himself never taught them! All such “pretences” to Occult
> learning and “magic powers” are due to the later Arhats, the subsequent
> followers of the “Light of Asia”! Prof. B. Jowett, again, as
> contemptuously passes the sponge over the “absurd” interpretations of
> Plato’s _Timæus_ and the Mosaic Books by the Neoplatonists. There is not a
> breath of the Oriental (Gnostic) spirit of Mysticism in Plato’s
> _Dialogues_, the Regius Professor of Greek tells us, nor any approach to
> Science, either. Finally, to cap the climax, Prof. Sayce, the
> Assyriologist, although he does not deny the actual presence, in the
> Assyrian tablets and cuneiform literature, of a hidden meaning—
> 
>     Many of the sacred texts ... so written as to be intelligible only
>     to the initiated—
> 
> yet insists that the “keys and glosses” thereof are now in the hands of
> the Assyriologists. The modern scholars, he affirms, have in their
> possession clues to the interpretation of the Esoteric Records,
> 
>     Which even the initiated priests [of Chaldæa] did not possess.
> 
> Thus, in the scholarly appreciation of our modern Orientalists and
> Professors, Science was in its infancy in the days of the Egyptian and
> Chaldæan Astronomers. Pânini, the greatest Grammarian in the world, was
> unacquainted with the art of writing. So was the Lord Buddha, and everyone
> else in India until 300 B.C. The grossest ignorance reigned in the days of
> the Indian Rishis, and even in those of Thales, Pythagoras, and Plato.
> Theosophists must indeed be superstitious ignoramuses to speak as they do,
> in the face of such learned evidence to the contrary!
> 
> Truly it looks as if, since the world’s creation, there has been but one
> age of real knowledge on earth—the present age. In the misty twilight, in
> the grey dawn of history, stand the pale shadows of the old Sages of world
> renown. They were hopelessly groping for the correct meaning of their own
> Mysteries, the spirit whereof has departed without revealing itself to the
> Hierophants, and has remained latent in space until the advent of the
> initiates of Modern Science and Research. The noontide brightness of
> knowledge has only now arrived at the “Know‐All,” who, basking in the
> dazzling sun of induction, busies himself with his Penelopeian task of
> “working hypotheses,” and loudly asserts his rights to universal
> knowledge. Can anyone wonder, then, that according to present views the
> learning of the ancient Philosopher, and even sometimes that of his direct
> successors in the past centuries, has ever been useless to the world and
> valueless to himself? For, as explained repeatedly in so many words, while
> the Rishis and the Sages of old have walked far over the arid fields of
> myth and superstition, the mediæval Scholar, and even the average
> eighteenth century Scientist, have always been more or less cramped by
> their “supernatural” religion and beliefs. True, it is generally conceded
> that some ancient and also mediæval Scholars, such as Pythagoras, Plato,
> Paracelsus, and Roger Bacon, followed by a host of glorious names, had
> indeed left not a few landmarks over precious mines of Philosophy and
> unexplored lodes of Physical Science. But then the actual excavation of
> these, the smelting of the gold and silver, and the cutting of the
> precious jewels they contain, are all due to the patient labours of the
> modern man of Science. And is it not to the unparalleled genius of the
> latter that the ignorant and hitherto‐deluded world owes a correct
> knowledge of the real nature of the Kosmos, of the true origin of the
> universe and man, as revealed in the automatic and mechanical theories of
> the Physicists, in accordance with strictly scientific Philosophy? Before
> our cultured era, Science was but a name, Philosophy a delusion and a
> snare. According to the modest claims of contemporary authority on genuine
> Science and Philosophy, the Tree of Knowledge has only now sprung from the
> dead weeds of superstition, as a beautiful butterfly emerges from an ugly
> grub. We have, therefore, nothing for which to thank our forefathers. The
> Ancients have at best prepared and fertilised the soil; it is the Moderns
> who have planted the seeds of knowledge and reared the lovely plants
> called blank negation and sterile agnosticism.
> 
> Such, however, is not the view taken by Theosophists. They repeat what was
> stated twenty years ago. It is not sufficient to speak of the “untenable
> conceptions of an uncultured past” (Tyndall); of the “_parler enfantin_”
> of the Vaidic poets (Max Müller); of the “absurdities” of the
> Neoplatonists (Jowett); and of the ignorance of the Chaldæo‐Assyrian
> initiated Priests with regard to their own symbols, when compared with the
> knowledge thereon of the British Orientalist (Sayce). Such assumptions
> have to be proven by something more solid than the mere word of these
> scholars. For no amount of boastful arrogance can hide the intellectual
> quarries out of which the representations of so many modern Philosophers
> and Scholars have been carved. How many of the most distinguished European
> Scientists have derived honour and credit for the mere dressing‐up of the
> ideas of these old Philosophers, whom they are ever ready to disparage, is
> left to an impartial posterity to say. Thus it does seem not altogether
> untrue as stated in _Isis Unveiled_, to say of certain Orientalists and
> Scholars of dead languages, that they will allow their boundless conceit
> and self‐opinionatedness to run away with their logic and reasoning
> powers, rather than concede to the ancient Philosophers the knowledge of
> anything the modern do not know.
> 
> As part of this work treats of the Initiates and the secret knowledge
> imparted during the Mysteries, the statements of those who, in spite of
> the fact that Plato was an Initiate, maintain that no hidden Mysticism is
> to be discovered in his works, have to be first examined. Too many of the
> present scholars, Greek and Sanskrit, are but too apt to forego facts in
> favour of their own preconceived theories based on personal prejudice.
> They conveniently forget, at every opportunity, not only the numerous
> changes in language, but also that the allegorical style in the writings
> of old Philosophers and the secretiveness of the Mystics had their _raison
> d’être_; that both the pre‐Christian and the post‐Christian classical
> writers—the great majority at all events—were under the sacred obligation
> never to divulge the solemn secrets communicated to them in the
> sanctuaries; and that this alone is sufficient to sadly mislead their
> translators and profane critics. But these critics will admit nothing of
> the kind, as will presently be seen.
> 
> For over twenty‐two centuries everyone who has read Plato has been aware
> that, like most of the other Greek Philosophers of note, he had been
> initiated; that therefore, being tied down by the Sodalian Oath, he could
> speak of certain things only in veiled allegories. His reverence for the
> Mysteries is unbounded; he openly confesses that he writes
> “enigmatically,” and we see him take the greatest precautions to conceal
> the true meaning of his words. Every time the subject touches the greater
> secrets of Oriental Wisdom—the cosmogony of the universe, or the ideal
> preëxisting world—Plato shrouds his Philosophy in the profoundest
> darkness. His _Timæus_ is so confused that no one but an Initiate can
> understand the hidden meaning. As already said in _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     The speculations of Plato in the _Banquet_ on the creation, or
>     rather the evolution, of primordial men, and the essay on
>     cosmogony in the _Timæus_, must be taken allegorically if we
>     accept them at all. It is this hidden Pythagorean meaning in
>     _Timæus_, _Cratylus_, and _Parmenides_, and a few other trilogies
>     and dialogues, that the Neoplatonists ventured to expound, as far
>     as the theurgical vow of secresy would allow them. The Pythagorean
>     doctrine that God is the Universal Mind diffused through all
>     things, and the dogma of the soul’s immortality, are the leading
>     features in these apparently incongruous teachings. His piety and
>     the great veneration he felt for the Mysteries are sufficient
>     warrant that Plato would not allow his indiscretion to get the
>     better of that deep sense of responsibility which is felt by every
>     Adept. “Constantly perfecting himself in perfect Mysteries a man
>     in them alone becomes truly perfect,” says he in the _Phædrus_.
> 
>     He took no pains to conceal his displeasure that the Mysteries had
>     become less secret than formerly. Instead of profaning them by
>     putting them within the reach of the multitude, he would have
>     guarded them with jealous care against all but the most earnest
>     and worthy of his disciples.(2) While mentioning the Gods on every
>     page, his monotheism is unquestionable, for the whole thread of
>     his discourse indicates that by the term “Gods” he means a class
>     of beings lower in the scale than Deities, and but one grade
>     higher than men. Even Josephus perceived and acknowledged this
>     fact, despite the natural prejudice of his race. In his famous
>     onslaught upon Apion, this historian says: “Those, however, among
>     the Greeks who philosophized in accordance with truth were not
>     ignorant of anything, ... nor did they fail to perceive the
>     chilling superficialities of the mythical allegories, on which
>     account they justly despised them.... By which thing Plato, being
>     moved, says it is not necessary to admit any one of the other
>     poets into ‘the Commonwealth,’ and he dismisses Homer blandly,
>     after having crowned him and pouring unguent upon him, in order
>     that indeed he should not destroy by _his myths_, the orthodox
>     belief respecting one God.”(3)
> 
> And this is the “God” of every Philosopher, God infinite and impersonal.
> All this and much more, which there is no room here to quote, leads one to
> the undeniable certitude that (_a_), as all the Sciences and Philosophies
> were in the hands of the temple Hierophants, Plato, as initiated by them,
> must have known them; and (_b_), that logical inference alone is amply
> sufficient to justify anyone in regarding Plato’s writings as allegories
> and “dark sayings,” veiling truths which he had no right to divulge.
> 
> This established, how comes it that one of the best Greek scholars in
> England, Prof. Jowett, the modern translator of Plato’s works, seeks to
> demonstrate that none of the Dialogues—including even the _Timæus_—have
> any element of Oriental Mysticism about them? Those who can discern the
> true spirit of Plato’s Philosophy will hardly be convinced by the
> arguments which the Master of Balliol College lays before his readers.
> “Obscure and repulsive” to him, the _Timæus_ may certainly be; but it is
> as certain that this obscurity does not arise, as the Professor tells his
> public, “in the infancy of physical science,” but rather in its days of
> secresy; not “out of the confusion of theological, mathematical, and
> physiological notions,” or “out of the desire to conceive the whole of
> Nature without any adequate knowledge of the parts.”(4) For Mathematics
> and Geometry were the backbone of Occult cosmogony, hence of “Theology,”
> and the physiological notions of the ancient Sages are being daily
> verified by Science in our age; at least, to those who know how to read
> and understand ancient Esoteric works. The “knowledge of the parts” avails
> us little, if this knowledge only leads us the more to ignorance of the
> Whole, or the “nature and reason of the Universal,” as Plato called Deity,
> and causes us to blunder most egregiously because of our boasted inductive
> methods. Plato may have been “incapable of induction, or generalization in
> the modern sense”;(5) he may have been ignorant also, of the circulation
> of the blood, which, we are told, “was absolutely unknown to him,”(6) but
> then, there is naught to disprove that he knew what blood _is_—and this is
> more than any modern Physiologist or Biologist can claim nowadays.
> 
> Though a wider and far more generous margin for knowledge is allowed the
> “physical philosopher” by Prof. Jowett than by nearly any other modern
> commentator and critic, nevertheless, his criticism so considerably
> outweighs his laudation, that it may be as well to quote his own words, to
> show clearly his bias. Thus he says:
> 
>     To bring sense under the control of reason; to find some way
>     through the labyrinth or chaos of appearances, either the highway
>     of mathematics, or more devious paths suggested by the analogy of
>     man with the world and of the world with man; to see that all
>     things have a cause and are tending towards an end—this is the
>     spirit of the ancient physical philosopher.(7) But we neither
>     appreciate the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected,
>     nor have the ideas which fastened upon his imagination the same
>     hold upon us. For he is hovering between matter and mind; he is
>     under the dominion of abstractions; his impressions are taken
>     almost at random from the outside of nature; he sees the light,
>     but not the objects which are revealed by the light; and he brings
>     into juxtaposition things which to us appear wide as the poles
>     asunder, because he finds nothing between them.
> 
> The last proposition but one must evidently be distasteful to the modern
> “physical philosopher,” who sees the “objects” before him, but fails to
> see the light of the Universal Mind, which reveals them, _i.e._, who
> proceeds in a diametrically opposite way. Therefore the learned Professor
> comes to the conclusion that the ancient Philosopher, whom he now judges
> from Plato’s _Timæus_, must have acted in a decidedly unphilosophical and
> even irrational way. For:
> 
>     He passes abruptly from persons to ideas and numbers, and _from
>     ideas and numbers to persons_,(8) he confuses subject and object,
>     _first_ and _final_ causes, and in dreaming of geometrical
>     figures(9) is lost in a flux of sense. And now an effort of mind
>     is required on our parts _in order to understand his double
>     language_, or to apprehend _the twilight character of the
>     knowledge_ and the genius of ancient philosophers which, under
>     such conditions [?], seems by a divine power in many instances to
>     have anticipated the truth.(10)
> 
> Whether “such conditions” imply those of ignorance and mental stolidity in
> “the genius of ancient philosophers” or something else, we do not know.
> But what we do know is that the meaning of the sentences we have
> italicized is perfectly clear. Whether the Regius Professor of Greek
> believes or disbelieves in a hidden sense of geometrical figures and of
> the Esoteric “jargon,” he nevertheless admits the presence of a “double
> language” in the writings of these Philosophers. Thence he admits a hidden
> meaning, which must have had an interpretation. Why, then, does he flatly
> contradict his own statement on the very next page? And why should he deny
> to the _Timæus_—that preëminently Pythagorean (mystic) Dialogue—any Occult
> meaning and take such pains to convince his readers that
> 
>     The influence which the _Timæus_ has exercised upon posterity is
>     partly due to a misunderstanding.
> 
> The following quotation from his Introduction is in direct contradiction
> with the paragraph which precedes it, as above quoted:
> 
>     In the supposed depths of this dialogue the Neo‐Platonists found
>     hidden meanings and connections with the Jewish and Christian
>     Scriptures, and out of them they dictated doctrines quite at
>     variance with the spirit of Plato. Believing that he was inspired
>     by the Holy Ghost, or had received his wisdom from Moses,(11) they
>     seemed to find in his writings the Christian Trinity, the Word,
>     the Church ... and the Neo‐Platonists had a method of
>     interpretation which could elicit any meaning out of any words.
>     They were really incapable of distinguishing between the opinions
>     of one philosopher and another, or between the serious thoughts of
>     Plato and his passing fancies.(12)... [But] there is no danger of
>     the modern commentators on the _Timæus_ falling into the absurdity
>     of the Neo‐Platonists.
> 
> No danger whatever, of course, for the simple reason that the modern
> commentators have never had the key to Occult interpretations. And before
> another word is said in defence of Plato and the Neoplatonists, the
> learned master of Balliol College ought to be respectfully asked: What
> does, or can he know of the Esoteric canon of interpretation? By the term
> “canon” is here meant that key which was communicated orally from “mouth
> to ear” by the Master to the disciple, or by the Hierophant to the
> candidate for initiation; this from time immemorial throughout a long
> series of ages, during which the inner—not public—Mysteries were the most
> sacred institution of every land. Without such a key no correct
> interpretation of either the _Dialogues_ of Plato or any Scripture, from
> the _Vedas_ to Homer, from the _Zend Avesta_ to the Mosaic Books, is
> possible. How then can the Rev. Dr. Jowett know that the interpretations
> made by the Neoplatonists of the various sacred books of the nations were
> “absurdities?” Where, again, has he found an opportunity of studying these
> “interpretations”? History shows that all such works were destroyed by the
> Christian Church Fathers and their fanatical catechumens, wherever they
> were found. To say that such men as Ammonius, a genius and a saint, whose
> learning and holy life earned for him the title of Theodidaktos (“God‐
> taught”), such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus, were “incapable of
> distinguishing between the opinions of one philosopher and another, or
> between the serious thoughts of Plato and his fancies,” is to assume an
> untenable position for a Scholar. It amounts to saying that, (_a_) scores
> of the most famous Philosophers, the greatest Scholars and Sages of Greece
> and of the Roman Empire were dull fools, and (_b_) that all the other
> commentators, lovers of Greek Philosophy, some of them the acutest
> intellects of the age—who do not agree with Dr. Jowett—are also fools and
> no better than those whom they admire. The patronising tone of the last
> above‐quoted passage is modulated with the most _naïve_ conceit,
> remarkable even in our age of self‐glorification and mutual‐admiration
> cliques. We have to compare the Professor’s views with those of some other
> scholars.
> 
> Says Prof. Alexander Wilder of New York, one of the best Platonists of the
> day, speaking of Ammonius, the founder of the Neoplatonic School:
> 
>     His deep spiritual intuition, his extensive learning, his
>     familiarity with the Christian Fathers, Pantænus, Clement, and
>     Athenagoras, and with the most erudite philosophers of the time,
>     all fitted him for the labour which he performed so
>     thoroughly.(13) He was successful in drawing to his views the
>     greatest scholars and public men of the Roman Empire, who had
>     little taste for wasting time in dialectic pursuits or
>     superstitious observances. The results of his ministration are
>     perceptible at the present day in every country of the Christian
>     world; every prominent system of doctrine now bearing the marks of
>     his plastic hand. Every ancient philosophy has had its votaries
>     among the moderns; and even Judaism ... has taken upon itself
>     changes which were suggested by the “God‐taught” Alexandrian....
>     He was a man of rare learning and endowments, of blameless life
>     and amiable disposition. His almost superhuman ken and many
>     excellencies won for him the title of Theodidaktos; but he
>     followed the modest example of Pythagoras, and only assumed the
>     title of Philalethian, or lover of truth.(14)
> 
> It would be happy for truth and fact were our modern scholars to follow as
> modestly in the steps of their great predecessors. But not
> they—Philalethians!
> 
> Moreover, we know that:
> 
>     Like Orpheus, Pythagoras, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus
>     himself,(15) Ammonius committed nothing to writing.(16) Instead he
>     ... communicated his most important doctrines to persons duly
>     instructed and disciplined, imposing on them the obligations of
>     secresy, as was done before him by Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and
>     in the Mysteries. Except a few treatises of his disciples we have
>     only the declarations of his adversaries from which to ascertain
>     what he actually taught.(17)
> 
> It is from the biassed statements of such “adversaries,” probably, that
> the learned Oxford translator of Plato’s Dialogues came to the conclusion
> that:
> 
>     That which was truly great and truly characteristic of him
>     [Plato], his effort to realise and connect abstractions, _was not
>     understood_ by them [the Neoplatonists] at all [?].
> 
> He states, contemptuously enough for the ancient methods of intellectual
> analysis, that:
> 
>     In the present day ... an ancient philosopher is to be interpreted
>     from himself and by the contemporary history of thought.(18)
> 
> This is like saying that the ancient Greek canon of proportion (if ever
> found), and the Athena Promachus of Phidias, have to be interpreted in the
> present day from the contemporary history of architecture and sculpture,
> from the Albert Hall and Memorial Monument, and the hideous Madonnas in
> crinolines sprinkled over the fair face of Italy. Prof. Jowett remarks
> that “mysticism is not criticism.” No; but neither is criticism always
> fair and sound judgment.
> 
>     La critique est aisée, mais l’art est difficile.
> 
> And such “art” our critic of the Neoplatonists—his Greek scholarship
> notwithstanding—lacks from _a_ to _z_. Nor has he, very evidently, the key
> to the true spirit of the Mysticism of Pythagoras and Plato, since he
> denies even in the _Timæus_ an element of Oriental Mysticism, and seeks to
> show Greek Philosophy reäcting upon the East, forgetting that the truth is
> the exact reverse; that it is “the deeper and more pervading spirit of
> Orientalism” that had—through Pythagoras and his own initiation into the
> Mysteries—penetrated into the very depths of Plato’s soul.
> 
> But Dr. Jowett does not see this. Nor is he prepared to admit that
> anything good or rational—in accordance with the “contemporary history of
> thought”—could ever come out of that Nazareth of the Pagan Mysteries; nor
> even that there is anything to interpret of a hidden nature in the
> _Timæus_ or any other Dialogue. For him,
> 
>     The so‐called mysticism of Plato is purely Greek, arising out of
>     his imperfect knowledge(19) and high aspirations, and is the
>     growth of an age in which philosophy is not wholly separated from
>     poetry and mythology.(20)
> 
> Among several other equally erroneous propositions, it is especially the
> assumptions (_a_) that Plato was entirely free from any element of Eastern
> Philosophy in his writings, and (_b_) that every modern scholar, without
> being a Mystic and a Kabalist himself, can pretend to judge of ancient
> Esotericism—which we mean to combat. To do this we have to produce more
> authoritative statements than our own would be, and bring the evidence of
> other scholars as great as Dr. Jowett, if not greater, specialists in
> their subjects, moreover, to bear on and destroy the arguments of the
> Oxford Regius Professor of Greek.
> 
> That Plato was undeniably an ardent admirer and follower of Pythagoras no
> one will deny. And it is equally undeniable, as Matter has it, that Plato
> had inherited on the one hand his doctrines, and on the other had drawn
> his wisdom, from the same sources as the Samian Philosopher.(21) And the
> doctrines of Pythagoras are Oriental to the backbone, and even
> Brâhmanical; for this great Philosopher ever pointed to the far East as
> the source whence he derived his information and his Philosophy, and
> Colebrooke shows that Plato makes the same profession in his Epistles, and
> says that he has taken his teachings “from ancient and sacred
> doctrines.”(22) Furthermore, the ideas of both Pythagoras and Plato
> coincide too well with the systems of India and with Zoroastrianism to
> admit any doubt of their origin by anyone who has some acquaintance with
> these systems. Again:
> 
>     Pantænus, Athenagoras, and Clement were thoroughly instructed in
>     the Platonic philosophy, and _comprehended_ its essential unity
>     with the Oriental systems.(23)
> 
> The history of Pantænus and his contemporaries may give the key to the
> Platonic, and at the same time Oriental, elements that predominate so
> strikingly in the Gospels over the Jewish Scriptures.
> 
> SECTION I. PRELIMINARY SURVEY.
> 
> Initiates who have acquired powers and transcendental knowledge can be
> traced back to the Fourth Root Race from our own age. As the multiplicity
> of the subjects to be dealt with prohibits the introduction of such a
> historical chapter, which, however historical in fact and truth, would be
> rejected _à priori_ as blasphemy and fable by both Church and Science—we
> shall only touch on the subject. Science strikes out, at its own sweet
> will and fancy, dozens of names of ancient heroes, simply because there is
> too great an element of myth in their histories; the Church insists that
> biblical patriarchs shall be regarded as historical personages, and terms
> her seven “Star‐angels” the “historical channels and agents of the
> Creator.” Both are right, since each finds a strong party to side with it.
> Mankind is at best a sorry herd of Panurgian sheep, following blindly the
> leader that happens to suit it at the moment. Mankind—the majority at any
> rate—hates to think for itself. It resents as an insult the humblest
> invitation to step for a moment outside the old well‐beaten tracks, and,
> judging for itself, to enter into a new path in some fresh direction. Give
> it an unfamiliar problem to solve, and if its mathematicians, not liking
> its looks, refuse to deal with it, the crowd, unfamiliar with mathematics,
> will stare at the unknown quantity, and getting hopelessly entangled in
> sundry _x_’s and _y_’s, will turn round, trying to rend to pieces the
> uninvited disturber of its intellectual Nirvâna. This may, perhaps,
> account for the ease and extraordinary success enjoyed by the Roman Church
> in her conversions of nominal Protestants and Free‐thinkers, whose name is
> legion, but who have never gone to the trouble of thinking for themselves
> on these most important and tremendous problems of man’s inner nature.
> 
> And yet, if the evidence of facts, the records preserved in History, and
> the uninterrupted anathemas of the Church against “Black Magic” and
> Magicians of the accursed race of Cain, are not to be heeded, our efforts
> will prove very puny indeed. When, for nearly two millenniums, a body of
> men has never ceased to lift its voice against _Black_ Magic, the
> inference ought to be irrefutable that if Black Magic exists as a real
> fact, there must be somewhere its counterpart—_White_ Magic. False silver
> coins could have no existence if there were no genuine silver money.
> Nature is dual in whatever she attempts, and this ecclesiastical
> persecution ought alone to have opened the eyes of the public long ago.
> However much travellers may be ready to pervert every fact with regard to
> abnormal powers with which certain men are gifted in “heathen” countries;
> however eager they may be to put false constructions on such facts, and—to
> use an old proverb—“to call white swan black goose,” and to kill it, yet
> the evidence of even Roman Catholic missionaries ought to be taken into
> consideration, once they swear in a body to certain facts. Nor is it
> because they choose to see Satanic agency in manifestations of a certain
> kind, that their evidence as to the existence of such powers can be
> disregarded. For what do they say of China? Those missionaries who have
> lived in the country for long years, and have seriously studied every fact
> and belief that may prove an obstacle to their success in making
> conversions, and who have become familiar with every exoteric rite of both
> the official religion and sectarian creeds—all swear to the existence of a
> certain body of men, whom no one can reach but the Emperor and a select
> body of high officials. A few years ago, before the war in Tonkin, the
> archbishop in Pekin, on the report of some hundreds of missionaries and
> Christians, wrote to Rome the identical story that had been reported
> twenty‐five years before, and had been widely circulated in clerical
> papers. They had fathomed, it was said, the mystery of certain official
> deputations, sent at times of danger by the Emperor and ruling powers to
> their Sheu and Kiuay, as they are called among the people. These Sheu and
> Kiuay, they explained, were the Genii of the mountains, endowed with the
> most miraculous powers. They are regarded as the protectors of China, by
> the “ignorant” masses; as the incarnation of Satanic power by the good and
> “learned” missionaries.
> 
>     The Sheu and Kiuay are men belonging to another state of being to
>     that of the ordinary man, or to the state they enjoyed while they
>     were clad in their bodies. They are disembodied spirits, ghosts
>     and larvæ, living, nevertheless, in objective form on earth, and
>     dwelling in the fastnesses of mountains, inaccessible to all but
>     those whom they permit to visit them.(24)
> 
> In Tibet certain ascetics are also called Lha, Spirits, by those with whom
> they do not choose to communicate. The Sheu and Kiuay, who enjoy the
> highest consideration of the Emperor and Philosophers, and of
> Confucianists who believe in no “Spirits,” are simply Lohans—Adepts who
> live in the greatest solitude in their unknown retreats.
> 
> But both Chinese exclusiveness and Nature seem to have allied themselves
> against European curiosity and—as it is sincerely regarded in
> Tibet—desecration. Marco Polo, the famous traveller, was perhaps the
> European who ventured farthest into the interior of these countries. What
> was said of him in 1876 may now be repeated.
> 
>     The district of the Gobi wilderness, and, in fact, the whole area
>     of Independent Tartary and Tibet is carefully guarded against
>     foreign intrusion. Those who are permitted to traverse it are
>     under the particular care and pilotage of certain agents of the
>     chief authority, and are in duty bound to convey no intelligence
>     respecting places and persons to the outside world. But for this
>     restriction, many might contribute to these pages accounts of
>     exploration, adventure, and discovery that would be read with
>     interest. The time will come, sooner or later, when the dreadful
>     sand of the desert will yield up its long‐buried secrets, and then
>     there will indeed be unlooked‐for mortifications for our modern
>     vanity.
> 
>     “The people of Pashai,”(25) says Marco Polo, the daring traveller
>     of the thirteenth century, “are great adepts in sorceries and the
>     diabolic arts.” And his learned editor adds: “This Paschai, or
>     Udyana, was the native country of Padma Sambhava, one of the chief
>     apostles of Lamaism, _i.e._, of Tibetan Buddhism, and a great
>     master of enchantments. The doctrines of Sakya, as they prevailed
>     in Udyana _in old times_, were probably strongly tinged with
>     Sivaïtic magic, and the Tibetans still regard the locality as the
>     classic ground of sorcery and witchcraft.”
> 
>     The “old times” are just like the “modern times”; nothing is
>     changed as to magical practices except that they have become still
>     more esoteric and arcane, and that the caution of the adepts
>     increases in proportion to the traveller’s curiosity. Hiouen‐
>     Thsang says of the inhabitants: “The men ... are fond of study,
>     but pursue it with no ardour. _The science of magical formulæ has
>     become a regular professional business with them._”(26) We will
>     not contradict the venerable Chinese pilgrim on this point, and
>     are willing to admit that in the seventh century _some_ people
>     made “a professional business” of magic; so, also, do _some_
>     people now, but certainly not the true adepts. Moreover, in that
>     century, Buddhism had hardly penetrated into Tibet, and its races
>     were steeped in the sorceries of the Bhon,—the pre‐lamaïc
>     religion. It is not Hiouen‐Thsang, the pious, courageous man who
>     risked his life a hundred times to have the bliss of perceiving
>     Buddha’s shadow in the cave of Peshawur, who would have accused
>     the good lamas and monkish thaumaturgists of “making a
>     professional business” of showing it to travellers.
> 
>     The injunction of Gautama, contained in his answer to King
>     Prasenajit, his protector, who called on him to perform miracles,
>     must have been ever‐present to the mind of Hiouen‐Thsang. “Great
>     king,” said Gautama, “I do not teach the law to my pupils, telling
>     them, ‘Go, ye saints, and before the eyes of the Brâhmans and
>     householders perform, by means of your supernatural powers,
>     miracles greater than any man can perform.’ I tell them when I
>     teach them the law, ‘Live ye saints, _hiding your good works, and
>     showing your sins_.’ ”
> 
>     Struck with the accounts of magical exhibitions witnessed and
>     recorded by travellers of every age who had visited Tartary and
>     Tibet, Colonel Yule comes to the conclusion that the natives must
>     have had “at their command the whole encyclopædia of modern
>     Spiritualists.” Duhalde mentions among their sorceries the art of
>     producing by their invocations the figures of Laotseu(27) and
>     their divinities _in the air_, and “_of making a pencil write
>     answers to questions without anybody touching it_.”(28)
> 
>     The former invocations pertain to the religious mysteries of their
>     sanctuaries; if done otherwise, or for the sake of _gain_, they
>     are considered _sorcery_, necromancy, and strictly forbidden. The
>     latter art, that of making a pencil write without contact, was
>     known and practised in China and other countries before the
>     Christian era. It is the A B C of magic in those countries.
> 
>     When Hiouen‐Thsang desired to adore the shadow of Buddha, it was
>     not to “professional magicians” that he resorted, but to the power
>     of his own soul‐invocation; the power of prayer, faith, and
>     contemplation. All was dark and dreary near the cavern in which
>     the miracle was alleged to sometimes take place. Hiouen‐Thsang
>     entered and began his devotions. He made one hundred salutations,
>     but neither saw nor heard anything. Then, thinking himself too
>     sinful, he cried bitterly and despaired. But as he was about to
>     give up all hope, he perceived on the eastern wall a feeble light,
>     but it disappeared. He renewed his prayers, full of hope this
>     time, and again he saw the light, which flashed and disappeared
>     again. After this he made a solemn vow: he would not leave the
>     cave till he had the rapture to at last see the shadow of the
>     “Venerable of the Age.” He had to wait longer after this, for only
>     after two hundred prayers was the dark cave suddenly “bathed in
>     light, and the shadow of Buddha, of a brilliant white colour, rose
>     majestically on the wall, as when the clouds suddenly open, and
>     all at once display the marvellous image of the ‘Mountain of
>     Light.’ A dazzling splendour lighted up the features of the divine
>     countenance. Hiouen‐Thsang was lost in contemplation and wonder,
>     and would not turn his eyes away from the sublime and incomparable
>     object.” Hiouen‐Thsang adds in his own diary, _See‐yu‐kee_, that
>     it is only when man prays with sincere faith, and if he has
>     received from above a hidden impression, that he sees the shadow
>     clearly, but he cannot enjoy the sight for any length of time.
>     (Max Müller, _Buddhist Pilgrims_.)
> 
>     From one end to the other the country is full of mystics,
>     religious philosophers, Buddhist saints and magicians. Belief in a
>     spiritual world, full of invisible beings who, on certain
>     occasions, appear to mortals objectively, is universal. “According
>     to the belief of the nations of Central Asia,” remarks I. J.
>     Schmidt, “the earth and its interior, as well as the encompassing
>     atmosphere, are filled with spiritual beings, which exercise an
>     influence, partly beneficent, partly malignant, on the whole of
>     organic and inorganic nature.... Especially are deserts, and other
>     wild and uninhabited tracts, or regions in which the influences of
>     nature are displayed on a gigantic and terrible scale, regarded as
>     the chief abode or rendez‐vous of evil spirits. And hence the
>     steppes of Turan, and in particular the great sandy desert of
>     Gobi, have been looked on as the dwelling place of malignant
>     beings, from days of hoary antiquity.”
> 
>     The treasures exhumed by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenæ, have awakened
>     popular cupidity, and the eyes of adventurous speculators are
>     being turned toward the localities where the wealth of ancient
>     peoples is supposed to be buried, in crypt or cave, or beneath
>     sand or alluvial deposit. Around no other locality, not even Peru,
>     hang so many traditions as around the Gobi Desert. In independent
>     Tartary this howling waste of shifting sand was once, if report
>     speaks correctly, the seat of one of the richest empires the world
>     ever saw. Beneath the surface is said to lie such wealth in gold,
>     jewels, statuary, arms, utensils, and all that indicates
>     civilization, luxury, and fine arts, as no existing capital of
>     Christendom can show to‐day. The Gobi sand moves regularly from
>     east to west before terrific gales that blow continually.
>     Occasionally some of the hidden treasures are uncovered, but not a
>     native dare touch them, for the whole district is under the ban of
>     a mighty spell. Death would be the penalty. Bahti—hideous, but
>     faithful gnomes—guard the hidden treasures of this prehistoric
>     people, awaiting the day when the revolution of cyclic periods
>     shall again cause their story to be known for the instruction of
>     mankind.(29)
> 
> The above is purposely quoted from _Isis Unveiled_ to refresh the reader’s
> memory. One of the cyclic periods has just been passed, and we may not
> have to wait to the end of Mahâ Kalpa to have revealed something of the
> history of the mysterious desert, in spite of the Bahti, and even the
> Râkshasas of India, not less “hideous.” No tales or fictions were given in
> our earlier volumes, their chaotic state notwithstanding, to which chaos
> the writer, entirely free from vanity, confesses publicly and with many
> apologies.
> 
> It is now generally admitted that, from time immemorial, the distant East,
> India especially, was the land of knowledge and of every kind of learning.
> Yet there is none to whom the origin of all her Arts and Sciences has been
> so much denied as to the land of the primitive Âryas. From Architecture
> down to the Zodiac, every Science worthy of the name was imported by the
> Greeks, the mysterious Yavanas—agreeably with the decision of the
> Orientalists! Therefore, it is but logical that even the knowledge of
> Occult Science should be refused to India, since of its general practice
> in that country less is known than in the case of any other ancient
> people. It is so, simply because:
> 
>     With the Hindus it was, and is, more esoteric, if possible, than
>     it was even among the Egyptian priests. So sacred was it deemed
>     that its existence was only half admitted, and it was only
>     practised in public emergencies. _It was more than a religious
>     matter, for it was [and is still] considered divine._ The Egyptian
>     hierophants, notwithstanding the practice of a stern and pure
>     morality, could not be compared for one moment with the ascetical
>     Gymnosophists, either in holiness of life or miraculous powers
>     developed in them by the supernatural abjuration of everything
>     earthly. By those who knew them well they were held in still
>     greater reverence than the magians of Chaldæa. “Denying themselves
>     the simplest comforts of life, they dwelt in woods, and led the
>     life of the most secluded hermits,”(30) while their Egyptian
>     brothers at least congregated together. Notwithstanding the slur
>     thrown on all who practised magic and divination, history has
>     proclaimed them as possessing the greatest secrets in medical
>     knowledge and unsurpassed skill in its practice. Numerous are the
>     volumes preserved in Hindu Mathams, in which are recorded the
>     proofs of their learning. To attempt to say whether these
>     Gymnosophists were the real founders of magic in India, or whether
>     they only practised what had passed to them as an inheritance from
>     the earliest Rishis(31)—the seven primeval sages—would be regarded
>     as mere speculation by exact scholars.(32)
> 
> Nevertheless, this must be attempted. In _Isis Unveiled_, all that could
> be stated about Magic was set down in the guise of hints; and thus, owing
> to the great amount of material scattered over two large volumes, much of
> its importance was lost upon the reader, while it still more failed to
> draw his attention on account of the faulty arrangement. But hints may now
> grow into explanations. One can never repeat it too often—_Magic is as old
> as man_. It cannot any longer be called charlatanry or hallucination, when
> its lesser branches—such as mesmerism, now miscalled “hypnotism,” “thought
> reading,” “action by suggestion,” and what not else, only to avoid calling
> it by its right and legitimate name—are being so seriously investigated by
> the most famous Biologists and Physiologists of both Europe and America.
> Magic is indissolubly blended with the Religion of every country and is
> inseparable from its origin. It is as impossible for History to name the
> time when it was not, as that of the epoch when it sprang into existence,
> unless the doctrines preserved by the Initiates are taken into
> consideration. Nor can Science ever solve the problem of the origin of man
> if it rejects the evidence of the oldest records in the world, and refuses
> from the hand of the legitimate Guardians of the mysteries of Nature the
> key to Universal Symbology. Whenever a writer has tried to connect the
> first foundation of Magic with a particular country or some historical
> event or character, further research has shown his hypothesis to be
> groundless. There is a most lamentable contradiction among the
> Symbologists on this point. Some would have it that Odin, the Scandinavian
> priest and monarch, originated the practice of Magic some 70 years B.C.,
> although it is spoken of repeatedly in the _Bible_. But as it was proven
> that the mysterious rites of the priestesses Valas (Voilers) were greatly
> anterior to Odin’s age(33), then Zoroaster came in for an attempt, on the
> ground that he was the founder of Magian rites; but Ammianus Marcellinus,
> Pliny and Arnobius, with other ancient Historians, have shown that
> Zoroaster was but a reformer of Magic as practised by the Chaldæans and
> Egyptians, and not at all its founder.(34)
> 
> Who, then, of those who have consistently turned their faces away from
> Occultism and even Spiritualism, as being “unphilosophical” and therefore
> unworthy of scientific thought, has a right to say that he has studied the
> Ancients; or that, if he has studied them, he has understood all they have
> said? Only those who claim to be wiser than their generation, who think
> that they know all that the Ancients knew, and thus, knowing far more to‐
> day, fancy that they are entitled to laugh at their ancient simple‐
> mindedness and superstition; those, who imagine they have discovered a
> great secret by declaring the ancient royal sarcophagus, now empty of its
> King Initiate, to be a “corn‐bin,” and the Pyramid that contained it, a
> granary, perhaps a wine‐cellar!(35) Modern society, on the authority of
> some men of Science, calls Magic charlatantry. But there are eight hundred
> millions on the face of the globe who believe in it to this day; there are
> said to be twenty millions of perfectly sane and often very intellectual
> men and women, members of that same society, who believe in its phenomena
> under the name of Spiritualism. The whole ancient world, with its Scholars
> and Philosophers, its Sages and Prophets, believed in it. Where is the
> country in which it was not practised? At what age was it banished, even
> from our own country? In the New World as in the Old Country (the latter
> far younger than the former), the Science of Sciences was known and
> practised from the remotest antiquity. The Mexicans had their Initiates,
> their Priest‐Hierophants and Magicians, and their crypts of Initiation. Of
> the two statues exhumed in the Pacific States, one represents a Mexican
> Adept, in the posture prescribed for the Hindu ascetic, and the other an
> Aztec Priestess, in a head‐gear which might be taken from the head of an
> Indian Goddess; while the “Guatemalan Medal” exhibits the “Tree of
> Knowledge”—with its hundreds of eyes and ears, symbolical of seeing and
> hearing—encircled by the “Serpent of Wisdom” whispering into the ear of
> the sacred bird. Bernard Diaz de Castilla, a follower of Cortez, gives
> some idea of the extraordinary refinement, intelligence and civilization,
> and also of the magic arts of the people whom the Spaniards conquered by
> brute force. Their pyramids are those of Egypt, built according to the
> same secret canon of proportion as those of the Pharaohs, and the Aztecs
> appear to have derived their civilization and religion in more than one
> way from the same source as the Egyptians and, before these, the Indians.
> Among all these three peoples arcane Natural Philosophy, or Magic, was
> cultivated to the highest degree.
> 
> That it was natural, not supernatural, and that the Ancients so regarded
> it, is shown by what Lucian says of the “laughing Philosopher,”
> Democritus, who, he tells his readers,
> 
>     Believed in no [miracles] ... but applied himself to discover the
>     method by which the theurgists could produce them; in a word, his
>     philosophy brought him to the conclusion that magic was entirely
>     confined to the application and the imitation of the laws and the
>     works of nature.
> 
> Who then can still call the Magic of the Ancients “superstition”?
> 
>     In this respect the opinion of Democritus is of the greatest
>     importance to us, since the Magi left by Xerxes, at Abdera, were
>     his instructors, and he had studied magic, moreover, for a
>     considerable time with the Egyptian priests.(36) For nearly ninety
>     years of the one hundred and nine of his life, this great
>     philosopher had made experiments, and noted them down in a book,
>     which, according to Petronius,(37) _treated of nature_—facts that
>     he had verified himself. And we find him not only disbelieving in
>     and utterly rejecting miracles, but asserting that every one of
>     those that were authenticated by eye‐witnesses, had, and could
>     have taken place, for all, even the most _incredible_, were
>     produced according to _the _“hidden laws of nature”.(38) ... Add
>     to this that Greece, the “later cradle of the arts and sciences,”
>     and India, cradle of religions, were, and one of them still is,
>     devoted to its study and practice—and who shall venture to
>     discredit its dignity as a study, and its profundity as a
>     science?(39)
> 
> No true Theosophist will ever do so. For, as a member of our great
> Oriental body, he knows indubitably that the Secret Doctrine of the East
> contains the Alpha and the Omega of Universal Science; that in its obscure
> texts, under the luxuriant, though perhaps too exuberant, growth of
> allegorical Symbolism, lie concealed the corner‐ and the key‐stones of all
> ancient and modern knowledge. That Stone, brought down by the Divine
> Builder, is now rejected by the too‐human workman, and this because, in
> his lethal materiality, man has lost every recollection, not only of his
> holy childhood, but of his very adolescence, when he was one of the
> Builders himself; when “the morning stars sang together, and the Sons of
> God shouted for joy,” after they had laid the measures for the foundations
> of the earth—to use the deeply significant and poetical language of Job,
> the Arabian Initiate. But those who are still able to make room in their
> innermost selves for the Divine Ray, and who accept, therefore, the data
> of the Secret Sciences in good faith and humility, they know well that it
> is in this Stone that remains buried the absolute in Philosophy, which is
> the key to all those dark problems of Life and Death, some of which, at
> any rate, may find an explanation in these volumes.
> 
> The writer is vividly alive to the tremendous difficulties that present
> themselves in the handling of such abstruse questions, and to all the
> dangers of the task. Insulting as it is to human nature to brand truth
> with the name of imposture, nevertheless we see this done daily and accept
> it. For every occult truth has to pass through such denial and its
> supporters through martyrdom, before it is finally accepted; though even
> then it remains but too often—
> 
>                                       A crown
>     Golden in show, yet but a wreath of thorns.
> 
> Truths that rest on Occult mysteries will have, for one reader who may
> appreciate them, a thousand who will brand them as impostures. This is
> only natural, and the only means to avoid it would be for an Occultist to
> pledge himself to the Pythagorean “vow of silence,” and renew it every
> five years. Otherwise, cultured society—two‐thirds of which think
> themselves in duty bound to believe that, since the first appearance of
> the first Adept, one half of mankind practised deception and fraud on the
> other half—cultured society will undeniably assert its hereditary and
> traditional right to stone the intruder. Those benevolent critics, who
> most readily promulgate the now famous axiom of Carlyle with regard to his
> countrymen, of being “mostly fools,” having taken preliminary care to
> include themselves safely in the only fortunate exceptions to this rule,
> will in this work gain strength and derive additional conviction of the
> sad fact, that the human race is simply composed of knaves and congenital
> idiots. But this matters very little. The vindication of the Occultists
> and their Archaic Science is working itself slowly but steadily into the
> very heart of society, hourly, daily, and yearly, in the shape of two
> monster branches, two stray off‐shoots of the trunk of Magic—Spiritualism
> and the Roman Church. Fact works its way very often through fiction. Like
> an immense boa‐constrictor, Error, in every shape, encircles mankind,
> trying to smother in her deadly coils every aspiration towards truth and
> light. But Error is powerful only on the surface, prevented as she is by
> Occult Nature from going any deeper; for the same Occult Nature encircles
> the whole globe, in every direction, leaving not even the darkest corner
> unvisited. And, whether by phenomenon or miracle, by spirit‐hook or
> bishop’s crook, Occultism must win the day, before the present era reaches
> “Shani’s (Saturn’s) triple septenary” of the Western Cycle in Europe, in
> other words—before the end of the twenty‐first century “A.D.”
> 
> Truly the soil of the long by‐gone past is not dead, for it has only
> rested. The skeletons of the sacred oaks of the ancient Druids may still
> send shoots from their dried‐up boughs and be reborn to a new life, like
> that handful of corn, in the sarcophagus of a mummy 4,000 years old,
> which, when planted, sprouted, grew, and “gave a fine harvest.” Why not?
> Truth is stranger than fiction. It may any day, and most unexpectedly,
> vindicate its wisdom and demonstrate the conceit of our age, by proving
> that the Secret Brotherhood did not, indeed, die out with the
> Philalethians of the last Eclectic School, that the Gnosis flourishes
> still on earth, and its votaries are many, albeit unknown. All this may be
> done by one, or more, of the great Masters visiting Europe, and exposing
> in their turn the alleged exposers and traducers of Magic. Such secret
> Brotherhoods have been mentioned by several well‐known authors, and are
> spoken of in Mackenzie’s _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_. The writer now, in
> the face of the millions who deny, repeats boldly, that which was said in
> _Isis Unveiled_.
> 
>     If they [the Initiates] have been regarded as mere fictions of the
>     novelist, that fact has only helped the “brother‐adepts” to keep
>     their incognito the more easily....
> 
>     The St. Germains and Cagliostros of this century, having learned
>     bitter lessons from the vilifications and persecutions of the
>     past, pursue different tactics now‐a‐days.(40)
> 
> These prophetic words were written in 1876, and verified in 1886.
> Nevertheless, we say again,
> 
>     There are numbers of these mystic Brotherhoods which have naught
>     to do with “civilized” countries; and it is in their unknown
>     communities that are concealed the skeletons of the past. These
>     “adepts” could, if they chose, lay claim to strange ancestry, and
>     exhibit verifiable documents that would explain many a mysterious
>     page in both sacred and profane history.(41) Had the keys to the
>     hieratic writings and the secret of Egyptian and Hindu symbolism
>     been known to the Christian Fathers, they would not have allowed a
>     single monument of old to stand unmutilated.(42)
> 
> But there exists in the world another class of adepts, belonging to a
> brotherhood also, and mightier than any other of those known to the
> profane. Many among these are personally good and benevolent, even pure
> and holy occasionally, as individuals. Pursuing collectively, however, and
> as a body, a selfish, one‐sided object, with relentless vigour and
> determination, they have to be ranked with the adepts of the Black Art.
> These are our modern Roman Catholic “fathers” and clergy. Most of the
> hieratic writings and symbols have been deciphered by them since the
> Middle Ages. A hundred times more learned in secret Symbology and the old
> Religions than our Orientalists will ever be, the personification of
> astuteness and cleverness, every such adept in the art holds the keys
> tightly in his firmly clenched hand, and will take care the secret shall
> not be easily divulged, if he can help it. There are more profoundly
> learned Kabalists in Rome and throughout Europe and America, than is
> generally suspected. Thus are the professedly public “brotherhoods” of
> “black” adepts more powerful and dangerous for Protestant countries than
> any host of Eastern Occultists. People laugh at Magic! Men of Science,
> Physiologists and Biologists, deride the potency and even the belief in
> the existence of what is called in vulgar parlance “Sorcery” and “Black
> Magic”! The Archæologists have their Stonehenge in England with its
> thousands of secrets, and its twin‐brother Karnac of Brittany, and yet
> there is not one of them who even suspects what has been going on in its
> crypts, and its mysterious nooks and corners, for the last century. More
> than that, they do not even know of the existence of such “magic halls” in
> their Stonehenge, where curious scenes are taking place, whenever there is
> a new convert in view. Hundreds of experiments have been, and are being
> made daily at the Salpêtrière, and also by learned hypnotisers at their
> private houses. It is now proved that certain sensitives—both men and
> women—when commanded in trance, by the practitioner, who operates on them,
> to do a certain thing—from drinking a glass of water up to simulated
> murder—on recovering their normal state lose all remembrance of the order
> inspired—“suggested” it is now called by Science. Nevertheless, at the
> appointed hour and moment, the subject, though conscious and perfectly
> awake, is compelled by an irresistible power within himself to do that
> action which has been suggested to him by his mesmeriser; and that too,
> whatever it may be, and whatever the period fixed by him who controls the
> subject, that is to say, holds the latter under the power of his will, as
> a snake holds a bird under its fascination, and finally forces it to jump
> into its open jaws. Worse than this: for the bird is conscious of the
> peril; it resists, however helpless in its final efforts, while the
> hypnotized subject does not rebel, but seems to follow the suggestions and
> voice of his own free‐will and soul. Who of our European men of Science,
> who believe in such _scientific_ experiments—and very few are they who
> still doubt them now‐a‐days, and who do not feel convinced of their actual
> reality—who of them, it is asked, is ready to admit this as being Black
> Magic? Yet it is the _genuine_, undeniable and actual _fascination_ and
> _sorcery_ of old. The Mulu Kurumbas of Nîlgiri do not proceed otherwise in
> their _envoûtements_ when they seek to destroy an enemy, nor do the Dugpas
> of Sikkim and Bhûtân know of any more potential agent than their _will_.
> Only in them that will does not proceed by jumps and starts, but acts with
> certainty; it does not depend on the amount of receptivity or nervous
> impressibility of the “subject.” Having chosen his victim and placed
> himself _en rapport_ with him, the Dugpa’s “fluid” is sure to find its
> way, for his will is immeasurably more strongly developed than the will of
> the European experimenter—the self‐made, untutored, and _unconscious_
> Sorcerer for the sake of Science—who has no idea (or belief either) of the
> variety and potency of the world‐old methods used to develop this power,
> by the _conscious_ sorcerer, the “Black Magician” of the East and West.
> 
> And now the question is openly and squarely asked: Why should not the
> fanatical and zealous priest, thirsting to convert some selected rich and
> influential member of society, use the same means to accomplish his end as
> the French Physician and experimenter uses in his case with his subject?
> The conscience of the Roman Catholic priest is most likely at peace. He
> works _personally_ for no selfish purpose, but with the object of “saving
> a soul” from “eternal damnation.” In his view, if Magic there be in it, it
> is holy, meritorious and divine Magic. Such is the power of blind faith.
> 
> Hence, when we are assured by trustworthy and respectable persons of high
> social standing, and unimpeachable character, that there are many well‐
> organised societies among the Roman Catholic priests which, under the
> pretext and cover of Modern Spiritualism and mediumship, hold _séances_
> for the purposes of conversion by suggestion, directly and at a
> distance—we answer: We know it. And when, moreover, we are told that
> whenever those priest‐hypnotists are desirous of acquiring an influence
> over some individual or individuals, selected by them for conversion, they
> retire to an underground place, allotted and consecrated by them for such
> purposes (_viz._, ceremonial Magic); and there, forming a circle, throw
> their combined will‐power in the direction of that individual, and thus by
> repeating the process, gain a complete control over their victim—we again
> answer: Very likely. In fact we know the practice to be so, whether this
> kind of ceremonial Magic and _envoûtement_ is practised at Stonehenge or
> elsewhere. We know it, we say, through personal experience; and also
> because several of the writer’s best and most loved friends have been
> unconsciously drawn into the Romish Church and under her “benign”
> protection by such means. And, therefore, we can only laugh in pity at the
> ignorance and stubbornness of those deluded men of Science and cultured
> experimentalists who, while believing in the power of Dr. Charcot and his
> disciples to “envoûte” their subjects, find nothing better than a scornful
> smile whenever Black Magic and its potency are mentioned before them.
> Éliphas Lévi, the Abbé‐Kabalist, died before Science and the Faculté de
> Médecine of France had accepted hypnotism and influence _par suggestion_
> among its scientific experiments, but this is what he said twenty‐five
> years ago, in his _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_, on “Les
> Envoûtements et les Sorts”:
> 
>     That which sorcerers and necromancers sought above all things in
>     their evocations of the Spirit of Evil, was that magnetic potency
>     which is the lawful property of the true Adept, and which they
>     desired to obtain possession of for evil purposes.... One of their
>     chief aims was the power of spells or of deleterious
>     influences.... That power may be compared to real poisonings by a
>     current of astral light. They exalt their will by means of
>     ceremonies to the degree of rendering it venomous at a
>     distance.... We have said in our “Dogma” what we thought of magic
>     spells, and how this power was exceedingly real and dangerous. The
>     true Magus throws a spell without ceremony and by his sole
>     disapproval, upon those with whose conduct he is dissatisfied, and
>     whom he thinks it necessary to punish;(43) he casts a spell, even
>     by his pardon, over those who do him injury, and the enemies of
>     Initiates never long enjoy impunity for their wrong‐doing. We have
>     ourselves seen proofs of this fatal law in numerous instances. The
>     executioners of martyrs always perish miserably; and the Adepts
>     are the martyrs of intelligence. Providence [Karma] seems to
>     despise those who despise them, and puts to death those who would
>     seek to prevent them from living. The legend of the Wandering Jew
>     is the popular poetry of this arcanum. A people had sent a sage to
>     crucifixion; that people had bidden him “Move on!” when he tried
>     to rest for one moment. Well! that people will become subject,
>     henceforth, to a similar condemnation; it will become entirely
>     proscribed, and for long centuries it will be bidden “Move on!
>     move on!” finding neither rest nor pity.(44)
> 
> “Fables,” and “superstition,” will be the answer. Be it so. Before the
> lethal breath of selfishness and indifference every uncomfortable fact is
> transformed into meaningless fiction, and every branch of the once verdant
> Tree of Truth has become dried up and stripped of its primeval spiritual
> significance. Our modern Symbologist is superlatively clever only at
> detecting phallic worship and sexual emblems even where none were ever
> meant. But for the true student of Occult Lore, White or Divine Magic
> could no more exist in Nature without its counterpart Black Magic, than
> day without night, whether these be of twelve hours or of six months’
> duration. For him everything in that Nature has an occult—a bright and a
> night side to it. Pyramids and Druid’s oaks, dolmens and Bo‐trees, plant
> and mineral—everything was full of deep significance and of sacred truths
> of wisdom, when the Arch‐Druid performed his magic cures and incantations,
> and the Egyptian Hierophant evoked and guided Chemnu, the “lovely
> spectre,” the female Frankenstein‐creation of old, raised for the torture
> and test of the soul‐power of the candidate for initiation, simultaneously
> with the last agonising cry of his terrestrial human nature. True, Magic
> has lost its name, and along with it its rights to recognition. But its
> practice is in daily use; and its progeny, “magnetic influence,” “power of
> oratory,” “irresistible fascination,” “whole audiences subdued and held as
> though under a spell,” are terms recognised and used by all, generally
> meaningless though they now are. Its effects, however, are more determined
> and definite among religious congregations such as the Shakers, the Negro
> Methodists, and Salvationists, who call it “the action of the Holy Spirit”
> and “grace.” The real truth is that Magic is still in full sway amidst
> mankind, however blind the latter to its silent presence and influence on
> its members, however ignorant society may be, and remain, to its daily and
> hourly beneficent and maleficent effects. The world is full of such
> unconscious magicians—in politics as well as in daily life, in the Church
> as in the strongholds of Free‐Thought. Most of those magicians are
> “sorcerers” unhappily, not metaphorically but in sober reality, by reason
> of their inherent selfishness, their revengeful natures, their envy and
> malice. The true student of Magic, well aware of the truth, looks on in
> pity, and, if he be wise, keeps silent. For every effort made by him to
> remove the universal cecity is only repaid with ingratitude, slander, and
> often curses, which, unable to reach him, will react on those who wish him
> evil. Lies and calumny—the latter a teething lie, adding actual bites to
> empty harmless falsehoods—become his lot, and thus the well‐wisher is soon
> torn to pieces, as a reward for his benevolent desire to enlighten.
> 
> Enough has been given, it is believed, to shew that the existence of a
> Secret Universal Doctrine, besides its practical methods of Magic, is no
> wild romance or fiction. The fact was known to the whole ancient world,
> and the knowledge of it has survived in the East, in India especially. And
> if there be such a Science, there must be naturally, somewhere, professors
> of it, or Adepts. In any case it matters little whether the Guardians of
> the Sacred Lore are regarded as living, actually existing men, or are
> viewed as myths. It is their Philosophy that will have to stand or fall
> upon its own merits, apart from, and independent of any Adepts. For in the
> words of the wise Gamaliel, addressed by him to the Synedrion: “If this
> doctrine is false it will perish, and fall of itself; but if true,
> then—_it cannot be destroyed_.”
> 
> SECTION II. MODERN CRITICISM AND THE ANCIENTS.
> 
> The Secret Doctrine of the Âryan East is found repeated under Egyptian
> symbolism and phraseology in the Books of Hermes. At, or near, the
> beginning of the present century, all the books called Hermetic were, in
> the opinion of the average man of Science, unworthy of serious attention.
> They were set down and loudly proclaimed as simply a collection of tales,
> of fraudulent pretences and most absurd claims. They “never existed before
> the Christian era,” it was said: “they were all written with the triple
> object of speculation, deceiving and pious fraud;” they were all, even the
> best of them, silly apocrypha.(45) In this respect the nineteenth century
> proved a most worthy scion of the eighteenth, for, in the age of Voltaire
> as well as in this century, everything, save what emanated direct from the
> Royal Academy, was false, superstitious, foolish. Belief in the wisdom of
> the Ancients was laughed to scorn, perhaps more so even than it is now.
> The very thought of accepting as authentic the works and vagaries of “a
> false Hermes, a false Orpheus, a false Zoroaster,” of false Oracles, false
> Sibyls, and a thrice false Mesmer and his absurd fluid, was tabooed all
> along the line. Thus all that had its genesis outside the learned and
> dogmatic precincts of Oxford and Cambridge,(46) or the Academy of France,
> was denounced in those days as “unscientific,” and “ridiculously absurd.”
> This tendency has survived to the present day.
> 
> Nothing can be further from the intention of any true Occultist—who stands
> possessed, by virtue of his higher psychic development, of instruments of
> research far more penetrating in their power than any as yet in the hands
> of physical experimentalists—than to look unsympathetically on the efforts
> that are being made in the area of physical enquiry. The exertions and
> labours undertaken to solve as many as possible of the problems of Nature
> have always been holy in his sight. The spirit in which Sir Isaac Newton
> remarked that at the end of all his astronomical work he felt a mere child
> picking up shells beside the Ocean of Knowledge, is one of reverence for
> the boundlessness of Nature which Occult Philosophy itself cannot eclipse.
> And it may freely be recognised that the attitude of mind which this
> famous simile describes is one which fairly represents that of the great
> majority of _genuine_ Scientists in regard to all the phenomena of the
> physical plane of Nature. In dealing with this they are often caution and
> moderation itself. They observe facts with a patience that cannot be
> surpassed. They are slow to cast these into theories, with a prudence that
> cannot be too highly commended. And, subject to the limitations under
> which they observe Nature, they are beautifully accurate in the record of
> their observations. Moreover, it may be conceded further that modern
> Scientists are exceedingly careful not to affirm negations. They may say
> it is immensely improbable that any discovery will ever conflict with such
> or such a theory, now supported by such and such an aggregation of
> recorded facts. But even in reference to the broadest
> generalizations—which pass into a dogmatic form only in brief popular text
> books of scientific knowledge—the tone of “Science” itself, if that
> abstraction may be held to be embodied in the persons of its most
> distinguished representatives, is one of reserve and often of modesty.
> 
> Far, therefore, from being disposed to scoff at the errors into which the
> limitations of their methods may betray men of Science, the true Occultist
> will rather appreciate the pathos of a situation in which great industry
> and thirst for truth are condemned to disappointment, and often to
> confusion.
> 
> That which is to be deplored, however, in respect to Modern Science, is in
> itself an evil manifestation of the excessive caution which in its most
> favourable aspect protects Science from over‐hasty conclusions: namely,
> the tardiness of Scientists to recognise that other instruments of
> research may be applicable to the mysteries of Nature besides those of the
> physical plane, and that it may consequently be impossible to appreciate
> the phenomena of any one plane correctly without observing them as well
> from the points of view afforded by others. In so far then as they
> wilfully shut their eyes to evidence which ought to have shown them
> clearly that Nature is more complex than physical phenomena alone would
> suggest, that there are means by which the faculties of human perception
> can pass sometimes from one plane to the other, and that their energy is
> being misdirected while they turn it exclusively on the minutiæ of
> physical structure or force, they are less entitled to sympathy than to
> blame.
> 
> One feels dwarfed and humbled in reading what M. Renan, that learned
> modern “destroyer” of every religious belief, past, present and future,
> has to say of poor humanity and its powers of discernment. He believes
> 
>     Mankind has but a very narrow mind; and the number of men capable
>     of seizing acutely (_finement_) the true analogy of things, is
>     quite imperceptible.(47)
> 
> Upon comparing, however, this statement with another opinion expressed by
> the same author, namely, that:
> 
>     The mind of the critic should yield to facts, hands and feet
>     bound, to be dragged by them wherever they may lead him,(48)
> 
> one feels relieved. When, moreover, these two philosophical statements are
> strengthened by a third enunciation of the famous Academician, which
> declares that:
> 
>     _Tout parti pris à priori, doit être banni de la science_,(49)
> 
> there remains little to fear. Unfortunately M. Renan is the first to break
> this golden rule.
> 
> The evidence of Herodotus—called, sarcastically no doubt, the “Father of
> History,” since in every question upon which Modern Thought disagrees with
> him, his testimony goes for nought—the sober and earnest assurances in the
> philosophical narratives of Plato and Thucydides, Polybius, and Plutarch,
> and even certain statements of Aristotle himself, are invariably laid
> aside whenever they are involved in what modern criticism is pleased to
> regard as a myth. It is some time since Strauss proclaimed that:
> 
>     The presence of a supernatural element or miracle in a narrative
>     is an infallible sign of the presence in it of a myth;
> 
> and such is the canon of criticism tacitly adopted by every modern critic.
> But what is a myth—μῦθος—to begin with? Are we not told distinctly by
> ancient writers that the word means tradition? Was not the Latin term
> _fabula_, a fable, synonymous with something told, as having happened in
> pre‐historic times, and not necessarily an invention. With such autocrats
> of criticism and despotic rulers as are most of the French, English, and
> German Orientalists, there may, then, be no end of historical,
> geographical, ethnological and philological surprises in store for the
> century to come. Travesties in Philosophy have become so common of late,
> that the public can be startled by nothing in this direction. It has
> already been stated by one learned speculator that Homer was simply “a
> mythical personification of the épopée”(50); by another, that Hippocrates,
> son of Esculapius “could only be a chimera”; that the Asclepiades, their
> seven hundred years of duration notwithstanding, might after all prove
> simply a “fiction”; that “the city of Troy (Dr. Schliemann to the
> contrary) existed only on the maps,” etc. Why should not the world be
> invited after this to regard every hitherto historical character of days
> of old as a myth? Were not Alexander the Great needed by Philology as a
> sledge‐hammer wherewith to break the heads of Brâhmanical chronological
> pretensions, he would have become long ago simply “a symbol for
> annexation,” or “a genius of conquest,” as has been already suggested by
> some French writer.
> 
> Blank denial is the only refuge left to the critics. It is the most secure
> asylum for some time to come in which to shelter the last of the sceptics.
> For one who denies unconditionally, the trouble of arguing is unnecessary,
> and he also thus avoids what is worse, having to yield occasionally a
> point or two before the irrefutable arguments and facts of his opponent.
> Creuzer, the greatest of all the modern Symbologists, the most learned
> among the masses of erudite German Mythologists, must have envied the
> placid self‐confidence of certain sceptics, when he found himself forced
> in a moment of desperate perplexity to admit that:
> 
>     We are compelled to return to the theories of trolls and genii, as
>     they were understood by the ancients; [it is a doctrine] without
>     which it becomes absolutely impossible to explain to oneself
>     anything with regard to the Mysteries(51)
> 
> of the Ancients, which Mysteries are undeniable.
> 
> Roman Catholics, who are guilty of precisely the same worship, and to the
> very letter—having borrowed it from the later Chaldæans, the Lebanon
> Nabathæans, and the baptized Sabæans,(52) and not from the learned
> Astronomers and Initiates of the days of old—would now, by anathematizing
> it, hide the source from which it came. Theology and Churchianism would
> fain trouble the clear fountain that fed them from the first, to prevent
> posterity from looking into it, and thus seeing their original prototype.
> The Occultists, however, believe the time has come to give everyone his
> due. As to our other opponents—the modern sceptic and the Epicurean, the
> cynic and the Sadducee—they may find an answer to their denials in our
> earlier volumes. As to many unjust aspersions on the ancient doctrines,
> the reason for them is given in these words in _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     The thought of the present‐day commentator and critic as to the
>     ancient learning, is limited to and runs round the exoterism of
>     the temples; his insight is either unwilling or unable to
>     penetrate into the solemn adyta of old, where the hierophant
>     instructed the neophyte to regard the public worship in its true
>     light. No ancient sage would have taught that man is the king of
>     creation, and that the starry heaven and our mother earth were
>     created for his sake.(53)
> 
> When we find such works as _Phallicism_(54) appearing in our day in print,
> it is easy to see that the day for concealment and travesty has passed
> away. Science, in Philology, Symbolism and Comparative Religion, has
> progressed too far to make wholesale denials any longer, and the Church is
> too wise and cautious not to be now making the best of the situation.
> Meanwhile, the “rhombs of Hecate” and the “wheels of Lucifer,”(55) daily
> exhumed on the sites of Babylonia, can no longer be used as clear evidence
> of a Satan‐worship, since the same symbols are shown in the ritual of the
> Latin Church. The latter is too learned to be ignorant of the fact that
> even the later Chaldæans, who had gradually fallen into dualism, reducing
> all things to two primal Principles, never worshipped Satan or idols, any
> more than did the Zoroastrians, who now lie under the same accusation, but
> that their Religion was as highly philosophical as any; their dual and
> exoteric Theosophy became the heirloom of the Jews, who, in their turn,
> were forced to share it with the Christians. Pârsîs are to this day
> charged with Heliolatry, and yet in the Chaldæan Oracles, under the
> “Magical and Philosophical Precepts of Zoroaster” one finds the following:
> 
>     Direct not thy mind to the vast measures of the earth;
>     For the plant of truth is not upon ground.
>     Nor measure the measures of the sun, collecting rules,
>     For he is carried by the eternal will of the Father, not for your
>                 sake.
>     Dismiss the impetuous course of the moon; for she runs always by
>                 work of necessity.
>     The progression of the stars was not generated for your sake.
> 
> There was a vast difference between the true worship taught to those who
> showed themselves worthy, and the state religions. The Magians are accused
> of all kinds of superstition, but this is what the same Chaldæan Oracle
> says:
> 
>     The wide aerial flight of birds is not true,
>     Nor the dissections of the entrails of victims; they are all mere
>                 toys,
>     The basis of mercenary fraud; flee from these
>     If you would open the sacred paradise of piety,
>     Where virtue, wisdom, and equity are assembled.(56)
> 
> As we say in our former work:
> 
>     Surely it is not those who warn people against “mercenary fraud”
>     who can be accused of it; and if they accomplished acts which seem
>     miraculous, who can with fairness presume to deny that it was done
>     merely because they possessed a knowledge of natural philosophy
>     and psychological science to a degree unknown to our schools?(57)
> 
> The above quoted stanzas are a rather strange teaching to come from those
> who are universally believed to have worshipped the sun, and moon, and the
> starry hosts, as Gods. The sublime profundity of the Magian precepts being
> beyond the reach of modern materialistic thought, the Chaldæan
> Philosophers are accused of Sabæanism and Sun‐worship, which was the
> religion only of the uneducated masses.
> 
> SECTION III. THE ORIGIN OF MAGIC.
> 
> Things of late have changed, true enough. The field of investigation has
> widened; old religions are a little better understood; and since that
> miserable day when the Committee of the French Academy, headed by Benjamin
> Franklin, investigated Mesmer’s phenomena only to proclaim them
> charlatanry and clever knavery, both heathen Philosophy and Mesmerism have
> acquired certain rights and privileges, and are now viewed from quite a
> different standpoint. Is full justice rendered them, however, and are they
> any better appreciated? We are afraid not. Human nature is the same now,
> as when Pope said of the force of prejudice that:
> 
>     The difference is as great between
>     The optics seeing, as the objects seen.
>     All manners take a tincture from our own,
>     Or some discolour’d through our passions shown,
>     Or fancy’s beam enlarges, multiplies,
>     Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.
> 
> Thus in the first decades of our century Hermetic Philosophy was regarded
> by both Churchmen and men of Science from two quite opposite points of
> view. The former called it sinful and devilish; the latter denied point‐
> blank its authenticity, notwithstanding the evidence brought forward by
> the most erudite men of every age, including our own. The learned Father
> Kircher, for instance, was not even noticed; and his assertion that all
> the fragments known under titles of works by Mercury Trismegistus,
> Berosus, Pherecydes of Syros, etc., were rolls that had escaped the fire
> which devoured 100,000 volumes of the great Alexandrian Library—was simply
> laughed at. Nevertheless the educated classes of Europe knew then, as they
> do now, that the famous Alexandrian Library, the “marvel of the ages,” was
> founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus; that numbers of its MSS. had been
> carefully copied from hieratic texts and the oldest parchments, Chaldæan,
> Phœnician, Persian, etc.; and that these transliterations and copies
> amounted, in their turn, to another 100,000 rolls, as Josephus and Strabo
> assert.
> 
> There is also the additional evidence of Clemens Alexandrinus, that ought
> to be credited to some extent.(58) Clemens testified to the existence of
> an additional 30,000 volumes of the Books of Thoth, placed in the library
> of the Tomb of Osymandias, over the entrance of which were inscribed the
> words, “A Cure for the Soul.”
> 
> Since then, as all know, entire texts of the “apocryphal” works of the
> “false” Pymander, and the no less “false” Asclepias, have been found by
> Champollion in the most ancient monuments of Egypt.(59) As said in _Isis
> Unveiled_:
> 
>     After having devoted their whole lives to the study of the records
>     of the old Egyptian wisdom, both Champollion‐Figéac and
>     Champollion Junior publicly declared, notwithstanding many biassed
>     judgments hazarded by certain hasty and unwise critics, that the
>     _Books of Hermes_ “truly contain a mass of Egyptian traditions
>     which are constantly corroborated by the most authentic records
>     and monuments of Egypt of the hoariest antiquity.”(60)
> 
> The merit of Champollion as an Egyptologist none will question, and if he
> declare that everything demonstrates the accuracy of the writings of the
> mysterious Hermes Trismegistus, and if the assertion that their antiquity
> runs back into the night of time be corroborated by him in minutest
> details, then indeed criticism ought to be fully satisfied. Says
> Champollion:
> 
>     These inscriptions are only the faithful echo and expression of
>     the most ancient verities.
> 
> Since these words were written, some of the “apocryphal” verses by the
> “mythical” Orpheus have also been found copied word for word, in
> hieroglyphics, in certain inscriptions of the Fourth Dynasty, addressed to
> various Deities. Finally, Creuzer discovered and immediately pointed out
> the very significant fact that numerous passages found in Homer and Hesiod
> were undeniably borrowed by the two great poets from the Orphic Hymns,
> thus proving the latter to be far older than the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_.
> 
> And so gradually the ancient claims come to be vindicated, and modern
> criticism has to submit to evidence. Many are now the writers who confess
> that such a type of literature as the Hermetic works of Egypt can never be
> dated too far back into the prehistoric ages. The texts of many of these
> ancient works, that of Enoch included, so loudly proclaimed “apocryphal”
> at the beginning of this century, are now discovered and recognised in the
> most secret and sacred sanctuaries of Chaldæa, India, Phœnicia, Egypt and
> Central Asia. But even such proofs have failed to convince the bulk of our
> Materialists. The reason for this is very simple and evident. All these
> texts—held in universal veneration in Antiquity, found in the secret
> libraries of all the great temples, studied (if not always mastered) by
> the greatest statesmen, classical writers, philosophers, kings and laymen,
> as much as by renowned Sages—what were they? Treatises on Magic and
> Occultism, pure and simple; the now derided and tabooed Theosophy—hence
> the ostracism.
> 
> Were people, then, so simple and credulous in the days of Pythagoras and
> Plato? Were the millions of Babylonia and Egypt, of India and Greece, with
> their great Sages to lead them, all fools, that during those periods of
> great learning and civilization which preceded the year _one_ of our
> era—the latter giving birth but to the intellectual darkness of mediæval
> fanaticism—so many otherwise great men should have devoted their lives to
> a mere illusion, a superstition called Magic? It would seem so, had one to
> remain content with the word and conclusions of modern Philosophy.
> 
> Every Art and Science, however, whatever its intrinsic merit, has had its
> discoverer and practitioner, and subsequently its proficients to teach it.
> What is the origin of the Occult Sciences, or Magic? Who were its
> professors, and what is known of them, whether in history or legend?
> Clemens Alexandrinus, one of the most intelligent and learned of the early
> Christian Fathers, answers this question in his _Stromateis_. That ex‐
> pupil of the Neoplatonic School argues:
> 
>     If there is instruction, you must seek for the master.(61)
> 
> And so he shows Cleanthes taught by Zeno, Theophrastus by Aristotle,
> Metrodorus by Epicurus, Plato by Socrates, etc. And he adds that when he
> had looked further back to Pythagoras, Pherecydes, and Thales, he had
> still to search for their masters. The same for the Egyptians, the
> Indians, the Babylonians, and the Magi themselves. He would not cease
> questioning, he says, to learn who it was they all had for their masters.
> And when he (Clemens) had traced down the enquiry to the very cradle of
> mankind, to the first generation of men, he would reiterate once more his
> questioning, and ask, “Who is their teacher?” Surely, he argues, their
> master could be “no one of men.” And even when we should have reached as
> high as the Angels, the same query would have to be offered to them: “Who
> were their (meaning the ‘divine’ and the ‘fallen’ Angels) masters?”
> 
> The aim of the good father’s long argument is of course to discover two
> distinct masters, one the preceptor of biblical patriarchs, the other the
> teacher of the Gentiles. But the students of the Secret Doctrine need go
> to no such trouble. Their professors are well aware who were the Masters
> of their predecessors in Occult Sciences and Wisdom.
> 
> The two professors are finally traced out by Clemens, and are, as was to
> be expected, God, and his eternal and everlasting enemy and opponent, the
> Devil; the subject of Clemens’ enquiry relating to the _dual_ aspect of
> Hermetic Philosophy, as cause and effect. Admitting the moral beauty of
> the virtues preached in every Occult work with which he was acquainted,
> Clemens desires to know the cause of the apparent contradiction between
> the doctrine and the practice, good and evil Magic, and he comes to the
> conclusion that Magic has two origins—divine and diabolical. He perceives
> its bifurcation into two channels, hence his deduction and inference.
> 
> We perceive it too, without, however, necessarily designating such
> bifurcation diabolical, for we judge the “left‐hand path” as it issued
> from the hands of its founder. Otherwise, judging also by the effects of
> Clemens’ own religion and the walk in life of certain of its professors,
> since the death of their Master, the Occultists would have a right to come
> to somewhat the same conclusion as Clemens. They would have a right to say
> that while Christ, the Master of all _true_ Christians, was in every way
> godly, those who resorted to the horrors of the Inquisition, to the
> extermination and torture of heretics, Jews and Alchemists, the Protestant
> Calvin who burnt Servetus, and his persecuting Protestant successors, down
> to the whippers and burners of witches in America, must have had for
> _their_ Master, the Devil. But Occultists, not believing in the Devil, are
> precluded from retaliating in this way.
> 
> Clemens’ testimony, however, is valuable in so far as it shows (1) the
> enormous number of works on Occult Sciences in his day; and (2) the
> extraordinary powers acquired through those Sciences by certain men.
> 
> He devotes, for instance, the whole of the sixth book of his _Stromateis_
> to this research for the first two “Masters” of the true and the false
> Philosophy respectively, both preserved, as he says, in the Egyptian
> sanctuaries. Very pertinently too, he apostrophises the Greeks, asking
> them why they should not accept the “miracles” of Moses as such, since
> they claim the very same privileges for their own Philosophers, and he
> gives a number of instances. It is, as he says, Æachus obtaining through
> his Occult powers a marvellous rain; it is Aristæus causing the winds to
> blow; Empedocles quieting the gale, and forcing it to cease, etc.(62)
> 
> The books of Mercurius Trismegistus most attracted his attention.(63) He
> is also warm in his praise of Hystaspes (or Gushtasp), of the Sibylline
> books, and even of the right Astrology.
> 
> There have been in all ages use and abuse of Magic, as there are use and
> abuse of Mesmerism or Hypnotism in our own. The ancient world had its
> Apollonii and its Pherecydæ, and intellectual people could discriminate
> then, as they can now. While no classical or pagan writer has ever found
> one word of blame for Apollonius of Tyana, for instance, it is not so with
> regard to Pherecydes. Hesychius of Miletia, Philo of Byblos and
> Eusthathius charge the latter unstintingly with having built his
> Philosophy and Science on demoniacal traditions—_i.e._, on Sorcery. Cicero
> declares that Pherecydes is, _potius divinus quam medicus_, “rather a
> soothsayer than a physician,” and Diogenes Laërtius gives a vast number of
> stories relating to his predictions. One day Pherecydes prophesies the
> shipwreck of a vessel hundreds of miles away from him; another time he
> predicts the capture of the Lacedæmonians by the Arcadians; finally, he
> foresees his own wretched end.(64)
> 
> Bearing in mind the objections that will be made to the teachings of the
> Esoteric Doctrine as herein propounded, the writer is forced to meet some
> of them beforehand.
> 
> Such imputations as those brought by Clemens against the “heathen” Adepts,
> only prove the presence of clairvoyant powers and prevision in every age,
> but are no evidence in favour of a Devil. They are, therefore, of no value
> except to the Christians, for whom Satan is one of the chief pillars of
> the faith. Baronius and De Mirville, for instance, find an unanswerable
> proof of Demonology in the belief in the co‐eternity of Matter with
> Spirit!
> 
> De Mirville writes that Pherecydes
> 
>     Postulates in principle the primordiality of Zeus or Ether, and
>     then, on the same plane, a principle, coëternal and coäctive,
>     which he calls the fifth element, or Ogenos.(65)
> 
> He then points out that the meaning of Ogenos is given as that which shuts
> up, which holds captive, and that is Hades, “or in a word, hell.”
> 
> The synonyms are known to every schoolboy without the Marquis going to the
> trouble of explaining them to the Academy; as to the deduction, every
> Occultist will of course deny it and only smile at its folly. And now we
> come to the theological conclusion.
> 
> The _résumé_ of the views of the Latin Church—as given by authors of the
> same character as the Marquis de Mirville—amounts to this: that the
> Hermetic Books, their wisdom—fully admitted in Rome—notwithstanding, are
> “the heirloom left by Cain, the accursed, to mankind.” It is “generally
> admitted,” says that modern memorialist of Satan in History:
> 
>     That immediately after the Flood Cham and his descendants had
>     propagated anew the ancient teachings of the Cainites and of the
>     submerged Race.(66)
> 
> This proves, at any rate, that Magic, or Sorcery as he calls it, is an
> antediluvian Art, and thus one point is gained. For, as he says:—
> 
>     The evidence of Berosius makes Ham identical with the first
>     Zoroaster, founder of Bactria, the first author of all the magic
>     arts of Babylonia, the _Chemesenua_ or Cham,(67) the
>     _infamous_(68) of the faithful Noachians, finally the object of
>     adoration for Egypt, which having received its name Χημεία, whence
>     chemistry, built in his honour a town called _Choemnis_, or the
>     “city of fire.”(69) Ham adored it, it is said, whence the name
>     _Chammaim_ given to the pyramids; which in their turn have been
>     vulgarised into our modern noun “chimney.”(70)
> 
> This statement is entirely wrong. Egypt was the cradle of Chemistry and
> its birth‐place—this is pretty well known by this time. Only Kenrick and
> others show the root of the word to be _chemi_ or _chem_, which is not
> _Cham_ or Ham, but _Khem_, the Egyptian phallic God of the Mysteries.
> 
> But this is not all. De Mirville is bent upon finding a satanic origin
> even for the now innocent Tarot.
> 
> He goes on to say:
> 
>     As to the means for the propagation of this evil Magic, tradition
>     points it out, in certain runic characters traced on metallic
>     plates [or leaves, _des lames_] which have escaped destruction by
>     the Deluge.(71) This might have been regarded as legendary, had
>     not subsequent discoveries shown it far from being so. Plates were
>     found covered with curious and utterly undecipherable characters,
>     characters of undeniable antiquity, to which the Chamites
>     [Sorcerers, with the author] attribute the origin of their
>     marvellous and terrible powers.(72)
> 
> The pious author may, meanwhile, be left to his own orthodox beliefs. He,
> at any rate, seems quite sincere in his views. Nevertheless, his able
> arguments will have to be sapped at their very foundation, for it must be
> shown on mathematical grounds who, or rather what, Cain and Ham really
> were. De Mirville is only the faithful son of his Church, interested in
> keeping Cain in his anthropomorphic character and in his present place in
> “Holy Writ.” The student of Occultism, on the other hand, is solely
> interested in the truth. But the age has to follow the natural course of
> its evolution.
> 
> SECTION IV. THE SECRESY OF INITIATES.
> 
> The false rendering of a number of parables and sayings of Jesus is not to
> be wondered at in the least. From Orpheus, the first initiated Adept of
> whom history catches a glimpse in the mists of the pre‐Christian era, down
> through Pythagoras, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Apollonius of Tyana, to
> Ammonius Saccas, no Teacher or Initiate has ever committed anything to
> writing for public use. Each and all of them have invariably recommended
> silence and secresy on certain facts and deeds; from Confucius, who
> refused to explain publicly and satisfactorily what he meant by his “Great
> Extreme,” or to give the key to the divination by “straws,” down to Jesus,
> who charged his disciples to tell no man that he was Christ(73)
> (Chrestos), the “man of sorrows” and trials, before his supreme and last
> Initiation, or that he had produced a “miracle” of resurrection.(74) The
> Apostles had to preserve silence, so that the left hand should not know
> what the right hand did; in plainer words, that the dangerous proficients
> in the Left Hand Science—the terrible enemies of the Right Hand Adepts,
> especially before their supreme Initiation—should not profit by the
> publicity so as to harm both the healer and the patient. And if the above
> is maintained to be simply an assumption, then what may be the meaning of
> these awful words:
> 
>     Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom of God;
>     but unto them that are without all these things are done in
>     parables; that seeing they may see and not perceive; and hearing,
>     they may hear and not understand; lest at any time they should be
>     converted and their sins should be forgiven them.(75)
> 
> Unless interpreted in the sense of the law of silence and Karma, the utter
> selfishness and uncharitable spirit of this remark are but too evident.
> These words are directly connected with the terrible dogma of
> predestination. Will the good and intelligent Christian cast such a slur
> of cruel selfishness on his Saviour?(76)
> 
> The work of propagating such truths in parables was left to the disciples
> of the high Initiates. It was their duty to follow the key‐note of the
> Secret Teaching without revealing its mysteries. This is shown in the
> histories of all the great Adepts. Pythagoras divided his classes into
> hearers of exoteric and esoteric lectures. The Magians received their
> instructions and were initiated in the far hidden caves of Bactria. When
> Josephus declares that Abraham taught Mathematics he meant by it “Magic,”
> for in the Pythagorean code Mathematics mean Esoteric Science, or Gnosis.
> 
> Professor Wilder remarks:
> 
>     The Essenes of Judæa and Carmel made similar distinctions,
>     dividing their adherents into neophytes, brethren and the
>     perfect.... Ammonius obligated his disciples by oath not to
>     divulge his higher doctrines, except to those who had been
>     thoroughly instructed and exercised [prepared for initiation].(77)
> 
> One of the most powerful reasons for the necessity of strict secresy is
> given by Jesus Himself, if one may credit Matthew. For there the Master is
> made to say plainly:
> 
>     Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your
>     pearls before swine; lest they trample them under their feet, and
>     turn again and rend you.(78)
> 
> Profoundly true and wise words. Many are those in our own age, and even
> among us, who have been forcibly reminded of them—often when too late.(79)
> 
> Even Maimonides recommends silence with regard to the true meaning of the
> _Bible_ texts. This injunction destroys the usual affirmation that “Holy
> Writ” is the only book in the world whose divine oracles contain plain
> unvarnished truth. It may be so for the learned Kabalists; it is certainly
> quite the reverse with regard to Christians. For this is what the learned
> Hebrew Philosopher says:
> 
>     Whoever shall find out the true sense of the Book of _Genesis_
>     ought to take care not to divulge it. This is a maxim that all our
>     sages repeat to us, and above all respecting the work of the six
>     days. If a person should discover the _true_ meaning of it by
>     himself, or by the aid of another, then he ought to be silent, or
>     if he speaks he ought to speak of it obscurely, in an enigmatical
>     manner, as I do myself, leaving the rest to be guessed by those
>     who can understand me.
> 
> The Symbology and Esoterism of the _Old Testament_ being thus confessed by
> one of the greatest Jewish Philosophers, it is only natural to find
> Christian Fathers making the same confession with regard to the _New
> Testament_, and the _Bible_ in general. Thus we find Clemens Alexandrinus
> and Origen admitting it as plainly as words can do it. Clemens, who had
> been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries says, that:
> 
>     The doctrines there taught contained in them _the end of all
>     instructions as they were taken from Moses and the prophets_,
> 
> a slight perversion of facts pardonable in the good Father. The words
> admit, after all, that the Mysteries of the Jews were identical with those
> of the Pagan Greeks, who took them from the Egyptians, who borrowed them,
> in their turn, from the Chaldæans, who got them from the Âryans, the
> Atlanteans and so on—far beyond the days of that Race. The secret meaning
> of the Gospel is again openly confessed by Clemens when he says that the
> Mysteries of the Faith are not to be divulged to all.
> 
>     But since this tradition is not published alone for him who
>     perceives the magnificence of the word; it is requisite,
>     therefore, to hide in a Mystery the wisdom spoken, which the Son
>     of God taught.(80)
> 
> Not less explicit is Origen with regard to the _Bible_ and its symbolical
> fables. He exclaims:
> 
>     If we hold to the letter, and must understand what stands written
>     in the law after the manner of the Jews and common people, then I
>     should blush to confess aloud that it is God who has given these
>     laws: then the laws of men appear more excellent and
>     reasonable.(81)
> 
> And well he might have “blushed,” the sincere and honest Father of early
> Christianity in its days of relative purity. But the Christians of this
> highly literary and civilised age of ours do not blush at all; they
> swallow, on the contrary, the “light” before the formation of the sun, the
> Garden of Eden, Jonah’s whale and all, notwithstanding that the same
> Origen asks in a very natural fit of indignation:
> 
>     What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first,
>     second and third days in which the _evening_ is named and the
>     _morning_, were without sun, moon, and stars, and the first day
>     without a heaven? What man is found such an idiot as to suppose
>     that God planted trees in Paradise, in Eden, like a husbandman,
>     etc.? I believe that every man must hold these things for images,
>     under which a hidden sense lies concealed?(82)
> 
> Yet millions of “such idiots” are found in our age of enlightenment and
> not only in the third century. When Paul’s unequivocal statement in
> _Galatians_, iv. 22‐25, that the story of Abraham and his two sons is all
> “an allegory,” and that “Agar is Mount Sinai” is added to this, then
> little blame, indeed, can be attached to either Christian or Heathen who
> declines to accept the _Bible_ in any other light than that of a very
> ingenious allegory.
> 
> Rabbi Simeon Ben‐“Jochai,” the compiler of the _Zohar_, never imparted the
> most important points of his doctrine otherwise than orally, and to a very
> limited number of disciples. Therefore, without the final initiation into
> the _Mercavah_, the study of the _Kabalah_ will be ever incomplete, and
> the _Mercavah_ can be taught only “in darkness, in a deserted place, and
> after many and terrific trials.” Since the death of that great Jewish
> Initiate this hidden doctrine has remained, for the outside world, an
> inviolate secret.
> 
>     Among the venerable sect of the Tanaim, or rather the Tananim, the
>     wise men, there were those who taught the secrets practically and
>     initiated some disciples into the grand and final Mystery. But the
>     _Mishna Hagiga_, 2nd Section, say that the table of contents of
>     the _Mercaba_ “must only be delivered to wise old ones.” The
>     _Gemara_ is still more dogmatic. “The more important secrets of
>     the Mysteries were not even revealed to all priests. Alone the
>     initiates had them divulged.” And so we find the same great
>     secresy prevalent in every ancient religion.(83)
> 
> What says the _Kabalah_ itself? Its great Rabbis actually threaten him who
> accepts their sayings _verbatim_. We read in the _Zohar_:
> 
>     Woe to the man who sees in the Thorah, _i.e._, Law, only simple
>     recitals and ordinary words! Because if in truth it only contained
>     these, we would even to‐day be able to compose a Thorah much more
>     worthy of admiration. For if we find only the simple words, we
>     would only have to address ourselves to the legislators of the
>     earth,(84) to those in whom we most frequently meet with the most
>     grandeur. It would be sufficient to imitate them, and make a
>     Thorah after their words and example. But it is not so; each word
>     of the Thorah contains an elevated meaning and a sublime
>     mystery.... The recitals of the Thorah are the vestments of the
>     Thorah. Woe to him who takes this garment for the Thorah
>     itself.... The simple take notice only of the garments or recitals
>     of the Thorah, they know no other thing, they see not that which
>     is concealed under the vestment. The more instructed men do not
>     pay attention to the vestment, but to the body which it
>     envelops.(85)
> 
> Ammonius Saccas taught that the Secret Doctrine of the Wisdom‐Religion was
> found complete in the _Books of Thoth_ (Hermes), from which both
> Pythagoras and Plato derived their knowledge and much of their Philosophy;
> and these Books were declared by him to be “identical with the teachings
> of the Sages of the remote East.” Professor A. Wilder remarks:
> 
>     As the name Thoth means a college or assembly, it is not
>     altogether improbable that the books were so named as being the
>     collected oracles and doctrines of the sacerdotal fraternity of
>     Memphis. Rabbi Wise has suggested the same hypothesis in relation
>     to the divine utterances recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures.(86)
> 
> This is very probable. Only the “divine utterances” have never been, so
> far, understood by the profane. Philo Judæus, a non‐initiate, attempted to
> give their secret meaning and—failed.
> 
> But _Books of Thoth_ or _Bible_, _Vedas_ or _Kabalah_, all enjoin the same
> secresy as to certain mysteries of nature symbolised in them. “Woe be to
> him who divulges _unlawfully_ the words whispered into the ear of Manushi
> by the _First Initiator_.” Who that “Initiator” was is made plain in the
> _Book of Enoch_:
> 
>     From them [the Angels] I heard all things, and understood what I
>     saw; that which will not take place in this generation [Race], but
>     in a generation which is to succeed at a distant period [the 6th
>     and 7th Races] on account of the elect [the Initiates].(87)
> 
> Again, it is said with regard to the judgment of those who, when they have
> learned “every secret of the angels,” reveal them, that:
> 
>     They have discovered secrets, and _they are_ those who have been
>     judged; but not thou, my son [Noah] ... thou art pure and good and
>     _free_ from the reproach of _discovering_ [revealing] secrets.(88)
> 
> But there are those in our century, who, having “discovered secrets”
> unaided and owing to their own learning and acuteness only, and who being,
> nevertheless, honest and straightforward men, undismayed by threats or
> warning since they have never pledged themselves to secresy, feel quite
> startled at such revelations. One of these is the learned author and
> discoverer of one “Key to the Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery.” As he says, there
> are “some strange features connected with the promulgation and condition”
> of the _Bible_.
> 
>     Those who compiled this Book were men as we are. They knew, saw,
>     handled and realized, through the key measure,(89) the _law_ of
>     the living, ever‐active God.(90) They needed no faith that He was,
>     that He worked, planned, and accomplished, as a mighty mechanic
>     and architect.(91) What was it, then, that reserved to them alone
>     this knowledge, while first as men of God, and second as Apostles
>     of Jesus the Christ, they doled out a blinding ritual service, and
>     an empty teaching of _faith_ and no substance as proof, properly
>     coming through the exercise of just those senses which the Deity
>     has given all men as the essential means of obtaining any right
>     understanding? _Mystery_ and _parable_, and _dark saying_, and
>     _cloaking_ of the true meanings are the burden of the Testaments,
>     Old and New. Take it that the narratives of the _Bible_ were
>     purposed inventions to deceive the ignorant masses, even while
>     enforcing a most perfect code of moral obligations: How is it
>     possible to justify so great frauds, as part of a Divine economy,
>     when to that economy, the attribute of simple and perfect
>     _truthfulness_ must, in the nature of things, be ascribed? What
>     has, or what by possibility ought mystery to have, with the
>     promulgation of the truths of God?(92)
> 
> Nothing whatever most certainly, if those mysteries had been given from
> the first. And so it was with regard to the first, semi‐divine, pure and
> spiritual Races of Humanity. They had the “truths of God,” and lived up to
> them, and their ideals. They preserved them, so long as there was hardly
> any evil, and hence scarcely a possible abuse of that knowledge and those
> truths. But evolution and the gradual fall into materiality is also one of
> the “truths” and also one of the laws of “God.” And as mankind progressed,
> and became with every generation more of the earth, earthly, the
> individuality of each temporary Ego began to assert itself. It is personal
> selfishness that develops and urges man on to abuse of his knowledge and
> power. And selfishness is a human building, whose windows and doors are
> ever wide open for every kind of iniquity to enter into man’s soul. Few
> were the men during the early adolescence of mankind, and fewer still are
> they now, who feel disposed to put into practice Pope’s forcible
> declaration that he would tear out his own heart, if it had no better
> disposition than to love only himself, and laugh at all his neighbours.
> Hence the necessity of gradually taking away from man the divine knowledge
> and power, which became with every new human cycle more dangerous as a
> double‐edged weapon, whose evil side was ever threatening one’s neighbour,
> and whose power for good was lavished freely only upon self. Those few
> “elect” whose inner natures had remained unaffected by their outward
> physical growth, thus became in time the sole guardians of the mysteries
> revealed, passing the knowledge to those most fit to receive it, and
> keeping it inaccessible to others. Reject this explanation from the Secret
> Teachings, and the very name of Religion will become synonymous with
> deception and fraud.
> 
> Yet the masses could not be allowed to remain without some sort of moral
> restraint. Man is ever craving for a “beyond” and cannot live without an
> ideal of some kind, as a beacon and a consolation. At the same time, no
> average man, even in our age of universal education, could be entrusted
> with truths too metaphysical, too subtle for his mind to comprehend,
> without the danger of an imminent reaction setting in, and faith in Gods
> and Saints making room for an unscientific blank Atheism. No real
> philanthropist, hence no Occultist, would dream for a moment of a mankind
> without one tittle of Religion. Even the modern day Religion in Europe,
> confined to Sundays, is better than none. But if, as Bunyan put it,
> “Religion is the best armour that a man can have,” it certainly is the
> “worst cloak”; and it is that “cloak” and false pretence which the
> Occultists and the Theosophists fight against. The true ideal Deity, the
> one living God in Nature, can never suffer in man’s worship if that
> outward cloak, woven by man’s fancy, and thrown upon the Deity by the
> crafty hand of the priest greedy of power and domination, is drawn aside.
> The hour has struck with the commencement of this century to dethrone the
> “highest God” of every nation in favour of One Universal Deity—the God of
> Immutable Law, not charity; the God of Just Retribution, not mercy, which
> is merely an incentive to evil‐doing and to a repetition of it. The
> greatest crime that was ever perpetrated upon mankind was committed on
> that day when the first priest invented the first prayer with a selfish
> object in view. A God who may be propitiated by iniquitous prayers to
> “bless the arms” of the worshipper, and send defeat and death to thousands
> of his enemies—his brethren; a Deity that can be supposed not to turn a
> deaf ear to chants of laudation mixed with entreaties for a “fair
> propitious wind” for self, and as naturally disastrous to the selves of
> other navigators who come from an opposite direction—it is this idea of
> God that has fostered selfishness in man, and deprived him of his self‐
> reliance. Prayer is an ennobling action when it is an intense feeling, an
> ardent desire rushing forth from our very heart, for the good of other
> people, and when entirely detached from any selfish personal object; the
> craving for a beyond is natural and holy in man, but on the condition of
> sharing that bliss with others. One can understand and well appreciate the
> words of the “heathen” Socrates, who declared in his profound though
> untaught wisdom, that:
> 
>     Our prayers should be for blessings on all, in general, for the
>     Gods know best what is good for us.
> 
> But official prayer—in favour of a public calamity, or for the benefit of
> one individual irrespective of losses to thousands—is the most ignoble of
> crimes, besides being an impertinent conceit and a superstition. This is
> the direct inheritance by spoliation from the Jehovites—the Jews of the
> Wilderness and of the Golden Calf.
> 
> It is “Jehovah,” as will be presently shown, that suggested the necessity
> of veiling and screening this substitute for the unpronounceable name, and
> that led to all this “mystery, parables, dark sayings and cloaking.” Moses
> had, at any rate, initiated his seventy Elders into the hidden truths, and
> thus the writers of the _Old Testament_ stand to a degree justified. Those
> of the _New Testament_ have failed to do even so much, or so little. They
> have disfigured the grand central figure of Christ by their dogmas, and
> have led people ever since into millions of errors and the darkest crimes,
> in His holy name.
> 
> It is evident that with the exception of Paul and Clement of Alexandria,
> who had been both initiated into the Mysteries, none of the Fathers knew
> much of the truth themselves. They were mostly uneducated, ignorant
> people; and if such as Augustine and Lactantius, or again the Venerable
> Bede and others, were so painfully ignorant until the time of Galileo(93)
> of the most vital truths taught in the Pagan temples—of the rotundity of
> the earth, for example, leaving the heliocentric system out of
> question—how great must have been the ignorance of the rest! Learning and
> sin were synonymous with the early Christians. Hence the accusations of
> dealing with the Devil lavished on the Pagan Philosophers.
> 
> But truth must out. The Occultists, referred to as “the followers of the
> accursed Cain,” by such writers as De Mirville, are now in a position to
> reverse the tables. That which was hitherto known only to the ancient and
> modern Kabalists in Europe and Asia, is now published and shown as being
> mathematically true. The author of the _Key to the Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery
> or the Source of Measures_ has now proved to general satisfaction, it is
> to be hoped, that the two great God‐names, Jehovah and Elohim, stood, in
> one meaning of their numerical values, for a diameter and a circumference
> value, respectively; in other words, that they are numerical indices of
> geometrical relations; and finally that _Jehovah is Cain_ and _vice
> versâ_.
> 
> This view, says the author,
> 
>     Helps also to take the horrid blemish off from the name of Cain,
>     as a put‐up job to destroy his character; for even without these
>     showings, by the very text, _he_ [Cain] _was Jehovah_. So the
>     theological schools had better be alive to making the amend
>     honorable, if such a thing is possible, to the good name and fame
>     of the God they worship.(94)
> 
> This is not the first warning received by the “theological schools,”
> which, however, no doubt knew it from the beginning, as did Clemens of
> Alexandria and others. But if it be so they will profit still less by it,
> as the admission would involve more for them than the mere sacredness and
> dignity of the established faith.
> 
> But, it may also be asked, why is it that the Asiatic religions, which
> have nothing of this sort to conceal and which proclaim quite openly the
> Esoterism of their doctrines, follow the same course? It is simply this:
> While the present, and no doubt enforced silence of the Church on this
> subject relates merely to the external or theoretical form of the
> _Bible_—the unveiling of the secrets of which would have involved no
> practical harm, had they been explained from the first—it is an entirely
> different question with Eastern Esoterism and Symbology. The grand central
> figure of the Gospels would have remained as unaffected by the symbolism
> of the _Old Testament_ being revealed, as would that of the Founder of
> Buddhism had the Brâhmanical writings of the _Purânas_, that preceded his
> birth, all been shown to be allegorical. Jesus of Nazareth, moreover,
> would have gained more than he would have lost had he been presented as a
> simple mortal left to be judged on his own precepts and merits, instead of
> being fathered on Christendom as a God whose many utterances and acts are
> now so open to criticism. On the other hand the symbols and allegorical
> sayings that veil the grand truths of Nature in the _Vedas_, the
> _Brâhmanas_, the _Upanishads_ and especially in the Lamaist _Chagpa
> Thogmed_ and other works, are quite of a different nature, and far more
> complicated in their secret meaning. While the Biblical glyphs have nearly
> all a triune foundation, those of the Eastern books are worked on the
> septenary principle. They are as closely related to the mysteries of
> Physics and Physiology, as to Psychism and the transcendental nature of
> cosmic elements and Theogony; unriddled they would prove more than
> injurious to the uninitiated; delivered into the hands of the present
> generations in their actual state of physical and intellectual
> development, in the absence of spirituality and even of practical
> morality, they would become absolutely disastrous.
> 
> Nevertheless the secret teachings of the sanctuaries have not remained
> without witness; they have been made immortal in various ways. They have
> burst upon the world in hundreds of volumes full of the quaint, head‐
> breaking phraseology of the Alchemist; they have flashed like
> irrepressible cataracts of Occult mystic lore from the pens of poets and
> bards. Genius alone had certain privileges in those dark ages when no
> dreamer could offer the world even a fiction without suiting his heaven
> and his earth to biblical text. To genius alone it was permitted, in those
> centuries of mental blindness, when the fear of the “Holy Office” threw a
> thick veil over every cosmic and psychic truth, to reveal unimpeded some
> of the grandest truths of Initiation. Whence did Ariosto, in his _Orlando
> Furioso_, obtain his conception of that valley in the Moon, where after
> our death we can find the ideas and images of all that exists on earth?
> How came Dante to imagine the many descriptions given in his _Inferno_—a
> new Johannine Apocalypse, a true Occult Revelation in verse—his visit and
> communion with the Souls of the Seven Spheres? In poetry and satire every
> Occult truth has been welcomed—none has been recognised as serious. The
> Comte de Gabalis is better known and appreciated than Porphyry and
> Iamblichus. Plato’s mysterious Atlantis is proclaimed a fiction, while
> Noah’s Deluge is to this day on the brain of certain Archæologists, who
> scoff at the archetypal world of Marcel Palingenius’ _Zodiac_, and would
> resent as a personal injury being asked to discuss the four worlds of
> Mercury Trismegistus—the Archetypal, the Spiritual, the Astral and the
> Elementary, with three others behind the opened scene. Evidently civilised
> society is still but half prepared for the revelation. Hence, the
> Initiates will never give out the whole secret, until the bulk of mankind
> has changed its actual nature and is better prepared for truth. Clemens
> Alexandrinus was positively right in saying, “It is requisite to hide in a
> mystery the wisdom spoken”—which the “Sons of God” teach.
> 
> That Wisdom, as will be seen, relates to all the primeval truths delivered
> to the first Races, the “Mind‐born,” by the “Builders” of the Universe
> Themselves.
> 
>     There was in every ancient country having claims to civilisation,
>     an Esoteric Doctrine, a system which was designated WISDOM,(95)
>     and those who were devoted to its prosecution were first
>     denominated sages, or wise men.... Pythagoras termed this system ἡ
>     γνῶσις τῶν ὅντων, the Gnosis or Knowledge of things that are.
>     Under the noble designation of WISDOM, the ancient teachers, the
>     sages of India, the magians of Persia and Babylon, the seers and
>     prophets of Israel, the hierophants of Egypt and Arabia, and the
>     philosophers of Greece and the West, included all knowledge which
>     they considered as essentially divine; classifying a part as
>     esoteric and the remainder as exterior. The Rabbis called the
>     exterior and secular series the _Mercavah_, as being the body or
>     vehicle which contained the higher knowledge.(96)
> 
> Later on, we shall speak of the law of the silence imposed on Eastern
> chelâs.
> 
> SECTION V. SOME REASONS FOR SECRESY.
> 
> The fact that the Occult Sciences have been withheld from the world at
> large, and denied by the Initiates to Humanity, has often been made matter
> of complaint. It has been alleged that the Guardians of the Secret Lore
> were selfish in withholding the “treasures” of Archaic Wisdom; that it was
> positively criminal to keep back such knowledge—“if any”—from the men of
> Science, etc.
> 
> Yet there must have been some very good reasons for it, since from the
> very dawn of History such has been the policy of every Hierophant and
> “Master.” Pythagoras, the first Adept and real Scientist in pre‐Christian
> Europe, is accused of having taught in public the immobility of the earth,
> and the rotatory motion of the stars around it, while he was declaring to
> his privileged Adepts his belief in the motion of the Earth as a planet,
> and in the heliocentric system. The reasons for such secresy, however, are
> many and were never made a mystery of. The chief cause was given in _Isis
> Unveiled_. It may now be repeated.
> 
>     From the very day when the first mystic, taught by the first
>     Instructor of the “divine Dynasties” of the early races, was
>     taught the means of communication between this world and the
>     worlds of the invisible host, between the sphere of matter and
>     that of pure spirit, he concluded that to abandon this mysterious
>     science to the desecration, willing or unwilling, of the profane
>     rabble—was to lose it. An abuse of it might lead mankind to speedy
>     destruction; it was like surrounding a group of children with
>     explosive substances, and furnishing them with matches. The first
>     divine Instructor initiated but a select few, and these kept
>     silence with the multitudes. They recognised _their_ “God” and
>     each Adept felt the great “SELF” within himself. The Âtman, the
>     Self, the mighty Lord and Protector, once that man knew him as the
>     “I am,” the “Ego Sum,” the “Asmi,” showed his full power to him
>     who could recognise the “still small voice.” From the days of the
>     primitive man described by the first Vedic poet, down to our
>     modern age, there has not been a philosopher worthy of that name,
>     who did not carry in the silent sanctuary of his heart the grand
>     and mysterious truth. If initiated, he learnt it as a sacred
>     science; if otherwise, then, like Socrates, repeating to himself
>     as well as his fellow‐men, the noble injunction, “O man, know
>     thyself,” he succeeded in recognising his God within himself. “Ye
>     are Gods,” the king‐psalmist tells us, and we find Jesus reminding
>     the scribes that this expression was addressed to other mortal
>     men, claiming for themselves the same privilege without any
>     blasphemy. And as a faithful echo, Paul, while asserting that we
>     are all “the temple of the living God,” cautiously remarked
>     elsewhere that after all these things are only for the “wise,” and
>     it is “unlawful” to speak of them.(97)
> 
> Some of the reasons for this secresy may here be given.
> 
> The fundamental law and master‐key of practical Theurgy, in its chief
> applications to the serious study of cosmic and sidereal, of psychic and
> spiritual, mysteries was, and still is, that which was called by the Greek
> Neoplatonists “Theophania.” In its generally‐accepted meaning this is
> “communication between the Gods (or God) and those initiated mortals who
> are spiritually fit to enjoy such an intercourse.” Esoterically, however,
> it signifies more than this. For it is not only the presence of a God, but
> an actual—howbeit temporary—incarnation, the blending, so to say, of the
> personal Deity, the Higher Self, with man—its representative or agent on
> earth. As a general law, the Highest God, the Over‐soul of the human being
> (Âtma‐Buddhi), only overshadows the individual during his life, for
> purposes of instruction and revelation; or as Roman Catholics—who
> erroneously call that Over‐soul the “Guardian Angel”—would say, “It stands
> outside and watches.” But in the case of the theophanic mystery, it
> incarnates itself in the Theurgist for purposes of revelation. When the
> incarnation is temporary, during those mysterious trances or “ecstasy,”
> which Plotinus defined as
> 
>     The liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming
>     one and identified with the Infinite,
> 
> this sublime condition is very short. The human soul, being the offspring
> or emanation of its God, the “Father and the Son” become one, “the divine
> fountain flowing like a stream into its human bed.”(98) In exceptional
> cases, however, the mystery becomes complete; the Word is made Flesh in
> real fact, the individual becoming divine in the full sense of the term,
> since his personal God has made of him his permanent life‐long
> tabernacle—“the temple of God,” as Paul says.
> 
> Now that which is meant here by the _personal_ God of Man is, of course,
> not his seventh Principle alone, as _per se_ and in essence that is merely
> a beam of the infinite Ocean of Light. In conjunction with our Divine
> Soul, the Buddhi, it cannot be called a Duad, as it otherwise might,
> since, though formed from Âtmâ and Buddhi (the two higher Principles), the
> former is no entity but an emanation from the Absolute, and indivisible in
> reality from it. The personal God is not the Monad, but indeed the
> prototype of the latter, what for want of a better term we call the
> _manifested_ Kâranâtmâ(99) (Causal Soul), one of the “seven” and chief
> reservoirs of the human Monads or Egos. The latter are gradually formed
> and strengthened during their incarnation‐cycle by constant additions of
> individuality from the personalities in which incarnates that androgynous,
> half‐spiritual, half‐terrestrial principle, partaking of both heaven and
> earth, called by the Vedântins Jîva and Vijñânamaya Kosha, and by the
> Occultists the Manas (mind); that, in short, which uniting itself
> partially with the Monad, incarnates in each new birth. In perfect unity
> with its (seventh) Principle, the Spirit unalloyed, it is the divine
> Higher Self, as every student of Theosophy knows. After every new
> incarnation Buddhi‐Manas culls, so to say, the aroma of the flower called
> personality, the purely earthly residue of which—its dregs—is left to fade
> out as a shadow. This is the most difficult—because so transcendentally
> metaphysical—portion of the doctrine.
> 
> As is repeated many a time in this and other works, it is not the
> Philosophers, Sages, and Adepts of antiquity who can ever be charged with
> idolatry. It is they in fact, who, recognising divine unity, were the only
> ones, owing to their initiation into the mysteries of Esotericism, to
> understand correctly the ὑπόνοια (hyponéa), or under‐meaning of the
> anthropomorphism of the so‐called Angels, Gods, and spiritual Beings of
> every kind. Each, worshipping the one Divine Essence that pervades the
> whole world of Nature, reverenced, but never worshipped or idolised, any
> of these “Gods,” whether high or low—not even his own personal Deity, of
> which he was a Ray, and to whom he appealed.(100)
> 
>     The holy Triad emanates from the One, and is the Tetraktys; the
>     gods, daimons, and souls are an emanation of the Triad. Heroes and
>     men repeat the hierarchy in themselves.
> 
> Thus said Metrodorus of Chios, the Pythagorean, the latter part of the
> sentence meaning that man has within himself the seven pale reflections of
> the seven divine Hierarchies; his Higher Self is, therefore, in itself but
> the refracted beam of the direct Ray. He who regards the latter as an
> Entity, in the usual sense of the term, is one of the “infidels and
> atheists,” spoken of by Epicurus, for he fastens on that God “the opinions
> of the multitude”—an anthropomorphism of the grossest kind.(101) The Adept
> and the Occultist know that “what are styled the Gods are only the first
> principles” (Aristotle). None the less they are intelligent, conscious,
> and _living_ “Principles,” the Primary Seven Lights _manifested_ from
> Light _unmanifested_—which to us is Darkness. They are the
> Seven—exoterically four—Kumâras or “Mind‐Born Sons” of Brahmâ. And it is
> they again, the Dhyân Chohans, who are the prototypes in the æonic
> eternity of lower Gods and hierarchies of divine Beings, at the lowest end
> of which ladder of being are we—men.
> 
> Thus perchance Polytheism, when philosophically understood, may be a
> degree higher than even the Monotheism of the Protestant, say, who limits
> and conditions the Deity in whom he persists in seeing the Infinite, but
> whose supposed actions make of that “Absolute and Infinite” the most
> absurd paradox in Philosophy. From this standpoint Roman Catholicism
> itself is immeasurably higher and more logical than Protestantism, though
> the Roman Church has been pleased to adopt the exotericism of the heathen
> “multitude” and to reject the Philosophy of pure Esotericism.
> 
> Thus every mortal has his immortal counterpart, or rather his Archetype,
> in heaven. This means that the former is indissolubly united to the
> latter, in each of his incarnations, and for the duration of the cycle of
> births; only it is by the spiritual and intellectual Principle in him,
> entirely distinct from the lower _self_, never through the earthly
> personality. Some of these are even liable to break the union altogether,
> in case of absence in the moral individual of binding, _viz._, of
> spiritual ties. Truly, as Paracelsus puts it in his quaint, tortured
> phraseology, man with his three (compound) Spirits is suspended like a
> fœtus by all three to the matrix of the Macrocosm; the thread which holds
> him united being the “Thread‐Soul,” Sûtrâtmâ, and Taijasa (the “Shining”)
> of the Vedântins. And it is through this spiritual and intellectual
> Principle in man, through Taijasa—the Shining, “because it has the
> luminous internal organ as its associate”—that man is thus united to his
> heavenly prototype, never through his lower inner self or Astral Body, for
> which there remains in most cases nothing but to fade out.
> 
> Occultism, or Theurgy, teaches the means of producing such union. But it
> is the actions of man—his personal merit alone—that can produce it on
> earth, or determine its duration. This lasts from a few seconds—a flash—to
> several hours, during which time the Theurgist or Theophanist is that
> overshadowing “God” himself; hence he becomes endowed for the time being
> with relative omniscience and omnipotence. With such perfect (divine)
> Adepts as Buddha(102) and others such a hypostatical state of avatâric
> condition may last during the whole life; whereas in the case of full
> Initiates, who have not yet reached the perfect state of Jîvanmukta,(103)
> Theopneusty, when in full sway, results for the high Adept in a full
> recollection of everything seen, heard, or sensed.
> 
>     Taijasa has fruition of the supersensible.(104)
> 
> For one less perfect it will end only in a partial, indistinct
> remembrance; while the beginner has to face in the first period of his
> psychic experiences a mere confusion, followed by a rapid and finally
> complete oblivion of the mysteries seen during this super‐hypnotic
> condition. The degree of recollection, when one returns to his waking
> state and physical senses, depends on his spiritual and psychic
> purification, the greatest enemy of spiritual memory being man’s physical
> brain, the organ of his sensuous nature.
> 
> The above states are described for a clearer comprehension of terms used
> in this work. There are so many and such various conditions and states
> that even a Seer is liable to confound one with the other. To repeat: the
> Greek, rarely‐used word, “Theophania,” meant more with the Neoplatonists
> than it does with the modern maker of dictionaries. The compound word,
> “Theophania” (from “theos,” “God,” and “phainomai,” “to appear”), does not
> simply mean “a manifestation of God to man by _actual_ appearance”—an
> absurdity, by the way—but the actual presence of a God in man, a _divine_
> incarnation. When Simon the Magician claimed to be “God the Father,” what
> he wanted to convey was just that which has been explained, namely, that
> he was a _divine_ incarnation of his own Father, whether we see in the
> latter an Angel, a God, or a Spirit; therefore he was called “that power
> of God which is called great,”(105) or that power which causes the Divine
> Self to enshrine itself in its lower self—man.
> 
> This is one of the several mysteries of being and incarnation. Another is
> that when an Adept reaches during his lifetime that state of holiness and
> purity that makes him “equal to the Angels,” then at death his
> apparitional or astral body becomes as solid and tangible as was the late
> body, and is transformed into the real man.(106) The old physical body,
> falling off like the cast‐off serpent’s skin, the body of the “new” man
> remains either visible or, at the option of the Adept, disappears from
> view, surrounded as it is by the Âkâshic shell that screens it. In the
> latter case there are three ways open to the Adept:
> 
> (1.) He may remain in the earth’s sphere (Vâyu or Kâma‐loka), in that
> ethereal locality concealed from human sight save during flashes of
> clairvoyance. In this case his astral body, owing to its great purity and
> spirituality, having lost the conditions required for Âkâshic light (the
> nether or terrestrial ether) to absorb its semi‐material particles, the
> Adept will have to remain in the company of disintegrating shells—doing no
> good or useful work. This, of course, cannot be.
> 
> (2.) He can by a supreme effort of will merge entirely into, and get
> united with, his Monad. By doing so, however, he would (_a_) deprive his
> Higher Self of posthumous Samâdhi—a bliss which is not real Nirvâna—the
> astral, however pure, being too earthly for such state; and (_b_) he would
> thereby open himself to Karmic law; the action being, in fact, the outcome
> of personal selfishness—of reaping the fruits produced by and for
> oneself—alone.
> 
> (3.) The Adept has the option of renouncing conscious Nirvâna and rest, to
> work on earth for the good of mankind. This he can do in a two‐fold way:
> either, as above said, by consolidating his astral body into physical
> appearance, he can reassume the self‐same personality; or he can avail
> himself of an entirely new physical body, whether that of a newly‐born
> infant or—as Shankarâchârya is reported to have done with the body of a
> dead Râjah—by “entering a deserted sheath,” and living in it as long as he
> chooses. This is what is called “continuous existence.” The Section
> entitled “The Mystery about Buddha” will throw additional light on this
> theory, to the profane incomprehensible, or to the generality simply
> _absurd_. Such is the doctrine taught, everyone having the choice of
> either fathoming it still deeper, or of leaving it unnoticed.
> 
> The above is simply a small portion of what might have been given in _Isis
> Unveiled_, had the time come then, as it has now. One cannot study and
> profit by Occult Science, unless one gives himself up to it—heart, soul,
> and body. Some of its truths are too awful, too dangerous, for the average
> mind. None can toy and play with such terrible weapons with impunity.
> Therefore it is, as St. Paul has it, “unlawful” to speak of them. Let us
> accept the reminder and talk only of that which is “lawful.”
> 
> The quotation on p. 56 relates, moreover, only to psychic or spiritual
> Magic. The practical teachings of Occult Science are entirely different,
> and few are the strong minds fitted for them. As to ecstasy, and such like
> kinds of self‐illumination, this may be obtained by oneself and without
> any teacher or initiation, for ecstacy is reached by an inward command and
> control of Self over the physical Ego; as to obtaining mastery over the
> forces of Nature, this requires a long training, or the capacity of one
> born a “natural Magician.” Meanwhile, those who possess neither of the
> requisite qualifications are strongly advised to limit themselves to
> purely spiritual development. But even this is difficult, as the first
> necessary qualification is an unshakable belief in one’s own powers and
> the Deity within oneself; otherwise a man would simply develop into an
> irresponsible medium. Throughout the whole mystic literature of the
> ancient world we detect the same idea of spiritual Esoterism, that the
> personal God exists within, nowhere outside, the worshipper. That personal
> Deity is no vain breath, or a fiction, but an immortal Entity, the
> Initiator of the Initiates, now that the heavenly or Celestial Initiators
> of primitive humanity—the Shishta of the preceding cycles—are no more
> among us. Like an under‐current, rapid and clear, it runs without mixing
> its crystalline purity with the muddy and troubled waters of dogmatism, an
> enforced anthropomorphic Deity and religious intolerance. We find this
> idea in the tortured and barbarous phraseology of the _Codex Nazaræus_,
> and in the superb Neoplatonic language of the Fourth Gospel of the later
> Religion, in the oldest _Veda_ and in the _Avesta_, in the _Abhidharma_,
> in Kapila’s _Sânkhya_, and the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_. We cannot attain Adeptship
> and Nirvâna, Bliss and the “Kingdom of Heaven,” unless we link ourselves
> indissolubly with our Rex Lux, the Lord of Splendour and of Light, our
> immortal God within us. “Aham eva param Brahman”—“I am verily the Supreme
> Brahman”—has ever been the one living truth in the heart and mind of the
> Adepts, and it is this which helps the Mystic to become one. One must
> first of all recognise one’s own immortal Principle, and then only can one
> conquer, or take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. Only this has to be
> achieved by the higher—not the middle, nor the third—man, the last one
> being of dust. Nor can the second man, the “Son”—on this plane, as his
> “Father” is the Son on a still higher plane—do anything without the
> assistance of the first, the “Father.” But to succeed one has to identify
> oneself with one’s divine Parent.
> 
>     The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second [inner, our
>     higher] man is the Lord from heaven.... Behold, I show you a
>     mystery.(107)
> 
> Thus says Paul, mentioning but the dual and trinitarian man for the better
> comprehension of the non‐initiated. But this is not all, for the Delphic
> injunction has to be fulfilled: man must know himself in order to become a
> perfect Adept. How few can acquire the knowledge, however, not merely in
> its inner mystical, but even in its literal sense, for there are two
> meanings in this command of the Oracle. This is the doctrine of Buddha and
> the Bodhisattvas pure and simple.
> 
> Such is also the mystical sense of what was said by Paul to the
> Corinthians about their being the “temple of God,” for this meant
> Esoterically:
> 
>     Ye are the temple of [the, or your] God, and the Spirit of [a, or
>     your] God dwelleth in you.(108)
> 
> This carries precisely the same meaning as the “I am verily Brahman” of
> the Vedântin. Nor is the latter assertion more blasphemous than the
> Pauline—if there were any blasphemy in either, which is denied. Only the
> Vedântin, who never refers to his body as being himself, or even a part of
> himself, or aught else but an illusory form for others to see him in,
> constructs his assertion more openly and sincerely than was done by Paul.
> 
> The Delphic command “Know thyself” was perfectly comprehensible to every
> nation of old. So it is now, save to the Christians, since, with the
> exception of the Mussulmans, it is part and parcel of every Eastern
> religion, including the Kabalistically instructed Jews. To understand its
> full meaning, however, necessitates, first of all, belief in Reincarnation
> and all its mysteries; not as laid down in the doctrine of the French
> Reincarnationists of the Allan Kardec school, but as they are expounded
> and taught by Esoteric Philosophy. Man must, in short, know who he was,
> before he arrives at knowing what he is. And how many are there among
> Europeans who are capable of developing within themselves an absolute
> belief in their past and future reincarnations, in general, even as a law,
> let alone mystic knowledge of one’s immediately precedent life? Early
> education, tradition and training of thought, everything is opposing
> itself during their whole lives to such a belief. Cultured people have
> been brought up in that most pernicious idea that the wide difference
> found between the units of one and the same mankind, or even race, is the
> result of chance; that the gulf between man and man in their respective
> social positions, birth, intellect, physical and mental capacities—every
> one of which qualifications has a direct influence on every human
> life—that all this is simply due to blind hazard, only the most pious
> among them finding equivocal consolation in the idea that it is “the will
> of God.” They have never analysed, never stopped to think of the depth of
> the opprobrium that is thrown upon their God, once the grand and most
> equitable law of the manifold re‐births of man upon this earth is
> foolishly rejected. Men and women anxious to be regarded as Christians,
> often truly and sincerely trying to lead a Christ‐like life, have never
> paused to reflect over the words of their own _Bible_. “Art thou Elias?”
> the Jewish priests and Levites asked the Baptist.(109) Their Saviour
> taught His disciples this grand truth of the Esoteric Philosophy, but
> verily, if His Apostles comprehended it, no one else seems to have
> realised its true meaning. No; not even Nicodemus, who, to the assertion:
> “Except a man be born again(110) he cannot see the Kingdom of God,”
> answers: “How can a man be born when he is old?” and is forthwith reproved
> by the remark: “Art thou a master in Israel and knowest not these
> things?”—as no one had a right to call himself a “Master” and Teacher,
> without having been initiated into the mysteries (_a_) of a spiritual re‐
> birth through water, fire and spirit, and (_b_) of the re‐birth from
> flesh.(111) Then again what can be a clearer expression as to the doctrine
> of manifold re‐births than the answer given by Jesus to the Sadducees,
> “who deny that there is any resurrection,” _i.e._, any re‐birth, since the
> dogma of the resurrection in the flesh is now regarded as an absurdity
> even by the intelligent clergy:
> 
>     They who shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world
>     [Nirvâna](112) ... neither marry ... neither can they die any
>     more,
> 
> which shows that they had already died, and more than once. And again:
> 
>     Now that the dead are raised even Moses shewed ... he calleth the
>     Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of
>     Jacob, for he is not a God of the dead but of the living.(113)
> 
> The sentence “now that the dead _are raised_” evidently applied to the
> then actual re‐births of the Jacobs and the Isaacs, and not to their
> future resurrection; for in such case they would have been still dead in
> the interim, and could not be referred to as “the living.”
> 
> But the most suggestive of Christ’s parables and “dark sayings” is found
> in the explanation given by him to his Apostles about the blind man:
> 
>     Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born
>     blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this [blind, physical] man
>     sinned nor his parents; but that the works of [his] God should be
>     made manifest in him.(114)
> 
> Man is the “tabernacle,” the “building” only, of his God; and of course it
> is not the temple but its inmate—the vehicle of “God”(115)—that had sinned
> in a previous incarnation, and had thus brought the Karma of cecity upon
> the new building. Thus Jesus spoke truly; but to this day his followers
> have refused to understand the words of wisdom spoken. The Saviour is
> shown by his followers as though he were paving, by his words and
> explanation, the way to a preconceived programme that had to lead to an
> intended miracle. Verily the Grand Martyr has remained thenceforward, and
> for eighteen centuries, the Victim crucified daily far more cruelly by his
> clerical disciples and lay followers than he ever could have been by his
> allegorical enemies. For such is the true sense of the words “that the
> works of God should be made manifest in him,” in the light of theological
> interpretation, and a very undignified one it is, if the Esoteric
> explanation is rejected.
> 
> Doubtless the above will be regarded as fresh blasphemy. Nevertheless
> there are a number of Christians whom we know—whose hearts go out as
> strongly to their ideal of Jesus, as their souls are repelled from the
> theological picture of the official Saviour—who will reflect over our
> explanation and find in it no offence, but perchance a relief.
> 
> SECTION VI. THE DANGERS OF PRACTICAL MAGIC.
> 
> Magic is a dual power: nothing is easier than to turn it into Sorcery; _an
> evil thought suffices for it_. Therefore while theoretical Occultism is
> harmless, and may do good, practical Magic, or the fruits of the Tree of
> Life and Knowledge,(116) or otherwise the “Science of Good and Evil,” is
> fraught with dangers and perils. For the study of theoretical Occultism
> there are, no doubt, a number of works that may be read with profit,
> besides such books as the _Finer Forces of Nature_, etc., the _Zohar_,
> _Sepher Jetzirah_, _The Book of Enoch_, Franck’s _Kabalah_, and many
> Hermetic treatises. These are scarce in European languages, but works in
> Latin by the mediæval Philosophers, generally known as Alchemists and
> Rosicrucians, are plentiful. But even the perusal of these may prove
> dangerous for the unguided student. If approached without the right key to
> them, and if the student is unfit, owing to mental incapacity, for Magic,
> and is thus unable to discern the Right from the Left Path, let him take
> our advice and leave this study alone; he will only bring on himself and
> on his family unexpected woes and sorrows, never suspecting whence they
> come, nor what are the powers awakened by his mind being bent on them.
> Works for advanced students are many, but these can be placed at the
> disposal of only sworn or “pledged” chelâs (disciples), those who have
> pronounced the ever‐binding oath, and who are, therefore, helped and
> protected. For all other purposes, well‐intentioned as such works may be,
> they can only mislead the unwary and guide him imperceptibly to Black
> Magic or Sorcery—if to nothing worse.
> 
> The mystic characters, alphabets and numerals found in the divisions and
> sub‐divisions of the _Great Kabalah_, are, perhaps, the most dangerous
> portions in it, and especially the numerals. We say dangerous, because
> they are the most prompt to produce effects and results, and this with or
> without the experimenter’s will, even without his knowledge. Some students
> are apt to doubt this statement, simply because after manipulating these
> numerals they have failed to notice any dire physical manifestation or
> result. Such results would be found the least dangerous: it is the moral
> causes produced and the various events developed and brought to an
> unforeseen crisis, that would testify to the truth of what is now stated
> had the lay students only the power of discernment.
> 
> The point of departure of that special branch of the Occult teaching known
> as the “Science of Correspondences,” numerical or literal or alphabetical,
> has for its epigraph with the Jewish and Christian Kabalists, the two mis‐
> interpreted verses which say that God
> 
>     ordered all things in number, measure and weight;(117)
> 
> and:
> 
>     He created her in the Holy Ghost, and saw her, and numbered her,
>     and measured her.(118)
> 
> But the Eastern Occultists have another epigraph: “_Absolute Unity, x_,
> within number and plurality.” Both the Western and the Eastern students of
> the Hidden Wisdom hold to this axiomatic truth. Only the latter are
> perhaps more sincere in their confessions. Instead of putting a mask on
> their Science, they show her face openly, even if they do veil carefully
> her heart and soul before the inappreciative public and the profane, who
> are ever ready to abuse the most sacred truths for their own selfish ends.
> But Unity is the real basis of the Occult Sciences—physical and
> metaphysical. This is shown even by Éliphas Lévi, the learned Western
> Kabalist, inclined as he is to be rather jesuitical. He says:
> 
>     Absolute Unity is the supreme and final reason of things.
>     Therefore, that reason can be neither one person, nor three
>     persons; it is Reason, and pre‐eminently Reason (_raison par
>     excellence_).(119)
> 
> The meaning of this Unity in Plurality in “God” or Nature, can be solved
> only by the means of transcendental methods, by numerals, as by the
> correspondences between soul and the Soul. Names, in the _Kabalah_ as in
> the _Bible_, such as Jehovah, Adam Kadmon, Eve, Cain, Abel, Enoch, are all
> of them more intimately connected, by geometrical and astronomical
> relations, with Physiology (or Phallicism) than with Theology or Religion.
> Little as people are as yet prepared to admit it, this will be shown to be
> a fact. If all those names are symbols for things hidden, as well as for
> those manifested, in the _Bible_ as in the _Vedas_, their respective
> mysteries differ greatly. Plato’s motto “God geometrises” was accepted by
> both Âryans and Jews; but while the former applied their Science of
> Correspondences to veil the most spiritual and sublime truths of Nature,
> the latter used their acumen to conceal only one—to them the most
> divine—of the mysteries of Evolution, namely, that of birth and
> generation, and then they deified the organs of the latter.
> 
> Apart from this, every cosmogony, from the earliest to the latest, is
> based upon, interlinked with, and most closely related to, numerals and
> geometric figures. Questioned by an Initiate, these figures and numbers
> will yield numerical values based on the integral values of the
> Circle—“the secret habitat of the ever‐invisible Deity” as the Alchemists
> have it—as they will yield every other Occult particular connected with
> such mysteries, whether anthropographical, anthropological, cosmic, or
> psychical. “In reuniting Ideas to Numbers, we can operate upon Ideas in
> the same way as upon Numbers, and arrive at the Mathematics of Truth,”
> writes an Occultist, who shows his great wisdom in desiring to remain
> unknown.
> 
>     Any Kabalist well acquainted with the Pythagorean system of
>     numerals and geometry can demonstrate that the metaphysical views
>     of Plato were based upon the strictest mathematical principles.
>     “True mathematics,” says the _Magicon_, “is something with which
>     all higher sciences are connected; common mathematics is but a
>     deceitful phantasmagoria, whose much praised infallibility only
>     arises from this—that materials, conditions and references are
>     made to foundation.” ...
> 
>     The cosmological theory of numerals which Pythagoras learned in
>     India, and from the Egyptian Hierophants, is alone able to
>     reconcile the two units, matter and spirit, and cause each to
>     demonstrate the other mathematically. The sacred numbers of the
>     universe in their esoteric combination can alone solve the great
>     problem, and explain the theory of radiation and the cycle of the
>     emanations. The lower orders, before they develop into higher
>     ones, must emanate from the higher spiritual ones, and when
>     arrived at the turning‐point, be reäbsorbed into the
>     infinite.(120)
> 
> It is upon these true Mathematics that the knowledge of the Kosmos and of
> all mysteries rests, and to one acquainted with them, it is the easiest
> thing possible to prove that both Vaidic and Biblical structures are based
> upon “God‐in‐Nature” and “Nature‐in‐God,” as the radical law. Therefore,
> this law—as everything else immutable and fixed in eternity—could find a
> correct expression only in those purest transcendental Mathematics
> referred to by Plato, especially in Geometry as transcendentally applied.
> _Revealed_ to men—we fear not and will not retract the expression—in this
> geometrical and symbolical garb, Truth has grown and developed into
> additional symbology, invented by man for the wants and better
> comprehension of the masses of mankind that came too late in their cyclic
> development and evolution to have shared in the primitive knowledge, and
> would never have grasped it otherwise. If later on, the clergy—crafty and
> ambitious of power in every age—anthropomorphised and degraded abstract
> ideals, as well as the real and divine Beings who do exist in Nature, and
> are the Guardians and Protectors of our manvantaric world and period, the
> fault and guilt rests with those would‐be leaders, not with the masses.
> 
> But the day has come when the gross conceptions of our forefathers during
> the Middle Ages can no longer satisfy the thoughtful religionist. The
> mediæval Alchemist and Mystic are now transformed into the sceptical
> Chemist and Physicist; and most of them are found to have turned away from
> truth, on account of the purely anthropomorphic ideas, the gross
> Materialism, of the forms in which it is presented to them. Therefore,
> future generations have either to be gradually initiated into the truths
> underlying Exoteric Religions, including their own, or be left to break
> the feet of clay of the last of the gilded idols. No educated man or woman
> would turn away from any of the now called “superstitions” which they
> believe to be based on nursery tales and ignorance, if they could only see
> the basis of fact that underlies every “superstition.” But let them once
> learn for a certainty that there is hardly a claim in the Occult Sciences
> that is not founded on philosophical and scientific facts in Nature, and
> they will pursue the study of those Sciences with the same, if not with
> greater, ardour than that they have expended in shunning them. This cannot
> be achieved at once, for to benefit mankind such truths have to be
> revealed gradually and with great caution, the public mind not being
> prepared for them. However much the Agnostics of our age may find
> themselves in the mental attitude demanded by Modern Science, people are
> always apt to cling to their old hobbies so long as the remembrance of
> them lasts. They are like the Emperor Julian—called the Apostate, because
> he loved truth too well to accept aught else—who, though in his last
> Theophany he beheld his beloved Gods as pale, worn‐out, and hardly
> discernible shadows, nevertheless clung to them. Let, then, the world
> cling to its Gods, to whatever plane or realm they may belong. The true
> Occultist would be guilty of high treason to mankind, were he to break for
> ever the old deities before he could replace them with the whole and
> unadulterated truth—and this he cannot do as yet. Nevertheless, the reader
> may be allowed to learn at least the alphabet of that truth. He may be
> shown, at any rate, what the Gods and Goddesses of the Pagans, denounced
> as demons by the Church, are not, if he cannot learn the whole and final
> truth as to what they are. Let him assure himself that the Hermetic “Tres
> Matres,” and the “Three Mothers” of the _Sepher Jetzirah_ are one and the
> same thing; that they are no Demon‐Goddesses, but Light, Heat, and
> Electricity, and then, perchance, the learned classes will spurn them no
> longer. After this, the Rosicrucian Illuminati may find followers even in
> the Royal Academies, which will be more prepared, perhaps, than they are
> now, to admit the grand truths of archaic Natural Philosophy, especially
> when their learned members shall have assured themselves that, in the
> dialect of Hermes, the “Three Mothers” stand as symbols for the whole of
> the forces or agencies which have a place assigned to them in the modern
> system of the “correlation of forces.”(121) Even the polytheism of the
> “superstitious” Brâhman and idolater shows its _raison d’être_, since the
> three Shaktis of the three great Gods, Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Shiva, are
> identical with the “Three Mothers” of the monotheistic Jew.
> 
> The whole of the ancient religious and mystical literature is symbolical.
> The _Books of Hermes_, the _Zohar_, the _Ya‐Yakav_, the Egyptian _Book __
> of the Dead_, the _Vedas_, the _Upanishads_, and the _Bible_, are as full
> of symbolism as are the Nabathean revelations of the Chaldaic Qû‐tâmy; it
> is a loss of time to ask which is the earliest; all are simply different
> versions of the one primeval Record of prehistoric knowledge and
> revelation.
> 
> The first four chapters of _Genesis_ contain the synopsis of all the rest
> of the _Pentateuch_, being only the various versions of the same thing in
> different allegorical and symbolical applications. Having discovered that
> the Pyramid of Cheops with all its measurements is to be found contained
> in its minutest details in the structure of Solomon’s Temple; and having
> ascertained that the biblical names Shem, Ham and Japhet are determinative
> 
>     of pyramid measures, in connection with the 600‐year period of
>     Noah and the 500‐year period of Shem, Ham and Japhet; ... the term
>     “Sons of Elohim” and “Daughters” of H‐Adam, [are] for one thing
>     astronomical terms,(122)
> 
> the author of the very curious work already mentioned—a book very little
> known in Europe, we regret to say—seems to see nothing in his discovery
> beyond the presence of Mathematics and Metrology in the _Bible_. He also
> arrives at most unexpected and extraordinary conclusions, such as are very
> little warranted by the facts discovered. His impression seems to be that
> because the Jewish biblical names are all astronomical, therefore the
> Scriptures of all the other nations can be “only this and nothing more.”
> But this is a great mistake of the erudite and wonderfully acute author of
> _The Source of Measures_, if he really thinks so. The “Key to the Hebrew‐
> Egyptian Mystery” unlocks but a certain portion of the hieratic writings
> of these two nations, and leaves those of other peoples untouched. His
> idea is that the _Kabalah_ “is only that sublime Science upon which
> Masonry is based”; in fact he regards Masonry as the substance of the
> _Kabalah_, and the latter as the “rational basis of the Hebrew text of
> Holy Writ.” About this we will not argue with the author. But why should
> all those who may have found in the _Kabalah_ something beyond “the
> sublime Science” upon which Masonry is alleged to have been built, be held
> up to public contempt?
> 
> In its exclusiveness and one‐sidedness such a conclusion is pregnant with
> future misconceptions and is absolutely wrong. In its uncharitable
> criticism it throws a slur upon the “Divine Science” itself.
> 
> The _Kabalah_ is indeed “of the essence of Masonry,” but it is dependent
> on Metrology only in one of its aspects, the less Esoteric, as even Plato
> made no secret that the Deity was ever geometrising. For the uninitiated,
> however learned and endowed with genius they may be, the _Kabalah_, which
> treats only of “the garment of God,” or the _veil_ and _cloak_ of truth,
> 
>     is built from the ground upward with a practical application to
>     present uses.(123)
> 
> Or in other words represents an exact Science only on the terrestrial
> plane. To the initiated, the Kabalistic Lord descends from the primeval
> Race, generated spiritually from the “Mind‐born Seven.” Having reached the
> Earth the Divine Mathematics—a synonym for Magic in his day, as we are
> told by Josephus—veiled her face. Hence the most important secret yet
> yielded by her in our modern day is the identity of the old Roman measures
> and the present British measures, of the Hebrew‐Egyptian cubit and the
> Masonic inch.(124)
> 
> The discovery is most wonderful, and has led to further and minor
> unveilings of various riddles in reference to Symbology and biblical
> names. It is thoroughly understood and proven, as shown by Nachanides,
> that in the days of Moses the initial sentence in _Genesis_ was made to
> read _B’rash ithbara Elohim_, or “In the head‐source [or Mûlaprakiti—the
> Rootless Root] developed [or evolved] the Gods [Elohim], the heavens and
> the earth;” whereas it is now, owing to the Massora and theological
> cunning, transformed into _B’rashith bara Elohim_, or, “In the beginning
> God created the heavens and the earth”—which word juggling alone has led
> to materialistic anthropomorphism and dualism. How many more similar
> instances may not be found in the _Bible_, the last and latest of the
> Occult works of antiquity? There is no longer any doubt in the mind of the
> Occultist, that, notwithstanding its form and outward meaning, the
> _Bible_—as explained by the _Zohar_ or _Midrash_, the _Yetzirah_ (Book of
> Creation) and the _Commentary on the Ten Sephiroth_ (by Azariel Ben
> Manachem of the XIIth century)—is part and parcel of the Secret Doctrine
> of the Âryans, which explains in the same manner the _Vedas_ and all other
> allegorical books. The _Zohar_, in teaching that the Impersonal One Cause
> manifests in the Universe through Its Emanations, the Sephiroth—that
> Universe being in its totality simply the veil woven from the Deity’s own
> substance—is undeniably the copy and faithful echo of the earliest
> _Vedas_. Taken by itself, without the additional help of the Vaidic and of
> Brâhmanical literature in general, the _Bible_ will never yield the
> universal secrets of Occult Nature. The cubits, inches, and measures of
> this physical plane will never solve the problems of the world on the
> spiritual plane—for Spirit can neither be weighed nor measured. The
> working out of these problems is reserved for the “mystics and the
> dreamers” who alone are capable of accomplishing it.
> 
> Moses was an initiated priest, versed in all the mysteries and the Occult
> knowledge of the Egyptian temples—hence thoroughly acquainted with
> primitive Wisdom. It is in the latter that the symbolical and astronomical
> meaning of that “Mystery of Mysteries,” the Great Pyramid, has to be
> sought. And having been so familiar with the geometrical secrets that lay
> concealed for long æons in her strong bosom—the measurements and
> proportions of the Kosmos, our little Earth included—what wonder that he
> should have made use of his knowledge? The Esoterism of Egypt was that of
> the whole world at one time. During the long ages of the Third Race it had
> been the heirloom, in common, of the whole of mankind, received from their
> Instructors, the “Sons of Light,” the primeval Seven. There was a time
> also when the Wisdom‐Religion was not symbolical, for it became Esoteric
> only gradually, the change being necessitated by misuse and by the Sorcery
> of the Atlanteans. For it was the “misuse” only, and not the use, of the
> divine gift that led the men of the Fourth Race to Black Magic and
> Sorcery, and finally to become “forgetful of Wisdom”; while those of the
> Fifth Race, the inheritors of the Rishis of the Tretâ Yuga, used their
> powers to atrophise such gifts in mankind in general, and then, as the
> “Elect Root,” dispersed. Those who escaped the “Great Flood” preserved
> only its memory, and a belief founded on the knowledge of their direct
> fathers of one remove, that such a Science existed, and was now jealously
> guarded by the “Elect Root” exalted by Enoch. But there must again come a
> time when man shall once more become what he was during the second Yuga
> (age), when his probationary cycle shall be over and he shall gradually
> become what he was—semi‐corporeal and pure. Does not Plato, the Initiate,
> tell us in the _Phædrus_ all that man once was, and that which he may yet
> again become:
> 
>     Before man’s spirit sank into sensuality and became embodied
>     through the loss of his wings, he lived among the Gods in the airy
>     spiritual world where everything is true and pure.(125)
> 
> Elsewhere he speaks of the time when men did not perpetuate themselves,
> but lived as pure spirits.
> 
> Let those men of Science who feel inclined to laugh at this, themselves
> unravel the mystery of the origin of the first man.
> 
> Unwilling that his chosen people—chosen by him—should remain as grossly
> idolatrous as the profane masses that surrounded them, Moses utilised his
> knowledge of the cosmogonical mysteries of the Pyramid, to build upon it
> the Genesiacal Cosmogony in symbols and glyphs. This was more accessible
> to the minds of the _hoi polloi_ than the abstruse truths taught to the
> educated in the sanctuaries. He invented nothing but the outward garb,
> added not one iota; but in this he merely followed the example of older
> nations and Initiates. If he clothed the grand truths revealed to him by
> his Hierophant under the most ingenious imagery, he did it to meet the
> requirements of the Israelites; that stiff‐necked race would accept of no
> God unless He were as anthropomorphic as those of the Olympus; and he
> himself failed to foresee the times when highly educated statesmen would
> be defending the husks of the fruit of wisdom that grew and developed in
> him on Mount Sinai, when communing with his own personal God—his divine
> Self. Moses understood the great danger of delivering such truths to the
> selfish, for he understood the fable of Prometheus and remembered the
> past. Hence, he veiled them from the profanation of public gaze and gave
> them out allegorically. And this is why his biographer says of him, that
> when he descended from Sinai,
> 
>     Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone ... and he put a
>     veil upon his face.(126)
> 
> And so he “put a veil” upon the face of his _Pentateuch_; and to such an
> extent that, using orthodox chronology, only 3376 years after the event
> people begin to acquire a conviction that it is “a veil indeed.” It is not
> the face of God or even of a Jehovah shining through; not even the face of
> Moses, but verily the faces of the later Rabbis.
> 
> No wonder if Clemens wrote in the _Stromateis_ that:
> 
>     Similar, then, to the Hebrew enigmas in respect to concealment are
>     those of the Egyptians also.(127)
> 
> SECTION VII. OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES.
> 
> It is more than likely, that the Protestants in the days of the
> Reformation knew nothing of the true origin of Christianity, or, to be
> more explicit and correct, of Latin Ecclesiasticism. Nor is it probable
> that the Greek Church knew much of it, the separation between the two
> having occurred at a time when, in the struggle for political power the
> Latin Church was securing, at any cost, the alliance of the highly
> educated, the ambitious and influential Pagans, while these were willing
> to assume the outward appearance of the new worship, provided they were
> themselves kept in power. There is no need to remind the reader here of
> the details of that struggle, well‐known to every educated man. It is
> certain that the highly cultured Gnostics and their leaders—such men as
> Saturnilus, an uncompromising ascetic, as Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides,
> Menander and Cerinthus—were not stigmatised by the (now) Latin Church
> because they were heretics, nor because their tenets and practices were
> indeed “_ob turpitudinem portentosam nimium et horribilem_,” “monstrous,
> revolting abominations,” as Baronius says of those of Carpocrates; but
> simply because they knew too much of fact and truth. Kenneth R. H.
> Mackenzie correctly remarks:
> 
>     They were stigmatised by the later Roman Church because they came
>     into conflict with the purer Church of Christianity—the possession
>     of which was usurped by the Bishops of Rome, but which original
>     continues in its docility towards the founder, in the Primitive
>     Orthodox Greek Church.(128)
> 
> Unwilling to accept the responsibility of gratuitous assumptions, the
> writer deems it best to prove this inference by more than one personal and
> defiant admission of an ardent Roman Catholic writer, evidently entrusted
> with the delicate task by the Vatican. The Marquis de Mirville makes
> desperate efforts to explain in the Catholic interest certain remarkable
> discoveries in Archæology and Palæography, though the Church is cleverly
> made to remain outside of the quarrel and defence. This is undeniably
> shown by his ponderous volumes addressed to the Academy of France between
> 1803 and 1865. Seizing the pretext of drawing the attention of the
> materialistic “Immortals” to the “epidemic of Spiritualism,” the invasion
> of Europe and America by a numberless host of Satanic forces, he directs
> his efforts towards proving the same, by giving the full Genealogies and
> the Theogony of the Christian and Pagan Deities, and by drawing parallels
> between the two. All such wonderful likenesses and identities are only
> “seeming and superficial,” he assures the reader. Christian symbols, and
> even characters, Christ, the Virgin, Angels and Saints, he tells them,
> were all personated centuries beforehand by the fiends of hell, in order
> to discredit eternal truth by their ungodly copies. By their knowledge of
> futurity the devils anticipated events, having “discovered the secrets of
> the Angels.” Heathen Deities, all the Sun‐Gods named Soters—Saviours—born
> of immaculate mothers and dying a violent death, were only
> Ferouers(129)—as they were called by the Zoroastrians—the demon‐ante‐dated
> copies (_copies anticipées_) of the Messiah to come.
> 
> The danger of recognition of such _facsimiles_ had indeed lately become
> dangerously great. It had lingered threateningly in the air, hanging like
> a sword of Damocles over the Church, since the days of Voltaire, Dupuis
> and other writers on similar lines. The discoveries of the Egyptologists,
> the finding of Assyrian and Babylonian pre‐Mosaic relics bearing the
> legend of Moses(130) and especially the many rationalistic works published
> in England, such as _Supernatural Religion_ made recognition unavoidable.
> Hence the appearance of Protestant and Roman Catholic writers deputed to
> explain the inexplicable; to reconcile the fact of Divine Revelation with
> the mystery that the divine personages, rites, dogmas and symbols of
> Christianity were so often identical with those of the several great
> heathen religions. The former—the Protestant defenders—tried to explain
> it, on the ground of “prophetic, precursory ideas”; the Latinists, such as
> De Mirville, by inventing a double set of Angels and Gods, the one divine
> and true, the other—the earlier—“copies ante‐dating the originals” and due
> to a clever plagiarism by the Evil One. The Protestant stratagem is an old
> one, that of the Roman Catholics is so old that it has been forgotten, and
> is as good as new. Dr. Lundy’s _Monumental Christianity_ and _A Miracle in
> Stone_ belong to the first attempts. De Mirville’s _Pneumatologie_ to the
> second. In India and China, every such effort on the part of the Scotch
> and other missionaries ends in laughter, and does no harm; the plan
> devised by the Jesuits is more serious. De Mirville’s volumes are thus
> very important, as they proceed from a source which has undeniably the
> greatest learning of the age at its service, and this coupled with all the
> craft and casuistry that the sons of Loyola can furnish. The Marquis de
> Mirville was evidently helped by the acutest minds in the service of Rome.
> 
> He begins by not only admitting the justice of every imputation and charge
> made against the Latin Church as to the originality of her dogmas, but by
> taking a seeming delight in anticipating such charges; for he points to
> every dogma of Christianity as having existed in Pagan rituals in
> Antiquity. The whole Pantheon of Heathen Deities is passed in review by
> him, and each is shown to have had some point of resemblance with the
> Trinitarian personages and Mary. There is hardly a mystery, a dogma, or a
> rite in the Latin Church that is not shown by the author as having been
> “parodied by the Curvati”—the “Curved,” the Devils. All this being
> admitted and explained, the Symbologists ought to be silenced. And so they
> would be, if there were no materialistic critics to reject such
> omnipotency of the Devil in this world. For, if Rome admits the
> likenesses, she also claims the right of judgment between the true and the
> false Avatâra, the real and the unreal God, between the original and the
> copy—though the copy precedes the original by millenniums.
> 
> Our author proceeds to argue that whenever the missionaries try to convert
> an idolater, they are invariably answered:
> 
>     We had our Crucified before yours. What do you come to show
>     us?(131) Again, what should we gain by denying the mysterious side
>     of this copy, under the plea that according to Weber all the
>     present _Purânas_ are remade from older ones, since here we have
>     in the same order of personages a positive precedence which no one
>     would ever think of contesting.(132)
> 
> And the author instances Buddha, Krishna, Apollo, etc. Having admitted all
> this he escapes the difficulty in this wise:
> 
>     The Church Fathers, however, who recognized their own property
>     under all such sheep’s clothing ... knowing by means of the Gospel
>     ... all the ruses of the pretended spirits of light; the Fathers,
>     we say, meditating upon the decisive words, “all that ever came
>     before me are robbers” (_John_, x. 8), did not hesitate in
>     recognizing the Occult agency at work, the general and superhuman
>     direction given beforehand to falsehood, the universal attribute
>     and environment of all these false Gods of the nations; “_omnes
>     dii gentium dæmonia (elilim)_.” (_Psalm_ xcv.)(133)
> 
> With such a policy everything is made easy. There is not one glaring
> resemblance, not one fully proven identity, that could not thus be made
> away with. The above‐quoted cruel, selfish, self‐glorifying words, placed
> by John in the mouth of Him who was meekness and charity personified,
> could never have been pronounced by Jesus. The Occultists reject the
> imputation indignantly, and are prepared to defend the man as against the
> God, by showing whence come the words plagiarised by the author of the
> Fourth Gospel. They are taken bodily from the “Prophecies” in the _Book of
> Enoch_. The evidence on this head of the learned biblical scholar,
> Archbishop Laurence, and of the author of the _Evolution of Christianity_,
> who edited the translation, may be brought forward to prove the fact. On
> the last page of the Introduction to the _Book of Enoch_ is found the
> following passage:
> 
>     The parable of the sheep rescued by the good Shepherd from
>     hireling guardians and ferocious wolves, is obviously borrowed by
>     the fourth Evangelist from _Enoch_, lxxxix, in which the author
>     depicts the shepherds as killing and destroying the sheep before
>     the advent of their Lord, and thus discloses the true meaning of
>     that hitherto mysterious passage in the Johannine parable—“All
>     that ever came before me are thieves and robbers”—language in
>     which we now detect an obvious reference to the allegorical
>     shepherds of Enoch.
> 
> “Obvious” truly, and something else besides. For, if Jesus pronounced the
> words in the sense attributed to him, then he must have read the _Book of
> Enoch_—a purely Kabalistic, Occult work, and he therefore recognised the
> worth and value of a treatise now declared apocryphal by his Churches.
> Moreover, he could not have been ignorant that these words belonged to the
> oldest ritual of Initiation.(134) And if he had not read it, and the
> sentence belongs to John, or whoever wrote the Fourth Gospel, then what
> reliance can be placed on the authenticity of other sayings and parables
> attributed to the Christian Saviour?
> 
> Thus, De Mirville’s illustration is an unfortunate one. Every other proof
> brought by the Church to show the infernal character of the ante‐and‐anti‐
> Christian copyists may be as easily disposed of. This is perhaps
> unfortunate, but it is a fact, nevertheless—_Magna est veritas et
> prevalebit_.
> 
> The above is the answer of the Occultists to the two parties who charge
> them incessantly, the one with “Superstition,” and the other with
> “Sorcery.” To those of our Brothers who are Christians, and twit us with
> the secresy imposed upon the Eastern Chelâs, adding invariably that their
> own “Book of God” is “an open volume” for all “to read, understand, and
> _be saved_,” we would reply by asking them to study what we have just said
> in this Section, and then to refute it—if they can. There are very few in
> our days who are still prepared to assure their readers that the _Bible_
> had God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any
> mixture of error for its matter.
> 
> Could Locke be asked the question now, he would perhaps be unwilling to
> repeat again that the _Bible_ is
> 
>     all pure, all sincere, nothing too much, nothing wanting.
> 
> The _Bible_, if it is not to be shown to be the very reverse of all this,
> sadly needs an interpreter acquainted with the doctrines of the East, as
> they are to be found in its secret volumes; nor is it safe now, after
> Archbishop Laurence’s translation of the _Book of Enoch_, to cite Cowper
> and assure us that the _Bible_
> 
>     ... gives a light to every age,
>     It gives, but borrows none.
> 
> for it does borrow, and that very considerably; especially in the opinion
> of those who, ignorant of its symbolical meaning and of the universality
> of the truths underlying and concealed in it, are able to judge only from
> its dead‐letter appearance. It is a grand volume, a master‐piece composed
> of clever, ingenious fables containing great verities; but it reveals the
> latter only to those who, like the Initiates, have a key to its inner
> meaning; a tale sublime in its morality and didactics truly—still a tale
> and an allegory; a repertory of invented personages in its older Jewish
> portions, and of dark sayings and parables in its later additions, and
> thus quite misleading to anyone ignorant of its Esotericism. Moreover it
> is Astrolatry and Sabæan worship, pure and simple, that is to be found in
> the _Pentateuch_ when it is read exoterically, and Archaic Science and
> Astronomy to a most wonderful degree, when interpreted—Esoterically.
> 
> SECTION VIII. THE BOOK OF ENOCH THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATION OF
> CHRISTIANITY.
> 
> While making a good deal of the _Mercavah_, the Jews, or rather their
> synagogues, rejected the _Book of Enoch_, either because it was not
> included from the first in the Hebrew Canon, or else, as Tertullian
> thought, it was
> 
>     Disavowed by the Jews like all other Scripture which speaks of
>     Christ.(135)
> 
> But neither of these reasons was the real one. The Synedrion would have
> nothing to do with it, simply because it was more of a magic than a purely
> kabalistic work. The present day Theologians of both Latin and Protestant
> Churches class it among apocryphal productions. Nevertheless the _New
> Testament_, especially in the _Acts_ and _Epistles_, teems with ideas and
> doctrines, now accepted and established as dogmas by the infallible Roman
> and other Churches, and even with whole sentences taken bodily from Enoch,
> or the “pseudo‐Enoch,” who wrote under that name in Aramaic or Syro‐
> Chaldaic, as asserted by Bishop Laurence, the translator of the Ethiopian
> text.
> 
> The plagiarisms are so glaring that the author of _The Evolution of
> Christianity_, who edited Bishop Laurence’s translation, was compelled to
> make some suggestive remarks in his Introduction. On internal
> evidence(136) this book is found to have been written before the Christian
> period (whether two or twenty centuries does not matter). As correctly
> argued by the Editor, it is
> 
>     Either the inspired forecast of a great Hebrew prophet, predicting
>     with miraculous accuracy the future teaching of Jesus of Nazareth,
>     or the Semitic romance from which the latter borrowed His
>     conceptions of the triumphant return of the Son of man, to occupy
>     a judicial throne in the midst of rejoicing saints and trembling
>     sinners, expectant of everlasting happiness or eternal fire; and
>     whether these celestial visions be accepted as human or Divine,
>     they have exercised so vast an influence on the destinies of
>     mankind for nearly two thousand years that candid and impartial
>     seekers after religious truth can no longer delay enquiry into the
>     relationship of the _Book of Enoch_ with the revelation, or the
>     evolution, of Christianity.(137)
> 
> The _Book of Enoch_
> 
>     Also records the supernatural control of the elements, through the
>     action of individual angels presiding over the winds, the sea,
>     hail, frost, dew, the lightning’s flash, and reverberating
>     thunder. The names of the principal fallen angels are also given,
>     among whom we recognize some of the invisible powers named in the
>     incantations [magical] inscribed on the terra‐cotta cups of
>     Hebrew‐Chaldee conjurations.(138)
> 
> We also find on these cups the word “Halleluiah,” showing that
> 
>     A word with which ancient Syro‐Chaldæans conjured has become,
>     through the vicissitudes of language, the Shibboleth of modern
>     Revivalists.(139)
> 
> The Editor proceeds after this to give fifty‐seven verses from various
> parts of the _Gospels_ and _Acts_, with parallel passages from the _Book
> of Enoch_, and says:
> 
>     The attention of theologians has been concentrated on the passage
>     in the _Epistle of Jude_, because the author specifically names
>     the prophet; but the cumulative coincidence of language and ideas
>     in Enoch and the authors of the _New Testament_ Scripture, as
>     disclosed in the parallel passages which we have collated, clearly
>     indicates that the work of the Semitic Milton was the
>     inexhaustible source from which Evangelists and Apostles, or the
>     men who wrote in their names, borrowed their conceptions of the
>     resurrection, judgment, immortality, perdition, and of the
>     universal reign of righteousness, under the eternal dominion of
>     the Son of man. This evangelical plagiarism culminates in the
>     Revelation of John, which adapts the visions of Enoch to
>     Christianity, with modifications in which we miss the sublime
>     simplicity of the great master of apocalyptic prediction, who
>     prophesied in the name of the antediluvian patriarch.(140)
> 
> In fairness to truth, the hypothesis ought at least to have been
> suggested, that the _Book of Enoch_ in its present form is simply a
> transcript—with numerous pre‐Christian and post‐Christian additions and
> interpolations—from far older texts. Modern research went so far as to
> point out that Enoch is made, in Chapter lxxi, to divide the day and night
> into eighteen parts, and to represent the longest day in the year as
> consisting of twelve out of these eighteen parts, while a day of sixteen
> hours in length could not have occurred in Palestine. The translator,
> Archbishop Laurence, remarks thus:
> 
>     The region in which the author lived must have been situated not
>     lower than forty‐five degrees north latitude, where the longest
>     day is fifteen hours and a‐half, nor higher perhaps than forty‐
>     nine degrees, where the longest day is precisely sixteen hours.
>     This will bring the country where he wrote as high up at least as
>     the northern districts of the Caspian and Euxine Seas ... the
>     author of the _Book of Enoch_ was perhaps a member of one of the
>     tribes which Shalmaneser carried away, and placed “in Halah and in
>     Habor by the river Goshen, and in the cities of the Medes.”(141)
> 
> Further on, it is confessed that:
> 
>     It cannot be said that internal evidence attests the superiority
>     of the _Old Testament_ to the _Book of Enoch_.... The _Book of
>     Enoch_ teaches the preëxistence of the Son of man, the Elect One,
>     the Messiah, who “from the beginning existed in secret,(142) and
>     whose name was invoked in the presence of the Lord of Spirits,
>     before the sun and the signs were created.” The author also refers
>     to the “other Power who was upon Earth over the water on that
>     day”—an apparent reference to the language of _Genesis_, i.
>     2.(143) [We maintain that it applies as well to the Hindu
>     Nârâyana—the “mover on the waters.”] We have thus the Lord of
>     Spirits, the Elect One, and a third Power, seemingly foreshadowing
>     this Trinity [as much as the Trimûrti] of futurity; but although
>     Enoch’s ideal Messiah doubtless exercised an important influence
>     on primitive conceptions of the Divinity of the Son of man, we
>     fail to identify his obscure reference to another “Power” with the
>     Trinitarianism of the Alexandrine school; more especially as
>     “angels of power” abound in the visions of Enoch.(144)
> 
> An Occultist would hardly fail to identify the said “Power.” The Editor
> concludes his remarkable reflections by adding:
> 
>     Thus far we learn that the _Book of Enoch_ was published before
>     the Christian Era by some great Unknown of Semitic [?] race, who,
>     believing himself to be inspired in a post‐prophetic age, borrowed
>     the name of an antediluvian patriarch(145) to authenticate his own
>     enthusiastic forecast of the Messianic kingdom. And as the
>     contents of his marvellous book enter freely into the composition
>     of the _New Testament_, it follows that if the author was not an
>     inspired prophet, who predicted the teachings of Christianity, he
>     was a visionary enthusiast whose illusions were accepted by
>     Evangelists and Apostles as revelation—alternative conclusions
>     which involve the Divine or human origin of Christianity.(146)
> 
> The outcome of all of which is, in the words of the same Editor:
> 
>     The discovery that the language and ideas of alleged revelation
>     are found in a preëxistent work, accepted by Evangelists and
>     Apostles as inspired, but classed by modern theologians among
>     apocryphal productions.(147)
> 
> This accounts also for the unwillingness of the reverend librarians of the
> Bodleian Library to publish the Ethiopian text of the _Book of Enoch_.
> 
> The prophecies of the _Book of Enoch_ are indeed prophetic, but they were
> intended for, and cover the records of, the five Races out of the
> seven—everything relating to the last two being kept secret. Thus the
> remark made by the Editor of the English translation, that:
> 
>     Chapter xcii. records a series of prophecies extending from
>     Enoch’s own time to about one thousand years beyond the present
>     generation,(148)
> 
> is faulty. The prophecies extend to the end of our present Race, not
> merely to a “thousand years” hence. Very true that:
> 
>     In the system of [Christian] chronology adopted, a day stands
>     [occasionally] for a hundred, and a week for seven hundred
>     years.(149)
> 
> But this is an arbitrary and fanciful system adopted by Christians to make
> Biblical chronology fit with facts or theories, and does not represent the
> original thought. The “days” stand for the undetermined periods of the
> Side‐Races, and the “weeks” for the Sub‐Races, the Root‐Races being
> referred to by an expression that is not even found in the English
> translation. Moreover the sentence at the bottom of page 150:
> 
>     Subsequently, in the fourth week ... the visions of the holy and
>     the righteous shall be seen, the order of generation after
>     generation shall take place,(150)
> 
> is quite wrong. It stands in the original: “the order of generation after
> generation had taken place on the earth,” etc.; that is, after the first
> human race procreated in the truly human way had sprung up in the Third
> Root‐Race; a change which entirely alters the meaning. Then all that is
> given in the translation—as very likely also in the Ethiopic text, since
> the copies have been sorely tampered with—as about things which were to
> happen in the future, is, we are informed, in the past tense in the
> original Chaldæan MSS., and is not prophecy, but a narrative of what had
> already come to pass. When Enoch begins “to speak from a book”(151) he is
> reading the account given by a great Seer, and the prophecies are not his
> own, but are from the Seer. Enoch or Enoichion means “internal eye” or
> Seer. Thus every Prophet and Adept may be called “Enoichion,” without
> becoming a pseudo‐Enoch. But here, the Seer who compiled the present _Book
> of Enoch_ is distinctly shown as reading out from a book:
> 
>     I have been born the seventh in the first week [the seventh
>     branch, or Side‐Race, of the first Sub‐Race, after physical
>     generation had begun, namely, in the third Root‐Race].... But
>     after me, in the second week [second Sub‐Race] great wickedness
>     shall arise [arose, rather] and in that week the end of the first
>     shall take place, in which mankind shall be safe. But when the
>     first is completed iniquity shall grow up.(152)
> 
> As translated it has no sense. As it stands in the Esoteric text, it
> simply means, that the First Root‐Race shall come to an end during the
> second Sub‐Race of the Third Root‐Race, in the period of which time
> mankind will be safe; all this having no reference whatever to the
> biblical Deluge. Verse 10th speaks of the sixth week [sixth Sub‐Race of
> the Third Root‐Race] when
> 
>     All those who are in it shall be darkened, the hearts of all of
>     them shall be forgetful of wisdom [the divine knowledge will be
>     dying out] and in it shall a man ascend.
> 
> This “man” is taken by the interpreters, for some mysterious reasons of
> their own, to mean Nebuchadnezzar; he is in reality the first Hierophant
> of the purely human Race (after the allegorical Fall into generation)
> selected to perpetuate the dying Wisdom of the Devas (Angels or Elohim).
> He is the first “Son of Man”—the mysterious appellation given to the
> divine Initiates of the first human school of the Mânushi (men), at the
> very close of the Third Root‐Race. He is also called the “Saviour,” as it
> was He, with the other Hierophants, who saved the Elect and the Perfect
> from the geological conflagration, leaving to perish in the cataclysm of
> the Close(153) those who forgot the primeval wisdom in sexual sensuality.
> 
>     And during its completion [of the “sixth week,” or the sixth Sub‐
>     Race] he shall burn the house of dominion [the half of the globe
>     or the then inhabited continent] with fire, and all the race of
>     the elect root shall be dispersed.(154)
> 
> The above applies to the Elect Initiates, and not at all to the Jews, the
> supposed chosen people, or to the Babylonian captivity, as interpreted by
> the Christian theologians. Considering that we find Enoch, or his
> perpetuator, mentioning the execution of the “decree upon sinners” in
> several different weeks,(155) saying that “every work of the ungodly shall
> disappear from the whole earth” during this fourth time (the Fourth Race),
> it surely can hardly apply to the one solitary Deluge of the _Bible_,
> still less to the Captivity.
> 
> It follows, therefore, that as the _Book of Enoch_ covers the five Races
> of the Manvantara, with a few allusions to the last two, it does not
> contain “Biblical prophecies,” but simply facts taken out of the Secret
> Books of the East. The editor, moreover, confesses that:
> 
>     The preceding six verses, _viz._, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th,
>     and 18th, are taken from between the 14th and 15th verses of the
>     nineteenth chapter, where they are to be found in the MSS.(156)
> 
> By this arbitrary transposition, he has made confusion still more
> confused. Yet he is quite right in saying that the doctrines of the
> _Gospels_, and even of the _Old Testament_, have been taken bodily from
> the _Book of Enoch_, for this is as evident as the sun in heaven. The
> whole of the _Pentateuch_ was adapted to fit in with the facts given, and
> this accounts for the Hebrews refusing to give the book a place in their
> Canon, just as the Christians have subsequently refused to admit it among
> their canonical works. The fact that the Apostle Jude and many of the
> Christian Fathers referred to it as a revelation and a sacred volume, is,
> however, an excellent proof that the early Christians accepted it; among
> these the most learned—as, for instance, Clement of Alexandria—understood
> Christianity and its doctrines in quite a different light from their
> modern successors, and viewed Christ under an aspect that Occultists only
> can appreciate. The early Nazarenes and Chrestians, as Justin Martyr calls
> them, were the followers of Jesus, of the true Chrestos and Christos of
> Initiation; whereas, the modern Christians, especially those of the West,
> may be Papists, Greeks, Calvinists, or Lutherans, but can hardly be called
> Christians, _i.e._, the followers of Jesus, the Christ.
> 
> Thus the _Book of Enoch_ is entirely symbolical. It relates to the history
> of the human Races and of their early relation to Theogony, the symbols
> being interblended with astronomical and cosmic mysteries. One chapter is
> missing, however, in the Noachian records (from both the Paris and the
> Bodleian MSS.), namely, Chapter lviii. in Sect. X; this could not be
> remodelled, and therefore it had to disappear, disfigured fragments alone
> having been left of it. The dream about the cows, the black, red and white
> heifers, relates to the first Races, their division and disappearance.
> Chapter lxxxviii, in which one of the four Angels “went to the white cows
> and taught them a mystery,” after which, the mystery being born “became a
> man,” refers to (_a_) the first group evolved of primitive Âryans, and
> (_b_) to the “mystery of the Hermaphrodite” so called, having reference to
> the birth of the first human Races as they are now. The well‐known rite in
> India, one that has survived in that patriarchal country to this day,
> known as the passage, or rebirth through the cow—a ceremony to which those
> of lower castes who are desirous of becoming Brâhmans have to submit—has
> originated in this mystery. Let any Eastern Occultist read with careful
> attention the above‐named chapter in the _Book of Enoch_, and he will find
> that the “Lord of the Sheep,” in whom Christians and European Mystics see
> Christ, is the Hierophant Victim whose name in Sanskrit we dare not give.
> Again, that while the Western Churchmen see Egyptians and Israelites in
> the “sheep and wolves,” all these animals relate in truth to the trials of
> the Neophyte and the mysteries of initiation, whether in India or Egypt,
> and to that most terrible penalty incurred by the “wolves”—those who
> reveal indiscriminately that which is only for the knowledge of the Elect
> and the “Perfect.”
> 
> The Christians who, thanks to later interpolations,(157) have made out in
> that chapter a triple prophecy relating to the Deluge, Moses and Jesus,
> are mistaken, as in reality it bears directly on the punishment and loss
> of Atlantis and the penalty of indiscretion. The “Lord of the sheep” is
> Karma and the “Head of the Hierophants” also, the Supreme Initiator on
> earth. He says to Enoch, who implores him to save the leaders of the sheep
> from being devoured by the beasts of prey:
> 
>     I will cause a recital to be made before me ... how many they have
>     delivered up to destruction, and ... what they will do; whether
>     they will act as I have commanded them or not.
> 
>     Of this, however, they shall be ignorant; neither shalt thou make
>     any explanation to them, neither shalt thou reprove them; but
>     there shall be an account of all the destruction done by them in
>     their respective seasons.(158)
> 
>     ... He looked in silence, rejoicing they were devoured, swallowed
>     up, and carried off, and leaving them in the power of every beast
>     for food....(159)
> 
> Those who labour under the impression that the Occultists of any nation
> reject the _Bible_, in its original text and meaning, are wrong. As well
> reject the _Books of Thoth_, the Chaldæan _Kabalah_ or the _Book of Dzyan_
> itself. Occultists only reject the one‐sided interpretations and the human
> element in the _Bible_, which is an Occult, and therefore a sacred, volume
> as much as the others. And terrible indeed is the punishment of all those
> who transgress the permitted limits of secret revelations. From Prometheus
> to Jesus, and from Him to the highest Adept as to the lowest disciple,
> every revealer of mysteries has had to become a Chrestos, a “man of
> sorrow” and a martyr. “Beware,” said one of the greatest Masters, “of
> revealing the Mystery to those without”—to the profane, the Sadducee and
> the unbeliever. All the great Hierophants in history are shown ending
> their lives by violent deaths—Buddha,(160) Pythagoras, Zoroaster, most of
> the great Gnostics, the founders of their respective schools; and in our
> own more modern epoch a number of Fire‐Philosophers, of Rosicrucians and
> Adepts. All of these are shown—whether plainly or under the veil of
> allegory—as paying the penalty for the revelations they had made. This may
> seem to the profane reader only coincidence. To the Occultist, the death
> of every “Master” is significant, and appears pregnant with meaning. Where
> do we find in history that “Messenger” grand or humble, an Initiate or a
> Neophyte, who, when he was made the bearer of some hitherto concealed
> truth or truths, was not crucified and rent to shreds by the “dogs” of
> envy, malice and ignorance? Such is the terrible Occult law; and he who
> does not feel in himself the heart of a lion to scorn the savage barking,
> and the soul of a dove to forgive the poor ignorant fools, let him give up
> the Sacred Science. To succeed, the Occultist must be fearless; he has to
> brave dangers, dishonour and death, to be forgiving, and to be silent on
> that which cannot be given. Those who have vainly laboured in that
> direction must wait in these days—as the _Book of Enoch_ teaches—“until
> the evil‐doers be consumed” and the power of the wicked annihilated. It is
> not lawful for the Occultist to seek or even to thirst for revenge: let
> him
> 
>     Wait until sin pass away; for their [the sinners’] names shall be
>     blotted out of the holy books [the astral records], their seed
>     shall be destroyed and their spirits slain.(161)
> 
> Esoterically, Enoch is the “Son of man,” the first; and symbolically, the
> first Sub‐Race of the _Fifth_ Root Race.(162) And if his name yields for
> purposes of numerical and astronomical glyphs the meaning of the solar
> year, or 365, in conformity to the age assigned to him in _Genesis_, it is
> because, being the seventh, he is, for Occult purposes, the personified
> period of the two preceding Races with their fourteen Sub‐Races.
> Therefore, he is shown in the Book as the great grandfather of Noah who,
> in his turn, is the personification of the mankind of the Fifth,
> struggling with that of the Fourth Root‐Race—the great period of the
> revealed and profaned Mysteries, when the “sons of God” coming down on
> Earth took for wives the daughters of men, and taught them the secrets of
> the Angels; in other words, when the “mind‐born” men of the Third Race
> mixed themselves with those of the Fourth, and the divine Science was
> gradually brought down by men to Sorcery.
> 
> SECTION IX. HERMETIC AND KABALISTIC DOCTRINES.
> 
> The cosmogony of Hermes is as veiled as the Mosaic system, only it is upon
> its face far more in harmony with the doctrines of the Secret Sciences and
> even of Modern Science. Says the thrice great Trismegistus, “the hand that
> shaped the world out of formless pre‐existent matter is no hand”; to which
> _Genesis_ is made to reply, “The world was created out of nothing,”
> although the _Kabalah_ denies such a meaning in its opening sentences. The
> Kabalists have never, any more than have the Indian Âryans, admitted such
> an absurdity. With them, Fire, or Heat, and Motion(163) were chiefly
> instrumental in the formation of the world out of preëxisting Matter. The
> Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti of the Vedântins are the prototypes of the En
> Suph and Shekinah of the Kabalists. Aditi is the original of Sephira, and
> the Prajâpatis are the elder brothers of the Sephiroth. The nebular theory
> of Modern Science, with all its mysteries, is solved in the cosmogony of
> the Archaic Doctrine; and the paradoxical though very scientific
> enunciation, that “cooling causes contraction and contraction causes heat;
> therefore cooling causes heat,” is shown as the chief agency in the
> formation of the worlds, and especially of our sun and solar system.
> 
> All this is contained within the small compass of _Sepher Jetzirah_ in its
> thirty‐two wonderful Ways of Wisdom, signed “Jah Jehovah Sabaoth,” for
> whomsoever has the key to its hidden meaning. As to the dogmatic or
> theological interpretation of the first verses in _Genesis_ it is
> pertinently answered in the same book, where speaking of the Three
> Mothers, Air, Water and Fire, the writer describes them as a balance with
> 
>     The good in one scale, the evil in the other, and the oscillating
>     tongue of the Balance between them.(164)
> 
> One of the secret names of the One Eternal and Ever‐Present Deity, was in
> every country the same, and it has preserved to this day a phonetic
> likeness in the various languages. The Aum of the Hindus, the sacred
> syllable, had become the Ἀιών with the Greeks, and the Ævum with the
> Romans—the Pan or All. The “thirtieth way” is called in the _Sepher
> Jetzirah_ the “gathering understanding,” because
> 
>     Thereby gather the celestial adepts judgments of the stars and
>     celestial signs, and their observations of the orbits are the
>     perfection of science.(165)
> 
> The thirty‐second and last is called therein the “serving understanding,”
> and it is so‐called because it is
> 
>     A disposer of all those that are serving in the work of the Seven
>     Planets, according to their Hosts.(166)
> 
> The “work” was Initiation, during which all the mysteries connected with
> the “Seven Planets” were divulged, and also the mystery of the “Sun‐
> Initiate” with his seven radiances or beams cut off—the glory and triumph
> of the anointed, the Christos; a mystery that makes plain the rather
> puzzling expression of Clemens:
> 
>     For we shall find that very many of the dogmas that are held by
>     such sects [of Barbarian and Hellenic Philosophy] as have not
>     become utterly senseless, and are not cut out from the order of
>     nature [“by cutting off Christ,”(167) or rather Chrestos] ...
>     correspond in their origin and with the truth as a whole.(168)
> 
> In _Isis Unveiled_,(169) the reader will find fuller information than can
> be given here on the _Zohar_ and its author, the great Kabalist, Simeon
> Ben Jochai. It is said there that on account of his being known to be in
> possession of the secret knowledge and of the Mercaba, which insured the
> reception of the “Word,” his very life was endangered, and he had to fly
> to the wilderness, where he lived in a cave for twelve years surrounded by
> faithful disciples, and finally died there amid signs and wonders.(170)
> His teachings on the origin of the Secret Doctrine, or, as he also calls
> it, the Secret Wisdom, are the same as those found in the East, with the
> exception that in place of the Chief of a Host of Planetary Spirits he
> puts “God,” saying that this Wisdom was first taught by God himself to a
> certain number of Elect Angels; whereas in the Eastern Doctrine the saying
> is different, as will be seen.
> 
> Some synthetic and kabalistic studies on the sacred _Book of Enoch_ and
> the Taro (Rota) are before us. We quote from the MS. copy of a Western
> Occultist, which is prefaced by these words:
> 
>     There is but one Law, one Principle, one Agent, one Truth and one
>     Word. That which is above is analogically as that which is below.
>     All that which is, is the result of quantities and of
>     equilibriums.
> 
> The axiom of Éliphas Lévi and this triple epigraph show the identity of
> thought between the East and the West with regard to the Secret Science
> which, as the same MS. tells us, is:
> 
>     The key of things concealed, the key of the sanctuary. This is the
>     Sacred Word which gives to the Adept the supreme reason of
>     Occultism and its Mysteries. It is the Quintessence of
>     Philosophies and of Dogmas; it is the Alpha and Omega; it is the
>     Light, Life and Wisdom Universal.
> 
> The Taro of the sacred _Book of Enoch_, or Rota, is prefaced, moreover,
> with this explanation:
> 
>     The antiquity of this Book is lost in the night of time. It is of
>     _Indian origin_, and goes back to an epoch long before Moses....
>     It is written upon detached leaves, which at the first were of
>     fine gold and precious metals.... It is symbolical, and its
>     combinations adapt themselves to all the wonders of the Spirit.
>     Altered by its passage across the Ages, it is nevertheless
>     preserved—thanks to the ignorance of the curious—in its types and
>     its most important primitive figures.
> 
> This is the Rota of Enoch, now called Taro of Enoch, to which De Mirville
> alludes, as we saw, as the means used for “evil Magic,” the “metallic
> plates [or leaves] escaped from destruction during the Deluge” and which
> are attributed by him to Cain. They have escaped the Deluge for the simple
> reason that this Flood was not “Universal.” And it is said to be “of
> Indian origin,” because its origin is with the Indian Âryans of the first
> Sub‐Race of the Fifth Root‐Race, before the final destruction of the last
> stronghold of Atlantis. But, if it originated with the forefathers of the
> primitive Hindus, it was not in India that it was first used. Its origin
> is still more ancient and must be traced beyond and into the Himaleh,(171)
> the Snowy Range. It was born in that mysterious locality which no one is
> able to locate, and which is the despair of both Geographers and Christian
> Theologians—the region in which the Brâhman places his Kailâsa, the Mount
> Sumeru, and the Pârvatî Pamîr, transformed by the Greeks into Paropamisus.
> 
> Round this locality, which still exists, the traditions of the Garden of
> Eden were built. From these regions the Greeks obtained their
> Parnassus(172); and thence proceeded most of the biblical personages, some
> of them in their day men, some demi‐gods and heroes, some—though very
> few—myths, the astronomical doubles of the former. Abram was one of them—a
> Chaldæan Brâhman,(173) says the legend, transformed later, after he had
> repudiated his Gods and left his Ur (_pur_, “town”?) in Chaldæa, into A‐
> brahm(174) (or A‐braham) “no‐brâhman” who emigrated. Abram becoming the
> “father of many nations” is thus explained. The student of Occultism has
> to bear in mind that every God and hero in ancient Pantheons (that of the
> _Bible_ included), has three biographies in the narrative, so to say,
> running parallel with each other and each connected with one of the
> aspects of the hero—historical, astronomical and perfectly mythical, the
> last serving to connect the other two together and smooth away the
> asperities and discordancies in the narrative, and gathering into one or
> more symbols the verities of the first two. Localities are made to
> correspond with astronomical and even with psychic events. History was
> thus made captive by ancient Mystery, to become later on the great Sphynx
> of the nineteenth century. Only, instead of devouring her too dull
> querists who will unriddle her whether she acknowledges it or not, she is
> desecrated and mangled by the modern Œdipus, before he forces her into the
> sea of speculations in which the Sphynx is drowned and perishes. This has
> now become self‐evident, not only through the Secret Teachings,
> parsimoniously as they may be given, but by earnest and learned
> Symbologists and even Geometricians. The _Key to the Hebrew Egyptian
> Mystery_, in which a learned Mason of Cincinnati, Mr. Ralston Skinner,
> unveils the riddle of a God, with such ungodly ways about him as the
> Biblical Jah‐ve, is followed by the establishment of a learned society
> under the presidentship of a gentleman from Ohio and four vice‐presidents,
> one of whom is Piazzi Smyth, the well‐known Astronomer and Egyptologist.
> The Director of the Royal Observatory in Scotland and author of _The Great
> Pyramid, Pharaonic by name, Humanitarian by fact, its Marvels, Mysteries,
> and its Teachings_, is seeking to prove the same problem as the American
> author and Mason: namely, that the English system of measurement is the
> same as that used by the ancient Egyptians in the construction of their
> Pyramid, or in Mr. Skinner’s own words that the Pharaonic “source of
> measures” originated the “British inch and the ancient cubit.” It
> “originated” much more than this, as will be fully demonstrated before the
> end of the next century. Not only is everything in Western religion
> related to measures, geometrical figures, and time‐calculations, the
> principal period‐durations being founded on most of the historical
> personages,(175) but the latter are also connected with heaven and earth
> truly, only with the Indo‐Âryan heaven and earth, not with those of
> Palestine.
> 
> The prototypes of nearly all the biblical personages are to be sought for
> in the early Pantheon of India. It is the “Mind‐born” Sons of Brahmâ, or
> rather of the Dhyâni‐Pitara (the “Father‐Gods”), the “Sons of Light,” who
> have given birth to the “Sons of Earth”—the Patriarchs. For if the _Rig
> Veda_ and its three sister _Vedas_ have been “milked out from fire, air
> and sun,” or Agni, Indra, and Sûrya, as _Manu‐Smriti_ tells us, the _Old
> Testament_ was most undeniably “milked out” of the most ingenious brains
> of Hebrew Kabalists, partly in Egypt and partly in Babylonia—“the seat of
> Sanskrit literature and Brâhman learning from her origin,” as Colonel Vans
> Kennedy truly declared. One of such copies was Abram or Abraham, into
> whose bosom every orthodox Jew hopes to be gathered after death, that
> bosom being localised as “heaven in the clouds” or Abhra.(176)
> 
> From Abraham to Enoch’s Taro there seems to be a considerable distance,
> yet the two are closely related by more than one link. Gaffarel has shown
> that the four symbolical animals on the twenty‐first key of the Taro, at
> the third septenary, are the Teraphim of the Jews invented and worshipped
> by Abram’s father Terah, and used in the oracles of the Urim and Thummim.
> Moreover, astronomically Abraham is the sun‐measure and a portion of the
> sun, while Enoch is the solar year, as much as are Hermes or Thot; and
> Thot, numerically, “was the equivalent of Moses, or Hermes,” “the lord of
> the lower realms, also esteemed as a teacher of wisdom,” the same Mason‐
> mathematician tells us; and the Taro being, according to one of the latest
> bulls of the Pope, “an invention of Hell,” the same “as Masonry and
> Occultism,” the relation is evident. The Taro contains indeed the mystery
> of all such transmutations of personages into sidereal bodies and _vice
> versâ_. The “wheel of Enoch” is an archaic invention, the most ancient of
> all, for it is found in China. Éliphas Lévi says there was not a nation
> but had it, its real meaning being preserved in the greatest secresy. It
> was a universal heirloom.
> 
> As we see, neither the _Book of Enoch_ (his “Wheel”), nor the _Zohar_, nor
> any other kabalistic volume, contains merely Jewish wisdom.
> 
>     The doctrine itself being the result of whole millenniums of
>     thought, is therefore the joint property of Adepts of every nation
>     under the sun. Nevertheless, the _Zohar_ teaches practical
>     Occultism more than any other work on that subject; not as it is
>     translated and commented upon by its various critics though, but
>     with the secret signs on its margins. These signs contain the
>     hidden instructions, apart from the metaphysical interpretations
>     and apparent absurdities so fully credited by Josephus, who was
>     never initiated and gave out the _dead letter_ as he had received
>     it.(177)
> 
> SECTION X. VARIOUS OCCULT SYSTEMS OF INTERPRETATIONS OF ALPHABETS AND
> NUMERALS.
> 
> The transcendental methods of the _Kabalah_ must not be mentioned in a
> public work; but its various systems of arithmetical and geometrical ways
> of unriddling certain symbols may be described. The _Zohar_ methods of
> calculation, with their three sections, the Gematria, Notaricon and
> Temura, also the Albath and Algath, are extremely difficult to practise.
> We refer those who would learn more to Cornelius Agrippa’s works.(178) But
> none of those systems can ever be understood unless a Kabalist becomes a
> real Master in his Science. The Symbolism of Pythagoras requires still
> more arduous labour. His symbols are very numerous, and to comprehend even
> the general gist of his abstruse doctrines from his Symbology would
> necessitate years of study. His chief figures are the square (the
> Tetraktys), the equilateral triangle, the point within a circle, the cube,
> the triple triangle, and finally the forty‐seventh proposition of Euclid’s
> Elements, of which proposition Pythagoras was the inventor. But with this
> exception, none of the foregoing symbols originated with him, as some
> believe. Millenniums before his day, they were well known in India, whence
> the Samian Sage brought them, not as a speculation, but as a demonstrated
> Science, says Porphyry, quoting from the Pythagorean Moderatus.
> 
>     The numerals of Pythagoras were hieroglyphical symbols by means
>     whereof he explained _all_ ideas concerning the nature of
>     things.(179)
> 
> The fundamental geometrical figure of the _Kabalah_, as given in the _Book
> of Numbers_,(180) that figure which tradition and the Esoteric Doctrines
> tell us was given by the Deity Itself to Moses on Mount Sinai,(181)
> contains the key to the universal problem in its grandiose, because
> simple, combinations. This figure contains in itself all the others.
> 
> The Symbolism of numbers and their mathematical inter‐relations is also
> one of the branches of Magic, especially of mental Magic, divination and
> correct perception in clairvoyance. Systems differ, but the root idea is
> everywhere the same. As shown in the _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, by
> Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie:
> 
>     One system adopts unity, another trinity, a third quinquinity;
>     again we have sexagons, heptagons, novems, and so on, until the
>     mind is lost in the survey of the materials alone of a science of
>     numbers.(182)
> 
> The Devanâgarî characters in which Sanskrit is generally written, have all
> that the Hermetic, Chaldæan and Hebrew alphabets have, and in addition the
> Occult significance of the “eternal sound,” and the meaning given to every
> letter in its relation to spiritual as well as terrestrial things. As
> there are only twenty‐two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and ten
> fundamental numbers, while in the Devanâgarî there are thirty‐five
> consonants and sixteen vowels, making altogether fifty‐one simple letters,
> with numberless combinations in addition, the margin for speculation and
> knowledge is in proportion considerably wider. Every letter has its
> equivalent in other languages, and its equivalent in a figure or figures
> of the calculation table. It has also numerous other significations, which
> depend upon the special idiosyncrasies and characteristics of the person,
> object, or subject to be studied. As the Hindus claim to have received the
> Devanâgarî characters from Sarasvatî, the inventress of Sanskrit, the
> “language of the Devas” or Gods (in their exoteric pantheon), so most of
> the ancient nations claimed the same privilege for the origin of their
> letters and tongue. The _Kabalah_ calls the Hebrew alphabet the “letters
> of the Angels,” which were communicated to the Patriarchs, just as the
> Devanâgarî was to the Rishis by the Devas. The Chaldæans found their
> letters traced in the sky by the “yet unsettled stars and comets,” says
> the _Book of Numbers_; while the Phœnicians had a sacred alphabet formed
> by the twistings of the sacred serpents. The Natar Khari (hieratic
> alphabet) and secret (sacerdotal) speech of the Egyptians is closely
> related to the oldest “Secret Doctrine Speech.” It is a Devanâgarî with
> mystical combinations and additions, into which the Senzar largely enters.
> 
> The power and potency of numbers and characters are well known to many
> Western Occultists as being compounded from all these systems, but are
> still unknown to Hindu students, if not to their Occultists. In their turn
> European Kabalists are generally ignorant of the alphabetical secrets of
> Indian Esoterism. At the same time the general reader in the West knows
> nothing of either; least of all how deep are the traces left by the
> Esoteric numeral systems of the world in the Christian Churches.
> 
> Nevertheless this system of numerals solves the problem of cosmogony for
> whomsoever studies it, while the system of geometrical figures represents
> the numbers objectively.
> 
> To realise the full comprehension of the Deific and the Abstruse enjoyed
> by the Ancients, one has to study the origin of the figurative
> representations of their primitive Philosophers. The _Books of Hermes_ are
> the oldest repositories of numerical Symbology in Western Occultism. In
> them we find that the number _ten_(183) is the Mother of the Soul, Life
> and Light being therein united. For as the sacred anagram Teruph shows in
> the _Book of the Keys_ (Numbers), the number 1 (one) is born from Spirit,
> and the number 10 (ten) from Matter; “the unity has made the ten, the ten,
> the unity”; and this is only the Pantheistic axiom, in other words “God in
> Nature and Nature in God.”
> 
> The kabalistic Gematria is arithmetical, not geometrical. It is one of the
> methods for extracting the hidden meaning from letters, words, and
> sentences. It consists in applying to the letters of a word the sense they
> bear as numbers, in outward shape as well as in their individual sense. As
> illustrated by Ragon:
> 
>     The figure I signified the living man (a body erect), man being
>     the only living being enjoying this faculty. A head being added to
>     it, the glyph (or letter) P was obtained, meaning paternity,
>     creative potency; the R signifying the walking man (with his foot
>     forward) going, _iens_, _iturus_.(184)
> 
>     The characters were also made supplementary to speech, every
>     letter being at once a figure representing a sound for the ear, an
>     idea to the mind; as, for instance, the letter F, which is a
>     cutting sound like that of air rushing quickly through space;
>     fury, fusee, fugue, all words expressive of, and depicting what
>     they signify.(185)
> 
> But the above pertains to another system, that of the primitive and
> philosophical formation of the letters and their outward glyphic form—not
> to Gematria. The Temura is another kabalistic method, by which any word
> could be made to yield its mystery out of its anagram. So in _Sepher
> Jetzirah_ we read “One—the Spirit of the Alahim of Lives.” In the oldest
> kabalistic diagrams the Sephiroth (the seven and the three) are
> represented as wheels or circles, and Adam Kadmon, the primitive Man, as
> an upright pillar. “Wheels and seraphim and the holy creatures” (Chioth)
> says Rabbi Akiba. In still another system of the symbolical _Kabalah_
> called Albath—which arranges the letters of the alphabet by pairs in three
> rows—all the couples in the first row bear the numerical value ten; and in
> the system of Simeon Ben Shetah (an Alexandrian Neoplatonist under the
> first Ptolemy) the uppermost couple—the most sacred of all—is preceded by
> the Pythagorean cypher: one, and a nought—10.
> 
> All beings, from the first divine emanation, or “God manifested,” down to
> the lowest atomic existence, “have their particular number which
> distinguishes each of them and becomes the source of their attributes and
> qualities as of their destiny.” Chance, as taught by Cornelius Agrippa, is
> in reality only an unknown progression; and time but a succession of
> numbers. Hence, futurity being a compound of chance and time, these are
> made to serve Occult calculations in order to find the result of an event,
> or the future of one’s destiny. Said Pythagoras:
> 
>     There is a mysterious connection between the Gods and numbers, on
>     which the science of arithmancy is based. The soul is a world that
>     is self‐moving; the soul contains in itself, and is, the
>     quaternary, the tetraktys [the perfect cube].
> 
> There are lucky and unlucky, or beneficent and maleficent numbers. Thus
> while the ternary—the first of the odd numbers (the one being the perfect
> and standing by itself in Occultism)—is the divine figure or the triangle;
> the duad was disgraced by the Pythagoreans from the first. It represented
> Matter, the passive and evil principle—the number of Mâyâ, illusion.
> 
>     While the number _one_ symbolized harmony, order or the good
>     principle (the one God expressed in Latin by Solus, from which the
>     word Sol, the Sun, the symbol of the Deity), number two expressed
>     a contrary idea. The science of good and evil began with it. All
>     that is double, false, opposed to the only reality, was depicted
>     by the binary. It also expressed the contrasts in Nature which are
>     always double: night and day, light and darkness, cold and heat,
>     dampness and dryness, health and sickness, error and truth, male
>     and female, etc.... The Romans dedicated to Pluto the second month
>     of the year, and the second day of that month to expiations in
>     honour of the Manes. Hence the same rite established by the Latin
>     Church, and faithfully copied. Pope John XIX. instituted in 1003
>     the Festival of the Dead, which had to be celebrated on the 2nd of
>     November, the second month of autumn.(186)
> 
> On the other hand the triangle, a purely geometrical figure, had great
> honour shewn it by every nation, and for this reason:
> 
>     In geometry a straight line cannot represent an absolutely perfect
>     figure, any more than two straight lines. Three straight lines, on
>     the other hand, produce by their junction a triangle, or the first
>     absolutely perfect figure. Therefore, it symbolized from the first
>     and to this day the Eternal—the first perfection. The word for
>     deity in Latin, as in French, begins with D, in Greek the delta or
>     triangle, Δ, whose three sides symbolize the trinity, or the three
>     kingdoms, or, again, divine nature. In the middle is the Hebrew
>     Yod, the initial of Jehovah [see Éliphas Lévi’s _Dogme et Rituel_,
>     i. 154], the animating spirit or fire, the generating principle
>     represented by the letter G, the initial of “God” in the northern
>     languages, whose philosophical significance is generation.(187)
> 
> As stated correctly by the famous Mason Ragon, the Hindu Trimûrti is
> personified in the world of ideas by Creation, Preservation and
> Destruction, or Brahmâ, Vishnu and Shiva; in the world of matter by Earth,
> Water and Fire, or the Sun, and symbolised by the Lotus, a flower that
> lives by earth, water, and the sun.(188) The Lotus, sacred to Isis, had
> the same significance in Egypt, whereas in the Christian symbol, the
> Lotus, not being found in either Judæa or Europe, was replaced by the
> water‐lily. In every Greek and Latin Church, in all the pictures of the
> Annunciation, the Archangel Gabriel is depicted with this trinitarian
> symbol in his hand standing before Mary, while above the chief altar or
> under the dome, the Eye of the Eternal is painted within a triangle, made
> to replace the Hebrew Yod or God.
> 
> Truly, says Ragon, there was a time when numbers and alphabetical
> characters meant something more than they do now—the images of a mere
> insignificant sound.
> 
>     Their mission was nobler then. Each of them represented by its
>     form a complete sense, which, besides the meaning of the word, had
>     a double(189) interpretation adapted to a dual doctrine. Thus when
>     the sages desired to write something to be understood only by the
>     savants, they confabulated a story, a dream, or some other
>     fictitious subject with personal names of men and localities, that
>     revealed by their lettered characters the true meaning of the
>     author by that narrative. Such were all their religious
>     creations.(190)
> 
> Every appellation and term had its _raison d’être_. The name of a plant or
> mineral denoted its nature to the Initiate at the first glance. The
> essence of everything was easily perceived by him once that it was figured
> by such characters. The Chinese characters have preserved much of this
> graphic and pictorial character to this day, though the secret of the full
> system is lost. Nevertheless, even now, there are those among that nation
> who can write a long narrative, a volume, on one page; and the symbols
> that are explained historically, allegorically and astronomically, have
> survived until now.
> 
> Moreover, there exists a universal language among the Initiates, which an
> Adept, and even a disciple, of any nation may understand by reading it in
> his own language. We Europeans, on the contrary, possess only one graphic
> sign common to all, & (and); there is a language richer in metaphysical
> terms than any on earth, whose every word is expressed by like common
> signs. The Litera Pythagoræ, so called, the Greek Υ (the English capital
> Y) if traced alone in a message, was as explicit as a whole page filled
> with sentences, for it stood as a symbol for a number of things—for white
> and black Magic, for instance.(191) Suppose one man enquired of another:
> To what School of Magic does so and so belong? and the answer came back
> with the letter traced with the right branch thicker than the left, then
> it meant “to right hand or divine Magic;” but if the letter were traced in
> the usual way, with the left branch thicker than the right, then it meant
> the reverse, the right or left branch being the whole biography of a man.
> In Asia, especially in the Devanâgarî characters, every letter had several
> secret meanings.
> 
> Interpretations of the hidden sense of such apocalyptic writings are found
> in the keys given in the _Kabalah_, and they are among its most sacred
> lore. St. Hieronymus assures us that they were known to the School of the
> Prophets and taught therein, which is very likely. Molitor, the learned
> Hebraist, in his work on tradition says that:
> 
>     The two and twenty letters of the Hebrew alphabet were regarded as
>     an emanation, or the visible expression of the divine forces
>     inherent in the ineffable name.
> 
> These letters find their equivalent in, and are replaced by numbers, in
> the same way as in the other systems. For instance, the twelfth and the
> sixth letter of the alphabet yield eighteen in a name; the other letters
> of that name added being always exchanged for that figure which
> corresponds to the alphabetical letter; then all those figures are
> subjected to an algebraical process which transforms them again into
> letters; after which the latter yield to the enquirer “the most hidden
> secrets of divine Permanency (eternity in its immutability) in the
> Futurity.”
> 
> SECTION XI. THE HEXAGON WITH THE CENTRAL POINT, OR THE SEVENTH KEY.
> 
> Arguing upon the virtue in names (Baalshem), Molitor thinks it impossible
> to deny that the _Kabalah_—its present abuses notwithstanding—has some
> very profound and scientific basis to stand upon. And if it is claimed, he
> argues,
> 
>     That before the Name of Jesus every other Name must bend, why
>     should not the Tetragrammaton have the same power?(192)
> 
> This is good sense and logic. For if Pythagoras viewed the hexagon formed
> of two crossed triangles as the symbol of creation, and the Egyptians, as
> that of the union of fire and water (or of generation), the Essenes saw in
> it the Seal of Solomon, the Jews the Shield of David, the Hindus the Sign
> of Vishnu (to this day); and if even in Russia and Poland the double
> triangle is regarded as a powerful talisman—then so widespread a use
> argues that there is something in it. It stands to reason, indeed, that
> such an ancient and universally revered symbol should not be merely laid
> aside to be laughed at by those who know nothing of its virtues or real
> Occult significance. To begin with, even the known sign is merely a
> substitute for the one used by the Initiates. In a Tântrika work in the
> British Museum, a terrible curse is called down upon the head of him who
> shall ever divulge to the profane the real Occult hexagon known as the
> “Sign of Vishnu,” “Solomon’s Seal,” etc.
> 
> The great power of the hexagon—with its central mystic sign the T, or the
> Svastika, a septenary—is well explained in the seventh key of _Things
> Concealed_, for it says:
> 
>     The seventh key is the hieroglyph of the sacred septenary, of
>     royalty, of the priesthood [the Initiate], of triumph and true
>     result by struggle. It is magic power in all its force, the true
>     “Holy Kingdom.” In the Hermetic Philosophy it is the quintessence
>     resulting from the union of the two forces of the great Magic
>     Agent [Âkâsha, Astral Light.].... It is equally Jakin and Boaz
>     bound by the will of the Adept and overcome by his omnipotence.
> 
> The force of this key is absolute in Magic. All religions have consecrated
> this sign in their rites.
> 
> We can only glance hurriedly at present at the long series of antediluvian
> works in their postdiluvian and fragmentary, often disfigured, form.
> Although all of these are the inheritance from the Fourth Race—now lying
> buried in the unfathomed depths of the ocean—still they are not to be
> rejected. As we have shown, there was but one Science at the dawn of
> mankind, and it was entirely divine. If humanity on reaching its adult
> period has abused it—especially the last Sub‐Races of the Fourth Root‐
> Race—it has been the fault and sin of the practitioners who desecrated the
> divine knowledge, not of those who remained true to its pristine dogmas.
> It is not because the modern Roman Catholic Church, faithful to her
> traditional intolerance, is now pleased to see in the Occultist, and even
> in the innocent Spiritualist and Mason, the descendants of “the Kischuph,
> the Hamite, the Kasdim, the Cephene, the Ophite and the Khartumim”—all
> these being “the followers of Satan,” that they are such indeed. The State
> or National Religion of every country has ever and at all times very
> easily disposed of rival schools by professing to believe they were
> dangerous heresies—the old Roman Catholic State Religion as much as the
> modern one.
> 
> The anathema, however, has not made the public any the wiser in the
> Mysteries of the Occult Sciences. In some respects the world is all the
> better for such ignorance. The secrets of Nature generally cut both ways,
> and in the hands of the undeserving they are more than likely to become
> murderous. Who in our modern day knows anything of the real significance
> of, and the powers contained in, certain characters and
> signs—talismans—whether for beneficent or evil purposes? Fragments of the
> Runes and the writing of the Kischuph, found scattered in old mediæval
> libraries; copies from the Ephesian and Milesian letters or characters;
> the thrice famous _Book of Thoth_, and the terrible treatises (still
> preserved) of Targes, the Chaldæan, and his disciple Tarchon, the
> Etruscan—who flourished long before the Trojan War—are so many names and
> appellations void of sense (though met with in classical literature) for
> the educated modern scholar. Who, in the nineteenth century, believes in
> the art, described in such treatises as those of Targes, of evoking and
> directing thunder‐bolts? Yet the same is described in the Brâhmanical
> literature, and Targes copied his “thunder‐bolts” from the Astra,(193)
> those terrible engines of destruction known to the Mahâbhâratan Âryans. A
> whole arsenal of dynamite bombs would pale before this art—if it ever
> becomes understood by the Westerns. It is from an old fragment that was
> translated to him, that the late Lord Bulwer Lytton got his idea of Vril.
> It is a lucky thing, indeed, that, in the face of the virtues and
> philanthropy that grace our age of iniquitous wars, of anarchists and
> dynamiters, the secrets contained in the books discovered in Numa’s tomb
> should have been burnt. But the science of Circe and Medea is not lost.
> One can discover it in the apparent gibberish of the Tântrika Sûtras, the
> _Kuku‐ma_ of the Bhûtânî and the Sikhim Dugpas and “Red‐caps” of Tibet,
> and even in the sorcery of the Nîlgiri Mula Kurumbas. Very luckily few
> outside the high practitioners of the Left Path and of the Adepts of the
> Right—in whose hands the weird secrets of the real meaning are
> safe—understand the “black” evocations. Otherwise the Western as much as
> the Eastern Dugpas might make short work of their enemies. The name of the
> latter is legion, for the direct descendants of the antediluvian sorcerers
> hate all those who are not with them, arguing that, therefore, they are
> against them.
> 
> As for the “Little Albert”—though even this small half‐esoteric volume has
> become a literary relic—and the “Great Albert” or the “Red Dragon,”
> together with the numberless old copies still in existence, the sorry
> remains of the mythical Mother Shiptons and the Merlins—we mean the false
> ones—all these are vulgarised imitations of the original works of the same
> names. Thus the “Petit Albert” is the disfigured imitation of the great
> work written in Latin by Bishop Adalbert, an Occultist of the eighth
> century, sentenced by the second Roman Concilium. His work was reprinted
> several centuries later and named _Alberti Parvi Lucii Libellus de
> Mirabilibus Naturæ Arcanis_. The severities of the Roman Church have ever
> been spasmodic. While one learns of this condemnation, which placed the
> Church, as will be shown, in relation to the Seven Archangels, the Virtues
> or Thrones of God, in the most embarrassing position for long centuries,
> it remains a wonder indeed, to find that the Jesuits have not destroyed
> the archives, with all their countless chronicles and annals, of the
> History of France and those of the Spanish Escurial, along with them. Both
> history and the chronicles of the former speak at length of the priceless
> talisman received by Charles the Great from a Pope. It was a little volume
> on Magic—or Sorcery, rather—all full of kabalistic figures, signs,
> mysterious sentences and invocations to the stars and planets. These were
> talismans against the enemies of the King (_les ennemis de Charlemagne_),
> which talismans, the chronicler tells us, proved of great help, as “every
> one of them [the enemies] died a violent death.” The small volume,
> _Enchiridium Leonis Papæ_, has disappeared and is very luckily out of
> print. Again the Alphabet of Thoth can be dimly traced in the modern Tarot
> which can be had at almost every bookseller’s in Paris. As for its being
> understood or utilised, the many fortune‐tellers in Paris, who make a
> professional living by it, are sad specimens of failures of attempts at
> reading, let alone correctly interpreting, the symbolism of the Tarot
> without a preliminary philosophical study of the Science. The real Tarot,
> in its complete symbology, can be found only in the Babylonian cylinders,
> that any one can inspect and study in the British Museum and elsewhere.
> Any one can see these Chaldæan, antediluvian rhombs, or revolving
> cylinders, covered with sacred signs; but the secrets of these divining
> “wheels,” or, as de Mirville calls them, “the rotating globes of Hecate,”
> have to be left untold for some time to come. Meanwhile there are the
> “turning‐tables” of the modern medium for the babes, and the _Kabalah_ for
> the strong. This may afford some consolation.
> 
> People are very apt to use terms which they do not understand, and to pass
> judgments on _primâ facie_ evidence. The difference between White and
> Black Magic is very difficult to realise fully, as both have to be judged
> by their motive, upon which their ultimate though not their immediate
> effects depend, even though these may not come for years. Between the
> “right and the left hand [Magic] there is but a cobweb thread,” says an
> Eastern proverb. Let us abide by its wisdom and wait till we have learned
> more.
> 
> We shall have to return at greater length to the relation of the _Kabalah_
> to Gupta Vidyâ, and to deal further with esoteric and numerical systems,
> but we must first follow the line of Adepts in post‐Christian times.
> 
> SECTION XII. THE DUTY OF THE TRUE OCCULTIST TOWARD RELIGIONS.
> 
> Having disposed of pre‐Christian Initiates and their Mysteries—though more
> has to be said about the latter—a few words must be given to the earliest
> post‐Christian Adepts, irrespective of their personal beliefs and
> doctrines, or their subsequent places in History, whether sacred or
> profane. Our task is to analyse this adeptship with its abnormal
> thaumaturgical, or, as now called, psychological powers; to give each of
> such Adepts his due, by considering, firstly, what are the historical
> records about them that have reached us at this late day, and secondly, to
> examine the laws of probability with regard to the said powers.
> 
> And at the outset the writer must be allowed a few words in justification
> of what has to be said. It would be most unfair to see in these pages any
> defiance to, or disrespect for, the Christian religion—least of all, a
> desire to wound anyone’s feelings. The Theosophist believes in neither
> Divine nor Satanic miracles. At such a distance of time he can only obtain
> _primâ facie_ evidence and judge of it by the results claimed. There is
> neither Saint nor Sorcerer, Prophet nor Soothsayer for him; only Adepts,
> or proficients in the production of feats of a phenomenal character, to be
> judged by their words and deeds. The only distinction he is now able to
> trace depends on the results achieved—on the evidence whether they were
> beneficent or maleficent in their character as affecting those for or
> against whom the powers of the Adept were used. With the division so
> arbitrarily made between proficients in “miraculous” doings of this or
> that Religion by their respective followers and advocates, the Occultist
> cannot and _must not_ be concerned. The Christian whose Religion commands
> him to regard Peter and Paul as Saints, and divinely inspired and
> glorified Apostles, and to view Simon and Apollonius as Wizards and
> Necromancers, helped by, and serving the ends of, supposed Evil Powers—is
> quite justified in thus doing if he be a sincere orthodox Christian. But
> so also is the Occultist justified, if he would serve truth and only
> truth, in rejecting such a one‐sided view. The student of Occultism must
> belong to no special creed or sect, yet he is bound to show outward
> respect to every creed and faith, if he would become an Adept of the Good
> Law. He must not be bound by the pre‐judged and sectarian opinions of
> anyone, and he has to form his own opinions and to come to his own
> conclusions in accordance with the rules of evidence furnished to him by
> the Science to which he is devoted. Thus, if the Occultist is, by way of
> illustration, a Buddhist, then, while regarding Gautama Buddha as the
> grandest of all the Adepts that lived, and the incarnation of unselfish
> love, boundless charity, and moral goodness, he will regard in the same
> light Jesus—proclaiming Him another such incarnation of every divine
> virtue. He will reverence the memory of the great Martyr, even while
> refusing to recognise in Him the incarnation on earth of the One Supreme
> Deity, and the “Very God of Gods” in Heaven. He will cherish the ideal man
> for his personal virtues, not for the claims made on his behalf by
> fanatical dreamers of the early ages, or by a shrewd calculating Church
> and Theology. He will even believe in most of the “asserted miracles,”
> only explaining them in accordance with the rules of his own Science and
> by his psychic discernment. Refusing them the term “miracle”—in the
> theological sense of an event “contrary to the established laws of
> nature”—he will nevertheless view them as a deviation from the laws known
> (so far) to Science, quite another thing. Moreover the Occultist will, on
> the _primâ facie_ evidence of the _Gospels_—whether proven or not—class
> most of such works as beneficent, divine Magic, though he will be
> justified in regarding such events as casting out devils into a herd of
> swine(194) as allegorical, and as pernicious to true faith in their dead‐
> letter sense. This is the view a genuine, impartial Occultist would take.
> And in this respect even the fanatical Mussulmans who regard Jesus of
> Nazareth as a great Prophet, and show respect to Him, are giving a
> wholesome lesson in charity to Christians, who teach and accept that
> “religious tolerance is impious and absurd,”(195) and who will never refer
> to the prophet of Islam by any other term but that of a “false prophet.”
> It is on the principles of Occultism, then, that Peter and Simon, Paul and
> Apollonius, will now be examined.
> 
> These four Adepts are chosen to appear in these pages with good reason.
> They are the first in post‐Christian Adeptship—as recorded in profane and
> sacred writings—to strike the key‐note of “miracles,” that is of psychic
> and physical phenomena. It is only theological bigotry and intolerance
> that could so maliciously and arbitrarily separate the two harmonious
> parts into two distinct manifestations of Divine and Satanic Magic, into
> “godly” and “ungodly” works.
> 
> SECTION XIII. POST‐CHRISTIAN ADEPTS AND THEIR DOCTRINES.
> 
> What does the world at large know of Peter and Simon, for example? Profane
> history has no record of these two, while that which the so‐called sacred
> literature tells us of them is scattered about, contained in a few
> sentences in the _Acts_. As to the _Apocrypha_, their very name forbids
> critics to trust to them for information. The Occultists, however, claim
> that, one‐sided and prejudiced as they may be, the apocryphal _Gospels_
> contain far more historically true events and facts than does the _New
> Testament_, the _Acts_ included. The former are crude tradition, the
> latter (the official _Gospels_) are an elaborately made up legend. The
> sacredness of the _New Testament_ is a question of private belief and of
> blind faith, and while one is bound to respect the private opinion of
> one’s neighbour, no one is forced to share it.
> 
> Who was Simon Magus, and what is known of him? One learns in the _Acts_
> simply that on account of his remarkable magical Arts he was called “the
> Great Power of God.” Philip is said to have baptised this Samaritan; and
> subsequently he is accused of having offered money to Peter and John to
> teach him the power of working true “miracles,” false ones, it is
> asserted, being of the Devil.(196) This is all, if we omit the words of
> abuse freely used against him for working “miracles” of the latter kind.
> Origen mentions him as having visited Rome during the reign of Nero,(197)
> and Mosheim places him among the open enemies of Christianity;(198) but
> Occult tradition accuses him of nothing worse than refusing to recognise
> “Simeon” as a Vicegerent of God, whether that “Simeon” was Peter or anyone
> else being still left an open question with the critic.
> 
> That which Irenæus(199) and Epiphanius(200) say of Simon Magus—namely,
> that he represented himself as the incarnated trinity; that in Samaria he
> was the Father, in Judæa the Son, and had given himself out to the
> Gentiles as the Holy Spirit—is simply backbiting. Times and events change;
> human nature remains the same and unaltered under every sky and in every
> age. The charge is the result and product of the traditional and now
> classical _odium theologicum_. No Occultists—all of whom have experienced
> personally, more or less, the effects of theological rancour—will ever
> believe such things merely on the word of an Irenæus, if, indeed, he ever
> wrote the words himself. Further on it is narrated of Simon that he took
> about with him a woman whom he introduced as Helen of Troy, who had passed
> through a hundred reincarnations, and who, still earlier, in the beginning
> of æons, was Sophia, Divine Wisdom, an emanation of his own (Simon’s)
> Eternal Mind, when he (Simon) was the “Father”; and finally, that by her
> he had “begotten the Archangels and Angels, by whom this world was
> created,” etc.
> 
> Now we all know to what a degree of transformation and luxuriant growth
> any bare statement can be subjected and forced, after passing through only
> half a dozen hands. Moreover, all these claims may be explained and even
> shown to be true at bottom. Simon Magus was a Kabalist and a Mystic, who,
> like so many other reformers, endeavoured to found a new Religion based on
> the fundamental teachings of the Secret Doctrine, yet without divulging
> more than necessary of its mysteries. Why then should not Simon, a Mystic,
> deeply imbued with the fact of serial incarnations (we may leave out the
> number “one hundred,” as a very probable exaggeration of his disciples),
> speak of any one whom he knew psychically as an incarnation of some
> heroine of that name, and in the way he did—if he ever did so? Do we not
> find in our own century some ladies and gentlemen, not charlatans but
> intellectual persons highly honoured in society, whose inner conviction
> assures them that they were—one Queen Cleopatra, another one Alexander the
> Great, a third Joan of Arc, and who or what not? This is a matter of inner
> conviction, and is based on more or less familiarity with Occultism and
> belief in the modern theory of reincarnation. The latter differs from the
> one genuine doctrine of old, as will be shown, but there is no rule
> without its exception.
> 
> As to the Magus being “one with God the Father, God the Son, and God the
> Holy Ghost,” this again is quite reasonable, if we admit that a Mystic and
> Seer has a right to use allegorical language; and in this case, moreover,
> it is quite justified by the doctrine of Universal Unity taught in
> Esoteric Philosophy. Every Occultist will say the same, on (to him)
> scientific and logical grounds, in full accordance with the doctrine he
> professes. Not a Vedântin but says the same thing daily: he is, of course,
> Brahman, and he is Parabrahman, once that he rejects the individuality of
> his personal spirit, and recognises the Divine Ray which dwells in his
> Higher Self as only a reflection of the Universal Spirit. This is the echo
> in all times and ages of the primitive doctrine of Emanations. The first
> Emanation from the Unknown is the “Father,” the second the “Son,” and all
> and everything proceeds from the One, or that Divine Spirit which is
> “unknowable.” Hence, the assertion that by her (Sophia, or Minerva, the
> Divine Wisdom) he (Simon), when yet in the bosom of the Father, himself
> the Father (or the first collective Emanation), begot the Archangels—the
> “Son”—who were the creators of this world.
> 
> The Roman Catholics themselves, driven to the wall by the irrefutable
> arguments of their opponents—the learned Philologists and Symbologists who
> pick to shreds Church dogmas and their authorities, and point out the
> plurality of the Elohim in the _Bible_—admit to‐day that the first
> “creation” of God, the Tsaba, or Archangels, must have participated in the
> creation of the Universe. Might not we suppose:
> 
>     Although “God alone created the heaven and the earth” ... that
>     however unconnected they [the Angels] may have been with the
>     primordial _ex nihilo_ creation, they may have received a mission
>     to achieve, to continue, and to sustain it?(201)
> 
> exclaims De Mirville, in answer to Renan, Lacour, Maury and the _tutti
> quanti_ of the French Institute. With certain alterations it is precisely
> this which is claimed by the Secret Doctrine. In truth there is not a
> single doctrine preached by the many Reformers of the first and the
> subsequent centuries of our era, that did not base its initial teachings
> on this universal cosmogony. Consult Mosheim and see what he has to say of
> the many “heresies” he describes. Cerinthus, the Jew,
> 
>     Taught that the Creator of this world ... the Sovereign God of the
>     Jewish people, was a Being ... who derived his birth from the
>     Supreme God;
> 
> that this Being, moreover,
> 
>     Fell by degrees from his native virtue and primitive dignity.
> 
> Basilides, Carpocrates and Valentinus, the Egyptian Gnostics of the second
> century, held the same ideas with a few variations. Basilides preached
> seven Æons (Hosts or Archangels), who issued from the substance of the
> Supreme. Two of them, Power and Wisdom, begot the heavenly hierarchy of
> the first class and dignity; this emanated a second; the latter a third,
> and so on; each subsequent evolution being of a nature less exalted than
> the precedent, and each creating for itself a Heaven as a dwelling, the
> nature of each of these respective Heavens decreasing in splendour and
> purity as it approached nearer to the earth. Thus the number of these
> Dwellings amounted to 365; and over all presided the Supreme Unknown
> called Abraxas, a name which in the Greek method of numeration yields the
> number 365, which in its mystic and numerical meaning contains the number
> 355, or the man value.(202) This was a Gnostic Mystery based upon that of
> primitive Evolution, which ended with “man.”
> 
> Saturnilus of Antioch promulgated the same doctrine slightly modified. He
> taught two eternal principles, Good and Evil, which are simply Spirit and
> Matter. The seven Angels who preside over the seven Planets are the
> Builders of our Universe—a purely Eastern doctrine, as Saturnilus was an
> Asiatic Gnostic. These Angels are the natural Guardians of the seven
> Regions of our Planetary System, one of the most powerful among these
> seven creating Angels of the _third_ order being “Saturn,” the presiding
> genius of the Planet, and the God of the Hebrew people: namely, Jehovah,
> who was venerated among the Jews, and to whom they dedicated the seventh
> day or Sabbath, Saturday—“Saturn’s day” among the Scandinavians and also
> among the Hindus.
> 
> Marcion, who also held the doctrine of the two opposed principles of Good
> and Evil, asserted that there was a third Deity between the two—one of a
> “mixed nature”—the God of the Jews, the Creator (with his Host) of the
> lower, or our, World. Though ever at war with the Evil Principle, this
> intermediate Being was nevertheless also opposed to the Good Principle,
> whose place and title he coveted.
> 
> Thus Simon was only the son of his time, a religious Reformer like so many
> others, and an Adept among the Kabalists. The Church, to which a belief in
> his actual existence and great powers is a necessity—in order the better
> to set off the “miracle” performed by Peter and his triumph over
> Simon—extols unstintingly his wonderful magic feats. On the other hand,
> Scepticism, represented by scholars and learned critics, tries to make
> away with him altogether. Thus, after denying the very existence of Simon,
> they have finally thought fit to merge his individuality entirely in that
> of Paul. The anonymous author of _Supernatural Religion_ assiduously
> endeavoured to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the Apostle
> Paul, whose _Epistles_ were secretly as well as openly calumniated and
> opposed by Peter, and charged with containing “dysnoëtic learning.” Indeed
> this seems more than probable when we think of the two Apostles and
> contrast their characters.
> 
>     The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and
>     very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious,
>     insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially at
>     least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries,
>     admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar
>     to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used only by the
>     Initiates, are so many sure ear‐marks to that supposition. Our
>     suspicion has been strengthened by an able article entitled “Paul
>     and Plato,” by Dr. A. Wilder, in which the author puts forward one
>     remarkable and, for us, very precious observation. In the
>     _Epistles to the Corinthians_, he shows Paul abounding with
>     “expressions suggested by the initiations of Sabazius and Eleusis,
>     and the lectures of the (Greek) philosophers. He (Paul) designates
>     himself an _idiotes_—a person unskilful in the Word, but not in
>     the _gnosis_ or philosophical learning. ‘We speak wisdom among the
>     perfect or initiated,’ he writes, _even_ the _hidden wisdom_, ‘not
>     the wisdom of this world, nor of the Archons of this world, but
>     divine wisdom in a mystery, secret—which _none of the Archons of
>     this world knew_.’ ”(203)
> 
>     What else can the Apostle mean by those unequivocal words, but
>     that he himself, as belonging to the Mystæ (Initiated), spoke of
>     things shown and explained only in the Mysteries? The “divine
>     wisdom in a mystery which none of the _Archons of this world
>     knew_,” has evidently some direct reference to the Basileus of the
>     Eleusinian Initiation who did know. The Basileus belonged to the
>     staff of the great Hierophant, and was an Archon of Athens; and as
>     such was one of the chief Mystæ, belonging to the _interior_
>     Mysteries, to which a very select and small number obtained an
>     entrance.(204) The magistrates supervising the Eleusinia were
>     called Archons.(205)
> 
> We will deal, however, first with Simon the Magician.
> 
> SECTION XIV. SIMON AND HIS BIOGRAPHER HIPPOLYTUS.
> 
> As shown in our earlier volumes, Simon was a pupil of the Tanaim of
> Samaria, and the reputation he left behind him, together with the title of
> “the Great Power of God,” testify in favour of the ability and learning of
> his Masters. But the Tanaim were Kabalists of the same secret school as
> John of the _Apocalypse_, whose careful aim it was to conceal as much as
> possible the real meaning of the names in the Mosaic Books. Still the
> calumnies so jealously disseminated against Simon Magus by the unknown
> authors and compilers of the _Acts_ and other writings, could not cripple
> the truth to such an extent as to conceal the fact that no Christian could
> rival him in thaumaturgic deeds. The story told about his falling during
> an aerial flight, breaking both his legs and then committing suicide, is
> ridiculous. Posterity has heard but one side of the story. Were the
> disciples of Simon to have a chance, we might perhaps find that it was
> Peter who broke both his legs. But as against this hypothesis we know that
> this Apostle was too prudent ever to venture himself in Rome. On the
> confession of several ecclesiastical writers, no Apostle ever performed
> such “supernatural wonders,” but of course pious people will say this only
> the more proves that it was the Devil who worked through Simon. He was
> accused of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, only because he introduced as
> the “Holy Spiritus” the Mens (Intelligence) or “the Mother of all.” But we
> find the same expression used in the _Book of Enoch_, in which, in
> contradistinction to the “Son of Man,” he speaks of the “Son of the
> Woman.” In the _Codex_ of the Nazarenes, and in the _Zohar_, as well as in
> the _Books of Hermes_, the same expression is used; and even in the
> apocryphal _Evangelium of the Hebrews_ we read that Jesus admitted the
> female sex of the Holy Ghost by using the expression “My Mother, the Holy
> Pneuma.”
> 
> After long ages of denial, however, the actual existence of Simon Magus
> has been finally demonstrated, whether he was Saul, Paul or Simon. A
> manuscript speaking of him under the last name has been discovered in
> Greece and has put a stop to any further speculation.
> 
> In his _Histoire des Trois Premiers Siècles de l’Église_(206) M. de
> Pressensé gives his opinion on this additional relic of early
> Christianity. Owing to the numerous myths with which the history of Simon
> abounds—he says—many Theologians (among Protestants, he ought to have
> added) have concluded that it was no better than a clever tissue of
> legends. But he adds:
> 
>     It contains positive facts, it seems, now warranted by the
>     unanimous testimony of the Fathers of the Church and the narrative
>     of Hippolytus recently discovered.(207)
> 
> This MS. is very far from being complimentary to the alleged founder of
> Western Gnosticism. While recognising great powers in Simon, it brands him
> as a priest of Satan—which is quite enough to show that it was written by
> a Christian. It also shows that, like another “servant of the Evil One”—as
> Manes is called by the Church—Simon was a _baptised_ Christian; but that
> both, being too well versed in the mysteries of true _primitive_
> Christianity, were persecuted for it. The secret of such persecution was
> then, as it is now, quite transparent to those who study the question
> impartially. Seeking to preserve his independence, Simon could not submit
> to the leadership or authority of any of the Apostles, least of all to
> that of either Peter or John, the fanatical author of the _Apocalypse_.
> Hence charges of heresy followed by “anathema maranatha.” The persecutions
> by the Church were never directed against Magic, when it was orthodox; for
> the new Theurgy, established and regulated by the Fathers, now known to
> Christendom as “grace” and “miracles,” was, and is still, when it does
> happen, only Magic—whether conscious or unconscious. Such phenomena as
> have passed to posterity under the name of “divine miracles” were produced
> through powers acquired by great purity of life and ecstasy. Prayer and
> contemplation added to asceticism are the best means of discipline in
> order to become a Theurgist, where there is no regular initiation. For
> intense prayer for the accomplishment of some object is only intense
> _will_ and desire, resulting in unconscious Magic. In our own day George
> Müller of Bristol has proved it. But “divine miracles” are produced by the
> same causes that generate effects of Sorcery. The whole difference rests
> on the good or evil effects aimed at, and on the actor who produces them.
> The thunders of the Church were directed only against those who dissented
> from the formulæ and attributed to themselves the production of certain
> marvellous effects, instead of fathering them on a personal God; and thus,
> while those Adepts in Magic Arts who acted under her direct instructions
> and auspices were proclaimed to posterity and history as saints and
> friends of God, all others were hooted out of the Church and sentenced to
> eternal calumny and curses from their day to this. Dogma and authority
> have ever been the curse of humanity, the great extinguishers of light and
> truth.(208)
> 
> It was perhaps the recognition of a germ of that which, later on, in the
> then nascent Church, grew into the virus of insatiate power and ambition,
> culminating finally in the dogma of infallibility, that forced Simon, and
> so many others, to break away from her at her very birth. Sects and
> dissensions began with the first century. While Paul rebukes Peter to his
> face, John slanders under the veil of vision the Nicolaitans, and makes
> Jesus declare that he hates them.(209) Therefore we pay little attention
> to the accusations against Simon in the MS. found in Greece.
> 
> It is entitled _Philosophumena_. Its author, regarded as Saint Hippolytus
> by the Greek Church, is referred to as an “unknown heretic” by the
> Papists, only because he speaks in it “very slanderously” of Pope
> Callistus, also a Saint. Nevertheless, Greeks and Latins agree in
> declaring the _Philosophumena_ to be an extraordinary and very erudite
> work. Its antiquity and genuineness have been vouched for by the best
> authorities of Tübingen.
> 
> Whoever the author may have been, he expresses himself about Simon in this
> wise:
> 
>     Simon, a man well versed in magic arts, deceived many persons
>     partly by the art of Thrasymedes,(210) and partly _with the help
>     of demons_.(211)... He determined to pass himself off as a god....
>     Aided by his wicked arts, he turned to profit not only the
>     teachings of Moses, but those of the poets.... His disciples use
>     to this day his charms. Thanks to incantations, to philtres, to
>     their attractive caresses(212) and what they call “sleeps,” they
>     send demons to influence all those whom they would fascinate. With
>     this object they employ what they call “familiar demons.”(213)
> 
> Further on the MS. reads:
> 
>     The Magus (Simon) made those who wished to enquire of the demon,
>     write what their question was on a leaf of parchment; this, folded
>     in four, was thrown into a burning brazier, in order that the
>     smoke should reveal the contents of the writing to the Spirit
>     (demon) (_Philos._, IV. iv.). Incense was thrown by handfuls on
>     the blazing coals, the Magus adding, on pieces of papyrus, the
>     Hebrew names of the Spirits he was addressing, and the flame
>     devoured all. Very soon the _divine_ Spirit seemed to overwhelm
>     the Magician, who uttered unintelligible invocations, and plunged
>     in such a state he answered every question—phantasmal apparitions
>     being often raised over the flaming brazier (_ibid._, iii.); at
>     other times fire descended from heaven upon objects previously
>     pointed out by the Magician (_ibid._); or again the deity evoked,
>     crossing the room, would trace fiery orbs in its flight (_ibid._,
>     ix.).(214)
> 
> So far the above statements agree with those of Anastasius the Sinaïte:
> 
>     People saw Simon causing statues to walk; precipitating himself
>     into the flames without being burnt; metamorphosing his body into
>     that of various animals [lycanthropy]; raising at banquets
>     phantoms and spectres; _causing the furniture in the rooms to move
>     about_, by invisible _spirits_. He gave out that he was escorted
>     by a number of shades to whom he gave the name of “souls of the
>     dead.” Finally, he used to fly in the air ... (Anast., _Patrol.
>     Grecque_, vol. lxxxix., col. 523, quæst. xx.).(215)
> 
> Suetonius says in his _Nero_,
> 
>     In those days an Icarus fell at his first ascent near Nero’s box
>     and covered it with his blood.(216)
> 
> This sentence, referring evidently to some unfortunate acrobat who missed
> his footing and tumbled, is brought forward as a proof that it was Simon
> who fell.(217) But the latter’s name is surely too famous, if one must
> credit the Church Fathers, for the historian to have mentioned him simply
> as “an Icarus.” The writer is quite aware that there exists in Rome a
> locality named Simonium, near the Church of SS. Cosmas and Daimanus (Via
> Sacra), and the ruins of the ancient temple of Romulus, where the broken
> pieces of a stone, on which it is alleged the two knees of the Apostle
> Peter were impressed in thanksgiving after his supposed victory over
> Simon, are shown to this day. But what does this exhibition amount to? For
> the broken fragments of one stone, the Buddhists of Ceylon show a whole
> rock on Adam’s Peak with another imprint upon it. A crag stands upon its
> platform, a terrace of which supports a huge boulder, and on the boulder
> rests for nearly three thousand years the sacred foot‐print, of a foot
> five feet long. Why not credit the legend of the latter, if we have to
> accept that of St. Peter? “Prince of Apostles,” or “Prince of Reformers,”
> or even the “First‐born of Satan,” as Simon is called, all are entitled to
> legends and fictions. One may be allowed to discriminate, however.
> 
> That Simon could fly, _i.e._, raise himself in the air for a few minutes,
> is no impossibility. Modern mediums have performed the same feat supported
> by a force that Spiritualists persist in calling “spirits.” But if Simon
> did so, it was with the help of a self‐acquired blind power that heeds
> little the prayers and commands of rival Adepts, let alone Saints. The
> fact is that logic is against the supposed fall of Simon at the prayer of
> Peter. For had he been defeated publicly by the Apostle, his disciples
> would have abandoned him after such an evident sign of inferiority, and
> would have become orthodox Christians. But we find even the author of
> _Philosophumena_, just such a Christian, showing otherwise. Simon had lost
> so little credit with his pupils and the masses, that he went on daily
> preaching in the Roman Campania after his supposed fall from the clouds
> “far above the Capitolium,” in which fall he broke his legs only! Such a
> lucky fall is in itself sufficiently miraculous, one would say.
> 
> SECTION XV. ST. PAUL THE REAL FOUNDER OF PRESENT CHRISTIANITY.
> 
> We may repeat with the author of _Phallicism_:
> 
>     We are all for _construction_—even for _Christian_, although of
>     course philosophical _construction_. We have nothing to do with
>     reality, in man’s limited, mechanical, scientific sense, or with
>     _realism_. We have undertaken to show that mysticism is the very
>     life and soul of religion;(218) ... that _the Bible is only
>     misread and misrepresented when rejected as advancing supposed
>     fabulous and contradictory things_; that Moses did not make
>     mistakes, but spoke to the “children of men” in the only way in
>     which _children_ in their nonage can be addressed; that the world
>     is, indeed, a very different place from that which it is assumed
>     to be; that what is derided as superstition is the only true and
>     the only scientific _knowledge_, and moreover that modern
>     knowledge and modern science are to a great extent not only
>     _superstition_, but superstition of a very destructive and deadly
>     kind.(219)
> 
> All this is perfectly true and correct. But it is also true that the _New
> Testament_, the _Acts_ and the _Epistles_—however much the historical
> figure of Jesus may be true—are all symbolical and allegorical sayings,
> and that “it was not Jesus but Paul who was the real founder of
> Christianity;”(220) but it was not the official Church Christianity, at
> any rate. “The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch,” the
> _Acts of the Apostles_ tell us,(221) and they were not so called before,
> nor for a long time after, but simply Nazarenes.
> 
> This view is found in more than one writer of the present and the past
> centuries. But, hitherto, it has always been laid aside as an unproven
> hypothesis, a blasphemous assumption; though, as the author of _Paul, the
> Founder of Christianity_(222) truly says:
> 
>     Such men as Irenæus, Epiphanius and Eusebius have transmitted to
>     posterity a reputation for such untruth and dishonest practices
>     that the heart sickens at the story of the crimes of that period.
> 
> The more so, since the whole Christian scheme rests upon _their_ sayings.
> But we find now another corroboration, and this time on the perfect
> reading of biblical glyphs. In _The Source of Measures_ we find the
> following:
> 
>     It must be borne in mind that our present Christianity is
>     _Pauline_, not _Jesus_. Jesus, in his life, was a Jew, conforming
>     to the law; even more, He says: “The scribes and pharisees sit in
>     Moses’ seat; whatsoever therefore they command you to do, that
>     observe and do.” And again: “I did not come to destroy but to
>     fulfil the law.” Therefore, He was under the law to the day of his
>     death, and could not, while in life, abrogate one jot or tittle of
>     it. He was circumcised and commanded circumcision. But Paul said
>     of circumcision that it availed nothing, and _he_ (Paul) abrogated
>     the law. _Saul_ and _Paul_—that is, Saul, under the law, and Paul,
>     freed from the obligations of the law—were in one man, but
>     parallelisms _in the flesh_, of Jesus the man under the law as
>     observing it, who thus died in _Chréstos_ and arose, freed from
>     its obligations, in the spirit world as _Christos_, or the
>     triumphant Christ. It was the Christ who was freed, but Christ was
>     in the Spirit. Saul in the flesh was the function of, and parallel
>     of Chréstos. Paul in the flesh was the function and parallel of
>     Jesus become Christ in the spirit, as an early reality to answer
>     to and act for the _apotheosis_; and so armed with all authority
>     in the flesh to abrogate human law.(223)
> 
> The real reason why Paul is shown as “abrogating the law” can be found
> only in India, where to this day the most ancient customs and privileges
> are preserved in all their purity, notwithstanding the abuse levelled at
> the same. There is only one class of persons who can disregard the law of
> Brâhmanical institutions, caste included, with impunity, and that is the
> _perfect_ “Svâmîs,” the Yogîs—who have reached, or are supposed to have
> reached, the first step towards the Jîvanmukta state—or the full
> Initiates. And Paul was undeniably an Initiate. We will quote a passage or
> two from _Isis Unveiled_, for we can say now nothing better than what was
> said then:
> 
>     Take Paul, read the little of original that is left of him in the
>     writings attributed to this brave, honest, sincere man, and see
>     whether anyone can find a word therein to show that Paul meant by
>     the word Christ anything more than the abstract ideal of the
>     personal divinity indwelling in man. For Paul, Christ is not a
>     person, but an embodied idea. “If any man is in Christ he is a new
>     creation,” _he is reborn_, as after initiation, for the Lord is
>     spirit—the spirit of man. Paul was the only one of the apostles
>     who had understood the secret ideas underlying the teachings of
>     Jesus, although he had never met him.
> 
> But Paul himself was not infallible or perfect.
> 
>     Bent upon inaugurating a new and broad reform, one embracing the
>     whole of humanity, he sincerely set his own doctrines far above
>     the wisdom of the ages, above the ancient Mysteries and final
>     revelation to the Epoptæ.
> 
>     Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the “Initiates”
>     lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at
>     Ceuchreæ, where Lucius (_Apuleius_) was initiated, because “he had
>     a vow.” The Nazars—or set apart—as we see in the Jewish
>     Scriptures, had to cut their hair, which they wore long, and which
>     “no razor touched” at any other time, and sacrifice it on the
>     altar of initiation. And the Nazars were a class of Chaldæan
>     Theurgists or Initiates.
> 
> It is shown in _Isis Unveiled_ that Jesus belonged to this class.
> 
>     Paul declares that: “According to the grace of God which is given
>     unto me, as a wise _master‐builder_, I have laid the foundation.”
>     (_I. Corinth._, iii. 10.)
> 
>     This expression, master‐builder, used only _once_ in the whole
>     _Bible_, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In
>     the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called
>     Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance
>     it means the highest stage of clairvoyance—the divine; ... but the
>     real significance of the word is “overseeing,” from ὄπτομαι—“I see
>     myself.” In Sanskrit the root _âp_ had the same meaning
>     originally, though now it is understood as meaning “to
>     obtain.”(224)
> 
>     The word _epopteia_ is compound, from ἐπὶ “upon,” and ὄπτομαι “to
>     look,” or an overseer, an inspector—also used for a master‐
>     builder. The title of master‐mason, in Freemasonry, is derived
>     from this, in the sense used in the Mysteries. Therefore, when
>     Paul entitles himself a “master‐builder,” he is using a word pre‐
>     eminently kabalistic, theurgic, and masonic, and one which no
>     other apostle uses. He thus declares himself an _adept_, having
>     the right to initiate others.
> 
>     If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the
>     Grecian Mysteries and the _Kabalah_, before us, it will be easy to
>     find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by
>     Peter, John, and James. The author of the _Revelation_ was a
>     Jewish Kabalist, _pur sang_, with all the hatred inherited by him
>     from his forefathers toward the pagan Mysteries.(225) His jealousy
>     during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but
>     after the death of their common master that we see the two
>     apostles—the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the
>     Jewish Rabbis—preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the
>     eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so
>     much his superior in “Greek learning” and philosophy, must have
>     naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the
>     “Gnosis,” with the “wisdom” of the Greek Mysteries—hence, perhaps,
>     “Simon the Magician” as a comparison, not a nickname.(226)
> 
> SECTION XVI. PETER A JEWISH KABALIST, NOT AN INITIATE.
> 
> As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown that in all probability he had
> no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome than to
> furnish the pretext, so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenæus, of
> endowing the Church with a new name for the Apostle—Petra or Kiffa—a name
> which, by an easy play upon words, could be readily connected with
> Petroma. The Petroma was a pair of stone tablets used by the Hierophants
> at the Initiations, during the final Mystery. In this lies concealed the
> secret of the Vatican claim to the seat of Peter. As already quoted in
> _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 92:
> 
>     In the Oriental countries the designation Peter (in Phœnician and
>     Chaldaic an interpreter), appears to have been the title of this
>     personage.(227)
> 
> So far, and as the “interpreters” of _Neo_‐Christianism, the Popes have
> most undeniably the right to call themselves successors to the title of
> Peter, but hardly the successors to, least of all the interpreters of, the
> doctrines of Jesus, the Christ; for there is the Oriental Church, older
> and far purer than the Roman hierarchy, which, having ever faithfully held
> to the primitive teachings of the Apostles, is known historically to have
> refused to follow the Latin seceders from the original Apostolic Church,
> though, curiously enough, she is still referred to by her Roman sister as
> the “Schismatic” Church. It is useless to repeat the reasons for the
> statements above made, as they may all be found in _Isis Unveiled_,(228)
> where the words, Peter, Patar, and Pitar, are explained, and the origin of
> the “Seat of Pitah” is shown. The reader will find upon referring to the
> above pages that an inscription was found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept
> of the Eleventh Dynasty (2250 B.C. according to Bunsen), which in its turn
> was shown to have been transcribed from the Seventeenth Chapter of the
> _Book of the Dead_, dating certainly not later than 4500 B.C. or 496 years
> before the World’s Creation, in the Genesiacal chronology. Nevertheless,
> Baron Bunsen shows the group of the hieroglyphics given (_Peter‐ref‐su_,
> the “Mystery Word”) and the sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series
> of glosses and various interpretations on a monument 4,000 years old.
> 
>     This is identical with saying that the record (the true
>     interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible.... We beg
>     our readers to understand that a sacred text, a hymn, containing
>     the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state, about
>     4,000 years ago, as to be all but unintelligible to royal
>     scribes.(229)
> 
> “Unintelligible” to the non‐initiated—this is certain; and it is so proved
> by the confused and contradictory glosses. Yet there can be no doubt that
> it was—for it _still is_—a mystery word. The Baron further explains:
> 
>     It appears to me that our PTR is literally the old Aramaic and
>     Hebrew “Patar,” which occurs in the history of Joseph as the
>     specific word for _interpreting_, whence also Pitrum is the term
>     for interpretation of a text, a dream.(230)
> 
> This word, PTR, was partially interpreted owing to another word similarly
> written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a stele, the glyph used for
> it being an opened eye, interpreted by De Rougé(231) as “to appear,” and
> by Bunsen as “illuminator,” which is more correct. However it may be, the
> word Patar, or Peter, would locate both master and disciple in the circle
> of initiation, and connect them with the Secret Doctrine; while in the
> “Seat of Peter” we can hardly help seeing a connection with Petroma, the
> double set of stone tablets used by the Hierophant at the Supreme
> Initiation during the final Mystery, as already stated, also with the
> Pîtha‐sthâna (seat, or the place of a seat), a term used in the Mysteries
> of the Tântriks in India, in which the limbs of Satî are scattered and
> then united again, as those of Osiris by Isis.(232) Pîtha is a Sanskrit
> word, and is also used to designate the seat of the initiating Lama.
> 
> Whether all the above terms are due simply to “coincidences” or otherwise
> is left to the decision of our learned Symbologists and Philologists. We
> state facts—and nothing more. Many other writers, far more learned and
> entitled to be heard than the author has ever claimed to be, have
> sufficiently demonstrated that Peter never had anything to do with the
> foundation of the Latin Church; that his supposed name Petra or Kiffa,
> also the whole story of his Apostleship at Rome, are simply a play on the
> term, which meant in every country, in one or another form, the Hierophant
> or Interpreter of the Mysteries; and that finally, far from dying a martyr
> at Rome, where he had probably never been, he died at a good old age at
> Babylon. In _Sepher Toldoth Jeshu_, a Hebrew manuscript of great
> antiquity—evidently an original and very precious document, if one may
> judge from the care the Jews took to hide it from the Christians—Simon
> (Peter) is referred to as “a faithful servant of God,” who passed his life
> in austerities and meditation, a Kabalist and a Nazarene who lived at
> Babylon “at the top of a tower, composed hymns, preached charity,” and
> died there.
> 
> SECTION XVII. APOLLONIUS OF TYANA.
> 
> It is said in _Isis Unveiled_ that the greatest teachers of divinity agree
> that nearly all ancient books were written symbolically and in a language
> intelligible only to the Initiated. The biographical sketch of Apollonius
> of Tyana affords an example. As every Kabalist knows, it embraces the
> whole of the Hermetic Philosophy, being a counterpart in many respects of
> the traditions left us of King Solomon. It reads like a fairy story, but,
> as in the case of the latter, sometimes facts and historical events are
> presented to the world under the colours of fiction. The journey to India
> represents in its every stage, though of course allegorically, the trials
> of a Neophyte, giving at the same time a geographical and topographical
> idea of a certain country as it is even now, if one knows where to look
> for it. The long discourses of Apollonius with the Brâhmans, their sage
> advice, and the dialogues with the Corinthian Menippus would, if
> interpreted, give the Esoteric Catechism. His visit to the empire of the
> wise men, his interview with their king Hiarchas, the oracle of
> Amphiaraus, explain symbolically many of the secret dogmas of Hermes—in
> the generic sense of the name—and of Occultism. Wonderful is this to
> relate, and were not the statement supported by numerous calculations
> already made, and the secret already half revealed, the writer would never
> have dared to say it. The travels of the great Magus are correctly, though
> allegorically described—that is to say, all that is related by Damis had
> actually taken place—but the narrative is based upon the Zodiacal signs.
> As _transliterated_ by Damis under the guidance of Apollonius and
> _translated_ by Philostratus, it is a marvel indeed. At the conclusion of
> what may now be related of the wonderful Adept of Tyana our meaning will
> become clearer. Suffice it to say for the present that the dialogues
> spoken of would disclose, if correctly understood, some of the most
> important secrets of Nature. Éliphas Lévi points out the great resemblance
> which exists between King Hiarchus and the fabulous Hiram, from whom
> Solomon procured the cedars of Lebanon and the gold of Ophir. But he keeps
> silent as to another resemblance of which, as a learned Kabalist, he could
> not be ignorant. Moreover, according to his invariable custom, he
> mystifies the reader more than he teaches him, divulging nothing and
> leading him off the right track.
> 
> Like most of the historical heroes of hoary antiquity, whose lives and
> works strongly differ from those of commonplace humanity, Apollonius is to
> this day a riddle, which has, so far, found no Œdipus. His existence is
> surrounded with such a veil of mystery that he is often mistaken for a
> myth. But according to every law of logic and reason, it is quite clear
> that Apollonius should never be regarded in such a light. If the Tyanean
> Theurgist may be put down as a fabulous character, then history has no
> right to her Cæsars and Alexanders. It is quite true that this Sage, who
> stands unrivalled in his thaumaturgical powers to this day—on evidence
> historically attested—came into the arena of public life no one seems to
> know whence, and disappeared from it, no one seems to know whither. But
> the reasons for this are evident. Every means was used—especially during
> the fourth and fifth centuries of our era—to sweep from people’s minds the
> remembrance of this great and holy man. The circulation of his
> biographies, which were many and enthusiastic, was prevented by the
> Christians, and for a very good reason, as we shall see. The diary of
> Damis survived most miraculously, and remained alone to tell the tale. But
> it must not be forgotten that Justin Martyr often speaks of Apollonius,
> and the character and truthfulness of this good man are unimpeachable, the
> more in that he had good reasons to feel bewildered. Nor can it be denied
> that there is hardly a Church Father of the first six centuries that left
> Apollonius unnoticed. Only, according to invariable Christian customs of
> charity, their pens were dipped as usual in the blackest ink of _odium
> theologicum_, intolerance and one‐sidedness. St. Jerome (Hieronymus) gives
> at length the story of St. John’s alleged contest with the Sage of Tyana—a
> competition of “miracles”—in which, of course, the truthful saint(233)
> describes in glowing colours the defeat of Apollonius, and seeks
> corroboration in St. John’s _Apocrypha_ proclaimed doubtful _even_ by the
> Church.(234)
> 
> Therefore it is that nobody can say where or when Apollonius was born, and
> everyone is equally ignorant of the date at which, and of the place where
> he died. Some think he was eighty or ninety years old at the time of his
> death, others that he was one hundred or even one hundred and seventeen.
> But, whether he ended his days at Ephesus in the year 96 A.D., as some
> say, or whether the event took place at Lindus in the temple of Pallas‐
> Athene, or whether again he disappeared from the temple of Dictynna, or
> whether, as others maintain, he did not die at all, but when a hundred
> years old renewed his life by Magic, and went on working for the benefit
> of humanity, no one can tell. The Secret Records alone have noted his
> birth and subsequent career. But then—“who hath believed in _that_
> report?”
> 
> All that history knows is that Apollonius was the enthusiastic founder of
> a new school of contemplation. Perhaps less metaphorical and more
> practical than Jesus, he nevertheless inculcated the same quintessence of
> spirituality, the same high moral truths. He is accused of having confined
> them to the higher classes of society instead of doing what Buddha and
> Jesus did, instead of preaching them to the poor and the afflicted. Of his
> reasons for acting in such an exclusive way it is impossible to judge at
> so late a date. But Karmic law seems to be mixed up with it. Born, as we
> are told, among the aristocracy, it is very likely that he desired to
> finish the work undone in this particular direction by his predecessor,
> and sought to offer “peace on earth and good will” to _all_ men, and not
> alone to the outcast and the criminal. Therefore he associated with the
> kings and the mighty ones of the age. Nevertheless, the three “miracle‐
> workers” exhibited striking similarity of purpose. Like Jesus and like
> Buddha, Apollonius was the uncompromising enemy of all outward show of
> piety, all display of useless religious ceremonies, bigotry and hypocrisy.
> That his “miracles” were more wonderful, more varied, and far better
> attested in History than any others, is also true. Materialism denies; but
> evidence, and the affirmations of even the Church herself, however much he
> is branded by her, show this to be the fact.(235)
> 
>     The calumnies set afloat against Apollonius were as numerous as
>     they were false. So late as eighteen centuries after his death he
>     was defamed by Bishop Douglas in his work against miracles. In
>     this the Right Reverend bishop crushed himself against historical
>     facts. For it is not in the _miracles_, but in the identity of
>     ideas and doctrines preached that we have to look for a similarity
>     between Buddha, Jesus and Apollonius. If we study the question
>     with a dispassionate mind, we shall soon perceive that the ethics
>     of Gautama, Plato, Apollonius, Jesus, Ammonius Sakkas, and his
>     disciples, were all based on the same mystic philosophy—that all
>     worshipped one divine Ideal, whether they considered it as the
>     “Father” of humanity, who lives in man, as man lives in Him, or as
>     the Incomprehensible Creative Principle. All led God‐like lives.
>     Ammonius, speaking of his philosophy, taught that their school
>     dated from the days of Hermes, who brought his wisdom from India.
>     It was the same mystical contemplation throughout as that of the
>     Yogin: the communion of the Brâhman with his own luminous Self—the
>     “Âtman.”(236)
> 
> The groundwork of the Eclectic School is thus shown to be identical with
> the doctrines of the Yogîs—the Hindu Mystics; it is proved that it had a
> common origin, from the same source as the earlier Buddhism of Gautama and
> of his Arhats.
> 
>     The _Ineffable Name_ in the search for which so many
>     Kabalists—unacquainted with any Oriental or even European
>     Adepts—vainly consume their knowledge and lives, dwells latent in
>     the heart of every man. This mirific name which, according to the
>     most ancient oracles, “rushes into the infinite worlds,
>     ἀφοιτήτῳστροφάλιγγι,” can be obtained in a twofold way: by regular
>     initiation, and through the “small voice” which Elijah heard in
>     the cave of Horeb, the mount of God. And “when Elijah heard it he
>     wrapped his _face in his mantle_ and stood in the entering of the
>     cave. And behold there came _the_ voice.”
> 
>     When Apollonius of Tyana desired to hear the “small voice,” he
>     used to wrap himself up entirely in a mantle of fine wool, on
>     which he placed both his feet, after having performed certain
>     magnetic passes, and pronounced not the “name” but an invocation
>     well known to every adept. Then he drew the mantle over his head
>     and face, and his translucid or astral spirit was free. On
>     ordinary occasions he no more wore wool than the priests of the
>     temples. The possession of the secret combination of the “name”
>     gave the Hierophant supreme power over every being, human or
>     otherwise, inferior to himself in soul‐strength.(237)
> 
> To whatever school he belonged, this fact is certain, that Apollonius of
> Tyana left an imperishable name behind him. Hundreds of works were written
> upon this wonderful man; historians have seriously discussed him;
> pretentious fools, unable to come to any conclusion about the Sage, have
> tried to deny his very existence. As to the Church, although she execrates
> his memory, she has ever tried to present him in the light of a historical
> character. Her policy now seems to be to direct the impression left by him
> into another channel—a well known and a very old stratagem. The Jesuits,
> for instance, while admitting his “miracles,” have set going a double
> current of thought, and they have succeeded, as they succeed in all they
> undertake. Apollonius is represented by one party as an obedient “medium
> of Satan,” surrounding his theurgical powers by a most wonderful and
> dazzling light; while the other party professes to regard the whole matter
> as a clever romance, written with a predetermined object in view.
> 
> In his voluminous Memoirs of Satan, the Marquis de Mirville, in the course
> of his pleading for the recognition of the enemy of God as the producer of
> spiritual phenomena, devotes a whole chapter to this great Adept. The
> following translation of passages in his book unveils the whole plot. The
> reader is asked to bear in mind that the Marquis wrote every one of his
> works under the auspices and authorisation of the Holy See of Rome.
> 
>     It would be to leave the first century incomplete and to offer an
>     insult to the memory of St. John, to pass over in silence the name
>     of one who had the honour of being his special antagonist, as
>     Simon was that of St. Peter, Elymas that of Paul, etc. In the
>     first years of the Christian era, ... there appeared at Tyana in
>     Cappadocia one of those extraordinary men of whom the Pythagorean
>     School was so very lavish. As great a traveller as was his master,
>     initiated in all the secret doctrines of India, Egypt and Chaldæa,
>     endowed, therefore, with all the theurgic powers of the ancient
>     Magi, he bewildered, each in its turn, all the countries which he
>     visited, and which all—we are obliged to admit—seem to have
>     blessed his memory. We could not doubt this fact without
>     repudiating real historical records. The details of his life are
>     transmitted to us by a historian of the fourth century
>     (Philostratus), himself the translator of a diary that recorded
>     day by day the life of the philosopher, written by Damis, his
>     disciple and intimate friend.(238)
> 
> De Mirville admits the possibility of _some_ exaggerations in both
> recorder and translator; but he “does not believe they hold a very wide
> space in the narrative.” Therefore, he regrets to find the Abbé Freppel
> “in his eloquent _Essays_,(239) calling the diary of Damis a romance.”
> Why?
> 
>     [Because] the orator bases his opinion on the perfect similitude,
>     calculated as he imagines, of that legend with the life of the
>     Saviour. But in studying the subject more profoundly, he [Abbé
>     Freppel] can convince himself that neither Apollonius, nor Damis,
>     nor again Philostratus ever claimed a greater honour than a
>     likeness to St. John. This programme was in itself sufficiently
>     fascinating, and the travesty as sufficiently scandalous; for
>     owing to magic arts Apollonius had succeeded in counterbalancing,
>     in appearance, several of the miracles at Ephesus [produced by St.
>     John], etc.(240)
> 
> The _anguis in herba_ has shown its head. It is the perfect, the wonderful
> similitude of the life of Apollonius with that of the Saviour that places
> the Church between Scylla and Charybdis. To deny the life and the
> “miracles” of the former, would amount to denying the trustworthiness of
> the same Apostles and patristic writers on whose evidence is built the
> life of Jesus himself. To father the Adept’s beneficent deeds, his
> raisings of the dead, acts of charity, healing powers, etc., on the “old
> enemy” would be rather dangerous at this time. Hence the stratagem to
> confuse the ideas of those who rely upon authorities and criticisms. The
> Church is far more clear‐sighted than any of our great historians. The
> Church _knows_ that to deny the existence of that Adept would lead her to
> denying the Emperor Vespasian and _his_ Historians, the Emperors Alexander
> Severus and Aurelianus and _their_ Historians, and finally to deny Jesus
> and every evidence about Him, thus preparing the way to her flock for
> finally denying _herself_. It becomes interesting to learn what she says
> in this emergency, through her chosen speaker, De Mirville. It is as
> follows:
> 
> What is there so new and so impossible in the narrative of Damis
> concerning their voyages to the countries of the Chaldees and the
> Gymnosophists?—he asks. Try to recall, before denying, what were in those
> days those countries of marvels _par excellence_, as also the testimony of
> such men as Pythagoras, Empedocles and Democritus, who ought to be allowed
> to have known what they were writing about. With what have we finally to
> reproach Apollonius? Is it for having made, as the Oracles did, a series
> of prophecies and predictions wonderfully verified? No: because, better
> studied now, we _know_ what they are.(241) The Oracles have now become to
> us, what they were to every one during the past century, from Van Dale to
> Fontenelle. Is it for having been endowed with second sight, and having
> had visions at a distance?(242) No; for such phenomena are at the present
> day endemical in half Europe. Is it for having boasted of his knowledge of
> every existing language under the sun, without having ever learned one of
> them? But who can be ignorant of the fact that this is the best
> criterion(243) of the presence and assistance of a spirit of whatever
> nature it may be? Or is it for having believed in transmigration
> (reincarnation)? It is still believed in (by millions) in our day. No one
> has any idea of the number of the men of Science who long for the re‐
> establishment of the Druidical Religion and of the Mysteries of
> Pythagoras. Or is it for having exorcised the demons and the plague? The
> Egyptians, the Etruscans and all the Roman Pontiffs had done so long
> before.(244) For having conversed with the dead? We do the same to‐day, or
> believe we do so—which is all the same. For having believed in the
> Empuses? Where is the Demonologist that does not know that the Empuse is
> the “south demon” referred to in David’s _Psalms_, and dreaded then as it
> is feared even now in all Northern Europe?(245) For having made himself
> invisible at will? It is one of the achievements of mesmerism. For having
> appeared after his (supposed) death to the Emperor Aurelian above the city
> walls of Tyana, and for having compelled him thereby to raise the siege of
> that town? Such was the mission of every hero beyond the tomb, and the
> reason of the worship vowed to the Manes.(246) For having descended into
> the famous den of Trophonius, and taken from it an old book preserved for
> years after by the Emperor Adrian in his Antium library? The trustworthy
> and sober Pausanias had descended into the same den before Apollonius, and
> came back no less a believer. For having disappeared at his death? Yes,
> like Romulus, like Votan, like Lycurgus, like Pythagoras,(247) always
> under the most mysterious circumstances, ever attended by apparitions,
> revelations, etc. Let us stop here and repeat once more: had the life of
> Apollonius been simple _romance_, he would never have attained such a
> celebrity during his lifetime or created such a numerous sect, one so
> enthusiastic after his death.
> 
> And, to add to this, had all this been a romance, never would a Caracalla
> have raised a heroön to his memory(248) or Alexander, Severus have placed
> his bust between those of two Demi‐Gods and of the true God,(249) or an
> Empress have corresponded with him. Hardly rested from the hardships of
> the siege at Jerusalem, Titus would not have hastened to write to
> Apollonius a letter, asking to meet him at Argos and adding that his
> father and himself (Titus) owed all to him, the great Apollonius, and
> that, therefore, his first thought was for their benefactor. Nor would the
> Emperor Aurelian have built a temple and a shrine to that great Sage, to
> thank him for his apparition and communication at Tyana. That _posthumous_
> conversation, as all knew, saved the city, inasmuch as Aurelian had in
> consequence raised the siege. Furthermore, had it been a romance, History
> would not have had Vopiscus,(250) one of the most trustworthy Pagan
> Historians, to certify to it. Finally, Apollonius would not have been the
> object of the admiration of such a noble character as Epictetus, and even
> of several of the Fathers of the Church; Jerome for instance, in his
> better moments, writing thus of Apollonius:
> 
>     This travelling philosopher found something to learn wherever he
>     went; and profiting everywhere thus improved with every day.(251)
> 
> As to his prodigies, without wishing to fathom them, Jerome most
> undeniably admits them as such; which he would assuredly never have done,
> had he not been compelled to do so by facts. To end the subject, had
> Apollonius been a simple hero of a romance, dramatised in the fourth
> century, the Ephesians would not, in their enthusiastic gratitude, have
> raised to him a golden statue for all the benefits he had conferred upon
> them.(252)
> 
> SECTION XVIII. FACTS UNDERLYING ADEPT BIOGRAPHIES.
> 
> The tree is known by its fruits; the nature of the Adept by his words and
> deeds. These words of charity and mercy, the noble advice put into the
> mouth of Apollonius (or of his sidereal phantom), as given by Vopiscus,
> show the Occultists who Apollonius was. Why then call him the “Medium of
> Satan” seventeen centuries later? There must be a reason, and a very
> potent reason, to justify and explain the secret of such a strong animus
> of the Church against one of the noblest men of his age. There is a reason
> for it, and we give it in the words of the author of the _Key to the
> Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures_, and of Professor
> Seyffarth. The latter analyses and explains the salient dates in the life
> of Jesus, and thus throws light on the conclusions of the former. We quote
> both, blending the two.
> 
>     According to solar months (of thirty days, one of the calendars in
>     use among the Hebrews) all remarkable events of the _Old
>     Testament_ happened on the days of the equinoxes and the
>     solstices; for instance, the foundations and dedications of the
>     temples and altars [and consecration of the tabernacle]. On the
>     same cardinal days, the most remarkable events of the _New
>     Testament_ happened; for instance, the annunciation, the birth,
>     the resurrection of Christ, and the birth of John the Baptist. And
>     thus we learn that all remarkable epochs of the _New Testament_
>     were typically sanctified a long time before by the _Old
>     Testament_, beginning at the day succeeding the end of the
>     Creation, which was the day of the vernal equinox. During the
>     crucifixion, on the 14th day of Nisan, Dionysius Areopagita saw,
>     in Ethiopia, an eclipse of the sun, and he said, “Now the Lord
>     (Jehovah) is suffering something.” Then Christ arose from the dead
>     on the 22d March, 17 _Nisan_, Sunday, the day of the vernal
>     equinox (Seyf., quoting Philo de Septen)—that is, on Easter, or on
>     the day when the sun gives new life to the earth. The words of
>     John the Baptist “He must increase, but I must decrease,” serve to
>     prove, as is affirmed by the fathers of the church, that John was
>     born on the longest day of the year, and Christ, who was six
>     months younger, on the shortest, 22d June and 22d December, the
>     solstices.
> 
>     This only goes to show that, as to another phase, John and Jesus
>     were but epitomisers of the history of the same sun, under
>     differences of aspect or condition; and one condition following
>     another, of necessity, the statement, _Luke_, ix. 7, was not only
>     not an empty one, but it was true, that which “was said of some,
>     that (in Jesus) John was risen from the dead.” (And this
>     consideration serves to explain why it has been that the _Life of
>     Apollonius of Tyana_, by Philostratus, has been so persistently
>     kept back from translation and from popular reading. Those who
>     have studied it in the original have been forced to the comment
>     that either the _Life of Apollonius_ has been taken from the _New
>     Testament_, or that the _New Testament_ narratives have been taken
>     from the _Life of Apollonius_, because of the manifest sameness of
>     the _means of construction_ of the narratives. The explanation is
>     simple enough, when it is considered that the names of _Jesus_,
>     Hebrew יש, and Apollonius, or Apollo, are alike names of _the sun
>     in the heavens_; and necessarily the history of the one, as to his
>     travels through _the signs_, with the personifications of his
>     sufferings, triumphs and miracles, could be but the _history of
>     the other_, where there was a widespread, common method of
>     describing those travels by personification.) It seems also that,
>     for long afterward, all this was known to rest upon an
>     astronomical basis; for the secular church, so to speak, was
>     founded by Constantine, and the objective condition of the worship
>     established was that part of his decree, in which it was affirmed
>     that the venerable day of the _sun_ should be the day set apart
>     for the worship of Jesus Christ, as _Sun_‐day. There is something
>     weird and startling in some other facts about this matter. The
>     prophet Daniel (_true prophet_, as says Graetz),(253) by use of
>     the pyramid numbers, or astrological numbers, foretold the cutting
>     off of the _Méshiac_, as it happened (which would go to show the
>     accuracy of his astronomical knowledge, if there was an eclipse of
>     the sun at that time).... Now, however, the temple was destroyed
>     in the year 71, in the month Virgo, and 71 is the Dove number, as
>     shown, or 71 × 5 = 355, and with _the fish_, a Jehovah number.
> 
> “Is it possible,” queries further on the author, thus answering the
> intimate thought of every Christian and Occultist who reads and studies
> his work:
> 
>     Is it possible that the events of humanity do run co‐ordinately
>     with these number forms? If so, while Jesus Christ, as an
>     astronomical figure, was true to all that has been advanced, and
>     more, possibly, He may, as a man, have filled up, under the
>     numbers, answers in the sea of life to predestined type. The
>     personality of Jesus does not appear to have been destroyed,
>     because, _as a condition_, he was answering to astronomical forms
>     and relations. The Arabian says, “Your destiny is written in the
>     stars.”(254)
> 
> Nor is the “personality” of Apollonius “destroyed” for the same reason.
> The case of Jesus covers the ground for the same possibility in the cases
> of all Adepts and Avatâras—such as Buddha, Shankarâchârya, Krishna,
> etc.—all of these as great and as historical for their respective
> followers and in their countries, as Jesus of Nazareth is now for
> Christians and in this land.
> 
> But there is something more in the old literature of the early centuries.
> Iamblichus wrote a biography of the great Pythagoras.
> 
>     The latter so closely resembles the life of Jesus that it may be
>     taken for a travesty. Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch relate the
>     history of Plato according to a similar style.(255)
> 
> Why then wonder at the doubts that assail every scholar who studies all
> these lives? The Church herself knew all these doubts in her early stages;
> and though only one of her Popes has been known publicly and openly as a
> Pagan, how many more were there who were too ambitious to reveal the
> truth?
> 
> This “mystery,” for mystery indeed it is to those who, not being
> Initiates, fail to find the key of the perfect similitude between the
> lives of Pythagoras, Buddha, Apollonius, etc.—is only a natural result for
> those who know that all these great characters were Initiates of the same
> School. For them there is neither “travesty” nor “copy” of one from the
> other; for them they are all “originals,” only painted to represent one
> and the same subject: the mystic, and at the same time the public, life of
> the Initiates sent into the world to save portions of humanity, if they
> could not save the whole bulk. Hence, the same programme for all. The
> assumed “immaculate origin” for each, referring to their “mystic birth”
> during the Mystery of Initiation, and accepted literally by the
> multitudes, encouraged in this by the better informed but ambitious
> clergy. Thus, the mother of each one of them was declared a virgin,
> conceiving her son directly by the Holy Spirit of God; and the Sons, in
> consequence, were the “Sons of God,” though in truth, none of them was any
> more entitled to such recognition than were the rest of his brother
> Initiates, for they were all—so far as their mystic lives were
> concerned—only “the epitomisers of the history of the same Sun,” which
> epitome is another mystery within the Mystery. The biographies of the
> external personalities bearing the names of such heroes have nothing to do
> with, and are quite independent of the private lives of the heroes, being
> only the mystic records of their public and, parallel therewith, of their
> _inner_ lives, in their characters as Neophytes and Initiates. Hence, the
> manifest sameness of the means of construction of their respective
> biographies. From the beginning of Humanity the Cross, or Man, with his
> arms stretched out horizontally, typifying his kosmic origin, was
> connected with his psychic nature and with the struggles which lead to
> Initiation. But, if it is once shown that (_a_) every true Adept had, and
> still has, to pass through the seven and the twelve trials of Initiation,
> symbolised by the twelve labours of Hercules; (_b_) that the day of his
> real birth is regarded as that day when he is born into the world
> spiritually, his very age being counted from the hour of his second birth,
> which makes of him a “twice‐born,” a Dvija or Initiate, on which day he is
> indeed born of a God and from an immaculate Mother; and (_c_) that the
> trials of all these personages are made to correspond with the Esoteric
> significance of initiatory rites—all of which corresponded to the twelve
> zodiacal signs—then every one will see the meaning of the travels of all
> those heroes through the signs of the Sun in Heaven; and that they are in
> each individual case a personification of the “sufferings, triumphs and
> miracles” of an Adept, before and after his Initiation. When to the world
> at large all this is explained, then also the mystery of all those lives,
> so closely resembling each other that the history of one seems to be the
> history of the other, and _vice versâ_, will, like everything else, become
> plain.
> 
> Take an instance: The legends—for they are _all_ legends for exoteric
> purposes, whatever may be the denials in one case—of the lives of Krishna,
> Hercules, Pythagoras, Buddha, Jesus, Apollonius, Chaitanya. On the worldly
> plane, their biographies, if written by one outside the circle, would
> differ greatly from what we read of them in the narratives that are
> preserved of their mystic lives. Nevertheless, however much masked and
> hidden from profane gaze, the chief features of such lives will all be
> found there in common. Each of those characters is represented as a
> divinely begotten Sotēr (Saviour), a title bestowed on deities, great
> kings and heroes; everyone of them, whether at their birth or afterwards,
> is searched for, and threatened with death (yet never killed) by an
> opposing power (the world of Matter and Illusion), whether it be called a
> king Kansa, king Herod, or king Mâra (the Evil Power). They are all
> tempted, persecuted and finally said to have been murdered at the end of
> the rite of Initiation, _i.e._, in their _physical_ personalities, of
> which they are supposed to have been rid for ever after _spiritual_
> “resurrection” or “birth.” And having thus come to an end by this supposed
> violent death, they all descend to the Nether World, the Pit or Hell—the
> Kingdom of Temptation, Lust and Matter, therefore of Darkness, whence
> returning, having overcome the “Chrest‐condition,” they are glorified and
> become “Gods.”
> 
> It is not in the course of their everyday life, then, that the great
> similarity is to be sought, but in their inner state and in the most
> important events of their career as religious teachers. All this is
> connected with, and built upon, an astronomical basis, which serves, at
> the same time, as a foundation for the representation of the degrees and
> trials of Initiation: descent into the Kingdom of Darkness and Matter,
> _for the last time_, to emerge therefrom as “Suns of Righteousness,” is
> the most important of these and, therefore, is found in the history of all
> the Sotērs—from Orpheus and Hercules, down to Krishna and Christ. Says
> Euripides:
> 
>     Heracles, who has gone from the chambers of earth,
>     Leaving the nether home of Pluto.(256)
> 
> And Virgil writes:
> 
>     At Thee the Stygian lakes trembled; Thee the janitor of Orcus
>     Feared.... Thee not even Typhon frightened....
>     Hail, _true son of Jove_, glory added to the Gods.(257)
> 
> Orpheus seeks, in the kingdom of Pluto, Eurydice, his lost Soul; Krishna
> goes down into the infernal regions and rescues therefrom his six
> brothers, he being the seventh Principle; a transparent allegory of his
> becoming a “perfect Initiate,” the whole of the six Principles merging
> into the seventh. Jesus is made to descend into the kingdom of Satan to
> save the soul of Adam, or the symbol of material physical humanity.
> 
> Have any of our learned Orientalists ever thought of searching for the
> origin of this allegory, for the parent “Seed” of that “Tree of Life”
> which bears such verdant boughs since it was first planted on earth by the
> hand of its “Builders”? We fear not. Yet it is found, as is now shown,
> even in the exoteric, distorted interpretations of the _Vedas_—of the _Rig
> Veda_, the oldest, the most trustworthy of all the four—this root and seed
> of all future Initiate‐Saviours being called in it the Visvakarmâ, the
> “Father” Principle, “beyond the comprehension of mortals;” in the _second_
> stage Sûrya, the “Son,” who offers Himself as a sacrifice to Himself; in
> the third, the Initiate, who sacrifices His _physical_ to His _spiritual_
> Self. It is in Visvakarmâ, the “omnificent,” who becomes (mystically)
> Vikkartana, the “sun shorn of his beams,” who suffers for his too ardent
> nature, and then becomes glorified (by purification), that the keynote of
> the Initiation into the greatest Mystery of Nature was struck. Hence the
> secret of the wonderful “similarity.”
> 
> All this is allegorical and mystical, and yet perfectly comprehensible and
> plain to any student of Eastern Occultism, even superficially acquainted
> with the Mysteries of Initiation. In our objective Universe of Matter and
> false appearances the Sun is the most fitting emblem of the life‐giving,
> beneficent Deity. In the subjective, boundless World of Spirit and Reality
> the bright luminary has another and a mystical significance, which cannot
> be fully given to the public. The so‐called “idolatrous” Pârsîs and Hindus
> are certainly nearer the truth in their religious reverence for the Sun,
> than the cold, ever‐analysing, and as ever‐mistaken, public is prepared to
> believe, at present. The Theosophists, who will be alone able to take in
> the meaning, may be told that the Sun is the external manifestation of the
> Seventh Principle of our Planetary System, while the Moon is its Fourth
> Principle, shining in the borrowed robes of her master, saturated with and
> reflecting every passionate impulse and evil desire of her grossly
> material body, Earth. The whole cycle of Adeptship and Initiation and all
> its mysteries are connected with, and subservient to, these two and the
> Seven Planets. Spiritual clairvoyance is derived from the Sun; all psychic
> states, diseases, and even lunacy, proceed from the Moon.
> 
> According even to the data of History—her conclusions being remarkably
> erroneous while her premises are mostly correct—there is an extraordinary
> agreement between the “legends” of every Founder of a Religion (and also
> between the rites and dogmas of all) and the names and course of
> constellations headed by the Sun. It does not follow, however, because of
> this, that both Founders and their Religions should be, the one myths, and
> the other superstitions. They are, one and all, the different versions of
> the same natural primeval Mystery, on which the Wisdom‐Religion was based,
> and the development of its Adepts subsequently framed.
> 
> And now once more we have to beg the reader not to lend an ear to the
> charge—against Theosophy in general and the writer in particular—of
> disrespect toward one of the greatest and noblest characters in the
> History of Adeptship—Jesus of Nazareth—nor even of hatred to the Church.
> The expression of truth and fact can hardly be regarded, with any
> approximation to justice, as blasphemy or hatred. The whole question hangs
> upon the solution of that one point: Was Jesus as “Son of God” and
> “Saviour” of Mankind, unique in the World’s annals? Was His case—among so
> many similar claims—the only exceptional and unprecedented one; His birth
> the sole supernaturally immaculate; and were all others, as maintained by
> the Church, but blasphemous Satanic copies and plagiarisms by
> anticipation? Or was He only the “son of his deeds,” a pre‐eminently holy
> man, and a reformer, one of many, who paid with His life for the
> presumption of endeavouring, in the face of ignorance and despotic power,
> to enlighten mankind and make its burden lighter by His Ethics and
> Philosophy? The first necessitates a blind, all‐resisting faith; the
> latter is suggested to every one by reason and logic. Moreover, has the
> Church always believed as she does now—or rather, as she pretends she
> does, in order to be thus justified in directing her anathema against
> those who disagree with her—or has she passed through the same throes of
> doubt, nay, of secret denial and unbelief, suppressed only by the force of
> ambition and love of power?
> 
> The question must be answered in the affirmative as to the second
> alternative. It is an irrefutable conclusion, and a natural inference
> based on facts known from historical records. Leaving for the present
> untouched the lives of many Popes and Saints that loudly belied their
> claims to infallibility and holiness, let the reader turn to
> Ecclesiastical History, the records of the growth and progress of the
> Christian Church (not of Christianity), and he will find the answer on
> those pages. Says a writer:
> 
>     The Church has known too well the suggestions of freethought
>     created by enquiry, as also all those doubts that provoke her
>     anger to‐day; and the “sacred truths” she would promulgate have
>     been in turn admitted and repudiated, transformed and altered,
>     amplified and curtailed, by the dignitaries of the Church
>     hierarchy, even as regards the most fundamental dogmas.
> 
> Where is that God or Hero whose origin, biography, and genealogy were more
> hazy, or more difficult to define and finally agree upon than those of
> Jesus? How was the now irrevocable dogma with regard to His true nature
> settled at last? By His mother, according to the Evangelists, He was a
> man—a simple mortal man; by His Father He is God! But how? Is He then man
> or God, or is He both at the same time? asks the perplexed writer. Truly
> the propositions offered on this point of the doctrine have caused floods
> of ink and blood to be shed, in turn, on poor Humanity, and still the
> doubts are not at rest. In this, as in everything else, the wise Church
> Councils have contradicted themselves and changed their minds a number of
> times. Let us recapitulate and throw a glance at the texts offered for our
> inspection. This is History.
> 
> The Bishop Paul of Samosata denied the divinity of Christ at the first
> Council of Antioch; at the very origin and birth of theological
> Christianity, He was called “Son of God” merely on account of His holiness
> and good deeds. His blood was corruptible in the Sacrament of the
> Eucharist.
> 
> At the Council of Nicæa, held A.D. 325, Arius came out with his premisses,
> which nearly broke asunder the Catholic Union.
> 
> Seventeen bishops defended the doctrines of Arius, who was exiled for
> them. Nevertheless, thirty years after, A.D. 355, at the Council of Milan,
> three hundred bishops signed a letter of adherence to the Arian views,
> notwithstanding that ten years earlier, A.D. 345, at a new Council of
> Antioch, the Eusebians had proclaimed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God
> and One with His Father.
> 
> At the Council of Sirmium, A.D. 357, the “Son” had become no longer
> consubstantial. The Anomæans, who denied that consubstantiality, and the
> Arians were triumphant. A year later, at the second Council of Ancyra, it
> was decreed that the “Son was not consubstantial but only similar to the
> Father in his substance.” Pope Liberius ratified the decision.
> 
> During several centuries the Councils fought and quarrelled, supporting
> the most contradictory and opposite views, the fruit of their laborious
> travail being the Holy Trinity, which, Minerva‐like, issued forth from the
> theological brain, armed with all the thunders of the Church. The new
> mystery was ushered into the world amid some terrible strifes, in which
> murder and other crimes had a high hand. At the Council of Saragossa, A.D.
> 380, it was proclaimed that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and
> the same Person, Christ’s human nature being merely an “illusion”—an echo
> of the Avatâric Hindu doctrine. “Once upon this slippery path the Fathers
> had to slide down _ad absurdum_—which they did not fail of doing.” How
> deny human nature in him who was born of a woman? The only wise remark
> made during one of the Councils of Constantinople came from Eutyches, who
> was bold enough to say: “May God preserve me from reasoning on the nature
> of my God”—for which he was excommunicated by Pope Flavius.
> 
> At the Council of Ephesus, A.D. 449, Eutyches had his revenge. As
> Eusebius, the veracious Bishop of Cæsarea, was forcing him into the
> admission of _two_ distinct natures in Jesus Christ, the Council rebelled
> against him and it was proposed that Eusebius should be burned alive. The
> bishops arose like one man, and with fists clenched, foaming with rage,
> demanded that Eusebius should be torn into two halves, and be dealt by as
> he would deal with Jesus, whose nature he divided. Eutyches was re‐
> established in his power and office, Eusebius and Flavius deposed. Then
> the two parties attacked each other most violently and fought. St. Flavius
> was so ill‐treated by Bishop Diodorus, who assaulted and kicked him, that
> he died a few days later from the injuries inflicted.
> 
> Every incongruity was courted in these Councils, and the result is the
> present living paradoxes called Church dogmas. For instance, at the first
> Council of Ancyra, A.D. 314, it was asked, “In baptizing a woman with
> child, is the unborn baby also baptized by the fact?” The Council answered
> in the negative; because, as was alleged, “the person thus receiving
> baptism must be a consenting party, which is impossible to the child in
> its mother’s womb.” Thus then unconsciousness is a canonical obstacle to
> baptism, and thus no child baptised nowadays is baptised at all in fact.
> And then what becomes of the tens of thousands of starving heathen babies
> baptised by the missionaries during famines, and otherwise surreptitiously
> “saved” by the too zealous Padres? Follow one after another the debates
> and decisions of the numberless Councils, and behold on what a jumble of
> contradictions the present infallible and Apostolic Church is built!
> 
> And now we can see how greatly paradoxical, when taken literally, is the
> assertion in _Genesis_: “God created man in his own image.” Besides the
> glaring fact that it is not the Adam of dust (of Chapter ii.), who is thus
> made in the divine image, but the Divine Androgyne (of Chapter i.), or
> Adam Kadmon, one can see for oneself that God—the God of the Christians at
> any rate—was created by man in his own image, amid the kicks, blows and
> murders of the early Councils.
> 
> A curious fact, one that throws a flood of light on the claim that Jesus
> was an Initiate and a martyred Adept, is given in the work, (already so
> often referred to) which may be called “a mathematical revelation”.—_The
> Source of Measures._
> 
>     Attention is called to the part of the 46th verse of the 27th
>     Chapter of Matthew, as follows: “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?—that
>     is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Of course,
>     our versions are taken from the original _Greek_ manuscripts (the
>     reason why we have no original Hebrew manuscripts concerning these
>     occurrences being because the enigmas in Hebrew would betray
>     themselves on comparison with the sources of their derivation, the
>     _Old Testament_). The Greek manuscripts, without exception, give
>     these words as—
> 
>     Ἠλί Ἠλί λαμὰ σαβαχθανί
> 
>     They are _Hebrew words_, rendered into the _Greek_, and in Hebrew
>     are as follows:
> 
>     אלי אלי למח שבחתני
> 
>     The Scripture of these words says, “that is to say, My God, my
>     God, why hast thou forsaken me?” as their proper translation. Here
>     then are the words, beyond all dispute; and beyond all question,
>     such is the interpretation given of them by Scripture. Now the
>     words will not bear this interpretation, and it is a false
>     rendering. The true meaning is _just the opposite of the one
>     given_, and is—
> 
>     _My God, my God, how thou dost glorify me!_
> 
>     But even more, for while _lama_ is _why_, or _how_, as a verbal it
>     connects the idea of _to dazzle_, or adverbially, it could run
>     “_how dazzlingly_,” and so on. To the unwary reader this
>     interpretation is enforced, and made to answer, as it were, to the
>     fulfilment of a prophetic utterance, by a marginal reference to
>     the _first_ verse of the _twenty‐second_ Psalm, which reads:
> 
>     “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
> 
>     The Hebrew of this verse for these words is—
> 
>     אלי אלי למה עזבתני
> 
>     as to which the reference is correct, and the interpretation sound
>     and good, but with an utterly different word. The words are—
> 
>     _Eli, Eli, lamah azabvtha‐ni?_
> 
>     No wit of man, however scholarly, can save this passage from
>     _falseness of rendering_ on its face; and as so, it becomes a most
>     terrible blow upon the proper first‐face sacredness of the
>     recital.(258)
> 
> For ten years or more, sat the revisers (?) of the _Bible_, a most
> imposing and solemn array of the learned of the land, the greatest Hebrew
> and Greek scholars of England, purporting to correct the mistakes and
> blunders, the sins of omission and of commission of their less learned
> predecessors, the translators of the Bible. Are we going to be told that
> none of them saw the glaring difference between the Hebrew words in
> _Psalm_ xxii., _azabvtha‐ni_, and _sabachthani_ in _Matthew_; that they
> were not aware of the deliberate falsification?
> 
> For “falsification” it was. And if we are asked the reason why the early
> Church Fathers resorted to it, the answer is plain: Because the
> _Sacramental_ words belonged in their true rendering to Pagan temple
> rites. They were pronounced after the terrible trials of Initiation, and
> were still fresh in the memory of some of the “Fathers” when the _Gospel
> of Matthew_ was edited into the Greek language. Because, finally, many of
> the Hierophants of the Mysteries, and many more of the Initiates were
> still living in those days, and the sentence rendered in its true words
> would class Jesus directly with the simple Initiates. The words “My God,
> my Sun, thou hast poured thy radiance upon me!” were the final words that
> concluded the thanksgiving prayer of the Initiate, “the Son and the
> glorified Elect of the Sun.” In Egypt we find to this day carvings and
> paintings that represent the rite. The candidate is between two divine
> sponsors; one “Osiris‐Sun” with the head of a hawk, representing life, the
> other Mercury—the ibis‐headed, psychopompic genius, who guides the Souls
> after death to their new abode, Hades—standing for the death of the
> physical body, figuratively. Both are shown pouring the “stream of life,”
> the water of purification, on the head of the Initiate, the two streams of
> which, interlacing, form a cross. The better to conceal the truth, this
> _basso‐relievo_ has also been explained as a “Pagan presentment of a
> Christian truth.” The Chevalier des Mousseaux calls this Mercury:
> 
>     The assessor of Osiris‐Sol, as St. Michael is the assessor,
>     Ferouer, of the Word.
> 
> The monogram of Chrestos and the Labarum, the standard of Constantine—who,
> by the by, died a Pagan and was never baptised—is a symbol derived from
> the above rite and also denotes “life and death.” Long before the sign of
> the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret
> sign of recognition among Neophytes and Adepts. Say Éliphas Lévi:
> 
>     The sign of the cross adopted by the Christians does not belong
>     exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the
>     oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by
>     the occult verse of the _Pater_, to which we have called attention
>     in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it,
>     or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning:
>     one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to
>     neophytes and the profane.(259)
> 
> One can understand now why the _Gospel of Matthew_, the Evangel of the
> Ebionites, has been for ever excluded in its Hebrew form from the world’s
> curious gaze.
> 
>     Jerome found the authentic and original Evangel written in Hebrew,
>     by Matthew the Publican, at the library collected at Cæsarea by
>     the martyr Pamphilius. “_I received permission from the
>     Nazaræans_, who at Berœa of Syria used this (gospel) to translate
>     it,” he writes toward the end of the fourth century.(260) “In the
>     Evangel which the _Nazarenes_ and _Ebionites_ use,” said Jerome,
>     “which recently I translated from Hebrew into Greek, and which is
>     called by most persons the _genuine_ gospel of Matthew,” etc.(261)
> 
>     That the apostles had received a “secret doctrine” from Jesus, and
>     that he himself taught one, is evident from the following words of
>     Jerome, who confessed it in an unguarded moment. Writing to the
>     Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, he complains that “a difficult
>     work is enjoined, since this (translation) has been commanded me
>     by your Felicities, which _St. Matthew himself_, the Apostle and
>     Evangelist, _did not wish to be openly written_. For if this had
>     not been _secret_, he (Matthew) would have added to the Evangel
>     that what he gave forth _was his_; but he made up this book
>     _sealed up in the Hebrew characters_, which he put forth _even in
>     such a way_ that the book, written in Hebrew letters and by the
>     hand of himself, might be possessed _by the men most religious_;
>     who also, in the course of time, received it from those who
>     preceded them. But this very book they never gave to any one to be
>     transcribed, and _its text_ they related some one way and some
>     another.”(262) And he adds further on the same page: “And it
>     happened that this book, having been published by a disciple of
>     Manichæus, named Seleucus, who also wrote falsely _The Acts of the
>     Apostles_, exhibited matter not for edification, but for
>     destruction; and that this (book) was _approved in a synod_ which
>     the ears of the Church properly refused to listen to.”(263)
> 
>     Jerome admits, himself, that the book which he authenticates as
>     being written “by the hand of Matthew,” was nevertheless a book
>     which, notwithstanding that he translated it twice, was nearly
>     unintelligible to him, for it was arcane. Nevertheless, Jerome
>     coolly sets down every commentary upon it but his own as
>     _heretical_. More than that, Jerome knew that this Gospel was the
>     only _original_ one, yet he becomes more zealous than ever in his
>     persecution of the “Heretics.” Why? Because to accept it was
>     equivalent to reading the death sentence of the established
>     Church. _The Gospel according to the Hebrews_ was well known to
>     have been the only one accepted for four centuries by the Jewish
>     Christians, the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. And neither of the
>     latter accepted the _divinity of_ Christ.(264)
> 
> The Ebionites were the first, the earliest Christians, whose
> representative was the Gnostic author of the _Clementine Homilies_, and as
> the author of _Supernatural Religion_ shows,(265) Ebionitic Gnosticism had
> once been the purest form of Christianity. They were the pupils and
> followers of the early Nazarenes—the kabalistic Gnostics. They believed in
> the Æons, as the Cerinthians did, and that “the world was put together by
> Angels” (Dhyân Chohans), as Epiphanius complains (_Contra Ebionitas_):
> “Ebion had the opinion of the Nazarenes, the form of Cerinthians.” “They
> decided that Christ was of the seed of a man,” he laments.(266) Thus
> again:
> 
>     The badge of Dan‐Scorpio is _death‐life_, in the symbol ☧ as
>     _cross‐bones and skull_, ... or _life‐death_ ... the standard of
>     Constantine, the Roman Emperor. Abel has been shown to be Jesus,
>     and Cain‐Vulcain, or Mars, pierced him. Constantine was the Roman
>     Emperor, whose warlike god was Mars, and a Roman soldier pierced
>     Jesus on the cross....
> 
>     But the piercing of Abel was the consummation of his marriage with
>     Cain, and this was proper under the form of Mars Generator; hence
>     the double glyph, one of Mars‐Generator [Osiris‐Sun] and Mars‐
>     Destroyer [Mercury the God of Death in the Egyptian _basso‐
>     relievo_] in one; significant, again, of the primal idea of the
>     living cosmos, or of birth and death, as necessary to the
>     continuation of the stream of life.(267)
> 
> To quote once more from _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     A Latin cross of a perfect Christian shape was found hewn upon the
>     granite slabs of the Adytum of the Serapeum; and the monks did not
>     fail to claim that the cross had been hallowed by the Pagans in a
>     “spirit of prophecy.” At least, Sozomen, with an air of triumph,
>     records the fact.(268) But archæology and symbolism, those
>     tireless and implacable enemies of clerical false pretences, have
>     found in the hieroglyphics of the legend running round the design
>     at least a partial interpretation of its meaning.
> 
>     According to King and other numismatists and archæologists, the
>     cross was placed there as the symbol of eternal life. Such a Tau,
>     or Egyptian cross, was used in the Bacchic and Eleusinian
>     Mysteries. Symbol of the dual generative power, it was laid upon
>     the breast of the Initiate, after his “new birth” was
>     accomplished, and the Mystæ had returned from their baptism in the
>     sea. It was a mystic sign that his spiritual birth had regenerated
>     and united his astral soul with his divine spirit, and that he was
>     ready to ascend in spirit to the blessed abodes of light and
>     glory—the Eleusinia. The Tau was a magic talisman at the same time
>     as a religious emblem. It was adopted by the Christians through
>     the Gnostics and Kabalists, who used it largely, as their numerous
>     gems testify. These in turn had the Tau (or handled cross) from
>     the Egyptians, and the Latin Cross from the Buddhist missionaries,
>     who brought it from India (where it can be found even now) two or
>     three centuries B.C. The Assyrians, Egyptians, ancient Americans,
>     Hindus and Romans had it in various, but very slight modifications
>     of shape. Till very late in the middle ages, it was considered a
>     potent spell again at epilepsy and demoniacal possession, and the
>     “signet of the living God” brought down in St. John’s vision by
>     the angel ascending from the east to “seal the servants of our God
>     in the foreheads,” was but the same mystic Tau—the Egyptian Cross.
>     In the painted glass of St. Denis (France) this angel is
>     represented as stamping this sign on the forehead of the elect;
>     the legend reads, SIGNUM TAY. In King’s _Gnostics_, the author
>     reminds us that “this mark is commonly borne by St. Anthony, an
>     _Egyptian_ recluse.”(269) What the real meaning of the Tau was, is
>     explained to us by the Christian St. John, the Egyptian Hermes,
>     and the Hindu Brahmans. It is but too evident that, with the
>     Apostle at least, it meant the “Ineffable Name,” as he calls this
>     “signet of the living God” a few chapters further on(270) the
>     “_Father’s name written in their foreheads_.”
> 
>     The Brahmâtmâ, the chief of the Hindu Initiates, had on his head‐
>     gear two keys, symbol of the revealed mystery of life and death,
>     placed cross‐like; and in some Buddhist pagodas of Tartary and
>     Mongolia, the entrance of a chamber within the temple, generally
>     containing the staircase which leads to the inner dagoba,(271) and
>     the porticos of some _Prachidas_(272) are ornamented with a cross
>     formed of two fishes, as found on some of the zodiacs of the
>     Buddhists. We should not wonder at all at learning that the sacred
>     device in the tombs in the catacombs at Rome, the “Vesica Piscis,”
>     was derived from the said Buddhist zodiacal sign. How general must
>     have been that geometrical figure in the world‐symbols, may be
>     inferred from the fact that there is a Masonic tradition that
>     Solomon’s temple was built on three foundations, forming the
>     “triple Tau” or three crosses.
> 
>     In its mystical sense, the Egyptian cross owes its origin, as an
>     emblem, to the realisation by the earliest philosophy of an
>     _androgynous dualism of every manifestation in nature_, which
>     proceeds from the abstract ideal of a likewise androgynous deity,
>     while the Christian emblem is simply due to chance. Had the Mosaic
>     law prevailed, Jesus should have been lapidated.(273) The crucifix
>     was an instrument of torture, and utterly common among Romans as
>     it was unknown among Semitic nations. It was called the “Tree of
>     Infamy.” It is but later that it was adopted as a Christian
>     symbol; but during the first two decades the apostles looked upon
>     it with horror.(274) It is certainly not the Christian Cross that
>     John had in mind when speaking of the “signet of the living God,”
>     but the _mystic_ Tau—the Tetragrammaton, or mighty name, which, on
>     the most ancient Kabalistic talismans, was represented by the four
>     Hebrew letters composing the Holy Word.
> 
>     The famous Lady Ellenborough, known among the Arabs of Damascus,
>     and in the desert, after her last marriage, as _Hanoum Medjouye_,
>     had a talisman in her possession, presented to her by a Druse from
>     Mount Lebanon. It was recognised by a certain sign on its left
>     corner as belonging to that class of gems which is known in
>     Palestine as a “_Messianic_” amulet, of the second or third
>     century B.C. It is a green stone of a pentagonal form; at the
>     bottom is engraved a fish; higher, Solomon’s Seal;(275) and still
>     higher, the four Chaldaic letters—Jod, He, Vau, He, IAHO, which
>     form the name of the Deity. These are arranged in quite an unusual
>     way, running from below upward, in reversed order, and forming the
>     Egyptian Tau. Around these there is a legend which, as the gem is
>     not our property, we are not at liberty to give. The Tau, in its
>     mystical sense, as well as the _Crux ansata_, is the _Tree of
>     Life_.
> 
>     It is well known that the earliest Christian emblems—before it was
>     ever attempted to represent the bodily appearance of Jesus—were
>     the Lamb, the Good Shepherd, and _The Fish_. The origin of the
>     latter emblem, which has so puzzled the archæologists, thus
>     becomes comprehensible. The whole secret lies in the easily
>     ascertained fact that, while in the _Kabalah_ the King Messiah is
>     called “Interpreter,” or Revealer of the Mystery, and shown to be
>     the _fifth_ emanation, in the _Talmud_—for reasons we will now
>     explain—the Messiah is very often designated as “DAG,” or the
>     Fish. This is an inheritance from the Chaldees, and relates—as the
>     very name indicates—to the Babylonian Dagon, the man‐fish, who was
>     the instructor and interpreter of the people, to whom he appeared.
>     Abarbanel explains the name, by stating that the sign of his
>     (Messiah’s) coming is the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the
>     sign _Pisces_.(276) Therefore, as the Christians were intent upon
>     identifying their Christos with the Messiah of the _Old
>     Testament_, they adopted it so readily as to forget that its true
>     origin might be traced still further back than the Babylonian
>     Dagon. How eagerly and closely the ideal of Jesus was united, by
>     the early Christians, with every imaginable kabalistic and pagan
>     tenet, may be inferred from the language of Clemens, of
>     Alexandria, addressed to his co‐religionists.
> 
>     When they were debating upon the choice of the most appropriate
>     symbol to remind them of Jesus, Clemens advised them in the
>     following words: “Let the engraving upon the gem of your ring be
>     either _a dove_, or _a ship running before the wind_ (the Argha),
>     or a _fish_.” Was the good father, when writing this sentence,
>     labouring under the recollection of Joshua, son of Nun (called
>     _Jesus_ in the Greek and Slavonian versions); or had he forgotten
>     the real interpretation of these pagan symbols?(277)
> 
> And now, with the help of all these passages scattered hither and thither
> in _Isis_ and other works of this kind, the reader will see and judge for
> himself which of the two explanations—the Christian or that of the
> Occultist—is the nearer to truth. If Jesus were not an Initiate, why
> should all these _allegorical_ incidents of his life be given? Why should
> such extreme trouble be taken, so much time wasted trying to make the
> above: (_a_) answer and dovetail with purposely picked out sentences in
> the _Old Testament_, to show them as _prophecies_; and (_b_) to preserve
> in them the initiatory symbols, the emblems so pregnant with Occult
> meaning and all of these belonging to Pagan _mystic_ Philosophy? The
> author of the _Source of Measures_ gives out that _mystical_ intent; but
> only once now and again, in its one‐sided, numerical and kabalistic
> meaning, without paying any attention to, or having concern with, the
> primeval and more spiritual origin, and he deals with it only so far as it
> relates to the _Old Testament_. He attributes the _purposed_ change in the
> sentence “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” to the principle already mentioned
> of the crossed bones and skull in the Labarum,
> 
>     As an emblem of death, being placed over the door of life and
>     signifying _birth_, or of the intercontainment of two opposite
>     principles in one, just as, mystically, the Saviour was held to be
>     man‐woman.(278)
> 
> The author’s idea is to show the mystic blending by the Gospel writers of
> Jehovah, Cain, Abel, etc., with Jesus (in accordance with Jewish
> kabalistic numeration); the better he succeeds, the more clearly he shows
> that it was a _forced_ blending, and that we have not a record of the real
> events of the life of Jesus, narrated by eye‐witnesses or the Apostles.
> The narrative is all based on the signs of the Zodiac:
> 
>     Each a double sign or male‐female [in ancient astrological
>     Magic]—viz: it was Taurus‐Eve, and Scorpio was Mars‐Lupa, or Mars
>     with the female wolf [in relation to Romulus]. So, as these signs
>     were opposites of each other, yet _met in the centre_, they were
>     connected; and so in fact it was, and in a double sense, the
>     conception of the year was in Taurus, as the conception of Eve by
>     Mars, her opposite, in Scorpio. The birth would be at the winter
>     solstice, or Christmas. On the contrary, by conception in
>     Scorpio—_viz._, of Lupa by Taurus—birth would be in Leo. Scorpio
>     was Chrēstos in _humiliation_, while Leo was Christos in
>     _triumph_. While Taurus‐Eve fulfilled astronomical functions,
>     Mars‐Lupa fulfilled spiritual ones by type.(279)
> 
> The author bases all this on Egyptian correlations and meanings of Gods
> and Goddesses, but ignores the Âryan, which are far earlier.
> 
>     _Mooth_ or _Mouth_, was the Egyptian cognomen of Venus, (Eve,
>     mother of all living) [as _Vach_, mother of all living, a
>     permutation of _Aditi_, as Eve was one of Sephira] _or the moon_.
>     Plutarch (_Isis_, 374) hands it down that Isis was sometimes
>     called _Muth_, which word means _mother_ ... (Issa, אשה, woman).
>     (_Isis_, p. 372). Isis, he says is that part of Nature, which, as
>     feminine, contains in herself, as (nutrix) nurse, all things to be
>     born.... “Certainly the moon,” speaking astronomically, “chiefly
>     exercises this function in Taurus, Venus being the house (in
>     opposition to Mars, _generator_, in Scorpio), because the sign is
>     luna, hypsoma. Since ... Isis Metheur differs from Isis _Muth_ and
>     that in the vocable _Muth_ the _notion of bringing forth_ may be
>     concealed, and since fructification must take place, _Sol_ being
>     joined with _Luna_ in _Libra_, it is not improbable that Muth
>     first indeed signifies Venus in Libra; hence Luna in Libra.”
>     (Beiträge zur Kenntniss, pars. 11, S. 9, under _Muth_.)(280)
> 
> Then Fuerst, under _Bohu_, is quoted to show
> 
>     The double play upon the word _Muth_ by help of which the real
>     intent is produced in the occult way ... _sin_, _death_, and
>     _woman_ are one in the glyph, and correlatively connected with
>     _intercourse_ and _death_.(281)
> 
> All this is applied by the author _only_ to the exoteric and Jewish
> euhemerised symbols, whereas they were meant, first of all, to conceal
> cosmogonical mysteries, and then, those of anthropological evolution with
> reference to the Seven Races, already evoluted and to come, and especially
> as regards the last branch races of the third Root‐Race. However, the word
> _void_ (primeval Chaos) is shown to be taken for Eve‐Venus‐Naamah,
> agreeably with Fuerst’s definition; for as he says:
> 
>     In this primitive signification [of void] was בהו [bohu] taken in
>     the Biblical cosmogony, and used in establishing the dogma יש מאין
>     _Jes_ (us) _m’aven_, (_Jes‐us from nothing_), respecting creation.
>     [Which shows the writers of the _New Testament_ considerably
>     skilled in the _Kabalah_ and Occult Sciences, and corroborates
>     still more our assertion.] Hence Aquila translates οὔδεν vulg.
>     vacua (hence _vacca_, _cow_) [hence also the horns of Isis—Nature,
>     Earth, and the Moon—taken from Vâch, the Hindu “Mother of all that
>     lives,” identified with Virâj and called in Atharvaveda the
>     daughter of Kâma, the _first_ desires: “That daughter of thine, O
>     Kâma, is _called __ the cow_, she whom Sages name _Vâch‐Virâj_,”
>     who was _milked_ by Brihaspati, the Rishi, which is another
>     mystery] Onkelos and Samarit. ריקבי.
> 
>     The Phœnician cosmogony has connected _Bohu_ בהו Βααυ into a
>     personified expression denoting the _primitive substance_, and as
>     a deity, the _mother of races of the gods_ [which is Aditi and
>     Vâch]. The Aramean name בהו‐תא, בהו‐ת, בהו‐ת, Βαώθ, Βυθ‐ός, Buto,
>     for the _mother of the gods_, which passed over to the Gnostics,
>     Babylonians and Egyptians, _is identical then with Môt_ (מות, our
>     _Muth_) properly, (Βώθ) _originated in Phœnician_ from an
>     interchange of _b_ with _m_.(282)
> 
> Rather, one would say, go to the origin. The mystic euhemerisation of
> Wisdom and Intelligence, operating in the work of cosmic evolution, or
> _Buddhi_ under the names of Brahmâ, Purusha, etc., as male power, and
> Aditi‐Vâch, etc., as female, whence Sarasvatî, Goddess of Wisdom, who
> became under the veils of Esoteric concealment, Butos, _Bythos_—Depth, the
> grossly material, personal female, called Eve, the “primitive woman” of
> Irenæus, and the world springing out of _Nothing_.
> 
>     The workings out of this glyph of 4th _Genesis_ help to the
>     comprehension of the division of one character into the forms of
>     two persons; as Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abram and Isaac,
>     Jacob and Esau, and so on [all male and female].... Now, as
>     linking together several great salient points in the Biblical
>     structure: (_1_) as to the _Old_ and _New Testaments_; with also
>     (_2_) as to the Roman Empire; (_3_) as to confirming the meanings
>     and uses of symbols; and (_4_) as to confirming the entire
>     explanation and reading of the glyphs; as (_5_) recognising and
>     laying down the base of the great pyramid as the _foundation
>     square_ of the Bible construction; (_6_) as well as the new Roman
>     adoption under Constantine—the following given:(283)
> 
>     Cain has been shown to be ... the 360 circle of the Zodiac, the
>     perfect and exact standard, by a squared division; hence his name
>     of Melchizadik.... [The geometrical and numerical demonstrations
>     here follow.] It has been repeatedly stated that the object of the
>     Great Pyramid construction was to measure the _heavens and the
>     earth_ ... [the objective spheres as evoluting from the
>     subjective, purely spiritual Kosmos, we beg leave to add];
>     therefore, its measuring containment would indicate all the
>     substance of measure of _the heavens and the earth_, or agreeably
>     to ancient recognition, _Earth_, _Air_, _Water_ and _Fire_.(284)
>     (The base side of this pyramid was diameter to a circumference _in
>     feet_ of 2400. The characteristic of this is 24 feet, or 6 × 4 =
>     24, or this very Cain‐Adam square.) Now, by the restoration of the
>     encampment of the Israelites, as initiated by Moses, by the great
>     scholar, Father Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit priest, the above
>     is precisely, by Biblical record and traditionary sources, the
>     method of laying off this encampment. The _four interior squares_
>     were devoted to (1) Moses and Aaron; (2) Kohath; (3) Gershom; and
>     (4) Merari—the last three being the heads of the Levites. The
>     attributes of these squares were the _primal_ attributes of Adam‐
>     Mars and were concreted of the elements, _Earth_, _Air_, _Fire_,
>     _Water_, or ים = Iam = _Water_, נור = Nour = _Fire_, רוח = Rouach
>     = _Air_, and יבשׂׂשׂה = Iābeshah = _Earth_. The initial letters of
>     these words are INRI—the symbol usually translated as _I_esus
>     _N_azarenus _R_ex _I_udæorum—“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the
>     Jews.” This square of INRI is the _Adam square_, which was
>     extended from, as a foundation, into four others of 144 × 2 = 288,
>     to the side of the large square of 288 × 4 = 1152, = the whole
>     circumference. But this square is the display of also circular
>     elements and 115·2 can denote this. Put _INRI_ into a circle, or
>     read it as the letters stand in the square, as to its values of
>     1521, and we have [Symbol: circle with numbers inside: 1, 1, 2, 5]
>     which reads 115·2.
> 
>     But as seen Cain denotes this as, or in, the 115 of his name:
>     which 115 was the very complement to make up the 360 day year, to
>     agree with the balances of the standard circle, which were Cain.
>     The corner squares of the larger square are, A = Leo, and B = Dan
>     Scorpio; and it is seen that Cain pierces Abel at the intersection
>     of the equinoctial with the solstice cross lines, referred to from
>     Dan‐Scorpio on the celestial circle. But Dan‐Scorpio borders on
>     Libra, the scales, whose sign is ♎ (which sign is that of the
>     ancient _pillow_ on which _the back of the head to the ears_(285)
>     rested, the pillow of Jacob), and is represented for one symbol as
>     [Symbol: Letters X, P, and S, with Libra symbol atop them]....
>     Also the badge of Dan‐Scorpio is death‐life, in the symbol ☧. Now
>     the cross is the emblem of the _origin of measures_, in the
>     _Jehovah_ form of a _straight line one of a denomination of 20612,
>     the perfect circumference_; hence Cain was this as Jehovah, for
>     the text says that _he was_ Jehovah. But the attachment of a man
>     to this cross was that of 113: 355 to 6561: 5153 × 4 = 20612, as
>     shown. Now, over the _head_ of Jesus crucified was placed the
>     inscription, of which the initial letters of the words have always
>     been retained as symbolic, and handed down and used as a monogram
>     of Jesus Chrestos—_viz._, INRI or _Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judæorum_;
>     but they are located on the _Cross_, or the cubed _form_ of the
>     circular origin of measures which measure the substance of
>     _Earth_, _Air_, _Fire_ and _Water_, or INRI = 1152, as shown. Here
>     is the _man_ on the _cross_, or 113: 355 combined with 6561: 5153
>     × 4 = 20612. These are the _pyramid‐base_ numbers as coming from
>     113: 355 as the Hebrew source; whence the Adam‐square, which is
>     the pyramid base, and the centre one to the larger square of the
>     _encampment_. Bend INRI into a circle, and we have 1152, or the
>     circumference of the latter. But Jesus dying (or Abel married)
>     made use of the very words needed to set forth all. He says, _Eli,
>     Eli, Lama Sabachthani_.... Read them by their power values, in
>     _circular form_, as produced from the Adam form as shown, and we
>     have אלי = 113, אלי = 113, or 113—311: לפה = 345, or Moses in the
>     Cain‐Adam pyramid circle: שכחת = 710, equals Dove, or Jonah and
>     710 ÷ 2 = 355, or 355—553; and finally, as determinative of all יב
>     or _ni_, where ב = _nun_, fish = 565, and י = 1 or 10; together
>     565 י = יהוה or the Christ value....
> 
>     [All of the above] throws light on the transfiguration scene on
>     the mount. There were present there Peter and James and John with
>     Jesus; or ים Iami, James, _Water_; יבשה, Peter, _Earth_; דרה,
>     John, _Spirit_, _Air_, and יבור Jesus, _Fire_, _Life_—together
>     INRI. But behold Eli and Moses met them there, or אלי and למה or
>     _Eli_ and _Lamah_, or 113 and 345. And this shows that the scene
>     of transfiguration was connected with the one above set
>     forth.(286)
> 
> This kabalistical reading of the Gospel narratives—hitherto supposed to
> record the most important, the most mystically awful, yet most real events
> of the life of Jesus—must fall with terrible weight upon some Christians.
> Every honest trusting believer who has shed tears of reverential emotion
> over the events of the short period of the public life of Jesus of
> Nazareth, has to choose one of the two ways opening before him after
> reading the aforesaid: either his faith has to render him quite impervious
> to any light coming from human reasoning and evident fact; or he must
> confess that he has lost his Saviour. The One whom he had hitherto
> considered as the unique incarnation on this earth of the One Living God
> in heaven, fades into thin air, on the authority of the properly read and
> correctly interpreted _Bible_ itself. Moreover, since on the authority of
> Jerome himself and his accepted and authentic confession, the book written
> by the hand of Matthew “exhibits matter not for _edification_ but for
> _destruction_” (of Church and _human_ Christianity, and only that) what
> truth can be expected from his famous _Vulgate_? _Human_ mysteries,
> concocted by generations of Church Fathers bent upon evolving a religion
> of their own invention, are seen instead of a _divine_ Revelation; and
> that this was so is corroborated by a prelate of the Latin Church. Saint
> Gregory Nazianzen wrote to his friend and confidant, Saint Jerome:
> 
>     Nothing can impose better on a people than verbiage; the less they
>     understand the more they admire.... Our fathers and doctors have
>     often said, not what they thought, but that to which circumstances
>     and necessity forced them.
> 
> Which then of the two—the clergy, or the Occultists and Theosophists—are
> the more blasphemous and dangerous? Is it those who would impose upon the
> world’s acceptance a Saviour of their own fashioning, a God with human
> shortcomings, and who therefore is certainly not a perfect divine Being;
> or those others who say: Jesus of Nazareth was an Initiate, a holy, grand
> and noble character, but withal human, though truly “a Son of God”?
> 
> If Humanity is to accept a so‐called supernatural Religion, how far more
> logical to the Occultist and the Psychologist seems the transparent
> allegory given of Jesus by the Gnostics. They, as Occultists, and with
> Initiates for their Chiefs, differed only in their renderings of the story
> and in their symbols, and not at all in substance. What say the Ophites,
> the Nazarenes, and other “heretics”? Sophia, “the Celestial Virgin,” is
> prevailed upon to send Christos, her emanation, to the help of perishing
> humanity, from whom Ilda‐Baoth (the Jehovah of the Jews) and his six Sons
> of Matter (the lower terrestrial Angels) are shutting out the divine
> light. Therefore, Christos, the perfect,(287)
> 
>     Uniting himself with Sophia [divine wisdom] descended through the
>     seven planetary regions, assuming in each an analogous form ...
>     [and] entered into the man Jesus at the moment of his baptism in
>     the Jordan. From this time forth Jesus began to work miracles;
>     before that he had been entirely ignorant of his own mission.
> 
> Ilda‐Baoth, discovering that Christos was bringing to an end his kingdom
> of Matter, stirred up the Jews, his own people, against Him, and Jesus was
> put to death. When Jesus was on the Cross Christos and Sophia left His
> body, and returned to Their own sphere. The material body of Jesus was
> abandoned to the earth, but He Himself, the Inner Man, was clothed with a
> body made up of _æther_.(288)
> 
>     Thenceforth he consisted merely of soul and spirit.... During his
>     sojourn upon earth of _eighteen_ months after he had risen, he
>     received from Sophia that perfect knowledge, that true Gnosis,
>     which he communicated to the small portion of the Apostles who
>     were capable of receiving the same.(289)
> 
> The above is transparently Eastern and Hindu; it is the Esoteric Doctrine
> pure and simple, save for the names and the allegory. It is, more or less,
> the history of every Adept who obtains Initiation. The Baptism in the
> Jordan is the Rite of Initiation, the final purification; whether in
> sacred pagoda, tank, river, or temple lake in Egypt or Mexico. The perfect
> Christos and Sophia—divine Wisdom and Intelligence—enter the Initiate at
> the moment of the mystic rite, by transference from Guru to Chelâ, and
> leave the physical body, at the moment of the death of the latter, to re‐
> enter the Nirmânakâya, or the astral Ego of the Adept.
> 
>     The spirit of Buddha [collectively] overshadows the Bodhisattvas
>     of his Church
> 
> says the Buddhist Ritual of Âryâsangha.
> 
> Says the Gnostic teaching:
> 
>     When he [the spirit of Christos] shall have collected all the
>     Spiritual, all the Light [that exists in matter], out of
>     Ilbadaoth’s empire, Redemption is accomplished and the end of the
>     world arrived.(290)
> 
> Say the Buddhists:
> 
>     When Buddha [the Spirit of the Church] hears the hour strike, he
>     will send Maitreya Buddha—after whom the old world wall be
>     destroyed.
> 
> That which is said of Basilides by King may be applied as truthfully to
> every innovator, so called, whether of a Buddhist or of a Christian
> Church. In the eyes of Clemens Alexandrinus, he says, the Gnostics taught
> very little that was blameable in their mystical transcendental views.
> 
>     In his eyes the latter [Basilides], was not a _heretic_, that is
>     an innovator upon the accepted doctrines of the Catholic Church,
>     but only a theosophic speculator who sought to express old truths
>     by new formulæ.(291)
> 
> There was a Secret Doctrine preached by Jesus; and “secresy” in those days
> meant Secrets, or Mysteries of Initiation, all of which have been either
> rejected or disfigured by the Church. In the Clementine _Homilies_ we
> read:
> 
>     And Peter said: “We remember that our Lord and Teacher, commanding
>     us, said ‘Guard the mysteries for me and the sons of my house.’ ”
>     Wherefore also he explained to His disciples privately the
>     Mysteries of the Kingdom of the Heavens.(292)
> 
> SECTION XIX. ST. CYPRIAN OF ANTIOCH.
> 
> The Æons (Stellar Spirits)—emanated from the Unknown of the Gnostics, and
> identical with the Dhyân Chohans of the Esoteric Doctrine—and their
> Pleroma, having been transformed into Archangels and the “Spirits of the
> Presence” by the Greek and Latin Churches, the prototypes have lost caste.
> The Pleroma(293) was now called the “Heavenly Host,” and therefore the old
> name had to become identified with Satan and his “Host.” Might is right in
> every age, and History is full of contrasts. Manes had been called the
> “Paraclete”(294) by his followers. He was an Occultist, but passed to
> posterity, owing to the kind exertions of the Church, as a Sorcerer, so a
> match had to be found for him by way of contrast. We recognise this match
> in St. Cyprianus of Antioch, a self‐confessed if not a real “Black
> Magician,” it seems, whom the Church—as a reward for his contrition and
> humility—subsequently raised to the high rank of Saint and Bishop.
> 
> What history knows of him is not much, and it is mostly based on his own
> confession, the truthfulness of which is warranted, we are told, by St.
> Gregory, the Empress Eudoxia, Photius and the Holy Church. This curious
> document was ferreted out by the Marquis de Mirville,(295) in the Vatican,
> and by him translated into French for the first time, as he assures the
> reader. We beg his permission to re‐translate a few pages, not for the
> sake of the penitent Sorcerer, but for that of some students of Occultism,
> who will thus have an opportunity of comparing the methods of ancient
> Magic (or as the Church calls it, Demonism) with those of modern Theurgy
> and Occultism.
> 
> The scenes described took place at Antioch about the middle of the third
> century, 252 A.D., says the translator. This Confession was written by the
> penitent Sorcerer after his conversion; therefore, we are not surprised to
> find how much room he gives in his lamentations to reviling his Initiator
> “Satan,” or the “Serpent Dragon,” as he calls him. There are other and
> more modern instances of the same trait in human nature. Converted Hindus,
> Pârsîs and other “heathen” of India are apt to denounce their forefathers’
> religions at every opportunity. Thus runs the Confession:
> 
>     O all of you who reject the real mysteries of Christ, see my
>     tears!... You who wallow in your demoniacal practices, learn by my
>     sad example all the vanity of their [the demons’] baits ... I am
>     that Cyprianus, who, vowed to Apollo from his infancy, was early
>     initiated into all the arts of the dragon.(296) Even before the
>     age of seven I had already been introduced into the temple of
>     Mithra: three years later, my parents taking me to Athens to be
>     received as citizen, I was permitted likewise to penetrate the
>     mysteries of Ceres lamenting her daughter,(297) and I also became
>     the guardian of the Dragon in the Temple of Pallas.
> 
>     Ascending after that to the summit of Mount Olympus, the Seat of
>     the Gods, as it is called, there too I was initiated into the
>     sense, and the _real_ meaning of their [the Gods’] speeches and
>     their clamorous manifestations (_strepituum_). It is there that I
>     was made to see in imagination (_phantasia_) [or _mâyâ_] those
>     trees and all those herbs that operate such prodigies with the
>     help of demons; ... and I saw their dances, their warfares, their
>     snares, illusions and promiscuities. I heard their singing.(298) I
>     saw finally, for forty consecutive days, the phalanx of the Gods
>     and Goddesses, sending from Olympus, as though they were Kings,
>     spirits to represent them on earth and act in their name among all
>     the nations.(299)
> 
>     At that time I lived entirely on fruit, eaten only after sunset,
>     the virtues of which were explained to me by the seven priests of
>     the sacrifices.(300)
> 
>     When I was fifteen my parents desired that I should be made
>     acquainted, not only with all the natural laws in connection with
>     the generation and corruption of bodies on earth, in the air and
>     in the seas, but also with all the other forces _grafted_(301)
>     (_insitas_) on these by the Prince of the World in order to
>     counteract their primal and divine constitution.(302) At twenty I
>     went to Memphis, where, penetrating into the Sanctuaries, I was
>     taught to discern all that pertains to the communications of
>     demons [Daimones or Spirits] with terrestrial matters, their
>     aversion for certain places, their sympathy and attraction for
>     others, their expulsion from certain planets, certain objects and
>     laws, their persistence in preferring darkness and their
>     resistance to light.(303) There I learned the number of the fallen
>     Princes,(304) that which takes place in human souls and the bodies
>     they enter into communication with.
> 
>     I learnt the analogy that exists between earthquakes and the
>     rains, between the motion of the earth(305) and the motion of the
>     seas; I saw the spirits of the Giants plunged in subterranean
>     darkness and seemingly supporting the earth like a man carrying a
>     burden on his shoulders.(306)
> 
>     When thirty I travelled to Chaldæa to study there the true power
>     of the air, placed by some in the fire and by the more learned in
>     light [Âkâsha]. I was taught to see that the planets were in their
>     variety as dissimilar as the plants on earth, and the stars were
>     like armies ranged in battle order. I knew the Chaldæan division
>     of Ether into 365 parts,(307) and I perceived that every one of
>     the demons who divide it among themselves(308) was endowed with
>     that material force that permitted him to execute the orders of
>     the Prince and guide all the movements therein [in the
>     Ether].(309) They [the Chaldees] explained to me how those Princes
>     had become participants in the Council of Darkness, ever in
>     opposition to the Council of Light.
> 
>     I got acquainted with the Mediatores [surely not mediums as De
>     Mirville explains!],(310) and upon seeing the covenants they were
>     mutually bound by, I was struck with wonder upon learning the
>     nature of their oaths and observances.(311)
> 
>     Believe me, I saw the Devil; believe me I have embraced him(312)
>     [like the witches at the Sabbath (?)] when I was yet quite young,
>     and he saluted me by the title of the new Jambres, declaring me
>     worthy of my ministry (initiation). He promised me continual help
>     during life and a principality after death.(313) Having become in
>     great honour [an Adept] under his tuition, he placed under my
>     orders a phalanx of demons, and when I bid him good‐bye, “Courage,
>     good success, excellent Cyprian,” he exclaimed, rising up from his
>     seat to see me to the door, plunging thereby those present into a
>     profound admiration.(314)
> 
> Having bidden farewell to his Chaldæan Initiator, the future Sorcerer and
> Saint went to Antioch. His tale of “iniquity” and subsequent repentance is
> long but we will make it short. He became “an accomplished Magician,”
> surrounded by a host of disciples and “candidates to the perilous and
> sacrilegious art.” He shows himself distributing love‐philtres and dealing
> in deathly charms “to rid young wives of old husbands, and to ruin
> Christian virgins.” Unfortunately Cyprianus was not above love himself. He
> fell in love with the beautiful Justine, a converted maiden, after having
> vainly tried to make her share the passion one named Aglaides, a
> profligate, had for her. His “demons failed” he tells us, and he got
> disgusted with them. This disgust brings on a quarrel between him and his
> Hierophant, whom he insists on identifying with the Demon; and the dispute
> is followed by a tournament between the latter and some Christian
> converts, in which the “Evil One” is, of course, worsted. The Sorcerer is
> finally baptised and gets rid of his enemy. Having laid at the feet of
> Anthimes, Bishop of Antioch, all his books on Magic, he became a Saint in
> company with the beautiful Justine, who had converted him; both suffered
> martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian; and both are buried side by side
> in Rome, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, near the Baptistery.
> 
> SECTION XX. THE EASTERN GUPTA VIDYA & THE KABALAH.
> 
> We now return to the consideration of the essential identity between the
> Eastern Gupta Vidyâ and the Kabalah as a system, while we must also show
> the dissimilarity in their philosophical interpretations since the Middle
> Ages.
> 
> It must be confessed that the views of the Kabalists—meaning by the word
> those students of Occultism who study the Jewish _Kabalah_ and who know
> little, if anything, of any other Esoteric literature or of its
> teachings—are as varied in their synthetic conclusions upon the nature of
> the mysteries taught even in the _Zohar_ alone, and are as wide of the
> true mark, as are the _dicta_ upon it of exact Science itself. Like the
> mediæval Rosicrucian and the Alchemist—like the Abbot Trithemius, John
> Reuchlin, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, Philalethes, etc.—by whom
> they swear, the continental Occultists see in the Jewish _Kabalah_ alone
> the universal well of wisdom; they find in it the secret lore of nearly
> all the mysteries of Nature—metaphysical and divine—some of them including
> herein, as did Reuchlin, those of the Christian _Bible_. For them the
> _Zohar_ is an Esoteric Thesaurus of all the mysteries of the Christian
> Gospel; and the _Sepher Yetzirah_ is the light that shines in every
> darkness, and the container of the keys to open every secret in Nature.
> Whether many of our modern followers of the mediæval Kabalists have an
> idea of the real meaning of the symbology of their chosen Masters is
> another question. Most of them have probably never given even a passing
> thought to the fact that the Esoteric language used by the Alchemists was
> their own, and that it was given out as a blind, necessitated by the
> dangers of the epoch they lived in, and not as the Mystery‐language, used
> by the Pagan Initiates, which the Alchemists had re‐translated and re‐
> veiled once more.
> 
> And now the situation stands thus: as the old Alchemists have not left a
> key to their writings, the latter have become a mystery within an older
> mystery. The _Kabalah_ is interpreted and checked only by the light which
> mediæval Mystics have thrown upon it, and they, in their forced
> Christology, had to put a theological dogmatic mask on every ancient
> teaching, the result being that each Mystic among our modern European and
> American Kabalists interprets the old symbols in his own way, and each
> refers his opponents to the Rosicrucian and the Alchemist of three and
> four hundred years ago. Mystic Christian dogma is the central maëlstrom
> that engulfs every old Pagan symbol, and Christianity—Anti‐Gnostic
> Christianity, the modern retort that has replaced the alembic of the
> Alchemists—has distilled out of all recognition the _Kabalah_, _i.e._, the
> Hebrew _Zohar_ and other rabbinical mystic works. And now it has come to
> this: The student interested in the Secret Sciences has to believe that
> the whole cycle of the symbolical “Ancient of Days,” every hair of the
> mighty beard of Macroprosopos, refers only to the history of the earthly
> career of Jesus of Nazareth! And we are told that the _Kabalah_ “was first
> taught to a select company of angels” by Jehovah himself—who, out of
> modesty, one must think, made himself only the third Sephiroth in it, and
> a female one into the bargain. So many Kabalists, so many explanations.
> Some believe—perchance with more reason than the rest—that the substance
> of the _Kabalah_ is the basis upon which Masonry is built, since modern
> Masonry is undeniably the dim and hazy reflection of primeval Occult
> Masonry, of the teaching of those divine Masons who established the
> Mysteries of the prehistoric and prediluvian Temples of Initiation, raised
> by truly superhuman Builders. Others declare that the tenets expounded in
> the _Zohar_ relate merely to mysteries terrestrial and profane, having no
> more concern with metaphysical speculations—such as the soul, or the
> _post‐mortem_ life of man—than have the Mosaic books. Others, again—and
> these are the real, genuine Kabalists, who had their instructions from
> initiated Jewish Rabbis—affirm that if the two most learned Kabalists of
> the mediæval period, John Reuchlin and Paracelsus, differed in their
> religious professions—the former being the Father of the Reformation and
> the latter a Roman Catholic, at least in appearance—the _Zohar_ cannot
> contain much of Christian dogma or tenet, one way or the other. In other
> words, they maintain that the numerical language of the Kabalistic works
> teaches universal truths—and not any one Religion in particular. Those who
> make this statement are perfectly right in saying that the Mystery‐
> language used in the _Zohar_ and in other Kabalistic literature was once,
> in a time of unfathomable antiquity, the universal language of Humanity.
> But they become entirely wrong if to this fact they add the untenable
> theory that _this language was invented by, or was the original property
> of, the Hebrews, from whom all the other nations borrowed it_.
> 
> They are wrong, because, although the _Zohar_ (זהר ZHR), _The Book of
> Splendour_ of Rabbi Simeon Ben Iochai, did indeed originate with him—his
> son, Rabbi Eleazar, helped by his secretary, Rabbi Abba, compiling the
> Kabalistic teachings of his deceased father into a work called the
> _Zohar_—those teachings were not Rabbi Simeon’s, as the Gupta Vidyâ shows.
> They are as old as the Jewish nation itself, and far older. In short, the
> writings which pass at present under the title of the _Zohar_ of Rabbi
> Simeon are about as original as were the Egyptian synchronistic Tables
> after being handled by Eusebius, or as St. Paul’s _Epistles_ after their
> revision and correction by the “Holy Church.”(315)
> 
> Let us throw a rapid retrospective glance at the history and the
> tribulations of that very same _Zohar_, as we know of them from
> trustworthy tradition and documents. We need not stop to discuss whether
> it was written in the first century B.C. or in the first century A.D.
> Suffice it for us to know that there was at all times a Kabalistic
> literature among the Jews; that though historically it can be traced only
> from the time of the Captivity, yet from the _Pentateuch_ down to the
> _Talmud_ the documents of that literature were ever written in a kind of
> Mystery‐language, were, in fact, a series of symbolical records which the
> Jews had copied from the Egyptian and the Chaldæan Sanctuaries, only
> adapting them to their own national history—if history it can be called.
> Now that which we claim—and it is not denied even by the most prejudiced
> Kabalist, is that although Kabalistic lore had passed orally through long
> ages down to the latest Pre‐Christian Tanaim, and although David and
> Solomon may have been great Adepts in it, as is claimed, yet no one dared
> to write it down till the days of Simeon Ben Iochai. In short, the lore
> found in Kabalistic literature was never recorded in writing before the
> first century of the modern era.
> 
> This brings the critic to the following reflection: While in India we find
> the _Vedas_ and the Brâhmanical literature written down and edited ages
> before the Christian era—the Orientalists themselves being obliged to
> concede a couple of millenniums of antiquity to the older manuscripts;
> while the most important allegories in _Genesis_ are found recorded on
> Babylonian tiles centuries B.C.; while the Egyptian sarcophagi yearly
> yield proofs of the origin of the doctrines borrowed and copied by the
> Jews; yet the Monotheism of the Jews is exalted and thrown into the teeth
> of all the Pagan nations, and the so‐called Christian Revelation is placed
> above all others, like the sun above a row of street gas‐lamps. Yet it is
> perfectly well known, having been ascertained beyond doubt or cavil, that
> no manuscript, whether Kabalistic, Talmudistic, or Christian, which has
> reached our present generation, is of earlier date than the first
> centuries of our era, whereas this can certainly never be said of the
> Egyptian papyri or the Chaldæan tiles, or even of some Eastern writings.
> 
> But let us limit our present research to the _Kabalah_, and chiefly to the
> _Zohar_—called also the _Midrash_. This book, whose teachings were edited
> for the first time between 70 and 110 A.D., is known to have been lost,
> and its contents to have been scattered throughout a number of minor
> manuscripts, until the thirteenth century. The idea that it was the
> composition of Moses de Leon of Valladolid, in Spain who passed it off as
> a pseudograph of Simeon Ben Iochai, is ridiculous and was well disposed of
> by Munk—though he does point to more than one modern interpolation in the
> _Zohar_. At the same time it is more than certain that the present _Book
> of Zohar_ was written by Moses de Leon, and, owing to joint editorship, is
> more Christian in its colouring than is many a genuine Christian volume.
> Munk gives the reason why, saying that it appears evident that the author
> made use of ancient documents, and among these of certain _Midraschim_, or
> collections of traditions and Biblical expositions, which we do not now
> possess.
> 
> As a proof, also, that the knowledge of the Esoteric system taught in the
> _Zohar_ came to the Jews very late indeed—at any rate, that they had so
> far forgotten it that the innovations and additions made by de Leon
> provoked no criticism, but were thankfully received—Munk quotes from
> Tholuck, a Jewish authority, the following information: Haya Gaon, who
> died in 1038, is to our knowledge the first author who developed (and
> perfected) the theory of the Sephiroth, and he gave them names which we
> find again among the Kabalistic names used by Dr. Jellinek. Moses Ben
> Schem‐Tob de Leon, who held intimate intercourse with the Syrian and
> Chaldæan Christian learned scribes, was enabled through the latter to
> acquire a knowledge of some of the Gnostic writings.(316)
> 
> Again, the _Sepher Jetzirah_ (_Book of Creation_)—though attributed to
> Abraham and though very archaic as to its contents—is first mentioned in
> the eleventh century by Jehuda Ho Levi (Chazari). And these two, the
> _Zohar_ and _Jetzirah_, are the storehouse of all the subsequent
> Kabalistic works. Now let us see how far the Hebrew sacred canon itself is
> to be trusted.
> 
> The word “Kabalah” comes from the root “to receive,” and has a meaning
> identical with the Sanskrit “Smriti” (“received by tradition”)—a system of
> oral teaching, passing from one generation of priests to another, as was
> the case with the Brâhmanical books before they were embodied in
> manuscript. The Kabalistic tenets came to the Jews from the Chaldæans; and
> if Moses knew the primitive and universal language of the Initiates, as
> did every Egyptian priest, and was thus acquainted with the numerical
> system on which it was based, he may have—and we say he has—written
> _Genesis_ and other “scrolls.” The five books that now pass current under
> his name, the _Pentateuch_, are _not_ withal the original Mosaic
> Records.(317) Nor were they written in the old Hebrew square letters, nor
> even in the Samaritan characters, for both alphabets belong to a date
> later than that of Moses, and Hebrew—as it is now known—did not exist in
> the days of the great lawgiver, either as a language or as an alphabet.
> 
> As no statements contained in the records of the Secret Doctrine of the
> East are regarded as of any value by the world in general, and since to be
> understood by and convince the reader one has to quote names familiar to
> him, and use arguments and proofs out of documents which are accessible to
> all, the following facts may perhaps demonstrate that our assertions are
> not merely based on the teachings of Occult Records:
> 
> (1) The great Orientalist and scholar, Klaproth, denied positively the
> antiquity of the so‐called Hebrew alphabet, on the ground that the square
> Hebrew characters in which the Biblical manuscripts are written, and which
> we use in printing, were probably derived from the Palmyrene writing, or
> some other Semitic alphabet, so that the Hebrew _Bible_ is written merely
> in the Chaldaic phonographs of Hebrew words.
> 
> The late Dr. Kenealy pertinently remarked that the Jews and Christians
> rely on
> 
>     A phonograph of a dead and almost unknown language, as abstruse as
>     the cuneiform letters on the mountains of Assyria.(318)
> 
> (2) The attempts made to carry back the square Hebrew character to the
> time of Esdras (B.C. 458) have all failed.
> 
> (3) It is asserted that the Jews took their alphabet from the Babylonians
> during their captivity. But there are scholars who do not carry the now‐
> known Hebrew square letters beyond the late period of the fourth century,
> A.D.(319)
> 
>     The Hebrew Bible is precisely as if Homer were printed, not in
>     Greek, but in English letters; or as if Shakespeare’s works were
>     phonographed in Burmese.(320)
> 
> (4) Those who maintain that the ancient Hebrew is the same as the Syraic
> or Chaldaic have to see what is said in _Jeremiah_, wherein the Lord is
> made to threaten the house of Israel with bringing against it the mighty
> and ancient nation of the Chaldæans:
> 
>     A nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest
>     what they say.(321)
> 
> This is quoted by Bishop Walton(322) against the assumption of the
> identity of Chaldaic and Hebrew, and ought to settle the question.
> 
> (5) The real Hebrew of Moses was lost after the seventy years’ captivity,
> when the Israelites brought back Chaldaic with them and grafted it on
> their own language, the fusion resulting in a dialectical variety of
> Chaldaic, the Hebrew tincturing it very slightly and ceasing from that
> time to be a spoken language.(323)
> 
> As to our statement that the present _Old Testament_ does not contain the
> original Books of Moses, this is proven by the facts that:
> 
> (1) The Samaritans repudiated the Jewish canonical books and _their_ “Law
> of Moses.” They will have neither the _Psalms_ of David, nor the Prophets,
> nor the _Talmud_ and _Mishna_: nothing but the real Books of Moses, and in
> quite a different edition.(324) The Books of Moses and of Joshua are
> disfigured out of recognition by the Talmudists, they say.
> 
> (2) The “black Jews” of Cochin, Southern India—who know nothing of the
> Babylonian Captivity or of the _ten_ “lost tribes” (the latter a pure
> invention of the Rabbis), proving that these Jews must have come to India
> before the year 600 B.C.—have their Books of Moses which they will show to
> no one. And these Books and Laws differ greatly from the present scrolls.
> Nor are they written in the square Hebrew characters (semi‐Chaldaic and
> semi‐Palmyrean) but in the archaic letters, as we were assured by one of
> them—letters entirely unknown to all but themselves and a few Samaritans.
> 
> (3) The Karaim Jews of the Crimea—who call themselves the descendants of
> the true children of Israel, _i.e._, of the Sadducees—reject the _Torah_
> and the _Pentateuch_ of the Synagogue, reject the Sabbath of the Jews
> (keeping Friday), will have neither the Books of the Prophets nor the
> _Psalms_—nothing but their own Books of Moses and what they call his one
> and real Law.
> 
> This makes it plain that the _Kabalah_ of the Jews is but the distorted
> echo of the Secret Doctrine of the Chaldæans, and that the real _Kabalah_
> is found only in the Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_ now in the possession of
> some Persian Sufis. Every nation in antiquity had its traditions based on
> those of the Âryan Secret Doctrine; and each nation points to this day to
> a Sage of its own race who had received the primordial revelation from,
> and had recorded it under the orders of, a more or less divine Being. Thus
> it was with the Jews, as with all others. They had received their Occult
> Cosmogony and Laws from their Initiate, Moses, and they have now entirely
> mutilated them.
> 
> Âdi is the generic name in our Doctrine of all the first men, _i.e._, the
> first speaking races, in each of the seven zones—hence probably “Ad‐am.”
> And such first men, in every nation, are credited with having been taught
> the divine mysteries of creation. Thus, the Sabæans (according to a
> tradition preserved in the Sufi works) say that when the “Third First Man”
> left the country adjacent to India for Babel, a tree(325) was given to
> him, then another and a third tree, whose leaves recorded the history of
> all the races; the “Third First Man” meant one who belonged to the Third
> Root‐Race, and yet the Sabæans call him Adam. The Arabs of Upper Egypt,
> and the Mohammedans generally, have recorded a tradition that the Angel
> Azaz‐el brings a message from the Wisdom‐Word of God to Adam whenever he
> is reborn; this the Sufis explain by adding that this book is given to
> every Seli‐Allah (“the chosen one of God”) for his wise men. The story
> narrated by the Kabalists—namely, that the book given to Adam before his
> Fall (a book full of mysteries and signs and events which either had been,
> were, or were to be) was taken away by the Angel Raziel after Adam’s Fall,
> but again restored to him lest men might lose its wisdom and instruction;
> that this book was delivered by Adam to Seth, who passed it to Enoch, and
> the latter to Abraham, and so on in succession to the most wise of every
> generation—relates to all nations, and not to the Jews alone. For Berosus
> narrates in his turn that Xisuthrus compiled a book, writing it at the
> command of his deity, which book was buried in Zipara(326) or Sippara, the
> City of the Sun, in Ba‐bel‐on‐ya, and was dug up long afterwards and
> deposited in the temple of Belos; it is from this book that Berosus took
> his history of the antediluvian dynasties of Gods and Heroes. Ælian (in
> _Nimrod_) speaks of a Hawk (emblem of the Sun), who in the days of the
> beginnings brought to the Egyptians a book containing the wisdom of their
> religion. The _Sam‐Sam_ of the Sabæans is also a _Kabalah_, as is the
> Arabic _Zem‐Zem_ (_Well of Wisdom_).(327)
> 
> We are told by a very learned Kabalist that Seyffarth asserts that the old
> Egyptian tongue was only old Hebrew, or a Semitic dialect; and he proves
> this, our correspondent thinks, by sending him “some 500 words in common”
> in the two languages. This proves very little to our mind. It only shows
> that the two nations lived together for centuries, and that before
> adopting the Chaldæan for their phonetic tongue the Jews had adopted the
> old Coptic or Egyptian. The Israelitish Scriptures drew their hidden
> wisdom from the primeval Wisdom‐Religion that was the source of other
> Scriptures, only it was sadly degraded by being applied to things and
> mysteries of this Earth, instead of to those in the higher and ever‐
> present, though invisible, spheres. Their national history, if they can
> claim any autonomy before their return from the Babylonian captivity,
> cannot be carried back one day earlier than the time of Moses. The
> language of Abraham—if Zeruan (Saturn, the emblem of time—the “Sar,”
> “Saros,” a “cycle”) can be said to have any language—was not Hebrew, but
> Chaldaic, perhaps Arabic, and still more likely some old Indian dialect.
> This is shown by numerous proofs, some of which we give here; and unless,
> indeed, to please the tenacious and stubborn believers in _Bible_
> chronology, we cripple the years of our globe to the Procrustean bed of
> 7,000 years, it becomes self‐evident that the Hebrew cannot be called an
> old language, merely because Adam is supposed to have used it in the
> Garden of Eden. Bunsen says in _Egypt’s Place in Universal History_ that
> in the
> 
>     Chaldæan tribe immediately connected with Abraham, we find
>     reminiscences of dates disfigured and misunderstood as genealogies
>     of single men, or figures of epochs. The Abrahamic recollections
>     go back at least three millennia beyond the grandfather of
>     Jacob.(328)
> 
> The _Bible_ of the Jews has ever been an Esoteric Book in its hidden
> meaning, but this meaning has not remained one and the same throughout
> since the days of Moses. It is useless, considering the limited space we
> can give to this subject, to attempt anything like the detailed history of
> the vicissitudes of the so‐called _Pentateuch_, and besides, the history
> is too well known to need lengthy disquisitions. Whatever was, or was not,
> the Mosaic _Book of Creation_—from _Genesis_ down to the Prophets—the
> _Pentateuch_ of to‐day is not the same. It is sufficient to read the
> criticisms of Erasmus, and even of Sir Isaac Newton, to see clearly that
> the Hebrew Scriptures had been tampered with and remodelled, had been lost
> and rewritten, a dozen times before the days of Ezra. This Ezra himself
> may yet one day turn out to have been Azara, the Chaldæan priest of the
> Fire and Sun‐God, a renegade who, through his desire of becoming a ruler,
> and in order to create an Ethnarchy, restored the old lost Jewish Books in
> his own way. It was an easy thing for one versed in the secret system of
> Esoteric numerals, or Symbology, to put together events from the stray
> books that had been preserved by various tribes, and make of them an
> apparently harmonious narrative of creation and of the evolution of the
> Judæan race. But in its hidden meaning, from _Genesis_ to the last word of
> _Deuteronomy_, the Pentateuch is the symbolical narrative of the sexes,
> and is an apotheosis of Phallicism, under astronomical and physiological
> personations.(329) Its coördination, however, is only apparent; and the
> human hand appears at every moment, is found everywhere in the “Book of
> God.” Hence the Kings of Edom discuss in _Genesis_ before any king had
> reigned in Israel; Moses records his own death, and Aaron dies twice and
> is buried in two different places, to say nothing of other trifles. For
> the Kabalist they are trifles, for he knows that all these events are not
> history, but are simply the cloak designed to envelope and hide various
> physiological peculiarities; but for the sincere Christian, who accepts
> all these “dark sayings” in good faith, it matters a good deal. Solomon
> may very well be regarded as a myth(330) by the Masons, as they lose
> nothing by it, for all their secrets are Kabalistic and allegorical—for
> those few, at any rate, who understand them. For the Christian, however,
> to give up Solomon, the son of David—from whom Jesus is made to
> descend—involves a real loss. But how even the Kabalists can claim great
> antiquity for the Hebrew texts of the old Biblical scrolls now possessed
> by the scholars is not made at all apparent. For it is certainly a fact of
> history, based on the confessions of the Jews themselves, and of
> Christians likewise, that:
> 
>     The Scriptures having perished in the captivity of Nabuchodonozar,
>     Esdras, the Levite, the priest, in the times of Artaxerxes, king
>     of the Persians, having become inspired, in the exercise of
>     prophecy restored again the whole of the ancient Scriptures.(331)
> 
> One must have a strong belief in “Esdras,” and especially in his good
> faith, to accept the now‐existing copies as genuine Mosaic Books; for:
> 
>     Assuming that the copies, or rather phonographs which had been
>     made by Hilkiah and Esdras, and the various anonymous editors,
>     were really true and genuine, they must have been wholly
>     exterminated by Antiochus; and the versions of the Old Testament
>     which now subsist must have been made by Judas, or by some unknown
>     compilers, probably from the Greek of the Seventy, long after the
>     appearance and death of Jesus.(332)
> 
> The _Bible_, therefore, as it is now (the Hebrew texts, that is), depends
> for its accuracy on the genuineness of the _Septuagint_; this, we are
> again told, was written miraculously by the Seventy, in Greek, and the
> original copy having been lost since that time, our texts are re‐
> translated back into Hebrew from that language. But in this vicious circle
> of proofs we once more have to rely upon the good faith of two
> Jews—Josephus and Philo Judæus of Alexandria—these two Historians being
> the only witnesses that the Septuagint was written under the circumstances
> narrated. And yet it is just these circumstances that are very little
> calculated to inspire one with confidence. For what does Josephus tell us?
> He says that Ptolemy Philadelphus, desiring to read the Hebrew Law in
> Greek, wrote to Eleazar, the high‐priest of the Jews, begging him _to send
> him six men from each of the twelve tribes_, who should make a translation
> for him. Then follows a truly miraculous story, vouchsafed by Aristeas, of
> these seventy‐two men from the twelve tribes of Israel, who, shut up in an
> island, compiled their translation in exactly seventy‐two days, etc.
> 
> All this is very edifying, and one might have had very little reason to
> doubt the story, had not the “ten lost tribes” been made to play their
> part in it. How could these tribes, lost between 700 and 900 B.C., each
> send six men some centuries later, to satisfy the whim of Ptolemy, and to
> disappear once more immediately afterwards from the horizon? A miracle,
> verily.
> 
> We are expected, nevertheless, to regard such documents as the
> _Septuagint_ as containing direct divine revelation: Documents originally
> written in a tongue about which nobody now knows anything; written by
> authors that are practically mythical, and at dates as to which no one is
> able even to make a defensible surmise; documents of the original copies
> of which there does not now remain a shred. Yet people will persist in
> talking of the ancient Hebrew, as if there were any man left in the world
> who now knows one word of it. So little, indeed, was Hebrew known that
> both the Septuagint and the _New Testament_ had to be written in a
> _heathen_ language (the Greek), and no better reasons for it given than
> what Hutchinson says, namely, that the Holy Ghost chose to write the New
> Testament in Greek.
> 
> The Hebrew language is considered to be very old, and yet there exists no
> trace of it anywhere on the old monuments, not even in Chaldæa. Among the
> great number of inscriptions of various kinds found in the ruins of that
> country:
> 
>     One in the Hebrew Chaldee letter and language _has never been
>     found_; nor has a single authentic medal or gem in this new‐
>     fangled character been ever discovered, which could carry it even
>     to the days of Jesus.(333)
> 
> The original _Book of Daniel_ is written in a dialect which is a mixture
> of Hebrew and Aramaic; it is not even in Chaldaic, with the exception of a
> few verses interpolated later on. According to Sir W. Jones and other
> Orientalists, the oldest discoverable languages of Persia are the Chaldaic
> and Sanskrit, and there is no trace of the “Hebrew” in these. It would be
> very surprising if there were, since the Hebrew known to the Philologists
> does not date earlier than 500 B.C., and its characters belong to a far
> later period still. Thus, while the real Hebrew characters, if not
> altogether lost are nevertheless so hopelessly transformed—
> 
>     A mere inspection of the alphabet showing that it has been shaped
>     and made regular, in doing which the characteristic marks of some
>     of the letters _have been retrenched_ in order to make them more
>     square and uniform—(334)
> 
> that no one but an initiated Rabbi of Samaria or a “Jain” could read them,
> the new system of the masoretic points has made them a sphinx‐riddle for
> all. Punctuation is now to be found everywhere in all the later
> manuscripts, and by means of it anything can be made of a text; a Hebrew
> scholar can put on the texts any interpretation he likes. Two instances
> given by Kenealy will suffice:
> 
>     In _Genesis_, xlix. 21, we read:
> 
>     Naphtali is a _hind let loose_; he _giveth goodly words_.
> 
>     By only a slight alteration of the points Bochart changes this
>     into:
> 
>     Naphtali is a _spreading tree, shooting forth beautiful branches_.
> 
>     So again, in _Psalms_ (xxix. 9), instead of:
> 
>     The voice of the Lord _maketh the hind to calve_, and discovereth
>     the forests;
> 
>     Bishop Lowth gives:
> 
>     The voice of the Lord _striketh the oak_, and discovereth the
>     forests.
> 
>     The same word in Hebrew signifies “God” and “nothing,” etc.(335)
> 
> With regard to the claim made by some Kabalists that there was in
> antiquity one knowledge and one language, this claim is also our own, and
> it is very just. Only it must be added, to make the thing clear, that this
> knowledge and language have both been esoteric ever since the submersion
> of the Atlanteans. The Tower of Babel myth relates to that enforced
> secrecy. Men falling into sin were regarded as no longer trustworthy for
> the reception of such knowledge, and, from being universal, it became
> limited to the few. Thus, the “one‐lip”—or the Mystery‐language—being
> gradually denied to subsequent generations, all the nations became
> severally restricted to their own national tongue; and forgetting the
> primeval Wisdom‐language, they stated that the Lord—one of the chief Lords
> or Hierophants of the Mysteries of the Java Aleim—had confounded the
> languages of all the earth, so that the sinners could understand one
> another’s speech no longer. But Initiates remained in every land and
> nation, and the Israelites, like all others, had their learned Adepts. One
> of the keys to this Universal Knowledge is a pure geometrical and
> numerical system, the alphabet of every great nation having a numerical
> value for every letter,(336) and, moreover, a system of permutation of
> syllables and synonyms which is carried to perfection in the Indian Occult
> methods, and which the Hebrew certainly has not. This one system,
> containing the elements of Geometry and Numeration, was used by the Jews
> for the purpose of concealing their Esoteric creed under the mask of a
> popular and national monotheistic Religion. The last who knew the system
> to perfection were the learned and “atheistical” Sadducees, the greatest
> enemies of the pretensions of the Pharisees and of their confused notions
> brought from Babylon. Yes, the Sadducees, the Illusionists, who maintained
> that the Soul, the Angels, and all similar Beings, were illusions because
> they were temporary—thus showing themselves at one with Eastern
> Esotericism. And since they rejected every book and Scripture, with the
> exception of the Law of Moses, it seems that the latter must have been
> very different from what it is now.(337)
> 
> The whole of the foregoing is written with an eye to our Kabalists. Great
> scholars as some of them undoubtedly are, they are nevertheless wrong to
> hang the harps of their faith on the willows of Talmudic growth—on the
> Hebrew scrolls, whether in square or pointed characters, now in our public
> libraries, museums, or even in the collections of Paleographers. There do
> not remain half‐a‐dozen copies from the true Mosaic Hebrew scrolls in the
> whole world. And those who are in possession of these—as we indicated a
> few pages back—would not part with them, or even allow them to be
> examined, on any consideration whatever. How then can any Kabalist claim
> priority for Hebrew Esotericism, and say, as does one of our
> correspondents, that “the Hebrew has come down from a far remoter
> antiquity than any of them [whether Egyptian or even Sanskrit!], and that
> it was the source, or nearer to the old original source, than any of
> them”?(338)
> 
> As our correspondent says: “It becomes more convincing to me every day
> that in a far past time there was _a mighty civilization with __ enormous
> learning, which had a common language over the earth, as to which its
> essence can be recovered from the fragments which now exist_.”
> 
> Aye, there existed indeed a mighty civilization, and a still mightier
> secret learning and knowledge, the entire scope of which can never be
> discovered by Geometry and the _Kabalah_ alone: for there are seven keys
> to the large entrance‐door, and not one, nor even two, keys can ever open
> it sufficiently to allow more than glimpses of what lies within.
> 
> Every scholar must be aware that there are two distinct styles—_two
> schools_, so to speak—plainly traceable in the Hebrew Scriptures: the
> Elohistic and the Jehovistic. The portions belonging to these respectively
> are so blended together, so completely mixed up by later hands, that often
> all external characteristics are lost. Yet it is also known that the two
> schools were antagonistic; that the one taught esoteric, the other
> exoteric, or theological doctrines; that the one, the Elohists, were Seers
> (Roch), whereas the other, the Jehovists, were prophets (Nabhi),(339) and
> that the latter—who later became Rabbis—were generally only nominally
> prophets by virtue of their official position, as the Pope is called the
> infallible and inspired vicegerent of God. That, again, the Elohists meant
> by “Elohim” “forces,” identifying their Deity, as in the Secret Doctrine,
> with Nature; while the Jehovists made of Jehovah a personal God
> externally, and used the term simply as a phallic symbol—a number of them
> secretly disbelieving even in metaphysical, abstract Nature, and
> synthesizing all on the terrestrial scale. Finally, the Elohists made of
> man the divine incarnate image of the Elohim, emanated first in all
> Creation; and the Jehovists show him as the last, the crowning glory of
> the animal creation, instead of his being the head of all the sensible
> beings on earth. (This is reversed by some Kabalists, but the reversion is
> due to the designedly‐produced confusion in the texts, especially in the
> first four chapters of _Genesis_.)
> 
> Take the _Zohar_ and find in it the description relating to Ain‐Suph, the
> Western or Semitic Parabrahman. What passages have come so nearly up to
> the Vedântic ideal as the following:
> 
>     The creation [the evolved Universe] is the garment of that which
>     has no name, the garment _woven from the Deity’s own
>     substance_.(340)
> 
> Between that which is Ain or “nothing,” and the Heavenly Man, there is an
> Impersonal First Cause, however, of which it is said:
> 
>     Before It gave any shape to this world, before It produced any
>     form, It was alone, without form or similitude to anything else.
>     Who, then, can comprehend It, how It was before the creation,
>     since It was formless? Hence it is forbidden to represent It by
>     any form, similitude, or even by Its sacred name, by a single
>     letter or a single point.(341)
> 
> The sentence that follows, however, is an evident later interpolation; for
> it draws attention to a complete contradiction:
> 
>     And to this the words (_Deut._ iv. 15), refer—“Ye saw no manner of
>     similitude on the day the Lord spake unto you.”
> 
> But this reference to Chapter iv. of _Deuteronomy_, when in Chapter v. God
> is mentioned as speaking “face to face” with the people, is very clumsy.
> 
> Not one of the names given to Jehovah in the _Bible_ has any reference
> whatever to either Ain‐Suph or the Impersonal First‐Cause (which is the
> Logos) of the _Kabalah_; but they all refer to the _Emanations_.
> 
> It says
> 
>     For although to reveal itself to us, the concealed of all the
>     concealed sent forth the Ten Emanations [Sephiroth] called the
>     Form of God, Form of the Heavenly Man, yet since even this
>     luminous form was too dazzling for our vision, it had to assume
>     another form, or had to put on another garment, _which is the
>     Universe_. The Universe, therefore, or the visible world, is a
>     farther expansion of the Divine Substance, and is called in the
>     Kabalah “The Garment of God.”(342)
> 
> This is the doctrine of all the Hindu Purânas, especially that of the
> _Vishnu Purâna_. Vishnu pervades the Universe and is that Universe; Brahmâ
> enters the Mundane Egg, and issues from it as the Universe; Brahmâ even
> dies with it and there remains only Brahman, the impersonal, the eternal,
> the unborn, and the unqualifiable. The Ain‐Suph of the Chaldæans and later
> of the Jews is assuredly a copy of the Vaidic Deity; while the “Heavenly
> Adam,” the Macrocosm which unites in itself the totality of beings and is
> the _Esse_ of the visible Universe, finds his original in the Purânic
> Brahmâ. In _Sôd_, “the Secret of the Law,” one recognizes the expressions
> used in the oldest fragments of the Gupta Vidyâ, the Secret Knowledge. And
> it is not venturing too much to say that even a Rabbi quite familiar with
> his own special Rabbinical _Hebrew_ would only comprehend its secrets
> thoroughly if he added to his learning a serious knowledge of the Hindu
> philosophies. Let us turn to Stanza I. of the _Book of Dzyan_ for an
> example.
> 
> The _Zohar_ premises, as does the Secret Doctrine, a universal, eternal
> Essence, passive—because absolute—in all that men call attributes. The
> pregenetic or pre‐cosmical Triad is a pure metaphysical abstraction. The
> notion of a triple hypostasis in one Unknown Divine Essence is as old as
> speech and thought. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara—the Creator, the
> Preserver, and the Destroyer—are the three manifested attributes of it,
> appearing and disappearing with Kosmos; the visible Triangle, so to speak,
> on the plane of the ever‐invisible Circle. This is the primeval root‐
> thought of thinking Humanity; the Pythagorean Triangle emanating from the
> ever‐concealed Monad, or the Central Point.
> 
> Plato speaks of it and Plotinus calls it an ancient doctrine, on which
> Cudworth remarks that:
> 
>     Since Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, who all of them asserted a
>     Trinity of divine hypostases, unquestionably derived their
>     doctrine from the Egyptians, it may be reasonably suspected that
>     the Egyptians did the like before them.(343)
> 
> The Egyptians certainly derived their Trinity from the Indians. Wilson
> justly observes:
> 
>     As, however, the Grecian accounts and those of the Egyptians are
>     much more perplexed and unsatisfactory than those of the Hindus,
>     it is most probable that we find amongst them the doctrine in its
>     most original, as well as most methodical and significant
>     form.(344)
> 
> This, then, is the meaning:
> 
> “_Darkness alone filled the Boundless All, for Father, Mother and Son were
> once more One._”(345)
> 
> Space was, and is ever, as it is between the Manvantaras. The Universe in
> its pre‐kosmic state was once more homogeneous and one—outside its
> aspects. This was a Kabalistic, and is now a Christian teaching.
> 
> As is constantly shown in the _Zohar_, the Infinite Unity, or Ain‐Suph, is
> ever placed outside human thought and appreciation; and in _Sepher
> Jetzirah_ we see the Spirit of God—the Logos, not the Deity itself—called
> One.
> 
>     One is the Spirit of the living God, ... who liveth for ever.
>     Voice, Spirit, [of the Spirit], and Word: this is the Holy
>     Spirit,(346)
> 
> —and the Quaternary. From this Cube emanates the whole Kosmos.
> 
> Says the Secret Doctrine:
> 
> “_It is called to life. The mystic Cube in which rests the Creative Idea,
> the manifesting Mantra_ [or articulate speech—Vâch] _and the holy Purusha_
> [both radiations of prima materia] _exist in the Eternity in the Divine
> Substance in their latent state_”
> 
> —during Pralaya.
> 
> And in the _Sepher Jetzirah_, when the Three‐in‐One are to be called into
> being—by the manifestation of Shekinah, the first effulgency or radiation
> in the manifesting Kosmos—the “Spirit of God,” or Number One,(347)
> fructifies and awakens the dual Potency, Number Two, Air, and Number
> Three, Water; in these “are darkness and emptiness, slime and dung”—which
> is Chaos, the Tohu‐Vah‐Bohu. The Air and Water emanate Number Four, Ether
> or Fire, the Son. This is the Kabalistic Quaternary. This Fourth Number,
> which in the manifested Kosmos is the One, or the Creative God, is with
> the Hindus the “Ancient,” Sanat, the Prajâpati of the _Vedas_ and the
> Brahmâ of the Brâhmans—the heavenly Androgyne, as he becomes the male only
> after separating himself into two bodies, Vâch and Virâj. With the
> Kabalists, he is at first the Jah‐Havah, only later becoming Jehovah, like
> Virâj, his prototype; after separating himself as Adam‐Kadmon into Adam
> and Eve in the formless, and into Cain‐Abel in the semi‐objective, world,
> he became finally the Jah‐Havah, or man and woman, in Enoch, the son of
> Seth.
> 
> For, the true meaning of the compound name of Jehovah—of which, unvoweled,
> you can make almost anything—is: men and women, or humanity composed of
> its two sexes. From the first chapter to the end of the fourth chapter of
> _Genesis_ every name is a permutation of another name, and every personage
> is at the same time somebody else. A Kabalist traces Jehovah from the Adam
> of earth to Seth, the third son—or rather race—of Adam.(348) Thus Seth is
> Jehovah male; and Enos, being a permutation of Cain and Abel, is Jehovah
> male and female, or our mankind. The Hindu Brahmâ‐Virâj, Virâj‐Manu, and
> Manu‐Vaivasvata, with his daughter and wife, Vâch, present the greatest
> analogy with these personages—for anyone who will take the trouble of
> studying the subject in both the _Bible_ and the _Purânas_. It is said of
> Brahmâ that he created himself as Manu, and that he was born of, and was
> identical with, his original self, while he constituted the female portion
> “Shata‐rûpâ” (hundred‐formed). In this Hindu Eve, “the mother of all
> living beings,” Brahmâ created Virâj, who is himself, but on a lower
> scale, as Cain is Jehovah on an inferior scale: both are the first males
> of the Third Race. The same idea is illustrated in the Hebrew name of God
> (יהוה) Read from right to left “Jod” (י) is the father, “He” (ה) the
> mother, “Vau” (ו) the son, and “He” (ה), repeated at the end of the word,
> is generation, the act of birth, materiality. This is surely a sufficient
> reason why the God of the Jews and Christians should be personal, as much
> as the male Brahmâ, Vishnu, or Shiva of the orthodox, exoteric Hindu.
> 
> Thus the term of Jhvh alone—now accepted as the name of “One living [male]
> God”—will yield, if seriously studied, not only the whole mystery of
> _Being_ (in the Biblical sense,) but also that of the Occult Theogony,
> from the highest divine Being, the third in order, down to man. As shown
> by the best Hebraists:
> 
>     The verbal היה, or Hâyâh, or E‐y‐e, means _to be_, _to exist_,
>     while חיה or Châyâh, or H‐y‐e, means _to live_, as _motion of
>     existence_.(349)
> 
> Hence Eve stands as the evolution and the never‐ceasing “becoming” of
> Nature. Now if we take the almost untranslatable Sanskrit word Sat, which
> means the quintessence of absolute immutable Being, or Be‐ness—as it has
> been rendered by an able Hindu Occultist—we shall find no equivalent for
> it in any language; but it may be regarded as most closely resembling
> “Ain,” or “En‐Suph,” Boundless Being. Then the term Hâyâh, “to be,” as
> passive, changeless, yet manifested existence may perhaps be rendered by
> the Sanskrit Jîvâtmâ, universal life or soul, in its secondary and cosmic
> meaning; while “Châyâh,” “to live,” as “motion of existence,” is simply
> Prâna, the ever‐changing life in its objective sense. It is at the head of
> this third category that the Occultist finds Jehovah—the Mother, Binah,
> and the Father, Arelim. This is made plain in the _Zohar_, when the
> emanation and evolution of the Sephiroth are explained: First, Ain‐Suph,
> then Shekinah, the Garment or Veil of Infinite Light, then Sephira or the
> Kadmon, and, thus making the fourth, the spiritual Substance sent forth
> from the Infinite Light. This Sephira is called the Crown, Kether, and has
> besides, six other names—in all seven. These names are: 1. Kether; 2. the
> Aged; 3. the Primordial Point; 4. the White Head; 5. the Long Face; 6. the
> Inscrutable Height; and 7. Ehejeh (“I am”.)(350) This septenary Sephira is
> said to contain in itself the nine Sephiroth. But before showing how she
> brought them forth, let us read an explanation about the Sephiroth in the
> _Talmud_, which gives it as an archaic tradition, or Kabalah.
> 
> There are three groups (or orders) of Sephiroth: 1. The Sephiroth called
> “divine attributes” (the Triad in the Holy Quaternary); 2. the sidereal
> (personal) Sephiroth; 3. the metaphysical Sephiroth, or a periphrasis of
> Jehovah, who are the first three Sephiroth (Kether, Chokmah and Binah),
> the rest of the seven being the personal “Seven Spirits of the Presence”
> (also of the planets, therefore). Speaking of these, the angels are meant,
> though not because they are seven, but because they represent the seven
> Sephiroth which contain in them the universality of the Angels.
> 
> This shows (_a_) that, when the first four Sephiroth are separated, as a
> Triad‐Quaternary—Sephira being its synthesis—there remain only seven
> Sephiroth, as there are seven Rishis; these become ten when the
> Quaternary, or the first divine Cube, is scattered into units; and (_b_)
> that while Jehovah might have been viewed as the Deity, if he be included
> in the three divine groups or orders of the Sephiroth, the collective
> Elohim, or the quaternary indivisible Kether, once that he becomes a male
> God, he is no more than one of the Builders of the lower group—a Jewish
> Brahmâ.(351) A demonstration is now attempted.
> 
> The first Sephira, containing the other nine, brought them forth in this
> order: (2) Hokmah (Chokmah, or Wisdom), a masculine active potency
> represented among the divine names as Jah; and, as a permutation or an
> evolution into lower forms in this instance—becoming the Auphanim (or the
> Wheels—cosmic rotation of matter) among the army, or the angelic hosts.
> From this Chokmah emanated a feminine passive potency called (3)
> Intelligence, Binah, whose divine name is Jehovah, and whose angelic name,
> among the Builders and Hosts, is _Arelim_.(352) It is from the union of
> these two potencies, male and female (or Chokmah and Binah) that emanated
> all the other Sephiroth, the seven orders of the Builders. Now if we call
> Jehovah by his divine name, then he becomes at best and forthwith “a
> female passive” potency in Chaos. And if we view him as a male God, he is
> no more than one of many, an Angel, Arelim. But straining the analysis to
> its highest point, and if his male name Jah, that of Wisdom, be allowed to
> him, still he is not the “Highest and the one Living God;” for he is
> contained with many others within Sephira, and Sephira herself is a third
> Potency in Occultism, though regarded as the first in the exoteric
> _Kabalah_—and is one, moreover, of lesser importance than the Vaidic
> Aditi, or the Primordial Water of Space, which becomes after many a
> permutation the Astral Light of the Kabalist.
> 
> Thus the _Kabalah_, as we have it now, is shown to be of the greatest
> importance in explaining the allegories and “dark sayings” of the _Bible_.
> As an Esoteric work upon the mysteries of creation, however, it is almost
> worthless as it is now disfigured, unless checked by the Chaldæan _Book of
> Numbers_ or by the tenets of the Eastern Secret Science, or Esoteric
> Wisdom. The Western nations have neither the original _Kabalah_, nor yet
> the Mosaic _Bible_.
> 
> Finally, it is demonstrated by internal as well as by external evidence,
> on the testimony of the best European Hebraists, and the confessions of
> the learned Jewish Rabbis themselves, that “an ancient document forms the
> essential basis of the _Bible_, which received very considerable
> insertions and supplements;” and that “the Pentateuch arose out of the
> primitive or older document by means of a supplementary one.” Therefore in
> the absence of the _Book of Numbers_,(353) the Kabalists of the West are
> only entitled to come to definite conclusions, when they have at hand some
> data at least from that “ancient document”—data now found scattered
> throughout Egyptian papyri, Assyrian tiles, and the traditions preserved
> by the descendants of the disciples of the last Nazars. Instead of that,
> most of them accept as their authorities and infallible guides Sabre
> d’Olivet—who was a man of immense erudition and of speculative mind, but
> neither a Kabalist nor an Occultist, either Western or Eastern—and the
> Mason Ragon, the greatest of the “Widow’s sons,” who was even less of an
> Orientalist than d’Olivet, for Sanskrit learning was almost unknown in the
> days of both these eminent scholars.
> 
> SECTION XXI. HEBREW ALLEGORIES.
> 
> How can any Kabalist, acquainted with the foregoing, deduce his
> conclusions with regard to the true Esoteric beliefs of the primitive
> Jews, from that only which he now finds in the Jewish scrolls? How can any
> scholar—even though one of the keys to the universal language be now
> positively discovered, the true key to the numerical reading of a pure
> geometrical system—give out anything as his _final_ conclusion? Modern
> Kabalistic speculation is on a par now with modern “speculative Masonry;”
> for as the latter tries vainly to link itself with the ancient—or rather
> the archaic—Masonry of the Temples, failing to make the link because all
> its claims have been shown to be inaccurate from an archæological
> standpoint, so fares it also with Kabalistic speculation. As no mystery of
> Nature worth running after can be revealed to humanity by settling whether
> Hiram Abif was a living Sidonian builder, or a solar myth, so no fresh
> information will be added to Occult Lore by the details of the exoteric
> privileges conferred on the Collegia Fabrorum by Numa Pompilius. Rather
> must the symbols used in it be studied in the Âryan light, since all the
> Symbolism of the ancient Initiations came to the West with the light of
> the Eastern Sun. Nevertheless, we find the most learned Masons and
> Symbologists declaring that all these weird symbols and glyphs, that run
> back to a common origin of immense antiquity, were nothing more than a
> display of cunning natural phallicism, or emblems of primitive typology.
> How much nearer the truth is the author of _The Source of Measures_, who
> declares that the elements of human and numerical construction in the
> _Bible_ do not shut out the spiritual elements in it, albeit so few now
> understand them. The words we quote are as suggestive as they are true:
> 
>     How desperately blinding becomes a superstitious use, through
>     ignorance, of such emblems, when they are made to possess the
>     power of bloodshed and torture, through orders of propaganda of
>     any species of religious cultus. When one thinks of the horrors of
>     a _Moloch_, or _Baal_, or _Dagon_ worship; of the correlated
>     blood‐deluges under the Cross baptized in gore by Constantine, at
>     the initiative of the secular Church; ... when one thinks of all
>     this and then that the cause of all has been simply ignorance of
>     the real radical reading of the _Moloch_, and _Baal_, and _Dagon_,
>     and the _Cross_ and the _T’phillin_, all running back to a common
>     origin, and after all being nothing more than a display of pure
>     and natural mathematics, ... one is apt to feel like cursing
>     ignorance, and to lose confidence in what are called _intuitions_
>     of religion; one is apt to wish for a return of the day when all
>     the world was of one _lip_ and of one _knowledge_.... But while
>     these elements [of the construction of the pyramid] are rational
>     and scientific, ... let no man consider that with this discovery
>     comes a cutting‐off of the _spirituality_(354) of the _Bible_
>     intention, or of man’s relation to this spiritual foundation. Does
>     one wish to build a house? No house was ever actually built with
>     tangible material _until first the architectural design of
>     building had been accomplished_, no matter whether the structure
>     was palace or hovel. So with these elements and numbers. They are
>     not of man, nor are they of his invention. They have been revealed
>     to him to the extent of his ability to realize a system, which is
>     _the creative system_ of the eternal God.... But _spiritually_, to
>     man the value of this matter is that he can actually in
>     contemplation, bridge over all material construction of the
>     cosmos, and pass into the very _thought_ and _mind_ of God, to the
>     extent of recognizing this _system of design_ for cosmic
>     creation—yea, even before the words went forth: “_Let there
>     be_.”(355)
> 
> But true as the above words may be, when coming from one who has re‐
> discovered, more completely than anyone else has done during the past
> centuries, one of the keys to the universal Mystery Language, it is
> impossible for an Eastern Occultist to agree with the conclusion of the
> able author of _The Source of Measures_. He “has set out to find the
> truth,” and yet he still believes that:
> 
>     The best and most authentic vehicle of communication from [the
>     creative] God to man ... is to be found in the Hebrew Bible.
> 
> To this we must and shall demur, giving our reasons for it in a few words.
> The “Hebrew _Bible_” exists no more, as has been shown in the foregoing
> pages, and the garbled accounts, the falsified and pale copies we have of
> the real Mosaic _Bible_ of the Initiates, warrant the making of no such
> sweeping assertion and claim. All that the scholar can fairly claim is
> that the Jewish _Bible_, as now extant—in its latest and final
> interpretation, and according to the newly‐discovered key—may give a
> partial presentment of the truths it contained before it was mangled. But
> how can he tell what the _Pentateuch_ contained before it had been re‐
> composed by Esdras; then corrupted still more by the ambitious Rabbis in
> later times, and otherwise remodelled and interfered with? Leaving aside
> the opinion of the declared enemies of the Jewish Scriptures, one may
> quote simply what their most devoted followers say.
> 
> Two of these are Horne and Prideaux. The avowals of the former will be
> sufficient to show how much now remains of the original Mosaic books,
> unless indeed we accept his sublimely blind faith in the inspiration and
> editorship of the Holy Ghost. He writes that when a Hebrew scribe found a
> writing of any author he was entitled, if he thought fit, being “conscious
> of the aid of the Holy Spirit,” to do exactly as he pleased with it—to cut
> it up, or copy it, or use as much of it as he deemed right, and so to
> incorporate it with his own manuscript. Dr. Kenealy aptly remarks of
> Horne, that it is almost impossible to get any admission from him
> 
>     That makes against his church, so remarkably guarded is he [Horne]
>     in his phraseology and so wonderfully discreet in the use of words
>     that his language, like a diplomatic letter, perpetually suggests
>     to the mind ideas other than those which he really means; I defy
>     any unlearned person to read his chapter on “Hebrew characters”
>     and to derive _any knowledge_ from it whatever on the subject on
>     which he professes to treat.(356)
> 
> And yet this same Horne writes:
> 
>     We are persuaded that the things to which reference is made
>     proceeded from the original writers or _compilers_ of the books
>     [_Old Testament_]. Sometimes they took other writings, annals,
>     genealogies, and such like, with which they _incorporated
>     additional matter_, or which they put together with greater or
>     less condensation. The _Old Testament_ authors used the sources
>     they employed (that is, the writing of other people) with freedom
>     and independence. Conscious of the aid of the Divine Spirit, _they
>     adapted_ their own productions, or the productions of others, to
>     the wants of the times. But in these respects they cannot be said
>     to have corrupted the text of Scripture. _They made the
>     text._(357)
> 
> But of what did they make it? Why, of the writings of other persons,
> justly observes Kenealy:
> 
>     And this is Horne’s notion of what the _Old Testament_ is—a cento
>     from the writings of unknown persons collected and put together by
>     those who, he says, were divinely inspired. No infidel that I know
>     of has ever made so damaging a charge as this against the
>     authenticity of the _Old Testament_.(358)
> 
> This is quite sufficient, we think, to show that no key to the universal
> language‐system can ever open the mysteries of Creation in a work in
> which, whether through design or carelessness, nearly every sentence has
> been made to apply to the latest outcome of religious views—to Phallicism,
> and to nothing else. There are a sufficient number of stray bits in the
> Elohistic portions of the _Bible_ to warrant the inference that the
> Hebrews who wrote it were Initiates; hence the mathematical coördinations
> and the perfect harmony between the measures of the Great Pyramid and the
> numerals of the Biblical glyphs. But surely if one borrowed from the
> other, it cannot be the architects of the Pyramid who borrowed from
> Solomon’s Temple, if only because the former exists to this day as a
> stupendous living monument of Esoteric records, while the famous temple
> has never existed outside of the far later Hebrew scrolls.(359) Hence
> there is a great distance between the admission that some Hebrews were
> Initiates, and the conclusion that because of this the Hebrew _Bible_ must
> be the best standard, as being the highest representative of the archaic
> Esoteric System.
> 
> Nowhere does the _Bible_ say, moreover, that the Hebrew is the language of
> God; of this boast, at any rate, the authors are not guilty. Perhaps
> because in the days when the _Bible_ was last edited the claim would have
> been too preposterous—hence dangerous. The _compilers_ of the _Old
> Testament_, as it exists in the Hebrew canon, knew well that the language
> of the Initiates in the days of Moses was identical with that of the
> Egyptian Hierophants; and that none of the dialects that had sprung from
> the old Syriac and the pure old Arabic of Yarab—the father and progenitor
> of the primitive Arabians, long before the time of Abraham, in whose days
> the ancient Arabic had already become vitiated—that none of those
> languages was the one sacerdotal universal tongue. Nevertheless all of
> them included a number of words which could be traced to common roots. And
> to do this is the business of modern Philology, though to this day, with
> all the respect due to the labours of the eminent Philologists of Oxford
> and Berlin, that Science seems to be hopelessly floundering in the
> Cimmerian darkness of mere hypothesis.
> 
> Ahrens, when speaking of the letters as arranged in the Hebrew sacred
> scrolls, and remarking that they were musical notes, had probably never
> studied Âryan Hindu music. In the Sanskrit language letters are
> continually arranged in the sacred Ollas so that they may become musical
> notes. For the whole Sanskrit alphabet and the _Vedas_, from the first
> word to the last, are musical notations reduced to writing; the two are
> inseparable.(360) As Homer distinguished between the “language of Gods”
> and the “language of men,”(361) so did the Hindus. The Devanâgarî, the
> Sanskrit characters, are the “speech of the Gods,” and Sanskrit is the
> divine language.
> 
> It is argued in defence of the present version of the Mosaic Books that
> the mode of language adopted was an “accommodation” to the ignorance of
> the Jewish people. But the said “mode of language” drags down the “sacred
> text” of Esdras and his colleagues to the level of the most unspiritual
> and gross phallic religions. This plea confirms the suspicions entertained
> by some Christian Mystics and many philosophical critics, that:
> 
> (_a_) Divine Power as an Absolute Unity had never anything more to do with
> the Biblical Jehovah and the “Lord God” than with any other Sephiroth or
> Number. The Ain‐Suph of the _Kabalah_ of Moses is as independent of any
> relation with the created Gods as is Parabrahman Itself.
> 
> (_b_) The teachings veiled in the _Old Testament_ under allegorical
> expressions are all copied from the Magical Texts of Babylonia, by Esdras
> and others, while the earlier Mosaic Text had its source in Egypt.
> 
> A few instances known to almost all Symbologists of note, and especially
> to the French Egyptologists, may help to prove the statement. Furthermore,
> no ancient Hebrew Philosopher, Philo no more than the Sadducees, claimed,
> as do now the ignorant Christians, that the events in the _Bible_ should
> be taken literally. Philo says most explicitly:
> 
>     The verbal statements are fabulous [in the Book of the Law]: it is
>     in the allegory that we shall find the truth.
> 
> Let us give a few instances, beginning with the latest narrative, the
> Hebrew, and thus if possible trace the allegories to their origin.
> 
> 1. Whence the Creation in six days, the seventh day as day of rest, the
> seven Elohim,(362) and the division of space into heaven and earth, in the
> first chapter of _Genesis_?
> 
> The division of the vault above from the Abyss, or Chaos, below is one of
> the first acts of creation or rather of evolution, in every cosmogony.
> Hermes in _Pymander_ speaks of a heaven seen in seven circles with seven
> Gods in them. We examine the Assyrian tiles and find the same on them—the
> seven creative Gods busy each in his own sphere. The cuneiform legends
> narrate how Bel prepared the seven mansions of the Gods; how heaven was
> separated from the earth. In the Brâhmanical allegory everything is
> septenary, from the seven zones, or envelopes, of the Mundane Egg down to
> the seven continents, islands, seas, etc. The six days of the week and the
> seventh, the Sabbath, are based primarily on the seven creations of the
> Hindu Brahmâ, the seventh being that of man; and secondarily on the number
> of generation. It is preëminently and most conspicuously phallic. In the
> Babylonian system the seventh day, or period, was that in which man and
> the animals were created.
> 
> 2. The Elohim make a woman out of Adam’s rib.(363) This process is found
> in the Magical Texts translated by G. Smith.
> 
>     The seven Spirits bring forth the woman from the loins of the man,
> 
> explains Mr. Sayce in his _Hibbert Lectures_.(364)
> 
> The mystery of the woman who was made from the man is repeated in every
> national religion, and in Scriptures far antedating the Jewish. You find
> it in the Avestan fragments, in the Egyptian _Book of the Dead_, and
> finally in Brahmâ, the male, separating from himself, as a female self,
> Vâch, in whom he creates Virâj.
> 
> 3. The two Adams of the first and second chapters in _Genesis_ originated
> from garbled exoteric accounts coming from the Chaldæans and the Egyptian
> Gnostics, revised later from the Persian traditions, most of which are old
> Âryan allegories. As Adam Kadmon is the seventh creation,(365) so the Adam
> of dust is the eighth; and in the Purânas one finds an eighth, the
> Anugraha creation, and the Egyptian Gnostics had it. Irenæus, complaining
> of the heretics, says of the Gnostics:
> 
>     Sometimes they will have him [man] to have been made on the sixth
>     day, and sometimes on the eighth.(366)
> 
> The author of _The Hebrew and Other Creations_ writes:
> 
>     These two creations of man on the sixth day and on the eighth were
>     those of the Adamic, or fleshly man, and of the spiritual man, who
>     were known to Paul and the Gnostics as the first and second Adam,
>     the man of earth and the man of Heaven. Irenæus also says they
>     insisted that Moses began with the Ogdoad of the Seven Powers and
>     their mother, Sophia (the old Kefa of Egypt, who is the _Living
>     Word_ at Ombos).(367)
> 
> Sophia is also Aditi with her seven sons.
> 
> One might go on enumerating and tracing the Jewish “revelations” _ad
> infinitum_ to their original sources, were it not that the task is
> superfluous, since so much is already done in that direction by others—and
> done thoroughly well, as in the case of Gerald Massey, who has sifted the
> subject to the very bottom. Hundreds of volumes, treatises, and pamphlets
> are being written yearly in defence of the “divine‐inspiration” claim for
> the _Bible_; but symbolical and archæological research is coming to the
> rescue of truth and fact—therefore of the Esoteric Doctrine—upsetting
> every argument based on faith and breaking it as an idol with feet of
> clay. A curious and learned book, _The Approaching End of the Age_, by H.
> Grattan Guinness, professes to solve the mysteries of the _Bible_
> chronology and to prove thereby God’s direct revelation to man. Among
> other things its author thinks that:
> 
>     It is impossible to deny that _a septiform chronology was divinely
>     appointed_ in the elaborate ritual of Judaism.
> 
> This statement is innocently accepted and fervently believed in by
> thousands and tens of thousands, only because they are ignorant of the
> Bibles of other nations. Two pages from a small pamphlet, a lecture by Mr.
> Gerald Massey,(368) so upset the arguments and proofs of the enthusiastic
> Mr. Grattan Guinness, spread over 760 pages of small print, as to prevent
> them from ever raising their heads any more. Mr. Massey treats of the
> Fall, and says:
> 
>     Here, as before, the genesis does not begin at the beginning.
>     There was an earlier Fall than that of the Primal Pair. In this
>     the number of those who failed and fell was seven. We meet with
>     those seven in Egypt—eight with the Mother—where they are called
>     the “Children of Inertness,” who were cast out from Am‐Smen, the
>     Paradise of the Eight; also in a Babylonian legend of Creation, as
>     the Seven Brethren, who were Seven Kings, like the Seven Kings in
>     the _Book of Revelation_; and the Seven Non‐Sentient Powers, who
>     became the Seven Rebel Angels that made war in heaven. The Seven
>     Kronidæ, described as the Seven Watchers, who in the beginning
>     were formed in the interior of heaven. The heaven, like a vault,
>     they extended or hollowed out; that which was not visible they
>     raised, and that which had no _exit_ they opened; their work of
>     creation being exactly identical with that of the Elohim in the
>     _Book of Genesis_. These are the Seven elemental Powers of space,
>     who were continued as Seven Timekeepers. It is said of them: “In
>     watching was their office, but among the stars of heaven their
>     watch they kept not,” and their failure was the Fall. In the _Book
>     of Enoch_ the same Seven Watchers in heaven are stars which
>     transgressed the commandment of God before their time arrived, for
>     they came not in their proper season, therefore was he offended
>     with them, and bound them until the period of the consummation of
>     their crimes, at the end of the _secret_, or great year of the
>     World, _i.e._, the Period of Precession, when there was to be
>     restoration and rebeginning. The Seven deposed constellations are
>     seen by Enoch, looking like seven great blazing mountains
>     overthrown—the seven mountains in _Revelation_, on which the
>     Scarlet Lady sits.(369)
> 
> There are seven keys to this, as to every other allegory, whether in the
> _Bible_ or in pagan religions. While Mr. Massey has hit upon the key in
> the mysteries of cosmogony, John Bentley in his _Hindu Astronomy_ claims
> that the Fall of the Angels, or _War in Heaven_, as given by the Hindus,
> is but a figure of the calculations of time‐periods, and goes on to show
> that among the Western nations the same war, with like results, took the
> form of the war of the Titans.
> 
> In short, he makes it _astronomical_. So does the author of _The Source of
> Measures_:
> 
>     The celestial sphere with the earth, was divided into twelve
>     compartments [astronomically], and these compartments were
>     esteemed as _sexed_, the _lords_ or _husbands_ being respectively
>     the planets presiding over them. This being the settled scheme,
>     want of proper correction would bring it to pass, after a time,
>     that error and confusion would ensue by the compartments coming
>     under the lordship of the wrong planets. Instead of lawful
>     wedlock, there would be illegal intercourse, as between the
>     planets, “_sons of Elohim_” and these compartments, “daughters of
>     H‐Adam,” or the _earth_‐man; and in fact the fourth verse of sixth
>     _Genesis_ will bear _this_ interpretation for the usual one,
>     _viz._, “In the same days, or periods, there were untimely births
>     in the earth; and also behind that, when the sons of Elohim came
>     to the daughters of H‐Adam, they begat to them the offspring of
>     harlotry,” etc., astronomically indicating this confusion.(370)
> 
> Do any of these learned explanations explain anything except a possible
> ingenious allegory, and a personification of the celestial bodies, by the
> ancient Mythologists and Priests? Carried to their last word they would
> undeniably explain much, and would thus furnish one of the right seven
> keys, fitting a great many of the Biblical puzzles yet opening none
> naturally and entirely, instead of being scientific and cunning master‐
> keys. But they yet prove one thing—that neither the septiform chronology
> nor the septiform theogony and evolution of all things is of divine origin
> in the _Bible_. For let us see the sources at which the _Bible_ sipped its
> divine inspiration with regard to the sacred number seven. Says Mr. Massey
> in the same lecture:
> 
>     The _Book of Genesis_ tells us nothing about the nature of these
>     Elohim, erroneously rendered “God,” who are creators of the Hebrew
>     beginning, and who are themselves preëxtant and seated when the
>     theatre opens and the curtain ascends. It says that in the
>     beginning the Elohim created the heaven and the earth. In
>     thousands of books the Elohim have been discussed, but ... with no
>     conclusive result.... The Elohim are Seven in number, whether as
>     nature‐powers, gods of constellations, or planetary gods, ... as
>     the Pitris and Patriarchs, Manus and Fathers of earlier times. The
>     Gnostics, however, and the Jewish _Kabalah_ preserve an account of
>     the Elohim of _Genesis_ by which we are able to identify them with
>     other forms of the seven primordial powers.... Their names are
>     Ildabaoth, Jehovah (or Jao), Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloeus, Oreus, and
>     Astanphæus. Ildabaoth signifies the Lord God of the fathers, that
>     is the fathers who preceded the Father; and thus the seven are
>     identical with the seven Pitris or Fathers of India (Irenæus, B.
>     I., xxx., 5). Moreover, the Hebrew Elohim were preëxtant by name
>     and nature as Phœnician divinities or powers. Sanchoniathon
>     mentions them by name, and describes them as Auxiliaries of Kronos
>     or Time. In this phase, then, the Elohim are time‐keepers in
>     heaven! In the Phœnician mythology the Elohim are the Seven sons
>     of Sydik [Melchizedek], identical with the Seven Kabiri, who in
>     Egypt are the Seven sons of Ptah, and the Seven Spirits of Ra in
>     _The Book of the Dead_; ... in America with the seven Hohgates,
>     ... in Assyria with the seven Lumazi.... They are always seven in
>     number ... who _Kab_—that is, turn round, together, whence the
>     “Kab‐iri.”... They are also the Ili or Gods, in Assyrian, who were
>     seven in number!... They were first born of the Mother in
>     Space,(371) and then the Seven Companions passed into the sphere
>     of time as auxiliaries of Kronus, or Sons of the Male Parent. As
>     Damascius says in his _Primitive Principles_, the Magi consider
>     that space and time were the source of all; and from being powers
>     of the air the gods were promoted to become time‐keepers for men.
>     Seven constellations were assigned to them.... As the seven turned
>     round in the ark of the sphere they were designated the Seven
>     Sailors’ Companions, Rishis, or Elohim. The first “Seven Stars”
>     are not planetary. They are the leading stars of seven
>     constellations which turned round with the Great Bear in
>     describing the circle of the year.(372) These the Assyrians called
>     the seven Lumazi, or leaders of the flocks of stars, designated
>     sheep. On the Hebrew line of descent or development, these Elohim
>     are identified for us by the Kabalists and Gnostics, who retained
>     the hidden wisdom or gnosis, the clue of which is absolutely
>     essential to any proper understanding of mythology or theology....
>     There were two constellations with seven stars each. _We_ call
>     them the Two Bears. But the seven stars of the Lesser Bear were
>     once considered to be the seven heads of the Polar Dragon, which
>     we meet with—as the beast with seven heads—in the Akkadian Hymns
>     and in _Revelation_. The mythical dragon originated in the
>     crocodile, which is the dragon of Egypt.... Now in one particular
>     cult, the Sut‐Typhonian, the first god was Sevekh [the seven‐
>     fold], who wears the crocodile’s head, as well as the Serpent, and
>     who is the Dragon, or whose constellation was the Dragon.... In
>     Egypt the Great Bear was the constellation of Typhon, or _Kepha_,
>     the old genetrix, called the Mother of the Revolutions; and the
>     Dragon with seven heads was assigned to her son, Sevekh‐Kronus, or
>     Saturn, called the Dragon of Life. That is, the typical dragon or
>     serpent with seven heads was female at first, and then the type
>     was continued, as male in her son Sevekh, the Sevenfold Serpent,
>     in Ea the Sevenfold, ... Iao Chnubis, and others. We find these
>     two in _The Book of Revelation_. One is the Scarlet Lady, the
>     mother of mystery, the great harlot, who sat on a scarlet‐coloured
>     beast with seven heads, which is the Red Dragon of the Pole. She
>     held in her hand the unclean things of her fornication. That means
>     the emblems of the male and female, imaged by the Egyptians at the
>     Polar Centre, the very uterus of creation, as was indicated by the
>     Thigh constellation, called the Khepsh of Typhon, the old Dragon,
>     in the northern birthplace of Time in heaven. The two revolved
>     about the _pole of heaven_, or the Tree, as it was called, which
>     was figured at the centre of the starry motion. In _The Book of
>     Enoch_ these two constellations are identified as Leviathan and
>     Behemoth‐Bekhmut, or the Dragon and Hippopotamus = Great Bear, and
>     they are the primal pair that were first created in the Garden of
>     Eden. So that the Egyptian first mother, Kefa [or Kepha] whose
>     name signifies “mystery,” was the original of the Hebrew Chavah,
>     our Eve; and therefore Adam is one with Sevekh the sevenfold one,
>     the solar dragon in whom the powers of light and darkness were
>     combined, and the sevenfold nature was shown in the seven rays
>     worn by the Gnostic Iao‐Chnubis, god of the number seven, who is
>     Sevekh by name and a form of the first father as head of the
>     Seven.(373)
> 
> All this gives the key to the astronomical prototype of the allegory in
> _Genesis_, but it furnishes no other key to the mystery involved in the
> sevenfold glyph. The able Egyptologist shows also that Adam himself
> according to Rabbinical and Gnostic tradition, was the chief of the Seven
> who fell from Heaven, and he connects these with the Patriarchs, thus
> agreeing with the Esoteric Teaching. For by mystic permutation and the
> mystery of primeval rebirths and adjustment, the Seven Rishis are in
> reality identical with the seven Prajâpatis, the fathers and creators of
> mankind, and also with the Kumâras, the first sons of Brahmâ, who refused
> to procreate and multiply. This apparent contradiction is explained by the
> seven‐fold nature—make it four‐fold on metaphysical principles and it will
> come to the same thing—of the celestial men, the Dhyân Chohans. This
> nature is made to divide and separate; and while the higher principles
> (Âtmâ‐Buddhi) of the “Creators of Men” are said to be the Spirits of the
> seven constellations, their middle and lower principles are connected with
> the earth and are shown
> 
>     Without desire or passion, inspired with holy wisdom, estranged
>     from the Universe and undesirous of progeny,(374)
> 
> remaining Kaumâric (virgin and undefiled); therefore it is said they
> refused to create. For this they are cursed and sentenced to be born and
> reborn “Adams,” as the Semites would say.
> 
> Meanwhile let me quote a few lines more from Mr. G. Massey’s lecture, the
> fruit of his long researches in Egyptology and other ancient lore, as it
> shows that the septenary division was at one time a universal doctrine:
> 
>     Adam as the father among the Seven is identical with the Egyptian
>     Atum, ... whose other name of Adon is identical with the Hebrew
>     Adonai. In this way the second Creation in _Genesis_ reflects and
>     continues the later creation in the mythos which explains it. The
>     Fall of Adam to the lower world led to his being humanised on
>     earth, by which process the celestial was turned into the mortal,
>     and this, which belongs to the astronomical allegory, got
>     literalised as the Fall of Man, or descent of the soul into
>     matter, and the conversion of the angelic into an earthly
>     being.... It is found in the [Babylonian] texts, when Ea, the
>     first father, is said to “grant forgiveness to the conspiring
>     gods,” for whose “redemption did he create mankind.” (Sayce; _Hib.
>     Lec._, p. 140) ... The Elohim, then, are the Egyptian, Akkadian,
>     Hebrew, and Phœnician form of the Universal Seven Powers, who are
>     Seven in Egypt, Seven in Akkad, Babylon, Persia, India, Britain,
>     and Seven among the Gnostics and Kabalists. They were the Seven
>     fathers who preceded the Father in Heaven, because they were
>     earlier than the individualised fatherhood on earth.... When the
>     Elohim said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,”
>     there were seven of them who represented the seven elements,
>     powers, or souls that went to the making of the human being who
>     came into existence before the Creator was represented
>     anthropomorphically, or could have conferred the human likeness on
>     the Adamic man. It was in the sevenfold image of the Elohim that
>     man was first created, with his seven elements, principles or
>     souls,(375) and therefore he could not have been formed in the
>     image of the one God. The seven Gnostic Elohim tried to make a man
>     in their own image, but could not for lack of virile power.(376)
>     Thus their creation in earth and heaven was a failure ... because
>     they themselves were lacking in the soul of the fatherhood! When
>     the Gnostic Ildabaoth,(377) chief of the Seven, cried: “I am the
>     father and God,” his mother Sophia [Achamoth] replied: “Do not
>     tell lies, Ildabaoth, for the first man (Anthropos, son of
>     Anthropos)(378) is above thee.” That is, man who had now been
>     created in the image of the fatherhood was superior to the gods
>     who were derived from the Mother‐Parent alone!(379) For, as it had
>     been first on earth, so was it afterwards in heaven [the Secret
>     Doctrine teaches the reverse]; and thus the primary gods were held
>     to be soulless like the earliest races of men.... The Gnostics
>     taught that the Spirits of Wickedness, the inferior Seven, derived
>     their origin from the great Mother alone, who produced without the
>     fatherhood! It was in the image, then, of the sevenfold Elohim
>     that the seven races were formed which we sometimes hear of as the
>     Pre‐Adamite races of men, because they were earlier than the
>     fatherhood, which was individualised only in the second Hebrew
>     Creation.(380)
> 
> This shows sufficiently how the echo of the Secret Doctrine—of the Third
> and Fourth Races of men, made complete by the incarnation in humanity of
> the Mânasa Putra, Sons of Intelligence or Wisdom—reached every corner of
> the globe. The Jews, however, although they borrowed of the older nations
> the groundwork on which to build their revelation, never had more than
> three keys out of the seven in their mind, while composing their national
> allegories—the astronomical, the numerical (metrology), and above all the
> purely anthropological, or rather physiological key. This resulted in the
> most phallic religion of all, and has now passed, part and parcel, into
> Christian theology, as is proved by the lengthy quotations made from a
> lecture of an able Egyptologist, who can make naught of it save
> astronomical myths and phallicism, as is implied by his explanations of
> “fatherhood” in the allegories.
> 
> SECTION XXII. THE “ZOHAR” ON CREATION AND THE ELOHIM.
> 
> The opening sentence in _Genesis_, as every Hebrew scholar knows, is:
> 
> בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ
> 
> Now there are two well‐known ways of rendering this line, as any other
> Hebrew writing: one exoteric, as read by the orthodox _Bible_ interpreters
> (Christian), and the other Kabalistic, the latter, moreover, being divided
> into the Rabbinical and the purely Kabalistic or Occult method. As in
> Sanskrit writing, the words are not separated in the Hebrew, but are made
> to run together—especially in the old systems. For instance, the above,
> divided, would read: “_B’rashith bara Elohim eth hashamayim v’eth
> h’areths_;” and it can be made to read thus: “_B’rash ithbara Elohim
> ethhashamayim v’eth’arets_,” thus changing the meaning entirely. The
> latter means, “In the beginning _God made the heavens_ and the earth,”
> whereas the former, precluding the idea of any beginning, would simply
> read that “out of the ever‐existing Essence [divine] [or out of the
> _womb_—also head—thereof] the dual [or androgyne] Force [Gods] shaped the
> double heaven;” the upper and the lower heaven being generally explained
> as heaven and earth. The latter word means Esoterically the “Vehicle,” as
> it gives the idea of an empty globe, within which the manifestation of the
> world takes place. Now, according to the rules of Occult symbolical
> reading as established in the old _Sepher Jetzirah_ (in the Chaldæan _Book
> of Numbers_(381)) the initial fourteen letters (or “B’rasitb’ raalaim”)
> are in themselves quite sufficient to explain the theory of “creation”
> without any further explanation or qualification. Every letter of them is
> a sentence; and, placed side by side with the hieroglyphic or pictorial
> initial version of “creation” in the _Book of Dzyan_, the origin of the
> Phœnician and Jewish letters would soon be found out. A whole volume of
> explanations would give no more to the student of primitive Occult
> Symbology than this: the head of a bull within a circle, a straight
> horizontal line, a circle or sphere, then another one with three dots in
> it, a triangle, then the Svastika (or Jaina cross); after these come an
> equilateral triangle within a circle, seven small bulls’ heads standing in
> three rows, one over the other; a black round dot (an opening), and then
> seven lines, meaning Chaos or Water (feminine).
> 
> Anyone acquainted with the symbolical and numerical value of the Hebrew
> letters will see at a glance that this glyph and the letters of “B’rasith’
> raalaim” are identical in meaning. “Beth” is “abode” or “region;” “Resh,”
> a “circle” or “head;” “Aleph,” “bull” (the symbol of generative or
> creative power(382)); “Shin,” a “tooth” (300 exoterically—a trident or
> _three in one_ in its Occult meaning); “Jodh,” the perfect unity or
> “one”(383); “Tau,” the “root” or “foundation” (the same as the cross with
> the Egyptians and Âryans): again, “Beth,” “Resh,” and “Aleph.” Then
> “Aleph,” or seven bulls for the seven Alaim; an ox‐goad, “Lamedh,” active
> procreation; “He,” the “opening” or “matrix;” “Yodh,” the organ of
> procreation; and “Mem,” “water” or “chaos,” the female Power near the male
> that precedes it.
> 
> The most satisfactory and scientific exoteric rendering of the opening
> sentence of _Genesis_—on which was hung in blind faith the whole Christian
> religion, synthesized by its fundamental dogmas—is undeniably the one
> given in the Appendix to _The Source of Measures_ by Mr. Ralston Skinner.
> He gives, and we must admit in the ablest, clearest, and most scientific
> way, the numerical reading of this first sentence and chapter in
> _Genesis_. By the means of number 31, or the word “El” (1 for “Aleph” and
> 30 for “Lamedh”), and other numerical _Bible_ symbols, compared with the
> measures used in the great pyramid of Egypt, he shows the perfect identity
> between its measurements—inches, cubits, and plan—and the numerical values
> of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and the Patriarchs. In short, the
> author shows that the pyramid contains in itself architecturally the whole
> of _Genesis_, and discloses the astronomical, and even the physiological,
> secrets in its symbols and glyphs; yet he will not admit, it would seem,
> the psycho‐cosmical and spiritual mysteries involved in these. Nor does
> the author apparently see that the root of all this has to be sought in
> the archaic legends and the Pantheon of India.(384) Failing this, whither
> does his great and admirable labour lead him? Not further than to find out
> that Adam, the earth, and Moses or Jehovah “are the same”—or to the a‐b‐c
> of comparative Occult Symbology—and that the days in _Genesis_ being
> “circles” “displayed by the Hebrews as squares,” the result of the sixth‐
> day’s labour culminates in the fructifying principle. Thus the _Bible_ is
> made to yield Phallicism, and that alone.
> 
> Nor—read in this light, and as its Hebrew texts are interpreted by Western
> scholars—can it ever yield anything higher or more sublime than such
> phallic elements, the root and the corner‐stone of its dead‐letter
> meaning. Anthropomorphism and Revelation dig the impassable chasm between
> the material world and the ultimate spiritual truths. That creation is not
> thus described in the Esoteric Doctrine is easily shown. The Roman
> Catholics give a reading far more approaching the true Esoteric meaning
> than that of the Protestant. For several of their saints and doctors admit
> that the formation of heaven and earth, of the celestial bodies, etc.,
> belongs to the work of the “Seven Angels of the Presence.” St. Denys calls
> the “Builders” “the coöperators of God,” and St. Augustine goes even
> farther, and credits the Angels with the possession of the divine thought,
> the prototype, as he says, of everything created.(385) And, finally, St.
> Thomas Aquinas has a long dissertation upon this topic, calling God the
> primary, and the Angels the secondary, cause of all visible effects. In
> this, with some dogmatic differences of form, the “Angelic Doctor”
> approaches very nearly the Gnostic ideas. Basilides speaks of the lowest
> order of Angels as the Builders of our material world, and Saturnilus
> held, as did the Sabæans, that the Seven Angels who preside over the
> planets are the real creators of the world; the Kabalist‐monk, Trithemius,
> in his _De Secundis Deis_, taught the same.
> 
> The eternal _Kosmos_, the Macrocosm, is divided in the Secret Doctrine,
> like man, the Microcosm, into three Principles and four Vehicles,(386)
> which in their collectivity are the seven Principles. In the Chaldæan or
> Jewish _Kabalah_, the Kosmos is divided into seven worlds: the Original,
> the Intelligible, the Celestial, the Elementary, the Lesser (Astral), the
> Infernal (Kâma‐loka or Hades), and the Temporal (of man). In the Chaldæan
> system it is in the Intelligible World, the second, that appear the “Seven
> Angels of the Presence,” or the Sephiroth (the three higher ones being, in
> fact, one, and also the sum total of all). They are also the “Builders” of
> the Eastern Doctrine: and it is only in the third, the celestial world,
> that the seven planets and our solar system are built by the seven
> Planetary Angels, the planets becoming their visible bodies. Hence—as
> correctly stated—if the universe as a whole is formed out of the Eternal
> _One_ Substance or Essence, it is not that everlasting Essence, the
> Absolute Deity, that builds it into shape; this is done by the first Rays,
> the Angels or Dhyân Chohans, that emanate from the One Element, which
> becoming periodically Light and Darkness, remains eternally, in its Root‐
> Principle, the one unknown yet existing Reality.
> 
> A learned Western Kabalist, Mr. S. L. MacGregor Mathers, whose reasoning
> and conclusions will be the more above suspicion since he is untrained in
> Eastern Philosophy and unacquainted with its Secret Teachings, writes on
> the first verse of _Genesis_ in an unpublished essay:
> 
>     _Berashith Bara_ Elohim—“In the beginning the Elohim created!” Who
>     are these Elohim of _Genesis_?
> 
>     _Va‐Yivra Elohim Ath Ha‐Adam Be‐Tzalmo, Be‐Tzelem Elohim Bara
>     Otho, Zakhar Vingebah Bara Otham_—“And the Elohim created the Adam
>     in Their own Image, in the Image of the Elohim created They them,
>     Male and Female created They them!” Who are they, the Elohim? The
>     ordinary English translation of the _Bible_ renders the word
>     Elohim by “God:” it translates a _plural_ noun by a _singular_
>     one. The only excuse brought forward for this is the somewhat lame
>     one that the word is certainly plural, but is not to be used in a
>     plural sense: that it is “a plural denoting excellence.” But this
>     is only an assumption whose value may be justly gauged by
>     _Genesis_ i. 26, translated in the orthodox Biblical version thus:
>     “And God [Elohim] said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after
>     our likeness.’ ” Here is a distinct admission of the fact that
>     “Elohim” is _not_ a “plural of excellence,” but a plural noun
>     denoting more than one being.(387)
> 
>     What, then, is the proper translation of “Elohim,” and to whom is
>     it referable? “Elohim” is not only a plural, but a _feminine
>     plural_! And yet the translators of the _Bible_ have rendered it
>     by a _masculine singular_! Elohim is the plural of the feminine
>     noun El‐h, for the final letter, ‐h, marks the gender. It,
>     however, instead of forming the plural in ‐oth, takes the usual
>     termination of the masculine plural, which is ‐im.
> 
>     Although in the great majority of cases the nouns of both genders
>     take the terminations appropriated to them respectively, there are
>     yet many masculines which form the plural in ‐oth, as well as
>     feminine which form it in ‐im while some nouns of each gender take
>     alternately both. It must be observed, however, that the
>     termination of the plural does not affect its gender, which
>     remains the same as in the singular....
> 
>     To find the real meaning of the symbolism involved in this word
>     Elohim we must go to that key of Jewish Esoteric Doctrine, the
>     little‐known and less‐understood _Kabalah_. There we shall find
>     that this word represents two united masculine and feminine
>     Potencies, co‐equal and co‐eternal, conjoined in everlasting union
>     for the maintenance of the Universe—the great Father and Mother of
>     Nature, into whom the Eternal One conforms himself before the
>     Universe can subsist. For the teaching of the _Kabalah_ is that
>     before the Deity conformed himself thus—_i.e._ as male and
>     female—the Worlds of the Universe could not subsist; or in the
>     words of _Genesis_, that “the earth was formless and void.” Thus,
>     then, is the conformation of the Elohim, the end of the Formless
>     and the Void and the Darkness, for only after that conformation
>     can the _Ruach Elohim_—the “Spirit of the Elohim”—vibrate upon the
>     countenance of the Waters. But this is a very small part of the
>     information which the Initiate can derive from the _Kabalah_
>     concerning this word _Elohim_.
> 
> Attention must here be called to the confusion—if not worse—which reigns
> in the Western interpretations of the _Kabalah_. The Eternal _One_ is said
> to conform himself into two: the Great Father and Mother of Nature. To
> begin with, it is a horribly anthropomorphic conception to apply terms
> implying sexual distinction to the earliest and first differentiations of
> the One. And it is even more erroneous to identify these first
> differentiations—the Purusha and Prakriti of Indian Philosophy—with the
> Elohim, the creative powers here spoken of; and to ascribe to these (to
> our intellects) unimaginable abstractions, the formation and construction
> of this visible world, full of pain, sin, and sorrow. In truth, the
> “creation by the Elohim” spoken of here is but a much later “creation,”
> and the Elohim far from being supreme, or even exalted powers in Nature,
> are only lower Angels. This was the teaching of the Gnostics, the most
> philosophical of all the early Christian Churches. They taught that the
> imperfections of the world were due to the imperfection of its Architects
> or Builders—the imperfect, and therefore inferior, Angels. The Hebrew
> Elohim correspond to the Prajâpati of the Hindus, and it is shown
> elsewhere from the Esoteric interpretation of the Purânas that the
> Prajâpati were the fashioners of man’s material and astral form _only_:
> that they could not give him intelligence or reason, and therefore in
> symbolical language they “failed to create man.” But, not to repeat what
> the reader can find elsewhere in this work, his attention needs only to be
> called to the fact that “creation” in this passage is not the Primary
> Creation, and that the Elohim are not “_God_,” nor even the higher
> Planetary Spirits, but the Architects of this visible physical planet and
> of man’s material body, or encasement.
> 
>     A fundamental doctrine of the _Kabalah_ is that the gradual
>     development of the Deity from negative to positive Existence is
>     symbolized by the gradual development of the Ten Numbers of the
>     denary scale of numeration, from the Zero, through the Unity, into
>     the Plurality. This is the doctrine of the Sephiroth, or
>     Emanations.
> 
>     For the inward and concealed Negative Form concentrates a centre
>     which is the primal Unity. But the Unity is one and indivisible:
>     it can neither be increased by multiplication nor decreased by
>     division, for 1 × 1 = 1, and no more; and 1 ÷ 1 = 1, and no less.
>     And it is this changelessness of the Unity, or Monad, which makes
>     it a fitting type of the One and Changeless Deity. It answers thus
>     to the Christian idea of God the Father, for as the Unity is the
>     parent of the other numbers, so is the Deity the Father of All.
> 
> The philosophical Eastern mind would never fall into the error which the
> _connotation_ of these words implies. With them the “One and
> Changeless”—Parabrahman—the Absolute All and One, cannot be conceived as
> standing in any _relation_ to things finite and conditioned, and hence
> they would never use such terms as these, which in their very essence
> imply such a relation. Do they, then, absolutely sever man from God? On
> the contrary. They feel a closer union than the Western mind has done in
> calling God the “Father of All,” for they know that in his immortal
> essence man _is_ himself the Changeless, Secondless One.
> 
>     But we have just said that the Unity is one and changeless by
>     either multiplication or division; how then is two, the Duad,
>     formed? By reflection. For, unlike Zero, the Unity is partly
>     definable—that is, in its positive aspect; and the definition
>     creates an Eikon or Eidolon of itself which, together with itself,
>     forms a Duad; and thus the number two is to a certain extent
>     analogous to the Christian idea of the Son as the Second Person.
>     And as the Monad vibrates, and recoils into the Darkness of the
>     Primary Thought, so is the Duad left as its vice‐gerent and
>     representative, and thus co‐equal with the Positive Duad is the
>     Triune Idea, the number three, co‐equal and co‐eternal with the
>     Duad in the bosom of the Unity, yet, as it were, proceeding
>     therefrom in the numerical conception of its sequence.
> 
> This explanation would seem to imply that Mr. Mathers is aware that this
> “creation” is not the truly divine or primary one, since the Monad—the
> first manifestation on _our_ plane of objectivity—“recoils into the
> Darkness of the Primal Thought,” _i.e._, into the subjectivity of the
> first divine Creation.
> 
>     And this, again, also partly answers to the Christian idea of the
>     Holy Ghost, and of the whole three forming a Trinity in unity.
>     This also explains the fact in geometry of the three right lines
>     being the smallest number which will make a plane rectilineal
>     figure, while two can never enclose a space, being powerless and
>     without effect till completed by the number Three. These three
>     first numbers of the decimal scale the Qabalists call by the names
>     of Kether, the Crown, Chokmah, Wisdom, and Binah, Understanding;
>     and they furthermore associate with them these divine names: with
>     the Unity, Eheich, “I exist;” with the Duad, Yah; and with the
>     Triad, Elohim; they especially also call the Duad, Abba—the
>     Father, and the Triad, Aima—the Mother, whose eternal conjunction
>     is symbolized in the word Elohim.
> 
>     But what especially strikes the student of the _Kabalah_ is the
>     malicious persistency with which the translators of the _Bible_
>     have jealously crowded out of sight and suppressed every reference
>     to the feminine form of the Deity. They have, as we have just
>     seen, translated the feminine plural “Elohim,” by the masculine
>     singular, “God.” But they have done more than this: they have
>     carefully hidden the fact that the word Ruach—the “Spirit”—is
>     feminine, and that consequently the Holy Ghost of the _New
>     Testament_ is a feminine Potency. How many Christians are
>     cognizant of the fact that in the account of the Incarnation in
>     _Luke_ (i. 35) _two_ divine Potencies are mentioned?
> 
>     “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the Power of the Highest
>     shall overshadow thee.” The Holy Ghost (the feminine Potency)
>     descends, and the Power of the Highest (the masculine Potency) is
>     united therewith. “Therefore also that holy thing which shall be
>     born of thee shall be called the Son of God”—of the Elohim namely,
>     seeing that these two Potencies descend.
> 
>     In the _Sepher Yetzirah_, or _Book of Formation_, we read:
> 
>     “One is She the Ruach Elohim Chüm—(Spirit of the Living
>     Elohim).... Voice, Spirit, and Word; and this is She, the Spirit
>     of the Holy One.” Here again we see the intimate connection which
>     exists between the Holy Spirit and the Elohim. Furthermore,
>     farther on in this same _Book of Formation_—which, is, be it
>     remembered, one of the oldest of the Kabalistical Books, and whose
>     authorship is ascribed to Abraham the Patriarch—we shall find the
>     idea of a Feminine Trinity in the first place, from whom a
>     masculine Trinity proceeds; or, as it is said in the text: “Three
>     Mothers whence proceed three Fathers.” And yet this double Triad
>     forms, as it were, but one complete Trinity. Again it is worthy of
>     note that the Second and Third Sephiroth (Wisdom and
>     Understanding) are both distinguished by feminine names, Chokmah
>     and Binah, notwithstanding that to the former more particularly
>     the masculine idea, and to the latter the feminine, are
>     attributed, under the titles of Abba and Aima (or Father and
>     Mother). This Aima (the Great Mother) is magnificently symbolized
>     in the twelfth chapter of the _Apocalypse_, which is undoubtedly
>     one of the most Kabalistical books in the _Bible_. In fact,
>     without the Kabalistical keys its meaning is utterly
>     unintelligible.
> 
>     Now, in the Hebrew, as in the Greek, alphabet, there are no
>     distinct numeral characters, and consequently each letter has a
>     certain numerical value attached to it. From this circumstance
>     results the important fact that every Hebrew word constitutes a
>     number, and every number a word. This is referred to in the
>     _Revelations_ (xiii. 18) in mentioning the “number of the beast”!
>     In the _Kabalah_ words of equal numerical values are supposed to
>     have a certain explanatory connection with each other. This forms
>     the science of Gematria, which is the first division of the
>     Literal _Kabalah_. Furthermore, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet
>     had for the Initiates of the _Kabalah_ a certain hieroglyphical
>     value and meaning which, rightly applied, gave to each word the
>     value of a mystical sentence; and this again was variable
>     according to the relative positions of the letters with regard to
>     each other. From these various Kabalistical points of view let us
>     now examine this word Elohim.
> 
>     First then we can divide the word into the two words, which
>     signify “The Feminine Divinity of the Waters;” compare with the
>     Greek Aphrodite. “sprung from the foam of the sea.” Again it is
>     divisible into the “Mighty One, Star of the Sea,” or “the Mighty
>     One breathing forth the Spirit upon the Waters.” Also by
>     combination of the letters we get “the Silent Power of Iah.” And
>     again, “My God, the Former of the Universe,” for _Mah_ is a secret
>     Kabalistical name applied to the idea of Formation. Also we obtain
>     “Who is my God.” Furthermore “the Mother in Iah.”
> 
>     The total number is 1 + 30 + 5 + 10 + 40 = 86 = “Violent heat,” or
>     “the Power of Fire.” If we add together the three middle letters
>     we obtain 45, and the first and last letters yield 41, making thus
>     “the Mother of Formation.” Lastly, we shall find the two divine
>     names “El” and “Yah,” together with the letter _m_, which
>     signifies “Water,” for Mem, the name of this letter, means
>     “water.”
> 
>     If we divide it into its component letters and take them as
>     hieroglyphical signs we shall have:
> 
>     “Will perfected through Sacrifice progressing through successive
>     Transformation by Inspiration.”
> 
> The last few paragraphs of the above, in which the word “Elohim” is
> Kabalistically analyzed, show conclusively enough that the Elohim are not
> one, nor two, nor even a trinity, but a Host—the army of the creative
> powers.
> 
> The Christian Church, in making of Jehovah—one of these very Elohim—the
> one Supreme God, has introduced hopeless confusion into the celestial
> hierarchy, in spite of the volumes written by Thomas Aquinas and his
> school on the subject. The only explanation to be found in all their
> treatises on the nature and essence of the numberless classes of celestial
> beings mentioned in the _Bible_—Archangels, Thrones, Seraphim, Cherubim,
> Messengers, etc.—is that “The angelic host is God’s militia.” They are
> “Gods _the creatures_,” while he is “God _the Creator_;” but of their true
> functions—of their actual place in the economy of Nature—not one word is
> said. They are
> 
>     More brilliant than the flames, more rapid than the wind, and they
>     live in love and harmony, mutually enlightening each other,
>     feeding on bread and a mystic beverage—the communion wine and
>     water?—surrounding as with a _river of fire_ the throne of the
>     Lamb, and veiling their faces with their wings. This throne of
>     love and glory they leave only to carry to the stars, the earth,
>     the kingdoms and all the sons of God, their brothers and pupils,
>     in short, to all creatures _like themselves_ the divine
>     influence.... As to their number, it is that of the great army of
>     Heaven (Sabaoth), more numerous than the stars.... Theology shows
>     us these rational luminaries, each constituting a species, and
>     containing in their natures such or another position of Nature:
>     covering immense space, though of a determined area;
>     residing—incorporeal though they are—within circumscribed limits;
>     ... more rapid than light or thunderbolt, disposing of all the
>     elements of Nature, providing at will inexplicable mirages
>     [illusions?], objective and subjective in turn, speaking to men a
>     language at one time articulate, at another purely spiritual.(388)
> 
> We learn farther on in the same work that it is these Angels and their
> hosts who are referred to in the sentence of verse I, 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 chapter iii. of the _Second Epistle of Peter_, and he will find
> there the same ideas.
> 
>     There shall come in the last days scoffers, ... saying, Where is
>     the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all
>     things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
>     For this they willingly are ignorant of that by the word of God
>     the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water
>     and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being
>     overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth,
>     which are now, by the same word are ... reserved unto fire, ... in
>     the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the
>     elements shall melt with fervent heat.... Nevertheless we ... look
>     for new heavens and a new earth.
> 
> If the interpreters chose to see in this a reference to a creation, a
> deluge, and a promised coming of Christ, when they will live in a New
> Jerusalem in heaven, that is no fault of Peter. What he meant was the
> destruction of the Fifth Race and the appearance of a new continent for
> the Sixth Race.
> 
> The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore when all
> the fires were extinguished on the 1st of November their sacred and
> inextinguishable fire remained alone to illumine the horizon like those of
> the Magi and the modern Zoroastrian. And like the early Fifth Race and the
> later Chaldæans and Greeks, and again like the Christians (who do it to
> this day without suspecting the real meaning), they greeted the “Morning‐
> Star,” the beautiful Venus‐Lucifer.(504) Strabo speaks of an island near
> Britannia where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites
> as in Samothrace, and this was the sacred Ierna, where a perpetual fire
> was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not, as Lucian
> explains,
> 
>     That the same _Spirit_ shall animate a new body, not here, but in
>     a different world,
> 
> but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus
> says, they declared that the souls of men after a determinate period would
> pass into other bodies.(505)
> 
> These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their ancestors of the
> Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They piously preserved the teachings, while
> their parent Root‐Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant,
> owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, were gradually approaching
> their end.
> 
> SECTION XXIX. THE TRIAL OF THE SUN INITIATE.
> 
> We will begin with the ancient Mysteries—those received from the
> Atlanteans by the primitive Âryans—whose mental and intellectual state
> Professor Max Müller has described with such a masterly hand, yet left so
> incomplete withal.
> 
>     He says: We have in it [in the _Rig Veda_] a period of the
>     intellectual life of man to which there is no parallel in any
>     other part of the world. In the hymns of the _Veda_ we see man
>     left to himself to solve the riddle of this world.... He invokes
>     the gods around him, he praises, he worships them. But still with
>     all these gods ... beneath him, and above him, the early poet
>     seems ill at rest within himself. There, too, in his own breast,
>     he has discovered a power that is never mute when he prays, never
>     absent when he fears and trembles. It seems to inspire his prayers
>     and yet to listen to them; it seems to live in him, and yet to
>     support him and all around him. The only name he can find for this
>     mysterious power is “Brahman;” for brahman meant originally force,
>     will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation. But this
>     impersonal brahman too, as soon as it is named, grows into
>     something strange and divine. It ends by being one of many gods,
>     one of the great triad, worshipped to the present day. And still
>     the thought within him has no real name; that power which is
>     nothing but itself, which supports the gods, the heavens, and
>     every living being, floats before his mind, conceived but not
>     expressed. At last he calls it “Âtman,” for âtman, originally
>     breath or spirit, comes to mean Self and Self alone, Self, whether
>     divine or human; Self, whether creating or suffering; Self,
>     whether One or All; but always Self, independent and free. “Who
>     has seen the first‐born?” says the poet, “when he who had no bones
>     (_i.e._, form) bore him that had bones? Where was the life, the
>     blood, the Self of the world? Who went to ask this from any one
>     who knew it? (_Rig Veda_, I, 164, 4.) This idea of a divine Self
>     once expressed, everything else must acknowledge its supremacy;
>     _Self_ is the Lord of all things; it is the King of all things; as
>     all the spokes of a wheel are contained in the nave and
>     circumference, all things are contained in this Self; all selves
>     are contained in this _Self_.” (Brihadâranyaka, IV. v. 15).(506)
> 
> This Self, the highest, the one, and the universal, was symbolised on the
> plane of mortals by the Sun, its life‐giving effulgence being in its turn
> the emblem of the Soul—killing the terrestrial passions which have ever
> been an impediment to the re‐union of the Unit Self (the Spirit) with the
> All‐Self. Hence the allegorical mystery, only the broad features of which
> may be given here. It was enacted by the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist” and of
> “Light.” The second Sun (the “second hypostasis” of Rabbi Drach) appeared
> as put on his trial, Vishvakarma, the Hierophant, cutting off seven of his
> beams, and replacing them with a crown of brambles, when the “Sun” became
> Vikarttana, shorn of his beams or rays. After that, the Sun—enacted by a
> neophyte ready to be initiated—was made to descend into Pâtâla, the nether
> regions, on a trial of Tantalus. Coming out of it triumphant, he emerged
> from this region of lust and iniquity, to re‐become Karmasâkshin, witness
> of the Karma of men,(507) and arose once more triumphant in all the glory
> of his regeneration, as the Graha‐Râjah, King of the Constellations, and
> was addressed as Gabhastiman, “re‐possessed of his rays.”
> 
> The “fable” in the popular Pantheon of India, founded upon, and born out
> of the poetical mysticism of the _Rig‐Veda_—the sayings of which were
> mostly all dramatised during the religious Mysteries—grew in the course of
> its exoteric evolution into the following allegory. It may be found now in
> several of the _Purânas_ and in other Scriptures. In the _Rig‐Veda_ and
> its Hymns, Vishvakarma, a Mystery‐God, is the Logos, the Demiurgos, one of
> the greatest Gods, and spoken of in two of the hymns as the highest. He is
> the Omnificent (Vishvakarma), called the “Great Architect of the
> Universe,” the
> 
>     All seeing God, ... the father, the generator, the disposer, who
>     gives the gods their names, and is beyond the comprehension of
>     mortals,
> 
> as is every Mystery‐God. Esoterically, He is the personification of the
> creative manifested Power: and mystically He is the seventh principle in
> man, in its collectivity. For He is the son of Bhuvana, the self‐created,
> luminous Essence, and of the virtuous, chaste and lovely Yoga‐Siddhâ, the
> virgin Goddess, whose name speaks for itself, since it personified Yoga‐
> power, the “chaste mother” that creates the Adepts. In the Rig‐Vaidic
> Hymns, Vishvakarma performs the “great sacrifice,” _i.e._, sacrifices
> himself for the world; or, as the _Nirukta_ is made to say, translated by
> the Orientalists:
> 
>     Vishvakarma first of all offers up all the world in a sacrifice,
>     and then ends by sacrificing himself.
> 
> In the mystical representations of his character, Vishvakarma is often
> called Vittoba, and is pictured as the “Victim,” the “Man‐God,” or the
> Avatâra crucified in space.
> 
> [Of the true Mysteries, the real Initiations, nothing of course can be
> said in public; they can be known only to those who are able to experience
> them. But a few hints can be given of the great ceremonial Mysteries of
> Antiquity, which stood to the public as the real Mysteries, and into which
> candidates were initiated with much ceremony and display of Occult Arts.
> Behind these, in silence and darkness, were the true Mysteries, as they
> have always existed and continue to exist. In Egypt, as in Chaldæa and
> later in Greece, the Mysteries were celebrated at stated times, and the
> first day was a public holiday, on which, with much pomp, the candidates
> were escorted to the Great Pyramid and passed thereinto out of sight. The
> second day was devoted to ceremonies of purification, at the close of
> which the candidate was presented with a white robe; on the third
> day](508) he was tried and examined as to his proficiency in Occult
> learning. On the fourth day, after another ceremony symbolical of
> purification, he was sent alone to pass through various trials, finally
> becoming entranced in a subterranean crypt, in utter darkness, for two
> days and two nights. In Egypt, the entranced neophyte was placed in an
> empty sarcophagus in the Pyramid, where the initiatory rites took place.
> In India and Central Asia, he was bound on a lathe, and when his body had
> become like that of one dead (entranced), he was carried into the crypt.
> Then the Hierophant kept watch over him “guiding the apparitional soul
> (astral body) from this world of Samsâra (or delusion) to the _nether_
> kingdoms, from which, if successful, he had the right of releasing _seven
> suffering souls_” (Elementaries). Clothed with his Anandamayakosha, the
> body of bliss—the Srotâpanna remained there where we have no right to
> follow him, and upon returning—received the _Word_, with or without the
> “heart’s blood” of the Hierophant.(509)
> 
> Only in truth the Hierophant was never killed—neither in India nor
> elsewhere, the murder being simply feigned—unless the Initiator had chosen
> the Initiate for his successor and had decided to pass to him the last and
> supreme Word, after which he had to die—only one man in a nation having
> the right to know that word. Many are those grand Initiates who have thus
> passed out of the world’s sight, disappearing
> 
>     As mysteriously from the sight of men as Moses from the top of
>     Mount Pisgah (_Nebo_, oracular Wisdom), after he had laid his
>     hands upon Joshua, who thus became “full of the spirit of wisdom,”
>     _i.e._, initiated.
> 
> But he died, he was not killed. For killing, if really done, would belong
> to black, not to divine Magic. It is the transmission of light, rather
> than a transfer of life, of life spiritual and divine, and it is the
> shedding of Wisdom, not of blood. But the uninitiated inventors of
> theological Christianity took the allegorical language _à la lettre_; and
> instituted a dogma, the crude, misunderstood expression of which horrifies
> and repels the spiritual “heathen.”
> 
> All these Hierophants and Initiates were types of the Sun and of the
> Creative Principle (spiritual potency) as were Vishvakarma and Vikarttana,
> from the origin of the Mysteries. Ragon, the famous Mason, gives curious
> details and explanations with regard to the Sun rites. He shows that the
> biblical Hiram, the great hero of Masonry (the “widow’s son”) a type taken
> from Osiris, is the Sun‐God, the inventor of arts, and the “architect,”
> the name Hiram meaning the _elevated_, a title belonging to the Sun. Every
> Occultist knows how closely related to Osiris and the Pyramids are the
> narratives in _Kings_ concerning Solomon, his Temple and its construction;
> he knows also that the whole of the Masonic rite of Initiation is based
> upon the Biblical allegory of the construction of that Temple, Masons
> conveniently forgetting, or perhaps ignoring, the fact that the latter
> narrative is modelled upon Egyptian and still earlier symbolisms. Ragon
> explains it by showing that the three companions of Hiram, the “three
> murderers,” typify the three last months of the year; and that Hiram
> stands for the Sun—from its summer solstice downwards, when it begins
> decreasing—the whole rite being an astronomical allegory.
> 
>     During the summer solstice, the Sun provokes songs of gratitude
>     from all that breathes; hence Hiram, who represents it, can give
>     to whomsoever has the right to it, the sacred Word, that is to say
>     life. When the Sun descends to the inferior signs all Nature
>     becomes mute, and Hiram can no longer give the sacred Word to the
>     companions, who represent the three inert months of the year. The
>     first companion strikes Hiram feebly with a rule twenty‐four
>     inches long, symbol of the twenty‐four hours which make up each
>     diurnal revolution; it is the first distribution of time, which
>     after the exaltation of the mighty star, feebly assails his
>     existence, giving him the first blow. The second companion strikes
>     him with an _iron square_, symbol of the last season, figured by
>     the intersections of two right lines, which would divide into four
>     equal parts the Zodiacal circle, whose centre symbolises Hiram’s
>     heart, where it touches the point of the four squares representing
>     the four seasons: second distribution of time, which at that
>     period strikes a heavier blow at the solar existence. The third
>     companion strikes him mortally on his forehead with a heavy blow
>     of his mallet, whose cylindrical form symbolises the year, the
>     ring or circle: third distribution of time, the accomplishment of
>     which deals the last blow to the existence of the _expiring_ Sun.
>     From this interpretation it has been inferred that _Hiram_, a
>     _founder_ of metals, the hero of the new legend with the title of
>     _architect_, is Osiris (the Sun) of modern initiation; that
>     _Isis_, his widow, is the _Lodge_, the emblem of the Earth (_loka_
>     in Sanskrit, the world) and that _Horus_, son of Osiris (or of
>     light) and the widow’s son, is the _free Mason_, that is to say,
>     the _Initiate_ who inhabits the terrestrial lodge (_the child of
>     the Widow, and of Light_.)(510)
> 
> And here again, our friends the Jesuits have to be mentioned, for the
> above rite is of their making. To give one instance of their success in
> throwing dust into the eyes of ordinary individuals to prevent their
> seeing the truths of Occultism, we will point out what they did in what is
> now called Freemasonry.
> 
> This Brotherhood does possess a considerable portion of the symbolism,
> formulæ, and ritual of Occultism, handed down from time immemorial from
> the primeval Initiations. To render this Brotherhood a mere harmless
> negation, the Jesuits sent some of their most able emissaries into the
> Order, who first made the simple brethren believe that the true secret was
> lost with Hiram Abiff; and then induced them to put this belief into their
> formularies. They then invented specious but spurious higher degrees,
> pretending to give further light upon this lost secret, to lead the
> candidate on and amuse him with forms borrowed from the real thing but
> containing no substance, and all artfully contrived to lead the aspiring
> Neophyte to nowhere. And yet men of good sense and abilities, in other
> respects, will meet at intervals, and with solemn face, zeal and
> earnestness, go through the mockery of revealing “substituted secrets”
> instead of the real thing.
> 
> If the reader turns to a very remarkable and very useful work called _The
> Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, Art. “Rosicrucianism,” he will find its author,
> a high and learned Mason, showing what the Jesuits have done to destroy
> Masonry. Speaking of the period when the existence of this mysterious
> Brotherhood (of which many pretend to know “something” if not a good deal,
> and know in fact nothing) was first made known, he says:
> 
>     There was a dread among the great masses of society in byegone
>     days of the unseen—a dread, as recent events and phenomena show
>     very clearly, not yet overcome in its entirety. Hence students of
>     Nature and mind were forced into an obscurity not altogether
>     unwelcome.... The Kabalistic reveries of a Johann Reuchlin led to
>     the fiery action of a Luther, and the patient labours of
>     Trittenheim produced the modern system of diplomatic cipher
>     writing.... It is very worthy of remark, that one particular
>     century, and that in which the Rosicrucians first showed
>     themselves, is distinguished in history as the era in which most
>     of these efforts at throwing off the trammels of the past [Popery
>     and Ecclesiasticism] occurred. Hence the opposition of the losing
>     party, and their virulence against anything mysterious or unknown.
>     They freely organised pseudo‐Rosicrucian and Masonic societies in
>     return; and these societies were instructed to irregularly entrap
>     the weaker brethren of the True and Invisible Order, and then
>     triumphantly betray anything they might be so inconsiderate as to
>     communicate to the superiors of these transitory and unmeaning
>     associations. Every wile was adopted by the authorities, fighting
>     in self‐defence against the progress of truth, to engage, by
>     persuasion, interest or terror, such as might be cajoled into
>     receiving the Pope as Master—when gained, as many converts to that
>     faith know, but dare not own, they are treated with neglect, and
>     left to fight the battle of life as best they may, not even being
>     admitted to the knowledge of such miserable aporrheta as the
>     Romish faith considers itself entitled to withhold.
> 
> But if Masonry has been spoiled, none is able to crush the real, invisible
> Rosicrucian and the Eastern Initiate. The symbolism of Vishvakarma and
> Sûrya Vikarttana has survived, where Hiram Abiff was indeed murdered, and
> we will now return to it. It is not simply an astronomical, but is the
> most solemn rite, an inheritance from the Archaic Mysteries that has
> crossed the ages and is used to this day. It typifies a whole drama of the
> Cycle of Life, of progressive incarnations, and of psychic as well as of
> physiological secrets, of which neither the Church nor Science knows
> anything, though it is this rite that has led the former to the greatest
> of its Christian Mysteries.
> 
> SECTION XXX. THE MYSTERY “SUN OF INITIATION.”
> 
> The antiquity of the Secret Doctrine may be better realised when it is
> shown at what point of history its Mysteries had already been desecrated,
> by being made subservient to the personal ambition of despot‐ruler and
> crafty priest. These profoundly philosophical and scientifically composed
> religious dramas, in which were enacted the grandest truths of the Occult
> or Spiritual Universe and the hidden lore of learning, had become subject
> to persecution long before the days when Plato and even Pythagoras
> flourished. Withal, primal revelations given to Mankind have not died with
> the Mysteries; they are still preserved as heirlooms for future and more
> spiritual generations.
> 
> It has been already stated in _Isis Unveiled_,(511) that so far back as in
> the days of Aristotle, the great Mysteries had already lost their
> primitive grandeur and solemnity. Their rites had fallen into desuetude,
> and they had to a great degree degenerated into mere priestly speculations
> and had become religious shams. It is useless to state when they first
> appeared in Europe and Greece, since recognised history may almost be said
> to begin with Aristotle, everything before him appearing to be in an
> inextricable chronological confusion. Suffice it to say, that in Egypt the
> Mysteries had been known since the days of Menes, and that the Greeks
> received them only when Orpheus introduced them from India. In an article
> “Was writing known before Pânini?”(512) it is stated that the Pândus had
> acquired universal dominion and had taught the “sacrificial” Mysteries to
> other races as far back as 3,300 B.C. Indeed, when Orpheus, the son of
> Apollo or Helios, received from his father the phorminx—the seven‐stringed
> lyre, symbolical of the sevenfold mystery of Initiation—these Mysteries
> were already hoary with age in Central Asia and India. According to
> Herodotus it was Orpheus who brought them from India, and Orpheus is far
> anterior to Homer and Hesiod. Thus even in the days of Aristotle few were
> the true Adepts left in Europe and even in Egypt. The heirs of those who
> had been dispersed by the conquering swords of various invaders of old
> Egypt had been dispersed in their turn. As 8,000 or 9,000 years earlier
> the stream of knowledge had been slowly running down from the tablelands
> of Central Asia into India and towards Europe and Northern Africa, so
> about 500 years B.C. it had begun to flow backward to its old home and
> birthplace. During the two thousand subsequent years the knowledge of the
> existence of great Adepts nearly died out in Europe. Nevertheless, in some
> secret places the Mysteries were still enacted in all their primitive
> purity. The “Sun of Righteousness” still blazed high on _the midnight
> sky_; and, while darkness was upon the face of the profane world, there
> was the eternal light in the Adyta on the nights of Initiation. The _true_
> Mysteries were never made public. Eleusinia and Agræ for the multitudes;
> the God Εὐβουλῆ “of the good counsel,” the great Orphic Deity, for the
> neophyte.
> 
> This mystery God—mistaken by our Symbologists for the Sun—who was He?
> Everyone who has any idea of the ancient Egyptian exoteric faith is quite
> aware that for the multitudes Osiris was the Sun in Heaven, “the Heavenly
> King,” Ro‐Imphab; that by the Greeks the Sun was called the “Eye of
> Jupiter,” as for the modern orthodox Pârsî he is “the Eye of Ormuzd:” that
> the Sun, moreover, was addressed as the “All‐seeing God” (πολυόφθαλμος) as
> the “God Saviour,” and the “saving God” (Αἴτιον τῆς σωτηρίας). Read the
> papyrus of Papheronmes at Berlin, and the stela as rendered by Mariette
> Bey,(513) and see what they say:
> 
>     Glory to thee, O Sun, divine child! ... thy rays carry life to the
>     pure and to those ready.... The Gods [the “Sons of God”] who
>     approach thee tremble with delight and awe.... Thou art the first
>     born, the Son of God, the Word.(514)
> 
> The Church has now seized upon these terms and sees presentments of the
> coming Christ in these expressions in the initiatory rites and prophetic
> utterances of the Pagan Oracles. They are nothing of the kind, for they
> were applied to every worthy Initiate. If the expressions that were used
> in hieratic writings and glyphs thousands of years before our era are now
> found in the laudatory hymns and prayers of Christian Churches, it is
> simply because they have been unblushingly appropriated by the Latin
> Christians, in the full hope of never being detected by posterity.
> Everything that could be done had been done to destroy the original Pagan
> manuscripts and the Church felt secure. Christianity has undeniably had
> her great Seers and Prophets, like every other religion; but their claims
> are not strengthened by denying their predecessors.
> 
> Listen to Plato:
> 
>     Know then, Glaucus, that when I speak of the production of good,
>     it is the Sun I mean. The Son has a perfect analogy with his
>     Father.
> 
> Iamblichus calls the Sun “the image of divine intelligence or Wisdom.”
> Eusebius, repeating the words of Philo, calls the rising Sun (ἀνατολὴ) the
> chief Angel, the most ancient, adding that the Archangel who is
> _polyonymous_ (of many names) is the Verbum or Christ. The word Sol (Sun)
> being derived from _solus_, the One, or the “He alone,” and its Greek name
> Helios meaning the “Most High,” the emblem becomes comprehensible.
> Nevertheless, the Ancients made a difference between the Sun and its
> prototype.
> 
> Socrates saluted the rising Sun as does a true Pârsî or Zoroastrian in our
> own day; and Homer and Euripides, as Plato did after them several times,
> mention the Jupiter‐Logos, the “Word” or the Sun. Nevertheless, the
> Christians maintain that since the oracle consulted on the God Iao
> answered: “It is the Sun,” therefore
> 
>     The Jehovah of the Jews was well known to the Pagans and
>     Greeks;(515)
> 
> and “Iao is our Jehovah.” The first part of the proposition has nothing,
> it seems, to do with the second part, and least of all can the conclusion
> be regarded as correct. But if the Christians are so anxious to prove the
> identity, Occultists have nothing against it. Only, in such case, Jehovah
> is also Bacchus. It is very strange that the people of civilised
> Christendom should until now hold on so desperately to the skirts of the
> idolatrous Jews—Sabæans and Sun worshippers as they were,(516) like the
> rabble of Chaldæa—and that they should fail to see that the later Jehovah
> is but a Jewish development of the Ja‐va, or the Iao, of the Phœnicians;
> that this name, in short, was the secret name of a Mystery‐God, one of the
> many Kabiri. “Highest God” as He was for one little nation, he never was
> so regarded by the Initiates who conducted the Mysteries; for them he was
> but a Planetary Spirit attached to the visible Sun; and the visible Sun is
> only the central Star, not the central spiritual Sun.
> 
>     And the Angel of the Lord said unto him [Manoah] “Why askest thou
>     thus after my name, seeing it is secret.”(517)
> 
> However this may be, the identity of the Jehovah of Mount Sinai with the
> God Bacchus is hardly disputable, and he is surely—as already shown in
> _Isis Unveiled_—Dionysos.(518) Wherever Bacchus was worshipped there was a
> tradition of Nyssa,(519) and a cave where he was reared. Outside Greece,
> Bacchus was the all‐powerful “Zagreus, the highest of Gods,” in whose
> service was Orpheus, the founder of the Mysteries. Now, unless it be
> conceded that Moses was an initiated Priest, an Adept, whose actions are
> all narrated allegorically, then it must be admitted that he personally,
> together with his hosts of Israelites, worshipped Bacchus.
> 
>     And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it _Jehovah
>     Nissi_ [or, Iao‐nisi, or again Dionisi].(520)
> 
> To strengthen the statement we have further to remember that the place
> where Osiris, the Egyptian Zagreus or Bacchus, was born, was Mount Sinai,
> which is called by the Egyptians Mount Nissa. The brazen serpent was a
> nis, כהש, and the month of the Jewish Passover is Nisan.
> 
> SECTION XXXI. THE OBJECTS OF THE MYSTERIES.
> 
> The earliest Mysteries recorded in history are those of Samothrace. After
> the distribution of pure Fire, a new life began. This was the new birth of
> the Initiate, after which, like the Brâhmans of old in India, he became a
> dwija—a “twice born,”
> 
>     Initiated into that which may be rightly called the most blessed
>     of all Mysteries ... being ourselves pure,(521)
> 
> says Plato. Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus, and Sanchoniathon the
> Phœnician—the oldest of Historians—say that these Mysteries originated in
> the night of time, thousands of years probably before the historical
> period. Iamblichus informs us that Pythagoras
> 
>     Was initiated in all the Mysteries of Byblus and Tyre, in the
>     sacred operations of the Syrians, and in the Mysteries of the
>     Phœnicians.(522)
> 
> As was said in _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     When men like Pythagoras, Plato and Iamblichus, renowned for their
>     severe morality, took part in the Mysteries and spoke of them with
>     veneration, it ill behoves our modern critics to judge them [and
>     their Initiates] upon their merely external aspect.
> 
> Yet this is what has been done until now, especially by the Christian
> Fathers. Clement Alexandrinus stigmatises the Mysteries as “indecent and
> diabolical” though his words, showing that the Eleusinian Mysteries were
> identical with, and even, as he would allege, borrowed from, those of the
> Jews, are quoted elsewhere in this work. The Mysteries were composed of
> two parts, of which the Lesser were performed at Agræ, and the Greater at
> Eleusis, and Clement had been himself initiated. But the Katharsis, or
> trials of purification, have ever been misunderstood. Iamblichus explains
> the worst; and his explanation ought to be perfectly satisfactory, at any
> rate for every unprejudiced mind.
> 
> He says:—
> 
>     Exhibitions of this kind in the Mysteries were designed to free us
>     from licentious passions, by gratifying the sight, and at the same
>     time vanquishing all evil thought, through the awful sanctity with
>     which these rites were accompanied.
> 
> Dr. Warburton remarks:
> 
>     The wisest and best men in the Pagan world are unanimous in this,
>     that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest
>     ends by the worthiest means.
> 
> Although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take part
> in the Mysteries, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very
> few indeed attained the higher and final Initiation in these celebrated
> rites. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth
> book of his _Theology of Plato_.
> 
>     The perfective rite, precedes in order the initiation Telete,
>     _Muesis_, and the initiation, _Epopteia_, or the final apocalypse
>     [revelation].
> 
> Theon of Smyrna, in _Mathematica_, also divides the mystic rites into five
> parts:
> 
>     The first of which is the previous purification; for neither are
>     the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them;
>     but there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of
>     the crier ... since it is necessary that such as are not expelled
>     from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain
>     purifications: but after purification the reception of the sacred
>     rites succeeds. The third part is denominated _epopteia_ or
>     reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the
>     revelation, is (the investiture) the binding of the head and
>     fixing of the crowns(523) ... whether after this he [the initiated
>     person] becomes a torchbearer, or an hierophant of the Mysteries,
>     or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the
>     fifth, which is produced from all these, _is friendship and
>     interior communion with God_. And this was the last and most awful
>     of all the Mysteries.(524)
> 
> The chief objects of the Mysteries, represented as diabolical by the
> Christian Fathers and ridiculed by modern writers, were instituted with
> the highest and the most moral purpose in view. There is no need to repeat
> here that which has been already described in _Isis Unveiled_(525) that
> whether through temple Initiation or the private study of Theurgy, every
> student obtained the proof of the immortality of his Spirit, and the
> survival of his Soul. What the last _epopteia_ was is alluded to by Plato
> in _Phædrus_:
> 
>     Being _initiated_ in those _Mysteries_, which it is lawful to call
>     the most blessed of all mysteries ... we were freed from the
>     molestations of evils, which otherwise await us in a future period
>     of time. Likewise in consequence of this divine _initiation_, we
>     became spectators of entire, simple, immoveable, and blessed
>     visions, resident in a pure light.(526)
> 
> This veiled confession shows that the Initiates enjoyed Theophany—saw
> visions of Gods and of real immortal Spirits. As Taylor correctly infers:
> 
>     The most sublime part of the _epopteia_ or final revealing,
>     consisted in beholding the Gods [the high Planetary Spirits]
>     themselves, invested with a resplendent light.(527)
> 
> The statement of Proclus upon the subject is unequivocal:
> 
>     In all the Initiations and Mysteries, the Gods exhibit many forms
>     of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes; and sometimes
>     indeed a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view;
>     sometimes this light is according _to a human form_ and sometimes
>     it proceeds into a different shape.(528)
> 
> Again we have
> 
>     Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and shadow of something
>     that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing [the prototype
>     of the Soul‐Spirit] remaineth in _unchangeable_ condition, it is
>     well also with its shadow. When that resplendent one removeth far
>     from its shadow life removeth [from the latter] to a distance.
>     Again that light is the shadow of something more resplendent than
>     itself.(529)
> 
> Thus speaks the _Desatir_, in the _Book of Shet_ (the prophet Zirtusht),
> thereby showing the identity of its Esoteric doctrines with those of the
> Greek Philosophers.
> 
> The second statement of Plato confirms the view that the Mysteries of the
> Ancients were identical with the Initiations practised even now among the
> Buddhist and the Hindu Adepts. The higher visions, the most truthful, were
> produced through a regular discipline of gradual Initiations, and the
> development of psychical powers. In Europe and Egypt the Mystæ were
> brought into close union with those whom Proclus calls “mystical natures,”
> “resplendent Gods,” because, as Plato says:
> 
>     [We] were ourselves pure and immaculate, being liberated from this
>     surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we
>     are now bound like an oyster to its shell.(530)
> 
> As to the East,
> 
>     The doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed
>     _entirely_ in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last
>     moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees.(531)
> 
> The word _Pitris_ may now be explained and something else added. In India
> the chela of the third degree of Initiation has two Gurus: One, the living
> Adept; the other the disembodied and glorified Mahâtmâ, Who remains the
> adviser or instructor of even the high Adepts. Few are the accepted chelas
> who even see their living Master, their Guru, till the day and hour of
> their final and for ever binding vow. It is this that was meant in _Isis
> Unveiled_, when it was stated that few of the _fakirs_ (the word _chela_
> being unknown to Europe and America in those days) however
> 
>     Pure, and honest, and self‐devoted, have yet ever seen the astral
>     form of a purely _human pitar_ (an ancestor or father), otherwise
>     than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It
>     is in the presence of his instructor, the Guru, and just before
>     the _vatou_‐fakir [the just initiated chela] is despatched into
>     the world of the living, with his seven‐knotted bamboo wand for
>     all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the
>     unknown PRESENCE [of his Pitar or Father, the glorified invisible
>     Master, or disembodied Mahâtmâ]. He sees it, and falls prostrate
>     at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the
>     great secret of its evocation, for it is the supreme mystery of
>     the holy syllable.
> 
> The Initiate, says Éliphas Lévi, _knows_; therefore, “he dares all and
> keeps silent.” Says the great French Kabalist:
> 
>     You may see him often sad, never discouraged or desperate; often
>     poor, never humbled or wretched; often persecuted, never cowed
>     down or vanquished. For he remembers the widowhood and the murder
>     of Orpheus, the exile and solitary death of Moses, the martyrdom
>     of the prophets, the tortures of Apollonius, the Cross of the
>     Saviour. He knows in what forlorn state died Agrippa, whose memory
>     is slandered to this day; he knows the trials that broke down the
>     great Paracelsus, and all that Raymond Lully had to suffer before
>     he arrived at a bloody death. He remembers Swedenborg having to
>     feign insanity, and losing even his reason before his knowledge
>     was forgiven to him; St. Martin, who had to hide himself all his
>     life; Cagliostro, who died forsaken in the cells of the
>     Inquisition(532); Cazotte, who perished on the guillotine.
>     Successor of so many victims, he dares, nevertheless, but
>     understands the more the necessity to keep silent.(533)
> 
> Masonry—not the political institution known as the Scotch Lodge, but real
> Masonry, some rites of which are still preserved in the Grand Orient of
> France, and that Elias Ashmole, a celebrated English Occult Philosopher of
> the XVIIth century, tried in vain to remodel, after the manner of the
> Indian and Egyptian Mysteries—Masonry rests, according to Ragon, the great
> authority upon the subject, upon three fundamental degrees: the triple
> duty of a Mason is to study _whence he comes_, _what he is_, and _whither
> he goes_; the study that is, of God, of himself, and of the future
> transformation.(534) Masonic Initiation was modelled on that in the lesser
> Mysteries. The third degree was one used in both Egypt and India from time
> immemorial, and the remembrance of it lingers to this day in every Lodge,
> under the name of the death and resurrection of Hiram Abiff, the “Widow’s
> Son.” In Egypt the latter was called “Osiris;” in India “Loka‐chakshu”
> (Eye of the World), ind “Dinakara” (day‐maker) or the Sun—and the rite
> itself was everywhere named the “gate of death.” The coffin, or
> sarcophagus, of Osiris, killed by Typhon, was brought in and placed in the
> middle of the Hall of the Dead, with the Initiates all around it and the
> candidate near by. The latter was asked whether he had participated in the
> murder, and notwithstanding his denial, and after sundry and very hard
> trials, the Initiator feigned to strike him on the head with a hatchet; he
> was thrown down, swathed in bandages like a mummy, and wept over. Then
> came lightning and thunder, the supposed corpse was surrounded with fire,
> and was finally raised.
> 
> Ragon speaks of a rumour that charged the Emperor Commodus—when he was at
> one time enacting the part of the Initiator—with having played this part
> in the initiatory drama so seriously that he actually killed the postulant
> when dealing him the blow with the hatchet. This shows that the _lesser_
> Mysteries had not quite died out in the second century A.D.
> 
> The Mysteries were carried into South and Central America, Northern Mexico
> and Peru by the Atlanteans in those days when
> 
>     A pedestrian from the North [of what was once upon a time also
>     India] might have reached—hardly wetting his feet—the Alaskan
>     Peninsula, through Manchooria, across the _future_ Gulf of
>     Tartary, the Kurile and Aleutian Islands; while another traveller,
>     furnished with a canoe and starting from the South, could have
>     walked over from Siam, crossed the Polynesian Islands and trudged
>     into any part of the continent of South America.(535)
> 
> They continued to exist down to the day of the Spanish invaders. These
> destroyed the Mexican and Peruvian records, but were prevented from laying
> their desecrating hands upon the many Pyramids—the lodges of an ancient
> Initiation—whose ruins are scattered over Puente Nacional, Cholula, and
> Teotihuacan. The ruins of Palenque, of Ococimgo in Chiapas, and others in
> Central America are known to all. If the pyramids and temples of Guiengola
> and Mitla ever betray their secrets, the present Doctrine will then be
> shown to have been a forerunner of the grandest truths in Nature.
> Meanwhile they have all a claim to be called Mitla, “the place of sadness”
> and “the abode of the (desecrated) dead.”
> 
> SECTION XXXII. TRACES OF THE MYSTERIES.
> 
> Says the _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, art. “Sun:”
> 
>     In all times, the Sun has necessarily played an important part as
>     a symbol, and especially in Freemasonry. The W.M. represents the
>     rising sun, the J.W. the sun at the meridian, and the S.W. the
>     setting sun. In the Druidical rites, the Arch‐Druid represented
>     the sun, and was aided by two other officers, one representing the
>     Moon in the West, and the other the Sun at the South in its
>     meridian. It is quite unnecessary to enter into any lengthened
>     discussion on this symbol.
> 
> It is the more “unnecessary” since J. M. Ragon has discussed it very
> fully, as one may find at the end of Section XXIX., where part of his
> explanations have been quoted. Freemasonry derived her rites from the
> East, as we have said. And if it be true to say of the modern Rosicrucians
> that “they are invested with a knowledge of chaos, not perhaps a very
> desirable acquisition,” the remark is still more true when applied to all
> the other branches of Masonry, since the knowledge of their members about
> the full signification of their symbols is _nil_. Dozens of hypotheses are
> resorted to, one more unlikely than the other, as to the “Round Towers” of
> Ireland; one fact is enough to show the ignorance of the Masons, namely,
> that, according to the _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, the idea that they are
> connected with Masonic Initiation may be at once dismissed as unworthy of
> notice. The “Towers,” which are found throughout the East in Asia, were
> connected with the Mystery‐Initiations, namely, with the Vishvakarma and
> the Vikarttana rites. The candidates for Initiation were placed in them
> for three days and three nights, wherever there was no temple with a
> subterranean crypt close at hand. These round towers were built for no
> other purposes. Discredited as are all such monuments of Pagan origin by
> the Christian clergy, who thus “soil their own nest,” they are still the
> living and indestructible relics of the Wisdom of old. Nothing exists in
> this objective and illusive world of ours that cannot be made to serve two
> purposes—a good and a bad one. Thus in later ages, the Initiates of the
> _Left_ Path and the anthropomorphists took in hand most of those venerable
> ruins, then silent and deserted by their first wise inmates, and turned
> them indeed into phallic monuments. But this was a deliberate, wilful, and
> vicious misinterpretation of their real meaning, a deflection from their
> first use. The Sun—though ever, even for the multitudes, μὸνος οὐρανοῦ
> θεὸς, “the only and one King and God in Heaven,” and the Εὐβουλῆ, “the God
> of Good Counsel” of Orpheus—had in every exoteric popular religion a dual
> aspect which was anthropomorphised by the profane. Thus the Sun was
> Osiris‐_Typhon_, Ormuzd‐_Ahriman_, Bel‐Jupiter and _Baal_, the life‐giving
> and the _death_‐giving luminary. And thus one and the same monolith,
> pillar, pyramid, tower or temple, originally built to glorify the first
> principle or aspect, might become in time an idol‐fane, or worse, a
> phallic emblem in its crude and brutal form. The Lingam of the Hindus has
> a spiritual and highly philosophical meaning, while the missionaries see
> in it but an “indecent emblem;” it has just the meaning which is to be
> found in all those baalim, chammanim, and the bamoth with the pillars of
> unhewn stone of the Bible, set up for the glorification of the male
> Jehovah. But this does not alter the fact that the pureia of the Greeks,
> the nur‐hags of Sardinia, the teocalli of Mexico, etc., were all in the
> beginning of the same character as the “Round Towers” of Ireland. They
> were sacred places of Initiation.
> 
> In 1877, the writer, quoting the authority and opinions of some most
> eminent scholars, ventured to assert that there was a great difference
> between the terms _Chrestos_ and _Christos_, a difference having a
> profound and Esoteric meaning. Also that while _Christos_ means “to live”
> and “to be born into a new life,” _Chrestos_, in “Initiation” phraseology,
> signified the death of the inner, lower, or personal nature in man; thus
> is given the key to the Brâhmanical title, the twice‐born; and finally,
> 
>     There were _Chrestians_ long before the era of Christianity, and
>     the Essenes belonged to them.(536)...
> 
> For this epithets sufficiently opprobrious to characterise the writer
> could hardly be found. And yet then as well as now, the author never
> attempted a statement of such a serious nature without showing as many
> learned authorities for it as could be mustered. Thus on the next page it
> was said:
> 
>     Lepsius shows that the word _Nofre_ means Chrestos, “good,” and
>     that one of the titles of Osiris, “Onnofre,” must be translated
>     “the goodness of God made manifest.” “The worship of Christ was
>     not universal at this early date,” explains Mackenzie, “by which I
>     mean that Christolatry had not been introduced; but the worship of
>     _Chrestos_—the Good Principle—had preceded it by many centuries,
>     and even survived the general adoption of Christianity, as shown
>     on monuments still in existence....” Again, we have an inscription
>     which is pre‐Christian on an epitaphial tablet (Spon. _Misc.
>     Erud._, Ant., x. xviii. 2). Υαχινθε Λαρισαιων Δησμοσιε Πρως Χρηστε
>     Χαιρε, and de Rossi (_Roma Sotteranea_, tome i., tav. xxi.) gives
>     us another example from the catacombs—“Ælia Chreste, in
>     Pace.”(537)
> 
> To‐day the writer is able to add to all those testimonies the
> corroboration of an erudite author, who proves whatever he undertakes to
> show on the authority of geometrical demonstration. There is a most
> curious passage with remarks and explanations in the _Source of Measures_,
> whose author has probably never heard of the “Mystery‐God” Visvakarma of
> the early Âryans. Treating on the difference between the terms Chrest and
> Christ, he ends by saying that:
> 
>     There were two Messiahs: one who went down into the pit for the
>     salvation of this world; this was the Sun shorn of his golden
>     rays, and crowned with blackened ones (symbolising this loss), as
>     the thorns: the other was the triumphant Messiah mounting up to
>     the summit of the arch of heaven, and _personified as the Lion of
>     the Tribe of Judah_. In both instances he had the cross; once in
>     humiliation and once holding it in his control as the law of
>     creation, He being Jehovah.
> 
> And then the author proceeds to give “the fact” that “there were two
> Messiahs,” etc., as quoted above. And this—leaving the divine and mystic
> character and claim for Jesus entirely independent of this event of His
> mortal life—shows Him, beyond any doubt, as an Initiate of the Egyptian
> Mysteries, where the same rite of Death and of spiritual Resurrection for
> the neophyte, or the suffering Chrestos on his trial and new birth by
> Regeneration, was enacted—for this was a universally adopted rite.
> 
> The “pit” into which the Eastern Initiate was made to descend was, as
> shown before, Pâtâla, one of the seven regions of the nether world, over
> which ruled Vâsuki, the great “snake God.” This pit, Pâtâla, has in the
> Eastern Symbolism precisely the same manifold meaning as is found by Mr.
> Ralston Skinner in the Hebrew word _shiac_ in its application to the case
> in hand. For it was the synonym of Scorpio—Pâtâla’s depths being
> “impregnated with the brightness of the new Sun”—represented by the “newly
> born” into the glory; and Pâtâla was and is in a sense, “a pit, a grave,
> the place of death, and the door of Hades or Sheol”—as, in the partially
> exoteric Initiations in India, the candidate had to pass through the
> matrix of the heifer before proceeding to Pâtâla. In its non‐mystic sense
> it is the Antipodes—America being referred to in India as Pâtâla. But in
> its symbolism it meant all that, and much more. The fact alone that
> Vâsuki, the ruling Deity of Pâtâla, is represented in the Hindu Pantheon
> as the great Nâga (Serpent)—who was used by the Gods and Asuras as a rope
> round the mountain Mandara, at the churning of the ocean for Amrita, the
> water of immortality—connects him directly with Initiation.
> 
> For he is Shesha Nâga also, serving as a couch for Vishnu, and upholding
> the seven worlds; and he is also Ananta, “the endless,” and the symbol of
> eternity—hence the “God of Secret Wisdom,” degraded by the Church to the
> _rôle_ of the tempting Serpent, of Satan. That what is now said is correct
> may be verified by the evidence of even the exoteric rendering of the
> attributes of various Gods and Sages both in the Hindu and the Buddhist
> Pantheons. Two instances will suffice to show how little our best and most
> erudite Orientalists are capable of dealing correctly and fairly with the
> symbolism of Eastern nations, while remaining ignorant of the
> corresponding points to be found only in Occultism and the Secret
> Doctrine.
> 
> (1) The learned Orientalist and Tibetan traveller, Professor Emil
> Schlagintweit, mentions in one of his works on Tibet, a national legend to
> the effect that
> 
>     Nâgârjuna [a “mythological” personage “without any real
>     existence,” the learned German scholar thinks] received the book
>     Paramârtha, or according to others, the book _Avatamsaka_, from
>     the Nâgas, fabulous creatures of the nature of serpents, who
>     occupy a place among the beings superior to man, and are regarded
>     as protectors of the law of Buddha. To these spiritual beings
>     Shâkyamuni is said to have taught a more philosophical religious
>     system than to men, who were not sufficiently advanced to
>     understand it at the time of his appearance.(538)
> 
> Nor are men sufficiently advanced for it now; for “the more philosophical
> religious system” is the Secret Doctrine, the Occult Eastern Philosophy,
> which is the corner‐stone of all sciences rejected by the unwise builders
> even at this day, and more to‐day perhaps than ever before, in the great
> conceit of our age. The allegory means simply that Nâgârjuna having been
> initiated by the “Serpents”—the Adepts, “the wise ones”—and driven out
> from India by the Brâhmans, who dreaded to have their Mysteries and
> sacerdotal Science divulged (the real cause of their hatred of Buddhism),
> went away to China and Tibet, where he initiated many into the truths of
> the hidden Mysteries taught by Gautama Buddha.
> 
> (2) The hidden symbolism of Nârada—the great Rishi and the author of some
> of the Rig‐Vaidic hymns, who incarnated again later on during Krishna’s
> time—has never been understood. Yet, in connection with the Occult
> Sciences, Nârada, the son of Brahmâ, is one of the most prominent
> characters; he is directly connected in his first incarnation with the
> “Builders”—hence with the seven “Rectors” of the Christian Church, who
> “helped God in the work of creation.” This grand personification is hardly
> noticed by our Orientalists, who refer only to that which he is alleged to
> have said of Pâtâla, namely, “that it is a place of sexual and sensual
> gratifications.” This is thought to be amusing, and the reflection is
> suggested that Nârada, no doubt, “found the place delightful.” Yet this
> sentence simply shows him to have been an Initiate, connected directly
> with the Mysteries, and walking, as all the other neophytes, before and
> after him, had to walk, in “the pit among the thorns” in the “sacrificial
> _Chrest_ condition,” as the suffering victim made to descend thereinto—a
> mystery, truly!
> 
> Nârada is one of the seven Rishis, the “mind‐born sons” of Brahmâ. The
> fact of his having been during his incarnation a high Initiate—he, like
> Orpheus, being the founder of the Mysteries—is corroborated, and made
> evident by his history. The _Mahâbhârata_ states that Nârada, having
> frustrated the scheme formed for peopling the universe, in order to remain
> true to his vow of chastity, was cursed by Daksha, and sentenced to be
> born once more. Again, when born during Krishna’s time, he is accused of
> calling his father Brahmâ “a false teacher,” because the latter advised
> him to get married, and he refused to do so. This shows him to have been
> an Initiate, going against the orthodox worship and religion. It is
> curious to find this Rishi and leader among the “Builders” and the
> “Heavenly Host” as the prototype of the Christian “leader” of the same
> “Host”—the Archangel Mikael. Both are the male “Virgins,” and both are the
> only ones among their respective “Hosts” who refuse to create. Nârada is
> said to have dissuaded the Hari‐ashvas, the five thousand sons of Daksha,
> begotten by him for the purpose of peopling the Earth, from producing
> offspring. Since then the Hari‐ashvas have “dispersed themselves through
> the regions, and have never returned.” The Initiates are, perhaps, the
> incarnations of these Hari‐ashvas?
> 
> It was on the seventh day, the third of his ultimate trial, that the
> neophyte arose, a regenerated man, who, having passed through his second
> spiritual birth, returned to earth a glorified and triumphant conqueror of
> Death, a Hierophant.
> 
> An Eastern neophyte in his Chrest condition may be seen in a certain
> engraving in Moor’s _Hindu Pantheon_, whose author mistook another form of
> the crucified Sun or Vishnu, Vittoba, for Krishna, and calls it “Krishna
> crucified in Space.” The engraving is also given in Dr. Lundy’s
> _Monumental Christianity_, in which work the reverend author has collected
> as many proofs as his ponderous volume could hold of “Christian symbols
> _before_ Christianity,” as he expresses it. Thus he shows us Krishna and
> Apollo as good shepherds, Krishna holding the cruciform Conch and the
> Chakra, and Krishna “crucified in Space,” as he calls it. Of this figure
> it may be truly said, as the author says of it himself:
> 
>     This representation I believe to be anterior to Christianity....
>     It looks like a Christian crucifix in many respects.... The
>     drawing, the attitude, the nail‐marks in hands and feet, indicate
>     a Christian origin, while the Parthian coronet of seven points,
>     the absence of the wood, and of the usual inscription, and the
>     rays of glory above, would seem to point to some other than a
>     Christian origin. Can it be the victim‐man, or the priest and
>     victim both in one, of the Hindu Mythology, who offered himself a
>     sacrifice before the worlds were?
> 
> It is surely so.
> 
>     Can it be Plato’s Second God who impressed himself on the universe
>     in the form of the cross? Or is it his divine man, who would be
>     scourged, tormented, fettered, have his eyes burnt out; and lastly
>     ... _would be crucified_?
> 
> It is all that and much more; archaic religious Philosophy was universal,
> and its Mysteries are as old as man. It is the eternal symbol of the
> personified Sun—astronomically purified—in its mystic meaning regenerated,
> and symbolised by all the Initiates in memory of a sinless Humanity when
> all were “Sons of God.” Now, mankind has become the “Son of Evil” truly.
> Does all this take anything away from the dignity of Christ as an ideal,
> or of Jesus as a divine man? Not at all. On the contrary, made to stand
> alone, glorified above all other “Sons of God,” He can only foment evil
> feelings in all those many millioned nations who do not believe in the
> Christian system, provoking their hatred and leading to iniquitous wars
> and strifes. If, on the other hand, we place Him among a long series of
> “Sons of God” and Sons of divine Light, every man may then be left to
> choose for himself, among those many ideals, which he will choose as a God
> to call to his help, and worship on earth as in Heaven.
> 
> Many among those called “Saviours” were “good shepherds,” as was Krishna
> for one, and all of them are said to have “crushed the serpent’s head”—in
> other words to have conquered their sensual nature and to have mastered
> divine and Occult Wisdom. Apollo killed Python, a fact which exonerates
> him from the charge of being himself the great Dragon, Satan: Krishna slew
> the snake Kalinâga, the Black Serpent; and the Scandinavian Thor bruised
> the head of the symbolical reptile with his crucifixion mace.
> 
> In Egypt every city of importance was separated from its burial‐place by a
> sacred lake. The same ceremony of judgment, as is described in _The Book
> of the Dead_—“that precious and mysterious book” (Bunsen)—as taking place
> in the world of Spirit, took place on earth during the burial of the
> mummy. Forty‐two judges or assessors assembled on the shore and judged the
> departed “Soul” according to its actions when in the body. After that the
> priests returned within the sacred precincts and instructed the neophytes
> upon the probable fate of the Soul, and the solemn drama that was then
> taking place in the invisible realm whither the Soul had fled. The
> immortality of the Spirit was strongly inculcated on the neophytes by the
> _Al‐om‐jah_—the name of the highest Egyptian Hierophant. In the Crata
> Nepoa—the priestly Mysteries in Egypt—the following are described as four
> out of the seven degrees of Initiation.
> 
> After a preliminary trial at Thebes, where the neophyte had to pass
> through many probations, called the “Twelve Tortures,” he was commanded,
> in order that he might come out triumphant, to govern his passions and
> never lose for a moment the idea of his inner God or seventh Principle.
> Then, as a symbol of the wanderings of the unpurified Soul, he had to
> ascend several ladders and wander in darkness in a cave with many doors,
> all of which were locked. Having overcome all, he received the degree of
> Pastophoris, after which he became, in the second and third degrees, the
> Neocoris and Melancphoris. Brought into a vast subterranean chamber,
> thickly furnished with mummies lying in state, he was placed in presence
> of the coffin which contained the mutilated body of Osiris. This was the
> hall called the “Gates of Death,” whence the verse in Job:
> 
>     Have the gates of Death been opened to thee,
>     Hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?
> 
> Thus asks the “Lord,” the Hierophant, the Al‐om‐jah, the Initiator of Job,
> alluding to this third degree of Initiation. For the _Book of Job_ is the
> poem of Initiation _par excellence_.
> 
> When the neophyte had conquered the terrors of this trial, he was
> conducted to the “Hall of Spirits,” to be judged by them. Among the rules
> in which he was instructed, he was commanded:
> 
>     Never to either desire or seek revenge; to be always ready to help
>     a brother in danger, even unto the risk of his own life; to bury
>     every dead body; to honour his parents above all; to respect old
>     age, and protect those weaker than himself; and, finally, to ever
>     bear in mind the hour of death, and that of resurrection in a new
>     and imperishable body.
> 
> Purity and chastity were highly recommended, and adultery was threatened
> with death. Thus the Egyptian neophyte was made a Kristophoros. In this
> degree the mystery‐name of IAO was communicated to him.
> 
> Let the reader compare the above sublime precepts with the precepts of
> Buddha, and the noble commandments in the “Rule of Life” for the ascetics
> of India, and he will understand the unity of the Secret Doctrine
> everywhere.
> 
> It is impossible to deny the presence of a sexual element in many
> religious symbols, but this fact is not in the least open to censure, once
> it becomes generally known that—in the religious traditions of every
> country—man was not born in the first “human” race from father and mother.
> From the bright “mind‐born Sons of Brahmâ,” the Rishis, and from Adam
> Kadmon with his Emanations, the Sephiroth, down to the “parentless,” the
> Anupâdaka, or the Dhyâni‐Buddhas, from whom sprang the Bodhisattvas and
> Manushi‐Buddhas, the earthly Initiates—men—the first race of men was with
> every nation held as being born without father or mother. Man, the
> “Manushi‐Buddha,” the Manu, the “Enosh,” son of Seth, or the “Son of Man”
> as he is called—is born in the present way only as the consequence, the
> unavoidable fatality, of the law of natural evolution. Mankind—having
> reached the last limit, and that turning point where its spiritual nature
> had to make room for mere physical organisation—had to “fall into matter”
> and generation. But man’s evolution and involution are cyclic. He will end
> as he began. Of course to our grossly material minds even the sublime
> symbolism of Kosmos conceived in the matrix of Space after the divine Unit
> had entered into and fructified it with Its holy fiat, will no doubt
> suggest materiality. Not so with primitive mankind. The initiatory rite in
> the Mysteries of the self‐sacrificing Victim that dies a spiritual death
> to save the world from destruction—really from depopulation—was
> established during the Fourth Race, to commemorate an event, which,
> physiologically, has now become the Mystery of Mysteries among the world‐
> problems. In the Jewish script it is Cain and the female Abel who are the
> sacrificed and sacrificing couple—both immolating themselves (as
> permutations of Adam and Eve, or the dual Jehovah) and shedding their
> blood “of separation and union,” for the sake of and to save mankind by
> inaugurating a new physiological race. Later still, when the neophyte, as
> already mentioned, in order to be re‐born once more into his lost
> spiritual state, had to pass through the entrails (the womb) of a _virgin_
> heifer(539) killed at the moment of the rite, it involved again a mystery
> and one as great, for it referred to the process of birth, or rather the
> first entrance of man on to this earth, through Vâch—“the melodious cow
> who milks forth sustenance and water”—and who is the female Logos. It had
> also reference to the same self‐sacrifice of the “divine Hermaphrodite”—of
> the third Root‐Race—the transformation of Humanity into truly physical
> men, after the loss of spiritual potency. When, the fruit of evil having
> been tasted along with the fruit of good, there was as a result the
> gradual atrophy of spirituality and a strengthening of the materiality in
> man, then he was doomed to be born thenceforth through the present
> process. This is the Mystery of the Hermaphrodite, which the Ancients kept
> so secret and veiled. It was neither the absence of moral feeling, nor the
> presence of gross sensuality in them that made them imagine their Deities
> under a dual aspect; but rather their knowledge of the mysteries and
> processes of primitive Nature. The Science of Physiology was better known
> to them than it is to us now. It is in this that lies buried the key to
> the Symbolism of old, the true focus of national thought, and the strange
> dual‐sexed images of nearly every God and Goddess in both pagan and
> monotheistic Pantheons.
> 
> Says Sir William Drummond in _Œdipus Judaïcus_:
> 
>     The truths of science were the arcana of the priests because these
>     truths were the foundations of religion.
> 
> But why should the missionaries so cruelly twit the Vaishnavas and Krishna
> worshippers for the supposed grossly indecent meaning of their symbols,
> since it is made clear beyond the slightest doubt, and by the most
> unprejudiced writers, that Chrestos in the pit—whether the pit be taken as
> meaning the grave or hell—had likewise a sexual element in it, from the
> very origin of the symbol.
> 
> This fact is no longer denied to‐day. The “Brothers of the Rosy Cross” of
> the Middle Ages were as good Christians as any to be found in Europe,
> nevertheless, all their rites were based on symbols whose meaning was pre‐
> eminently phallic and sexual. Their biographer, Hargrave Jennings, the
> best modern authority on Rosicrucianism, speaking of this mystic
> Brotherhood, describes how
> 
>     The tortures and the sacrifice of Calvary, the Passion of the
>     Cross, were, in their [the Rose‐Croix’s] glorious blessed magic
>     and triumph, the protest and appeal.
> 
> Protest—by whom? The answer is, the protest of the crucified Rose, the
> greatest and the most unveiled of all sexual symbols—the Yoni and Lingam,
> the “victim” and the “murderer,” the female and male principles in Nature.
> Open the last work of that author, _Phallicism_, and see in what glowing
> terms he describes the sexual symbolism in that which is most sacred to
> the Christian:
> 
>     The flowing blood streamed from the crown, or the piercing circlet
>     of the thorns of Hell. The Rose is feminine. Its lustrous carmine
>     petals are guarded with thorns. The Rose is the most beautiful of
>     flowers. The Rose is the Queen of God’s Garden (Mary, the Virgin).
>     It is not the Rose alone which is the magical idea, or truth. But
>     it is the “crucified rose,” or the “martyred rose” (by the grand
>     mystic apocalyptic figure) which is the talisman, the standard,
>     the object of adoration of all the “Sons of Wisdom” or the true
>     Rosicrucians.(540)
> 
> Not of _all_ the “Sons of Wisdom,” by any means, not even of the _true_
> Rosicrucian. For the latter would never put in such sickening relievo, in
> such a purely sensual and terrestrial, not to say animal light, the
> grandest, the noblest of Nature’s symbols. To the Rosicrucian, the “Rose”
> was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis,
> the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as
> a virgin woman by the Egyptian Initiates. Like every other personification
> of Nature and the Earth she is the sister and wife of Osiris, as the two
> characters answer to the personified symbol of the Earth, both she and the
> Sun being the progeny of the same mysterious Father, because the Earth is
> fecundated by the Sun—according to the earliest Mysticism—by divine
> insufflation. It was the pure ideal of mystic Nature that was personified
> in the “World Virgins,” the “Celestial Maidens,” and later on by the human
> Virgin, Mary, the Mother of the Saviour, the _Salvator Mundi_ now chosen
> by the Christian World. And it was the character of the Jewish maiden that
> was adapted by Theology to archaic Symbolism,(541) and not the Pagan
> symbol that was modelled for the new occasion.
> 
> We know through Herodotus that the Mysteries were brought from India by
> Orpheus—a hero far anterior to both Homer and Hesiod. Very little is
> really known of him, and till very lately Orphic literature, and even the
> Argonauts, were attributed to Onamacritus, a contemporary of Pisistratus,
> Solon and Pythagoras—who was credited with their compilation in the
> present form toward the close of the sixth century B.C., or 800 years
> after the time of Orpheus. But we are told that in the days of Pausanias
> there was a sacerdotal family, who, like the Brâhmans with the _Vedas_,
> had committed to memory all the Orphic Hymns, and that they were usually
> thus transmitted from one generation to another. By placing Orpheus so far
> back as 1200 B.C., official Science—so careful in her chronology to choose
> in each case as late a period as possible—admits that the Mysteries, or in
> other words Occultism dramatised, belong to a still earlier epoch than the
> Chaldæan and Egyptians.
> 
> The downfall of the Mysteries in Europe may now be mentioned.
> 
> SECTION XXXIII. THE LAST OF THE MYSTERIES IN EUROPE.
> 
> As was predicted by the great Hermes in his dialogue with Æsculapius, the
> time had indeed come when impious foreigners accused Egypt of adoring
> monsters, and naught but the letters engraved in stone upon her monuments
> survived—enigmas unintelligible to posterity. Her sacred Scribes and
> Hierophants became wanderers upon the face of the earth. Those who had
> remained in Egypt found themselves obliged for fear of a profanation of
> the sacred Mysteries to seek refuge in deserts and mountains, to form and
> establish secret societies and brotherhoods—such as the Essenes; those who
> had crossed the oceans to India and even to the (now‐called) New World,
> bound themselves by solemn oaths to keep silent, and to preserve secret
> their Sacred Knowledge and Science; thus these were buried deeper than
> ever out of human sight. In Central Asia and on the northern borderlands
> of India, the triumphant sword of Aristotle’s pupil swept away from his
> path of conquest every vestige of a once pure Religion: and its Adepts
> receded further and further from that path into the most hidden spots of
> the globe. The cycle of —— being at its close, the first hour for the
> disappearance of the Mysteries struck on the clock of the Races, with the
> Macedonian conqueror. The first strokes of its last hour sounded in the
> year 47 B.C. Alesia(542) the famous city in Gaul, the Thebes of the Kelts,
> so renowned for its ancient rites of Initiation and Mysteries, was, as J.
> M. Ragon well describes it:
> 
>     The ancient metropolis and the tomb of Initiation, of the religion
>     of the Druids and of the freedom of Gaul.(543)
> 
> It was during the first century before our era, that the last and supreme
> hour of the great Mysteries had struck. History shows the populations of
> Central Gaul revolting against the Roman yoke. The country was subject to
> Cæsar, and the revolt was crushed; the result was the slaughter of the
> garrison at Alesia (or Alisa), and of all its inhabitants, including the
> Druids, the college‐priests and the neophytes; after this the whole city
> was plundered and razed to the ground.
> 
> Bibractis, a city as large and as famous, not far from Alesia, perished a
> few years later. J. M. Ragon describes her end as follows:
> 
>     Bibractis, the mother of sciences, the soul of the early nations
>     [in Europe], a town equally famous for its sacred college of
>     Druids, its civilisation, its schools, in which 40,000 students
>     were taught philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence,
>     medicine, astrology, occult sciences, architecture, etc. Rival of
>     Thebes, of Memphis, of Athens and of Rome, it possessed an
>     amphitheatre, surrounded with colossal statues, and accommodating
>     100,000 spectators, gladiators, a capitol, temples of Janus,
>     Pluto, Proserpine, Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva, Cybele, Venus and
>     Anubis; and in the midst of those sumptuous edifices the Naumachy,
>     with its vast basin, an incredible construction, a gigantic work
>     wherein floated boats and galleys devoted to naval games; then a
>     _Champ de Mars_, an aqueduct, fountains, public baths; finally
>     fortifications and walls, the construction of which dated from the
>     heroic ages.(544)
> 
> Such was the last city in Gaul wherein died for Europe the secrets of the
> Initiations of the Great Mysteries, the Mysteries of Nature, and of her
> forgotten Occult truths. The rolls and manuscripts of the famous
> Alexandrian Library were burned and destroyed by the same Cæsar,(545) but
> while History deprecates the action of the Arab general, Amrus, who gave
> the final touch to this act of vandalism perpetrated by the great
> conqueror, it has not a word to say to the latter for his destruction of
> nearly the same amount of precious rolls in Alesia, nor to the destroyer
> of Bibractis. While Sacrovir—chief of the Gauls, who revolted against
> Roman despotism under Tiberius, and was defeated by Silius in the year 21
> of our era—was burning himself alive with his fellow conspirators on a
> funeral pyre before the gates of the city, as Ragon tells us, the latter
> was sacked and plundered, and all her treasures of literature on the
> Occult Sciences perished by fire. The once majestic city, Bibractis, has
> now become Autun, Ragon explains.
> 
>     A few monuments of glorious antiquity are still there, such as the
>     temples of Janus and of Cybele.
> 
> Ragon goes on:
> 
>     Arles, founded two thousand years before Christ, was sacked in
>     270. This metropolis of Gaul, restored 40 years later by
>     Constantine, has preserved to this day a few remains of its
>     ancient splendour; amphitheatre, capitol, an obelisk, a block of
>     granite 17 metres high, a triumphal arch, catacombs, etc. Thus
>     ended Kelto‐Gaulic civilisation. Cæsar, as a barbarian worthy of
>     Rome, had already accomplished the destruction of the ancient
>     Mysteries by the sack of the temples and their initiatory
>     colleges, and by the massacre of the Initiates and the Druids.
>     Remained Rome; but she never had but the lesser Mysteries, shadows
>     of the Secret Sciences. The Great Initiation was extinct.(546)
> 
> A few further extracts may be given from his _Occult Masonry_, as they
> bear directly upon our subject. However learned and erudite, some of the
> chronological mistakes of that author are very great. He says:
> 
>     After deified man (Hermes) came the King‐Priest [the Hierophant]
>     Menes was the first legislator and the founder of Thebes of the
>     hundred palaces. He filled that city with magnificent splendour;
>     it is from his day that the sacerdotal epoch of Egypt dates. The
>     priests reigned, for it is they who made the laws. It is said that
>     there have been three hundred and twenty‐nine [Hierophants] since
>     his time—all of whom have remained unknown.
> 
> After that, genuine Adepts having become scarce, the author shows the
> Priests choosing false ones from the midst of slaves, whom they exhibited,
> having crowned and deified them, for the adoration of the ignorant masses.
> 
>     Tired of reigning in such a servile way, the kings rebelled and
>     freed themselves. Then came Sesostris, the founder of Memphis
>     (1613, they say, before our era). To the sacerdotal election to
>     the throne succeeded that of the warriors.... Cheops who reigned
>     from 1178 to 1122 built the great Pyramid which bears his name. He
>     is accused of having persecuted theocracy and closed the temples.
> 
> This is utterly incorrect, though Ragon repeats “History.” The Pyramid
> called by the name of Cheops is the Great Pyramid, the building of which
> even Baron Bunsen assigned to 5,000 B.C. He says in _Egypt’s Place in
> Universal History_:
> 
>     The Origines of Egypt go back to the ninth millennium before
>     Christ.(547)
> 
> And as the Mysteries were performed and the Initiations took place in that
> Pyramid—for indeed it was built for that purpose—it looks strange and an
> utter contradiction with known facts in the history of the Mysteries, to
> suppose that Cheops, if the builder of that Pyramid, ever turned against
> the initiated Priests and their temples. Moreover, as far as the Secret
> Doctrine teaches, it was not Cheops who built the Pyramid of that name,
> whatever else he might have done.
> 
> Yet, it is quite true that
> 
>     Owing to an Ethiopian invasion and the federated government of
>     twelve chiefs, royalty fell into the hands of Amasis, a man of low
>     birth.
> 
> This was in 570 B.C., and it is Amasis who destroyed priestly power. And
> 
>     Thus perished that ancient theocracy which showed its crowned
>     priests for so many centuries to Egypt and the whole world.
> 
> Egypt had gathered the students of all countries around her Priests and
> Hierophants before Alexandria was founded. Ennemoser asks:
> 
>     How comes it that so little has become known of the Mysteries and
>     of their particular contents, through so many ages, and amongst so
>     many different times and people? The answer is that it is again
>     owing to the universally strict silence of the initiated. Another
>     cause may be found in the destruction and total loss of all the
>     written memorials of the secret knowledge of the remotest
>     antiquity.
> 
>     Numa’s books, described by Livy, consisting of natural philosophy,
>     were found in his tomb; but they were not allowed to be made
>     known, lest they should reveal the most secret mysteries of the
>     state religion.... The senate and the tribunes of the people
>     determined ... that the books themselves should be burned, which
>     was done.(548)
> 
> Cassain mentions a treatise, well‐known in the fourth and fifth centuries,
> which was accredited to Ham, the son of Noah, who in his turn was reputed
> to have received it from Jared, the fourth generation from Seth, the son
> of Adam.
> 
> Alchemy also was first taught in Egypt by her learned Priests, though the
> first appearance of this system is as old as man. Many writers have
> declared that Adam was the first Adept; but that was a blind and a pun
> upon the name, which is “red earth” in one of its meanings. The correct
> information—under its allegorical veil—is found in the sixth chapter of
> Genesis, which speaks of the “Sons of God” who took wives of the daughters
> of men, after which they communicated to these wives many a mystery and
> secret of the phenomenal world. The cradle of Alchemy, says Olaus
> Borrichius, is to be sought in the most distant times. Democritus of
> Abdera was an Alchemist, and a Hermetic Philosopher. Clement of Alexandria
> wrote considerably upon the Science, and Moses and Solomon are called
> proficients in it. We are told by W. Godwin:
> 
>     The first authentic record on this subject is an edict of
>     Diocletian about 300 years A.D., ordering a diligent search to be
>     made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art
>     of making gold and silver, that they might, without distinction,
>     be consigned to the flames.
> 
> The Alchemy of the Chaldæans and the old Chinamen is not even the parent
> of that Alchemy which revived among the Arabians many centuries later.
> There is a spiritual Alchemy and a physical transmutation. The knowledge
> of both was imparted at the Initiations.
> 
> SECTION XXXIV. THE POST‐CHRISTIAN SUCCESSORS TO THE MYSTERIES.
> 
> The Eleusinian Mysteries were no more. Yet it was these which gave their
> principal features to the Neo‐platonic school of Ammonius Saccas, for the
> Eclectic System was chiefly characterised by its Theurgy and ecstasis. It
> was Iamblichus who added to it the Egyptian doctrine of Theurgy with its
> practices, and Porphyry, the Jew, who opposed this new element. The
> school, however, with but few exceptions, practised asceticism and
> contemplation, its mystics passing through a discipline as rigorous as
> that of the Hindu devotee. Their efforts never tended so much to develop
> the successful practice of thaumaturgy, necromancy or sorcery—such as they
> are now accused of—as to evolve the higher faculties of the inner man, the
> Spiritual Ego. The school held that a number of spiritual beings, denizens
> of spheres quite independent of the earth and of the human cycle, were
> mediators between the “Gods” and men, and even between man and the Supreme
> Soul. To put it in plainer language, the soul of man became, owing to the
> help of the Planetary Spirits, “recipient of the soul of the world” as
> Emerson puts it. Apollonius of Tyana asserted his possession of such a
> power in these words (quoted by Professor Wilder in his _Neo‐Platonism_):
> 
>     I can see the present and the future in a clear mirror. The sage
>     [Adept] need not wait for the vapours of the earth and the
>     corruption of the air to foresee plagues and fevers; he must know
>     them later than God, but earlier than the people. The _theoi_ or
>     gods see the future; common men, the present; sages, that which is
>     about to take place. My peculiar abstemious mode of living
>     produces such an acuteness of the senses, or creates some other
>     faculty, so that the greatest and most remarkable things may be
>     performed.(549)
> 
> Professor A. Wilder’s comment thereupon is remarkable:
> 
>     This is what may be termed _spiritual photography_. The soul is
>     the camera in which facts and events, future, past, and present,
>     are alike fixed; and the mind becomes conscious of them. Beyond
>     our everyday world of limits, all is as one day or state—the past
>     and future comprised in the present. Probably this is the “great
>     day,” the “_last_ day,” the “day of the Lord,” of the Bible
>     writers—the day into which everyone passes by death or _ecstasis_.
>     Then the soul is freed from the constraint of the body, and its
>     nobler part is united to higher nature and becomes partaker in the
>     wisdom and foreknowledge of the higher beings.(550)
> 
> How far the system practised by the Neo‐Platonists was identical with that
> of the old and the modern Vedântins may be inferred from what Dr. A.
> Wilder says of the Alexandrian Theosophists.
> 
>     The anterior idea of the New Platonists was that of a single
>     Supreme Essence.... All the old philosophies contained the
>     doctrine that θεοὶ, _theoi_, gods or disposers, angels, demons,
>     and other spiritual agencies, emanated from the Supreme Being.
>     Ammonius accepted the doctrine of the Books of Hermes, that from
>     the divine All proceeded the Divine Wisdom or Amun; that from
>     Wisdom proceeded the Demiurge or Creator; and from, the Creator,
>     the subordinate spiritual beings; the world and its peoples being
>     the last. The first is contained in the second, the first and
>     second in the third, and so on through the entire series.(551)
> 
> This is a perfect echo of the belief of the Vedântins, and it proceeds
> directly from the secret teachings of the East. The same author says:
> 
>     Akin to this is the doctrine of the Jewish Kabala which was taught
>     by the Pharsi or Pharisees, who probably borrowed it, as their
>     sectarian designation would seem to indicate, from the Magians of
>     Persia. It is substantially embodied in the following synopsis.
> 
>     The Divine Being is the All, the source of all existence, the
>     Infinite; and He cannot be known. The Universe reveals Him, and
>     subsists by Him. At the beginning His effulgence went forth
>     everywhere.(552) Eventually He retired within Himself and so
>     formed around Him a vacant space. Into this He transmitted His
>     first Emanation, a Ray, containing in it the generative and
>     conceptive power, and hence the name IE, or Jah. This in its turn
>     produced the _tikkun_, the _pattern_ or idea of form; and in this
>     emanation, which also contained the male and female, or generative
>     and conceptive potencies, were the three primitive forces of
>     Light, Spirit and Life. This Tikkun is united to the Ray, or first
>     emanation, and pervaded by it: and by that union is also in
>     perpetual communication with the infinite source. It is the
>     pattern, the primitive man, the Adam Kadmon, the _macrocosm_ of
>     Pythagoras and other philosophers. From it proceeded the
>     _Sephiroth_.... From the Sephiroth in turn emanated the four
>     worlds, each proceeding out of the one immediately above it, and
>     the lower one enveloping its superior. These worlds became less
>     pure as they descended in the scale, the lowest of all being the
>     material world.(553)
> 
> This veiled enunciation of the Secret Teaching will be clear to our
> readers by this time. These worlds are:
> 
>     _Aziluth_ is peopled with the purest emanations [the First, almost
>     spiritual, Race of the human beings that were to inhabit] the
>     Fourth; the second, _Beriah_, by a lower order, the servants of
>     the former [the second Race]; the third, _Jesirah_, by the
>     cherubim and seraphim, the Elohim and B’ni Elohim [“Sons of Gods”
>     or _Elohim_, our Third Race]. The fourth world, _Asiah_, is
>     inhabited by the Klipputh, of whom Belial is chief [the Atlantean
>     Sorcerers].(554)
> 
> These worlds are all the earthly duplicates of their heavenly prototypes,
> the mortal and temporary reflections and shadows of the more durable, if
> not eternal, races dwelling in other, to us, invisible worlds. The souls
> of the men of our Fifth Race derive their elements from these four
> worlds—Root Races—that preceded ours: namely, our intellect, Manas, the
> fifth principle, our passions and mental and corporeal appetites. A
> conflict having arisen, called “war in heaven,” among our prototypical
> worlds, war came to pass, æons later, between the Atlanteans(555) of
> Asiah, and those of the third Root Race, the B’ni Elohim or the “Sons of
> God,”(556) and then evil and wickedness were intensified. Mankind (in the
> last sub‐race of the third Root Race) having
> 
>     Sinned in their first parent [a physiological allegory, truly!]
>     from whose soul every human soul is an emanation,
> 
> says the _Zohar_, men were “exiled” into more material bodies to
> 
>     Expiate that sin and become proficient in goodness.
> 
> To accomplish the cycle of necessity, rather, explains the doctrine; to
> progress on their task of evolution, from which task none of us can be
> freed, neither by death nor suicide, for each of us have to pass through
> the “Valley of Thorns” before he emerges into the plains of divine light
> and rest. And thus men will continue to be born in new bodies
> 
>     Till they have become sufficiently pure to enter a higher form of
>     existence.
> 
> This means only that Mankind, from the First down to the last, or Seventh
> Race, is composed of one and the same company of actors, who have
> descended from higher spheres to perform their artistic tour on this our
> planet, Earth. Starting as pure spirits on our downward journey around the
> world (verily!) with the knowledge of truth—now feebly echoed in the
> Occult Doctrines—inherent in us, cyclic law brings us down to the reversed
> apex of matter, which is lost down here on earth and the bottom of which
> we have already struck; and then, the same law of spiritual gravity will
> make us slowly ascend to still higher, still purer spheres than those we
> started from.
> 
> Foresight, prophecy, oracular powers! Illusive fancies of man’s dwarfed
> perceptions, which see actual images in reflections and shadows, and
> mistake past actualities for prophetic images of a future that has no room
> in Eternity. Our macrocosm and its smallest microcosm, man, are both
> repeating the same play of universal and individual events at each
> station, as on every stage on which Karma leads them to enact their
> respective dramas of life. False prophets could have no existence had
> there been no true prophets. And so there were, and many of both classes,
> and in all ages. Only, none of these ever saw anything but that which had
> already come to pass, and had been before prototypically enacted in higher
> spheres—if the event foretold related to national or public weal or woe—or
> in some preceding life, if it concerned only an individual, for every such
> event is stamped as an indelible record of the Past and Future, which are
> only, after all, the ever Present in Eternity. The “worlds” and the
> purifications spoken of in the _Zohar_ and other Kabalistic books, relate
> to our globe and races no more and no less than they relate to other
> globes and other races that have preceded our own in the great cycle. It
> was such fundamental truths as these that were performed in allegorical
> plays and images during the Mysteries, the last Act of which, the Epilogue
> for the Mystæ, was the _anastasis_ or “continued existence,” as also the
> “Soul transformation.”
> 
> Hence, the author of _Neo‐platonism and Alchemy_ shows us that all such
> Eclectic doctrines were strongly reflected in the _Epistles_ of Paul, and
> were
> 
>     Inculcated more or less among the Churches. Hence, such passages
>     as these “Ye were dead in errors and sins; ye walked according to
>     the _æon_ of this world, according to the _archon_ that has the
>     domination of the air.” “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,
>     but against the dominations, against potencies, against the lords
>     of darkness, and against the mischievousness of spirits in the
>     empyrean regions.” But Paul was evidently hostile to the effort to
>     blend his gospel with the gnostic ideas of the Hebrew‐Egyptian
>     school, as seems to have been attempted at Ephesus; and
>     accordingly, wrote to Timothy, his favourite disciple, “Keep safe
>     the precious charge entrusted to thee; and reject the new
>     doctrines and the antagonistic principles of the gnosis, falsely
>     so‐called, of which some have made profession and gone astray from
>     the faith.”(557)
> 
> But as the Gnosis is the Science pertaining to our Higher Self, as blind
> faith is a matter of temperament and emotionalism, and as Paul’s doctrine
> was still newer and his interpretations far more thickly veiled, to keep
> the inner truths hidden far away from the Gnostic, preference has been
> given to the former by every earnest seeker after truth.
> 
> Besides this, the great Teachers who professed the so‐called “false
> Gnosis” were very numerous in the days of the Apostles, and were as great
> as any converted Rabbi could be. If Porphyry, the Jew Malek, went against
> Theurgy on account of old traditional recollections, there were other
> teachers who practised it. Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus were all
> thaumaturgists, and the latter
> 
>     Elaborated the entire theosophy and theurgy of his predecessors
>     into a complete system. (558)
> 
> As to Ammonius,
> 
>     Countenanced by Clemens and Athenagoras, in the Church, and by
>     learned men of the Synagogue, the Academy, and the Grove, he
>     fulfilled his labour by teaching a common doctrine for all.(559)
> 
> Thus it is not Judaism and Christianity that re‐modelled the ancient Pagan
> Wisdom, but rather the latter that put its heathen curb, quietly and
> insensibly, on the new faith; and this, moreover, was still further
> influenced by the Eclectic Theosophical system, the direct emanation of
> the Wisdom Religion. All that is grand and noble in Christian theology
> comes from Neo‐Platonism. It is too well‐known to now need much repetition
> that Ammonius Saccas, the God‐taught (_theodidaktos_) and the lover of the
> truth (_philalethes_), in establishing his school, made a direct attempt
> to benefit the world by teaching those portions of the Secret Science that
> were permitted by its direct guardians to be revealed in those days.(560)
> The modern movement of our own Theosophical Society was begun on the same
> principles; for the Neo‐Platonic school of Ammonius aimed, as we do, at
> the reconcilement of all sects and peoples, under the once common faith of
> the Golden Age, trying to induce the nations to lay aside their
> contentions—in religious matters at any rate—by proving to them that their
> various beliefs are all the more or less legitimate children of one common
> parent, the Wisdom Religion.
> 
> Nor was the Eclectic Theosophical system—as some writers inspired by Rome
> would make the world believe—developed only during the third century of
> our era; but it belongs to a much earlier age, as has been shown by
> Diogenes Laertius. He traces it to the beginning of the dynasty of the
> Ptolemies; to the great seer and prophet, the Egyptian Priest Pot‐Amun, of
> the temple of the God of that name—for Amun is the God of Wisdom. Unto
> that day the communication between the Adepts of Upper India and Bactria
> and the Philosophers of the West had never ceased.
> 
>     Under Philadelphus ... the Hellenic teachers became rivals of the
>     College of Rabbis of Babylon. The Buddhistic, Vedântic and Magian
>     systems were expounded along with the philosophies of Greece....
>     Aristobulus, the Jew, declared that the ethics of Aristotle were
>     derived from the law of Moses (!); and Philo, after him, attempted
>     to interpret the Pentateuch in accordance with the doctrines of
>     Pythagoras and the Academy. In Josephus it is said that, in the
>     Book of the Genesis, Moses wrote philosophically—that is, in the
>     figurative style; and the Essenes of Carmel were reproduced in the
>     Therapeutæ of Egypt, who, in turn, were declared by Eusebius to be
>     identical with the Christians, though they actually existed long
>     before the Christian era. Indeed, in its turn, Christianity also
>     was taught at Alexandria, and underwent an analogous
>     metamorphosis. Pantænus, Athenagoras and Clement were thoroughly
>     instructed in the Platonic philosophy, and comprehended its
>     essential unity with the oriental systems.(561)
> 
> Ammonius, though the son of Christian parents, was a _lover_ of the truth,
> a true Philaletheian foremost of all. He set his heart upon the work of
> reconciling the different systems into a harmonious whole, for he had
> already perceived the tendency of Christianity to raise itself on the
> hecatomb which it had constructed out of all other creeds and faiths. What
> says history?
> 
> The ecclesiastical historian, Mosheim, declares that
> 
>     Ammonius, conceiving that not only the philosophers of Greece, but
>     also all those of the different barbarous nations, were perfectly
>     in unison with each other with regard to every essential point,
>     made it his business so to temper and expound the tenets of all
>     these various sects, as to make it appear they had all of them
>     originated from one and the same source, and all tended to one and
>     the same end. Again, Mosheim says that Ammonius taught that the
>     religion of the multitude went hand in hand with philosophy, and
>     with her had shared the fate of being by degrees corrupted and
>     obscured with mere human conceits, superstition, and lies; that it
>     ought, therefore, to be brought back to its original purity by
>     purging it of this dross and expounding it upon philosophical
>     principles; and that the whole which Christ had in view was to
>     reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the Wisdom of the
>     Ancients.(562)
> 
> Now what was that “Wisdom of the Ancients” that the Founder of
> Christianity “had in view”? The system taught by Ammonius in his Eclectic
> Theosophical School was made of the crumbs permitted to be gathered from
> the antediluvian lore; those Neo‐Platonic teachings are described in the
> _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_ as follows:
> 
>     He [Ammonius] adopted the doctrines which were received in Egypt
>     concerning the Universe and the Deity, considered as constituting
>     one great whole; concerning the eternity of the world, the nature
>     of souls, the empire of Providence [Karma] and the government of
>     the world by demons [_daimons_ or spirits, archangels]. He also
>     established a system of moral discipline which allowed the people
>     in general to live according to the laws of their country and the
>     dictates of nature; but required the wise to exalt their minds by
>     contemplation, and to mortify the body,(563) so that they might be
>     capable of enjoying the presence and assistance of the demons
>     [including their own _daimon_ or Seventh Principle] ... and
>     ascending after death to the presence of the Supreme [Soul]
>     Parent. In order to reconcile the popular religions, and
>     particularly the Christian, with this new system, he made the
>     whole history of the heathen gods an allegory, maintaining that
>     they were only celestial ministers(564) entitled to an inferior
>     kind of worship; and he acknowledged that Jesus Christ was an
>     excellent man and the friend of God, but alleged that it was not
>     his design entirely to abolish the worship of demons,(565) and
>     that his only intention was to purify the ancient religion.
> 
> No more could be declared except for those Philaletheians who were
> initiated, “persons duly instructed and disciplined” to whom Ammonius
> communicated his more important doctrines,
> 
>     Imposing on them the obligations of secrecy, as was done before
>     him by Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and in the Mysteries [where an
>     oath was required from the neophytes or catechumens not to divulge
>     what they had learned]. The great Pythagoras divided his teachings
>     into exoteric and esoteric.(566)
> 
> Has not Jesus done the same, since He declared to His disciples that to
> them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, whereas
> to the multitudes it was not given, and therefore He spoke in parables
> which had a two‐fold meaning?
> 
> Dr. A. Wilder proceeds:
> 
>     Thus Ammonius found his work ready to his hand. His deep spiritual
>     intuition, his extensive learning, and his familiarity with the
>     Christian fathers, Pantænus, Clement and Athenagoras, and with the
>     most erudite philosophers of the time, all fitted him for the
>     labour he performed so thoroughly.... The results of his
>     ministration are perceptible at the present day in every country
>     of the Christian world; every prominent system of doctrine now
>     bearing the marks of his plastic hand. Every ancient philosophy
>     has had its votaries among the moderns; and even Judaism, oldest
>     of them all, has taken upon itself changes which were suggested by
>     the “God‐taught” Alexandrian.(567)
> 
> The Neo‐Platonic School of Alexandria founded by Ammonius—the prototype
> proposed for the Theosophical Society—taught Theurgy and Magic, as much as
> they were taught in the days of Pythagoras, and by others far earlier than
> his period. For Proclus says that the doctrines of Orpheus, who was an
> Indian and came from India, were the origin of the systems afterwards
> promulgated.
> 
>     What Orpheus delivered in hidden allegories, Pythagoras learned
>     when he was initiated into the Orphic Mysteries; and Plato next
>     received a perfect knowledge of them from Orphic and Pythagorean
>     writings.(568)
> 
> The Philaletheians had their division into neophytes (_chelas_) and
> Initiates, or Masters; and the eclectic system was characterised by three
> distinct features, which are purely Vedântic; a Supreme Essence, One and
> Universal; the eternity and indivisibility of the human spirit; and
> Theurgy, which is Mantricism. So also, as we have seen, they had their
> secret or Esoteric teachings like any other mystic school. Nor were they
> allowed to reveal anything of their secret tenets, any more than were the
> Initiates of the Mysteries. Only the penalties incurred by the revealers
> of the secrets of the latter were far more terrible, and this prohibition
> has survived to this day, not only in India, but even among the Jewish
> Kabalists in Asia.(569)
> 
> One of the reasons for such secrecy may be the undoubtedly serious
> difficulties and hardships of chelaship, and the dangers attending
> Initiation. The modern candidate has, like his predecessor of old, to
> either conquer or die; when, which is still worse, he does not lose his
> reason. There is no danger to him who is true and sincere, and,
> especially, unselfish. For he is thus prepared beforehand to meet any
> temptation.
> 
>     He, who fully recognised the power of his immortal spirit, and
>     never doubted for one moment its omnipotent protection, had naught
>     to fear. But woe to the candidate in whom the slightest physical
>     fear—sickly child of matter—made him lose sight and faith in his
>     own invulnerability. He who was not wholly confident of his moral
>     fitness to accept the burden of these tremendous secrets was
>     doomed.(570)
> 
> There were no such dangers in Neo‐Platonic Initiations. The selfish and
> the unworthy failed in their object, and in the failure was the
> punishment. The chief aim was “reunion of the part with the _all_.” This
> All was One, with numberless names. Whether called _Dui_, the “bright Lord
> of Heaven” by the Âryan; _Iao_, by the Chaldæan and Kabalist; _Iabe_ by
> the Samaritan; the _Tiu_ or _Tuisco_ by the Northman; _Duw_ by the Briton;
> _Zeus_, by the Thracian or _Jupiter_ by the Roman—it was _the_ Being, the
> _Facit_, One and Supreme,(571) the unborn and the inexhaustible source of
> every emanation, the fountain of life and light eternal, a Ray of which
> every one of us carries in him on this earth. The knowledge of this
> Mystery had reached the Neo‐Platonists from India through Pythagoras, and
> still later through Apollonius of Tyana and the rules and methods for
> producing ecstasy had come from the same lore of the divine Vidyâ, the
> Gnosis. For Âryavarta, the bright focus into which had been poured in the
> beginning of time the flames of Divine Wisdom, had become the centre from
> which radiated the “tongues of fire” into every portion of the globe. What
> was Samâdhi but that
> 
>     Sublime ecstasy, in which state things divine and the mysteries of
>     Nature are revealed to us,
> 
> of which Porphyry speaks?
> 
>     The efflux from the divine soul is imparted to the human spirit in
>     unreserved abundance, accomplishing for the soul a union with the
>     divine, and enabling it while in the body to be partaker of the
>     life which is not in the body,
> 
> he explains elsewhere.
> 
> Thus under the title of Magic was taught every Science, physical and
> metaphysical, natural or deemed supernatural by those who are ignorant of
> the omnipresence and universality of Nature.
> 
>     Divine Magic makes of man a God; human magic creates a new fiend.
> 
> We wrote in _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     In the oldest documents now in the possession of the World—the
>     _Vedas_ and the older laws of Manu—we find many magical rites
>     practised and permitted by the Brâhmans.(572) Tibet, Japan, and
>     China, teach in the present age that which was taught by the
>     oldest Chaldæans. The clergy of these respective countries prove
>     moreover what they teach—namely, that the practice of moral and
>     physical purity, and of certain austerities, developes the vital
>     soul‐power of self‐illumination. Affording to man the control over
>     his own immortal spirit, it gives him truly magical powers over
>     the elementary spirits inferior to himself. In the West we find
>     magic of as high an antiquity as in the East. The Druids of Great
>     Britain practised it in the silent crypts of their deep caves; and
>     Pliny devotes many a chapter to the “wisdom”(573) of the leaders
>     of the Celts. The Semothees—the Druids of the Gauls—expounded the
>     physical as well as the spiritual sciences. They taught the
>     secrets of the universe, the harmonious progress of the heavenly
>     bodies, the formation of the earth, and above all—the immortality
>     of the Soul.(574) In their sacred groves—natural academies built
>     by the hand of the Invisible Architect—the initiates assembled at
>     the still hour of midnight, to learn about what man once was, and
>     what he will be.(575) They needed no artificial illumination, nor
>     life‐drawing gas, to light up their temples, for the chaste
>     goddess of night beamed her most silvery rays on their oak‐crowned
>     heads; and their white‐robed sacred bards knew how to converse
>     with the solitary queen of the starry vault.(576)
> 
> During the palmy days of Neo‐Platonism these Bards were no more, for their
> cycle had run its course, and the last of the Druids had perished at
> Bibractis and Alesia. But the Neo‐Platonic school was for a long time
> successful, powerful and prosperous. Still, while adopting Âryan Wisdom in
> its doctrines, the school failed to follow the wisdom of the Brâhmans in
> practice. It showed its moral and intellectual superiority too openly,
> caring too much for the great and powerful of this earth. While the
> Brâhmans and their great Yogîs—experts in matters of philosophy,
> metaphysics, astronomy, morals and religion—preserved their dignity under
> the sway of the most powerful princes, remained aloof from the world and
> would not condescend to visit them or ask for the slightest favour,(577)
> the Emperors Alexander, Severus, and Julian, and the greatest among the
> aristocracy of the land, embraced the tenets of the Neo‐Platonists, who
> mixed freely with the world. The system flourished for several centuries
> and comprised within the ranks of its followers the ablest and most
> learned among the men of the time; Hypatia, the teacher of the Bishop
> Synesius, was one of the ornaments of the School until the fatal and
> shameful day when she was murdered by the Christian mob at the instigation
> of Bishop Cyril of Alexandria. The school was finally removed to Athens,
> and closed by order of the Emperor Justinian.
> 
> How accurate is Dr. Wilder’s remark that
> 
>     Modern writers have commented upon the peculiar views of the Neo‐
>     Platonists upon these [metaphysical] subjects, seldom representing
>     them correctly, even if this was desired or intended.(578)
> 
> The few speculations on the sublunary, material, and spiritual universes
> that they did put into writing—Ammonius never having himself written a
> line, after the wont of reformers—could not enable posterity to judge them
> rightly, even had not the early Christian Vandals, the later crusaders,
> and the fanatics of the Middle Ages, destroyed three parts of that which
> remained of the Alexandrian Library and its later schools.
> 
> Professor Draper shows that Cardinal Ximenes alone
> 
>     Delivered to the flames in the squares of Granada eighty thousand
>     Arabic manuscripts, many of them translations of classical
>     authors.
> 
> In the Vatican Library, whole passages in the most rare and precious
> treatises of the Ancients were found erased and blotted out, “for the sake
> of interlining them with absurd psalmodies!” Moreover it is well known
> that over thirty‐six volumes written by Porphyry were burnt and otherwise
> destroyed by the “Fathers.” Most of the little that is known of the
> doctrines of the Eclectics is found in the writings of Plotinus and of
> those same Church Fathers.
> 
> Says the author of _Neo‐Platonism_:
> 
>     What Plato was to Socrates, and the Apostle John to the head of
>     the Christian faith, Plotinus became to the God‐taught Ammonius.
>     To Plotinus, Origenes, and Longinus we are indebted for what is
>     known of the Philaletheian system. They were duly instructed,
>     initiated and entrusted with the interior doctrines.(579)
> 
> This accounts marvellously for Origen’s calling people “idiots” who
> believe in the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve fables; as also for the
> fact that so few of the writings of that Church Father have passed to
> posterity. Between the secrecy imposed, the vows of silence and that which
> was maliciously destroyed by every foul means, it is indeed miraculous
> that even so much of the Philaletheian tenets has reached the world.
> 
> SECTION XXXV. SYMBOLISM OF SUN AND STARS.
> 
>     And the Heaven was visible in Seven Circles and the planets
>     appeared with all their signs, in star‐form, and the stars were
>     divided and numbered with the rulers that were in them, and their
>     revolving course, through the agency of the divine Spirit.(580)
> 
> Here Spirit denotes Pneuma, collective Deity, manifested in its
> “Builders,” or, as the Church has it, “the seven Spirits of the Presence,”
> the _mediantibus angelis_ of whom Thomas Aquinas says that “God never
> works but through them.”
> 
> These seven “rulers” or mediating Angels were the Kabiri Gods of the
> Ancients. This was so evident, that it forced from the Church, together
> with the admission of the fact, an explanation and a theory, whose
> clumsiness and evident sophistry are such that it must fail to impress.
> The world is asked to believe, that while the Planetary Angels of the
> Church are divine Beings, the genuine “Seraphim,”(581) these very same
> angels, under identical names and planets, were and are “false”—as Gods of
> the ancients. They are no better than pretenders; the cunning copies of
> the real Angels, produced beforehand through the craft and power of
> Lucifer and of the fallen Angels. Now, what are the Kabiri?
> 
> Kabiri, as a name, is derived from Habir חבר, great, and also from Venus,
> this Goddess being called to the present day Kabar, as is also her star.
> The Kabiri were worshipped at Hebron, the city of the Anakim, or anakas
> (kings, princes). They are the highest Planetary Spirits, the “greatest
> Gods” and “the powerful.” Varro, following Orpheus, calls these Gods
> εὐδυνατοί, “divine Powers.” The word Kabirim when applied to men, and the
> words Heber, Gheber (with reference to Nimrod, or the “giants” of
> _Genesis_, vi.) and Kabir, are all derived from the “mysterious Word”—the
> Ineffable and the “Unpronounceable.” Thus it is they who represent
> _tsaba_, the “host of heaven.” The Church, however, bowing before the
> angel Anael (the regent of Venus),(582) connects the planet Venus with
> Lucifer, the chief of the rebels under Satan—so poetically apostrophized
> by the prophet Isaiah as “O Lucifer, son of the morning.”(583) All the
> Mystery Gods were Kabiri. As these “seven lictors” relate directly to the
> Secret Doctrine their real status is of the greatest importance.
> 
> Suidas defines the Kabiri as the Gods who command all the other dæmons
> (Spirits), καβείρους δαίμονας. Macrobius introduces them as
> 
>     Those Penates and tutelary deities, through whom we live and learn
>     and know (_Saturn_, I. iii. ch. iv.).
> 
> The teraphim through which the Hebrews consulted the oracles of the Urim
> and the Thummim, were the symbolical hieroglyphics of the Kabiri.
> Nevertheless, the good Fathers have made of Kibir the synonym, of devil
> and of daimon (spirit) a demon.
> 
> The Mysteries of the Kabiri at Hebron (Pagan and Jewish) were presided
> over by the seven Planetary Gods, among the rest by Jupiter and Saturn
> under their mystery names, and they are referred to as ἀξιόχρσος and
> ἀξιόχερσα, and by Euripides as ἀξιόχρεως ὁ θεὸς. Creuzer, moreover, shows
> that whether in Phœnicia or in Egypt, the Kabiri were always the seven
> planets as known in antiquity, who, together with their Father the
> Sun—referred to elsewhere as their “elder brother”—composed a powerful
> ogdoad;(584) the eight superior powers, as παρεδοὶ, or solar assessors,
> danced around him the sacred circular dance, the symbol of the rotation of
> the planets around the Sun. Jehovah and Saturn, moreover, are one.
> 
> It is quite natural, therefore, to find a French writer, D’Anselme,
> applying the same terms of ἀξιόχερσος and ἀξιόχερσα to Jehovah and his
> word, and they are correctly so applied. For if the “circle dance”
> prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries—being the “circle dance” of
> the planets, and characterised as “the motion of the divine Spirit carried
> on the waves of the great Deep”—can now be called “infernal” and
> “lascivious” when performed by the Pagans, then the same epithets ought to
> be applied to David’s dance;(585) and to the dance of the daughters of
> Shiloh,(586) and to the leaping of the prophets of Baal;(587) they were
> all identical and all belonged to Sabæan worship. King David’s dance,
> during which he uncovered himself before his maid‐servants in a public
> thoroughfare, saying:
> 
>     I will _play_ (act wantonly) before יהוה (Jehovah), and I will yet
>     be more vile than this,
> 
> was certainly more reprehensible than any “circle dance” during the
> Mysteries, or even than the modern Râsa Mandala in India,(588) which is
> the same thing. It was David who introduced Jehovistic worship into Judea,
> after sojourning so long among the Tyrians and Philistines, where these
> rites were common.
> 
>     David knew nothing of Moses; and if he introduced the Jehovah‐
>     worship, it was not in its monotheistic character, but simply as
>     that of one of the many (_Kabirean_) gods of the neighbouring
>     nations, a tutelary deity of his own, יהוה to whom he had given
>     the preference—whom he had chosen among “all other (Kabeiri)
>     gods,”(589)
> 
> and who was one of the “associates,” Chabir, of the Sun. The Shakers dance
> the “circle dance” to this day when turning round for the Holy Ghost to
> move them. In India it is Nârâ‐yana who is “the mover on the waters;” and
> Nârâyana is Vishnu in his secondary form, and Vishnu has Krishna for an
> Avatâra, in whose honour the “circle dance” is still enacted by the
> Nautch‐girls of the temples, he being the Sun‐God and they the planets as
> symbolised by the gopis.
> 
> Let the reader turn to the works of De Mirville, a Roman Catholic writer,
> or to _Monumental Christianity_, by Dr. Lundy, a Protestant divine, if he
> wants to appreciate to any degree the subtlety and casuistry of their
> reasonings. No one ignorant of the occult versions can fail to be
> impressed with the proofs brought forward to show how cleverly and
> perseveringly “Satan has worked for long millenniums to tempt a humanity”
> unblessed with an infallible Church, in order to have himself recognised
> as the “One living God,” and his fiends as holy Angels. The reader must be
> patient, and study with attention what the author says on behalf of his
> Church. To compare it the better with the version of the Occultists, a few
> points may be quoted here verbatim.
> 
>     St. Peter tells us: “May the divine Lucifer arise in your
>     hearts”(590) [Now the Sun is Christ].... “I will send my Son from
>     the Sun,” said the Eternal through the voice of prophetic
>     traditions; and prophecy having become history the Evangelists
>     repeated in their turn: The _Sun rising_ from on high visited
>     us.(591)
> 
> Now God says, through Malachi, that the Sun shall arise for those who fear
> his name. What Malachi meant by “the Sun of Righteousness” the Kabalists
> alone can tell; but what the Greek, and even the Protestant, theologians
> understood by the term is of course Christ, referred to metaphorically.
> Only, as the sentence, “I will send my Son from the Sun,” is borrowed
> verbatim from a Sibylline Book, it becomes very hard to understand how it
> can be attributed to, or classed with any prophecy relating to the
> Christian Saviour, unless, indeed, the latter is to be identified with
> Apollo. Virgil, again, says, “Here comes the Virgin’s and Apollo’s reign,”
> and Apollo, or Apollyon, is to this day viewed as a form of Satan, and is
> taken to mean the Antichrist. If the Sibylline promise, “He will send his
> Son from the Sun” applies to Christ, then either Christ and Apollo are
> one—and then why call the latter a demon?—or the prophecy had nothing to
> do with the Christian Saviour, and, in such a case, why appropriate it at
> all?
> 
> But De Mirville goes further. He shows us St. Denys, the Areopagite,
> affirming that
> 
>     The Sun is the special signification, and the statue of
>     God(592).... It is by the Eastern door that the glory of the Lord
>     penetrated into the temples [of the Jews and Christians, that
>     divine glory being Sun‐light.]... “We build our churches towards
>     the east,” says in his turn St. Ambrose, “for during the Mysteries
>     we begin by renouncing him who is in the west.”
> 
> “He who is in the west” is Typhon, the Egyptian god of darkness—the west
> having been held by them as the “Typhonic Gate of Death.” Thus, having
> borrowed Osiris from the Egyptians, the Church Fathers thought little of
> helping themselves to his brother Typhon. Then again:
> 
>     The prophet Baruch(593) speaks of the stars that rejoice in their
>     _vessels_ and _citadels_ (Chap. iii.); and _Ecclesiastes_ applies
>     the same terms to the sun, which is said to be “the admirable
>     vessel of the most High,” and the “citadel of the Lord”
>     φυλαχη.(594)
> 
>     In every case there is no doubt about the thing, for the sacred
>     writer says, It is a _Spirit_ who rules the sun’s course. Hear
>     what he says (in _Eccles._, i. 6), “The sun also ariseth—and its
>     spirit lighting all in its circular path (gyrat gyrans) returneth
>     according to his circuits.”(595)
> 
> De Mirville seems to quote from texts either rejected by or unknown to
> Protestants, in whose bible there is no forty‐third chapter of
> _Ecclesiastes_; nor is the sun made to go “in circuits” in the latter, but
> the wind. This is a question to be settled between the Roman and the
> Protestant Churches. Our point is the strong element of Sabæanism or
> Heliolatry present in Christianity.
> 
> An Œcumenical Council having authoritatively put a stop to Christian
> Astrolatry by declaring that there were no sidereal Souls in sun, moon, or
> planets, St. Thomas took upon himself to settle the point in dispute. The
> “angelic doctor” announced that such expressions did not mean a “soul,”
> but only an Intelligence, not resident in the sun or stars, but one that
> assisted them, “a guiding and directing intelligence.”(596)
> 
> Thereupon the author, comforted by the explanation, quotes Clement the
> Alexandrian, and reminds the reader of the opinion of that philosopher,
> the inter‐relation that exists “between the seven branches of the
> candlestick—the seven stars of the Revelation,” and the sun:
> 
>     The six branches (says Clement) fixed to the central candlestick
>     have lamps, but the sun placed in the midst of the wandering ones
>     (πλανητῶν) pours his beams on them all; this golden candlestick
>     hides one more mystery: it is the sign of Christ, not only in
>     shape, but because he sheds his light through the ministry of the
>     seven spirits primarily created, and who are the Seven Eyes of the
>     Lord. Therefore the principal planets are to the seven primeval
>     spirits, according to St. Clement, that which the candlestick‐sun
>     is to Christ Himself, namely—their vessels, their φυλαχαὶ.
> 
> Plain enough, to be sure; though one fails to see that this explanation
> even helps the situation. The seven‐branched chandelier of the Israelites,
> as well as the “wanderers” of the Greeks, had a far more natural meaning,
> a purely astrological one to begin with. In fact from Magi and Chaldæans
> down to the much‐laughed‐at Zadkiel, every astrological work will tell its
> reader that the Sun placed in the midst of the planets, with Saturn,
> Jupiter and Mars on one side, and Venus, Mercury and the Moon on the
> other, the planets’ line crossing through the whole Earth, has always
> meant what Hermes tells us, namely, the thread of destiny, or that whose
> action (influence) is called destiny.(597) But symbol for symbol we prefer
> the sun to a candlestick. One can understand how the latter came to
> represent the sun and planets, but no one can admire the chosen symbol.
> There is poetry and grandeur in the sun when it is made to symbolize the
> “Eye of Ormuzd,” or of Osiris, and is regarded as the Vâhan (vehicle) of
> the highest Deity. But one must for ever fail to perceive that any
> particular glory is rendered to Christ by assigning to him the trunk of a
> candlestick,(598) in a Jewish synagogue, as a mystical seat of honour.
> 
> There are then positively two suns, a sun adored and a sun adoring. The
> _Apocalypse_ proves it.
> 
>     The Word is found in Chap. vii., in the angel who ascends with the
>     rising of the sun, having the seal of the living God.... While
>     commentators differ on the personality of this angel, St. Ambrose
>     and many other theologians see in him Christ himself.... He is the
>     _Sun adored_. But in Chap. xix. we find an angel standing _in_ the
>     sun, inviting all the nations to gather to the great supper of the
>     Lamb. This time it is literally and simply the angel of the
>     sun—who cannot be mistaken for the “Word,” since the prophet
>     distinguishes him from the Word, the King of Kings and the Lord of
>     Lords.... The angel _in_ the sun seems to be an adoring sun. Who
>     may be the latter? And who else can he be but the Morning Star,
>     the guardian angel of the Word, his _ferouer_, or _angel of the
>     face_, as the Word is the angel of the Face (presence) of his
>     Father, his principal attribute and strength, as his name itself
>     implies (Mikael), the powerful rector glorified by the Church, the
>     _Rector potens_ who will fell the Antichrist, the Vice‐Word, in
>     short, who represents his master, and seems to be _one with
>     him_.(599)
> 
> Yes, Mikael is the alleged conqueror of Ormuzd, Osiris, Apollo, Krishna,
> Mithra, etc., of all the Solar Gods, in short, known and unknown, now
> treated as demons and as “Satan.” Nevertheless, the “Conqueror” has not
> disdained to don the war‐spoils of the vanquished foes—their
> personalities, attributes, even their names—to become the _alter ego_ of
> these demons.
> 
>     Thus the Sun‐God here is _Honover_ or the Eternal. The prince is
>     Ormuzd, since he is the first of the seven Amshaspends [the demon
>     copies of the seven original angels] (_capul angelorum_); the lamb
>     (_hamal_), the Shepherd of the Zodiac and the antagonist of the
>     snake. But the Sun (the Eye of Ormuzd) has also his rector,
>     Korshid or the _Mitraton_, who is the _Ferouer_ of the face of
>     Ormuzd, his Ized, or the morning star. The Mazdeans had a triple
>     Sun.... For us this _Korshid‐Mitraton_ is the first of the
>     _psychopompian_ genii, and the guide of the sun, the immolator of
>     the terrestrial Bull [or lamb] whose wounds are licked by the
>     serpent [on the famous Mithraic monument].(600)
> 
> St. Paul, in speaking of the rulers of this world, the Cosmocratores, only
> said what was said by all the primitive Philosophers of the ten centuries
> before the Christian era, only he was scarcely understood, and was often
> wilfully misinterpreted. Damascius repeats the teachings of the Pagan
> writers when he explains that
> 
>     There are seven series of cosmocratores or cosmic forces, which
>     are double: the higher ones commissioned to support and guide the
>     superior world; the lower ones, the inferior world [our own].
> 
> And he is but saying what the ancients taught. Iamblichus gives this dogma
> of the duality of all the planets and celestial bodies, of gods and
> daimons (spirits). He also divides the Archontes into two classes—the more
> and the less spiritual; the latter more connected with and clothed with
> matter, as having a _form_, while the former are bodiless (_arûpa_). But
> what have Satan and his angels to do with all this? Perhaps only that the
> identity of the Zoroastrian dogma with the Christian, and of Mithra,
> Ormuzd, and Ahriman with the Christian Father, Son, and Devil, might be
> accounted for. And when we say “Zoroastrian dogmas” we mean the exoteric
> teaching. How explain the same relations between Mithra and Ormuzd as
> those between the Archangel Mikael and Christ?
> 
>     Ahura Mazda says to holy Zaratushta: “When I _created_ [emanated]
>     Mithra ... I created him that he should be invoked and adored
>     equally with myself.”
> 
> For the sake of necessary reforms, the Zoroastrian Âryans transformed the
> Devas, the bright Gods of India, into devs or devils. It was their Karma
> that in their turn the Christians should vindicate on this point the
> Hindus. Now Ormuzd and Mithra have become the devs of Christ and Mikael,
> the dark lining and aspect of the Saviour and Angel. The day of the Karma
> of Christian theology will come in its turn. Already the Protestants have
> begun the first chapter of the religion that will seek to transform the
> “Seven Spirits” and the host of the Roman Catholics into demons and idols.
> Every religion has its Karma, as has every individual. That which is due
> to human conception and is built on the abasement of our brothers who
> disagree with us, must have its day. “There is no religion higher than
> truth.”
> 
> The Zoroastrians, Mazdeans, and Persians borrowed their conceptions from
> India; the Jews borrowed their theory of angels from Persia; the
> Christians borrowed from the Jews.
> 
> Hence the latest interpretation by Christian theology—to the great disgust
> of the synagogue, forced to share the symbolical candlestick with the
> hereditary enemy—that the seven‐branched candlestick represents the seven
> Churches of Asia and the seven planets which are the angels of those
> Churches. Hence also, the conviction that the Mosaic Jews, the inventors
> of that symbol for their tabernacle, were a kind of Sabæans, who blended
> their planets and the spirits thereof into one, and called them—only far
> later—Jehovah. For this we have the testimony of Clemens Alexandrinus, St.
> Hieronymus and others.
> 
> And Clement, as an Initiate of the Mysteries—at which the secret of the
> heliocentric system was taught several thousands of years before Galileo
> and Copernicus—proves it by explaining that
> 
>     By these various symbols connected with (sidereal) phenomena the
>     totality of all the creatures which bind heaven with earth, are
>     figured.... The chandelier represented the motion of the seven
>     luminaries, describing their astral revolution. To the right and
>     the left of that candelabrum projected the six branches, each of
>     which had its lamp, because the Sun placed as a candelabrum in the
>     middle of other planets distributes light to them.(601) ... As to
>     the cherubs having twelve wings between the two, they represent to
>     us the sensuous world in the twelve zodiacal signs.(602)
> 
> And yet, in the face of all this evidence, sun, moon, planets, all are
> shown as being demoniacal before, and divine only after, the appearance of
> Christ. All know the Orphic verse: “It is Zeus, it is Adas, it is the Sun,
> it is Bacchus,” these names having been all synonymous for classic poets
> and writers. Thus for Democritus “Deity is but a soul in an orbicular
> fire,” and that fire is the Sun. For Iamblichus the sun was “the image of
> divine intelligence”; for Plato “an immortal living Being.” Hence the
> oracle of Claros when asked to say who was the Jehovah of the Jews,
> answered, “It is the Sun.” We may add the words in _Psalm_ xix. 4
> 
>     In the sun hath he placed a tabernacle for himself(603) ... his
>     going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto
>     the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.
> 
> Jehovah then is the sun, and thence also the Christ of the Roman Church.
> And now the criticism of Dupuis on that verse becomes comprehensible, as
> also the despair of the Abbé Foucher. “Nothing is more favourable to
> Sabæism than this text of the Vulgate!” he exclaims. And, however
> disfigured may be the words and sense in the English authorised bible, the
> Vulgate and the Septuagint both give the correct text of the original, and
> translate the latter: “In the sun he established his abode”; while the
> Vulgate regards the “heat” as coming direct from God and not from the sun
> alone, since it is God who issues forth from, and dwells in the sun and
> performs the circuit: _in sole posuit ... et ipse exultavit_. From these
> facts it will be seen that the Protestants were right in charging St.
> Justin with saying that
> 
>     God has permitted us to worship the sun.
> 
> And this, notwithstanding the lame excuses that what was really meant was
> that
> 
>     God permitted himself to be worshipped in, or within, the sun,
> 
> which is all the same.
> 
> It will be seen from the above, that while the Pagans located in the sun
> and planets only the inferior powers of Nature, the representative
> Spirits, so to say, of Apollo, Bacchus, Osiris, and other solar gods, the
> Christians, in their hatred of Philosophy, appropriated the sidereal
> localities, and now limit them to the use of their anthropomorphic deity
> and his angels—new transformations of the old, old gods. Something had to
> be done in order to dispose of the ancient tenants, so they were disgraced
> into “demons,” wicked devils.
> 
> SECTION XXXVI. PAGAN SIDEREAL WORSHIP, OR ASTROLOGY.
> 
> The Teraphim of Abram’s father _Terah_, the “maker of images,” and the
> Kabiri Gods are directly connected with ancient Sabæan worship or
> Astrolatry. Kiyun, or the God Kivan, worshipped by the Jews in the
> wilderness, is Saturn and Shiva, later on called Jehovah. Astrology
> existed before astronomy, and _Astronomus_ was the title of the highest
> hierophant in Egypt.(604) One of the names of the Jewish Jehovah,
> “Sabaoth,” or the “Lord of Hosts” (_tsabaoth_), belongs to the Chaldæan
> Sabæans (or _Tsabæans_), and has for its root the word _tsab_, meaning a
> “car,” a “ship,” and “an army”; sabaoth thus meaning literally the _army
> of the ship_, the _crew_, or a _naval host_, the sky being metaphorically
> referred to as the “upper ocean” in the doctrine.
> 
> In his interesting volumes, _The God of Moses_, Lacour explains that all
> such words as
> 
>     The celestial armies or the hosts of heaven, signify not only the
>     totality of the heavenly constellations, but also the Aleim on
>     whom they are dependent; the _aleitzbaout_ are the forces or
>     _souls_ of the constellations, the potencies that maintain and
>     guide the planets in this order and procession; ... the Jae‐va‐
>     Tzbaout signifies Him, the supreme chief of those celestial
>     bodies.
> 
> In his collectivity, as the chief “Order of Spirits,” not a chief Spirit.
> 
> The Sabæans having worshipped in the _graven_ images only the celestial
> hosts—angels and gods whose habitations were the planets, never in truth
> worshipped the stars. For on Plato’s authority, we know that among the
> stars and constellations, the planets alone had a right to the title of
> _theoi_ (Gods), as that name was derived from the verb θεῖν, to run or to
> circulate. Seldenus also tells us that they were likewise called
> 
>     θεοὶ βουλαιοὶ (God‐Councillors) and ῥαβδοφόροι (_lictors_) as they
>     (the planets) were present at the sun’s consistory, _solis
>     consistoris adstantes_.
> 
> Says the learned Kircher:
> 
>     The sceptres the seven presiding angels were armed with, explain
>     these names of Rhabdophores and lictors given to them.
> 
> Reduced to its simplest expression and popular meaning, this is of course
> fetish worship. Yet esoteric astrolatry was not at all the worship of
> idols, since under the names of “Councillors” and “Lictors,” present at
> the “Sun’s consistory,” it was not the planets in their material bodies
> that were meant, but their Regents or “Souls” (Spirits). If the prayer
> “Our Father in heaven,” or “Saint” so‐and‐so in “Heaven” is not an
> idolatrous invocation, then “Our Father in Mercury,” or “Our Lady in
> Venus,” “Queen of Heaven,” etc., is no more so; for it is precisely the
> same thing, the name making no difference in the act. The word used in the
> Christian prayers, “in heaven” cannot mean anything abstract. A
> dwelling—whether of Gods, angels or Saints (every one of these being
> anthropomorphic individualities and beings)—must necessarily mean a
> locality, some defined spot in that “heaven”; hence it is quite immaterial
> for purposes of worship whether that spot be considered as “heaven” in
> general, meaning nowhere in particular, or in the Sun, Moon or Jupiter.
> 
> The argument is futile that there were
> 
>     Two deities, and two distinct hierarchies or _tsabas_ in heaven,
>     in the ancient world as in our modern times ... the one, the
>     living God and his host, and the other, _Satan_, Lucifer with his
>     councillors and lictors, or the _fallen_ angels.
> 
> Our opponents say that it is the latter which Plato with the whole of
> antiquity worshipped, and which two‐thirds of humanity worship to this
> day. “The whole question is to know how to discern between the two.”
> 
> Protestant Christians fail to find any mention of angels in the
> Pentateuch, we may therefore leave them aside. The Roman Catholics and the
> Kabalists find such mention; the former, because they have accepted Jewish
> angelology, without suspecting that the “tsabæan Hosts” were colonists and
> settlers on Judæan territory from the lands of the Gentiles; the latter,
> because they accepted the bulk of the Secret Doctrine, keeping the kernel
> for themselves and leaving the husks to the unwary.
> 
> Cornelius a Lapide points out and proves the meaning of the word _tsaba_
> in the first verse of Chapter ii. of _Genesis_; and he does so correctly,
> guided, as he probably was, by learned Kabalists. The Protestants are
> certainly wrong in their contention, for angels _are_ mentioned in the
> Pentateuch under the word _tsaba_, which means “hosts” of angels. In the
> Vulgate the word is translated _ornatus_, meaning the “sidereal army,” the
> _ornament_ also of the sky—kabalistically. The biblical scholars of the
> Protestant Church, and the _savants_ among the materialists, who failed to
> find “angels” mentioned by Moses, have thus committed a serious error. For
> the verse reads:
> 
>     Thus the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of
>     them,
> 
> the “host” meaning “the army of stars and angels”; the last two words
> being, it seems, convertible terms in Church phraseology. A Lapide is
> cited as an authority for this; he says that
> 
>     _Tsaba_ does not mean _either one_ or the other but “_the one and
>     the other_,” or both, _siderum ac angelorum_.
> 
> If the Roman Catholics are right on this point, so are the Occultists when
> they claim that the angels worshipped in the Church of Rome are none else
> than their “Seven Planets,” the Dhyân Chohans of Buddhistic Esoteric
> Philosophy, or the Kumâras, “the mind‐born sons of Brahmâ,” known under
> the patronymic of Vaidhâtra. The identity between the Kumâras, the
> Builders or cosmic Dhyân Chohans, and the Seven Angels of the Stars, will
> be found without one single flaw if their respective biographies are
> studied, and especially the characteristics of their chiefs, Sanat‐Kumâra
> (Sanat Sujâta), and Michael the Archangel. Together with the Kabirim
> (Planets), the name of the above in Chaldæa, they were all “_divine_
> Powers” (Forces). Fuerot says that the name Kabiri was used to denote the
> _seven_ sons of יצדיק meaning Pater Sadic, Cain, or Jupiter, or again of
> Jehovah. There are seven Kumâras—four exoteric and three secret—the names
> of the latter being found in the _Sânkhya Bhâshya_, by
> Gaudapâdâchârya.(605) They are all “Virgin Gods,” who remain eternally
> pure and innocent and decline to create progeny. In their primitive
> aspect, these Âryan seven “mind‐born sons” of God are not the regents of
> the planets, but dwell far beyond the planetary region. But the same
> mysterious transference from one character or dignity to another is found
> in the Christian Angel‐scheme. The “Seven Spirits of the Presence” attend
> perpetually on God, and yet we find them under the same names of Mikael,
> Gabriel, Raphael, etc., as “Star‐regents” or the informing deities of the
> seven planets. Suffice it to say that the Archangel Michael is called “the
> invincible virgin combatant” as he “refused to create,”(606) which would
> connect him with both Sana Sujâta and the Kumâra who is the God of War.
> 
> The above has to be demonstrated by a few quotations. Commenting upon St.
> John’s “Seven Golden Candlesticks,” Cornelius a Lapide says:
> 
>     These seven lights relate to the seven branches of the candlestick
>     by which were represented the seven [principal] planets in the
>     temples of Moses and Solomon ... or, better still, to the seven
>     principal Spirits, commissioned to watch over the salvation of men
>     and churches.
> 
> St. Jerome says:
> 
>     In truth the candlestick with the seven branches was the type of
>     the world and its planets.
> 
> St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Roman Catholic doctor writes:
> 
>     I do not remember having ever met in the works of saints or
>     philosophers a denial that the planets are guided by spiritual
>     beings.... It seems to me that it may be proved to demonstration
>     that the celestial bodies are guided by some intelligence, either
>     directly by God, or by the mediation of angels. But the latter
>     opinion seems to be far more consonant with the order of things
>     asserted by St. Denys to be without exception, that everything on
>     earth is, as a rule, governed by God through intermediary
>     agencies.(607)
> 
> And now let the reader recall what the Pagans say of this. All the
> classical authors and philosophers who have treated the subject, repeat
> with Hermes Trismegistus, that the seven Rectors—the planets including the
> sun—were the associates, or the co‐workers, of the Unknown All represented
> by the Demiurgos—commissioned to contain the Cosmos—our planetary
> world—within seven circles. Plutarch shows them representing “the circle
> of the celestial worlds.” Again, Denys of Thracia and the learned Clemens
> of Alexandria both describe the Rectors as being shown in the Egyptian
> temples in the shape of mysterious wheels or spheres always in motion,
> which made the Initiates affirm that the problem of perpetual motion had
> been solved by the celestial wheels in the Initiation Adyta.(608) This
> doctrine of Hermes was that of Pythagoras and of Orpheus before him. It is
> called by Proclus “the God‐given” doctrine. Iamblichus speaks of it with
> the greatest reverence. Philostratus tells his readers that the whole
> sidereal court of the Babylonian heaven was represented in the temples
> 
>     In globes made of sapphires and supporting the golden images of
>     their respective gods.
> 
> The temples of Persia were especially famous for these representations. If
> Cedrenus can be credited
> 
>     The Emperor Heraclius on his entry into the city of Bazaeum was
>     struck with admiration and wonder before the immense machine
>     fabricated for King Chosroes, which represented the night‐sky with
>     the planets and all their revolutions, with the angels presiding
>     over them.(609)
> 
> It was on such “spheres” that Pythagoras studied Astronomy in the _adyta
> arcana_ of the temples to which he had access. And it was there on his
> Initiation, that the eternal rotation of those spheres—“the mysterious
> wheels” as they are called by Clemens and Denys, and which Plutarch calls
> “world‐wheels”—demonstrated to him the verity of what had been divulged to
> him, namely, the heliocentric system, the great secret of the Adyta. All
> the discoveries of modern astronomy, like all the secrets that can be
> revealed to it in future ages, were contained in the secret observatories
> and Initiation Halls of the temples of old India and Egypt. It is in them
> that the Chaldæan made his calculations, revealing to the world of the
> profane no more than it was fit to receive.
> 
> We may, and shall be told, no doubt, that Uranus was unknown to the
> ancients, and that they were forced to reckon the sun amongst the planets
> and as their chief. How does anyone know? Uranus is a modern name; but one
> thing is certain: the ancients had a planet, “a mystery planet,” that they
> never named and that the highest Astronomus, the Hierophant, alone could
> “confabulate with.” But this seventh planet was not the sun, but the
> hidden Divine Hierophant, who was said to have a crown, and to embrace
> within its wheel “seventy‐seven smaller wheels.” In the archaic secret
> system of the Hindus, the sun is the visible Logos “Sûrya”; over him there
> is another, the divine or heavenly Man—who, after having established the
> system of the world of matter on the archetype of the Unseen Universe, or
> Macrocosm, conducted during the Mysteries the heavenly Râsa Mandala; when
> he was said:
> 
>     To give with his right foot the impulse to _Tyam_ or Bhûmi [Earth]
>     that makes her rotate in a double revolution.
> 
> What says Hermes again? When explaining Egyptian Cosmology he exclaims:
> 
>     Listen, O my son ... the Power has also formed seven agents, who
>     contain within their circles the material world, and whose action
>     is called destiny.... When all became subject to man, the Seven,
>     willing to favour human intelligence, communicated to him their
>     powers. But as soon as man knew their true essence and his own
>     nature, he desired to penetrate within and beyond the circles and
>     thus break their circumference by usurping the power of him who
>     has dominion over the Fire [Sun] itself; after which, having
>     robbed one of the Wheels of the Sun of the sacred fire, he fell
>     into slavery.(610)
> 
> It is _not_ Prometheus who is meant here. Prometheus is a symbol and a
> personification of the whole of mankind in relation to an event which
> occurred during its childhood, so to say—the “Baptism by Fire”—which is a
> mystery within the great Promethean Mystery, one that may be at present
> mentioned only in its broad general features. By reason of the
> extraordinary growth of human intellect and the development in our age of
> the fifth principle (Manas) in man, its rapid progress has paralysed
> spiritual perceptions. It is at the expense of wisdom that intellect
> generally lives, and mankind is quite unprepared in its present condition
> to comprehend the awful drama of human disobedience to the laws of Nature
> and the subsequent Fall, as a result. It can only be hinted at in its
> place.
> 
> SECTION XXXVII. THE SOULS OF THE STARS—UNIVERSAL HELIOLATRY.
> 
> In order to show that the Ancients have never “mistaken stars for Gods,”
> or Angels and the sun for the highest Gods and God, but have worshipped
> only the Spirit of all, and have reverenced the minor Gods supposed to
> reside in the sun and planets—the difference between these two worships
> has to be pointed out. Saturn, “the Father of Gods” must not be confused
> with his namesake—the planet of the same name with its eight moons and
> three rings. The two—though in one sense identical, as are, for instance,
> physical man and his soul—must be separated in the question of worship.
> This has to be done the more carefully in the case of the seven planets
> and their Spirits, as the whole formation of the universe is attributed to
> them in the Secret Teachings. The same difference has to be shown again
> between the stars of the Great Bear, the Riksha and the Chitra
> Shikhandina, “the bright‐crested,” and the Rishis—the mortal Sages who
> appeared on earth during the Satya Yuga. If all of these have been so far
> closely united in the visions of the seers of every age—the bible seers
> included—there must have been a reason for it. Nor need one go back so far
> as into the periods of “superstition” and “unscientific fancies” to find
> great men in our epoch sharing in them. It is well known that Kepler, the
> eminent astronomer, in common with many other great men who believed that
> the heavenly bodies ruled favourably or adversely the fates of men and
> nations—fully credited besides this the fact that all heavenly bodies,
> even our own earth, are endowed with living and thinking souls.
> 
> Le Couturier’s opinion is worthy of notice in this relation:
> 
>     We are too inclined to criticize unsparingly everything concerning
>     astrology and its ideas; nevertheless our criticism, to be one,
>     ought at least to know, lest it should be proved aimless, what
>     those ideas in truth are. And when among the men we thus
>     criticize, we find such names as those of Regiomontanus, Tycho
>     Brahe, Kepler, etc., there is reason why we should be careful.
>     Kepler was an astrologer by profession, and became an astronomer
>     in consequence. He was earning his livelihood by genethliac
>     figures, which, indicating the state of the heavens at the moment
>     of the birth of individuals, were a means to which everyone
>     resorted for horoscopes. That great man was a believer in the
>     principles of astrology, without accepting all its foolish
>     results.(611)
> 
> But astrology is nevertheless proclaimed as a sinful science, and together
> with Occultism is tabooed by the Churches. It is very doubtful, however,
> whether mystic “star worship” can be so easily laughed down as people
> imagine—at any rate by Christians. The hosts of Angels, Cherubs and
> Planetary Archangels are identical with the minor Gods of the Pagans. As
> to their “great Gods,” if Mars has been shown—on the admission of even the
> enemies of the Pagan astrologers—to have been regarded by the latter
> simply as the personified strength of the one highest impersonal Deity,
> Mercury being personified as its omniscience, Jupiter as its omnipotency,
> and so on, then the “superstition” of the Pagan has indeed become the
> “religion” of the masses of the civilized nations. For with the latter,
> Jehovah is the synthesis of the seven Elohim, the eternal centre of all
> those attributes and forces, the Alei of the Aleim, and the Adonai of the
> Adonim. And if with them Mars is now called St. Michael, the “_strength_
> of God,” Mercury Gabriel, the “omniscience and fortitude of the Lord,” and
> Raphael “the blessing or healing power of God,” this is simply a change of
> names, the characters behind the masks remaining the same.
> 
> The Dalai‐lama’s mitre has seven ridges in honour of the seven chief
> Dhyâni Buddhas. In the funeral ritual of the Egyptians the defunct is made
> to exclaim:
> 
>     Salutation to you, O Princes, who stand in the presence of
>     Osiris.... Send me the grace to have my sins destroyed, as you
>     have done for the seven spirits who follow their Lord!(612)
> 
> Brahmâ’s head is ornamented with seven rays, and he is followed by the
> seven Rishis, in the seven Svargas. China has her seven Pagodas; the
> Greeks had their seven Cyclopes, seven Demiurgi, and the Mystery Gods, the
> seven Kabiri, whose chief was Jupiter‐Saturn, and with the Jews, Jehovah.
> Now the latter Deity has become chief of all, the highest and the one God,
> and his old place is taken by Mikael (Michael). He is the “Chief of the
> Host” (_tsaba_); the “Archistrategus of the Lord’s army”; the “Conqueror
> of the Devil”—Victor diaboli—and the “Archisatrap of the Sacred Militia,”
> he who slew the “Great Dragon.” Unfortunately astrology and symbology,
> having no inducement to veil old things with new masks, have preserved the
> real name of Mikael—“that was Jehovah”—Mikael being the Angel of the face
> of the Lord,(613) “the guardian of the planets,” and the living image of
> God. He represents the Deity in his visits to earth, for as it is well
> expressed in Hebrew, he is one מיכאל, who is as God, or who is like unto
> God. It is he who cast out the serpent.(614)
> 
> Mikael, being the regent of the planet Saturn, is—_Saturn_.(615) His
> mystery‐name is Sabbathiel, because he presides over the Jewish Sabbath,
> as also over the astrological Saturday. Once identified, the reputation of
> the Christian conqueror of the devil is in still greater danger from
> further identifications. Biblical angels are called Malachim, the
> messengers between God (or rather _the gods_) and men. In Hebrew מכאל
> Malach, is also “a King,” and Malech or Melech was likewise Moloch, or
> again Saturn, the Seb of Egypt, to whom _Dies Saturni_, or the Sabbath,
> was dedicated. The Sabæans separated and distinguished the planet Saturn
> from its God far more than the Roman Catholics do their angels from their
> stars; and the Kabalists make of the Archangel Mikael the patron of the
> seventh work of magic.
> 
>     In theological symbolism ... Jupiter [the Sun] is the risen and
>     glorious Saviour, and Saturn, God the Father, or the Jehovah of
>     Moses,(616)
> 
> says Éliphas Lévi, who _ought_ to know. Jehovah and the Saviour, Saturn
> and Jupiter, being thus one, and Mikael being called the living image of
> God, it does seem dangerous for the Church to call Saturn, Satan—_le dieu
> mauvais_. However, Rome is strong in casuistry and will get out of this as
> she got out of every other identification, with glory to herself and to
> her own full satisfaction. Nevertheless all her dogmas and rituals seem
> like so many pages torn out from the history of Occultism, and then
> distorted. The extremely thin partition that separates the Kabalistic and
> Chaldæan Theogony from the Roman Catholic Angelology and Theodicy is now
> confessed by at least one Roman Catholic writer. One can hardly believe
> one’s eyes in finding the following (the passages italicized by us should
> be carefully noticed):
> 
>     One of the most characteristic features of our Holy Scriptures is
>     _the calculated discretion used in the enunciation of the
>     mysteries less directly useful to salvation_.... Thus, beyond
>     those “myriads of myriads” of angelic creatures just noticed(617)
>     and all these prudently elementary divisions, there are certainly
>     many others, whose very names have not yet reached us.(618) “For,”
>     excellently says St. John Chrysostom, “there are doubtless, (_sine
>     dubio_,) many other _Virtues_ [celestial beings] whose
>     denominations we are yet far from knowing.... The nine orders are
>     not by any means the only populations in heaven, where, on the
>     contrary, _are to be found numberless tribes_ of inhabitants
>     infinitely varied, and of which it would be impossible _to give
>     the slightest idea_ through human tongue.... Paul, who _had
>     learned their names_, reveals to us their existence.” (_De
>     Incomprehensibili Natura Dei_, Bk. IV.)....
> 
>     It would thus amount _to a gross mistake to see merely errors_ in
>     the Angelology of the Kabalists and Gnostics, so severely treated
>     by the Apostle of the Gentiles, for his imposing censure reached
>     _only their exaggerations and vicious interpretations_, and still
>     more, _the application of those noble_ titles _to the miserable
>     personalities of demoniacal usurpers_.(619) Often nothing so
>     resemble each other as _the language of the judges and that of the
>     convicts_ [of saints and Occultists]. One has to penetrate deeply
>     into this _dual_ study [of creed and profession] and what is still
>     better, _to trust blindly to the authority of the tribunal_ [the
>     Church of Rome, of course] to enable oneself to seize precisely
>     the point of the error. The _Gnosis_ condemned by St. Paul
>     remains, nevertheless, for him as for Plato the supreme knowledge
>     of all truths, and of the _Being par excellence_, ὁ ὄντως ὤν
>     (_Republ._ Bk. VI). The Ideas, _types_, ἀρχὰι of the Greek
>     philosopher, the _Intelligences_ of Pythagoras, the _aeons_ or
>     _emanations_, the occasion of so much reproach to the first
>     heretics, the Logos or Word, Chief of these Intelligences, the
>     _Demiurgos_, the architect of the world under his father’s
>     direction [of the Pagans], the unknown God, the _En‐soph_, or the
>     _It of the Infinite_ [of the Kabalists], the angelical
>     periods,(620) the _seven_ spirits, the Depths of _Ahriman_, the
>     World’s _Rectors_, the _Archontes_ of the air, the _God of this
>     world_, the _pleroma_ of the intelligences, down to _Metatron_ the
>     angel of the Jews, _all this is found word for word, as so many
>     truths, in the works of our greatest doctors, and in St.
>     Paul_.(621)
> 
> If an Occultist, eager to charge the Church with a numberless series of
> plagiarisms were to write the above, could he have written more strongly?
> And have we, or have we not, the right, after such a complete confession,
> to reverse the tables and to say of Roman Catholics and others what is
> said of the Gnostics and Occultists. “They used our expressions and
> rejected our doctrines.” For it is not the “promoters of the false
> Gnosis”—who had all those expressions from their archaic ancestors—who
> helped themselves to Christian expressions, but verily the Christian
> Fathers and Theologians, who helped themselves to our nest, and have tried
> ever since to soil it.
> 
> The words above quoted will explain much to those who are searching for
> truth and for truth only. They will show the origin of certain rites in
> the Church inexplicable hitherto to the simple‐minded, and will give the
> reason why such words as “Our Lord the Sun” were used in prayer by
> Christians up to the fifth and even sixth century of our era, and embodied
> in the Liturgy, until altered into “Our Lord, the God.” Let us remember
> that the early Christians painted Christ on the walls of their
> subterranean necropolis, as a shepherd in the guise of, and invested with
> all the attributes of Apollo, driving away the wolf, Fenris, who seeks to
> devour the Sun and his Satellites.
> 
> SECTION XXXVIII. ASTROLOGY AND ASTROLATRY.
> 
> The books of Hermes Trismegistus contain the exoteric meaning, still
> veiled for all but the Occultist, of the Astrology and Astrolatry of the
> Khaldi. The two subjects are closely connected. Astrolatry, or the
> adoration of the heavenly host, is the natural result of only half‐
> revealed Astrology, whose Adepts carefully concealed from the non‐
> initiated masses its Occult principles and the wisdom imparted to them by
> the Regents of the Planets—the “Angels.” Hence, divine Astrology for the
> Initiates; superstitious Astrolatry for the profane. St. Justin asserts
> it:
> 
>     From the first invention of the hieroglyphics it was not the
>     vulgar, but the distinguished and select men who became initiated
>     in the secrecy of the temples into the science of every kind of
>     Astrology—even into its most abject kind: that Astrology which
>     later on found itself prostituted in the public thoroughfares.
> 
> There was a vast difference between the Sacred Science taught by Petosiris
> and Necepso—the first Astrologers mentioned in the Egyptian manuscripts,
> believed to have lived during the reign of Ramses II. (Sesostris)(622)—and
> the miserable charlatanry of the quacks called Chaldæans, who degraded the
> Divine Knowledge under the last Emperors of Rome. Indeed, one may fairly
> describe the two as the “high ceremonial Astrology” and “astrological
> Astrolatry.” The first depended on the knowledge by the Initiates of those
> (to us) immaterial Forces or Spiritual Entities that affect matter and
> guide it. Called by the ancient Philosophers the Archontes and the
> Cosmocratores, they were the types or paradigms on the higher planes of
> the lower and more material beings on the scale of evolution, whom we call
> Elementals and Nature‐Spirits, to whom the Sabæans bowed and whom they
> worshipped, without suspecting the essential difference. Hence the latter
> kind when not a mere pretence, degenerated but too often into Black Magic.
> It was the favourite form of popular or exoteric Astrology, entirely
> ignorant of the apotelesmatic principles of the primitive Science, the
> doctrines of which were imparted only at Initiation. Thus, while the real
> Hierophants soared like Demi‐Gods to the very summit of spiritual
> knowledge, the _hoi polloi_ among the Sabæans crouched, steeped in
> superstition—ten millenniums back, as they do now—in the cold and lethal
> shadow of the valleys of matter. Sidereal influence is dual. There is the
> physical and physiological influence, that of exotericism; and the high
> spiritual, intellectual, and moral influence, imparted by the knowledge of
> the planetary Gods. Bailly, speaking with only an imperfect knowledge of
> the former, called Astrology, so far back as the eighteenth century, “The
> very foolish mother of a very wise daughter”—Astronomy. On the other hand,
> Arago, a luminary of the nineteenth century, supports the reality of the
> sidereal influence of the Sun, Moon and Planets. He asks:
> 
>     Where do we find lunar influences refuted by arguments that
>     science would dare to avow?
> 
> But even Bailly, having, as he thought, put down Astrology as publicly
> practised, dares not do the same with the real Astrology. He says:
> 
>     Judiciary Astrology was at its origin the result of a profound
>     system, the work of an enlightened nation that would wander too
>     far into the mysteries of God and Nature.
> 
> A Scientist of a more recent date, a member of the Institute of France,
> and a professor of History, Ph. Lebas, discovers (unconsciously to
> himself) the very root of Astrology in his able article on the subject in
> the _Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de France_. He well understands, he tells
> his readers, that the adhesion to that Science of such a number of highly
> intellectual men should be in itself a sufficient motive for believing
> that all Astrology is not folly:
> 
>     While proclaiming in politics the sovereignty of the people and of
>     public opinion can we admit, as heretofore, that mankind allowed
>     itself to be radically deceived in this only: that an absolute and
>     gross absurdity reigned in the minds of whole nations for so many
>     centuries without being based on anything save—on one hand human
>     imbecility, and on the other charlatanry? How for fifty centuries
>     and more can most men have been either dupes or knaves? ... Even
>     though we may find it impossible to decide between and separate
>     the realities of Astrology from the elements of invention and
>     empty dreaming in it, ... let us, nevertheless, repeat with
>     Bossuet and all modern philosophers, that “nothing that has been
>     dominant could be absolutely false.” Is it not true, at all
>     events, that there is a physical reaction on one another among the
>     planets? Is it not again true, that the planets have an influence
>     on the atmosphere, and consequently at any rate a mediate action
>     on vegetation and animals? Has not modern science demonstrated now
>     these two points beyond any doubt?... Is it any less true that
>     human liberty of action is not absolute: that all is bound, that
>     all weighs, planets as the rest, on each individual will; that
>     Providence [_or Karma_] acts on us and directs men through those
>     relations that it has established between them and the visible
>     objects and the whole universe?... Astrolatry, in its essence, is
>     nothing but that; we are bound to recognise that an instinct
>     superior to the age they lived in guided the efforts of the
>     ancient Magi. As to the materialism and annihilation of human
>     moral freedom with which Bailly charges their theory (Astrology),
>     the reprobate has no sense whatever. All the great astrologers
>     admitted, without one single exception, that man could react
>     against the influence of the stars. This principle is established
>     in the Ptolemœian _Tetrabiblos_, the true astrological Scriptures,
>     in chapters ii. and iii. of book i.(623)
> 
> Thomas Aquinas had corroborated Lebas in anticipation; he says:
> 
>     The celestial bodies are _the cause of all that happens in this
>     sublunary world_, they act indirectly on human actions; but not
>     all the effects produced by them are unavoidable.(624)
> 
> The Occultists and Theosophists are the first to confess that there is
> white and black Astrology. Nevertheless, Astrology has to be studied in
> both aspects by those who wish to become proficient in it; and the good or
> bad results obtained do not depend upon the principles, which are the same
> in both kinds, but in the Astrologer himself. Thus Pythagoras, who
> established the whole Copernican system by the Books of Hermes 2,000 years
> before Galileo’s predecessor was born, found and studied in them the whole
> Science of divine Theogony, of the communication with, and the evocation
> of, the world’s Rectors—the Princes of the “Principalities” of St.
> Paul—the nativity of each Planet and of the Universe itself, the formulæ
> of incantations and the consecration of each portion of the human body to
> the respective Zodiacal sign corresponding to it. All this cannot be
> regarded as childish and absurd—still less “devilish”—save by those who
> are, and wish to remain, tyros in the Philosophy of the Occult Sciences.
> No true thinker—no one who recognises the presence of a common bond
> between man and visible, as well as invisible, Nature—would see in the old
> relics of Archaic Wisdom—such as the _Petemenoph Papyrus_, for
> instance—“childish nonsense and absurdity,” as many Academicians and
> Scientists have done. But upon finding in such ancient documents the
> application of the Hermetic rules and laws, such as
> 
>     The consecration of one’s hair to the celestial Nile; of the left
>     temple to the living Spirit in the sun, and in the right one to
>     the spirit of Ammon,
> 
> he will endeavour to study and comprehend better the “laws of
> correspondences.” Nor will he disbelieve in the antiquity of Astrology on
> the plea that some Orientalists have thought fit to declare that the
> Zodiac was not very ancient, being only the invention of the Greeks of the
> Macedonian period. For this statement, besides having been shown to be
> entirely erroneous by a number of other reasons, may be entirely disproved
> by facts relating to the latest discoveries in Egypt, and by the more
> accurate readings of hieroglyphics and inscriptions of the earliest
> dynasties. The published polemics on the contents of the so‐called “Magic”
> Papyri of the Anastasi collection indicate the antiquity of the Zodiac. As
> the _Lettres à Lettrone_ say: The papyri discourse at length upon the four
> bases or
> 
>     Foundations of the world, the identity of which it is impossible,
>     according to Champollion, to mistake, as one is forced to
>     recognise in them the Pillars of the World of St. Paul. It is they
>     who are invoked with the gods of all the celestial zones, quite
>     analogous, once more, to the _Spiritualia nequitiæ in cælestibus_
>     of the same Apostle.(625)
> 
>     That invocation was made in the proper terms ... of the formula,
>     reproduced far too faithfully by Jamblichus for it to be possible
>     to refuse him any longer the merit of having transmitted to
>     posterity the ancient and primitive spirit of the Egyptian
>     Astrologers.(626)
> 
> As Letronne had tried to prove that all the genuine Egyptian Zodiacs had
> been manufactured during the Roman period, the Sensaos mummy is brought
> forward to show that:
> 
>     All the Zodiacal monuments in Egypt were chiefly astronomical.
>     Royal tombs and funereal rituals are so many tables of
>     constellations and of their influences for all the hours of every
>     month.
> 
>     Thus the genethliac tables themselves prove that they are far
>     older than the period assigned to their origin; all the Zodiacs of
>     the sarcophagi of later epochs being simple reminiscences of the
>     Zodiacs belonging to the mythological [archaic] period.
> 
> Primitive Astrology was as far above modern judiciary Astrology, so‐
> called, as the guides (the Planets and Zodiacal signs) are above the lamp‐
> posts. Berosus shows the sidereal sovereignty of Bel and Mylitta (Sun and
> Moon), and only “the twelve lords of the Zodiacal Gods,” the “thirty‐six
> Gods Counsellors” and the “twenty‐four Stars, judges of this world,” which
> support and guide the Universe (our solar system), watch over mortals and
> reveal to mankind its fate and their own decrees. Judiciary Astrology as
> it is now known, is correctly denominated by the Latin Church the
> 
>     Materialistic and pantheistic prophesying by the objective planet
>     itself, independently of its Rector [the Mlac of the Jews, the
>     ministers of the Eternal commissioned by him to announce his will
>     to mortals]; the ascension or conjunction of the planet at the
>     moment of the birth of an individual deciding his fortune and the
>     moment and mode of his death.(627)
> 
> Every student of Occultism knows that the heavenly bodies are closely
> related during each Manvantara with the mankind of that special cycle; and
> there are some who believe that each great character born during that
> period has—as every other mortal has, only in a far stronger degree—his
> destiny outlined within his proper constellation or star, traced as a
> self‐prophecy, an anticipated autobiography, by the indwelling Spirit of
> that particular star. The human Monad in its first beginning is that
> Spirit, or the Soul of that star (Planet) itself. As our Sun radiates its
> light and beams on every body in space within the boundaries of its
> system, so the Regent of every Planet‐star, the Parent‐monad, shoots out
> from itself the Monad of every “pilgrim” Soul born under its house within
> its own group. The Regents are esoterically seven, whether in the
> Sephiroth, the “Angels of the Presence,” the Rishis, or the Amshaspends.
> “The One is no number” is said in all the esoteric works.
> 
> From the Kasdim and Gazzim (Astrologers) the noble primitive science
> passed to the Khartumim Asaphim (or Theologians) and the Hakamim (or
> scientists, the Magicians of the lower class), and from these to the Jews
> during their captivity. The Books of Moses had been buried in oblivion for
> centuries, and when re‐discovered by Hilkiah had lost their true sense for
> the people of Israel. Primitive Occult Astrology was on the decline when
> Daniel, the last of the Jewish Initiates of the old school, became the
> chief of the Magi and Astrologers of Chaldæa. In those days even Egypt,
> who had her wisdom from the same source as Babylon, had degenerated from
> her former grandeur, and her glory had begun to fade out. Still, the
> science of old had left her eternal imprint on the world, and the seven
> great Primitive Gods reigned for ever in the Astrology and in the division
> of time of every nation upon the face of the earth. The names of the days
> of our (Christian) week are those of the Gods of the Chaldæans, who
> translated them from those of the Âryans; the uniformity of these
> antediluvian names in every nation, from the Goths back to the Indians,
> would remain inexplicable, as Sir W. Jones thought, had not the riddle
> been explained to us by the invitation made by the Chaldæan oracles,
> recorded by Porphyry and quoted by Eusebius:
> 
>     To carry those names first to the Egyptian and Phœnician colonies,
>     then to the Greeks, with the express recommendation that each God
>     should be invoked only on that day that had been called by his
>     name....
> 
>     Thus Apollo says in those oracles: “I must be invoked on the day
>     of the _sun_; Mercury after his directions, then Chronos [Saturn],
>     then Venus, and do not fail to call seven times each of those
>     gods.”(628)
> 
> This is slightly erroneous. Greece did not get her astrological
> instruction from Egypt or from Chaldæa, but direct from Orpheus, as Lucian
> tells us.(629) It was Orpheus, as he says, who imparted the Indian
> Sciences to nearly all the great monarchs of antiquity; and it was they,
> the ancient kings favoured by the Planetary Gods, who recorded the
> principles of Astrology—as did Ptolemus, for instance. Thus Lucian writes:
> 
>     The Bœotian Tiresias acquired the greatest reputation in the art
>     of predicting futurity.... In those days divination was not as
>     slightly treated as it is now; and nothing was ever undertaken
>     without previous consultation with diviners, whose oracles were
>     all directed by astrology.... At Delphos the virgin commissioned
>     to announce futurity was the symbol of the Heavenly Virgin, ...
>     and Our Lady.
> 
> On the sarcophagus of an Egyptian Pharaoh, Neith, mother of Ra, the heifer
> that brings forth the Sun, her body spangled with stars, and wearing the
> solar and lunar discs, is equally referred to as the “Heavenly Virgin” and
> “Our Lady of the Starry Vault.”
> 
> Modern judiciary Astrology in its present form began only during the time
> of Diodorus, as he apprises the world.(630) But Chaldæan Astrology was
> believed in by most of the great men in History, such as Cæsar, Pliny,
> Cicero—whose best friends, Nigidius Figulus and Lucius Tarrutius, were
> themselves Astrologers, the former being famous as a prophet. Marcus
> Antonius never travelled without an Astrologer recommended to him by
> Cleopatra. Augustus, when ascending the throne, had his horoscope drawn by
> Theagenes. Tiberius discovered pretenders to his throne by means of
> Astrology and divination. Vitellius dared not exile the Chaldæans, as they
> had announced the day of their banishment as that of his death. Vespasian
> consulted them daily; Domitian would not move without being advised by the
> prophets; Adrian was a learned Astrologer himself; and all of them, ending
> with Julian (called the _Apostate_ because he would not become one),
> believed in, and addressed their prayers to, the Planetary “Gods.” The
> Emperor Adrian, moreover, “predicted from the January calends up to
> December 31st, every event that happened to him daily.” Under the wisest
> emperors Rome had a School of Astrology, wherein were secretly taught the
> occult influences of the Sun, Moon, and Saturn.(631) Judiciary Astrology
> is used to this day by the Kabalists; and Éliphas Lévi, the modern French
> Magus, teaches its rudiments in his _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_.
> But the key to ceremonial or ritualistic Astrology, with the teraphim and
> the urim and thummim of Magic, is lost to Europe. Hence our century of
> Materialism shrugs its shoulders and sees in Astrology—a pretender.
> 
> Not all scientists scoff at it, however, and one may rejoice in reading in
> the _Musée des Sciences_(632) the suggestive and fair remarks made by Le
> Couturier, a man of science of no mean reputation. He thinks it curious to
> notice that while the bold speculations of Democritus are found vindicated
> by Dalton,
> 
>     The reveries of the alchemists are also on their way to a certain
>     rehabilitation. They receive renewed life from the minute
>     investigations of their successors, the chemists; a very
>     remarkable thing indeed is to see how much modern discoveries have
>     served to vindicate, of late, the theories of the Middle Ages from
>     the charge of absurdity laid at their door. Thus, if, as
>     demonstrated by Col. Sabine, the direction of a piece of steel,
>     hung a few feet above the soil, may be influenced by the position
>     of the moon, whose body is at a distance of 240,000 miles from our
>     planet, who then could accuse of extravagance the belief of the
>     ancient astrologers [or the modern, either] in the influence of
>     the stars on human destiny.(633)
> 
> SECTION XXXIX. CYCLES AND AVATARAS.
> 
> We have already drawn attention to the facts that the record of the life
> of a World‐Saviour is emblematical, and must be read by its mystic
> meaning, and that the figures 432 have a cosmic evolutionary significance.
> We find these two facts throwing light on the origin of the exoteric
> Christian religion, and clearing away much of the obscurity surrounding
> its beginnings. For is it not clear that the names and characters in the
> Synoptical Gospels and in that of St. John are not historical? Is it not
> evident that the compilers of the life of Christ, desirous to show that
> the birth of their Master was a cosmic, astronomical, and divinely‐
> preördained event, attempted to coördinate the same with the end of the
> secret cycle, 4,320? When facts are collated this answers to them as
> little as does the other cycle of “thirty‐three solar years, seven months,
> and seven days,” which has also been brought forward as supporting the
> same claim, the soli‐lunar cycle in which the Sun gains on the Moon one
> solar year. The combination of the three figures, 4, 3, 2, with cyphers
> according to the cycle and Manvantara concerned, was, and is, preëminently
> Hindu. It will remain a secret even though several of its significant
> features are revealed. It relates, for instance, to the Pralaya of the
> races in their periodical dissolution, before which events a special
> Avatâra has always to descend and incarnate on earth. These figures were
> adopted by all the older nations, such as those of Egypt and Chaldæa, and
> before them were current among the Atlanteans. Evidently some of the more
> learned among the early Church Fathers who had dabbled, whilst Pagans, in
> temple secrets, knew them to relate to the Avatâric or Messianic mystery,
> and tried to apply this cycle to the birth of their Messiah; they failed
> because the figures relate to the respective ends of the Root‐Races and
> not to any individual. In their badly‐directed efforts, moreover, an error
> of five years occurred. Is it possible, if their claims as to the
> importance and universality of the event were correct, that such a vital
> mistake should have been allowed to creep into a chronological computation
> preördained and traced in the heavens by the finger of God? Again, what
> were the Pagan and even Jewish Initiates doing, if this claim as to Jesus
> be correct? Could they, the custodians of the key to the secret cycles and
> Avatâras, the heirs of all the Âryan, Egyptian, and Chaldæan wisdom, have
> failed to recognise their great “God‐Incarnate,” one with Jehovah,(634)
> their Saviour of the latter days, him whom all the nations of Asia still
> expect as their Kalki Avatâra, Maitreya Buddha, Sosiosh, Messiah, etc.?
> 
> The simple secret is this: There are cycles within greater cycles, which
> are all contained in the one Kalpa of 4,320,000 years. It is at the end of
> this cycle that the Kalki Avatâra is expected—the Avatâra Whose name and
> characteristics are secret, Who will come forth from Shamballa, the “City
> of Gods,” which is in the West for some nations, in the East for others,
> in the North or South for yet others. And this is the reason why, from the
> Indian Rishi to Virgil, and from Zoroaster down to the latest Sibyl, all
> have, since the beginning of the Fifth Race, prophesied, sung, and
> promised the cyclic return of the Virgin—Virgo, the constellation—and the
> birth of a divine child who should bring back to our earth the Golden Age.
> 
> No one, however fanatical, would have sufficient hardihood to maintain
> that the Christian era has ever been a return to the Golden Age—Virgo
> having actually entered into Libra since then. Let us trace as briefly as
> possible the Christian traditions to their true origin.
> 
> First of all, they discover in a few lines from Virgil a direct prophecy
> of the birth of Christ. Yet it is impossible to detect in this prophecy
> any feature of the present age. It is in the famous fourth Eclogue in
> which, half a century before our era, Pollio is made to ask the Muses of
> Sicily to sing to him about greater events.
> 
>     The last era of Cumæan song is now arrived and the grand series of
>     ages [that series which recurs again and again in the course of
>     our mundane revolution] begins afresh. Now the Virgin Astræa
>     returns, and the reign of Saturn recommences. Now a new progeny
>     _descends from the celestial realms_. Do thou, chaste Lucina,
>     smile propitious to the infant Boy who will bring to a close the
>     present Age of Iron,(635) and introduce throughout the whole world
>     the Age of Gold.... He shall share the life of Gods and shall see
>     heroes mingled in society with Gods, himself be seen by them and
>     all the peaceful world.... Then shall the herds no longer dread
>     the huge lion, the serpent also shall die: and the poison’s
>     deceptive plant shall perish. Come then, dear child of the Gods,
>     great descendant of Jupiter!... The time is near. See, the world
>     is shaken with its globe saluting thee: the earth, the regions of
>     the sea, and the heavens sublime.(636)
> 
> It is in these few lines, called the “Sibylline prophecy about the coming
> of Christ,” that his followers now see a direct foretelling of the event.
> Now who will presume to maintain that either at the birth of Jesus or
> since the establishment of the so‐called Christian religion, any portion
> of the above‐quoted sentences can be shown as prophetic? Has the “last
> age”—the Age of Iron, or Kali Yuga—closed since then? Quite the reverse,
> since it is shown to be in full sway just now, not only because the Hindus
> use the name, but by universal personal experience. Where is that “new
> race that has descended from the celestial realms”? Was it the race that
> emerged from Paganism into Christianity? Or is it our present race, with
> nations ever red‐hot for fight, jealous and envious, ready to pounce upon
> each other, showing mutual hatred that would put to blush cats and dogs,
> ever lying and deceiving one another? Is it this age of ours that is the
> promised “Golden Age”—in which neither the venom of the serpent nor of any
> plant is any longer lethal, and in which we are all secure under the mild
> sway of God‐chosen sovereigns? The wildest fancy of an opium‐eater could
> hardly suggest a more inappropriate description, if it is to be applied to
> our age or to any age since the year one of our era. What of the mutual
> slaughter of sects, of Christians by Pagans, and of Pagans and Heretics by
> Christians; the horrors of the Middle Ages and of the Inquisition;
> Napoleon, and since his day, an “armed peace” at best—at the worst,
> torrents of blood, shed for supremacy over acres of land, and a handful of
> heathen: millions of soldiers under arms, ready for battle; a diplomatic
> body playing at Cains and Judases; and instead of the “mild sway of a
> divine sovereign” the universal, though unrecognised, sway of Cæsarism, of
> “might” in lieu of “right,” and the breeding therefrom of anarchists,
> socialists, pétroleuses, and destroyers of every description?
> 
> The Sibylline prophecy and Virgil’s inspirational poetry remain
> unfulfilled in every point, as we see.
> 
>     The fields are yellow with soft ears of corn;
> 
> but so they were before our era:
> 
>     The blushing grapes shall hang from the rude brambles, and dewy
>     honey shall [or may] distil from the rugged oak;
> 
> but they have not thus done, so far. We must look for another
> interpretation. What is it? The Sibylline Prophetess spoke, as thousands
> of other Prophets and Seers have spoken, though even the few such records
> that have survived are rejected by Christian and infidel, and their
> interpretations are only allowed and accepted among the Initiated. The
> Sibyl alluded to cycles in general and to the great cycle especially. Let
> us remember how the Purânas corroborate the above, among others the
> _Vishnu Purâna_:
> 
>     When the practices taught by the Vedas, and the Institutes of Law
>     shall have nearly ceased, and the close of the Kali Yuga [the
>     “Iron Age” of Virgil] shall be nigh, an aspect of that divine
>     Being who exists of his own spiritual nature in the character of
>     Brahmâ and even is the beginning and the end [_Alpha and Omega_],
>     ... shall descend upon earth: he will be born in the family of
>     Vishnuyashas, an eminent Brâhman of Shamballah ... endowed with
>     the eight superhuman powers. By his irresistible might he will
>     destroy ... all whose minds are devoted to iniquity. He will then
>     reëstablish righteousness upon earth; and the minds of those who
>     live at the end of the [Kali] Age shall be awakened, and shall be
>     as pellucid as crystal.(637) The men who are thus changed by
>     virtue of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of human beings
>     [the Shistha, the survivors of the future cataclysm], and shall
>     give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita [or
>     Satya] Yuga [the age of purity, or the “Golden Age”]. For it is
>     said: “When the sun and moon and Tishya [asterisms] and the planet
>     Jupiter are in one mansion the Krita Age [the Golden] shall
>     return.”(638)
> 
> The astronomical cycles of the Hindus—those taught publicly—have been
> sufficiently well understood, but the esoteric meaning thereof, in its
> application to transcendental subjects connected with them, has ever
> remained a dead‐letter. The number of cycles was enormous; it ranged from
> the Mahâ Yuga cycle of 4,320,000 years down to the small septenary and
> quinquennial cycles, the latter being composed of the five years called
> respectively the Samvatsara, Parivatsara, Idvatsara, Anuvatsara, and
> Vatsara, each having secret attributes or qualities attached to them.
> Vriddhagarga gives these in a treatise, now the property of a Trans‐
> Himâlayan Matham (or temple); and describes the relation between this
> quinquennial and the Brihaspati cycle, based on the conjunction of the Sun
> and Moon every sixtieth year: a cycle as mysterious—for national events in
> general and those of the Âryan Hindu nation especially—as it is important.
> 
> SECTION XL. SECRET CYCLES.
> 
> The former five‐year cycle comprehends sixty solar‐sidereal months of 1800
> days, sixty‐one solar months (or 1830 days); sixty‐two lunar months (or
> 1860 lunations), and sixty‐seven lunar‐asterismal months (or 1809 such
> days).
> 
> In his _Kâla Sankalita_, Col. Warren very properly regards these years as
> cycles; this they are, for each year has its own special importance as
> having some bearing upon, and connection with, specified events in
> individual horoscopes. He writes that in the cycle of sixty there
> 
>     Are contained five cycles of twelve years, each supposed equal to
>     one year of the planet (Brihaspati, or Jupiter) ... I mention this
>     cycle because I found it mentioned in some books, but I know of no
>     nation or tribe that reckons time after that account.(639)
> 
> The ignorance is very natural, since Col. Warren could know nothing of the
> secret cycles and their meanings. He adds:
> 
>     The names of the five cycles or Yugas are: ... (1) Samvatsara, (2)
>     Parivatsara, (3) Idvatsara, (4) Anuvatsara, (5) Udravatsara.
> 
> The learned Colonel might, however, have assured himself that there were
> “other nations” which had the same secret cycle, if he had but remembered
> that the Romans also had their _lustrum_ of five years (from the Hindus
> undeniably) which represented the same period if multiplied by 12.(640)
> Near Benares there are still the relics of all these cycle‐records, and of
> astronomical instruments cut out of solid rock, the everlasting records of
> Archaic Initiation, called by Sir W. Jones (as suggested by the prudent
> Brâhmans who surrounded him) old “back records” or reckonings. But in
> Stonehenge they exist to this day. Higgins says that Waltire found the
> barrows of tumuli surrounding this giant‐temple represented accurately the
> situation and magnitude of the fixed stars, forming a complete orrery or
> planisphere. As Colebrooke found out, it is the cycle of the _Vedas_,
> recorded in the _Jyotisha_, one of the Vedângas, a treatise on Astronomy,
> which is the basis of calculation for all other cycles, larger or
> smaller;(641) and the _Vedas_ were written in characters, archaic though
> they be, long after those natural observations, made by the aid of their
> gigantic mathematical and astronomical instruments, had been recorded by
> the men of the Third Race, who had received their instruction from the
> Dhyân Chohans. Maurice speaks truly when he observes that all such
> 
>     Circular stone monuments were intended as durable symbols of
>     astronomical cycles by a race who, not having, or for political
>     reasons, forbidding the use of letters, had no other permanent
>     method of instructing their disciples or handing down their
>     knowledge to posterity.
> 
> He errs only in the last idea. It was to conceal their knowledge from
> profane posterity, leaving it as an heirloom only to the Initiates, that
> such monuments, at once rock observatories and astronomical treatises,
> were cut out.
> 
> It is no news that as the Hindus divided the earth into seven zones, so
> the more western peoples—Chaldæans, Phœnicians, and even the Jews, who got
> their learning either directly or indirectly from the Brâhmans—made all
> their secret and sacred numerations by 6 and 12, though using the number 7
> whenever this would not lend itself to handling. Thus the numerical base
> of 6, the exoteric figure given by Ârya Bhatta, was made good use of. From
> the first secret cycle of 600—the Naros, transformed successively into
> 60,000 and 60 and 6, and, with other noughts added into other secret
> cycles—down to the smallest, an Archæologist and Mathematician can easily
> find it repeated in every country, known to every nation. Hence the globe
> was divided into 60 degrees, which, multiplied by 60, became 3,600 the
> “great year.” Hence also the hour with its 60 minutes of 60 seconds each.
> The Asiatic people count a cycle of 60 years also, after which comes the
> lucky seventh decad, and the Chinese have their small cycle of 60 days,
> the Jews of 6 days, the Greeks of 6 centuries—the Naros again. The
> Babylonians had a great year of 3,600, being the Naros multiplied by 6.
> The Tartar cycle called Van was 180 years, or three sixties; this
> multiplied by 12 times 12 = 144, makes 25,920 years, the exact period of
> revolution of the heavens.
> 
> India is the birthplace of arithmetic and mathematics; as “Our Figures,”
> in _Chips from a German Workshop_, by Prof. Max Müller, shows beyond a
> doubt. As well explained by Krishna Shâstri Godbole in _The Theosophist_:
> 
>     The Jews ... represented the units (1‐9) by the first nine letters
>     of our alphabet; the tens (10‐90) by the next nine letters; the
>     first four hundreds (100‐400) by the last four letters, and the
>     remaining ones (500‐900) by the second forms of the letters “kâf”
>     (11th), “mîm” (13th), “nûn” (14th), “pe” (17th), and “sâd” (18th);
>     and they represented other numbers by combining these letters
>     according to their value.... The Jews of the present period still
>     adhere to this practice of notation in their Hebrew books. The
>     Greeks had a numerical system similar to that used by the Jews,
>     but they carried it a little farther by using letters of the
>     alphabet with a dash or slant‐line behind, to represent thousands
>     (1000‐9000), tens of thousands (10,000‐90,000) and one hundred of
>     thousands (100,000) the last, for instance, being represented by
>     “rho” with a dash behind, while “rho” singly represented 100. The
>     Romans represented all numerical values by the combination
>     (additive when the second letter is of equal or less value) of six
>     letters of their alphabet: i (= 1), v (= 5), x (= 10), c (for
>     “centum” = 100), d (= 500), and m (= 1000): thus 20 = xx, 15 = xv,
>     and 9 = ix. These are called the Roman numerals, and are adopted
>     by all European nations when using the Roman alphabet. The Arabs
>     at first followed their neighbours, the Jews, in their method of
>     computation, so much so that they called it Abjad from the first
>     four Hebrew letters—“alif,” “beth,” “gimel”—or rather “jimel,”
>     that is, “jim” (Arabic being wanting in “g”), and “daleth,”
>     representing the first four units. But when in the early part of
>     the Christian era they came to India as traders, they found the
>     country already using for computation the decimal scale of
>     notation, which they forthwith borrowed literally; _viz._, without
>     altering its method of writing from left to right, at variance
>     with their own mode of writing, which is from right to left. They
>     introduced this system into Europe through Spain and other
>     European countries lying along the coast of the Mediterranean and
>     under their sway, during the dark ages of European history. It has
>     thus become evident that the Âryas knew well mathematics or the
>     science of computation at a time when all other nations knew but
>     little, if anything, of it. It has also been admitted that the
>     knowledge of arithmetic and algebra was first introduced from the
>     Hindus by the Arabs, and then taught by them to the Western
>     nations. This fact convincingly proves that the Âryan civilisation
>     is older than that of any other nation in the world; and as the
>     _Vedas_ are avowedly proved the oldest work of that civilisation,
>     a presumption is raised in favour of their great antiquity.(642)
> 
> But while the Jewish nation, for instance—regarded so long as the first
> and oldest in the order of creation—knew nothing of arithmetic and
> remained utterly ignorant of the decimal scale of notation—the latter
> existed for ages in India before the actual era.
> 
> To become certain of the immense antiquity of the Âryan Asiatic nations
> and of their astronomical records one has to study more than the _Vedas_.
> The secret meaning of the latter will never be understood by the present
> generation of Orientalists; and the astronomical works which give openly
> the real dates and prove the antiquity of both the nation and its science,
> elude the grasp of the collectors of ollas and old manuscripts in India,
> the reason being too obvious to need explanation. Yet there are
> Astronomers and Mathematicians to this day in India, humble Shâstris and
> Pandits, unknown and lost in the midst of that population of phenomenal
> memories and metaphysical brains, who have undertaken the task and have
> proved to the satisfaction of many that the _Vedas_ are the oldest works
> in the world. One of such is the Shâstri just quoted, who published in
> _The Theosophist_(643) an able treatise proving astronomically and
> mathematically that:
> 
>     If the Post‐Vaidika works alone, the Upanishads, the Brâhmanas,
>     etc., down to the Purânas, when examined critically carry us back
>     to 20,000 B.C., then the time of the composition of the _Vedas_
>     themselves cannot be less than 30,000 B.C., in round numbers, a
>     date which we may take at present as the age of that Book of
>     books.(644)
> 
> And what are his proofs?
> 
> Cycles and the evidence yielded by the asterisms. Here are a few extracts
> from his rather lengthy treatise, selected to give an idea of his
> demonstrations and bearing directly on the quinquennial cycle spoken of
> just now. Those who feel interested in the demonstrations and are advanced
> mathematicians can turn to the article itself, “The Antiquity of the
> _Vedas_,”(645) and judge for themselves.
> 
>     10. Somâkara in his commentary on the _Shesha Jyotisha_ quotes a
>     passage from the _Satapatha Brâhmana_, which contains an
>     observation on the change of the tropics, and which is also found
>     in the _Sâkhâyana Brâhmana_, as has been noticed by Prof. Max
>     Müller in his preface to _Rigveda Samhitâ_ (p. xx. foot‐note, vol.
>     iv.). The passage is this: ... “The full‐moon night in Phâlguna is
>     the first night of Samvatsara, the first year of the quinquennial
>     age.” This passage clearly shows that the quinquennial age which,
>     according to the sixth verse of the _Jyotisha_, begins on the 1st
>     of Mâgha (January‐February), once began on the 15th of Phâlguna
>     (February‐March). Now when the 15th of Phâlguna of the first year
>     called Samvatsara of the quinquennial age begins, the moon,
>     according to the _Jyotisha_, is in 3/4th of the Uttar Phâlgunî,
>     and the sun in 1/4th of Pûrva Bhâdrapadâ. Hence the position of
>     the four principal points on the ecliptic was then as follows:
> 
>     The winter solstice in 3°29’ of Purva Bhâdrapadâ.
> 
>     The vernal equinox in the beginning of Mrigashîrsha.
> 
>     The summer solstice in 10 of Purva Phâlgunî.
> 
>     The autumnal equinox in the middle of Jyeshtha.
> 
>     The vernal equinoctial point, we have seen, coincided with the
>     beginning of Krittikâ in 1421 B.C.; and from the beginning of
>     Krittikâ to that of Mrigashîrsha, was, in consequence, 1421 +
>     26‐2/3 x 72 = 1421 + 1920 = 3341 B.C., supposing the rate of
>     _precession_ to be 50° a year. When we take the rate to be 3°20"
>     in 247 years, the time comes up to 1516 + 1960·7 = 3476·7 B.C.
> 
>     When the winter solstice by its retrograde motion coincided after
>     that with the beginning of Pûrva Bhâdrapadâ, then the commencement
>     of the quinquennial age was changed from the 15th to the 1st of
>     Phâlguna (February‐March). This change took place 240 years after
>     the date of the above observation, that is, in 3101 B.C. This date
>     is most important, as from it an era was reckoned in after times.
>     The commencement of the Kali or Kali Yuga (derived from “kal,” “to
>     reckon”), though said by European scholars to be an imaginary
>     date, becomes thus an astronomical fact.
> 
>     INTERCHANGE OF KRITTIKÂ AND ASHVINÎ.(646)
> 
>     We thus see that the asterisms, twenty‐seven in number, were
>     counted from the Mrigashîrsha when the vernal equinox was in its
>     beginning, and that the practice of thus counting was adhered to
>     till the vernal equinox retrograded to the beginning of Krittikâ,
>     when it became the first of the asterisms. For then the winter
>     solstice had changed, receding from Phâlguna (February‐March) to
>     Mâgha (January‐February), one complete lunar month. And, in like
>     manner, the place of Krittikâ was occupied by Ashvinî, that is,
>     the latter became the first of the asterisms, heading all others,
>     when its beginning coincided with the vernal equinoctial point,
>     or, in other words, when the winter solstice was in Pansha
>     (December‐February). Now from the beginning of Krittikâ to that of
>     Ashvinî there are two asterisms, or 26‐2/3°, and the time the
>     equinox takes to retrograde this distance at the rate of 1 in 72
>     years is 1920 years; and hence the date at which the vernal
>     equinox coincided with the commencement of Ashvinî or with the end
>     of Revatî is 1920 ‐ 1421 = 499 A.D.
> 
>     BENTLEY’S OPINION.
> 
>     12. The next and equally‐important observation we have to record
>     here is one discussed by Mr. Bentley in his researches into the
>     Indian antiquities. “The first lunar asterism,” he says, “in the
>     division of twenty‐eight was called Mûla, that is to say, the root
>     or origin. In the division of twenty‐seven the first lunar
>     asterism was called Jyeshtha, that is to say, the eldest or first,
>     and consequently of the same import as the former” (_vide_ his
>     _Historical View of the Hindu Astronomy_, p. 4). From this it
>     becomes manifest that the vernal equinox was once in the beginning
>     of Mûla, and Mûla was reckoned the first of the asterisms when
>     they were twenty‐eight in number, including Adhijit. Now there are
>     fourteen asterisms, or 180°, from the beginning of Mrigashîrsha to
>     that of Mûla, and hence the date at which the vernal equinox
>     coincided with the beginning of Mûla was at least 3341 + 180 × 72
>     = 16,301 B.C. The position of the four principal points on the
>     ecliptic was then as given below:
> 
>     The winter solstice in the beginning of Uttara Phâlgunî in the
>     month of Shrâvana.
> 
>     The vernal equinox in the beginning of Mûla in Kârttika.
> 
>     The summer solstice in the beginning of Pûrva Bhâdrapadâ in Mâgha.
> 
>     The autumnal equinox in the beginning of Mrigashîrsha in
>     Vaishâkha.
> 
>     A PROOF FROM THE BHAGAVAD GÎTÂ.
> 
>     13. The _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, as well as the _Bhâgavata_, makes mention
>     of an observation which points to a still more remote antiquity
>     than the one discovered by Mr. Bentley. The passages are given in
>     order below:
> 
>     “I am the Mârgashîrsha [_viz._ the first among the months] and the
>     spring [_viz._ the first among the seasons].”
> 
>     This shows that at one time the first month of spring was
>     Mârgashîrsha. A season includes two months, and the mention of a
>     month suggests the season.
> 
>     “I am the Samvatsara among the years [which are five in number]
>     and the spring among the seasons, and the Mârgashîrsha among the
>     months and the Abhijit among the asterisms [which are twenty‐eight
>     in number].”
> 
>     This clearly points out that at one time in the first year called
>     Samvatsara, of the quinquennial age, the Madhu, that is, the first
>     month of spring, was Mârgashîrsha, and Abhijit was the first of
>     the asterisms. It then coincided with the vernal equinoctial
>     point, and thence from it the asterisms were counted. To find the
>     date of this observation: There are three asterisms from the
>     beginning of Mûla to the beginning of Abhijit, and hence the date
>     in question is at least 16,301 + 3/7 × 90 × 72 = 19,078 or about
>     20,000 B.C. The Samvatsara at this time began in Bhâdrapadâ, the
>     winter solstitial month.
> 
> So far then 20,000 years are mathematically proven for the antiquity of
> the _Vedas_. And this is simply exoteric. Any mathematician, provided he
> be not blinded by preconception and prejudice, can see this, and an
> unknown but very clever amateur Astronomer, S. A. Mackey, has proved it
> some sixty years back.
> 
> His theory about the Hindu Yugas and their length is curious—as being so
> very near the correct doctrine.
> 
>     It is said in volume ii. p. 131, of _Asiatic Researches_ that:
>     “The great ancestor of Yudhister reigned 27,000 years ... at the
>     end of the brazen age.” In volume ix. p. 364, we read:
> 
>     “In the _beginning of the Cali Yuga_, in the reign of Yudhister.
>     And Yudhister ... began his reign immediately after the flood
>     called Pralaya.”
> 
>     Here we find three different statements concerning Yudhister ...
>     to explain these seeming differences we must have recourse to
>     their books of science, where we find the heavens and the earth
>     divided into _five parts_ of unequal dimensions, by circles
>     parallel to the equator. Attention to these divisions will be
>     found to be of the utmost importance ... as it will be found that
>     from them arose the division of their Maha‐Yuga into its four
>     component parts. Every astronomer knows that there is a point in
>     the heavens called the pole, round which the whole seems to turn
>     in twenty‐four hours; and that at ninety degrees from it they
>     imagine a _circle_ called the _equator_, which divides the heavens
>     and the earth into two equal parts, the north and the south.
>     Between this circle and the pole there is another imaginary circle
>     called the circle of _perpetual apparition_: between which and the
>     equator there is a point in the heavens called the zenith, through
>     which let another imaginary circle pass, parallel to the other
>     two; and then there wants but the circle of perpetual occultation
>     to complete the round.... No astronomer of Europe besides myself
>     has ever applied them to the development of the Hindu mysterious
>     numbers. We are told in the _Asiatic Researches_ that Yudhister
>     brought Vicramâditya to reign in Cassimer, which is in the
>     latitude of 36 degrees. And in that latitude the circle of
>     perpetual apparition would extend up to 72 degrees altitude, and
>     from that to the zenith there are but 18 degrees, but from the
>     zenith to the equator in that latitude there are 36 degrees, and
>     from the equator to the circle of perpetual occultation there are
>     54 degrees. Here we find the semi‐circle of 180 degrees divided
>     into four parts, in the proportion of 1, 2, 3, 4, _i.e._, 18, 36,
>     54, 72. Whether the Hindu astronomers were acquainted with the
>     motion of the earth or not is of no consequence, since the
>     appearances are the same; and if it will give those gentlemen of
>     _tender consciences_ any pleasure I am willing to admit that they
>     imagined the heavens rolled round the earth, but they had observed
>     the stars in the path of the sun to move _forward_ through the
>     equinoctial points, at the rate of fifty‐four seconds of a degree
>     in a year, which carried the whole zodiac round in 24,000 years;
>     in which time they also observed that the angle of obliquity
>     varied, so as to _extend_ or _contract_ the width of the tropics 4
>     degrees on each side, which rate of motion would carry the tropics
>     from the equator to the poles in 540,000 years: in which time the
>     Zodiac would have made twenty‐two and a half revolutions, which
>     are expressed by the parallel circles from the equator to the
>     poles ... or what amounts to the same thing, the north pole of the
>     ecliptic would have moved from the north pole of the earth to the
>     equator.... Thus the poles become inverted in 1,080,000 years,
>     which is their Maha Yuga, and which they had divided into four
>     unequal parts, in the proportions of 1, 2, 3, 4, for the reasons
>     mentioned above; which are 108,000, 216,000, 324,000, and 432,000.
>     Here we have the most positive proofs that the above numbers
>     originated in _ancient astronomical observations_, and
>     consequently are not deserving of those epithets which have been
>     bestowed upon them by the Essayist, echoing the voice of Bentley,
>     Wilford, Dupuis, etc.
> 
>     I have now to show that the reign of Yudhister for 27,000 years is
>     neither _absurd nor disgusting_, but perhaps the Essayist is not
>     aware that there were several Yudhisters or Judhisters. In volume
>     ii. p. 131, _Asiatic Researches_: “The great ancestor of Yudhister
>     reigned 27,000 years at the end of the brazen or third age.” Here
>     I must again beg your attention to this projection. This is a
>     plane of that machine which the second gentleman thought so very
>     clumsy; it is that of a _prolong spheroid_, called by the ancients
>     an atroscope. Let the longest axis represent the poles of the
>     earth, making an angle of 28 degrees with the horizon; then will
>     the seven divisions above the horizon to the North Pole, the
>     temple of Buddha, and the seven from the North Pole to the circle
>     of perpetual apparition represent the fourteen Manvantaras, or
>     very long periods of time, each of which, according to the third
>     volume of _Asiatic Researches_, p. 258 or 259, was the reign of a
>     Menu. But Capt. Wilford, in volume v. p. 243, gives us the
>     following information: “The Egyptians had fourteen dynasties, and
>     the Hindus had fourteen dynasties, the _rulers_ of which are
>     called Menus.” ...
> 
>     Who can here mistake the fourteen very long periods of time for
>     those which constituted the Cali Yuga of Delhi, or any other place
>     in the latitude of 28 degrees, where the blank space from the foot
>     of Meru to the seventh circle from the equator, constitutes the
>     part passed over by the tropic in the next age; which proportions
>     differ considerably from those in the latitude of 36; and because
>     the numbers in the Hindu books differ, Mr. Bentley asserts that:
>     “This shows what little dependence is to be put in them.” But, on
>     the contrary, it shows with what accuracy the Hindus had
>     _observed_ the motions of the heavens in different latitudes.
> 
>     Some of the Hindus inform us that “the earth has _two spindles_
>     which are surrounded by _seven tiers of heavens and hells_ at the
>     distance of _one Raju_ each.” This needs but little explanation
>     when it is understood that the seven divisions from the equator to
>     their zenith are called _Rishis_ or _Rashas_. But what is most to
>     our present purpose to know is that they had given names to each
>     of those divisions which the tropics passed over during each
>     revolution of the Zodiac. In the latitude of 36 degrees where the
>     Pole or Meru was nine steps high at Cassimere, they were called
>     _Shastras_; in latitude 28 degrees at Delhi, where the Pole or
>     Meru was seven steps high, they were called Menus; but in 24
>     degrees, at Cacha, where the Pole or Meru was but six steps high,
>     they were called Sacas. But in the ninth volume (_Asiatic
>     Researches_) Yudhister, the son of Dherma, or _Justice_, was the
>     first of the six Sacas; the name implies the _end_, and as
>     everything has two ends, Yudhister is as applicable to the first
>     as to the last. And as the division on the north of the circle of
>     perpetual apparition is the first of the Cali Yuga, supposing the
>     tropics to be ascending, it was called the division or reign of
>     Yudhister. But the division which immediately precedes the circle
>     of perpetual apparition is the last of the third or _brazen age_,
>     and was therefore called Yudhister, and as his reign preceded the
>     reign of the other, as the tropic ascended to the Pole or Meru, he
>     was called _the father_ of the other—“the great ancestor of
>     Yudhister, who reigned _twenty‐seven thousand years, at the end_
>     of the brazen age.” (Vol. ii. _Asiatic Researches_.)
> 
>     The ancient Hindus observed that the Zodiac went forward at about
>     the rate of fifty‐four seconds a year, and to avoid greater
>     fractions, stated it at that, which would make a complete round in
>     24,000 years; and observing the angle of the poles to vary nearly
>     4 degrees each round, stated the three numbers as such, which
>     would have given _forty‐five rounds of the Zodiac_ to half a
>     revolution of the poles; but finding that forty‐five rounds would
>     not bring the northern tropic to coincide with the circle of
>     perpetual apparition by thirty minutes of a degree, which required
>     the Zodiac to move one sign and a half more, which we all know it
>     could not do in less than 3,000 years, they were, in the case
>     before us, added to the end of the _brazen age_; which lengthen
>     the reign of _that_ Yudhister to 27,000 years instead of 24,000,
>     but, at another time they did not alter the regular order of
>     24,000 years to the reign of each of these long‐winded monarchs,
>     but rounded up the time by allowing a _regency_ to continue three
>     or four thousand years. In volume ii. p. 134, _Asiatic
>     Researches_, we are told that: “Paricshit, the great nephew and
>     successor of Yudhister, is allowed without controversy to have
>     reigned in the interval between the _brazen and earthen_, or Cali
>     Ages, and to have died at the setting‐in of the Cali Yug.” Here we
>     find an _interregnum_ at the _end_ of the _brazen_ age, and
>     _before_ the setting‐in of the Cali Yug: and as there can be but
>     one brazen or Treta Yug, _i.e._, the third age, in a Maha Yuga of
>     1,080,000 years: the reign of this Paricshit must have been in the
>     second Maha Yuga, when the pole had returned to its original
>     position, which must have taken 2,160,000 years: and this is what
>     the Hindus call the Prajanatha Yuga. Analogous to this custom is
>     that of some nations more modern, who, fond of even numbers, have
>     made the common year to consist of twelve months of thirty days
>     each, and the five days and odd measure have been represented as
>     the reign of a little serpent biting his tail, and divided into
>     five parts, etc.
> 
>     But “Yudhister began his reign immediately _after the flood called
>     Pralaya_,” _i.e._, at the end of the Cali Yug (or age of heat),
>     when the tropic had passed from the pole to the other side of the
>     circle of perpetual apparition, which coincides with the northern
>     horizon; here the tropics or summer solstice would be again in the
>     same parallel of north declination, at the _commencement_ of their
>     first age, as he was at the _end_ of their _third age_, or Treta
>     Yug, called the brazen age....
> 
>     Enough has been said to prove that the Hindu books of science are
>     not disgusting absurdities, originated in ignorance, vanity, and
>     credulity; but books containing the most profound knowledge of
>     astronomy and geography.
> 
>     What, therefore, can induce those gentlemen of tender consciences
>     to insist that Yudhister was a real mortal man I have no guess;
>     unless it be that they fear for the fate of Jared and his
>     grandfather, Methuselah?
> 
> SECTION XLI. THE DOCTRINE OF AVATARAS.
> 
> A strange story—a legend rather—is persistently current among the
> disciples of some great Himâlayan Gurus, and even among laymen, to the
> effect that Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu, has never left the
> terrestrial regions, though his body died and was burnt, and its relics
> are preserved to this day. There is an oral tradition among the Chinese
> Buddhists, and a written statement among the secret books of the Lamaists
> of Tibet, as well as a tradition among the Âryans, that Gautama BUDDHA had
> two doctrines: one for the masses and His lay disciples, the other for His
> “elect,” the Arhats. His policy and after Him that of His Arhats was, it
> appears, to refuse no one admission into the ranks of candidates for
> Arhatship, but never to divulge the final mysteries except to those who
> had proved themselves, during long years of probation, to be worthy of
> Initiation. These once accepted were consecrated and initiated without
> distinction of race, caste or wealth, as in the case of His western
> successor. It is the Arhats who have set forth and allowed this tradition
> to take root in the people’s mind, and it is the basis, also, of the later
> dogma of Lamaic reincarnation or the succession of human Buddhas.
> 
> The little that can be said here upon the subject may or may not help to
> guide the psychic student in the right direction. It being left to the
> option and responsibility of the writer to tell the facts as she
> _personally_ understood them, the blame for possible misconceptions
> created must fall only upon her. She has been taught the doctrine, but it
> was left to her sole intuition—as it is now left to the sagacity of the
> reader—to group the mysterious and perplexing facts together. The
> incomplete statements herein given are fragments of what is contained in
> certain secret volumes, but it is not lawful to divulge the details.
> 
> The esoteric version of the mystery given in the secret volumes may be
> told very briefly. The Buddhists have always stoutly denied that their
> Buddha was, as alleged by the Brâhmans, an Avatâra of Vishnu in the same
> sense as a man is an incarnation of his Karmic ancestor. They deny it
> partly, perhaps, because the esoteric meaning of the term “Mahâ Vishnu” is
> not known to them in its full, impersonal, and general meaning. There is a
> mysterious Principle in Nature called “Mahâ Vishnu,” which is not the God
> of that name, but a principle which contains Bîja, the seed of Avatârism
> or, in other words, is the potency and cause of such divine incarnations.
> All the World‐Saviours, the Bodhisattvas and the Avatâras, are the trees
> of salvation grown out from the one seed, the Bîja or “Mahâ Vishnu.”
> Whether it be called Âdi‐Buddha (Primeval Wisdom) or Mahâ Vishnu, it is
> all the same. Understood esoterically, Vishnu is both Saguna and Nirguna
> (with and without attributes). In the first aspect, Vishnu is the object
> of exoteric worship and devotion; in the second, as Nirguna, he is the
> culmination of the totality of spiritual wisdom in the
> Universe—Nirvâna,(647) in short—and has as worshippers all philosophical
> minds. In this esoteric sense the Lord BUDDHA _was_ an incarnation of Mahâ
> Vishnu.
> 
> This is from the philosophical and purely spiritual standpoint. From the
> plane of illusion, however, as one would say, or from the terrestrial
> standpoint, those initiated _know_ that He was a direct incarnation of one
> of the primeval “Seven Sons of Light” who are to be found in every
> Theogony—the Dhyân Chohans whose mission it is, from one eternity (æon) to
> the other, to watch over the spiritual welfare of the regions under their
> care. This has been already enunciated in _Esoteric Buddhism_.
> 
> One of the greatest mysteries of speculative and philosophical
> Mysticism—and it is one of the mysteries now to be disclosed—is the _modus
> operandi_ in the degrees of such hypostatic transferences. As a matter of
> course, divine as well as human incarnations must remain a closed book to
> the theologian as much as to the physiologist, unless the esoteric
> teachings be accepted and become the religion of the world. This teaching
> may never be fully explained to an unprepared public; but one thing is
> certain and may be said now: that between the dogma of a newly‐created
> soul for each new birth, and the physiological assumption of a temporary
> animal soul, there lies the vast region of Occult teaching(648) with its
> logical and reasonable demonstrations, the links of which may all be
> traced in logical and philosophical sequence in nature.
> 
> This “Mystery” is found, for him who understands its right meaning, in the
> dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, in the _Bhagavad Gita_, chapter iv.
> Says the Avatâra:
> 
>     Many births of mine have passed, as also of yours, O Arjuna! All
>     those I know, but you do not know yours, O harasser of your
>     enemies.
> 
>     Although I am unborn, with exhaustless Âtmâ, and am the Lord of
>     all that is; yet, taking up the domination of my nature I am born
>     by the power of illusion.(649)
> 
>     Whenever, O son of Bhârata, there is decline of Dharma [the right
>     law] and the rise of Adharma [the opposite of Dharma] there I
>     manifest myself.
> 
>     For the salvation of the good and the destruction of wickedness,
>     for the establishment of the law, _I am born_ in every yuga.
> 
>     Whoever comprehends truly my divine birth and action, he, O
>     Arjuna, having abandoned the body does not receive re‐birth; he
>     comes to me.
> 
> Thus, all the Avatâras are one and the same: the Sons of their “Father,”
> in a direct descent and line, the “Father,” or one of the seven Flames
> becoming, for the time being, the Son, and these two being one—in
> Eternity. What is the Father? Is it the absolute Cause of all?—the
> fathomless Eternal? No; most decidedly. It is Kâranâtmâ, the “Causal Soul”
> which, in its general sense, is called by the Hindus Îshvara, the Lord,
> and by Christians, “God,” the One and Only. From the standpoint of unity
> it is so; but then the lowest of the Elementals could equally be viewed in
> such case as the “One and Only.” Each human being has, moreover, his own
> divine Spirit or personal God. That divine Entity or Flame from which
> Buddhi emanates stands in the same relation to man, though on a lower
> plane, as the Dhyâni‐Buddha to his human Buddha. Hence monotheism and
> polytheism are not irreconcilable; they exist in Nature.
> 
> Truly, “for the salvation of the good and the destruction of wickedness,”
> the personalities known as Gautama, Shankara, Jesus and a few others were
> born each in his age, as declared—“I am born in every Yuga”—and they were
> all born through the same Power.
> 
> There is a great mystery in such incarnations and they are outside and
> beyond the cycle of general re‐births. Rebirths may be divided into three
> classes: the divine incarnations called Avatâras; those of Adepts who give
> up Nirvâna for the sake of helping on humanity—the Nirmânakâyas; and the
> natural succession of rebirths for all—the common law. The Avatâra is an
> appearance, one which may be termed a special illusion within the natural
> illusion that reigns on the planes under the sway of that power, Mâyâ; the
> Adept is re‐born consciously, at his will and pleasure;(650) the units of
> the common herd unconsciously follow the great law of dual evolution.
> 
> What _is_ an Avatâra? for the term before being used ought to be well
> understood. It is a descent of the manifested Deity—whether under the
> specific name of Shiva, Vishnu, or Âdi‐Buddha—into an illusive form of
> individuality, an appearance which to men on this illusive plane is
> objective, but is not so in sober fact. That illusive form, having neither
> past nor future, because it had neither previous incarnation nor will have
> subsequent rebirths, has naught to do with Karma, which has therefore no
> hold on it.
> 
> Gautama BUDDHA was born an Avatâra in one sense. But this, in view of
> unavoidable objections on dogmatic grounds, necessitates explanation.
> There is a great difference between an Avatâra and a Jîvanmukta: one, as
> already stated, is an illusive appearance, Karma‐less, and having never
> before incarnated; and the other, the Jîvanmukta, is one who obtains
> Nirvâna by his individual merits. To this expression again an
> uncompromising, philosophical Vedântin would object. He might say that as
> the condition of the Avatâra and the Jîvanmukta are one and the same
> state, no amount of personal merit, in howsoever many incarnations, can
> lead its possessor to Nirvâna. Nirvâna, he would say, is actionless; how
> can, then, any action lead to it? It is neither a result nor a cause, but
> an ever‐present, eternal _Is_, as Nâgasena defined it. Hence it can have
> no relation to, or concern with, action, merit, or demerit, since these
> are subject to Karma. All this is very true, but still to our mind there
> is an important difference between the two. An Avatâra _is_; a Jîvanmukta
> _becomes_ one. If the state of the two is identical, not so are the causes
> which lead to it. An Avatâra is a descent of a God into an illusive form;
> a Jîvanmukta, who may have passed through numberless incarnations and may
> have accumulated merit in them, certainly does not become a Nirvânî
> because of that merit, but only because of the Karma generated by it,
> which leads and guides him in the direction of the Guru who will initiate
> him into the mystery of Nirvâna and who alone can help him to reach this
> abode.
> 
> The Shâstras say that from our works alone we obtain Moksha, and if we
> take no pains there will be no gain and we shall be neither assisted nor
> benefited by Deity [the Mahâ‐Guru]. Therefore it is maintained that
> Gautama, though an Avatâra in one sense, is a true human Jîvanmukta, owing
> his position to his personal merit, and thus more than an Avatâra. It was
> his personal merit that enabled him to achieve Nirvâna.
> 
> Of the voluntary and conscious incarnations of Adepts there are two
> types—those of Nirmânakâyas, and those undertaken by the probationary
> chelâs who are on their trial.
> 
> The greatest, as the most puzzling mystery of the first type lies in the
> fact, that such re‐birth in a human body of the personal Ego of some
> particular Adept—when it has been dwelling in the Mâyâvi or the Kâma Rûpa,
> and remaining in the Kâma Loka—may happen even when his “Higher
> Principles” are in the state of Nirvâna.(651) Let it be understood that
> the above expressions are used for popular purposes, and therefore that
> what is written does not deal with this deep and mysterious question from
> the _highest_ plane, that of absolute spirituality, nor again from the
> highest philosophical point of view, comprehensible but to the very few.
> It must not be supposed that anything can go into Nirvâna which is not
> eternally there; but human intellect in conceiving the Absolute must put
> It as the highest term in an indefinite series. If this be borne in mind a
> great deal of misconception will be avoided. The content of this spiritual
> evolution is the material on various planes with which the Nirvânî was in
> contact prior to his attainment of Nirvâna. The plane on which this is
> true, being in the series of illusive planes, is undoubtedly not the
> highest. Those who search for that must go to the right source of study,
> the teachings of the _Upanishads_, and must go in the right spirit. Here
> we attempt only to indicate the direction in which the search is to be
> made, and in showing a few of the mysterious Occult possibilities we do
> not bring our readers actually to the goal. The ultimate truth can be
> communicated only from Guru to initiated pupil.
> 
> Having said so much, the statement still will and must appear
> incomprehensible, if not absurd, to many. Firstly, to all those who are
> unfamiliar with the doctrine of the manifold nature and various aspects of
> the human Monad; and secondly to those who view the septenary division of
> the human entity from a too materialistic standpoint. Yet the intuitional
> Occultist, who has studied thoroughly the mysteries of Nirvâna—who knows
> it to be identical with Parabrahman, and hence unchangeable, eternal and
> no Thing but the Absolute All—will seize the possibility of the fact. They
> know that while a Dharmakâya—a Nirvânî “without remains,” as our
> Orientalists have translated it, being absorbed into that Nothingness,
> which is the one real, because Absolute, Consciousness—cannot be said to
> return to incarnation on Earth, the Nirvânî being no longer a he, a she,
> or even an it, the Nirmânakâya—or he who has obtained Nirvâna “with
> remains,” _i.e._, who is clothed in a subtle body, which makes him
> impervious to all outward impressions and to every mental feeling, and in
> whom the notion of his Ego has not entirely ceased—can do so. Again, every
> Eastern Occultist is aware of the fact that there are two kinds of
> Nirmânakâyas—the natural, and the assumed; that the former is the name or
> epithet given to the condition of a high ascetic, or Initiate, who has
> reached a stage of bliss second only to Nirvâna; while the latter means
> the self‐sacrifice of one who voluntarily gives up the absolute Nirvâna,
> in order to help humanity and be still doing it good, or, in other words,
> to save his fellow‐creatures by guiding them. It may be objected that the
> Dharmakâya, being a Nirvânî or Jîvanmukta, can have no “remains” left
> behind him after death, for having attained that state from which no
> further incarnations are possible, there is no need for him of a subtle
> body, or of the individual Ego that reincarnates from one birth to
> another, and that therefore the latter disappears of logical necessity; to
> this it is answered: it is so for all exoteric purposes and as a general
> law. But the case with which we are dealing is an exceptional one, and its
> realization lies within the Occult powers of the high Initiate, who,
> before entering into the state of Nirvâna, can cause his “remains”
> (sometimes, though not very well, called his Mâyâvi Rûpa), to remain
> behind,(652) whether he is to become a Nirvânî, or to find himself in a
> lower state of bliss.
> 
> Next, there are cases—rare, yet more frequent than one would be disposed
> to expect—which are the voluntary and conscious reincarnations of
> Adepts(653) on their trial. Every man has an Inner, a “Higher Self,” and
> also an Astral Body. But few are those who, outside the higher degrees of
> Adeptship, can guide the latter, or any of the principles that animate it,
> when once death has closed their short terrestrial life. Yet such
> guidance, or their transference from the dead to a living body, is not
> only possible, but is of frequent occurrence, according to Occult and
> Kabalistic teachings. The degrees of such power of course vary greatly. To
> mention but three: the lowest of these degrees would allow an Adept, who
> has been greatly trammelled during life in his study and in the use of his
> powers, to choose after death another body in which he could go on with
> his interrupted studies, though ordinarily he would lose in it every
> remembrance of his previous incarnation. The next degree permits him, in
> addition to this, to transfer the memory of his past life to his new body;
> while the highest has hardly any limits in the exercise of that wonderful
> faculty.
> 
> As an instance of an Adept who enjoyed the first mentioned power some
> mediæval Kabalists cite a well‐known personage of the fifteenth
> century—Cardinal de Cusa; Karma, due to his wonderful devotion to Esoteric
> study and the _Kabalah_, led the suffering Adept to seek intellectual
> recuperation and rest from ecclesiastical tyranny in the body of
> Copernicus. _Se non e vero e ben trovato_; and the perusal of the lives of
> the two men might easily lead a believer in such powers to a ready
> acceptance of the alleged fact. The reader having at his command the means
> to do so is asked to turn to the formidable folio in Latin of the
> fifteenth century, called _De Docta Ignorantia_, written by the Cardinal
> de Cusa, in which all the theories and hypotheses—all the ideas—of
> Copernicus are found as the key‐notes to the discoveries of the great
> astronomer.(654) Who was this extraordinarily learned Cardinal? The son of
> a poor boatman, owing all his career, his Cardinal’s hat, and the
> reverential awe rather than friendship of the Popes Eugenius IV., Nicholas
> V., and Pius II., to the extraordinary learning which seemed innate in
> him, since he had studied nowhere till comparatively late in life. De Cusa
> died in 1473; moreover, his best works were written before he was forced
> to enter orders—to escape persecution. Nor did the Adept escape it.
> 
> In the voluminous work of the Cardinal above‐quoted is found a very
> suggestive sentence, the authorship of which has been variously attributed
> to Pascal, to Cusa himself, and to the _Zohar_, and which belongs by right
> to the Books of Hermes:
> 
>     The world is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and
>     whose circumference is nowhere.
> 
> This is changed by some into: “The centre being nowhere, and the
> circumference everywhere,” a rather heretical idea for a Cardinal, though
> perfectly orthodox from a Kabalistic standpoint.
> 
> The theory of rebirth must be set forth by Occultists, and then applied to
> special cases. The right comprehension of this psychic fact is based upon
> a correct view of that group of celestial Beings who are universally
> called the seven Primeval Gods or Angels—our Dhyân Chohans—the “Seven
> Primeval Rays” or Powers, adopted later on by the Christian Religion as
> the “Seven Angels of the Presence.” Arûpa, formless, at the upper rung of
> the ladder of Being, materializing more and more as they descend in the
> scale of objectivity and form, ending in the grossest and most imperfect
> of the Hierarchy, man—it is the former purely spiritual group that is
> pointed out to us, in our Occult teaching, as the nursery and fountain‐
> head of human beings. Therein germinates that consciousness which is the
> earliest manifestation from causal Consciousness—the Alpha and the Omega
> of divine being and life for ever. And as it proceeds downward through
> every phase of existence descending through man, through animal and plant,
> it ends its descent only in the mineral. It is represented by the double
> triangle—the most mysterious and the most suggestive of all mystic signs,
> for it is a double glyph, embracing spiritual and physical consciousness
> and life, the former triangle running upwards, and the lower downwards,
> both interlaced, and showing the various planes of the twice‐seven modes
> of consciousness, the fourteen spheres of existence, the Lokas of the
> Brâhmans.
> 
> The reader may now be able to obtain a clearer comprehension of the whole
> thing. He will also see what is meant by the “Watchers,” there being one
> placed as the Guardian or Regent over each of the seven divisions or
> regions of the earth, according to old traditions, as there is one to
> watch over and guide every one of the fourteen worlds or Lokas.(655) But
> it is not with any of these that we are at present concerned, but with the
> “Seven Breaths,” so‐called, that furnish man with his immortal Monad in
> his cyclic pilgrimage.
> 
> The Commentary on the _Book of Dzyan_ says:
> 
> _Descending on his region first as Lord of Glory, the Flame (or Breath),
> having called into conscious being the highest of the Emanations of that
> special region, ascends from it again to Its primeval seat, whence It
> watches __ over and guides Its countless Beams (Monads). It chooses as Its
> Avatâras only those who had the Seven Virtues in them_(_656_)_ in their
> previous incarnation. As for the rest, It overshadows each with one of Its
> countless beams.... Yet even the __“__beam__”__ is a part of the Lord of
> Lords._(657)
> 
> The septenary principle in man—who can be regarded as dual only as
> concerns psychic manifestation on this gross earthly plane—was known to
> all antiquity, and may be found in every ancient Scripture. The Egyptians
> knew and taught it, and their division of principles is in every point a
> counterpart of the Âryan Secret Teaching. It is thus given in _Isis
> Unveiled_:
> 
>     In the Egyptian notions, as in those of all other faiths founded
>     on philosophy, man was not merely ... a union of soul and body: he
>     was a trinity when Spirit was added to it. Besides, that doctrine
>     made him consist of Kha (body), Khaba (astral form or shadow), Ka
>     (animal soul or life‐principle), Ba (the higher soul), and Akh
>     (terrestrial intelligence). They had also a sixth principle, named
>     Sah (or mummy), but the functions of this one commenced after the
>     death of the body.(658)
> 
> The seventh principle being of course the highest, uncreated Spirit was
> generically called Osiris, therefore every deceased person became
> Osirified—or an Osiris—after death.
> 
> But in addition to reiterating the old ever‐present fact of reincarnation
> and Karma—not as taught by the Spiritists, but as by the most Ancient
> Science in the world—Occultists must teach cyclic and evolutionary
> reincarnation: that kind of re‐birth, mysterious and still
> incomprehensible to many who are ignorant of the world’s history, which
> was cautiously mentioned in _Isis Unveiled_. A general re‐birth for every
> individual with interlude of Kâma Loka and Devachan, and a cyclic
> conscious reincarnation with a grand and divine object for the few. Those
> great characters who tower like giants in the history of mankind like
> Siddârtha BUDDHA and Jesus in the realm of the spiritual, and Alexander
> the Macedonian and Napoleon the Great in the realm of physical conquests
> are but the reflected images of human types which had existed—not ten
> thousand years before, as cautiously put forward in _Isis Unveiled_, but
> for millions of consecutive years from the beginning of the Manvantara.
> For—with the exception of real Avatâras, as above explained—they are the
> same unbroken Rays (Monads), each respectively of its own special Parent‐
> Flame—called Devas, Dhyân Chohans, or Dhyâni‐Buddhas, or again, Planetary
> Angels, etc.—shining in æonic eternity as their prototypes. It is in their
> image that some men are born, and when some specific humanitarian object
> is in view, the latter are hypostatically animated by their divine
> prototypes reproduced again and again by the mysterious Powers that
> control and guide the destinies of our world.
> 
> No more could be said at the time when _Isis Unveiled_ was written; hence
> the statement was limited to the single remark that
> 
>     There is no prominent character in all the annals of sacred or
>     profane history whose prototype we cannot find in the half
>     fictitious and half real traditions of bygone religions and
>     mythologies. As the star, glimmering at an immeasurable distance
>     above our heads, in the boundless immensity of the sky, reflects
>     itself in the smooth waters of a lake, so does the imagery of men
>     of the antediluvian ages reflect itself in the periods we can
>     embrace in a historical retrospect.
> 
> But now that so many publications have been brought out, stating much of
> the doctrine, and several of them giving many an erroneous view, this
> vague allusion may be amplified and explained. Not only does this
> statement apply to prominent characters in history in general, but also to
> men of genius, to every remarkable man of the age, who soars beyond the
> common herd with some abnormally developed special capacity in him,
> leading to the progress and good of mankind. Each is a reincarnation of an
> individuality that has gone before him with capacities in the same line,
> bringing thus as a dowry to his new form that strong and easily re‐
> awakened capacity or quality which had been fully developed in him in his
> preceding birth. Very often they are ordinary mortals, the Egos of natural
> men in the course of their cyclic development.
> 
> But it is with “special cases” that we are now concerned. Let us suppose
> that a person during his cycle of incarnations is thus selected for
> special purposes—the vessel being sufficiently clean—by his personal God,
> the Fountain‐head (on the plane of the manifested) of his Monad, who thus
> becomes his in‐dweller. That God, his own prototype or “Father in Heaven,”
> is, in one sense, not only the image in which he, the spiritual man, is
> made, but in the case we are considering, it is that spiritual, individual
> Ego himself. This is a case of permanent, life‐long Theophania. Let us
> bear in mind that this is neither Avatârism, as it is understood in
> Brâhmanical Philosophy, nor is the man thus selected a Jîvanmukta or
> Nirvânî, but that it is a wholly exceptional case in the realm of
> Mysticism. The man may or may not have been an Adept in his previous
> lives; he is so far, and simply, an extremely pure and spiritual
> individual—or one who was all that in his preceding birth, if the vessel
> thus selected is that of a newly‐born infant. In this case, after the
> physical translation of such a saint or Bodhisattva, his astral principles
> cannot be subjected to a natural dissolution like those of any common
> mortal. They remain in our sphere and within human attraction and reach;
> and thus it is that not only a Buddha, a Shankarâchârya, or a Jesus can be
> said to animate several persons at one and the same time, but even the
> principles of a high Adept may be animating the outward tabernacles of
> common mortals.
> 
> A certain Ray (principle) from Sanat Kumâra spiritualized (animated)
> Pradyumna, the son of Krishna during the great Mahâbhârata period, while
> at the same time, he, Sanat Kumâra, gave spiritual instruction to King
> Dhritarâshtra. Moreover, it is to be remembered that Sanat‐Kumâra is “an
> eternal youth of sixteen,” dwelling in Jana Loka, his own sphere or
> spiritual state.
> 
> Even in ordinary _mediumistic_ life, so‐called, it is pretty well
> ascertained that while the body is acting—even though only mechanically—or
> resting in one place, its astral double may be appearing and acting
> independently in another, and very often distant place. This is quite a
> common occurrence in mystic life and history, and if this be so with
> ecstatics, Seers and Mystics of every description, why cannot the same
> thing happen on a higher and more spiritually developed plane of
> existence? Admit the possibility on the lower psychic plane, then why not
> on a higher plane? In the cases of higher Adeptship, when the body is
> entirely at the command of the Inner Man, when the Spiritual Ego is
> completely reünited with its seventh principle even during the life‐time
> of the personality, and the Astral Man or personal Ego has become so
> purified that he has gradually assimilated all the qualities and
> attributes of the middle nature (Buddhi and Manas in their terrestrial
> aspect) that personal Ego substitutes itself, so to say, for the spiritual
> Higher Self, and is thenceforth capable of living an independent life on
> earth; when corporeal death takes place the following mysterious event
> often happens. As a Dharmakâya, a Nirvânî “without remains” entirely free
> from terrestrial admixture, the Spiritual Ego cannot return to reincarnate
> on earth. But in such cases, it is affirmed, the personal Ego of even a
> Dharmakâya can remain in our sphere as a whole, and return to incarnation
> on earth if need be. For now it can no longer be subject, like the astral
> remains of any ordinary man, to gradual dissolution in the Kâma Loka (the
> _limbus_ or purgatory of the Roman Catholic, and the “Summer‐land” of the
> Spiritualist); it cannot die a second death, as such disintegration is
> called by Proclus.(659) It has become too holy and pure, no longer by
> reflected but its own natural light and spirituality, either to sleep in
> the unconscious slumber of a lower Nirvânic state, or to be dissolved like
> any ordinary astral shell and disappear in its entirety.
> 
> But in that condition known as the Nirmânakâya [the Nirvânî “with
> remains,”] he can still help humanity.
> 
> “Let me suffer and bear the sins of all [be reincarnated unto new misery]
> but let the world be saved!” was said by Gautama BUDDHA: an exclamation
> the real meaning of which is little understood now by his followers. “If I
> will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”(660) asks the
> astral Jesus of Peter. “Till I come” means “till I am reincarnated again”
> in a physical body. Yet the Christ of the old crucified body could truly
> say: “I am with my Father and one with Him,” which did not prevent the
> astral from taking a form again nor John from tarrying indeed till his
> Master had come; nor hinder John from failing to recognize him when he did
> come, or from then opposing him. But in the Church that remark generated
> the absurd idea of the millennium or chiliasm, in its physical sense.
> 
> Since then the “Man of Sorrows” has returned perchance, more than once,
> unknown to, and undiscovered by, his blind followers. Since then also,
> this grand “Son of God” has been incessantly and most cruelly crucified
> daily and hourly by the Churches founded in his name. But the Apostles,
> only half‐initiated, failed to tarry for their Master, and not recognizing
> him, spurned him every time he returned.(661)
> 
> SECTION XLII. THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES.
> 
> The “Mystery of Buddha” is that of several other Adepts—perhaps of many.
> The whole trouble is to understand correctly that other mystery: that of
> the real fact, so abstruse and transcendental at first sight, about the
> “Seven Principles” in man, the reflections in man of the seven powers in
> Nature, physically, and of the seven Hierarchies of Being, intellectually
> and spiritually. Whether a man—material, ethereal, and spiritual—is for
> the clearer comprehension of his (broadly‐speaking) triple nature, divided
> into groups according to one or another system, the foundation and the
> apex of that division will be always the same. There being only three
> Upâdhis (bases) in man, any number of Koshas (sheaths) and their aspects
> may be built on these without destroying the harmony of the whole. Thus,
> while the Esoteric System accepts the septenary division, the Vedântic
> classification gives five Koshas, and the Târaka Râja Yoga simplifies them
> into four—the three Upâdhis synthesized by the highest principle, Âtmâ.
> 
> That which has just been stated will, of course, suggest the question:
> “How can a spiritual (or semi‐spiritual) personality lead a triple or even
> a dual life, shifting respective ‘Higher Selves’ _ad libitum_, and be
> still the one eternal Monad in the infinity of a Manvantara?” The answer
> to this is easy for the true Occultist, while for the uninitiated profane
> it must appear absurd. The “Seven Principles” are, of course, the
> manifestation of one indivisible Spirit, but only at the end of the
> Manvantara, and when they come to be re‐united on the plane of the One
> Reality does the unity appear; during the “Pilgrim’s” journey the
> reflections of that indivisible One Flame, the aspects of the one eternal
> Spirit, have each the power of action on one of the manifested planes of
> existence—the gradual differentiations from the one unmanifested plane—on
> that plane namely to which it properly belongs. Our earth affording every
> Mâyâvic condition, it follows that the purified Egotistical Principle, the
> astral and personal Self of an Adept, though forming in reality one
> integral whole with its Highest Self (Âtmâ and Buddhi) may, nevertheless,
> for purposes of universal mercy and benevolence, so separate itself from
> its divine Monad as to lead on this plane of illusion and temporary being
> a distinct independent conscious life of its own under a borrowed illusive
> shape, thus serving at one and the same time a double purpose: the
> exhaustion of its own individual Karma, and the saving of millions of
> human beings less favoured than itself from the effects of mental
> blindness. If asked: “When the change described as the passage of a Buddha
> or a Jîvanmukta into Nirvâna takes place, where does the original
> consciousness which animated the body continue to reside—in the Nirvânî or
> in the subsequent reincarnations of the latter’s ‘remains’ (the
> Nirmânakâya)?” the answer is that _imprisoned_ consciousness may be a
> “certain knowledge from observation and experience,” as Gibbon puts it,
> but _disembodied_ consciousness is not an effect, but a cause. It is a
> part of the whole, or rather a Ray on the graduated scale of its
> manifested activity, of the one all‐pervading, limitless Flame, the
> reflections of which alone can differentiate; and, as such, consciousness
> is ubiquitous, and can be neither localized nor centred on or in any
> particular subject, nor can it be limited. Its effects alone pertain to
> the region of matter, for thought is an energy that affects matter in
> various ways, but consciousness _per se_, as understood and explained by
> Occult philosophy, is the highest quality of the sentient spiritual
> principle in us, the Divine Soul (or Buddhi) and our Higher Ego, and does
> not belong to the plane of materiality. After the death of the physical
> man, if he be an Initiate, it becomes transformed from a human quality
> into the independent principle itself; the conscious Ego becoming
> Consciousness _per se_ without any Ego, in the sense that the latter can
> no longer be limited or conditioned by the senses, or even by space or
> time. Therefore it is capable, without separating itself from or
> abandoning its possessor, Buddhi, of reflecting itself at the same time in
> its astral man that was, without being under any necessity for localizing
> itself. This is shown at a far lower stage in our dreams. For if
> consciousness can display activity during our visions, and while the body
> and its material brain are fast asleep—and if even during those visions it
> is all but ubiquitous—how much greater must be its power when entirely
> free from, and having no more connection with, our physical brain.
> 
> SECTION XLIII. THE MYSTERY OF BUDDHA.
> 
> Now the mystery of Buddha lies in this: Gautama, an incarnation of pure
> Wisdom, had yet to learn in His human body and to be initiated into the
> world’s secrets like any other mortal, until the day when He emerged from
> His secret recess in the Himâlayas and preached for the first time in the
> grove of Benares. The same with Jesus: from the age of twelve to thirty
> years, when He is found preaching the Sermon on the Mount, nothing is
> positively said or known of Him. Gautama had sworn inviolable secrecy as
> to the Esoteric Doctrines imparted to Him. In His immense pity for the
> ignorance—and as its consequence the sufferings—of mankind, desirous
> though He was to keep inviolate His sacred vows, He failed to keep within
> the prescribed limits. While constructing His Esoteric Philosophy (the
> “Eye‐Doctrine”) on the foundations of eternal Truth, He failed to conceal
> certain dogmas, and trespassing beyond the lawful lines, caused those
> dogmas to be misunderstood. In His anxiety to make away with the false
> Gods, He revealed in the “Seven Paths to Nirvâna” some of the mysteries of
> the Seven Lights of the Arûpa (formless) World. A little of the truth is
> often worse than no truth at all.
> 
>     Truth and fiction are like oil and water: they will never mix.
> 
> His new doctrine, which represented the outward dead body of the Esoteric
> Teaching without its vivifying Soul, had disastrous effects: it was never
> correctly understood, and the doctrine itself was rejected by the Southern
> Buddhists. Immense philanthropy, a boundless love and charity for all
> creatures, were at the bottom of His unintentional mistake; but Karma
> little heeds intentions, whether good or bad, if they remain fruitless. If
> the “Good Law” as preached resulted in the most sublime code of ethics and
> the unparalleled philosophy of things external in the visible Kosmos, it
> biassed and misguided immature minds into believing there was nothing more
> under the outward mantle of the system, and its dead‐letter only was
> accepted. Moreover, the new teaching unsettled many great minds which had
> previously followed the orthodox Brâhmanical lead.
> 
> Thus, fifty odd years after his death “the great Teacher”(662) having
> refused full Dharmakâya and Nirvâna, was pleased, for purposes of Karma
> and philanthropy, to be reborn. For Him death had been no death, but as
> expressed in the “Elixir of Life,”(663) He changed
> 
>     A sudden plunge into darkness to a transition into a brighter
>     light.
> 
> The shock of death was broken, and like many other Adepts, He threw off
> the mortal coil and left it to be burnt, and its ashes to serve as relics,
> and began interplanetary life, clothed in His subtle body. He was reborn
> as Shankara, the greatest Vedântic teacher of India, whose
> philosophy—based as it is entirely on the fundamental axioms of the
> eternal Revelation, the Shruti, or the primitive Wisdom‐Religion, as
> Buddha from a different point of view had before based His—finds itself in
> the middle‐ground between the too exuberantly veiled metaphysics of the
> orthodox Brâhmans and those of Gautama, which, stripped in their exoteric
> garb of every soul‐vivifying hope, transcendental aspiration and symbol,
> appear in their cold wisdom like crystalline icicles, the skeletons of the
> primeval truths of Esoteric Philosophy.
> 
> Was Shankarâchârya Gautama the Buddha, then, under a new personal form? It
> may perhaps only puzzle the reader the more if he be told that there was
> the “astral” Gautama inside the outward Shankara, whose higher principle,
> or Âtman, was, nevertheless, his own divine prototype—the “Son of Light,”
> indeed—the heavenly, mind‐born son of Aditi.
> 
> This fact is again based on that mysterious transference of the divine ex‐
> personality merged in the impersonal Individuality—now in its full
> trinitarian form of the Monad as Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas—to a new body, whether
> visible or subjective. In the first case it is a Manushya‐Buddha; in the
> second it is a Nirmânakâya. The Buddha is in Nirvâna, it is said, though
> this once mortal vehicle—the subtle body—of Gautama is still present among
> the Initiates; nor will it leave the realm of conscious Being so long as
> suffering mankind needs its divine help—not to the end of this Root Race,
> at any rate. From time to time He, the “astral” Gautama, associates
> Himself, in some most mysterious—to us quite incomprehensible—manner, with
> Avatâras and great saints, and works through them. And several such are
> named.
> 
> Thus it is averred that Gautama Buddha was reincarnated in
> Shankarâchârya—that, as is said in _Esoteric Buddhism_:
> 
>     Shankarâchârya simply _was_ Buddha in all respects in a new
>     body.(664)
> 
> While the expression in its mystic sense is true, the way of putting it
> may be misleading until explained. Shankara was a Buddha, most assuredly,
> but he never was a reincarnation of the Buddha, though Gautama’s “Astral”
> Ego—or rather his Bodhisattva—may have been associated in some mysterious
> way with Shankarâchârya. Yes, it was perhaps the Ego, Gautama, under a new
> and better adapted casket—that of a Brâhman of Southern India. But the
> Âtman, the Higher Self that overshadowed both, was distinct from the
> Higher Self of the translated Buddha, which was now in Its own sphere in
> Kosmos.
> 
> Shankara was an Avatâra in the full sense of the term. According to
> Sayanâchârya, the great commentator on the _Vedas_, he is to be held as an
> Avatâra, or direct incarnation of Shiva—the Logos, the Seventh Principle
> in Nature—Himself. In the Secret Doctrine Shri Shankarâchârya is regarded
> as the abode—for the thirty‐two years of his mortal life—of a Flame, the
> highest of the manifested Spiritual Beings, one of the Primordial Seven
> Rays.
> 
> And now what is meant by a “Bodhisattva”? Buddhists of the Mahâyâna mystic
> system teach that each BUDDHA manifests Himself (hypostatically or
> otherwise) simultaneously in three worlds of Being, namely, in the world
> of Kâma (concupiscence or desire—the sensuous universe or our earth) in
> the shape of a man; in the world of Rûpa (form, yet supersensuous) as a
> Bodhisattva; and in the highest Spiritual World (that of purely
> incorporeal existences) as a Dhyâni‐Buddha. The latter prevails eternally
> in space and time, _i.e._, from one Mahâ‐Kalpa to the other—the synthetic
> culmination of the three being Âdi‐Buddha,(665) the Wisdom‐Principle,
> which is Absolute, and therefore out of space and time. Their inter‐
> relation is the following: The Dhyâni‐Buddha, when the world needs a human
> Buddha, “creates” through the power of Dhyâna (meditation, omnipotent
> devotion), a mind‐born son—a Bodhisattva—whose mission it is after the
> physical death of his human, or Manushya‐Buddha, to continue his work on
> earth till the appearance of the subsequent Buddha. The Esoteric meaning
> of this teaching is clear. In the case of a simple mortal, the principles
> in him are only the more or less bright reflections of the seven cosmic,
> and the seven celestial Principles, the Hierarchy of supersensual Beings.
> In the case of a Buddha, they are almost the principles _in esse_
> themselves. The Bodhisattva replaces in him the Kârana Sharira, the Ego
> principle, and the rest correspondingly; and it is in this way that
> Esoteric Philosophy explains the meaning of the sentence that “by virtue
> of Dhyâna [or abstract meditation] the Dhyâni‐Buddha [the Buddha’s Spirit
> or Monad] creates a Bodhisattva,” or the astrally clothed Ego within the
> Manushya‐Buddha. Thus, while the Buddha merges back into Nirvâna whence it
> proceeded, the Bodhisattva remains behind to continue the Buddha’s work
> upon earth. It is then this Bodhisattva that may have afforded the lower
> principles in the apparitional body of Shankarâchârya, the Avatâra.
> 
> Now to say that Buddha, after having reached Nirvâna, returned thence to
> reïncarnate in a new body, would be uttering a heresy from the
> Brâhmanical, as well as from the Buddhistic standpoint. Even in the
> Mahâyâna exoteric School in the teaching as to the three “Buddhic”
> bodies,(666) it is said of the Dharmakâya—the ideal formless Being—that
> once it is taken, the Buddha in it abandons the world of sensuous
> perceptions for ever, and has not, nor can he have, any more connection
> with it. To say, as the Esoteric or Mystic School teaches, that though
> Buddha is in Nirvâna he has left behind him the Nirmânakâya (the
> Bodhisattva) to work after him, is quite orthodox and in accordance with
> both the Esoteric Mahâyâna and the Prasanga Mâdhyâmika Schools, the latter
> an anti‐esoteric and most rationalistic system. For in the _Kâla Chakra_
> Commentary it is shown that there is: (1) Âdi‐Buddha, eternal and
> conditionless; then (2) come Sambhogakâya‐Buddhas, or Dhyâni‐Buddhas,
> existing from (æonic) eternity and never disappearing—the _Causal_ Buddhas
> so to say; and (3) the Manushya‐Bodhisattvas. The relation between them is
> determined by the definition given. Âdi‐Buddha is Vajradhara, and the
> Dhyâni‐Buddhas are Vajrasattva; yet though these two are different Beings
> on their respective planes, They are identical in fact, one acting through
> the other, as a Dhyâni through a human Buddha. One is “Endless
> Intelligence;” the other only “Supreme Intelligence.” It is said of Phra
> Bodhisattva—who was subsequently on earth Buddha Gautama:
> 
>     Having fulfilled all the conditions for the immediate attainment
>     of perfect Buddhaship, the Holy One preferred, from unlimited
>     charity towards living beings, _once more_ to reincarnate for the
>     benefit of man.
> 
> The Nirvâna of the Buddhists is only the threshold of Paranirvâna,
> according to the Esoteric Teaching: while with the Brâhmans, it is the
> _summum bonum_, that final state from which there is no more return—not
> till the next Mahâ‐Kalpa, at all events. And even this last view will be
> opposed by some too orthodox and dogmatic Philosophers who will not accept
> the Esoteric Doctrine. With them Nirvâna is absolute nothingness, in which
> there is nothing and no one: only an unconditioned All. To understand the
> full characteristics of that Abstract Principle one must sense it
> intuitionally and comprehend fully the “one permanent condition in the
> Universe,” which the Hindûs define so truly as
> 
>     The state of perfect unconsciousness—bare Chidâkâsham (field of
>     consciousness) in fact,
> 
> however paradoxical it may seem to the profane reader.(667)
> 
> Shankarâchârya was reputed to be an Avatâra, an assertion the writer
> implicitly believes in, but which other people are, of course, at liberty
> to reject. And as such he took the body of a southern Indian, newly‐born
> Brâhman baby; that body, for reasons as important as they are mysterious
> to us, is said to have been animated by Gautama’s astral personal remains.
> This divine Non‐Ego chose as its own Upâdhi (physical basis), the
> ethereal, human Ego of a great Sage in this world of forms, as the fittest
> vehicle for Spirit to descend into.
> 
> Said Shankarâchârya:
> 
>     Parabrahman is Kartâ [Purusha], as there is no other
>     Adhishtâthâ,(668) and Parabrahman is Prakriti, there being no
>     other substance.(669)
> 
> Now what is true of the Macrocosmical is also true of the Microcosmical
> plane. It is therefore nearer the truth to say—when once we accept such a
> possibility—that the “astral” Gautama, or the Nirmânakâya, was the Upâdhi
> of Shankarâchârya’s spirit, rather than that the latter was a
> reincarnation of the former.
> 
> When a Shankarâchârya has to be born, naturally every one of the
> principles in the manifested mortal man must be the purest and finest that
> exist on earth. Consequently those principles that were once attached to
> Gautama, who was the direct great predecessor of Shankara, were naturally
> attracted to him, the economy of Nature forbidding the re‐evolution of
> similar principles from the crude state. But it must be remembered that
> the higher ethereal principles are not, like the lower more material ones,
> visible sometimes to man (as astral bodies), and they have to be regarded
> in the light of separate or independent Powers or Gods, rather than as
> material objects. Hence the right way of representing the truth would be
> to say that the various principles, the Bodhisattva, of Gautama Buddha,
> which did not go to Nirvâna, re‐united to form the middle principles of
> Shankarâchârya, the earthly Entity.(670)
> 
> It is absolutely necessary to study the doctrine of the Buddhas
> esoterically and understand the subtle differences between the various
> planes of existence to be able to comprehend correctly the above. Put more
> clearly, Gautama, the human Buddha, who had, exoterically, Amitâbha for
> his Bodhisattva and Avalokiteshvara for his Dhyâni‐Buddha—the triad
> emanating directly from Âdi‐Buddha—assimilated these by his “Dhyâna”
> (meditation) and thus become a Buddha (“enlightened”). In another manner
> this is the case with all men; everyone of us has his Bodhisattva—the
> middle principle, if we hold for a moment to the trinitarian division of
> the septenary group—and his Dhyâni‐Buddha, or Chohan, the “Father of the
> Son.” Our connecting link with the higher Hierarchy of Celestial Beings
> lies here in a nutshell, only we are too sinful to assimilate them.
> 
> Six centuries after the translation of the human Buddha (Gautama) another
> Reformer, as noble and as loving, though less favoured by opportunity,
> arose in another part of the world, among another and a less spiritual
> race. There is a great similarity between the subsequent opinions of the
> world about the two Saviours, the Eastern and the Western. While millions
> became converted to the doctrines of the two Masters, the enemies of
> both—sectarian opponents, the most dangerous of all—tore both to shreds by
> insinuating maliciously‐distorted statements based on Occult truths, and
> therefore doubly dangerous. While of Buddha it is said by the Brâhmans
> that He was truly an Avatâra of Vishnu, but that He had come to tempt the
> Brâhmans from their faith, and was therefore the evil aspect of the God;
> of Jesus the Bardesanian Gnostics and others asserted that He was Nebu,
> the false Messiah, the destroyer of the old orthodox religion. “He is the
> founder of a new sect of Nazars,” said other sectarians. In Hebrew the
> word “Naba” means “to speak by inspiration,” (נבא, and נבו is Nebo, the
> God of wisdom). But Nebo is also Mercury, who is Buddha in the Hindu
> monogram of planets. And this is shown by the fact that the Talmudists
> hold that Jesus was inspired by the Genius (or Regent) of Mercury
> confounded by Sir William Jones with Gautama Buddha. There are many other
> strange points of similarity between Gautama and Jesus, which cannot be
> noticed here.(671)
> 
> If both the Initiates, aware of the danger of furnishing the uncultured
> masses with the powers acquired by ultimate knowledge, left the innermost
> corner of the sanctuary in profound darkness, who, acquainted with human
> nature, can blame either of them for this? Yet although Gautama, actuated
> by prudence, left the Esoteric and most dangerous portions of the Secret
> Knowledge untold, and lived to the ripe old age of eighty—the Esoteric
> Doctrine says one hundred—years, dying with the certainty of having taught
> its essential truths, and of having sown the seeds for the conversion of
> one‐third of the world, He yet perhaps revealed more than was strictly
> good for posterity. But Jesus, who had promised His disciples the
> knowledge which confers upon man the power of producing “miracles” far
> greater than He had ever produced Himself, died, leaving but a few
> faithful disciples—men only half‐way to knowledge. They had therefore to
> struggle with a world to which they could impart only what they but half‐
> knew themselves, and—no more. In later ages the exoteric followers of both
> mangled the truths given out, often out of recognition. With regard to the
> adherents of the Western Master, the proof of this lies in the very fact
> that none of them can now produce the promised “miracles.” They have to
> choose: either it is they who have blundered, or it is their Master who
> must stand arraigned for an empty promise, an uncalled‐for boast.(672) Why
> such a difference in the destiny of the two? For the Occultist this enigma
> of the unequal favour of Karma or Providence is unriddled by the Secret
> Doctrine.
> 
> It is “not lawful” to speak of such things publicly, as St. Paul tells us.
> One more explanation only may be given in reference to this subject. It
> was said a few pages back that an Adept who thus sacrifices himself to
> live, giving up full Nirvâna, though he can never lose the knowledge
> acquired by him in previous existences, yet can never rise higher in such
> borrowed bodies. Why? Because he becomes simply the vehicle of a “Son of
> Light” from a still higher sphere, Who being Arûpa, has no personal astral
> body of His own fit for this world. Such “Sons of Light,” or Dhyâni‐
> Buddhas, are the Dharmakâyas of preceding Manvantaras, who have closed
> their cycles of incarnations in the ordinary sense and who, being thus
> Karmaless, have long ago dropped their individual Rûpas, and have become
> identified with the first Principle. Hence the necessity of a sacrificial
> Nirmânakâya, ready to suffer for the misdeeds or mistakes of the new body
> in its earth‐pilgrimage, without any future reward on the plane of
> progression and rebirth, since there are no rebirths for him in the
> ordinary sense. The Higher Self, or Divine Monad, is not in such a case
> attached to the lower Ego; its connection is only temporary, and in most
> cases it acts through decrees of Karma. This is a real, genuine sacrifice,
> the explanation of which pertains to the highest Initiation of Gñâna
> (Occult Knowledge). It is closely linked, by a direct evolution of Spirit
> and involution of Matter, with the primeval and great Sacrifice at the
> foundation of the manifested Worlds, the gradual smothering and death of
> the spiritual in the material. The seed “is not quickened except it
> die.”(673) Hence in the Purusha Sûkta of the _Rig Veda_,(674) the mother‐
> fount and source of all subsequent religions, it is stated allegorically
> that “the thousand‐headed Purusha” was slaughtered at the foundation of
> the World, that from his remains the Universe might arise. This is nothing
> more nor less than the foundation—the seed, truly—of the later many‐formed
> symbol in various religions, including Christianity, of the sacrificial
> lamb. For it is a play upon the words. “Aja” (Purusha), “the unborn,” or
> eternal Spirit, means also “lamb,” in Sanskrit. Spirit disappears—dies,
> metaphorically—the more it gets involved in matter, and hence the
> sacrifice of the “unborn,” or the “lamb.”
> 
> Why the BUDDHA chose to make this sacrifice will be plain only to those
> who, to the minute knowledge of His earthly life, add that of a thorough
> comprehension of the laws of Karma. Such occurrences, however, belong to
> the most exceptional cases.
> 
> As tradition goes, the Brâhmans had committed a heavy sin by persecuting
> Gautama BUDDHA and His teachings instead of blending and reconciling them
> with the tenets of pure Vaidic Brâhmanism, as was done later by
> Shankarâchârya. Gautama had never gone against the _Vedas_, only against
> the exoteric growth of preconceived interpretations. The Shruti—divine
> oral revelation, the outcome of which was the _Veda_—is eternal. It
> reached the ear of Gautama Siddartha as it had those of the Rishis who had
> written it down. He accepted the revelation, while rejecting the later
> overgrowth of Brâhmanical thought and fancy, and built His doctrines on
> one and the same basis of imperishable truth. As in the case of His
> Western successor, Gautama, the “Merciful,” the “Pure,” and the “Just,”
> was the first found in the Eastern Hierarchy of historical Adepts, if not
> in the world‐annals of divine mortals, who was moved by that generous
> feeling which locks the whole of mankind within one embrace, with no petty
> differences of race, birth, or caste. It was He who first enunciated that
> grand and noble principle, and He again who first put it into practice.
> For the sake of the poor and the reviled, the outcast and the hapless,
> invited by Him to the king’s festival table, He had excluded those who had
> hitherto sat alone in haughty seclusion and selfishness, believing that
> they would be defiled by the very shadow of the disinherited ones of the
> land—and these non‐spiritual Brâhmans turned against Him for that
> preference. Since then such as these have never forgiven the prince‐
> beggar, the son of a king, who, forgetting His rank and station, had flung
> widely open the doors of the forbidden sanctuary to the pariah and the man
> of low estate, thus giving precedence to personal merit over hereditary
> rank or fortune. The sin was theirs—the cause nevertheless Himself: hence
> the “Merciful and the Blessed One” could not go out entirely from this
> world of illusion and created causes without atoning for the sin of
> all—therefore of these Brâhmans also. If “man afflicted by man” found safe
> refuge with the Tathâgata, “man afflicting man” had also his share in His
> self‐sacrificing, all‐embracing and forgiving love. It is stated that He
> desired to atone for the sin of His enemies. Then only was He willing to
> become a full Dharmakâya, a Jivanmukta “without remains.”
> 
> The close of Shankarâchârya’s life brings us face to face with a fresh
> mystery. Shankarâchârya retires to a cave in the Himâlayas, permitting
> none of his disciples to follow him, and disappears therein for ever from
> the sight of the profane. Is he dead? Tradition and popular belief answer
> in the negative, and some of the local Gurus, if they do not emphatically
> corroborate, do not deny the rumour. The truth with its mysterious details
> as given in the Secret Doctrine is known but to them; it can be given out
> fully only to the direct followers of the great Dravidian Guru, and it is
> for them alone to reveal of it as much as they think fit. Still it is
> maintained that this Adept of Adepts lives to this day in his spiritual
> entity as a mysterious, unseen, yet overpowering presence among the
> Brotherhood of Shamballa, beyond, far beyond, the snowy‐capped Himâlayas.
> 
> SECTION XLIV. “REINCARNATIONS” OF BUDDHA.
> 
> Every section in the chapter on “Dezhin Shegpa”(675) (Tathâgata) in the
> Commentaries represents one year of that great Philosopher’s life, in its
> dual aspect of public and private teacher, the two being contrasted and
> commented upon. It shows the Sage reaching Buddha‐hood through a long
> course of study, meditation, and Initiations, as any other Adept would
> have to do, not one rung of the ladder up to the arduous “Path of
> Perfection” being missed. The Bodhisattva became a Buddha and a Nirvânî
> through personal effort and merit, after having had to undergo all the
> hardships of every other neophyte—not by virtue of a divine birth, as
> thought by some. It was only the reaching of Nirvâna while still living in
> the body and on this earth that was due to His having been in previous
> births high on the “Path of Dzyan” (knowledge, wisdom). Mental or
> intellectual gifts and abstract knowledge follow an Initiate in his new
> birth, but he has to acquire phenomenal powers anew, passing through all
> the successive stages. He has to acquire Rinchen‐na‐dun (“the seven
> precious gifts”)(676) one after the other. During the period of meditation
> no worldly phenomena on the physical plane must be allowed to enter into
> his mind or cross his thoughts. Zhine‐Ihagthong (Sanskrit: Vipashya,
> religious abstract meditation) will develop in him most wonderful
> faculties independently of himself. The four degrees of contemplation, or
> Sam‐tan (Sanskrit: Dhyâna), once acquired, everything becomes easy. For,
> once that man has entirely got rid of the idea of individuality, merging
> his Self in the Universal Self, becoming, so to say, the bar of steel to
> which the properties inherent in the loadstone (Âdi Buddha, or Anima
> Mundi) are imparted, powers hitherto dormant in him are awakened,
> mysteries in invisible Nature are unveiled, and becoming a Thonglam‐pa (a
> Seer) he becomes a Dhyâni‐Buddha. Every Zung (Dhâranî, a mystic word or
> mantra) of the Lokottaradharma (the highest world of causes) will be known
> to him.
> 
> Thus, after His outward death, twenty years later, Tathâgata in His
> immense love and “pitiful mercy” for erring and ignorant humanity, refused
> Paranirvâna(677) in order that He might continue to help men.
> 
> Says a Commentary:
> 
> _Having reached the Path of Deliverance [Thar‐lam] from transmigration,
> one cannot perform Tulpa_(_678_)_ any longer, for to become a Paranirvânî
> is to close the circle of the Septenary Ku‐Sum._(_679_)_ He has merged his
> borrowed Dorjesempa [Vajrasattva] into the Universal and become one with
> it._
> 
> Vajradhara, also Vajrasattva (Tibetan: Dorjechang and Dorjedzin, or
> Dorjosampa), is the regent or President of all the Dhyân Chohans or Dhyâni
> Buddhas, the highest, the Supreme Buddha; personal, yet never manifested
> objectively; the “Supreme Conqueror,” the “Lord of all Mysteries,” the
> “One without Beginning or End”—in short, the Logos of Buddhism. For, as
> Vajrasattva, He is simply the Tsovo (Chief) of the Dhyâni Buddhas or Dhyân
> Chohans, and the Supreme Intelligence in the Second World; while as
> Vajradhara (Dorjechang), He is all that which was enumerated above. “These
> two are one, and yet two,” and over them is “Chang, the Supreme
> Unmanifested and Universal Wisdom that has no name.” As two in one He
> (They) is the Power that subdued and conquered Evil from the beginning,
> allowing it to reign only over willing subjects on earth, and having no
> power over those who despise and hate it. Esoterically the allegory is
> easily understood; exoterically Vajradhara (Vajrasattva) is the God to
> whom all the evil spirits swore that they would not impede the propagation
> of the Good Law (Buddhism), and before whom all the demons tremble.
> Therefore, we say this dual personage has the same _rôle_ assigned to it
> in canonical and dogmatic Tibetan Buddhism as have Jehovah and the
> Archangel Mikael, the Metatron of the Jewish Kabalists. This is easily
> shown. Mikael is “the angel of the face of God,” or he who represents his
> Master. “My face shall go with thee” (in English, “presence”), before the
> Israelites, says God to Moses (_Exodus_, xxxiii. 14). “The angel of my
> presence” (Hebrew: “of my face”) (_Isaiah_, lxiii. 9), etc. The Roman
> Catholics identify Christ with Mikael, who is also his ferouer, or “face,”
> mystically. This is precisely the position of Vajradhara, or Vajrasattva,
> in Northern Buddhism. For the latter, in His Higher Self as Vajradhara
> (Dorjechang), is _never_ manifested, except to the seven Dhyân Chohans,
> the primeval Builders. Esoterically, it is the Spirit of the “Seven”
> collectively, their seventh principle, or Âtman. Exoterically, any amount
> of fables may be found in _Kâla Chakra_, the most important work in the
> Gyut [or (D)gyu] division of the Kanjur, the division of mystic knowledge
> [(D)gyu]. Dorjechang (wisdom) Vajradhara, is said to live in the second
> Arûpa World, which connects him with Metatron, in the first world of pure
> Spirits, the Briatic world of the Kabalists, who call this angel El‐
> Shaddai, the Omnipotent and Mighty One. Metatron is in Greek ἄγγελος
> (Messenger), or the Great Teacher. Mikael fights Satan, the Dragon, and
> conquers him and his Angels. Vajrasattva, who is one with Vajrapâni, the
> Subduer of the Evil Spirits, conquers Râhu, the Great Dragon who is always
> trying to devour the sun and moon (eclipses). “War in Heaven” in the
> Christian legend is based upon the bad angels having discovered the
> secrets (magical wisdom) of the good ones (Enoch), and the mystery of the
> “Tree of Life.” Let anyone read simply the exoteric accounts in the Hindu
> and Buddhist Pantheons—the latter version being taken from the former—and
> he will find both resting on the same primeval, archaic allegory from the
> Secret Doctrine. In the exoteric texts (Hindu and Buddhist), the Gods
> churn the ocean to extract from it the Water of Life—Amrita—or the Elixir
> of Knowledge. In both the Dragon steals some of this, and is exiled from
> heaven by Vishnu, or Vajradhara, or the chief God, whatever may be his
> name. We find the same in the Book of _Enoch_, and it is poetized in St.
> John’s _Revelation_. And now the allegory, with all its fanciful
> ornamentations, has become a dogma!
> 
> As will be found mentioned later, the Tibetan Lamaseris contain many
> secret and semi‐secret volumes, detailing the lives of great Sages. Many
> of the statements in them are purposely confused, and in others the reader
> becomes bewildered, unless a clue be given him, by the use of one name to
> cover many individuals who follow the same line of teaching. Thus there is
> a succession of “living Buddhas’” and the name “Buddha” is given to
> teacher after teacher. Schlagintweit writes:
> 
>     To each human Buddha belongs a Dhyâni‐Buddha, and a Dhyâni‐
>     Bodhisattva, and the unlimited number of the former also involves
>     an equally unlimited number of the latter.(680)
> 
> [But if this be so—and the exoteric and semi‐exoteric use of the name
> justify the statement—the reader must depend on his own intuition to
> distinguish between the Dhyâni Buddhas and the human Buddhas, and must not
> apply to the great BUDDHA of the Fifth Race all that is ascribed to “the
> Buddha” in books where, as said, blinds are constantly introduced.
> 
> In one of these books some strange and obscure statements are made which
> the writer gives, as before, entirely on her own responsibility, since a
> few may sense a meaning hidden under words misleading in their surface
> meaning.](681) It is stated that at the age of thirty‐three,
> Shankarâchârya, tired of his mortal body, “put it off” in the cave he had
> entered, and that the Bodhisattva, that served as his lower personality,
> was freed
> 
>     With the burden of a sin upon him which he had not committed.
> 
> At the same time it is added:
> 
>     At whatever age one puts off his outward body by free will, at
>     that age will he be made to die a violent death against his will
>     in his next rebirth.
> 
> Now, Karma could have no hold on “Mahâ Shankara” (as Shankara is called in
> the secret work), as he had, as Avatâra, no Ego of his own, but a
> Bodhisattva—a willing sacrificial victim. Neither had the latter any
> responsibility for the deed, whether sinful or otherwise. Therefore we do
> not see the point, since Karma cannot act unjustly. There is some terrible
> mystery involved in all this story, one that no uninitiated intellect can
> ever unravel. Still, there it is, suggesting the natural query, “Who,
> then, was punished by Karma?” and leaving it to be answered.
> 
> A few centuries later Buddha tried one more incarnation, it is said, in *
> * *, and again, fifty years subsequent to the death of this Adept, in one
> whose name is given as Tiani‐Tsang.(682) No details, no further
> information or explanation is given. It is simply stated that the last
> Buddha had to work out the remains of his Karma, which none of the Gods
> themselves can escape, forced as he was to bury still deeper certain
> mysteries half revealed by him—hence misinterpreted. The words used would
> stand when translated:(683)
> 
>     Born fifty‐two years too early as Shramana Gautama, the son of
>     King Zastang; then retiring fifty‐seven years too soon as Mahâ
>     Shankara, who got tired of his outward form. This wilful act
>     aroused and attracted King Karma, who killed the new form of * * *
>     at thirty‐three,(684) the age of the body that was put off. [At
>     whatever age one puts off his outward body by free will, at that
>     age will he be made to die in his next incarnation _against his
>     will_—Commentary.] He died in his next (body) at thirty‐two and a
>     little over, and again in his next at eighty—a Mâyâ, and at one
>     hundred, in reality. The Bodhisattva chose Tiani‐Tsang,(685) then
>     again the Sugata became Tsong‐Kha‐pa, who became thus Dezhin‐
>     Shegpa [Tathâgata—“one who follows in the way and manner of his
>     predecessors”]. The Blessed One could do good to his generation as
>     * * * but none to posterity, and so as Tiani‐Tsaug he became
>     incarnated only for the “_remains_” [of his precedent Karma, as we
>     understand it]. The Seven Ways and the Four Truths were once more
>     hidden out of sight. The Merciful One confined since then his
>     attention and fatherly care to the heart of Bodyul, the nursery‐
>     grounds of the seeds of truth. The blessed “remains” since then
>     have overshadowed and rested in many a holy body of human
>     Bodhisattvas.
> 
> No further information is given, least of all are there any details or
> explanations to be found in the secret volume. All is darkness and mystery
> in it, for it is evidently written but for those who are already
> instructed. Several flaming red asterisks are placed instead of names, and
> the few facts given are abruptly broken off. The key of the riddle is left
> to the intuition of the disciple, unless the “direct followers” of Gautama
> the Buddha—“those who are to be denied by His Church for the next
> cycle”—and of Shankarâchârya, are pleased to add more.
> 
> The final section gives a kind of summary of the seventy sections—covering
> seventy‐three years of Buddha’s life(686)—from which the last paragraph is
> summarized as follows:
> 
>     Emerging from ——, the most excellent seat of the three secrets
>     [Sang‐Sum], the Master of incomparable mercy, after having
>     performed on all the anchorites the rite of ——, and each of these
>     having been cut off,(687) perceived through [the power of] Hlun‐
>     Chub(688) what was his next duty. The Most‐Illustrious meditated
>     and asked himself whether this would help [the future]
>     generations. What they needed was the sight of Mâyâ in a body of
>     illusion. Which?... The great conqueror of pains and sorrows arose
>     and proceeded back to his birthplace. There Sugata was welcomed by
>     the few, for they did not know Shramana Gautama. “Shâkya [the
>     Mighty] is in Nirvâna.... He has given the Science to the Shuddhas
>     [Shûdra],” said they of Damze Yul [the country of Brâhmans:
>     India].... It was for that, born of pity, that the All‐Glorious
>     One had to retire to ——, and then appear [karmically] as Mahâ
>     Shankara; and out of pity as ——, and again as ——, and again as
>     Tsong‐Kha‐pa.... For, he who chooses in humiliation must go down,
>     and he who _loves not_ allows Karma to raise him.(689)
> 
> This passage is confessedly obscure and written for the few. It is not
> lawful to say any more, for the time has not yet come when nations are
> prepared to hear the whole truth. The old religions are full of mysteries,
> and to demonstrate some of them would surely lead to an explosion of
> hatred, followed, perhaps, by bloodshed and worse. It will be sufficient
> to know that while Gautama Buddha is merged in Nirvâna ever since his
> death, Gautama Shâkyamuni may have had to reincarnate—this dual inner
> personality being one of the greatest mysteries of Esoteric psychism.
> 
> “The seat of the three secrets” refers to a place inhabited by high
> Initiates and their disciples. The “secrets” are the three mystic powers
> known as Gopa, Yasodhara, and Uptala Varna, that Csomo de Köros mistook
> for Buddha’s three wives, as other Orientalists have mistaken Shakti (Yoga
> power) personified by a female deity for His wife; or the Draupadî—also a
> spiritual power—for the wife in common of the five brothers Pândava.
> 
> SECTION XLV. AN UNPUBLISHED DISCOURSE OF BUDDHA.
> 
> (It is found in the second _Book of Commentaries_ and is addressed to the
> Arhats.)
> 
> Said the All‐Merciful: Blessed are ye, O Bhikshus, happy are ye who have
> understood the mystery of Being and _Non‐Being_ explained in Bas‐pa
> [Dharma, Doctrine], and have given preference to the latter, for ye are
> verily my Arhats.... The elephant, who sees his form mirrored in the lake,
> looks at it, and then goes away, taking it for the real body of another
> elephant, is wiser than the man who beholds his face in the stream, and,
> looking at it, says, “Here am I.... I am I”: for the “I,” his Self, is not
> in the world of the twelve Nidânas and mutability, but in that of Non‐
> Being, the only world beyond the snares of Mâyâ.... That alone, which has
> neither cause nor author, which is self‐existing, eternal, far beyond the
> reach of mutability, is the true “I” [Ego], the Self of the Universe. The
> Universe of Nam‐Kha says: “I am the world of Sien‐Chan”;(690) the four
> illusions laugh and reply, “Verily so.” But the truly wise man knows that
> neither man, nor the Universe that he passes through like a flitting
> shadow, is any more a real Universe than the dewdrop that reflects a spark
> of the morning sun is that sun.... There are three things, Bhikshus, that
> are everlastingly the same, upon which no vicissitude, no modification can
> ever act: these are the Law, Nirvâna, and Space,(691) and those three are
> One, since the first two are within the last, and that last one a Mâyâ, so
> long as man keeps within the whirlpool of sensuous existences. One need
> not have his mortal body die to avoid the clutches of concupiscence and
> other passions. The Arhat who observes the seven hidden precepts of Bas‐pa
> may become Dang‐ma and Lha.(692) He may hear the “holy voice” of ...
> [Kwan‐yin],(693) and find himself within the quiet precincts of his
> Sangharama(694) transferred into Amitâbha Buddha.(695) Becoming one with
> Anuttara Samyak Sambodhi,(696) he may pass through all the six worlds of
> Being (Rûpaloka) and get into the first three worlds of Arûpa.(697)... He
> who listens to my secret law, preached to my select Arhats, will arrive
> with its help at the knowledge of Self, and thence at perfection.
> 
> It is due to entirely erroneous conceptions of Eastern thought and to
> ignorance of the existence of an Esoteric key to the outward Buddhist
> phrases that Burnouf and other great scholars have inferred from such
> propositions—held also by the Vedântins—as “my body is not body” and
> “myself is no self of mine,” that Eastern psychology was all based upon
> non‐permanency. Cousin, for instance, lecturing upon the subject, brings
> the two following propositions to prove, on Burnouf’s authority, that,
> unlike Brâhmanism, Buddhism rejects the perpetuity of the thinking
> principle. These are:
> 
>     1. Thought or Spirit(698)—for the faculty is not distinguished
>     from the subject—appears only with sensation and does not survive
>     it.
> 
>     2. The Spirit cannot itself lay hold of itself, and in directing
>     attention to itself it draws from it only the conviction of its
>     powerlessness to see itself otherwise than as successive and
>     transitory.
> 
> This all refers to Spirit embodied, not to the freed Spiritual Self on
> whom Mâyâ has no more hold. Spirit is no body; therefore have the
> Orientalists made of it “nobody” and nothing. Hence they proclaim
> Buddhists to be Nihilists, and Vedântins to be the followers of a creed in
> which the “Impersonal [God] turns out on examination to be a myth”; their
> goal is described as
> 
>     The complete extinction of all spiritual, mental, and bodily
>     powers by absorption into the Impersonal.(699)
> 
> SECTION XLVI. NIRVANA‐MOKSHA.
> 
> The few sentences given in the text from one of Gautama Buddha’s secret
> teachings show how uncalled for is the epithet of “Materialist” when
> applied to One Whom two‐thirds of those who are looked upon as great
> Adepts and Occultists in Asia recognize as their Master, whether under the
> name of Buddha or that of Shankarâchârya. The reader will remember the
> just‐quoted words are what Buddha Sanggyas (or Pho) is alleged by the
> Tibetan Occultists to have taught: there are three eternal things in the
> Universe—the Law, Nirvâna, and Space. The Buddhists of the Southern Church
> claim, on the other hand, that Buddha held only two things as
> eternal—Âkâsha and Nirvâna. But Âkâsha being the same as Aditi,(700) and
> both being translated “Space,” there is no discrepancy so far, since
> Nirvâna as well as Moksha, is a state. Then in both cases the great
> Kapilavastu Sage unifies the two, as well as the three, into one eternal
> Element, and ends by saying that even “that One is a Mâyâ” to one who is
> not a Dang‐ma, a perfectly purified Soul.
> 
> The whole question hangs upon materialistic misconceptions and ignorance
> of Occult Metaphysics. To the man of Science who regards Space as simply a
> mental representation, a conception of something existing _pro formâ_, and
> having no real being outside our mind, Space _per se_ is verily an
> illusion. He may fill the boundless interstellar space with an “imaginary”
> ether, nevertheless Space for him is an abstraction. Most of the
> Metaphysicians of Europe are so wide of the mark, from the purely Occult
> standpoint, of a correct comprehension of “Space,” as are the
> Materialists, though the erroneous conceptions of both of course differ
> widely.
> 
> If, bearing in mind the philosophical views of the Ancients upon this
> question, we compare them with what is now termed exact physical Science,
> it will be found that the two disagree only in inferences and names, and
> that their postulates are the same when reduced to their most simple
> expression. From the beginning of the human Æons, from the very dawn of
> Occult Wisdom, the regions that the men of Science fill with ether have
> been explored by the Seers of every age. That which the world regards
> simply as cosmic Space, an abstract representation, the Hindu Rishi, the
> Chaldæan Magus, the Egyptian Hierophant held, each and all, as the one
> eternal Root of all, the playground of all the Forces in Nature. It is the
> fountain‐head of all terrestrial life, and the abode of those (to us)
> invisible swarms of existences—of real beings, as of the shadows only
> thereof, conscious and unconscious, intelligent and senseless—that
> surround us on all sides, that interpenetrate the atoms of our Kosmos, and
> see us not, as we do not either see or sense them through our physical
> organisms. For the Occultist “Space” and “Universe” are synonyms. In Space
> there is not Matter, Force, nor Spirit, but all that and much more. It is
> the One Element, and that one the Anima Mundi—Space, Âkâsha, Astral
> Light—the Root of Life which, in its eternal, ceaseless motion, like the
> out‐ and in‐breathing of one boundless ocean, evolves but to reabsorb all
> that lives and feels and thinks and has its being in it. As said of the
> Universe in _Isis Unveiled_, it is:
> 
>     The combination of a thousand elements and yet the expression of a
>     single Spirit—a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.
> 
> Such were the views upon the subject of all the great ancient
> Philosophers, from Manu down to Pythagoras, from Plato to Paul.
> 
>     When the dissolution [Pralaya] had arrived at its term the great
>     Being [Para‐Âtmâ, or Para‐Purusha], the Lord existing through
>     himself, out of whom and through whom all things were, and are,
>     and will be, ... resolved to emanate from his own substance the
>     various creatures.(701)
> 
>     The mystic Decad [of Pythagoras] (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) is a way of
>     expressing this idea. The One is God;(702) the Two, matter; the
>     Three, combining Monad and Duad and partaking of the nature of
>     both, is the phenomenal world; the Tetrad, or form of perfection,
>     expresses the emptiness of all; and the Decad, or sum of all,
>     involves the entire Cosmos.(703)
> 
> Plato’s “God” is the “Universal Ideation,” and Paul saying “Out of him,
> and through him, and in him, all things are,” had surely a Principle—never
> a Jehovah—in his profound mind. The key to the Pythagorean dogmas is the
> key to every great Philosophy. It is the general formula of unity in
> multiplicity, the One evolving the many and pervading the All. It is the
> archaic doctrine of Emanation in a few words.
> 
> Speusippus and Xenocrates held, like their great Master, Plato, that:
> 
>     The Anima Mundi (or “world‐soul”) was not the Deity, but a
>     manifestation. Those philosophers never conceived of the One as an
>     _animate nature_. The original One did not _exist_, as we
>     understand the term. Not till he (it) had united with the many
>     emanated existences (the Monad and Duad), was a being produced.
>     The τίμιον (“honoured”), the something manifested, dwells in the
>     centre as in the circumference, but it is only the reflection of
>     the Deity—the World‐Soul. In this doctrine we find the spirit of
>     Esoteric Buddhism.(704)
> 
> And it is that of Esoteric Brâhmanism and of the Vedântin Adwaitîs. The
> two modern philosophers, Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, teach the same
> ideas. The Occultists say that:
> 
>     The psychic and ectenic forces, the “ideo‐motor” and “electro‐
>     biological powers,” “latent thought,” and even “unconscious
>     cerebration” theories can be condensed in two words: the
>     Kabalistic Astral Light.(705)
> 
> Schopenhauer only synthesized all this by calling it Will, and
> contradicted the men of Science in their materialistic views, as von
> Hartmann did later on. The author of the _Philosophy of the Unconscious_
> calls their views “an instinctual prejudice.”
> 
>     Furthermore, he demonstrates that no experimenter can have
>     anything to do with matter properly so termed, but only with the
>     forces into which he divides it. The visible effects of matter are
>     but the effects of force. He concludes thereby that that which is
>     now called matter is nothing but the aggregation of atomic forces,
>     to express which the word “matter” is used; outside of that, for
>     science, matter is but a word void of sense.(706)
> 
> As much, it is to be feared, as those other terms with which we are now
> concerned, “Space,” “Nirvâna,” and so on.
> 
>     The bold theories and opinions expressed in Schopenhauer’s works
>     differ widely from those of the majority of our orthodox
>     scientists.(707) “In reality,” remarks this daring speculator,
>     “there is neither _Matter_ nor _Spirit_. The tendency to
>     gravitation in a stone is as unexplainable as thought in the human
>     brain.... If matter can—no one knows why—fall to the ground, then
>     it can also—no one knows why—think.... As soon, even in mechanics,
>     as we trespass beyond the purely mathematical, as soon as we reach
>     the inscrutable adhesion, gravitation, and so on we are faced by
>     phenomena which are to our senses as mysterious as the _will_ and
>     _thought_ in man: we find ourselves facing the incomprehensible,
>     for such is every force in nature. Where is, then, that _matter_
>     which you all pretend to know so well, and from which—being so
>     familiar with it—you draw all your conclusions and explanations,
>     and attribute to it all things?... That which can be fully
>     realized by our reason and senses is but the superficial; they can
>     never reach the true inner substance of things. Such was the
>     opinion of Kant. If you consider that there is in a human head
>     some sort of a _spirit_, then you are obliged to concede the same
>     to a stone. If your dead and utterly‐passive matter can manifest a
>     tendency toward gravitation or, like electricity, attract and
>     repel and send out sparks then as well as the brain it can also
>     think. In short, every particle of the so‐called spirit we can
>     replace with an equivalent of matter, and every particle of matter
>     replace with spirit.... Thus, it is not the Christian division of
>     all things into matter and spirit that can ever be found
>     philosophically exact; but only if we divide them into _will_ and
>     _manifestation_, which form of division has naught to do with the
>     former, for it spiritualizes everything: all that which is in the
>     first instance real and objective—body and matter—it transforms
>     into a representation, and every manifestation into will.”(708)
> 
> The _matter_ of science may be for all objective purposes a “dead and
> utterly‐passive matter”; to the Occultist not an atom of it can be
> dead—“Life is ever present in it.” We send the reader who would know more
> about it to our article, “Transmigration of Life‐Atoms.”(709) What we are
> now concerned with is the doctrine of Nirvâna.
> 
> A “system of atheism” it may be justly called, since it recognizes neither
> God nor Gods—least of all a Creator, as it entirely rejects creation. The
> _Fecit ex nihilo_ is as incomprehensible to the Occult metaphysical
> Scientist as it is to the scientific Materialist. It is at this point that
> all agreement stops between the two. But if such be the sin of the
> Buddhist and Brâhman Occultist, then Pantheists and Atheists, and also
> theistical Jews—the Kabalists—must also plead “guilty” to it; yet no one
> would ever think of calling the Hebrews of the Kabalah “Atheists.” Except
> the Talmudistic and Christian exoteric systems there never was a religious
> Philosophy, whether in the ancient or modern world, but rejected _à
> priori_ the _ex nihilo_ hypothesis, simply because Matter was always co‐
> eternalized with Spirit.
> 
> Nirvâna, as well as the Moksha of the Vedântins, is regarded by most of
> the Orientalists as a synonym of annihilation; yet no more glaring
> injustice could be done, and this capital error must be pointed out and
> disproved. On this most important tenet of the Brâhmo‐Buddhistic
> system—the Alpha and the Omega of “Being” or “Non‐Being”—rests the whole
> edifice of Occult Metaphysics. Now the rectification of the great error
> concerning Nirvâna may be very easily accomplished with relation to the
> philosophically inclined, to those who,
> 
>     In the glass of things temporal see the image of things spiritual.
> 
> On the other hand, to that reader who could never soar beyond the details
> of tangible material form, our explanation will appear meaningless. He may
> comprehend and even accept the logical inferences from the reasons
> given—the true spirit will ever escape his intuitions. The word “nihil”
> having been misconceived from the first, it is continually used as a
> sledge‐hammer in the matter of Esoteric Philosophy. Nevertheless it is the
> duty of the Occultist to try and explain it.
> 
> Nirvâna and Moksha, then, as said before, have their being in non‐being,
> if such a paradox be permitted to illustrate the meaning the better.
> Nirvâna, as some illustrious Orientalists have attempted to prove, does
> mean the “blowing‐out”(710) of all sentient existence. It is like the
> flame of a candle burnt out to its last atom, and then suddenly
> extinguished. Quite so. Nevertheless, as the old Arhat Nâgasena affirmed
> before the king who taunted him: “Nirvâna _is_”—and Nirvâna is eternal.
> But the Orientalists deny this, and say it is not so. In their opinion
> Nirvâna is not a re‐absorption in the Universal Force, not eternal bliss
> and rest, but it means literally “the blowing‐out, the extinction,
> complete annihilation, and not absorption.” The _Lankavatara_ quoted in
> support of their arguments by some Sanskritists, and which gives the
> different interpretations of Nirvâna by the Tîrthika Brâhmans, is no
> authority to one who goes to primeval sources for information, namely, to
> the Buddha who taught the doctrine. As well quote the Chârvâka
> Materialists in their support.
> 
> If we bring as an argument the sacred Jaina books, wherein the dying
> Gautama Buddha is thus addressed: “Arise into Nirvi [Nirvâna] from this
> decrepit body into which thou hast been sent.... Ascend into thy former
> abode, O blessed Avatâra”; and if we add that this seems to us the very
> opposite of nihilism, we may be told that so far it may only prove a
> contradiction, one more discrepancy in the Buddhist faith. If again we
> remind the reader that since Gautama is believed to appear occasionally,
> re‐descending from his “former abode” for the good of humanity and His
> faithful congregation, thus making it incontestable that Buddhism does not
> teach final annihilation, we shall be referred to authorities to whom such
> teaching is ascribed. And let us say at once: Men are no authority for us
> in questions of conscience, nor ought they to be for anyone else. If
> anyone holds to Buddha’s Philosophy, let him do and say as Buddha did and
> said; if a man calls himself a Christian, let him follow the commandments
> of Christ—not the interpretations of His many dissenting priests and
> sects.
> 
> In _A Buddhist Catechism_ the question is asked:
> 
>     Are there any dogmas in Buddhism which we are required to accept
>     on faith?
> 
>     A. No. We are earnestly enjoined to accept nothing whatever on
>     faith, whether it be written in books, handed down from our
>     ancestors, or taught by sages. Our Lord Buddha has said that we
>     must not believe in a thing said merely because it is said; nor
>     traditions because they have been handed down from antiquity; nor
>     rumours, as such; nor writings by sages, because sages wrote them:
>     nor fancies that we may suspect to have been inspired in us by a
>     Deva (that is, in presumed spiritual inspiration); nor from
>     inferences drawn from some haphazard assumption we may have made;
>     nor because of what seems an analogical necessity; nor on the mere
>     authority of our teachers or masters. But we are to believe when
>     the writing, doctrine, or saying is corroborated by our own reason
>     and consciousness. “For this,” says he in concluding, “I taught
>     you not to believe merely because you have heard, but when you
>     believed of your consciousness, then to act accordingly and
>     abundantly.”(711)
> 
> That Nirvâna, or rather, that state in which we are in Nirvâna, is quite
> the reverse of annihilation is suggested to us by our “reason and
> consciousness,” and that is sufficient for us personally. At the same
> time, this fact being inadequate and very ill‐adapted for the general
> reader, something more efficient may be added.
> 
> Without resorting to sources unsympathetic to Occultism, the _Kabalah_
> furnishes us with the most luminous and clear proofs that the term “nihil”
> in the minds of the Ancient Philosophers had a meaning quite different
> from that it has now received at the hands of Materialists. It means
> certainly “nothing”—or “no‐thing.” F. Kircher, in his work on the
> _Kabalah_ and the Egyptian Mysteries(712) explains the term admirably. He
> tells his readers that in the _Zohar_ the first of the Sephiroth(713) has
> a name the significance of which is “the _Infinite_,” but which was
> translated indifferently by the Kabalists as “Ens” and “Non‐Ens” (“Being”
> and “Non‐Being”); a _Being_, inasmuch as it is the _root_ and source of
> all other beings; _Non‐Being_ because Ain Soph—the Boundless and the
> Causeless, the Unconscious and the Passive Principle—resembles nought else
> in the Universe.
> 
> The author adds:
> 
>     This is the reason why St. Denys did not hesitate to call it
>     Nihil.
> 
> “Nihil” therefore stands—even with some Christian theologians and
> thinkers, especially with the earlier ones who lived but a few removes
> from the profound Philosophy of the initiated Pagans—as a synonym for the
> impersonal, divine Principle, the Infinite All, which is no Being or
> thing—the En or Ain Soph, the Parabrahman of the Vedânta. Now St. Denys
> was a pupil of St. Paul—an Initiate—and this fact makes everything clear.
> 
> The “Nihil” is _in esse_ the Absolute Deity itself, the hidden Power or
> Omnipresence degraded by Monotheism into an anthropomorphic Being, with
> all the passions of a mortal on a grand scale. Union with That is not
> annihilation in the sense understood in Europe.(714) In the East
> annihilation in Nirvâna refers but to matter: that of the visible as well
> as the invisible body, for the astral body, the personal double, is still
> matter, however sublimated. Buddha taught that the primitive Substance is
> eternal and unchangeable. Its vehicle is the pure, luminous ether, the
> boundless, infinite Space,
> 
>     Not a void resulting from the absence of forms, but on the
>     contrary, the foundation of all forms.... [This] denotes it to be
>     the creation of Mâyâ, all the works of which are as nothing before
>     the uncreated Form [Spirit], in whose profound and sacred depths
>     all motion must cease for ever.(715)
> 
> Motion here refers only to illusive objects, to their change as opposed to
> perpetuity, rest—perpetual motion being the Eternal Law, the ceaseless
> Breath of the Absolute.
> 
> The mastery of Buddhistic dogmas can be attained only according to the
> Platonic method: from universals to particulars. The key to it lies in the
> refined and mystical tenets of spiritual influx and divine life.
> 
> Saith Buddha:
> 
> _Whosoever is unacquainted with my Law,_(_716_)_ and dies in that state
> must return to earth until he becomes a perfect Samano [ascetic]. To
> achieve this object he must destroy within himself the trinity of
> Mâyâ._(_717_)_ He must extinguish his passions, unite and identify himself
> with the Law [the teaching of the Secret Doctrine], and comprehend the
> philosophy of annihilation._(718)
> 
> No, it is not in the dead‐letter of Buddhistical literature that scholars
> may ever hope to find the true solution of its metaphysical subtleties.
> Alone in all antiquity the Pythagoreans understood them perfectly, and it
> is on the (to the average Orientalist and the Materialist)
> incomprehensible abstractions of Buddhism that Pythagoras grounded the
> principal tenets of his Philosophy.
> 
> Annihilation means with the Buddhistical Philosophy only a dispersion of
> matter, in whatever form or _semblance_ of form it may be, for everything
> that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish,
> _i.e._, change that shape; therefore, as something temporal, though
> seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Mâyâ; for as eternity has
> neither beginning nor end, the more or less prolonged duration of some
> particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of
> lightning. Before we have the time to realize that we have seen it, it is
> gone and passed for ever; hence even our astral bodies, pure ether, are
> but illusions of matter so long as they retain their terrestrial outline.
> The latter changes, says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits
> of the person during his lifetime, and this is metempsychosis. When the
> spiritual Entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then
> only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvâna. He exists in
> Spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely
> annihilated, and thus will die no more, for Spirit alone is no Mâyâ, but
> the only Reality in an illusionary universe of ever‐passing forms.
> 
>     It is upon this Buddhist doctrine that the Pythagoreans grounded
>     the principal tenets of their philosophy. “Can that Spirit which
>     gives life and motion, and partakes of the nature of light, be
>     reduced to nonentity?” they ask. “Can that sensitive Spirit in
>     brutes which exercises memory, one of the rational faculties, die
>     and become nothing?” And Whitelock Bulstrode in his able defence
>     of Pythagoras expounds this doctrine by adding:
> 
>     “If you say they [the brutes] breathe their Spirits into the air,
>     and there vanish, that is all that I contend for. The air indeed
>     is the proper place to receive them, being according to Laertius
>     full of souls; and according to Epicurus full of atoms, the
>     principles of all things; for even this place wherein we walk and
>     birds fly has so much of a spiritual nature that it is invisible,
>     and therefore may well be the receiver of forms, since the forms
>     of all bodies are so; we can only see and hear its effects; the
>     air itself is too fine and above the capacity of the age. What
>     then is the ether in the region above, and what are the influences
>     of forms that descend from thence?” The _Spirits_ of creatures,
>     the Pythagoreans hold, who are emanations of the most sublimated
>     portions of ether—emanations, _breaths, but not forms_. Ether is
>     corruptible—all philosophers agree in that;—and what is
>     incorruptible _is so far from being annihilated_ when it gets rid
>     of the _form_ that it lays a good claim to _immortality_.
> 
>     “But what is that which has no body, no _form_; which is
>     imponderable, invisible, and indivisible—that which exists, and
>     yet _is not_?” ask the Buddhists. “It is Nirvâna,” is the answer.
>     It is _nothing_—not a region, but rather a state.(719)
> 
> SECTION XLVII. THE SECRET BOOKS OF “LAM‐RIN” AND DZYAN.
> 
> The _Book of Dzyan_—from the Sanskrit word “Dhyân” (mystic meditation)—is
> the first volume of the Commentaries upon the seven secret folios of Kiu‐
> te, and a Glossary of the public works of the same name. Thirty‐five
> volumes of Kiu‐te for exoteric purposes and the use of the laymen may be
> found in the possession of the Tibetan Gelugpa Lamas, in the library of
> any monastery; and also fourteen books of Commentaries and Annotations on
> the same by the initiated Teachers.
> 
> Strictly speaking, those thirty‐five books ought to be termed “The
> Popularised Version” of the Secret Doctrine, full of myths, blinds, and
> errors; the fourteen volumes of _Commentaries_, on the other hand—with
> their translations, annotations, and an ample glossary of Occult terms,
> worked out from one small archaic folio, the _Book of the Secret Wisdom of
> the World_(720)—contain a digest of all the Occult Sciences. These, it
> appears, are kept secret and apart, in the charge of the Teshu Lama of
> Tji‐gad‐je. The Books of Kiu‐te are comparatively modern, having been
> edited within the last millennium, whereas, the earliest volumes of the
> _Commentaries_ are of untold antiquity, some fragments of the original
> cylinders having been preserved. With the exception that they explain and
> correct some of the too fabulous, and to every appearance, grossly‐
> exaggerated accounts in the Books of Kiu‐te(721)—properly so‐called—the
> _Commentaries_ have little to do with these. They stand in relation to
> them as the Chaldæo‐Jewish _Kabalah_ stands to the Mosaic Books. In the
> work known as the _Avatumsaka Sûtra_, in section: “The Supreme Âtman
> [Soul] as manifested in the character of the Arhats and Pratyeka Buddhas,”
> it is stated that:
> 
>     Because from the beginning all sentient creatures have confused
>     the truth and embraced the false, therefore there came into
>     existence a hidden knowledge called Alaya Vijñâna.
> 
> “Who is in possession of the true knowledge?” is asked. “The great
> Teachers of the Snowy Mountain,” is the response.
> 
> These “great Teachers” have been known to live in the “Snowy Range” of the
> Himâlayas for countless ages. To deny in the face of millions of Hindus
> the existence of their great Gurus, living in the Âshrams scattered all
> over the Trans‐ or the Cis‐Himâlayan slopes is to make oneself ridiculous
> in their eyes. When the Buddhist Saviour appeared in India, their
> Âshrams—for it is rarely that these great Men are found in Lamaseries,
> unless on a short visit—were on the spots they now occupy, and that even
> before the Brâhmans themselves came from Central Asia to settle on the
> Indus. And before that more than one Âryan Dvija of fame and historical
> renown had sat at their feet, learning that which culminated later on in
> one or another of the great philosophical schools. Most of these Himâlayan
> Bhante were Âryan Brâhmans and ascetics.
> 
> No student, unless very advanced, would be benefited by the perusal of
> those exoteric volumes.(722) They must be read with a key to their
> meaning, and that key can only be found in the _Commentaries_. Moreover
> there are some comparatively modern works that are positively injurious so
> far as a fair comprehension of even exoteric Buddhism is concerned. Such
> are the _Buddhist Cosmos_, by Bonze Jin‐ch’on of Pekin; the _Shing‐Tau‐ki_
> (or _The Records of the Enlightenment of Tathâgata_), by Wang Puk—seventh
> century; _Hisai Sûtra_ (or _Book of Creation_), and some others.
> 
> SECTION XLVIII. AMITA BUDDHA KWAN‐SHAI‐YIN, AND KWAN‐YIN.—WHAT THE “BOOK
> OF DZYAN” AND THE LAMASERIES OF TSONG‐KHA‐PA SAY.
> 
> As a supplement to the _Commentaries_ there are many secret folios on the
> lives of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and among these there is one on
> Prince Gautama and another on His reincarnation in Tsong‐Kha‐pa. This
> great Tibetan Reformer of the fourteenth century, said to be a direct
> incarnation of Amita Buddha, is the founder of the secret School near Tji‐
> gad‐je, attached to the private retreat of the Teshu Lama. It is with Him
> that began the regular system of Lamaic incarnations of Buddhas (Sang‐
> gyas), or of Shâkya‐Thub‐pa (Shakya‐muni). Amida or Amita Buddha is called
> by the author of _Chinese Buddhism_, a mythical being. He speaks of
> 
>     Amida Buddha (_Ami‐to Fo_) a fabulous personage, worshipped
>     assiduously—like Kwan‐yin—by the Northern Buddhists, but unknown
>     in Siam, Burmah, and Ceylon.(723)
> 
> Very likely. Yet Amida Buddha is not a “fabulous” personage, since (_a_)
> “Amida” is the Senzar form of “Âdi”; “Âdi‐Buddhi” and “Âdi‐Buddha,”(724)
> as already shown, existed ages ago as a Sanskrit term for “Primeval Soul”
> and “Wisdom”; and (_b_) the name was applied to Gautama Shâkyamuni, the
> last Buddha in India, from the seventh century, when Buddhism was
> introduced into Tibet. “Amitâbha” (in Chinese, “Wu‐liang‐sheu”) means
> literally “Boundless Age,” a synonym of “En,” or “Ain‐Suph,” the “Ancient
> of Days,” and is an epithet that connects Him directly with the Boundless
> Âdi‐Buddhi (primeval and Universal Soul) of the Hindus, as well as with
> the Anima Mundi of all the ancient nations of Europe and the Boundless and
> Infinite of the Kabalists. If Amitâbha be a fiction of the Tibetans, or a
> new form of Wu‐liang‐sheu, “a fabulous personage,” as the author‐compiler
> of _Chinese Buddhism_ tells his readers, then the “fable” must be a very
> ancient one. For on another page he says himself that the addition to the
> canon, of the books containing the
> 
>     Legends of Kwan‐yin and of the Western heaven with its Buddha,
>     Amitâbha, was also previous to the Council of Kashmere, a little
>     before the beginning of our era,(725)
> 
> and he places
> 
>     the origin of the primitive Buddhist books which are common to the
>     Northern and Southern Buddhists before 246 B.C.
> 
> Since Tibetans accepted Buddhism only in the seventh century A.D., how
> comes it that they are charged with inventing Amita‐Buddha? Besides which,
> in Tibet, Amitâbha is called Odpag‐med, which shows that it is not the
> name but the abstract idea that was first accepted of an unknown,
> invisible, and Impersonal Power—taken, moreover, from the Hindu “Âdi‐
> Buddhi,” and not from the Chinese “Amitâbha.”(726) There is a great
> difference between the popular Odpag‐med (Amitâbha) who sits enthroned in
> Devachan (Sukhâvatî), according to the _Mani Kambum_ Scriptures—the oldest
> _historical_ work in Tibet, and the philosophical abstraction called Amida
> Buddha, the name being passed now to the earthly Buddha, Gautama.
> 
> SECTION XLIX. TSONG‐KHA‐PA.—LOHANS IN CHINA.
> 
> In an article, “Reincarnation in Tibet,” everything that could be said
> about Tsong‐Kha‐pa was published.(727) It was stated that this reformer
> was not, as is alleged by Pârsî scholars, an incarnation of one of the
> celestial Dhyânis, or the five heavenly Buddhas, said to have been created
> by Shâkyamuni after he had risen to Nirvâna, but that he was an
> incarnation of Amita Buddha Himself. The records preserved in the Gon‐pa,
> the chief Lamasery of Tda‐shi‐Hlumpo, show that Sang‐gyas left the regions
> of the “Western Paradise” to incarnate Himself in Tsong‐Kha‐pa, in
> consequence of the great degradation into which His secret doctrines had
> fallen.
> 
>     Whenever made too public, the Good Law of Cheu [magical powers]
>     fell invariably into sorcery or “black magic.” The Dwijas, the
>     Hoshang [Chinese monks] and the Lamas could alone be entrusted
>     safely with the formulæ.
> 
> Until the Tsong‐Kha‐pa period there had been no Sang‐gyas (Buddha)
> incarnations in Tibet.
> 
> Tsong‐Kha‐pa gave the signs whereby the presence of one of the twenty‐five
> Bodhisattvas(728) or of the Celestial Buddhas (Dhyân Chohans) in a human
> body might be recognized, and He strictly forbade necromancy. This led to
> a split amongst the Lamas, and the malcontents allied themselves with the
> aboriginal Bhons against the reformed Lamaism. Even now they form a
> powerful sect, practising the most disgusting rites all over Sikkhim,
> Bhutan, Nepaul, and even on the borderlands of Tibet. It was worse then.
> With the permission of the Tda‐shu or Teshu Lama,(729) some hundred Lohans
> (Arhats), to avert strife, went to settle in China in the famous monastery
> near Tien‐t’‐ai, where they soon became subjects for legendary lore, and
> continue to be so to this day. They had been already preceded by other
> Lohans,
> 
>     The world‐famous disciples of Tathâgata, called the “sweet‐voiced”
>     on account of their ability to chant the Mantras with magical
>     effect.(730)
> 
> The first ones came from Kashmir in the year 3,000 of Kali Yuga (about a
> century before the Christian era),(731) while the last ones arrived at the
> end of the fourteenth century, 1,500 years later; and, finding no room for
> themselves at the lamasery of Yihigching, they built for their own use the
> largest monastery of all on the sacred island of Pu‐to (Buddha, or Put, in
> Chinese), in the province of Chusan. There the Good Law, the “Doctrine of
> the Heart,” flourished for several centuries. But when the island was
> desecrated by a mass of Western foreigners, the chief Lohans left for the
> mountains of ——. In the Pagoda of Pi‐yun‐ti, near Pekin, one can still see
> the “Hall of the Five‐hundred Lohans.” There the statues of the first‐
> comers are arranged below, while one solitary Lohan is placed quite under
> the roof of the building, which seems to have been built in commemoration
> of their visit.
> 
> The works of the Orientalists are full of the direct landmarks of Arhats
> (Adepts), possessed of thaumaturgic powers, but these are spoken
> of—whenever the subject cannot be avoided—with unconcealed scorn. Whether
> innocently ignorant of, or purposely ignoring, the importance of the
> Occult element and symbology in the various Religions they undertake to
> explain, short work is generally made of such passages, and they are left
> untranslated. In simple justice, however, it should be allowed that much
> as all such miracles may have been exaggerated by popular reverence and
> fancy, they are neither less credible nor less attested in “heathen”
> annals than are those of the numerous Christian Saints in the church
> chronicles. Both have an equal right to a place in their respective
> histories.
> 
> If, after the beginning of persecution against Buddhism, the Arhats were
> no more heard of in India, it was because, their vows prohibiting
> retaliation, they had to leave the country and seek solitude and security
> in China, Tibet, Japan, and elsewhere. The sacerdotal powers of the
> Brâhmans being at that time unlimited, the Simons and Apolloniuses of
> Buddhism had as much chance of recognition and appreciation by the
> Brâhmanical Irenæuses and Tertullians as had their successors in the
> Judæan and Roman worlds. It was a historical rehearsal of the dramas that
> were enacted centuries later in Christendom. As in the case of the so‐
> called “Heresiarchs” of Christianity, it was not for rejecting the _Vedas_
> or the sacred Syllable that the Buddhist Arhats were persecuted, but for
> understanding too well the secret meaning of both. It was simply because
> their knowledge was regarded as dangerous and their presence in India
> unwelcome, that they had to emigrate.
> 
> Nor were there a smaller number of Initiates among the Brâhmans
> themselves. Even to‐day one meets most wonderfully‐gifted Sâddhus and
> Yogîs, obliged to keep themselves unnoticed and in the shadow, not only
> owing to the absolute secresy imposed upon them at their Initiation but
> also for fear of the Anglo‐Indian tribunals and courts of law, wherein
> judges are determined to regard as charlatanry, imposition, and fraud, the
> exhibition of, or claim to, any abnormal powers, and one may judge of the
> past by the present. Centuries after our era the Initiates of the inner
> temples and the Mathams (monastic communities) chose a superior council,
> presided over by an all‐powerful Brahm‐Âtmâ, the Supreme Chief of all
> those Mahâtmâs. This pontificate could be exercised only by a Brâhman who
> had reached a certain age, and he it was who was the sole guardian of the
> mystic formula, and he was the Hierophant who created great Adepts. He
> alone could explain the meaning of the sacred word, AUM, and of all the
> religious symbols and rites. And whosoever among those Initiates of the
> Supreme Degree revealed to a profane a single one of the truths, even the
> smallest of the secrets entrusted to him, had to die; and he who received
> the confidence was put to death.
> 
> But there existed, and still exists to this day, a Word far surpassing the
> mysterious monosyllable, and which renders him who comes into possession
> of its key nearly the equal of Brahman. The Brahmâtmâs alone possess this
> key, and we know that to this day there are two great Initiates in
> Southern India who possess it. It can be passed only at death, for it is
> the “Lost Word.” No torture, no human power, could force its disclosure by
> a Brâhman who knows it; and it is well guarded in Tibet.
> 
> Yet this secresy and this profound mystery are indeed disheartening, since
> they alone—the Initiates of India and Tibet—could thoroughly dissipate the
> thick mists hanging over the history of Occultism, and force its claims to
> be recognized. The Delphic injunction, “_Know thyself_,” seems for the few
> in this age. But the fault ought not to be laid at the door of the Adepts,
> who have done all that could be done, and have gone as far as Their rules
> permitted, to open the eyes of the world. Only while the European shrinks
> from public obloquy and the ridicule unsparingly thrown on Occultists, the
> Asiatic is being discouraged by his own Pandits. These profess to labour
> under the gloomy impression that no Bîga Vidyâ, no Arhatship (Adeptship),
> is possible during the Kali Yuga (the “Black Age”) we are now passing
> through. Even the Buddhists are taught that the Lord Buddha is alleged to
> have prophesied that the power would die out in “one millennium after His
> death.” But this is an entire mistake. In the _Dîgha Nikâya_ the Buddha
> says:
> 
>     Hear, Subhadra! The world will never be without Rahats, if the
>     ascetics in my congregations well and truly keep my precepts.
> 
> A similar contradiction of the view brought forward by the Brâhmans is
> made by Krishna in the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, and there is further the actual
> appearance of many Sâddhus and miracle‐workers in the past, and even in
> the present age. The same holds good for China and Tibet. Among the
> commandments of Tsong‐Kha‐pa there is one that enjoins the Rahats (Arhats)
> to make an attempt to enlighten the world, including the “white
> barbarians,” every century, at a certain specified period of the cycle. Up
> to the present day none of these attempts has been very successful.
> Failure has followed failure. Have we to explain the fact by the light of
> a certain prophecy? It is said that up to the time when Pban‐chhen‐rin‐po‐
> chhe (the Great Jewel of Wisdom)(732) condescends to be reborn in the land
> of the P’helings (Westerners), and appearing as the Spiritual Conqueror
> (Chom‐den‐da), destroys the errors and ignorance of the ages, it will be
> of little use to try to uproot the misconceptions of P’heling‐pa (Europe):
> her sons will listen to no one. Another prophecy declares that the Secret
> Doctrine shall remain in all its purity in Bhod‐yul (Tibet), only to the
> day that it is kept free from foreign invasion. The very visits of Western
> natives, however friendly, would be baneful to the Tibetan populations.
> This is the true key to Tibetan exclusiveness.
> 
> SECTION L. A FEW MORE MISCONCEPTIONS CORRECTED.
> 
> Notwithstanding widespread misconceptions and errors—often most amusing to
> one who has a certain knowledge of the true doctrines—about Buddhism
> generally, and especially about Buddhism in Tibet, all the Orientalists
> agree that the Buddha’s foremost aim was to lead human beings to salvation
> by teaching them to practise the greatest purity and virtue, and by
> detaching them from the service of this illusionary world, and the love of
> one’s still more illusionary—because so evanescent and unreal—body and
> physical self. And what is the good of a virtuous life, full of privations
> and suffering, if the only result of it is to be annihilation at the end?
> If even the attainment of that supreme perfection which leads the Initiate
> to remember the whole series of his past lives, and to foresee that of the
> future ones, by the full development of that inner, divine eye in him, and
> to acquire the knowledge that unfolds the causes(733) of the ever‐
> recurring cycles of existence, brings him finally to non‐being, and
> nothing more—then the whole system is idiotic, and Epicureanism is far
> more philosophical than _such_ Buddhism. He who is unable to comprehend
> the subtle, and yet so potent, difference between existence in a material
> or physical state and a purely spiritual existence—Spirit or “Soul‐
> life”—will never appreciate at their full value the grand teachings of the
> Buddha, even in their exoteric form. Individual or personal existence is
> the cause of pains and sorrows; collective and impersonal life‐eternal is
> full of divine bliss and joy for ever, with neither causes nor effects to
> darken its light. And the hope for such a life‐eternal is the keynote of
> the whole of Buddhism. If we are told that impersonal existence is no
> existence at all, but amounts to annihilation, as was maintained by some
> French reincarnationists, then we would ask: What difference can it make
> in the spiritual perceptions of an Ego whether he enter Nirvâna loaded
> with the recollections only of his own personal lives—tens of thousands
> according to the modern reincarnationists—or whether, merged entirely in
> the Parabrâhmic state it becomes one with the All, with the absolute
> knowledge and the absolute feeling of representing collective humanities?
> Once that an Ego lives only ten distinct individual lives he must
> necessarily lose his one self, and become mixed up—merged, so to say—with
> these ten selves. It really seems that so long as this great mystery
> remains a dead‐letter to the world of Western thinkers, and especially to
> the Orientalists, the less the latter undertake to explain it the better
> for Truth.
> 
> Of all the existing religious Philosophies, Buddhism is the least
> understood. The Lassens, Webers, Wassiljows, the Burnoufs and Juliens, and
> even such “eye‐witnesses” of Tibetan Buddhism as Csoma de Köros and the
> Schlagintweits, have hitherto only added perplexity to confusion. None of
> these has ever received his information from a genuine Gelugpa source: all
> have judged Buddhism from the bits of knowledge picked up at Tibetan
> frontier lamaseries, in countries thickly populated by Bhutanese and
> Leptchas, Bhons, and red‐capped Dugpas, along the line of the Himâlayas.
> Hundreds of volumes purchased from Burats, Shamans, and Chinese Buddhists,
> have been read and translated, glossed and misinterpreted according to
> invariable custom. Esoteric Schools would cease to be worthy of their name
> were their literature and doctrines to become the property of even their
> profane co‐religionists—still less of the Western public. This is simple
> common‐sense and logic. Nevertheless this is a fact which our Orientalists
> have ever refused to recognize: hence they have gone on, gravely
> discussing the relative merits and absurdities of idols, “sooth‐saying
> tables,” and “magical figures of Phurbu” on the “square tortoise.” None of
> these have anything to do with the real philosophical Buddhism of the
> Gelugpa, or even of the most educated among the Sakyapa and Kadampa sects.
> All such “plates” and sacrificial tables, Chinsreg magical circles, etc.,
> were avowedly got from Sikkhim, Bhutan, and Eastern Tibet, from Bhons and
> Dugpas. Nevertheless, these are given as characteristics of Tibetan
> Buddhism! It would be as fair to judge the unread Philosophy of Bishop
> Berkeley after studying Christianity in the clown‐worship of Neapolitan
> lazzaroni, dancing a mystic jig before the idol of St. Pip, or carrying
> the _ex‐voto_ in wax of the phallus of SS. Cosmo and Domiano, at Tsernie.
> 
> It is quite true that the primitive Shrâvakas (listeners or hearers) and
> the Shramanas (the “thought‐restrainers” and the “pure”) have degenerated,
> and that many Buddhist sects have fallen into mere dogmatism and
> ritualism. Like every other Esoteric, half‐suppressed teaching, the words
> of the Buddha convey a double meaning, and every sect has gradually come
> to claim to be the only one knowing the correct meaning, and thus to
> assume supremacy over the rest. Schism has crept in, and has fastened,
> like a hideous cancer, on the fair body of early Buddhism. Nâgârjuna’s
> Mahâyâna (“Great Vehicle”) School was opposed by the Hînayâna (or “Little
> Vehicle”) System, and even the Yogâchârya of Âryâsanga became disfigured
> by the yearly pilgrimage from India to the shores of Mansarovara, of hosts
> of vagabonds with matted locks who play at being Yogîs and Fakirs,
> preferring this to work. An affected detestation of the world, and the
> tedious and useless practice of the counting of inhalations and
> exhalations as a means to produce absolute tranquillity of mind or
> meditation, have brought this school within the region of Hatha Yoga, and
> have made it heir to the Brâhmanical Tîrthikas. And though its Srotâpatti,
> its Sakridâgâmin, Anâgâmin, and Arhats,(734) bear the same names in almost
> every school, yet the doctrines of each differ greatly, and none of these
> is likely to gain real Abhijñâs (the supernatural abnormal five powers).
> 
> One of the chief mistakes of the Orientalists when judging on “internal
> (?) evidence,” as they express it, was that they assumed that the Pratyeka
> Buddhas, the Bodhisattvas, and the “Perfect” Buddhas were a later
> development of Buddhism. For on these three chief degrees are based the
> seven and twelve degrees of the Hierarchy of Adeptship. The first are
> those who have attained the Bodhi (wisdom) of the Buddhas, but do not
> become Teachers.(735) The human Bodhisattvas are candidates, so to say,
> for perfect Buddhaship (in Kalpas to come), and with the option of using
> their powers now if need be. “Perfect” Buddhas are simply “perfect”
> Initiates. All these are men, and not disembodied Beings, as is given out
> in the Hînayâna exoteric books. Their correct character may be found only
> in the secret volumes of Lugrub or Nâgârjuna, the founder of the Mahâyâna
> system, who is said to have been initiated by the Nâgas (fabulous
> “Serpents,” the veiled name for an Initiate or Mahâtmâ). The fabled report
> found in Chinese records that Nâgârjuna considered his doctrine to be in
> opposition to that of Gautama Buddha, until he discovered from the Nâgas
> that it was precisely the doctrine that had been secretly taught by
> Shâkyamuni Himself, is an allegory, and is based upon the reconciliation
> between the old Brâhmanical secret Schools in the Himâlayas and Gautama’s
> Esoteric teachings, both parties having at first objected to the rival
> schools of the other. The former, the parent of all others, had been
> established beyond the Himâlayas for ages before the appearance of
> Shâkyamuni. Gautama was a pupil of this; and it was with them, those
> Indian Sages, that He had learned the truths of the Sungata, the emptiness
> and impermanence of every terrestrial, evanescent thing, and the mysteries
> of Prajñâ Pâramitâ, or “knowledge across the River,” which finally lands
> the “Perfect One” in the regions of the One Reality. But His Arhats were
> not Himself. Some of them were ambitious, and they modified certain
> teachings after the great councils, and it is on account of these
> “heretics” that the Mother‐School at first refused to allow them to blend
> their schools, when persecution began driving away the Esoteric
> Brotherhood from India. But when finally most of them submitted to the
> guidance and control of the chief Âshrams, then the Yogâchârya of
> Âryâsanga was merged into the oldest Lodge. For it is _there_ from time
> immemorial that has lain concealed the final hope and light of the world,
> the salvation of mankind. Many are the names of that School and land, the
> name of the latter being now regarded by the Orientalists as the mythic
> name of a fabulous country. It is from this mysterious land, nevertheless,
> that the Hindu expects his Kalki Avatâra, the Buddhist his Maitreya, the
> Pârsî his Sosiosh, and the Jew his Messiah, and so would the Christian
> expect thence his Christ—if he only knew of it.
> 
> There, and there alone, reigns Paranishpanna (Gunggrub), the absolutely
> perfect comprehension of Being and Non‐Being, the changeless true
> Existence in Spirit, even while the latter is seemingly still in the body,
> every inhabitant thereof being a Non‐Ego because he has become the Perfect
> Ego. Their voidness is “self‐existent and perfect”—if there were profane
> eyes to sense and perceive it—because it has become absolute; the unreal
> being transformed into conditionless Reality, and the realities of this,
> our world, having vanished in their own nature into thin (non‐existing)
> air. The “Absolute Truth” (Dondam‐pay‐den‐pa; Sanskrit: Paramârthasatya),
> having conquered “relative truth” (Kunza‐bchi‐den‐pa; Sanskrit:
> Samvritisatya), the inhabitants of the mysterious region are thus supposed
> to have reached the state called in mystic phraseology Svasamvedanâ
> (“self‐analyzing reflection”) and Paramârtha, or that absolute
> consciousness of the personal merged into the impersonal Ego, which is
> above all, hence above illusion in every sense. Its “Perfect” Buddhas and
> Bodhisattvas may be on every nimble Buddhist tongue as celestial—therefore
> unreachable Beings, while these names may suggest and say nothing to the
> dull perceptions of the European profane. What matters it to Those who,
> being in this world, yet live outside and far beyond our illusive earth!
> Above Them there is but one class of Nirvânîs, namely, the Chos‐ku
> (Dharmakâya), or the Nirvânîs “without remains”—the pure Arûpa, the
> formless Breaths.(736)
> 
> Thence emerge occasionally the Bodhisattvas in their Prul‐pai‐ku (or
> Nirmânakâya) body and, assuming an ordinary appearance, they teach men.
> There are conscious, as well as unconscious, incarnations.
> 
> Most of the doctrines contained in the Yogâchârya, or Mahâyâna systems are
> Esoteric, like the rest. One day the profane Hindu and Buddhist may begin
> to pick the _Bible_ to pieces, taking it literally. Education is fast
> spreading in Asia, and already there have been made some attempts in this
> direction, so that the tables may then be cruelly turned on the
> Christians. Whatever conclusions the two may arrive at, they will never be
> half as absurd and unjust as some of the theories launched by Christians
> against their respective Philosophies. Thus, according to Spence Hardy, at
> death the Arhat enters Nirvâna:
> 
>     That is, he ceases to exist.
> 
> And, agreeably to Major Jacob, the Jîvanmukta,
> 
>     Absorbed into Brahma, enters upon an unconscious and stonelike
>     existence.(737)
> 
> Shankarâchârya is shown as saying in his prolegomena to the
> _Shvetâshvatara:_
> 
>     Gnosis, once arisen, requires nothing farther for the realization
>     of its result: it needs _subsidia_ only that it may arise.
> 
> The Theosophist, it has been argued, as long as he lives, may do good and
> evil as he chooses, and incur no stain, such is the efficacy of gnosis.
> And it is further alleged that the doctrine of Nirvâna lends itself to
> immoral inferences, and that the Quietists of all ages have been taxed
> with immorality.(738)
> 
> According to Wassilyew(739) and Csoma de Köros,(740) the Prasanga School
> adopted a peculiar mode of
> 
>     Deducing the absurdity and erroneousness of every esoteric
>     opinion.(741)
> 
> Correct interpretations of Buddhist Philosophy are crowned by that gloss
> on a thesis from the Prasanga School, that
> 
>     Even an Arhat goes to hell in case he doubt anything,(742)
> 
> thus making of the most free‐thinking religion in the world a blind‐faith
> system. The “threat” refers simply to the well‐known law that even an
> Initiate may fail, and thus have his object utterly ruined, if he doubt
> for one moment the efficacy of his psychic powers—the alphabet of
> Occultism, as every Kabalist well knows.
> 
> The Tibetan sect of the Ngo‐vo‐nyid‐med par Mraba (“they who deny
> existence,” or “regard nature as Mâyâ”)(743) can never be contrasted for
> one moment with some of the nihilistic or materialistic schools of India,
> such as the Chârvâka. They are pure Vedântins—if anything—in their views.
> And if the Yogâchâryas may be compared with, or called the Tibetan
> Vishishtadwaitîs, the Prasanga School is surely the Adwaita Philosophy of
> the land. It was divided into two: one was originally founded by Bhavya,
> the Svantatra Madhyamika School, and the other by Buddhapâlita; both have
> their exoteric and esoteric divisions. It is necessary to belong to the
> latter to know anything of the esoteric doctrines of that sect, the most
> metaphysical and philosophical of all. Chandrakirti (Dava Dagpa) wrote his
> commentaries on the Prasanga doctrines and taught publicly; and he
> expressly states that there are two ways of entering the “Path” to
> Nirvâna. Any virtuous man can reach by Naljorngonsum (“meditation by self‐
> perception”), the intuitive comprehension of the four Truths, without
> either belonging to a monastic order or having been initiated. In this
> case it was considered as a heresy to maintain that the visions which may
> arise in consequence of such meditation, or Vishnâ (internal knowledge),
> are not susceptible of errors (Namtog or false visions), for they are.
> Alaya alone having an absolute and eternal existence, can alone have
> absolute knowledge; and even the Initiate, in his Nirmânakâya(744) body
> may commit an occasional mistake in accepting the false for the true in
> his explorations of the “Causeless” World. The Dharmakâya Bodhisattva is
> alone infallible, when in real Samâdhi. Âlaya, or Nying‐po, being the root
> and basis of all, invisible and incomprehensible to human eye and
> intellect, it can reflect only its reflection—not Itself. Thus that
> reflection will be mirrored like the moon in tranquil and clear water only
> in the passionless Dharmakâya intellect, and will be distorted by the
> flitting image of everything perceived in a mind that is itself liable to
> be disturbed.
> 
> In short, this doctrine is that of the Râj‐Yoga in its practice of the two
> kinds of the Samâdhi state; one of the “Paths” leading to the sphere of
> bliss (Sukhâvatî or Devachan), where man enjoys perfect, unalloyed
> happiness, but is yet still connected with personal existence; and the
> other the Path that leads to entire emancipation from the worlds of
> illusion, self, and unreality. The first one is open to all and is reached
> by merit simply; the second—a hundredfold more rapid—is reached through
> knowledge (Initiation). Thus the followers of the Prasanga School are
> nearer to Esoteric Buddhism than are the Yogâchâryas; for their views are
> those of the most secret Schools, and only the echo of these doctrines is
> heard in the _Yamyangshapda_ and other works in public circulation and
> use. For instance, the unreality of two out of the three divisions of time
> is given in public works, namely (_a_) that there is neither past nor
> future, both of these divisions being correlative to the present; and
> (_b_) that the reality of things can never be sensed or perceived except
> by him who has obtained the Dharmakâya body; here again is a difficulty,
> since this body “without remains” carries the Initiate to full
> Paranirvâna, if we accept the exoteric explanation verbally, and can
> therefore neither sense nor perceive. But evidently our Orientalists do
> not feel the _caveat_ in such incongruities, and they proceed to speculate
> without pausing to reflect over it. Literature on Mysticism being
> enormous, and Russia, owing to the free intercourse with the Burats,
> Shamans, and Mongolians, having alone purchased whole libraries on Tibet,
> scholars ought to know better by this time. It suffices to read, however,
> what Csoma wrote on the origin of the Kâla Chakra System,(745) or
> Wassilyew on Buddhism, to make one give up every hope of seeing them go
> below the rind of the “forbidden fruit.” When Schlagintweit is found
> saying that Tibetan Mysticism is not Yoga—
> 
>     That abstract devotion by which supernatural powers are
>     acquired,(746)
> 
> as Yoga is defined by Wilson, but that it is closely related to Siberian
> Shamanism, and is “almost identical with the Tântrika ritual”; and that
> the Tibetan _Zung_ is the “_Dhâranîs_,” and the _Gyut_ only the
> _Tantras_—pre‐Christian Tantra being judged by the ritual of the modern
> Tântrikas—one seems almost justified in suspecting our materialistic
> Orientalists of acting as the best friends and allies of the missionaries.
> Whatever is not known to our geographers seems to be a non‐existent
> locality. Thus:
> 
>     Mysticism is reported to have originated in the fabulous country,
>     Sambhala.... Csoma, from _careful_ investigations, places this
>     [fabulous?] country beyond the Sir Daria [Yaxartes] between 45°
>     and 50° north latitude. It was first known in India in the year
>     965 A.D., and was introduced ... into Tibet from India, _viâ_
>     Kashmir, in the year 1025 A.D.(747)
> 
> “It” meaning the “Dus‐kyi Khorlo,” or Tibetan Mysticism. A system as old
> as man, known in India and practised before Europe had become a continent,
> “was first known,” we are told, only nine or ten centuries ago! The text
> of its books in its present form may have “originated” even later, for
> there are numerous such texts that have been tampered with by sects to
> suit the fancies of each. But who has read the original book on Dus‐Kyi
> Khorlo, re‐written by Tsong‐Kha‐pa, with his Commentaries? Considering
> that this grand Reformer burnt every book on Sorcery on which he could lay
> his hands in 1387, and that he has left a whole library of his own
> works—not a tenth part of which has ever been made known—such statements
> as those above‐quoted are, to say the least, premature. The idea is also
> cherished—from a happy hypothesis offered by Abbé Huc—that Tsong‐Kha‐pa
> derived his wisdom and acquired his extraordinary powers from his
> intercourse with a stranger from the West, “remarkable for a long nose.”
> This stranger is believed by the good Abbé “to have been a European
> missionary”; hence the remarkable resemblance of the religious ritual in
> Tibet to the Roman Catholic service. The sanguine “Lama of Jehovah” does
> not say, however, who were the five foreigners who appeared in Tibet in
> the year 371 of our era, to disappear as suddenly and mysteriously as they
> came, after leaving with King Thothori‐Nyang‐tsan instructions how to use
> certain things in a casket that “had fallen from heaven” in his presence
> precisely fifty years before, or in the year A.D. 331.(748)
> 
> There is generally a hopeless confusion about Eastern dates among European
> scholars, but nowhere is this so great as in the case of Tibetan Buddhism.
> Thus, while some, correctly enough, accept the seventh century as the date
> of the introduction of Buddhism, there are others—such as Lassen and
> Koeppung, for instance—who show on good authority, the one, the
> construction of a Buddhist monastery on the slopes of the Kailas Range so
> far back as the year 137 B.C.,(749) and the other, Buddhism established in
> and north of the Punjab, as early as the year 292 B.C. The difference
> though trifling—only just one thousand years—is nevertheless puzzling. But
> even this is easily explained on Esoteric grounds. Buddhism—the veiled
> Esotericism of Buddha—was established and took root in the seventh century
> of the Christian era; while true Esoteric Buddhism, or the kernel, the
> very spirit of Tathâgata’s doctrines, was brought to the place of its
> birth, the cradle of humanity, by the chosen Arhats of Buddha, who were
> sent to find for it a secure refuge, as
> 
>     The Sage had perceived the dangers ever since he had entered upon
>     Thonglam (“the Path of seeing,” or clairvoyance).
> 
> Amidst populations deeply steeped in Sorcery the attempt proved a failure;
> and it was not until the School of the “Doctrine of the Heart” had merged
> with its predecessor, established ages earlier on the slope facing Western
> Tibet, that Buddhism was finally engrafted, with its two distinct
> Schools—the Esoteric and the exoteric divisions—in the land of the Bhon‐
> pa.
> 
> SECTION LI. THE “DOCTRINE OF THE EYE” & THE “DOCTRINE OF THE HEART,” OR
> THE “HEART’S SEAL.”
> 
> Prof. Albrecht Weber was right when he declared that the Northern
> Buddhists
> 
>     Alone possess these [Buddhist] Scriptures complete.
> 
> For, while the Southern Buddhists have no idea of the existence of an
> Esoteric Doctrine—enshrined like a pearl within the shell of every
> religion—the Chinese and the Tibetans have preserved numerous records of
> the fact. Degenerate, fallen as is now the Doctrine publicly preached by
> Gautama, it is yet preserved in those monasteries in China that are placed
> beyond the reach of visitors. And though for over two millennia every new
> “reformer,” taking something out of the original has replaced it by some
> speculation of his own, still truth lingers even now among the masses. But
> it is only in the Trans‐Himâlayan fastnesses—loosely called Tibet—in the
> most inaccessible spots of desert and mountain, that the Esoteric “Good
> Law”—the “Heart’s Seal”—lives to the present day in all its pristine
> purity.
> 
> Was Emanuel Swedenborg wrong when he remarked of the forgotten, long‐lost
> Word:
> 
>     Seek for it in China; peradventure you may find it in Great
>     Tartary.
> 
> He had obtained this information, he tells his readers, from certain
> “Spirits,” who told him that they performed their worship according to
> this (lost) ancient Word. On this it was remarked in _Isis Unveiled_ that
> 
>     Other students of Occult Sciences had more than the word of
>     “spirits” to rely upon in this special case: they have seen the
>     books
> 
> that contain the “Word.”(750) Perchance the names of those “Spirits” who
> visited the great Swedish Theosophist were Eastern. The word of a man of
> such undeniable and recognised integrity, of one whose learning in
> Mathematics, Astronomy, the natural Sciences and Philosophy was far in
> advance of his age, cannot be trifled with or rejected as unceremoniously
> as if it were the statement of a modern Theosophist; further, he claimed
> to pass at will into that state when the Inner Self frees itself entirely
> from every physical sense, and lives and breathes in a world where every
> secret of Nature is an open book to the Soul‐eye.(751) Unfortunately two‐
> thirds of his public writings are also allegorical in one sense; and, as
> they have been accepted literally, criticism has not spared the great
> Swedish Seer any more than other Seers.
> 
> Having taken a panoramic view of the hidden Sciences and Magic with their
> Adepts in Europe, Eastern Initiates must now be mentioned. If the presence
> of Esotericism in the Sacred Scriptures of the West only now begins to be
> suspected, after nearly two thousand years of blind faith in their
> _verbatim_ wisdom, the same may well be granted as to the Sacred Books of
> the East. Therefore neither the Indian nor the Buddhist system can be
> understood without a key, nor can the study of comparative Religion become
> a “Science” until the symbols of every Religion yield their final secrets.
> At the best such a study will remain a loss of time, a playing at hide‐
> and‐seek.
> 
> On the authority of a Japanese _Encyclopædia_, Remusat shows the Buddha,
> before His death, committing the secrets of His system to His disciple,
> Kâsyapa, to whom alone was entrusted the sacred keeping of the Esoteric
> interpretation. It is called in China _Ching‐fa‐yin‐Tsang_ (“the Mystery
> of the Eye of the Good Doctrine”). To any student of Buddhist Esotericism
> the term, “the Mystery of the Eye,” would show the absence of any
> Esotericism. Had the word “Heart” stood in its place, then it would have
> meant what it now only professes to convey. The “Eye Doctrine” means dogma
> and dead‐letter form, church ritualism intended for those who are content
> with exoteric formulæ. The “Heart Doctrine,” or the “Heart’s Seal” (the
> Sin Yin), is the only real one. This may be found corroborated by Hiuen
> Tsang. In his translation of _Mahâ‐Prajnâ‐Pâramitâ_ (_Ta‐poh‐je‐King_), in
> one hundred and twenty volumes, it is stated that it was Buddha’s
> “favourite disciple Ânanda,” who, after his great Master had gone into
> Nirvâna, was commissioned by Kâsyapa to promulgate “the Eye of the
> Doctrine,” the “Heart” of the Law having been left with the Arhats alone.
> 
> The essential difference that exists between the two—the “Eye” and the
> “Heart,” or the outward form and the hidden meaning, the cold metaphysics
> and the Divine Wisdom—is clearly demonstrated in several volumes on
> “Chinese Buddhism,” written by sundry missionaries. Having lived for years
> in China, they still know no more than they have learned from pretentious
> schools calling themselves esoteric, yet freely supplying the open enemies
> of their faith with professedly ancient manuscripts and esoteric works!
> This ludicrous contradiction between profession and practice has never, as
> it seems, struck any of the western and reverend historians of other
> peoples’ secret tenets. Thus many esoteric schools are mentioned in
> _Chinese Buddhism_ by the Rev. Joseph Edkins, who believes quite sincerely
> that he has made “a minute examination” of the secret tenets of Buddhists
> whose works “were until lately inaccessible in their original form.” It
> really will not be saying too much to state at once that the genuine
> Esoteric literature is “inaccessible” to this day, and that the
> respectable gentleman who was inspired to state that
> 
>     It does not appear that there was any secret doctrine which those
>     who knew it would not divulge,
> 
> made a great mistake if he ever believed in what he says on page 161 of
> his work. Let him know at once that all those Yû‐luh (“Records of the
> Sayings”) of celebrated teachers are simply blinds, as complete—if not
> more so—than those in the Purânas of the Brâhmans. It is useless to
> enumerate an endless string of the finest Oriental scholars or to bring
> forward the researches of Remusat, Burnouf, Koeppen, St. Hilaire, and St.
> Julian, who are credited with having exposed to view the ancient Hindu
> world, by revealing the sacred and secret books of Buddhism: the world
> that they reveal has never been veiled. The mistakes of all the
> Orientalists may be judged by the mistake of one of the most popular, if
> not the greatest among them all—Prof. Max Müller. It is made with
> reference to what he laughingly translates as the “god Who” (Ka).
> 
>     The authors of the Brâhmanas had so completely broken with the
>     past, that, forgetful of the poetical character of the hymns and
>     the yearning of the poets after the Unknown God, they exalted the
>     interrogative pronoun itself into a deity, and acknowledged a god
>     Ka (or Who?)... Wherever interrogative verses occur the author
>     states that Ka is Prajâpati, or the Lord of Creatures. Nor did
>     they stop here. Some of the hymns in which the interrogative
>     pronoun occurred were called Kadvat, _i.e._, having Kad or Quid.
>     But soon a new adjective was formed, and not only the hymns but
>     the sacrifice also offered to the god were called Kaya, or
>     “Who”‐ish.... At the time of Pânini this word acquired such
>     legitimacy as to call for a separate rule explaining its
>     formation. The Commentator here explains Ka by Brahman.
> 
> Had the commentator explained It even by Parabrahman he would have been
> still more in the right than he was by rendering It as “Brahman.” One
> fails to see why the secret and sacred Mystery‐Name of the highest,
> sexless, formless Spirit, the Absolute,—Whom no one would have dared to
> classify with the rest of the manifested Deities, or even to name during
> the primitive nomenclature of the symbolical Panthenon, should not be
> expressed by an interrogative pronoun. Is it those who belong to the most
> anthropomorphic Religion in the world who have a right to take ancient
> Philosophers to task for even an exaggerated religious awe and veneration?
> 
> But we are now concerned with Buddhism. Its Esotericism and oral
> instruction, which is written down and preserved in single copies by the
> highest chiefs in genuine Esoteric Schools, is shown by the author San‐
> Kian‐yi‐su. Contrasting Bodhidharma with Buddha, he exclaims:
> 
>     “Julai” (Tathâgata) taught great truths and the causes of things.
>     He became the instructor of men and Devas. He saved multitudes,
>     and spoke the contents of more than five hundred works. Hence
>     arose the Kiau‐men, or exoteric branch of the system, and it was
>     believed to be the tradition of the _words_ of Buddha. Bodhidharma
>     brought from the Western Heaven [Shamballa] the “Seal of Truth”
>     (true seal) and opened the fountain of contemplation in the East.
>     He pointed directly to Buddha’s heart and nature, swept away the
>     parasitic and alien growth of book‐instruction, and thus
>     established the Tsung‐men, or Esoteric branch of the system
>     containing the tradition of the heart of Buddha.(752)
> 
> A few remarks made by the author of _Chinese Buddhism_ throw a flood of
> light on the universal misconceptions of Orientalists in general, and of
> the missionaries in the “lands of the Gentiles” in particular. They appeal
> very forcibly to the intuition of Theosophists—more particularly of those
> in India. The sentences to be noticed are italicized.
> 
>     The common [Chinese] word for the esoteric Schools is _dan_, the
>     Sanskrit _Dhyâna_.... Orthodox Buddhism has in China slowly but
>     steadily _become heterodox_. The Buddhism of books and ancient
>     traditions _has become the Buddhism of mystic contemplation_....
>     The history of ancient schools springing up long ago in the
>     Buddhist communities of India _can now be only very partially
>     recovered_. Possibly some light may be thrown back by China upon
>     the religious history of the country from which Buddhism
>     came.(753) In no part of the story is aid to the recovery of the
>     lost knowledge more likely to be found than in the accounts of the
>     patriarchs, the line of whom was completed by Bodhidharma. In
>     seeking the best explanation of the Chinese and Japanese narrative
>     of the patriarchs, and the _seven Buddhas_ terminating in Gautama,
>     or Shâkyamuni, it is important to know the Jain traditions as they
>     were early in the sixth century of our era, when the Patriarch
>     Bodhidharma removed to China....
> 
>     In tracing the rise of the various schools of esoteric Buddhism it
>     must be kept in mind that a principle somewhat similar to the
>     dogma of apostolical succession belongs to them all. They all
>     profess _to derive their doctrines through a succession of
>     teachers, each instructed personally by his predecessor, till the
>     time of Bodhidharma, and so further up in the series to Shâkyamuni
>     himself and the earlier Buddhas_.(754)
> 
> It is complained further on, and is mentioned as a falling away from
> strict orthodox Buddhism, that _the Lamas of Tibet are received in Pekin
> with the utmost respect_ by the Emperor.
> 
> The following passages, taken from different parts of the book, summarise
> Mr. Edkins’ views:
> 
>     Hermits are not uncommonly met with in the vicinity of large
>     Buddhist temples ... their hair being allowed to grow unshorn....
>     The doctrine of metempsychosis is rejected. Buddhism is one form
>     of Pantheism on the ground that the doctrine of metempsychosis
>     makes all nature instinct with life, and that that life is the
>     Deity assuming different forms of personality, that Deity not
>     being a self‐conscious, free‐acting Self‐Cause, but an all‐
>     pervading Spirit. The esoteric Buddhists of China, keeping rigidly
>     to their one doctrine,(755) say nothing of the metempsychosis, ...
>     or any other of the more material parts of the Buddhist system....
>     The Western paradise promised to the worshippers of Amida Buddha
>     is ... inconsistent with the doctrine of Nirvana [?].(756)... _It
>     promises immortality_ instead of annihilation. The great antiquity
>     of this School is evident from the early date of the translation
>     of the _Amida Sûtra_, which came from the hands of Kumârajîva, and
>     the _Ku‐liang‐sheu‐King_, dating from the Han dynasty. Its extent
>     of influence is seen in the attachment of the Tibetans and Moguls
>     to the worship of this Buddha, and in the fact that the name of
>     this fictitious personage [?] is more commonly heard in China than
>     that of the historical Shâkyamuni.
> 
> We fear the learned writer is on a false track as to Nirvâna and Amita
> Buddha. However, here we have the evidence of a missionary to show that
> there are several schools of Esoteric Buddhism in the Celestial Empire.
> When the misuse of dogmatical orthodox Buddhist Scriptures had reached its
> climax, and the true spirit of the Buddha’s Philosophy was nearly lost,
> several reformers appeared from India, who established an oral teaching.
> Such were Bodhidharma and Nâgârjuna, the authors of the most important
> works of the contemplative School in China during the first centuries of
> our era. It is known, moreover, as is said in _Chinese Buddhism_, that
> Bodhidharma became the chief founder of the Esoteric Schools, which were
> divided into five principal branches. The data given are correct enough,
> but every conclusion, without one single exception, is wrong. It was said
> in _Isis Unveiled_ that—
> 
>     Buddha teaches the doctrine of a new birth as plainly as Jesus
>     does. Desiring to break with the ancient Mysteries, to which it
>     was impossible to admit the ignorant masses, the Hindu reformer,
>     though generally silent upon more than one secret dogma, clearly
>     states his thought in several passages. Thus, he says: “_Some
>     people are born again_; evil‐doers go to hell [Avitchi]; righteous
>     people go to heaven [Devachan]; those who are free from all
>     worldly desires enter Nirvâna” (_Precepts of the Dhammapada_, v.
>     126). Elsewhere Buddha states that “it is better to believe in a
>     future life, in which happiness or misery can be felt: for if the
>     heart believes therein it will abandon sin and act virtuously; and
>     even if there is no resurrection [rebirth], such a life will bring
>     a good name and the reward of men. But those who believe in
>     extinction at death will not fail to commit any sin that they may
>     choose, because of their disbelief in a future.” (See _Wheel of
>     the Law_.)
> 
> How is immortality, then, “inconsistent with the doctrine of Nirvâna?” The
> above are only a few of Buddha’s openly‐expressed thoughts to his chosen
> Arhats; the great Saint said much more. As a comment upon the mistaken
> views held in our century by the Orientalists, “who vainly try to fathom
> Tathâgata’s thoughts,” and those of Brâhmans, “who repudiate the great
> Teacher to this day,” here are some original thoughts expressed in
> relation to the Buddha and the study of the Secret Sciences. They are from
> a work written in Chinese by a Tibetan, and published in the monastery of
> Tientaï for circulation among the Buddhists
> 
>     Who live in foreign lands, and are in danger of being spoiled by
>     missionaries,
> 
> as the author truly says, every convert being not only “spoiled” for his
> own creed, but being also a sorry acquisition for Christianity. A
> translation of a few passages, kindly made from that work for the present
> volumes is now given.
> 
>     No profane ears having heard the mighty Chau‐yan [secret and
>     enlightening _precepts_] of Vu‐vei‐Tchen‐jen [Buddha _within_
>     Buddha],(757) of our beloved Lord and Bodhisattva, how can one
>     tell what his thoughts really were? The holy Sang‐gyas‐
>     Panchhen(758) never offered an insight into the _One Reality_ to
>     the unreformed [uninitiated] Bhikkus. Few are those even among the
>     Tu‐fon [Tibetans] who knew it; as for the Tsung‐men(759) Schools,
>     they are going with every day more down hill.... Not even the Fa‐
>     siong‐Tsung(760) can give one the wisdom taught in real Naljor‐
>     chod‐pa [Sanskrit:(761) Yogâchârya]: ... it is all “Eye” Doctrine,
>     and no more. The loss of a restraining guidance is felt, since the
>     Tch’‐an‐si [teachers] of inward meditation [self‐contemplation or
>     Tchung‐kwan] have become rare, and the Good Law is replaced by
>     idol‐worship [Siang‐kyan]. It is of this [idol‐ or image‐worship]
>     that the Barbarians [Western people] have heard, and know nothing
>     of Bas‐pa‐Dharma [the secret Dharma or doctrine]. Why has truth to
>     hide like a tortoise within its shell? Because it is now found to
>     have become like the Lama’s tonsure knife,(762) a weapon too
>     dangerous to use even for the Lanoo. Therefore no one can be
>     entrusted with the knowledge [Secret Science] before his time. The
>     Chagpa‐Thog‐mad have become rare, and the best have retired to
>     Tushita the Blessed.(763)
> 
> Further on, a man seeking to master the mysteries of Esotericism before he
> had been declared by the initiated Tch’‐an‐si (teachers) to be ready to
> receive them, is likened to
> 
>     One who would, without a lantern and on a dark night, proceed to a
>     place full of scorpions, determined to feel on the ground for a
>     needle his neighbour has dropped.
> 
> Again:
> 
>     He who would acquire the Sacred Knowledge should, before he goes
>     any farther “_trim his lamp_ of inner understanding,” and then
>     “with the help of such good light” use his meritorious actions as
>     a dust‐cloth to remove every impurity from his mystic mirror,(764)
>     so that he should be enabled to see in its lustre the faithful
>     reflection of Self.... First, this; then Tong‐pa‐nya,(765) lastly;
>     Samma Sambuddha.(766)
> 
> In _Chinese Buddhism_ a corroboration of these statements is to be found
> in the aphorisms of Lin‐tsi:
> 
>     Within the body which admits sensations, acquires knowledge,
>     thinks, and acts, there is the “true man without a position” Wu‐
>     wei‐chen‐jen. He makes himself clearly visible; not the thinnest
>     separating film hides him. Why do you not recognise him?... If the
>     mind does not come to conscious existence, there is deliverance
>     everywhere.... What is Buddha? _Ans._ A mind clear and at rest.
>     What is the Law? _Ans._ A mind clear and enlightened. What is
>     _Tau_? _Ans._ In every place absence of impediments and pure
>     enlightenment. These three are one.
> 
> The reverend author of _Chinese Buddhism_ makes merry over the symbolism
> of Buddhist discipline. Yet the self‐inflicted “slaps on the cheek” and
> “blows under the ribs” find their pendants in the mortifications of the
> body and self‐flagellation—“the discipline of the scourge”—of the
> Christian monks, from the first centuries of Christianity down to our own
> day. But then the said author is a Protestant, who substitutes for
> mortification and discipline—good living and comfort. The sentence in the
> Lin‐tsi,
> 
>     The “true man, without a position,” Wu‐wei‐chen‐jen, is wrapped in
>     a prickly shell, like the chestnut. He cannot be approached. This
>     is Buddha—the Buddha within you,
> 
> is laughed at. Truly
> 
>     An infant cannot understand the seven enigmas!
> 
> SOME PAPERS ON THE BEARING OF OCCULT PHILOSOPHY ON LIFE.
> 
> NOTE.
> 
> Papers I. II. III. of the following were written by H. P. B. and were
> circulated privately during her lifetime, but they were written with the
> idea that they would be published after a time. They are papers intended
> for students rather than for the ordinary reader, and will repay careful
> study and thought. The “Notes of some Oral Teaching” were written down by
> some of her pupils and were partially corrected by her, but no attempt has
> been made to relieve them of their fragmentary character. She had intended
> to make them the basis for written papers similar to the first three, but
> her failing health rendered this impossible, and they are published with
> her consent, the time for restricting them to a limited circle having
> expired.
> 
> ANNIE BESANT.
> 
> Paper I. A Warning.
> 
> There is a strange law in Occultism which has been ascertained and proven
> by thousands of years of experience; nor has it failed to demonstrate
> itself, almost in every case, during the years that the Theosophical
> Society has been in existence. As soon as anyone pledges himself as a
> “Probationer,” certain Occult effects ensue. Of these the first is the
> _throwing outward_ of everything latent in the nature of the man; his
> faults, habits, qualities or subdued desires, whether good, bad or
> indifferent.
> 
> For instance, if a man be vain or a sensualist, or ambitious, whether by
> atavism or by karmic heirloom, those vices are sure to break out, even if
> he has hitherto successfully concealed and repressed them. They will come
> to the front irrepressibly, and he will have to fight a hundred times
> harder than before, until he kills all such tendencies in himself.
> 
> On the other hand, if he be good, generous, chaste and abstemious, or has
> any virtue hitherto latent and concealed in him, it will work its way out
> as irrepressibly as the rest. Thus a civilized man who hates to be
> considered a saint, and therefore assumes a mask, will not be able to
> conceal his true nature, whether base or noble.
> 
> THIS IS AN IMMUTABLE LAW IN THE DOMAIN OF THE OCCULT.
> 
> Its action is the more marked, the more earnest and sincere the desire of
> the candidate, and the more deeply he has felt the reality and importance
> of his pledge.
> 
>                   ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> 
> The ancient occult axiom, “Know Thyself,” must be familiar to every
> student; but few if any have apprehended the real meaning of this wise
> exhortation of the Delphic Oracle. You all know your earthly pedigree, but
> who of you has ever traced all the links of heredity, astral, psychic and
> spiritual, which go to make you what you are? Many have written and
> expressed their desire to unite themselves with their Higher Ego, yet none
> seem to know the indissoluble link connecting their “Higher Egos” with the
> One Universal SELF.
> 
> For all purposes of Occultism, whether practical or purely metaphysical,
> such knowledge is absolutely requisite. It is proposed, therefore, to
> begin these papers by showing this connection in all directions with the
> worlds: Absolute, Archetypal, Spiritual, Mânasic, Psychic, Astral, and
> Elemental. Before, however, we can touch upon the higher
> worlds—Archetypal, Spiritual and Mânasic—we must master the relations of
> the seventh, the terrestrial world, the lower Prakriti, or Malkuth as in
> the Kabalah, to the worlds or planes which immediately follow it.
> 
> OM.
> 
> “OM,” says the Âryan Adept, the son of the Fifth Race, who with this
> syllable begins and ends his salutation to the human being, his
> conjuration of, or appeal to, non‐human PRESENCES.
> 
> “OM‐MANI,” murmurs the Turanian Adept, the descendant of the Fourth Race;
> and after pausing he adds, “PADME‐HUM.”
> 
> This famous invocation is very erroneously translated by the Orientalists
> as meaning, “Oh the Jewel in the Lotus.” For although, literally, OM is a
> syllable sacred to the Deity, PADME means “in the Lotus,” and MANI is any
> precious stone, still neither the words themselves, nor their symbolical
> meaning, are thus really correctly rendered.
> 
> In this, the most sacred of all Eastern formulas, not only has every
> syllable a secret potency producing a definite result, but the whole
> invocation has seven different meanings and can produce seven distinct
> results, each of which may differ from the others.
> 
> The seven meanings and the seven results depend upon the intonation which
> is given to the whole formula and to each of its syllables; and even the
> numerical value of the letters is added to or diminished according as such
> or another rhythm is made use of. Let the student remember that number
> underlies form, and number guides sound. Number lies at the root of the
> manifested Universe: numbers and harmonious proportions guide the first
> differentiations of homogeneous substance into heterogeneous elements; and
> number and numbers set limits to the formative hand of Nature.
> 
> Know the corresponding numbers of the fundamental principle of every
> element and its sub‐elements, learn their interaction and behaviour on the
> occult side of manifesting Nature, and the law of correspondences will
> lead you to the discovery of the greatest mysteries of macrocosmical life.
> 
> But to arrive at the macrocosmical, you must begin by the microcosmical,
> _i.e._, you must study MAN, the microcosm—in this case as physical science
> does—inductively, proceeding from particulars to universals. At the same
> time, however, since a key‐note is required to analyze and comprehend any
> combination of differentiations of sound, we must never lose sight of the
> Platonic method, which starts with one general view of all, and descends
> from the universal to the individual. This is the method adopted in
> Mathematics—the only _exact_ science that exists in our day.
> 
> Let us study Man, therefore; but if we separate him for one moment from
> the Universal Whole, or view him in isolation, from a single aspect, apart
> from the “Heavenly Man”—the Universe symbolized by Adam Kadmon or his
> equivalents in every Philosophy—we shall either land in Black Magic or
> fail most ingloriously in our attempt.
> 
> Thus the mystic sentence, “_Om Mani Padme Hum_,” when rightly understood,
> instead of being composed of the almost meaningless words, “Oh the Jewel
> in the Lotus,” contains a reference to this indissoluble union between Man
> and the Universe, rendered in seven different ways, and having the
> capability of seven different applications to as many planes of thought
> and action.
> 
> From whatever aspect we examine it, it means: “I am that I am”: “I am in
> thee and thou art in me.” In this conjunction and close union the good and
> pure man becomes a God. Whether consciously or unconsciously, he will
> bring about, or innocently cause to happen, unavoidable results. In the
> first case, if an Initiate (of course an Adept of the Right‐hand Path
> alone is meant), he can guide a beneficent or a protecting current, and
> thus benefit and protect individuals and even whole nations. In the second
> case, although quite unaware of what he is doing, the good man becomes a
> shield to whomsoever he is with.
> 
> Such is the fact; but its how and why have to be explained, and this can
> be done only when the actual presence and potency of numbers in sounds,
> and hence in words and letters, have been rendered clear. The formula,
> “_Om Mani Padme Hum_,” has been chosen as an illustration on account of
> its almost infinite potency in the mouth of an Adept, and of its
> potentiality when pronounced by any man. Be careful, all you who read
> this: do not use these words in vain, or when in anger, lest you become
> yourself the first sacrificial victim, or, what is worse, endanger those
> whom you love.
> 
> The profane Orientalist, who all his life skims mere externals, will tell
> you flippantly, and laughing at the superstition, that in Tibet this
> sentence is the most powerful six‐syllabled incantation and is said to
> have been delivered to the nations of Central Asia by Padmapâni, the
> Tibetan Chenresi.(767)
> 
> But who is Padmapâni, in reality? Each of us must recognize him for
> himself, whenever he is ready. Each of us has within himself the “Jewel in
> the Lotus,” call it Padmapâni, Krishna, Buddha, Christ, or whatever name
> we may give to our Divine Self. The exoteric story runs thus:
> 
> The supreme Buddha, or Amitâbha, they say, at the hour of the creation of
> man, caused a rosy ray of light to issue from his right eye. The ray
> emitted a sound and became Padmapâni Bodhisattva. Then the Deity allowed
> to stream forth from his left eye a blue ray of light, which, becoming
> incarnate in the two virgins Dolma, acquired the power to enlighten the
> minds of living beings. Amitâbha then called the combination, which
> forthwith took up its abode in man, “_Om Mani Padme Hum_,” “I am the Jewel
> in the Lotus and in it I will remain.” Then Padmapâni, “the One in the
> Lotus” vowed never to cease working until he had made Humanity feel his
> presence in itself and had thus saved it from the misery of rebirth. He
> vowed to perform the feat before the end of the Kalpa, adding that, in
> case of failure, he wished that his head should split into numberless
> fragments. The Kalpa closed; but Humanity felt him not within its cold,
> evil heart. Then Padmapâni’s head split and was shattered into a thousand
> fragments. Moved with compassion, the Deity re‐formed the pieces into
> _ten_ heads, three white, and seven of various colours. And since that day
> man has become a perfect number, or TEN.
> 
> In this allegory the potency of SOUND, COLOUR, and NUMBER is so
> ingeniously introduced as to veil the real Esoteric meaning. To the
> outsider it reads like one of the many meaningless fairy‐tales of
> creation; but it is pregnant with spiritual and divine, physical and
> magical meaning. From Amitâbha—_no colour_, or the _white glory_—are born
> the seven differentiated colours of the prism. These each emit a
> corresponding sound, forming the seven of the _musical scale_. As
> Geometry, among the Mathematical Sciences, is specially related to
> Architecture, and also (proceeding to Universals) to Cosmogony, so the ten
> Jods of the Pythagorean Tetrad, or Tetraktys, being made to symbolize the
> Macrocosm, the Microcosm, or man, its image, had also to be divided into
> ten points. For this Nature herself has provided, as will be seen.
> 
> But before this statement can be proved and the perfect correspondences
> between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm demonstrated, a few words of
> explanation are necessary.
> 
> To the learner who would study the Esoteric Sciences with their double
> object: (_a_) of proving Man to be identical in spiritual and physical
> essence with both the Absolute Principle and with God in Nature; and (_b_)
> of demonstrating the presence in him of the same potential powers as exist
> in the creative forces in Nature—to such a one a perfect knowledge of the
> correspondences between Colours, Sounds, and Numbers is the first
> requisite. As already said, the sacred formula of the far East, “_Om Mani
> Padme Hum_,” is the one best calculated to make these correspondential
> qualities and functions clear to the learner.
> 
> In the allegory of Padmapâni, the Jewel (or Spiritual Ego) in the Lotus,
> or the symbol of androgynous man, the numbers 3, 4, 7, 10, as synthesizing
> the _Unit_, Man, are prominent, as I have already said. It is on the
> thorough knowledge and comprehension of the meaning and potency of these
> numbers, in their various and multiform combinations, and in their mutual
> correspondence with sounds or words, and colours or rates of motion
> (represented in physical science by vibrations), that the progress of a
> student in Occultism depends. Therefore we must begin with the first,
> initial word, OM, or AUM. OM is a “blind.” The sentence “_Om Mani Padme
> Hum_” is not a six‐ but a seven‐syllabled phrase, as the first syllable is
> double in its right pronunciation, and triple in its essence, A‐UM. It
> represents the for ever concealed primeval triune differentiation, not
> _from_ but _in_ the ONE Absolute, and is therefore symbolized by the 4, or
> the Tetraktys, in the metaphysical world. It is the Unit‐ray, or Âtman.
> 
> It is the Âtman, this highest Spirit in man, which, in conjunction with
> Buddhi and Manas, is called the upper Triad, or Trinity. This Triad with
> its four lower human principles, is, moreover, enveloped with an auric
> atmosphere, like the yolk of an egg (the future embryo) by the albumen and
> shell. This, to the perceptions of higher Beings from other planes, makes
> of each individuality an oval sphere of more or less radiancy.
> 
> To show the student the perfect correspondence between the birth of
> Kosmos, a World, a Planetary Being, or a Child of Sin and Earth, a more
> definite and clear description must be given. Those acquainted with
> Physiology will understand it better than others.
> 
> Who, having read say the _Vishnu_ or other _Purâna_, is not familiar with
> the exoteric allegory of the birth of Brahmâ (male‐female) in the Egg of
> the World, Hiranyagarbha, surrounded by its seven zones, or rather planes,
> which in the world of form and matter become seven and fourteen Lokas; the
> numbers seven and fourteen reäppearing as occasion requires.
> 
> Without giving out the secret analysis, the Hindus have from time
> immemorial compared the matrix of the Universe, and also the solar matrix,
> to the female uterus. It is written of the former: “Its womb is vast as
> the Meru,” and
> 
>     The future mighty oceans lay asleep in the waters that filled its
>     cavities, the continents, seas and mountains, the stars, planets,
>     the gods, demons and mankind.
> 
> The whole resembled, in its inner and outer coverings, the cocoanut filled
> interiorly with pulp, and covered externally with husk and rind. “Vast as
> Meru,” say the texts.
> 
>     Meru was its Amnion, and the other mountains were its Chorion,
> 
> adds a verse in _Vishnu Purâna_.(768)
> 
> In the same way is man born in his mother’s womb. As Brahmâ is surrounded,
> in exoteric traditions, by seven layers within and seven without the
> Mundane Egg, so is the embryo (the first or the seventh layer, according
> to the end from which we begin to count). Thus, just as Esotericism in its
> Cosmogony enumerates seven inner and seven outer layers, so Physiology
> notes the contents of the uterus as seven also, although it is completely
> ignorant of this being a copy of what takes place in the Universal Matrix.
> These contents are:
> 
> 1. _Embryo._ 2. _Amniotic Fluid_, immediately surrounding the Embryo. 3.
> _Amnion_, a membrane derived from the Fœtus, which contains the fluid. 4.
> _Umbilical Vesicle_, which serves to convey nourishment originally to the
> Embryo and to nourish it. 5. _Allantois_, a protrusion from the Embryo in
> the form of a closed bag, which spreads itself between 3 and 7, in the
> midst of 6, and which, after being specialized into the Placenta, serves
> to conduct nourishment to the Embryo. 6. _Interspace_ between 3 and 7 (the
> Amnion and Chorion), filled with an albuminous fluid. 7. _Chorion_, or
> outer layer.
> 
> Now, each of these seven contents severally corresponds with, and is
> formed after, an antetype, one on each of the seven planes of being, with
> which in their turn correspond the seven states of Matter and all other
> forces, sensational or functional, in Nature.
> 
> The following is a bird’s‐eye view of the seven correspondential contents
> of the wombs of Nature and of Woman. We may contrast them thus:
> 
>     (1) Cosmic Process: The mathematical Point, called the “Cosmic
>     Seed,” the Monad of Leibnitz; which contains the whole Universe,
>     as the acorn the oak. This is the first bubble on the surface of
>     boundless homogeneous Substance, or Space, the bubble of
>     differentiation in its incipient stage. It is the beginning of the
>     Orphic or Brahmâ’s Egg. It corresponds in Astrology and Astronomy
>     to the Sun.
> 
>     Human Process: The terrestrial Embryo, which contains in it the
>     future man with all his potentialities. In the series of
>     principles of the human system it is the Âtman, or the super‐
>     spiritual principle, just as in the physical Solar System it is
>     the Sun.
> 
>     (2) Cosmic Process: The _vis vitæ_ of our solar system exudes from
>     the Sun. Human Process: The Amniotic Fluid exudes from the Embryo.
> 
>     (_a_) Cosmic Process: It is called, when referred to the higher
>     planes, Âkâsha. Human Process: It is called, on the plane of
>     matter, Prâna.(769)
> 
>     (_b_) Cosmic Process: It proceeds from the ten “divinities,” the
>     ten numbers of the Sun, which is itself the “Perfect Number.”
>     These are called Dis—in reality Space—the forces spread in Space,
>     three of which are contained in the Sun’s Âtman, or seventh
>     principle, and seven are the rays shot out by the Sun.
> 
>     Human Process: It proceeds, taking its source in the universal One
>     Life, from the heart of man and Buddhi, over which the Seven Solar
>     Rays (Gods) preside.
> 
>     (3) Cosmic Process: The Ether of Space, which, in its external
>     aspect, is the plastic crust which is supposed to envelope the
>     Sun. On the higher plane it is the whole Universe, as the third
>     differentiation of evolving Substance, Mûlaprakriti becoming
>     Prakriti.
> 
>     Human Process: The Amnion, the membrane containing the Amniotic
>     Fluid and enveloping the Embryo. After the birth of man it becomes
>     the third layer, so to say, of his magneto‐vital aura.
> 
>     (_a_) Cosmic Process: It corresponds mystically to the manifested
>     Mahat, or the Intellect or Soul of the World. Human Process:
>     Manas, the third principle (counting from above), or the Human
>     Soul in Man.
> 
>     (4) Cosmic Process: The sidereal contents of Ether, the
>     substantial parts of it, unknown to Modern Science, represented as
>     follows. Human Process: Umbilical Vesicle, serving, as Science
>     teaches, to nourish the Embryo originally, but, as Occult Science
>     avers, to carry to the Fœtus by osmosis the cosmic influences
>     extraneous to the mother.
> 
>     (_a_) Cosmic Process: In Occult and Kabalistic Mysteries, by
>     Elementals. Human Process: In the grown man these become the
>     feeders of Kâma, over which they preside.
> 
>     (_b_) Cosmic Process: In physical Astronomy, by meteors, comets,
>     and all kinds of casual and phenomenal cosmic bodies. Human
>     Process: In the physical man, his passions and emotions, the moral
>     meteors and comets of human nature.
> 
>     (5) Cosmic Process: Life currents in Ether, having their origin in
>     the Sun: the canals through which the vital principle of that
>     Ether (the blood of the Cosmic Body) passes to nourish everything
>     on the Earth and on the other Planets: from the minerals, which
>     are thus made to grow and become specialized, from the plants,
>     which are thus fed, to animal and man, to whom life is thus
>     imparted.
> 
>     Human Process: The Allantois, a protrusion from the Embryo, which
>     spreads itself between the Amnion and Chorion; it is supposed to
>     conduct the nourishment from the mother to the Embryo. It
>     corresponds to the life‐principle, Prâna or Jîva.
> 
>     (6) Cosmic Process: The double radiation, psychic and physical,
>     which radiates from the Cosmic Seed and expands around the whole
>     Kosmos, as well as around the Solar System and every Planet. In
>     Occultism it is called the upper divine, and the lower material,
>     Astral Light.
> 
>     Human Process: The Allantois is divided into two layers. The
>     interspace between the Amnion and the Chorion contains the
>     Allantois and also an albuminous fluid.(770)
> 
>     (7) Cosmic Process: The outer crust of every sidereal body, the
>     Shell of the Mundane Egg, or the sphere of our Solar System, of
>     our Earth, and of every man and animal. In sidereal space, Ether
>     proper; on the terrestrial plane, Air, which again is built in
>     seven layers.
> 
>     Human Process: The Chorion, or the _Zona Pellucida_, the globular
>     object called Blastodermic Vesicle, the outer and the inner layers
>     of the membrane of which go to form the physical man. The outer,
>     or ectoderm, forms his epidermis; the inner, or endoderm, his
>     muscles, bones, etc. Man’s skin, again, is composed of seven
>     layers.
> 
>     (_a_) Cosmic Process: The primordial potential world‐stuff becomes
>     (for the Manvantaric period) the permanent globe or globes. Human
>     Process: The “primitive” becomes the “permanent” Chorion.
> 
> Even in the evolution of the Races we see the same order as in Nature and
> Man.(771) Placental animal‐man became such only after the separation of
> sexes in the Third Root‐Race. In the physiological evolution, the placenta
> is fully formed and functional only after the third month of uterine life.
> 
> Let us put aside such human conceptions as a personal God, and hold to the
> purely divine, to that which underlies all and everything in boundless
> Nature. It is called by its Sanskrit Esoteric name in the _Vedas_, TAT (or
> THAT), a term for the unknowable Rootless Root. If we do so, we may answer
> these seven questions of the _Esoteric Catechism_ thus:
> 
>     (1) Q.—What is the Eternal Absolute?
> 
>     A.—THAT.
> 
>     (2) Q.—How came Kosmos into being?
> 
>     A.—Through THAT.
> 
>     (3) Q.—How, or what will it be when it falls back into Pralaya?
> 
>     A.—In THAT.
> 
>     (4) Q.—Whence all the animate, and suppositionally, the
>     “inanimate” nature?
> 
>     A.—From THAT.
> 
>     (5) Q.—What is the Substance and Essence of which the Universe is
>     formed?
> 
>     A.—THAT.
> 
>     (6) Q.—Into what has it been and will be again and again resolved?
> 
>     A.—Into THAT.
> 
>     (7) Q.—Is THAT then both the instrumental and material cause of
>     the Universe?
> 
>     A.—What else is it or can it be than THAT?
> 
> As the Universe, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm,(772) are _ten_, why
> should we divide Man into _seven_ “principles”? This is the reason why the
> perfect number ten is divided into two: in their completeness, _i.e._,
> super‐spiritually and physically, the forces are TEN: to wit, three on the
> subjective and inconceivable, and seven on the objective plane. Bear in
> mind that I am now giving you the description of the two opposite poles:
> (_a_) the primordial Triangle, which, as soon as it has reflected itself
> in the “Heavenly Man,” the highest of the lower seven—disappears,
> returning into “Silence and Darkness”; and (_b_) the astral paradigmatic
> man, whose Monad (Âtmâ) is also represented by a triangle, as it has to
> become a ternary in conscious Devachanic interludes. The purely
> terrestrial man being reflected in the universe of Matter, so to say,
> upside down, the upper Triangle, wherein the creative ideation and the
> subjective potentiality of the formative faculty resides, is shifted in
> the man of clay below the seven. Thus three of the ten, containing in the
> archetypal world only ideative and paradigmatical potentiality, _i.e._,
> existing in possibility, not in action, are in fact one. The potency of
> formative creation resides in the Logos, the synthesis of the seven Forces
> or Rays, which becomes forthwith the Quaternary, the sacred Tetraktys.
> This process is repeated in man, in whom the lower physical triangle
> becomes, in conjunction with the female One, the male‐female creator, or
> generator. The same on a still lower plane in the animal world. A mystery
> above, a mystery below, truly.
> 
> This is how the upper and highest, and the lower and most animal, stand in
> mutual relation.
> 
> Diagram I
> 
> 1st—Macrocosm and Its 3, 7, or 10 Centres of Creative Forces
> 
>                    [Illustration: Triangle with A B C]
> 
> A. B. C. The Unknowable
> A. Sexless, Unmanifested Logos
> B. Potential Wisdom
> C. Universal Ideation
> 
>                  [Illustration: Circle with a through g]
> 
> a. Creative Logos
> b. Eternal Substance
> c. Spirit
> 
> a. b. c. This is Pradhâna, undifferentiated matter in Sânkhya philosophy,
> or Good, Evil and Chaotic Darkness (Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas),
> neutralizing each other. When differentiated, they become the Seven
> Creative Potencies: Spirit, Substance and Fire stimulating Matter to form
> itself.
> 
> D. The Spiritual Forces acting in Matter
> 
> 2nd.—Microcosm (the Inner Man) and his 3, 7, or 10 Centres of Potential
> Forces
> 
>                  [Illustration: Circle with 1 through 6]
> 
> (ÂTMAN, although exoterically reckoned as the seventh principle, is no
> individual principle at all, and belongs to the Universal Soul; 7 is the
> AURIC EGG, the Magnetic Sphere round every human and animal being.)
> 
> 1. BUDDHI, the vehicle of ÂTMÂ.
> 
> 2. MANAS, the vehicle of BUDDHI.
> 
> 3. LOWER MANAS (the Upper and Lower MANAS are two aspects of one and the
> same principle) and
> 
> 4. KÂMA RÛPA, its vehicle.
> 
> 5. PRÂNA, Life, and
> 
> 6. LINGA SHARIRA, its vehicle
> 
> I. II. III. are the Three Hypostases of ÂTMAN, its contact with Nature and
> Man being the Fourth, making it a Quaternary, or Tetraktys, the Higher
> self.
> 
> 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. These six principles, acting on four different planes,
> and having their AURIC ENVELOPE on the seventh (_vide infra_), are those
> used by the Adepts of the Right‐Hand, or White Magicians.
> 
> 3rd.—Microcosm (the Physical Man) and his 10 Orifices, or centres of
> Action
> 
>                  [Illustration: Circle with 1 through 10]
> 
> 1. (BUDDHI) Right Eye
> 
> 3. (LOWER MANAS) Right Ear
> 
> 5. (LIFE PRINCIPLE) Right Nostril
> 
> 7. The Organ of the CREATIVE LOGOS, the Mouth
> 
> 8. 9. 10. As this Lower Ternary has a direct connection with the Higher
> Âtmic Triad and its three aspects (creative, preservative and destructive,
> or rather regenerative), the abuse of the corresponding functions is the
> most terrible of Karmic Sins—the Sin against the Holy Ghost with the
> Christians.
> 
> 2. (MANAS) Left Eye
> 
> 4. (KÂMA RÛPA) Left Ear
> 
> 6. (LIFE VEHICLE) Left Nostril
> 
> 7. The Paradigm of the 10th (creative) orifice in the Lower Triad.
> 
> These Physical Organs are used only by Dugpas in Black Magic.
> 
> In this diagram, we see that physical man (or his body) does not share in
> the _direct_ pure waves of the divine Essence which flows from the _One in
> Three_, the Unmanifested, through the Manifested Logos (the upper face in
> the diagram). Purusha, the primeval Spirit, touches the human head and
> stops there. But the Spiritual Man (the synthesis of the seven principles)
> is directly connected with it. And here a few words ought to be said about
> the usual exoteric enumeration of the principles. At first an approximate
> division only was made and given out. _Esoteric Buddhism_ begins with
> Âtmâ, the seventh, and ends with the Physical Body, the first. Now neither
> Âtmâ, which is no individual “principle,” but a radiation _from_ and _one
> with_ the Unmanifested Logos; nor the Body, which is the material rind, or
> shell, of the Spiritual Man, can be, in strict truth, referred to as
> “principles.” Moreover, the chief “principle” of all, one not even
> mentioned heretofore, is the “Luminous Egg” (Hiranyagarbha), or the
> invisible magnetic sphere in which every man is enveloped.(773) It is the
> direct emanation: (_a_) from the Âtmic Ray in its triple aspect of
> Creator, Preserver and Destroyer (Regenerator); and (_b_) from Buddhi‐
> Manas. The _seventh_ aspect of this individual Aura is the faculty of
> assuming the form of its body and becoming the “Radiant,” the Luminous
> Augoeides. It is this, strictly speaking, which at times becomes the form
> called Mâyâvi Rûpa. Therefore, as explained in the second face of the
> diagram (the astral man), the Spiritual Man consists of only five
> principles, as taught by the Vedântins,(774) who substitute, tacitly, for
> the physical this sixth, or Auric, Body, and merge the dual Manas (the
> dual mind, or consciousness) into one. Thus they speak of five Koshas
> (sheaths or principles), and call Âtmâ the sixth yet no “principle.” This
> is the secret of the late Subba Row’s criticism of the division in
> _Esoteric Buddhism_. But let the student now learn the true Esoteric
> enumeration.
> 
> The reason why public mention of the Auric Body was not permitted was on
> account of its being so sacred. It is this Body which, at death,
> assimilates the essence of Buddhi and Manas and becomes the vehicle of
> these spiritual principles, _which are not objective_, and then, with the
> full radiation of Âtmâ upon it ascends as Manas‐Taijasi into the
> Devachanic state. Therefore is it called by many names. It is the
> Sûtrâtmâ, the silver “thread” which “incarnates” from the beginning of
> Manvantara to the end, stringing upon itself the pearls of human
> existence, in other words, the spiritual aroma of every personality it
> _follows_ through the pilgrimage of life.(775) It is also the material
> from which the Adept forms his Astral Bodies, from the Augoeides and the
> Mâyâvi Rûpa downwards. After the death of man, when its most ethereal
> particles have drawn into themselves the spiritual principles of Buddhi
> and the Upper Manas, and are illuminated with the radiance of Âtmâ, the
> Auric Body remains either in the Devachanic state of consciousness, or, in
> the case of a full Adept, prefers the state of a Nirmânakâya, that is, one
> who has so purified his whole system that he is above even the divine
> illusion of a Devachanî. Such an Adept remains in the astral (invisible)
> plane connected with our earth, and henceforth moves and lives in the
> possession of all his principles except the Kâma Rûpa and Physical Body.
> In the case of the Devachanî, the Linga Sharîra—the _alter ego_ of the
> body, which during life is within the physical envelope while the radiant
> aura is without—strengthened by the material particles which this aura
> leaves behind, remains close to the dead body and outside it, and soon
> fades away. In the case of the full Adept, the body alone becomes subject
> to dissolution, while the centre of that force which was the seat of
> desires and passions, disappears with its cause—the animal body. But
> during the life of the latter all these centres are more or less active
> and in constant correspondence with their prototypes, the cosmic centres,
> and their microcosms, the principles. It is only through these cosmic and
> spiritual centres that the physical centres (the upper seven orifices and
> the lower triad) can benefit by their Occult interaction, for these
> orifices, or openings, are channels conducting into the body the
> influences that _the will of man_ attracts and uses, _viz._, the cosmic
> forces.
> 
> This will has, of course, to act primarily through the spiritual
> principles. To make this clearer, let us take an example. In order to stop
> pain, let us say in the right eye, you have to attract to it the potent
> magnetism from that cosmic principle which corresponds to this eye and
> also to Buddhi. Create, by a powerful will effort, an imaginary line of
> communication between the right eye and Buddhi, locating the latter as a
> _centre_ in the same part of the head. This line, though you may call it
> “imaginary,” is, once you succeed in seeing it with your mental eye and
> give it a shape and colour, in truth as good as real. A rope in a dream
> _is not_ and yet _is_. Moreover, according to the prismatic colour with
> which you endow your line, so will the influence act. Now Buddhi and
> Mercury correspond with each other, and both are yellow, or radiant and
> golden coloured. In the human system, the right eye corresponds with
> Buddhi and Mercury; and the left with Manas and Venus or Lucifer. Thus, if
> your line is golden or silvery, it will stop the pain; if red, it will
> increase it, for red is the colour of Kâma and corresponds with Mars.
> Mental or Christian Scientists have stumbled upon the _effects_ without
> understanding the _causes_. Having found by chance the secret of producing
> such results owing to mental abstraction, they attribute them to their
> union with God (whether a personal or impersonal God they know best),
> whereas it is simply the effect of one or another principle. However it
> may be, they are on the path of discovery, although they must remain
> wandering for a long time to come.
> 
> Let not Esoteric students commit the same mistake. It has often been
> explained that neither the cosmic planes of substance nor even the human
> principles—with the exception of the lowest material plane or world and
> the physical body, which, as has been said, are no “principles,”—can be
> located or thought of as being in Space and Time. As the former are seven
> in ONE, so are we seven in ONE—that same absolute Soul of the World, which
> is both Matter and non‐Matter, Spirit and non‐Spirit, Being and non‐Being.
> Impress yourselves well with this idea, all those of you who would study
> the mysteries of SELF.
> 
> Remember that with our physical senses alone at our command, none of us
> can hope to reach beyond gross Matter. We can do so only through one or
> another of our seven _spiritual_ senses, either by training, or if one is
> a born Seer. Yet even a clairvoyant possessed of such faculties, if not an
> Adept, no matter how honest and sincere he may be, will, through his
> ignorance of the truths of Occult Science, be led by the visions he sees
> in the Astral Light only to mistake for God or Angels the denizens of
> those spheres of which he may occasionally catch a glimpse, as witness
> Swedenborg and others.
> 
> These seven senses of ours correspond with every other septenate in nature
> and in ourselves. Physically, though invisibly, the human Auric Envelope
> (the amnion of the physical man in every age of life) has seven layers,
> just as Cosmic Space and our physical epidermis have. It is this Aura
> which, according to our mental and physical state of purity or impurity,
> either opens for us vistas into other worlds, or shuts us out altogether
> from anything but this three‐dimensional world of Matter.
> 
> Each of our seven physical senses (two of which are still unknown to
> profane Science), and also of our seven states of consciousness—_viz._:
> (1) waking; (2) waking‐dreaming; (3) natural sleeping; (4) induced or
> trance‐sleep; (5) psychic; (6) super‐psychic; and (7) purely
> spiritual—corresponds with one of the seven Cosmic Planes, develops and
> uses one of the seven super‐senses, and is connected directly, in its use
> on the terrestro‐spiritual plane, with the cosmic and divine centre of
> force that gave it birth, and which is its direct creator. Each is also
> connected with, and under the direct influence of, one of the seven sacred
> Planets.(776) These belonged to the Lesser Mysteries, whose followers were
> called Mystai (the veiled), seeing that they were allowed to perceive
> things only through a mist, as it were “with the eyes closed”; while the
> Initiates or “Seers” of the Greater Mysteries were called Epoptai (those
> who see things unveiled). It was the latter only who were taught the true
> mysteries of the Zodiac and the relations and correspondences between its
> twelve signs (two secret) and the ten human orifices. The latter are now
> of course ten in the female, and only nine in the male; but this is merely
> an external difference. In the second volume of this work it is stated
> that till the end of the Third Root‐Race (when androgynous man separated
> into male and female) the ten orifices existed in the hermaphrodite, first
> potentially, then functionally. The evolution of the human embryo shows
> this. For instance, the only opening formed at first is the buccal cavity,
> “a _cloaca_ communicating with the anterior extremity of the intestine.”
> These become later the mouth and the posterior orifice: the Logos
> differentiating and emanating gross matter on the lower plane, in Occult
> parlance. The difficulty which some students will experience in
> reconciling the correspondences between the Zodiac and the orifices can be
> easily explained. Magic is coëval with the Third Root‐Race, which began by
> creating through Kriyâshakti and ended by generating its species in the
> present way.(777) Woman, being left with the full or perfect cosmic number
> 10 (the divine number of Jehovah), was deemed higher and more spiritual
> than man. In Egypt, in days of old, the marriage service contained an
> article that the woman should be the “lady of the lord,” and real lord
> over him, the husband pledging himself to be “obedient to his wife” for
> the production of alchemical results such as the Elixir of Life and the
> Philosopher’s Stone, for the _spiritual_ help of the woman was needed by
> the male Alchemist. But woe to the Alchemist who should take this in the
> dead‐letter sense of _physical_ union. Such sacrilege would become Black
> Magic and be followed by certain failure. The true Alchemist of old took
> _aged_ women to help him, carefully avoiding the young ones; and if any of
> them happened to be married they treated their wives for months both
> before and during their operations as sisters.
> 
> The error of crediting the Ancients with knowing only ten of the zodiacal
> signs is explained in _Isis Unveiled_.(778) The Ancients did know of
> twelve, but viewed these signs differently from ourselves. They took
> neither Virgo nor Scorpio singly into consideration, but regarded them as
> two in one, since they were made to refer directly and symbolically to the
> primeval dual man and his separation into sexes. During the reformation of
> the Zodiac, Libra was added as the twelfth sign, though it is simply an
> equilibrating sign, at the turning point—the mystery of separated man.
> 
> Let the student learn all this well. Meanwhile we have to recapitulate
> what has been said.
> 
> (1) Each human being is an incarnation of his God, in other words, one
> with his “Father in Heaven,” just as Jesus, an Initiate, is made to say.
> As many men on earth, so many Gods in Heaven; and yet these Gods are in
> reality ONE, for at the end of every period of activity, they are
> withdrawn, like the rays of the setting sun, into the Parent Luminary, the
> Non‐Manifested Logos, which in its turn is merged into the One Absolute.
> Shall we call these “Fathers” of ours, whether individually or
> collectively, and under any circumstances, our _personal God_? Occultism
> answers, _Never_. All that an average man can know of his “Father” is what
> he knows of himself, through and within himself. The Soul of his “Heavenly
> Father” is incarnated in him. This Soul is himself, if he be successful in
> assimilating the Divine Individuality while in his physical, animal shell.
> As to the Spirit thereof, as well expect to be heard by the Absolute. Our
> prayers and supplications are vain, unless to potential words we add
> potent acts, and make the Aura which surrounds each one of us so pure and
> divine that the God within us may act outwardly, or in other words, become
> as it were an extraneous Potency. Thus have Initiates, Saints, and very
> holy and pure men been enabled to help others as well as themselves in the
> hour of need, and produce what are foolishly called “miracles,” each by
> the help and with the aid of the God within himself, which he alone has
> enabled to act on the outward plane.
> 
> (2) The word AUM or OM, which corresponds to the upper Triangle, if
> pronounced by a very holy and pure man, will draw out, or awaken, not only
> the less exalted Potencies residing in the planetary spaces and elements,
> but even his Higher Self, or the “Father” within him. Pronounced by an
> averagely good man, in the correct way, it will help to strengthen him
> morally, especially if between two “AUMS” he meditates intently upon the
> AUM within him, concentrating all his attention upon the ineffable glory.
> But woe to the man who pronounces it after the commission of some far‐
> reaching sin: he will only thereby attract to his own impure photosphere
> invisible Presences and Forces which could not otherwise break through the
> Divine Envelope.
> 
> AUM is the original of Amen. Now, Amen is not a Hebrew term, but, like the
> word Halleluiah, was borrowed by the Jews and Greeks from the Chaldees.
> The latter word is often found repeated in certain magical inscriptions
> upon cups and urns among the Babylonian and Ninevean relics. Amen does not
> mean “so be it,” or “verily,” but signified in hoary antiquity almost the
> same as AUM. The Jewish Tanaïm (Initiates) used it for the same reason as
> the Âryan Adepts use AUM, and with a like success, the numerical value of
> _AMeN_ in Hebrew letters being 91, the same as the full value of
> _YHVH_,(779) 26, and _ADoNaY_, 65, or 91. Both words mean the affirmation
> of the being, or existence, of the sexless “Lord” within us.
> 
> (3) Esoteric Science teaches that every sound in the visible world awakens
> its corresponding sound in the invisible realms, and arouses to action
> some force or other on the Occult side of Nature. Moreover, every sound
> corresponds to a colour and a number (a potency spiritual, psychic or
> physical) and to a sensation on some plane. All these find an echo in
> every one of the so‐far developed elements, and even on the terrestrial
> plane, in the Lives that swarm in the terrene atmosphere, thus prompting
> them to action.
> 
> Thus a prayer, unless pronounced _mentally_ and addressed to one’s
> “Father” in the silence and solitude of one’s “closet,” must have more
> frequently disastrous than beneficial results, seeing that the masses are
> entirely ignorant of the potent effects which they thus produce. To
> produce good effects, the prayer must be uttered by “one who knows how to
> make himself heard in silence,” when it is no longer a prayer, but becomes
> a command. Why is Jesus shown to have forbidden his hearers to go to the
> public synagogues? Surely every praying man was not a hypocrite and a
> liar, nor a Pharisee who loved to be seen praying by people! He had a
> motive, we must suppose: the same motive which prompts the experienced
> Occultist to prevent his pupils from going into crowded places now as
> then, from entering churches, séance rooms, etc., unless they are in
> sympathy with the crowd.
> 
> There is one piece of advice to be given to beginners, who cannot help
> going into crowds—one which may appear superstitious, but which in the
> absence of Occult knowledge will be found efficacious. As well known to
> good Astrologers, the days of the week are not in the order of those
> planets whose names they bear. The fact is that the ancient Hindus and
> Egyptians divided the day into four parts, each day being under the
> protection (as ascertained by practical magic) of a planet; and every day,
> as correctly asserted by Dion Cassius, received the name of the planet
> which ruled and protected its first portion. Let the student protect
> himself from the “Powers of the Air” (Elementals) which throng public
> places, by wearing either a ring containing some jewel of the colour of
> the presiding planet, or else of the metal sacred to it. But the best
> protection is a clear conscience and a firm desire to benefit Humanity.
> 
> The Planets, The Days of the Week and Their Corresponding Colours and
> Metals.
> 
> [Transcriber’s Note: This table was a wide pull‐out insert into the book,
> with more columns than modern readers can display. It has been reformatted
> into several tables of more manageable width.]
> 
> These Correspondences are from the Objective, Terrestrial Plane.
> 
> Âtman is no Number, and corresponds to no visible Planet, for it proceeds
> from the Spiritual Sun; nor does it bear any relation either to Sound,
> Colour, or the rest, for it includes them all.
> 
> As the Human Principles have no Numbers per se, but only correspond to
> Numbers, Sounds, Colours, etc., they are not enumerated here in the order
> used for exoteric purposes.
> 
> _NUMBERS_              _METALS._              _PLANETS._
> 1 and 10. Physical     Iron.                  Mars. The Planet of
> Man’s Key‐note.                               Generation.
> 2. Life Spiritual      Gold.                  The Sun. The Giver
> and Life Physical.                            of Life physically.
>                                               Spiritually and
>                                               esoterically the
>                                               substitute for the
>                                               inter‐Mercurial
>                                               Planet, a sacred and
>                                               secret planet with
>                                               the ancients.
> 3. Because Buddhi is   Mercury. Mixes with    Mercury. The
> (so to speak)          Sulphur, as Buddhi     Messenger and the
> between Âtmâ and       is mixed with the      Interpreter of the
> Manas, and forms       Flame of Spirit (See   Gods.
> with the seventh, or   Alchemical
> Auric Envelope, the    Definitions.)
> Devachanic Triad.
> 4. The middle          Lead.                  Saturn.
> principle—between
> the purely material
> and purely spiritual
> triads. The
> conscious part of
> _animal_ man.
> 5.                     Tin.                   Jupiter.
> 6.                     Copper. When alloyed   Venus. The Morning
>                        becomes Bronze (the    and the Evening
>                        _dual_ principle).     Star.
> 7. Contains in         Silver.                The Moon. The Patent
> itself the                                    of the Earth.
> reflection of
> Septenary Man.
> 
> _NUMBERS_              _THE HUMAN             _DAYS OF THE WEEK._
>                        PRINCIPLES._
> 1 and 10.              Kâma Rûpa. The         Tuesday. _Dies
>                        vehicle or seat of     Martis_, or Tiw.
>                        the Animal Instincts
>                        and Passions.
> 2.                     Prâna or Jîva. Life.   Sunday. _Dies
>                                               Solss_, or Sun.
> 3.                     Buddhi. Spiritual      Wednesday. _Dies
>                        Soul, or Âtmic Ray;    Mercurii_, or Woden.
>                        vehicle of Âtmâ.       Day of Buddha in the
>                                               South, end of Woden
>                                               in the North—Gods of
>                                               Wisdom.
> 4.                     Kâma Manas. The        Saturday. _Dies
>                        Lower Mind, or         Saturns_, or Saturn.
>                        Animal Soul.
> 5.                     Auric Envelope.        Thursday. _Dies
>                                               Jovis_, or Thor.
> 6.                     Manas. The Higher      Friday. _Dies
>                        Mind, or Human Soul.   Veneris_, or Friga.
> 7.                     Linga Sharîra. The
>                        Astral Double of
>                        Man, the Parent of
>                        the Physical Man.
> 
> _NUMBERS_              _COLOURS._             _SOUND._ MUSICAL
>                                               SCALE..
> 1 and 10.              1 Red.                 Sa or Do.
> 2.                     2 Orange.              Ri or Re.
> 3.                     3. Yellow.             Ga or Mi.
> 4.                     4. Green.              Ma or Fa.
> 5.                     5. Blue.               Pa or Sol.
> 6.                     6. Indigo or Dark      Da or La.
>                        Blue.
> 7.                     7. Violet.             Ni or Si.
> 
> In the accompanying diagram the days of the week do not stand in their
> usual order, though they are placed in their correct sequence as
> determined by the order of the colours in the solar spectrum and the
> corresponding colours of their ruling planets. The fault of the confusion
> in the order of the days revealed by this comparison lies at the door of
> the early Christians. Adopting from the Jews their lunar months, they
> tried to blend them with the solar planets, and so made a mess of it; for
> the order of the days of the week as it now stands does not follow the
> order of the planets.
> 
> Now, the Ancients arranged the planets in the following order: Moon,
> Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, counting the Sun as a planet
> for exoteric purposes. Again, the Egyptians and Indians, the two oldest
> nations, divided their day into four parts, each of which was under the
> protection and rule of a planet. In course of time each day came to be
> called by the name of that planet which ruled its first portion—the
> morning. Now, when they arranged their week, the Christians proceeded as
> follows: they wanted to make the day of the Sun, or Sunday, the seventh,
> so they named the days of the week by taking every fourth planet in turn;
> _e.g._, beginning with the Moon (Monday), they counted thus: Moon,
> Mercury, Venus, Sun, _Mars_; thus Tuesday, the day whose first portion was
> ruled by Mars, became the second day of the week; and so on. It should be
> remembered also that the Moon, like the Sun, is a substitute for a secret
> planet.
> 
> The present division of the solar year was made several centuries later
> than the beginning of our era; and our week is not that of the Ancients
> and the Occultists. The septenary division of the four parts of the lunar
> phases is as old as the world, and originated with the people who reckoned
> time by the lunar months. The Hebrews never used it, for they counted only
> the seventh day, the Sabbath, though the second chapter of _Genesis_ seems
> to speak of it. Till the days of the Cæsars there is no trace of a week of
> seven days among any nation save the Hindus. From India it passed to the
> Arabs, and reached Europe with Christianity. The Roman week consisted of
> eight days, and the Athenian of ten.(780) Thus one of the numberless
> contradictions and fallacies of Christendom is the adoption of the Indian
> septenary week of the lunar reckoning, and the preservation at the same
> time of the mythological names of the planets.
> 
> Nor do modern Astrologers give the correspondences of the days and planets
> and their colours correctly; and while Occultists can give good reason for
> every detail of their own tables of colours, etc., it is doubtful whether
> the Astrologers can do the same.
> 
>                   ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> 
> To close this first Paper, let me say that the readers must in all
> necessity be separated into two broad divisions: those who have not quite
> rid themselves of the usual sceptical doubts, but who long to ascertain
> how much truth there may be in the claims of the Occultists; and those
> others who, having freed themselves from the trammels of Materialism and
> Relativity, feel that true and real bliss must be sought only in the
> knowledge and personal experience of that which the Hindu Philosopher
> calls the Brahmavidyâ, and the Buddhist Arhat the realization of
> Âdibuddha, the primeval Wisdom. Let the former pick out and study from
> these Papers only those explanations of the phenomena of life which
> profane Science is unable to give them. Even with such limitations, they
> will find by the end of a year or two that they will have learned more
> than all their Universities and Colleges can teach them. As to the sincere
> believers, they will be rewarded by seeing their faith transformed into
> knowledge. True knowledge is of Spirit and in Spirit alone, and cannot be
> acquired in any other way except through the region of the higher mind,
> the only plane from which we can penetrate the depths of the all‐pervading
> Absoluteness. He who carries out only those laws established by human
> minds, who lives that life which is prescribed by the code of mortals and
> their fallible legislation, chooses as his guiding star a beacon which
> shines on the ocean of Mâyâ, or of temporary delusions, and lasts for but
> one incarnation. These laws are necessary for the life and welfare of
> physical man alone. He has chosen a pilot who directs him through the
> shoals of one existence, a master who parts with him, however, on the
> threshold of death. How much happier that man who, while strictly
> performing on the temporary objective plane the duties of daily life,
> carrying out each and every law of his country, and rendering, in short,
> to Cæsar what is Cæsar’s, leads in reality a spiritual and permanent
> existence, a life with no breaks of continuity, no gaps, no interludes,
> not even during those periods which are the halting‐places of the long
> pilgrimage of purely spiritual life. All the phenomena of the lower human
> mind disappear like the curtain of a proscenium, allowing him to live in
> the region beyond it, the plane of the noumenal, the one reality. If man
> by suppressing, if not destroying, his selfishness and personality, only
> succeeds in knowing himself as he is behind the veil of physical Mâyâ, he
> will soon stand beyond all pain, all misery, and beyond all the wear and
> tear of change, which is the chief originator of pain. Such a man will be
> physically of Matter, he will move surrounded by Matter, and yet he will
> live beyond and outside it. His body will be subject to change, but he
> himself will be entirely without it, and will experience everlasting life
> even while in temporary bodies of short duration. All this may be achieved
> by the development of unselfish universal love of Humanity, and the
> suppression of personality, or _selfishness_, which is the cause of all
> sin, and consequently of all human sorrow.
> 
> Paper II. An Explanation.
> 
> In view of the abstruse nature of the subjects dealt with, the present
> Paper will begin with an explanation of some points which remained obscure
> in the preceding one, as well as of some statements in which there was an
> appearance of contradiction.
> 
> Astrologers, of whom there are many among the Esotericists, are likely to
> be puzzled by some statements distinctly contradicting their teachings;
> whilst those who know nothing of the subject may perhaps find themselves
> opposed at the outset by those who have studied the exoteric systems of
> the Kabalah and Astrology. For let it be distinctly known, nothing of that
> which is printed broadcast, and available to every student in public
> libraries or museums, is really Esoteric, but is either mixed with
> deliberate “blinds,” or cannot be understood and studied with profit
> without a complete glossary of Occult terms.
> 
> The following teachings and explanations, therefore, may be useful to the
> student in assisting him to formulate the teaching given in the preceding
> Paper.
> 
> In Diagram I. it will be observed that the 3, 7, and 10 centres are
> respectively as follows:
> 
> (_a_) The 3 pertain to the spiritual world of the Absolute, and therefore
> to the three higher principles in Man.
> 
> (_b_) The 7 belong to the spiritual, psychic, and physical worlds and to
> the body of man. Physics, metaphysics and hyper‐physics are the triad that
> symbolizes man on this plane.
> 
> (_c_) The 10, or the sum total of these, is the Universe as a whole, in
> all its aspects, and also its Microcosm—Man, with his ten orifices.
> 
> Laying aside, for the moment, the Higher Decad (Kosmos) and the Lower
> Decad (Man), the first three numbers of the separate sevens have a direct
> reference to the Spirit, Soul and Auric Envelope of the human being, as
> well as to the higher supersensual world. The lower four, or the four
> aspects, belong to Man also, as well as to the Universal Kosmos, the whole
> being synthesized by the Absolute.
> 
> If these three discrete or distributive degrees of Being be conceived,
> according to the Symbology of all the Eastern Religions, as contained in
> one Ovum, or EGG, the name of that EGG will be Svabhâvat, or the ALL‐BEING
> on the manifested plane. This Universe has, in truth, neither centre nor
> periphery; but in the individual and finite mind of man it has such a
> definition, the natural consequence of the limitations of human thought.
> 
> In Diagram II., as already stated therein, no notice need be taken of the
> numbers used in the left‐hand column, as these refer only to the
> Hierarchies of the Colours and Sounds on the metaphysical plane, and are
> not the characteristic numbers of the human principles or of the planets.
> The human principles elude enumeration, because each man differs from
> every other, just as no two blades of grass on the whole earth are
> absolutely alike. Numbering is here a question of spiritual progress and
> the natural predominance of one principle over another. With one man it
> may be Buddhi that stands as number one; with another, if he be a bestial
> sensualist, the Lower Manas. With one the physical body, or perhaps Prâna,
> the life principle, will be on the first and highest plane, as would be
> the case in an extremely healthy man, full of vitality; with another it
> may come as the sixth or even seventh downward. Again, the colours and
> metals corresponding to the planets and human principles, as will be
> observed, are not those known exoterically to modern Astrologers and
> Western Occultists.
> 
> Let us see whence the modern Astrologer got his notions about the
> correspondence of planets, metals and colours. And here we are reminded of
> the modern Orientalist, who, judging by appearances credits the ancient
> Akkadians (and also the Chaldæans, Hindus and Egyptians) with the crude
> notion that the Universe, and in like manner the earth, was like an
> inverted, bell‐shaped bowl! This he demonstrates by pointing to the
> symbolical representations of some Akkadian inscriptions and to the
> Assyrian carvings. It is, however, no place here to explain how mistaken
> is the Assyriologist, for all such representations are simply symbolical
> of the _Khargakkurra_, the World‐Mountain, or Meru, and relate only to the
> North Pole, the Land of the Gods. Now, the Assyrians arranged their
> _exoteric_ teaching about the planets and their correspondences as
> follows:
> 
> Diagram II.
> 
> _Numbers._   _Planets._   _Metals._      _Colours._   _Solar
>                                                       Days of
>                                                       Week._
> 1.           Saturn.      Lead.          Black.       Saturday.
>                                                       (Whence
>                                                       Sabbath,(781)
>                                                       in honour
>                                                       of
>                                                       Jehovah.)
> 2.           Jupiter.     Tin.           White, but   Thursday.
>                                          as often
>                                          Purple or
>                                          Orange.
> 3.           Mars.        Iron.          Red.         Tuesday.
> 4.           Sun.         Gold.          Yellow‐      Sunday.
>                                          golden.
> 5.           Venus.       Copper.        Green or     Friday.
>                                          Yellow.
> 6.           Mercury.     Quicksilver.   Blue.        Wednesday.
> 7.           Moon.        Silver.        Silver‐      Monday.
>                                          white.
> 
> This is the arrangement now adopted by Christian Astrologers, with the
> exception of the order of the days of the week, of which, by associating
> the solar planetary names with the lunar weeks, they have made a sore
> mess, as has been already shown in Paper I. This is the Ptolemaic
> geocentric system, which represents the Universe as in the following
> diagram, showing our Earth in the centre of the Universe, and the Sun a
> Planet, the fourth in number.
> 
> And if the Christian chronology and order of the days of the week are
> being daily denounced as being based on an entirely wrong astronomical
> foundation, it is high time to begin a reform also in Astrology built on
> such lines, and coming to us entirely from the Chaldæan and Assyrian
> exoteric mob.
> 
> But the correspondences given in these Papers are purely Esoteric. For
> this reason it follows that when the Planets of the Solar System are named
> or symbolized (as in Diagram II.) it must not be supposed that the
> planetary bodies themselves are referred to, except as types on a purely
> physical plane of the septenary nature of the psychic and spiritual
> worlds. A material planet can correspond only to a material something.
> Thus when Mercury is said to correspond to the right eye, it does not mean
> that the objective planet has any influence on the right optic organ, but
> that both stand rather as corresponding mystically through Buddhi. Man
> derives his Spiritual Soul (Buddhi) from the essence of the Mânasa Putra,
> the Sons of Wisdom, who are the Divine Beings (or Angels) ruling and
> presiding over the planet Mercury.
> 
> In the same way Venus, Manas and the left eye are set down as
> correspondences. Exoterically, there is, in reality, no such association
> of physical eyes and physical planets; but Esoterically there is; for the
> right eye is the “Eye of Wisdom,” _i.e._, it corresponds magnetically with
> that Occult centre in the brain which we call the “Third Eye”;(782) while
> the left corresponds with the intellectual brain, or those cells which are
> the organ on the physical plane of the thinking faculty. The kabalistic
> triangle of Kether, Chokmah and Binah shows this. Chokmah and Binah, or
> Wisdom and Intelligence, the Father and Mother, or, again, the Father and
> Son, are on the same plane and reäct mutually on one another.
> 
> When the individual consciousness is turned inward, a conjunction of Manas
> and Buddhi takes place. In the spiritually regenerated man this
> conjunction is permanent, the Higher Manas clinging to Buddhi beyond the
> threshold of Devachan, and the Soul, or rather the Spirit, which should
> not be confounded with Âtmâ, the Super‐Spirit, is then said to have the
> “Single Eye.” Esoterically, in other words, the “Third Eye” is active. Now
> Mercury is called Hermes, and Venus, Aphrodite, and thus their conjunction
> in man on the psycho‐physical plane gives him the name of the
> Hermaphrodite, or Androgyne. The absolutely Spiritual Man is, however,
> entirely disconnected from sex. The Spiritual Man corresponds directly
> with the higher “coloured circles,” the Divine Prism which emanates from
> the One Infinite White Circle; while physical man emanates from the
> Sephiroth, which are the Voices or Sounds of Eastern Philosophy. And these
> “Voices” are lower than the “Colours,” for they are the seven lower
> Sephiroth, or the objective Sounds, seen, not heard, as the _Zohar_
> shows,(783) and even the Old Testament also. For, when properly
> translated, verse 18 of chapter xx. _Exodus_ would read: “And the people
> saw the Voices” (or Sounds, not the “thunderings” as now translated); and
> these Voices, or Sounds, are the Sephiroth.(784)
> 
> In the same way the right and left nostrils, into which is breathed the
> “Breath of Lives”(785) are here said to correspond with Sun and Moon, as
> Brahmâ‐Prajâpati and Vâch, or Osiris and Isis, are the parents of the
> natural life. This Quaternary, _viz._: the two eyes and two nostrils,
> Mercury and Venus, Sun and Moon, constitutes the Kabalistic Guardian‐
> Angels of the Four Corners of the Earth. It is the same in the Eastern
> Esoteric Philosophy, which, however, adds that the Sun is not a planet,
> but the central star of our system, and the Moon a dead planet, from which
> all the principles are gone, both being substitutes, the one for an
> invisible inter‐Mercurial planet, and the other for a planet which seems
> to have now altogether disappeared from view. These are the Four
> Mahârâjahs,(786) the “Four Holy Ones” connected with Karma and Humanity,
> Kosmos and Man, in all their aspects. They are: the Sun, or its substitute
> Michael; Moon, or substitute Gabriel; Mercury, Raphael; and Venus, Uriel.
> It need hardly be said here again that the planetary bodies themselves,
> being only physical symbols, are not often referred to in the Esoteric
> System, but, as a rule, their cosmic, psychic, physical and spiritual
> forces are symbolized under these names. In short, it is the seven
> physical planets which are the lower Sephiroth of the _Kabalah_, and our
> triple physical Sun whose reflection only we see, which is symbolized, or
> rather personified, by the Upper Triad, or Sephirothal Crown.(787)
> 
> Then, again, it will be well to point out that the numbers attached to the
> psychic principles in Diagram I. appear the reverse of those in exoteric
> writings. This is because numbers in this connection are purely arbitrary,
> changing with every school. Some schools count three, some four, some six,
> and others seven, as do all the Buddhist Esotericists. As said
> before,(788) the Esoteric School has been divided into two departments
> since the fourteenth century, one for the inner Lanoos, or higher Chelâs,
> the other for the outer circle, or lay Chelâs. Mr. Sinnett was distinctly
> told in the letters he received from one of the Gurus that he could not be
> taught the real Esoteric Doctrine given out only to the pledged disciples
> of the Inner Circle. The numbers and principles do not go in regular
> sequence, like the skins of an onion, but the student must work out for
> himself the number appropriate to each of his principles, when the time
> comes for him to enter upon practical study. The above will suggest to the
> student the necessity of knowing the principles by their names and their
> appropriate faculties apart from any system of enumeration, or by
> association with their corresponding centres of actions, colours, sounds,
> etc., until these become inseparable.
> 
> The old and familiar mode of reckoning the principles, given in the
> _Theosophist_ and _Esoteric Buddhism_, leads to another apparently
> perplexing contradiction, though it is really none at all. The principles
> numbered 3 and 2, _viz._: Linga Sharîra and Prâna, or Jîva, stand in the
> reverse order to that given in Diagram I. A moment’s consideration will
> suffice to explain the apparent discrepancy between the exoteric
> enumeration, and the Esoteric order given in Diagram I. For in Diagram I.
> the Linga Sharîra is defined as the vehicle of Prâna, or Jîva, the life
> principle, and as such must of necessity be inferior to Prâna, not
> superior as the exoteric enumeration would suggest. The principles do not
> stand one above the other, and thus cannot be taken in numerical sequence;
> their order depends upon the superiority and predominance of one or
> another principle, and therefore differs in every man.
> 
> The Linga Sharîra is the double, or protoplasmic antetype of the body,
> which is its image. It is in this sense that it is called in Diagram II.
> the parent of the physical body, _i.e._, the mother by conception of
> Prâna, the father. This idea is conveyed in the Egyptian mythology by the
> birth of Horus, the child of Osiris and Isis, although, like all sacred
> Mythoi, this has both a threefold spiritual, and a sevenfold psycho‐
> physical application. To close the subject, Prâna, the life principle,
> can, in sober truth, have no number, as it pervades every other principle,
> or the human total. Each number of the seven would thus be naturally
> applicable to Prâna‐Jîva exoterically as it is to the Auric Body
> Esoterically. As Pythagoras showed, Kosmos was produced not _through_ or
> _by_ number, but geometrically, _i.e._, following the proportions of
> numbers.
> 
>                   ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> 
> To those who are unacquainted with the exoteric astrological natures
> ascribed in practice to the planetary bodies, it may be useful if we set
> them down here after the manner of Diagram II., in relation to their
> dominion over the human body, colours, metals, etc., and explain at the
> same time why genuine Esoteric Philosophy differs from the astrological
> claims.
> 
> _Planets._   _Days._      _Metals._      _Parts of    _Colours._
>                                          the Body._
> Saturn.      Saturday.    Lead.          Right Ear,   Black.(789)
>                                          Knees and
>                                          Bony
>                                          System.
> Jupiter.     Thursday.    Tin.           Left Ear,    Purple.(790)
>                                          Thighs,
>                                          Feet and
>                                          Arterial
>                                          System.
> Mars.        Tuesday.     Iron.          Forehead     Red.
>                                          and Nose,
>                                          the Skull,
>                                          Sex‐
>                                          function
>                                          and
>                                          Muscular
>                                          System.
> Sun.         Sunday.      Gold.          Right Eye,   Orange.(791)
>                                          Heart and
>                                          Vital
>                                          Centres.
> Venus.       Friday.      Copper.        Chin and     Yellow.(792)
>                                          Cheeks,
>                                          Neck and
>                                          Reins and
>                                          the Venous
>                                          System.
> Mercury.     Wednesday.   Quicksilver.   Mouth,       Dove or
>                                          Hands,       Cream.(793)
>                                          Abdominal
>                                          Viscera
>                                          and
>                                          Nervous
>                                          System.
> Moon.        Monday.      Silver.        Breasts,     White.(794)
>                                          Left Eye,
>                                          the
>                                          Fluidic
>                                          System,
>                                          Saliva,
>                                          Lymph,
>                                          etc.
> 
> Thus it will be seen that the influence of the solar system in the
> exoteric kabalistic Astrology is by this method distributed over the
> entire human body, the primary metals, and the gradations of colour from
> black to white; but that Esotericism recognizes neither black nor white as
> colours, because it holds religiously to the seven solar or natural
> colours of the prism. Black and white are artificial tints. They belong to
> the Earth, and are only perceived by virtue of the special construction of
> our physical organs. White is the absence of all colours, and therefore no
> colour; black is simply the absence of light, and therefore the negative
> aspect of white. The seven prismatic colours are direct emanations from
> the Seven Hierarchies of Being, each of which has a direct bearing upon
> and relation to one of the human principles, since each of these
> Hierarchies is, in fact, the creator and source of the corresponding human
> principle. Each prismatic colour is called in Occultism the “Father of the
> Sound” which corresponds to it; Sound being the Word, or the Logos, of its
> Father‐Thought. This is the reason why sensitives connect every colour
> with a definite sound, a fact well recognized in Modern Science (_e.g._,
> Francis Galton’s _Human Faculty_). But black and white are entirely
> negative colours, and have no representatives in the world of subjective
> being.
> 
> Kabalistic Astrology says that the dominion of the planetary bodies in the
> human brain also is defined thus: there are seven primary groups of
> faculties, six of which function through the cerebrum, and the seventh
> through the cerebellum. This is perfectly correct Esoterically. But when
> it is further said that: Saturn governs the devotional faculties; Mercury,
> the intellectual; Jupiter, the sympathetic; the Sun, the governing
> faculties; Mars, the selfish; Venus, the tenacious; and the Moon, the
> instincts;—we say that the explanation is incomplete and even misleading.
> For, in the first place, the physical planets can rule only the physical
> body and the purely physical functions. All the mental, emotional, psychic
> and spiritual faculties, are influenced by the Occult properties of the
> scale of causes which emanate from the Hierarchies of the Spiritual Rulers
> of the planets, and not by the planets themselves. This scale, as given in
> Diagram II., leads the student to perceive in the following order: (1)
> colour; (2) sound; (3) the sound materializes into the spirit of the
> metals, _i.e._, the metallic Elementals; (4) these materialize again into
> the physical metals; (5) then the harmonial and vibratory radiant essence
> passes into the plants, giving them colour and smell, both of which
> “properties” depend upon the rate of vibration of this energy per unit of
> time; (6) from plants it passes into the animals; (7) and finally
> culminates in the “principles” of man.
> 
> Thus we see the Divine Essence of our Progenitors in Heaven circling
> through seven stages; Spirit becoming Matter, and Matter returning to
> Spirit. As there is sound in Nature which is inaudible, so there is colour
> which is invisible, but which can be heard. The creative force, at work in
> its incessant task of transformation, produces colour, sound and numbers,
> in the shape of rates of vibration which compound and dissociate the atoms
> and molecules. Though invisible and inaudible to us in detail, yet the
> synthesis of the whole becomes audible to us on the material plane. It is
> that which the Chinese call the “Great Tone,” or _Kung_. It is, even by
> scientific confession, the actual tonic of Nature, held by musicians to be
> the middle Fa on the keyboard of a piano. We hear it distinctly in the
> voice of Nature, in the roaring of the ocean, in the sound of the foliage
> of a great forest, in the distant roar of a great city, in the wind, the
> tempest and the storm; in short, in everything in Nature which has a voice
> or produces sound. To the hearing of all who hearken, it culminates in a
> single definite tone, of an unappreciable pitch, which, as said, is the F,
> or Fa, of the diatonic scale. From these particulars, that wherein lies
> the difference between the exoteric and the Esoteric nomenclature and
> symbolism will be evident to the student of Occultism. In short,
> kabalistic Astrology, as practised in Europe, is the semi‐esoteric Secret
> Science, adapted for the outer and not for the inner circle. It is,
> furthermore, often left incomplete and not infrequently distorted to
> conceal the real truth. While it symbolizes and adapts its correspondences
> on the mere appearances of things, Esoteric Philosophy, which concerns
> itself pre‐eminently with the essence of things, accepts only such symbols
> as cover the whole ground, _i.e._, such symbols as yield a spiritual as
> well as a psychic and physical meaning. Yet even Western Astrology has
> done excellent work, for it has helped to carry the knowledge of the
> existence of a Secret Wisdom throughout the dangers of the Mediæval Ages
> and their dark bigotry up to the present day, when all danger has
> disappeared.
> 
> The order of the planets in exoteric practice is that defined by their
> geocentric radii, or the distance of their several orbits from the Earth
> as a centre, _viz._, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon.
> In the first three of these we find symbolized the celestial Triad of
> supreme power in the physical, manifested universe, or Brahmâ, Vishnu and
> Shiva; while in the last four we recognize the symbols of the terrestrial
> quaternary ruling over all natural and physical revolutions of the
> seasons, quarters of the day, points of the compass, and elements. Thus:
> 
> Spring.     Summer.         Autumn.      Winter.
> Morning.    Noon.           Evening.     Night.
> Youth.      Adolescence.    Manhood.     Age.
> Fire.       Air.            Water.       Earth.
> East.       South.          West.        North.
> 
> But Esoteric Science is not content with analogies on the purely objective
> plane of the physical senses, and therefore it is absolutely necessary to
> preface further teachings in this direction with a clear explanation of
> the real meaning of the word Magic.
> 
> What Magic Is, In Reality.
> 
> Esoteric Science is, above all, the knowledge of our relations with and in
> Divine Magic,(795) inseparableness from our divine _Selves_—the latter
> meaning something else besides our own higher Spirit. Thus, before
> proceeding to exemplify and explain these relations, it may perhaps be
> useful to give the student a correct idea of the full meaning of this most
> misunderstood word “Magic.” Many are those willing and eager to study
> Occultism, but very few have even an approximate idea of the Science
> itself. Now, very few of our American and European students can derive
> benefit from Sanskrit works or even their translations, as these
> translations are, for the most part, merely blinds to the uninitiated. I
> therefore propose to offer to their attention demonstrations of the
> aforesaid drawn from Neo‐Platonic works. These are accessible in
> translation; and in order to throw light on that which has hitherto been
> full of darkness, it will suffice to point to a certain key in them. Thus
> the Gnosis, both pre‐Christian and post‐Christian, will serve our purpose
> admirably.
> 
> There are millions of Christians who know the name of Simon Magus, and the
> little that is told about him in the _Acts_; but very few who have even
> heard of the many motley, fantastic and contradictory details which
> tradition records about his life. The story of his claims and his death is
> to be found only in the prejudiced, half‐fantastic records about him in
> the works of the Church Fathers, such as Irenæus, Epiphanius and St.
> Justin, and especially in the anonymous _Philosophumena_. Yet he is a
> historical character, and the appellation of “Magus” was given to him and
> was accepted by all his contemporaries, including the heads of the
> Christian Church, as a qualification indicating the miraculous powers he
> possessed, and irrespective of whether he was regarded as a white (divine)
> or a black (infernal) Magician. In this respect, opinion has always been
> made subservient to the Gentile or Christian proclivities of his
> chronicler.
> 
> It is in his system and in that of Menander, his pupil and successor, that
> we find what the term “Magic” meant for Initiates in those days.
> 
> Simon, as all the other Gnostics, taught that our world was created by the
> _lower_ angels, whom he called Æons. He mentions only three degrees of
> such, because it was and is useless, as we have before explained, to teach
> anything about the four higher ones, and he therefore begins at the plane
> of globes A and G. His system is as near to Occult Truth as any, so that
> we may examine it, as well as his own and Menander’s claims about “Magic,”
> to find out what they meant by the term. Now, for Simon, the summit of all
> manifested creation was Fire. It was, with him as with us, the Universal
> Principle, the Infinite Potency, born from the concealed Potentiality.
> This Fire was the primeval cause of the manifested world of being, and was
> dual, having a manifested and a concealed, or secret, side.
> 
>     The secret side of the Fire is concealed in its evident [or
>     objective] side, and the objective is produced from the secret
>     side,(796)
> 
> he writes, which amounts to saying that the visible is ever present in the
> invisible, and the invisible in the visible. This was but a new form of
> stating Plato’s idea of the Intelligible (_Noêton_) and the Sensible
> (_Aisthêton_), and Aristotle’s teaching on the Potency (_Dunamis_) and the
> Act (_Energeia_). For Simon, all that can be thought of, all that can be
> acted upon, was perfect intelligence. Fire contained _all_. And thus all
> the parts of that Fire, being endowed with intelligence and reason, were
> susceptible of development by extension and emanation. This is our
> teaching of the Manifested Logos, and these parts in their primordial
> emanation are our Dhyân Chohans, the “Sons of Flame and Fire,” or higher
> Æons. This “Fire” is the symbol of the active and living side of Divine
> Nature. Behind it lay “infinite Potentiality in Potentiality,” which Simon
> named “that which has stood, stands and will stand,” or permanent
> stability and personified immutability.
> 
> From the Potency of Thought, Divine Ideation thus passed to Action. Hence
> the series of primordial emanations through Thought begetting the Act, the
> objective side of Fire being the Mother, the sacred side of it being the
> Father. Simon called these emanations Syzygies (a united pair, or couple),
> for they emanated two‐by‐two, one as an active, and the other as a passive
> Æon. Three couples thus emanated (or six in all, the Fire being the
> seventh), to which Simon gave the following names: “Mind and Thought;
> Voice and Name; Reason and Reflection,”(797) the first in each pair being
> male, the last female. From these primordial six emanated the six Æons of
> the Middle World. Let us see what Simon himself says:
> 
>     Each of these six primitive beings contained the entire infinite
>     Potency [of its parent]; but it was there only in Potency, and not
>     in Act. That Potency had to be called forth [or conformed] through
>     an _image_ in order that it should manifest in all its essence,
>     virtue, grandeur and effects; for only then could the emanated
>     Potency become similar to its parent, the eternal and infinite
>     Potency. If, on the contrary, it remained simply potentially in
>     the six Potencies and failed to be conformed through an image,
>     then the Potency would not pass into action, but would get
>     lost,(798)
> 
> in clearer terms, it would become atrophied, as the modern expression
> goes.
> 
> Now, what do these words mean if not that to be equal in all things to the
> Infinite Potency the Æons had to imitate it in its action, and become
> themselves, in their turn, emanative Principles, as was their Parent,
> giving life to new beings, and becoming Potencies _in actu_ themselves? To
> produce emanations, or to have acquired the gift of Kriyâ‐shakti.(799) is
> the direct result of that power, an effect which depends on our own
> action. That power, then, is inherent in man, as it is in the primordial
> Æons and even in the secondary Emanations, by the very fact of their and
> our descent from the One Primordial Principle, the Infinite Power, or
> Potency. Thus we find in the system of Simon Magus that the first six
> Æons, synthesized by the seventh, the Parent Potency, passed into Act, and
> emanated, in their turn, six secondary Æons, which were each synthesized
> by their respective Parents. In the _Philosophumena_ we read that Simon
> compared the Æons to the “Tree of Life.” Said Simon in the
> _Revelation_:(800)
> 
>     It is written that there are two ramifications of the universal
>     Æons, having neither beginning nor end, issued both from the same
>     Root, the invisible and incomprehensible Potentiality, Sigê
>     [Silence]. One of these [series of Æons] appears from above. This
>     is the Great Potency, Universal Mind [or Divine Ideation, the
>     Mahat of the Hindus]; it orders all things and is male. The other
>     is from below, for it is the Great [manifested] Thought, the
>     female Æon, generating all things. These [two kinds of Æons]
>     corresponding(801) with each other, have conjunction and manifest
>     the middle distance [the intermediate sphere, or plane], the
>     incomprehensible Air which has neither beginning nor end.(802)
> 
> This female “Air” is our Ether, or the kabalistic Astral Light. It is,
> then, the Second World of Simon, born of Fire, the principle of
> everything. We call it the ONE LIFE, the Intelligent, Divine Flame,
> omnipresent and infinite. In Simon’s system this Second World was ruled by
> a Being, or Potency, both male and female, or active and passive, good and
> bad. This Parent‐Being, like the primordial infinite Potency, is also
> called “that which has stood, stands and will stand,” so long as the
> manifested Kosmos shall last. When it emanated _in actu_ and became like
> unto its own Parent, it was not dual or androgyne. It is the Thought
> (Sigê) that emanated from it which became as itself (the Parent), having
> become like unto its image (or antetype); the second had now become in its
> turn the first (on its own plane or sphere). As Simon has it:
> 
>     It [the Parent or Father] was one. For having it [the Thought] in
>     itself, it was alone. It was not, however, first, though it was
>     preëxisting; but manifesting itself to itself from itself, it
>     became the second (or dual). Nor was it called Father before it
>     [the Thought] gave it that name. As, therefore, itself developing
>     itself by itself, manifested to itself its own Thought, so also
>     the Thought being manifested did not act, but seeing the Father
>     hid it in itself, that is, (hid) that Potency (in itself). And the
>     Potency [_Dunamis_, _viz._: _Nous_] and Thought [_Epinoia_] are
>     male‐female. Whence they correspond with one another—for Potency
>     in no way differs from Thought—being one. So from the things above
>     is found Potency, and from those below, Thought. It comes to pass,
>     therefore, that that which is manifested from them, although being
>     one, yet is found to be twofold, the androgyne having the female
>     in itself. So is Mind in Thought, things inseparable from each
>     other which though being one are yet found dual.(803)
> 
>     He [Simon] calls the first Syzygy of the six Potencies and of the
>     seventh, which is with it, Nous and Epinoia, Heaven and Earth: the
>     male looks down from on high and takes thought for his Syzygy [or
>     spouse], for the Earth below receives those intellectual fruits
>     which are brought down from Heaven and are cognate to the
>     Earth.(804)
> 
> Simon’s Third World with its third series of six Æons and the seventh, the
> Parent, is emanated in the same way. It is this same note which runs
> through every Gnostic system—gradual development downward into Matter by
> similitude; and it is a law which is to be traced down to primordial
> Occultism, or Magic. With the Gnostics, as with us, this seventh Potency,
> synthesizing all, is the Spirit brooding over the dark waters of
> undifferentiated Space, Nârâyana, or Vishnu, in India; the Holy Ghost in
> Christianity. But while in the latter the conception is conditioned and
> dwarfed by limitations necessitating faith and grace, Eastern Philosophy
> shows it pervading every atom, conscious or unconscious. Irenæus
> supplements the information on the further development of these six Æons.
> We learn from him that Thought, having separated itself from its Parent,
> and knowing through its identity of Essence with the latter what it had to
> know, proceeded on the second or intermediate plane, or rather World (each
> of such Worlds consisting of two planes, the superior and inferior, male
> and female, the latter assuming finally both Potencies and becoming
> androgyne), to create inferior Hierarchies, Angels and Powers, Dominions
> and Hosts, of every description, which in their turn created, or rather
> emanated out of their own Essence, our world with its men and beings, over
> which they watch.
> 
> It thus follows that every rational being—called Man on Earth—is of the
> same essence and possesses potentially all the attributes of the higher
> Æons, the primordial Seven. It is for him to develope, “with the image
> before him of the highest,” by imitation _in actu_, the Potency with which
> the highest of his Parents, or Fathers, is endowed. Here we may again
> quote with advantage from the _Philosophumena_:
> 
>     So then, according to Simon, this blissful and imperishable
>     [principle] is concealed in everything in potency, not in act.
>     This is “that which has stood, stands and will stand,” _viz._,
>     that which has stood above in ingenerable Potency; that which
>     stands below in the stream of the waters generated in an image;
>     that which will stand above, beside the blissful infinite Potency,
>     if it makes itself like unto this image. For three, he says, are
>     they that stand, and without these three Æons of stability, there
>     is no adornment of the generable which, according to them [the
>     Simonians], is borne on the water, and being moulded according to
>     the similitude is a perfect and celestial (Æon), in no manner of
>     thinking inferior to the ingenerable Potency. Thus they say: “I
>     and thou [are] one; before me [wast] thou; that which is after
>     thee [is] I.” This, he says, is the one Potency, divided into
>     above and below, generating itself, nourishing itself, seeking
>     itself, finding itself; its own mother, father, brother, spouse,
>     daughter and son, one, for it is the Root of all.(805)
> 
> Thus of this triple Æon, we learn the first exists as “that which has
> stood, stands and will stand,” or the uncreate Power, Âtman; the second is
> generated in the dark waters of Space (Chaos, or undifferentiated
> Substance, our Buddhi), from or through the image of the former reflected
> in those waters, the image of Him, or It, which moves on them; the third
> World (or, in man, Manas) will be endowed with every power of that eternal
> and omnipresent Image if it but assimilates it to itself. For,
> 
>     All that is eternal, pure and incorruptible is concealed in
>     everything that is,
> 
> if only potentially, not actually. And
> 
>     Everything is that image, provided the lower image (man) ascends
>     to that highest Source and Root in Spirit and Thought.
> 
> Matter as Substance is eternal and has never been created. Therefore Simon
> Magus, with all the great Gnostic Teachers and Eastern Philosophers, never
> speaks of its beginning. “Eternal Matter” receives its various forms in
> the lower Æon from the Creative Angels, or Builders, as we call them. Why,
> then, should not Man, the direct heir of the highest Æon, do the same, by
> the potency of his thought, which is born from Spirit? This is
> Kriyâshakti, the power of producing forms on the objective plane through
> the potency of Ideation and Will, from invisible, indestructible Matter.
> 
> Truly says Jeremiah,(806) quoting the “Word of the Lord”:
> 
>     Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou
>     camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee,
> 
> for Jeremiah stands here for Man when he was yet an Æon, or Divine Man,
> both with Simon Magus and Eastern Philosophy. The first three chapters of
> _Genesis_ are as Occult as that which is given in Paper I. For the
> terrestrial Paradise is the Womb, says Simon,(807) Eden the region
> surrounding it. The river which went out of Eden to water the garden is
> the Umbilical Cord; this cord is divided into four Heads, the streams that
> flowed out of it, the four canals which serve to carry nutrition to the
> Fœtus, _i.e._, the two arteries and the two veins which are the channels
> for the blood and convey the breathing air, the unborn child, according to
> Simon, being entirely enveloped by the Amnion, fed through the Umbilical
> Cord and given vital air through the Aorta.(808)
> 
> The above is given for the elucidation of that which is to follow. The
> disciples of Simon Magus were numerous, and were instructed by him in
> Magic. They made use of so‐called “exorcisms” (as in the _New Testament_),
> incantations, philtres; believed in dreams and visions, and produced them
> at will; and finally forced the lower orders of spirits to obey them.
> Simon Magus was called “the Great Power of God,” literally “the Potency of
> the Deity which is called Great.” That which was then termed Magic we now
> call Theosophia, or Divine Wisdom, Power and Knowledge.
> 
> His direct disciple, Menander, was also a great Magician. Says Irenæus,
> among other writers:
> 
>     The successor of Simon was Menander, a Samaritan by birth, who
>     reached the highest summits in the Science of Magic.
> 
> Thus both master and pupil are shown as having attained the highest powers
> in the art of enchantments, powers which can be obtained only through “the
> help of the Devil,” as Christians claim; and yet their “works” were
> identical with those spoken of in the _New Testament_, wherein such
> phenomenal results are called divine miracles, and are, therefore,
> believed in and accepted as coming from and through God. But the question
> is, have these so‐called “miracles” of the “Christ” and the Apostles ever
> been explained any more than the magical achievements of so‐called
> Sorcerers and Magicians? I say, never. We Occultists do not believe in
> supernatural phenomena, and the Masters laugh at the word “miracle.” Let
> us see, then, what is really the sense of the word Magic.
> 
> The source and basis of it lie in Spirit and Thought, whether on the
> purely divine or the terrestrial plane. Those who know the history of
> Simon have the two versions before them, that of White and of Black Magic,
> at their option, in the much talked of union of Simon with Helena, whom he
> called his Epinoia (Thought). Those who, like the Christians, had to
> discredit a dangerous rival, talk of Helena as being a beautiful and
> actual woman, whom Simon had met in a house of ill‐fame at Tyre, and who
> was, according to those who wrote his life, the reincarnation of Helen of
> Troy. How, then, was she “Divine Thought”? The lower angels, Simon is made
> to say in _Philosophumena_, or the third Æons, being so material, had more
> badness in them than all the others. Poor man, created or emanated from
> them, had the vice of his origin. What was it? Only this: when the third
> Æons possessed themselves, in their turn, of the Divine Thought through
> the transmission into them of Fire, instead of making of man a complete
> being, according to the universal plan, they at first detained from him
> that Divine Spark (Thought, on Earth Manas); and that was the cause and
> origin of senseless man’s committing the original sin as the angels had
> committed it æons before by refusing to create.(809) Finally, after
> detaining Epinoia prisoner amongst them and having subjected the Divine
> Thought to every kind of insult and desecration, they ended by shutting it
> into the already defiled body of man. After this, as interpreted by the
> enemies of Simon, she passed from one female body into another through
> ages and races, until Simon found and recognized her in the form of
> Helena, the “prostitute,” the “lost sheep” of the parable. Simon is made
> to represent himself as the Saviour descended on Earth to rescue this
> “lamb” and those men in whom Epinoia is still under the dominion of the
> lower angels. The greatest magical feats are thus attributed to Simon
> through his sexual union with Helena, hence Black Magic. Indeed, the chief
> rites of this kind of Magic are based on such disgusting literal
> interpretation of noble myths, one of the noblest of which was thus
> invented by Simon as a symbolical mark of his own teaching. Those who
> understood it correctly knew what was meant by “Helena.” It was the
> marriage of Nous (Âtmâ‐Buddhi) with Manas, the union through which Will
> and Thought become one and are endowed with divine powers. For Âtman in
> man, being of an unalloyed essence, the primordial Divine Fire (or the
> eternal and universal “that which has stood, stands and will stand”), is
> of all the planes; and Buddhi is its vehicle or Thought, generated by and
> generating the “Father” in her turn, and also Will. She is “that which has
> stood, stands and will stand,” thus becoming, in conjunction with Manas,
> male‐female, in this sphere only. Hence, when Simon spoke of himself as
> the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, and of Helena as his Epinoia,
> Divine Thought, he meant the marriage of his Buddhi with Manas. Helena was
> the Shakti of the inner man, the female potency.
> 
> Now, what says Menander? The lower angels, he taught, were the emanations
> of Ennoia (Designing Thought). It was Ennoia who taught the Science of
> Magic and imparted it to him, together with the art of conquering the
> creative angels of the lower world. The latter stand for the passions of
> our lower nature. His pupils, after receiving baptism from him (_i.e._,
> after Initiation), were said to “resurrect from the dead” and, “growing no
> older,” became “immortal.”(810) This “resurrection” promised by Menander
> meant, of course, simply the passage from the darkness of ignorance into
> the light of truth, the awakening of man’s immortal Spirit to inner and
> eternal life. This is the Science of the Râja Yogîs—Magic.
> 
> Every person who has read Neo‐Platonic Philosophy knows how its chief
> Adepts, such as Plotinus, and especially Porphyry, fought against
> phenomenal Theurgy. But, beyond all of them, Jamblichus, the author of the
> _De Mysteriis_, lifts high the veil from the real term Theurgy, and shows
> us therein the true Divine Science of Râja Yoga.
> 
> Magic, he says, is a lofty and sublime Science, Divine, and exalted above
> all others.
> 
>     It is the great remedy for all.... It neither takes its source in,
>     nor is it limited to, the body or its passions, to the human
>     compound or its constitution; but all is derived by it from our
>     upper Gods,
> 
> our divine Egos, which run like a silver thread from the Spark in us up to
> the primeval divine Fire.(811)
> 
> Jamblichus execrates physical phenomena, produced, as he says, by the bad
> demons who deceive men (the spooks of the séance room), as vehemently as
> he exalts Divine Theurgy. But to exercise the latter, he teaches, the
> Theurgist must imperatively be “a man of high morality and a chaste Soul.”
> The other kind of Magic is used only by impure, selfish men, and has
> nothing of the Divine in it. No real Vates would ever consent to find in
> its communications anything coming from our higher Gods. Thus one
> (Theurgy) is the knowledge of our Father (the Higher Self); the other,
> subjection to our lower nature. One requires holiness of the Soul, a
> holiness which rejects and excludes everything corporeal; the other, the
> desecration of it (the Soul). One is the union with the Gods (with one’s
> God), the source of all Good; the other intercourse with demons
> (Elementals), which, unless we subject them, will subject us, and lead us
> step by step to moral ruin (mediumship). In short:
> 
>     Theurgy unites us most strongly to divine nature. This nature
>     begets itself through itself, moves through its own powers,
>     supports all, and is intelligent. Being the ornament of the
>     Universe, it invites us to intelligible truth, to perfection and
>     imparting perfection to others. It unites us so intimately to all
>     the creative actions of the Gods, according to the capacity of
>     each of us, that the soul having accomplished the sacred rites is
>     consolidated in their [the Gods’] actions and intelligences, until
>     it launches itself into and is absorbed by the primordial divine
>     essence. This is the object of the sacred Initiations of the
>     Egyptians.(812)
> 
> Now, Jamblichus shows us how this union of our Higher Soul with the
> Universal Soul, with the Gods, is to be effected. He speaks of Manteia,
> which is Samâdhi, the highest trance.(813) He speaks also of dream which
> is divine vision, when man re‐becomes again a God. By Theurgy, or Râja
> Yoga, a man arrives at: (1) Prophetic Discernment through our God (the
> respective Higher Ego of each of us) revealing to us the truths of the
> plane on which we happen to be acting; (2) Ecstacy and Illumination; (3)
> Action in Spirit (in Astral Body or through Will); (4) and Domination over
> the minor, senseless demons (Elementals) by the very nature of our
> purified Egos. But this demands the complete purification of the latter.
> And this is called by him Magic, through initiation into Theurgy.
> 
> But Theurgy has to be preceded by a training of our senses and the
> knowledge of the human Self in relation to the Divine SELF. So long as man
> has not thoroughly mastered this preliminary study, it is idle to
> anthropomorphize the formless. By “formless” I mean the higher and the
> lower Gods, the supermundane as well as mundane Spirits, or Beings, which
> to beginners can be revealed only in Colours and Sounds. For none but a
> high Adept can perceive a “God” in its true transcendental form, which to
> the untrained intellect, to the Chelâ, will be visible only by its Aura.
> The visions of full figures casually perceived by sensitives and mediums
> belong to one or another of the only three categories they can see: (_a_)
> Astrals of living men; (_b_) Nirmânakâyas (Adepts, good or bad, whose
> bodies are dead, but who have learned to live in the invisible space in
> their ethereal personalities); and (_c_) Spooks, Elementaries and
> Elementals masquerading in shapes borrowed from the Astral Light in
> general, or from figures in the “mind’s eye” of the audience, or of the
> medium, which are immediately reflected in their respective Auras.
> 
> Having read the foregoing, students will now better comprehend the
> necessity of first studying the correspondences between our
> “principles”—which are but the various aspects of the triune (spiritual
> and physical) man—and our Paradigm, the direct roots of these in the
> Universe. In view of this, we must resume our teaching about the
> Hierarchies directly connected and for ever linked with man.
> 
>                   ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> 
> Enough has been said to show that while for the Orientalists and profane
> masses the sentence, “_Om Mani Padme Hum_,” means simply “Oh the Jewel in
> the Lotus,” Esoterically it signifies “Oh my God within me.” Yes; there is
> a God in each human being, for man was, and will re‐become, God. The
> sentence points to the indissoluble union between Man and the Universe.
> For the Lotus is the universal symbol of Kosmos as the absolute totality,
> and the Jewel is Spiritual Man, or God.
> 
> In the preceding Paper, the correspondences between Colours, Sounds, and
> “Principles” were given; and those who have read our second volume will
> remember that these seven principles are derived from the seven great
> Hierarchies of Angels, or Dhyân Chohans, which are, in their turn,
> associated with Colours and Sounds, and form collectively the Manifested
> Logos.
> 
> In the eternal music of the spheres we find the perfect scale
> corresponding to the colours, and in the number, determined by the
> vibrations of colour and sound, which “underlies every form and guides
> every sound,” we find the summing‐up of the Manifested Universe.
> 
> We may illustrate these correspondences by showing the relation of colour
> and sound to the geometrical figures which(814) express the progressive
> stages in the manifestation of Kosmos.
> 
> But the student will certainly be liable to confusion if, in studying the
> Diagrams, he does not remember two things: (1) That, our plane being a
> plane of reflection, and therefore illusionary, _the various notations are
> reversed and must be counted from below upwards_. The musical scale begins
> from below upwards, commencing with the deep Do and ending with the far
> more acute Si. (2) That Kâma Rûpa (corresponding to Do in the musical
> scale), containing as it does all potentialities of Matter, is necessarily
> the starting‐point on our plane. Further, it commences the notation on
> every plane, as corresponding to the “matter” of that plane. Again, the
> student must also remember that these notes have to be arranged in a
> circle, thus showing how Fa is the middle note of Nature. In short,
> musical notes, or Sounds, Colours and Numbers proceed from one to seven,
> and not from seven to one as erroneously shown in the spectrum of the
> prismatic colours, in which Red is counted first: a fact which
> necessitated my putting the principles and the days of the week at random
> in Diagram II. The musical scale and colours, according to the number of
> vibrations, proceed from the world of gross Matter to that of Spirit thus:
> 
> _Principles._   _Colours._   _Notes._     _Numbers._   _States of
>                                                        Matter._
> Chhâyâ,         Violet.      Si.          7.           Ether.
> Shadow or
> Double.
> Higher Manas,   Indigo.      La.          6.           Critical
> Spiritual                                              State,
> Intelligence.                                          called Air
>                                                        in
>                                                        Occultism.
> Auric           Blue.        Sol.         5.           Steam or
> Envelope.                                              Vapour.
> Lower Manas,    Green.       Fa.          4.           Critical
> or Animal                                              State.
> Soul.
> Buddhi, or      Yellow.      Mi.          3.           Water.
> Spiritual
> Soul.
> Prâna, or       Orange.      Re.          2.           Critical
> Life                                                   State.
> Principle.
> Kâma Rûpa,      Red.         Do.          1.           Ice.
> the Seat of
> Animal Life.
> 
> Here again the student is asked to dismiss from his mind any
> correspondence between “principles” and numbers, for reasons already
> given. The Esoteric enumeration cannot be made to correspond with the
> conventional exoteric. The one is the reality, the other is classified
> according to illusive appearances. The human principles, as given in
> _Esoteric Buddhism_, were tabulated for beginners, so as not to confuse
> their minds. It was half a blind.
> 
> Colours, Sounds and Forms.
> 
> To proceed:
> 
>                           [Illustration: Square]
> 
> The Point in the Circle is the Unmanifested Logos, corresponding to
> Absolute Life and Absolute Sound.
> 
> The first geometrical figure after the Circle or the Spheroid is the
> Triangle. It corresponds to Motion, Colour and Sound. Thus the Point in
> the Triangle represents the Second Logos, “Father‐Mother,” or the White
> Ray which is no colour, since it contains potentially all colours. It is
> shown radiating from the Unmanifested Logos, or the Unspoken Word. Around
> the first Triangle is formed on the plane of Primordial Substance in this
> order (_reversed_ as to our plane):
> 
>                           [Illustration: Square]
> 
>                    [Illustration: Triangle and Square]
> 
>                    [Illustration: Triangle and Square]
> 
> A.
> 
> (_a_) The Astral Double of Nature, or the Paradigm of all Forms.
> 
> (_b_) Divine Ideation, or Universal Mind.
> 
> (_c_) The Synthesis of Occult Nature, the Egg of Brahmâ, containing all
> and radiating all.
> 
> (_d_) Animal or Material Soul of Nature, source of animal and vegetable
> intelligence and instinct.
> 
> (_e_) The aggregate of Dhyân Chohanic Intelligences, Fohat.
> 
> (_f_) Life Principle in Nature.
> 
> (_g_) The Life Procreating Principle in Nature. That which, on the
> spiritual plane, corresponds to sexual affinity on the lower.
> 
> Mirrored on the plane of Gross Nature, the World of Reality is reversed,
> and becomes on Earth and our plane:
> 
> B.
> 
> (_a_) Red is the colour of manifested dual, or male and female. In man it
> is shown in its lowest animal form.
> 
> (_b_) Orange is the colour of the robes of the Yogîs and Buddhist Priests,
> the colour of the Sun and Spiritual Vitality, also of the Vital Principle.
> 
> (_c_) Yellow or radiant Golden is the colour of the Spiritual, Divine Ray
> in every atom; in man of Buddhi.
> 
> (_d_) Green and Red are, so to speak, interchangeable colours, for Green
> absorbs the Red, as being threefold stronger in its vibrations than the
> latter; and Green is the complementary colour of extreme Red. This is why
> the Lower Manas and Kâma Rûpa are respectively shown as Green and Red.
> 
> (_e_) The Astral Plane, or Auric Envelope in Nature and Man.
> 
> (_f_) The Mind or rational element in Man and Nature.
> 
> (_g_) The most ethereal counterpart of the Body of man, the opposite pole,
> standing in point of vibration and sensitiveness as the Violet stands to
> the Red.
> 
> The above is on the manifested plane; after which we get the seven and the
> Manifested Prism, or Man on Earth. With the latter, the Black Magician
> alone is concerned.
> 
> In Kosmos, the gradations and correlations of Colours and Sounds, and
> therefore of Numbers are infinite. This is suspected even in Physics, for
> it is ascertained that there exist slower vibrations than those of the
> Red, the slowest perceptible to us, and far more rapid vibrations than
> those of the Violet, the most rapid that our senses can perceive. But on
> Earth, in our physical world, the range of perceptible vibrations is
> limited. Our physical senses cannot take cognizance of vibrations above
> and below the septenary and limited gradations of the prismatic colours,
> for such vibrations are incapable of causing in us the sensation of colour
> or sound. It will always be the graduated septenary and no more, unless we
> learn to paralyze our Quaternary and discern both the superior and
> inferior vibrations with our spiritual senses seated in the upper
> Triangle.
> 
> Now, on this plane of illusion, there are three fundamental colours, as
> demonstrated by Physical Science, Red, Blue and Yellow (or rather Orange‐
> Yellow). Expressed in terms of the human principles they are: (1) Kâma
> Rûpa, the seat of the animal sensations, welded to, and serving as a
> vehicle for the Animal Soul or Lower Manas (Red and Green, as said, being
> interchangeable); (2) Auric Envelope, or the essence of man; and (3)
> Prâna, or Life Principle. But if from the realm of illusion, or the living
> man as he is on our Earth, subject to his sensuous perceptions only, we
> pass to that of semi‐illusion, and observe the natural colours themselves,
> or those of the principles, that is, if we try to find out which are those
> that in the perfect man absorb all others, we shall find that the colours
> correspond and become complementary in the following way:
> 
>              Violet.
> (1) Red               Green.
> (2) Orange            Blue.
> (3) Yellow            Indigo.
>              Violet.
> 
> A faint violet, mist‐like form represents the Astral Man within an oviform
> bluish circle, over which radiate in ceaseless vibrations the prismatic
> colours. That colour is predominant, of which the corresponding principle
> is the most active generally, or at the particular moment when the
> clairvoyant perceives it. Such man appears during his waking states; and
> it is by the predominance of this or that colour, and by the intensity of
> its vibrations, that a clairvoyant, _if_ he be acquainted with
> correspondences, can judge of the inner state or character of a person,
> for the latter is an open book to every practical Occultist.
> 
> In the trance state the Aura changes entirely, the seven prismatic colours
> being no longer discernible. In sleep also they are not all “at home.” For
> those which belong to the spiritual elements in the man, _viz._, Yellow,
> Buddhi; Indigo, Higher Manas; and the Blue of the Auric Envelope will be
> either hardly discernible, or altogether missing. The Spiritual Man is
> free during sleep, and though his physical memory may not become aware of
> it, lives, robed in his highest essence, in realms on other planes, in
> realms which are the land of reality, called dreams on our plane of
> illusion.
> 
> A good clairvoyant, moreover, if he had an opportunity of seeing a Yogî in
> the trance state and a mesmerized subject, side by side, would learn an
> important lesson in Occultism. He would learn to know the difference
> between self‐induced trance and a hypnotic state resulting from extraneous
> influence. In the Yogî, the “principles” of the lower Quaternary disappear
> entirely. Neither Red, Green, Red‐Violet nor the Auric Blue of the Body
> are to be seen; nothing but hardly perceptible vibrations of the golden‐
> hued Prâna principle and a violet flame streaked with gold rushing upwards
> from the head, in the region where the Third Eye rests, and culminating in
> a point. If the student remembers that the true Violet, or the extreme end
> of the spectrum, is no compound colour of Red and Blue, but a homogeneous
> colour with vibrations seven times more rapid than those of the Red,(815)
> and that the golden hue is the essence of the three yellow hues from
> Orange Red to Yellow‐Orange and Yellow, he will understand the reason why:
> he lives in his own Auric Body, now become the vehicle of Buddhi‐Manas. On
> the other hand, in a subject in an artificially produced hypnotic or
> mesmeric trance, an effect of unconscious when not of conscious Black
> Magic, unless produced by a high Adept, the whole set of the principles
> will be present, with the Higher Manas paralyzed, Buddhi severed from it
> through that paralysis, and the red‐violet Astral Body entirely subjected
> to the Lower Manas and Kâma Rûpa (the green and red animal monsters in
> us).
> 
> One who comprehends well the above explanations will readily see how
> important it is for every student, whether he is striving for practical
> Occult powers or only for the purely psychic and spiritual gifts of
> clairvoyance and metaphysical knowledge, to master thoroughly the right
> correspondences between the human, or nature principles, and those of
> Kosmos. It is ignorance which leads materialistic Science to deny the
> inner man and his Divine powers; knowledge and personal experience that
> allow the Occultist to affirm that such powers are as natural to man as
> swimming to fishes. It is like a Laplander, in all sincerity, denying the
> possibility of the catgut, strung loosely on the sounding‐board of a
> violin producing comprehensive sounds or melody. Our principles are the
> Seven‐Stringed Lyre of Apollo, truly. In this our age, when oblivion has
> shrouded ancient knowledge, men’s faculties are no better than the loose
> strings of the violin to the Laplander. But the Occultist who knows how to
> tighten them and tune his violin in harmony with the vibrations of colour
> and sound, will extract divine harmony from them. The combination of these
> powers and the attuning of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm will give the
> geometrical equivalent of the invocation “_Om Mani Padme Hum_.”
> 
> This was why the previous knowledge of music and geometry was obligatory
> in the School of Pythagoras.
> 
> The Roots Of Colour And Sound.
> 
> Further, each of the Primordial Seven, the first Seven Rays forming the
> Manifested Logos, is again sevenfold. Thus, as the seven colours of the
> solar spectrum correspond to the seven Rays, or Hierarchies, so each of
> these latter has again its seven divisions corresponding to the same
> series of colours. But in this case one colour, _viz._, that which
> characterizes the particular Hierarchy as a whole, is predominant and more
> intense than the others.
> 
> These Hierarchies can only be symbolized as concentric circles of
> prismatic colours; each Hierarchy being represented by a series of seven
> concentric circles, each circle representing one of the prismatic colours
> in their natural order. But in each of these “wheels” one circle will be
> brighter and more vivid in colour than the rest, and the wheel will have a
> surrounding Aura (a fringe, as the physicists call it) of that colour.
> This colour will be the characteristic colour of that Hierarchy as a
> whole. Each of these Hierarchies furnishes the essence (the Soul) and is
> the “Builder” of one of the seven kingdoms of Nature which are the three
> elemental kingdoms, the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the
> kingdom of spiritual man.(816) Moreover, each Hierarchy furnishes the Aura
> of one of the seven principles in man with its specific colour. Further,
> as each of these Hierarchies is the Ruler of one of the Sacred Planets, it
> will easily be understood how Astrology came into existence, and that real
> Astrology has a strictly scientific basis.
> 
> The symbol adopted in the Eastern School to represent the Seven
> Hierarchies of creative Powers is a wheel of seven concentric circles,
> each circle being coloured with one of the seven colours; call them
> Angels, if you will, or Planetary Spirits, or, again, the Seven Rulers of
> the Seven Sacred Planets of our system, as in our present case. At all
> events, the concentric circles stand as symbols for Ezekiel’s Wheels with
> some Western Occultists and Kabalists, and for the “Builders” or Prajâpati
> with us.
> 
> DIAGRAM III.
> 
> The student should carefully examine the following Diagram.
> 
>                               [Diagram III]
> 
> Thus the Linga Sharîra is derived from the Violet sub‐ray of the Violet
> Hierarchy; the Higher Manas is similarly derived from the Indigo sub‐ray
> of the Indigo Hierarchy, and so on. Every man being born under a certain
> planet, there will always be a predominance of that planet’s colour in
> him, because that “principle” wall rule in him which has its origin in the
> Hierarchy in question. There will also be a certain amount of the colour
> derived from the other planets present in his Aura, but that of the ruling
> planet will be strongest. Now a person in whom, say, the Mercury principle
> is predominant, will, by acting upon the Mercury principle in another
> person born under a different planet, be able to get him entirely under
> his control. For the stronger Mercury principle in him will overpower the
> weaker Mercurial element in the other. But he will have little power over
> persons born under the same planet as himself. This is the key to the
> Occult Sciences of Magnetism and Hypnotism.
> 
> The student will understand that the Orders and Hierarchies are here named
> after their corresponding colours, so as to avoid using numerals, which
> would be confusing in connection with the human principles, as the latter
> have no proper numbers of their own. The real Occult names of these
> Hierarchies cannot now be given.
> 
> The student must, however remember that the colours which we see with our
> physical eyes are not the true colours of Occult Nature, but are merely
> the effects produced on the mechanism of our physical organs by certain
> rates of vibration. For instance, Clerk Maxwell has demonstrated that the
> retinal effects of any colour may be imitated by properly combining three
> other colours. It follows, therefore, that our retina has only three
> distinct colour sensations, and we therefore do not perceive the seven
> colours which really exist, but only their “imitations,” so to speak, in
> our physical organism.
> 
> Thus, for instance, the Orange‐Red of the first “Triangle” is not a
> combination of Orange and Red, but the true “spiritual” Red, if the term
> may be allowed, while the Red (blood‐red) of the spectrum is the colour of
> Kâma, animal desire, and is inseparable from the material plane.
> 
> The Unity Of Deity.
> 
> Esotericism, pure and simple, speaks of no personal God; therefore are we
> considered as Atheists. But, in reality, Occult Philosophy, as a whole, is
> based absolutely on the ubiquitous presence of God, the Absolute Deity;
> and if IT Itself is not speculated upon, as being too sacred and yet
> incomprehensible as a Unit to the finite intellect, yet the entire
> Philosophy is based upon Its Divine Powers as being the Source of all that
> breathes and lives and has existence. In every ancient Religion the ONE
> was demonstrated by the many. In Egypt and India, in Chaldæa and Phœnicia,
> and finally in Greece, the ideas about Deity were expressed by multiples
> of three, five and seven; and also by eight, nine and twelve great Gods,
> which symbolized the powers and properties of the One and Only Deity. This
> was related to that infinite subdivision by irregular and odd numbers to
> which the metaphysics of these nations subjected their ONE DIVINITY. Thus
> constituted, the cycle of the Gods had all the qualities and attributes of
> the ONE SUPREME AND UNKNOWABLE; for in this collection of divine
> Personalities, or rather of Symbols personified, dwells the ONE GOD, the
> GOD ONE, that God which, in India, is said to have no Second.
> 
>     O God Ani [the Spiritual Sun], thou residest in the agglomeration
>     of thy divine personages.(817)
> 
> These words show the belief of the ancients that all manifestation
> proceeds from one and the same Source, all emanating from the one
> identical Principle which can never be completely developed except in and
> through the collective and entire aggregate of Its emanations.
> 
> The Pleroma of Valentinus is absolutely the Space of Occult Philosophy;
> for Pleroma means the “Fullness,” the superior regions. It is the sum
> total of all the Divine manifestations and emanations expressing the
> _plenum_ or totality of the rays proceeding from the ONE, differentiating
> on all the planes, and transforming themselves into Divine Powers, called
> Angels and Planetary Spirits in the Philosophy of every nation. The
> Gnostic Æons and Powers of the Pleroma are made to speak as the Devas and
> Siddhas of the _Purânas_. The Epinoia, the first female manifestation of
> God, the “Principle” of Simon Magus and Saturninus, holds the same
> language as the Logos of Basilides; and each of these is traced to the
> purely esoteric Alêtheia, the TRUTH of the Mysteries. All of them, we are
> taught, repeat at different times and in different languages the
> magnificent hymn of the Egyptian papyrus, thousands of years old:
> 
>     The Gods adore thee, they greet thee, O the One Dark Truth.
> 
> And addressing Ra, they add:
> 
>     The Gods bow before thy Majesty, by exalting the Souls of that
>     which produces them ... and say to thee, Peace to all emanations
>     from the Unconscious Father of the Conscious Fathers of the
>     Gods.... Thou producer of beings, we adore the souls which emanate
>     from thee. Thou begettest us, O thou Unknown, and we greet thee in
>     worshipping each God‐Soul which descendeth from thee and liveth in
>     us.
> 
> This is the source of the assertion:
> 
>     Know ye not that ye are Gods and the temple of God.
> 
> This is shown in the “Roots of Ritualism in Church and Masonry,” in
> _Lucifer_ for March, 1889. Truly then, as said seventeen centuries ago,
> “Man cannot possess Truth (Alêtheia) except he participate in the Gnosis.”
> So we may say now: No man can know the Truth unless he studies the secrets
> of the Pleroma of Occultism; and these secrets are all in the Theogony of
> the ancient Wisdom‐Religion, which is the Alêtheia of Occult Science.
> 
> Paper III. A Word Concerning the Earlier Papers.
> 
> As many have written and almost complained to me that they could find no
> practical clear application of certain diagrams appended to the first two
> Papers, and others have spoken of their abstruseness, a short explanation
> is necessary.
> 
> The reason of this difficulty in most cases has been that the point of
> view taken was erroneous; the purely abstract and metaphysical was
> mistaken for, and confused with, the concrete and the physical. Let us
> take for example the diagrams on page 477 (Paper II.,) and say that these
> are entirely macrocosmic and ideal. It must be remembered that the study
> of Occultism proceeds from Universals to Particulars and not the reverse
> way, as accepted by Science. As Plato was an Initiate, he very naturally
> used the former method, while Aristotle, never having been initiated,
> scoffed at his master, and, elaborating a system of his own, left it as an
> heirloom to be adopted and improved by Bacon. Of a truth the aphorism of
> Hermetic Wisdom, “As above, so below,” applies to all Esoteric
> instruction; but we must begin with the above; we must learn the formula
> before we can sum the series.
> 
> The two figures, therefore, are not meant to represent any two particular
> planes, but are the abstraction of a pair of planes, explanatory of the
> law of reflection, just as the Lower Manas is a reflection of the Higher.
> They must therefore be taken in the highest metaphysical sense.
> 
> The diagrams are only intended to familiarize students with the leading
> ideas of Occult correspondences, the very genius of metaphysical, or
> macrocosmic and spiritual Occultism forbidding the use of figures or even
> symbols further than as temporary aids. Once define an idea in words, and
> it loses its reality; once figure a metaphysical idea, and you materialize
> its spirit. Figures must be used only as ladders to scale the battlements,
> ladders to be disregarded when once the foot is set upon the rampart.
> 
> Let students, therefore, be very careful to spiritualize the Papers and
> avoid materializing them; let them always try to find the highest meaning
> possible, confident that in proportion as they approach the material and
> visible in their speculations on the Papers, so far are they from the
> right understanding of them. This is especially the case with these first
> Papers and Diagrams, for as in all true arts, so in Occultism, we must
> first learn the theory before we are taught the practice.
> 
> Concerning Secrecy.
> 
> Students ask: Why such secrecy about the details of a doctrine the body of
> which has been publicly revealed, as in _Esoteric Buddhism_ and the
> _Secret Doctrine_?
> 
> To this Occultism would reply: for two reasons:—
> 
> (_a_) The whole truth is too sacred to be given out promiscuously.
> 
> (_b_) The knowledge of all the details and missing links in the exoteric
> teachings is too dangerous in profane hands.
> 
> The truths revealed to man by the “Planetary Spirits”—the highest Kumâras,
> those who incarnate no longer in the Universe during this
> Mahâmanvantara—who will appear on earth as Avatâras only at the beginning
> of every new human Race, and at the junctions or close of the two ends of
> the small and great cycles—in time, as man became more animalized, were
> made to fade away from his memory. Yet, though these Teachers remain with
> man no longer than the time required to impress upon the plastic minds of
> child‐humanity the eternal verities they teach, Their Spirit remains vivid
> though latent in mankind. And the full knowledge of the primitive
> revelation has remained always with a few elect, and has been transmitted
> from that time up to the present, from one generation of Adepts to
> another. As the Teachers say in the Occult Primer:
> 
> _This is done so as to ensure them_ [the eternal truths] _from being
> utterly lost or forgotten in ages hereafter by the forthcoming
> generations._
> 
> The mission of the Planetary Spirit is but to strike the key‐note of
> Truth. When once He has directed the vibration of the latter to run its
> course uninterruptedly along the concatenation of the race to the end of
> the cycle, He disappears from our earth until the following Planetary
> Manvantara. The mission of any teacher of Esoteric truths, whether he
> stands at the top or the foot of the ladder of knowledge, is precisely the
> same; as above, so below. I have only orders to strike the key‐note of the
> various Esoteric truths among the learners as a body. Those units among
> you who will have raised themselves on the “Path” over their fellow‐
> students, in their Esoteric sphere, will, as the “Elect” spoken of did and
> do in the Parent Brotherhoods, receive the last explanatory details and
> the ultimate key to what they learn. No one, however, can hope to gain
> this privilege before the MASTERS—not my humble self—find him or her
> worthy.
> 
> If you wish to know the real _raison d’être_ for this policy, I now give
> it to you. No use my repeating and explaining what all of you know as well
> as myself; at the very beginning, events have shown that no caution can be
> dispensed with. Of our body of several hundred men and women, many did not
> seem to realize either the awful sacredness of the pledge (which some took
> at the end of their pen), or the fact that their _personality_ has to be
> entirely disregarded, when brought face to face with their HIGHER SELF; or
> that all their words and professions went for naught unless corroborated
> by actions. This was human nature, and no more; therefore it was passed
> leniently by, and a new lease accorded by the MASTER. But apart from this
> there is a danger lurking in the nature of the present cycle itself.
> Civilized humanity, however carefully guarded by its invisible Watchers,
> the Nirmânakâyas, who watch over our respective races and nations, is yet,
> owing to its collective Karma, terribly under the sway of the traditional
> opposers of the Nirmânakâyas—the “Brothers of the Shadow,” embodied and
> disembodied; and this, as has already been told you, will last to the end
> of the first Kali Yuga cycle (1897), and a few years beyond, as the
> smaller dark cycle happens to overlap the great one. Thus, notwithstanding
> all precautions, terrible secrets are often revealed to entirely unworthy
> persons by the efforts of the “Dark Brothers” and their working on human
> brains. This is entirely owing to the simple fact that in certain
> privileged organisms, vibrations of the primitive truth put in motion by
> the Planetary Beings are set up, in what Western philosophy would term
> innate ideas, and Occultism “flashes of genius.”(818) Some such idea based
> on eternal truth is awakened, and all that the watchful Powers can do is
> to prevent its entire revelation.
> 
> Everything in this Universe of differentiated matter has its two aspects,
> the light and the dark side, and these two attributes applied practically,
> lead the one to use, the other to abuse. Every man may become a Botanist
> without apparent danger to his fellow‐creatures; and many a Chemist who
> has mastered the science of essences knows that every one of them can both
> heal and kill. Not an ingredient, not a poison, but can be used for both
> purposes—aye, from harmless wax to deadly prussic acid, from the saliva of
> an infant to that of the cobra di capella. This every tyro in medicine
> knows—theoretically, at any rate. But where is the learned Chemist in our
> day who has been permitted to discover the “night side” of an attribute of
> any substance in the three kingdoms of Science, let alone in the seven of
> the Occultists? Who of them has penetrated into its Arcana, into the
> innermost Essence of things and its primary correlations? Yet it is this
> knowledge alone which makes of an Occultist a genuine practical Initiate,
> whether he turn out a Brother of Light or a Brother of Darkness. The
> essence of that subtle, traceless poison, the most potent in nature, which
> entered into the composition of the so‐called Medici and Borgia poisons,
> if used with discrimination by one well versed in the septenary degrees of
> its potentiality on each of the planes accessible to man on earth—could
> heal or kill every man in the world; the result depending, of course, on
> whether the operator was a Brother of the Light or a Brother of the
> Shadow. The former is prevented from doing the good he might, by racial,
> national, and individual Karma; the second is impeded in his fiendish work
> by the joint efforts of the human “Stones” of the “Guardian Wall.”(819)
> 
> It is incorrect to think that there exists any special “powder of
> projection” or “philosopher’s stone,” or “elixir of life.” The latter
> lurks in every flower, in every stone and mineral throughout the globe. It
> is the ultimate essence of _everything on its way to higher and higher
> evolution_. As there is no good or evil _per se_, so there is neither
> “elixir of life” nor “elixir of death,” nor poison, _per se_, but all this
> is contained in one and the same universal Essence, this or the other
> effect, or result, depending on the degree of its differentiation and its
> various correlations. The _light side_ of it produces life, health, bliss,
> divine peace, etc.; the _dark side_ brings death, disease, sorrow and
> strife. This is proven by the knowledge of the nature of the most violent
> poisons; of some of them even a large quantity will produce no evil effect
> on the organism, whereas a grain of the same poison kills with the
> rapidity of lightning; while the same grain, again, altered by a certain
> combination, though its quantity remains almost identical, will heal. The
> number of the degrees of its differentiation is septenary, as are the
> planes of its action, each degree being either beneficent or maleficent in
> its effects, according to the system into which it is introduced. He who
> is skilled in these degrees is on the high road to practical Adeptship; he
> who acts at hap‐hazard—as do the enormous majority of the “Mind Curers,”
> whether “Mental” or “Christian Scientists”—is likely to rue the effects on
> himself as well as on others. Put on the track by the example of the
> Indian Yogîs, and of their broadly but incorrectly outlined practices,
> which they have only read about, but have had no opportunity to
> study—these new sects have rushed headlong and guideless into the practice
> of _denying_ and _affirming_. Thus they have done more harm than good.
> Those who are successful owe it to their innate magnetic and healing
> powers, which very often counteract that which would otherwise be
> conducive to much evil. Beware, I say; Satan and the Archangel are more
> than twins; they are one body and one mind—_Deus est Demon inversus_.
> 
> Is The Practice Of Concentration Beneficent?
> 
> Such is another question often asked. I answer: Genuine concentration and
> meditation, _conscious and cautious_, upon one’s lower self in the light
> of the inner divine man and the Pâramitâs, is an excellent thing. But to
> “sit for Yoga,” with only a superficial and often distorted knowledge of
> the real practice, is almost invariably fatal; for ten to one the student
> will either develop mediumistic powers in himself or lose time and get
> disgusted both with practice and theory. Before one rushes into such a
> dangerous experiment and seeks to go beyond a minute examination of one’s
> lower self and _its_ walk in life, or that which is called in our
> phraseology, “The Chelâ’s Daily Life Ledger,” he would do well to learn at
> least the difference between the two aspects of “Magic,” the White or
> Divine, and the Black or Devilish, and assure himself that by “sitting for
> Yoga,” with no experience, as well as with no guide to show him the
> dangers, he does not daily and hourly cross the boundaries of the Divine
> to fall into the Satanic. Nevertheless, the way to learn the difference is
> very easy; one has only to remember that _no Esoteric truths entirely
> unveiled will ever be given in public print_, in book or magazine.
> 
> I ask students to turn to the _Theosophist_ of November, 1887. On page 98
> they will find the beginning of an excellent article by Mr. Râma Prasâd on
> “Nature’s Finer Forces.”(820) The value of this work is not so much in its
> literary merit, though it gained its author the gold medal of the
> _Theosophist_, as in its exposition of tenets hitherto concealed in a rare
> and ancient Sanskrit work on Occultism. But Mr. Râma Prasâd is not an
> Occultist, only an excellent Sanskrit scholar, a university graduate and a
> man of remarkable intelligence. His essays are almost entirely based on
> Tântra works, which, if read indiscriminately by a tyro in Occultism, will
> lead to the practice of most unmitigated Black Magic. Now, since the
> difference of primary importance between Black and White Magic is the
> object with which it is practised, and that of secondary importance the
> nature of the agents used for the production of phenomenal results, the
> line of demarcation between the two is very—_very_ thin. The danger is
> lessened only by the fact that every _Occult_ book, so‐called, is Occult
> only in a certain sense: that is, the text is Occult merely by reason of
> its blinds. The symbolism has to be thoroughly understood before the
> reader can get at the correct sense of the teaching. Moreover, it is never
> complete, its several portions each being under a different title, and
> each containing a portion of some other work; so that without a key to
> these no such work divulges the whole truth. Even the famous _Shivâgama_,
> on which _Natures Finer Forces_ is based, “is nowhere to be found in
> complete form,” as the author tells us. Thus, like all others, it treats
> of only five Tattvas instead of the seven as in Esoteric teachings.
> 
> Now, the Tattvas being simply the substratum of the seven forces of
> Nature, how can this be? There are seven forms of Prakriti, as Kapila’s
> Sânkhya, the _Vishnu Purâna_, and other works teach. Prakriti is Nature,
> Matter (primordial and elemental); therefore logic demands that the
> Tattvas also should be seven. For whether Tattvas mean, as Occultism
> teaches, “forces of Nature,” or, as the learned Râma Prâsad explains, “the
> substance out of which the universe is formed” and “the power by which it
> is sustained,” it is all one; they are Force, Purusha, and _Matter_,
> Prakriti. And if the _forms_, or rather planes, of the latter are seven,
> then its forces must be seven also. In other words, the degrees of the
> solidity of matter and the degrees of the power that ensouls it must go
> hand in hand.
> 
>     The Universe is made out of the Tattva, it is sustained by the
>     Tattva, and it disappears into the Tattva,
> 
> says Shiva, as quoted from the _Shivâgama_ in _Nature’s Finer Forces_.
> This settles the question; if Prakriti is septenary, then the Tattvas must
> be seven, for, as said, they are both Substance and Force, or atomic
> Matter and the Spirit that ensoule it.
> 
> This is explained here to enable the student to read between the lines of
> the so‐called Occult articles on Sanskrit Philosophy, by which they must
> not be misled. The doctrine of the seven Tattvas (the principles of the
> Universe and also of man) was held in great sacredness and therefore
> secrecy, in days of old, by the Brâhmans, who have now almost forgotten
> the teaching. Yet it is taught to this day in the Schools beyond the
> Himâlayan Range, though now hardly remembered or heard of in India except
> through rare Initiates. The policy has, however, been changed gradually;
> Chelâs began to be taught the broad outlines of it, and at the advent of
> the T. S. in India in 1879, I was ordered to teach it in its exoteric form
> to one or two. I now give it out Esoterically.
> 
> Knowing that some students try to follow a system of Yoga in their own
> fashion, guided only by the rare hints they find in Theosophical books and
> magazines, which must naturally be incomplete, I chose one of the best
> expositions upon ancient Occult works, _Nature’s Finer Forces_, in order
> to point out how very easily one can be misled by their blinds.
> 
> The author seems to have been himself deceived. The Tantras read
> Esoterically are as full of wisdom as the noblest Occult works. Studied
> without a guide and applied to practice, they may lead to the production
> of various phenomenal results, on the moral and physiological planes. But
> let anyone accept their dead‐letter rules and practices, let him try with
> some selfish motive in view to carry out the rites prescribed therein,
> and—he is lost. Followed with pure heart and unselfish devotion merely for
> the sake of experiment, either no results will follow, or such as can only
> throw back the performer. But woe to the selfish man who seeks to develop
> Occult powers only to attain earthly benefits or revenge, or to satisfy
> his ambition; the separation of the Higher from the Lower Principles and
> the severing of Buddhi‐Manas from the Tântrist’s personality will speedily
> follow, the terrible Karmic results to the _dabbler_ in Magic.
> 
> In the East, in India and China, _soulless_ men and women are as
> frequently met with as in the West, though vice is, in truth, far less
> developed there than it is here.
> 
> It is Black Magic and oblivion of their ancestral wisdom that lead them
> thereunto. But of this I will speak later, now merely adding: you have to
> be warned and know the danger.
> 
> Meanwhile, in view of what follows, the real Occult division of the
> Principles in their correspondences with the Tattvas and other minor
> forces has to be well studied.
> 
> About “Principles” And “Aspects.”
> 
> Speaking metaphysically and philosophically, on strict Esoteric lines, man
> as a complete unit is composed of Four basic Principles and their Three
> Aspects on this earth. In the semi‐esoteric teachings, these Four and
> Three have been called Seven Principles, to facilitate the comprehension
> of the masses.
> 
> The Eternal Basic Principles.
> 
> 1. _Âtmâ_, or _Jîva_, “the One Life,” which permeates the _Monadic Trio_.
> (One in three and three in One.)
> 
> 2. _Auric Envelope_; because the substratum of the Aura around man is the
> universally diffused primordial and pure Akâsha, the first film on the
> boundless and shoreless expanse of Jîva, the immutable Root of all.
> 
> 3. _Buddhi_; for Buddhi is a ray of the Universal Spiritual Soul (ALAYA).
> 
> 4. _Manas_ (the Higher Ego); for it proceeds from Mahat, the first product
> or emanation of Pradhâna which contains _potentially_ all the Gunas
> (attributes). Mahat is Cosmic Intelligence, called the “Great
> Principle.”(821)
> 
> Transitory Aspects Produced by the Principles.
> 
> 1. _Prâna_, the Breath of Life, the same as _Nephesh_. At the death of a
> living being, Prâna re‐becomes Jîva.(822)
> 
> 2. _Linga Sharîra_, the Astral Form, the transitory emanation of the Auric
> Egg. This form precedes the formation of the living Body, and after death
> clings to it, dissipating only with the disappearance of its last atom
> (the skeleton excepted).
> 
> 3. Lower Manas, the Animal Soul, the reflection or shadow of the Buddhi‐
> Manas, having the potentialitie of both, but conquered generally by its
> association with the Kâma elements.
> 
> As the lower man is the combined product of two aspects—physically, of his
> Astral Form, and psycho‐physiologically of Kâma‐Manas—he is not looked
> upon even as an aspect, but as an illusion.
> 
> The Auric Egg, on account of its nature and manifold functions, has to be
> well studied. As Hiranyagarbha, the Golden Womb or Egg, contains Brahmâ,
> the collective symbol of the Seven Universal Forces, so the Auric Egg
> contains, and is directly related to, both the divine and the physical
> man. In its essence, as said, it is eternal; in its constant correlations
> and transformations, during the reincarnating progress of the Ego on this
> earth, it is a kind of perpetual motion machine.
> 
> As given out in our second volume, the Egos or Kumâras, incarnating in
> man, at the end of the Third Root‐Race, are not human Egos of this earth
> or plane, but become such only from the moment they ensoul the Animal Man,
> thus endowing him with his Higher Mind. Each is a “Breath” or Principle,
> called the Human Soul, or Manas, the Mind. As the teachings say:
> 
> _“__Each is a pillar of light. Having chosen its vehicle, it expanded,
> surrounding with an Âkâshic Aura the human animal, while the Divine
> (Mânasic) Principle settled within that human form.__”_
> 
> Ancient Wisdom teaches us, moreover, that from this first incarnation, the
> Lunar Pitris, who had made men out of their Chhâyâs or Shadows, are
> absorbed by this Auric Essence, and a distinct Astral Form is now produced
> for each forthcoming personality of the reincarnating series of each Ego.
> 
> Thus the Auric Egg, reflecting all the thoughts, words and deeds of man,
> is:
> 
> (_a_) The preserver of every Karmic record.
> 
> (_b_) The storehouse of all the good and evil powers of man, receiving and
> giving out at his will—nay, at his very thought—every potentiality, which
> becomes, then and there, an acting potency: this Aura is the mirror in
> which sensitives and clairvoyants sense and perceive the real man, and see
> him _as he is_, not as he appears.
> 
> (_c_) As it furnishes man with his Astral Form, around which the physical
> entity models itself, first as a fœtus, then as a child and man, the
> astral growing apace with the human being, so it furnishes him during
> life, if an Adept, with his Mâyâvi Rûpa, or Illusion Body, which is not
> his _Vital_‐Astral Body; and after death, with his Devachanic Entity and
> Kâma Rûpa, or Body of Desire (the Spook).(823)
> 
> In the case of the Devachanic Entity, the Ego, in order to be able to go
> into a state of bliss, as the “I” of its immediately preceding
> incarnation, has to be clothed (metaphorically speaking) with the
> spiritual elements of the ideas, aspirations and thoughts of the now
> disembodied personality; otherwise what is it that enjoys bliss and
> reward? Surely not the impersonal Ego, the Divine Individuality. Therefore
> it must be the good Karmic records of the deceased, impressed upon the
> Auric Substance, which furnish the Human Soul with just enough of the
> spiritual elements of the ex‐personality, to enable it to still believe
> itself that body from which it has just been severed, and to receive its
> fruition, during a more or less prolonged period of “spiritual gestation.”
> For Devachan is a “spiritual gestation” within an ideal matrix state, a
> birth of the Ego into the world of effects, which ideal, subjective birth
> precedes its next terrestrial birth, the latter being determined by its
> bad Karma, into the world of causes.(824)
> 
> In the case of the Spook, the Kâma Rûpa is furnished from the animal dregs
> of the Auric Envelope, with its daily Karmic record of animal life, so
> full of animal desires and selfish aspirations.(825)
> 
> Now the Linga Sharîra remains with the Physical Body, and fades out along
> with it. An astral entity then has to be created, a new Linga Sharîra
> provided, to become the bearer of all the past Tanhas and future Karma.
> How is this accomplished? The mediumistic Spook, the “departed angel,”
> fades out and vanishes also in its turn(826) as an entity or full image of
> the personality that was, and leaves in the Kâmalokic world of effects
> only the record of its misdeeds and sinful thoughts and acts, known in the
> phraseology of Occultists as Tânhic or human Elementals. Entering into the
> composition of the Astral Form of the new body, into which the Ego, upon
> its quitting the Devachanic state, is to enter according to Karmic decree,
> the Elementals form that new astral entity which is born within the Auric
> Envelope, and of which it is often said:
> 
>     Bad Karma waits at the threshold of Devachan, with its army of
>     Skandhas.(827)
> 
> For no sooner is the Devachanic state of reward ended, than the Ego is
> indissolubly united with (or rather follows in the track of) the new
> Astral Form. Both are Karmically propelled towards the family or woman
> from whom is to be born the _animal child_ chosen by Karma to become the
> vehicle of the Ego which has just awakened from the Devachanic state. Then
> the _new_ Astral Form, composed partly of the pure Akâshic Essence of the
> Auric Egg, and partly of the terrestrial elements of the punishable sins
> and misdeeds of the last personality, is drawn into the woman. Once there,
> Nature models the fœtus of flesh around the Astral, out of the growing
> materials of the male seed in the female soil. Thus grows out of the
> essence of a decayed seed the fruit or eidolon of the dead seed, the
> physical fruit producing in its turn within itself another, and other
> seeds for future plants.
> 
> And now we may return to the Tattvas, and see what they mean in nature and
> man, showing thereby the great danger of indulging in fancy, amateur Yoga,
> without knowing what we are about.
> 
> The Tâttvic Correlations and Meaning.
> 
> In Nature, then, we find seven Forces, or seven Centres of Force, and
> everything seems to respond to that number, as for instance, the septenary
> scale in music, or Sounds, and the septenary spectrum in Colours. I have
> not exhausted its nomenclature and proofs in the earlier volumes, yet
> enough is given to show every thinker that the facts adduced are no
> coincidences, but very weighty testimony.
> 
> There are several reasons why only five Tattvas are given in the Hindu
> systems. One of these I have already mentioned; another is that owing to
> our having reached only the Fifth Race, and being (so far as Science is
> able to ascertain) endowed with only five senses, the two remaining senses
> that are still latent in man can have their existence proven only on
> phenomenal evidence which to the Materialist is no evidence at all. The
> five physical senses are made to correspond with the five lower Tattvas,
> the two yet undeveloped senses in man; and the two forces, or Tattvas,
> forgotten by Brâhmans and still unrecognized by Science, being so
> subjective and the highest of them so sacred, that they can only be
> recognized by, and known through, the highest Occult Sciences. It is easy
> to see that these two Tattvas and the two senses (the sixth and the
> seventh) correspond to the two highest human principles, Buddhi and the
> Auric Envelope, impregnated with the light of Âtmâ. Unless we open in
> ourselves, by Occult training, the sixth and seventh senses, we can never
> comprehend correctly their corresponding types. Thus the statement in
> _Nature’s Finer Forces_ that, in the Tâttvic scale, the highest Tattva of
> all is Âkâsha(828) (followed by [only] four, each of which becomes grosser
> than its predecessor), if made from the Esoteric standpoint, is erroneous.
> For once Âkâsha, an almost homogeneous and certainly universal Principle,
> is translated Ether, then Âkâsha is dwarfed and limited to our visible
> Universe, for assuredly it is not the Ether of Space. Ether, whatever
> Modern Science makes of it, is differentiated Substance; Âkâsha, having no
> attributes save one—SOUND, _of which it is the substratum_—is no substance
> even exoterically and in the minds of some Orientalists,(829) but rather
> Chaos, or the Great Spatial Void.(830)
> 
> Esoterically, Âkâsha alone is _Divine_ Space, and becomes Ether only on
> the lowest and last plane, or our visible Universe and Earth. In this case
> the blind is in the word “attribute,” which is said to be Sound. But Sound
> is no attribute of Âkâsha, but its primary correlation, its primordial
> manifestation, the LOGOS, or Divine Ideation made Word, and that “WORD”
> made “Flesh.” Sound may be considered an “attribute” of Âkâsha only on the
> condition of anthropomorphizing the latter. It is not a characteristic of
> it, though it is certainly as innate in it as the idea “I am _I_” is
> innate in our thoughts.
> 
> Occultism teaches that Âkâsha contains and includes the seven Centres of
> Force, therefore the six Tattvas, of which it is the seventh, or rather
> their synthesis. But if Âkâsha be taken, as we believe it is in this case,
> to represent only the exoteric idea, then the author is right; because,
> seeing that Âkâsha is universally omnipresent, following the Paurânic
> limitation, _for the better comprehension of our finite intellects_, he
> places its commencement only beyond the four planes of our Earth
> Chain,(831) the two higher Tattvas being as concealed to the average
> mortal as the sixth and seventh senses are to the materialistic mind.
> 
> Therefore, while Sanskrit and Hindu Philosophy generally speak of five
> Tattvas only, Occultists name seven, thus making them correspond with
> every septenary in Nature. The Tattvas stand in the same order as the
> seven macro‐ and micro‐cosmic Forces: and as taught in Esotericism, are as
> follows:
> 
> (1) ÂDI TATTVA, the primordial universal Force, issuing at the beginning
> of manifestation, or of the “creative” period, from the eternal immutable
> Sat, the substratum of ALL. It corresponds with the Auric Envelope or
> Brahmâ’s Egg, which surrounds every globe, as well as every man, animal
> and thing. It is the vehicle containing potentially everything—Spirit and
> Substance, Force and Matter. Âdi Tattva, in Esoteric Cosmogony, is the
> Force which we refer to as proceeding from the First or Unmanifested
> LOGOS.
> 
> (2) ANUPÂDAKA TATTVA,(832) the first differentiation on the plane of
> being—the first being an ideal one—or that which is born by transformation
> from something higher than itself. With the Occultists, this Force
> proceeds from the Second LOGOS.
> 
> (3) ÂKÂSHA TATTVA, this is the point from which all _exoteric_
> Philosophies and Religions start. Âkâsha Tattva is explained in them as
> Etheric Force, Ether. Hence Jupiter, the “highest” God, was named after
> Pater Æther; Indra, once the highest God in India, is the etheric or
> heavenly expanse, and so with Uranus, etc. The Christian biblical God,
> also, is spoken of as the Holy Ghost, Pneuma, rarefied wind or air. This
> the Occultists call the Force of the Third LOGOS, the Creative Force in
> the already Manifested Universe.
> 
> (4) VÂYU TATTVA, the aërial plane where substance is gaseous.
> 
> (5) TAIJAS TATTVA, the plane of our atmosphere, from _tejas_, luminous.
> 
> (6) ÂPAS TATTVA, watery or liquid substance or force.
> 
> (7) PRITHIVÎ TATTVA, solid earthly substance, the terrestrial spirit or
> force, the lowest of all.
> 
> All these correspond to our Principles, and to the seven senses and forces
> in man. According to the Tattva or Force generated or induced in us, so
> will our bodies act.
> 
> Now, what I have to say here is addressed especially to those members who
> are anxious to develop powers by “sitting for Yoga.” You have seen, from
> what has been already said, that in the development of Râja Yoga, no
> extant works made public are of the least good; they can at best give
> inklings of Hatha Yoga, something that may develop mediumship at best, and
> in the worst case—consumption. If those who practice “meditation,” and try
> to learn “the Science of Breath,” will read attentively _Nature’s Finer
> Forces_, they will find that it is by utilizing the five Tattvas only that
> this dangerous science is acquired. For in the exoteric Yoga Philosophy,
> and the Hatha Yoga practice, Âkâsha Tattva is placed in the head (or
> physical brain) of man; Tejas Tattva in the shoulders; Vâyu Tattva in the
> navel (the seat of all the phallic Gods, “creators” of the universe and
> man); Âpas Tattva in the knees; and Prithivî Tattva in the feet. Hence the
> two higher Tattvas and their correspondences are ignored and excluded;
> and, as these are the chief factors in Râja Yoga, no spiritual or
> intellectual phenomena of a high nature can take place. The best results
> obtainable will be physical phenomena and no more. As the “Five Breaths,”
> or rather the five states of the human breath, in Hatha Yoga correspond to
> the above _terrestrial_ planes and colours, what spiritual results can be
> obtained? On the contrary, they are the very reverse of the plane of
> Spirit, or the higher macrocosmic plane, reflected as they are upside
> down, in the Astral Light. This is proven in the Tântra work, _Shivâgama_,
> itself. Let us compare.
> 
> First of all, remember that the Septenary of visible and also invisible
> Nature is said in Occultism to consist of the _three_ (and four) Fires,
> which grow into the forty‐nine Fires. This shows that as the Macrocosm is
> divided into seven great planes of various differentiations of
> Substance—from the spiritual or subjective, to the fully objective or
> material, from Akâsha down to the sin‐laden atmosphere of our earth—so, in
> its turn, each of these great planes has three aspects, based on four
> Principles, as already shown above. This seems to be quite natural, as
> even modern Science has her three states of matter and what are generally
> called the “critical” or intermediate states between the solid, the
> fluidic, and the gaseous.
> 
> Now, the Astral Light is not a universally diffused stuff, but pertains
> only to our earth and all other bodies of the system on the same plane of
> matter with it. Our Astral Light is, so to speak, the Linga Sharîra of our
> earth; only instead of being its primordial prototype, as in the case of
> our Chhâyâ, or Double, it is the reverse. Human and animal bodies grow and
> develop on the model of their antetypal Doubles; whereas the Astral Light
> is born from the terrene emanations, grows and develops after its
> prototypal parent, and in its treacherous waves everything from the upper
> planes and from the lower solid plane, the earth, both ways, is reflected
> _reversed_. Hence the confusion of its colours and sounds in the
> clairvoyance and clairaudience of the sensitive who trusts to its records,
> be that sensitive a Hatha Yogî or a medium.
> 
> Such, then, is the Occult Science on which the modern Ascetics and Yogîs
> of India base their Soul development and powers. They are known as the
> Hatha Yogîs. Now, the science of Hatha Yoga rests upon the “suppression of
> breath,” or Prânâyâma, to which exercise our Masters are unanimously
> opposed. For what is Prânâyâma? Literally translated, it means the “death
> of (vital) breath.” Prâna, as said, is not Jîva, the eternal fount of life
> immortal; nor is it connected in any way with Pranava, as some think, for
> Pranava is a synonym of AUM in a mystic sense. As much as has ever been
> taught publicly and clearly about it is to be found in _Nature’s Finer
> Forces_. If such directions, however, are followed, they can only lead to
> Black Magic and mediumship. Several impatient Chelâs, whom we knew
> personally in India, went in for the practice of Hatha Yoga,
> notwithstanding our warnings. Of these, two developed consumption, of
> which one died; others became almost idiotic; another committed suicide;
> and one developed into a regular Tântrika, a Black Magician, but his
> career, fortunately for himself, was cut short by death.
> 
> The science of the Five Breaths, the moist, the fiery, the airy, etc., has
> a twofold significance and two applications. The Tântrikas take it
> literally, as relating to the regulation of the vital, lung breath,
> whereas the ancient Râja Yogîs understood it as referring to the mental or
> “will” breath, which alone leads to the highest clairvoyant powers, to the
> function of the Third Eye, and the acquisition of the true Râja Yoga
> Occult powers. The difference between the two is enormous. The former, as
> shown, use the five lower Tattvas; the latter begin by using the three
> higher alone, for mental and will development, and the rest only when they
> have completely mastered the three; hence, they use only one (Âkâsha
> Tattva) out of the Tântric five. As well said in the above stated work,
> “Tattvas are the modifications of Svara.” Now, the Svara is the root of
> all sound, the substratum of the Pythagorean music of the spheres, Svara
> being that which is _beyond_ Spirit, in the modern acceptation of the
> word, the Spirit within Spirit, or as very properly translated, the
> “current of the life‐wave,” the emanation of the One Life. The Great
> Breath spoken of in our first volume is ÂTMÂ, the etymology of which is
> “_eternal motion_.” Now while the ascetic Chelâ of our school, for his
> mental development, follows carefully the process of the evolution of the
> Universe, that is, proceeds from universals to particulars, the Hatha Yogî
> reverses the conditions and begins by sitting for the suppression of his
> (vital) breath. And if, as Hindu philosophy teaches, at the beginning of
> kosmic evolution, “Svara threw itself into the form of Âkâsha,” and thence
> successively into the forms of Vâyu (air), Agni (fire), Âpas (water), and
> Prithivî (solid matter),(833) then it stands to reason that we have to
> begin by the higher _supersensuous_ Tattvas. The Râja Yogî does not
> descend on the planes of substance beyond Sûkshma (subtle matter), while
> the Hatha Yogî develops and uses his powers only on the material plane.
> Some Tântrikas locate the three Nadîs, Sushumnâ, Îdâ and Pingalâ, in the
> medulla oblongata, the central line of which they call Sushumnâ, and the
> right and left divisions, Pingalâ and Îdâ, and also in the heart, to the
> divisions of which they apply the same names. The Trans‐Himâlayan school
> of the ancient Indian Râja Yogîs, with which the modern Yogîs of India
> have little to do, locates Sushumnâ, the chief seat of these three Nadîs,
> in the central tube of the spinal cord, and Îdâ and Pingalâ on its left
> and right sides. Sushumnâ is the Brahmadanda. It is that canal (of the
> spinal cord), of the use of which Physiology knows no more than it does of
> the spleen and the pineal gland. Îâ and Pingalâ are simply the sharps and
> flats of that _Fa_ of human nature, the keynote and the middle key in the
> scale of the septenary harmony of the Principles, which, when struck in a
> proper way, awakens the sentries on either side, the spiritual Manas and
> the physical Kâma, and subdues the lower through the higher. But this
> effect has to be produced by the exercise of will‐power, not through the
> scientific or trained suppression of the breath. Take a transverse section
> of the spinal region, and you will find sections across three columns, one
> of which columns transmits the volitional orders, and a second a life
> current of Jîva—not of Prâna, which animates the body of man—during what
> is called Samâdhi and like states.
> 
> He who has studied both systems, the Hatha and the Râja Yoga, finds an
> enormous difference between the two: one is purely psycho‐physiological,
> the other purely psycho‐spiritual. The Tântrists do not seem to go higher
> than the six visible and known plexuses, with each of which they connect
> the Tattvas; and the great stress they lay on the chief of these, the
> Mûladhâra Chakra (the sacral plexus), shows the material and selfish bent
> of their efforts towards the acquisition of powers. Their five Breaths and
> five Tattvas are chiefly concerned with the prostatic, epigastric,
> cardiac, and laryngeal plexuses. Almost ignoring the Âjñâ, they are
> positively ignorant of the synthesizing laryngeal plexus. But with the
> followers of the old school it is different. We begin with the mastery of
> that organ which is situated at the base of the brain, in the pharynx, and
> called by Western Anatomists the Pituitary Body. In the series of the
> objective cranial organs, corresponding to the subjective Tâttvic
> principles, it stands to the Third Eye (Pineal Gland) as Manas stands to
> Buddhi; the arousing and awakening of the Third Eye must be performed by
> that vascular organ, that insignificant little body, of which, once again,
> Physiology knows nothing at all. The one is the Energizer of Will, the
> other that of Clairvoyant Perception.
> 
> Those who are Physicians, Physiologists, Anatomists, etc., will understand
> me better than the rest in the following explanation.
> 
> Now, as to the functions of the Pineal Gland, or Conarium, and of the
> Pituitary Body, we find no explanations vouchsafed by the standard
> authorities. Indeed, on looking through the works of the greatest
> specialists, it is curious to observe how much confused ignorance on the
> human vital economy, physiological as well as psychological, is openly
> confessed. The following is all that can be gleaned from the authorities
> upon these two important organs.
> 
> (1) The Pineal Gland, or Conarium, is a rounded, oblong body, from three
> to four lines long, of a deep reddish grey, connected with the posterior
> part of the third ventricle of the brain. It is attached at its base by
> two thin medullary cords, which diverge forward to the Optic Thalami.
> Remember that the latter are found by the best Physiologists to be the
> organs of reception and condensation of the most sensitive and sensorial
> incitations from the periphery of the body (according to Occultism, from
> the periphery of the Auric Egg, which is our point of communication with
> the higher, universal planes). We are further told that the two bands of
> the Optic Thalami, which are inflected to meet each other, unite on the
> median line, where they become the two peduncles of the Pineal Gland.
> 
> (2) The Pituitary Body, or Hypophysis Cerebri, is a small and hard organ,
> about six lines broad, three long and three high. It is formed of an
> anterior bean‐shaped, and of a posterior and more rounded lobe, which are
> uniformly united. Its component parts, we are told, are almost identical
> with those of the Pineal Gland; yet not the slightest connection can be
> traced between the two centres. To this, however, Occultists take
> exception; they _know_ that there is a connection, and this even
> anatomically and physically. Dissectors, on the other hand, have to deal
> with corpses; and, as they themselves admit, brain‐matter, of all tissues
> and organs, collapses and changes form the soonest—in fact, a few minutes
> after death. When, then, the pulsating life which expanded the mass of the
> brain, filled all its cavities and energized all its organs, vanishes, the
> cerebral mass shrinks into a sort of pasty condition, and once open
> passages become closed. But the contraction and even interblending of
> parts in this process of shrinking, and the subsequent pasty state of the
> brain, do not imply that there is no connection between these two organs
> before death. In point of fact, as Professor Owen has shown, a connection
> as objective as a groove and tube exists in the crania of the human fœtus
> and of certain fishes. When a man is in his normal condition, an Adept can
> see the golden Aura pulsating in both the centres, like the pulsation of
> the heart, which never ceases throughout life. This motion, however, under
> the abnormal condition of effort to develop clairvoyant faculties, becomes
> intensified, and the Aura takes on a stronger vibratory or swinging
> action. The arc of the pulsation of the Pituitary Body mounts upward, more
> and more, until, just as when the electric current strikes some solid
> object, the current finally strikes the Pineal Gland, and the dormant
> organ is awakened and set all glowing with the pure Âkâshic Fire. This is
> the psycho‐physiological illustration of two organs on the physical plane,
> which are, respectively, the concrete symbols of the metaphysical concepts
> called Manas and Buddhi. The latter, in order to become conscious on this
> plane, needs the more differentiated fire of Manas; _but once the sixth
> sense has awakened the seventh_, the light which radiates from this
> seventh sense illumines the fields of infinitude. For a brief space of
> time man becomes omniscient; the Past and the Future, Space and Time,
> disappear and become for him the Present. If an Adept, he will store the
> knowledge he thus gains in his physical memory, and nothing, save the
> crime of indulging in Black Magic, can obliterate the remembrance of it.
> If only a Chelâ, portions alone of the whole truth will impress themselves
> on his memory, and he will have to repeat the process for years, never
> allowing one speck of impurity to stain him mentally or physically, before
> he becomes a fully initiated Adept.
> 
> It may seem strange, almost incomprehensible, that the chief success of
> Gupta Vidyâ, or Occult Knowledge, should depend upon such flashes of
> clairvoyance, and that the latter should depend in man on two such
> insignificant excrescences in his cranial cavity, “two horny _warts_
> covered with grey sand (acervulus cerebri),” as expressed by Bichat in his
> _Anatomie Descriptive_; yet so it is. But this sand is not to be despised;
> nay, in truth, it is only this landmark of the internal, independent
> activity of the Conarium that prevents Physiologists from classifying it
> with the absolutely useless atrophied organs, the relics of a previous and
> now utterly changed anatomy of man during some period of his unknown
> evolution. This “sand” is very mysterious, and baffles the inquiry of
> every Materialist. In the cavity on the anterior surface of this gland, in
> young persons, and in its substance, in people of advanced years, is found
> 
>     A yellowish substance, semi‐transparent, brilliant and hard, the
>     diameter of which does not exceed half a line.(834)
> 
> Such is the acervulus cerebri.
> 
> This brilliant “sand” is the concretion of the gland itself, so say the
> Physiologists. Perhaps not, we answer. The Pineal Gland is that which the
> Eastern Occultist calls Devâksha, the “Divine Eye.” To this day, it is the
> chief organ of spirituality in the human brain, the seat of genius, the
> magical Sesame uttered by the purified will of the Mystic, which opens all
> the avenues of truth for him who knows how to use it. The Esoteric Science
> teaches that Manas, the Mind Ego, does not accomplish its full union with
> the child before he is six or seven years of age, before which period,
> even according to the canon of the Church and Law, no child is deemed
> responsible.(835) Manas becomes a prisoner, one with the body, only at
> that age. Now a strange thing was observed in several thousand cases by
> the famous German anatomist, Wengel. With a few extremely rare exceptions,
> this “sand,” or golden‐coloured concretion, is found only in subjects
> after the completion of their seventh year. In the case of fools these
> calculi are very few; in congenital idiots they are completely absent.
> Morgagni,(836) Grading,(837) and Gum(838) were wise men in their
> generation, and are wise men to‐day, since they are the only
> Physiologists, so far, who connect the calculi with mind. For, sum up the
> facts, that they are absent in young children, in very old people, and in
> idiots, and the unavoidable conclusion will be that they must be connected
> with mind.
> 
> Now since every mineral, vegetable and other atom is only a concretion of
> crystallized Spirit, or Âkâsha, the Universal Soul, why, asks Occultism,
> should the fact that these concretions of the Pineal Gland, are, upon
> analysis, found to be composed of animal matter, phosphate of lime and
> carbonate, serve as an objection to the statement that they are the result
> of the work of mental electricity upon surrounding matter?
> 
> Our seven Chakras are all situated in the head, and it is these Master
> Chakras which govern and rule the seven (for there are seven) principal
> plexuses in the body, besides the forty‐two minor ones to which Physiology
> refuses that name. The fact that no microscope can detect such centres on
> the objective plane goes for nothing; no microscope has ever yet detected,
> nor ever will, the difference between the motor and sensory nerve‐tubes,
> the conductors of all our bodily and psychic sensations; and yet logic
> alone would show that such difference exists. And if the term plexus, in
> this application, does not represent to the Western mind the idea conveyed
> by the term of the Anatomist, then call them Chakras or Padmas, or the
> Wheels, the Lotus Heart and Petals. Remember that Physiology, imperfect as
> it is, shows septenary groups all over the exterior and interior of the
> body; the seven head orifices, the seven “organs” at the base of the
> brain, the seven plexuses, the pharyngeal, laryngeal, cavernous, cardiac,
> epigastric, prostatic, and sacral, etc.
> 
> When the time comes, advanced students will be given the minute details
> about the Master Chakras and taught the use of them; till then, less
> difficult subjects have to be learned. If asked whether the seven
> plexuses, or Tâttvic centres of action, are the centres where the seven
> Rays of the Logos vibrate, I answer in the affirmative, simply remarking
> that the rays of the Logos vibrate in every atom, for the matter of that.
> 
> In these volumes it is almost revealed that the “Sons of Fohat” are the
> personified Forces known in a general way as Motion, Sound, Heat, Light,
> Cohesion, Electricity or Electric Fluid, and Nerve‐Force or Magnetism.
> This truth, however, cannot teach the student to attune and moderate the
> Kundalinî of the cosmic plane with the _vital_ Kundalinî, the Electric
> Fluid with the Nerve‐Force, and unless he does so, he is sure to kill
> himself; for the one travels at the rate of about 90 feet, and the other
> at the rate of 115,000 leagues a second. The seven Shaktis respectively
> called Para Shakti, Jñâna Shakti, etc., are synonymous with the “Sons of
> Fohat,” for they are their female aspects. At the present stage, however,
> as their names would only be confusing to the Western student, it is
> better to remember the English equivalents as translated above. As each
> Force is septenary, their sum is, of course, forty‐nine.
> 
> The question now mooted in Science, whether a sound is capable of calling
> forth impressions of light and colour in addition to its natural sound
> impressions, has been answered by Occult Science ages ago. Every impulse
> or vibration of a physical object producing a certain vibration of the
> air, that is, causing the collision of physical particles, the sound of
> which is capable of affecting the ear, produces at the same time a
> corresponding flash of light, which will assume some particular colour.
> For, in the realm of hidden Forces, an _audible_ sound is but a subjective
> colour; and a perceptible colour, but an _inaudible_ sound; both proceed
> from the same potential substance, which Physicists used to call ether,
> and now refer to under various other names; but which we call plastic,
> through invisible SPACE. This may appear a paradoxical hypothesis, but
> facts are there to prove it. Complete deafness, for instance, does not
> preclude the possibility of discerning sounds; medical science has several
> cases on record which prove that these sounds are received by, and
> conveyed to, the patient’s organ of sight, through the mind, under the
> form of chromatic impressions. The very fact that the intermediate tones
> of the chromatic musical scale were formerly written in colours shows an
> unconscious reminiscence of the ancient Occult teaching that colour and
> sound are two out of the seven correlative aspects, _on our plane_, of one
> and the same thing, _viz._, Nature’s first differentiated Substance.
> 
> Here is an example of the relation of colour to vibration well worthy of
> the attention of Occultists. Not only Adepts and advanced Chelâs, but also
> the lower order of Psychics, such as clairvoyants and psychometrists, can
> perceive a psychic Aura of various colours around every individual,
> corresponding to the temperament of the person within it. In other words,
> the mysterious records within the Auric Egg are not the heirloom of
> trained Adepts alone, but sometimes also of natural Psychics. Every human
> passion, every thought and quality, is indicated in this Aura by
> corresponding colours and shades of colour, and certain of these are
> sensed and felt rather than perceived. The best of such Psychics, as shown
> by Galton, can also perceive colours produced by the vibrations of musical
> instruments, every note suggesting a different colour. As a string
> vibrates and gives forth an audible note, so the nerves of the human body
> vibrate and thrill in correspondence with various emotions under the
> general impulse of the circulating vitality of Prâna, thus producing
> undulations in the psychic Aura of the person which result in chromatic
> effects.
> 
> The human nervous system as a whole, then, may be regarded as an Æolian
> Harp, responding to the impact of the vital force, which is no
> abstraction, but a dynamic reality, and manifests the subtlest shades of
> the individual character in colour phenomena. If these nerve vibrations
> are made intense enough and brought into vibratory relation with an astral
> element, the result is—sound. How, then, can anyone doubt the relation
> between the microcosmic and macrocosmic forces?
> 
> And now that I have shown that the Tântric works as explained by Râma
> Prâsad, and other Yoga treatises of the same character which have appeared
> from time to time in Theosophical journals—for note well that those of
> true Râja Yoga are never published—tend to Black Magic and are most
> dangerous to take for guides in self‐training, I hope that students will
> be on their guard.
> 
> For, considering that no two authorities up to the present day agree as to
> the real location of the Chakras and Padmas in the body, and, seeing that
> the colours of the Tattvas as given are reversed, _e.g._:
> 
> (_a_) Âkâsha is made black or colourless, whereas corresponding to Manas,
> it is indigo;
> 
> (_b_) Vâyu is made blue, whereas, corresponding to the Lower Manas, it is
> green;
> 
> (_c_) Âpas is made white, whereas, corresponding to the Astral Body, it is
> violet, with a silver, moonlike white substratum;
> 
> Tejas, red, is the only colour given correctly—from such considerations, I
> say, it is easy to see that these disagreements are dangerous blinds.
> 
> Further, the practice of the Five Breaths results in deadly injury, both
> physiologically and psychically, as already shown. It is indeed that which
> it is called, Prânâyâma, or the death of the breath, for it results, for
> the practiser, in death—in moral death always, and in physical death very
> frequently.
> 
> On Exoteric “Blinds” and “the Death of the Soul.”
> 
> As a corollary to this, and before going into still more abstruse
> teachings, I must redeem the promise already given. I have to illustrate
> by tenets you already know, the awful doctrine of personal annihilation.
> Banish from your minds all that you have hitherto read in such works as
> _Esoteric Buddhism_, and thought you understood, of such hypotheses as the
> eighth sphere and the moon, and that man shares a common ancestor with the
> ape. Even the details occasionally given out by myself in the
> _Theosophist_ and _Lucifer_ were nothing like the whole truth, but only
> broad general ideas, hardly touched upon in their details. Certain
> passages, however, give out hints, especially my foot‐notes on articles
> translated from Éliphas Lévi’s _Letters on Magic_.(839)
> 
> Nevertheless, personal immortality is conditional, for there are such
> things as “soulless men,” a teaching barely mentioned, although it is
> spoken of even in _Isis Unveiled_;(840) and there is an Avîtchi, rightly
> called Hell, though it has no connection with, or similitude to, the good
> Christian’s Hell, either geographically or psychically. The truth known to
> Occultists and Adepts in every age could not be given out to a promiscuous
> public; hence, though almost every mystery of Occult Philosophy lies half
> concealed in _Isis_ and the two earlier volumes of the present work, I had
> no right to amplify or correct the details of others. Readers may now
> compare those four volumes and such books as _Esoteric Buddhism_ with the
> diagrams and explanations in these Papers, and see for themselves.
> 
> Paramâtmâ, the Spiritual Sun, may be thought of as outside the human Auric
> Egg, as it is also outside the Macrocosmic or Brahmâ’s Egg. Why? Because,
> though every particle and atom are, so to speak, cemented with and soaked
> through by this Paramâtmic essence, yet it is wrong to call it a “human”
> or even a “universal” Principle, for the term is very likely to give rise
> to naught but an erroneous idea of the philosophical and purely
> metaphysical concept; it is not a Principle, but the cause of every
> Principle, the latter term being applied by Occultists only to its
> shadow—the Universal Spirit that ensouls the boundless Kosmos whether
> within or beyond Space and Time.
> 
> Buddhi serves as a vehicle for that Paramâtmic shadow. This Buddhi is
> universal, and so also is the human Âtmâ. Within the Auric Egg is the
> macracosmic pentacle of LIFE, Prâna, containing within itself the
> pentagram which represents man. The universal pentacle must be pictured
> with its point soaring upwards, the sign of White Magic—in the human
> pentacle it is the lower limbs which are upward, forming the “Horns of
> Satan,” as the Christian Kabbalists call them. This is the symbol of
> Matter, that of the personal man, and the recognized pentacle of the Black
> Magician. For this reversed pentacle does not stand only for Kâma, the
> fourth Principle exoterically, but it also represents physical man, the
> animal of flesh with its desires and passions.
> 
> Now, mark well, in order to understand that which follows, that Manas may
> be pictured as an upper triangle connected with the lower Manas by a thin
> line which binds the two together. This is the Antah‐karana, that path or
> bridge of communication which serves as a link between the personal being
> whose physical brain is under the sway of the lower animal mind, and the
> reincarnating Individuality, the spiritual Ego, Manas, Manu, the “Divine
> Man.” This thinking Manu alone is that which reincarnates. In truth and in
> nature, the two Minds, the spiritual and the physical or animal, are one,
> but separate into two at reincarnation. For while that portion of the
> Divine which goes to animate the personality, consciously separating
> itself, like a dense but pure shadow, from the Divine Ego,(841) wedges
> itself into the brain and senses(842) of the fœtus, at the completion of
> its seventh month, the Higher Manas does not unite itself with the child
> before the completion of the first seven years of its life. This detached
> essence, or rather the reflection or shadow of the Higher Manas, becomes,
> as the child grows, a distinct thinking Principle in man, its chief agent
> being the physical brain. No wonder the Materialists, who perceive only
> _this_ “rational soul,” or mind, will not disconnect it with the brain and
> matter. But Occult Philosophy has ages ago solved the problem of mind, and
> discovered the duality of Manas. The Divine Ego tends with its point
> upwards towards Buddhi, and the human Ego gravitates downwards, immersed
> in Matter, connected with its higher, subjective half only by the
> Antahkarana. As its derivation suggests, this is the only connecting link
> during life between the two minds—the higher consciousness of the Ego and
> the human intelligence of the lower mind.
> 
> To understand this abstruse metaphysical doctrine fully and correctly, one
> has to be thoroughly impressed with an idea, which I have in vain
> endeavoured to impart to Theosophists at large, namely, the great
> axiomatic truth that the only eternal and living Reality is that which the
> Hindus call Paramâtmâ and Parabrahman. This is the one ever‐existing Root
> Essence, immutable and unknowable to our physical senses, but manifest and
> clearly perceptible to our spiritual natures. Once imbued with that basic
> idea and the further conception that if It is omnipresent, universal and
> eternal, like abstract Space itself, we must have emanated from It and we
> must, some day, return into It, and all the rest becomes easy.
> 
> If so, then it stands to reason that life and death, good and evil, past
> and future, are all empty words, or at best, figures of speech. If the
> objective Universe itself is but a passing illusion on account of its
> beginning and finitude, then both life and death must also be aspects and
> illusions. They are changes of state, in fact, and no more. Real life is
> in the spiritual consciousness of that life, _in a conscious existence in
> Spirit, not Matter_; and real death is the limited perception of life, the
> impossibility of sensing conscious or even individual existence outside of
> form, or at least, of some form of Matter. Those who sincerely reject the
> possibility of conscious life divorced from Matter and brain‐substance,
> are _dead units_. The words of Paul, an Initiate, become comprehensible.
> “Ye are dead, and your _life_ is hid with Christ in God;” which is to say:
> Ye are personally dead matter, unconscious of its own spiritual essence,
> and your real life is hid with your Divine Ego (Christos) in, or merged
> with, God (Âtmâ); now has it departed from you, ye soulless people.
> Speaking on Esoteric lines, every irrevocably materialistic person is a
> _dead Man_, a living automaton, in spite of his being endowed with great
> brain power. Listen to what Aryasangha says, stating the same fact:
> 
>     That which is neither Spirit nor Matter, neither Light nor
>     Darkness, but is verily the container and root of these, that thou
>     art. The Root projects at every Dawn its shadow on ITSELF, and
>     that shadow thou callest Light and Life, O poor dead Form. (This)
>     Life‐Light streameth downward through the stairway of the seven
>     worlds, the stairs of which each step become denser and darker. It
>     is of this seven‐times‐seven scale that thou art the faithful
>     climber and mirror, O little man! Thou art this, but thou knowest
>     it not.
> 
> This is the first lesson to learn. The second is to study well the
> Principles of both the Kosmos and ourselves, dividing the group into the
> permanent and the impermanent, the higher and immortal and the lower and
> mortal, for thus only can we master and guide, first the lower cosmic and
> personal, then the higher cosmic and impersonal.
> 
> Once we can do that we have secured our immortality. But some may say:
> “How few are those who can do so. All such are great Adepts, and none can
> reach such Adeptship in one short life.” Agreed; but there is an
> alternative. “If the Sun thou canst not be, then be the humble Planet,”
> says the _Book of the Golden Precepts_. And if even that is beyond our
> reach, then let us at least endeavour to keep within the ray of some
> lesser star, so that its silvery light may penetrate the murky darkness,
> through which the stony path of life trends onward; for without this
> divine radiance we risk losing more than we imagine.
> 
> With regard, then, to “soulless” men, and the “second death” of the
> “Soul,” mentioned in the second volume of _Isis Unveiled_, you will there
> find that I have spoken of such soulless people, and even of Avîtchi,
> though I leave the latter unnamed. Read from the last paragraph on page
> 367 to the end of the first paragraph on page 370, and then collate what
> is there said with what I have now to say.
> 
> The higher triad, Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas, may be recognized from the first
> lines of the quotation from the Egyptian papyrus. In the _Ritual_, now the
> _Book of the Dead_, the purified Soul, the dual Manas, appears as “the
> victim of the dark influence of the Dragon Apophis,” the physical
> personality of Kâmarûpic man, with his passions. “If it has attained the
> final knowledge of the heavenly and infernal Mysteries, the Gnosis”—the
> divine and the terrestrial Mysteries, of White and Black Magic—then the
> defunct personality “will triumph over its enemy”—death. This alludes to
> the case of a complete re‐union, at the end of earth life, of the lower
> Manas, full of “the harvest of life,” with its Ego. But if Apophis
> conquers the Soul, then it “cannot escape a _second_ death.”
> 
> These few lines from a papyrus, many thousands of years old, contain a
> whole revelation, known, in those days, only to the Hierophants and the
> Initiates. The “harvest of life” consists of the finest spiritual
> thoughts, of the memory of the noblest and most unselfish deeds of the
> personality, and the constant presence during its bliss after death of all
> those it loved with divine, spiritual devotion.(843) Remember the
> teaching: The Human Soul, lower Manas, is the _only_ and direct mediator
> between the personality and the Divine Ego. That which goes to make up on
> this earth the _personality_ miscalled _individuality_ by the majority, is
> the sum of all its mental, physical, and spiritual characteristics, which,
> being impressed on the Human Soul, produces the _man_. Now, of all these
> characteristics it is the purified thoughts alone which can be impressed
> on the higher, immortal Ego. This is done by the Human Soul merging again,
> in its essence, into its parent source, commingling with its Divine Ego
> during life, and re‐uniting itself entirely with it after the death of the
> physical man. Therefore, unless Kâma‐Manas transmits to Buddhi‐Manas such
> personal ideations, and such consciousness of its “I” as can be
> assimilated by the Divine Ego, nothing of that “I” or personality can
> survive in the Eternal. Only that which is worthy of the immortal God
> within us, and identical in its nature with the divine quintessence, can
> survive; for in this case it is its own, the Divine Ego’s, “shadows” or
> emanations which ascend to it and are indrawn by it into itself again, to
> become once more part of its own Essence. No noble thought, no grand
> aspiration, desire, or divine immortal love, can come into the brain of
> the man of clay and settle there, except as a direct emanation from the
> Higher to, and through, the lower Ego; all the rest, intellectual as it
> may seem, proceeds from the “shadow,” the _lower mind_, in its association
> and commingling with Kâma, and passes away and disappears for ever. But
> the mental and spiritual ideations of the personal “I” return to it, as
> parts of the Ego’s Essence, and can never fade out. Thus of the
> personality that was, only its spiritual experiences, the memory of all
> that is good and noble, with the consciousness of its “I” blended with
> that of all the other personal “I’s” that preceded it, survive and become
> immortal. There is no distinct or separate immortality for the men of
> earth outside of the Ego which informed them. That Higher Ego is the sole
> bearer of all its _alter egos_ on earth and their sole representative in
> the mental state called Devachan. As the last embodied personality,
> however, has a right to its own special state of bliss, unalloyed and free
> from the memories of all others, it is the _last life only which is fully
> and realistically vivid_. Devachan is often compared to the happiest day
> in a series of many thousands of other “days” in the life of a person. The
> intensity of its happiness makes the man entirely forget all others, his
> past becoming obliterated.
> 
> This is what we call the Devachanic state, the reward of the personality,
> and it is on this old teaching that the hazy Christian notion of Paradise
> was built, borrowed with many other things from the Egyptian Mysteries,
> wherein the doctrine was enacted. And this is the meaning of the passage
> quoted in _Isis_. The Soul has triumphed over Apophis, the Dragon of
> Flesh. Henceforth, the personality will live in eternity, in its highest
> and noblest elements, the memory of its past deeds, while the
> “characteristics” of the “Dragon” will be fading out in Kâma Loka. If the
> question be asked, “How live in eternity, when Devachan lasts but from
> 1,000 to 2,000 years,” the answer is: “In the same way as the recollection
> of each day which is worth remembering lives in the memory of each one of
> us.” For the sake of an example, the days passed in one personal life may
> be taken as an illustration of each personal life, and this or that person
> may stand for the Divine Ego.
> 
> To obtain the key which will open the door of many a psychological mystery
> it is sufficient to understand and remember that which precedes and that
> which follows. Many a Spiritualist has felt terribly indignant on being
> told that personal immortality was _conditional_; and yet such is the
> philosophical and logical fact. Much has been said already on the subject,
> but no one to this day seems to have fully understood the doctrine.
> Moreover, it is not enough to know that such a fact is said to exist. All
> Occultist, or he who would become one, must know _why_ it is so; for
> having learned and comprehended the _raison d’étre_, it becomes easier to
> set others right in their erroneous speculations, and, most important of
> all, it affords one an opportunity, without saying too much, to teach
> other people to avoid a calamity which, sad to say, occurs in our age
> almost daily. This calamity will now be explained at length.
> 
> One must know little indeed of the Eastern modes of expression to fail to
> see in the passage quoted from the _Book of the Dead_, and the pages of
> _Isis_, (_a_) an allegory for the uninitiated, containing our Esoteric
> teaching; and (_b_) that the two terms “second death” and “Soul” are, in
> one sense, blinds. “Soul” refers indifferently to Buddhi‐Manas and Kâma‐
> Manas. As to the term “second death,” the qualification “second” applies
> to several deaths which have to be undergone by the “Principles” during
> their incarnation, Occultists alone understanding fully the sense in which
> such a statement is made. For we have (1) the death of the Body; (2) the
> death of the Animal Soul in Kâma Loka; (3) the death of the Astral Linga
> Sharîra, following that of the Body; (4) the metaphysical death of the
> Higher Ego, the _immortal_, every time it “falls into matter,” or
> incarnates in a new personality. The Animal Soul, or lower Manas, that
> shadow of the Divine Ego which separates from it to inform the
> personality, cannot by any possible means _escape death_ in Kâma Loka, at
> any rate that portion of this reflection which remains as a terrestrial
> residue and cannot be impressed on the Ego. Thus the chief and most
> important secret with regard to that “second death,” in the Esoteric
> teaching, was and is to this day the terrible possibility of the _death_
> of the Soul, that is, its severance from the Ego on earth during a
> person’s lifetime. This is a _real_ death (though with chances of
> resurrection), which shows no traces in a person and yet leaves him
> morally a living corpse. It is difficult to see why this teaching should
> have been preserved until now with such secrecy, when, by spreading it
> among people, at any rate among those who believe in reincarnation, so
> much good might be done. But so it was, and I had no right to question the
> wisdom of the prohibition, but have given it hitherto, as it was given to
> myself, _under pledge_ not to reveal it to the world at large. But now I
> have permission to give it to all, revealing its tenets first to the
> Esotericists, and then when they have assimilated them thoroughly it will
> be their duty to teach others this special tenet of the “second death,”
> and warn all the Theosophists of its dangers.
> 
> To make the teaching clearer, I shall seemingly have to go over old
> ground; in reality, however, it is given out with new light and new
> details. I have tried to hint at it in the _Theosophist_ as I have done in
> _Isis_, but have failed to make myself understood. I will now explain it,
> point by point.
> 
> The Philosophical Rationale of the Tenet.
> 
> (1) Imagine, for illustration’s sake, the one homogeneous, absolute and
> omnipresent Essence, above the upper step of the “stair of the seven
> planes of worlds,” ready to start on its evolutionary journey. As its
> correlating reflection gradually descends, it differentiates and
> transforms into subjective, and finally into objective matter. Let us call
> it at its north pole Absolute Light; at its south pole, which to us would
> be the fourth or middle step, or plane, counting either way, we know it
> Esoterically as the One and Universal Life. Now mark the difference.
> Above, LIGHT; below, _Life_. The former is ever immutable, the latter
> manifests under the aspects of countless differentiations. According to
> the Occult law, all potentialities included in the higher become
> differentiated reflections in the lower; and according to the same law,
> nothing which is differentiated can be blended with the homogeneous.
> 
> Again, nothing can endure of that which lives and breathes and has its
> being in the seething waves of the world, or plane of differentiation.
> Thus Buddhi and Manas being both primordial rays of the One Flame, the
> former the vehicle, the upâdhi or vâhana, of the one eternal Essence, the
> latter the vehicle of Mahat or Divine Ideation (Mahâ‐Buddhi in the
> _Purânas_), the Universal Intelligent Soul—neither of them, as such, can
> become extinct or be annihilated, either in essence or consciousness. But
> the physical personality with its Linga Sharîra, and the animal soul, with
> its Kâma,(844) can and do become so. They are born in the realm of
> illusion, and must vanish like a fleecy cloud from the blue and eternal
> sky.
> 
> He who has read these volumes with any degree of attention, must know the
> origin of the human Egos, called Monads, generically, and what they were
> before they were forced to incarnate in the human animal. The divine
> beings whom Karma led to act in the drama of Manvantaric life, are
> entities from higher and earlier worlds and planets, whose Karma had not
> been exhausted when their world went into Pralaya. Such is the teaching;
> but whether it is so or not, the Higher Egos are—as compared to such forms
> of transitory, terrestrial mud as ourselves—Divine Beings, Gods, immortal
> throughout the Mahâmanvantara, or the 311,040,000,000,000 years during
> which the Age of Brahmâ lasts. And as the Divine Egos, in order to re‐
> become the One Essence, or be indrawn again into the AUM, have to purify
> themselves in the fire of suffering and individual experience, so also
> have the terrestrial Egos, the personalities, to do likewise, if they
> would partake of the immortality of the Higher Egos. This they can achieve
> by crushing in themselves all that benefits only the lower personal nature
> of their “selves” and by aspiring to transfuse their thinking Kâmic
> Principle into that of the Higher Ego. We (_i.e._, our personalities)
> become immortal by the mere fact of our thinking moral nature being
> grafted on our Divine Triune Monad, Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas, the three in one
> and one in three (aspects). For the Monad manifested on earth by the
> incarnating Ego is that which is called the Tree of Life Eternal, that can
> only be approached by eating the fruit of knowledge, the Knowledge of Good
> and Evil, or of GNOSIS, Divine Wisdom.
> 
> In the Esoteric teachings, this Ego is the fifth Principle in man. But the
> student who has read and understood the first two Papers, knows something
> more. He is aware that the seventh is not a human, but a universal
> Principle in which man participates; but so does equally every physical
> and subjective atom, and also every blade of grass and everything that
> lives or is in Space, whether it be sensible of it or not. He knows,
> moreover, that if man is more closely connected with it, and assimilates
> it with a hundredfold more power, it is simply because he is endowed with
> the highest consciousness on this earth; that man, in short, may become a
> Spirit, a Deva, or a God, in his next transformation, whereas neither a
> stone nor a vegetable, nor an animal, can do so before they become men in
> their proper turn.
> 
> (2) Now what are the functions of Buddhi? On this plane it has none,
> unless it is united with Manas, the conscious Ego. Buddhi stands to the
> divine Root Essence in the same relation as Mûlaprakriti to Parabrahman,
> in the Vedânta School; or as Alaya the Universal Soul to the One Eternal
> Spirit, or that which is beyond Spirit. It is its human vehicle, one
> remove from that Absolute, which can have no relation whatever to the
> finite and the conditioned.
> 
> (3) What, again, is Manas and its functions? In its purely metaphysical
> aspect, Manas, though one remove on the downward plane from Buddhi, is
> still so immeasurably higher than the physical man, that it cannot enter
> into direct relation with the personality, except through its reflection,
> the lower mind. Manas is _Spiritual Self‐Consciousness_ in itself, and
> Divine Consciousness when united with Buddhi, which is the true “producer”
> of that “production” (vikâra), or Self‐Consciousness, through Mahat.
> Buddhi‐Manas, therefore, is entirety unfit to manifest during its
> periodical incarnations, except through the human mind or lower Manas.
> Both are linked together and are inseparable, and can have as little to do
> with the lower Tanmâtras,(845) or rudimentary atoms, as the homogeneous
> with the heterogeneous. It is, therefore, the task of the lower Manas, or
> thinking personality, if it would blend itself with its God, the Divine
> Ego, to dissipate and paralyze the Tanmâtras, or properties of the
> material form. Therefore, Manas is shown double, as the Ego and Mind of
> Man. It is Kâma‐Manas, or the lower Ego, which, deluded into a notion of
> independent existence, as the “producer” in its turn and the sovereign of
> the five Tanmâtras, becomes _Ego‐ism_, the selfish Self, in which case it
> has to be considered as Mahâbhûtic and finite, in the sense of its being
> connected with Ahankâra, the personal “I‐creating” faculty. Hence
> 
>     Manas has to be regarded as eternal and non‐eternal; eternal in
>     its atomic nature (paramanu rûpa), as eternal substance (dravya),
>     finite (kârya rûpa) when linked as a duad with Kâma (animal desire
>     or human _egoistic_ volition), a lower production, in short.(846)
> 
> While, therefore, the INDIVIDUAL EGO, owing to its essence and nature, is
> immortal throughout eternity, with a form (rûpa), which prevails during
> the whole life cycles of the Fourth Round, its _Sosie_, or resemblance,
> the personal Ego, has to win its immortality.
> 
> (4) Antahkarana is the name of that imaginary bridge, the _path_ which
> lies between the Divine and the human Egos, for they are _Egos_, during
> human life, to re‐become _one_ Ego in Devachan or Nirvâna. This may seem
> difficult to understand, but in reality, with the help of a familiar,
> though fanciful illustration, it becomes quite simple. Let us figure to
> ourselves a bright lamp in the middle of a room, casting its light upon
> the wall. Let the lamp represent the Divine Ego, and the light thrown on
> the wall the lower Manas, and let the wall stand for the body. That
> portion of the atmosphere which transmits the ray from the lamp to the
> wall, will then represent the Antahkarana. We must further suppose that
> the light thus cast is endowed with reason and intelligence, and
> possesses, moreover, the faculty of dissipating all the evil shadows which
> pass across the wall, and of attracting all brightnesses to itself,
> receiving their indelible impressions. Now, it is in the power of the
> human Ego to chase away the shadows, or sins, and multiply the
> brightnesses, or good deeds, which make these impressions, and thus
> through Antahkarana, ensure its own permanent connection, and its final
> re‐union, with the Divine Ego. Remember that the latter cannot take place
> while there remains a single taint of the terrestrial, or of matter, in
> the purity of that light. On the other hand, the connection cannot be
> entirely ruptured, and final re‐union prevented, so long as there remains
> one spiritual deed, or potentiality to serve as a thread of union; but the
> moment this last spark is extinguished, and the last potentiality
> exhausted, then comes the severance. In an Eastern parable, the Divine Ego
> is likened to the Master who sends out his labourers to till the ground
> and to gather in the harvest, and who is content to keep the field so long
> as it can yield even the smallest return. But when the ground becomes
> absolutely sterile, not only is it abandoned, but the labourer also (the
> lower Manas) perishes.
> 
> On the other hand, however, still using our simile, when the light thrown
> on the wall, or the rational human Ego, reaches the point of actual
> spiritual exhaustion, the Antahkarana disappears, no more light is
> transmitted, and the lamp becomes non‐existent to the ray. The light which
> has been absorbed gradually disappears and “Soul eclipse” occurs; the
> being lives on earth and then passes into Kâma Loka as a mere surviving
> congeries of material qualities; it can never pass onwards towards
> Devachan, but is reborn immediately, a human animal and scourge.
> 
> This simile, however fantastic, will help us to seize the correct idea.
> Save through the blending of the moral nature with the Divine Ego, there
> is no immortality for the personal Ego. It is only the most spiritual
> emanations of the personal Human Soul which survive. Having, during a
> lifetime, been imbued with the notion and feeling of the “I am I” of its
> personality, the Human Soul, the bearer of the very essence of the Karmic
> deeds of the physical man, becomes, after the death of the latter, part
> and parcel of the Divine Flame, the Ego. It becomes immortal through the
> mere fact that it is now strongly grafted on the Monad, which is the “Tree
> of Life Eternal.”
> 
> And now we must speak of the tenet of the “second death.” What happens to
> the Kâmic Human Soul, which is always that of a debased and wicked man or
> of a soulless person? This mystery will now be explained.
> 
> The personal Soul in this case, _viz._, in that of one who has never had a
> thought not concerned with the animal self, having nothing to transmit to
> the Higher, or to add to the sum of the experiences gleaned from past
> incarnations which its memory is to preserve throughout eternity—this
> personal Soul becomes separated from the Ego. It can graft nothing of self
> on that eternal trunk whose sap throws out millions of personalities, like
> leaves from its branches, leaves which wither, die and fall at the end of
> their season. These personalities bud, blossom forth and expire, some
> without leaving a trace behind, others after commingling their own life
> with that of the parent stem. It is the Souls of the former class that are
> doomed to annihilation, or Avîtchi, a state so badly understood, and still
> worse described by some Theosophical writers, but which is not only
> located on our earth, but is in fact this very earth itself.
> 
> Thus we see that Antahkarana has been destroyed before the lower man has
> had an opportunity of assimilating the Higher and becoming at one with it;
> and therefore the Kâmic “Soul” becomes a separate entity, to live
> henceforth, for a short or long period according to its Karma, as a
> “soulless” creature.
> 
> But before I elaborate this question, I must explain more clearly the
> meaning and functions of the Antahkarana. As already said, it may be
> represented as a narrow bridge connecting the Higher and the lower Manas.
> If you look at the Glossary of the _Voice of the Silence_, pp. 88 and 89,
> you will find that it is a projection of the lower Manas, or, rather, the
> link between the latter and the Higher Ego, or, between the Human and the
> Divine or Spiritual Soul.(847)
> 
>     At death it is destroyed as a path, or medium of communication,
>     and its remains survive as Kâma Rûpa,
> 
> the “shell.” It is this which the Spiritualists see sometimes appearing in
> the séance rooms as materialized “forms,” which they foolishly mistake for
> the “Spirits of the Departed.”(848) So far is this from being the case,
> that in dreams, though Antahkarana is there, the personality is only half
> awake; therefore, Antahkarana is said to be _drunk_ or _insane_ during our
> normal sleeping state. If such is the case during the periodical death, or
> sleep, of the living body, one may judge what the consciousness of
> Antahkarana is like when it has been transformed after the “eternal sleep”
> into Kâma Rûpa.
> 
> But to return. In order not to confuse the mind of the Western student
> with the abstruse difficulties of Indian metaphysics, let him view the
> lower Manas, or Mind, as the personal Ego during the waking state, and as
> Antahkarana only during those moments when it aspires towards its Higher
> Ego, and thus becomes the medium of communication between the two. It is
> for this reason that it is called the “Path.” Now, when a limb or organ
> belonging to the physical organism is left in disuse, it becomes weak and
> finally atrophies. So also is it with mental faculties; and hence the
> atrophy of the lower mind‐function, called Antahkarana, becomes
> comprehensible in both completely materialistic and depraved natures.
> 
> According to Esoteric Philosophy, however, the teaching is as follows:
> Seeing that the faculty and function of Antahkarana is as necessary as the
> medium of the ear for hearing, or that of the eye for seeing; then so long
> as the feeling of Ahankâra, that is, of the personal “I” or selfishness,
> is not entirely crushed out in a man, and the lower mind not entirely
> merged into and become one with the Higher Buddhi‐Manas, it stands to
> reason that to destroy Antahkarana is like destroying a bridge over an
> impassable chasm; _the traveller can never reach the goal on the other
> shore_. And here lies the difference between the exoteric and Esoteric
> teaching. The former makes the Vedânta state that so long as Mind (the
> lower) clings through Antahkarana to Spirit (Buddhi‐Manas) it is
> impossible for it to acquire true Spiritual Wisdom, Gnyâna, and that this
> can only be attained by seeking to come _en rapport_ with the Universal
> Soul (Âtmâ); that, in fact, it is by ignoring the Higher Mind altogether
> that one reaches Râja Yoga. We say it is not so. No single rung of the
> ladder leading to knowledge can be skipped. No personality can ever reach
> or bring itself into communication with Âtmâ, except through Buddhi‐Manas;
> to try and become a Jîvanmukta or a Mahâtmâ, before one has become an
> Adept or even a Narjol (a sinless man) is like trying to reach Ceylon from
> India without crossing the sea. Therefore we are told that if we destroy
> Antahkarana before the personal is absolutely under the control of the
> impersonal Ego, we risk to lose the latter and be severed for ever from
> it, unless indeed we hasten to re‐establish the communication by a supreme
> and final effort.
> 
> It is only when we are indissolubly linked with the essence of the Divine
> Mind, that we have to destroy Antahkarana.
> 
>     Like as a solitary warrior pursued by an army, seeks refuge in a
>     stronghold; to cut himself off from the enemy, he first destroys
>     the drawbridge, and then only commences to destroy the pursuer; so
>     must the Srotâpatti act before he slays Antahkarana.
> 
> Or as an Occult axiom has it:
> 
>     _The Unit becomes Three, and Three generate Four. It is for the
>     latter [the Quaternary] to rebecome Three, and for the Divine
>     Three to expand into the Absolute One._
> 
> Monads, which become Duads on the differentiated plane, to develop into
> Triads during the cycle of incarnations, even when incarnated know neither
> space nor time, but are diffused through the lower Principles of the
> Quaternary, being omnipresent and omniscient in their nature. But this
> omniscience is innate, and can manifest its reflected light only through
> that which is at least semi‐terrestrial or material; even as the physical
> brain which, in its turn, is the vehicle of the lower Manas enthroned in
> Kâma Rûpa. And it is this which is gradually annihilated in cases of
> “second death.”
> 
> But such annihilation—which is in reality the absence of the slightest
> trace of the doomed Soul from the eternal MEMORY, and therefore signifies
> annihilation in eternity—does not mean simply discontinuation of human
> life on earth, for earth is Avîtchi, and the worst Avîtchi possible.
> Expelled for ever from the consciousness of the Individuality, the
> reincarnating Ego, the physical atoms and psychic vibrations of the now
> separate personality are immediately reincarnated on the same earth, only
> in a lower and still more abject creature, a human being only in form,
> doomed to Karmic torments during the whole of its new life. Moreover, if
> it persists in its criminal or debauched course, it will suffer a long
> series of immediate reincarnations.
> 
> Here two questions present themselves: (1) What becomes of the Higher Ego
> in such cases? (2) What kind of an animal is a human creature born
> soulless?
> 
> Before answering these two very natural queries, I have to draw the
> attention of all of you who are born in Christian countries to the fact
> that the romance of the vicarious atonement and the mission of Jesus, as
> it now stands, was drawn or borrowed by some too liberal Initiates from
> the mysterious and weird tenet of the earthly experience of the
> reincarnating Ego. The latter is indeed the sacrificial victim of, and
> through, its own Karma in previous Manvantaras, which takes upon itself
> voluntarily the duty of saving what would be otherwise soulless men or
> personalities. Eastern truth is thus more philosophical and logical than
> Western fiction. The Christos, or Buddhi‐Manas of each man is not quite an
> innocent and sinless God, though in one sense it is the “Father,” being of
> the same essence with the Universal Spirit, and at the same time the
> “Son,” for Manas is the second remove from the “Father.” By incarnation
> the Divine Son makes itself responsible for the sins of all the
> personalities which it will inform. This it can do only through its proxy
> or reflection, the lower Manas. The only case in which the Divine Ego can
> escape individual penalty and responsibility as a guiding Principle, is
> when it has to break off from the personality, because matter, with its
> psychic and astral vibrations, is then, by the very intensity of its
> combinations, placed beyond the control of the Ego. Apophis, the Dragon,
> having become the conqueror, the reincarnating Manas, separating itself
> gradually from its tabernacle, breaks finally asunder from the psycho‐
> animal Soul.
> 
> Thus, in answer to the first question, I say:
> 
> (1) The Divine Ego does one of two things: either (_a_) it recommences
> immediately under its own Karmic impulses a fresh series of incarnations;
> or (_b_) it seeks and finds refuge in the bosom of the Mother, Alaya, the
> Universal Soul, of which the Manvantaric aspect is Mahat. Freed from the
> life‐impressions of the personality, it merges into a kind of Nirvânic
> interlude, wherein there can be nothing but the eternal Present, which
> absorbs the Past and Future. Bereft of the “labourer,” both field and
> harvest now being lost, the Master, in the infinitude of his thought,
> naturally preserves no recollection of the finite and evanescent illusion
> which had been his last personality. And then, indeed, is the latter
> annihilated.
> 
> (2) The future of the lower Manas is more terrible, and still more
> terrible to humanity than to the now animal man. It sometimes happens that
> after the separation the exhausted Soul, now become supremely animal,
> fades out in Kâma Loka, as do all other animal souls. But seeing that the
> more material is the human mind, the longer it lasts, even in the
> intermediate stage, it frequently happens that after the present life of
> the soulless man is ended, he is again and again reincarnated into new
> personalities, each one more abject than the other. The impulse of _animal
> life_ is too strong; it cannot wear itself out in one or two lives only.
> In rarer cases, however, when the lower Manas is doomed to exhaust itself
> by _starvation_; when there is no longer hope that even a remnant of a
> lower light will, owing to favourable conditions—say, even a short period
> of spiritual aspiration and repentance—attract back to itself its Parent
> Ego, and Karma leads the Higher Ego back to new incarnations, then
> something far more dreadful may happen. The Kâma‐Mânasic spook may become
> that which is called in Occultism the “Dweller on the Threshold.” This
> Dweller is not like that which is described so graphically in _Zanoni_,
> but an actual fact in Nature and not a fiction in romance, however
> beautiful the latter may be. Bulwer, however, must have got the idea from
> some Eastern Initiate. This Dweller, led by affinity and attraction,
> forces itself into the astral current, and through the Auric Envelope, of
> the new tabernacle inhabited by the Parent Ego, and declares war to the
> lower light which has replaced it. This, of course, can only happen in the
> case of the moral weakness of the personality so obsessed. No one strong
> in virtue, and righteous in his walk of life, can risk or dread any such
> thing; but only those depraved in heart. Robert Louis Stevenson had a
> glimpse of a true vision indeed when he wrote his _Strange Case of Dr.
> Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. His story is a true allegory. Every Chelâ will
> recognise in it a substratum of truth, and in Mr. Hyde a Dweller, an
> obsessor of the personality, the tabernacle of the Parent Spirit.
> 
> “This is a nightmare tale!” I was often told by one, now no more in our
> ranks, who had a most pronounced “Dweller,” a “Mr. Hyde,” as an almost
> constant companion. “How can such a process take place without one’s
> knowledge?” It can and does so happen, and I have almost described it once
> before in the _Theosophist_.
> 
>     The Soul, the lower Mind, becomes as a half animal principle
>     almost paralyzed with daily vice, and grows gradually unconscious
>     of its subjective half, the Lord, one of the mighty Host; [and] in
>     proportion to the rapid sensuous development of the brain and
>     nerves, sooner or later, it (the personal Soul) finally loses
>     sight of its divine mission on earth.
> 
> Truly,
> 
>     Like the vampire, the brain feeds and lives and grows in strength
>     at the expense of its spiritual parent ... and the personal half‐
>     unconscious Soul becomes senseless, beyond hope of redemption. It
>     is powerless to discern the voice of its God. It aims but at the
>     development and fuller comprehension of natural, earthly life; and
>     thus can discover but the mysteries of physical nature.... It
>     begins by becoming virtually dead, during the life of the body;
>     and ends by dying completely—that is, by being _annihilated as a
>     complete immortal Soul_. Such a catastrophe may often happen long
>     years before one’s physical death: “We elbow soulless men and
>     women at every step in life.” And when death arrives ... there is
>     no more a Soul (the reincarnating Spiritual Ego) to liberate ...
>     for _it has fled years before_.
> 
> _Result_: Bereft of its guiding Principles, but strengthened by the
> material elements, Kâma‐Manas, from being a “derived light” now becomes an
> independent Entity. After thus suffering itself to sink lower and lower on
> the animal plane, when the hour strikes for its earthly body to die, one
> of two things happens: either Kâma‐Manas is immediately reborn in Myalba,
> the state of Avîtchi on earth,(849) or, if it become too strong in
> evil—“immortal in Satan” is the Occult expression—it is sometimes allowed,
> for Karmic purposes, to remain in an active state of Avîtchi in the
> terrestrial Aura. Then through despair and loss of all hope it becomes
> like the mythical “devil” in its endless wickedness; it continues in its
> elements, which are imbued through and through with the essence of Matter;
> for evil is coeval with Matter rent asunder from Spirit. And when its
> Higher Ego has once more reincarnated, evolving a new reflection, or Kâma‐
> Manas, the doomed lower Ego, like a Frankenstein’s monster, will ever feel
> attracted to its Father, who repudiates his son, and will become a regular
> “Dweller on the Threshold” of terrestrial life. I gave the outlines of the
> Occult doctrine in the _Theosophist_ of October, 1881, and November, 1882,
> but could not go into details, and therefore got very much embarrassed
> when called upon to explain. Yet I have written there plainly enough about
> “useless drones,” those who refuse to become co‐workers with Nature and
> who perish by millions during the Manvantaric life‐cycle; those, as in the
> case in hand, who prefer to be ever suffering in Avîtchi under Karmic law
> rather than give up their lives “in evil,” and finally, those who are co‐
> workers with Nature for destruction. These are thoroughly wicked and
> depraved men, but yet as highly intellectual and acutely _spiritual_ for
> evil, as those who are spiritual for good.
> 
>     The (lower) Egos of these may escape the law of final destruction
>     or annihilation for ages to come.
> 
> Thus we find two kinds of soulless beings on earth: those who have lost
> their Higher Ego in the present incarnation, and those who are born
> soulless, having been severed from their Spiritual Soul in the preceding
> birth. The former are candidates for Avîtchi; the latter are “Mr. Hydes,”
> whether _in_ or _out_ of human bodies, whether incarnated or hanging about
> as invisible though potent ghouls. In such men, cunning develops to an
> enormous degree, and no one except those who are familiar with the
> doctrine would suspect them of being soulless, for neither Religion nor
> Science has the least suspicion that such facts actually exist in Nature.
> 
> There is, however, still hope for a person who has lost his Higher Soul
> through his vices, while he is yet in the body. He may be still redeemed
> and made to turn on his material nature. For either an intense feeling of
> repentance, or one single earnest appeal to the Ego that has fled, or best
> of all, an active effort to amend one’s ways, may bring the Higher Ego
> back again. The thread of connection is not altogether broken, though the
> Ego is now beyond forcible reach, for “Antahkarana is destroyed,” and the
> personal Entity has one foot already in Myalba;(850) yet it is not
> entirely beyond hearing a strong spiritual appeal. There is another
> statement made in _Isis Unveiled_(851) on this subject. It is said that
> this terrible death may be sometimes avoided by the knowledge of the
> mysterious NAME, the “WORD.”(852) What this “WORD,” which is not a “Word”
> but a _Sound_, is, you all know. Its potency lies in the rhythm or the
> accent. This means simply that even a bad person may, by the study of the
> Sacred Science, be redeemed and stopped on the path of destruction. But
> unless he is in thorough union with his Higher Ego, he may repeat it,
> parrot‐like, ten thousand times a day, and the “Word” will not help him.
> On the contrary, if not entirely at one with his Higher Triad, it may
> produce quite the reverse of a beneficent effect, the Brothers of the
> Shadow using it very often for malicious objects; in which case it awakens
> and stirs up naught but the evil, material elements of Nature. But if
> one’s nature is good, and sincerely strives towards the HIGHER SELF, which
> is that Aum, through one’s Higher Ego, which is its third letter, and
> Buddhi the second, there is no attack of the Dragon Apophis which it will
> not repel. From those to whom much is given much is expected. He who
> knocks at the door of the Sanctuary in full knowledge of its sacredness,
> and after obtaining admission, departs from the threshold, or turns round
> and says, “Oh, there’s nothing in it!” and thus loses his chance of
> learning the whole truth—can but await his Karma.
> 
> Such are then the Esoteric explanations of that which has perplexed so
> many who have found what they thought contradictions in various
> Theosophical writings, including “Fragments of Occult Truth,” in vols.
> iii. and iv. of _The Theosophist_, etc. Before finally dismissing the
> subject, I must add a caution, which pray keep well in mind. It will be
> very natural for those of you who are Esotericists to hope that none of
> you belong so far to the soulless portion of mankind, and that you can
> feel quite easy about Avîtchi, even as the good citizen is about the penal
> laws. Though not, perhaps, exactly on the Path as yet, you are skirting
> its border, and many of you in the right direction. Between such venal
> faults as are inevitable under our social environment, and the blasting
> wickedness described in the Editor’s note on Éliphas Lévi’s “Satan,”(853)
> there is an abyss. If not become “immortal in good by identification with
> (our) God,” or AUM, Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas, we have surely not made ourselves
> “immortal in evil” by coalescing with Satan, the lower Self. You forget,
> however, that everything must have a beginning; that the first step on a
> slippery mountain slope is the necessary antecedent to one’s falling
> precipitately to the bottom and into the arms of death. Be it far from me
> the suspicion that any of the Esoteric students have reached to any
> considerable point down the plane of spiritual descent. All the same I
> warn you to avoid taking the first step. You may not reach the bottom in
> this life or the next, but you may now generate causes which will insure
> your spiritual destruction in your third, fourth, fifth, or even some
> subsequent birth. In the great Indian epic you may read how a mother whose
> whole family of warrior sons were slaughtered in battle, complained to
> Krishna that though she had the spiritual vision to enable her to look
> back fifty incarnations, yet she could see no sin of hers that could have
> begotten so dreadful a Karma; and Krishna answered her: “If thou could’st
> look back to thy fifty‐first anterior birth, as I can, thou would’st see
> thyself killing in wanton cruelty the same number of ants as that of the
> sons thou hast now lost.” This, of course, is only a poetical
> exaggeration; yet it is a striking image to show how great results come
> from apparently trifling causes.
> 
> Good and evil are relative, and are intensified or lessened according to
> the conditions by which man is surrounded. One who belongs to that which
> we call the “useless portion of mankind,” that is to say, the lay
> majority, is in many cases irresponsible. Crimes committed in Avidyâ, or
> ignorance, involve physical but not moral responsibilities or Karma. Take,
> for example, the case of idiots, children, savages, and people who know no
> better. But the case of each who is pledged to the HIGHER SELF is quite
> another matter. _You cannot invoke this Divine Witness with impunity_, and
> once that you have put yourselves under its tutelage, you have asked the
> Radiant Light to shine and search through all the dark corners of your
> being; consciously you have invoked the Divine Justice of Karma to take
> note of your motive, to scrutinize your actions, and to enter up all in
> your account. The step is irrevocable as that of the infant taking birth.
> Never again can you force yourselves back into the matrix of Avidyâ and
> irresponsibility. Though you flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, and
> hide yourselves from the sight of men, or seek oblivion in the tumult of
> the social whirl, that Light will find you out and lighten your every
> thought, word and deed. All H. P. B. can do is to send to each earnest one
> among you a most sincerely fraternal sympathy and hope for a good outcome
> to your endeavours. Nevertheless, be not discouraged, but try, ever keep
> trying;(854) twenty failures are not irremediable if followed by as many
> undaunted struggles upward. Is it not so that mountains are climbed? And
> know further, that if Karma relentlessly records in the Esotericist’s
> account, bad deeds that in the ignorant would be overlooked, yet, equally
> true is it that each of his good deeds is, by reason of his association
> with the Higher Self, a hundredfold intensified as a potentiality for
> good.
> 
> Finally, keep ever in mind the consciousness that though you see no Master
> by your bedside, nor hear one audible whisper in the silence of the still
> night, yet the Holy Power is about you, the Holy Light is shining into
> your hour of spiritual need and aspirations, and it will be no fault of
> the MASTERS, or of their humble mouthpiece and servant, if through
> perversity or moral feebleness some of you cut yourselves off from these
> higher potencies, and step upon the declivity that leads to Avîtchi.
> 
> Appendix. Notes on Papers I., II. and III.
> 
> Page 436.
> 
> Students in the west have little or no idea of the forces that lie latent
> in Sound, the Âkâshic vibrations that may be set up by those who
> understand how to pronounce certain words. The Om, or the “_Om mani padme
> hum_” are in spiritual affinity with cosmic forces, but without a
> knowledge of the natural arrangement, or of the order in which the
> syllables stand, very little can be achieved. “Om” is, of course, Aum,
> that may be pronounced as two, three or seven syllables, setting up
> different vibrations.
> 
> Now, letters, as vocal sounds, cannot fail to correspond with musical
> notes, and therefore with numbers and colours; hence also with Forces and
> Tattvas. He who remembers that the Universe is built up from the Tattvas
> will readily understand something of the power that may be exercised by
> vocal sounds. Every letter in the alphabet, whether divided into three,
> four, or seven septenaries, or forty‐nine letters, has its own colour, or
> shade of colour. He who has learnt the colours of the alphabetical
> letters, and the corresponding numbers of the seven, and the forty‐nine
> colours and shades on the scale of planes and forces, and knows their
> respective order in the seven planes, will easily master the art of
> bringing them into affinity or interplay. But here a difficulty arises.
> The Senzar and Sanskrit alphabets, and other Occult tongues, besides other
> potencies, have a number, colour, and distinct syllable for every letter,
> and so had also the old Mosaic Hebrew. But how many students know any of
> these tongues? When the time comes, therefore, it must suffice to teach
> the students the numbers and colours attached to the Latin letters only
> (N.B. as pronounced in Latin, not in Anglo‐Saxon, Scotch, or Irish). This,
> however, would be at present premature.
> 
> The colour and number of not only the planets but also the zodiacal
> constellations corresponding to every letter of the alphabet, are
> necessary to make any special syllable, and even letter, _operative_.(855)
> Therefore if a student would make Buddhi operative, for instance, he would
> have to intone the first words of the Mantra on the note _mi_. But he
> would have still further to accentuate the _mi_, and produce mentally the
> yellow colour corresponding to this sound and note, on every letter M in
> “_Om mani padme hum_”; this, not because the note bears the same name in
> the vernacular, Sanskrit, or even the Senzar, for it does not—but because
> the letter M follows the first letter, and is in this sacred formula also
> the seventh and the fourth. As Buddhi it is second; as Buddhi‐Manas it is
> the second and third combined.
> 
> H. P. B.
> 
> Page 439.(856)
> 
> The Pythagorean Four, or Tetraktys, was the symbol of the Kosmos, as
> containing within itself, the point, the line, the superficies, the solid;
> in other words, the essentials of all forms. Its mystical representation
> is the point within the triangle. The Decad or perfect number is contained
> in the Four; thus, 1+2+3+4=10.
> 
> Page 477.
> 
> The difficult passage: “Bear in mind ... a mystery below truly,”(857) may
> become a little more clear to the student if slightly amplified. The
> “primordial Triangle” is the Second Logos, which reflects itself as a
> Triangle in the Third Logos, or Heavenly Man, and then disappears. The
> Third Logos, containing the “potency of formative creation,” develops the
> Tetraktys from the Triangle, and so becomes the Seven, the Creative Force,
> making a Decad with the primordial Triangle which originated it. When this
> heavenly Triangle and Tetraktys are reflected in the Universe of Matter,
> as the astral paradigmatic man, they are reversed, and the Triangle, or
> formative potency, is thrown below the Quaternary, with its apex pointing
> downwards: the Monad of this astral paradigmatic man is itself a Triangle,
> bearing to the Quaternary and Triangle the relation borne by the
> primordial Triangle to the Heavenly Man. Hence the phrase, “the upper
> Triangle ... is shifted in the man of clay below _the seven_.” Here again
> the Point tracing the Triangle, the Monad becoming the Ternary, with the
> Quaternary and the lower creative triangle, make up the Decad, the perfect
> number. “As above, so below.”
> 
> The student will do well to relate the knowledge here acquired to that
> given on p. 477. Here the upper Triangle is given as Violet, Indigo, Blue,
> associating Violet as the paradigm of all forms with Indigo as Mahat, and
> blue as the Âtmic Aura. In the Quaternary, Yellow, as substance, is
> associated with Yellow‐Orange, Life, and Red‐Orange, the creative potency.
> Green is the plane between.
> 
> The next stage is not explained. Green passes upwards to Violet, Indigo,
> Blue, the Triangle opening out to receive it, and so forming the square,
> Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green. This leaves the Red‐Orange, Yellow‐Orange,
> and Yellow, and these, having thus lost their fourth member, can only form
> a triangle. This triangle revolves, to point downwards for the descent
> into matter, and “mirrored on the plane of gross nature, it is reversed.”
> 
> In the perfect man the Red will be absorbed by the Green; Yellow will
> become one with Indigo; Yellow‐Orange will be absorbed in Blue; Violet
> will remain outside the True Man, though connected with him. Or, to
> translate the colours: Kâma will be absorbed in the Lower Manas; Buddhi
> will become one with Manas; Prâna will be absorbed in the Auric Egg; the
> physical body remains, connected but outside the real life.
> 
> A. B.
> 
> Page 481.
> 
> To the five senses at present the property of mankind two more on this
> globe are to be added. The sixth sense is the psychic sense of colour. The
> seventh is that of spiritual sound. In the second instruction, the
> corrected rates of vibration for the seven primary colours and their
> modulations are given. Inspecting these, it appears that each colour
> differs from the proceeding one by a step of 42, or 6 × 7.
> 
> 462 Red     + 42 = 504
> 504 Orange  + 42 = 546
> 546 Yellow  + 42 = 588
> 588 Green   + 42 = 630
> 630 Blue    + 42 = 672
> 672 Indigo  + 42 = 714
> 714 Violet  + 42 = 756
> 756 Red
> 
> Carrying the process backward, and subtracting 42, we find that the first
> or ground colour is green, for this globe.
> 
> —— Green
> 42 Blue
> 84 Indigo
> 126 Violet (end of First semi‐octave)
> 168 Red (start of Second octave)
> 210 Orange
> 252 Yellow
> 294 Green
> 336 Blue
> 378 Indigo
> 420 Violet
> 462 Red
> 
> The second and fourth octaves would be heat and actinic rays, and are
> invisible to our present perception.
> 
> The seventh sense is that of spiritual sound; and, since the vibrations of
> the sixth progress by steps of 6 × 7, those of the seventh progress by
> steps of 7 × 7. This is their table:
> 
> —— Fa ... Green Sound (start of First semi‐octave)
> 49 Sol ...  Blue
> 98 La ...  Indigo
> 147 Si ...  Violet
> 196 Do ... Red
> 245 Re ... Orange (start of Second Octave)
> 294 Mi ...  Yellow
> 343 Fa ... Green
> 392 Sol ...  Blue
> 441 La ... Indigo
> 490 Si ... Violet
> 539 Do ...  Red
> Etc., etc.
> 
> The fifth sense is in our possession: it is possibly that of geometrical
> form, and its steps of progression would be 5 × 7, or 35.
> 
> The fourth sense is that of physical hearing, music, and its progressions
> are 28, or 4 × 7. The truth of this is demonstrated by the fact that it is
> in accord with the theories of Science as to the vibrations of musical
> notes. Our scale is as follows:
> 
> —, 28, 56, 84, 112, 140, 168, 196, 224, 252, 280, 308, 336, 364, 392, 420,
> 448, 476, 504, 532, 560, 588, 616, 644, 672, 700.
> 
> According to musical science, the notes C, E, G, are as 4, 5, 6, in their
> ratios of vibrations. The same ratio obtains between the notes of the
> triplet G, B, D, and F, A, C.
> 
> H. C.
> 
> Notes On Some Oral Teachings.
> 
> The Three Vital Airs.
> 
> It is the pure Âkâsha that passes up Sushumnâ: its two aspects flow in Idâ
> and Pingalâ. These are the three vital airs, and are symbolized by the
> Brâhmanical thread. They are ruled by the Will. Will and Desire are the
> higher and lower aspects of one and the same thing. Hence the importance
> of the purity of the canals; for if they soil the vital airs energized by
> the Will, Black Magic results. This is why all sexual intercourse is
> forbidden in practical Occultism.
> 
> From Sushumnâ, Idâ and Pingalâ a circulation is set up, and from the
> central canal passes into the whole body. (Man is a tree; he has in him
> the macrocosm and the microcosm. Hence the trees used as symbols; the
> Dhyân‐Chohanic body is thus figured.)
> 
> The Auric Egg.
> 
> The Auric Egg is formed in curves, which may be conceived from the curves
> formed by sand on a vibrating metal disk. Each atom, as each body, has its
> Auric Egg, each centre forming its own. This Auric Egg, with the
> appropriate materials thrown into it, is a defence; no wild animal,
> however ferocious, will approach the Yogî thus guarded: it flings back
> from its surface all malign influences. No Will power is manifested
> through the Auric Egg.
> 
> _Q. What is the connection between the circulation of the vital airs and
> the power of the Yogî to make his Auric Egg a defence against aggression?_
> 
> _A._ It is impossible to answer this question. The knowledge is the last
> word of Magic. It is connected with Kundalinî, that can as easily destroy
> as preserve. The ignorant tyro might kill himself.
> 
> _Q. Is the Auric Egg of a child a differentiation of Akâsha, into which
> may be thrown by the Adept the materials he needs for special
> purposes_—_e.g._, _the Mâyâvi Rûpa?_
> 
> [The question was somewhat obscurely worded. Evidently what the questioner
> wanted to know was if the Auric Egg was a differentiation of Akâsha, into
> which, as the child became a man, he might, if an Adept, weave the
> materials needed for special purposes, etc.]
> 
> _A._ Taking the question in the sense of an Adept putting something into
> or acting on the Auric Egg of a child, then this could not be done, as the
> Auric Egg is Karmic, and not even an Adept must interfere with such Karmic
> record. If the Adept were to put anything into the Auric Egg of another,
> for which the person is not responsible, or which does not come from the
> Higher Self of that personality, how could Karmic justice be maintained?
> 
> The Adept can draw into his own Auric Egg from his planet, or even from
> that of the globe or of the universe, according to his degree. This
> envelope is the receptacle of all Karmic causes, and photographs all
> things like a sensitive plate.
> 
> The child has a very small Auric Egg which is in colour almost pure white.
> At birth the Auric Egg consists of almost pure Akâsha plus the Tanhâs,
> which, until the seventh year, remain potential or in latency.
> 
> The Auric Egg of an idiot cannot be said to be human, that is, it is not
> tinged with Manas. It is Akâshic vibrations rather than an Auric Egg—the
> material envelope, such as that of the plant, the mineral or other object.
> 
> The Auric Egg is the transmitter from the periodical lives to the Life
> eternal, _i.e._, from Prâna to Jîva. It disappears, but remains.
> 
> The reason why the confession of the Roman Catholic and Greek Churches is
> so great a sin is because the confessor interferes with the Auric Egg of
> the penitent by means of his will power, engrafting artificially
> emanations from his own Auric Egg and casting seeds for germination into
> the Auric Egg of his subject. It is on the same lines as hypnotic
> suggestion.
> 
> The above remarks apply equally to Hypnotism, although the latter is a
> psycho‐physical force, and it is this which constitutes one of its many
> serious dangers. At the same time “a good thing may pass through dirty
> channels,” as in the case of the breaking by suggestion of the alcohol or
> opium habit. Mesmerism may be used by the Occultist to remove evil habits,
> if the intention be perfectly pure; as on the higher plane intention is
> everything, and good intention must work for good.
> 
> _Q. Is the Auric Egg the expansion of the __“__Pillar of Light,__”__ the
> Mânasic Principle, and so not surrounding the child till its seventh
> year?_
> 
> _A._ It is the Auric Egg. The Auric Egg is quite pure at birth, but it is
> a question whether the higher or lower Manas will colour it at the seventh
> year. The Mânasic expansion is pure Âkâsha. The ray of Manas is let down
> into the vortex of the lower Principles, and being discoloured, and so
> limited by the Kâmic Tanhâs and by the defects of the bodily organism,
> forms the personality. Hereditary Karma can reach the child before the
> seventh year, but no individual Karma can come into play till the descent
> of the Manas.
> 
>     The Auric Egg is to the Man
>     As the Astral Light is to the Earth
>     As the Ether is to the Astral Light
>     As the Akâsha is to the Ether
> 
> The critical states are left out in the enumeration. They are the Lava
> Centres, or missing links in our consciousness, and separate these four
> planes from one another.
> 
> The Dweller.
> 
> The “Dweller on the Threshold” is found in two cases: (_a_) In the case of
> the separation of the Triangle from the Quaternary; (_b_) When Kâmic
> desires and passions are so intense that the Kâma Rûpa persists in Kâma
> Loka beyond the Devachanic period of the Ego, and thus survives the
> reincarnation of the Devachanic Entity (_e.g._, when reincarnation occurs
> within two hundred or three hundred years). The “Dweller” being drawn by
> affinity towards the Reincarnating Ego to whom it had belonged, and being
> unable to reach it, fastens on the Kâma of the new personality, and
> becomes the Dweller on the Threshold, strengthening the Kâmic element and
> thus lending it a dangerous potency. Some become mad from this cause.
> 
> Intellect.
> 
> The white Adept is not always at first of powerful intellect. In fact, H.
> P. B. had known Adepts whose intellectual powers were originally below the
> average. It is the Adept’s purity, his equal love to all, his working with
> Nature, with Karma, with his “Inner God,” that give him his power.
> Intellect by itself alone will make the Black Magician. For intellect
> alone is accompanied with pride and selfishness: it is the intellectual
> _plus_ the spiritual that raises man. For spirituality prevents pride and
> vanity.
> 
> Metaphysics are the domain of the Higher Manas; whereas Physics are that
> of Kâma‐Manas, which does the thinking in Physical Science and on material
> things. Kâma‐Manas, like every other Principle, is of seven degrees. The
> Mathematician without spirituality, however great he may be, will not
> reach Metaphysics; but the Metaphysician will master the highest
> conceptions of Mathematics, and will apply them, without learning the
> latter. To a born Metaphysician the Psychic Plane will not be of much
> account: he will see its errors immediately he enters it, inasmuch as it
> is not the thing he seeks. With respect to Music and other Arts, they are
> the children of either the Mânasic or Kâma‐Mânasic Principle,
> proportionately as Soul or technicality predominates.
> 
> Karma.
> 
> After each incarnation, when the Mânasic Ray returns to its Father, the
> Ego, some of its atoms remain behind and scatter. These Mânasic atoms,
> Tânhic and other “causes,” being of the same nature as the Manas, are
> attracted to it by strong bonds of affinity, and on the reincarnation of
> the Ego are unerringly attracted to it and constitute its Karma. Until
> these are all gathered up, the individuality is not free from rebirth. The
> Higher Manas is responsible for the Ray it sends forth. If the Ray be not
> soiled, no bad Karma is generated.
> 
> The Turîya State.
> 
> You should bear in mind that, in becoming Karma‐less, good Karma, as well
> as bad, has to be gotten rid of, and that Nidânas, started towards the
> acquisition of good Karma, are as binding as those induced in the other
> direction. For both are Karma.
> 
> Yogîs cannot attain the Turîya state unless the Triangle is separated from
> the Quaternary.
> 
> Mahat.
> 
> Mahat is the manifested universal Parabrâhmic Mind (for one Manvantara) on
> the Third Plane [of Kosmos]. It is the Law whereby the Light falls from
> plane to plane and differentiates. The Mânasaputras are its emanations.
> 
> Man alone is capable of conceiving the Universe on this plane of
> existence.
> 
> Existence _is_; but when the entity does not feel it, for that entity it
> is not. The pain of an operation exists, though the patient does not feel
> it, and for the patient it is not.
> 
> How To Advance.
> 
> _Q. What is the correct pronunciation of AUM?_
> 
> _A._ It should first be practised physically, always at the same pitch,
> which must be discovered in the same way as the particular colour of the
> student is found, for each has his own tone.
> 
> AUM consists of two vowels and one semi‐vowel, which latter must be
> prolonged. Just as Nature has its Fa, so each man has his: man being
> differentiated from Nature. The body may be compared to an instrument and
> the Ego to the player. You begin by producing effects on yourself; then
> little by little you learn to play on the Tattvas and Principles; learn
> first the notes, then the chords, then the melodies. Once the student is
> master of every chord, he may begin to be a co‐worker with Nature and for
> others. He may then, by the experience he has gained of his own nature,
> and by the knowledge of the chords, strike such as will be beneficial in
> another, and so will serve as a keynote for beneficial results.
> 
> Try to have a clear representation of the geometrical triangle on every
> plane, the conception gradually growing more metaphysical, and ending with
> the subjective Triangle, Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas. It is only by the knowledge of
> this Triangle under all forms that you can succeed, _e.g._ in enclosing
> the past and the future in the present. Remember that you have to merge
> the Quaternary in the Triangle. The Lower Manas is drawn upwards, with the
> Kâma, Prâna and Linga, leaving only the physical body behind, the lower
> reinforcing the higher.
> 
> Advance may be made in Occultism even in Devachan, if the Mind and Soul be
> set thereon during life; but it is only as in a dream, and the knowledge
> will fade away as memory of a dream fades, unless it be kept alive by
> conscious study.
> 
> Fear And Hatred.
> 
> Fear and hatred are essentially one and the same. He who fears nothing
> will never hate, and he who hates nothing will never fear.
> 
> The Triangle.
> 
> _Q. What is the meaning of the phrase: __“__Form a clear image of the
> Triangle on every plane;__”_ _e.g._, _on the Astral Plane, what should one
> think of as the Triangle?_
> 
> _A._ [H. P. B. asked whether the question signified the meaning of the
> Triangle or the way to represent the Triangle on the “screen of light.”
> The questioner explaining that the latter was the meaning, H. P. B. said
> that] it was only in the Turîya state, the fourth of the seven steps of
> Râja Yoga that the Yogî can represent to himself that which is abstract.
> Below this state, the perceptive power, being conditioned, must have some
> form to contemplate; it cannot represent to itself the Arûpa. In the
> Turîya state the Triangle is in yourself and is felt. Below the Turîya
> state there must be a symbol to represent Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas. It is not a
> mere geometrical Triangle, but the Triad imaged, to make thought possible.
> Of this Triad, we can make some kind of representation of Manas, however
> indistinct; while of Âtmâ no image can be formed. We must try to represent
> the Triangle to ourselves on higher and higher planes. We must figure
> Manas as overshadowed by Buddhi, and immersed in Âtmâ. Only Manas, the
> Higher Ego, can be represented; we may think it as the Augoeides, the
> radiant figure in _Zanoni_. A very good Psychic might see this.
> 
> Psychic Vision.
> 
> Psychic vision, however, is not to be desired, since Psyche is earthly and
> evil. More and more as Science advances, the psychic will be reached and
> understood; Psychism has in it nothing that is spiritual. Science is right
> on its own plane, from its own standpoint. The law of the Conservation of
> Energy implies that psychic motion is generated by motion. Psychic motion
> being only motion on the Psychic Plane, a material plane, the Psychologist
> is right who sees in it nothing beyond matter. Animals have no Spirit, but
> they have psychic vision, and are sensitive to psychic conditions; observe
> how these react on their health, their bodily state.
> 
> Motion is the abstract Deity; on the highest plane it is Arûpa, absolute;
> but on the lowest it is merely mechanical. Psychic action is within the
> sphere of physical motion. Ere psychic action can be developed in the
> brain and nerves, there must be adequate action which generates it on the
> Physical Plane. The paralyzed animal that cannot generate action in the
> physical body, cannot think. Psychics merely see on a plane of different
> material density; the spiritual glimpses sometimes obtained by them come
> from a plane beyond. A Psychic’s vision is that of one coming, as it were,
> into a lighted room, and seeing everything there by an artificial light:
> when the light is extinguished, vision is lost. Spiritual vision sees by
> the light within, the light hidden beneath the bushel of the body, by
> which we can see clearly and independently of all outside. The Psychic
> seeing by an external light, the vision is coloured by the nature of that
> light.
> 
> X. saying that she felt as though she saw on three planes, H. P. B.
> answered that each plane was sevenfold, the Astral as every other. She
> gave as an example on the Physical Plane the vision of a table with the
> sense of sight; seeing it still, with the eyes closed, by retinal
> impression; the image of it conserved in the brain; it can be recalled by
> memory; it can be seen in dream; or as an aggregate of atoms; or as
> disintegrated. All these are on the Physical Plane. Then we can begin
> again on the Astral Plane, and obtain another septenary. This hint should
> be followed and worked out.
> 
> Triangle And Quaternary.
> 
> _Q.  Why is the violet, the color of the Linga Sharîra, placed at the apex
> of the triangle, when the Macrocosm is figured as a triangle over a
> square, thus throwing the yellow, Buddhi, into the lower Quaternary?_
> 
> _A._ It is wrong to speak of the “lower Quaternary” in the Macrocosm. It
> is the Tetraktys, the highest, the most sacred of all symbols. There comes
> a moment when, in the highest meditation, the Lower Manas is withdrawn
> into the Triad, which thus becomes the Quaternary, the Tetraktys of
> Pythagoras, leaving what was the Quaternary as the lower Triad, which is
> then reversed. The Triad is reflected in the Lower Manas. The Higher Manas
> cannot reflect itself, but when the Green passes upward it becomes a
> mirror for the Higher; it is then no more Green, having passed from its
> associations. The Psyche then becomes spiritual, the Ternary is reflected
> in the Fourth, and the Tetraktys is formed. So long as you are not dead,
> there must be something to reflect the Higher Triad; for there must be
> something to bring back to the waking consciousness the experiences passed
> through on the higher plane. The Lower Manas is as a tablet which retains
> the impressions made on it during trance.
> 
> The Turîya state is entered on the Fourth Path; it is figured in the
> diagram on p. 478, in the Second Paper.
> 
> _Q. What is the meaning of a triangle formed of lines of light appearing
> in the midst of intense vibrating blue?_
> 
> _A._ Seeing the Triangle outside is nothing; it is merely a reflection of
> the Triad on the Auric Envelope, and proves that the seer is outside the
> Triangle. It should be seen in quite another way. You must endeavour to
> merge yourself in it, to assimilate yourself with it. You are merely
> seeing things in the Astral. “When the Third Eye is opened in any one of
> you, you will have something very different to tell me.”
> 
> _Q. With reference to the __“__Pillar of Light__”__ in a previous
> question, is the Auric Envelope the Higher Ego, and does it correspond to
> the Ring Pass‐Not?_
> 
> [This question was not answered, as going too far. The Ring Pass‐Not is at
> the circumference of the manifested Universe.]
> 
> Nidânas.
> 
> _Q. The root of the Nidânas is Avidyâ. How does this differ from Mâyâ? How
> many Nidânas are there Esoterically?_
> 
> _A._ Again too much is asked. The Nidânas, the concatenations of causes
> and effects (not in the sense of the Orientalists), are not caused by
> ignorance. They are produced by Dhyân Chohans and Devas, who certainly
> cannot be said to act in ignorance. We produce Nidânas in ignorance. Each
> cause started on the Physical Plane sets up action on every plane to all
> eternity. They are eternal effects reflected from plane to plane on to the
> “screen of eternity.”
> 
> Manas.
> 
> _Q. What is the septenary classification of Manas? There are seven degrees
> of the Lower Manas, and presumably there are seven degrees of the Higher.
> Are there then fourteen degrees of Manas, or is Manas, taken as a whole,
> divided into forty‐nine Mânasic fires?_
> 
> _A._ Certainly there are fourteen, but you want to run before you can
> walk. First learn the three, and then go on to the forty‐nine. There are
> three Sons of Agni; they become seven, and then evolve to the forty‐nine.
> But you are still ignorant how to produce the three. Learn first how to
> produce the “Sacred Fire,” spoken of in the _Purânas_. The forty‐nine
> fires are all states of Kundalinî, to be produced in ourselves by the
> friction of the Triad. First learn the septenary of the body, and then
> that of each Principle. But first of all learn the first Triad (the three
> vital airs).
> 
> The Spinal Cord.
> 
> _Q. What is the sympathetic nerve and its function in Occultism? It is
> found only after a certain stage of animal evolution, and would seem to be
> evolving in complexity towards a second spinal cord._
> 
> _A._ At the end of the next Round, Humanity will again become male‐female,
> and then there will be two spinal cords. In the Seventh Race the two will
> merge into the one. The evolution corresponds to the Races, and with the
> evolution of the Races the sympathetic developes into a true spinal cord.
> We are returning up the arc only with self‐consciousness added. The Sixth
> Race will correspond to the “pudding bags,” but will have the perfection
> of form with the highest intelligence and spirituality.
> 
> Anatomists are beginning to find new ramifications and new modifications
> in the human body. They are in error on many points, _e.g._, as to the
> spleen, which they call the manufactory of white blood corpuscles, but
> which is really the vehicle of the Linga Sharîra. Occultists know each
> minute portion of the heart, and have a name for each. They call them by
> the names of the Gods, as Brahmâ’s Hall, Vishnu’s Hall, etc. They
> correspond with parts of the brain. The very atoms of the body are the
> thirty‐three crores of Gods.
> 
> The sympathetic nerve is played on by the Tântrikas, who call it Shiva’s
> Vînâ.
> 
> Prâna.
> 
> _Q. What is the relation of man to Prâna—the periodical life?_
> 
> _A._ Jîva becomes Prâna only when the child is born and begins to breathe.
> It is the breath of life, Nephesh. There is no Prâna on the Astral Plane.
> 
> Antahkarana.
> 
> _Q. The Antahkarana is the link between the Higher and the Lower Egos;
> does it correspond to the umbilical cord in projection?_
> 
> _A._ No; the umbilical cord joining the astral to the physical body is a
> real thing. Antahkarana is imaginary, a figure of speech, and is only the
> bridging over from the Higher to the Lower Manas. Antahkarana only exists
> when you commence to “throw your thought upwards and downwards.” The
> Mâyâvi Rûpa, or Mânasic body, has no material connection with the physical
> body, no umbilical cord. It is spiritual and ethereal, and passes
> everywhere without let or hindrance. It entirely differs from the astral
> body, which, if injured, acts by repercussion on the physical body. The
> Devachanic entity, even previous to birth, can be affected by the
> Skandhas, but these have nothing to do with the Antahkarana. It is
> affected, _e.g._, by the desire for reincarnation.
> 
> _Q. We are told in_ The Voice of the Silence _that we have to become __
> __“__the path itself,__”__ and in another passage that Antahkarana is that
> path. Does this mean anything more than that we have to bridge over the
> gap between the consciousness of the Lower and the Higher Egos?_
> 
> _A._ That is all.
> 
> _Q. We are told that there are seven portals on the Path: is there then a
> sevenfold division of Antahkarana? Also, is Antahkarana the battlefield?_
> 
> _A._ It is the battlefield. There are seven divisions in the Antahkarana.
> As you pass from each to the next you approach the Higher Manas. When you
> have bridged the fourth you may consider yourself fortunate.
> 
> Miscellaneous.
> 
> _Q. We are told that_ AUM _“__should be practised physically.__”__ Does
> this mean that, colour being more differentiated than sound, it is only
> through the colours that we shall get at the real sound of each of us? and
> that_ AUM _can only have its Spiritual and Occult signification when
> turned to the Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas of each person?_
> 
> _A._ AUM means good action, not merely lip‐sound. You must say it in
> deeds.
> 
> _Q. With reference to the triangle, is not the Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas different
> for each entity, according to the plane on which he is?_
> 
> _A._ Each Principle is on a different plane. The Chelâ must rise to one
> after the other, assimilating each, until the three are one. This is the
> real root of the Trinity.
> 
> _Q. In_ The Secret Doctrine _we are told that Âkâsha is the same as
> Pradhâna. Âkâsha is the Auric Egg of the earth, and yet Âkâsha is Mahat.
> What that is the relation of Manas to the Auric Egg?_
> 
> _A._ Mûlaprakriti is the same as Âkâsha (seven degrees). Mahat is the
> positive aspect of Âkâsha, and is the Manas of the Kosmic Body. Mahat is
> to Âkâsha as Manas is to Buddhi, and Pradhâna is but another name for
> Mûlaprakriti.
> 
> The Auric Egg is Âkâsha and has seven degrees. Being pure abstract
> substance, it reflects abstract ideas, but also reflects lower concrete
> things.
> 
> The Third Logos and Mahat are one, and are the same as the Universal Mind,
> Alaya.
> 
> The Tetraktys is the Chatur Vidyâ, or the fourfold knowledge in one, the
> four‐faced Brahmâ.
> 
> Nâdis.
> 
> _Q. Have the Nâdîs any fixed relationship to the vertebræ; can they be
> located opposite to or between any vertebræ? can they be regarded as
> occupying each a given and fixed extent in the cord? Do they correspond to
> the divisions of the cord known to Anatomists?_
> 
> _A._  H. P. B. believed that the Nâdîs corresponded to regions of the
> spinal cord known to Anatomists. There are thus six or seven Nâdîs or
> plexuses along the spinal cord. The term, however, is not technical but
> general, and applies to any knot, centre, ganglion, etc. The sacred Nâdîs
> are those which run along or above Sushumnâ. Six are known to Science, and
> one (near the atlas) unknown. Even the Târaka Râja Yogîs speak only of
> six, and will not mention the sacred seventh.
> 
> Idâ and Pingalâ play along the curved wall of the cord in which is
> Sushumnâ. They are semi‐material, positive and negative, sun and moon, and
> start into action the free and spiritual current of Sushumnâ. They have
> distinct paths of their own, otherwise they would radiate all over the
> body. By concentration on Idâ and Pingalâ is generated the “sacred fire.”
> 
> Another name for Shiva’s Vînâ (sympathetic system) is Kâlî’s Vînâ.
> 
> The sympathetic cords and Idâ and Pingalâ start from a sacred spot above
> the medulla oblongata, called Triveni. This is one of the sacred centres,
> another of which is Brahmarandra, which is, if you like, the grey matter
> of the brain. It is also the anterior fontanelle in the new‐born child.
> 
> The spinal column is called Brahmadanda, the stick of Brahmâ. This is
> again symbolized by the bamboo rod carried by Ascetics. The Yogîs on the
> other sides of the Himâlayas, who assemble regularly at Lake Mânsarovara,
> carry a triple knotted bamboo stick, and are called Tridandins. This has
> the same signification as the Brâhmanical cord, which has many other
> meanings besides the three vital airs: _e.g._, it symbolizes the three
> initiations of a Brâhman, taking place: (_a_) at birth, when he receives
> his mystery name from the family Astrologer, who is supposed to have
> received it from the Devas (he is also thus said to be initiated by the
> Devas); a Hindu will sooner die than reveal this name; (_b_) at seven,
> when he receives the cord; and (_c_) at eleven or twelve, when he is
> initiated into his caste.
> 
> _Q. If it is right to study the body and its organs, with their
> correspondences, will you give the main outline of these in connection
> with the Nâdîs and with the diagram of the orifices._
> 
>     _A._ The Spleen corresponds to the Linga Sharîra
>     The  Liver to Kâma
>     The Heart to Prâna
>     The Corpora‐quadrigemina to Kâma‐Manas
>     The Pituitary body to Manas‐Antahkarana
>     The Pineal gland to Manas
> 
> until it is touched by the vibrating light of Kundalinî, which proceeds
> from Buddhi, when it becomes Buddhi‐Manas.
> 
> The pineal gland corresponds with Divine Thought. The pituitary body is
> the organ of the Psychic Plane. Psychic vision is caused by the molecular
> motion of this body, which is directly connected with the optic nerve, and
> thus affects the sight and gives rise to hallucinations. Its motion may
> readily cause flashes of light, such as may be obtained by pressing the
> eyeballs. Drunkenness and fever produce illusions of sight and hearing by
> the action of the pituitary body. This body is sometimes so affected by
> drunkenness that it is paralyzed. If an influence on the optic nerve is
> thus produced and the current thus reversed, the colour will probably be
> complementary.
> 
> Sevens.
> 
> _Q. If the physical body is no part of the real human septenary, is the
> physical material world one of the seven planes of the Kosmic septenary?_
> 
> _A._ It is. The body is not a Principle in Esoteric parlance, because the
> body and the Linga are both on the same plane; then the Auric Egg makes
> the seventh. The body is an Upâdhi rather than a Principle. The earth and
> its astral light are as closely related to each other as the body and its
> Linga, the earth being the Upâdhi. Our plane in its lowest division is the
> earth, in its highest the astral. The terrestrial astral light should of
> course not be confounded with the universal Astral Light.
> 
> _Q. A physical object was spoken of as a septenary on the physical plane,
> inasmuch as we could (1) directly contact it; (2) retinally reproduce it;
> (3) remember it; (4) dream of it; (5) view it atomically; (6) view it
> disintegrated; (7)—What is the seventh?_
> 
> _These are seven ways in which we view it: the septenary is our way of
> seeing one thing. Is it objectively septenary?_
> 
> _A._ The seventh bridges across from one plane to another. The last is the
> idea, the privation of matter, and carries you to the next plane. The
> highest of one plane touches the lowest of the next. Seven is a factor in
> nature, as in colours and sounds. There are seven degrees in the same
> piece of wood, each perceived by one of the seven senses. In wood the
> smell is the most material degree, while in other substances it may be the
> sixth. Substances are septenary apart from the consciousness of the
> viewer.
> 
> The psychometer, seeing a morsel, say of a table a thousand years hence,
> would see the whole; for every atom reflects the whole body to which it
> belongs, just as with the Monads of Leibnitz.
> 
> After the seven material subdivisions are the seven divisions of the
> Astral, which is its second Principle. The disintegrated matter—the
> highest of the material subdivisions—is the privation of the idea of
> it—the fourth.
> 
> The number fourteen is the first step between seven and forty‐nine. Each
> septenary is really a fourteen, because each of the seven has its two
> aspects. Thus fourteen signifies the inter‐relation of two planes in its
> turn. The septenary is to be clearly traced in the lunar months, fevers,
> gestations, etc. On it is based the week of the Jews and the septenary
> Hierarchies of the Lord of Hosts.
> 
> Sounds.
> 
> _Q. Sound is an attribute of Âkâsha; but we cannot cognize anything on the
> Âkâshic plane; on what plane then do we recognize sound? On what plane is
> sound produced by the physical contact of bodies? Is there sound on seven
> planes, and is the physical plane one of them?_
> 
> _A._ The physical plane is one of them. You cannot see Âkâsha, but you can
> sense it from the Fourth Path. You may not be fully conscious of it, and
> yet you may sense it. Âkâsha is at the root of the manifestation of all
> sounds. Sound is the expression and manifestation of that which is behind
> it, and which is the parent of many correlations. All Nature is a
> sounding‐board; or rather Âkâsha is the sounding‐board of Nature. It is
> the Deity, the one Life, the one Existence. (Hearing is the vibration of
> molecular particles; the order is seen in the sentence, “The disciple
> feels, hears, sees.”)
> 
> Sound can have no end. H. P. B. remarked with regard to a tap made by a
> pencil on the table: “By this time it has affected the whole universe. The
> particle which has had its wear and tear destroys something which passes
> into something else. It is eternal in the Nidânas it produces.” A sound,
> if not previously produced on the Astral Plane, and before that on the
> Âkâshic, could not be produced at all. Âkâsha is the bridge between nerve
> cells and mental powers.
> 
> _Q. __“__Colours are psychic, and sounds are spiritual.__”__ What,
> assuming that these are vibrations, is the successive order (these
> corresponding to sight and hearing) of the other senses?_
> 
> _A._ This phrase was not to be taken out of its context, otherwise
> confusion would arise. All are on all planes. The First Race had touch all
> over like a sounding board; this touch differentiated into the other
> senses, which developed with the Races. The “sense” of the First Race was
> that of touch, meaning the power of their atoms to vibrate in unison with
> external atoms. The “touch” would be almost the same as sympathy.
> 
> The senses were on a different plane with each Race; _e.g._, the Fourth
> Race had very much more developed senses than ourselves, but on another
> plane. It was also a very material Race. The sixth and seventh senses will
> merge into the Âkâshic Sound. “It depends to what degree of matter the
> sense of touch relates itself as to what we call it.”
> 
> Prâna.
> 
> _Q. Is Prâna the production of the countless __“__lives__”__ of the human
> body, and therefore, to some extent, of the congeries of the cells or
> atoms of the body?_
> 
> _A._ No; Prâna is the parent of the “lives.” As an example, a sponge may
> be immersed in an ocean. The water in the sponge’s interior may be
> compared to Prâna; outside is Jîva. Prâna is the motor‐principle in life.
> The “lives” leave Prâna; Prâna does not leave them. Take out the sponge
> from the water, and it becomes dry, thus symbolizing death. Every
> principle is a differentiation of Jîva, but the life‐motion in each is
> Prâna, the “breath of life.” Kâma depends on Prâna, without which there
> would be no Kâma. Prâna wakes the Kâmic germs to life; it makes all
> desires vital and living.
> 
> The Second Spinal Cord.
> 
> _Q. With reference to the answer to the question on the second cord, what
> is it that will become a second spinal cord in the Sixth Race? Will Idâ
> and Pingalâ have separate physical ducts?_
> 
> _A._ It is the sympathetic cords which will grow together and form another
> spinal cord. Idâ and Pingalâ will be joined with Sushumnâ, and they will
> become one. Idâ is on the left side of the cord, and Pingalâ on the right.
> 
> Initiates.
> 
> Pythagoras was an Initiate, one of the grandest of Scientists. His
> disciple, Archytas, was marvellously apt in applied Science. Plato and
> Euclid were Initiates, but not Socrates. No real Initiates were married.
> Euclid learned his Geometry in the Mysteries. Modern men of Science only
> rediscover the old truths.
> 
> Kosmic Consciousness.
> 
> H. P. B. proceeded to explain Kosmic Consciousness, which is, like all
> else, on seven planes, of which three are inconceivable, and four are
> cognizable by the highest Adept.
> 
> Taking the lowest only, the Terrestrial (it was afterwards decided to call
> this plane Prâkritic), it is divisible, into seven planes, and these again
> into seven, making the forty‐nine.
> 
> She then took the lowest plane of Prâkriti, or the true Terrestrial.
> 
> Its objective or sensuous plane is that which is sensed by the five
> physical senses.
> 
> On its second plane things are reversed.
> 
> Its third plane is psychic: here is the instinct which prevents a kitten
> going into the water and getting drowned.
> 
> Then objective consciousness was given.
> 
> The three lower Prâkritic are related to the three lower of the Astral
> Plane immediately succeeding.
> 
> With regard to the first division of the second plane, H. P. B. reminded
> her pupils that all seen on it must be reversed in translating it, _e.g._,
> with numbers which appeared backwards. The Astral Objective corresponds in
> everything to the Terrestrial Objective.
> 
> The second division corresponds to the second of the lower plane, but the
> objects are of extreme tenuity, an astralized Astral. This plane is the
> limit of the ordinary medium, beyond which he cannot go. A non‐mediumistic
> person to reach it must be asleep or in a trance, or under the influence
> of laughing‐gas; or in ordinary delirium people pass on to this plane.
> 
> The third, the Prânic, is of an intensely vivid nature. Extreme delirium
> carries the patient to this plane. In delirium tremens the sufferer passes
> to this and to the one above it. Lunatics are often conscious on this
> plane, where they see terrible visions. It runs into the—
> 
> Fourth division, the worst of the astral planes, Kâmic and terrible. Hence
> come the images that tempt; images of drunkards in Kâma Loka impelling
> others to drink; images of all vices inoculating men with the desire to
> commit crimes. The weak imitate these images in a kind of monkeyish
> fashion, so falling beneath their influence. This is also the cause of
> epidemics of vices, and cycles of disaster, of accidents of all kinds
> coming in groups. Extreme delirium tremens is on this plane.
> 
> The fifth division is that of premonitions in dreams, of reflections from
> the lower mentality, glimpses into the past and future, the plane of
> things mental and not spiritual. The mesmerized clairvoyant can reach this
> plane, and even, if good, may go higher.
> 
> The sixth is the plane from which come all beautiful inspirations of art,
> poetry, and music; high types of dreams, flashes of genius. Here we have
> glimpses of past incarnations, without being able to locate or analyze
> them.
> 
> We are on the seventh plane at the moment of death or in exceptional
> visions. The drowning man is here when he remembers his past life. The
> memory of events of this plane must be centred in the heart, “the seat of
> Buddha.” There it will remain, but impressions from this plane are not
> made on the physical brain.
> 
> General Notes.
> 
> The two planes above dealt with are the only two used in the Hatha Yoga.
> 
> Prâna and the Auric Envelope are essentially the same, and again, as Jîva,
> it is the same as the Universal Deity. This, in its Fifth Principle, is
> Mahat, in its Sixth, Alaya. (The Universal Life is also seven‐principled.)
> Mahat is the highest _Entity_ in Kosmos; beyond this is no diviner Entity;
> it is of subtlest matter, Sûkshma. In us this is Manas, and the very Logoi
> are less high, not having gained experience. The Mânasic Entity will not
> be destroyed, even at the end of the Mahâmanvantara, when all the Gods are
> absorbed, but will re‐emerge from Parabrâhmic latency.
> 
> Consciousness is the Kosmic seed of superkosmic omniscience. It has the
> potentiality of budding into the Divine Consciousness.
> 
> Rude physical health is a drawback to seership. This was the case with
> Swedenborg.
> 
> Fohat is everywhere: it runs like a thread through all, and has its own
> seven divisions.
> 
> Auric Envelope or Âtmic Elements of Manifested Kosmos.
> Alaya. Buddhi.
> Mahat. Manas.
> Fohat. Kâma‐Manas.
> Jîva. Kâma‐Prana.
> Astral. Linga.
> Prâkriti. Body.
> 
> In the Kosmic Auric Envelope is all the Karma of the manifesting Universe.
> This is the Hiranyagarbha. Jîva is everywhere, and so with the other
> Principles.
> 
>                               [Illustration]
> 
> The above diagram represents the type of all the Solar Systems.
> 
> Mahat, single before informing the Universe, differentiates when informing
> it, as does Manas in man.
> 
>                               [Illustration]
> 
> Taking this figure to represent the human Principles and planes of
> consciousness, then 7, 6, 5 represent respectively, Shiva, Vishnu, Brahmâ,
> Brahmâ being the lowest.
> 
> Shiva is the four‐faced Brahmâ; the Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, and
> Regenerator.
> 
> Between 5 and 4 comes the Antahkarana.  The triangle represents the
> Christos, the Sacrificial Victim crucified between the thieves: this is
> the double‐faced entity. The Vedântins make this a quaternary for a blind:
> Antahkarana, Chit, Buddhi, and Manas.
> 
> MANVANTARIC ASPECT OF PARABRAHMAN AND MÛLAPRAKRITI.
> 
>                               [Illustration]
> 
> [N.B.—The number of Rays is arbitrary and without significance.]
> 
> Perceptive life begins with the Astral: it is not our physical atoms which
> see, etc.
> 
> Consciousness proper begins between Kâma and Manas. Âtmâ‐Buddhi acts more
> in the atoms of the body, in the bacilli, microbes, etc., than in Man
> himself.
> 
> Objective Consciousness.
> 
> Sensuous objective consciousness includes all that pertains to the five
> physical senses in man, and rules in animals, birds, fishes and some
> insects. Here are the “Lives”; their consciousness is in Âtmâ‐Buddhi;
> these are entirely without Manas.
> 
> Astral Consciousness.
> 
> That of some plants (_e.g._, sensitive), of ants, spiders, and some night‐
> flies (Indian), but not of bees.
> 
> The vertebrate animals in general are without this consciousness, but the
> placental Mammals have all the potentialities of human consciousness,
> though at present, of course, dormant.
> 
> Idiots are on this plane. The common expression “he has lost his mind” is
> an Occult truth. For when through fright or other cause the lower mind
> becomes paralyzed, then the consciousness is on the Astral Plane. The
> study of lunacy will throw much light on these points. This may be called
> the “nerve plane.” It is cognized by our “nervous centres” of which
> Physiology knows nothing, _e.g._, the clairvoyant reading with the eyes
> bandaged, reading with the tips of the fingers, the pit of the stomach,
> etc. This sense is greatly developed in the deaf and dumb.
> 
> Kâma‐Prânic Consciousness.
> 
> The general life‐consciousness which belongs to all the objective world,
> even to the stones; for if stones were not living they could not decay,
> emit a spark, etc. Affinity between chemical elements is a manifestation
> of this Kâmic consciousness.
> 
> Kâma‐Mânasic Consciousness.
> 
> The instinctual consciousness of animals and idiots in its lowest degrees,
> the planes of sensation: in man these are rationalized, _e.g._, a dog shut
> in a room has the instinct to get out, but cannot because its instinct is
> not sufficiently rationalized to take the necessary means; whereas a man
> at once takes in the situation and extricates himself. The highest degree
> of this Kâma‐Mânasic consciousness is the psychic. Thus there are seven
> degrees from the instinctual animal to the rationalized instinctual and
> psychic.
> 
> Mânasic Consciousness.
> 
> From this plane Manas stretches upwards to Mahat.
> 
> Buddhic Consciousness.
> 
> The plane of Buddhi and the Auric Envelope. From here it goes to the
> Father in heaven, Âtmâ, and reflects all that is in the Auric Envelope.
> Five and six therefore cover the planes from the psychic to the divine.
> 
> Miscellaneous.
> 
> Reason is a thing that oscillates between right and wrong. But
> Intelligence—Intuition—is higher, it is the clear vision.
> 
> To get rid of Kâma we must crush out all our material instincts—“crush out
> matter.” The flesh is a thing of habit; it will repeat mechanically a good
> impulse as well as a bad one. It is not the flesh which is always the
> tempter; in nine cases out of ten it is the Lower Manas, which, by its
> images, leads the flesh into temptation.
> 
> The highest Adept begins his Samâdhi on the Fourth Solar Plane, but cannot
> go outside the Solar System. When he begins Samâdhi he is on a par with
> some of the Dhyân Chohans, but he transcends them as he rises to the
> seventh plane (Nirvâna).
> 
> The Silent Watcher is on the Fourth Kosmic Plane.
> 
> The higher Mind directs the Will: the lower turns it into selfish Desire.
> 
> The head should not be covered in meditation. It is covered in Samâdhi.
> 
> The Dhyân Chohans are passionless, pure and mindless. They have no
> struggle, no passions to crush.
> 
> The Dhyân Chohans are made to pass through the School of Life. “God goes
> to School.”
> 
> The best of us in the future will be Mânasaputras; the lowest will be
> Pitris. We are seven intellectual Hierarchies here. This earth becomes the
> moon of the next earth.
> 
> The “Pitris” are the Astral overshadowed by Âtmâ‐Buddhi, falling into
> matter. The “Pudding‐bags” had Life and Âtmâ‐Buddhi, but no Manas. They
> were therefore senseless. The reason for all evolution is the gaining of
> experience.
> 
> In the Fifth Round all of us will play the part of Pitris. We shall have
> to go and shoot out our Chhâyâs into another humanity, and remain until
> that humanity is perfected. The Pitris have finished their office in this
> Round and have gone into Nirvâna; but they will return to do the same
> office up to the middle point of the Fifth Round. The Fourth or Kâmic
> Hierarchy of the Pitris becomes the “man of flesh.”
> 
> The astral body is first in the womb; then comes the germ that fructifies
> it. It is then clothed with matter, as were the Pitris.
> 
> The Chhâyâ is really the lower Manas, the shadow of the higher Mind. This
> Chhâyâ makes the Mâyâvi Rûpa. The Ray clothes itself in the highest degree
> of the Astral Plane. The Mâyâvi Rûpa is composed of the astral body as
> Upâdhi, the guiding intelligence from the heart, the attributes and
> qualities from the Auric Envelope.
> 
> The Auric Envelope takes up the light of Âtmâ, and overshadows the
> coronal, circling round the head.
> 
> The Auric Fluid is a combination of the Life and Will principles, the life
> and the will being one and the same in Kosmos. It emanates from the eyes
> and hands, when directed by the will of the operator.
> 
> The Auric Light surrounds all bodies: it is the “aura” emanating from
> them, whether they be animal, vegetable, or mineral. It is the light,
> _e.g._, seen round magnets.
> 
> Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas in man corresponds to the three Logoi in Kosmos. They
> not only correspond, but each is the radiation from Kosmos to Microcosmos.
> The third Logos, Mahat, becomes Manas in man, Manas being only Mahat
> individualized, as the sun‐rays are individualized in bodies that absorb
> them. The sun‐rays give life, they fertilize what is already there, and
> the individual is formed. Mahat, so to say, fertilizes, and Manas is the
> result.
> 
> Buddhi‐Manas is the Kshetrajña.
> 
> There are seven planes of Mahat, as of all else.
> 
> The Human Principles.
> 
> Here H. P. B. drew two diagrams, illustrating different ways of
> representing the human principles. In the first
> 
>                               [Illustration]
> 
> the two lower are disregarded; they go out, disintegrate, are of no
> account. Remain five, under the radiation of Âtmâ.
> 
> In the second:
> 
>                               [Illustration]
> 
> the lower Quaternary is regarded as mere matter, objective illusion, and
> there remain Manas and the Auric Egg, the higher Principles being
> reflected in the Auric Egg. In all these systems remember the main
> principle, the descent and re‐ascent of the Spirit, in man as in Kosmos.
> The Spirit is drawn downwards as by spiritual gravitation.
> 
> Seeking further for the cause of this, the students were checked, H. P. B.
> giving only a suggestion on the three Logoi:
> 
> 1. Potentiality of Mind (Absolute Thought).
> 
> 2. Thought in Germ.
> 
> 3. Ideation in Activity.
> 
> Notes.
> 
> Protective variation, _e.g._, identity of colouring of insects and of that
> on which they feed, was explained to be the work of Nature Elementals.
> 
> Form is on different planes, and the forms of one plane may be formless to
> dwellers on another. The Kosmocratores build on planes in the Divine Mind,
> visible to them though not to us. The principle of limitation—_principium
> individuationis_—is Form: this principle is Divine Law manifested in
> Kosmic Matter, which, in its essence, is limitless. The Auric Egg is the
> limit of man as Hiranyagarbha of the Kosmos.
> 
> The first step towards the accomplishment of Kriyâshakti is the use of the
> Imagination. To imagine a thing is to firmly create a model of what you
> desire, perfect in all its details. The Will is then brought into action,
> and the form is thereby transferred to the objective world. This is
> creation by Kriyâshakti.
> 
> Suns And Planets.
> 
> A comet partially cools and settles down as a sun. It then gradually
> attracts round it planets that are as yet unattached to any centre, and
> thus, in millions of years, a Solar System is formed. The worn‐out planet
> becomes a moon to the planet of another system.
> 
> The sun we see is a reflection of the true Sun: this reflection, as an
> outward concrete thing, is a Kâma‐Rûpa, all the suns forming the Kâma‐Rûpa
> of Kosmos. To its own system the sun is Buddhi, as being the reflection
> and vehicle of the true Sun, which is Âtmâ, invisible on this plane. All
> the Fohatic forces—electricity, etc.—are in this reflection.
> 
> The Moon.
> 
> At the beginning of the evolution of our globe, the moon was much nearer
> to the earth, and larger than it is now. It has retreated from us, and
> shrunk much in size. (The moon gave all her Principles to the earth, while
> the Pitris gave only their Chhâyâs to man.)
> 
> The influences of the moon are wholly psycho‐physiological. It is dead,
> sending out injurious emanations like a corpse. It vampirizes the earth
> and its inhabitants, so that anyone sleeping in its rays suffers, losing
> some of his life‐force. A white cloth is a protection, the rays not
> passing through it, and the head especially should be thus guarded. It has
> most power when it is full. It throws off particles which we absorb, and
> is gradually disintegrating. Where there is snow the moon looks like a
> corpse, being unable, through the white snow, to vampirize effectually.
> Hence snow‐covered mountains are free from its bad influences. The moon is
> phosphorescent.
> 
> The Râkshakas of Lanka and the Atlanteans are said to have subjected the
> moon. The Thessalians learned from them their Magic.
> 
> Esoterically, the moon is the symbol of the Lower Manas; it is also the
> symbol of the Astral.
> 
> Plants which under the sun’s rays are beneficent are maleficent under
> those of the moon. Herbs containing poisons are most active when gathered
> under the moon’s rays.
> 
> A new moon will appear during the Seventh Round, and our moon will finally
> disintegrate and disappear. There is now a planet, the “Mystery Planet,”
> behind the moon, and it is gradually dying. Finally the time will come for
> it to send its Principles to a new Laya Centre, and there a new planet
> will form, to belong to another Solar System, the present Mystery Planet
> then functioning as moon to that new globe. This moon will have nothing to
> do with our earth, though it will come within our range of vision.
> 
> The Solar System.
> 
> All the visible planets placed in our Solar System by Astronomers belong
> to it, except Neptune. There are also some others not known to Science,
> belonging to it, and “all moons which are not yet visible for next
> things.”
> 
> The planets only move in our consciousness. The Rulers of the seven Secret
> Planets have no influence on this earth, as this earth has on other
> planets. It is the sun and moon which really have not only a mental, but
> also a physical effect. The effect of the sun on humanity is connected
> with Kâma‐Prâna, with the most physical Kâmic elements in us; it is the
> vital principle which helps growth. The effect of the moon is chiefly
> Kâma‐Mânasic or psycho‐physiological; it acts on the psychological brain,
> on the brain‐mind.
> 
> Precious Stones.
> 
> In answer to a question, H. P. B. said that the diamond and the ruby were
> under the sun, the sapphire under the moon—“but what does it matter to
> you?”
> 
> Time.
> 
> When once out of the body, and not subject to the habit of consciousness
> formed by others, time does not exist.
> 
> Cycles and epochs depend on consciousness: we are not here for the first
> time; the cycles return because we come back into conscious existence.
> Cycles are measured by the consciousness of humanity and not by Nature. It
> is because we are the same people as in past epochs that these events
> occur to us.
> 
> Death.
> 
> The Hindus look upon death as impure, owing to the disintegration of the
> body and the passing from one plane to another. “I believe in
> transformation, not in death.”
> 
> Atoms.
> 
> The Atom is the Soul of the molecule. It is the six Principles, and the
> molecule is the body thereof. The Atom is the Âtman of the objective
> Kosmos, _i.e._, it is on the seventh plane of the lowest Prakriti.
> 
> Terms.
> 
> H. P. B. began by saying that students ought to know the correct meaning
> of the Sanskrit terms used in Occultism, and should learn the Occult
> Symbology. To begin with one had better learn the correct Esoteric
> classification and names of the fourteen (7 × 2) and seven (Sapta) Lokas
> found in the exoteric texts. These are given there in a very confused
> manner, and are full of “blinds.” To illustrate this three classifications
> are given below.
> 
> Lokas.
> 
> 1. The general exoteric, orthodox and tântric category:
>       Bhûr‐loka.
>       Bhuvar‐loka.
>       Swar‐loka.
>       Mahar‐loka.       The second seven are reflected.
>       Janar‐loka.
>       Tapar‐loka.
>       Satya‐loka.
> 
> 2. The Sânkhya category, and that of some Vedântins
>       Brahmâ‐loka.
>       Pitri‐loka.
>       Soma‐loka.
>       Indra‐loka.
>       Gandharva‐loka.
>       Râkshasa‐loka
>       Yaksha‐loka.
> 
> And an eighth.
> 
> 3. The Vedântic, the nearest approach to the Esoteric:
>       Atala.
>       Vitala.
>       Sutala.
>       Talâtala (or Karatala).
>       Rasâtala.
>       Mahâtala.
>       Pâtâla.
> 
> Each and all correspond Esoterically to the Kosmic or Dhyân Chohanic
> Hierarchies, and to the human States of Consciousness and their
> subdivisions (forty‐nine). To appreciate this the meanings of the terms
> used in the Vedântic classification must be first understood.
> 
> _Tala_     means _place_.
> 
> Atala      means no place.
> 
> Vitala     means some change for the better: _i.e._, better for matter in
> that more matter enters into it, or, in other words, it becomes more
> differentiated. This is an ancient Occult term.
> 
> Sutala     means good, excellent, place.
> 
> Karatala   means something that can be grasped or touched (from kara, a
> hand): _i.e._, the state in which matter becomes tangible.
> 
> Rasâtala   means place of taste; a place you can sense with one of the
> organs of sense.
> 
> Mahâtala   means exoterically “great place”; but, Esoterically, a place
> including all others subjectively, and potentially including all that
> precedes it.
> 
> Pâtâla     means something under the feet (from pada, foot), the upâdhi,
> or basis, of anything, the antipodes, America, etc.
> 
> Each of the Lokas, places, worlds, states, etc., corresponds with and is
> transformed into five (exoterically) and seven (Esoterically) states or
> Tattvas, for which there are no definite names. These in the main
> divisions cited below make up the forty‐nine Fires:
> 
>     5 and 7 Tanmâtras, outer and inner senses.
>     5 and 7 Bhûtas, or elements.
>     5 and 7 Gnyânendryas, or organs of sensation.
>     5 and 7 Karmendryas, or organs of action.
> 
> These correspond in general to States of Consciousness, to the Hierarchies
> of Dhyân Chohans, to the Tattvas, etc. These Tattvas transform themselves
> into the whole Universe. The fourteen Lokas are made of seven with seven
> reflections: above, below; within, without; subjective, objective; pure,
> impure; positive, negative; etc.
> 
> Explanation of the States of Consciousness Corresponding to the Vedântic
> Classification of Lokas.
> 
> 7. _Atala._ The Âtmic or Auric state or locality: it emanates directly
> from ABSOLUTENESS, and is the first something in the Universe. Its
> correspondence is the Hierarchy of non‐substantial primordial Beings, in a
> place which is no place (for us), a state which is no state. This
> Hierarchy contains the primordial plane, all that was, is, and will be,
> from the beginning to the end of the Mahâmanvantara; all is there. This
> statement should not, however, be taken to imply Kismet: the latter is
> contrary to all the teachings of Occultism.
> 
> Here are the Hierarchies of the Dhyâni Buddhas. Their state is that of
> Parasamâdhi, of the Dharmakâya; a state where no progress is possible. The
> entities there may be said to be crystallized in purity, in homogeneity.
> 
> 6. _Vitala._ Here are the Hierarchies of the celestial Buddhas, or
> Bodhisattvas, who are said to emanate from the seven Dhyâni Buddhas. It is
> related on earth to Samâdhi, to the Buddhic consciousness in man. No
> Adept, save one, can be higher than this and live; if he passes into the
> Âtmic or Dharmakâya state (Alaya) he can return to earth no more. These
> two states are purely hyper‐metaphysical.
> 
> 5. _Sutala._ A differential state corresponding on earth with the Higher
> Manas, and therefore with Shabda (Sound), the Logos, our Higher Ego; and
> also to the Manushi Buddha state, like that of Gautama, on earth. This is
> the third stage of Samâdhi (which is septenary). Here belong the
> Hierarchies of the Kumâras—the Agnishvattas, etc.
> 
> 4. _Karatala_ corresponds with Sparsha (touch) and to the Hierarchies of
> ethereal, semi‐objective Dhyân Chohans of the astral matter of the Mânasa‐
> Manas, or the pure ray of Manas, that is the Lower Manas before it is
> mixed with Kâma (as in the young child). They are called Sparsha Devas,
> the Devas endowed with touch. These Hierarchies of Devas are progressive:
> the first have one sense; the second two; and so on to seven: each
> containing all the senses potentially, but not yet developed. Sparsha
> would be rendered better by affinity, contact.
> 
> 3. _Rasâtala_, or Rûpatala: corresponds to the Hierarchies of Rûpa or
> Sight Devas, possessed of three senses, sight, hearing, and touch. These
> are the Kâma‐Mânasic entities, and the higher Elementals. With the
> Rosicrucians they were the Sylphs and Undines. It corresponds on earth
> with an artificial state of consciousness, such as that produced by
> hypnotism and drugs (morphia, etc.).
> 
> 2. _Mahâtala._ Corresponds to the Hierarchies of Rasa or Taste Devas, and
> includes a state of consciousness embracing the lower five senses and
> emanations of life and being. It corresponds to Kâma and Prâna in man, and
> to Salamanders and Gnomes in nature.
> 
> 1. _Pâtâla._ Corresponds to the Hierarchies of Gandha or Smell Devas, the
> underworld or antipodes: Myalba. The sphere of irrational animals, having
> no feeling save that of self‐preservation and gratification of the senses:
> also of intensely selfish human beings, waking or sleeping. This is why
> Nârada is said to have visited Pâtâla when he was cursed to be reborn. He
> reported that life there was very pleasant for those “who had never left
> their birth‐place”; they were very happy. It is the earthly state, and
> corresponds with the sense of smell. Here are also animal Dugpas,
> Elementals of animals, and Nature Spirits.
> 
> Further Explanations of the Same Classifications.
> 
> 7. Auric, Âtmic, Alayic, sense or state. One of full potentiality, but not
> of activity.
> 
> 6. Buddhic; the sense of being one with the universe; the impossibility of
> imagining oneself apart from it.
> 
> (It was asked why the term Alayic was here given to the Âtmic and not to
> the Buddhic state. _Ans._ These classifications are not hard and fast
> divisions. A term may change places according as the classification is
> exoteric, Esoteric or practical. For students the effort should be to
> bring all things down to states of consciousness. Buddhi is really one and
> indivisible. It is a feeling within, absolutely inexpressible in words.
> All cataloguing is useless to explain it.)
> 
> 5. Shâbdic, sense of hearing.
> 
> 4. Spârshic, sense of touch.
> 
> 3. Rûpic, the state of feeling oneself a body and perceiving it (rûpa =
> form).
> 
> 2. Râsic, sense of taste.
> 
> 1. Gândhic, sense of smell.
> 
> All the Kosmic and anthropic states and senses correspond with our organs
> of sensation, Gnyânendryas, rudimentary organs for receiving knowledge
> through direct contact, sight, etc. These are the faculties of Sharîra,
> through Netra (eyes), nose, speech, etc., and also with the organs of
> action, Karmendryas, hands, feet, etc.
> 
> Exoterically, there are five sets of five, giving twenty‐five. Of these
> twenty are facultative and five Buddhic. Exoterically Buddhi is said to
> perceive; Esoterically it reaches perception only through the Higher
> Manas. Each of these twenty is both positive and negative, thus making
> forty in all. There are two subjective states answering to each of the
> four sets of five, hence eight in all. These being subjective cannot be
> doubled. Thus we have 40 + 8 = 48 “cognitions of Buddhi.” These with Mâyâ,
> which includes them all, make 49. (Once that you have reached the
> cognition of Mâyâ, you are an Adept.)
> 
> The Lokas.
> 
> In their exoteric blinds the Brâhmans count fourteen Lokas (earth
> included), of which seven are objective, though not apparent, and seven
> subjective, yet fully demonstrable to the Inner Man. There are seven
> Divine Lokas and seven infernal (terrestrial) Lokas.
> 
> SEVEN DIVINE LOKAS.              SEVEN INFERNAL (TERRESTRIAL)
>                                  LOKAS.
> 1. Bhûrloka (the earth).         1. Pâtâla (our earth).
> 2. Bhuvarloka (between the       2. Mahâtala.
> earth and the sun [Munis]).
> 3. Svarloka (between the sun     3. Rasâtala.
> and and Pole Star [Yogîs]).
> 4. Maharloka (between the        4. Talâtala (or Karatala).
> earth and the utmost limit of
> the Solar System).(858)
> 5. Janarloka (beyond the Solar   5. Sutala.
> System, the abode of the
> Kumâras, who do not belong to
> this plane).
> 6. Taparloka (still beyond the   6. Vitala.
> Mahâtmic region, the dwelling
> of the Vairâja deities).
> 7. Satyaloka (the abode of the   7. Atala.
> Nirvanîs).
> 
> These the Brâhmans read from the bottom.
> 
> Now all these fourteen are planes from without within, and (the seven
> Divine) States of Consciousness through which man can pass‐‐and must pass,
> once he is determined to go through the seven paths and portals of Dhyâni;
> one need not be disembodied for this, and all this is reached on earth,
> and in one or many of the incarnations.
> 
> See the order: the four lower ones (1, 2, 3, 4), are _rûpa_; _i.e._, they
> are performed by the Inner Man with the full concurrence of the diviner
> portions, or, elements, of the Lower Manas, and consciously by the
> personal man. The three higher states cannot be reached and remembered by
> the latter, unless he is a fully initiated Adept. A Hatha Yogî will never
> pass beyond the Maharloka, psychically, and the Talâtala (double or dual
> place), physico‐mentally. To become a Râja Yogî, one has to ascend up to
> the seventh portal, the Satyaloka. For such, the Master Yogîs tell us, is
> the fruition of Yajna, or sacrifice. When the Bhûr, Bhuvar and Svarga
> (states) are once passed, and the Yogî’s consciousness centred in
> Maharloka, it is in the last plane and state between entire identification
> of the Personal and the Higher Manas.
> 
> One thing to remember: while the infernal (or terrestrial) states are also
> the seven divisions of the earth, for planes and states, as much as they
> are Kosmic divisions, the divine Saptaloka are purely subjective, and
> begin with the psychic Astral Light plane, ending with the Satya or
> Jîvanmukta state. These fourteen Lokas, or spheres, form the extent of the
> whole Brahmânda (world). The four lower are transitory, with all their
> dwellers, and the three higher eternal; _i.e._, the former states, planes
> and subjects, to these, last only a Day of Brahmâ, changing with every
> Kalpa: the latter endure for an Age of Brahmâ.
> 
> Students must learn the correspondences: then concentrate on the organs
> and so reach their corresponding states of consciousness. Take them in
> order beginning with the lowest, and working steadily upwards. A medium
> might irregularly catch glimpses of higher, but would not thus gain
> orderly development.
> 
> The greatest phenomena are produced by touching and centering the
> attention upon the little finger.
> 
> The Lokas and Talas are reflections the one of the other. So also are the
> Hierarchies in each, in pairs of opposites, at the two poles of the
> sphere. Everywhere are such opposites: good and evil, light and darkness,
> male and female.
> 
> H. P. B. could not say why blue was the colour of the earth. Blue is a
> colour by itself, a primary. Indigo is a colour, not a shade of blue, so
> is violet.
> 
> The Vairâjas belong to, are the fiery Egos of, other Manvantaras. They
> have already been purified in the fire of passions. It is they who refused
> to create. They have reached the Seventh Portal, and have refused Nirvâna,
> remaining for succeeding Manvantaras.
> 
> The seven steps of Antahkarana correspond with the Lokas.
> 
> Samâdhi is the highest state on earth that can be reached in the body.
> Beyond that the Initiate must have become a Nirmânakâya.
> 
> Purity of mind is of greater importance than purity of body. If the Upâdhi
> be not perfectly pure, it cannot preserve recollections coming from a
> higher state. An act may be performed to which little or no attention is
> paid, and it is of comparatively small importance. But if thought of,
> dwelt on in the mind, the effect is a thousand times greater. The thoughts
> must be kept pure.
> 
> Remember that Kâma, while having bad passions and emotions, helps you to
> evolve by giving also the desire and impulse necessary for rising.
> 
> The flesh, the body, the human being in his material part, is, on this
> plane, the most difficult thing to subject. The highest Adept, put into a
> new body, has to struggle against it and subdue it, and finds its
> subjugation difficult.
> 
> The Liver is the General, the Spleen is the Aide‐de‐Camp. All that the
> Liver does not accomplish is taken up and completed by the Spleen.
> 
> H. P. B. was asked whether each person must pass through the fourteen
> states, and answered that the Lokas and Talas represented planes on this
> earth, through some of which all must pass, and through all of which the
> disciple must pass, on his way to Adeptship. Everyone passes through the
> lower Lokas, but not necessarily through the corresponding Talas. There
> are two poles in everything: seven states in every state.
> 
> Vitala represents a sublime as well as an infernal state. That state which
> for the mortal is a complete separation of the Ego from the personality is
> for a Buddha a mere temporary separation. For the Buddha it is a Kosmic
> state.
> 
> The Brâhmans and Buddhists regard the Talas as hells, but in reality the
> term is figurative. We are in hell whenever we are in misery, suffer
> misfortune and so on.
> 
> Forms In The Astral Light.
> 
> The Elementals in the Astral light are reflections. Everything on earth is
> reflected there. It is from these that photographs are sometimes obtained
> through mediums. The mediums unconsciously produce them as forms. The
> Adepts produce them consciously through Kriyâshakti, bringing them down by
> a process that may be compared to the focussing of rays of light by a
> burning glass.
> 
> States Of Consciousness.
> 
> Bhûrloka is the waking state in which we normally live; it is the state in
> which animals also are, when they sense food, a danger, etc. To be in
> Svarloka is to be completely abstracted on this plane, leaving only
> instinct to work, so that on the material plane you would behave as an
> animal. Yogîs are known who have become crystallized in this state, and
> then they must be nourished by others. A Yogî near Allahabad had been for
> fifty‐three years sitting on a stone; his Chelâs plunge him into the river
> every night and then replace him. During the day his consciousness returns
> to Bhûrloka, and he talks and teaches. A Yogî was found on an island near
> Calcutta round whose limbs the roots of trees had grown. He was cut out,
> and in the endeavour to awaken him so many outrages were inflicted on him
> that he died.
> 
> _Q. Is it possible to be in more than one state of consciousness at once?_
> 
> _A._ The consciousness cannot be entirely on two planes at once. The
> higher and lower states are not wholly incompatible, but if you are on the
> higher you will wool‐gather on the lower. In order to remember the higher
> state on returning to the lower, the memory must be carried upwards to the
> higher. An Adept may apparently enjoy a dual consciousness; when he
> desires not to see he can abstract himself: he may be in a higher state
> and yet return answers to questions addressed to him. But in this case he
> will momentarily return to the material plane, shooting up again to the
> higher plane. This is his only salvation in adverse conditions.
> 
> The lower you go in the Talas the more intellectual you become and the
> less spiritual. You may be a morally good man but not spiritual. Intellect
> may remain very closely related to Kâma. A man may be in a Loka and visit
> one and all the Talas, his condition depending on the Loka to which he
> belongs. Thus a man in Bhûrloka only may pass into the Talas and go to the
> devil. If he dwells in Bhuvarloka he cannot become as bad. If he has
> reached the Satya state he can go into any Tala without danger; buoyed up
> by his own purity he can never be engulfed. The Talas are brain intellect
> states, while the Lokas—or more accurately the three higher—are spiritual.
> 
> Manas absorbs the light of Buddhi. Buddhi is Arûpa, and can absorb
> nothing. When the Ego takes all the light of Buddhi, it takes that of
> Âtmâ, Buddhi being the vehicle, and thus the three become one. This done,
> the _full_ Adept is one spiritually, but has a body. The fourfold Path is
> finished and he is one. The Masters’ bodies are, as far as they are
> concerned, illusionary, and hence do not grow old, become wrinkled, etc.
> 
> The student, who is not naturally psychic, should fix the fourfold
> consciousness in a higher plane and nail it there. Let him make a bundle
> of the four lower and pin them to a higher state. He should centre on this
> higher, trying not to permit the body and intellect to draw him down and
> carry him away. Play ducks and drakes with the body, eating, drinking and
> sleeping, but living always on the ideal.
> 
> Mother‐Love.
> 
> Mother‐love is an instinct, the same in the human being and in the animal,
> and often stronger in the latter. The continuance of this love in human
> beings is due to association, to blood magnetism and to psychic affinity.
> Families are sometimes formed of those who have lived together before, but
> often not. The causes at work are very complex and have to be balanced.
> Sometimes when a child with very bad Karma is to be born, parents of a
> callous type are chosen, or they may die before the Karmic results appear.
> Or the suffering through the child may be their own Karma. Mother‐love as
> an instinct is between Rasâtala and Talâtala.
> 
> The Lipikas keep man’s Karmic record, and impress it on the Astral Light.
> 
> Vacillating people pass from one state of consciousness to another.
> 
> Thought arises before desire. The thought acts on the brain, the brain on
> the organ, and then desire awakes. It is not the outer stimulus that
> arouses the organ. Thought therefore must be slain ere desire can be
> extinguished. The student must guard his thoughts. Five minutes’ thought
> may undo the work of five years; and though the five years’ work will be
> run through more rapidly the second time, yet time is lost.
> 
> Consciousness.
> 
> H. P. B. began by challenging the views of consciousness in the West,
> commenting on the lack of definition in the leading Philosophies. No
> distinction was made between consciousness and self‐consciousness, and yet
> in this lay the difference between man and the animal. The animal was
> conscious only, not self‐conscious; the animal does not know the Ego as
> Subject, as does man. There is therefore an enormous difference between
> the consciousness of the bird, the insect, the beast, and that of man.
> 
> But the full consciousness of man is self‐consciousness—that which makes
> us say, “_I_ do that.” If there is pleasure it must be traced to some one
> experiencing it. Now the difference between the consciousness of man and
> of animals is that while there is a Self in the animal, the animal is not
> conscious of the Self. Spencer reasons on consciousness, but when he comes
> to a gap he merely jumps over it. So again Hume, when he says that on
> introspection he sees merely feelings and can never find any “I,” forgets
> that without an “I” no seeing of feelings would be possible. What is it
> that studies the feelings? The animal is not conscious of the feeling “I
> am I.” It has instinct, but instinct is not self‐consciousness. Self‐
> consciousness is an attribute of the mind, not of the soul, the _anima_,
> whence the very name _animal_ is taken. Humanity had no self‐consciousness
> until the coming of the Mânasaputras in the Third Race. Consciousness,
> brain‐consciousness, is the field of the light of the Ego, of the Auric
> Egg, of the Higher Manas. The cells of the leg are conscious, but they are
> the slaves of the idea; they are not self‐conscious, they cannot originate
> an idea, although when they are tired they can convey to the brain an
> uneasy sensation, and so give rise to the idea of fatigue. Instinct is the
> lower state of consciousness. Man has consciousness running through the
> four lower keys of his septenary consciousness; there are seven scales of
> consciousness in his consciousness, which is none the less essentially and
> pre‐eminently one, a unit. There are millions and millions of states of
> consciousness, as there are millions and millions of leaves; but as you
> cannot find two leaves alike, so you cannot find two states of
> consciousness alike; a state is never exactly repeated.
> 
> Is memory a thing born in us that it can give birth to the Ego? Knowledge,
> feeling, volition, are colleagues of the mind, not faculties of it. Memory
> is an artificial thing, an adjunct of relativeness; it can be sharpened or
> left dull, and it depends on the condition of the brain‐cells which store
> all impressions; knowledge, feeling, volition, cannot be correlated, do
> what you will. They are not produced from each other, nor produced from
> mind, but are principles, colleagues. You cannot have knowledge without
> memory, for memory stores all things, garnishing and furnishing. If you
> teach a child nothing, it will know nothing. Brain‐consciousness depends
> on the intensity of the light shed by the Higher Manas on the Lower, and
> the extent of affinity between the brain and this light. Brain‐mind is
> conditioned by the responsiveness of the brain to this light; it is the
> field of consciousness of the Manas. The animal has the Monad and the
> Manas latent, but its brain cannot respond. All potentialities are there,
> but are dormant. There are certain accepted errors in the West which
> vitiate all their theories.
> 
> How many impressions can a man receive simultaneously into his
> consciousness and record? The Westerns say one: Occultists say normally
> seven, and abnormally fourteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty‐one, up to
> forty‐nine, impressions can be simultaneously received. Occultism teaches
> that the consciousness always receives a sevenfold impression and stores
> it in the memory. You can prove it by striking at once the seven notes of
> the musical scale: the seven sounds reach the consciousness
> simultaneously, but the untrained ear can only recognize them one after
> another, and if you choose you can measure the intervals. The trained ear
> will hear the seven notes at once, simultaneously. And experiment has
> shown that in two or three weeks a man may be trained to receive seventeen
> or eighteen impressions of colour, the intervals decreasing with practice.
> 
> Memory is acquired for this life, and can be expanded. Genius is the
> greatest responsiveness of the brain and brain‐memory to the Higher Manas.
> Impressions on any sense are stored in the memory.
> 
> Before a physical sense is developed there is a mental feeling which
> proceeds to become a physical sense. Fishes who are blind, living in the
> deep sea, or subterranean waters, if they are put into a pond will in a
> few generations develop eyes. But in their previous state there is a sense
> of seeing, though no physical sight; how else should they in the darkness
> find their way, avoid dangers, etc.? The mind will take in and store all
> kinds of things mechanically and unconsciously, and will throw them into
> the memory as unconscious perceptions. If the attention is greatly
> engrossed in any way, the sense perception of any injury is not felt at
> the time, but later the suffering enters into consciousness. So, returning
> to our example of the seven notes struck simultaneously, we have one
> impression, but the ear is affected in succession by the notes one after
> another, so that they are stored in the brain‐mind in order, for the
> untrained consciousness cannot register them simultaneously. All depends
> on training and on attention. Thus the transference of a sensation passing
> from any organ to the consciousness is almost simultaneous if your
> attention is fixed on it, but if any noise distracts your attention, then
> it will take a fraction more of a second before it reaches your
> consciousness. The Occultist should train himself to receive and transmit
> along the line of the seven scales of his consciousness every impression,
> or impressions, simultaneously. He who reduces the intervals of physical
> time the most has made the most progress.
> 
> Consciousness, Its Seven Scales.
> 
> There are seven scales or shades of consciousness, of the Unit; _e.g._, in
> a moment of pleasure or pain; four lower and three higher.
> 
> 1. Physical sense‐perception: Perception of the cell (if paralyzed, the
> sense is there, though _you_ do not feel it).
> 
> 2. Self‐perception or apperception: _I.e._, self‐perception of cell.
> 
> 3. Psychic apperception: Of astral double, döppelganger, carrying it
> higher to the:
> 
> 4. Vital perception: Physical feeling, sensations of pleasure and pain, of
> quality.
> 
> These are the four lower scales, and belong to the psycho‐physiological
> man.
> 
> 5. Mânasic discernment of the Mânasic self‐perception. Lower Manas:
> 
> 6. Will perception: Volitional perception, the voluntary taking in of an
> idea; you can regard or disregard physical pain.
> 
> 7. Spiritual, entirely conscious apperception:   Because it reaches the
> Higher, self‐conscious Manas.
> 
> [Apperception means self‐perception, conscious action, not as with
> Leibnitz, but when attention is fixed on the perception.]
> 
> You can take these on any planes: _e.g._, bad news passes through the four
> lower stages before coming to the heart.
> 
> Or take Sound:
> 
>     1. It strikes the ear.
> 
>     2. Self‐perception of the ear.
> 
>     3. On the psychic or mental, which carries it to
> 
>     4. Vital (harsh, soft; strong, weak; etc.).
> 
> The Ego.
> 
> One of the best proofs that there is an Ego, a true Field of
> Consciousness, is the fact already mentioned, that a state of
> consciousness is never exactly reproduced, though you should live a
> hundred years, and pass through milliards and milliards. In an active day,
> how many states and substates there are; it would be impossible to have
> cells enough for all. This will help you to understand why some mental
> states and abstract things follow the Ego into Devachan, and why others
> merely scatter in space. That which touches the Entity has an affinity for
> it, as a noble action, is immortal and goes with it into Devachan, forming
> part and parcel of the biography of the personality which is
> disintegrating. A lofty emotion runs through the seven stages, and touches
> the Ego, the mind that plays its tunes in the mind‐cells. We can analyze
> the work of consciousness and describe it; but we cannot define
> consciousness unless we postulate a Subject.
> 
> Bhûrloka.
> 
> The Bhûrloka begins with the Lower Manas. Animals do not feel as do men.
> The dog thinks more of his master being angry than of the actual pain of
> the lash. The animal does not suffer in memory and in imagination, feeling
> past and future as well as actual present pain.
> 
> Pineal Gland.
> 
> The special physical organ of perception is the brain, and perception is
> located in the aura of the pineal gland. This aura answers in vibrations
> to any impressions, but it can only be sensed, not perceived, in the
> living man. During the process of thought manifesting in consciousness, a
> constant vibration occurs in the light of this aura, and a clairvoyant
> looking at the brain of a living man may almost count, see with the
> spiritual eye, the seven scales, the seven shades of light, passing from
> the dullest to the brightest. You touch your hand; before you touch it the
> vibration is already in the aura of the pineal gland, and has its own
> shade of colour. It is this aura which causes the wear and tear of the
> organ, by the vibrations it sets up. The brain, set vibrating, conveys the
> vibrations to the spinal cord, and so to the rest of the body. Happiness
> as well as sorrow sets up these strong vibrations, and so wears out the
> body. Powerful vibrations of joy or sorrow may thus kill.
> 
> The Heart.
> 
> The septenary disturbance and play of light around the pineal gland are
> reflected in the heart, or rather the aura of the heart, which vibrates
> and illumines the seven brains of the heart, just as does the aura round
> the pineal gland. This is the exoterically four‐ but Esoterically seven‐
> leaved lotus, the Saptaparna, the cave of Buddha, with its seven
> compartments.
> 
> Astral And Ego.
> 
> There is a difference between the nature and the essence of the Astral
> Body and the Ego. The Astral Body is molecular, however etherealized it
> may be: the Ego is atomic, spiritual. The Atoms are spiritual, and are for
> ever invisible on this plane; molecules form around them, they remaining
> as the higher invisible principles of the molecules. The eyes are the most
> Occult of our senses: close them and you pass to the mental plane. Stop
> all the senses and you are entirely on another plane.
> 
> Individuality.
> 
> If twelve people are smoking together, the smoke of their cigarettes may
> mingle, but the molecules of the smoke from each have an affinity with
> each other, and they remain distinct for ever and ever, no matter how the
> whole mass may interblend. So a drop of water, though it fall into the
> ocean retains its individuality. It has become a drop with a life of its
> own, like a man, and cannot be annihilated. Any group of people would
> appear as a group in the Astral Light, but would not be permanent; but a
> group meeting to study Occultism would cohere, and the impression would be
> more permanent. The higher and the more spiritual the affinity, the more
> permanent the cohesion.
> 
> Lower Manas.
> 
> The Lower Manas is an emanation from the Higher Manas, and is of the same
> nature as the Higher. This nature can make no impression on this plane,
> nor receive any: an Archangel, having no experience, would be senseless on
> this plane, and could neither give nor receive impressions. So the Lower
> Manas clothes itself with the essence of the Astral Light; this astral
> envelope shuts it out from its Parent, except through the Antahkarana
> which is its only salvation. Break this and you become an animal.
> 
> Kâma.
> 
> Kâma is life, it is the essence of the blood. When this leaves the blood
> the latter congeals. Prâna is universal on this plane; it is in us the
> vital principle, Prânic, rather than Prâna.
> 
> Self‐Hood.
> 
> Qualities determine the properties of “Self‐hood.” As, for instance, two
> wolves placed in the same environment would probably not act differently.
> 
> The field of the consciousness of the Higher Ego is never reflected in the
> Astral Light. The Auric Envelope receives the impressions of both the
> Higher and the Lower Manas, and it is the latter impressions that are also
> reflected in the Astral Light. Whereas the essence of all things
> spiritual, all that which reaches, or is not rejected by, the Higher Ego
> is not reflected in the Astral Light, because it is on too low a plane.
> But during the life of a man, this essence, with a view to Karmic ends, is
> impressed on the Auric Envelope, and after death and the separation of the
> Principles is united with the Universal Mind (that is to say, those
> “impressions” which are superior to even the Devachanic Plane), to await
> there Karmically until the day when the Ego is to be reincarnated. [There
> are thus three sets of impressions, which we may call the Kâmic,
> Devachanic and Mânasic.] For the entities, no matter how high, must have
> their Karmic rewards and punishments on earth. These spiritual impressions
> are made more or less on the brain, otherwise the Lower Ego would not be
> responsible. There are some impressions, however, received through the
> brain, which are not of our previous experience. In the case of the Adept
> the brain is trained to retain these impressions.
> 
> The Reincarnating Ray may, for convenience, be separated into two aspects:
> the lower Kâmic Ego is scattered in Kâma Loka; the Mânasic part
> accomplishes its cycle and returns to the Higher Ego. It is, in reality,
> this Higher Ego which is, so to speak, punished, which suffers. This is
> the true crucifixion of the Christos—the most abstruse but yet the most
> important mystery of Occultism; all the cycle of our lives hangs on it. It
> is indeed the Higher Ego that is the sufferer; for remember that the
> abstract consciousness of the higher personal consciousness will remain
> impressed on the Ego, since it must be part and parcel of its eternity.
> All our grandest impressions are impressed on the Higher Ego, because they
> are of the same nature as itself.
> 
> Patriotism and great actions in national service are not altogether good,
> from the point of view of the highest. To benefit a portion of humanity is
> good; but to do so at the expense of the rest is bad. Therefore, in
> patriotism, etc., the venom is present with the good. For though the inner
> essence of the Higher Ego is unsoilable, the outer garment may be soiled.
> Thus both the bad and the good of such thoughts and actions are impressed
> on the Auric Envelope and the Karma of the bad is taken up by the Higher
> Ego, though it is perfectly guiltless of it. Thus both sets of
> impressions, after death, scatter in the Universal Mind, and at
> reincarnation the Ego sends out a Ray which is itself, into a new
> personality, and there suffers. It suffers in the Self‐consciousness that
> it has created by its own accumulated experiences.
> 
> Every one of our Egos has the Karma of past Manvantaras behind. There are
> seven Hierarchies of Egos, some of which, _e.g._, in inferior tribes, may
> be said to be only just beginning the present cycle. The Ego starts with
> Divine Consciousness; no past, no future, no separation. It is long before
> realizing that it is itself. Only after many births does it begin to
> discern, by this collectivity of experience, that it is individual. At the
> end of its cycle of reincarnation it is still the same Divine
> Consciousness, but it has now become individualized Self‐consciousness.
> 
> The feeling of responsibility is inspired by the presence of the Light of
> the Higher Ego. As the Ego in its cycle of re‐birth becomes more and more
> individualized, it learns more and more by suffering to recognize its own
> responsibility, by which it finally gains Self‐consciousness, the
> consciousness of all the Egos of the whole Universe. Absolute Being, to
> have the idea or sensation of all this, must pass through all experience
> individually, not universally, so that when it returns it should be of the
> same omniscience as the Universal Mind _plus_ the memory of all that it
> has passed through.
> 
> At the Day “Be with us” every Ego has to remember all the cycles of its
> past reincarnations for Manvantaras. The Ego comes in contact with this
> earth, all seven Principles become one, it sees all that it has done
> therein. It sees the stream of its past reincarnations by a certain divine
> light. It sees all humanity at once, but still there is ever, as it were,
> a stream which is always the “I.”
> 
> We should therefore always endeavour to accentuate our responsibility.
> 
> The Higher Ego is, as it were, a globe of pure divine light, a Unit from a
> higher plane, on which is no differentiation. Descending to a plane of
> differentiation it emanates a Ray, which it can only manifest through the
> personality which is already differentiated. A portion of this Ray, the
> Lower Manas, during life, may so crystallize itself and become one with
> Kâma that it will remain assimilated with Matter. That portion which
> retains its purity forms Antahkarana. The whole fate of an incarnation
> depends on whether Antahkarana will be able to restrain the Kâma‐Manas or
> not. After death the higher light (Antahkarana) which bears the
> impressions and memory of all good and noble aspirations, assimilates
> itself with the Higher Ego, the bad is dissociated in space, and comes
> back as bad Karma awaiting the personality.
> 
> The feeling of responsibility is the beginning of Wisdom, a proof that
> Ahankâra is beginning to fade out, the beginning of losing the sense of
> separateness.
> 
> Kâma Rûpa.
> 
> The Kâma Rûpa eventually breaks up and goes into animals. All red‐blooded
> animals come from man. The cold‐blooded are from the matter of the past.
> The blood is the Kâma Rûpa.
> 
> The white corpuscles are the scavengers, “devourers”; they are oozed out
> of the Astral through the spleen, and are of the same essence as the
> Astral. They are the sweat‐born of the Chhâyâ. Kâma is everywhere in the
> body. The red cells are drops of electrical fluid, the perspiration of all
> the organs oozed out from every cell. They are the progeny of the Fohatic
> Principle.
> 
> Heart.
> 
> There are seven brains in the heart, the Upâdhis and symbols of the seven
> Hierarchies.
> 
> The Fires.
> 
> The fires are always playing round the pineal gland, but when Kundalinî
> illuminates them for a brief instant the whole universe is seen. Even in
> deep sleep the Third Eye opens. This is good for Manas, who profits by it,
> though we ourselves do not remember.
> 
> Perception.
> 
> In answer to a question on the seven stages of perception, H. P. B. said
> that thought should be centred on the highest, the seventh, and then an
> attempt to transcend this will prove that it is impossible to go beyond it
> on this plane. There is nothing in the brain to carry the thinker on, and
> if thought is to rise yet further it must be thought without a brain. Let
> the eyes be closed, the will set not to let the brain work, and then the
> point may be transcended and the student will pass to the next plane. All
> the seven stages of perception come before Antahkarana; if you can pass
> beyond them you are on the Mânasic Plane.
> 
> Try to imagine something which transcends your power of thought, say, the
> nature of the Dhyân Chohans. Then make the brain passive, and pass beyond;
> you will see a white radiant light, like silver, but opalescent as mother
> of pearl; then waves of colour will pass over it, beginning in the
> tenderest violet, and through bronze shades of green to indigo with
> metallic lustre, and that colour will remain. If you see this you are on
> another plane. You should pass through seven stages.
> 
> When a colour comes, glance at it, and if it is not good reject it. Let
> your attention be arrested only on the green, indigo and yellow. These are
> good colours. The eyes being connected with the brain, the colour you see
> most easily will be the colour of the personality. If you see red, it is
> merely physiological, and is to be disregarded. Green‐bronze is the Lower
> Manas, yellow‐bronze the Antahkarana, indigo‐bronze is Manas. These are to
> be observed, and when the yellow‐bronze merges into the indigo you are on
> the Mânasic Plane.
> 
> On the Mânasic Plane you see the Noumena, the essence of phenomena. You do
> not see people or other consciousnesses, but have enough to do to keep
> your own. The trained Seer can see Noumena always. The Adept sees the
> Noumena on this plane, the reality of things, so cannot be deceived.
> 
> In meditation the beginner may waver backwards and forwards between two
> planes. You hear the ticking of a clock on this plane, then on the
> astral—the soul of the ticking. When clocks are stopped here the ticking
> goes on on higher planes, in the astral, and then in the ether, until the
> last bit of the clock is gone. It is the same as with a dead body, which
> sends out emanations until the last molecule is disintegrated.
> 
> There is no time in meditation, because there is no succession of states
> of consciousness on this plane.
> 
> Violet is the colour of the Astral. You begin with it, but should not stay
> in it; try to pass on. When you see a sheet of violet, you are beginning
> unconsciously to form a Mâyâvi Rûpa. Fix your attention, and if you go
> away keep your consciousness firmly to the Mâyâvic Body; do not lose sight
> of it, hold on like grim death.
> 
> Consciousness.
> 
> The consciousness which is merely the animal consciousness is made up of
> the consciousness of all the cells in the body except those of the heart.
> The heart is the king, the most important organ in the body of man. Even
> if the head be severed from the body, the heart will continue to beat for
> thirty minutes. It will beat for some hours if wrapped in cotton wool and
> put in a warm place. The spot in the heart which is the last of all to die
> is the seat of life, the centre of all, Brahmâ, the first spot that lives
> in the fœtus and the last that dies. When a Yogî is buried in a trance it
> is this spot that lives, though the rest of the body be dead, and as long
> as this is alive the Yogî can be resurrected. This spot contains
> potentially mind, life, energy, and will. During life it radiates
> prismatic colours, fiery and opalescent. The heart is the centre of
> spiritual consciousness, as the brain is the centre of intellectual. But
> this consciousness cannot be guided by a person, nor its energy directed
> by him until he is at one with Buddhi‐Manas; until then it guides him—if
> it can. Hence the pangs of remorse, the prickings of conscience; they come
> from the heart, not the head. In the heart is the only manifested God, the
> other two are invisible, and it is this which represents the Triad,
> Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas.
> 
> In reply to a question whether the consciousness might not be concentrated
> in the heart, and so the promptings of the Spirit caught, H. P. B. said
> that any one who could thus concentrate would be at one with Manas, would
> have united Kâma‐Manas to the Higher Manas. The Higher Manas could not
> directly guide man, it could only act through the Lower Manas.
> 
> There are three principal centres in man, Heart, Head, and Navel: any two
> of which may be + or ‐ to each other, according to the relative
> predominance of the centres.
> 
> The heart represents the Higher Triad; the liver and spleen represent the
> Quaternary. The solar plexus is the brain of the stomach.
> 
> H. P. B. was asked if the three centres above‐named would represent the
> Christos, crucified between two thieves; she said it might serve as an
> analogy, but these figures must not be over‐driven. It must never be
> forgotten that the Lower Manas is the same in its essence as the Higher,
> and may become one with it by rejecting Kâmic impulses. The crucifixion of
> the Christos represents the self‐sacrifice of the Higher Manas, the Father
> that sends his only begotten Son into the world to take upon him our sins:
> the Christ‐myth came from the Mysteries. So also did the life of
> Apollonius of Tyana; this was suppressed by the Fathers of the Church
> because of its striking similarity to the life of Christ.
> 
> The psycho‐intellectual man is all in the head with its seven gateways;
> the spiritual man is in the heart. The convolutions are formed by thought.
> 
> The third ventricle in life is filled with light, and not with a liquid as
> after death.
> 
> There are seven cavities in the brain which are quite empty during life,
> and it is in these that visions must be reflected if they are to remain in
> the memory. These centres are, in Occultism, called the seven harmonies,
> the scale of the divine harmonies. They are filled with Âkâsha, each with
> its own colour, according to the state of consciousness in which you are.
> The sixth is the pineal gland, which is hollow and empty during life; the
> seventh is the whole; the fifth is the third ventricle; the fourth the
> pituitary body. When Manas is united to Âtmâ‐Buddhi, or when Âtmâ‐Buddhi
> is centred in Manas, it acts in the three higher cavities, radiating,
> sending forth a halo of light, and this is visible in the case of a very
> holy person.
> 
> The cerebellum is the centre, the storehouse, of all the forces; it is the
> Kâma of the head. The pineal gland corresponds to the uterus; its
> peduncles to the Fallopian tubes. The pituitary body is only its servant,
> its torch‐bearer, like the servants bearing lights that used to run before
> the carriage of a princess. Man is thus androgyne so far as his head is
> concerned.
> 
> Man contains in himself every element that is found in the Universe. There
> is nothing in the Macrocosm that is not in the Microcosm. The pineal
> gland, as was said, is quite empty during life; the pituitary contains
> various essences. The granules in the pineal gland are precipitated after
> death within the cavity.
> 
> The cerebellum furnishes the materials for ideation; the frontal lobes of
> the cerebrum are the finishers and polishers of the materials, but they
> cannot create of themselves.
> 
> Clairvoyant perception is the consciousness of touch: thus reading
> letters, psychometrizing substances, etc., may be done at the pit of the
> stomach. Every sense has its consciousness, and you can have consciousness
> through every sense. There may be consciousness on the plane of sight,
> though the brain be paralyzed; the eyes of a paralyzed person will show
> terror. So with the sense of hearing. Those who are physically blind, deaf
> or dumb, are still possessed of the psychic counterparts of these senses.
> 
> Will And Desire.
> 
> Eros in man is the will of the genius to create great pictures, great
> music, things that will live and serve the race. It has nothing in common
> with the animal desire to create. Will is of the Higher Manas. It is the
> universal harmonious tendency acting by the Higher Manas. Desire is the
> outcome of separateness, aiming at the satisfaction of Self in Matter. The
> path opened between the Higher Ego and the Lower enables the Ego to act on
> the personal self.
> 
> Conversion.
> 
> It is not true that a man powerful in evil can suddenly be converted and
> become as powerful for good. His vehicle is too defiled, and he can at
> best but neutralize the evil, balancing up the bad Karmic causes he has
> set in motion, at any rate for this incarnation. You cannot take a herring
> barrel and use it for attar of roses: the wood is too soaked through with
> the drippings. When evil impulses and tendencies have become impressed on
> the physical nature, they cannot at once be reversed. The molecules of the
> body have been set in a Kâmic direction, and though they have sufficient
> intelligence to discern between things on their own plane, _i.e._, to
> avoid things harmful to themselves, they cannot understand a change of
> direction, the impulse to which is from another plane. If they are forced
> too violently, disease, madness or death will result.
> 
> Origines.
> 
> Absolute eternal motion, Parabrahman, which is nothing and everything,
> motion inconceivably rapid, in this motion throws off a film, which is
> Energy, Eros. It thus transforms itself to Mûlaprakriti, primordial
> Substance which is still Energy. This Energy, still transforming itself in
> its ceaseless and inconceivable motion, becomes the Atom, or rather the
> germ of the Atom, and then it is on the Third Plane.
> 
> Our Manas is a Ray from the World‐Soul and is withdrawn at Pralaya; “it is
> perhaps the Lower Manas of Parabrahman,” that is, of the Parabrahman of
> the manifested Universe. The first film is Energy, or motion on the
> manifested plane; Alaya is the Third Logos, Mahâ‐Buddhi, Mahat. We always
> begin on the Third Plane; beyond that all is inconceivable. Âtmâ is
> focussed in Buddhi, but is embodied only in Manas, these being the Spirit,
> Soul and Body of the Universe.
> 
> Dreams.
> 
> We may have evil experiences in dreams as well as good. We should,
> therefore, train ourselves so as to awaken directly we tend to do wrong.
> 
> The Lower Manas is asleep in sense‐dreams, the animal consciousness being
> then guided towards the Astral Light by Kâma; the tendency of such sense‐
> dreams is always towards the animal.
> 
> If we could remember our dreams in deep sleep, then we should be able to
> remember all our past incarnations.
> 
> Nidânas.
> 
> There are twelve Nidânas, exoteric and Esoteric, the fundamental doctrine
> of Buddhism.
> 
> So also there are twelve exoteric Buddhist Sûttas called Nidânas, each
> giving one Nidâna.
> 
> The Nidânas have a dual meaning. They are:
> 
> (1) The twelve causes of sentient existence, through the twelve links of
> subjective with objective Nature, or between the subjective and objective
> Natures.
> 
> (2) A concatenation of causes and effects.
> 
> Every cause produces an effect, and this effect becomes in its turn a
> cause. Each of these has as Upâdhi (basis), one of the sub‐divisions of
> one of the Nidânas, and also an effect or consequence.
> 
> Both bases and effects belong to one or another Nidâna, each having from
> three to seventeen, eighteen and twenty‐one sub‐divisions.
> 
> The names of the twelve Nidânas are:
> 
> (1) Jarâmarana.
> (2) Jâti.
> (3) Bhava.
> (4) Upâdâna.
> (5) Trishnâ.
> (6) Vedanâ.
> (7) Sparsha.
> (8) Chadayâtana.
> (9) Nâmarûpa.
> (10) Vignâna.
> (11) Samskâra.
> (12) Avidyâ.(859)
> 
> (1) JARÂMARANA, lit. death in consequence of decrepitude. Notice that
> death and not life comes as the first of the Nidânas. This is the first
> fundamental in Buddhist Philosophy; every Atom, at every moment, as soon
> as it is born begins dying.
> 
> The five Skandhas are founded on it; they are its effects or product.
> Moreover, in its turn, it is based on the five Skandhas. They are mutual
> things, one gives to the other.
> 
> (2) JÂTI, lit. Birth.
> 
> That is to say, Birth according to one of the four modes of Chaturyoni
> (the four wombs), _viz._:
> 
> (i) Through the womb, like Mammalia.
> 
> (ii) Through Eggs.
> 
> (iii) Ethereal or liquid Germs—fish spawn, pollen, insects, etc.
> 
> (iv) Anupâdaka—Nirmânakâyas, Gods, etc.
> 
> That is to say that birth takes place by one of these modes. You must be
> born in one of the six objective modes of existence, or in the seventh
> which is subjective. These four are within six modes of existence, _viz._:
> 
> _Exoterically_:—
> 
> (i) Devas; (ii) Men; (iii) Asuras; (iv) Men in Hell; (v) Pretas, devouring
> demons on earth; (vi) animals.
> 
> _Esoterically_:—
> 
> (i) Higher Gods; (ii) Devas or Pitris (all classes); (iii) Nirmânakâyas;
> (iv) Bodhisattvas; (v) Men in Myalba; (vi) Kâma Rûpic existences, whether
> of men or animals, in Kâma Loka or the Astral Light; (vii) Elementals
> (Subjective Existences).
> 
> (3) BHAVA = Karmic existence, not life existence, but as a moral agent
> which determines _where_ you will be born, _i.e._, in which of the
> Triloka, Bhûr, Bhuvar or Svar (seven Lokas in reality).
> 
> The cause or Nidâna of Bhava is Upâdâna, that is, the clinging to
> existence, that which makes us desire life in whatever form.
> 
> Its effect is Jâti in one or another of the Triloka and under whatever
> conditions.
> 
> Nidânas are the detailed expression of the law of Karma under twelve
> aspects; or we might say the law of Karma under twelve Nidânic aspects.
> 
> Skandhas.
> 
> Skandhas are the germs of life on all the seven planes of Being, and make
> up the totality of the subjective and objective man. Every vibration we
> have made is a Skandha. The Skandhas are closely united to the pictures in
> the Astral Light, which is the medium of impressions, and the Skandhas, or
> vibrations, connected with subjective or objective man, are the links
> which attract the Reincarnating Ego, the germs left behind when it went
> into Devachan which have to be picked up again and exhausted by a new
> personality. The exoteric Skandhas have to do with the physical atoms and
> vibrations, or objective man; the Esoteric with the internal and
> subjective man.
> 
> A mental change, or a glimpse of spiritual truth, may make a man suddenly
> change to the truth even at his death, thus creating good Skandhas for the
> next life. The last acts or thoughts of a man have an enormous effect upon
> his future life, but he would still have to suffer for his misdeeds, and
> this is the basis of the idea of a death‐bed repentance. But the Karmic
> effects of the past life must follow, for the man in his next birth must
> pick up the Skandhas or vibratory impressions that he left in the Astral
> Light, since nothing comes from nothing in Occultism, and there must be a
> link between the lives. New Skandhas are born from their old parents.
> 
> It is wrong to speak of Tanhâs in the plural; there is only one Tanhâ,
> _the desire to live_. This develops into a multitude or one might say a
> congeries of ideas. The Skandhas are Karmic and non‐Karmic. Skandhas may
> produce Elementals by unconscious Kriyâshakti. Every Elemental that is
> thrown out by man must return to him sooner or later, since it is his own
> vibration. They thus become his Frankenstein. Elementals are simply
> effects producing effects. They are disembodied thoughts, good and bad.
> They remain crystallized in the Astral Light and are attracted by affinity
> and galvanized back into life again, when their originator returns to
> earth‐life. You can paralyze them by reverse effects. Elementals are
> caught like a disease and hence are dangerous to ourselves and to others.
> This is why it is dangerous to influence others. The Elementals which live
> after your death are those which you implant in others: the rest remain
> latent till you are reincarnated, when they come to life in you. “Thus,”
> H. P. B. said, “if you are badly taught by me or incited thereby to do
> something wrong, you would go on after my death and sin through me, but I
> should have to bear the Karma. Calvin, for instance, will have to suffer
> for all the wrong teaching he has given, though he gave it with good
> intentions. The worst * * * * does is to arrest the progress of truth.
> Even Buddha made mistakes. He applied his teaching to people who were not
> ready; and this has produced Nidânas.”
> 
> Subtle Bodies.
> 
> When a man visits another in his Astral Body, it is the Linga Sharîra
> which goes, but this cannot happen at any great distance. When a man
> _thinks_ of another at a distance very intently, he sometimes appears to
> that person.
> 
> In this case it is the Mâyâvi Rûpa, which is created by unconscious
> Kriyâshakti, and the man himself is not conscious of appearing. If he
> were, and projected his Mâyâvi Rûpa consciously, he would be an
> Adept.(860) No two persons can be simultaneously conscious of one
> another’s presence, unless one be an Adept. Dugpas use the Mâyâvi Rûpa and
> sorcerers also. Dugpas work on the Linga Sharîra of other people.
> 
> The Linga Sharîra in the spleen is the perfect picture of the man, and is
> good or bad, according to his own nature. The Astral Body is the
> subjective image of the man which is to be, the first germ in the matrix,
> the model of the physical body in which the child is formed and developed.
> The Linga Sharîra may be hurt by a sharp instrument, and would not face a
> sword or bayonet, although it would easily pass through a table or other
> piece of furniture.
> 
> Nothing however can hurt the Mâyâvi Rûpa or thought‐body, since it is
> purely subjective. When swords are struck at shades, it is the sword
> itself, not its Linga Sharîra or Astral that cuts. Sharp instruments alone
> can penetrate Astrals, _e.g._, under water, a blow will not affect you,
> but a cut will.
> 
> The projection of the Astral Body should not be attempted, but the power
> of Kriyâshakti should be exercised in the projection of the Mâyâvi Rûpa.
> 
> Fire.
> 
> Fire is not an Element but a divine thing. The physical flame is the
> objective vehicle of the highest Spirit. The Fire Elementals are the
> highest. Everything in this world has its Aura and its Spirit. The flame
> you apply to the candle has nothing to do with the candle itself. The Aura
> of the object comes into conjunction with the lowest part of the other.
> Granite cannot burn because its Aura is Fire. Fire Elementals have no
> consciousness on this plane, they are too high, reflecting the divinity of
> their own source. Other Elementals have consciousness on this plane as
> they reflect man and his nature. There is a very great difference between
> the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. The wick of the lamp, for instance, is
> negative. It is made positive by fire, the oil being the medium. Æther is
> Fire. The lowest part of Æther is the flame which you see. Fire is
> Divinity in its subjective presence throughout the universe. Under other
> conditions, this Universal Fire manifests as water, air and earth. It is
> the one Element in our visible Universe which is the Kriyâshakti of all
> forms of life. It is that which gives light, heat, death, life, etc. It is
> even the blood. In all its various manifestations it is essentially _one_.
> 
> It is the “seven Cosmocratores.”
> 
> Evidence of the esteem in which Fire was held are to be found in the _Old
> Testament_. The Pillar of Fire, the Burning Bush, the Shining Face of
> Moses—all Fire. Fire is like a looking‐glass in its nature, and reflects
> the beams of the first order of subjective manifestations which are
> supposed to be thrown on to the screen of the first outlines of the
> created universe; in their lower aspect these are the creations of Fire.
> 
> Fire in the grossest aspect of its essence is the first form and reflects
> the lower forms of the first subjective beings which are in the universe.
> The first divine chaotic thoughts are the Fire Elementals. When on earth
> they take form and come flitting in the flame in the form of the
> Salamanders or lower Fire Elementals. In the air you have millions of
> living and conscious beings, besides our thoughts which they catch up. The
> Fire Elementals are related to the sense of sight and absorb the
> Elementals of all the other senses. Thus through sight you can have the
> consciousness of feeling, hearing, tasting, etc., since all are included
> in the sense of sight.
> 
> Hints On The Future.
> 
> As time passes on there will be more and more ether in the air. When ether
> fills the air, then will be born children without fathers. In Virginia
> there is an apple tree of a special kind. It does not blossom but bears
> fruit from a kind of berry without any seeds. This will gradually extend
> to animals and then to men. Women will bear children without impregnation,
> and in the Seventh Round there will appear men who can reproduce
> themselves. In the Seventh Race of the Fourth Round, men will change their
> skins every year and will have new toe and finger nails. People will
> become more psychic, then spiritual. Last of all in the Seventh Round,
> Buddhas will be born without sin. The Fourth Round is the longest in the
> Kali Yuga, then the Fifth, then the Sixth, and the Seventh Round will be
> very short.
> 
> The Egos.
> 
> On the separation of the Principles at death the Higher Ego may be said to
> go to Devachan by reason of the experiences of the Lower. The Higher Ego
> in its own plane is the Kumâra.
> 
> The Lower Quaternary dissolves; the body rots, the Linga Sharîra fades
> out.
> 
> At reincarnation the Higher Ego shoots out a Ray, the Lower Ego. Its
> energies are upward and downward. The upward tendencies become its
> Devachanic experiences; the lower are Kâmic. The Higher Manas stands to
> Buddhi as the Lower Manas to the Higher.
> 
> As to the question of responsibility, it may be understood by an example.
> If you take the form of Jack the Ripper, you must suffer for its misdeeds,
> for the law will punish the murderer and hold him responsible. You are the
> sacrificial victim. In the same way the Higher Ego is the Christos, the
> sacrificial victim for the Lower Manas. The Ego takes the responsibility
> of every body it informs.
> 
> You borrow some money to lend it to another; the other runs away, but it
> is you who are responsible. The mission of the Higher Ego is to shoot out
> a Ray to be a Soul in a child.
> 
> Thus the Ego incarnates in a thousand bodies, taking upon itself the sins
> and responsibilities of each body. At every incarnation a new Ray is
> emitted, and yet it is the same Ray in essence, the same in you and me and
> every one. The dross of the incarnation disintegrates, the good goes to
> Devachan.
> 
> The Flame is eternal. From the Flame of the Higher Ego, the Lower is
> lighted, and from this a lower vehicle, and so on.
> 
> And yet the Lower Manas is such as it makes itself. It is possible for it
> to act differently in like conditions, for it has reason and self‐
> conscious knowledge of right and wrong, and good and evil, given to it. It
> is in fact endowed with all the attributes of the Divine Soul. In this the
> Ray is the Higher Manas, the speck of responsibility on earth.
> 
> The part of the essence is the essence, but while it is out of itself, so
> to say, it can get soiled and polluted. The Ray can be manifested on this
> earth because it can send forth its Mâyâvi Rûpa. But the Higher cannot, so
> it has to send forth a Ray. We may look upon the Higher Ego as the Sun,
> and the personal Manases as its Rays. If we take away the surrounding air
> and light the Ray may be said to return to the Sun, so with the Lower
> Manas and Lower Quaternary.
> 
> The Higher Ego can only manifest through its attributes.
> 
> In cases of sudden death, the Lower Manas no more disappears than does the
> Kâma Rûpa after death. After the severance the Ray may be said to snap or
> be dropped. After death such a man cannot go to Devachan, nor yet remain
> in Kâma Loka; his fate is to reincarnate immediately. Such an entity is
> then an animal Soul _plus_ the intelligence of the severed Ray. The
> manifestation of this intelligence in the next birth will depend entirely
> on the physical formation of the brain and on education.
> 
> Such a Soul may be re‐united with its Higher Ego in the next birth, if the
> environment is such as to give it a chance of aspiration (this is the
> “grace” of the Christians); or it may go on for two or three incarnations,
> the Ray becoming weaker and weaker, and gradually dissipating, until it is
> born a congenital idiot and then finally dissipated in lower forms.
> 
> There are enormous mysteries connected with the Lower Manas.
> 
> With regard to some intellectual giants, they are in somewhat the same
> condition as smaller men, for their Higher Ego is paralyzed, that is to
> say, their spiritual nature is atrophied.
> 
> The Manas can pass its essence to several vehicles, _e.g._, the Mâyâvi
> Rûpa, etc., and even to Elementals which it can ensoul, as the
> Rosicrucians taught.
> 
> The Mâyâvi Rûpa may be sometimes so vitalized that it goes on to another
> plane and unites with the beings of that plane and so ensouls them.
> 
> People who bestow great affection upon animal pets are ensouling them to a
> certain extent, and such animal Souls progress very rapidly; in return
> such persons get back the animal vitality and magnetism. It is, however,
> against Nature to thus accentuate animal evolution, and on the whole is
> bad.
> 
> Monadic Evolution.
> 
> The Kumâras do not direct the evolution of the Lunar Pitris. To understand
> the latter, we might take the analogy of the blood.
> 
> The blood may be compared to the universal Life Principle, the corpuscles
> to the Monads. The different kinds of corpuscles are the same as the
> various classes of Monads and various kingdoms, not, however, because of
> their essence being different, but because of the environment in which
> they are. The Chhâyâ is the permanent seed, and Weissmann in his
> hereditary germ theory is very near truth.
> 
> H. P. B. was asked whether there was one Ego to one permanent Chhâyâ seed,
> oversouling it in a series of incarnations; her answer was: “No, it is
> Heaven and Earth kissing each other.”
> 
> The animal Souls are in temporary forms and shells in which they gain
> experience, and in which they prepare materials for higher evolution.
> 
> Until the age of seven the astral atavic germ forms and moulds the body;
> after that the body forms the Astral.
> 
> The Astral and the Mind mutually react on each other.
> 
> The meaning of the passage in the _Upanishads_, where it says that the
> Gods feed on men, is that the Higher Ego obtains its earth experience
> through the Lower.
> 
> Astral Body.
> 
> The Astral can get out unconsciously to the person and wander about.
> 
> The Chhâyâ is the same as the Astral Body.
> 
> The germ or life essence of it is in the spleen.
> 
> “The Chhâyâ is coiled up in the spleen.” It is from this that the Astral
> is formed; it evolves in a shadowy curling or gyrating essence like smoke,
> gradually taking form as it grows. But it is not projected from the
> physical, atom for atom. This latter intermolecular form is the Kâma Rûpa.
> At death every cell and molecule gives out its essence, and from it is
> formed the Astral of the Kâma Rûpa; but this can never come out during
> life.
> 
> The Chhâyâ in order to become visible draws upon the surrounding
> atmosphere, attracting the atoms to itself; the Linga Sharîra could not
> form _in vacuo_. The fact of the Astral Body accounts for the Arabian and
> Eastern tales of Djins and bottle imps, etc.
> 
> In spiritualistic phenomena, the resemblance to deceased persons is mostly
> caused by the imagination. The clothing of such phantoms is formed from
> the living atoms of the medium, and is no real clothing, and has nothing
> to do with the clothing of the medium. “All the clothing of a
> materialization has been paid for.”
> 
> The Astral supports life; it is the reservoir or sponge of life, gathering
> it up from all the natural kingdoms around, and is the intermediary
> between the kingdoms of Prânic and physical life.
> 
> Life cannot come immediately from the subjective to the objective, for
> Nature goes gradually through each sphere. Therefore the Linga Sharîra is
> the intermediary between Prâna and our physical body, and pumps in the
> life.
> 
> The spleen is consequently a very delicate organ, but the physical spleen
> is only a cover for the real spleen.
> 
> Now Life is in reality Divinity, Parabrahman. But in order to manifest on
> the Physical Plane it must be assimilated; and as the purely physical is
> too gross, it must have a medium, _viz._, the Astral. Astral matter is not
> homogeneous, and the Astral Light is nothing but the shadow of the real
> Divine Light; it is however not molecular.
> 
> Those (Kâmarûpic) entities which are below the Devachanic Plane are in
> Kâma Loka and only possess intelligence like monkeys. There are no
> entities in the four lower kingdoms possessing intelligence which can
> communicate with men, but the Elementals have instincts like animals. It
> is, however, possible for the Sylphs (the Air Elementals, the wickedest
> things in the world) to communicate, but they require to be propitiated.
> 
> Spooks (Kâmarûpic entities) can only give the information they see
> immediately before them. They see things in the Aura of people, although
> the people may not be aware of them themselves.
> 
> Earth‐bound spirits are Kâmalokic entities that have been so materialistic
> that they cannot be dissolved for a long time. They have only a glimmering
> of consciousness and do not know why they are held, some sleep, some
> preserve a glimmering of consciousness and suffer torture.
> 
> In the case of people who have very little Devachan, the greater part of
> the consciousness remains in Kâma Loka, and may last far beyond the normal
> period of one hundred and fifty years and remain over until the next
> reincarnation of the Spirit. This then becomes the Dweller on the
> Threshold and fights with the new Astral.
> 
> The acme of Kâma is the sexual instinct, _e.g._, idiots have such desires
> and also food appetites, etc., and nothing else.
> 
> Devachan is a state on a plane of spiritual consciousness; Kâma Loka is a
> place of physical consciousness. It is the shadow of the animal world and
> that of instinctual feelings. When the consciousness thinks of spiritual
> things, it is on a spiritual plane.
> 
> If one’s thoughts are of nature, flowers, etc., then the consciousness is
> on the material plane.
> 
> But if thoughts are about eating, drinking, etc., and the passions, then
> the consciousness is in the Kâmalokic plane, which is the plane of animal
> instincts pure and simple.
> 
> [Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.]
> 
> FOOTNOTES
> 
>     1 The majority of the Pandits know nothing of the Esoteric Philosophy
>       now, because they have lost the key to it; yet not one of these, if
>       honest, would deny that the _Upanishads_, and especially the
>       _Purânas_, are allegorical and symbolical; nor that there still
>       remain in India a few great scholars who could, if they would, give
>       them the key to such interpretations. Nor do they reject the actual
>       existence of Mahâtmâs—initiated Yogis and Adepts—even in this age of
>       Kali Yuga.
> 
>     2 This assertion is clearly corroborated by Plato himself, who writes:
>       “You say that in my former discourse I have not sufficiently
>       explained to you the nature of the First. I purposely spoke
>       enigmatically, that in case the tablet should have happened with any
>       accident, either by sea or land, a person without some previous
>       knowledge of the subject might not be able to understand its
>       contents.” (Plato, _Ep._, ii. 312; Cory, _Ancient Fragments_, p.
>       304.)
> 
>     3 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 287, 288.
> 
>     4 _The Dialogues of Plato_, translated by B. Jowett, Regius Professor
>       of Greek at the University of Oxford, iii. 523.
> 
>     5 _Op. cit._, p. 561.
> 
>     6 _Op. cit._, p. 591.
> 
>     7 This definition places (unwittingly, of course), the ancient
>       “physical philosopher” many cubits higher than his modern “physical”
>       _confrère_, since the _ultima thule_ of the latter is to lead
>       mankind to believe that neither universe nor man have any cause at
>       all—not an intelligent one at all events—and that they have sprung
>       into existence owing to blind chance and a senseless whirling of
>       atoms. Which of the two hypotheses is the more rational and logical
>       is left to the impartial reader to decide.
> 
>     8 Italics are mine. Every tyro in Eastern Philosophy, every Kabalist,
>       will see the reason for such an association of persons with ideas,
>       numbers, and geometrical figures. For number, says Philolaus, “is
>       the dominant and self‐produced bond of the eternal continuance of
>       things.” Alone the modern Scholar remains blind to the grand truth.
> 
>     9 Here again the ancient Philosopher seems to be ahead of the modern.
>       For he only “confuses ... first and final causes” (which confusion
>       is denied by those who know the spirit of ancient scholarship),
>       whereas his modern successor is confessedly and absolutely ignorant
>       of both. Mr. Tyndall shows Science “powerless” to solve a single one
>       of the final problems of Nature and “disciplined [read, modern
>       materialistic], imagination retiring in bewilderment from the
>       contemplation of the problems” of the world of matter. He even
>       doubts whether the men of present Science possess “the intellectual
>       elements which would enable them to grapple with the ultimate
>       structural energies of Nature.” But for Plato and his disciples, the
>       lower types were but the concrete images of the higher abstract
>       ones; the immortal Soul has an arithmetical, as the body has a
>       geometrical, beginning. This beginning, as the reflection of the
>       great universal Archæus (_Anima Mundi_), is self‐moving, and from
>       the centre diffuses itself over the whole body of the Macrocosm.
> 
>    10 _Op. cit._, p. 523.
> 
>    11 Nowhere are the Neoplatonists guilty of such an absurdity. The
>       learned Professor of Greek must have been thinking of two spurious
>       works attributed by Eusebius and St. Jerome to Ammonius Saccas, who
>       wrote nothing; or must have confused the Neoplatonists with Philo
>       Judæus. But then Philo lived over 130 years before the birth of the
>       founder of Neoplatonism. He belonged to the School of Aristobulus
>       the Jew, who lived under Ptolemy Philometer (150 years B.C.), and is
>       credited with having inaugurated the movement which tended to prove
>       that Plato and even the Peripatetic Philosophy were derived from the
>       “revealed” Mosaic Books. Valckenaer tries to show that the author of
>       the _Commentaries on the Books of Moses_, was not Aristobulus, the
>       sycophant of Ptolemy. But whatever he was, he was not a
>       Neoplatonist, but lived before, or during the days of Philo Judæus,
>       since the latter seems to know his works and follow his methods.
> 
>    12 Only Clemens Alexandrinus, a Christian Neoplatonist and a very
>       fantastic writer.
> 
>    13 The labour of reconciling the different systems of religion.
> 
>    14 _New Platonism and Alchemy_, by Alex. Wilder, M.D. pp. 7, 4.
> 
>    15 It is well‐known that, though born of Christian parents, Ammonius
>       had renounced the tenets of the Church—Eusebius and Jerome
>       notwithstanding. Porphyry, the disciple of Plotinus, who had lived
>       with Ammonius for eleven years together, and who had no interest for
>       stating an untruth, positively declares that he had renounced
>       Christianity entirely. On the other hand, we know that Ammonius
>       believed in the bright Gods, Protectors, and that the Neoplatonic
>       Philosophy was as “pagan” as it was mystical. But Eusebius, the most
>       unscrupulous forger and falsifier of old texts, and St. Jerome, an
>       out‐and‐out fanatic, who had both an interest in denying the fact,
>       contradict Porphyry. We prefer to believe the latter, who has left
>       to posterity an unblemished name and a great reputation for honesty.
> 
>    16 Two works are falsely attributed to Ammonius. One, now lost, called
>       _De Consensu Moysis et Jesu_, is mentioned by the same “trustworthy”
>       Eusebius, the Bishop of Cæsaræa, and the friend of the Christian
>       Emperor Constantine, who died, however, a heathen. All that is known
>       of this pseudo‐work is that Jerome bestows great praise upon it
>       (_Vir. Illust._, § 55; and Euseb., _H. E._, vi. 19). The other
>       spurious production is called the _Diatesseron_ (or the “Harmony of
>       the Gospels”). This is partially extant. But then, again, it exists
>       only in the Latin version of Victor, Bishop of Capua (sixth
>       century), who attributed it himself to Tatian, and as wrongly,
>       probably, as later scholars attributed the _Diatesseron_ to
>       Ammonius. Therefore no great reliance can be placed upon it, nor on
>       its “esoteric” interpretation of the Gospels. Is it this work, we
>       wonder, which led Prof. Jowett to regard the Neo‐platonic
>       interpretations as “absurdities”?
> 
>    17 _Op. cit._, p. 7.
> 
>    18 _Op. cit._, iii, 524.
> 
>    19 “Imperfect knowledge” of what? That Plato was ignorant of many of
>       the modern “working hypotheses”—as ignorant as our immediate
>       posterity is sure to be of the said hypotheses when they in their
>       turn after exploding join the “great majority”—is perhaps a blessing
>       in disguise.
> 
>    20 _Op. cit._, p. 524.
> 
>    21 _Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme_, by M. J. Matter, Professor of
>       the Royal Academy of Strasburg, “It is in Pythagoras and Plato that
>       we find, in Greece, the first elements of [Oriental] Gnosticism,” he
>       says. (Vol. i, pp. 48 and 50.)
> 
>    22 _Asiat. Trans._, i, 579.
> 
>    23 _New Platonism and Alchemy_, p. 4.
> 
>    24 This fact and others may be found in Chinese Missionary Reports, and
>       in a work by Monseigneur Delaplace, a Bishop in China. _Annales de
>       la Propagation de la Foi._
> 
>    25 The regions somewhere about Udyana and Kashmir, as the translator
>       and editor of Marco Polo (Colonel Yule) believes (i. 175).
> 
>    26 _Voyage des Pélerins Bouddhistes_, Vol. I.; _Histoire de la Vie de
>       Hiouen‐Thsang_, etc., traduit du chinois en français, par Stanislas
>       Julien.
> 
>    27 Lao‐tse, the Chinese philosopher.
> 
>    28 _The Book of Ser Marco Polo_, i. 318.
> 
>    29 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 599‐601, 603, 598.
> 
>    30 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiii. 6.
> 
>    31 The Rishis—the first group of seven in number—lived in days
>       preceding the Vedic period. They are now known as Sages and held in
>       reverence like demigods. But they may now be shown as something more
>       than merely mortal Philosophers. There are other groups of ten,
>       twelve and even twenty‐one in number. Haug shows that they occupy in
>       the Brâhmanical religion a position answering to that of the twelve
>       sons of Jacob in the Jewish _Bible_. The Brâhmans claim to descend
>       directly from the Rishis.
> 
>    32 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 90.
> 
>    33 See Münter “On the most Ancient Religions of the North before Odin.”
>       _Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de France_, ii. 230.
> 
>    34 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvi. 6.
> 
>    35 “The date of the hundreds of pyramids in the Valley of the Nile is
>       impossible to fix by any of the rules of modern science; Herodotus
>       informs us that each successive king erected one to commemorate his
>       reign, and serve as his sepulchre. But, Herodotus did not tell all,
>       although he knew that the real purpose of the pyramid was very
>       different from that which he assigns to it. Were it not for his
>       religious scruples, he might have added that, externally, it
>       symbolized the creative principle of Nature, and illustrated also
>       the principles of geometry, mathematics, astrology and astronomy.
>       Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre recesses were
>       performed the Mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the
>       initiation scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry
>       sarcophagus, which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of
>       Scotland, degrades into a corn‐bin, was the baptismal font, upon
>       emerging from which, the neophyte was ‘born again,’ and became an
>       adept.” (_Isis Unveiled_, i. 518, 519.)
> 
>    36 Diog. Laërt., in “Democrit. Vit.”
> 
>    37 _Satyric_, ix. 3.
> 
>    38 Pliny, _Hist. Nat._
> 
>    39 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 512.
> 
>    40 _Op. cit._, ii. 403.
> 
>    41 This is precisely what some of them are preparing to do, and many a
>       “mysterious page” in sacred and profane history are touched on in
>       these pages. Whether or not their explanations will be accepted—is
>       another question.
> 
>    42 _Ibid._
> 
>    43 This is incorrectly expressed. The true Adept of the “Right Hand”
>       never punishes anyone, not even his bitterest and most dangerous
>       enemy; he simply leaves the latter to his Karma, and Karma never
>       fails to do so, sooner or later.
> 
>    44 _Op. cit._, ii. 239, 241, 240.
> 
>    45 See, in this connection, _Pneumatologie des Esprits_, by the Marquis
>       de Mirville, who devotes six enormous volumes to show the absurdity
>       of those who deny the reality of Satan and Magic, or the Occult
>       Sciences—the two being with him synonymous.
> 
>    46 We think we see the sidereal phantom of the old Philosopher and
>       Mystic—once of Cambridge University—Henry More, moving about in the
>       astral mist over the old moss‐covered roofs of the ancient town in
>       which he wrote his famous letter to Glanvil about “witches.” The
>       “soul” seems restless and indignant, as on that day of May, 1678,
>       when the doctor complained so bitterly to the author of _Sadducismus
>       Triumphatus_ of Scot, Adie and Webster. “Our new inspired saints,”
>       the soul is heard to mutter, “sworn advocates of the witches ... who
>       against all sense and reason ... will have no Samuel but a
>       confederate knave ... these in‐blown buffoons, puffed up with ...
>       ignorance, vanity and stupid infidelity!” (See “Letter to Glanvil,”
>       and _Isis Unveiled_, i. 205, 206.)
> 
>    47 _Études Religieuses._
> 
>    48 _Études Historiques._
> 
>    49 _Mémoire_ read at the Académie des Inscriptions des Belles Lettres,
>       in 1859.
> 
>    50 See Alfred Maury’s _Histoire des Religions de la Grèce_, i. 248; and
>       the speculations of Holzmann in _Zeitschrift für Vergleichende
>       Sprach forschung_, ann. 1852, p. 487, _sq._
> 
>    51 Creuzer’s _Introduction des Mystères_, iii. 456.
> 
>    52 The later Nabathæans adhered to the same belief as the Nazarenes and
>       the Sabæans, honoured John the Baptist, and used Baptism. (See _Isis
>       Unveiled_, ii. 127; Munck, _Palestine_, p. 525; Dunlap, _Sod, the
>       Son of Man_, etc.)
> 
>    53 i. 535.
> 
>    54 By Hargrave Jennings.
> 
>    55 See De Mirville’s _Pneumatologie_, iii. 267 _et seq._
> 
>    56 Psellus, 4: in Cory’s _Ancient Fragments_, 269.
> 
>    57 _Isis Unveiled_, i, 535, 536.
> 
>    58 The forty‐two Sacred Books of the Egyptians, mentioned by Clement of
>       Alexandria as having existed in his time, were but a portion of the
>       Books of Hermes. Iamblichus, on the authority of the Egyptian priest
>       Abammon, attributes 1,200 of such books to Hermes, and Manetho
>       36,000. But the testimony of Iamblichus as a Neoplatonist and
>       Theurgist is of course rejected by modern critics. Manetho, who is
>       held by Bunsen in the highest consideration as a “purely historical
>       personage,” with whom “none of the later native historians can be
>       compared” (see _Égypte_, i. 97), suddenly becomes a Pseudo‐Manetho,
>       as soon as the ideas propounded by him clash with the scientific
>       prejudices against Magic and the Occult knowledge claimed by the
>       ancient priests. However, none of the Archæologists doubt for a
>       moment the almost incredible antiquity of the Hermetic books.
>       Champollion shows the greatest regard for their authenticity and
>       truthfulness, corroborated as it is by many of the oldest monuments.
>       And Bunsen brings irrefutable proofs of their age. From his
>       researches, for instance, we learn that there was a line of sixty‐
>       one kings before the days of Moses, who preceded the Mosaic period
>       by a clearly‐traceable civilization of several thousand years. Thus
>       we are warranted in believing that the works of Hermes Trismegistus
>       were extant many ages before the birth of the Jewish law‐giver.
>       “Styli and inkstands were found on monuments of the fourth Dynasty,
>       the oldest in the world,” says Bunsen. If the eminent Egyptologist
>       rejects the period of 48,863 years before Alexander, to which
>       Diogenes Laërtius carries back the records of the priests, he is
>       evidently more embarrassed with the ten thousand of astronomical
>       observations, and remarks that “if they were actual observations,
>       they _must have_ extended over 10,000 years” (p. 14). “We learn,
>       however,” he adds, “from one of their own old chronological works
>       ... that the genuine Egyptian traditions concerning the mythological
>       period treated of _myriads_ of years.” (_Égypte_, i. 15; _Isis
>       Unveiled_, i. 33.)
> 
>    59 These details are taken from _Pneumatologie_, iii. pp. 204, 205.
> 
>    60 _Égypte_, p. 143; _Isis Unveiled_, i. 625.
> 
>    61 _Strom._, VI. vii. The following paragraph is paraphrased from the
>       same chapter.
> 
>    62 See _Pneumatologie_, iii. 207. Therefore Empedocles is called
>       κωλυθάνεμος, the “dominator of the wind.” _Strom._, VI. iii.
> 
>    63 _Ibid._, iv.
> 
>    64 Summarised from _Pneumatologie_, iii. 209.
> 
>    65 _Loc. cit._
> 
>    66 _Op. cit._, iii. 208.
> 
>    67 The English speaking people who spell the name of Noah’s
>       disrespectful son “Ham” have to be reminded that the right spelling
>       is “Kham” or “Cham.”
> 
>    68 Black Magic, or Sorcery, is the _evil_ result obtained in any shape
>       or way through the practice of Occult Arts; hence it has to be
>       judged only by its effects. The name of neither Ham nor Cain, when
>       pronounced, has ever killed any one; whereas, if we have to believe
>       that same Clemens Alexandrinus who traces the teacher of every
>       Occultist, outside of Christianity, to the Devil, the name of
>       Jehovah (pronounced Jevo and in a peculiar way) had the effect of
>       killing a man at a distance. The mysterious Schemham‐phorasch was
>       not always used for holy purposes by the Kabalists, especially since
>       the Sabbath or Saturday, sacred to Saturn or the evil Shani,
>       became—with the Jews—sacred to “Jehovah.”
> 
>    69 Khoemnis, the pre‐historic city, may or may not have been built by
>       Noah’s son, but it was not his name that was given to the town, but
>       that of the Mystery Goddess Khoemnu or Khoemnis (Greek form); the
>       deity that was created by the ardent fancy of the neophyte, who was
>       thus tantalised during his “twelve labours” of probation before his
>       final initiation. Her male counterpart is Khem. The city of Choemnis
>       or Khemmis (to‐day Akhmem) was the chief seat of the God Khem. The
>       Greeks identifying Khem with Pan, called this city “Panopolis.”
> 
>    70 _Pneumatologie_, iii. 210. This looks more like pious vengeance than
>       philology. The picture, however, seems incomplete, as the author
>       ought to have added to the “chimney” a witch flying out of it on a
>       broomstick.
> 
>    71 How could they escape from the Deluge unless God so willed it? This
>       is scarcely logical.
> 
>    72 _Loc. cit._, p. 210.
> 
>    73 _Matthew_, xvi. 20.
> 
>    74 _Mark_, v. 43.
> 
>    75 _Mark_, iv. 11, 12.
> 
>    76 Is it not evident that the words: “lest at any time they should be
>       converted (or: ‘lest haply they should turn again’—as in the revised
>       version) and their sins be forgiven them”—do not at all mean to
>       imply that Jesus feared that through repentance any outsider, or
>       “them that are without,” should escape damnation, as the literal
>       dead‐letter sense plainly shows—but quite a different thing? Namely,
>       “lest any of the profane should by understanding his preaching,
>       undisguised by parable, get hold of some of the secret teachings and
>       mysteries of Initiation—and even of Occult powers? ‘Be converted’
>       is, in other words, to obtain a knowledge belonging exclusively to
>       the Initiated: ‘and their sins be forgiven them,’ that is, their
>       sins would fall upon the illegal revealer, on those who had helped
>       the unworthy to reap there where they have never laboured to sow,
>       and had given them, thereby, the means of escaping on this earth
>       their deserved Karma, which must thus re‐act on the revealer, who,
>       instead of good, did harm and failed.”
> 
>    77 _New Platonism and Alchemy_, 1869, pp. 7, 9.
> 
>    78 vii. 6.
> 
>    79 History is full of proofs of the same. Had not Anaxagoras enunciated
>       the great truth taught in the Mysteries, _viz._, that the sun was
>       surely larger than the Peloponnesus, he would not have been
>       persecuted and nearly put to death by the fanatical mob. Had that
>       other rabble which was raised against Pythagoras understood what the
>       mysterious Sage of Crotona meant by giving out his remembrance of
>       having been the “Son of Mercury”—God of the Secret Wisdom—he would
>       not have been forced to fly for his life; nor would Socrates have
>       been put to death, had he kept secret the revelations of his divine
>       Daimon. He knew how little his century—save those initiated—would
>       understand his meaning, had he given out all he knew of the moon.
>       Thus he limited his statement to an allegory, which is now proven to
>       have been more scientific than was hitherto believed. He maintained
>       that the moon was inhabited and that the lunar beings lived in
>       profound, vast and dark valleys, our satellite being airless and
>       without any atmosphere outside such profound valleys; this,
>       disregarding the revelation full of meaning for the few only, must
>       be so of necessity, if there is any atmosphere on our bright Selene
>       at all. The facts recorded in the secret annals of the Mysteries had
>       to remain veiled under penalty of death.
> 
>    80 _Stromateis_, xii.
> 
>    81 See _Homilies_ 7, in _Levit._, quoted in the _Source of Measures_,
>       p. 307.
> 
>    82 Origen: Huet., _Origeniana_, 167; Franck, 121; quoted from Dunlap’s
>       _Sôd_, p. 176.
> 
>    83 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 350.
> 
>    84 The materialistic “law‐givers,” the critics and Sadducees who have
>       tried to tear to shreds the doctrines and teachings of the great
>       Asiatic Masters past and present—no scholars in the modern sense of
>       the word—would do well to ponder over these words. No doubt that
>       doctrines and secret teachings had they been invented and written in
>       Oxford and Cambridge would be more brilliant outwardly. Would they
>       equally answer to universal truths and facts, is the next question
>       however.
> 
>    85 iii. fol. 1526, quoted in Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 102.
> 
>    86 _New‐Platonism and Alchemy_, p. 6.
> 
>    87 i. 2.
> 
>    88 lxiv. 10.
> 
>    89 The _key_ is shown to be “in the source of measures originating the
>       British inch and the ancient cubit” as the author tries to prove.
> 
>    90 The word as a plural might have better solved the mystery. God is
>       _ever‐present_; if he were _ever‐active_ he could no longer be an
>       infinite God—nor ever‐present in his limitation.
> 
>    91 The author is evidently a Mason of the way of thinking of General
>       Pike. So long as the American and English Masons will reject the
>       “Creative Principle” of the “Grand Orient” of France they will
>       remain in the dark.
> 
>    92 _Source of Measures_, pp. 308, 309.
> 
>    93 In his _Pneumatologie_, in Vol. iv., pp. 105‐112, the Marquis de
>       Mirville claims the knowledge of the heliocentric system—earlier
>       than Galileo—for Pope Urban VIII. The author goes further. He tries
>       to show that famous Pope, not as the persecutor but as one
>       persecuted by Galileo, and calumniated by the Florentine Astronomer
>       into the bargain. If so, so much the worse for the Latin Church,
>       since her Popes, knowing of it, still preserved silence upon this
>       most important fact, either to screen Joshua or their own
>       infallibility. One can understand well that the _Bible_ having been
>       so exalted over all the other systems, and its alleged monotheism
>       depending upon the silence preserved, nothing remained of course but
>       to keep quiet over its symbolism, thus allowing all its blunders to
>       be fathered on its God.
> 
>    94 _Op. cit._, App. vii. p. 296. The writer feels happy to find this
>       fact now mathematically demonstrated. When it was stated in _Isis
>       Unveiled_ that Jehovah and Saturn were one and the same with Adam
>       Kadmon, Cain, Adam and Eve, Abel, Seth, etc., and that all were
>       convertible symbols in the Secret Doctrine (see Vol. ii. pp. 446,
>       448, 464 _et seq._); that they answered, in short, to secret
>       numerals and stood for more than one meaning in the _Bible_ as in
>       other doctrines—the author’s statements remained unnoticed. _Isis_
>       had failed to appear under a scientific form, and by giving too
>       much, in fact, gave very little to satisfy the enquirer. But now, if
>       mathematics and geometry, besides the evidence of the _Bible_ and
>       _Kabalah_ are good for anything, the public must find itself
>       satisfied. No fuller, more scientifically given proof can be found
>       to show that Cain is the transformation of an Elohim (the Sephira
>       Binah) into Jah‐Veh (or God‐Eve) androgyne, and that Seth is the
>       Jehovah male, than in the combined discoveries of Seyffarth, Knight,
>       etc., and finally in Mr. Ralston Skinner’s most erudite work. The
>       further relations of these personifications of the first human
>       races, in their gradual development, will be given later on in the
>       text.
> 
>    95 The writings extant in olden times often personified Wisdom as an
>       emanation and associate of the Creator. Thus we have the Hindu
>       Buddha, the Babylonian Nebo, the Thoth of Memphis, the Hermes of
>       Greece; also the female divinities, Neïtha, Metis, Athena, and the
>       Gnostic potency Achamoth or Sophia. The Samaritan _Pentateuch_
>       denominated the _Book of Genesis_, Akamouth, or Wisdom, and two
>       remnants of old treatises, the _Wisdom of Solomon_ and the _Wisdom
>       of Jesus_, relate to the same matters. The _Book of Mashalim_—the
>       _Discourses_ or _Proverbs_ of Solomon—thus personifies Wisdom as the
>       auxiliary of the Creator. In the Secret Wisdom of the East that
>       auxiliary is found collectively in the first emanations of Primeval
>       Light, the Seven Dhyáni‐Chohans, who have been shown to be identical
>       with the “Seven Spirits of the Presence” of the Roman Catholics.
> 
>    96 _New Platonism and Alchemy_, p. 6.
> 
>    97 ii. 317. 318. Many verbal alterations from the original text of
>       _Isis Unveiled_ were made by H. P. B. in her quotations therefrom,
>       and these are followed throughout.
> 
>    98 Proclus claims to have experienced this sublime ecstasy six times
>       during his mystic life; Porphyry asserts that Apollonius of Tyana
>       was thus united four times to his deity—a statement which we believe
>       to be a mistake, since Apollonius was a Nirmânakâya (divine
>       incarnation—not Avatâra)—and he (Porphyry) only once, when over
>       sixty years of age. Theophany (or the actual appearance of a God to
>       man), Theopathy (or “assimilation of divine nature”), and
>       Theopneusty (inspiration, or rather the mysterious power to hear
>       orally the teachings of a God) have never been rightly understood.
> 
>    99 Kârana Sharîra is the “causal” body and is sometimes said to be the
>       “personal God.” And so it is, in one sense.
> 
>   100 This would be in one sense Self‐worship.
> 
>   101 “The Gods exist,” said Epicurus, “but they are not what the _hoi
>       polloi_ [the multitude] suppose them to be. He is not an infidel or
>       atheist who denies the existence of Gods whom the multitude worship,
>       but he is such who fastens on the Gods the opinions of the
>       multitude.”
> 
>   102 Esoteric, as exoteric, Buddhism rejects the theory that Gautama was
>       an incarnation or Avatâra of Vishnu, but teaches the doctrine as
>       herein explained. Every man has in him the materials, if not the
>       conditions, for theophanic intercourse and Theopneusty, the
>       inspiring “God” being, however, in every case, his own Higher Self,
>       or divine prototype.
> 
>   103 One entirely and absolutely purified, and having nothing in common
>       with earth except his body.
> 
>   104 _Mândûkyopanishad_, 4.
> 
>   105 Acts, viii. 10 (Revised Version).
> 
>   106 See the explanations given on the subject in “The Elixir of Life,”
>       by G. M. (From a Chelâ’s Diary), _Five Years of Theosophy_.
> 
>   107 _I. Cor._, xv. 47, 50.
> 
>   108 _I. Cor._, iii. 16. Has the reader ever meditated upon the
>       suggestive words, often pronounced by Jesus and his Apostles? “Be ye
>       therefore perfect as your Father ... is perfect” (_Matt._, v. 48),
>       says the Great Master. The words are, “as perfect as your Father
>       which is in heaven,” being interpreted as meaning God. Now the utter
>       absurdity of any man becoming as perfect as the infinite, all‐
>       perfect omniscient and omnipresent Deity, is too apparent. If you
>       accept it in such a sense, Jesus is made to utter the greatest
>       fallacy. What was Esoterically meant is, “Your Father who is above
>       the material and astral man, the highest Principle (save the Monad)
>       within man, his own personal God, or the God of his own personality,
>       of whom he is the ‘prison’ and the ‘temple.’ ” “If thou wilt be
>       perfect (_i.e._, an Adept and Initiate) go and sell that thou hast”
>       (_Matt._, xix. 21). Every man who desired to become a neophyte, a
>       chelâ, then, as now, had to take the vow of poverty. The “Perfect,”
>       was the name given to the Initiates of every denomination. Plato
>       calls them by that term. The Essenes had their “Perfect,” and Paul
>       plainly states that they, the Initiates, can only speak before other
>       Adepts. “We speak wisdom among them [only] that are perfect” (_I.
>       Cor._ ii. 6.)
> 
>   109 _John_, i. 21.
> 
>   110 _John_, iii. “Born” from above, _viz._, from his Monad or divine
>       EGO, the seventh Principle, which remains till the end of the Kalpa,
>       the nucleus of, and at the same time the overshadowing Principle, as
>       the Kâranâtmâ (Causal Soul) of the personality in every rebirth. In
>       this sense, the sentence “born anew” means “descends from above,”
>       the last two words having no reference to heaven or space, neither
>       of which can be limited or located, since one is a state and the
>       other infinite, hence having no cardinal points. (See _New
>       Testament, Revised Version_, _loc. cit._)
> 
>   111 This can have no reference to Christian Baptism, since there was
>       none in the days of Nicodemus and he could not therefore know
>       anything of it, even though a “Master.”
> 
>   112 This word, translated in the _New Testament_ “world” to suit the
>       official interpretation, means rather an “age” (as shown in the
>       _Revised Version_) or one of the periods during the Manvantara, a
>       Kalpa, or Æon. Esoterically the sentence would read: “He who shall
>       reach, through a series of births and Karmic law, that state in
>       which Humanity shall find itself after the Seventh Round and the
>       Seventh Race, when comes Nirvâna, Moksha, and when man becomes
>       ‘equal unto the Angels’ or Dhyân Chohans, is a ‘son of the
>       resurrection’ and ‘can die no more’; then there will be no marriage,
>       as there will be no difference of sexes”—a result of our present
>       materiality and animalism.
> 
>   113 _Luke_, xx. 27‐38.
> 
>   114 _John_, ix. 2, 3.
> 
>   115 The conscious Ego, or Fifth Principle Manas, the vehicle of the
>       divine Monad or “God.”
> 
>   116 Some Symbologists, relying on the correspondence of numbers and the
>       symbols of certain things and personages, refer these “secrets” to
>       the mystery of generation. But it is more than this. The glyph of
>       the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” has no doubt a phallic and
>       sexual element in it, as has the “Woman and the Serpent”; but it has
>       also a psychical and spiritual significance. Symbols are meant to
>       yield more than one meaning.
> 
>   117 _Wisdom_, xi. 21. Douay version.
> 
>   118 _Ecclesiasticus_, i. 9. Douay version.
> 
>   119 _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_, i. 361.
> 
>   120 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 6, 7.
> 
>   121 “Synesius mentions books of stone which he found in the temple of
>       Memphis, on one of which was engraved the following sentence: ‘One
>       _nature_ delights in another, one nature overcomes another, one
>       nature overrules another, and the whole of them are _one_’.”
> 
>       “The inherent restlessness of matter is embodied in the saying of
>       Hermes: ‘Action is the life of Phta’; and Orpheus calls nature
>       πολυμήχανος μάτηρ, ‘the mother that makes many things,’ or the
>       ingenious, the contriving, the inventive mother.”—_Isis Unveiled_,
>       i. 257.
> 
>   122 _Source of Measures_, p. x.
> 
>   123 _Masonic Review_, July, 1886.
> 
>   124 See _Source of Measures_, pp. 47‐50, _et pass._
> 
>   125 See Cary’s translation, pp. 322, 323.
> 
>   126 _Exodus_, xxxiv. 29, 33.
> 
>   127 _Op. cit._, V. vii.
> 
>   128 _The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, under “Gnosticism.”
> 
>   129 In the Ferouers and Devs of Jacobi (Letters F. and D.) the word
>       “ferouer” is explained in the following manner: The Ferouer is a
>       part of the creature (whether man or animal) of which it is the type
>       and which it survives. It is the Nous of the Greeks, therefore
>       divine and immortal, and thus can hardly be the Devil or the satanic
>       copy De Mirville would represent it (see _Mémoires de l’Académie des
>       Inscriptions_, Vol. XXXVII. p. 623, and chap. xxxix. p. 749).
>       Foucher contradicts him entirely. The Ferouer was never the
>       “principle of sensations,” but always referred to the most divine
>       and pure portion of Man’s Ego—the spiritual principle. Anquetil says
>       that the Ferouer is the purest portion of man’s soul. The Persian
>       Dev is the antithesis of the Ferouer, for the Dev has been
>       transformed by Zoroaster into the Genius of Evil (whence the
>       Christian Devil), but even the Dev is only finite; for having become
>       possessed of the soul of man by _usurpation_, it will have to leave
>       it at the great day of Retribution. The Dev obsesses the soul of the
>       defunct for three days, during which the soul wanders about the spot
>       at which it was forcibly separated from its body; the Ferouer
>       ascends to the region of eternal Light. It was an unfortunate idea
>       that made the noble Marquis de Mirville imagine the Ferouer to be a
>       “satanic copy” of a _divine_ original. By calling all the Gods of
>       the Pagans—Apollo, Osiris, Brahmâ, Ormazd, Bel, etc., the “Ferouers
>       of Christ and of the chief Angels,” he merely exhibits the God and
>       the Angels he would honour as inferior to the Pagan Gods, as man is
>       inferior to his Soul and Spirit; since the Ferouer is the immortal
>       part of the mortal being of which it is the type and which it
>       survives. Perchance the poor author is unconsciously prophetic; and
>       Apollo, Brahmâ, Ormazd, Osiris, etc., are destined to survive and
>       replace—as eternal cosmic verities—the evanescent fictions about the
>       God, Christ and Angels of the Latin Church!
> 
>   130 See George Smith’s _Babylon_ and other works.
> 
>   131 This is as fanciful as it is arbitrary. Where is the Hindu or
>       Buddhist who would speak of his “Crucified”?
> 
>   132 _Op. cit._, iv. 237.
> 
>   133 _Loc. cit._, 250.
> 
>   134 “_Q._: Who knocks at the door?
> 
>       _A._: The good cowherd.
> 
>       _Q._: Who preceded thee?
> 
>       _A._: The three robbers.
> 
>       _Q._: Who follows thee?
> 
>       _A._: The three murderers,” etc., etc.
> 
>       Now this is the conversation that took place between the priest‐
>       initiators and the candidates for initiation during the mysteries
>       enacted in the oldest sanctuaries of the Himâlayan fastnesses. The
>       ceremony is still performed to this day in one of the most ancient
>       temples in a secluded spot of Nepaul. It originated with the
>       Mysteries of the first Krishna, passed to the First Tirthankara and
>       ended with Buddha, and is called the Kurukshetra rite, being enacted
>       as a memorial of the great battle and death of the divine Adept. It
>       is not Masonry, but an initiation into the Occult teachings of that
>       Hero—Occultism, pure and simple.
> 
>   135 _Book of Enoch_, Archbishop Laurence’s translation. Introduction, p.
>       v.
> 
>   136 _The Book of Enoch_ was unknown to Europe for a thousand years, when
>       Bruce found in Abyssinia some copies of it in Ethiopic; it was
>       translated by Archbishop Laurence in 1821, from the text in the
>       Bodleian Library, Oxford.
> 
>   137 _Op. cit._, p. xx.
> 
>   138 _Loc. cit._
> 
>   139 _Op. cit._, p. xiv., note.
> 
>   140 _Op. cit._, p. xxxv.
> 
>   141 _Op. cit._, p. xiii.
> 
>   142 The Seventh Principle, the First Emanation.
> 
>   143 _Op. cit._, pp. xxxvii. and xl.
> 
>   144 _Op. cit._, pp. xl. and li.
> 
>   145 Who stands for the “Solar” or Manvantaric Year.
> 
>   146 _Op. cit._, pp. xli., xlii.
> 
>   147 _Op. cit._, p. xlviii.
> 
>   148 _Op. cit._, p. xxiii.
> 
>   149 _Loc. cit._
> 
>   150 xcii. 9.
> 
>   151 _Op. cit._, xcii. 4.
> 
>   152 _Op. cit._, xcii. 4‐7.
> 
>   153 At the close of every Root‐Race there comes a cataclysm, in turn by
>       fire or water. Immediately after the “Fall into generation” the
>       dross of the third Root‐Race—those who fell into sensuality by
>       falling off from the teaching of the Divine Instructors—were
>       destroyed, after which the Fourth Root‐Race originated, at the end
>       of which took place the last Deluge. (See the “Sons of God”
>       mentioned in _Isis Unveiled_, 593 _et seq._)
> 
>   154 _Op. cit._, xcii. 11.
> 
>   155 _Op. cit._, xcii. 7, 11, 13, 15.
> 
>   156 _Op. cit._, note, p. 152.
> 
>   157 Those interpolations and alterations are found almost in every case
>       where figures are given—especially whenever the numbers eleven and
>       twelve come in—as these are all made (by the Christians) to relate
>       to the numbers of Apostles, and Tribes, and Patriarchs. The
>       translator of the Ethiopic text—Archbishop Laurence—attributes them
>       generally to “mistakes of the transcriber” whenever the two texts,
>       the Paris and the Bodleian MSS., differ. We fear it is no mistake,
>       in most cases.
> 
>   158 _Op. cit._, lxxxviii. 99, 100.
> 
>   159 _Loc. cit._, 94. This passage, as will be presently shown, has led
>       to a very curious discovery.
> 
>   160 In the profane history of Gautama Buddha he dies at the good old age
>       of eighty, and passes off from life to death peacefully with all the
>       serenity of a great saint, as Barthélemy St. Hilaire has it. Not so
>       in the Esoteric and true interpretation which reveals the real sense
>       of the profane and allegorical statement that makes Gautama, the
>       Buddha, die very unpoetically from the effects of too much pork,
>       prepared for him by Tsonda. How one who preached that the killing of
>       animals was the greatest sin, and who was a perfect vegetarian,
>       could die from eating pork, is a question that is never asked by our
>       Orientalists, some of whom made (as now do many charitable
>       missionaries in Ceylon) great fun at the alleged occurrence. The
>       simple truth is that the said rice and pork are purely allegorical.
>       Rice stands for “forbidden fruit,” like Eve’s “apple,” and means
>       Occult knowledge with the Chinese and Tibetans; and “pork” for
>       Brâhmanical teachings—Vishnu having assumed in his first Avatâra the
>       form of a boar, in order to raise the earth on the surface of the
>       waters of space. It is not, therefore, from “pork” that Buddha died,
>       but for having divulged some of the Brâhmanical mysteries, after
>       which, seeing the bad effects brought on some unworthy people by the
>       revelation, he preferred, instead of availing himself of Nirvâna, to
>       leave his earthly form, remaining still in the sphere of the living,
>       in order to help humanity to progress. Hence his constant
>       reincarnations in the hierarchy of the Dalai and Teshu Lamas, among
>       other bounties. Such is the Esoteric explanation. The life of
>       Gautama will be more fully discussed later on.
> 
>   161 _Op. cit._, cv. 21.
> 
>   162 In the _Bible_ (_Genesis_, iv and v) there are three distinct Enochs
>       (Kanoch or Chanoch)—the son of Cain, the son of Seth, and the son of
>       Jared; but they are all identical, and two of them are mentioned for
>       purposes of misleading. The years of only the last two are given,
>       the first one being left without further notice.
> 
>   163 The eternal and incessant “in‐breathing and out‐breathing of
>       Parabrahman” or Nature, the Universe in Space, whether during
>       Manvantara or Pralaya.
> 
>   164 _Op. cit._, iii. 1.
> 
>   165 _Op. cit._, 30.
> 
>   166 _Op. cit._, 32.
> 
>   167 Those who are aware that the term Christos was applied by the
>       Gnostics to the Higher Ego (the ancient Pagan Greek Initiates doing
>       the same), will readily understand the allusion. Christos was said
>       to be cut off from the lower Ego, Chrestos, after the final and
>       supreme Initiation, when the two became blended in one; Chrestos
>       being conquered and resurrected in the glorified Christos.—Franck,
>       _Die Kabbala_, 75; Dunlap, _Sôd_, Vol. II.
> 
>   168 _Stromateis_, I. xiii.
> 
>   169 _Op. cit._, II. viii.
> 
>   170 Many are the marvels recorded as having taken place at his death, or
>       we should rather say his translation; for he did not die as others
>       do, but having suddenly disappeared, while a dazzling light filled
>       the cavern with glory, his body was again seen upon its subsidence.
>       When this heavenly light gave place to the habitual semi‐darkness of
>       the gloomy cave—then only, says Ginsburg, “the disciples of Israel
>       perceived that the lamp of Israel was extinguished.” His biographers
>       tell us that there were voices heard from Heaven during the
>       preparation for his funeral, and at his interment, when the coffin
>       was lowered into the deep cave prepared for it, a flame broke forth
>       and a voice mighty and majestic pronounced these words: “This is he
>       who caused the earth to quake, and the kingdoms to shake!”
> 
>   171 Pockocke, maybe, was not altogether wrong in deriving the German
>       Heaven, Himmel, from Himâlaya; nor can it be denied that it is the
>       Hindu Kailâsa (Heaven) that is the father of the Greek Heaven
>       (Koilon), and of the Latin Cœlum.
> 
>   172 See Pockocke’s _India in Greece_, and his derivation of Mount
>       Parnassus from Parnasa, the leaf and branch huts of the Hindu
>       ascetics, half shrine and half habitation. “Part of the Par‐o‐
>       Pamisus (the hill of Bamian), is called Parnassus. ‘These mountains
>       are called Devanica, because they are so full of Devas or Gods,
>       called “Gods of the Earth,” Bhu Devas. They lived, according to the
>       Purânas, in bowers or huts, called Parnasas, because they were made
>       of leaves’ (Parnas),” p. 302.
> 
>   173 Rawlinson is justly very confident of an Âryan and Vedic influence
>       on the early mythology and history of Babylon and Chaldæa.
> 
>   174 This is a Secret Doctrine affirmation, and may or may not be
>       accepted. Only Abrahm, Isaac and Judah resemble terribly the Hindu
>       Brahmâ Ikshvâku and Yadu.
> 
>   175 It is said in _The Gnostics and their Remains_, by C. W. King (p.
>       13), with regard to the names of Brahmâ and Abram; “This figure of
>       the _man_, Seir Aupin, consists of 243 numbers, being the numerical
>       value of the letters in the name ‘Abram’ signifying the different
>       orders in the celestial Hierarchies. In fact the names Abram and
>       Brahmâ are equivalent in numerical value.” Thus to one acquainted
>       with Esoteric Symbolism, it does not seem at all strange to find in
>       the Loka‐pâlas (the four cardinal and intermediate points of the
>       compass personified by eight Hindu Gods) Indra’s elephant, named
>       Abhra—(mâtanga) and his wife Abhramu. Abhra is in a way a Wisdom
>       Deity, since it is this elephant’s head that replaced that of
>       Ganesha (Ganapati) the God of Wisdom, cut off by Shiva. Now Abhra
>       means “cloud,” and it is also the name of the city where Abram is
>       supposed to have resided—when read backwards—“Arba (Kirjath) the
>       city of four ... Abram is Abra with an appended _m_ final, and Abra
>       read backward is Arba” (_Key to the Hebrew Egyptian Mystery_). The
>       author might have added that Abra meaning in Sanskrit “in, or of,
>       the clouds,” the cosmo‐astronomical symbol of Abram becomes still
>       plainer. All of these ought to be read in their originals, in
>       Sanskrit.
> 
>   176 Before these theories and speculations—we are willing to admit they
>       are such—are rejected, the following few points ought to be
>       explained, (1) Why, after leaving Egypt, was the patriarch’s name
>       changed by Jehovah from Abram to Abraham. (2) Why Sarai becomes on
>       the same principle Sarah (_Gen._, xvii.). (3) Whence the strange
>       coincidence of names? (4) Why should Alexander Polyhistor say that
>       Abraham was born at Kamarina or Uria, a city of soothsayers, and
>       invented Astronomy? (5) “The Abrahamic recollections go back at
>       least three millenniums beyond the grandfather of Jacob,” says
>       Bunsen (_Egypt’s Place in History_, v. 35.)
> 
>   177 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 35.
> 
>   178 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 218‐300. Gematria is formed by a metathesis
>       from the Greek word γραμματεία; Notaricon may be compared to
>       stenography; Temura is permutation—a way of dividing the alphabet
>       and shifting letters.
> 
>   179 _De Vita Pythag._
> 
>   180 We are not aware that a copy of this ancient work is embraced in the
>       catalogue of any European library; but it is one of the “Books of
>       Hermes,” and it is referred to and quotations are made from it in
>       the works of a number of ancient and mediæval philosophical authors.
>       Among these authorities are Arnoldo di Villanova’s _Rosarium
>       Philosoph._, Francesco Arnuphi’s _Opus de Lapide_, Hermes
>       Trismegistus’ _Tractatus de Transmutatione Metallorum_ and _Tabula
>       Smaragdina_, and above all the treatise of Raymond Lully, _Ab
>       Angelis Opus Divinum de Quinta Essentia_.
> 
>   181 _Exodus_, xxv. 40.
> 
>   182 _Sub voce_ “Numbers.”
> 
>   183 See Johannes Meursius, _Denarius Pythagoricus_.
> 
>   184 Ragon, _Maçonnerie Occulte_, p. 426, note.
> 
>   185 _Ibid._, p. 432, note.
> 
>   186 Extracted from Ragon, _Maçonnerie Occulte_, p. 427, note.
> 
>   187 Summarised from Ragon, _ibid._, p. 428, note.
> 
>   188 Ragon mentions the curious fact that the first four numbers in
>       German are named after the elements.
> 
>       “Ein, or one, means the air, the element which, ever in motion,
>       penetrates matter throughout, and whose continual ebb and tide is
>       the universal vehicle of life.
> 
>       “Zwei, two, is derived from the old German Zweig, signifying germ,
>       fecundity; it stands for earth the fecund mother of all.
> 
>       “Drei, three, is the _trienos_ of the Greeks, standing for water,
>       whence the Sea‐gods, Tritons; and trident, the emblem of Neptune—the
>       water, or sea, in general being called Amphitrite (surrounding
>       water).
> 
>       “Vier, four, a number meaning in Belgian fire.... It is in the
>       quaternary that the first solid figure is found, the universal
>       symbol of immortality, the Pyramid, ‘whose first syllable means
>       fire.’ Lysis and Timæus of Locris claimed that there was not a thing
>       one could name that had not the quaternary for its root.... The
>       ingenious and mystical idea which led to the veneration of the
>       ternary and the triangle was applied to number four and its figure:
>       it was said to express a living being, 1, the vehicle of the
>       triangle 4, vehicle of God, or man carrying in him the divine
>       principle.”
> 
>       Finally, “the Ancients represented the world by the number five.
>       Diodorus explains it by saying that this number represents earth,
>       fire, water, air and ether or spiritus. Hence, the origin of Pente
>       (five) and of Pan (the God) meaning in Greek all.” (Compare Ragon,
>       _op. cit._, pp. 428‐430.) It is left with the Hindu Occultists to
>       explain the relation this Sanskrit word Pancha (five) has to the
>       elements, the Greek Pente having for its root the Sanskrit term.
> 
>   189 The system of the so‐called Senzar characters is still more
>       wonderful and difficult, since each letter is made to yield several
>       meanings, a sign placed at the commencement showing the true
>       meaning.
> 
>   190 Ragon, _op. cit._, p. 431, note.
> 
>   191 The Y exoterically signifies only the two paths of virtue or vice,
>       and stands also for the numeral 150 and with a dash over the letter
>       Y for 150,000.
> 
>   192 _Tradition_, chap. on “Numbers.”
> 
>   193 This is a kind of magical bow and arrow calculated to destroy in one
>       moment whole armies; it is mentioned in the _Râmâyana_, the
>       _Purânas_ and elsewhere.
> 
>   194 _Matthew_, viii. 30‐34.
> 
>   195 _Dogmatic Theology_, iii. 345.
> 
>   196 viii. 9, 10.
> 
>   197 _Adv. Celsum._
> 
>   198 _Eccles. Hist._, i. 140.
> 
>   199 _Contra Hæreses_, I. xxiii. 1‐4.
> 
>   200 _Contra Hæreses_, ii. 1‐6.
> 
>   201 _Op. cit._, ii. 337.
> 
>   202 Ten is the perfect number of the Supreme God among the “manifested”
>       deities, for number 1 is the symbol of the Universal Unit, or male
>       principle in Nature, and number O the feminine symbol Chaos, the
>       Deep, the two forming thus the symbol of Androgyne nature as well as
>       the full value of the solar year, which was also the value of
>       Jehovah and Enoch. Ten, with Pythagoras, was the symbol of the
>       Universe; also of Enos, the Son of Seth, or the “Son of Man” who
>       stands as the symbol of the solar year of 365 days, and whose years
>       are therefore given as 365 also. In the Egyptian Symbology Abraxas
>       was the Sun, the “Lord of the Heavens.”
> 
>       The circle is the symbol of the one Unmanifesting Principle, the
>       plane of whose figure is infinitude eternally, and this is crossed
>       by a diameter only during Manvantaras.
> 
>   203 _I. Cor._, ii. 6‐8.
> 
>   204 Compare Taylor’s _Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries_.
> 
>   205 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 89.
> 
>   206 _Op. cit._, ii. 395.
> 
>   207 Quoted by De Mirville, _Op. cit._, vi. 41 and 42.
> 
>   208 Mr. St. George Lane‐Fox has admirably expressed the idea in his
>       eloquent appeal to the many rival schools and societies in India. “I
>       feel sure,” he said, “that the prime motive, however dimly
>       perceived, by which you, as the promoters of these movements, were
>       actuated, was a revolt against the tyrannical and almost universal
>       establishment throughout all existing social and so‐called religious
>       institutions of a usurped authority in some external form
>       supplanting and obscuring the only real and ultimate authority, the
>       indwelling spirit of truth revealed to each individual soul, true
>       conscience in fact, that supreme source of all human wisdom and
>       power which elevates man above the level of the brute.” (_To the
>       Members of the Ârya Samâj, the Theosophical Society, Brahmo and
>       Hindu Samâj and other Religious and Progressive Societies in
>       India._)
> 
>   209 _Revelation_, ii. 6.
> 
>   210 This “art” is not common jugglery, as some define it now: it is a
>       kind of psychological jugglery, if jugglery at all, where
>       fascination and glamour are used as means of producing illusions. It
>       is hypnotism on a large scale.
> 
>   211 The author asserts in this his Christian persuasion.
> 
>   212 Magnetic passes, evidently, followed by a trance and sleep.
> 
>   213 “Elementals” used by the highest Adept to do mechanical, not
>       intellectual work, as a physicist uses gases and other compounds.
> 
>   214 Quoted from De Mirville, _op. cit._, vi. 43.
> 
>   215 _Ibid._, vi. 45.
> 
>   216 _Ibid._, p. 46.
> 
>   217 Amédée Fleury, _Rapports de St. Paul avec Sénèque_, ii. 100. The
>       whole of this is summarised from De Mirville.
> 
>   218 But we can never agree with the author “that rites and ritual and
>       formal worship and prayers are of the absolute necessity of things,”
>       for the external can develop and grow and receive worship only at
>       the expense of, and to the detriment of, the internal, the only real
>       and true.
> 
>   219 H. Jennings, _op. cit._, pp. 37, 38.
> 
>   220 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 574.
> 
>   221 xi. 26.
> 
>   222 Art., by Dr. A. Wilder, in _Evolution_.
> 
>   223 _Op. cit._, p. 262.
> 
>   224 In its most extensive meaning, the Sanskrit word has the same
>       literal sense as the Greek term; both imply “revelation,” by no
>       human agent, but through the “receiving of the sacred drink.” In
>       India the initiated received the “Soma,” sacred drink, which helped
>       to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries
>       it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian
>       Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brâhmanical Vaidic rites, and
>       the latter from the Ante‐Vaidic religious Mysteries—primitive Wisdom
>       Philosophy.
> 
>   225 It is needless to state that the _Gospel according to John_ was not
>       written by John, but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the
>       Neoplatonic school.
> 
>   226 _Ibid._, _loc. cit._ The fact that Peter persecuted the “Apostle to
>       the Gentiles” under that name, does not necessarily imply that there
>       was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have
>       become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the
>       earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those
>       days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul and to state
>       that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a
>       diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the “antithesis of the
>       Gnosis” (_1. Epistle to Timothy_), must have been a sore thorn in
>       the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual
>       existence of Simon Magus.
> 
>   227 Taylor’s _Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries_, Wilder’s ed., p. x.
> 
>   228 ii. 91‐94.
> 
>   229 Bunsen, _Egypt’s Place in History_, v. 90.
> 
>   230 _Ibid._
> 
>   231 _Stele_, p. 44.
> 
>   232 See Dowson’s _Hindu Classical Dict._, _sub voc._, “Pîtha‐sthânaru.”
> 
>   233 See _Preface to St. Matthew’s Gospel_, Baronius, i. 752, quoted in
>       De Mirville, vi. 63. Jerome is the Father who having found the
>       authentic and original _Evangel_ (the Hebrew text), by Matthew the
>       Apostle‐publican, in the library of Cæsarea, “_written by the hand_
>       of Matthew” (Hieronymus: _De Viris_, Illust. Chap. iii.)—as he
>       himself admits—set it down as heretical, and substituted for it his
>       own Greek text. And it is also he who perverted the text in the
>       _Book of Job_ to enforce belief in the resurrection in flesh (see
>       _Isis Unveiled_, Vol. ii. pp. 181 and 182, _et seq._), quoting in
>       support the most learned authorities.
> 
>   234 De Mirville gives the following thrilling account of the “contest.”
> 
>       “John, pressed, as St. Jerome tells us, by all the churches of Asia
>       to proclaim more solemnly [in the face of the miracles of
>       Apollonius] the divinity of Jesus Christ, after a long prayer with
>       his disciples on the Mount of Patmos and being in ecstasy by the
>       divine Spirit, made heard amid thunder and lightning his famous _In
>       Principio erat Verbum_. When that sublime extasis, that caused him
>       to be named the ‘Son of Thunder,’ had passed, Apollonius was
>       compelled to retire and to disappear. Such was his defeat, less
>       bloody but as hard as that of Simon, the Magician.” (“The Magician
>       Theurgist,” vi. 63) For our part we have never heard of extasis
>       producing thunder and lightning and we are at a loss to understand
>       the meaning.
> 
>   235 This is the old, old story. Who of us, Theosophists, but knows by
>       bitter personal experience what clerical hatred, malice and
>       persecution can do in this direction; to what an extent of
>       falsehood, calumny and cruelty these feelings can go, even in our
>       modern day, and what exemplars of _Christ‐like_ charity His alleged
>       and self‐constituted servants have shown themselves to be!
> 
>   236 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 342.
> 
>   237 _Loc. cit._, ii. 343, 344.
> 
>   238 _Pneumatologie_, vi. 62.
> 
>   239 _Les Apologistes Chrétiens au Second Siècle_, p. 106.
> 
>   240 _Pneumatologie_, vi, 62.
> 
>   241 Many are they who _do not know_: hence, they do not believe in them.
> 
>   242 Just so. Apollonius, during a lecture he was delivering at Ephesus
>       before an audience of many thousands, perceived the murder of the
>       Emperor Domitian in Rome and notified it at the very moment it was
>       taking place, to the whole town; and Swedenborg, in the same manner,
>       saw from Gothenburg the great fire at Stockholm and told it to his
>       friends, no telegraph being in use in those days.
> 
>   243 No criterion at all. The Hindu Sâddhus and Adepts acquire the gift
>       by the holiness of their lives. The Yoga‐Vidyâ teaches it, and no
>       “spirits” are required.
> 
>   244 As to the Pontiffs, the matter is rather doubtful.
> 
>   245 But this alone is no reason why people should believe in this class
>       of spirits. There are better authorities for such belief.
> 
>   246 De Mirville’s aim is to show that all such apparitions of the Manes
>       or disembodied Spirits are the work of the Devil, “Satan’s
>       simulacra.”
> 
>   247 He might have added: like the great Shankarâchârya, Tsong‐Kha‐Pa,
>       and so many other real Adepts—even his own Master, Jesus; for this
>       is indeed a criterion of true Adeptship, though “to disappear” one
>       need not fly up in the clouds.
> 
>   248 See _Dion Cassius_, XXVII. xviii. 2.
> 
>   249 Lampridius, _Adrian_, xxix. 2.
> 
>   250 The passage runs as follows: “Aurelian had determined to destroy
>       Tyana, and the town owed its salvation only to a miracle of
>       Apollonius; this man so famous and so wise, this great friend of the
>       Gods, appeared suddenly before the Emperor, as he was returning to
>       his tent, in his own figure and form, and said to him in the
>       Pannonian language: ‘Aurelian, if thou wouldst conquer, abandon
>       these evil designs against my fellow‐citizens: if thou wouldst
>       command, abstain from shedding innocent blood; and if thou wouldst
>       live, abstain from injustice.’ Aurelian, familiar with the face of
>       Apollonius, whose portraits he had seen in many temples, struck with
>       wonder, immediately vowed to him (Apollonius) statue, portrait and
>       temple, and returned completely to ideas of mercy.” And then
>       Vopiscus adds: “If I have believed more and more in the virtues of
>       the _majestic_ Apollonius, it is because, after gathering my
>       information from the most serious men, I have found all these facts
>       corroborated in the Books of the Ulpian Library.” (See Flavius
>       Vopiscus, _Aurelianus_). Vopiscus wrote in 250 and consequently
>       preceded Philostratus by a century.
> 
>   251 _Ep. ad Paulinum._
> 
>   252 The above is mostly summarised from De Mirville, _loc. cit._, pp.
>       66‐69.
> 
>   253 A “true prophet” because an Initiate, one perfectly versed in Occult
>       astronomy.
> 
>   254 _Key to Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery_, p. 259 _et seq._ Astronomy and
>       physiology are the bodies, astrology and psychology their informing
>       souls; the former being studied by the eye of sensual perception,
>       the latter by the inner or “soul‐eye”; and both are _exact_
>       sciences.
> 
>   255 _New Platonism and Alchemy_, p. 12
> 
>   256 _Heracles_, 807.
> 
>   257 _Æneid_, viii., 274 ff.
> 
>   258 App., vii., p. 301.
> 
>   259 _Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie_, ii. 88.
> 
>   260 (Hieronymus, _De Viris Illust._, iii.) “It is remarkable that, while
>       all Church Fathers say that _Matthew_ wrote in _Hebrew_, the whole
>       of them use the _Greek_ text as the genuine apostolic writing,
>       without mentioning what relation the _Hebrew_ Matthew has to our
>       _Greek_ one! It had many _peculiar additions_ which are wanting in
>       our (Greek) Evangel” (Olshausen, _Nachweis der Echtheit der
>       Sämmtlichen Schriften des Neuen Test._, p. 32; Dunlap, _Sôd, the Son
>       of the Man_, p. 44.)
> 
>   261 _Commen. to Matthew_ (xii. 13) Book II. Jerome adds that it was
>       written in the Chaldaic language, but with Hebrew letters.
> 
>   262 “St. Jerome,” v. 445; Dunlap, _Sôd, the Son of Man_, p. 46.
> 
>   263 This accounts also for the rejection of the works of Justin Martyr,
>       who used only this “Gospel according to the Hebrews,” as also did
>       most probably Tatian, his disciple. At what a late period the
>       divinity of Christ was fully established we can judge by the mere
>       fact that even in the fourth century Eusebius did not denounce this
>       book as spurious, but only classed it with such as the _Apocalypse_
>       of John; and Credner (_Zur Gesch. des Kan_, p. 120) shows Nicephorus
>       inserting it, together with the _Revelation_, in his _Stichometry_,
>       among the Antilegomena. The Ebionites, the _genuine_ primitive
>       Christians, rejecting the rest of the Apostolic writings, make use
>       only of this Gospel (_Adv. Hær._, i. 26) and the Ebionites, as
>       Epiphanius declares, firmly believed, with the Nazarenes, that Jesus
>       was but a man, “of the seed of a man.”
> 
>   264 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 182‐3.
> 
>   265 _Op. cit._, ii. 5.
> 
>   266 See also _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 180, to end of chapter.
> 
>   267 _Source of Measures_, p. 299. This “stream of life” being
>       emblematised in the Philloc _basso‐relievo_ just mentioned, by the
>       water poured in the shape of a Cross on the initiated candidate by
>       Osiris—_Life_ and the Sun—and Mercury—_Death_. It was the _finale_
>       of the rite of Initiation after the _seven_ and the _twelve_
>       tortures in the Crypts of Egypt were passed through successfully.
> 
>   268 Another untrustworthy, untruthful and ignorant writer, an
>       ecclesiastical historian of the fifth century. His alleged history
>       of the strife between the Pagans, Neoplatonists, and the Christians
>       of Alexandria and Constantinople, which extends from the year 324 to
>       439, dedicated by him to Theodosius, the younger, is full of
>       deliberate falsifications.
> 
>   269 _Gems of the Orthodox Christians_, vol. I., p. 135.
> 
>   270 _Revelation_, xiv. 1.
> 
>   271 A Dagoba is a small temple of globular form, in which are preserved
>       the relics of Gautama.
> 
>   272 Prachidas are buildings of all sizes and forms, like our mausoleums,
>       and are sacred to votive offerings to the dead.
> 
>   273 The Talmudistic records claim that, after having been hanged, he was
>       lapidated and buried under the water at the junction of two streams.
>       _Mishna Sanhedrin_, Vol. VI., p. 4; _Talmud_, of Babylon, same
>       article, 43 a, 67 a.
> 
>   274 _Coptic Legends of the Crucifixion_, MSS. XI.
> 
>   275 We are at a loss to understand why King, in his _Gnostic Gems_,
>       represents Solomon’s Seal as a five‐pointed star, whereas it is six‐
>       pointed, and is the signet of Vishnu in India.
> 
>   276 King (_Gnostics_) gives the figure of a Christian symbol, very
>       common during the middle ages, of three fishes interlaced into a
>       triangle, and having the FIVE letters (a most sacred Pythagorean
>       number) ΙΧΘΥΣ engraved on it. The number five relates to the same
>       kabalistic computation.
> 
>   277 _Op. cit._, ii., 253‐256.
> 
>   278 _Op. cit._, 301. All this connects Jesus with great Initiates and
>       solar heroes; all this is purely Pagan, under a newly‐evolved
>       variation, the Christian scheme.
> 
>   279 _Op. cit._, 296.
> 
>   280 Pp. 294, 295.
> 
>   281 P. 295
> 
>   282 Pp. 295, 296.
> 
>   283 Had we known the learned author before his book was printed, he
>       might have been perchance prevailed upon to add a seventh link from
>       which all others, far preceding those enumerated in point of time,
>       and surpassing them in universally philosophical meaning, have been
>       derived, aye, even to the great pyramid, whose foundation square
>       was, in its turn, the great Âryan Mysteries.
> 
>   284 We would say cosmic Matter, Spirit, Chaos, and Divine Light, for the
>       Egyptian idea was identical in this with the Âryan. However, the
>       author is right with regard to the Occult Symbology of the Jews.
>       They were a remarkably matter of fact, unspiritual people at all
>       times; yet even with them “Ruach” was Divine Spirit, not “air.”
> 
>   285 Mr. Ralston Skinner shows that the symbol ☧, the crossed bones and
>       skull, has the letter ק _Koph_, the half of the head behind the
>       ears.
> 
>   286 Pp. 296‐302. By these numbers, explains the author, “Eli is 113 (by
>       placing the word in a circle); _amah_ being 345, is by change of
>       letters to suit the same value משת (in a circle) or Moses, while
>       Sabachth is John or the dove, or Holy Spirit, because (in a circle)
>       it is 710 (or 355 × 2). The termination _ni_, as _meni_ or 5651,
>       becomes Jehovah.”
> 
>   287 The Western personification of that power, which the Hindus call the
>       _Vija_, the “one seed,” or _Mahâ Vishnu_—a power, not the God—or
>       that mysterious Principle that contains in Itself the Seed of
>       Avatârism.
> 
>   288 “Arise into Nervi from this decrepit body into which thou hast been
>       sent. Ascend into thy former abode, O blessed Avatâr!”
> 
>   289 _The Gnostics and their Remains_, King, pp. 100, 101.
> 
>   290 _Loc cit._
> 
>   291 _Op. cit._ 258.
> 
>   292 _Homilies_ XIX., xx. 1.
> 
>   293 The Pleroma constituted the synthesis or entirety of all the
>       spiritual entities. St. Paul still used the name in his Epistles.
> 
>   294 The “Comforter,” second Messiah, intercessor. “A term applied to the
>       Holy Ghost.” Manes was the disciple of Terebinthus, an Egyptian
>       Philosopher, who, according to the Christian Socrates (I. i., cited
>       by Tillemont, iv. 584), “while invoking one day the demons of the
>       air, fell from the roof of his house and was killed.”
> 
>   295 _Cf._ _op. cit._, vi. 169‐183.
> 
>   296 “The _great serpent_ placed to _watch the temple_,” comments De
>       Mirville. “How often have we repeated that it was no _symbol_, no
>       personification but really a serpent occupied by a god!”—he
>       exclaims; and we answer that at Cairo in a Mussulman, not a
>       _heathen_ temple, we have seen, as thousands of other visitors have
>       also seen, a huge serpent that lived there for centuries, we were
>       told, and was held in great respect. Was it also “occupied by a
>       God,” or possessed, in other words?
> 
>   297 The Mysteries of Demeter, or the “afflicted mother.”
> 
>   298 By the satyrs.
> 
>   299 This looks rather suspicious and seems interpolated. De Mirville
>       tries to have what he says of Satan and his Court sending their imps
>       on earth to tempt humanity and masquerade at _séances_, corroborated
>       by the ex‐sorcerer.
> 
>   300 This does not look like sinful food. It is the diet of Chelâs to
>       this day.
> 
>   301 “Grafted” is the correct expression. “The seven Builders graft the
>       divine and the beneficent forces on to the gross material nature of
>       the vegetable and mineral kingdoms every Second Round”—says the
>       _Catechism of Lanoos_.
> 
>   302 Only the Prince of the World is not Satan, as the translator would
>       make us believe, but the collective Host of the Planetary. This is a
>       little theological back‐biting.
> 
>   303 Here the Elemental and Elementary Spirits are evidently meant.
> 
>   304 The reader has already learned the truth about them in the course of
>       the present work.
> 
>   305 Pity the penitent _Saint_ had not imparted his knowledge of the
>       rotation of the earth and helio‐centric system earlier to his
>       Church. That might have saved more than one human life—that of Bruno
>       for one.
> 
>   306 Chelâs in their trials of initiation, also see _in trances
>       artificially generated for them_, the vision of the Earth supported
>       by an elephant on the top of a tortoise standing on nothing—and
>       this, to teach them to discern the true from the false.
> 
>   307 Relating to the days of the year, also to 7 × 7 divisions of the
>       earth’s sublunary sphere, divided into seven upper and seven lower
>       spheres with their respective Planetary Hosts or “armies.”
> 
>   308 Daimon is not “demon,” as translated by De Mirville, but Spirit.
> 
>   309 All this is to corroborate his dogmatic assertions that Pater Æther
>       or Jupiter is Satan! and that pestilential diseases, cataclysms, and
>       even thunderstorms that prove disastrous, come from the Satanic Host
>       dwelling in Ether—a good warning to the men of Science!
> 
>   310 The translator replaces the word Mediators by mediums, excusing
>       himself in a foot‐note by saying that Cyprian _must_ have meant
>       modern mediums!
> 
>   311 Cyprianus simply meant to hint at the rites and mysteries of
>       Initiation, and the pledge of secresy and oaths that bound the
>       Initiates together. His translator, however, has made a Witches’
>       Sabbath of it instead.
> 
>   312 “Twelve centuries later, in full renaissance and reform, the world
>       saw Luther do the same [embrace the Devil he means?]—according to
>       his own confession and in the same conditions,” explains De Mirville
>       in a foot‐note, showing thereby the brotherly love that binds
>       Christians. Now Cyprianus meant by the Devil (if the word is really
>       in the original text) his Initiator and Hierophant. No Saint—even a
>       penitent Sorcerer—would be so silly as to speak of his (the Devil’s)
>       rising from his seat to see him to the door, were it otherwise.
> 
>   313 Every Adept has “a principality after his death.”
> 
>   314 Which shows that it was the Hierophant and his disciples. Cyprianus
>       shows himself as grateful as most of the other converts (the modern
>       included) to his Teachers and Instructors.
> 
>   315 This is proved if we take but a single recorded instance. J. Picus
>       de Mirandola, finding that there was more Christianity than Judaism
>       in the _Kabalah_, and discovering in it the doctrines of the
>       Trinity, the Incarnation, the Divinity of Jesus, etc., wound up his
>       proofs of this with a challenge to the world at large from Rome. As
>       Ginsburg shows: “In 1486, when only twenty‐four years old, he
>       [Picus] published nine hundred [Kabalistic] _theses_, which were
>       placarded in Rome, and undertook to defend them in the presence of
>       all European scholars whom he invited to the Eternal City, promising
>       to defray their travelling expenses.”
> 
>   316 This account is summarised from Isaac Myer’s _Qabbalah_, p. 10, _et
>       seq._
> 
>   317 There is not in the decalogue one idea that is not the counterpart,
>       or the paraphrase, of the dogmas and ethics current among the
>       Egyptians long before the time of Moses and Aaron. (The Mosaic Law a
>       transcript from Egyptian Sources; vide _Geometry in Religion_,
>       1890.)
> 
>   318 _Book of God._ Kenealy, p. 383. The reference to Klaproth is also
>       from this page.
> 
>   319 See _Asiat. Jour._, N.S. vii., p. 275, quoted by Kenealy.
> 
>   320 _Book of God_, _loc. cit._
> 
>   321 _Op. cit._, v. 15.
> 
>   322 _Prolegomena_, iii. 13, quoted by Kenealy, p. 385.
> 
>   323 See _Book of God_, p. 385. “Care should be taken,” says Butler
>       (quoted by Kenealy, p. 489), “to distinguish between the Pentateuch
>       in the Hebrew language but in the letters of the Samaritan alphabet,
>       and the version of the Pentateuch in the Samaritan language. One of
>       the most important differences between the Samaritan and the Hebrew
>       text respects the duration of the period between the deluge and the
>       birth of Abraham. The Samaritan text makes it longer by some
>       centuries than the Hebrew text; and the Septuagint makes it longer
>       by some centuries than the Samaritan.” It is observable that in the
>       authentic translation of the Latin Vulgate, the Roman Church follows
>       the computation expressed in the Hebrew text; and in her Martyrology
>       follows that of the Seventy, both texts being inspired, as she
>       claims.
> 
>   324 See Rev. Joseph Wolff’s _Journal_, p. 200.
> 
>   325 A tree is symbolically a book—as “pillar” is another synonym of the
>       same.
> 
>   326 The wife of Moses, one of the seven daughters of a Midian priest, is
>       called Zipora. It was Jethro, the priest of Midian, who initiated
>       Moses, Zipora, one of the seven daughters, being simply one of the
>       seven Occult powers that the Hierophant was and is supposed to pass
>       to the initiated novice.
> 
>   327 See for these details the _Book of God_, pp. 244, 250.
> 
>   328 _Op. cit._ v. 85.
> 
>   329 As is fully shown in the _Source of Measures_ and other works.
> 
>   330 Surely even Masons would never claim the _actual_ existence of
>       Solomon? As Kenealy shows, he is not noticed by Herodotus, nor by
>       Plato, nor by any writer of standing. It is most extraordinary, he
>       says, “that the Jewish nation, over whom but a few years before the
>       mighty Solomon had reigned in all his glory, with a magnificence
>       scarcely equalled by the greatest monarchs, spending nearly _eight
>       thousand millions_ of gold on a temple, was overlooked by the
>       historian Herodotus, writing of Egypt on the one hand, and of
>       Babylon on the other—visiting both places, and of course passing
>       almost necessarily within a few miles of the splendid capital of the
>       national Jerusalem? How can this be accounted for?” he asks (p.
>       457). Nay, not only are there no proofs of the twelve tribes of
>       Israel having ever existed, but Herodotus, the most accurate of
>       historians, who was in Assyria when Ezra flourished, never mentions
>       the Israelites at all; and Herodotus was born in 484 B.C. How is
>       this?
> 
>   331 Clement, _Stromateis_, xxii.
> 
>   332 _Book of God_, p. 408.
> 
>   333 _Book of God_, p. 453.
> 
>   334 _Asiatic Journal_, vii., p. 275, quoted by Kenealy.
> 
>   335 _Book of God_, p. 385.
> 
>   336 Speaking of the hidden meaning of the Sanskrit words, Mr. T. Subba
>       Row, in his able article on “The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac,” gives
>       some advice as to the way in which one should proceed to find out
>       “the deep significance of ancient Sanskrit nomenclature in the old
>       Âryan myths. 1. Find out the synonyms of the word used which have
>       other meanings. 2. Find out the numerical value of the letters
>       composing the word according to the methods of the ancient Tântrik
>       works [_Tântrika Shâstra_—works on Incantation and Magic]. 3.
>       Examine the ancient myths or allegories, if there are any, which
>       have any special connection with the word in question. 4. Permute
>       the different syllables composing the word and examine the new
>       combinations that will thus be formed and their meanings,” etc. But
>       he does not give the principal rule. And no doubt he is quite right.
>       The Tântrika _Shâstras_ are as old as Magic itself. Have they also
>       borrowed their Esotericism from the Hebrews?
> 
>   337 Their founder, Sadoc, was the pupil, through Antigonus Saccho, of
>       Simon the Just. They had their own secret _Book of the Law_ ever
>       since the foundation of their sect (about 400 B.C.) and this volume
>       was unknown to the masses. At the time of the Separation the
>       Samaritans recognised only the _Book of the Law of Moses_ and the
>       _Book of Joshua_, and their _Pentateuch_ is far older, and is
>       different from the Septuagint. In 168 B.C. Jerusalem had its temple
>       plundered, and its Sacred Books—namely, the _Bible_ made up by Ezra
>       and finished by Judas Maccabeus—were lost (see Burder’s _Josephus_,
>       vol. ii. pp. 331‐335); after which the _Massorah_ completed the work
>       of destruction (even of Ezra’s once‐more adjusted _Bible_) begun by
>       the change into square from horned letters. Therefore the later
>       _Pentateuch_ accepted by the Pharisees was rejected and laughed at
>       by the Sadducees. They are generally called atheists; yet, since
>       those learned men, who made no secret of their freethought,
>       furnished from among their number the most eminent of the Jewish
>       high‐priests, this seems impossible. How could the Pharisees and the
>       other two believing and pious sects allow notorious atheists to be
>       selected for such posts? The answer is difficult to find for bigotry
>       and for believers in a personal, anthropomorphic God, but very easy
>       for those who accept facts. The Sadducees were called atheists
>       because they believed as the initiated Moses believed, thus
>       differing very widely from the latter made‐up Jewish legislator and
>       hero of Mount Sinai.
> 
>   338 The measurements of the Great Pyramid being those of the temple of
>       Solomon, of the Ark of the Covenant, etc., according to Piazzi
>       Smythe and the author of the _Source of Measures_, and the Pyramid
>       of Gizeh being shown on astronomical calculations to have been built
>       4950 B.C., and Moses having _written_ his books—for the sake of
>       argument—not even half that time before our era, how can this be?
>       Surely if any one borrowed from the other, it is not the Pharaohs
>       from Moses. Even philology shows not only the Egyptian, but even the
>       Mongolian, older than the Hebrew.
> 
>   339 This alone shows how the Books of Moses were tampered with. In
>       _Samuel_ (ix. 9), it is said: “He that is now a prophet [Nabhi] was
>       beforetime called a Seer [Roch].” Now since before _Samuel_, the
>       word “Roch” is met nowhere in the _Pentateuch_, but its place is
>       always taken by that of “Nabhi,” this proves clearly that the Mosaic
>       text has been replaced by that of the later Levites. (See for fuller
>       details _Jewish Antiquities_, by the Rev. D. Jennings, D.D.)
> 
>   340 _Zohar_, i, 2a.
> 
>   341 _Zohar_, 42b.
> 
>   342 _Zohar_, i, 2a. See Dr. Ch. Ginsburg’s essay on _The Cabbalah, its
>       Doctrines, Developments and Literature_.
> 
>   343 Cudworth, I. iii, quoted by Wilson, _Vishnu Purâna_, i. 14, note.
> 
>   344 _Vishnu Purâna_, i. 14.
> 
>   345 Stanza i, 4.
> 
>   346 _Mishna_, i. 9.
> 
>   347 In its manifested state it becomes Ten, the Universe. In the
>       Chaldæan _Kabalah_ it is sexless. In the Jewish, Shekinah is female,
>       and the early Christians and Gnostics regarded the Holy Ghost as a
>       female potency. In the _Book of Numbers_ “Shekina” is made to drop
>       the final “h” that makes it a feminine name. Nârâyana, the Mover on
>       the Waters, is also sexless; but it is our firm belief that Shekinah
>       and Daiviprakriti, the “Light of the Logos,” are one and the same
>       thing philosophically.
> 
>   348 The Elohim create the Adam of dust, and in him Jehovah‐Binah
>       separates himself into Eve, after which the male portion of God
>       becomes the Serpent, tempts himself in Eve, then creates himself in
>       her as Cain, passes into Seth, and scatters from Enoch, the Son of
>       Man, or Humanity, as Jodheva.
> 
>   349 _The Source of Measures_, p. 8.
> 
>   350 This identifies Sephira, the third potency, with Jehovah the Lord,
>       who says to Moses out of the burning bush: “(Here) I am.” (_Exodus_,
>       iii, 4.) At this time the “Lord” had not yet become Jehovah. It was
>       not the one Male God who spoke, but the Elohim manifested, or the
>       Sephiroth in their manifested collectivity of seven, contained in
>       the triple Sephira.
> 
>   351 The Brâhmans were wise in their generation when they gradually, for
>       no other reason than this, abandoned Brahmâ, and paid less attention
>       to him individually than to any other deity. As an abstract
>       synthesis they worshipped him collectively and in every God, each of
>       which represents him. As Brahmâ, the male, he is far lower than
>       Shiva, the Lingam, who personates universal generation, or Vishnu,
>       the preserver—both Shiva and Vishnu being the regenerators of life
>       after destruction. The Christians might do worse than follow their
>       example, and worship God in Spirit, and not in the male Creator.
> 
>   352 A plural word, signifying a collective host generically; literally,
>       the “strong lion.”
> 
>   353 The writer possesses only a few extracts, some dozen pages in all,
>       verbatim quotations from that priceless work, of which but two or
>       three copies, perhaps, are still extant.
> 
>   354 Aye; but that _spirituality_ can never be discovered, far less
>       proved, unless we turn to the Âryan Scriptures and Symbology. For
>       the Jews it was lost, save for the Sadducees, from the day that the
>       “chosen people” reached the Promised Land, the national Karma
>       preventing Moses from reaching it.
> 
>   355 _Op. cit._, pp. 317‐319.
> 
>   356 _The Book of God_, pp. 388, 389.
> 
>   357 See Horne’s _Introduction_ (10th edition), vol. ii, p. 33, as quoted
>       by Dr. Kenealy, p. 389.
> 
>   358 See Horne’s _Introduction_ (10th edition), vol. ii, p. 33, as quoted
>       by Dr. Kenealy, p. 389.
> 
>   359 The author says that Parker’s _quadrature_ is “that identical
>       measure which was used anciently as the perfect measure, by the
>       Egyptians, in the construction of the Great Pyramid, which was built
>       to _monument it and its uses_,” and that “from it the _sacred cubit‐
>       value was derived_, which was the cubit‐value used in the
>       construction of the Temple of Solomon, the Ark of Noah, and the Ark
>       of the Covenant” (p. 22). This is a grand discovery, no doubt, but
>       it only shows that the Jews profited well by their captivity in
>       Egypt, and that Moses was a great Initiate.
> 
>   360 See _Theosophist_, November, 1879, art. “Hindu Music,” p. 47.
> 
>   361 The Sanskrit letters are far more numerous than the poor twenty‐two
>       letters of the Hebrew alphabet. They are all musical, and they are
>       read—or rather chanted—according to a system given in very old
>       Tântrika works, and are called Devanâgarî, the speech, or language,
>       of the Gods. And since each letter answers to a numeral, the
>       Sanskrit affords a far larger scope for expression, and it must
>       necessarily be far more perfect than the Hebrew, which followed the
>       same system but could apply it only in a very limited way. If either
>       of these two languages, were taught to humanity by the Gods, surely
>       it would more likely be the Sanskrit, the perfect form of the most
>       perfect language on earth, than the Hebrew, the roughest and the
>       poorest. For once anyone believes in a language of divine origin, he
>       can hardly believe at the same time that Angels or Gods or any
>       divine Messengers have had to develop it from a rough monosyllabic
>       form into a perfect one, as we see in terrestrial linguistic
>       evolution.
> 
>   362 In the first chapter of _Genesis_ the word “God” represents the
>       Elohim—Gods in the plural, not one God. This is a cunning and
>       dishonest translation. For the whole _Kabalah_ explains sufficiently
>       that the Alhim (Elohim) are seven; each creates one of the seven
>       things enumerated in the first chapter, and these answer
>       allegorically to the seven creations. To make this clear, count the
>       verses in which it is said “And God saw that it was good,” and you
>       will find that this is said seven times—in verses 4, 10, 12, 18, 21,
>       25, and 31. And though the compilers cunningly represent the
>       creation of man as occurring on the sixth day, yet, having made man
>       “male and female in the image of God,” the Seven Elohim repeat the
>       sacramental sentence, “It was good,” for the seventh time, thus
>       making of man the seventh creation, and showing the origin of this
>       bit of cosmogony to be in the Hindu creations. The Elohim are, of
>       course, the seven Egyptian Khnûmû, the “assistant‐architects”; the
>       seven Amshaspends of the Zoroastrians; the Seven Spirits subordinate
>       to Ildabaoth of the Nazareans; the seven Prajâpati of the Hindus,
>       etc.
> 
>   363 _Gen._, ii. 21, 22.
> 
>   364 _Op. cit._, p. 395, note.
> 
>   365 The seventh esoterically, exoterically the sixth.
> 
>   366 _Contra Hereses_, I, xviii, 2.
> 
>   367 _Op. cit._ by Gerald Massey, p. 19.
> 
>   368 _Op cit._, p. 278.
> 
>   369 _The Hebrew and other Creations: with a reply to Professor A. H.
>       Sayce_, p. 19.
> 
>   370 _Op. cit._, p. 243.
> 
>   371 When they are the Anupâdakas (Parentless) of the Secret Doctrine.
>       See Stanzas, i, 9, Vol. i, 56.
> 
>   372 These originated with the Âryans, who placed therein their “bright‐
>       crested” (Chitra‐Shikhandan) Seven Rishis. But all this is far more
>       Occult than appears on the surface.
> 
>   373 _Op. cit._, pp. 19‐22.
> 
>   374 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson’s Trans., i, 101. The period of these
>       Kumâras is Pre‐Adamic, _i.e._, before the separation of sexes, and
>       before humanity had received the creative, or sacred, fire of
>       Prometheus.
> 
>   375 The Secret Doctrine says that this was the second creation, not the
>       first, and that it took place during the Third Race, when men
>       separated, _i.e._, began to be born as distinct men and women. See
>       Vol. ii. of this work, Stanzas and Commentaries.
> 
>   376 This is a Western mangling of the Indian doctrine of the Kumâras.
> 
>   377 He was regarded by several Gnostic sects as one with Jehovah. See
>       _Isis Unveiled_, vol. ii. p. 184.
> 
>   378 Or “man, son of man.” The Church found in this a _prophecy_ and a
>       confession of Christ, the “Son of Man!”
> 
>   379 See Stanza ii. 5, Secret Doctrine, ii. 16.
> 
>   380 _Op. cit._, pp. 23, 24.
> 
>   381 The _Sepher Jetzirah_ now known is but a portion of the original one
>       incorporated in the Chaldæan _Book of Numbers_. The fragment now in
>       possession of the Western Kabalists is one greatly tampered with by
>       the Rabbis of the Middle Ages, as its masoretic points show. The
>       “Masorah” scheme is a modern blind, dating after our era and
>       perfected in Tiberias. (See _Isis Unveiled_, vol. ii, pp. 430‐431.)
> 
>   382 In the oldest symbolism—that used in the Egyptian hieroglyphics—when
>       the bull’s head only is found it means the Deity, the Perfect
>       Circle, with the procreative power latent in it. When the whole bull
>       is represented, a solar God, a _personal_ deity is meant, for it is
>       then the symbol of the acting generative power.
> 
>   383 It took three Root‐Races to degrade the symbol of the One Abstract
>       Unity manifested in Nature as a Ray emanating from infinity (the
>       Circle) into a phallic symbol of generation, as it was even in the
>       _Kabalah_. This degradation began with the Fourth Race, and had its
>       _raison d’etre_, in Polytheism, as the latter was invented to screen
>       the One Universal Deity from profanation. The Christians may plead
>       ignorance of its meaning as an excuse for its acceptance. But why
>       sing never‐ceasing laudations to the Mosaic Jews who repudiated all
>       the other Gods, preserved the most phallic, and then most impudently
>       proclaimed themselves Monotheists? Jesus ever steadily ignored
>       Jehovah. He went against the Mosaic commandments. He recognized his
>       Heavenly Father alone, and prohibited public worship.
> 
>   384 Is it everything to have found out that the celestial circle of 360°
>       is determined by “the full word‐form of Elohim,” and that this
>       yields, when the word is placed in a circle, “3.1415, or the
>       relation of circumference to a diameter of _one_.” This is only its
>       astronomical or mathematical aspect. To know the full _septenary_
>       significance of the “Primordial Circle,” the pyramid and the
>       Kabalistic _Bible_ must be read in the light of the figure on which
>       the temples of India are built. The mathematical squaring of the
>       circle is only the terrestrial _résumé_ of the problem. The Jews
>       were content with the six days of activity and the seventh of rest.
>       The progenitors of mankind solved the greatest problems of the
>       Universe with their seven Rays or Rishis.
> 
>   385 _Genesis_ begins with the _third_ stage of “creation,” skipping the
>       preliminary two.
> 
>   386 The three _root_‐principles are, exoterically: Man, Soul, and Spirit
>       (meaning by “man” the intelligent personality), and esoterically:
>       Life, Soul, and Spirit; the four vehicles are Body, Astral double,
>       Animal (or human) Soul, and Divine Soul (Sthûla‐Sharîra, Linga‐
>       Sharîra, Kâma‐rûpa, and Buddhi, the vehicle of Âtma or Spirit). Or,
>       to make it still clearer: (1) the _Seventh_ Principle has for its
>       vehicle the Sixth (Buddhi); (2) the vehicle of Manas is Kâma‐rûpa;
>       (3) that of Jîva or Prâna (life) is the Linga‐Sharîra (the “double”
>       of man; the Linga‐Sharîra proper can never leave the body till
>       death; that which appears is an astral body, reflecting the physical
>       body and serving as a vehicle for the human soul, or intelligence);
>       and (4) the Body, the physical vehicle of all the above
>       collectively. The Occultist recognizes the same order as existing
>       for the cosmical totality, the _psycho_‐cosmical Universe.
> 
>   387 St. Denys, the Areopagite, the supposed contemporary of St. Paul,
>       his co‐disciple, and first Bishop of St. Denis, near Paris, teaches
>       that the bulk of the “work of creation” was performed by the
>       “_Seven_ Spirits of the Presence”—God’s _co‐operators_, owing to a
>       participation of the divinity in them. (_Hierarch._, p. 196.) And
>       Saint Augustine also thinks that “things were rather created in the
>       angelic minds than in Nature, that is to say, that the angels
>       perceived and knew them (all things) in their thoughts before they
>       could spring forth into actual existence.” (_Vid. De Genesis ad
>       Litteram_ p. II.) (Summarized from De Mirville, Vol. II., pp.
>       337‐338.) Thus the early Christian Fathers, even a non‐initiate like
>       St. Augustine, ascribed the creation of the visible world to Angels,
>       or Secondary Powers, while St. Denys not only specifies these as the
>       “_Seven_ Spirits of the Presence,” but shows them owing their power
>       to the informing divine energy—Fohat in the Secret Doctrine. But the
>       egotistical darkness which caused the Western races to cling so
>       desperately to the _Geo_‐centric System, made them also neglect and
>       despise all those fragments of the true Religion which would have
>       deprived them and the little globe they took for the centre of the
>       Universe of the signal honour of having been expressly “created” by
>       the One, Secondless, Infinite God!
> 
>   388 De Mirville, ii. 295.
> 
>   389 To the Occultist and Chelâ the difference made between _Energy_ and
>       Emanation need not be explained. The Sanskrit word “Sakti” is
>       untranslatable. It may be Energy, but it is one that proceeds
>       through itself, not being due to the active or conscious will of the
>       one that produces it. The “First‐Born,” or Logos, is not an
>       Emanation, but an Energy inherent in and co‐eternal with
>       Parabrahman, the One. The _Zohar_ speaks of emanations, but reserves
>       the word for the seven Sephiroth emanated from the first three—which
>       form one triad—Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. As for these three, it
>       explains the difference by calling them “immanations,” something
>       inherent to and coëval with the subject postulated, or in other
>       words, “Energies.”
> 
>       It is these “Auxiliaries,” the Auphanim, the half‐human Prajâpatis,
>       the Angels, the Architects under the leadership of the “Angel of the
>       Great Council,” with the rest of the Kosmos‐Builders of other
>       nations, that can alone explain the imperfection of the Universe.
>       This imperfection is one of the arguments of the Secret Science in
>       favour of the existence and activity of these “Powers.” And who know
>       better than the few philosophers of our civilised lands how near the
>       truth Philo was in ascribing the origin of evil to the admixture of
>       inferior potencies in the arrangement of matter, and even in the
>       formation of man—a task entrusted to the divine Logos.
> 
>   390 _Psalms_ cxxxv. 5.
> 
>   391 _Psalms_ xcvi. 5.
> 
>   392 Rather as Ormazd or Ahura‐Mazda, Vit‐nam‐Ahmi, and all the
>       unmanifested Logoi. Jehovah is the manifested Virâj, corresponding
>       to Binah, the third Sephira in the _Kabalah_, a female Power which
>       would find its prototype rather in the Prajâpati, than in Brahmâ,
>       the Creator.
> 
>   393 Neith is Aditi, evidently.
> 
>   394 The Self‐created Logos, Nârâyana, Purushottama, and others.
> 
>   395 _Mère d’Apis_, pp. 32‐35. Quoted by De Mirville.
> 
>   396 See _Republic_, I. vi.
> 
>   397 _Harmonie entre l’Église et la Synagogue_, t. II., p. 427, by the
>       Chevalier Drach. See De Mirville iv. 38, 39.
> 
>   398 Julian died for the same crime as Socrates. Both divulged a portion
>       of the solar mystery, the heliocentric system being only a part of
>       what was given during Initiation—one consciously, the other
>       unconsciously, the Greek Sage never having been initiated. It was
>       not the real solar system that was preserved in such secrecy, but
>       the mysteries connected with the Sun’s constitution. Socrates was
>       sentenced to death by earthly and worldly judges; Julian died a
>       violent death because the hitherto protecting hand was withdrawn
>       from him, and, no longer shielded by it, he was simply left to his
>       destiny or Karma. For the student of Occultism there is a suggestive
>       difference between the two kinds of death. Another memorable
>       instance of the unconscious divulging of secrets pertaining to
>       mysteries is that of the poet, P. Ovidius Naso, who, like Socrates,
>       had not been initiated. In his case, the Emperor Augustus, who was
>       an Initiate, mercifully changed the penalty of death into banishment
>       to Tomos on the Euxine. This sudden change from unbounded royal
>       favour to banishment has been a fruitful scheme of speculation to
>       classical scholars not initiated into the Mysteries. They have
>       quoted Ovid’s own lines to show that it was some great and heinous
>       immorality of the Emperor of which Ovid had become unwillingly
>       cognizant. The inexorable law of the death penalty, always following
>       upon the revelation of any portion of the Mysteries to the profane,
>       was unknown to them. Instead of seeing the amiable and merciful act
>       of the Emperor in its true light, they have made it an occasion for
>       traducing his moral character. The poet’s own words can be no
>       evidence, because as he was not an Initiate, it could not be
>       explained to him in what his offence consisted. There have been
>       comparatively modern instances of poets unconsciously revealing in
>       their verses so much of the hidden knowledge as to make even
>       Initiates suppose them to be fellow‐Initiates, and come to talk to
>       them on the subject. This only shows that the sensitive poetic
>       temperament is sometimes so far transported beyond the bounds of
>       ordinary sense as to get glimpses into what has been impressed on
>       the Astral Light. In the _Light of Asia_ there are two passages that
>       might make an Initiate of the first degree think that Mr. Edwin
>       Arnold had been initiated himself in the Himâlyan _âshrams_, but
>       this is not so.
> 
>   399 A proof that Julian was acquainted with the heliocentric system.
> 
>   400 _La Gravitation par l’Electricité_, p. 7, quoted by De Mirville; iv.
>       156.
> 
>   401 De Mirville, iv. 157.
> 
>   402 _Memoir on the Solar System_, p. 7, De Mirville, iv. 157.
> 
>   403 _Essai sur l’ Identité des Agents Producteurs du Son, de la
>       Lumière_, etc., p. 15, _Ibid._
> 
>   404 _Ibid._, p. 218.
> 
>   405 Summarised from _Ibid._, p. 213. De Mirville, iv. 158.
> 
>   406 May, 1855. _Ibid._, p. 139.
> 
>   407 _La Terre et notre Système solaire._ De Mirville, iv. 139.
> 
>   408 If, as Sir W. Herschel thought, the so‐called fixed stars have
>       resulted from, and owe their origin to nebular combustion, they
>       cannot be fixed any more than is our sun, which was believed to be
>       motionless and is now found to rotate around its axis every twenty‐
>       five days. As the fixed star nearest to the sun, however, is eight‐
>       thousand times farther away from him than is Neptune, the illusions
>       furnished by the telescopes must be also eight‐thousand times as
>       great. We will therefore leave the question at rest, repeating only
>       what A. Maury said in his work (_La Terre et l’Homme_, published in
>       1858): “It is utterly impossible, so far, to decide anything
>       concerning Neptune’s constitution, analogy alone authorising us to
>       ascribe to him a rotary motion like that of other planets” (De
>       Mirville, iv. 140).
> 
>   409 _Exposition du vrai Système du Monde_, p. 282.
> 
>   410 See the passage quoted by Herschel in _Natural Philosophy_, p. 165.
>       De Mirville, iv. 105.
> 
>   411 _Loc. cit._
> 
>   412 _Terre et Ciel_, p. 28. _Ibid._
> 
>   413 _Œuvres d’Arago_, vol. i., p. 219; quoted by De Mirville, iii. 462.
> 
>   414 “_Die Sterne sind vielleicht ein Sitz verklarter Geister;_
>       _Wie hier das Laster herrscht, ist dort die Tugend Meister._”
> 
>   415 _Op. cit._, p. 411.
> 
>   416 Whenever Occult doctrines were expounded in the pages of _The
>       Theosophist_, care was taken each time to declare a subject
>       incomplete when the whole could not be given in its fulness, and no
>       writer has ever tried to mislead the reader. As to the Western
>       “ranges of perception” concerning doctrines really Occult, the
>       Eastern Occultists have been made acquainted with them for some time
>       past. Thus they are enabled to assert with confidence that the West
>       may be in possession of Hermetic philosophy as a speculative system
>       of dialectics, the latter being used in the West admirably well, but
>       it lacks entirely the knowledge of Occultism. The genuine Eastern
>       Occultist keeps silent and unknown, never publishes what he knows,
>       and rarely even speaks of it, as he knows too well the penalty of
>       indiscretion.
> 
>   417 See _The Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, art. “Sepher Jetzirah.”
> 
>   418 In the exoteric sense, the Mantra (or that psychic faculty or power
>       that conveys perception or thought) is the older portion of the
>       _Vedas_, the second part of which is composed of the _Brâhmanas_. In
>       Esoteric phraseology Mantra is the Word made flesh, or rendered
>       objective, through divine magic.
> 
>   419 The secret meaning of the word “Brahmâ” is “expansion,” “increase,”
>       or “growth.”
> 
>   420 Why not give at once its theological meaning, as we find it in
>       Webster? With the Roman Catholics it means simply “purgatory,” the
>       borderland between heaven and hell (_Limbus patrum_ and _Limbus
>       infantum_), the one for all men, whether good, bad or indifferent;
>       the other for the souls of unbaptized children! With the ancients it
>       meant simply that which in _Esoteric Buddhism_ is called the Kâma
>       Loka, between Devachan and Avitchi.
> 
>   421 As Chaos, the eternal Element, not as the Kâma Loka surely.
> 
>   422 A proof that by this word Éliphas Lévi means the lowest region of
>       the terrestrial Âkâsha.
> 
>   423 Evidently he is concerned only with our periodical world, or the
>       terrestrial globe.
> 
>   424 In the “reäwakening” of the Forces would be more correct.
> 
>   425 An action which is incessant in eternity cannot be called
>       “creation;” it is evolution, and the eternally or ever‐becoming of
>       the Greek Philosopher and the Hindu Vedântin; it is the Sat and the
>       one Beingness of Parmenides, or the Being identical with Thought.
>       Now how can the Potencies be said to “create movement,” once it is
>       seen movement never had any beginning, but existed in the Eternity?
>       Why not say that the reawakened Potencies transferred motion from
>       the eternal to the temporal plane of being? Surely this is not
>       Creation.
> 
>   426 _Histoire de la Magie._ Int., p. 1.
> 
>   427 _Histoire de la Magie._ Int., p. 2.
> 
>   428 The Vaishnavas, who regard Vishnu as the Supreme God and the
>       fashioner of the Universe, claim that Brahmâ sprang from the navel
>       of Vishnu, the “imperishable,” or rather from the lotus that grew
>       from it. But the “navel” here means the Central Point, the
>       mathematical symbol of infinitude, or Parabrahman, the One and the
>       Secondless.
> 
>   429 _Ecclesiastes_, i. 12, 13.
> 
>   430 It is probably needless to say here what everyone knows. The
>       translation of the Protestant _Bible_ is not a word for word
>       rendering of the earlier Greek and Latin _Bibles_: the sense is very
>       often disfigured, and “God” is put where “Jahve” and “Elohim” stand.
> 
>   431 _Psalms_, civ. 2, 3.
> 
>   432 To avoid misunderstanding of the word “creation” so often used by
>       us, the remarks of the author of _Through the Gates of Gold_ may be
>       quoted owing to their clearness and simplicity. “The words ‘to
>       create’ are often understood by the ordinary mind to convey the idea
>       of evolving something out of nothing. This is clearly not its
>       meaning. We are mentally obliged to provide our Creator with chaos
>       from which to produce the worlds. The tiller of the soil, who is the
>       typical producer of social life, must have his material: his earth,
>       his sky, rain and sun, and the seeds to place within the earth. Out
>       of nothing he can produce nothing. Out of a void nature cannot
>       arise; there is that material beyond, behind, or within, from which
>       she is shaped by our desire for a Universe.” (P. 72.)
> 
>   433 Commentary on Stanza ix. on Cycles.
> 
>   434 Or, read from right to left, the letters and their corresponding
>       numerals stand thus: “t,” 4; “h,” 5; “bh,” 2; “v,” 6; “v,” 6; “h,”
>       5; “v” or “w,” 6; which yields “thuvbhu,” 4566256, or “Tohu‐vah‐
>       bohu.”
> 
>   435 Mr. Ralston Skinner’s MSS.
> 
>   436 That the teraphim was a statue, and no small article either, is
>       shown in _Samuel_ xix., where Michal takes a teraphim (“image,” as
>       it is translated) and puts it in bed to represent David, her
>       husband, who ran away from Saul (see verse 13, _et seq._). It was
>       thus of the size and shape of a human figure—a statue or real
>       _idol_.
> 
>   437 _Op. cit._, iii. 4
> 
>   438 Louis de Dieu, _Genesis_, xxxi. 19. See De Mirville, iii. 257.
> 
>   439 “The teraphim of Abram’s father, Terah, the ‘maker of images,’ were
>       the Kabeiri Gods, and we see them worshipped by Micah, by the
>       Danites, and others. (_Judges_, xvii.‐xviii., etc.) Teraphim were
>       identical with seraphim, and these were serpent images, the origin
>       of which is in the Sanskrit ‘Sarpa’ (the ‘serpent’) a symbol sacred
>       to all the deities as a symbol of immortality. Kiyun, or the God
>       Kivan, worshipped by the Hebrews in the wilderness, is Shiva, the
>       Hindu Saturn. (The Zendic ‘h’ is ‘s’ in India; thus, ‘Hapta’ is
>       ‘Sapta;’ ‘Hindu’ is ‘Sindbaya.’ (A. Wilder)) ‘The “s” continually
>       softens to “h” from Greece to Calcutta, from the Caucasus to Egypt,’
>       says Dunlap. Therefore the letters ‘k,’ ‘h,’ and ‘s’ are
>       interchangeable. The Greek story shows that Dardanus, the Arcadian,
>       having received them as a dowry, carried them to Samothrace, and
>       thence to Troy; and they were worshipped long before the days of
>       glory of Tyre or Sidon, though the former had been built 2760 B.C.
>       From where did Dardanus derive them?” _Isis Unveiled_, i. 570.
> 
>   440 Maimon, _More Nevochim_, III. xxx.
> 
>   441 Those dedicated to the sun were made in gold, and those to the moon
>       in silver.
> 
>   442 _De Diis Syriis, Teraph._ II. Syat, p. 31.
> 
>   443 Those that the Kabalists call _elementary_ spirits are sylphs,
>       gnomes, undines and salamanders, nature‐spirits, in short. The
>       spirits of the angels formed a distinct class.
> 
>   444 _Œdipus_, ii. 444.
> 
>   445 _Op. cit._, xxv. 22 _et seq._
> 
>   446 The ephod was a linen garment worn by the high priest, but as the
>       thummim was attached to it, the entire paraphernalia of divination
>       was often comprised in that single word, ephod. See I. _Sam._,
>       xxviii. 6, and xxx. 7, 8.
> 
>   447 _Paganism and Judaism_, iv. 197.
> 
>   448 _Op. cit._, I. vi. 5.
> 
>   449 _Discourse to the Gentiles_, p. 146.
> 
>   450 _De Gener._, I, II. iv.
> 
>   451 See _Cosmos_, by Ménage, I., vi., § 101.
> 
>   452 _Op. cit._, I. ii.
> 
>   453 “The characters employed on those parchments,” writes De Mirville,
>       “are sometimes hieroglyphics, placed perpendicularly, a kind of
>       lineary tachygraphy (abridged characters), where the image is often
>       reduced to a simple stroke; at other times placed in horizontal
>       lines; then the hieratic or sacred writing, going from right to left
>       as in all Semitic languages; lastly, the characters of the country,
>       used for official documents, mostly contracts, etc., but which since
>       the Ptolemies has been also adopted for the monuments,” v. 81, 82. A
>       copy of the Harris papyrus, translated by Chabas—_Papyrus
>       magique_—may be studied at the British Museum.
> 
>   454 And what of the “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” the words that “the
>       fingers of a man’s hand,” whose body and arm remained invisible,
>       wrote on the walls of Belshazzar’s palace? (_Daniel_, v.) What of
>       the writings of Simon the Magician, and the magic characters on the
>       walls and in the air of the crypts of Initiation, without mentioning
>       the tables of stone on which the finger of God wrote the
>       commandments? Between the writing of one God and other Gods the
>       difference, if any, lies only in their respective natures; and if
>       the tree is to be known by its fruits, then preference would have to
>       be given always to the Pagan Gods. It is the immortal “To be or not
>       to be.” Either all of them are—or at any rate, may be—true, or all
>       are surely pious frauds and the result of credulity.
> 
>   455 _Papyrus Magique_, p. 186.
> 
>   456 See Maspero’s _Guide to the Bulak Museum_, among others.
> 
>   457 De Mirville (from whom much of the preceding is taken), v. 81, 85.
> 
>   458 See De Mirville, v. 84, 85.
> 
>   459 One sees this difficulty arise even with a perfectly known language
>       like Sanskrit, the meaning of which is far easier to comprehend than
>       the hieratic writings of Egypt. Everyone knows how hopelessly the
>       Sanskritists are often puzzled over the real meaning and how they
>       fail in rendering the meaning correctly in their respective
>       translations, in which one Orientalist contradicts the other.
> 
>   460 _Op. cit._, i. 297.
> 
>   461 Book II., Commentary.
> 
>   462 Bunsen and Champollion so declare, and Dr. Carpenter says that the
>       _Book of the Dead_, sculptured on the oldest monuments, with “the
>       very phrases we find in the _New Testament_ in connection with the
>       Day of Judgment ... was engraved probably 2,000 years before the
>       time of Christ.” (See _Isis Unveiled_, i., 518.)
> 
>   463 De Mirville, v. 88. Just such a calendar and horoscope interdictions
>       exist in India in our day, as well as in China and all the Buddhist
>       countries.
> 
>   464 See De Mirville, iii. 65.
> 
>   465 _Pap. Mag._, p. 163.
> 
>   466 _Ibid._, p. 168.
> 
>   467 Maimonides in his _Treatise on Idolatry_ says, speaking of the
>       Jewish teraphim: “They talked with men.” To this day Christian
>       Sorcerers in Italy, and negro Voodoos at New Orleans fabricate small
>       wax figures in the likeness of their victims, and transpierce them
>       with needles, the _wound_, as on the teraphim or Menh, being
>       repercussed on the living, often killing them. Mysterious deaths are
>       still many, and not all are traced to the guilty hand.
> 
>   468 The Ramses of Lepsius, who reigned some 1300 years before our era.
> 
>   469 One may judge how trustworthy are the translations of such Egyptian
>       documents when the sentence is rendered in three different ways by
>       three Egyptologists. Rougé says: “He found her in a state _to fall
>       under the power of spirits_,” or “with her limbs quite stiff,” (?)
>       another version; and Chabas translates: “And the Scribe found the
>       Khou too wicked.” Between her being in possession of an evil Khou
>       and “with her limbs quite stiff,” there is a difference.
> 
>   470 De Mirville, v. 247, 248.
> 
>   471 Some translators would have Lucian speak of the inhabitants of the
>       city, but they fail to show that this view is maintainable.
> 
>   472 De Mirville, v. 256, 257.
> 
>   473 How can de Mirville see Satan in the Egyptian God of the great
>       divine Name, when he himself admits that nothing was greater than
>       the name of the oracle of Dodona, as it was that of the God of the
>       Jews, IAO, or Jehovah? That oracle had been brought by the
>       Pelasgians to Dodona more than fourteen centuries B.C. and left with
>       the forefathers of the Hellenes, and its history is well‐known and
>       may be read in Herodotus. Jupiter, who loved the fair nymph of the
>       ocean, Dodona, had ordered Pelasgus to carry his cult to Thessaly.
>       The name of the God of that oracle at the temple of Dodona was Zeus
>       Pelasgicos, the Zeuspater (God the Father), or as De Mirville
>       explains: “It was the name _par excellence_, the name that the Jews
>       held as the ineffable, the unpronounceable Name—in short, _Jaoh‐
>       pater_, _i.e._, ‘he who was, who is, and who will be,’ otherwise the
>       Eternal.” And the author admits that Maury is right “in discovering
>       in the name of the Vaidic Indra the Biblical Jehovah,” and does not
>       even attempt to deny the etymological connection between the two
>       names—“the _great_ and the _lost_ name with the sun and the thunder‐
>       bolts.” Strange confessions, and still stranger contradictions.
> 
>   474 Reuvens’ _Letter to Letronne on the 75th number of the Papyri
>       Anastasi_. See De Mirville. v. 258.
> 
>   475 The Eleusinian Fields.
> 
>   476 _Fragments_, ix.
> 
>   477 _De Legibus_, II. iv.
> 
>   478 _Judaism and Paganism_, i. 184.
> 
>   479 _Frag. of Styg., ap. Stob._
> 
>   480 _De Special. Legi._
> 
>   481 De Mirville, v. 278, 279.
> 
>   482 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 25.
> 
>   483 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 282, 283.
> 
>   484 De Mirville, v. 248.
> 
>   485 De Mirville, v. 281.
> 
>   486 Tod’s Rajasthan, i. 28.
> 
>   487 _Op. cit._, ix. iii. 28.
> 
>   488 _Vishnu Purâna_, iv. i. Wilson’s translation, iii. 248‐254.
> 
>   489 There were no Brâhmans as a hereditary caste in days of old. In
>       those long‐departed ages a man became a Brâhman through personal
>       merit and Initiation. Gradually, however, despotism crept in, and
>       the son of a Brâhman was created a Brâhman by right of protection
>       first, then by that of heredity. The rights of blood replaced those
>       of real merit, and thus arose the body of Brâhmans, which was soon
>       changed into a powerful caste.
> 
>   490 _Des Initiations Anciennes and Modernes._ “The mysteries,” says
>       Ragon, “were the gift of India.” In this he is mistaken, for the
>       Âryan race had brought the mysteries of Initiation from Atlantis.
>       Nevertheless he is right in saying that the mysteries preceded all
>       civilisations, and that by polishing the mind and morals of the
>       peoples they served as a base for all the laws—civil, political, and
>       religious.
> 
>   491 _De Off._, i. 33.
> 
>   492 _Des Initiations_, p. 22.
> 
>   493 _Essais Historiques sur la Franc‐Maçonnerie_, pp. 142, 143.
> 
>   494 The word “patriarch” is composed of the Greek word “Patria”
>       (“family,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and “Archos” (a “chief”), the
>       paternal principle. The Jewish Patriarchs who were pastors, passed
>       their name to the Christian Patriarchs; yet they were no priests,
>       but were simply the heads of their tribes, like the Indian Rishis.
> 
>   495 There is no need to observe here that the resurrection of a really
>       dead body is an impossibility in Nature.
> 
>   496 The kings of Hungary claimed that they could cure the jaundice; the
>       Dukes of Burgundy were credited with preserving people from the
>       plague; the kings of Spain delivered those possessed by the devil.
>       The prerogative of curing the king’s evil was given to the kings of
>       France, in reward for the virtues of good King Robert. Francis the
>       First, during a short stay at Marseilles for his son’s wedding,
>       touched and cured of that disease upwards of 500 persons. The kings
>       of England had the same privilege.
> 
>   497 See Laurens’ _Essais Historiques_ for further information as to the
>       world‐wide, universal knowledge of the Egyptian Priests.
> 
>   498 _Des Initiations_, p. 24.
> 
>   499 The word comes from the Greek “hieros” (“sacred”) and “glupho” (“I
>       grave”). The Egyptian characters were sacred to the Gods, as the
>       Indian Devanâgarî is the language of the Gods.
> 
>   500 The same author had (as Occultists have) a very reasonable objection
>       to the modern etymology of the word “philosophy,” which is
>       interpreted “love of wisdom,” and is nothing of the kind. The
>       philosophers were scientists, and philosophy was a real science—not
>       simply verbiage, as it is in our day. The term is composed of two
>       Greek words whose meaning is intended to convey its secret sense,
>       and ought to be interpreted as “wisdom of love.” Now it is in the
>       last word, “love,” that lies hidden the esoteric significance: for
>       “love” does not stand here as a noun, nor does it mean “affection”
>       or “fondness,” but is the term used for Eros, that primordial
>       principle in divine creation, synonymous with πόθος, the abstract
>       desire in Nature for procreation, resulting in an everlasting series
>       of phenomena. It means “divine love,” that universal element of
>       divine omnipresence spread throughout Nature and which is at once
>       the chief cause and effect. The “wisdom of love” (or “philosophia,”)
>       meant attraction to and love of everything hidden beneath objective
>       phenomena and the knowledge thereof. Philosophy meant the highest
>       Adeptship—love of and assimilation with Deity. In his modesty
>       Pythagoras even refused to be called a Philosopher (or one who knows
>       every hidden thing in things visible; cause and effect, or absolute
>       truth), and called himself simply a Sage an aspirant to philosophy,
>       or to Wisdom of Love—love in its exoteric meaning being as degraded
>       by men then as it is now by its purely terrestrial application.
> 
>   501 _Lev._, xix. 18.
> 
>   502 “On,” the “Sun,” the Egyptian name of Heliopolis (the “City of the
>       Sun”).
> 
>   503 _Book of God_, p. 160.
> 
>   504 Mr. Kenealy quotes, in his _Book of God_, Vallancey, who says: “I
>       had not been a week landed in Ireland from Gibraltar, where I had
>       studied Hebrew and Chaldaic under Jews of various countries, when I
>       heard a peasant girl say to a boor standing by her ‘_Feach an Maddin
>       Nag_’ (‘Behold the morning star’), pointing to the planet Venus, the
>       Maddena Nag of the Chaldeans.”
> 
>   505 There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had
>       one religion, as they were of “one lip.” “All the religions of the
>       earth were at first one, and emanated from one centre,” says Faber.
> 
>   506 _Chips from a German Workshop_, i. 69, 70.
> 
>   507 Sûrya, the Sun, is one of the nine divinities that witness all human
>       actions.
> 
>   508 [There is a gap in H. P. B.’s MS., and the paragraph in brackets
>       supplies what was missing.—A. B.]
> 
>   509 In _Isis Unveiled_, Vol. II., pp. 41, 42, a portion of this rite is
>       referred to. Speaking of the dogma of Atonement, it is traced to
>       ancient “heathendom” again. We say: “This cornerstone of a church
>       which had believed herself built on a firm rock for long centuries,
>       is now excavated by science and proved to come from the Gnostics.
>       Professor Draper shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian,
>       and as having ‘originated among the Gnostic heretics’ (see _Conflict
>       Between Religion and Science_, p. 224).... But there are sufficient
>       proofs to show that it _originated_ among them no more than did
>       their anointed Christos and Sophia. The former they modelled on the
>       original of the King Messiah, the male principle of wisdom, and the
>       latter on the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldæan _Kabalah_, and even
>       from the Hindu Brahmâ and Sarasvatî, and the Pagan Dionysius and
>       Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because it
>       is now proved that the _New Testament_ never appeared in its
>       complete form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after the
>       period of the apostles, and the _Zohar_ and other Kabalistic books
>       are found to belong to the first century before our era, if not to
>       be far older still.
> 
>       “The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the
>       Essenes had their greater and minor Mysteries at least two centuries
>       before our era. They were the _Isarim_ or _Initiates_, the
>       descendants of the Egyptian hierophants, in whose country they had
>       been settled for several centuries before they were converted to
>       Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries of King Asoka, and
>       amalgamated later with the earliest Christians: and they existed,
>       probably, before the old Egyptian temples were desecrated and ruined
>       in the incessant invasions of Persians, Greeks, and other conquering
>       hordes. The hierophants had their atonement enacted in the Mystery
>       of Initiation ages before the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had
>       appeared. It was known among hierophants as the Baptism of Blood,
>       and was considered not as an atonement for the ‘fall of man’ in
>       Eden, but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and future
>       sins of ignorant, but nevertheless polluted mankind. The hierophant
>       had the option of either offering his pure and sinless life as a
>       sacrifice for his race to the gods whom he hoped to rejoin, or an
>       animal victim. The former depended entirely on their own will. At
>       the last moment of the solemn ‘new birth,’ the Initiator passed ‘the
>       word’ to the initiated, and immediately after the latter had a
>       weapon placed in his right hand, and was ordered _to strike_. This
>       is the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.”
> 
>       As Ballanche says, quoted by Ragon: “Destruction is the great God of
>       the World,” justifying therefore the philosophical conception of the
>       Hindu Shîva. According to this immutable and sacred law, “the
>       Initiate was compelled to kill the Initiator; otherwise initiation
>       remained incomplete.... It is death that generates life.”
>       _Orthodoxie maçonnique_, p. 104. All that, however, was emblematic
>       and exoteric. Weapon and killing must be understood in their
>       allegorical sense.
> 
>   510 _Orthodoxie maçonnique_, pp. 102‐104.
> 
>   511 _Op. cit._, i. 15.
> 
>   512 _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 258. A curious question to start and
>       to deny, when it is well‐known even to the Orientalists that, to
>       take but one case, there is Yaska, who was a predecessor of Pânini,
>       and his work still exists; there are seventeen writers of Nirukta
>       (glossary) known to have preceded Yaska.
> 
>   513 _La Mère d’Apis_, p. 47.
> 
>   514 One just initiated is called the “first‐born,” and in India he
>       becomes dwija, “twice born,” only after his final and supreme
>       Initiation. Every Adept is a “Son of God” and a “Son of Light” after
>       receiving the “Word,” when he becomes the “Word” himself, after
>       receiving the seven divine attributes or the “lyre of Apollo.”
> 
>   515 See De Mirville, iv. 15.
> 
>   516 II. _Kings_, xxiii. 4‐13.
> 
>   517 _Judges_, xiii. 18. Samson, Manoah’s son, was an Initiate of that
>       “Mystery” Lord, Ja‐va; he was consecrated before his birth to become
>       a “Nazarite” (a chela) an Adept. His sin with Dalilah, and the
>       cropping of his long hair that “no razor was to touch” shows how
>       well he kept his sacred vow. The allegory of Samson proves the
>       Esotericism of the _Bible_, as also the character of the “Mystery
>       Gods” of the Jews. True, Môvers gives a definition of the Phœnician
>       idea of the ideal sunlight as a spiritual influence issuing from the
>       highest God, Iao, “the light conceivable only by intellect—the
>       physical and spiritual Principle of all things; out of which the
>       soul emanates.” It was the male Essence, or Wisdom, while the
>       primitive matter or _Chaos_ was the female. Thus the first two
>       principles, co‐eternal and infinite, were already with the primitive
>       Phœnicians, spirit and matter. But this is the echo of Jewish
>       thought, not the opinion of Pagan Philosophers.
> 
>   518 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 526.
> 
>   519 Beth‐San or Scythopolis in Palestine had that designation; so had a
>       spot on Mount Parnassus. But Diodorus declares that Nyssa was
>       between Phœnicia and Egypt; Euripides states that Dionysos came to
>       Greece from India; and Diodorus adds his testimony: “Osiris was
>       brought up in Nyssa, in Arabia the Happy; he was the son of Zeus,
>       and was named from his father (nominative Zeus, genitive _Dios_) and
>       the place Dio‐Nysos”—the Zeus or Jove of Nyssa. This identity of
>       name or title is very significant. In Greece Dionysos was second
>       only to Zeus, and Pindar says: “So Father Zeus governs all things,
>       and Bacchus he governs also.”
> 
>   520 _Ex._, xvii. 15.
> 
>   521 _Phædrus_, Cary’s translation, p. 326.
> 
>   522 _Life of Pythagoras_, p. 297. “Since Pythagoras,” he adds, “also
>       spent two and twenty years in the adyta of the temples in Egypt,
>       associated with the Magians in Babylon, and was instructed by them
>       in their venerable knowledge, it is not at all wonderful that he was
>       skilled in Magic or Theurgy, and was therefore able to perform
>       things which surpass merely human power, and which appear to be
>       perfectly incredible to the vulgar” (p. 298).
> 
>   523 This expression must not be understood simply literally; for, as in
>       the initiation of certain Brotherhoods, it has a secret meaning that
>       we have just explained; it was hinted at by Pythagoras, when he
>       describes his feelings after the Initiation, and says that he was
>       crowned by the Gods in whose presence he had drunk “the waters of
>       life”—in the Hindu Mysteries there was the fount of life, and
>       _soma_, the sacred drink.
> 
>   524 _Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries_, T. Taylor, p. 46, 47.
> 
>   525 ii. 111, 113.
> 
>   526 _Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries_, p. 63.
> 
>   527 _Op. cit._, p. 65.
> 
>   528 Quoted by Taylor, p. 66.
> 
>   529 Verses 35‐38.
> 
>   530 _Phædrus_, 64, quoted by Taylor, p. 64.
> 
>   531 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 114.
> 
>   532 This is false, and the Abbé Constant (Éliphas Lévi) _knew_ it was
>       so. Why did he promulgate the untruth?
> 
>   533 _Dogme de la Haute Magie_, i. 219, 220.
> 
>   534 _Orthodoxie Maçonnique_, p. 99.
> 
>   535 _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 214.
> 
>   536 In I. _Peter_, ii. 3, Jesus is called “the Lord Chrestos.”
> 
>   537 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 323.
> 
>   538 _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 31.
> 
>   539 The Âryans replaced the living cow by one made of gold, silver or
>       any other metal, and the rite is preserved to this day, when one
>       desires to become a Brâhman, a twice‐born, in India.
> 
>   540 _Op. cit._, p. 141.
> 
>   541 In Ragon’s _Orthodoxie Maçonnique_, p. 105, _note_, we find the
>       following statement—borrowed from Albumazar the Arabian, probably:
>       “_The Virgin of the Magi and Chaldæans._ The Chaldæan sphere [globe]
>       showed in its heavens a newly‐born babe, called _Christ and Jesus_;
>       it was placed in the arms of the Celestial Virgin. It was to this
>       Virgin that Eratosthenes, the Alexandrian Librarian, born 276 years
>       before our era, gave the name of Isis, mother of Horus.” This is
>       only what Kircher gives (in _Ædipus Ægypticus_, iii. 5), quoting
>       Albumazar: “In the first decan of the Virgin rises a maid, called
>       Aderenosa, that is pure, immaculate virgin ... sitting upon an
>       embroidered throne nursing a boy...; a boy, named Jessus ... which
>       signifies Issa, whom they also call Christ in Greek.” (See _Isis
>       Unveiled_, ii. 491.)
> 
>   542 Now called _St. Reine_ (Côte d’Or) on the two streams, the Ose and
>       the Oserain. Its fall is a historical fact in Keltic Gaulish
>       History.
> 
>   543 _Orthodoxie Maçonnique_, p. 22.
> 
>   544 _Op. cit._, p. 22.
> 
>   545 The Christian mob in 389 of our era completed the work of
>       destruction upon what remained; most of the priceless works were
>       saved for students of Occultism, but lost to the world.
> 
>   546 _Op. cit._ p. 23. J. M. Ragon, a Belgian by birth, and a Mason, knew
>       more about Occultism than any other non‐initiated writer. For fifty
>       years he studied the ancient Mysteries wherever he could find
>       accounts of them. In 1805, he founded at Paris the Brotherhood of
>       _Les Trinosophes_, in which Lodge he delivered for years lectures on
>       Ancient and Modern Initiation (in 1818 and again in 1841), which
>       were published, and now are lost. Then he became the writer in chief
>       of _Hermes_, a masonic paper. His best works were _La Maçonnerie
>       Occulte_ and the _Fastes Initiatiques_. After his death, in 1866, a
>       number of his MSS. remained in the possession of the Grand Orient of
>       France. A high Mason told the writer that Ragon had corresponded for
>       years with two Orientalists in Syria and Egypt, one of whom is a
>       Kopt gentleman.
> 
>   547 _Op. cit._, iv. 462.
> 
>   548 _History of Magic_, ii. 11.
> 
>   549 _Neo‐Platonism and Alchemy_, p. 15.
> 
>   550 _Loc. cit._
> 
>   551 _Op. cit._, pp. 9, 10.
> 
>   552 This Divine Effulgence and Essence is the light of the Logos; only
>       the Vedântin would not use the pronoun “He,” but would say “It.”
> 
>   553 _Loc. cit._, _note_, p. 10.
> 
>   554 _Loc. cit._, _note_.
> 
>   555 See _Esoteric Buddhism_, by A. P. Sinnett, Fifth Edition.
> 
>   556 See _Isis Unveiled_, Vol. I., pp. 589‐595. The “Sons of God” and
>       their war with the giants and magicians.
> 
>   557 _Loc. cit._, _note_.
> 
>   558 _Op. cit._, p. 18.
> 
>   559 _Op. cit._, p. 8.
> 
>   560 No orthodox Christian has ever equalled, far less surpassed, in the
>       practice of true Christ‐like virtues and ethics, or in the beauty of
>       his moral nature, Ammonius, the Alexandrian pervert from
>       Christianity (he was born from Christian parents).
> 
>   561 _Op. cit._, pp. 3, 4.
> 
>   562 Quoted by Dr. Wilder, p. 5.
> 
>   563 “Mortification” is here meant in the moral, not the physical sense;
>       to restrain every lust and passion, and live on the simplest diet
>       possible.
> 
>   564 This is the Neo‐Platonic teaching adopted as a doctrine in the Roman
>       Catholic Church, with its worship of the Seven Spirits.
> 
>   565 The Church has made of it the worship of devils. “Daimon” is Spirit,
>       and relates to our divine Spirit, the seventh Principle and to the
>       Dhyân Chohans. Jesus prohibited going to the temple or church “as
>       Pharisees do” but commanded that man should retire for prayer
>       (communion with his God) into a private closet. Is it Jesus who
>       would have countenanced in the face of the starving millions, the
>       building of the most gorgeous churches?
> 
>   566 _Op. cit._, p. 7.
> 
>   567 _Op. cit._, p. 7.
> 
>   568 _Op. cit._, p. 18.
> 
>   569 The _Talmud_ gives the story of the four Tanaim, who are made, in
>       allegorical terms, to enter into _the garden of delights_, _i.e._,
>       to be initiated into the occult and final science.
> 
>       “According to the teaching of our holy masters the names of the four
>       who entered the garden of delight, are: Ben Asai, Ben Zoma, Acher,
>       and Rabbi Akiba....
> 
>       “Ben Asai looked and—lost his sight.
> 
>       “Ben Zoma looked and—lost his reason.
> 
>       “Acher made depredations in the plantation” (mixed up the whole and
>       failed). “But Akiba, who had entered in peace came out of it in
>       peace; for the saint, whose name he blessed, had said, ‘This old man
>       is worthy of serving us with glory.’ ”
> 
>       “The learned commentators of the _Talmud_, the Rabbis of the
>       synagogue, explain that the _garden of delight_, in which those four
>       personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the
>       most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads
>       directly to insanity,” says A. Franck, in his _Kabbalah_. It is not
>       the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting
>       himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who
>       need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of
>       sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble.
>       The latter will never understand the kabalistic evocations of the
>       supreme initiation.—_Isis Unveiled_, ii. 119.
> 
>   570 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 119.
> 
>   571 See _Neo‐Platonism_, p. 9.
> 
>   572 See the Code published by Sir William Jones, Chapter ix. p. 11.
> 
>   573 Pliny: _Hist. Nat._, xxx. 1; _Ib._, xvi. 14; xxv. 9, etc.
> 
>   574 Pomponius ascribes to them the knowledge of the highest sciences.
> 
>   575 Cæsar, iii. 14.
> 
>   576 Pliny, xxx. _Isis Unveiled_, i. 18.
> 
>   577 “The care which they took in educating youth, in familiarizing it
>       with generous and virtuous sentiments, did them peculiar honour, and
>       their maxims and discourses, as recorded by historians, prove that
>       they were expert in matters of philosophy, metaphysics, astronomy,
>       morality and religion,” says a modern writer. “If kings or princes
>       desired the advice or the blessings of the holy men, they were
>       either obliged to go themselves, or to send messengers. To these men
>       no secret power of either plant or mineral was unknown. They had
>       fathomed nature to its depths, while psychology and physiology were
>       to them open books, and the result was that science that is now
>       termed, so superciliously, _magic_.”
> 
>   578 _Op. cit._, p. 9.
> 
>   579 _Op. cit._, p. 11.
> 
>   580 _Hermes_, iv. 6.
> 
>   581 From _Saraph_ שרף “fiery, burning,” plural (see _Isaiah_, vi. 2‐6).
>       They are regarded as the personal attendants of the Almighty, “his
>       messengers,” angels or metatrons. In _Revelation_ they are the
>       “seven burning lamps” in attendance before the throne.
> 
>   582 Venus with the Chaldæans and Egyptians was the wife of _Proteus_,
>       and is regarded as the mother of the Kabiri, the sons of Phta or
>       Emepth—the divine light or the Sun. The angels answer to the stars
>       in the following order: The Sun, the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury,
>       Jupiter, and Saturn; Michael, Gabriel, Samael, Anael, Raphael,
>       Zachariel, and Orifiel; this is in religion and Christian Kabalism;
>       astrologically and esoterically the places of the “regents” stand
>       otherwise, as also in the Jewish, or rather the real Chaldæan
>       _Kabalah_.
> 
>   583 _Loc. cit._, xiv. 12.
> 
>   584 This is one more proof that the Ancients knew of seven planets
>       besides the Sun; for otherwise which is the eighth in such a case?
>       The seventh, with two others, as stated, were “mystery” planets,
>       whether Uranus or any other.
> 
>   585 II. _Sam._, vi. 20‐22.
> 
>   586 _Judges_, xxi. 21, _et seq._
> 
>   587 I. _Kings_, xviii. 26.
> 
>   588 This dance—the Râsa Mandala, enacted by the Gopîs or shepherdesses
>       of Krishna, the Sun‐God, is enacted to this day in Râjputâna in
>       India, and is undeniably the same theo‐astronomical and symbolical
>       dance of the planets and the Zodiacal signs, that was danced
>       thousands of years before our era.
> 
>   589 _Isis Unveiled_, ii. 45.
> 
>   590 II. _Epistle_, i. 19. The English text says: “Until the day‐star
>       arise in your heart,” a trifling alteration which does not really
>       matter—as _Lucifer_ is the day as well as the “morning” star—and it
>       is less shocking to pious ears. There are a number of such
>       alterations in the Protestant bibles.
> 
>   591 Again the English translation changes the word “Sun” into “day‐
>       spring.” The Roman Catholics are decidedly braver and more sincere
>       than the Protestant theologians. De Mirville: iv. 34, 38.
> 
>   592 Thus said the Egyptians and the Sabæans in days of old, the symbol
>       of whose manifested gods, Osiris and Bel, was the sun. But they had
>       a higher deity.
> 
>   593 Exiled from the Protestant bible but left in the _Apocrypha_ which,
>       according to Article VI. of the Church of England, “she doth read
>       for example of life and instruction of manners” (?), but not to
>       establish any doctrine.
> 
>   594 _Cornelius a Lapide_, v. 248.
> 
>   595 _Ecclesiastes_, xliii. The above quotations are taken from De
>       Mirville’s chapter “On Christian and Jewish Solar Theology,” iv.
>       35‐38.
> 
>   596 Nevertheless the Church has preserved in her most sacred rites the
>       “star‐rites” of the Pagan Initiates. In the pre‐Christian Mithraic
>       Mysteries, the candidate who overcame successfully the “twelve
>       Tortures” which preceded the final Initiation, received a small
>       round cake or wafer of unleavened bread, symbolising in one of its
>       meanings, the solar disc, and known as the manna (heavenly
>       bread).... A lamb, or a bull even, was killed, and with the blood
>       the candidate had to be sprinkled, as in the case of the Emperor
>       Julian’s initiation. The seven rules or mysteries that are
>       represented in the _Revelation_ as the seven seals which are opened
>       in order were then delivered to the newly born.
> 
>   597 Truly says S. T. Coleridge: “Instinctively the reason has always
>       pointed out to men the ultimate end of various sciences.... There is
>       no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other will be the last
>       achievement of astronomy; there must be chemical relations between
>       the planets ... the difference of their magnitude compared with that
>       of their distances is not explicable otherwise.” Between planets and
>       our earth with its mankind, we may add.
> 
>   598 “Christ then,” the author says (p. 40), “is represented by the trunk
>       of the candlestick.”
> 
>   599 De Mirville, iv. 41, 42.
> 
>   600 De Mirville, iv. 42.
> 
>   601 Notwithstanding the above, written in the earliest Christian period
>       by the renegade Neo‐Platonist, the Church persists to this day in
>       her wilful error. Helpless against Galileo, she now tries to throw a
>       doubt even on the heliocentric system!
> 
>   602 _Stromateis_, V., vi.
> 
>   603 The English bible has: “In them (the Heavens) hath he set a
>       tabernacle for the sun,” which is incorrect and has no sense in view
>       of the verse that follows, for there _are_ things “hid from the heat
>       thereof” if the latter word is to be applied to the sun.
> 
>   604 When the hierophant took his last degree, he emerged from the sacred
>       recess called _Manneras_ and was given the golden _Tau_, the
>       Egyptian Cross, which was subsequently placed on his breast, and
>       buried with him.
> 
>   605 The three secret names are “Sana, Sanat Sujâta, and Kapila;” while
>       the four exoteric Gods are called, Sanat Kumâra, Sananda, Sanaka and
>       Sanâtana.
> 
>   606 Another Kumâra, the “God of War” is called in the Hindu system the
>       “eternal celibate”—“the virgin warrior.” He is the Âryan St.
>       Michael.
> 
>   607 We give the original: “Coelestia corpora moveri a spirituali
>       creatura, a _nemine_ Sanctorum vel philosophorum, negatum, legisse
>       me memini. (_Opusc._ X. art. iii.).... Mihi autam videtur, quod
>       _Demonstrative_ probari posset, quod ab aliquo intellectu corpora
>       coelestia moveantur, vel a Deo immediate, vel a mediantibus angelis.
>       Sed quod mediantibus angelis ca moveat, congruit rerum ordine, quem
>       Dionysius infallibilem asserit, ut inferiora a Deo per _Media_
>       secundum cursum communem administrentur” (_Opusc._ II. art. ii.),
>       and if so, and God _never_ meddles with the once for ever
>       established laws of Nature, leaving it to his administrators, why
>       should their being called Gods by the “heathen” be deemed
>       idolatrous?
> 
>   608 In one of Des Mousseaux’s volumes on Demonology (_Œuvres des
>       Demons_) if we do not mistake the statement of the Abbé Huc is
>       found, and the author testifies to having heard the following story
>       repeatedly from the Abbé himself. In a lamasery of Tibet, the
>       missionary found the following:
> 
>       It is a simple canvas without the slightest mechanical apparatus
>       attached, as the visitor may prove by examining it at his leisure.
>       It represents a moonlit landscape, but the moon is not at all
>       motionless and dead; quite the reverse, for, according to the Abbé,
>       one would say that our moon herself, or at least her living double,
>       lighted the picture. Each phase, each aspect, each movement of our
>       satellite, is repeated in her facsimile, in the movement and
>       progress of the moon in the sacred picture. “You see this planet in
>       the painting ride as a crescent, or full, shine brightly, pass
>       behind the clouds, peep out or set, in a manner corresponding in the
>       most extraordinary way with the real luminary. It is, in a word, a
>       most perfect and resplendent reproduction of the pale queen of the
>       night, which received the adoration of so many people in the days of
>       old.” We know from the most reliable sources and numerous eye‐
>       witnesses, that such “machines”—not canvas paintings—do exist in
>       certain temples of Tibet; as also the “sidereal wheels” representing
>       the planets, and kept for the same purposes—astrological and
>       magical. Huc’s statement was translated in _Isis Unveiled_ from Des
>       Mousseaux’s volume.
> 
>   609 Cedrenus, p. 338. Whether produced by _clockwork_ or _magic_ power,
>       such machines—whole celestial spheres with planets rotating—were
>       found in the Sanctuaries, and some exist to this day in Japan, in a
>       secret subterranean temple of the old Mikados, as well as in two
>       other places.
> 
>   610 Champollion’s _Égypte Moderne_, p. 42.
> 
>   611 _Musée des Sciences_, p. 230.
> 
>   612 Translated by the Vicomte de Rougemont. See _Les Annales de
>       Philosophie Chrétienne_, 7th year, 1861.
> 
>   613 _Isaiah_, lxiii. 9.
> 
>   614 Chapter xii. of _Revelation_: “There was war in heaven, Mikael and
>       his angels fought against the Dragon,” etc. (7) and the great dragon
>       was cast out (9).
> 
>   615 He is also the informing Spirit of the Sun and Jupiter, and even of
>       Venus.
> 
>   616 _Dogme et Rituel_, ii. 116.
> 
>   617 If enumerated, they will be found to be the Hindu “divisions” and
>       choirs of Devas, and the Dhyân Chohans of Esoteric Buddhism.
> 
>   618 But this fact has not prevented the Roman Church from adopting them
>       all the same, accepting them from ignorant, though perchance sincere
>       Church Fathers, who had borrowed them from Kaballists—Jews and
>       Pagans.
> 
>   619 To call “usurpers” those who preceded the Christian Beings for whose
>       benefit these same titles were borrowed, is carrying paradoxical
>       anachronism a little too far!
> 
>   620 Or the _divine ages_, the “days and years of Brahmâ.”
> 
>   621 De Mirville, ii. 325, 326. So we say too. And this shows that it is
>       to the Kabalists and _Magicians_ that the Church is indebted for her
>       dogmas and names. Paul never condemned _real_ Gnosis, but the
>       _false_ one, now accepted by the Church.
> 
>   622 Sesostris, or Pharaoh Ramses II., whose mummy was unswathed in 1886
>       by Maspero of the Bulak Museum, and recognised as that of the
>       greatest king of Egypt, whose grandson, Ramses III. was the last
>       king of an ancient kingdom.
> 
>   623 _Op. cit._, p. 422.
> 
>   624 _Summa_, Quest. xv. Art. v., upon Astrologers, and Vol. III. pp.
>       2‐29.
> 
>   625 “The principalities and powers [born] in heavenly places” (_Ephes._,
>       iii. 10). The verse, “For though there be that are called Gods,
>       whether in heaven or on earth, as there be Gods many and lords many”
>       (I. _Corinth._, viii. 5), shows, at any rate, the recognition by
>       Paul of a plurality of “Gods” whom he calls “dæmons”
>       (“spirits”—never _devils_). Principalities, Thrones, Dominions,
>       Rectors, etc. are all Jewish and Christian names for the Gods of the
>       ancients—the Archangels and Angels of the former being in every case
>       the Devas and the Dhyân Chohans of the more ancient religions.
> 
>   626 Answer by Reuvens to Letronne with regard to his mistaken notions
>       about the Zodiac of Dendera.
> 
>   627 St. Augustine (_De Gen._, I. iii.) and Delrio (_Disquisit._, Vol.
>       IV., chap. iii.) are quoted by De Mirville, to show that “the more
>       astrologers speak the truth and the better they prophesy it, the
>       more one has to feel diffident, seeing that their agreement with the
>       devil becomes thereby the more apparent.” The famous statement made
>       by Juvenal (_Satires_, vi.) to the effect that “not one single
>       astrologer could be found who did not pay dearly for the help he
>       received from his genius”—no more proves the latter to be a devil
>       than the death of Socrates proves his daimon to have been a native
>       from the nether world—if such there be. Such argument only
>       demonstrates human stupidity and wickedness, once reason is made
>       subservient to prejudice and fanaticism of every sort. “Most of the
>       great writers of antiquity, Cicero and Tacitus among them, believed
>       in Astrology and the realization of its prophecies;” and “the
>       penalty of death decreed nearly everywhere against those
>       mathematicians [astrologers] who happened to predict falsely
>       diminished neither their number nor their tranquillity of mind.”
> 
>   628 _Preparatio Evangelica_, I. xiv.
> 
>   629 _Ast._, iv. 60.
> 
>   630 _Hist._, I. ii.
> 
>   631 All these particulars may be found more fully and far more
>       completely in Champollion Figeac’s _Égypte_.
> 
>   632 _Op. cit._, p. 230.
> 
>   633 _Op. cit._, p. 230.
> 
>   634 In the 1,326 places in the _New Testament_ where the word “God” is
>       mentioned nothing signifies that in God are included more beings
>       than God. On the contrary in 17 places God is called the only God.
>       The places where the Father is so‐called amount to 320. In 105
>       places God is addressed with high‐sounding titles. In 90 places all
>       prayers and thanks are addressed to the Father; 300 times in the
>       _New Testament_ is the Son declared to be inferior to the Father; 85
>       times is Jesus called the “Son of Man;” 70 times is he called a man.
>       In not one single place in the bible is it said that God holds
>       within him three different Beings or Persons, and yet is one Being
>       or Person.—Dr. Karl von Bergen’s _Lectures in Sweden_.
> 
>   635 Kali Yuga, the Black or Iron Age.
> 
>   636 Virgil, _Eclogue_, iv.
> 
>   637 At the close of our Race, people, it is said, through suffering and
>       discontent will become more spiritual. Clairvoyance will become a
>       general faculty. We shall be approaching the spiritual state of the
>       Third and Second Races.
> 
>   638 _Vishnu Purâna_, IV., xxiv. 228, Wilson’s translation.
> 
>   639 _Op. cit._, p. 212.
> 
>   640 At any rate, the temple secret meaning was the same.
> 
>   641 _Asiat. Res._, vol. viii. p. 470, _et seq._
> 
>   642 _Theosophist_, August, 1881.
> 
>   643 Aug., 1881 to Feb., 1882.
> 
>   644 _Loc. cit._, iv. 127.
> 
>   645 _Theosophist_, vol. iii. p. 22.
> 
>   646 The impartial study of Vaidic and Post‐Vaidic works shows that the
>       ancient Âryans knew well the precession of the equinoxes, and “that
>       they changed their position from a certain asterism to two
>       (occasionally three) asterisms back whenever the precession amounted
>       to two, properly speaking, to 2 11/61 asterisms or about 29°, being
>       the motion of the sun in a lunar month, and so caused the seasons to
>       fall back a complete lunar month.... It appears certain that at the
>       date of _Sûrya Siddhânta_, _Brahmâ Siddânta_, and other ancient
>       treatises on astronomy, the vernal equinoctial point had not
>       actually reached the beginning of Ashvinî, but was a few degrees
>       east of it.... The astronomers of Europe change westward the
>       beginning of Aries and of all other signs of the Zodiac every year
>       by about 50" 25, and thus make the names of the signs meaningless.
>       But these signs are as much fixed as the asterisms themselves, and
>       hence the Western astronomers of the present day appear to us in
>       this respect less wary and scientific in their observations than
>       their very ancient brethren—the Âryas.”—_Theosophist_, iii. 23.
> 
>   647 A great deal of misconception is raised by a confusion of planes of
>       being and misuse of expressions. For instance, certain spiritual
>       states have been confounded with the Nirvâna of BUDDHA. The Nirvâna
>       of BUDDHA is totally different from any other spiritual state of
>       Samâdhi or even the highest Theophania enjoyed by lesser Adepts.
>       After physical death the kinds of spiritual states reached by Adepts
>       differ greatly.
> 
>   648 This region is the one possible point of conciliation between the
>       two diametrically opposed poles of religion and science, the one
>       with its barren fields of dogmas on faith, the other over‐running
>       with empty hypotheses, both overgrown with the weeds of error. They
>       will never meet. The two are at feud, at an everlasting warfare with
>       each other, but this does not prevent them from uniting against
>       Esoteric Philosophy, which for two millenniums has had to fight
>       against infallibility in both directions, or “mere vanity and
>       pretence” as Antoninus defined it, and now finds the materialism of
>       Modern Science arrayed against its truths.
> 
>   649 Whence some of the Gnostic ideas? Cerinthus taught that the world
>       and Jehovah having fallen off from virtue and primitive dignity the
>       Supreme permitted one of his glorious Æons, whose name was the
>       “Anointed” (Christ) to incarnate in the man Jesus. Basilides denied
>       the reality of the body of Jesus, and calling it an “illusion” held
>       that it was Simon of Cyrene who suffered on the Cross in his stead.
>       All such teachings are echoes of the Eastern Doctrines.
> 
>   650 A genuine initiated Adept will retain his Adeptship, though there
>       may be for our world of illusion numberless incarnations of him. The
>       propelling power that lies at the root of a series of such
>       incarnations is not Karma, as ordinarily understood, but a still
>       more inscrutable power. During the period of his lives the Adept
>       does not lose his Adeptship, though he cannot rise in it to a higher
>       degree.
> 
>   651 From the so‐called Brahmâ Loka—the seventh and higher world, beyond
>       which all is arûpa, formless, purely spiritual—to the lowest world
>       and insect, or even to an object such as a leaf, there is perpetual
>       revolution of the condition of existence, evolution and re‐birth.
>       Some human beings attain states or spheres from which there is only
>       a return in a new Kalpa (a day of Brahmâ); there are other states or
>       spheres from which there is only return after 100 years of Brahmâ
>       (Mahâ‐Kalpa, a period covering 311,040,000,000,000 years). Nirvâna,
>       it is said, is a state from which there is no return. Yet it is
>       maintained that there may be, as exceptional cases, re‐incarnation
>       from that state; only such incarnations are illusion, like
>       everything else on this plane, as will be shown.
> 
>   652 This fact of the disappearance of the vehicle of Egotism in the
>       fully developed Yogî, who is supposed to have reached Nirvâna on
>       earth, years before his corporeal death, has led to the law in Manu,
>       sanctioned by millenniums of Brâhmanical authority, that such a
>       Paramâtmâ should be held as absolutely blameless and free from sin
>       or responsibility, do whatever he may (see last chapter of the _Laws
>       of Manu_). Indeed, caste itself—that most despotic, uncompromising
>       and autocratic tyrant in India—can be broken with impunity by the
>       Yogî, who is above caste. This will give the key to our statements.
> 
>   653 [The word “Adept” is very loosely used by H. P. B., who often seems
>       to have implied by it no more than the possession of special
>       knowledge of some kind. Here it seems to mean first an uninitiated
>       disciple and then an initiated one.—EDS.]
> 
>   654 About fifty years before the birth of Copernicus, de Cusa wrote as
>       follows: “Though the world may not be absolutely infinite, no one
>       can represent it to himself as finite, since human reason is
>       incapable of assigning to it any term.... For in the same way that
>       our earth cannot be in the centre of the Universe, as thought, no
>       more could the sphere of the fixed stars be in it.... Thus this
>       world is like a vast machine, having its centre [Deity] everywhere,
>       and its circumference nowhere [_machina mundi, quasi habens ubique
>       centrum, et nullibi circumferentiam_].... Hence, the earth not being
>       in the centre, cannot therefore be motionless ... and though it is
>       far smaller than the sun, one must not conclude for all that, that
>       she is worse [_vilior_—more vile].... One cannot see whether its
>       inhabitants are superior to those who dwell nearer to the sun, or in
>       other stars, as sidereal space cannot be deprived of inhabitants....
>       The earth, very likely [_fortasse_] one of the smallest globes, is
>       nevertheless the cradle of intelligent beings, most noble and
>       perfect.” One cannot fail to agree with the biographer of Cardinal
>       de Cusa, who, having no suspicion of the Occult truth, and the
>       reason of such erudition in a writer of the fourteenth and fifteenth
>       centuries, simply marvels at such a miraculous foreknowledge, and
>       attributes it to God, saying of him that he was a man incomparable
>       in every kind of philosophy, by whom many a theological mystery
>       inaccessible to the human mind (!), veiled and neglected for
>       centuries (_velata et neglecta_) were once more brought to light.
>       “Pascal might have read De Cusa’s works; but whence could the
>       Cardinal have borrowed his ideas?” asks Moreri. Evidently from
>       Hermes and the works of Pythagoras, even if the mystery of his
>       incarnation and re‐incarnation be dismissed.
> 
>   655 This is the secret meaning of the statements about the Hierarchy of
>       Prajâpatis or Rishis. First seven are mentioned, then ten, then
>       twenty‐one, and so on. They are “Gods” and creators of men—many of
>       them the “Lords of Beings”; they are the “Mind‐born Sons” of Brahmâ,
>       and then they became mortal heroes, and are often shown as of a very
>       sinful character. The Occult meaning of the Biblical Patriarchs,
>       their genealogy, and their descendants dividing among themselves the
>       earth, is the same. Again, Jacob’s dream has the same significance.
> 
>   656 He “of the Seven Virtues” is one who, without the benefit of
>       Initiation, becomes as pure as any Adept by the simple exertion of
>       his own merit. Being so holy, his body at his next incarnation
>       becomes the Avatâra of his “Watcher” or Guardian Angel, as the
>       Christian would put it.
> 
>   657 The title of the highest Dhyân Chohans.
> 
>   658 _Op. cit._, ii. 367.
> 
>   659 “After death, the soul continueth in the aerial (astral) body, till
>       it is entirely purified from all angry, sensual passions; then doth
>       it put off by a _second death_ [when arising to Devachan] the aerial
>       body as it did the earthly one. Wherefore the ancients say that
>       there is a celestial body always joined with the soul, which is
>       immortal, luminous and star‐like.” It becomes natural then, that the
>       “aerial body” of an Adept should have no such second dying, since it
>       has been cleansed of all its natural impurity before its separation
>       from the physical body. The high Initiate is a “Son of the
>       Resurrection,” “being equal unto the angels,” and cannot die any
>       more (see _Luke_, xx. 36).
> 
>   660 _St. John_, xxi. 21.
> 
>   661 See the extract made in the _Theosophist_ from a glorious novel by
>       Dostoievsky—a fragment entitled “The Great Inquisitor.” It is a
>       fiction, naturally, still a sublime fiction of Christ returning in
>       Spain during the palmy days of the Inquisition, and being imprisoned
>       and put to death by the Inquisitor, who fears lest Christ should
>       ruin the work of Jesuit hands.
> 
>   662 When we say the “great Teacher,” we do not mean His Buddhic Ego, but
>       that principle in Him which was the vehicle of His personal or
>       terrestrial Ego.
> 
>   663 _Five Years of Theosophy_, New Edition, p. 3.
> 
>   664 _Op. cit._, p. 175, Fifth Edition.
> 
>   665 It would be useless to raise objections from exoteric works to
>       statements in this, which aims to expound, however superficially,
>       the Esoteric Teachings alone. It is because they are misled by the
>       exoteric doctrine that Bishop Bigandet and others aver that the
>       notion of a supreme eternal Âdi‐Buddha is to be found only in
>       writings of comparatively recent date. What is given here is taken
>       from the secret portions of Dus Kyi Khorlo (Kâla Chakra, in
>       Sanskrit, or the “Wheel of Time,” or duration).
> 
>   666 The three bodies are (1) the Nirmânakâya (Pru‐lpai‐Ku in Tibetan),
>       in which the Bodhisattva after entering by the six Pâramitâs the
>       Path to Nirvâna, appears to men in order to teach them; (2)
>       Sambhogakâya (Dzog‐pai‐Ku), the, body of bliss impervious to all
>       physical sensations, received by one who has fulfilled the three
>       conditions of moral perfection; and (3) Dharmakâya (in Tibetan,
>       Chos‐Ku), the Nirvânic body.
> 
>   667 _Five Years of Theosophy_, art. “Personal and Impersonal God,” p.
>       129.
> 
>   668 Adhishtâthâ, the active or working agent in Prakriti (or matter).
> 
>   669 _Vedânta‐Sûtras_, Ad. I. Pâda iv. Shi. 23. Commentary. The passage
>       is given as follows in Thibaut’s translation (Sacred Books of the
>       East, xxxiv.), p. 286: “The Self is thus the operative cause,
>       because there is no other ruling principle, and the material cause
>       because there is no other substance from which the world could
>       originate.”
> 
>   670 In _Five Years of Theosophy_ (art. “Shâkya Muni’s Place in History,”
>       p. 234, note) it is stated that one day when our Lord sat in the
>       Sattapanni Cave (Saptaparna) he compared man to a Saptaparna (seven
>       leaved) plant.
> 
>       “Mendicants,” he said, “there are seven Buddhas in every Buddha, and
>       there are _six_ Bhikshus and but one Buddha in each mendicant. What
>       are the _seven_? The seven branches of complete knowledge. What are
>       the _six_? The six organs of sense. What are the five? The five
>       elements of illusive being. And the One which is also ten? He is a
>       true Buddha who develops in him the ten forms of holiness and
>       subjects them all to the One.” Which means that every principle in
>       the Buddha was the highest that could be evolved on this earth;
>       whereas in the case of other men who attain to Nirvâna this is not
>       necessarily the case. Even as a mere human (Manushya) Buddha Gautama
>       was a pattern for all men. But his Arhats were not necessarily so.
> 
>   671 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii., 132.
> 
>   672 “Before one becomes a Buddha he must be a Bodhisattva; before
>       evolving into a Bodhisattva he must be a Dhyâni‐Buddha.... A
>       Bodhisattva is the way and Path to his Father, and thence to the One
>       Supreme Essence” (_Descent of Buddhas_, p. 17, from Âryâsanga). “I
>       am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father
>       but by me” (_St. John_, xiv. 6). The “way” is not the goal. Nowhere
>       throughout the _New Testament_ is Jesus found calling himself God,
>       or anything higher than “a son of God,” the son of a “Father” common
>       to all, synthetically. Paul never said (I. _Tim._, iii. 10), “God
>       was manifest in the flesh,” but “He who was manifested in the flesh”
>       (Revised Edition). While the common herd among the Buddhists—the
>       Burmese especially—regard Jesus as an incarnation of Devadatta, a
>       relative who opposed the teachings of Buddha, the students of
>       Esoteric Philosophy see in the Nazarene Sage a Bodhisattva with the
>       spirit of Buddha Himself in Him.
> 
>   673 I. _Corinth._, xv. 36.
> 
>   674 _Op. cit._, Mandala x., hymn 90.
> 
>   675 Literally, “he who walks [or follows] in the way [or path] of his
>       predecessors.”
> 
>   676 Schmidt, in _Slanong Seetsen_, p. 471, and Schlagintweit, in
>       _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 53, accept these precious things
>       _literally_, enumerating them as “the wheel, the precious stone, the
>       royal consort, the best treasurer, the best horse, the elephant, the
>       best leader.” After this one can little wonder if “besides a Dhyâni‐
>       Buddhi and a Dhyâni‐Bodhisattva” each human Buddha is furnished with
>       “a female companion, a Shakti”—when in truth “Shakti” is simply the
>       Soul‐power, the psychic energy of the God as of the Adept. The
>       “royal consort,” the third of the “seven precious gifts,” very
>       likely led the learned Orientalist into this ludicrous error.
> 
>   677 A Bodhisattva can reach Nirvâna and live, as Buddha did, and after
>       death he can either refuse objective reincarnation or accept and use
>       it at his convenience for the benefit of mankind whom he can
>       instruct in various ways while he remains in the Devachanic regions
>       within the attraction of our earth. But having once reached
>       Paranirvâna or “Nirvâna without remains”—the highest Dharmakâya
>       condition, in which state he remains entirely outside of every
>       earthly condition—he will return no more until the commencement of a
>       new Manvantara, since he has crossed beyond the cycle of births.
> 
>   678 Tulpa is the voluntary incarnation of an Adept into a living body,
>       whether of an adult, child, or new‐born babe.
> 
>   679 Ku‐sum is the triple form of the Nirvâna state and its respective
>       duration in the “cycle of Non‐Being.” The number seven here refers
>       to the seven Rounds of our septenary System.
> 
>   680 _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 52. This same generic use of a name is found
>       among Hindus with that of Shankarâchârya, to take but one instance.
>       All His successors bear his name, but are not reincarnations of Him.
>       So with the “Buddhas.”
> 
>   681 [The words within brackets are supplied to introduce the following
>       statements that are confused and contradictory as they stand, and
>       which H. P. B. had probably intended to elucidate to some slight
>       extent, as they are written two or three times with different
>       sentences following them. The MS. is exceedingly confused, and
>       everything H. P. B. said is here pieced together, the addition above
>       made being marked in brackets to distinguish it from hers.—A. B.]
> 
>   682 King Suddhodana.
> 
>   683 There are several names marked simply by asterisks.
> 
>   684 Shankarâchârya died also at thirty‐two years of age, or rather
>       disappeared from the sight of his disciples, as the legend goes.
> 
>   685 Does “Tiani‐Tsang” stand for Apollonius of Tyana? This is a simple
>       surmise. Some things in the life of that Adept would seem to tally
>       with the hypothesis—others to go against it.
> 
>   686 According to Esoteric teaching Buddha lived one hundred years in
>       reality, though having reached Nirvâna in his eightieth year he was
>       regarded as one dead to the world of the living. See article
>       “Shâkyamuni’s Place in History” in _Five Years of Theosophy_.
> 
>   687 It is a _secret_ rite, pertaining to high Initiation, and has the
>       same significance as the one to which Clement of Alexandria alludes
>       when he speaks of “the token of recognition being in common with us,
>       as by cutting off Christ” (Strom., 13). Schlagintweit wonders what
>       it may be. “The typical representation of a hermit,” he says, “is
>       always that of a man with long, uncut hair and beard.... A rite very
>       often selected, though I am unable to state for what reason, is that
>       of Chod (‘to cut’ or ‘to destroy’) the meaning of which is anxiously
>       kept a profound secret by the Lamas.” (_Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 163.)
> 
>   688 Hlun‐Chub is the divining spirit in man, the highest degree of
>       seership.
> 
>   689 The secret meaning of this sentence is that Karma exercises its sway
>       over the Adept as much as over any other man; “Gods” can escape it
>       as little as simple mortals. The Adept who, having reached the Path
>       and won His Dharmakâya—the Nirvâna from which there is no return
>       until the new grand Kalpa—prefers to use His right of choosing a
>       condition inferior to that which belongs to Him, but that will leave
>       him free to return whenever He thinks it advisable and under
>       whatever personality He may select, must be prepared to take all the
>       chances of failure—possibly—and a lower condition than was His
>       lot—for a certainty—as it is an occult law. Karma alone is absolute
>       justice and infallible in its selections. He who uses his rights
>       with it (Karma) must bear the consequences—if any. Thus Buddha’s
>       first reincarnation was produced by Karma—and it led Him higher than
>       ever; the two following were “out of pity” and * * *.
> 
>   690 The Universe of Brahmâ (Sien‐Chan; Nam‐Kha) is Universal Illusion,
>       or our phenomenal world.
> 
>   691 Âkâsha. It is next to impossible to render the mystic word “Tho‐og”
>       by any other term than “Space,” and yet, unless coined on purpose,
>       no new appellation can render it so well to the mind of the
>       Occultist. The term “Aditi” is also translated “Space,” and there is
>       a world of meaning in it.
> 
>   692 Dang‐ma, a purified soul, and Lha, a freed spirit within a living
>       body; an Adept or Arhat. In the popular opinion in Tibet, a Lha is a
>       disembodied spirit, something similar to the Burmese Nat—only
>       higher.
> 
>   693 Kwan‐yin is a synonym, for in the original another term is used, but
>       the meaning is identical. It is the divine voice of Self, or the
>       “Spirit‐voice” in man, and the same as Vâchîshvara (the “Voice‐
>       deity”) of the Brâhmans. In China, the Buddhist ritualists have
>       degraded its meaning by anthropomorphizing it into a Goddess of the
>       same name, with one thousand hands and eyes, and they call it Kwan‐
>       shai‐yin‐Bodhisat. It is the Buddhist “daïmon”‐voice of Socrates.
> 
>   694 Sangharama is the _sanctum sanctorum_ of an ascetic, a cave or any
>       place he chooses for his meditation.
> 
>   695 Amitâbha Buddha is in this connection the “boundless light” by which
>       things of the subjective world are perceived.
> 
>   696 Esoterically, “the unsurpassingly merciful and enlightened heart,”
>       said of the “Perfect Ones,” the Jîvan‐muktas, collectively.
> 
>   697 These six worlds—seven with us—are the worlds of Nats or Spirits,
>       with the Burmese Buddhists, and the seven higher worlds of the
>       Vedântins.
> 
>   698 Two things entirely distinct from each other. The “faculty is not
>       distinguished from the subject” only on this material plane, while
>       thought generated by our physical brain, one that has never
>       impressed itself at the same time on the spiritual counterpart,
>       whether through the atrophy of the latter or the intrinsic weakness
>       of that thought, can never survive our body; this much is sure.
> 
>   699 _Vedânta Sâra_, translated by Major Jacob, p. 123.
> 
>   700 Aditi is, according to the _Rig Veda_, “the Father and Mother of all
>       the Gods”; and Âkâsha is held by Southern Buddhism as the Root of
>       all, whence everything in the Universe came out, in obedience to a
>       law of motion inherent in it; and this is the Tibetan “Space” (Tho‐
>       og).
> 
>   701 _Mânava‐Dharma‐Shâstra_, i. 6, 7.
> 
>   702 The “God” of Pythagoras, the disciple of the Âryan Sages, is no
>       personal God. Let it be remembered that he taught as a cardinal
>       tenet that there exists a permanent Principle of Unity beneath all
>       forms, changes, and other phenomena of the Universe.
> 
>   703 _Isis Unveiled_, i. xvi.
> 
>   704 _Isis Unveiled_, i. xviii.
> 
>   705 _Isis Unveiled_ i. 58.
> 
>   706 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 59.
> 
>   707 While they are to a great extent identical with those of Esoteric
>       Buddhism, the Secret Doctrine of the East.
> 
>   708 _Parerga_, II. iii. 112; quoted in _Isis Unveiled_, i. 58.
> 
>   709 _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 338, _et seq._
> 
>   710 Prof. Max Müller, in a letter to _The Times_ (April, 1857),
>       maintained most vehemently that Nirvâna meant _annihilation_ in the
>       fullest sense of the word. (_Chips from a German Workshop_, i. 287.)
>       But in 1869, in a lecture before the General Meeting of the
>       Association of German Philologists at Kiel, “he distinctly declares
>       his belief that the Nihilism attributed to Buddha’s teaching forms
>       no part of his doctrine, and that it is wholly wrong to suppose that
>       Nirvâna means annihilation.” (Trubner’s _Amer. and Oriental Lit.
>       Rec._, Oct. 16th, 1869.)
> 
>   711 See the _Kalama Sutta_ of the _Anguttaranikayo_, as quoted in _A
>       Buddhist Catechism_, by H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical
>       Society, pp. 55, 56.
> 
>   712 _Œdipus Ægypt._, II. i. 291.
> 
>   713 Sephir, or Aditi (mystic Space). The Sephiroth, be it understood,
>       are identical with the Hindu Prajâpatis, the Dhyân Chohans of
>       Esoteric Buddhism, the Zoroastrian Amshaspends, and finally with the
>       Elohim—the “Seven Angels of the Presence” of the Roman Catholic
>       Church.
> 
>   714 According to the Eastern idea, the All comes out from the One, and
>       returns to it again. Absolute annihilation is simply unthinkable.
>       Nor can eternal Matter be annihilated. Form may be annihilated: co‐
>       relations may change. That is all. There can be no such thing as
>       annihilation—in the European sense—in the Universe.
> 
>   715 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 289.
> 
>   716 The Secret Law, the “Doctrine of the Heart,” so called in contrast
>       to the “Doctrine of the Eye,” or exoteric Buddhism.
> 
>   717 “Illusive matter in its triple manifestation in the earthly, and the
>       astral or fontal Soul (the body), and the Platonian dual Soul—the
>       rational and the irrational one.”
> 
>   718 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 289.
> 
>   719 _Isis Unveiled_, i. 290.
> 
>   720 It is from the texts of all these works that the Secret Doctrine has
>       been given. The original matter would not make a small pamphlet, but
>       the explanations and notes from the Commentaries and Glossaries
>       might be worked into ten volumes as large as _Isis Unveiled_.
> 
>   721 The monk Della Penna makes considerable fun in his _Memoirs_ (see
>       Markham’s _Tibet_) of certain statements in the Books of Kiu‐te. He
>       brings to the notice of the Christian public “the great mountain
>       160,000 leagues high” (a Tibetan league consisting of five miles) in
>       the Himâlayan Range. “According to their law,” he says, “in the west
>       of this world is an eternal world ... a paradise, and in it a Saint
>       called Hopahma, which means ‘Saint of Splendour and Infinite Light.’
>       This Saint has many disciples who are all Chang‐chub,” which means,
>       he adds in a footnote, “the Spirits of those who, on account of
>       their perfection, do not care to become saints, and train and
>       instruct the bodies of the reborn Lamas ... so that they may help
>       the living.” Which means that the presumably “dead” Yang‐Chhub (not
>       “Chang‐chub”) are simply living Bodhisattvas, some of those known as
>       Bhante (“the Brothers”). As to the “mountain 160,000 leagues high,”
>       the _Commentary_ which gives the key to such statements explains
>       that according to the code used by the writers, “to the west of the
>       ‘Snowy Mountain’ 160 leagues [the cyphers being a blind] from a
>       certain spot and by a direct road, is the Bhante Yul [the country or
>       ‘Seat of the Brothers’], the residence of Mahâ‐Chohan ...” etc. This
>       is the real meaning. The “Hopahma” of Della Penna is—the
>       Mahâ‐Chohan, the Chief.
> 
>   722 In some MSS. notes before us, written by Gelung (priest) Thango‐pa
>       Chhe‐go‐mo, it is said: “The few Roman Catholic missionaries who
>       have visited our land (under protest) in the last century and have
>       repaid our hospitality by turning our sacred literature into
>       ridicule, have shown little discretion and still less knowledge. It
>       is true that the Sacred Canon of the Tibetans, the _Kahgyur_ and
>       _Bstanhgyur_, comprises 1707 distinct works—1083 public and 624
>       secret volumes, the former being composed of 350 and the latter of
>       77 volumes folio. May we humbly invite the good missionaries,
>       however, to tell us when they ever succeeded in getting a glimpse of
>       the last‐named secret folios? Had they even by chance seen them I
>       can assure the Western Pandits that these manuscripts and folios
>       could never be understood even by a born Tibetan without a key (_a_)
>       to their peculiar characters, and (_b_) to their hidden meaning. In
>       our system every description of locality is figurative, every name
>       and word purposely veiled; and one has first to study the mode of
>       deciphering and then to learn the equivalent secret terms and
>       symbols for nearly every word of the religious language. The
>       Egyptian enchorial or hieratic system is child’s play to our
>       sacerdotal puzzles.”
> 
>   723 _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 171.
> 
>   724 “Buddhi” is a Sanskrit term for “discrimination” or intellect (the
>       sixth principle), and “Buddha” is “wise,” “wisdom,” and also the
>       planet Mercury.
> 
>   725 This curious contradiction may be found in _Chinese Buddhism_, pp.
>       171, 273. The reverend author assures his readers that “to the
>       philosophic Buddhists ... Amitâbha Yoshi Fo, and the others are
>       nothing but the signs of ideas” (p. 236). Very true. But so should
>       be all other deific names, such as Jehovah, Allah, etc., and if they
>       are not simply “signs of ideas” this would only show that minds that
>       receive them otherwise are not “philosophic”; it would not at all
>       afford serious proof that there are personal, living Gods of these
>       names in reality.
> 
>   726 The Chinese Amitâbha (Wu‐liang‐sheu) and the Tibetan Amitâbha
>       (Odpag‐med) have now become personal Gods, ruling over and living in
>       the celestial region of Sukhâvatî, or Tushita (Tibetan: Devachan);
>       while Âdi‐Buddhi, of the philosophic Hindu, and Amita Buddha of the
>       philosophic Chinaman and Tibetan, are names for universal, primeval
>       ideas.
> 
>   727 See _Theosophist_ for March, 1882.
> 
>   728 The intimate relation of the twenty‐five Buddhas (Bodhisattvas) with
>       the twenty‐five Tattvas (the Conditioned or Limited) of the Hindus
>       is interesting.
> 
>   729 It is curious to note the great importance given by European
>       Orientalists to the Dalaï Lamas of Lhassa, and their utter ignorance
>       as to the Tda‐shu (or Teshu) Lamas, while it is the latter who began
>       the hierarchical series of Buddha‐incarnations, and are _de facto_
>       the “popes” in Tibet; the Dalaï Lamas are the creations of Nabang‐
>       lob‐Sang, the Tda‐shu Lama, who was Himself the sixth incarnation of
>       Amita, through Tsong Kha‐pa, though very few seem to be aware of
>       that fact.
> 
>   730 The chanting of a Mantra is not a prayer, but rather a magical
>       sentence in which the law of Occult causation connects itself with,
>       and depends on, the will and acts of its singer. It is a succession
>       of Sanskrit sounds, and when its string of words and sentences is
>       pronounced according to the magical formulæ in the _Atharva Veda_,
>       but understood by the few, some Mantras produce an instantaneous and
>       very wonderful effect. In its esoteric sense it contains the Vâch
>       (the “mystic speech”), which resides in the Mantra, or rather in its
>       sounds, since it is according to the vibrations, one way or the
>       other, of ether that the effect is produced. The “sweet singers”
>       were called by that name because they were experts in Mantras. Hence
>       the legend in China that the singing and melody of the Lohans are
>       heard at dawn by the priests from their cells in the monastery of
>       Fang‐Kwang. (See _Biography of Chi‐Kai_ in Tien‐tai‐nan‐tchi.)
> 
>   731 The celebrated Lohan, Mâdhyantika, who converted the king and whole
>       country of Kashmir to Buddhism, sent a body of Lohans to preach the
>       Good Law. He was the sculptor who raised to Buddha the famous statue
>       one hundred feet high, which Hiuen‐Tsaung saw at Dardu, to the north
>       of the Punjab. As the same Chinese traveller mentions a temple ten
>       Li from Peshawur—350 feet round and 850 feet high—which was at his
>       time (A.D. 550) already 850 years old, Koeppen thinks that so far
>       back as 292 B.C. Buddhism was the prevalent religion in the Punjab.
> 
>   732 A title of the Tda‐shu‐Hlum‐po Lama.
> 
>   733 The twelve Nidâwas, called in Tibetan Tin‐brel Chug‐nyi, which are
>       based upon the “Four Truths.”
> 
>   734 The Srotâpatti is one who has attained the _first_ Path of
>       comprehension in the real and the unreal; the Sakridâgâmin is the
>       candidate for one of the higher Initiations: “one who is to receive
>       birth once more;” the Anâgâmin is he who has attained the “third
>       Path,” or literally, “he who will not be reborn again” _unless he so
>       wishes it_, having the option of being reborn in any of the “worlds
>       of the Gods,” or of remaining in Devachan, or of choosing an earthly
>       body with a philanthropic object. An Arhat is one who has reached
>       the highest Path; he may merge into Nirvâna at will, while here on
>       earth.
> 
>   735 [The Pratyeka Buddha stands on the level of the Buddha, but His work
>       for the world has nothing to do with its teaching, and His office
>       has always been surrounded with mystery. The preposterous view that
>       He, at such superhuman height of power, wisdom and love could be
>       selfish, is found in the exoteric books, though it is hard to see
>       how it can have arisen. H. P. B. charged me to correct the mistake,
>       as she had, in a careless moment, copied such a statement
>       elsewhere.—A. B.]
> 
>   736 It is an erroneous idea which makes the Orientalists take literally
>       the teaching of the Mahâyâna School about the three different kinds
>       of bodies, namely, the Prulpa‐ku, the Longehod‐drocpaig‐ku, and the
>       Chos‐ku, as all pertaining to the Nirvânic condition. There are two
>       kinds of Nirvâna: the earthly, and that of the purely disembodied
>       Spirits. These three “bodies” are the three envelopes—all more or
>       less physical—which are at the disposal of the Adept who has entered
>       and crossed the six Pâramitâs, or “Paths” of Buddha. Once He enters
>       upon the seventh, He can return no more to earth. See Cosma, _Jour.
>       As. Soc. Beng._, vii. 142; and Schott, _Buddhismus_, p. 9, who give
>       it otherwise.
> 
>   737 _Vedânta Sâra_, translated by Major Jacob, p. 119.
> 
>   738 _Ibid._, p. 122.
> 
>   739 _Der Buddhismus_, pp. 327, 357, _et seq._, quoted by Schlagintweit.
> 
>   740 _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 41.
> 
>   741 _Jour. of As. Soc. Bengal_, vii. 144, quoted as above.
> 
>   742 _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 44.
> 
>   743 They maintain also the existence of One Absolute pure Nature,
>       Parabrahman; the illusion of everything outside of it; the leading
>       of the individual Soul—a Ray of the “Universal”—into the true nature
>       of existence and things by Yoga alone.
> 
>   744 Nirmânakâya (also Nirvânakâya, vulg.) is the body or Self “with
>       remains,” or the influence of terrestrial attributes, however
>       spiritualized, clinging yet to that Self. An Initiate in Dharmakâya,
>       or in Nirvâna “without remains,” is the Jivanmukta, the Perfect
>       Initiate, who separates his Higher Self entirely from his body
>       during Samâdhi. [It will be noticed that these two words are here
>       used in a sense other than that previously given.—A. B.]
> 
>   745 The “Sacred” Books of Dus‐Kyi Khorlo (“Time Circle”). See _Jour. As.
>       Soc._, ii. 57. These works were abandoned to the Sikkhim Dugpas,
>       from the time of Tsong‐Kha‐pa’s reform.
> 
>   746 _Glossary of Judicial and Revenue Terms_, art. “Yoga,” quoted in
>       _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 47.
> 
>   747 _Buddhism in Tibet_, pp. 47, 48.
> 
>   748 _Buddhism in Tibet_, pp. 63, 64. The objects found in the casket, as
>       enumerated in the exoteric legend, are of course symbolical. They
>       may be found mentioned in the _Kanjur_. They were said to be: (1)
>       two hands joined; (2) a miniature Choten (Stûpa, or reliquary); (3)
>       a talisman with “Om mani padme hum” inscribed on it; (4) a religious
>       book, _Zamatog_ (“a constructed vehicle”).
> 
>   749 _Alterthumskunde_, ii. 1072.
> 
>   750 _Op. cit._, ii. 470.
> 
>   751 Unless one obtains exact information and the right method, one’s
>       visions, however correct and true in Soul‐life, will ever fail to
>       get photographed in our human memory, and certain cells of the brain
>       are sure to play havoc with our remembrances.
> 
>   752 _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 158. The Rev. Joseph Edkins either ignores,
>       or—which is more probable—is utterly ignorant of the real existence
>       of such Schools, and judges by the Chinese travesties of these,
>       calling such Esotericism “heterodox Buddhism.” And so it is, in one
>       sense.
> 
>   753 That country—India—has lost the records of such Schools and their
>       teachings only so far as the general public, and especially the
>       inappreciative Western Orientalists, are concerned. It has preserved
>       them in full in some Mathams (refuges for mystic contemplation). But
>       it may perhaps be better to seek them with, and from, their rightful
>       owners, the so‐called “mythical” Adepts, or Mahâtmâs.
> 
>   754 _Chinese Buddhism_, pp. 155‐159.
> 
>   755 They certainly reject most emphatically the popular theory of the
>       transmigration of human entities or Souls _into_ animals, but not
>       the evolution of men _from_ animals—so far, at least, as their lower
>       principles are concerned.
> 
>   756 It is quite consistent, on the contrary, when explained in the light
>       of the Esoteric Doctrine. The “Western paradise,” or Western heaven,
>       is no fiction located in transcendental space. It is a _bonâ‐fide_
>       locality in the mountains, or, to be more correct, one encircled in
>       a desert within mountains. Hence it is assigned for the residence of
>       those students of Esoteric Wisdom—disciples of Buddha—who have
>       attained the rank of Lohans and Anâgâmins (Adepts). It is called
>       “Western” simply from geographical considerations; and “the great
>       iron mountain girdle” that surrounds the Avitchi, and the seven
>       Lokas that encircle the “Western paradise” are a very exact
>       representation of well‐known localities and things to the Eastern
>       student of Occultism.
> 
>   757 The word is translated by the Orientalists as “true man without a
>       position,” (?) which is very misleading. It simply means the true
>       inner man, or Ego, “Buddha _within_ Buddha” meaning that there was a
>       Gautama _inwardly_ as well as _outwardly_.
> 
>   758 One of the titles of Gautama Buddha in Tibet.
> 
>   759 The “Esoteric” Schools, or sects, of which there are many in China.
> 
>   760 A school of contemplation founded by Hiuen‐Tsang, the traveller,
>       nearly extinct. Fa‐siong‐Tsung means “the School that unveils the
>       inner nature of things.”
> 
>   761 Esoteric, or hidden, teaching of Yoga (Chinese: Yogi‐mi‐kean).
> 
>   762 The “tonsure knife” is made of _meteoric_ iron, and is used for the
>       purpose of cutting off the “vow‐lock,” or hair from the novice’s
>       head during his first ordination. It has a double‐edged blade, is
>       sharp as a razor, and lies concealed within a hollow handle of horn.
>       By touching a spring the blade jerks out like a flash of lightning,
>       and recedes back with the same rapidity. A great dexterity is
>       required in using it without wounding the head of the young Gelung
>       and Gelung‐ma (candidates to become priests and nuns) during the
>       preliminary rites, which are public.
> 
>   763 Chagpa‐Thog‐mad is the Tibetan name of Âryâsanga, the founder of the
>       Yogâchârya or Naljorchodpa School. This Sage and Initiate is said to
>       have been taught “Wisdom” by Maitreya Buddha Himself, the Buddha of
>       the Sixth Race, at Tushita (a celestial region presided over by
>       Him), and as having received from Him the five books of
>       _Champaitehos‐nga_. The Secret Doctrine teaches, however, that he
>       came from Dejung, or Shambhalla, called the “source of happiness”
>       (“wisdom‐acquired”) and declared by some Orientalists to be a
>       “fabulous” place.
> 
>   764 It may not be, perhaps, amiss to remind the reader of the fact that
>       the “mirror” was a part of the symbolism of the Thesmophoria, a
>       portion of the Eleusinian Mysteries; and that it was used in the
>       search for Atmu, the “Hidden One,” or “Self.” In his excellent paper
>       on the above‐named mysteries, Dr. Alexander Wilder of New York says:
>       “Despite the assertion of Herodotus and others that the Bacchic
>       Mysteries were Egyptian, there exists strong probability that they
>       came originally from India, and were Shaivitic or Buddhistical.
>       Kore‐Persep‐honeia was but the goddess Parasu‐pani, or Bhavani, and
>       Zagreus is from Chakra, a country extending from ocean to ocean. If
>       this is a Turanian story we can easily recognise the ‘horns’ as the
>       crescent worn by Lama‐priests, and assume the whole legend [the
>       fable of Dionysus‐Zagreus] to be based on Lama‐succession and
>       transmigration.... The whole story of Orpheus ... has a Hindu ring
>       all through.” The tale of “Lama‐succession and transmigration” did
>       not originate with the Lamas, who date themselves only so far back
>       as the seventh century, but with the Chaldæans and the Brâhmans,
>       still earlier.
> 
>   765 The state of absolute freedom from any sin or desire.
> 
>   766 The state during which an Adept sees the long series of his past
>       births, and lives through all his previous incarnations in this and
>       the other worlds. (See the admirable description in the _Light of
>       Asia_, p. 166, 1884 ed.)
> 
>   767 See _supra_, ii. 188, 189.
> 
>   768 Wilson’s translation, as amended by Fitzedward Hall, i. 40.
> 
>   769 Prâna is in reality the universal Life Principle.
> 
>   770 All the uterine contents, having a direct spiritual connection with
>       their cosmic antetypes, are, on the physical plane, potent objects
>       in Black Magic, and are therefore considered unclean.
> 
>   771 See _supra_, ii. Part I.
> 
>   772 The Solar System or the Earth, as the case may be.
> 
>   773 So are the animals, the plants, and even the minerals. Reichenbach
>       never understood what he learned through his sensitives and
>       clairvoyants. It _is_ the odic, or rather the auric or magnetic
>       fluid which emanates from man, but it is also something more.
> 
>   774 See _supra_, i. 181, for the Vedântic exoteric enumeration.
> 
>   775 See _Lucifer_, January, 1889, “Dialogue upon the Mysteries of After‐
>       Life.”
> 
>   776 See _supra_, i, 626‐629.
> 
>   777 See _supra_, i, 228, _et seq._, and ii. _passim_.
> 
>   778 _Op. cit._, ii, 456, 461, 465 _et seq._
> 
>   779 _Jod‐Hevah_, or male‐female on the terrestrial plane, as invented by
>       the Jews, and now made out to mean Jehovah; but signifying in
>       reality and literally, “giving being” and “receiving life.”
> 
>   780 See _Notice sur le Calendrier_, J. H. Ragon.
> 
>   781 See _supra_, ii. 373; and 152, _et seq._
> 
>   782 See _supra_, ii. 302, _et seq._
> 
>   783 _Op. cit._, ii. 81, 6.
> 
>   784 See Frank’s _Die Kabbala_, p. 314, _et seq._
> 
>   785 _Genesis_, ii. 7.
> 
>   786 _Supra_, i. 147.
> 
>   787 We may refer for confirmation to Origen’s works, who says that “the
>       seven ruling daimons” (genii or planetary rulers) are Michael, the
>       Sun (the lion‐like); the second in order, the Bull, Jupiter or
>       Suriel, etc.; and all these, the “Seven of the Presence,” are the
>       Sephiroth. The Sephirothal Tree is the Tree of the Divine Planets as
>       given by Porphyry, or Porphyry’s Tree, as it is usually called.
> 
>   788 _Supra_, i, 147.
> 
>   789 Esoterically, green, there being no black in the prismatic ray.
> 
>   790 Esoterically, light blue. As a pigment, purple is a compound of red
>       and blue, and in Eastern Occultism blue is the spiritual essence of
>       the colour purple, while red is its material basis. In reality,
>       Occultism makes Jupiter blue because he is the son of Saturn, which
>       is green, and light blue as a prismatic colour contains a great deal
>       of green. Again, the Auric Body will contain much of the colour of
>       the Lower Manas if the man is a material sensualist, just as it will
>       contain much of the darker hue if the Higher Manas has preponderance
>       over the Lower.
> 
>   791 Esoterically, the Sun cannot correspond with the eye, nose, or any
>       other organ, since, as explained, it is no planet, but a central
>       star. It was adopted as a planet by the post‐Christian Astrologers,
>       who had never been initiated. Moreover, the true colour of the Sun
>       is blue, and it appears yellow only owing to the effect of the
>       absorption of vapours (chiefly metallic) by its atmosphere. All is
>       Mâyâ on our Earth.
> 
>   792 Esoterically, indigo, or dark blue, which is the complement of
>       yellow in the prism. Yellow is a simple or primitive colour. Manas
>       being dual in its nature—as is its sidereal symbol, the planet
>       Venus, which is both the morning and evening star—the difference
>       between the higher and the lower principles of Manas, whose essence
>       is derived from the Hierarchy ruling Venus, is denoted by the dark
>       blue and green. Green, the Lower Manas, resembles the colour of the
>       solar spectrum which appears between the yellow and the dark blue,
>       the Higher Spiritual Manas. Indigo is the intensified colour of the
>       heaven or sky, to denote the upward tendency of Manas toward Buddhi,
>       or the heavenly Spiritual Soul. This colour is obtained from the
>       _indigofera tinctoria_, a plant of the highest occult properties in
>       India, much used in White Magic, and occultly connected with copper.
>       This is shown by the indigo assuming a copper lustre, especially
>       when rubbed on any hard substance. Another property of the dye is
>       that it is insoluble in water and even in ether, being lighter in
>       weight than any known liquid. No symbol has ever been adopted in the
>       East without being based upon a logical and demonstrable reason.
>       Therefore Eastern Symbologists, from the earliest ages, have
>       connected the spiritual and the animal minds of man, the one with
>       dark blue (Newton’s indigo), or true blue, free from green; and the
>       other with pure green.
> 
>   793 Esoterically, yellow, because the colour of the Sun is orange, and
>       Mercury now stands next to the Sun in distance, as it does in
>       colour. The planet for which the Sun is a substitute was still
>       nearer the Sun than Mercury now is, and was one of the most secret
>       and highest planets. It is said to have become invisible at the
>       close of the Third Race.
> 
>   794 Esoterically, violet, because, perhaps, violet is the colour assumed
>       by a ray of sunlight when transmitted through a very thin plate of
>       silver, and also because the Moon shines upon the Earth with light
>       borrowed from the Sun, as the human body shines with qualifications
>       borrowed from its double—the aërial man. As the astral shadow starts
>       the series of principles in man, on the terrestrial plane, up to the
>       lower, animal Manas, so the violet ray starts the series of
>       prismatic colours from its end up to green, both being, the one as a
>       principle and the other as a colour, the most refrangible of all the
>       principles and colours. Besides which, there is the same great
>       Occult mystery attached to all these correspondences, both celestial
>       and terrestrial bodies, colours and sounds. In clearer words, there
>       exists the same law of relation between the Moon and the Earth, the
>       astral and the living body of man, as between the violet end of the
>       prismatic spectrum and the indigo and the blue. But of this more
>       anon.
> 
>   795 Magic, _Magia_, means, in its spiritual, secret sense, the “Great
>       Life,” or divine life _in spirit_. The root is _magh_, as seen in
>       the Sanskrit _mahat_, Zend _maz_, Greek _megas_, and Latin _magnus_,
>       all signifying “great.”
> 
>   796 _Philosophumena_, vi. 9.
> 
>   797 _Nous_, _Epinoia_; _Phône_, _Onoma_; _Logismos_, _Enthumêsis_.
> 
>   798 _Philosophumena_, vi. 12.
> 
>   799 See _supra_, _sub voce_.
> 
>   800 _The Great Revelation_ (_Hê Megalê Apophasis_), of which Simon
>       himself is supposed to have been the author.
> 
>   801 Literally, standing opposite each other in rows or pairs.
> 
>   802 _Philosophumena_, vi. 18.
> 
>   803 _Op. cit._, vi. 18.
> 
>   804 _Op. cit._, i. 13.
> 
>   805 _Op. cit._, vi. 17.
> 
>   806 _Op. cit._, i. 5.
> 
>   807 _Philosophumena_, vi. 14.
> 
>   808 At first there are the omphalo‐mesenteric vessels, two arteries and
>       two veins, but these afterwards totally disappear, as does the
>       “vascular area” on the Umbilical Vesicle, from which they proceed.
>       As regards the “Umbilical Vessels” proper, the Umbilical Cord
>       ultimately has entwined around it from right to left the one
>       Umbilical Vein which takes the oxygenated blood from the mother to
>       the Fœtus, and two Hypogastric or Umbilical Arteries which take the
>       used‐up blood from the Fœtus to the Placenta, the contents of the
>       vessels being the reverse of that which prevails after birth. Thus
>       Science corroborates the wisdom and knowledge of ancient Occultism,
>       for in the days of Simon Magus no man, unless an Initiate, knew
>       anything about the circulation of the blood or about Physiology.
>       While this Paper was being printed, I received two small pamphlets
>       from Dr. Jerome A. Anderson, which were printed in 1884 and 1888,
>       and in which is to be found the scientific demonstration of the
>       fœtal nutrition as advanced in Paper I. Briefly, the Fœtus is
>       nourished by osmosis from the Amniotic Fluid and respires by means
>       of the Placenta. Science knows little or nothing about the Amniotic
>       Fluid and its uses. If any one cares to follow up this question, I
>       would recommend Dr. Anderson’s _Remarks on the Nutrition of the
>       Fœtus_. (Wood & Co., New York.)
> 
>   809 _Supra_, vol. ii.
> 
>   810 See Eusebius, _Hist. Eccles._, lib. iii. cap. 26.
> 
>   811 _De Mysteriis_, p. 100, lines 10 to 19; p. 109, fol. 1.
> 
>   812 _De Mysteriis_, p. 290, lines 15 to 18, _et seq._, caps. v. and vii.
> 
>   813 _Ibid._, p. 100, sec. iii, cap. iii.
> 
>   814 See _supra_, i. 34; i. 4, _et seq._; ii. 39, _et seq._, and 625, _et
>       seq._
> 
>   815 The following table lists the wave‐lengths in Millimetres, and the
>       number of vibrations in Trillions, of the various colours.
> 
>       Violet extreme: 406, 759
>       Violet: 423, 709
>       Violet‐Indigo: 439, 683
>       Indigo: 449, 668
>       Indigo‐Blue: 459, 654
>       Blue: 479, 631
>       Blue‐Green: 492, 610
>       Green: 512, 586
>       Green‐Yellow: 532, 564
>       Yellow: 551, 544
>       Yellow‐Orange: 571, 525
>       Orange: 583, 514
>       Orange‐Red: 596, 503
>       Red: 620, 484
>       Red‐extreme: 645, 465
> 
>   816 See _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 273 to 278.
> 
>   817 _Apud Grêbaut Papyrus Orbiney_, p. 101.
> 
>   818 See “Genius,” _Lucifer_, Nov., 1889, p. 227.
> 
>   819 See _Voice of the Silence_, pp. 68 and 94, art. 28, Glossary.
> 
>   820 The references to “Nature’s Finer Forces” which follow, have respect
>       to the eight articles which appeared in the pages of the
>       _Theosophist_ and not to the fifteen essays and the translation of a
>       chapter of the Shivâgama which are contained in the book called
>       _Nature’s Finer Forces_. The _Shivâgama_ in its details is purely
>       Tântric, and nothing but harm can result from any practical
>       following of its precepts. I would most strongly dissuade any
>       student from attempting any of these Hatha Yoga practices, for he
>       will either ruin himself entirely, or throw himself so far back that
>       it will be almost impossible to regain the lost ground in this
>       incarnation. The translation referred to has been considerably
>       expurgated, and even now is hardly fit for publication. It
>       recommends Black Magic of the worst kind, and is the very antipodes
>       of spiritual Râja Yoga. Beware, I say.
> 
>   821 Prâna, on earth at any rate, is thus but a mode of life, a constant
>       cyclic motion from within outwardly and back again, an out‐breathing
>       and in‐breathing of the ONE LIFE, or Jîva, the synonym of the
>       Absolute and Unknowable Deity. Prâna is not absolute life, or Jîva,
>       but its aspect in a world of delusion. In the _Theosophist_, May,
>       1888, p. 478, Prâna is said to be “one stage finer than the gross
>       matter of the earth.”
> 
>   822 Remember that our re‐incarnating Egos are called the Mânasaputras,
>       “Sons of Manas” (or Mahat), Intelligence, Wisdom.
> 
>   823 It is erroneous to call the fourth human principle “Kâma Rûpa.” It
>       is no Rûpa or form at all until after death, but stands for the
>       Kâmic elements in man, his animal desires and passions, such as
>       anger, lust, envy, revenge, etc., the progeny of selfishness and
>       matter.
> 
>   824 Here the world of effects is the Devachanic state, and the world of
>       causes, earth life.
> 
>   825 It is this Kâma Rûpa alone that can _materialize_ in mediumistic
>       séances, which occasionally happens when it is not the Astral Double
>       or Linga Sharîra, of the medium himself which appears. How, then,
>       can this vile bundle of passions and terrestrial lusts, resurrected
>       by, and gaining consciousness only through the organism of the
>       medium, be accepted as a “departed angel” or the Spirit of a once
>       human body? As well say of the microbic pest which fastens on a
>       person, that it is a sweet departed angel.
> 
>   826 This is accomplished in more or less time, according to the degree
>       in which the personality (whose dregs it now is) was spiritual or
>       material. If spirituality prevailed, then the Larva, or Spook, will
>       fade out very soon; but if the personality was very materialistic,
>       the Kâma Rûpa may last for centuries and—in some, though very
>       exceptional cases—even survive with the help of some of its
>       scattered Skandhas, which are all transformed in time into
>       Elementals. See the _Key to Theosophy_, pp. 141 _et seq._, in which
>       work it was impossible to go into details, but where the Skandhas
>       are spoken of as the germs of Karmic effect.
> 
>   827 _Key to Theosophy_, p. 141
> 
>   828 Following _Shivâgama_, the said author enumerates the
>       correspondences in this wise; Âkâsha, Ether, is followed by Vâyu,
>       Gas; Tejas, Heat; Âpas, Liquid; and Prithivî, Solid.
> 
>   829 See Fitz‐Edward Hall’s notes on the _Vishnu Purâna_.
> 
>   830 The pair which we refer to as the One Life, the Root of All, and
>       Âkâsha in its pre‐differentiating period answers to the Brahma
>       (neuter) and Aditi of some Hindus, and stands in the same relation
>       as the Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti of the Vedântins.
> 
>   831 See above, i. diagram, p. 221.
> 
>   832 Anupâdaka, Opapatika in Pâli, means the “parentless,” born without
>       father or mother, from _itself_, as a transformation, _e.g._, the
>       God Brahmâ sprung from the Lotus (the symbol of the Universe) that
>       grows from Vishnu’s navel, Vishnu typifiying eternal and limitless
>       Space, and Brahmâ the Universe and LOGOS; the mythical Buddha is
>       also born from a Lotus.
> 
>   833 See _Theosophist_, February, 1888, p. 276.
> 
>   834 Sœmmerring, _De Acervulo Cerebri_, vol. ii. p. 322.
> 
>   835 In the Greek Eastern Church no child is allowed to go to confession
>       before the age of seven, after which he is considered to have
>       reached the age of reason.
> 
>   836 _De Caus. Ep._, vol xii.
> 
>   837 _Advers. Med._, ii. 322.
> 
>   838 _De Lapillis Glandulæ Pinealis in Quinque Ment Alien_, 1753.
> 
>   839 See “Stray Thoughts on Death and Satan” in the _Theosophist_, vol.
>       iii. No. 1; also “Fragments of Occult Truth,” vols. iii. and iv.
> 
>   840 _Op. cit._, ii. 368, _et seq._
> 
>   841 The essence of the Divine Ego is “pure flame,” an entity to which
>       nothing can be added and from which nothing can be taken; it cannot,
>       therefore, be diminished even by countless numbers of lower minds,
>       detached from it like flames from a flame. This is in answer to an
>       objection by an Esotericist who asked whence was that inexhaustible
>       essence of one and the same Individuality which was called upon to
>       furnish a human intellect for every new personality in which it is
>       incarnated.
> 
>   842 The brain, or thinking machinery, is not only in the head, but, as
>       every physiologist who is not quite a materialist will tell you,
>       every organ in man, heart, liver, lungs, etc., down to every nerve
>       and muscle, has, so to speak, its own distinct brain or thinking
>       apparatus. As our brain has naught to do in the guidance of the
>       collective and individual work of every organ in us, what is that
>       which guides each so unerringly in its incessant functions; that
>       make these struggle, and that too with disease, throws it off and
>       acts, each of them, even to the smallest, not in a clock‐work
>       manner, as alleged by some materialists (for, at the slightest
>       disturbance or breakage the clock stops), but as an entity endowed
>       with instinct? To say it is Nature is to say nothing, if it is not
>       the enunciation of a fallacy; for Nature after all is but a name for
>       these very same functions, the sum of the qualities and attributes,
>       physical, mental, etc., in the universe and man, the total of
>       agencies and forces guided by intelligent laws.
> 
>   843 See _Key to Theosophy_, pp. 147, 148, _et seq._
> 
>   844 Kâma Rûpa, the vehicle of the Lower Manas, is said to dwell in the
>       physical brain, in the five physical senses and in all the sense‐
>       organs of the physical body.
> 
>   845 Tanmâtra means subtle and rudimentary form, the gross type of the
>       finer elements. The five Tanmâtras are really the characteristic
>       properties or qualities of matter and of all the elements; the real
>       spirit of the word is “something” or “merely transcendental,” in the
>       sense of properties or qualities.
> 
>   846 See _Theosophist_, August, 1883, “The Real and the Unreal.”
> 
>   847 As the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_ and the _Occult World_ called
>       Manas the Human Soul, and Buddhi the Spiritual Soul, I have left
>       these terms unchanged in the _Voice_, seeing that it was a book
>       intended for the public.
> 
>   848 In the exoteric teachings of Râja Yoga, Antahkarana is called the
>       inner organ of perception and is divided into four parts: the
>       (lower) Manas, Buddhi (reason), Ahankâra (personality), and Chitta
>       (thinking faculty). It also, together with several other organs,
>       forms a part of Jîva, Soul called also Lingadeh. Esotericists,
>       however, must not be misled by this popular version.
> 
>   849 The Earth, or earth‐life rather, is the only Avîtchi (Hell) that
>       exists for the men of our humanity on this globe. Avîtchi is a
>       state, not a locality, a counterpart of Devachan. Such a state
>       follows the Soul wherever it goes, whether into Kâma Loka, as a
>       semi‐conscious Spook, or into a human body, when reborn to suffer
>       Avîtchi. Our Philosophy recognizes no other Hell.
> 
>   850 See _Voice of the Silence_, p. 97.
> 
>   851 _Loc. cit._
> 
>   852 Read the last footnote on p. 368, vol. ii. of _Isis Unveiled_, and
>       you will see that even profane Egyptologists and men who, like
>       Bunsen, were ignorant of Initiation, were struck by their own
>       discoveries when they found the “Word” mentioned in old papyri.
> 
>   853 See _Theosophist_, vol. iii., October, 1882, p. 13.
> 
>   854 Read pp. 40 and 63 in the _Voice of the Silence_.
> 
>   855 See _Voice of the Silence_, p. viii.
> 
>   856 The following notes were contributed by students and approved by H.
>       P. B.
> 
>   857 See page 444.
> 
>   858 All these “spaces” denote the special magnetic currents, the planes
>       of substance, and the degrees of approach that the consciousness of
>       the Yogî, or Chelâ, performs towards assimilation with the
>       inhabitants of the Lokas.
> 
>   859 [If the Nidânas are read the reverse way, _i.e._, from 12 to 1, they
>       give the evolutionary order.—ED.]
> 
>   860 [_I.e._, an Initiate, the word Adept being used by H. P. B. to cover
>       all grades of Initiation. As above seen, she used the words Mâyâvi
>       Rûpa in more than one sense.—ED.]
>
> — *The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 3 of 4 (Public Domain (Project Gutenberg))*