# The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 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 I.
> 
>                                Cosmogenesis
> 
>                     The Theosophical Publishing House
> 
>                                   London
> 
>                                    1893
> 
> CONTENTS
> 
> Preface To The First Edition.
> Preface To The Third And Revised Edition.
> Introductory.
> Proem: Pages From A Pre‐Historic Record.
> Part I. Cosmic Evolution.
>    Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan”
>       Stanza I.
>       Stanza II.
>       Stanza III.
>       Stanza IV.
>       Stanza V.
>       Stanza VI.
>       Stanza VII.
>    Commentaries On The Seven Stanzas And Their Terms, According To Their
>    Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.
>       Stanza I.
>       Stanza II.
>       Stanza III.
>       Stanza IV.
>       Stanza V.
>       Stanza VI.
>       A Digression.
>          A Few Early Misconceptions Concerning Planets, Rounds, And Man.
>          The Septenary Division In Different Indian Systems.
>          Additional Facts And Explanations Concerning The Globes And The
>          Monads.
>       Stanza VI.—_Continued_.
>       Stanza VII.
>       Summing Up.
>       Extracts From An Eastern Private Commentary, Hitherto Secret.
> Part II. The Evolution Of Symbolism.
>    Section I. Symbolism and Ideographs.
>    Section II. The Mystery Language and Its Keys.
>    Section III. Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.
>    Section IV. Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.
>    Section V. On the Hidden Deity, Its Symbols and Glyphs.
>    Section VI. The Mundane Egg.
>    Section VII. The Days and Nights of Brahmâ.
>    Section VIII. The Lotus, as a Universal Symbol.
>    Section IX. The Moon; Deus Lunus, Phœbe.
>    Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.
>    Section XI. Demon est Deus Inversus.
>    Section XII. The Theogony of the Creative Gods.
>    Section XIII. The Seven Creations.
>    Section XIV. The Four Elements.
>    Section XV. On Kwan‐Shi‐Yin and Kwan‐Yin.
> Part III. Addenda. On Occult And Modern Science.
>    Section I. Reasons for These Addenda.
>    Section II. Modern Physicists are Playing at Blind Man’s Buff.
>       “An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?”
>    Section III. Is Gravitation a Law?
>    Section IV. The Theories of Rotation in Science.
>       Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation.
>       Hypotheses of the Origin of Planets and Comets.
>    Section V. The Masks of Science. Physics Or Metaphysics?
>    Section VI. An Attack on the Scientific Theory of Force by a Man of
>    Science.
>    Section VII. Life, Force, or Gravity.
>    Section VIII. The Solar Theory.
>    Section IX. The Coming Force. Its Possibilities And Impossibilities.
>    Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.
>    Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.
>    Section XII. Scientific and Esoteric Evidence for, and Objections to,
>    the Modern Nebular Theory.
>    Section XIII. Forces—Modes of Motion or Intelligences?
>    Section XIV. Gods, Monads and Atoms.
>    Section XV. Cyclic Evolution and Karma.
>    Section XVI. The Zodiac and its Antiquity.
>    Section XVII. Summary of the Position.
> Footnotes
> 
>                                [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.]
> 
> This Work
> I Dedicate to all True Theosophists,
> In every Country,
> And of every Race,
> For they called it forth, and for them it was recorded.
> 
> PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
> 
> The author—the writer, rather—feels it necessary to apologize for the long
> delay which has occurred in the appearance of this work. It has been
> occasioned by ill‐health and the magnitude of the undertaking. Even the
> two volumes now issued do not complete the scheme, nor do these treat
> exhaustively of the subjects dealt with in them. A large quantity of
> material has already been prepared, dealing with the history of Occultism
> as contained in the lives of the great Adepts of the Âryan Race, and
> showing the bearing of Occult Philosophy upon the conduct of life, as it
> is and as it ought to be. Should the present volumes meet with a
> favourable reception, no effort will be spared to carry out the scheme of
> the work in its entirety.
> 
> This scheme, it must be added, was not in contemplation when the
> preparation of the work was first announced. As originally announced, it
> was intended that _The Secret Doctrine_ should be an amended and enlarged
> version of _Isis Unveiled_. It was, however, soon found that the
> explanations which could be added to those already put before the world,
> in the last‐named and other works dealing with Esoteric Science, were such
> as to require a different method of treatment; and consequently the
> present volumes do not contain, in all, twenty pages extracted from _Isis
> Unveiled_.
> 
> The author does not feel it necessary to ask the indulgence of her readers
> and critics for the many defects of literary style, and the imperfect
> English which may be found in these pages. She is a foreigner, and her
> knowledge of the language was acquired late in life. The English tongue is
> employed because it offers the most widely‐diffused medium for conveying
> the truths which it had become her duty to place before the world.
> 
> These truths are in no sense put forward as a _revelation_; nor does the
> author claim the position of a revealer of mystic lore, now made public
> for the first time in the world’s history. For what is contained in this
> work is to be found scattered throughout thousands of volumes embodying
> the Scriptures of the great Asiatic and early European religions, hidden
> under glyph and symbol, and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil.
> What is now attempted is to gather the oldest tenets together and to make
> of them one harmonious and unbroken whole. The sole advantage which the
> writer has over her predecessors, is that she need not resort to personal
> speculations and theories. For this work is a partial statement of what
> she herself has been taught by more advanced students, supplemented, in a
> few details only, by the results of her own study and observation. The
> publication of many of the facts herein stated has been rendered necessary
> by the wild and fanciful speculations in which many Theosophists and
> students of Mysticism have indulged, during the last few years, in their
> endeavour, as they imagined, to work out a complete system of thought from
> the few facts previously communicated to them.
> 
> It is needless to explain that this book is not the Secret Doctrine in its
> entirety, but a select number of fragments of its fundamental tenets,
> special attention being paid to some facts which have been seized upon by
> various writers, and distorted out of all resemblance to the truth.
> 
> But it is perhaps desirable to state unequivocally that the teachings,
> however fragmentary and incomplete, contained in these volumes, do not
> belong to the Hindû, the Zoroastrian, the Chaldæan, or the Egyptian
> religion, nor to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism or Christianity exclusively. The
> Secret Doctrine is the essence of all these. Sprung from it in their
> origins, the various religious schemes are now made to merge back into
> their original element, out of which every mystery and dogma has grown,
> developed, and become materialized.
> 
> It is more than probable that the book will be regarded by a large section
> of the public as a romance of the wildest kind; for who has ever even
> heard of the Book of Dzyan?
> 
> The writer, therefore, is fully prepared to take all the responsibility
> for what is contained in this work, and even to face the charge of having
> invented the whole of it. That it has many shortcomings she is fully
> aware; all that she claims for it is that, romantic as it may seem to
> many, its logical coherence and consistency entitle this new Genesis to
> rank, at any rate, on a level with the “working hypotheses” so freely
> accepted by Modern Science. Further, it claims consideration, not by
> reason of any appeal to dogmatic authority, but because it closely adheres
> to Nature, and follows the laws of uniformity and analogy.
> 
> The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a
> fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place
> in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic
> truths which are the basis of all religions; to uncover, to some extent,
> the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that
> the Occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of
> modern civilization.
> 
> If this is in any degree accomplished, the writer is content. It is
> written in the service of humanity, and by humanity and the future
> generations it must be judged. Its author recognizes no inferior court of
> appeal. Abuse she is accustomed to; calumny she is daily acquainted with;
> at slander she smiles in silent contempt.
> 
> _De minimis non curat lex._
> 
> H. P. B.
> 
> LONDON, _October, 1888_.
> 
> PREFACE TO THE THIRD AND REVISED EDITION.
> 
> In preparing this edition for the press, we have striven to correct minor
> points of detail in literary form, without touching at all more important
> matters. Had H. P. Blavatsky lived to issue the new edition, she would
> doubtless have corrected and enlarged it to a very considerable extent.
> That this is not done is one of the many minor losses caused by the one
> great loss.
> 
> Awkward phrases, due to imperfect knowledge of English, have been
> corrected; most of the quotations have been verified, and exact references
> given—a work involving great labour, as the references in the previous
> editions were often very loose; a uniform system of transliteration for
> Sanskrit words has been adopted. Rejecting the form most favoured by
> Western Orientalists as being misleading to the general reader—we have
> given to the consonants not present in our English alphabet combinations
> that approximately express their sound‐values, and we have carefully
> inserted quantities, wherever they occur, on the vowels. In a few
> instances we have incorporated notes in the text, but this has been very
> sparingly done, and only when they obviously formed part of it.
> 
> We have added a copious Index for the assistance of students, and have
> bound it separately, so that reference to it may be facilitated. For the
> great labour in this we, and all students, are the debtors of Mr. A. J.
> Faulding.
> 
> ANNIE BESANT.
> G. R. S. MEAD.
> 
> LONDON, 1893.
> 
> INTRODUCTORY.
> 
>     Gently to hear, kindly to judge.
>     SHAKESPEARE.
> 
> Since the appearance of Theosophical literature in England, it has become
> customary to call its teachings “Esoteric Buddhism.” And, having become a
> habit—as an old proverb based on daily experience has it—“Error runs down
> an inclined plane, while Truth has to laboriously climb its way up hill.”
> 
> Old truisms are often the wisest. The human mind can hardly remain
> entirely free from bias, and decisive opinions are often formed before a
> thorough examination of a subject from all its aspects has been made. This
> is said with reference to the prevailing double mistake (_a_) of limiting
> Theosophy to Buddhism; and (_b_) of confounding the tenets of the
> religious philosophy preached by Gautama, the Buddha, with the doctrines
> broadly outlined in _Esoteric Buddhism_. Any thing more erroneous than
> this could hardly be imagined. It has enabled our enemies to find an
> effective weapon against Theosophy, because, as an eminent Pâli scholar
> very pointedly expressed it, there was in the volume named “neither
> Esotericism nor Buddhism.” The esoteric truths, presented in Mr. Sinnett’s
> work, ceased to be esoteric from the moment they were made public; nor did
> the book contain the religion of Buddha, but simply a few tenets from a
> hitherto hidden teaching, which are now explained and supplemented by many
> more in the present volumes. And even the latter, though giving out many
> fundamental tenets from the SECRET DOCTRINE of the East, raise but a small
> corner of the dark veil. For no one, not even the greatest living Adept,
> would be permitted to, or could—even if he would—give out promiscuously to
> a mocking, unbelieving world that which has been so effectually concealed
> from it for long æons and ages.
> 
> _Esoteric Buddhism_ was an excellent work with a very unfortunate title,
> though it meant no more than does the title of this work, THE SECRET
> DOCTRINE. It proved unfortunate, because people are always in the habit of
> judging things by their appearance rather than by their meaning, and
> because the error has now become so universal, that even most of the
> Fellows of the Theosophical Society have fallen victims to the same
> misconception. From the first, however, protests were raised by Brâhmans
> and others against the title; and, in justice to myself, I must add that
> _Esoteric Buddhism_ was presented to me as a completed volume, and that I
> was entirely unaware of the manner in which the author intended to spell
> the word “Budh‐ism.”
> 
> This has to be laid directly at the door of those who, having been the
> first to bring the subject under public notice, neglected to point out the
> difference between “Buddhism”—the religious system of ethics preached by
> the Lord Gautama, and so named from his title of _Buddha_, the
> “Enlightened”—and “Budhism,” from _Budha_, Wisdom, or Knowledge (Vidyâ),
> the faculty of cognizing, from the Sanskrit root _Budh_, to know. We
> Theosophists of India are ourselves the real culprits, although, at the
> time, we did our best to correct the mistake.(1) To avoid this deplorable
> misnomer was easy; the spelling of the word had only to be altered, and by
> common consent both pronounced and written “Budhism,” instead of
> “Buddhism.” Nor is the latter term correctly spelt and pronounced, as it
> ought to be called, in English, Buddhaïsm, and its votaries “Buddhaïsts.”
> 
> This explanation is absolutely necessary at the beginning of a work like
> the present. The Wisdom‐Religion is the inheritance of all the nations,
> the world over, in spite of the statement made in _Esoteric Buddhism_(2)
> that “two years ago (_i.e._, in 1883), neither I, _nor any other European
> living_, knew the alphabet of the Science, here for the first time put
> into a scientific shape,” etc. This error must have crept in through
> inadvertence. The present writer knew all that is “divulged” in _Esoteric
> Buddhism_, and much more, _many years_ before it became her duty (in 1880)
> to impart a small portion of the Secret Doctrine to two _European_
> gentlemen, one of whom was the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_; and surely
> the present writer has the undoubted, though to her, rather equivocal,
> privilege of being a European by birth and education. Moreover, a
> considerable part of the philosophy expounded by Mr. Sinnett was taught in
> America, even before _Isis Unveiled_ was published, to two Europeans and
> to my colleague, Colonel H. S. Olcott. Of the three teachers the latter
> gentleman has had, the first was a Hungarian Initiate, the second an
> Egyptian, the third a Hindû. As permitted, Colonel Olcott has given out
> some of this teaching in various ways; if the other two have not, it has
> been simply because they were not allowed, their time for public work
> having not yet come. But for others it has, and the appearance of Mr.
> Sinnett’s several interesting books is a visible proof of the fact.
> Moreover, it is above everything important to keep in mind that no
> Theosophical book acquires the least additional value from pretended
> authority.
> 
> Âdi, or Âdhi Budha, the One, or the First, and Supreme Wisdom, is a term
> used by Âryâsanga in his secret treatises, and now by all the mystic
> Northern Buddhists. It is a Sanskrit term, and an appellation given by the
> earliest Âryans to the Unknown Deity; the word “Brahmâ” not being found in
> the _Vedas_ and the early works. It means the Absolute Wisdom, and
> Âdibhûta is translated by Fitzedward Hall, “the primeval uncreated cause
> of all.” Æons of untold duration must have elapsed, before the epithet of
> Buddha was so humanized, so to speak, as to allow of the term being
> applied to mortals, and finally appropriated to one whose unparalleled
> virtues and knowledge caused him to receive the title of the “Buddha of
> Wisdom Unmoved.” _Bodha_ means the innate possession of divine intellect
> or understanding; _Buddha_, the acquirement of it by personal efforts and
> merit; while _Buddhi_ is the faculty of cognizing, the channel through
> which divine knowledge reaches the Ego, the discernment of good and evil,
> also divine conscience, and the Spiritual Soul, which is the vehicle of
> Âtmâ. “When Buddhi absorbs our Ego‐tism (destroys it) with all its
> Vikâras, Avalokiteshvara becomes manifested to us, and Nirvâna, or Mukti,
> is reached,” Mukti being the same as Nirvana, _i.e._, freedom from the
> trammels of Mâyâ or Illusion. _Bodhi_ is likewise the name of a particular
> state of trance‐condition, called Samâdhi, during which the subject
> reaches the culmination of spiritual knowledge.
> 
> Unwise are those who, in their blind and, in our age, untimely hatred of
> Buddhism, and, by reäction, of Budhism, deny its esoteric teachings, which
> are those also of the Brâhmans, simply because the name suggests what to
> them, as Monotheists, are noxious doctrines. _Unwise_ is the correct term
> to use in their case. For in this age of crass and illogical materialism,
> the Esoteric Philosophy alone is calculated to withstand the repeated
> attacks on all and everything man holds most dear and sacred in his inner
> spiritual life. The true philosopher, the student of Esoteric Wisdom,
> entirely loses sight of personalities, dogmatic beliefs and special
> religions. Moreover, Esoteric Philosophy reconciles all religions, strips
> every one of its outward human garments, and shows the root of each to be
> identical with that of every other great religion. It proves the necessity
> of a Divine Absolute Principle in Nature. It denies Deity no more than it
> does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor
> Deity as the absolute and abstract _Ens_. It only refuses to accept any of
> the gods of the so‐called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in
> his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the
> Ever‐Unknowable. Furthermore, the records we mean to place before the
> reader embrace the esoteric tenets of the whole world since the beginning
> of our humanity, and Buddhistic Occultism occupies therein only its
> legitimate place, and no more. Indeed, the secret portions of the _Dan_ or
> _Janna_ (_Dhyâna_)(3) of Gautama’s metaphysics—grand as they appear to one
> unacquainted with the tenets of the Wisdom‐Religion of antiquity—are but a
> very small portion of the whole. The Hindû reformer limited his public
> teachings to the purely moral and physiological aspect of the Wisdom‐
> Religion, to ethics and man alone. Things “unseen and incorporeal,” the
> mysteries of Being outside our terrestrial sphere, the great Teacher left
> entirely untouched in his public lectures, reserving the Hidden Truths for
> a select circle of his Arhats. The latter received their Initiation at the
> famous Saptaparna Cave (the Sattapanni of Mahâvansa) near Mount Baibhâr
> (the Webhâra of the Pâli MSS.). This cave was in Râjâgriha, the ancient
> capital of Magadha, and was the Cheta Cave of Fa‐hian, as is rightly
> suspected by some archaeologists.(4)
> 
> Time and human imagination made short work of the purity and philosophy of
> these teachings, once that they were transplanted from the secret and
> sacred circle of the Arhats, during the course of their work of
> proselytism, into a soil less prepared for metaphysical conceptions than
> India; _i.e._, once they were transferred into China, Japan, Siam, and
> Burmah. How the pristine purity of these grand revelations was dealt with
> may be seen in studying some of the so‐called “esoteric” Buddhist schools
> of antiquity in their modern garb, not only in China and other Buddhist
> countries in general, but even in not a few schools of Tibet, which have
> been left to the care of uninitiated Lamas and Mongolian innovators.
> 
> Thus the reader is asked to bear in mind the very important difference
> between _orthodox_ Buddhism—_i.e._, the public teachings of Gautama, the
> Buddha—and his esoteric Budhism. His Secret Doctrine, however, differed in
> no wise from that of the initiated Brahmans of his day. The Buddha was a
> child of Âryan soil, a born Hindû, a Kshatriya and a disciple of the
> Twice‐born (the initiated Brâhmans) or Dvîjas. His teachings, therefore,
> could not be different from their doctrines, for the whole Buddhist reform
> consisted merely in giving out a portion of that which had been kept
> secret from every man outside of the “enchanted” circle of ascetics and
> Temple‐Initiates. Unable, owing to his pledges, to teach _all_ that had
> been imparted to him, though the Buddha taught a philosophy built upon the
> ground‐work of the true esoteric knowledge, he gave to the world only its
> outward material body and kept its soul for his Elect. Many Chinese
> scholars among Orientalists have heard of the “Soul‐Doctrine.” None seem
> to have understood its real meaning and importance.
> 
> That doctrine was preserved secretly—too secretly, perhaps—within the
> sanctuary. The mystery that shrouded its chief dogma and
> aspiration—Nirvâna—has so tried and irritated the curiosity of those
> scholars who have studied it, that, unable to solve it logically and
> satisfactorily by untying its Gordian knot, they have cut it through by
> declaring that Nirvâna means _absolute annihilation_.
> 
> Toward the end of the first quarter of this century a distinct class of
> literature appeared in the world, which with every year became more
> defined in its tendency. Being based, _soi‐disant_, on the scholarly
> researches of Sanskritists and Orientalists in general, it was considered
> scientific. Hindû, Egyptian, and other ancient religions, myths, and
> emblems were made to yield anything the symbologist wanted them to yield,
> and thus often the rude _outward_ form was given out in place of the inner
> meaning. Works, most remarkable for their ingenious deductions and
> speculations, _circulo vicioso_—foregone conclusions generally taking the
> place of premisses in the syllogisms of more than one Sanskrit and Pâli
> scholar—appeared rapidly in succession, over‐flooding the libraries with
> dissertations on phallic and sexual worship rather than on real symbology,
> and each contradicting the other.
> 
> This is the true reason, perhaps, why the outline of a few fundamental
> truths from the Secret Doctrine of the Archaic Ages is now permitted to
> see the light, after long millenniums of the most profound silence and
> secrecy. I say advisedly “a _few_ truths,” because that which must remain
> unsaid could not be contained in a hundred such volumes, nor could it be
> imparted to the present generation of Sadducees. But even the little that
> is now given is better than complete silence upon these vital truths. The
> world of to‐day, in its mad career towards the unknown, which the
> Physicist is too ready to confound with the unknowable, whenever the
> problem eludes his grasp, is rapidly progressing on the reverse plane to
> that of spirituality. It has now become a vast arena, a true valley of
> discord and of eternal strife, a necropolis, wherein lie buried the
> highest and the most holy aspirations of our Spirit‐Soul. That soul
> becomes with every new generation more paralyzed and atrophied. The
> “amiable infidels and accomplished profligates” of Society, spoken of by
> Greeley, care little for the revival of the _dead_ sciences of the past;
> but there is a fair minority of earnest students who are entitled to learn
> the few truths that may be given to them _now_; and now much more than ten
> years ago, when _Isis Unveiled_ appeared, or even when the later attempts
> to explain the mysteries of esoteric science were published.
> 
> One of the greatest and perhaps the most serious objection to the
> correctness and reliability of the whole work will be the preliminary
> Stanzas. How can the statements contained in them be verified? True,
> though a great portion of the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Mongolian works
> quoted in the present volumes is known to some Orientalists, yet the chief
> work—that one from which the Stanzas are given—is not in the possession of
> European Libraries. THE BOOK OF DZYAN (or DZAN) is utterly unknown to our
> Philologists, or at any rate was never heard of by them under its present
> name. This is, of course, a great drawback to those who follow the methods
> of research prescribed by official Science; but to students of Occultism,
> and to every genuine Occultist, this will be of little moment. The main
> body of the doctrines given, however, is found scattered throughout
> hundreds and thousands of Sanskrit MSS., some already
> translated—disfigured in their interpretations, as usual—others still
> waiting their turn. Every scholar, therefore, has an opportunity of
> verifying the statements herein made, and of checking most of the
> quotations. A few new facts, _new_ to the profane Orientalist only, and
> passages quoted from the Commentaries will be found difficult to trace.
> Several of the teachings also have hitherto been transmitted orally, yet
> even these in every instance are hinted at in the almost countless volumes
> of Brâhmanical, Chinese and Tibetan temple‐literature.
> 
> However it may be, and whatsoever is in store for the writer through
> malevolent criticism, one fact is quite certain. The members of several
> esoteric schools—the seat of which is beyond the Himâlayas, and whose
> ramifications may be found in China, Japan, India, Tibet, and even in
> Syria, and also South America—claim to have in their possession the _sum
> total_ of sacred and philosophical works in MSS. and print, all the works,
> in fact, that have ever been written, in whatever language or character,
> since the art of writing began, from the ideographic hieroglyphs down to
> the alphabet of Cadmus and the Devanâgari.
> 
> It has been constantly claimed that, ever since the destruction of the
> Alexandrian Library,(5) every work of a character that might lead the
> profane to the ultimate discovery and comprehension of some of the
> mysteries of the Secret Science, owing to the combined efforts of the
> members of these Brotherhoods, has been diligently searched for. It is
> added, moreover, by those who know, that once found all such works were
> destroyed, save three copies of each which were preserved and safely
> stored away. In India, the last of these precious manuscripts were secured
> and hidden during the reign of the Emperor Akbar.
> 
> Prof. Max Müller shows that no bribes or threats of Akbar could extort the
> original text of the _Vedas_ from the Brâhmans, and yet boasts that
> European Orientalists have it.(6) That Europe has the _complete text_ is
> exceedingly doubtful, and the future may have very disagreeable surprises
> in store for the Orientalists.
> 
> It is maintained, furthermore, that every sacred book of this kind, the
> text of which was not sufficiently veiled in symbolism, or which had any
> direct references to the ancient mysteries, was first carefully copied in
> cryptographic characters, such as to defy the art of the best and
> cleverest palæographer, and then destroyed to the last copy. During
> Akbar’s reign, some fanatical courtiers, displeased at the Emperor’s
> sinful prying into the religions of the infidels, themselves helped the
> Brâhmans to conceal their MSS. Such was Badáoní, who had an _undisguised
> horror_ of Akbar’s mania for idolatrous religions.
> 
> Badáoní, in his _Muntakhab_ at _Tawarikh_, writes:
> 
>     As they [the Shramana and Brâhmans] surpass other learned men in
>     their treatises on morals and on physical and religious sciences,
>     and reach a high degree in their _knowledge of the future_, in
>     spiritual power, and human perfection, they brought proofs based
>     on reason and testimony, ... and inculcated their doctrines so
>     firmly ... that no man ... could now raise a doubt in his Majesty
>     even if mountains were to crumble to dust, or the heavens were to
>     tear asunder.... His Majesty relished inquiries into the sects of
>     these infidels, who cannot be counted, so numerous they are, and
>     who have no end of _revealed books_.(7)
> 
> This work “was kept secret and, was not published till the reign of
> Jahángír.”
> 
> Moreover in all the large and wealthy Lamasaries, there are subterranean
> crypts and cave‐libraries, cut in the rock, whenever the Gonpa and
> Lhakhang are situated in the mountains. Beyond the Western Tsaydam, in the
> solitary passes of Kuen‐lun there are several such hiding‐places. Along
> the ridge of Altyn‐tag, whose soil no European foot has ever trodden so
> far, there exists a certain hamlet, lost in a deep gorge. It is a small
> cluster of houses, a hamlet rather than a monastery, with a poor‐looking
> temple in it, and one old Lama, a hermit, living near by to watch it.
> Pilgrims say that the subterranean galleries and halls under it contain a
> collection of books, the number of which, according to the accounts given,
> is too large to find room even in the British Museum.
> 
> According to the same tradition the now desolate regions of the waterless
> land of Tarim—a veritable wilderness in the heart of Turkestan—were in
> days of old covered with flourishing and wealthy cities. At present, a few
> verdant oases only relieve its dread solitude. One such, carpeting the
> sepulchre of a vast city buried under the sandy soil of the desert,
> belongs to no one, but is often visited by Mongolians and Buddhists. The
> tradition also speaks of immense subterranean abodes, of large corridors
> filled with tiles and cylinders. It may be an idle rumour, and it may be
> an actual fact.
> 
> All this will very likely provoke a smile of doubt. But before the reader
> rejects the truthfulness of the reports, let him pause and reflect over
> the following well‐known facts. The collective researches of Orientalists,
> and especially of late years the labours of students of Comparative
> Philology and the Science of Religion, have enabled them to ascertain that
> an incalculable number of MSS., and even of printed works _known to have
> existed, are now to be no more found_. They have disappeared without
> leaving the slightest trace behind them. Were they works of no importance
> they might, in the natural course of time, have been left to perish, and
> their very names would have been obliterated from human memory. But this
> is not so, for, as now ascertained, most of them contained the true keys
> to works still extant, and now _entirely incomprehensible_, for the
> greater portion of their readers, _without these additional volumes of
> commentaries and explanations_.
> 
> Such, for instance, are the works of Lao‐tse, the predecessor of
> Confucius. He is said to have written nine hundred and thirty books on
> ethics and religions, and seventy on magic, _one thousand_ in all. His
> great work, however, the _Tao‐te‐King_, the _heart_ of his doctrine and
> the sacred scripture of the _Tao‐sse_, has in it, as Stanislas Julien
> shows, only “about 5,000 words,”(8) hardly a dozen of pages; yet Professor
> Max Müller finds that “the text is unintelligible without commentaries, so
> that M. Julien had to consult more than sixty commentators for the purpose
> of his translation, the earliest going back as far as the year 163 B.C.”,
> and _not earlier_, as we see. During the four centuries and a half that
> preceded this “earliest” of the commentators there was ample time to veil
> the true Lao‐tse doctrine from all but his initiated priests. The
> Japanese, among whom are now to be found the most learned of the priests
> and followers of Lao‐tse, simply laugh at the blunders and hypotheses of
> European Chinese scholars; and tradition affirms that the commentaries to
> which our Western Sinologues have access are not the real _occult_
> records, but intentional veils, and that the true commentaries, as well as
> almost all the texts, have long _disappeared_ from the eyes of the
> profane.
> 
> Of the works of Confucius we read:
> 
>     If we turn to China, we find that the religion of Confucius is
>     founded on the Five _King_ and the Four _Shu_ books—in themselves
>     of considerable extent and surrounded by voluminous Commentaries,
>     without which even the most learned scholars would not venture to
>     fathom _the depth_ of their sacred canon.(9)
> 
> But they have not fathomed it; and this is the complaint of the
> Confucianists, as a very learned member of that body, in Paris, complained
> in 1881.
> 
> If our scholars turn to the ancient literature of the Semitic religions,
> to the Scriptures of Chaldea, the elder sister and instructress, if not
> the fountain‐head of the Mosaic Bible, the basis and starting‐point of
> Christianity, what do they find? To perpetuate the memory of the ancient
> religions of Babylon, to record the vast cycle of astronomical
> observations of the Chaldean Magi, to justify the tradition of their
> splendid and preëminently occult literature, what now remains? Only a few
> fragments, which are _said to be_ by Berosus.
> 
> These, however, are almost valueless, even as a clue to the character of
> what has disappeared, for they passed through the hands of his Reverence,
> the Bishop of Cæsarea—that self‐constituted censor and editor of the
> sacred records of other men’s religions—and they doubtless to this day
> bear the mark of his eminently veracious and trustworthy hand. For what is
> the history of this treatise on the once grand religion of Babylon?
> 
> It was written in Greek for Alexander the Great, by Berosus, a priest of
> the temple of Belus, from the astronomical and chronological records
> preserved by the priests of that temple—records covering a period of
> 200,000 years—and is now lost. In the first century B.C. Alexander
> Polyhistor made a series of extracts from it, _which are also lost_.
> Eusebius (270‐340 A.D.) used these extracts in writing his _Chronicon_.
> The points of resemblance—almost of identity—between the Jewish and the
> Chaldean scriptures,(10) made the latter most dangerous to Eusebius, in
> his _rôle_ of defender and champion of the new faith which had adopted the
> former scriptures and together with them an absurd chronology.
> 
> Now it is pretty certain that Eusebius did not spare the Egyptian
> synchronistic tables of Manetho—so much so that Bunsen(11) charges him
> with mutilating history most unscrupulously, and Socrates, a historian of
> the fifth century, and Syncellus, vice‐patriarch of Constantinople in the
> beginning of the eighth, denounce him as the most daring and desperate
> forger. Is it likely, then, that he dealt more tenderly with the Chaldean
> records, which were already menacing the new religion, so rashly accepted?
> 
> So that, with the exception of these more than doubtful fragments, the
> entire Chaldean sacred literature has disappeared from the eyes of the
> profane as completely as the lost Atlantis. A few facts that were
> contained in the Berosian History are given later on, and may throw great
> light on the true origin of the Fallen Angels, personified by Bel and the
> Dragon.
> 
> Turning now to the oldest specimen of Âryan literature, the _Rig Veda_,
> the student if he strictly follows in this the data furnished by the
> Orientalists themselves, will find that although the _Rig Veda_ contains
> only about 10,580 verses, or 1,028 hymns, yet in spite of the _Brâhmanas_
> and the mass of glosses and commentaries, it is not understood correctly
> to this day. Why is this so? Evidently because the _Brâhmanas_, “the
> scholastic and oldest treatises on the primitive hymns,” _themselves
> require a key_, which the Orientalists have failed to secure.
> 
> What, again, do the scholars say of Buddhist literature? Do they possess
> it in its completeness? Assuredly not. Notwithstanding the 325 volumes of
> the _Kanjur_ and _Tanjur_ of the Northern Buddhists, each volume, we are
> told, “weighing from four to five pounds,” nothing, in truth, is known of
> real Lamaïsm. Yet the sacred canon is said in the _Saddharmâlankâra_(12)
> to contain 29,368,000 letters, or, exclusive of treatises and
> commentaries, five or six times the amount of the matter contained in the
> _Bible_, which, as Professor Max Müller states, rejoices in only 3,567,180
> letters. Notwithstanding, then, these 325 volumes (in reality there are
> 333, the _Kanjur_ comprising 108, and _Tanjur_ 225 volumes), “the
> translators, instead of supplying us with correct versions, have
> interwoven them with their own commentaries, for the purpose of justifying
> the dogmas of their several schools.”(13) Moreover, “according to a
> tradition preserved by the Buddhist schools, both of the South and of the
> North, the sacred Buddhist Canon comprised originally 80,000 or 84,000
> tracts, but most of them were lost, so that there remained but 6,000”—as
> the Professor tells his audience. Lost, as usual—for Europeans. But who
> can be quite sure that they are likewise lost for Buddhists and Brâhmans?
> 
> Considering the reverence of the Buddhists for every line written upon
> Buddha and the Good Law, the loss of nearly 76,000 tracts does seem
> miraculous. Had it been _vice versâ_, every one acquainted with the
> natural course of events would subscribe to the statement that, of these
> 76,000, 5,000 or 6,000 treatises _might have been_ destroyed during the
> persecutions in, and emigrations from, India. But as it is well
> ascertained that the Buddhist Arhats began their religious exodus, for the
> purpose of propagating the new faith beyond Kashmir and the Himâlayas, as
> early as the year 300 before our era,(14) and reached China in the year 61
> A.D.,(15) when Kashyapa, at the invitation of the Emperor Ming‐ti, went
> there to acquaint the “Son of Heaven” with the tenets of Buddhism, it does
> seem strange to hear the Orientalists speaking of such a loss as though it
> were really possible. They do not seem to allow for one moment the
> possibility that the texts may be lost only for the West and for
> themselves, or that the Asiatic people should have the unparalleled
> boldness to keep their most sacred records out of the reach of foreigners,
> thus refusing to deliver them to the profanation and misuse even of races
> so “vastly superior” to themselves.
> 
> Judging by the expressed regrets and numerous confessions of almost every
> one of the Orientalists,(16) the public may feel sufficiently sure, (_a_)
> that the students of ancient religions have indeed very few data upon
> which to build such final conclusions as they generally do about the old
> faiths, and (_b_) that such lack of data does not in the least prevent
> them from dogmatizing. One would imagine that, thanks to the numerous
> records of the Egyptian theogony and mysteries, preserved in the classics
> and in a number of ancient writers, the rites and dogmas of Pharaonic
> Egypt, at least, ought to be well understood; better, at any rate, than
> the too abstruse philosophies and Pantheism of India, of whose religion
> and language Europe had hardly any idea before the beginning of the
> present century. Along the Nile and on the face of the whole country,
> there stand to this hour, yearly and daily exhumed, ever fresh relics
> which eloquently tell their own history. Still it is not so. The learned
> Oxford Philologist himself confesses the truth by saying:
> 
>     We see still standing the pyramids, and the ruins of temples and
>     labyrinths, their walls covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions,
>     and with the strange pictures of gods and goddesses. On rolls of
>     papyrus, which seem to defy the ravages of time, we have even
>     fragments of what may be called the sacred books of the Egyptians.
>     Yet, though much has been deciphered in the ancient records of the
>     mysterious race, the mainspring of the religion of Egypt and the
>     original intention of its ceremonial worship are far from being
>     fully disclosed to us.(17)
> 
> Here again the mysterious hieroglyphic documents remain, but the keys by
> which alone they become intelligible have disappeared.
> 
> In fact so little acquainted are our greatest Egyptologists with the
> funerary rites of the Egyptians and the outward marks of the difference of
> sex on the mummies, that it has led to the most ludicrous mistakes. Only a
> year or two ago, one of this kind was discovered at Boulaq, Cairo. The
> mummy of what was considered the wife of an unimportant Pharaoh, has,
> thanks to an inscription found on an amulet hung round its neck, turned
> out to be that of Sesostris—the greatest King of Egypt!
> 
> Nevertheless, having found that “there is a natural connection between
> language and religion”; and that “there was a _common_ Âryan religion
> before the separation of the Âryan race; a _common_ Semitic religion
> before the separation of the Semitic race; and a _common_ Turanic religion
> before the separation of the Chinese and the other tribes belonging to the
> Turanian class”; having, in fact, discovered only “three ancient centres
> of religion” and “three centres of language”; and though as entirely
> ignorant of those primitive religions and languages as of their origin—the
> Professor does not hesitate to declare “that a truly _historical basis_
> for a scientific treatment of the principal religions of the world” has
> been gained!
> 
> A “scientific treatment” of a subject is no guarantee for its “historical
> basis”; and with such scarcity of data on hand, no Philologist, even among
> the most eminent, is justified in giving out his own conclusions for
> _historical facts_. No doubt, the eminent Orientalist has thoroughly
> proved to the world’s satisfaction that, according to the phonetic rules
> of Grimm’s law, Odin and Buddha are two different personages, quite
> distinct from each other, and has proved it _scientifically_. When,
> however, he takes the opportunity of saying in the same breath that Odin
> “was worshipped as the supreme deity during a period long anterior to the
> age of the _Veda_ and of Homer,”(18) he has not the slightest “historical
> basis” for it, but makes _history_ and _fact_ subservient to his own
> conclusions, which may be very “scientific” in the sight of Oriental
> scholars, but yet very wide of the mark of actual truth. The conflicting
> views of the various eminent Philologists and Orientalists, from Martin
> Haug down to Prof. Max Müller himself, on the subject of chronology, in
> the case of the _Vedas_, are an evident proof that the statement has no
> “historical” basis to stand upon, “internal evidence” being very often a
> Jack‐o’‐lantern, instead of a safe beacon to follow. Nor has the Science
> of modern Comparative Mythology any better argument to bring forward to
> crush the contention of those learned writers who have insisted for the
> last century or so that there must have been “fragments of a primeval
> revelation, granted to the ancestors of the whole race of mankind ...
> preserved in the temples of Greece and Italy.” For this is what all the
> Eastern Initiates and Pandits have been proclaiming to the world from time
> to time. And while a prominent Singhalese priest assured the writer that
> it was well known that the most important tracts, belonging to the
> Buddhist sacred canon, were stored away in _countries and places
> inaccessible to the European Pandits_, the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî,
> the greatest Sanskritist of his day in India, assured some members of the
> Theosophical Society of the same fact with regard to ancient Brâhmanical
> works. When told that Professor Max Müller had declared to the audiences
> of his _Lectures_ that the theory “_that there was a primeval
> preternatural revelation_ granted to the fathers of the human race, finds
> but few supporters at present”—the holy and learned man laughed. His
> answer was suggestive. “If Mr. ‘Moksh Mooller’ [as he pronounced the
> name], were a Brâhman, and came with me, I might take him to a _gupa_ cave
> [a secret crypt] near Okhee Math, in the Himâlayas, where he would soon
> find out that what crossed the Kâlapani [the black waters of the ocean]
> from India to Europe were only the _bits of rejected copies of some
> passages from our sacred books_. There _was_ a ‘primeval revelation,’ and
> it still exists; nor will it ever be lost to the world, but will reäppear;
> though the Mlechchhas will of course have to wait.”
> 
> Questioned further on the point, he would say no more. This was at Meerut,
> in 1880.
> 
> No doubt the mystification played by the Brâhmans upon Colonel Wilford and
> Sir William Jones, in the last century, at Calcutta, was cruel, but it had
> been well deserved, and no one was more to blame in that affair than the
> missionaries and Colonel Wilford himself. The former, on the testimony of
> Sir William Jones himself,(19) were silly enough to maintain that “the
> Hindûs were even now almost Christians, because their Brahmâ, Vishnu and
> Mahesha were no other than the Christian trinity.”(20) It was a good
> lesson. It made the Oriental scholars doubly cautious; but perchance it
> has also made some of them too shy and, in its reäction, has caused the
> pendulum of foregone conclusions to swing too much the other way. For
> “that first supply from the Brâhmanical market,” in answer to the demand
> of Colonel Wilford, has now created an evident necessity and desire in the
> Orientalists to declare nearly every archaic Sanskrit manuscript so modern
> as to give the missionaries full justification for availing themselves of
> their opportunity. That they do so and to the full extent of their mental
> powers, is shown by the absurd attempts of late to prove that the whole
> Purânic story about Krishna was _plagiarized by the Brâhmans from the
> Bible!_ But the facts cited by the Oxford Professor in his _Lectures_
> concerning the now famous interpolations, for the benefit, and later on to
> the sorrow, of Colonel Wilford, do not at all interfere with the
> conclusions to which one who studies the Secret Doctrine must unavoidably
> come. For, if the results show that neither the _New_ nor even the _Old
> Testament_ borrowed anything from the more ancient religion of the
> Brâhmans and Buddhists, it does not follow that the Jews have not borrowed
> all they knew from the Chaldean records, the latter being mutilated later
> on by Eusebius. As to the Chaldeans, they assuredly got their primitive
> learning from the Brâhmans, for Rawlinson shows an undeniably Vedic
> influence in the early mythology of Babylon; and Colonel Vans Kennedy has
> long ago justly declared that Babylonia was, from her origin, the seat of
> Sanskrit and Brâhman learning. But all such proofs must lose their value,
> in the presence of the latest theory worked out by Prof. Max Müller. What
> it is everyone knows. The code of phonetic laws has now become a universal
> solvent for every identification and “connection” between the gods of many
> nations. Thus, though the Mother of Mercury (Budha, Thot‐Hermes, etc.) was
> Maia, the mother of Gautama Buddha, also Mâyâ, and the mother of Jesus,
> likewise Mâyâ (Illusion, for Mary is Mare, the Sea, the great Illusion
> symbolically)—yet these three characters have no connection, nor can they
> have any, since Bopp has “laid down his code of phonetic laws.”
> 
> In their efforts to collect together the many skeins of unwritten history,
> it is a bold step for our Orientalists to take, to deny _à priori_
> everything that does not dove‐tail with their special conclusions. Thus,
> while new discoveries are daily made of great arts and sciences having
> existed far back in the night of time, yet even the knowledge of writing
> is refused to some of the most ancient nations, and they are credited with
> barbarism instead of culture. Nevertheless traces of an immense
> civilization, even in Central Asia, are still to be found. This
> civilization is undeniably _prehistoric_. And how can there be
> civilization without a literature in some form, without annals or
> chronicles? Common sense alone ought to supplement the broken links in the
> history of departed nations. The gigantic and unbroken wall of the
> mountains that hem in the whole table‐land of Tibet, from the upper course
> of the river Khuan‐Khé down to the Karakorum hills, witnessed a
> civilization during millenniums of years, and should have strange secrets
> to tell mankind. The eastern and central portions of these regions—the
> Nan‐chan and the Altyn‐tag—were once upon a time covered with cities that
> could well vie with Babylon. A whole geological period has swept over the
> land, since those cities breathed their last, as the mounds of shifting
> sand and the sterile and now dead soil of the immense central plains of
> the basin of Tarim testify. The borderlands alone are superficially known
> to the traveller. Within those table‐lands of sand there is water, and
> fresh oases are found blooming there, wherein no European foot has ever
> yet ventured, or trodden the now treacherous soil. Among these verdant
> oases there are some which are entirely inaccessible even to the profane
> native traveller. Hurricanes may “tear up the sands and sweep whole plains
> away,” they are powerless to destroy that which is beyond their reach.
> Built deep in the bowels of the earth, the subterranean stores are secure;
> and as their entrances are concealed, there is little fear that anyone
> would discover them, even should several armies invade the sandy wastes
> where—
> 
>     Not a pool, not a bush, not a house is seen,
>     And the mountain‐range forms a rugged screen
>     Round the parch’d flats of the dry, dry desert....
> 
> But there is no need to send the reader across the desert, when the same
> proofs of ancient civilization are found even in comparatively populated
> regions of the same country. The oasis of Tchertchen, for instance,
> situated about 4,000 feet above the level of the river Tchertchen‐Darya,
> is now surrounded in every direction by the ruins of archaic towns and
> cities. There, some 3,000 human beings represent the relics of about a
> hundred extinct nations and races, the very names of which are now unknown
> to our ethnologists. An anthropologist would feel more than embarrassed to
> class, divide and subdivide them; the more so, as the respective
> descendants of all these antediluvian races and tribes themselves know as
> little of their own forefathers as if they had fallen from the moon. When
> questioned about their origin, they reply that they know not whence their
> fathers had come, but had heard that their first, or earliest, men were
> ruled by the great Genii of these deserts. This may be put down to
> ignorance and superstition, yet in view of the teachings of the Secret
> Doctrine, the answer may be based upon primeval tradition. Alone the tribe
> of Khoorassan claims to have come from what is now known as Afghanistan,
> long before the days of Alexander, and brings legendary lore to that
> effect in corroboration. The Russian traveller Colonel (now General)
> Prjevalsky found quite close to the oasis of Tchertchen the ruins of two
> enormous cities, the oldest of which, according to local tradition, was
> destroyed 3,000 years ago by a hero and giant, and the other by Mongolians
> in the tenth century of our era.
> 
>     The emplacement of the two cities is now covered, owing to
>     shifting sands and the desert wind, with strange and heterogeneous
>     relics; with broken china and kitchen utensils and human bones.
>     The natives often find copper and gold coins, melted silver
>     ingots, diamonds, and turquoises, and what is the most
>     remarkable—broken glass.... Coffins of some undecaying wood, or
>     material, also, within which beautifully preserved embalmed bodies
>     are found.... The male mummies are all extremely tall powerfully
>     built men with long wavy hair.... A vault was found with twelve
>     dead men sitting in it. Another time, in a separate coffin, a
>     young girl was discovered by us. Her eyes were closed with golden
>     discs, and the jaws held firm by a golden circlet running from
>     under the chin across the top of the head. Clad in a narrow
>     woollen garment, her bosom was covered with golden stars, the feet
>     being left naked.(21)
> 
> To this, the famous traveller adds that all along their way on the river
> Tchertchen they heard legends about twenty‐three towns buried ages ago by
> the shifting sands of the deserts. The same tradition exists on the Lob‐
> nor and in the oasis of Kerya.
> 
> The traces of such civilization, and these and like traditions, give us
> the right to credit other legendary lore, warranted by well educated and
> learned natives of India and Mongolia who speak of immense libraries
> reclaimed from the sand, together with various relics of ancient Magic
> Lore, which have all been safely stowed away.
> 
> To recapitulate. The Secret Doctrine was the universally diffused religion
> of the ancient and prehistoric world. Proofs of its diffusion, authentic
> records of its history, a complete chain of documents, showing its
> character and presence in every land, together with the teaching of all
> its great Adepts, exist to this day in the secret crypts of libraries
> belonging to the Occult Fraternity.
> 
> This statement is rendered more credible by a consideration of the
> following facts: the tradition of the thousands of ancient parchments
> saved when the Alexandrian library was destroyed; the thousands of
> Sanskrit works which disappeared in India in the reign of Akbar; the
> universal tradition in China and Japan that the true ancient texts with
> the commentaries, which alone make them comprehensible, amounting to many
> thousands of volumes, have long passed out of the reach of profane hands;
> the disappearance of the vast sacred and occult literature of Babylon; the
> loss of those keys which alone could solve the thousand riddles of the
> Egyptian hieroglyphic records; the tradition in India that the real secret
> commentaries which alone make the _Vedas_ intelligible, though no longer
> visible to profane eyes, still remain for the Initiate, hidden in secret
> caves and crypts; and an identical belief among the Buddhists, with regard
> to their secret books.
> 
> The Occultists assert that all these exist, safe from Western spoliating
> hands, to reäppear in some more enlightened age, for which, in the words
> of the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî, “the Mlechchhas [outcasts, savages,
> those beyond the pale of Âryan civilization] will have to wait.”
> 
> For it is not the fault of the Initiates that these documents are now
> “lost” to the profane; nor was their policy dictated by selfishness, or
> any desire to monopolise the life‐giving sacred lore. There were portions
> of the Secret Science that for incalculable ages had to remain concealed
> from the profane gaze. But this was because the imparting to the
> unprepared multitude secrets of such tremendous importance was equivalent
> to giving a child a lighted candle in a powder magazine.
> 
> The answer to a question which has frequently arisen in the minds of
> students, when meeting with statements such as this, may well be outlined
> here.
> 
> We can understand, they say, the necessity for concealing from the herd
> such secrets as the Vril, or the rock‐destroying force, discovered by J.
> W. Keely, of Philadelphia, but we cannot understand how any danger could
> arise from the revelation of such a purely philosophical doctrine, for
> instance, as the evolution of the Planetary Chains.
> 
> The danger was that such doctrines as the Planetary Chain, or the seven
> Races, at once give a clue to the seven‐fold nature of man, for each
> principle is correlated to a plane, a planet, and a race, and the human
> principles are, on every plane, correlated to seven‐fold occult forces,
> those of the higher planes being of tremendous power. So that any
> septenary division at once gives a clue to tremendous occult powers, the
> abuse of which would cause incalculable evil to humanity; a clue which is,
> perhaps, no clue to the present generation—especially to Westerns,
> protected as they are by their very blindness and ignorant materialistic
> disbelief in the occult—but a clue which would, nevertheless, have been
> very real in the early centuries of the Christian era to people fully
> convinced of the reality of Occultism, and entering a cycle of degradation
> which made them rife for abuse of occult powers and sorcery of the worst
> description.
> 
> The documents were concealed, it is true, but the knowledge itself and its
> actual existence was never made a secret of by the Hierophants of the
> Temples, wherein the MYSTERIES have ever been made a discipline and
> stimulus to virtue. This is very old news, and was repeatedly made known
> by the great Adepts, from Pythagoras and Plato down to the Neo‐Platonists.
> It was the new religion of the Nazarenes that wrought a change for the
> worse in the policy of centuries.
> 
> Moreover, there is a well‐known fact—a very curious one, corroborated to
> the writer by a reverend gentleman attached for years to a Russian
> Embassy—that there are several documents in the St. Petersburg Imperial
> Libraries to show that, even so late as the days when Freemasonry and
> Secret Societies of Mystics flourished without hindrance in Russia, namely
> at the end of the last and the beginning of the present century, more than
> one Russian Mystic travelled to Tibet _viâ_ the Ural Mountains in search
> of knowledge and initiation in the unknown crypts of Central Asia. And
> more than one returned years later, with a rich store of information such
> as could never have been given him anywhere in Europe. Several cases could
> be cited and well‐known names brought forward, but for the fact that such
> publicity might annoy the surviving relatives of the late Initiates
> referred to. Let any one look over the annals and history of Freemasonry
> in the archives of the Russian metropolis, and he will assure himself of
> the fact above stated.
> 
> This is a corroboration of what has been stated many times before,
> unfortunately, too indiscreetly. Instead of benefiting humanity, the
> virulent charges of deliberate invention and imposture with a purpose,
> hurled at those who asserted a veritable, even if a little known fact,
> have only generated bad Karma for the slanderers. But now the mischief is
> done, and truth should no longer be denied, whatever the consequences.
> 
> Is Theosophy a new religion, we are asked? By no means; it is not a
> “religion,” nor is its philosophy “new”; for, as already stated, it is as
> old as thinking man. Its tenets are not now published for the first time,
> but have been cautiously given out to, and taught by, more than one
> European Initiate—especially by the late Ragon.
> 
> More than one great scholar has stated that there never was a religious
> founder, whether Âryan, Semitic or Turanian, who had _invented_ a new
> religion, or revealed a new truth. These founders were all _transmitters_,
> not original teachers. They were the authors of new forms and
> interpretations, while the truths upon which their teachings were based
> were as old as mankind. Thus out of the many truths revealed orally to man
> in the beginning, preserved and perpetuated in the Adyta of the temples
> through initiation, during the Mysteries and by personal transmission,
> they selected one or more of such grand verities—actualities visible only
> to the eye of the real Sage and Seer, and revealed them to the masses.
> Thus every nation received in its turn some of the said truths, under the
> veil of its own local and special symbolism, which, as time went on,
> developed into a more or less philosophical cultus, a Pantheon in mythical
> disguise. Therefore is Confucius, a very ancient legislator in historical
> chronology, though a very modern sage in the world’s history, shown by Dr.
> Legge(22) to be emphatically a _transmitter_, not a maker. As he himself
> says, “I only hand on: I cannot create new things. I believe in the
> ancients and therefore I love them.”(23)
> 
> The writer loves them too, and therefore believes in these ancients, and
> the modern heirs to their Wisdom. And believing in both, she now transmits
> that which she has received and learnt herself, to all those who will
> accept it. As to those who may reject her testimony—the great majority—she
> will bear them no malice, for they will be as right in their way in
> denying, as she is right in hers in affirming, since they look at Truth
> from two entirely different stand‐points. Agreeably with the rules of
> critical scholarship, the Orientalist has to reject _à priori_ whatever
> evidence he cannot fully verify for himself. And how can a Western scholar
> accept on hearsay that which he knows nothing about? Indeed, that which is
> given in these volumes is selected from oral, as much as from written
> teachings. This first instalment of the esoteric doctrines is based upon
> Stanzas, which are the records of a people unknown to ethnology. They are
> written, it is claimed, in a tongue absent from the nomenclature of
> languages and dialects with which philology is acquainted; are said to
> emanate from a source repudiated by Science—to‐wit, Occultism; and finally
> they are offered through an agency, incessantly discredited before the
> world by all those who hate unwelcome truths, or have some special hobby
> of their own to defend. Therefore, the rejection of these teachings may be
> expected, and must be expected beforehand. No one styling himself a
> “scholar,” in whatever department of exact Science, will permit himself to
> regard these teachings seriously. They will be derided and rejected _à
> priori_ in this century, but only in this one. For in the twentieth
> century of our era scholars will begin to recognize that the Secret
> Doctrine has neither been invented nor exaggerated, but, on the contrary,
> simply outlined; and finally that its teachings antedate the Vedas. This
> is no pretension to prophecy, but simply a statement based on the
> knowledge of facts. Every century an attempt is being made to show the
> world that Occultism is no vain superstition. Once the door is permitted
> to remain a little ajar, it will be opened wider with every new century.
> The times are ripe for a more serious knowledge than hitherto permitted,
> though still, even now, very limited.
> 
> For have not even the _Vedas_ been derided, rejected and called “a modern
> forgery” even so recently as fifty years ago? Was not Sanskrit proclaimed
> at one time the progeny of, and a dialect derived from, the Greek,
> according to Lemprière and other scholars? About 1820, as Prof. Max Müller
> tells us, the sacred books of the Brâhmans, of the Magians, and of the
> Buddhists, “were all but unknown, their very existence was doubted, and
> there was not a single scholar who could have translated a line of the
> _Veda_ ... of the _Zend Avesta_, or ... of the Buddhist _Tripitaka_, and
> now the _Vedas_ are proved to be the work of the highest antiquity, whose
> ‘preservation amounts almost to a marvel’.”
> 
> The same will be said of the Secret Archaic Doctrine, when undeniable
> proofs are given of its existence and records. But it will be centuries
> before much more is given from it. Speaking of the keys to the Zodiacal
> Mysteries as being almost lost to the world, it was remarked by the writer
> some ten years ago in _Isis Unveiled_ that: “The said key must be turned
> seven times before the whole system is divulged. We will give it but one
> turn, and thereby allow the profane one glimpse into the mystery. Happy
> he, who understands the whole!”
> 
> The same may be said of the whole Esoteric System. One turn of the key,
> and no more, was given in _Isis Unveiled_. Much more is explained in these
> volumes. In those days the writer hardly knew the language in which the
> work was written, and the disclosure of many things, freely spoken about
> now, was forbidden. In Century the Twentieth, some disciple more informed,
> and far better fitted, may be sent by the Masters of Wisdom to give final
> and irrefutable proofs that there exists a Science called Gupta Vidyâ; and
> that, like the once mysterious sources of the Nile, the source of all
> religions and philosophies now made known to the world has been for many
> ages forgotten and lost to men, but it is at last found.
> 
> Such a work as this has to be introduced with no simple preface, but with
> a volume rather—one that would give facts, not mere disquisitions, since
> THE SECRET DOCTRINE is not a treatise, or a series of vague theories, but
> contains all that can be given out to the world in this century.
> 
> It would be worse than useless to publish in these pages even those
> portions of the esoteric teachings that have now escaped from confinement,
> unless the genuineness and authenticity, or at any rate the probability,
> of the existence of such teachings were first established. Such statements
> as will now be made, have to be shown as warranted by various authorities,
> such as ancient philosophers, classical writers and even certain learned
> Church Fathers, some of whom knew these doctrines because they had studied
> them, had seen and read works written upon them; and some of whom had even
> been personally initiated into the ancient Mysteries, during the
> performance of which the arcane doctrines were allegorically enacted. The
> writer will have to give historical and trustworthy names, and to cite
> well‐known authors, ancient and modern, of recognized ability, good
> judgment, and truthfulness, as also to name some of the famous proficients
> in the secret arts and science, together with the mysteries of the latter,
> as they are divulged, or rather partially presented before the public in
> their strange archaic form.
> 
> How is this to be done; what is the best way for achieving such an object,
> has been the ever‐recurring question. To make our plan clearer, an
> illustration may be attempted. When a tourist, coming from a well‐explored
> country, suddenly reaches the borderland of a _terra incognita_, hedged
> in, and shut out from view by a formidable barrier of impassable rocks, he
> may still refuse to acknowledge himself baffled in his exploratory plans.
> Ingress beyond is forbidden. But if he cannot visit the mysterious region
> personally, he may still find a means of examining it from as short a
> distance as can be arrived at. Helped by his knowledge of the landscapes
> left behind, he can get a general and pretty correct idea of the
> transmural view, if he will only climb to the loftiest summit of the
> altitudes in front of him. Once there, he can gaze at it at his leisure,
> comparing that which he dimly perceives with that which he has just left
> below, now that he is, thanks to his own efforts, beyond the line of the
> mists and the cloud‐capped cliffs.
> 
> Such a point of preliminary observation, cannot in these two volumes be
> offered to those who would like to get a more correct understanding of the
> mysteries of the pre‐archaic periods given in the texts. But if the reader
> has patience, and will glance at the present state of beliefs and creeds
> in Europe, compare and check it with what is known to history of the ages
> directly preceding and following the Christian era, then he will find all
> this in a future volume of the present work.
> 
> In the latter volume a brief recapitulation will be made of all the
> principal Adepts known to history, and the downfall of the Mysteries will
> be described, after which began the disappearance and the systematic and
> final elimination from the memory of men of the real nature of Initiation
> and the Sacred Science. From that time its teachings became occult, and
> Magic sailed but too often under the venerable but frequently misleading
> name of Hermetic Philosophy. As real Occultism had been prevalent among
> the Mystics during the centuries that preceded our era, so Magic, or
> rather Sorcery, with its Occult Arts, followed the beginning of
> Christianity.
> 
> However great and zealous the fanatical efforts, during these early
> centuries, to obliterate every trace of the mental and intellectual labour
> of the Pagans, they were a failure; but the same spirit of the dark demon
> of bigotry and intolerance has ever since systematically perverted every
> bright page written in the pre‐Christian periods. Even history, in her
> uncertain records, has preserved enough of that which has survived to
> throw an impartial light upon the whole. Let, then, the reader tarry a
> little while with the writer on the spot of observation selected. He is
> asked to give all his attention to that millennium of the pre‐Christian
> and the post‐Christian periods, divided by the year One of the Nativity.
> This event—whether historically correct or not—has nevertheless been made
> to serve as a first signal for the erection of manifold bulwarks against
> any possible return of, or even a glimpse into, the hated religions of the
> Past; hated and dreaded, because throwing such a vivid light on the novel
> and intentionally veiled interpretation of what is now known as the “New
> Dispensation.”
> 
> However superhuman the efforts of the early Christian Fathers to
> obliterate the Secret Doctrine from the very memory of man, they all
> failed. Truth can never be killed; hence the failure to sweep away
> entirely from the face of the earth every vestige of that ancient Wisdom,
> and to shackle and gag every witness who testified to it. Let one only
> think of the thousands, perhaps millions, of MSS. burnt; of monuments,
> with their too indiscreet inscriptions and pictorial symbols, pulverized
> to dust; of the bands of early hermits and ascetics roaming about among
> the ruined cities of Upper and Lower Egypt, in desert and mountain, valley
> and highland, seeking for and eager to destroy every obelisk and pillar,
> scroll or parchment they could lay their hands on, if only it bore the
> symbol of the Tau, or any other sign borrowed and appropriated by the new
> faith—and he will then see plainly how it is that so little has remained
> of the records of the past. Verily, the fiendish spirit of fanaticism of
> early and mediæval Christianity and of Islam has loved from the first to
> dwell in darkness and ignorance; and both have made
> 
>     ... the sun like blood, the earth a tomb,
>     The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom!
> 
> Both creeds have won their proselytes at the point of the sword; both have
> built their churches on heaven‐kissing hecatombs of human victims. Over
> the gateway of Century I of our era, the ominous words “THE KARMA OF
> ISRAEL,” fatally glowed. Over the portals of our own, the future seer may
> discern other words, that will point to the Karma for cunningly made‐up
> history, for events purposely perverted, and for great characters
> slandered by posterity, mangled out of recognition, between the two cars
> of Jagannâtha—Bigotry and Materialism; one accepting too much, the other
> denying all. Wise is he who holds to the golden mid‐point, who believes in
> the eternal justice of things. Says Faizi Díwán, the “witness to the
> wonderful speeches of a freethinker who belongs to a thousand sects”:
> 
>     In the assembly of the day of resurrection, when past things shall
>     be forgiven, the sins of the Ka’bah will be forgiven for the sake
>     of the dust of Christian churches.
> 
> To this, Professor Max Müller replies:
> 
>     The sins of Islam are _as worthless as the dust of Christianity;
>     on the day of resurrection both Muhammadans and Christians will
>     see the vanity of their religious doctrines._ Men fight about
>     religion on earth; in heaven they shall find out that there is
>     only one true religion—the worship of God’s SPIRIT.(24)
> 
> In other words, “THERE IS NO RELIGION [OR LAW] HIGHER THAN TRUTH”—(_Satyât
> Nâsti Paro Dharmah_)—the motto of the Mahârâjah of Benares, adopted by the
> Theosophical Society.
> 
> As already said in the _Preface_, THE SECRET DOCTRINE is not a version of
> _Isis Unveiled_, as originally intended. It is rather a volume explanatory
> of the latter, and, though entirely independent of the earlier work, an
> indispensable corollary to it. Much of what was in the former work could
> hardly be understood by Theosophists in those days. THE SECRET DOCTRINE
> will now throw light on many a problem left unsolved in the first work,
> especially on the opening pages, which have never been understood.
> 
> As it was concerned simply with the philosophies within historical times
> and the respective symbolism of the fallen nations, only a hurried glance
> could be thrown at the panorama of Occultism in the two volumes of _Isis_.
> In the present work, detailed cosmogony and the evolution of the four
> Races that preceded our fifth‐race Humanity are given, and now two large
> volumes explain that which was stated only on the first page of _Isis
> Unveiled_ alone, and in a few allusions scattered hither and thither
> throughout that work. Nor can the vast catalogue of the Archaic Sciences
> be attempted in the present volumes, before we have disposed of such
> tremendous problems as cosmic and planetary Evolution, and the gradual
> development of the mysterious humanities and races that preceded our
> Adamic Humanity. Therefore, the present attempt to elucidate some
> mysteries of the Esoteric Philosophy has, in truth, nothing to do with the
> earlier work. The writer must be allowed to illustrate what is said by an
> instance.
> 
> Volume I of _Isis_ begins with a reference to an “old book”:
> 
>     So very old that our modern antiquarians might ponder over its
>     pages an indefinite time, and still not quite agree as to the
>     nature of the fabric upon which it is written. It is the only
>     original copy now in existence. The most ancient Hebrew document
>     on occult learning—the _Siprah Dzeniouta_—was compiled from it,
>     and that at a time when the former was already considered in the
>     light of a literary relic. One of its illustrations represents the
>     Divine Essence emanating from ADAM(25) like a luminous arc
>     proceeding to form a circle; and then, having attained the highest
>     point of its circumference, the ineffable Glory bends back again,
>     and returns to earth, bringing a higher type of humanity in its
>     vortex. As it approaches nearer and nearer to our planet, the
>     Emanation becomes more and more shadowy, until upon touching the
>     ground it is as black as night.
> 
> This very old book is the original work from which the many volumes of
> _Kiu‐ti_ were compiled. Not only the latter and the _Siphrah Dzeniouta_,
> but even the _Sepher Jetzirah_(26)—the work attributed by the Hebrew
> Kabalists to their Patriarch Abraham (!), the _Shu‐king_, China’s
> primitive Bible, the sacred volumes of the Egyptian Thoth‐Hermes, the
> _Purânas_ in India, the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_ and the _Pentateuch_
> itself, are all derived from that one small parent volume. Tradition says,
> that it was taken down in _Senzar_, the secret sacerdotal tongue, from the
> words of Divine Beings, who dictated it to the Sons of Light, in Central
> Asia, at the very beginning of our Fifth Race; for there was a time when
> its language (the Senzar) was known to the Initiates of every nation, when
> the forefathers of the Toltec understood it as easily as the inhabitants
> of the lost Atlantis, who inherited it, in their turn, from the sages of
> the Third Race, the Mânushis, who learnt it direct from the Devas of the
> Second and First Races. The illustration spoken of in _Isis_ relates to
> the evolution of these Races and of our fourth‐ and fifth‐race Humanity in
> the Vaivasvata Manvantara, or Round; each Round being composed of the
> Yugas of the seven periods of Humanity; four of which are now passed in
> _our_ Life‐Cycle, the middle point of the fifth being nearly reached. This
> illustration is symbolical, as every one can well understand, and covers
> the ground from the beginning. The old book, having described cosmic
> evolution and explained the origin of everything on earth, including
> physical man, after giving the true history of the Races, from the First
> down to our own Fifth Race, goes no further. It stops short at the
> beginning of the Kali Yuga, just 4,989 years ago, at the death of Krishna,
> the bright Sun‐god, the once living hero and reformer.
> 
> But there exists another book. None of its possessors regard it as very
> ancient, as it was born with, and is only as old as the Black Age, namely,
> about 5,000 years. In about nine years hence, the first cycle of the first
> five millenniums, that began with the great cycle of the Kali Yuga, will
> end. And then the last prophecy contained in that book—the first volume of
> the prophetic record for the Black Age—will be accomplished. We have not
> long to wait, and many of us will witness the dawn of the New Cycle, at
> the end of which not a few accounts will be settled and squared between
> the races. Volume II of the prophecies is nearly ready, having been in
> preparation since the time of Buddha’s grand successor, Shankarâchârya.
> 
> One more important point must be noticed, one that stands foremost in the
> series of proofs given of the existence of one primeval, universal
> Wisdom—at any rate for Christian Kabalists and students. The teachings
> were, at least, partially known to several of the Fathers of the Church.
> It is maintained, on purely historical grounds, that Origen, Synesius, and
> even Clemens Alexandrinus, had themselves been initiated into the
> Mysteries before adding to the Neo‐Platonism of the Alexandrian school
> that of the Gnostics, under the Christian veil. More than this, some of
> the doctrines of the secret schools, though by no means all, were
> preserved in the Vatican, and have since become part and parcel of the
> Mysteries, in the shape of disfigured additions made to the original
> Christian programme by the Latin Church. Such is the now materialised
> dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This accounts for the great
> persecutions set on foot by the Roman Catholic Church against Occultism,
> Masonry, and heterodox Mysticism generally.
> 
> The days of Constantine were the last turning‐point in history, the period
> of the supreme struggle, that ended in the Western world throttling the
> old religions in favour of the new one, built on their bodies. From thence
> the vista into the far distant past, beyond the Deluge and the Garden of
> Eden, began to be forcibly and relentlessly shut out by every fair and
> unfair means from the indiscreet gaze of posterity. Every issue was
> blocked up, every record upon which hands could be laid, destroyed. Yet
> there remains enough, even among such mutilated records, to warrant us in
> saying that there is in them every requisite evidence of the actual
> existence of a Parent Doctrine. Fragments have survived geological and
> political cataclysms, to tell the story; and every survival shows evidence
> that the now secret Wisdom was once the one fountain head, the ever‐
> flowing perennial source, from which were fed all the streamlets—the later
> religions of all nations—from the first down to the last. This period,
> beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and finishing with the
> Neo‐Platonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in
> History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light
> streaming from the æons of times gone by, unobscured by the hand of
> bigotry and fanaticism.
> 
> This accounts for the necessity under which the writer has laboured of
> ever explaining the facts given from the hoariest past by evidence
> gathered from the historical period, even at the risk of being once more
> charged with a lack of method and system. No other means was at hand. The
> public must be made acquainted with the efforts of many world‐adepts, of
> initiated poets and writers in the classics of every age, to preserve in
> the records of humanity the knowledge at least of the existence of such a
> philosophy, if not actually of its tenets. The Initiates of 1888 would
> indeed remain incomprehensible and even a seemingly impossible myth, were
> not like Initiates shown to have lived in every other age of history. This
> could be done only by naming chapter and verse where mention may be found
> of these great characters, who were preceded and followed by a long and
> interminable line of other famous antediluvian and postdiluvian Masters in
> the arts. Thus only could it be shown, on semi‐traditional and semi‐
> historical authority, that occult knowledge and the powers it confers on
> man, are not altogether fictions, but that they are as old as the world
> itself.
> 
> To my judges, past and future, therefore—whether they are serious literary
> critics, or those howling dervishes in literature who judge a book
> according to the popularity or unpopularity of the author’s name, who,
> hardly glancing at its contents, fasten like lethal _bacilli_ on the
> weakest points of the body—I have nothing to say. Nor shall I condescend
> to notice those crack‐brained slanderers—fortunately very few in
> number—who, hoping to attract public attention by throwing discredit on
> every writer whose name is better known than their own, foam and bark at
> their very shadows. These, having first maintained for years that the
> doctrines taught in the _Theosophist_, and which culminated in _Esoteric
> Buddhism_, had been all _invented_ by the present writer, have finally
> turned round, and denounced _Isis Unveiled_ and the rest as a plagiarism
> from Éliphas Lévi (!), Paracelsus (!!), and, _mirabile dictu_, Buddhism
> and Brâhminism (!!!). As well charge Renan with having stolen his _Vie de
> Jésus_ from the Gospels, and Max Müller his _Sacred Books of the East_ or
> his _Chips_ from the philosophies of the Brâhmans and of Gautama, the
> Buddha. But to the public in general and the readers of THE SECRET
> DOCTRINE I may repeat what I have stated all along, and which I now clothe
> in the words of Montaigne:
> 
>     _Gentlemen, __“__I have here made only a nosegay of culled
>     flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that
>     ties them.__”_
> 
> Pull the “string” to pieces and cut it up in shreds, if you will. As for
> the nosegay of _facts_—you will never be able to make away with these. You
> can only ignore them, and no more.
> 
> We may close with a parting word concerning this first volume. In an
> introduction prefacing chapters dealing chiefly with cosmogony, certain
> subjects brought forward may be deemed out of place, but one more
> consideration added to those already given has led me to touch upon them.
> Every reader will inevitably judge the statements made from the stand‐
> point of his own knowledge, experience, and consciousness, basing his
> judgment on what he has already learnt. This fact the writer is constantly
> obliged to bear in mind; hence, also the frequent references in this first
> volume to matters which, properly speaking, belong to a later part of the
> work, but which could not be passed by in silence, lest the reader should
> look upon it as a fairy tale indeed—a fiction of some modern brain.
> 
> Thus, the Past shall help to realize the Present, and the latter to better
> appreciate the Past. The errors of the day must be explained and swept
> away, yet it is more than probable—nay in the present case it amounts to
> certitude—that once more the testimony of long ages and of history will
> fail to impress any but the very intuitional—which is equal to saying the
> very few. But in this as in all like cases, the true and the faithful may
> console themselves by presenting the sceptical modern Sadducee with the
> mathematical proof and memorial of his obdurate obstinacy and bigotry.
> There still exists somewhere in the archives of the French Academy, the
> famous law of probabilities worked out by certain mathematicians for the
> benefit of sceptics by an algebraical process. It runs thus: If two
> persons give their evidence to a fact, and thus impart to it each of them
> 5/6 of certitude; that fact will have then 35/36 of certitude; _i.e._, its
> probability will bear to its improbability the ratio of 35 to 1. If three
> such evidences are joined together the certitude will become 215/216. The
> agreement of ten persons giving each 1/2 of certitude will produce
> 1023/1024, etc., etc. The Occultist may remain satisfied with such
> certitude, and care for no more.
> 
> PROEM: PAGES FROM A PRE‐HISTORIC RECORD.
> 
> An archaic Manuscript—a collection of palm leaves made impermeable to
> water, fire, and air, by some specific and unknown process—is before the
> writer’s eye. On the first page is an immaculate white disk within a dull
> black ground. On the following page, the same disk, but with a central
> point. The first, the student knows, represents Kosmos in Eternity, before
> the reäwakening of still slumbering Energy, the Emanation of the World in
> later systems. The point in the hitherto immaculate disk, Space and
> Eternity in Pralaya, denotes the dawn of differentiation. It is the Point
> in the Mundane Egg, the Germ within it which will become the Universe, the
> All, the boundless, periodical Kosmos—a Germ which is latent and active,
> periodically and by turns. The one circle is divine Unity, from which all
> proceeds, whither all returns: its circumference—a forcibly limited
> symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind—indicates the
> abstract, ever incognizable PRESENCE, and its plane, the Universal Soul,
> although the two are one. Only, the face of the disk being white, and the
> surrounding ground black, clearly shows that its plane is the sole
> knowledge, dim and hazy though it still is, that is attainable by man. It
> is on this plane that the manvantaric manifestations begin; for it is in
> this SOUL, that slumbers, during the Pralaya, the Divine Thought,(27)
> wherein lies concealed the plan of every future cosmogony and theogony.
> 
> It is the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet omnipresent, without beginning
> or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations—between which periods
> reigns the dark mystery of Non‐Being; unconscious, yet absolute
> Consciousness, unrealizable, yet the one self‐existing Reality; truly, “a
> Chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.” Its one absolute attribute,
> which is Itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance
> the Great Breath,(28) which is the perpetual motion of the Universe, in
> the sense of limitless, ever‐present Space. That which is motionless
> cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely
> motionless within the Universal Soul.
> 
> Almost five centuries B.C. Leucippus, the instructor of Democritus,
> maintained that Space was eternally filled with atoms actuated by a
> ceaseless motion, which, in due course of time, as they aggregated,
> generated rotatory motion, through mutual collisions producing lateral
> movements. Epicurus and Lucretius taught the same doctrine, adding however
> to the lateral motion of the atoms the idea of affinity—an Occult
> teaching.
> 
> From the beginning of man’s inheritance, from the first appearance of the
> architects of the globe he lives on, the unrevealed Deity was recognized
> and considered under its only philosophical aspect—Universal Motion, the
> thrill of the creative Breath in Nature. Occultism sums up the One
> Existence thus: “_Deity is an arcane, living [or moving] Fire, and the
> eternal witnesses to this unseen Presence, are Light, Heat,
> Moisture_,”—this trinity including, and being the cause of, every
> phenomenon in Nature.(29) Intra‐cosmic motion is eternal and ceaseless;
> cosmic motion—the visible, or that which is subject to perception—is
> finite and periodical. As an eternal abstraction it is the Ever‐Present;
> as a manifestation, it is finite both in the coming direction and the
> opposite, the two being the Alpha and Omega of successive reconstructions.
> Kosmos—the Noumenon—has nought to do with the causal relations of the
> phenomenal World. It is only with reference to the intra‐cosmic Soul, the
> ideal Kosmos in the immutable Divine Thought, that we may say: “It never
> had a beginning nor will it have an end.” With regard to its body or
> cosmic organization, though it cannot be said that it had a first, or will
> ever have a last construction, yet at each new Manvantara, its
> organization may be regarded as the first and the last of its kind, as it
> evolves every time on a higher plane.
> 
> A few years ago only, it was stated that:
> 
>     The esoteric doctrine, like Buddhism and Brâhmanism, and even
>     Kabalism, teaches that the one infinite and unknown Essence exists
>     from all eternity, and in regular and harmonious successions is
>     either passive or active. In the poetical phraseology of Manu
>     these conditions are called the Days and the Nights of Brahmâ. The
>     latter is either “awake” or “asleep.” The Svâbhâvikas, or
>     philosophers of the oldest school of Buddhism, which still exists
>     in Nepaul, speculate only upon the active condition of this
>     “Essence,” which they call Svabhâvat, and deem it foolish to
>     theorize upon the abstract and “unknowable” power in its passive
>     condition. Hence they are called Atheists by both Christian
>     theologians and modern scientists, for neither of the two are able
>     to understand the profound logic of their philosophy. The former
>     will allow of no other God than the personified secondary powers
>     which have worked out the visible universe, and which becomes with
>     them the anthropomorphic God of the Christians—the male Jehovah,
>     roaring amid thunder and lightning. In its turn, rationalistic
>     science greets the Buddhists and the Svâbhâvikas as the
>     “Positivists” of the archaic ages. If we take a one‐sided view of
>     the philosophy of the latter, our materialists may be right in
>     their own way. The Buddhists maintain that there is no Creator,
>     but an infinitude of creative powers, which collectively form the
>     one eternal substance, the essence of which is inscrutable—hence
>     not a subject for speculation for any true philosopher. Socrates
>     invariably refused to argue upon the mystery of universal being,
>     yet no one would ever have thought of charging him with atheism,
>     except those who were bent upon his destruction. Upon inaugurating
>     an active period, says the Secret Doctrine, an expansion of this
>     Divine Essence from without inwardly and from within outwardly,
>     occurs in obedience to eternal and immutable law, and the
>     phenomenal or visible universe is the ultimate result of the long
>     chain of cosmical forces thus progressively set in motion. In like
>     manner, when the passive condition is resumed, a contraction of
>     the Divine Essence takes place, and the previous work of creation
>     is gradually and progressively undone. The visible universe
>     becomes disintegrated, its material dispersed; and “darkness”
>     solitary and alone, broods once more over the face of the “deep.”
>     To use a metaphor from the secret books, which will convey the
>     idea still more clearly, an out‐breathing of the “unknown essence”
>     produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear. This
>     process has been going on from all eternity, and our present
>     universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning
>     and will have no end.(30)
> 
> This passage will be explained, as far as it is possible, in the present
> work. Though it contains nothing new to the Orientalist, as it now stands,
> its esoteric interpretation may contain a good deal which has hitherto
> remained entirely unknown to the Western student.
> 
> The first illustration is a plain disk, [circle]. The second in the
> archaic symbol shows a disk with a point in it, [circle with dot]—the
> first differentiation in the periodical manifestations of the ever‐eternal
> Nature, sexless and infinite, “Aditi in THAT,”(31) or potential Space
> within abstract Space. In its third stage the point is transformed into a
> diameter, [circle with line]. It now symbolizes a divine immaculate
> Mother‐Nature within the all‐embracing absolute Infinitude. When the
> horizontal diameter is crossed by a vertical one, [circle with cross], it
> becomes the Mundane Cross. Humanity has reached its Third Root‐Race; it is
> the sign for the origin of human Life. When the circumference disappears
> and leaves only the [cross], it is a sign that the fall of man into matter
> is accomplished, and the Fourth Race begins. The cross within a circle
> symbolizes pure Pantheism; when the cross is left uninscribed, it becomes
> phallic. It had the same and yet other meanings as a Tau inscribed within
> a circle, [circle with lines (Tau)]; or as a Thor’s Hammer—the so‐called
> Jaina cross, or Svastika, within a circle, [circle with swastika].
> 
> By the third symbol—the circle divided in two by a horizontal diameter—was
> meant the first manifestation of creative Nature—still passive, because
> feminine. The first shadowy perception of man connected with procreation
> is feminine, because man knows his mother more than his father. Hence
> female deities were more sacred than male. Nature is therefore feminine,
> and, to a degree, objective and tangible, and the Spirit Principle which
> fructifies it, is concealed.(32) By adding to the horizontal line in the
> circle, a perpendicular, the Tau was formed, [T], the oldest form of the
> letter. It was the glyph of the Third Root‐Race to the day of its
> symbolical Fall—_i.e._, when the separation of sexes by natural evolution
> took place—when the figure became [circle with vertical line], or sexless
> life modified or separated—a double glyph or symbol. With the sub‐races of
> our Fifth Race it became in symbology the Sacr’, and in Hebrew N’cabvah,
> of the first‐formed Races;(33) then it changed into the Egyptian emblem of
> life, [Ankh], and still later into the sign of Venus, [female symbol].
> Then comes the Svastika (Thor’s Hammer, now the Hermetic Cross), entirely
> separated from its circle, thus becoming purely phallic. The esoteric
> symbol of Kali Yuga is the five‐pointed star reversed, with its two points
> (horns) turned heavenward, thus [five‐pointed star], the sign of human
> sorcery, a position every Occultist will recognize as one of the “left‐
> hand,” and used in ceremonial magic.
> 
> It is hoped that during the perusal of this work the erroneous ideas of
> the public in general with regard to Pantheism will be modified. It is
> wrong and unjust to regard the Buddhists and Advaitin Occultists as
> Atheists. If not all of them philosophers, they are, at any rate, all
> logicians, their objections and arguments being based on strict reasoning.
> Indeed, if the Parabrahman of the Hindûs may be taken as a representative
> of the hidden and nameless deities of other nations, this absolute
> Principle will be found to be the prototype from which all the others were
> copied. Parabrahman is not “God,” because It is not _a_ God. “It is that
> which is supreme, and not supreme (_paravara_).”(34) It is supreme as
> cause, not supreme as effect. Parabrahman is simply, as a Secondless
> Reality, the all‐inclusive Kosmos—or rather the infinite Cosmic Space—in
> the highest spiritual sense, of course. Brahman (neuter) being the
> unchanging, pure, free, undecaying supreme Root, the “One true Existence,
> Paramârthika,” and the absolute Chit and Chaitanya (Intelligence,
> Consciousness), cannot be a cognizer, “for THAT can have no subject of
> cognition.” Can the Flame be called the Essence of Fire? This Essence is
> “the Life and Light of the Universe, the visible fire and flame are
> destruction, death, and evil.” “Fire and Flame destroy the body of an
> Arhat, their essence makes him immortal.”(35) “The knowledge of the
> absolute Spirit, like the effulgence of the sun, or like heat in fire, is
> naught else than the absolute Essence itself,” says Shankarâchârya. IT—is
> “the Spirit of the Fire,” not Fire itself; therefore, “the attributes of
> the latter, Heat or Flame, are not the attributes of the Spirit, but of
> that of which that Spirit is the unconscious cause.” Is not the above
> sentence the true key‐note of later Rosicrucian philosophy? Parabrahman
> is, in short, the collective aggregate of Kosmos in its infinity and
> eternity, the “THAT” and “THIS” to which distributive aggregates can not
> be applied.(36) “In the beginning THIS was the Self, one only;”(37) and
> the great Shankarâchârya explains that “_This_” refers to the Universe
> (Jagat); the words, “in the beginning,” meaning before the reproduction of
> the phenomenal Universe.
> 
> Therefore, when the Pantheists echo the _Upanishads_, which state, as in
> the Secret Doctrine, that “This” cannot create, they do not deny a
> Creator, or rather a collective aggregate of creators; they simply refuse,
> very logically, to attribute “creation” and especially formation—something
> finite—to an Infinite Principle. With them, Parabrahman is a passive
> because an absolute Cause, the unconditioned Mukta. It is only limited
> omniscience and omnipotence that are refused to the latter, because these
> are still attributes, reflected in man’s perceptions; and because
> Parabrahman, being the Supreme ALL, the ever invisible Spirit and Soul of
> Nature, changeless and eternal, can have no attributes, the term
> Absoluteness very naturally precluding any idea of the finite or
> conditioned from being connected with it. And if the Vedântins postulate
> attributes as belonging simply to its emanation, calling it Îshvara _plus_
> Mâyâ, and Avidyâ (Agnosticism and Nescience rather than Ignorance), it is
> difficult to find any Atheism in this conception.(38) Since there can be
> neither two Infinites nor two Absolutes in a Universe supposed to be
> boundless, this Self‐Existence can hardly be conceived of as creating
> personally. To the senses and in the perceptions of finite _beings_, THAT
> is Non‐_Being_, in the sense that it is the One _Be‐ness_; for, in this
> ALL lies concealed its coëternal and coëval emanation or inherent
> radiation, which, becoming periodically Brahmâ (the male‐female Potency),
> expands itself into the manifested Universe. “Nârâyana moving on the
> [abstract] Waters of Space,” is transformed into the Waters of concrete
> substance moved by him, who now becomes the manifested Word or Logos.
> 
> The orthodox Brâhmans, those who rise the most against the Pantheists and
> Advaitins, calling them Atheists, are forced, if Manu is any authority in
> this matter, to accept the death of Brahmâ, the Creator, at the expiration
> of every Age of this deity—100 Divine Years, a period which in our years
> requires fifteen figures to express. Yet no philosopher among them will
> view this “death” in any other sense than as a temporary disappearance
> from the manifested plane of existence, or as a periodical rest.
> 
> The Occultists are, therefore, at one with the Advaita Vedântin
> philosophers as to the above tenet. They show, on philosophical grounds,
> the impossibility of accepting the idea of the absolute ALL creating or
> even evolving the Golden Egg, into which it is said to enter in order to
> transform itself into Brahmâ, the Creator, who later expands himself into
> the Gods and all the visible Universe. They say that absolute Unity cannot
> pass to Infinity, for Infinity presupposes the limitless extension of
> _something_, and the duration of that something; and the One All—like
> Space, which is its only mental and physical representation on this earth,
> or our plane of existence—is neither an object of, nor a subject to,
> perception. If one could suppose the eternal infinite All, the omnipresent
> Unity, instead of being in Eternity, becoming through periodical
> manifestation a manifold Universe or a multiple Personality, that Unity
> would cease to be one. Locke’s idea, that “pure space is capable of
> neither resistance nor motion,” is incorrect. Space is neither a
> “limitless void,” nor a “conditioned fulness,” but both. Being—on the
> plane of absolute abstraction—the ever‐incognizable Deity, which is void
> only to finite minds,(39) and on that of mâyâvic perception, the Plenum,
> the absolute Container of all that is, whether manifested or unmanifested,
> it is, therefore, that ABSOLUTE ALL. There is no difference between the
> Christian Apostle’s “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and the
> Hindû Rishi’s “the Universe lives in, proceeds from, and will return to,
> Brahmâ”: for Brahman (neuter), the unmanifested, is that Universe _in
> abscondito_, and Brahmâ, the manifested, is the Logos, made male‐
> female(40) in the symbolical orthodox dogmas, the God of the Apostle‐
> Initiate and of the Rishi being both the Unseen and the Visible Space.
> Space is called, in esoteric symbolism, the “Seven‐Skinned Eternal Mother‐
> Father.” From its undifferentiated to its differentiated surface it is
> composed of seven layers.
> 
> “_What is that which was, is, and will be, whether there is a Universe or
> not; whether there be gods or none?_” asks the esoteric Senzar Catechism.
> And the answer made is—“_Space_.”
> 
> It is not the One unknown ever‐present God in Nature, or Nature _in
> abscondito_, that is rejected, but the “God” of human dogma, and his
> _humanized_ “Word.” Man, in his infinite conceit and inherent pride and
> vanity, shaped it himself with his sacrilegious hand out of the material
> he found in his own small brain‐fabric, and forced it upon his fellows as
> a direct revelation from the one unrevealed SPACE.(41) The Occultist
> accepts revelation as coming from divine yet still finite Beings, the
> manifested Lives, never from the unmanifestable ONE LIFE; from those
> Entities, called Primordial Man, Dhyâni‐Buddhas, or Dhyân Chohans, the
> Rishi‐Prajâpati of the Hindus, the Elohim or Sons of God of the Jews, the
> Planetary Spirits of all nations, who have become Gods for men. The
> Occultist also regards the Âdi‐Shakti—the direct emanation of
> Mûlaprakriti, the eternal Root of THAT, and the female aspect of the
> Creative Cause, Brahmâ, in her âkâshic form of the Universal Soul—as
> philosophically a Mâyâ, and cause of human Mâyâ. But this view does not
> prevent him from believing in its existence so long as it lasts, to wit,
> for one Mahâmanvantara; nor from applying Âkâsha, the radiation of
> Mûlaprakriti,(42) to practical purposes, connected as this World‐Soul is
> with all natural phenomena known or unknown to Science.
> 
> The oldest religions of the world—exoterically, for the esoteric root or
> foundation is one—are the Indian, the Mazdean, and the Egyptian. Next
> comes the Chaldean, the outcome of these, now entirely lost to the world,
> except in its disfigured Sabeanism as at present rendered by the
> archæologists. Then, passing over a number of religions that will be
> mentioned later, comes the Jewish, esoterically following in the line of
> Babylonian Magism, as in the _Kabalah_; exoterically, a collection of
> allegorical legends, as in _Genesis_ and the _Pentateuch_. Read by the
> light of the _Zohar_, the four initial chapters of _Genesis_ are the
> fragment of a highly philosophical page in the world’s cosmogony. Left in
> their symbolical disguise, they are a nursery tale, an ugly thorn in the
> side of science and logic, an evident effect of Karma. To let them serve
> as a prologue to Christianity was a cruel revenge on the part of the
> Rabbis, who knew better what their _Pentateuch_ meant. It was a silent
> protest against their spoliation, and the Jews have now certainly the
> better of their traditional persecutors. The above‐named exoteric creeds
> will be explained in the light of the universal doctrine as we proceed.
> 
> The Occult Catechism contains the following questions and answers:
> 
> _What is it that ever is?_—_Space, the eternal Anupâdaka [Parentless]._
> _What is it that ever was?—The Germ in the Root. What is it that is ever
> coming and going?—The Great Breath. Then, there are three Eternals?—No, __
> the three are one. That which ever is is one, that which ever was is one,
> that which is ever being and becoming is also one: and this is Space._
> 
> _Explain, O Lanoo [disciple].—The One is an unbroken Circle [Ring] with no
> circumference, for it is nowhere and everywhere; the One is the boundless
> Plane of the Circle, manifesting a Diameter only during the manvantaric
> periods; the One is the indivisible Point found nowhere, perceived
> everywhere during those periods; it is the Vertical and the Horizontal,
> the Father and the Mother, the summit and base of the Father, the two
> extremities of the Mother, reaching in reality nowhere, for the One is the
> Ring as also the Rings that are within that Ring. Light in Darkness and
> Darkness in Light: the __“__Breath which is eternal.__”__ It proceeds from
> without inwardly, when it is everywhere, and from within outwardly, when
> it is nowhere—(i.e., Mâyâ,_(_43_)_ one of the Centres)._(_44_)_ It expands
> and contracts [exhalation and inhalation]. When it expands, the Mother
> diffuses and scatters; when it contracts, the Mother draws back and
> ingathers. This produces the periods of Evolution and Dissolution,
> Manvantara and Pralaya. The Germ is invisible and fiery; the Root [the
> Plane of the Circle] is cool; but during Evolution and Manvantara her
> garment is cold and radiant. Hot Breath is the Father who devours the
> progeny of the many‐faced Element [heterogeneous], and leaves the single‐
> faced ones [homogeneous]. Cool Breath is the Mother, who conceives, forms,
> brings forth, and receives them back into her bosom, to reform them at the
> Dawn [of the Day of Brahmâ, or Manvantara]._
> 
> For clearer understanding on the part of the general reader, it must be
> stated that Occult Science recognizes _seven_ Cosmic Elements—four
> entirely physical, and the fifth (Ether) semi‐material, which will become
> visible in the Air towards the end of our Fourth Round, to reign supreme
> over the others during the whole of the Fifth. The remaining two are as
> yet absolutely beyond the range of human perception. They will, however,
> appear as presentments during the Sixth and Seventh Races of this Round,
> and will be fully known in the Sixth and Seventh Rounds respectively.(45)
> These seven Elements with their numberless sub‐elements, which are far
> more numerous than those known to Science, are simply _conditional_
> modifications and aspects of the One and only Element. This latter is not
> Ether,(46) not even Âkâsha, but the _source_ of these. The Fifth Element,
> now quite freely advocated by Science, is not the Ether hypothesized by
> Sir Isaac Newton—although he calls it by that name, having probably
> associated it in his mind with Æther, the “Father‐Mother” of antiquity. As
> Newton intuitionally says, “Nature is a perpetual circulatory worker,
> generating fluids out of solids, fixed things out of volatile, and
> volatile out of fixed, subtile out of gross, and gross out of subtile....
> Thus, perhaps, may all things be originated from Ether.”(47)
> 
> The reader has to bear in mind that the Stanzas treat only of the
> cosmogony of our own planetary system and of what is visible around it,
> after a Solar Pralaya. The secret teachings with regard to the evolution
> of the Universal Kosmos cannot be given, since they could not be
> understood by even the highest minds in this age, and there seem to be
> very few Initiates, even among the greatest, who are allowed to speculate
> upon this subject. Moreover the Teachers say openly that not even the
> highest Dhyâni‐Chohans have ever penetrated the mysteries beyond those
> boundaries that separate the milliards of solar systems from the Central
> Sun, as it is called. Therefore, that which is given relates only to our
> visible Cosmos, after a Night of Brahmâ.
> 
> Before the reader proceeds to the consideration of the Stanzas from the
> _Book of Dzyan_ which form the basis of the present work, it is absolutely
> necessary that he should be made acquainted with the few fundamental
> conceptions which underlie and pervade the entire system of thought to
> which his attention is invited. These basic ideas are few in number, but
> on their clear apprehension depends the understanding of all that follows;
> therefore no apology is required for asking the reader to make himself
> familiar with these first, before entering on the perusal of the work
> itself.
> 
> The Secret Doctrine then, establishes three fundamental propositions:
> 
> I. An Omnipresent, Eternal, Boundless and Immutable PRINCIPLE, on which
> all speculation is impossible, since it transcends the power of human
> conception and can only be dwarfed by any human expression or similitude.
> It is beyond the range and reach of thought—in the words of the
> _Mândûkya_, “unthinkable and unspeakable.”
> 
> To render these ideas clearer to the general reader, let him set out with
> the postulate that there is One Absolute Reality which antecedes all
> manifested, conditioned Being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause—dimly
> formulated in the “Unconscious” and “Unknowable” of current European
> philosophy—is the Rootless Root of “all that was, is, or ever shall be.”
> It is of course devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any
> relation to manifested, finite Being. It is “Be‐ness” rather than Being,
> Sat in Sanskrit, and is beyond all thought or speculation.
> 
> This Be‐ness is symbolized in the Secret Doctrine under two aspects. On
> the one hand, absolute Abstract Space, representing bare subjectivity, the
> one thing which no human mind can either exclude from any conception, or
> conceive of by itself. On the other, absolute Abstract Motion representing
> Unconditioned Consciousness. Even our Western thinkers have shown that
> consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change, and motion best
> symbolizes change, its essential characteristic. This latter aspect of the
> One Reality, is also symbolized by the term the Great Breath, a symbol
> sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first
> fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute
> BE‐NESS—symbolized by finite intelligence as the theological Trinity.
> 
> It may, however, assist the student if a few further explanations are here
> given.
> 
> Herbert Spencer has of late so far modified his Agnosticism, as to assert
> that the nature of the “First Cause,”(48) which the Occultist more
> logically derives from the Causeless Cause, the “Eternal,” and the
> “Unknowable,” may be essentially the same as that of the consciousness
> which wells up within us: in short, that the impersonal Reality pervading
> the Kosmos is the pure noumenon of thought. This advance on his part
> brings him very near to the Esoteric and Vedântin tenet.(49)
> 
> Parabrahman, the One Reality, the Absolute, is the field of Absolute
> Consciousness, _i.e._, that Essence which is out of all relation to
> conditioned existence, and of which conscious existence is a conditioned
> symbol. But once that we pass in thought from this (to us) Absolute
> Negation, duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or Consciousness)
> and Matter, Subject and Object.
> 
> Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as
> independent realities, but as the two symbols or aspects of the Absolute,
> Parabrahman, which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether
> subjective or objective.
> 
> Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all
> manifestation, the Great Breath assumes the character of Pre‐cosmic
> Ideation. It is the _fons et origo_ of Force and of all individual
> Consciousness, and supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast scheme of
> cosmic Evolution. On the other hand, Pre‐cosmic Root‐Substance
> (Mûlaprakriti) is that aspect of the Absolute which underlies all the
> objective planes of Nature.
> 
> Just as Pre‐cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual Consciousness,
> so Pre‐cosmic Substance is the substratum of Matter in the various grades
> of its differentiation.
> 
> Hence it will be apparent that the contrast of these two aspects of the
> Absolute is essential to the existence of the Manifested Universe. Apart
> from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual
> Consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle (_upâdhi_) of matter
> that consciousness wells up as “I am I,” a physical basis being necessary
> to focus a Ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.
> Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty
> abstraction, and no emergence of Consciousness could ensue.
> 
> The Manifested Universe, therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as
> it were, the very essence of its _Ex_‐istence as Manifestation. But just
> as the opposite poles of Subject and Object, Spirit and Matter, are but
> aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized, so, in the
> Manifested Universe, there is “that” which links Spirit to Matter, Subject
> to Object.
> 
> This something, at present unknown to Western speculation, is called by
> Occultists Fohat. It is the “bridge” by which the Ideas existing in the
> Divine Thought are impressed on Cosmic Substance as the Laws of Nature.
> Fohat is thus the dynamic energy of Cosmic Ideation; or, regarded from the
> other side, it is the intelligent medium, the guiding power of all
> manifestation, the Thought Divine transmitted and made manifest through
> the Dhyân Chohans,(50) the Architects of the visible World. Thus from
> Spirit, or Cosmic Ideation, comes our Consciousness, from Cosmic Substance
> the several Vehicles in which that Consciousness is individualized and
> attains to self—or reflective—consciousness; while Fohat, in its various
> manifestations, is the mysterious link between Mind and Matter, the
> animating principle electrifying every atom into life.
> 
> The following summary will afford a clearer idea to the reader.
> 
> (1.) ABSOLUTENESS: the Parabrahman of the Vedântins or the One Reality,
> Sat, which is, as Hegel says, both Absolute Being and Non‐Being.
> 
> (2.) The _First_ Logos: the impersonal, and, in philosophy, Unmanifested
> Logos, the precursor of the Manifested. This is the “First Cause,” the
> “Unconscious” of European Pantheists.
> 
> (3.) The _Second_ Logos: Spirit‐Matter, Life; the “Spirit of the
> Universe,” Purusha and Prakriti.
> 
> (4.) The _Third_ Logos: Cosmic Ideation, Mahat or Intelligence, the
> Universal World‐Soul; the Cosmic Noumenon of Matter, the basis of the
> intelligent operations in and of Nature, also called Mahâ‐Buddhi.
> 
> The ONE REALITY: its _dual_ aspects in the conditioned Universe.
> 
> Further, the Secret Doctrine affirms:
> 
> II. The Eternity of the Universe _in toto_ as a boundless plane;
> periodically “the playground of numberless Universes incessantly
> manifesting and disappearing,” called the “Manifesting Stars,” and the
> “Sparks of Eternity.” “_The Eternity of the Pilgrim_(_51_)_ is like a wink
> of the Eye of Self‐Existence_,” as the _Book of Dyzan_ puts it. “_The
> appearance and disappearance of Worlds is like a regular tidal ebb of flux
> and reflux._”
> 
> This second assertion of the Secret Doctrine is the absolute universality
> of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which
> physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature.
> An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and
> Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception,
> that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely
> fundamental Laws of the Universe.
> 
> Moreover, the Secret Doctrine teaches:
> 
> III. The fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over‐Soul,
> the latter being itself an aspect of the Unknown Root; and the obligatory
> pilgrimage for every Soul—a spark of the former—through the Cycle of
> Incarnation, or Necessity, in accordance with Cyclic and Karmic Law,
> during the whole term. In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (Divine
> Soul) can have an independent conscious existence before the spark which
> issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth Principle—or the OVER‐
> SOUL—has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world
> of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural
> impulse, and then by self‐induced and self‐devised efforts, checked by its
> Karma, thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the
> lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest
> Archangel (Dhyâni‐Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric Philosophy
> admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own
> Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of
> metempsychoses and reïncarnations. This is why the Hindûs say that the
> Universe is Brahman and Brahmâ, for Brahman is in every atom of the
> universe, the six Principles in Nature being all the outcome—the variously
> differentiated aspects—of the Seventh and One, the only Reality in the
> Universe whether cosmic or micro‐cosmic; and also why the permutations,
> psychic, spiritual and physical, on the plane of manifestation and form,
> of the Sixth (Brahmâ the vehicle of Brahman) are viewed by metaphysical
> antiphrasis as illusive and mâyâvic. For although the root of every atom
> individually and of every form collectively, is that Seventh Principle or
> the One Reality, still, in its manifested phenomenal and temporary
> appearance, it is no better than an evanescent illusion of our senses.
> 
> In its absoluteness, the One Principle under its two aspects, Parabrahman
> and Mûlaprakriti, is sexless, unconditioned and eternal. Its periodical
> manvantaric emanation, or primal radiation, is also One, androgynous and
> phenomenally finite. When the radiation radiates in its turn, all its
> radiations are also androgynous, to become male and female principles in
> their lower aspects. After Pralaya, whether the Great or Minor Pralaya—the
> latter leaving the worlds _in statu quo_(52)—the first that reäwakes to
> active life is the plastic Âkâsha, Father‐Mother, the Spirit and Soul of
> Ether, or the Plane of the Circle. Space is called the Mother before its
> cosmic activity, and Father‐Mother at the first stage of reäwakening. In
> the _Kabalah_ it is also Father‐Mother‐Son. But whereas in the Eastern
> Doctrine, these are the Seventh Principle of the Manifested Universe, or
> its Atmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas (Spirit‐Soul‐Intelligence), the Triad branching off
> and dividing into seven cosmical and seven human Principles, in the
> Western _Kabalah_ of the Christian Mystics it is the Triad or Trinity, and
> with their Occultists, the male‐female Jehovah, Jah‐Havah. In this lies
> the whole difference between the Esoteric and the Christian Trinities. The
> Mystics and the Philosophers, the Eastern and Western Pantheists,
> synthesize their pregenetic Triad in the pure divine abstraction. The
> orthodox, anthropomorphize it. Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara—the three
> Hypostases of the manifesting “Spirit of the Supreme Spirit,” by which
> title Prithivî, the Earth, greets Vishnu in his first Avatâra—are the
> purely metaphysical abstract qualities of Formation, Preservation, and
> Destruction, and are the three divine Avasthâs (Hypostases) of that which
> “does not perish with created things,” Achyuta, a name of Vishnu; whereas
> the orthodox Christian separates his Personal Creative Deity into the
> three Personages of the Trinity, and admits of no higher Deity. The
> latter, in Occultism, is the abstract Triangle; with the orthodox, the
> perfect Cube. The creative god or the aggregate gods are regarded by the
> Eastern philosopher as _Bhrântidarshanatah_, “false appearances,”
> something “conceived of, by reason of erroneous appearances, as a material
> form,” and explained as arising from the illusive conception of the
> egotistic personal and human Soul (lower Fifth Principle). It is
> beautifully expressed in a revised translation in Fitzedward Hall’s notes
> to Wilson’s translation of the _Vishnu Purâna_. “That Brahma in its
> totality, has essentially the aspect of Prakriti, both evolved and
> unevolved [Mûlaprakriti], and also the aspect of Spirit and the aspect of
> Time. Spirit, O twice born, is the leading aspect of the Supreme
> Brahma.(53) The next is a two‐fold aspect,—Prakriti, both evolved and
> unevolved, and Time is the last.” Cronus is shown in the Orphic Theogony
> also as being a generated god or agent.
> 
> At this stage of the reäwakening of the Universe, the sacred symbolism
> represents it as a perfect Circle with the Point (Root) in the centre.
> This sign was universal, therefore we find it in the _Kabalah_ also. The
> Western _Kabalah_, however, now in the hands of Christian Mystics, ignores
> it altogether, though it is plainly shown in the _Zohar_. These sectarians
> begin at the end, and give, as the symbol of pregenetic Kosmos, [cross],
> calling it the “Union of the Rose and Cross,” the great mystery of occult
> generation, from whence the name—Rosicrucian (Rose Cross)! This may be
> seen from one of the most important and best known of their symbols, one
> which has never been hitherto understood even by modern Mystics. It is
> that of the Pelican tearing open its breast to feed its seven little
> ones—the real creed of the Brothers of the Rosie‐Cross and a direct
> outcome from the Eastern Secret Doctrine.
> 
> Brahman (neuter) is called Kâlahamsa, meaning, as explained by Western
> Orientalists, the Eternal Swan (or goose), and so is Brahmâ, the Creator.
> A great mistake is thus brought under notice; it is Brahman (neuter) which
> ought to be referred to as Hamsa‐vâhana (that which uses the Swan as its
> Vehicle), and not Brahmâ, the Creator, who is the real Kâlahamsa; while
> Brahman (neuter) is Hamsa, and A‐hamsa, as will be explained in the
> Commentaries. Let it be understood that the terms Brahmâ and Parabrahman
> are not used here because they belong to our Esoteric nomenclature, but
> simply because they are more familiar to the students in the West. Both
> are the perfect equivalents of our one, three, and seven vowelled terms,
> which stand for the ONE ALL, and the One “All in All.”
> 
> Such are the basic conceptions on which the Secret Doctrine rests.
> 
> It would not be in place here to enter upon any defence or proof of their
> inherent reasonableness; nor can I pause to show how they are, in fact,
> contained—though too often under a misleading guise—in every system of
> thought or philosophy worthy of the name.
> 
> Once that the reader has gained a clear comprehension of them and realized
> the light which they throw on every problem of life, they will need no
> further justification in his eyes, because their truth will be to him as
> evident as the sun in heaven. I pass on, therefore, to the subject matter
> of the Stanzas as given in this volume, adding a skeleton outline of them,
> in the hope of thereby rendering the task of the student more easy, by
> placing before him in a few words the general conception therein
> explained.
> 
> The history of Cosmic Evolution, as traced in the Stanzas, is, so to say,
> the abstract algebraical formula of that evolution. Hence the student must
> not expect to find there an account of all the stages and transformations
> which intervene between the first beginnings of Universal Evolution and
> our present state. To give such an account would be as impossible as it
> would be incomprehensible to men who cannot grasp the nature of even the
> plane of existence next to that to which, for the moment, their
> consciousness is limited.
> 
> The Stanzas, therefore, give an abstract formula which can be applied,
> _mutatis mutandis_, to all evolution: to that of our tiny Earth, to that
> of the Chain of Planets of which that Earth forms one, to the Solar
> Universe to which that Chain belongs and so on, in an ascending scale,
> till the mind reels and is exhausted in the effort.
> 
> The seven Stanzas given in this volume represent the seven terms of this
> abstract formula. They refer to, and describe, the seven great stages of
> the evolutionary process, which are spoken of in the _Purânas_ as the
> “Seven Creations,” and in the _Bible_ as the “Days” of Creation.
> 
> _Stanza I_ describes the state of the ONE ALL during Pralaya, before the
> first flutter of reäwakening Manifestation.
> 
> A moment’s thought shows that such a state can only be symbolized; to
> describe it is impossible. Nor can it be symbolized except in negatives;
> for, since it is the state of Absoluteness _per se_, it can possess none
> of those specific attributes which serve us to describe objects in
> positive terms. Hence that state can only be suggested by the negatives of
> all those most abstract attributes which men feel rather than conceive, as
> the remotest limits attainable by their power of conception.
> 
> _Stanza II_ describes a stage which, to a Western mind, is so nearly
> identical with that mentioned in Stanza I, that to express the idea of its
> difference would require a treatise in itself. Hence it must be left to
> the intuition and the higher faculties of the reader to grasp, as far as
> he can, the meaning of the allegorical phrases used. Indeed it must be
> remembered that all these Stanzas appeal to the inner faculties rather
> than to the ordinary comprehension of the physical brain.
> 
> _Stanza III_ describes the Reäwakening of the Universe to life after
> Pralaya. It depicts the emergence of the Monads from their state of
> absorption within the One, the earliest and highest stage in the formation
> of Worlds—the term Monad being one which may apply equally to the vastest
> Solar System or the tiniest atom.
> 
> _Stanza IV_ shows the differentiation of the “Germ” of the Universe into
> the Septenary Hierarchy of conscious Divine Powers, which are the active
> manifestations of the One Supreme Energy. They are the framers, shapers,
> and ultimately the creators of all the manifested Universe, in the only
> sense in which the name “creator” is intelligible; they inform and guide
> it; they are the intelligent Beings who adjust and control evolution,
> embodying in themselves those manifestations of the One Law, which we know
> as the “Laws of Nature.”
> 
> Generically, they are known as the Dhyân Chohans, though each of the
> various groups has its own designation in the Secret Doctrine.
> 
> This stage of evolution is spoken of in Hindû mythology as the “Creation
> of the Gods.”
> 
> _Stanza V_ describes the process of world‐formation. First, diffused
> Cosmic Matter, then the “Fiery Whirlwind,” the first stage in the
> formation of a nebula. This nebula condenses, and after passing through
> various transformations, forms a Solar Universe, a Planetary Chain, or a
> single Planet, as the case may be.
> 
> _Stanza VI_ indicates the subsequent stages in the formation of a “World”
> and brings the evolution of such a World down to its fourth great period,
> corresponding to the period in which we are now living.
> 
> _Stanza VII_ continues the history, tracing the descent of life down to
> the appearance of Man; and thus closes the First Book of the Secret
> Doctrine.
> 
> The development of “Man” from his first appearance on this earth in this
> Round to the state in which we now find him will form the subject of Book
> II.
> 
> The Stanzas which form the thesis of every section are given throughout in
> their modern translated version, as it would be worse than useless to make
> the subject still more difficult by introducing the archaic phraseology of
> the original, with its puzzling style and words. Extracts are given from
> the Chinese, Tibetan and Sanskrit translations of the original Senzar
> Commentaries and Glosses on the _Book of Dzyan_—now rendered for the first
> time into a European language. It is almost unnecessary to state that only
> portions of the seven Stanzas are here given. Were they published complete
> they would remain incomprehensible to all save a few high Occultists. Nor
> is there any need to assure the reader that no more than most of the
> profane, does the writer, or rather the humble recorder, understand those
> forbidden passages. To facilitate the reading, and to avoid the too
> frequent reference to foot‐notes, it was thought best to blend together
> texts and glosses, using the Sanskrit and Tibetan proper names whenever
> these could not be avoided, in preference to giving the originals: the
> more so as the said terms are all accepted synonyms, the latter only being
> used between a Master and his Chelâs (or Disciples).
> 
> Thus, were one to translate into English, using only the substantives and
> technical terms as employed in one of the Tibetan and Senzar versions,
> shloka 1 would read as follows:
> 
> _Tho‐ag in Zhi‐gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas zhiba. All Nyug bosom.
> Konch‐hog not; Thyan‐Kam not; Lha‐Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
> Dharmakâya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang and Ssa in Ngovonyidj;
> alone Tho‐og Yinsin in night of Sun‐chan and Yong‐Grub [Paranishpanna],
> etc., etc._
> 
> This would sound like pure _Abracadabra_.
> 
> As this work is written for the instruction of students of Occultism, and
> not for the benefit of Philologists, we may well avoid such foreign terms
> wherever it is possible to do so. The untranslateable terms alone,
> incomprehensible unless their meanings are explained, are left, but all
> such terms are rendered in their Sanskrit form. Needless to remind the
> reader that these are, in almost every case, the late developments of the
> latter language, and pertain to the Fifth Root‐Race. Sanskrit, as now
> known, was not spoken by the Atlanteans, and most of the philosophical
> terms used in the systems of the India of the Post‐Mahâbhâratan period are
> not found in the _Vedas_, nor are they to be met with in the original
> Stanzas, but only their equivalents. The reader who is not a Theosophist,
> is once more invited to regard all that follows as a fairy tale, if he
> likes; at best as one of the yet unproven speculations of dreamers; and,
> at the worst, as an additional hypothesis to the many scientific
> hypotheses past, present and future, some exploded, others still
> lingering. It is not in any sense less scientific than are many of the so‐
> called scientific theories; and it is in every case more philosophical and
> probable.
> 
> In view of the abundant comments and explanations required, the references
> to the footnotes are marked in the usual way, while the sentences to be
> commented upon are marked with letters. Additional matter will be found in
> the Chapters on Symbolism, which are often more full of information than
> the Commentaries.
> 
> PART I. COSMIC EVOLUTION.
> 
> Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan,” With Commentaries.
> 
>     Nor Aught nor Nought existed; yon bright sky
>     Was not, nor heaven’s broad roof outstretched above.
>     What covered all? What sheltered? What concealed?
>     Was it the water’s fathomless abyss?
>     There was no death—yet there was nought immortal,
>     There was no confine betwixt day and night;
>     The only One breathed breathless by Itself,
>     Other than It there nothing since has been.
>     Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled
>     In gloom profound—an ocean without light.
>     The germ that still lay covered in the husk
>     Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat.
> 
>     Who knows the secret? Who proclaimed it here?
>     Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang?
>     The Gods themselves came later into being—
>     Who knows from whence this great creation sprang?
>     That, whence all this great creation came,
>     Whether Its will created or was mute,
>     The Most High Seer that is in highest heaven,
>     He knows it—or perchance even he knows not.
> 
>     Gazing into eternity
>     Ere the foundations of the earth were laid.
> 
>     Thou wert. And when the subterranean flame
>     Shall burst its prison and devour the frame,
>     Thou shalt be still as thou wert before
>     And know no change, when time shall be no more.
>     O, endless thought, divine Eternity.
> 
>     _Rig Veda_ (COLEBROOKE).
> 
> Seven Stanzas From The “Book Of Dzyan”
> 
> Stanza I.
> 
> 1. The Eternal Parent, wrapped in her Ever‐Invisible Robes, had slumbered
> once again for Seven Eternities.
> 
> 2. Time was not, for it lay asleep in the Infinite Bosom of Duration.
> 
> 3. Universal Mind was not, for there were no Ah‐hi to contain it.
> 
> 4. The Seven Ways to Bliss were not. The Great Causes of Misery were not,
> for there was no one to produce and get ensnared by them.
> 
> 5. Darkness alone filled the Boundless All, for Father, Mother and Son
> were once more one, and the Son had not yet awakened for the new Wheel and
> his Pilgrimage thereon.
> 
> 6. The Seven Sublime Lords and the Seven Truths had ceased to be, and the
> Universe, the Son of Necessity, was immersed in Paranishpanna, to be
> outbreathed by that which is, and yet is not. Naught was.
> 
> 7. The Causes of Existence had been done away with; the Visible that was,
> and the Invisible that is, rested in Eternal Non‐Being—the One Being.
> 
> 8. Alone, the One Form of Existence stretched boundless, infinite,
> causeless, in Dreamless Sleep; and Life pulsated unconscious in Universal
> Space, throughout that All‐Presence, which is sensed by the Opened Eye of
> Dangma.
> 
> 9. But where was Dangma when the Âlaya of the Universe was in Paramârtha,
> and the Great Wheel was Anupâdaka?
> 
> Stanza II.
> 
> 1. ... Where were the Builders, the Luminous Sons of Manvantaric Dawn?...
> In the Unknown Darkness in their Ah‐hi Paranishpanna. The Producers of
> Form from No‐Form—the Root of the World—the Devamâtri and Svabhâvat,
> rested in the Bliss of Non‐Being.
> 
> 2. ... Where was Silence? Where the ears to sense it? No, there was
> neither Silence nor Sound; naught save Ceaseless Eternal Breath, which
> knows itself not.
> 
> 3. The Hour had not yet struck; the Ray had not yet flashed into the Germ;
> the Mâtripadma had not yet swollen.
> 
> 4. Her Heart had not yet opened for the One Ray to enter, thence to fall,
> as Three into Four, into the Lap of Mâyâ.
> 
> 5. The Seven were not yet born from the Web of Light. Darkness alone was
> Father‐Mother, Svabhâvat; and Svabhâvat was in Darkness.
> 
> 6. These Two are the Germ, and the Germ is One. The Universe was still
> concealed in the Divine Thought and the Divine Bosom.
> 
> Stanza III.
> 
> 1. ... The last Vibration of the Seventh Eternity thrills through
> Infinitude. The Mother swells, expanding from within without, like the Bud
> of the Lotus.
> 
> 2. The Vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift Wing the whole
> Universe and the Germ that dwelleth in Darkness, the Darkness that
> breathes over the slumbering Waters of Life.
> 
> 3. Darkness radiates Light, and Light drops one solitary Ray into the
> Waters, into the Mother‐Deep. The Ray shoots through the Virgin Egg, the
> Ray causes the Eternal Egg to thrill, and drop the non‐eternal Germ, which
> condenses into the World‐Egg.
> 
> 4. The Three fall into the Four. The Radiant Essence becomes Seven inside,
> Seven outside. The Luminous Egg, which in itself is Three, curdles and
> spreads in milk‐white Curds throughout the Depths of Mother, the Root that
> grows in the Depths of the Ocean of Life.
> 
> 5. The Root remains, the Light remains, the Curds remain, and still
> Oeaohoo is One.
> 
> 6. The Root of Life was in every Drop of the Ocean of Immortality, and the
> Ocean was Radiant Light, which was Fire, and Heat, and Motion. Darkness
> vanished and was no more; it disappeared in its own Essence, the Body of
> Fire and Water, of Father and Mother.
> 
> 7. Behold, O Lanoo, the Radiant Child of the Two, the unparalleled
> refulgent Glory—Bright Space, Son of Dark Space, who emerges from the
> Depths of the great Dark Waters. It is Oeaohoo, the Younger, the ——. He
> shines forth as the Sun, he is the Blazing Divine Dragon of Wisdom; the
> Eka is Chatur, and Chatur takes to itself Tri, and the Union produces the
> Sapta, in whom are the Seven, which become the Tridasha, the Hosts and the
> Multitudes. Behold him lifting the Veil, and unfurling it from East to
> West. He shuts out the Above, and leaves the Below to be seen as the Great
> Illusion. He marks the places for the Shining Ones, and turns the Upper
> into a shoreless Sea of Fire, and the One Manifested into the Great
> Waters.
> 
> 8. Where was the Germ, and where was now Darkness? Where is the Spirit of
> the Flame that burns in thy Lamp, O Lanoo? The Germ is That, and That is
> Light, the White Brilliant Son of the Dark Hidden Father.
> 
> 9. Light is Cold Flame, and Flame is Fire, and Fire produces Heat, which
> yields Water—the Water of Life in the Great Mother.
> 
> 10. Father‐Mother spin a Web, whose upper end is fastened to Spirit, the
> Light of the One Darkness, and the lower one to its shadowy end, Matter;
> and this Web is the Universe, spun out of the Two Substances made in One,
> which is Svabhâvat.
> 
> 11. It expands when the Breath of Fire is upon it; it contracts when the
> Breath of the Mother touches it. Then the Sons dissociate and scatter, to
> return into their Mother’s Bosom, at the end of the Great Day, and re‐
> become one with her. When it is cooling, it becomes radiant. Its Sons
> expand and contract through their own Selves and Hearts; they embrace
> Infinitude.
> 
> 12. Then Svabhâvat sends Fohat to harden the Atoms. Each is a part of the
> Web. Reflecting the “Self‐Existent Lord,” like a Mirror, each becomes in
> turn a World.
> 
> Stanza IV.
> 
> 1. ... Listen, ye Sons of the Earth, to your Instructors—the Sons of the
> Fire. Learn, there is neither first nor last; for all is One Number,
> issued from No‐Number.
> 
> 2. Learn what we, who descend from the Primordial Seven, we, who are born
> from the Primordial Flame, have learnt from our Fathers....
> 
> 3. From the Effulgency of Light—the Ray of the Ever‐Darkness—sprang in
> Space the reäwakened Energies; the One from the Egg, the Six, and the
> Five. Then the Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five—the Twice
> Seven, the Sum Total. And these are the Essences, the Flames, the
> Elements, the Builders, the Numbers, the Arûpa, the Rûpa, and the Force or
> Divine Man, the Sum Total. And from the Divine Man emanated the Forms, the
> Sparks, the Sacred Animals, and the Messengers of the Sacred Fathers
> within the Holy Four.
> 
> 4. This was the Army of the Voice, the Divine Mother of the Seven. The
> Sparks of the Seven are subject to, and the servants of, the First, the
> Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, and the Seventh of
> the Seven. These are called Spheres, Triangles, Cubes, Lines and
> Modellers; for thus stands the Eternal Nidâna—the Oi‐Ha‐Hou.
> 
> 5. The Oi‐Ha‐Hou, which is Darkness, the Boundless, or the No‐Number, Âdi‐
> Nidâna Svabhâvat, the [circle]:
> 
> I. The Âdi‐Sanat, the Number, for he is One.
> 
> II. The Voice of the Word, Svabhâvat, the Numbers, for he is One and Nine.
> 
> III. The “Formless Square.”
> 
> And these Three, enclosed within the [circle], are the Sacred Four; and
> the Ten are the Arûpa Universe. Then come the Sons, the Seven Fighters,
> the One, the Eighth left out, and his Breath which is the Light‐Maker.
> 
> 6. ... Then the Second Seven, who are the Lipika, produced by the Three.
> The Rejected Son is One. The “Son‐Suns” are countless.
> 
> Stanza V.
> 
> 1. The Primordial Seven, the First Seven Breaths of the Dragon of Wisdom,
> produce in their turn from their Holy Circumgyrating Breaths the Fiery
> Whirlwind.
> 
> 2. They make of him the Messenger of their Will. The Dzyu becomes Fohat:
> the swift Son of the Divine Sons, whose Sons are the Lipika, runs circular
> errands. Fohat is the Steed, and the Thought is the Rider. He passes like
> lightning through the fiery clouds; takes Three, and Five, and Seven
> Strides through the Seven Regions above, and the Seven below. He lifts his
> Voice, and calls the innumerable Sparks, and joins them together.
> 
> 3. He is their guiding spirit and leader. When he commences work, he
> separates the Sparks of the Lower Kingdom, that float and thrill with joy
> in their radiant dwellings, and forms therewith the Germs of Wheels. He
> places them in the Six Directions of Space, and One in the middle—the
> Central Wheel.
> 
> 4. Fohat traces spiral lines to unite the Sixth to the Seventh—the Crown.
> An Army of the Sons of Light stands at each angle; the Lipika, in the
> Middle Wheel. They say: “his is good.” The first Divine World is ready;
> the First, the Second. Then the “Divine Arûpa” reflects itself in Chhâyâ
> Loka, the First Garment of Anupâdaka.
> 
> 5. Fohat takes five strides, and builds a winged wheel at each corner of
> the square for the Four Holy Ones ... and their Armies.
> 
> 6. The Lipika circumscribe the Triangle, the First One, the Cube, the
> Second One, and the Pentacle within the Egg. It is the Ring called “Pass
> Not” for those who descend and ascend; who during the Kalpa are
> progressing towards the Great Day “Be With Us.”... Thus were formed the
> Arûpa and the Rûpa: from One Light, Seven Lights; from each of the Seven,
> seven times Seven Lights. The Wheels watch the Ring....
> 
> Stanza VI.
> 
> 1. By the power of the Mother of Mercy and Knowledge, Kwan‐Yin—the Triple
> of Kwan‐Shai‐Yin, residing in Kwan‐Yin‐Tien—Fohat, the Breath of their
> Progeny, the Son of the Sons, having called forth, from the lower Abyss,
> the Illusive Form of Sien‐Tchan and the Seven Elements.
> 
> 2. The Swift and the Radiant One produces the seven Laya Centres, against
> which none will prevail to the Great Day “Be With Us”; and seats the
> Universe on these Eternal Foundations, surrounding Sien‐Tchan with the
> Elementary Germs.
> 
> 3. Of the Seven—first One manifested, Six concealed; Two manifested, Five
> concealed; Three manifested, Four concealed; Four produced, Three hidden;
> Four and One Tsan revealed, Two and One‐Half concealed; Six to be
> manifested, One laid aside. Lastly, Seven Small Wheels revolving: one
> giving birth to the other.
> 
> 4. He builds them in the likeness of older Wheels, placing them on the
> Imperishable Centres.
> 
> How does Fohat build them? He collects the Fiery‐Dust. He makes Balls of
> Fire, runs through them, and round them, infusing life thereïnto, then
> sets them into motion; some one way, some the other way. They are cold, he
> makes them hot. They are dry, he makes them moist. They shine, he fans and
> cools them. Thus acts Fohat from one Twilight to the other, during Seven
> Eternities.
> 
> 5. At the Fourth, the Sons are told to create their Images. One‐Third
> refuses. Two obey.
> 
> The Curse is pronounced. They will be born in the Fourth, suffer and cause
> suffering. This is the First War.
> 
> 6. The Older Wheels rotated downward and upward.... The Mother’s Spawn
> filled the whole. There were Battles fought between the Creators and the
> Destroyers, and Battles fought for Space; the Seed appearing and
> reäppearing continuously.
> 
> 7. Make thy calculations, O Lanoo, if thou wouldst learn the correct age
> of thy Small Wheel. Its Fourth Spoke is our Mother. Reach the Fourth Fruit
> of the Fourth Path of Knowledge that leads to Nirvana, and thou shalt
> comprehend, for thou shalt see....
> 
> Stanza VII.
> 
> 1. Behold the beginning of sentient formless Life.
> 
> First, the Divine, the One from the Mother‐Spirit; then, the Spiritual;
> the Three from the One, the Four from the One, and the Five, from which
> the Three, the Five and the Seven. These are the Three‐fold and the Four‐
> fold downward; the Mind‐born Sons of the First Lord, the Shining Seven. It
> is they who are thou, I, he, O Lanoo; they who watch over thee and thy
> mother, Bhûmî.
> 
> 2. The One Ray multiplies the smaller Rays. Life precedes Form, and Life
> survives the last atom. Through the countless Rays the Life‐Ray, the One,
> like a Thread through many Beads.
> 
> 3. When the One becomes Two, the Threefold appears, and the Three are One;
> and it is our Thread, O Lanoo, the Heart of the Man‐Plant called
> Saptaparna.
> 
> 4. It is the Root that never dies; the Three‐tongued Flame of the Four
> Wicks. The Wicks are the Sparks, that draw from the Three‐tongued Flame
> shot out by the Seven—their Flame—the Beams and Sparks of one Moon
> reflected in the running Waves of all the Rivers of Earth.
> 
> 5. The Spark hangs from the Flame by the finest thread of Fohat. It
> journeys through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ. It stops in the First, and is a
> Metal and a Stone; it passes into the Second, and behold—a Plant; the
> Plant whirls through seven changes and becomes a Sacred Animal. From the
> combined attributes of these, Manu, the Thinker, is formed. Who forms him?
> The Seven Lives and the One Life. Who completes him? The Fivefold Lha. And
> who perfects the last Body? Fish, Sin, and Soma....
> 
> 6. From the First‐born the Thread between the Silent Watcher and his
> Shadow becomes more strong and radiant with every Change. The morning
> Sunlight has changed into noon‐day glory....
> 
> 7. “This is thy present Wheel,” said the Flame to the Spark. “Thou art
> myself, my image and my shadow. I have clothed myself in thee, and thou
> art my Vâhan to the Day ‘Be With Us,’ when thou shalt re‐become myself and
> others, thyself and me.” Then the Builders, having donned their first
> Clothing, descend on radiant Earth and reign over Men—who are
> themselves....
> 
> [_Thus ends this portion of the archaic narrative, dark, confused, almost
> incomprehensible. An attempt will now be made to throw light into this
> darkness, to make sense out of this apparent non‐sense._]
> 
> Commentaries On The Seven Stanzas And Their Terms, According To Their
> Numeration, In Stanzas And Shlokas.
> 
> Stanza I.
> 
> 1. THE ETERNAL PARENT,(54) WRAPPED IN HER EVER‐INVISIBLE ROBES, HAD
> SLUMBERED ONCE AGAIN FOR SEVEN ETERNITIES.
> 
> The “Parent,” Space, is the eternal, ever‐present Cause of all—the
> incomprehensible DEITY, whose “Invisible Robes” are the mystic Root of all
> Matter, and of the Universe. Space is the _one eternal thing_ that we can
> most easily imagine, immovable in its abstraction and uninfluenced by
> either the presence or absence in it of an objective Universe. It is
> without dimension, in every sense, and self‐existent. Spirit is the first
> differentiation from “THAT,” the Causeless Cause of both Spirit and
> Matter. As taught in the Esoteric Catechism, it is neither “limitless
> void,” nor “conditioned fulness,” but both. It was and ever will be.
> 
> Thus, the “Robes” stand for the noumenon of undifferentiated Cosmic
> Matter. It is not matter as we know it, but the spiritual essence of
> matter, and is coëternal and even one with Space in its abstract sense.
> Root‐Nature is also the source of the subtile invisible properties in
> visible matter. It is the Soul, so to say, of the One Infinite Spirit. The
> Hindûs call it Mûlaprakriti, and say that it is the primordial Substance,
> which is the basis of the Upâdhi or Vehicle of every phenomenon, whether
> physical, psychic or mental. It is the source from which Âkâsha radiates.
> 
> By the “Seven Eternities,” æons or periods are meant. The word Eternity,
> as understood in Christian theology, has no meaning to the Asiatic ear,
> except in its application to the One Existence; nor is the term
> “sempiternity,” the eternal only in futurity, anything better than a
> misnomer.(55) Such words do not and cannot exist in philosophical
> metaphysics, and were unknown till the advent of ecclesiastical
> Christianity. The Seven Eternities mean the seven periods, or a period
> answering in its duration to the seven periods, of a Manvantara, extending
> throughout a Mahâkalpa or “Great Age” (100 Years of Brahmâ), making a
> total of 311,040,000,000,000 of years; each Year of Brahmâ being composed
> of 360 Days, and of the same number of Nights of Brahmâ (reckoning by the
> Chandrâyana or lunar year); and a Day of Brahmâ consisting of
> 4,320,000,000 of mortal years. These Eternities belong to the most secret
> calculations, in which, in order to arrive at the true total, every figure
> must be 7x, x varying according to the nature of the cycle in the
> subjective or real world; and every figure relating to, or representing,
> the different cycles—from the greatest to the smallest—in the objective or
> unreal world, must necessarily be multiples of seven. The key to this
> cannot be given, for herein lies the mystery of esoteric calculations, and
> for the purposes of ordinary calculation it has no sense. “The number
> seven,” says the _Kabalah_, “is the great number of the Divine Mysteries”;
> number ten is that of all human knowledge (the Pythagorean Decad); 1,000
> is the number ten to the third power, and therefore the number 7,000 is
> also symbolical. In the Secret Doctrine the figure 4 is the male symbol
> only on the highest plane of abstraction; on the plane of matter the 3 is
> the masculine and the 4 the feminine—the upright and the horizontal in the
> fourth stage of symbolism, when the symbols become the glyphs of the
> generative powers on the physical plane.
> 
> 2. TIME WAS NOT, FOR IT LAY ASLEEP IN THE INFINITE BOSOM OF DURATION.
> 
> “Time” is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of
> consciousness as we travel through Eternal Duration, and it does not exist
> where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced, but
> “lies asleep.” The Present is only a mathematical line which divides that
> part of Eternal Duration which we call the Future, from that part which we
> call the Past. Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains
> without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second; and the
> sensation we have of the actuality of the division of Time known as the
> Present, comes from the blurring of the momentary glimpse, or succession
> of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from
> the region of ideals, which we call the Future, to the region of memories
> that we name the Past. In the same way we experience a sensation of
> duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the
> blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing
> does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is
> composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its
> appearance in material form to its disappearance from earth. It is these
> “sum‐totals” that exist from eternity in the Future, and pass by degrees
> through matter, to exist for eternity in the Past. No one would say that a
> bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air,
> and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself
> consisted only of that cross‐section thereof which at any given moment
> coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same
> time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean. Even so of persons and things,
> which, dropping out of the “to be” into the “has been,” out of the Future
> into the Past—present momentarily to our senses a cross‐section, as it
> were, of their total selves, as they pass through Time and Space (as
> Matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two
> eternities constitute that Duration in which alone anything has true
> existence, were our senses but able to cognize it.
> 
> 3. UNIVERSAL MIND WAS NOT, FOR THERE WERE NO AH‐HI(56) TO CONTAIN IT.(57)
> 
> “Mind” is a name given to the sum of the States of Consciousness, grouped
> under Thought, Will and Feeling. During deep sleep ideation ceases on the
> physical plane, and memory is in abeyance; thus for the time‐being “Mind
> is not,” because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and
> memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased to function. A
> noumenon can become a phenomenon on any plane of existence only by
> manifesting on that plane through an appropriate basis or vehicle; and
> during the long Night of rest called Pralaya, when all the Existences are
> dissolved, the “Universal Mind” remains as a permanent possibility of
> mental action, or as that abstract absolute Thought, of which Mind is the
> concrete relative manifestation. The Ah‐hi (Dhyân Chohans) are the
> collective hosts of spiritual Beings—the Angelic Hosts of Christianity,
> the Elohim and “Messengers” of the Jews—who are the Vehicle for the
> manifestation of the Divine or Universal Thought and Will. They are the
> Intelligent Forces that give to, and enact in, Nature her “Laws,” while
> they themselves act according to Laws imposed upon them in a similar
> manner by still higher Powers; but they are not the “personifications” of
> the Powers of Nature, as erroneously thought. This Hierarchy of spiritual
> Beings, through which the Universal Mind comes into action, is like an
> army—a host, truly—by means of which the fighting power of a nation
> manifests itself, and which is composed of army‐corps, divisions,
> brigades, regiments, and so forth, each with its separate individuality or
> life, and its limited freedom of action and limited responsibilities; each
> contained in a larger individuality, to which its own interests are
> subservient, and each containing lesser individualities in itself.
> 
> 4. THE SEVEN WAYS TO BLISS(58) WERE NOT (_a_). THE GREAT CAUSES OF
> MISERY(59) WERE NOT, FOR THERE WAS NO ONE TO PRODUCE AND GET ENSNARED BY
> THEM (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) There are “Seven Paths” or “Ways” to the “Bliss” of Non‐Existence,
> which is absolute Being, Existence and Consciousness. They were not,
> because the Universe, so far, was empty, and existed only in the Divine
> Thought.
> 
> (_b_) For it is ... the Twelve Nidânas, or Causes of Being. Each is the
> effect of its antecedent cause, and a cause, in its turn, to its
> successor; the sum total of the Nidânas being based on the Four Truths, a
> doctrine especially characteristic of the Hînayâna System.(60) They belong
> to the theory of the stream of catenated law which produces merit and
> demerit, and finally brings Karma into full sway. It is a system based
> upon the great truth that reïncarnation is to be dreaded, as existence in
> this world entails upon man only suffering, misery and pain; death itself
> being unable to deliver man from it, since death is merely the door
> through which he passes to another life on earth after a little rest on
> its threshold—Devachan. The Hînayâna System, or School of the Little
> Vehicle, is of very ancient growth; while the Mahâyâna, or School of the
> Great Vehicle, is of a later period, having originated after the death of
> Buddha. Yet the tenets of the latter are as old as the hills that have
> contained such schools from time immemorial, and the Hînayâna and Mahâyâna
> Schools both teach the same doctrine in reality. Yâna, or Vehicle, is a
> mystic expression, both “Vehicles” inculcating that man may escape the
> sufferings of rebirth and even the false bliss of Devachan, by obtaining
> Wisdom and Knowledge, which alone can dispel the Fruits of Illusion and
> Ignorance.
> 
> Mâyâ, or Illusion, is an element which enters into all finite things, for
> everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute, reality,
> since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer
> depends upon his power of cognition. To the untrained eye of the savage, a
> painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of
> colour, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape.
> Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute Existence which
> contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The Existences belonging
> to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyân Chohans, are,
> comparatively, like the shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colourless
> screen. Nevertheless all things are relatively real, for the cognizer is
> also a reflection, and the things cognized are therefore as real to him as
> himself. Whatever reality things possess, must be looked for in them
> before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world;
> for we cannot cognize any such existence directly, so long as we have
> sense‐instruments which bring only material existence into the field of
> our consciousness. Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both
> we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our
> only realities. But as we rise in the scale of development, we perceive
> that in the stages through which we have passed, we mistook shadows for
> realities, and that the upward progress of the Ego is a series of
> progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now,
> at last, we have reached “reality”; but only when we shall have reached
> absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from
> the delusions produced by Mâyâ.
> 
> 5. DARKNESS ALONE FILLED THE BOUNDLESS ALL (_a_), FOR FATHER, MOTHER AND
> SON WERE ONCE MORE ONE, AND THE SON HAD NOT YET AWAKENED FOR THE NEW
> WHEEL(61) AND HIS PILGRIMAGE THEREON (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) “_Darkness is Father‐Mother: Light their Son_,” says an old Eastern
> proverb. Light is inconceivable except as coming from some source which is
> the cause of it: and as, in the case of Primordial Light, that source is
> unknown, though so strongly demanded by reason and logic, therefore it is
> called “Darkness” by us, from an intellectual point of view. As to
> borrowed or secondary light, whatever its source, it can be only of a
> temporary mâyâvic character. Darkness, then, is the Eternal Matrix in
> which the Sources of Light appear and disappear. Nothing is added to
> darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our
> plane. They are interchangeable; and, scientifically, light is but a mode
> of darkness and _vice versâ_. Yet both are phenomena of the same
> noumenon—which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray
> twilight to the perception of the average Mystic, though to that of the
> spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light. How far we discern the
> light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision. What is
> light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant
> sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness. When the
> whole Universe was plunged in sleep—had returned to its one primordial
> element—there was neither centre of luminosity, nor eye to perceive light,
> and darkness necessarily filled the “Boundless All.”
> 
> (_b_) The “Father” and “Mother” are the male and female principles in
> Root‐Nature, the opposite poles that manifest in all things on every plane
> of Kosmos—or Spirit and Substance, in a less allegorical aspect, the
> resultant of which is the Universe, or the “Son.” They are “once more
> one,” when in the Night of Brahmâ, during Pralaya, all in the objective
> Universe has returned to its one primal and eternal cause, to reäppear at
> the following Dawn—as it does periodically. Kârana—Eternal Cause—was
> alone. To put it more plainly: Kârana is alone during the Nights of
> Brahmâ. The previous objective Universe has dissolved into its one primal
> and eternal Cause, and is, so to say, held in solution in Space, to
> differentiate again and crystallize out anew at the following Manvataric
> Dawn, which is the commencement of a new Day or new activity of Brahmâ—the
> symbol of a Universe. In esoteric parlance, Brahmâ is Father‐Mother‐Son,
> or Spirit, Soul and Body at once; each personage being symbolical of an
> attribute, and each attribute or quality being a graduated efflux of
> Divine Breath in its cyclic differentiation, involutionary and
> evolutionary. In the cosmico‐physical sense, it is the Universe, the
> Planetary Chain and the Earth; in the purely spiritual, the Unknown Deity,
> Planetary Spirit, and Man—the son of the two, the creature of Spirit and
> Matter, and a manifestation of them in his periodical appearances on Earth
> during the “Wheels,” or the Manvantaras.
> 
> 6. THE SEVEN SUBLIME LORDS AND THE SEVEN TRUTHS HAD CEASED TO BE, (_a_)
> AND THE UNIVERSE, THE SON OF NECESSITY, WAS IMMERSED IN PARANISHPANNA,(62)
> (_b_) TO BE OUTBREATHED BY THAT WHICH IS, AND YET IS NOT. NAUGHT WAS
> (_c_).
> 
> (a) The “Seven Sublime Lords” are the Seven Creative Spirits, the Dhyân
> Chohans, who correspond to the Hebrew Elohim. It is the same Hierarchy of
> Archangels to which St. Michael, St. Gabriel, and others belong, in
> Christian Theogony. Only while St. Michael, for instance, is allowed in
> dogmatic Latin Theology to watch over all the promontories and gulfs, in
> the Esoteric System the Dhyânis watch successively over one of the Rounds
> and the great Root‐Races of our Planetary Chain. They are, moreover, said
> to send their Bodhisattvas, the human correspondents of the Dhyâni‐Buddhas
> during every Round and Race. Out of the “Seven Truths” and Revelations, or
> rather revealed secrets, four only have been handed to us, as we are still
> in the Fourth Round, and the world also has had only four Buddhas, so far.
> This is a very complicated question, and will receive more ample treatment
> later on.
> 
> So far “there are only Four Truths, and Four _Vedas_”—say the Buddhists
> and Hindûs. For a similar reason Irenæus insisted on the necessity of Four
> Gospels. But as every new Root‐Race at the head of a Round must have its
> revelation and revealers, the next Round will bring the Fifth, the
> following the Sixth, and so on.
> 
> (b) “Paranishpanna” is the Absolute Perfection to which all Existences
> attain at the close of a great period of activity, or Mahâmanvantara, and
> in which they rest during the succeeding period of repose. In Tibetan it
> is called “Yong‐Grub.” Up to the day of the Yogâchârya School the true
> nature of Paranirvâna was taught publicly, but since then it has become
> entirely esoteric; hence so many contradictory interpretations of it. It
> is only a true Idealist who can understand it. Everything has to be viewed
> as ideal, with the exception of Paranirvâna, by him who would comprehend
> that state, and acquire a knowledge of how Non‐Ego, Voidness, and Darkness
> are Three in One, and alone self‐existent and perfect. It is absolute,
> however, only in a relative sense, for it must give room to still further
> absolute perfection, according to a higher standard of excellence in the
> following period of activity—just as a perfect flower must cease to be a
> perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit, if such a
> mode of expression may be permitted.
> 
> The Secret Doctrine teaches the progressive development of everything,
> worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither
> conceivable beginning nor imaginable end. Our “Universe” is only one of an
> infinite number of Universes, all of them “Sons of Necessity,” because
> links in the great cosmic chain of Universes, each one standing in the
> relation of an effect as regards its predecessor, and of a cause as
> regards its successor.
> 
> The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an
> outbreathing and inbreathing of the “Great Breath,” which is eternal, and
> which, being Motion, is one of the three symbols of the Absolute—Abstract
> Space and Duration being the other two. When the Great Breath is
> projected, it is called the Divine Breath, and is regarded as the
> breathing of the Unknowable Deity—the One Existence—which breathes out a
> thought, as it were, which becomes the Kosmos. So also is it that when the
> Divine Breath is inspired, the Universe disappears into the bosom of the
> Great Mother, who then sleeps “wrapped in her Ever‐Invisible Robes.”
> 
> (c) By “that which is, and yet is not” is meant the Great Breath itself,
> which we can only speak of as Absolute Existence, but cannot picture to
> our imagination as any form of Existence that we can distinguish from Non‐
> Existence. The three periods—the Present, the Past and the Future—are in
> Esoteric Philosophy a compound time; for the three are a composite number
> only in relation to the phenomenal plane, but in the realm of noumena have
> no abstract validity. As said in the Scriptures: “The Past Time is the
> Present Time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into
> existence, still is,” according to a precept in the Prasanga Madhyamika
> teaching, whose dogmas have been known ever since it broke away from the
> purely esoteric schools.(63) Our ideas, in short, on duration and time are
> all derived from our sensations according to the laws of association.
> Inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge, they
> nevertheless can have no existence except in the experience of the
> individual Ego, and perish when its evolutionary march dispels the Mâyâ of
> phenomenal existence. What is time, for instance, but the panoramic
> succession of our states of consciousness? In the words of a Master, “I
> feel irritated at having to use these three clumsy words—Past, Present,
> and Future—miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective
> whole, they are about as ill‐adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine
> carving.” One has to acquire Paramârtha lest one should become too easy a
> prey to Samvriti—is a philosophical axiom.(64)
> 
> 7. THE CAUSES OF EXISTENCE HAD BEEN DONE AWAY WITH; (_a_) THE VISIBLE THAT
> WAS, AND THE INVISIBLE THAT IS, RESTED IN ETERNAL NON‐BEING—THE ONE BEING
> (_b_).
> 
> (a) “The Causes of Existence” mean not only the physical causes known to
> Science, but the metaphysical causes, the chief of which is the desire to
> exist, an outcome of Nidâna and Mâyâ. This desire for a sentient life
> shows itself in everything, from an atom to a sun, and is a reflection of
> the Divine Thought propelled into objective existence, into a law that the
> Universe should exist. According to Esoteric teaching, the real cause of
> that supposed desire, and of all existence, remains for ever hidden, and
> its first emanations are the most complete abstractions mind can conceive.
> These abstractions must of necessity be postulated as the cause of the
> material Universe which presents itself to the senses and intellect, and
> must underlie the secondary and subordinate powers of Nature, which have
> been anthropomorphized and worshipped as “God” and “gods” by the common
> herd of every age. It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause;
> the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank. This is virtually the
> condition to which the mind must come at last when we try to trace back
> the chain of causes and effects, but both Science and Religion jump to
> this condition of blankness much more quickly than is necessary, for they
> ignore the metaphysical abstractions which are the only conceivable causes
> of physical concretions. These abstractions become more and more concrete
> as they approach our plane of existence, until finally they phenomenalize
> in the form of the material Universe, by a process of conversion of
> metaphysics into physics, analogous to that by which steam can be
> condensed into water, and water frozen into ice.
> 
> (b) The idea of “Eternal Non‐Being,” which is the “One Being,” will appear
> a paradox to anyone who does not remember that we limit our ideas of Being
> to our present consciousness of Existence; making it a specific, instead
> of a generic term. An unborn infant, could it think in our acceptation of
> that term, would necessarily in a similar manner limit its conception of
> Being to the intra‐uterine life which alone it knows; and were it to
> endeavour to express to its consciousness the idea of life after birth
> (death to it), it would, in the absence of data to go upon, and of
> faculties to comprehend such data, probably express that life as “Non‐
> Being which is Real Being.” In our case the One Being is the noumenon of
> all the noumena which we know must underlie phenomena, and give them
> whatever shadow of reality they possess, but which we have not the senses
> or the intellect to cognize at present. The impalpable atoms of gold
> scattered through the substance of a ton of auriferous quartz may be
> imperceptible to the naked eye of the miner, yet he knows that they are
> not only present there, but that they alone give his quartz any
> appreciable value; and this relation of the gold to the quartz may faintly
> shadow forth that of the noumenon to the phenomenon. Only the miner knows
> what the gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the
> common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated
> from the Mâyâ which veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the
> Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his
> predecessors, directs the “Eye of Dangma” toward the essence of things on
> which no Mâyâ can have any influence. It is here that the teachings of
> Esoteric Philosophy in relation to the Nidânas and the Four Truths become
> of the greatest importance; but they are secret.
> 
> 8. ALONE, THE ONE FORM OF EXISTENCE (A) STRETCHED BOUNDLESS, INFINITE,
> CAUSELESS, IN DREAMLESS SLEEP (B); AND LIFE PULSATED UNCONSCIOUS IN
> UNIVERSAL SPACE, THROUGHOUT THAT ALL‐PRESENCE, WHICH IS SENSED BY THE
> OPENED EYE OF DANGMA.(65)
> 
> (a) The tendency of modern thought is to recur to the archaic idea of a
> homogeneous basis for apparently widely different things—heterogeneity
> developed from homogeneity. Biologists are now searching for their
> homogeneous protoplasm and Chemists for their protyle, while Science is
> looking for the force of which electricity, magnetism, heat, and so forth,
> are the differentiations. The Secret Doctrine carries this idea into the
> region of metaphysics, and postulates a “One Form of Existence” as the
> basis and source of all things. But perhaps the phrase, the “One Form of
> Existence,” is not altogether correct. The Sanskrit word is Prabhavâpyaya,
> “the place [or rather plane] whence is the origination, and into which is
> the resolution of all things,” as a commentator says. It is not the
> “Mother of the World,” as translated by Wilson;(66) for Jagad Yoni, as
> shown by Fitzedward Hall, is scarcely so much the “Mother of the World,”
> or the “Womb of the World,” as the “Material Cause of the World.” The
> Purânic commentators explain it by Kârana, “Cause,” but Esoteric
> Philosophy, by the _ideal spirit of that cause_. In its secondary stage,
> it is the Svabhâvat of the Buddhist philosopher, the Eternal Cause and
> Effect, omnipresent yet abstract, the self‐existent plastic Essence and
> the Root of all things, viewed in the same dual light as the Vedântin
> views his Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti, the one under two aspects. It
> seems indeed extraordinary to find great scholars speculating on the
> possibility of the Vedânta, and the Uttara Mîmânsâ especially, having been
> “evoked by the teachings of the Buddhists”; whereas, on the contrary, it
> is Buddhism, the teaching of Gautama Buddha, that was “evoked” and
> entirely upreared on the tenets of the Secret Doctrine, of which a partial
> sketch is here attempted, and on which, also, the _Upanishads_ are made to
> rest.(67) According to the teachings of Shrî Shankarâchârya our contention
> is undeniable.(68)
> 
> (b) “Dreamless Sleep” is one of the seven states of consciousness known in
> Oriental Esotericism. In each of these states a different portion of the
> mind comes into action; or as a Vedântin would express it, the individual
> is conscious in a different plane of his being. The term “Dreamless
> Sleep,” in this case, is applied allegorically to the Universe to express
> a condition somewhat analogous to that state of consciousness in man,
> which, not being remembered in a waking state, seems a blank, just as the
> sleep of the mesmerized subject seems to him an unconscious blank when he
> returns to his normal condition, although he has been talking and acting
> as a conscious individual would.
> 
> 9. BUT WHERE WAS DANGMA WHEN THE ÂLAYA OF THE UNIVERSE(69) WAS IN
> PARAMÂRTHA (_a_),(70) AND THE GREAT WHEEL WAS ANUPÂDAKA (_b_)?
> 
> (a) Here we have before us the subject of centuries of scholastic
> disputations. The two terms “Âlaya,” and “Paramârtha,” have been the
> causes of dividing schools and splitting the truth into more different
> aspects than any other mystic words. Âlaya is the Soul of the World or
> Anima Mundi—the Over‐Soul of Emerson—which according to esoteric teaching
> changes its nature periodically. Âlaya, though eternal and changeless in
> its inner essence on the planes which are unreachable by either men or
> cosmic gods (Dhyâni‐Buddhas), changes during the active life‐period with
> respect to the lower planes, ours included. During that time not only the
> Dhyâni‐Buddhas are one with Âlaya in Soul and Essence, but even the man
> strong in Yoga (Mystic Meditation) “is able to merge his soul with it,” as
> Aryâsanga, of the Yogâchârya school, says. This is not Nirvâna, but a
> condition next to it. Hence the disagreement. Thus, while the Yogâchâryas
> of the Mahâyâna School say that Âlaya (Nyingpo and Tsang in Tibetan) is
> the personification of the Voidness, and yet Âlaya is the basis of every
> visible and invisible thing, and that, though it is eternal and immutable
> in its essence, it reflects itself in every object of the Universe “like
> the moon in clear tranquil water”; other schools dispute the statement.
> The same for Paramârtha. The Yogâchâryas interpret the term as that which
> is also dependent upon other things (_paratantra_); and the Madhyamikas
> say that Paramârtha is limited to Paranishpanna or Absolute Perfection;
> _i.e._, in the exposition of these “Two Truths” of the Four, the former
> believe and maintain that, on this plane, at any rate, there exists only
> Samvritisatya or relative truth; and the latter teach the existence of
> Paramârthasatya, Absolute Truth.(71) “No Arhat, O mendicants, can reach
> absolute knowledge before he becomes one with Paranirvâna. Parikalpita and
> Paratantra are his two great enemies.”(72) Parikalpita (in Tibetan Kun‐
> tag) is error, made by those unable to realize the emptiness and
> illusionary nature of all; who believe something to exist which does
> not—_e.g._, the Non‐Ego. And Paratantra is that, whatever it is, which
> exists only through a dependent or causal connection, and which has to
> disappear as soon as the cause from which it proceeds is removed—_e.g._,
> the flame of a wick. Destroy or extinguish it, and light disappears.
> 
> Esoteric Philosophy teaches that everything lives and is conscious, but
> not that all life and consciousness are similar to those of human or even
> animal beings. Life we look upon as the One Form of Existence, manifesting
> in what is called Matter; or what, incorrectly separating them, we name
> Spirit, Soul and Matter in man. Matter is the Vehicle for the
> manifestation of Soul on this plane of existence, and Soul is the Vehicle
> on a higher plane for the manifestation of Spirit, and these three are a
> Trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all. The idea of
> Universal Life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to
> the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from
> anthropomorphic Theology. Science, it is true, contents itself with
> tracing or postulating the signs of Universal Life, but has not yet been
> bold enough to even whisper “Anima Mundi”! The idea of “crystalline life,”
> now familiar to Science, would have been scouted half a century ago.
> Botanists are now searching for the nerves of plants; not that they
> suppose that plants can feel or think as animals do, but because they
> believe that some structure, bearing the same relation functionally to
> plant life that nerves bear to animal life, is necessary to explain
> vegetable growth and nutrition. It seems hardly possible that Science, by
> the mere use of terms such as “force” and “energy,” can disguise from
> itself much longer the fact that things that have life are living things,
> whether they be atoms or planets.
> 
> But what is the belief of the inner Esoteric Schools, the reader may ask.
> What are the doctrines taught on this subject by the Esoteric “Buddhists”?
> With them, we answer, Âlaya has a double and even a threefold meaning. In
> the Yogâchârya system of the contemplative Mahâyâna School, Âlaya is both
> the Universal Soul, Anima Mundi, and the Self of a progressed Adept. “He
> who is strong in the Yoga can introduce at will his Âlaya by means of
> meditation into the true nature of Existence.” “The Âlaya has an absolute
> eternal existence,” says Aryâsanga, the rival of Nâgârjuna.(73) In one
> sense it is Pradhâna, which is explained in _Vishnu Purâna_ as, “that
> which is the unevolved cause, is emphatically called, by the most eminent
> sages, Pradhâna, original base, which is subtile Prakriti, _viz._, that
> which is eternal, and which at once is [or comprehends what is] and [what]
> is not, or is mere process.”(74) “The indiscrete cause which is uniform,
> and both cause and effect, and which those who are acquainted with first
> principles, call Pradhâna and Prakriti, is the incognizable Brahma who was
> before all,”(75) _i.e._, Brahma does not put forth evolution itself or
> create, but only exhibits various aspects of itself, one of which is
> Prakriti, an aspect of Pradhâna. “Prakriti,” however, is an incorrect
> word, and Âlaya would explain it better; for Prakriti is not the
> “uncognizable Brahma.” It is a mistake of those who know nothing of the
> universality of the Occult doctrines from the very cradle of the human
> races, and especially so of those scholars who reject the very idea of a
> “primordial revelation,” to teach that the Anima Mundi, the One Life or
> Universal Soul, was made known only by Anaxagoras, or during his age. This
> philosopher brought the teaching forward simply to oppose the too
> materialistic conceptions of Democritus on cosmogony, based on the
> exoteric theory of _blindly_ driven atoms. Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ,
> however, was not its inventor, but only its propagator, as was also Plato.
> That which he called Mundane Intelligence, Nous (Νοῦς), the principle that
> according to his views is absolutely separated and free from matter and
> acts with design, was called Motion, the One Life, or Jîvâtmâ, in India,
> ages before the year 500 B.C. Only the Âryan philosophers never endowed
> this principle, which with them is infinite, with the finite “attribute of
> thinking.”(76)
> 
> This leads naturally to the “Supreme Spirit” of Hegel and the German
> Transcendentalists—a contrast that it may be useful to point out. The
> schools of Schelling and Fichte have diverged widely from the primitive
> archaic conception of an Absolute Principle, and have mirrored an aspect
> only of the basic idea of the Vedânta. Even the “Absoluter Geist” shadowed
> forth by von Hartmann in his pessimistic philosophy of the “Unconscious,”
> while it is, perhaps, the closest approximation made by European
> speculation to the Hindû Advaitin doctrines, yet similarly falls far short
> of the reality.
> 
> According to Hegel, the “Unconscious” would never have undertaken the vast
> and laborious task of evolving the Universe, except in the hope of
> attaining clear Self‐Consciousness. In this connection it is to be borne
> in mind that in designating Spirit, a term which the European Pantheists
> use as equivalent to Parabrahman, as Unconscious, they do not attach to
> the expression the connotation it usually bears. It is employed in the
> absence of a better term to symbolize a profound mystery.
> 
> The “Absolute Consciousness behind phenomena,” they tell us, which is only
> termed unconsciousness in the absence of any element of personality,
> transcends human conception. Man, unable to form a single concept except
> in terms of empirical phenomena, is powerless from the very constitution
> of his being to raise the veil that shrouds the majesty of the Absolute.
> Only the liberated Spirit is able to faintly realize the nature of the
> source whence it sprung and whither it must eventually return. As the
> highest Dhyân Chohan, however, can but bow in ignorance before the awful
> mystery of Absolute Being; and since, even in that culmination of
> conscious existence—“the merging of the individual in the universal
> consciousness,” to use a phrase of Fichte’s—the Finite cannot conceive the
> Infinite, nor can it apply to it its own standard of mental experiences,
> how can it be said that the Unconscious and the Absolute can have even an
> instinctive impulse or hope of attaining clear Self‐Consciousness?(77) A
> Vedântin, moreover, would never admit this Hegelian idea; and the
> Occultist would say that it applies perfectly to the awakened Mahat, the
> Universal Mind already projected into the phenomenal world as the first
> aspect of the changeless Absolute, but never to the latter. “Spirit and
> Matter, or Purusha and Prakriti, are but the two primeval aspects of the
> One and Secondless,” we are taught.
> 
> The matter‐moving Nous, the animating Soul, immanent in every atom,
> manifested in man, latent in the stone, has different degrees of power;
> and this Pantheistic idea of a general Spirit‐Soul pervading all Nature is
> the oldest of all the philosophical notions. Nor was the Archæus a
> discovery either of Paracelsus or of his pupil Van Helmont; for this same
> Archæus is “Father‐Æther,” the manifested basis and source of the
> innumerable phenomena of life—localized. The whole series of the
> numberless speculations of this kind are but variations on the same theme,
> the key‐note of which was struck in this “primeval revelation.”
> 
> (b) The term “Anupâdaka,” parentless, or without progenitors, is a
> mystical designation having several meanings in our philosophy. By this
> name Celestial Beings, the Dhyân Chohans or Dhyâni‐Buddhas, are generally
> meant. These correspond mystically to the human Buddhas and Bodhisattvas,
> known as the Mânushi (Human) Buddhas, which latter are also designated
> Anupâdaka, once that their whole personality is merged in their compound
> Sixth and Seventh Principles, or Âtmâ‐Buddhi, and they have become the
> “Diamond‐Souled” (Vajrasattvas(78)), or full Mahâtmâs. The “Concealed
> Lord” (Sangbai Dag‐po), “the one merged with the Absolute,” can have no
> parents since he is Self‐Existent, and one with the Universal Spirit
> (Svayambhû),(79) the Svabhâvat in its highest aspect. The mystery of the
> Hierarchy of the Anupâdaka is great, its apex being the universal Spirit‐
> Soul, and the lower rung the Mânushi‐Buddha: and even every soul‐endowed
> man also is an Anupâdaka in a latent state. Hence—when speaking of the
> Universe in its formless, eternal, or absolute condition, before it was
> fashioned by the Builders—the expression, “the great Wheel [Universe] was
> Anupâdaka.”
> 
> Stanza II.
> 
> 1. ... WHERE WERE THE BUILDERS, THE LUMINOUS SONS OF MANVANTARIC DAWN?...
> (_a_) IN THE UNKNOWN DARKNESS IN THEIR AH‐HI(80) PARANISHPANNA. THE
> PRODUCERS OF FORM(81) FROM NO‐FORM(82)—THE ROOT OF THE WORLD—THE
> DEVÂMATRI(83) AND SVABHÂVAT, RESTED IN THE BLISS OF NON‐BEING (_b_).
> 
> (a) The “Builders,” the “Sons of Manvantaric Dawn,” are the real creators
> of the Universe; and in this doctrine, which deals only with our Planetary
> System, they, as the architects of the latter, are also called the
> “Watchers” of the Seven Spheres, which exoterically are the seven planets,
> and esoterically the seven earths or spheres (Globes) of our Chain also.
> The opening sentence of Stanza I, when mentioning “Seven Eternities,”
> applies both to the Mahâkalpa or “the (Great) Age of Brahmâ,” as well as
> to the Solar Pralaya and subsequent resurrection of our Planetary System
> on a higher plane. There are many kinds of Pralaya (dissolution of a thing
> visible), as will be shown elsewhere.
> 
> (b) “Paranishpanna,” remember, is the _summum bonum_, the Absolute, hence
> the same as Paranirvâna. Besides being the final state, it is that
> condition of subjectivity which has no relation to anything but the One
> Absolute Truth (Paramârthasatya) on its own plane. It is that state which
> leads one to appreciate correctly the full meaning of Non‐Being, which, as
> explained, is Absolute Being. Sooner or later, all that now _seemingly_
> exists, will be in reality and actually in the state of Paranishpanna. But
> there is a great difference between _conscious_ and _unconscious_ Being.
> The condition of Paranishpanna, without Paramârtha, the Self‐analysing
> Consciousness (Svasamvedâna), is no bliss, but simply extinction for Seven
> Eternities. Thus, an iron ball placed under the scorching rays of the sun
> will get heated through, but will not feel or appreciate the warmth, while
> a man will. It is only “_with a mind clear and undarkened by Personality,
> and an assimilation of the merit of manifold Existences devoted to Being
> in its collectivity_ [_the whole living and sentient Universe_],” that one
> gets rid of personal existence, merging into, becoming one with, the
> Absolute,(84) and continuing in full possession of Paramârtha.
> 
> 2. ... WHERE WAS SILENCE? WHERE THE EARS TO SENSE IT? NO, THERE WAS
> NEITHER SILENCE NOR SOUND (_a_); NAUGHT SAVE CEASELESS ETERNAL BREATH,(85)
> WHICH KNOWS ITSELF NOT (_b_).
> 
> (a) The idea that things can cease to _exist_ and still _be_, is a
> fundamental one in Eastern psychology. Under this apparent contradiction
> in terms, there rests a fact of Nature, to realize which in the mind,
> rather than to argue about words, is the important thing. A familiar
> instance of a similar paradox is afforded by chemical combination. The
> question whether hydrogen and oxygen cease to exist, when they combine to
> form water, is still a moot one; some arguing that since they are found
> again when the water is decomposed, they must be there all the while;
> others contending that as they actually turn into something totally
> different, they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being; but
> neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition
> of a thing, which has become something else and yet has not ceased to be
> itself. Existence as water for oxygen and hydrogen may be said to be a
> state of Non‐Being, which is more real Being than their existence as
> gases; and it may faintly symbolize the condition of the Universe when it
> goes to sleep, or ceases to be, during the Nights of Brahmâ—to awaken or
> reäppear again, when the dawn of the new Manvantara recalls it to what we
> call existence.
> 
> (b) The “Breath” of the One Existence is only used in application to the
> spiritual aspect of Cosmogony by Archaic Esotericism; in other cases, it
> is replaced by its equivalent on the material plane—Motion. The One
> Eternal Element, or element‐containing Vehicle, is Space, dimensionless in
> every sense; coëxistent with which are Endless Duration, Primordial (hence
> Indestructible) Matter, and Motion—Absolute “Perpetual Motion,” which is
> the “Breath” of the One Element. This Breath, as seen, can never cease,
> not even during the Pralayic Eternities.
> 
> But the Breath of the One Existence does not, all the same, apply to the
> One Causeless Cause or the All‐Be‐ness, in contradistinction to All‐Being,
> which is Brahmâ, or the Universe. Brahmâ, the four‐faced god, who, after
> lifting the Earth out of the waters, “accomplished the creation,” is held
> to be only the Instrumental, and not, as clearly implied, the Ideal Cause.
> No Orientalist, so far, seems to have thoroughly comprehended the real
> sense of the verses in the _Purânas_, that treat of “creation.”
> 
> Therein Brahmâ is the cause of the potencies that are to be generated
> subsequently for the work of “creation.” For instance, in the _Vishnu
> Purâna_,(86) the translation, “and from him proceed the potencies to be
> created, after they have become the real cause,” would perhaps be more
> correctly rendered, “and from IT proceed the potencies that _will create_
> as they _become_ the real cause [on the material plane].” Save that One
> Causeless Ideal Cause there is no other to which the Universe can be
> referred. “Worthiest of ascetics, through its potency—_i.e._, through the
> potency of that cause—every created thing comes by its inherent or proper
> nature.” If, “in the Vedânta and Nyâya, _nimitta_ is the efficient cause,
> as contrasted with _upâdâna_, the material cause, [and] in the Sânkhya,
> _pradhâna_ implies the functions of both”; in the Esoteric Philosophy,
> which reconciles all these systems, and the nearest exponent of which is
> the Vedânta as expounded by the Advaita Vedântists, none but the _upâdâna_
> can be speculated upon. That which is, in the minds of the Vaishnavas (the
> Visishthadvaitas), as the ideal in contradistinction to the real—or
> Parabrahman and Îshvara—can find no room in published speculations, since
> that ideal even is a misnomer, when applied to that of which no human
> reason, even that of an Adept, can conceive.
> 
> To know itself or oneself, necessitates consciousness and perception to be
> cognized—both limited faculties in relation to any subject except
> Parabrahman. Hence the “Eternal Breath which knows itself not.” Infinity
> cannot comprehend Finiteness. The Boundless can have no relation to the
> Bounded and the Conditioned. In the Occult teachings, the Unknown and the
> Unknowable Mover, or the Self‐Existing, is the Absolute Divine Essence.
> And thus being Absolute Consciousness, and Absolute Motion—to the limited
> senses of those who describe this indescribable—it is unconsciousness and
> immovableness. Concrete consciousness cannot be predicated of abstract
> consciousness, any more than the quality wet can be predicated of
> water—wetness being its own attribute and the cause of the wet quality in
> other things. Consciousness implies limitations and qualifications;
> something to be conscious of, and someone to be conscious of it. But
> Absolute Consciousness contains the cognizer, the thing cognized and the
> cognition, all three in itself and all three _one_. No man is conscious of
> more than that portion of his knowledge which happens to be recalled to
> his mind at any particular time, yet such is the poverty of language that
> we have no term to distinguish the knowledge not actively thought of, from
> knowledge we are unable to recall to memory. To forget is synonymous with
> not to remember. How much greater must be the difficulty of finding terms
> to describe, and to distinguish between, abstract metaphysical facts or
> differences! It must not be forgotten, also, that we give names to things
> according to the appearances they assume for ourselves. We call Absolute
> Consciousness “unconsciousness,” because it seems to us that it must
> necessarily be so, just as we call the Absolute, “Darkness,” because to
> our finite understanding it appears quite impenetrable; yet we recognize
> fully that our perception of such things does not do them justice. We
> involuntarily distinguish in our minds, for instance, between unconscious
> Absolute Consciousness, and unconsciousness, by secretly endowing the
> former with some indefinite quality that corresponds, on a higher plane
> than our thoughts can reach, with what we know as consciousness in
> ourselves. But this is not any kind of consciousness that we can manage to
> distinguish from what appears to us as unconsciousness.
> 
> 3. THE HOUR HAD NOT YET STRUCK; THE RAY HAD NOT YET FLASHED INTO THE GERM
> (_a_); THE MÂTRIPADMA(87) HAD NOT YET SWOLLEN (_b_).(88)
> 
> (_a_) The “Ray” of the “Ever Darkness” becomes, as it is emitted, a Ray of
> effulgent Light or Life, and flashes into the “Germ”—the Point in the
> Mundane Egg, represented by Matter in its abstract sense. But the term
> “Point” must not be understood as applying to any particular point in
> Space, for a germ exists in the centre of every atom, and these
> collectively form the “Germ;” or rather, as no atom can be made visible to
> our physical eye, the collectivity of these (if the term can be applied to
> something which is boundless and infinite) forms the noumenon of eternal
> and indestructible Matter.
> 
> (_b_) One of the symbolical figures for the Dual Creative Power in Nature
> (matter and force on the material plane) is “Padma,” the water‐lily of
> India. The Lotus is the product of heat (fire) and water (vapour or
> ether); fire standing in every philosophical and religious system, even in
> Christianity, as a representation of the Spirit of Deity, the active,
> male, generative principle; and ether, or the soul of matter, the light of
> the fire, for the passive female principle, from which everything in this
> Universe emanated. Hence, ether or water is the Mother, and fire is the
> Father. Sir William Jones—and before him archaic botany—showed that the
> seeds of the Lotus contain—even before they germinate—perfectly formed
> leaves, with the miniature shape of what one day, as perfect plants, they
> will become: nature thus giving us a specimen of the preformation of its
> production ... the seeds of all phanerogamous plants bearing proper
> flowers containing an embryo plantlet ready formed.(89) This explains the
> sentence, “The Mâtri‐Padma had not yet swollen”—the form being usually
> sacrificed to the inner or root idea in archaic symbology.
> 
> The Lotus, or Padma, is, moreover, a very ancient and favourite symbol for
> the Cosmos itself, and also for man. The popular reasons given are,
> firstly, the fact just mentioned, that the Lotus‐seed contains within
> itself a perfect miniature of the future plant, which typifies the fact
> that the spiritual prototypes of all things exist in the immaterial world,
> before these things become materialized on earth. Secondly, the fact that
> the Lotus‐plant grows up through the water, having its root in the Ilus,
> or mud, and spreading its flower in the air above. The Lotus thus typifies
> the life of man and also that of the Cosmos; for the Secret Doctrine
> teaches that the elements of both are the same, and that both are
> developing in the same direction. The root of the Lotus sunk in the mud
> represents material life, the stalk passing up through the water typifies
> existence in the astral world, and the flower floating on the water and
> opening to the sky is emblematical of spiritual being.
> 
> 4. HER HEART HAD NOT YET OPENED FOR THE ONE RAY TO ENTER, THENCE TO FALL,
> AS THREE INTO FOUR, INTO THE LAP OF MÂYÂ.
> 
> The Primordial Substance had not yet passed out of its precosmic latency
> into differentiated objectivity, or even become the (to man, so far)
> invisible Protyle of Science. But, as the “Hour strikes” and it becomes
> receptive of the Fohatic impress of the Divine Thought—the Logos, or the
> male aspect of the Anima Mundi, Alaya—its “Heart” opens. It
> differentiates, and the Three (Father, Mother, Son) are transformed into
> Four. Herein lies the origin of the double mystery of the Trinity and the
> Immaculate Conception. The first and fundamental dogma of Occultism is
> Universal Unity (or Homogeneity) under three aspects. This leads to a
> possible conception of Deity, which as an absolute Unity must remain
> forever incomprehensible to finite intellects.
> 
>     If thou wouldest believe in the Power which acts within the root
>     of a plant, or imagine the root concealed under the soul, thou
>     hast to think of its stalk or trunk, and of its leaves and
>     flowers. Thou canst not imagine that Power independently of these
>     objects. Life can be known only by the Tree of Life....(90)
> 
> The idea of Absolute Unity would be broken entirely in our conception, had
> we not something concrete before our eyes to contain that Unity. And the
> Deity being absolute, must be omnipresent; hence not an atom but contains
> It within itself. The roots, the trunk, and its many branches, are three
> distinct objects, yet they are one tree. Say the Kabalists: “The Deity is
> one, because It is infinite. It is triple, because It is ever
> manifesting.” This manifestation is triple in its aspects, for it
> requires, as Aristotle has it, three principles for every natural body to
> become objective: privation, form, and matter.(91) Privation meant in the
> mind of the great philosopher that which the Occultists call the
> prototypes impressed in the Astral Light—the lowest plane and world of
> Anima Mundi. The union of these three principles depends upon a fourth—the
> Life which radiates from the summits of the Unreachable, to become a
> universally diffused Essence on the manifested planes of Existence. And
> this Quaternary (Father, Mother, Son, as a Unity, and a Quaternary—as a
> living manifestation) has been the means of leading to the very archaic
> idea of Immaculate Conception, now finally crystallized into a dogma of
> the Christian Church, which has carnalized this metaphysical idea beyond
> any common sense. For one has but to read the _Kabalah_ and study its
> numerical methods of interpretation to find the origin of the dogma. It is
> purely astronomical, mathematical, and preëminently metaphysical: the Male
> Element in Nature (personified by the male deities and Logoi—Virâj, or
> Brahmâ, Horus, or Osiris, etc., etc.) is born through, not from, an
> immaculate source, personified by the “Mother,” for—the Abstract Deity
> being sexless, and not even a Being but Be‐ness, or Life itself—that Male
> having a “Mother” cannot have a “Father.” Let us render this in the
> mathematical language of the author of _The Source of Measures_. Speaking
> of the “Measure of a Man” and his numerical (Kabalistic) value, he writes
> that in _Genesis_, iv. 1—
> 
>     It is called the “Man even Jehovah” Measure, and this is obtained
>     in this way, viz.: 113 x 5 = 565, and the value 565 can be placed
>     under the form of expression 56.5 x 10 = 565. Here the Man‐number
>     113 becomes a factor of 56.5 x 10, and the (Kabalistic) reading of
>     this last numbered expression is Jod, He, Vau, He, or Jehovah....
>     The expansion of 565 into 56·5 x 10 is purposed to show the
>     emanation of the male (Jod) from the female (Eva) principle; or,
>     so to speak, the birth of a male element from an immaculate
>     source, in other words, an immaculate conception.
> 
> Thus is repeated on earth the mystery enacted, according to the Seers, on
> the divine plane. The Son of the Immaculate Celestial Virgin (or the
> Undifferentiated Cosmic Protyle, Matter in its infinitude) is born again
> on earth as the Son of the terrestrial Eve, our mother Earth, and becomes
> Humanity as a total—past, present, and future—for Jehovah, or Jod‐Hé‐Vau‐
> Hé, is androgyne, or both male and female. Above, the Son is the whole
> Kosmos; below, he is Mankind. The Triad or Triangle becomes Tetraktys, the
> sacred Pythagorean number, the perfect Square, and a six‐faced Cube on
> earth. The Macroprosopus (the Great Face) is now Microprosopus (the Lesser
> Face); or, as the Kabbalists have it, the Ancient of Days, descending on
> Adam Kadmon whom he uses as his vehicle to manifest through, gets
> transformed into Tetragrammaton. It is now in the “Lap of Mâyâ,” the Great
> Illusion, and between itself and the Reality has the Astral Light, the
> Great Deceiver of man’s limited senses, unless Knowledge through
> Paramârthasatya comes to the rescue.
> 
> 5. THE SEVEN(92) WERE NOT YET BORN FROM THE WEB OF LIGHT, DARKNESS ALONE
> WAS FATHER‐MOTHER, SVABHÂVAT; AND SVABHÂVAT WAS IN DARKNESS.
> 
> The Secret Doctrine, in the Stanzas here given, occupies itself chiefly,
> if not entirely, with our Solar System, and especially with our Planetary
> Chain. The “Seven Sons,” therefore, are the creators of the latter. This
> teaching will be explained more fully hereafter.
> 
> Svabhâvat, the “Plastic Essence” that fills the Universe, is the root of
> all things. Svabhâvat is, so to say, the Buddhistic concrete aspect of the
> abstraction called in Hindû philosophy Mûlaprakriti. It is the body of the
> Soul, and that which Ether would be to Âkâsha, the latter being the
> informing principle of the former. Chinese mystics have made of it the
> synonym of “Being.” In the Chinese translation of the _Ekashloka‐Shâstra_
> of Nâgârjuna (the Lung‐shu of China), called the _Yih‐shu‐lu‐kia‐lun_, it
> is said that the term “Being,” or “Subhâva,” (Yeu in Chinese) means “the
> Substance giving substance to itself”; it is also explained by him as
> meaning “without action and with action,” “the nature which has no nature
> of its own.” Subhâva, from which Svabhâvat, is composed of two words: _su_
> fair, handsome, good; _sva_, self, and _bhâva_, being or states of being.
> 
> 6. THESE TWO ARE THE GERM, AND THE GERM IS ONE. THE UNIVERSE WAS STILL
> CONCEALED IN THE DIVINE THOUGHT AND THE DIVINE BOSOM.
> 
> The “Divine Thought” does not imply the idea of a Divine Thinker. The
> Universe, not only past, present and future—a human and finite idea
> expressed by finite thought—but in its totality, the Sat (an
> untranslateable term), Absolute Being, with the Past and Future
> crystallized in an eternal Present, is that Thought itself reflected in a
> secondary or manifested cause. Brahman (neuter), as the Mysterium Magnum
> of Paracelsus, is an absolute mystery to the human mind. Brahmâ, the male‐
> female, the aspect and anthropomorphic reflection of Brahman, is
> conceivable to the perceptions of blind faith, though rejected by human
> intellect when it attains its majority.
> 
> Hence the statement that during the prologue, so to say, of the drama of
> creation, or the beginning of cosmic evolution, the Universe, or the Son,
> lies still concealed “in the Divine Thought,” which had not yet penetrated
> into the “Divine Bosom.” This idea, note well, is at the root, and forms
> the origin, of all the allegories about the “Sons of God” born of
> immaculate virgins.
> 
> Stanza III.
> 
> 1. ... THE LAST VIBRATION OF THE SEVENTH ETERNITY THRILLS THROUGH
> INFINITUDE (_a_). THE MOTHER SWELLS, EXPANDING FROM WITHIN WITHOUT, LIKE
> THE BUD OF THE LOTUS (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) The seemingly paradoxical use of the term, “Seventh Eternity,” thus
> dividing the indivisible, is sanctified in Esoteric Philosophy. The latter
> divides boundless Duration into unconditionally eternal and universal Time
> (Kâla); and conditioned Time (Khandakâla). One is the abstraction or
> noumenon of infinite Time, the other its phenomenon appearing
> periodically, as the effect of Mahat—the Universal Intelligence, limited
> by manvantaric duration. With some schools, Mahat is the first‐born of
> Pradhâna (undifferentiated Substance, or the periodical aspect of
> Mûlaprakriti, the Root of Nature), which (Pradhâna) is called Mâyâ,
> Illusion. In this respect, I believe, Esoteric teaching differs from the
> Vedântin doctrines of both the Advaita and the Visishthadvaita schools.
> For it says that, while Mûlaprakriti, the noumenon, is self‐existing and
> without any origin—is, in short, parentless, Anupâdaka, as one with
> Brahman—Prakriti, its phenomenon, is periodical and no better than a
> phantasm of the former; so Mahat, the first‐born of Jñâna (or Gnôsis),
> Knowledge, Wisdom or the Logos—is a phantasm reflected from the Absolute
> Nirguna (Parabrahman), the One Reality, “devoid of attributes and
> qualities”; while with some Vedântins Mahat is a manifestation of
> Prakriti, or Matter.
> 
> (_b_) Therefore, the “last Vibration of the Seventh Eternity” was “fore‐
> ordained”—by no God in particular, but occurred in virtue of the eternal
> and changeless Law which causes the great periods of Activity and Rest,
> called so graphically, and at the same time so poetically, the Days and
> Nights of Brahmâ. The expansion “from within without” of the Mother,
> called elsewhere the “Waters of Space,” “Universal Matrix,” etc., does not
> allude to an expansion from a small centre or focus, but means the
> development of limitless subjectivity into as limitless objectivity,
> without reference to size or limitation or area. “_The ever [to us]
> invisible and immaterial Substance present in eternity, threw its
> periodical Shadow from its own plane into the Lap of Mâyâ._” It implies
> that this expansion, not being an increase in size—for infinite extension
> admits of no enlargement—was a change of condition. It expanded “like the
> Bud of the Lotus”; for the Lotus plant exists not only as a miniature
> embryo in its seed (a physical characteristic), but its prototype is
> present in an ideal form in the Astral Light from “Dawn” to “Night” during
> the manvantaric period, like everything else, as a matter of fact, in this
> objective Universe; from man to mite, from giant trees to the tiniest
> blades of grass.
> 
> All this, teaches the Hidden Science, is but the temporary reflection, the
> shadow of the eternal ideal prototype in Divine Thought; the word
> “Eternity,” note well again, standing here only in the sense of “Æon,” as
> lasting throughout the seemingly interminable, but still limited cycle of
> activity, called by us Manvantara. For what is the real esoteric meaning
> of Manvantara, or rather a Manu‐antara? It means, literally, “between two
> Manus,” of whom there are fourteen in every Day of Brahmâ, such a Day
> consisting of 1,000 aggregates of four Ages, 1,000 “Great Ages” or
> Mahâyugas. Let us now analyse the word or name Manu. Orientalists in their
> dictionaries tell us that the term “Manu” is from the root _man_, “to
> think”; hence “the thinking man.” But, esoterically, every Manu, as an
> anthropomorphized patron of his special cycle (or Round), is but the
> personified idea of the “Thought Divine” (as the Hermetic Pymander); each
> of the Manus, therefore, being the special god, the creator and fashioner
> of all that appears during his own respective cycle of being or
> Manvantara. Fohat runs the Manus’ (or Dhyân Chohans’) errands, and causes
> the ideal prototypes to expand from within without—that is, to cross
> gradually, on a descending scale, all the planes, from the noumenal to the
> lowest phenomenal, to bloom finally on the last into full objectivity—the
> acme of Illusion, or the grossest matter.
> 
> 2. THE VIBRATION SWEEPS ALONG, TOUCHING(93) WITH ITS SWIFT WING THE WHOLE
> UNIVERSE AND THE GERM THAT DWELLETH IN DARKNESS, THE DARKNESS THAT
> BREATHES(94) OVER THE SLUMBERING WATERS OF LIFE.
> 
> The Pythagorean Monas is also said to dwell in solitude and “Darkness”
> like the “Germ.” The idea of the Breath of Darkness moving over “the
> slumbering Waters of Life,” which is Primordial Matter with the latent
> Spirit in it, recalls the first chapter of _Genesis_. Its original is the
> Brâhmanical Nârâyana (the Mover on the Waters), who is the personification
> of the Eternal Breath of the unconscious All (or Parabrahaman) of the
> Eastern Occultists. The Waters of Life, or Chaos—the female principle in
> symbolism—are the vacuum (to our mental sight), in which lie the latent
> Spirit and Matter. This it was that made Democritus assert, after his
> instructor Leucippus, that the primordial principles of all were atoms and
> a vacuum, in the sense of space, but not of empty space, for “Nature
> abhors a vacuum,” according to the Peripatetics and every ancient
> philosopher.
> 
> In all Cosmogonies “Water” plays the same important part. It is the base
> and source of material existence. Scientists, mistaking the word for the
> thing, understand by it the definite chemical combination of oxygen and
> hydrogen, thus giving a specific meaning to a term used by Occultists in a
> generic sense, and which is employed in Cosmogony with a metaphysical and
> mystical meaning. Ice is not water, neither is steam, although all three
> have precisely the same chemical composition.
> 
> 3. DARKNESS RADIATES LIGHT, AND LIGHT DROPS ONE SOLITARY RAY INTO THE
> WATERS, INTO THE MOTHER‐DEEP. THE RAY SHOOTS THROUGH THE VIRGIN EGG, THE
> RAY CAUSES THE ETERNAL EGG TO THRILL, AND DROP THE NON‐ETERNAL GERM,(95)
> WHICH CONDENSES INTO THE WORLD‐EGG.
> 
> The “solitary Ray” dropping into the “Mother‐Deep” may be taken to mean
> Divine Thought, or Intelligence, impregnating Chaos. This, however, occurs
> on the plane of metaphysical abstraction, or rather the plane whereon that
> which we call a metaphysical abstraction, is a reality. The “Virgin‐Egg,”
> being in one sense the abstract of all ova, or the power of becoming
> developed through fecundation, is eternal and for ever the same. And just
> as the fecundation of an egg takes place before it is dropped; so the non‐
> eternal periodical Germ, which later becomes in symbolism the Mundane Egg,
> contains in itself, when it emerges from the said symbol, “the promise and
> potency” of all the Universe. Though the idea _per se_ is, of course, an
> abstraction, a symbolical mode of expression, it is a true symbol, for it
> suggests the idea of infinity as an endless circle. It brings before the
> mind’s eye the picture of Kosmos emerging from and in boundless Space, a
> Universe as shoreless in magnitude, if not as endless in its objective
> manifestation. The symbol of an egg also expresses the fact taught in
> Occultism that the primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to
> globe, from man to angel, is spheroidal, the sphere being with all nations
> the emblem of eternity and infinity—a serpent swallowing its tail. To
> realize the meaning, however, the sphere must be thought of as seen from
> its centre. The field of vision, or of thought, is like a sphere whose
> radii proceed from one’s self in every direction, and extend out into
> space, opening up boundless vistas all around. It is the symbolical circle
> of Pascal and the Kabalists, “whose centre is everywhere and circumference
> nowhere”—a conception which enters into the compound idea of this emblem.
> 
> The “World‐Egg” is, perhaps, one of the most universally adopted symbols,
> highly suggestive as it is, equally in the spiritual, physiological, and
> cosmological sense. Therefore, it is found in every world‐theogony, where
> it is largely associated with the serpent symbol, the latter being
> everywhere, in philosophy as in religious symbolism, an emblem of
> eternity, infinitude, regeneration, and rejuvenation, as well as of
> wisdom. The mystery of apparent self‐generation and evolution through its
> own creative power, repeating in miniature, in the egg, the process of
> cosmic evolution—both due to heat and moisture under the efflux of the
> unseen creative spirit—fully justified the selection of this graphic
> symbol. The “Virgin‐Egg” is the microcosmic symbol of the macrocosmic
> prototype, the “Virgin Mother”—Chaos or the Primeval Deep. The male
> creator (under whatever name) springs forth from the virgin female, the
> Immaculate Root fructified by the Ray. Who, if versed in astronomy and
> natural sciences, can fail to see its suggestiveness? Kosmos, as receptive
> Nature, is an egg fructified—yet left immaculate; for once regarded as
> boundless, it could have no other representation than a spheroid. The
> Golden Egg was surrounded by seven natural Elements, “four ready [ether,
> fire, air, water], three secret.” This may be found stated in _Vishnu
> Purâna_, where elements are translated “envelopes,” and a _secret_ one is
> added—Ahamkâra.(96) The original text has no Ahamkâra; it mentions seven
> Elements without specifying the last three.
> 
> 4. THE THREE(97) FALL INTO THE FOUR(98). THE RADIANT ESSENCE BECOMES SEVEN
> INSIDE, SEVEN OUTSIDE (_a_). THE LUMINOUS EGG,(99) WHICH IN ITSELF IS
> THREE,(100) CURDLES AND SPREADS IN MILK‐WHITE CURDS THROUGHOUT THE DEPTHS
> OF MOTHER, THE ROOT THAT GROWS IN THE DEPTHS OF THE OCEAN OF LIFE (_b_).
> 
> The use of geometrical figures and the frequent allusions to figures in
> all ancient scriptures, as in the _Purânas_, the Egyptian _Book of the
> Dead_ and even the _Bible_—must be explained. In the _Book of Dzyan_, as
> in the _Kabalah_, there are two kinds of numerals to be studied—the
> Figures, often simple blinds, and the Sacred Numbers, the values of which
> are all known to the Occultists through Initiation. The former are but
> conventional glyphs; the latter, the basic symbols of all. That is to say,
> the one are purely physical, the other purely metaphysical, the two
> standing in relation to each other as Matter stands to Spirit—the extreme
> poles of the One Substance.
> 
> As Balzac, the unconscious Occultist of French literature, says somewhere,
> the Number is to Mind the same as it is to Matter, “an incomprehensible
> agent.” Perhaps so to the profane, never to the initiated mind. Number is,
> as the great writer thought, an Entity, and, at the same time, a Breath
> emanating from what he called God and what we call the ALL, the Breath
> which alone could organize the physical Cosmos, “where naught obtains its
> form but through the Deity, which is an effect of Number.” It is
> instructive to quote Balzac’s words upon this subject:
> 
>     The smallest as the most immense creations, are they not to be
>     distinguished from each other by their quantities, their
>     qualities, their dimensions, their forces and attributes, all
>     begotten by Number? The infinitude of Numbers is a fact proven to
>     our mind, but of which no proof can be physically given. The
>     mathematician will tell us that the infinitude of Numbers exists
>     but is not to be demonstrated. God is a Number endowed with
>     motion, which is felt but not demonstrated. _As Unity, it begins
>     the Numbers, with which it has nothing in common._... The
>     existence of Numbers depends on Unity, which without a single
>     Number, begets them all.... What! unable either to measure the
>     first abstraction yielded to you by the Deity, or to get hold of
>     it, you still hope to subject to your measurements the mystery of
>     the Secret Sciences which emanate from that Deity? .... And what
>     would you feel, were I to plunge you into the abysses of Motion,
>     the Force which organizes the Numbers? What would you think, were
>     I to add that _Motion_ and _Number_(101) are begotten by the Word,
>     the Supreme Reason of the Seers and Prophets, who, in days of old,
>     sensed the mighty Breath of God, a witness to which is the
>     Apocalypse?
> 
> (_b_) “The Radiant Essence curdles and spreads throughout the Depths” of
> Space. From an astronomical point of view this is easy of explanation: it
> is the Milky Way, the World‐Stuff, or Primordial Matter in its first form.
> It is more difficult, however, to explain it in a few words, or even
> lines, from the standpoint of Occult Science and Symbolism, as it is the
> most complicated of glyphs. Herein are enshrined more than a dozen
> symbols. To begin with, it contains the whole pantheon of mysterious
> objects,(102) every one of them having some definite Occult meaning,
> extracted from the Hindû allegorical “Churning of the Ocean” by the Gods.
> Besides Amrita, the water of life or immortality, Surabhi, the “cow of
> plenty,” called “the fountain of milk and curds,” was extracted from this
> “sea of milk.” Hence the universal adoration of the cow and bull, one the
> productive, the other the generative power in Nature: symbols connected
> with both the solar and the cosmic deities. The specific properties, for
> Occult purposes, of the “fourteen precious things,” being explained only
> at the Fourth Initiation, cannot be given here; but the following may be
> remarked. In the _Shatapatha Brâhmana_ it is stated that the Churning of
> the Ocean of Milk took place in the Satya Yuga, the first Age which
> immediately followed the “Deluge.” As, however, neither the _Rig Veda_ nor
> _Manu_—both preceding Vaivasvata’s “Deluge,” that of the bulk of the
> Fourth Race—mention this Deluge, it is evident that it is neither the
> Great Deluge, nor that which carried away Atlantis, nor even the Deluge of
> Noah, which is here meant. This “Churning” relates to a period before the
> earth’s formation, and is in direct connection with another universal
> legend, the various and contradictory versions of which culminated in the
> Christian dogma of the “War in Heaven,” and the “Fall of the Angels.” The
> _Brâhmanas_, reproached by the Orientalists with their versions on the
> same subjects often clashing with each other, _are preëminently occult
> works_, hence used purposely as blinds. They are allowed to survive for
> public use and property only because they were and are absolutely
> unintelligible to the masses. Otherwise they would have disappeared from
> circulation as long ago as the days of Akbar.
> 
> 5. THE ROOT REMAINS, THE LIGHT REMAINS, THE CURDS REMAIN, AND STILL
> OEAOHOO IS ONE.
> 
> “Oeaohoo” is rendered “Father‐Mother of the Gods” in the Commentaries, or
> the “Six in One,” or _the Septenary Root from which all proceeds_. All
> depends upon the accent given to these seven vowels, which may be
> pronounced as one, three, or even seven syllables, by adding an _e_ after
> the final _o_. This mystic name is given out, because without a thorough
> mastery of the triple pronunciation it remains for ever ineffectual.
> 
> “Is One” refers to the Non‐Separateness of all that lives and has its
> being, whether in an active or passive state. In one sense, Oeaohoo is the
> Rootless Root of All; hence, one with Parabrahman: in another sense it is
> a name for the manifested One Life, the eternal living Unity. The “Root”
> means, as already explained, Pure Knowledge (Sattva),(103) eternal
> (_nitya_) unconditioned Reality, or Sat (Satya), whether we call it
> Parabrahman or Mûlaprakriti, for these are but the two symbols of the One.
> The “Light” is the same Omnipresent Spiritual Ray, which has entered and
> now fecundated the Divine Egg, and calls cosmic matter to begin its long
> series of differentiations. The “Curds” are the first differentiation, and
> probably also refer to that cosmic matter which is supposed to be the
> origin of the Milky Way—the matter we know. This “matter,” which,
> according to the revelation received from the primeval Dhyâni‐Buddhas, is,
> during the periodical Sleep of the Universe, of the ultimate tenuity
> conceivable to the eye of the perfect Bodhisattva—this matter, radiant and
> cool, becomes, at the first reawakening of cosmic motion, scattered
> through Space; appearing, when seen from the Earth, in clusters and lumps,
> like curds in thin milk. These are the seeds of the future worlds, the
> “star‐stuff.”
> 
> 6. THE ROOT OF LIFE WAS IN EVERY DROP OF THE OCEAN OF IMMORTALITY,(104)
> AND THE OCEAN WAS RADIANT LIGHT, WHICH WAS FIRE, AND HEAT, AND MOTION.
> DARKNESS VANISHED AND WAS NO MORE; IT DISAPPEARED IN ITS OWN ESSENCE, THE
> BODY OF FIRE AND WATER, OF FATHER AND MOTHER.
> 
> The Essence of Darkness being Absolute Light, Darkness is taken as the
> appropriate allegorical representation of the condition of the Universe
> during Pralaya, or the term of Absolute Rest, or Non‐Being, as it appears
> to our finite minds. The “Fire, and Heat, and Motion,” here spoken of,
> are, of course, not the fire, heat, and motion of Physical Science, but
> the underlying abstractions, the noumena, or the soul, of the essence of
> these material manifestations—the “things in themselves,” which, as Modern
> Science confesses, entirely elude the instruments of the laboratory, and
> which even the mind cannot grasp, although it can equally as little avoid
> the conclusion that these underlying essences of things must exist. “Fire
> and Water, or Father and Mother,” may be taken here to mean the divine Ray
> and Chaos. “Chaos, from this union with Spirit obtaining sense, shone with
> pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos [the first‐born Light],”
> says a fragment of Hermas. Damascius calls it Dis, the “disposer of all
> things.”(105)
> 
> According to the Rosicrucian tenets, as handled and explained by the
> profane for once correctly, if only partially, “Light and Darkness are
> identical in themselves, being only divisible in the human mind”; and
> according to Robert Fludd, “Darkness adopted illumination in order to make
> itself visible.”(106) According to the tenets of Eastern Occultism,
> Darkness is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of Light,
> without which the latter could never manifest itself, nor even exist.
> Light is Matter, and Darkness pure Spirit. Darkness, in its radical,
> metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute Light; while the latter in
> all its seeming effulgence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it
> can never be eternal, and is simply an Illusion, or Mâyâ.
> 
> Even in the mind‐baffling and science‐harassing _Genesis_,(107) light is
> created out of darkness—“and darkness was upon the face of the deep”—and
> not _vice versâ_. “In him [in darkness] was life; and the life was the
> _light_ of men.”(108) A day may come when the eyes of men will be opened;
> and then they may comprehend better than they do now the verse in the
> Gospel of John that says, “And the light shineth in darkness; and the
> darkness comprehendeth it not.” They will see then that the word
> “darkness” does not apply to man’s spiritual eyesight, but indeed to
> Darkness, the Absolute, that comprehendeth not (cannot cognize) transient
> Light, however transcendent to human eyes. _Demon est Deus inversus._ The
> Devil is now called “darkness” by the Church, whereas in the _Bible_, in
> the _Book of Job_, he is called the “Son of God,” the bright star of the
> early morning, Lucifer. There is a whole philosophy of dogmatic craft in
> the reason why the first Archangel, who sprang from the depths of Chaos,
> was called Lux (Lucifer), the luminous “Son of the Morning,” or
> Manvantaric Dawn. He has been transformed by the Church into Lucifer or
> Satan, because he is higher and older than Jehovah, and had to be
> sacrificed to the new dogma.
> 
> 7. BEHOLD, O LANOO,(109) THE RADIANT CHILD OF THE TWO, THE UNPARALLELED
> REFULGENT GLORY—BRIGHT SPACE, SON OF DARK SPACE, WHO EMERGES FROM THE
> DEPTHS OF THE GREAT DARK WATERS. IT IS OEAOHOO, THE YOUNGER, THE —— (110)
> (_a_). HE SHINES FORTH AS THE SUN, HE IS THE BLAZING DIVINE DRAGON OF
> WISDOM; THE EKA(111) IS CHATUR, AND CHATUR TAKES TO ITSELF TRI, AND THE
> UNION PRODUCES THE SAPTA, IN WHOM ARE THE SEVEN, WHICH BECOME THE
> TRIDASHA,(112) THE HOSTS AND THE MULTITUDES (_b_). BEHOLD HIM LIFTING THE
> VEIL, AND UNFURLING IT FROM EAST TO WEST. HE SHUTS OUT THE ABOVE, AND
> LEAVES THE BELOW TO BE SEEN AS THE GREAT ILLUSION. HE MARKS THE PLACES FOR
> THE SHINING ONES,(113) AND TURNS THE UPPER(114) INTO A SHORELESS SEA OF
> FIRE (_c_), AND THE ONE MANIFESTED(115) INTO THE GREAT WATERS.
> 
> (_a_) “Bright Space, Son of Dark Space,” corresponds to the Ray dropped at
> the first thrill of the new Dawn into the great Cosmic Depths, from which
> it reëmerges differentiated as “Oeaohoo, the Younger” (the “New Life”), to
> be to the end of the Life‐Cycle the Germ of all things. He is “the
> Incorporeal Man who contains in himself the Divine Idea,” the generator of
> Light and Life, to use an expression of Philo Judæus. He is called the
> “Blazing Dragon of Wisdom,” because, firstly, he is that which the Greek
> philosophers called the Logos, the Verbum of the Thought Divine; and
> secondly, because in Esoteric Philosophy this first manifestation, being
> the synthesis or the aggregate of Universal Wisdom, Oeaohoo, the “Son of
> the Sun,” contains in himself the Seven Creative Hosts (Sephiroth), and is
> thus the essence of manifested Wisdom. “_He who bathes in the Light of
> Oeaohoo will never be deceived by the Veil of Mâyâ._”
> 
> “Kwan‐Shai‐Yin” is identical with, and an equivalent of the Sanskrit
> Avalokiteshvara, and as such is an androgynous deity, like the
> Tetragrammaton and all the Logoi of antiquity. It is only by some sects in
> China that he is anthropomorphized, and represented with female
> attributes; under his female aspect becoming Kwan‐Yin, the Goddess of
> Mercy, called the “Divine Voice.”(116) The latter is the patron deity of
> Tibet and of the island of Puto in China, where both deities have a number
> of monasteries.(117)
> 
> The higher gods of antiquity are all “Sons of the Mother” before they
> become “Sons of the Father.” The Logoi, like Jupiter or Zeus, son of
> Cronus‐Saturn, “Infinite Time” (Kâla), in their origin were represented as
> male‐female. Zeus is said to be the “beautiful virgin,” and Venus is made
> bearded. Apollo was originally bisexual, so is Brahmâ‐Vâch in _Manu_ and
> the _Purânas_. Osiris is interchangeable with Isis, and Horus is of both
> sexes. Finally in St. John’s vision in _Revelation_, the Logos, who is now
> connected with Jesus, is hermaphrodite, for he is described as having
> female breasts. So also is Tetragrammaton, or Jehovah. But there are two
> Avalokiteshvaras in Esotericism; the First and the Second Logos.
> 
> No religious symbol can escape profanation and even derision in our days
> of politics and science. In Southern India the writer has seen a converted
> native making pûjâ with offerings before a statue of Jesus clad in woman’s
> clothes and with a ring in its nose. On asking the meaning of this
> masquerade, we were answered that it was Jesu‐Maria blended in one, and
> that it was done by the permission of the Padre, as the zealous convert
> had no money to purchase two statues, or “idols” as they, very properly,
> were called by a witness, another but a non‐converted Hindû. Blasphemous
> this will appear to a dogmatic Christian, but the Theosophist and the
> Occultist must award the palm of logic to the converted Hindû. The
> esoteric Christos in the Gnôsis is, of course, sexless, but in exoteric
> Theology he is male and female.
> 
> (b) The “Dragon of Wisdom” is the One, the “Eka” or Saka. It is curious
> that Jehovah’s name in Hebrew should also be One, Achad. “His name is
> Achad,” say the Rabbins. The Philologists ought to decide which of the two
> is derived from the other, linguistically and symbolically; surely, not
> the Sanskrit. The “One” and the “Dragon” are expressions used by the
> ancients in connection with their respective Logoi. Jehovah—esoterically
> Elohim—is also the Serpent or Dragon that tempted Eve; and the Dragon is
> an old glyph for the Astral Light (Primordial Principle), “which is the
> Wisdom of Chaos.” Archaic philosophy, recognizing neither Good nor Evil as
> a fundamental or independent power, but starting from the Absolute ALL
> (Universal Perfection eternally), traces both through the course of
> natural evolution to pure Light condensing gradually into form, and hence
> becoming Matter or Evil. It was left with the early and ignorant Christian
> Fathers to degrade the philosophical and highly scientific idea of this
> emblem into the absurd superstition called the “Devil.” They took this
> from the later Zoroastrians, who saw Devils or Evil in the Hindû Devas,
> and the word Evil has become by a double transmutation D’Evil (Diabolos,
> Diable, Diavolo, Teufel). But the Pagans have always shown a philosophical
> discrimination in their symbols. The primitive symbol of the serpent
> symbolized divine Wisdom and Perfection, and has always stood for
> psychical Regeneration and Immortality. Hence, Hermes calling the serpent
> the most spiritual of all beings; Moses, initiated into the Wisdom of
> Hermes, following suit in _Genesis_; the Gnostic Serpent with the seven
> vowels over its head, being the emblem of the Seven Hierarchies of the
> Septenary or Planetary Creators. Hence, also, the Hindû serpent Shesha or
> Ananta, the Infinite, a name of Vishnu, and his first Vâhana, or Vehicle,
> on the Primordial Waters. Like the Logoi and the Hierarchies of Powers,
> however, these serpents have to be distinguished one from the other.
> Shesha or Ananta, the “Couch of Vishnu,” is an allegorical abstraction,
> symbolizing infinite Time in Space, which contains the Germ and throws off
> periodically the efflorescence of this Germ, the Manifested Universe;
> whereas, the Gnostic Ophis contains the same triple symbolism in its seven
> vowels as the one, three and seven‐syllabled Oeaohoo of the archaic
> doctrine; _i.e._, the First Unmanifested Logos, the Second Manifested, the
> Triangle concreting into the Quaternary or Tetragrammaton, and the Rays of
> the latter on the material plane.
> 
> Yet they all made a difference between the good and the bad Serpent (the
> Astral Light of the Kabalists)—between the former, the embodiment of
> divine Wisdom in the region of the Spiritual, and the latter, Evil, on the
> plane of Matter. For the Astral Light, or the Ether, of the ancient
> Pagans—the name Astral Light is quite modern—is Spirit‐Matter. Beginning
> with the pure spiritual plane, it becomes grosser as it descends, until it
> becomes Mâyâ, or the tempting and deceitful Serpent on our plane.
> 
> Jesus accepted the serpent as a synonym of Wisdom, and this formed part of
> his teaching: “Be ye wise as serpents,” he says. “_In the beginning,
> before Mother became Father‐Mother, the Fiery Dragon moved in the
> Infinitudes alone._”(118) The _Aitareya Brahmana_ calls the Earth
> Sarparâjni, the “Serpent Queen,” and the “Mother of all that moves.”
> Before our globe became egg‐shaped (and the Universe also), “a long trail
> of cosmic dust [or fire‐mist] moved and writhed like a serpent in Space.”
> The “Spirit of God moving on Chaos” was symbolized by every nation in the
> shape of a fiery serpent breathing fire and light upon the primordial
> waters, until it had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the
> annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth—which symbolizes not
> only eternity and infinitude, but also the globular shape of all the
> bodies formed within the Universe from that fiery mist. The Universe, as
> also the Earth and Man, serpent‐like, periodically cast off their old
> skins, to assume new ones after a time of rest. The serpent is surely not
> a less graceful or a more unpoetical image than the caterpillar and
> chrysalis from which springs the butterfly, the Greek emblem of Psyche,
> the human soul! The Dragon was also the symbol of the Logos with the
> Egyptians, as with the Gnostics. In the _Book of Hermes_, Pymander, the
> oldest and the most spiritual of the Logoi of the Western Continent,
> appears to Hermes in the shape of a Fiery Dragon of “Light, Fire, and
> Flame.” Pymander, the “Thought Divine” personified, says:
> 
>     The Light is I, I am the Nous [the Mind or Manu], I am thy God,
>     and I am far older than the human principle which escapes from the
>     shadow [Darkness, or the concealed Deity]. I am the germ of
>     thought, the resplendent Word, the Son of God. All that thus sees
>     and hears in thee is the Verbum of the Master; it is the Thought
>     [Mahat] which is God, the Father.(119) The celestial Ocean, the
>     Æther, ... is the Breath of the Father, the life‐giving principle,
>     the Mother, the Holy Spirit, ... for these are not separated, and
>     their union is Life.
> 
> Here we find the unmistakable echo of the archaic Secret Doctrine, as now
> expounded. Only the latter does not place at the head of the Evolution of
> Life the “Father,” who comes third and is the “Son of the Mother,” but the
> “Eternal and Ceaseless Breath of the ALL.” Mahat (Understanding, Universal
> Mind, Thought, etc.), before it manifests itself as Brahmâ or Shiva,
> appears as Vishnu, says the _Sânkhya Sâra_.(120) Hence it has several
> aspects, just as the Logos has. Mahat is called the Lord, in the _Primary_
> Creation, and is, in this sense, Universal Cognition or Thought Divine;
> but, “that Mahat which was first produced is (afterwards) called _Ego‐
> ism_, when it is born as (the feeling itself) ‘I,’ that is said to be the
> _Secondary_ Creation.”(121) And the translator (an able and learned
> Brâhman, not a European Orientalist) explains in a foot‐note, “_i.e._,
> when Mahat develops into the feeling of Self‐Consciousness—I—then it
> assumes the name of Egoism,” which, translated into our Esoteric
> phraseology, means—when Mahat is transformed into the human Manas (or even
> that of the finite gods), and becomes _Aham_‐ship. Why it is called the
> Mahat of the _Secondary_ Creation (or the _Ninth_, the Kaumâra in _Vishnu
> Purâna_), will be explained hereafter.
> 
> (c) The “Sea of Fire” is, then, the Super‐Astral (_i.e._, Noumenal) Light,
> the first radiation from the Root Mûlaprakriti, Undifferentiated Cosmic
> Substance, which becomes Astral Matter. It is also called the “Fiery
> Serpent,” as above described. If the student bears in mind that there is
> but One Universal Element, which is infinite, unborn, and undying and that
> all the rest—as in the world of phenomena—are but so many various
> differentiated aspects and transformations (correlations, they are now
> called) of that One, from macrocosmical down to microcosmical effects,
> from super‐human down to human and sub‐human beings, the totality, in
> short, of objective existence—then the first and chief difficulty will
> disappear and Occult Cosmology may be mastered. Thus in the Egyptian also
> as in the Indian Theogony there was a _Concealed_ Deity, the ONE, and a
> creative, androgynous god; Shoo being the god of creation, and Osiris in
> his original primary form, the god “whose name is unknown.”(122)
> 
> All the Kabalists and Occultists, Eastern and Western, recognize (_a_) the
> identity of “Father‐Mother” with Primordial Æther, or Âkâsha (Astral
> Light); and (_b_) its homogeneity before the evolution of the “Son,”
> cosmically Fohat, for it is Cosmic Electricity. “_Fohat hardens and
> scatters the Seven Brothers_”;(123) which means that the Primordial
> Electric Entity—for the Eastern Occultists insist that Electricity is an
> Entity—electrifies into life, and separates primordial stuff or pregenetic
> matter into atoms, themselves the source of all life and consciousness.
> “There exists a universal _agent unique_ of all forms and of life, that is
> called Od, Ob, and Aour,(124) active and passive, positive and negative,
> like day and night: it is the first light in Creation” (Éliphas Lévi)—the
> “first light” of the primordial Elohim, the Adam, “male and female,” or
> (scientifically) Electricity and Life.
> 
> The ancients represented it by a serpent, for “_Fohat hisses as he glides
> hither and thither_,” in zigzags. The Kabalah figures it with the Hebrew
> letter Teth, ט, whose symbol is the serpent which played such a prominent
> part in the Mysteries. Its universal value is nine, for it is the ninth
> letter of the alphabet, and the ninth door of the fifty portals, or
> gateways, that lead to the concealed mysteries of being. It is the magical
> agent _par excellence_, and designates in Hermetic philosophy “Life
> infused into Primordial Matter,” the essence that composes all things, and
> the spirit that determines their form. But there are two secret Hermetical
> operations, one spiritual, the other material, correlative and for ever
> united. As Hermes says:
> 
>     Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the
>     solid ... that which ascends from earth to heaven and descends
>     again from heaven to earth. It [the subtile light] is the strong
>     force of every force, for it conquers every subtile thing and
>     penetrates into every solid. Thus was the world formed.
> 
> It was not Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, alone, who taught that the
> Universe evolves, and its primary substance is transformed from the state
> of fire into that of air, then into that of water, etc. Heraclitus of
> Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in
> Nature is fire. The intelligence that moves the Universe is fire, and fire
> is intelligence. And while Anaximenes said the same of air, and Thales of
> Miletus (600 years B.C.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine reconciles all
> these philosophers, by showing that though each was right, the system of
> none was complete.
> 
> 8. WHERE WAS THE GERM, AND WHERE WAS NOW DARKNESS? WHERE IS THE SPIRIT OF
> THE FLAME THAT BURNS IN THY LAMP, O LANOO? THE GERM IS THAT, AND THAT IS
> LIGHT, THE WHITE BRILLIANT SON OF THE DARK HIDDEN FATHER..
> 
> The answer to the first question, suggested by the second, which is the
> reply of the teacher to the pupil, contains in a single phrase one of the
> most essential truths of Occult Philosophy. It indicates the existence of
> things imperceptible to our physical senses which are of far greater
> importance, more real and more permanent, than those that appeal to these
> senses themselves. Before the Lanoo can hope to understand the
> transcendentally metaphysical problem contained in the first question, he
> must be able to answer the second; while the very answer he gives to the
> second will furnish him with the clue to the correct reply to the first.
> 
> In the Sanskrit Commentary on this Stanza, the terms used for the
> concealed and the unrevealed Principle are many. In the earliest MSS. of
> Indian literature this Unrevealed Abstract Deity has no name. It is
> generally called “That” (Tad, in Sanskrit), and means all that is, was,
> and will be, or that can be so received by the human mind.
> 
> Among such appellations given—of course, only in Esoteric Philosophy—as
> the “Unfathomable Darkness,” the “Whirlwind,” etc., it is also called the
> “It of the Kâlahansa,” the “Kâla‐ham‐sa,” and even the “Kâli Hamsa” (Black
> Swan). Here the m and the n are convertible, and both sound like the nasal
> French an or am. As in the Hebrew so also in the Sanskrit many a
> mysterious sacred name conveys to the profane ear no more than some
> ordinary, and often vulgar word, because it is concealed anagrammatically
> or otherwise. This word Hansa, or Hamsa, is just such a case. Hamsa is
> equal to “A‐ham‐sa”—three words meaning “I am He”; while divided in still
> another way it will read “So‐ham,” “He [is] I.” In this single word is
> contained, for him who understands the language of wisdom, the universal
> mystery, the doctrine of the identity of man’s essence with god‐essence.
> Hence the glyph of, and the allegory about, Kâlahansa (or Hamsa), and the
> name given to Brahman (neuter), later on to the male Brahmâ, of Hamsa‐
> vâhana, “he who uses the Hamsa as his vehicle.” The same word may be read
> “Kâlaham‐sa,” or “I am I, in the eternity of time,” answering to the
> Biblical, or rather Zoroastrian, “I am that I am.” The same doctrine is
> found in the _Kabalah_, as witness the following extract from an
> unpublished MS. by Mr. S. Liddell McGregor Mathers, the learned Kabalist:
> 
>     The three pronouns, הוא, אתה, אני, Hua, Ateh, Ani—He, Thou, I—are
>     used to symbolize the ideas of Macroposopus and Microprosopus in
>     the Hebrew Qabalah. Hua, “He,” is applied to the hidden and
>     concealed Macroprosopus; Ateh, “Thou,” to Microprosopus; and Ani,
>     “I,” to the latter when He is represented as speaking. (See
>     _Lesser Holy Assembly_, 204 _et seq_.) It is to be noted that each
>     of these names consists of three letters, of which the letter
>     Aleph א, A, forms the conclusion of the first word Hua, and the
>     commencement of Atah and Ani, as if it were the connecting link
>     between them. But א is the symbol of the Unity and consequently of
>     the unvarying Idea of the Divine operating through all these. But
>     behind the א in the name Hua are the letters ו and ה, the symbols
>     of the numbers Six and Five, the Male and the Female, the Hexagram
>     and the Pentagram. And the numbers of these three words, Hua,
>     Ateh, Ani, are 12, 406, and 61, which are resumed in the key
>     numbers of 3, 10, and 7, by the Qabalah of the Nine Chambers which
>     is a form of the exegetical rule of Temura.
> 
> It is useless to attempt to explain the mystery in full. Materialists and
> the men of Modern Science will never understand it, since, in order to
> obtain clear perception of it, one has first of all to admit the postulate
> of a universally diffused, omnipresent, eternal Deity in Nature; secondly,
> to have fathomed the mystery of electricity in its true essence; and
> thirdly, to credit man with being the septenary symbol, on the terrestrial
> plane, of the One Great Unit, the Logos, which is Itself the seven‐
> vowelled sign, the Breath crystallized into the Word.(125) He who believes
> in all this, has also to believe in the multiple combination of the seven
> planets of Occultism and of the _Kabalah_, with the twelve zodiacal signs;
> and attribute, as we do, to each planet and to each constellation an
> influence which, in the words of Mr. Ely Star (a French astrologer), “is
> proper to it, beneficent or maleficent, and this, after the planetary
> spirit which rules it, who, in his turn, is capable of influencing men and
> things which are found in harmony with him and with which he has any
> affinity.” For these reasons, and since few believe in the foregoing, all
> that can now be given is that in both cases the symbol of Hansa (whether
> I, He, Goose or Swan) is an important symbol, representing, among other
> things, Divine Wisdom, Wisdom in Darkness beyond the reach of men. For all
> exoteric purposes, Hansa, as every Hindû knows, is a fabulous bird which,
> when (in the allegory) given milk mixed with water for its food, separated
> the two, drinking the milk and leaving the water; thus showing inherent
> wisdom—milk standing symbolically for spirit, and water for matter.
> 
> That this allegory is very ancient and dates from the very earliest
> archaic period, is shown by the mention, in the _Bhâgavata Purâna_, of a
> certain caste named Hamsa or Hansa, which was the “one caste” _par
> excellence_; when far back in the mists of a forgotten past there was
> among the Hindûs only “One Veda, One Deity, One Caste.” There is also a
> range in the Himâlayas, described in the old books as being situated north
> of Mount Meru, called Hamsa, and connected with episodes pertaining to the
> history of religious mysteries and initiations. As to Kâlahansa being the
> supposed Vehicle of Brahmâ‐Prajâpati, in the exoteric texts and
> translations of the Orientalists, it is quite a mistake. Brahman, the
> neuter, is called by them Kâla‐hansa, and Brahmâ, the male, Hansa‐vâhana,
> because, forsooth, “his vehicle is a swan or goose.”(126) This is a purely
> exoteric gloss. Esoterically and logically, if Brahman, the infinite, is
> all that is described by the Orientalists, and, agreeably with the
> Vedântic texts, is an abstract deity, in no way characterized by the
> ascription of any human attributes, and at the same time it is maintained
> that he or it is called Kâlahansa—then how can it ever become the Vâhan of
> Brahmâ, the manifested finite god? It is quite the reverse. The “Swan or
> Goose” (Hansa) is the symbol of the male or temporary deity, Brahmâ, the
> emanation of the primordial Ray, which is made to serve as a Vâhan or
> Vehicle for the Divine Ray, which otherwise could not manifest itself in
> the Universe, being, antiphrastically, itself an emanation of Darkness—for
> our human intellect, at any rate. It is Brahmâ, then, who is Kâlahansa,
> and the Ray, Hansa‐vâhana.
> 
> As to the strange symbol thus chosen, it is equally suggestive; the true
> mystic significance being the idea of a Universal Matrix, figured by the
> Primordial Waters of the Deep, or the opening for the reception, and
> subsequently for the issuing, of that One Ray (the Logos) which contains
> in itself the other Seven Procreative Rays or Powers (the Logoi or
> Builders). Hence the choice by the Rosecroix of the aquatic fowl—whether
> swan or pelican(127)—with seven young ones, for a symbol, modified and
> adapted to the religion of every country. Ain Suph is called the “Fiery
> Soul of the Pelican” in the _Book of Numbers_.(128) Appearing with every
> Manvantara as Nârâyana, or Svâyambhuva, the Self‐Existent, and penetrating
> into the Mundane Egg, it emerges from it at the end of the divine
> incubation as Brahmâ, or Prajâpati, the progenitor of the future Universe,
> into which he expands. He is Purusha (Spirit), but he is also Prakriti
> (Matter). Therefore it is only after separating itself into two
> halves—Brahmâ‐Vâch (the female) and Brahmâ‐Virâj (the male)—that the
> Prajâpati becomes the male Brahmâ.
> 
> 9. LIGHT IS COLD FLAME, AND FLAME IS FIRE, AND FIRE PRODUCES HEAT, WHICH
> YIELDS WATER—THE WATER OF LIFE IN THE GREAT MOTHER.(129)
> 
> It must be remembered that the words “Light,” “Flame” and “Fire,” have
> been adopted by the translators from the vocabulary of the old “Fire
> Philosophers,”(130) in order to render more clearly the meaning of the
> archaic terms and symbols employed in the original. Otherwise they would
> have remained entirely unintelligible to a European reader. To a student
> of the Occult, however, the above terms will be sufficiently clear.
> 
> All these—“Light,” “Flame,” “Cold,” “Fire,” “Heat,” “Water,” and “Water of
> Life”—are, on our plane, the progeny, or, as a modern Physicist would say,
> the correlations of Electricity. Mighty word, and a still mightier symbol!
> Sacred generator of a no less sacred progeny; of Fire—the creator, the
> preserver and the destroyer; of Light—the essence of our divine ancestors;
> of Flame—the soul of things. Electricity, the One Life at the upper rung
> of Being, and Astral Fluid, the Athanor of the Alchemists, at the lower;
> God and Devil, Good and Evil.
> 
> Now, why is Light called “Cold Flame”? In the order of Cosmic Evolution
> (as taught by the Occultist), the energy that actuates matter, after its
> first formation into atoms, is generated on our plane by Cosmic Heat; and
> before that period Cosmos, in the sense of dissociated matter, was not.
> The first Primordial Matter, eternal and coëval with Space, “_which has
> neither a beginning nor an end, [is] neither hot nor cold, but is of its
> own special nature_,” says the Commentary. Heat and cold are relative
> qualities and pertain to the realms of the manifested worlds, which all
> proceed from the manifested Hyle, which, in its absolutely latent aspect,
> is referred to as the “Cold Virgin,” and when awakened to life, as the
> “Mother.” The ancient Western cosmogonic myths state that at first there
> was only cold mist (the Father) and the prolific slime (the Mother, Ilus
> or Hyle), from which crept forth the Mundane Snake (Matter).(131)
> Primordial Matter, then, before it emerges from the plane of the never‐
> manifesting, and awakens to the thrill of action under the impulse of
> Fohat, is but “a cool radiance, colourless, formless, tasteless, and
> devoid of every quality and aspect.” Even such are her First‐born, the
> “Four Sons,” who “are One, and become Seven,”—the Entities, by whose
> qualifications and names the ancient Eastern Occultists called the four of
> the seven primal “Centres of Force,” or Atoms, that develop later into the
> great Cosmic “Elements,” now divided into the seventy or so sub‐elements,
> known to Science. The four “Primal Natures” of the first Dhyân Chohans are
> the so‐called (for want of better terms) Âkâshic, Ethereal, Watery and
> Fiery. They answer, in the terminology of practical Occultism, to the
> scientific definitions of gases, which—to convey a clear idea to both
> Occultists and laymen—may be defined as parahydrogenic,(132) paraoxygenic,
> oxyhydrogenic, and ozonic, or perhaps nitrozonic; the latter forces, or
> gases (in Occultism, supersensuous, yet atomic substances), being the most
> effective and active when energizing on the plane of more grossly
> differentiated matter. These elements are both electro‐positive and
> electro‐negative. These and many more are probably the missing links of
> Chemistry. They are known by other names in Alchemy and to Occultists who
> practise phenomenal powers. It is by combining and recombining, or
> dissociating, the “Elements” in a certain way, by means of Astral Fire,
> that the greatest phenomena are produced.
> 
> 10. FATHER‐MOTHER SPIN A WEB, WHOSE UPPER END IS FASTENED TO SPIRIT,(133)
> THE LIGHT OF THE ONE DARKNESS, AND THE LOWER ONE TO ITS SHADOWY END,
> MATTER;(134) AND THIS WEB IS THE UNIVERSE SPUN OUT OF THE TWO SUBSTANCES
> MADE IN ONE, WHICH IS SVABHÂVAT.
> 
> In the _Mândukya Upanishad_(135) it is written, “As a spider throws out
> and retracts its web, as herbs spring up in the ground ... so is the
> Universe derived from the undecaying one,” Brahmâ, for the “Germ of
> unknown Darkness,” is the material from which all evolves and develops,
> “as the web from the spider, as foam from the water,” etc. This is only
> graphic and true, if the term Brahmâ, the “Creator,” is derived from the
> root _brih_, to increase or expand. Brahmâ “expands,” and becomes the
> Universe woven out of his own substance.
> 
> The same idea has been beautifully expressed by Goethe, who says:
> 
>     Thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,
>     And weave for God the garment thou see’st Him by.
> 
> 11. IT(136) EXPANDS WHEN THE BREATH OF FIRE(137) IS UPON IT; IT CONTRACTS
> WHEN THE BREATH OF THE MOTHER(138) TOUCHES IT. THEN THE SONS(139)
> DISSOCIATE AND SCATTER, TO RETURN INTO THEIR MOTHER’S BOSOM, AT THE END OF
> THE GREAT DAY, AND RE‐BECOME ONE WITH HER. WHEN IT(140) IS COOLING, IT
> BECOMES RADIANT. ITS SONS EXPAND AND CONTRACT THROUGH THEIR OWN SELVES AND
> HEARTS; THEY EMBRACE INFINITUDE.
> 
> The expanding of the Universe, under the “Breath of Fire,” is very
> suggestive in the light of the fire‐mist period, of which Modern Science
> speaks so much, and knows in reality so little.
> 
> Great heat breaks up the compound elements and resolves the heavenly
> bodies into their Primeval One Element, explains the Commentary.
> 
> “_Once disintegrated into its primal constituent, by getting within the
> attraction and reach of a focus, or centre of heat [energy], of which many
> are carried about to and fro in space, a body, whether alive or dead, will
> be vapourized, and held in the __‘__Bosom of the Mother,__’__ until Fohat,
> gathering a few of the clusters of Cosmic Matter [nebulæ], will, by giving
> it an impulse, set it in motion anew, develop the required heat, and then
> leave it to follow its own new growth._”
> 
> The expanding and contracting of the “Web” _i.e._, the world‐stuff, or
> atoms—express here the pulsatory movement; for it is the regular
> contraction and expansion of the infinite and shoreless Ocean, of that
> which we may call the noumenon of Matter, emanated by Svabhâvat, which
> causes the universal vibration of atoms. But it is also suggestive of
> something else. It shows that the ancients were acquainted with that which
> is now the puzzle of many Scientists and especially of Astronomers—the
> cause of the first ignition of matter, or world‐stuff, the paradox of the
> heat produced by refrigerative contraction, and other such cosmic
> riddles—for it points unmistakably to a knowledge by the ancients of such
> phenomena. “_There is heat internal and heat external in every atom_,” say
> the MSS. Commentaries, to which the writer has had access, “_the Breath of
> the Father [Spirit], and the Breath [or Heat] of the Mother [Matter]_”;
> and they give explanations which show that the modern theory of the
> extinction of the solar fires, by loss of heat through radiation, is
> erroneous. The assumption is false even on the Scientists’ own admission.
> For, as Professor Newcomb(141) points out, “by losing heat a gaseous body
> contracts, and the heat generated by the contraction exceeds that which it
> had to lose in order to produce the contraction.” This paradox, that a
> body gets hotter, as the shrinking produced by its getting colder is
> greater, has led to long disputes. The surplus of heat, it is argued, is
> lost by radiation, and to assume that the temperature is not lowered _pari
> passu_ with a decrease of volume under a constant pressure, is to set at
> naught the law of Charles. Contraction develops heat, it is true; but
> contraction (from cooling) is incapable of developing the whole amount of
> heat at any time existing in the mass, or even of maintaining a body at a
> constant temperature, etc. Professor Winchell tries to reconcile the
> paradox—only a seeming one in fact, as J. Homer Lane(142) proved—by
> suggesting “something besides heat.” “May it not be,” he asks, “simply a
> repulsion among the molecules, which varies according to some law of the
> distance”?(143) But even this will be found irreconcilable, unless this
> “something besides heat” is ticketed “Causeless Heat,” the “Breath of
> Fire,” the all‐creative Force _plus_ Absolute Intelligence, which Physical
> Science is not likely to accept.
> 
> However it may be, the reading of this Stanza, notwithstanding its archaic
> phraseology, shows it to be more scientific than even Modern Science.
> 
> 12. THEN SVABHÂVAT SENDS FOHAT TO HARDEN THE ATOMS. EACH(144) IS A PART OF
> THE WEB.(145) REFLECTING THE “SELF‐EXISTENT LORD,”(146) LIKE A MIRROR,
> EACH BECOMES IN TURN A WORLD.(147)
> 
> Fohat hardens the Atoms; _i.e._, by infusing energy into them, he scatters
> the “Atoms,” or Primordial Matter. “_He scatters himself while scattering
> Matter into Atoms_.”
> 
> It is through Fohat that the ideas of the Universal Mind are impressed
> upon Matter. Some faint idea of the nature of Fohat may be gathered from
> the appellation “Cosmic Electricity,” sometimes applied to it; but, in
> this case, to the commonly known properties of electricity, must be added
> others, including intelligence. It is of interest to note that Modern
> Science has come to the conclusion, that all cerebration and brain‐
> activity are attended by electrical phenomena.
> 
> Stanza IV.
> 
> 1. ... LISTEN, YE SONS OF THE EARTH, TO YOUR INSTRUCTORS—THE SONS OF THE
> FIRE (_a_). LEARN THERE IS NEITHER FIRST NOR LAST; FOR ALL IS ONE NUMBER,
> ISSUED FROM NO‐NUMBER (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) The terms, the “Sons of the Fire,” the “Sons of the Fire‐Mist,” and
> the like, require explanation. They are connected with a great primordial
> and universal mystery, and it is not easy to make it clear. There is a
> passage in the _Bhagavadgîtâ_, wherein Krishna, speaking symbolically and
> esoterically, says:
> 
>     I will state the times [conditions] ... at which devotees
>     departing [from this life] do so never to return [be reborn], or
>     to return [to incarnate again]. The fire, the flame, the day, the
>     bright [lucky] fortnight, the six months of the northern solstice,
>     departing [dying] ... in these, those who know the Brahman [Yogîs]
>     go to the Brahman. Smoke, night, the dark [unlucky] fortnight, the
>     six months of the southern solstice, (dying) in these, the devotee
>     goes to the lunar light [or mansion, the Astral Light also] and
>     returns [is reborn]. These two paths, bright and dark, are said to
>     be eternal in this world [or Great Kalpa (Age)]. By the one (a
>     man) goes never to return, by the other he comes back.(148)
> 
> Now these terms “fire,” “flame,” “day,” the “bright fortnight,” etc.,
> “smoke,” “night,” and so on, leading only to the end of the Lunar Path,
> are incomprehensible without a knowledge of Esotericism. These are all
> _names of various deities_ which preside over the cosmo‐psychic Powers. We
> often speak of the Hierarchy of “Flames,” of the “Sons of Fire,” etc.
> Shankarâchârya, the greatest of the Esoteric Masters of India, says that
> Fire means a deity which presides over Time (Kâla). The able translator of
> the _Bhagavadgîtâ_, Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A., of Bombay, confesses
> he has “no clear notion of the meaning of these verses.” It seems quite
> clear, on the contrary, to him who knows the Occult doctrine. With these
> verses the mystic sense of the solar and lunar symbols are connected. The
> Pitris are Lunar Deities and our Ancestors, because they _created the
> physical man_. The Agnishvatta, the Kumâras (the Seven Mystic Sages), are
> Solar Deities, though they are Pitris also; and these are the “Fashioners
> of the _Inner_ Man.” They are “The Sons of Fire,” because they are the
> first Beings, called “Minds,” in the Secret Doctrine, evolved from
> Primordial Fire. “The Lord ... is a consuming fire.”(149) “The Lord shall
> be revealed ... with his mighty angels in flaming fire.”(150) The Holy
> Ghost descended on the Apostles as “cloven tongues like as of fire”;(151)
> Vishnu will return on Kalkî, the White Horse, as the last Avatâra, amid
> fire and flames; and Sosiosh will also descend on a White Horse in a
> “tornado of fire.” “And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and
> he that sat upon him ... and his name is called the Word of God,”(152)
> amid flaming Fire. Fire is Æther in its purest form, and hence is not
> regarded as matter, but is the unity of Æther—the second, manifested
> deity—in its universality. But there are two “Fires,” and a distinction is
> made between them in the Occult teachings. The first, or the purely
> _formless_ and _invisible_ Fire, concealed in the _Central Spiritual Sun_,
> is spoken of as Triple (metaphysically); while the Fire of the Manifested
> Cosmos is Septenary, throughout both the Universe and our Solar System.
> “_The fire of knowledge burns up all action on the plane of illusion_,”
> says the Commentary. “_Therefore, those who have acquired it and are
> emancipated, are called __‘__Fires__’__._” Speaking of the _seven_ senses,
> symbolized as Hotris, or Priests, Nârada says in _Anugitâ_: “Thus these
> seven [senses, smell and taste, and colour, and sound, etc.,] are the
> causes of emancipation”; and the translator adds: “It is from these seven
> from which the Self is to be emancipated. ‘I’ [in the sentence, ‘I am ...
> devoid of qualities’] must mean the Self, not the Brâhmana who
> speaks.”(153)
> 
> (_b_) The expression, “all is One Number, issued from No‐Number,” relates
> again to that universal and philosophical tenet just explained in the
> commentary on Shloka 4 of Stanza III. That which is absolute, is of course
> No‐Number; but in its later significance it has an application both in
> Space and in Time. It means that not only every increment of time is part
> of a larger increment, up to the most indefinitely prolonged duration
> conceivable by the human intellect, but also that no manifested thing can
> be thought of except as part of a whole: the total aggregate being the One
> Manifested Universe that issues from the Unmanifested or Absolute—called
> Non‐Being, or “No‐Number,” to distinguish it from Being, or the “One
> Number.”
> 
> 2. LEARN WHAT WE, WHO DESCEND FROM THE PRIMORDIAL SEVEN, WE, WHO ARE BORN
> FROM THE PRIMORDIAL FLAME, HAVE LEARNT FROM OUR FATHERS....
> 
> This is explained in Book II, and the term, “Primordial Flame,”
> corroborates what is said in the first paragraph of the preceding
> commentary on Stanza IV.
> 
> The distinction between the “Primordial” and the subsequent Seven Builders
> is that the former are the Ray and direct emanation of the first “Sacred
> Four,” the Tetraktys, that is, the eternally Self‐Existent One—eternal in
> _essence_ note well, not in manifestation, and distinct from the Universal
> One. Latent, during Pralaya, and active, during Manvantara, the
> “Primordial” proceed from “Father‐Mother” (Spirit‐Hyle, or Ilus); whereas
> the other Manifested Quaternary and the Seven proceed from the Mother
> alone. It is the latter who is the immaculate Virgin‐Mother, who is
> overshadowed, not impregnated, by the Universal Mystery—when she emerges
> from her state of Laya, or undifferentiated condition. In reality, they
> are, of course, all one; but their aspects on the various planes of Being
> are different.
> 
> The first Primordial are the highest Beings on the Scale of Existence.
> They are the Archangels of Christianity, those who refuse to create or
> rather to multiply—as did Michael in the latter system, and as did the
> eldest “Mind‐born Sons” of Brahmâ (Vedhâs).
> 
> 3. FROM THE EFFULGENCY OF LIGHT—THE RAY OF THE EVER‐DARKNESS—SPRANG IN
> SPACE THE REÄWAKENED ENERGIES;(154) THE ONE FROM THE EGG, THE SIX, AND THE
> FIVE (_a_). THEN THE THREE, THE ONE, THE FOUR, THE ONE, THE FIVE—THE TWICE
> SEVEN, THE SUM TOTAL (_b_). AND THESE ARE THE ESSENCES, THE FLAMES, THE
> ELEMENTS, THE BUILDERS, THE NUMBERS (_c_), THE ARÛPA,(155) THE RÛPA,(156)
> AND THE FORCE, OR DIVINE MAN—THE SUM TOTAL. AND FROM THE DIVINE MAN
> EMANATED THE FORMS, THE SPARKS, THE SACRED ANIMALS (_d_), AND THE
> MESSENGERS OF THE SACRED FATHERS(157) WITHIN THE HOLY FOUR.(158)
> 
> (a) This relates to the Sacred Science of the Numerals; so sacred, indeed,
> and so important in the study of Occultism that the subject can hardly be
> skimmed, even in such a large work as the present. It is on the
> Hierarchies and the correct numbers of these Beings—invisible (to us)
> except upon very rare occasions—that the mystery of the whole Universe is
> built. The Kumâras, for instance, are called the “Four”—though in reality
> seven in number—because Sanaka, Sananda, Sanâtana and Sanatkumâra are the
> chief Vaidhâtra (their patronymic name), who sprang from the “four‐fold
> mystery.” To make the whole clearer, we have to turn for our illustrations
> to tenets more familiar to some of our readers, namely the Brâhmanical.
> 
> According to _Manu_, Hiranyagarbha is Brahmâ, the first _male_, formed by
> the undiscernible Causeless Cause, in a “Golden Egg resplendent as the
> Sun,” as states the _Hindû Classical Dictionary_; Hiranyagarbha meaning
> the Golden, or rather the Effulgent, Womb or Egg. The meaning tallies
> awkwardly with the epithet “male.” Surely the esoteric meaning of the
> sentence is clear enough! In the _Rig Veda_ it is said—“THAT, the one Lord
> of all beings ... the one animating principle of gods and men,” arose, in
> the beginning, in the Golden Womb, Hiranyagarbha—which is the Mundane Egg,
> or Sphere of our Universe. That Being is surely androgynous, and the
> allegory of Brahmâ separating into two, and creating in one of his halves
> (the female Vâch) himself as Virâj, is a proof of it.
> 
> “The One from the Egg, the Six and the Five,” give the number 1065, the
> value of the First‐born (later on the male and female Brahmâ‐Prajâpati),
> who answers to the numbers 7, and 14, and 21 respectively. The Prajâpati,
> like the Sephiroth are only seven, including the synthetic Sephira of the
> Triad from which they spring. Thus from Hiranyagarbha, or Prajâpati, the
> Triune (the primeval Vedic Trimûrti, Agni, Vâyu, and Sûrya), emanate the
> other seven, or again ten, if we separate the first three which exist in
> one, and one in three; all, moreover, being comprehended within that one
> “Supreme,” Parama, called Guhya or “Secret,” and Sarvâtman, the “Super‐
> Soul.” “_The seven Lords of Being lie concealed in Sarvâtman like thoughts
> in one brain_.” So with the Sephiroth. They are either seven when counting
> from the upper Triad, headed by Kether, or ten—exoterically. In the
> _Mahâbhârata_, the Prajâpati are 21 in number, or ten, six, and five
> (1065), thrice seven.(159)
> 
> (b) “The Three, the One, the Four, the One, the Five,” in their
> total—Twice Seven, represent 31415—the numerical Hierarchy of the Dhyân
> Chohans of various orders, and of the inner or circumscribed world.(160)
> Placed on the boundary of the great Circle, “Pass Not”—called also the
> Dhyânipâsha, the “Rope of the Angels,” the “Rope” that hedges off the
> phenomenal from the noumenal Cosmos, which does not fall within the range
> of our present objective consciousness—this number, when not enlarged by
> permutation and expansion, is ever 31415, anagrammatically and
> Kabalistically, being both the number of the Circle and the mystic
> Svastika, the “Twice Seven” once more; for whatever way the two sets of
> figures are counted, when added separately, one figure after another,
> whether crossways from right, or from left, they will always yield
> fourteen. Mathematically they represent the well‐known mathematical
> formula, that the ratio of the diameter of a circle to the circumference
> is as 1 to 3.1415, or the value of π (pi), as it is called. This set of
> figures must have the same meaning, since the 1:314,159 and again
> 1:3.1415927 are worked out in the secret calculations to express the
> various cycles and ages of the “First‐born,” or 311,040,000,000,000 with
> fractions, and yield the same 1.3415 by a process we are not concerned
> with at present. And it may be shown that Mr. Ralston Skinner, the author
> of _The Source of Measures_, reads the Hebrew word Alhim in the same
> number values—by omitting, as said, the ciphers, and by permutation—13514:
> since א (a) is 1; ל (l) is 3 (30); ה (h) is 5; י (i) is 1 (10); and מ (m)
> is 4 (40); and anagrammatically—31415, as explained by him.
> 
> Thus, while in the metaphysical world, the Circle with the one central
> Point in it has no number, and is called Anupâdaka—parentless and
> numberless, for it can fall under no calculation; in the manifested world,
> the Mundane Egg or Circle is circumscribed within the groups called the
> Line, the Triangle, the Pentagram, the second Line and the Square (or
> 13514); and when the Point has generated a Line, and thus becomes a
> diameter which stands for the androgynous Logos, then the figures become
> 31415, or a triangle, a line, a square, a second line, and a pentagram.
> “_When the Son separates from the Mother he becomes the Father_,” the
> diameter standing for Nature, or the feminine principle. Therefore it is
> said: “_In the World of Being, the One Point fructifies the Line, the
> Virgin Matrix of Kosmos [the egg‐shaped zero], and the immaculate Mother
> gives birth to the Form that combines all forms_.” Prajâpati is called the
> first procreating male, and “his mother’s husband.”(161) This gives the
> key‐note to all the later “Divine Sons” from “Immaculate Mothers.” It is
> strongly corroborated by the significant fact that Anna, the name of the
> Mother of the Virgin Mary, now represented by the Roman Catholic Church as
> having given birth to her daughter in an immaculate way (“Mary conceived
> without sin”), is derived from the Chaldean Ana, Heaven, or Astral Light,
> Anima Mundi; whence Anaitia, Devî‐Durgâ, the wife of Shiva, is also called
> Annapurna, and Kanyâ, the Virgin; Umâ‐Kanyâ being her esoteric name, and
> meaning the “Virgin of Light,” Astral Light in one of its multitudinous
> aspects.
> 
> (_c_) The Devas, Pitris, Rishis; the Suras and the Asuras; the Daityas and
> Âdityas; the Dânavas and Gandharvas, etc., etc., have all their synonyms
> in our Secret Doctrine, as well as in the _Kabalah_ and Hebrew Angelology;
> but it is useless to give their ancient names, as it would only create
> confusion. Many of these may be now also found even in the Christian
> Hierarchy of divine and celestial Powers. All those Thrones and Dominions,
> Virtues and Principalities, Cherubs, Seraphs and Demons, the various
> denizens of the Sidereal World, are the modern copies of archaic
> prototypes. The very symbolism in their names, when transliterated and
> arranged, in Greek and Latin, are sufficient to show it, as will be proved
> in several cases further on.
> 
> (_d_) The “Sacred Animals” are found in the _Bible_ as well as in the
> _Kabalah_, and they have their meaning—a very profound one, too—on the
> page of the origins of Life. In the _Sepher Jetzirah_ it is stated that:
> “God engraved in the Holy Four the Throne of his Glory, the Auphanim [the
> Wheels or World‐Spheres], the Seraphim, and the Sacred Animals, as
> Ministering Angels, and from these [Air, Water, and Fire or Ether] he
> formed his habitation.”
> 
> The following is the literal translation from the IXth and Xth Sections:
> 
>     Ten numbers without what? One: the Spirit of the living God ...
>     who liveth in eternities! Voice and Spirit and Word, and this is
>     the Holy Spirit. Two: Air out of Spirit. He designed and hewed
>     therewith twenty‐two letters of foundation, three mothers, and
>     seven double and twelve single, and one Spirit out of them. Three:
>     Water out of Spirit; he designed and hewed with them the barren
>     and the void, mud and earth. He designed them as a flower‐bed,
>     hewed them as a wall, covered them as a paving. Four: Fire out of
>     Water. He designed and hewed therewith the throne of glory and the
>     wheels, and the seraphim and the holy animals as ministering
>     angels, and of the three He founded his dwelling, as it is said,
>     He makes his angels spirits, and his servants fiery flames!
> 
> The words “founded his dwelling” show clearly that in the _Kabalah_, as in
> India, the Deity was considered as the Universe, and was not, in his
> origin, the extra‐cosmic God he now is.
> 
> Thus was the world made “through Three Seraphim—Sepher, Saphar, and
> Sipur,” or “through Number, Numbers, and Numbered.” With the astronomical
> key, these “Sacred Animals” become the signs of the Zodiac.
> 
> 4. THIS WAS THE ARMY OF THE VOICE, THE DIVINE MOTHER OF THE SEVEN. THE
> SPARKS OF THE SEVEN ARE SUBJECT TO, AND THE SERVANTS OF, THE FIRST, THE
> SECOND, THE THIRD, THE FOURTH, THE FIFTH, THE SIXTH, AND THE SEVENTH OF
> THE SEVEN (_a_). THESE(162) ARE CALLED SPHERES, TRIANGLES, CUBES, LINES
> AND MODELLERS; FOR THUS STANDS THE ETERNAL NIDÂNA—THE OI‐HA‐HOU
> (_b_).(163)
> 
> (a) This Shloka gives again a brief analysis of the Hierarchies of the
> Dhyân Chohans, called Devas (Gods) in India, or the Conscious Intelligent
> Powers in Nature. To this Hierarchy correspond the actual types into which
> Humanity may be divided; for Humanity, as a whole, is in reality a
> materialized, though as yet imperfect, expression thereof. The “Army of
> the Voice” is a term closely connected with the mystery of Sound and
> Speech, as an effect and corollary of the Cause—Divine Thought. As
> beautifully expressed by P. Christian, the learned author of _Histoire de
> la Magie_ and _L’Homme Rouge des Tuileries_, the words spoken by, as well
> as the name of, every individual largely determine his future fate. Why?
> Because:
> 
>     When our soul [mind] creates or evokes a thought, the
>     representative sign of that thought is self‐engraved upon the
>     astral fluid, which is the receptacle and, so to say, the mirror
>     of all the manifestations of being.
> 
>     The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the [hidden or occult]
>     virtue of the sign.
> 
>     To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present:
>     the magnetic potency of human speech is the commencement of every
>     manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to
>     define a Being [an Entity], but to place it under, and condemn it
>     through the emission of the Word [Verbum] to the influence of, one
>     or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that
>     which it [the Word] makes them while naming them. The Word
>     [Verbum] or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to
>     himself, a _blessing_ or a _curse_; this is why our present
>     ignorance about the properties and attributes of the _idea_, as
>     well as about the attributes and properties of _matter_, is often
>     fatal to us.
> 
>     Yes, names [and words] are either _beneficent_ or _maleficent_;
>     they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health‐giving,
>     according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to
>     their elements, that is to say, to the _letters_ which compose
>     them, and the _numbers_ correlative to these letters.
> 
> This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern
> Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other
> alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its _rationale_: it is
> a cause and an effect of a preceding cause, and a combination of these
> very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially,
> contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The _Mantras_ (magical
> rather than religious invocations, esoterically) are chanted by the
> Brâhmans, and so are the rest of the _Vedas_ and other Scriptures.
> 
> The “Army of the Voice” is the prototype of the “Host of the Logos,” or
> the “Word,” of the _Sepher Jetzirah_, called in the Secret Doctrine the
> “One Number issued from No‐Number”—the One Eternal Principle. The Esoteric
> Theogony begins with the One Manifested (therefore not eternal in its
> presence and being, if eternal in its essence), the Number of the Numbers
> and Numbered—the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vâch, “of
> the hundred forms,” Shatarûpâ, or Nature. It is from this Number, 10, or
> Creative Nature, the Mother (the Occult cypher, or “0,” ever procreating
> and multiplying in union with the unit “1,” or the Spirit of Life), that
> the whole Universe proceeds.
> 
> In the _Anugîtâ_,(164) a conversation is given between a Brâhmana and his
> wife on the origin of Speech and its Occult properties. The wife asks how
> Speech came into existence, and which was prior to the other, Speech or
> Mind. The Brâhmana tells her that the Apâna (_inspirational __ breath_)
> becoming lord, changes that intelligence, which does not understand Speech
> or Words, into the state of Apâna, and thus opens the Mind. Thereupon he
> tells her a story, a dialogue between Speech and Mind. Both went to the
> Self of Being (_i.e._, to the individual Higher Self, as Nîlakantha
> thinks; to Prajâpati, according to the commentator Arjuna Mishra), and
> asked him to destroy their doubts, and decide which of them preceded and
> was superior to the other. To this the Lord said: “Mind (is superior).”
> But Speech answered the Self of Being, by saying: “I verily yield (you)
> your desires,” meaning that by Speech he acquired what he desired.
> Thereupon again, the Self told her that there are two Minds, the “movable”
> and the “immovable.” “The immovable is with me,” he said, “the movable is
> in your dominion” (_i.e._ of Speech), on the plane of matter. “To that you
> are superior.”
> 
>     But inasmuch, O beautiful one, as you came personally to speak to
>     me (in the way you did, _i.e._ proudly), therefore, O Sarasvatî!
>     you shall never speak after (hard) exhalation. The goddess Speech
>     [Sarasvatî, a later form or aspect of Vâch, the goddess also of
>     secret learning, or Esoteric Wisdom], verily, dwelt always between
>     the Prâna and the Apâna. But, O noble one! going with the Apâna
>     wind [vital air], though impelled, ... without the Prâna
>     [expirational breath], she ran up to Prajâpati [Brahmâ], saying,
>     “Be pleased, O venerable sir!” Then the Prâna appeared again
>     nourishing Speech. And, therefore, Speech never speaks after
>     (hard) exhalation. It is always noisy or noiseless. Of these two,
>     the noiseless is the superior to the noisy (Speech).... The
>     (Speech) which is produced in the body by means of the Prâna, and
>     which then goes [is transformed] into Apâna and then becoming
>     assimilated with the Udâna [physical organs of Speech] ... then
>     finally dwells in the Samâna [“at the navel in the form of sound,
>     as the material cause of all words,” says Arjuna Mishra]. So
>     Speech formerly spoke. Hence the Mind is distinguished by reason
>     of its being immovable, and the Goddess (Speech) by reason of her
>     being movable.
> 
> The above allegory is at the root of the Occult law, which prescribes
> silence upon the knowledge of certain secret and invisible things,
> perceptible only to the spiritual mind (the sixth sense), and which cannot
> be expressed by “noisy” or uttered speech. This chapter of _Anugîtâ_
> explains, says Arjuna Mishra, Prânâyâma, or regulation of the breath in
> Yoga practices. This mode, however, without the previous acquisition of,
> or at least full understanding of, the two higher senses (of which there
> are seven, as will be shown), pertains rather to the lower Yoga. The Hatha
> so called was and still is discountenanced by the Arhats. It is injurious
> to the health, and alone can never develop into Râja Yoga. This story is
> quoted to show how inseparably connected in the metaphysics of old, are
> intelligent beings, or rather “intelligences,” with every sense or
> function, whether physical or mental. The Occult claim that there are
> seven senses in man, and in nature, as there are seven states of
> consciousness, is corroborated in the same work, Chapter vii, on
> Pratyâhâra (the restraint and regulation of the senses, Prânâyâma being
> that of the “vital winds” or breath). The Brâhmana, speaking of the
> institution of the seven sacrificial Priests (Hotris), says: “The nose and
> the eye, and the tongue, and the skin and the ear as the fifth [or smell,
> sight, taste, touch, and hearing], mind and understanding are the seven
> sacrificial priests separately stationed,” which “dwelling in a minute
> space (still) do not perceive each other,” on this sensuous plane, none of
> them except mind. For mind says: “The nose smells not without me, the eye
> does not take in colour, etc., etc. I am the eternal chief among all
> elements [_i.e._, senses]. Without me, the senses never shine, like an
> empty dwelling, or like fires the flames of which are extinct. Without me,
> all beings, like fuel half dried and half moist, fail to apprehend
> qualities or objects even with the senses exerting themselves.”(165)
> 
> This, of course, only with regard to _mind on the sensuous plane_.
> Spiritual Mind, the upper portion or aspect of the _impersonal_ Manas,
> takes no cognizance of the senses in physical man. How well the ancients
> were acquainted with the correlation of forces, and all the recently
> discovered phenomena of mental and physical faculties and functions, and
> with many more mysteries also—may be found in reading Chapters vii and
> viii of this priceless work in philosophy and mystic learning. See the
> quarrel of the senses about their respective superiority and their taking
> the Brahman, the Lord of all creatures, for their arbiter. “You are all
> greatest and not greatest [or superior to objects, as Arjuna Mishra says,
> none being independent of the other]. You are all possessed of one
> another’s qualities. All are greatest in their own spheres and all support
> one another. There is one unmoving [life‐wind or breath, the _yoga‐
> inhalation_, so called, which is the breath of the _One_ or Higher Self].
> That one is my own Self, accumulated in numerous (forms).”
> 
> This Breath, Voice, Self or Wind (Pneuma?), is the Synthesis of the Seven
> Senses, _noumenally_ all minor deities, and esoterically—the _Septenary_
> and the “Army of the Voice.”
> 
> (_b_) Next we see Cosmic Matter scattering and forming itself into
> Elements; grouped into the mystic Four within the fifth Element—Ether, the
> “lining” of Âkâsha, the Anima Mundi, or Mother of Cosmos. “Dots, Lines,
> Triangles, Cubes, Circles” and finally “Spheres”—why or how? Because, says
> the Commentary, such is the first law of Nature, and because Nature
> geometrizes universally in all her manifestations. There is an inherent
> law—not only in the primordial, but also in the manifested matter of our
> phenomenal plane—by which Nature correlates her geometrical forms, and
> later, also, her compound elements, and in which also there is no place
> for accident or chance. It is a fundamental law in Occultism, that there
> is no rest or cessation of motion in Nature.(166) That which seems rest is
> only the change of one form into another, the change of substance going
> hand in hand with that of form—so at least we are taught in Occult
> physics, which thus seem to have anticipated the discovery of the
> “conservation of matter” by a considerable time. Says the ancient
> Commentary(167) to Stanza IV:
> 
> _The Mother is the fiery Fish of Life. She scatters her Spawn and the
> Breath [Motion] heats and quickens it. The Grains [of Spawn] are soon
> attracted to each other and form the Curds in the Ocean [of Space]. The
> larger lumps coalesce and receive new Spawn—in fiery Dots, Triangles and
> Cubes, which ripen, and at the appointed time some of the lumps detach
> themselves and assume spheroidal form, a process which they effect only
> when not interfered with by the others. After which, Law No. —— comes into
> operation. Motion [the Breath] becomes the Whirlwind and sets them into
> rotation._(168)
> 
> 5. THE OI‐HA‐HOU, WHICH IS DARKNESS, THE BOUNDLESS, OR THE NO‐NUMBER, ÂDI‐
> NIDÂNA SVABHÂVAT, THE [circle]:(169)
> 
> I. THE ÂDI‐SANAT, THE NUMBER, FOR HE IS ONE (_a_).
> 
> II. THE VOICE OF THE WORD, SVABHÂVAT, THE NUMBERS, FOR HE IS ONE AND
> NINE.(170)
> 
> III. THE “FORMLESS SQUARE”.(171)
> 
> AND THESE THREE, ENCLOSED WITHIN THE [CIRCLE],(172) ARE THE SACRED FOUR;
> AND THE TEN ARE THE ARÛPA (173) UNIVERSE (_b_). THEN COME THE SONS, THE
> SEVEN FIGHTERS, THE ONE, THE EIGHTH LEFT OUT, AND HIS BREATH WHICH IS THE
> LIGHT‐MAKER (_c_).(174)
> 
> (_a_) “Âdi‐Sanat,” translated literally, is the First or “Primeval
> Ancient,” a name which identifies the Kabalistic “Ancient of Days” and the
> “Holy Aged” (Sephira and Adam Kadmon) with Brahmâ, the Creator, called
> also Sanat among his other names and titles.
> 
> “Svabhâvat” is the mystic Essence, the plastic Root of physical
> Nature—“Numbers” when manifested; the “Number,” in its Unity of Substance,
> on the highest plane. The name is of Buddhist use and a synonym for the
> four‐fold Anima Mundi, the Kabalistic Archetypal World, from whence
> proceed the Creative, Formative, and Material Worlds; and the Scintillæ or
> Sparks—the various other worlds contained in the last three. The Worlds
> are all subject to Rulers or Regents—Rishis and Pitris with the Hindûs,
> Angels with the Jews and Christians, Gods with the Ancients in general.
> 
> (_b_) “[circle].” This means that the “Boundless Circle,” the zero,
> becomes a number, only when one of the other nine figures precedes it, and
> thus manifests its value and potency; the “Word” or Logos, in union with
> “Voice” and Spirit(175) (the expression and source of Consciousness),
> standing for the nine figures, and thus forming, with the cypher, the
> Decad which contains in itself all the Universe. The Triad forms the
> Tetraktys, or “Sacred Four,” within the Circle, the Square within the
> Circle being the most potent of all the magical figures.
> 
> (_c_) The “One Rejected” is the Sun of our system. The exoteric version
> may be found in the oldest Sanskrit Scriptures. In the _Rig Veda_, Aditi,
> the “Boundless” or Infinite Space—translated by Prof. Max Müller, “the
> visible infinite, visible by the naked eye (!!); the endless expanse
> beyond the earth, beyond the clouds, beyond the sky”—is the equivalent of
> “Mother‐Space,” coëval with “Darkness.” She is very properly called the
> “Mother of the Gods,” Deva‐Mâtri, as it is from her cosmic matrix that all
> the heavenly bodies of our system were born—sun and planets. Thus she is
> described, allegorically, in this wise: “_Eight sons were born from the
> body of Aditi; she approached the gods with seven, but cast away the
> eighth, Mârttânda_,” our sun. The seven sons called the Adityas are,
> cosmically or astronomically, the seven planets; and the sun being
> excluded from their number shows plainly that the Hindûs may have known,
> and in fact knew, of a seventh planet, without calling it Uranus.(176) But
> esoterically and theologically, so to say, the Adityas, in their primitive
> most ancient meanings, are the eight, and twelve great gods of the Hindû
> Pantheon. “The Seven allow the mortals to see their dwellings, but show
> themselves only to the Arhats,” says an old proverb; “their dwellings”
> standing here for the planets. The ancient Commentary gives the following
> allegory and explains it:
> 
> _Eight houses were built by Mother: eight houses for her eight Divine
> Sons; four large and four small ones. Eight brilliant Suns, according to
> their age and merits. Bal‐i‐lu [Mârttânda] was not satisfied, though his
> house was the largest. He began [to work] as the huge elephants do. He
> breathed [drew in] into his stomach the vital airs of his brothers. He
> sought to devour them. The larger four were far away; far, on the margin
> __ of their kingdom._(_177_)_ They were not robbed [affected], and
> laughed. Do your worst, Sir, you cannot reach us, they said. But the
> smaller wept. They complained to the Mother. She exiled Bal‐i‐lu to the
> centre of her kingdom, from whence he could not move. [Since then] he
> [only] watches and threatens. He pursues them, turning slowly round
> himself; they turning swiftly from him, and he following from afar the
> direction in which his brothers move on the path that encircles their
> houses._(_178_)_ From that day he feeds on the sweat of the Mother’s body.
> He fills himself with her breath and refuse. Therefore, she rejected him_.
> 
> Thus the “Rejected Son” being our Sun, evidently, as shown above, the
> “Son‐Suns” refer not only to our planets but to the heavenly bodies in
> general. Sûrya, himself only a reflection of the Central Spiritual Sun, is
> the prototype of all those bodies that evolved after him. In the _Vedas_
> he is called Loka‐Chakshuh, the “Eye of the World” (our planetary world),
> and he is one of the three chief deities. He is called indifferently the
> Son of Dyaus or of Aditi, because no distinction is made with reference
> to, or scope allowed for, the esoteric meaning. Thus he is depicted as
> drawn by seven horses, and by one horse with seven heads; the former
> referring to his seven planets, the latter to their one common origin from
> the One Cosmic Element. This “One Element” is called figuratively “Fire.”
> The _Vedas_ teach that “fire verily is all the deities.”(179)
> 
> The meaning of the allegory is plain, for we have both the Dzyan
> Commentary and Modern Science to explain it, though the two differ in more
> than one particular. The Occult Doctrine rejects the hypothesis born of
> the Nebular Theory, that the (seven) great planets have evolved from the
> Sun’s central mass, of this our visible Sun, at any rate. The first
> condensation of cosmic matter of course took place about a central
> nucleus, its parent Sun; but our Sun, it is taught, merely detached itself
> earlier than all the others, as the rotating mass contracted, and is their
> elder, bigger “brother” therefore, not their “father.” The eight Adityas,
> the “gods,” are all formed from the eternal substance (cometary
> matter(180)—the Mother), or the “world‐stuff,” which is both the fifth and
> the sixth Cosmic Principle, the Upâdhi, or Basis, of the Universal Soul,
> just as in man, the Microcosm, Manas(181) is the Upâdhi of Buddhi.(182)
> 
> There is a whole poem on the pregenetic battles fought by the growing
> planets before the final formation of Cosmos, thus accounting for the
> seemingly disturbed position of the systems of several planets; the plane
> of the satellites of some (of Neptune and Uranus, for instance, of which
> the ancients knew nothing, it is said) being tilted over, thus giving them
> an appearance of retrograde motion. These planets are called the Warriors,
> the Architects, and are accepted by the Roman Church as the leaders of the
> heavenly Hosts, thus showing the same traditions. Having evolved from
> Cosmic Space, the Sun, we are taught—before the final formation of the
> primaries and the annulation of the planetary nebulæ—drew into the depths
> of his mass all the cosmic vitality he could, threatening to engulf his
> weaker “Brothers,” before the law of attraction and repulsion was finally
> adjusted; after which, he began feeding on “the Mother’s refuse and
> sweat”; in other words, on those portions of Æther (the “Breath of the
> Universal Soul”), of the existence and constitution of which Science is as
> yet absolutely ignorant. As a theory of this kind has been propounded by
> Sir William Grove,(183) who theorizes that the systems “are gradually
> changing by atmospheric additions or subtractions, or by accretions and
> diminutions arising from nebular substance,” and again that “the sun may
> condense gaseous matter as it travels in space, and so heat may be
> produced”—the archaic teaching seems scientific enough, even in this
> age.(184) Mr. W. Mattieu Williams suggested that the diffused matter or
> Ether, which is the recipient of the heat radiations of the Universe, is
> thereby drawn into the depths of the solar mass; expelling thence the
> previously condensed and thermally exhausted Ether, it becomes compressed
> and gives up its heat, to be in turn itself driven out in a rarefied and
> cooled state, to absorb a fresh supply of heat, which he supposes to be in
> this way taken up by the Ether, and again concentrated and redistributed
> by the Suns of the Universe.
> 
> This is about as close an approximation to the Occult teachings as Science
> ever imagined; for Occultism explains it by the “dead breath,” given back
> by Mârttânda, and his feeding on the “sweat and refuse” of “Mother Space.”
> What could affect Neptune,(185) Saturn and Jupiter, but little, would have
> killed such comparatively small “Houses” as Mercury, Venus and Mars. As
> Uranus was not known before the end of the eighteenth century, the name of
> the fourth planet mentioned in the allegory must remain to us, so far, a
> mystery.
> 
> The “Breath” of all the “Seven” is said to be Bhâskara, the Light‐Maker,
> because they (the planets) were all comets and suns in their origin. They
> evolve into manvantaric life from Primeval Chaos (now the noumenon of
> irresolvable nebulæ), by aggregation and accumulation of the primary
> differentiations of eternal Matter, according to the beautiful expression
> in the Commentary, “_Thus the Sons of Light clothed themselves in the
> fabric of Darkness_.” They are called allegorically the “Heavenly Snails,”
> on account of their (to us) formless Intelligences inhabiting unseen their
> starry and planetary homes, and so to speak, carrying them, as the snails
> do, along with themselves in their revolution. The doctrine of a common
> origin for all the heavenly bodies and planets was, as we see, inculcated
> by the archaic astronomers, before Kepler, Newton, Leibnitz, Kant,
> Herschel and Laplace. Heat (the “Breath”), Attraction and Repulsion—the
> three great factors of Motion—are the conditions under which all the
> members of this primitive family are born, develop, and die; to be reborn
> after a Night of Brahmâ, during which eternal Matter relapses periodically
> into its primary undifferentiated state. The most attenuated gases can
> give no idea of its nature to the modern Physicist. Centres of Forces at
> first, the invisible Sparks, or primordial Atoms, differentiate into
> Molecules, and become Suns—passing gradually into objectivity—gaseous,
> radiant, cosmic, the one “Whirlwind” (or Motion) finally giving the
> impulse to the form, and the initial motion, regulated and sustained by
> the never‐resting “Breaths”—the Dhyân Chohans.
> 
> 6. ... THEN THE SECOND SEVEN, WHO ARE THE LIPIKA, PRODUCED BY THE
> THREE.(186) THE REJECTED SON IS ONE. THE “SON‐SUNS” ARE COUNTLESS.
> 
> The “Lipika,” from the word _lipi_, “writing,” means literally the
> “Scribes.”(187) Mystically, these Divine Beings are connected with Karma,
> the Law of Retribution, for they are the Recorders, or Annalists, who
> impress on the (to us) invisible tablets of the Astral Light, “the great
> picture‐gallery of eternity”—a faithful record of every act, and even
> thought, of man; of all that was, is, or ever will be, in the phenomenal
> Universe. As said in _Isis Unveiled_, this divine and unseen canvas is the
> _Book of Life_. As it is the Lipika who project into objectivity from the
> passive Universal Mind the ideal plan of the Universe, upon which the
> “Builders” reconstruct the Kosmos after every Pralaya, it is they who
> stand parallel to the Seven Angels of the Presence, whom the Christians
> recognize in the Seven “Planetary Spirits,” or the “Spirits of the Stars”;
> and thus it is they who are the direct amanuenses of the Eternal
> Ideation—or, as Plato calls it, the “Divine Thought.” The Eternal Record
> is no fantastic dream, for we meet with the same records in the world of
> gross matter. As Dr. Draper says:
> 
>     A shadow never falls upon a wall without leaving thereupon a
>     permanent trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper
>     processes.... The portraits of our friends or landscape‐views may
>     be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are
>     ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are
>     resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or a glassy
>     surface, until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth into the
>     visible world. Upon the walls of our most private apartments,
>     where we think the eye of intrusion is altogether shut out, and
>     our retirement can never be profaned, there exist the vestiges of
>     our acts, silhouettes of whatever we have done.(188)
> 
> Drs. Jevons and Babbage believe that every thought displaces the particles
> of the brain and, setting them in motion, scatters them throughout the
> universe: they also think that “each particle of the existing matter must
> be a register of all that has happened.”(189) Thus the ancient doctrine
> has begun to acquire rights of citizenship in the speculations of the
> scientific world.
> 
> The forty “Assessors,” who stand in the region of Amenti as the accusers
> of the Soul before Osiris, belong to the same class of deities as the
> Lipika, and might stand as parallels, were not the Egyptian gods so little
> understood in their esoteric meaning. The Hindû Chitragupta who reads out
> the account of every Soul’s life from his register, called Agra‐Sandhânî;
> the Assessors who read theirs from the Heart of the Defunct, which becomes
> an open book before either Yama, Minos, Osiris, or Karma—are all so many
> copies of, and variants from, the Lipika and their Astral Records.
> Nevertheless, the Lipika are not deities connected with Death, but with
> Life Eternal.
> 
> Connected as the Lipika are with the destiny of every man, and the birth
> of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light—not
> fatalistically, but only because the Future, like the Past, is ever alive
> in the Present—they may also be said to exercise an influence on the
> Science of Horoscopy. We must admit the truth of the latter whether we
> will or not. For, as observed by one of the modern professors of
> Astrology:
> 
>     Now that photography has revealed to us the chemical influence of
>     the sidereal system, by fixing on the sensitized plate of the
>     apparatus milliards of stars and planets that had hitherto baffled
>     the efforts of the most powerful telescopes to discover, it
>     becomes easier to understand how our solar system can, at the
>     birth of a child, influence his brain—virgin of any impression—in
>     a definite manner and according to the presence on the zenith of
>     such or another zodiacal constellation.(190)
> 
> Stanza V.
> 
> 1. THE PRIMORDIAL SEVEN, THE FIRST SEVEN BREATHS OF THE DRAGON OF WISDOM,
> PRODUCE IN THEIR TURN FROM THEIR HOLY CIRCUMGYRATING BREATHS THE FIERY
> WHIRLWIND.
> 
> This is, perhaps, the most difficult of all the Stanzas to explain. Its
> language is comprehensible only to him who is thoroughly versed in Eastern
> allegory, and its purposely obscure phraseology. The question will surely
> be asked: Do the Occultists believe in all these “Builders,” “Lipika,” and
> “Sons of Light,” as Entities, or are they merely imagery? To this the
> answer is given as plainly: After due allowance for the imagery of
> personified Powers, we must admit the existence of these Entities, if we
> would not reject the existence of Spiritual Humanity within physical
> mankind. For the hosts of these Sons of Light, the Mind‐born Sons of the
> first manifested Ray of the Unknown All, are the very root of Spiritual
> Man. Unless we want to believe the unphilosophical dogma of a specially
> created soul for every human birth—a fresh supply of these pouring in
> daily, since “Adam”—we have to admit the Occult teachings. This will be
> explained in its place. Let us see, now, what may be the meaning of this
> Occult Stanza.
> 
> The Doctrine teaches that, in order to become a divine, fully conscious
> God—aye, even the highest—the Spiritual Primeval Intelligences must pass
> through the human stage. And when we say human, this does not apply merely
> to our terrestrial humanity, but to the mortals that inhabit any world,
> _i.e._, to those Intelligences that have reached the appropriate
> equilibrium between matter and spirit, as _we_ have now, ever since the
> middle point of the Fourth Root Race of the Fourth Round was passed. Each
> Entity must have won for itself the right of becoming divine, through
> self‐experience. Hegel, the great German thinker, must have known or
> sensed intuitionally this truth, when he said, that the Unconscious
> evolved the Universe only “in the hope of attaining clear self‐
> consciousness,” in other words, of becoming Man; for this is also the
> secret meaning of the oft recurring Purânic phrase, of Brahmâ being
> constantly “moved by the desire to create.” This explains also the hidden
> Kabalistic meaning of the saying: “The Breath becomes a stone; the stone,
> a plant; the plant, an animal; the animal, a man; the man, a spirit; and
> the spirit, a god.” The Mind‐born Sons, the Rishis, the Builders, etc.,
> were all Men—of whatever forms and shapes—in other worlds and in preceding
> Manvantaras.
> 
> This subject being so very mystical, it is most difficult to explain it in
> all its details and bearings; for the whole mystery of evolutionary
> creation is contained therein. A sentence or two in the Shloka vividly
> recalls to mind similar sentences in the _Kabalah_ and the phraseology of
> the King Psalmist.(191) Both, when speaking of God, show him making the
> wind his messenger and his “ministers a flaming fire.” But in the Esoteric
> Doctrine it is used figuratively. The “Fiery Whirl‐wind” is the
> incandescent cosmic dust which only follows magnetically, as the iron
> filings follow the magnet, the directing thought of the “Creative Forces.”
> Yet, this cosmic dust is something more; for every atom in the Universe
> has the potentiality of self‐consciousness in it, and is, like the Monads
> of Leibnitz, a Universe in itself, and _for_ itself. _It is an atom and an
> angel_.
> 
> In this connection it should be noted that one of the luminaries of the
> modern Evolutionist School, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the
> inadequacy of “natural selection” as the sole factor in the development of
> physical man, practically concedes the whole point here discussed. He
> holds that the evolution of man was directed and furthered by superior
> Intelligences, whose agency is a necessary factor in the scheme of Nature.
> But once the operation of these Intelligences is admitted in one place, it
> is only a logical deduction to extend it still further. No hard and fast
> line can be drawn.
> 
> 2. THEY MAKE OF HIM THE MESSENGER OF THEIR WILL (_a_). THE DZYU BECOMES
> FOHAT: THE SWIFT SON OF THE DIVINE SONS, WHOSE SONS ARE THE LIPIKA,(192)
> RUNS CIRCULAR ERRANDS. FOHAT IS THE STEED, AND THE THOUGHT IS THE
> RIDER.(193) HE PASSES LIKE LIGHTNING THROUGH THE FIERY CLOUDS(194) (_b_);
> TAKES THREE, AND FIVE, AND SEVEN STRIDES THROUGH THE SEVEN REGIONS ABOVE,
> AND THE SEVEN BELOW.(195) HE LIFTS HIS VOICE, AND CALLS THE INNUMERABLE
> SPARKS,(196) AND JOINS THEM TOGETHER (_c_).
> 
> (_a_) This shows the “Primordial Seven” using for their Vehicle, (Vâhana,
> or the manifested subject which becomes the symbol of the Power directing
> it) Fohat, called in consequence, the “Messenger of their Will”—the “Fiery
> Whirlwind.”
> 
> (_b_) “Dzyu becomes Fohat”—the expression itself shows it. Dzyu is the one
> Real (Magical) Knowledge, or Occult Wisdom; which, dealing with eternal
> truths and primal causes, becomes almost omnipotence when applied in the
> right direction. Its antithesis is Dzyu‐mi, that which deals with
> illusions and false appearances only, as in our exoteric modern sciences.
> In this case, Dzyu is the expression of the collective Wisdom of the
> Dhyâni‐Buddhas.
> 
> As the reader is supposed not to be acquainted with the Dhyâni‐Buddhas, it
> is as well to say at once that, _according to the Orientalists_, there are
> five Dhyânis who are the Celestial Buddhas, of whom the Human Buddhas are
> the manifestations in the world of form and matter. Esoterically, however,
> the Dhyâni‐Buddhas are seven, of whom five only have hitherto
> manifested,(197) and two are to come in the Sixth and Seventh Root‐Races.
> They are, so to speak, the eternal prototypes of the Buddhas who appear on
> this earth, each of whom has his particular divine prototype. So, for
> instance, Amitâbha is the Dhyâni‐Buddha of Gautama Shâkyamuni, manifesting
> through him whenever this great Soul incarnates on earth as He did in
> Tzonkha‐pa.(198) As the synthesis of the seven Dhyâni‐Buddhas,
> Avalokiteshvara was the first Buddha (the Logos), and Amitâbha is the
> inner “God” of Gautama, who, in China, is called Amida (Buddha). They are,
> as Prof. Rhys Davids correctly states, “the glorious counterparts in the
> mystic world, free from the debasing conditions of this material life,” of
> every earthly mortal Buddha—the liberated Mânushi‐Buddhas appointed to
> govern the Earth in this Round. They are the “Buddhas of Contemplation,”
> and are all Anupâdaka (parentless), _i.e._, self‐born of the divine
> essence. The exoteric teaching—which says that every Dhyâni‐Buddha has the
> faculty of creating from himself an equally celestial son, a Dhyâni‐
> Bodhisattva, who, after the decease of the Mânushi‐Buddha, has to carry
> out the work of the latter—rests on the fact that, owing to the highest
> Initiation performed by one overshadowed by the “Spirit of Buddha”—who is
> credited by the Orientalists with having created the five Dhyâni‐
> Buddhas!—a candidate becomes virtually a Bodhisattva, created such by the
> High Initiator.
> 
> (_c_) Fohat, being one of the most, if not the most important character in
> Esoteric cosmogony, should be minutely described. As in the oldest Grecian
> cosmogony, which differed widely from the later mythology, Eros is the
> third person in the primeval trinity, Chaos, Gæa, Eros—answering to the
> Kabalistic Trinity, Ain Suph, the Boundless All (for Chaos is Space, from
> χαίνω, to open wide, to be void), Shekinah and the Ancient of Days, or the
> Holy Ghost—so Fohat is one thing in the yet Unmanifested Universe, and
> another in the phenomenal and Cosmic World. In the latter, he is that
> occult, electric, vital power, which, under the Will of the Creative
> Logos, unites and brings together all forms, giving them the first
> impulse, which in time becomes law. But in the Unmanifested Universe,
> Fohat is no more this, than Eros is the later brilliant winged Cupid, or
> Love. Fohat has naught to do with Cosmos yet, since Cosmos is not born,
> and the Gods still sleep in the bosom of “Father‐Mother.” He is an
> abstract philosophical idea. He produces nothing yet by himself; he is
> simply that potential creative Power, in virtue of whose action the
> Noumenon of all future phenomena divides, so to speak, but to reunite in a
> mystic supersensuous act, and emit the creative Ray. When the “Divine Son”
> breaks forth, then Fohat becomes the propelling force, the active Power
> which causes the One to become Two and Three—on the cosmic plane of
> manifestation. The triple One differentiates into the Many, and then Fohat
> is transformed into that force which brings together the elemental atoms,
> and makes them aggregate and combine. We find an echo of this primeval
> teaching in early Greek mythology. Erebus and Nux are born out of Chaos,
> and, under the action of Eros, give birth in their turn to Æther and
> Hemera, the light of the superior and the light of the inferior, or
> terrestrial, regions. Darkness generates light. Compare in the _Purânas_
> Brahmâ’s Will or “Desire” to create; and in the Phœnician cosmogony of
> Sanchuniathon the doctrine that Desire, πόθος, is the principle of
> creation.
> 
> Fohat is closely related to the “One Life.” From the Unknown One, the
> Infinite Totality, the Manifested One, or the periodical, Manvantaric
> Deity, emanates; and this is the Universal Mind, which, separated from its
> Fountain‐Source, is the Demiurge or the Creative Logos of the Western
> Kabalists, and the Four‐faced Brahmâ of the Hindû religion. In its
> totality, viewed, in the Esoteric doctrine, from the standpoint of
> manifested Divine Thought, it represents the Hosts of the higher Creative
> Dhyân Chohans. Simultaneously with the evolution of the Universal Mind,
> the Concealed Wisdom of Adi‐Buddha—the One Supreme and Eternal—manifests
> itself as Avalokiteshvara (or Manifested Îshvara), which is the Osiris of
> the Egyptians, the Ahura‐Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Heavenly Man of
> the Hermetic philosophers, the Logos of the Platonists, and the Âtman of
> the Vedântins.(199) By the action of the Manifested Wisdom, or
> Mahat—represented by these innumerable centres of spiritual energy in the
> Kosmos—the Reflection of the Universal Mind, which is Cosmic Ideation and
> the Intellectual Force accompanying such Ideation, becomes objectively the
> Fohat of the Buddhist esoteric philosopher. Fohat, running along the seven
> principles of Âkâsha, acts upon manifested Substance, or the One Element,
> as declared above, and, by differentiating it into various centres of
> energy, sets in motion the law of Cosmic Evolution, which, in obedience to
> the Ideation of the Universal Mind, brings into existence all the various
> states of being in the manifested Solar System.
> 
> The Solar System, brought into existence by these agencies, consists of
> Seven Principles, like everything else within these centres. Such is the
> teaching of the Trans‐Himâlayan Esotericism. Every philosophy, however,
> has its own way of dividing these principles.
> 
> Fohat, then, is the personified electric vital power, the transcendental
> binding unity of all cosmic energies, on the unseen as on the manifested
> planes, the action of which resembles—on an immense scale—that of a living
> Force created by Will, in those phenomena where the seemingly subjective
> acts on the seemingly objective, and propels it to action. Fohat is not
> only the living Symbol and Container of that Force, but is looked upon by
> the Occultists as an Entity; the forces it acts upon being cosmic, human
> and terrestrial, and exercising their influence on all these planes
> respectively. On the earthly plane, its influence is felt in the magnetic
> and active force generated by the strong desire of the magnetizer. On the
> cosmic, it is present in the constructive power that, in the formation of
> things—from the planetary system down to the glow‐worm and simple
> daisy—carries out the plan in the mind of Nature, or in the Divine
> Thought, with regard to the development and growth of a particular thing.
> It is, metaphysically, the objectivized Thought of the Gods, the “Word
> made flesh” on a lower scale, and the messenger of cosmic and human
> Ideation; the active force in Universal Life. In its secondary aspect,
> Fohat is the Solar Energy, the electric vital fluid, and the preserving
> Fourth Principle, the Animal Soul of Nature, so to say, or—Electricity.
> 
> In 1882, the President of the Theosophical Society, Col. Olcott, was taken
> to task for asserting in one of his lectures that Electricity is matter.
> Such, nevertheless, is the teaching of the Occult Doctrine. “Force,”
> “Energy,” may be better names for it, so long as European Science knows so
> little about its true nature; yet matter it is, as much as Ether is
> matter, since it is as atomic, though indeed several removes from Ether.
> It seems ridiculous to argue that because a thing is imponderable to
> Science, therefore it cannot be called matter. Electricity is
> “immaterial,” in the sense that its molecules are not subject to
> perception and experiment; yet it may be—and Occultism says it is—atomic;
> therefore it is matter. But even supposing it were unscientific to speak
> of it in such terms, once Electricity is called in Science a source of
> Energy, Energy simply, and a Force—where is that Force or that Energy
> which can be thought of without thinking of matter? Maxwell, a
> mathematician and one of the greatest authorities upon Electricity and its
> phenomena, said, years ago, that Electricity was matter, not motion
> merely. “If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are
> composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity also,
> positive as well as negative, is divided into definite elementary
> portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.”(200) We will go further
> than this, and assert that Electricity is not only Substance, but that it
> is an emanation from an Entity, which is neither God nor Devil, but one of
> the numberless Entities that rule and guide our world, according to the
> eternal Law of Karma.
> 
> To return to Fohat, it is connected with Vishnu and Sûrya in the early
> character of the former God; for Vishnu is not a high God in the _Rig
> Veda_. The name Vishnu is from the root _vish_, “to pervade,” and Fohat is
> called the “Pervader” and the Manufacturer, because he shapes the atoms
> from crude material.(201) In the sacred texts of the _Rig Veda_, Vishnu is
> also “a manifestation of the Solar Energy, and is described as striding
> through the seven regions of the Universe in three steps,” the Vedic God
> having little in common with the Vishnu of later times. Therefore the two
> are identical in this particular feature, and one is the copy of the
> other.
> 
> The Three and Seven “Strides” refer to the seven spheres inhabited by man,
> in the Esoteric Doctrine, as well as to the seven regions of the Earth.
> Notwithstanding the frequent objections made by would‐be Orientalists, the
> Seven Worlds, or Spheres, of our Planetary Chain are distinctly referred
> to in the exoteric Hindû scriptures. But how strangely all these numbers
> are connected with like numbers in other cosmogonies and with their
> symbols, can be seen from the comparisons and parallelisms made by
> students of old religions. The “three strides of Vishnu,” through the
> “seven regions of the Universe,” of the _Rig Veda_, have been variously
> explained by commentators as meaning fire, lightning and the sun,
> cosmically, and as having been taken in the earth, the atmosphere, and the
> sky; more philosophically—and in the astronomical sense, very
> correctly—they are explained by Aurnavâbha as being the various positions
> of the sun, rising, noon, and setting. Esoteric Philosophy alone explains
> it clearly, though the _Zohar_ has laid it down very philosophically and
> comprehensively. It is plainly demonstrated therein that in the beginning
> the Elohim (Alhim) were called Achad, “One,” or the “Deity, One in Many,”
> a very simple idea in a pantheistic conception—pantheistic in its
> philosophical sense, of course. Then came the change, “Jehovah is Elohim,”
> thus unifying the multiplicity and taking the first step towards
> Monotheism. Now to the query, “How is Jehovah Elohim?” the answer is, “By
> Three Steps” from below. The meaning is plain. The Steps are symbols, and
> emblematic, mutually and correlatively, of Spirit, Soul and Body (Man); of
> the Circle, transformed into Spirit, the Soul of the World and its Body
> (or Earth). Stepping out of the Circle of Infinity, that no man
> comprehendeth, Ain Suph—the Kabalistic synonym for Parabrahman, for the
> Zeroâna Akerne, of the Mazdeans, or for any other “Unknowable”—becomes
> “One” (the Achad, the Eka, the Ahu); then he (or it) is transformed by
> evolution into the “One in Many,” the Dhyâni‐Buddhas or the Elohim, or
> again the Amshaspends, his third Step being taken into the generation of
> the flesh, or Man. And from Man, or Jah‐Hovah, “male‐female,” the _inner_
> divine entity becomes, on the metaphysical plane, once more the Elohim.
> 
> The numbers 3, 5, and 7 are prominent in speculative Masonry, as shown in
> _Isis Unveiled_. A Mason writes:
> 
>     There are the 3, 5, and 7 steps to show a circular walk. The three
>     faces of 3, 3; 5, 3; and 7, 3; etc., etc. Sometimes it comes in
>     this form: 753/2 = 376.5, and 7535/2 = 3817.5, and the ratio of
>     20612/6561 feet for cubit measure gives the Great Pyramid
>     measures.
> 
> Three, five and seven are mystical numbers, and the last and the first are
> as greatly honoured by Masons as by Parsis—the Triangle being a symbol of
> Deity everywhere.(202) As a matter of course, Doctors of Divinity—Cassel,
> for instance—show the _Zohar_ explaining and supporting the Christian
> Trinity(!). It is the latter, however, that had its origin from the
> [triangle], in the archaic Occultism and Symbology of the Heathen. The
> Three Strides relate metaphysically to the descent of Spirit into Matter,
> of the Logos falling as a ray into the spirit, then into the soul, and
> finally into the human physical form of man, in which it becomes Life.
> 
> The Kabalistic idea is identical with the Esotericism of the archaic
> period. This Esotericism is the common property of all, and belongs
> neither to the Âryan Fifth Race, nor to any of its numerous sub‐races. It
> cannot be claimed by the Turanians, so‐called, the Egyptians, Chinese,
> Chaldeans, or by any of the seven divisions of the Fifth Root Race, but
> really belongs to the Third and Fourth Root Races, whose descendants we
> find in the Seed of the Fifth, the earliest Âryans. The Circle was with
> every nation the symbol of the Unknown—“Boundless Space,” the abstract
> garb of an ever present abstraction—the Incognizable Deity. It represents
> limitless Time in Eternity. The Zeroâna Akerne is also the “Boundless
> Circle of Unknown Time,” from which Circle issues the radiant Light—the
> Universal Sun, or Ormazd(203)—and the latter is identical with Cronus, in
> his Æolian form, that of a Circle. For the Circle is Sar and Saros, or
> Cycle. It was the Babylonian God whose circular horizon was the visible
> symbol of the invisible, while the Sun was the One Circle from which
> proceeded the cosmic orbs, of which he was considered the leader. Zeroâna,
> is the Chakra, or Circle, of Vishnu, the mysterious emblem which is,
> according to the definition of a Mystic, “a curve of such a nature that as
> to any, the least possible, part thereof, if the curve be protracted
> either way, it will proceed and finally reënter upon itself, and form one
> and the same curve—or that which we call the circle.” No better definition
> could thus be given of the natural symbol and the evident nature of Deity,
> which having its circumference everywhere (the boundless) has, therefore,
> its central point also everywhere; in other words, is in every point of
> the Universe. The invisible Deity is thus also the Dhyân Chohans, or the
> Rishis, the primitive seven, and the nine, without, and ten, including,
> their synthetical unit, from which IT steps into Man.
> 
> Returning to Commentary 4 of Stanza IV, the reader now will understand
> why, while the Trans‐Himâlayan Chakra has inscribed within it [triangle]
> [square] [5‐point star with middle dot]—triangle, first line, square,
> second line, and a pentacle with a point in the centre, either thus
> [5‐point star with middle dot] or some other variation—the Kabalistic
> Circle of the Elohim reveals, when the letters of the word אלהים (Alhim or
> Elohim) are read numerically, the famous numerals 13514, or
> anagrammatically 31415—the astronomical π (pi), or the hidden meaning of
> the Dhyâni‐Buddhas, of the Gebers, the Giburim, the Kabeiri, and the
> Elohim, all signifying “Great Men,” “Titans,” “Heavenly Men,” and, on
> earth, “Giants.”
> 
> The Seven was a Sacred Number with every nation; but none applied it to
> more physiologically materialistic uses than the Hebrews. With them 7 was
> preëminently the generative number, and 9 the male causative one, forming
> as shown by the Kabalists the otz, עצ (90, 70), or “the Tree of the Garden
> of Eden,” the “double hermaphrodite rod” of the Fourth Race. This was the
> symbol of the “Holy of Holies,” the 3 and the 4 of sexual separation.
> Nearly every one of the 22 Hebrew letters are merely phallic symbols. Of
> the two letters—as shown above—one, the _ayin_, is a negative female
> letter, symbolically an eye; the the other a male letter, _tzâ_, a
> _fish_‐hook or dart. Whereas with the Hindûs and Âryans generally, the
> significance was manifold, and related almost entirely to purely
> metaphysical and astronomical truths. Their Rishis and Gods, their Demons
> and Heroes, have historical and ethical meanings.
> 
> Yet we are told by a Kabalist, who, in a work not yet published, contrasts
> the _Kabalah_ and _Zohar_ with Âryan Esotericism, that:
> 
>     The Hebrew clear, short, terse and exact, modes far and beyond
>     measure surpass the toddling word‐talk of the Hindûs—just as by
>     parallelisms the Psalmist says, “My mouth speaks with my tongue, I
>     know not thy numbers” (lxxi., 15).... The Hindû glyph shows by its
>     insufficiency in the large admixture of adventitious sides the
>     same borrowed plumage that the Greeks (the lying Greeks) had, and
>     that Masonry has: which, in the rough monosyllabic (and apparent)
>     poverty of the Hebrew, shows the latter to have come down from a
>     far more remote antiquity than any of these, and to have been the
>     source [! ?], or nearer the old original source than any of them.
> 
> This is entirely erroneous. Our learned brother and correspondent judges
> the Hindû religious systems apparently by their _Shâstras_ and _Purânas_,
> probably the latter, and in their modern translations moreover, which
> disfigure them out of all recognition. It is to their philosophical
> systems that we have to turn, to their esoteric teaching, if we would make
> a point of comparison. No doubt the symbology of the _Pentateuch_, and
> even of the _New Testament_, comes from the same source. But surely the
> Pyramid of Cheops, whose measurements are all found, by Professor Piazzi
> Smyth, repeated in Solomon’s alleged and mythical Temple, is not of a
> later date than the Mosaic books? Hence, if there is any such great
> identity as is claimed, it must be due to servile copying on the part of
> the Jews, not on that of the Egyptians. The glyphs of the Jews—and even
> their language, the Hebrew—are not original. They are borrowed from the
> Egyptians, from whom Moses got his Wisdom; from the Coptic, the probable
> kinsman, if not parent, of the old Phœnician and from the Hyksos, their
> (alleged) ancestors, as Josephus shows.(204) Aye; but who are the Hyksos
> shepherds? And who the Egyptians? History knows nothing of the question,
> and speculates and theorizes out of the depths of the respective
> consciousnesses of her historians.(205) “Khamism, or old Coptic, is from
> Western Asia, and contains some germ of the Semitic, thus bearing witness
> to the primitive cognate unity of the Âryan and Semitic races,” says
> Bunsen, who places the great events in Egypt 9,000 years B.C. The fact is
> that in archaic Esotericism and Âryan thought we find a grand philosophy,
> whereas in the Hebrew records we find only the most surprising ingenuity
> in inventing apotheoses for phallic worship and sexual theogony.
> 
> That the Âryans never made their religion rest solely on physiological
> symbols, as the old Hebrews have done, may be seen in the exoteric Hindû
> Scriptures. That these accounts, also, are blinds is shown by their
> contradicting each other, a different explanation being found in almost
> every _Purâna_ and epic poem. Read esoterically, however, they will all
> yield the same meaning. Thus one account enumerates seven worlds,
> exclusive of the nether worlds, also seven in number; these fourteen upper
> and nether worlds have nothing to do with the classification of the
> Septenary Chain and belong to the purely ethereal, invisible worlds. These
> will be noticed elsewhere. Suffice it for the present to show that they
> are purposely referred to as though they belonged to the Chain. “Another
> enumeration calls the seven worlds earth, sky, heaven, middle region,
> place of birth, mansion of the blest, and abode of truth; placing the Sons
> of Brahmâ in the sixth division, and stating the fifth, or Jana‐loka, to
> be that where animals destroyed in the general conflagration are born
> again.”(206) Some real Esoteric teaching is given in the subsequent
> chapters on Symbolism. He who is prepared for it will understand the
> hidden meaning.
> 
> 3. HE IS THEIR GUIDING SPIRIT AND LEADER. WHEN HE COMMENCES WORK, HE
> SEPARATES THE SPARKS OF THE LOWER KINGDOM,(207) THAT FLOAT AND THRILL WITH
> JOY IN THEIR RADIANT DWELLINGS,(208) AND FORMS THEREWITH THE GERMS OF
> WHEELS. HE PLACES THEM IN THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE, AND ONE IN THE
> MIDDLE—THE CENTRAL WHEEL.
> 
> “Wheels,” as already explained, are the centres of force, around which
> primordial cosmic matter expands, and, passing through all the six stages
> of consolidation, becomes spheroidal and ends by being transformed into
> globes or spheres. It is one of the fundamental dogmas of Esoteric
> cosmogony, that during the Kalpas (or Æons) of Life, Motion, which, during
> the periods of Rest, “_pulsates and thrills through every slumbering
> atom_”—assumes an evergrowing tendency, from the first awakening of Kosmos
> to a new “Day,” to circular movement. “The Deity becomes a Whirlwind.” It
> may be asked, as the writer has not failed to ask: Who is there to
> ascertain the difference in that Motion, since all Nature is reduced to
> its primal essence, and there can be no one—not even one of the Dhyâni‐
> Chohans, who are all in Nirvâna—to see it? The answer to this is:
> Everything in Nature has to be judged by analogy. Though the highest
> Deities (Archangels or Dhyâni‐Buddhas) are unable to penetrate the
> mysteries which lie too far beyond our Planetary System and the visible
> Cosmos, yet there were great seers and prophets in olden times who were
> enabled to perceive the mystery of Breath and Motion retrospectively, when
> the systems of Worlds were at rest and plunged in their periodic sleep.
> 
> The Wheels are also called Rotæ—the moving wheels of the celestial orbs
> participating in the world’s creation—when the meaning refers to the
> animating principle of the stars and planets; for, in the _Kabalah_, they
> are represented by the Auphanim, the Angels of the Spheres and Stars, of
> which they are the informing Souls.(209)
> 
> This law of vortical movement in primordial matter is one of the oldest
> conceptions of Greek philosophy, whose first historical sages were nearly
> all Initiates of the Mysteries. The Greeks had it from the Egyptians, and
> the latter from the Chaldeans, who had been the pupils of Brâhmans of the
> Esoteric school. Leucippus, and Democritus of Abdera—the pupil of the
> Magi—taught that this gyratory movement of the atoms and spheres existed
> from eternity.(210) Hicetas, Heraclides, Ecphantus, Pythagoras, and all
> his pupils, taught the rotation of the earth; and Âryabhata of India,
> Aristarchus, Seleucus, and Archimedes calculated its revolution as
> scientifically as the Astronomers do now; while the theory of Elemental
> Vortices was known to Anaxagoras, and maintained by him 500 years B.C., or
> nearly 2,000 before it was taken up by Galileo, Descartes, Swedenborg, and
> finally, with slight modifications, by Sir W. Thomson.(211) All such
> knowledge, if justice be only done, is an echo of the archaic doctrine, an
> attempt to explain which is now being made. How men of the last few
> centuries have come to the same ideas and conclusions that were taught as
> axiomatic truths in the secrecy of the Adyta, dozens of millenniums ago,
> is a question that is treated separately. Some were led to it by the
> natural progress in Physical Science and by independent observation;
> others—such as Copernicus, Swedenborg, and a few more—their great learning
> notwithstanding, owed their knowledge far more to intuitive than to
> acquired ideas, developed in the usual way by a course of study. That
> Swedenborg, who could not possibly have known anything of the esoteric
> ideas of Buddhism, independently came near the Occult teaching in his
> general conceptions, is shown by his essay on the Vortical Theory. In
> Clissold’s translation of it, quoted by Prof. Winchell,(212) we find the
> following _résumé_:
> 
>     The first cause is the infinite or unlimited. This gives existence
>     to the first finite or limited. [The Logos in its manifestation
>     and the Universe.] That which produces a limit is analogous to
>     motion. [See Stanza I _supra_.] The limit produced is a point, the
>     essence of which is motion; but being without parts, this essence
>     is not actual motion, but only a conatus to it. [In our doctrine
>     it is not a “conatus,” but a change from Eternal Vibration, in the
>     unmanifested, to Vortical Motion, in the phenomenal or manifested
>     World.] From this first proceed extension, space, figure, and
>     succession, or time. As in geometry a point generates a line, a
>     line a surface, and a surface a solid, so here the conatus of the
>     point tends towards lines, surfaces and solids. In other words,
>     the Universe is contained _in ovo_ in the first natural point.
> 
>     The Motion toward which the conatus tends is circular, since the
>     circle is the most perfect of all figures.... “The most perfect
>     figure of the motion above described must be the perpetually
>     circular; that is to say, it must proceed from the centre to the
>     periphery and from the periphery to the centre.”(213)
> 
> This is Occultism pure and simple.
> 
> By the “Six Directions of Space” is here meant the “Double Triangle,” the
> junction and blending together of pure Spirit and Matter, of the Arûpa and
> the Rûpa, of which the Triangles are a Symbol. This Double Triangle is a
> sign of Vishnu; it is Solomon’s Seal, and the Shrî‐Antara of the Brâhmans.
> 
> 4. FOHAT TRACES SPIRAL LINES TO UNITE THE SIXTH TO THE SEVENTH—THE CROWN
> (_a_). AN ARMY OF THE SONS OF LIGHT STANDS AT EACH ANGLE; THE LIPIKA, IN
> THE MIDDLE WHEEL (_b_). THEY(214) SAY: “THIS IS GOOD.” THE FIRST DIVINE
> WORLD IS READY; THE FIRST, THE SECOND.(215) THEN THE “DIVINE ARÛPA”(216)
> REFLECTS ITSELF IN CHHÂYÂ LOKA,(217) THE FIRST GARMENT OF ANUPÂDAKA (_c_).
> 
> (_a_) This tracing of “spiral lines” refers to the evolution of Man’s as
> well as of Nature’s Principles; an evolution which takes place gradually,
> as does everything else in Nature. The Sixth Principle in Man (Buddhi, the
> Divine Soul), though a mere breath, in our conceptions, is still something
> material when compared with Divine Spirit (Âtmâ), of which it is the
> carrier or vehicle. Fohat, in his capacity of Divine Love (Eros), the
> electric power of affinity and sympathy, is shown, allegorically, trying
> to bring the pure Spirit, the Ray inseparable from the One Absolute, into
> union with the Soul, the two constituting in Man the Monad, and in Nature
> the first link between the ever‐unconditioned and the manifested. “The
> First is now the Second [World]”—of the Lipikas—has reference to the same.
> 
> (_b_) The “Army” at each angle is the Host of Angelic Beings (Dhyân
> Chohans), appointed to guide and watch over each respective region, from
> the beginning to the end of a Manvantara. They are the “Mystic Watchers”
> of the Christian Kabalists and Alchemists, and relate, symbolically as
> well as cosmogonically, to the numerical system of the Universe. The
> numbers with which these Celestial Beings are connected, are extremely
> difficult to explain, as each number refers to several groups of distinct
> ideas, according to the particular group of “Angels” which it is intended
> to represent. Herein lies the _nodus_ in the study of symbology, with
> which so many scholars, unable to untie it, have preferred dealing as
> Alexander dealt with the Gordian knot; hence erroneous conceptions and
> teachings, as a direct result.
> 
> (_c_) The “First is the Second,” because the “First” cannot really be
> numbered or regarded as such, for the First is the realm of noumena in its
> primary manifestation, the threshold to the World of Truth, or Sat,
> through which the direct energy that radiates from the One Reality—the
> Nameless Deity—reaches us. Here again, the untranslateable term Sat (Be‐
> ness) is likely to lead to an erroneous conception, since that which is
> manifested cannot be Sat, but is something phenomenal, not everlasting,
> nor, in truth, even sempiternal. It is coëval and coëxistent with the One
> Life, “Secondless,” but as a manifestation it is still a Mâyâ—like the
> rest. This “World of Truth,” in the words of the Commentary, can be
> described only as “_a bright star dropped from the Heart of Eternity; the
> beacon of hope on whose Seven Rays hang the Seven Worlds of Being_.” Truly
> so; since these are the Seven Lights whose reflections are the human
> immortal Monads—the Âtmâ, or the irradiating Spirit of every creature of
> the human family. First, this Septenary Light; then the “Divine World”—the
> countless lights lit at the primeval Light—the Buddhis, or formless Divine
> Souls, of the last Arûpa (Formless) World, the “Sum Total,” in the
> mysterious language of the old Stanza.
> 
> In the Catechism, the Master is made to ask the pupil:
> 
> _“__Lift thy head, O Lanoo; dost thou see one, or countless lights above
> thee, burning in the dark midnight sky?__”_
> 
> _“__I sense one Flame, O Gurudeva, I see countless undetached sparks
> shining in it.__”_
> 
> _“__Thou sayest well. And now look around and into thyself. That light
> which burns inside thee, dost thou feel it different in anywise from the
> light that shines in thy brother‐men?__”_
> 
> _“__It is in no way different, though the prisoner is held in bondage by
> Karma, and though its outer garments delude the ignorant into saying,
> __‘__Thy Soul and My Soul__’__.__”_
> 
> The radical unity of the ultimate essence of each constituent part of
> compounds in Nature—from star to mineral atom, from the highest Dhyân
> Chohan to the smallest infusorium, in the fullest acceptation of the term,
> and whether applied to the spiritual, intellectual, or physical
> worlds—this unity is the one fundamental law in Occult Science. “The Deity
> is boundless and infinite expansion,” says an Occult axiom: hence, the
> name of Brahmâ, as previously remarked.(218)
> 
> There is a deep philosophy underlying the earliest worship in the world,
> the worship of the Sun and of Fire. Of all the Elements known to Physical
> Science, Fire is that which has ever eluded definite analysis. It is
> confidently asserted that air is a mixture containing the gases oxygen and
> nitrogen. We view the Universe and the Earth as matter composed of
> definite chemical molecules. We speak of the primitive ten earths,
> endowing each with a Greek or Latin name. We say that water is,
> chemically, a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. But what is Fire? It is the
> effect of combustion, we are gravely answered. It is heat and light and
> motion, and a correlation of physical and chemical forces in general. And
> this scientific definition is philosophically supplemented by a
> theological one in Webster’s Dictionary, which explains fire as “the
> instrument of punishment, or the punishment of the impenitent in another
> state”—the “state,” by the bye, being supposed to be spiritual; but, alas!
> the presence of fire would seem to be a convincing proof of its material
> nature. Yet, speaking of the illusion of regarding phenomena as simple,
> because they are familiar, Professor Bain says:
> 
>     Very familiar facts seem to stand in no need of explanation
>     themselves and to be the means of explaining whatever can be
>     assimilated to them. Thus, the boiling and evaporation of a liquid
>     is supposed to be a very simple phenomenon requiring no
>     explanation, and a satisfactory explanation of rarer phenomena.
>     That water should dry up is, to the uninstructed mind, a thing
>     wholly intelligible: whereas to the man acquainted with physical
>     science the liquid state is anomalous and inexplicable. The
>     lighting of a fire by a flame is a _great scientific difficulty_,
>     yet few people think so.(219)
> 
> What says the Esoteric teaching with regard to Fire? “_Fire is the most
> perfect and unadulterated reflection, in Heaven as on Earth, of the One
> Flame. It is Life and Death, the origin and the end of every material
> thing. It is divine Substance._” Thus, not only the Fire‐Worshipper, the
> Parsi, but even the wandering savage tribes of America, which proclaim
> themselves “born of fire,” show more science in their creeds and truth in
> their superstitions, than all the speculations of modern physics and
> learning. The Christian who says, “God is a living Fire,” and speaks of
> the Pentecostal “Tongues of Fire” and of the “Burning Bush” of Moses, is
> as much a fire‐worshipper as any other “Heathen.” Among the Mystics and
> Kabalists, the Rosicrucians were those who defined Fire in the most
> correct way. Procure a sixpenny lamp, keep it only supplied with oil, and
> you will be able to light at its flame the lamps, candles, and fires of
> the whole globe without diminishing that flame. If the Deity, the radical
> One, is an eternal and infinite Substance never consumed (“the Lord thy
> God is a consuming fire”), then it does not seem reasonable that the
> Occult teaching should be held as unphilosophical when it says: “Thus were
> formed the Arûpa and Rûpa [Worlds]: from One Light Seven Lights; from each
> of the Seven, seven times Seven” etc., etc.
> 
> 5. FOHAT TAKES FIVE STRIDES(220) (_a_), AND BUILDS A WINGED WHEEL AT EACH
> CORNER OF THE SQUARE FOR THE FOUR HOLY ONES ... AND THEIR ARMIES(221)
> (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) The “Strides,” as already explained in the last Commentary, refer to
> both the cosmic and the human Principles—the latter of which consist, in
> the exoteric division, of three (Spirit, Soul and Body), and, in the
> esoteric calculation, of seven Principles—three Rays of the Essence and
> four Aspects.(222) Those who have studied Mr. Sinnett’s _Esoteric
> Buddhism_ will easily grasp the nomenclature. There are two Esoteric
> schools beyond the Himâlayas, or rather one school, divided into two
> sections—one for the inner Lanoos, the other for the outer or semi‐lay
> Chelâs; the first teaching a septenary, the other a six‐fold division of
> the human Principles.
> 
> From a cosmic point of view, Fohat taking “Five Strides” refers here to
> the five upper planes of Consciousness and Being, the sixth and the
> seventh (counting downwards) being the astral and the terrestrial, or the
> two lower planes.
> 
> (_b_) Four “Winged Wheels at each corner ... for the Four Holy Ones and
> their Armies (Hosts).” These are the “Four Mahârâjahs,” or great Kings, of
> the Dhyân Chohans, the Devas, who preside each over one of the four
> cardinal points. They are the Regents, or Angels, who rule over the
> Cosmical Forces of North, South, East and West, Forces having each a
> distinct Occult property. These Beings are also connected with Karma, as
> the latter needs physical and material agents to carry out its decrees,
> such as the four kinds of winds, for instance, professedly admitted by
> Science to have their respective evil and beneficent influences upon the
> health of mankind and every living thing. There is Occult philosophy in
> the Roman Catholic doctrine which traces the various public calamities,
> such as epidemics of disease, and wars, and so on, to the invisible
> “Messengers” from North and West. “The glory of God comes from the way of
> the East,” says Ezekiel; while Jeremiah, Isaiah, and the Psalmist assure
> their readers that all the evil under the Sun comes from the North and the
> West—which, when applied to the Jewish nation, sounds like an undeniable
> prophecy. And this accounts also for St. Ambrose(223) declaring that it is
> precisely for this reason that “we curse the North Wind, and that during
> the ceremony of baptism we begin by turning towards the West [Sidereal],
> to renounce the better him who inhabits it; after which we turn to the
> East.”
> 
> Belief in the Four Mahârâjahs—the Regents of the four cardinal points—was
> universal and is now that of Christians, who call them, after St.
> Augustine, “Angelic Virtues” and “Spirits,” when enumerated by themselves,
> and “Devils,” when named by Pagans. But where is the difference between
> the Pagans and the Christians in this case? Says the scholarly Vossius:
> 
>     Though St. Augustine has said that every visible thing in this
>     world had an angelic virtue as an overseer near it, it is not
>     individuals but entire species of things that must be understood,
>     each such species having indeed its particular angel to watch it.
>     He is at one in this with all the philosophers ... For us these
>     angels are spirits separated from the objects.... whereas for the
>     [Pagan] philosophers they were gods.(224)
> 
> Considering the Ritual for the “Spirits of the Stars,” established by the
> Roman Catholic Church, these look suspiciously like “gods,” but they were
> no more honoured or worshipped by the ancient, nor are they by the modern,
> Pagan rabble than they are now at Rome by the highly cultured Catholic
> Christians.
> 
> Following Plato, Aristotle explained that the term στοιχεῖα was understood
> only as meaning the incorporeal principles placed at each of the four
> great divisions of our cosmical world, to supervise them. Thus, no more
> than Christians do Pagans _adore_ and _worship_ the Elements and the
> (imaginary) cardinal points, but the “gods” that respectively rule over
> them. For the Church, there are two kinds of Sidereal Beings, Angels and
> Devils. For the Kabalist and Occultist, there is but one class, and
> neither Occultist nor Kabalist makes any difference between the “Rectors
> of Light” and the “Rectores Tenebrarum,” or Cosmocratores, whom the Roman
> Church imagines and discovers in the “Rectors of Light,” as soon as any
> one of them is called by another name than the one she addresses him by.
> It is not the Rector, or Mahârâjah, who punishes or rewards, with or
> without “God’s” permission or order, but man himself—his deeds, or Karma,
> attracting individually and collectively (as in the case of whole nations,
> sometimes) every kind of evil and calamity. We produce _Causes_, and these
> awaken the corresponding powers in the Sidereal World, which are
> magnetically and irresistibly attracted to—and reäct upon—those who
> produce such causes; whether such persons are practically the evil‐doers,
> or simply “thinkers” who brood mischief. For thought is matter, we are
> taught by Modern Science; and “every particle of the existing matter must
> be a register of all that has happened,” as Messrs. Jevons and Babbage in
> their _Principles of Science_ tell the profane. Modern Science is every
> day drawn more into the maëlstrom of Occultism; unconsciously, no doubt,
> still very sensibly.
> 
> “Thought is matter”: not of course, however, in the sense of the German
> Materialist Moleschott, who assures us that “thought is the movement of
> matter”—a statement of almost unparalleled absurdity. Mental states and
> bodily states are utterly contrasted as such. But that does not affect the
> position that every thought, in addition to its physical accompaniment
> (brain‐change), exhibits an objective—though to us supersensuously
> objective—aspect on the astral plane.(225)
> 
> The two main theories of Science as to the relations between Mind and
> Matter are Monism and Materialism. These two cover the whole ground of
> negative psychology with the exception of the quasi‐occult views of the
> German Pantheistic schools.
> 
> The views of our present‐day scientific thinkers as to the relations
> between mind and matter may be reduced to the following two hypotheses.
> These show that both views equally exclude the possibility of an
> independent soul, distinct from the physical brain through which it
> functions. They are:
> 
> (1.) _Materialism_, the theory which regards mental phenomena as the
> product of molecular change in the brain; _i.e._, as the outcome of a
> transformation of motion into feeling (!). The cruder school once went so
> far as to identify mind with a “peculiar mode of motion” (!!), but this
> view is now happily regarded as absurd by most of the men of Science
> themselves.
> 
> (2.)_ Monism_, or the Single Substance doctrine, is the more subtle form
> of negative psychology, which one of its advocates, Professor Bain, ably
> terms “guarded materialism.” This doctrine, which commands a very wide
> assent, counting among its upholders such men as Lewes, Spencer, Ferrier,
> and others, while positing thought and mental phenomena generally as
> radically contrasted with matter, regards them as the two sides, or
> aspects, of one and the same substance in some of its conditions. Thought
> as thought, they say, is utterly contrasted with material phenomena, but
> it must be also regarded as only “the subjective side of nervous
> motion”—whatever our learned men may mean by this.
> 
> To return to the commentary on the Four Mahârâjahs, however, in the
> Egyptian temples, according to Clemens Alexandrinus, an immense curtain
> separated the tabernacle from the place for the congregation. The Jews had
> the same. In both, the curtain was drawn over five pillars (the Pentacle),
> symbolizing our five senses and five Root Races esoterically, while the
> four colours of the curtain represented the four cardinal points and the
> four terrestrial elements. The whole was an allegorical symbol. It is
> through the four high Rulers over the four points and elements that our
> five senses may become cognizant of the hidden truths of Nature; and not
> at all, as Clemens would have it, that it is the elements _per se_ that
> furnished the Pagans with Divine Knowledge or the Knowledge of God.(226)
> While the Egyptian emblem was spiritual, that of the Jews was purely
> materialistic, and, indeed, honoured only the blind elements and the
> imaginary “points.” For what was the meaning of the square Tabernacle
> raised by Moses in the wilderness, if it had not the same cosmical
> significance? “Thou shalt make an hanging ... of blue, purple, and scarlet
> ... five pillars of shittim wood for the hanging ... four brazen rings in
> the four corners thereof ... boards of fine wood for the four sides,
> North, South, West, and East ... of the Tabernacle ... with Cherubims of
> cunning work.”(227) The Tabernacle and the square courtyard, Cherubim and
> all, were precisely the same as those in the Egyptian temples. The square
> form of the Tabernacle meant just the same thing as it still means, to
> this day, in the exoteric worship of the Chinese and Tibetans—the four
> cardinal points signifying that which the four sides of the pyramids,
> obelisks, and other such square erections mean. Josephus takes care to
> explain the whole thing. He declares that the Tabernacle pillars were the
> same as those raised at Tyre to the four elements, which were placed on
> pedestals whose four angles faced the four cardinal points; adding that
> “the angles of the pedestals had the four figures of the Zodiac” on them,
> which represented the same orientation.(228)
> 
> The idea may be traced in the Zoroastrian caves, in the rock‐cut temples
> of India, and in all the sacred square buildings of antiquity that have
> survived to this day. This is shown definitely by Layard, who finds the
> four cardinal points, and the four primitive elements, in the religion of
> every country, under the shape of square obelisks, the four sides of the
> pyramids, etc., etc. Of these elements and their points the Four
> Mahârâjahs were the regents and directors.
> 
> If the student would know more of them, he has but to compare the Vision
> of Ezekiel (ch. i.) with what is known of Chinese Buddhism, even in its
> exoteric teachings, and examine the outward shape of these “Great Kings of
> the Devas.” In the opinion of the Rev. Joseph Edkins, “they preside each
> over one of the four continents into which the Hindûs divide the world....
> Each leads an army of spiritual beings to protect mankind and
> Buddhism.”(229) With the exception of favouritism towards Buddhism, the
> four Celestial Beings are precisely this. The Hindûs, however, happen to
> divide the world into seven continents, exoterically as well as
> esoterically; and their four Cosmic Devas are eight, presiding over the
> eight points of the compass and not over the continents.
> 
> The “Four” are the protectors of mankind and also the agents of Karma on
> Earth, whereas the Lipika are concerned with Humanity’s hereafter. At the
> same time they are the four living creatures, “who have the likeness of a
> man,” of Ezekiel’s vision, called by the translators of the Bible,
> “Cherubim,” “Seraphim,” etc.; by the Occultists, “Winged Globes,” “Fiery
> Wheels”; and in the Hindû Pantheon, by a number of different names. All
> these Gandharvas, the “Sweet Songsters,” the Asuras, Kinnaras, and Nâgas,
> are the allegorical descriptions of the Four Mahârâjahs. The Seraphim are
> the fiery Serpents of Heaven which we find in a passage, describing Mount
> Meru as “the exalted mass of glory, the venerable haunt of gods and
> heavenly choristers ... not to be reached by sinful men ... because
> guarded by Serpents.” They are called the Avengers, and the “Winged
> Wheels.”
> 
> Their mission and character being explained, let us see what the Christian
> bible‐interpreters say of the Cherubim. “The word signifies in Hebrew,
> fulness of knowledge; these angels are so called from their exquisite
> Knowledge, and were therefore used for the punishment of men who affected
> divine Knowledge.” (Interpreted by Cruden in his _Concordance_, from
> _Genesis_ iii. 24.) Very well; and vague as the information is, it shows
> that the Cherub placed at the gate of the Garden of Eden, after the
> “Fall,” suggested to the venerable interpreters the idea of punishment
> connected with forbidden Science or divine Knowledge—one that generally
> leads to another “Fall,” that of the gods or “God,” in man’s estimation.
> But as the good old Cruden knew nought of Karma, he may be forgiven. Yet
> the allegory is suggestive. From Meru, the abode of gods, to Eden, the
> distance is very small, and from the Hindû Serpents to the Ophite
> Cherubim, the third out of the seven of which was the Dragon, the
> separation is still smaller, for both watched the entrance to the realm of
> Secret Knowledge. Ezekiel, moreover, plainly describes the four Cosmic
> Angels:
> 
>     I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind, ... a ... cloud and a fire
>     infolding it ... also out of the midst thereof came the likeness
>     of four living creatures ... they had the likeness of a man. And
>     every one had four faces and ... four wings ... the face of a
>     man,(230) and the face of a lion ... the face of an ox, and ...
>     the face of an eagle.... Now as I beheld the living creatures,
>     behold one wheel upon the Earth ... with his four faces ... as it
>     were a wheel in the middle of a wheel ... for the spirit of the
>     living creature was in the wheel.(231)
> 
> There are three chief Groups of Builders, and as many of the Planetary
> Spirits and the Lipika, each Group being again divided into seven sub‐
> groups. It is impossible, even in such a large work as this, to enter into
> a minute examination of even the three principal Groups, as it would
> demand an extra volume. The Builders are the representatives of the first
> “Mind‐Born” Entities, therefore of the primeval Rishi‐Prajâpati; also of
> the Seven great Gods of Egypt, of which Osiris is the chief; of the Seven
> Amshaspends of the Zoroastrians, with Ormazd at their head; of the “Seven
> Spirits of the Face”; of the Seven Sephiroth separated from the first
> Triad, etc., etc.(232) They build, or rather rebuild, every “System” after
> the “Night.” The Second Group of the Builders is the Architect of our
> Planetary Chain exclusively; and the Third, the Progenitor of our
> Humanity—the macrocosmic prototype of the microcosm.
> 
> The Planetary Spirits are the informing spirits of the Stars in general,
> and of the Planets especially. They rule the destinies of men who are all
> born under one or other of their constellations; the Second and Third
> Groups pertaining to other systems have the same functions, and all rule
> various departments in Nature. In the Hindû exoteric Pantheon they are the
> guardian deities who preside over the eight points of the compass—the four
> cardinal and the four intermediate points—and are called Lokapâlas,
> “Supporters or Guardians of the World” (in our visible Cosmos), of which
> Indra (East), Yama (South), Varuna (West), and Kuvera (North) are the
> chief; their elephants and spouses pertaining of course to fancy and
> afterthought, though all of them have an Occult significance.
> 
> The Lipika, a description of whom is given in Commentary 6 of Stanza IV,
> are the Spirits of the Universe, whereas the Builders are only our own
> planetary deities. The former belong to the most Occult portion of
> cosmogenesis, which cannot be given here. Whether the Adepts—even the
> highest—know this angelic order in the completeness of its triple degrees,
> or only the lower one connected with the records of our world, is
> something which the writer is unprepared to say, and she would rather
> incline to the latter supposition. Of its highest grade one thing only is
> taught: the Lipika are connected with Karma—being its direct Recorders.
> The Symbol for Sacred and Secret Knowledge in antiquity was universally a
> Tree, by which a Scripture or a Record was also meant. Hence the word
> Lipika, the Writers or Scribes; the Dragons, symbols of Wisdom, who guard
> the Trees of Knowledge; the “golden” Apple‐Tree of the Hesperides; the
> “Luxuriant Trees” and vegetation of Mount Meru, guarded by Serpents.
> Juno’s giving Jupiter, on her marriage, a Tree with golden fruit, is
> another form of Eve offering Adam the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.
> 
> 6. THE LIPIKA CIRCUMSCRIBE THE TRIANGLE, THE FIRST ONE,(233) THE CUBE, THE
> SECOND ONE, AND THE PENTACLE WITHIN THE EGG(234) (_a_).
> 
> IT IS THE RING CALLED “PASS NOT” FOR THOSE WHO DESCEND AND ASCEND;(235)
> WHO DURING THE KALPA ARE PROGRESSING TOWARDS THE GREAT DAY “BE WITH US”
> (_b_).... THUS WERE FORMED THE ARÛPA AND THE RÛPA:(236) FROM ONE LIGHT,
> SEVEN LIGHTS; FROM EACH OF THE SEVEN, SEVEN TIMES SEVEN LIGHTS. THE WHEELS
> WATCH THE RING....
> 
> The Stanza proceeds with a minute classification of the Orders of the
> Angelic Hierarchy. From the Group of Four and Seven emanates the Mind‐Born
> Groups of Ten, of Twelve, of Twenty‐one, etc., all these divided again
> into sub‐groups of Heptads, Enneads, Dodecads, and so on, until the mind
> is lost in this endless enumeration of celestial Hosts and Beings, each
> having its distinct task in the ruling of the visible Cosmos during its
> existence.
> 
> (_a_) The Esoteric meaning of the first sentence of the Shloka is, that
> those who have been called Lipikas, the Recorders of the Karmic Ledger,
> make an impassible barrier between the personal _Ego_ and the impersonal
> _Self_, the Noumenon and Parent‐Source of the former. Hence the allegory.
> They circumscribe the manifested world of matter within the Ring “Pass
> Not.” This world is the objective symbol of the One divided into the Many,
> on the planes of Illusion, of Adi (the “First”) or of Eka (the “One”); and
> this One is the collective aggregate, or totality, of the principal
> Creators or Architects of this visible Universe. In Hebrew Occultism their
> name is both Achath, feminine, “One,” and Achad, “One” again, but
> masculine. The Monotheists have taken, and are still taking, advantage of
> the profound esotericism of the _Kabalah_, to apply the name by which the
> One Supreme Essence is known, to _its_ manifestation, the Sephiroth‐
> Elohim, and call it Jehovah. But this is quite arbitrary and against all
> reason and logic, as the term Elohim is a plural noun, identical with the
> plural word Chiim, often compounded with it. The sentence in the _Sepher
> Yetzirah_ and elsewhere, “Achath‐Ruach‐Elohim‐Chiim,” denotes the Elohim
> as androgynous at best, the feminine element almost predominating, as it
> would read: “ONE is She the Spirit of the Elohim of Life.” As said, Achath
> (or Echath) is feminine, and Achad (or Echad) masculine, both meaning One.
> 
> Moreover, in Occult metaphysics, there are, properly speaking, two
> “Ones”—the One on the unreachable plane of Absoluteness and Infinity, on
> which no speculation is possible; and the second One on the plane of
> Emanations. The former can neither emanate nor be divided, as it is
> eternal, absolute, and immutable; but the second, being, so to speak, the
> reflection of the first One (for it is the Logos, or Îshvara, in the
> Universe of Illusion), can do so. It emanates from itself—as the upper
> Sephirothal Triad emanates the lower seven Sephiroth—the seven Rays or
> Dhyân Chohans; in other words, the Homogeneous becomes the Heterogeneous,
> the Protyle differentiates into the Elements. But these, unless they
> return into their primal Element, can never cross beyond the Laya, or
> zero‐point. This metaphysical tenet can hardly be better described than in
> T. Subba Row’s _Bhagavadgîtâ_ Lectures:
> 
>     Mûlaprakriti [the veil of Parabrahman] acts as the one energy
>     through the Logos [or Îshvara]. Now Parabrahman ... is the one
>     essence from which starts into existence a centre of energy, which
>     I shall for the present call the Logos.... It is called the Verbum
>     ... by the Christians, and it is the divine Christos who is
>     eternal in the bosom of his Father. It is called Avalokiteshvara
>     by the Buddhists.... In almost every doctrine, they have
>     formulated the existence of a centre of spiritual energy which is
>     unborn and eternal, and which exists in the bosom of Parabrahman
>     at the time of Pralaya, and starts as a centre of conscious energy
>     at the time of cosmic activity....(237)
> 
> For, as the lecturer premised by saying, Parabrahman is not this or that,
> it is not even consciousness, as it cannot be related to matter or
> anything conditioned. It is not Ego nor is it Non‐Ego, nor even Âtmâ, but
> verily the one source of all manifestations and modes of existence.
> 
> Thus in the allegory, the Lipika separate the world (or plane) of pure
> Spirit from that of Matter. Those who “descend and ascend”—the incarnating
> Monads, and men striving towards purification and “ascending,” but still
> not having quite reached the goal—may cross the Circle of “Pass Not,” only
> on the Day “Be With Us”; that day when man, freeing himself from the
> trammels of ignorance, and recognizing fully the non‐separateness of the
> Ego within his Personality—erroneously regarded as his own—from the
> Universal Ego (Anima Supra‐Mundi), merges thereby into the One Essence, to
> become not only one with “Us,” the manifested universal Lives which are
> _one_ Life, but that very Life itself.
> 
> Astronomically, the Ring “Pass Not” that the Lipika trace round “the
> Triangle, the First One, the Cube, the Second One, and the Pentacle,” to
> circumscribe these figures, is thus again shown to contain the symbols of
> 31415, or the coëfficient constantly used in mathematical tables, the
> value π (pi), the geometrical figures standing here for numerical figures.
> According to the general philosophical teachings, this Ring is beyond the
> region of what are called nebulæ in astronomy. But this is as erroneous a
> conception as that of the topography and descriptions, given in Purânic
> and other exoteric Scriptures, about the 1008 worlds of the Deva‐loka
> worlds and firmaments. There are worlds, of course, in the esoteric as
> well as in the profane scientific teachings, at such incalculable
> distances that the light of the nearest of them, though it has only just
> reached our modern “Chaldees,” may have left its luminary long before the
> day on which the words, “Let there be Light,” were pronounced; but these
> are not worlds on the Devalokic plane, but in our Cosmos.
> 
> The Chemist goes to the laya or zero‐point of the plane of matter with
> which he deals, and then stops short. The Physicist or the Astronomer
> counts billions of miles beyond the nebulæ, and then he also stops short.
> The semi‐initiated Occultist also will represent this laya‐point to
> himself as existing on some plane which, if not physical, is still
> conceivable to the human intellect. But the full Initiate _knows_ that the
> Ring “Pass Not” is neither a locality, nor can it be measured by distance,
> but that it exists in the absoluteness of Infinity. In this “Infinity” of
> the full Initiate, there is neither height, breadth nor thickness, but all
> is fathomless profundity, reaching down from the physical to the “para‐
> metaphysical.” In using the word “down,” essential depth—“nowhere and
> everywhere”—is meant, not depth of physical matter.
> 
> If one carefully searches through the exoteric and grossly anthropomorphic
> allegories of popular religions, even in these the doctrine embodied in
> the Circle of “Pass Not,” guarded by the Lipika, may be dimly perceived.
> Thus one finds it even in the teachings of the Vedântin sect of the
> Visishthadvaita, the most tenaciously anthropomorphic in all India. For we
> read of the released soul that, after reaching Moksha—a state of bliss
> meaning “release from Bandha,” or bondage—bliss is enjoyed by it in a
> place called Paramapada, which place is not material, but made of
> Suddasattva, the essence, of which the body of Îshvara—the “Lord”—is
> formed. There, Muktas or Jîvâtmâs (Monads) who have attained Moksha, are
> never again subject to the qualities of either matter or Karma. “But if
> they choose, _for the __ sake of doing good to the world_, they may
> incarnate on earth.”(238) The way to Paramapada, or the immaterial worlds,
> from this world, is called Devayâna. When a person has attained Moksha and
> the body dies:
> 
>     The Jîva (Soul) goes with Sûkshma Sharira(239) from the heart of
>     the body to the Brahmarandra in the crown of the head, traversing
>     Sushumna, a nerve connecting the heart with the Brahmarandra. The
>     Jiva breaks through the Brahmarandra and goes to the region of the
>     Sun (Sûryamandala) through the solar rays. Then it goes, through a
>     dark spot in the Sun, to Paramapada.... The Jîva is directed on
>     its way ... by the Supreme Wisdom acquired by Yoga.(240) The Jîva
>     thus proceeds to Paramapada by the aid of Athivâhikas (bearers in
>     transit), known by the names of Archi Ahas ... Âditya, ...
>     Prajâpati, etc. The Archis, etc., here mentioned, are certain pure
>     Souls, etc., etc.(241)
> 
> No Spirits except the “Recorders” (Lipika) have ever crossed the forbidden
> line of this Ring, nor will any do so until the day of the next Pralaya,
> for it is the boundary that separates the Finite—however infinite in man’s
> sight—from the truly Infinite. The Spirits referred to, therefore, as
> those who “ascend and descend,” are the “Hosts” of what are loosely called
> “Celestial Beings.” But they are, in fact, nothing of the kind. They are
> Entities of higher worlds in the Hierarchy of Being, so immeasurably high
> that, to us, they must appear as Gods, and collectively—_God_. But so must
> we, mortal men, appear to the ant, which reasons on the scale of its
> special capacities. The ant may also, for all we know, see the avenging
> finger of a Personal God in the hand of the urchin who, under the impulse
> of mischief, destroys, in one moment, its ant‐hill, the labour of many
> weeks—long years in the chronology of insects. The ant, feeling it
> acutely, may also, like man, attribute the undeserved calamity to a
> combination of providence and sin, and see in it the result of the sin of
> its first parent. Who knows, and who can affirm or deny? The refusal to
> admit, in the whole Solar System, of any other reasonable and intellectual
> beings than ourselves on the human plane, is the greatest conceit of our
> age. All that Science has a right to affirm, is that there are no
> invisible Intelligences living under the same conditions as we do. It
> cannot deny point‐blank the possibility of there being worlds within
> worlds, under conditions totally different to those that constitute the
> nature of our world; nor can it deny that there may be a certain limited
> communication between some of these worlds and our own. The greatest
> philosopher of European birth, Emmanuel Kant, assures us that such a
> communication is in no way improbable.
> 
>     I confess I am much disposed to assert the existence of immaterial
>     natures in the world, and to place my own soul in the class of
>     these beings. It will hereafter, I know not where, or when, yet be
>     proved that the human soul stands even in this life in
>     indissoluble connection with all immaterial natures in the spirit‐
>     world, that it reciprocally acts upon these and receives
>     impressions from them.(242)
> 
> To the highest of these worlds, we are taught, belong the seven Orders of
> the purely divine Spirits; to the six lower ones belong Hierarchies that
> can occasionally be seen and heard by men, and that do communicate with
> their progeny of the Earth; a progeny which is indissolubly linked with
> them, each Principle in man having its direct source in the nature of
> these great Beings, who furnish us respectively with the invisible
> elements in us. Physical Science is welcome to speculate upon the
> physiological mechanism of living beings, and to continue her fruitless
> efforts in trying to resolve our feelings, our sensations, mental and
> spiritual, into functions of their organic vehicles. Nevertheless, all
> that will ever be accomplished in this direction has already been done,
> and Science can go no farther. She is before a dead wall, on the face of
> which she traces, as she imagines, great physiological and psychic
> discoveries, every one of which will be shown later on to be no better
> than cobwebs, spun by her scientific fancies and illusions. The tissues of
> our objective framework alone are subservient to the analysis and
> researches of Physiological Science. The six higher Principles in them
> will evade for ever the hand that is guided by an animus, which purposely
> ignores and rejects the Occult Sciences. All that modern physiological
> research in connection with psychological problems has, and owing to the
> nature of things could have shown, is that every thought, sensation, and
> emotion is attended with a re‐marshalling of the molecules of certain
> nerves. The inference drawn by scientists of the type of Büchner, Vogt,
> and others, that thought is molecular motion, necessitates the fact of our
> subjective consciousness being made a complete abstraction.
> 
> The Great Day “Be With Us,” then, is an expression, the only merit of
> which lies in its literal translation. Its significance is not so easily
> revealed to a public, unacquainted with the mystic tenets of Occultism, or
> rather of Esoteric Wisdom or “Budhism.” It is an expression peculiar to
> the latter, and as hazy for the profane as that of the Egyptians, who
> called the same the Day “Come To Us,” which is identical with the
> former—though the word “be,” in this sense, might be still better replaced
> with either of the two terms “remain” or “rest with us,” as it refers to
> that long period of Rest which is called Paranirvâna. “Le Jour de ‘Viens à
> nous’! C’est le jour où Osiris a dit au Soleil: Viens! Je le vois
> rencontrant le Soleil dans l’Amenti.”(243) The Sun here stands for the
> Logos (or Christos, or Horus), as the central Essence synthetically, and
> as a diffused essence of radiated Entities, different in substance, but
> not in essence. As expressed by the _Bhagavadgîtâ_ lecturer, “it must not
> be supposed that the Logos is but a single centre of energy which is
> manifested by Parabrahman. There are innumerable others. Their number is
> almost infinite, in the bosom of Parabrahman.” Hence the expressions, “The
> Day of Come to Us” and “The Day of Be With Us,” etc. Just as the Square is
> the Symbol of the Four sacred Forces or Powers—Tetraktys—so the Circle
> shows the boundary within the Infinity that no man, even in spirit, or
> Deva or Dhyân Chohan can cross. The Spirits of those who “descend and
> ascend,” during the course of cyclic evolution, shall cross the “iron‐
> bound world,” only on the day of their approach to the threshold of
> Paranirvâna. If they reach it, they will rest in the bosom of Parabrahman,
> or the “Unknown Darkness,” which shall then become for all of them Light,
> during the whole period of Mahâpralaya, the “Great Night,” namely,
> 311,040,000,000,000 years of absorption in Brahman. The Day of “Be With
> Us” is this period of Rest, or Paranirvâna. It corresponds to the Day of
> the Last Judgment of the Christians, which has been sorely materialized in
> their religion.(244)
> 
> As in the exoteric interpretation of the Egyptian rites, the soul of every
> defunct person—from the Hierophant down to the sacred bull Apis—became an
> Osiris, was Osirified (the Secret Doctrine, however, teaching that the
> real Osirification was the lot of every Monad only after 3,000 cycles of
> Existences); so in the present case. The Monad, born of the nature and the
> very Essence of the “Seven” (its highest Principle becoming immediately
> enshrined in the Seventh Cosmic Element), has to perform its septenary
> gyration throughout the Cycle of Being and Forms, from the highest to the
> lowest; and then again from man to God. At the threshold of Paranirvâna,
> it reässumes its primeval Essence and becomes the Absolute once more.
> 
> Stanza VI.
> 
> 1. BY THE POWER OF THE MOTHER OF MERCY AND KNOWLEDGE (_a_), KWAN‐YIN—THE
> TRIPLE OF KWAN‐SHAI‐YIN, RESIDING IN KWAN‐YIN‐TIEN (_b_)—FOHAT, THE BREATH
> OF THEIR PROGENY, THE SON OF THE SONS, HAVING CALLED FORTH, FROM THE LOWER
> ABYSS,(245) THE ILLUSIVE FORM OF SIEN‐TCHAN(246) AND THE SEVEN ELEMENTS.
> 
> This Stanza is translated from the Chinese text, and the names given as
> the equivalents of the original terms are preserved. The real Esoteric
> nomenclature cannot be given, as it would only confuse the reader. The
> Brâhmanical doctrine has no equivalents for these. Vâch seems, in many an
> aspect, to approach the Chinese Kwan‐Yin, but there is no regular worship
> of Vâch under this name in India, as there is of Kwan‐Yin in China. No
> exoteric religious system has ever adopted a female Creator, and thus,
> from the first dawn of popular religions, woman has been regarded and
> treated as inferior to man. It is only in China and Egypt that Kwan‐Yin
> and Isis are placed on a par with the male gods. Esotericism ignores both
> sexes. Its highest Deity is as sexless as it is formless, neither Father
> nor Mother; and its first manifested beings, celestial and terrestrial
> alike, become only gradually androgynous to finally separate into distinct
> sexes.
> 
> (_a_) “The Mother of Mercy and Knowledge” is called the “Triple” of Kwan‐
> Shai‐Yin, because in her correlations, metaphysical and cosmical, she is
> the “Mother, the Wife and the Daughter” of the Logos, just as in the later
> theological translations she became the “Father, Son and (female) Holy
> Ghost”—the Shakti or Energy—the Essence of the Three. Thus in the
> Esotericism of the Vedântins, Daiviprakriti, the Light manifested through
> Îshvara, the Logos,(247) is at one and the same time the Mother and also
> the Daughter of the Logos, or Verbum of Parabrahman; while in that of the
> Trans‐Himâlayan teachings, it is—in the Hierarchy of their allegorical and
> metaphysical theogony—the “Mother,” or abstract ideal Matter,
> Mûlaprakriti, the Root of Nature; from the metaphysical standpoint, a
> correlation of Adi‐Budha, manifested in the Logos, Avalokiteshvara; and
> from the purely Occult and cosmical, Fohat, the “Son of the Son,” the
> androgynous energy resulting from this “Light of the Logos,” which
> manifests in the plane of the objective Universe as the hidden, as much as
> the revealed, Electricity—which is Life. Says T. Subba Row:
> 
>     Evolution is commenced by the intellectual energy of the Logos,
>     ... not merely on account of the potentialities locked up in
>     Mûlaprakriti. This Light of the Logos is the link ... between
>     objective matter and the subjective Thought of Îshvara [or Logos].
>     It is called in several Buddhist books Fohat. It is the one
>     instrument with which the Logos works.(248)
> 
> (_b_) “Kwan‐Yin‐Tien” means the “Melodious Heaven of Sound,” the Abode of
> Kwan‐Yin, or the “Divine Voice.” This “Voice” is a synonym of the Verbum
> or Word, “Speech,” as the expression of Thought. Thus may be traced the
> connection with, and even the origin of, the Hebrew Bath‐Kol, the
> “Daughter of the Divine Voice,” or Verbum, or the male and female Logos,
> the “Heavenly Man,” or Adam Kadmon, who is at the same time Sephira. The
> latter was surely anticipated by the Hindû Vâch, the goddess of Speech, or
> of the Word. For Vâch—the daughter and the female portion, as is stated,
> of Brahmâ, one “generated by the gods”—is, in company with Kwan‐Yin, with
> Isis (also the daughter, wife and sister of Osiris) and other goddesses,
> the female Logos, so to speak, the goddess of the _active_ forces in
> Nature, the Word, Voice or Sound, and Speech. If Kwan‐Yin is the
> “Melodious Voice,” so is Vâch “the melodious cow who milked forth
> sustenance and water [the female principle] ... who yields us nourishment
> and sustenance,” as Mother‐Nature. She is associated in the work of
> creation with Prajâpati. She is male and female _ad libitum_, as Eve is
> with Adam. And she is a form of Aditi—the principle higher than Æther—of
> Âkâsha, the synthesis of all the forces in Nature. Thus Vâch and Kwan‐Yin
> are both the magic potency of Occult Sound in Nature and Æther—which
> “Voice” calls forth Sien‐Tchan, the illusive form of the Universe out of
> Chaos and the Seven Elements.
> 
> Thus, in _Manu_, Brahmâ (the Logos also) is shown dividing his body into
> two parts, male and female, and creating in the latter, who is Vâch,
> Virâj, who is himself, or Brahmâ again. A learned Vedântin Occultist
> speaks of this “goddess” as follows, explaining the reason why Îshvara (or
> Brahmâ) is called Verbum or Logos; why in fact it is called Sabda Brahman:
> 
>     The explanation I am going to give you will appear thoroughly
>     mystical; but if mystical, it has a tremendous significance when
>     properly understood. Our old writers said that Vâch is of four
>     kinds. [See _Rig Veda_ and the _Upanishads_.] Vaikharî Vâch is
>     what we utter. Every kind of Vaikharî Vâch exists in its Madhyama,
>     further in its Pashyanti, and ultimately in its Para form.(249)
>     The reason why this Pranava is called Vâch is this, that the four
>     principles of the great cosmos correspond to these four forms of
>     Vâch. Now the whole manifested solar system exists in its Sûkshma
>     form in the light or energy of the Logos, because its energy is
>     caught up and transferred to cosmic matter ... the whole cosmos in
>     its objective form is Vaikharî Vâch, the light of the Logos is the
>     Madhyama form, and the Logos itself the Pashyanti form, and
>     Parabrahman the Para aspect of that Vâch. It is by the light of
>     this explanation that we must try to understand certain statements
>     made by various philosophers to the effect that the manifested
>     cosmos is the Verbum manifested as cosmos.(250)
> 
> 2. THE SWIFT AND THE RADIANT ONE PRODUCES THE SEVEN LAYA(251) CENTRES
> (_a_), AGAINST WHICH NONE WILL PREVAIL TO THE GREAT DAY “BE WITH US”; AND
> SEATS THE UNIVERSE ON THESE ETERNAL FOUNDATIONS, SURROUNDING SIEN‐TCHAN
> WITH THE ELEMENTARY GERMS (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) The seven Laya Centres are the seven zero‐points, using the term
> zero in the same sense that Chemists do. It indicates, in Esotericism, a
> point at which the reckoning of differentiation begins. From these
> Centres—beyond which Esoteric Philosophy allows us to perceive the dim
> metaphysical outlines of the “Seven Sons” of Life and Light, the Seven
> Logoi of the Hermetic and all other philosophers—begins the
> differentiation of the Elements which enter into the constitution of our
> Solar System. It has often been asked what is the exact definition of
> Fohat and his powers and functions, for he seems to exercise those of a
> Personal God as understood in the popular religions. The answer has just
> been given in the Commentary on Stanza V. As well said in the
> _Bhagavadgîtâ_ Lectures, “The whole cosmos must necessarily exist in the
> one source of energy from which this light [Fohat] emanates.” Whether we
> count the principles in cosmos and man as seven or only as four, the
> forces of, and in, physical Nature are Seven; and it is stated by the same
> authority that, “Prajnâ, or the capacity of perception, exists in seven
> different aspects corresponding to the seven conditions of matter.” For,
> “just as a human being is composed of seven principles, differentiated
> matter in the solar system exists in seven different conditions.”(252) So
> does Fohat. Fohat has several meanings, as already shown. He is called the
> “Builder of the Builders,” the Force that he personifies having formed our
> Septenary Chain. He is One and Seven, and on the cosmic plane is behind
> all such manifestations as light, heat, sound, adhesion, etc., etc., and
> is the “spirit” of electricity, which is the Life of the Universe. As an
> abstraction, we will call it the One Life; as an objective and evident
> Reality, we speak of a septenary scale of manifestation, which begins at
> the upper rung with the One Unknowable Causality, and ends as Omnipresent
> Mind and Life, immanent in every atom of Matter. Thus, while Science
> speaks of its evolution through brute matter, blind force, and senseless
> motion, the Occultists point to _Intelligent_ Law and _Sentient_ Life, and
> add that Fohat is the guiding Spirit of all this. Yet he is no personal
> god at all, but the emanation of those other Powers behind him, whom the
> Christians call the “Messengers” of their God (in reality, of the Elohim,
> or rather one of the Seven Creators called Elohim), and we the Messenger
> of the primordial Sons of Life and Light.
> 
> (_b_) The “Elementary Germs,” with which he fills Sien‐Tchan (the
> Universe) from Tien‐Sin (the “Heaven of Mind,” or that which is absolute),
> are the Atoms of Science and the Monads of Leibnitz.
> 
> 3. OF THE SEVEN(253)—FIRST ONE MANIFESTED, SIX CONCEALED; TWO MANIFESTED,
> FIVE CONCEALED; THREE MANIFESTED, FOUR CONCEALED; FOUR PRODUCED, THREE
> HIDDEN; FOUR AND ONE TSAN(254) REVEALED, TWO AND ONE HALF CONCEALED; SIX
> TO BE MANIFESTED, ONE LAID ASIDE (_a_). LASTLY, SEVEN SMALL WHEELS
> REVOLVING; ONE GIVING BIRTH TO THE OTHER (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) Although these Stanzas refer to the whole Universe after a
> Mahâpralaya (Universal Dissolution), yet this sentence, as any student of
> Occultism may see, refers also by analogy to the evolution and final
> formation of the primitive (though compound) seven Elements on our Earth.
> Of these, four Elements are now fully manifested, while the fifth—Ether—is
> only partially so, as we are hardly in the second half of the Fourth
> Round, and consequently the fifth Element will manifest fully only in the
> Fifth Round. The Worlds, including our own, as germs, were of course
> primarily evolved from the One Element in its second stage—“Father‐
> Mother,” the Differentiated World’s Soul, not what is termed the “Over‐
> Soul” by Emerson—whether we call it, with Modern Science, cosmic dust and
> fire‐mist, or with Occultism, Âkâsha, Jîvâtmâ, Divine Astral Light, or the
> “Soul of the World.” But this first stage of Evolution was in due course
> of time followed by the next. No World, and no heavenly body, could be
> constructed on the objective plane, had not the Elements been already
> sufficiently differentiated from their primeval Ilus, resting in Laya. The
> latter term is a synonym of Nirvâna. It is, in fact, the Nirvânic
> dissociation of all substances, merged after a Life‐Cycle into the latency
> of their primary conditions. It is the luminous but bodiless shadow of the
> Matter that _was_, the realm of negativeness—wherein lie latent during
> their period of rest the active Forces of the Universe.
> 
> Now, speaking of Elements, it is made the standing reproach of the
> Ancients, that they “supposed their elements simple and undecomposable.”
> The shades of our pre‐historic ancestors might return the compliment to
> modern Physicists, now that new discoveries in Chemistry have led Mr. W.
> Crookes, F.R.S., to admit, that Science is yet a thousand leagues from a
> knowledge of the compound nature of the simplest molecule. From him we
> learn that such a thing as a really simple molecule entirely homogeneous
> is _terra incognita_ in Chemistry. “Where are we to draw the line?” he
> asks; “is there no way out of this perplexity? Must we either make the
> elementary examinations so stiff that only 60 or 70 candidates can pass,
> or must we open the examination doors so wide that the number of
> admissions is limited only by the number of applicants?” And then the
> learned chemist gives striking instances. He says:
> 
>     Take the case of yttrium. It has its definite atomic weight, it
>     behaved in every respect as a simple body, an element, to which we
>     might indeed add, but from which we could not take away. Yet this
>     yttrium, this supposed homogeneous whole, on being submitted to a
>     certain method of fractionation, is resolved into portions not
>     absolutely identical among themselves, and exhibiting a gradation
>     of properties. Or take the case of didymium. Here was a body
>     betraying all the recognized characters of an element. It had been
>     separated with much difficulty from other bodies which
>     approximated closely to it in their properties, and during this
>     crucial process it had undergone very severe treatment and very
>     close scrutiny. But then came another chemist, who, treating this
>     assumed homogeneous body by a peculiar process of fractionation,
>     resolved it into the two bodies praseodymium and neodymium,
>     between which certain distinctions are perceptible. Further, we
>     even now have no certainty that neodymium and praseodymium are
>     simple bodies. On the contrary, they likewise exhibit symptoms of
>     splitting up. Now, if one supposed element on proper treatment is
>     thus found to comprise dissimilar molecules, we are surely
>     warranted in asking whether similar results might not be obtained
>     in other elements, perhaps in all elements, if treated in the
>     right way. We may even ask where the process of sorting‐out is to
>     stop—a process which of course presupposes variations between the
>     individual molecules of each species. And in these successive
>     separations we naturally find bodies approaching more and more
>     closely to each other.(255)
> 
> Once more this reproach against the Ancients is an unwarrantable
> statement. Their initiated philosophers at any rate, can hardly come under
> such an imputation, since it is they who have invented allegories and
> religious myths from the beginning. Had they been ignorant of the
> Heterogeneity of their Elements they would have had no personifications of
> Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Æther; their cosmic gods and goddesses would
> never have been blessed with such posterity, with so many sons and
> daughters, elements born _from_ and _within_ each respective Element.
> Alchemy and Occult phenomena would have been a delusion and a snare, even
> in theory, had the Ancients been ignorant of the potentialities and
> correlative functions and attributes, of every element that enters into
> the composition of Air, Water, Earth, and even Fire—the latter a _terra
> incognita_ to this day to Modern Science, which is obliged to call it
> motion, evolution of light and heat, state of ignition—defining it by its
> outward aspects in short, in ignorance of its nature.
> 
> But what Modern Science seems to fail to perceive, is that, differentiated
> as may have been those simple chemical atoms—which archaic philosophy
> called “the creators of their respective parents,” fathers, brothers,
> husbands of their mothers, and these mothers the daughters of their own
> sons, like Aditi and Daksha, for example—differentiated as these elements
> were in the beginning, still, they were not the compound bodies known to
> Science, as they are now. Neither Water, Air, nor Earth (a synonym for
> solids generally) existed in their present form, representing the only
> three states of matter recognized by Science; for all these and even Fire
> are productions already recombined by the atmospheres of completely formed
> globes, so that in the first periods of the earth’s formation they were
> something quite _sui generis_. Now that the conditions and laws ruling our
> Solar System are fully developed, and that the atmosphere of our earth, as
> of every other globe, has become, so to say, a crucible of its own, Occult
> Science teaches that there is a perpetual exchange taking place, in space,
> of molecules, or rather of atoms, correlating, and thus changing their
> combining equivalents on every planet. Some men of Science, and these
> among the greatest Physicists and Chemists, begin to suspect this fact,
> which has been known for ages to the Occultists. The spectroscope shows
> only the probable similarity (on external evidence) of terrestrial and
> sidereal substance; it is unable to go any farther, or to show whether or
> not atoms gravitate towards one another in the same way, and under the
> same conditions, as they are supposed to do on our planet, physically and
> chemically. The scale of temperature, from the highest degree to the
> lowest that can be conceived of, may be imagined to be one and the same in
> and for the whole Universe; nevertheless, its properties, other than those
> of dissociation and reässociation, differ on every planet; and thus atoms
> enter into new forms of existence, undreamed of, and incognizable to,
> Physical Science. As already expressed in _Five Years of Theosophy_,(256)
> the essence of cometary matter, for instance, “is totally different from
> any of the chemical or physical characteristics with which the greatest
> Chemists and Physicists of the earth are acquainted.” And even that
> matter, during rapid passage through our atmosphere, undergoes a certain
> change in its nature.
> 
> Thus not only the elements of our planet, but even those of all its
> sisters in the Solar System, differ in their combinations as widely from
> each other, as from the cosmic elements beyond our solar limits. This is
> again corroborated by the same man of Science in the lecture referred to
> above, who quotes Clerk Maxwell, saying “that the elements are not
> absolutely homogeneous.” He writes:
> 
>     It is difficult to conceive of selection and elimination of
>     intermediate varieties, for where can these eliminated molecules
>     have gone to, if, as we have reason to believe, the hydrogen,
>     etc., of the fixed stars is composed of molecules identical in all
>     respects with our own.... In the first place we may call in
>     question this absolute molecular identity, since we have hitherto
>     had no means for coming to a conclusion save the means furnished
>     by the spectroscope, while it is admitted that, for accurately
>     comparing and discriminating the spectra of two bodies, they
>     should be examined under identical states of temperature,
>     pressure, and all other physical conditions. We have certainly
>     seen, in the spectrum of the sun, rays which we have not been able
>     to identify.
> 
> Therefore, the elements of our planet cannot be taken as a standard for
> comparison with the elements in other worlds. In fact each world has its
> Fohat, which is omnipresent in its own sphere of action. But there are as
> many Fohats as there are worlds, each varying in power and degree of
> manifestation. The individual Fohats make one universal, collective
> Fohat—the aspect‐entity of the one absolute Non‐Entity, which is absolute
> Be‐ness, Sat. “Millions and billions of worlds are produced at every
> Manvantara”—it is said. Therefore there must be many Fohats, whom we
> consider as conscious and _intelligent_ Forces. This, no doubt, to the
> disgust of scientific minds. Nevertheless the Occultists, who have good
> reasons for it, consider all the forces of Nature as veritable, though
> supersensuous, states of Matter; and as possible objects of perception to
> beings endowed with the requisite senses.
> 
> Enshrined in its pristine, virgin state within the Bosom of the Eternal
> Mother, every atom born beyond the threshold of her realm is doomed to
> incessant differentiation. “_The Mother sleeps, yet is ever breathing_.”
> And every breath sends out into the plane of manifestation her protean
> products, which, carried on by the wave of efflux, are scattered by Fohat,
> and driven toward or beyond this or another planetary atmosphere. Once
> caught by the latter, the atom is lost; its pristine purity is gone for
> ever, unless fate dissociates it by leading it to a “current of efflux”
> (an Occult term meaning quite a different process from that which the
> ordinary word implies), when it may be carried once more to the borderland
> where it had previously perished, and taking its flight, not into Space
> _above_ but into Space _within_, be brought under a state of differential
> equilibrium and happily reabsorbed. Were a truly learned Occultist‐
> Alchemist to write the “Life and Adventures of an Atom,” he would secure
> thereby the supreme scorn of the modern Chemist, though perchance also his
> subsequent gratitude. Indeed, if such an imaginary Chemist happened to be
> intuitional, and would for a moment step out of the habitual groove of
> strictly “Exact Science,” as the Alchemists of old did, he might be repaid
> for his audacity. However it may be, “_The Breath of the Father‐Mother
> issues cold and radiant, and gets hot and corrupt, to cool once more and
> be purified in the eternal bosom of inner Space_,” says the Commentary.
> Man absorbs cold pure air on the mountain‐top, and throws it out impure,
> hot and transformed. Thus, the higher atmosphere of every globe, being its
> mouth, and the lower its lungs, the man of our planet breathes only the
> “refuse of Mother;” therefore, “he is doomed to die thereon.” He who would
> allotropize sluggish oxygen into ozone to a measure of alchemical
> activity, reducing it to its pure essence (for which there are means),
> would discover thereby a substitute for an “Elixir of Life” and prepare it
> for practical use.
> 
> (_b_) The process referred to as the “Small Wheels, one giving birth to
> the other,” takes place in the sixth region from above, and on the plane
> of the most material world of all in the manifested Kosmos—our terrestrial
> plane. These “Seven Wheels” are our Planetary Chain. By “Wheels” the
> various spheres and centres of forces are generally meant; but in this
> case they refer to our septenary Ring.
> 
> 4. HE BUILDS THEM IN THE LIKENESS OF OLDER WHEELS,(257) PLACING THEM ON
> THE IMPERISHABLE CENTRES (_a_).
> 
> HOW DOES FOHAT BUILD THEM? HE COLLECTS THE FIERY‐DUST. HE MAKES BALLS OF
> FIRE, RUNS THROUGH THEM, AND ROUND THEM, INFUSING LIFE THEREINTO, THEN
> SETS THEM INTO MOTION; SOME ONE WAY, SOME THE OTHER WAY. THEY ARE COLD, HE
> MAKES THEM HOT. THEY ARE DRY, HE MAKES THEM MOIST. THEY SHINE, HE FANS AND
> COOLS THEM (_b_). THUS ACTS FOHAT FROM ONE TWILIGHT TO THE OTHER, DURING
> SEVEN ETERNITIES.(258)
> 
> (_a_) The Worlds are built “in the likeness of older Wheels”—_i.e._, of
> those that had existed in preceding Manvantaras and went into Pralaya; for
> the Law for the birth, growth, and decay of everything in Kosmos, from the
> Sun to the glow‐worm in the grass, is One. There is an everlasting work of
> perfection with every new appearance, but the Substance‐Matter and Forces
> are all one and the same. And this Law acts on every planet through minor
> and varying laws.
> 
> The “Imperishable [Laya] Centres” have a great importance, and their
> meaning must be fully understood, if we would have a clear conception of
> the Archaic Cosmogony, whose theories have now passed into Occultism. At
> present, one thing may be stated. The Worlds are built neither _upon_, nor
> _over_, nor _in_ the Laya Centres, the zero‐point being a condition, not a
> mathematical point.
> 
> (_b_) Bear in mind that Fohat, the constructive Force of Cosmic
> Electricity, is said, metaphorically, to have sprung, like Rudra from the
> head of Brahmâ, “_from the Brain of the Father and the Bosom of the
> Mother_,” and then to have metamorphosed himself into a male and a female,
> _i.e._, polarized himself into positive and negative electricity. He has
> _Seven Sons_ who are his _Brothers_. Fohat is forced to be born, time
> after time, whenever any two of his “Son‐Brothers” indulge in _too close
> contact_—whether an embrace or a fight. To avoid this, he unites and binds
> together those of unlike nature, and separates those of similar
> temperaments. This, as any one can see, relates, of course, to electricity
> generated by friction, and to the law of attraction between two objects of
> unlike, and repulsion between those of like polarity. The Seven Son‐
> Brothers, however, represent and personify the seven forms of cosmic
> magnetism, called in Practical Occultism the “Seven Radicals,” whose
> coöperative and active progeny are, among other energies, Electricity,
> Magnetism, Sound, Light, Heat, Cohesion, etc. Occult Science defines all
> these as super‐sensuous effects in their hidden behaviour, and as
> objective phenomena in the world of sense; the former requiring abnormal
> faculties to perceive them, the latter cognizable by our ordinary physical
> senses. They all pertain to, and are the emanations of, still more
> supersensuous spiritual qualities, not personated by, but belonging to,
> real and conscious Causes. To attempt a description of such Entities would
> be worse than useless. The reader must bear in mind that, according to our
> teaching which regards this phenomenal Universe as a Great Illusion, the
> nearer a body is to the Unknown Substance, the more it approaches Reality,
> as being the farther removed from this world of Mâyâ. Therefore, though
> the molecular constitution of these bodies is not deducible from their
> manifestations, on this plane of consciousness, they nevertheless, from
> the standpoint of the Adept Occultist, possess a distinctive objective if
> not material structure, in the relatively noumenal—as opposed to the
> phenomenal—Universe. Men of science may term them force or forces
> generated by matter, or “modes of its motion,” if they will; Occultism
> sees in these effects Elementals (Forces), and, in the direct causes
> producing them, intelligent Divine Workmen. The intimate connection of
> these Elementals, guided by the unerring hand of the Rulers, with the
> elements of pure Matter—their correlation we might call it—results in our
> terrestrial phenomena, such as light, heat, magnetism, etc., etc. Of
> course we shall never agree with the American Substantialists(259) who
> call every force and energy—whether light, heat, electricity or
> cohesion—an “entity”; for this would be equivalent to calling the noise
> produced by the rolling of the wheels of a vehicle an entity—thus
> confusing and identifying that “noise” with the “driver” _outside_, and
> the guiding “Master Intelligence” _within_ the vehicle. But we do
> certainly give that name to the “drivers” and to these guiding
> “Intelligences,” the ruling Dhyân Chohans, as has been shown. The
> Elementals, the Nature‐Forces, are the acting, though invisible, or rather
> imperceptible, secondary causes, and in themselves the effects of primary
> causes behind the veil of all terrestrial phenomena. Electricity, light,
> heat, etc., have been aptly termed the “Ghosts or Shadows of Matter in
> Motion,” _i.e._, supersensuous states of Matter whose effects only we are
> able to cognize. To expand, then, the simile given above. The sensation of
> light is like the sound of the rolling wheels—a purely phenomenal effect,
> having no existence outside the observer. The proximate exciting cause of
> the sensation is comparable to the driver—a supersensuous state of matter
> in motion, a Nature‐Force or Elemental. But, behind this—just as the owner
> of the carriage directs the driver from within—stands the higher and
> _noumenal_ cause, the _Intelligence_ from whose essence radiate these
> States of “Mother,” generating the countless milliards of Elementals, or
> Psychic Nature‐Spirits, just as every drop of water generates its physical
> infinitesimal Infusoria. It is Fohat who guides the transfer of the
> principles from one planet to the other, from one star to another child‐
> star. When a planet dies, its informing principles are transferred to a
> laya or sleeping centre, with potential but latent energy in it, which is
> thus awakened into life and begins to form itself into a new sidereal
> body.
> 
> It is most remarkable that, while honestly confessing their entire
> ignorance of the true nature of even terrestrial matter—primordial
> substance being regarded more as a dream than as a sober reality—the
> Physicists should, nevertheless, set themselves up as judges of that
> matter, and claim to know what it is able and is not able to do, in
> various combinations. Scientists know this matter hardly skin‐deep, and
> yet they will dogmatize. It is “a mode of motion” and nothing else! But
> the “force” that is inherent in a living person’s breath, when blowing a
> speck of dust from the table, is also, undeniably, “a mode of motion.” It
> is as undeniably not a quality of the matter, or the particles of the
> speck, and it emanates from the living and thinking Entity that breathed,
> whether the impulse originated consciously or unconsciously. Indeed, to
> endow matter—something of which nothing is so far known—with an inherent
> quality called force, of the nature of which still less is known, is to
> create a far more serious difficulty than that which lies in the
> acceptation of the intervention of our “Nature‐Spirits” in every natural
> phenomenon.
> 
> The Occultists—who, if they would express themselves correctly, do not say
> that matter, but only the _substance_ or _essence_ of matter, (_i.e._,
> Mûlaprakriti, the Root of all) is indestructible and eternal—assert that
> all the so‐called Forces of Nature, electricity, magnetism, light, heat,
> etc., etc., far from being modes of motion of material particles, are _in
> esse_, _i.e._, in their ultimate constitution, the differentiated aspects
> of that Universal Motion which is discussed and explained in the first
> pages of this volume. When Fohat is said to produce Seven Laya Centres, it
> means that, for formative or creative purposes, the _Great Law_—Theists
> may call it God—stays, or rather modifies, its perpetual motion on seven
> invisible points within the area of the Manifested Universe. “_The Great
> Breath digs through Space seven holes into Laya, to cause them to
> circumgyrate during Manvantara_,” says the Occult Catechism. We have said
> that Laya is what Science may call the zero‐point or line; the realm of
> absolute negativeness, or the one real absolute Force, the _noumenon_ of
> the Seventh State of that which we ignorantly call and recognize as
> “Force”; or again the noumenon of Undifferentiated Cosmic Substance, which
> is itself an unreachable and unknowable object for finite perception; the
> root and basis of all states of objectivity and also subjectivity; the
> neutral axis, not one of the many aspects, but its centre. It may serve to
> elucidate the meaning, if we try to imagine a “neutral centre”—the dream
> of those who would discover perpetual motion. A “neutral centre” is, in
> one aspect, the limiting point of any given set of senses. Thus, imagine
> two consecutive planes of matter; each of these corresponding to an
> appropriate set of perceptive organs. We are forced to admit that between
> these two planes of matter an incessant circulation takes place; and if we
> follow the atoms and molecules of, say, the lower in their transformation
> upwards, they will come to a point where they pass altogether beyond the
> range of the faculties we are using on the lower plane. In fact, for us
> the matter of the lower plane there vanishes from our perception—or
> rather, it passes on to the higher plane, and the state of matter
> corresponding to such a point of transition must certainly possess
> special, and not readily discoverable, properties. Seven such “Neutral
> Centres,”(260) then, are produced by Fohat, who, when, as Milton has it:
> 
>     Fair foundations (are) laid whereon to build ...
> 
> quickens matter into activity and evolution.
> 
> The Primordial Atom (Anu) cannot be multiplied either in its pregenetic
> state, or its primogeneity; therefore it is called the “Sum Total,” of
> course, figuratively, as that “Sum Total” is boundless. That which is the
> abyss of nothingness to the Physicist, who knows only the world of visible
> causes and effects, is the boundless Space of the Divine Plenum to the
> Occultist. Among many other objections to the doctrine of an endless
> evolution and involution, or reäbsorption of the Kosmos, a process which,
> according to the Brâhmanical and Esoteric Doctrine, is without beginning
> or end, the Occultist is told that it cannot be, since “by all the
> admissions of modern scientific philosophy it is a necessity of nature to
> run down.” If the tendency of nature “to run down” is to be considered so
> forcible an objection to Occult Cosmogony, how, we may ask, do your
> Positivists and Free‐thinkers and Scientists account for the phalanx of
> active stellar systems around us? They had eternity to “run down” in; why,
> then, is not the Kosmos a huge inert mass? Even the moon is only
> hypothetically believed to be a dead planet, “run down,” and Astronomy
> does not seem to be acquainted with many such dead planets.(261) The query
> is unanswerable. But apart from this, it must be noted that the idea of
> the amount of “transformable energy” in our little system coming to an
> end, is based purely on the fallacious conception of a “white‐hot,
> incandescent sun,” perpetually radiating away its heat without
> compensation into space. To this we reply that nature runs down and
> disappears from the objective plane, only to reëmerge after a time of rest
> out of the subjective, and to reäscend once more. Our Kosmos and Nature
> will run down only to reäppear on a more perfect plane after every
> Pralaya. The Matter of the Eastern philosophers is not the “matter” and
> Nature of the Western metaphysicians. For what is Matter? And above all,
> what is our scientific philosophy but that which was so justly and so
> politely defined by Kant as the “science of the _limits_ to our
> knowledge?” To what have the many attempts made by Science to bind,
> connect, and define all the phenomena of organic life, by mere physical
> and chemical manifestations, brought it? To speculation generally—mere
> soap‐bubbles, that have burst one after the other before the men of
> Science were permitted to discover real facts. All this would have been
> avoided, and the progress of knowledge would have proceeded with gigantic
> strides, had only Science and its philosophy abstained from accepting
> hypotheses merely on the one‐sided knowledge of _their_ “matter.” The
> behaviour of Uranus and Neptune—whose satellites, four and one in number
> respectively, revolved, it was thought, in their orbits from East to West,
> whereas all the other satellites rotate from West to East—is a very good
> instance, as showing how unreliable are all _à priori_ speculations, even
> when based on the strictest mathematical analysis. The famous hypothesis
> of the formation of our Solar System out of nebulous rings, put forward by
> Kant and Laplace, was chiefly based on the assumed fact that all the
> planets revolved in the same direction. Laplace, relying on this
> mathematically demonstrated fact in his own time, and calculating on the
> theory of probabilities, offered to bet three milliards to one that the
> next planet discovered would have in its system the same peculiarity of
> motion eastward. The immutable laws of scientific mathematics got “worsted
> by further experiments and observations.” This idea of Laplace’s mistake
> prevails generally to this day; but some Astronomers have finally
> succeeded in demonstrating (?) that the error has been in accepting
> Laplace’s assertion for a mistake; and steps to correct the _bévue_,
> without attracting general attention, are now being taken. Many such
> unpleasant surprises are in store for hypotheses of even a purely physical
> character. What further disillusions, then, may there not be in questions
> concerning a transcendental, Occult Nature? At any rate, Occultism teaches
> that the so‐called “reverse rotation” is a fact.
> 
> If no physical intellect is capable of counting the grains of sand
> covering a few miles of sea‐shore, or of fathoming the ultimate nature and
> essence of these grains, when palpable and visible on the palm of the
> Naturalist, how can any Materialist limit the laws which govern the
> changes in the conditions and being of the atoms in Primordial Chaos, or
> know anything certain about the capabilities and potency of the atoms and
> molecules, before and after their formation into worlds? These changeless
> and eternal molecules—far more numberless in space than the grains on the
> ocean shore—may differ in their constitution along the lines of their
> planes of existence, as the soul‐substance differs from its vehicle, the
> body. Each atom has seven planes of being or existence, we are taught; and
> each plane is governed by its specific laws of evolution and absorption.
> Ignorant of any, even approximate, chronological data from which to start,
> in attempting to decide the age of our planet or the origin of the solar
> system, Astronomers, Geologists, and Physicists, with each new hypothesis,
> are drifting farther and farther away from the shores of fact into the
> fathomless depths of speculative ontology.(262) The Law of Analogy, in the
> plan of structure between the trans‐solar systems and the solar planets,
> does not necessarily bear upon the finite conditions, to which every
> visible body is subject, in this our plane of being. In Occult Science,
> this Law of Analogy is the first and most important key to cosmic physics;
> but it has to be studied in its minutest details, and “turned seven
> times,” before one comes to understand it. Occult Philosophy is the only
> science that can teach it. How, then, can anyone hang the truth or the
> untruth of the Occultist’s proposition, “the Kosmos is eternal in its
> unconditioned collectivity, and finite only in its conditioned
> manifestations,” on this one‐sided physical enunciation that “it is a
> necessity of Nature to run down”?(263)
> 
> A Digression.
> 
> With this Shloka ends that portion of the Stanzas relating to the
> cosmogony of the Universe after the last Mahâpralaya, or Universal
> Dissolution, which, when it comes, sweeps out of Space every
> differentiated thing, gods as well as atoms, like so many dry leaves. From
> this verse onwards, the Stanzas are only concerned with our Solar System
> in general, with the Planetary Chains therein inferentially, and with the
> history of our Globe (the Fourth and its Chain) especially. All the verses
> which follow in this Volume refer only to the evolution of, and on, our
> Earth. With regard to the latter, a strange tenet—strange from the modern
> scientific standpoint only, of course—is held, which ought to be made
> known.
> 
> But before entirely new and somewhat startling theories are presented to
> the reader, they must be prefaced by a few words of explanation. This is
> absolutely necessary, as these theories clash not only with Modern
> Science, but, on certain points, contradict earlier statements(264) made
> by other Theosophists, who claim to base their explanations and renderings
> of these teachings on the same authority as we do.
> 
> This may give rise to the idea that there is a decided contradiction
> between the expounders of the same doctrine; whereas the difference, in
> reality, arises from the incompleteness of the information given to
> earlier writers, who thus drew some erroneous conclusions and indulged in
> premature speculations, in their endeavour to present a complete system to
> the public. Thus the reader, who is already a student of Theosophy, must
> not be surprised to find in these pages the rectification of certain
> statements made in various Theosophical works, and also the explanation of
> certain points which have remained obscure, because they were necessarily
> left incomplete. Many are the questions upon which even the author of
> _Esoteric Buddhism_, the best and most accurate of all such works, has not
> touched. On the other hand, even he has introduced several mistaken
> notions, which must now be presented in their true mystic light, as far as
> the present writer is capable of so doing.
> 
> Let us then make a short break between the Shlokas just explained and
> those which follow, for the cosmic periods which separate them are of
> immense duration. This will afford us ample time to take a bird’s‐eye view
> of some points pertaining to the Secret Doctrine, which have been
> presented to the public under a more or less uncertain and sometimes
> mistaken light.
> 
> A Few Early Misconceptions Concerning Planets, Rounds, And Man.
> 
> Among the eleven Stanzas omitted, there is one which gives a full
> description of the formation of the Planetary Chains one after another,
> after the first cosmic and atomic differentiation had commenced in the
> primitive Acosmism. It is idle to speak of “laws arising when Deity
> prepares to create,” for “laws,” or rather Law, are eternal and uncreated;
> and again Deity is Law, and _vice versà_. Moreover, the one eternal Law
> unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested Nature on a sevenfold
> principle; among the rest, the countless circular Chains of Worlds,
> composed of seven Globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the World
> of Formation, the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe. Out
> of these seven only one, _the lowest and the most material of these
> Globes_, is within our plane or means of perception, the six others lying
> outside it and being therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye. Every
> such Chain of Worlds is the progeny and creation of another, _lower_, and
> _dead_ Chain—its _reïncarnation_, so to say. To make it clearer: we are
> told that each of the planets—of which _seven only_ were called sacred, as
> being ruled by the highest Regents or Gods, and not at all because the
> Ancients knew nothing of the others(265)—whether known or unknown, is a
> septenary, as also is the Chain to which the Earth belongs. For instance,
> all such planets as Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc., etc., or
> our Earth, are as visible to us as our Globe, probably, is to the
> inhabitants, if any, of the other planets, because they are all on the
> same plane; while the superior fellow‐globes of these planets are on other
> planes quite outside that of our terrestrial senses. As their relative
> positions are given further on, and also in the diagram appended to the
> comments on Shloka 6 of Stanza VI, a few words of explanation is all that
> is needed at present. These invisible companions correspond curiously to
> that which we call the “principles” in man. The seven are on three
> material planes and one spiritual plane, answering to the three Upâdhis
> (Material Bases), and one spiritual Vehicle (Vâhana), of our seven
> Principles in the human division. If, for the sake of a clearer mental
> conception, we imagine the human Principles to be arranged as in the
> following scheme, we shall obtain the following diagram of
> correspondences:
> 
>                                [Diagram I]
> 
> As we are proceeding here from Universals to Particulars, instead of using
> the inductive or Aristotelean method, the numbers are reversed. Spirit is
> enumerated the first instead of seventh, as is usually done, but in truth,
> _ought not to be done_.
> 
> The Principles, as usually named after the manner of _Esoteric Buddhism_
> and other works, are: 1, Âtmâ; 2, Buddhi (Spiritual Soul); 3, Manas (Human
> Soul); 4, Kâma Rûpa (Vehicle of Desires and Passions); 5, Prâna; 6, Linga
> Sharîra; 7, Sthûla Sharîra.
> 
> The dark horizontal lines of the lower planes are the Upâdhis in the case
> of the human Principles, and the planes in the case of the Planetary
> Chain. Of course, as regards the Human Principles, the diagram does not
> place them quite in order, yet it shows the correspondence and analogy to
> which attention is now drawn. As the reader will see, it is a case of
> descent into matter, the adjustment—in both the mystic and the physical
> sense—of the two, and their interblending for the great coming “struggle
> for life” that awaits both Entities. “Entity” may be thought a strange
> term to use in the case of a Globe, but the ancient philosophers, who saw
> in the Earth a huge “animal,” were wiser in their generation than our
> modern geologists are in theirs; and Pliny, who called the Earth our kind
> nurse and mother, the only Element which is not inimical to man, spoke
> more truly than Watts, who fancied that he saw in her the footstool of
> God. For Earth is only the footstool of man in his ascension to higher
> regions; the vestibule—
> 
>     ... to glorious mansions,
>     Through which a moving crowd for ever press.
> 
> But this only shows how admirably Occult Philosophy fits every thing in
> Nature, and how much more logical are its tenets than the lifeless
> hypothetical speculations of Physical Science.
> 
> Having learned thus much, the Mystic will be better prepared to understand
> the Occult teaching, though every formal student of Modern Science may,
> and probably will, regard it as preposterous nonsense. The student of
> Occultism, however, holds that the theory at present under discussion is
> far more philosophical and probable than any other. It is more logical, at
> any rate, than the theory recently advanced which made of the Moon the
> projection of a portion of our Earth, extruded when the latter was a globe
> in fusion, a molten plastic mass.
> 
> Says Mr. Samuel Laing, the author of _Modern Science and Modern Thought_:
> 
>     The astronomical conclusions are theories based on data so
>     uncertain, that while in some cases they give results incredibly
>     short, like that of 15 millions of years for the whole past
>     process of formation of the solar system, in others they give
>     results almost incredibly long, as in that which _supposes the
>     moon to have been thrown off when the earth was rotating in three
>     hours_, while the utmost actual retardation obtained from
>     observation would require 600 millions of years to make it rotate
>     in twenty‐three hours instead of twenty‐four.(266)
> 
> And if Physicists persist in such speculations, why should the chronology
> of the Hindûs be laughed at as exaggerated?
> 
> It is said, moreover, that the Planetary Chains having their Days and
> their Nights—_i.e._, periods of activity or life, and of inertia or
> death—behave in heaven as do men on earth: they generate their likes, grow
> old, and become personally extinct, their spiritual principles only living
> in their progeny as a survival of themselves.
> 
> Without attempting the very difficult task of giving out the whole process
> in all its cosmic details, enough may be said to give an approximate idea
> of it. When a Planetary Chain is in its last Round, its Globe A, before
> finally _dying out_, sends all its energy and principles into a neutral
> centre of latent force, a laya centre, and thereby informs a new nucleus
> of undifferentiated substance or matter, _i.e._, calls it into activity or
> gives it life. Suppose such a process to have taken place in the Lunar
> Planetary Chain; suppose again, for argument’s sake—though Mr. Darwin’s
> theory quoted below has lately been upset, even if the fact has not yet
> been ascertained by mathematical calculation—that the Moon is far older
> than the Earth. Imagine the _six_ fellow‐globes of the Moon—æons before
> the first Globe of our seven was evolved—just in the same position in
> relation to each other as the fellow‐globes of our Chain now occupy in
> regard to our Earth.(267) And now it will be easy to imagine further Globe
> A of the Lunar Chain informing Globe A of the Terrestrial Chain,
> and—dying; next Globe B of the former sending its energy into Globe B of
> the new Chain; then Globe C of the Lunar creating its progeny Sphere C of
> the Terrene Chain; then the Moon (our satellite) pouring forth into the
> lowest Globe of our Planetary Chain—Globe D, our Earth—all its life,
> energy and powers; and, having transferred them to a new centre, becoming
> virtually a _dead planet_, in which since the birth of our Globe rotation
> has almost ceased. The Moon is the satellite of our Earth, undeniably, but
> this does not invalidate the theory that she has given to the Earth all
> but her corpse. For Darwin’s theory to hold good, besides the hypothesis
> just upset, other still more incongruous speculations had to be invented.
> The Moon, it is said, has cooled nearly six times as rapidly as the
> Earth.(268) “The Moon, if the earth is 14,000,000 years old since its
> incrustation, is only eleven and two‐thirds millions of years old since
> that stage ...” etc. And if our Moon is but a splash from our Earth, why
> can no similar inference be established for the Moons of other planets?
> The Astronomers “do not know.” Why should Venus and Mercury have no
> satellites, and by what, when they exist, were they formed? The
> Astronomers do not know, because, we say, Science has only one key—the key
> of matter—to open the mysteries of Nature, while Occult Philosophy has
> seven keys and explains that which Science fails to see. Mercury and Venus
> have no satellites, but they had “parents” just as the Earth had. Both are
> far older than the Earth, and, before the latter reaches her Seventh
> Round, her mother Moon will have dissolved into thin air, as the Moons of
> the other planets have, or have not, as the case may be, since there are
> planets which have _several_ Moons—a mystery again which no Œdipus of
> Astronomy has solved.
> 
> The Moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the
> new body, into which her living powers and principles are transfused. She
> now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted
> by and to attract her progeny. Constantly _vampirized_ by her child, she
> revenges herself on it, by soaking it through and through with the
> nefarious, invisible and poisoned influence which emanates from the occult
> side of her nature. For she is a _dead_, yet a _living body_. The
> particles of her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life,
> although the body which they had formed, is soulless and lifeless.
> Therefore its emanations are at the same time beneficent and maleficent—a
> circumstance finding its parallel on earth, in the fact that the grass and
> plants are nowhere more juicy and thriving than on graves; while at the
> same time it is the graveyard, or corpse‐emanations, which kill. And like
> all ghouls or vampires, the Moon is the friend of the sorcerers and the
> foe of the unwary. From the archaic æons and the later times of the
> witches of Thessaly, down to some of the present Tântrikas of Bengal, her
> nature and properties have been known to every Occultist, but have
> remained a closed book for Physicists.
> 
> Such is the Moon from the astronomical, geological, and physical
> standpoints. As to her metaphysical and psychic nature, it must remain an
> occult secret in this work, as it was in the volume entitled _Esoteric
> Buddhism_, notwithstanding the rather sanguine statement made therein,
> that “there is not much mystery left now in the riddle of the eighth
> sphere.”(269) These are topics, indeed, “on which the Adepts are very
> reserved in their communications to uninitiated pupils,” and since they
> have, moreover, never sanctioned or permitted any published speculations
> upon them, the less said the better.
> 
> Yet, without treading upon the forbidden ground of the “eighth sphere,” it
> may be useful to state some additional facts with regard to the ex‐monads
> of the Lunar Chain—the “Lunar Ancestors”—as they play a leading part in
> the coming Anthropogenesis. This brings us directly to the Septenary
> Constitution of man; and as some discussion has arisen of late about the
> best classification to be adopted for the division of the microcosmic
> entity, two systems are now appended with a view to facilitate comparison.
> The subjoined short article is from the pen of Mr. T. Subba Row, a learned
> Vedântin scholar. He prefers the Brâhmanical division of the Râja Yoga,
> and from a metaphysical point of view he is quite right. But, as it is a
> question of simple choice and expediency, we hold in this work to the
> time‐honoured classification of the Trans‐Himâlayan “Arhat Esoteric
> School.” The following table and its explanatory text are reprinted from
> the _Theosophist_, and are also contained in _Five Years of
> Theosophy_.(270)
> 
> The Septenary Division In Different Indian Systems.
> 
> We give below in a tabular form the classifications adopted by the
> Buddhist and Vedântic teachers of the principles of man:
> 
> “Esoteric         Vedânta.              Târaka Râja
> Buddhism.”                              Yoga.
> 1. Sthûla         Annamayakosha.(271)   Sthûlopâdhi.(272)
> Sharîra.
> 2. Prâna.(273)    Prânamayakosha.       Sthûlopâdhi.
> 3. The Vehicle    Prânamayakosha.       Sthûlopâdhi.
> of Prâna.(274)
> 4. Kâma Rûpa.     Mânomayakosha.        Sûkshmopâdhi.
> 5. Mind           Mânomayakosha.        Sûkshmopâdhi.
> (Volitions and
> feelings);
> Vijñânam.
> 6. Spiritual      Ânandamayakosha.      Kâranopâdhi.
> Soul.(275)
> 7. Âtmâ.          Âtmâ.                 Âtmâ.
> 
> From the foregoing table it will be seen that the third principle in the
> Buddhist classification is not separately mentioned in the Vedântic
> division, as it is merely the vehicle of Prâna. It will also be seen that
> the fourth principle is included in the third Kosha (Sheath), as the same
> principle is but the vehicle of will‐power, which is but an energy of the
> mind. It must also be noticed that the Vijñânamayakosha is considered to
> be distinct from the Mânomayakosha, as a division is made after death
> between the lower part of the mind, as it were, which has a closer
> affinity with the fourth principle than with the sixth and its higher
> part, which attaches itself to the latter, and which is, in fact, the
> basis for the higher spiritual individuality of man.
> 
> We may also here point out to our readers that the classification
> mentioned in the last column is, for all practical purposes, connected
> with Râja Yoga, the best and simplest. Though there are seven principles
> in man, there are but three distinct Upâdhis (Bases), in each of which his
> Âtmâ may work independently of the rest. These three Upâdhis can be
> separated by an Adept without killing himself. He cannot separate the
> seven principles from each other without destroying his constitution.
> 
> The student will now be better prepared to see that between the three
> Upâdhis of the Râja Yoga and its Atmâ, and our three Upâdhis, Âtmâ, and
> the additional three divisions, there is in reality but very little
> difference. Moreover, as every Adept in Cis‐Himâlayan or Trans‐Himâlayan
> India, of the Patanjali, the Âryâsanga or the Mahâyâna schools, has to
> become a Râja Yogî, he must, therefore, accept the Târaka Râja
> classification in principle and theory, whatever classification he resorts
> to for practical and Occult purposes. Thus, it matters very little whether
> one speaks of the _three_ Upâdhis, with their _three_ Aspects, and Âtmâ,
> the eternal and immortal synthesis, or calls them the “Seven Principles.”
> 
> For the benefit of those who may not have read, or, if they have, may not
> have clearly understood, in Theosophical writings, the doctrine of the
> septenary Chains of Worlds in the Solar Cosmos, the teaching is briefly as
> follows.
> 
> 1. Everything in the metaphysical as in the physical Universe is
> septenary. Hence every sidereal body, every planet, whether visible or
> invisible, is credited with six companion Globes. The evolution of life
> proceeds on these seven Globes or bodies, from the First to the Seventh,
> in Seven Rounds or Seven Cycles.
> 
> 2. These Globes are formed by a process which the Occultists call the
> “rebirth of Planetary Chains (or Rings).” When the Seventh and last Round
> of one of such Rings has been entered upon, the highest or first Globe, A,
> followed by all the others down to the last, instead of entering upon a
> certain time of rest—or “Obscuration,” as in the previous Rounds—begins to
> die out. The Planetary Dissolution (Pralaya) is at hand, and its hour has
> struck; each Globe has to transfer its life and energy to another
> planet.(276)
> 
> 3. Our Earth, as the visible representative of its invisible superior
> fellow‐globes, its “Lords” or “Principles,” has to live, as have the
> others, through seven Rounds. During the first three, it forms and
> consolidates; during the fourth, it settles and hardens; during the last
> three, it gradually returns to its first ethereal form: it is
> spiritualized, so to say.
> 
> 4. Its Humanity develops fully only in the Fourth—our present Round. Up to
> this Fourth Life‐Cycle, it is referred to as “Humanity” only for lack of a
> more appropriate term. Like the grub which becomes chrysalis and
> butterfly, Man, or rather that which becomes Man, passes through all the
> forms and kingdoms during the First Round, and through all the human
> shapes during the two following Rounds. Arrived on our Earth at the
> commencement of the Fourth, in the present series of Life‐Cycles and
> Races, Man is the first form that appears thereon, being preceded only by
> the mineral and vegetable kingdoms—even the latter having to _develop and
> continue_ its further evolution _through man_. This will be explained in
> Volume II. During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the Globe on
> which it lives, will be ever tending to reässume its primeval form, that
> of a Dhyân Chohanic Host. Man tends to become _a_ God and then—_God_, like
> every other Atom in the Universe.
> 
> _Beginning so early as with the Second Round, Evolution proceeds already
> on quite a different plan. It is only during the first Round that
> (Heavenly) Man becomes a human being on Globe A, (rebecomes) a mineral, a
> plant, an animal, on Globe B and C, etc. The process changes entirely from
> the Second Round; but you have learned prudence ... and I advise you to
> say nothing before the time for saying it has come...._(277)
> 
> 5. Every Life‐Cycle on Globe D (our Earth)(278) is composed of seven Root‐
> Races. They commence with the ethereal and end with the spiritual, on the
> double line of physical and moral evolution—from the beginning of the
> Terrestrial Round to its close. One is a “Planetary Round” from Globe A to
> Globe G, the seventh; the other, the “Globe Round,” or the Terrestrial.
> 
> This is very well described in _Esoteric Buddhism_, and needs no further
> elucidation for the time being.
> 
> 6. The First Root‐Race, _i.e._, the first “Men” on earth (irrespective of
> form), were the progeny of the “Celestial Men,” rightly called in Indian
> philosophy the “Lunar Ancestors” or the Pitris, of which there are seven
> Classes or Hierarchies. As all this will be sufficiently explained in the
> following sections and in Volume II, no more need be said of it here.
> 
> But the two works already mentioned, both of which treat of subjects from
> the Occult doctrine, need particular notice. _Esoteric Buddhism_ is too
> well known in Theosophical circles, and even to the outside world, for it
> to be necessary to enter at length upon its merits here. It is an
> excellent book, and has done still more excellent work. But this does not
> alter the fact that it contains some mistaken notions, and that it has led
> many Theosophists and lay‐readers to form an erroneous conception of the
> Eastern Secret Doctrine. Moreover it seems, perhaps, a little too
> materialistic.
> 
> _Man_, which came later, was an attempt to present the archaic doctrine
> from a more ideal standpoint, to translate some visions in and from the
> Astral Light, to render some teachings partly gathered from a Master’s
> thoughts, but unfortunately misunderstood. This work also speaks of the
> evolution of the early Races of men on Earth, and contains some excellent
> pages of a philosophical character. But so far it is only an interesting
> little mystical romance. It has failed in its mission, because the
> conditions required for a correct translation of these visions were not
> present. Hence the reader must not wonder if our volumes contradict these
> earlier descriptions in several particulars.
> 
> Esoteric cosmogony in general, and the evolution of the human Monad
> especially, differ so essentially in these two books, and in other
> Theosophical works written independently by _beginners_, that it becomes
> impossible to proceed with the present work without special mention of
> these two earlier volumes, for both have a number of admirers—_Esoteric
> Buddhism_ especially. The time has arrived for the explanation of some
> matters in this direction. Mistakes have now to be checked by the original
> teachings, and corrected. If one of the said works has too pronounced a
> bias toward materialistic Science, the other is decidedly too idealistic,
> and at times is fantastic.
> 
> From the doctrine—rather incomprehensible to Western minds—which deals
> with the periodical Obscurations and successive Rounds of the Globes,
> along their circular Chains, were born the first perplexities and
> misconceptions. One of such has reference to the “Fifth‐” and even “Sixth‐
> Rounders.” Those who knew that a Round was preceded and followed by a long
> Pralaya, a pause of rest, which created an impassable gulf between two
> Rounds until the time came for a renewed cycle of life, could not
> understand the “fallacy” of talking about “_Fifth_ and _Sixth_‐Rounders”
> in our _Fourth_ Round. Gautama Buddha, it was held, was a “Sixth‐Rounder,”
> Plato and some other great philosophers and minds, “Fifth‐Rounders.” How
> could it be? One Master taught and affirmed that there were such “Fifth‐
> Rounders” even now on Earth; and though _understood to say_ that mankind
> was yet in the Fourth Round, in another place he _seemed_ to say that we
> were in the Fifth. To this an “apocalyptic answer” was returned by another
> Teacher: “A few drops of rain do not make a monsoon, though they presage
> it.”... “No, we are not in the Fifth Round, but Fifth Round men have been
> coming in for the last few thousand years.” This was worse than the riddle
> of the Sphinx! Students of Occultism subjected their brains to the wildest
> work of speculation. For a considerable time they tried to outvie Œdipus
> and reconcile the two statements. And as the Masters kept as silent as the
> stony Sphinx herself, they were accused of “inconsistency,”
> “contradiction,” and “discrepancies.” But they were simply allowing the
> speculations to go on, in order _to teach a lesson_ which the Western mind
> sorely needs. In their conceit and arrogance, and in their habit of
> materializing every metaphysical conception and term, without allowing any
> margin for Eastern metaphor and allegory, the Orientalists had made a
> jumble of the Hindû exoteric philosophy, and the Theosophists were now
> doing the same with regard to Esoteric teachings. To this day it is
> evident that the latter have utterly failed to understand the meaning of
> the term “Fifth and Sixth‐Rounders.” But it is simply this: every Round
> brings about a new development, and even an entire change, in the mental,
> psychic, spiritual and physical constitution of man; all these principles
> evolving on an ever ascending scale. Hence it follows that those persons
> who, like Confucius and Plato, belonged psychically, mentally and
> spiritually to the higher planes of evolution, were in our Fourth Round as
> the average man will be in the Fifth Round, whose mankind is destined to
> find itself, on this scale of evolution, immensely higher than is our
> present humanity. Similarly, Gautama Buddha—Wisdom incarnate—was still
> higher and greater than all the men we have mentioned who are called
> “Fifth‐Rounders,” and so Buddha and Shankarâchârya are termed “Sixth
> Rounders,” allegorically. Hence again the concealed wisdom of the remark,
> pronounced at the time “evasive”—“a few drops of rain do not make a
> monsoon, _though they presage it_.”
> 
> And now the truth of the following remark, in _Esoteric Buddhism_, will be
> fully apparent:
> 
>     It is impossible, _when the complicated facts of an entirely
>     unfamiliar science are being presented to untrained minds for the
>     first time_, to put them forward with all their appropriate
>     qualifications ... and abnormal developments.... We must be
>     content to take the broad rules first and deal with the exceptions
>     afterwards, and especially is this the case with a study, in
>     connection with which _the traditional methods of teaching,
>     generally followed, aim at impressing every fresh idea on the
>     memory by provoking the perplexity it at last relieves_.
> 
> As the author of the remark was himself, as he says, “an untrained mind”
> in Occultism, his own inferences, and his better knowledge of modern
> astronomical speculations than of archaic doctrines, led him, quite
> naturally, and unconsciously to himself, to commit a few mistakes of
> detail rather than of any “broad rule.” One such will now be noticed. It
> is a trifling one, still it is calculated to lead many a beginner into
> erroneous conceptions. But as the mistaken notions of the earlier editions
> were corrected in the annotations of the fifth edition, so the sixth may
> be revised and perfected. There were several reasons for such mistakes.
> They were due to the necessity, under which the Teachers laboured, of
> giving what were considered as “evasive answers”; the questions being too
> persistently pressed to be left unnoticed, while, on the other hand, they
> _could only be partially answered_. This position notwithstanding, the
> confession that “half a loaf is better than no bread” was but too often
> misunderstood, and hardly appreciated as it ought to have been. As a
> result thereof gratuitous speculations were sometimes indulged in by the
> European lay‐chelâs. Among such were the “Mystery of the Eighth Sphere” in
> its relation to the Moon, and the erroneous statement that two of the
> superior Globes of the Terrestrial Chain were two of our well‐known
> planets; “besides the earth ... there are _only two other worlds of our
> chain which are visible_ ... Mars and Mercury....”(279)
> 
> This was a great mistake. But the blame for it is to be attached as much
> to the vagueness and incompleteness of the Master’s answer as to the
> question of the learner itself, which was equally vague and indefinite.
> 
> It was asked: “What planets, of those known to ordinary Science, besides
> Mercury, belong to our system of worlds?” Now if by “system of worlds” our
> _Terrestrial Chain_, or “String,” was intended, in the mind of the
> querist, instead of the “Solar System of Worlds,” as it should have been,
> then of course the answer was likely to have been misunderstood. For the
> reply was: “_Mars, etc., and, four other planets of which Astronomy knows
> nothing. Neither A, B, nor Y, Z, are known, nor can they be seen through
> physical means, however perfected_.” This is plain: (_a_) Astronomy as yet
> knows nothing in reality of the planets, neither the ancient ones, nor
> those discovered in modern times. (_b_) No _companion_ planets from A to
> Z, _i.e._, no upper Globes of any Chain in the Solar System, can be seen;
> with the exception of course of all the planets which come _fourth_ in
> number, as our Earth, the Moon, etc., etc. As to Mars, Mercury, and “the
> four other planets,” they bear a relation to Earth of which no Master or
> high Occultist will ever speak, much less explain the nature.
> 
> In this same letter the impossibility is distinctly stated by one of the
> Teachers to the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_: “_Try to understand that
> you are putting me questions pertaining to the highest Initiation; that I
> can give you (only) a general view, but that I dare not, nor will I, enter
> into details_....” Copies of all the letters ever received, or sent, with
> the exception of a few private ones—“_in which there was no teaching_,”
> the Master says—are with the writer. As it was her duty, in the beginning,
> to answer and explain certain points not touched upon, it is more than
> likely that, notwithstanding the many annotations on these copies, the
> writer, in her ignorance of English and her fear of saying too much, may
> have bungled the information given. _She takes the whole blame for it upon
> herself in any and every case_. But it is impossible for her to allow
> students to remain any longer under erroneous impressions, or to believe
> that the fault lies with the Esoteric system.
> 
> Let it then be now distinctly stated that the theory broached is
> impossible, with or without the additional evidence furnished by modern
> Astronomy. Physical Science can supply corroborative, though still very
> uncertain, evidence, but only as regards heavenly bodies on the same plane
> of materiality as our objective Universe. Mars and Mercury, Venus and
> Jupiter, like every hitherto discovered planet, or those still to be
> discovered, are all, _per se_, the representatives on our plane of such
> Chains. As distinctly stated in one of the numerous letters of Mr.
> Sinnett’s Teacher: “_there are other and innumerable __ manvantaric Chains
> of Globes which bear intelligent Beings, both in and outside our Solar
> System_.” But neither Mars nor Mercury belong to _our_ Chain. They are,
> along with other planets, septenary Units in the great host of Chains of
> our System, and all are as visible as their _upper_ Globes are invisible.
> 
> If it is still argued that certain expressions in the Teacher’s letters
> were liable to mislead, the answer comes: Amen; so they were. The author
> of _Esoteric Buddhism_ understood it well when he wrote that such are “the
> traditional modes of teaching ... by provoking the perplexity,” they _do_
> or _do not relieve_—as the case may be. At all events, if it is urged that
> this might have been explained earlier, and the true nature of the planets
> given out as they now are, the answer comes that: It was not found
> expedient to do so at the time, as it would have opened the way to a
> series of additional questions _which could never be answered on account
> of their Esoteric nature_, and thus would only become embarrassing. It had
> been declared from the first, and has been repeatedly asserted since: (1)
> That no Theosophist, _not even as an accepted Chelâ_, let alone lay
> students, could expect to have the secret teachings explained to him
> _thoroughly and completely_, before _he had irretrievably pledged himself
> to the Brotherhood and passed through at least one Initiation_, because no
> figures and numbers could be given to the public, for figures and numbers
> are the key to the Esoteric system. (2) That what was revealed was merely
> the Esoteric lining of that which is contained in almost all the exoteric
> scriptures of the world‐religions—preëminently in the _Brâhmanas_ and the
> _Upanishads_ of the _Vedas_, and even in the _Purânas_. It was a small
> portion of what is divulged far more fully now in the present volumes; and
> even this is very incomplete and fragmentary.
> 
> When the present work was commenced, the writer, feeling sure that the
> speculation about Mars and Mercury was a mistake, applied to the Teachers
> _by letter_ for an explanation and an authoritative version. Both came in
> due time, and _verbatim_ extracts from these are now given.
> 
> “... _It is quite correct that Mars is in a state of obscuration at
> present, and Mercury just beginning to get out of it. You might add that
> Venus is in her last Round.... If neither Mercury nor Venus have
> satellites, it is because of the reasons ... and also because Mars has two
> satellites to which he has no right.... Phobos, the supposed
> __‘__inner__’__ satellite, is no satellite at all. Thus, this remark of
> long ago by Laplace and now by Faye do not agree, you see. (Read
> __‘__Comptes Rendus,__’__ __ Tome XC, p. 569.) Phobos keeps a too short
> periodic time, and therefore there __‘__must exist some defect in the
> mother idea of the theory,__’__ as Faye justly observes.... Again, both
> [Mars and Mercury] are septenary Chains, as independent of the Earth’s
> sidereal lords and superiors as you are independent of the
> __‘__principles__’__ of Däumling [Tom Thumb]—which were perhaps his six
> brothers, with or without night‐caps.... __‘__Gratification of curiosity
> is the end of knowledge for some men,__’__ was said by Bacon, who was as
> right in postulating this truism, as those who were familiar with it
> before him, were right in hedging off_ WISDOM _from Knowledge, and tracing
> limits to that which is to be given out at one time.... Remember:_
> 
>     _... knowledge dwells_
>     _In heads replete with thoughts of other men,_
>     _Wisdom in minds attentive to their own_....”
> 
> “_You can never impress it too profoundly on the minds of those to whom
> you impart some of the Esoteric teachings_.”
> 
> Here are more extracts from another letter written by the same authority.
> This time it is in answer to some objections laid before the Teachers.
> They are based upon extremely scientific, and as futile, reasonings about
> the advisability of trying to reconcile the Esoteric theories with the
> speculations of Modern Science, were written by a young Theosophist as a
> warning against the “Secret Doctrine,” and in reference to the same
> subject. He had declared that if there were such companion Earths, “they
> must be only a wee bit less material than our globe.” How then was it that
> they could not be seen? The answer was:
> 
> “..._ Were psychic and spiritual teachings more fully understood, it would
> become next to impossible to even imagine such an incongruity. Unless less
> trouble is taken to reconcile the irreconcilable—that is to say, the
> metaphysical and spiritual sciences with physical or natural philosophy,
> __‘__natural__’__ being a synonym to them [men of Science] of that matter
> which falls under the perception of their corporeal senses—no progress can
> be really achieved. Our Globe, as taught from the first, is at the bottom
> of the arc of descent, where the matter of our perceptions exhibits itself
> in its grossest form.... Hence it only stands to reason that the Globes
> which overshadow our Earth, must be on different and superior planes. In
> short, as Globes, they are in_ COÄDUNITION _but not in_ CONSUBSTANTIALITY
> _with our Earth, and thus pertain to quite another state of consciousness.
> Our planet (like all those we see) is adapted to the peculiar state of its
> human stock, that state which enables us to see with our naked eye the
> sidereal bodies __ which are coëssential with our terrene plane and
> substance, just as their respective inhabitants, the Jovians, Martians and
> others, can perceive our little world; because our planes of
> consciousness, differing as they do in degree, but being the same in kind,
> are on the same layer of differentiated matter.... What I wrote was:
> __‘__The minor Pralaya concerns only our little Strings of Globes. (We
> called Chains __“__Strings__”__ in those days of lip‐confusion.)... To
> such a String our Earth belongs.__’__ This ought to have shown plainly
> that the other planets were also __‘__Strings,__’__ or_ CHAINS.... _If he
> [meaning the objector] would perceive even the dim silhouette of one of
> such __‘__planets__’__ on the higher planes, he has to first throw off
> even the thin clouds of the astral matter that stand between him and the
> next plane_.”
> 
> It thus becomes patent why we could not perceive, even with the help of
> the best telescopes, that which is outside our world of matter. Those
> alone, whom we call Adepts, who know how to direct their mental vision and
> to transfer their consciousness—both physical and psychic—to other planes
> of being, are able to speak with authority on such subjects. And they tell
> us plainly:
> 
> “_Lead the life necessary for the acquisition of such knowledge and
> powers, and Wisdom will come to you naturally. Whenever you are able to
> attune your consciousness to any of the seven chords of __‘__Universal
> Consciousness,__’__ those chords that run along the sounding‐board of
> Kosmos, vibrating from one Eternity to another; when you have studied
> thoroughly the __‘__Music of the Spheres,__’__ then only will you become
> quite free to share your knowledge with those with whom it is safe to do
> so. Meanwhile, be prudent. Do not give out the great Truths that are the
> inheritance of the future Races, to our present generation. Do not attempt
> to unveil the secret of Being and Non‐Being to those unable to see the
> hidden meaning of Apollo’s Heptachord, the lyre of the radiant god, in
> each of the seven strings of which dwelleth the Spirit, Soul and Astral
> Body of the Kosmos, whose shell only has now fallen into the hands of
> modern Science.... Be prudent, we say, prudent and wise, and above all
> take care what those who learn from you believe in; lest by deceiving
> themselves they deceive others, ... for such is the fate of every truth
> with which men are, as yet, unfamiliar.... Let rather the Planetary Chains
> and other super‐ and sub‐cosmic mysteries remain a dreamland for those who
> can neither see, nor yet believe that others can_.”
> 
> It is to be regretted that few of us have followed the wise advice, and
> that many a priceless pearl, many a jewel of wisdom, has been cast to an
> enemy, unable to understand its value, who has turned round and rent us.
> 
> “_Let us imagine_”—wrote the same Master to his two “lay chelâs,” as he
> called the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_ and another gentleman, his co‐
> student for some time—“_let us imagine that our earth is one of a group of
> seven planets or man‐bearing worlds.... [The __‘__seven planets__’__ are
> the sacred planets of antiquity, and are all septenary.] Now the life‐
> impulse reaches A, or rather that which is destined to become A, and which
> so far is but cosmic dust [a laya‐centre]_ ...” etc.
> 
> In these early letters, in which terms had to be invented and words
> coined, the “Rings” very often became “Rounds,” and the “Rounds,” “Life‐
> Cycles,” and _vice versâ_. To a correspondent who called a “Round” a
> “World‐Ring,” the Teacher wrote: “_I believe this will lead to a further
> confusion. A Round we are agreed to call the passage of a Monad from Globe
> A to Globe G or Z.... The __‘__World‐Ring__’__ is correct.... Advise Mr.
> ... strongly, to agree upon a nomenclature before going any further_.”
> 
> Notwithstanding this agreement, many mistakes, owing to this confusion,
> crept into the earliest teachings. The “Races” even were occasionally
> mixed up with the “Rounds” and “Rings,” and led to similar mistakes in
> _Man: Fragments of Forgotten Truth_. From the first the Master had
> written:
> 
> “_Not being permitted to give you the whole truth, or divulge the number
> of isolated fractions, ... I am unable to satisfy you_.”
> 
> This in answer to the questions: “If we are right, then the total
> existence prior to the man‐period is 637,” etc., etc. To all the queries
> relating to figures, the reply was: “_Try to solve the problem of 777
> incarnations.... Though I am obliged to withhold information, ... yet if
> you should work out the problem by yourself, it will be my duty to tell
> you so_.”
> 
> But it never was so worked out, and the results were—never‐ceasing
> perplexity and mistakes.
> 
> Even the teaching about the septenary constitution of the sidereal bodies
> and of the macrocosm—from which the septenary division of the microcosm,
> or man—has until now been among the most esoteric. In olden times it used
> to be divulged only at Initiation together with the most sacred figures of
> the cycles. Now, as stated in one of the Theosophical journals,(280) the
> revelation of the whole system of cosmogony had not been contemplated, nor
> even thought for one moment possible, at a time when a few scraps of
> information were sparingly given out, in answer to letters, written by the
> author of _Esoteric Buddhism_, in which he put forward a multiplicity of
> questions. Among these were questions on such problems _as no_ MASTER,
> _however high and independent he might be, would have the right to answer,
> and thus divulge to the world the most time‐honoured and archaic of the
> mysteries of the ancient college‐temples_. Hence only a few of the
> doctrines were revealed in their broad outlines, while details were
> constantly withheld, and all the efforts made to elicit more information
> about them were systematically eluded from the beginning. This was
> perfectly natural. Of the four Vidyâs, out of the seven branches of
> Knowledge mentioned in the _Purânas_—namely, Yajna Vidyâ, the performance
> of religious rites in order to produce certain results; Mahâ Vidyâ, the
> great (magic) knowledge, now degenerated into Tântrika worship; Guhya
> Vidyâ, the science of Mantras and their true rhythm or chanting, of
> mystical incantations, etc.; Âtmâ Vidyâ, or the true _spiritual_ and
> _divine Wisdom_—it is only the last which can throw final and absolute
> light upon the teachings of the three first named. Without the help of
> Âtmâ Vidyâ, the other three remain no better than _surface_ sciences,
> geometrical magnitudes having length and breadth, but no thickness. They
> are like the soul, limbs and mind of a sleeping man, capable of mechanical
> motions, of chaotic dreams and even sleep‐walking, of producing visible
> effects, but stimulated only by instinctual not intellectual causes, least
> of all by fully conscious spiritual impulses. A good deal can be given out
> and explained from the three first‐named sciences. But unless the key to
> their teachings is furnished by Âtmâ Vidyâ, they will remain for ever like
> the fragments of a mangled text‐book, like the adumbrations of great
> truths, dimly perceived by the most spiritual, but distorted out of all
> proportion by those who would nail every shadow to the wall.
> 
> Then, again, another great perplexity was created in the minds of students
> by the incomplete exposition of the doctrine of the evolution of the
> Monads. To be fully realized, both this process and that of the birth of
> the Globes must be examined far more from their metaphysical aspect, than
> from what one might call a statistical standpoint, involving figures and
> numbers which are rarely permitted to be widely used. Unfortunately, there
> are few who are inclined to handle these doctrines only metaphysically.
> Even the best of the Western writers upon our doctrine declares in his
> work, when speaking of the evolution of the Monads, that “on pure
> metaphysics of that sort we are not now engaged.”(281) And in such case,
> as the Teacher remarks in a letter to him: “_Why this preaching of our
> doctrines, all this uphill work and swimming __‘__in adversum flumen__’__?
> Why should the West ... learn ... from the East ... that which can never
> meet the requirements of the special tastes of the æsthetics?_” And he
> draws his correspondent’s attention “_to the formidable difficulties
> encountered by us [the Adepts] in every attempt we make to explain our
> metaphysics to the Western mind._”
> 
> And well he may; for _outside_ of metaphysics, no Occult philosophy, no
> Esotericism is possible. It is like trying to explain the aspirations and
> affections, love and hatred, the most private and sacred workings in the
> soul and mind of a living man, by an anatomical description of the thorax
> and brain of his dead body.
> 
> Let us now examine two tenets mentioned above, but hardly alluded to in
> _Esoteric Buddhism_, and supplement them as far as lies in our power.
> 
> Additional Facts And Explanations Concerning The Globes And The Monads.
> 
> Two statements made in the above work must be noticed and the author’s
> opinions quoted. The first is as follows:
> 
>     The spiritual Monads ... do not fully complete their mineral
>     existence on Globe A, then complete it on Globe B, and so on. They
>     pass several times round the whole circle as minerals, and then
>     again several times round as vegetables, and several times as
>     animals. We purposely refrain for the present from going into
>     figures, etc., etc.(282)
> 
> That was a wise course to adopt in view of the great secrecy maintained
> with regard to figures and numbers. This reticence is now partially
> relinquished; but it would perhaps have been better had the real numbers
> concerning Rounds and evolutional gyrations been either entirely divulged
> at the time, or entirely withheld. Mr. Sinnett understood this difficulty
> well when saying:
> 
>     For reasons which are not easy for the outsider to divine, the
>     possessors of Occult knowledge are especially reluctant to give
>     out numerical facts relating to cosmogony, though it is hard for
>     the uninitiated to understand why they should be withheld.(283)
> 
> That there were such reasons is evident. Nevertheless, it is to this
> reticence that most of the confused ideas of some Eastern as well as
> Western pupils are due. The difficulties in the way of the acceptance of
> the particular tenets under consideration seemed great, just because of
> the absence of any data to go upon. But there it was. For, as the Masters
> have many times declared, the figures belonging to the Occult calculations
> cannot be given—outside the circle of pledged Chelâs, and not even these
> can break the rules.
> 
> To make things plainer, without touching upon the mathematical aspects of
> the doctrine, the teaching given may be expanded and some obscure points
> solved. As the evolution of the Globes and that of the Monads are so
> closely interblended, we will make of the two teachings one. In reference
> to the Monads, the reader is asked to bear in mind that Eastern philosophy
> rejects the Western theological dogma of a newly‐created soul for every
> baby born, a dogma as unphilosophical as it is impossible in the economy
> of Nature. There must be a limited number of Monads, evolving and growing
> more and more perfect, through their assimilation of many successive
> Personalities, in every new Manvantara. This is absolutely necessary in
> view of the doctrines of Rebirth and Karma, and of the gradual return of
> the human Monad to its source—Absolute Deity. Thus, although the hosts of
> more or less progressed Monads are almost incalculable, they are still
> finite, as is everything in this Universe of differentiation and
> finiteness.
> 
> As shown in the double diagram of the human Principles and the ascending
> Globes of the World‐Chains,(284) there is an eternal concatenation of
> causes and effects, and a perfect analogy which runs through, and links
> together, all the lines of evolution. One begets the other—Globes as
> Personalities. But, let us begin at the beginning.
> 
> The general outline of the process by which the successive Planetary
> Chains are formed has just been given. To prevent future misconceptions,
> some further details may be offered which will also throw light on the
> history of Humanity on our own Chain, the progeny of that of the Moon.
> 
> In the accompanying diagram, Fig. 1 represents the Lunar Chain of seven
> Globes at the outset of its seventh or last Round; while Fig. 2 represents
> the Earth Chain which will be, but is not yet in existence. The seven
> Globes of each Chain are distinguished in their cyclic order by the
> letters A to G, the Globes of the Earth Chain being further marked by a
> cross, the symbol of the Earth.
> 
>                                [Diagram II]
> 
> Now, it must be remembered that the Monads cycling round any septenary
> Chain are divided into seven Classes or Hierarchies, according to their
> respective stages of evolution, consciousness and merit. Let us follow,
> then, the order of their appearance on Globe A, in the First Round. The
> time‐spaces between the appearances of these Hierarchies on any one Globe
> are so adjusted, that when Class 7, the last, appears on Globe A, Class 1,
> the first, has just passed on to Globe B; and so on, step by step, all
> round the Chain.
> 
> Again, in the Seventh Round of the Lunar Chain, when Class 7, the last,
> quits Globe A, that Globe, instead of falling asleep, as it had done in
> previous Rounds, begins to die (to go into its Planetary Pralaya);(285)
> and in dying it transfers successively, as just said, its principles, or
> life‐elements and energy, etc., one after the other, to a new laya‐centre,
> which commences the formation of Globe A of the Earth Chain. A similar
> process takes place for each of the Globes of the Lunar Chain, one after
> the other, each forming a fresh Globe of the Earth Chain. Our Moon was the
> fourth Globe of the series, and was on the same plane of perception as our
> Earth. But Globe A of the Lunar Chain is not fully “dead,” till the first
> Monads of the first Class have passed from Globe G or Z, the last of the
> Lunar Chain, into the Nirvâna which awaits them between the two Chains;
> and similarly for all the other Globes as stated, each giving birth to the
> corresponding Globe of the Earth Chain.
> 
> Further, when Globe A of the new Chain is ready, the first Class or
> Hierarchy of Monads from the Lunar Chain incarnate upon it in the lowest
> kingdom, and so on successively. The result of this is, that it is only
> the first Class of Monads which attains the human state of development
> during the first Round, since the second Class, on each Globe, arriving
> later, has not time to reach that stage. Thus the Monads of Class 2 reach
> the incipient human stage only in the Second Round, and so on up to the
> middle of the Fourth Round. But at this point—and on this Fourth Round in
> which the human stage will be _fully_ developed—the “door” into the human
> kingdom closes; and henceforward the number of “human” Monads, _i.e._,
> Monads in the human stage of development, is complete. For the Monads
> which had not reached the human stage by this point, will, owing to the
> evolution of Humanity itself, find themselves so far behind, that they
> will reach the human stage only at the close of the Seventh and last
> Round. They will, therefore, not be men on this Chain, but will form the
> Humanity of a future Manvantara, and be rewarded by becoming “men” on a
> higher Chain altogether, thus receiving their Karmic compensation. To this
> there is _but one solitary exception_, and for very good reasons, of which
> we shall speak farther on. But this accounts for the difference in the
> Races.
> 
> It thus becomes apparent how perfect is the analogy between the processes
> of Nature in the cosmos and in the individual man. The latter lives
> through his life‐cycle, and dies. His higher principles, corresponding in
> the development of a Planetary Chain to the cycling Monads, pass into
> Devachan, which corresponds to the Nirvâna and states of rest intervening
> between two Chains. The man’s lower principles are disintegrated in time,
> and are used by Nature again for the formation of new human principles;
> the same process also taking place in the disintegration and formation of
> Worlds. Analogy is thus the surest guide to the comprehension of the
> Occult teachings.
> 
> This is one of the “seven mysteries of the moon,” and it is now revealed.
> The seven “mysteries” are called by the Japanese Yamabooshis, the mystics
> of the Lao‐Tze sect and the ascetic monks of Kioto, the Dzenodoo—the
> “Seven Jewels”; only, the Japanese and the Chinese Buddhist ascetics and
> Initiates are, if possible, even more reticent in giving out their
> “Knowledge” than are the Hindûs.
> 
> But the reader must not be allowed to lose sight of the Monads, and must
> be enlightened as to their nature, as far as permitted, without
> trespassing upon the highest mysteries, of which the writer does not in
> any way pretend to know the last or final word.
> 
> The Monadic Host may be roughly divided into three great Classes:
> 
> 1. The most developed Monads—the Lunar Gods or “Spirits,” called, in
> India, the Pitris—whose function it is to pass in the First Round through
> the whole triple cycle of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, in
> their most ethereal, filmy, and rudimentary forms, in order to clothe
> themselves in, and assimilate, the nature of the newly formed Chain. They
> are those who first reach the human form—if there can be any form in the
> realm of the almost subjective—on Globe A, in the First Round. It is they,
> therefore, who lead and represent the human element during the Second and
> Third Rounds, and finally evolve their shadows at the beginning of the
> Fourth Round for the second Class, or those who come behind them.
> 
> 2. Those Monads that are the first to reach the human stage during the
> three and a half Rounds, and to become “men.”
> 
> 3. The laggards, the Monads which are retarded, and which will not reach,
> by reason of Karmic impediments, the human stage at all during this Cycle
> or Round, save one exception which will be spoken of elsewhere, as already
> promised.
> 
> We are forced to use above the misleading word “men,” and this is a clear
> proof of how little any European language is adapted to express these
> subtle distinctions.
> 
> It stands to reason that these “men” did not resemble the men of to‐day,
> either in form or nature. Why then, it may be asked, call them “men” at
> all? Because there is no other term, in any Western language, which
> approximately conveys the idea intended. The word “men” at least indicates
> that these beings were “_manus_,” thinking entities, however they differed
> in form and intellection from ourselves. But in reality they were, in
> respect of spirituality and intellection, rather “gods” than “men.”
> 
> The same difficulty of language is met with in describing the “stages”
> through which the Monad passes. Metaphysically speaking, it is of course
> an absurdity to talk of the “development” of a Monad, or to say that _it_
> becomes “man.” But any attempt to preserve metaphysical accuracy of
> language, in the use of such a tongue as the English, would necessitate at
> least three extra volumes of this work, and would entail an amount of
> verbal repetition which would be wearisome in the extreme. It stands to
> reason that a Monad cannot either progress or develop, or even be affected
> by the changes of state it passes through. _It is not of this world or
> plane_, and may only be compared to an indestructible star of divine light
> and fire, thrown down on to our Earth, as a plank of salvation for the
> Personalities in which it indwells. It is for the latter to cling to it;
> and thus partaking of its divine nature, obtain immortality. Left to
> itself the Monad will cling to no one; but, like the plank, be drifted
> away to another incarnation, by the unresting current of evolution.
> 
> Now the evolution of the _external_ form, or body, round the _astral_, is
> produced by the terrestrial forces, just as in the case of the lower
> kingdoms; but the evolution of the _internal_, or real, _Man_ is purely
> spiritual. It is now no more a passage of the impersonal Monad through
> many and various forms of matter—endowed at best with instinct and
> consciousness on quite a different plane—as in the case of external
> evolution, but a journey of the “Pilgrim‐Soul” through various _states_ of
> not only matter, but of self‐consciousness and self‐perception, or of
> _perception_ from _apperception_.
> 
> The Monad emerges from its state of spiritual and intellectual
> unconsciousness; and, skipping the first two planes—too near the Absolute
> to permit of any correlation with anything on a lower plane—it gets
> directly into the plane of Mentality. But there is no plane in the whole
> universe with a broader margin, or a wider field of action, in its almost
> endless gradations of perceptive and apperceptive qualities, than this
> plane, which has in its turn an appropriate smaller plane for every
> “form,” from the Mineral Monad up to the time when that Monad blossoms
> forth by evolution into the Divine Monad. But all the time it is still one
> and the same Monad, differing only in its incarnations, throughout its
> ever succeeding cycles of partial or total obscuration of spirit, or
> partial or total obscuration of matter—two polar antitheses—as it ascends
> into the realms of mental spirituality, or descends into the depths of
> materiality.
> 
> To return to _Esoteric Buddhism_. The second statement is with regard to
> the enormous period intervening between the mineral epoch, on Globe A, and
> the man epoch, the term “man epoch” being used because of the necessity of
> giving a name to that fourth kingdom which follows the animal, though in
> truth the “man” on Globe A, during the First Round, is no man, but only
> his prototype, or dimensionless image, from the astral regions. The
> statement runs as follows:
> 
>     The full development of the mineral epoch on Globe A, prepares the
>     way for the vegetable development, and, as soon as this begins,
>     the mineral life‐impulse overflows into Globe B. Then, when the
>     vegetable development on Globe A is complete and the animal
>     development begins, the vegetable life‐impulse overflows to Globe
>     B, and the mineral impulse passes on to Globe C. Then finally
>     comes the human life impulse on Globe A.(286)
> 
> And so it goes on for three Rounds, when it slackens, and finally stops at
> the threshold of our Globe, in the Fourth Round; because the human period
> (of the true physical men to be), the seventh, is now reached. This is
> evident, for as said:
> 
>     ... There are processes of evolution which precede the mineral
>     kingdom, and thus a wave of evolution, indeed several waves of
>     evolution, precede the mineral wave in its progress round the
>     spheres.(287)
> 
> And now we have to quote from another article, “The Mineral Monad,” in
> _Five Years of Theosophy_:
> 
>     There are seven kingdoms. The first group comprises three degrees
>     of elementals, or nascent centres of forces—from the first stage
>     of differentiation of [from] Mûlaprakriti [or rather Pradhâna,
>     Primordial Homogeneous Matter] to its third degree—_i.e._, from
>     full unconsciousness to semi‐perception; the second or higher
>     group embraces the kingdoms from vegetable to man; the mineral
>     kingdom thus forming the central or turning point in the degrees
>     of the “Monadic Essence,” considered as an evolving energy. Three
>     stages [sub‐physical] on the elemental side; the mineral kingdom;
>     three stages on the objective physical(288) side—these are the
>     [first or preliminary] seven links of the evolutionary chain.(289)
> 
> “Preliminary” because they are preparatory, and though belonging in fact
> to the natural, they would be more correctly described as the sub‐natural
> evolution. This process makes a halt in its stages at the third, at the
> threshold of the fourth stage, when it becomes, on the plane of natural
> evolution, the first really manward stage, thus forming with the three
> elemental kingdoms, the ten, the Sephirothal number. It is at this point
> that begins:
> 
>     A descent of spirit into matter equivalent to an ascent in
>     physical evolution; a reäscent from the deepest depths of
>     materiality (the mineral) towards its _status quo ante_, with a
>     corresponding dissipation of concrete organism—up to Nirvâna, the
>     vanishing point of differentiated matter.(290)
> 
> Therefore it becomes evident, why that which is pertinently called in
> _Esoteric Buddhism_ “wave of evolution,” and “mineral, vegetable, animal
> and man‐impulse,” stops at the door of our Globe, at its Fourth Cycle or
> Round. It is at this point that the Cosmic Monad (Buddhi) will be wedded
> to, and become the vehicle of, the Âtmic Ray; _i.e._, Buddhi will awaken
> to an apperception of it (Âtman), and thus enter on the first step of a
> new septenary ladder of evolution, which will lead it eventually to the
> tenth, counting from the lowest upwards, of the Sephirothal Tree, the
> Crown.
> 
> Everything in the Universe follows analogy. “As above, so below”; Man is
> the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual
> plane, repeats itself on the cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of
> abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material
> to the spiritual. Thus, corresponding to the Sephirothal Crown, or Upper
> Triad, there are the three elemental kingdoms, which precede the
> mineral,(291) and which, using the language of the Kabalists, answer in
> the cosmic differentiation to the Worlds of Form and Matter, from the
> Super‐Spiritual to the Archetypal.
> 
> Now what is a Monad? And what relation does it bear to an Atom? The
> following reply is based upon the explanations given in answer to these
> questions in the above‐cited article, “The Mineral Monad,” written by the
> author. To the second question it is answered:
> 
>     None whatever to the atom or molecule as at present existing in
>     the scientific conception. It can neither be compared with the
>     microscopic organisms, once classed among polygastric infusoria,
>     and now regarded as vegetable, and classed among algæ; nor is it
>     quite the _monas_ of the Peripatetics. Physically or
>     constitutionally the Mineral Monad differs, of course, from the
>     Human Monad, which is not physical, nor can its constitution be
>     rendered by chemical symbols and elements.(292)
> 
> In short, as the Spiritual Monad is One, Universal, Boundless and
> Impartite, whose Rays, nevertheless, form what we, in our ignorance, call
> the “Individual Monads” of men, so the Mineral Monad—being at the opposite
> curve of the circle—is also One, and from it proceed the countless
> physical atoms, which Science is beginning to regard as individualized.
> 
>     Otherwise how could one account for, and explain mathematically,
>     the evolutionary and spiral progress of the four kingdoms? The
>     Monad is the combination of the last two principles in man, the
>     sixth and the seventh, and, properly speaking, the term “Human
>     Monad” applies only to the Dual Soul (Âtmâ‐Buddhi), not to its
>     highest spiritual vivifying principle, Âtmâ, alone. But since the
>     Spiritual Soul, if divorced from the latter (Âtmâ), could have no
>     existence, no being, it has thus been called.... Now the Monadic,
>     or rather Cosmic, Essence, if such a term be permitted, in the
>     mineral, vegetable and animal, though the same throughout the
>     series of cycles, from the lowest elemental up to the Deva
>     kingdom, yet differs in the scale of progression. It would be very
>     misleading to imagine a Monad as a separate Entity, trailing its
>     slow way in a distinct path through the lower kingdoms, and after
>     an incalculable series of transformations flowering into a human
>     being; in short, that the Monad of a Humboldt dates back to the
>     Monad of an atom of hornblende. Instead of saying a “Mineral
>     Monad,” the more correct phraseology in Physical Science, which
>     differentiates every atom, would of course have been to call it
>     “the Monad manifesting in that form of Prakriti called ‘the
>     Mineral Kingdom’.” The atom, as represented in the ordinary
>     scientific hypothesis, is not a particle of something, animated by
>     a psychic something, destined after æons to blossom into a man.
>     But it is a concrete manifestation of the Universal Energy, which
>     itself has not yet become individualized; a sequential
>     manifestation of the one Universal Monas. The Ocean of Matter does
>     not divide into its potential and constituent drops, until the
>     sweep of the life‐impulse reaches the evolutionary stage of man‐
>     birth. The tendency towards segregation into individual Monads is
>     gradual, and in the higher animals comes almost to the point. The
>     Peripatetics applied the word Monas to the whole Kosmos, in the
>     pantheistic sense; and the Occultists, while accepting this
>     thought for convenience sake, distinguish the progressive stages
>     of the evolution of the concrete from the abstract, by terms of
>     which the “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal Monad,” etc., are examples.
>     The term merely means that the tidal wave of spiritual evolution
>     is passing through that arc of its circuit. The “Monadic Essence”
>     begins to imperceptibly differentiate towards individual
>     consciousness in the vegetable kingdom. As the Monads are
>     uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the
>     Spiritual Essence which vivifies them in their degrees of
>     differentiation, which properly constitutes the Monad—not the
>     atomic aggregation, which is only the vehicle and the substance
>     through which thrill the lower and the higher degrees of
>     intelligence.(293)
> 
> Leibnitz conceived of the Monads as elementary and indestructible units,
> endowed with the power of _giving and receiving_ with respect to other
> units, and thus of determining all spiritual and physical phenomena. It is
> he who invented the term apperception, which together with nerve‐ (not
> perception, but rather) sensation, expresses the state of the Monadic
> consciousness through all the kingdoms up to Man.
> 
> Thus it may be wrong, on strictly metaphysical lines, to call Âtmâ‐Buddhi
> a Monad, since in the materialistic view it is dual and therefore
> compound. But as Matter is Spirit, and _vice versâ_; and since the
> Universe and the Deity which informs it are unthinkable apart from each
> other; so in the case of Âtmâ‐Buddhi. The latter being the vehicle of the
> former, Buddhi stands in the same relation to Âtmâ, as Adam‐Kadmon, the
> Kabalistic Logos, does to Ain Suph, or Mûlaprakriti to Parabrahman.
> 
> And now a few words more on the Moon.
> 
> What, it may be asked, are the “Lunar Monads,” just spoken of? The
> description of the seven Classes of Pitris will come later, but now some
> general explanations may be given. It must be plain to everyone that they
> are Monads, who, having ended their Life‐Cycle on the Lunar Chain, which
> is inferior to the Terrestrial Chain, have incarnated on the latter. But
> there are some further details which may be added, though they border too
> closely on forbidden ground to be treated of fully. The last word of the
> mystery is divulged only to Adepts, but it may be stated that our
> satellite is only the gross body of its invisible principles. Seeing then
> that there are seven Earths, so there are seven Moons, the last alone
> being visible; the same for the Sun, whose visible body is called a Mâyâ,
> a reflection, just as man’s body is. “_The real Sun and the real Moon are
> as invisible as the real man_,” says an Occult maxim.
> 
> And it may be remarked, _en passant_, that those Ancients were not so
> foolish after all who first started the idea of “Seven Moons.” For though
> this conception is now taken solely as an astronomical measure of time, in
> a very materialized form, yet underlying the husk there can still be
> recognized the traces of a profoundly philosophical idea.
> 
> In reality the Moon is the satellite of the Earth in one respect only,
> viz., that physically the Moon revolves round the Earth. But in every
> other respect, it is the Earth which is the satellite of the Moon, and not
> _vice versâ_. Startling as the statement may seem, it is not without
> confirmation from scientific knowledge. It is evidenced by the tides, by
> the cyclic changes in many forms of disease, which coincide with the lunar
> phases; it can be traced in the growth of plants, and is very marked in
> the phenomena of human conception and gestation. The importance of the
> Moon and its influence on the Earth were recognized in every ancient
> religion, notably the Jewish, and have been remarked by many observers of
> psychical and physical phenomena. But, so far as Science knows, the
> Earth’s action on the Moon is confined to the physical attraction, which
> causes her to circle in her orbit. And should an objector insist, that
> this fact alone is sufficient evidence that the Moon is truly the Earth’s
> satellite on other planes of action, one may reply by asking whether a
> mother, who walks round and round her child’s cradle, keeping watch over
> the infant, is the subordinate of her child or dependent upon it? Though
> in one sense she is its satellite, yet she is certainly older and more
> fully developed than the child she watches.
> 
> It is, then, the Moon that plays the largest and most important part, as
> well in the formation of the Earth itself, as in the peopling thereof with
> human beings. The Lunar Monads, or Pitris, the ancestors of man, become in
> reality man himself. They are the Monads, who enter on the cycle of
> evolution on Globe A, and who, passing round the Chain of Globes, evolve
> the human form, as has just been shown. At the beginning of the human
> stage of the Fourth Round on this Globe, they “ooze out” their astral
> doubles, from the “ape‐like” forms which they had evolved in the Third
> Round. And it is this subtle, finer form, which serves as the model round
> which Nature builds physical man. These Monads, or Divine Sparks, are thus
> the Lunar Ancestors, the Pitris themselves; for these Lunar Spirits have
> to become “men,” in order that their Monads may reach a higher plane of
> activity and self‐consciousness, _i.e._, the plane of the Mânasa‐Putras,
> those who endow the “senseless” shells, created and informed by the
> Pitris, with “mind,” in the latter part of the Third Root‐Race.
> 
> In the same way, the Monads, or Egos, of the men of the Seventh Round of
> our Earth, after our own Globes A, B, C, D, etc., parting with their life‐
> energy, will have informed, and thereby called to life, other laya‐
> centres, destined to live and act on a still higher plane of being—in the
> same way will the Terrene Ancestors create those who will become their
> superiors.
> 
> It now becomes plain, that there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary
> scheme for the formation of the three _periodical_ Upâdhis; or rather
> three separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably
> interwoven and interblended at every point. These are the Monadic (or
> Spiritual), the Intellectual, and the Physical Evolutions. These three are
> the finite aspects, or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion, of
> Âtmâ, the seventh, the One Reality.
> 
> 1. The Monadic, as the name implies, is concerned with the growth and
> development into still higher phases of activity of the Monads, in
> conjunction with:
> 
> 2. The Intellectual, represented by the Mânasa‐Dhyânis (the Solar Devas,
> or the Agnishvatta Pitris), the “givers of intelligence and consciousness”
> to man, and:
> 
> 3. The Physical, represented by the Chhâyâs of the Lunar Pitris, round
> which Nature has concreted the present physical body. This body serves as
> the vehicle for the “growth,” to use a misleading word, and the
> transformations—through Manas, and owing to the accumulation of
> experiences—of the Finite into the Infinite, of the Transient into the
> Eternal and Absolute.
> 
> Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and guided by
> different sets of the highest Dhyânis or Logoi. Each is represented in the
> constitution of Man, the Microcosm of the great Macrocosm; and it is the
> union of these three streams in him, which makes him the complex being he
> now is.
> 
> Nature, the physical evolutionary Power, could never evolve Intelligence
> unaided; she can only create “senseless forms,” as will be seen in our
> Anthropogenesis. The Lunar Monads cannot progress, for they have not yet
> had sufficient touch with the forms created by “Nature,” to allow of their
> accumulating experiences through its means. It is the Mânasa‐Dhyânis who
> fill up the gap, and they represent the evolutionary power of Intelligence
> and Mind, the link between Spirit and Matter—in this Round.
> 
> Also it must be borne in mind that the Monads which enter upon the
> evolutionary cycle upon Globe A, in the first Round, are in very different
> stages of development. Hence the matter becomes somewhat complicated. Let
> us recapitulate.
> 
> The most developed, the Lunar Monads, reach the human germ‐stage in the
> First Round; become terrestrial, though very ethereal, human beings
> towards the end of the Third Round, remaining on the Globe through the
> “obscuration” period, as the seed for future mankind in the Fourth Round,
> and thus become the pioneers of Humanity at the beginning of this, the
> present Fourth Round. Others reach the human stage only during later
> Rounds, _i.e._, in the second, third or first half of the Fourth Round.
> And finally the most retarded of all—_i.e._, those still occupying animal
> forms after the middle turning‐point of the Fourth Round—will not become
> men at all during this Manvantara. They will reach to the verge of
> Humanity only at the close of the Seventh Round, to be, in their turn,
> ushered into a new Chain, after Pralaya, by older pioneers, the
> progenitors of Humanity, or the Seed‐Humanity (Shishta), viz., the men who
> will be at the head of all at the end of these Rounds.
> 
> The student scarcely needs any further explanation on the part played by
> the Fourth Globe and the Fourth Round in the scheme of evolution.
> 
> From the preceding diagrams, which are applicable, _mutatis mutandis_, to
> Rounds, Globes or Races, it will be seen that the fourth member of a
> series occupies a unique position. Unlike the others, the Fourth has no
> “sister” Globe on the same plane as itself, and it thus forms the fulcrum
> of the “balance” represented by the whole Chain. It is the sphere of final
> evolutionary adjustments, the world of the Karmic scales, the Hall of
> Justice, where the balance is struck which determines the future course of
> the Monad during the remainder of its incarnations in the Cycle. And
> therefore is it that, after this central turning‐point has been passed in
> the Great Cycle—_i.e._, after the middle point of the Fourth Race in the
> Fourth Round on our Globe—no more Monads can enter the human kingdom. The
> door is closed for this Cycle, and the balance struck. For were it
> otherwise—had there been a new soul created for each of the countless
> milliards of human beings that have passed away, and had there been no
> reïncarnation—it would become difficult indeed to provide room for the
> disembodied “spirits”; nor could the origin and cause of suffering ever be
> accounted for. It is the ignorance of the Occult tenets, and the
> enforcement of false conceptions under the guise of religious education,
> which have created Materialism and Atheism as a protest against the
> asserted divine order of things.
> 
> The only exceptions to the rule just stated are the “dumb races,” whose
> Monads are already within the human stage, in virtue of the fact that
> these “animals” are later than, and even half descended from, man; their
> last descendants being the anthropoid and other apes. These “human
> presentments” are in truth only the distorted copies of the early
> humanity. But this will receive full attention in the next volume.
> 
> As the Commentary, broadly rendered, says:
> 
> _1. Every Form on earth, and every Speck [atom] in Space strives in its
> efforts towards self‐formation to follow the model placed for it in the
> __“__Heavenly Man.__”__... Its (the atom’s) involution and evolution, its
> __ external and internal growth and development, have all one and the same
> object—Man; Man, as the highest physical and ultimate form on this Earth;
> the __“__Monad,__”__ in its absolute totality and awakened condition—as
> the culmination of the divine incarnations on Earth._
> 
> _2. The Dhyânis [Pitris] are those who have evolved their Bhuta [Doubles]
> from themselves, which Rûpa [Form] has become the vehicle of Monads
> [Seventh and Sixth principles] that had completed their cycle of
> transmigration in the three preceding Kalpas [Rounds]. Then, they [the
> Astral Doubles] became the men of the first Human Race of the Round. But
> they were not complete, and were senseless._
> 
> This will be explained in the sequel. Meanwhile man—or rather his
> Monad—has existed on Earth from the very beginning of this Round. But, up
> to our own Fifth Race, the external shapes which covered those divine
> Astral Doubles, have changed and consolidated with every sub‐race; the
> form and physical structure of the fauna changing at the same time, as
> they had to be adapted to the ever‐changing conditions of life on this
> Globe, during the geological periods of its formative cycle. And thus will
> they go on changing with every Root‐Race, and every _chief_ sub‐race, down
> to the last one of the Seventh in this Round.
> 
> _3. The inner, now concealed, man, was then [in the beginnings] the
> external man. The progeny of the Dhyânis [Pitris], he was __“__the son
> like unto his father.__”__ Like the lotus, whose external shape assumes
> gradually the form of the model within itself, so did the form of man in
> the beginning evolve from within without. After the cycle in which man
> began to procreate his species after the fashion of the present animal
> kingdom, it became the reverse. The human fœtus follows now in its
> transformations all the forms that the physical frame of man assumed,
> throughout the three Kalpas [Rounds], during the tentative efforts at
> plastic formation around the Monad, by senseless, because imperfect,
> matter, in her blind wanderings. In the present age, the physical embryo
> is a plant, a reptile, an animal, before it finally becomes man, evolving
> within himself his own ethereal counterpart, in his turn. In the beginning
> it was that counterpart [astral man] which, being senseless, got entangled
> in the meshes of matter._
> 
> But this “man” belongs to the Fourth Round. As shown, the Monad had passed
> through, journeyed and been imprisoned in, every transitional form,
> throughout every kingdom of nature, during the three preceding Rounds. But
> the Monad which becomes human, is _not the Man_. In this Round—with the
> exception of the highest mammals after man, the anthropoids destined to
> die out in this our race, when their Monads will be liberated and pass
> into the astral human forms, or the highest elementals, of the Sixth and
> the Seventh Races, and then into the lowest human forms in the Fifth
> Round—no units of any of the kingdoms are animated any longer by Monads
> destined to become human in their next stage, but only by the lower
> elementals of their respective realms. These “elementals” will become
> human Monads, in their turn, only at the next great planetary Manvantara.
> 
> And in fact the last human Monad incarnated before the beginning of the
> Fifth Root‐Race. Nature never repeats herself; therefore the anthropoids
> of our day have not existed at any time since the middle of the Miocene
> period, when, like all cross breeds, they began to show a tendency, more
> and more marked as time went on, to return to the type of their first
> parent, the gigantic black and yellow Lemuro‐Atlantean. To search for the
> “missing link” is useless. To the Scientists of the closing Sixth Root‐
> Race, millions and millions of years hence, our modern races, or rather
> their fossils, will appear as those of small insignificant apes—an extinct
> species of the _genus homo_.
> 
> Such anthropoids form an exception because they were not intended by
> Nature, but are the direct product and creation of “senseless” man. The
> Hindûs attribute a divine origin to the apes and monkeys, because the men
> of the Third Race were gods from another plane, who had become “senseless”
> mortals. This subject had already been touched upon in _Isis Unveiled_,
> twelve years ago, as plainly as was then possible. The reader is there
> referred to the Brâhmans, if he would know the reason of the regard they
> have for the monkeys.
> 
>     He [the reader] would perhaps learn—were the Brâhman to judge him
>     worthy of an explanation—that the Hindû sees in the ape but what
>     Manu desired he should: the transformation of species most
>     directly connected with that of the human family—a bastard branch
>     engrafted on their own stock before the final perfection of the
>     latter. He might learn, further, that in the eyes of the educated
>     “heathen” the spiritual or inner man is one thing, and his
>     terrestrial physical casket another. That physical nature, that
>     great combination of correlations of physical forces, ever
>     creeping on towards perfection, has to avail herself of the
>     material at hand; she models and remodels as she proceeds, and,
>     finishing her crowning work in man, presents him alone as a fit
>     tabernacle for the overshadowing of the Divine Spirit.(294)
> 
> Moreover, a German scientific work is mentioned in a footnote on the same
> page. It says that:
> 
>     A Hanoverian Scientist has recently published a work entitled,
>     _Ueber die __ Auflösung der Arten durch Natürliche Zucht‐wahl_, in
>     which he shows, with great ingenuity, that Darwin was wholly
>     mistaken in tracing man back to the ape. On the contrary, he
>     maintains that it is the ape which is evolved from man. He shows
>     that, in the beginning, mankind were, morally and physically, the
>     types and prototypes of our present race and of our human dignity,
>     by their beauty of form, regularity of feature, cranial
>     development, nobility of sentiments, heroic impulses, and grandeur
>     of ideal conceptions. This is a purely Brâhmanic, Buddhistic and
>     Kabalistic doctrine. His book is copiously illustrated with
>     diagrams, tables, etc. It asserts that the gradual debasement and
>     degradation of man, morally and physically, can be readily traced
>     throughout ethnological transformations down to our time. And, as
>     one portion has already degenerated into apes, so the civilized
>     man of the present day will at last, under the action of the
>     inevitable law of necessity, be also succeeded by like
>     descendants. If we may judge of the future by the actual present,
>     it certainly does seem possible that so unspiritual and
>     materialistic a race should end as Simia rather than as Seraphs.
> 
> But though the apes descend from man, it is certainly not the fact that
> the human Monad, which has once reached the level of humanity, ever
> incarnates again in the form of an animal.
> 
> The cycle of “metempsychosis” for the human Monad is closed, for we are in
> the Fourth Round and the Fifth Root‐Race. The reader will have to bear in
> mind—at any rate one who has made himself acquainted with _Esoteric
> Buddhism_—that the Stanzas which follow in this volume and the next speak
> of the evolution in our Fourth Round only. The latter is the cycle of the
> turning‐point, after which, matter, having reached its lowest depths,
> begins to strive onward and to become spiritualized, with every new race
> and with every fresh cycle. Therefore the student must take care not to
> see contradiction where there is none, for in _Esoteric Buddhism_ Rounds
> are spoken of in general, while here only the Fourth, or our present
> Round, is meant. Then it was the work of formation; now it is that of
> reformation and evolutionary perfection.
> 
> Finally, to close this digression anent various, but unavoidable,
> misconceptions, we must refer to a statement in _Esoteric Buddhism_, which
> has produced a very fatal impression upon the minds of many Theosophists.
> One unfortunate sentence, from the work just referred to, is constantly
> brought forward to prove the materialism of the doctrine. The author,
> referring to the progress of organisms on the Globes, says that:
> 
>     The mineral kingdom will no more develop the vegetable ... than
>     the Earth was able to develop man from the ape, till it received
>     an impulse.(295)
> 
> Whether this sentence renders the thought of the author literally, or is
> simply, as we believe it is, a _lapsus calami_, may remain an open
> question.
> 
> It is really with surprise that we have ascertained the fact, that
> _Esoteric Buddhism_ was so little understood by some Theosophists, as to
> have led them into the belief that it thoroughly supported Darwinian
> evolution, and especially the theory of the descent of man from a
> pithecoid ancestor. As one member writes: “I suppose you realize that
> three‐fourths of Theosophists and even outsiders imagine that, as far as
> the evolution of man is concerned, Darwinism and Theosophy kiss one
> another.” Nothing of the kind was ever realized, nor is there any great
> warrant for it, so far as we know, in _Esoteric Buddhism_. It has been
> repeatedly stated, that evolution as taught by Manu and Kapila was the
> groundwork of the modern teachings, but neither Occultism nor Theosophy
> has ever supported the wild theories of the present Darwinists—least of
> all the descent of man from an ape. Of this, more hereafter. But one has
> only to turn to p. 47 of the work named, to find the statement that:
> 
>     Man belongs to a kingdom distinctly separate from that of the
>     animals.
> 
> With such a plain and unequivocal statement before him, it is very strange
> that any careful student should have been so misled, unless he is prepared
> to charge the author with a gross contradiction.
> 
> Every Round repeats the evolutionary work of the preceding Round, on a
> higher scale. With the exception of some higher anthropoids, as just
> mentioned, the Monadic inflow, or inner evolution, is at an end till the
> next Manvantara. It can never be too often repeated that the full‐blown
> human Monads have to be first disposed of, before the new crop of
> candidates appears on this Globe at the beginning of the next Cycle. Thus
> there is a lull; and this is why, during the Fourth Round, man appears on
> Earth earlier than any animal creation, as will be described.
> 
> But it is still urged that the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_ has “preached
> Darwinism” all along. Certain passages would undoubtedly seem to lend
> countenance to this inference. Besides which, the Occultists themselves
> are ready to concede _partial_ correctness to the Darwinian hypothesis, in
> later details, bye‐laws of evolution, and after the midway point of the
> Fourth Race. Of that which has taken place, Physical Science can really
> know nothing, for such matters lie entirely outside of its sphere of
> investigation. But what the Occultists have never admitted, nor will they
> ever admit, is that man was _an ape in __ this or any other Round_; or
> that he ever could be one, however much he may have been “ape‐like.” This
> is vouched for by the very authority from whom the author of _Esoteric
> Buddhism_ got his information.
> 
> Thus to those who confront the Occultists with these lines from the above‐
> named volume:
> 
>     It is enough to show that we may as reasonably—and that we must,
>     if we would talk about these matters at all—conceive a life‐
>     impulse giving birth to mineral forms, as of the same sort of
>     impulse concerned to _raise a race of apes into a race of
>     rudimentary men_.
> 
> To those who bring this passage forward as showing “decided Darwinism,”
> the Occultists answer by pointing to the explanation of the Master, Mr.
> Sinnett’s Teacher, which would contradict these lines, were they written
> in the spirit attributed to them. A copy of this letter was sent to the
> writer, together with others, two years ago (1886), with additional
> marginal remarks, to quote from, in the _Secret Doctrine_.
> 
> It begins by considering the difficulty experienced by the Western
> student, in reconciling some facts, previously given, with the evolution
> of man from the animal, _i.e._, from the mineral, vegetable and animal
> kingdoms, and advises the student to hold to the doctrine of analogy and
> correspondences. Then it touches upon the mystery of the Devas, and even
> Gods, having to pass through states, which it was agreed to refer to as
> “Immetallization, Inherbation, Inzoönization and finally Incarnation,” and
> explains this by hinting at the necessity of failures even in the ethereal
> races of Dhyân Chohans. Concerning this it says:
> 
> “_These __‘__failures__’__ are too far progressed and spiritualized to be
> thrown back forcibly from Dhyân Chohanship into the vortex of a new
> primordial evolution through the lower kingdoms_....”
> 
> After which, a hint only is given about the mystery contained in the
> allegory of the fallen Asuras, which will be expanded and explained in
> Volume II. When Karma has reached them at the stage of human evolution:
> 
> “_They will have to drink it to the last drop in the bitter cup of
> retribution. Then they become an active force and commingle with the
> elementals, the progressed entities of the pure animal kingdom, to develop
> little by little the full type of humanity._”
> 
> These Dhyân Chohans, as we see, do not pass through the three kingdoms as
> do the lower Pitris; nor do they incarnate in man until the Third Root
> Race. Thus, as the teaching stands:
> 
> “_Round I. Man in the First Round and First Race on Globe D, our __ Earth,
> was an ethereal being (a Lunar Dhyâni, as man), non‐intelligent but super‐
> spiritual; and correspondingly, on the law of analogy, in the First Race
> of the Fourth Round. In each of the subsequent races and sub‐races, ... he
> grows more and more into an encased or incarnate being, but still
> preponderatingly ethereal.... He is sexless, and, like the animal and
> vegetable, he develops monstrous bodies correspondential with his coarser
> surroundings._
> 
> “_Round II. He [man] is still gigantic and ethereal, but growing firmer
> and more condensed in body; a more physical man yet still less intelligent
> than spiritual (1), for mind is a slower and more difficult evolution than
> is the physical frame...._
> 
> “_Round III. He has now a perfectly concrete or compacted body, at first
> the form of a giant‐ape, and now more intelligent, or rather cunning, than
> spiritual. For, on the downward arc, he has now reached a point where his
> primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent mentality
> (2). In the last half of the Third Round, his gigantic stature decreases,
> and his body improves in texture, and he becomes a more rational being,
> though still more an ape than a Deva.... [All this is almost exactly
> repeated in the Third Root‐Race of the Fourth Round.]_
> 
> “_Round IV. Intellect has an enormous development in this Round. The
> [hitherto] dumb races acquire our [present] human speech on this Globe, on
> which, from the Fourth Race, language is perfected and knowledge
> increases. At this half‐way point of the Fourth Round [as of the Fourth,
> or Atlantean, Root‐Race], humanity passes the axial point of the minor
> manvantaric cycle ... the world teeming with the results of intellectual
> activity and spiritual decrease...._”
> 
> This is from the authentic letter; what follows are the later remarks and
> additional explanations traced by the same hand in the form of footnotes.
> 
> “_(1) ... The original letter contained general teaching—a __‘__bird’s‐eye
> view__’__—and particularized nothing.... To speak of __‘__physical
> man,__’__ while limiting the statement to the early Rounds, would be
> drifting back to the miraculous and instantaneous __‘__coats of
> skin.__’__... The first __‘__Nature,__’__ the first __‘__body,__’__ the
> first __‘__mind__’__ on the first plane of perception, on the first Globe
> in the first Round, is what was meant. For Karma and evolution have:_
> 
>     ‘_... centred in our make such strange extremes,_
>     _From different Natures_(_296_)_ marvellously mixed ..._’
> 
> “_(2) Restore: he has now reached the point [by analogy, and as the __
> Third Root Race in the Fourth Round], where his [the angel‐man’s]
> primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent human
> mentality, and you have the true version on your thumb‐nail...._”
> 
> These are the words of the Teacher; text, words and sentences in brackets,
> and explanatory footnotes. It stands to reason that there must be an
> enormous difference in such terms as “objectivity” and “subjectivity,”
> “materiality” and “spirituality,” when the same terms are applied to
> different planes of being and perception. All this must be taken in its
> relative sense. And therefore there is little to be wondered at, if, left
> to his own speculations, an author who, however eager to learn, was yet
> quite inexperienced in these abstruse teachings, has fallen into an error.
> Nor was the difference between the Rounds and the Races sufficiently
> defined in the letters received, since nothing of the kind had been
> required before, as the ordinary Eastern disciple would have found out the
> difference in a moment. Moreover, to quote from a letter of the Master:
> 
> “_The teachings were imparted under protest.... They were, so to say,
> smuggled goods ... and when I remained face to face with only one
> correspondent, the other, Mr. ... had so far tossed all the cards into
> confusion, that little remained to be said without trespassing upon law._”
> 
> Theosophists “whom it may concern” will understand what is meant.
> 
> The outcome of all this is, that nothing had ever been said in the letters
> to warrant the assurance, that the Occult doctrine has ever taught, or any
> Adept believed in, unless metaphorically, the preposterous modern theory
> of the descent of man from a common ancestor with the ape—an anthropoid of
> the actual animal kind. To this day the world is more full of ape‐like men
> than the woods are of men‐like apes. The ape is sacred in India because
> its origin is well known to the Initiates, though concealed under a thick
> veil of allegory. Hanumâna is the son of Pavana (Vâyu, “God of the wind”)
> by Anjanâ, wife of a monster called Kesarî, though his genealogy varies.
> The reader who bears this in mind, will find in Volume II, _passim_, the
> whole explanation of this ingenious allegory. The “men” of the Third Race
> (who separated) were “Gods,” by their spirituality and purity, though
> senseless, and as yet destitute of mind, as men.
> 
> These “men” of the Third Race, the ancestors of the Atlanteans, were just
> such ape‐like, intellectually senseless, giants as were those beings, who,
> during the Third Round, represented Humanity. Morally irresponsible, it
> was these Third Race “men” who, through promiscuous connection with animal
> species lower than themselves, created that missing link which became ages
> later (in the Tertiary period only), the remote ancestor of the real ape,
> as we find it now in the pithecoid family.
> 
> And if this is found clashing with the statement which shows the animal
> later than man, then the reader is asked to bear in mind that the
> _placental mammal_ only is meant. In those days, there were animals of
> which Zoölogy does not even dream in our own; _and the modes of
> reproduction were not identical_ with the notions which modern Physiology
> has upon the subject. It is not altogether convenient to touch upon such
> questions in public, but there is _no_ contradiction or impossibility in
> this whatever.
> 
> Thus the earlier teachings, however unsatisfactory, vague and fragmentary,
> did not teach the evolution of “man” from the “ape.” Nor does the author
> of _Esoteric Buddhism_ assert it anywhere in his work in so many words;
> but, owing to his inclination towards Modern Science, he uses language
> which might perhaps justify such an inference. The man who preceded the
> Fourth, the Atlantean, Race, however much he may have looked physically
> like a “gigantic ape”—“the counterfeit of man who hath not the life of a
> man”—was still a thinking and already a speaking man. The Lemuro‐Atlantean
> was a highly civilized Race, and if one accepts tradition, which is better
> history than the speculative fiction which now passes under that name, he
> was higher than we are with all our sciences and the degraded civilization
> of the day: at any rate, the Lemuro‐Atlantean of the closing Third Race
> was so.
> 
> And now we may return to the Stanzas.
> 
> Stanza VI.—_Continued_.
> 
> 5. AT THE FOURTH(297) (_a_), THE SONS ARE TOLD TO CREATE THEIR IMAGES. ONE
> THIRD REFUSES. TWO(298) OBEY.
> 
> THE CURSE IS PRONOUNCED (_b_); THEY WILL BE BORN IN THE FOURTH,(299)
> SUFFER AND CAUSE SUFFERING. THIS IS THE FIRST WAR (_c_).
> 
> The full meaning of this Shloka can only be fully comprehended after
> reading the additional detailed explanations, in the Anthropogenesis and
> its Commentaries, in Volume II. Between this Shloka and Shloka 4, extend
> long ages; and there now gleams the dawn and sunrise of another æon. The
> drama enacted on our planet is at the beginning of its fourth act; but for
> a clearer comprehension of the whole play the reader will have to turn
> back before he can proceed onward. For this verse belongs to the general
> Cosmogony given in the archaic volumes, whereas Volume II will give a
> detailed account of the “creation,” or rather formation, of the first
> human beings, followed by the second humanity, and then by the third; or,
> as they are called, the First, Second, and the Third Root‐Races. As the
> solid Earth began by being a ball of liquid fire, of fiery dust and its
> protoplasmic phantom, so did man.
> 
> (_a_) That which is meant by the qualification the “Fourth,” is explained
> as the Fourth Round, only on the authority of the Commentaries. It can
> equally mean Fourth Eternity as Fourth Round, or even our Fourth Globe.
> For, as will repeatedly be shown, the latter is the fourth sphere, on the
> fourth or lowest plane of material life. And it so happens that we are in
> the Fourth Round, at the middle point of which the perfect equilibrium
> between Spirit and Matter had to take place.
> 
> It was, as we shall see, at this period—during the highest point of
> civilization and knowledge, and also of human intellectuality, of the
> Fourth, Atlantean Race—that, owing to the final crisis of the
> physiologico‐spiritual adjustment of the races, humanity branched off into
> two diametrically opposite paths: the _Right‐_ and the _Left‐hand_ Paths
> of Knowledge or Vidyâ. In the words of the Commentary:
> 
> _Thus were the germs of the White and the Black Magic sown in those days.
> The seeds lay latent for some time, to sprout only during the early period
> of the Fifth [our Race]._
> 
> Says the Commentary explaining the Shloka:
> 
> _The Holy Youths [the Gods] refused to multiply and create species after
> their likeness, after their kind. __“__They are not fit Forms [Rûpas] for
> us. They have to grow.__”__ They refuse to enter the Chhâyâs [Shadows or
> Images] of their inferiors. Thus had selfish feeling prevailed from the
> beginning, even among the Gods, and they fell under the eye of the Karmic
> Lipikas._
> 
> They had to suffer for it in later births. How the punishment reached the
> Gods will be seen in Volume II.
> 
> It is a universal tradition that, before the physiological “Fall,”
> propagation of one’s kind, whether human or animal, took place through the
> _Will_ of the Creators, or of their progeny. This was the Fall of Spirit
> into generation, not the Fall of mortal Man. It has already been stated
> that, to become self‐conscious, Spirit must pass through every cycle of
> being, culminating in its highest point on earth in Man. Spirit _per se_
> is an unconscious negative _abstraction_. Its purity is inherent, not
> acquired by merit; hence, as already shown, to become the highest Dhyân
> Chohan, it is necessary for each Ego to attain to full self‐consciousness
> as a human, _i.e._, conscious, being, which is synthesized for us in Man.
> The Jewish Kabalists, arguing that no Spirit can belong to the divine
> Hierarchy unless Ruach (Spirit) is united to Nephesh (Living Soul), only
> repeat the Eastern Esoteric teaching:
> 
> _A Dhyâni has to be an Âtmâ‐Buddhi; once the Buddhi‐Manas breaks loose
> from the immortal Âtmâ, of which it (Buddhi) is the vehicle, Âtman passes
> into Non‐Being, which is Absolute Being._
> 
> This means that the purely Nirvânic state is a passage of Spirit back to
> the ideal abstraction of Be‐ness, which has no relation to the plane on
> which our Universe is accomplishing its cycle.
> 
> (_b_) “The Curse is pronounced” does not mean, in this instance, that any
> Personal Being, God, or Superior Spirit, pronounced it, but simply that
> the cause, which could but create bad results, had been generated; and
> that the effects of this Karmic cause could lead the Beings that
> counteracted the laws of Nature, and thus impeded her legitimate progress,
> only to bad incarnations, hence to suffering.
> 
> (_c_) “There were many Wars,” all referring to struggles of adjustment,
> spiritual, cosmical and astronomical, but chiefly to the mystery of the
> evolution of man, as he is now. The Powers or pure Essences that were
> “told to create,” relate to a mystery explained, as already said,
> elsewhere. It is not only one of the most hidden secrets of Nature—that of
> generation, over whose solution the Embryologists have vainly put their
> heads together—but likewise a divine function which involves that great
> religious, or rather dogmatic, mystery, the so‐called “Fall” of the
> Angels. Satan and his rebellious host, when the meaning of the allegory is
> explained, will thus prove to have refused to create physical man, only to
> become the direct Saviours and Creators of divine Man. The symbolical
> teaching is more than mystical and religious, it is purely scientific, as
> will be seen later on. For, instead of remaining a mere blind functioning
> medium, impelled and guided by fathomless Law, the “rebellious” Angel
> claimed and enforced his right of independent judgment and will, his right
> of free‐agency and responsibility, since Man and Angel are alike under
> Karmic Law.
> 
> Explaining Kabalistic views, the author of _New Aspects of Life_ says of
> the Fallen Angels that:
> 
>     According to the symbolical teaching, Spirit, from being simply a
>     functionary agent of God, became volitional in its developed and
>     developing action; and, substituting its own will for the divine
>     desire in its regard, so fell. Hence the kingdom and reign of
>     spirits and spiritual action, which flow from and are the product
>     of spirit‐volition, are outside, and contrasted with, and in
>     contradiction to, the kingdom of souls and divine action.(300)
> 
> So far, so good; but what does the author mean by saying:
> 
>     When man was created, he was human in constitution, with human
>     affections, human hopes and aspirations. From this state he
>     fell—into the brute and savage.
> 
> This is diametrically opposite to our Eastern teaching, and even to the
> Kabalistic notion, so far as we understand it, and to the _Bible_ itself.
> This looks like Corporealism and Substantialism colouring Positive
> Philosophy, though it is rather difficult to feel quite sure of the
> author’s meaning. A _fall_, however, “from the natural into the
> supernatural and the animal”—supernatural meaning the purely spiritual in
> this case—implies what we suggest.
> 
> The _New Testament_ speaks of one of these “Wars,” as follows:
> 
>     And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against
>     the Dragon; and the Dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed
>     not; neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And the
>     great Dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and
>     Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.(301)
> 
> The Kabalistic version of the same story is given in the _Codex Nazaræus_,
> the scripture of the Nazarenes, the real mystic Christians of John the
> Baptist, and the Initiates of Christos. Bahak Zivo, the “Father of the
> Genii,” is ordered to construct creatures—to “create.” But, as he is
> “ignorant of Orcus,” he fails to do so, and calls in Fetahil, a still
> purer spirit, to his aid, who fails still worse. This is a repetition of
> the failure of the “Fathers,” the Lords of Light, who fail one after the
> other.(302)
> 
> We will now quote from our earlier volumes:(303)
> 
>     Then steps on the stage of creation the Spirit(304) (of the Earth
>     so‐called, or the Soul, Psyche, which St. James calls “devilish”),
>     the lower portion of the Anima Mundi or Astral Light. [See the
>     close of this Shloka.] With the Nazarenes and the Gnostics this
>     Spirit was _feminine_. Thus the Spirit of the Earth, perceiving
>     that for Fetahil,(305) the newest man (the latest), the splendour
>     was “changed,” and that for splendour existed “decrease and
>     damage,” she awakes Karabtanos,(306) “who was frantic and _without
>     sense and judgment_,” and says to him: “Arise, see, the Splendour
>     (Light) of the _Newest_ Man (Fetahil) has failed (to produce or
>     create men), the decrease of this Splendour is visible. Rise up,
>     come with thy Mother (the Spiritus) and free thee from limits by
>     which thou art held, and those more ample than the whole world.”
>     After which, follows the union of the frantic and blind matter,
>     guided by the insinuations of the Spirit (not the _Divine_ Breath
>     but the _Astral_ Spirit, which by its double essence is already
>     tainted with matter); and the offer of the Mother being accepted,
>     the Spiritus conceives “Seven Figures,” and the Seven Stellars
>     (Planets), which represent also the _seven capital sins_, the
>     progeny of an Astral Soul, separated from its divine source
>     (spirit), and _matter_, the blind demon of concupiscence. Seeing
>     this, Fetahil extends his hand towards the abyss of matter, and
>     says: “Let the earth exist, just as the abode of the Powers has
>     existed.” Dipping his hand in the chaos, which he condenses, he
>     creates our planet.
> 
>     Then the _Codex_ proceeds to tell how Bahak Zivo was separated
>     from the Spiritus, and the Genii or Angels from the Rebels.(307)
>     Then (the greatest) Mano,(308) who dwells with the greatest Ferho,
>     calls Kebar Zivo (known also by the name of Nebat Iavar bar Iufin
>     Ifafin), the Helm and Vine of the Food of Life(309)—he being the
>     third Life, and commiserating the rebellious and foolish Genii, on
>     account of the magnitude of their ambition, says: “Lord of the
>     Genii(310) (Æons), see what the Genii (the Rebellious Angels) do,
>     and about what they are consulting.(311) They say: ‘Let us call
>     forth the world, and let us call the “Powers” into existence. The
>     Genii are the Princes (Principes), the Sons of Light, but Thou art
>     the Messenger of Life’.”
> 
>     And in order to counteract the influence of the seven “badly
>     disposed” principles the progeny of Spiritus, Kebar Zivo (or Cabar
>     Zio), the mighty Lord of Splendour, produces _seven other lives_
>     (the cardinal virtues), who shine in their own form and light
>     “from on high,”(312) and thus reëstablish the balance between good
>     and evil, light and darkness.
> 
> Here one finds a repetition of the early _allegorical_ dual systems, such
> as the Zoroastrian, and detects a germ of the dogmatic and dualistic
> religions of the future, a germ which has grown into such a luxuriant tree
> in ecclesiastical Christianity. It is already the outline of the two
> “Supremes”—God and Satan. But in the Stanzas no such idea exists.
> 
> Most of the Western Christian Kabalists—preëminently Éliphas Lévi—in their
> desire to reconcile the Occult Sciences with Church Dogmas, did their best
> to make of the “Astral Light” only and preeminently the Plerôma of the
> early Church Fathers, the abode of the Hosts of the Fallen Angels, of the
> Archôns and Powers. But the Astral Light, though only the lower aspect of
> the Absolute, is still dual. It is the Anima Mundi, and ought never to be
> viewed otherwise, except for Kabalistic purposes. The difference which
> exists between its “Light” and its “Living Fire,” ought ever to be present
> in the mind of the Seer and the Psychic. The higher aspect of this
> “Light,” without which only creatures of matter can be produced, is this
> Living Fire, and its Seventh Principle. It is stated in _Isis Unveiled_,
> in a complete description of it:
> 
>     The Astral Light or Anima Mundi is dual and bi‐sexual. The (ideal)
>     male part of it is purely divine and spiritual, it is Wisdom, it
>     is Spirit or Purusha; while the female portion (the Spiritus of
>     the Nazarenes) is tainted, in one sense, with matter, _is_ indeed
>     matter, and therefore is evil already. It is the life‐principle of
>     every living creature, and furnishes the astral soul, the fluidic
>     _perisprit_, to men, animals, fowls of the air, and everything
>     living. Animals have only the latent germ of the highest immortal
>     soul in them. This latter will develop only after a series of
>     countless evolutions; the doctrine of which evolutions is
>     contained in the Kabalistic axiom: “A stone becomes a plant; a
>     plant, a beast; a beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a
>     god.(313)”
> 
> The seven principles of the Eastern Initiates had not been explained when
> _Isis Unveiled_ was written, but only the three _Kabalistic Faces_ of the
> semi‐exoteric _Kabalah_.(314) But these contain the description of the
> mystic natures of the first Group of Dhyân Chohans in the _regimen ignis_,
> the region and “rule (or government) of fire,” divided into three classes,
> synthesized by the first, which makes _four_ or the “Tetraktys.” If one
> studies the commentaries attentively, he will find the same progression in
> the angelic natures, _viz_., from the _passive_ down to the _active_; the
> last of these Beings are as near to the Ahamkâra Element—the region or
> plane wherein _Egoship_, or the feeling of _I‐am‐ness_, is beginning to be
> defined—as the first are near to the undifferentiated Essence. The former
> are Arûpa, incorporeal; the latter, Rûpa, corporeal.
> 
> In Volume II of the same work,(315) the philosophical systems of the
> Gnostics and the primitive Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes and the
> Ebionites, are fully considered. They show the views held in those days,
> outside the circle of Mosaic Jews, about Jehovah. He was identified by all
> the Gnostics with the evil, rather than with the good principle. For them,
> he was Ilda‐Baoth, the “Son of Darkness,” whose mother, Sophia Achamôth,
> was the daughter of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom—the female Holy Ghost of the
> early Christians—Âkâsha; Sophia Achamôth personifying the Lower Astral
> Light or Ether. The Astral Light stands in the same relation to Âkâsha and
> Anima Mundi, as Satan stands to the Deity. They are one and the same thing
> _seen from two aspects_, the spiritual and the psychic—the super‐ethereal,
> or connecting link between matter and pure spirit—and the physical.(316)
> Ilda‐Baoth—a compound name, made up of _Ilda_ (ילד), child, and _Baoth_;
> the latter from בהוצ an egg, and בהות, chaos, emptiness, void, or
> desolation; or the Child born in the Egg of Chaos, like Brahmâ—or Jehovah,
> is simply one of the Elohim, the Seven Creative Spirits, and one of the
> lower Sephiroth. Ilda‐Baoth produces from himself seven other Gods,
> “Stellar Spirits,” or the Lunar Ancestors,(317) for they are all the
> same.(318) They are all _in his own image_, the “Spirits of the Face,” and
> the reflections one of the other, who become darker and more material, as
> they successively recede from their originator. They also inhabit seven
> regions disposed like a stair, for its steps mount and descend the scale
> of spirit and matter.(319) With Pagans and Christians, with Hindûs and
> Chaldeans, with Greek as with Roman Catholics—the texts varying slightly
> in their interpretations—they all were the Genii of the seven planets, and
> of the seven planetary spheres of our septenary Chain, of which Earth is
> the lowest. This connects the “Stellar” and “Lunar” Spirits with the
> higher planetary Angels, and the Saptarshis, the Seven Rishis of the
> Stars, of the Hindûs—as subordinate Angels, or Messengers, to these
> Rishis, their emanations, on the descending scale. Such, in the opinion of
> the philosophical Gnostics, were the God and the Archangels now worshipped
> by the Christians! The “Fallen Angels” and the legend of the “War in
> Heaven” are thus purely pagan in their origin, and come from India, _viá_
> Persia and Chaldea. The only reference to them in the Christian canon is
> found in _Revelation_ xii, as quoted a few pages back.
> 
> Thus “Satan,” once he ceases to be viewed in the superstitious, dogmatic,
> unphilosophical spirit of the Churches, grows into the grandiose image of
> one who makes of a _terrestrial_, a _divine_ Man; who gives him,
> throughout the long cycle of Mahâkalpa, the law of the Spirit of Life, and
> makes him free from the Sin of Ignorance, hence of Death.
> 
> 6. THE OLDER WHEELS ROTATED DOWNWARD AND UPWARD (_a_).... THE MOTHER’S
> SPAWN FILLED THE WHOLE.(320) THERE WERE BATTLES FOUGHT BETWEEN THE
> CREATORS AND THE DESTROYERS, AND BATTLES FOUGHT FOR SPACE; THE SEED
> APPEARING AND REÄPPEARING CONTINUOUSLY (_b_).(321)
> 
> (_a_) Here, having finished for the time being with our side‐issues—which,
> however they may break the flow of the narrative, are necessary for the
> elucidation of the whole scheme—we must return once more to Cosmogony. The
> phrase “Older Wheels” refers to the Worlds, or Globes, of our Chain as
> they were during the previous Rounds. The present Stanza, when explained
> esoterically, is found embodied entirely in Kabalistic works. Therein will
> be found the very history of the evolution of those countless Globes,
> which evolve after a periodical Pralaya, rebuilt from old material into
> new forms. The previous Globes disintegrate and reäppear, transformed and
> perfected for a new phase of life. In the _Kabalah_, worlds are compared
> to sparks which fly from under the hammer of the great Architect—_Law_,
> the Law which rules all the smaller Creators.
> 
> The following comparative diagram shows the identity between the two
> systems, the Kabalistic and the Eastern. The three upper are the three
> higher planes of consciousness, revealed and explained in both schools
> only to the Initiates; the lower represent the four lower planes—the
> lowest being our plane, or the visible Universe.
> 
>                               [Diagram III]
> 
> These seven _planes_ correspond to the seven _states_ of consciousness in
> man. It remains with him to attune the three higher states in himself to
> the three higher planes in Kosmos. But before he can attempt to attune, he
> must awaken the three “seats” to life and activity. And how many are
> capable of bringing themselves to even a superficial comprehension of Âtmâ
> Vidyâ (Spirit‐Knowledge), or what is called by the Sufis, Rohanee!(322)
> 
> (_b_) “The Seed appearing and reäppearing continuously.” Here “Seed”
> stands for the “World‐Germ,” viewed by Science as material particles in a
> highly attenuated condition, but in Occult Physics as “spiritual
> particles,” _i.e._, supersensuous matter existing in a state of primeval
> differentiation. To see and appreciate the difference—the immense gulf
> that separates terrestrial matter from the finer grades of supersensuous
> matter—every Astronomer, every Chemist and Physicist ought to be a
> _Psychometer_, to say the least; he ought to be able to sense for himself
> that difference in which he now refuses to believe. Mrs. Elizabeth Denton,
> one of the most learned, and also one of the most materialistic and
> sceptical women of her age—the wife of Professor Denton, the well‐known
> American Geologist, and the author of _The Soul of Things_—was, in spite
> of her scepticism, one of the most wonderful psychometers. This is what
> she describes in one of her experiments. A particle of a meteorite was
> placed on her forehead, in an envelope, and the lady, not being aware of
> what it contained, said:
> 
>     What a difference between that which we recognize as matter here
>     and that which seems like matter there! In the one, the _elements
>     are so coarse and so angular_, I wonder that we can endure it at
>     all, much more that we can desire to continue our present
>     relations to it; in the other, all the elements are so refined,
>     they are so free from those great, rough angularities, which
>     characterize the elements here, that I can but regard _that_ as by
>     so much the more than this the real existence.(323)
> 
> In Theogony, every Seed is an ethereal organism, from which evolves later
> on a celestial Being, a God.
> 
> In the “Beginning,” that which is called in mystic phraseology “Cosmic
> Desire” evolves into Absolute Light. Now light without any shadow would be
> absolute light; in other words, absolute darkness, as Physical Science
> tries to prove. This “shadow” appears under the form of primordial matter,
> allegorized—if you will—in the shape of the Spirit of Creative Fire or
> Heat. If, rejecting the poetical form and allegory, Science chooses to see
> in this the primordial “fire‐mist,” it is welcome to do so. Whether one
> way or the other, whether Fohat or the famous Force of Science, nameless
> and as difficult of definition as our Fohat himself, that Something
> “caused the Universe to move with circular motion,” as Plato has it; or,
> as the Occult teaching expresses it:
> 
> _The Central Sun causes Fohat to collect primordial dust in the form of
> balls, to impel them to move in converging lines and finally to approach
> __ each other and aggregate.... Being scattered in Space, without order or
> system, the World‐Germs come into frequent collision until their final
> aggregation, after which they become Wanderers [Comets]. Then the battles
> and struggles begin. The older [bodies] attract the younger, while others
> repel them. Many perish, devoured by their stronger companions. Those that
> escape become worlds._(324)
> 
> When carefully analyzed and reflected upon, this will be found as
> scientific as Science can make it, even at our late period.
> 
> We have been assured, that there exist several modern works of speculative
> fancy upon such struggles for life in sidereal heaven, especially in the
> German language. We rejoice to hear it, for ours is an Occult teaching
> lost in the darkness of archaic ages. We have treated of it fully in _Isis
> Unveiled_,(325) and the idea of Darwinian‐like evolution, of struggle for
> life and supremacy, and of the “survival of the fittest,” among the Hosts
> above as of the Hosts below, runs throughout both the volumes of our
> earlier work, written in 1876. But the idea is not ours, it is that of
> antiquity. Even the Purânic writers have ingeniously interwoven allegory
> with cosmic facts and human events. Any symbologist may discern their
> astro‐cosmical allusions, even though he be unable to grasp the whole
> meaning. The great “wars in heaven,” in the _Purânas_; the wars of the
> Titans, in Hesiod and other classical writers; the “struggles” also
> between Osiris and Typhon, in the Egyptian myth; and even those in the
> Scandinavian legends; all refer to the same subject. Northern Mythology
> refers to it as the battle of the Flames, the sons of Muspel who fought on
> the field of Wigred. All these relate to Heaven and Earth, and have a
> double, and often even a triple, meaning and esoteric application to
> things above as to things below. They severally relate to astronomical,
> theogonical and human struggles; to the adjustment of orbs, and the
> supremacy among nations and tribes. The “struggle for existence” and the
> “survival of the fittest” reigned supreme from the moment that Kosmos
> manifested into being, and could hardly escape the observant eye of the
> ancient Sages. Hence the incessant fights of Indra, the God of the
> Firmament, with the Asuras—degraded from high Gods into cosmic Demons—and
> with Vritra or Ahi; the battles fought between stars and constellations,
> between moons and planets—later on incarnated as kings and mortals. Hence
> also the War in Heaven of Michael and his Host against the Dragon—Jupiter
> and Lucifer Venus—when a third of the stars of the rebellious Host was
> hurled down into Space, and “its place was found no more in Heaven.” As we
> wrote long ago:
> 
>     This is the basic and fundamental stone of the secret cycles. It
>     shows that the Brâhmans and Tanaïm ... speculated on the creation
>     and development of the world quite in a Darwinian way, both
>     anticipating him and his school in the natural selection, gradual
>     development and transformation of species.(326)
> 
> There were old worlds that perished, conquered by the new, etc., etc. The
> assertion that all the worlds (stars, planets, etc.)—as soon as a nucleus
> of primordial substance, in the laya (undifferentiated) state, is informed
> by the freed principles of a just _deceased_ sidereal body—become first
> comets, and then suns, to cool down to inhabitable worlds, is a teaching
> as old as the Rishis.
> 
> Thus the Secret Books, as we see, distinctly teach an astronomy that would
> not be rejected even by modern speculation, could the latter thoroughly
> understand its teachings.
> 
> For archaic astronomy and the ancient physical and mathematical sciences
> expressed views identical with those of Modern Science, and many of far
> more momentous import. A “struggle for life” and a “survival of the
> fittest,” in the worlds above and on our planet here below, are distinctly
> taught. This teaching, however, although it would not be entirely rejected
> by Science, is sure to be repudiated as an integral whole. For it avers
> that there are only seven self‐born primordial “Gods,” emanated from the
> trinitarian One. In other words, it means that all the worlds, or sidereal
> bodies—always on strict analogy—are formed one from the other, after the
> primordial manifestation at the beginning of the Great Age is
> accomplished.
> 
> The birth of the celestial bodies in space is compared to a multitude of
> pilgrims at the Festival of the Fires. Seven ascetics appear on the
> threshold of the temple with seven lighted sticks of incense. At the light
> of these the first row of pilgrims light their incense sticks. After
> which, every ascetic begins whirling his stick around his head in space,
> and furnishes the rest with fire. Thus with the heavenly bodies. A laya‐
> centre is lighted and awakened into life by the fires of another
> “pilgrim,” after which, the new “centre” rushes into space and becomes a
> comet. It is only after losing its velocity, and hence its fiery tail,
> that the Fiery Dragon settles down into quiet and steady life, as a
> regular respectable citizen of the sidereal family. Therefore it is said:
> 
> _Born in the unfathomable depths of Space, out of the homogeneous Element
> called the World‐Soul, every nucleus of cosmic matter, suddenly launched
> into being, begins life under the most hostile circumstances. Through a
> series of countless ages, it has to conquer for itself a place in the
> infinitudes. It circles round and round, between denser and already fixed
> bodies, moving by jerks, and pulling towards some given point or centre
> that attracts it, and, like as a ship drawn into a channel dotted with
> reefs and sunken rocks, trying to avoid other bodies that draw and repel
> it in turn. Many perish, their mass disintegrating through stronger
> masses, and, when born within a system, chiefly within the insatiable
> stomachs of various Suns. Those which move slower, and are propelled into
> an elliptic course, are doomed to annihilation sooner or later. Others,
> moving in parabolic curves, generally escape destruction, owing to their
> velocity._
> 
> Some very critical readers will perhaps imagine that this teaching, as to
> the cometary stage passed through by all heavenly bodies, is in
> contradiction with the statements just made as to the Moon being the
> mother of the Earth. They will perhaps fancy that intuition is needed to
> harmonize the two. But no intuition is in truth required. What does
> Science know of comets, their genesis, growth, and ultimate behaviour?
> Nothing—absolutely nothing! And what is there so impossible in that a
> laya‐centre—a lump of cosmic protoplasm, homogeneous and latent—when
> suddenly animated or fired up, should rush from its bed in space, and
> whirl throughout the abysmal depths, in order to strengthen its
> homogeneous organism by an accumulation and addition of differentiated
> elements? And why should not such a comet settle in life, live, and become
> an inhabited globe?
> 
> _“__The abodes of Fohat are many__”_—it is said. _“__He places his Four
> Fiery [electro‐positive] Sons in the Four Circles__”_; these Circles are
> the equator, the ecliptic, and the two parallels of declination, or the
> tropics, to preside over the _climates_ of which are placed the Four
> Mystical Entities. Then again: “_Other Seven [Sons] are commissioned to
> preside over the seven hot, and seven cold Lokas [the Hells of the
> orthodox Brâhmans] at the two ends of the Egg of Matter [our Earth and its
> poles]._” The seven Lokas are elsewhere also called the “Rings” and the
> “Circles.” The Ancients made the polar circles _seven_ instead of two, as
> do the Europeans; for Mount Meru, which is the North Pole, is said to have
> seven gold and seven silver steps leading to it.
> 
> The strange statements, in one of the Stanzas, that “_The Songs of __
> Fohat and his Sons were_ RADIANT _as the noon‐tide Sun and the Moon
> combined_,” and that the Four Sons, on the _middle_ Four‐fold Circle, “SAW
> _their Father’s Songs and_ HEARD _his solar‐selenic Radiance_,” are
> explained, in the Commentary, in these words: “_The agitation of the
> Fohatic Forces at the two cold ends [North and South Poles] of the Earth,
> which results in a multicoloured radiance at night, has in it several of
> the properties of Âkâsha [Ether], Colour and Sound as well_.”
> 
> “Sound is the characteristic of Âkâsha [Ether]: it generates Air, the
> property of which is Touch; which [by friction] becomes productive of
> Colour and Light.”(327)
> 
> Perhaps the above will be regarded as archaic nonsense, but it will be
> better comprehended, if the reader remembers the Aurora Borealis and
> Australis, both of which take place at the very centres of terrestrial
> electric and magnetic forces. The two Poles are said to be the store‐
> houses, the receptacles and liberators, at the same time, of cosmic and
> terrestrial Vitality (Electricity), from the surplus of which the Earth,
> had it not been for these two natural safety‐valves, would have been rent
> to pieces long ago. At the same time it is a theory that has lately become
> an axiom, that the phenomenon of the polar lights is accompanied by, and
> productive of, strong sounds, like whistling, hissing and cracking. See
> Professor Humboldt’s works on the Aurora Borealis, and his correspondence
> regarding this moot question.
> 
> 7. MAKE THY CALCULATIONS, O LANOO, IF THOU WOULDST LEARN THE CORRECT AGE
> OF THY SMALL WHEEL.(328) ITS FOURTH SPOKE IS OUR MOTHER(329) (_a_). REACH
> THE FOURTH FRUIT OF THE FOURTH PATH OF KNOWLEDGE THAT LEADS TO NIRVÂNA,
> AND THOU SHALT COMPREHEND, FOR THOU SHALT SEE (_b_)....
> 
> (_a_) The “Small Wheel” is our Chain of Spheres, and the “Fourth Spoke” is
> our Earth, the fourth in the Chain. It is one of those on which the “hot
> [positive] breath of the Sun” has a direct effect.
> 
> The seven fundamental transformations of the Globes or heavenly Spheres,
> or rather of their constituent particles of matter, are described as
> follows: (1) _homogeneous_; (2) _aëriform_ and _radiant_—gaseous; (3)
> _curd‐like_ (nebulous); (4) _atomic, ethereal_—beginning of motion, hence
> of differentiation; (5) _germinal, fiery_—differentiated, but composed of
> the germs only of the Elements, in their earliest states, they having
> seven states, when completely developed on our earth; (6) _four‐fold,
> vapoury_—the future Earth; (7) _cold_—and depending on the Sun for life
> and light.
> 
> To calculate its age, however, as the pupil is asked to do in the Stanza,
> is rather difficult, since we are not given the figures of the Great
> Kalpa, and are not allowed to publish those of our small Yugas, except as
> to the approximate duration of these. “_The older Wheels rotated for one
> Eternity and one‐half of an Eternity_,” it says. We know that by
> “Eternity” the seventh part of 311,040,000,000,000 years, or an Age of
> Brahmâ is meant. But what of that? We also know that, to begin with, if we
> take for our basis the above figures, we have first of all to eliminate
> from the 100 Years of Brahmâ, or 311,040,000,000,000 years, two Years
> taken up by the Sandhyâs (Twilights), which leaves 98, as we have to bring
> it to the mystical combination 14 x 7. But _we_ have no knowledge at what
> time precisely the evolution and formation of our little Earth began.
> Therefore, it is impossible to calculate its age, unless the time of its
> birth is given—which the Teachers refuse to do, so far. At the close of
> this Volume and in Volume II, however, some chronological hints will be
> given. We must remember, moreover, that the law of analogy holds good for
> the worlds, as it does for man; and that as “_The One [Deity] becomes Two
> [Deva or Angel], and Two becomes Three [or Man]_,” etc., so we are taught
> that the Curds (World‐Stuff) become Wanderers (Comets); these become
> stars; and the stars (the centres of vortices), _our sun and planets_—to
> put it briefly. This cannot be so very _unscientific_, since Descartes
> also thought that “the planets rotate on their axes, because they were
> once lucid stars, the centres of vortices.”
> 
> (_b_) There are four grades of Initiation mentioned in exoteric works,
> which are known respectively in Sanskrit as Srotâpanna, Sakridâgâmin,
> Anâgâmin, and Arhan; the Four Paths to Nirvâna, in this our Fourth Round,
> bearing the same appellations. The Arhan, though he can see the Past, the
> Present and the Future, is not yet the highest Initiate; for the Adept
> himself, the _initiated_ candidate, becomes Chelâ (Pupil) to a higher
> Initiate. Three higher grades have still to be conquered by the Arhan who
> would reach the apex of the ladder of Arhatship. There are those who have
> reached it even in this Fifth Race of ours, but the faculties necessary
> for the attainment of these higher grades will be fully developed, in the
> average ascetic, only at the end of this Root‐Race, and in the Sixth and
> Seventh. Thus, there will always be Initiates and the Profane until the
> end of this minor Manvantara, the present Life‐Cycle. The Arhats of the
> “Fire‐Mist,” of the Seventh Rung, are but one remove from the Root‐Base of
> their Hierarchy, the highest on Earth and our Terrestrial Chain. This
> “Root‐Base” has a name which can only be translated into English by
> several compound words—the “Ever‐Living‐Human‐Banyan.” This “Wondrous
> Being” descended from a “high region,” they say, in the early part of the
> Third Age, before the separation of sexes in the Third Race.
> 
> This Third Race is sometimes called collectively the “Sons of Passive
> Yoga,” _i.e._, it was produced unconsciously by the Second Race, which, as
> it was intellectually inactive, is supposed to have been constantly
> plunged in a kind of blank or abstract contemplation, as required by the
> conditions of the Yoga state. In the first or earlier portion of the
> existence of this Third Race, while it was yet in its state of purity, the
> “Sons of Wisdom,” who, as will be seen, incarnated in this Root‐Race,
> produced by Kriyâshakti a progeny, called the “Sons of Ad,” or of the
> “Fire‐Mist,” the “Sons of Will and Yoga,” etc. They were a conscious
> production, as a portion of the Race was already animated with the divine
> spark of spiritual, superior intelligence. This progeny was not a race. It
> was at first a Wondrous Being, called the “Initiator,” and after him a
> group of semi‐divine and semi‐human Beings. “Set apart” in archaic genesis
> for certain purposes, they are those in whom are said to have incarnated
> the highest Dhyânis—“Munis and Rishis from previous Manvantaras”—_to form
> the nursery for future human Adepts_, on this Earth and during the present
> Cycle. These “Sons of Will and Yoga,” born, so to speak, in an immaculate
> way, remained, it is explained, entirely apart from the rest of mankind.
> 
> The “Being” just referred to, who has to remain nameless, is the _Tree_
> from which, in subsequent ages, all the great _historically_ known Sages
> and Hierophants, such as the Rishi Kapila, Hermes, Enoch, Orpheus, etc.,
> have branched off. As objective _man_, he is the mysterious (to the
> profane—the ever invisible, yet ever present) Personage, about whom
> legends are rife in the East, especially among the Occultists and the
> students of the Sacred Science. It is he who changes form, yet remains
> ever the same. And it is he, again, who holds spiritual sway over the
> _initiated_ Adepts throughout the whole world. He is, as said, the
> “Nameless One” who has so many names, and yet whose names and whose very
> nature are unknown. He is _the_ “Initiator,” called the “GREAT SACRIFICE.”
> For, sitting at the Threshold of LIGHT, he looks into it from within the
> Circle of Darkness, which he will not cross; nor will he quit his post
> till the last Day of this Life‐Cycle. Why does the Solitary Watcher remain
> at his self‐chosen post? Why does he sit by the Fountain of Primeval
> Wisdom, of which he drinks no longer, for he has naught to learn which he
> does not know—aye, neither on this Earth, nor in its Heaven? Because the
> lonely, sore‐footed Pilgrims, on their journey back to their Home, are
> never sure, to the last moment, of not losing their way, in this limitless
> desert of Illusion and Matter called Earth‐Life. Because he would fain
> show the way to that region of freedom and light, from which he is a
> voluntary exile himself, to every prisoner who has succeeded in liberating
> himself from the bonds of flesh and illusion. Because, in short, he has
> sacrificed himself for the sake of Mankind, though but a few elect may
> profit by the GREAT SACRIFICE.
> 
> It is under the direct, silent guidance of this _Mahâ‐Guru_ that all the
> other less divine Teachers and Instructors of Mankind became, from the
> first awakening of human consciousness, the guides of early Humanity. It
> is through these “Sons of God” that infant Humanity learned its first
> notions of all the arts and sciences, as well as of spiritual knowledge;
> and it is They who laid the first foundation‐stone of those ancient
> civilizations that so sorely puzzle our modern generation of students and
> scholars.
> 
> Let those who doubt this statement, explain, on any other equally
> reasonable grounds, the mystery of the extraordinary knowledge possessed
> by the Ancients—who, some pretend, developed from lower and animal‐like
> savages, the “cave‐men” of the palæolithic age! Let them turn, for
> instance, to such works as those of Vitruvius Pollio of the Augustan age,
> on architecture, in which all the rules of proportion are those _anciently
> taught at Initiations_, if they would acquaint themselves with this truly
> divine art, and understand the _deep esoteric significance hidden in every
> rule and law of proportion_. No man descended from a palæolithic cave‐
> dweller could ever evolve such a science unaided, even in millenniums of
> thought and intellectual evolution. It is the pupils of those incarnated
> Rishis and Devas of the Third Root Race who handed on their knowledge,
> from one generation to another, to Egypt and to Greece with her now lost
> _canon of proportion_; just as the disciples of the Initiates of the
> Fourth, the Atlanteans, handed it over to their Cyclopes, the “Sons of
> Cycles” or of the “Infinite,” from whom the name passed to the still later
> generations of Gnostic priests.
> 
>     It is owing to the divine perfection of these architectural
>     proportions that the Ancients could build these wonders of all the
>     subsequent ages, their Fanes, Pyramids, Cave‐Temples, Cromlechs,
>     Cairns, Altars, proving they had the powers of machinery and a
>     knowledge of mechanics to which modern skill is like a child’s
>     play, and which that skill refers to itself as the “works of
>     hundred‐handed giants.”(330)
> 
> Modern architects may not have altogether neglected these rules, but they
> have superadded enough empirical innovations to destroy the just
> proportions. It is Vitruvius who gave to posterity the rules of
> construction of the Grecian temples erected to the immortal Gods; and the
> ten books of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio on Architecture, of one, in short,
> _who was an Initiate_, can only be studied esoterically. The Druidical
> Circles, the Dolmens, the Temples of India, Egypt and Greece, the Towers,
> and the 127 towns in Europe which were found “Cyclopean in origin” by the
> French Institute, are all the work of initiated Priest‐Architects, the
> descendants of those first taught by the “Sons of God,” and justly called
> the “Builders.” This is what appreciative posterity says of these
> descendants:
> 
>     They used neither mortar nor cement, nor steel, nor iron to cut
>     the stones with; and yet they were so artificially wrought that in
>     many places the joints are hardly seen, though many of the stones,
>     as in Peru, are 38 feet long, 18 feet broad, and 6 feet thick, and
>     in the walls of the fortress of Cuzco there are stones of a still
>     greater size.(331)
> 
> Again:
> 
>     The well of Syene, made 5,400 years ago, when that spot was
>     exactly under the tropic, which it has now ceased to be, was ...
>     so constructed, that at noon, at the precise moment of the solar
>     solstice, the entire disk of the sun was seen reflected on its
>     surface—a work which the united skill of all the astronomers in
>     Europe would not now be able to effect.(332)
> 
> Although these matters were barely hinted at in _Isis Unveiled_, it will
> be well to remind the reader of what was said there(333) concerning a
> certain Sacred Island in Central Asia, and to refer him for further
> details to the Section, entitled “The Sons of God and the Sacred Island,”
> attached to Stanza IX of Volume II. A few more explanations, however,
> though thrown out in a fragmentary form, may help the student to obtain a
> glimpse into the present mystery.
> 
> To state at least one detail concerning these mysterious “Sons of God” in
> plain words: it is from them, these Brahmaputras, that the high Dvijas,
> the initiated Brâhmans of old, claimed descent, while the modern Brâhman
> would have the lower castes believe literally that they (the Brâhmans)
> issued direct from the mouth of Brahmâ. Such is the Esoteric teaching; and
> it adds moreover that, although those descended (spiritually, of course)
> from the “Sons of Will and Yoga” became in time divided into opposite
> sexes, as their “Kriyâshakti” progenitors did themselves later on; yet
> even their degenerate descendants have, down to the present day, retained
> a veneration and respect for the creative function, and still regard it in
> the light of a religious ceremony, whereas the more civilized nations
> consider it as a mere animal function. Compare the Western views and
> practice in these matters with the Institutions of Manu, in regard to the
> laws of Grihastha, or married life. The true Brâhman is, thus, indeed “he
> whose seven forefathers have drunk the juice of the Moon‐plant (Soma),”
> and who is a “Trisuparna,” for he has understood the secret of the
> _Vedas_.
> 
> And, to this day, such Brâhmans know that, during the early beginnings of
> this Race, psychic and physical intellect being dormant and consciousness
> still undeveloped, its spiritual conceptions were quite unconnected with
> its physical surroundings; that _divine_ man dwelt in his animal—though
> externally human—form; that, if there was instinct in him, no self‐
> consciousness came to enlighten the darkness of the latent Fifth
> Principle. When the Lords of Wisdom, moved by the law of evolution,
> infused into him the spark of consciousness, the first feeling it awoke to
> life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one‐ness with his
> spiritual creators. As the child’s first feeling is for its mother and
> nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in
> primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who
> were yet outside, and independent of him. _Devotion_ arose out of that
> feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature; for it is
> the only one which is natural in his heart, which is innate in him, and
> which we find alike in the human babe and the young of the animal. This
> feeling of irrepressible, instinctive aspiration in primitive man is
> beautifully, and one may say intuitionally, described by Carlyle, who
> exclaims:
> 
>     The great antique heart—how like a child’s in its simplicity, like
>     a man’s in its earnest solemnity and depth! Heaven lies over him
>     wheresoever he goes or stands on the earth; making all the earth a
>     mystic temple to him, the earth’s business all a kind of worship.
>     Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels
>     yet hover, doing God’s messages among men.... Wonder, miracle,
>     encompass the man; he lives in an element of miracle.(334)... A
>     great law of duty, high as these two infinitudes (heaven and
>     hell), dwarfing all else, annihilating all else—it was a reality,
>     and it is one: the garment only of it is dead; the essence of it
>     lives through all times and all eternity!
> 
> It lives undeniably, and has settled in all its ineradicable strength and
> power in the Asiatic Âryan heart, from the Third Race direct, through its
> first Mind‐born Sons, the fruits of Kriyâshakti. As time rolled on, the
> holy caste of Initiates produced, but rarely, from age to age, such
> perfect creatures; beings apart, inwardly, though the same as those who
> produced them, outwardly.
> 
> In the infancy of the Third primitive Race:
> 
>     A creature of a more exalted kind
>     Was wanting yet, and therefore was designed;
>     Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
>     For empire formed and fit to rule the rest.
> 
> It was called into being, a ready and perfect vehicle for the incarnating
> denizens of higher spheres, who took forthwith their abodes in these
> forms, born of _Spiritual Will_ and the natural divine power in man. It
> was a child of pure spirit, mentally unalloyed with any tincture of
> earthly element. Its physical frame alone was of time and of life, for it
> drew its intelligence direct from above. It was the Living Tree of Divine
> Wisdom; and may therefore be likened to the Mundane Tree of the Norse
> Legends, which cannot wither and die until the last battle of life shall
> be fought, while its roots are all the time gnawed by the dragon Nidhogg.
> For even so, the first and holy Son of Kriyâshakti had his body gnawed by
> the tooth of time, but the roots of his inner being remained for ever
> undecaying and strong, because they grew and expanded in heaven, and not
> on earth. He was the first of the _First_, and he was the Seed of all the
> others. There were other Sons of Kriyâshakti produced by a second
> spiritual effort, but the first one has remained to this day the Seed of
> Divine Knowledge, the One and the Supreme among the terrestrial “Sons of
> Wisdom.” Of this subject we can say no more, except to add that in every
> age—aye, even in our own—there have been great intellects who have
> understood the problem correctly.
> 
> But how comes our physical body to the state of perfection it is now found
> in? Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through,
> or from, animals, as taught by Materialism. For, as Carlyle says:
> 
>     ... The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself
>     “I,”—ah, what words have we for such things?—is a breath of
>     Heaven; the Highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these
>     faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for that
>     Unnamed?
> 
> The “breath of Heaven,” or rather the breath of Life, called in the
> _Bible_ Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck and in every
> mineral atom. But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the
> nature of that “Highest Being,”(335) as none has that divine harmony in
> its form, which man possesses. It is, as Novalis said, and no one since
> has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle:
> 
>     There is but one temple in the Universe, and that is the Body of
>     Man. Nothing is holier than that high form.... We touch Heaven
>     when we lay our hand on a human body! This sounds like a mere
>     flourish of rhetoric; but it is not so. If well meditated, it will
>     turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression ... of the actual
>     truth of the thing. _We_ are the miracle of miracles—the great
>     inscrutable Mystery....(336)
> 
> Stanza VII.
> 
> 1. BEHOLD THE BEGINNING OF SENTIENT FORMLESS LIFE (_a_).
> 
> FIRST, THE DIVINE(337) (_b_), THE ONE FROM THE MOTHER‐SPIRIT;(338) THEN,
> THE SPIRITUAL(339) (_c_); (340)THE THREE FROM THE ONE (_d_), THE FOUR FROM
> THE ONE (_e_), AND THE FIVE (_f_), FROM WHICH THE THREE, THE FIVE AND THE
> SEVEN (_g_). THESE ARE THE THREE‐FOLD AND THE FOUR‐FOLD DOWNWARD; THE
> MIND‐BORN SONS OF THE FIRST LORD,(341) THE SHINING SEVEN.(342) IT IS THEY
> WHO ARE THOU, I, HE, O LANOO; THEY WHO WATCH OVER THEE AND THY MOTHER,
> BHÛMI.(343)
> 
> (_a_) The Hierarchy of Creative Powers is divided esoterically into Seven
> (four and three), within the Twelve great Orders, recorded in the twelve
> signs of the Zodiac; the Seven of the manifesting scale being connected,
> moreover, with the Seven Planets. All these are subdivided into numberless
> Groups of divine spiritual, semi‐spiritual, and ethereal Beings.
> 
> The chief Hierarchies among these are hinted at in the great Quaternary,
> or the “four bodies and the three faculties,” exoterically, of Brahmâ and
> the Panchâsya, the five Brahmâs, or the five Dhyâni‐Buddhas in the
> Buddhist system.
> 
> The highest Group is composed of the Divine Flames, so called, also spoken
> of as the “Fiery Lions” and the “Lions of Life,” whose esotericism is
> securely hidden in the zodiacal sign of Leo. It is the _nucleole_ of the
> superior Divine World. They are the Formless Fiery Breaths, identical in
> one aspect with the upper Sephirothal Triad, which is placed by the
> Kabalists in the Archetypal World.
> 
> The same Hierarchy, with the same numbers, is found in the Japanese
> system, in the “Beginnings,” as taught by both the Shinto and the Buddhist
> sects. In this system, Anthropogenesis precedes Cosmogenesis, as the
> divine merges into the human, and creates—midway in its descent into
> matter—the visible Universe; the legendary personages, remarks
> reverentially Omoie, “having to be understood as the stereotyped
> embodiment of the higher [secret] doctrine, and its sublime truths.” To
> state this old system at full length would occupy too much of our space; a
> few words on it, however, cannot be out of place. The following is a short
> synopsis of this Anthropo‐Cosmogenesis, and shows how closely the most
> separated nations echoed one and the same archaic teaching.
> 
> When all was as yet Chaos (Kon‐ton), three spiritual Beings appeared on
> the stage of future creation: (1) Ame no ani naka nushi no Kami, “Divine
> Monarch of the Central Heaven”; (2) Taka mi onosubi no Kami, “Exalted,
> Imperial Divine Offspring of Heaven and Earth”; and (3) Kamu mi musubi no
> Kami, “Offspring of the Gods,” simply.
> 
> These were without form or substance—our Arûpa Triad—as neither the
> celestial nor the terrestrial substance had yet differentiated, “nor had
> the essence of things been formed.”
> 
> (_b_) In the _Zohar_—which, as now arranged and reëdited by Moses de Leon,
> with the help of Syrian and Chaldean Christian Gnostics, in the XIIIth
> century, and corrected and revised still later by many Christian hands, is
> only a little less exoteric than the _Bible_ itself—this “Divine
> [Vehicle]” no longer appears as it does in the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_.
> True enough, Ain Suph, the Absolute Endless No‐thing, uses also the form
> of the One, the manifested “Heavenly Man” (the First Cause), as its
> Chariot (Mercabah, in Hebrew; Vâhana, in Sanskrit) or Vehicle, to descend
> into, and manifest itself in, the phenomenal world. But the Kabalists
> neither make it plain how the Absolute can use anything, or exercise any
> attribute whatever, since, as the Absolute, it is devoid of attributes;
> nor do they explain that in reality it is the First Cause (Plato’s Logos),
> the original and eternal Idea, that manifests through Adam Kadmon, the
> Second Logos, so to speak. In the _Book of Numbers_, it is explained that
> Ain (En, or Aiôr) is the only self‐existent, whereas its “Depth,” the
> Bythos of the Gnostics, called Propatôr, is only periodical. The latter is
> Brahmâ, as differentiated from Brahman or Parabrahman. It is the Depth,
> the Source of Light, or Propatôr, which is the Unmanifested Logos, or the
> abstract Idea, and not Ain Suph, whose Ray uses Adam Kadmon—“male and
> female”—or the Manifested Logos, the objective Universe, as a Chariot,
> through which to manifest. But in the _Zohar_ we read the following
> incongruity: “_Senior occultatus est, et absconditus; Microprosopus
> manifestus est, et non manifestus_.”(344) This is a fallacy, since
> Microprosopus, or the Microcosm, can only exist during its manifestations,
> and is destroyed during the Mahâpralayas. Rosenroth’s _Kabbala_ is no
> guide, but very often a puzzle.
> 
> The _First Order_ are the Divine. As in the Japanese system, in the
> Egyptian, and every old cosmogony—at this divine Flame, the “One,” are lit
> the Three descending Groups. Having their potential being in the higher
> Group, they now become distinct and separate Entities. These are called
> the Virgins of Life, the Great Illusion, etc., etc., and collectively the
> six‐pointed star. The latter, in almost every religion, is the symbol of
> the Logos as the first emanation. It is the sign of Vishnu in India, the
> Chakra, or Wheel; and the glyph of the Tetragrammaton, “He of the Four
> Letters,” in the _Kabalah_, or metaphorically the “Limbs of
> Microprosopus,” which are ten and six respectively.
> 
> The later Kabalists, however, especially the Christian Mystics, have
> played sad havoc with this magnificent symbol. Indeed, the
> Microprosopus—who is, philosophically speaking, quite distinct from the
> unmanifested eternal Logos, “one with the Father”—has finally been
> brought, by centuries of incessant efforts of sophistry and of paradoxes,
> to be considered as one with Jehovah, or the _one_ living God (!), whereas
> Jehovah is no better than Binah, a female Sephira. This fact cannot be too
> frequently impressed upon the reader. For the “Ten Limbs” of the Heavenly
> Man are the ten Sephiroth; but the first Heavenly Man is the unmanifested
> Spirit of the Universe, and ought never to be degraded into Microprosopus,
> the Lesser Face or Countenance, the prototype of man on the terrestrial
> plane. The Microprosopus is, as just said, the Logos manifested, and of
> such there are many. Of this, however, later on. The six‐pointed star
> refers to the six Forces or Powers of Nature, the six planes, principles,
> etc., etc., all synthesized by the seventh, or the central point in the
> star. All these, the upper and lower Hierarchies included, emanate from
> the Heavenly or Celestial Virgin, the Great Mother in all religions, the
> Androgyne, the Sephira Adam Kadmon. Sephira is the Crown, Kether, in the
> abstract principle only, as a mathematical x, the unknown quantity. On the
> plane of differentiated nature, she is the female counterpart of Adam
> Kadmon, the first Androgyne. The _Kabalah_ teaches that the words “_Fiat
> Lux_”(345) referred to the formation and evolution of the Sephiroth, and
> not to light as opposed to darkness. Rabbi Simeon says:
> 
>     O companions, companions, man as an emanation was both man and
>     woman, Adam Kadmon verily, and this is the sense of the words,
>     “Let there be Light, and there was Light.” And this is the two‐
>     fold man.(346)
> 
> In its Unity, Primordial Light is the seventh, or highest, principle,
> Daiviprakriti, the Light of the Unmanifested Logos. But in its
> differentiation, it becomes Fohat, or the “Seven Sons.” The former is
> symbolized by the central point in the Double Triangle; the latter by the
> Hexagon itself, or the “Six Limbs” of Microprosopus, the Seventh being
> Malkuth, the “Bride” of the Christian Kabalists, or our Earth. Hence the
> expressions:
> 
> _The first after the One is Divine Fire; the second, Fire and Ether; the
> third is composed of Fire, Ether and Water; the fourth of Fire, Ether,
> Water, and Air. The One is not concerned with Man‐bearing Globes, but with
> the inner, invisible Spheres. The First‐Born are the_ LIFE, _the Heart and
> Pulse of the Universe; the Second are its_ MIND _or Consciousness_.
> 
> These Elements of Fire, Air, etc., are not our compound elements; and this
> “Consciousness” has no relation to our consciousness. The Consciousness of
> the “One Manifested,” if not absolute, is still unconditioned. Mahat, the
> Universal Mind, is the first production of the Brahmâ‐Creator, but also of
> Pradhâna, Undifferentiated Matter.
> 
> (_c_) The _Second Order_ of Celestial Beings, those of Fire and Ether,
> corresponding to Spirit and Soul, or Âtmâ‐Buddhi, whose names are legion,
> are still formless, but more definitely “substantial.” They are the first
> differentiation in the Secondary Evolution or “Creation”—a misleading
> word. As the name shows, they are the Prototypes of the incarnating Jîvas
> or Monads, and are composed of the Fiery Spirit of Life. It is through
> these that passes, like a pure solar beam, the Ray which is furnished by
> them with its future Vehicle, the Divine Soul, Buddhi. These are directly
> concerned with the Hosts of the higher World of _our_ System. From these
> Two‐fold Units emanate the “Three‐fold.”
> 
> In the cosmogony of Japan, when, out of the chaotic mass, an egg‐like
> nucleus appears, having within itself the germ and potency of all
> universal as well as of all terrestrial life, it is the Three‐fold just
> named, which differentiate. The male ethereal principle (Yo) ascends, and
> the female grosser or more material principle (In) is precipitated into
> the universe of substance, when a separation occurs between the celestial
> and the terrestrial. From this, the female, the Mother, the first
> rudimentary objective being is born. It is ethereal, without form or sex,
> and yet it is from it and the Mother that the Seven Divine Spirits are
> born, from whom will emanate the seven “creations”; just as in the _Codex
> Nazaræus_ from Karabtanos and the Mother Spiritus the seven “evilly
> disposed” (material) spirits are born. It would be too long to give here
> the Japanese names, but in translation they stand in this order:
> 
> (1.) The “Invisible Celibate,” which is the Creative Logos of the non‐
> creating “Father,” or the creative potentiality of the latter made
> manifest.
> 
> (2.) The “Spirit [or God] of the rayless Depths [Chaos],” which becomes
> differentiated matter, or the world‐stuff; also the mineral realm.
> 
> (3.) The “Spirit of the Vegetable Kingdom,” of the “Abundant Vegetation.”
> 
> (4.) The “Spirit of the Earth” and “the Spirit of the Sands”; a Being of
> dual nature, the former containing the potentiality of the male element,
> the latter that of the female element. These two were one, as yet
> unconscious of being two.
> 
> In this duality were contained (_a_) Isu no gai no Kami, the male, dark
> and muscular Being; and (_b_) Eku gai no Kami, the female, fair and weaker
> or more delicate Being. Then:
> 
> (5 and 6.) The Spirits who were androgynous or dual‐sexed.
> 
> (7.) The Seventh Spirit, the last emanated from the “Mother,” appears as
> the first divine human form distinctly male and female. It was the seventh
> “creation,” as in the _Purânas_, wherein man is the seventh creation of
> Brahmâ.
> 
> These, Tsanagi‐Tsanami, descended into the Universe by the Celestial
> Bridge, the Milky Way, and “Tsanagi, perceiving far below a chaotic mass
> of cloud and water, thrust his jewelled spear into the depths, and dry
> land appeared. Then the two separated to explore Onokoro, the newly‐
> created island‐world.” (Omoie.)
> 
> Such are the Japanese exoteric fables, the rind that conceals the kernel
> of the same one truth of the Secret Doctrine.
> 
> (_d_) The _Third Order_ correspond to Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas, Spirit, Soul and
> Intellect; and are called the “Triads.”
> 
> (_e_) The _Fourth Order_ are substantial Entities. This is the highest
> Group among the Rûpas (Atomic Forms). It is the nursery of the human,
> conscious, spiritual Souls. They are called the “Imperishable Jîvas,” and
> constitute, through the Order below their own, the first Group of the
> first Septenary Host—the great mystery of human, conscious and
> intellectual Being. For the latter is the field wherein lies concealed,
> _in its privation_, the Germ that will _fall into generation_. That Germ
> will become the spiritual potency in the physical cell, that guides the
> development of the embryo, and that is the cause of the hereditary
> transmission of faculties, and all the inherent qualities in man. The
> Darwinian theory, however, of the transmission of acquired faculties is
> neither taught nor accepted in Occultism. Evolution, in the latter,
> proceeds on quite other lines; the physical, according to Esoteric
> teaching, evolving gradually from the spiritual, mental, and psychic. This
> inner soul of the physical cell—the “spiritual plasm” that dominates the
> germinal plasm—is the key that must open one day the gates of the _terra
> incognita_ of the Biologist, now called the dark mystery of Embryology. It
> is worthy of notice that Modern Chemistry, while rejecting, as a
> superstition of Occultism and Religion as well, the theory of substantial
> and invisible Beings, called Angels, Elementals, etc.—without, of course,
> having ever looked into the philosophy of these incorporeal Entities, or
> thought over them—should, owing to observation and discovery, have been
> unconsciously forced to recognize and adopt the same ratio of progression
> and order, in the evolution of chemical atoms, as Occultism does for both
> its Dhyânis and Atoms—analogy being its first law. As seen above, the very
> first Group of the Rûpa Angels is quaternary, an element being added to
> each in descending order. So also are the atoms, in the phraseology of
> Chemistry, monatomic, diatomic, triatomic, tetratomic, etc., progressing
> downwards.
> 
> Let it be remembered that the Fire, Water, and Air of Occultism, or the
> “Elements of Primary Creation” so‐called, are not the compound elements
> they are on earth, but noumenal homogeneous Elements—the Spirits of the
> former. Then follow the Septenary Groups or Hosts. Placed on parallel
> lines with the atoms in a diagram, the natures of these Beings would be
> seen to correspond, in their downward scale of progression, to composite
> elements in a mathematically identical manner as to analogy. This refers,
> of course, only to diagrams made by Occultists; for were the scale of
> Angelic Beings to be placed on parallel lines with the scale of the
> chemical atoms of Science—from the hypothetical Helium down to
> Uranium—they would of course be found to differ. For the latter have, as
> correspondents on the Astral Plane, only the four lowest orders—the three
> higher principles in the atom, or rather molecule, or chemical element,
> being perceptible to the initiated Dangma’s eye alone. But then, if
> Chemistry desired to find itself on the right path, it would have to
> correct its tabular arrangement by that of the Occultists—which it might
> refuse to do. In Esoteric Philosophy, every physical particle corresponds
> to, and depends on, its higher noumenon—the Being to whose essence it
> belongs; and, above as below, the Spiritual evolves from the Divine, the
> Psycho‐mental from the Spiritual—tainted from its lower plane by the
> Astral—the whole animate and (seemingly) inanimate Nature evolving on
> parallel lines, and drawing its attributes from above as well as below.
> 
> The number seven, as applied to the term Septenary Host, above mentioned,
> does not imply only seven Entities, but seven Groups or Hosts, as
> explained before. The highest Group, the Asuras born in Brahmâ’s first
> body, which turned into “Night,” are septenary, _i.e._, divided like the
> Pitris into seven Classes, three of which are bodiless (arûpa) and four
> with bodies.(347) They are in fact more truly our Pitris (Ancestors) than
> the Pitris who projected the first physical man.
> 
> (_f_) The _Fifth Order_ is a very mysterious one, as it is connected with
> the microcosmic pentagon, the five‐pointed star, representing man. In
> India and Egypt, these Dhyânis were connected with the Crocodile, and
> their abode is in Capricornus. But these are convertible terms in Indian
> Astrology, for the tenth sign of the Zodiac, which is called Makara, is
> loosely translated “Crocodile.” The word itself is occultly interpreted in
> various ways, as will be shown further on. In Egypt, the Defunct—whose
> symbol is the pentagram, or the five‐pointed star, the points of which
> represent the limbs of a man—was shown emblematically transformed into a
> crocodile. Sebekh, or Sevekh (or “Seventh”), as Mr. Gerald Massey says,
> showing it to be the type of intelligence, is a dragon in reality, not a
> crocodile. He is the “Dragon of Wisdom,” or Manas, the Human Soul, Mind,
> the Intelligent Principle, called in our Esoteric Philosophy the _Fifth_
> Principle.
> 
> Says the defunct “Osirified,” in the _Book of the Dead_, or _Ritual_,
> under the glyph of a mummiform God with a crocodile’s head:
> 
>     I am the crocodile presiding at the fear, I am the God‐crocodile,
>     at the arrival of his Soul among men. I am the God‐crocodile
>     brought for destruction.
> 
> An allusion to the destruction of divine spiritual purity when man
> acquires the knowledge of good and evil; also to the “fallen” Gods, or
> Angels of every theogony.
> 
>     I am the fish of the great Horus. [As Makara is the “Crocodile,”
>     the Vehicle of Varuna.] I am merged in Sekhem.(348)
> 
> This last sentence gives the corroboration, and repeats the doctrine of
> esoteric “Buddhism,” for it alludes directly to the Fifth Principle
> (Manas), or the most spiritual part of its essence rather, which merges
> into, is absorbed by, and made one with Âtmâ‐Buddhi, after the death of
> man. For Sekhem is the residence, or Loka, of the God Khem (Horus‐Osiris,
> or Father and Son); hence the Devachan of Âtmâ‐Buddhi. In the _Book of the
> Dead_, the Defunct is shown entering into Sekhem, with Horus‐Thot, and
> “emerging from it as pure spirit.” Thus the Defunct says:
> 
>     I see the forms of [myself, as various] men transforming
>     eternally.... I know this [chapter]. He who knows it ... takes all
>     kinds of living forms.(349)
> 
> And addressing in magic formula that which is called, in Egyptian
> Esotericism, the “ancestral heart,” or the reïncarnating principle, the
> permanent Ego, the Defunct says:
> 
>     O my heart, my ancestral heart, necessary for my transformations,
>     ... do not separate thyself from me before the guardian of the
>     scales. Thou art my personality within my breast, divine companion
>     _watching over my fleshes_ [bodies].(350)
> 
> It is in Sekhem that lies concealed the “Mysterious Face,” or the real Man
> concealed under the false personality, the triple‐crocodile of Egypt, the
> symbol of the higher Trinity, or human Triad, Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas.
> 
> One of the explanations of the real though hidden meaning of this Egyptian
> religious glyph is easy. The crocodile is the first to await and meet the
> devouring fires of the morning sun, and very soon came to personify the
> solar heat. When the sun arose, it was like the arrival on earth, and
> among men, of the “divine soul which informs the Gods.” Hence the strange
> symbolism. The mummy donned the head of a crocodile to show that it was a
> Soul arriving from the earth.
> 
> In all the ancient papyri, the crocodile is called Sebekh (Seventh); water
> also symbolizes the fifth principle esoterically; and, as already stated,
> Mr. Gerald Massey shows that the crocodile was the “seventh Soul, the
> supreme one of seven—the Seer unseen.” Even exoterically Sekhem is the
> residence of the God Khem, and Khem is Horus avenging the death of his
> father Osiris, hence punishing the sins of man, when he becomes a
> disembodied Soul. Thus the defunct Osirified became the God Khem, who
> “gleans the field of Aanroo”; that is, he gleans either his reward or
> punishment, for that field is the celestial locality (Devachan), where the
> Defunct is given _wheat_, the food of divine justice. The Fifth Group of
> Celestial Beings is supposed to contain in itself the dual attributes of
> both the spiritual and physical aspects of the Universe; the two poles, so
> to say, of Mahat, the Universal Intelligence, and the dual nature of man,
> the spiritual and the physical. Hence its number Five, doubled and made
> into Ten, connecting it with Makara, the tenth sign of the Zodiac.
> 
> (_g_) The _Sixth_ and _Seventh Orders_ partake of the lower qualities of
> the Quaternary. They are conscious ethereal Entities, as invisible as
> Ether, which are shot out, like the boughs of a tree, from the first
> central Group of the Four, and shoot out in their turn numberless side
> Groups, the lower of which are the Nature‐Spirits, or Elementals, of
> countless kinds and varieties; from the formless and unsubstantial—the
> ideal Thoughts of their creators—down to atomic, though, to human
> perception, invisible organisms. The latter are considered as the “spirits
> of atoms,” for they are the first remove (backwards) from the physical
> atom—sentient, if not intelligent creatures. They are all subject to
> Karma, and have to work it out through every cycle. For, as the Doctrine
> teaches, there are no such privileged Beings in the Universe, whether in
> our own or in other Systems, in the outer or the inner Worlds,(351) as the
> Angels of the Western Religion and the Judean. A Dhyân Chohan has to
> become one; he cannot be born or appear suddenly on the plane of life as a
> full‐blown Angel. The Celestial Hierarchy of the present Manvantara will
> find itself transferred, in the next Circle of Life, into higher superior
> Worlds, and will make room for a new Hierarchy, composed of the elect ones
> of our mankind. Being is an endless cycle within the One Absolute
> Eternity, wherein move numberless inner cycles finite and conditioned.
> Gods, created as such, would evince no personal merit in being Gods. Such
> a class of Beings—perfect only by virtue of the special immaculate nature
> inherent in them—in the face of suffering and struggling humanity, and
> even of the lower creation, would be the symbol of an eternal injustice
> quite Satanic in character, an ever present crime. It is an anomaly and an
> impossibility in Nature. Therefore the “Four” and the “Three” have to
> incarnate as all other beings have. This Sixth Group, moreover, remains
> almost inseparable from man, who draws from it all but his highest and
> lowest principles, or his spirit and body; the five middle human
> principles being the very essence of those Dhyânis. Paracelsus calls them
> the Flagæ; the Christians, the Guardian Angels; the Occultists, the
> Ancestors, the Pitris. They are the Six‐fold Dhyân Chohans, having the six
> spiritual Elements in the composition of their bodies—in fact, men, minus
> the physical body.
> 
> Alone, the Divine Ray, the Âtman, proceeds directly from the One. When
> asked how this can be? How is it possible to conceive that these “Gods,”
> or Angels, can be at the same time their own emanations and their personal
> selves? Is it in the same sense as in the material world, where the son
> is, in one way, his father, being his blood, the bone of his bone and the
> flesh of his flesh? To this the Teachers answer: Verily it is so. But one
> has to go deep into the mystery of Being, before one can fully comprehend
> this truth.
> 
> 2. THE ONE RAY MULTIPLIES THE SMALLER RAYS. LIFE PRECEDES FORM, AND LIFE
> SURVIVES THE LAST ATOM.(352) THROUGH THE COUNTLESS RAYS THE LIFE‐RAY, THE
> ONE, LIKE A THREAD THROUGH MANY BEADS.(353)
> 
> This shloka expresses the conception—a purely Vedântic one, as already
> explained elsewhere—of a Life‐Thread, Sûtrâtmâ, running through successive
> generations. How, then, can this be explained? By resorting to a simile,
> to a familiar illustration, though necessarily imperfect, as all our
> available analogies must be. Before resorting to it, however, I would ask,
> whether it seems unnatural, least of all “supernatural,” to any one of us,
> when we consider the process of the growth and development of a fœtus into
> a healthy baby weighing several pounds? Evolving from what? From the
> segmentation of an infinitesimally small ovum and a spermatozoön! And
> afterwards we see the baby develop into a six‐foot man! This refers to the
> atomic and physical expansion, from the microscopically small into
> something exceedingly large; from the unseen, to the naked eye, into the
> visible and objective. Science has provided for all this; and, I dare say,
> her theories, embryological, biological and physiological, are correct
> enough, so far as exact observation of the material goes. Nevertheless,
> the two chief difficulties of the science of Embryology—namely, what are
> the forces at work in the formation of the fœtus, and the _cause_ of
> “hereditary transmission” of likeness, physical, moral or mental—have
> never been properly answered; nor will they ever be solved, till the day
> when Scientists condescend to accept the Occult theories. But if this
> physical phenomenon astonishes no one, except in so far as it puzzles the
> Embryologists, why should our intellectual and inner growth, the evolution
> of the Human‐Spiritual to the Divine‐Spiritual, be regarded as, or seem,
> more impossible than the other?
> 
> The Materialists and the Evolutionists of the Darwinian school would be
> ill‐advised to accept the newly worked‐out theories of Professor
> Weissmann, the author of _Beiträge zur Descendenzlehre_, with regard to
> one of the two mysteries of Embryology, as above specified, which he seems
> to think he has solved; for, when it is fully solved, Science will have
> stepped into the domain of the truly Occult, and passed for ever out of
> the realm of transformation, as taught by Darwin. The two theories are
> irreconcilable, from the standpoint of Materialism. Regarded from that of
> the Occultists, however, the new theory solves all these mysteries. Those
> who are not acquainted with the discovery of Professor Weissmann—at one
> time a fervent Darwinist—ought to hasten to repair the deficiency. The
> German embryologist‐philosopher—stepping over the heads of the Greek
> Hippocrates and Aristotle, right back into the teachings of the old
> Âryans—shows one infinitesimal cell, out of millions of others at work in
> the formation of an organism, alone and unaided determining, by means of
> constant segmentation and multiplication, the correct image of the future
> man, or animal, in its physical, mental and psychic characteristics. It is
> this cell which impresses on the face and form of the new individual the
> features of the parents, or of some distant ancestor; it is this cell,
> again, which transmits to him the intellectual and mental idiosyncracies
> of his sires, and so on. This Plasm is the immortal portion of our bodies,
> developing by means of a process of successive assimilations. Darwin’s
> theory, viewing the embryological cell as the essence or extract from all
> other cells, is set aside; it is incapable of accounting for hereditary
> transmission. There are but two ways of explaining the mystery of
> heredity: either the substance of the germinal cell is endowed with the
> faculty of crossing the whole cycle of transformations that lead to the
> construction of a separate organism, and then to the reproduction of
> identical germinal cells; or, _these germinal cells do not have their
> genesis at all in the body of the individual, but proceed directly from
> the ancestral germinal cell passed from father to son through long
> generations_. It is the latter hypothesis that Weissmann has adopted and
> worked upon, and it is to this cell that he traces the immortal portion of
> man. So far, so good; and when this almost correct theory is accepted, how
> will Biologists explain the first appearance of this everlasting cell?
> Unless man “grew” like the immortal “Topsy,” and was not born at all, but
> fell from the clouds, how was that embryological cell generated in him?
> 
> Complete the Physical Plasm, mentioned above, the “Germinal Cell” of man
> with all its material potentialities, with the “Spiritual Plasm,” so to
> say, or the fluid that contains the five lower principles of the Six‐
> principled Dhyâni—and you have the secret, if you are spiritual enough to
> understand it.
> 
> Now to the promised simile.
> 
> _When the seed of the animal man is cast into the soil of the animal
> woman, that seed cannot germinate unless it has been fructified by the
> five virtues [the fluid of, or the emanation from, the principles] of the
> Six‐fold Heavenly Man. Wherefore the Microcosm is represented as a
> Pentagon, within the Hexagon Star, the Macrocosm._(_354_)
> 
> _The functions of Jiva on this Earth are of a five‐fold character. In the
> mineral atom, it is connected with the lowest principles of the Spirits of
> the Earth (the Six‐fold Dhyânis); in the vegetable particle, with their __
> second—the Prâna (Life); in the animal, with all these plus the third and
> the fourth; in man, the germ must receive the fruitage of all the five.
> Otherwise he will be born no higher than an animal_.(355)
> 
> Thus in man alone the Jîva is complete. As to his seventh principle, it is
> but one of the Beams of the Universal Sun, for each rational creature
> receives the temporary loan only of that which has to return to its
> source. As to his physical body, it is shaped by the lowest terrestrial
> Lives, through physical, chemical and physiological evolution; “the
> Blessed Ones have nought to do with the purgations of matter,” says the
> Kabalah in the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_.
> 
> It comes to this: Mankind, in its first prototypal, shadowy form, is the
> offspring of the Elohim of Life, or Pitris; in its qualitative and
> physical aspect, it is the direct progeny of the “Ancestors,” the lowest
> Dhyânis, or Spirits of the Earth; for its moral, psychic and spiritual
> nature, it is indebted to a Group of divine Beings, the name and
> characteristics of which will be given in Volume II. Collectively, men are
> the handiwork of Hosts of various Spirits; distributively, the tabernacles
> of those Hosts; and occasionally and individually, the vehicles of some of
> them. In our present all‐material Fifth Race, the earthly Spirit of the
> Fourth is still strong in us; but we are approaching the time when the
> pendulum of evolution will direct its swing decidedly upwards, bringing
> Humanity back on a parallel line with the primitive Third Root‐Race in
> spirituality. During its childhood, mankind was wholly composed of that
> Angelic Host, who were the indwelling Spirits that animated the monstrous
> and gigantic tabernacles of clay of the Fourth Race, built by and composed
> of countless myriads of Lives, as our bodies are also now. This sentence
> will be explained later on in the present Commentary. Science, dimly
> perceiving the truth, may find bacteria and other infinitesimals in the
> human body, and see in them only occasional and abnormal visitors, to
> which diseases are attributed. Occultism—which discerns a Life in every
> atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or
> water—affirms that our whole body is built of such Lives; the smallest
> bacterium under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an
> elephant to the tiniest infusoria.
> 
> The “tabernacles” mentioned above have improved in texture and symmetry of
> form, growing and developing with the Globe that bears them; but the
> physical improvement has taken place at the expense of the spiritual Inner
> Man and of Nature. The three middle principles, in earth and man, became
> with every Race more material; the Soul stepping back to make room for the
> Physical Intellect; the essence of the Elements becoming the material and
> composite elements now known.
> 
> Man is not, nor could he ever be, the complete product of the “Lord God”;
> but he _is_ the child of the Elohim, so arbitrarily changed into the
> singular number and masculine gender. The first Dhyânis, commissioned to
> “create” man in their image, could only throw off their Shadows, as a
> delicate model for the Nature Spirits of matter to work upon. Man is,
> beyond any doubt, formed physically out of the dust of the Earth, but his
> creators and fashioners were many. Nor can it be said that the “Lord God
> breathed into his nostrils the Breath of Life,” unless that God is
> identified with the “One Life,” omnipresent though invisible, and unless
> the same operation is attributed to “God” on behalf of every “Living
> Soul,” which is the _Vital_ Soul (Nephesh), and not the Divine Spirit
> (Ruach) which ensures to man alone a divine degree of immortality, that no
> animal, as such, could ever attain in this cycle of incarnation. It is
> owing to the inadequate distinctions made by the Jews, and now by our
> Western metaphysicians, who are unable to understand, and hence to accept,
> more than a triune man—Spirit, Soul, Body—that the “Breath of Life” has
> been confused with the immortal “Spirit.” This applies also directly to
> the Protestant theologians, who in translating a certain verse in the
> Fourth Gospel(356) have entirely perverted its meaning. This
> mistranslation runs, “the _wind_ bloweth where it listeth,” instead of
> “the _spirit_ goeth where it willeth,” as in the original, and also in the
> translation of the Greek Eastern Church.
> 
> The learned and very philosophical author of _New Aspects of Life_ would
> impress upon his reader that the Nephesh Chiah (Living Soul), according to
> the Hebrews:
> 
>     Proceeded from, or was produced by, the infusion of the Spirit or
>     Breath of Life into the quickening body of man, and was to
>     supersede and take the place of that Spirit in the thus
>     constituted Self, so that the Spirit passed into, was lost sight
>     of, and disappeared in the Living Soul.
> 
> The human body, he thinks, ought to be viewed as a matrix in which, and
> from which, the Soul, which he seems to place higher than the Spirit, is
> developed. Considered _functionally_ and from the standpoint of activity,
> the Soul stands undeniably higher, in this finite and conditioned world of
> Mâyâ. The Soul, he says, “is ultimately produced from the animated body of
> man.” Thus the author identifies “Spirit” (Âtmâ) with the “Breath of Life”
> simply. The Eastern Occultists will demur to this statement, for it is
> based on the erroneous conception that Prâna and Âtmâ, or Jîvâtmâ, are one
> and the same thing. The author supports the argument, by showing that with
> the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and even Latins, Ruach, Pneuma and Spiritus
> meant Wind—with the Jews undeniably, and with the Greeks and Romans very
> probably; the Greek word Anemos (Wind) and the Latin Animus (Soul) having
> a suspicious relation.
> 
> This is very far fetched. But a legitimate battle‐field for deciding this
> question is hardly to be found, since Dr. Pratt seems to be a practical,
> matter‐of‐fact metaphysician, a kind of Kabalist‐Positivist, whereas the
> Eastern metaphysicians, especially the Vedântins, are all Idealists. The
> Occultists also are of the extreme Esoteric Vedântin school, and though
> they call the One Life (Parabrahman) the Great Breath and the Whirlwind,
> they disconnect the seventh principle entirely from matter, and deny that
> it has any relation to, or connection with it.
> 
> Thus the philosophy of man’s psychic, spiritual and mental relations with
> his physical functions is in almost inextricable confusion. Neither the
> old Âryan nor the Egyptian psychology is now properly understood; nor can
> they be assimilated, without accepting the Esoteric septenary, or, at any
> rate, the Vedântic quinquepartite division of the human inner principles.
> Failing which, it will be for ever impossible to understand the
> metaphysical and purely psychic, and even physiological, relations between
> the Dhyân Chohans, or Angels, on the one plane, and Humanity on the other.
> No Eastern (Âryan) Esoteric works are so far published, but we possess the
> Egyptian papyri, which speak clearly of the seven principles, or the
> “Seven Souls of Man.” The _Book of the Dead_ gives a complete list of the
> “transformations” that every Defunct undergoes, while divesting himself,
> one by one, of all these principles—materialized for the sake of clearness
> into ethereal entities or bodies. We must, moreover, remind those who try
> to show that the Ancient Egyptians did not teach Reïncarnation, that the
> “Soul” (the Ego or Self) of the Defunct is said to be living in Eternity:
> it is immortal, “coëval with, and disappearing with, the Solar Boat,” that
> is, for the Cycle of Necessity. This “Soul” _emerges_ from the Tiaou, the
> Realm of the _Cause of Life_, and joins the living on Earth by _day_, to
> return to Tiaou every _night_. This expresses the periodical existences of
> the Ego.(357)
> 
> The Shadow, the Astral Form, is annihilated, “devoured by the Uræus,”(358)
> the Manes will be annihilated; the two Twins (the Fourth and Fifth
> Principles) will be scattered; but the Soul‐Bird, “the Divine Swallow, and
> the Uræus of Flame” (Manas and Âtmâ‐Buddhi) will live in the eternity, for
> they are their mother’s husbands.
> 
> Another suggestive analogy between the Âryan, or Brâhmanical, and the
> Egyptian Esotericism. The former call the Pitris the “Lunar Ancestors” of
> men, and the Egyptians make of the Moon‐God, Taht‐Esmun, the first human
> ancestor.
> 
>     This Moon‐God “expressed the Seven nature‐powers that were prior
>     to himself, and were summed up in him as his seven souls, of which
>     he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. [Hence the eighth
>     sphere.]... The seven rays of the Chaldean ... Heptakis or Iao, on
>     the Gnostic stones, indicate the same septenary of souls.... The
>     first form of the mystical Seven was seen to be figured in heaven,
>     by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation
>     assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven
>     Elemental Powers.”(359)
> 
> As well known to every Hindû, this same constellation represents in India
> the Seven Rishis, and is called Riksha, and Chitrashikandinas.
> 
> Like alone produces like. The Earth gives Man his body, the Gods (Dhyânis)
> give him his five inner principles, the psychic Shadow, of which these
> Gods are often the animating principle. Spirit (Âtman) is one, and
> indiscrete. It is not in the Tiaou.
> 
> For what is the Tiaou? The frequent allusion to it in the _Book of the
> Dead_ contains a mystery. Tiaou is the path of the Night‐Sun, the inferior
> hemisphere, or the infernal region of the Egyptians, placed by them on the
> _concealed side of the Moon_. The human being, in their Esotericism, came
> out from the Moon—a triple mystery, astronomical, physiological and
> psychical, at once; he crossed the whole cycle of existence, and then
> returned to his birth‐place, before issuing from it again. Thus the
> Defunct is shown arriving in the West, receiving his judgment before
> Osiris, resurrecting as the God Horus, and circling round the sidereal
> heavens, which is an allegorical assimilation to Ra, the Sun; then having
> crossed the Noot, the Celestial Abyss, returning once more to Tiaou; an
> assimilation to Osiris, who, as the God of life and reproduction, inhabits
> the Moon. Plutarch(360) shows the Egyptians celebrating a festival called
> “The Ingress of Osiris into the Moon.” In the _Ritual_,(361) life is
> promised after death; and the renovation of life is placed under the
> patronage of Osiris‐Lunus, because the Moon was the symbol of life‐
> renewals or reïncarnations, owing to its growth, waning, dying, and
> reäppearance every month. In the _Dankmoe_,(362) it is said: “O Osiris‐
> Lunus, that renews to thee thy renewal.” And Sabekh says to Seti I:(363)
> “Thou renewest thyself as the God Lunus, when a babe.” It is still better
> explained in a Louvre papyrus:(364) “Couplings and conceptions abound when
> he [Osiris‐Lunus] is seen in heaven on that day.” Says Osiris: “O sole
> radiant beam of the Moon! I issue from the circulating multitudes [of
> stars].... Open me the Tiaou, for Osiris N. I will issue by day to do what
> I have to do amongst the living”(365)—_i.e._, to produce conceptions.
> 
> Osiris was “God manifest in generation,” because the ancients knew, far
> better than the moderns, the real occult influences of the lunar body upon
> the mysteries of conception. In the oldest systems we find the Moon always
> male. Thus Soma, with the Hindûs, is a kind of sidereal Don Juan, a
> “King,” and the father, albeit illegitimate, of Budha—Wisdom. This relates
> to Occult Knowledge, a wisdom gathered through a thorough acquaintance
> with lunar mysteries, including those of sexual generation. And later,
> when the Moon became connected with the female Goddesses, with Diana,
> Isis, Artemis, Juno, etc., this connection was also due to a thorough
> knowledge of physiology and female nature, physical as much as psychic.
> 
> If, instead of being taught in Sunday Schools useless lessons from the
> _Bible_, the armies of the ragged and poor were taught Astrology—so far,
> at any rate, as the occult properties of the Moon and its hidden
> influences on generation are concerned—then, there would be little need to
> fear increase of the population, or to resort to the questionable
> literature of the Malthusians for its arrest. For it is the Moon and her
> conjunctions that regulate conceptions, and every Astrologer in India
> knows it. During the previous Races, and at least at the beginning of the
> present one, those who indulged in marital relations during certain lunar
> phases that made those relations sterile, were regarded as sorcerers and
> sinners. But now even these sins of old, which arose from the abuse of
> Occult knowledge, would appear preferable to the crimes of to‐day, which
> are perpetrated because of the complete ignorance of such Occult
> influences.
> 
> But, primarily, the Sun and Moon were the only visible and, by their
> effects, so to say, _tangible_, psychic and physiological deities—the
> Father and the Son—while Space or Air in general, or that expanse of
> heaven called Noot by the Egyptians, was the concealed Spirit or Breath of
> the two. The Father and Son were interchangeable in their functions, and
> worked together harmoniously in their effects upon terrestrial nature and
> humanity; hence they were regarded as _one_, though _two_ as personified
> Entities. They were both males, and both had their distinct though
> collaborative work in the causative generation of humanity. So much from
> the astronomical and cosmic standpoints, viewed and expressed in
> symbolical language, which became in our last races theological and
> dogmatic. But behind this veil of cosmic and astrological symbols, there
> were the occult mysteries of anthropography and the primeval genesis of
> man. And in this, no knowledge of symbols, or even the key to the post‐
> diluvian symbolical language of the Jews, will or can help, save only with
> reference to that which has been laid down in national scriptures for
> exoteric uses; the sum of which, however cleverly veiled, was but the
> smallest portion of the real primitive history of each people, and often,
> moreover, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, related merely to the terrestrial
> human, and not to the divine life of that nation. That psychic and
> spiritual element belonged to the MYSTERIES and INITIATION. There were
> things never recorded in scrolls, but which, as in Central Asia, were
> engraved on rocks and in subterranean crypts.
> 
> Nevertheless, there was a time when the whole world was “of one lip and of
> one knowledge,” and man knew more of his origin than he does now; and thus
> knew that the Sun and Moon, however large a part they may play in the
> constitution, growth and development of the human body, were not the
> direct causative agents of his appearance on Earth; for these agents, in
> truth, are the living and intelligent Powers which the Occultists call
> Dhyân Chohans.
> 
> As to this, a very learned admirer of the Jewish Esotericism tells us
> that:
> 
>     The _Kabalah_ says expressly that Elohim is a “general
>     abstraction”; what we call in mathematics “a constant
>     coëfficient,” or a “general function,” entering into all
>     construction, not particular; that is, by the general ratio 1 to
>     31415, the [Astro‐Dhyânic and] Elohistic figures.
> 
> To this the Eastern Occultist replies: Quite so; they are an abstraction
> to our physical senses. To our spiritual perceptions, however, and to our
> inner spiritual eye, the Elohim, or Dhyânis, are no more an abstraction
> than our soul and spirit are to us. Reject the one and you reject the
> other, since that which is the _surviving_ Entity _in us_, is partly the
> direct emanation from, and partly those celestial Entities _themselves_.
> One thing is certain; the Jews were perfectly acquainted with sorcery and
> various maleficent forces: but, with the exception of some of their great
> prophets and seers like Daniel and Ezekiel—Enoch belonging to a far
> distant race, as a generic character, and not to any nation but to
> all—they knew little of, nor would they deal with, the real divine
> Occultism; their national character being averse to anything which had no
> direct bearing upon their own ethnical, tribal and individual
> benefits—witness their own prophets, and the curses thundered by them
> against the “stiff‐necked race.” But even the _Kabalah_ plainly shows the
> direct relation between the Sephiroth, or Elohim, and men.
> 
> Therefore, when it is proved to us that the Kabalistic identification of
> Jehovah with Binah, a female Sephira, has still another, a sub‐occult,
> meaning in it, then and then only will Occultists be ready to pass the
> palm of perfection to the Kabalist. Until then, it is asserted that, as
> Jehovah, in the abstract sense of a “one living God,” is a single number,
> a metaphysical figment, and a reality only when put in his proper place as
> an emanation and a Sephira—we have a right to maintain that the _Zohar_,
> as witnessed by the _Book of Numbers_, at any rate, gave out originally,
> before the Christian Kabalists had disfigured it, and still gives out, the
> same doctrine that we do; that is, it makes Man emanate, not from one
> Celestial Man, but from a Septenary Group of Celestial Men, or Angels,
> just as in _Pymander, the Thought Divine_.
> 
> 3. WHEN THE ONE BECOMES TWO, THE THREE‐FOLD APPEARS (_a_). THE THREE
> ARE(366) ONE; AND IT IS OUR THREAD, O LANOO, THE HEART OF THE MAN‐PLANT,
> CALLED SAPTAPARNA (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) “When the One becomes Two, the Three‐fold appears”: to wit, when the
> One Eternal drops its reflection into the region of Manifestation, that
> reflection, the Ray, differentiates the Water of Space; or, in the words
> of the _Book of the Dead_: “Chaos ceases, through the effulgence of the
> Ray of Primordial Light dissipating total darkness, by the help of the
> great magic power of the Word of the [Central] Sun.” Chaos becomes male‐
> female, and Water, incubated by Light, and the Three‐fold Being issues as
> its “First‐born.” “Ra [or Osiris‐Ptah] creates his own Limbs [like
> Brahmâ], by creating the Gods destined to personify his phases,” during
> the Cycle.(367) The Egyptian Ra, issuing from the Deep, is the Divine
> Universal Soul in its manifested aspect, and so is Nârâyana, the Purusha,
> “concealed in Âkâsha, and present in Ether.”
> 
> This is the metaphysical explanation, and refers to the very beginning of
> Evolution, or, as we would rather say, of Theogony. The meaning of the
> Stanza, when explained from another standpoint in its reference to the
> mystery of man and his origin, is still more difficult to comprehend. In
> order to form a clear conception of what is meant by the One becoming Two,
> and then being transformed into the Three‐fold, the student has to make
> himself thoroughly acquainted with what we call Rounds. If he refers to
> _Esoteric Buddhism_—the first attempt to sketch out an approximate outline
> of archaic cosmogony—he will find that by a Round is meant the serial
> evolution of nascent material Nature, of the seven Globes of our
> Chain,(368) with their mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; man being
> included in the latter and standing at the head of it, during the whole
> period of a Life‐Cycle, which latter would be called by the Brâhmans a
> “Day of Brahmâ.” It is, in short, one revolution of the “Wheel” (our
> Planetary Chain), which is composed of seven Globes, or seven separate
> “Wheels,” in another sense this time. When evolution has run downward into
> matter from Globe A to Globe G, it is one Round. In the middle of the
> fourth revolution, which is our present Round, “Evolution has reached its
> acme of physical development, crowned its work with the perfect physical
> man, and, from this point, begins its work spirit‐ward.” All this needs
> little repetition, as it is well explained in _Esoteric Buddhism_. That
> which was hardly touched upon, however, and of which the little that was
> said has misled many, is the origin of man, and it is upon this that a
> little more light may now be thrown, just enough to make the Stanza more
> comprehensible, as the process will be fully explained only in its
> legitimate place, in Volume II.
> 
> Now every Round, on the descending scale, is but a repetition in a more
> concrete form of the Round which preceded it, just as every Globe, down to
> our Fourth Sphere the actual Earth, is a grosser and more material copy of
> the more shadowy Sphere which precedes it, each in order, on the three
> higher planes.(369) On its way upwards, on the ascending arc, Evolution
> spiritualizes and etherealizes, so to speak, the general nature of all,
> bringing it on to a level with the plane on which the twin Globe on the
> opposite arc is placed; the result being, that when the seventh Globe is
> reached, in whatever Round, the nature of everything that is evolving
> returns to the condition it was in at its starting point—_plus_, every
> time, a new and superior degree in the states of consciousness. Thus it
> becomes clear that the “origin of man,” so‐called, in this our present
> Round, or Life‐Cycle, on this Planet, must occupy the same place in the
> same order—save details based on local conditions and time—as in the
> preceding Round. Again, it must be explained and remembered that, as the
> work of each Round is said to be apportioned to a different Group of so‐
> called Creators, or Architects, so is that of every Globe; that is, it is
> under the supervision and guidance of special Builders and Watchers—the
> various Dhyân Chohans.
> 
> “Creators” is an incorrect word to use, as no other religion, not even the
> sect of the Visishthadvaitîs in India, one which anthropomorphizes even
> Parabrahman, believes in creation _ex nihilo_, as Christians and Jews do,
> but only in evolution out of preëxisting materials.
> 
> The Group of the Hierarchy which is commissioned to “create” men is a
> special Group, then; yet it evolved shadowy man in this Cycle, just as a
> higher and still more spiritual Group evolved him in the Third Round. But
> as it is the Sixth, on the downward scale of Spirituality—the last and
> Seventh being the Terrestrial Spirits (Elementals), which gradually form,
> build and condense his physical body—this Sixth Group evolves no more than
> the future man’s shadowy form, a filmy, hardly visible, transparent copy
> of themselves. It becomes the task of the Fifth Hierarchy—the mysterious
> Beings that preside over the constellation Capricornus, Makara, or
> “Crocodile,” in India and in Egypt—to inform the empty and ethereal animal
> form, and make of it the Rational Man. This is one of those subjects upon
> which very little may be said to the general public. It is a Mystery
> truly, but only to him who is prepared to reject the existence of
> intellectual and conscious Spiritual Beings in the Universe, and to limit
> full Consciousness to man alone, and that only as a “function of the
> brain.” Many are those among the Spiritual Entities, who have incarnated
> bodily in man, since his first appearance, and who, for all that, still
> exist as independently as they did before, in the infinitudes of Space.
> 
> To put it more clearly, such an invisible Entity may be bodily present on
> earth without, however, abandoning its status and functions in the
> supersensuous regions. If this needs explanation, we can do no better than
> remind the reader of like cases in so‐called “Spiritualism”; though such
> cases are very rare, at least as regards the nature of the Entity
> incarnating, or taking temporary possession of a medium. For the so‐called
> “spirits” that may occasionally possess themselves of the bodies of
> mediums are not the Monads, or Higher Principles, of disembodied
> Personalities. Such “spirits” can only be either Elementaries,
> or—Nirmânakâyas. Just as certain persons, whether by virtue of a peculiar
> organization, or through the power of acquired mystic knowledge, can be
> seen in their “double” in one place, while their body is many miles away;
> so the same thing can occur in the case of superior Beings.
> 
> Man, philosophically considered, is, in his outward form, simply an
> animal, hardly more perfect than his pithecoid‐like ancestor of the Third
> Round. He is a living Body, not a living Being, since the realization of
> existence, the “_Ego Sum_,” necessitates self‐consciousness, and an animal
> can only have direct consciousness, or instinct. This was so well
> understood by the ancients, that even the Kabalists made of soul and body
> two Lives, independent of each other. In the _New Aspects of Life_, the
> author states the Kabalistic teaching:
> 
>     They held that, functionally, Spirit and Matter, of corresponding
>     opacity and density, tended to coalesce; and that the resultant
>     created Spirits, in the disembodied state, were constituted on a
>     scale in which the differing opacities and transparencies of
>     elemental or uncreated Spirit were reproduced. And that these
>     Spirits, in the disembodied state, attracted, appropriated,
>     digested and assimilated elemental Spirit and elemental Matter
>     whose condition was conformed to their own.... They therefore
>     taught that there was a wide difference in the conditions of
>     created Spirits; and that, in the intimate association between the
>     Spirit‐world and the world of Matter, the more opaque Spirits, in
>     the disembodied state, were drawn towards the more dense parts of
>     the material world, and therefore tended towards the centre of the
>     Earth, where they found the conditions most suited to their state;
>     while the more transparent Spirits passed into the surrounding
>     aura of the planet, the most rarefied finding their home in its
>     satellite.(370)
> 
> This relates exclusively to our Elemental Spirits, and has naught to do
> with either the Planetary, Sidereal, Cosmic or Inter‐Etheric Intelligent
> Forces, or “Angels” as they are termed by the Roman Church. The Jewish
> Kabalists, especially the practical Occultists who dealt with Ceremonial
> Magic, busied themselves solely with the Spirits of the Planets and the
> “Elementals” so‐called. Therefore the above covers only a portion of the
> Esoteric teaching.
> 
> The Soul, whose body‐vehicle is the astral, ethereo‐substantial envelope,
> could die and man be still living on earth. That is to say, the Soul could
> free itself from and quit the tabernacle for various reasons, such as
> insanity, spiritual and physical depravity, etc. The possibility of the
> “Soul”—that is, the eternal Spiritual Ego—dwelling in the unseen worlds,
> while its body goes on living on Earth, is a preeminently Occult doctrine,
> especially in Chinese and Buddhist philosophy. Many are the _soulless_ men
> among us, for the occurrence is found to take place in wicked materialists
> as well as in persons “who advance in holiness and never turn back.”
> 
> Therefore, that which living men (Initiates) can do, the Dhyânis, who have
> no physical body to hamper them, can do still better. This was the belief
> of the antediluvians, and it is fast becoming that of modern intellectual
> society in “Spiritualism,” as well as in the Greek and Roman Churches,
> which teach the ubiquity of their Angels. The Zoroastrians regarded their
> Amshaspends as dual entities (Ferouers), applying this duality—in Esoteric
> philosophy, at any rate—to all the spiritual and invisible denizens of the
> numberless worlds in space, which are visible to our eye. In a note of
> Damascius (sixth century) on the Chaldean Oracles, we have ample evidence
> of the universality of this doctrine, for he says: “In these Oracles, the
> seven Cosmocratores of the World [‘the World‐Pillars’], mentioned likewise
> by St. Paul, are double; one set being commissioned to rule the superior
> worlds, the spiritual and the sidereal, and the other to guide and watch
> over the worlds of matter.” Such is also the opinion of Jamblichus, who
> makes an evident distinction between the Archangels and the
> Archontes.(371)
> 
> The above may be applied, of course, to the distinction made between the
> degrees or orders of Spiritual Beings, and it is in this sense that the
> Roman Catholic Church tries to interpret and teach the difference; for
> while the Archangels are in her teaching divine and holy, she denounces
> their “Doubles” as Devils. But the word Ferouer is not to be understood in
> this sense, for it means simply the reverse or the opposite side of some
> attribute or quality. Thus when the Occultist says that the “Demon is the
> inverse of God”—evil, the reverse of the medal—he does not mean two
> separate actualities, but two aspects or facets of the same Unity. But the
> best man living, side by side with an Archangel—as described in
> Theology—would appear a fiend. Hence a certain reason in depreciating a
> lower “Double,” immersed far deeper in matter than its original. But still
> there is as little cause to regard them as Devils, and this is precisely
> what the Roman Catholics maintain against all reason and logic.
> 
> This identity between the Spirit and its material “Double”—in man it is
> the reverse—explains still better the confusion, already alluded to in
> this work, in the names and individualities, as well as in the numbers, of
> the Rishis and Prajâpatis; especially of those of the Satya Yuga and the
> Mahâbhâratan Period. It also throws additional light on what the Secret
> Doctrine teaches with regard to the Root‐ and the Seed‐Manus. Not only
> these Progenitors of our mankind, but every human being, we are taught,
> has his prototype in the Spiritual Spheres, which prototype is the highest
> essence of his Seventh Principle. Thus the seven Manus become fourteen,
> the Root‐Manu being the Prime Cause, and the Seed‐Manu its Effect; and
> from the Satya Yuga (the first stage) to the Heroic Period, these Manus or
> Rishis become twenty‐one in number.
> 
> (_b_) The concluding sentence of this shloka shows how archaic is the
> belief and the doctrine that man is seven‐fold in his constitution. The
> “Thread” of Being, which animates man, and passes through all his
> Personalities, or Rebirths on this Earth—an allusion to Sûtrâtmâ—the
> Thread on which moreover all his “Spirits” are strung, is spun from the
> essence of the Three‐fold, the Four‐fold and the Five‐fold which contain
> all the preceding. Panchâshikha, agreeably to _Padma Purâna_,(372) is one
> of the seven _Kumâras_ who go to Shveta Dvîpa to worship Vishnu. We shall
> see, further on, what connection there is between the “celibate” and
> chaste Sons of Brahmâ, who refuse “to multiply,” and terrestrial mortals.
> Meanwhile, it is evident that the “Man‐Plant, Saptaparna,” thus refers to
> the seven principles, and that man is compared to this seven‐leaved plant,
> which is so sacred among Buddhists. The Egyptian allegory, in the _Book of
> the Dead_, that relates to the “reward of the Soul,” is as suggestive of
> our septenary doctrine as it is poetical. The Deceased is allotted a piece
> of land in the field of Aanroo, wherein the Manes, the deified shades of
> the dead, glean, as the harvest they have sown by their actions in life,
> the corn seven cubits high, which grows in a territory divided into seven
> and fourteen portions. This corn is the food on which they will live and
> prosper, or that will kill them, in Amenti, the realm of which the Aanroo‐
> field is a domain. For, as said in the hymn,(373) the Deceased is either
> destroyed therein, or becomes pure spirit for the Eternity, in consequence
> of the “seven times seventy‐seven lives” passed, or to be passed, on
> Earth. The idea of the corn reaped as the “fruit of our actions” is very
> graphic.
> 
> 4. IT IS THE ROOT THAT NEVER DIES, THE THREE‐TONGUED FLAME OF THE FOUR
> WICKS (_a_)... THE WICKS ARE THE SPARKS, THAT DRAW FROM THE THREE‐TONGUED
> FLAME,(374) SHOT OUT BY THE SEVEN, THEIR FLAME; THE BEAMS AND SPARKS OF
> ONE MOON, REFLECTED IN THE RUNNING WAVES OF ALL THE RIVERS OF THE
> EARTH(375) (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) The “Three‐tongued Flame that never dies” is the immortal spiritual
> Triad, the Âtmâ, Buddhi and Manas, or rather the fruitage of the last,
> assimilated by the first two after every terrestrial life. The “Four
> Wicks,” that go out and are extinguished, are the Quaternary, the four
> lower principles, including the body.
> 
> “I am the Three‐wicked Flame and my Wicks are immortal,” says the Defunct.
> “I enter into the domain of Sekhem [the God whose hand sows the seed of
> action produced by the disembodied soul], and I enter the region of the
> Flames who have destroyed their adversaries [_i.e._, got rid of the sin‐
> creating Four Wicks].”(376)
> 
> “The Three‐tongued Flame of the Four Wicks” corresponds to the four
> Unities and the three Binaries of the Sephirothal tree.
> 
> (_b_) Just as milliards of bright sparks dance on the waters of an ocean,
> above which one and the same moon is shining, so our evanescent
> Personalities—the illusive envelopes of the immortal Monad‐Ego—twinkle and
> dance on the waves of Mâyâ. They appear and, as the thousands of sparks
> produced by the moon‐beams, last only so long as the Queen of the Night
> radiates her lustre on the “Running Waves” of Life, the period of a
> Manvantara; and then they disappear, the “Beams”—symbols of our eternal
> Spiritual Egos—alone surviving, remerged in, and being, as they were
> before, one with the Mother‐Source.
> 
> 5. THE SPARK HANGS FROM THE FLAME BY THE FINEST THREAD OF FOHAT. IT
> JOURNEYS THROUGH THE SEVEN WORLDS OF MÂYÂ (_a_). IT STOPS IN THE
> FIRST,(377) AND IS A METAL AND A STONE; IT PASSES INTO THE SECOND,(378)
> AND BEHOLD—A PLANT; THE PLANT WHIRLS THROUGH SEVEN FORMS AND BECOMES A
> SACRED ANIMAL(379) (_b_).
> 
> FROM THE COMBINED ATTRIBUTES OF THESE, MANU,(380) THE THINKER, IS FORMED.
> 
> WHO FORMS HIM? THE SEVEN LIVES, AND THE ONE LIFE (_c_). WHO COMPLETES HIM?
> THE FIVE‐FOLD LHA. AND WHO PERFECTS THE LAST BODY? FISH, SIN AND SOMA(381)
> (_d_).
> 
> (_a_) The phrase, “through the Seven Worlds of Mâyâ,” refers here to the
> seven Globes of the Planetary Chain and the seven Rounds, or the forty‐
> nine stations of active existence that are before the “Spark,” or Monad,
> at the beginning of every Great Life‐Cycle, or Manvantara. The “Thread of
> Fohat” is the Thread of Life before referred to.
> 
> This relates to the greatest problem of philosophy—the physical and
> substantial nature of Life, the independent nature of which is denied by
> Modern Science, because that Science is unable to comprehend it. The
> reïncarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive, that the
> whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations,
> whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because even if:
> 
>     Life, like a dome of many‐coloured glass,
>     Stains the white radiance of Eternity—
> 
> yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can
> understand Life.
> 
> What is that “Spark” which “hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad
> in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from
> each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ‐Buddhi, the Flame, by
> the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever
> number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown
> that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the
> Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of
> the last‐mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this
> statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the
> divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its
> permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into the _One_
> itself; an endless and boundless Circle.
> 
> As says the _Zohar_:
> 
>     The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] manifests itself through
>     the _ten_ Sephiroth, which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity
>     is like the sea from which outflows a stream called Wisdom, the
>     waters of which fall into a lake named Intelligence. From the
>     basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth.... For
>     _ten_ equal _seven_: the Decad contains _four_ Unities and _three_
>     Binaries.
> 
> The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.
> 
>     When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal
>     shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at
>     once on the billows of the _seven_ millions of skies, and my _ten_
>     Splendours were his Limbs.
> 
> But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen;
> therefore we read in the _Siphra Dtzenioutha_, the “Book of the Concealed
> Mystery”:
> 
>     In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim [the “Sons of Light and
>     Life,” or the Builders] had shaped out of the eternal Essence the
>     Heavens and the Earth, they formed the worlds six by six.
> 
> The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth(382) on its plane, and the
> lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. The Chaldean _Book
> of Numbers_ contains a detailed explanation of all this.
> 
>     The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon [the three upper planes
>     of the seven (383)] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the
>     presence of the Ancient of Days.
> 
> The Sephiroth of this upper Triad are: “1. Kether (the Crown), represented
> by the brow of Macroprosopus; 2. Chokmah (Wisdom, a male Principle), by
> his right shoulder; and 3. Binah (Intelligence, a female Principle), by
> the left shoulder.” Then come the _seven_ Limbs, or Sephiroth, on the
> planes of manifestation; the totality of these four planes being
> represented by Microprosopus, the Lesser Face, or Tetragrammaton, the
> “four‐lettered” Mystery. “The _seven_ manifested and the _three_ concealed
> Limbs are the Body of the Deity.”
> 
> Thus our Earth, Malkuth, is both the _seventh_ and the _fourth_ World; the
> former when counting from the first Globe above, the latter if reckoned by
> the planes. It is generated by the sixth Globe or Sephira, called Yezud,
> “Foundation,” or, as said in the _Book of Numbers_, “by Yezud, He [Adam
> Kadmon] fecundates the primitive Heva [Eve or our Earth].” Rendered in
> mystic language, this is the explanation why Malkuth, called the Inferior
> Mother, Matrona, Queen, and the Kingdom of the Foundation, is shown as the
> Bride of Tetragrammaton, or Microprosopus (the Second Logos), the Heavenly
> Man. When free from all impurity, she will become united with the
> Spiritual Logos, _i.e._, in the Seventh Race of the Seventh Round—after
> the regeneration, on the day of “Sabbath.” For the “_Seventh_ Day” again
> has an occult significance undreamed of by our theologians.
> 
>     When Matronitha, the Mother, is separated and brought face to face
>     with the King, in the excellence of the Sabbath, all things become
>     one body.(384)
> 
> “Become one body” means, that all is reäbsorbed once more into the One
> Element, the spirits of men becoming Nirvânîs, and the elements of
> everything else becoming again what they were before—Protyle or
> Undifferentiated Substance. “Sabbath” means Rest, or Nirvâna. It is not
> the “_seventh_ day” after _six_ days, but a period the duration of which
> equals that of the seven “days,” or any period made up of seven parts.
> Thus a Pralaya is equal in duration to a Manvantara, or a Night of Brahmâ
> is equal to his Day. If the Christians will follow Jewish customs, they
> ought to adopt the spirit and not the dead letter thereof. They should
> work one week of seven days and _rest_ seven days. That the word “Sabbath”
> had a mystic significance, is disclosed in the contempt shown by Jesus for
> the Sabbath day, and by what is said in _Luke_.(385) Sabbath is there
> taken for the _whole week_. See the Greek text where the week is called
> “Sabbath.” Literally, “I fast twice in the Sabbath.” Paul, an Initiate,
> knew it well when referring to the eternal rest and felicity in Heaven, as
> Sabbath:(386) “and their happiness will be eternal, for they will ever be
> [one] with the Lord, and will enjoy _an eternal Sabbath_.”(387)
> 
> The difference between the Kabalah and the archaic Esoteric Vidyâ—taking
> the Kabalah as contained in the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_, not as
> misrepresented by its now disfigured copy, the _Kabalah_ of the Christian
> Mystics—is very small indeed, being confined to unimportant divergences of
> form and expression. Thus Eastern Occultism refers to our Earth as the
> Fourth World, the lowest of the Chain, above which run upward on both
> curves the six Globes, three on each side. The _Zohar_, on the other hand,
> calls the Earth the lower, or the _seventh_, adding that upon the six
> depend all things which are in it (Microprosopus). The “Smaller Face
> [smaller because manifested and finite] is formed of _six_ Sephiroth,”
> says the same work. “Seven Kings come and _die in the thrice‐destroyed
> World_ [Malkuth, our Earth, destroyed after each of the Three Rounds which
> it has gone through]. And their reign [that of the Seven Kings] will be
> broken up.”(388) This relates to the Seven Races, _five_ of which have
> already appeared, and _two_ more have still to appear in this Round.
> 
> The Shinto allegorical accounts of cosmogony and the origin of man, in
> Japan, hint at the same belief.
> 
> Captain C. Pfoundes, who studied the religion underlying the various sects
> of the land, for nearly nine years in the monasteries of Japan, says:
> 
>     The Shinto idea of creation is as follows: Out of Chaos (Konton)
>     the Earth (In) was the sediment precipitated, and the Heavens (Yo)
>     the ethereal essences which ascended: Man (Jin) appeared between
>     the two. The first man was called Kuni‐to ko tatchino‐mikoto, and
>     _five other names were given to him_, and then the human race
>     appeared, male and female. Isanagi and Isanami begat Tenshoko
>     doijin, the first of the five Gods of the Earth.
> 
> These “Gods” are simply our Five Races, Isanagi and Isanami being the two
> kinds of “Ancestors,” the two preceding Races which give birth to animal
> and to rational man.
> 
> It will be shown in Volume II, that the number seven, as well as the
> doctrine of the septenary constitution of man, was preëminent in all the
> secret systems. It plays as important a part in Western Kabalah as in
> Eastern Occultism. Éliphas Lévi calls the number seven “the key to the
> Mosaic creation and the symbols of every religion.” He shows the Kabalah
> faithfully following even the septenary division of man, for the diagram
> he gives in his _Clef des Grands Mystères_(389) is septenary. This may be
> seen at a glance, however cleverly the correct thought is veiled. One
> needs also only to look at the diagram, the “Formation of the Soul,” in
> Mathers’ _Kabbalah Unveiled_,(390) from the above mentioned, work of Lévi,
> to find the same, though with a different interpretation.
> 
> Thus it stands with both the Kabalistic and Occult names attached:
> 
>                                [Diagram IV]
> 
> Lévi calls Nephesh that which we name Manas, and _vice versâ_. Nephesh is
> the Breath of (animal) Life in man—the Breath of Life, _instinctual_ in
> the animal; and Manas is the Third Soul—the human in its light side, and
> animal, in its connection with Samaël or Kâma. Nephesh is really the
> “Breath of (animal) Life” breathed into Adam, the Man of Dust; it is
> consequently the Vital Spark, the informing Element. Without Manas, the
> “Reasoning Soul,” or Mind, which in Lévi’s diagram is miscalled Nephesh,
> Âtmâ‐Buddhi is irrational on this plane and cannot act. It is Buddhi which
> is the Plastic Mediator; not Manas, the intelligent medium between the
> upper Triad and the lower Quaternary. But there are many such strange and
> curious transformations to be found in the Kabalistic works—a convincing
> proof that this literature has become a sad jumble. We do not accept the
> classification, except in this one particular, in order to show the points
> of agreement.
> 
> We will now give in tabular form what the very cautious Éliphas Lévi says
> in explanation of his diagram, and what the Esoteric Doctrine teaches—and
> compare the two. Lévi, too, makes a distinction between Kabalistic and
> Occult Pneumatics.
> 
> Says Éliphas Lévi, the Kabalist:   Say the Theosophists:
> KABALISTIC PNEUMATICS.             ESOTERIC PNEUMATICS.
> 1. The Soul (or Ego) is a          1. The same; for it is
> clothed light; and this light is   Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas.
> triple.
> 2. Neshamah—pure Spirit.           2. The same(391).
> 3. Ruach—the Soul or Spirit.       3. Spiritual Soul.
> 4. Nephesh—Plastic                 4. Mediator between Spirit and
> Mediator.(392)                     Man, the Seat of Reason, the
>                                    Mind, in man.
> 5. The garment of the Soul is      5. Correct.
> the rind [body] of the Image
> [Astral Soul].
> 6. The Image is double, because    6. Too uselessly apocalyptic.
> it reflects the good and the       Why not say that the Astral
> bad.                               reflects the good as well as the
>                                    bad man; man, who is ever
>                                    tending to the upper Triad, or
>                                    else disappears with the
>                                    Quaternary.
> 7. [Image—Body.]                   7. The Earthly Image.
> 
> OCCULT PNEUMATICS.                 OCCULT PNEUMATICS.
> (As given by Éliphas Lévi.)        (As given by the Occultists.)
> 1. Nephesh is immortal, because    1. Manas is immortal, because
> it renews its life by the          after every new incarnation it
> destruction of forms. [But         adds to Âtmâ‐Buddhi something of
> Nephesh, the “Breath of Life,”     itself; and thus, assimilating
> is a misnomer, and a useless       itself to the Monad, shares its
> puzzle to the student.]            immortality.
> 2. Ruach progresses by the         2. Buddhi becomes conscious by
> evolution of ideas (!?).           the accretions it gets from
>                                    Manas, on the death of man after
>                                    every new incarnation.
> 3. Neshamah is progressive,        3. Âtmâ neither progresses,
> without oblivion and               forgets, nor remembers. It does
> destruction.                       not belong to this plane; it is
>                                    but the Ray of Light eternal
>                                    which shines upon, and through,
>                                    the darkness of matter—when the
>                                    latter is willing.
> 4. The Soul has three dwellings.   4. The Soul—collectively, as the
>                                    Upper Triad—_lives_ on three
>                                    planes, besides its fourth, the
>                                    terrestrial sphere; and it _is_
>                                    eternally on the highest of the
>                                    three.
> 5. These dwellings are: the        5. These dwellings are: Earth
> Plane of Mortals; the Superior     for the physical man, or Animal
> Eden; and the Inferior Eden.       Soul; Kâma Loka (Hades, the
>                                    Limbo) for the disembodied man,
>                                    or his Shell; Devachan for the
>                                    Higher Triad.
> 
> 6. The Image [man] is a sphinx     6. Correct.
> that offers the riddle of birth.
> 7. The fatal Image [the Astral]    7. The Astral, through Kâma
> endows Nephesh with its            (Desire), is ever drawing Manas
> aptitudes; but Ruach is able to    down into the sphere of material
> substitute for it the Image        passions and desires. But if the
> conquered in accordance with the   _better_ Man, or Manas, tries to
> inspirations of Neshamah.          escape the fatal attraction, and
>                                    turns its aspirations to Âtmâ
>                                    (Neshamah), then Buddhi (Ruach)
>                                    conquers, and carries Manas with
>                                    it to the realm of eternal
>                                    Spirit.
> 
> It is very evident that the French Kabalist either did not sufficiently
> know the real tenet, or distorted it to suit himself and his objects. Thus
> he says again, treating upon the same subject, as follows; and we
> Occultists answer the late Kabalist and his admirers also as follows:
> 
> 1. The Body is the mould of        1. The Body follows the whims,
> Nephesh; Nephesh the mould of      good or bad, of Manas; Manas
> Ruach; Ruach the mould of the      tries to follow the Light of
> _garment_ of Neshamah.             Buddhi, but often fails. Buddhi
>                                    is the mould of the “garments”
>                                    of Âtmâ; for Âtmâ is no body, or
>                                    shape, or anything, and because
>                                    Buddhi is only _figuratively_
>                                    its Vehicle.
> 2. Light [the Soul] personifies    2. The Monad becomes a personal
> itself in clothing itself [with    Ego when it incarnates; and
> a Body]; and personality endures   something remains of that
> only when the garment is           Personality through Manas, when
> perfect.                           the latter is perfect enough to
>                                    assimilate Buddhi.
> 3. The Angels aspire to become     3. Correct.
> men; a Perfect Man, a Man‐God,
> is above all the Angels.
> 4. Every 14,000 years the soul     4. Within a period, a Great Age,
> rejuvenates, and rests in the      or a Day of Brahmâ, 14 Manus
> jubilean sleep of oblivion.        reign; after which comes
>                                    Pralaya, when all the Souls
>                                    (Egos) rest in Nirvâna.
> 
> Such are the distorted copies of the Esoteric Doctrine in the _Kabalah_.
> 
> But to return to Shloka 5 of Stanza VII.
> 
> (_b_) The well‐known Kabalistic aphorism runs: “A stone becomes a plant; a
> plant, a beast; the beast, a man; a man, a spirit; and the spirit, a god.”
> The “Spark” animates all the kingdoms, in turn, before it enters into and
> informs Divine Man, between whom and his predecessor animal man, there is
> all the difference in the world. _Genesis_ begins its anthropology at the
> wrong end—evidently for a blind—and lands nowhere. The introductory
> chapters of _Genesis_ were never meant to represent even a remote allegory
> of the creation of _our_ Earth. They embrace a metaphysical conception of
> some indefinite period, in eternity, when successive attempts were being
> made by the law of evolution at the formation of universes. The idea is
> plainly stated in the _Zohar_:
> 
>     There were old Worlds, which perished as soon as they came into
>     existence, were formless, and were called Sparks. Thus, the smith,
>     when hammering the iron, lets the sparks fly in all directions.
>     The Sparks are the primordial Worlds, which could not continue
>     because the Sacred Aged (Sephira) had not as yet assumed its form
>     (of androgyne, or opposite sexes) of King and Queen (Sephira and
>     Kadmon), and the Master was not yet at his work.(393)
> 
> Had _Genesis_ begun as it ought, one would have found in it, first, the
> Celestial Logos, the “Heavenly Man,” which evolves as a Compound Unit of
> Logoi, out of which, after their pralayic sleep—a sleep that gathers the
> Numbers scattered on the mâyâvic plane into One, as the separate globules
> of quicksilver on a plate blend into one mass—the Logoi appear in their
> totality as the first “Male and Female,” or Adam Kadmon, the “Fiat Lux” of
> the _Bible_, as we have already seen. But this transformation did not take
> place on our Earth, nor on any material plane, but in the Spacial Depths
> of the first differentiation of the eternal Root‐Matter. On our nascent
> Globe, things proceed differently. The Monad or Jîva, as said in _Isis
> Unveiled_,(394) is, first of all, shot down by the Law of Evolution into
> the lowest form of matter—the mineral. After a sevenfold gyration encased
> in the stone, or that which will become mineral and stone in the Fourth
> Round, it creeps out of it, say, as a lichen. Passing thence, through all
> the forms of vegetable matter, into what is termed animal matter, it has
> now reached the point at which it has become the germ, so to speak, of the
> animal, that will become the physical man. All this, up to the Third
> Round, is formless, as matter, and senseless, as consciousness. For the
> Monad, or Jîva, _per se_, cannot be called even Spirit: it is a Ray, a
> Breath of the Absolute, or the ABSOLUTENESS rather; and the Absolute
> Homogeneity, having no relations with the conditioned and relative
> finiteness, is unconscious on our plane. Therefore, besides the material
> which will be needed for its future human form, the Monad requires (_a_) a
> spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and
> (_b_) an intelligent consciousness, to guide its evolution and progress,
> neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous Monad, or by senseless
> though living matter. The Adam of dust requires the Soul of Life to be
> breathed into him: the two middle Principles, which are the _sentient_
> Life of the irrational animal and the Human Soul, for the former is
> irrational without the latter. It is only when, from a potential
> androgyne, man has become separated into male and female, that he will be
> endowed with this conscious, rational, individual Soul (Manas), “the
> principle, or the intelligence, of the Elohim,” to receive which, he has
> to eat of the fruit of Knowledge from the Tree of Good and Evil. How is he
> to obtain all this? The Occult Doctrine teaches that while the Monad is
> cycling on downward into matter, these very Elohim, or Pitris—the lower
> Dhyân Chohans—are evolving, _pari passu_ with it, on a higher and more
> spiritual plane, descending also relatively into matter, on their own
> plane of consciousness, when, after having reached a certain point, they
> will meet the incarnating senseless Monad, encased in the lowest matter,
> and blending the two potencies, Spirit and Matter, the union will produce
> that terrestrial symbol of the “Heavenly Man” in space—PERFECT MAN. In the
> Sânkhya Philosophy, Purusha (Spirit) is spoken of as something impotent
> unless it mounts on the shoulders of Prakriti (Matter), which, left alone,
> is—senseless. But in the Secret Philosophy they are viewed as graduated.
> Spirit and Matter, though one and the same thing in their origin, when
> once they are on the plane of differentiation, begin each of them their
> evolutionary progress in contrary directions—Spirit falling gradually into
> Matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure
> spiritual Substance. Both are inseparable, yet ever separated. On the
> physical plane, two like poles will always repel each other, while the
> negative and the positive are mutually attracted; so do Spirit and Matter
> stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous Substance, the
> Root‐Principle of the Universe.
> 
> Therefore, when the hour strikes for Purusha to mount on Prakriti’s
> shoulders for the formation of the Perfect Man—rudimentary man of the
> first Two and a Half Races being only the _first_, gradually evolving into
> the _most perfect, of mammals_—the Celestial Ancestors (Entities from
> preceding Worlds, called in India the Shishta) step in on this our plane,
> and incarnate in the physical or animal man, as the Pitris had stepped in
> before them for the formation of the latter. Thus the two processes for
> the two “creations”—the animal and the divine man—differ greatly. The
> Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies still more ethereal and
> shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call “doubles,”
> or “astral forms,” in their own likeness.(395) This furnishes the Monad
> with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon
> which to build henceforth. But _Man is still incomplete_. From Svâyambhuva
> Manu,(396) from whom descended the seven primitive Manus, or Prajâpatis,
> each of whom gave birth to a primitive Race of men, down to the _Codex
> Nazaræus_, in which Karabtanos, or Fetahil, blind concupiscent Matter,
> begets on his Mother, Spiritus, seven Figures, each of which stands as the
> progenitor of one of the primeval seven Races—this doctrine has left its
> impress on every archaic scripture.
> 
> “Who forms Manu [the Man] and who forms his body? The Life and the Lives.
> Sin(397) and the Moon.” Here Manu stands for the spiritual, heavenly Man,
> the real and non‐dying Ego in us, which is the direct emanation of the
> “One Life,” or the Absolute Deity. As to our outward physical bodies, the
> house of the tabernacle of the Soul, the Doctrine teaches a strange
> lesson; so strange that unless thoroughly explained, and as thoroughly
> comprehended, it is only the exact science of the future that is destined
> to fully vindicate the theory.
> 
> It has been stated before now that Occultism does not accept anything
> inorganic in the Kosmos. The expression employed by Science, “inorganic
> substance,” means simply that the latent life, slumbering in the molecules
> of so‐called “inert matter,” is incognizable. ALL IS LIFE, and every atom
> of even mineral dust is a LIFE, though beyond our comprehension and
> perception, because it is outside the range of the laws known to those who
> reject Occultism. “The very atoms,” says Tyndall, “seem instinct with a
> desire for life.” Whence, then, we would ask, comes the tendency “to run
> into organic form”? Is it in any way explicable except according to the
> teachings of Occult Science?
> 
> _The Worlds, to the profane, are built up of the known Elements. To the
> conception of an Arhat, these Elements are themselves, collectively, a
> Divine Life; distributively, on the plane of manifestations, the
> numberless and countless crores of Lives. Fire alone is_ ONE, _on the
> plane of the One Reality: on that of manifested, hence illusive, Being,
> its particles are fiery Lives which live and have their being at the
> expense of every other Life that they consume. Therefore they are named
> the_ “DEVOURERS.” ... _Every visible thing in this Universe was built by
> such_ LIVES, _from conscious and divine primordial man down to the
> unconscious agents that construct matter.... From the_ ONE LIFE, _formless
> and uncreate, proceeds the Universe of Lives. First was manifested from
> the Deep [Chaos] cold luminous Fire [gaseous light?], which formed the
> Curds in Space [irresolvable nebulæ, perhaps?] ... These fought, and a
> great heat was developed by the encountering and collision, which produced
> rotation. Then came the first manifested_ MATERIAL _Fire, the hot Flames,
> the Wanderers in Heaven [Comets]. Heat generates moist vapour; that forms
> solid water [?]; then dry mist, then liquid mist, watery, that puts out
> the luminous brightness of the Pilgrims [Comets?], and forms solid watery
> Wheels_ [MATTER _Globes]. Bhümi [the Earth] appears with six sisters.
> These produce by their continuous motion the inferior fire, heat, and an
> aqueous mist, which yields the third World‐Element_—WATER; _and from the
> breath of all [atmospheric]_ AIR _is born. These four are the four Lives
> of the first four Periods [Rounds] of Manvantara. The three last will
> follow_.
> 
> The Commentary first speaks of the “numberless and countless crores of
> Lives.” Is Pasteur, then, unconsciously taking the first step toward
> Occult Science, in declaring that, if he dared express his ideas fully
> upon this subject, he would say, that the organic cells are endowed with a
> vital potency that does not cease its activity with the cessation of a
> current of oxygen towards them, and does not, on that account, break off
> its relations with life itself, which is supported by the influence of
> that gas? “I would add,” continues Pasteur, “that the evolution of the
> germ is accomplished by means of complicated phenomena, among which we
> must class processes of fermentation”; and life, according to Claude
> Bernard and Pasteur, is nothing else than a process of fermentation. That
> there exist in Nature Beings, or Lives, that can live and thrive without
> air, even on our Globe, has been demonstrated by the same Scientists.
> Pasteur found that many of the lower lives, such as vibriones, and other
> microbes and bacteria, could exist without air, which, on the contrary,
> killed them. They derived the oxygen necessary for their multiplication
> from the various substances that surrounded them. He calls them _ærobes_,
> living on the tissues of our matter, when the latter has ceased to form a
> part of an integral and living whole (then called very unscientifically by
> Science “dead matter”), and _anærobes_. The one kind binds oxygen, and
> contributes greatly to the destruction of animal life and vegetable
> tissues, furnishing to the atmosphere materials which enter, later on,
> into the constitution of other organisms; the other finally destroys, or
> rather annihilates, the so‐called organic substance; ultimate decay being
> impossible without their participation. Certain germ‐cells, such as those
> of yeast, develop and multiply in air, but when deprived of it, they will
> adapt themselves to life without air and become ferments, absorbing oxygen
> from substances coming in contact with them, and thereby ruining the
> latter. The cells in fruit, when lacking free oxygen, act as ferments and
> stimulate fermentation. “Therefore the vegetable cell, in this case,
> manifests its life as an anærobic being. Why, then, should an organic cell
> form, in this case, an exception?” asks Professor Bogolubof. Pasteur shows
> that in the substance of our tissues and organs, the cell, not finding
> sufficient oxygen for itself, stimulates fermentation in the same way as
> the fruit‐cell, and Claude Bernard thought that Pasteur’s idea of the
> formation of ferments found its application and corroboration in the fact
> that urea increases in the blood during strangulation. LIFE therefore is
> everywhere in the Universe, and, Occultism teaches us, it is also in the
> atom.
> 
> “Bhûmi appears with six sisters,” says the Commentary. It is a Vedic
> teaching that “there are three Earths, corresponding to three Heavens, and
> our Earth [the fourth] is called Bhûmi.” This is the explanation given by
> our exoteric Western Orientalists. But the esoteric meaning, and allusion
> to it in the _Vedas_, is that it refers to our Planetary Chain; “three
> Earths” on the descending arc, and “three Heavens,” which are three Earths
> or Globes also, only far more ethereal, on the ascending or spiritual arc.
> By the first three we descend into Matter, by the other three we ascend
> into Spirit; the lowest one, Bhûmi, our Earth, forming the turning point,
> so to say, and containing, _potentially_, as much of Spirit as it does of
> Matter. But we shall treat of this hereafter.
> 
> The general teaching of the Commentary, then, is that every new Round
> develops one of the Compound Elements, as now known to Science, which
> rejects the primitive nomenclature, preferring to subdivide them into
> constituents. If Nature is the “Ever‐Becoming” on the manifested plane,
> then these Elements are to be regarded in the same light: they have to
> evolve, progress, and increase to the manvantaric end.
> 
> Thus the First Round, we are taught, developed but one Element, and a
> nature and humanity in what may be spoken of as one aspect of
> Nature—called by some, very unscientifically, though it may be so _de
> facto_, “one‐dimensional space.”
> 
> The Second Round brought forth and developed two Elements, Fire and Earth;
> and _its_ humanity, adapted to this condition of Nature, if we can give
> the name humanity to beings living under conditions now unknown to men,
> was—to use again a familiar phrase in a strictly figurative sense, the
> only way in which it can be used correctly—a “two‐dimensional” species.
> 
> The processes of natural development which we are now considering will at
> once elucidate and discredit the fashion of speculating on the attributes
> of _two_, _three_, and _four_ or more _dimensional_ space; but, in
> passing, it is worth while to point out the real significance of the
> sound, but incomplete, intuition that has prompted—among Spiritualists and
> Theosophists, and several great men of Science, for the matter of
> that(398)—the use of the modern expression, the “fourth dimension of
> space.” To begin with, the superficial absurdity of assuming that Space
> itself is measurable in any direction is of little consequence. The
> familiar phrase can only be an abbreviation of the fuller form—the
> “_fourth dimension of matter, in Space_.”(399) But even thus expanded, it
> is an unhappy phrase, because while it is perfectly true that the progress
> of evolution may be destined to introduce us to new characteristics of
> matter, those with which we are already familiar are really more numerous
> than the three dimensions. The qualities, or what is perhaps the best
> available term, the characteristics of matter, must clearly bear a direct
> relation always to the senses of man. Matter has extension, colour, motion
> (molecular motion), taste and smell, corresponding to the existing senses
> of man, and the next characteristic it develops—let us call it for the
> moment “Permeability”—will correspond to the next sense of man, which we
> may call “Normal Clairvoyance.” Thus, when some bold thinkers have been
> thirsting for a fourth dimension, to explain the passage of matter through
> matter, and the production of knots upon an endless cord, they have been
> in want of a _sixth characteristic_ of matter. The three dimensions belong
> really to only one attribute, or characteristic, of matter—extension; and
> popular common sense justly rebels against the idea that, under any
> condition of things, there can be more than three of such dimensions as
> length, breadth and thickness. These terms, and the term “dimension”
> itself, all belong to one plane of thought, to one stage of evolution, to
> one characteristic of matter. So long as there are foot‐rules within the
> resources of cosmos, to apply to matter, so long will they be able to
> measure it three ways and no more; just as, from the time the idea of
> measurement first occupied a place in the human understanding, it has been
> possible to apply measurement in three directions and no more. But these
> considerations do not in any way militate against the certainty that, in
> the progress of time, as the faculties of humanity are multiplied, so will
> the characteristics of matter be multiplied also. Meanwhile, the
> expression is far more incorrect than even the familiar phrase of the
> sun’s “rising” or “setting.”
> 
> We now return to the consideration of material evolution through the
> Rounds. Matter in the Second Round, it has been stated, may be
> figuratively referred to as two‐dimensional. But here another _caveat_
> must be entered. This loose and figurative expression may be regarded—on
> one plane of thought, as we have just seen—as equivalent to the second
> characteristic of matter, corresponding to the second perceptive faculty
> or sense of man. But these two linked scales of evolution are concerned
> with the processes going on within the limits of a single Round. The
> succession of primary aspects of Nature, with which the succession of
> Rounds is concerned, has to do, as already indicated, with the development
> of the Elements—in the Occult sense—Fire, Air, Water, Earth. We are only
> in the Fourth Round, and our catalogue so far stops short. The order in
> which these Elements are mentioned, in the last sentence but one, is the
> correct one for Esoteric purposes and in the Secret Teachings. Milton was
> right when he spoke of the “Powers of Fire, Air, Water, Earth”; the Earth,
> such as we know it now, had no existence before the Fourth Round, hundreds
> of millions of years ago, the commencement of our geological Earth. The
> Globe, says the Commentary, was “_fiery, cool and radiant, as its ethereal
> men and animals, during the First Round_”—a contradiction or paradox in
> the opinion of our present Science—“_luminous and more dense and heavy,
> during the Second Round; watery during the Third_.” Thus are the Elements
> reversed.
> 
> The centres of consciousness of the Third Round, destined to develop into
> humanity as we know it, arrived at a perception of the third Element,
> Water. If we had to frame our conclusions according to the _data_
> furnished us by Geologists, then we would say that there was no real
> water, even during the Carboniferous Period. We are told that gigantic
> masses of carbon, which existed formerly spread in the atmosphere, as
> carbonic acid, were absorbed by plants, while a large proportion of that
> gas was mixed in the water. Now, if this be so, and we have to believe
> that all the carbonic acid which went to compose those plants that formed
> bituminous coal, lignite, etc., and went towards the formation of lime‐
> stone, and so on, that all this was at that period in the atmosphere in
> gaseous form, then, there must have been seas and oceans of liquid
> carbonic acid! But how then could the Carboniferous Period be preceded by
> the Devonian and Silurian Ages—those of fishes and molluscs—on that
> assumption? Barometric pressure, moreover, must have exceeded several
> hundred times the pressure of our present atmosphere. How could organisms,
> even so simple as those of certain fishes and molluscs, stand that? There
> is a curious work by Blanchard, on the Origin of Life, wherein he shows
> some strange contradictions and confusions in the theories of his
> colleagues, and which we recommend to the reader’s attention.
> 
> Those of the Fourth Round have added Earth as a state of matter to their
> stock, as well as the three other Elements in their present
> transformation.
> 
> In short, none of the so‐called Elements were, in the three preceding
> Rounds, as they are now. For all we know, FIRE may have been _pure_
> Âkâsha, the First Matter of the “Magnum Opus” of the Creators and
> Builders, that Astral Light which the paradoxical Éliphas Lévi calls in
> one breath the “Body of the Holy Ghost,” and in the next “Baphomet,” the
> “Androgyne Goat of Mendes”; AIR, simply Nitrogen, the “Breath of the
> Supporters of the Heavenly Dome,” as the Mahometan Mystics call it; WATER,
> that primordial fluid which was required, according to Moses, to make a
> “Living Soul.” And this may account for the flagrant discrepancies and
> unscientific statements found in _Genesis_. Separate the first from the
> second chapter; read the former as a scripture of the Elohists, and the
> latter as that of the far later Jehovists; still one finds, if one reads
> between the lines, the same order in which created things appear; namely,
> Fire (Light), Air, Water, and Man (or Earth). For the sentence of the
> first chapter (the Elohistic), “In the beginning God created the heaven
> and the earth,” is a mistranslation; it is not “the heaven and the earth,”
> but the duplex, or dual, Heaven, the _upper_ and the _lower_ Heavens, or
> the separation of Primordial Substance that was light in its upper, and
> dark in its lower portions (the manifested Universe), in its duality of
> the _invisible_ (to the senses), and the _visible_ to our perceptions.
> “God divided the light from the darkness”; and then made the firmament
> (Air). “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it
> divide the waters from the waters,” _i.e._, “the waters which were under
> the firmament [our manifested visible Universe] from the waters which were
> _above_ the firmament [the (to us) invisible planes of being].” In the
> second chapter (the Jehovistic), plants and herbs are created before
> water, just as in the first, _light_ is produced before the _sun_. “God
> made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field _before it
> was in the earth_, and every herb of the field _before it grew_; for the
> Lord God [Elohim] had not caused it to rain upon the earth, etc.”—an
> absurdity unless the esoteric explanation is accepted. The plants _were_
> created before they were in the earth—_for there was no earth then such as
> it is now_; and the herb of the field was in existence before it grew as
> it does now, in the Fourth Round.
> 
> Discussing and explaining the nature of the invisible Elements and the
> “Primordial Fire” mentioned above, Éliphas Lévi invariably calls it the
> “Astral Light”: with him it is the “Grand Agent Magique.” Undeniably it is
> so, but—only so far as _Black_ Magic is concerned, and on the lowest
> planes of what we call Ether, the noumenon of which is Âkâsha; and even
> this would be held incorrect by orthodox Occultists. The “Astral Light” is
> simply the older “Sidereal Light” of Paracelsus; and to say that
> “everything which exists has been evolved from it, and it preserves and
> reproduces all forms,” as he does, is to enunciate truth only in the
> second proposition. The first is erroneous; for if all that exists was
> evolved _through_ (or _viâ_) it, this is not the Astral Light, since the
> latter is not the container of _all_ things but, at best, only the
> reflector of this _all_. Éliphas Lévi very truly shows it “a force in
> Nature,” by means of which “a single man who can master it ... might throw
> the world into confusion and transform its face”; for it is the “Great
> Arcanum of transcendent Magic.” Quoting the words of the great Western
> Kabalist in their translated form,(400) we may, perhaps, the better
> explain them by the occasional addition of a word or two, to show the
> difference between Western and Eastern explanations of the same subject.
> The author says of the great Magic Agent:
> 
>     This ambient and all‐penetrating fluid, this ray detached from the
>     [Central or Spiritual] Sun’s splendour ... fixed by the weight of
>     the atmosphere [?!] and the power of central attraction ... the
>     Astral Light, this electro‐magnetic ether, this vital and luminous
>     caloric, is represented on ancient monuments by the girdle of
>     Isis, which twines round two poles ... and in ancient theogonies
>     by the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of
>     Saturn [emblem of infinity, immortality, and Cronus—Time—not the
>     God Saturn or the planet]. It is the winged dragon of Medea, the
>     double serpent of the caduceus, and the tempter of Genesis; but it
>     is also the brazen snake of Moses encircling the Tau ... lastly,
>     it is the devil of exoteric dogmatism, and is really the blind
>     force [it is not blind, and Lévi knew it], which souls must
>     conquer, in order to detach themselves from the chains of Earth;
>     for if they should not, they will be absorbed by the same power
>     which first produced them, and will return to the central and
>     eternal fire.
> 
> This great Archæus is now publicly discovered by, and _for_, only one
> man—J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia. For others, however, it _is_ discovered,
> yet must remain almost useless. “So far shalt thou go....”
> 
> All the above is as practical as it is correct, save one error, which we
> have explained. Éliphas Lévi commits a great blunder in always identifying
> the Astral Light with what we call Âkâsha. What it really is will be
> expounded in Volume II.
> 
> Éliphas Lévi further writes:
> 
>     The great Magic Agent is the fourth emanation of the life
>     principle [we say—it is the first in the inner, and the second in
>     the outer (our) Universe], of which the Sun is the third form ...
>     for the day‐star [the Sun] is only the reflection and material
>     shadow of the Central Sun of truth, which illuminates the
>     intellectual [invisible] world of Spirit, and which itself is but
>     a gleam borrowed from the Absolute.
> 
> So far he is right enough. But when the great authority of the Western
> Kabalists adds that, nevertheless, “it is not the immortal Spirit, as the
> Indian Hierophants have imagined”—we answer, that he slanders the said
> Hierophants, as they have said nothing of the kind; for even the Purânic
> exoteric writings flatly contradict the assertion. No Hindû has ever
> mistaken Prakriti—the Astral Light being only above the lowest plane of
> Prakriti, the Material Kosmos—for the “immortal Spirit.” Prakriti is ever
> called Mâyâ, Illusion, and is doomed to disappear with the rest, the Gods
> included, at the hour of the Pralaya. As it is shown that Âkâsha is not
> even the Ether, least of all then, we imagine, can it be the Astral Light.
> Those unable to penetrate beyond the dead letter of the _Purânas_, have
> occasionally confused Âkâsha with Prakriti, with Ether, and even with the
> visible Sky! It is true also that those who have invariably translated the
> term Âkâsha by “Ether”—Wilson, for instance—finding it called “the
> material cause of sound” possessing, moreover, this _one single property_,
> have ignorantly imagined it to be “material,” in the physical sense. True,
> again, that if the characteristics are accepted literally, then, since
> nothing material or physical, and therefore conditioned and temporary, can
> be immortal—according to metaphysics and philosophy—it would follow that
> Âkâsha is neither infinite nor immortal. But all this is erroneous, since
> both the words Pradhâna, Primeval Matter, and Sound, as a property, have
> been misunderstood; the former term (Pradhâna) being certainly synonymous
> with Mûlaprakriti and Âkâsha, and the latter (Sound) with the Verbum, the
> Word or the Logos. This is easy to demonstrate; for it is shown in the
> following sentence from _Vishnu Purâna_.(401) “There was neither day nor
> night, nor sky, nor earth, nor darkness, nor light, nor any other thing,
> save only One, unapprehensible by intellect, or that which is Brahman, and
> Pums, [Spirit] and Pradhâna [Primordial Matter].”
> 
> Now, what is Pradhâna, if it is not Mûlaprakriti, the Root of All, in
> another aspect? For though Pradhâna is said, further on, to merge into the
> Deity, as everything else does, in order to leave the One absolute during
> the Pralaya, yet is it held as infinite and immortal. The literal
> translation is given as: “One Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit: THAT was”; and the
> Commentator interprets the compound term as a substantive, not as a
> derivative word used attributively, _i.e._, like something “conjoined with
> Pradhâna.” The student has to note, moreover, that the Purânic is a
> dualistic system, not evolutionary, and that, in this respect, far more
> will be found, from an Esoteric standpoint, in the Sânkhya, and even in
> the _Mânava‐Dharma‐Shâstra_, however much the latter differs from the
> former. Hence Pradhâna, even in the _Purânas_, is an aspect of
> Parabrahman, not an evolution, and must be the same as the Vedântic
> Mûlaprakriti. “Prakriti, in its _primary_ state, is Âkâsha,” says a
> Vedântin scholar.(402) It is almost abstract Nature.
> 
> Âkâsha, then, is Pradhâna in another form, and as such cannot be Ether,
> the ever‐invisible agent, courted even by Physical Science. Nor is it
> Astral Light. It is, as said, the _noumenon_ of the seven‐fold
> differentiated Prakriti(403)—the ever immaculate “Mother” of the
> _fatherless_ “Son,” who becomes “Father” on the lower manifested plane.
> For Mahat is the first product of Pradhâna, or Âkâsha; and Mahat—Universal
> Intelligence, “whose _characteristic property_ is Buddhi”—is no other than
> the Logos, for he is called Îshvara, Brahmâ, Bhâva, etc.(404) He is, in
> short, the “Creator,” or the Divine Mind in creative operation, “the Cause
> of all things.” He is the “First‐Born,” of whom the _Purânas_ tell us that
> “Earth and Mahat are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe,” or,
> in our language, the negative and the positive poles of dual Nature
> (abstract and concrete), for the _Purâna_ adds:
> 
>     In this manner—as were the _seven_ forms [principles] of Prakriti
>     reckoned from Mahat to Earth—so at the (time of elemental)
>     dissolution (_pratyâhâra_), these seven successively reënter into
>     each other. The Egg of Brahmâ (_Sarva‐mandala_) is dissolved, with
>     its seven zones (_dvîpa_), seven oceans, seven regions, etc.(405)
> 
> These are the reasons why the Occultists refuse to give the name of Astral
> Light to Âkâsha, or to call it Ether. “In my Father’s house are many
> mansions,” may be contrasted with the Occult saying, “In our Mother’s
> house are seven mansions,” or planes, the lowest of which is above and
> around us—the Astral Light.
> 
> The Elements, whether simple or compound, could not have remained the same
> since the commencement of the evolution of our Chain. Everything in the
> Universe progresses steadily in the Great Cycle, while incessantly going
> up and down in the smaller Cycles. Nature is never stationary during
> Manvantara, as it is ever _becoming_,(406) not simply _being_; and
> mineral, vegetable, and human life are always adapting their organisms to
> the then reigning Elements; and therefore _those_ Elements were then
> fitted for them, as they are now for the life of present humanity. It will
> only be in the next, or Fifth, Round that the fifth Element, Ether—the
> gross body of Âkâsha, if it can be called even that—will, by becoming a
> familiar fact of Nature to all men, as Air is familiar to us now, cease to
> be, as at present, hypothetical and an “agent” for so many things. And
> only during that Round will those higher senses, the growth and
> development of which Âkâsha subserves, be susceptible of a complete
> expansion. As already indicated, a _partial_ familiarity with the
> characteristic of matter—Permeability—which should be developed
> concurrently with the sixth sense, may be expected to develop at the
> proper period in this Round. But with the next Element added to our
> resources, in the next Round, Permeability will become so manifest a
> characteristic of matter, that the densest forms of this Round will seem
> to man’s perceptions as obstructive to him as a thick fog, and no more.
> 
> Let us now return to the Life‐Cycle. Without entering at length upon the
> description given of the Higher LIVES, we must direct our attention, at
> present, simply to the earthly Beings and the Earth itself. The latter, we
> are told, is built up for the _First_ Round by the “Devourers,” which
> disintegrate and differentiate the germs of other Lives in the Elements;
> pretty much, it must be supposed, as in the present stage of the world,
> the _ærobes_ do, when, undermining and loosening the chemical structure in
> an organism, they transform animal matter, and generate substances that
> vary in their constitutions. Thus Occultism disposes of the so‐called
> Azoic Age of Science, for it shows that there never was a time when the
> Earth was without life upon it. Wherever there is an atom of matter, a
> particle, or a molecule, even in its most gaseous condition, there is life
> in it, however latent and unconscious.
> 
> _Whatsoever quits the Laya State, becomes active Life; it is drawn into
> the vortex of_ MOTION _[the Alchemical Solvent of Life]; Spirit and Matter
> are __ the two States of the_ ONE, _which is neither Spirit nor Matter,
> both being the Absolute Life, latent.... Spirit is the first
> differentiation of [and in]_ SPACE; _and Matter the first differentiation
> of Spirit. That, which is neither Spirit nor Matter, That is IT—the
> Causeless_ CAUSE _of Spirit and Matter, which are the Cause of Kosmos. And
> THAT we call the_ ONE LIFE, _or the Intra‐Cosmic Breath_.(407)
> 
> Once more we say—_like must produce like_. Absolute Life cannot produce an
> inorganic atom, whether single or complex, and there is life even in Laya,
> just as a man in a profound cataleptic state—to all appearance a corpse—is
> still a living being.
> 
> When the “Devourers”—in whom the men of Science are invited to see, with
> some show of reason, atoms of the Fire‐Mist, if they will, as the
> Occultist will offer no objection to this—when the “Devourers,” we say,
> have differentiated the “Fire Atoms,” by a peculiar process of
> segmentation, the latter become Life‐Germs, which aggregate according to
> the laws of cohesion and affinity. Then the Life‐Germs produce Lives of
> another kind, which work on the structure of our Globes.
> 
> Thus, in the First Round, the Globe, having been built by the primitive
> Fire‐Lives—_i.e._, formed into a sphere—had no solidity, no
> qualifications, save a cold brightness, no form, no colour; it is only
> towards the end of the First Round that it developed one Element, which,
> from its inorganic, so to say, or simple Essence, has become now, in our
> Round, the fire we know throughout the System. The Earth was in her first
> Rûpa, the essence of which is the Âkâshic Principle named ——, that which
> is now known as, and very erroneously termed, Astral Light, which Éliphas
> Lévi calls the “Imagination of Nature,” probably to avoid giving it its
> correct name, as others do.
> 
> Speaking of it, in his Preface to the _Histoire de la Magie_, Éliphas Lévi
> says:
> 
>     It is through this Force that all the nervous centres secretly
>     communicate with each other; from it—that sympathy and antipathy
>     are born; from it—that we have our dreams; and that the phenomena
>     of second sight and extra‐natural visions take place.... Astral
>     Light [acting under the impulsion of powerful wills] ... destroys,
>     coagulates, separates, breaks, gathers in all things.... God
>     created it on that day when he said: “_Fiat Lux!_” ... It is
>     directed by the Egregores, _i.e._, the chiefs of the souls, who
>     are the spirits of energy and action.(408)
> 
> Éliphas Lévi ought to have added that the Astral Light, or Primordial
> Substance, if matter at all, is that which, called Light, _Lux_
> esoterically explained, _is the body of those Spirits themselves, and
> their very essence. Our physical light is the manifestation on our plane_,
> and the reflected radiance, of the Divine Light, emanating from the
> collective Body of those who are called the “Lights” and the “Flames.” But
> no other Kabalist has ever had the talent of heaping up one contradiction
> on the other, of making one paradox chase another in the same sentence,
> and in such flowing language, as Éliphas Lévi. He leads his reader through
> the most lovely valleys, to strand him after all on a desert and barren
> rock.
> 
> Says the Commentary:
> 
> _It is through and from the radiations of the seven Bodies of the seven
> Orders of Dhyânis, that the seven Discrete Quantities [Elements], whose
> Motion and harmonious Union produce the manifested Universe of Matter, are
> born._
> 
> The _Second_ Round brings into manifestation the second Element—AIR; an
> element, the purity of which would ensure continuous life to him who would
> use it. In Europe there have been two Occultists only who have discovered
> and even partially applied it in practice, though its composition has
> always been known among the highest Eastern Initiates. The ozone of the
> modern Chemists is poison compared with the real Universal Solvent, which
> could never be thought of unless it existed in Nature.
> 
> _From the Second Round, Earth—hitherto a fœtus in the matrix of
> Space—began its real existence: it had developed individual sentient Life,
> its second Principle. The second corresponds to the sixth [Principle]; the
> second is Life continuous, the other, temporary._
> 
> The _Third_ Round developed the third Principle—WATER; while the _Fourth_
> transformed the gaseous fluids and plastic form of our Globe into the
> hard, crusted, grossly material sphere we are living on. Bhûmi has reached
> her fourth Principle. To this it may be objected that the law of analogy,
> so much insisted upon, is broken. Not at all. Earth will reach her true
> ultimate form—her body shell—inversely in this to man, only toward the end
> of the Manvantara, after the Seventh Round. Eugenius Philalethes was right
> when he assured his readers, “on his word of honour,” that no one had yet
> seen the “Earth,” _i.e._, Matter in its essential form. Our Globe is, so
> far, in its Kâmarûpic state—the Astral Body of Desires of Ahamkâra, dark
> Egotism, the progeny of Mahat, on the lower plane.
> 
> It is not molecularly constituted matter, least of all the human Body,
> Sthûla Sharîra, that is the grossest of all our “Principles,” but verily
> the _middle_ Principle, the real Animal Centre, whereas our Body is but
> its shell, the irresponsible factor and medium through which the beast in
> us acts all its life. Every intellectual Theosophist will understand my
> real meaning. Thus the idea that the human tabernacle is built by
> countless Lives, just in the same way as was the rocky crust of our Earth,
> has nothing repulsive in it for the true Mystic. Nor can Science oppose
> the Occult teaching, for it is not because the microscope will ever fail
> to detect the ultimate living atom or life, that it can reject the
> doctrine.
> 
> (_c_) Science teaches us that the living as well as the dead organisms of
> both man and animal are swarming with bacteria of a hundred various kinds;
> that from without we are threatened with the invasion of microbes with
> every breath we draw, and from within by leucomaines, ærobes, anærobes,
> and what not. But Science has never yet gone so far as to assert with the
> Occult doctrine, that our bodies, as well as those of animals, plants, and
> stones, are themselves altogether built up of such beings; which, with the
> exception of the larger species, no microscope can detect. So far as
> regards the purely animal and material portion of man, Science is on its
> way to discoveries that will go far towards corroborating this theory.
> Chemistry and Physiology are the two great magicians of the future, which
> are destined to open the eyes of mankind to great physical truths. With
> every day, the identity between the animal and physical man, between the
> plant and man, and even between the reptile and its nest, the rock, and
> man—is more and more clearly shown. The physical and chemical constituents
> of all being found to be identical, Chemical Science may well say that
> there is no difference between the matter which composes the ox, and that
> which forms man. But the Occult doctrine is far more explicit. It says:
> Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal
> _invisible_ Lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the
> daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant and of the tree which shelters
> it from the sun. Each particle—whether you call it organic or
> inorganic—_is a_ Life. Every atom and molecule in the Universe is both
> _life‐giving_ and _death‐giving_ to such forms, inasmuch as it builds by
> aggregation universes, and the ephemeral vehicles ready to receive the
> transmigrating soul, and as eternally destroys and changes the _forms_,
> and expels the souls from their temporary abodes. It creates and kills; it
> is self‐generating and self‐destroying; it brings into being, and
> annihilates, that mystery of mysteries, the _living body_ of man, animal,
> or plant, every second in time and space; and it generates equally life
> and death, beauty and ugliness, good and bad, and even the agreeable and
> disagreeable, the beneficent and maleficent sensations. It is that
> mysterious LIFE, represented collectively by countless myriads of Lives,
> that follows in its own sporadic way the hitherto incomprehensible law of
> Atavism; that copies family resemblances, as well as those it finds
> impressed in the Aura of the generators of every future human being; a
> mystery, in short, that will receive fuller attention elsewhere. For the
> present, one instance may be cited in illustration. Modern Science is
> beginning to find out that ptomaine, the alkaloid poison generated by
> decaying corpses and matter—a Life also, extracted with the help of
> volatile ether, yields a smell as strong as that of the freshest orange‐
> blossoms; but that free from oxygen, such alkaloids yield either a most
> sickening, disgusting smell, or a most agreeable aroma, which recalls that
> of the most delicately scented flowers; and it is suspected that such
> blossoms owe their agreeable smell to the poisonous ptomaine. The venomous
> essence of certain fungi, also, is nearly identical with the venom of the
> cobra of India, the most deadly of serpents. The French savants Arnaud,
> Gautier, and Villiers, have found in the saliva of living men the same
> venomous alkaloid as in that of the toad, the salamander, the cobra, and
> the trigonocephalus of Portugal. It is proven that venom of the deadliest
> kind, whether called ptomaine, or leucomaine, or alkaloid, is generated by
> living men, animals and plants. Gautier also discovered an alkaloid in the
> fresh carcase and brains of an ox, and a venom which he calls
> xanthocreatinine, similar to the substance extracted from the poisonous
> saliva of reptiles. It is the muscular tissues, the most active organs in
> the animal economy, that are suspected of being the generators or factors
> of venoms, which have the same importance as carbonic acid and urea in the
> functions of life, and are the ultimate products of inner combustion. And
> though it is not yet fully determined whether poisons can be generated by
> the animal systems of living beings, without the participation and
> interference of microbes, it is ascertained that the animal does produce
> venomous substances in its physiological or living state.
> 
> Thus, having discovered the effects, Science has to find their _primary_
> causes; and this it can never do without the help of the old sciences, of
> Alchemy, Occult Botany and Physics. We are taught that every physiological
> change, in addition to pathological phenomena, diseases—nay, life itself,
> or rather the objective phenomena of life, produced by certain conditions
> and changes in the tissues of the body, which allow and force life to act
> in that body—that all this is due to those unseen “Creators” and
> “Destroyers,” which are called, in such a loose and general way, microbes.
> It might be supposed that these Fiery Lives and the microbes of Science
> are identical. This is not true. The Fiery Lives are the seventh and
> highest sub‐division of the plane of matter, and correspond in the
> individual with the One Life of the Universe, though only on that plane of
> matter. The microbes of Science are the first and lowest sub‐division on
> the second plane—that of material Prâna, or Life. The physical body of man
> undergoes a complete change of structure every seven years, and its
> destruction and preservation are due to the alternate functions of the
> Fiery Lives, as Destroyers and Builders. They are Builders by sacrificing
> themselves, in the form of vitality, to restrain the destructive influence
> of the microbes, and, by supplying the microbes with what is necessary,
> they compel them under that restraint to build up the material body and
> its cells. They are Destroyers also, when that restraint is removed, and
> the microbes, unsupplied with vital constructive energy, are left to run
> riot as destructive agents. Thus, during the first half of a man’s life,
> the first _five_ periods of seven years each, the Fiery Lives are
> indirectly engaged in the process of building up man’s material body; Life
> is on the ascending scale, and the force is used in construction and
> increase. After this period is passed, the age of retrogression commences,
> and, the work of the Fiery Lives exhausting their strength, the work of
> destruction and decrease also commences.
> 
> An analogy between cosmic events in the descent of Spirit into Matter, for
> the first half of a Manvantara (planetary as well as human), and its
> ascent, at the expense of Matter, in the second half, may here be traced.
> These considerations have to do solely with the plane of matter, but the
> restraining influence of the Fiery Lives on the lowest sub‐division of the
> second plane, the microbes, is confirmed by the fact mentioned in the
> theory of Pasteur above referred to, that the cells of the organs, when
> they do not find sufficient oxygen for themselves, adapt themselves to
> that condition and form _ferments_, which, by absorbing oxygen from
> substances which come in contact with them, produce their destruction.
> Thus the process is commenced by one cell robbing its neighbour of the
> source of its vitality, when the supply is insufficient; and the
> destruction so commenced steadily progresses.
> 
> Such experimenters as Pasteur are the best friends and helpers of the
> Destroyers, and the worst enemies of the Creators—if the latter were not
> at the same time Destroyers also. However it may be, one thing is certain
> in this: the knowledge of these primary causes, and of the ultimate
> essence of every Element, of its Lives, their functions, properties, and
> conditions of change—constitutes the basis of MAGIC. Paracelsus was,
> perhaps, the only Occultist in Europe, during the latter centuries of the
> Christian era, who was versed in this mystery. Had not a criminal hand put
> an end to his life years before the time allotted him by Nature,
> physiological Magic would have fewer secrets for the civilized world than
> it now has.
> 
> (_d_) But what has the Moon to do in all this, we may be asked. What have
> “Fish, Sin and Soma [Moon],” in the apocalyptic sentence of the Stanza, to
> do in company with the Life‐microbes? With the latter nothing, except that
> they avail themselves of the tabernacle of clay prepared by them; with
> divine perfect Man everything, since “Fish, Sin and Moon” conjointly
> compose the three symbols of the immortal Being.
> 
> This is all that can be given. Nor does the writer pretend to know more of
> these strange symbols than may be inferred about them from exoteric
> religions—from the mystery, perhaps, which underlies the Matsya (Fish)
> Avatâra of Vishnu, the. Chaldean Oannes, the Man‐Fish, recorded in the
> imperishable sign of the Zodiac, Pisces, and running throughout the two
> _Testaments_ in the personages of Joshua “Son of Nun (the Fish)” and
> Jesus; from the allegorical “Sin,” or Fall of Spirit into Matter; and from
> the Moon—in so far as it relates to the Lunar Ancestors, the Pitris.
> 
> For the present, it may be as well to remind the reader, that while the
> Moon‐Goddesses were connected in every mythology, especially the Grecian,
> with child‐birth, because of the influence of the Moon on women and
> conception, the Occult and actual connection of our satellite with
> fecundation is to this day unknown to Physiology, which regards every
> popular practice in this connection as gross superstition. As it is
> useless to discuss these in detail, we can only stop for the present to
> notice the lunar symbology casually, to show that the said superstition
> belongs to the most ancient beliefs, and even to Judaism—the basis of
> Christianity. With the Israelites, the chief function of Jehovah was
> child‐giving, and the Esotericism of the _Bible_, interpreted
> kabalistically, shows undeniably that the Holy of Holies in the Temple was
> simply the symbol of the womb. This is now proven beyond doubt and cavil,
> by the _numerical_ reading of the _Bible_ in general, and of _Genesis_
> especially. This idea must certainly have been borrowed by the Jews from
> the Egyptians and Indians, whose Holy of Holies is symbolized by the
> King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid and the Yoni symbols of exoteric
> Hindûism. To make the matter clearer, and to show at the same time the
> enormous difference in the spirit of interpretation and the original
> meaning of the same symbols between the ancient Eastern Occultists and the
> Jewish Kabalists, we refer the reader to the Section on “The Holy of
> Holies,” in the second Volume.
> 
> Phallic worship has developed only with the loss of the keys to the true
> meaning of the symbols. It was the last and most fatal turning from the
> highway of truth and divine knowledge into the side path of fiction,
> raised into dogma through human falsification and hierarchic ambition.
> 
> 6. FROM THE FIRST‐BORN,(409) THE THREAD BETWEEN THE SILENT WATCHER AND HIS
> SHADOW BECOMES MORE STRONG AND RADIANT WITH EVERY CHANGE.(410) THE MORNING
> SUN‐LIGHT HAS CHANGED INTO NOON‐DAY GLORY....
> 
> This sentence, “the Thread between the Silent Watcher and his Shadow [Man]
> becomes more strong with every Change,” is another psychological mystery,
> that will find its explanation in Volume II. For the present, it will
> suffice to say that the “Watcher” and his “Shadows”—the latter numbering
> as many as there are reïncarnations for the Monad—are one. The Watcher, or
> the Divine Prototype, is at the upper rung of the Ladder of Being; the
> Shadow, at the lower. Withal, the Monad of every living being, unless his
> moral turpitude breaks the connection, and he runs loose and astray into
> the “Lunar Path”—to use the Occult expression—_is an individual Dhyân
> Chohan, distinct from others, with a kind of spiritual Individuality of
> its own_, during one special Manvantara. Its Primary, the Spirit (Âtman),
> is one, of course, with the One Universal Spirit (Paramâtmâ), but the
> Vehicle (Vâhan) it is enshrined in, the Buddhi, is part and parcel of that
> Dhyân‐Chohanic Essence; and it is in this that lies the mystery of that
> _ubiquity_, which was discussed a few pages back. “My Father, that is in
> Heaven, and I—are one,” says the Christian Scripture; and in this, at any
> rate, it is the faithful echo of the Esoteric tenet.
> 
> 7. “THIS IS THY PRESENT WHEEL”—SAID THE FLAME TO THE SPARK. “THOU ART
> MYSELF, MY IMAGE AND MY SHADOW. I HAVE CLOTHED MYSELF IN THEE, AND THOU
> ART MY VÂHAN,(411) TO THE DAY ‘BE WITH US,’ WHEN THOU SHALT RE‐BECOME
> MYSELF AND OTHERS, THYSELF AND I” (_a_). THEN THE BUILDERS, HAVING DONNED
> THEIR FIRST CLOTHING, DESCEND ON RADIANT EARTH, AND REIGN OVER MEN—WHO ARE
> THEMSELVES (_b_).
> 
> (_a_) The Day when the Spark will re‐become the Flame, when Man will merge
> into his Dhyân Chohan, “myself and others, thyself and I,” as the Stanza
> has it, means that in Paranirvâna—when Pralaya will have reduced not only
> material and psychical bodies, but even the spiritual Egos, to their
> original principle—the Past, Present, and even Future Humanities, like all
> things, will be one and the same. Everything will have reëntered the Great
> Breath. In other words, everything will be “merged in Brahman,” or the
> Divine Unity.
> 
> Is this annihilation, as some think? Or _atheism_, as other critics—the
> worshippers of a _personal_ deity, and believers in an unphilosophical
> paradise—are inclined to suppose? Neither. It is worse than useless to
> return to the question of implied atheism, in that which is _spirituality_
> of a most refined character. To see in Nirvâna annihilation, amounts to
> saying of a man plunged in a sound _dreamless_ sleep—_one that leaves no
> impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper’s Higher
> Self is then in its original state of Absolute Consciousness_—that he,
> too, is annihilated. The latter simile answers to one side of the question
> only—the most material; since _reäbsorption_ is by no means such a
> “dreamless sleep,” but, on the contrary, _Absolute_ Existence, an
> unconditioned unity, or a state, to describe which human language is
> absolutely and hopelessly inadequate. The only approach to anything like a
> comprehensive conception of it can be attempted solely in the panoramic
> visions of the Soul, through spiritual ideations of the divine Monad. Nor
> is the Individuality—_nor even the essence of the Personality_, if any be
> left behind—lost, because reäbsorbed. For, however limitless from a human
> standpoint, the paranirvânic state, yet it has a limit in Eternity. Once
> reached, the same Monad will _reëmerge_ therefrom, as a still higher
> being, on a far higher plane, to recommence its cycle of perfected
> activity. The human mind, in its present stage of development, cannot
> transcend, scarcely can it reach this plane of thought. It totters here,
> on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity.
> 
> (_b_) The “Watchers” reign over men during the whole period of Satya Yuga
> and the smaller subsequent Yugas, down to the beginning of the Third Root
> Race; after which it is the Patriarchs, Heroes, and the Manes, as in the
> Egyptian Dynasties enumerated by the priests to Solon, the incarnated
> Dhyânis of a lower order, up to King Menes and the human Kings of other
> nations. All were carefully recorded. In the views of symbologists this
> Mythopœic Age is of course regarded as only a fairy tale. But since
> traditions and even chronicles of such Dynasties of _Divine_ Kings, of
> Gods reigning over men, followed by Dynasties of Heroes or Giants, exist
> in the annals of every nation, it is difficult to understand how all the
> peoples under the sun, some of whom are separated by vast oceans and
> belong to different hemispheres, such as the ancient Peruvians and
> Mexicans, as well as the Chaldeans, could have worked out the same “fairy
> tales” in the same order of events.(412) However, as the Secret Doctrine
> teaches _history_—which, although esoteric and traditional, is, none the
> less, more reliable than profane history—we are entitled to our beliefs as
> much as anyone else, whether religionist or sceptic. And that Doctrine
> says that the Dhyâni‐Buddhas of the two higher Groups, namely, the
> Watchers or the Architects, furnished the many and various races with
> divine kings and leaders. It is the latter who taught humanity their arts
> and sciences, and the former who revealed to the incarnated Monads that
> had just shaken off their Vehicles of the lower Kingdoms, and who had,
> therefore, lost every recollection of their divine origin, the great
> spiritual truths of the transcendental Worlds.
> 
> Thus, as expressed in the Stanza, the Watchers “descend on radiant Earth
> and reign over men, _who are themselves_.” The reigning Kings had finished
> their cycle on Earth and other Worlds, in the preceding Rounds. In the
> future Manvantaras they will have risen to higher Systems than our
> planetary World; and it is the Elect of our Humanity, the Pioneers on the
> hard and difficult path of Progress, who will take the places of their
> predecessors. The next great Manvantara will witness the men of our own
> Life‐Cycle becoming the instructors and guides of a Mankind whose Monads
> may now be still imprisoned—semi‐conscious—in the most intellectual of the
> animal kingdom, while their lower principles may be animating, perhaps,
> the highest specimens of the vegetable world.
> 
> Thus proceed the cycles of the septenary evolution, in Seven‐fold Nature;
> the spiritual or divine; the psychic or semi‐divine; the intellectual; the
> passional, the instinctual, or _cognitional_; the semi‐corporeal; and the
> purely material or physical natures. All these evolve and progress
> cyclically, passing from one into another, in a double, centrifugal and
> centripetal, way, _one_ in their ultimate essence, _seven_ in their
> aspects. The lowest, of course, is that depending upon and subservient to
> our five physical senses, which are in truth _seven_, as shown later, on
> the authority of the oldest _Upanishads_. Thus far, for individual, human,
> sentient, animal and vegetable life, each the microcosm of its higher
> macrocosm. The same for the Universe, which manifests periodically, for
> purposes of the collective progress of the countless Lives, the
> outbreathings of the One Life; in order that, through the Ever‐Becoming,
> every cosmic atom in this infinite Universe, passing from the formless and
> the intangible, through the mixed natures of the semi‐terrestrial, down to
> matter in full generation, and then back again, reäscending at each new
> period higher and nearer the final goal; that each atom, we say, may
> reach, _through individual merits and efforts_, that plane where it re‐
> becomes the One Unconditioned ALL. But between the Alpha and the Omega
> there is the weary “Road,” hedged in by thorns, that goes down first,
> then—
> 
>     Winds up hill all the way;
>     Yes, to the very end....
> 
> Starting upon the long journey immaculate, descending more and more into
> sinful matter, and having connected himself with every atom in manifested
> Space—the Pilgrim, having struggled through, and suffered in, every form
> of Life and Being, is only at the bottom of the valley of matter, and half
> through his cycle, when he has identified himself with collective
> Humanity. This, _he has made in his own image_. In order to progress
> upwards and homewards, the “God” has now to ascend the weary uphill path
> of the Golgotha of Life. It is the martyrdom of self‐conscious existence.
> Like Vishvakarman, he has to sacrifice _himself to himself_, in order to
> redeem all creatures, to resurrect from the Many into the One Life. Then
> he ascends into Heaven indeed; where, plunged into the incomprehensible
> Absolute Being and Bliss of Paranirvâna, he reigns unconditionally, and
> whence he will re‐descend again, at the next “Coming,” which one portion
> of humanity expects in its dead‐letter sense as the “Second Advent,” and
> the other as the last “Kalkî Avatâra.”
> 
> Summing Up.
> 
>     The History of Creation and of this World, from its beginning up
>     to the present time, is composed of _seven_ chapters. The
>     _seventh_ chapter is not yet written.
> 
>     T. SUBBA ROW.(413)
> 
> The first of these “seven chapters” has been attempted and is now
> finished. However incomplete and feeble as an exposition, it is, at any
> rate, an approximation—using the word in a mathematical sense—to that
> which is the oldest basis for all subsequent cosmogonies. The attempt to
> render in a European tongue the grand panorama of the ever periodically
> recurring Law, impressed upon the plastic minds of the first Races endowed
> with Consciousness, by those who reflected the same from the Universal
> Mind, is daring; for no human language, save the Sanskrit—which is that
> _of the Gods_—can do so with any degree of adequacy. But the failures in
> this work must be forgiven for the sake of the motive.
> 
> As a whole, neither the foregoing nor what follows can be found in full
> anywhere. It is not taught in any of the six Indian schools of philosophy,
> for it pertains to their synthesis, the seventh, which is the Occult
> Doctrine. It is not traced on any crumbling papyrus of Egypt, nor is it
> any longer graven on Assyrian tile or granite wall. The Books of the
> Vedânta—the “last word of human knowledge”—give out but the metaphysical
> aspect of this world‐cosmogony; and their priceless thesaurus, the
> _Upanishads_—_Upa‐ni‐shad_ being a compound word, expressing the conquest
> of ignorance by the revelation of _secret_, _spiritual_ knowledge—now
> requires the additional possession of a master‐key, to enable the student
> to get at their full meaning. The reason for this I venture to state here
> as I learned it from a Master.
> 
> The name _Upanishad_, is usually translated “esoteric doctrine.” These
> treatises form part of Shruti, or “revealed” Knowledge, Revelation in
> short, and are generally attached to the Brâhmana portion of the _Vedas_,
> as their third division.
> 
>     [Now] the _Vedas_ have a distinct dual meaning—one expressed by
>     the literal sense of the words, the other indicated by the metre
>     and the _svara_ (intonation), which are as the life of the
>     _Vedas_.... Learned pandits and philologists of course deny that
>     _svara_ has anything to do with philosophy or ancient esoteric
>     doctrines; but the mysterious connection between _svara_ and
>     _light_ is one of its most profound secrets.(414)
> 
> There are over 150 _Upanishads_ enumerated by Orientalists, who credit the
> oldest with being written _probably_ about 600 years B.C.; but of
> _genuine_ texts there does not exist a fifth of the number. The
> _Upanishads_ are to the _Vedas_ what the _Kabalah_ is to the Jewish
> _Bible_. They treat of and expound the secret and mystic meaning of the
> Vedic texts. They speak of the origin of the Universe, the nature of
> Deity, and of Spirit and Soul, as also of the metaphysical connection of
> Mind and Matter. In a few words: _They_ CONTAIN _the beginning and the end
> of all human knowledge, but they have ceased to_ REVEAL _it_, since the
> days of Buddha. If it were otherwise, the _Upanishads_ could not be called
> _esoteric_, since they are now openly attached to the Sacred Brâhmanical
> Books, which have, in our present age, become accessible even to the
> Mlechchhas (out‐castes) and the European Orientalists. One thing in
> them—and this, in all the _Upanishads_—invariably and constantly points to
> their ancient origin, and proves (_a_) that they were written, in some of
> their portions, _before_ the caste system became the tyrannical
> institution which it still is; and (_b_) that half of their contents have
> been eliminated, while some of them have been rewritten and abridged. “The
> great Teachers of the higher Knowledge and the Brâhmans are continually
> represented as going to Kshatriya [military‐caste] kings to become their
> pupils.” As Professor Cowell pertinently remarks, the _Upanishads_
> “breathe an entirely different spirit [from other Brâhmanical writings], a
> freedom of thought unknown in any earlier work, except in the _Rig Veda_
> hymns themselves.” The second fact is explained by a tradition recorded in
> one of the MSS. on Buddha’s life. It says that the _Upanishads_ were
> originally attached to their _Brâhmanas_ after the beginning of a reform,
> which led to the exclusiveness of the present caste system among the
> Brâhmans, a few centuries after the invasion of India by the “Twice‐born.”
> They were complete in those days, and were used for the instruction of the
> Chelâs who were preparing for Initiation.
> 
> This lasted so long as the _Vedas_ and the _Brâhmanas_ remained in the
> sole and exclusive keeping of the temple‐Brâhmans—while no one else had
> the right to study or even read them outside of the _sacred_ caste. Then
> came Gautama, the Prince of Kapilavastu. After _learning_ the whole of the
> Brâhmanical wisdom in the _Rahasya_, or the _Upanishads_, and finding that
> the teachings differed little, if at all, from those of the “Teachers of
> Life” inhabiting the snowy ranges of the Himâlayas,(415) the disciple of
> the Brâhmans, feeling indignant because the Sacred Wisdom was thus
> withheld from all but Brâhmans, determined, by popularizing it, to save
> the whole world. Then it was that the Brâhmans, seeing that their Sacred
> Knowledge and Occult Wisdom was falling into the hands of the Mlechchhas,
> abridged the texts of the _Upanishads_, which originally contained thrice
> the matter of the _Vedas_ and the _Brâhmanas_ together, without altering,
> however, one word of the texts. They simply detached from the MSS. the
> most important portions, containing the last word of the Mystery of Being.
> The key to the Brâhmanical secret code remained henceforth with the
> Initiates alone, and the Brâhmans were thus in a position to publicly deny
> the correctness of Buddha’s teaching by appealing to their _Upanishads_,
> silenced for ever on the chief questions. Such is the esoteric tradition
> beyond the Himâlayas.
> 
> Shrî Shankarâchârya, the greatest Initiate living in the historical ages,
> wrote many a Bhâshya (Commentary) on the _Upanishads_. But his original
> treatises, as there are reasons to suppose, have not yet fallen into the
> hands of the Philistines, for they are too jealously preserved in his
> monasteries (mathams). And there are still weightier reasons to believe
> that the priceless Bhâshyas on the Esoteric Doctrine of the Brâhmans, by
> their greatest expounder, will remain for ages still a dead letter to most
> of the Hindûs, except the Smârtava Brâhmans. This sect, founded by
> Shankarâchârya, which is still very powerful in Southern India, is now
> almost the only one to produce students who have preserved sufficient
> knowledge to comprehend the dead letter of the Bhâshyas. The reason for
> this, I am informed, is that they alone have occasionally real Initiates
> at their head in their mathams, as for instance, in the Shringa‐giri, in
> the Western Ghâts of Mysore. On the other hand, there is no sect, in that
> desperately exclusive caste of the Brâhmans, more exclusive than is the
> Smârtava; and the reticence of its followers, to say what they may know of
> the Occult sciences and the Esoteric Doctrine, is only equalled by their
> pride and learning.
> 
> Therefore the writer of the present statement must be prepared beforehand
> to meet with great opposition, and even the denial of such statements as
> are brought forward in this work. Not that any claim to infallibility, or
> to perfect correctness in every detail of all which is herein written, has
> ever been put forward. Facts are there, and they can hardly be denied.
> But, owing to the intrinsic difficulties of the subjects treated of, and
> the almost insurmountable limitations of the English tongue, as of all
> other European languages, to express certain ideas, it is more than
> probable that the writer has failed to present the explanations in the
> best and the clearest form; yet all that could be done, under every
> adverse circumstance, has been done, and this is the utmost that can be
> expected of any writer.
> 
> Let us recapitulate and, by the vastness of the subjects expounded, show
> how difficult, if not impossible, it is to do them full justice.
> 
> (1) The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, and its
> cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate of all systems, even
> as veiled in the exotericism of the _Purânas_. But such is the mysterious
> power of Occult symbolism, that the facts which have actually occupied
> countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, set down
> and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all
> recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs. The flashing gaze
> of those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded
> the soul of things there, where an ordinary profane observer, however
> learned, would have perceived but the external work of form. But Modern
> Science believes not in the “soul of things,” and hence will reject the
> whole system of ancient cosmogony. It is useless to say that the system in
> question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals; that it is an
> uninterrupted record, covering thousands of generations of seers, whose
> respective experiences were made to test and verify the traditions, passed
> on orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and
> exalted Beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity; that for long
> ages, the “Wise Men” of the Fifth Race, of the stock saved and rescued
> from the last cataclysm and the shifting of continents, passed their lives
> _in learning, not teaching_. How did they do so? It is answered: by
> checking, testing, and verifying, in every department of Nature, the
> traditions of old, by the independent visions of great Adepts; that is to
> say, men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic,
> and spiritual organizations, to the utmost possible degree. No vision of
> one Adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions—so
> obtained as to stand as independent evidence—of other Adepts, and by
> centuries of experience.
> 
> (2) The fundamental law in that system, the central point from which all
> emerges, around and towards which all gravitates, and upon which is hung
> all its philosophy, is the One Homogeneous Divine SUBSTANCE‐PRINCIPLE, the
> One Radical Cause.
> 
>     ... Some few, whose lamps shone brighter, have been led
>     From cause to cause to nature’s secret head,
>     And found that one first Principle must be....
> 
> It is called “Substance‐Principle,” for it becomes “Substance” on the
> plane of the manifested Universe, an Illusion, while it remains a
> “Principle” in the beginningless and endless abstract, visible and
> invisible, SPACE. It is the omnipresent Reality; impersonal, because it
> contains all and everything. Its _Impersonality_ is the _fundamental
> conception_ of the System. It is latent in every atom in the Universe, and
> is the Universe itself.
> 
> (3) The Universe is the periodical manifestation of this unknown Absolute
> Essence. To call it “Essence,” however, is to sin against the very spirit
> of the philosophy. For though the noun may be derived in this case from
> the verb _esse_, “to be,” yet IT cannot be identified with a “being” of
> any kind, that can be conceived by human intellect. IT is best described
> as neither Spirit nor Matter, but both. Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti are
> One, in reality, yet TWO in the universal conception of the Manifested,
> even in the conception of the One Logos, the first “Manifestation,” to
> which, as the able lecturer shows, in the “Notes on the _Bhagavadgîtâ_,”
> IT appears from the objective standpoint as Mûlaprakriti, and not as
> Parabrahman; as its Veil, and not the One Reality hidden behind, which is
> unconditioned and absolute.
> 
> (4) The Universe, with everything in it, is called Mâyâ, because all is
> temporary therein, from the ephemeral life of a fire‐fly to that of the
> sun. Compared to the eternal immutability of the ONE, and the
> changelessness of that Principle, the Universe, with its evanescent ever‐
> changing forms, must be necessarily, in the mind of a philosopher, no
> better than a will‐o’‐the‐wisp. Yet, the Universe is real enough to the
> conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.
> 
> (5) Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is
> _conscious_: _i.e._, endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on
> its own plane of perception. We men must remember that, simply because
> _we_ do not perceive any signs of consciousness which we can recognize,
> say, in stones, we have no right to say that _no consciousness exists
> there_. There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind” matter, as
> there is no “blind” or “unconscious” Law. These find no place among the
> conceptions of Occult Philosophy. The latter never stops at surface
> appearances, and for it the noumenal Essences have more reality than their
> objective counterparts; wherein it resembles the system of the mediæval
> Nominalists, for whom it was the universals that were the realities, and
> the particulars which existed only in name and human fancy.
> 
> (6) The Universe is worked and _guided_, from _within outwards_. As above
> so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man, the microcosm and
> miniature copy of the macrocosm, is the living witness to this Universal
> Law, and to the mode of its action. We see that every _external_ motion,
> act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is
> produced and preceded by _internal_ feeling or emotion, will or volition,
> and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal, in man’s
> external body, can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given
> through one of the three functions named, so with the external or
> manifested Universe. The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated
> by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a
> mission to perform, and who—whether we give them one name or another,
> whether we call them Dhyân Chohans or Angels—are “Messengers,” in the
> sense only that they are the agents of Karmic and Cosmic Laws. They vary
> infinitely in their respective degrees of consciousness and intelligence;
> and to call them all pure Spirits, without any of the earthly alloy “which
> time is wont to prey upon,” is only to indulge in poetical fancy. For each
> of these Beings either _was_, or prepares to become, a man, if not in the
> present, then in a past or a coming Manvantara. They are _perfected_, when
> not _incipient_, men; and in their higher, less material, spheres differ
> morally from terrestrial human beings only in that they are devoid of the
> feeling of personality, and of the _human_ emotional nature—two purely
> earthly characteristics. The former, or the “perfected,” have become free
> from these feelings, because (_a_) they have no longer fleshly bodies—an
> ever‐numbing weight on the Soul; and (_b_), the pure spiritual element
> being left untrammelled and more free, they are less influenced by Mâyâ
> than man can ever be, unless he is an Adept who keeps his two
> personalities—the spiritual and the physical—entirely separated. The
> incipient Monads, having never yet had terrestrial bodies, can have no
> sense of personality or _Ego_‐ism. That which is meant by “personality”
> being a limitation and a relation, or, as defined by Coleridge,
> “individuality existing in itself but with a nature as a ground,” the term
> cannot of course be applied to non‐human Entities; but, as a fact insisted
> upon by generations of Seers, none of these Beings, high or low, have
> either individuality or personality as separate Entities, _i.e._, they
> have no individuality in the sense in which a man says, “_I am myself_ and
> no one else”; in other words, they are conscious of no such distinct
> separateness as men and things have on earth. Individuality is the
> characteristic of their respective Hierarchies, not of their units; and
> these characteristics vary only with the degree of the plane to which
> these Hierarchies belong: the nearer to the region of Homogeneity and the
> One Divine, the purer and the less accentuated is that individuality in
> the Hierarchy. They are finite in all respects, with the exception of
> their higher principles—the immortal Sparks reflecting the Universal
> Divine Flame, individualized and separated only on the spheres of
> Illusion, by a differentiation as illusive as the rest. They are “Living
> Ones,” because they are the streams projected on the cosmic screen of
> Illusion from the Absolute Life; Beings in whom life cannot become
> extinct, before the fire of ignorance is extinct in those who sense these
> “Lives.” Having sprung into being under the quickening influence of the
> uncreated Beam, the reflection of the great Central Sun that radiates on
> the shores of the River of Life, it is the Inner Principle in them which
> belongs to the Waters of Immortality, while its differentiated clothing is
> as perishable as man’s body. Therefore Young was right in saying that
> 
>     Angels are men of a superior kind ...
> 
> and no more. They are neither “ministering” nor “protecting” Angels, nor
> are they “Harbingers of the Most High”; still less the “Messengers of
> Wrath” of any God such as man’s fancy has created. To appeal to their
> protection is as foolish as to believe that their sympathy may be secured
> by any kind of propitiation; for they are, as much as man himself is, the
> slaves and creatures of immutable Karmic and Cosmic Law. The reason for
> this is evident. Having no elements of personality in their essence, they
> can have no personal qualities, such as are attributed by men, in exoteric
> religions, to their anthropomorphic God—a jealous and exclusive God, who
> rejoices and feels wrathful, is pleased with sacrifice, and is more
> despotic in his vanity than any finite foolish man. Man, being a compound
> of the essences of all these celestial Hierarchies, may succeed in making
> himself, as such, superior, in one sense, to any Hierarchy or Class, or
> even combination of them. “Man can neither propitiate nor command the
> Devas,” it is said. But, by paralyzing his lower personality, and arriving
> thereby at the full knowledge of the _non‐separateness_ of his Higher Self
> from the One Absolute SELF, man can, even during his terrestrial life,
> become as “one of us.” Thus it is, by eating of the fruit of knowledge,
> which dispels ignorance, that man becomes like one of the Elohim, or the
> Dhyânis; and once on _their_ plane, the spirit of Solidarity and perfect
> Harmony, which reigns in every Hierarchy, must extend over him, and
> protect him in every particular.
> 
> The chief difficulty which prevents men of Science from believing in
> divine as well as in nature spirits is their Materialism. The main
> impediment before the Spiritualist which hinders him from believing in the
> same, while preserving a blind belief in the “Spirits” of the Departed, is
> the general ignorance of all—except some Occultists and Kabalists—about
> the true essence and nature of Matter. It is on the acceptance or
> rejection of the theory of the _Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate
> Essence_, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around
> us of other conscious Beings, besides the Spirits of the Dead. It is on
> the right comprehension of the primeval Evolution of Spirit‐Matter, and
> its real Essence, that the student has to depend for the further
> elucidation in his mind of the Occult Cosmogony, and for the only sure
> clue which can guide his subsequent studies.
> 
> In sober truth, as just shown, every so‐called “Spirit” is either a
> _disembodied or a future man_. As from the highest Archangel (Dhyân
> Chohan) down to the last conscious Builder (the inferior Class of
> Spiritual Entities), all such are _men_, having lived æons ago, in other
> Manvantaras, on this or other Spheres; so the inferior, semi‐intelligent
> and non‐intelligent Elementals are all _future_ men. The fact alone, that
> a Spirit is endowed with intelligence, is a proof to the Occultist that
> such a Being must have been a _man_, and acquired his knowledge and
> intelligence throughout the human cycle. There is but one indivisible and
> absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills
> throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole Kosmos, which
> has no bounds, and which people call Space, considered independently of
> anything contained in it. But the first differentiation of its
> _reflection_ in the Manifested World is purely spiritual, and the Beings
> generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation
> to the one we conceive of. They can have no human consciousness or
> intelligence before they have acquired such, personally and individually.
> This may be a mystery, yet it is a fact in Esoteric Philosophy, and a very
> apparent one too.
> 
> The whole order of Nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher
> life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The
> whole process of evolution, with its endless adaptations, is a proof of
> this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to
> make room for the strong, and which ensure the “survival of the fittest,”
> though so cruel in their immediate action, all are working toward the
> grand end. The very _fact_ that adaptations _do_ occur, that the fittest
> _do_ survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called
> “unconscious Nature” is in reality an aggregate of forces, manipulated by
> semi‐intelligent beings (Elementals), guided by High Planetary Spirits
> (Dhyân Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the Manifested Verbum of
> the Unmanifested Logos, and constitutes one and the same time the Mind of
> the Universe and its immutable Law.
> 
> For Nature, taken in its abstract sense, _cannot_ be “unconscious,” as it
> is the emanation from, and thus an aspect on the manifested plane of, the
> Absolute Consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny
> to vegetation and even to minerals _a consciousness of their own_? All he
> can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.
> 
> Three distinct representations of the Universe, in its three distinct
> aspects, are impressed upon our thoughts by the Esoteric Philosophy: the
> _Pre‐existing_, evolved from the _Ever‐existing_, and the _Phenomenal_—the
> world of illusion, the reflection, and shadow thereof. During the great
> mystery and drama of life, known as the Manvantara, real Kosmos is like
> the objects placed behind the white screen upon which shadows are thrown.
> The actual figures and things remain invisible, while the wires of
> evolution are pulled by unseen hands. Men and things are thus but the
> reflections, _on_ the white field, of the realities _behind_ the snares of
> Mahâmâyâ, or the Great Illusion. This was taught in every philosophy, in
> every religion, ante‐ as well as post‐diluvian, in India and Chaldea, by
> the Chinese as by the Grecian Sages. In the former countries these three
> Universes were allegorized, in exoteric teachings, by the three Trinities,
> emanating from the central eternal Germ, and forming with it a Supreme
> Unity: the _initial_, the _manifested_, and the _creative_ Triad, or the
> Three in One. The last is but the symbol, in its concrete expression, of
> the first _ideal_ two. Hence Esoteric Philosophy passes over the
> necessarianism of this purely metaphysical conception, and calls the first
> one, only, the Ever‐Existing. This is the view of every one of the six
> great schools of Indian philosophy—the six principles of that unit body of
> Wisdom of which the Gnôsis, the _hidden_ Knowledge, is the seventh.
> 
> The writer hopes that, however superficially the comments on the Seven
> Stanzas may have been handled, enough has been given, in this cosmogonic
> portion of the work, to show the archaic teachings to be on their very
> face more _scientific_ (in the modern sense of the word) than any other
> ancient Scriptures left to be judged on their exoteric aspect. Since,
> however, as before confessed, this work _withholds far more than it gives
> out_, the student is invited to use his own intuitions. Our chief care is
> to elucidate that which has already been given out, and, to our regret,
> very incorrectly at times; to supplement the knowledge hinted at—whenever
> and wherever possible—by additional matter; and to bulwark our doctrines
> against the too strong attacks of modern Sectarianism, and more especially
> against those of our latter‐day Materialism, very often miscalled Science,
> whereas, in reality, the words “Scientists” and “Sciolists” ought alone to
> bear the responsibility for the many illogical theories offered to the
> world. In its great ignorance, the public, while blindly accepting
> everything that emanates from “authorities,” and feeling it to be its duty
> to regard every _dictum_ coming from a man of Science as a proven fact—the
> public, we say, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from
> “heathen” sources. Therefore, as materialistic Scientists can be fought
> solely with their own weapons—those of controversy and argument—an
> Addendum is added to each Volume contrasting the respective views, and
> showing how even great authorities may often err. We believe that this can
> be done effectually, by showing the weak points of our opponents, and by
> proving their too frequent sophisms, which are made to pass for scientific
> _dicta_, to be incorrect. We hold to Hermes and his “Wisdom,” in its
> universal character; they—to Aristotle, as against intuition and the
> experience of the Ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of
> the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As Hermes says: “Knowledge
> differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but
> Knowledge is the end of sense”—_i.e._, of the illusion of our physical
> brain and its intellect; thus emphasizing the contrast between the
> laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses and Mind (Manas), and the
> intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual Divine Soul (Buddhi).
> 
> Whatever may be the destiny of these actual writings in a remote future,
> we hope to have so far proven the following facts:
> 
> (1) The Secret Doctrine teaches no Atheism, except in the sense underlying
> the Sanskrit word Nâstika, a rejection of idols, including every
> anthropomorphic God. In this sense every Occultist is a Nâstika.
> 
> (2) It admits a Logos, or a Collective “Creator” of the Universe; a
> Demiurge, in the sense implied when one speaks of an “Architect” as the
> “Creator” of an edifice, whereas that Architect has never touched one
> stone of it, but, furnishing the plan, has left all the manual labour to
> the masons; in our case the plan was furnished by the Ideation of the
> Universe, and the constructive labour was left to the Hosts of intelligent
> Powers and Forces. But that Demiurge is no _personal_ deity—_i.e._, an
> imperfect _extra‐cosmic God_, but only the aggregate of the Dhyân Chohans
> and the other Forces.
> 
> (3) The Dhyân Chohans are dual in their character; being composed of (_a_)
> the irrational _brute Energy_, inherent in Matter, and (_b_) the
> intelligent Soul, or cosmic Consciousness, which directs and guides that
> Energy, and which is the _Dhyân Chohanic Thought, reflecting the Ideation
> of the Universal Mind_. This results in a perpetual series of physical
> manifestations and _moral effects_ on Earth, during manvantaric periods,
> the whole being subservient to Karma. As that process is not always
> perfect; and since, however many proofs it may exhibit of a guiding
> Intelligence behind the veil, it still shows gaps and flaws, and even very
> often results in evident failures—therefore, neither the collective Host
> (Demiurge), nor any of the working Powers individually, are proper
> subjects for divine honours or worship. All are entitled to the grateful
> reverence of humanity, however, and man ought to be ever striving to help
> the divine evolution of _Ideas_, by becoming, to the best of his ability,
> a _co‐worker with Nature_, in the cyclic task. The ever unknowable and
> incognizable Kârana alone, the Causeless Cause of all causes, should have
> its shrine and altar on the holy and ever untrodden ground of our
> heart—invisible, intangible, unmentioned, save through the “still small
> voice” of our spiritual consciousness. Those who worship before it, ought
> to do so in the silence and the sanctified solitude of their Souls; making
> their Spirit the sole mediator between them and the Universal Spirit,
> their good actions the only priests, and their sinful intentions the only
> visible and objective sacrificial victims to the _Presence_.
> 
> “When thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are ... but enter
> into _thine inner chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father
> which is in secret_.”(416) Our Father is _within us_ “in secret,” our
> Seventh Principle in the “inner chamber” of our soul‐perception. “The
> Kingdom of God” and of Heaven is _within_ us, says Jesus, not _outside_.
> Why are Christians so absolutely blind to the self‐evident meaning of the
> words of wisdom they delight in mechanically repeating?
> 
> (4) Matter is Eternal. It is the Upâdhi, or Physical Basis, for the One
> Infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations. Therefore, the
> Esotericists maintain that there is no inorganic or “dead” matter in
> Nature, the distinction between the two made by Science being as unfounded
> as it is arbitrary and devoid of reason. Whatever Science may think,
> however—and _exact_ Science is a fickle dame, as we all know by
> experience—Occultism knows and teaches differently, as it has done from
> time immemorial, from Manu and Hermes down to Paracelsus and his
> successors.
> 
> Thus, Hermes, the Thrice Great, says:
> 
>     Oh, my son, matter _becomes_; formerly it _was_; for matter is the
>     vehicle of becoming. Becoming is the mode of activity of the
>     uncreate and foreseeing God. Having been endowed with the germ of
>     becoming, [objective] matter is brought into birth, for the
>     creative force fashions it _according to the ideal forms_. Matter
>     not yet engendered had no form; it becomes, when it is put into
>     operation.(417)
> 
> To this the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, the able translator and compiler of
> the Hermetic Fragments, remarks in a footnote:
> 
>     Dr. Ménard observes that in Greek the same word signifies _to be
>     born_ and _to become_. The idea here is, that the material of the
>     world is in its essence eternal, but that before creation or
>     “becoming” it is in a passive and motionless condition. Thus it
>     “was” before being put into operation; now it “becomes,” that is,
>     it is mobile and progressive.
> 
> And she adds the purely Vedântic doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy that:
> 
>     Creation is thus the period of activity [Manvantara] of God, who,
>     according to Hermetic thought [or _which_, according to the
>     Vedântin], has two modes—Activity or Existence, God evolved (Deus
>     explicitus); and Passivity of Being [Pralaya], God involved (Deus
>     implicitus). Both modes are perfect and complete, as are the
>     waking and sleeping states of man. Fichte, the German philosopher,
>     distinguished Being (Seyn) as One, which we know only through
>     existence (Daseyn) as the Manifold. This view is thoroughly
>     Hermetic. The “Ideal Forms” ... are the archetypal or formative
>     ideas of the Neo‐Platonists; the eternal and subjective concepts
>     of things subsisting in the Divine Mind, prior to “creation” or
>     becoming.
> 
> Or, as in the philosophy of Paracelsus:
> 
>     Everything is the product of one universal creative effort....
>     There is nothing _dead_ in Nature. _Everything is organic and
>     living_, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living
>     organism.(418)
> 
> (5) The Universe was evolved out of its ideal plan, upheld through
> Eternity in the Unconsciousness of that which the Vedântins call
> Parabrahman. This is practically identical with the conclusions of the
> highest Western philosophy, “the innate, eternal, and self‐existing Ideas”
> of Plato, now reflected by Von Hartmann. The “Unknowable” of Herbert
> Spencer bears but a faint resemblance to that transcendental Reality
> believed in by Occultists, often appearing merely a personification of a
> “force behind phenomena”—an infinite and eternal Energy, from which all
> things proceed, whereas the author of the _Philosophy of the Unconscious_
> has come (in this respect only) as near to a solution of the great Mystery
> as mortal man can. Few have been those, whether in ancient or mediæval
> philosophy, who have dared to approach the subject or even hint at it.
> Paracelsus mentions it inferentially, and his ideas are admirably
> synthesized by Dr. F. Hartmann, F.T.S., in his _Paracelsus_, from which we
> have just quoted.
> 
> All the Christian Kabalists understood well the Eastern root idea. The
> active Power, the “Perpetual Motion of the great Breath,” only awakens
> Cosmos at the dawn of every new Period, setting it into motion by means of
> the two contrary Forces, the centripetal and the centrifugal Forces, which
> are male and female, positive and negative, physical and spiritual, the
> two being the one _Primordial_ Force, and thus causing it to become
> objective on the plane of Illusion. In other words, that dual motion
> transfers Cosmos from the plane of the Eternal Ideal into that of finite
> manifestation, or from the _noumenal_ to the _phenomenal_ plane.
> Everything that _is_, _was_, and _will be_, eternally IS, even the
> countless Forms, which are finite and perishable only in their objective,
> but not in their _ideal_ form. They existed as Ideas, in the Eternity,
> and, when they pass away, will exist as reflections. Occultism teaches
> that no form can be given to anything, either by Nature or by man, whose
> ideal type does not already exist on the subjective plane: more than this;
> that no form or shape can possibly enter man’s consciousness, or evolve in
> his imagination, which does not exist in prototype, at least as an
> approximation. Neither the form of man, nor that of any animal, plant or
> stone, has ever been “created”; and it is only on this plane of ours that
> it commenced “becoming,” that is to say, objectivizing into its present
> materiality, or expanding _from within outwards_, from the most sublimated
> and supersensuous essence into its grossest appearance. Therefore _our_
> human forms have existed in the Eternity as astral or ethereal prototypes;
> according to which models, the Spiritual Beings, or Gods, whose duty it
> was to bring them into objective being and terrestrial life, evolved the
> protoplasmic forms of the future Egos from _their own_ essence. After
> which, when this human Upâdhi, or basic mould, was ready, the natural
> terrestrial Forces began to work on these supersensuous moulds, _which
> contained, besides their own, the elements of all the past vegetable and
> future animal forms of this Globe_. Therefore, man’s _outward_ shell
> passed through every vegetable and animal body, before it assumed the
> human shape. But as this will be fully described in Volume II, in the
> Commentaries, there is no need to say more of it here.
> 
> According to the Hermetico‐Kabalistic philosophy of Paracelsus, it is
> Yliaster—the ancestor of the just‐born Protyle, introduced by Mr. Crookes
> into Chemistry—or primordial Protomateria, that evolved out of itself the
> Cosmos.
> 
>     When creation [evolution] took place, the Yliaster divided itself;
>     it, so to say, melted and dissolved, developed out of [from
>     within] itself the Ideos or Chaos (Mysterium Magnum, Iliados,
>     Limbus Major, or Primordial Matter). This Primordial Essence is of
>     a monistic nature, and manifests itself not only as vital
>     activity, a spiritual force, an invisible, incomprehensible, and
>     indescribable power, but also as vital matter of which the
>     substance of living beings consists. In this Limbus or Ideos of
>     primordial matter, ... the only matrix of all created things, the
>     substance of all things is contained. It is described by the
>     ancients as the Chaos ... out of which the Macrocosmos, and
>     afterwards, by division and evolution in Mysteria Specialia,(419)
>     each separate being came into existence. All things and all
>     elementary substances were contained in it _in potentiâ_ but not
>     _in actu_.(420)
> 
> This makes the translator, Dr. F. Hartmann, justly observe that “it seems
> that Paracelsus anticipated the modern discovery of the ‘potency of
> matter’ three hundred years ago.”
> 
> The Magnus Limbus, then, or Yliaster, of Paracelsus is simply our old
> friend “Father‐Mother,” _within_, before it appeared in Space. It is the
> Universal Matrix of Kosmos, personified in the dual character of Macrocosm
> and Microcosm, or the Universe and our Globe,(421) by Aditi‐Prakriti,
> spiritual and physical Nature. For we find it explained in Paracelsus
> that:
> 
>     The Magnus Limbus is the nursery out of which all creatures have
>     grown, in the same sense as a tree may grow out of a small seed;
>     with the difference, however, that the great Limbus takes its
>     origin from the Word of God, while the Limbus minor (the
>     terrestrial seed or sperm) takes it from the earth. The great
>     Limbus is the seed out of which all beings have come, and the
>     little Limbus is each ultimate being that reproduces its form, and
>     that has itself been produced by the great. The little Limbus
>     possesses all the qualifications of the great one, in the same
>     sense as a son has an organization similar to that of his
>     father.... As ... Yliaster dissolved, Ares, the dividing,
>     differentiating, and individualizing power [Fohat, another old
>     friend] ... began to act. All production took place in consequence
>     of separation. There were produced out of the Ideos the elements
>     of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, whose birth, however, did not take
>     place in a material mode, or by simple separation, but spiritually
>     and dynamically [not even by complex combinations—_e.g._,
>     mechanical mixture as opposed to chemical combination], just as
>     fire may come out of a pebble, or a tree out of a seed, although
>     there is originally no fire in the pebble, nor a tree in the seed.
>     “Spirit is living, and Life is Spirit, and Life and Spirit
>     [Prakriti, Purusha (?)] produce all things, but they are
>     essentially one and not two.” ... The elements, too, have each one
>     its own Yliaster, because all the activity of matter in every form
>     is only an effluvium of the same fountain. But as from the seed
>     grow the roots with their fibres, afterwards the stalk with its
>     branches and leaves, and lastly the flowers and seeds; likewise
>     all beings were born from the elements, and consist of elementary
>     substances out of which other forms may come into existence,
>     bearing the characteristics of their parents.(422) The elements as
>     the mothers of all creatures _are of an __ invisible, spiritual
>     nature, and have souls_.(423) They all spring from the Mysterium
>     Magnum.
> 
> Compare this with _Vishnu Purâna_.
> 
>     From Pradhâna [Primordial Substance] presided over by Kshetrajna
>     [“embodied spirit” (?)] proceeds the unequal development
>     [Evolution] of those qualities.... From the great principle
>     (Mahat) [Universal] Intellect [or Mind] ... is produced the origin
>     of the subtle elements and of the organs of sense.(424) ...
> 
> Thus it may be shown that all the fundamental truths of Nature were
> universal in antiquity, and that the basic ideas upon Spirit, Matter and
> the Universe, or upon God, Substance and Man, were identical. Taking the
> two most ancient religious philosophies on the globe, Hindûism and
> Hermeticism, from the Scriptures of India and Egypt, the identity of the
> two is easily recognizable.
> 
> This becomes apparent to one who reads the latest translation and
> rendering of the “Hermetic Fragments” just mentioned, by our late lamented
> friend, Dr. Anna Kingsford. Disfigured and tortured as these have been in
> their passage through sectarian Greek and Christian hands, the translator
> has most ably and intuitionally seized the weak points and tried to remedy
> them by means of explanations and footnotes. She says:
> 
>     The creation of the visible world by the “working gods” or Titans,
>     as agents of the Supreme God,(425) is a thoroughly Hermetic idea,
>     recognizable _in all religious systems_, and in accordance with
>     modern scientific research [?], which shows us everywhere the
>     Divine Power operating through natural Forces.
> 
> To quote from the translation:
> 
>     That Universal Being, that contains all, and which is all, puts
>     into motion the soul and the world, all that nature comprises. In
>     the manifold unity of universal life, the innumerable
>     individualities distinguished by their variations are,
>     nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and
>     that everything proceeds from Unity.(426)
> 
> And again from another translation:
> 
>     God is not a mind, but the cause that the Mind is; _not a spirit_,
>     but the cause that the Spirit is; not light, but the cause that
>     the Light is.(427)
> 
> The above shows plainly that the “Divine Pymander,” however much distorted
> in some passages by Christian “smoothing,” was nevertheless written by a
> philosopher, while most of the so‐called “Hermetic Fragments” are the
> production of sectarian pagans with a tendency towards an anthropomorphic
> Supreme Being. Yet both are the echo of the Esoteric Philosophy and the
> Hindû _Purânas_.
> 
> Compare two invocations, one to the Hermetic “Supreme All,” the other to
> the “Supreme All” of the later Âryans. Says a Hermetic Fragment cited by
> Suidas:
> 
>     I adjure thee, Heaven, holy work of the great God; I adjure thee,
>     Voice of the Father, uttered in the beginning when the universal
>     world was framed; I adjure thee by the Word, only Son of the
>     Father Who upholds all things; be favourable, be favourable.(428)
> 
> This is preceded by the following:
> 
>     Thus the Ideal Light was before the Ideal Light, and the luminous
>     Intelligence of Intelligence was always, _and its unity was
>     nothing else than the Spirit enveloping the Universe. Out of Whom
>     [Which] is neither God nor Angels, nor any other essentials_, for
>     He [It] is the Lord of all things and the Power and the Light; and
>     all depends on Him [It] and is in Him [It].
> 
> A passage contradicted by the very same Trismegistus, who is made to say:
> 
>     To speak of God is impossible. For the corporeal cannot express
>     the incorporeal.... That which has not any body nor appearance,
>     nor form, nor matter, cannot be apprehended by sense. I
>     understand, Tatios, I understand, that which it is impossible to
>     define—that is God.(429)
> 
> The contradiction between the two passages is evident; and this shows
> (_a_) that Hermes was a generic _nom de plume_ used by a series of
> generations of Mystics of every shade, and (_b_) that great discernment
> has to be used before accepting a Fragment as esoteric teaching only
> because it is undeniably ancient. Let us now compare the above with a like
> invocation in the Hindû Scriptures—undoubtedly as old, if not far older.
> Here it is. Parâshara, the Âryan “Hermes,” instructs Maitreya, the Indian
> Asclepios, and calls upon Vishnu in his triple hypostasis:
> 
>     Glory to the unchangeable, holy, eternal, supreme Vishnu, of one
>     universal nature, the mighty over all; to him who is
>     Hiranyagarbha, Hari, and Shankara [Brahmâ, Vishnu, and Shiva], the
>     creator, the preserver, and destroyer of the world; to Vâsudeva,
>     the liberator (of his worshippers); to him whose essence is both
>     single and manifold; who is both subtile and corporeal, indiscrete
>     and discrete; to Vishnu, the cause of final emancipation. Glory to
>     the supreme Vishnu, the cause of the creation, existence, the end
>     of this world; _who is the root of the world_, and who _consists
>     of the world_.(430)
> 
> This is a grand invocation, with a deep philosophical meaning underlying
> it; but, for the profane masses, as suggestive as is the Hermetic prayer
> of an anthropomorphic Being. We must respect the feeling that dictated
> both; but we cannot help finding it in full disharmony with its inner
> meaning, even with that which is found in the same Hermetic treatise where
> it is said:
> 
>     _Trismegistus_: Reality is not upon the earth, my son, and it
>     cannot be thereon.... Nothing on earth is real, there are only
>     appearances.... He [man] is not real, my son, as man. The real
>     consists solely in itself and remains what it is.... Man is
>     transient, therefore he is not real, he is but appearance, and
>     appearance is the supreme illusion.
> 
>     _Tatios_: Then the celestial bodies themselves are not real, my
>     father, since they also vary?
> 
>     _Trismegistus_: That which is subject to birth and to change is
>     not real ... there is in them a certain falsity, seeing that they
>     too are variable....
> 
>     _Tatios_: And what then is the primordial Reality, O my Father?
> 
>     _Trismegistus_: He Who [That Which] is one and alone, O Tatios; He
>     Who [That Which] is not made of matter, nor in any body. Who
>     [Which] has neither colour nor form, Who [Which] changes not nor
>     is transmitted, but Who [Which] always IS.(431)
> 
> This is quite consistent with the Vedântic teaching. The leading thought
> is Occult; and many are the passages in the Hermetic Fragments that belong
> bodily to the Secret Doctrine.
> 
> This Doctrine teaches that the whole Universe is ruled by intelligent and
> semi‐intelligent Forces and Powers, as stated from the very beginning.
> Christian Theology admits and even _enforces_ belief in such, but makes an
> arbitrary division and refers to them as “Angels” and “Devils.” Science
> denies the existence of both, and ridicules the very idea. Spiritualists
> believe in the “Spirits of the Dead,” and outside these deny entirely any
> other kind or class of invisible beings. The Occultists and Kabalists are
> thus the only rational expounders of the ancient traditions, which have
> now culminated in dogmatic faith on the one hand, and dogmatic denial on
> the other. For both belief and unbelief each embrace but one small corner
> of the infinite horizons of spiritual and physical manifestations: and
> thus both are right from their respective standpoints, yet both are wrong
> in believing that they can circumscribe the whole within their own special
> and narrow barriers, for—they can never do so. In this respect, Science,
> Theology, and even Spiritualism show little more wisdom than the ostrich,
> when it hides its head in the sand at its feet, feeling sure that there
> can be thus nothing beyond its own point of observation and the limited
> area occupied by its foolish head.
> 
> As the only works now extant upon the subject under consideration, within
> reach of the profane of the Western “civilized” races, are the above‐
> mentioned Hermetic Books, or rather Hermetic Fragments, we may contrast
> them in the present case with the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy. To
> quote for this purpose from any other would be useless, since the public
> knows nothing of the Chaldean works, which are translated into Arabic and
> preserved by some Sufi Initiates. Therefore the “Definitions of
> Asclepios,” as lately compiled and glossed by Dr. Anna Kingsford, F.T.S.,
> some of which sayings are in remarkable agreement with the Eastern
> Esoteric Doctrine, have to be resorted to for comparison. Though not a few
> passages bear a strong impression of some later Christian hand, yet on the
> whole the characteristics of the Genii and Gods are those of Eastern
> teachings, although concerning other things there are passages which
> differ widely in our doctrines.
> 
> As to the Genii, the Hermetic philosophers called Theoi (Gods), Genii and
> Daimones, those Entities whom we call Devas (Gods), Dhyân Chohans,
> Chitkala (the Kwan‐Yin, of the Buddhists), and various other names. The
> Daimones are—in the Socratic sense, and even in the Oriental and Latin
> theological sense—the guardian spirits of the human race; “those who dwell
> in the neighbourhood of the immortals, and thence watch over human
> affairs,” as Hermes has it. In Esoteric parlance, they are called
> Chitkala, some of which are those who have furnished man with his fourth
> and fifth Principles from their own essence, and others the so‐called
> Pitris. This will be explained when we come to the production of the
> _complete man_. The root of the name is Chit, “that by which the
> consequences of acts and species of knowledge are selected for the use of
> the soul,” or conscience, the _inner voice_ in man. With the Yogins, Chit
> is a synonym of Mahat, the first and divine Intellect; but in Esoteric
> Philosophy Mahat is the root of Chit, its germ; and Chit is a quality of
> Manas in conjunction with Buddhi, a quality that attracts to itself by
> spiritual affinity a Chitkala, when it develops sufficiently in man. This
> is why it is said that Chit is a voice acquiring mystic life and becoming
> Kwan‐Yin.
> 
> Extracts From An Eastern Private Commentary, Hitherto Secret.(432)
> 
> xvii. _The Initial Existence, in the first Twilight of the Mahâmanvantara
> [after the Mahâpralaya that follows every Age of Brahmâ], is a_ CONSCIOUS
> SPIRITUAL QUALITY. _In the Manifested Worlds [Solar Systems], it is, in
> its Objective Subjectivity, like the film from a Divine Breath to the gaze
> of the entranced seer. It spreads as it issues from Laya_(_433_)_
> throughout Infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid. It is on the Seventh
> Plane, and in its Seventh State, in our Planetary World._(434)
> 
> xviii. _It is Substance to_ OUR _spiritual sight. It cannot be called so
> by men in their Waking State; therefore they have named it in their
> ignorance __“__God‐Spirit.__”_
> 
> xix. _It exists everywhere and forms the first Upâdhi [Foundation] on
> which our World [Solar System] is built. Outside the latter, it is to be
> found in its pristine purity only between [the Solar Systems or] the Stars
> of the Universe, the Worlds already formed or forming; those in Laya
> resting meanwhile in its bosom. As its substance is of a different kind
> from that known on Earth, the inhabitants of the latter, seeing_ THROUGH
> IT, _believe in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space. There
> is not one finger’s breadth [angula] of void Space in the whole Boundless
> [Universe]...._
> 
> xx. _Matter or Substance is septenary within our World, as it is so beyond
> it. Moreover, each of its states or principles is graduated into seven
> degrees of density. Sûrya [the Sun], in its visible reflection, exhibits
> the first or lowest state of the seventh, the highest state of the
> Universal_ PRESENCE, _the pure of the pure, the first manifested Breath of
> the Ever‐Unmanifested Sat [Be‐ness]. All the central physical or objective
> Suns are in their substance the lowest state of the first principle of the
> Breath. Nor are any of these any more than the Reflections of their
> Primaries, which are concealed from the gaze of all but the Dhyân Chohans,
> whose corporeal substance belongs to the fifth division of the seventh
> principle of the Mother‐Substance, and is, therefore, four degrees higher
> than the solar reflected substance. As there are seven Dhâtu [principal
> substances in the human body], so there are seven Forces in Man and in all
> Nature._
> 
> xxi. _The real substance of the Concealed [Sun] is nucleus of __ Mother‐
> Substance._(_435_)_ It is the Heart and Matrix of all the living and
> existing Forces in our Solar Universe. It is the Kernel from which proceed
> to spread on their cyclic journeys all the Powers that set in action the
> Atoms, in their functional duties, and the Focus within which they again
> meet in their Seventh Essence every eleventh year. He who tells thee he
> has seen the Sun, laugh at him,_(_436_)_ as if he had said that the Sun
> moves really onward in his diurnal path...._
> 
> xxiii. _It is on account of his septenary nature, that the Sun is spoken
> of by the ancients as one who is driven by seven horses equal to the
> metres of the Vedas; or, again, that, though he is identified with the
> seven Gana [Classes of Being] in his orb, he is distinct from
> them,_(_437_)_ as he is, indeed; as also that he has Seven Rays, as indeed
> he has...._
> 
> xxv. _The Seven Beings in the Sun are the Seven Holy Ones, self‐born from
> the inherent power in the Matrix of Mother‐Substance. It is they who send
> the seven principal Forces, called Rays, which at the beginning of Pralaya
> will centre into seven new Suns for the next Manvantara. The energy, from
> which they spring into conscious existence in every Sun, is what some
> people call Vishnu, which is the Breath of the __ABSOLUTENESS__._
> 
> _We call it the One Manifested life—itself a reflection of the
> Absolute...._
> 
> xxvii. _The latter must never be mentioned in words or speech_, LEST IT
> SHOULD TAKE AWAY SOME OF OUR SPIRITUAL ENERGIES _that aspire towards_ ITS
> _state, gravitating ever toward unto_ IT _spiritually, as the whole
> physical universe gravitates towards_ ITS _manifested centre—cosmically._
> 
> xxviii. _The former—the Initial Existence—which may be called, while in
> this state of being, the_ ONE LIFE, _is, as explained, a Film for creative
> or formative purposes. It manifests in seven states, which, with their
> septenary sub‐divisions, are the Forty‐nine Fires mentioned in sacred
> books...._
> 
> xxix. _The first is the ... __“__Mother__”__ [Prima_ MATERIA]. _Separating
> itself into its primary seven states, it proceeds down cyclically; when
> having consolidated itself in its_ LAST _principle, as_ GROSS MATTER,(438)
> _it revolves around itself and informs, with the seventh emanation of the
> last, the first and the lowest element [the serpent biting its own tail].
> In a Hierarchy, or Order of Being, the seventh emanation of her last
> principle is:_
> 
> _(a) In the Mineral, the Spark that lies latent in it, and is called to
> its evanescent being by the Positive awakening the Negative [and so
> forth]...._
> 
> _(b) In the Plant, it is that vital and intelligent Force which informs
> the seed and develops it into the blade of grass, or the root and sapling.
> It is the germ which becomes the Upâdhi of the seven principles of the
> thing it resides in, shooting them out as the latter grows and develops._
> 
> _(c) In every Animal, it does the same. It is its Life‐Principle and vital
> power; its instinct and qualities; its characteristics and special
> idiosyncrasies...._
> 
> _(d) To Man, it gives all that it bestows on all the rest of the
> manifested units in Nature; but develops, furthermore, the reflection of
> all its __“__Forty‐nine Fires__”__ in him. Each of his seven principles is
> an heir in full to, and a partaker of, the seven principles of the
> __“__Great Mother.__”__ The breath of her first principle is his Spirit
> [Âtmâ]. Her second principle is Buddhi [Soul]. We call it, erroneously,
> the seventh. The third furnishes him with the Brain Stuff on the physical
> plane, and with the Mind that moves it [which is the Human Soul._—H. P.
> B.]—_according to his organic capacities._
> 
> _(e) It is the guiding Force in the cosmic and terrestrial Elements. It
> resides in the Fire provoked out of its latent into active being; for the
> whole of the seven sub‐divisions of the ... principle reside in the
> terrestrial Fire. It whirls in the breeze, blows with the hurricane, and
> sets the air in motion, which element participates in one of its
> principles also. Proceeding cyclically, it regulates the motion of the
> water, attracts and repels the waves,_(_439_)_ according to fixed laws, of
> which its seventh principle is the informing soul._
> 
> _(f) Its four higher principles contain the Germ that develops into the
> Cosmic Gods; its three lower ones breed the Lives of the Elements
> [Elementals]._
> 
> _(g) In our Solar World, the One Existence is Heaven and Earth, the Root
> and the Flower, the Action and the Thought. It is in the Sun, and is as
> present in the glow‐worm. Not an atom can escape it. Therefore, the
> ancient Sages have wisely called it the manifested God in Nature...._
> 
> It may be interesting, in this connection, to remind the reader of what T.
> Subba Row said of the Forces—mystically defined.
> 
>     Kanyâ [the sixth sign of the Zodiac, or Virgo] means a virgin, and
>     represents Shakti or Mahâmâyâ. The sign in question is the sixth
>     Râshi or division, and indicates that there are six primary forces
>     in Nature [synthesized by the Seventh]....
> 
> These Shaktis stand as follows:
> 
>     (1) _Parâshakti._—Literally the great or supreme force or power.
>     It means and includes _the powers of light and heat_.
> 
>     (2) _Jñânashakti._—Literally the power of intellect, of real
>     wisdom or knowledge. It has two aspects:
> 
>     I. The following are _some_ of its manifestations _when placed
>     under the influence or control of material conditions_. (_a_) The
>     power of the mind in interpreting our sensations. (_b_) Its power
>     in recalling past ideas (memory) and raising future expectation.
>     (_c_) Its power as exhibited in what are called by modern
>     psychologists “the laws of association,” which enables it to form
>     _persisting_ connections between various groups of sensations and
>     possibilities of sensations, and thus generate the notion or idea
>     of an external object. (_d_) Its power in connecting our ideas
>     together by the mysterious link of memory, and thus generating the
>     notion of self or individuality.
> 
>     II. The following are _some_ of its manifestations _when liberated
>     from the bonds of matter_:
> 
>     (_a_) Clairvoyance. (_b_) Psychometry.
> 
>     (3) _Ichchhâshakti._—Literally _the power of the will_. Its _most
>     ordinary manifestation_ is the generation of certain nerve
>     currents, which set in motion such muscles as are required for the
>     accomplishment of the desired object.
> 
>     (4) _Kriyâshakti._—The mysterious power of thought which enables
>     it to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own
>     inherent energy. The ancients held that _any idea will manifest
>     itself externally if one’s attention is deeply concentrated upon
>     it_. Similarly _an intense volition will be followed by the
>     desired result_.
> 
>     A Yogi generally performs his wonders by means of Ichchhâshakti
>     and Kriyâshakti.
> 
>     (5) _Kundalinî Shakti._—The power or force which moves in a
>     serpentine or curved path. It is the universal life‐principle
>     which everywhere manifests in Nature. This force includes the two
>     great forces of attraction and repulsion. Electricity and
>     magnetism are but manifestations of it. This is the power which
>     brings about that “continuous adjustment of _internal relations to
>     external relations_,” which is the essence of life according to
>     Herbert Spencer, and that “continuous adjustment of _external
>     relations to internal relations_,” which is the basis of
>     transmigration of souls, Punarjanman (Re‐birth), in the doctrines
>     of the ancient Hindû philosophers.
> 
>     A Yogi must thoroughly subjugate this power or force, before he
>     can attain Moksha....
> 
>     (6) _Mantrikâshakti._—Literally the force or power of letters,
>     speech or music. The whole of the ancient _Mantra Shâstra_ has
>     this force or power in all its manifestations for its subject
>     matter.... The influence of its music is one of its ordinary
>     manifestations. The power of the mirific ineffable name is the
>     crown of this Shakti.
> 
>     Modern Science has but partly investigated the first, second and
>     fifth of the forces or powers above named, but is altogether in
>     the dark as regards the remaining powers.... The six forces are in
>     their unity represented by the Astral Light [Daiviprakriti, the
>     seventh, the Light of the Logos].(440)
> 
> The above is quoted to show the real Hindû ideas on the subject. It is all
> esoteric, though not covering the tenth part of _what might be said_. For
> one thing, the six names of the six Forces mentioned are those of the six
> Hierarchies of Dhyân Chohans, synthesized by their Primary, the
> seventh—who personify the Fifth Principle of Cosmic Nature, or of the
> “Mother” in its mystical sense. The enumeration alone of the Yoga Powers
> would require ten volumes. Each of these Forces has a living _Conscious
> Entity_ at its head, of which Entity it is an emanation.
> 
> But let us compare with the Commentary above cited the words of Hermes,
> the Thrice Great:
> 
>     The creation of life by the sun is as continuous as his light;
>     nothing arrests or limits it. Around him, like an army of
>     satellites, are innumerable _choirs of Genii_. These dwell in the
>     neighbourhood of the Immortals, and thence watch over human
>     things. They fulfil the will of the Gods [Karma] by means of
>     _storms_, _tempests_, _transitions of fire and earthquakes_;
>     likewise by famines and wars, for the punishment of impiety.(441)
>     ...
> 
>     It is the sun who preserves and nourishes all creatures; and, even
>     as the Ideal World, which environs the sensible world, fills this
>     last with the plenitude and universal variety of forms, so also
>     the sun, enfolding all in his light, accomplishes everywhere the
>     birth and development of creatures.... “_Under his orders is the
>     choir of the Genii, or rather the choirs, for there are many and
>     diverse, and their number corresponds to that of the stars. Every
>     star has its Genii, good and evil by nature, or rather by their
>     operation, for operation is the essence of the Genii...._ All
>     these Genii _preside over mundane affairs_,(442) they shake and
>     overthrow the constitution of states and of individuals; they
>     _imprint their likeness on our souls_, they are present in our
>     nerves, our marrow, our veins, our arteries, and _our very brain‐
>     substance_.... At the moment when each of us receives life and
>     being, he is taken in charge by the Genii [Elementals] who preside
>     over births,(443) and who are classed beneath the astral powers
>     [superhuman astral Spirits]. Perpetually they change, not always
>     identically, but revolving in circles.(444) They permeate by the
>     body two parts of the soul, that it may receive from each the
>     impress of his own energy. But the reasonable part of the soul is
>     not subject to the Genii; it is designed for the reception of
>     [the] God,(445) who enlightens it with a sunny ray. Those who are
>     thus illumined are few in number, and from them the Genii abstain:
>     for neither Genii nor Gods have any power in the presence of a
>     single ray of God.(446) But all other men, both soul and body, are
>     directed by Genii, to whom they cleave, and whose operations they
>     affect.... The Genii have then the control of mundane things and
>     our bodies serve them as instruments.”(447)
> 
> The above, save a few sectarian points, represents that which was a
> universal belief, common to all nations, till about a century or so back.
> It is still as orthodox in its broad outlines and features among Pagans
> and Christians alike, if one excepts a handful of Materialists and men of
> Science.
> 
> For whether one calls the Genii of Hermes and his “Gods,” “Powers of
> Darkness” and “Angels,” as in the Greek and Latin Churches; or “Spirits of
> the Dead,” as in Spiritualism; or, again, Bhûts and Devas, Shaitan or
> Djin, as they are still called in India and Mussulman countries—_they are
> all one and the same thing_—ILLUSION. Let not this, however, be
> misunderstood in the sense into which the great philosophical doctrine of
> the Vedântists has been lately perverted by Western schools.
> 
> All that which _is_, emanates from the ABSOLUTE, which, by reason of this
> qualification alone, stands as the One and Only Reality—hence, everything
> extraneous to this Absolute, the generative and causative Element, _must_
> be an Illusion, most undeniably. But this is only so from the purely
> metaphysical view. A man who regards himself as mentally sane, and is so
> regarded by his neighbours, calls the visions of an _insane_
> brother—hallucinations which make the victim either _happy or supremely
> wretched_, as the case may be—likewise illusions and fancies. But, where
> is that madman for whom the hideous shadows in his deranged mind, his
> _illusions_, are not, for the time being, as actual and as real as the
> things which his physician or keeper may see? Everything is relative in
> this Universe, everything is an Illusion. But the experience of any plane
> is an actuality for the percipient being, whose consciousness is on that
> plane, though the said experience, regarded from the purely metaphysical
> standpoint, may be conceived to have no objective reality. But it is not
> against Metaphysicians, but against Physicists and Materialists that
> Esoteric teaching has to fight; and for these latter Vital Force, Light,
> Sound, Electricity, even to the objectively drawing force of Magnetism,
> have no objective being, and are said to exist merely as “modes of
> motion,” “sensations and _affections_ of matter.”
> 
> Neither the Occultists generally, nor the Theosophists, reject, as
> erroneously believed by some, the views and theories of the Modern
> Scientists only because these views are opposed to Theosophy. The first
> rule of our Society is to render unto Cæsar what is Cæsar’s. Theosophists,
> therefore, are the first to recognize the intrinsic value of Science. But
> when its high priests resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey
> matter of the brain, and everything else in Nature into a mode of motion,
> we protest against the doctrine as being unphilosophical, self‐
> contradictory, and simply absurd, from a _scientific_ point of view, as
> much and even more than from the Occult aspect of the Esoteric Knowledge.
> 
> For truly the Astral Light of the derided Kabalists has strange and weird
> secrets for him who can see in it; and the mysteries concealed within its
> incessantly disturbed waves _are there_, the whole body of Materialists
> and scoffers notwithstanding.
> 
> The Astral Light of the Kabalists is by some very incorrectly translated
> “Ether,” the latter is confused with the hypothetical Ether of Science,
> and both are referred to by some Theosophists as synonymous with Âkâsha.
> This is a great mistake.
> 
> The author of _A Rational Refutation_ writes, thus unconsciously helping
> Occultism:
> 
>     A characterization of Âkâsha will serve to show how inadequately
>     it is represented by “ether.” In dimension it is ... infinite; it
>     is not made up of parts; and colour, taste, smell, and tangibility
>     do not appertain to it. So far forth it corresponds exactly to
>     time, space, Îshvara [the “Lord,” but rather creative potency and
>     soul—Anima Mundi] and soul. Its speciality, as compared therewith,
>     consists in its being the _material cause of sound_. Except for
>     its being so, one might take it to be one with vacuity.(448)
> 
> It is _vacuity_, no doubt, especially for Rationalists. At any rate Âkâsha
> is sure to produce vacuity in the brain of a Materialist. Nevertheless,
> though Âkâsha is certainly not the Ether of Science—not even the Ether of
> the Occultist who defines the latter as one of the principles of Âkâsha
> only—it is as certainly, together with its primary, the cause of sound, a
> psychical and spiritual, not a material cause by any means. The relations
> of Ether to Âkâsha may be defined by applying to both Âkâsha and Ether the
> words used of the God in the _Vedas_, “So himself was indeed (his own)
> son,” one being the progeny of the other and yet itself. This may be a
> difficult riddle to the profane, but very easy to understand for any
> Hindû—even though not a Mystic.
> 
> These secrets of the Astral Light, along with many other mysteries, will
> remain non‐existent to the Materialists of our age, in the same way as
> America was a non‐existent myth for Europeans during the early part of the
> mediæval ages, whereas Scandinavians and Norwegians had actually reached
> and settled in that very old “New World” several centuries before. But, as
> a Columbus was born to re‐discover, and to force the Old World to believe
> in antipodal countries, so will there be born Scientists who will discover
> the marvels now claimed by Occultists to exist in the regions of Ether,
> with their varied and multiform denizens and conscious Entities. Then,
> _nolens volens_, Science will have to accept the old “superstition,” as it
> has several others. And having been once forced to accept it, its learned
> professors in all probability—judging from past experience, as in the case
> of Mesmerism and Magnetism, now re‐baptized Hypnotism—will father the
> thing and reject the name. The choice of the new appellation will, in its
> turn, depend on the “modes of motion”—the new name for the older
> “automatic physical processes among the nerve fibrils of the [scientific]
> brain” of Moleschott—and also, most likely, upon the last meal of the
> namer, since, according to the founder of the new Hylo‐Idealistic Scheme,
> “cerebration is generically the same as chylification.”(449) Thus, were
> one to believe this preposterous proposition, the new name of the archaic
> truth would have to take its chance on the inspiration of the namer’s
> liver, and then only would these truths have a chance of becoming
> scientific!
> 
> But, TRUTH, however distasteful to the generally blind majority, has
> always had her champions ready to die for her, and it is not the
> Occultists who will protest against its adoption by Science under whatever
> new name. But until absolutely forced on the notice and acceptance of
> Scientists, many an Occult truth will be tabooed, as the phenomena of the
> Spiritualists and other psychic manifestations were, to be finally
> appropriated by its ex‐traducers without the least acknowledgment or
> thanks. Nitrogen has added considerably to chemical knowledge, but its
> discoverer, Paracelsus, is to this day called a “quack.” How profoundly
> true are the words of H. T. Buckle, in his admirable _History of
> Civilization_, when he says:
> 
>     Owing to circumstances still unknown [Karmic provision] there
>     appear from time to time great thinkers, who, devoting their lives
>     to a single purpose, are able to anticipate the progress of
>     mankind, and to produce a religion or a philosophy by which
>     important effects are eventually brought about. But if we look
>     into history we shall clearly see that, although the origin of a
>     new opinion may be thus due to a single man, the result which the
>     new opinion produces will depend on the condition of the people
>     among whom it is propagated. If either a religion or a philosophy
>     is too much in advance of a nation, it can do no present service,
>     but must bide its time(450) until the minds of men are ripe for
>     its reception.... Every science, every creed has had its martyrs.
>     _According to the ordinary course of affairs, a few generations
>     pass away, and then there comes a period when these very truths
>     are looked upon as commonplace facts, and a little later there
>     comes another period in which they are declared to be necessary,
>     and even the dullest intellect wonders how they could ever have
>     been denied._(451)
> 
> It is barely possible that the minds of the present generations are not
> quite ripe for the reception of Occult truths. Such perchance will be the
> retrospect furnished to the advanced thinkers of the Sixth Root‐Race of
> the history of the acceptance of Esoteric Philosophy—fully and
> unconditionally. Meanwhile the generations of our Fifth Race will continue
> to be led away by prejudice and preconceptions. Occult Sciences will have
> the finger of scorn pointed at them from every street‐corner, and everyone
> will seek to ridicule and crush them in the name, and for the greater
> glory, of Materialism and its so‐called Science. The present Volumes,
> however, show, in an anticipatory answer to several of the forthcoming
> Scientific objections, the true and mutual positions of the defendant and
> plaintiff. The Theosophists and Occultists stand arraigned by public
> opinion, which still holds high the banner of the inductive Sciences. The
> latter have, then, to be examined; and it must be shown how far their
> achievements and discoveries in the realm of natural law are opposed, not
> so much to our claims, as to facts in nature. The hour has now struck to
> ascertain whether the walls of the modern Jericho are so impregnable, that
> no blast of the Occult trumpet is ever likely to make them crumble.
> 
> The so‐called “Forces,” with Light and Electricity heading them, and the
> constitution of the Solar orb must be carefully examined; as also
> Gravitation and the Nebular theories. The natures of Ether and of other
> Elements must be discussed; thus contrasting Scientific with Occult
> teachings, while revealing some of the hitherto secret tenets of the
> latter.
> 
> Some fifteen years ago, the writer was the first to repeat, after the
> Kabalists, the wise Commandments in the Esoteric Catechism.
> 
>     Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of _this_ [the mystery],
>     and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart
>     has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the
>     object of our alliance.(452)
> 
> And again, from the _Rules of Initiation_.
> 
> _This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst
> reveal it to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape
> from it and fall outside._
> 
> A few years later, a corner of the Veil of Isis had to be lifted; and now
> another and a larger rent is made.
> 
> But old and time‐honoured errors—such as become with every day more
> glaring and self‐evident—stand arrayed in battle‐order now, as they did
> then. Marshalled by blind conservatism, conceit and prejudice, they are
> constantly on the watch, ready to strangle every truth, which, awakening
> from its age‐long sleep, happens to knock for admission. Such has been the
> case ever since man became an animal. That this proves in every case
> _moral death_ to the revealers who bring to light any of these old, old
> truths, is as certain as that it gives _life_ and _regeneration_ to those
> who are fit to profit even by the little that is now revealed to them.
> 
> PART II. THE EVOLUTION OF SYMBOLISM.
> 
> Section I. Symbolism and Ideographs.
> 
>     Is not a symbol ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or
>     clearer revelation of the God‐like?... Through all ... there
>     glimmers something of a Divine Idea. Nay, the highest ensign that
>     men ever met and embraced under, the cross itself, had no meaning,
>     save an accidental extrinsic one.
> 
>     CARLYLE.
> 
> The study of the hidden meaning in every religious and profane legend, of
> whatsoever nation, large or small, and preëminently in the traditions of
> the East, has occupied the greater portion of the present writer’s life.
> She is one of those who feel convinced that no mythological story, no
> traditional event in the folk‐lore of a people, has ever, at any time,
> been pure fiction, but that every one of such narratives has an actual
> historical lining to it. In this the writer disagrees with those
> symbologists, however great their reputation, who find in every myth
> nothing more than additional proof of the superstitious bent of mind of
> the Ancients, and who believe that all mythologies sprang from, and are
> built upon, _solar myths_. Such superficial thinkers have been admirably
> disposed of by Mr. Gerald Massey, the poet and Egyptologist, in a lecture
> on “Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern.” His pointed criticism is worthy of
> reproduction in this part of our work, as it echoes so well our own
> feelings, expressed openly so far back as 1875, when _Isis Unveiled_ was
> written.
> 
>     For thirty years past Professor Max Müller has been teaching in
>     his books and lectures, in the _Times_, _Saturday Review_, and
>     various magazines, from the platform of the Royal Institution, the
>     pulpit of Westminster Abbey, and his chair at Oxford, that
>     mythology is a disease of language, and that the ancient symbolism
>     was a result of something like a primitive mental aberration.
> 
>     “We know,” says Renouf, echoing Max Müller, in his Hibbert
>     lectures, “We know that mythology _is_ the disease which springs
>     up at a peculiar stage of human culture.” Such is the shallow
>     explanation of the non‐evolutionists, and such explanations are
>     still accepted by the British public, that gets its thinking done
>     for it by proxy. Professor Max Müller, Cox, Gubernatis, and other
>     propounders of the Solar Mythos, have portrayed the primitive
>     myth‐maker for us as a sort of Germanised‐Hindû metaphysician,
>     projecting his own shadow on a mental mist, and talking
>     ingeniously concerning smoke, or, at least, _cloud_; the sky
>     overhead becoming like the dome of dreamland, scribbled over with
>     the imagery of aboriginal nightmares! They conceive the early man
>     in their own likeness, and look upon him as perversely prone to
>     self‐mystification, or, as Fontenelle has it, “subject to
>     beholding things that are not there”! They have misrepresented
>     primitive or archaic man as having been idiotically misled from
>     the first by an active but untutored imagination into believing
>     all sorts of fallacies, which were directly and constantly
>     contradicted by his own daily experience; a fool of fancy in the
>     midst of those grim realities that were grinding his experiences
>     into him, like the griding icebergs making their imprints upon the
>     rocks submerged beneath the sea. It remains to be said, and will
>     one day be acknowledged, that these accepted teachers have been no
>     nearer to the beginnings of mythology and language than Burns’s
>     poet Willie had been near to Pegasus. My reply is, ’Tis but a
>     dream of the metaphysical theorist that mythology was a disease of
>     language, or of anything else except his own brain. The origin and
>     meaning of mythology have been missed altogether by these
>     solarites and weather‐mongers! Mythology was a primitive mode of
>     _thinking_ the early thought. It was founded on natural facts, and
>     is still verifiable in phenomena. There is nothing insane, nothing
>     irrational in it, when considered in the light of evolution, and
>     when its mode of expression by sign‐language is thoroughly
>     understood. The insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or
>     Divine Revelation.(453) Mythology is the repository of man’s most
>     ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this—when truly
>     interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those
>     false theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth!(454)
> 
>     In modern phraseology a statement is sometimes said to be mythical
>     in proportion to its being untrue; but the ancient mythology was
>     not a system or mode of falsifying in that sense. Its fables were
>     the means of conveying facts; they were neither forgeries nor
>     fictions.... For example, when the Egyptians portrayed the moon as
>     a _cat_, they were not ignorant enough to suppose that the moon
>     was a cat; nor did their wandering fancies see any likeness in the
>     moon to a cat; nor was a cat‐myth any _mere expansion of verbal
>     metaphor_; nor had they any intention of making puzzles or
>     riddles.... They had observed the simple fact that the cat saw in
>     the dark, and that her eyes became full‐orbed, and grew most
>     luminous by night. The moon was the seer by night in heaven, and
>     the cat was its equivalent on the earth; and so the familiar cat
>     was adopted as a representative, a natural sign, a living
>     pictograph of the lunar orb.... And so it followed that the sun
>     which saw down in the under‐world at night could also be called
>     the cat, as it was, because _it also saw_ in the dark. The name of
>     the cat in Egyptian is _mau_, which denotes the seer, from _mau_,
>     to see. One writer on mythology asserts that the Egyptians
>     “imagined a great cat behind the sun, which is the pupil of the
>     cat’s eye.” But this imagining is all modern. It is the Müllerite
>     stock in trade. The moon, _as cat, was_ the eye of the sun,
>     _because it reflected the solar light_, and because the eye gives
>     back the image in its mirror. In the form of the goddess Pasht,
>     the cat keeps watch for the sun, with her paw holding down and
>     bruising the head of the serpent of darkness, called his eternal
>     enemy!
> 
> This is a very correct exposition of the lunar mythos from its
> astronomical aspect. Selenography, however, is the least esoteric of the
> divisions of lunar Symbology. To master thoroughly—if one is permitted to
> coin a new word—Selenognosis, one must become proficient in more than its
> astronomical meaning. The Moon is intimately related to the Earth, as
> shown in the Stanzas, and is more directly concerned with all the
> mysteries of our Globe than is even Venus‐Lucifer, the occult sister and
> _alter ego_ of the Earth.(455)
> 
> The untiring researches of Western, especially German, symbologists,
> during the last and the present centuries, have induced the most
> unprejudiced students, and of course every Occultist, to see that without
> the help of symbology—with its seven departments, of which the moderns
> know nothing—no ancient Scripture can ever be correctly understood.
> Symbology must be studied from every one of its aspects, for each nation
> had its own peculiar methods of expression. In short, no Egyptian papyrus,
> no Indian olla, no Assyrian tile, no Hebrew scroll, should be read and
> interpreted _literally_.
> 
> This every scholar now knows. The able lectures of Mr. Gerald Massey alone
> are sufficient to convince any fair‐minded Christian that to accept the
> dead‐letter of the _Bible_ is equivalent to falling into a grosser error
> and superstition than any hitherto evolved by the brain of the savage
> South Sea Islander. But the fact to which even the most truth‐loving and
> truth‐searching Orientalists—whether Âryanists or Egyptologists—seem to
> remain blind, is that every symbol on papyrus or olla is a many‐faced
> diamond, each of whose facets not only includes several interpretations,
> but also relates to several sciences. This is instanced in the just quoted
> interpretation of the cat symbolizing the moon—an example of sidereo‐
> terrestrial imagery; for the moon has with other nations many other
> meanings besides.
> 
> As a learned Mason and Theosophist, the late Kenneth Mackenzie, has shown
> in his _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_, there is a great difference between
> _emblem_ and _symbol_. The former “comprises a larger series of thoughts
> than a symbol, which may be said rather to illustrate some single special
> idea.” Hence, the symbols—lunar, or solar, for example—of several
> countries, each illustrating such a special idea, or series of ideas, form
> collectively an esoteric emblem. The latter is “a concrete visible picture
> or sign representing principles, or a series of principles, _recognizable
> by those who have received certain instructions_ [Initiates].” To put it
> still plainer, an emblem is usually _a series of graphic pictures_ viewed
> and explained allegorically, and unfolding an idea in panoramic views, one
> after the other. Thus the _Purânas_ are written emblems. So are the Mosaic
> and Christian _Testaments_, or the _Bible_, and all other exoteric
> Scriptures. As the same authority shows:
> 
>     All esoteric societies have made use of emblems and symbols, such
>     as the Pythagorean Society, the Eleusinia, the Hermetic Brethren
>     of Egypt, the Rosicrucians, and the Freemasons. Many of these
>     emblems it is not proper to divulge to the general eye, and _a
>     very minute difference_ may make the emblem or symbol differ
>     widely in its meaning. The magical sigilla, being founded on
>     certain principles of number, partake of this character, and
>     although monstrous or ridiculous in the eyes of the uninstructed,
>     convey a whole body of doctrine to those who have been trained to
>     recognize them.
> 
> The above enumerated societies are all comparatively modern, none dating
> back earlier than the Middle Ages. How much more proper, then, that the
> students of the oldest archaic school should be careful not to divulge
> secrets of far more importance to humanity (as being dangerous in ignorant
> hands) than any of the so‐called “Masonic Secrets,” which have now become
> those of Polichinelle, as the French say! But this restriction can apply
> only to the psychological or rather psycho‐physiological and cosmical
> significance of symbol and emblem, and even to that only partially. For
> though an Adept is compelled to refuse to impart the conditions and means
> that lead to any correlation of Elements—whether psychic or physical—which
> may produce harmful as well as beneficent results; yet he is ever ready to
> impart to the earnest student the secret of the ancient thought, in
> anything that has respect to history concealed under mythological
> symbolism, and thus to furnish a few more land‐marks for a retrospective
> view of the past, in so far as it furnishes useful information with regard
> to the origin of man, the evolution of the Races and geognosy. And yet it
> is the crying complaint to‐day, not only among Theosophists, but also
> among the few profane interested in the subject: Why do not the Adepts
> reveal that which they know? To this, one might answer: Why should they,
> since one knows beforehand that no man of Science will accept it, even as
> a hypothesis, much less as a theory or axiom. Have you so much as accepted
> or believed in the A B C of the Occult Philosophy contained in the
> _Theosophist_, _Esoteric Buddhism_, and other works and periodicals? Has
> not even the little which has been given, been ridiculed and derided, and
> made to face the “animal‐” and “ape‐theory” of Huxley and Hæckel, on the
> one hand, and the rib of Adam and the apple on the other? Notwithstanding
> such an unenviable prospect, however, a mass of facts is given in the
> present work, and the origin of man, the evolution of the Globe and the
> Races, human and animal, are as fully treated as the writer is able to
> treat them.
> 
> The proofs brought forward in corroboration of the old teachings are
> scattered widely throughout the old scriptures of ancient civilizations.
> The _Purânas_, the _Zend Avesta_, and the old classics, are full of such
> facts; but no one has ever taken the trouble of collecting and collating
> them together. The reason for this is that all such events were recorded
> symbolically; and that the best scholars, the most acute minds, among our
> Âryanists and Egyptologists, have been too often darkened by one or
> another preconception, and still oftener, by one‐sided views of the secret
> meaning. Yet even a parable is a spoken symbol: a fiction or a fable, as
> some think; an allegorical representation, we say, of life‐realities,
> events, and facts. And just as a moral was ever drawn from a parable, such
> moral being an actual truth and fact in human life, so a historical, real
> event was deduced, by those versed in the hieratic sciences, from emblems
> and symbols recorded in the ancient archives of the temples. The religious
> and esoteric history of every nation was embedded in symbols; it was never
> expressed literally in so many words. All the thoughts and emotions, all
> the learning and knowledge, revealed and acquired, of the early Races,
> found their pictorial expression in allegory and parable. Why? Because
> _the spoken word has a potency not only unknown to, but even unsuspected
> and naturally disbelieved in_, by the modern “sages.” Because sound and
> rhythm are closely related to the four Elements of the Ancients; and
> because such or another vibration in the air is sure to awaken the
> corresponding Powers, union with which produces good or bad results, as
> the case may be. No student was ever allowed to recite historical,
> religious, or real events of any kind, in so many unmistakable words, lest
> the Powers connected with the event should be once more attracted. Such
> events were narrated only during Initiation, and every student had to
> record them in corresponding symbols, drawn out of his own mind and
> examined later by his Master, before they were finally accepted. Thus by
> degrees was the Chinese Alphabet created, as just before it the hieratic
> symbols were fixed upon in old Egypt. In the Chinese language, the
> characters of which may be read in any language, and which, as just said,
> is only a little less ancient than the Egyptian alphabet of Thoth, every
> word has its corresponding symbol in a pictorial form. This language
> possesses many thousands of such symbol‐letters, or logograms, each
> conveying the meaning of a whole word; for letters proper, or an alphabet
> as we understand it, do not exist in the Chinese language, any more than
> they did in the Egyptian, till a far later period.
> 
> Thus a Japanese who does not understand one word of Chinese, meeting with
> a Chinaman who has never heard the language of the former, will
> communicate in writing with him, and they will understand each other
> perfectly—because their writing is symbolical.
> 
> The explanation of the chief symbols and emblems is now attempted, as Book
> II, which treats of Anthropogenesis, would be most difficult to understand
> without a preparatory acquaintance with at least the metaphysical symbols.
> 
> Nor would it be just to enter upon an esoteric reading of symbolism,
> without giving due honour to one who has rendered it the greatest service
> in this century, by discovering the chief key to ancient Hebrew symbology,
> strongly interwoven with metrology, one of the keys to the once universal
> Mystery Language. Mr. Ralston Skinner, of Cincinnati, the author of _The
> Key to the Hebrew‐Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures_, has our
> thanks. A Mystic and a Kabalist by nature, he has laboured for many years
> in this direction, and his efforts have certainly been crowned with great
> success. In his own words:
> 
>     The writer is quite certain that there was an ancient language
>     which modernly and up to this time appears to have been lost, the
>     vestiges of which, however, abundantly exist.... The author
>     discovered that this geometrical ratio [the integral ratio of the
>     diameter to the circumference of a circle] was the very ancient,
>     and probably the divine origin of ... linear measures.... It
>     appears almost proven that the same system of geometry, numbers,
>     ratio, and measures was known and made use of on the continent of
>     North America, even prior to the knowledge of the same by the
>     descending Semites....
> 
>     The peculiarity of this language was that it could be contained in
>     another, concealed and not to be perceived, save through the help
>     of special instruction; letters and syllabic signs possessing at
>     the same time the powers or meanings of numbers, of geometrical
>     shapes, pictures, or ideographs and symbols, the designed scope of
>     which would be determinatively helped out by parables in the shape
>     of narratives or parts of narratives; while also it could be set
>     forth separately, independently, and variously, by pictures, in
>     stone work, or in earth constructions.
> 
>     To clear up an ambiguity as to the term language: Primarily the
>     word means the expression of ideas by human speech; but,
>     secondarily, it may mean the expression of ideas by any other
>     instrumentality. This old language is so composed in the Hebrew
>     text, that by the use of the written characters, which uttered
>     shall be the language first defined, a distinctly separated series
>     of ideas may be intentionally communicated, other than those ideas
>     expressed by the reading of the sound‐signs. This secondary
>     language sets forth, under a veil, series of ideas, copies in
>     imagination of things sensible, which may be pictured, and of
>     things which may be classed as real without being sensible: as,
>     for instance, the number 9 may be taken as a reality, though it
>     has no sensible existence, so also a revolution of the moon, as
>     separated from the moon itself by which that revolution has been
>     made, may be taken as giving rise to, or causing a real idea,
>     though such a revolution has no substance. This idea‐language may
>     consist of symbols restricted to arbitrary terms and signs, having
>     a very limited range of conceptions, and quite valueless, or it
>     may be a reading of nature in some of her manifestations of a
>     value almost immeasurable, as regards human civilization. A
>     picture of something natural may give rise to ideas of
>     coördinating subjects, radiating out in various and even opposing
>     directions, like the spokes of a wheel, and producing natural
>     realities in departments very foreign to the apparent tendency of
>     the reading of the first or starting picture. Notion may give rise
>     to connected notion, but if it does, then, however apparently
>     incongruous, all resulting ideas must spring from the original
>     picture and be harmonically connected, or related the one with the
>     other. Thus with a pictured idea radical enough, the imagination
>     of the cosmos itself, even in its details of construction, might
>     result. Such a use of ordinary language is now obsolete, but it
>     has become a question with the writer whether at one time, far
>     back in the past, it, or such, was not the language of the world
>     and of universal use, possessed, however, as it became more and
>     more moulded into its arcane forms, by a select class or caste. By
>     this I mean that the popular tongue or vernacular commenced even
>     in its origin to be made use of as the vehicle of this peculiar
>     mode of conveying ideas. Of this the evidences are very strong;
>     and, indeed, it would seem that in the history of the human race
>     there happened, from causes which at present, at any rate, we
>     cannot trace, a lapse or loss from an original perfect language
>     and a perfect system of science—shall we say perfect because they
>     were of divine origin and importation?(456)
> 
> “Divine origin” does not here mean a revelation from an anthropomorphic
> God on a mount amidst thunder and lightning; but, as we understand it, a
> language and a system of science imparted to early mankind by a more
> advanced mankind, so much higher as to be _divine_ in the sight of that
> infant humanity: by a “mankind,” in short, from other spheres; an idea
> which contains nothing supernatural in it, but the acceptance or rejection
> of which depends upon the degree of conceit and arrogance in the mind of
> him to whom it is stated. For, if the professors of modern knowledge would
> only confess that, though they know nothing of the future of the
> disembodied man—or rather will accept nothing—yet this future may be
> pregnant with surprises and unexpected revelations to them, once their
> Egos are rid of their gross bodies—then materialistic unbelief would have
> fewer chances than it has. Who of them knows, or can tell, what may happen
> when once the Life‐Cycle of this Globe is run down, and our mother Earth
> herself falls into her last sleep? Who is bold enough to say that the
> _divine_ Egos of our mankind—at least the elect out of the multitudes
> passing on to other spheres—will not become in their turn the “divine”
> instructors of a new mankind generated by them on a new Globe, called to
> life and activity by the disembodied “principles” of our Earth? All this
> may have been the experience of the Past, and these strange records lie
> embedded in the “Mystery Language” of the pre‐historic ages, the language
> now called SYMBOLISM.
> 
> Section II. The Mystery Language and Its Keys.
> 
> Recent discoveries made by great mathematicians and Kabalists thus prove,
> beyond a shadow of doubt, that every theology, from the earliest down to
> the latest, has sprung, not only from a common source of abstract beliefs,
> but from one universal Esoteric, or Mystery, Language. These scholars hold
> the key to the universal language of old, and have turned it successfully,
> though only _once_, in the hermetically closed door leading to the Hall of
> Mysteries. The great archaic system known from prehistoric ages as the
> sacred Wisdom‐Science, one that is contained and can be traced in every
> old as well as in every new religion, had, and still has, its universal
> language—suspected by the Mason Ragon—the language of the Hierophants,
> which has seven “dialects,” so to speak, each referring, and being
> specially appropriate, to one of the seven mysteries of Nature. Each had
> its own symbolism. Nature could thus be either read in its fulness, or
> viewed from one of its special aspects.
> 
> The proof of this lies, to this day, in the extreme difficulty which the
> Orientalists in general, and the Indianists and Egyptologists in
> particular, experience in interpreting the allegorical writings of the
> Âryans and the hieratic records of old Egypt. This is because they will
> never remember that all the ancient records were written in a language
> which was universal and known to all nations alike in days of old, but
> which is now intelligible only to the few. Like the Arabic figures which
> are understandable to men of every nation, or like the English word _and_,
> which becomes _et_ for the Frenchman, _und_ for the German, and so on, yet
> which may be expressed for all civilized nations in the simple sign &—so
> all the words of that Mystery Language signified the same thing to each
> man, of whatever nationality. There have been several men of note who have
> tried to reëstablish such a universal and _philosophical_ tongue,
> Delgarme, Wilkins, Leibnitz; but Demaimieux, in his _Pasigraphie_, is the
> only one who has proven its possibility. The scheme of Valentinius, called
> the “Greek Kabalah,” based on the combination of Greek letters, might
> serve as a model.
> 
> The many‐sided facets of the Mystery Language have led to the adoption of
> widely varied dogmas and rites in the exotericism of the Church rituals.
> It is these, again, which are at the origin of most of the dogmas of the
> Christian Church; for instance, the seven Sacraments, the Trinity, the
> Resurrection, the seven Capital Sins and the seven Virtues. The Seven Keys
> to the Mystery Tongue, however, having always been in the keeping of the
> highest among the initiated Hierophants of antiquity; it is only the
> partial use of a few out of the seven which passed, through the treason of
> some early Church Fathers—ex‐Initiates of the Temples—into the hands of
> the new sect of the Nazarenes. Some of the early Popes were Initiates, but
> the last fragments of their knowledge have now fallen into the power of
> the Jesuits, who have turned them into a system of sorcery.
> 
> It is maintained that _India_—not confined to its present limits, but
> including its ancient boundaries—is the only country in the world which
> still has among her sons Adepts, who have the knowledge of all the seven
> sub‐systems and the key to the entire system. From the fall of Memphis,
> Egypt began to lose these keys one by one, and Chaldæa had preserved only
> three in the days of Berosus. As for the Hebrews, in all their writings
> they show no more than a thorough knowledge of the astronomical,
> geometrical and numerical systems of symbolizing the human, and especially
> the physiological functions. They never had the higher keys.
> 
> M. Gaston Maspero, the great French Egyptologist and the successor of
> Mariette Bey, writes:
> 
>     Every time I hear people talking of the religion of Egypt, I am
>     tempted to ask _which_ of the Egyptian religions they are talking
>     about? Is it of the Egyptian religion of the fourth dynasty, or of
>     the Egyptian religion of the Ptolemaic period? Is it of the
>     religion of the rabble, or of that of the learned? Of the religion
>     such as was taught in the schools of Heliopolis, or of that which
>     was in the minds and conceptions of the Theban sacerdotal class?
>     For, between the first Memphite tomb, which bears the _cartouche_
>     of a king of the third dynasty, and the last stones engraved at
>     Esneh under Cæsar Philippus, the Arabian, there is an interval of
>     at least five thousand years. Leaving aside the invasion of the
>     Shepherds, the Ethiopian and Assyrian dominions, the Persian
>     conquest, Greek colonization, and the thousand revolutions of its
>     political life, Egypt had passed during those five thousand years
>     through many vicissitudes of life, moral and intellectual. Chapter
>     XVII of the _Book of the Dead_, which seems to contain the
>     exposition of the system of the world, as it was understood at
>     Heliopolis during the time of the first dynasties, is known to us
>     by a few copies of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties. Every one
>     of the verses composing it was already interpreted in three or
>     four different ways; so different, indeed, that according to this
>     or another school, the Demiurge became either the solar fire—Ra‐
>     shoo, or the primordial water. Fifteen centuries later, the number
>     of readings had increased considerably. Time, in its course, had
>     modified their ideas about the universe and the forces that ruled
>     it. In the short eighteen centuries that Christianity has existed,
>     it has worked up, developed and transformed most of its dogmas;
>     how many times, then, might not the Egyptian priesthood have
>     altered their dogmas during those fifty centuries that separate
>     Theodosius from the King Builders of the Pyramids.(457)
> 
> Here we believe the eminent Egyptologist is going too far. The exoteric
> dogmas may often have been altered, the esoteric never. He does not take
> into account the sacred immutability of the primitive truths, revealed
> only during the mysteries of Initiation. The Egyptian priests _had
> forgotten much, they altered nothing_. The loss of a great part of the
> primitive teaching was due to the sudden deaths of the great Hierophants,
> who passed away before they had time to reveal _all_ to their successors,
> mostly in the absence of worthy heirs to the knowledge. Yet they have
> preserved in their rituals and dogmas the principal teachings of the
> Secret Doctrine.
> 
> Thus, in the Chapter of the _Book of the Dead_, mentioned by Maspero, we
> find (1) Osiris saying he is Toom—the creative force in Nature, giving
> form to all beings, spirits and men, self‐generated and self‐
> existent—issued from Noon, the celestial river, called Father‐Mother of
> the Gods, the primordial deity, which is Chaos or the Deep, impregnated by
> the unseen Spirit. (2) He has found Shoo, the solar force, on the Stairway
> in the City of the Eight (the two squares of Good and Evil), and he has
> annihilated the Children of Rebellion, the evil principles in Noon
> (Chaos). (3) He is the Fire and Water, Noon the Primordial Parent, and he
> created the Gods out of his Limbs—fourteen Gods (twice seven), seven dark
> and seven light Gods—the seven Spirits of the Presence of the Christians,
> and the seven dark Evil Spirits.
> 
> (4) He is the Law of Existence and Being, the Bennoo, or Phœnix, the Bird
> of Resurrection in Eternity, in whom Night follows Day, and Day Night—an
> allusion to the periodical cycles of cosmic resurrection and human
> reïncarnation. For what else can this mean? “The Wayfarer who crosses
> millions of years is the name of one, and the Great Green [Primordial
> Water or Chaos] the name of the other,” one begetting millions of years in
> succession, the other engulfing them, to restore them back. (5) He speaks
> of the Seven Luminous Ones who follow their Lord, Osiris, who confers
> justice, in Amenti.
> 
> All this is now shown to have been the source and origin of Christian
> dogmas. That which the Jews had from Egypt, through Moses and other
> Initiates, was confused and distorted enough in later days; but that which
> the Church got from both, is still more misinterpreted.
> 
> Yet the system of the former, in this special department of symbology—the
> key, namely, to the mysteries of astronomy as connected with those of
> generation and conception—is now proven identical with those ideas in
> ancient religions which have developed the phallic element of theology.
> The Jewish system of sacred measures, applied to religious symbols, is the
> same, so far as geometrical and numerical combinations go, as those of
> Greece, Chaldæa and Egypt, for it was adopted by the Israelites during the
> centuries of their slavery and captivity among the two latter
> nations.(458) What was this system? It is the intimate conviction of the
> author of _The Source of Measures_ that: “the Mosaic Books were intended,
> by a mode of art‐speech, to set forth a geometrical and numerical system
> of exact science, which should serve as an origin of measures.” Piazzi
> Smyth believes similarly. This system and these measures are found by some
> scholars to be identical with those used in the construction of the Great
> Pyramid: but this is only partially so. “The foundation of these measures
> was the Parker ratio,” says Ralston Skinner, in _The Source of Measures_.
> 
> The author of this very extraordinary work has discovered it, he says, in
> the use of the integral ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a
> circle, discovered by John A. Parker, of New York. This ratio is 6561 for
> diameter, and 20612 for circumference. Furthermore, that this geometrical
> ratio was the very ancient and probably the divine origin of what have now
> become, through exoteric handling and practical application, the British
> linear measures, “the underlying unit of which, viz., the _inch_, was
> likewise the base of one of the royal Egyptian _cubits_, and of the Roman
> _foot_.”
> 
>     He also discovered that there was a modified form of the ratio,
>     viz., 113 to 355; and that while this last ratio pointed through
>     its origin to the exact integral _pi_, or to 6561 to 20612, it
>     also served as a base for astronomical calculations. The author
>     discovered that a system of _exact science_, geometrical,
>     numerical, and astronomical, founded on these ratios, and to be
>     seen in use in the construction of the Great Egyptian Pyramid, was
>     in part the burden of this _language_, as contained in, and
>     concealed under, the verbiage of the Hebrew text of the Bible. The
>     _inch_ and the two‐foot rule of 24 inches, interpreted for use
>     through the elements of the circle and the ratios mentioned, were
>     found to be at the basis or foundation of this natural, and
>     Egyptian, and Hebrew system of science; while, moreover, it seems
>     evident enough that the system itself was looked upon as of divine
>     origin, and of divine revelation.
> 
> But let us see what is said by the opponents of Prof. Piazzi Smyth’s
> measurements of the Pyramid.
> 
> Mr. Petrie seems to deny them, and to have made short work altogether of
> Piazzi Smyth’s calculations in their Biblical connection. So does Mr.
> Proctor, the champion “Coincidentalist” for many years past in every
> question of ancient arts and sciences. Speaking of “the multitude of
> relations independent of the Pyramid, which have turned up while the
> Pyramidalists have been endeavouring to connect the Pyramid with the solar
> system,” he says:
> 
>     These coincidences [which “would still remain if the Pyramid had
>     no existence,”] are altogether more curious than any coincidence
>     between the Pyramid and astronomical numbers: the former are as
>     close and remarkable as they are real; the latter, which are only
>     _imaginary_ (?), have only been established by the process which
>     schoolboys call “fudging,” and now new measures have left the work
>     to be done all over again.(459)
> 
> On this Mr. C. Staniland Wake justly observes:
> 
>     They must, however, have been more than _mere coincidences_, if
>     the builders of the Pyramid had the astronomical knowledge
>     displayed in its perfect orientation and in its other admitted
>     astronomical features.(460)
> 
> They had it assuredly; and it is on this “knowledge” that the programme of
> the Mysteries and of the series of Initiations was based: hence, the
> construction of the Pyramid, the everlasting record and the indestructible
> symbol of these Mysteries and Initiations on Earth, as the courses of the
> stars are in Heaven. The cycle of Initiation was a reproduction in
> miniature of that great series of cosmic changes to which astronomers have
> given the name of the Tropical or Sidereal Year. Just as, at the close of
> the cycle of the Sidereal Year (25,868 years), the heavenly bodies return
> to the same relative positions as they occupied at its outset, so at the
> close of the cycle of Initiation the Inner Man has regained the pristine
> state of divine purity and knowledge from which he set out on his cycle of
> terrestrial incarnation.
> 
> Moses, an Initiate into the Egyptian Mystagogy, based the religious
> mysteries of the new nation which he created, upon the same abstract
> formulæ derived from this Sidereal Cycle, symbolized by the form and
> measurements of the Tabernacle, which he is supposed to have constructed
> in the Wilderness. On these data, the later Jewish High Priests
> constructed the allegory of Solomon’s Temple—a building which never had a
> real existence, any more than had King Solomon himself, who is as much a
> solar myth as is the still later Hiram Abif of the Masons, as Ragon has
> well demonstrated. Thus, if the measurements of this allegorical Temple,
> the symbol of the cycle of Initiation, coincide with those of the Great
> Pyramid, it is due to the fact that the former were derived from the
> latter through the Tabernacle of Moses.
> 
> That our author has undeniably discovered _one_ and even _two_ of the
> _keys_, is fully demonstrated in the work just quoted. One has only to
> read it, to feel a growing conviction that the hidden meaning of the
> allegories and parables of both _Testaments_ is now unveiled. But that he
> owes this discovery far more to his own genius than to Parker and Piazzi
> Smyth, is also as certain, if not more so. For, as just shown, it is not
> so certain whether the measures of the Great Pyramid adopted by the
> Biblical Pyramidalists are beyond suspicion. A proof of this is to be
> found in the work called _The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh_, by Mr. F.
> Petrie, and also in other works written quite recently to oppose the said
> calculations, which their authors call “biassed.” We gather that nearly
> every one of Piazzi Smyth’s measurements differs from the later and more
> carefully made measurements of Mr. Petrie, who concludes the Introduction
> to his work with this sentence:
> 
>     As to the results of the whole investigation, perhaps many
>     theorists will agree with an American who was a warm believer in
>     Pyramid theories when he came to Gizeh. I had the pleasure of his
>     company there for a couple of days, and at our last meal together
>     he said to me in a saddened way: “Well, sir! I feel as if I had
>     been to a funeral. By all means let the old theories have a decent
>     burial, though we should take care that in our haste none of the
>     wounded ones are buried alive.”
> 
> As regards the late J. A. Parker’s calculation in general, and his third
> proposition especially, we have consulted some eminent mathematicians, and
> this is the substance of what they say:
> 
> Parker’s reasoning rests on sentimental, rather than on mathematical,
> considerations, and is logically inconclusive.
> 
> Proposition III, namely, that:
> 
>     The circle is the natural basis or beginning of all area, and the
>     square being made so in mathematical science, is artificial and
>     arbitrary.
> 
> —is an illustration of an arbitrary proposition, and cannot safely be
> relied upon in mathematical reasoning. The same observation applies, even
> more strongly, to Proposition VII, which states that:
> 
>     Because the circle is the primary shape in nature, and hence the
>     basis of area; and because the circle is measured by, and is equal
>     to the square only in ratio of half its circumference by the
>     radius, therefore, circumference and radius, and not the square of
>     diameter, are the only natural and legitimate elements of area, by
>     which all regular shapes are made equal to the square, and equal
>     to the circle.
> 
> Proposition IX is a remarkable example of faulty reasoning, though it is
> the one on which Mr. Parker’s Quadrature mainly rests. It states that:
> 
>     The circle and the equilateral triangle are opposite to one
>     another in all the elements of their construction, and hence the
>     fractional diameter of one circle, which is equal to the diameter
>     of one square, is in the opposite duplicate ratio to the diameter
>     of an equilateral triangle whose area is one, etc., etc.
> 
> Granting, for the sake of argument, that a triangle can be said to have a
> radius, in the sense in which we speak of the radius of a circle—for what
> Parker calls the radius of the triangle, is the radius of a circle
> inscribed in a triangle, and therefore not the radius of the triangle at
> all—and granting for the moment the other fanciful and mathematical
> propositions united in his premisses, why must we conclude that, if the
> equilateral triangle and circle are opposite in all the elements of their
> construction, the diameter of any defined circle is in the opposite
> duplicate ratio of the diameter of any given equivalent triangle? What
> necessary connection is there between the premisses and the conclusion?
> The reasoning is of a kind not known in geometry, and would not be
> accepted by strict mathematicians.
> 
> Whether the archaic Esoteric system originated the British inch or not, is
> of little consequence, however, to the strict and true metaphysician. Nor
> does Mr. Ralston Skinner’s esoteric reading of the _Bible_ become
> incorrect, merely because the measurements of the Pyramid may not be found
> to agree with those of Solomon’s Temple, the Ark of Noah, etc., or because
> Mr. Parker’s Quadrature of the Circle is rejected by mathematicians. For
> Mr. Skinner’s reading depends primarily on the Kabalistic methods and the
> Rabbinical value of the Hebrew letters. But it is extremely important to
> ascertain whether the measures used in the evolution of the symbolic
> religion of the Âryans, in the construction of their temples, in the
> figures given in the _Purânas_, and especially in their chronology, their
> astronomical symbols, the duration of the cycles, and other computations,
> were, or were not, the same as those used in the Biblical measurements and
> glyphs. For this will prove that the Jews, unless they took their sacred
> cubit and measurements from the Egyptians—Moses being an Initiate of their
> Priests—must have got those notions from India. At any rate they passed
> them on to the early Christians. Hence, it is the Occultists and Kabalists
> who are the true heirs to the Knowledge, or the Secret Wisdom, which is
> still found in the _Bible_; for they alone now understand its real
> meaning, whereas profane Jews and Christians cling to the husks and dead
> letter thereof. That it was this system of measures which led to the
> invention of the God‐names Elohim and Jehovah, and to their adaptation to
> Phallicism, and that Jehovah is a not very flattering copy of Osiris, is
> now demonstrated by the author of the _Source of Measures_. But the latter
> and Mr. Piazzi Smyth both seem to labour under the impression that (_a_)
> the priority of the system belongs to the Israelites, the Hebrew language
> being the divine language, and that (_b_) this universal language belongs
> to direct revelation!
> 
> The latter hypothesis is correct only in the sense shown in the last
> paragraph of the preceding Section; but we have yet to agree as to the
> nature and character of the divine “Revealer.” The former hypothesis as to
> priority will for the profane, of course depend on (_a_) the internal and
> external evidence of the revelation, and (_b_) on each scholar’s
> individual preconceptions. This, however, cannot prevent either the
> Theistic Kabalist, or the Pantheistic Occultist, from believing each in
> his way; neither of the two convincing the other. The data furnished by
> history are too meagre and unsatisfactory for either of them to prove to
> the sceptic which of them is right.
> 
> On the other hand, the proofs afforded by tradition are too constantly
> rejected for us to hope to settle the question in our present age.
> Meanwhile, Materialistic Science will be laughing at both Kabalists and
> Occultists indifferently. But the vexed question of priority once laid
> aside, Science, in its departments of Philology and Comparative Religion,
> will find itself finally taken to task, and be compelled to admit the
> common claim.
> 
> One by one the claims become admitted, as one Scientist after another is
> compelled to recognize the facts given out from the Secret Doctrine;
> though he rarely, if ever, recognizes that he has been anticipated in his
> statements. Thus, in the palmy days of Mr. Piazzi Smyth’s authority on the
> Pyramid of Gizeh, his theory was, that the porphyry sarcophagus of the
> King’s Chamber was “_the unit of measure_ for the two most enlightened
> nations of the earth, England and America,” and was no better than a
> “corn‐bin.” This was vehemently denied by us in _Isis Unveiled_, which had
> just been published at that time. Then the New York press arose in arms
> (the _Sun_ and the _World_ newspapers chiefly) against our presuming to
> correct or find fault with such a star of learning. In that work, we had
> said, that Herodotus, when treating of that Pyramid:
> 
>     ... might have added that, externally it symbolized _the creative
>     principle of Nature_, and illustrated also the _principles of
>     geometry_, _mathematics_, _astrology_, _and astronomy_.
>     Internally, it was a majestic fane, in whose sombre recesses were
>     performed the Mysteries, and whose walls had often witnessed the
>     initiation‐scenes of members of the royal family. The porphyry
>     sarcophagus, which Professor Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal of
>     Scotland, degrades into a corn‐bin, was the _baptismal font_, upon
>     emerging from which the neophyte was “born again” and became an
>     adept.(461)
> 
> Our statement was laughed at in those days. We were accused of having got
> our ideas from the “craze” of Shaw, an English writer who had maintained
> that the sarcophagus had been used for the celebration of the Mysteries of
> Osiris, although we had never heard of that writer. And now, six or seven
> years later (1882), this is what Mr. Staniland Wake writes:
> 
>     The so‐called King’s Chamber, of which an enthusiastic pyramidist
>     says, “The polished walls, fine materials, grand proportions, and
>     exalted place, eloquently tell of glories yet to come,” if not
>     “the chamber of perfections” of Cheops’ tomb, was probably _the
>     place to which the initiant was admitted after he had passed
>     through the narrow upward passage and the grand gallery, with its
>     lowly termination, which gradually prepared him for the final
>     stage of the Sacred Mysteries_.(462)
> 
> Had Mr. Staniland Wake been a Theosophist, he might have added that the
> narrow upward passage leading to the King’s Chamber had a “narrow gate”
> indeed; the same “strait gate” which “leadeth unto life,” or the new
> spiritual re‐birth alluded to by Jesus in Matthew;(463) and that it was of
> this gate in the Initiation Temple, that the writer, who recorded the
> words alleged to have been spoken by an Initiate, was thinking.
> 
> Thus the greatest scholars of Science, instead of pooh‐poohing that
> supposed “farrago of absurd fiction and superstitions,” as the Brâhmanical
> literature is generally termed, will endeavour to learn the symbolical
> universal language, with its numerical and geometrical keys. But here,
> again, they will hardly be successful, if they share the belief that the
> Jewish Kabalistic system contains the key to the _whole_ mystery; for it
> _does not_. Nor does any other Scripture at present possess it in its
> entirety, since even the _Vedas_ are not complete. Every old religion is
> but a chapter or two of the entire volume of archaic primeval mysteries;
> Eastern Occultism alone being able to boast that it is in possession of
> the full secret, with its _seven_ keys. Comparisons will be instituted,
> and as much as possible will be explained in this work; the rest is left
> to the student’s personal intuition. In saying that Eastern Occultism has
> the secret, it is not as if a “complete” or even an approximate knowledge
> was claimed by the writer, which would be absurd. What I know, I give out;
> that which I cannot explain, the student must find out for himself.
> 
> But though we may suppose that the entire cycle of the universal Mystery
> Language will not be mastered for centuries to come, yet even the little
> which has hitherto been discovered in the _Bible_ by some scholars, is
> quite sufficient to demonstrate the claim—mathematically. As Judaism
> availed itself of two keys out of the seven, and as these two keys have
> now been re‐discovered, it becomes no longer a matter of individual
> speculation and hypothesis, least of all of “coincidence,” but one of a
> correct reading of the Biblical texts, just as anyone acquainted with
> arithmetic reads and verifies an addition sum. In fact, all we have said
> in _Isis Unveiled_ is now found corroborated in the _Egyptian Mystery_, or
> _The Source of Measures_, by such readings of the _Bible_ with the
> numerical and geometrical keys.
> 
> A few years longer, and this system will kill the dead‐letter reading of
> the _Bible_, as it will that of all the other exoteric faiths, by showing
> the dogmas in their real, naked meaning. And then this undeniable meaning,
> however incomplete, will unveil the mystery of Being, and will, moreover,
> entirely change the modern scientific systems of Anthropology, Ethnology
> and especially that of Chronology. The element of Phallicism, found in
> every God‐name and narrative in the _Old_, and to some degree in the
> _New_, _Testament_, may also in time considerably change modern
> materialistic views on Biology and Physiology.
> 
> Divested of their modern repulsive crudeness, such views of Nature and man
> will, on the authority of the celestial bodies and their mysteries, unveil
> the evolutions of the human mind and show how natural was such a course of
> thought. The so‐called phallic symbols have become offensive only because
> of the element of materiality and animality in them. In the beginning,
> such symbols were but natural, as they originated with the archaic races,
> which, issuing to their personal knowledge from an androgyne ancestry,
> were the first phenomenal manifestations in their own sight of the
> separation of the sexes and the ensuing mystery of creating in their turn.
> If later races, especially the “chosen people,” have degraded them, this
> does not affect the origin of the symbols. This little Semitic tribe—one
> of the smallest branchlets from the commingling of the fourth and fifth
> sub‐races, the Mongolo‐Turanian and the so‐called Indo‐European, after the
> sinking of the great Continent—could only accept its symbology in the
> spirit which was given to it by the nations from which it was derived.
> And, perchance, in the Mosaic beginnings, the symbology was not so crude
> as it became later under the handling of Ezra, who remodelled the whole
> _Pentateuch_. To take an instance, the glyph of Pharaoh’s daughter (the
> woman), the Nile (the Great Deep and Water), and the baby‐boy found
> floating therein in the ark of rushes, was not primarily composed for, or
> by, Moses. It was anticipated in the fragments found on the Babylonian
> tiles, in the story of King Sargon, who lived far earlier than Moses.
> 
> In his _Assyrian Antiquities_,(464) Mr. George Smith says: “In the palace
> of Sennacherib at Kouyunjik, I found another fragment of the curious
> history of Sargon ... published in my translation in the _Transactions of
> the Society of Biblical Archeology_.”(465) The capital of Sargon the
> Babylonian Moses, “was the great city of Agadi, called by the Semites
> Akkad—mentioned in _Genesis_(466) as the capital of Nimrod.... Akkad lay
> near the City of Sippara on the Euphrates and North of Babylon.”(467)
> Another strange “coincidence” is found in the fact that the name of the
> neighbouring City of Sippara is the same as the name of the wife of
> Moses—Zipporah.(468) Of course the story is a clever addition by Ezra,
> _who could not have been ignorant of the original_. This curious story is
> found on fragments of tablets from Kouyunjik, and reads as follows:
> 
>     1. Sargina, the powerful king, the king of Akkad am I.
> 
>     2. My mother was a princess, my father I did not know; a brother
>     of my father ruled over the country.
> 
>     3. In the city of Azupiranu, which by the side of the river
>     Euphrates is situated,
> 
>     4. My mother, the princess, conceived me; in difficulty she
>     brought me forth;
> 
>     5. She placed me in an ark of rushes, with bitumen my exit she
>     sealed up;
> 
>     6. She launched me in the river, which did not drown me.
> 
>     7. The river carried me, to Akki, the water‐carrier, it brought
>     me.
> 
>     8. Akki, the water‐carrier, in tenderness of bowels, lifted
>     me.(469)
> 
> And now let us compare the _Bible_ narrative in _Exodus_:
> 
>     And when she [Moses’ mother] could not longer hide him, she took
>     for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with
>     pitch, and put the child therein, and she laid it in the flags by
>     the river’s brink.(470)
> 
> Mr. G. Smith then continues:
> 
>     The story is supposed to have happened about 1600 B.C., rather
>     earlier than the supposed age of Moses; and, as we know that the
>     fame of Sargon reached Egypt, it is quite likely that this account
>     had a connection with the events related in _Exodus_ II, for every
>     action, when once performed, has a tendency to be repeated.
> 
> But now that Professor Sayce has had the courage to push back the dates of
> the Chaldean and Assyrian Kings by two thousand years more, Sargon must
> have preceded Moses by 2,000 years at the least. The confession is
> suggestive, but the figures lack a cypher or two.
> 
> Now, what is the logical inference? Most assuredly, that which gives us
> the right to say that the story told of Moses by Ezra had been learned by
> him while at Babylon, and that he applied the allegory told of Sargon to
> the Jewish lawgiver. In short, that _Exodus_ was never written by Moses,
> but was re‐fabricated from old materials by Ezra.
> 
> And if so, then why should not other symbols and glyphs far more crude in
> their phallic element have been added by this adept in the later Chaldean
> and Sabæan phallic worship? We are taught that the primeval faith of the
> Israelites was quite different from that which was developed centuries
> later by the Talmudists, and before them by David and Hezekiah.
> 
> All this, notwithstanding the exoteric element, as now found in the two
> _Testaments_, is quite sufficient to class the _Bible_ among esoteric
> works, and to connect its secret system with Indian, Chaldean, and
> Egyptian symbolism. The whole cycle of Biblical glyphs and numbers, as
> suggested by astronomical observations—Astronomy and Theology being
> closely connected—is found in Indian exoteric, as well as esoteric,
> systems. These figures and their symbols, the signs of the Zodiac, the
> planets, their aspects and nodes—the last term having now passed even into
> our modern Botany—are known in Astronomy as Sextiles, Quartiles and so on,
> and have been used for ages and æons by the archaic nations, and in one
> sense have the same meaning as the Hebrew numerals. The earliest forms of
> elementary geometry must have certainly been suggested by the observation
> of the heavenly bodies and their groupings. Hence, the most archaic
> symbols in Eastern Esotericism are a circle, a point, a triangle, a
> square, a pentagon, and a hexagon, and other plane figures with various
> sides and angles. This shows the knowledge and use of geometrical
> symbology to be as old as the world.
> 
> Starting from this, it becomes easy to understand how Nature herself, even
> without the help of their divine instructors, could have taught primeval
> mankind the first principles of a numerical and geometrical symbol‐
> language.(471) Hence we find numbers and figures used as an expression and
> a record of thought in every archaic symbolical Scripture. They are ever
> the same, with certain variations only, arising from the first figures.
> Thus the evolution and correlation of the mysteries of Kosmos, of its
> growth and development—spiritual and physical, abstract and concrete—were
> first recorded in geometrical changes of shape. Every Cosmogony began with
> a circle, a point, a triangle and a square, up to number 9, when it was
> synthesized by the first line and a circle—the Pythagorean mystic Decad,
> the sum of all, involving and expressing the mysteries of the entire
> Kosmos; mysteries recorded a hundred times more fully in the Hindû system
> than elsewhere, for him who can understand its mystic language. The
> numbers 3 and 4, in their combination 7, and also 5, 6, 9, and 10, are the
> very corner‐stones of Occult Cosmogonies. This Decad and its thousand
> combinations are found in every portion of the globe. One recognizes it in
> the caves and rock‐cut temples of Hindûstan and Central Asia; in the
> Pyramids and Lithoi of Egypt and America; in the Catacombs of Ozimandyas;
> in the mounds of the snow‐capped Caucasian fastnesses; in the ruins of
> Palenque; in Easter Island; everywhere whither the foot of ancient man has
> ever journeyed. The 3 and the 4, the triangle and the square, or the
> universal male and female glyphs, showing the first aspect of the evolving
> deity, are stamped for ever in the Southern Cross in the Heavens, as in
> the Egyptian Crux Ansata. As well expressed by the author of _The Source
> of Measures_:
> 
>     The Cube unfolded is in display a cross of the Tau, or Egyptian
>     form, or of the Christian cross‐form.... A circle attached to the
>     first, gives the Ansated Cross ... numbers 3 and 4, counted on the
>     cross, showing a form of the [Hebrew] golden candlestick [in the
>     Holy of Holies], and of the 3 + 4 = 7, and 6 + 1 = 7, days in the
>     _circle of the week_, as 7 lights of the sun. So also as the week
>     of 7 lights gave origin to the _month_ and _year_, so it is the
>     _time‐marker of birth_.... The cross‐form being shown, then, by
>     the connected use of the form 113:355, the symbol is completed by
>     the _attachment of a man to the cross_.(472) This kind of measure
>     was made to coördinate with the idea of the _origin_ of human
>     life, and hence the _phallic form_.
> 
> The Stanzas show the cross and these numbers playing a prominent part in
> archaic Cosmogony. Meanwhile we may profit by the evidence collected by
> the same author, in the section which he rightly calls the “Primordial
> Vestiges of these Symbols,” to show the identity of symbols and their
> esoteric meaning all over the globe.
> 
>     Under the general view taken of the nature of the number‐forms ...
>     it becomes a matter of research of the utmost interest as to when
>     and where their existence and their use first became known. Has it
>     been a matter of revelation in what we know as the historic age—a
>     cycle exceedingly modern when the age of the human race is
>     contemplated? It seems, in fact, as to the date of its possession
>     by man, to have been farther removed, in the past, from the old
>     Egyptians than are the old Egyptians from us.
> 
>     The Easter Isles in “_mid Pacific_” present the feature of the
>     remaining peaks of the mountains of _a submerged continent_, for
>     the reason that these peaks are thickly studded with cyclopean
>     statues, remnants of the civilization of a dense and cultivated
>     people, who must have, of necessity, occupied a widely extended
>     area. On the backs of these images is to be found the “_ansated
>     cross_” and the same modified to the outlines of the human form. A
>     full description, with plate showing the land with the thickly
>     planted statues, also with copies of the images, is to be found in
>     the January number, 1870, of the _London Builder_....
> 
>     In the _Naturalist_, published at Salem, Massachusetts, in one of
>     the early numbers (about 36), is to be found a description of some
>     very ancient and curious carving on the crest walls of the
>     mountains of South America, older by far, it is averred, than the
>     races now living. The strangeness of these tracings is in that
>     they exhibit the outlines of a man stretched out on a cross,(473)
>     by a series of drawings, by which from the form of a _man_ that of
>     a _cross_ springs, but so done that the cross may be taken as the
>     man, or the man as the cross....
> 
>     It is known that tradition among the Aztecs has handed down a very
>     perfect account of the _deluge_.... Baron Humboldt says that we
>     are to look for the country of Aztalan, the original country of
>     the Aztecs, as high up, at least, as the 42nd parallel north;
>     whence journeying, they at last arrived in the vale of Mexico. In
>     that vale the earthen mounds of the far north become the elegant
>     stone pyramidal, and other structures, whose remains are now
>     found. The correspondences between the Aztec remains and those of
>     the Egyptians are well known.... Atwater, from examination of
>     hundreds of them, is convinced that they had a knowledge of
>     astronomy. As to one of the most perfect of the pyramidal
>     structures among the Aztecs, Humboldt gives a description to the
>     following effect:
> 
>     “The form of this pyramid [of Papantla] which has _seven_ stories,
>     is more tapering than any other monument of this kind yet
>     discovered, but its height is not remarkable, being but 57 feet,
>     its base but 25 feet on each side. However, it is remarkable on
>     one account: it is built entirely of hewn stones, of an
>     extraordinary size, and very beautifully shaped. _Three_
>     staircases lead to the top, the steps of which were decorated with
>     hieroglyphical sculptures and small _niches_, arranged with great
>     symmetry. The number of these niches seem to allude to the 318
>     _simple and compound signs of the days of their civil calendar_.”
> 
>     318 is the Gnostic value of Christ, and the famous number of the
>     trained or circumcized servants of Abram. When it is considered
>     that 318 is an _abstract value_, and _universal_, as expressive of
>     a diameter value to a circumference of _unity_, its use in the
>     composition of a civil calendar becomes manifest.
> 
> Identical glyphs, numbers and esoteric symbols are found in Egypt, Peru,
> Mexico, Easter Island, India, Chaldæa, and Central Asia—Crucified Men, and
> symbols of the evolution of races from Gods—and yet behold Science
> repudiating the idea of a human race other than one made in _our_ image;
> Theology clinging to its 6,000 years of Creation; Anthropology teaching
> our descent from the ape; and the Clergy tracing it from Adam 4,004 years
> B.C.!!
> 
> Shall one, for fear of incurring the penalty of being called a
> superstitious fool, and even a liar, abstain from furnishing proofs—as
> good as any existent—only because that day, when all the Seven Keys shall
> be delivered unto Science, or rather the men of learning and research in
> the department of symbology, has not yet dawned? In the face of the
> crushing discoveries of Geology and Anthropology with regard to the
> antiquity of man, shall we—in order to avoid the usual penalty that awaits
> every one who strays outside the beaten paths of either Theology or
> Materialism—hold to the 6,000 years and “special creation” or accept in
> submissive admiration our genealogy and descent from the ape? Not so, as
> long as it is known that the Secret Records hold the said Seven Keys to
> the mystery of the genesis of man. Faulty, materialistic, and biassed as
> the scientific theories may be, they are a thousand times nearer the truth
> than the vagaries of Theology. The latter are in their death agony for
> every one but the most uncompromising bigot and fanatic. Or rather, some
> of its defenders must have lost their reason. For what can one think when,
> in the face of the dead‐letter absurdities of the _Bible_, these are still
> publicly supported, and as fiercely as ever, and one finds the Theologians
> maintaining that though “the Scriptures carefully refrain [?] from making
> any direct contribution to scientific knowledge, they have _never_
> stumbled upon any statement _which will not abide the light of_ Advancing
> Science”!!!(474)
> 
> Hence we have no choice but either to blindly accept the deductions of
> Science, or to cut ourselves adrift from it, and withstand it fearlessly
> to its face, stating what the Secret Doctrine teaches us, and being fully
> prepared to bear the consequences.
> 
> But let us see whether Science, in its materialistic speculations, and
> even Theology, in its death‐rattle and supreme struggle to reconcile the
> 6,000 years since Adam with Sir Charles Lyell’s _Geological Evidences of
> the Antiquity of Man_, do not themselves unconsciously give us a helping
> hand. Ethnology, on the confession of some of its most learned votaries,
> finds it already impossible to account for the varieties in the human
> race, unless the hypothesis of the _creation of several Adams_ be
> accepted. They speak of “a white Adam and a black Adam, a red Adam and a
> yellow Adam.”(475) Were they Hindûs enumerating the rebirths of Vâmadeva,
> from the _Linga Purâna_, they could say little more. For, enumerating the
> repeated births of Shiva, they show him in one Kalpa of a _white_
> complexion, in another of a _black_ colour, in still another of a _red_
> colour, after which the Kumâra becomes “four youths of a _yellow_ colour.”
> This strange “coincidence,” as Mr. Proctor would say, speaks only in
> favour of scientific intuition, as Shiva‐Kumâra simply represents,
> allegorically, the human Races during the genesis of man. But it has led
> to another intuitional phenomenon—in the theological ranks this time. The
> unknown author of _Primeval Man_, in a desperate effort to screen the
> Divine Revelation from the merciless and eloquent discoveries of Geology
> and Anthropology, remarking that “it would be unfortunate if the defenders
> of the _Bible_ should be driven into the position of either surrendering
> the inspiration of Scripture, or denying the conclusions of
> Geologists”—finds a compromise. Nay, he devotes a thick volume to proving
> this fact: “Adam was not the _first man_(476) created upon this earth.”
> The exhumed relics of pre‐Adamic man, “instead of shaking our confidence
> in Scripture, supply additional proof of its veracity.”(477) How so? In
> the simplest way imaginable; for the author argues that, henceforth “we
> [the clergy] are enabled to leave scientific men to pursue their studies
> without attempting to coërce them by the fear of heresy.” This must be a
> relief indeed to Messrs. Huxley, Tyndall, and Sir Charles Lyell!
> 
>     The Bible narrative _does not commence with creation_, as is
>     commonly supposed, but with the formation of Adam and Eve,
>     _millions of years after_ our planet had been created. Its
>     previous history, so far as Scripture is concerned, is yet
>     unwritten.... There may have been not one, but twenty different
>     races upon the earth before the time of Adam, just as there may be
>     twenty different races of men on other worlds.(478)
> 
> Who, then, or what were those races, since the author still maintains that
> Adam is _the first man of our race_? It was the Satanic Race and Races!
> “Satan [was] never in heaven, Angels and men [being] one species.” It was
> the pre‐Adamic race of “Angels that sinned.” Satan was the “first prince
> of this world,” we read. Having died in consequence of his rebellion, he
> remained on earth as a _disembodied Spirit_, and tempted Adam and Eve.
> 
>     The earlier ages of the Satanic race, and more especially _during
>     the life‐time of Satan_ [!!!], may have been a period of
>     patriarchal civilization and comparative repose—a time of Tubal‐
>     Cains and Jubals, when both sciences and arts attempted to strike
>     their roots into the accursed ground.... What a subject for an
>     epic!... There are inevitable incidents which must have occurred.
>     We see before us ... the gay primeval lover wooing his blushing
>     bride at dewy eve under the Danish oaks, that then grew where now
>     no oaks will grow ... the grey primeval patriarch ... the primeval
>     offspring innocently gambolling by his side.... A thousand such
>     pictures rise before us!(479)
> 
> The retrospective glance at this Satanic “blushing bride,” in the days of
> Satan’s innocence, does not lose in poetry as it gains in originality.
> Quite the reverse. The modern Christian bride—who does not often blush
> now‐a‐days before her gay modern lovers—might even derive a moral lesson
> from this daughter of Satan, created in the exuberant fancy of her first
> human biographer. These pictures—and to appreciate them at their true
> value they must be examined in the volume that describes them—are all
> suggested with a view to reconcile the infallibility of revealed Scripture
> with Sir Charles Lyell’s _Antiquity of Man_, and other damaging scientific
> works. But this does not prevent truth and fact appearing at the
> foundation of these vagaries, which the author has not dared to sign with
> his own, or even a borrowed, name. For, his pre‐Adamic Races—not Satanic
> but simply Atlantean, and the Hermaphrodites before the latter—are
> mentioned in the _Bible_, if read esoterically, as they are in the Secret
> Doctrine. The Seven Keys open the mysteries, past and future, of the seven
> great Root‐Races, and of the seven Kalpas. Though the genesis of man, and
> even the geology, of Esotericism will surely be rejected by Science, just
> as much as the Satanic and pre‐Adamic Races, yet if the Scientists, having
> no other way out of their difficulties, are compelled to choose between
> the two, we feel certain that—Scripture notwithstanding—once the Mystery
> Language is approximately mastered, it is the archaic teaching that will
> be accepted.
> 
> Section III. Primordial Substance and Divine Thought.
> 
>     As it would seem irrational to affirm that we already know all
>     existing causes, permission must be given to assume, if need be,
>     _an entirely new agent_.
> 
>     Assuming, what is not strictly accurate as yet, that the
>     undulatory hypothesis accounts for all the facts, we are called on
>     to decide whether the existence of an undulating ether is thereby
>     proved. _We cannot positively affirm that no other supposition
>     will explain the facts._ Newton’s corpuscular hypothesis is
>     admitted to have broken down on interference; and there is, at the
>     present day, no rival. Still, it is extremely desirable in all
>     such hypotheses to find some collateral confirmation, some
>     evidence _aliunde_, of _the supposed Ether_.... Some hypotheses
>     consist of assumptions as to the minute structure and operations
>     of bodies. From the nature of the case, these assumptions can
>     never be proved by direct means. Their only merit is _their
>     suitability to express the phenomena_. They are _representative
>     fictions_.
> 
>     _Logic_, by ALEXANDER BAIN, L.L.D., Part II, p. 133.
> 
> Ether—this hypothetical Proteus, one of the “representative fictions” of
> Modern Science, which, nevertheless, was so long accepted—is one of the
> lower “principles” of what we call Primordial Substance (Âkâsha, in
> Sanskrit), one of the dreams of old, which has now again become the dream
> of Modern Science. It is the greatest, as it is the boldest, of the
> surviving speculations of ancient philosophers. For the Occultists,
> however, both Ether and the Primordial Substance are realities. To put it
> plainly, Ether is the Astral Light, and the Primordial Substance is
> Âkâsha, the Upâdhi of Divine Thought.
> 
> In modern language, the latter would be better named Cosmic Ideation,
> Spirit; the former, Cosmic Substance, Matter. These, the Alpha and the
> Omega of Being, are but the two _facets_ of the one Absolute Existence.
> The latter was never addressed, or even mentioned, by any name in
> antiquity, except in allegory. In the oldest Âryan race, the Hindû, the
> worship of the intellectual classes at no time ever consisted in an
> adoration of marvellous form and art, however fervent, as with the Greeks;
> an adoration, which led later on to anthropomorphism. But while the Greek
> philosopher adored form, and the Hindû sage alone “perceived the true
> relation of earthly beauty and eternal truth”—the uneducated of every
> nation understood neither, at any time.
> 
> They do not understand it even now. The evolution of the God‐idea proceeds
> apace with man’s own intellectual evolution. So true is it that the
> noblest ideal to which the religious spirit of one age can soar, will
> appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding
> epoch! The philosophers themselves had to be _initiated into perceptive
> mysteries_, before they could grasp the correct idea of the Ancients in
> relation to this most metaphysical subject. Otherwise—outside such
> Initiation—for every thinker there will be a “thus far shalt thou go and
> no farther” mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and as
> unmistakably as there is one for the progress of any nation or race in its
> cycle by the law of Karma. Outside of Initiation, the ideals of
> contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped, and
> remain unable to soar higher; for idealistic, as well as realistic,
> thinkers, and even free‐thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural
> product of their respective environments and periods. The ideals of each
> are but the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome of
> that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its
> collectivity, has attained. Hence, as already remarked, the highest
> flights of modern Western metaphysics have fallen far short of the truth.
> Much of current Agnostic speculation on the existence of the “First Cause”
> is little better than veiled Materialism—the terminology alone being
> different. Even so great a thinker as Mr. Herbert Spencer speaks of the
> “Unknowable” occasionally in terms that demonstrate the lethal influence
> of materialistic thought, which, like the deadly Sirocco, has withered and
> blighted all current ontological speculation.
> 
> For instance, when he terms the “First Cause” the “Unknowable,” a “power
> _manifesting_ through phenomena,” and “an infinite eternal _energy_,” it
> is clear that he has grasped solely the _physical_ aspect of the Mystery
> of Being—the Energies of Cosmic Substance only. The coeternal aspect of
> the One Reality, Cosmic Ideation, is absolutely omitted from
> consideration, and as to its Noumenon, it seems non‐existent in the mind
> of the great thinker. Without doubt, this one‐sided mode of dealing with
> the problem is due largely to the pernicious Western practice of
> subordinating Consciousness to Matter, or regarding it as a “bye‐product”
> of molecular motion.
> 
> From the early ages of the Fourth Race, when Spirit alone was worshipped
> and the Mystery was made manifest, down to the last palmy days of Grecian
> art, at the dawn of Christianity, the Hellenes alone had dared publicly to
> raise an altar to the “Unknown God.” Whatever St. Paul may have had in his
> profound mind, when declaring to the Athenians that this “Unknown,” which
> they ignorantly worshipped, was the true God announced by himself—that
> Deity _was not_ “Jehovah,” nor was he “the maker of the world and all
> things.” For it is not the “God of Israel” but the “Unknown” of the
> ancient and modern Pantheist that “dwelleth not in temples _made with
> hands_.”(480)
> 
> Divine Thought cannot be defined, nor can its meaning be explained, except
> by the numberless manifestations of Cosmic Substance, in which the former
> is _sensed_ spiritually by those who can do so. To say this, after having
> defined it as the Unknown Deity, abstract, impersonal, sexless, which must
> be placed at the root of every Cosmogony and its subsequent evolution, is
> equivalent to saying nothing at all. It is like attempting a
> transcendental equation of conditions, having in hand for deducing the
> true value of its terms only a number of _unknown_ quantities. Its place
> is found in the old primitive symbolic charts, in which, as already shown,
> it is represented by a boundless darkness, on the ground of which appears
> the first central point in white—thus symbolizing coëval and coëternal
> Spirit‐Matter making its appearance in the phenomenal world, before its
> first differentiation. When “the One becomes Two,” it may then be referred
> to as Spirit _and_ Matter. To “Spirit” is referable every manifestation of
> Consciousness, reflective or direct, and of “unconscious purposiveness”—to
> adopt a modern expression used in Western _philosophy_, so‐called—as
> evidenced in the Vital Principle, and Nature’s submission to the majestic
> sequence of immutable Law. “Matter” must be regarded as objectivity in its
> purest abstraction, the self‐existing basis, whose septenary manvantaric
> differentiations constitute the objective reality underlying the phenomena
> of each phase of conscious existence. During the period of Universal
> Pralaya, Cosmic Ideation is non‐existent; and the variously differentiated
> states of Cosmic Substance are resolved back again into the primary state
> of abstract potential objectivity.
> 
> Manvantaric impulse commences with the reäwakening of Cosmic Ideation, the
> Universal Mind, concurrently with, and parallel to, the primary emergence
> of Cosmic Substance—the latter being the manvantaric vehicle of the
> former—from its undifferentiated pralayic state. Then, Absolute Wisdom
> mirrors itself in its Ideation; which, by a transcendental process,
> superior to and incomprehensible by human Consciousness, results in Cosmic
> Energy, Fohat. Thrilling through the bosom of inert Substance, Fohat
> impels it to activity, and guides its primary differentiations on all the
> seven planes of Cosmic Consciousness. There are thus Seven Protyles—as
> they are now called, whereas Âryan antiquity named them the Seven
> Prakritis, or Natures—serving, severally, as the _relatively_ homogeneous
> bases, which in the course of the increasing heterogeneity, in the
> evolution of the Universe, differentiate into the marvellous complexity
> presented by phenomena on the planes of perception. The term “relatively”
> is used designedly, because the very existence of such a process,
> resulting in the primary segregations of undifferentiated Cosmic Substance
> into its septenary bases of evolution, compels us to regard the Protyle of
> each plane as only a _mediate_ phase assumed by Substance in its passage
> from abstract, into full objectivity. The term Protyle is due to Mr.
> Crookes, the eminent Chemist, who has given that name to _pre‐matter_, if
> one may so call primordial and purely homogeneous substance, suspected, if
> not actually yet found, by Science in the ultimate composition of the
> atom. But the incipient segregation of primordial matter into atoms and
> molecules takes its rise subsequent to the evolution of our Seven
> Protyles. It is the last of these that Mr. Crookes is in search of, having
> recently detected the possibility of its existence on our plane.
> 
> Cosmic Ideation is said to be non‐existent during pralayic periods, for
> the simple reason that there is no one, and nothing, to perceive its
> effects. There can be no manifestation of consciousness, semi‐
> consciousness, or even “unconscious purposiveness,” except through a
> vehicle of Matter; that is to say, on this our plane, wherein human
> consciousness, _in its normal state_, cannot soar beyond what is known as
> transcendental metaphysics, it is only through some molecular aggregation,
> or fabric, that Spirit wells up in a stream of individual or sub‐conscious
> subjectivity. And as Matter existing apart from perception is a mere
> abstraction, both of these aspects of the Absolute—Cosmic Substance and
> Cosmic Ideation—are mutually interdependent. In strict accuracy, to avoid
> confusion and misconception, the term “Matter” ought to be applied to the
> aggregate of objects of possible perception, and the term “Substance” to
> Noumena; for inasmuch as the phenomena of _our_ plane are the creations of
> the perceiving Ego—the modifications of its own subjectivity—all the
> “states of matter representing the aggregate of perceived objects” can
> have but a relative and purely phenomenal existence for the children of
> our plane. As the modern Idealists would say, the coöperation of Subject
> and Object results in the sense‐object, or phenomenon.
> 
> But this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it is the same
> on all other planes; that the coöperation of the two, on the planes of
> their septenary differentiation, results in a septenary aggregate of
> phenomena which are likewise non‐existent _per se_, though concrete
> realities for the Entities of whose experience they form a part, in the
> same manner as the rocks and rivers around us are real from the stand‐
> point of a Physicist, though unreal illusions of sense from that of the
> Metaphysician. It would be an error to say, or even conceive, such a
> thing. From the stand‐point of the highest metaphysics, the whole
> Universe, Gods included, is an Illusion (Mâyâ). But the illusion of him
> who is in himself an illusion differs on every plane of consciousness; and
> we have no more right to dogmatize about the possible nature of the
> perceptive faculties of an Ego on, say, the sixth plane, than we have to
> identify our perceptions with, or make them a standard for, those of an
> ant, in _its_ mode of consciousness. Cosmic Ideation focussed in a
> Principle, or Upâdhi (Basis), results as the consciousness of the
> individual Ego. Its manifestation varies with the degree of the Upâdhi.
> For instance, through that known as Manas, it wells up as Mind‐
> Consciousness; through the more finely differentiated fabric (sixth state
> of matter) of Buddhi—resting on the experience of Manas as its Basis—as a
> stream of Spiritual Intuition.
> 
> The pure Object apart from consciousness is unknown to us, while living on
> the plane of our three‐dimensional world, for we know only the mental
> states it excites in the perceiving Ego. And, so long as the contrast of
> Subject and Object endures—to wit, so long as we enjoy our five senses and
> no more, and do not know how to divorce our all‐perceiving Ego from the
> thraldom of these senses—so long will it be impossible for the _personal_
> Ego to break through the barrier which separates it from a knowledge of
> “things in themselves,” or Substance.
> 
> That Ego, progressing in an arc of ascending subjectivity, must exhaust
> the experience of every plane. But not till the Unit is merged in the ALL,
> whether on this or any other plane, and Subject and Object alike vanish in
> the absolute negation of the Nirvânic State—negation, again, only _from
> our plane_—not until then, is scaled that peak of Omniscience, the
> Knowledge of Things‐in‐themselves, and the solution of the yet more awful
> riddle approached, before which even the highest Dhyân Chohan must bow in
> silence and ignorance—the Unspeakable Mystery of that which is called by
> the Vedântins, Parabrahman.
> 
> Therefore, such being the case, all those who have sought to give a name
> to the Incognizable Principle have simply degraded it. Even to speak of
> Cosmic Ideation—save in its _phenomenal_ aspect—is like trying to bottle
> up primordial Chaos, or to put a printed label on Eternity.
> 
> What, then, is the “Primordial Substance,” that mysterious object of which
> Alchemy was ever talking, and which was the subject of philosophical
> speculation in every age? What can it be finally, even in its _phenomenal_
> pre‐differentiation? Even _that_ is the All of manifested Nature
> and—_nothing_ to our senses. It is mentioned under various names in every
> cosmogony, referred to in every philosophy, and shown to be, to this day,
> the ever grasp‐eluding Proteus in Nature. We touch and do not feel it; we
> look at it without seeing it; we breathe it and do not perceive it; we
> hear and smell it without the smallest cognition that it is there; for it
> is in every molecule of that which, in our illusion and ignorance, we
> regard as Matter in any of its states, or conceive as a feeling, a
> thought, an emotion. In short, it is the Upâdhi, or Vehicle, of every
> possible phenomenon, whether physical, mental, or psychic. In the opening
> sentences of _Genesis_, and in the Chaldean Cosmogony; in the _Purânas_ of
> India, and in the _Book of the Dead_ of Egypt; everywhere it opens the
> cycle of manifestation. It is termed Chaos, and the Face of the Waters,
> incubated by the Spirit, proceeding from the Unknown, whatever that
> Spirit’s name may be.
> 
> The authors of the Sacred Scriptures in India go deeper into the origin of
> the evolution of things than does Thales or Job, for they say:
> 
>     From Intelligence [called Mahat, in the _Purânas_], associated
>     with Ignorance [Îshvara, as a _personal_ deity], _attended by its
>     projective power_, in which the quality of dulness [_tamas_,
>     insensibility] predominates, proceeds _Ether_—from ether, air;
>     from air, heat; from heat, water; and from water, earth with
>     everything on it.
> 
> “From This, from this same Self, was the Ether produced,” says the
> _Veda_.(481)
> 
> It thus becomes evident that it is not _this_ Ether—sprung at the fourth
> remove from an _emanation_ of “Intelligence, associated with
> Ignorance”—which is the high Principle, the _deific_ Entity worshipped by
> the Greeks and Latins under the name of “Pater, Omnipotens Æther,” and
> “Magnus Æther,” in its collective aggregate. The septenary gradation, and
> the innumerable sub‐divisions and differences, made by the Ancients
> between the powers of Ether collectively—from its outward fringe of
> effects, with which our Science is so familiar, up to the “Imponderable
> Substance,” once admitted as the “Ether of Space,” but now about to be
> rejected—have been ever a vexing riddle for every branch of knowledge. The
> Mythologists and Symbologists of our day, confused by this
> incomprehensible glorification on the one hand, and degradation on the
> other, of the same deified Entity and in the same religious systems, are
> often driven to the most ludicrous mistakes. The Church, firm as a rock in
> each and all of her early errors of interpretation, has made of Ether the
> abode of her Satanic legions. The whole Hierarchy of the “Fallen” Angels
> is there; Cosmocratores, the “World Bearers,” according to Bossuet; Mundi
> Tenentes, the “World Holders,” as Tertullian calls them; Mundi Domini,
> “World Dominations,” or rather Dominators; the Curbati, or “Curved,” etc.;
> thus making of the stars and celestial orbs in their courses—Devils!
> 
> For it is thus that the Church has interpreted the verse: “For we wrestle
> not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,
> against the rulers of the darkness of this world.”(482) Further, St. Paul
> mentions the spiritual malices (“wickedness,” in English texts), in the
> Air—_spiritualia nequitiæ cœlestibus_—the Latin texts giving various names
> to these “malices,” the innocent “Elementals.” But the Church is right
> this time, though wrong in calling them all Devils. The Astral Light, or
> lower Ether, _is_ full of conscious, semi‐conscious and unconscious
> entities; only the church has less _power_ over them than over invisible
> microbes or mosquitoes.
> 
> The difference made between the seven states of Ether—itself one of the
> Seven Cosmic Principles, whereas the Æther of the ancients is Universal
> Fire—may be seen in the injunctions by Zoroaster and Psellus,
> respectively. The former said: “Consult it only when it is without form or
> figure”—_absque formâ et figurâ_—which means, without flames or burning
> coals. “When it has a form, _heed it not_”; teaches Psellus, “but when it
> is formless, obey it, for it is then _sacred fire_, and all it will reveal
> thee shall be true.”(483) This proves that Ether, itself an aspect of
> Âkâsha, has in its turn several aspects or “principles.”
> 
> All the ancient nations deified Æther in its imponderable aspect and
> potency. Virgil calls Jupiter, _Pater Omnipotens Æther_, and the “Great
> Æther.”(484) The Hindûs have also placed it among their deities, under the
> name of Âkâsha, the synthesis of Ether. And the author of the Homœomerian
> System of philosophy, Anaxagoras of Clazomenæ, firmly believed that the
> spiritual prototypes of all things, as well as their elements, were to be
> found in the boundless Æther, where they were generated, whence they
> evolved, and whither they returned—an Occult teaching.
> 
> It thus becomes clear that it is from Æther, in its highest synthetic
> aspect, once anthropomorphized, that sprang the first idea of a personal
> Creative Deity. With the philosophical Hindûs the Elements are _tâmasa_,
> _i.e._, “unenlightened by _intellect_, which they obscure.”
> 
> We have now to exhaust the question of the mystical meaning of Primordial
> Chaos and of the Root‐Principle, and show how they were connected in the
> ancient philosophies with Âkâsha, incorrectly translated Ether, and also
> with Mâyâ, Illusion, of which Îshvara is the male aspect. We shall speak
> further on of the Intelligent Principle, or rather of the invisible
> immaterial properties, in the visible and material elements, that “sprang
> from the Primordial Chaos.”
> 
> For “what is the primordial Chaos but Æther?”—it is asked, in _Isis
> Unveiled_. Not the _modern_ Ether; not such as is recognized now, but such
> as _was_ known to the ancient philosophers long before the time of
> Moses—Æther, with all its mysterious and occult properties, containing in
> itself the germs of universal creation. The Upper Æther, or Âkâsha, is the
> Celestial Virgin and Mother of every existing form and being, from whose
> bosom, as soon as “incubated” by the Divine Spirit, are called into
> existence Matter and Life, Force and Action. Æther is the Aditi of the
> Hindûs, and it is Âkâsha. Electricity, magnetism, heat, light, and
> chemical action are so little understood even now, that fresh facts are
> constantly widening the range of our knowledge. Who knows where ends the
> power of this protean giant—Æther; or whence its mysterious origin? Who,
> we mean, that denies the Spirit that works in it, and evolves out of it
> all visible forms?
> 
> It will be an easy task to show that the cosmogonical legends all over the
> world are based on a knowledge among the Ancients of those sciences, which
> have, in our days, allied themselves in support of the doctrine of
> evolution; and that further research may demonstrate that these Ancients
> were far better acquainted with the fact of evolution itself, embracing
> both its physical and spiritual aspects, than we are now.
> 
>     With the old philosophers, evolution was a universal theorem, a
>     doctrine embracing the _whole_, and an established principle;
>     whereas our modern evolutionists are enabled to present us merely
>     with speculative theoretics; with _particular_, if not wholly
>     _negative_ theorems. It is idle for the representatives of our
>     modern wisdom to close the debate and pretend that the question is
>     settled, merely because the obscure phraseology of the Mosaic ...
>     account clashes with the definite exegesis of “Exact
>     Science.”(485)
> 
> If we turn to the _Ordinances of Manu_, we find the prototype of all these
> ideas. Mostly lost, to the Western world, in their original form,
> disfigured by later interpolations and additions, they have, nevertheless,
> preserved quite enough of their ancient spirit to show its character.
> 
> “Removing the darkness, the Self‐existent Lord [Vishnu, Nârâyana, etc.]
> became manifest; and, wishing to produce beings from his Essence, created,
> in the beginning, water alone. In that he cast seed. That became a Golden
> Egg.”
> 
> Whence this Self‐existent Lord? It is called This, and is spoken of as
> “Darkness, imperceptible, without definite qualities, undiscoverable,
> unknowable, as if wholly in sleep.” Having dwelt in that Egg for a whole
> Divine Year, he “who is called in the world Brahmâ,” splits that Egg in
> two, and from the upper portion he forms the heaven, from the lower the
> earth, and from the middle the sky and “the perpetual place of
> waters.”(486)
> 
> Directly following these verses, however, there is something more
> important for us, as it entirely corroborates our Esoteric teachings. From
> verse 14 to 36, evolution is given in the order described in the Esoteric
> Philosophy. This cannot be easily gainsaid. Even Medhâtithi, the son of
> Virasvâmin, and the author of the Commentary, the _Manubhâsya_, whose
> date, according to the western Orientalists, is 1,000 A.D., helps us with
> his remarks to the elucidation of the truth. He shows himself either
> unwilling to give out more, because he knew what had to be kept from the
> profane, or else he was really puzzled. Still, what he does give out makes
> the septenary principle in man and Nature plain enough.
> 
> Let us begin with Chapter I of the _Ordinances_, or “Laws,” after the
> Self‐existent Lord, the Unmanifesting Logos of the Unknown “Darkness,”
> becomes manifested in the Golden Egg. It is from this Egg, from
> 
> 11. “That which is the undiscrete [undifferentiated] Cause, eternal, which
> _is_ and _is not_, from It issued that Male who is called in the world
> Brahmâ.”
> 
> Here, as in all genuine philosophical systems, we find even the “Egg,” or
> the Circle, or Zero, Boundless Infinity, referred to as “It,”(487) and
> Brahmâ, the first Unit only, referred to as the “Male” God, _i.e._, the
> fructifying Principle. It is [circle split by vertical line], or 10 (ten),
> the Decad. On the plane of the Septenary, or _our_ World, only, it is
> called Brahmâ. On that of the Unified Decad, in the realm of Reality, this
> male Brahmâ is an Illusion.
> 
> 14. “From Self (_Âtmanah_) he created Mind, _which is and is not_; and
> from Mind, Ego‐ism [Self‐Consciousness] (_a_), the ruler (_b_), the Lord.”
> 
> (_a_) The Mind is Manas. Medhâtithi, the commentator, justly observes here
> that it is the reverse of this, and shows already interpolation and
> rearranging; for it is Manas that springs from Ahamkâra or (Universal)
> Self‐Consciousness, as Manas in the microcosm springs from Mahat, or
> Mahâ‐Buddhi (Buddhi, in man). For Manas is dual. As shown and translated
> by Colebrooke, “Mind, _serving both for sense and action_, is an organ by
> affinity, being cognate with the rest”;(488) “the rest” here meaning that
> Manas, our Fifth Principle (the _fifth_, because the body was named the
> _first_, which is the reverse of the true philosophical order), is in
> affinity both with Âtmâ‐Buddhi and with the lower Four Principles. Hence,
> our teaching: namely, that Manas follows Âtmâ‐Buddhi to Devachan, and that
> the Lower Manas, that is to say, the dregs or residue of Manas, remains
> with Kâma Rûpa, in Limbus, or Kâma Loka, the abode of the “Shells.”
> 
> (_b_) Medhâtithi translates this as “the one conscious of the I,” or Ego,
> not “the ruler,” as do the Orientalists. Thus also they translate the
> following shloka:
> 
> 16. “He also, having made the subtile parts of those six [the great Self
> and the five organs of sense], of unmeasured brightness, to enter into the
> elements of self (_âtmamâtrâsu_), created all beings.”
> 
> When, according to Medhâtithi, it ought to read _mâtrâbhih_ instead of
> _âtmamâtrâsu_, and thus would read:
> 
> “He having pervaded the subtile parts of those six, of unmeasured
> brightness, by elements of self, created all beings.”
> 
> The latter reading must be the correct one, since He, the Self, is what we
> call Âtmâ, and thus constitutes the seventh principle, the synthesis of
> the “six.” Such is also the opinion of the editor of the _Mânava Dharma
> Shâstra_, who seems to have intuitionally entered far deeper into the
> spirit of the philosophy than has the translator, the late Dr. Burnell;
> for he hesitates little between the text of Kullûka Bhatta and the
> commentary of Medhâtithi. Rejecting the _tanmâtra_, or subtile elements,
> and the _âtmamâtra_ of Kullûka Bhatta, he says, applying the principles to
> the Cosmic Self:
> 
> “The six appear rather to be the _manas_ plus the five principles of
> ether, air, fire, water, earth; ‘having united five portions of those six
> with the spiritual element [the _seventh_] he (thus) created all existing
> things;’ ... _âtmamâtra_ is therefore the spiritual atom as opposed to the
> elementary, not reflexive ‘elements of himself’.”
> 
> Thus he corrects the translation of verse 17:
> 
> “As the subtile elements of bodily forms of this One depend on these six,
> so the wise call his form Sharîra.”
> 
> And he adds that “elements” mean here portions, or parts (or principles),
> which reading is borne out by verse 19, which says:
> 
> “This non‐eternal (Universe) arises then from the Eternal, by means of the
> subtile elements of forms of _those seven_ very glorious Principles
> (_Purusha_).”
> 
> Commenting upon which emendation of Medhâtithi, the editor remarks: “the
> five elements _plus_ mind [_Manas_] and self‐consciousness
> [_Ahamkâra_](489) are probably meant; ‘subtile elements,’ as before
> [meaning] ‘fine portions of form’ [or principles].” Verse 20 shows this,
> when saying of these five elements, or “fine portions of form” (Rûpa
> _plus_ Manas and Self‐Consciousness) that they constitute the “Seven
> Purusha,” or Principles, called in the _Purânas_ the “Seven Prakritis.”
> 
> Moreover, these “five elements,” or “five portions,” are spoken of in
> verse 27 as “those which are called the atomic destructible portions,” and
> which are, therefore, “distinct from the atoms of the Nyâya.”
> 
> This creative Brahmâ, issuing from the Mundane or Golden Egg, unites in
> himself both the male and female principles. He is, in short, the same as
> all the creative Protologoi. Of Brahmâ, however, it could not be said, as
> of Dionysos, “πρωτόγονον διφυῆ τρίγονον βακχεῖον Ἅνακτα Ἄγριον ἀρρητὸν
> κρύφιον δικέρωτα δίμορφον”—a lunar Jehovah, Bacchus truly, with David
> dancing nude before his _symbol_ in the ark—because no licentious Dionysia
> were ever established in his name and honour. All such public worship was
> exoteric, and the great universal symbols were distorted universally, as
> those of Krishna are now by the Vallabâchâryas of Bombay, the followers of
> the “infant” God. But are these popular Gods the _true_ Deity? Are _they_
> the apex and synthesis of the sevenfold creation, man included?
> Impossible! Each and all are one of the rungs of that septenary ladder of
> Divine Consciousness, Pagan as Christian. Ain Suph is said to manifest
> through the _Seven Letters_ of the Name of Jehovah who, having usurped the
> place of the Unknown Limitless, was given by his devotees his Seven Angels
> of the Presence—his Seven Principles. But, indeed, they are mentioned in
> almost every school. In the pure Sânkhya philosophy Mahat, Ahamkâra and
> the five Tanmâtras are called the Seven Prakritis, or Natures, and are
> counted from Mahâ‐Buddhi, or Mahat, down to Earth.(490)
> 
> Nevertheless, however disfigured by Ezra for Rabbinical purposes is the
> original Elohistic version, however repulsive at times is even the
> _esoteric_ meaning in the Hebrew scrolls, far more so indeed than its
> outward veil or cloaking may be—once the Jehovistic portions are
> eliminated, the Mosaic Books are found full of purely Occult and priceless
> knowledge, especially in the first six chapters.
> 
> Read by the aid of the _Kabalah_, one finds a matchless temple of Occult
> truths, a well of deeply concealed beauty, hidden under a structure, the
> _visible_ architecture of which, notwithstanding its apparent symmetry, is
> unable to stand the criticism of cold reason, or to reveal the age of its
> hidden truth, for it belongs to all the ages. There is more Wisdom
> concealed under the exoteric _fables_ of the _Purânas_ and _Bible_ than in
> all the exoteric _facts_ and science in the literature of the world, and
> more Occult true Science, than there is of exact knowledge in all the
> academies. Or, in plainer and stronger language, there is as much esoteric
> wisdom in some portions of the _exoteric Purânas_ and _Pentateuch_, as
> there is of nonsense and of designedly childish fancy, when read only in
> the dead‐letter and murderous interpretations of the great dogmatic
> religions, and especially of their sects.
> 
> Let anyone read the first verses of _Genesis_ and reflect upon them.
> There, “God” commands _another_ “God,” _who does his bidding_—even in the
> _cautious_ English Protestant authorized translation of King James I.
> 
> In the “beginning”—the Hebrew language having no word to express the idea
> of eternity(491)—“God” fashions the Heaven and the Earth; and the latter
> is “without form and void,” while the former is in fact not Heaven, but
> the “Deep,” Chaos, with darkness upon its face.(492)
> 
> “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Waters,” or the Great
> Deep of the Infinite Space. And this Spirit is Nârâyana, or Vishnu.
> 
> “And God said, Let there be a firmament....” And “God,” the second, obeyed
> and “_made_ the firmament.” “And God said let there be light.” And “there
> was light.” Now the latter does not mean light at all, but, as in the
> _Kabalah_, the androgyne Adam Kadmon, or Sephira (Spiritual Light), for
> they are one; or, according to the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_, the
> _secondary_ Angels, the first being the Elohim, who are the aggregate of
> that “fashioning” _God_. For to whom are those words of command addressed?
> And who is it who commands? That which commands is the Eternal Law, and he
> who obeys, the Elohim, the known quantity acting in and with _x_, or the
> coëfficient of the unknown quantity, the Forces of the One Force. All this
> is Occultism, and is found in the archaic Stanzas. It is perfectly
> immaterial whether we call these “Forces” the Dhyân Chohans, or the
> Auphanim as Ezekiel does.
> 
> “The one Universal Light, which to man is Darkness, is ever existent,”
> says the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_. From it proceeds periodically the
> Energy, which is reflected in the Deep, or Chaos, the store‐house of
> future Worlds, and, once awakened, stirs up and fructifies the latent
> Forces, which are the ever present eternal potentialities in it. Then
> awake anew the Brahmâs and Buddhas—the co‐eternal Forces—and a new
> Universe springs into being.
> 
> In the _Sepher Yetzirah_, the Kabalistic Book of Creation, the author has
> evidently repeated the words of Manu. In it, the Divine Substance is
> represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and
> absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.(493) “One is the
> Spirit of the living God, blessed be Its name, which liveth for ever!
> Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy Spirit.”(494) And this is the
> Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously anthropomorphized by the
> Christian Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole Kosmos. First
> from One emanated number Two, or Air (the Father), the creative Element;
> and then number Three, Water (the Mother), proceeded from Air; Ether or
> Fire completes the Mystic Four, the Arbo‐al.(495) When the Concealed of
> the Concealed wanted to reveal Himself, he first made a Point [the
> Primordial Point, or the first Sephira, Air, or Holy Ghost,] shaped into a
> sacred Form, [the Ten Sephiroth, or the Heavenly Man,] and covered it with
> a rich and splendid Garment, _that is the World_.(496)
> 
> “He maketh the Wind His messengers, flaming Fire His servants”;(497) says
> the _Yetzirah_, showing the cosmical character of the later euhemerized
> Elements, and that Spirit permeates every atom in Kosmos.
> 
> Paul calls the invisible Cosmic Beings the “Elements.” But now the
> Elements are degraded into, and limited to, atoms of which nothing is
> known so far, and which are only “children of necessity,” as is Ether
> also. As we said in _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     The poor primordial Elements have long been exiled, and our
>     ambitious Physicists run races, to determine who shall add one
>     more to the fledgling brood of the sixty and odd elementary
>     substances.
> 
> Meanwhile there rages a war in modern Chemistry about terms. We are denied
> the right to call these substances “chemical elements,” for these are not
> “primordial principles of self‐existing essences, out of which the
> universe was fashioned,” according to Plato. Such ideas associated with
> the word “element” were good enough for the old Greek Philosophy, but
> Modern Science rejects them; for, as Mr. William Crookes says: “they are
> unfortunate terms,” and experimental Science will have “nothing to do with
> any kind of essences except those which it can see, smell, or taste. It
> leaves others to the metaphysicians....” We must feel grateful even for so
> much!
> 
> This “Primordial Substance” is called by some Chaos. Plato and the
> Pythagoreans named it the Soul of the World, after it had been impregnated
> by the Spirit of that which broods over the Primeval Waters, or Chaos. It
> is by being reflected in it, say the Kabalists, that the brooding
> Principle “created” the phantasmagoria of a visible, manifested Universe.
> Chaos before, Ether after this “reflection,” it is still the Deity that
> pervades Space and all things. It is the invisible, imponderable Spirit of
> things, and the invisible, but only too tangible, fluid that radiates from
> the fingers of the healthy magnetizer, for it is Vital Electricity—Life
> itself. Called in derision, by the Marquis de Mirville, the “Nebulous
> Almighty,” it is to this day termed by the Theurgists and Occultists the
> “Living Fire”; and there is not a Hindû who practises at dawn a certain
> kind of meditation but knows its effects. It is the “Spirit of Light” and
> Magnes. As truly expressed by an opponent, Magus and Magnes are two
> branches growing from the same trunk and shooting forth the same
> resultants. And in this appellation of “Living Fire” we may also discover
> the meaning of the puzzling sentence in the _Zend Avesta_: there is “a
> Fire that gives knowledge of the future, science and amiable speech”; that
> is to say, which develops an extraordinary eloquence in the sibyl, the
> sensitive, and even some orators. Writing upon this subject, in _Isis
> Unveiled_, we said:
> 
>     The Chaos of the ancients, the Zoroastrian Sacred Fire, or the
>     Atash‐Behram of the Parsîs; the Hermes‐fire, the Elmes‐fire of the
>     ancient Germans; the Lightning of Cybele; the Burning Torch of
>     Apollo; the Flame on the altar of Pan; the Inextinguishable Fire
>     in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the Fire‐
>     flame of Pluto’s helm; the brilliant Sparks on the caps of the
>     Dioscuri, on the Gorgon’s head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff
>     of Mercury; the Egyptian Ptah‐Ra; the Grecian Zeus Cataibates (the
>     Descending) of Pausanias; the Pentecostal Fire‐tongues; the
>     Burning Bush of Moses; the Pillar of Fire of _Exodus_, and the
>     Burning Lamp of Abram; the Eternal Fire of the “bottomless pit”;
>     the Delphic oracular vapours; the Sidereal Light of the
>     Rosicrucians; the Âkâsha of the Hindû Adepts; the Astral Light of
>     Éliphas Lévi; the Nerve‐Aura and the Fluid of the Magnetists; the
>     Od of Reichenbach; the Psychod and Ectenic Force of Thury; the
>     “Psychic Force” of Sergeant Cox, and the atmospheric magnetism of
>     some Naturalists; galvanism; and finally, electricity—all these
>     are but various names for many different manifestations or effects
>     of the same mysterious, all‐pervading Cause, the Greek Archæus.
> 
> We now add—it is all this and much more.
> 
> This “Fire” is spoken of in all the Hindû Sacred Books, as also in the
> Kabalistic works. The _Zohar_ explains it as the “White Hidden Fire, in
> the Risha Havurah,” the White Head, whose Will causes the fiery fluid to
> flow in 370 currents in every direction of the Universe. It is identical
> with the “Serpent that runs with 370 leaps” of the _Siphrah Dtzenioutha_,
> the Serpent, which, when the “Perfect Man,” the Metatron, _is raised_,
> that is to say, when the _Divine_ Man indwells in the _animal_ man,
> becomes _three_ Spirits, or Âtmâ‐Buddhi‐Manas, in our Theosophical
> phraseology.
> 
> Spirit, then, or Cosmic Ideation, and Cosmic Substance—one of whose
> “principles” is Ether—are _one_, and include the Elements, in the sense
> St. Paul attaches to them. These Elements are the veiled Synthesis
> standing for Dhyân Chohans, Devas, Sephiroth, Amshaspends, Archangels,
> etc. The Ether of Science—the Ilus of Berosus, or the Protyle of
> Chemistry—constitutes, so to speak, the _rude_ material, relatively, out
> of which the above‐named Builders, following the plan traced out for them
> eternally in the Divine Thought, fashion the Systems in the Kosmos. They
> are “myths,” we are told. No more so than Ether and the Atoms, we answer.
> The two latter are absolute necessities of Physical Science, and the
> Builders are as absolute a necessity of Metaphysics. We are twitted with
> the objection: You never saw them. And we ask the Materialists: Have you
> ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your Force? Moreover, one of
> the greatest Western Evolutionists of our modern day, co‐“discoverer” with
> Darwin, Mr. A. R. Wallace, when discussing the inadequacy of Natural
> Selection alone accounting for the physical form of Man, admits the
> guiding action of “higher intelligences” as a “_necessary_ part of the
> great laws which govern the material Universe.”(498)
> 
> These “higher intelligences” are the Dhyân Chohans of the Occultists.
> 
> Indeed, there are few myths in any religious system worthy of the name,
> but have a historical as well as a scientific foundation. “Myths,” justly
> observes Pococke, “are now proved to be _fables_, just in proportion as
> _we misunderstand_ them; _truths_, in proportion as _they were once
> understood_.”
> 
> The most distinct and the one prevailing idea, found in all ancient
> teaching, with reference to Cosmic Evolution and the first “creation” of
> our Globe with all its products, organic and _inorganic_—strange word for
> an Occultist to use!—is that the whole Kosmos has sprung from the Divine
> Thought. This Thought impregnates Matter, which is co‐eternal with the One
> Reality; and all that lives and breathes evolves from the Emanations of
> the One Immutable, Parabrahman‐Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal One‐Root. The
> former of these, in its aspect of the Central Point turned inward, so to
> say, into regions quite inaccessible to human intellect, is Absolute
> Abstraction; whereas, in its aspect as Mûlaprakriti, the Eternal Root of
> all, it gives one at least some hazy comprehension of the Mystery of
> Being.
> 
>     Therefore, it was taught in the _inner_ temples that this visible
>     Universe of Spirit and Matter is but the concrete Image of the
>     ideal Abstraction; it was built on the Model of the first Divine
>     Idea. Thus our Universe existed from eternity in a latent state.
>     The Soul animating this purely spiritual Universe is the Central
>     Sun, the highest Deity Itself. It was not the One who built the
>     concrete form of the idea, but the First‐Begotten; and, as it was
>     constructed on the geometrical figure of the dodecahedron,(499)
>     the First‐Begotten “was pleased to employ 12,000 years in its
>     creation.” The latter number is expressed in the Tyrrhenian
>     Cosmogony,(500) which shows man created in the sixth millennium.
>     This agrees with the Egyptian theory of 6,000 “years,”(501) and
>     with the Hebrew computation. But it is the exoteric form of it.
>     The secret computation explains that the “12,000 and the 6,000
>     years” are Years of Brahmâ, one Day of Brahmâ being equal to
>     4,320,000,000 years. Sanchuniathon, in his _Cosmogony_,(502)
>     declares that when the Wind (Spirit) became enamoured of its own
>     principles (Chaos), an intimate union took place, which connection
>     was called Pothos (ποθος), and from this sprang the seed of all.
>     And the Chaos knew not its own production, for it was _senseless_;
>     but from its embrace with the Wind was generated Môt, or the Ilus
>     (Mud).(503) From this proceeded the spores of creation and the
>     generation of the Universe.(504)
> 
>     Zeus‐Zên (Æther), and Chthonia (Chaotic Earth) and Metis (Water),
>     his wives; Osiris—also representing Æther, the first emanation of
>     the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of Light—and Isis‐
>     Latona, the Goddess Earth and Water again; Mithras,(505) the rock‐
>     born God, the symbol of the male Mundane Fire, or the personified
>     Primordial Light, and Mithra, the Fire‐Goddess, at once his mother
>     and his wife—the pure element of Fire, the active or male
>     principle, regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with Earth
>     and Water, or matter, the female, or passive, element of cosmical
>     generation—Mithras who is the son of Bordj, the Persian mundane
>     mountain,(506) from which he flashed out as a radiant ray of
>     light; Brahmâ, the Fire‐God, and his prolific consort; and the
>     Hindû Agni, the refulgent Deity from whose body issue a thousand
>     streams of glory and _seven_ tongues of flame, and in whose honour
>     certain Brâhmans to this day maintain a perpetual fire; Shiva,
>     personated by Meru, the mundane mountain of the Hindûs, the
>     terrific Fire‐God, who is said in the legend to have descended
>     from heaven, like the Jewish Jehovah, “in a pillar of fire”; and a
>     dozen other archaic double‐sexed Deities—all loudly proclaim their
>     hidden meaning. And what could be the dual meaning of these myths
>     but the psycho‐chemical principle of primordial creation; the
>     First Evolution, in its triple manifestation of Spirit, Force and
>     Matter; the divine _correlation_, at its starting point,
>     allegorized as the marriage of Fire and Water, the products of
>     electrifying Spirit—the union of the male active principle with
>     the female passive element—which become the parents of their
>     tellurian child, Cosmic Matter, the Prima Materia, whose Soul is
>     Æther, and whose Shadow is the Astral Light!(507)
> 
> But the fragments of the cosmogonical systems that have reached us are now
> rejected as absurd fables. Nevertheless, Occult Science—which has survived
> even the Great Flood that submerged the Antediluvian Giants and with them
> their very memory, save the record preserved in the Secret Doctrine, the
> _Bible_ and other Scriptures—still holds the Key to all the world
> problems.
> 
> Let us, then, apply this Key to the rare fragments of long‐forgotten
> Cosmogonies, and by means of their scattered portions endeavour to
> reestablish the once Universal Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine. The Key
> fits them all. No one can seriously study ancient philosophies without
> perceiving that the striking similitude of conception in all of them, in
> their exoteric form very frequently, and in their hidden spirit
> invariably, is the result of no mere coincidence, but of a concurrent
> design; and that, during the youth of mankind, there was but one language,
> one knowledge, one universal religion, when there were no churches, no
> creeds or sects, but when every man was a priest unto himself. And, if it
> is shown that already in those early ages which are shut out from our
> sight by the exuberant growth of tradition, human religious thought
> developed in uniform sympathy in every portion of the globe; then, it
> becomes evident that that thought, born under whatever latitude, in the
> cold North or the burning South, in the East or West, was inspired by the
> same revelations, and that man was nurtured under the protecting shadow of
> the same _Tree of Knowledge_.
> 
> Section IV. Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.
> 
> These three are the containment of Space; or, as a learned Kabalist has
> defined it: “Space, the all‐containing uncontained, is the primary
> embodiment of simple Unity ... boundless extension.”(508) But, he asks
> again: “boundless extension of what?”—and makes the correct reply: “The
> Unknown Container of All, the _Unknown First Cause_.” This is a most
> correct definition and answer; most esoteric and true, from every aspect
> of Occult Teaching.
> 
> _Space_, which, in their ignorance and with their iconoclastic tendency to
> destroy every philosophic idea of old, the modern wiseacres have
> proclaimed “an abstract idea” and a “void,” is, in reality, the Container
> and the Body of the Universe in its Seven Principles. It is a Body of
> limitless extent, whose Principles, in Occult phraseology—each being in
> its turn a septenary—manifest in our phenomenal World only the grossest
> fabric of their _sub‐divisions_. “No one has ever seen the Elements in
> their fulness,” the Doctrine teaches. We have to search for our Wisdom in
> the original expressions and synonyms of the primeval peoples. Even the
> Jews, the latest of these, show the same idea, in their Kabalistic
> teachings, when they speak of the seven‐headed Serpent of Space, called
> the “Great Sea.”
> 
>     In the beginning, the Alhim created the Heavens and the Earth; the
>     Six [Sephiroth].... They created Six, and on these all things are
>     based. And these [Six] depend upon the _seven forms_ of the
>     Cranium up to the Dignity of all Dignities.(509)
> 
> Now Wind, Air and Spirit have ever been synonymous in every nation. Pneuma
> (Spirit) and Anemos (Wind), with the Greeks, Spiritus and Ventus, with the
> Latins, were convertible terms, even if dissociated from the original idea
> of the Breath of Life. In the “Forces” of Science we see but the _material
> effect_ of the _spiritual effect_ of one or other of the four primordial
> Elements, transmitted to us by the Fourth Race just as we shall transmit
> Æther, or rather its gross sub‐division, in its fulness to the Sixth Root‐
> Race.
> 
> Chaos was called _senseless_ by the Ancients, because—Chaos and Space
> being synonymous—it represented and contained in itself all the Elements
> in their rudimentary, undifferentiated State. They made Æther, the fifth
> Element, the synthesis of the other four; for the Æther of the Greek
> philosophers was not its Dregs, although indeed they knew more than
> Science does now of these Dregs (Ether), which are rightly enough supposed
> to act as an agent for many Forces that manifest on Earth. Their Æther was
> the Âkâsha of the Hindûs; the Ether accepted in Physics is but one of its
> sub‐divisions, on our plane, the Astral Light of the Kabalists with all
> its _evil_ as well as its good effects.
> 
> Seeing that the Essence of Æther, or the Unseen Space, was considered
> divine, as being the supposed Veil of Deity, it was regarded as the Medium
> between this life and the next. The Ancients considered that when the
> directing active Intelligences—the Gods—retired from any portion of Æther
> in _our_ Space, or the four realms which they superintend, then that
> particular region was left in the possession of _evil_, so called by
> reason of the absence from it of _good_.
> 
>     The existence of Spirit in the common Mediator, the Ether, is
>     denied by Materialism; while Theology makes of it a Personal God.
>     But the Kabalist holds that both are wrong, saying that in Ether,
>     the elements represent only Matter, the blind Cosmic Forces of
>     Nature; while Spirit represents the Intelligence which directs
>     them. The Âryan, Hermetic, Orphic, and Pythagorean cosmogonical
>     doctrines, as well as those of Sanchuniathon and Berosus, are all
>     based upon one irrefutable formula, viz., that Æther and Chaos,
>     or, in the Platonic language, Mind and Matter, were the two
>     primeval and eternal principles of the Universe, utterly
>     independent of anything else. The former was the all‐vivifying
>     intellectual principle, while Chaos was a shapeless liquid
>     principle, without “form or sense”; from the union of which two
>     sprang into existence the Universe, or rather the Universal World,
>     the first Androgynous Deity—Chaotic Matter becoming its Body, and
>     Ether its Soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of
>     Hermeias: “Chaos, from this union with Spirit, obtaining _sense_,
>     shone with pleasure, and thus was produced Protogonos the (First‐
>     Born) Light.”(510) This is the universal Trinity, based on the
>     metaphysical conceptions of the Ancients, who, reasoning by
>     analogy, made of man, who is a compound of Intellect and Matter,
>     the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, or Great Universe.(511)
> 
> “Nature abhors Vacuum” said the Peripatetics, who though Materialists in
> their way, comprehended perhaps why Democritus, with his instructor
> Leucippus, taught that the first principles of all things contained in the
> Universe were Atoms and a Vacuum. The latter means simply _latent_ Force
> or Deity, which, before its first manifestation—when it became Will,
> communicating the first impulse to these Atoms—was the great Nothingness,
> Ain Suph, or No‐Thing; and, therefore, to every sense, a Void, or Chaos.
> 
> This Chaos, however, became the “Soul of the World,” according to Plato
> and the Pythagoreans. According to Hindû teaching, Deity, in the shape of
> Æther or Âkâsha, pervades all things. It was called, therefore, by the
> Theurgists the “Living Fire,” the “Spirit of Light,” and sometimes
> “Magnes.” According to Plato, the highest Deity itself built the Universe
> in the geometrical form of the dodecahedron, and its “First‐Begotten” was
> born of Chaos and Primordial Light—the Central Sun. This First‐Born,
> however, was only the aggregate of the Host of the Builders, the first
> Constructive Forces, who are called in ancient Cosmogonies, the Ancients,
> born of the Deep or Chaos, and the First Point. He is the Tetragrammaton,
> so‐called, at the head of the Seven lower Sephiroth. This was also the
> belief of the Chaldeans. Philo, the Jew, speaking very flippantly of the
> first instructors of his ancestors, writes as follows:
> 
>     These Chaldeans were of opinion that the Kosmos, _among the things
>     that exist_ [?], is a single Point, either being itself God
>     [Theos] or that in it is God, comprehending the Soul of all
>     things.(512)
> 
> Chaos, Theos, Kosmos are but the three symbols of their synthesis—_Space_.
> One can never hope to solve the mystery of this Tetraktys, by holding to
> the dead‐letter even of the old philosophies as now extant. But even in
> these, Chaos, Theos, Kosmos and Space are identified in all Eternity, as
> the One Unknown Space, the last word on which will never, perhaps, be
> known, before our Seventh Round. Nevertheless, the allegories and
> metaphysical symbols about the primeval and _perfect_ Cube, are
> remarkable, even in the exoteric _Purânas_.
> 
> There, also, Brahmâ is Theos, evolving out of Chaos, or the Great Deep,
> the Waters, over which Spirit or Space—the Spirit moving over the face of
> the future boundless Kosmos—is silently hovering, in the first hour of
> reäwakening. It is also Vishnu, sleeping on Ananta‐Shesha, the great
> Serpent of Eternity, of which Western Theology, ignorant of the _Kabalah_,
> the only key that opens the secrets of the _Bible_, has made—the Devil. It
> is the first Triangle or the Pythagorean Triad, the “God of the _three_
> Aspects,” before it is transformed, through the perfect quadrature of the
> Infinite Circle, into the “four‐faced” Brahmâ. “Of him who is and yet is
> not, from Non‐Being, the Eternal Cause, is born the Being, Purusha,” says
> Manu, the legislator.
> 
>     In the Egyptian mythology, Kneph, the Eternal _Unrevealed_ God, is
>     represented by a snake‐emblem of Eternity encircling a water urn,
>     with its head hovering over the waters, which it incubates with
>     its breath. In this case, the Serpent is the Agathodaimôn, the
>     Good Spirit; in its opposite aspect, it is the Kakodaimôn, the
>     Evil Spirit. In the Scandinavian _Eddas_, the honey‐dew, the fruit
>     of the Gods, and of the creative busy Yggdrasil bees, falls during
>     the hours of night, when the atmosphere is impregnated with
>     humidity; and in the Northern mythologies, as the passive
>     principle of creation, it typifies the creation of the Universe
>     out of Water. This dew is the Astral Light in one of its
>     combinations, and possesses creative as well as destructive
>     properties. In the Chaldean legend of Berosus, Oannes or Dagon,
>     the man‐fish, instructing the people, shows the infant World
>     created out of Water, and all beings originating from this Prima
>     Materia. Moses teaches that only Earth and Water can bring into
>     existence a Living Soul: and we read in the Scriptures that herbs
>     could not grow until the Eternal caused it to _rain_ upon Earth.
>     In the Mexican _Popol Vuh_, man is created out of _mud_ or clay
>     (_terre glaise_), taken from under the Water. Brahmâ creates the
>     great Muni, or first man, seated on his Lotus, only after having
>     called spirits into being, who thus enjoyed over mortals a
>     priority of existence; and he creates him out of Water, Air and
>     Earth. Alchemists claim that the primordial or pre‐adamic Earth,
>     when reduced to its first substance, is in its _second_ stage of
>     transformation like clear Water, the first being the Alkahest
>     proper. This primordial substance is said to contain within itself
>     the essence of all that goes to make up man; it contains not only
>     all the elements of his physical being, but even the “breath of
>     life” in a latent state, ready to be awakened. This it derives
>     from the “incubation” of the “Spirit of God” upon the face of the
>     Waters—Chaos. In fact, this substance is Chaos itself. From this
>     it was that Paracelsus claimed to be able to make his Homunculi;
>     and this is why Thales, the great natural philosopher, maintained
>     that Water was the principle of all things in nature.(513)... Job
>     says that dead _things_ are formed from under the Waters, and the
>     inhabitants thereof.(514) In the original text, instead of “dead
>     _things_,” it is written dead Rephaim, Giants or mighty Primitive
>     Men, from whom Evolution may one day trace our present race.(515)
> 
> “In the primordial state of the creation,” says Polier’s _Mythologie des
> Indous_, “the rudimental Universe, submerged in Water, reposed in the
> bosom of Vishnu. Sprung from this Chaos and Darkness, Brahmâ, the
> Architect of the World, poised on a lotus‐leaf, floated [moved] upon the
> waters, unable to discern anything but water and darkness.” Perceiving
> such a dismal state of things, Brahmâ soliloquizes in consternation: “Who
> am I? Whence came I?” Then he hears a voice:(516) “Direct your thoughts to
> Bhagavat.” Brahmâ, rising from his natatory position, seats himself upon
> the lotus, in an attitude of contemplation, and reflects upon the Eternal,
> who, pleased with this evidence of piety, disperses the primeval darkness
> and opens his understanding. “After this Brahmâ issues from the Universal
> Egg [Infinite Chaos] as Light, for his understanding is now opened, and he
> sets himself to work. He moves on the eternal Waters, with the Spirit of
> God within himself; and in his capacity of Mover of the Waters he is
> Vishnu, or Nârâyana.”
> 
> This is, of course, exoteric; yet, in its main idea, it is as identical as
> possible with the Egyptian Cosmogony, which, in its opening sentences,
> shows Athtor,(517) or Mother Night, representing Illimitable Darkness, as
> the Primeval Element which covered the Infinite Abyss, animated by Water
> and the Universal Spirit of the Eternal, dwelling alone in Chaos.
> Similarly in the Jewish Scriptures, the history of the creation opens with
> the Spirit of God and his creative Emanation—another Deity.(518)
> 
> The _Zohar_ teaches that it is the Primordial Elements—the trinity of
> Fire, Air and Water—the Four Cardinal Points, and all the Forces of
> Nature, which form collectively the Voice of the Will, Memrab, or the
> Word, the Logos of the Absolute Silent ALL. “The indivisible Point,
> limitless and unknowable,” spreads itself over space, and thus forms a
> Veil, the Mûlaprakriti of Parabrahman, which conceals this Absolute Point.
> 
> In the Cosmogonies of all the nations it is the Architects, synthesized by
> the Demiurge, in the _Bible_ the Elohim, or Alhim, who fashion Kosmos out
> of Chaos, and who are the collective Theos, male‐female, Spirit and
> Matter. “By a series (_yom_) of foundations (_hasoth_), the Alhim caused
> earth and heaven to be.”(519) In _Genesis_, it is first Alhim, then Jahva‐
> Alhim, and finally Jehovah—after the separation of the sexes in the fourth
> chapter. It is noticeable that nowhere, except in the later, or rather the
> _last_, Cosmogonies of our Fifth Race does the ineffable and unutterable
> NAME(520)—the symbol of the Unknown Deity, which was used only in the
> MYSTERIES—occur in connection with the “Creation” of the Universe. It is
> the Movers, the Runners, the Theoi (from θέειν to run), who do the work of
> formation, the Messengers of the Manvantaric Law, who have now become in
> Christianity simply the “Messengers” (Malachim). This seems to be also the
> case in Hindûism or early Brâhmanism. For in the _Rig Veda_, it is not
> Brahmâ who creates, but the Prajâpatis, the “Lords of Being,” who are also
> the Rishis; the term Rishi, according to Professor Mahadeo Kunte, being
> connected with the word to move, to lead on, applied to them in their
> terrestrial character, when, as Patriarchs, they lead their Hosts on the
> Seven Rivers.
> 
> Moreover, the very word “God,” in the singular, embracing all the Gods, or
> Theoi, came to the “superior” civilized nations from a strange source, one
> as entirely and preëminently phallic as the sincere outspokenness of the
> Indian Lingham. The attempt to derive _God_ from the Anglo‐Saxon synonym
> _Good_ is an abandoned idea, for in no other language, from the Persian
> _Khoda_ down to the Latin _Deus_, has an instance been found of the name
> for God being derived from the attribute of _Goodness_. To the Latin races
> it comes from the Âryan _Dyaus_ (the Day); to the Slavonian, from the
> Greek Bacchus (_Bagh‐bog_); and to the Saxon races directly from the
> Hebrew _Yod_, or _Jod_. The latter is י the number‐letter 10, male and
> female, and Yod is the phallic _hook_. Hence the Saxon _Godh_, the
> Germanic _Gott_, and the English _God_. This symbolic term may be said to
> represent the Creator of Physical Humanity, on the _terrestrial_ plane;
> but surely it had nothing to do with the Formation, or “Creation,” of
> either Spirit, Gods, or Kosmos?
> 
> Chaos‐Theos‐Kosmos, the Triple Deity, is _all in all_. Therefore, it is
> said to be male and female, good and evil, positive and negative; the
> whole series of contrasted qualities. When latent, in Pralaya, it is
> incognizable and becomes the Unknowable Deity. It can be known only in its
> active functions; hence as Matter‐Force and _living_ Spirit, the
> correlations and outcome, or the expression, on the visible plane, of the
> ultimate and ever‐to‐be unknown Unity.
> 
> In its turn this Triple Unit is the producer of the Four Primary
> Elements,(521) which are known, in our visible terrestrial Nature, as the
> seven (so far the five) Elements, each divisible into forty‐nine—seven
> times seven—sub‐elements, with about seventy of which Chemistry is
> acquainted. Every Cosmical Element, such as Fire, Air, Water, Earth,
> partaking of the qualities and defects of its Primaries, is in its nature
> Good and Evil, Force or Spirit, and Matter, etc.; and each, therefore, is
> at one and the same time Life and Death, Health and Disease, Action and
> Reaction. They are ever forming Matter, under the never‐ceasing impulse of
> the One Element, the Incognizable, represented in the world of phenomena
> by Æther. They are “the immortal Gods who give birth and life to all.”
> 
> In _The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol_, in
> treating of the structure of the Universe, it is said:
> 
>     R. Yehudah began, it is written: “Elohim said: Let there be a
>     firmament in the midst of the waters.” Come, see! At the time that
>     the Holy ... created the World, He created 7 heavens Above. He
>     created 7 earths Below, 7 seas, 7 days, 7 rivers, 7 weeks, 7
>     years, 7 times, and 7,000 years that the World has been. The Holy
>     _is in the seventh_ of all.(522)
> 
> This, besides showing a strange identity with the Cosmogony of the
> _Purânas_,(523) corroborates all our teachings with regard to number
> seven, as briefly given in _Esoteric Buddhism_.
> 
> The Hindûs have an endless series of allegories to express this idea. In
> the Primordial Chaos, before it became developed into the Sapta Samudra,
> or Seven Oceans—emblematical of the Seven Gunas, or conditioned Qualities,
> composed of Trigunas (Sattva, Rajas and Tamas)—lie latent both Amrita, or
> Immortality, and Visha, or Poison, Death, Evil. This is to be found in the
> allegorical Churning of the Ocean by the Gods. Amrita is beyond any Guna,
> for it is _unconditioned_, _per se_; but when once fallen into phenomenal
> creation, it became mixed with Evil, Chaos, with latent Theos in it,
> before Kosmos was evolved. Hence we find Vishnu, the personification of
> Eternal Law, periodically calling forth Kosmos into activity, or, in
> allegorical phraseology, churning out of the Primitive Ocean, or Boundless
> Chaos, the Amrita of Eternity, reserved only for the Gods and Devas; and
> in the task he has to employ Nâgas and Asuras, or Demons in exoteric
> Hindûism. The whole allegory is highly philosophical, and indeed we find
> it repeated in every ancient system of philosophy. Thus we find it in
> Plato, who having fully embraced the ideas which Pythagoras had brought
> from India, compiled and published them in a form more intelligible than
> the original mysterious numerals of the Samian Sage. Thus the Kosmos is
> the “Son” with Plato, having for his Father and Mother Divine Thought and
> Matter.(524)
> 
> “The Egyptians,” says Dunlap, “distinguish between an older and younger
> Horus; the former the _brother_ of Osiris, the latter the _son_ of Osiris
> and Isis.”(525) The first is the Idea of the World remaining in the
> Demiurgic Mind, “born in Darkness before the Creation of the World.” The
> second Horus is this Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed
> with Matter, and assuming an actual existence.(526)
> 
> The _Chaldean Oracles_ speak of the “Mundane God, eternal, boundless,
> young and old, of winding form.”(527) This “winding form” is a figure to
> express the vibratory motion of the Astral Light, with which the ancient
> priests were perfectly well acquainted, though the name “Astral Light” was
> invented by the Martinists.
> 
> Cosmolatry has the finger of scorn pointed at its superstitions by Modern
> Science. Science, however, before laughing at it, ought, as advised by a
> French savant, “to entirely remodel its own system of cosmo‐
> pneumatological education.” _Satis eloquentiæ, sapientiæ parum!_
> Cosmolatry, like Pantheism, in its ultimate expression, may be made to
> express itself in the same words in which the _Purâna_ describes Vishnu:
> 
>     He is only the _ideal cause_ of the _potencies_ to be created in
>     the work of creation; and from him proceed the potencies to be
>     created, after they have become the real cause. _Save that one
>     ideal cause_, there is no other to which the world can be
>     referred.... _Through the potency of that cause_, every created
>     thing comes by its proper nature.(528)
> 
> Section V. On the Hidden Deity, Its Symbols and Glyphs.
> 
> The Logos, or Creative Deity, the “Word made Flesh,” of every religion,
> has to be traced to its ultimate source and essence. In India, it is a
> Proteus of 1,008 divine names and aspects in each of its _personal_
> transformations, from Brahmâ‐Purusha, through the Seven _Divine_ Rishis
> and Ten _Semi‐divine_ Prajâpatis (also Rishis), down to the _Divine‐human_
> Avatâras. The same puzzling problem of the “One in Many,” and the
> Multitude in One, is found in other Pantheons; in the Egyptian, the Greek
> and the Chaldeo‐Judaic, the latter having made confusion still more
> confused by presenting its Gods as euhemerizations, in the shapes of
> Patriarchs. And these Patriarchs are now accepted by those who reject
> Romulus as a myth, and are represented as living and _historical_
> Entities. _Verbum satis sapienti!_
> 
> In the _Zohar_, Ain Suph is also the One, the Infinite Unity. This was
> known to the very few learned Fathers of the Church, who were aware that
> Jehovah was no “highest” God, but a _third‐rate_ Potency. But while
> complaining bitterly of the Gnostics, and saying: “our Heretics hold ...
> that Propatôr is known but to the Only‐begotten Son(529) [who is Brahmâ],
> that is to the Mind [Nous],” Irenæus failed to mention that the Jews did
> the same in their real _secret_ books. Valentinus, “the profoundest doctor
> of the Gnosis,” held that “there was a perfect Aiôn who existed before
> Bythos [the first Father of unfathomable nature, which is the Second
> Logos], called Propatôr.” It is this Aiôn who springs as a Ray from Ain
> Suph, which _does not create_, and Aiôn who creates, or _through_ whom,
> rather, everything is created, or evolves. For, as the Basilidians taught,
> “there was a Supreme God, Abrasax, by whom was created Mind [Mahat, in
> Sanskrit; Nous, in Greek]. From Mind proceeded the Word, Logos; from the
> Word, Providence [Divine Light, rather]; then from it Virtue and Wisdom in
> Principalities, Powers, Angels, etc.” By these Angels the 365 Æons were
> created. “Amongst the lowest, indeed, and those who made this world, he
> [Basilides] sets last of all the God of the Jews, whom he denies to be God
> [and very rightly], affirming he is one of the Angels.”
> 
> Here, then, we find the same system as in the _Purânas_, wherein the
> Incomprehensible drops a Seed, which becomes the Golden Egg, from which
> Brahmâ is produced. Brahmâ produces Mahat, etc. True Esoteric Philosophy,
> however, speaks neither of “creation,” nor of “evolution,” in the sense in
> which the exoteric religions do. All these personified Powers are not
> evolutions from one another, but so many aspects of the one and sole
> manifestation of the Absolute All.
> 
> The same system as that of the Gnostic Emanations prevails in the
> Sephirothic aspects of Ain Suph, and, as these aspects are in Space and
> Time, a certain order is maintained in their successive appearances.
> Therefore, it becomes impossible not to take notice of the great changes
> that the _Zohar_ has undergone under the handling of generations of
> Christian Mystics. For, even in the metaphysics of the _Talmud_, the Lower
> Face or Lesser Countenance, or Microprosopus, could never be placed on the
> same plane of abstract ideals as the Higher, or Greater Countenance,
> Macroprosopus. The latter is, in the Chaldean _Kabalah_, a pure
> abstraction, the Word or Logos, or Dabar in Hebrew; which Word, though it
> becomes in fact a plural number, or Words, D(a)B(a)R(i)M, when it reflects
> itself, or falls into the aspect of a Host of Angels, or Sephiroth—the
> “Number”—is still collectively One, and on the ideal plane a nought,
> [circle], “Nothing.” _It_ is without form or being, “with no likeness with
> anything else.”(530) And even Philo calls the Creator, the Logos who
> stands next God, the “Second God,” when he speaks of “the Second God, who
> is his [the Highest God’s] Wisdom.”(531) Deity is not God. It is No‐thing,
> and Darkness. It is nameless, and therefore called Ain Suph, the word
> “Ayin meaning nothing.”(532) The “Highest God,” the Unmanifested Logos, is
> Its Son.
> 
> Nor are most of the Gnostic systems which have come down to us, mutilated
> as they are by the Church Fathers, anything better than the distorted
> shells of the original speculations. Nor were they, moreover, ever _open_
> to the public or general reader; for had their hidden meaning or
> esotericism been revealed, it would have been no more an esoteric
> teaching, and this could never have been. Marcus, the chief of the
> Marcosians, who flourished in the middle of the second century, and taught
> that Deity had to be viewed under the symbol of _four_ syllables, gave out
> more of the esoteric truths than any other Gnostic. But even he was never
> well understood. For it is only on the surface or dead‐letter of his
> _Revelation_ that it appears that God is a Quaternary, to wit, “the
> Ineffable, the Silence, the Father, and Truth,” since in reality it is
> quite erroneous, and divulges only one more esoteric riddle. This teaching
> of Marcus was that of the early Kabalists and is ours. For he makes of
> Deity the Number 30, in four syllables, which, translated esoterically,
> means a Triad or Triangle, and a Quaternary or a Square, in all seven,
> which, on the lower plane, made the seven divine or Secret Letters of
> which the God‐name is composed. This requires demonstration. In his
> _Revelation_, speaking of divine mysteries expressed by means of letters
> and numbers, Marcus narrates how the Supreme “Tetrad came down” unto him
> “from the region which cannot be seen nor named, _in a female form_,
> because _the world would have been unable to bear her appearing in a male
> figure_,” and revealed to him “the generation of the universe, _untold
> before to either_ Gods or men.”
> 
> The first sentence already contains a double meaning. Why should the
> apparition of a female figure be more easily borne, or listened to, by the
> world than a male figure? On the face of it, this appears nonsensical. But
> to one who is acquainted with the Mystery Language, it is quite clear and
> simple. Esoteric Philosophy, or the Secret Wisdom, was symbolized by a
> female form, while a male figure stood for the Unveiled Mystery. Hence,
> the world, not being ready to receive it, could not bear it, and the
> Revelation of Marcus had to be given allegorically. Thus he writes:
> 
>     When first its Father [_sc._ of the Tetrad] ... the Inconceivable,
>     the Beingless, Sexless [the Kabalistic Ain Suph], desired that Its
>     Ineffable [the First Logos, or Æon] should be born, and Its
>     Invisible should be clothed with form, Its mouth opened and
>     uttered the Word like unto Itself. This Word [Logos] standing near
>     showed It what It was, manifesting itself in the form of the
>     Invisible One. Now the uttering of the [Ineffable] Name [through
>     the Word] came to pass in this manner. It [the Supreme Logos]
>     uttered the first Word of its Name, ... which, was a combination
>     [syllable] of _four_ elements [letters]. Then the second
>     combination was added, also of _four_ elements. Then the third,
>     composed of _ten_ elements; and after this the fourth was uttered,
>     which contained _twelve_ elements. The utterance of the whole Name
>     consisted thus of _thirty_ elements and of _four_ combinations.
>     Each element has its own letters and peculiar character, and
>     pronunciation, and groupings and similitudes; but none of them
>     perceives the form of that of which it is the element, nor
>     understands the utterance of its neighbour, but, what each sounds
>     forth itself, as sounding forth all [it can], that it thinks good
>     to call the whole.... And these sounds are they which manifest in
>     form the Beingless and Ingenerable Æon, and these are the forms
>     which are called Angels, perpetually beholding the Face of the
>     Father,(533) the Logos, the “Second God,” who stands next God the
>     “Inconceivable,” according to Philo.(534)
> 
> This is as plain as ancient esoteric secresy could make it. It is as
> Kabalistic though less veiled than the _Zohar_, in which the mystic names,
> or attributes, are also four syllabled, twelve, forty‐two, and even
> seventy‐two syllabled words! The Tetrad shows to Marcus the Truth in the
> shape of a naked woman, and letters every limb of that figure, calling her
> head Α Ω, her neck Β Ψ, shoulders and hands Γ Χ, etc. In this, Sephira is
> easily recognized; the head, or Crown, Kether, being numbered 1; the
> brain, or Chokmah, 2; the Heart, or Intelligence, Binah, 3; and the other
> seven Sephiroth representing the limbs of the body. The Sephirothic Tree
> is the Universe, and Adam Kadmon personifies it in the West, as Brahmâ
> represents it in India.
> 
> Throughout, the Ten Sephiroth are represented as divided into the Three
> higher, or the spiritual Triad, and the lower Septenary. The true esoteric
> meaning of the sacred number Seven though cleverly veiled, in the _Zohar_,
> is betrayed by the double way of writing the term, “in the Beginning,” or
> _Be‐rasheeth_, and _Be‐raishath_, the latter the “Higher, or Upper
> Wisdom.” As shown by S. L. MacGregor Mathers(535) and Isaac Myer,(536)
> both of these Kabalists being supported by the best ancient authorities,
> these words have a dual and secret meaning. _Braisheeth barah Elohim_
> means, that the _six_, over which stands the _seventh_ Sephira, belong to
> the lower material class, or, as the author says: “Seven ... are applied
> to the Lower Creation, and Three to the Spiritual Man, the Heavenly
> Prototypic or First Adam.”
> 
> When the Theosophists and Occultists say that God is no Being, for It is
> Nothing, No‐Thing, they are more reverential and religiously respectful to
> the Deity than those who call God _He_, and thus make of Him a gigantic
> Male.
> 
> He who studies the _Kabalah_ will soon find the same idea in the ultimate
> thought of its authors, the earlier and great Hebrew Initiates, who got
> this Secret Wisdom in Babylonia from the Chaldean Hierophants, just as
> Moses got his in Egypt. The Zoharic system cannot very well be judged by
> its translations into Latin and other tongues, when all its ideas were
> softened and made to fit in with the views and policy of its Christian
> arrangers; for its original ideas are identical with those of all other
> religious systems. The various Cosmogonies show that the Universal Soul
> was considered by every archaic nation as the Mind of the Demiurgic
> Creator; and that it was called the Mother, Sophia, or the female Wisdom,
> with the Gnostics; the Sephira, with the Jews; Sarasvatî or Vâch, with the
> Hindûs; the Holy Ghost also being a female Principle.
> 
> Hence, the Kurios, or Logos, born from it, was, with the Greeks, the God,
> Mind (Nous). “Now Koros [Kurios] ... signifies the pure and unmixed nature
> of Intellect—Wisdom,” says Plato, in _Cratylus_;(537) and Kurios is
> Mercury (Mercurius, Mar‐kurios), the Divine Wisdom, and “Mercury is Sol
> [the Sun],”(538) from whom Thot‐Hermes received this Divine Wisdom. While,
> then, the Logoi of all countries and religions are correlative, in their
> sexual aspects, with the female Soul of the World or the Great Deep, the
> Deity, from which these Two in One have their being, is ever concealed and
> called the Hidden One, and is connected only indirectly with
> “Creation,”(539) as it can act only through the Dual Force emanating from
> the Eternal Essence. Even Æsculapius, called the “Saviour of all,” is
> identical, according to ancient classical writers, with the Egyptian Ptah,
> the Creative Intellect, or Divine Wisdom, and with Apollo, Baal, Adonis
> and Hercules:(540) and Ptah, in one of its aspects, is the Anima Mundi;
> the Universal Soul of Plato; the Divine Spirit of the Egyptians; the Holy
> Ghost of the early Christians and Gnostics; and the Âkâsha of the Hindûs,
> and even, in its lower aspect, the Astral Light. For Ptah was originally
> the God of the Dead, he into whose bosom they were received, hence the
> Limbus of the Greek Christians, or the Astral Light. It was far later that
> Ptah was classed with the Sun‐Gods, his name signifying “he who opens,” as
> he is shown to be the first to unveil the face of the dead mummy, to call
> the Soul to _life in his bosom_. Kneph, the Eternal Unrevealed, is
> represented by the snake‐emblem of eternity encircling a water‐urn, with
> its head hovering over the “Waters,” which it incubates with its
> breath—another form of the one original idea of “Darkness,” with its Ray
> moving on the Waters, etc. As the Logos‐Soul, this _permutation_ is called
> Ptah; as the Logos‐Creator, he becomes Imhotep, his Son, the “God of the
> handsome face.” In their primitive characters, these two were the first
> Cosmic Duad, Noot, Space or “Sky,” and Noon, the “Primordial Waters,” the
> Androgyne Unity, above whom was the Concealed Breath of Kneph. And all of
> them had the aquatic animals and plants sacred to them, the ibis, the
> swan, the goose, the crocodile, and the lotus.
> 
> Returning to the Kabalistic Deity, this Concealed Unity is then Ain Suph
> (אין סוף, τὸ πάν, τό ἄπειρον), Endless, Boundless, Non‐Existent (אין), so
> long as the Absolute is within Oulom,(541) the Boundless and Termless
> Time; as such, Ain Suph cannot be the Creator or even the Modeller of the
> Universe, nor can It be Aur (Light). Therefore Ain Suph is also Darkness.
> The _immutably_ Infinite, and the _absolutely_ Boundless, can neither
> will, think, nor act. To do this, it has to become Finite, and _it_ does
> so by its Ray penetrating into the Mundane Egg, or Infinite Space, and
> emanating from it as a Finite God. All this is left to the Ray latent in
> the One. When the period arrives, the Absolute Will expands naturally the
> Force within it, according to the Law of which it is the inner and
> ultimate Essence. The Hebrews did not adopt the Egg as a symbol, but they
> substituted for it the “Duplex Heavens,” for, translated correctly, the
> sentence “God made the heavens and the earth” would read: “In and out of
> his own Essence, as a Womb [the Mundane Egg], God created the Two
> Heavens.” The Christians, however, have chosen the Dove, the bird and not
> the egg, as the symbol of their Holy Ghost.
> 
> “Whoever acquaints himself with Hud, the Mercabah and the Lahgash [secret
> speech or incantation], will learn the secret of secrets.” Lahgash is
> nearly identical in meaning with Vâch, the hidden power of the Mantras.
> 
> When the active period has arrived, from within the Eternal Essence of Ain
> Suph, comes forth Sephira, the Active Power, called the Primordial Point
> and the Crown, Kether. It is only through her that the “Un‐bounded Wisdom”
> could give a Concrete Form to the Abstract Thought. Two sides of the Upper
> Triangle, by which the Ineffable Essence and its Manifested Body, the
> Universe, are symbolized, the right side and the base, are composed of
> unbroken lines; the third, the left side, is dotted. It is through the
> latter that emerges Sephira. Spreading in every direction, she finally
> encompasses the whole Triangle. In this emanation the triple Triad is
> formed. From the invisible Dew falling from the higher Uni‐triad, the
> “Head,”—thus leaving 7 Sephiroth only—Sephira _creates_ Primeval Waters,
> or in other words, Chaos takes shape. It is the first stage towards the
> solidification of Spirit which, through various modifications, will
> produce Earth. “It requires Earth and Water to make a Living Soul,” says
> Moses. It requires the image of an aquatic bird to connect it with Water,
> the female element of procreation, with the egg and the bird that
> fecundates it.
> 
> When Sephira emerges as an Active Power from within the Latent Deity, she
> is female; when she assumes the office of a Creator, she becomes a male;
> hence, she is androgyne. She is the “Father and Mother, Aditi,” of the
> Hindû Cosmogony and of the Secret Doctrine. If the oldest Hebrew scrolls
> had been preserved, the modern Jehovah‐worshipper would have found that
> many and uncomely were the symbols of the “Creative God.” The frog in the
> moon, typical of his generative character, was the most frequent. All the
> birds and animals now called “unclean” in the _Bible_ have been the
> symbols of this Deity, in days of old. A mask of uncleanness was placed
> over them, in order to preserve them from destruction, because they were
> so sacred. The brazen serpent is not a bit more poetical than the goose or
> swan, if symbols are to be accepted _à la lettre_.
> 
> In the words of the _Zohar_:
> 
>     The Indivisible Point, which has no limit and cannot be
>     comprehended because of Its purity and brightness, expanded _from
>     without_, forming a brightness that served the Indivisible Point
>     as a Veil; [yet the latter also] _could not be viewed in_
>     consequence of its immeasurable Light. It too _expanded from
>     without_, and this expansion was its Garment. Thus through a
>     constant _upheaving_ [motion] finally the world originated.(542)
> 
> The Spiritual Substance sent forth by the Infinite Light is the First
> Sephira or Shekinah. Sephira, _exoterically_, contains all the other nine
> Sephiroth in her: _esoterically_, she contains but two, Chokmah or Wisdom,
> “a masculine, _active_ potency whose divine name is Jah (יה),” and Binah,
> or Intelligence, a feminine passive potency, represented by the divine
> name Jehovah (יהוה); which two potencies form, with Sephira the third, the
> Jewish Trinity or the Crown, Kether. These two Sephiroth, called Abba,
> Father, and Amona, Mother, are the Duad, or the double‐sexed Logos, from
> which issued the other seven Sephiroth. Thus, the first Jewish Triad,
> Sephira, Chokmah and Binah, is the Hindû Trimûrti.(543) However veiled
> even in the _Zohar_, and still more in the exoteric Pantheon of India,
> every particular connected with one is reproduced in the other. The
> Prajâpatis are the Sephiroth. Ten with Brahmâ, they dwindle to seven when
> the Trimûrti, or the Kabalistic Triad, are separated from the rest. The
> seven Builders, or “Creators,” become the seven Prajâpati, or the seven
> Rishis, in the same order as the Sephiroth become the Creators, then the
> Patriarchs, etc. In both Secret Systems, the One Universal Essence is
> incomprehensible and inactive, in its Absoluteness, and can be connected
> with the Building of the Universe only in an indirect way. In both, the
> primeval Male‐female, or Androgynous, Principle and its ten and seven
> Emanations—Brahmâ‐Virâj and Aditi‐Vâch, on the one hand; and the Elohim‐
> Jehovah, or Adam‐Adami (Adam Kadmon) and Sephira‐Eve, on the other; with
> their Prajâpatis and Sephiroth—in their totality, represent primarily the
> Archetypal Man, the Protologos; and it is only in their secondary aspect
> that they become cosmic powers, and astronomical or sidereal bodies. If
> Aditi is the Mother of the Gods, Deva‐Mâtri, Eve is the Mother of All
> Living; both are the Shakti, or Generative Power, in their female aspect,
> of the Heavenly Man, and they are both compound Creators. Says a Guptâ
> Vidyâ Sûtra:
> 
> _In the beginning, a Ray, issuing from Paramârthika [the one and only True
> Existence], became manifested in Vyâvahârika [Conventional Existence],
> which was used as a Vâhana to descend with into the Universal Mother, and
> to cause her to expand [swell, brih]._
> 
> And in the _Zohar_ it is stated:
> 
>     The Infinite Unity, formless and without similitude, after the
>     Form of the Heavenly Man was created, used it. The Unknown
>     Light(544) [Darkness] used the Heavenly Form (אדם עילאה—Adam
>     Oilah) as a Chariot (מרכבה—Mercabah), through which to descend,
>     and wished to be called by this Form, which is the sacred name
>     Jehovah.
> 
> As the _Zohar_ again says:
> 
>     In the beginning was the Will of the King, prior to any other
>     existence.... It [the Will] sketched the forms of all things that
>     had been concealed but now came into view. And there went forth as
>     a sealed secret, from the head of Ain Suph, a nebulous spark of
>     matter, without shape or form.... Life is drawn from below, and
>     from above the source renews itself, the sea is always full and
>     spreads its waters everywhere.
> 
> Thus the Deity is compared to a shoreless sea, to Water which is “the
> fountain of life.”(545) “The seventh palace, the fountain of life, is the
> first in the order from above.”(546) Hence the Kabalistic tenet on the
> lips of the very Kabalistic Solomon, who says in _Proverbs_: “Wisdom hath
> builded her house; it hath hewn out its _seven_ pillars.”(547)
> 
> Whence, then, all this identity of ideas, if there were no primeval
> Universal Revelation? The few points so far brought out are like a few
> straws in a stack, in comparison to that which will be disclosed as the
> work proceeds. If we turn to the Chinese Cosmogony, the most hazy of all,
> even there the same idea is found. Tsi‐tsai, the Self‐Existent, is the
> Unknown Darkness, the Root of the Wu‐liang‐sheu, Boundless Age; Amitâbha,
> and Tien, Heaven, come later on. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius gives
> the same idea, his “straws” notwithstanding. The latter are a source of
> great amusement to the missionaries, who laugh at every “heathen”
> religion, despise and hate that of their brother Christians of other
> denominations, and yet one and all accept their own _Genesis_,
> _literally_.
> 
> If we turn to the Chaldean we find in it Anu, the Concealed Deity, the
> One, whose name, moreover, shows it to be of Sanskrit origin; for Anu in
> Sanskrit means Atom, Anîyâmsam‐anîyasâm, smallest of the small, being a
> name of Parabrahman, in the Vedântic philosophy, in which Parabrahman is
> described as smaller than the smallest atom, and greater than the greatest
> sphere or universe, Anagrânîyas and Mahatoruvat. In the first verses of
> the Akkadian _Genesis_, as found in the cuneiform texts on the Babylonian
> tiles or Lateres Coctiles, and as translated by George Smith, we find Anu,
> the Passive Deity, or Ain Suph; Bel, the Creator, the Spirit of God, or
> Sephira, moving on the Face of the Waters, hence Water itself; and Hea,
> the Universal Soul, or Wisdom of the Three combined.
> 
> The first eight verses read as follows:
> 
>     1. When above, were not raised the heavens:
>     2. and below on the earth a plant had not grown up;
>     3. the abyss had not broken open their boundaries.
>     4. The Chaos (or Water) Tiamat (the Sea) was the producing‐mother
>                 of the whole of them. [This is the Cosmical Aditi and
>                 Sephira.]
>     5. Those waters at the beginning were ordained; but
>     6. a tree had not grown, a flower had not unfolded.
>     7. When the Gods had not sprung up, any one of them;
>     8. a plant had not grown, and order did not exist.(548)
> 
> This was the Chaotic or Ante‐genetic Period; the double Swan, and the Dark
> Swan which becomes white, when Light is created.(549)
> 
> The symbol chosen for the majestic ideal of the Universal Principle may
> perhaps seem little calculated to answer its sacred character. A goose, or
> even a swan, will, no doubt, be thought an unfit symbol to represent the
> grandeur of the Spirit. Nevertheless, it must have had some deep Occult
> meaning, since it figures not only in every Cosmogony and World‐religion,
> but was also chosen by the Crusaders, among the mediæval Christians, as
> the Vehicle of the Holy Ghost, which was supposed to be leading the army
> to Palestine, to wrench the tomb of the Saviour from the hands of the
> Saracen. If we are to credit Professor Draper’s statement, in his
> _Intellectual Development of Europe_, the Crusaders, under Peter the
> Hermit, were preceded, at the head of the army, by the Holy Ghost, under
> the shape of a white gander in the company of a goat. Seb, the Egyptian
> God of Time, carries a goose on his head; Jupiter assumes the form of a
> swan, and so also does Brahmâ; and the root of all this is that mystery of
> mysteries—the Mundane Egg. One should learn the reason of a symbol before
> depreciating it. The dual element of Air and Water is that of the ibis,
> swan, goose and pelican, of crocodiles and frogs, lotus flowers and water
> lilies, etc.; and the result is the choice of the most unseemly symbols by
> the modern as much as by the ancient Mystics. Pan, the great God of
> Nature, was generally figured in company with aquatic birds, geese
> especially, and so were other Gods. If later on, with the gradual
> degeneration of religion, the Gods to whom geese were sacred, became
> priapic deities, it does not, therefore, follow that water‐fowls were made
> sacred to Pan and other phallic deities, as some scoffers even of
> antiquity would have it,(550) but that the abstract and divine power of
> Procreative Nature had become grossly anthropomorphized. Nor does the swan
> of Leda show “priapic doings and her enjoyment thereof,” as Mr. Hargrave
> Jennings chastely expresses it; for the myth is but another version of the
> same philosophical idea of Cosmogony. Swans are frequently found
> associated with Apollo, as they are the emblems of Water and Fire, and
> also of the Sun‐light, before the separation of the Elements.
> 
> Our modern symbologists might profit by some remarks made by a well‐known
> writer, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, who says:
> 
>     From time immemorial an emblem has been worshipped in Hindûstan as
>     the type of creation, or the origin of life.... Shiva, or the
>     Mahâdeva, being not only the reproducer of human forms, but also
>     the fructifying principle, the generative power that pervades the
>     Universe. The maternal emblem is likewise a religious type. This
>     reverence for the production of life introduced into the worship
>     of Osiris the sexual emblems. Is it strange that they regarded
>     with reverence the great mystery of human birth? Were they impure
>     thus to regard it? Or are _we_ impure that we do not so regard it?
>     But _no clean and thoughtful mind_ could so regard them.... We
>     have travelled far, and unclean have been the paths, since those
>     old anchorites first spoke of God and the soul in the solemn
>     depths of their first sanctuaries. Let us not smile at their mode
>     of tracing the infinite and the incomprehensible Cause throughout
>     all the mysteries of nature, lest by so doing we cast the shadow
>     of our own grossness on their patriarchal simplicity.(551)
> 
> Section VI. The Mundane Egg.
> 
> Whence this universal symbol? The Egg was incorporated as a sacred sign in
> the Cosmogony of every people on the earth, and was revered both on
> account of its form and of its inner mystery. From the earliest mental
> conceptions of man, it has been known as that which represented most
> successfully the origin and secret of Being. The gradual development of
> the imperceptible germ within the closed shell; the inward working,
> without any apparent outward interference of force, which from a latent
> _nothing_ produced an active _something_, needing naught save heat; and
> which, having gradually evolved into a concrete, living creature, broke
> its shell, appearing to the outward senses of all as a self‐generated and
> self‐created being; all this must have been a standing miracle from the
> beginning.
> 
> The Secret Teaching explains the reason for this reverence by the
> symbolism of the prehistoric races. In the beginnings, the “First Cause”
> had no name. Later it was pictured in the fancy of the thinkers as an ever
> invisible, mysterious Bird that dropped an Egg into Chaos, which Egg
> became the Universe. Hence Brahmâ was called Kâlahansa, the “Swan in
> [Space and] Time.” Becoming the Swan of Eternity, Brahmâ, at the beginning
> of each Mahâmanvantara, lays a Golden Egg, which typifies the great
> Circle, or [circle] itself a symbol for the Universe and its spherical
> bodies.
> 
> A second reason for the Egg having been chosen as the symbolical
> representation of the Universe, and of our Earth, was its form. It was a
> Circle and a Sphere; and the ovi‐form shape of our Globe must have been
> known from the beginning of symbology, since it was so universally
> adopted. The first manifestation of the Kosmos in the form of an Egg was
> the most widely diffused belief of Antiquity. As Bryant shows,(552) it was
> a symbol adopted among the Greeks, the Syrians, Persians, and Egyptians.
> In the Egyptian _Ritual_, Seb, the God of Time and of the Earth, is spoken
> of as having laid an Egg, or the Universe, an “Egg conceived at the hour
> of the Great One of the Dual Force.”(553)
> 
> Ra is shown like Brahmâ gestating in the Egg of the Universe. The Deceased
> is “resplendent in the Egg of the Land of Mysteries.”(554) For, this is
> “the Egg to which is given Life among the Gods.”(555) “It is the Egg of
> the great clucking Hen, the Egg of Seb, who issues from it like a
> hawk.”(556)
> 
> Among the Greeks the Orphic Egg is described by Aristophanes, and was part
> of the Dionysiac and other Mysteries, during which the Mundane Egg was
> consecrated and its significance explained; Porphyry also shows it to be a
> representation of the world: “Ἑρμηνεύει δὲ τὸ ὠὸν τὸν κόσμον.” Faber and
> Bryant have tried to show that the Egg typified the Ark of Noah—a wild
> belief, unless the latter is accepted as purely allegorical and
> symbolical. It can only have typified the Ark as a synonym of the Moon,
> the Argha which carries the universal seed of life; but had surely nothing
> to do with the Ark of the _Bible_. Anyhow, the belief that the Universe
> existed in the beginning in the shape of an Egg was general. And as Wilson
> says:
> 
>     A similar account of the first aggregation of the elements in the
>     form of an Egg is given in all the _Purânas_, with the usual
>     epithet Haima or Hiranya, “golden,” as it occurs in _Manu_, I.
>     9.(557)
> 
> Hiranya, however, means “resplendent,” “shining,” rather than “golden,” as
> is proven by the great Indian scholar, the late Svâmi Dayanand Sarasvatî,
> in his unpublished polemics with Professor Max Müller. As said in the
> _Vishnu Purâna_:
> 
>     Intellect [Mahat] ... the [unmanifested] gross elements inclusive,
>     formed an Egg ... and the Lord of the Universe himself abided in
>     it, in the character of Brahmâ. In that Egg, O Brâhmana, were the
>     continents, and seas and mountains, the planets and divisions of
>     the planets, the gods, the demons and mankind.(558)
> 
> Both in Greece and in India the first visible male Being, who united in
> himself the nature of either sex, abode in the Egg and issued from it.
> This “First‐born of the World” was Dionysus, with some Greeks; the God who
> sprang from the Mundane Egg, and from whom the Mortals and Immortals were
> derived. The God Ra is shown, in the _Book of the Dead_, beaming in his
> Egg [the Sun], and the stars off as soon as the God Shoo [the Solar
> Energy] awakens and gives him the impulse.(559) “He is in the Solar Egg,
> the Egg to which is given Life among the Gods.”(560) The Solar God
> exclaims: “I am the Creative Soul of the Celestial Abyss. None sees my
> Nest, none can break my Egg, I am the Lord!”(561)
> 
> In view of this circular form, the “[vertical bar]” issuing from the
> “[circle],” or the Egg, or the male from the female in the androgyne, it
> is strange to find a scholar saying, on the ground that the most ancient
> Indian MSS. show no trace of it, that the ancient Âryans were ignorant of
> the decimal notation. The 10, being the sacred number of the Universe, was
> secret and esoteric, both as regards the unit and cipher, or zero, the
> circle. Moreover, Professor Max Müller tells that “the two words _cipher_
> and _zero_, which are but one, are sufficient to prove that our figures
> are borrowed from the Arabs.”(562) Cipher is the Arabic _cifron_, and
> means “empty,” a translation of the Sanskrit _sunyan_, or “nought,” says
> the Professor.(563) The Arabs had their figures from Hindûstan, and never
> claimed the discovery for themselves. As to the Pythagoreans, we need but
> turn to the ancient manuscripts of Boethius’ treatise, _De Arithmetica_,
> composed in the sixth century, to find among the Pythagorean numerals the
> “1” and the “0,” as the first and final figures.(564) And Porphyry, who
> quotes from the Pythagorean Moderatus,(565) says that the numerals of
> Pythagoras were “hieroglyphical symbols, by means whereof he explained
> ideas concerning the nature of things,” or the origin of the Universe.
> 
> Now, if, on the one hand, the most ancient Indian MSS. show as yet no
> trace of decimal notation in them, and Max Müller states very clearly that
> until now he has found but nine letters, the initials of the Sanskrit
> numerals; on the other hand, we have records as ancient, to supply the
> wanted proof. We speak of the sculptures and the sacred imagery in the
> most ancient temples of the far East. Pythagoras derived his knowledge
> from India; and we find Professor Max Müller corroborating this statement,
> at least so far as to allow that the Neo‐Pythagoreans were the first
> teachers of “ciphering,” among the Greeks and Romans; that they “at
> Alexandria, or in Syria, became acquainted with the Indian figures, and
> adapted them to the Pythagorean Abacus.” This cautious admission implies
> that Pythagoras himself was acquainted with only _nine_ figures. Thus we
> might reasonably answer that, although we possess no certain proof,
> exoterically, that the decimal notation was known to Pythagoras, who lived
> at the very close of the archaic ages,(566) yet we have sufficient
> evidence to show that the full numbers, as given by Boethius, were known
> to the Pythagoreans, even before Alexandria was built.(567) This evidence
> we find in Aristotle, who says that “some philosophers hold that ideas and
> numbers are of the same nature, and amount to _ten_ in all.”(568) This, we
> believe, will be sufficient to show that the decimal notation was known
> among them at least as early as four centuries B.C., for Aristotle does
> not seem to treat the question as an innovation of the Neo‐Pythagoreans.
> 
> But we know more than this; _we know_ that the decimal system must have
> been used by the mankind of the earliest archaic ages, since the whole
> astronomical and geometrical portion of the secret sacerdotal language was
> built upon the number 10, or the combination of the male and female
> principles, and since the “Pyramid of Cheops,” so‐called, is built upon
> measures of this decimal notation, or rather upon the digits and their
> combinations with the _nought_. Of this, however, sufficient has been said
> in _Isis Unveiled_, and it is useless to repeat it.
> 
> The symbolism of the Lunar and Solar Deities is so inextricably mixed up,
> that it is next to impossible to separate from each other such glyphs as
> the Egg, the Lotus, and the “Sacred” Animals. The Ibis, for instance, was
> held in the greatest veneration in Egypt. It was sacred to Isis, who is
> often represented with the head of that bird, and also sacred to Mercury
> or Thoth, who is said to have assumed its form while escaping from Typhon.
> There were two kinds of Ibises in Egypt, Herodotus(569) tells us; one
> _quite black_, the other black and white. The former is credited with
> fighting and exterminating the winged serpents which came every spring
> from Arabia, and infested the country. The other was sacred to the Moon,
> because the latter planet is white and brilliant on her external side,
> dark and black on that side which she never turns to the Earth. Moreover,
> the Ibis kills land serpents, and makes the most terrible havoc amongst
> the eggs of the crocodile, and thus saves Egypt from having the Nile over‐
> infested by those horrible saurians. The bird is credited with doing this
> in the moonlight, and thus being helped by Isis, whose sidereal symbol is
> the Moon. But the more correct esoteric truth underlying these popular
> myths is, that Hermes, as shown by Abenephius,(570) watched over the
> Egyptians under the form of that bird, and taught them the Occult arts and
> sciences. This simply means that the _ibis religiosa_ had, and has,
> “magical” properties in common with many other birds, the albatross
> preëminently, and the mythical white swan, the Swan of Eternity or Time,
> the Kâlahansa.
> 
> Were it otherwise, indeed, why should all the ancient peoples, who were no
> more fools than we are, have had such a superstitious dread of killing
> certain birds? In Egypt, he who killed an Ibis, or the Golden Hawk, the
> symbol of the Sun and Osiris, risked death, and could hardly escape it.
> The veneration of some nations for birds was such that Zoroaster, in his
> precepts, forbids their slaughter as a heinous crime. In our age, we laugh
> at every kind of divination. Yet why should so many generations have
> believed in divination by birds, and even in Oömancy, which is said by
> Suidas to have been imparted by Orpheus, who taught how, under certain
> conditions, to perceive in the yolk and white of an egg, that which the
> bird born from it would have seen around it during its short life. This
> Occult art, which, 3,000 years ago, demanded the greatest learning and the
> most abstruse mathematical calculations, has now fallen into the depths of
> degradation; and to‐day it is the old cooks and fortune‐tellers who read
> the future for servant‐girls in search of husbands, from the white of an
> egg in a glass.
> 
> Nevertheless, even Christians have to this day their sacred birds; for
> instance, the Dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost. Nor have they neglected
> the sacred animals; and the evangelical zoölatry, with its Bull, Eagle,
> Dion, and Angel—in reality the Cherub, or Seraph, the fiery‐winged
> Serpent—is as much Pagan as that of the Egyptians or the Chaldeans. These
> four animals are, in reality, the symbols of the four Elements, and of the
> four _lower_ Principles in man. Nevertheless, they correspond physically
> and materially to the four constellations that form, so to speak, the
> _suite_ or _cortège_ of the Solar God, and which, during the winter
> solstice, occupy the four cardinal points of the zodiacal circle. These
> four “animals” may be seen in many of the Roman Catholic _New Testaments_
> in which the “portraits” of the Evangelists are given. They are the
> animals of Ezekiel’s Mercabah.
> 
> As truly stated by Ragon:
> 
>     The ancient Hierophants have combined so cleverly the dogmas and
>     symbols of their religious philosophies, that these symbols can be
>     fully explained only by the combination and knowledge of _all_ the
>     keys.
> 
> They can be only _approximately_ interpreted, even if one discovers three
> out of these seven systems, viz., the anthropological, the psychic and the
> astronomical. The two chief interpretations, the highest and the lowest,
> the spiritual and the physiological, were preserved in the greatest
> secrecy, until the latter fell into the dominion of the profane. Thus far,
> with regard only to the pre‐historic Hierophants, with whom that which has
> now become purely—or impurely—phallic, was a science as profound and as
> mysterious as Biology and Physiology are now. This was their exclusive
> property, the fruit of their studies and discoveries. The other two were
> those which dealt with the Creative Gods, or Theogony, and with creative
> man; that is to say, with the ideal and the practical Mysteries. These
> interpretations were so cleverly veiled and combined, that many were those
> who, while arriving at the discovery of one meaning, were baffled in
> understanding the significance of the others, and could never unriddle
> them sufficiently to commit dangerous indiscretions. The highest, the
> first and the fourth—Theogony in relation to Anthropogony—were almost
> impossible to fathom. We find the proofs of this in the Jewish “Holy
> Writ.”
> 
> It is owing to the serpent being oviparous, that it became a symbol of
> Wisdom and an emblem of the Logoi, or the Self‐Born. In the temple of
> Philæ, in Upper Egypt, an egg was artificially prepared of clay mixed with
> various incenses. This was hatched by a peculiar process, and a cerastes
> or horned viper was produced. The same was done in the Indian temples, in
> antiquity, in the case of the cobra. The Creative God emerges from the Egg
> that issues from the mouth of Kneph, as a winged Serpent, for the Serpent
> is the symbol of the All‐Wisdom. With the Hebrews the same Deity is
> glyphed by the Flying or “Fiery Serpents” of Moses in the Wilderness; and
> with the Alexandrian Mystic she becomes the Orphio‐Christos, the Logos of
> the Gnostics. The Protestants try to show that the allegory of the Brazen
> Serpent and of the Fiery Serpents has a direct reference to the mystery of
> the Christ and the Crucifixion, whereas, in truth, it has a far nearer
> relation to the _mystery of generation_, when dissociated from the Egg
> with the Central Germ, or the _Circle with its Central Point_. Protestant
> Theologians would have us believe their interpretation _only_ because the
> Brazen Serpent was lifted on a pole! Whereas it had rather a reference to
> the Egyptian Egg standing upright supported by the sacred Tau; since the
> Egg and the Serpent are in‐separable in the old worship and symbology of
> Egypt, and since both the Brazen and Fiery Serpents were Seraphs, the
> burning “Fiery” Messengers, or the Serpent Gods, the Nâgas of India.
> Without the Egg it was a purely phallic symbol, but when associated
> therewith, it related to cosmic creation. The Brazen Serpent had no such
> holy meaning as the Protestants would ascribe to it; nor was it, in fact,
> glorified above the Fiery Serpents, _for the bite of which it was only a
> natural remedy_; the symbological meaning of the word “Brazen” being the
> feminine principle, and that of “Fiery,” or “Gold,” the masculine
> principle.
> 
>     Brass was a metal symbolizing the _nether world_ ... that of the
>     womb where life should be given.... The word for serpent in Hebrew
>     was _Nachash_, but this is also the term for _brass_.
> 
> It is said in _Numbers_ that the Jews complained of the Wilderness _where
> there was no water_,(571) after which “the Lord sent fiery serpents” to
> bite them, and then, to oblige Moses, he gave him as a remedy the Brazen
> Serpent on a pole for them to look at; after which “any man when he beheld
> the serpent of brass ... _lived_” (?). After that the “Lord,” gathering
> the people together at the well of Beer, gave them water, and grateful
> Israel sang this song, “Spring up, O well.” When, after studying
> symbology, the Christian reader comes to understand the innermost meaning
> of these three symbols, Water, Brazen, and Serpent, and a few more, _in
> the sense given to them in the Holy Bible_, he will hardly like to connect
> the sacred name of his Saviour with the Brazen Serpent incident. The
> Seraphim (שרפים) or Fiery Winged Serpents, are no doubt connected with,
> and inseparable from, the idea of the “Serpent of Eternity—God,” as
> explained in Kenealy’s _Apocalypse_; but the word Cherub also meant
> Serpent, in one sense, though its direct meaning is different, for the
> Cherubim and the Persian Winged Griffins (Γρύπες), the guardians of the
> Golden Mountain, are the same, and the compound name of the former shows
> their character, as it is formed of _kr_ (כר), a circle, and _aub_ or _ob_
> (אוב), a serpent, and therefore means a “serpent in a circle.” And this
> settles the phallic character of the Brazen Serpent, and justifies
> Hezekiah for breaking it.(572) _Verbum satis sapienti!_
> 
> In the _Book of the Dead_, as just shown,(573) reference is often made to
> the Egg. Ra, the Mighty One, remains in his Egg, during the struggle
> between the “Children of the Rebellion” and Shoo, the Solar Energy and the
> Dragon of Darkness. The Deceased is resplendent in his Egg when he crosses
> to the Land of Mystery. He is the Egg of Seb. The Egg was the symbol of
> Life in Immortality and Eternity; and also the glyph of the generative
> matrix; whereas the Tau, which was associated with it, was only the symbol
> of life and birth in _generation_. The Mundane Egg was placed in Khoom,
> the Water of Space, or the feminine _abstract_ Principle; Khoom becoming,
> with the “fall” of mankind into generation and phallicism, Ammon the
> Creative God. When Ptah, the “Fiery God,” carries the Mundane Egg in his
> hand, then the symbolism becomes quite terrestrial and concrete in its
> significance. In conjunction with the Hawk, the symbol of Osiris‐Sun, the
> symbol is dual, and relates to both Lives—the mortal and the immortal. The
> engraving of a papyrus in Kircher’s _Œdipus Egyptiacus_,(574) shows an egg
> floating above the mummy. This is the symbol of hope and the promise of a
> Second Birth for the Osirified Dead; his Soul, after due purification in
> the Amenti, will gestate in this Egg of Immortality, to be reborn
> therefrom into a new life on earth. For this Egg, in the Esoteric
> Doctrine, is Devachan, the Abode of Bliss; the Winged Scarabæus also being
> another symbol of it. The Winged Globe is but another form of the Egg, and
> has the same significance as the Scarabæus, the Khopiroo—from the Root
> _khoproo_, to become, to be reborn—which relates to the rebirth of man, as
> well as to his spiritual regeneration.
> 
> In the _Theogony_ of Mochus, we find Æther first, and then Air, the two
> principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (Νοητὸς) Deity, the visible
> Universe of Matter, is born, out of the Mundane Egg.(575)
> 
> In the _Orphic Hymns_, Eros‐Phanes evolves from the Divine Egg, which the
> Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” or rather the
> “Spirit of the Unknown Darkness”—the Divine Idea of Plato—which is said to
> move in Æther.(576) In the Hindû _Kathopanishad_, Purusha, the Divine
> Spirit, already stands before the Original Matter, “from whose union
> springs the Great Soul of the World,” Mahâ‐Âtmâ, Brahmâ, the Spirit of
> Life,(577) etc.; the latter appellations being all identical with Anima
> Mundi, or the “Universal Soul,” the Astral Light of the Kabalist and the
> Occultist, or the “Egg of Darkness.” Besides this there are many charming
> allegories on this subject, scattered through the Sacred Books of the
> Brâhmans. In one place, it is the female creator who is first a germ, then
> a drop of heavenly dew, a pearl, and then an Egg. In such cases, of which
> there are too many to enumerate separately, the Egg gives birth to the
> four Elements within the fifth, Æther, and is covered with seven
> coverings, which become later on the seven upper and the seven lower
> worlds. Breaking in two, the shell becomes the Heaven, and the contents
> the Earth, the white forming the Terrestrial Waters. Then, again, it is
> Vishnu who emerges from within the Egg, with a Lotus in his hand. Vinatâ,
> a daughter of Daksha and wife of Kashyapa, “the Self‐born, sprung from
> Time,” one of the seven “Creators” of our World, brought forth an Egg from
> which was born Garuda, the Vehicle of Vishnu; the latter allegory having a
> relation to our Earth, as Garuda is the Great Cycle.
> 
> The Egg was sacred to Isis; and therefore the priests of Egypt never ate
> eggs.
> 
> Isis is almost always represented holding a Lotus in one hand, and in the
> other a Circle and a Cross (_crux ansata_).
> 
> Diodorus Siculus states that Osiris was born from an Egg, like Brahmâ.
> From Leda’s Egg, Apollo and Latona were born, and also Castor and Pollux,
> the bright Gemini. And though the Buddhists do not attribute the same
> origin to their Founder, yet, no more than the ancient Egyptians or the
> modern Brâhmans, do they eat eggs, lest they should destroy the germ of
> life latent in them, and thereby commit sin. The Chinese believe that
> their First Man was born from an Egg, which Tien dropped down from Heaven
> to Earth into the Waters.(578) This egg‐symbol is still regarded by some
> as representing the idea of the origin of life, which is a scientific
> truth, though the human _ovum_ is invisible to the naked eye. Therefore we
> see respect shown to it from the remotest antiquity, by the Greeks,
> Phœnicians, Romans, the Japanese, and the Siamese, the North and South
> American tribes, and even the savages of the remotest islands.
> 
> With the Egyptians, the Concealed God was Ammon or Mon, the “Hidden”, the
> Supreme Spirit. All their Gods were dual—the scientific _Reality_ for the
> sanctuary; its double, the fabulous and mythical Entity, for the masses.
> For instance, as observed in the Section “Chaos, Theos, Kosmos,” the Elder
> Horus was the Idea of the World remaining in the Demiurgic Mind, “born in
> Darkness before the Creation of the World”; the Second Horus was the same
> Idea going forth from the Logos, becoming clothed with matter and assuming
> an actual existence.(579) Horus, the “Elder,” or Haroiri, is an ancient
> aspect of the Solar God, contemporary with Ra and Shoo; Haroiri is often
> mistaken for Hor (Horsusi), Son of Osiris and Isis. The Egyptians very
> often represented the rising Sun under the form of Hor, the Elder, rising
> from a full‐blown Lotus, the Universe, when the solar disk is always found
> on the hawk‐head of that God. Haroiri is Khnoom. The same with Khnoom and
> Ammon, both are represented as ram‐headed, and both are often confused,
> though their functions are different. Khnoom is the “modeller of men,”
> fashioning men and things out of the Mundane Egg, on a potter’s wheel;
> Ammon‐Ra, the Generator, is the secondary aspect of the Concealed Deity.
> Khnoom was adored at Elephanta and Philæ,(580) Ammon at Thebes. But it is
> Emepht, the One, Supreme Planetary Principle, who blows the Egg out of his
> mouth, and who is, therefore, Brahmâ. The Shadow of the Deity, Kosmic and
> Universal, of that which broods over and permeates the Egg with its
> vivifying Spirit, until the Germ contained in it is ripe, was the Mystery
> God whose name was unpronounceable. It is Ptah, however, “he who opens,”
> the opener of Life and Death,(581) who proceeds from the Egg of the World
> to begin his dual work.(582)
> 
> According to the Greeks, the phantom form of the Chemis (Chemi, ancient
> Egypt) which floats on the Ethereal Waves of the Empyrean Sphere, was
> called into being by Horus‐Apollo, the Sun‐God, who caused it to evolve
> out of the Mundane Egg.
> 
> The _Brahmânda Purâna_ contains fully the mystery about Brahmâ’s Golden
> Egg; and this is why, perhaps, it is inaccessible to the Orientalists, who
> say that this _Purâna_, like the _Skanda_, is “no longer procurable in a
> collective body,” but “is represented by a variety of Khandas and
> Mâhâtmyas professing to be derived from it.” The _Brahmânda Purâna_ is
> described as “that which has declared in 12,200 verses, the magnificence
> of the Egg of Brahmâ, and in which an account of the future Kalpas is
> contained, as revealed by Brahmâ.”(583) Quite so, and much more,
> perchance.
> 
> In the Scandinavian Cosmogony, placed by Professor Max Müller, in point of
> time, as “far anterior to the _Vedas_,” in the poem of Wöluspa, the Song
> of the Prophetess, the Mundane Egg is again discovered in the Phantom‐Germ
> of the Universe, which is represented as lying in the Ginnungagap, the Cup
> of Illusion, Mâyâ, the Boundless and Void Abyss. In this World’s Matrix,
> formerly a region of night and desolation, Nefelheim, the Mist‐Place, the
> _nebular_, as it is called now, in the Astral Light, dropped a _Ray of
> Cold Light_ which overflowed this cup and froze in it. Then the Invisible
> blew a scorching Wind which dissolved the frozen Waters and cleared the
> Mist. These Waters (Chaos), called the Streams of Eliwagar, distilling in
> vivifying drops, fell down and created the Earth and the Giant Ymir, who
> had only the “semblance of man” (the Heavenly Man), and the Cow, Audumla
> (the “Mother,” Astral Light or Cosmic Soul), from whose udder flowed
> _four_ streams of milk—the four cardinal points; the four heads of the
> four rivers of Eden, etc.—which “four” are symbolized by the Cube in all
> its various and mystical meanings.
> 
> The Christians—especially the Greek and Latin Churches—have fully adopted
> the symbol, and see in it a commemoration of life eternal, of salvation
> and of resurrection. This is found in, and corroborated by, the time‐
> honoured custom of exchanging “Easter Eggs.” From the Anguinum, the “Egg”
> of the Pagan Druid, whose name alone made Rome tremble with fear, to the
> red Easter Egg of the Slavonian peasant, a cycle has passed. And yet,
> whether in civilized Europe, or among the abject savages of Central
> America, we find the same archaic, primitive thought, if we will only
> search for it, and do not—in the haughtiness of our fancied mental and
> physical superiority—disfigure the original idea of the symbol.
> 
> Section VII. The Days and Nights of Brahmâ.
> 
> This is the name given to the Periods called Manvantara (Manuantara, or
> between the Manus) and Pralaya, or Dissolution; one referring to the
> Active Periods of the Universe; the other to its times of relative and
> complete Rest, whether they occur at the end of a Day or an Age, or Life,
> of Brahmâ. These Periods, which follow each other in regular succession,
> are also called Small and Great Kalpas, the Minor and the Mahâ Kalpas;
> though, properly speaking, the Mahâ Kalpa is never a Day, but a whole Life
> or Age of Brahmâ, for it is said in the _Brahma Vaivarta_: “Chronologers
> compute a Kalpa by the Life of Brahmâ. Minor Kalpas, as Samvarta and the
> rest, are numerous.” In sober truth they are infinite; for they have never
> had a commencement; or, in other words, there never was a _first_ Kalpa,
> nor will there ever be a _last_, in Eternity.
> 
> One Parârdha, or half of the existence of Brahmâ, in the ordinary
> acceptation of this measure of time, has already expired in the present
> Mahâ Kalpa; the last Kalpa was the Padma, or that of the Golden Lotus; the
> present one is the Varâha,(584) the “Boar” Incarnation, or Avatâra.
> 
> One thing is to be especially noted by the scholar who studies the Hindû
> religion from the _Puranâs_. He must never take the statements found
> therein literally, and in one sense only; and those especially, which
> concern the Manvantaras, or Kalpas, have to be understood in their several
> references. Thus these Ages relate, in the same language, to both the
> great and the small periods, to Mahâ Kalpas and to Minor Cycles. The
> Matsya, or Fish Avatâra, happened before the Varâha or Boar Avatâra; the
> allegories, therefore, must relate to both the Padma and the present
> Manvantara, and also to the Minor Cycles which have occurred since the
> reäppearance of our Chain of Worlds and the Earth. And as the Matsya
> Avatâra of Vishnu and Vaivasvata’s Deluge are correctly connected with an
> event that happened on our Earth during this Round, it is evident that,
> while it may relate to pre‐cosmic events, pre‐cosmic in the sense of _our_
> Cosmos, or Solar System, it has reference, in our case, to a distant
> geological period. Not even Esoteric Philosophy can claim to know, except
> by analogical inference, that which took place before the reäppearance of
> our Solar System, and previous to the last Mahâ Pralaya. But it teaches
> distinctly, that after the first geological disturbance of the Earth’s
> axis, which ended in the sweeping down to the bottom of the seas of the
> whole Second Continent, with its primeval races—of which successive
> Continents, or “Earths,” Atlantis was the fourth—there came another
> disturbance owing to the axis again resuming its previous degree of
> inclination as rapidly as it had changed it: when the Earth was indeed
> once more _raised_ out of the waters—as above, so below, and _vice versâ_.
> There were “Gods” on Earth in those days; Gods, and not men, as we know
> them now, says the tradition. As will be shown in Volume II, the
> computation of periods, in exoteric Hindûism, refers to both the great
> cosmic and the small terrestrial events and cataclysms, and the same may
> be demonstrated in respect to names. For instance, the name
> Yudishthira—the first king of the Sacae or Shakas, who opens the Kali Yuga
> Era, which has to last 432,000 years, “an actual king who lived 3,102
> years B.C.”—applies also to the Great Deluge, at the time of the first
> sinking of Atlantis. He is the “Yudishthira,(585) born on the mountain of
> the hundred peaks, at the extremity of the world, _beyond which nobody can
> __ go_” and “immediately after the flood.”(586) We know of no “Flood”
> 3,102 years B.C., not even that of Noah, for, agreeably with Judæo‐
> Christian chronology, it took place 2,349 years B.C.
> 
> This relates to an esoteric division of time and a mystery explained
> elsewhere, and may therefore be left aside for the present. Suffice it to
> remark, at this juncture, that all the efforts of imagination of the
> Wilfords, Bentleys, and other would‐be Œdipuses of esoteric Hindû
> Chronology, have sadly failed. No computation of either the Four Ages, or
> the Manvantaras, has ever yet been unriddled by our very learned
> Orientalists, who have therefore cut the Gordian Knot by proclaiming the
> whole “a figment of the Brâhmanical brain.” So be it, and may the great
> scholars rest in peace! This “figment” is given at the end of the
> Commentaries on Stanza II of the Anthropogenesis, in Volume II, with
> Esoteric additions.
> 
> Let us see, however, what were the three kinds of Pralayas, and what is
> the _popular_ belief about them. For once it agrees with Esotericism.
> 
> Of the Pralaya, before which fourteen Manvantaras elapse, having over them
> as many presiding Manus, and at whose close occurs the Incidental, or
> Brahmâ’s Dissolution, it is said in _Vishnu Purâna_, in condensed
> paraphrase:
> 
>     At the end of a thousand Periods of Four Ages, which complete a
>     day of Brahmâ, the earth is almost exhausted. The Eternal (Avyaya)
>     Vishnu then assumes the character of Rudra, the Destroyer (Shiva),
>     and reünites all his creatures to himself. He enters the Seven
>     Rays of the Sun and drinks up all the Waters of the Globe; he
>     causes the moisture to evaporate, thus drying up the whole Earth.
>     Oceans and rivers, torrents and small streams, are all exhaled.
>     Thus fed with abundant moisture the Seven Solar Rays become Seven
>     Suns, by dilation, and they finally set the World on fire. Hari,
>     the destroyer of all things, who is the Flame of Time, Kâlâgni,
>     finally consumes the Earth. Then Rudra, becoming Janârdana,
>     breathes clouds and rain.(587)
> 
> There are many kinds of Pralaya, but three chief periods are specially
> mentioned in old Hindû books. The first of these, as Wilson shows, is
> called Naimittika,(588) “Occasional” or “Incidental,” caused by the
> intervals of Brahmâ’s Days; it is the destruction of creatures, of all
> that lives and has a form, but not of the substance, which remains in
> _statu quo_ till the new Dawn after that Night. The second is called
> Prâkritika, and occurs at the end of the Age or Life of Brahmâ, when
> everything that exists is resolved into the Primal Element, to be
> remodelled at the end of that longer Night. The third, Âtyantika, does not
> concern the Worlds, or the Universe, but only the Individualities of some
> people. It is thus the Individual Pralaya, or Nirvâna, after having
> reached which, there is no more future existence possible, no rebirth till
> after the Mahâ Pralaya. The latter Night—lasting as it does
> 311,040,000,000,000 years, with the possibility also of being almost
> doubled in the case of the lucky Jîvanmukta who reaches Nirvâna at an
> early period of a Manvantara—is long enough to be regarded as _eternal_,
> if not endless. The _Bhâgavata Purâna_(589) speaks of a fourth kind of
> Pralaya, the Nitya, or Constant Dissolution, and explains it as the change
> which takes place imperceptibly in everything in this Universe from the
> globe down to the atom, without cessation. It is growth and decay—life and
> death.
> 
> When the Mahâ Pralaya arrives, the inhabitants of Svar‐loka, the Upper
> Sphere, disturbed by the conflagration, seek refuge “with the Pitris,
> their Progenitors, the Manus, the Seven Rishis, the various orders of
> Celestial Spirits and the Gods, in Mahar‐loka.” When the latter is reached
> also, the whole of the above enumerated beings migrate in their turn from
> Mahar‐loka, and repair to Jana‐loka, “_in their subtile forms, destined to
> become reëmbodied, in similar capacities as their former, when the world
> is renewed at the beginning of the succeeding Kalpa_.”(590)
> 
>     Clouds, mighty in size, and loud in thunder, fill up all Space
>     [Nabhas‐tala]. Showering down torrents of water, these clouds
>     quench the dreadful fires, ... and then they rain uninterruptedly
>     for a hundred [divine] Years, and deluge the whole World [Solar
>     System]. Pouring down, in drops as large as dice, these rains
>     overspread the Earth, and fill the Middle Region (Bhuvo‐loka) and
>     inundate Heaven. The World is now enveloped in darkness; and all
>     things, animate or inanimate, having perished, the clouds continue
>     to pour down their Waters, ... and the Night of Brahmâ reigns
>     supreme over the scene of desolation.(591)
> 
> This is what we call in the Esoteric Doctrine a Solar Pralaya. When the
> Waters have reached the region of the Seven Rishis, and the World, our
> Solar System, is one Ocean, they stop. The Breath of Vishnu becomes a
> strong Wind, which blows for another hundred Divine Years until all clouds
> are dispersed. The wind is then reäbsorbed: and That—
> 
>     Of which all things are made, the Lord by whom all things exist,
>     He who is inconceivable, without beginning, the beginning of the
>     Universe, reposes, sleeping upon Shesha [the Serpent of Infinity]
>     in the midst of the Deep. The Creator [(?) Âdikrit] Hari, sleeps
>     upon the Ocean [of Space] in the form of Brahmâ—glorified by
>     Sanaka(592) and the Saints (Siddhas) of Jana‐loka, and
>     contemplated by the holy denizens of Brahma‐loka, anxious for
>     final liberation—involved in mystic slumber, the celestial
>     personification of his own illusions.... This is the Dissolution
>     [(?) Pratisanchara] termed Incidental because Hari is its
>     Incidental [Ideal] Cause.(593) When the Universal Spirit wakes,
>     the World revives; when he closes his eyes, all things fall upon
>     the bed of mystic slumber. In like manner, as a thousand Great
>     Ages constitute a Day of Brahmâ [in the original it is Padmayoni,
>     the same as Abjayoni, “Lotus‐born,” not Brahmâ], so his Night
>     consists of the same period.... Awaking at the end of his Night,
>     the Unborn ... creates the Universe anew.(594)
> 
> This is “Incidental” Pralaya; what is the Elemental (Prâkritika)
> Dissolution? Parâshara describes it to Maitreya as follows:
> 
>     When, by dearth and fire all the Worlds and Pâtâlas [Hells] are
>     withered up(595) ... the progress of Elemental Dissolution is
>     begun. Then, first, the Waters swallow up the property of Earth
>     (which is the rudiment of Smell), and Earth deprived of this
>     property proceeds to destruction ... and becomes one with
>     Water.... When the Universe is, thus, pervaded by the waves of the
>     watery Element, its rudimentary flavour is licked up by the
>     Element of Fire ... and the Waters themselves are destroyed ...
>     and become one with Fire; and the Universe is, therefore, entirely
>     filled with [ethereal] Flame, which ... gradually overspreads the
>     whole World. While Space is [one] Flame, ... the Element of Wind
>     seizes upon the rudimental property, or form, which is the Cause
>     of Light, and that being withdrawn (pralîna), all becomes of the
>     nature of Air. The rudiment of form being destroyed, and Fire [(?)
>     Vibhâvasu] deprived of its rudiment, Air extinguishes Fire and
>     spreads ... over Space, which is deprived of Light, when Fire
>     merges into Air. Air, then, accompanied by Sound, which is the
>     source of Ether, extends everywhere throughout the ten regions ...
>     until Ether seizes upon Contact [(?) Sparsha, Cohesion—Touch?],
>     its rudimental property, by the loss of which, Air is destroyed,
>     and Ether [(?) Kha] remains unmodified; devoid of Form, Flavour,
>     Touch (Sparsha), and Smell, it exists [un]embodied [mûrttimat] and
>     vast, and pervades the whole of Space. Ether [Âkâsha], whose
>     characteristic property and rudiment is Sound [the “Word”] exists
>     alone, occupying all the vacuity of Space [or rather, occupying
>     the whole containment of Space]. Then the Origin [Noumenon?] of
>     the Elements (Bhûtâdi) devours Sound [the collective Demiurgos];
>     [and the hosts of Dhyân Chohans] and all the [existing]
>     Elements(596) are, at once, merged into their original. This
>     Primary Element is Consciousness, combined with the Property of
>     Darkness [Tâmasa—Spiritual Darkness rather], and is, itself,
>     swallowed up [disintegrated] by Mahat [the Universal Intellect],
>     whose characteristic property is Intelligence [Buddhi], and Earth
>     and Mahat are the inner and outer boundaries of the Universe. In
>     this manner, as [in the Beginning] were the seven forms of Nature
>     [Prakriti] reckoned from Mahat to Earth, so ... _these seven_
>     successively reënter into each other.(597)
> 
>     The Egg of Brahmâ (Sarva‐mandala) is dissolved in the Waters that
>     surround it, with its seven zones (dvîpas), seven oceans, seven
>     regions, and their mountains. The investure of Water is drunk by
>     Fire; the (stratum of) Fire is absorbed by (that of) Air; Air
>     blends itself with Ether [Âkâsha]; the Primary Element [Bhûtâdi,
>     the origin, or rather the _cause_, of the Primary Element] devours
>     the Ether, and is (itself) destroyed by Intellect [Mahat, the
>     Great, the Universal Mind], which, along with all these, is seized
>     upon by Nature [Prakriti] and disappears. This Prakriti is,
>     essentially, the same, whether discrete or indiscrete; only that
>     which is discrete is, finally, lost or absorbed in the indiscrete.
>     Spirit [Pums] also, which is one, pure, imperishable, eternal,
>     all‐pervading, is a portion of that Supreme Spirit which is all
>     things. That Spirit [Sarvesha] which is other than (embodied)
>     Spirit, and in which there are no attributes of name, species
>     [nâman and jâti, or rûpa, hence body rather than species], or the
>     like ... [remains] as the (sole) Existence [Sattâ]. Nature
>     [Prakriti] and Spirit [Purusha] both resolve [finally] into
>     Supreme Spirit.(598)
> 
> This is the final Pralaya(599)—the Death of Kosmos; after which its Spirit
> rests in Nirvâna, or in _That_ for which there is neither Day nor Night.
> All the other Pralayas are periodical, and follow the Manvantaras in
> regular succession, as the night follows the day of every human creature,
> animal, and plant. The Cycle of Creation of the Lives of Kosmos is run
> down; the energy of the Manifested “Word” having its growth, culmination,
> and decrease, as have all things temporary, however long their duration.
> The Creative Force is Eternal as noumenal; as a phenomenal manifestation,
> in its aspects, it has a beginning and must, therefore, have an end.
> During that interval, it has its Periods of Activity and its Periods of
> Rest. And these are the Days and Nights of Brahmâ. But Brahman, the
> Noumenon, never rests, as _It_ never changes, but ever _is_, though It
> cannot be said to be anywhere.
> 
> The Jewish Kabalists felt the necessity of this _immutability_ in an
> eternal, infinite Deity, and therefore applied the same thought to the
> anthropomorphic God. The idea is poetical, and very appropriate in its
> application. In the _Zohar_ we read as follows:
> 
>     As Moses was keeping a vigil on Mount Sinai, in company with the
>     Deity, who was concealed from his sight by a cloud, he felt a
>     great fear overcome him, and suddenly asked: “Lord, where art thou
>     ... sleepest thou, O Lord? ...” And the Spirit answered him; “I
>     never sleep: were I to fall asleep for a moment _before my time_,
>     all the creation would crumble into dissolution in one instant.”
> 
> “Before my time” is very suggestive. It shows the God of Moses to be only
> a temporary substitute, like Brahmâ, the male, a substitute and an aspect
> of THAT which is immutable, and which, therefore, can take no part in the
> Days, or Nights, nor have any concern whatever with reäction or
> dissolution.
> 
> While the Eastern Occultists have seven modes of interpretation, the Jews
> have only four; namely, the real‐mystical, the allegorical, the moral, and
> the literal or Pashut. The latter is the key of the exoteric Churches and
> not worth discussion. Here are several sentences, which, read in the
> first, or mystical key, show the identity of the foundations of
> construction in every Scripture. They are given in Isaac Myer’s excellent
> book on the Kabalistic works, which he seems to have well studied. I quote
> _verbatim_.
> 
>     “_B’raisheeth barah elohim ath hashama’ yem v’ath haa’retz_,
>     _i.e._, ‘In the beginning the God(s) created the heavens and the
>     earth’; (the meaning of which is;) the six (Sephiroth of
>     Construction),(600) over which _B’raisheeth_ stands, _all belong
>     Below_. It created six, (and) on these stand (exist) all Things.
>     And those depend upon the _seven forms of the Cranium_ up to the
>     Dignity of all Dignities. And the second ’Earth’ does not come
>     into calculation, therefore it has been said: ‘And from it (that
>     Earth) which underwent the curse; came it forth.’ ... ‘It (the
>     Earth) was without form and void; and darkness was over the face
>     of the Abyss, and the Spirit of Elohim ... was breathing
>     (_me’racha’pheth_, _i.e._, hovering, brooding over, moving, ...)
>     over the waters.’ Thirteen depend on thirteen (forms) of the most
>     worthy Dignity. Six thousand years hang (are referred to) in the
>     first six words. The seventh (thousand, the millennium) above it
>     (the cursed Earth) is that which is strong by Itself. And it was
>     rendered entirely desolate during twelve hours (one ... day ...).
>     In the thirteenth, It (the Deity) shall restore them ... and
>     everything shall be renewed as before; and all those six shall
>     continue.”(601)
> 
> The “Sephiroth of Construction” are the six Dhyân Chohans, or Manus, or
> Prajâpatis, synthesized by the seventh “B’raisheeth,” the First Emanation,
> or Logos, and who are called, therefore, the Builders of the Lower or
> Physical Universe, all belonging Below. These Six [6‐pointed star with
> middle dot], whose essence is of the _Seventh_, are the Upâdhi, the Base
> or Fundamental Stone, on which the Objective Universe is built, the
> Noumenoi of all things. Hence they are, at the same time, the Forces of
> Nature; the Seven Angels of the Presence; the Sixth and Seventh Principles
> in Man; the spirito‐psycho‐physical Spheres of the Septenary Chain, the
> Root Races, etc. They all “depend upon the Seven Forms of the Cranium” up
> to the Highest. The “_Second_ ‘Earth’ does not come into calculation,”
> because it is _no Earth_, but the Chaos, or Abyss of Space, in which
> rested the Paradigmatic, or Model Universe, in the Ideation of the Over‐
> Soul, brooding over it. The term “Curse” is here very misleading, for it
> means simply Doom or Destiny, or _that fatality which sent it forth_ into
> the objective state. This is shown by that “Earth,” under the “Curse,”
> being described as “without form and void,” in whose abysmal depths the
> “Breath” of the Elohim, or collective Logoi, produced, or so to say
> photographed, the first Divine Ideation of the _things to be_. This
> process is repeated after every Pralaya before the beginnings of a new
> Manvantara, or Period of sentient individual Being. “Thirteen depend on
> thirteen Forms,” refers to the thirteen Periods, personified by the
> thirteen Manus, with Svâyambhuva, the fourteenth—13, instead of 14, being
> an additional veil—those fourteen Manus who reign within the term of a
> Mahâ Yuga, a Day of Brahmâ. These thirteen‐fourteen of the objective
> Universe depend on the thirteen‐fourteen paradigmatic, ideal Forms. The
> meaning of the “six thousand Years” which “hang in the first six Words,”
> has again to be sought in the Indian Wisdom. They refer to the primordial
> six (seven) “Kings of Edom,” who typify the Worlds, or Spheres, of our
> Chain, during the First Round, as well as the primordial men of this
> Round. They are the septenary pre‐Adamic First Root‐Race, or they who
> existed before the Third, _Separated_ Race. As they were Shadows, and
> senseless, for they had not yet eaten of the fruit of the Tree of
> Knowledge, they could not see the Parzuphim, or “Face could not see Face”;
> that is to say, primeval men were “unconscious.” “Therefore, the
> primordial (seven) Kings died,” _i.e._, were destroyed.(602) Now, who are
> these Kings? They are the Kings who are the “Seven Rishis, certain
> (secondary) divinities, Indra [Shakra], Manu, and the Kings his Sons [who]
> _are created and perish at one period_” as _Vishnu Purâna_ tells us.(603)
> For the seventh “thousand,” which is not the millennium of exoteric
> Christianity, but that of Anthropogenesis, represents both the “Seventh
> Period of Creation,” that of physical man, according to _Vishnu Purâna_,
> and the Seventh Principle, both macrocosmic and microcosmic, and also the
> Pralaya after the Seventh Period, the Night, which has the same duration
> as the Day, of Brahmâ. “It was rendered entirely desolate during twelve
> hours.” It is in the Thirteenth (twice six and the synthesis) that
> everything shall be restored, and the “_six_ shall continue.”
> 
> Thus, the author of the _Qabbalah_ remarks quite truly that:
> 
>     Long before his [Ibn Gebirol’s] time ... many centuries before the
>     Christian era, there was in Central Asia a “Wisdom Religion”,
>     fragments of which subsequently existed among the learned men of
>     the archaic Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, Hindûs, etc.... [And
>     that] the _Qabbalah_ most likely originally came from Âryan
>     sources, through Central Asia, Persia, India and Mesopotamia, for
>     from Ur and Haran came Abraham and many others, into
>     Palestine.(604)
> 
> Such was also the firm conviction of C. W. King, the author of _The
> Gnostics and Their Remains_.
> 
> Vâmadeva Modelyar describes the coming Night most poetically. Though it is
> given in _Isis Unveiled_, it is worthy of repetition.
> 
>     Strange noises are heard, proceeding from every point.... These
>     are the precursors of the Night of Brahmâ; _dusk rises at the
>     horizon_, and the Sun passes away behind the thirteenth degree of
>     Makara [the tenth sign of the Zodiac], and will reach no more the
>     sign of the Mîna [the Zodiacal sign Pisces, or the Fish]. The
>     Gurus of the Pagodas, appointed to watch the Râshichakram
>     [Zodiac], may now break their circle and instruments, for they are
>     henceforth useless.
> 
>     Gradually light pales, heat diminishes, uninhabited spots multiply
>     on the earth, the air becomes more and more rarefied; the springs
>     of waters dry up, the great rivers see their waves exhausted, the
>     ocean shows its sandy bottom and plants die. Men and animals
>     decrease in size daily. Life and motion lose their force, planets
>     can hardly gravitate in space; they are extinguished one by one,
>     like a lamp which the hand of the Chokra [servant] neglects to
>     replenish. Sûrya [the Sun] flickers and goes out, matter falls
>     into Dissolution [Pralaya], and Brahmâ merges back into Dyaus, the
>     Unrevealed God, and, his task being accomplished, he falls asleep.
>     Another Day is passed, Night sets in, and continues until the
>     future Dawn.
> 
>     And now again reënter into the Golden Egg of his Thought the germs
>     of all that exist, as the divine Manu tells us. During His
>     peaceful rest, the animated beings, endowed with the principles of
>     action, cease their functions, and all feeling [Manas] becomes
>     dormant. When they are all absorbed in the Supreme Soul, this Soul
>     of all the beings sleeps in complete repose, till the Day when it
>     resumes its form, and awakes again from its primitive
>     darkness.(605)
> 
> As the Satya Yuga is always the first in the series of the Four Ages or
> Yugas, so the Kali ever comes the last. The Kali Yuga now reigns supreme
> in India, and it seems to coincide with that of the Western Age. Anyhow,
> it is curious to see how prophetic in almost all things was the writer of
> _Vishnu Purâna_, when foretelling to Maitreya some of the dark influences
> and sins of this Kali Yuga. For after saying that the “barbarians” will be
> masters of the banks of the Indus, of Chandrabhâgâ and Kâshmîra, he adds:
> 
>     There will be contemporary monarchs, reigning over the earth,
>     kings of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to
>     falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women,
>     children, and cows; they will seize upon the property of their
>     subjects [or, according to another reading, _be intent upon the
>     wives of others_]; they will be of limited power ... their lives
>     will be short, their desires insatiable.... People of various
>     countries intermingling with them will follow their example; and,
>     the barbarians being powerful [in India] in the patronage of the
>     princes, whilst pure tribes are neglected, the people will perish
>     [or, as the Commentator has it: “the Mlechchhas will be in the
>     centre, and the Âryas in the end”].(606) Wealth and piety will
>     decrease day by day, until the world will be wholly depraved....
>     Property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of
>     devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the
>     sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation;
>     and women will be objects merely of sensual gratification....
>     _External types will be the only distinction of the several orders
>     of life_; dishonesty [anyâya] will be the (universal) means of
>     subsistence; weakness the cause of dependence; menace and
>     presumption will be substituted for learning; liberality will be
>     devotion; a man if rich will be reputed pure; mutual assent will
>     be marriage; fine clothes will be dignity.... He who is the
>     strongest will reign ... the people, unable to bear the heavy
>     burthens [khara‐bhâra, load of taxes], will take refuge among the
>     valleys.... Thus, in the Kali Age, will decay constantly proceed,
>     until the human race approaches its annihilation [pralaya]. When
>     ... the close of the Kali age shall be nigh, a portion of that
>     divine Being which exists, of its own spiritual nature [Kalkî
>     Avatâra] ... shall descend upon Earth, ... endowed with the eight
>     superhuman faculties.... He will reëstablish righteousness upon
>     earth; and the minds of those who live at the end of Kali Yuga
>     shall be awakened, and shall be as pellucid as crystal. The men
>     who are, thus, changed ... shall be as _the seeds of human
>     beings_, and shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws
>     of the Krita Age (or Age of Purity). As it is said: “When the Sun
>     and Moon and (the Lunar Asterism) Tishya, and the planet Jupiter
>     are in one mansion, the Krita [or Satya] Age shall
>     return....”(607)
> 
> Two persons, Devâpi, of the race of Kuru, and Maru [Moru], of the family
> of Ikshvâku, ... continue alive throughout the Four Ages, residing at ...
> Kalâpa.(608) They will return hither, in the beginning of the Krita
> Age(609) ... Maru [Moru](610) the son of Shîghra, through the power of
> devotion (Yoga) is still living ... and will be the restorer of the
> Kshattriya race of the Solar Dynasty.(611)
> 
> Whether right or wrong with regard to the latter prophecy, the “blessings”
> of Kali Yuga are well described, and fit in admirably even with that which
> one sees and hears in Europe and other civilized and Christian lands in
> the full XIXth, and at the dawn of the XXth century of our great “Era of
> Enlightenment.”
> 
> Section VIII. The Lotus, as a Universal Symbol.
> 
> There are no ancient symbols without a deep and philosophical meaning
> attached to them, their importance and significance increasing with their
> antiquity. Such is the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to Nature and her
> Gods, and represents the Abstract and the Concrete Universes, standing as
> the emblem of the productive powers of both Spiritual and Physical Nature.
> It was held as sacred from the remotest antiquity by the Âryan Hindûs, the
> Egyptians, and by the Buddhists after them. It was revered in China and
> Japan, and adopted as a Christian emblem by the Greek and Latin Churches,
> who made of it a messenger, as do now the Christians, who have replaced it
> with the water‐lily.
> 
> In the Christian religion, in every picture of the Annunciation, Gabriel,
> the Archangel, appears to the Virgin Mary, holding in his hand a spray of
> water‐lilies. This spray, typifying Fire and Water, or the idea of
> creation and generation, symbolizes _precisely the same idea_ as the
> Lotus, in the hand of the Bodhisattva who announces to Mahâ‐Mâyâ,
> Gautama’s mother, the birth of Buddha, the world’s Saviour. Thus also,
> were Osiris and Horus constantly represented by the Egyptians in
> association with the Lotus‐flower, both being Sun‐Gods or Gods of Fire;
> just as the Holy Ghost is still typified by “tongues of fire,” in the
> _Acts_.
> 
> It had, and still has, its mystic meaning, which is identical in every
> nation on earth. We refer the reader to Sir William Jones.(612) With the
> Hindûs, the Lotus is the emblem of the productive power of Nature, through
> the agency of Fire and Water, or Spirit and Matter. “O Thou Eternal! I see
> Brahm, the Creator, enthroned in thee above the Lotus!” says a verse in
> the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_. And Sir W. Jones shows, as already noted in the
> Stanzas, that the seeds of the Lotus, even before they germinate, contain
> perfectly‐formed leaves, the miniature shapes of what they will become one
> day, as perfected plants. The Lotus, in India, is the symbol of prolific
> Earth and, what is more, of Mount Meru. The four Angels or Genii of the
> four quarters of Heaven, the Mahârâjahs of the Stanzas, stand each on a
> Lotus. The Lotus is the two‐fold type of the Divine and Human
> Hermaphrodite, being so to say, of dual sex.
> 
> With the Hindûs, the Spirit of Fire or Heat—which stirs up, fructifies,
> and develops into concrete form, from its ideal prototype, everything
> which is born of Water, or Primordial Earth—evolved Brahmâ. The Lotus‐
> flower, represented as growing out of Vishnu’s navel, the God who rests in
> the Waters of Space on the Serpent of Infinity, is the most graphic symbol
> ever yet made. It is the Universe evolving from the Central Sun, the
> Point, the ever‐concealed Germ. Lakshmî, who is the female aspect of
> Vishnu, and who is also called Padma, the Lotus, in the _Râmâyana_, is
> likewise shown floating on a Lotus‐flower, at the “Creation,” and during
> the “Churning of the Ocean” of Space, as also springing from the “Sea of
> Milk,” like Venus‐Aphrodite from the Foam of the Ocean.
> 
>     ... Then, seated on a lotus,
>     Beauty’s bright Goddess, peerless Shrî, arose
>     Out of the waves ...
> 
> sings an English Orientalist and poet, Sir Monier Williams.
> 
> The underlying idea, in this symbol, is very beautiful, and, furthermore,
> shows an identical parentage in all the religious systems. Whether as the
> Lotus or water‐lily, it signifies one and the same philosophical idea;
> namely, the Emanation of the Objective from the Subjective, Divine
> Ideation passing from the abstract into the concrete, or visible form.
> For, as soon as Darkness, or rather that which is “Darkness” for
> ignorance, has disappeared in its own realm of Eternal Light, leaving
> behind itself only its Divine Manifested Ideation, the Creative Logoi have
> their understanding opened, and they see in the Ideal World, hitherto
> concealed in the Divine Thought, the archetypal forms of all, and proceed
> to copy and build, or fashion, upon these models, forms evanescent and
> transcendent.
> 
> At this stage of Action, the Demiurge is not yet the Architect. Born in
> the Twilight of Action, he has yet to first perceive the Plan, to realize
> the Ideal Forms, which lie buried in the Bosom of Eternal Ideation, just
> as the future lotus‐leaves, the immaculate petals, are concealed within
> the seed of that plant.
> 
> In Esoteric Philosophy the Demiurge, or Logos, regarded as the Creator, is
> simply an abstract term, an idea, like the word “army.” As the latter is
> the all‐embracing term for a body of active forces, or working
> units—soldiers, so is the Demiurge the qualitative compound of a multitude
> of Creators or Builders. Burnouf, the great Orientalist, seized the idea
> perfectly, when he said that Brahmâ does _not_ create the Earth, any more
> than the rest of the Universe.
> 
>     Having evolved himself from the Soul of the World, once separated
>     from the First Cause, he evaporates with, and emanates, all Nature
>     out of himself. He does not stand above it, but is mixed up with
>     it; Brahmâ and the Universe form one Being, each particle of which
>     is in its essence Brahmâ himself, who proceeded out of himself.
> 
> In a chapter of the _Book of the Dead_, called “Transformation into the
> Lotus,” the God, figured as a head emerging from this flower, exclaims:
> 
>     I am the pure Lotus, emerging from the Luminous Ones.... I carry
>     the messages of Horus. I am the pure Lotus which comes from the
>     Solar Fields.(613)
> 
> The lotus‐idea may be traced even in the Elohistic first chapter of
> _Genesis_, as stated in _Isis Unveiled_. It is to this idea that we must
> look for the origin and explanation of the verse in the Jewish Cosmogony
> which reads: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth ... the fruit‐tree
> yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.”(614) In all the
> primitive religions, the Creative God is the “Son of the Father,” that is
> to say, his Thought made visible; and before the Christian era, from the
> Trimûrti of the Hindûs down to the three Kabalistic Heads of the
> scriptures, as explained by the Jews, the Triune Godhead of each nation
> was fully defined and substantiated, in its allegories.
> 
> Such is the cosmic and ideal significance of this great symbol with the
> Eastern peoples. But when applied to practical and exoteric worship, which
> had also its esoteric symbology, the Lotus, in time, became the carrier
> and container of a more terrestrial idea. No dogmatic religion has ever
> escaped having the sexual element in it; and to this day it soils the
> moral beauty of the root idea of symbology. The following is quoted from
> the same Kabalistic MS. which we have already cited on several occasions:
> 
>     Pointing to like signification was the Lotus growing in the waters
>     of the Nile. Its mode of growth peculiarly fitted it as a symbol
>     of the generative activities. The flower of the Lotus, which is
>     the bearer of the seed for reproduction, as the result of its
>     maturing, is connected by its placenta‐like attachment to mother‐
>     earth, or the womb of Isis, through the water of the womb, that
>     is, the river Nile, by the long cord‐like stalk, the umbilicus.
>     Nothing can be plainer than the symbol, and to make it perfect in
>     its intended signification, a child is sometimes represented as
>     seated in or issuing from the flower.(615) Thus Osiris and Isis,
>     the children of Cronus, or time without end, in the development of
>     their nature‐forces, in this picture become the parents of man
>     under the name Horus.
> 
>     We cannot lay too great stress upon the use of this generative
>     function as a basis for a symbolical language, and a scientific
>     art‐speech. Thought upon the idea leads at once to reflection upon
>     the subject of creative cause. In its workings Nature is observed
>     to have fashioned a wonderful piece of living mechanism, governed
>     by an added living soul; the life development and history of which
>     soul, as to its whence, its present, and its whither, surpass all
>     efforts of the human intellect.(616) The new‐born is an ever‐
>     recurring miracle, an evidence that within the workshop of the
>     womb an intelligent creative power has intervened to fasten a
>     living soul to a physical machine. The amazing wonderfulness of
>     the fact attaches a holy sacredness to all connected with the
>     organs of reproduction, as the dwelling and place of evident
>     constructive intervention of deity.
> 
> This is a correct rendering of the underlying ideas of old, of the purely
> pantheistic conceptions, _impersonal_ and reverential, of the archaic
> philosophers of the prehistoric ages. It is not so, however, when applied
> to sinful humanity, to the gross ideas attached to _personality_.
> Therefore, no pantheistic philosopher would fail to find the remarks that
> follow the above, and which represent the anthropomorphism of Judean
> symbology, other than dangerous for the sacredness of true religion, and
> fitting only for our materialistic age, which is the direct outcome and
> result of that anthropomorphic character. For this is the key‐note to the
> entire spirit and essence of the _Old __ Testament_, as the MS. states,
> treating of the symbolism of the art‐speech of the _Bible_:
> 
>     Therefore the locality of the womb is to be taken as the Most Holy
>     Place, the Sanctum Sanctorum, and the veritable Temple of the
>     Living God.(617) With man, the possession of the woman has always
>     been considered as an essential part of himself, to make one out
>     of two, and jealously guarded as sacred. Even the part of the
>     ordinary house or home consecrated to the dwelling of the wife was
>     called the _penetralia_, the secret or sacred, and hence the
>     metaphor of the Holy of Holies, of sacred constructions taken from
>     the idea of the sacredness of the organs of generation. Carried to
>     the extreme of description(618) by metaphor, this part of the
>     house is described in the Sacred Books as the “between the thighs
>     of the house,” and sometimes the idea is carried out
>     constructively in the great door‐opening of Churches placed inward
>     between flanking buttresses.
> 
> No such thought, “carried to the extreme,” ever existed among the old
> primitive Âryans. This is proven by the fact that, in the Vedic period,
> their women were not placed apart from men in _penetralia_, or Zenanas.
> This seclusion began when the Mahommedans—the next heirs to Hebrew
> symbolism, after Christian ecclesiasticism—had conquered the land and
> gradually enforced their ways and customs upon the Hindûs. The pre‐ and
> post‐Vedic woman was as free as man; and no impure terrestrial thought was
> ever mixed with the religious symbology of the early Âryans. The idea and
> application are purely Semitic. This is corroborated by the writer of the
> said intensely learned and Kabalistic revelation, when he closes the
> above‐quoted passages by adding:
> 
>     If to these organs as symbols of creative cosmic agencies the idea
>     of the origin of measures as well as of time‐periods can be
>     attached, then indeed, in the constructions of the Temples as
>     Dwellings of Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as the
>     Holy of Holies, or the Most Holy Place, should borrow its title
>     from the recognized sacredness of the generative organs,
>     considered as symbols of measures as well as of creative cause.
>     With the ancient _wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no
>     symbol_ of a First Cause.
> 
> Most decidedly not. Rather never give a thought to it and leave it for
> ever nameless, as the early Pantheists did, than degrade the sacredness of
> that Ideal of Ideals, by dragging down its symbols into such
> anthropomorphic forms! Here again one perceives the immense chasm between
> Âryan and Semitic religious thought, the two opposite poles, Sincerity and
> Concealment. With the Brâhmans, who have never invested the natural
> procreative functions of mankind with an “original sin” element, it is a
> _religious duty_ to have a son. A Brâhman, in days of old, having
> accomplished his mission of human creator, retired to the jungle, and
> passed the rest of his days in religious meditation. He had accomplished
> his duty to nature, as mortal man and its co‐worker, and henceforth gave
> all his thoughts to the spiritual and immortal portion of himself,
> regarding the terrestrial as a mere illusion, an evanescent dream—which,
> indeed it is. With the Semite, it was different. He invented a temptation
> of flesh in a garden of Eden, and showed his God—esoterically, the Tempter
> and the Ruler of Nature—_cursing for ever_ an act, which was in the
> logical programme of that Nature.(619) All this exoterically, as in the
> _cloak_ and dead‐letter of _Genesis_ and the rest. At the same time,
> _esoterically_, he regarded the supposed _sin_ and _fall_ as an act so
> sacred, as to choose the organ, the perpetrator of the _original sin_, as
> the fittest and most sacred symbol to represent that God, who is shown as
> branding its entering into function as disobedience and everlasting _sin!_
> 
> Who can ever fathom the paradoxical depths of the Semitic mind! And this
> paradoxical element, _minus_ its innermost significance, has now passed
> entirely into Christian theology and dogma!
> 
> Whether the early Fathers of the Church knew the esoteric meaning of the
> Hebrew _Testament_, or whether only a few of them were aware of it, while
> the others remained ignorant of the secret, is for posterity to decide.
> One thing, at any rate, is certain. As the Esotericism of the _New
> Testament_ agrees perfectly with that of the Hebrew Mosaic Books; and
> since, at the same time, a number of purely Egyptian symbols and Pagan
> dogmas in general—the Trinity, for example—have been copied by, and
> incorporated into, the Synoptics and St. John, it becomes evident that the
> identity of those symbols was known to the writers of the _New Testament_,
> whoever they may have been. They must have been also aware of the priority
> of the Egyptian Esotericism, since they have adopted several symbols which
> typify purely Egyptian conceptions and beliefs, in their outward and
> inward meaning, and which are not to be found in the Jewish Canon. One of
> these is the water‐lily in the hands of the Archangel, in the early
> representations of his appearance to the Virgin Mary; and these symbolical
> images are preserved to this day in the iconography of the Greek and Roman
> Churches. Thus Water, Fire and the Cross, as well as the Dove, the Lamb
> and other Sacred Animals, with all their combinations, esoterically yield
> an identical meaning, and must have been accepted as an improvement upon
> Judaism pure and simple.
> 
> For the Lotus and Water are among the oldest symbols, and in their origin
> are purely Âryan, though they became common property during the branching
> off of the Fifth Race. To give an example; letters, as well as numbers,
> were all mystic, whether in combination, or taken separately. The most
> sacred of all is the letter M. It is both feminine and masculine, or
> androgyne, and is made to symbolize Water in its origin, the Great Deep.
> It is a mystic letter in all languages, Eastern and Western, and stands as
> a glyph for the waves, thus [three triangles]. In the Âryan Esotericism,
> as in the Semitic, this letter has always stood for the Waters. In
> Sanskrit, for instance, Makara, the tenth sign of the Zodiac, means a
> Crocodile, or rather an aquatic monster associated always with Water. The
> letter Ma is equivalent to, and corresponds with, the number 5, which is
> composed of a Binary, the symbol of the two sexes separated, and of the
> Ternary, the symbol of the Third Life, the progeny of the Binary. This,
> again, is often symbolized by a Pentagon, the latter being a sacred sign,
> a divine Monogram. Maitreya is the secret name of the Fifth Buddha, and
> the Kalkî Avatâra of the Brâhmans, the last Messiah who will come at the
> culmination of the Great Cycle. It is also the initial letter of the Greek
> Metis, or Divine Wisdom; of Mimra, the Word, or Logos; and of Mithras, the
> Mihr, the Monad Mystery. All these are born in, and from, the Great Deep,
> and are the Sons of Mâyâ, the “Mother”; in Egypt, Moot; in Greece,
> Minerva, Divine Wisdom; of Mary, or Miriam, Myrrha, etc., the Mother of
> the Christian Logos; and of Mâyâ, the Mother of Buddha. Mâdhava and
> Mâdhavî are the titles of the most important Gods and Goddesses of the
> Hindû Pantheon. Finally, Mandala is, in Sanskrit, a “Circle,” or an Orb,
> also the ten divisions of the _Rig Veda_. The most sacred names in India
> generally begin with this letter, from Mahat, the first manifested
> Intellect, and Mandara, the great mountain used by the Gods to churn the
> Ocean, down to Mandâkinî, the heavenly Gangâ, or Ganges, Manu, etc., etc.
> 
> Will this be called a coincidence? A strange one is it then, indeed, when
> we see even Moses, found in the Water of the Nile, with the symbolical
> consonant in his name. And Pharaoh’s daughter “called his name Moses; and
> she said, Because I drew him out of the Water.”(620) Besides which, the
> Hebrew sacred name of God, applied to this letter M, is Meborach, the
> “Holy” or the “Blessed,” and the name for the Water of the Flood is Mbul.
> A reminder of the “Three Maries” at the Crucifixion, and their connection
> with Mare, the Sea, or Water, may close these examples. This is why, in
> Judaism and Christianity, the Messiah is always connected with Water,
> Baptism; and also with the Fishes, the sign of the Zodiac called Mînam in
> Sanskrit, and even with the Matsya (Fish) Avatâra, and the Lotus, the
> symbol of the womb, or with the water‐lily, which has the same
> signification.
> 
> In the relics of ancient Egypt, the greater the antiquity of the votive
> symbols and emblems of the objects exhumed, the oftener are Lotus‐flowers
> and Water found in connection with the Solar Gods. The God Khnoom, the
> Moist Power, or Water, as Thales taught, being the principle of all
> things, sits on a throne enshrined in a Lotus. The God Bes stands on a
> Lotus, ready to devour his progeny. Thot, the God of Mystery and Wisdom,
> the sacred Scribe of Amenti, wearing the solar disk as head gear, sits
> with a bull’s head—the sacred bull of Mendes being a form of Thot—and a
> human body, on a full blown Lotus. Finally, it is the Goddess Hiqit, under
> her shape of a frog, who rests on the Lotus, thus showing her connection
> with water. And it is from the unpoetical shape of this frog‐symbol,
> undeniably the glyph of the most ancient of the Egyptian Deities, that the
> Egyptologists have been vainly trying to unravel the mystery and functions
> of the Goddess. Its adoption in the Church, by the early Christians, shows
> that they knew it better than our modern Orientalists. The “frog or toad
> Goddess” was one of the chief Cosmic Deities connected with Creation, on
> account of this animal’s amphibious nature, and chiefly because of its
> apparent resurrection, after long ages of solitary life, enshrined in old
> walls, in rocks, etc. She not only participated in the organization of the
> World, together with Khnoom, but was also connected with _the dogma of
> resurrection_.(621) There must have been some very profound and sacred
> meaning attached to this symbol, since, notwithstanding the risk of being
> charged with a disgusting form of zoölatry, the early Egyptian Christians
> adopted it in their Churches. A frog or toad, enshrined in a Lotus‐flower,
> or simply without the latter emblem, was the form chosen for the _Church‐
> lamps_, on which were engraved the words, “Ἐγώ εἰμι ἀναστάσις”—I am the
> resurrection.(622) These frog‐Goddesses are also found on all the mummies.
> 
> Section IX. The Moon; Deus Lunus, Phœbe.
> 
> This archaic symbol is the most poetical of all symbols, as also the most
> philosophical. The ancient Greeks brought it into prominence, and the
> modern poets have worn it threadbare. The Queen of Night, riding in the
> majesty of her peerless light in Heaven, throwing all, even Hesperus, into
> darkness, and spreading her silver mantle over the whole Sidereal World,
> has ever been a favourite theme with all the poets of Christendom, from
> Milton and Shakespeare down to the latest versifier. But the refulgent
> lamp of night, with her suite of stars unnumbered, spoke only to the
> imagination of the profane. Until lately, Religion and Science had nought
> to do with the beautiful mythos. Yet, the cold chaste Moon, she, who, in
> the words of Shelley:
> 
>     ... makes all beautiful on which she smiles,
>     That wandering shrine of soft, yet icy flame
>     Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,
>     And warms not, but illumes....
> 
> stands in closer relations to Earth than any other sidereal orb. The Sun
> is the Giver of Life to the whole Planetary System; the Moon is the Giver
> of Life to our Globe; and the early races understood and knew it, even in
> their infancy. She is the Queen, and she is the King. She was King Soma
> before she became transformed into Phœbe and the chaste Diana. She is
> preëminently the Deity of the Christians, through the Mosaic and
> Kabalistic Jews, though the civilized world may have remained ignorant of
> the fact for long ages; in fact, ever since the last initiated Father of
> the Church died, carrying with him into his grave the secrets of the Pagan
> Temples. For such Fathers as Origen or Clemens Alexandrinus, the Moon was
> Jehovah’s living symbol; the Giver of Life and the Giver of Death, the
> Disposer of Being—in _our_ World. For, if Artemis was Luna in Heaven, and,
> with the Greeks, Diana on Earth, who presided over child‐birth and life;
> with the Egyptians, she was Hekat (Hecate) in Hell, the Goddess of Death,
> who ruled over magic and enchantments. More than this; as the personified
> Moon, whose phenomena are triadic, Diana‐Hecate‐Luna is the _three in
> one_. For she is _Diva triformis_, _tergemina_, _triceps_, three heads on
> one neck,(623) like Brahmâ‐Vishnu‐Shiva. Hence she is the prototype of our
> Trinity, which has not always been entirely male. The number seven, so
> prominent in the _Bible_, so sacred in the seventh day, or Sabbath, came
> to the Jews from antiquity, deriving its origin from the four‐fold number
> 7 contained in the 28 days of the lunar month, each septenary portion
> thereof being typified by one quarter of the Moon.
> 
> It is worth the trouble of presenting, in this work, a bird’s‐eye view of
> the origin and development of the lunar myth and worship, in historical
> antiquity, on our side of the globe. Its earlier origin is untraceable by
> _exact_ Science, which rejects all tradition; while for Theology, which,
> under the guidance of the crafty Popes, has put a brand on every fragment
> of literature that does not bear the _imprimatur_ of the Church of Rome,
> its archaic history is a sealed book. Whether the Egyptian or the Âryan
> Hindû religious philosophy is the more ancient—the Secret Doctrine says it
> is the latter—does not much matter, in this instance, as the Lunar and
> Solar “worship” are the most ancient in the world. Both have survived, and
> prevail to this day throughout the whole world; with some openly, with
> others—as, for instance, in Christian symbology—secretly. The cat, a lunar
> symbol, was sacred to Isis, who was the Moon in one sense, just as Osiris
> was the Sun, and is often seen on the top of the Sistrum in the hand of
> the Goddess. This animal was held in great veneration in the city of
> Bubastis, which went into deep mourning on the death of the sacred cats,
> because Isis, as the Moon, was particularly worshipped in that city of
> mysteries. The astronomical symbolism connected with it has already been
> given in Section I, and no one has better described it than Mr. Gerald
> Massey, in his _Lectures_ and in _The Natural Genesis_. The eye of the
> cat, it is said, seems to follow the lunar phases in their growth and
> decline, and its orbs shine like two stars in the darkness of night. Hence
> the mythological allegory which shows Diana hiding in the Moon, under the
> shape of a cat, when she was seeking, in company with other Deities, to
> escape the pursuit of Typhon, as related in the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid.
> The Moon, in Egypt, was both the “Eye of Horns” and the “Eye of Osiris,”
> the Sun.
> 
> The same with the Cynocephalus. The dog‐headed ape was a glyph to
> symbolize the Sun and Moon, in turn, though the Cynocephalus is really
> _more a Hermetic than a religious symbol_. For it is the hieroglyph of
> Mercury, the planet, and of the Mercury of the Alchemical philosophers,
> who say that:
> 
>     Mercury has to be ever _near_ Isis, as her _minister_, for without
>     Mercury neither Isis nor Osiris can accomplish anything in the
>     Great Work.
> 
> The Cynocephalus, whenever represented with the caduceus, the crescent, or
> the lotus, is a glyph of the “philosophical” Mercury; but when seen with a
> reed, or a roll of parchment, he stands for Hermes, the secretary and
> adviser of Isis, as Hanumâna filled the same office with Râma.
> 
> Though the regular Sun‐Worshippers, the Parsîs, are few, yet not only is
> the bulk of the Hindû mythology and history based upon, and interblended
> with, these two worships, but so is even the Christian religion itself.
> From their origin down to our modern day, it has coloured the theologies
> of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. Indeed, the difference
> between the Aryan Hindû and the Âryan European faiths is very small, if
> only the fundamental ideas of both are taken into consideration. Hindûs
> are proud of calling themselves Sûryavanshas and Chandravanshas, of the
> _Solar_ and _Lunar_ Dynasties. The Christians pretend to regard this as
> idolatry, and yet they adhere to a religion entirely based upon Solar and
> Lunar worship. It is vain and useless for the Protestants to exclaim
> against the Roman Catholics for their “Mariolatry,” based on the ancient
> cult of lunar Goddesses, when they themselves worship Jehovah,
> preëminently a _lunar_ God; and when both Churches have accepted in their
> theologies the _Sun_‐Christ and the _Lunar_ Trinity.
> 
> What is known of Chaldean Moon‐Worship, of the Babylonian God, Sin, called
> by the Greeks Deus Lunus, is very little; and that little is apt to
> mislead the profane student, who fails to grasp the esoteric significance
> of the symbols. As popularly known to the ancient profane philosophers and
> writers—for those who were initiated were pledged to silence—the Chaldeans
> were the worshippers of the Moon under _her_, and _his_, various names,
> just as were the Jews, who came after them.
> 
> In the unpublished MS. on the Art‐Speech, already mentioned, giving a key
> to the formation of the ancient symbolical language, a logical _raison
> d’être_ is brought forward for this double worship. It is written by a
> wonderfully well‐informed and acute scholar and Mystic, who gives it in
> the comprehensive form of a hypothesis. The latter, however, forcibly
> becomes a proven fact in the history of religious evolution in human
> thought, to anyone who has ever had a glimpse into the secret of ancient
> symbology. Thus, he says:
> 
>     One of the first occupations among men, connected with those of
>     actual necessity, would be the perception of time periods,(624)
>     marked on the vaulted arch of the heavens, sprung and rising over
>     the level floor of the horizon, or the plain of still water. These
>     would come to be marked as those of day and night, of the phases
>     of the moon, of its stellar or synodic revolutions, and of the
>     period of the solar year with recurrence of the seasons, and with
>     the application to such periods of the natural measure of day or
>     night, or of the day divided into the light and the dark. It would
>     also be discovered that there was a longest and shortest solar
>     day, and two solar days of equal day and night, within the period
>     of the solar year; and the points in the year of these could be
>     marked with the greatest precision in the starry groups of the
>     heavens or the constellations, subject to that retrograde movement
>     thereof, which in time would require a correction by
>     intercalation, as was the case in the description of the Flood,
>     where correction of 150 days was made for a period of 600 years,
>     during which confusion of landmarks had increased.... This would
>     naturally come to pass with all races in all time; and such
>     knowledge must be taken to have been inherent in the human race,
>     prior to what we call the historic period as during the same.
> 
> On this basis, the author seeks for some natural physical function,
> possessed in common by the human race, and connected with the periodical
> manifestations, such that “the connection between the two kinds of
> phenomena ... became fixed in common or popular usage.” He finds it in:
> 
>     (_a_) The feminine physiological phenomena every lunar month of 28
>     days, or 4 weeks of 7 days each, so that 13 occurrences of the
>     period should happen in 364 days, which is the solar week‐year of
>     52 weeks of 7 days each. (_b_) The quickening of the fœtus is
>     marked by a period of 126 days, or 18 weeks of 7 days each. (_c_)
>     That period which is called “the period of viability” is one of
>     210 days, or 30 weeks of 7 days each. (_d_) The period of
>     parturition is accomplished in 280 days, or a period of 40 weeks
>     of 7 days each, or 10 lunar months of 28 days each, or of 9
>     calendar months of 31 days each, counting on the royal arch of
>     heavens for the measure of the period of traverse from the
>     darkness of the womb to the light and glory of conscious
>     existence, that continuing inscrutable mystery and miracle....
>     Thus the observed periods of time marking the workings of the
>     birth function would naturally become a basis of astronomical
>     calculation.... We may almost affirm ... that this was the mode of
>     reckoning among all nations, either independently, or
>     intermediately and indirectly by tuition. It was the mode with the
>     Hebrews, for even to‐day they calculate the calendar by means of
>     the 354 and 355 of the lunar year, and we possess a special
>     evidence that it was the mode with the ancient Egyptians, as to
>     which this is the proof:
> 
>     The basic idea underlying the religious philosophy of the Hebrews
>     was that God contained all things within himself,(625) and that
>     man was his image, man including woman.... The place of the man
>     and woman with the Hebrews was among the Egyptians occupied by the
>     bull and the cow, sacred to Osiris and Isis,(626) who were
>     represented, respectively, by a man having a bull’s head, and a
>     woman having the head of a cow; which symbols were worshipped.
>     Notoriously Osiris was the Sun and the river Nile, the tropical
>     year of 365 days, which number is the value of the word Neilos,
>     and the bull, as he was also the principle of fire and of life‐
>     giving force; while Isis was the moon, the bed of the river Nile,
>     or the Mother Earth, for the parturient energies of which water
>     was a necessity, the lunar year of 354‐364 days, the time‐maker of
>     the periods of gestation, and the cow marked by, or with, the
>     crescent new moon....
> 
>     But the use of the cow of the Egyptians for the woman of the
>     Hebrews was not intended as of any radical difference of
>     signification, but a concurrence in the teaching, intended, and
>     merely as the substitution of a symbol of common import, which was
>     this, viz., the period of parturition with the cow and the woman
>     was held to be the same, or 280 days, or ten lunar months of 4
>     weeks each. And in this period consisted the essential value of
>     this animal symbol, whose mark was that of the crescent
>     moon.(627)... These parturient and natural periods are found to
>     have been subjects of symbolism all over the world. They were thus
>     used by the Hindûs, and are found to be most plainly set forth by
>     the ancient Americans, in the Richardson and Gest tablets, in the
>     Palenque Cross and elsewhere, and manifestly lay at the base of
>     the formation of the calendar forms of the Mayas of Yucatan, the
>     Hindûs, the Assyrians, and the ancient Babylonians, as well as the
>     Egyptians and old Hebrews. The natural symbols ... would be either
>     the phallus or the phallus and yoni, ... _male_ and _female_.
>     Indeed, the words translated by the generalizing terms male and
>     female, in the 27th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis are ...
>     _sacr_ and _n’cabvah_ or, literally, phallus and yoni.(628) While
>     the representation of the phallic emblems would barely indicate
>     the genital members of the human body, when their functions and
>     the development of the seed‐vesicles emanating from them were
>     considered, there would come into indication a mode of measures of
>     lunar time, and through lunar, of solar time.
> 
> This is the physiological or anthropological key to the Moon symbol. The
> key that opens the mystery of Theogony, or the evolution of the
> manvantaric Gods, is more complicated, and has nothing phallic in it.
> There, all is mystical and divine. But the Jews, beyond connecting Jehovah
> directly with the Moon as a generative God, preferred to ignore the higher
> Hierarchies, and have made their Patriarchs of some of these zodiacal
> constellations and planetary Gods, thus euhemerizing the purely
> theosophical idea and dragging it down to the level of sinful humanity.
> The MS., from which the above is extracted, explains very clearly to what
> Hierarchy of Gods Jehovah belonged, and who this Jewish God was; for it
> shows, in clear language, that which the writer has always insisted upon,
> namely, that the God with which the Christians have burdened themselves,
> was no better than the lunar symbol of the reproductive or generative
> faculty in Nature. They have ever ignored even the Hebrew secret God of
> the Kabalists, Ain Suph, a conception as grand as Parabrahman in the
> earliest Kabalistic and mystical ideas. But it is not the _Kabalah_ of
> Rosenroth that can ever give the true original teachings of Shimeon Ben
> Yochaï, which were as metaphysical and philosophical as any could be. And
> how many are there among the students of the _Kabalah_ who know anything
> of them except in their distorted Latin translations? Let us glance at the
> idea which led the ancient Jews to adopt a substitute for the Ever‐
> Unknowable, and which has misled the Christians into mistaking the
> substitute for the reality.
> 
>     If to these organs [phallus and yoni] as symbols of creative
>     cosmic agencies the idea of ... time periods can be attached,
>     then, indeed, in the construction of Temples as Dwellings of
>     Deity, or of Jehovah, that part designated as the Holy of Holies,
>     or The Most Holy Place, should borrow its title from the
>     recognized sacredness of the generative organs, considered as
>     symbols of measures as well as of creative cause.
> 
>     With the ancient Wise, there was no name, and no idea, and no
>     symbol, of a First Cause.(629) With the Hebrews, the indirect
>     conception of such was couched in a term of negation of
>     comprehension, viz., Ain Suph, or the Without Bounds. But the
>     symbol of _its first comprehensible manifestation_ was the
>     conception of a circle with its diameter line, to at once carry a
>     geometric, phallic, and astronomic idea; ... for the one takes its
>     birth from the 0, or the circle, without which it could not be,
>     and from the 1, or primal one, spring the 9 digits, and,
>     geometrically, all plane shapes. So in Kabalah this circle, with
>     its diameter line, is the picture of the 10 Sephiroth, or
>     Emanations, composing the Adam Kadmon, or the Archetypal Man, the
>     creative origin of all things.... This idea of connecting the
>     picture of the circle and its diameter line, that is, the number
>     10, with the signification of the reproductive organs, and the
>     Most Holy Place ... was carried out constructively in the King’s
>     Chamber, or Holy of Holies, of the great Pyramid, in the
>     Tabernacle of Moses, and in the Holy of Holies of the Temple of
>     Solomon.... It is _the picture of a double womb_, for in Hebrew
>     the letter _Hé_ (ה) is at the same time the number 5, and the
>     symbol of the womb, and twice 5 is 10, or the phallic number.
> 
> This “double womb” also shows the duality of the idea carried from the
> highest or spiritual down to the lowest or terrestrial plane; and limited
> by the Jews to the latter. With them, therefore, the number seven has
> acquired the most prominent place in their exoteric religion, a cult of
> external forms and empty rituals; take, for instance, their Sabbath, the
> seventh day sacred to their Deity, the Moon, symbolical of the generative
> Jehovah. But, with other nations, the number seven was typical of
> theogonic evolution, of Cycles, Cosmic Planes, and the Seven Forces and
> Occult Powers in Kosmos, as a Boundless Whole, whose first upper Triangle
> was unreachable to the finite intellect of man. While other nations,
> therefore, busied themselves, in their forcible limitation of Kosmos in
> Space and Time, only with its septenary manifested plane, the Jews centred
> this number solely in the Moon, and based all their sacred calculations
> thereupon. Hence we find the thoughtful author of the MS. just quoted,
> remarking, in reference to the metrology of the Jews, that:
> 
>     If 20,612 be multiplied by 4/3, _the product will afford a base
>     for the ascertainment of the mean revolution of the moon_; and if
>     this product be again multiplied by 4/3, this continued product
>     will afford a base for finding the exact period of the mean solar
>     year, ... this form ... becoming, for the finding of astronomical
>     periods of time, of very great service.
> 
> This double number—male and female—is symbolized also in some well‐known
> idols; for instance:
> 
>     Ardhanârî‐Îshvara, the Isis of the Hindûs, Eridanus, or Ardan, or
>     the Hebrew Jordan, or _source of descent_. She is standing on a
>     lotus‐leaf floating on the water. But the signification is, that
>     it is androgyne or hermaphrodite, that is phallus and yoni
>     combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter _Yod_ (י), the
>     _containment of Jehovah_. She, or rather she‐he, gives the minutes
>     of the same circle of 360 degrees.
> 
> “Jehovah,” in its best aspect is Binah, the “Upper mediating Mother, the
> Great Sea or Holy Spirit,” and therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the
> Mother of Jesus, than of his Father; that “Mother, being the Latin Mare,”
> the Sea, is here, also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or “Star of the Sea.”
> 
> The ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians—the Chandravanshas or
> Indovanshas, the Lunar Kings, whom tradition shows reigning at Prayâga
> (Allahabad), ages before our era—had come from India, and brought with
> them the worship of their forefathers, of Soma, and his son Budha, which
> afterwards became that of the Chaldeans. Yet such adoration, apart from
> popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in no sense _idolatry_. No more, at
> any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which connects the
> Virgin Mary, the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks, with the Moon.
> 
> Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud, and
> loudly confess to it. In a _Mémoire_ to the French Academy, the Marquis De
> Mirville says:
> 
>     It is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon‐Râ
>     should be his mother’s husband, since the Magna Mater of the
>     Christians _is precisely the spouse of that son she conceives_....
>     We [Christians] can understand now _why Neïth throws radiance on
>     the Sun, while remaining the Moon_, since the Virgin, who is the
>     Queen of Heaven, _as was Neïth_, clothes the Christ‐Sun, as does
>     Neïth, and is clothed by him; “_Tu vestis solem et te sol vestit_”
>     [as is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service].
> 
>     We [Christians] understand also how it is that the famous
>     inscription at Saïs should have stated that “none has ever lifted
>     my veil [peplum],” considering that this sentence, literally
>     translated, _is the summary of what is sung in the Church on the
>     Day of the Immaculate Conception_.(630)
> 
> Surely nothing could be more sincere than this! It justifies entirely what
> Mr. Gerald Massey has said in his Lecture on “Luniolatry, Ancient and
> Modern”:
> 
>     The man in the moon [Osiris‐Sut, Jehovah‐Satan, Christ‐Judas, and
>     other Lunar Twins] is often charged with bad conduct.... In the
>     lunar phenomena the moon was one, as _the_ moon, which was two‐
>     fold in sex, and three‐fold in character, as mother, child, and
>     adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort of his
>     own mother! It could not be _helped_ if there was to be any
>     reproduction. He was compelled to be his own father! These
>     relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and the
>     primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet in its latest, most
>     inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the
>     grossest superstition the world has seen, for these lunar
>     phenomena and their humanly represented relationships, the
>     incestuous included, are the very foundations of the Christian
>     Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism, the simple
>     representation of early time has become the most profound
>     religious mystery in modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without
>     being in any wise ashamed of the proof, portrays the Virgin Mary
>     arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at her feet, holding the
>     lunar infant in her arms—as child and consort of the mother moon!
>     The mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental....
> 
>     In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified
>     mythology, and legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us
>     in the _Old Testament_ and the _New_, as divine revelation uttered
>     by the very voice of God.(631)
> 
> A charming allegory is found in the _Zohar_, one which unveils better than
> anything else ever did the true character of Jehovah, or YHVH, in the
> primitive conception of the Hebrew Kabalists. It is now found in the
> philosophy of Ibn Gebirol’s _Kabalah_, translated by Isaac Myer.
> 
>     In the introduction written by R. ’Hiz’qee‐yah, which is very old,
>     and forms part of our Brody edition of the _Zohar_ (1. 5b. _sq._)
>     is an account of a journey taken by R. El’azar, son of R. Shim‐on
>     b. Yo’haï, and R. Abbah.... They met a man bearing a heavy
>     burden.... They conversed together ... and the explanations of the
>     Thorah, by the man with the burden, were so wonderful, that they
>     asked him for his name; he replied: “Do not ask me who I am; but
>     we will all proceed with the explanation of the Thorah [Law].”
>     They asked: “Who caused thee thus to walk and carry such a heavy
>     load?” He answered: “The letter י (Yod, which = 10, and is the
>     symbolical letter of Kether and the essence and germ of the Holy
>     Name יהוה, YHVH) made war, etc.”.... They said to him: “If thou
>     wilt tell us the name of thy father, we will kiss the dust of thy
>     feet.” He replied: “... As to my father, _he had his dwelling in
>     the Great Sea, and was a fish therein_ [like Vishnu and Dagon or
>     Oannes]; which [first] destroyed the Great Sea ... and he was
>     great and mighty and ‘Ancient of Days,’ until he swallowed all the
>     other fishes in the (Great) Sea.” ... R. El’azar listened to his
>     words and said to him: “Thou art the Son of the Holy Flame, thou
>     art the Son of Rab Ham‐’_nun_‐ah Sabah (the old) [the _fish_ in
>     Aramaic or Chaldee is _nun_ (_noon_)], thou art the Son of the
>     Light of the Thorah [Dharma], etc.”(632)
> 
> Then the author explains that the feminine Sephira, Binah, is termed by
> the Kabalists the Great Sea: therefore Binah, whose divine names are
> Jehovah, Yah, and Elohim, is simply the Chaldean Tiamat, the Female Power,
> the Thalatth of Berosus, who presides over the Chaos, and was made out
> later by Christian Theology to be the Serpent and the Devil. She‐He (Yah‐
> hovah) is the supernal Hé, and Eve. This Yah‐hovah then, or Jehovah, is
> identical with our Chaos—Father, Mother, Son—on the material plane, and in
> the purely physical World; Deus and Demon, at one and the same time; the
> Sun and Moon, Good and Evil, God and Demon.
> 
> Lunar magnetism generates life, preserves and destroys it, psychically as
> well as physically. And if, astronomically, the Moon is one of the seven
> planets of the Ancient World, in Theogony she is one of the Regents
> thereof—with Christians now as much as with Pagans, the former referring
> to her under the name of one of their Archangels, and the latter under
> that of one of their Gods.
> 
> Therefore the meaning of the “fairy tale,” translated by Chwolsohn from
> the Arabic translation of an old Chaldean MS., of Qû‐tâmy being instructed
> by the _idol_ of the Moon, is easily understood. Seldenus tells us the
> secret, as well as Maimonides in his _Guide to the Perplexed_.(633) The
> worshippers of the Teraphim, or the Jewish Oracles, “carved images, and
> claimed that the light of the principal stars [planets] permeating these
> through and through, the Angelic Virtues [or the Regents of the stars and
> planets] conversed with them, teaching them many most useful things and
> arts.” And Seldenus explains that the Teraphim were built and composed
> after the position of certain planets, those which the Greeks called
> στοιχεῖα, and according to figures that were located in the sky, and
> called ἀλεξητήριοι, or the Tutelary Gods. Those who traced out the
> στοιχεῖα were called στοιχειωματικοί, or diviners by the στοιχεῖα.(634)
> 
> It is such sentences, however, in the _Nabathean Agriculture_, which have
> frightened the men of Science, and made them proclaim the work “either an
> apocryphon, or a fairy tale, unworthy of the notice of an Academician.” At
> the same time, as shown, zealous Roman Catholics and Protestants
> metaphorically tore it to pieces; the former because “it described the
> worship of demons,” the latter because it was “ungodly.” Once more, all
> are wrong. It is _not_ a fairy tale; and, as far as the pious Churchmen
> are concerned, the same worship may be shown in their Scriptures, however
> disfigured by translation. Solar and Lunar worship and also the worship of
> the Stars and Elements can be traced, and figure in Christian Theology.
> These are defended by Papists, and can be stoutly denied by the
> Protestants only at their own risk and peril. Two instances may be given.
> 
> Ammianus Marcellinus teaches that ancient divinations were always
> accomplished with the help of the Spirits of the Elements (_Spiritus
> Elementorum_, and in Greek πνεύματα τῶν στοιχείων).(635)
> 
> But it is found now that the Planets, the Elements, and the Zodiac, were
> figured not only at Heliopolis by the twelve stones called “Mysteries of
> the Elements” (_Elementorum Arcana_), but also in Solomon’s Temple, and,
> as pointed out by various writers, in several old Italian churches and
> even at _Notre Dame de Paris_, where they can be seen to this day.
> 
> No symbol, even including the Sun, was more complex in its manifold
> meanings than the lunar symbol. The sex was, of course, dual. With some it
> was male; as, for instance, the Hindû “King Soma,” and the Chaldean Sin;
> with other nations it was female, the beauteous Goddesses Diana‐Luna,
> Ilithyia, Lucina. With the Tauri, human victims were sacrificed to
> Artemis, a form of the lunar Goddess; the Cretans called her Dictynna, and
> the Medes and Persians Anaïtis, as shown by an inscription of Colœ:
> Ἀρτέμιδι Ἀνάειτι. But, we are now concerned chiefly with the most chaste
> and pure of the virgin Goddesses, Luna‐Artemis, to whom Pamphôs was the
> first to give the surname of Καλλίστη, and of whom Hippolytus wrote:
> Καλλίστα πολὺ παρθένων.(636) This Artemis‐Lochia, the Goddess that
> presided at conception and childbirth, is, in her functions and as the
> triple Hecate, the Orphic Deity, the predecessor of the God of the Rabbins
> and pre‐Christian Kabalists, and his lunar type. The Goddess Τρίμορφος was
> the personified symbol of the various and successive aspects represented
> by the Moon in each of her three phases; and this interpretation was
> already that of the Stoics,(637) while the Orpheans explained the epithet
> Τρίμορφος by the three kingdoms of Nature over which she reigned. Jealous,
> bloodthirsty, revengeful and exacting, Hecate‐Luna is a worthy counterpart
> of the “jealous God” of the Hebrew prophets.
> 
> The whole riddle of the Solar and Lunar worship, as now traced in the
> churches, hangs indeed on this world‐old mystery of lunar phenomena. The
> correlative forces in the “Queen of Night,” that lie latent for Modern
> Science, but are fully active to the knowledge of Eastern Adepts, explain
> well the thousand and one images under which the Moon was represented by
> the Ancients. It also shows how much more profoundly learned in the
> Selenic Mysteries were the Ancients than are now our modern Astronomers.
> The whole Pantheon of the lunar Gods and Goddesses, Nephtys or Neïth,
> Proserpina, Melitta, Cybele, Isis, Astarte, Venus, and Hecate, on the one
> hand, and Apollo, Dionysus, Adonis, Bacchus, Osiris, Atys, Thammuz, etc.,
> on the other, all show on the face of their names and titles—those of
> “Sons” and “Husbands” of their “Mothers”—their identity with the Christian
> Trinity. In every religious system, the Gods were made to merge their
> functions, as Father, Son, and Husband, into one, and the Goddesses were
> identified as Wife, Mother, and Sister of the male God; the former
> synthesizing the human attributes as the “Sun, the Giver of Life,” the
> latter merging all the other titles in the grand synthesis known as Maia,
> Maya, Maria, etc., a generic name. Maia, in its forced derivation, has
> come to mean with the Greeks, “mother,” from the root _ma_ (nurse), and
> even gave its name to the month of May, which was sacred to all these
> Goddesses before it became consecrated to Mary.(638) Its primitive
> meaning, however, was Mâyâ, Durgâ, translated by the Orientalists as
> “inaccessible,” but meaning in truth the “unreachable,” in the sense of
> illusion and unreality, as being the source and cause of spells, the
> personification of illusion.
> 
> In religious rites, the Moon served a dual purpose. Personified as a
> female Goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male God in allegory and
> symbol, in Occult Philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless
> Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded. With the
> initiated Âryans, Chaldeans, Greeks and Romans, Soma, Sin, Artemis Soteira
> (the hermaphrodite Apollo, whose attribute is the lyre, and the bearded
> Diana of the bow and arrow), Deus Lunus, and especially Osiris‐Lunus and
> Thot‐Lunus,(639) were the Occult potencies of the Moon. But whether male
> or female, whether Thot or Minerva, Soma or Astoreth, the Moon is the
> Occult Mystery of Mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good. Her
> seven phases, in the original Esoteric division, are divided into three
> astronomical phenomena and four purely psychic phases. That the Moon was
> not always reverenced is shown in the Mysteries, in which the death of the
> Moon‐God—the three phases of gradual waning and final disappearance—was
> allegorized by the Moon standing for the Genius of Evil that, for the
> time, triumphs over the Light and Life‐giving God, the Sun; and all the
> skill and learning of the ancient Hierophants in Magic were required to
> turn this triumph into a defeat.
> 
> It was the most ancient worship of all, that of the Third Race of our
> Round, the Hermaphrodites, in which the _male_ Moon became sacred, when,
> after the so‐called Fall, the sexes had become separated. Deus Lunus then
> became an androgyne, male and female in turn; to finally serve, _for
> purposes of sorcery_, as a dual power for the Fourth Root Race, the
> Atlanteans. With the Fifth, our own Race, the Lunar‐solar worship divided
> the nations into two distinct, antagonistic camps. It led to events
> described æons later in the Mahâbhâratan War, which to the Europeans is
> the fabulous, to the Hindûs and Occultists the historical, strife between
> the Sûryavanshas and the Indovanshas. Originating in the dual aspect of
> the Moon, the worship of the female and the male principles respectively,
> it ended in distinct Solar and Lunar cults. Among the Semitic races, the
> Sun was for a very long time feminine and the Moon masculine; the latter
> notion being adopted by them from the Atlantean traditions. The Moon was
> called the “Lord of the Sun,” Bel‐Shemesh, before the Shemesh worship. The
> ignorance of the incipient reasons for such a distinction, and of Occult
> principles, led the nations into anthropomorphic idol‐worship. During that
> period which is absent from the Mosaic books, viz., from the exile from
> Eden to the allegorical Flood, the Jews, with the rest of the Semites,
> worshipped Dayanisi, דינאישי, the “Ruler of Men,” the “Judge,” or the Sun.
> Though the Jewish canon and Christianism have made the Sun to become the
> “Lord God” and “Jehovah” in the _Bible_, yet the same _Bible_ is full of
> indiscreet traces of the androgyne Deity, which was Jehovah, the Sun, and
> Astoreth, the Moon in its female aspect, and quite free from the present
> metaphorical element given to it. God is a “consuming fire,” appears _in_,
> and “is encompassed _by_ fire.” It was not only in vision that Ezekiel saw
> the Jews “worshipping the Sun.”(640) The Baal of the Israelites—the
> Shemesh of the Moabites and the Moloch of the Ammonites—was the identical
> “Sun‐Jehovah,” and he is till now the “King of the Host of Heaven,” the
> Sun, as much as Astoreth was the “Queen of Heaven,” or the Moon. The “Sun
> of Righteousness” has _only now_ become a _metaphorical_ expression. But
> the religion of every ancient nation had been primarily based upon the
> Occult manifestations of a purely abstract Force or Principle now called
> “God.” The very establishment of such worship shows, in its details and
> rites, that the philosophers who evolved such systems of Nature,
> subjective and objective, possessed profound knowledge, and were
> acquainted with many facts of a scientific nature. For besides being
> purely Occult, the rites of Lunar worship were based, as just shown, upon
> a knowledge of Physiology—quite a modern science with us—Psychology,
> sacred Mathematics, Geometry and Metrology, in their right applications to
> symbols and figures, which are but glyphs recording observed natural and
> scientific _facts_; in short upon a most minute and profound knowledge of
> Nature. As we have just said, lunar magnetism generates life, preserves
> and destroys it; and Soma embodies the triple power of the Trimûrti,
> though it remains unrecognized by the profane to this day. The allegory
> that makes Soma, the Moon, produced by the Churning of the Ocean of Life
> (Space) by the Gods in another Manvantara, that is, in the pre‐genetic day
> of our Planetary System, and the myth, which represents “the Rishis
> milking the Earth, whose calf was Soma, the Moon,” have a deep
> cosmographical meaning; for it is neither _our_ Earth which is milked, nor
> was the Moon which we know the calf.(641) Had our wise men of Science
> known as much of the mysteries of Nature as the ancient Âryans did, they
> would surely never have imagined that the Moon was projected from the
> Earth. Once more, the oldest of permutations in Theogony, the Son becoming
> his own Father and the Mother generated by the Son, has to be remembered
> and taken into consideration if the symbolical language of the Ancients is
> to be understood by us. Otherwise mythology will be ever haunting the
> Orientalists as simply “the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage
> of human culture!”—as Renouf gravely observes.
> 
> The Ancients taught the auto‐generation, so to speak, of the Gods: the One
> Divine Essence, _unmanifested_, perpetually begetting a Second‐Self,
> _manifested_, which Second‐Self, androgynous in its nature, _gives birth,
> in an immaculate way_, to everything macrocosmical and microcosmical in
> this Universe. This was shown in the Circle and the Diameter, or the
> Sacred Ten (10), a few pages back.
> 
> But our Orientalists, notwithstanding their extreme desire to discover one
> homogeneous Element in Nature, _will not_ see it. Cramped in their
> researches by such ignorance, the Âryanists and Egyptologists are
> constantly led astray from truth in their speculations. Thus, de Rougé is
> unable to understand, in the text which he translates, the meaning of
> Ammon‐Ra saying to King Amenophes, who is supposed to be Memnon: “Thou art
> my Son, I have begotten thee.” And, finding the same idea in many a text
> and under various forms, this very Christian Orientalist is finally
> compelled to exclaim:
> 
>     For this idea to have entered the mind of a hierogrammatist, there
>     must have been in their religion a more or less defined doctrine,
>     _indicating as a possible fact that might come to pass, a divine
>     and immaculate incarnation under a human form._
> 
> Precisely. But why throw the explanation on to an impossible prophecy,
> when the whole secret is explained by the later religion copying the
> earlier?
> 
> This doctrine was universal, nor was it the mind of any one
> hierogrammatist that evolved it; for the Indian Avatâras are a proof to
> the contrary. After which, having come “to realize more clearly”(642) what
> the “Divine Father and Son” were with the Egyptians, de Rougé still fails
> to account for, and to perceive what were the functions attributed to, the
> _feminine_ Principle in that primordial generation. He does not find it in
> the Goddess Neïth, of Saïs. Yet he quotes the sentence of the Commander to
> Cambyses, when introducing that king into the Saïtic temple: “I made known
> to his Majesty the dignity of Saïs, which is the abode of Neïth, the great
> [female] producer, _genitrix of the Sun_, who is the _first‐born, and who
> is not begotten, but only brought forth_”—and hence is the fruit of an
> Immaculate Mother.
> 
> How much more grandiose, philosophical and poetical—for whoever is able to
> understand and appreciate it—is the real distinction made between the
> Immaculate Virgin of the ancient Pagans and the modern Papal conception.
> With the former, the ever‐youthful Mother Nature, the antitype of her
> prototypes, the Sun and Moon, _generates_ and _brings forth_ her “mind‐
> born” Son, the Universe. The Sun and Moon, as male‐female deities,
> fructify the Earth, the microcosmical Mother, and the latter conceives and
> brings forth, in her turn. With the Christians, the “First‐born”
> (_primogenitus_) is indeed generated, _i.e._, begotten (_genitus, non
> factus_), and positively _conceived and brought forth_: “_Virgo pariet_,”
> explains the Latin Church. Thus does that Church drag down the noble
> spiritual ideal of the Virgin Mary to the earth, and, making her “of the
> earth earthy,” degrades the ideal she portrays to the lowest of the
> anthropomorphic Goddesses of the rabble.
> 
> Truly, Neïth, Isis, Diana, etc., by whatever name she was called, was “a
> demiurgical Goddess, at once visible and invisible, having her place in
> Heaven, and _helping on the generation of species_”—the Moon, in short.
> Her occult aspects and powers are numberless, and, in one of them, the
> Moon becomes with the Egyptians Hathor, another aspect of Isis,(643) and
> both of these Goddesses are shown suckling Horus. Behold in the Egyptian
> Hall of the British Museum, Hathor worshipped by Pharaoh Thotmes, who
> stands between her and the Lord of Heavens. The monolith was taken from
> Karnac. The same Goddess has the following legend inscribed on her throne:
> “_The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven_”; also the “_Morning
> Star_,” and the “_Light of the Sea_”—_Stella Matutina_ and _Lux Maris_.
> All the Lunar Goddesses had a dual aspect; one _divine_, the other
> _infernal_. All were the Virgin Mothers of an _immaculately_ born Son—the
> Sun. Raoul Rochette shows the Moon‐Goddess of the Athenians, Pallas, or
> Cybele, Minerva, or again Diana, holding her child‐son on her lap, invoked
> in her festivals as Μονογενὴς θεοῦ, the “One Mother of God,” sitting on a
> lion, and surrounded by twelve personages; in whom the Occultist
> recognizes the twelve great Gods, and the pious Christian Orientalist the
> Apostles, or rather the Grecian Pagan prophecy thereof.
> 
> They are both right, for the Immaculate Goddess of the Latin Church is a
> faithful copy of the older Pagan Goddesses; the number of the Apostles is
> that of the twelve Tribes, and the latter are a personification of the
> twelve great Gods, and of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Almost every
> detail in the Christian dogma is borrowed from the Heathens. Semele, the
> Wife of Jupiter and Mother of Bacchus, the Sun, is, according to Nonnus,
> also “carried,” or made to ascend to Heaven after her death, where she
> presides between Mars and Venus, under the name of the “Queen of the
> World,” or the Universe, πανβασίλεια; “at the name of which,” as at the
> names of Hathor, Hecate, and other infernal Goddesses, “all the demons
> tremble.”(644)
> 
> “Σεμέλην τρέμουσι δαίμονες.” This Greek inscription on a small temple,
> reproduced on a stone that was found by Beger, and copied by Montfaucon,
> as De Mirville tells us, informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna
> Mater of the old world was an impudent “plagiarism” of the Immaculate
> Virgin Mother of his Church, perpetrated by the Demon. Whether so, or
> _vice versâ_, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is
> the perfect identity between the _archaic copy_ and the _modern original_.
> 
> Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern
> exhibited by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when they are
> made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury’s remark that “the
> Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and Venus, and that
> the Pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in honour of those Goddesses,
> were in a great measure transferred to the Mother of Christ,”(645) the
> advocate of Rome answers, that such _is_ the fact, and that it is just as
> it should be, and quite natural.
> 
>     As the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman
>     Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments,
>     inscribed on papyri, and cylinders _hardly posterior to the
>     Deluge_, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a _first
>     ante‐historical_ [Roman] _Catholicism of which our own is but the
>     faithful continuation_.... [But while the former was the
>     culmination, the “_summum_ of the impudence of demons and goëtic
>     necromancy” ... the latter is _divine_.] If in _our_ [Christian]
>     _Revelation_ [_l’Apocalypse_], Mary, clothed with the Sun and
>     having the Moon under her feet, has no longer anything in common
>     _with the humble servant_ [servante] _of Nazareth_ [_sic_], it is
>     because she has now become the greatest of theological and
>     cosmological powers in _our_ universe.(646)
> 
> Verily so, since Pindar thus sings of her “assumption”: “She sits _at the
> right hand_ of her Father [Jupiter], ... and is more powerful than all the
> other (Angels or) Gods”(647)—a hymn likewise applied to the Virgin. St.
> Bernard also, quoted by Cornelius à Lapide, is made to address the Virgin
> Mary in this wise: “The Sun‐Christ lives in thee and thou livest in
> him.”(648)
> 
> Again the Virgin is admitted to be the Moon by the same unsophisticated
> holy man. Being the Lucina of the Church, in childbirth the verse of
> Virgil, “_Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo_,” is applied to her.
> “Like the Moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven,” adds the innocent
> saint.(649)
> 
> This settles the question. According to such writers as De Mirville, the
> more similarity there exists between the Pagan conceptions and the
> Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the
> more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman
> Catholic form. The unbelieving Scientists and Academicians who think they
> see in the Latin Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who
> will not believe in the Satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are
> severely taken to task. But then “they believe in nothing and reject even
> the _Nabathean Agriculture_ as a romance and a pack of superstitious
> nonsense,” complains the memorialist. “In their perverted opinion
> Qû‐tâmy’s ‘idol of the Moon’ and the statue of the Madonna are one!” A
> noble Marquis, twenty‐five years ago, wrote six huge volumes, or, as he
> calls them “Mémoires to the French Academy,” with the sole object of
> proving Roman Catholicism to be an inspired and revealed faith. As a proof
> thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the
> entire Ancient World, ever since the Deluge, had, with the help of the
> Devil, been systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas
> of the future Holy Church, which was to be born ages later. What would
> that faithful son of Rome have said had he heard his co‐religionist, M.
> Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British Museum, declaring in
> one of his learned lectures, that neither “Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any
> of their ideas from Egypt”?
> 
> But perhaps M. Renouf intended to say that it was the Egyptians, the
> Greeks, and the Âryans, who borrowed their ideas from the Latin Church?
> And if so, why, in the name of logic, do the Papists reject the additional
> information which the Occultists may give them on Moon‐worship, since it
> all tends to show that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church is as old
> as the world—_of Sabæanism and Astrolatry_?
> 
> The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic Astrolatry, or the
> symbolical worship of Sun and Moon, a worship identical with that of the
> Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the “Sun‐worship” of the
> Zoroastrians, is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The
> adoption by the Latin Church of such symbols as Water, Fire, Sun, Moon and
> Stars, and many others, is simply a continuation by the early Christians
> of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus, Odin got his wisdom, power, and
> knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice‐wise Jotun, who
> passed his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline Waters
> of which increased his knowledge daily. “Mimir drew the highest knowledge
> from the fountain, because the World was born of Water; hence primeval
> Wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element.” The eye which Odin had
> to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be “the Sun, which enlightens and
> penetrates all things; his other eye being the Moon, whose reflection
> gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks into the
> Ocean.”(650) But it is something more than this. Loki, the Fire‐God, is
> said to have hidden in the Water, as well as in the Moon, the light‐giver,
> whose reflection he found therein. This belief that the Fire finds refuge
> in the Water was not limited to the old Scandinavians. It was shared by
> all nations and was finally adopted by the early Christians, who
> symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “cloven tongues like as
> of fire”—the breath of the Father‐Sun. This Fire descends also into the
> Water, or the Sea—Mare, Mary. The Dove was the symbol of the Soul with
> several nations; it was sacred to Venus, the Goddess born from the sea‐
> foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or Holy
> Spirit.
> 
> One of the most occult chapters in the _Book of the Dead_ is that
> entitled, “The transformation into the God giving Light to the Path of
> Darkness,” wherein “Woman‐Light of the Shadow” serves Thot in his retreat
> in the Moon. Thot‐Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the
> representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested Logos of its
> light side; the concealed Deity or “Dark Wisdom” when he is supposed to
> retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the Moon calls
> herself repeatedly: “The Light which shineth in Darkness,” the “Woman‐
> Light.” Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin‐Mother
> Goddesses. As the wicked “evil” Spirits warred against the Moon in days of
> yore, so they are supposed to war now, without, however, being able to
> prevail against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the Moon. Hence, also,
> the Moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan Theogonies with the
> Dragon, her eternal enemy. The Virgin, or Madonna, stands on the mythical
> Satan thus symbolized, who lies crushed and powerless, under her feet.
> This, because the head and tail of the Dragon, which, to this day in
> Eastern Astronomy, represent the ascending and descending nodes of the
> Moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules
> kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the Babe in his Virgin‐
> Mother’s arms. As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection:
> 
>     All such symbols figured their own facts from the first, and did
>     not pre‐figure others of a totally different order. The
>     iconography [and dogmas, too] had survived in Rome from a period
>     remotely pre‐Christian. _There was neither forgery nor
>     interpolation of types; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a
>     perversion of its meaning._
> 
> Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.
> 
>     Object of horror or of adoration, men have for the serpent an
>     implacable hatred, or prostrate themselves before its genius. Lie
>     calls it, Prudence claims it, Envy carries it in its heart, and
>     Eloquence on its caduceus. In Hell it arms the whip of the Furies;
>     in Heaven Eternity makes of it its symbol.
> 
>     DE CHÂTEAUBRIAND.
> 
> The Ophites asserted that there were several kinds of Genii, from God to
> man; that the relative superiority of these was decided by the degree of
> Light that was accorded to each; and they maintained that the Serpent had
> to be constantly called upon and to be thanked for the signal service it
> had rendered humanity. For it taught Adam that if he ate of the fruit of
> the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his Being immensely
> by the learning and wisdom he would thus acquire. Such was the exoteric
> reason given.
> 
> It is easy to see whence is the primal idea of the dual, Janus‐like
> character of the Serpent—the good and the bad. This symbol is one of the
> most ancient, because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the
> mammal. Hence the belief, or rather the superstition, of the savage tribes
> who think that the souls of their ancestors live under this form, and the
> general association of the Serpent with the Tree. The legends about the
> various meanings it represents are numberless; but, as most of them are
> allegorical, they have now passed into the class of fables based on
> ignorance and dark superstition. For instance, when Philostratus narrates
> that the natives of India and Arabia fed on the heart and liver of
> Serpents in order to learn the language of all the animals, the Serpent
> being credited with that faculty, he certainly never meant his words to be
> accepted literally.(651) As will be found more than once as we proceed,
> Serpent and Dragon were names given to the Wise Ones, the Initiated Adepts
> of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured
> or assimilated by their followers, whence the allegory. When the
> Scandinavian Sigurd is fabled to have roasted the heart of Fafnir, the
> Dragon, whom he had slain, and thence to have become the wisest of men,
> the meaning is the same. Sigurd had become learned in the runes and
> magical charms; he had received the “Word” from an Initiate of the name of
> Fafnir, or from a sorcerer, after which the latter died, as do many, after
> “passing the word.” Epiphanius lets out a secret of the Gnostics in trying
> to expose their “heresies.” The Gnostic Ophites, he says, had a reason for
> honouring the Serpent: _it was because he taught the primeval men the
> Mysteries_.(652) Verily so; but they did not have Adam and Eve in the
> Garden in their minds when teaching this dogma, but simply that which is
> stated above. The Nâgas of the Hindû and Tibetan Adepts were human Nâgas
> (Serpents), not reptiles. Moreover, the Serpent has ever been the type of
> consecutive or serial rejuvenation, of Immortality and Time.
> 
> The numerous and extremely interesting readings, the interpretations and
> facts about Serpent worship, given in Mr. Gerald Massey’s _Natural
> Genesis_, are very ingenious and scientifically correct. But they are far
> from covering the _whole_ of the meanings implied. They divulge only the
> astronomical and physiological mysteries, with the addition of some cosmic
> phenomena. On the lowest plane of materiality, the Serpent was, no doubt,
> the “great emblem of Mystery in the Mysteries,” and was, very likely,
> “adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and
> self‐renewal.” It was so, however, only with regard to mysteries
> concerning terrestrial _animal_ life, for as the symbol of “_re‐clothing_
> and re‐birth in the [universal] mysteries,” its “final phase,”(653) or
> shall we rather say its incipient and culminating phases, was not of this
> plane. These phases were generated in the pure realm of Ideal Light, and
> having accomplished the round of the whole cycle of adaptations and
> symbolism, the Mysteries returned from whence they had come, into the
> essence of _immaterial_ causality. They belonged to the highest Gnôsis.
> And surely this could have never obtained its name and fame solely on
> account of its penetration into physiological and especially feminine
> functions!
> 
> As a symbol, the Serpent had as many aspects and occult meanings as the
> Tree itself; the “Tree of Life,” with which it was emblematically and
> almost indissolubly connected. Whether viewed as a metaphysical or a
> physical symbol, the Tree and Serpent, jointly, or separately, have never
> been so degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this our age of the
> breaking of idols, not for truth’s sake, but to glorify the most gross
> matter. The revelations and interpretations in General Forlong’s _Rivers
> of Life_ would have astounded the worshippers of the Tree and Serpent in
> the days of archaic Chaldean and Egyptian wisdom; and even the early
> Shaivas would have recoiled in horror at the theories and suggestions of
> the author of the said work. “The notion of Payne Knight and Inman that
> the Cross or Tau is simply a copy of the male organs in a triadic form is
> radically false,” writes Mr. G. Massey, who proves what he says. But this
> is a statement that could be as justly applied to almost all the modern
> interpretations of ancient symbols. _The Natural Genesis_, a monumental
> work of research and thought, the most complete on that subject that has
> ever been published, covering as it does a wider field, and explaining
> much more than all the Symbologists who have hitherto written, does not
> yet go beyond the “psycho‐theistic” stage of ancient thought. Nor were
> Payne Knight and Inman altogether wrong; except in entirely failing to see
> that their interpretations of the Tree of Life, as the Cross and Phallus,
> fitted the symbol only in the lowest and latest stage of the evolutionary
> development of the idea of the Giver of Life. It was the last and the
> grossest physical transformation of Nature, in animal, insect, bird and
> even plant; for bi‐une, creative magnetism, in the form of the attraction
> of contraries, or sexual polarization, acts in the constitution of reptile
> and bird as it does in that of man. Moreover, the modern Symbologists and
> Orientalists, from first to last, being ignorant of the real Mysteries
> revealed by Occultism, can necessarily see but this last stage. If told
> that this mode of procreation, which the whole world of being has now in
> common on this Earth, is but a passing phase, a physical means of
> furnishing the conditions to and producing the phenomena of life, and that
> it will alter with this and disappear with the next Root‐Race, they would
> laugh at such a superstitious and unscientific idea. But the most learned
> Occultists assert this because _they know it_. The universe of living
> beings, of all those which procreate their species, is the living witness
> to the various modes of procreation in the evolution of animal and human
> species and races; and the Naturalist ought to sense this truth
> intuitionally, even though he is yet unable to demonstrate it. How could
> he, indeed, with the present modes of thought! The landmarks of the
> archaic history of the Past are few and scarce, and those that men of
> Science come across are mistaken for finger‐posts of our little era. Even
> so‐called “universal (?) history” embraces but a tiny field in the almost
> boundless space of the unexplored regions of our latest, Fifth Root‐Race.
> Hence, every fresh sign‐post, every new glyph of the hoary Past that is
> discovered, is added to the old stock of information, to be interpreted on
> the same lines of preëxisting conceptions, and without any reference to
> the special cycle of thought which that particular glyph may belong to.
> How can Truth ever come to light if this method is never changed!
> 
> Thus, in the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal
> Being, the Tree and Serpent were divine imagery, truly. The Tree was
> _reversed_, and its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of the
> Rootless Root of All‐Being. Its trunk grew and developed; crossing the
> planes of the Plerôma, it shot out crossways its luxuriant branches, first
> on the plane of hardly differentiated matter, and then downward till they
> touched the terrestrial plane. Thus, the Ashvattha Tree of Life and Being,
> whose destruction alone leads to immortality, is said in the
> _Bhagavadgîtâ_ to grow with its roots above and its branches below.(654)
> The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the Logos; but one
> has to go beyond those roots to _unite oneself with Krishna_, who, says
> Arjuna, is “greater than Brahman, and First Cause ... the indestructible,
> that which is, that which is not, and what is beyond them.”(655) Its
> boughs are Hiranyagarbha (Brahmâ or Brahman in its highest manifestations,
> say Shrîdhara Svâmin and Madhusûdana), the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas.
> The _Vedas_ are its leaves. He only who goes _beyond_ the roots shall
> never return; that is to say, shall reïncarnate no more during this Age of
> Brahmâ.
> 
> It is only when its pure boughs had touched the terrestrial mud of the
> Garden of Eden, of our Adamic Race, that this Tree became soiled by the
> contact and lost its pristine purity; and that the Serpent of Eternity,
> the Heaven‐Born Logos, was finally degraded. In days of old, of the Divine
> Dynasties on Earth, the now dreaded reptile was regarded as the first beam
> of light that radiated from the abyss of Divine Mystery. Various were the
> forms which it was made to assume, and numerous the natural symbols
> adapted to it, as it crossed the æons of Time; as from Infinite Time
> (Kâla) itself it fell into the space and time evolved out of human
> speculation. These forms were cosmic and astronomical, theistic and
> pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon
> and the Southern Cross, the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the
> Hindû‐Buddhist Dragon, which ever threatens, yet never swallows the Sun
> during its eclipses. Till then, the Tree remained ever green, for it was
> sprinkled by the Waters of Life; the Great Dragon remained ever divine, so
> long as it was kept within the precincts of the sidereal fields. But the
> Tree grew and its lower boughs at last touched the Infernal Regions—our
> Earth. Then the Great Serpent Nidhögg—he who devours the corpses of the
> evil‐doers in the “Hall of Misery” (human life), so soon as they are
> plunged into Hwergelmir, the roaring cauldron (of human passions)—gnawed
> the reversed World‐Tree. The worms of materiality covered the once healthy
> and mighty roots, and are now ascending higher and higher along the trunk;
> while the Midgard Snake coiled at the bottom of the Seas, encircles the
> Earth, and, through its venomous breath, makes her powerless to defend
> herself.
> 
> The Dragons and Serpents of Antiquity are all seven‐headed—one head for
> each Race, and “every head with seven hairs on it,” as the allegory has
> it. Aye, from Ananta, the Serpent of Eternity, which carries Vishnu
> through the Manvantara; from the original primordial Shesha, whose seven
> heads become “one thousand heads” in the Purânic fancy, down to the seven‐
> headed Akkadian Serpent. This typifies the Seven Principles throughout
> Nature and in man; the highest or middle head being the seventh. It is not
> of the Mosaic, Jewish Sabbath that Philo speaks, in his _Creation of the
> World_, when saying that the world was completed “according to the perfect
> nature of number 6.” For:
> 
>     _When that Reason_ [_Nous_] _which is holy in accordance with the
>     number 7, has entered the soul_ [the living body rather], the
>     number 6 is thus arrested and all the mortal things which that
>     number makes.
> 
> And again:
> 
>     Number 7 is the festival day of all the earth, the _birthday of
>     the world_. I know not whether any one would be able to celebrate
>     the number 7 in adequate terms.(656)
> 
> The author of _The Natural Genesis_ thinks that:
> 
>     The septenary of stars seen in the Great Bear [the Saptarshis] and
>     seven‐headed Dragon furnished a visible origin for the symbolic
>     seven of time above. The goddess of the seven stars was the mother
>     of time, as Kep; whence Kepti and Sebti for the two times and
>     number 7. So this is the star of the Seven by name. Sevekh
>     (Kronus), the son of the goddess, has the name of the seven or
>     seventh. So has Sefekh Abu who builds the house on high, as Wisdom
>     (Sophia) built hers with seven pillars.... The primary kronotypes
>     were seven, and thus the beginning of time in heaven is based on
>     the number and the name of seven, on account of the starry
>     demonstrators. The seven stars as they turned round annually kept
>     pointing, as it were, with the forefinger of the right hand, and
>     describing a circle in the upper and lower heaven.(657) The number
>     7 naturally suggested a measure by seven, that led to what may be
>     termed _Sevening_, and to the marking and mapping out of the
>     circle in seven corresponding divisions which were assigned to the
>     seven great constellations; and thus was formed the celestial
>     heptanomis of Egypt in the heavens.
> 
>     When the stellar heptanomis was broken up and divided into four
>     quarters, it was multiplied by four, and the twenty‐eight signs
>     took the place of the primary seven constellations; the lunar
>     zodiac of twenty‐eight signs being the registered result of
>     reckoning twenty‐eight days to the moon, or a lunar month.(658) In
>     the Chinese arrangement, the four sevens are given to four Genii
>     that preside over the four cardinal points,(659) or rather the
>     seven northern constellations make up the Black Warrior; the seven
>     eastern (Chinese autumn) constitute the White Tiger; the seven
>     southern are the Vermilion Bird; and the seven western (called
>     vernal) are the Azure Dragon. Each of these four spirits presides
>     over its heptanomis during one lunar week. The genitrix of the
>     first heptanomis (Typhon of the seven stars) now took a lunar
>     character.... In this phase we find the goddess Sefekh, whose name
>     signifies number 7, is the feminine word, or logos in place of the
>     mother of time, who was the earlier _Word_, as goddess of the
>     Seven Stars.(660)
> 
> The author shows that it was the Goddess of the Great Bear and Mother of
> Time who was in Egypt from the earliest times the “Living Word,” and that
> Sevekh‐Kronus, whose type was the Crocodile‐Dragon, the pre‐planetary form
> of Saturn, was called her son and consort; he was her Word‐Logos.(661)
> 
> The above is quite plain, but it was not the knowledge of astronomy only
> that led the Ancients to the process of _Sevening_. The primal cause goes
> far deeper and will be explained in its place.
> 
> The above quotations are no digressions. They are brought forward as
> showing (_a_) the reason why a full Initiate was called a Dragon, a Snake,
> a Nâga; and (_b_) that our septenary division was used by the priests of
> the earliest dynasties in Egypt, for the same reason, and on the same
> basis, as by us. This needs further elucidation, however. As already
> stated, what Mr. Gerald Massey calls the Four Genii of the four cardinal
> points; and the Chinese, the Black Warrior, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird,
> and Azure Dragon, are called in the Secret Books, the “Four Hidden Dragons
> of Wisdom” and the “Celestial Nâgas.” Now, the seven‐headed or septenary
> Dragon‐Logos is shown to have, in course of time, been split up, so to
> speak, into _four_ heptanomic parts or twenty‐eight portions. Each week
> has a distinct Occult character in the lunar month; each day of the
> twenty‐eight has its special characteristics; for each of the twelve
> constellations, whether separately or in combination with other signs, has
> an Occult influence either for good or for evil. This represents the sum
> of knowledge that men can acquire on this earth; yet few are those who
> acquire it, and still fewer are the wise men who get to the root of
> knowledge symbolized by the great Root‐Dragon, the Spiritual Logos of
> these visible signs. But those who do, receive the name of Dragons, and
> they are the “Arhats of the Four Truths of the Twenty‐eight Faculties,” or
> attributes, and have always been so called.
> 
> The Alexandrian Neo‐Platonists asserted that to become real Chaldees or
> Magi, one had to master the science or knowledge of the periods of the
> Seven Rectors of the World, in whom is all wisdom. And Jamblichus is
> credited with another version, which does not, however, alter the meaning,
> for he says:
> 
>     The Assyrians have not only preserved the records of seven and
>     twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but
>     likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven
>     Rulers of the World.(662)
> 
> The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage, point
> to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the
> Serpents. They are “charmers.” They hypnotize the bird with their eye, and
> man himself very often does not overcome their fascinating influence;
> therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.
> 
> The Crocodile is the Egyptian Dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and
> Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its
> amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to Eusebius, the
> Egyptians represented the Sun in a Ship as its pilot, this ship being
> carried along by a Crocodile, “to show the motion of the Sun in the Moist
> (Space).”(663) The Crocodile was, moreover, the symbol of Lower Egypt
> herself, the Lower being the more swampy of the two countries. The
> Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the
> Sun in the Ship on the Ether of Space meant that the Hermetic Matter is
> the principle, or basis, of Gold, or again the _philosophical_ Sun; the
> Water, within which the Crocodile is swimming, is that Water, or Matter,
> made liquid; the Ship herself, finally, representing the Vessel of Nature,
> in which the Sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle, acts as a pilot,
> because it is the Sun which conducts the work by his action upon the Moist
> or Mercury. The above is only for the Alchemists.
> 
> The Serpent became the type and symbol of evil, and of the Devil, only
> during the Middle Ages. The early Christians as well as the Ophite
> Gnostics, had their dual Logos: the Good and the Bad Serpent, the
> Agathodæmon and the Kakodæmon. This is demonstrated by the writings of
> Marcus, Valentinus, and many others, and especially in _Pistis‐
> Sophia_—certainly a document of the earliest centuries of Christianity. On
> the marble sarcophagus of a tomb, discovered in 1852 near the Porta Pia,
> one sees the scene of the adoration of the Magi, “or else,” remarks the
> late C. W. King, in _The Gnostics and their Remains_, “the prototype of
> that scene, the ‘Birth of the New Sun’.” The mosaic floor exhibited a
> curious design which might have represented either Isis suckling the babe
> Harpocrates, or the Madonna nursing the infant Jesus. In the smaller
> sarcophagi that surrounded the larger one, many leaden plates rolled like
> scrolls were found, eleven of which can still be deciphered. The contents
> of these ought to be regarded as final proof of a much‐vexed question, for
> they show that either the early Christians, up to the VIth Century, were
> _bonâ fide_ Pagans, or that dogmatic Christianity was borrowed wholesale,
> and passed in full into the Christian Church—Sun, Tree, Serpent, Crocodile
> and all.
> 
>     On the first is seen Anubis ... holding out a scroll; at his feet
>     are two female busts: below all are two serpents entwined about
>     ... a corpse swathed up like a mummy. In the second scroll ... is
>     Anubis, holding out a cross, the “Sign of Life.” Under his feet
>     lies the corpse encircled in the numerous folds of a huge serpent,
>     the Agathodæmon, guardian of the deceased.... In the third scroll
>     ... the same Anubis bears on his arm an oblong object, ... held so
>     as to convert the outline of the figure into a complete Latin
>     cross. ... At the god’s foot is a rhomboid, the Egyptian “Egg of
>     the World,” towards which crawls a serpent coiled into a
>     circle.... Under the ... busts ... is the letter ω, repeated
>     _seven_ times in a line, reminding one of the “Names.” ... Very
>     remarkable also is the line of characters, apparently Palmyrene,
>     upon the legs of the first Anubis. As for the figure of the
>     _serpent_, supposing these talismans to emanate not from the Isiac
>     but the newer Ophite creed, it may well stand for that “True and
>     perfect Serpent,” who “leads forth the souls of all that put their
>     trust in him out of the Egypt of the body, and through the Red Sea
>     of Death into the Land of Promise, saving them on their way from
>     the Serpents of the Wilderness, that is, from the Rulers of the
>     Stars.”(664)
> 
> And this “true and perfect Serpent” is the seven‐lettered God who is now
> credited with being Jehovah, and Jesus _one with him_. To this seven‐
> vowelled God the candidate for Initiation is sent by the “First Mystery,”
> in the _Pistis‐Sophia_, a work earlier than St. John’s _Revelation_, and
> evidently of the same school. “The (Serpent of the) Seven Thunders uttered
> these seven vowels,” but “seal up those things which the Seven Thunders
> uttered, and write them not,” says _Revelation_. “Do ye seek after these
> mysteries?”—inquires Jesus in _Pistis‐Sophia_. “No mystery is more
> excellent than they [the seven vowels]; for they shall bring your souls
> unto the Light of Lights”—_i.e._, true Wisdom. “Nothing, therefore, is
> more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the
> mystery of the _Seven Vowels_ and their _forty and nine_ Powers, and the
> numbers thereof.”
> 
> In India, it was the mystery of the _Seven Fires_ and their Forty‐nine
> Fires or aspects, or “the numbers thereof.”
> 
> These Seven Vowels are represented by the Svastika signs on the crowns of
> the seven heads of the Serpent of Eternity, in India, among Esoteric
> “Buddhists,” in Egypt, in Chaldæa, etc., and among the Initiates of every
> other country. They are the Seven Zones of _post mortem_ ascent, in the
> Hermetic writings, in each of which the “Mortal” leaves one of his Souls,
> or Principles; until arrived on the plane above all Zones, he remains as
> the great Formless Serpent of Absolute Wisdom, or the Deity Itself. The
> seven‐headed Serpent has more than one signification in the arcane
> teachings. It is the seven‐headed Draco, each of whose heads is a star of
> the Lesser Bear; but it was also, and preëminently, the Serpent of
> Darkness, inconceivable and incomprehensible, whose seven heads were the
> seven Logoi, the reflections of the one and first‐manifested Light—the
> Universal Logos.
> 
> Section XI. Demon est Deus Inversus.
> 
> This symbolical sentence, in its many‐sided forms, is certainly most
> dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later
> religions, or rather theologies, and especially so in the light of
> Christianity. Yet it is neither just nor correct to say that it is
> Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan. As an
> “Adversary,” the opposing Power required by the equilibrium and harmony of
> things in Nature, as Shadow is required to make still brighter the Eight,
> as Night to bring into greater relief the Day, and as Cold to make one
> appreciate the more the comfort of Heat, so has Satan ever existed.
> Homogeneity is one and indivisible. But if the homogeneous One and
> Absolute is no mere figure of speech, and if Heterogeneity, in its
> dualistic aspect, is its offspring, its bifurcous shadow or reflection,
> then even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of
> both good and evil. If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root
> of all and everything in Nature and its Universe, whence comes Evil or
> D’Evil if not from the same Golden Womb of the Absolute? Thus we are
> forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodæmon and
> Kakodæmon, as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or to
> resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!
> 
> Having to trace the origin of the idea to the very beginnings of the human
> mind, it is but just, meanwhile, to give his due even to the proverbial
> Devil. Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely bad “God
> of evil.” Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born
> from the same mother—Nature; so soon as that thought ceased to be archaic,
> Wisdom passed into Philosophy. In the beginning the symbols of good and
> evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; later their types were
> chosen among the most natural and ever‐recurrent periodical cosmic
> phenomena—the Day and Night, or the Sun and Moon. Then the Hosts of the
> Solar and Lunar Deities were made to represent them, and the Dragon of
> Darkness was contrasted with the Dragon of Light. The Host of Satan is a
> Son of God, no less than the Host of the B’ne Alhim, the Children of God
> who came to “present themselves before the Lord,” their Father.(665) “The
> Sons of God” become the “Fallen Angels” only after perceiving that the
> daughters of men _were fair_.(666) In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are
> among the earliest and the brightest Gods, and become Asuras only when
> dethroned by Brâhmanical fancy, Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic,
> individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a “one _living_
> personal God,” had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime
> necessity. A screen was needed; a scape‐goat to explain the cruelty,
> blunders, and but too‐evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom
> absolute perfection, mercy and goodness were claimed. This was the first
> Karmic effect of abandoning a philosophical and logical Pantheism, to
> build, as a prop for lazy man, “a merciful Father in Heaven,” whose daily
> and hourly actions, as Natura Naturans, the “comely Mother but stone
> cold,” belie the assumption. This led to the primal twins, Osiris‐Typhon,
> Ormazd‐Ahriman, and finally Cain‐Abel and the _tutti quanti_ of
> contraries.
> 
> Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God,” the Creator,
> ended by being made its author. Pascal settles the difficulty very
> cunningly by saying:
> 
>     Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of
>     God; and defects, in order to show that she is _only_ his image.
> 
> The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric ages,
> the more philosophical does the prototypic figure of the later Satan
> appear. The first “Adversary,” in individual human form, that one meets
> with in old Purânic literature, is one of her greatest Rishis and
> Yogis—Nârada, surnamed the “Strife‐maker.”
> 
> And he is a Brahmaputra, a son of Brahmâ, the male. But of him later on.
> Who the great “Deceiver” really is, one can ascertain by searching for
> him, _with open eyes_ and an unprejudiced mind, in every old Cosmogony and
> Scripture.
> 
> It is the anthropomorphized Demiurge, the Creator of Heaven and Earth,
> when separated from the collective Hosts of his Fellow‐Creators, whom, so
> to speak, he represents and synthesizes. It is _now_ the God of
> Theologies. “The wish is father to the thought.” Once upon a time, a
> philosophical symbol left to perverse human fancy; afterwards, fashioned
> into a fiendish, deceiving, cunning, and jealous God.
> 
> As the Dragons and other Fallen Angels are described in other parts of
> this work, a few words upon the much‐slandered Satan will be sufficient.
> The student will do well to remember that, with every people, except the
> Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the
> opposite aspect, in the dual nature of the so‐called Creator. This is only
> natural. One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as
> Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from Evil.
> As there is far more Evil than Good in the world, it follows on logical
> grounds that either God must include Evil, or stand as the direct cause of
> it, or else surrender his claims to Absoluteness. The Ancients understood
> this so well that their philosophers, now followed by the Kabalists,
> defined Evil as the “lining” of God or Good; _Demon est Deus inversus_,
> being a very old adage. Indeed, Evil is but an antagonizing blind force in
> Nature; it is reäction, opposition, and contrast—evil for some, good for
> others. There is no _malum in se_; only the Shadow of Light, without which
> Light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If Evil
> disappeared, Good would disappear along with it from Earth. The “Old
> Dragon” was pure Spirit before he became Matter, _passive_ before he
> became _active_. In the Syro‐Chaldean Magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos
> are joined in the Zodiac in the sign of the Androgyne Virgo‐Scorpio.
> Before its fall on earth the Serpent was Ophis‐Christos, and after its
> fall it became Ophiomorphos‐Chrestos. Everywhere the speculations of the
> Kabalists treat of Evil as a _Force_, which is antagonistic, but at the
> same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which
> it could never have otherwise. There would be no _Life_ possible (in the
> mâyâvic sense) without _Death_; no regeneration and reconstruction without
> destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man,
> who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will, and
> his aspiring towards that sunlight, which would lose its being and value
> for him had he nothing but light. Good is infinite and eternal only in the
> eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the
> manifested planes, one equilibrates the other. Few are those Theists,
> believers in a Personal God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God;
> or who, confounding both, do not believe they have a right to pray to
> their idol, asking its help and protection for the exercise of and
> immunity for their evil and cruel deeds. “Lead us not into temptation” is
> addressed daily to “our Father, in Heaven,” and not to the Devil, by
> millions of Christian hearts. This they do, repeating the very words put
> into the mouth of their Saviour, and yet do not give one thought to the
> fact that their meaning is contradicted point blank by James, “the brother
> of the Lord”:
> 
>     Let do man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God
>     cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.(667)
> 
> Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches
> us, _on the authority of Christ_, that it is God who does so? Open any
> pious volume in which the word “temptation” is defined in its theological
> sense, and forthwith you find two definitions:
> 
>     (1) Those afflictions and troubles _whereby God tries his people_;
>     (2) Those means and enticements which the Devil makes use of to
>     _ensnare_ and allure mankind.(668)
> 
> Accepted literally, the teachings of Christ and James contradict each
> other, and what dogma can reconcile the two if the Occult meaning is
> rejected?
> 
> Between the alternative allurements, wise will be that philosopher who
> will be able to decide where God disappears to make room for the Devil!
> Therefore, when we read that “the Devil is a liar and the father of it,”
> that is an _incarnate lie_, and are also told in the same breath that
> Satan, the Devil, was a Son of God and the most beautiful of his
> Archangels, rather than believe that Father and Son are a gigantic,
> personified and eternal Lie, we prefer to turn to Pantheism and to Pagan
> philosophy for information.
> 
> Once that the key to _Genesis_ is in our hands, the scientific and
> symbolical Kabalah unveils the secret. The Great Serpent of the Garden of
> Eden and the “Lord God” are identical, and so are Jehovah and Cain—that
> Cain who is referred to in Theology as the “murderer” and the Liar to God!
> Jehovah tempts the King of Israel to number the people, and Satan tempts
> him to do the same in another place. Jehovah turns into the Fiery Serpents
> to bite those he is displeased with; and Jehovah informs the Brazen
> Serpent that heals them.
> 
> These short, and seemingly contradictory, statements in the _Old
> Testament_—contradictory because the two Powers are separated instead of
> being regarded as the two faces of one and the same thing—are the echoes,
> distorted out of recognition by exotericism and theology, of the universal
> and philosophical dogmas in Nature, so well understood by the primitive
> Sages. We find the same groundwork in several personifications in the
> _Purânas_, only far more ample and philosophically suggestive.
> 
> Thus Pulastya, a “Son of God,” one of the first progeny, is made the
> progenitor of Demons, the Râkshasas, the tempters and the devourers of
> men. Pishâchâ, a female Demon, is a daughter of Daksha, a “Son of God”
> too, and a God, and the mother of all the Pishâchas.(669) The Demons, so‐
> called in the _Purânas_, are very extraordinary Devils when judged from
> the standpoint of European and orthodox views, since all of them, Dânavas,
> Daityas, Pishâchas, and Râkshasas, are represented as extremely pious,
> following the precepts of the _Vedas_, some of them even being great
> Yogins. But they oppose the clergy and ritualism, sacrifices and forms,
> just as the head Yogins do to this day in India, and are no less respected
> for it, though they are permitted to follow neither caste nor ritual;
> hence all those Purânic Giants and Titans are called Devils. The
> missionaries, ever on the watch to show, if they can, that the Hindû
> traditions are nothing better than a reflection of the Jewish _Bible_,
> have evolved a whole romance on the alleged identity of Pulastya with
> Cain, and of the Râkshasas with the Cainites, the “Accursed,” the cause of
> the “Noachian” Deluge. (See the work of Abbé Gorresio, who “etymologizes”
> Pulastya’s name as meaning the “rejected,” hence Cain, if you please).
> Pulastya dwells in Kedara, he says, which means a “dug‐up place,” a
> “mine,” and Cain is shown, in tradition and the _Bible_, as the first
> worker in metals and a miner thereof!
> 
> While it is very probable that the Gibborim, or Giants, of the _Bible_ are
> the Râkshasas of the Hindûs, it is still more certain that both are
> Atlanteans, and belong to the submerged races. However it may be, no Satan
> could be more persistent in slandering his enemy, or more spiteful in his
> hatred, than the Christian Theologians are in cursing him as the father of
> every evil. Compare their vituperation and their opinions about the Devil
> with the philosophical views of the Purânic Sages and their Christ‐like
> mansuetude. When Parâshara, whose father was devoured by a Râkshasa, was
> preparing himself to destroy, by magic arts, the whole race, his
> grandsire, Vasishtha, after showing the irate Sage, on his own confession,
> that there is Evil and Karma, but no “evil Spirits” speaks the following
> suggestive words:
> 
>     Let thy wrath be appeased: the Râkshasas are not culpable; thy
>     father’s death _was the work of Destiny_ [_Karma_]. Anger is the
>     passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. _By whom, it may be
>     asked, is any one killed?_ Every man _reaps the consequences of
>     his own acts_. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man
>     obtains ... and prevents the attainment ... of emancipation. The
>     ... sages shun wrath: be not thou, my child, subject to its
>     influence. Let no more of those _unoffending_ spirits of darkness
>     be consumed; let this thy sacrifice cease. Mercy is the might of
>     the righteous.(670)
> 
> Thus, every such “sacrifice” or prayer to God for help is no better than
> _an act of Black Magic_. That which Parâshara prayed for, was the
> destruction of the Spirits of Darkness, for his personal revenge. He is
> called a Pagan, and the Christians have doomed him, as such, to Eternal
> Hell. Yet, in what respect is the prayer of sovereigns and generals, who
> pray before every battle for the destruction of their enemy, any better?
> Such a prayer is in every case Black Magic of the worst kind, concealed
> like a demon “Mr. Hyde” under a sanctimonious “Dr. Jekyll.”
> 
> In human nature, evil denotes only the polarity of Matter and Spirit, a
> “struggle for life” between the two manifested Principles in Space and
> Time, which Principles are one _per se_, inasmuch as they are rooted in
> the Absolute. In Cosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations
> of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and
> centrifugal forces, which, being mutually inter‐dependent, are necessary
> to each other, “in order that both should live.” If one should be
> arrested, the action of the other would become immediately self‐
> destructive.
> 
> Since the personification called Satan has been amply analyzed from its
> triple aspect, in the _Old Testament_, Christian Theology and the ancient
> Gentile attitude of thought, those who would learn more of the subject are
> referred to _Isis Unveiled_(671) and the Second Part of Volume II of the
> present work. The subject is here touched upon, and fresh explanations are
> attempted, for a very good reason. Before we can approach the evolution of
> Physical and Divine Man, we have first to master the idea of Cyclic
> Evolution, to acquaint ourselves with the philosophies and beliefs of the
> four Races which preceded our present Race, and to learn what were the
> ideas of those Titans and Giants—Giants, verily, mentally, as well as
> physically. The whole of antiquity was imbued with that philosophy which
> teaches the involution of Spirit into Matter, the progressive, downward
> cyclic descent, or active, self‐conscious evolution. The Alexandrian
> Gnostics have sufficiently divulged the secrets of Initiations, and their
> records are full of the “falling down of the Æons,” in their double
> qualification of Angelic Beings and Periods; the one the natural evolution
> of the other. On the other hand, Oriental traditions on both sides of the
> “Black Water,” the Oceans that separate the two “Easts,” are equally full
> of allegories about the downfall of the Plerôma, or that of the Gods and
> Devas. One and all, they allegorized and explained the Fall as _the desire
> to learn and acquire knowledge—the desire to know_. This is the natural
> sequence of mental evolution, the Spiritual becoming transmuted into the
> Material or Physical. The same law of descent into Materiality and of
> reäscent into Spirituality asserted itself during the Christian era, the
> reäction having only stopped just now, in our own special Sub‐race.
> 
> That which was allegorized in _Pymander_, perhaps ten millenniums ago, for
> a triune mode of interpretation, and intended for a record of an
> astronomical, anthropological, and even alchemical fact, namely, the
> allegory of the Seven Rectors breaking through the Seven Circles of Fire,
> was dwarfed into one material and anthropomorphic interpretation—the
> Rebellion and Fall of the Angels. The multivocal, profoundly philosophical
> narrative, under its poetical form of the “Marriage of Heaven with Earth,”
> the love of Nature for Divine Form, and the Heavenly Man enraptured with
> his own beauty mirrored in Nature, that is to say, Spirit attracted into
> Matter, has now become, under theological handling, the Seven Rectors
> disobeying Jehovah, self‐admiration generating Satanic pride, followed by
> their Fall, Jehovah permitting no worship to be lost save upon himself. In
> short, the beautiful Planet‐Angels, the glorious Cyclic Æons of the
> Ancients, have become synthesized in their most orthodox shape in Samael,
> the Chief of the Demons in the _Talmud_, “that Great Serpent with Twelve
> Wings that draws down after himself, in his Fall, the Solar System, or the
> Titans.” But Schemal—the _alter ego_ and the Sabean type of Samael—in his
> philosophical and esoteric aspect, meant the “Year,” in its astrological
> evil aspect, with its twelve months or “Wings” of unavoidable evils, in
> Nature. In Esoteric Theogony both Schemal and Samael represented a
> particular divinity.(672) With the Kabalists they are the “Spirit of the
> Earth,” the Personal God that governs it, and therefore _de facto_
> identical with Jehovah. For the Talmudists themselves admit that Samael is
> a god‐name of one of the seven Elohim. The Kabalists, moreover, show the
> two, Schemal and Samael, as a symbolical form of Saturn, Cronus; the
> “Twelve Wings” standing for the twelve months, and the symbol in its
> collectivity representing _a racial cycle_. Jehovah and Saturn are also
> glyphically identical.
> 
> This leads, in its turn, to a very curious deduction from a Roman Catholic
> dogma. Many renowned writers belonging to the Latin Church admit that a
> difference exists, and should be made, between the Uranian Titans, the
> antediluvian Giants, who were also Titans, and those post‐diluvian Giants,
> in whom the Roman Catholics persist in seeing the descendants of the
> mythical Ham. In clearer words, there is a difference to be made between
> the cosmic, _primordial_ opposing Forces, guided by Cyclic Law, the
> Atlantean human Giants, and the post‐diluvian great Adepts, whether of the
> Right or the Left‐hand. At the same time they show that Michael, “the
> _generalissimo_ of the fighting Celestial Host, the _bodyguard of
> Jehovah_,” as it would seem, according to de Mirville, is also a Titan,
> only with the adjective of “divine” before the cognomen. Thus those
> “Uranides” who are called everywhere “Divine Titans”—and who, having
> rebelled against Cronus, or Saturn, are therefore also shown to be the
> enemies of Samael, also one of the Elohim, and synonymous with Jehovah in
> his collectivity—are identical with Michael and his Host. In short, the
> _rôles_ are reversed, all the combatants are confused, and no student is
> able to distinguish clearly which is which. Esoteric explanation may,
> however, bring some order into this confusion, in which Jehovah becomes
> Saturn, and Michael and his Army, Satan and the Rebellious Angels, owing
> to the indiscreet endeavours of the too faithful zealots to see a Devil in
> every Pagan God. The true meaning is far more philosophical, and the
> legend of the first “Fall” of the Angels assumes a scientific colouring
> when correctly understood.
> 
> Cronus stands for endless, and hence immovable Duration, without
> beginning, without end, beyond divided Time and beyond Space. Those
> Angels, Genii, or Devas, who were born _to act in space and time_, that
> is, to break through the _Seven Circles_ of the super‐spiritual planes
> into the phenomenal, or circumscribed, super‐terrestrial regions, are said
> allegorically to have _rebelled_ against Cronus, and fought the Lion who
> was then the one living and highest God. When Cronus, in his turn, is
> represented as mutilating Uranus, his father, the meaning of the allegory
> is very simple. Absolute Time is made to become the finite and
> conditioned; a portion is robbed from the whole, thus showing that Saturn,
> the Father of the Gods, has been transformed from Eternal Duration into a
> limited period. Cronus with his scythe cuts down even the longest and, to
> us, seemingly endless cycles, which, for all that, are limited in
> Eternity, and with the same scythe destroys the mightiest rebels. Aye, not
> one will escape the scythe of Time! Praise the God or Gods, or flout one
> or both, that scythe will not tremble one millionth of a second in its
> ascending or descending course.
> 
> The Titans of Hesiod’s _Theogony_ were copied in Greece from the Suras and
> Asuras of India. These Hesiodic Titans, the Uranides, which were once upon
> a time numbered as only six, have been recently discovered, in an old
> fragment relating to the Greek myth, to be _seven_, the seventh being
> called Phoreg. Thus their identity with the Seven Rectors is fully
> demonstrated. The origin of the War in Heaven and the Fall has, in our
> mind, to be traced unavoidably to India, and perhaps far earlier than the
> Purânic accounts thereof. For the Târakâmaya was in a later age, and there
> are accounts of three distinct Wars to be traced in almost every
> Cosmogony.
> 
> The first War happened in the night of time, between the Gods and
> (A)‐suras, and lasted for the period of one Divine Year.(673) On this
> occasion the Deities were defeated by the Daityas, under the leadership of
> Hrâda. But afterwards, owing to a device of Vishnu, to whom the conquered
> Gods applied for help, the latter defeated the Asuras. In the _Vishnu
> Purâna_ no interval is found between the two Wars. In the Esoteric
> Doctrine, however, one War takes place before the building of the Solar
> System; another, on Earth, at the “creation” of man; and a third War is
> mentioned as taking place at the close of the Fourth Race, between its
> Adepts and those of the Fifth Race; that is, between the Initiates of the
> “Sacred Island” and the Sorcerers of Atlantis. We shall notice the first
> contest, as recounted by Parâshara, and endeavour to separate the two
> accounts, which are purposely blended together.
> 
> It is there stated that as the Daityas and Asuras were engaged in the
> duties of their respective Orders (Varnas) and followed the paths
> prescribed by holy writ, practising also religious penance—a queer
> employment for _Demons_ if they are identical with our _Devils_, as it is
> claimed—it was impossible for the Gods to destroy them. The prayers
> addressed by the Gods to Vishnu are curious, as showing the ideas involved
> in an anthropomorphic Deity. Having, after their defeat, “fled to the
> northern shore of the Milky Ocean [Atlantic Ocean],”(674) the discomfited
> Gods address many supplications “to the first of Beings, the divine
> Vishnu,” and among others the following:
> 
>     Glory to thee, who art one with the Saints, whose perfect nature
>     is ever blessed, and traverses, unobstructed, all permeable
>     elements. Glory to thee, _who art one with the Serpent‐Race,
>     double‐tongued, impetuous, cruel, insatiate of enjoyment_ and
>     abounding with wealth.... Glory to thee, ... O Lord, _who hast
>     neither colour nor extension_, nor bulk (_ghana_), _nor any
>     predicable qualities_, and whose essence (_rûpa_), purest of the
>     pure, is appreciable only by holy Paramarshis [the greatest of
>     Sages or Rishis]. We bow to thee, in the nature of Brahma,
>     uncreated, undecaying (_avyaya_); who _art in our bodies_, and _in
>     all other bodies, and in all living creatures_; and beside whom
>     nothing exists. We glorify that Vâsudeva, the lord (of all), who
>     is without soil, the seed of all things, exempt from dissolution,
>     unborn, eternal; being, in essence, Paramapadâtmavat [beyond the
>     condition of Spirit], and, in substance (_rûpa_), the whole of
>     this (Universe).(675)
> 
> The above is quoted as an illustration of the vast field offered by the
> _Purânas_ to adverse and erroneous criticism, by every European bigot who
> forms an estimate of an alien religion on mere external evidence. Any man
> accustomed to subject what he reads to thoughtful analysis, will see at a
> glance the incongruity of addressing the accepted “Unknowable,” the
> formless, and attributeless Absolute, such as the Vedântins define
> Brahman, as being “one with the Serpent‐Race, double‐tongued, cruel and
> insatiable,” thus associating the abstract with the concrete, and
> bestowing adjectives on that which is free from any limitations, and
> conditionless. Even Professor Wilson, who, after living surrounded by
> Brâhmans and Pandits in India for so many years, ought to have known
> better—even that scholar lost no opportunity of criticizing the Hindû
> Scriptures on this account. Thus, he exclaims:
> 
>     The _Purânas_ constantly teach incompatible doctrines! According
>     to this passage,(676) the Supreme Being is not the inert cause of
>     creation only, but exercises the functions of an active
>     providence. The Commentator quotes a text of the _Veda_ in support
>     of this view: “Universal Soul entering into men, governs their
>     conduct.” Incongruities, however, are as frequent in the _Vedas_
>     as in the _Purânas_.
> 
> Less frequent, in sober truth, than in the Mosaic _Bible_. But prejudice
> is great in the hearts of our Orientalists, especially in those of
> “reverend” scholars. Universal Soul is _not_ the inert Cause of Creation
> or (Para) Brahman, but simply that which we call the Sixth Principle of
> _Intellectual_ Kosmos, on the manifested plane of being. It is Mahat, or
> Mahâbuddhi, the Great Soul, the Vehicle of Spirit, the first primeval
> reflection of the formless CAUSE, and that which is even _beyond_ Spirit.
> So much for Professor Wilson’s uncalled‐for fling at the _Purânas_. As for
> the apparently incongruous appeal to Vishnu by the defeated Gods, the
> explanation is there, in the text of _Vishnu Purâna_, if Orientalists
> would only notice it. There is Vishnu as Brahmâ, and Vishnu _in his two
> aspects_, philosophy teaches. There is but one Brahman, “essentially
> Prakriti and Spirit.”
> 
> This ignorance is truly and beautifully expressed in the praise of the
> Yogins to Brahmâ, “the upholder of the earth,” when they say:
> 
>     Those who have not practised devotion conceive erroneously of the
>     nature of the world. The ignorant, who do not perceive that this
>     Universe is of the nature of Wisdom, and judge of it as an object
>     of perception only, are lost in the ocean of spiritual ignorance.
>     But they who know true Wisdom, and whose minds are pure, behold
>     this whole world _as one with Divine Knowledge_, as one with thee,
>     O God! Be favourable, O universal Spirit!(677)
> 
> Therefore, it is not Vishnu, “the inert cause of creation,” which
> exercised the functions of an _Active_ Providence, but the Universal Soul,
> that which, in its material aspect, Éliphas Lévi calls Astral Light. And
> this Soul is, in its dual aspect of Spirit and Matter, the true
> anthropomorphic God of the Theists; for this God is a _personification_ of
> that Universal Creative Agent, both pure and impure, owing to its
> manifested condition and differentiation in this Mâyâvic World—_God_ and
> _Devil_, truly. But Professor Wilson failed to see how Vishnu, in this
> character, closely resembles the Lord God of Israel, “especially in his
> policy of deception, temptation, and cunning.”
> 
> In the _Vishnu Purâna_ this is made as plain as can be. For it is said
> there, that:
> 
>     At the conclusion of their prayers (_stotra_) the Gods beheld the
>     Sovereign Deity Hari (Vishnu) armed with the shell, the discus,
>     and the mace, _riding on Garuda._
> 
> Now Garuda is the Manvantaric Cycle, as will be shown in its place.
> Vishnu, therefore, is the Deity _in Space and Time_, the peculiar God of
> the Vaishnavas. Such Gods are called in Esoteric Philosophy _tribal_ or
> _racial_; that is to say, one of the many Dhyânis or Gods, or Elohim, one
> of whom was generally chosen for some special reason by a nation or a
> tribe, and thus became gradually a “God _above all_ Gods,”(678) the
> “highest God,” as Jehovah, Osiris, Bel, or any other of the Seven Regents.
> 
> “The tree is known by its fruit”; the nature of a God by his actions. We
> must either judge these actions by the dead‐letter narratives, or must
> accept them allegorically. If we compare the two—Vishnu, as the defender
> and champion of the defeated Gods; and Jehovah, the defender and champion
> of the “chosen” people, so called by antiphrasis, no doubt, as it is the
> Jews who had chosen that “jealous” God—we shall find that both use deceit
> and cunning. They do so on the principle of “the end justifying the
> means,” in order to have the best of their respective opponents and
> foes—the Demons. Thus while, according to the Kabalists, Jehovah assumes
> the shape of the tempting Serpent in the Garden of Eden, sends Satan with
> a special mission to tempt Job, harasses and wearies Pharaoh with Saraï,
> Abraham’s wife, and “hardens” another Pharaoh’s heart against Moses, lest
> there should be no opportunity for plaguing his victims “with great
> plagues,” Vishnu is made in his _Purâna_ to resort to a trick no less
> unworthy of any respectable God.
> 
> The defeated Gods addressed Vishnu as follows:
> 
>     Have compassion upon us, O Lord, and protect us, who have come to
>     thee for succour from the Daityas (Demons)! They have seized upon
>     the three worlds, and appropriated the offerings which are our
>     portion, _taking care not to transgress the precepts of the Veda_.
>     Although _we, as well as they, are parts of thee_(679) ... engaged
>     [as they are] ... in the paths prescribed by the holy writ ... it
>     is impossible for us to destroy them. Do thou, whose wisdom is
>     immeasurable (Ameyâtman) instruct us _in some device_ by which we
>     may be able to exterminate the enemies of the Gods!
> 
>     When the mighty Vishnu heard their request, he emitted from his
>     body an _illusory_ form (Mâyâmoha, the “deluder by illusion”)
>     which he gave to the Gods and thus spake: “This Mâyâmoha shall
>     _wholly beguile_ the Daityas, so that, being led astray from the
>     path of the _Vedas_, they may be put to death.... Go then and fear
>     not. Let this delusive vision precede you. It shall this day be of
>     great service unto you, O Gods!”
> 
>     After this, the great Delusion (Mâyâmoha) having proceeded (to
>     earth), beheld the Daityas, engaged in ascetic penances, and
>     approaching them, in the semblance of a Digambara (naked
>     mendicant) with his head shaven ... he thus addressed them, in
>     gentle accents: “Ho, lords of the Daitya race, wherefore is it
>     that you practise these acts of penances?” etc.(680)
> 
> Finally the Daityas were seduced by the wily talk of Mâyâmoha, as Eve was
> seduced by the advice of the Serpent. They became apostates to the
> _Vedas_. As Dr. Muir translates the passage:
> 
>     The great Deceiver, practising illusion, next beguiled other
>     Daityas, by means of many other sorts of heresy. In a very short
>     time, these Asuras (Daityas), deluded by the Deceiver [_who was
>     Vishnu_] abandoned the entire system founded on the ordinances of
>     the triple _Veda_. Some reviled the _Vedas_; others, the
>     ceremonial of sacrifice; and others, the Brâhmans. This (they
>     exclaimed), is a doctrine which will not bear discussion: the
>     slaughter (of animals, in sacrifice), is not conducive to
>     religious merit. (To say, that) oblations of butter consumed in
>     the fire produce any future reward, is the assertion of a
>     child.... If it be a fact that a beast slain in sacrifice is
>     exalted to heaven, why does not the worshipper slaughter his own
>     father?... Infallible utterances do not, great Asuras, fall from
>     the skies; it is only assertions founded on reasoning that are
>     accepted by me and by other [intelligent] persons like yourselves!
>     Thus by numerous methods the Daityas were unsettled by the great
>     Deceiver [_Reason_].... When the Daityas had entered on the path
>     of error, the Deities mustered all their energies and approached
>     to battle. Then followed a combat between the Gods and the Asuras;
>     and the latter, who had abandoned the right road, were smitten by
>     the former. In previous times they had been defended by the armour
>     of righteousness which they bore; but, when that had been
>     destroyed, they, also, perished.(681)
> 
> Whatever may be thought of the Hindûs, no enemy of theirs can regard them
> as fools. A people, whose holy men and sages have left to the world the
> greatest and most sublime philosophies that ever emanated from the minds
> of men, must have known the difference between right and wrong. Even a
> savage can discern white from black, good from bad, and deceit from
> sincerity and truthfulness. Those who had narrated this event in the
> biography of their God, must have seen that in this case it was that God
> who was the Arch‐Deceiver, and the Daityas, who “never transgressed the
> precepts of the _Vedas_,” who had the sunny side in the transaction, and
> who were the true “Gods.” Thence there must have been, and _there is_ a
> secret meaning hidden under this allegory. In no class of society, in no
> nation, are deceit and craft considered as _divine_ virtues—except perhaps
> in the clerical classes of Theologians and modern Jesuitism.
> 
> The _Vishnu Purâna_,(682) like all other works of this kind, passed at a
> later period into the hands of the Temple‐Brâhmans, and the old MSS. have,
> no doubt, been further tampered with by sectarians. But there was a time
> when the _Purânas_ were esoteric works, and so they are still for the
> Initiates who can read them with the key that is in their possession.
> 
> Whether the Brâhman Initiates will ever give out the full meaning of these
> allegories, is a question with which the writer is not concerned. The
> present object is to show that, while honouring the _Creative Powers_ in
> their multiple forms, no philosopher could have, or ever has, accepted the
> allegory for its true spirit, except, perhaps, some philosophers belonging
> to the present “superior and civilized” Christian races. For, as shown,
> Jehovah is not one whit the superior of Vishnu on the plane of ethics.
> This is why the Occultists, and even some Kabalists, whether or not they
> regard those creative Forces _as living and conscious Entities_—and one
> does not see why they should not be so accepted—will never confuse the
> Cause with the Effect, and accept the Spirit of the Earth for Parabrahman,
> or Ain Suph. At all events they know well the true nature of what was
> called by the Greeks Father‐Æther, Jupiter‐Titan, etc. They know that the
> Soul of the Astral Light is divine, and its Body—the Light‐waves on the
> lower planes—infernal. This Light is symbolized by the “Magic Head” in the
> _Zohar_, the Double Face on the Double Pyramid; the black Pyramid rising
> against a pure white ground, with _a white Head and Face within its black
> Triangle_; the White Pyramid, inverted—the reflection of the first in the
> dark Waters—showing the _black reflection of the white Face_.
> 
> This is the Astral Light, or _Demon est Deus Inversus_.
> 
> Section XII. The Theogony of the Creative Gods.
> 
> To thoroughly comprehend the idea underlying every ancient Cosmology
> necessitates the study and comparative analysis of all the great religions
> of antiquity; for it is only by this method that the root‐idea can be made
> plain. Exact Science, could it soar so high, in tracing the operations of
> Nature to their ultimate and original sources, would call this idea the
> Hierarchy of Forces. The original, transcendental and philosophical
> conception was one. But as systems began to reflect more and more with
> every age the idiosyncrasies of nations, and as the latter, after
> separating, settled into distinct groups, each evolving along its own
> national or tribal groove, the main idea gradually became veiled by the
> overgrowth of human fancy. While in some countries the Forces, or rather
> the intelligent Powers of Nature, received divine honours to which they
> were hardly entitled, in others—as now in Europe and the other _civilized_
> lands—the very thought of such Forces being endowed with intelligence
> seems absurd, and is proclaimed _unscientific_. Therefore one finds relief
> in such statements as are found in the Introduction to _Asgard and the
> Gods_; “Tales and Traditions of our Northern Ancestors,” edited by W. S.
> W. Anson, who says:
> 
>     Although in Central Asia, or on the banks of the Indus, in the
>     Land of the Pyramids, and in the Greek and Italian peninsulas, and
>     even in the North, whither Kelts, Teutons and Slavs wandered, the
>     religious conceptions of the people have taken different forms,
>     _yet their common origin_ is still perceptible. We point out this
>     connection between the stories of the Gods, and the deep thought
>     contained in them, and their importance, in order that the reader
>     may see that _it is not a magic world of erratic fancy_ which
>     opens out before him, but that ... _Life and Nature_ formed the
>     basis of the existence and action of these divinities.(683)
> 
> And though it is impossible for any Occultist or student of Eastern
> Esotericism to concur in the strange idea that, “the religious conceptions
> of the most famous nations of antiquity are connected with the beginnings
> of civilization amongst the Germanic races,”(684) he is yet glad to find
> such truths expressed as that: “These fairy tales are not senseless
> stories written for the amusement of the idle; they embody the profound
> religion of our forefathers.”(685)
> 
> Precisely so. Not only their Religion, but likewise their History. For a
> myth, in Greek μῦθος, means oral tradition, passed from mouth to mouth
> from one generation to the other; and even in the modern etymology the
> term stands for a _fabulous_ statement conveying some important truth; a
> tale of some extraordinary personage whose biography has become overgrown,
> owing to the veneration of successive generations, with rich popular
> fancy, but which is no _wholesale_ fable. Like our ancestors, the
> primitive Âryans, we believe firmly in the personality and intelligence of
> more than one phenomenon‐producing Force in Nature.
> 
> As time rolled on, the archaic teaching grew dimmer; and the nations more
> or less lost sight of the Highest and One Principle of all things, and
> began to transfer the abstract attributes of the Causeless Cause to the
> caused effects, which became in their turn causative, the Creative Powers
> of the Universe; the great nations thus acted from fear of profaning the
> Idea; the smaller, because they either failed to grasp it, or lacked the
> power of philosophic conception needed to preserve it in all its
> immaculate purity. But one and all, with the exception of the latest
> Âryans, now become Europeans and Christians, show this veneration in their
> Cosmogonies. As Thomas Taylor,(686) the most intuitional of all the
> translators of the Greek Fragments, shows, no nation has ever conceived
> the One Principle as the immediate creator of the visible Universe, for no
> sane man would credit a planner and architect with having built with his
> own hands the edifice he admires. On the testimony of Damascius in his
> work, _On First Principles_ (Περὶ Πρώτων Ἀρχῶν), they referred to it as
> the “Unknown Darkness.” The Babylonians passed over this principle in
> silence. “To that God,” says Porphyry, in his _On Abstinence_ (Περί ἀποχῆς
> τῶν ἐμψύχων), “who is above all things, neither external speech ought to
> be addressed, nor yet that which is inward.” Hesiod begins his _Theogony_
> with the words, “Chaos of all things was the first produced,”(687) thus
> allowing the inference that its Cause or Producer must be passed over in
> reverential silence. Homer in his poems ascends no higher than Night,
> which he represents Zeus as reverencing. According to all the ancient
> theologists, and the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato, Zeus, or the
> immediate Artificer of the Universe, _is not the highest God_; any more
> than Sir Christopher Wren in his physical, human aspect is the Mind in him
> which produced his great works of art. Homer, therefore, is not only
> silent with respect to the First Principle, but likewise with respect to
> those two Principles immediately posterior to the First, the Æther and
> Chaos of Orpheus and Hesiod, and the Bound and Infinity of Pythagoras and
> Plato.(688) Proclus says of this Highest Principle that it is “the Unity
> of Unities, and beyond the first Adyta ... more ineffable than all
> Silence, and more occult than all Essence ... concealed amidst the
> intelligible Gods.”(689)
> 
> To what was written by Thomas Taylor in 1797—namely, that the “Jews appear
> to have ascended no higher ... than the _immediate_ Artificer of the
> Universe,” as “Moses introduces a darkness on the face of the deep,
> without even insinuating that there was any cause of its existence,”(690)
> one might add something more. Never have the Jews in their _Bible_—a
> purely esoteric, symbolical work—so profoundly degraded their metaphorical
> deity as have the Christians, by accepting Jehovah as their one living yet
> _personal_ God.
> 
> This First, or rather One, Principle was called the “Circle of Heaven,”
> symbolized by the hierogram of a Point within a Circle or Equilateral
> Triangle, the Point being the Logos. Thus, in the _Rig Veda_, wherein
> Brahmâ is not even named. Cosmogony is preluded with the Hiranyagarbha,
> the “Golden Egg,” and Prajâpati (later on Brahmâ), from whom emanate all
> the Hierarchies of “Creators.” The Monad, or Point, is the original and is
> the Unit from which follows the entire numeral system. This Point is the
> First Cause, but THAT from which it emanates, or of which, rather, it is
> the expression, the Logos, is passed over in silence. In its turn, the
> universal symbol, the _Point __ within the Circle_, was not yet the
> Architect, but the Cause of that Architect; and the latter stood to it in
> precisely the same relation as the Point itself stood to the Circumference
> of the Circle, which cannot be defined, according to Hermes Trismegistus.
> Porphyry shows that the Monad and the Duad of Pythagoras are identical
> with Plato’s Infinite and Finite, in _Philebus_, or what Plato calls the
> ἄπειρον and πέρας. It is the latter only, the Mother, which is
> substantial, the former being the “Cause of all Unity and measure of all
> things”;(691) the Duad, Mûlaprakriti, the Veil of Parabrahman, being thus
> shown to be the Mother of the Logos and, at the same time, his
> Daughter—that is to say, the object of his perception—the produced
> producer and the secondary cause of it. With Pythagoras, the Monad returns
> into Silence and Darkness, as soon as it has evolved the Triad, from which
> emanate the remaining 7 numbers of the 10 numbers which are at the base of
> the Manifested Universe.
> 
> In the Norse Cosmogony it is again the same.
> 
>     In the beginning was a great Abyss (Chaos), neither Day nor Night
>     existed; the Abyss was Ginnungagap, the yawning gulf, without
>     beginning, without end. All‐Father, the Uncreated, the Unseen,
>     dwelt in the Depth of the Abyss (Space) and _willed_, and what was
>     willed came into being.(692)
> 
> As in the Hindû Cosmogony, the evolution of the Universe is divided into
> two acts, which are called in India the Prâkrita and Pâdma Creations.
> Before the warm rays pouring from the Home of Brightness awaken life in
> the Great Waters of Space, the Elements of the First Creation come into
> view, and from them is formed the Giant Ymir, or Örgelmir (literally,
> Seething Clay), Primordial Matter differentiated from Chaos. Then comes
> the Cow Audumla, the Nourisher,(693) from whom is born Buri, the Producer,
> whose son Bör (Born), by Bestla, the daughter of the Frost‐Giants, the
> sons of Ymir, had three sons, Odin, Willi and We, or Spirit, Will, and
> Holiness. This was when Darkness still reigned throughout Space, when the
> Ases, the Creative Powers, or Dhyân Chohans, were not yet evolved, and the
> Yggdrasil, the Tree of the Universe of Time and of Life, had not yet
> grown, and there was, as yet, no Walhalla, or Hall of Heroes. The
> Scandinavian legends of Creation, of our Earth and World, begin with Time
> and human Life. All that precedes it is for them Darkness, wherein All‐
> Father, the Cause of all, dwells. As observed by the editor of _Asgard and
> the Gods_, though these legends have in them the idea of that All‐Father,
> the original cause of all, “he is scarcely more than mentioned in the
> poems,” not, as he thinks, because before the preaching of the Gospel, the
> idea “could not rise to distinct conceptions of the Eternal,” but on
> account of its deep esoteric character. Therefore, all the Creative Gods,
> or _Personal_ Deities, begin at the secondary stage of Cosmic Evolution.
> Zeus is born _in_, and _out_ of Cronus—Time. So is Brahmâ the production
> and emanation of Kâla, “Eternity and Time,” Kâla being one of the names of
> Vishnu. Hence we find Odin, the Father of _the Gods and of the Ases_, as
> Brahmâ is the Father of _the Gods and of the Asuras_; and hence also the
> androgyne character of all the chief Creative Gods, from the second Monad
> of the Greeks down to the Sephira Adam Kadmon, the Brahmâ or Prajâpati‐
> Vâch of the _Vedas_, and the androgyne of Plato, which is but another
> version of the Indian symbol.
> 
> The best metaphysical definition of primeval Theogony, in the spirit of
> the Vedântins, may be found in the “Notes on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_”, by T.
> Subba Row. Parabrahman, the Unknown and the Incognizable, as the lecturer
> tells his audience:
> 
>     Is not Ego, it is not Non‐Ego, nor is it consciousness ... it is
>     not even Âtmâ ... but though not itself an object of knowledge, it
>     is yet capable of supporting and giving rise to every kind of
>     object and every kind of existence which becomes an object of
>     knowledge.... [It is] the one essence from which starts into
>     existence a centre of energy ... [which he calls the Logos].(694)
> 
> This Logos is the Shabda Brahman of the Hindûs, which he will not even
> call Îshvara (the “Lord” God), lest the term should create confusion in
> the people’s minds. It is the Avalokiteshvara of the Buddhists, the Verbum
> of the Christians in its real _esoteric_ meaning, not in its theological
> disfigurement.
> 
>     It is, the first Jñâta, or the Ego in the Kosmos, and every other
>     Ego ... is but its reflection and manifestation.... It exists in a
>     latent condition in the bosom of Parabrahman, at the time of
>     Pralaya.... [During Manvantara] it has a consciousness and an
>     individuality of its own.... [It is a centre of energy, but] such
>     centres of energy are almost innumerable in the bosom of
>     Parabrahman. It must not be supposed, that [even] this Logos is
>     [_the_ Creator, or that it is] but a single centre of energy....
>     Their number is almost infinite.... [This] is the first Ego that
>     appears in Kosmos, and is the end of all evolution. [It is the
>     abstract Ego].... This is the _first_ manifestation [or aspect] of
>     Parabrahman.... When once it starts into existence as a conscious
>     being, ... from its objective standpoint, Parabrahman appears to
>     it as Mûlaprakriti. Please bear this in mind ... for here is the
>     root of the whole difficulty about Purusha and Prakriti felt by
>     the various writers on Vedântic philosophy.... This Mûlaprakriti
>     is material to it [the Logos], as any material object is material
>     to us. This Mûlaprakriti is no more Parabrahman than the bundle of
>     attributes of a pillar is the pillar itself; Parabrahman is an
>     unconditioned and absolute reality, and Mûlaprakriti is a sort of
>     veil thrown over it. Parabrahman by itself cannot be seen as it
>     is. It is seen by the Logos with a veil thrown over it, and that
>     veil is the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter.... Parabrahman, after
>     having appeared on the one hand as the Ego, and on the other as
>     Mûlaprakriti, acts as the one energy through the Logos.(695)
> 
> And the lecturer explains what he means by this acting of Something which
> is _Nothing_, though it is the ALL, by a fine simile. He compares the
> Logos to the Sun through which light and heat radiate, but whose energy,
> light and heat, exist in some unknown condition in Space and are diffused
> in Space only as _visible_ light and heat, the Sun being only the agent
> thereof. This is the first triadic hypostasis. The quaternary is made up
> by the _energizing light_ shed by the Logos.
> 
> The Hebrew Kabalists stated it in a manner which is esoterically identical
> with the Vedântic. Ain Suph, they taught, could not be comprehended, could
> not be located, nor named, though the Causeless Cause of all. Hence its
> name, Ain Suph, is a term of negation, “the Inscrutable, the Incognizable,
> and the Unnameable.” They made of it, therefore, a Boundless Circle, a
> Sphere, of which human intellect, with the utmost stretch, could only
> perceive the vault. In the words of one who has unriddled much in the
> Kabalistical system most thoroughly, in one of its meanings, in its
> numerical and geometrical esotericism:
> 
>     Close your eyes, and from your own consciousness of perception try
>     and think outward to the extremest limits in every direction. You
>     will find that equal lines or rays of perception extend out evenly
>     in all directions, so that the utmost effort of perception will
>     terminate in the _vault of a sphere_. The limitation of this
>     sphere will, of necessity, be a great Circle, and the direct rays
>     of thought in any and every direction must be right line radii of
>     the circle. This, then, _must_ be, humanly speaking, the extremest
>     all‐embracing conception of the Ain Suph _manifest_, which
>     formulates itself as a geometrical figure, viz., of a circle, with
>     its elements of curved circumference and right line diameter
>     divided into radii. Hence, a geometrical shape is the first
>     recognizable means of connection between the Ain Suph and the
>     intelligence of man.(696)
> 
> This Great Circle, which Eastern Esotericism reduces to the Point within
> the Boundless Circle, is the Avalokiteshvara, the Logos, or Verbum, of
> which T. Subba Row speaks. But this Circle or manifested God is as unknown
> to us, except through its _manifested_ Universe, as is the ONE, though
> easier, or rather more possible to our highest conceptions. This Logos
> which sleeps in the bosom of Parabrahman, during Pralaya, as our “Ego is
> latent [in us] at the time of Sushupti,” or sleep, which cannot cognize
> Parabrahman otherwise than as Mûlaprakriti—the latter being a Cosmic Veil
> which is “the mighty expanse of Cosmic Matter”—is thus only an organ in
> Cosmic Creation, through which radiate the Energy and Wisdom of
> Parabrahman, _unknown to the Logos, as it is to ourselves_. Moreover, as
> the Logos is as unknown to us as Parabrahman is unknown in reality to the
> Logos, both Eastern Esotericism and the Kabalah, in order to bring the
> Logos within the range of our conceptions, have resolved the abstract
> synthesis into concrete images; viz., into the reflections or multiplied
> aspects of that Logos, or Avalokiteshvara, Brahmâ Ormazd, Osiris, Adam
> Kadmon, call it by any of such names you will; which aspects, or
> manvantaric emanations, are the Dhyân Chohans, the Elohim, the Devas, the
> Amshaspends, etc. Metaphysicians explain the root and germ of the latter,
> according to T. Subba Row, as the first manifestation of Parabrahman, “the
> highest trinity that we are capable of understanding,” which is
> Mûlaprakriti, the Veil, the Logos, and the Conscious Energy of the latter,
> or its Power and Light, called in the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, Daiviprakriti; or
> “Matter, Force and the Ego, or the one root of Self, of which every other
> kind of self is but a manifestation or a reflection.” It is then only in
> this Light of consciousness, of mental and physical perception, that
> _practical_ Occultism can throw the Logos into visibility by geometrical
> figures, which, when closely studied, will yield not only a scientific
> explanation of the real, objective, existence(697) of the “Seven Sons of
> the Divine Sophia,” which is this Light of the Logos, but will show, by
> means of other yet undiscovered keys, that, with regard to Humanity, these
> “Seven Sons” and their numberless emanations, centres of energy
> personified, are an absolute necessity. Make away with them, and the
> Mystery of Being and Mankind _will never be unriddled, nor even closely
> approached_.
> 
> It is through this Light that everything is created. This Root of mental
> SELF is also the root of physical _Self_, for this Light is the
> permutation, in our manifested world, of Mûlaprakriti, called Aditi in the
> _Vedas_. In its third aspect it becomes Vâch,(698) the Daughter and the
> Mother of the Logos, as Isis is the Daughter and the Mother of Osiris, who
> is Horns, and Moot, the Daughter, Wife, and Mother, of Ammon, in the
> Egyptian Moon‐glyph. In the _Kabalah_, Sephira is the same as Shekinah,
> and is, in another synthesis, the Wife, Daughter, and Mother of the
> Heavenly Man, Adam Kadmon, and is even identical with him, just as Vâch is
> identical with Brahmâ, and is called the female Logos. In the _Rig Veda_,
> Vâch is “Mystic Speech,” by whom Occult Knowledge and Wisdom are
> communicated to man, and thus Vâch is said to have “entered the Rishis.”
> She is “generated by the Gods”; she is the Divine Vâch, the “Queen of
> Gods”; and she is associated, like Sephira with the Sephiroth, with the
> Prajâpatis in their work of creation. Moreover, she is called the “Mother
> of the _Vedas_,” “since it is through her powers, [as Mystic _Speech_]
> that Brahmâ revealed them, and also owing to her power that he produced
> the Universe”; that is to say, through Speech, and words, synthesized by
> the “Word” and numbers.(699)
> 
> But when Vâch is also spoken of as the daughter of Daksha, “the God who
> lives in all the Kalpas,” her mâyâvic character is shown; during the
> Pralaya she disappears, absorbed in the One, all‐devouring Ray.
> 
> But there are two distinct aspects in universal Esotericism, Eastern and
> Western, in all these personations of the female Power in Nature, or
> Nature the _noumenal_ and the _phenomenal_. One is its purely metaphysical
> aspect, as described by the learned lecturer in his “Notes on the
> _Bhagavad Gîtâ_”; the other terrestrial and physical, and at the same time
> _divine_ from the stand‐point of practical human conception and Occultism.
> They are all the symbols and personifications of Chaos, the Great Deep, or
> the Primordial Waters of Space, the impenetrable Veil between the
> INCOGNIZABLE and the Logos of Creation. “Connecting himself through his
> mind with Vâch, Brahmâ [the Logos] created the Primordial Waters.” In the
> _Katha Upanishad_ it is stated still more clearly:
> 
>     Prajâpati was this Universe. _Vâch was a second to him._ He
>     associated with her ... she produced these creatures and again
>     reëntered Prajâpati.
> 
> This connects Vâch and Sephira with the Goddess Kwan‐Yin, the “Merciful
> Mother,” the Divine Voice of the Soul, even in exoteric Buddhism, and with
> the female aspect of Kwan‐Shai‐Yin, the Logos, the Verbum of Creation, and
> at the same time with the Voice that speaks audibly to the Initiate,
> according to Esoteric Budhism. Bath Kol, the Filia Vocis, the Daughter of
> the Divine Voice of the Hebrews, responding from the Mercy Seat within the
> Veil of the Temple is—a result.
> 
> And here we may incidentally point out one of the many unjust slurs thrown
> by the “good and pious” missionaries in India on the religion of the land.
> The allegory, in the _Shatapatha Brâhmana_, that Brahmâ, as the Father of
> men, performed the work of procreation by incestuous intercourse with his
> own daughter Vâch, also called Sandhyâ, Twilight, and Shatarûpâ, of a
> hundred forms, is incessantly thrown in the teeth of the Brâhmans, as
> condemning their “detestable, false religion.” Besides the fact,
> conveniently forgotten by the Europeans, that the Patriarch Lot is shown
> guilty of the same crime under the _human form_, whereas it was under the
> form of a buck that Brahmâ, or rather Prajâpati, accomplished the incest
> with his daughter, who had that of a hind (_rohit_), the esoteric reading
> of the third chapter of _Genesis_ shows the same. Moreover, there is
> certainly a _cosmic_, and not a physiological, meaning attached to the
> Indian allegory, since Vâch is a permutation of Aditi and Mûlaprakriti, or
> Chaos, and Brahmâ a permutation of Nârâyana, the Spirit of God entering
> into, and fructifying Nature; and, therefore, there is nothing phallic in
> the conception at all.
> 
> As already stated, Aditi‐Vâch is the female Logos, or Verbum, the Word;
> and Sephira in the _Kabalah_ is the same. These feminine Logoi are all
> correlations, in their _noumenal_ aspect, of Light, and Sound, and Æther,
> showing how well‐informed were the Ancients both in Physical Science, as
> now known to the moderns, and also as to the birth of that Science in the
> Spiritual and Astral spheres.
> 
>     Our old writers said that Vâch is of four kinds. These are called
>     Parâ, Pashyantî, Madhyamâ, Vaikharî. This statement you will find
>     in the _Rig Veda_ itself and in several of the _Upanishads_.
>     Vaikharî Vâch is what we utter.
> 
> It is Sound, _Speech_, that again which becomes comprehensive and
> objective to one of our physical senses and may be brought under the laws
> of perception. Hence:
> 
>     Every kind of Vaikharî Vâch exists in its Madhyamâ ... Pashyantî
>     and ultimately in its Parâ form.... The reason why this
>     Pranava(700) is called Vâch is this, that these four principles of
>     the great Kosmos correspond to these four forms of Vâch.... The
>     whole Kosmos in its objective form is Vaikharî Vâch; the Light of
>     the Logos is the Madhyamâ form; and the Logos itself the Pasyantî
>     form; while Parabrahman is the Parâ [beyond the Noumenon of all
>     Noumena] aspect of that Vâch.(701)
> 
> Thus Vâch, Shekinah, or the “Music of the Spheres” of Pythagoras, are one,
> if we take for our example instances in the three most (apparently)
> dissimilar religious philosophies in the world, the Hindû, the Greek and
> the Chaldean Hebrew. These personations and allegories may be viewed under
> _four_ chief and _three_ lesser aspects, or _seven_ in all, as in
> Esotericism. The Parâ form is the ever subjective and latent Light and
> Sound, which exist eternally in the bosom of the INCOGNIZABLE; when
> transferred into the ideation of the Logos, or its latent Light, it is
> called Pasyantî, and when it becomes that Light _expressed_, it is
> Madhyamâ.
> 
> Now the _Kabalah_ gives the definition thus:
> 
>     There are three kinds of Light, and that [the fourth] which
>     interpenetrates the others; (1) the clear and the penetrating, the
>     _objective_ Light, (2) the _reflected_ Light, and (3) the
>     _abstract_ Light.
> 
> The ten Sephiroth, the Three and the Seven, are called in the _Kabalah_
> the Ten Words, DBRIM (Dabarim), the Numbers and the Emanations of the
> Heavenly Light, which is both Adam Kadmon and Sephira, Prajâpati‐Vâch, or
> Brahmâ. Light, Sound, Number, are the three factors of creation in the
> _Kabalah_. Parabrahman cannot be known except through the luminous Point,
> the Logos, which knows not Parabrahman but only Mûlaprakriti. Similarly
> Adam Kadmon knew only Shekinah, though he was the Vehicle of Ain Suph.
> And, as Adam Kadmon, he is, in the Esoteric interpretation, the total of
> the Number Ten, the Sephiroth, himself being a Trinity, or the three
> attributes of the Incognizable Deity in One.(702) “When the Heavenly Man
> (or Logos) first assumed the form of the Crown(703) [Kether] and
> identified himself with Sephira, he caused Seven splendid Lights to
> emanate from it [the Crown],” which made in their totality Ten; so
> Brahmâ‐Prajâpati, once he became separated from, yet identical with Vâch,
> caused the seven Rishis, the seven Manus or Prajâpatis, to issue from that
> Crown. In _exotericism_ one will always find 10 and 7, of either Sephira
> or Prajâpati; in _esoteric_ rendering always 3 and 7, which yield also 10.
> Only when divided, in the manifested sphere, into 3 and 7, they form
> [circle with vertical line], the androgyne, and [circle containing an X],
> or the figure X manifested and differentiated.
> 
> This will help the student to understand why Pythagoras esteemed the
> Deity, the Logos, to be the Centre of Unity and Source of Harmony. We say
> this Deity was the Logos, not the Monad that dwelleth in Solitude and
> Silence, because Pythagoras taught that Unity being indivisible is _no
> number_. And this is also why it was required of the candidate, who
> applied for admittance into his school, that he should have already
> studied as a preliminary step, the sciences of Arithmetic, Astronomy,
> Geometry and _Music_, which were held to be the four divisions of
> Mathematics.(704) Again, this explains why the Pythagoreans asserted that
> the doctrine of Numbers, the chief of all in Esotericism, had been
> revealed to man by the Celestial Deities; that the World had been called
> forth out of Chaos by Sound, or Harmony, and constructed according to the
> principles of musical proportion; that the seven planets which rule the
> destiny of mortals have a harmonious motion and, as Censorinus says:
> 
>     Intervals corresponding to musical diastemes, rendering various
>     sounds, so perfectly consonant, that they produce the sweetest
>     melody, which is inaudible to us, only by reason of the greatness
>     of the sound, which our ears are incapable of receiving.
> 
> In the Pythagorean Theogony, the Hierarchies of the Heavenly Host and Gods
> were numbered, and also expressed numerically. Pythagoras had studied
> Esoteric Science in India; therefore we find his pupils saying:
> 
>     The Monad [the manifested One] is the principle of all things.
>     From the Monad and the indeterminate Duad (Chaos), Numbers; from
>     Numbers, Points; from Points, Lines; from Lines, Superficies; from
>     Superficies, Solids; from these, Solid Bodies, whose elements are
>     four, Fire, Water, Air, Earth; of all which transmuted
>     [correlated], and totally changed, the World consists.(705)
> 
> And this, if it does not unriddle the mystery altogether, may at any rate
> lift a corner of the veil off those wondrous allegories that have been
> thrown over Vâch, the most mysterious of all the Brâhmanical Goddesses;
> she who is termed “the _melodious_ Cow who milked forth sustenance and
> Water”—the Earth with all her mystic powers; and again she “who yields us
> nourishment and sustenance”—the physical Earth. Isis is also mystic Nature
> and also Earth; and her cow’s horns identify her with Vâch, who, after
> being recognized in her highest form as Parâ, becomes, at the lower or
> material end of creation, Vaikharî. Hence she is mystic, though physical,
> Nature, with all her magic ways and properties.
> 
> Again, as Goddess of Speech and of Sound, and a permutation of Aditi, she
> is Chaos, in one sense. At any rate, she is the “Mother of the Gods,” and
> it is from Brahmâ, Îshvara or the Logos, and Vâch, as from Adam Kadmon and
> Sephira, that the real _manifested_ Theogony has to start. Beyond, all is
> Darkness and abstract speculation. With the Dhyân Chohans or the Gods, the
> Seers, the Prophets and the Adepts in general are on firm ground. Whether
> as Aditi, or the Divine Sophia of the Greek Gnostics, she is the mother of
> the Seven Sons, the Angels of the Face, of the Deep, or the Great Green
> One of the _Book of the Dead_. Says the _Book of Dzyan_, or Real
> Knowledge, obtained through meditation:
> 
>     _The Great Mother lay with the [triangle], and the |, and the
>     [square], the second | and the [five‐pointed star],_(_706_)_ in
>     her Bosom, ready to bring them forth, the valiant Sons of the
>     [square] [triangle] || [or 4,320,000, the Cycle], whose two Elders
>     are the [circle] [Circle] and the · [Point]._
> 
> At the beginning of every Cycle of 4,320,000, the Seven, or as some
> nations had it Eight, Great Gods, descend to establish the new order of
> things and to give the impetus to the new cycle. That _eighth_ God was the
> unifying Circle, or Logos, separated and made distinct from its Host, in
> exoteric dogma, just as the three divine _hypostases_ of the ancient
> Greeks are now considered in the Churches as three distinct _personæ_. As
> a Commentary says:
> 
>     _The Mighty Ones perform their great works, and leave behind them
>     __ everlasting monuments to commemorate their visit, every time
>     they penetrate within our mâyâvic veil [atmosphere]._(707)
> 
> Thus we are taught that the great Pyramids were built under their direct
> supervision, “when Dhruva [the then Pole‐star], was at his lowest
> culmination, and the Krittikâs [Pleiades] looked over his head [were on
> the same meridian but above] to watch the work of the Giants.” Thus, as
> the first Pyramids were built at the beginning of a Sidereal Year, under
> Dhruva (Alpha Polaris), it must have been over 31,000 years (31,105) ago.
> Bunsen was right in admitting for Egypt an antiquity of over 21,000 years,
> but this concession hardly exhausts truth and fact in this question. As
> Mr. Gerald Massey says:
> 
>     The stories told by Egyptian priests and others of time‐keeping in
>     Egypt are now beginning to look less like lies in the sight of all
>     who have escaped from biblical bondage. Inscriptions have lately
>     been found at Sakkarah, making mention of two Sothiac cycles ...
>     registered at that time, now some 6,000 years ago. Thus when
>     Herodotus was in Egypt, the Egyptians had—as now known—observed at
>     least five different Sothiac cycles of 1,461 years....
> 
>     The priests informed the Greek enquirer that time had been
>     reckoned by them for so long that the sun had twice risen where it
>     then set, and twice set where it then arose. This ... can only be
>     realized as a fact in nature by means of two cycles of Precession,
>     or a period of 51,736 years.(708)
> 
> Mor Isaac(709) shows the ancient Syrians defining their World of the
> “Rulers” and “Active Gods” in the same way as the Chaldeans. The lowest
> World was the Sublunary—our own—watched by the _Angels_ of the first or
> lower order; the one that came next in rank, was Mercury, ruled by the
> _Archangels_: then came Venus, whose Gods were the _Principalities_; the
> fourth was that of the Sun, the domain and region of the highest and
> mightiest Gods of our system, the solar Gods of all nations; the fifth was
> Mars, ruled by the _Virtues_; the sixth, that of Bel or Jupiter, was
> governed by the _Dominions_; the seventh, the World of Saturn, by the
> _Thrones_. These are the Worlds of Form. Above come the Four higher ones,
> making Seven again, since the Three _highest_ are “unmentionable and
> unpronounceable.” The eighth, composed of 1,122 stars, is the domain of
> the _Cherubs_; the ninth, belonging to the _walking_ and numberless stars
> on account of their distance, has the _Seraphs_; as to the tenth, Kircher,
> quoting Mor Isaac, says that it is composed “of invisible stars that could
> be taken, they said, for clouds, so massed are they in the zone that we
> call Via Straminis, the Milky Way”; and he hastens to explain that “these
> are the stars of Lucifer, engulfed with him in his terrible shipwreck.”
> That which comes after and beyond the ten Worlds (our Quaternary), or the
> Arûpa World, the Syrians could not tell. “All they knew was that it is
> there that begins the vast and incomprehensible Ocean of the Infinite, the
> abode of the True Divinity, without boundary or end.”
> 
> Champollion shows the same belief among the Egyptians. Hermes having
> spoken of the Father‐Mother and Son, whose Spirit—collectively the Divine
> Fiat—shapes the Universe, says: “Seven Agents [Media] were also formed, to
> contain the Material [or manifested] Worlds within their respective
> Circles, and the action of these Agents was named Destiny.” He further
> enumerates seven and ten and twelve orders, but it would take too long to
> detail them here.
> 
> As the _Rig Vidhâna_ together with the _Brahmânda Purâna_ and all such
> works, whether describing the magic efficacy of the Rig Vedic _Mantras_,
> or the future Kalpas, are declared by Dr. Weber and others to be modern
> compilations “belonging probably only to the time of the _Purânas_,” it is
> useless to refer the reader to their mystic explanations; and one may as
> well simply quote from the archaic books utterly unknown to the
> Orientalists. These works explain that which so puzzles the scholars,
> namely that the Saptarshis, the “Mind‐born Sons” of Brahmâ, are referred
> to in the _Shatapatha Brâhmana_ under one set of names; in the
> _Mahâbhârata_ under another set; and that the _Vâyu Purâna_ makes even
> _nine_ instead of _seven_ Rishis, by adding the names of Bhrigu and Daksha
> to the list. But the same occurs in every exoteric Scripture. The Secret
> Doctrine gives a long genealogy of Rishis, but separates them into many
> classes. Like the Gods of the Egyptians, who were divided into seven, and
> even twelve, Classes, so are the Indian Rishis in their Hierarchies. The
> first three Groups are the Divine, the Cosmical and the Sublunary. Then
> come the Solar Gods of our System, the Planetary, the Submundane, and the
> purely Human—the Heroes and the Mânushi.
> 
> At present, however, we are only concerned with the Pre‐cosmic, Divine
> Gods, the Prajâpatis, or the Seven Builders. This Group is found
> unmistakably in every Cosmogony. Owing to the loss of Egyptian archaic
> documents, since, according to M. Maspero, “the materials and historical
> data on hand to study the history of the religious evolution in Egypt are
> neither complete nor very often intelligible,” the ancient Hymns and
> inscriptions on the tombs must be appealed to, in order to have the
> statements brought forward from the Secret Doctrine partially and
> indirectly corroborated. One such shows that Osiris, like
> Brahmâ‐Prajâpati, Adam Kadmon, Ormazd, and so many other Logoi, was the
> chief and synthesis of the Group of “Creators” or Builders. Before Osiris
> became the “One” and the _Highest_ God of Egypt, he was worshipped at
> Abydos as the Head, or Leader, of the Heavenly Host of the Builders
> belonging to the higher of the three Orders. The Hymn engraved on the
> votive stele of a tomb from Abydos (3rd register) addresses Osiris thus:
> 
>     Salutations to thee, O Osiris, elder son of Seb; thou the greatest
>     over the six Gods issued from the Goddess Noo [Primordial Water],
>     thou the great favourite of thy father Ra; Father of Fathers, King
>     of Duration, Master in the Eternity ... who, as soon as these
>     issued from thy Mother’s Bosom, gathered all the Crowns and
>     attached the Uræus [serpent or _naja_](710) on thy head; multiform
>     God, _whose name is unknown_ and who has many names in towns and
>     provinces.
> 
> Coming out from the Primordial Water crowned with the Uræus, which is the
> serpent‐emblem of Cosmic Fire, and himself the _seventh_ over the six
> Primary Gods, issued from Father‐Mother, Noo and Noot, the Sky, who can
> Osiris be, but the chief Prajâpati, the chief Sephira, the chief
> Amshaspend, Ormazd! That this latter Solar and Cosmic God stood, in the
> beginning of religious evolution, in the same position as the Archangel,
> “whose name was secret,” is certain. This Archangel was Michael, the
> representative on earth of the _Hidden_ Jewish God; in short, it is his
> “Face” that is said to have gone before the Jews like a “Pillar of Fire.”
> Burnouf says: “The seven Amshaspends, who are most assuredly our
> Archangels, designate also the personifications of the Divine
> Virtues.”(711) And these Archangels, therefore, are as certainly the
> Saptarshis of the Hindus, though it is next to impossible to class each
> with its Pagan prototype and parallel, since, as in the case of Osiris,
> they have all so “many names in towns and provinces.” Some of the most
> important, however, will be shown in their order.
> 
> One thing is thus undeniably proven. The more we study their Hierarchies
> and find out their identity, the more proofs we acquire that there is not
> one of the past or present _personal_ Gods, known to us from the earliest
> days of history, that does not belong to the third stage of cosmic
> manifestation. In every religion we find the Concealed Deity forming the
> ground work; then the Ray therefrom, that falls into primordial Cosmic
> Matter, the _first_ manifestation; then the Androgyne result, the dual
> Male and Female abstract Force personified, the _second_ stage; this
> finally separates itself, in the _third_, into Seven Forces, called the
> Creative Powers by all the ancient religions, and the Virtues of God by
> the Christians. The later explanations and abstract metaphysical
> qualifications have not prevented the Roman and Greek Churches from
> worshipping these “Virtues” under the personifications and distinct names
> of the Seven Archangels. In the _Book of Druschim_,(712) in the _Talmud_,
> a distinction between these groups is given which is the correct
> Kabalistical explanation. It says:
> 
>     There are three Groups (or Orders) of Sephiroth. 1st. The
>     Sephiroth called the “Divine Attributes” [abstract]. 2nd. The
>     Physical or Sidereal Sephiroth [personal]—one group of _seven_,
>     the other of _ten_. 3rd. The metaphysical Sephiroth, or
>     periphrasis of Jehovah, who are the first three Sephiroth [Kether,
>     Chokmah and Binah], the rest of the seven being the (personal)
>     seven Spirits of the Presence [also of the planets].
> 
> The same division has to be applied to the primary, secondary and tertiary
> evolution of Gods in every Theogony, if one wishes to translate the
> meaning esoterically. We must not confuse the purely metaphysical
> personifications of the _abstract_ attributes of Deity, with their
> reflection—the Sidereal Gods. This reflection, however, is in reality the
> objective expression of the abstraction; _living_ Entities and the models
> formed on that divine Prototype. Moreover, the three metaphysical
> Sephiroth, or the “periphrasis of Jehovah,” are _not_ Jehovah. It is the
> latter himself, with the additional titles of Adonai, Elohim, Sabbaoth,
> and the numerous names lavished on him, who is the periphrasis of the
> Shaddai (שדי), the Omnipotent. The name is a circumlocution, indeed, a too
> abundant figure of Jewish rhetoric, and has always been denounced by the
> Occultists. To the Jewish Kabalists, and even the Christian Alchemists and
> Rosicrucians, Jehovah was a convenient _screen_, unified by the folding of
> its many panels, and adopted as a substitute; one name of an individual
> Sephira being as good as another name, for those who had the secret. The
> Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable, the Sidereal “Sum Total,” was invented for
> no other purpose than to mislead the profane and to symbolize life and
> generation.(713) The real secret and _unpronounceable_ Name, the “Word
> that is no word,” has to be sought in the seven names of the first Seven
> Emanations, or the “Sons of the Fire,” in the secret Scriptures of all the
> great nations, and even in the _Zohar_, the Kabalistic lore of the
> smallest of all of them, viz., the Jewish. This word, composed of seven
> letters in every tongue, is found embodied in the architectural remains of
> every great sacred building in the world; from the Cyclopean remains on
> Easter Island—part of a Continent buried under the seas nearer 4,000,000
> years ago(714) than 20,000—down to the earliest Egyptian pyramids.
> 
> We shall have to enter more fully into this subject later on, and to bring
> practical illustrations to prove the statements made in the text.
> 
> For the present it is sufficient to show, by a few instances, the truth of
> what has been asserted at the beginning of this work, namely, that no
> Cosmogony, the world over, with the sole exception of the Christian, has
> ever attributed to the One Highest Cause, the Universal Deific Principle,
> the immediate creation of our earth, or man, or anything connected with
> these. This statement holds as well for the Hebrew or Chaldean _Kabalah_
> as it does for _Genesis_, had the latter been ever thoroughly understood
> and, what is still more important, correctly translated.(715) Everywhere
> there is either a Logos—a “Light shining in Darkness,” truly—or the
> Architect of the Worlds is esoterically in the plural number. The Latin
> Church, paradoxical as ever, while applying the epithet of Creator to
> Jehovah alone, adopts a whole Kyriel of names for the _working_ Forces of
> the latter, names which betray the secret. For if the said Forces had
> nought to do with “Creation” so‐called, why call them Elohim (Alhim), a
> plural word; Divine Workmen and Energies (Ἐνέργειαι), incandescent
> celestial stones (_lapides igniti cœlorum_); and especially Supporters of
> the World (Κοσμοκράτορες), Governors or Rulers of the World (Rectores
> Mundi), Wheels of the World (Rotæ), Auphanim, Flames and Powers, Sons of
> God (B’ne Alhim), Vigilant Counsellors, etc.?
> 
> It is often asserted, and unjustly, as usual, that China, nearly as old a
> country as India, had no Cosmogony. It was unknown to Confucius, and the
> Buddhists extended their Cosmogony without introducing a Personal
> God,(716) it is complained. The _Yi‐King_, “the very essence of ancient
> thought and the combined work of the most venerated sages,” fails to show
> a distinct Cosmogony. Nevertheless, one existed, and a very distinct one.
> Only as Confucius did not admit of a future life(717) and the Chinese
> Buddhists reject the idea of _One_ Creator, accepting one Cause and its
> numberless effects, they are misunderstood by the believers in a Personal
> God. The “Great Extreme,” as the commencement of “changes”
> (transmigrations), is the shortest and, perhaps, the most suggestive of
> all Cosmogonies for those who, like the Confucianists, love virtue for its
> own sake and try to do good unselfishly without perpetually looking to
> reward and profit. The “Great Extreme” of Confucius produces “Two
> Figures.” These Two produce in their turn the “Four Images”; these again
> the “Eight Symbols.” It is complained that though the Confucianists see in
> them “heaven, earth and man in miniature,” we can see in them anything we
> like. No doubt, and so it is with regard to many symbols, especially those
> of the latest religions. But they who know something of Occult numerals,
> see in these “Figures” the symbol, however rude, of a harmonious
> progressive Evolution of Kosmos and its Beings, both Heavenly and
> Terrestrial. And any one who has studied the numerical evolution in the
> primeval Cosmogony of Pythagoras—a contemporary of Confucius—can never
> fail to find in his Triad, Tetraktys and Decad, emerging from the One and
> solitary Monad, the same idea. Confucius is laughed at by his Christian
> biographer for “talking of divination,” before and after this passage, and
> is represented as saying:
> 
>     The eight symbols determine good and ill fortune, and these lead
>     to great deeds. There are no imitable images greater than heaven
>     and earth. There are no changes greater than the four seasons
>     [meaning North, South, East and West, etc.]. There are no
>     suspended images brighter than the sun and moon. In preparing
>     things for use, there is none greater than the sage. In
>     determining good and ill‐luck there is nothing greater than the
>     _divining straws_ and the _tortoise_.(718)
> 
> Therefore, the “divining straws” and the “tortoise,” the “symbolic sets of
> lines,” and the great sage who looks at them as they become one and two,
> and two become four, and four become eight, and the other sets “three and
> six,” are laughed to scorn, only because his wise symbols are
> misunderstood.
> 
> So the author of the volume cited and his colleagues will no doubt scoff
> at the Stanzas given in our text, for they represent _precisely the same
> idea_. The old archaic map of Cosmogony is full of lines in the Confucian
> style, of concentric circles and dots. Yet all these represent the most
> abstract and philosophical conceptions of the Cosmogony of our Universe.
> At all events it may, perhaps, answer better to the requirements and the
> scientific purposes of our age, than the cosmogonical essays of St.
> Augustine and the Venerable Bede, though these were published over a
> millennium later than the Confucian.
> 
> Confucius, one of the greatest sages of the ancient world, believed in
> ancient magic, and practised it himself, “if we take for granted the
> statements of _Kià‐yü_” and “he praised it to the skies in the _Yi‐king_,”
> we are told by his reverend critic. Nevertheless, even in his age, 600
> B.C., Confucius and his school taught the sphericity of the earth and even
> the heliocentric system; while, at about thrice 600 years after the
> Chinese philosopher, the Popes of Rome threatened and even burnt
> “heretics” for asserting the same. He is laughed at for speaking of the
> “Sacred Tortoise.” No unprejudiced person can see any great difference
> between a Tortoise and a Lamb as candidates for sacredness, as both are
> symbols and no more. The Ox, the Eagle,(719) and the Lion, and
> occasionally the Dove are the “sacred animals” of the Western _Bible_; the
> first three are found grouped round the Evangelists; the fourth,
> associated with these, a human face, is a Seraph, _i.e._, a “fiery
> serpent,” the Gnostic Agathodæmon probably.
> 
> The choice is curious, and shows how paradoxical were the first Christians
> in their selections. For why should they have chosen these symbols of
> Egyptian Paganism, when the Eagle is never mentioned in the _New
> Testament_ save once, when Jesus refers to it as a _carrion_ eater,(720)
> and in the _Old Testament_ it is called _unclean_; when the Lion is made a
> point of comparison with Satan, both roaring for men to devour; and the
> Oxen are driven out of the Temple? On the other hand the Serpent, brought
> in as an exemplar of wisdom, is now regarded as the symbol of the Devil.
> The esoteric pearl of Christ’s religion, degraded into Christian theology,
> may indeed be said to have chosen a strange and unfitting _shell_ to be
> born in and evolved from.
> 
> As explained, the Sacred Animals and the Flames or Sparks, within the Holy
> Four, refer to the Prototypes of all that is found in the Universe in the
> Divine Thought, in the Root, which is the Perfect Cube, or the Foundation
> of the Kosmos, collectively and individually. They have all an occult
> reference to primordial Cosmic Forms, and the first concretions, work, and
> evolution of Kosmos.
> 
> In the earliest Hindû exoteric Cosmogonies, it is not even the Demiurge
> who creates. For it is said in one of the _Purânas_:
> 
>     The great Architect of the World gives the first impulse to the
>     rotatory motion of our planetary system by stepping in turn over
>     each planet and body.
> 
> It is this action “that causes each sphere to turn around itself, and all
> around the Sun.” After which action, “it is the Brahmândika,” the Solar
> and Lunar Pitris, the Dhyân Chohans, “who take charge of their respective
> spheres [earths and planets], to the end of the Kalpa.” The Creators are
> the Rishis, most of whom are credited with the authorship of the Mantras,
> or Hymns, of the _Rig Veda_. They are sometimes _seven_, sometimes _ten_,
> when they become Prajâpati, the Lord of Beings; then they rebecome the
> _seven_ and the _fourteen_ Manus, as the representatives of the seven and
> fourteen Cycles of Existence, or Days of Brahmâ, thus answering to the
> seven Æons, when, at the end of the first stage of Evolution, they are
> transformed into the seven stellar Rishis, the Saptarshis; while their
> _human_ Doubles appear as Heroes, Kings and Sages on this earth.
> 
> The Esoteric Doctrine of the East having thus furnished and struck the
> key‐note, which, under its allegorical garb, is, as may be seen, as
> scientific as it is philosophical and poetical, every nation has followed
> its lead. It is from the exoteric religions that we have to dig out the
> root‐idea before we turn to esoteric truths, lest the latter should be
> rejected. Furthermore, every symbol, in _every_ national religion, may be
> read esoterically; and the proof of its being correctly read when
> transliterated into its corresponding numerals and geometrical forms, may
> be obtained from the extraordinary agreement of all glyphs and symbols,
> however much they may externally vary among themselves. For in the origin
> those symbols were all identical. Take, for instance, the opening
> sentences in various Cosmogonies; in every case it is a Circle, an Egg, or
> a Head. Darkness is always associated with this first symbol and surrounds
> it, as is shown in the Hindû, the Egyptian, the Chaldeo‐Hebrew and even
> the Scandinavian systems. Hence black ravens, black doves, black waters
> and even black flames; the seventh tongue of Agni, the Fire‐God being
> called Kâlî, the “Black,” since it was a black flickering flame. Two
> “black” doves flew from Egypt and, settling on the oaks of Dodona, gave
> their names to the Grecian Gods. Noah sends out a “black” raven after the
> Deluge, which is a symbol for the Cosmic Pralaya, after which began the
> real creation or evolution of our Earth and Humanity. Odin’s “black”
> ravens fluttered round the Goddess Saga and “whispered to her of the past
> and of the future.” Now what is the inner meaning of all those black
> birds? It is that they are all connected with the primeval Wisdom, which
> flows out of the pre‐cosmic Source of All, symbolized by the Head, the
> Circle or the Egg; and they all have an identical meaning and relate to
> the primordial Archetypal Man, Adam Kadmon, the Creative Origin of all
> things, which is composed of the Host of Cosmic Powers—the Creative Dhyân
> Chohans, beyond which all is Darkness.
> 
> Let us enquire of the wisdom of the Kabalah, even veiled and distorted as
> it now is, to explain in its numerical language an approximate meaning, at
> least of the word “raven.” This is its number value as given in the
> _Source of Measures_:
> 
>     The term Raven is used but once, and taken as Eth‐h’ orebv
>     את־הערב=678, or 113 × 6; while the Dove is mentioned five times.
>     Its value is 71, and 71 × 5=355. Six diameters, or the Raven,
>     crossing, would divide the circumference of a circle of 355 into
>     12 parts or compartments; and 355 subdivided for each unit by 6,
>     would equal 213‐0, or the Head [“beginning”] in the first verse of
>     _Genesis_. This divided, or subdivided, after the same fashion, by
>     2, or the 355 by 12, would give 213‐2, or the word B’râsh, ב־ראש,
>     or the first word of _Genesis_, with its prepositional prefix,
>     signifying the same concreted general form, astronomically, with
>     the one here intended.
> 
> Now the secret reading of the first verse in _Genesis_ being: “In Râsh
> (B’râsh) or Head, developed Gods, the Heavens and the Earth”—it is easy to
> comprehend the esoteric meaning of the Raven, once that the like meaning
> of the Flood, or Noah’s Deluge, is ascertained. Whatever the many other
> meanings of this emblematical allegory may be, its _chief_ meaning is that
> of a new Cycle and a new Round—our Fourth Round.(721) The Raven, or the
> Eth‐h’ orebv, yields the same numerical value as the Head, and returned
> not to the Ark, while the Dove returned, carrying the olive‐branch; when
> Noah, the new man of the new Race—whose prototype is Vaivasvata Manu,
> prepared to leave the Ark, the Womb, or Argha, of terrestrial Nature, he
> is the symbol of the purely spiritual, sexless and androgyne man of the
> first three Races, who vanished from Earth for ever. Numerically, in the
> _Kabalah_, Jehovah, Adam, Noah, are one. At best, then, it is Deity
> descending on Ararat and later, on Sinai, to incarnate henceforth in man,
> his _image_, through the natural process, the mother’s womb, whose symbols
> are the Ark, the Mount (Sinai), etc., in _Genesis_. The Jewish allegory is
> astronomical and physiological, rather than anthropomorphic.
> 
> And here lies the abyss between the Âryan and Semitic systems, though both
> are built on the same foundation. As shown by an expounder of the
> _Kabalah_:
> 
>     The basic idea underlying the philosophy of the Hebrews was that
>     God contained all things within himself and that man was _his
>     image_; man, including woman [as androgynes; and that] geometry
>     (and numbers and measures applicable to astronomy) are contained
>     in the terms _man_ and _woman_; and the apparent incongruity of
>     such a mode was eliminated by showing the connection of man and
>     woman with a particular system of numbers and measures and
>     geometry, by the parturient time‐periods, which furnished the
>     connecting link between the terms used and the facts shown, and
>     perfected the mode used.(722)
> 
> It is argued that, the primal cause being absolutely incognizable, “the
> symbol of its first _comprehensible manifestation_ was the conception of a
> circle with its diameter line, so as at once to carry the idea of
> geometry, phallicism, and astronomy”; and this was finally applied to the
> “signification of simply human generative organs.” Hence the whole cycle
> of events from Adam and the Patriarchs down to Noah is made to apply to
> phallic and astronomical uses, the one regulating the other, as the lunar
> periods, for instance. Hence, too, the _Genesis_ of the Hebrews begins
> after their coming out of the Ark, and the end of the Flood, _i.e._, at
> the Fourth Race. With the Aryan people it is different.
> 
> Eastern Esotericism has never degraded the One Infinite Deity, the
> Container of all things, to such uses; and this is shown by the absence of
> Brahmâ from the _Rig Veda_ and the modest positions occupied therein by
> Rudra and Vishnu, who became the powerful and great Gods, the “Infinites”
> of the exoteric creeds, ages later. But even they, “Creators” as they all
> three maybe, are not the direct “Creators” and “forefathers of men.” The
> latter are shown occupying a still lower scale, and are called the
> Prajâpatis, the Pitris, our Lunar Ancestors, etc., but never the One
> Infinite God. Esoteric Philosophy shows only _physical_ man as created in
> the _image_ of the Deity; which Deity, however, is only the “_minor
> Gods_.” It is the HIGHER‐SELF, the real EGO, who alone is divine and GOD.
> 
> Section XIII. The Seven Creations.
> 
>     There was neither day nor night, nor sky nor earth, nor darkness
>     nor light, nor any other thing save only One, unapprehensive by
>     intellect, or That which is Brahma and Pums (Spirit) and Pradhâna
>     ([crude] Matter).(723)
> 
>     VISHNU PURÂNA (I. ii.)
> 
> In _Vishnu Purâna_, Parâshara says to Maitreya, his pupil:
> 
>     I have thus explained to you, excellent Muni, six creations ...
>     the creation of the Arvâksrotas beings was the seventh, and was
>     that of man.(724)
> 
> Then he proceeds to speak of two additional and very mysterious creations,
> variously interpreted by the commentators.
> 
> Origen, commenting upon the books written by Celsus, his Gnostic
> opponent—books which were all destroyed by the prudent Church
> Fathers—evidently answers the objections of his contradictor and reveals
> his system at the same time. This was clearly _septenary_. But the
> theogony of Celsus, the genesis of the stars or planets, and of sound and
> colour, found as an answer satire, and no more. Celsus, you see, “desiring
> to exhibit his learning,” speaks of a ladder of creation with _seven
> gates_, and on the top of it the eighth, ever closed. The mysteries of the
> Persian Mithras are explained and “musical reasons, moreover, are added.”
> And to these again he strives “to add a second explanation connected also
> with musical considerations,”(725) that is to say with the seven notes of
> the scale, the seven Spirits of the Stars, etc.
> 
> Valentinus expatiates upon the power of the great Seven, who were summoned
> to bring forth this universe after Ar(r)hetos, or the Ineffable, whose
> name is composed of seven letters, had represented the first Hebdomad. The
> name Ar(r)hetos indicates the sevenfold nature of the One, the Logos. “The
> Goddess Rhea,” says Proclus, “is a Monad, Duad, and Heptad,” comprehending
> in herself all the Titanidæ, “who are seven.”(726)
> 
> The Seven Creations are found in almost every _Purâna_. They are all
> preceded by what Wilson translates as the “Indiscrete Principle,” Absolute
> Spirit, independent of any relation with objects of sense.
> 
> They are: (1) Mahattattva, the Universal Soul, Infinite Intellect, or
> Divine Mind; (2) Tanmâtras, Bhûta or Bhûtasarga, Elemental Creation the
> first differentiation of Universal Indiscrete Substance; (3) Indriya or
> Aindriyaka, Organic Evolution. “These three were the Prâkrita Creations,
> the _developments of indiscrete nature_, preceded by the Indiscrete
> Principle”; (4) Mukhya, “the Fundamental Creation (of perceptible things)
> was that of inanimate bodies”;(727) (5) Tairyagyonya or Tiryaksrotas, was
> that of animals; (6) Ûrdhvasrotas, or that of divinities(?);(728) (7)
> Arvâksrotas, was that of man.(729)
> 
> This is the order given in the _exoteric_ texts. According to esoteric
> teaching there are seven Primary, and seven Secondary “Creations”; the
> former being the Forces _self‐evolving_ from the one _causeless_ FORCE;
> the latter showing the manifested Universe emanating from the already
> differentiated _divine_ Elements.
> 
> Esoterically, as well as exoterically, all the above enumerated Creations
> stand for the seven periods of Evolution, whether after an Age or a Day of
> Brahmâ. This is the teaching _par excellence_ of Occult Philosophy, which,
> however, never uses the term “creation,” nor even that of evolution, with
> regard to _Primary_ “Creation”; but calls all such Forces the “_aspects_
> of the Causeless Force.” In the _Bible_, the seven periods are dwarfed
> into the six Days of Creation and the seventh Day of Rest, and the
> Westerns adhere to the letter. In the Hindû Philosophy, when the active
> Creator has produced the World of Gods, the _Germs_ of all the
> undifferentiated Elements, and the Rudiments of future Senses—the World of
> Noumena, in short—the Universe remains unaltered for a Day of Brahmâ, a
> period of 4,320,000,000 years. This is the _seventh_ passive Period, or
> the “Sabbath” of Eastern Philosophy, following six periods of active
> evolution. In the _Shatapatha Brâhmana_, Brahma (neuter), the Absolute
> Cause of all Causes, _radiates_ the Gods. Having radiated the Gods,
> through its inherent nature, the work is interrupted. In the First Book of
> _Manu_ it is said:
> 
>     At the expiration of each Night (Pralaya), Brahma, having been
>     asleep, awakes, and, _through the sole energy of the motion_,
>     causes to emanate from _itself_ the Spirit [or mind], which in its
>     essence is, and yet is not.
> 
> In the _Sepher Yetzirah_, the Kabalistic “Book of Creation,” the author
> has evidently reëchoed the words of Manu. In it the Divine Substance is
> represented as having alone existed from the eternity, boundless and
> absolute; and as having emitted from itself the Spirit.
> 
>     One is the Spirit of the living God, blessed be his Name, who
>     liveth for ever! Voice, Spirit, and Word, this is the Holy
>     Spirit.(730)
> 
> And this is the Kabalistic abstract Trinity, so unceremoniously
> anthropomorphized by the Fathers. From this triple One emanated the whole
> Kosmos. First from One emanated number Two, or Air, the creative element;
> and then number Three, Water, proceeded from the Air; Ether or Fire
> completes the mystic Four, the Arba‐il. In the Eastern doctrine, Fire is
> the first Element—Ether, synthesizing the whole, since it contains all of
> them.
> 
> In the _Vishnu Purâna_, the whole seven periods are given; and the
> progressive Evolution of the “Spirit‐Soul,” and of the seven Forms of
> Matter, or Principles, is shown. It is impossible to enumerate them in
> this work. The reader is asked to peruse one of the _Purânas_.
> 
>     R. Yehudah began, it is written: “Elohim said: Let there be a
>     firmament, in the midst of waters.” Come, see! At the time that
>     the Holy ... created the world, He [they] created 7 heavens Above.
>     He created 7 earths Below, 7 seas, 7 days, 7 rivers, 7 weeks, 7
>     years, 7 times, and 7,000 years that the world has been, ... the
>     seventh of all (the millennium).... So here are 7 earths Below,
>     they are all inhabited except those which are above, and those
>     which are below. And ... between each earth, a heaven (firmament)
>     is spread out between each other.... And there are in them [these
>     earths] creatures who look different one from the other; ... but
>     if you object and say that all the children of the world came out
>     from Adam, it is not so.... And the lower earths, where do they
>     come from? They are from _the chain of the earth_, and from the
>     Heaven above.(731)
> 
> Irenæus also is our witness—and a very unwilling one—that the Gnostics
> taught the same system, veiling very carefully the true esoteric meaning.
> This “veiling,” however, is identical with that of the _Vishnu Purâna_ and
> others. Thus Irenæus writes of the Marcosians:
> 
>     They maintain that first of all the four elements, fire, water,
>     earth and air, were produced after the image of the primary Tetrad
>     above, and that then if we add their operations, namely, heat,
>     cold, moisture and dryness, an exact likeness of the Ogdoad is
>     presented.(732)
> 
> Only this “likeness” and the Ogdoad itself is a blind, just as in the
> seven creations of the _Vishnu Purâna_, to which two more are added, of
> which the eighth, termed Anugraha, “possesses both the qualities of
> goodness and darkness,” a Sânkhyan more than a Purânic idea. For Irenæus
> says again, that:
> 
>     They [the Gnostics] had a like eighth creation which was good and
>     bad, divine and human. They affirm that man was formed on the
>     _eighth day_. Sometimes they affirm that he was made on the
>     _sixth_ day, and at others on the eighth; unless, perchance, they
>     mean that his earthly part was formed on the sixth day and his
>     fleshly part [?] on the eighth day; these two being distinguished
>     by them.(733)
> 
> They were so “distinguished,” but not as Irenæus gives it. The Gnostics
> had a superior, and an inferior Hebdomad in Heaven; and a third
> terrestrial Hebdomad, on the plane of matter. Iaô, the Mystery God and the
> Regent of the Moon, as given in Origen’s Chart, was the chief of these
> superior “Seven Heavens,”(734) hence identical with the chief of the Lunar
> Pitris, that name being given by them to the Lunar Dhyân Chohans. “They
> affirm that these seven heavens are intelligent, and _speak of them as
> being angels_,” writes the same Irenæus; and adds that on this account
> they termed Iaô Hebdomas, while his mother was called Ogdoas, because, as
> he explains, “she preserved the number of _the first begotten and primary
> Ogdoad of the Plerôma_.”(735)
> 
> This “first begotten Ogdoad” was in Theogony the Second Logos, the
> Manifested, because it was born of the Seven‐fold First Logos, hence it is
> the eighth on this manifested plane; and in Astrolatry, it was the Sun,
> Mârttânda, the eighth Son of Aditi, whom she rejects while preserving her
> Seven Sons, _the planets_. For the Ancients have never regarded the Sun as
> a planet, but as _a central and fixed Star_. This, then, is the second
> Hebdomad born of the Seven‐rayed One, Agni, the Sun and what not, only not
> the seven planets, which are Sûrya’s _Brothers_, not his _Sons_. With the
> Gnostics, these Astral Gods were the Sons of Ialdabaoth(736) (from _ilda_,
> child, and _baoth_ egg), the Son of Sophia Achamôth, the daughter of
> Sophia or Wisdom, whose region is the Plerôma. Ialdabaoth produces from
> himself these six stellar Spirits: Iaô (Jehovah), Sabaôth, Adoneus,
> Eloæus, Oreus, Astaphæus,(737) and it is they who are the second, or
> inferior Hebdomad. As to the third, it is composed of the seven primeval
> men, the shadows of the Lunar Gods, projected by the first Hebdomad. In
> this the Gnostics did not, as seen, differ much from the Esoteric
> Doctrine, except that they veiled it. As to the charge made by Irenæus,
> who was evidently ignorant of the true tenets of the “Heretics,” with
> regard to man being created on the _sixth_ day, and man being created on
> the _eighth_, this relates to the mysteries of the _inner_ man. It will
> become comprehensible to the reader only after he has read Volume II, and
> understood well the Anthropogenesis of the Esoteric Doctrine.
> 
> Ialdabaoth is a copy of Manu, who boasts:
> 
>     O best of twice‐born men! Know that I (Manu) am he, the creator of
>     all this world, whom that male Virâj ... spontaneously
>     produced.(738)
> 
> He first creates the ten Lords of Being, the Prajâpatis, who, as verse 36
> tells us, “produce seven other Manus.” Ialdabaoth boasts likewise: “I am
> Father and God, and there is no one above me,” he exclaims. For which his
> Mother coolly puts him down by saying: “Do not lie, Ialdabaoth, for the
> Father of all, the _First_ Man (Anthrôpos) is above thee, and so is
> Anthrôpos, the Son of Anthrôpos.”(739) This is a good proof that there
> were three Logoi—besides the Seven born of the First—one of these being
> the Solar Logos. And, again, who was that Anthrôpos himself, so much
> higher than Ialdabaoth? The Gnostic records alone can solve this riddle.
> In _Pistis‐Sophia_ the four‐vowelled name Ieou is generally accompanied by
> the epithet of “the Primal, or First Man.” This shows again that the
> Gnôsis was but an echo of our Archaic Doctrine. The names answering to
> Parabrahman, to Brahmâ, and Manu, the first _thinking_ Man, are composed
> of one‐vowelled, three‐vowelled and seven‐vowelled sounds. Marcus, whose
> philosophy was certainly more Pythagorean than anything else, speaks of a
> revelation to him of the seven Heavens sounding each one vowel, as they
> pronounced the seven names of the seven Angelic Hierarchies.
> 
> When Spirit has permeated every minutest atom of the Seven Principles of
> Kosmos, then the _Secondary_ Creation, after the above‐mentioned period of
> rest, begins.
> 
> “The Creators [Elohim] outline in the _second_ ‘Hour’ the shape of man,”
> says Rabbi Simeon in _The Nuchthemeron of the Hebrews_. “There are twelve
> hours in the day,” says the _Mishna_, “and it is during these that
> creation is accomplished.” The “twelve hours of the day” are again the
> dwarfed copy, the faint, yet faithful, echo of primitive Wisdom. They are
> like the 12,000 Divine Years of the Gods, a cyclic blind. Every Day of
> Brahmâ has 14 Manus, which the Hebrew Kabalists, following, however, in
> this the Chaldeans, have disguised into 12 “Hours.”(740) The
> _Nuchthemeron_ of Apollonius of Tyana is the same thing. “The Dodecahedron
> lies concealed in the perfect Cube,” say the Kabalists. The mystic meaning
> of this is, that the twelve great transformations of Spirit into
> Matter—the 12,000 Divine Years—take place during the four great Ages, or
> the first Mahâyuga. Beginning with the metaphysical and the supra‐human,
> it ends in the physical and purely human natures of Kosmos and Man.
> Eastern Philosophy can give the number of mortal years that run along the
> line of spiritual and physical evolutions of the seen and the unseen, if
> Western Science fails to do so.
> 
> Primary Creation is called the Creation of Light (Spirit); and the
> Secondary, that of Darkness (Matter).(741) Both are found in
> _Genesis_.(742) The first is the emanation of self‐born Gods (Elohim); the
> second of physical Nature.
> 
> This is why it is said in the _Zohar_:
> 
>     Oh, companions, companions, man as emanation was both man and
>     woman; as well on the side of the Father as on the side of the
>     Mother. And this is the sense of the words: And Elohim spake: “Let
>     there be Light and it was Light!” ... And this is the “two‐fold
>     Man”!
> 
> Light, however, on our plane, is Darkness in the higher spheres.
> 
> “Man and woman ... on the side of the FATHER” (Spirit) refers to Primary
> Creation; and on the side of the Mother (Matter), to the Secondary. The
> two‐fold Man is Adam Kadmon, the male and female abstract prototype and
> the differentiated Elohim. Man proceeds from the Dhyân Chohan, and is a
> “Fallen Angel,” a God in exile, as will be shown.
> 
> In India these creations were described as follows:(743)
> 
> (I) _The First Creation_: Mahattattva Creation, so‐called because it was
> the primordial self‐evolution of that which had to become Mahat, the
> “Divine Mind, conscious and intelligent”; esoterically, the “Spirit of the
> Universal Soul.”
> 
>     Worthiest of ascetics, through its potency (_the potency of that
>     cause_), every _produced_ cause comes by its proper nature.
> 
> And again:
> 
>     Seeing that the potencies of all beings are understood _only_
>     through the knowledge of That (Brahma), which is beyond reasoning,
>     creation, and the like, such potencies are referable to Brahma.
> 
> THAT, then precedes the manifestation. “The first was Mahat,” says _Linga
> Purâna_; for the One (the That) is neither _first_ nor _last_, but _all_.
> Exoterically, however, this manifestation is the _work_ of the “Supreme
> One”—a natural _effect_, rather, of an Eternal Cause; or, as the
> Commentator says, it might have been understood to mean that Brahmâ was
> then _created_ (?), being identified with Mahat, active intelligence, or
> the operating will of the Supreme. Esoteric Philosophy renders it the
> “operating _Law_.”
> 
> It is on the right comprehension of this tenet in the _Brâhmanas_ and
> _Purânas_ that hangs, we believe, the apple of discord between the three
> Vedântin Sects: the Advaita, Dvaita, and the Vishishthâdvaita. The first
> argues rightly that Parabrahman, having no relation, as the absolute ALL,
> to the manifested World, the Infinite having no connection with the
> Finite, can neither _will_ nor _create_; that, therefore, Brahmâ, Mahat,
> Îshvara, or whatever name the Creative Power may be known by, Creative
> Gods and all, are simply an illusive aspect of Parabrahman in the
> conception of the conceivers; while the other sects identify the
> Impersonal Cause with the Creator, or Îshvara.
> 
> Mahat, or Mahâ‐Buddhi, is, with the Vaishnavas, however, Divine Mind, _in
> active operation_, or, as Anaxagoras has it, “an ordering and disposing
> Mind, which was the cause of all things”—Νοῦς ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων
> ἀίτιος.
> 
> Wilson saw at a glance the suggestive connection between Mahat and the
> Phœnician Môt, or Mut, who was female with the Egyptians, the Goddess
> Moot, the Mother, “which, like Mahat,” he says, “was the first product of
> the mixture(?) of Spirit and Matter, and the first rudiment of Creation.”
> “Ex connexione autem ejus Spiritus prodidit Môt.... Hinc ... seminium
> omnis creaturæ et omnium rerum creatio,” says Brucker,(744) giving it a
> still more materialistic and anthropomorphic colouring.
> 
> Nevertheless, the esoteric sense of the doctrine is seen, through every
> exoteric sentence, on the very face of the old Sanskrit texts that treat
> of primordial Creation.
> 
>     The Supreme Soul, the _All‐permeant_ (Sarvaga) Substance of the
>     World, having entered [been drawn] into Matter [Prakriti] and
>     Spirit [Purusha], _agitated_ the _mutable and the immutable
>     principles_, the season of Creation [Manvantara] being arrived.
> 
> The Nous of the Greeks, which is (spiritual or divine) Mind, or Mens,
> Mahat, operates upon Matter in the same way; it “enters into” and
> “_agitates_” it:
> 
>     Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,
>     Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.
> 
> In the Phœnician Cosmogony also, “Spirit mixing with its own principles
> gives rise to creation”;(745) the Orphic Triad shows an identical
> doctrine; for there Phanes, or Erôs, Chaos, containing crude
> _undifferentiated_ Cosmic Matter, and Chronos, Time, are the three co‐
> operating principles, emanating from the Concealed and Unknowable Point,
> which produce the work of “Creation.” And they are the Hindû Purusha
> (Phanes), Pradhâna (Chaos) and Kâla (Chronos). The good Professor Wilson
> does not like the idea, as no Christian clergyman, however liberal, would.
> He remarks that: “the _mixture_ [of the Supreme Spirit or Soul with its
> own principles] _is not mechanical_; it is _an influence or effect exerted
> upon intermediate agents_ which produce effects.” The sentence in _Vishnu
> Purâna_, “as fragrance affects the mind from its proximity merely, _and
> not from any immediate operation upon mind itself_, so the Supreme
> influenced the elements of creation,” the reverend and erudite Sanskritist
> correctly explains by: “as perfumes do not delight the mind by actual
> contact, but by the impression they make upon the sense of smelling, which
> communicates it to the mind”; adding, “the entrance of the Supreme ...
> into Spirit, as well as Matter, _is less intelligible_ than the view
> elsewhere taken of it, as the _infusion_ of Spirit, identified with the
> Supreme, into Prakriti or Matter alone.” He prefers the verse in _Pâdma
> Purâna_: “He who is called the _male_ (spirit) of Prakriti ... that same
> divine Vishnu entered into Prakriti.” This view is certainly more akin to
> the plastic character of certain verses in the _Bible_ concerning the
> Patriarchs, such as Lot and even Adam,(746) and others of a still more
> anthropomorphic nature. But it is just that which led Humanity to
> _Phallicism_; the Christian religion being honeycombed with it, from the
> first chapter of _Genesis_ down to the _Revelation_.
> 
> The Esoteric Doctrine teaches that the Dhyân Chohans are the collective
> aggregate of Divine Intelligence or Primordial Mind, and that the first
> Manus, the seven “mind‐born” Spiritual Intelligences, are identical with
> the former. Hence the Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, the “_Golden Dragon in whom are the
> Seven_,” of Stanza III, is the Primordial Logos, or Brahmâ, the first
> manifested Creative Power; and the Dhyânic Energies are the Manus, or Manu
> Svâyambhuva _collectively_. The direct connection, moreover, between the
> Manus and Mahat is easy to see. Manu is from the root _man_, to think; and
> thinking proceeds from the mind. It is, in Cosmogony, the Pre‐nebular
> Period.
> 
> (II) _The Second Creation_, Bhûta, was of the Rudimental Principles or
> Tanmâtras; thence termed the Elemental Creation or Bhûtasarga. It is the
> period of the first breath of the differentiation of the Pre‐cosmic
> Elements, or Matter. Bhûtâdi means the “origin of the Elements,” and
> precedes Bhûtasarga, the “creation,” or differentiation, of those Elements
> in Primordial Âkâsha, Chaos or Vacuity.(747) In the _Vishnu Purâna_ it is
> said to proceed along, and belong to, the triple aspect of Ahankâra,
> translated Egotism, but meaning rather that untranslatable term “I‐am‐
> ness,” that which first issues from Mahat, or Divine Mind; the first
> shadowy outline of Self‐hood, for “pure” Ahankâra becomes “passionate” and
> finally “rudimental” or initial: it is “the origin of conscious as of all
> _unconscious_ being,” though the Esoteric school rejects the idea of
> anything being “unconscious,” save on our plane of illusion and ignorance.
> At this stage of the Second Creation, the Second Hierarchy of the Manus
> appear, the Dhyân Chohans or Devas, who are the origin of Form (Rûpa), the
> Chitrashikhandinas, “Bright‐crested,” or Rikshas; those Rishis who have
> become the informing Souls of the Seven Stars (of the Great Bear).(748) In
> astronomical and cosmogonical language, this Creation relates to the Fire‐
> Mist Period, the first stage of Cosmic Life, after its Chaotic state,(749)
> when Atoms issue from Laya.
> 
> (III) _The Third Creation_: the Third or Indriya Creation was the modified
> form of Ahankâra, the conception of “I” (from Aham, “I”), termed the
> Organic Creation, or Creation of the Senses, Aindriyaka. “These three were
> the Prâkrita Creation, the [discrete] developments of indiscrete nature
> preceded by the indiscrete principle.” “Preceded by,” ought to be replaced
> here with “beginning with Buddhi”; for the latter is neither a discrete
> nor an indiscrete quantity, but partakes of the nature of both, in man as
> in Kosmos. A unit or human Monad on the plane of illusion, when once freed
> from the three forms of Ahankâra and liberated from its terrestrial Manas,
> Buddhi indeed becomes a continued quantity, both in duration and
> extension, for it is eternal and immortal. Earlier it is stated, that the
> Third Creation “abounding with the quality of goodness,” is termed
> Ûrdhvasrotas; and a page or two further the Ûrdhvasrotas Creation is
> referred to as “the sixth creation ... or that of the divinities.” This
> shows plainly that earlier as well as later Manvantaras have been
> purposely confused, to prevent the profane from perceiving the truth. This
> is called “incongruity” and “contradictions” by the Orientalists. “The
> three creations beginning with Intelligence are elemental, but the six
> creations which proceed from the series of which Intellect is the first,
> are the work of Brahmâ.”(750) Here “creations” mean everywhere _stages of
> evolution_. Mahat, “Intellect” or Mind, which corresponds with Manas, the
> former being on the cosmic, and the latter on the human plane, stands
> here, too, lower than Buddhi or supra‐divine Intelligence. Therefore, when
> we read in _Linga Purâna_ that “the first Creation was that of Mahat,
> Intellect being the first in manifestation,” we must refer that
> (specified) creation to the first evolution of our System or even our
> Earth, none of the preceding ones being discussed in the _Purânas_, but
> only occasionally hinted at.
> 
> This Creation of the first Immortals, or Devasarga, is the last of the
> series, and has a universal meaning; it refers, namely, to Evolution in
> general, and not specifically to our Manvantara, which begins with the
> same over and over again, thus showing that it refers to several distinct
> Kalpas. For it is said “at the close of the past [Pâdma] Kalpa the divine
> Brahmâ awoke from his night of sleep and beheld the Universe void.” Then
> Brahmâ is shown going once more over the “Seven Creations,” in the
> secondary stage of evolution, repeating the first three on the objective
> plane.
> 
> (IV) _The Fourth Creation_: the Mukhya or Primary, as it begins the series
> of four. Neither the term “inanimate” bodies nor “immovable things,” as
> translated by Wilson, gives a correct idea of the Sanskrit words used.
> Esoteric Philosophy is not alone in rejecting the idea of any atom being
> “inorganic,” for it is found also in orthodox Hindûism. Moreover, Wilson
> himself says: “All the Hindû systems consider vegetable bodies as endowed
> with life.”(751) Charâchara, or the synonymous sthâvara and jangama, is,
> therefore, inaccurately rendered by “animate and inanimate,” “sentient
> beings” and “unconscious,” or “conscious and unconscious beings,” etc.
> “Locomotive and fixed” would be better, “since trees are considered to
> possess souls.” The Mukhya is the “creation,” or rather organic evolution,
> of the vegetable kingdom. In this Secondary Period, the three degrees of
> the elemental or rudimental kingdoms are evolved in this World,
> corresponding, _inversely_ in order, to the three Prâkritic Creations,
> during the Primary Period of Brahmâ’s activity. As in that Period, in the
> words of _Vishnu Purâna_, “the first creation was that of Mahat or
> Intellect.... The second was that of the Rudimental Principles
> (Tanmâtras).... The third was ... the creation of the senses
> (Aindriyaka)”; so in this one, the order of the Elemental Forces stands
> thus: (1) the _nascent_ Centres of Force, intellectual and physical; (2)
> the Rudimentary Principles, _nerve force_, so to say; and (3) nascent
> Apperception, which is the Mahat of the lower kingdoms, and is especially
> developed in the third order of Elementals; these are succeeded by the
> objective kingdom of minerals, in which this “apperception” is entirely
> latent, to re‐develop only in the plants. The Mukhya Creation, then, is
> the middle point between the three lower and the three higher kingdoms,
> which represent the seven esoteric kingdoms of Kosmos, and of Earth.
> 
> (V) _The Fifth Creation_: the Tiryaksrotas or Tairyagyonya Creation,(752)
> that of the “(sacred) animals,” corresponding on Earth only to the dumb
> animal creation. That which is meant by “animals,” in the Primary
> Creation, is the germ of awakening consciousness, or of “apperception,”
> that which is faintly traceable in some sensitive plants on Earth and more
> distinctly in the protistic Monera.(753) On our Globe, during the First
> Round, animal “creation” precedes that of man, while the mammalian animals
> evolve from man in our Fourth Round, on the physical plane. In the First
> Round, the animal atoms are drawn into a cohesion of human physical form;
> while in the Fourth, the reverse occurs according to magnetic conditions
> developed during life. And this is “metempsychosis.”(754) This fifth Stage
> of Evolution, called exoterically “Creation,” may be viewed in both the
> Primary and Secondary Periods, one as the spiritual and cosmic, the other
> as the material and terrestrial. It is archebiosis, or life‐origination;
> “origination,” so far, of course, as the _manifestation_ of life on all
> the seven planes is concerned. It is at this period of evolution that the
> absolutely eternal universal motion, or vibration, that which is called in
> Esoteric language the “Great Breath,” differentiates into the primordial,
> first manifested Atom. More and more, as chemical and physical sciences
> progress, does this Occult axiom find its corroboration in the world of
> knowledge; the scientific hypothesis, that even the simplest elements of
> matter are identical in their nature, and differ from each other only in
> consequence of the various distributions of atoms in the molecule or speck
> of substance, or of the modes of its atomic vibration, gains more ground
> every day.
> 
> Thus, as the differentiation of the primordial germ of life has to precede
> the evolution of the Dhyân Chohan of the _Third_ Group or Hierarchy of
> Being in Primary Creation, before those Gods can become embodied in their
> first ethereal form (rûpa), so animal creation has for the same reason to
> _precede_ “divine man” on Earth. And this is why we find in the _Purânas_,
> “the fifth, the Tairyagyonya Creation, was that of animals.”
> 
> (VI) _The Sixth Creation_: the Ûrdhvasrotas Creation, or that of
> Divinities. But these Divinities are simply the Prototypes of the First
> Race, the Fathers of their “mind‐born” progeny with the “soft bones.” It
> is these who became the Evolvers of the “Sweat‐born”—an expression
> explained in Volume II.
> 
> “Created beings,” explains the _Vishnu Purâna_, “although they are
> destroyed [in their individual forms] at the periods of dissolution, yet
> being affected by the good or evil acts of _former existences_, are never
> exempted from their consequences. And when Brahmâ produces the world anew,
> they are the progeny of his will.”
> 
> “_Collecting his mind into itself_ [yoga‐willing], Brahmâ creates the four
> Orders of Beings, termed Gods, Demons, Progenitors, and Men”; Progenitors
> here meaning the Prototypes and Evolvers of the first Root‐Race of men.
> The Progenitors are the Pitris, and are of Seven Classes. They are said,
> in _exoteric_ mythology, to be born of “Brahmâ’s side,” like Eve from the
> rib of Adam.
> 
> Finally, the Sixth Creation is followed, and “Creation” in general closed
> by:
> 
> (VII) _The Seventh Creation_: the evolution of the Arvâksrotas Beings,
> “which was ... that of man.”
> 
> The “Eighth Creation” mentioned is no Creation at all: it is a “blind,”
> for it refers to a purely mental process, the cognition of the “Ninth
> Creation,” which, in its turn, is an effect, manifesting in the Secondary,
> of that which was a “Creation” in the Primary (Prâkrita) Creation.(755)
> The Eighth, then, called Anugraha, the Pratyayasarga or Intellectual
> Creation of the Sânkhyas,(756) is “the creation of which _we have a
> notion_ [in its esoteric aspect], or to which we give intellectual assent
> (Anugraha), in contradistinction to _organic creation_.” It is the correct
> perception of our relations to the whole range of “Gods,” and especially
> of those we bear to the Kumâras, the so‐called “Ninth Creation,” which is
> in reality an aspect, or reflection, of the Sixth in our Manvantara (the
> Vaivasvata). “There is a _ninth_, the Kaumâra Creation, which is both
> primary and secondary,” says the _Vishnu Purâna_, the oldest of such
> texts.(757) As an Esoteric text explains:
> 
> _The Kumâras, are the Dhyânis, derived immediately from the Supreme
> Principle, who reäppear in the Vaivasvata Manu period, for the progress of
> mankind._(758)
> 
> The translator of the _Vishnu Purâna_ corroborates it, by remarking that
> “these sages ... live as long as Brahmâ; and they are only created by him
> in the _First_ Kalpa, although their generation is very commonly, but
> inconsistently, introduced in the [_Secondary_] Vârâha, or Pâdma Kalpa.”
> Thus, the Kumâras are, exoterically, “the creation of Rudra or Nîlalohita,
> a form of Shiva, by Brahmâ ... and of certain other mind‐born sons of
> Brahmâ.” But, in the Esoteric teaching, they are the Progenitors of the
> true spiritual Self in the physical man, the higher Prajâpatis, while the
> Pitris, or lower Prajâpatis, are no more than the Fathers of the model, or
> type of his physical form, made “in _their_ image.” Four (and occasionally
> _five_) are mentioned freely in the exoteric texts, three of the Kumâras
> being secret.
> 
> “The four Kumâras [are] the mind‐born Sons of Brahmâ. Some specify
> _seven_.”(759) All these seven Vaidhâtra, the patronymic of the Kumâras,
> the “Maker’s Sons,” are mentioned and described in Îshvara Krishna’s
> _Sânkhya Kârikâ_ with the Commentary of Gaudapâdâchârya (Shankarâchvrya’s
> Paraguru) attached to it. It discusses the nature of the Kumâras, though
> it refrains from mentioning _by name_ all the seven Kumâras, but calls
> them instead the “seven sons of Brahmâ,” which they are, as they are
> created by Brahmâ in Rudra. The list of names it gives us is: Sanaka,
> Sanandana, Sanâtana, Kapila, Ribhu, and Panchashikha. But these again are
> all _aliases_.
> 
> The exoteric four are Sanatkumâra, Sananda, Sanaka, and Sanâtana; and the
> esoteric three Sana, Kapila, and Sanatsujâta. Special attention is once
> more drawn to this class of Dhyân Chohans, for herein lies the mystery of
> generation and heredity hinted at in the Commentary on Stanza VII, in
> treating of the Four Orders of Angelic Beings. Volume II explains their
> position in the Divine Hierarchy. Meanwhile, let us see what the exoteric
> texts say about them.
> 
> They say little; and to him who fails to read between the lines—nothing.
> “We must have recourse, here, to other _Purânas_ for the elucidation of
> this term,” remarks Wilson, who does not suspect for one moment that he is
> in the presence of the “Angels of Darkness,” the mythical “great enemy” of
> his Church. Therefore, he contrives to “elucidate” no more than that
> “these [Divinities] _declining to create progeny_, [and thus rebelling
> against Brahmâ], remained, as the name of the first [Sanatkumâra] implies,
> ever boys, Kumâras; that is, ever pure and innocent, whence their creation
> is called the Kaumâra.” The _Purânas_, however, may afford a little more
> light. “Being ever as he was born, he is here called a youth; and hence
> his name is well known as Sanatkumâra.”(760) In the _Shaiva Purânas_, the
> Kumâras are always described as Yogins. The _Kurma Purâna_, after
> enumerating them, says: “These five, O Brâhmans, were Yogins, who acquired
> entire exemption from passion.” They are _five_, because two of the
> Kumâras _fell_.
> 
> So untrustworthy are some translations of the Orientalists that in the
> French translation of the _Hari Vamsha_, it is said: “The seven Prajâpati,
> Rudra, Skanda (his son) and Sanatkumâra proceeded to create beings.”
> Whereas, as Wilson shows, the original is: “These seven ... created
> progeny; and so did Rudra, but Skanda and Sanatkumâra, _restraining their
> power, abstained_ (from creation).” The “four orders of beings” are
> referred to sometimes as Ambhâmsi, which Wilson renders as “literally
> Waters” and believes it “a mystic term.” It is one, no doubt; but he
> evidently failed to catch the _real_ Esoteric meaning. “Waters” and
> “Water” stand as the symbol for Âkâsha, the “Primordial Ocean of Space,”
> on which Nârâyana, the self‐born Spirit, moves, reclining on that _which
> is its progeny_.(761) “Water is the body of Nara; thus we have heard the
> name of Water explained. Since Brahmâ rests on the Water, therefore he is
> termed Nârâyana.”(762) “Pure, Purusha created the Waters pure.” At the
> same time Water is the _Third_ Principle in material Kosmos, and the third
> in the realm of the Spiritual: _Spirit_ of Fire, Flame, Âkâsha, Ether,
> Water, Air, Earth, are the cosmic, sidereal, psychic, spiritual and mystic
> principles, _preëminently occult_, on every _plane_ of being. “Gods,
> Demons, Pitris and Men,” are the four orders of beings to whom the term
> Ambhâmsi is applied, because they are all the product of _Waters_
> (mystically), of the Âkâshic Ocean, and of the _Third_ principle in
> Nature. In the _Vedas_ it is a synonym of Gods. Pitris and Men on Earth
> are the transformations or rebirths of Gods and Demons (Spirits) on a
> higher plane. Water is, in another sense, the feminine principle. Venus
> Aphrodite is the personified Sea, and the Mother of the God of Love, the
> Generatrix of all the Gods, as much as the Christian Virgin Mary is Mare,
> the Sea, the Mother of the Western God of Love, Mercy and Charity. If the
> student of Esoteric Philosophy thinks deeply over the subject, he is sure
> to find out all the suggestiveness of the term Ambhâmsi, in its manifold
> relations to the Virgin in Heaven, to the Celestial Virgin of the
> Alchemists, and even to the “Waters of Grace” of the modern Baptist.
> 
> Of all the seven great divisions of Dhyân Chohans, or Devas, there is none
> with which humanity is more concerned than with the Kumâras. Imprudent are
> the Christian Theologians who have degraded them into _Fallen_ Angels, and
> now call them Satan and Demons; as among these heavenly denizens who
> “refuse to create,” the Archangel Michael, the greatest patron Saint of
> the Western and Eastern Churches, under his double name of St. Michael and
> his supposed copy on earth, St. George conquering the Dragon, has to be
> given one of the most prominent places.
> 
> The Kumâras, the Mind‐born Sons of Brahmâ‐Rudra, or Shiva, mystically the
> howling and terrific _destroyer of human passions and physical senses_,
> which are ever in the way of the development of the higher spiritual
> perceptions and the growth of the _inner_ eternal man, are the progeny of
> Shiva, the Mahâyogî, the great patron of all the Yogîs and Mystics of
> India.
> 
> Shiva‐Rudra is the Destroyer, as Vishnu is the Preserver; and both are the
> Regenerators of spiritual as well as of physical Nature. To live as a
> plant, the _seed_ must die. To live as a conscious entity in the Eternity,
> the passions and senses of man must die before his body does. “That to
> live is to die and to die is to live,” has been too little understood in
> the West. Shiva, the Destroyer, is the Creator and the Saviour of
> Spiritual Man, as he is the good gardener of Nature. He weeds out the
> plants, human and cosmic, and kills the passions of the physical, to call
> to life the perceptions of the spiritual, man.
> 
> The Kumâras, themselves then, being the “virgin ascetics,” refuse to
> create the _material_ being Man. Well may they be suspected of a direct
> connection with the Christian Archangel Michael, the “virgin combatant” of
> the Dragon Apophis, whose victim is every Soul united too loosely to its
> immortal Spirit, the Angel who, as shown by the Gnostics, _refused to
> create_ just as the Kumâras did. Does not that patron Angel of the Jews
> _preside_ over Saturn (Shiva or Rudra), and the Sabbath, the day of
> Saturn? Is he not shown of the same essence with his Father (Saturn), and
> called the Son of Time, Cronus, or Kâla, a form of Brahmâ (Vishnu and
> Shiva)? And is not Old Time of the Greeks, with its scythe and sand‐glass,
> identical with the Ancient of Days of the Kabalists; the latter “Ancient”
> being one with the Hindû Ancient of Days, Brahmâ, in his _triune_ form,
> whose name is also Sanat, the Ancient? Every Kumâra bears the prefix of
> Sanat and Sana. And Shanaishchara is Saturn, the planet Shani, the King
> Saturn, whose Secretary in Egypt was Thot‐Hermes the first. They are thus
> identified both with the planet and the God (Shiva), who are, in their
> turn, shown to be the prototypes of Saturn, who is the same as Bel, Baal,
> Shiva, and Jehovah Sabbaoth, the Angel of the Face of whom is
> Mikael—מיכאל, “who [is] as God.” He is the patron, and guardian Angel of
> the Jews, as Daniel tells us; and, before the Kumâras were degraded, by
> those who were ignorant of their very name, into Demons and Fallen Angels,
> the Greek Ophites, the occultly inclined predecessors and precursors of
> the Roman Catholic Church after its secession and separation from the
> primitive Greek Church, had identified Michael with their Ophiomorphos,
> the rebellious and opposing spirit. This means nothing more than the
> reverse aspect, symbolically, of Ophis, the Divine Wisdom or Christos. In
> the _Talmud_, Mikael is “Prince of Water” and the chief of the Seven
> Spirits, for the same reason that one of his many prototypes, Sanatsujâta,
> the chief of the Kumâras, is called Ambhâmsi, “Waters,” according to the
> commentary on _Vishnu Purâna_. Why? Because the Waters is another name of
> the Great Deep, the Primordial Waters of Space, or Chaos, and also means
> Mother, Ambâ, meaning Aditi and Akâsha, the Celestial Virgin‐Mother of the
> visible Universe. Furthermore, the “Waters of the Flood” are also called
> the “Great Dragon,” or Ophis, Ophiomorphos.
> 
> The Rudras will be noticed in their septenary character of “Fire‐Spirits”
> in the “Symbolism” attached to the Stanzas in Volume II. There we shall
> also consider the Cross (3 + 4) under its primeval and later forms, and
> shall use for purposes of comparison the Pythagorean numbers side by side
> with Hebrew metrology. The immense importance of the number _seven_ will
> thus become evident, as the root number of Nature. We shall examine it
> from the standpoint of the _Vedas_ and the Chaldean Scriptures; as it
> existed in Egypt thousands of years B.C., and as treated in the Gnostic
> records; we shall show how its importance as a basic number has gained
> recognition in Physical Science; and we shall endeavour to prove that the
> importance attached to the number _seven_ throughout all antiquity was due
> to no fanciful imaginings of uneducated priests, but to a profound
> knowledge of Natural Law.
> 
> Section XIV. The Four Elements.
> 
> Metaphysically and esoterically, there is but _One Element_ in Nature, and
> at the root of it is the Deity; and the so‐called _seven_ Elements, of
> which _five_ have already manifested and asserted their existence, are the
> garment, the veil, of that Deity, direct from the essence whereof comes
> Man, whether considered physically, psychically, mentally or spiritually.
> Four Elements only are generally spoken of in later antiquity, while five
> only are admitted in philosophy. For the body of Ether is not fully
> manifested yet, and its noumenon is still the “Omnipotent Father Æther,”
> the synthesis of the rest. But what are these Elements, whose compound
> bodies have now been discovered by Chemistry and Physics to contain
> numberless sub‐elements, even the sixty or seventy of which no longer
> embrace the whole number suspected? Let us follow their evolution from the
> _historical_ beginnings, at any rate.
> 
> The Four Elements were fully characterized by Plato when he said that they
> were _that_ “which _composes_ and _decomposes_ the _compound bodies_.”
> Hence Cosmolatry was never, even in its worst aspect, the fetichism which
> adores or worships the passive external form and matter of any object, but
> looked ever to the Noumenon therein. Fire, Air, Water, Earth, were but the
> visible garb, the symbols of the informing, invisible Souls or Spirits,
> the Cosmic Gods, to whom worship was offered by the ignorant, and simple,
> but respectful, recognition by the wiser. In their turn, the phenomenal
> subdivisions of the noumenal Elements were informed by the Elementals, so‐
> called, the “Nature Spirits” of lower grades.
> 
> In the Theogony of Môchus, we find Ether first, and then the Air; the two
> principles from which Ulom, the Intelligible (νοητὸς) God, the visible
> Universe of Matter, is born.(763)
> 
> In the Orphic hymns, the Erôs‐Phanes evolves from the Spiritual Egg, which
> the Æthereal Winds impregnate, Wind being the “Spirit of God,” which is
> said to move in Æther, “brooding over the Chaos,” the Divine Idea. In the
> Hindû _Kathopanishad_, Purusha, the Divine Spirit, already stands before
> the Original Matter, and from their union springs the great Soul of the
> World, “Mahâ‐Âtmâ, Brahman, the Spirit of Life”;(764) these latter
> appellations being again identical with the Universal Soul, or Anima
> Mundi; the Astral Light of the Theurgists and Kabalists being its last and
> lowest division.
> 
> The Elements (στοιχεῖα) of Plato and Aristotle were thus the _incorporeal
> principles_ attached to the four great divisions of our Cosmic World, and
> it is with justice that Creuzer defines these primitive beliefs as “a
> _species of magism_, a _psychic paganism_, and a _deification of
> potencies_; a _spiritualization_ which placed the believers in a close
> community with these potencies.”(765) So close, indeed, that the
> Hierarchies of these Potencies, or Forces, have been classified on a
> graduated scale of seven from the ponderable to the imponderable. They are
> septenary, not as an artificial aid to facilitate their comprehension, but
> in their real _cosmic_ gradation, from their chemical, or physical, to
> their purely spiritual composition. Gods with the ignorant masses; Gods
> independent and supreme; Demons with the fanatics, who, intellectual as
> they often may be, are unable to understand the _spirit_ of the
> philosophical sentence, _in pluribus unum_. With the Hermetic philosopher
> they are Forces _relatively_ “blind” or “intelligent,” according to which
> of the principles in them he deals with. It required long millenniums
> before they found themselves finally, in our cultured age, degraded into
> simple chemical elements.
> 
> At any rate, good Christians, and especially the Biblical Protestants,
> ought to show more reverence for the Four Elements, if they would maintain
> any for Moses. For the _Bible_ manifests the consideration and mystic
> significance in which they were held by the Hebrew Lawgiver, on every page
> of the _Pentateuch_. The tent which contained the Holy of Holies was a
> Cosmic Symbol, sacred, in one of its meanings, to the Elements, the four
> cardinal points, and Ether. Josephus shows it built in white, the colour
> of Ether. And this explains also why, in the Egyptian and the Hebrew
> temples, according to Clemens Alexandrinus,(766) a gigantic curtain,
> supported by five pillars, separated the _sanctum sanctorum_—now
> represented by the altar in Christian churches—wherein the priests alone
> were permitted to enter, from the part accessible to the profane. By its
> _four_ colours this curtain symbolized the four principal Elements, and
> with the five pillars signified the knowledge of the divine that the
> _five_ senses can enable man to acquire with the help of the _four_
> Elements.
> 
> In Cory’s _Ancient Fragments_, one of the “Chaldean Oracles” expresses
> ideas about the elements and Ether in language singularly like that of
> _The Unseen Universe_, written by two eminent Scientists of our day.
> 
> It states that from Ether have come all things, and to it all will return;
> that the images of all things are indelibly impressed upon it; and that it
> is the store‐house of the germs, or of the remains of all visible forms,
> and even ideas. It appears as if this case strangely corroborates our
> assertion that whatever discoveries may be made in our days will be found
> to have been anticipated by many thousand years by our “simple‐minded
> ancestors.”
> 
> Whence came the Four Elements and the Malachim of the Hebrews? They have
> been made to merge, by a theological sleight of hand on the part of the
> Rabbins and the later Fathers of the Church, into Jehovah, but their
> origin is identical with that of the Cosmic Gods of all other nations.
> Their symbols, whether born on the shores of the Oxus, on the burning
> sands of Upper Egypt, or in the wild forests, weird and glacial, which
> cover the slopes and peaks of the sacred snowy mountains of Thessaly, or
> again, in the pampas of America—their symbols, we repeat, when traced to
> their source, are ever one and the same. Whether Egyptian or Pelasgian,
> Âryan or Semitic, the Genius Loci, the Local God, embraced in its unity
> all Nature; but not especially the four elements any more than one of
> their creations, such as trees, rivers, mounts or stars. The Genius Loci,
> a very late afterthought of the last sub‐races of the Fifth Root‐Race,
> when the primitive and grandiose meaning had become nearly lost, was ever
> the representative, in his accumulated titles, of all his colleagues. It
> was the God of Fire, symbolized by thunder, as Jove or Agni; the God of
> Water, symbolized by the fluvial bull, or some sacred river or fountain,
> as Varuna, Neptune, etc.; the God of Air, manifesting in the hurricane and
> tempest, as Vâyu and Indra; and the God or Spirit of the Earth, who
> appeared in earthquakes, like Pluto, Yama, and so many others.
> 
> These were the Cosmic Gods, ever synthesizing all in one, as found in
> every cosmogony or mythology. Thus, the Greeks had their Dodonean Jupiter,
> who included in himself the four Elements and the four cardinal points,
> and who was recognized, therefore, in old Rome under the pantheistic title
> of Jupiter Mundus; and who now, in modern Rome, has become the Deus
> Mundus, the one Mundane God, who is made to swallow all others, in the
> latest theology, by the arbitrary decision of his special ministers.
> 
> As Gods of Fire, Air, and Water, they were _Celestial_ Gods; as Gods of
> the Lower Region, they were _Infernal_ Deities; the latter adjective
> applying simply to the _Earth_. They were “Spirits of the Earth” under
> their respective names of Yama, Pluto, Osiris, the “Lord of the Lower
> Kingdom,” etc., and their tellurial character sufficiently proves it. The
> Ancients knew of no worse abode after death than the Kâma Loka, the Limbus
> on this Earth.(767) If it is argued that the Dodonean Jupiter was
> identified with Dis, or the Roman Pluto with the Dionysus Chthonius, the
> Subterranean, and with Aïdoneus, the King of the Subterranean World,
> wherein, according to Creuzer,(768) oracles were rendered, then it will
> become the pleasure of the Occultists to prove that both Aïdoneus and
> Dionysus are the bases of Adonaï, or Iurbo‐Adonaï, as Jehovah is called in
> the _Codex Nazaræus_. “Thou shalt not worship the Sun, who is named
> Adonaï, whose name is also Kadush and El‐El,”(769) and also “Lord
> Bacchus.” Baal‐Adonis of the Sôds, or Mysteries, of the pre‐Babylonian
> Jews became the Adonaï by the Massorah, the later vowelled Jehovah. Hence
> the Roman Catholics are right. All these Jupiters are of the same family;
> but Jehovah has to be included therein to make it complete. The Jupiter
> Aërius or Pan, the Jupiter‐Ammon, and the Jupiter‐Bel‐Moloch, are all
> correlations and one with Iurbo‐Adonaï, because they are all one Cosmic
> Nature. It is that Nature and Power which creates the specific terrestrial
> symbol, and the physical and material fabric of the latter, which proves
> the Energy manifesting through it as _extrinsic_.
> 
> For primitive religion was something better than simple preöccupation
> about physical phenomena, as remarked by Schelling; and principles, more
> elevated than we modern Sadducees know of, “were hidden under the
> transparent veil of such merely natural divinities as thunder, the winds,
> and rain.” The Ancients knew and could distinguish the _corporeal_ from
> the _spiritual_ Elements in the Forces of Nature.
> 
> The four‐fold Jupiter, as the four‐faced Brahmâ, the aërial, the
> fulgurant, the terrestrial, and the marine God, the lord and master of the
> four Elements, may stand as a representative for the great Cosmic Gods of
> every nation. Although deputing power over the fire to Hephæstus‐Vulcan,
> over the sea to Poseidon‐Neptune, and over the Earth to Pluto‐Aïdoneus,
> the Aërial Jove was still all these; for Æther, from the first, had
> preëminence over, and was the synthesis of, all the Elements.
> 
> Tradition tells of a grotto, a vast cave in the deserts of Central Asia,
> whereinto light pours, through four seemingly natural apertures, or clefts
> placed crossways at the four cardinal points. From noon till an hour
> before sunset the light streams in, of four different colours, as averred,
> red, blue, orange‐gold, and white, owing to some either natural or
> artificially prepared conditions of vegetation and soil. The light
> converges in the centre round a pillar of white marble with a globe upon
> it, which represents our earth. It is named the “Grotto of Zarathustra.”
> 
> Included under the arts and sciences of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans,
> the phenomenal manifestation of the Four Elements, which were justly
> attributed by these believers to the intelligent interference of the
> Cosmic Gods, assumed a scientific character. The Magic of the ancient
> priests consisted, in those days, in addressing _their Gods in their own
> language_.
> 
> _The speech of the men of the Earth cannot reach the Lords. Each must be
> addressed in the language of his respective Element._
> 
> So says _The Book of Rules_, in a sentence which will be shown pregnant
> with meaning, adding as an explanation of the nature of that
> _element_‐language:
> 
> _It is composed of_ SOUNDS, _not words; of sounds, numbers and figures. He
> who knows how to blend the three, will call forth the response of the
> superintending Power_ [_the Regent‐God of the specific Element needed_].
> 
> Thus this “language” is that of _incantations_ or of _mantras_, as they
> are called in India; sound being _the most potent and effectual magic
> agent, and the first of the keys which opens the door of communication
> between Mortals and Immortals_. He who believes in the words and teachings
> of St. Paul, has no right to pick out from the latter those sentences only
> which he chooses to accept, to the rejection of others; and St. Paul
> teaches most undeniably the existence of Cosmic Gods and their presence
> among us. Paganism preached a dual and simultaneous evolution, a
> “creation” _spiritualem ac mundanum_, as the Roman Church has it, ages
> before the advent of that Roman Church. Exoteric phraseology has changed
> little with respect to Divine Hierarchies since the most palmy days of
> Paganism, or “Idolatry.” Names alone have changed, together with claims
> which have now become false pretences. For when, for instance, Plato put
> in the mouth of the Highest Principle (Father Æther or Jupiter) the words,
> “the Gods of the Gods of whom I am the _maker_, as I am the father of all
> their works,” he knew the spirit of this sentence as fully, we suspect, as
> St. Paul did, when saying: “For though there be that are called Gods,
> whether in Heaven or in Earth, as there be Gods many and Lords
> many....”(770) Both knew the sense and the meaning of what they put
> forward in such guarded terms.
> 
> We cannot be taken to task by the Protestants for interpreting the verse
> from the _Corinthians_ as we do; for, if the translation in the English
> _Bible_ is made ambiguous, it is not so in the original texts, and the
> Roman Catholic Church accepts the words of the Apostle in their true
> sense. For a proof see St. Dionysius, the Areopagite, who was “_directly
> inspired_ by the Apostle,” and “who wrote under his dictation,” as we are
> assured by the Marquis de Mirville, whose works are approved by Rome, and
> who says, commenting on that special verse: “And, though there are (in
> fact) they who are called Gods, for it seems there are really _several
> Gods_, withal and for all that, the _God‐Principle_ and the Superior God
> ceases not to remain essentially _one_ and indivisible.”(771) Thus spoke
> the old Initiates also, knowing that the worship of minor Gods could never
> affect the “_God Principle_.” (772)
> 
> Says Sir W. Grove, F.R.S., speaking of the correlation of forces:
> 
>     The ancients when they witnessed a natural phenomenon, removed
>     from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action
>     known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural
>     power.... Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but
>     subsequently they became invested with a more material character;
>     and the same words πνεῦμα, spirit, etc., were used to signify the
>     soul or a gas; the very word gas, from _geist_, a ghost or spirit,
>     affords us an instance of the gradual transmutation of a spiritual
>     into a physical conception.(773)
> 
> This, the great man of Science, in his preface to the sixth edition of his
> work, considers to be the _only_ concern of exact Science, which has no
> business to meddle with the _causes_.
> 
>     Cause and effect are, therefore, in their abstract relation to
>     these forces, words solely of convenience. We are totally
>     unacquainted _with the ultimate generating power_ of each and all
>     of them, and probably shall ever remain so; we can only ascertain
>     the normal of their actions; we must humbly refer their causation
>     to one omnipresent influence, and content ourselves with studying
>     their effects and developing, by experiment, their mutual
>     relations.(774)
> 
> This policy once accepted, and the system virtually admitted in the above‐
> quoted words, namely, the _spirituality_ of the “ultimate generating
> power,” it would be more than illogical to refuse to recognize this
> quality which is inherent in the _material elements_, or rather, in their
> compounds, as present in the fire, air, water or earth. The Ancients knew
> these powers so well, that, while concealing their true nature under
> various allegories, for the benefit, or to the detriment, of the
> uneducated rabble, they never departed from the multiple object in view,
> while inverting them. They contrived to throw a thick veil over the
> nucleus of truth concealed by the symbol, but they ever tried to preserve
> the latter as a _record_ for future generations, sufficiently transparent
> to allow their wise men to discern the truth behind the fabulous form of
> the glyph or allegory. These ancient sages are accused of _superstition_
> and _credulity_; and this too by the very nations, which, though learned
> in all the modern arts and sciences, and cultured and wise in their
> generation, accept to this day as their one living and infinite God, the
> anthropomorphic “Jehovah” of the Jews!
> 
> What were some of these alleged “superstitions”? Hesiod believed, for
> instance, that “the winds were the sons of the Giant Typhôeus,” who were
> chained and unchained at will by Æolus, and the polytheistic Greeks
> accepted it along with Hesiod. Why should they not, since the monotheistic
> Jews had the same beliefs, with other names for their _dramatis personæ_,
> and since Christians believe in the same to this day? The Hesiodic Æolus,
> Boreas, etc., were named Kedem, Tzephum, Derum, and Ruach Hayum by the
> “chosen people” of Israel. What is, then, the fundamental difference?
> While the Hellenes were taught that Æolus tied and untied the winds, the
> Jews believed as fervently that their Lord God, _with __“__smoke__”__
> coming __“__out of his nostrils and fire out of his mouth, ... rode upon a
> cherub and did fly; and he was seen upon the wings of the wind__”_.(775)
> The expressions of the two nations are either both figures of speech, or
> both _superstitions_. We think they are neither; but only arise from a
> keen sense of oneness with Nature, and a perception of the mysterious and
> the intelligent behind every natural phenomenon, which the moderns no
> longer possess. Nor was it “superstitious” in the Greek Pagans to listen
> to the oracle of Delphi, when, at the approach of the fleet of Xerxes,
> that oracle advised them to “sacrifice to the winds,” if the same has to
> be regarded as _divine_ worship in the Israelites, who sacrificed as often
> to the wind and also especially to the fire. Do they not say that their
> “God is a consuming fire,”(776) who appeared generally as fire and
> “encompassed by fire”? and did not Elijah seek for the “Lord” in the
> “great strong wind, and in the earthquake”? Do not the Christians repeat
> the same after them? Do not they, moreover, sacrifice to this day, to the
> same “God of Wind and Water”? They do; because special prayers for rain,
> dry weather, trade‐winds and the calming of storms on the seas, exist to
> this hour in the prayer‐books of the three Christian Churches; and the
> several hundred sects of the Protestant religion offer them to their God
> upon every threat of calamity. The fact that they are no more answered by
> Jehovah, than they were, probably, by Jupiter Pluvius, does not alter the
> fact of these prayers being addressed to the Power, or Powers, supposed to
> rule over the Elements, or of these Powers being identical in Paganism and
> Christianity; or have we to believe that such prayers are crass idolatry
> and absurd “superstition” _only_ when addressed by a Pagan to his “idol,”
> and that the same superstition is suddenly transformed into “praiseworthy
> piety” and “religion” whenever the name of the celestial addressee is
> changed? But the tree _is_ known by its fruit. And the fruit of the
> Christian tree being no better than that of the tree of Paganism, why
> should the former command more reverence than the latter?
> 
> Thus, when we are told by the Chevalier Drach, a converted Jew, and by the
> Marquis de Mirville, a Roman Catholic fanatic of the French aristocracy,
> that in Hebrew “lightning” is a synonym of “fury,” and is always handled
> by the “evil” Spirit; that Jupiter Fulgur or Fulgurans is also called by
> the Christians Elicius, and denounced as the “soul of lightning,” its
> Dæmon;(777) we have either to apply the same explanation and definitions
> to the “Lord God of Israel,” under the same circumstances, or renounce our
> right of abusing the Gods and creeds of other nations.
> 
> The foregoing statements, emanating as they do from two ardent and learned
> Roman Catholics, are, to say the least, _dangerous_, in the presence of
> the _Bible_ and its prophets. Indeed, if Jupiter, the “chief Dæmon of the
> Pagan Greeks,” hurled his deadly thunder‐bolts and lightnings at those who
> excited his wrath, so did the Lord God of Abraham and Jacob. For we read
> that:
> 
>     The Lord thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his
>     voice. And he sent out arrows [thunder‐bolts] and scattered them
>     [Saul’s armies]; lightning, and discomfited them.(778)
> 
> The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this “Dæmon”
> is charged with having submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian
> fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having become so furious that
> all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract him by offering contra‐
> sacrifices to Thetis.(779) Very fortunately, no authenticated instance is
> on the records of Christian wars, showing a like catastrophe on the same
> scale happening to one Christian fleet, owing to the “prayers” of its
> enemy—another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for
> each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the
> Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black
> magic _con amore_. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly
> due to lack of prayers, sent to a _common_ Almighty God for mutual
> destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and
> Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and
> offer thanks to the Lord, if during some future war, 400 ships of the
> hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers? What is,
> then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a
> Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one’s own next‐of‐kin, say of
> one’s father, is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of
> our neighbour’s parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime
> is the same.
> 
> So far the “blessings of Christianity” do not seem to have made any
> appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.
> 
> The above is not a defence of Pagan Gods, nor is it an attack on the
> Christian Deity, nor does it mean belief in either. The writer is quite
> impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of both, neither praying
> to, believing in, nor dreading any such “personal” and anthropomorphic
> God. The parallels are brought forward simply as one more curious
> exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the civilized
> theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the
> two beliefs, and there is none in their respective effects upon
> _morality_, or spiritual nature. The “light of Christ” shines upon as
> hideous features of the animal man now, as the “light of Lucifer” did in
> days of old. Says the missionary Lavoisier, in the _Journal des Colonies_:
> 
>     These unfortunate heathens in their superstition regard even the
>     Elements as something that has comprehension!... They still have
>     faith in their idol Vâyu—the God or, rather, Demon of the Wind and
>     Air ... they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and
>     in the powers of their Brâhmans over the winds and storms.
> 
> In reply to this, we may quote from _Luke_: “And he [Jesus] arose and
> _rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there
> was a calm_.”(780) And here is another quotation from a Prayer Book: “O
> Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves.”
> This prayer of the Neapolitan and Provençal sailors, is copied textually
> from that of the Phœnician mariners to their Virgin‐Goddess Astarte. The
> logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought
> forward, and the denunciation of the missionary, is that the _commands_ of
> the Brâhmans to their Element‐Gods _not remaining_ “ineffectual,” the
> power of the Brâhmans is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus.
> Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the “Virgin
> of the Sea” of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad
> name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and
> Astarte may be “Devils” in theological fancy, but, as just remarked, the
> tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown to
> be as immoral and as wicked as the Pagans ever were, what benefit has
> Humanity derived from its change of Gods and Idols?
> 
> That which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes in
> simple mortals a crime, if successful. Sorcery and incantations are now
> regarded as fables; yet from the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws
> of England and America against witchcraft—obsolete but not repealed to
> this day—such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as
> criminal. Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the
> Emperor, sentencing to death the philosopher Sopatrus for “unchaining the
> winds,” and thus preventing ships laden with grain from arriving in time
> to put an end to famine. Pausanias is derided when he affirms that he saw
> with his own eyes “men who by simple prayers and incantations” stopped a
> strong hail‐storm. This does not prevent modern Christian writers from
> advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its efficacy.
> Hoppo and Stadlein, two magicians and sorcerers, were sentenced to death
> for “throwing charms on fruit” and transferring a harvest by magic arts
> from one field to another, hardly a century ago, if we can believe
> Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: “_Qui fruges excantassent
> segetem pellicentes incantando_.”
> 
> Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of
> superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth,
> in spiritual and material, in visible and invisible Nature, and that
> Science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For
> if, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the
> _result_ of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the
> “_ultimate_ generating power” of every Force, the “one omnipresent
> influence,” then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the
> Ancients did; namely, that every Element is _dual_ in its nature.
> “Ethereal Fire is the emanation of the Kabir proper; the Aërial is but the
> union [correlation] of the former with Terrestrial Fire, and its guidance
> and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser
> dignity”—an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the
> same may be said of every Cosmic Element.
> 
> No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces,
> magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult,
> mechanical, mental, in fact of every kind of force; and that the physical
> forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle
> with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual
> and moral, the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upâdhis, of the
> second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in saying
> that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being;
> that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their
> physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic,
> clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are now regarded and
> recognized as perfectly natural, even by Science. Why should man be the
> only exception in Nature, and why cannot even the Elements have their
> Vehicles, their Vâhanas, in what we call the Physical Forces? And why,
> above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the
> religions of old?
> 
> Section XV. On Kwan‐Shi‐Yin and Kwan‐Yin.
> 
> Like Avalokiteshvara, Kwan‐Shi‐Yin has passed through several
> transformations, but it is an error to say of him that he is a modern
> invention of the Northern Buddhists, for under another appellation he has
> been known from the earliest times. The Secret Doctrine teaches that: “_He
> who is the first to appear at Renovation will be the last to come before
> Reäbsorption_ [_Pralaya_]”. Thus the Logoi of all nations, from the Vedic
> Vishvakarman of the Mysteries down to the Saviour of the present civilized
> nations, are the “Word” who was in the “Beginning,” or the reäwakening of
> the energizing Powers of Nature, with the One ABSOLUTE. Born of Fire and
> Water, before these became distinct Elements, It was the “Maker,” the
> fashioner or modeller, of all things. “Without him was not anything made
> that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men,” who
> finally may be called as he ever has been, the Alpha and the Omega of
> Manifested Nature. “The great Dragon of Wisdom is born of Fire and Water,
> and into Fire and Water will all be reäbsorbed with him.”(781) As this
> Bodhisattva is said “to assume any form he pleases,” from the beginning of
> a Manvantara to its end, though his special birthday, or memorial day, is
> celebrated according to the _Kin‐kwang‐ming‐King_, or “Luminous Sûtra of
> Golden Light,” in the second month on the nineteenth day, and that of
> Maitreya Buddha, in the first month on the first day, yet the two are one.
> He will appear as Maitreya Buddha, the last of the Avatâras and Buddhas,
> in the Seventh Race. This belief and expectation are universal throughout
> the East. Only it is not in the Kali Yuga, our present terrifically
> materialistic age of Darkness, the “Black Age,” that a new Saviour of
> Humanity can ever appear. The Kali Yuga is “l’Age d’Or” (!) only in the
> _mystic_ writings of some French pseudo‐Occultists.(782)
> 
> Hence the ritual in the exoteric worship of this Deity was founded on
> magic. The Mantras are all taken from special books kept secret by the
> priests, and each is said to work a magical effect; as the reciter or
> reader, by simply chanting them, produces a secret causation which results
> in immediate effects. Kwan‐Shi‐Yin is Avalokiteshvara, and both are forms
> of the Seventh Universal Principle; while in its highest metaphysical
> character this Deity is the synthetic aggregation of all the Planetary
> Spirits, Dhyân Chohans. He is the “Self‐Manifested”; in short, the “Son of
> the Father.” Crowned with seven dragons, above his statue there appears
> the inscription Pu‐tsi‐k’iun‐ling, “the universal Saviour of all living
> beings.”
> 
> Of course the name given in the archaic volume of the Stanzas is quite
> different, but Kwan‐Yin is a perfect equivalent. In a temple of P’u‐to,
> the sacred island of the Buddhists in China, Kwan‐Shi‐Yin is represented
> floating on a black aquatic bird (Kâlahamsa), and pouring on the heads of
> mortals the elixir of life, which, as it flows, is transformed into one of
> the chief Dhyâni‐Buddhas, the Regent of a star called the “Star of
> Salvation.” In his third transformation Kwan‐Yin is the informing Spirit
> or Genius of Water. In China the Dalaï‐Lama is believed to be an
> incarnation of Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, who in his third terrestrial appearance was a
> Bodhisattva, while the Teshu Lama is an incarnation of Amitâbha Buddha, or
> Gautama.
> 
> It may be remarked _en passant_ that a writer must indeed have a diseased
> imagination to discover phallic worship everywhere, as do McClatchey and
> Hargrave Jennings. The first discovers “the old phallic gods, represented
> under two evident symbols, the Kheen or Yang, which is the _membrum
> virile_, and the Khw‐an or Yin, the _pudendum muliebre_.”(783) Such a
> rendering seems the more strange as Kwan‐Shi‐Yin (Avalokiteshvara) and
> Kwan‐Yin, besides being now the patron Deities of the Buddhist ascetics,
> the Yogîs of Tibet, are the Gods of chastity, and are, in their esoteric
> meaning, not even that which is implied in the rendering of Mr. Rhys
> Davids’ _Buddhism_: “The name Avalokiteshvara ... means ‘the Lord who
> looks down from on high’.”(784) Nor is Kwan‐Shi‐Yin the “Spirit of the
> Buddhas present in the Church,” but, literally interpreted, it means “the
> Lord that is seen.” and in one sense, “the Divine Self perceived by
> Self”—the human Self—that is, the Âtman or Seventh Principle, merged in
> the Universal, perceived by, or the object of perception to, Buddhi, the
> Sixth Principle, or Divine Soul in man. In a still higher sense,
> Avalokiteshvara‐Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, referred to as the seventh Universal
> Principle, is the Logos perceived by the Universal Buddhi, or Soul, as the
> synthetic aggregate of the Dhyâni‐Buddhas; and is not the “Spirit of
> Buddha present in the Church,” but the Omnipresent Universal Spirit
> manifested in the temple of Kosmos or Nature. This Orientalistic etymology
> of Kwan and Yin is on a par with that of Yoginî, which, we are told by Mr.
> Hargrave Jennings, is a Sanskrit word, “in the dialects pronounced Jogi or
> Zogee (!), and is ... equivalent with Sena, and exactly the same as Duti
> or Dutica,” _i.e._, a sacred prostitute of the temple, worshipped as Yoni
> or Shakti.(785) “The books of morality [in India] direct a faithful wife
> to shun the society of Yogini or females who have been adored as
> Sacti.”(786) Nothing should surprise us after this. And it is, therefore,
> with hardly a smile that we find another preposterous absurdity quoted
> about “Budh,” as being a name “which signifies not only the sun as the
> source of generation but also the male organ.”(787) Max Müller, in
> treating of “False Analogies,” says that “the most celebrated Chinese
> scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat ... maintains that the three syllables I
> Hi Wei [in the fourteenth chapter of the _Tao‐te‐King_] were meant for Je‐
> ho‐vah”;(788) and again, Father Amyot “felt certain that the three persons
> of the Trinity could be recognized” in the same work. And if Abel Rémusat,
> why not Hargrave Jennings? Every scholar will recognize the absurdity of
> ever seeing in Budh, the “enlightened” and the “awakened,” a “phallic
> symbol.”
> 
> Kwan‐Shi‐Yin, then, is “the Son identical with his Father,” mystically, or
> the Logos, the Word. He is called the “Dragon of Wisdom,” in Stanza III,
> for all the Logoi of all the ancient religious systems are connected with,
> and symbolized by, serpents. In old Egypt, the God Nahbkoon, “he who
> unites the doubles,” was represented as a serpent on human legs, either
> with or without arms. This was the Astral Light reüniting by its dual
> physiological and spiritual potency the Divine‐Human to its purely Divine
> Monad, the Prototype in “Heaven” or Nature. It was the emblem of the
> resurrection of Nature; of Christ with the Ophites; and of Jehovah as the
> brazen serpent healing those who looked at him. The serpent was also an
> emblem of Christ with the Templars, as is shown by the Templar degree in
> Masonry. The symbol of Knooph (Khnoom also), or the Soul of the World,
> says Champollion, “is represented among other forms under that of a huge
> serpent on human legs; this reptile, being the emblem of the Good Genius
> and the veritable Agathodæmon, is sometimes bearded.”(789) This sacred
> animal is thus identical with the serpent of the Ophites, and is figured
> on a great number of engraved stones, called Gnostic or Basilidean gems.
> It appears with various heads, human and animal, but its gems are always
> found inscribed with the name ΧΝΟΥΒΙΣ (ChNOUBIS). This symbol is identical
> with one which; according to Jamblichus and Champollion, was called the
> “First of the Celestial Gods,” the God Hermes, or Mercury, with the
> Greeks, to which God Hermes Trismegistus attributes the invention of, and
> the first initiation of men into, Magic; and Mercury is Budh, Wisdom,
> Enlightenment, or “Reäwakening” into the divine Science.
> 
> To close, Kwan‐Shi‐Yin and Kwan‐Yin are the two aspects, male and female,
> of the same principle in Kosmos, Nature and Man, of Divine Wisdom and
> Intelligence. They are the Christos‐Sophia of the mystic Gnostics, the
> Logos and its Shakti. In their longing for the expression of some
> mysteries never to be wholly comprehended by the profane, the Ancients,
> knowing that nothing could be preserved in human memory without some
> outward symbol, have chosen the, to us, often ridiculous images of the
> Kwan‐Yins to remind man of his origin and inner nature. To the impartial,
> however, the Madonnas in crinolines and the Christs in white kid gloves
> must appear far more absurd than the Kwan‐Shi‐Yin and Kwan‐Yin in their
> dragon‐garb. The subjective can hardly be expressed by the objective.
> Therefore, since the symbolic formula attempts to characterize that which
> is above scientific reasoning, and is as often far beyond our intellects,
> it must needs go beyond that intellect in some shape or other, or else it
> will fade out from human remembrance.
> 
> PART III. ADDENDA. ON OCCULT AND MODERN SCIENCE.
> 
> The knowledge of this nether world—
>   Say, friend, what is it, false or true?
> The false, what mortal cares to know?
>   The true, what mortal ever knew?
> 
> Section I. Reasons for These Addenda.
> 
> Many of the doctrines contained in the foregoing seven Stanzas and
> Commentaries having been studied and critically examined by some Western
> Theosophists, certain of the Occult Teachings have been found wanting from
> the ordinary stand‐point of modern scientific knowledge. They seemed to
> encounter insuperable difficulties in the way of their acceptance, and to
> require reconsideration in view of scientific criticism. Some friends have
> already been tempted to regret the necessity of so often calling in
> question the assertions of Modern Science. It appeared to them—and I here
> repeat only their arguments—that “to run counter to the teachings of its
> most eminent exponents, was to court a premature discomfiture in the eyes
> of the Western World.”
> 
> It is, therefore, desirable to define, once and for all, the position
> which the writer, who does not in this agree with her friends, intends to
> maintain. So far as Science remains what in the words of Prof. Huxley it
> is, viz., “organized common sense”; so far as its inferences are drawn
> from accurate premisses, its generalizations resting on a purely inductive
> basis, every Theosophist and Occultist welcomes respectfully and with due
> admiration its contributions to the domain of cosmological law. There can
> be no possible conflict between the teachings of Occult and so‐called
> exact Science, wherever the conclusions of the latter are grounded on a
> substratum of unassailable fact. It is only when its more ardent
> exponents, over‐stepping the limits of observed phenomena in order to
> penetrate into the arcana of Being, attempt to wrench the formation of
> Kosmos and its _living_ Forces from Spirit, and to attribute all to blind
> Matter, that the Occultists claim the right of disputing and calling in
> question their theories. Science cannot, owing to the very nature of
> things, unveil the mystery of the Universe around us. Science can, it is
> true, collect, classify, and generalize upon phenomena; but the Occultist,
> arguing from admitted metaphysical data, declares that the daring
> explorer, who would probe the inmost secrets of Nature, must transcend the
> narrow limitations of sense, and transfer his consciousness into the
> region of Noumena and the sphere of Primal Causes. To effect this, he must
> develop faculties which, save in a few rare and exceptional cases, are
> absolutely dormant, in the constitution of the off‐shoots of our present
> Fifth Root‐Race in Europe and America. He can in no other conceivable
> manner collect the facts on which to base his speculations. Is this not
> apparent on the principles of Inductive Logic and Metaphysics alike?
> 
> On the other hand, whatever the writer may do, she will never be able to
> satisfy both Truth and Science. To offer the reader a systematic and
> uninterrupted version of the Archaic Stanzas is impossible. A gap of 43
> verses or shlokas has to be left between the 7th, already given, and the
> 51st, which is the subject of Book II, though the latter are made to run
> as from 1 onwards, for easier reading and reference. The mere appearance
> of man on Earth occupies an equal number of Stanzas, which minutely
> describe his primal evolution from the human Dhyân Chohans, the state of
> the Globe at that time, etc., etc. A great number of names referring to
> chemical substances and other compounds, which have now ceased to combine
> together, and are therefore unknown to the later offshoots of our Fifth
> Race, occupy a considerable space. As they are simply untranslatable, and
> would remain in every case inexplicable, they are omitted, along with
> those which cannot be made public. Nevertheless, even the little that is
> given will irritate every follower and defender of dogmatic materialistic
> Science who happens to read it.
> 
> In view of the criticism offered, it is proposed, before proceeding to the
> remaining Stanzas, to defend those already given. That they are not in
> perfect accord or harmony with Modern Science, we all know. But had they
> been as much in agreement with the views of modern knowledge as is a
> lecture by Sir William Thomson, they would have been rejected all the
> same. For they teach belief in conscious Powers and Spiritual Entities; in
> terrestrial, semi‐intelligent, and highly intellectual Forces on other
> planes;(790) and in Beings that dwell around us in spheres imperceptible,
> whether through telescope or microscope. Hence the necessity of examining
> the beliefs of materialistic Science, of comparing its views about the
> “Elements” with the opinions of the Ancients, and of analysing the
> physical Forces as they exist in modern conceptions, before the Occultists
> admit themselves to be in the wrong. We shall touch upon the constitution
> of the Sun and planets, and the Occult characteristics of what are called
> Devas and Genii, and are now termed by Science, Forces, or “modes of
> motion,” and see whether Esoteric belief is defensible or not.
> Notwithstanding the efforts made to the contrary, an unprejudiced mind
> will discover that under Newton’s “agent, material or immaterial,”(791)
> the agent which _causes gravity_, and in his personal _working_ God, there
> is just as much of the metaphysical Devas and Genii, as there is in
> Kepler’s Angelus Rector conducting each planet, and in the _species
> immateriata_ by which the celestial bodies were carried along in their
> courses, according to that Astronomer.
> 
> In Volume II, we shall have to openly approach dangerous subjects. We must
> bravely face Science and declare, in the teeth of materialistic learning,
> of Idealism, Hylo‐Idealism, Positivism and all‐denying modern Psychology,
> that the true Occultist believes in “Lords of Light”; that he believes in
> a Sun, which—far from being simply a “lamp of day” moving in accordance
> with physical law, and far from being merely one of those Suns, which,
> according to Richter, “are sun‐flowers of a higher light”—is, like
> milliards of other Suns, the dwelling or the vehicle of a God, and of a
> host of Gods.
> 
> In this dispute, of course, it is the Occultists who will be worsted. They
> will be considered, on the _primâ facie_ aspect of the question, to be
> ignoramuses, and will be labelled with more than one of the usual epithets
> given to those whom the superficially judging public, itself ignorant of
> the great underlying truths in Nature, accuses of believing in mediæval
> superstitions. Let it be so. Submitting beforehand to every criticism in
> order to go on with their task, they only claim the privilege of showing
> that the Physicists are as much at loggerheads among themselves in their
> speculations, as these speculations are with the teachings of Occultism.
> 
> The Sun is Matter, and the Sun is Spirit. Our ancestors, the “Heathen,”
> like their modern successors, the Parsîs, were, and are, wise enough in
> their generation to see in it the symbol of Divinity, and at the same time
> to sense within, concealed by the physical symbol, the bright God of
> Spiritual and Terrestrial Light. Such belief can be regarded as a
> superstition only by rank Materialism, which denies Deity, Spirit, Soul,
> and admits no intelligence outside the mind of man. But if too much wrong
> superstition bred by “Churchianity,” as Laurence Oliphant calls it,
> “renders a man a fool,” too much scepticism makes him mad. We prefer the
> charge of folly in believing too much, to that of a madness which denies
> everything, as do Materialism and Hylo‐Idealism. Hence, the Occultists are
> fully prepared to receive their dues from Materialism, and to meet the
> adverse criticism which will be poured on the author of this work, not for
> writing it, but for believing in that which it contains.
> 
> Therefore the discoveries, hypotheses, and unavoidable objections which
> will be brought forward by the scientific critics must be anticipated and
> disposed of. It has also to be shown how far the Occult Teachings depart
> from Modern Science, and whether the ancient or the modern theories are
> the more logically and philosophically correct. The unity and mutual
> relations of all parts of Kosmos were known to the Ancients, before they
> became evident to modern Astronomers and Philosophers. And even if the
> external and visible portions of the Universe, and their mutual relations,
> cannot be explained in Physical Science, in any other terms than those
> used by the adherents of the mechanical theory of the Universe, it does
> not follow that the Materialist, who denies that the Soul of Kosmos (which
> appertains to Metaphysical Philosophy) exists, has the right to trespass
> upon that metaphysical domain. That Physical Science is trying to, and
> actually does, encroach upon it, is only one more proof that “might is
> right”; it does not justify the intrusion.
> 
> Another good reason for these Addenda is this. Since only a certain
> portion of the Secret Teachings can be given out in the present age, the
> doctrines would never be understood even by Theosophists, if they were
> published without any explanations or commentary. Therefore they must be
> contrasted with the speculations of Modern Science. Archaic Axioms must be
> placed side by side with Modern Hypotheses, and the comparison of their
> value must be left to the sagacious reader.
> 
> On the question of the “Seven Governors”—as Hermes calls the “Seven
> Builders,” the Spirits which guide the operations of Nature, the animated
> atoms of which are the shadows, in their own world, of their Primaries in
> the Astral Realms—this work will, of course, have every Materialist
> against it, as well as the men of Science. But this opposition can, at
> most, be only temporary. People have laughed at everything unusual, and
> have scouted every unpopular idea at first, and have then ended by
> accepting it. Materialism and Scepticism are evils that must remain in the
> world so long as man has not quitted his present gross form to don the one
> he had during the First and Second Races of this Round. Unless Scepticism
> and our present natural ignorance are equilibrated by Intuition and a
> natural Spirituality, every being afflicted with such feelings will see in
> himself nothing better than a bundle of flesh, bones, and muscles, with an
> empty garret inside, which serves the purpose of storing his sensations
> and feelings. Sir Humphrey Davy was a great Scientist, as deeply versed in
> Physics as any theorist of our day, yet he loathed Materialism. He says:
> 
>     I heard with disgust, in the dissecting‐rooms, the plan of the
>     Physiologist, of the gradual secretion of matter, and its becoming
>     endued with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring
>     such organs as were necessary, by its own inherent forces, and at
>     last rising into intellectual existence.
> 
> Nevertheless, Physiologists are not those who should be most blamed for
> speaking of that only which they can see by, and estimate on the evidence
> of, their physical senses. Astronomers and Physicists are, we consider,
> far more illogical in their materialistic views than are even
> Physiologists, and this has to be proved. Milton’s
> 
>     ... Light
>     Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure,
> 
> has become with the Materialists only
> 
>     ... Prime cheerer, light,
>     Of all material beings, first and best.
> 
> For the Occultists it is both Spirit and Matter. Behind the “mode of
> motion,” now regarded as the “property of matter” and nothing more, they
> perceive the radiant Noumenon. It is the “Spirit of Light,” the first‐born
> of the Eternal pure Element, whose energy, or emanation, is stored in the
> Sun, the great Life‐Giver of the Physical World, as the hidden concealed
> Spiritual Sun is the Light‐ and Life‐Giver of the Spiritual and Psychic
> Realms. Bacon was one of the first to strike the key‐note of Materialism,
> not only by his inductive method—renovated from ill‐digested Aristotle—but
> by the general tenor of his writings. He inverts the order of mental
> Evolution when saying:
> 
>     The first creation of God was the light of the sense; the last was
>     the light of the reason; and his Sabbath work ever since is the
>     illumination of the Spirit.
> 
> It is just the reverse. The light of Spirit is the eternal Sabbath of the
> Mystic or Occultist, and he pays little attention to that of mere sense.
> That which is meant by the allegorical sentence, “_Fiat Lux_,” is, when
> esoterically rendered, “Let there be the ‘Sons of Light’,” or the Noumena
> of all phenomena. Thus the Roman Catholics rightly interpret the passage
> as referring to Angels, but wrongly as meaning Powers created by an
> anthropomorphic God, whom they personify in the ever thundering and
> punishing Jehovah.
> 
> These beings are the “Sons of Light,” because they emanate from, and are
> self‐generated in, that infinite Ocean of Light, whose one pole is pure
> _Spirit_ lost in the absoluteness of Non‐Being, and the other pole, the
> _Matter_ in which it condenses, “crystallizing” into a more and more gross
> type as it descends into manifestation. Therefore Matter, though it is, in
> one sense, but the illusive dregs of that Light whose Rays are the
> Creative Forces, yet has in it the full presence of the Soul thereof, of
> that Principle, which none—not even the “Sons of Light,” evolved from its
> ABSOLUTE DARKNESS—will ever know. The idea is as beautifully, as it is
> truthfully, expressed by Milton, who hails the holy Light, which is the
> 
>     ... Offspring of Heaven, first‐born,
>     Or of th’ Eternal coëternal beam;
>     ... Since God is Light,
>     And never but in unapproached Light
>     Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,
>     Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
> 
> Section II. Modern Physicists are Playing at Blind Man’s Buff.
> 
> And now Occultism puts to Science the question: Is light a body, or is it
> not? Whatever the answer of the latter, the former is prepared to show
> that, to this day, the most eminent Physicists have no real knowledge on
> the subject. To know what light is, and whether it is an actual substance
> or a mere undulation of the “ethereal medium,” Science has first to learn
> what Matter, Atom, Ether, Force, are in reality. Now, the truth is, that
> it knows nothing of any of these, and admits its ignorance. It has not
> even agreed what to believe in, as dozens of hypotheses on the same
> subject, emanating from various and very eminent Scientists, are
> antagonistic to each other and often self‐contradictory. Thus their
> learned speculations may, with a stretch of good‐will, be accepted as
> “working hypotheses” in a secondary sense, as Stallo puts it. But being
> radically inconsistent with each other, they must finally end by mutually
> destroying themselves. As declared by the author of _Concepts of Modem
> Physics_:
> 
>     It must not be forgotten that the several departments of science
>     are simply arbitrary divisions of science at large. In these
>     several departments the same physical object may be considered
>     under different aspects. The physicist may study its molecular
>     relations, while the chemist determines its atomic constitution.
>     But when they both deal with the same element or agent, it cannot
>     have one set of properties in physics, and another set
>     contradictory of them, in chemistry. If the physicist and chemist
>     alike assume the existence of ultimate atoms absolutely invariable
>     in bulk and weight, the atom cannot be a cube or oblate spheroid
>     for physical, and a sphere for chemical purposes. A group of
>     constant atoms cannot be an aggregate of extended and absolutely
>     inert and impenetrable masses in a crucible or retort, and a
>     system of mere centres of force as part of a magnet or of a
>     Clamond battery. The universal æther cannot be soft and mobile to
>     please the chemist, and rigid‐elastic to satisfy the physicist; it
>     cannot be continuous at the command of Sir William Thomson and
>     discontinuous on the suggestion of Cauchy or Fresnel.(792)
> 
> The eminent Physicist, G. A. Hirn, may likewise be quoted as saying the
> same thing in the 43rd Volume of the _Mémoires de l’Académie Royale de
> Belgique_, which we translate from the French, as cited:
> 
>     When one sees the assurance with which to‐day are affirmed
>     doctrines which attribute the collectivity, the universality of
>     the phenomena to the motions alone of the atom, one has a right to
>     expect to find likewise unanimity in the qualities assigned to
>     this unique being, the foundation of all that exists. Now, from
>     the first examination of the particular systems proposed, one
>     finds the strangest deception; one perceives that the atom of the
>     chemist, the atom of the physicist, that of the metaphysician, and
>     that of the mathematician ... have absolutely nothing in common
>     but the name! The inevitable result is the existing subdivision of
>     our sciences, each of which, in its own little pigeon‐hole,
>     constructs an atom which satisfies the requirements of the
>     phenomena it studies, without troubling itself in the least about
>     the requirements proper to the phenomena of the neighbouring
>     pigeon‐hole. The metaphysician banishes the principles of
>     attraction and repulsion as dreams; the mathematician, who
>     analyses the laws of elasticity and those of the propagation of
>     light, admits them implicitly, without even naming them.... The
>     chemist cannot explain the grouping of the atoms, in his often
>     complicated molecules, without attributing to his atoms specific
>     distinguishing qualities; _for the physicist and the
>     metaphysician, partisans of the modern doctrines, the atom is, on
>     the contrary, always and everywhere the same_. What am I saying?
>     There is no agreement even in one and the same science as to the
>     properties of the atom. Each constructs an atom to suit his own
>     fancy, in order to explain some special phenomenon with which he
>     is particularly concerned.(793)
> 
> The above is the photographically correct image of Modern Science and
> Physics. The “pre‐requisite of that incessant play of the ’scientific
> imagination’,” which is so often found in Professor Tyndall’s eloquent
> discourses, is vivid indeed, as is shown by Stallo, and for contradictory
> variety it leaves far behind it any “phantasies” of Occultism. However
> that may be, if physical theories are confessedly “mere formal,
> explanatory, didactic devices,” and if, to use the words of a critic of
> Stallo, “atomism is only a symbolical graphic system,”(794) then the
> Occultist can hardly be regarded as assuming too much, when he places
> alongside of these “devices” and “symbolical systems” of Modern Science,
> the symbols and devices of Archaic Teachings.
> 
> “An Lumen Sit Corpus, Nec Non?”
> 
> Most decidedly light is not a body, we are told. Physical Sciences say
> light is a force, a vibration, the undulation of Ether. It is the property
> or quality of Matter, or even an affection thereof—never _a body_!
> 
> Just so. For this discovery, the knowledge, whatever it may be worth, that
> light or caloric is not a motion of _material particles_, Science is
> chiefly, if not solely indebted, to Sir William Grove. It was he who in a
> lecture at the London Institution, in 1842, was the first to show that
> “heat, light,(795) may be considered as affections of matter itself, and
> not of a distinct ethereal, ‘imponderable,’ fluid [a state of matter
> _now_] permeating it.”(796) Yet, perhaps, for some Physicists—as for
> Œrsted, a very eminent Scientist—Force and Forces were tacitly “Spirit
> [and hence Spirits] in Nature.” What several rather mystical Scientists
> taught was that light, heat, magnetism, electricity and gravity, etc.,
> were not the final Causes of the visible phenomena, including planetary
> motion, but were themselves the secondary _effects of other Causes_, for
> which Science in our day cares very little, but in which Occultism
> believes; for the Occultists have exhibited proofs of the validity of
> their claims in every age. And in what age were there no Occultists and no
> Adepts?
> 
> Sir Isaac Newton held to the Pythagorean corpuscular theory, and was also
> inclined to admit its consequences; which made the Comte de Maistre hope,
> at one time, that Newton would ultimately lead Science back to the
> recognition of the fact that Forces and the Celestial Bodies _were
> propelled and guided by Intelligences_.(797) But de Maistre counted
> without his host. The innermost thoughts and ideas of Newton were
> perverted, and of his great mathematical learning only the mere physical
> husk was turned to account.
> 
> According to one atheistic Idealist, Dr. Lewins:
> 
>     When Sir Isaac, in 1687 ... showed mass and atom acted upon ... by
>     innate activity ... he effectually disposed of Spirit, Anima, or
>     Divinity, as supererogatory.
> 
> Had poor Sir Isaac foreseen to what use his successors and followers would
> apply his “gravity,” that pious and religious man would surely have
> quietly eaten his apple, and never have breathed a word about any
> mechanical ideas connected with its fall.
> 
> Great contempt is shown by Scientists for Metaphysics generally and for
> Ontological Metaphysics especially. But whenever the Occultists are bold
> enough to raise their diminished heads, we see that Materialistic,
> Physical Science is honey‐combed with Metaphysics;(798) that its most
> fundamental principles, while inseparably wedded to transcendentalism, are
> nevertheless, in order to show Modern Science divorced from such “dreams,”
> tortured and often ignored in the maze of contradictory theories and
> hypotheses. A very good corroboration of this charge lies in the fact that
> Science finds itself absolutely compelled to accept the “hypothetical”
> Ether, and to try to explain it on the materialistic grounds of atomo‐
> mechanical laws. This attempt has led directly to the most fatal
> discrepancies and radical inconsistencies between the assumed nature of
> Ether and its physical behaviour. A second proof is found in the many
> contradictory statements made about the Atom—the most metaphysical object
> in creation.
> 
> Now, what does the modern science of Physics know of Ether, the first
> concept of which belongs undeniably to ancient Philosophers, the Greeks
> having borrowed it from the Âryans, and the origin of modern Ether being
> found in, and disfigured from, Âkâsha? This disfigurement is claimed as a
> modification and refinement of the idea of Lucretius. Let us then examine
> the modern concept, from several scientific volumes containing the
> admissions of the Physicists themselves.
> 
> As Stallo shows, the existence of Ether is accepted in Physical Astronomy,
> in ordinary Physics, and in Chemistry.
> 
>     By the astronomers, this æther was originally regarded as a fluid
>     of extreme tenuity and mobility, offering no sensible resistance
>     to the motions of celestial bodies, and the question of its
>     continuity or discontinuity was not seriously mooted. Its main
>     function in modern astronomy has been to serve as a basis for
>     hydro‐dynamical theories of gravitation. In physics this fluid
>     appeared for some time in several _rôles_ in connection with the
>     “imponderables” [so cruelly put to death by Sir William Grove],
>     some physicists going so far as to identify it with one or more of
>     them.(799)
> 
> Stallo then points out the change caused by the kinetic theories; that
> from the date of the dynamical theory of heat, Ether was chosen in Optics
> as a substratum for luminous undulations. Next, in order to explain the
> dispersion and polarization of light, Physicists had to resort once more
> to their “scientific imagination,” and forthwith endowed the Ether with
> (_a_) atomic or molecular structure, and (_b_) with an enormous
> elasticity, “so that its resistance to deformation far exceeded that of
> the most rigid elastic bodies.” This necessitated the _theory of the
> essential discontinuity of Matter_, hence of Ether. After having accepted
> this discontinuity, in order to account for dispersion and polarization,
> theoretical impossibilities were discovered with regard to such
> dispersion. Cauchy’s “scientific imagination” saw in Atoms “material
> points without extension,” and he proposed, in order to obviate the most
> formidable obstacles to the undulatory theory (namely, some well‐known
> mechanical theorems which stood in the way), to assume that the ethereal
> medium of propagation, instead of being continuous, should consist of
> particles separated by sensible distances. Fresnel rendered the same
> service to the phenomena of polarization. E. B. Hunt upset the theories of
> both.(800) There are now men of Science who proclaim them “materially
> fallacious,” while others—the “atomo‐mechanicalists”—cling to them with
> desperate tenacity. The supposition of an _atomic_ or _molecular
> constitution_ of Ether is upset, moreover, by thermo‐dynamics, for Clerk
> Maxwell showed that such a medium would be simply _gas_.(801) The
> hypothesis of “finite intervals” is thus proven of no avail as a
> supplement to the undulatory theory. Besides, eclipses fail to reveal any
> such variation of colour as is supposed by Cauchy, on the assumption that
> the chromatic rays are propagated with different velocities. Astronomy has
> pointed out more than one phenomenon absolutely at variance with this
> doctrine.
> 
> Thus, while in one department of Physics the atomo‐molecular constitution
> of the Ether is accepted in order to account for one special set of
> phenomena, in another department such a constitution is found to be quite
> subversive of a number of well‐ascertained facts; and Hirn’s charges are
> thus justified. Chemistry deemed it
> 
>     Impossible to concede the enormous elasticity of the æther without
>     depriving it of those properties, upon which its serviceableness
>     in the construction of chemical theories mainly depended.
> 
> This ended in a final transformation of Ether.
> 
>     The exigencies of the atomo‐mechanical theory have led
>     distinguished mathematicians and physicists to attempt a
>     substitution for the traditional atoms of matter, of peculiar
>     forms of vortical motion in a universal, homogeneous,
>     incompressible, and _continuous_ material medium [Ether].(802)
> 
> The present writer—claiming no great scientific education, but only a
> tolerable acquaintance with modern theories, and a better one with Occult
> Sciences—picks up weapons against the detractors of the Esoteric Teaching
> in the very arsenal of Modern Science. The glaring contradictions, the
> mutually‐destructive hypotheses of world‐renowned Scientists, their
> disputes, their accusations and denunciations of each other, show plainly
> that, whether accepted or not, the Occult Theories have as much right to a
> hearing as any of the so‐called learned and academical hypotheses. Thus,
> whether the followers of the Royal Society choose to accept Ether as a
> _continuous_ or as a _discontinuous_ fluid matters little, and is
> indifferent for the present purpose. It simply points to one certainty:
> Official Science _knows nothing to this day of the constitution of Ether_.
> Let Science call it Matter, if it likes; only neither as Âkâsha, nor as
> the one sacred Æther of the Greeks, is it to be found in any of the states
> of Matter known to modern Physics. It is Matter on quite another plane of
> perception and being, and it can neither be analyzed by scientific
> apparatus, nor appreciated or even conceived by the “scientific
> imagination,” unless the possessors thereof study the Occult Sciences.
> That which follows proves this statement.
> 
> It is clearly demonstrated by Stallo as regards the crucial problems of
> modern Physics, as was done by De Quatrefages and several others in those
> of Anthropology, Biology, etc., that, in their efforts to support their
> individual hypotheses and systems, most of the eminent and learned
> Materialists very often utter the greatest fallacies. Let us take the
> following case. Most of them reject _actio in distans_—one of the
> fundamental principles in the question of Æther or Âkâsha in
> Occultism—while, as Stallo justly observes, there is no physical action
> “which, on close examination, does not resolve itself into _actio in
> distans_”; and he proves it.
> 
> Now, metaphysical arguments, according to Professor Lodge,(803) are
> “unconscious appeals to experience.” And he adds that if such an
> experience _is not conceivable_, then it does not exist. In his own words:
> 
>     If a highly‐developed mind or set of minds, find a doctrine about
>     some comparatively simple and fundamental matter absolutely
>     unthinkable, it is an evidence ... that the unthinkable state of
>     things has no existence.
> 
> And thereupon, toward the end of his lecture, the Professor indicates that
> the explanation of cohesion, as well as of gravity, “is to be looked for
> in the vortex‐atom theory of Sir William Thomson.”
> 
> It is needless to stop to inquire whether it is to this vortex‐atom
> theory, also, that we have to look for the dropping down on earth of the
> first life‐germ by a passing meteor or comet—Sir William Thomson’s
> hypothesis. But Prof. Lodge might be reminded of the wise criticism on his
> lecture in Stallo’s _Concepts of Modem Physics_. Noticing the above‐quoted
> declaration by the Professor, the author asks
> 
>     Whether ... the elements of the vortex‐atom theory are familiar,
>     or even possible, facts of experience? For, if they are not,
>     clearly that theory is obnoxious to the same criticism which is
>     said to invalidate the assumption of _actio in distans_.(804)
> 
> And then the able critic shows clearly what the Ether is not, nor can ever
> be, notwithstanding all scientific claims to the contrary. And thus he
> opens widely, if unconsciously, the entrance door to our Occult Teachings.
> For, as he says:
> 
>     The medium in which the vortex‐movements arise is, according to
>     Professor Lodge’s own express statement (_Nature_, vol. xxvii. p.
>     305), “a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, continuous body,
>     incapable of being resolved into simple elements or atoms; it is,
>     in fact, continuous, not molecular.” And after making this
>     statement Professor Lodge adds: “_There is no other body of which
>     we can say this, and hence the properties of the æther must be
>     somewhat different from those of ordinary matter_.” It appears,
>     then, that the whole vortex‐atom theory, which is offered to us as
>     a substitute for the “metaphysical theory” of _actio in distans_,
>     rests upon the hypothesis of the existence of a material medium
>     which is utterly unknown to experience, and which has properties
>     _somewhat_ different(805) from those of ordinary matter. Hence
>     this theory, instead of being, as is claimed, a reduction of an
>     unfamiliar fact of experience to a familiar fact, is, on the
>     contrary, a reduction of a fact which is perfectly familiar, to a
>     fact which is not only unfamiliar, but wholly unknown, unobserved
>     and unobservable. Furthermore, the alleged vortical motion of, or
>     rather in, the assumed ethereal medium is ... _impossible_,
>     because “motion in a perfectly homogeneous, incompressible, and
>     therefore continuous fluid, is not sensible motion.”... It is
>     manifest, therefore ... that, wherever the vortex‐atom theory may
>     land us, it certainly does not land us anywhere in the region of
>     physics, or in the domain of _veræ causæ_.(806) And I may add
>     that, inasmuch as the hypothetical undifferentiated(807) and
>     undifferentiable medium is clearly an involuntary reïfication of
>     the old ontological concept _pure being_, the theory under
>     discussion has all the attributes of an inapprehensible
>     metaphysical phantom.(808)
> 
> A “phantom,” indeed, which can be made apprehensible only by Occultism.
> From such scientific Metaphysics to Occultism there is hardly one step.
> Those Physicists who hold the view that the atomic constitution of Matter
> is consistent with its penetrability, need not go far out of their way to
> be able to account for the greatest phenomena of Occultism, now so derided
> by Physical Scientists and Materialists. Cauchy’s “material points without
> extension” are Leibnitz’s Monads, and at the same time are the materials
> out of which the “Gods” and other invisible Powers clothe themselves in
> bodies. The disintegration and reïntegration of “material” particles
> without extension, as a chief factor in phenomenal manifestations, ought
> to suggest themselves very easily as a clear possibility, at any rate to
> those few scientific minds which accept M. Cauchy’s views. For, disposing
> of that property of Matter which they call impenetrability, by simply
> regarding the Atoms as “material points exerting on each other attractions
> and repulsions which vary with the distances that separate them,” the
> French theorist explains that:
> 
>     From this it follows that, if it pleased the author of nature
>     simply to modify the laws according to which the atoms attract or
>     repel each other, we might instantly see the hardest bodies
>     penetrating each other, the smallest particles of matter occupying
>     immense spaces, or the largest masses reducing themselves to the
>     smallest volumes, the entire universe concentrating itself, as it
>     were, in a single point.(809)
> 
> And that “point,” _invisible on our plane of perception and matter_, is
> quite visible to the eye of the Adept who can follow and see it present on
> other planes. For the Occultists, who say that the author of Nature _is
> Nature itself_, something indistinct and inseparable from the Deity, it
> follows that those who are conversant with the Occult laws of Nature, and
> know how to change and provoke new conditions in Ether, may—_not_ modify
> the laws, but work and do the same in accordance with these immutable
> laws.
> 
> Section III. Is Gravitation a Law?
> 
> The corpuscular theory has been unceremoniously put aside; but
> gravitation—the principle that all bodies attract each other with a force
> proportional directly to their masses, and inversely to the squares of the
> distances between them—survives to this day and reigns, supreme as ever,
> in the alleged ethereal waves of Space. As a hypothesis, it had been
> threatened with death for its inadequacy to embrace all the facts
> presented to it; as a physical law, it is the King of the late and once
> all‐potent “Imponderables.” “It is little short of blasphemy ... an insult
> to Newton’s grand memory to doubt it!”—is the exclamation of an American
> reviewer of _Isis Unveiled_. Well; what is finally that invisible and
> intangible God in whom we should believe on blind faith? Astronomers who
> see in gravitation an easy‐going solution for many things, and a universal
> force which allows them to calculate planetary motions, care little about
> the Cause of Attraction. They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We
> call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary
> effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does
> not answer after all; and then it will follow the corpuscular theory of
> light, and be consigned to rest for many scientific æons in the archives
> of all exploded speculations. Has not Newton himself expressed grave
> doubts about the nature of Force and the corporeality of the “Agents,” as
> they were then called? So has Cuvier, another scientific light shining in
> the night of research. He warns his readers, in the _Révolution du Globe_,
> about the doubtful nature of the so‐called Forces, saying that “it is not
> so sure whether those agents were not after all Spiritual Powers [_des
> agents spirituels_].” At the outset of his _Principia_, Sir Isaac Newton
> took the greatest care to impress upon his school that he did not use the
> word “attraction,” with regard to the mutual action of bodies in a
> physical sense. To him it was, he said, a purely mathematical conception,
> involving no consideration of real and primary physical causes. In a
> passage of his _Principia_,(810) he tells us plainly that, physically
> considered, attractions are rather impulses. In Section xi (Introduction),
> he expresses the opinion that “there is some subtle spirit by the force
> and action of which all movements of matter are determined”;(811) and in
> his _Third Letter_ to Bentley he says:
> 
>     It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without
>     the mediation of something else _which is not material_, operate
>     upon and affect other matter, without mutual contact, as it must
>     do if gravitation, in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and
>     inherent in it.... That gravity should be innate, inherent and
>     essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a
>     distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else
>     by and through which their action may be conveyed from one to
>     another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man, who
>     has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can
>     ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting
>     constantly according to certain laws; but _whether this agent be
>     material or immaterial_ I have left to the consideration of my
>     readers.
> 
> At this, even Newton’s contemporaries got frightened—at the apparent
> return of Occult Causes into the domain of Physics. Leibnitz called his
> principle of attraction “an incorporeal and inexplicable power.” The
> supposition of an attractive faculty and a perfect void was characterized
> by Bernoulli as “revolting,” the principle of _actio in distans_ finding
> then no more favour than it does now. Euler, on the other hand, thought
> the action of gravity was due to either a _Spirit_ or some subtle medium.
> And yet Newton knew of, if he did not accept, the Ether of the Ancients.
> He regarded the intermediate space between the sidereal bodies as vacuum.
> Therefore he believed in “subtle Spirit” and Spirits as we do, guiding the
> so‐called attraction. The above‐quoted words of the great man have
> produced poor results. The “absurdity” has now become a dogma in the case
> of pure Materialism, which repeats: “No Matter without Force, no Force
> without Matter; Matter and Force are inseparable, eternal and
> indestructible [_true_]; there can be no independent Force, since all
> Force is an inherent and necessary property of Matter [_false_];
> consequently, there is no immaterial Creative Power.” Oh, poor Sir Isaac!
> 
> If, leaving aside all the other eminent men of Science who agreed in
> opinion with Euler and Leibnitz, the Occultists claim as their authorities
> and supporters Sir Isaac Newton and Cuvier only, as above cited, they need
> fear little from Modern Science, and may loudly and proudly proclaim their
> beliefs. But the hesitation and doubts of the above cited authorities, and
> of many others, too, whom we could name, did not in the least prevent
> scientific speculation from wool‐gathering in the fields of brute matter
> just as before. First it was matter and an imponderable fluid distinct
> from it; then came the imponderable fluid so much criticized by Grove;
> then Ether, which was at first discontinuous and then became continuous;
> after which came the “mechanical” Forces. These have now settled in life
> as “modes of motion,” and the Ether has become more mysterious and
> problematical than ever. More than one man of Science objects to such
> crude materialistic views. But then, from the days of Plato, who
> repeatedly asks his readers not to confuse _incorporeal_ Elements with
> their Principles—the transcendental or spiritual Elements; from those of
> the great Alchemists, who, like Paracelsus, made a great difference
> between a phenomenon and its cause, or the Noumenon; to Grove, who, though
> he sees “no reason to divest universally diffused matter of the functions
> common to all matter,” yet uses the term Forces where his critics, “who do
> not attach to the word any idea of a specific action,” say Force; from
> those days to this, nothing has proved competent to stem the tide of
> brutal Materialism. Gravitation is the sole cause, the acting God, and
> Matter is its prophet, said the men of Science only a few years ago.
> 
> They have changed their views several times since then. But do the men of
> Science understand the innermost thought of Newton, one of the most
> spiritual‐minded and religious men of his day, any better now than they
> did then? It is certainly to be doubted. Newton is credited with having
> given the death‐blow to the Elemental Vortices of Descartes—the idea of
> Anaxagoras, resurrected, by the bye—though the last modern “vortical
> atoms” of Sir William Thomson do not, in truth, differ much from the
> former. Nevertheless, when his disciple Forbes wrote in the Preface to the
> chief work of his master a sentence declaring that “attraction was the
> cause of the system,” Newton was the first to solemnly protest. That which
> in the mind of the great mathematician assumed the shadowy, but firmly
> rooted image of God, as the Noumenon of all,(812) was called more
> philosophically by ancient and modern Philosophers and Occultists—“Gods,”
> or the creative fashioning Powers. The modes of expression may have been
> different, and the ideas more or less philosophically enunciated by all
> sacred and profane Antiquity; but the fundamental thought was the
> same.(813) For Pythagoras the Forces were Spiritual Entities, Gods,
> independent of planets and Matter as we see and know them on Earth, who
> are the rulers of the Sidereal Heaven. Plato represented the planets as
> moved by an intrinsic Rector, one with his dwelling, like “a boatman in
> his boat.” As for Aristotle, he called those rulers “_immaterial_
> substances”;(814) though as one who had never been initiated, he rejected
> the Gods as Entities.(815) But this did not prevent him from recognizing
> the fact that the stars and planets “were not inanimate masses but acting
> and living bodies indeed.” As if sidereal spirits were the “diviner
> portions of their phenomena (τὰ θειότερα τῶν φανερῶν).”(816)
> 
> If we look for corroboration in more modern and scientific times, we find
> Tycho Brahe recognizing in the stars a triple force, divine, spiritual and
> vital. Kepler, putting together the Pythagorean sentence, “the Sun,
> guardian of Jupiter,” and the verses of David, “He placed his throne in
> the Sun,” and “the Lord is the Sun,” etc., said that he understood
> perfectly how the Pythagoreans could believe that all the Globes
> disseminated through Space were rational Intelligences (_facultates
> ratiocinativæ_), circulating round the Sun, “in which resides a pure
> spirit of fire; the source of the general harmony.”(817)
> 
> When an Occultist speaks of Fohat, the energizing and guiding Intelligence
> in the Universal Electric or Vital Fluid, he is laughed at. Withal, as now
> shown, the nature neither of electricity, nor of life, nor even of light,
> is to this day understood. The Occultist sees in the manifestation of
> every force in Nature, the action of the quality, or the special
> characteristic of its Noumenon; which Noumenon is a distinct and
> intelligent Individuality _on the other side of the manifested mechanical
> Universe_. Now the Occultist does not deny—on the contrary he will support
> the view—that light, heat, electricity and so on are affections, not
> properties or qualities, of Matter. To put it more clearly: Matter is the
> condition, the necessary basis or vehicle, a _sine quâ non_, for the
> manifestation of these Forces, or Agents, on this plane.
> 
> But in order to gain the point, the Occultists have to examine the
> credentials of the law of gravity, first of all, of “Gravitation, the King
> and Ruler of Matter,” under every form. To do so effectually, the
> hypothesis, in its earliest appearance, has to be recalled to mind. To
> begin with, is it Newton who was the first to discover it? The _Athenæum_
> of Jan. 26, 1867, has some curious information upon this subject. It says:
> 
>     Positive evidence can be adduced that Newton derived all his
>     knowledge of Gravitation and its laws from Bœhme, with whom
>     Gravitation or Attraction is the first property of Nature.... For
>     with him, his [Bœhme’s] system shows us the inside of things,
>     while modern physical science is content with looking at the
>     outside.
> 
> Then again:
> 
>     The science of electricity, which was not yet in existence when he
>     [Bœhme] wrote, is there anticipated [in his writings]; and not
>     only does Bœhme describe all the now known phenomena of that
>     force, but he even gives us the origin, generation, and birth of
>     electricity, itself.
> 
> Thus Newton, whose profound mind easily read between the lines, and
> fathomed the spiritual thought of the great Seer, in its mystic rendering,
> owes his great discovery to Jacob Bœhme, the nursling of the Genii,
> Nirmânakâyas who watched over and guided him, of whom the author of the
> article in question so truly remarks:
> 
>     Every new scientific discovery goes to prove his profound and
>     intuitive insight into the most secret workings of Nature.
> 
> And having _discovered_ gravity, Newton, in order to render possible the
> action of attraction in space, had, so to speak, to annihilate every
> physical obstacle capable of impeding its free action; Ether among others,
> though he had more than a presentiment of its existence. Advocating the
> corpuscular theory, he made an _absolute vacuum_ between the heavenly
> bodies. Whatever may have been his suspicions and inner convictions about
> Ether; however many friends he may have unbosomed himself to—as in the
> case of his correspondence with Bentley—his teachings never showed that he
> had any such belief. If he was “persuaded that the power of attraction
> could not be exerted by matter across a vacuum,”(818) how is it that so
> late as 1860, French astronomers, Le Couturier, for instance, combated
> “the _disastrous_ results of the theory of vacuum established by the great
> man”? Le Couturier says:
> 
>     Il n’est plus possible aujourd’hui, de soutenir comme Newton, que
>     les corps célestes se mouvent au milieu du vide immense des
>     espaces.... Parmi les conséquences de la théorie du vide établie
>     par Newton, il ne reste plus debout que le mot “attraction.”...
>     Nous voyous venir le jour ou le mot attraction disparaîtra du
>     vocabulaire scientifique.(819)
> 
> Professor Winchell writes:
> 
>     These passages [Letter to Bentley] show what were his views
>     respecting the nature of the interplanetary medium of
>     communication. Though declaring that the heavens “are void of
>     sensible matter,” he elsewhere excepted “perhaps some very thin
>     vapours, steams, and effluvia, arising from the atmospheres of the
>     earth, planets, and comets, and from such an exceedingly rare
>     ethereal medium as we have elsewhere described.”(820)
> 
> This only shows that even such great men as Newton have not always the
> courage of their opinions. Dr. T. S. Hunt
> 
>     Called attention to some long‐neglected passages in Newton’s
>     works, from which it appears that a belief in such universal,
>     intercosmical medium gradually took root in his mind.(821)
> 
> But such attention was never called to the said passages before Nov. 28,
> 1881, when Dr. Hunt read his “Celestial Chemistry, from the time of
> Newton.” As Le Couturier says:
> 
>     Till then the idea was universal, even among the men of Science,
>     that Newton had, while advocating the corpuscular theory, preached
>     a _void_.
> 
> The passages had been “long neglected,” no doubt because they contradicted
> and clashed with the preconceived pet theories of the day, till finally
> the undulatory theory imperiously required the presence of an “ethereal
> medium” to explain it. This is the whole secret.
> 
> Anyhow, it is from this theory of Newton of a universal void, taught, if
> not believed in by himself, that dates the immense scorn now shown by
> modern Physics for ancient. The old sages had maintained that “Nature
> abhorred a vacuum,” and the greatest mathematicians of the world—read of
> the Western races—had discovered the antiquated “fallacy” and exposed it.
> And now Modern Science, however ungracefully, vindicates Archaic
> Knowledge, and has, moreover, to vindicate Newton’s character and powers
> of observation at this late hour, after having neglected, for one century
> and a half, to pay any attention to such very important
> passages—perchance, because it was wiser not to attract any notice to
> them. Better late than never!
> 
> And now Father Æther is _re‐welcomed_ with open arms and wedded to
> gravitation, linked to it for weal or woe, until the day when it, or both,
> shall be replaced by something else. Three hundred years ago it was
> _plenum_ everywhere, then it became one dismal _vacuity_; later still the
> sidereal ocean‐beds, dried up by Science, rolled onward once more their
> ethereal waves. _Recede ut procedas_ must become the motto of exact
> Science—“exact,” chiefly, in finding itself inexact every leap‐year.
> 
> But we will not quarrel with the great men. They had to go back to the
> earliest “Gods of Pythagoras and old Kanâda” for the very backbone and
> marrow of their correlations and “newest” discoveries, and this may well
> afford good hope to the Occultists for their minor Gods. For we believe in
> Le Couturier’s prophecy about gravitation. We know the day is approaching
> when an absolute reform will be demanded in the present modes of Science
> by the Scientists themselves, as was done by Sir William Grove, F.R.S.
> Till that day there is nothing to be done. For if gravitation were
> dethroned to‐morrow, the Scientists would discover some other new mode of
> mechanical motion the day after.(822) Rough and up‐hill is the path of
> true Science, and its days are full of vexation of spirit. But in the face
> of its “thousand” contradictory hypotheses offered as explanations of
> physical phenomena, there has been no better hypothesis than
> “motion”—however paradoxically interpreted by Materialism. As may be found
> in the first pages of this Volume, Occultists have nothing to say against
> Motion,(823) the Great Breath of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s “Unknowable.” But,
> believing that everything on Earth is the shadow of something in Space,
> they believe in smaller “Breaths,” which, living, intelligent and
> independent of all but Law, blow in every direction during manvantaric
> periods. These Science will reject. But whatever may be made to replace
> attraction, _alias_ gravitation, the result will be the same. Science will
> be as far then from the solution of its difficulties as it is now, unless
> it comes to some compromise with Occultism, and even with Alchemy—a
> supposition which will be regarded as an impertinence, but remains,
> nevertheless, a fact. As Faye says:
> 
>     Il manque quelque chose aux géologues pour faire la géologie de la
>     Lune; c’est d’être astronomes. À la vérité, il manque aussi
>     quelque chose aux astronomes pour aborder avec fruit cette étude,
>     c’est d’être géologues.(824)
> 
> But he might have added, with still more pointedness:
> 
>     Ce qui manque à tous les deux, c’est l’intuition du mystique.
> 
> Let us remember Sir William Grove’s wise “concluding remarks,” on the
> ultimate structure of Matter, or the minutiæ of molecular actions, which,
> he thought, man will never know.
> 
>     Much harm has already been done by attempting hypothetically to
>     dissect matter and to discuss the shapes, sizes, and numbers of
>     atoms, and their atmospheres of heat, ether, or electricity.
>     Whether the regarding electricity, light, magnetism, etc., as
>     simply motions of ordinary matter, be or be not admissible,
>     certain it is that all past theories have resolved, and all
>     existing theories do resolve, the action of these forces into
>     motion. Whether it be that, on account of our familiarity with
>     motion, we refer other affections to it, as to a language which is
>     most easily construed, and most capable of explaining them, or
>     whether it be that it is in reality the only mode in which our
>     minds, as contra‐distinguished from our senses, are able to
>     conceive material agencies, certain it is that since the period at
>     which the mystic notions of spiritual or preternatural powers were
>     applied to account for physical phenomena, all hypotheses framed
>     to explain them have resolved them into motion.
> 
> And then the learned gentleman states a purely Occult tenet:
> 
>     The term perpetual motion, which I have not infrequently used in
>     these pages, is itself equivocal. If the doctrines here advanced
>     be well founded, all motion is, in one sense, perpetual. In
>     masses, whose motion is stopped by mutual concussion, heat or
>     motion of the particles is generated; and thus the motion
>     continues, so that if we could venture to extend such thoughts to
>     the universe, we should assume the same amount of motion affecting
>     the same amount of matter for ever.(825)
> 
> This is precisely what Occultism maintains, and on the same principle,
> that:
> 
>     Where force is made to oppose force, and produce static
>     equilibrium, the balance of preëxisting equilibrium is affected,
>     and fresh motion is started equivalent to that which is withdrawn
>     into a state of abeyance.
> 
> This process finds intervals in the Pralaya, but is eternal and ceaseless
> as the “Breath,” even when the manifested Kosmos rests.
> 
> Thus, supposing attraction or gravitation should be given up in favour of
> the Sun being a huge magnet—a theory already accepted by some Physicists—a
> magnet that acts on the planets as attraction is now supposed to do,
> whereto, or how much farther, would it lead the Astronomers from where
> they are now? Not an inch farther. Kepler came to this “curious
> hypothesis” nearly 300 years ago. He had not discovered the theory of
> attraction and repulsion in Kosmos, for it was known from the days of
> Empedocles, by whom the two opposite forces were called “love” and
> “hate”—words implying the same idea. But Kepler gave a pretty fair
> description of cosmic magnetism. That such magnetism exists in Nature, is
> as certain as that gravitation does not; not at any rate, in the way in
> which it is taught by Science, which has never taken into consideration
> the different modes in which the dual Force, that Occultism calls
> attraction and repulsion, may act within our Solar System, the Earth’s
> atmosphere and beyond in the Kosmos.
> 
> As the great Humboldt writes:
> 
>     Trans‐solar space has not hitherto shown any phenomenon analogous
>     to our solar system. It is a peculiarity of _our_ system, that
>     matter should have condensed within it in nebulous rings, the
>     nuclei of which condense into earths and moons. I say again,
>     heretofore, _nothing of the kind has ever been observed beyond our
>     planetary system_.(826)
> 
> True, that since 1860 the Nebular Theory has sprung up, and being better
> known, a few identical phenomena were supposed to be observed beyond the
> Solar System. Yet the great man is quite right; and no _earths_ or _moons_
> can be found, _except in appearance_, beyond, or of the same order of
> Matter as found in, our System. Such is the Occult Teaching.
> 
> This was proven by Newton himself; for there are many phenomena in our
> Solar System, which he confessed his inability to explain by the law of
> gravitation; “such were the uniformity in the directions of planetary
> movements, the nearly circular forms of the orbits, and their remarkable
> conformity to one plane.”(827) And if there is one single exception, then
> the law of gravitation has no right to be referred to as a universal law.
> “These adjustments,” we are told, “Newton, in his general Scholium,
> pronounces to be ‘the work of an intelligent and all‐powerful Being’.”
> Intelligent that “Being” may be; as to “all‐powerful,” there would be
> every reason to doubt the claim. A poor “God” he, who would work upon
> minor details and leave the most important to secondary forces! The
> poverty of this argument and logic is surpassed only by that of Laplace,
> who, seeking very correctly to substitute Motion for Newton’s “all‐
> powerful Being,” and ignorant of the true nature of that Eternal Motion,
> saw in it a blind physical law. “Might not those arrangements be an effect
> of the laws of motion?” he asks, forgetting, as do all our modern
> Scientists, that this law and this motion are a vicious circle, so long as
> the _nature of both_ remains unexplained. His famous answer to Napoleon:
> “_Dieu est devenu une hypothèse inutile_,” could be correctly made only by
> one who adhered to the philosophy of the Vedântins. It becomes a pure
> fallacy, if we exclude the interference of operating, intelligent,
> powerful (never “all‐powerful”) Beings, who are called “Gods.”
> 
> But we would ask the critics of the mediæval Astronomers, why should
> Kepler be denounced as most unscientific, for offering just the same
> solution as did Newton, only showing himself more sincere, more consistent
> and even more logical? Where may be the difference between Newton’s “all‐
> powerful Being” and Kepler’s Rectores, his Sidereal and Cosmic Forces, or
> Angels? Kepler again is criticized for his “curious hypothesis which made
> use of a vortical movement within the solar system,” for his theories in
> general, and for favouring Empedocles’ idea of attraction and repulsion,
> and “solar magnetism” in particular. Yet several modern men of Science, as
> will be shown—Hunt, if Metcalfe is to be excluded, Dr. Richardson,
> etc.—very strongly favour the same idea. He is half excused, however, on
> the plea that:
> 
>     To the time of Kepler no interaction between masses of matter had
>     been distinctly recognized which was generically different from
>     magnetism.(828)
> 
> Is it _distinctly_ recognized now? Does Professor Winchell claim for
> Science any serious knowledge whatever of the nature of either electricity
> or magnetism—except that both seem to be the effects of some result
> arising from an undetermined cause.
> 
> The ideas of Kepler, when their theological tendencies are weeded out, are
> purely Occult. He saw that:
> 
> (I) The Sun is a great Magnet.(829) This is what some eminent modern
> Scientists and also the Occultists believe in.
> 
> (II) The Solar substance is immaterial.(830) In the sense, of course, of
> Matter existing in states unknown to Science.
> 
> (III) For the constant motion and restoration of the Sun’s energy and
> planetary motion, he provided the perpetual care of a Spirit, or Spirits.
> The whole of Antiquity believed in this idea. The Occultists do not use
> the word Spirit, but say Creative Forces, which they endow with
> intelligence. But we may call them Spirits also. We shall be taken to task
> for contradiction. It will be said that while we deny God, we admit Souls
> and operative Spirits, and quote from bigoted Roman Catholic writers in
> support of our argument. To this we reply: We deny the anthropomorphic God
> of the Monotheists, but never the Divine Principle in Nature. We combat
> Protestants and Roman Catholics on a number of dogmatic theological
> beliefs of human and sectarian origin. We agree with them in their belief
> in Spirits and intelligent operative Powers, though we do not worship
> “Angels” as the Roman Latinists do.
> 
> This theory is tabooed a great deal more on account of the “Spirit” that
> is given room in it, than of anything else. Herschell, the elder, believed
> in it likewise, and so do several modern Scientists. Nevertheless
> Professor Winchell declares that “a hypothesis more fanciful, and less in
> accord with the requirements of physical principles, has not been offered
> in ancient or modern times.”(831)
> 
> The same was said, once upon a time, of the universal Ether, and now it is
> not only accepted perforce, but is advocated as the only possible theory
> to explain certain mysteries.
> 
> Grove’s ideas, when he first enunciated them in London about 1840, were
> denounced as unscientific; nevertheless, his views on the Correlation of
> Forces are now universally accepted. It would, very likely, require one
> more conversant with Science than is the writer, to combat with any
> success some of the now prevailing ideas about gravitation and other
> similar “solutions” of cosmic mysteries. But, let us recall a few
> objections that came from recognized men of Science; from Astronomers and
> Physicists of eminence, who rejected the theory of rotation, as well as
> that of gravitation. Thus one reads in the _French Encyclopædia_ that
> “Science agrees, in the face of all its representatives, that it is
> _impossible_ to explain the _physical_ origin of the rotatory motion of
> the solar system.”
> 
> If the question is asked: “What causes rotation?” We are answered: “It is
> the centrifugal force.” “And this force, what is it that produces it?”
> “The force of rotation,” is the grave answer.(832) It will be well,
> perhaps, to examine both these theories as being directly or indirectly
> connected.
> 
> Section IV. The Theories of Rotation in Science.
> 
> Considering that “final cause is pronounced a chimera, and the First Great
> Cause is remanded to the sphere of the Unknown,” as a reverend gentleman
> justly complains, the number of hypotheses put forward, a nebula of them,
> is most remarkable. The profane student is perplexed, and does not know in
> which of the theories of _exact_ Science he has to believe. We give below
> hypotheses enough for every taste and power of brain. They are all
> extracted from a number of scientific volumes.
> 
> Current Hypotheses explaining the Origin of Rotation.
> 
> Rotation has originated:
> 
> (_a_) By the collision of nebular masses wandering aimlessly in Space; or
> by attraction, “in cases where no actual impact takes place.”
> 
> (_b_) By the tangential action of currents of nebulous matter (in the case
> of an amorphous nebula) descending from higher to lower levels,(833) or
> simply by the action of the central gravity of the mass.(834)
> 
> “It is a fundamental principle in physics that _no rotation could be
> generated in such a mass by the action of its own parts_. As well attempt
> to change the course of a steamer by pulling at the deck railing,” remarks
> on this Prof. Winchell in _World‐Life_.(835)
> 
> Hypotheses of the Origin of Planets and Comets.
> 
> (_a_) We owe the birth of the planets (1) to an explosion of the Sun—a
> parturition of its central mass;(836) or (2) to some kind of disruption of
> the nebular rings.
> 
> (_b_) “The comets are strangers to the planetary system.”(837) “The comets
> are undeniably generated in our solar system.”(838)
> 
> (_c_) The “_fixed_ stars are motionless,” says one authority. “All the
> stars are actually in motion,” answers another authority. “Undoubtedly
> every star is in motion.”(839)
> 
> (_d_) “For over 350,000,000 years, the slow and majestic movement of the
> sun around its axis has never for a moment ceased.”(840)
> 
> (_e_) “Maedler believes that ... our sun has Alcyone in the Pleiades for
> the centre of its orbit, and consumes 180,000,000 of years in completing a
> single revolution.”(841)
> 
> (_f_) “The sun has existed no more than 15,000,000 of years, and will emit
> heat for no longer than 10,000,000 years more.”(842)
> 
> A few years ago this eminent Scientist was telling the world that the time
> required for the Earth to cool from incipient incrustation to its present
> state, could not exceed 80,000,000 years.(843) the encrusted age of the
> world is only 40,000,000, or half the duration once allowed, and the Sun’s
> age is only 15,000,000, have we to understand that the Earth was at one
> time independent of the Sun?
> 
> Since the ages of the Sun, of the planets, and of the Earth, as they are
> stated in the various scientific hypotheses of the Astronomers and
> Physicists, are given elsewhere below, we have said enough to show the
> disagreement between the ministers of Modern Science. Whether we accept
> the _fifteen_ million years of Sir William Thomson or the _thousand_
> millions of Mr. Huxley, for the rotational evolution of our Solar System,
> it will always come to this; that by accepting self‐generated rotation for
> the heavenly bodies composed of inert Matter and yet moved by their own
> internal motion, for millions of years, this teaching of Science amounts
> to:
> 
> (_a_) An evident denial of that fundamental physical law, which states
> that “a body in motion tends constantly to inertia, _i.e._, to continue in
> the same state of motion or rest, unless it is stimulated into further
> action by a superior active force.”
> 
> (_b_) An original impulse, which culminates in an unalterable motion,
> within a resisting Ether that Newton had declared incompatible with that
> motion.
> 
> (_c_) Universal gravity, which, we are taught, always tends to a centre in
> rectilinear descent—alone the cause of the revolution of the whole Solar
> System, which is performing an eternal double gyration, each body around
> its axis and orbit. Another occasional version is:
> 
> (_d_) A magnet in the Sun; or, that the said revolution is due to a
> magnetic force, which acts, just as gravitation does, in a straight line,
> and varies inversely as the square of the distance.(844)
> 
> (_e_) The whole acting under invariable and changeless laws, which are,
> nevertheless, often shown variable, as during some well‐known freaks of
> planets and other bodies, as also when the comets approach or recede from
> the Sun.
> 
> (_f_) A Motor Force always proportionate to the mass it is acting upon;
> but independent of the specific nature of that mass, to which it is
> proportionate; which amounts to saying, as Le Couturier does, that:
> 
>     Without that force independent from, and of quite another nature
>     than, the said mass, the latter, were it as huge as Saturn, or as
>     tiny as Ceres, would always fall with the same rapidity.(845)
> 
> A mass, furthermore, which derives its weight from the body on which it
> weighs.
> 
> Thus neither Laplace’s perceptions of a solar atmospheric fluid, which
> would extend beyond the orbits of the planets, nor Le Couturier’s
> electricity, nor Foucault’s heat,(846) nor this, nor the other, can ever
> help any of the numerous hypotheses about the origin and permanency of
> rotation to escape from this squirrel’s wheel, any more than can the
> theory of gravity itself. This mystery is the Procrustean bed of Physical
> Science. If Matter is passive, as we are now taught, the simplest movement
> cannot be said to be an essential property of Matter—the latter being
> considered simply as an inert mass. How, then, can such a complicated
> movement, compound and multiple, harmonious and equilibrated, lasting in
> the eternities for millions and millions of years, be attributed simply to
> its own inherent force, unless the latter is an Intelligence? A physical
> will is something new—a conception that the Ancients would never have
> entertained, indeed! For over a century all distinction between body and
> force has been made away with. “Force is but the property of a body in
> motion,” say the Physicists; “life—the property of our animal organs—is
> but the result of their molecular arrangement,” answer the Physiologists.
> As Littré teaches:
> 
>     In the bosom of that aggregate which is named planet, are
>     developed all the forces immanent in matter ... _i.e._, that
>     matter possesses _in itself_ and _through itself_ the forces that
>     are proper to it ... and which are _primary_, not _secondary_.
>     Such forces are the property of weight, the property of
>     electricity, of terrestrial magnetism, the property of life....
>     Every planet can develop life ... as earth, for instance, which
>     had not always mankind on it, and now bears (_produit_) men.(847)
> 
> An Astronomer says:
> 
>     We talk of the weight of the heavenly bodies, but since it is
>     recognized that weight decreases in proportion to the distance
>     from the centre, it becomes evident that, at a certain distance,
>     that weight must be forcibly reduced to zero. Were there any
>     _attraction_ there would be equilibrium.... And since the modern
>     school recognizes neither a _beneath_ nor an _above_ in universal
>     space, it is not clear what should cause the earth to fall, were
>     there even no gravitation, nor attraction.(848)
> 
> Methinks the Count de Maistre was right in solving the question in his own
> theological way. He cuts the Gordian knot by saying:—“The planets rotate
> because they are made to rotate ... and the modern physical system of the
> universe is a physical impossibility.”(849) For did not Herschell say the
> same thing when he remarked that there is a Will needed to impart a
> circular motion, and another Will to restrain it?(850) This shows and
> explains how a retarded planet is cunning enough to calculate its time so
> well as to hit off its arrival at the fixed minute. For, if Science
> sometimes succeeds, with great ingenuity, in explaining some of such
> stoppages, retrograde motions, angles outside the orbits, etc., by
> appearances resulting from the inequality of their progress and ours in
> the course of our mutual and respective orbits, we still know that there
> are others, and “very real and considerable deviations,” according to
> Herschell, “which cannot be explained except by the mutual and irregular
> action of those planets and by the perturbing influence of the sun.”
> 
> We understand, however, that there are, besides those little and
> accidental perturbations, continuous perturbations called
> “secular”—because of the extreme slowness with which the irregularity
> increases and affects the relations of the elliptic movement—and that
> these perturbations can be corrected. From Newton, who found that this
> world needed repairing very often, down to Reynaud, all say the same. In
> his _Ciel et Terre_, the latter says:
> 
>     The orbits described by the planets are far from immutable, and
>     are, on the contrary, subject to a perpetual mutation in their
>     position and form.(851)
> 
> Proving gravitation and the peripatetic laws to be as negligent as they
> are quick to repair their mistakes. The charge as it stands seems to be
> that:
> 
>     These orbits are alternately widening and narrowing, their great
>     axis lengthens and diminishes, or oscillates at the same time from
>     right to left around the sun, the plane itself, in which they are
>     situated, raising and lowering itself periodically while pivoting
>     around itself with a kind of tremor.
> 
> To this, De Mirville, who believes in intelligent “workmen” invisibly
> ruling the Solar System—as we do—observes very wittily:
> 
>     _Voilà, certes_, a voyage which has little in it of mechanical
>     precision; at the utmost, one could compare it to a steamer,
>     pulled to and fro and tossed on the waves, retarded or
>     accelerated, all and each of which impediments might put off its
>     arrival indefinitely, were there not the intelligence of a pilot
>     and engineers to catch up the time lost, and to repair the
>     damages.(852)
> 
> The law of gravity, however, seems to be becoming an obsolete law in
> starry heaven. At any rate those long‐haired sidereal Radicals, called
> comets, appear to be very poor respecters of the majesty of that law, and
> to beard it quite impudently. Nevertheless, and though presenting in
> nearly every respect “phenomena not yet fully understood,” comets and
> meteors are credited by the believers in Modern Science with obeying the
> same laws and consisting of the same Matter, “as the suns, stars and
> nebulæ,” and even “the earth and its inhabitants.”(853)
> 
> This is what one might call taking things on trust, aye, even to blind
> faith. But exact Science is not to be questioned, and he who rejects the
> hypotheses imagined by her students—gravitation, for instance—would be
> regarded as an ignorant fool for his pains; yet we are told by the just
> cited author a queer legend from the scientific annals.
> 
>     The comet of 1811 had a tail 120 millions of miles in length and
>     25 millions of miles in diameter at the widest part, while the
>     diameter of the nucleus was about 127,000 miles, more than ten
>     times that of the earth.
> 
> He tells us that:
> 
>     In order that bodies of this magnitude, passing near the earth,
>     should not affect its motion or change the length of the year by
>     even a single second, their actual substance must be inconceivably
>     rare.
> 
> It must be so indeed, yet:
> 
>     The extreme tenuity of a comet’s mass is also proved by the
>     phenomenon of the tail, which, as the comet approaches the sun, is
>     thrown out sometimes to a length of 90 millions of miles in a few
>     hours. And what is remarkable, this tail is thrown out against the
>     force of gravity by some repulsive force, probably electrical, so
>     that it always points away from the sun [!!!].... And yet, thin as
>     the matter of comets must be, it obeys the common Law of Gravity
>     [!?], and whether the comet revolves in an orbit within that of
>     the outer planets, or shoots off into the abysses of space, and
>     returns only after hundreds of years, its path is, at each
>     instant, regulated by the same force as that which causes an apple
>     to fall to the ground.(854)
> 
> Science is like Cæsar’s wife, and must not be suspected—this is evident.
> But it can be respectfully criticized, nevertheless, and at all events, it
> may be reminded that the “apple” is a dangerous fruit. For the second time
> in the history of mankind, it may become the cause of the Fall—this time,
> of “exact” Science. A comet whose tail defies the law of gravity right in
> the Sun’s face can hardly be credited with obeying that law.
> 
> In a series of scientific works on Astronomy and the Nebular Theory,
> written between 1865 and 1866, the present writer, a poor tyro in Science,
> has counted in a few hours, no less than thirty‐nine contradictory
> hypotheses offered as explanations for the self‐generated, primitive
> rotatory motion of the heavenly bodies. The writer is no Astronomer, no
> Mathematician, no Scientist; but she was obliged to examine these errors
> in defence of Occultism, in general, and what is still more important, in
> order to support the Occult Teachings concerning Astronomy and Cosmology.
> Occultists were threatened with terrible penalties for questioning
> scientific truths. But now they feel braver; Science is less secure in its
> “impregnable” position than they were led to expect, and many of its
> strongholds are built on very shifting sands.
> 
> Thus, even this poor and unscientific examination of it has been useful,
> and it has certainly been very instructive. We have learned a good many
> things, in fact, having especially studied with particular care those
> astronomical data, that would be the most likely to clash with our
> heterodox and “superstitious” beliefs.
> 
> Thus, for instance, we have found there, concerning gravitation, the axial
> and orbital motions, that synchronous movement having been once overcome,
> in the early stage, this was enough to originate a rotatory motion till
> the end of Manvantara. We have also come to know, in all the aforesaid
> combinations of possibilities with regard to incipient rotation, most
> complicated in every case, some of the causes to which it may have been
> due, as well as some others to which it ought and should have been due,
> but, in some way or other, was not. Among other things, we are informed
> that incipient rotation may be provoked with equal ease in a mass in
> igneous fusion, and in one that is characterized by glacial opacity.(855)
> That gravitation is a law which nothing can overcome, but which is,
> nevertheless, overcome, in and out of season, by the most ordinary
> celestial or terrestrial bodies—the tails of impudent comets, for
> instance. That we owe the universe to the holy Creative Trinity, called
> Inert Matter, Senseless Force and Blind Chance. Of the real essence and
> nature of any of these three, Science knows nothing, but this is a
> trifling detail. Ergo, we are told that, when a mass of cosmic or nebular
> Matter—whose nature is entirely unknown, and which may be in a state of
> fusion (Laplace), or dark and cold (Thomson), for “this intervention of
> heat is itself a pure hypothesis” (Faye)—decides to exhibit its mechanical
> energy under the form of rotation, it acts in this wise. It (the mass)
> either bursts into spontaneous conflagration, or it remains inert,
> tenebrous, and frigid, both states being equally capable of sending it,
> without any adequate cause, spinning through Space for millions of years.
> Its movements may be retrograde, or they may be direct, about a hundred
> various reasons being offered for both motions, in about as many
> hypotheses; anyhow, it joins the maze of stars, whose origin belongs to
> the same miraculous and spontaneous order—for:
> 
>     _The nebular theory does not profess to discover the_ ORIGIN _of
>     things, but only a stadium in material history._(856)
> 
> Those millions of suns, planets, and satellites, composed of inert matter,
> will whirl on in most impressive and majestic symmetry round the
> firmament, moved and guided only, notwithstanding their inertia, “by their
> own internal motion.”
> 
> Shall we wonder, after this, if learned Mystics, pious Roman Catholics,
> and even such learned Astronomers as were Chaubard and Godefroy,(857) have
> preferred the _Kabalah_ and the ancient systems to the modern dreary and
> contradictory exposition of the Universe? The _Zohar_ makes a distinction,
> at any rate, between “the Hajaschar [the ‘Light Forces’], the Hachoser
> [‘Reflected Lights’], and the simple _phenomenal exteriority_ of their
> spiritual types.”(858)
> 
> The question of “gravity” may now be dismissed, and other hypotheses
> examined. That Physical Science knows nothing of “Forces” is clear. We may
> close the argument, however, by calling to our help one more man of
> Science—Professor Jaumes, Member of the Academy of Medicine at
> Montpellier. Says this learned man, speaking of Forces:
> 
>     A cause is that which is essentially acting in the genealogy of
>     phenomena, in every production as in every modification. I said
>     that activity (or force) was invisible.... To suppose it corporeal
>     and _residing in the properties of matter_ would be a gratuitous
>     hypothesis.... To reduce all the causes to God, ... would amount
>     to embarrassing oneself with a hypothesis hostile to many
>     verities. But to speak of _a plurality of forces_ proceeding from
>     the Deity and possessing inherent powers of their own, is not
>     unreasonable, ... and I am disposed to admit phenomena produced by
>     intermediate agents called Forces or Secondary Agents. The
>     _distinction_ of Forces is the principle of the division of
>     Sciences; so many real and separate Forces, so many mother‐
>     Sciences.... No; Forces are not suppositions and abstractions, but
>     realities, and the only acting realities whose attributes can be
>     determined with the help of direct observation and induction.(859)
> 
> Section V. The Masks of Science. Physics Or Metaphysics?
> 
> If there is anything like progress on earth, Science will some day have to
> give up, _nolens volens_, such monstrous ideas as her physical, self‐
> guiding laws, void of Soul and Spirit, and will then have to turn to the
> Occult Teachings. It has already done so, however altered may be the
> title‐pages and revised editions of the Scientific Catechism. It is now
> over half a century since, in comparing modern with ancient thought, it
> was found that, however different our Philosophy may appear from that of
> our ancestors, it is, nevertheless, composed only of additions and
> subtractions taken from the old Philosophy and transmitted drop by drop
> through the filter of antecedents.
> 
> This fact was well known to Faraday, and to other eminent men of Science.
> Atoms, Ether, Evolution itself—all come to Modern Science from ancient
> notions, all are based on the conceptions of the archaic nations.
> “Conceptions” for the profane, under the shape of allegories; plain truths
> taught during the Initiations to the Elect, which truths have been
> partially divulged through Greek writers and have descended to us. This
> does not mean that Occultism has ever had the same views on Matter, Atoms
> and Ether as may be found in the exotericism of the classical Greek
> writers. Yet, if we may believe Mr. Tyndall, even Faraday was an
> Aristotelean, and was more an Agnostic than a Materialist. In his
> _Faraday, as a Discoverer_,(860) the author shows the great Physicist
> using “old reflections of Aristotle” which are “concisely found in some of
> his works.” Faraday, Boscovitch, and all others, however, who see, in the
> Atoms and molecules, “centres of force,” and in the corresponding element,
> Force, an Entity by itself, are far nearer the truth, perchance, than
> those, who, denouncing them, denounce at the same time the “old
> corpuscular Pythagorean theory”—one, by the way, which never passed to
> posterity as the great Philosopher really taught it—on the ground of its
> “delusion that the conceptual elements of matter can be grasped as
> separate and real entities.”
> 
> The chief and most fatal mistake and fallacy made by Science, in the view
> of the Occultists, lies in the idea of the possibility of such a thing
> existing in Nature as inorganic, or dead Matter. Is anything dead or
> inorganic which is capable of transformation or change?—Occultism asks.
> And is there anything under the sun which remains immutable or changeless?
> 
> For a thing to be _dead_ implies that it had been at some time _living_.
> When, at what period of cosmogony? Occultism says that in all cases Matter
> is the most active, when it appears inert. A wooden or a stone block is
> motionless and impenetrable to all intents and purposes. Nevertheless, and
> _de facto_, its particles are in ceaseless eternal vibration which is so
> rapid that to the physical eye the body seems absolutely devoid of motion;
> and the spacial distance between those particles in their vibratory motion
> is—considered from another plane of being and perception—as great as that
> which separates snow flakes or drops of rain. But to Physical Science this
> will be an absurdity.
> 
> This fallacy is nowhere better illustrated than in the scientific work of
> a German _savant_, Professor Philip Spiller. In this cosmological
> treatise, the author attempts to prove that:
> 
>     No material constituent of a body, no atom, is in itself
>     originally endowed with force, but that every such atom is
>     absolutely dead, and without any inherent power to act at a
>     distance.(861)
> 
> This statement, however, does not prevent Spiller from enunciating an
> Occult doctrine and principle. He asserts _the independent substantiality
> of Force_, and shows it as an “incorporeal stuff” (_unkörperlicher Stoff_)
> or Substance. Now _Substance_ is not _Matter_ in Metaphysics, and for
> argument’s sake it may be granted that it is a wrong expression to use.
> But this is due to the poverty of European languages, and especially to
> the paucity of scientific terms. Then this “stuff” is identified and
> connected by Spiller with the Æther. Expressed in Occult language it might
> be said with more correctness that this “Force‐Substance” is the ever‐
> active phenomenal positive Ether—Prakriti; while the omnipresent all‐
> pervading Æther is the Noumenon of the former, the substratum of all, or
> Âkâsha. Nevertheless, Stallo falls foul of Spiller, as he does of the
> Materialists. He is accused of “utter disregard of the fundamental
> correlation of Force and Matter,” of neither of which Science knows
> anything certain. For this “hypostasized half‐concept” is, in the view of
> all other Physicists, not only _imponderable_, but destitute of cohesive,
> chemical, thermal, electric, and magnetic forces, of all of which
> forces—according to Occultism—Æther is the Source and Cause.
> 
> Therefore Spiller, with all his mistakes, exhibits more intuition than
> does any other modern Scientist, with the exception, perhaps, of Dr.
> Richardson, the theorist on “Nerve‐Force,” or Nervous Ether, also on “Sun‐
> Force and Earth‐Force.”(862) For Æther, in Esotericism, is the very
> quintessence of all possible energy, and it is certainly to this Universal
> Agent (composed of many agents) that are due all the manifestations of
> energy in the material, psychic and spiritual worlds.
> 
> What, in fact, are electricity and light? How can Science know that one is
> a fluid and the other a “mode of motion”? Why is no reason given why a
> difference should be made between them, since both are considered as
> force‐correlations? Electricity is a fluid, we are told, immaterial and
> lion‐molecular—though Helmholtz thinks otherwise—and the proof of it is
> that we can bottle it up, accumulate it and store it away. Then, it must
> be simply Matter, and no peculiar “fluid.” Nor is it only “a mode of
> motion,” for motion could hardly be stored in a Leyden jar. As for light,
> it is a still more extraordinary “mode of motion”; since, “marvellous as
> it may appear, light [also] can _actually be stored up for use_,” as was
> demonstrated by Grove nearly half a century ago.
> 
>     Take an engraving which has been kept for some days in the dark,
>     expose it to full sunshine—that is, insulate it for 15 minutes;
>     lay it on sensitive paper in a dark place, and at the end of 24
>     hours it will have left an impression of itself on the sensitive
>     paper, the whites coming out as blacks.... There seems to be no
>     limit for the reproduction of engravings.(863)
> 
> What is it that remains fixed, nailed, so to say, on the paper? It is a
> Force certainly that fixed the thing, but what is _that thing_, the
> residue of which remains on the paper?
> 
> Our learned men will get out of this by some scientific technicality; but
> what is it that is intercepted, so as to imprison a certain quantity of it
> on glass, paper, or wood? Is it “Motion” or is it “Force”? Or shall we be
> told that what remains behind is only the effect of the Force or Motion?
> Then what is this Force? Force or Energy is a quality; but every quality
> must belong to a something, or a somebody. In Physics, Force is defined as
> “that which changes or tends to change any physical relation between
> bodies, whether mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, magnetic, etc.”
> But it is not that Force or that Motion which remains behind on the paper,
> when the Force or Motion has ceased to act; and yet something, which our
> physical senses cannot perceive, has been left there, to become a cause in
> its turn and to produce effects. What is it? It is not Matter, as defined
> by Science—_i.e._, Matter in any of its known states. An Alchemist would
> say it was a spiritual secretion—and he would be laughed at. But yet, when
> the Physicist said that electricity, stored up, is a fluid, or that light
> fixed on paper is still sunlight—that was _Science_. The newest
> authorities have, indeed, rejected these explanations as “exploded
> theories,” and have now deified “Motion” as their sole idol. But, surely,
> they and their idol will one day share the fate of their predecessors! An
> experienced Occultist, one who has verified the whole series of Nidânas,
> of causes and effects, that finally project their last effect on to this
> our plane of manifestations, one who has traced Matter back to its
> Noumenon, holds the opinion that the explanation of the Physicist is like
> calling anger, or its effects—the exclamation provoked by it—a secretion
> or a fluid, and man, the cause of it, its _material_ conductor. But, as
> Grove prophetically remarked, the day is fast approaching when it will be
> confessed that the Forces we know are but the phenomenal manifestations of
> Realities we know nothing about—but which were known to the Ancients, and
> by them worshipped.
> 
> He made one still more suggestive remark which ought to have become the
> motto of Science, but has not. Sir William Grove said that: “_Science
> should have neither desires nor prejudices. Truth should be her sole
> aim_.”
> 
> Meanwhile, in our days, Scientists are more self‐opinionated and bigoted
> than even the Clergy. For they minister to, if they do not actually
> worship, “Force‐Matter,” which is their _Unknown God_. And how unknown it
> is, may be inferred from the many confessions of the most eminent
> Physicists and Biologists, with Faraday at their head. Not only, he said,
> could he never presume to pronounce whether Force was a property or
> function of Matter, but he actually did not know what was meant by the
> word Matter.
> 
> There was a time, he added, when he believed he knew something of Matter.
> But the more he lived, and the more carefully he studied it, the more he
> became convinced of his utter ignorance of the nature of Matter.(864)
> 
> This ominous confession was made, we believe, at a Scientific Congress at
> Swansea. Faraday held a similar opinion, however, as stated by Tyndall:
> 
>     What do we know of the atom apart from its force? You imagine a
>     nucleus which maybe called _a_ and surround it by forces which may
>     be called _m_; to my mind the _a_ or nucleus vanishes and the
>     substance consists of the powers _m_. And, indeed, what notion can
>     we form of the nucleus independent of its powers? What thought
>     remains on which to hang the imagination of an _a_ independent of
>     the acknowledged forces?
> 
> The Occultists are often misunderstood because, for lack of better terms,
> they apply to the Essence of Force, _under certain aspects_, the
> descriptive epithet of _Substance_. Now the names for the varieties of
> Substance on different planes of perception and being are legion. Eastern
> Occultism has a special appellation for each kind; but Science—like
> England, in the recollection of a witty Frenchman, blessed with thirty‐six
> religions and only one fish‐sauce—has but one name for all, namely
> “Substance.” Moreover, neither the orthodox Physicists nor their critics
> seem to be very certain of their premisses, and are as apt to confuse the
> effects as they are the causes. It is incorrect, for instance, to say, as
> Stallo does, that “Matter can no more be realized or conceived as mere
> positive spatial presence than as a concretion of forces,” or that “Force
> is nothing without mass, and mass is nothing without force”—for one is the
> Noumenon and the other the phenomenon. Again; Schelling, when saying that
> 
>     It is a mere delusion of the phantasy that something, we know not
>     what, remains after we have denuded an object of all the
>     predicates belonging to it,(865)
> 
> could never have applied the remark to the realm of transcendental
> Metaphysics. It is true that pure Force is _nothing_ in the world of
> Physics; it is All in the domain of Spirit. Says Stallo:
> 
>     If we reduce the mass upon which a given force, however small,
>     acts to its limit zero—or, mathematically expressed, until it
>     becomes infinitely small—the consequence is that the velocity of
>     the resulting motion is infinitely great, and that the “thing” ...
>     is at any given moment neither here nor there, but everywhere—that
>     there is no real presence; it is impossible, therefore, to
>     construct matter by a synthesis of forces.(866)
> 
> This may be true in the phenomenal world, inasmuch as the illusive
> reflection of the One Reality of the supersensual world may appear true to
> the dwarfed conceptions of a Materialist. It is absolutely incorrect when
> the argument is applied to things in what the Kabalists call the
> supermundane spheres. Inertia, so‐called, is Force, according to
> Newton,(867) and for the student of Esoteric Sciences the greatest of the
> Occult Forces. A body can only conceptually, only on this plane of
> illusion, be considered divorced from its relations with other
> bodies—which, according to the physical and mechanical sciences, give rise
> to its attributes. In fact, it can never be so detached; death itself
> being unable to detach it from its relation with the Universal Forces, of
> which the One Force, or Life, is the synthesis: the inter‐relation simply
> continues on another plane. But what, if Stallo is right, can Dr. James
> Croll mean when, in speaking “On the Transformation of Gravity,” he brings
> forward the views advocated by Faraday, Waterston, and others? For he says
> very plainly that gravity
> 
>     Is a force pervading Space external to bodies, and that, on the
>     mutual approach of the bodies, the force is not increased, as is
>     generally supposed, but the bodies merely pass into a place where
>     the force exists with greater intensity.(868)
> 
> No one will deny that a Force, whether gravity, electricity, or any other
> Force, which exists _outside_ bodies and in open Space—be it Ether or a
> vacuum—must be _something_, and not a pure _nothing_, when conceived apart
> from a mass. Otherwise it could hardly exist in one place with a greater
> and in another with reduced “intensity.” G. A. Hirn declares the same in
> his _Théorie Mécanique de l’Univers_. He tries to demonstrate:
> 
>     That the atom of the chemists is not an entity of pure convention,
>     or simply an explicative device, but that it exists really, that
>     its volume is unalterable, and that consequently it is _not_
>     elastic [!!]. Force, therefore, is not in the atom; it is _in the
>     space_ which separates the atoms from each other.
> 
> The above‐cited views, expressed by two men of Science of great eminence
> in their respective countries, show that it is not in the least
> _unscientific_ to speak of the substantiality of the so‐called Forces.
> Subject to some future specific name, this Force is Substance of some
> kind, and can be nothing else; and perhaps one day Science will be the
> first to reädopt the derided name of phlogiston. Whatever may be the
> future name given to it, to maintain that Force does not reside in the
> Atoms, but only in the “space between them,” may be scientific enough;
> nevertheless it is not true. To the mind of an Occultist it is like saying
> that water does not reside in the drops of which the ocean is composed,
> but only in the space between those drops!
> 
> The objection that there are two distinct schools of Physicists, by one of
> which
> 
>     This force is assumed to be an independent substantial entity,
>     which is not a property of matter nor essentially related to
>     matter,(869)
> 
> is hardly likely to help the profane to any clearer understanding. It is,
> on the contrary, more calculated to throw the question into still greater
> confusion than ever. For Force is, then, neither this nor the other. By
> viewing it as “an independent substantial entity,” the theory extends the
> right hand of fellowship to Occultism, while the strange contradictory
> idea that it is not “related to Matter otherwise than by its power to act
> upon it,”(870) leads Physical Science to the most absurd contradictory
> hypotheses. Whether “Force” or “Motion” (Occultism, seeing no difference
> between the two, never attempts to separate them), it cannot act for the
> adherents of the atomo‐mechanical theory in one way, and for those of the
> rival school in another. Nor can the Atoms be, in one case, absolutely
> uniform in size and weight, and in another, vary in their weight
> (Avogadro’s law). For, in the words of the same able critic:
> 
>     While the absolute equality of the primordial units of mass is
>     thus an essential part of the very foundations of the mechanical
>     theory, the whole modern science of chemistry is based upon a
>     principle directly subversive of it—a principle of which it has
>     recently been said that “it holds the same place in chemistry that
>     the law of gravitation does in astronomy.”(871) This principle is
>     known as the law of Avogadro or Ampère.(872)
> 
> This shows that either modern Chemistry, or modern Physics, is entirely
> wrong in the respective fundamental principles. For if the assumption of
> Atoms of different specific gravities is deemed absurd, on the basis of
> the atomic theory in Physics; and if Chemistry, nevertheless, on this very
> assumption, meets with “unfailing experimental verification,” in the
> formation and transformation of chemical compounds; then it becomes
> apparent that it is the atomo‐mechanical theory which is untenable. The
> explanation of the latter, that “the differences of weight are only
> differences of density, and differences of density are differences of
> distance between the particles contained in a given space,” is not really
> valid, because, before a Physicist can argue in his defence that “as in
> the atom there is no multiplicity of particles and no void space, hence
> differences of density or weight are impossible in the case of atoms,” he
> must first know what an Atom is, in reality, and that is just what he
> cannot know. He must bring it under the observation of at least one of his
> physical senses—and that he cannot do: for the simple reason that no one
> has ever seen, smelt, heard, touched or tasted an Atom. The Atom belongs
> wholly to the domain of Metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction—at any
> rate for Physical Science—and has nought to do with Physics, strictly
> speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. The
> mechanical conception, therefore, becomes a jumble of the most conflicting
> theories and dilemmas, in the minds of the many Scientists who disagree on
> this, as on other subjects; and its evolution is beheld with the greatest
> bewilderment by the Eastern Occultist, who follows this scientific strife.
> 
> To conclude, on the question of gravity. How can Science presume to know
> anything certain of it? How can it maintain its position and its
> hypotheses against those of the Occultists, who see in gravity only
> sympathy and antipathy, or attraction and repulsion, caused by physical
> polarity on our terrestrial plane, and by spiritual causes outside its
> influence? How can they disagree with the Occultists before they agree
> among themselves? Indeed one hears of the Conservation of Energy, and in
> the same breath of the perfect hardness and inelasticity of the Atoms; of
> the kinetic theory of gases being identical with “potential energy,” so
> called, and, at the same time, of the elementary units of mass being
> absolutely hard and inelastic! An Occultist opens a scientific work and
> reads as follows:
> 
>     Physical atomism derives all the qualitative properties of matter
>     from the forms of atomic motion. The _atoms themselves remain as
>     elements utterly devoid of quality_.(873)
> 
> And further:
> 
>     Chemistry in its ultimate form must be atomic mechanics.(874)
> 
> And a moment after he is told that:
> 
>     Gases consist of atoms which behave like solid, _perfectly
>     elastic_ spheres.(875)
> 
> Finally, to crown all, Sir W. Thomson is found declaring that:
> 
>     We are forbidden by the modern theory of the conservation of
>     energy to assume inelasticity, or anything short of perfect
>     elasticity of the ultimate molecules whether of ultra‐mundane or
>     mundane matter.(876)
> 
> But what do the men of true Science say to all this? By the “men of true
> Science” we mean those who care too much for truth and too little for
> personal vanity to dogmatize on anything, as do the majority. There are
> several among them—perhaps more than dare openly publish their secret
> conclusions, for fear of the cry “Stone him to death!”—men, whose
> intuitions have made them span the abyss that lies between the terrestrial
> aspect of Matter, and the, to us, on our plane of illusion, subjective,
> _i.e._, transcendentally objective Substance, and have led them to
> proclaim the existence of the latter. Matter, to the Occultist, it must be
> remembered, is that totality of existences in the Kosmos, which falls
> within any of the planes of possible perception. We are but too well aware
> that the orthodox theories of sound, heat and light, are against the
> Occult Doctrines. But, it is not enough for the men of Science, or their
> defenders, to say that they do not deny dynamic power to light and heat,
> and to urge, as a proof, the fact that Mr. Crookes’ radiometer has
> unsettled no views. If they would fathom the ultimate nature of these
> Forces, they have first to admit their _substantial_ nature, however
> _supersensuous_ that nature may be. Neither do the Occultists deny the
> correctness of the vibratory theory.(877) Only they limit its functions to
> our Earth—declaring its inadequacy on other planes than ours, since
> Masters in the Occult Sciences perceive the Causes that produce ethereal
> vibrations. Were all these only the fictions of the Alchemists, or dreams
> of the Mystics, such men as Paracelsus, Philalethes, Van Helmont, and so
> many others, would have to be regarded as worse than visionaries; they
> would become impostors and deliberate mystificators.
> 
> The Occultists are taken to task for calling the Cause of light, heat,
> sound, cohesion, magnetism, etc., etc., a Substance.(878) Mr. Clerk
> Maxwell has stated that the pressure of strong sunlight on a square mile
> is about 3‐¼ lbs. It is, they are told, “the energy of the myriad ether
> waves”; and when they call it a Substance impinging on that area, their
> explanation is proclaimed unscientific.
> 
> There is no justification for such an accusation. In no way—as already
> more than once stated—do the Occultists dispute the explanations of
> Science, as affording a solution of the immediate objective agencies at
> work. Science only errs in believing that, because it has detected in
> vibratory waves the _proximate_ cause of these phenomena, it has,
> therefore, revealed _all_ that lies beyond the threshold of Sense. It
> merely traces the sequence of phenomena on a plane of effects, illusory
> projections from the region that Occultism has long since penetrated. And
> the latter maintains that those etheric tremors are not set up, as
> asserted by Science, by the vibrations of the molecules of known bodies,
> the Matter of our terrestrial objective consciousness, but that we must
> seek for the ultimate Causes of light, heat, etc., in Matter existing in
> supersensuous states—states, however, as fully objective to the spiritual
> eye of man, as a horse or a tree is to the ordinary mortal. Light and heat
> are the ghost or shadow of Matter in motion. Such states can be perceived
> by the Seer or the Adept during the hours of trance, under the Sushumnâ
> Ray—the first of the Seven Mystic Rays of the Sun.(879)
> 
> Thus, we put forward the Occult teaching which maintains the reality of a
> supersubstantial and supersensible essence of that Âkâsha—not Ether, which
> is only an aspect of the latter—the nature of which cannot be inferred
> from its remoter manifestations, its merely phenomenal phalanx of effects,
> on this terrene plane. Science, on the contrary, informs us that heat can
> never be regarded as Matter in any conceivable state. To cite a most
> impartial critic, one whose authority no one can call in question, as a
> reminder to Western dogmatists, that the question cannot be in any way
> considered as settled:
> 
>     There is no fundamental difference between light and heat ... each
>     is merely a metamorphosis of the other.... Heat is light in
>     complete repose. Light is heat in rapid motion. Directly light is
>     combined with a body, it becomes heat; but when it is thrown off
>     from that body it again becomes light.(880)
> 
> Whether this is true or false we cannot tell, and many years, perhaps many
> generations, will have to elapse before we shall be able to tell.(881) We
> are also told that the two great obstacles to the fluid (?) theory of heat
> undoubtedly are:
> 
> (1) The production of heat by friction—excitation of molecular motion.
> 
> (2) The conversion of heat into mechanical motion.
> 
> The answer given is: There are fluids of various kinds. Electricity is
> called a fluid, and so was heat quite recently, but it was on the
> supposition that heat was some imponderable substance. This was during the
> supreme and autocratic reign of Matter. When Matter was dethroned, and
> Motion was proclaimed the sole sovereign ruler of the Universe, heat
> became a “mode of motion.” We need not despair; it may become something
> else to‐morrow. Like the Universe itself, Science is ever becoming, and
> can never say, “I am that I am.” On the other hand, Occult Science has its
> changeless traditions from prehistoric times. It may err in particulars;
> it can never become guilty of a mistake in questions of Universal Law,
> simply because that Science, justly referred to by Philosophy as the
> Divine, was born on higher planes, and was brought to Earth by Beings who
> were wiser than man will be, even in the Seventh Race of his Seventh
> Round. And _that_ Science maintains that Forces are not what modern
> learning would have them; _e.g._, magnetism is not a “mode of motion”;
> and, in this particular case, at least, exact Modern Science is sure to
> come to grief some day. Nothing, at the first blush, can appear more
> ridiculous, more outrageously absurd than to say, for instance: The Hindû
> initiated Yogî knows really ten times more than the greatest European
> Physicist of the ultimate nature and constitution of light, both solar and
> lunar. Yet why is the Sushumnâ Ray believed to be that Ray which furnishes
> the Moon with its borrowed light? Why is it “the Ray cherished by the
> initiated Yogî”? Why is the Moon considered as the Deity of the Mind, by
> those Yogîs? We say, because light, or rather all its Occult properties,
> every combination and correlation of it with other forces, mental,
> psychic, and spiritual, was perfectly known to the old Adepts.
> 
> Therefore, although Occult Science may be less well‐informed than modern
> Chemistry as to the behaviour of compound elements in various cases of
> physical correlation, yet it is immeasurably higher in its knowledge of
> the ultimate Occult states of Matter, and of the true nature of Matter,
> than all the Physicists and Chemists of our modern day put together.
> 
> Now, if we state the truth openly and in full sincerity, namely, that the
> ancient Initiates had a far wider knowledge of Physics, as a Science of
> Nature, than is possessed by our Academies of Science, all taken together,
> the statement will be characterized as an impertinence and an absurdity;
> for Physical Sciences are considered to have been carried in our age to
> the apex of perfection. Hence, the twitting query: Can the Occultists meet
> successfully the two points, namely (_a_) the production of heat by
> friction—excitation of molecular motion; and (_b_) the conversion of heat
> into mechanical force, if they hold to the old exploded theory of heat
> being a substance or a fluid?
> 
> To answer the question, it must first be observed that the Occult Sciences
> do not regard either electricity, or any of the Forces supposed to be
> generated by it, as Matter in any of the states known to Physical Science;
> to put it more clearly, none of these Forces, so‐called, is a solid, gas,
> or fluid. If it did not look pedantic, an Occultist would even object to
> electricity being called a fluid—as it is an effect and not a cause. But
> its Noumenon, he would say, is a Conscious Cause. The same in the cases of
> “Force” and the “Atom.” Let us see what an eminent Academician, Butlerof,
> the Chemist, had to say about these two abstractions. This great man of
> Science argues:
> 
>     What is Force? What is it from a strictly scientific stand‐point,
>     and as warranted by the law of conservation of energy? Conceptions
>     of Force are resumed by our conceptions of this, that, or another
>     mode of motion. Force is thus simply the passage of one state of
>     motion into another state of the same; of electricity into heat
>     and light, of heat into sound or some mechanical function, and so
>     on.(882) The first time electric fluid was produced by man on
>     earth it must have been by friction; hence, as well known, it is
>     heat that produces it by disturbing its zero state,(883) and
>     electricity exists no more on earth _per se_ than heat or light,
>     or any other force. They are all correlations, as Science says.
>     When a given quantity of heat, assisted by a steam engine, is
>     transformed into mechanical work, we speak of steam power (or
>     force). When a falling body strikes an obstacle in its way,
>     thereby generating heat and sound—we call it the power of
>     collision. When electricity decomposes water or heats a platinum
>     wire, we speak of the force of the electric fluid. When the rays
>     of the sun are intercepted by the thermometer bulb and its
>     quicksilver expands, we speak of the calorific energy of the sun.
>     In short, when one state of a determined quantity of motion
>     ceases, another state of motion equivalent to the preceding takes
>     its place, and the result of such a transformation or correlation
>     is—Force. In all cases where such a transformation, or the passage
>     of one state of motion into another, is entirely absent, there no
>     force is possible. Let us admit for a moment an absolutely
>     homogeneous state of the Universe, and our conception of Force
>     falls down to nought.
> 
>     Therefore it becomes evident that the Force, which Materialism
>     considers as the cause of the diversity that surrounds us, is in
>     sober reality only an effect, a result of that diversity. From
>     such point of view Force is not the cause of motion, but a result,
>     while the cause of that Force, or forces, is not the Substance or
>     Matter, but Motion itself. Matter thus must be laid aside, and
>     with it the basic principle of Materialism, which has become
>     unnecessary, as Force brought down to a state of motion can give
>     no idea of the Substance. If Force is the result of motion, then
>     it becomes incomprehensible why that motion should become witness
>     to Matter and not to Spirit or a Spiritual essence. True, our
>     reason cannot conceive of a motion minus something moving (and our
>     reason is right); but the nature or _esse_ of that something
>     moving remains to Science entirely unknown; and the Spiritualist,
>     in such case, has as much right to attribute it to a “Spirit,” as
>     a Materialist to creative and all‐potential Matter. A Materialist
>     has no special privileges in this instance, nor can he claim any.
>     The law of the conservation of energy, as thus seen, is shown to
>     be illegitimate in its pretensions and claims in this case. The
>     “great dogma”—_no force without matter and no matter without
>     force_—falls to the ground, and loses entirely the solemn
>     significance with which Materialism has tried to invest it. The
>     conception of Force still gives no idea of Matter, and compels us
>     in no way to see in it “the origin of all origins.”(884)
> 
> We are assured that Modern Science is not Materialistic; and our own
> conviction tells us that it cannot be so, when its learning is real. There
> is good reason for this, well defined by some Physicists and Chemists
> themselves. Natural Sciences cannot go hand in hand with Materialism. To
> be at the height of their calling, men of Science have to reject the very
> possibility of Materialistic doctrines having aught to do with the Atomic
> Theory; and we find that Lange, Butlerof, Du Bois Reymond—the last
> probably unconsciously—and several others, have proved it. And this is,
> furthermore, demonstrated by the fact, that Kanâda in India, and Leucippus
> and Democritus in Greece, and after them Epicurus—the earliest Atomists in
> Europe—while propagating their doctrine of definite proportions, believed
> in Gods or supersensuous Entities, at the same time. Their ideas upon
> Matter thus differed from those now prevalent. We must be allowed to make
> our statement clearer by a short synopsis of the ancient and modern views
> of Philosophy upon Atoms, and thus prove that the Atomic Theory kills
> Materialism.
> 
> From the standpoint of Materialism, which reduces the beginnings of all to
> Matter, the Universe consists, in its fulness, of Atoms and vacuity. Even
> leaving aside the axiom taught by the Ancients, and now absolutely
> demonstrated by telescope and microscope, that Nature abhors a vacuum,
> what is an Atom? Professor Butlerof writes:
> 
>     It is, we are answered by Science, the limited division of
>     Substance, the indivisible particle of Matter. To admit the
>     divisibility of the atom, amounts to an admission of an infinite
>     divisibility of Substance, which is equivalent to reducing
>     Substance to _nihil_, or nothingness. Owing to a feeling of self‐
>     preservation alone, Materialism cannot admit infinite
>     divisibility; otherwise, it would have to bid farewell for ever to
>     its basic principle and thus sign its own death‐warrant.(885)
> 
> Büchner, for instance, like a true dogmatist in Materialism declares that:
> 
>     To accept infinite divisibility is absurd, and amounts to doubting
>     the very existence of Matter.
> 
> The Atom is indivisible then, saith Materialism? Very well. Butlerof
> answers:
> 
>     See now what a curious contradiction this fundamental principle of
>     the Materialists is leading them into. The atom is _indivisible_,
>     and at the same time we know it to be _elastic_. An attempt to
>     deprive it of elasticity is unthinkable; it would amount to an
>     absurdity. Absolutely non‐elastic atoms could never exhibit a
>     single one of those numerous phenomena that are attributed to
>     their correlations. Without any elasticity, the atoms could not
>     manifest their energy, and the Substance of the Materialists would
>     remain weeded of every force. Therefore, if the Universe is
>     composed of atoms, then those atoms must be elastic. It is here
>     that we meet with an insuperable obstacle. For, what are the
>     conditions requisite for the manifestation of elasticity? An
>     elastic ball, when striking against an obstacle, is flattened and
>     contracts, which it would be impossible for it to do, were not
>     that ball to consist of particles, the relative position of which
>     experiences at the time of the blow a temporary change. This may
>     be said of elasticity in general; no elasticity is possible
>     without change with respect to the position of the compound
>     particles of an elastic body. This means that the elastic body is
>     changeful and consists of particles, or, in other words, that
>     elasticity can pertain only to those bodies that are divisible.
>     And the atom _is_ elastic.(886)
> 
> This is sufficient to show how absurd are the simultaneous admissions of
> the non‐divisibility and of the elasticity of the Atom. The Atom is
> elastic, _ergo_, the Atom is divisible, and must consist of particles, or
> of sub‐atoms. And these sub‐atoms? They are either non‐elastic, and in
> such case they represent no dynamic importance, or, they are elastic also;
> and in that case, they, too, are subject to divisibility. And thus _ad
> infinitum_. But infinite divisibility of Atoms resolves Matter into simple
> centres of Force, _i.e._, precludes the possibility of conceiving Matter
> as an objective substance.
> 
> This vicious circle is fatal to Materialism. It finds itself caught in its
> own nets, and no issue out of the dilemma is possible for it. If it says
> that the Atom is indivisible, then it will have Mechanics asking it the
> awkward question:
> 
>     How does the Universe move in this case, and how do its forces
>     correlate? A world built on absolutely non‐elastic atoms, is like
>     an engine without steam, it is doomed to eternal inertia.(887)
> 
> Accept the explanations and teachings of Occultism, and—the blind inertia
> of Physical Science being replaced by the intelligent active Powers behind
> the veil of Matter—motion and inertia become subservient to those Powers.
> It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of Matter, and the infinite
> divisibility of the Atom, that the whole Science of Occultism is built. It
> opens limitless horizons to Substance, informed by the divine breath of
> its Soul in every possible state of tenuity, states still undreamed of by
> the most spiritually disposed Chemists and Physicists.
> 
> The above views were enunciated by an Academician, the greatest Chemist in
> Russia, and a recognized authority even in Europe, the late Professor
> Butlerof. True, he was defending the phenomena of the Spiritualists, the
> materializations, so‐called, in which he believed, as Professors Zöllner
> and Hare did, as Mr. A. Russel Wallace, Mr. W. Crookes, and many another
> Fellow of the Royal Society, do still, whether openly or secretly. But his
> argument with regard to the nature of the Essence that acts behind the
> physical phenomena of light, heat, electricity, etc., is no less
> scientific and authoritative for all that, and applies admirably to the
> case in hand. Science has no right to deny to the Occultists their claim
> to a more profound knowledge of the so‐called Forces, which, they say, are
> only the effects of causes generated by Powers, substantial, yet
> supersensuous, and beyond any kind of Matter with which Scientists have
> hitherto become acquainted. The most Science can do is to assume and to
> maintain the attitude of Agnosticism. Then it can say: Your case is no
> more proven than is ours; but we confess to knowing nothing in reality
> either about Force or Matter, or about that which lies at the bottom of
> the so‐called correlation of Forces. Therefore, time alone can prove who
> is right and who is wrong. Let us wait patiently, and meanwhile show
> mutual courtesy, instead of scoffing at each other.
> 
> But to do this requires a boundless love of truth and the surrender of
> that prestige—however false—of infallibility, which the men of Science
> have acquired among the ignorant and flippant, though cultured, masses of
> the profane. The blending of the two Sciences, the Archaic and the Modern,
> requires first of all the abandonment of the actual Materialistic lines.
> It necessitates a kind of religious Mysticism and even the study of old
> Magic, which our Academicians will never take up. The necessity is easily
> explained. Just as in old Alchemical works the real meaning of the
> Substances and Elements mentioned is concealed under the most ridiculous
> metaphors, so are the physical, psychic, and spiritual natures of the
> Elements (say of Fire) concealed in the _Vedas_;, and especially in the
> _Purânas_, under allegories comprehensible only to the Initiates. Had they
> no meaning, then indeed all these long legends and allegories about the
> sacredness of the three types of Fire, and the _Forty‐Nine original
> Fires_—personified by the Sons of Daksha’s Daughters and the Rishis, their
> Husbands, “who with the first Son of Brahmâ and his three descendants
> constitute the Forty‐nine Fires”—would be idiotic verbiage and no more.
> But it is not so. Every Fire has a distinct function and meaning in the
> worlds of the physical and the spiritual. It has, moreover, in its
> essential nature a corresponding relation to one of the human psychic
> faculties, besides its well determined chemical and physical potencies
> when coming in contact with terrestrially differentiated Matter. Science
> has no speculations to offer upon Fire _per se_; Occultism and ancient
> religious Science have. This is shown even in the meagre and purposely
> veiled phraseology of the _Purânas_, where, as in the _Vâyu Purâna_, many
> of the qualities of the personified Fires are explained. Thus, Pâvaka is
> Electric Fire, or Vaidyuta; Pavamâna, the Fire produced by Friction, or
> Nirmathya: and Shuchi is Solar Fire, or Saura(888)—all these three being
> the sons of Abhimânin, the Agni (Fire), eldest son of Brahmâ and of Svâhâ.
> Pâvaka, moreover, is made parent to Kavyavâhana, the Fire of the Pitris:
> Shuchi to Havyaváhana, the Fire of the Gods; and Pavamâna to Saharaksha,
> the Fire of the Asuras. Now all this shows that the writers of the
> _Purânas_ were perfectly conversant with the Forces of Science and their
> correlations, as well as with the various qualities of the latter in their
> bearing upon those psychic and physical phenomena which receive no credit
> and are now unknown to Physical Science. Very naturally, when an
> Orientalist, especially one with materialistic tendencies, reads that
> these are only appellations of Fire employed in the invocations and
> rituals, he calls this “Tântrika superstition and mystification”; and he
> becomes more careful to avoid errors in spelling than to give attention to
> the secret meaning attached to the personifications, or to seek their
> explanation in the physical correlations of Forces, so far as these are
> known. So little credit, indeed, is given to the ancient Âryans for
> knowledge, that even such glaring passages as that in _Vishnu Purâna_, are
> left without any notice. Nevertheless, what can this sentence mean?
> 
>     Then ether, air, light, water, and earth, severally united with
>     the properties of sound and the rest, existed as distinguishable
>     according to their qualities, ... but, possessing many and various
>     energies and being unconnected, they could not, without
>     combination, create living beings, not having blended with each
>     other. Having combined therefore with one another, they assumed
>     through their mutual association, the character of one mass of
>     entire unity; and, from the direction of Spirit, etc.(889)
> 
> This means, of course, that the writers were perfectly acquainted with
> correlation, and were well posted about the origin of Kosmos from the
> “Indiscrete Principle,” Avyaktânugrahena, as applied to Parabrahman and
> Mûlaprakriti conjointly, and not to “Avyakta, either First Cause, or
> Matter,” as Wilson gives it. The old Initiates knew of no “miraculous
> creation,” but taught the evolution of Atoms, on our physical plane, and
> their first differentiation from Laya into Protyle, as Mr. Crookes has
> suggestively named Matter, or primordial substance, _beyond_ the zero‐
> line—there where we place Mûlaprakriti, the Root‐Principle of the World‐
> Stuff and of all in the World.
> 
> This can be easily demonstrated. Take, for instance, the newly‐published
> catechism of the Vishishthâdvaita Vedântins, an orthodox and exoteric
> system, yet fully enunciated and taught in the XIth century(890) at a time
> when European “Science” still believed in the squareness and flatness of
> the Earth of Cosmas Indicopleustes of the VIth century. It teaches that
> before Evolution began, Prakriti, Nature, was in a condition of Laya, or
> of absolute homogeneity, as “Matter exists in two conditions, the Sûkshma,
> or latent and undifferentiated, and the Sthûla, or differentiated,
> condition.” Then it became Anu, atomic. It teaches of Suddasattva—“a
> substance not subject to the qualities of Matter, from which it is quite
> different,” and adds that out of that Substance the bodies of the Gods,
> the inhabitants of Vaikunthaloka, the Heaven of Vishnu, are formed. That
> every particle or atom of Prakriti contains Jîva (divine life), and is the
> Sharîra (body) of that Jîva which it contains, while every Jîva is in its
> turn the Sharîra of the Supreme Spirit, as “Parabrahman pervades every
> Jîva, as well as every particle of Matter.” Dualistic and anthropomorphic
> as may be the philosophy of the Vishishthâdvaita, when compared with that
> of the Advaita—the non‐dualists—it is yet supremely higher in logic and
> philosophy than the Cosmogony accepted either by Christianity or by its
> great opponent, Modern Science. The followers of one of the greatest minds
> that ever appeared on Earth, the Advaita Vedântins are called Atheists,
> because they regard all save Parabrahman, the Secondless, or the Absolute
> Reality as an illusion. Yet the wisest Initiates came from their ranks, as
> also the greatest Yogîs. The _Upanishads_ show that they most assuredly
> knew not only what is the causal substance in the effects of friction, and
> that their forefathers were acquainted with the conversion of heat into
> mechanical force, but that they were also acquainted with the Noumenon of
> every spiritual as well as of every cosmic phenomenon.
> 
> Truly the young Brâhman who graduates in the Universities and Colleges of
> India with the highest honours; who starts in life as an M.A. and an
> LL.B., with a tail initialed from Alpha to Omega after his name, and a
> contempt for his national Gods proportioned to the honours received in his
> education in Physical Science; truly he has but to read in the light of
> the latter, and with an eye to the correlation of physical Forces, certain
> passages in his _Purânas_, if he would learn how much more his ancestors
> knew than he will ever know—unless he becomes an Occultist. Let him turn
> to the allegory of Purûravas and the celestial Gandharva,(891) who
> furnished the former with a vessel full of heavenly fire. The primeval
> mode of obtaining fire by friction has its scientific explanation in the
> _Vedas_, and is pregnant with meaning for him who reads between the lines.
> The Tretâgni (sacred triad of fires) obtained by the attrition of sticks
> made of the wood of the Ashvattha tree, the Bo‐tree of Wisdom and
> Knowledge, sticks “as many finger‐breadths long as there are syllables in
> the Gâyatrî,” must have a secret meaning, or else the writers of the
> _Vedas_ and _Purânas_ were no sacred writers but mystificators. That it
> has such a meaning, the Hindu Occultists are a proof, and they alone are
> able to enlighten Science, as to why and how the Fire, that was primevally
> One, was made three‐fold (tretâ) in our present Manvantara, by the Son of
> Ilâ (Vâch), the Primeval Woman after the Deluge, the wife and daughter of
> Vaivasvata Manu. The allegory is suggestive, in whatever _Purâna_ it may
> be read and studied.
> 
> Section VI. An Attack on the Scientific Theory of Force by a Man of
> Science.
> 
> The wise words of several English men of Science have now to be quoted in
> our favour. Ostracized for “principle’s sake” by the few, they are tacitly
> approved of by the many. That one of them preaches almost Occult
> doctrines—in some things identical with, and often amounting to a public
> recognition of, our “Fohat and his seven Sons,” the Occult Gandharva of
> the _Vedas_—will be recognized by every Occultist, and even by some
> profane readers.
> 
> If such readers will open Volume V of the _Popular Science Review_,(892)
> they will find in it an article on “Sun‐Force and Earth‐Force,” by Dr. E.
> W. Richardson, F.R.S., which reads as follows:
> 
>     At this moment, when the theory of mere motion as the origin of
>     all varieties of force is again becoming the prevailing thought,
>     it were almost heresy to reöpen a debate, which for a period
>     appears, by general consent, to be virtually closed; but I accept
>     the risk, and shall state, therefore, what were the precise views
>     of the immortal heretic, whose name I have whispered to the
>     readers, (Samuel Metcalfe,) respecting Sun‐Force. Starting with
>     the argument on which nearly all physicists are agreed, that there
>     exist in nature two agencies—matter which is ponderable, visible,
>     and tangible, and a something which is imponderable, invisible,
>     and appreciable only by its influence on matter—Metcalfe maintains
>     that the imponderable and active agency which he calls “caloric”
>     is _not a mere form of motion_, not a vibration amongst the
>     particles of ponderable matter, but _itself a material substance
>     flowing from the sun_ through space,(893) filling the voids
>     between the particles of solid bodies, and conveying by sensation
>     the property called heat. The nature of caloric, or Sun‐Force, is
>     contended for by him on the following grounds:
> 
>     (i) That it may be added to, and abstracted from other bodies and
>     measured with mathematical precision.
> 
>     (ii) That it augments the volume of bodies, which are again
>     reduced in size by its abstraction.
> 
>     (iii) That it modifies the forms, properties, and conditions of
>     all other bodies.
> 
>     (iv) That _it passes by radiation through the most perfect
>     vacuum_(894) that can be formed, in which it produces the same
>     effects on the thermometer as in the atmosphere.
> 
>     (v) That it exerts mechanical and chemical forces which nothing
>     can restrain, as in volcanoes, the explosion of gunpowder, and
>     other fulminating compounds.
> 
>     (vi) That it operates in a sensible manner on the nervous system,
>     producing intense pain; and when in excess, disorganization of the
>     tissues.
> 
>     As against the vibratory theory, Metcalfe further argues that if
>     caloric were a _mere property or quality_, it could not augment
>     the volume of other bodies; for this purpose it must itself have
>     volume, it must occupy space, and it must, therefore, be a
>     material agent. If caloric were _only the effect of vibratory
>     motion_ amongst the particles of ponderable matter, _it could not
>     radiate from hot bodies_ without the simultaneous transition of
>     the vibrating particles; but the fact stands out that heat can
>     radiate from material ponderable substance without loss of weight
>     of such substance.... With this view as to the material nature of
>     caloric or sun‐force; with the impression firmly fixed on his mind
>     that “everything in Nature is composed of two descriptions of
>     matter, the one essentially active and ethereal, the other passive
>     and motionless,”(895) Metcalfe based the hypothesis that the sun‐
>     force, or caloric, is a self‐active principle. For its own
>     particles, he holds, it has repulsion; for the particles of all
>     ponderable matter it has affinity; it attracts the particles of
>     ponderable matter with forces which vary inversely as the squares
>     of the distance. It thus acts _through_ ponderable matter. If
>     universal space were filled with caloric, sun‐force, alone
>     (without ponderable matter), caloric would also be inactive and
>     would constitute a boundless ocean of powerless or quiescent
>     ether, because it would then have nothing on which to act, while
>     ponderable matter, however inactive of itself, has “certain
>     properties by which it modifies and controls the actions of
>     caloric, both of which are governed by immutable laws that have
>     their origin in the mutual relations and specific properties of
>     each.”
> 
>     And he lays down a law which he believes is absolute, and which is
>     thus expressed:
> 
>     “By the attraction of caloric for ponderable matter, it unites and
>     holds together all things; by its self‐repulsive energy it
>     separates and expands all things.”
> 
> This, of course, is almost the Occult explanation of cohesion. Dr.
> Richardson continues:
> 
>     As I have already said, _the tendency of modern teaching is to
>     rest upon the hypothesis __ ... that heat is motion_, or, as it
>     would, perhaps, be better stated, a specific force or form of
>     motion.(896)
> 
>     But this hypothesis, popular as it is, is not one that ought to be
>     accepted to the exclusion of the simpler views of the material
>     nature of sun‐force, and of its influence in modifying the
>     conditions of matter. _We do not yet know sufficient to be
>     dogmatic._(897)
> 
>     The hypothesis of Metcalfe respecting sun‐force and earth‐force is
>     not only very simple, but most fascinating.... Here are two
>     elements in the universe, the one is ponderable matter.... The
>     second element is the all‐pervading ether, solar fire. It is
>     _without weight, substance, form, or colour; it is matter
>     infinitely divisible_, and its particles repel each other; its
>     rarity is such that we have no word, except ether,(898) by which
>     to express it. It pervades and fills space, but alone it too is
>     quiescent—dead.(899) We bring together the two elements, the inert
>     matter, the self‐repulsive ether [?] and thereupon dead [?]
>     ponderable matter is vivified; [_Ponderable matter may be inert
>     but never dead—this is Occult Law._] ... through the particles of
>     the ponderable substance the ether [_Ether’s second principle_]
>     penetrates, and, so penetrating, it combines with the ponderable
>     particles and holds them in mass, holds them together in bond of
>     union; they are dissolved in the ether.
> 
>     This distribution of solid ponderable matter through ether
>     extends, according to the theory before us, to everything that
>     exists at this moment. The ether is all‐pervading. The human body
>     itself is charged with the ether [_Astral Light rather_]; its
>     minute particles are held together by it; the plant is in the same
>     condition; the most solid earth, rock, adamant, crystal, metal,
>     all are the same. But there are differences in the capacities of
>     different kinds of ponderable matter to receive sun‐force, and
>     upon this depends the various changing conditions of matter; the
>     solid, the liquid, the gaseous condition. Solid bodies have
>     attracted caloric in excess over fluid bodies, and hence their
>     firm _cohesion_; when a portion of molten zinc is poured upon a
>     plate of solid zinc, the molten zinc becomes as solid because
>     there is a rush of caloric from the liquid to the solid, and in
>     the equalization the particles, previously loose or liquid, are
>     more closely brought together.... Metcalfe himself, dwelling on
>     the above‐named phenomena, and accounting for them by the unity of
>     principle of action, which has already been explained, sums up his
>     argument in very clear terms, in a comment on the densities of
>     various bodies. “Hardness and softness,” he says, “solidity and
>     liquidity, are not essential conditions of bodies, but depend on
>     the relative proportions of ethereal and ponderable matter of
>     which they are composed. The most elastic gas may be reduced to
>     the liquid form by the abstraction of caloric, and again converted
>     into a firm solid, the particles of which would cling together
>     with a force proportional to their augmented affinity for caloric.
>     On the other hand, by adding a sufficient quantity of the same
>     principle to the densest metals, their attraction for it is
>     diminished when they are expanded into the gaseous state, and
>     their cohesion is destroyed.”
> 
> Having thus quoted at length the heterodox views of the great
> “heretic”—views that to be correct, need only a little alteration of terms
> here and there—Dr. Richardson, undeniably an original and liberal thinker,
> proceeds to sum up these views, and continues:
> 
>     I shall not dwell at great length on this unity of sun‐force and
>     earth‐force, which this theory implies. But I may add that out of
>     it, or out of the hypothesis of mere motion as force, and of
>     virtue without substance, we may gather, as the nearest possible
>     approach to the truth on this, the most complex and profound of
>     all subjects, the following inferences:
> 
>     (_a_) Space, inter‐stellary, inter‐planetary, inter‐material,
>     inter‐organic, is not a vacuum, but is filled with a subtle fluid
>     or gas, which for want of a better term(900) we may still call, as
>     the ancients did, _Aith‐ur_—Solar Fire—Æther. This fluid,
>     unchangeable in composition, indestructible, invisible,(901)
>     pervades everything and all [_ponderable_] matter,(902) the pebble
>     in the running brook, the tree overhanging, the man looking on, is
>     charged with the ether in various degrees; the pebble less than
>     the tree, the tree less than man. All in the planet is in like
>     manner so charged! A world is built up in ethereal fluid, and
>     moving through a sea of it.
> 
>     (_b_) The ether, whatever its nature is, is from the sun and from
>     the suns:(903) the suns are the generators of it, the store‐houses
>     of it, the diffusers of it.(904)
> 
>     (_c_) Without the ether there could be no motion; without it
>     particles of ponderable matter could not glide over each other;
>     without it there could be no impulse to excite those particles
>     into action.
> 
>     (_d_) Ether determines the constitution of bodies. Were there no
>     ether there could be no change of constitution in substance;
>     water, for instance, could only exist as a substance, compact and
>     insoluble beyond any conception we could form of it. It could
>     never even be ice, never fluid, never vapour, except for ether.
> 
>     (_e_) Ether connects sun with planet, planet with planet, man with
>     planet, man with man. Without ether there could be no
>     communication in the Universe; no light, no heat, no phenomenon of
>     motion.
> 
> Thus we find that Ether and elastic Atoms are, in the alleged mechanical
> conception of the Universe, the Spirit and Soul of Kosmos, and that the
> theory—put it in any way and under any disguise—always leaves a more
> widely opened issue for men of Science to speculate upon beyond the line
> of modern Materialism(905) than the majority avails itself of. Atoms,
> Ether, or both, modern speculation cannot get out of the circle of ancient
> thought; and the latter was soaked through with archaic Occultism.
> Undulatory or corpuscular theory—it is all one. It is speculation from the
> aspects of phenomena, not from the knowledge of the essential nature of
> the cause and causes. When Modern Science has explained to its audience
> the late achievements of Bunsen and Kirchoff; when it has shown the seven
> colours, the primary of a ray which is decomposed in a fixed order on a
> screen; and has described the respective lengths of luminous waves, what
> has it proved? It has justified its reputation for exactness in
> mathematical achievement by measuring even the length of a luminous
> wave—“varying from about seven hundred and sixty millionths of a
> millimètre at the red end of the spectrum to about three hundred and
> ninety‐three millionths of a millimètre at the violet end.” But when the
> exactness of the calculation with regard to the effect on the light‐wave
> is thus vindicated, Science is forced to admit that the Force, which is
> the supposed cause, is _believed_ to produce “inconceivably minute
> undulations” in some medium—“generally regarded as identical with the
> ethereal medium”(906)—and that medium itself is still only—a “hypothetical
> agent”!
> 
> Auguste Comte’s pessimism with respect to the possibility of knowing some
> day the chemical composition of the Sun, has not, as has been averred,
> been belied thirty years later by Kirchoff. The spectroscope has helped us
> to see that the elements, with which the modern Chemist is familiar, must
> in all probability be present in the Sun’s outward “robes”—_not in the Sun
> itself_; and, taking these “robes,” the solar cosmic veil, for the Sun
> itself, the Physicists have declared its luminosity to be due to
> combustion and flame, and mistaking the vital principle of that luminary
> for a purely material thing, have called it “chromosphere.”(907) We have
> only hypotheses and theories so far, not law—by any means.
> 
> Section VII. Life, Force, or Gravity.
> 
> The imponderable fluids have had their day; mechanical Forces are less
> talked about; Science has put on a new face for this last quarter of a
> century; but gravitation has remained, owing its life to new combinations
> after the old ones had nearly killed it. It may answer scientific
> hypotheses very well, but the question is whether it answers as well to
> truth, and represents a fact in nature. Attraction by itself is not
> sufficient to explain even planetary motion; how can it then presume to
> explain the rotatory motion in the infinitudes of Space? Attraction alone
> will never fill all the gaps, unless a special impulse is admitted for
> every sidereal body, and the rotation of every planet with its satellites
> is shown to be due to some one cause combined with attraction. And even
> then, says an Astronomer,(908) Science would have to name that cause.
> 
> Occultism has named it for ages, and so have all the ancient Philosophers;
> but then all such beliefs are now proclaimed exploded superstitions. The
> extra‐cosmic God has killed every possibility of belief in intra‐cosmic
> intelligent Forces; yet who, or what, is the original “pusher” in that
> motion? Says Francœur:(909)
> 
>     When we have learned the cause, _unique et speciale_, that pushes,
>     we will be ready to combine it with the one which attracts.
> 
> And again:
> 
>     Attraction between the celestial bodies is only repulsion: it is
>     the sun that drives them incessantly onward; for otherwise, their
>     motion would stop.
> 
> If ever this theory of the Sun‐Force being the primal cause of all life on
> earth, and of all motion in heaven, is accepted, and if that other far
> bolder theory of Herschell, about certain organisms in the Sun, is
> accepted even as a provisional hypothesis, then will our teachings be
> vindicated, and Esoteric allegory will be shown to have anticipated Modern
> Science by millions of years, probably, for such are the Archaic
> Teachings. Mârttânda, the Sun, watches and threatens his seven brothers,
> the planets, without abandoning the central position to which his Mother,
> Aditi, relegated him. The Commentary(910) says:
> 
>     _He pursues them, turning slowly around himself, ... following
>     from afar the direction in which his brothers move, on the path
>     that encircles their houses_—or the orbit.
> 
> It is the sun‐fluids or emanations that impart all motion, and awaken all
> into life, in the Solar System. It is attraction and repulsion, but not as
> understood by modern Physics or according to the law of gravity, but in
> harmony with the laws of _manvantaric motion_ designed from the early
> Sandhyâ, the Dawn of the rebuilding and higher reformation of the System.
> These laws are immutable; but the motion of all the bodies—which motion is
> diverse and alters with every minor Kalpa—is regulated by the Movers, the
> Intelligences within the Cosmic Soul. Are we so very wrong in believing
> all this? Well, here is a great and modern man of Science who, speaking of
> vital electricity, uses language far more akin to Occultism than to modern
> Materialistic thought. We refer the sceptical reader to an article on “The
> Source of Heat in the Sun,” by Robert Hunt, F.R.S.,(911) who, speaking of
> the luminous envelope of the Sun and its “peculiar curdy appearance,”
> says:
> 
>     Arago proposed that this envelope should be called the
>     Photosphere, a name now generally adopted. By the elder Herschell,
>     the surface of this photosphere was compared to mother‐of‐
>     pearl.... It resembles the ocean on a tranquil summer‐day, when
>     its surface is slightly crisped by a gentle breeze.... Mr. Nasmyth
>     has discovered a more remarkable condition than any that had
>     previously been suspected, ... objects which are peculiarly lens‐
>     shaped ... like “willow leaves,” ... different in size ... not
>     arranged in any order, ... crossing each other in all directions
>     ... with an irregular motion among themselves.... They are seen
>     approaching to and receding from each other, and sometimes
>     assuming new angular positions, so that the appearance ... has
>     been compared to a dense shoal of fish, which, indeed, they
>     resemble in shape.... The size of these objects gives a grand idea
>     of the gigantic scale upon which physical (?) operations are
>     carried out in the sun. They cannot be less than 1,000 miles in
>     length, and from two to three hundred miles in breadth. The most
>     probable conjecture which has been offered respecting those leaf
>     or lens‐like objects, is that the photosphere(912) is an immense
>     ocean of gaseous matter [what kind of “matter”?] ... in a state of
>     intense [apparent] incandescence, and that they are perspective
>     projections of the sheets of flame.
> 
> Solar “flames” seen through telescopes are reflections, says Occultism.
> But the reader has already seen what Occultists have to say to this.
> 
>     Whatever they [those sheets of flame] may be, it is evident they
>     are the immediate sources of solar heat and light. Here we have a
>     surrounding envelope of photogenic matter,(913) which pendulates
>     with mighty energies, and by communicating its motion to the
>     ethereal medium in stellar space, produces heat and light in far
>     distant worlds. We have said that those forms have been compared
>     to certain organisms, and Herschell says, “Though it would be too
>     daring to speak of such organizations as _partaking of life_ [why
>     not?],(914) yet we do not know that vital action is competent to
>     develop heat, light, and electricity.”... Can it be that there is
>     truth in this fine thought? May the pulsing of vital matter in the
>     central sun of our system be the source of all that life which
>     crowds the earth, and without doubt overspreads the other planets,
>     to which the sun is the mighty minister?
> 
> Occultism answers these queries in the affirmative; and Science will find
> this to be the case, one day.
> 
> Again, Mr. Hunt writes:
> 
>     But regarding Life—Vital Force—as a power far more exalted than
>     either light, heat, or electricity, and indeed capable of exerting
>     a controlling power over them all [this is absolutely Occult] ...
>     we are certainly disposed to view with satisfaction that
>     speculation which supposes the photosphere to be the primary seat
>     of vital power, and to regard with a poetic pleasure that
>     hypothesis which refers the solar energies to Life.(915)
> 
> Thus, we have an important scientific corroboration for one of our
> fundamental dogmas—namely, that (_a_) the Sun is the store‐house of Vital
> Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity; and (_b_) that it is from its
> mysterious, never‐to‐be‐fathomed depths, that issue those life‐currents
> which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing
> on Earth. For see what another eminent Physician says, who calls this, our
> life‐fluid, “Nervous Ether.” Change a few sentences in the article,
> extracts from which now follow, and you have another quasi‐Occult treatise
> on Life‐Force. It is again Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S., who gives his
> views as follows on “Nervous Ether,” as he has on “Sun‐Force” and “Earth‐
> Force”:
> 
>     The idea attempted to be conveyed by the theory is, that between
>     the molecules of the matter, solid or fluid, of which the nervous
>     organisms, and, indeed, of which all the organic parts of a body
>     are composed, there exists a refined subtle medium, vaporous or
>     gaseous, which holds the molecules in a condition for motion upon
>     each other, and for arrangement and reärrangement of form; a
>     medium by and through which all motion is conveyed; by and through
>     which the one organ or part of the body is held in communion with
>     the other parts, by which and through which the outer living world
>     communicates with the living man; a medium, which, being present,
>     enables the phenomena of life to be demonstrated, and which, being
>     universally absent, leaves the body actually dead.
> 
> And the whole Solar System falls into Pralaya—the author might have added.
> But let us read further:
> 
>     I use the word ether in its general sense as meaning a very light,
>     vaporous or gaseous matter; I use it, in short, as the astronomer
>     uses it when he speaks of the ether of Space, by which he means a
>     subtle but material medium.... When I speak of a _nervous_ ether,
>     I do not convey that the ether is existent in nervous structure
>     only: I believe truly that it is a special part of the nervous
>     organization; but, as nerves pass into all structures that have
>     capacities for movement and sensibilities, so the nervous ether
>     passes into all such parts; and as the nervous ether is, according
>     to my view, a direct product from blood, so we may look upon it as
>     a part of the atmosphere of the blood.... The evidence in favour
>     of the existence of an elastic medium pervading the nervous matter
>     and capable of being influenced by simple pressure is all‐
>     convincing.... In nervous structure there is, unquestionably, a
>     true nervous fluid, as our predecessors taught.(916) The precise
>     chemical (?)(917) composition of this fluid is not yet well known;
>     the physical characters of it have been little studied. Whether it
>     moves in currents, we do not know; whether it circulates, we do
>     not know; whether it is formed in the centres and passes from them
>     to the nerves, or whether it is formed everywhere where blood
>     enters nerve, we do not know. The exact uses of the fluid we do
>     not consequently know. It occurs to my mind, however, that the
>     veritable fluid of nervous matter is not of itself sufficient to
>     act as the subtle medium that connects the outer with the inner
>     universe of man and animal. I think—and this is the modification I
>     suggest to the older theory—there must be another form of matter
>     present during life; a matter which exists in the condition of
>     vapour or gas, which pervades the whole nervous organism,
>     surrounds as an enveloping atmosphere(918) each molecule of
>     nervous structure, and is the medium of all motion, communicated
>     to and from the nervous centres.... When it is once fairly
>     presented to the mind that during life _there is in the animal
>     body a finely diffused form of matter_, a vapour filling every
>     part—and even stored in some parts; a matter constantly renewed by
>     the vital chemistry; a matter as easily disposed of as the breath,
>     after it has served its purpose—a new flood of light breaks on the
>     intelligence.(919)
> 
> A new flood of light is certainly thrown on the wisdom of ancient and
> mediæval Occultism and its votaries. For Paracelsus wrote the same thing
> more than three hundred years ago, in the sixteenth century, as follows:
> 
>     The whole of the Microcosm is potentially contained in the Liquor
>     Vitæ, a nerve fluid ... in which is contained the nature, quality,
>     character, and essence of beings.(920)
> 
>     The Archæus is an essence that is equally distributed in all parts
>     of the human body.... The Spiritus Vitæ takes its origin from the
>     Spiritus Mundi. Being an emanation of the latter, it contains the
>     elements of all cosmic influences, and is therefore the cause by
>     which the action of the stars [cosmic forces] upon the invisible
>     body of man [his vital _Linga Sharîra_] may be explained.(921)
> 
> Had Dr. Richardson studied all the secret works of Paracelsus, he would
> not have been obliged to confess so often, “we do not know,” “it is not
> known to us,” etc. Nor would he ever have written the following sentence,
> recanting the best portions of his independent rediscovery.
> 
>     It may be urged that in this line of thought is included no more
>     than the theory of the existence of the ether ... supposed to
>     pervade space.... It may be said that this universal ether
>     pervades all the organism of the animal body as from without, and
>     as part of every organization. This view would be Pantheism
>     physically discovered, _if it were true_ [!!]. It fails to be true
>     because it would destroy the individuality of every individual
>     sense.(922)
> 
> We fail to see this, and we _know_ it is not so. Pantheism _may_ be
> “physically rediscovered.” It was known, seen, and felt by the whole of
> antiquity. Pantheism manifests itself in the vast expanse of the starry
> heavens, in the breathing of the seas and oceans, and in the quiver of
> life of the smallest blade of grass. Philosophy rejects one _finite_ and
> _imperfect_ God in the universe, the anthropomorphic deity of the
> Monotheist as represented by his followers. It repudiates, in its name of
> _Philo‐theo‐sophia_, the grotesque idea that Infinite, Absolute Deity
> should, or rather could, have any direct or indirect relation to finite
> illusive evolutions of Matter, and therefore it cannot imagine a universe
> _outside_ that Deity, or the absence of that Deity from the smallest speck
> of animate or inanimate Substance. This does not mean that every bush,
> tree or stone is God or _a_ God; but only that every speck of the
> manifested material of Kosmos belongs to, and is the Substance of, God,
> however low it may have fallen in its cyclic gyration through the
> Eternities of the Ever‐Becoming; and also that every such speck
> individually, and Kosmos collectively, is an aspect and a reminder of that
> universal One Soul—which Philosophy refuses to call God, thus limiting the
> eternal and ever‐present Root and Essence.
> 
> Why either the Ether of Space or “Nervous Ether” should “destroy the
> individuality of every sense,” seems incomprehensible to one acquainted
> with the real nature of that “Nervous Ether” under its Sanskrit, or rather
> Esoteric and Kabalistic name. Dr. Richardson agrees that:
> 
>     If we did not individually produce the medium of communication
>     between ourselves and the outer world, if it were produced from
>     without and adapted to one kind of vibration alone, there were
>     fewer senses required than we possess: for, taking two
>     illustrations only—ether of light is not adapted for sound, and
>     yet we hear as well and see; while air, the medium of motion of
>     sound, is not the medium of light, and yet we see and hear.
> 
> This is not so. The opinion that Pantheism “fails to be true because it
> would destroy the individuality of every individual sense” shows that all
> the conclusions of the learned doctor are based on the modern physical
> theories, though he would fain reform them. But he will find it impossible
> to do this unless he allows the existence of spiritual senses to replace
> the gradual atrophy of the physical. “We see and hear,” in accordance (of
> course, in Dr. Richardson’s mind) with the explanations of the phenomena
> of sight and hearing, afforded by that same Materialistic Science which
> postulates that we cannot see and hear otherwise. The Occultists and
> Mystics know better. The Vedic Âryans were as familiar with the mysteries
> of sound and colour on the physical plane as are our Physiologists, but
> they had also mastered the secrets of both on planes inaccessible to the
> Materialist. They knew of a double set of senses; spiritual and material.
> In a man who is deprived of one or more senses, the remaining senses
> become the more developed; for instance, the blind man will recover his
> sight through the senses of touch, of hearing, etc., and he who is deaf
> will be able to hear through sight, by seeing _audibly_ the words uttered
> by the lips and mouth of the speaker. But these are cases that belong to
> the world of Matter still. The spiritual senses, those that act on a
> higher plane of consciousness, are rejected _à priori_ by Physiology,
> because the latter is ignorant of the Sacred Science. It limits the action
> of Ether to vibrations, and, dividing it from air—though air is simply
> differentiated and compound Ether—makes it assume functions to fit in with
> the special theories of the Physiologist. But there is more real Science
> in the teachings of the _Upanishads_, when these are correctly understood,
> than the Orientalists, who do not understand them at all, are ready to
> admit. Mental as well as physical correlations of the seven senses—seven
> on the physical and seven on the mental planes—are clearly explained and
> defined in the _Vedas_, and especially in the _Upanishad_ called
> _Anugîtâ_:
> 
>     The indestructible and the destructible, such is the double
>     manifestation of the Self. Of these the indestructible is the
>     existent [the true essence or nature of Self, the underlying
>     principles], the manifestation as an individual (entity) is called
>     the destructible.(923)
> 
> Thus speaks the Ascetic in the _Anugîtâ_, and also:
> 
>     Every one who is twice‐born [initiated] knows such is the teaching
>     of the ancients.... Space is the first entity.... Now Space
>     [Âkâsha, or the Noumenon of Ether] has one quality ... and that is
>     stated to be sound only ... [and the] qualities of sound [are]
>     Shadja, Rishabha, together with Gândhâra, Madhyama, Panchama, and
>     beyond these [should be understood to be] Nishâda and Dhaivata
>     [the Hindû gamut].(924)
> 
> These seven notes of the scale are the principles of sound. The qualities
> of every Element, as of every sense, are septenary, and to judge and
> dogmatize on them from their manifestation on the material or objective
> plane—likewise sevenfold in itself—is quite arbitrary. For it is only by
> the SELF emancipating itself from these seven causes of illusion, that we
> can acquire the knowledge (Secret Wisdom) of the qualities of objects of
> sense on their dual plane of manifestation, the visible and the invisible.
> Thus it is said:
> 
>     Hear me ... state this wonderful mystery.... Hear also the
>     assignment of causes exhaustively. The nose, and the tongue, and
>     the eye, and the skin, and the ear as the fifth [organ of sense]
>     mind and understanding,(925) these seven [senses] should be
>     understood to be the causes of (the knowledge of) qualities.
>     Smell, and taste, and colour, sound, and touch as the fifth, the
>     object of the mental operation, and the object of the
>     understanding [the highest spiritual sense or perception], these
>     seven are causes of action. He who smells, he who eats, he who
>     sees, he who speaks, and he who hears as the fifth, he who thinks,
>     and he who understands, these seven should be understood to be the
>     causes of the agents. These [the agents] being possessed of
>     qualities (sattva, rajas, tamas), enjoy their own qualities,
>     agreeable and disagreeable.(926)
> 
> The modern commentators, failing to comprehend the subtle meaning of the
> ancient Scholiasts, take the sentence, “causes of the agents,” to mean
> “that the powers of smelling, etc., when attributed to the Self, make him
> appear as an agent, as an active principle” (!), which is entirely
> fanciful. These “seven” are understood to be the causes of the agents,
> because “the objects are causes, as their enjoyment causes an impression.”
> It means esoterically that they, these seven senses, are caused by the
> agents, which are the “deities,” for otherwise what does, or can, the
> following sentence mean? “Thus,” it is said, “these seven [senses] are the
> causes of emancipation”—_i.e._, when these causes are made ineffectual.
> And, again, the sentence, “among the learned [the wise Initiates] who
> understand everything, the qualities _which are in the position_ [in the
> nature, rather] _of the deities_, each in its place,” etc., means simply
> that the “learned” understand the nature of the Noumena of the various
> phenomena; and that “qualities,” in this instance, mean the qualities of
> the high Planetary or Elementary Gods or Intelligences, which rule the
> elements and their products, and not at all the “senses,” as the modern
> commentator thinks. For the learned do not suppose their senses to have
> aught to do with them, any more than with their SELF.
> 
> Then we read in the _Bhagavadgîtâ_ of _Krishna_, the Deity, saying:
> 
>     Only some know me truly. Earth, water, fire, air, space [or
>     Âkâsha, Æther], mind, understanding and egoism [or the perception
>     of all the former on the illusive plane], ... this is a lower form
>     of my nature. Know (that there is) another (form of my) nature,
>     and higher than this, which is animate, O you of mighty arms! and
>     by which this universe is upheld.... All this is woven upon me,
>     like numbers of pearls upon a thread.(927) I am the taste in the
>     water, O son of Kuntî! I am the light of the sun and moon. I am
>     ... sound (“_i.e._, the occult essence which underlies all these
>     and the other qualities of the various things mentioned”—Transl.),
>     in space ... the fragrant smell in the earth, refulgence in the
>     fire ... etc.(928)
> 
> Truly, then, one should study Occult Philosophy before one begins to seek
> for and verify the mysteries of Nature on its surface alone, as he alone
> “who knows the truth about the qualities of Nature, who understands the
> creation of all entities ... is emancipated” from error. Says the
> Preceptor:
> 
>     Accurately understanding the great (tree) of which the unperceived
>     [Occult Nature, the root of all] is the sprout from the seed
>     [Parabrahman], which consists of the understanding [Mahat, or the
>     Universal Intelligent Soul] as its trunk, the branches of which
>     are the great egoism,(929) in the holes of which are the sprouts,
>     namely, the senses, of which the great [occult, or invisible]
>     elements are the flower‐bunches,(930) the gross elements [the
>     gross objective matter], the smaller boughs, which are always
>     possessed of leaves, always possessed of flowers ... which is
>     eternal and the seed of which is the Brahman [the Deity]; and
>     cutting it with that excellent sword—knowledge [Secret Wisdom]—one
>     attains immortality and casts off birth and death.(931)
> 
> This is the Tree of Life, the Ashvattha tree, after the cutting of which
> only, Man, the slave of life and death, can be emancipated.
> 
> But the men of Science know nought, nor will they hear of the “Sword of
> Knowledge” used by the Adepts and Ascetics. Hence the one‐sided remarks of
> even the most liberal among them, based on and flowing from undue
> importance given to the arbitrary divisions and classification of Physical
> Science. Occultism heeds them very little, and Nature heeds them still
> less. The whole range of physical phenomena proceeds from the Primary of
> Æther—Âkâsha, as dual‐natured Âkâsha proceeds from undifferentiated Chaos,
> so‐called, the latter being the primary aspect of Mûlaprakriti, the Root‐
> Matter and the first abstract Idea one can form of Parabrahman. Modern
> Science may divide its hypothetically conceived Ether in as many ways as
> it likes; the real Æther of Space will remain as it is throughout. It has
> its seven “principles,” as all the rest of Nature has, and where there was
> no Æther there would be _no_ “sound,” as it is the vibrating sounding‐
> board in Nature in all its seven differentiations. This is the first
> mystery the Initiates of old have learned. Our present normal physical
> senses were, from our present point of view, abnormal in those days of
> slow and progressive downward evolution and fall into Matter. And there
> was a day when all that in our modern times is regarded as exceptional, so
> puzzling to the Physiologists now compelled to believe in them—such as
> thought‐transference, clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc.; in short, all
> that is now called “wonderful and abnormal”—when all that and much more
> belonged to the senses and faculties common to all humanity. We are,
> however, cycling back and cycling forward; that is to say, that having
> lost in spirituality what we acquired in physical development until almost
> the end of the Fourth Race, we are now as gradually and imperceptibly
> losing in the physical all that we regain once more in the spiritual
> reëvolution. This process must go on, until the period which will bring
> the Sixth Root‐Race on a line parallel with the spirituality of the Second
> Race, a long extinct mankind.
> 
> But this will hardly be understood at present. We must return to Dr.
> Richardson’s hopeful, though somewhat incorrect hypothesis about “Nervous
> Ether.” Under the misleading translation of the word as “Space,” Âkâsha
> has just been shown in the ancient Hindû system as the “first born” of the
> One, having but one quality, “Sound,” which is septenary. In Esoteric
> language this One is the Father‐Deity, and Sound is synonymous with the
> Logos, Verbum, or Son. Whether consciously or otherwise, it must be the
> latter; and Dr. Richardson, while preaching an Occult doctrine, chooses
> the lowest form of the septenary nature of that Sound, and speculates upon
> it, adding:
> 
>     The theory, I offer, is that the nervous ether is an _animal
>     product_. In different classes of animals it may differ in
>     physical quality so as to be adapted to the special wants of the
>     animal, but essentially it plays one part in all animals, and is
>     produced, in all, in the same way.
> 
> Herein lies the nucleus of error leading to all the resultant mistaken
> views. This “Nervous Ether” is the lowest principle of the Primordial
> Essence which is Life. It is Animal Vitality diffused in all Nature, and
> acting according to the conditions it finds for its activity. It is not an
> “animal product,” but the living animal, the living flower and plant, are
> its products. The animal tissues only absorb it according to their more or
> less morbid or healthy state—as do physical materials and structures (in
> their primogenial state, _nota bene_)—and, from the moment of the birth of
> the Entity, are regulated, strengthened, and fed by it. It descends in a
> larger supply to vegetation in the Sushumnâ Sun‐Ray which lights and feeds
> the Moon, and it is through her beams that it pours its light upon, and
> penetrates man and animal, more during their sleep and rest, than when
> they are in full activity. Therefore Dr. Richardson errs again in stating
> that:
> 
>     The nervous ether is not, according to my idea of it, _in itself
>     active, nor an excitant of animal motion in the sense of a force_;
>     but it is essential as supplying the conditions by which the
>     motion is rendered possible. [It is _just the reverse_.].... It is
>     the conductor of all vibrations of heat, of light, of sound, of
>     electrical action, of mechanical friction.(932) It holds the
>     nervous system throughout in perfect tension, during states of
>     life [true]. By exercise it is disposed of [_rather generated_]
>     ... and when demand for it is greater than the supply, its
>     deficiency is indicated by nervous collapse or exhaustion.(933) It
>     accumulates in the nervous centres during sleep, bringing them, if
>     I may so speak, to their due tone, and therewith raising the
>     muscles to awakening and renewed life.
> 
> Just so; this is quite correct and comprehensible. Therefore:
> 
>     The body fully renewed by it, presents capacity for motion,
>     fulness of form, _life_. The body bereft of it presents inertia,
>     the configuration of shrunken death, _the evidence of having lost
>     something physical that was in it when it lived_.
> 
> Modern Science denies the existence of a “vital principle.” This extract
> is a clear proof of its grand mistake. But this “physical something,” that
> we call life‐fluid—the Liquor Vitæ of Paracelsus—has not deserted the
> body, as Dr. Richardson thinks. It has only changed its state from
> activity to passivity, and has become latent, owing to the too morbid
> state of the tissues, on which it has hold no longer. Once the _rigor
> mortis_ is absolute, the Liquor Vitæ will reäwaken into action, and will
> begin its work on the atoms _chemically_. Brahmâ‐Vishnu, the Creator and
> the Preserver of Life, will have transformed himself into Shiva the
> Destroyer.
> 
> Lastly Dr. Richardson writes:
> 
>     The nervous ether may be poisoned; it may, I mean, have diffused
>     through it, by simple gaseous diffusion, other gases or vapours
>     derived from without; it may derive from within products of
>     substances swallowed and ingested, or gases of decomposition
>     produced during disease in the body itself.(934)
> 
> And the learned gentleman might have added on the same Occult principle:
> That the “Nervous Ether” of one person can be poisoned by the “Nervous
> Ether” of another person or by his “auric emanations.” But see what
> Paracelsus said of this “Nervous Ether”:
> 
>     The Archæus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repulses
>     other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same
>     plane. The less power of resistance for astral influences a person
>     possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences. The
>     vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates [within and]
>     around him like a luminous sphere [aura] and it may be made to act
>     at a distance.... It may poison the essence of life [_blood_] and
>     cause diseases, or it may purify it after it has been made impure,
>     and restore the health.(935)
> 
> That the two, “Archæus” and “Nervous Ether,” are identical, is shown by
> the English Scientist, who says that _generally_ the tension of it may be
> too high or too low; that it may be so:
> 
>     Owing to local changes in the nervous matter it invests.... Under
>     sharp excitation it may vibrate as if in a storm and plunge every
>     muscle under cerebral or spinal control into uncontrolled
>     motion—unconscious convulsions.
> 
> This is called nervous excitation, but no one, except the Occultist, knows
> the reason of such nervous perturbation, or explains the primary causes of
> it. The principle of Life may kill when too exuberant, as much as when
> there is too little of it. But this “principle” on the manifested plane,
> that is to say, our plane, is but the effect and the result of the
> intelligent action of the “Host,” or collective Principle, the manifesting
> Life and Light. It is itself subordinate to, and emanates from, the ever‐
> invisible, eternal and Absolute One Life, in a descending and reäscending
> scale of hierarchic degrees, a true septenary ladder, with Sound, the
> Logos, at the upper end, and the Vidyâdharas(936), the inferior Pitris, at
> the lower.
> 
> Of course, the Occultists are fully aware of the fact that the vitalist
> “fallacy,” so derided by Vogt and Huxley, is, nevertheless, still
> countenanced in very high scientific quarters, and, therefore, they are
> happy to feel that they do not stand alone. Thus, Professor de Quatrefages
> writes:
> 
>     It is very true that we do not know _what_ life _is_; but no more
>     do we know _what_ the force _is_ that set the stars in motion....
>     Living beings are heavy, and therefore subject to gravitation;
>     they are the seat of numerous and various physico‐chemical
>     phenomena which are indispensable to their existence, and which
>     must be referred to the action of etherodynamy [electricity, heat,
>     etc.]. But these phenomena are here manifested under the influence
>     of another force.... Life is not antagonistic to the inanimate
>     forces, but it governs and rules their action by its laws.(937)
> 
> Section VIII. The Solar Theory.
> 
>     A SHORT ANALYSIS OF THE COMPOUND AND SINGLE ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE AS
>     AGAINST THE OCCULT TEACHINGS. HOW FAR THIS THEORY, AS GENERALLY
>     ACCEPTED, IS SCIENTIFIC.
> 
> In his reply to Dr. Gull’s attack on the theory of Vitality, which is
> inseparably connected with the Elements of the Ancients in the Occult
> Philosophy, Professor Beale, the great Physiologist, has a few words as
> suggestive as they are beautiful:
> 
>     There is a mystery in life—a mystery which has never been
>     fathomed, and which appears greater, the more deeply the phenomena
>     of life are studied and contemplated. In living centres—far more
>     central than the centres seen by the highest magnifying powers, in
>     centres of living matter, where the eye cannot penetrate, but
>     towards which the understanding may tend—proceed changes of the
>     nature of which the most advanced physicists and chemists fail to
>     afford us the conception: nor is there the slightest reason to
>     think that the nature of these changes will ever be ascertained by
>     physical investigation, inasmuch as they are certainly of an order
>     or nature totally distinct from that to which any other phenomenon
>     known to us can be relegated.
> 
> This “mystery,” or the origin of the Life Essence, Occultism locates in
> the same Centre as the nucleus of _prima materia_ of our Solar System, for
> they are one.
> 
> As says the Commentary:
> 
> _The Sun is the heart of the Solar World [System] and its brain is hidden
> behind the [visible] Sun. Thence, sensation is radiated into every nerve‐
> centre of the great body, and the waves of the life‐essence flow into each
> artery and vein.... The planets are its limbs and pulses._
> 
> It has been stated elsewhere(938) that Occult philosophy denies that the
> Sun is a globe in combustion, but defines it simply as a world, a glowing
> sphere, the real Sun being hidden behind, and the visible Sun being only
> its reflection, its shell. The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir John
> Herschell for “solar inhabitants,” are the reservoirs of solar vital
> energy; “the vital electricity that feeds the whole system; the sun _in
> abscondito_ being thus the storehouse of our little Cosmos, self‐
> generating its vital fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out,”
> and the visible Sun only a window cut into the real solar palace and
> presence, which, however, shews without distortion the interior work.
> 
> Thus, during the manvantaric solar period, or life, there is a regular
> circulation of the vital fluid throughout our System, of which the Sun is
> the heart—like the circulation of the blood in the human body; the Sun
> contracting as rhythmically as the human heart does at every return of it.
> Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the
> solar blood ten of its years to circulate, and a whole year to pass
> through its auricle and ventricle before it washes the lungs, and passes
> thence back to the great arteries and veins of the System.
> 
> This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of
> eleven years when the number of solar spots increases,(939) the increase
> being due to the contraction of the Solar Heart. The Universe, our World
> in this case, breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and
> even mineral does upon the Earth; and as our Globe itself breathes every
> twenty‐four hours. The dark region is not due to the “absorption exerted
> by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun, and interposed between
> the observer and the photosphere,” as Father Secchi would have it,(940)
> nor are the spots formed “by the matter [heated gaseous matter] itself
> which the irruption projects upon the solar disk.” The phenomenon is
> similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life
> fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made
> luminous, and the living and throbbing organ made visible, so as to have
> it reflected upon a screen, such as is used by lecturers on Astronomy to
> show the moon, for instance, then every one would see the sun‐spot
> phenomena repeated every second, and that they were due to contraction and
> the rushing of the blood.
> 
> We read in a work on Geology that it is the dream of Science that:
> 
>     All the recognized chemical elements will one day be found but
>     modifications of a single material element.(941)
> 
> Occult Philosophy has taught this since the existence of human speech and
> language, adding, however, on the principle of the immutable law of
> analogy, “as it is above, so it is below,” another of its axioms, that
> there is neither Spirit nor Matter, in reality, but only numberless
> aspects of the One ever‐hidden Is, or Sat. The homogeneous primordial
> Element is simple and single, _only on the terrestrial plane_ of
> consciousness and sensation, since Matter, after all, is nothing more than
> the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of
> psychic intuition. Even on the next higher plane, that single element
> which is defined on our Earth by current Science, as the ultimate
> undecomposable constituent of some kind of Matter, would be pronounced in
> the world of a higher spiritual perception to be something very complex
> indeed. Our purest water would be found to yield, instead of its two
> declared simple elements of oxygen and hydrogen, many other constituents,
> undreamed of by our modern terrestrial Chemistry. As in the realm of
> Matter, so in the realm of Spirit, the shadow of that which is cognized on
> the plane of objectivity exists on that of pure subjectivity. The speck of
> the perfectly homogeneous Substance, the sarcode of the Hæckelian Moneron,
> is now viewed as the archebiosis of terrestrial existence (Mr. Huxley’s
> protoplasm)(942); and Bathybius Hæckelii has to be traced to its pre‐
> terrestrial archebiosis. This is first perceived by the Astronomers at its
> third stage of evolution, and in the “secondary creation,” so‐called. But
> the students of Esoteric Philosophy understand well the secret meaning of
> the Stanza:
> 
>     Brahmâ ... has essentially the _aspect of_ Prakriti, both evolved
>     and unevolved.... Spirit, O Twice‐born [Initiate], is the leading
>     _aspect_ of Brahmâ. The next is a two‐fold aspect [of Prakriti and
>     Purusha] ... both evolved and unevolved; and Time is the
>     last!(943)
> 
> Anu is one of the names of Brahmâ, as distinct from Brahman, and it means
> “atom”; anîyâmsam anîyasâm, “the most atomic of the atomic,” the
> “immutable and imperishable (achyuta) Purushottama.”
> 
> Surely, then, the elements now known to us—be their number whatever it
> may—as they are understood and defined at present, are not, nor can they
> be, the _primordial_ Elements. Those were formed from “the _curds of the
> cold radiant Mother_” and “_the fire‐seed of the hot Father_,” who “are
> one,” or, to express it in the plainer language of Modern Science, those
> Elements had their genesis in the depths of the primordial Fire‐mist, the
> masses of incandescent vapour of the irresolvable nebulæ; for, as
> Professor Newcomb shows,(944) resolvable nebulæ do not constitute a class
> of proper nebulæ. More than half of those, he thinks, which were at first
> mistaken for nebulæ, are what he calls “starry clusters.”
> 
> The elements now known have arrived at their state of permanency in this
> Fourth Round and Fifth Race. They have a short period of rest before they
> are propelled once more on their upward spiritual evolution, when the
> “living fire of Orcus” will dissociate the most irresolvable, and scatter
> them again into the primordial One.
> 
> Meanwhile the Occultist goes further, as has been shown in the
> Commentaries on the Seven Stanzas. Hence he can hardly hope for any help
> or recognition from Science, which will reject both his “anîyâmsam
> anîyasâm,” the absolutely spiritual Atom, and his Mânasaputras or Mind‐
> born Men. In resolving the “single material element” into one absolute
> irresolvable Element, Spirit, or Root‐Matter, thus placing it at once
> outside the reach and province of Physical Philosophy—he has, of course
> but little in common with the orthodox men of Science. He maintains that
> Spirit and Matter are two Facets of the unknowable Unity, their apparently
> contrasted aspects depending, (_a_) on the various degrees of
> differentiation of Matter, and (_b_) on the grades of consciousness
> attained by man himself. This is, however, Metaphysics, and has little to
> do with Physics—however great in its own terrestrial limitation that
> physical Philosophy may now be.
> 
> Nevertheless, once that Science admits, if not the actual existence, at
> any rate, the possibility of the existence, of a Universe with its
> numberless forms, conditions, and aspects built out of a “single
> Substance,”(945) it has to go further. Unless it also admits the
> possibility of One Element, or the One Life of the Occultists, it will
> have to hang up that “single Substance,” especially if limited to only the
> solar nebulæ, in mid air, like the coffin of Mahomet, though minus the
> attractive magnet that sustained that coffin. Fortunately for the
> speculative Physicists, if we are unable to state with any degree of
> precision what the nebular theory does imply, we have, thanks to Professor
> Winchell, and several dissident Astronomers, been able to learn what it
> does not imply.
> 
> Unfortunately, this is far from clearing even the most simple of the
> problems that have vexed, and do still vex, the men of learning in their
> search after truth. We have to proceed with our enquiries, starting with
> the earliest hypotheses of Modern Science, if we would discover _where_
> and _why_ it sins. Perchance it may be found that Stallo is right, after
> all, and that the blunders, contradictions and fallacies made by the most
> eminent men of learning are simply due to their abnormal attitude. They
> are, and want to remain Materialistic _quand même_, and yet “the general
> principles of the atomo‐mechanical theory—the basis of modern Physics—are
> substantially identical with the cardinal doctrines of ontological
> Metaphysics.” Thus, “the fundamental errors of ontology become apparent in
> proportion to the advance of physical science.”(946) Science is
> honeycombed with metaphysical conceptions, but the Scientists will not
> admit the charge, and fight desperately to put atomo‐mechanical masks on
> purely incorporeal and spiritual laws in Nature, on our plane—refusing to
> admit their substantiality even on other planes, the bare existence of
> which they reject _à priori_.
> 
> It is easy to show, however, how Scientists, wedded to their materialistic
> views, have, ever since the days of Newton, endeavoured to put false masks
> on fact and truth. But their task is becoming every year more difficult;
> and every year also, Chemistry, beyond all the other sciences, approaches
> nearer and nearer the realm of the Occult in Nature. It is assimilating
> the very truths taught by the Occult Sciences for ages, but hitherto
> bitterly derided. “Matter is eternal,” says the Esoteric Doctrine. But the
> Matter the Occultists conceive of in its _laya_, or _zero_ state, is not
> the matter of Modern Science, not even in its most rarefied gaseous state.
> Mr. Crookes’ “radiant matter” would appear Matter of the grossest kind in
> the realm of the beginnings, as it becomes pure Spirit before it returns
> back even to its first point of differentiation. Therefore, when the Adept
> or Alchemist adds that, though Matter is eternal, for it is Pradhâna, yet
> Atoms are born at every new Manvantara, or reconstruction of the universe,
> it is no such contradiction as a Materialist, who believes in nothing
> beyond the Atom, might think. There is a difference between _manifested_
> and _unmanifested_ Matter, between Pradhâna, the beginningless and endless
> cause, and Prakriti, or the manifested effect. Says the Shloka:
> 
>     That which is the unevolved cause is emphatically called by the
>     most eminent sages, Pradhâna, original base, which is subtile
>     Prakriti, _viz._, that which is eternal and which at once is, and
>     is not, a mere process.(947)
> 
> That which in modern phraseology is referred to as Spirit and Matter, is
> ONE in eternity as the Perpetual Cause, and it is neither Spirit nor
> Matter, but IT—rendered in Sanskrit by TAD, “that”—all that is, was, or
> will be, all that the imagination of man is capable of conceiving. Even
> the exoteric Pantheism of Hindûism renders it as no monotheistic
> Philosophy ever did, for in superb phraseology its Cosmogony begins with
> the well‐known words:
> 
>     There was neither day nor night, neither heaven nor earth, neither
>     darkness nor light. And there was not aught else apprehensible by
>     the senses or by the mental faculties. There was then, however,
>     one Brahma, essentially Prakriti [Nature] and Spirit. For the two
>     aspects of Vishnu which are other than his supreme essential
>     aspect are Prakriti and Spirit, O Brâhman. _When_ these two other
>     _aspects_ of his no longer subsist, but are dissolved, _then_ that
>     _aspect_ whence form and the rest, _i.e._, _creation_, proceed
>     _anew_, is denominated time, O twice‐born.
> 
> It is that which is dissolved, or the illusionary _dual_ aspect of That,
> the essence of which is eternally One, that we call Eternal Matter, or
> Substance, formless, sexless, inconceivable, even to our sixth sense or
> mind,(948) in which, therefore, we refuse to see that which Monotheists
> call a personal, anthropomorphic God.
> 
> How are these two propositions—that “Matter is eternal,” and that “the
> Atom is periodical, and not eternal”—viewed by exact Modern Science? The
> materialistic Physicist will criticize and laugh them to scorn. The
> liberal and progressive man of Science, however, the true and earnest
> scientific searcher after truth, such as the eminent Chemist, Mr. Crookes,
> will corroborate the probability of the two statements. For hardly had the
> echo of his lecture on the “Genesis of the Elements” died away—the lecture
> which, delivered by him before the Chemical Section of the British
> Association, at the Birmingham meeting in 1887, so startled every
> evolutionist who heard or read it—than there came another in March, 1888.
> Once more the President of the Chemical Society brought before the world
> of Science and the public the fruits of some new discoveries in the realm
> of Atoms, and these discoveries justified the Occult Teachings in every
> way. They are more startling even than the statements made by him in the
> first lecture, and well deserve the attention of every Occultist,
> Theosophist, and Metaphysician. This is what he says in his “Elements and
> _Meta_‐Elements,” thus justifying Stallo’s charges and prevision, with the
> fearlessness of a scientific mind which loves Science for truth’s sake,
> regardless of any consequences to his own glory and reputation. We quote
> his own words:
> 
>     Permit me, gentlemen, now to draw your attention for a short time
>     to a subject which concerns the fundamental principles of
>     chemistry, a subject which may lead us to admit the possible
>     existence of bodies which, though neither compounds nor mixtures,
>     are not elements in the strictest sense of the word—bodies which I
>     venture to call “meta‐elements.” To explain my meaning it is
>     necessary for me to revert to our conception of an element. What
>     is the criterion of an element? Where are we to draw the line
>     between distinct existence and identity? No one doubts that
>     oxygen, sodium, chlorine, sulphur are separate elements; and when
>     we come to such groups as chlorine, bromine, iodine, etc., we
>     still feel no doubt, although were degrees of “elementicity”
>     admissible—and to that we may ultimately have to come—it might be
>     allowed that chlorine approximates much more closely to bromine
>     than to oxygen, sodium, or sulphur. Again, nickel and cobalt are
>     near to each other, very near, though no one questions their claim
>     to rank as distinct elements. Still I cannot help asking what
>     would have been the prevalent opinion among chemists had the
>     respective solutions of these bodies and their compounds presented
>     identical colours, instead of colours which, approximately
>     speaking, are mutually complementary. Would their distinct nature
>     have even now been recognized? When we pass further and come to
>     the so‐called rare earths the ground is less secure under our
>     feet. Perhaps we may admit scandium, ytterbium, and others of the
>     like sort to elemental rank; but what are we to say in the case of
>     praseo‐ and neo‐dymium, between which there may be said to exist
>     no well‐marked chemical difference, their chief claim to separate
>     individuality being slight differences in basicity and
>     crystallizing powers, though their physical distinctions, as shown
>     by spectrum observations, are very strongly marked? Even here we
>     may imagine the disposition of the majority of chemists would
>     incline toward the side of leniency, so that they would admit
>     these two bodies within the charmed circle. Whether in so doing
>     they would be able to appeal to any broad principle is an open
>     question. If we admit these candidates how in justice are we to
>     exclude the series of elemental bodies or meta‐elements made known
>     to us by Krüss and Nilson? Here the spectral differences are well
>     marked, while my own researches on didymium show also a slight
>     difference in basicity between some at least of these doubtful
>     bodies. In the same category must be included the numerous
>     separate “elements”—commonly so‐called—have been and are being
>     split up. Where then are we to draw the line? The different
>     groupings shade off so imperceptibly the one into the other that
>     it is impossible to erect a definite boundary between any two
>     adjacent bodies and to say that the body on this side of the line
>     is an element, while the one on the other side is non‐elementary,
>     or merely something which simulates or approximates to an element.
>     Wherever an apparently reasonable line might be drawn it would no
>     doubt be easy at once to assign most bodies to their proper side,
>     as in all cases of classification the real difficulty comes in
>     when the border‐line is approached. Slight chemical differences,
>     of course, are admitted, and, up to a certain point, so are well‐
>     marked physical differences. What are we to say, however, when the
>     only chemical difference is an almost imperceptible tendency for
>     the one body—of a couple or of a group—to precipitate before the
>     other? Again, there are cases where the chemical differences reach
>     the vanishing point, although well‐marked physical differences
>     still remain. Here we stumble on a new difficulty: in such
>     obscurities what is chemical and what is physical? Are we not
>     entitled to call a slight tendency of a nascent amorphous
>     precipitate to fall down in advance of another a “physical
>     difference”? And may we not call coloured reactions depending on
>     the amount of some particular acid present and varying, according
>     to the concentration of the solution and to the solvent employed,
>     “chemical differences”? I do not see how we can deny elementary
>     character to a body which differs from another by well‐marked
>     colour, or spectrum‐reactions, while we accord it to another body
>     whose only claim is a very minute difference in basic powers.
>     Having once opened the door wide enough to admit some spectrum
>     differences, we have to inquire how minute a difference qualifies
>     the candidate to pass? I will give instances from my own
>     experience of some of these doubtful candidates.
> 
> Here the great Chemist gives several cases of the very extraordinary
> behaviour of molecules and earths, apparently the same, but which yet,
> when examined very closely, were found to exhibit differences which,
> however minute, still show that none of them are simple bodies, and that
> the 60 or 70 elements accepted in chemistry can no longer cover the
> ground. Their name, apparently, is legion, but as the so‐called “periodic
> theory” stands in the way of an unlimited multiplication of elements, Mr.
> Crookes is obliged to find some means of reconciling the new discovery
> with the old theory. “That theory,” he says:
> 
>     Has received such abundant verification that we cannot lightly
>     accept any interpretation of phenomena which fails to be in
>     accordance with it. But if we suppose the elements reïnforced by a
>     vast number of bodies slightly differing from each other in their
>     properties, and forming, if I may use the expression, aggregations
>     of nebulæ where we formerly saw, or believed we saw, separate
>     stars, the periodic arrangement can no longer be definitely
>     grasped. No longer, that is, if we retain our usual conception of
>     an element. Let us, then, modify this conception. For “element”
>     read “elementary group”—such elementary groups taking the place of
>     the old elements in the periodic scheme—and the difficulty falls
>     away. In defining an element, let us take not an external
>     boundary, but an internal type. Let us say, _e.g._, the smallest
>     ponderable quantity of yttrium is an assemblage of ultimate atoms
>     almost infinitely more like each other than they are to the atoms
>     of any other approximating element. It does not necessarily follow
>     that the atoms shall all be absolutely alike among themselves. The
>     atomic weight which we ascribed to yttrium, therefore, merely
>     represents a mean value around which the actual weights of the
>     individual atoms of the “element” range within certain limits. But
>     if my conjecture is tenable, could we separate atom from atom, we
>     should find them varying within narrow limits on each side of the
>     mean. The very process of fractionation implies the existence of
>     such differences in certain bodies.
> 
> Thus fact and truth have once more forced the hand of “exact” Science, and
> compelled it to enlarge its views and change its terms, which, masking the
> multitude, reduced them to one body—like the Septenary Elohim and their
> hosts transformed by the materialistic religionists into one Jehovah.
> Replace the chemical terms “molecule,” “atom,” “particle,” etc., by the
> words “Hosts,” “Monads,” “Devas,” etc., and one might think the genesis of
> Gods, the primeval evolution of manvantaric _intelligent_ Forces, was
> being described. But the learned lecturer adds to his descriptive remarks
> something still more suggestive; whether consciously or unconsciously, who
> knoweth? For he says:
> 
>     Until lately such bodies passed muster as elements. They had
>     definite properties, chemical and physical; they had recognized
>     atomic weights. If we take a pure dilute solution of such a body,
>     yttrium for instance, and if we add to it an excess of strong
>     ammonia, we obtain a precipitate which appears perfectly
>     homogeneous. But if instead we add very dilute ammonia in quantity
>     sufficient only to precipitate one‐half of the base present, we
>     obtain no immediate precipitate. If we stir up the whole
>     thoroughly so as to insure a uniform mixture of the solution and
>     the ammonia, and set the vessel aside for an hour, carefully
>     excluding dust, we may still find the liquid clear and bright,
>     without any vestige of turbidity. After three or four hours,
>     however, an opalescence will declare itself, and the next morning
>     a precipitate will have appeared. Now let us ask ourselves, What
>     can be the meaning of this phenomenon? The quantity of precipitant
>     added was insufficient to throw down more than half the yttria
>     present, therefore a process akin to selection has been going on
>     for several hours. The precipitation has _evidently not been
>     effected at random_, those molecules of the base being decomposed
>     which happened to come in contact with a corresponding molecule of
>     ammonia, for we have taken care that the liquids should be
>     uniformly mixed, so that one molecule of the original salt would
>     not be more exposed to decomposition than any other. If, further,
>     we consider the time which elapses before the appearance of a
>     precipitate, we _cannot avoid coming to the conclusion that the
>     action which has been going on for the first few hours is of a
>     selective character_. The problem is not why a precipitate is
>     produced, but what determines or directs some atoms to fall down
>     and others to remain in solution. Out of the multitude of atoms
>     present, _what power is it that directs each atom to choose the
>     proper path? We may picture to ourselves some directive force
>     passing the atoms one by one in review, selecting one for
>     precipitation and another for solution till all have been
>     adjusted._
> 
> The italics in the above passage are ours. Well may a man of Science ask
> himself: What power is it that directs each Atom? and what is the meaning
> of its character being _selective_? Theists would solve the question by
> answering “God”; and would thereby solve nothing philosophically.
> Occultism answers on its own Pantheistic grounds, and teaches the student
> about Gods, Monads, and Atoms. The learned lecturer sees in it that which
> is his chief concern: the finger‐posts and the traces of a path which may
> lead to the discovery, and the full and complete demonstration, of an
> homogeneous element in Nature. He remarks:
> 
>     In order that such a selection can be effected there evidently
>     must be some slight differences between which it is possible to
>     select, and this difference almost certainly must be one of
>     basicity, so slight as to be imperceptible by any test at present
>     known, but susceptible of being nursed and encouraged to a point
>     when the difference can be appreciated by ordinary tests.
> 
> Occultism, which knows of the existence and presence in Nature of the One
> Eternal Element, at the first differentiation of which the roots of the
> Tree of Life are periodically struck, needs no scientific proofs. It says:
> Ancient Wisdom has solved the problem ages ago. Aye; earnest, as well as
> mocking reader, Science is slowly but surely approaching our domains of
> the Occult. It is forced by its own discoveries to adopt _nolens volens_
> our phraseology and symbols. Chemical Science is now compelled, by the
> very force of things, to accept even our illustration of the evolution of
> the Gods and Atoms, so suggestively and undeniably figured in the Caduceus
> of Mercury, the God of Wisdom, and in the allegorical language of the
> Archaic Sages. Says a Commentary in the Esoteric Doctrine:
> 
> _The trunk of the_ ASVATTHA (the tree of Life and Being, the ROD of the
> Caduceus) _grows from and descends at every Beginning_ (every new
> Manvantara) _from the two dark wings of the Swan_ (HANSA) _of Life. The
> two Serpents, the ever‐living and its illusion_ (Spirit and matter) _whose
> two heads grow from the one head between the wings, descend along the
> trunks interlaced in close embrace. The two tails join on earth_ (the
> manifested Universe) _into one, and this is the great illusion, O Lanoo!_
> 
> Every one knows what the Caduceus is, modified considerably by the Greeks.
> The original symbol—with the triple head of the serpent—became altered
> into a rod with a knob, and the two lower heads were separated, thus
> disfiguring somewhat the original meaning. Yet it is as good an
> illustration as can be for our purpose, this laya rod, entwined by two
> serpents. Verily the wonderful powers of the magic Caduceus were sung by
> all the ancient poets, with a very good reason for those who understood
> the secret meaning.
> 
> Now what says the learned President of the Chemical Society of Great
> Britain, in that same lecture, which has any reference to, or bearing
> upon, our above‐mentioned doctrine? Very little; only this—and nothing
> more:
> 
>     In the Birmingham address already referred to I asked my audience
>     to picture the action of two forces on the original protyle—one
>     being time, accompanied by a lowering of temperature; the other,
>     swinging to and fro like a mighty pendulum, having periodic cycles
>     of ebb and swell, rest and activity, being intimately connected
>     with the imponderable matter, essence, or source of energy we call
>     electricity. Now, a simile like this effects its object if it
>     fixes in the mind the particular fact it is intended to emphasize,
>     but it must not be expected necessarily to run parallel with all
>     the facts. Besides the lowering of temperature with the periodic
>     ebb and flow of electricity, positive or negative, requisite to
>     confer on the newly‐born elements their particular atomicity, it
>     is evident that a third factor must be taken into account. Nature
>     does not act on a flat plane; she demands space for her cosmogenic
>     operations, and if we introduce space as the third factor, all
>     appears clear. Instead of a pendulum, which, though to a certain
>     extent a good illustration, is impossible as a fact, let us seek
>     some more satisfactory way of representing what I conceive may
>     have taken place. Let us suppose the zigzag diagram not drawn upon
>     a plane, but projected in space of three dimensions. What figure
>     can we best select to meet all the conditions involved? Many of
>     the facts can be well explained by supposing the projection in
>     space of Professor Emerson Reynolds’ zigzag curve to be a spiral.
>     This figure is, however, inadmissible, inasmuch as the curve has
>     to pass through a point neutral as to electricity and chemical
>     energy twice in each cycle. We must, therefore, adopt some other
>     figure. A figure of eight (8), or lemniscate, will foreshorten
>     into a zigzag just as well as a spiral, and it fulfils every
>     condition of the problem.
> 
> A lemniscate for the evolution downward, from Spirit into Matter; another
> form of a spiral, perhaps, in its reinvolutionary path onward, from Matter
> into Spirit; and the necessary gradual and final reabsorption into the
> _laya_ state, that which Science calls, in her own way, “the point neutral
> as to electricity,” or the _zero_ point. Such are the Occult facts and
> statement. They may be left with the greatest security and confidence to
> Science, to be justified some day. Let us hear some more, however, about
> this primordial genetic type of the symbolical Caduceus.
> 
>     Such a figure will result from three very simple simultaneous
>     motions. First, a simple oscillation backwards and forwards
>     (suppose east and west); secondly, a simple oscillation at right
>     angles to the former (suppose north and south) of half the
>     periodic time—_i.e._, twice as fast; and thirdly, a motion at
>     right angles to these two (suppose downwards), which, in its
>     simplest form, would be with unvarying velocity. If we project
>     this figure in space we find on examination that the points of the
>     curves, where chlorine, bromine, and iodine are formed, come close
>     under each other; so also will sulphur, selenium, and tellurium;
>     again, phosphorus, arsenic, and antimony; and in like manner other
>     series of analogous bodies. It may be asked whether this scheme
>     explains how and why the elements appear in this order? Let us
>     imagine a cyclical translation in space, each evolution witnessing
>     the genesis of the group of elements which I previously
>     represented as produced during one complete vibration of the
>     pendulum. Let us suppose that one cycle has thus been completed,
>     the centre of the unknown creative force in its mighty journey
>     through space having scattered along its track the primitive
>     atoms—the seeds, if I may use the expression—which presently are
>     to coalesce and develop into the groupings now known as lithium,
>     beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium,
>     magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur, and chlorine.
>     What is most probably the form of track now pursued? Were it
>     strictly confined to the same plane of temperature and time, the
>     next elementary groupings to appear would again have been those of
>     lithium, and the original cycle would have been eternally
>     repeated, producing again and again the same 14 elements. The
>     conditions, however, are not quite the same. Space and electricity
>     are as at first, but temperature has altered, and thus, instead of
>     the atoms of lithium being supplemented with atoms in all respects
>     analogous with themselves, the atomic groupings which come into
>     being when the second cycle commences form, not lithium, but its
>     lineal descendant, potassium. Suppose, therefore, the _vis
>     generatrix_ travelling to and fro in cycles along a lemniscate
>     path, as above suggested, while simultaneously temperature is
>     declining and time is flowing on—variations which I have
>     endeavoured to represent by the downward sink—each coil of the
>     lemniscate track crosses the same vertical line at lower and lower
>     points. Projected in space, the curve shows a central line neutral
>     as far as electricity is concerned, and neutral in chemical
>     properties—positive electricity on the north, negative on the
>     south. Dominant atomicities are governed by the distance east and
>     west from the neutral centre line, monatomic elements being one
>     remove from it, diatomic two removes, and so on. In every
>     successive coil the same law holds good.
> 
> And, as if to prove the postulate of Occult Science and Hindû philosophy,
> that, at the hour of the Pralaya, the two aspects of the Unknowable Deity,
> “the Swan in darkness,” Prakriti and Purusha, Nature or Matter in all its
> forms and Spirit, no longer subsist but are absolutely dissolved, we learn
> the conclusive scientific opinion of the great English Chemist, who caps
> his proofs by saying:
> 
>     We have now traced the formation of the chemical elements from
>     knots and voids in a primitive, formless fluid. We have shown the
>     possibility, nay, the probability that the atoms are not eternal
>     in existence, but share with all other created beings the
>     attributes of decay and death.
> 
> Occultism says _amen_ to this, as the scientific “possibility” and
> “probability” are for it facts, demonstrated beyond the necessity for
> further proof, or for any extraneous physical evidence. Nevertheless, it
> repeats with as much assurance as ever: “MATTER IS ETERNAL, becoming
> atomic (its aspect) only periodically.” This is as sure as that the other
> proposition, which is almost unanimously accepted by Astronomers and
> Physicists—namely, that the wear and tear of the body of the Universe is
> steadily going on, and that it will finally lead to the extinction of the
> Solar Fires and the destruction of the Universe—is quite erroneous on the
> lines traced by men of Science. There will be, as there ever were in time
> and eternity, periodical dissolutions of the manifested Universe, such as
> a partial Pralaya after every Day of Brahmâ; and a Universal Pralaya—the
> Mahâ‐Pralaya—only after the lapse of every Age of Brahmâ. But the
> scientific causes for such dissolution, as brought forward by exact
> Science, have nothing to do with the true causes. However that may be,
> Occultism is once more justified by Science, for Mr. Crookes said:
> 
>     We have shown, from arguments drawn from the chemical laboratory,
>     that in matter which has responded to every test of an element,
>     there are minute shades of difference which may admit of
>     selection. We have seen that the time‐honoured distinction between
>     elements and compounds no longer keeps pace with the developments
>     of chemical science, but must be modified to include a vast array
>     of intermediate bodies—“meta‐elements.” We have shown how the
>     objections of Clerk‐Maxwell, weighty as they are, may be met; and
>     finally, we have adduced reasons for believing that primitive
>     matter was formed by the act of a generative force, throwing off
>     at intervals of time atoms endowed with varying quantities of
>     primitive forms of energy. If we may hazard any conjectures as to
>     the source of energy embodied in a chemical atom, we may, I think,
>     premise that the heat radiations propagated outwards through the
>     ether from the ponderable matter of the universe, by some process
>     of nature not yet known to us, are transformed at the confines of
>     the universe into the primary—the essential—motions of chemical
>     atoms, which, the instant they are formed, gravitate inwards, and
>     thus restore to the universe the energy which otherwise would be
>     lost to it through radiant heat. If this conjecture be well
>     founded, Sir William Thomson’s startling prediction of the final
>     decrepitude of the universe through the dissipation of its energy
>     falls to the ground. In this fashion, gentlemen, it seems to me
>     that the question of the elements may be provisionally treated.
>     Our slender knowledge of these first mysteries is extending
>     steadily, surely, though slowly.
> 
> By a strange and curious coincidence even our Septenary doctrine seems to
> force the hand of Science. If we understand rightly, Chemistry speaks of
> fourteen groupings of primitive atoms—lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon,
> nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon,
> phosphorus, sulphur and chlorine; and Mr. Crookes, speaking of the
> “dominant atomicities,” enumerates seven groups of these, for he says:
> 
>     As the mighty focus of creative energy goes round, we see it in
>     successive cycles sowing in one tract of space seeds of lithium,
>     potassium, rubidium, and cæsium; in another tract, chlorine,
>     bromine, and iodine; in a third, sodium, copper, silver, and gold;
>     in a fourth, sulphur, selenium, and tellurium; in a fifth,
>     beryllium, calcium, strontium, and barium; in a sixth, magnesium,
>     zinc, cadmium, and mercury; in a seventh, phosphorus, arsenic,
>     antimony, and bismuth [which makes seven groupings on the one
>     hand. And after showing] ... in other tracts the other
>     elements—namely, aluminium, gallium, indium, and thallium;
>     silicon, germanium, and tin; carbon, titanium, and zirconium ...
>     [he adds] while a natural position near the neutral axis is found
>     for the three groups of elements relegated by Professor Mendeleeff
>     to a sort of Hospital for Incurables—his eighth family.
> 
> It might be interesting to compare these seven, and the eighth family of
> “incurables,” with the allegories concerning the seven primitive sons of
> “Mother, Infinite Space,” or Aditi, and the eighth son rejected by her.
> Many a strange coincidence may thus be found between “those intermediate
> links ... named meta‐elements” or elementoids, and those whom Occult
> Science names their Noumenoi, the intelligent Minds and Rulers of those
> groupings of Monads and Atoms. But this would lead us too far. Let us be
> content with finding the confession of the fact that:
> 
>     This deviation from absolute homogeneity should mark the
>     constitution of these molecules or aggregations of matter which we
>     designate elements and will perhaps be clearer if we return in
>     imagination to the earliest dawn of our material universe, and,
>     face to face with the Great Secret, try to consider the processes
>     of elemental evolution.
> 
> Thus finally Science, in the person of its highest representatives, in
> order to make itself clearer to the profane, adopts the phraseology of
> such old Adepts as Roger Bacon, and returns to the “protyle.” All this is
> hopeful and suggestive of the “signs of the times.”
> 
> Indeed these “signs” are many and multiply daily; but none are more
> important than those just quoted. For now the chasm between the Occult
> “superstitious and unscientific” teachings and those of “exact” Science is
> completely bridged, and one, at least, of the few eminent Chemists of the
> day is in the realm of the infinite possibilities of Occultism. Every new
> step he will take will bring him nearer and nearer to that mysterious
> Centre, from which radiate the innumerable paths that lead down Spirit
> into Matter, and which transform the Gods and the living Monads into man
> and sentient Nature.
> 
> But we have something more to say on this subject in the following
> Section.
> 
> Section IX. The Coming Force. Its Possibilities And Impossibilities.
> 
> Shall we say that Force is “moving Matter,” or “Matter in motion,” and a
> manifestation of Energy; or that Matter and Force are the phenomenal
> differentiated aspects of the one primary, undifferentiated Cosmic
> Substance?
> 
> This query is made with regard to that Stanza which treats of FOHAT and
> his “Seven brothers or Sons,” in other words, of the _cause_ and the
> _effects_ of Cosmic Electricity, the Brothers or Sons of Occult parlance
> being the seven primary forces of Electricity, whose purely phenomenal,
> and hence grossest, effects are alone cognizable by Physicists on the
> cosmic and especially on the terrestrial plane. These include, among other
> things, Sound, Light, Colour, etc. Now what does Physical Science tell us
> of these “Forces”? SOUND, it says, is a sensation produced by the impact
> of atmospheric molecules on the tympanum, which, by setting up delicate
> tremors in the auditory apparatus, thus communicate their vibrations to
> the brain. LIGHT is the sensation caused by the impact of inconceivably
> minute vibrations of ether on the retina of the eye.
> 
> So, too, say we. But these are simply the effects produced in our
> atmosphere and its immediate surroundings, all, in fact, which falls
> within the range of our terrestrial consciousness. Jupiter Pluvius sent
> his symbol in drops of rain, of water composed, as is believed, of two
> “elements,” which Chemistry dissociates and recombines. The compound
> molecules are in its power, but their atoms still elude its grasp.
> Occultism sees in all these Forces and manifestations a ladder, the lower
> rungs of which belong to exoteric Physics, and the higher are traced to a
> living, intelligent, invisible Power, which is, as a rule, the
> unconcerned, but, exceptionally, the conscious, Cause of the sense‐born
> phenomena designated as this or that natural law.
> 
> We say and maintain that SOUND, for one thing, is a tremendous Occult
> power; that it is a stupendous force, of which the electricity generated
> by a million of Niagaras could never counteract the smallest potentiality
> when directed with Occult Knowledge. Sound may be produced of such a
> nature that the pyramid of Cheops would be raised in the air, or that a
> dying man, nay, one at his last breath, would be revived and filled with
> new energy and vigour.
> 
> For Sound generates, or rather attracts together, the elements that
> produce an _ozone_ the fabrication of which is beyond Chemistry, but is
> within the limits of Alchemy. It may even _resurrect_ a man or an animal
> whose astral “vital body” has not been irreparably separated from the
> physical body by the severance of the magnetic or odic chord. _As one
> saved thrice from death_ by that power, the writer ought to be credited
> with personally knowing something about it.
> 
> And if all this appears too _unscientific_ to be even noticed, let Science
> explain to what mechanical and physical laws, known to it, are due the
> recently produced phenomena of the so‐called Keely motor. What is it that
> acts as the formidable generator of invisible but tremendous force, of
> that power which is not only capable of driving an engine of 25 horse‐
> power, but has even been employed to bodily lift the machinery? Yet this
> is done simply by drawing a fiddle‐bow across a tuning fork, as has been
> repeatedly proven. For the Etheric Force, discovered by John Worrell
> Keely, of Philadelphia, well‐known in America and Europe, is no
> hallucination. Notwithstanding his failure to utilize it—a failure
> prognosticated and maintained by some Occultists from the first—the
> phenomena exhibited by the discoverer during the last few years have been
> wonderful, almost miraculous, not in the sense of the _supernatural_(949)
> but of the _superhuman_. Had Keely been permitted to succeed, he might
> have reduced a whole army to atoms in the space of a few seconds, as
> easily as he reduced a dead ox to that condition.
> 
> The reader is now asked to give serious attention to that newly‐discovered
> potency, which the discoverer has named Inter‐Etheric Force, and Forces.
> 
> In the humble opinion of the Occultists, as of his immediate friends, Mr.
> Keely was, and still is, at the threshold of some of the greatest secrets
> of the Universe; of that chiefly on which is built the whole mystery of
> physical Forces, and the Esoteric significance of the “Mundane Egg”
> symbolism. Occult Philosophy, viewing the manifested and the unmanifested
> Kosmos as a UNITY, symbolizes the ideal conception of the former by that
> “Golden Egg” with two poles in it. It is the positive pole that acts in
> the manifested World of Matter, while the negative loses itself in the
> unknowable Absoluteness of SAT—_Be‐ness_.(950) Whether this agrees with
> the philosophy of Mr. Keely, we cannot tell, nor does it really much
> matter. Nevertheless, his ideas about the ethero‐material construction of
> the Universe look strangely like our own, being _in this respect_ nearly
> identical. This is what we find him saying in an able pamphlet compiled by
> Mrs. Bloomfield‐Moore, an American lady of wealth and position, whose
> incessant efforts in the pursuit of truth can never be too highly
> appreciated:
> 
>     Mr. Keely, in explanation of the working of his engine, says: “In
>     the conception of any machine heretofore constructed, the medium
>     for inducing a neutral centre has never been found. If it had, the
>     difficulties of perpetual‐motion seekers would have ended, and
>     this problem would have become an established and operating fact.
>     It would only require an introductory impulse of a few pounds, on
>     such a device, to cause it to run for centuries. In the conception
>     of my vibratory engine, I did not seek to attain perpetual motion;
>     but a circuit is formed that actually has _a neutral centre_,
>     which is in a condition to be vivified by my vibratory ether, and,
>     while under operation by said substance, is really a machine that
>     is virtually independent of the mass (or globe),(951) and it is
>     the wonderful velocity of the vibratory circuit which makes it so.
>     Still, with all its perfection, it requires to be fed with the
>     vibratory ether to make it an independent motor.... All structures
>     require a foundation in strength according to the weight of the
>     mass they have to carry, but the foundations of the universe rest
>     on a vacuous point far more minute than a molecule; in fact, to
>     express this truth properly, on an _inter‐etheric point_, which
>     requires an infinite mind to understand it. To look down into the
>     depths of an etheric centre is precisely the same as it would be
>     to search into the broad space of heaven’s ether to find the end,
>     with this difference: that one is the positive field, while the
>     other is the negative field.”
> 
> This is, as may easily be seen, precisely the Eastern Doctrine. Mr.
> Keely’s inter‐etheric point is the laya‐point of the Occultists; this,
> however, does not require “an infinite mind to understand it,” but only a
> specific intuition and ability to trace its hiding‐place in this World of
> Matter. Of course, the _laya centre_ cannot be produced, but an _inter‐
> etheric vacuum_ can be—as is proved by the production of bell‐sounds in
> space. Mr. Keely speaks as an unconscious Occultist, nevertheless, when he
> remarks, in his theory of planetary suspension:
> 
>     As regards planetary volume, we would ask in a scientific point of
>     view, How can the immense difference of volume in the planets
>     exist without disorganizing the harmonious action that has always
>     characterized them? I can only answer this question properly by
>     entering into a progressive analysis, starting on the rotating
>     etheric centres that were fixed by the Creator(952) with their
>     attractive or accumulative power. If you ask what power it is that
>     gives to each etheric atom its inconceivable velocity of rotation
>     (or introductory impulse), I must answer that no finite mind will
>     ever be able to conceive what it is. The philosophy of
>     accumulation is the only proof that such a power has been given.
>     The area, if we can so speak, of such an atom presents to the
>     attractive or magnetic, the elective or propulsive, all the
>     receptive force and all the antagonistic force that characterize a
>     planet of the largest magnitude; consequently, as the accumulation
>     goes on, the perfect equation remains the same. When this minute
>     centre has once been fixed, the power to rend it from its position
>     would necessarily have to be so great as to displace the most
>     immense planet that exists. When this atomic neutral centre is
>     displaced, the planet must go with it. The neutral centre carries
>     the full load of any accumulation from the start, and remains the
>     same, for ever balanced in the eternal space.
> 
> Mr. Keely illustrates his idea of “a neutral centre” in this way:
> 
>     We will imagine that, after an accumulation of a planet of any
>     diameter, say, 20,000 miles, more or less, for the size has
>     nothing to do with the problem, there should be a displacement of
>     all the material, with the exception of a crust 5,000 miles thick,
>     leaving an intervening void between this crust and a centre of the
>     size of an ordinary billiard ball, it would then require a force
>     as great to move this small central mass as it would to move the
>     shell of 5,000 miles thickness. Moreover, this small central mass
>     would carry the load of this crust for ever, keeping it
>     equidistant; and there could be no opposing power, however great,
>     that could bring them together. The imagination staggers in
>     contemplating the immense load which bears upon this point of
>     centre, where weight ceases.... This is what we understand by a
>     neutral centre.
> 
> And this is what Occultists understand by a laya centre.
> 
> The above is pronounced to be “unscientific” by many. But so is everything
> that is not sanctioned and kept on the strictly orthodox lines of Physical
> Science. Unless the explanation given by the inventor himself is
> accepted—and his explanations, being quite _orthodox_ from the Spiritual
> and the Occult standpoints, if not from that of materialistic speculative
> Science, called _exact_, are therefore ours in this particular—what can
> Science answer to facts already seen, which it is no longer possible for
> anyone to deny? Occult Philosophy divulges few of its most important vital
> mysteries. It drops them like precious pearls, one by one, far and wide
> apart, and even this only when forced to do so by the evolutionary tidal
> wave that carries on Humanity slowly, silently, but steadily, toward the
> dawn of the Sixth Race mankind. For once out of the safe custody of their
> legitimate heirs and keepers, those mysteries cease to be Occult: they
> fall into the public domain, and have to run the risk of becoming curses
> more often than blessings in the hands of the selfish—of the Cains of the
> human race. Nevertheless, whenever such individuals as the discoverer of
> Etheric Force are born, men with peculiar psychic and mental
> capacities,(953) they are generally and more frequently helped, than
> allowed to go unassisted, groping on their way; if left to their own
> resources, they very soon fall victims to martyrdom or become the prey of
> unscrupulous speculators. But they are helped only on the condition that
> they should not become, whether consciously or unconsciously, an
> additional peril to their age: _a danger to the poor_, now offered in
> daily holocaust by the less wealthy to the very wealthy.(954) This
> necessitates a short digression and an explanation.
> 
> Some twelve years back, during the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, the
> writer, in answering the earnest queries of a Theosophist, one of the
> earliest admirers of Mr. Keely, repeated to him what she had heard in
> quarters, information from which she could never doubt.
> 
> It had been stated that the inventor of the “Self‐Motor” was what is
> called, in the jargon of the Kabalists, a “_natural‐born_ magician.” That
> he was and would remain unconscious of the full range of his powers, and
> would work out merely those which he had found out and ascertained in his
> own nature—_firstly_, because, attributing them to a wrong source, he
> could never give them full sway; and _secondly_, because it was beyond his
> power to pass to others that which was _a capacity inherent in his own
> special nature_. Hence, the whole secret could not be made over
> permanently to anyone, for practical purposes or use.(955)
> 
> Individuals born with such a capacity are not very rare. That they are not
> heard of more frequently is due to the fact that they live and die, in
> almost every case, in utter ignorance that they are possessed of abnormal
> powers. Mr. Keely possesses powers which are called abnormal, just because
> they happen to be as little known, in our day, as was the circulation of
> the blood before Harvey’s time. Blood existed, and it behaved as it does
> at present in the first man born from woman; and so exists and has existed
> in man that _principle_ which can control and guide etheric vibratory
> Force. At any rate, it exists in all those mortals whose _Inner Selves_
> are _primordially connected, by reason of their direct descent, with that
> group of Dhyân‐Chohans_ who are called “the first‐born of Æther.” Mankind,
> psychically considered, is divided into various groups, each group being
> connected with one of the Dhyânic Groups that first formed _psychic_ man
> (see paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the Commentary to Stanza VII.). Mr.
> Keely—being greatly favoured in this respect, and besides his psychic
> temperament, being, moreover, intellectually a genius in mechanics—may
> achieve most wonderful results. He has achieved some already—more than any
> mortal man, _not initiated into the final Mysteries_, has achieved in this
> age up to the present day. What he has done is—as his friends justly say
> of him—certainly quite sufficient “to demolish with the hammer of Science
> the idols of Science”—the idols of matter with the feet of clay. Nor would
> the writer for a moment think of contradicting Mrs. Bloomfield‐Moore,
> when, in her paper on “Psychic Force and Etheric Force,” she states that
> Mr. Keely, as a Philosopher:
> 
>     Is great enough in soul, wise enough in mind, and sublime enough
>     in courage to overcome all difficulties, and to stand at last
>     before the world as the greatest discoverer and inventor in the
>     world.
> 
> And again she writes:
> 
>     Should Keely do no more than lead scientists from the dreary
>     realms where they are groping into the open field of elemental
>     force, where gravity and cohesion are disturbed in their haunts
>     and diverted to use; where, from unity of origin, emanates
>     infinite energy in diversified forms, he will achieve immortal
>     fame. Should he demonstrate, to the destruction of materialism,
>     that the universe is animated by a mysterious principle to which
>     matter, however perfectly organized, is absolutely subservient, he
>     will be a greater spiritual benefactor to our race than the modern
>     world has yet found in any man. Should he be able to substitute,
>     in the treatment of disease, the finer forces of nature for the
>     grossly material agencies which have sent more human beings to
>     their graves than war, pestilence and famine combined, he will
>     merit and receive the gratitude of mankind. All this and more will
>     he do, if he and those who have watched his progress, day by day
>     for years, are not too sanguine in their expectations.
> 
> The same lady, in her pamphlet, _Keely’s Secrets_,(956) brings forward the
> following passage from an article, written in the _Theosophist_ a few
> years ago, by the writer of the present volume:
> 
>     The author of No. 5 of the pamphlets issued by the Theosophical
>     Publication Society, _What is Matter and What is Force_, says
>     therein: “The men of science have just found out ‘a fourth state
>     of matter,’ whereas the Occultists have penetrated years ago
>     beyond the sixth, and therefore do not infer, but know of, the
>     existence of the seventh, the last.” This knowledge comprises one
>     of the secrets of Keely’s so‐called “compound secret.” It is
>     already known to many that his secret includes “the augmentation
>     of energy,” the insulation of the ether, and the adaptation of
>     dynaspheric force to machinery.
> 
> It is just because Keely’s discovery would lead to a knowledge of one of
> the most Occult secrets, a secret which can never be allowed to fall into
> the hands of the masses, that his failure to push his discoveries to their
> logical end seems certain to Occultists. But of this more presently. Even
> in its limitations this discovery may prove of the greatest benefit. For:
> 
>     Step by step, with a patient perseverance which some day the world
>     will honour, this man of genius has made his researches,
>     overcoming the colossal difficulties which again and again raised
>     up in his path what seemed to be (to all but himself)
>     insurmountable barriers to further progress: but never has the
>     world’s index finger so pointed to an hour when all is making
>     ready for the advent of the new form of force that mankind is
>     waiting for. Nature, always reluctant to yield her secrets, is
>     listening to the demands made upon her by her master, necessity.
>     The coal mines of the world cannot long afford the increasing
>     drain made upon them. Steam has reached its utmost limits of
>     power, and does not fulfil the requirements of the age. It knows
>     that its days are numbered. Electricity holds back, with bated
>     breath, dependent upon the approach of her sister colleague. Air
>     ships are riding at anchor, as it were, waiting for the force
>     which is to make aërial navigation something more than a dream. As
>     easily as men communicate with their offices from their homes by
>     means of the telephone, so will the inhabitants of separate
>     continents talk across the ocean. Imagination is palsied when
>     seeking to foresee the grand results of this marvellous discovery,
>     when once it is applied to art and mechanics. In taking the throne
>     which it will force steam to abdicate, dynaspheric force will rule
>     the world with a power so mighty in the interests of civilization,
>     that no finite mind can conjecture the results. Laurence Oliphant,
>     in his preface to _Scientific Religion_, says: “A new moral future
>     is dawning upon the human race—one, certainly, of which it stands
>     much in need.” In no way could this new moral future be so widely,
>     so universally, commenced as by the utilizing of dynaspheric force
>     to beneficial purposes in life.
> 
> The Occultists are ready to admit all this with the eloquent writer.
> Molecular vibration is, undeniably, “Keely’s legitimate field of
> research,” and the discoveries made by him will prove wonderful—yet _only
> in his hands_ and _through himself_. The world so far will get but that
> with which it can be safely entrusted. The truth of this assertion has,
> perhaps, not yet quite dawned upon the discoverer himself, since he writes
> that he is absolutely certain that he will accomplish all that he has
> promised, and that he will then give it out to the world; but it must dawn
> upon him, and at no very far distant date. And what he says in reference
> to his work is a good proof of it:
> 
>     In considering the operation of my engine, the visitor, in order
>     to have even an approximate conception of its _modus operandi_,
>     must discard _all thought of engines that are operated upon the
>     principle of pressure and exhaustion, by the expansion of steam or
>     other analogous gas which impinges upon an abutment, such as the
>     piston of a steam‐engine_. My engine has neither piston nor
>     eccentrics, nor is there one grain of pressure exerted in the
>     engine, whatever may be the size or capacity of it. My system, in
>     every part and detail, both in the developing of my power and in
>     every branch of its utilization, _is based and founded on
>     sympathetic vibration_. In no other way would it be possible to
>     awaken or develop my force, and equally impossible would it be to
>     operate my engine upon any other principle.... This, however, is
>     the true system; and henceforth all my operations will be
>     conducted in this manner—that is to say, my power will be
>     generated, my engines run, my cannon operated, _through a wire_.
>     It has been only after years of incessant labour, and the making
>     of almost innumerable experiments, involving not only the
>     construction of a great many most peculiar mechanical structures,
>     and the closest investigation and study of the phenomenal
>     properties of the substance “ether,” _per se_, produced, that I
>     have been able to dispense with complicated mechanism, and to
>     obtain, as I claim, _mastery over the subtle and strange force
>     with which I am dealing_.
> 
> The passages underlined by us, are those which bear directly on the Occult
> side of the application of the vibratory Force, that which Mr. Keely calls
> “sympathetic vibration.” The “wire” is already a step below, or downward
> from the pure Etheric plane into the Terrestrial. The discoverer has
> produced marvels—the word “miracle” is not too strong—when acting through
> the inter‐etheric Force alone, the fifth and sixth principles of Âkâsha.
> From a generator six feet long, he has come down to one “no larger than an
> old‐fashioned silver watch”; and this by itself is a miracle of
> _mechanical_, but not of spiritual, genius. As was well said by his great
> patroness and defender, Mrs. Bloomfield‐Moore:
> 
>     The two forms of force which he has been experimenting with, and
>     the phenomena attending them, are the very antithesis of each
>     other.
> 
> One was generated and acted upon by and through himself. No one, who
> should have repeated the thing done by himself, _could have produced the
> same results_. It was truly Keely’s Ether that acted, while Smith’s or
> Brown’s Ether would have remained for ever barren of results. For Keely’s
> difficulty has hitherto been to produce a machine which would develop and
> regulate the Force without the intervention of any “will power” or
> personal influence of the operator, whether conscious or unconscious. In
> this he has failed, so far as others were concerned, for _no one but
> himself_ could operate on his “machines.” Occultly this was a far more
> advanced achievement than the “success” which he anticipates from his
> wire, but the results obtained from the fifth and sixth planes of the
> Etheric, or Astral, Force, _will never be permitted to serve for purposes
> of commerce and traffic_. That Keely’s organism is directly connected with
> the production of his marvellous results is proven by the following
> statement, emanating from one who knows the great discoverer intimately.
> 
>     At one time the shareholders of the “Keely Motor Co.” put a man in
>     his workshop for the express purpose of discovering his secret.
>     After six months of close watching, he said to J. W. Keely one
>     day: “I know how it is done, now.” They had been setting up a
>     machine together, and Keely was manipulating the stop‐cock which
>     turned the force on and off. “Try it, then,” was the answer. The
>     man turned the cock, and nothing came. “Let me see you do it
>     again,” the man said to Keely. The latter complied, and the
>     machinery operated at once. Again the other tried, but without
>     success. Then Keely put his hand on his shoulder and told him to
>     try once more. He did so, with the result of an instantaneous
>     production of the current.
> 
> This fact, if true, settles the question.
> 
> We are told that Mr. Keely defines electricity “as a certain form of
> atomic vibration.” In this he is quite right; but this is Electricity on
> the terrestrial plane, and through terrestrial correlations. He estimates—
> 
> Molecular vibrations at 100,000,000 per second.
> Inter‐molecular vibrations at 300,000,000 per second.
> Atomic vibrations at 900,000,000 per second.
> Inter‐atomic vibrations at 2,700,000,000 per second.
> Ætheric vibrations at 8,100,000,000 per second.
> Inter‐Ætheric vibrations at 24,300,000,000 per second.
> 
> This proves our point. There are no vibrations that could be counted or
> even estimated at an _approximate_ rate beyond “the realm of the fourth
> Son of Fohat,” to use an Occult phrase, or that motion which corresponds
> to the formation of Mr. Crookes’ radiant matter, lightly called some years
> ago the “fourth state of matter”—_on this our plane_.
> 
> If the question is asked why Mr. Keely was not allowed to pass a certain
> limit, the answer is easy; it was because that, which he has unconsciously
> discovered, is the terrible sidereal Force, known to, and named by the
> Atlanteans Mash‐mak, and by the Âryan Rishis in their Astra Vidyâ by a
> name that we do not like to give. It is the Vril of Bulwer Lytton’s
> _Coming Race_, and of the coming Races of our mankind. The name Vril may
> be a fiction; the Force itself is a fact, as little doubted in India as is
> the existence of the Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret
> books.
> 
> It is this vibratory Force, which, when aimed at an army from an Agni‐
> ratha, fixed on a flying vessel, a balloon, according to the instructions
> found in Astra Vidyâ, would reduce to ashes 100,000 men and elephants, as
> easily as it would a dead rat. It is allegorized in the _Vishnu Purâna_,
> in the _Râmâyana_ and other works, in the fable about the sage Kapila
> whose “glance made a mountain of ashes of King Sagara’s 60,000 sons,” and
> which is explained in the Esoteric Works, and referred to as the
> Kapilâksha—Kapila’s Eye.
> 
> And is it this Satanic Force that our generations are to be allowed to add
> to their stock of Anarchist’s baby‐toys, known as melenite, dynamite
> clock‐work, explosive oranges, “flower baskets,” and such other innocent
> names? Is it this destructive agency, which, once in the hands of some
> modern Attila, a bloodthirsty Anarchist, for instance, would in a few days
> reduce Europe to its primitive chaotic state, with no man left alive to
> tell the tale—is it this Force which is to become the common property of
> all men alike?
> 
> What Mr. Keely has already done is grand and wonderful in the extreme;
> there is enough work before him in the demonstration of his new system to
> “humble the pride of those scientists who are materialistic, by revealing
> those mysteries which lie behind the world of matter,” without, _nolens
> volens_, revealing it to all. For surely Psychics and Spiritualists, of
> whom there are a good number in European armies, would be the first to
> personally experience the fruits of the revelation of such mysteries.
> Thousands of them would speedily find themselves in blue Ether, perhaps
> with the populations of whole countries to keep them company, were such a
> Force to be even entirely discovered, let alone made publicly known. The
> discovery in its completeness is by several thousand—or shall we say
> hundred thousand—years too premature. It will be in its appointed place
> and time only when the great roaring flood of starvation, misery, and
> underpaid labour ebbs back again—as it will when the just demands of the
> many are at last happily attended to; when the proletariat exists but in
> name, and the pitiful cry for bread, that rings unheeded throughout the
> world, has died away. This may be hastened by the spread of learning, and
> by new openings for work and emigration, with better prospects than now
> exist, _and on some new continent that may appear_. Then only will Keely’s
> Motor and Force, as originally contemplated by himself and his friends, be
> in demand, because it will then be more needed by the poor than by the
> wealthy.
> 
> Meanwhile the Force he has discovered will work through wires, and, if he
> succeeds, this will be quite sufficient to make of him the greatest
> discoverer of the age in the present generation.
> 
> What Mr. Keely says of _Sound_ and _Colour_ is also correct from the
> Occult standpoint. Hear him talk as though he were the nursling of the
> “Gods‐Revealers,” and as if he had gazed all his life into the depths of
> Father‐Mother Æther.
> 
> In comparing the tenuity of the atmosphere with that of the etheric flows,
> obtained by his invention for breaking up the molecules of air by
> vibration, Keely says:
> 
>     It is as platinum to hydrogen gas. Molecular separation of air
>     brings us to the first sub‐division only; inter‐molecular, to the
>     second; atomic, to the third; inter‐atomic, to the fourth;
>     etheric, to the fifth; and inter‐etheric, to the sixth sub‐
>     division, or positive association with luminiferous ether.(957) In
>     my introductory argument I have contended that this is the
>     vibratory envelope of all atoms. In my definition of atom I do not
>     confine myself to the sixth sub‐division where this luminiferous
>     ether is developed in its crude form, as far as my researches
>     prove.(958) I think this idea will be pronounced by the physicists
>     of the present day, a wild freak of the imagination. Possibly, in
>     time, a light may fall upon this theory that will bring its
>     simplicity forward for scientific research. At present I can only
>     compare it to some planet in a dark space, where the light of the
>     sun of science has not yet reached it.... I assume that sound,
>     like odour, is a real substance of unknown and wonderful tenuity,
>     emanating from a body where it has been induced by percussion and
>     throwing out absolute corpuscles of matter, inter‐atomic
>     particles, with velocity of 1,120 feet per second; _in vacuo_
>     20,000. The substance which is thus disseminated is a part and
>     parcel of the mass agitated, and, if kept under this agitation
>     continuously, would, in the course of a certain cycle of time,
>     become thoroughly absorbed by the atmosphere; or, more truly,
>     would pass through the atmosphere to an elevated point of tenuity
>     corresponding to the condition of sub‐division that governs its
>     liberation from its parent body.... The sounds from vibratory
>     forks, set so as to produce etheric chords, while disseminating
>     their tones (compound), permeate most thoroughly all substances
>     that come under the range of their atomic bombardment. The
>     clapping of a bell _in vacuo_ liberates these atoms with the same
>     velocity and volume as one in the open air; and were the agitation
>     of the bell kept up continuously for a few millions of centuries
>     it would thoroughly return to its primitive element; and, if the
>     chamber were hermetically sealed, and strong enough, the vacuous
>     volume surrounding the bell would be brought to a pressure of many
>     thousands of pounds to the square inch, by the tenuous substance
>     evolved. In my estimation, sound truly defined is the disturbance
>     of atomic equilibrium, rupturing actual atomic corpuscles; and the
>     substance thus liberated must certainly be a certain order of
>     etheric flow. Under these conditions, is it unreasonable to
>     suppose that, if this flow were kept up, and the body thus robbed
>     of its element, it would in time disappear entirely? All bodies
>     are formed primitively from this highly tenuous ether, animal,
>     vegetable, and mineral, and they are only returned to their high
>     gaseous condition when brought under a state of differential
>     equilibrium.... As regards odour, we can only get some definite
>     idea of its extreme and wondrous tenuity by taking into
>     consideration that a large area of atmosphere can be impregnated
>     for a long series of years from a single grain of musk; which, if
>     weighed after that long interval, will be found to be not
>     appreciably diminished. The great paradox attending the flow of
>     odorous particles is that they can be held under confinement in a
>     glass vessel! Here is a substance of much higher tenuity than the
>     glass that holds it, and yet it cannot escape. It is as a sieve
>     with its meshes large enough to pass marbles, and yet holding fine
>     sand which cannot pass through; in fact, a molecular vessel
>     holding an atomic substance. This is a problem that would confound
>     those who stop to recognize it. But infinitely tenuous as odour
>     is, it holds a very crude relation to the substance of sub‐
>     division that governs a magnetic flow (a flow of sympathy, if you
>     please to call it so). This sub‐division comes next to sound, but
>     is above sound. The action of the flow of a magnet coincides
>     somewhat to the receiving and distributing portion of the human
>     brain, giving off at all times a depreciating ratio of the amount
>     received. It is a grand illustration of the control of mind over
>     matter, which gradually depreciates the physical till dissolution
>     takes place. The magnet on the same ratio gradually loses its
>     power and becomes inert. If the relations that exist between mind
>     and matter could be equated and so held, we would live on in our
>     physical state eternally, as there would be no physical
>     depreciation. But this physical depreciation leads, at its
>     terminus, to the source of a much higher development—viz., the
>     liberation of the pure ether from the crude molecular; which, in
>     my estimation, is to be much desired.(959)
> 
> It may be remarked that, save for a few small divergencies, no Adept nor
> Alchemist could have better explained these theories, in the light of
> Modern Science, however much the latter may protest against these novel
> views. In all its fundamental principles, if not in its details, this is
> Occultism pure and simple; and moreover, it is modern Natural Philosophy
> as well.
> 
> This new Force, or whatever Science may call it, the effects of which are
> undeniable—as is admitted by more than one Naturalist and Physicist who
> has visited Mr. Keely’s laboratory and personally witnessed its tremendous
> effects—what is it? Is it a “mode of motion,” also, _in vacuo_, since
> there is no Matter to generate it except Sound—another “mode of motion,”
> no doubt, a _sensation_ caused, like Colour, by vibrations? Fully as we
> believe in these vibrations as the proximate, the immediate, cause of such
> sensations, we as absolutely reject the one‐sided scientific theory that
> there is _no factor_ to be considered as external to us, other than
> etheric or atmospheric vibrations.
> 
> In this case the American Substantialists are not wrong, though they are
> too anthropomorphic and material in their views for these to be accepted
> by Occultists, when they argue through Mrs. M. S. Organ, M.D., that:
> 
>     There must be positive entitative properties in objects which have
>     a constitutional relation to the nerves of animal sensations, or
>     there can be no perception. No impression of any kind can be made
>     upon brain, nerve, or mind—no stimulus to action—unless there is
>     an actual and direct communication of a substantial force.
>     [“Substantial” as far as it appears, in the usual sense of the
>     word, in this universe of Illusion and Mâyâ, of course; not in
>     reality.] That force may be the most refined and sublimated
>     immaterial Entity [?]. Yet it must exist; for no sense, element,
>     or faculty of the human being can have a perception, or be
>     stimulated into action, without some substantial force coming in
>     contact with it. This is the fundamental law pervading the whole
>     organic and mental world. In the true philosophical sense there is
>     no such thing as independent action: for every force or substance
>     is correlated to some other force or substance. We can with just
>     as much truth and reason assert that no substance possesses any
>     inherent gustatory property or any olfactory property—that taste
>     and odour are simply sensations caused by vibrations; and hence
>     mere illusions of animal perceptions.
> 
> There _is_ a transcendental set of causes put in motion, so to speak, in
> the occurrence of these phenomena, which, _not being in relation to our
> narrow range of cognition_, can only be understood and traced to their
> source and their nature, by the spiritual faculties of the Adept. They
> are, as Asclepios puts it to the King, “incorporeal corporealities,” such
> as “appear in the mirror,” and “abstract forms” that we see, hear, and
> smell, in our dreams and visions. What have the “modes of motion,” light,
> and ether to do with these? Yet we see, hear, smell and touch them, _ergo_
> they are as much _realities_ to us in our dreams, as any other thing on
> this plane of Mâyâ.
> 
> Section X. On the Elements and Atoms.
> 
> When the Occultist speaks of Elements, and of human Beings who lived
> during those geological ages, the duration of which it is found as
> impossible to determine—according to the opinion of one of the best
> English Geologists(960)—as the nature of Matter, it is because he knows
> what he is talking about. When he says Man and Elements, he means neither
> man in his present physiological and anthropological form, nor the
> elemental Atoms, those hypothetical conceptions, existing at present in
> scientific minds, the entitative abstractions of Matter in its highly
> attenuated state; nor, again, does he mean the compound Elements of
> Antiquity. In Occultism the word Element in every case means _Rudiment_.
> When we say “Elementary Man,” we mean either the proëmial, incipient
> sketch of man, in its unfinished and undeveloped condition, hence in that
> form which now lies latent in physical man during his life‐time, and takes
> shape only occasionally and under certain conditions; or, that form which
> for a time survives the material body, and which is better known as an
> Elementary.(961) With regard to Element, when the term is used
> metaphysically, it means, in distinction to the mortal, the incipient
> Divine Man; and, in its physical usage, it means inchoate Matter in its
> first undifferentiated condition, or in the Laya state, the eternal and
> normal condition of Substance, which differentiates only periodically;
> during that differentiation, Substance is really in an abnormal state—in
> other words, it is but a transitory illusion of the senses.
> 
> As to the Elemental Atoms, so‐called, the Occultists refer to them by that
> name with a meaning analogous to that which is given by the Hindû to
> Brahmâ, when he calls him Anu, the Atom. Every Elemental Atom, in search
> of which more than one Chemist has followed the path indicated by the
> Alchemists, is, in their firm belief, when not _knowledge_, a Soul; not
> necessarily a disembodied Soul, but a Jîva, as the Hindûs call it, a
> centre of Potential Vitality, with latent intelligence in it, and, in the
> case of compound Souls, an intelligent active Existence, from the highest
> to the lowest order, a form composed of more or less differentiations. It
> requires a Metaphysician—and an Eastern Metaphysician—to understand our
> meaning. All those Atom‐Souls are differentiations from the One, and are
> in the same relation to it as is the Divine Soul, Buddhi, to its informing
> and inseparable Spirit, Âtmâ.
> 
> Modern Physics, in borrowing from the Ancients their Atomic Theory, forgot
> one point, the most important point of the doctrine; hence they have got
> only the husks and will never be able to get the kernel. In adopting
> physical Atoms, they omitted the suggestive fact that, from Anaxagoras to
> Epicurus, to the Roman Lucretius, and finally even to Galileo, all these
> Philosophers believed more or less in _animated_ Atoms, not in invisible
> specks of so‐called “brute” matter. According to them, rotatory motion was
> generated by larger (read, more divine and pure) Atoms forcing other Atoms
> downwards; the lighter ones being simultaneously thrust upward. The
> Esoteric meaning of this is the ever cyclic curve of differentiated
> Elements downward and upward through intercyclic phases of existence,
> until each again reaches its starting‐point or birthplace. The idea was
> metaphysical as well as physical; the hidden interpretation embracing Gods
> or Souls, in the shape of Atoms, as the _causes_ of all the _effects_
> produced on Earth by the _secretions_ from the divine bodies.(962) No
> Ancient Philosopher, not even the Jewish Kabalists, ever dissociated
> Spirit from Matter, or Matter from Spirit. Everything originated in the
> One, and, proceeding from the One, must finally return to the One.
> 
>     Light becomes heat, and consolidates into fiery particles; which,
>     from being ignited, become cold, hard particles, round and smooth.
>     And this is called Soul, imprisoned in its robe of matter.(963)
> 
> Atoms and Souls were synonymous in the language of the Initiates. The
> doctrine of “whirling Souls,” Gilgoolem, in which so many learned Jews
> have believed,(964) had no other meaning esoterically. The learned Jewish
> Initiates never meant Palestine alone by the Promised Land, but they meant
> the same Nirvâna as do the learned Buddhist and Brahman—the bosom of the
> Eternal ONE, symbolized by that of Abraham, and by Palestine as its
> substitute on Earth.
> 
> Surely no educated Jew ever believed this allegory in its literal sense,
> that the bodies of Jews contain within them a principle of Soul which
> cannot rest, if the bodies are deposited in a foreign land, until, by a
> process called the “whirling of the Soul” the immortal particle reaches
> once more the sacred soil of the “Promised Land.”(965) The meaning of this
> is evident to an Occultist. The process was supposed to be accomplished by
> a kind of metempsychosis, the psychic spark being conveyed through bird,
> beast, fish, and the most minute insect.(966) The allegory relates to the
> _Atoms of the body_, each of which has to pass through every form, before
> all reach the final state, which is the first starting‐point of the
> departure of every Atom—its primitive Laya state. But the primitive
> meaning of Gilgoolem, or the “Revolution of Souls,” was the idea of the
> reïncarnating Souls or Egos. “All the Souls go into the Gilgoolah,” into a
> cyclic or revolving process; _i.e._, they all proceed on the cyclic path
> of re‐births. Some Kabalists interpret this doctrine to mean only a kind
> of purgatory for the souls of the wicked. But this is not so.
> 
> The passage of the Soul‐Atom “through the seven Planetary Chambers” had
> the same metaphysical and physical meaning. It had the latter when it was
> said to dissolve into Ether. Even Epicurus, the model Atheist and
> Materialist, knew so much and believed so much in the ancient Wisdom, that
> he taught that the Soul—entirely distinct from immortal Spirit, when the
> former is enshrined _latent_ in it, as it is in every atomic speck—was
> composed of a fine, tender essence, formed from the _smoothest, roundest,
> and finest atoms_.(967)
> 
> And this shows that the ancient Initiates, who were followed more or less
> closely by all profane Antiquity, meant by the term Atom, a Soul, a Genius
> or Angel, the first‐born of the ever‐concealed Cause of all causes; and in
> this sense their teachings become comprehensible. They asserted, as do
> their successors, the existence of Gods and Genii, Angels or Demons, not
> outside, nor independent of, the Universal Plenum, but within it. Only
> this Plenum, during the life‐cycles, is infinite. They admitted and taught
> a good deal of that which modern Science now teaches—namely, the existence
> of a primordial World‐Stuff or Cosmic Substance, eternally homogeneous,
> except during its periodic existence; then, universally diffused
> throughout infinite Space, it differentiates, and gradually forms sidereal
> bodies from itself. They taught the revolution of the Heavens, the Earth’s
> rotation, the Heliocentric System, and the Atomic Vortices—Atoms being in
> reality Souls and Intelligences. These “Atomists” were spiritual, most
> transcendental, and philosophical Pantheists. It is not they who would
> have ever conceived or dreamed that monstrous contrasted progeny, the
> nightmare of our modern civilized race: inanimate material and self‐
> guiding Atoms, on the one hand, and an extra‐cosmic God on the other.
> 
> It may be useful to show what the Monad was, and what its origin, in the
> teachings of the old Initiates.
> 
> Modern exact Science, as soon as it began to grow out of its teens,
> perceived the great, and to it hitherto esoteric, axiom, that nothing,
> whether in the spiritual, psychic, or physical realm of Being, could come
> into existence out of nothing. There is no cause in the manifested
> Universe without its adequate effects, whether in Space or Time; nor can
> there be an effect without its primal cause, which itself owes its
> existence to a still higher one—the final and absolute Cause having to
> remain to man for ever an incomprehensible Causeless Cause. But even this
> is no solution, and must be viewed, if at all, from the highest
> philosophical and metaphysical standpoints, otherwise the problem had
> better be left unapproached. It is an abstraction, on the verge of which
> human reason—however trained in metaphysical subtleties—trembles,
> threatening to collapse. This may be demonstrated to any European, who
> would undertake to solve the problem of existence, by the articles of
> faith of the true Vedântin for instance. Let him read and study the
> sublime teachings of Shankarâchârya, on the subject of Soul and Spirit,
> and the reader will realize what is now said.(968)
> 
> While the Christian is taught that the human Soul is a breath of God,
> being created by him for sempiternal existence, having a beginning, but no
> end—and therefore never to be called eternal—the Occult Teaching says:
> Nothing is created, it is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in
> this Universe—from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought—that was not in
> the Universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal
> _is_; as everything on the objective plane is an _ever‐becoming_—because
> all is transitory.
> 
> The Monad—a truly “indivisible thing,” as defined by Good, who did not
> give it the sense we now do—is here rendered as the Âtmâ, in conjunction
> with Buddhi and the higher Manas. This trinity is one and eternal, the
> latter being absorbed in the former at the termination of all conditioned
> and illusive life. The Monad, then, can be traced through the course of
> its pilgrimage and in its changes of transitory vehicles, only from the
> incipient stage of the manifested Universe. In Pralaya, the intermediate
> period between two Manvantaras, it loses its name, as it loses it when the
> real One Self of man merges into Brahman, in cases of high Samâdhi (the
> Turîya state), or final Nirvâna; in the words of Shankara:
> 
>     When the disciple having attained that primeval consciousness,
>     absolute bliss, of which the nature is truth, which is without
>     form and action, abandons this illusive body that has been assumed
>     by the _Âtmâ_ just as an actor (abandons) the dress (put on).
> 
> For Buddhi, the Anandamaya Sheath, is but a mirror which reflects absolute
> bliss; and, moreover, that reflection itself is yet not free from
> ignorance, and is _not_ the Supreme Spirit, since it is subject to
> conditions, is a spiritual modification of Prakriti, and is an effect;
> Âtmâ alone is the one real and eternal substratum of all, the Essence and
> Absolute Knowledge, the Kshetrajña. Now that the Revised Version of the
> Gospels has been published and the most glaring mistranslations of the old
> versions are corrected, one can understand better the words in 1 _John_ v.
> 6: “It is the Spirit that beareth witness because the Spirit is truth.”
> The words that follow in the mistranslated version about the “three
> witnesses,” hitherto supposed to stand for “the Father, the Word, and the
> Holy Ghost,” show the real meaning of the writer very clearly, thus still
> more forcibly identifying his teaching in this respect with that of
> Shankarâchârya. For what can the sentence mean, “there are three that bear
> witness ... the Spirit and the Water and the Blood”—if it bears no
> relation to, nor connection with, the more philosophical statement of the
> great Vedântin teacher, who, speaking of the Sheaths—the principles in
> man—Jîva, Vijñânamaya, etc., which _are_, in their physical manifestation,
> “Water and Blood” or Life, adds that Âtmâ, Spirit, alone is what remains
> after the subtraction of the Sheaths and that it is the Only Witness, or
> synthesized unity. The less spiritual and philosophical school, solely
> with an eye to a Trinity, made three witnesses out of “one,” thus
> connecting it more with Earth than with Heaven. It is called in Esoteric
> Philosophy the “One Witness,” and, while it rests in Devachan, is referred
> to as the “Three Witnesses to Karma.”
> 
> Âtmâ, our seventh principle, being identical with the Universal Spirit,
> and man being one with it in his essence, what is then the Monad proper?
> It is that homogeneous spark which radiates in millions of rays from the
> primeval Seven;—of which Seven something will be said further on. It is
> the EMANATING SPARK FROM THE UNCREATED RAY—a mystery. In the esoteric, and
> even exoteric Buddhism of the North, Âdi‐Buddha (Chogi Dangpoi Sangye),
> the One Unknown, without beginning or end, identical with Parabrahman and
> Ain Suph, emits a bright Ray from its Darkness.
> 
> This is the Logos, the First, or Vajradhara, the Supreme Buddha, also
> called Dorjechang. As the Lord of all Mysteries he cannot manifest, but
> sends into the world of manifestation his Heart—the “Diamond Heart,”
> Vajrasattva or Dorjesempa. This is the Second Logos of Creation, from whom
> emanate the seven—in the exoteric blind the five—Dhyâni‐Buddhas, called
> the Anupâdaka, the “Parentless.” These Buddhas are the primeval Monads
> from the World of Incorporeal Being, the Arûpa World, wherein the
> Intelligences (on that plane only) have neither shape nor name, in the
> exoteric system, but have their distinct seven names in the Esoteric
> Philosophy. These Dhyâni‐Buddhas emanate, or create from themselves, by
> virtue of Dhyâna, celestial Selves—the super‐human Bodhisattvas. These,
> incarnating at the beginning of every human cycle on Earth as mortal men,
> become occasionally, owing to their personal merit, Bodhisattvas among the
> Sons of Humanity, after which they may reäppear as Mânushi, or Human,
> Buddhas. The Anupâdaka, or Dhyâni‐Buddhas, are thus identical with the
> Brâhmanical Mânasaputra, Mind‐born Sons—whether of Brahmâ, or of either of
> the other two Trimûrtian Hypostases; they are identical also with the
> Rishis and Prajâpatis. Thus, a passage is found in _Anugîtâ_, which, read
> esoterically, shows plainly, though under another imagery, the same idea
> and system. It says:
> 
>     Whatever entities there are in this world, moveable or immoveable,
>     they are the very first to be dissolved [at Pralaya]; and next the
>     developments produced from the elements [from which the visible
>     universe is fashioned]; and (after) these developments [evolved
>     entities], all the elements. Such is the upward gradation among
>     entities. Gods, Men, Gandharvas, Pishâchas, Asuras, Râkshasas, all
>     have been created by Nature [Svabhâva, or Prakriti, plastic
>     Nature], not by actions, nor by a cause [not by any physical
>     cause]. These Brâhmanas [the Rishi Prajâpati?], the creators of
>     the world, are born here (on earth) again and again. And whatever
>     is produced from them is dissolved in due time in those very five
>     great elements [the five, or rather seven, Dhyâni‐Buddhas, also
>     called “Elements” of Mankind], like billows in the ocean. These
>     great elements are in every way (beyond) the elements that make up
>     the world [the gross elements]. And he who is released, even from
>     these five elements [the Tanmâtras],(969) goes to the highest
>     goal. The Lord Prajâpati [Brahmâ] created all this by the mind
>     only [by Dhyâna, or abstract meditation and mystic powers, like
>     the Dhyâni‐Buddhas].(970)
> 
> Evidently then, these Brâhmanas are identical with the terrestrial
> Bodhisattvas of the heavenly Dhyâni‐Buddhas. Both, as primordial,
> intelligent “Elements,” become the Creators or the Emanators of the Monads
> destined to become human in that cycle; after which they evolve
> themselves, or, so to say, expand into their own Selves as Bodhisattvas or
> Brâhmanas, in heaven and earth, to become at last simple men. “The
> creators of the world are born here, on earth again and again”—truly. In
> the Northern Buddhist system, or the popular exoteric religion, it is
> taught that every Buddha, while preaching the Good Law on Earth, manifests
> himself simultaneously in three Worlds: in the Formless World as a Dhyâni‐
> Buddha, in the World of Forms as a Bodhisattva, and in the World of
> Desire, the lowest or our World, as a man. Esoterically the teaching
> differs. The divine, purely Âdi‐Buddhic Monad manifests as the universal
> Buddhi, the Mahâ‐Buddhi or Mahat, in Hindû philosophies, the spiritual,
> omniscient and omnipotent Root of divine Intelligence, the highest Anima
> Mundi or the Logos. This descends “like a flame spreading from the eternal
> Fire, immoveable, without increase or decrease, ever the same to the end”
> of the cycle of existence, and becomes Universal Life on the Mundane
> Plane. From this Plane of conscious Life shoot out, like seven fiery
> tongues, the Sons of Light, the Logoi of Life; then the Dhyâni‐Buddhas of
> contemplation, the concrete forms of their formless Fathers, the Seven
> Sons of Light, _still themselves_, to whom maybe applied the Brâhmanical
> mystic phrase: “Thou art THAT”—Brahman. It is from these Dhyâni‐Buddhas
> that emanate their Chhâyâs or Shadows, the Bodhisattvas of the celestial
> realms, the prototypes of the super‐terrestrial Bodhisattvas, and of the
> terrestrial Buddhas, and finally of men. The Seven Sons of Light are also
> called Stars.
> 
> The star under which a human Entity is born, says the Occult Teaching,
> will remain for ever its star, throughout the whole cycle of its
> incarnations in one Manvantara. _But this is not his astrological star._
> The latter is concerned and connected with the _Personality_; the former
> with the _Individuality_. The Angel of that Star, or the Dhyâni‐Buddha
> connected with it, will be either the guiding, or simply the presiding,
> Angel, so to say, in every new rebirth of the Monad, _which is part of his
> own essence_, though his vehicle, man, may remain for ever ignorant of
> this fact. The Adepts have each their Dhyâni‐Buddha, their elder “Twin‐
> Soul,” and they know it, calling it “Father‐Soul,” and “Father‐Fire.” It
> is only at the last and supreme Initiation, however, when placed face to
> face with the bright “Image” that they learn to recognize it. How much did
> Bulwer Lytton know of this mystic fact, when describing, in one of his
> highest inspirational moods, Zanoni face to face with his Augoeides?
> 
> The Logos, or both the unmanifested and the manifested Word, is called by
> the Hindûs, Îshvara, the Lord, though the Occultists give it another name.
> Îshvara, say the Vedântins, is the highest consciousness in Nature. “This
> highest consciousness,” answer the Occultists, “is only a synthetic unit
> in the World of the manifested Logos—or on the plane of illusion; for it
> is the sum total of Dhyân Chohanic consciousness.” “O wise man, remove the
> conception that _Not‐Spirit is Spirit_”—says Shankarâchârya. Âtmâ is Not‐
> Spirit in its final Parabrahmic state; Îshvara, or Logos, is Spirit; or,
> as Occultism explains, it is a compound unity of manifested living
> Spirits, the parent‐source and nursery of all the mundane and terrestrial
> Monads, _plus_ their divine Reflection, which emanate from, and return
> into, the Logos, each in the culmination of its time. There are seven
> chief Groups of such Dhyân Chohans, which groups will be found and
> recognized in every religion, for they are the primeval Seven Rays.
> Humanity, Occultism teaches us, is divided into seven distinct Groups,
> with their sub‐divisions, mental, spiritual, and physical. Hence there are
> seven chief planets, the spheres of the indwelling seven Spirits, under
> each of which is born one of the human Groups which is guided and
> influenced thereby. There are only seven planets _specially_ connected
> with Earth, and twelve houses, but the possible combinations of their
> aspects are countless. As each planet can stand to each of the others in
> twelve different aspects, their combinations must be almost infinite; as
> infinite, in fact, as the spiritual, psychic, mental, and physical
> capacities in the numberless varieties of the _genus homo_, each of which
> varieties is born under one of the seven planets and one of the said
> countless planetary combinations.(971)
> 
> The Monad, then, viewed as One, is above the seventh principle in Kosmos
> and man; and as a Triad, it is the direct radiant progeny of the said
> compound Unit, not the Breath of “God,” as that Unit is called, nor
> creating out of _nihil_; for such an idea is quite unphilosophical, and
> degrades Deity, dragging It down to a finite, attributive condition. As
> well expressed by the translator of the _Crest‐Jewel of Wisdom_—though
> Îshvara is “God.”
> 
>     Unchanged in the profoundest depths of Pralayas and in the
>     intensest activity of Manvantaras, [still] beyond [him] is ÂTMÂ,
>     round whose pavilion is the darkness of eternal MÂYÂ.(972)
> 
> The “Triads” born under the same Parent‐Planet, or rather the Radiations
> of one and the same Planetary Spirit or Dhyâni‐Buddha are, in all their
> after lives and rebirths, sister, or “twin” souls, on this Earth. The idea
> is the same as that of the Christian Trinity, the “Three in One,” only it
> is still more metaphysical: the Universal “Over‐Spirit,” manifesting on
> the two higher planes, those of Buddhi and Mahat. These are the three
> Hypostases, metaphysical, but never personal.
> 
> This was known to every high Initiate in every age and in every country:
> “I and my Father are one,” said Jesus.(973) When he is made to say,
> elsewhere: “I ascend to _my_ Father and _your_ Father,”(974) it meant that
> which has just been stated. The identity, and at the same time the
> illusive differentiation of the _Angel_‐Monad and the _Human_‐Monad is
> shown in the sentences: “My Father is _greater_ than I”;(975) “Glorify
> _your_ Father _which is in Heaven_”;(976) “Then shall the righteous shine
> forth as the sun in the kingdom of _their_ Father” (not _our_
> Father).(977) So again Paul asks: “Know ye not ye are the _temple_ of God,
> and that the _Spirit of God dwelleth_ in you?”(978) All this was simply
> meant to show that the group of disciples and followers attracted to him
> belonged to the same Dhyâni‐Buddha, Star, or Father, and that this again
> belonged to the same planetary realm and division as he did. It is the
> _knowledge_ of this Occult Doctrine that found expression in the review of
> _The Idyll of the White Lotus_, when T. Subba Row wrote:
> 
>     Every Buddha meets at his last Initiation all the great Adepts who
>     reached Buddhahood during the preceding ages ... every class of
>     Adepts has its own bond of spiritual communion which knits them
>     together.... The only possible and effectual way of entering into
>     such brotherhood ... is by bringing oneself within the influence
>     of the Spiritual light which radiates from one’s own Logos. I may
>     further point out here ... that such communion is only possible
>     between persons whose souls derive their life and sustenance from
>     the same divine Ray, and that, as seven distinct Rays radiate from
>     the “Central Spiritual Sun,” all Adepts and Dhyân Chohans are
>     divisible into seven classes, each of which is guided, controlled,
>     and overshadowed by one of the seven forms or manifestations of
>     the divine Wisdom.(979)
> 
> It is then the Seven Sons of Light,—called after their planets and often
> identified with them by the rabble, namely, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury,
> Mars, Venus, and _presumably_ the Sun and Moon, for the modern critic, who
> goes no deeper than the surface of old religions(980)—which are, according
> to the Occult Teachings, our heavenly Parents, or synthetically our
> “Father.” Hence, as already remarked, Polytheism is really more
> philosophical and correct, as to fact and Nature, than is anthropomorphic
> Monotheism. Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus, the four exoteric
> planets, and the three others, which must remain unnamed, were the
> heavenly bodies in direct astral and psychic communication, morally and
> physically, with the Earth, its Guides, and Watchers; the visible orbs
> furnishing our Humanity with its outward and inward characteristics, and
> their Regents or Rectors with our Monads and spiritual faculties. In order
> to avoid creating new misconceptions, let it be stated that among the
> three Secret Orbs, or Star‐Angels, neither Uranus nor Neptune were
> included; not only because they were unknown under these names to the
> ancient Sages, but because they, like all other planets, however many
> there may be, are the Gods and Guardians of other septenary Chains of
> Globes within our System.
> 
> Nor do the two great planets last discovered depend entirely on the Sun,
> as do the rest of the planets. Otherwise, how can we explain the fact that
> Uranus receives 1/390th part of the light received by our Earth, while
> Neptune receives only 1/900th part; and that their satellites show a
> peculiarity of inverse rotation found in no other planets of the Solar
> System? At any rate, what we say applies to Uranus, though the fact has
> again been disputed recently.
> 
> This subject will, of course, be considered as a mere vagary, by all those
> who confuse the universal order of Being with their own systems of
> classification. Here, however, simple facts from Occult Teachings are
> stated, to be either accepted or rejected, as the case may be. There are
> details which, on account of their great metaphysical abstraction,
> _cannot_ be entered upon. Hence, we merely state that only seven of our
> planets are as intimately related to our Globe, as the Sun is to all the
> bodies subject to him in his System. Of these bodies the poor little
> number of _primary_ and _secondary_ planets known to Astronomy, looks
> wretched enough, in truth.(981) Therefore, it stands to reason that there
> are a great number of planets, small and large, that have not been
> discovered yet, but of the existence of which ancient Astronomers—all of
> them initiated Adepts—must certainly have been aware. But, as the relation
> of these to the Gods was sacred, it had to remain arcane, as did also the
> names of various other planets and stars.
> 
> Besides this, even the Roman Catholic Theology speaks of “_seventy_
> planets that preside over the destinies of the nations of this globe;”
> and, save the erroneous application, there is more truth in this tradition
> than in exact modern Astronomy. The seventy planets are connected with the
> seventy elders of the people of Israel,(982) and the Regents of these
> planets are meant, not the orbs themselves; the word seventy is a play and
> a blind upon the 7 × 7 of the subdivisions. Each people and nation, as we
> have already said, has its _direct_ Watcher, Guardian and Father in
> Heaven—a Planetary Spirit. We are willing to leave their own national God,
> Jehovah, to the descendants of Israel, the worshippers of Sabaoth or
> Saturn; for, indeed, the Monads of the people chosen by him are his own,
> and the _Bible_ has never made any secret of it. Only the text of the
> Protestant English _Bible_ is, as usual, in disagreement with those of the
> Septuagint and the Vulgate. Thus, while in the former we read:
> 
>     When the Most High [not Jehovah] divided to the nations their
>     inheritance ... he set the bounds of the people according to the
>     number of the children of Israel.(983)
> 
> In the _Septuagint_ the text reads “according to the number of the
> Angels,” Planet‐Angels, a version more concordant with truth and fact.
> Moreover, all the texts agree that “the Lord’s [Jehovah’s] portion is his
> people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance”;(984) and this settles the
> question. The “Lord” Jehovah took Israel _for his portion_; what have
> other nations to do with that particular national Deity? Let then, the
> “Angel Gabriel” watch over Iran and “Mikael‐Jehovah” over the Hebrews.
> These are not the Gods of other nations, and it is difficult to see why
> Christians should have selected a God against whose commandments Jesus was
> the first to rise in rebellion.
> 
> The planetary origin of the Monad, or Soul, and of its faculties was
> taught by the Gnostics. On its way to the Earth, as on its way back from
> the Earth, each soul born in, and from, the “Boundless Light,”(985) had to
> pass through the seven planetary regions either way. The pure Dhyâni and
> Devas of the oldest religions had become, in course of time, with the
> Zoroastrians, the Seven Devs, the ministers of Ahriman, “each chained to
> his planet”;(986) with the Brâhmans, the Asuras and some of the
> Rishis—good, bad and indifferent; among the Egyptian Gnostics it was
> Thoth, or Hermes, who was the chief of the Seven whose names are given by
> Origen as Adonai, genius of the Sun; Tao, of the Moon; Eloi, of Jupiter;
> Sabaoth, of Mars; Orai, of Venus; Astaphai, of Mercury; and Ildabaoth
> (Jehovah), of Saturn. Finally, the _Pistis‐Sophia_, which the greatest
> modern authority on exoteric Gnostic beliefs, the late Mr. C. W. King,
> refers to as “that precious monument of Gnosticism”—this old document
> echoes the archaic belief of the ages, while distorting it to suit
> sectarian purposes. The Astral Rulers of the Spheres, the planets, create
> the Monads, or Souls, from their own substance out of “the tears of their
> eyes, and the sweat of their torments,” endowing the Monads with a spark
> of their substance which is the Divine Light. It will be shown in Volume
> II why these “Lords of the Zodiac and Spheres” have been transformed by
> sectarian Theology into the Rebellious Angels of the Christians, who took
> them from the Seven Devs of the Magi, without understanding the
> significance of the allegory.(987)
> 
> As usual, that which _is_, and _was_ from its beginning, divine, pure, and
> spiritual in its earliest unity, became—by reason of its differentiation
> through the distorted prism of man’s conceptions—human and impure, as
> reflecting man’s own sinful nature. Thus, in time, the planet Saturn
> became reviled by the worshippers of other Gods. The nations born under
> Saturn—the Jewish, for instance, with whom he became Jehovah, after being
> considered as a son of Saturn, or Ilda‐Baoth, by the Ophites, and in the
> Book of Jasher—were eternally fighting with those born under Jupiter,
> Mercury, or any other planet, except Saturn‐Jehovah; genealogies and
> prophecies notwithstanding, Jesus _the Initiate_ (or Jehoshua)—the type
> from whom the “historical” Jesus was copied—was not of pure Jewish blood,
> and thus recognized no Jehovah; nor did he worship any planetary God
> beside his own “Father,” whom he knew, and with whom he communed, as every
> high Initiate does, “Spirit to Spirit and Soul to Soul.” This can hardly
> be taken exception to, unless the critic explains to every one’s
> satisfaction the strange sentences put into the mouth of Jesus during his
> disputes with the Pharisees by the author of the Fourth Gospel:
> 
>     I know that ye are Abraham’s seed(988).... I speak that which I
>     have seen with my Father; and ye do that which ye have seen with
>     your Father.... Ye do the deeds of your Father.... Ye are of your
>     Father, the Devil.... He was a murderer from the beginning, and
>     abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he
>     speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the
>     father of it.(989)
> 
> This “Father” of the Pharisees was Jehovah, for he was identical with
> Cain, Saturn, Vulcan, etc.—the planet under which they were born, and the
> God whom they worshipped. Evidently there must be an Occult meaning sought
> in these words and admonitions, however mistranslated, since they are
> pronounced by one who threatened with hell‐fire anyone who says to his
> brother simply Raca, fool.(990) And evidently, again, the planets are not
> merely spheres, twinkling in Space, and made to shine for no purpose, but
> they are the domains of various Beings with whom the uninitiated are so
> far unacquainted, but who have, nevertheless, a mysterious, unbroken, and
> powerful connection with men and globes. Every heavenly body is the temple
> of a God, and these Gods themselves are the temples of God, the Unknown
> “_Not_ Spirit.” There is nothing profane in the Universe. All Nature is a
> consecrated place, as Young says:
> 
>     Each of these Stars is a religious house.
> 
> Thus can all exoteric religions be shown to be the falsified copies of the
> Esoteric Teaching. It is the priesthood which has to be held responsible
> for the reaction of our day in favour of Materialism. It is by worshipping
> and enforcing on the masses the worship of the shells of pagan
> ideals—personified for purposes of allegory—that the latest exoteric
> religion has made of Western lands a Pandemonium, in which the higher
> classes worship the golden calf, and the lower and ignorant masses are
> made to worship an idol with feet of clay.
> 
> Section XI. Ancient Thought in Modern Dress.
> 
> Modern _Science is Ancient Thought distorted_, and no more. We have seen,
> however, what intuitional Scientists think, and are busy about; and now
> the reader shall be given a few more proofs of the fact that more than one
> F.R.S. is unconsciously approaching the derided Secret Sciences.
> 
> With regard to Cosmogony and primeval matter, modern speculations are
> undeniably ancient thought, “improved” by contradictory theories of recent
> origin. The whole foundation belongs to Grecian and Indian Archaic
> Astronomy and Physics, in those days called always Philosophy. In all the
> Âryan and Greek speculations, we meet with the conception of an all‐
> pervading, unorganized, and homogeneous Matter, or Chaos, re‐named by
> modern Scientists “nebular condition of the world‐stuff.” What Anaxagoras
> called Chaos in his _Homoiomeria_ is now called “primitive fluid” by Sir
> William Thomson. The Hindû and Greek Atomists—Kanâda, Leucippus,
> Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, etc.—are now reflected, as in a clear
> mirror, in the supporters of the Atomic Theory of our modern days,
> beginning with Leibnitz’s Monads, and ending with the Vortical Atoms of
> Sir William Thomson.(991) True, the corpuscular theory of old is rejected,
> and the undulatory theory has taken its place. But the question is,
> whether the latter is so firmly established as not to be liable to be
> dethroned like its predecessor? Light, from its metaphysical aspect, has
> been fully treated in _Isis Unveiled_:
> 
>     Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the
>     Supreme, and Light is Life, says the Evangelist [and the
>     Kabalist]. Both are electricity—the life principle, the Anima
>     Mundi—pervading the Universe, the electric vivifier of all things.
>     Light is the great Protean magician, and under the divine Will of
>     the Architect(992) [or rather the _Architects_, the “Builders,”
>     called _One_ collectively], its multifarious, omnipotent waves
>     gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From
>     its swelling electric bosom, spring _Matter_ and _Spirit_. Within
>     its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action,
>     and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and
>     disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its
>     Primordial Point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of
>     worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies. It was at the ray
>     of this First Mother, one in three, that “God,” according to
>     Plato, “lighted a Fire which we now call the Sun,”(993) and which
>     is _not_ the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus,
>     or, as we might say, the lens, by which the Rays of the Primordial
>     Light become materialized, are concentrated upon our Solar System,
>     and produce all the correlations of forces.(994)
> 
> This is the Ether, as just explained in the views of Metcalfe, repeated by
> Dr. Richardson, save for the submission of the former to some details of
> the modern undulatory theory. We do not say that we deny the theory; we
> assert only that it needs completion and reärrangement. But the Occultists
> are by no means the only heretics in this respect; for Mr. Robert Hunt,
> F.R.S. finds that:
> 
>     The undulatory theory does not account for the results of his
>     experiments.(995) Sir David Brewster, in his _Treatise on Optics_,
>     showing “that the colours of vegetable life arise ... from a
>     specific attraction which the particles of these bodies exercise
>     over the differently‐coloured rays of light,” and that “it is by
>     the light of the sun that the coloured juices of plants are
>     elaborated, that the colours of bodies are changed, etc.,” remarks
>     that it is not easy to allow “that such effects can be produced by
>     the mere vibration of an ethereal medium.” And he is _forced_, he
>     says, “by this class of facts, to reason as if light was
>     _material_” [?]. Professor Josiah P. Cooke, of Harvard University,
>     says that he “cannot agree ... with those who regard the wave‐
>     theory of light as an established principle of science.”(996)
>     Herschell’s doctrine, that the intensity of light, in effect of
>     each undulation, “is inversely as the square of the distance from
>     the luminous body,” if correct, damages a good deal, if it does
>     not kill, the undulatory theory. That he is right, was proved
>     repeatedly by experiments with photometers; and though it begins
>     to be much doubted, the undulatory theory is still alive.(997)
> 
> To this remark of Sir David Brewster—“forced to reason as if light was
> material”—there is a good deal to reply. Light, in one sense, is certainly
> as material as is electricity itself. And if electricity is not material,
> if it is only a “mode of motion,” how is it that it can be _stored up_ in
> Faure’s accumulators? Helmholtz says that electricity must be as atomic as
> matter; and Mr. W. Crookes, F.R.S., supported the view in his address at
> Birmingham, in 1886, to the Chemical Section of the British Association,
> of which he was President. This is what Helmholtz says:
> 
>     If we accept the hypothesis that the elementary substances are
>     composed of atoms, we cannot avoid concluding that electricity
>     also, positive as well as negative, is divided into definite
>     elementary portions, which behave like atoms of electricity.(998)
> 
> Here we have to repeat that which was already said in Section VIII, that
> there is but one science that can henceforth direct modern research into
> the one path which will lead to the discovery of the whole, hitherto
> Occult, truth, and it is the youngest of all—Chemistry, as it now stands
> reformed. There is no other, not excluding Astronomy, that can so
> unerringly guide scientific intuition, as can Chemistry. Two proofs of
> this are to be found in the world of Science—two great Chemists, each
> among the greatest in his own country, namely, Mr. Crookes and the late
> Professor Butlerof: the one is a thorough believer in abnormal phenomena;
> the other was as fervid a Spiritualist, as he was great in the natural
> sciences. It becomes evident that, while pondering over the ultimate
> divisibility of Matter, and in the hitherto fruitless chase after the
> element of negative atomic weight, the scientifically trained mind of the
> Chemist must feel irresistibly drawn towards those ever‐shrouded worlds,
> to that mysterious Beyond, whose measureless depths seem to close against
> the approach of the too materialistic hand that would fain draw aside its
> veil. “It is the unknown and the ever‐unknowable,” warns the Monist‐
> Agnostic. “Not so,” answers the persevering Chemist. “We are on the track
> and we are not daunted, and fain would we enter the mysterious region
> which ignorance tickets unknown.”
> 
> In his Presidential Address at Birmingham Mr. Crookes said:
> 
>     There is but one unknown—the ultimate substratum of Spirit
>     [Space]. That which is not the Absolute and the One is, in virtue
>     of that very differentiation, however far removed from the
>     physical senses, always accessible to the spiritual human mind,
>     which is a coruscation of the undifferentiable Integral.
> 
> Two or three sentences, at the very close of his lecture on the _Genesis
> of the Elements_, showed the eminent Scientist to be on the royal road to
> the greatest discoveries. He has been for some time overshadowing “the
> original protyle,” and he has come to the conclusion that “he who grasps
> the Key will be permitted to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of
> creation.” Protyle, as the great Chemist explains:
> 
>     ... is a word analogous to protoplasm, to express the idea of the
>     original primal matter existing before the evolution of the
>     chemical elements. The word I have ventured to use for this
>     purpose is compounded of πρὸ (earlier than) and ὕλη (the stuff of
>     which things are made). The word is scarcely a new coinage, for
>     600 years ago Roger Bacon wrote in his _Arte Chymiae_, “The
>     elements are made out of ὕλη and every element is converted into
>     the nature of another element.”
> 
> The _knowledge_ of Roger Bacon did not come to this wonderful old
> magician(999) by inspiration, but because he studied ancient works on
> Magic and Alchemy, and had a key to the real meaning of their language.
> But see what Mr. Crookes says of Protyle, next neighbour to the
> unconscious Mûlaprakriti of the Occultists:
> 
>     Let us start at the moment when the first element came into
>     existence. Before this time, matter, as we know it, was not. It is
>     equally impossible to conceive of matter without energy, as of
>     energy without matter; from one point of view both are convertible
>     terms. Before the birth of atoms, all those forms of energy, which
>     become evident when matter acts upon matter, could not have
>     existed(1000)—they were locked up in the protyle as latent
>     potentialities only. Coincident with the creation of atoms, all
>     those attributes and properties, which form the means of
>     discriminating one chemical element from another, start into
>     existence fully endowed with energy.(1001)
> 
> With every respect due to the great knowledge of the lecturer, the
> Occultist would put it otherwise. He would say that no Atom is ever
> “created,” for the Atoms are eternal within the bosom of the One Atom—“the
> Atom of Atoms”—viewed during Manvantara as the Jagad‐Yoni, the material
> causative womb of the World. Pradhâna, unmodified Matter—that which is the
> first form of Prakriti, or material, visible, as well as invisible
> Nature—and Purusha, Spirit, are eternally one; and they are Nirupâdhi,
> without adventitious qualities or attributes, only during Pralaya, and
> when beyond any of the planes of consciousness of existence. The Atom, as
> known to modern science, is inseparable from Purusha, which is Spirit, but
> is now called “energy” in Science. The Protyle Atom has not been
> comminuted or subtilized: it has simply passed into that plane, which is
> no plane, but the eternal state of everything beyond the planes of
> illusion. Both Purusha and Pradhâna are immutable and unconsumable, or
> Aparinâmin and Avyaya, in eternity; and both may be referred to during the
> Mâyâvic periods as Vyaya and Parinâmin, or that which can expand, pass
> away and disappear, and which is “modifiable.” In this sense Purusha,
> must, of course, be held distinct in our conceptions from Parabrahman.
> Nevertheless that, which is called “energy” or “force” in Science, and
> which has been explained as a dual force by Metcalfe, is never, in fact,
> and cannot be, energy alone; for it is the Substance of the World, its
> Soul, the All‐permeant, Sarvaga, in conjunction with Kâla, Time. The three
> are the trinity in one, during Manvantara, the all‐potential Unity, which
> acts as three distinct things on Mâyâ, the plane of illusion. In the
> Orphic philosophy of ancient Greece they were called Phanes, Chaos, and
> Chronos—the triad of the Occult Philosophers of that period.
> 
> But see how closely Mr. Crookes brushes the “Unknowable,” and what
> potentialities there are for the acceptance of Occult truths in his
> discoveries. He continues, speaking of the evolution of Atoms:
> 
>     Let us pause at the end of the first complete vibration and
>     examine the result. We have already found the elements of water,
>     ammonia, carbonic acid, the atmosphere, plant and animal life,
>     phosphorus for the brain, salt for the seas, clay for the solid
>     earth ... phosphates and silicates sufficient for a world and
>     inhabitants not so very different from what we enjoy at the
>     present day. True the human inhabitants would have to live in a
>     state of more than Arcadian simplicity, and the absence of calcic
>     phosphate would be awkward as far as the bone is
>     concerned.(1002)... At the lower end of our curve ... we see a
>     great hiatus.... This oasis, and the blanks which precede and
>     follow it, may be referred with much probability to the particular
>     way in which our earth developed into a member of our solar
>     system. If this be so, it may be that on our earth only these
>     blanks occur, and not generally throughout the universe.
> 
> This justifies several assertions in the Occult works.
> 
> Firstly, that neither the stars nor the Sun can be said to be constituted
> of those terrestrial elements with which the Chemist is familiar, though
> they are all present in the Sun’s outward robes—as well as a host more of
> elements so far unknown to Science.
> 
> Secondly, that our globe has its own special laboratory on the far‐away
> outskirts of its atmosphere, crossing which, every Atom and molecule
> changes and differentiates from its primordial nature.
> 
> And thirdly, that though no element present on our Earth could ever
> possibly be found wanting in the Sun, there are many others there which
> have either not reached, or not as yet been discovered on our globe.
> 
>     Some may be missing in certain stars and heavenly bodies in the
>     process of formation; or, though present in them, these elements,
>     on account of their present state, may not respond as yet to the
>     usual scientific tests.(1003)
> 
> Mr. Crookes speaks of helium, an element of still lower atomic weight than
> hydrogen, an _element purely hypothetical_ as far as our earth is
> concerned, though existing in abundance in the chromosphere of the Sun.
> Occult Science adds that not one of the elements regarded as such by
> Chemistry really deserves the name.
> 
> Again we find Mr. Crookes speaking with approbation of
> 
>     Dr. Carnelly’s weighty argument in favour of the compound nature
>     of the so‐called elements, from their analogy to the compound
>     radicles.
> 
> Hitherto, Alchemy alone, within the historical period, and in the so‐
> called civilized countries, has succeeded in obtaining a real _element_,
> or a particle of homogeneous Matter, the _Mysterium Magnum_ of Paracelsus.
> But then that was before Lord Bacon’s day.(1004)
> 
>     ... Let us now turn to the upper portion of the scheme. With
>     hydrogen of atomic weight = 1, there is little room for other
>     elements, save, perhaps, for hypothetical _Helium_. But what if we
>     get “through the looking‐glass,” and cross the zero line in search
>     of new principles—what shall we find on the other side of zero?
>     Dr. Carnelly asks for an element of negative atomic weight; here
>     is ample room and verge enough for a shadow series of such
>     unsubstantialities. Helmholtz says that electricity is probably as
>     atomic as matter; is electricity one of the negative elements, and
>     the luminiferous ether another? Matter, as we now know it, does
>     not here exist; the forms of energy which are apparent in the
>     motions of matter are as yet only latent possibilities. _A
>     substance of negative weight is not inconceivable._(1005) But can
>     we form a clear conception of a body which combines with other
>     bodies in proportions expressible by negative qualities?(1006)
> 
>     A genesis of the elements such as is here sketched out would not
>     be confined to our little solar system, but would probably follow
>     the same general sequence of events in every centre of energy now
>     visible as a star.
> 
>     Before the birth of atoms to gravitate towards one another, no
>     pressure could be exercised; but at the outskirts of the fire‐mist
>     sphere, within which all is protyle—at the shell on which the
>     tremendous forces involved in the birth of a chemical element
>     exert full sway—the fierce heat would be accompanied by
>     gravitation sufficient to keep the newly‐born elements from flying
>     off into space. As temperature increases, expansion and molecular
>     motion increase, molecules tend to fly asunder, and their chemical
>     affinities become deadened; but the enormous: pressure of the
>     gravitation of the mass of atomic matter, outside what I may for
>     brevity call the birth‐shell, would counteract the action of heat.
> 
>     Beyond the birth‐shell would be a space in which no chemical
>     action could take place, owing to the temperature there being
>     above what is called the dissociation‐point for compounds. In this
>     space the lion and the lamb would lie down together: phosphorus
>     and oxygen would mix without union; hydrogen and chlorine would
>     show no tendency to closer bonds; and even fluorine, that
>     energetic gas which chemists have only isolated within the last
>     month or two, would float about free and uncombined.
> 
>     Outside this space of free atomic matter would be another shell,
>     in which the formed chemical elements would have cooled down to
>     the combination point, and the sequence of events so graphically
>     described by Mr. Mattieu Williams in _The Fuel of the Sun_ would
>     now take place, culminating in the solid earth and the
>     commencement of geological time (p. 19).
> 
> This is, in strictly scientific, but beautiful language, the description
> of the evolution of the differentiated Universe in the Secret Teachings.
> The learned gentleman closes his address in words, every sentence of which
> is like a flash of light from beyond the dark veil of materiality,
> hitherto thrown upon the exact sciences, and is a step forward towards the
> _Sanctum Sanctorum_ of the Occult. Thus he says:
> 
>     We have glanced at the difficulty of defining an element; we have
>     noticed, too, the revolt of many leading physicists and chemists
>     against the ordinary acceptation of the term element; we have
>     weighed the improbability of their eternal existence,(1007) or
>     _their origination by chance_. As a remaining alternative, we have
>     suggested their origin by a process of evolution like that of the
>     heavenly bodies according to Laplace, and the plants and animals
>     of our globe according to Lamarck, Darwin, and Wallace.(1008) In
>     the general array of the elements, as known to us, we have seen a
>     striking approximation to that of the organic world.(1009) In lack
>     of direct evidence of the decomposition of any element, we have
>     sought and found indirect evidence.... We have next glanced at the
>     view of the genesis of the elements; and lastly we have reviewed a
>     scheme of their origin suggested by Professor Reynolds’ method of
>     illustrating the periodic classification(1010).... Summing up all
>     the above considerations we cannot, indeed, venture to assert
>     positively _that our so‐called elements have been evolved from one
>     primordial matter; but we may contend that the balance of
>     evidence, I think, fairly weighs in favour of this speculation_.
> 
> Thus inductive Science, in its branches of Astronomy, Physics, and
> Chemistry, while advancing timidly towards the conquest of Nature’s
> secrets in her final effects on our terrestrial plane, recedes to the days
> of Anaxagoras and the Chaldees in its discoveries of (_a_) the origin of
> our phenomenal world, and (_b_) the modes of formation of the bodies that
> compose the Universe. And having, for their cosmogonical hypotheses to
> turn back to the beliefs of the earliest philosophers, and the systems of
> the latter—systems that were all based on the teachings of a universal
> Secret Doctrine with regard to primeval Matter, with its properties,
> functions, and laws—have we not the right to hope that the day is not far
> off when Science will show a better appreciation of the Wisdom of the
> Ancients than it has hitherto done?
> 
> No doubt Occult Philosophy could learn a good deal from exact Modern
> Science; but the latter, on the other hand, might profit by ancient
> learning in more than one way, and chiefly in Cosmogony. It might learn,
> for instance, the mystical signification, alchemical and transcendental,
> of the many _imponderable_ substances that fill interplanetary space, and
> which, interpenetrating each, are the direct cause, at the lower end, of
> the production of natural phenomena manifesting through so‐called
> vibration. The knowledge of the _real_, not the hypothetical, nature of
> Ether, or rather of the Âkâsha, and other mysteries, in short, can alone
> lead to the knowledge of Forces. It is that Substance against which the
> Materialistic school of the Physicists rebels with such fury, especially
> in France,(1011) and which exact Science has to advocate notwithstanding.
> They cannot make away with it without incurring the risk of pulling down
> the pillars of the Temple of Science, like a modern Samson, and of getting
> buried under its roof.
> 
> The theories built upon the rejection of Force, outside and independent of
> Matter pure and simple, have all been shown to be fallacious. They do not,
> and cannot, cover the ground, and many of the scientific data are thus
> proved to be unscientific. “Ether produced Sound” is said in the
> _Purânas_, and the statement is laughed at. Sound is the result of the
> vibrations of the _air_, we are corrected. And what is air? Could it exist
> if there were no etheric medium in Space to buoy up its molecules? The
> case stands simply thus. Materialism cannot admit the existence of
> anything outside Matter, because with the acceptance of an imponderable
> Force—the source and head of all the physical Forces—other _intelligent_
> Forces would have to be virtually admitted, and that would lead Science
> very far. For it would have to accept as a sequel the presence in Man of a
> still more spiritual power—entirely independent, for once, of any kind of
> Matter about which Physicists know anything. Hence, apart from a
> hypothetical Ether of Space and gross physical bodies, the whole sidereal
> and unseen Space is, in the sight of Materialists, one boundless _void_ in
> Nature—blind, unintelligent, useless.
> 
> And now the next question is: What is that Cosmic Substance, and how far
> can one go in suspecting its nature or in wrenching from it its secrets,
> thus feeling justified in giving it a name? How far, especially, has
> Modern Science gone in the direction of those secrets, and what is it
> doing to solve them? The latest hobby of Science, the Nebular Theory, may
> afford us some answer to this question. Let us then examine the
> credentials of this Nebular Theory.
> 
> Section XII. Scientific and Esoteric Evidence for, and Objections to, the
> Modern Nebular Theory.
> 
> Of late, Esoteric Cosmogony has been frequently opposed by the phantom of
> this theory and its ensuing hypotheses. “Can this most scientific teaching
> be denied by your Adepts?” it is asked. “Not entirely,” is the reply, “but
> the admissions of the men of Science themselves _kill_ it; and there
> remains nothing for the Adepts to deny.”
> 
> To make of Science an integral _whole_ necessitates, indeed, the study of
> spiritual and psychic, as well as of physical, Nature. Otherwise it will
> ever be like the anatomy of man, discussed of old by the profane from the
> point of view of his shell‐side, and in ignorance of the interior work.
> Even Plato, the greatest Philosopher of his country, was guilty, before
> his Initiation, of such statements as that liquids pass into the stomach
> through the lungs. Without metaphysics, as Mr. H. J. Slack says, _real_
> Science is inadmissible.
> 
> The nebulæ exist; yet the Nebular Theory is wrong. A nebula exists in a
> state of entire elemental dissociation. It is gaseous and—something else
> besides, which can hardly be connected with gases as these are known to
> Physical Science; and it is self‐luminous. But that is all. The sixty‐two
> “coincidences” enumerated by Professor Stephen Alexander,(1012) confirming
> the Nebular Theory, may all be explained by Esoteric Science; though, as
> this is not an astronomical work, the refutations are not attempted at
> present. Laplace and Faye come nearer to the correct theory than any; but
> of the speculations of Laplace there remains little in the present theory
> beyond its general features.
> 
> Nevertheless, says John Stuart Mill:
> 
>     There is in Laplace’s theory nothing hypothetical; it is an
>     example of legitimate reasoning from present effect to its past
>     cause; it assumes nothing more than that objects which really
>     exist obey the laws which are known to be obeyed by all
>     terrestrial objects resembling them.(1013)
> 
> From such an eminent logician as was Mill, this would be valuable, if it
> could only be proved that “terrestrial objects resembling” celestial
> objects at such a distance as are the nebulæ, _resemble those objects in
> reality, and not only in appearance_.
> 
> Another of the fallacies, from the Occult standpoint, embodied in the
> modern theory as it now stands, is the hypothesis that the Planets were
> all detached from the Sun; that they are bone of his bone, and flesh of
> his flesh; whereas the Sun and the Planets are only co‐uterine brothers,
> having the same nebular origin, but in a different mode from that
> postulated by modern Astronomy.
> 
> The many objections raised by some opponents of the modern Nebular Theory
> against the homogeneity of original diffuse Matter, on the ground of the
> uniformity in the composition of the fixed Stars, do not affect the
> question of that homogeneity at all, but only the theory itself. Our solar
> nebula may not be completely homogeneous, or, rather, it may fail to
> reveal itself as such to the Astronomers, and yet be _de facto_
> homogeneous. The Stars do differ in their constituent materials, and even
> exhibit elements quite unknown on Earth; nevertheless, this does not
> affect the point that Primeval Matter—Matter as it appeared even in its
> first differentiation from its laya‐condition(1014)—is yet to this day
> homogeneous, at immense distances, in the depths of infinitude, and
> likewise at points not far removed from the outskirts of our Solar System.
> 
> Finally, there does not exist one single fact brought forward by the
> learned objectors against the Nebular Theory (false as it is, and hence,
> illogically enough, fatal to the hypothesis of the homogeneity of Matter),
> that can withstand criticism. One error leads to another. A false premiss
> will naturally lead to a false conclusion, although an inadmissible
> inference does not necessarily affect the validity of the major
> proposition of the syllogism. Thus, one may leave every side‐issue and
> inference from the evidence of spectra and lines, as simply provisional
> for the present, and abandon all matters of detail to Physical Science.
> The duty of the Occultist lies with the _Soul_ and _Spirit_ of Cosmic
> Space, not merely with its illusive appearance and behaviour. That of
> official Physical Science is to analyze and study its _shell_—the Ultima
> Thule of the Universe and Man, in the opinion of Materialism.
> 
> With the latter, Occultism has nought to do. It is only with the theories
> of such men of learning as Kepler, Kant, Oersted, and Sir William
> Herschell, who believed in a Spiritual World, that Occult Cosmogony might
> treat, and attempt a satisfactory compromise. But the views of those
> Physicists differed vastly from the latest modern speculations. Kant and
> Herschell had in their mind’s eye speculations upon the origin and the
> final destiny, as well as upon the present aspect, of the Universe, from a
> far more philosophical and psychic standpoint; whereas modern Cosmology
> and Astronomy now repudiate anything like research into the mysteries of
> Being. The result is what might be expected: complete failure and
> inextricable contradictions in the thousand and one varieties of so‐called
> Scientific Theories, and in this Theory as in all others.
> 
> The nebular hypothesis, involving the theory of the existence of a
> Primeval Matter, diffused in a nebulous condition, is of no modern date in
> Astronomy, as everyone knows. Anaximenes, of the Ionian school, had
> already taught that the sidereal bodies were formed through the
> progressive condensation of a primordial _pregenetic_ Matter, which had
> almost a negative weight, and was spread out through Space in an extremely
> sublimated condition.
> 
> Tycho Brahé, who viewed the Milky Way as an ethereal substance, thought
> the new star that appeared in Cassiopeia, in 1572, had been formed out of
> that Matter.(1015) Kepler believed that the star of 1606 had likewise been
> formed out of the ethereal substance that fills the universe.(1016) He
> attributed to that same Ether the apparition of a luminous ring round the
> Moon, during the total eclipse of the Sun observed at Naples in
> 1605.(1017) Still later, in 1714 the existence of a self‐luminous Matter
> was recognized by Halley in the _Philosophical Transactions_. Finally, the
> journal of this name published in 1811 the famous hypothesis of the
> eminent Astronomer, Sir William Herschell, on the transformation of the
> nebulæ into Stars,(1018) and after this the Nebular Theory was accepted by
> the Royal Academies.
> 
> In _Five Years of Theosophy_, on p. 245, may be read an article headed,
> “Do the Adepts deny the Nebular Theory?” The answer there given is:
> 
> _No; they do not deny its general propositions, nor the approximative
> truth of the scientific hypotheses. They only deny the completeness of the
> present, as well as the entire error of the many so‐called
> __“__exploded__”__ old theories, which, during the last century, have
> followed each other in such rapid succession._
> 
> This was asserted at the time to be “an evasive answer.” Such disrespect
> to official Science, it was argued, must be justified by the replacement
> of the _orthodox_ speculation by another theory more complete, and having
> a firmer ground to stand upon. To this there is but one reply: It is
> useless to give out isolated theories with regard to things embodied in a
> complete and consecutive system, for, when separated from the main body of
> the teaching, they would necessarily lose their vital coherence and would
> thus do no good when studied independently. To be able to appreciate and
> accept the Occult views on the Nebular Theory, we must study the whole
> Esoteric cosmogonical system. And the time has hardly arrived for the
> Astronomers to be asked to accept Fohat and the Divine Builders. Even the
> undeniably correct surmises of Sir William Herschell, which had nothing
> “supernatural” in them, as to the Sun’s being called a “globe of fire,”
> perhaps metaphorically, and his early speculations about the nature of
> that which is now called the Nasmyth Willow‐leaf Theory, only caused that
> most eminent of all Astronomers to be smiled at by other, far less
> eminent, colleagues, who saw and now see in his ideas purely “imaginative
> and fanciful theories.” Before the whole Esoteric System could be given
> out and appreciated by the Astronomers, the latter would have to return to
> some of those “antiquated ideas,” not only to those of Herschell, but also
> to the dreams of the oldest Hindû Astronomers, and thus abandon their own
> theories, which are none the less “fanciful” because they have appeared
> nearly eighty years later than the one, and many thousands of years later
> than the others. Foremost of all they would have to repudiate their ideas
> of the Sun’s solidity and incandescence; the Sun “glowing” most
> undeniably, but not “burning.” Then the Occultists state, with regard to
> the “willow‐leaves,” that those “objects,” as Sir William Herschell called
> them, are the immediate sources of the solar light and heat. And though
> the Esoteric Teaching does not regard these as he did—namely, as
> “organisms” partaking of the nature of life, for the Solar “Beings” will
> hardly place themselves within telescopic focus—yet it asserts that the
> whole Universe is full of such “organisms,” conscious and active according
> to the proximity or distance of their planes to, or from, our plane of
> consciousness; and finally that the great Astronomer was right while
> speculating on those supposed “organisms,” in saying that “we do not know
> that vital action is incompetent to develop at once heat, light, and
> electricity.” For, at the risk of being laughed at by the whole world of
> Physicists, the Occultists maintain that all the “Forces” of the
> Scientists have their origin in the Vital Principle, the One Life
> collectively of our Solar System—that “Life” being a portion, or rather
> one of the _aspects_, of the One Universal LIFE.
> 
> We may, therefore—as in the article under consideration, wherein, on the
> authority of the Adepts, it was maintained that it is “sufficient to make
> a _résumé_ of what the solar Physicists do not know”—we may, we maintain,
> define our position with regard to the modern Nebular Theory and its
> evident incorrectness, by simply pointing out facts diametrically opposed
> to it in its present form. And to begin with, what does it teach?
> 
> Summarizing the aforesaid hypotheses, it becomes plain that Laplace’s
> theory—now made quite unrecognizable, moreover—was an unfortunate one. He
> postulates in the first place Cosmic Matter, existing in a state of
> diffuse nebulosity “so fine that its presence could hardly have been
> suspected.” No attempt is made by him to penetrate into the Arcana of
> Being, except as regards the immediate evolution of our small Solar
> System.
> 
> Consequently, whether one accepts or rejects his theory in its bearing
> upon the immediate cosmological problems presented for solution, he can
> only be said to have thrown back the mystery a little further. To the
> eternal query: “Whence Matter itself; whence the evolutionary impetus
> determining its cyclic aggregations and dissolutions; whence the exquisite
> symmetry and order into which the primeval Atoms arrange and group
> themselves?” no answer is attempted by Laplace. All we are confronted
> with, is a sketch of the _probable_ broad principles on which the actual
> process is assumed to be based. Well, and what is this now celebrated note
> on the said process? What has he given so wonderfully new and original,
> that its ground‐work, at any rate, should have served as a basis for the
> modern Nebular Theory? The following is what one gathers from various
> astronomical works.
> 
> Laplace thought that, in consequence of the condensation of the atoms of
> the primeval nebula, according to the “law” of gravity, the now gaseous,
> or perhaps, partially liquid mass, acquired a rotatory motion. As the
> velocity of this rotation increased, it assumed the form of a thin disc;
> finally, the centrifugal force overpowering that of cohesion, huge rings
> were detached from the edge of the whirling incandescent masses, and these
> rings contracted necessarily by gravitation (as accepted) into spheroidal
> bodies, which would necessarily still continue to preserve the orbit
> previously occupied by the outer zone from which they were
> separated.(1019) The velocity of the outer edge of each nascent planet, he
> said, exceeding that of the inner, there results a rotation on its axis.
> The more dense bodies would be thrown off last; and finally, during the
> preliminary state of their formation, the newly‐segregated orbs in their
> turn throw off one or more satellites. In formulating the history of the
> rupture and planetation of rings Laplace says:
> 
>     Almost always each ring of vapours must have broken up into
>     numerous masses, which, moving with a nearly uniform velocity,
>     must have continued to circulate at the same distance around the
>     sun. These masses must have taken a spheroidal form with a motion
>     of rotation in the same direction as their revolution, since the
>     inner molecules (those nearest the sun) would have less actual
>     velocity than the exterior ones. They must then have formed as
>     many planets in a state of vapour. But, if one of them was
>     sufficiently powerful to unite successively, by its attraction,
>     all the others around its centre, the ring of vapours must have
>     been thus transformed into a single spheroidal mass of vapours
>     circulating around the sun with a rotation in the same direction
>     as its revolution. The latter case has been the more common, but
>     the solar system presents us the first case, in the four small
>     planets which move between Jupiter and Mars.
> 
> While few will be found to deny the “magnificent audacity of this
> hypothesis,” it is impossible not to recognize the insurmountable
> difficulties with which it is attended. Why, for instance, do we find that
> the satellites of Neptune and Uranus display a retrograde motion? Why, in
> spite of its closer proximity to the Sun, is Venus less dense than the
> Earth? Why, again, is the more distant Uranus denser than Saturn? How is
> it that there are so many variations in the inclination of their axes and
> orbits in the supposed progeny of the central orb; that such startling
> variations in the size of the Planets are noticeable; that the satellites
> of Jupiter are more dense by ·288 than their primary; that the phenomena
> of meteoric and cometary systems still remain unaccounted for? To quote
> the words of a Master:
> 
> _They_ [the Adepts] _find that the centrifugal theory of Western birth is
> unable to cover all the ground. That, unaided, it can neither account for
> every oblate spheroid, nor explain away such evident difficulties as are
> presented by the relative density of some planets. How, indeed, can any
> calculation of centrifugal force explain to us, for instance, why Mercury,
> whose rotation is, we are told, only __“__about one‐third that of the
> Earth, and its density only about one‐fourth greater than the Earth,__”__
> should have a polar compression more than ten times greater than the
> latter? And again, why Jupiter, whose equatorial rotation is said to be
> __“__twenty‐seven times greater, and its density only about one‐fifth that
> of the Earth__”__ should have its polar compression seventeen times
> greater than that of the Earth? Or why Saturn, with an equatorial velocity
> fifty‐five times greater than Mercury for centripetal force to contend
> with, should have its polar compression only three times greater than
> Mercury’s? To crown the above contradictions, we are asked to believe in
> the Central Forces, as taught by Modern Science, even when told that the
> equatorial matter of the Sun, with more than four times the centrifugal
> velocity of the Earth’s equatorial surface, and only about one‐fourth part
> of the gravitation of the equatorial matter, has not manifested any
> tendency to bulge at the solar equator, nor shown the least flattening at
> the poles of the solar axis. In other and clearer words, the Sun, with
> only one‐fourth of our Earth’s density for the centrifugal force to work
> upon, has no polar compression at all! We find this objection made by more
> than one astronomer, yet never explained away satisfactorily, so far as
> the __“__Adepts__”__ are aware._
> 
> _Therefore, do they_ [the Adepts] _say, that the great men of Science of
> the West, knowing ... next to nothing either about cometary matter,
> centrifugal and centripetal forces, the nature of the nebulæ, or the
> physical constitution of the Sun, the Stars, or even the Moon, are
> imprudent to speak so confidently as they do about the __“__central mass
> of the Sun,__”__ whirling out into space planets, comets, and what not....
> We maintain that it_ [the Sun] _evolves out only the life‐principle, the
> Soul of these __ bodies, giving and receiving it back, in our little Solar
> System, as the __“__Universal Life‐Giver__”__ ... in the Infinitude and
> Eternity; that the Solar System is as much the Microcosm of the One
> Macrocosm as man is the former when compared with his own little Solar
> Cosmos._(1020)
> 
> The essential power of all the cosmic and terrestrial Elements to generate
> within themselves a regular and harmonious series of results, a
> concatenation of causes and effects, is an irrefutable proof that they are
> either animated by an _Intelligence_, _ab extrâ_ or _ab intrâ_, or conceal
> such within or behind the “manifested veil.” Occultism does not deny the
> certainty of the mechanical origin of the Universe; it only claims the
> absolute necessity of mechanicians of some sort behind or within those
> Elements—a dogma with us. It is not the fortuitous assistance of the Atoms
> of Lucretius, as he himself knew well, that built the Kosmos and all in
> it. Nature herself contradicts such a theory. Celestial Space, containing
> Matter so attenuated as Ether, cannot be called on, with or without
> attraction, to explain the common motion of the sidereal hosts. Although
> the perfect accord of their inter‐revolution indicates clearly the
> presence of a mechanical cause in Nature, Newton, who of all men had most
> right to trust to his deductions, was nevertheless forced to abandon the
> idea of ever explaining the original impulse given to the millions of
> orbs, by merely the laws of _known_ Nature and its material Forces. He
> recognized fully the limits that separate the action of natural Forces
> from that of the _Intelligences_ that set the immutable laws in order and
> action. And if a Newton had to renounce such hope, which of the modern
> materialistic pigmies has the right of saying: “I know better?”
> 
> A cosmogonical theory, to become complete and comprehensible, has to start
> with a Primordial Substance diffused throughout boundless Space, _of an
> intellectual and divine nature_. That Substance must be the Soul and
> Spirit, the Synthesis and Seventh Principle of the manifested Kosmos, and,
> to serve as a spiritual Upâdhi to this, there must be the sixth, its
> vehicle—Primordial Physical Matter, so to speak, though its nature must
> escape for ever our limited _normal_ senses. It is easy for an Astronomer,
> if endowed with an imaginative faculty, to build a theory of the emergence
> of the Universe out of Chaos, by simply applying to it the principles of
> mechanics. But such a Universe will always prove a Frankenstein’s monster
> with respect to its scientific human creator; it will lead him into
> endless perplexities. The application of mechanical laws only can never
> carry the speculator beyond the objective world; nor will it unveil to men
> the origin and final destiny of Kosmos. This is whither the Nebular Theory
> has led Science. In sober fact and truth this Theory is twin sister to
> that of Ether, and both are the offspring of necessity; one is as
> indispensable to account for the transmission of light, as is the other to
> explain the problem of the origin of the Solar Systems. The question with
> Science is, how the same homogeneous Matter(1021) could, obeying the laws
> of Newton, give birth to bodies—Sun, Planets, and their satellites—subject
> to conditions of identity of motion, and formed of such heterogeneous
> elements.
> 
> Has the Nebular Theory helped to solve the problem, even if applied solely
> to bodies considered as inanimate and material? We say: most decidedly
> not. What progress has it made since 1811, when first Sir William
> Herschell’s paper, with its facts based on observation and showing the
> existence of nebular matter, made the sons of the Royal Society “shout for
> joy”? Since then a still greater discovery, through spectrum analysis, has
> permitted the verification and corroboration of Sir William Herschell’s
> conjecture. Laplace demanded some kind of primitive “world‐stuff” to prove
> the idea of progressive world‐evolution and growth. Here it is, as offered
> two millenniums ago.
> 
> The “world‐stuff,” now called nebulæ, was known from the highest
> antiquity. Anaxagoras taught that, upon differentiation, the resulting
> commixture of heterogeneous substances remained motionless and
> unorganized, until finally the “Mind”—the collective body of Dhyân
> Chohans, we say—began to work upon, and communicated to, them motion and
> order.(1022) This theory is now taken up, so far as concerns its first
> portion; the last, that of any “Mind” interfering, being rejected.
> Spectrum analysis reveals the existence of nebulæ formed entirely of gases
> and luminous vapours. Is this the primitive nebular Matter? The spectra
> reveal, it is said, the physical conditions of the Matter which emits
> cosmic light. The spectra of the resolvable and the irresolvable nebulæ
> are shown to be entirely different, the spectra of the latter showing
> their physical state to be that of glowing gas or vapour. The bright lines
> of one nebula reveal the existence of hydrogen, and of other material
> substances known and unknown. The same as to the atmospheres of the Sun
> and Stars. This leads to the direct inference that a Star is formed by the
> condensation of a nebula; hence that even the metals themselves are formed
> on earth by the condensation of hydrogen or of some other primitive
> matter, some ancestral cousin to helium, perhaps, or some yet unknown
> stuff. _This does not clash with the Occult Teachings._ And this is the
> problem that Chemistry is trying to solve; and it must succeed sooner or
> later in the task, accepting _nolens volens_, when it does, the Esoteric
> Teaching. But when this does happen, it will kill the Nebular Theory as it
> now stands.
> 
> Meanwhile Astronomy cannot accept in any way, if it is to be regarded as
> an _exact_ Science, the present theory of the filiation of Stars—even if
> Occultism does so in its own way, seeing that it explains this filiation
> differently—because Astronomy has _not one single physical datum_ to show
> for it. Astronomy could anticipate Chemistry in proving the existence of
> the fact, if it could show a planetary nebula exhibiting a spectrum of
> three or four bright lines, gradually condensing and transforming into a
> Star, with a spectrum all covered with a number of dark lines. But
> 
>     The question of the variability of the nebulæ, even as to their
>     form, is yet one of the mysteries of Astronomy. The data of
>     observation possessed so far are of too recent an origin, too
>     uncertain, to permit us to affirm anything.(1023)
> 
> Since its discovery, the magic power of the spectroscope has revealed to
> its adepts only one single transformation of a Star of this kind; and even
> that showed directly the reverse of what is needed as proof in favour of
> the Nebular Theory; for it revealed _a Star transforming itself into a
> planetary nebula_. As related in _The Observatory_,(1024) the temporary
> Star, discovered by J. F. J. Schmidt in the constellation Cygnus, in
> November, 1876, exhibited a spectrum broken by very brilliant lines.
> Gradually, the continuous spectrum and most of the lines disappeared,
> leaving finally one single brilliant line, which appeared to coincide with
> the green line of the nebula.
> 
> Though this metamorphosis is not irreconcileable with the hypothesis of
> the nebular origin of the Stars, nevertheless this single solitary case
> rests on no observation whatever, least of all on direct observation. The
> occurrence may have been due to several other causes. Since Astronomers
> are inclined to think our Planets are tending toward precipitation into
> the Sun, why should not that Star have blazed up owing to a collision of
> such precipitated Planets, or, as many suggest, the appulse of a Comet? Be
> that as it may, the only known instance of star‐transformation since 1811
> is not favourable to the Nebular Theory. Moreover, on the question of this
> Theory, as on all others, Astronomers disagree.
> 
> In our own age, and before Laplace ever thought of it, Buffon, being very
> much struck by the identity of motion in the Planets, was the first to
> propose the hypothesis that the Planets and their satellites originated in
> the bosom of the Sun. Forthwith and for this purpose, he invented a
> special Comet, supposed to have torn out, by a powerful oblique blow, the
> quantity of matter necessary for their formation. Laplace gave its dues to
> the “Comet” in his _Exposition du Système du Monde_.(1025) But the idea
> was seized and even improved upon by a conception of the alternate
> evolution, from the Sun’s central mass, of Planets _apparently_ without
> weight or influence on the motion of the visible Planets—and as evidently
> without any more existence than the likeness of Moses in the Moon.
> 
> But the modern theory is also a variation on the systems elaborated by
> Kant and Laplace. The idea of both was that, at the origin of things, all
> that Matter which now enters into the composition of the planetary bodies
> was spread over all the space comprized in the Solar System—and even
> beyond. It was a nebula of extremely small density, and its condensation
> gradually gave birth, by a mechanism that has hitherto never been
> explained, to the various bodies of our System. This is the original
> Nebular Theory, an _incomplete_ yet faithful repetition—a short chapter
> out of the large volume of universal Esoteric Cosmogony—of the teachings
> of the Secret Doctrine. And both systems, Kant’s and Laplace’s, differ
> greatly from the modern Theory, redundant with conflicting _sub_‐theories
> and fanciful hypotheses. Say the Teachers:
> 
>     _The essence of cometary matter_ [and of that which composes the
>     Stars] ... _is totally different from any of the chemical or
>     physical characteristics with which the greatest Chemists and
>     Physicists of the earth are familiar.... While the spectroscope
>     has shown the probable similarity_ [owing to the chemical action
>     of terrestrial light upon the intercepted rays] _of terrestrial
>     and sidereal substance, the chemical actions peculiar to the
>     variously progressed orbs of space, have not been detected, nor
>     proven to be identical with those observed on our own
>     planet._(1026)
> 
> Mr. Crookes says almost the same in the fragment quoted from his lecture,
> _Elements and Meta‐Elements_. C. Wolf, Member of the Institute, Astronomer
> of the Observatory, Paris, observes:
> 
>     At the utmost the nebular hypothesis can only show in its favour,
>     with W. Herschell, the existence of planetary nebulæ in various
>     degrees of condensation, and of spiral nebulæ, with nuclei of
>     condensation on the branches and centre.(1027) But, in fact, the
>     knowledge of the bond that unites the nebulæ to the stars is yet
>     denied to us; and lacking as we do direct observation, we are even
>     debarred from establishing it on the analogy of chemical
>     composition.(1028)
> 
> Even if the men of Science—leaving aside the difficulty arising out of
> such undeniable variety and heterogeneity of matter in the constitution of
> nebulæ—did admit, with the Ancients, that the origin of all the visible
> and invisible heavenly bodies must be sought for in one primordial
> homogeneous world‐stuff, in a kind of _Pre_‐Protyle,(1029) it is evident
> that this would not put an end to their perplexities. Unless they admit
> also that our actual visible Universe is merely the Sthûla Sharîra, the
> gross body, of the sevenfold Kosmos, they will have to face another
> problem; especially if they venture to maintain that its now visible
> bodies are the result of the condensation of that one and single
> Primordial Matter. For mere observation shows them that the operations
> which produced the actual Universe are far more complex than could ever be
> embraced in that theory.
> 
> First of all, there are two distinct classes of “irresolvable” nebulæ, as
> Science itself teaches.
> 
> The telescope is unable to distinguish between these two classes, but the
> spectroscope can do so, and notices an essential difference between their
> physical constitutions.
> 
>     The question of the resolvability of the nebulæ has been often
>     presented in too affirmative a manner and quite contrary to the
>     ideas expressed by the illustrious experimenter with the spectra
>     of these constellations—Mr. Huggins. Every nebula whose spectrum
>     contains only bright lines is gaseous, it is said, and hence is
>     irresolvable; every nebula with a continuous spectrum must end by
>     resolving into stars with an instrument of sufficient power. This
>     assumption is contrary at once to the results obtained, and to
>     spectroscopic theory. The “Lyra” nebula, the “Dumb‐bell” nebula,
>     the central region of the nebula of Orion, appear resolvable, and
>     show a spectrum of bright lines; the nebula of Canes Venatici is
>     not resolvable, and gives a continuous spectrum. Because, indeed,
>     the spectroscope informs us of the physical state of the
>     constituent matter of the stars, but affords us no notions of
>     their modes of aggregation. A nebula formed of gaseous globes (or
>     even of nuclei, faintly luminous, surrounded by a powerful
>     atmosphere) would give a spectrum of lines and be still
>     resolvable; such seems to be the state of Huggins’ region in the
>     Orion nebula. A nebula formed of solid or fluidic particles in a
>     state of incandescence, a true cloud, will give a continuous
>     spectrum and will be irresolvable.
> 
> Some of these nebulæ, Wolf tells us,
> 
>     Have a spectrum of three or four bright lines, others a continuous
>     spectrum. The first are gaseous, the others formed of a
>     pulverulent matter. The former must constitute a veritable
>     atmosphere: it is among these that the solar nebula of Laplace has
>     to be placed. The latter form an _ensemble_ of particles that may
>     be considered as independent, and the rotation of which obeys the
>     laws of internal weight: such are the nebulæ adopted by Kant and
>     Faye. Observation allows us to place the one as the other at the
>     very origin of the planetary world. But when we try to go beyond
>     and ascend to the primitive chaos which has produced the totality
>     of the heavenly bodies, we have first to account for the actual
>     existence of these two classes of nebulæ. If the primitive chaos
>     were a cold luminous gas,(1030) one could understand how the
>     contraction resulting from attraction could have heated it and
>     made it luminous. We have to explain the condensation of this gas
>     to the state of incandescent particles, the presence of which is
>     revealed to us in certain nebulæ by the spectroscope. If the
>     original chaos was composed of such particles, how did certain of
>     their portions pass into the gaseous state, while others have
>     preserved their primitive condition?
> 
> Such is the synopsis of the objections and difficulties in the way of the
> acceptance of the Nebular Theory, brought forward by the French _savant_,
> who concludes this interesting argument by declaring that:
> 
>     The first part of the cosmogonical problem—what is the primitive
>     matter of chaos; and how did that matter give birth to the sun and
>     stars?—thus remains to this day in the domain of romance and of
>     mere imagination.(1031)
> 
> If this is the last word of Science upon the subject, whither then should
> we turn in order to learn what the Nebular Theory is supposed to teach?
> What, in fact, is this theory? What it _is_, no one seems to know for
> certain. What it is not—we learn from the erudite author of _World‐Life_.
> He tells us that it:
> 
>     i. Is not a theory of the evolution of the Universe. It is
>     primarily a genetic explanation of the phenomena of the solar
>     system, and accessorily a co‐ordination in a common conception of
>     the principal phenomena in the stellar and nebular firmament, as
>     far as human vision has been able to penetrate.
> 
>     ii. It does not regard the comets as involved in that particular
>     evolution which has produced the Solar System. [The Esoteric
>     Doctrine does, because it, too, “recognizes the comets as forms of
>     cosmic existence co‐ordinated with earlier stages of nebular
>     evolution”; and it actually assigns _to them chiefly_ the
>     formation of all worlds.]
> 
>     iii. _It does not deny an antecedent history of the luminous fire
>     mist_—[the _secondary_ stage of evolution in the Secret Doctrine]
>     [and] ... makes no claim to having reached an absolute beginning.
>     [And even it allows that this] fire mist may have previously
>     existed in a cold, non‐luminous and invisible condition.
> 
>     iv. [And that finally] _it does not profess to discover the_
>     ORIGIN _of things, but only a stadium in material history_....
>     [leaving] the philosopher and the theologian as free as they ever
>     were to seek the origin of the modes of being.(1032)
> 
> But this is not all. Even the greatest philosopher of England—Mr. Herbert
> Spencer—arrayed himself against this fantastic theory by saying that (_a_)
> “The problem of existence is not resolved” by it; (_b_) the nebular
> hypothesis “throws no light upon the origin of diffused matter”; and (_c_)
> that “the nebular hypothesis (as it now stands) implies a First
> Cause.”(1033)
> 
> The latter, we are afraid, is more than our modern Physicists have
> bargained for. Thus, it seems that the poor “hypothesis” can hardly expect
> to find help or corroboration even in the world of the Metaphysicians.
> 
> Considering all this, the Occultists believe they have a right to present
> _their_ Philosophy, however misunderstood and ostracized it may be at
> present. And they maintain that this failure of the Scientists to discover
> the truth is entirely due to their Materialism and their contempt for
> transcendental Sciences. Yet although the scientific minds in our century
> are as far from the true and correct doctrine of Evolution as ever, there
> may be still some hope left for the future, for even now we find another
> Scientist giving us a faint glimmer of it.
> 
> In an article in the _Popular Science Review_ on “Recent Researches in
> Minute Life,” we find Mr. H. J. Slack, F.C.S., Sec. R.M.S., saying:
> 
>     There is an evident convergence of all sciences, from physics to
>     chemistry and physiology, toward some doctrine of evolution and
>     development, of which the facts of Darwinism will form part, but
>     what ultimate aspect this doctrine will take, there is little, if
>     any, evidence to show, and perhaps it will not be shaped by the
>     human mind until metaphysical as well as physical inquiries are
>     much more advanced.(1034)
> 
> This is a happy forecast indeed. The day _may_ come, then, when “Natural
> Selection,” as taught by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer, will, in its
> ultimate modification, form only _a part_ of our Eastern doctrine of
> Evolution, which will be Manu and Kapila _Esoterically explained_.
> 
> Section XIII. Forces—Modes of Motion or Intelligences?
> 
> This is, then, the last word of Physical Science up to the present year,
> 1888. Mechanical laws will never be able to prove the homogeneity of
> Primeval Matter, except inferentially and as a desperate necessity, when
> there will remain no other issue—as in the case of Ether. Modern Science
> is secure only in its own domain and region; within the physical
> boundaries of our Solar System, beyond which everything, every particle of
> Matter, is different from the Matter it knows, and where Matter exists in
> states of which Science can form no idea. _This_ Matter, which is truly
> homogeneous, is beyond human perception, if perception is tied down merely
> to the five senses. We feel its effects through those INTELLIGENCES which
> are the results of its primeval differentiation, whom we name Dhyân
> Chohans, called in the Hermetic works the “Seven Governors”; those to whom
> Pymander, the “Thought Divine,” refers as the “Building Powers,” and whom
> Asklepios calls the “Supernal Gods.” This Matter—the real Primordial
> Substance, the Noumenon of all the “matter” we know of—some of our
> Astronomers even have been led to believe in, for they despair of the
> possibility of ever accounting for rotation, gravitation, and the origin
> of any mechanical physical laws, unless these INTELLIGENCES be admitted by
> Science. In the above‐quoted work upon Astronomy by Wolf,(1035) the author
> endorses fully the theory of Kant, and the latter theory, if not in its
> general aspect, at any rate in some of its features, reminds one strongly
> of certain Esoteric Teachings. Here we have the world’s system “reborn
> from its ashes,” through a nebula—the emanation from the bodies, dead and
> dissolved in Space, resultant of the _incandescence_ of the Solar
> Centre—reänimated by the combustible matter of the Planets. In this
> theory, generated and developed in the brain of a young man hardly twenty‐
> five years of age, who had never left his native place, Königsberg, a
> small town of Northern Prussia, one can hardly fail to recognize either
> the presence of an inspiring external power, or an evidence of the
> _reïncarnation_ which the Occultists see in it. It fills a gap which
> Newton, with all his genius, failed to bridge. And surely it is our
> Primeval Matter, Âkâsha, that Kant had in view, when he postulated a
> universally pervading primordial Substance, in order to solve Newton’s
> difficulty, and his failure to explain, by natural forces alone, the
> primitive impulse imparted to the Planets. For, as he remarks in Chapter
> viii, if it is once admitted that the perfect harmony of the Stars and
> Planets and the coincidence of their orbital planes prove the existence of
> a natural Cause, which would thus be the Primal Cause, “that Cause cannot
> really be the matter which fills to‐day the heavenly spaces.” It must be
> that which filled Space—was Space—originally, whose motion in
> differentiated Matter was the origin of the actual movements of the
> sidereal bodies; and which, “in condensing itself in those very bodies,
> thus abandoned the space that is to‐day found void.” In other words, it is
> of that same Matter that are now composed the Planets, Comets, and the Sun
> himself, and that Matter, having originally formed itself into those
> bodies, has preserved its inherent quality of motion; which quality, now
> centred in their nuclei, directs all motion. A very slight alteration of
> words in this is needed, and a few additions, to make of it our Esoteric
> Doctrine.
> 
> The latter teaches that it is this original, primordial Prima Materia,
> divine and intelligent, the direct emanation of the Universal Mind, the
> Daiviprakriti—the Divine Light(1036) emanating from the Logos—which formed
> the nuclei of all the “self‐moving” orbs in Kosmos. It is the informing,
> ever‐present moving‐power and life‐principle, the Vital Soul of the Suns,
> Moons, Planets, and even of our Earth; the former latent, the latter
> active—the invisible Ruler and Guide of the gross body attached to, and
> connected with, its Soul, which is the spiritual emanation, after all, of
> these respective Planetary Spirits.
> 
> Another quite Occult Doctrine is the theory of Kant, that the Matter of
> which the inhabitants and the animals of other Planets are formed is of _a
> lighter and more subtle nature and of a more perfect conformation, in
> proportion to their distance from the Sun_. The latter is too full of
> Vital Electricity, of the physical, life‐giving principle. Therefore, the
> men on Mars are more ethereal than we are, while those on Venus are more
> gross, though far more intelligent, if less spiritual.
> 
> The last doctrine is not quite ours—yet these Kantian theories are as
> metaphysical, and as transcendental as any Occult Doctrines; and more than
> one man of Science would, if he but _dared_ speak his mind, accept them as
> Wolf does. From this Kantian Mind and Soul of the Suns and Stars to the
> Mahat (Mind) and Prakriti of the _Purânas_ there is but a step. After all,
> the admission of this by Science would be only the admission of a natural
> cause, whether it would or would not stretch its belief to such
> metaphysical heights. But then Mahat, the Mind, is a “God,” and Physiology
> admits “mind” only as a temporary function of the material brain, and no
> more.
> 
> The Satan of Materialism now laughs at all alike, and denies the visible
> as well as the invisible. Seeing in light, heat, electricity, and even in
> the phenomenon of _life_, only properties inherent in Matter, it laughs
> whenever life is called the _Vital Principle_, and derides the idea of its
> being independent of and distinct from the organism.
> 
> But here again scientific opinions differ as in everything else, and there
> are several men of Science who accept views very similar to ours.
> Consider, for instance, what Dr. Richardson, F.R.S. (elsewhere quoted at
> length) says of that “Vital Principle,” which he calls “Nervous Ether”:
> 
>     I speak only of a veritable _material agent_, refined, it may be,
>     to the world at large, but _actual and substantial_: an agent
>     having quality of weight and of volume, an agent susceptible of
>     chemical combination, and thereby of change of physical state and
>     condition, an agent passive in its action, moved always, that is
>     to say, by influences apart from itself,(1037) obeying other
>     influences, an agent possessing no initiative power, no _vis_ or
>     _energeia naturæ_,(1038) but still playing a most important, if
>     not a primary part in the production of the phenomena resulting
>     from the action of the _energeia_ upon visible matter.(1039)
> 
> As Biology and Physiology now deny, _in toto_, the existence of a Vital
> Principle, this extract, together with De Quatrefages’ admission, is a
> clear confirmation that there are men of Science who take the same views
> about “things Occult” as do Theosophists and Occultists. These recognize a
> distinct Vital Principle independent of the organism—material, of course,
> _as physical Force cannot be divorced from Matter_, but of a Substance
> existing in a state unknown to Science. _Life for them is something more
> than the mere interaction of molecules and atoms._ There is a Vital
> Principle without which no molecular combinations could ever have resulted
> in a living organism, least of all in the so‐called “inorganic” Matter of
> our plane of consciousness.
> 
> By “molecular combinations” are meant, of course, those of the Matter of
> our present illusive perceptions, which Matter energizes only on this, our
> plane. And this is the chief point at issue.(1040)
> 
> Thus the Occultists are not alone in their beliefs. Nor are they so
> foolish, after all, in rejecting even the “gravity” of Modern Science
> along with other _physical_ laws, and in accepting instead _attraction_
> and _repulsion_. They see, moreover, in these two opposite Forces only the
> two _aspects_ of the Universal Unit, called _Manifesting Mind_; in which
> aspects, Occultism, through its great Seers, perceives an innumerable Host
> of operative Beings: cosmic Dhyân Chohans, Entities, whose essence, in its
> _dual_ nature, is the Cause of all terrestrial phenomena. For that essence
> is con‐substantial with the universal Electric Ocean, which is LIFE; and
> being dual, as said—positive and negative—it is the emanations of that
> duality that act now on Earth under the name of “modes of motion”; even
> Force having now become objectionable as a word, for fear it should lead
> someone, even in thought, to separate it from Matter! It is, as Occultism
> says, the dual _effects_ of that dual essence, which have now been called
> centripetal and centrifugal forces, now negative and positive poles, or
> polarity, heat and cold, light and darkness, etc.
> 
> And it is further maintained that even the Greek and Roman Catholic
> Christians are wiser in believing, as they do—even if blindly connecting
> and tracing them all to an anthropomorphic God—in Angels, Archangels,
> Archons, Seraphs, and Morning Stars, in all those theological _deliciæ
> humani generis_, in short, that rule the Cosmic Elements, than Science is,
> in disbelieving in them altogether, and in advocating its mechanical
> Forces. For these act very often with more than human intelligence and
> pertinency. Nevertheless, that intelligence is denied and attributed to
> blind chance. But, as De Maistre was right in calling the law of
> gravitation merely a _word_ which replaced “the thing unknown,” so are we
> right in applying the same remark to all the other Forces of Science. And
> if it is objected that the Count was an ardent Roman Catholic, then we may
> cite Le Couturier, as ardent a Materialist, who said the same thing, as
> did also Herschell and many others.(1041)
> 
> From Gods to men, from Worlds to atoms, from a Star to a rush‐light, from
> the Sun to the vital heat of the meanest organic being—the world of Form
> and Existence is an immense chain, the links of which are all connected.
> The Law of Analogy is the first key to the world‐problem, and these links
> have to be studied coördinately in their Occult relations to each other.
> 
> When, therefore, the Secret Doctrine—postulating that conditioned or
> limited space (location) has no real being except in this world of
> illusion, or, in other words, in our perceptive faculties—teaches that
> every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is interblended with our
> own objective world; that millions of things and beings are, in point of
> localization, around and _in_ us, as we are around, with, and in them;
> this is no mere metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature,
> however incomprehensible to our senses.
> 
> But one has to understand the phraseology of Occultism before criticizing
> what it asserts. For example, the Doctrine refuses—as Science does, in one
> sense—to use the words “above” and “below,” “higher” and “lower,” in
> reference to _invisible_ spheres, since here they are without meaning.
> Even the terms “East” and “West” are merely conventional, necessary only
> to aid our human perceptions. For though the Earth has its two fixed
> points in the poles, North and South, yet both East and West are variable
> relatively to our own position on the Earth’s surface, and in consequence
> of its rotation from West to East. Hence, when “other worlds” are
> mentioned—whether better or worse, more spiritual or still more material,
> though both invisible—the Occultist does not locate these spheres either
> outside or inside our Earth, as the theologians and the poets do; for
> their location is nowhere in the space known to, or conceived by, the
> profane. They are, as it were, blended with our world—interpenetrating it
> and interpenetrated by it. There are millions and millions of worlds and
> firmaments visible to us; there are still greater numbers beyond those
> visible to the telescope, and many of the latter kind do not belong to our
> _objective_ sphere of existence. Although as invisible as if they were
> millions of miles beyond our Solar System, they are yet with us, near us,
> _within_ our own world, as objective and material to their respective
> inhabitants as ours is to us. But, again, the relation of these worlds to
> ours is not that of a series of egg‐shaped boxes enclosed one within the
> other, like the toys called Chinese nests; each is entirely under its own
> special laws and conditions, having no direct relation to our sphere. The
> inhabitants of these, as already said, may be, for all we know, or feel,
> passing _through_ and _around_ us as if through empty space, their very
> habitations and countries being interblended with ours, though not
> disturbing our vision, because we have not yet the faculties necessary for
> discerning them. Yet by their spiritual sight the Adepts, and even some
> seers and sensitives, are always able to discern, whether in a greater or
> smaller degree, the presence and close proximity to us of Beings
> pertaining to other spheres of life. Those of the spiritually higher
> worlds communicate only with those terrestrial mortals who ascend to them,
> through individual efforts, on to the higher plane they are occupying.
> 
> _The sons of Bhûmi_ [Earth] _regard the Sons of Deva‐lokas_ [Angel‐
> spheres] _as their Gods; and the Sons of lower kingdoms look up to the men
> of Bhûmi as to their Devas_ [Gods]; _men remaining unaware of it in their
> blindness.... They_ [men] _tremble before them while using them_ [for
> magical purposes].... _The First Race of Men were the __“__Mind‐born
> Sons__”__ of the former. They_ [the Pitris and Devas] _are our
> progenitors_.(1042)
> 
> “Educated people,” so‐called, deride the idea of Sylphs, Salamanders,
> Undines, and Gnomes; the men of Science regard any mention of such
> superstitions as an insult; and with a contempt of logic and common good
> sense, that is often the prerogative of “accepted authority,” they allow
> those, whom it is their duty to instruct, to labour under the absurd
> impression that in the whole Kosmos, or at any rate in our own atmosphere,
> there are no other conscious, intelligent beings, save ourselves.(1043)
> Any other humanity (composed of distinct _human_ beings) save a mankind
> with two legs, two arms, and a head with man’s features on it, would not
> be called human; though the etymology of the word would seem to have
> little to do with the general appearance of a creature. Thus, while
> Science sternly rejects even the possibility of there being such (to us,
> generally) invisible creatures, Society, while believing in it all
> _secretly_, is made to deride the idea openly. It hails with mirth such
> works as the _Comte de Gabalis_, and fails to understand that _open satire
> is the securest mask_.
> 
> Nevertheless, such invisible worlds do exist. Inhabited as thickly as is
> our own, they are scattered throughout apparent Space in immense numbers;
> some far more material than our own world, others gradually etherealizing
> until they become formless and are as “breaths.” The fact that our
> physical eye does not see them, is no reason for disbelieving in them.
> Physicists cannot see their Ether, Atoms, “modes of motion,” or Forces.
> Yet they accept and teach them.
> 
> If we find, even in the natural world with which we are acquainted, Matter
> affording a partial analogy to the difficult conception of such invisible
> worlds, there seems little difficulty in recognizing the possibility of
> such a presence. The tail of a Comet, which, though attracting our
> attention by virtue of its luminosity, yet does not disturb or impede our
> vision of objects, which we perceive through and beyond it, affords the
> first stepping‐stone toward a proof of the same. The tail of a Comet
> passes rapidly across our horizon, and we should neither feel it, nor be
> cognizant of its passage, but for the brilliant coruscation, often
> perceived only by a few interested in the phenomenon, while everyone else
> remains ignorant of its presence and of its passage _through_, or across,
> a portion of our globe. This tail may, or may not, be an integral portion
> of the being of the Comet, but its tenuity subserves our purpose as an
> illustration. Indeed, it is no question of superstition, but simply a
> result of transcendental Science, and of logic still more, to admit the
> existence of worlds formed of even far more attenuated Matter than the
> tail of a Comet. By denying such a possibility, Science has for the last
> century played into the hands of neither Philosophy nor true Religion, but
> simply into those of Theology. To be able to dispute the better the
> plurality of even material worlds, a belief thought by many churchmen
> incompatible with the teachings and doctrines of the _Bible_,(1044)
> Maxwell had to calumniate the memory of Newton, and to try and convince
> his public that the principles contained in the Newtonian philosophy are
> those “which lie at the foundation of all atheistical systems.”(1045)
> 
> “Dr. Whewell disputed the plurality of worlds by appeal to scientific
> evidence,” writes Professor Winchell.(1046) And if even the habitability
> of physical worlds, of Planets, and distant Stars which shine in myriads
> over our heads is so disputed, how little chance is there for the
> acceptance of invisible worlds within the apparently transparent space of
> our own!
> 
> But, if we can conceive of a world composed of Matter still more
> attenuated to _our_ senses than the tail of a Comet, hence of inhabitants
> in it who are as ethereal, in proportion to _their_ Globe, as we are in
> comparison with _our_ rocky, hard‐crusted Earth, no wonder if we do not
> perceive them, nor sense their presence or even existence. Only, in what
> is the idea contrary to Science? Cannot men and animals, plants and rocks,
> be supposed to be endowed with quite a different set of senses from those
> we possess? Cannot their organisms be born, develop, and exist, under
> other laws of being than those that rule our little world? Is it
> absolutely necessary that every corporeal being should be clothed in
> “coats of skin” like those that Adam and Eve were provided with in the
> legend of Genesis? Corporeality, we are told, however, by more than one
> man of Science, “may exist under very divergent conditions.” Professor A.
> Winchell—arguing upon the plurality of worlds—makes the following remarks:
> 
>     It is not at all improbable that substances of a refractory nature
>     might be so mixed with other substances, known or unknown to us,
>     as to be capable of enduring vastly greater vicissitudes of heat
>     and cold than is possible with terrestrial organisms. The tissues
>     of terrestrial animals are simply suited to terrestrial
>     conditions. Yet even here we find different types and species of
>     animals adapted to the trials of extremely dissimilar
>     situations.... That an animal should be a quadruped or a biped is
>     something not depending on the necessities of organization, or
>     instinct, or intelligence. That an animal should possess just five
>     senses is not a necessity of percipient existence. There may be
>     animals on the earth with neither smell nor taste. There may be
>     beings on other worlds, and even on this, who possess more
>     numerous senses than we. The possibility of this is apparent when
>     we consider the high probability that other properties and other
>     modes of existence lie among the resources of the Cosmos, and even
>     of terrestrial matter. There are animals which subsist where
>     rational man would perish—in the soil, in the river, and the sea
>     ... [and why not _human_ beings of different organizations, in
>     such case?].... Nor is incorporated rational existence conditioned
>     on warm blood, nor on any temperature which does not change the
>     forms of matter of which the organism may be composed. There may
>     be intelligences corporealized after some concept not involving
>     the processes of injection, assimilation, and reproduction. Such
>     bodies would not require daily food and warmth. They might be lost
>     in the abysses of the ocean, or laid up on a stormy cliff through
>     the tempests of an Arctic winter, or plunged in a volcano for a
>     hundred years, and yet retain consciousness and thought. It is
>     conceivable. Why might not psychic natures be enshrined in
>     indestructible flint and platinum? These substances are no further
>     from the nature of intelligence than carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and
>     lime. But, not to carry the thought to such an extreme [?], might
>     not high intelligence be embodied in frames as indifferent to
>     external conditions as the sage of the western plains, or the
>     lichens of Labrador, the rotifers which remain dried for years, or
>     the bacteria which pass living through boiling water.... These
>     suggestions are made simply to remind the reader how little can be
>     argued respecting the necessary conditions of intelligent,
>     organized existence, from the standard of corporeal existence
>     found upon the earth. Intelligence is, from its nature, as
>     universal and as uniform as the laws of the universe. Bodies are
>     merely the local fitting of intelligence to particular
>     modifications of universal matter or force.(1047)
> 
> Do not we know through the discoveries of that same all‐denying Science
> that we are surrounded by myriads of invisible lives? If these microbes,
> bacteria and the _tutti quanti_ of the infinitesimally small, are
> invisible to us by virtue of their minuteness, cannot there be, at the
> other pole, beings as invisible owing to the quality of their texture or
> matter—to its tenuity, in fact? Conversely, as to the effects of cometary
> matter, have we not another example of a half visible form of Life and
> Matter? The ray of sunlight entering our apartment reveals in its passage
> myriads of tiny beings living their little life and ceasing to be,
> independent and heedless of whether they are or are not perceived by our
> grosser materiality. And so again, of the microbes and bacteria and such‐
> like unseen beings in other elements. We passed them by, during those long
> centuries of dreary ignorance, after the lamp of knowledge in the heathen
> and highly philosophical systems had ceased to throw its bright light on
> the ages of intolerance and bigotry of early Christianity; and we would
> fain pass them by again now.
> 
> And yet these lives surrounded us _then_ as they do now. They have worked
> on, obedient to their own laws, and it is only as they have been gradually
> revealed by Science that we have begun to take cognizance of them and of
> the effects produced by them.
> 
> How long has it taken the world to become what it now is? If it can be
> said that even up to the present day cosmic dust, “which has never
> belonged to the earth before,”(1048) reaches our Globe, how much more
> logical is it to believe—as the Occultists do—that through the countless
> millions of years that have rolled away since that dust aggregated and
> formed the Globe we live in round its nucleus of _intelligent_ Primeval
> Substance, many humanities—differing from our present mankind as greatly
> as the humanity which will evolve millions of years hence will differ from
> our races—appeared but to disappear from the face of the Earth, as will
> our own. These primitive and far‐distant humanities are denied, because,
> as Geologists think, they have left no tangible relics of themselves. All
> trace of them is swept away, and therefore they have never existed. Yet
> their relics—though very few of them, truly—are to be found, and they must
> be discovered by geological research. But, even if they were never to be
> met with, there would be no reason to say that no men could have ever
> lived in the geological periods to which their presence on earth is
> assigned. For their organisms needed no warm blood, no atmosphere, no
> feeding; the author of _World‐Life_ is right, and there is no extravagance
> in believing as we do, that as, on scientific hypotheses, there may be to
> this day “psychic natures enshrined in indestructible flint and platinum,”
> so there were psychic natures enshrined in forms of equally indestructible
> Primeval Matter—the real forefathers of our Fifth Race.
> 
> When, therefore, as in Volume II, we speak of men who inhabited this Globe
> 18,000,000 years ago, we have in mind neither the men of our present
> races, nor the present atmospheric laws, thermal conditions, etc. The
> Earth and Mankind, like the Sun, Moon, and Planets, all have their growth,
> changes, development, and gradual evolution in their life‐periods; they
> are born, become infants, then children, adolescent, grown‐up, they grow
> old, and finally die. Why should not Mankind be also under this universal
> law? Says Uriel to Enoch:
> 
>     Behold, I have showed thee all things, O Enoch.... Thou seest the
>     sun, the moon, and those which conduct the stars of heaven, which
>     cause all their operations, seasons, and arrivals to return. In
>     the days of sinners the years shall be shortened ... everything
>     done on earth shall be subverted ... the moon shall change its
>     laws.(1049)
> 
> The “days of sinners” meant the days when Matter would be in its full sway
> on Earth, and man would have reached the apex of physical development in
> stature and animality. That came to pass during the period of the
> Atlanteans, about the middle point of their Race, the Fourth, which was
> drowned, as prophesied by Uriel. Since then man has been decreasing in
> physical stature, strength, and years, as will be shown in Volume II. But
> as we are at the mid‐point of our sub‐race of the Fifth Root‐Race—the acme
> of materiality in each—the animal propensities, though more refined, are
> none the less developed; and this is most marked in civilized countries.
> 
> Section XIV. Gods, Monads and Atoms.
> 
> Some years ago we remarked that:
> 
>     The Esoteric Doctrine may well be called ... the “Thread
>     Doctrine,” since, like Sûtrâtmâ [in the Vedânta Philosophy](1050),
>     it passes through and strings together all the ancient
>     philosophical religious systems, and ... reconciles and explains
>     them.(1051)
> 
> We now say it does more. It not only reconciles the various and apparently
> conflicting systems, but it checks the discoveries of modern exact
> Science, showing some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are
> found corroborated in the Ancient Records. All this will, no doubt, be
> regarded as terribly impertinent and disrespectful, a veritable crime of
> _lèse‐science_; nevertheless, it is a fact.
> 
> Science is, undeniably, ultra‐materialistic in our days; but it finds, in
> one sense, its justification. Nature behaving ever esoterically _in actu_,
> and being, as the Kabalists say, _in abscondito_, can only be judged by
> the profane through her appearance, and that appearance is always
> deceitful on the physical plane. On the other hand, the Naturalists refuse
> to blend Physics with Metaphysics, the Body with its informing Soul and
> Spirit. They prefer to ignore the latter. This is a matter of choice with
> some, while the minority very sensibly strive to enlarge the domain of
> Physical Science by trespassing on the forbidden grounds of Metaphysics,
> so distasteful to some Materialists. These Scientists are wise in their
> generation. For all their wonderful discoveries will go for nothing, and
> remain for ever _headless_ bodies, unless they lift the veil of Matter and
> strain their eyes to see _beyond_. Now that they have studied Nature in
> the length, breadth, and thickness of her physical frame, it is time to
> remove the skeleton to the second plane, and search within the unknown
> depths for the living and real entity, for its _sub_‐stance—the noumenon
> of evanescent Matter.
> 
> It is only by acting along such lines that some truths, now called
> “exploded superstitions,” will be discovered to be facts, and the relics
> of ancient knowledge and wisdom.
> 
> One of such “degrading” beliefs—degrading in the opinion of the all‐
> denying Sceptic—is found in the idea that Kosmos, besides its objective
> planetary inhabitants, its humanities in other inhabited worlds, is full
> of invisible, intelligent _Existences_. The so‐called Arch‐Angels, Angels
> and Spirits, of the West, copies of their prototypes, the Dhyân Chohans,
> the Devas and Pitris, of the East, are not real Beings, but fictions. On
> this point materialistic Science is inexorable. To support its position,
> it upsets its own axiomatic law of uniformity and of continuity in the
> laws of Nature, and all the logical sequence of analogies in the evolution
> of Being. The masses of the profane are asked, and are made to believe
> that the accumulated testimony of History—which shows even the “Atheists”
> of old, such men as Epicurus and Democritus, as believers in _Gods_—is
> false; and that Philosophers like Socrates and Plato, asserting such
> existences, were mistaken enthusiasts and fools. If we hold our opinions
> merely on historical grounds, on the authority of legions of the most
> eminent Sages, Neo‐Platonists, and Mystics in all ages, from Pythagoras
> down to the eminent Scientists and Professors of the present century, who,
> if they reject “Gods,” believe in “Spirits,” are we to consider such
> authorities to be as weak‐minded and foolish as any Roman Catholic
> peasant, who believes in and prays to his once human Saint, or the
> Archangel St. Michael? But is there no difference between the belief of
> the peasant and that of the Western heirs of the Rosicrucians and
> Alchemists of the Middle Ages? Is it the Van Helmonts, the Khunraths, the
> Paracelsuses and Agrippas, from Roger Bacon down to St. Germain, who were
> all blind enthusiasts, hysteriacs or cheats, or is it the handful of
> modern Sceptics—the “leaders of thought”—who are struck with the cecity of
> negation? The latter is the case, we opine. It would indeed be a
> _miracle_, quite an abnormal fact in the realm of probabilities and logic,
> were that handful of negators to be the sole custodians of _truth_, while
> the million‐strong hosts of believers in Gods, Angels, and Spirits—in
> Europe and America alone—namely, Greek and Latin Christians, Theosophists,
> Spiritualists, Mystics, etc., should be no better than deluded fanatics
> and hallucinated mediums, and often no higher than the victims of
> deceivers and impostors! However varying in their external presentations
> and dogmas, beliefs in the Hosts of invisible Intelligences of various
> grades have all the same foundation. Truth and error are mixed in all. The
> exact extent, depth, breadth, and length of the mysteries of Nature are to
> be found only in Eastern Esoteric Science. So vast and so profound are
> these that scarcely even a few, a very few of the highest Initiates—those
> _whose very existence is known but to a small number of Adepts_—are
> capable of assimilating the knowledge. Yet it is all there, and one by one
> facts and processes in Nature’s workshops are permitted to find their way
> into exact Science, while mysterious help is given to rare individuals in
> unravelling its arcana. It is at the close of great Cycles, in connection
> with racial development, that such events generally take place. We are at
> the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Âryan Kali Yuga;
> and between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil
> of Nature, and materialistic Science will receive a death‐blow.
> 
> Without throwing any discredit upon time‐honoured beliefs, in any
> direction, we are forced to draw a marked line between blind faith,
> evolved by theologies, and knowledge due to the independent researches of
> long generations of Adepts; between, in short, faith and Philosophy. There
> have been, in all ages, undeniably learned and good men who, having been
> reared in sectarian beliefs, died in their crystallized convictions. For
> Protestants, the garden of Eden is the primeval point of departure in the
> drama of Humanity, and the solemn tragedy on the summit of Calvary is the
> prelude to the hoped‐for Millennium. For Roman Catholics, Satan is at the
> foundation of Kosmos, Christ in its centre, and Antichrist at its apex.
> For both, the Hierarchy of Being begins and ends within the narrow frames
> of their respective theologies: one self‐created _personal_ God, and an
> empyrean ringing with the Hallelujas of _created_ Angels; the rest,
> _false_ Gods, Satan and fiends.
> 
> Theo‐Philosophy proceeds on broader lines. From the very beginning of
> æons—in time and space in our Round and Globe—the mysteries of Nature (at
> any rate, those which it is lawful for our Races to know) were recorded by
> the pupils of those same, now invisible, “Heavenly Men,” in geometrical
> figures and symbols. The keys thereto passed from one generation of “Wise
> Men” to another. Some of the symbols thus passed from the East to the
> West, brought from the Orient by Pythagoras, who was not the inventor of
> his famous “Triangle.” The latter figure, along with the square and
> circle, are more eloquent and scientific descriptions of the order of the
> evolution of the Universe, spiritual and psychic, as well as physical,
> than volumes of descriptive Cosmogonies and revealed “Geneses.” The ten
> Points inscribed within that “Pythagorean Triangle” are worth all the
> theogonies and angelologies ever emanated from the theological brain. For
> he who interprets these seventeen points (the seven Mathematical Points
> hidden)—on their very face, and in the order given—will find in them the
> uninterrupted series of the genealogies from the first Heavenly to
> Terrestrial Man. And, as they give the order of Beings, so they reveal the
> order in which were evolved the Kosmos, our Earth, and the primordial
> Elements by which the latter was generated. Begotten in the invisible
> “Depths,” and in the Womb of the same “Mother” as its fellow‐globes—he who
> masters the mysteries of our own Earth will have mastered those of all
> others.
> 
> Whatever ignorance, pride or fanaticism may suggest to the contrary,
> Esoteric Cosmology can be shown to be inseparably connected with both
> Philosophy and Modern Science. The Gods and Monads of the Ancients—from
> Pythagoras down to Leibnitz—and the Atoms of the present materialistic
> schools (as borrowed by them from the theories of the old Greek Atomists)
> are only a compound unit, or a graduated unity like the human frame, which
> begins with body and ends with Spirit. In the Occult Sciences they can be
> studied separately, but they can never be mastered unless they are viewed
> in their mutual correlations during their life‐cycle, and as a Universal
> Unity during Pralayas.
> 
> La Pluche shows sincerity, but gives a poor idea of his philosophical
> capacities, when declaring his personal views on the Monad or the
> Mathematical Point. He says:
> 
>     A point is enough to put all the schools in the world in a
>     combustion. But what need has man to know that point, since the
>     creation of such a small being is beyond his power? _À fortiori_,
>     philosophy acts against probability when, from that point which
>     absorbs and disconcerts all her meditations, she presumes to pass
>     on to the generation of the world.
> 
> Philosophy, however, could never have formed its conception of a logical,
> universal, and absolute Deity, if it had had no Mathematical Point within
> the Circle upon which to base its speculations. It is only the manifested
> Point, lost to our senses after its pregenetic appearance in the
> infinitude and incognizability of the Circle, that makes a reconciliation
> between Philosophy and Theology possible—on condition that the latter
> should abandon its crude materialistic dogmas. And it is because Christian
> theology has so unwisely rejected the Pythagorean Monad and geometrical
> figures, that it has evolved its self‐created human and personal God, the
> monstrous Head whence flow in two streams the dogmas of Salvation and
> Damnation. This is so true, that even those clergymen who are Masons, and
> who would be Philosophers, have, in their arbitrary interpretations,
> fathered upon the Ancient Sages the queer idea that:
> 
>     The Monad represented [with them] the throne of the Omnipotent
>     Deity, placed in the centre of the empyrean to indicate
>     T.G.A.O.T.U. [_read_ the “Great Architect of the Universe”].(1052)
> 
> A curious explanation this, more Masonic than strictly Pythagorean.
> 
> Nor did the “Hierogram within a Circle, or equilateral Triangle,” ever
> mean “the exemplification of the unity of the divine Essence”; for this
> was exemplified by the plane of the boundless Circle. What it really meant
> was the triune coëqual Nature of the first differentiated Substance, or
> the con‐substantiality of the (manifested) Spirit, Matter and the
> Universe—their “Son”—which proceeds from the Point, the real, Esoteric
> Logos, or Pythagorean Monad. For the Greek Monas signifies “Unity” in its
> primary sense. Those unable to seize the difference between the Monad—the
> Universal Unit—and the Monads or the manifested Unity, as also between the
> ever‐hidden and the revealed Logos, or the Word, ought never to meddle
> with Philosophy, let alone with the Esoteric Sciences. It is needless to
> remind the educated reader of Kant’s Thesis to demonstrate his second
> Antinomy.(1053) Those who have read and understood it will see clearly the
> line we draw between the _absolutely ideal_ Universe and the invisible
> though manifested Kosmos. Our Gods and Monads are not the Elements of
> extension itself, but only those of the invisible Reality which is the
> basis of the manifested Kosmos. Neither Esoteric Philosophy, nor Kant, to
> say nothing of Leibnitz, would ever admit that extension can be composed
> of simple or unextended parts. But theologian‐philosophers will not grasp
> this. The Circle and the Point—the latter retiring into and merging with
> the former, after having emanated the first three Points and connected
> them with lines, thus forming the first noumenal basis of the Second
> Triangle in the Manifested World—have ever been an insuperable obstacle to
> theological flights into dogmatic empyreans. On the authority of this
> Archaic Symbol, a male, personal God, the Creator and Father of all,
> becomes a third‐rate emanation, the Sephira standing fourth in descent,
> and on the left hand of Ain Suph, in the Kabalistic Tree of Life. Hence,
> the Monad is degraded into a Vehicle—a “Throne”!
> 
> The Monad—the emanation and reflection only of the Point, or Logos, in the
> phenomenal World—becomes, as the apex of the manifested equilateral
> Triangle, the “Father.” The left side or line is the Duad, the “Mother,”
> regarded as the evil, counteracting principle;(1054) the right side
> represents the “Son,” “his Mother’s Husband” in _every_ Cosmogony, as
> being one with the apex; the base line is the universal plane of
> productive Nature, unifying on the phenomenal plane Father‐Mother‐Son, as
> these were unified in the apex, in the supersensuous World.(1055) By
> mystic transmutation they became the Quaternary—the Triangle became the
> Tetraktys.
> 
> This transcendental application of geometry to cosmic and divine
> theogony—the Alpha and the Omega of mystical conception—was dwarfed after
> Pythagoras by Aristotle. By omitting the Point and the Circle, and taking
> no account of the apex, he reduced the metaphysical value of the idea, and
> thus limited the doctrine of magnitude to a simple Triad—the _line_, the
> _surface_, and the _body_. His modern heirs, who play at Idealism, have
> interpreted these three geometrical figures as Space, Force, and
> Matter—“the potencies of an interacting Unity.” Materialistic Science,
> perceiving but the base line of the _manifested_ Triangle—the plane of
> Matter—translates it practically as (Father)‐_Matter_, (Mother)‐_Matter_,
> and (Son)‐_Matter_, and theoretically as Matter, Force, and Correlation.
> 
> But to the average Physicist, as remarked by a Kabalist:
> 
>     Space, and Force, and Matter, are what signs in Algebra are to the
>     Mathematician, merely conventional symbols, or Force as Force, and
>     Matter as Matter, are as absolutely unknowable as is the assumed
>     empty space in which they are held to interact.(1056)
> 
> Symbols represent abstractions, and on these
> 
>     The physicist bases reasoned hypotheses of the origin of things
>     ... he sees three needs in what he terms creation: A place wherein
>     to create. A medium by which to create. A material from which to
>     create. And in giving a logical expression to this hypothesis
>     through the terms space, force, matter, he believes he has proved
>     the existence of that which each of these represents as he
>     conceives it to be.(1057)
> 
> The Physicist who regards Space merely as a representation of our mind, or
> extension unrelated to things in it, which Locke defined as capable of
> neither resistance nor motion; the paradoxical Materialist, who would have
> a _void_ there, where he can see no Matter, would reject with the utmost
> contempt the proposition that Space is
> 
>     A substantial though [apparently an absolutely] unknowable living
>     Entity.(1058)
> 
> Such is, nevertheless, the Kabalistic teaching, and it is that of Archaic
> Philosophy. Space is the _real_ World, while our world is an artificial
> one. It is the One Unity throughout its infinitude: in its bottomless
> depths as on its illusive surface; a surface studded with countless
> phenomenal Universes, Systems and mirage‐like Worlds. Nevertheless, to the
> Eastern Occultist, who is an objective Idealist at bottom, in the _real_
> World, which is a Unity of Forces, there is “a connection of all Matter in
> the Plenum,” as Leibnitz would say. This is symbolized in the Pythagorean
> Triangle.
> 
> It consists of Ten Points inscribed pyramid‐like (from one to four) within
> its three sides, and it symbolizes the Universe in the famous Pythagorean
> Decad. The upper single point is a Monad, and represents a Unit‐Point,
> which is _the_ Unity whence all proceeds. All is of the same essence with
> it. While the ten points within the equilateral Triangle represent the
> phenomenal world, the three sides enclosing the pyramid of points are the
> barriers of _noumenal_ Matter, or Substance, that separate it from the
> world of Thought.
> 
>     Pythagoras considered a _point_ to correspond in proportion to
>     unity; a _line_ to 2; a _superfice_ to 3; a _solid_ to 4; and he
>     defined a point as a monad having position, and the beginning of
>     all things; a line was thought to correspond with duality, because
>     it was produced by the first motion from indivisible nature, and
>     formed the junction of two points. A superfice was compared to the
>     number three because it is the first of all causes that are found
>     in figures; for a circle, which is the principal of all round
>     figures, comprises a triad, in centre—space—circumference. But a
>     triangle, which is the first of all rectilineal figures, is
>     included in a ternary, and receives its form according to that
>     number; and was considered by the Pythagoreans to be the author of
>     all sublunary things. The four points at the base of the
>     Pythagorean triangle correspond with a solid or cube, which
>     combines the principles of length, breadth, and thickness, for no
>     solid can have less than four extreme boundary points.(1059)
> 
> It is argued that “the human mind cannot conceive an indivisible unit
> short of the annihilation of the idea with its subject.” This is an error,
> as the Pythagoreans have proved, and a number of Seers before them,
> although there is a special training needed for the conception, and
> although the profane mind can hardly grasp it. But there are such things
> as “_Meta‐mathematics_” and “_Meta‐geometry_.” Even Mathematics pure and
> simple proceed from the universal to the particular, from the mathematical
> indivisible point to solid figures. The teaching originated in India, and
> was taught in Europe by Pythagoras, who, throwing a veil over the Circle
> and the Point—which no living man can define except as incomprehensible
> abstractions—laid the origin of the differentiated cosmic Matter in the
> base of the Triangle. Thus the latter became the earliest of geometrical
> figures. The author of _New Aspects of Life_, dealing with the Kabalistic
> Mysteries, objects to the objectivization, so to speak, of the Pythagorean
> conception and the use of the equilateral triangle, and calls it a
> “misnomer.” His argument that a solid equilateral body—
> 
>     One whose base, as well as each of its sides, form equal
>     triangles—must have four co‐equal sides or surfaces, while a
>     triangular plane will as necessarily possess five,(1060)
> 
> —demonstrates on the contrary the grandeur of the conception in all its
> Esoteric application to the idea of the _pregenesis_, and the genesis of
> Kosmos. Granted, that an ideal Triangle, depicted by mathematical,
> imaginary lines,
> 
>     Can have no sides at all, being simply a phantom of the mind to
>     which, if sides be imputed, these must be the sides of the object
>     it constructively represents.(1061)
> 
> But in such case most of the scientific hypotheses are no better than
> “phantoms of the mind”; they are unverifiable, except on inference, and
> have been adopted merely to answer scientific necessities. Furthermore,
> the ideal Triangle—“as the abstract idea of a triangular body, and,
> therefore, as the type of an abstract idea”—accomplished and carried out
> to perfection the double symbolism intended. As an emblem applicable to
> the objective idea, the simple triangle became a solid. When repeated in
> stone, facing the four cardinal points, it assumed the shape of the
> Pyramid—the symbol of the phenomenal merging into the noumenal Universe of
> thought, at the apex of the four triangles; and, as an “imaginary figure
> constructed of three mathematical lines,” it symbolized the subjective
> spheres—these lines “enclosing a mathematical space—which is equal to
> nothing enclosing nothing.” And this because, to the senses and the
> untrained consciousness of the Profane and the Scientist, everything
> beyond the line of differentiated Matter—_i.e._, outside of, and beyond
> the realm of even the most Spiritual _Substance_—has to remain for ever
> _equal to nothing_. It is the Ain Suph—the _No Thing_.
> 
> Yet these “phantoms of the mind” are in truth no greater abstractions than
> the abstract ideas in general as to evolution and physical
> development—_e.g._, Gravity, Matter, Force, etc.—on which the exact
> Sciences are based. Our most eminent Chemists and Physicists are earnestly
> pursuing the not hopeless attempt of finally tracing to its hiding‐place
> the Protyle, or the basic line of the Pythagorean Triangle. The latter is,
> as we have said, the grandest conception imaginable, for it symbolizes
> both the ideal and the visible universes.(1062) For if
> 
>     _The possible unit is only a possibility as an actuality of
>     nature, as an individual of any kind_, [and as] every individual
>     natural object is capable of division, and by division loses its
>     unity, or ceases to be a unit,(1063)
> 
> this is true only of the realm of exact Science in a world as deceptive as
> it is illusive. In the realm of Esoteric Science the Unit divided _ad
> infinitum_, instead of losing its unity, approaches with every division
> the planes of the only eternal REALITY. The eye of the Seer can follow it
> and behold it in all its pregenetic glory. This same idea of the reality
> of the subjective, and the unreality of the objective Universe, is found
> at the bottom of the Pythagorean and Platonic Teachings—limited to the
> Elect alone; for Porphyry, speaking of the Monad and the Duad, says that
> the former only was considered substantial and real, “that most simple
> Being, the cause of all unity and the measure of all things.”
> 
> But the Duad, although the origin of Evil, or Matter—hence _unreal_ in
> Philosophy—is still Substance during Manvantara, and is often called the
> Third Monad, in Occultism, and the connecting line as between two Points,
> or Numbers, which proceeded from THAT, “which was before all Numbers,” as
> expressed by Rabbi Barahiel. And from this Duad proceeded all the
> Scintillas of the three Upper and the four Lower Worlds or Planes—which
> are in constant interaction and correspondence. This is a teaching which
> the Kabalah has in common with Eastern Occultism. For in the Occult
> Philosophy there is the “ONE Cause” and the “Primal Cause,” the latter
> thus becoming, paradoxically, the Second, as is clearly expressed by the
> author of the _Qabbalah, from the Philosophical Writings of Ibn Gabirol_,
> who says:
> 
>     In the treatment of the Primal Cause, two things must be
>     considered, the Primal Cause _per se_, and the relation and
>     connection of the Primal Cause with the visible and unseen
>     universe.(1064)
> 
> Thus he shows the early Hebrews, as the later Arabians, following in the
> steps of the Oriental Philosophy, such as the Chaldean, Persian, Hindû,
> etc. Their Primal Cause was designated at first,
> 
>     By the triadic שדי Shaddaï, the [triune] Almighty, subsequently by
>     the Tetragrammaton, יהוה, YHVH symbol of the Past, Present, and
>     Future,(1065)
> 
> and, let us add, of the eternal IS, or the I AM. Moreover, in the Kabalah
> the name YHVH (or Jehovah) expresses a He and a She, male and female, two
> in one, or Chokmah and Binah, and his, or rather their Shekinah or
> synthesizing Spirit (or Grace), which again makes of the Duad a Triad.
> This is demonstrated in the Jewish Liturgy for Pentecost, and the prayer:
> 
>     “In the name of Unity, of the Holy and Blessed Hû [He], and His
>     She’keenah, the Hidden and Concealed Hû, blessed be YHVH [the
>     Quaternary] for ever.” Hû is said to be masculine and YaH
>     feminine, together they make the יהוה אחד _i.e._, one YHVH. One,
>     but of a male‐female nature. The She’keenah is always considered
>     in the Qabbalah as feminine.(1066)
> 
> And so it is considered in the exoteric _Purânas_, for Shekinah is no more
> than Shakti—the female double of any God—in such case. And so it was with
> the early Christians, whose Holy Spirit was feminine, as Sophia was with
> the Gnostics. But in the transcendental Chaldean Kabalah, or _Book of
> Numbers_, Shekinah is sexless, and the purest abstraction, a state, like
> Nirvâna, neither subject nor object, nor anything except an absolute
> PRESENCE.
> 
> Thus it is only in the anthropomorphized systems—such as the Kabalah has
> now for the most part become—that Shekinah‐Shakti is feminine. As such she
> becomes the Duad of Pythagoras, the two straight lines which can form no
> geometrical figure and are the symbol of Matter. Out of this Duad, when
> united in the basic line of the Triangle on the lower plane (the upper
> Triangle of the Sephirothal Tree), emerge the Elohim, or Deity in Cosmic
> Nature, with the true Kabalists the _lowest_ designation, translated in
> the _Bible_ “God.”(1067) Out of these (the Elohim) issue the Scintillas.
> 
> The Scintillas are the “Souls,” and these Souls appear in the three‐fold
> form of Monads (Units), Atoms and Gods—according to our Teaching. As says
> the _Esoteric Catechism_:
> 
> _Every Atom becomes a visible complex unit_ [a molecule], _and once
> attracted into the sphere of terrestrial activity, the Monadic Essence,
> passing through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, becomes man_.
> 
> Again:
> 
> _God, Monad, and Atom are the correspondences of Spirit, Mind, and Body_
> [Âtmâ, Manas, and Sthûla Sharîra] _in man_.
> 
> In their septenary aggregation they are the “Heavenly Man,” in the
> Kabalistic sense; thus, terrestrial man is the provisional reflection of
> the Heavenly. Once again:
> 
> _The Monads_ [Jîvas] _are the Souls of the Atoms; both are the fabric in
> which the Chohans_ [Dhyânîs, Gods] _clothe themselves when a form is
> needed_.
> 
> This relates to cosmic and sub‐planetary Monads, not to the super‐cosmic
> Monads, the Pythagorean Monad, as it is called, in its synthetic
> character, by the Pantheistical Peripatetics. The Monads of the present
> dissertation are treated, from the standpoint of their individuality, as
> _Atomic Souls_, before these Atoms descend into pure terrestrial form. For
> this descent into _concrete_ Matter marks the medial point of their own
> individual pilgrimage. Here, losing in the mineral kingdom their
> individuality, they begin to ascend through the seven states of
> terrestrial evolution to that point where a correspondence is firmly
> established between the human and Deva (divine) consciousness. At present,
> however, we are not concerned with their terrestrial metamorphoses and
> tribulations, but with their life and behaviour in Space, on planes
> wherein the eye of the most intuitional Chemist and Physicist cannot reach
> them—unless, indeed, he develops in himself highly clairvoyant faculties.
> 
> It is well known that Leibnitz came very near the truth several times, but
> he defined Monadic Evolution incorrectly, a thing not to be wondered at,
> since he was not an Initiate, nor even a Mystic, but only a very
> intuitional Philosopher. Yet no Psycho‐physicist ever came nearer than has
> he to the Esoteric general outline of evolution. This evolution—viewed
> from its several standpoints, _i.e._, as the _Universal_ and the
> _Individualized_ Monad, and the chief aspects of the Evolving Energy after
> differentiation, the purely Spiritual, the Intellectual, the Psychic and
> the Physical—may be thus formulated as an invariable law: a descent of
> Spirit into Matter, equivalent to an ascent in physical evolution; a
> reäscent from the depths of materiality towards its _status quo ante_,
> with a corresponding dissipation of concrete form and substance up to the
> Laya‐state, or what Science calls the “zero‐point,” and beyond.
> 
> These states—once the spirit of Esoteric Philosophy is grasped—become
> absolutely necessary from simple logical and analogical considerations.
> Physical Science having now ascertained, through its department of
> Chemistry, the invariable law of this evolution of Atoms—from their
> “protylean” state down to that of a physical and then a chemical particle,
> or molecule—cannot well reject these states as a general law. And once it
> is forced by its enemies—Metaphysics and Psychology(1068)—out of its
> alleged impregnable strongholds, it will find it more difficult than it
> now appears to refuse room in the Spaces of SPACE to Planetary Spirits
> (Gods), Elementals, and even the Elementary Spooks or Ghosts, and others.
> Already Figuier and Paul D’Assier, two Positivists and Materialists, have
> succumbed before this logical necessity. Other and still greater
> Scientists will follow in that intellectual “Fall.” They will be driven
> out of their position not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other
> physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous _gaps_ and
> _chasms_ that open daily and will still be opening before them, as one
> discovery follows the other, until they are finally knocked off their feet
> by the ninth wave of simple common sense.
> 
> We may take as an example, Mr. W. Crookes’ latest discovery of what he has
> named Protyle. In the _Notes on the Bhagavad Gîtâ_, by one of the best
> metaphysicians and Vedântic scholars in India, the lecturer, referring
> cautiously to “things Occult” in that great Indian Esoteric work, makes a
> remark as suggestive as it is strictly correct. He says:
> 
>     Into the details of the evolution of the solar system itself, it
>     is not necessary for me to enter. You may gather some idea _as to
>     the way_ in which the various elements start into existence from
>     these three principles into which Mûlaprakriti [the Pythagorean
>     Triangle] is differentiated, by examining the lecture delivered by
>     Professor Crookes a short time ago upon the so‐called elements of
>     modern chemistry. This lecture will give you some idea of the way
>     in which these so‐called elements spring from Vishvânara,(1069)
>     the most objective of these three principles, which seems to stand
>     in the place of the _protyle_ mentioned in that lecture. Except in
>     a few particulars, this lecture seems to give the outlines of the
>     theory of physical evolution on the plane of Vishvânara, and is,
>     so far as I know, the nearest approach made by modern
>     investigators to the real occult theory on the subject.(1070)
> 
> These words will be reëchoed and approved by every Eastern Occultist. Much
> from the lectures by Mr. Crookes has already been quoted in Section XI. A
> second lecture has been delivered by him, as remarkable as the first, on
> the “Genesis of the Elements,”(1071) and also a third one. Here we have
> almost a corroboration of the teachings of Esoteric Philosophy concerning
> the mode of primeval evolution. It is, indeed, as near an approach, made
> by a great scholar and specialist in Chemistry,(1072) to the Secret
> Doctrine, as could be made apart from the application of the Monads and
> Atoms to the dogmas of pure transcendental Metaphysics, and their
> connection and correlation with “Gods and intelligent conscious Monads.”
> But Chemistry is now on its ascending plane, thanks to one of its highest
> European representatives. It is impossible for it to go back to that day
> when Materialism regarded its _sub_‐elements as absolutely simple and
> homogeneous bodies, which it had raised, in its blindness, to the rank of
> Elements. The mask has been snatched off by too clever a hand for there to
> be any fear of a new disguise. And after years of pseudology, of bastard
> molecules parading under the name of Elements, behind and beyond which
> there could be nought but void, a great professor of Chemistry asks once
> more:
> 
>     What are these elements, whence do they come, what is their
>     signification?... These elements perplex us in our researches,
>     baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams.
>     They stretch like an unknown sea before us—mocking, mystifying,
>     and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities.(1073)
> 
> Those who are heirs to primeval revelations have taught these
> “possibilities” in every century, but have never found a fair hearing. The
> truths inspired into Kepler, Leibnitz, Gassendi, Swedenborg, etc., were
> ever alloyed with their own speculations in one or another predetermined
> direction—hence were distorted. But now one of the great truths has dawned
> upon an eminent professor of exact Modern Science, and he fearlessly
> proclaims as a fundamental axiom that Science has not made itself
> acquainted, so far, with real simple Elements. For Mr. Crookes tells his
> audience:
> 
>     If I venture to say that our commonly received elements are not
>     simple and primordial, that they have _not_ arisen by chance or
>     have _not_ been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but
>     have been evolved from simpler matters—or perhaps, indeed, from
>     one sole kind of matter—I do but give formal utterance to an idea
>     which has been, so to speak, for some time “in the air” of
>     science. Chemists, physicists, philosophers of the highest merit,
>     declare explicitly their belief that the seventy (or thereabouts)
>     elements of our text‐books are not the pillars of Hercules which
>     we must never hope to pass.... Philosophers in the present as in
>     the past—men who certainly have not worked in the laboratory—have
>     reached the same view from another side. Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer
>     records his conviction that “the chemical atoms are produced from
>     the true or physical atoms by processes of evolution under
>     conditions which chemistry has not yet been able to produce.”...
>     And the poet has forestalled the philosopher. Milton (_Paradise
>     Lost_, Book V.) makes the Archangel Raphael say to Adam instinct
>     with the evolutionary idea, that the Almighty had created
> 
>     ... “One first matter, all
>     Indued with various forms, various degrees
>     Of substance.”
> 
> Nevertheless, the idea would have remained crystallized “in the air of
> Science,” and would not have descended into the thick atmosphere of
> Materialism and profane mortals for years to come, perhaps, had not Mr.
> Crookes bravely and fearlessly reduced it to its simple constituents, and
> thus publicly forced it on scientific notice. Says Plutarch:
> 
>     An idea is a Being incorporeal, which has no subsistence by
>     itself, but gives figure and form unto shapeless matter, and
>     becomes the cause of the manifestation.(1074)
> 
> The revolution produced in old Chemistry by Avogadro was the first page in
> the volume of “New Chemistry.” Mr. Crookes has now turned the second page,
> and is boldly pointing _to what may be the last_. For Protyle once
> accepted and recognized—as invisible Ether was, both being logical and
> scientific necessities—Chemistry will have virtually ceased to live: it
> will reäppear in its reïncarnation as—“New Alchemy,” or “Meta‐chemistry.”
> The discoverer of radiant matter will have vindicated in time the Archaic
> Âryan works on Occultism, and even the _Vedas_ and _Purânas_. For what are
> the manifested “Mother,” the “Father‐Son‐Husband” (Aditi and Daksha, a
> form of Brahmâ, as Creators), and the “Son”—the three “First‐born”—but
> simply Hydrogen, Oxygen, and that which in its terrestrial manifestation
> is called Nitrogen. Even the exoteric descriptions of the “First‐born”
> Triad give all the characteristics of these three “gases.” Priestley, the
> “discoverer” of Oxygen, or of that which was known in the highest
> antiquity!
> 
> Yet all the ancient, mediæval, and modern Poets and Philosophers have been
> anticipated even in the exoteric Hindû books as to the Elemental Vortices
> inaugurated by the Universal Mind—Descartes’ “Plenum” of Matter
> differentiated into particles; Leibnitz’s “ethereal fluid”; and Kant’s
> “primitive fluid” dissolved into its elements; Kepler’s solar vortex and
> systemic vortices; in short, through Anaxagoras, down to Galileo,
> Torricelli, and Swedenborg, and after them to the latest speculations by
> European Mystics—all this is found in the Hindû Hymns, or Mantras, to the
> “Gods, Monads and Atoms,” in their Fulness, for they are inseparable. In
> Esoteric Teachings, the most transcendental conceptions of the Universe
> and its mysteries, as also the most seemingly materialistic speculations,
> are found reconciled, because these Sciences embrace the whole scope of
> evolution from Spirit to Matter. As declared by an American Theosophist:
> 
>     The Monads [of Leibnitz] may from one point of view be called
>     _force_, from another _matter_. To Occult Science, _force_ and
>     _matter_ are only two sides of the same substance.(1075)
> 
> Let the reader remember these “Monads” of Leibnitz, every one of which is
> a living mirror of the Universe, every Monad reflecting every other, and
> compare this view and definition with certain Sanskrit Shlokas translated
> by Sir William Jones, in which it is said that the creative source of the
> Divine Mind,
> 
>     Hidden in a veil of thick darkness, formed mirrors of the atoms of
>     the world, and cast reflection from its own face on every atom.
> 
> When, therefore, Mr. Crookes declares that:
> 
>     If we can show how the so‐called chemical elements might have been
>     generated we shall be able to fill up a formidable gap in our
>     knowledge of the universe,
> 
> the answer is ready. The theoretical knowledge is contained in the
> Esoteric meaning of every Hindû cosmogony in the _Purânas_; the practical
> demonstration thereof—is in the hands of those who will not be recognized
> in _this_ century, save by the very few. The scientific possibilities of
> various discoveries, that must inexorably lead exact Science into the
> acceptation of Eastern Occult views, which contain all the requisite
> material for the filling of those “gaps,” are, so far, at the mercy of
> Modern Materialism. It is only by working in the direction taken by Mr.
> William Crookes that there is any hope for the recognition of a few,
> hitherto Occult, truths.
> 
> Meanwhile, any one thirsting to have a glimpse at a practical diagram of
> the evolution of primordial Matter—which, separating and differentiating
> under the impulse of cyclic law, divides itself on a general view into a
> septenary gradation of _Substance_—can do no better than examine the
> plates attached to Mr. Crookes’ lecture, _Genesis of the Elements_, and
> ponder well over some passages of the text. In one place he says:
> 
>     Our notions of a chemical element have expanded. Hitherto the
>     molecule has been regarded as an aggregate of two or more atoms,
>     and no account has been taken of the architectural design on which
>     these atoms have been joined. We may consider that the structure
>     of a chemical element is more complicated than has hitherto been
>     supposed. Between the molecules we are accustomed to deal with in
>     chemical reactions and ultimate atoms as first created, come
>     smaller molecules or aggregates of physical atoms; these sub‐
>     molecules differ one from the other, according to the position
>     they occupy in the yttrium edifice.
> 
>     Perhaps this hypothesis can be simplified if we imagine yttrium to
>     be represented by a five‐shilling piece. By chemical fractionation
>     I have divided it into five separate shillings, and find that
>     these shillings are not counterparts, but like the carbon atoms in
>     the benzol ring, have the impress of their position, 1, 2, 3, 4,
>     5, stamped on them.... If I throw my shillings into the melting‐
>     pot or dissolve them chemically, the mint stamp disappears and
>     they all turn out to be silver.(1076)
> 
> This will be the case with all the Atoms and molecules when they have
> separated from their compound forms and bodies—when Pralaya sets in.
> Reverse the case, and imagine the dawn of a new Manvantara. The pure
> “silver” of the absorbed material will once more separate into SUBSTANCE,
> which will generate “Divine Essences” whose “Principles”(1077) are the
> Primary Elements, the Sub‐elements, the Physical Energies, and subjective
> and objective Matter; or, as these are epitomized—GODS, MONADS, and ATOMS.
> If leaving for one moment the metaphysical or transcendental side of the
> question—dropping out of the present consideration the supersensuous and
> intelligent Beings and Entities believed in by the Kabalists and
> Christians—we turn to the theory of atomic evolution, the Occult Teachings
> are still found corroborated by exact Science and its confessions, so far,
> at least, as regards the supposed “simple” Elements, now suddenly degraded
> into poor and distant relatives, not even second cousins to the latter.
> For we are told by Mr. Crookes that:
> 
>     Hitherto, it has been considered that if the atomic weight of a
>     metal, determined by different observers, setting out from
>     different compounds, was always found to be constant ... then such
>     metal must rightly take rank among the simple or elementary
>     bodies. We learn ... that this is no longer the case. Again, we
>     have here wheels within wheels. Gadolinium is not an element but a
>     compound. ... We have shown that yttrium is a complex of five or
>     more new constituents. And who shall venture to gainsay that each
>     of these constituents, if attacked in some different manner, and
>     if the result were submitted to a test more delicate and searching
>     than the radiant‐matter test, might not be still further
>     divisible? Where, then, is the actual ultimate element? As we
>     advance it recedes like the tantalizing mirage lakes and groves
>     seen by the tired and thirsty traveller in the desert. Are we in
>     our quest for truth to be thus deluded and baulked? The very idea
>     of an element, as something absolutely primary and ultimate, seems
>     to be growing less and less distinct.(1078)
> 
> In _Isis Unveiled_, we said:
> 
>     This mystery of first creation, which was ever the despair of
>     Science, is unfathomable unless we accept the doctrine of Hermes.
>     Could he [Darwin] remove his quest from the visible universe into
>     the invisible, he might find himself on the right path. But then,
>     he would be following in the footsteps of the Hermetists.(1079)
> 
> Our prophecy begins to assert itself.
> 
> But between Hermes and Huxley there is a middle course and point. Let the
> men of Science only throw a bridge half‐way, and think seriously over the
> theories of Leibnitz. We have shown _our_ theories with regard to the
> evolution of Atoms—their last formation into compound chemical molecules
> being produced within our terrestrial workshops in the Earth’s atmosphere
> and not elsewhere—as strangely agreeing with the evolution of Atoms shown
> on Mr. Crookes’ plates. Several times already it has been stated in this
> volume that Mârttânda, the Sun, had evolved and aggregated, together with
> his seven smaller Brothers, from his Mother Aditi’s bosom, that bosom
> being Prima _Mater_‐ia—the lecturer’s primordial Protyle. Esoteric
> Doctrines teach the existence of
> 
>     An antecedent form of energy having periodic cycles of ebb and
>     swell, rest and activity.(1080)
> 
> And behold a great scholar in Science now asking the world to accept this
> as one of his postulates! We have shown the “Mother,” fiery and hot,
> becoming gradually cool and radiant, and this same Scientist claims as his
> second postulate—a _scientific necessity_, it would seem—
> 
>     An internal action, akin to cooling, operating slowly in the
>     protyle.
> 
> Occult Science teaches that the “Mother” lies stretched in Infinity,
> during Pralaya, as the great Deep, the “_dry_ Waters of Space,” according
> to the quaint expression in the _Catechism_, and becomes _wet_ only after
> the separation and the moving over its face of Nârâyana, the
> 
> _Spirit which is invisible Flame, which never burns, but sets on fire all
> that it touches, and gives it life and generation._(1081)
> 
> And now Science tells us that “the first‐born element ... most nearly
> allied to protyle” would be “_hydrogen_ ... which for some time would be
> the only existing form of matter” in the Universe. What says _Old_
> Science? It answers: Just so; but we would call Hydrogen (and Oxygen),
> which—in the pre‐geological and even pre‐genetic ages—instils the fire of
> life into the “Mother” by incubation, the _spirit_, the _noumenon_, of
> that which becomes in its grossest form Oxygen and Hydrogen and Nitrogen
> on Earth—Nitrogen being of no divine origin, but merely an earth‐born
> cement for uniting other gases and fluids, and serving as a sponge to
> carry in itself the Breath of Life, pure air.(1082) Before these gases and
> fluids become what they are in _our_ atmosphere, they are interstellar
> Ether; still earlier and on a _deeper_ plane—something else, and so on _in
> infinitum_. The eminent and learned gentleman must pardon an Occultist for
> quoting him at such length; but such is the penalty of a Fellow of the
> Royal Society who approaches so near the precincts of the Sacred Adytum of
> Occult Mysteries as virtually to overstep the forbidden boundaries.
> 
> But it is time to leave Modern Physical Science and turn to the
> psychological and metaphysical side of the question. We would only remark
> that to the “two very reasonable postulates” required by the eminent
> lecturer, “to get a glimpse of some few of the secrets so darkly hidden”
> behind “the door of the Unknown,” a third should be added(1083)—lest no
> battering at it should avail; the postulate that Leibnitz stood on a firm
> groundwork of fact and truth in his speculations. The admirable and
> thoughtful synopsis of these speculations—as given by John Theodore Mertz
> in his “Leibnitz”—shows how nearly he has brushed the hidden secrets of
> Esoteric Theogony in his _Monadologie_. And yet this philosopher has
> hardly risen in his speculations above the first planes, the lower
> principles of the Cosmic Great Body. His theory soars to no loftier
> heights than those of the _manifested_ life, self‐consciousness and
> intelligence, leaving the regions of the earlier post‐genetic mysteries
> untouched, as his ethereal fluid is post‐planetary.
> 
> But this third postulate will hardly be accepted by the modern men of
> Science; and, like Descartes, they will prefer keeping to the properties
> of external things, which, like extension, are incapable of explaining the
> phenomenon of motion, rather than accept the latter as an independent
> Force. They will never become anti‐Cartesian in this generation; nor will
> they admit that:
> 
>     This property of inertia is not a purely geometrical property;
>     that it points to the existence of something in external bodies
>     which is not extension merely.
> 
> This is Leibnitz’s idea as analyzed by Mertz, who adds that he called this
> “something” Force, and maintained that external things were endowed with
> Force, and that in order to be the bearers of this Force they must have a
> Substance, for they are not lifeless and inert masses, but the centres and
> bearers of Form—a purely Esoteric claim, since Force was with Leibnitz an
> _active_ principle—the division between Mind and Matter disappearing by
> this conclusion.
> 
>     The mathematical and dynamical enquiries of Leibnitz would not
>     have led to the same result in the mind of a purely scientific
>     enquirer. But Leibnitz was not a scientific man in the modern
>     sense of the word. Had he been so, he might have worked out the
>     conception of energy, defined mathematically the ideas of force
>     and mechanical work, and arrived at the conclusion that even for
>     purely scientific purposes it is desirable to look upon force, not
>     as a primary quantity, but as a quantity derived from some other
>     value.
> 
> But, luckily for truth:
> 
>     Leibnitz was a philosopher; and as such he had certain primary
>     principles, which biassed him in favour of certain conclusions,
>     and his discovery that external things were substances endowed
>     with force was at once used for the purpose of applying these
>     principles. One of these principles was the law of continuity, the
>     conviction that all the world was connected, that there were no
>     gaps and chasms which could not be bridged over. The contrast of
>     extended thinking substances was unbearable to him. The definition
>     of the extended substances had already become untenable: it was
>     natural that a similar enquiry was made into the definition of
>     mind, the thinking substance.
> 
> The divisions made by Leibnitz, however incomplete and faulty from the
> standpoint of Occultism, show a spirit of metaphysical intuition to which
> no man of Science, not Descartes, not even Kant, has ever reached. With
> him there existed ever an infinite gradation of thought. Only a small
> portion of the contents of our thoughts, he said, rises into the clearness
> of apperception, “into the light of perfect consciousness.” Many remain in
> a confused or obscure state, in the state of “perceptions”; but they are
> there. Descartes denied soul to the animal. Leibnitz, as do the
> Occultists, endowed “the whole creation with mental life, this being,
> according to him, capable of infinite gradations.” And this, as Mertz
> justly observes:
> 
>     At once widened the realm of mental life, destroying the contrast
>     of _animate_ and _inanimate matter_; it did yet more—it reäcted on
>     the conception of matter, of the extended substance. For it became
>     evident that external or material things presented the property of
>     extension to our senses only, not to our thinking faculties. The
>     mathematician, in order to calculate geometrical figures, had been
>     obliged to divide them into an infinite number of infinitely small
>     parts, and the physicist saw no limit to the divisibility of
>     matter into atoms. The bulk through which external things seemed
>     to fill space was a property which they acquired only through the
>     coarseness of our senses.... Leibnitz followed these arguments to
>     some extent, but he could not rest content in assuming that matter
>     was composed of a finite number of very small parts. His
>     mathematical mind forced him to carry out the argument _in
>     infinitum_. And what became of the atoms then? They lost their
>     extension and they retained only their property of resistance;
>     they were the centres of force. They were reduced to mathematical
>     points.... But if their extension in space was nothing, _so much
>     fuller was their inner life_. Assuming that inner existence, such
>     as that of the human mind, is a new dimension, not a geometrical
>     but a metaphysical dimension, ... having reduced the geometrical
>     extension of the atoms to nothing, Leibnitz endowed them with an
>     infinite extension in the direction of their metaphysical
>     dimension. After having lost sight of them in the world of space,
>     the mind has, as it were, to dive into a metaphysical world to
>     find and grasp the real essence of what appears in space merely as
>     a mathematical point.... As a cone stands on its point, or a
>     perpendicular straight line cuts a horizontal plane only in one
>     mathematical point, but may extend infinitely in height and depth,
>     so the essences of _things real_ have only a punctual existence in
>     this physical world of space; but have an infinite depth of inner
>     life in the metaphysical world of thought.(1084)
> 
> This is the spirit, the very root of Occult doctrine and thought. The
> “Spirit‐Matter” and “Matter‐Spirit” extend infinitely _in depth_, and like
> the “essence of things” of Leibnitz, our essence of _things real_ is at
> the _seventh depth_; while the _unreal_ and gross matter of Science and
> the external world, is at the lowest extreme of our perceptive senses. The
> Occultist knows the worth or worthlessness of the latter.
> 
> The student must now be shown the fundamental distinction between the
> system of Leibnitz(1085) and that of Occult Philosophy, on the question of
> the Monads, and this may be done with his _Monadologie_ before us. It may
> be correctly stated that were Leibnitz’ and Spinoza’s systems reconciled,
> the essence and spirit of Esoteric Philosophy would be made to appear.
> From the shock of the two—as opposed to the Cartesian system—emerge the
> truths of the Archaic Doctrine. Both oppose the Metaphysics of Descartes.
> His idea of the contrast of two Substances—Extension and Thought—radically
> differing from each other and mutually irreducible, is too arbitrary and
> too un‐philosophical for them. Thus Leibnitz made of the two Cartesian
> Substances two attributes of one universal Unity, in which he saw God.
> Spinoza recognized but one universal indivisible Substance, an absolute
> ALL, like Parabrahman. Leibnitz, on the contrary, perceived the existence
> of a plurality of Substances. There was but One for Spinoza; for Leibnitz
> an infinitude of Beings, _from_, and _in_, the One. Hence, though both
> admitted but _One Real Entity_, while Spinoza made it impersonal and
> indivisible, Leibnitz divided his personal Deity into a number of divine
> and semi‐divine Beings. Spinoza was a _subjective_, Leibnitz an
> _objective_ Pantheist, yet both were great Philosophers in their intuitive
> perceptions.
> 
> Now, if these two teachings were blended together and each corrected by
> the other—and foremost of all the One Reality weeded of its
> personality—there would remain as sum total a true spirit of Esoteric
> Philosophy in them; the impersonal, attributeless, absolute Divine
> Essence, which is no “being” but the root of all Being. Draw a deep line
> in your thought between that ever‐incognizable Essence, and the as
> invisible, yet comprehensible Presence, Mûlaprakriti or Shekinah, _from
> beyond_ and _through which_ vibrates the Sound of the Verbum, and from
> which evolve the numberless Hierarchies of intelligent Egos, of conscious
> as of semi‐conscious, “apperceptive” and “perceptive” Beings, whose
> Essence is spiritual Force, whose Substance is the Elements, and whose
> Bodies (when needed) are the Atoms—and our Doctrine is there. For, says
> Leibnitz:
> 
>     The primitive element of every material body being force, which
>     has none of the characteristics of [objective] matter—it can be
>     conceived but can never be the object of any imaginative
>     representation.
> 
> That which was for him the primordial and ultimate element in everybody
> and object was thus not the material atoms, or molecules, necessarily more
> or less extended, as those of Epicurus and Gassendi, but, as Mertz shows,
> immaterial and metaphysical Atoms, “mathematical points,” or _real
> souls_—as explained by Henri Lachelier (Professeur Agrégé de Philosophie),
> his French biographer.
> 
>     That which exists outside of us in an absolute manner, are Souls
>     whose essence is force.(1086)
> 
> Thus, _reality_ in the manifested world is composed of a _unity of units_,
> so to say, immaterial—from our standpoint—and infinite. These Leibnitz
> calls Monads, Eastern Philosophy Jîvas, while Occultism, with the
> Kabalists and all the Christians, gives them a variety of names. With us,
> as with Leibnitz, they are “the expression of the universe,”(1087) and
> every physical point is but the phenomenal expression of the noumenal,
> metaphysical Point. His distinction between “perception” and
> “apperception” is the philosophical though dim expression of the Esoteric
> Teachings. His “reduced universes,” of which “there are as many as there
> are Monads”—is the chaotic representation of our Septenary System with its
> divisions and sub‐divisions.
> 
> As to the relation his Monads bear to our Dhyân Chohans, Cosmic Spirits,
> Devas, and Elementals, we may reproduce briefly the opinion of a learned
> and thoughtful Theosophist, Mr. C. H. A. Bjerregaard, on the subject. In
> an excellent paper, “On the Elementals, the Elementary Spirits, and the
> Relationship between Them and Human Beings,” read by him before the Âryan
> Theosophical Society of New York, Mr. Bjerregaard thus distinctly
> formulates his opinion:
> 
>     To Spinoza, substance is dead and inactive, but to Leibnitz’s
>     penetrating powers of mind everything is living activity and
>     active energy. In holding this view, he comes infinitely nearer
>     the Orient than any other thinker of his day, or after him. His
>     discovery that _an active energy forms the essence of substance_
>     is a principle that places him in direct relationship to the Seers
>     of the East.(1088)
> 
> And the lecturer proceeds to show that to Leibnitz Atoms and Elements are
> _Centres of Force_, or rather “spiritual beings whose very nature it is to
> act,” for the
> 
>     Elementary particles are vital forces, not acting mechanically,
>     but from an internal principle. They are incorporeal spiritual
>     units [“substantial,” however, but not “immaterial” in our sense]
>     inaccessible to all change from without ... [and] indestructible
>     by any external force. Leibnitz’ monads differ from atoms in the
>     following particulars, which are very important for us to
>     remember, otherwise we shall not be able to see the difference
>     between Elementals and mere matter. Atoms are not distinguished
>     from each other, they are qualitatively alike; but one monad
>     differs from every other monad qualitatively; and every one is a
>     peculiar world to itself. Not so with the atoms; they are
>     absolutely alike quantitatively and qualitatively, and possess no
>     individuality of their own.(1089) Again, the atoms [molecules,
>     rather] of materialistic philosophy can be considered as extended
>     and divisible, while the monads are mere “metaphysical points” and
>     indivisible. Finally, and this is a point where these monads of
>     Leibnitz closely resemble the Elementals of mystic philosophy,
>     these monads are representative beings. Every monad reflects every
>     other. Every monad is a living mirror of the Universe within its
>     own sphere. And mark this, for upon it depends the power possessed
>     by these monads, and upon it depends the work they can do for us;
>     in mirroring the world, the monads are not mere passive reflective
>     agents, but _spontaneously self active_; they produce the images
>     spontaneously, as the soul does a dream. In every monad,
>     therefore, the adept may read everything, even the future. Every
>     monad—or Elemental—is a looking‐glass that can speak.
> 
> It is at this point that Leibnitz’s philosophy breaks down. There is no
> provision made, nor any distinction established, between the “Elemental”
> Monad and that of a high Planetary Spirit, or even the Human Monad or
> Soul. He even goes so far as to sometimes doubt whether
> 
>     God has ever made anything but monads or substances without
>     extension.(1090)
> 
> He draws a distinction between Monads and Atoms,(1091) because, as he
> repeatedly states:
> 
>     Bodies with all their qualities are only phenomenal, like the
>     rainbow. _Corpora omnia cum omnibus qualitatibus suis non sunt
>     aliud quam phenomena bene fundata, ut Iris._(1092)
> 
> But soon after he finds a provision for this in a substantial
> correspondence, a certain metaphysical bond between the Monads—_vinculum
> substantiale_. Esoteric Philosophy, teaching an _objective_
> Idealism—though it regards the objective Universe and all in it as Mâyâ,
> Temporary Illusion—draws a practical distinction between Collective
> Illusion, Mahâmâyâ, from the purely metaphysical standpoint, and the
> objective relations in it between various conscious Egos so long as this
> Illusion lasts. The Adept, therefore, _may_ read the future in an
> Elemental Monad, but he has to draw together for this object a great
> number of them, as each Monad represents only a portion of the Kingdom it
> belongs to.
> 
>     It is not in the object, but in the modification of the cognition
>     of the object that the monads are limited. They all tend
>     (confusedly) to the infinite, to the whole, but they are limited
>     and distinguished by the degrees of distinctness in their
>     perception.(1093)
> 
> And as Leibnitz explains:
> 
>     All the portions of the universe are distinctly represented in the
>     monads, but some are reflected in one monad, some in another.
> 
> A number of Monads could represent simultaneously the thoughts of the two
> million inhabitants of Paris.
> 
> But what say the Occult Sciences to this, and what do they add?
> 
> They say that what is called collectively Monads by Leibnitz—roughly
> viewed, and leaving every subdivision out of calculation, for the
> present—may be separated into three distinct Hosts,(1094) which, counted
> from the highest planes, are, firstly, “Gods,” or conscious, spiritual
> Egos; the intelligent Architects, who work after the plan in the Divine
> Mind. Then come the Elementals, or “Monads,” who form collectively and
> unconsciously the grand Universal Mirrors of everything connected with
> their respective realms. Lastly, the “Atoms,” or material molecules, which
> are informed in their turn by their “perceptive” Monads, just as every
> cell in a human body is so informed. There are shoals of such _informed_
> Atoms which, in their turn, inform the molecules; an infinitude of Monads,
> or Elementals proper, and countless spiritual Forces—Monadless, for they
> are pure incorporealities,(1095) except under certain laws, when they
> assume a form—not _necessarily_ human. Whence the substance that clothes
> them—the apparent organism they evolve around their centres? The Formless
> (Arûpa) Radiations, existing in the harmony of Universal Will, and being
> what we term the collective or the aggregate of Cosmic Will on the plane
> of the subjective Universe, unite together an infinitude of Monads—each
> the mirror of its own Universe—and thus individualize for the time being
> an independent Mind, omniscient and universal; and by the same process of
> magnetic aggregation they create for themselves objective, visible bodies,
> out of the interstellar Atoms. For Atoms and Monads, associated or
> dissociated, simple or complex, are, from the moment of the first
> differentiation, but the “principles,” corporeal, psychic and spiritual,
> of the “Gods”—themselves the Radiations of Primordial Nature. Thus, to the
> eye of the Seer, the higher Planetary Powers appear under two aspects: the
> subjective—as _influences_, and the objective—as mystic _forms_, which,
> under Karmic law, become a _Presence_, Spirit and Matter being One, as
> repeatedly stated. Spirit is Matter _on the seventh plane_; Matter is
> Spirit at the lowest point of its cyclic activity; and both are—Mâyâ.
> 
> Atoms are called Vibrations in Occultism; also Sound—collectively. This
> does not interfere with Mr. Tyndall’s scientific discovery. He traced, on
> the lower rung of the ladder of monadic being, the whole course of the
> _atmospheric_ Vibrations—and this constitutes the _objective_ part of the
> process in Nature. He has traced and recorded the rapidity of their motion
> and transmission; the force of their impact; their setting up vibrations
> in the tympanum and their transmission of these to the otoliths, etc.,
> till the vibration of the auditory nerve commences—and a new phenomenon
> now takes place: the _subjective_ side of the process or the _sensation_
> of sound. Does he perceive or see it? No; for his specialty is to discover
> the behaviour of Matter. But why should not a Psychic see it, a spiritual
> Seer, whose inner Eye is opened, one who can see through the veil of
> Matter? The waves and undulations of Science are all produced by Atoms
> propelling their molecules into activity _from within_. Atoms fill the
> immensity of Space, and by their continuous vibration _are_ that MOTION
> which keeps the wheels of Life perpetually going. It is that inner work
> that produces the natural phenomenon called the correlation of Forces.
> Only, at the origin of every such “Force,” there stands the _conscious_
> guiding Noumenon thereof—Angel or God, Spirit or Demon, ruling powers, yet
> the same.
> 
> As described by Seers—those who can see the motion of the interstellar
> shoals, and follow them clairvoyantly in their evolution—they are
> dazzling, like specks of virgin snow in radiant sunlight. Their velocity
> is swifter than thought, quicker than any mortal physical eye can follow,
> and, as well as can be judged from the tremendous rapidity of their
> course, the motion is circular. Standing on an open plain, on a mountain
> summit especially, and gazing into the vast vault above and the spatial
> infinitudes around, the whole atmosphere seems ablaze with them, the air
> soaked through with these dazzling coruscations. At times, the intensity
> of their motion produces flashes like the Northern Lights in the Aurora
> Borealis. The sight is so marvellous, that, as the Seer gazes into this
> inner world, and feels the scintillating points shoot past him, he is
> filled with awe at the thought of other, still greater mysteries, that lie
> beyond, and within, this radiant ocean.
> 
> However imperfect and incomplete this explanation on “Gods, Monads and
> Atoms,” it is hoped that some students and Theosophists, at least, will
> feel that there may indeed be a close relation between Materialistic
> Science and Occultism, which is the complement and missing soul of the
> former.
> 
> Section XV. Cyclic Evolution and Karma.
> 
> It is the spiritual evolution of the _inner_, immortal Man that forms the
> fundamental tenet of the Occult Sciences. To realize even distantly such a
> process, the student has to believe (_a_) in the One Universal Life,
> independent of Matter (or what Science regards as Matter); and (_b_) in
> the individual Intelligences that animate the various manifestations of
> this Principle. Mr. Huxley does not believe in Vital Force; others
> Scientists do. Dr. J. H. Hutchinson Stirling’s work _As regards
> Protoplasm_ has made no small havoc of this dogmatic negation. Professor
> Beale’s decision also is in favour of a Vital Principle; and Dr. B. W.
> Richardson’s lectures on Nervous Ether have been sufficiently quoted.
> Thus, opinions are divided.
> 
> The One Life is closely related to the One Law which governs the World of
> Being—KARMA. Exoterically, this is simply and literally “action,” or
> rather an “effect‐producing cause.” Esoterically, it is quite a different
> thing in its far‐reaching moral effects. It is the unerring LAW OF
> RETRIBUTION. To say to those ignorant of the real significance,
> characteristics, and awful importance of this eternal immutable Law, that
> no theological definition of a Personal Deity can give an idea of this
> impersonal, yet ever present and active Principle, is to speak in vain.
> Nor can it be called Providence. For Providence, with the Theists—the
> Protestant Christians, at any rate—rejoices in a personal male gender,
> while with the Roman Catholics it is a female potency. “Divine Providence
> tempers His blessings to secure their better effects,” Wogan tells us.
> Indeed “He” tempers them, which Karma—a sexless principle—does not.
> 
> Throughout the first two Parts, it has been shown that, at the first
> flutter of renascent life, Svabhâvat, “_the Mutable Radiance of the
> Immutable Darkness unconscious in Eternity_,” passes, at every new rebirth
> of Kosmos, from an inactive state into one of intense activity; that it
> differentiates, and then begins its work through that differentiation.
> This work is KARMA.
> 
> The Cycles are also subservient to the effects produced by this activity.
> 
> _The one Cosmic Atom becomes seven Atoms on the plane of Matter, and each
> is transformed into a centre of energy; that same Atom becomes seven Rays
> on the plane of Spirit; and the seven creative Forces of Nature, radiating
> from the Root‐Essence ... follow, one the right, the other the left path,
> separate till the end of the Kalpa, and yet in close embrace. What unites
> them? Karma._
> 
> The Atoms emanated from the Central Point emanate in their turn new
> centres of energy, which, under the potential breath of Fohat, begin their
> work from within without, and multiply other minor centres. These, in the
> course of evolution and involution, form in their turn the roots or
> developing causes of new effects, from worlds and “man‐bearing” globes,
> down to the genera, species, and classes of all the seven kingdoms, of
> which we know only _four_. For as says the _Book of the Aphorisms of Tson‐
> ka‐pa_:
> 
>     The blessed workers have received the Thyan‐kam, in the eternity.
> 
> Thyan‐kam is the power or knowledge of guiding the impulses of Cosmic
> Energy in the right direction.
> 
> The true Buddhist, recognizing no “personal God,” nor any “Father” and
> “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” still believes in an _Absolute
> Consciousness_, Adi‐Buddhi; and the Buddhist Philosopher _knows_ that
> there are Planetary Spirits, the Dhyân Chohans. But though he admits of
> “Spiritual Lives,” yet, as they are temporary in eternity, even they,
> according to his Philosophy, are “the Mâyâ of the Day,” the Illusion of a
> “Day of Brahmâ,” a short Manvantara of 4,320,000,000 years. The Yin‐Sin is
> not for the speculations of men, for the Lord Buddha has strongly
> prohibited all such enquiry. If the Dhyân Chohans and all the Invisible
> Beings—the Seven Centres and their direct Emanations, the minor centres of
> Energy—are the direct reflex of the One Light, yet men are far removed
> from these, since the whole of the visible Kosmos consists of “_self‐
> produced_ beings, the creatures of Karma.” Thus regarding a personal God
> “as only a gigantic shadow thrown upon the void of space by the
> imagination of ignorant men,”(1096) they teach that only “two things are
> [objectively] eternal, namely Âkâsha and Nirvâna”; and that these are
> _one_ in reality, and but a Mâyâ when divided.
> 
>     Everything has come out of Âkâsha [or Svabhâvat on our earth] in
>     obedience to a law of motion inherent in it, and after a certain
>     existence passes away. No thing ever came out of nothing. We do
>     not believe in miracles; hence we deny creation and cannot
>     conceive of a creator.(1097)
> 
> If a Vedântic Brahman of the Advaita Sect, were asked whether he believed
> in the existence of God, he would probably answer, as Jacolliot was
> answered—“I am myself ‘God’;” while a Buddhist (a Sinhalese especially)
> would simply laugh, and say in reply, “There is no God; no Creation.” Yet
> the root Philosophy of both Advaita and Buddhist scholars is _identical_,
> and both have the same respect for animal life, for both believe that
> every creature on Earth, however small and humble, “is an immortal portion
> of the immortal Matter”—Matter having with them quite another significance
> from that which it has with either Christian or Materialist—and that every
> creature is subject to Karma.
> 
> The answer of the Brâhman would have suggested itself to every ancient
> Philosopher, Kabalist, and Gnostic of the early days. It contains the very
> spirit of the Delphic and Kabalistic commandments, for Esoteric Philosophy
> solved, ages ago, the problem of what man _was_, _is_, and _will be_; his
> origin, life‐cycle—interminable in its duration of successive incarnations
> or rebirths—and his final absorption into the Source from which he
> started.
> 
> But it is not Physical Science that we can ever ask to read man for us, as
> the riddle of the Past, or of the Future; since no Philosopher can tell us
> even what man is, as known to both Physiology and Psychology. In doubt
> whether man was a God or a beast, Science has now connected him with the
> latter and derives him from an animal. Certainly the task of analyzing and
> classifying the human being as a _terrestrial animal_ may be left to
> Science, which Occultists, of all men, regard with veneration and respect.
> They recognize its ground and the wonderful work it has done, the progress
> achieved in Physiology, and even—to a degree—in Biology. But man’s
> _inner_, spiritual, psychic, or even moral, nature cannot be left to the
> tender mercies of an ingrained Materialism; for not even the higher
> psychological Philosophy of the West is able, in its present
> incompleteness and tendency towards a decided Agnosticism, to do justice
> to the inner man; especially to his higher capacities and perceptions, and
> to those states of consciousness, across the road to which such
> authorities as Mill draw a strong line, saying “So far, and no farther
> shalt thou go.”
> 
> No Occultist would deny that man—together with the elephant and the
> microbe, the crocodile and the lizard, the blade of grass and the
> crystal—is, in his physical formation, the simple product of the
> evolutionary forces of Nature through a numberless series of
> transformations; but he puts the case differently.
> 
> It is not against zoölogical and anthropological discoveries, based on the
> fossils of man and animal, that every Mystic and believer in a Divine Soul
> inwardly revolts, but only against the uncalled‐for conclusions built on
> preconceived theories and made to fit in with certain prejudices. The
> premisses of Scientists may or may not be always true; and as some of
> these theories live but a short life, the deductions therefrom must ever
> be one‐sided with materialistic Evolutionists. Yet it is on the strength
> of such very ephemeral authority, that most of the men of Science
> frequently receive honours where they deserve them the least.(1098)
> 
> To make the working of Karma—in the periodical renovations of the
> Universe—more evident and intelligible to the student when he arrives at
> the origin and evolution of man, he has now to examine with us the
> Esoteric bearing of the Karmic Cycles upon Universal Ethics. The question
> is, do those mysterious divisions of time, called Yugas and Kalpas by the
> Hindûs, and so very graphically, κύκλοι, cycles, rings or circles, by the
> Greeks, have any bearing upon, or any direct connection with, human life?
> Even exoteric Philosophy explains that these perpetual circles of time are
> ever returning on themselves, periodically and intelligently, in Space and
> Eternity. There are “Cycles of Matter,”(1099) and there are “Cycles of
> Spiritual Evolution,” and racial, national, and individual Cycles. May not
> Esoteric speculation allow us a still deeper insight into their workings?
> 
> This idea is beautifully expressed in a very clever scientific work.
> 
>     The possibility of rising to a comprehension of a system of
>     coördination so far outreaching in time and space all range of
>     human observations, is a circumstance which signalizes the power
>     of man to transcend the limitations of changing and inconsistent
>     matter, and assert his superiority over all insentient and
>     perishable forms of being. There is a method in the succession of
>     events, and in the relation of coëxistent things, which the mind
>     of man seizes hold of; and by means of this as a clue, he runs
>     back or forward over æons of material history of which human
>     experience can never testify. Events germinate and unfold. They
>     have a past which is connected with their present, and we feel a
>     well‐justified confidence that a future is appointed which will be
>     similarly connected with the present and the past. This continuity
>     and unity of history repeat themselves before our eyes in all
>     conceivable stages of progress. The phenomena furnish us the
>     grounds for the generalization of two laws which are truly
>     _principles of scientific divination_, by which alone the human
>     mind penetrates the sealed records of the past and the unopened
>     pages of the future. The first of these is the law of evolution,
>     or, to phrase it for our purpose, _the law of correlated
>     successiveness or organized history in the individual_,
>     illustrated in the changing phases of every single maturing system
>     of results.... These thoughts summon into our immediate presence
>     the measureless past and the measureless future of material
>     history. They seem almost to open vistas through infinity, and to
>     endow the human intellect with an existence and a vision exempt
>     from the limitations of time and space and finite causation, and
>     lift it up towards a sublime apprehension of the Supreme
>     Intelligence whose dwelling place is eternity.(1100)
> 
> According to the teachings, Mâyâ—the illusive appearance of the
> marshalling of events and actions on this Earth—changes, varying with
> nations and places. But the chief features of one’s life are always in
> accordance with the “Constellation” under which one is born, or, we should
> say, with the characteristics of its animating principle or the Deity that
> presides over it, whether we call it a Dhyân Chohan, as in Asia, or an
> Archangel, as with the Greek and Latin Churches. In ancient Symbolism it
> was always the Sun—though the Spiritual, not the visible, Sun was
> meant—that was supposed to send forth the chief Saviours and Avatâras.
> Hence the connecting link between the Buddhas, the Avatâras, and so many
> other incarnations of the highest Seven. The closer the approach to one’s
> Prototype, in “Heaven,” the better for the mortal whose Personality was
> chosen, by his own _personal_ Deity (the Seventh Principle), as its
> terrestrial abode. For, with every effort of will toward purification and
> unity with that “Self‐God,” one of the lower Rays breaks, and the
> spiritual entity of man is drawn higher and ever higher to the Ray that
> supersedes the first, until, from Ray to Ray, the Inner Man is drawn into
> the one and highest Beam of the Parent‐Sun. Thus, “the events of humanity
> _do_ run coördinately with the number forms,” since the single units of
> that humanity proceed one and all from the same source—the Central Sun and
> its _shadow_, the visible. For the equinoxes and solstices, the periods
> and various phases of the solar course, astronomically and numerically
> expressed, are only the concrete symbols of the eternally living verity,
> though they do seem _abstract ideas_ to uninitiated mortals. And this
> explains the extraordinary numerical coincidences with geometrical
> relations, shown by several authors.
> 
> Yes; “our destiny _is_ written in the stars”! Only, the closer the union
> between the mortal reflection Man and his celestial Prototype, the less
> dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reïncarnations—which
> neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape. This is not superstition, least of
> all is it _fatalism_. The latter implies a blind course of some still
> blinder power, but man is a free agent during his stay on earth. He cannot
> escape his _ruling_ Destiny, but he has the choice of two paths that lead
> him in that direction, and he can reach the goal of misery—if such is
> decreed to him—either in the snowy white robes of the martyr, or in the
> soiled garments of a volunteer in the iniquitous course; for there are
> _external_ and _internal conditions_ which affect the determination of our
> will upon our actions, and it is in our power to follow either of the two.
> Those who believe in Karma have to believe in Destiny, which, from birth
> to death, every man weaves thread by thread round himself, as a spider his
> web; and this Destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the
> invisible Prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate _astral_, or
> inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity
> called man. Both these lead on the outward man, but one of them must
> prevail; and from the very beginning of the invisible affray the stern and
> implacable _Law of Compensation_ steps in and takes its course, faithfully
> following the fluctuations of the fight. When the last strand is woven,
> and man is seemingly enwrapped in the network of his own doing, then he
> finds himself completely under the empire of this _self‐made_ Destiny. It
> then either fixes him like the inert shell against the immovable rock, or
> carries him away like a feather in a whirlwind raised by his own actions,
> and this is—KARMA.
> 
> A Materialist, treating of the periodical creations of our globe, has
> expressed it in a single sentence:
> 
>     The whole _past_ of the earth is nothing but an unfolded
>     _present_.
> 
> The writer was Büchner, who little suspected that he was repeating an
> axiom of the Occultists. It is quite true also, as Burmeister remarks,
> that:
> 
>     The historical investigation of the development of the earth has
>     proved that _now_ and _then_ rest upon the same base; that the
>     past has been developed in the same manner as the present rolls
>     on; and that the forces which were in action ever remained the
>     same.(1101)
> 
> The Forces—their Noumena rather—are the same, of course; therefore, the
> phenomenal Forces must be the same also. But how can any one feel so sure
> that the attributes of Matter have not altered under the hand of Protean
> Evolution? How can any Materialist assert with such confidence, as is done
> by Rossmassler, that:
> 
>     This eternal conformity in the essence of phenomena renders it
>     certain that fire and water possessed at all times the same powers
>     and ever will possess them.
> 
> Who are they “that darken counsel with words without knowledge,” and where
> were the Huxleys and Büchners when the foundations of the Earth were laid
> by the Great Law? This same homogeneity of Matter and immutability of
> natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by Materialism, are a
> fundamental principle of the Occult Philosophy; but this unity rests upon
> the inseparability of Spirit from Matter, and, if the two were once
> divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into Chaos and Non‐being.
> Therefore, it is absolutely _false_, and but an additional demonstration
> of the great conceit of our age, to assert, as men of Science do, that all
> the great geological changes and terrible convulsions of the past have
> been produced _by ordinary and known physical Forces_. For these Forces
> were but the tools and final means for the accomplishment of certain
> purposes, acting periodically, and apparently mechanically, through an
> inward impulse mixed up with, but beyond their material nature. There is a
> purpose in every important act of Nature, whose acts are all cyclic and
> periodical. But spiritual Forces having been usually confused with the
> purely physical, the former are denied by, and therefore, because left
> unexamined, have to remain unknown to Science.(1102) Says Hegel:
> 
>     The history of the World begins with its general aim, the
>     realization of the Idea of Spirit—only in an _implicit_ form (_an
>     sich_), that is, as Nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden
>     unconscious instinct, and the whole process of History ... is
>     directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one.
>     Thus appearing in the form of merely natural existence, natural
>     will—that which has been called the subjective side—physical
>     craving, instinct, passion, private interest, as also opinion and
>     subjective conception—spontaneously present themselves at the very
>     commencement. This vast congeries of volitions, interests and
>     activities constitute the instruments and means of the World‐
>     Spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness and
>     realizing it. And this aim is none other than finding
>     itself—coming to itself—and contemplating itself in concrete
>     actuality. But that those manifestations of vitality on the part
>     of individuals and peoples, in which they seek and satisfy their
>     own purposes, are at the same time the means and instruments of a
>     higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing—which they
>     realize unconsciously—might be made a matter of question; rather
>     has been questioned ... on this point I announced my view at the
>     very outset, and asserted our hypothesis ... and our belief that
>     Reason governs the World and has consequently governed its
>     history. In relation to this independently universal and
>     substantial existence—all else is subordinate, subservient to it,
>     and the means for its development.(1103)
> 
> No Metaphysician or Theosophist could demur to these truths, which are all
> embodied in Esoteric Teachings. There _is_ a predestination in the
> geological life of our globe, as in the history, past and future, of races
> and nations. This is closely connected with what we call Karma, and what
> Western Pantheists called Nemesis and Cycles. The law of evolution is now
> carrying us along the ascending arc of _our_ cycle, when the effects will
> be once more re‐merged into, and re‐become the now neutralized causes, and
> all things affected by the former will have regained their original
> harmony. This will be the cycle of our special Round, a moment in the
> duration of the Great Cycle, or Mahâyuga.
> 
> The fine philosophical remarks of Hegel are found to have their
> application in the teachings of Occult Science, which shows Nature ever
> acting with a given purpose, whose results are always dual. This was
> stated in our first Occult volumes, in the following words:
> 
>     As our Planet revolves once every year around the Sun, and at the
>     same time turns once in every twenty‐four hours upon its own axis,
>     thus traversing minor circles within a larger one, so is the work
>     of the smaller cyclic periods accomplished and recommenced within
>     the Great Saros. The revolution of the physical world, according
>     to the ancient doctrine, is attended by a like revolution in the
>     world of intellect—the spiritual evolution of the world proceeding
>     in cycles, like the physical one. Thus we see in history a regular
>     alternation of ebb and flow in the tide of human progress. The
>     great kingdoms and empires of the world, after reaching the
>     culmination of their greatness, descend again, in accordance with
>     the same law by which they ascended; till, having reached the
>     lowest point, humanity reässerts itself and mounts up once more,
>     the height of its attainment being, by this law of ascending
>     progression by cycles, somewhat higher than the point from which
>     it had before descended.(1104)
> 
> But these cycles—wheels within wheels, so comprehensively and ingeniously
> symbolized by the various Manus and Rishis in India, and by the Kabiri in
> the West(1105)—_do not affect all mankind at one and the same time_.
> Hence, as we see, the difficulty of comprehending, and of discriminating
> between them, with regard to their physical and spiritual effects, without
> having thoroughly mastered their relations with, and action upon, the
> respective positions of nations and races, in their destiny and evolution.
> This system cannot be comprehended if the spiritual action of these
> periods—_preördained_, so to say, by Karmic law—is separated from their
> physical course. The calculations of the best Astrologers would fail, or
> at any rate remain imperfect, unless this dual action is thoroughly taken
> into consideration and mastered upon these lines. And this mastery can be
> achieved only through INITIATION.
> 
> The Grand Cycle includes the progress of mankind from the appearance of
> primordial man of ethereal form. It runs through the inner Cycles of man’s
> progressive evolution from the ethereal down to the semi‐ethereal and
> purely physical; down to the redemption of man from his “coat of skin” and
> matter, after which it continues running its course downward and then
> upward again, to meet at the culmination of a Round, when the Manvantaric
> Serpent “swallows its tail” and seven Minor Cycles are passed. These are
> the great Racial Cycles which affect equally all the nations and tribes
> included in that special Race; but there are minor and national, as well
> as tribal, Cycles within these, which run their course independently of
> each other. They are called in Eastern Esotericism the Karmic Cycles. In
> the West—since Pagan Wisdom has been repudiated as having grown from and
> been developed by the Dark Powers, supposed to be at constant war with and
> in opposition to the little tribal Jehovah—the full and awful significance
> of the Greek Nemesis, or Karma, has been entirely forgotten. Otherwise
> Christians would have better realized the profound truth that Nemesis is
> without attributes; that while the dreaded Goddess is absolute and
> immutable as a Principle, it is we ourselves—nations and individuals—who
> propel it to action and give the impulse to its direction. Karma‐Nemesis
> is the creator of nations and mortals, but once created, it is they who
> make of her either a Fury or a rewarding Angel. Yea—
> 
>     Wise are they who worship Nemesis(1106)
> 
> —as the Chorus tells Prometheus. And as unwise they, who believe that the
> Goddess may be propitiated by any sacrifices and prayers, or have her
> wheel diverted from the path it has once taken. “The triform Fates and
> ever mindful Furies” are her attributes only on Earth, and begotten by
> ourselves. There is no return from the paths she cycles over; yet those
> paths are of our own making, for it is we, collectively or individually,
> who prepare them. Karma‐Nemesis is the synonym of Providence, _minus_
> design, goodness, and every other _finite_ attribute and qualification, so
> unphilosophically attributed to the latter. An Occultist or a Philosopher
> will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence; but, identifying
> it with Karma‐Nemesis, he will nevertheless teach that it guards the good
> and watches over them in this, as in future lives; and that it punishes
> the evil‐doer—aye, even to his seventh rebirth—so long, indeed, as the
> effect of his having thrown into perturbation even the smallest atom in
> the Infinite World of Harmony has not been finally reädjusted. For the
> only decree of Karma—an eternal and immutable decree—is absolute Harmony
> in the world of Matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not,
> therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we who reward or
> punish ourselves, according as we work with, through and along with
> Nature, abiding by the laws on which that harmony depends, or—breaking
> them.
> 
> Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and
> harmony, instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of these
> ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and
> intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism, and a
> third, simple Chance, with neither Gods nor Devils to guide them—would
> surely disappear, if we would but attribute all of them to their correct
> cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction
> that our neighbours would no more work to hurt us than we would think of
> harming them, two‐thirds of the world’s evil would vanish into thin air.
> Were no man to hurt his brother, Karma‐Nemesis would have neither cause to
> work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our
> midst of every element of strife and opposition, and the division of
> races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels,
> wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the “ways of Providence.” We
> cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands,
> while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of
> respectability and duty, and then we complain because these windings are
> so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our
> own making, and the riddles of life that _we will not_ solve, and then
> accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us. But verily there is not an
> accident in our lives, not a misshapen day, or a misfortune, that could
> not be traced back to our own doings in this or in another life. If one
> breaks the laws of Harmony, or, as a theosophical writer expresses it, the
> “laws of life,” one must be prepared to fall into the chaos oneself has
> produced. For, according to the same writer:
> 
>     The only conclusion one can come to is that these laws of life are
>     their own avengers; and consequently that every avenging angel is
>     only a typified representation of their reäction.
> 
> Therefore, if any one is helpless before these immutable laws, it is not
> ourselves, the artificers of our destinies, but rather those Angels, the
> guardians of Harmony. Karma‐Nemesis is no more than the spiritual
> dynamical effect of causes produced, and forces awakened into activity, by
> our own actions. It is a law of Occult dynamics that “a given amount of
> energy expended on the spiritual or astral plane is productive of far
> greater results than the same amount expended on the physical objective
> plane of existence.”
> 
> This condition of things will last till man’s spiritual intuitions are
> fully opened, and this will not be until we fairly cast off our thick
> coats of Matter; until we begin acting from _within_, instead of ever
> following impulses from _without_, impulses produced by our physical
> senses and gross selfish body. Until then the only palliatives for the
> evils of life are union and harmony—a Brotherhood _in actu_, and Altruism
> not simply in name. The suppression of one single bad _cause_ will
> suppress not one, but many bad effects. And if a Brotherhood, or even a
> number of Brotherhoods, may not be able to prevent nations from
> occasionally cutting each other’s throats, still unity in thought and
> action, and philosophical research into the mysteries of being, will
> always prevent some persons, who are trying to comprehend that which has
> hitherto remained to them a riddle, from creating additional causes of
> mischief in a world already so full of woe and evil. Knowledge of Karma
> gives the conviction that if
> 
>     ... virtue in distress, and vice in triumph
>     Make atheists of mankind,(1107)
> 
> it is only because mankind has ever shut its eyes to the great truth that
> man is himself his own saviour and his own destroyer. He need not accuse
> Heaven and the Gods, Fates and Providence, of the apparent injustice that
> reigns in the midst of humanity. But let him rather remember and repeat
> this fragment of Grecian wisdom, which warns man to forbear accusing
> _That_ which
> 
>     Just, though mysterious, leads us on unerring
>     Through ways unmark’d from guilt to punishment;
> 
> and such are now the ways on which the great European nations move onward.
> Every nation and tribe of the Western Âryans, like their Eastern brethren
> of the Fifth Race, has had its Golden and its Iron Age, its period of
> comparative irresponsibility, or its Satya Age of purity, and now, several
> of them have reached their Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, an age black with
> horrors.
> 
> On the other hand, it is true that the exoteric Cycles of every nation
> have been rightly derived from, and shown to depend on, sidereal motions.
> The latter are inseparably blended with the destinies of nations and men.
> But, in the purely physical sense, Europe knows of no Cycles other than
> the astronomical, and it makes its computations accordingly. Nor will it
> hear of any other than _imaginary_ circles or circuits in the starry
> heavens that gird them,
> 
>     With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er
>     Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.
> 
> But with the Pagans—of whom Coleridge rightly says, “Time, cyclical time,
> was their abstraction of the Deity,” that “Deity” manifesting coördinately
> with, and only through, Karma, and being that Karma‐Nemesis itself—the
> Cycles meant something more than a mere succession of events, or a
> periodical space of time of more or less prolonged duration. For they were
> generally marked with recurrences of a more varied and intellectual
> character than are exhibited in the periodical return of seasons or of
> certain constellations. Modern wisdom is satisfied with astronomical
> computations and prophecies, based on unerring mathematical laws. Ancient
> Wisdom added to the cold shell of Astronomy the vivifying elements of its
> soul and spirit—Astrology. And, as the sidereal motions _do_ regulate and
> determine other events on Earth besides potatoes and the periodical
> diseases of that useful vegetable—a statement which, not being amenable to
> scientific explanation, is merely derided, while none the less
> accepted—these events have to submit to predetermination, by simple
> astronomical computations. Believers in Astrology will understand our
> meaning, sceptics will laugh at the belief and mock the idea. Thus they
> shut their eyes, ostrich‐like, to their own fate.(1108)
> 
> This because their little _historical_ period, so called, allows them no
> margin for comparison. Sidereal heaven is before them; and though their
> spiritual vision is still unopened, and the atmospheric dust of
> terrestrial origin seals their sight and chains it within the limits of
> physical systems, still they do not fail to perceive the movements and
> note the behaviour of meteors and comets. They record the periodical
> advents of those wanderers and “flaming messengers,” and prophesy, in
> consequence, earthquakes, meteoric showers, the apparition of certain
> stars, comets, etc. Are they, then, soothsayers after all? No; they are
> learned Astronomers.
> 
> Why, then, should Occultists and Astrologers, as learned as these
> Astronomers, be disbelieved when they prophesy the return of some cyclic
> event on the same mathematical principles? Why should the claim that they
> _know_ this return be ridiculed? Their forefathers and predecessors,
> having recorded the recurrence of such events in their time and day,
> throughout a period embracing hundreds of thousands of years, the
> conjunction of the same constellations must necessarily produce, if not
> quite the same, at any rate similar, effects. Are the prophecies to be
> derided, because of the claim made for hundreds of thousands of years of
> observation, and for millions of years for the human Races? In its turn,
> Modern Science is laughed at by those who hold to Biblical chronology, for
> its far more modest geological and anthropological figures. Thus Karma
> adjusts even human laughter, at the mutual expense of sects, learned
> societies, and individuals. Yet in the prognostication of _such_ future
> events, at any rate, all foretold on the authority of cyclic recurrences,
> no psychic phenomenon is involved. It is neither _prevision_, nor
> _prophecy_; any more than is the signalling of a comet or star, several
> years before its appearance. It is simply knowledge, and mathematically
> correct computations, which enable the _Wise Men of the East_ to foretell,
> for instance, that England is on the eve of such or another catastrophe;
> that France is nearing such a point of her Cycle; and that Europe in
> general is threatened with, or rather is on the eve of, a cataclysm, to
> which her own Cycle of racial Karma _has led her_. Our view of the
> reliability of the information depends, of course, on our acceptation or
> rejection of the claim for a tremendous period of historical observation.
> Eastern Initiates maintain that they have preserved records of racial
> development and of events of universal import ever since the beginning of
> the Fourth Race—their knowledge of events preceding that epoch being
> traditional. Moreover, those who believe in Seership and in Occult Powers
> will have no difficulty in crediting the general character, at least, of
> the information given, even if it be traditional, once the tradition is
> checked and corrected by clairvoyance and Esoteric Knowledge. But in the
> present case no such metaphysical belief is claimed as our chief
> dependence, for proof is given—on what, to every Occultist, is quite
> scientific evidence—the records preserved through the Zodiac for
> incalculable ages.
> 
> It is now amply proved that even horoscopes and judiciary Astrology are
> not quite based on fiction, and that Stars and Constellations,
> consequently, have an occult and mysterious influence on, and connection
> with, individuals. And if with the latter, why not with nations, races,
> and mankind as a whole? This, again, is a claim made on the authority of
> the Zodiacal records. We shall then enquire how far the Zodiac was known
> to the Ancients, and how far it is forgotten by the Moderns.
> 
> Section XVI. The Zodiac and its Antiquity.
> 
> “All men are apt to have a high conceit of their own understanding, and to
> be tenacious of the opinions they profess,” said Jordan, justly adding to
> this—“and yet almost all men are guided by the understandings of others,
> not by their own; and may be said more truly to adopt, than to beget,
> their opinions.”
> 
> This is doubly true in regard to scientific opinions upon hypotheses
> offered for consideration—the prejudice and preconceptions of
> “authorities,” so called, often deciding upon questions of the most vital
> importance for history. There are several such predetermined opinions held
> by our learned Orientalists, and few are more unjust or illogical than the
> general error with regard to the antiquity of the Zodiac. Thanks to the
> hobby of some German Orientalists, English and American Sanskritists have
> accepted Professor Weber’s opinion that the peoples of India had no idea
> or knowledge of the Zodiac prior to the Macedonian invasion, and that it
> is from the Greeks that the ancient Hindûs imported it into their country.
> We are further told, by several other “authorities,” that no Eastern
> nation knew of the Zodiac before the Hellenes kindly acquainted their
> neighbours with their invention. And _this_, in the face of the _Book of
> Job_, which is declared, even by themselves, to be the oldest in the
> Hebrew canon, and certainly prior to Moses; a book which speaks of the
> _making_ of “Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades [Osh, Kesil, and Kimah] and the
> chambers of the South”(1109); of Scorpio and the Mazaruth—the _twelve
> signs_(1110); words which, if they mean anything, imply knowledge of the
> Zodiac even among the nomadic Arabian tribes. The _Book of Job_ is alleged
> to have preceded Homer and Hesiod by at least one thousand years—the two
> Greek poets having themselves flourished some eight centuries before the
> Christian era (!!). Though, by the bye, one who prefers to believe
> Plato—who shows Homer flourishing far earlier—could point to a number of
> Zodiacal signs mentioned in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, in the Orphic
> poems, and elsewhere. But since the cock‐and‐bull hypothesis of some
> modern critics that, so far from Orpheus, not even Homer or Hesiod has
> ever existed, it would seem time lost to mention these archaic authors at
> all. The Arabian Job will suffice; unless, indeed, his volume of
> lamentations, along with the poems of the two Greeks, to which we may add
> those of Linus, should now also be declared to be the patriotic forgery of
> the Jew Aristobulus. But if the Zodiac was known in the days of Job, how
> could the civilized and philosophical Hindûs have remained ignorant of it?
> 
> Risking the arrows of modern criticism—rather blunted by misuse—the reader
> may make himself acquainted with Bailly’s learned opinion upon the
> subject. Inferred speculations may be shown to be erroneous. Mathematical
> calculations stand on more secure grounds. Taking as a starting point
> several astronomical references in _Job_, Bailly devised a very ingenious
> means of proving that the earliest founders of the Science of the Zodiac
> belonged to an antediluvian, primitive people. The fact that he seems
> willing to see some of the Biblical patriarchs in Thoth, Seth, and in the
> Chinese Fohi, does not interfere with the validity of his proof as to the
> antiquity of the Zodiac.(1111) Even accepting, for argument’s sake, his
> cautious 3700 years B.C. as the correct age of the Zodiacal Science, this
> date proves in the most irrefutable way that it was not the Greeks who
> invented the Zodiac, for the simple reason that they did not exist as a
> nation thirty‐seven centuries B.C.—at any rate not as a _historical_ race
> admitted by the critics. Bailly then calculated the period at which the
> constellations manifested the atmospheric influence called by Job the
> “sweet influences of the Pleiades,”(1112) in Hebrew Kimah; that of Orion,
> Kesil; and that of the desert rains with reference to Scorpio, the eighth
> constellation; and found that in presence of the eternal conformity of
> these divisions of the Zodiac, and of the names of the Planets applied in
> the same order everywhere and always, and in presence of the impossibility
> of attributing it all to chance and “coincidence”—“which never creates
> such similarities”—a very great antiquity indeed must be allowed for the
> Zodiac.(1113)
> 
> Again, if the _Bible_ is supposed to be an authority on any matter—and
> there are some who still regard it as such, whether from Christian or
> Kabalistical considerations—then the Zodiac is clearly mentioned in _II
> Kings_, xxiii. 5. Before the “book of the law” was “found” by Hilkiah, the
> high priest, the signs of the Zodiac were known and worshipped. These were
> held in the same adoration as the Sun and Moon, since the
> 
>     priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense ...
>     unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to
>     all the host of heaven,
> 
> or to the “twelve signs or constellations,” as the marginal note in the
> English _Bible_ explains, had followed the injunction for centuries. They
> were stopped in their idolatry only by King Josiah, 624 B.C.
> 
> The _Old Testament_ is full of allusions to the twelve zodiacal signs, and
> the whole scheme is built upon it—heroes, personages, and events. Thus in
> the dream of Joseph, who saw eleven “Stars” bowing to the twelfth, which
> was _his_ “Star,” the Zodiac is referred to. The Roman Catholics have
> discovered in it, moreover, a prophecy of Christ, who is that twelfth
> Star, they say, and the others the eleven apostles; the absence of the
> twelfth being also regarded as a prophetic allusion to the treachery of
> Judas. The twelve sons of Jacob, again, are a reference to the same, as is
> justly pointed out by Villapandus.(1114) Sir James Malcolm, in his
> _History of Persia_,(1115) shows the _Dabistan_ echoing all such
> traditions about the Zodiac. He traces the invention of it to the palmy
> days of the Golden Age of Iran, remarking that one of the said traditions
> maintains that the Genii of the Planets are represented under the same
> shapes and figures they had assumed when _they showed themselves to
> several holy prophets_, and thus led to the establishment of the rites
> based on the Zodiac.
> 
> Pythagoras, and after him Philo Judæus, held the number 12 as very sacred.
> 
>     This duodenary number is _perfect_. It is that of the signs of the
>     Zodiac, which the sun visits in twelve months, and it is to honour
>     that number that Moses divided his nation into twelve tribes,
>     established the twelve cakes of the shew‐bread, and placed twelve
>     precious stones upon the breast‐plate of the pontiffs.(1116)
> 
> According to Seneca, Berosus taught prophecy of every future event and
> cataclysm by the Zodiac; and the times fixed by him for the conflagration
> of the World—Pralaya—and for a deluge, are found to answer to the times
> given in an ancient Egyptian papyrus. Such a catastrophe comes at every
> renewal of the cycle of the Sidereal Year of 25,868 years. The names of
> the Akkadian months were called by, and derived from, the names of the
> signs of the Zodiac, and the Akkadians are far earlier than the Chaldæans.
> Mr. Proctor shows, in his _Myths and Marvels of Astronomy_, that the
> ancient Astronomers had acquired a system of the most accurate Astronomy
> 2,400 years B.C.; the Hindûs date their Kali Yuga from a great periodical
> conjunction of the Planets thirty‐one centuries B.C.; but, withal, it was
> the Greeks, belonging to the expedition of Alexander the Great, who were
> the instructors of the Âryan Hindûs in Astronomy!
> 
> Whether the origin of the Zodiac is Âryan or Egyptian, it is still of an
> immense antiquity. Simplicius, in the sixth century A.D., writes that he
> had always heard that the Egyptians had kept astronomical observations and
> records for a period of 630,000 years. This statement appears to frighten
> Mr. Gerald Massey, who remarks on it that:
> 
>     If we read this number of years by the month which Euxodus said
>     the Egyptians termed a year, _i.e._, a course of time, that would
>     still yield the length of two cycles of precession [51,736
>     years].(1117)
> 
> Diogenes Laërtius carried back the astronomical calculations of the
> Egyptians to 48,863 years before Alexander the Great.(1118) Martianus
> Capella corroborates this by telling posterity that the Egyptians had
> secretly studied Astronomy for over 40,000 years, before they imparted
> their knowledge to the world.(1119)
> 
> Several valuable quotations are made in _Natural Genesis_ with the view of
> supporting the author’s theories, but they justify the teaching of the
> Secret Doctrine far more. For instance, Plutarch is quoted from his _Life
> of Sulla_, saying:
> 
>     One day when the sky was serene and clear, there was heard in it
>     the sound of a trumpet, so loud, shrill, and mournful, that it
>     affrighted and astonished the world. The Tuscan sages said that it
>     portended a new race of men, and a renovation of the world; for
>     they affirmed that there were eight several kinds of men, all
>     being different in life and manners; and that Heaven had allotted
>     each its time, which was limited by the circuit of the great year
>     [25,868 years].(1120)
> 
> This reminds one strongly of our Seven Races of men, and of the eighth—the
> “animal man”—descended from the later Third Race; as also of the
> successive submersions and destruction of the continents which finally
> disposed of almost all that Race. Says Iamblichus:
> 
>     The Assyrians have not only preserved the memorials of seven‐and‐
>     twenty myriads of years [270,000 years], as Hipparchus says they
>     have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the
>     Seven Rulers of the World.(1121)
> 
> This is as nearly as possible the calculation of the Esoteric Doctrine.
> For 1,000,000 years are allowed for our present Root‐Race (the Fifth), and
> about 850,000 years have passed since the submersion of the last large
> island—part of the continent of Atlantis—the Ruta of the Fourth Race, the
> Atlanteans; while Daitya, a small island inhabited by a mixed race, was
> destroyed about 270,000 years ago, during the Glacial Period or
> thereabouts. But the Seven Rulers, or the seven great Dynasties of the
> Divine Kings, belong to the traditions of every great people of antiquity.
> Wherever twelve are mentioned, they are invariably the twelve signs of the
> Zodiac.
> 
> So patent is this fact, that the Roman Catholic writers—especially among
> the French Ultramontanes—have tacitly agreed to connect the twelve Jewish
> Patriarchs with the Signs of the Zodiac. This is done in a kind of
> prophetico‐mystic way, which sounds to pious and ignorant ears like a
> portentous token, a tacit divine recognition of the “chosen people of
> God,” whose finger has purposely traced in heaven, from the beginning of
> creation, the numbers of these patriarchs. For instance, curiously enough,
> these writers, De Mirville among others, recognize all the characteristics
> of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, in the words addressed by the dying
> Jacob to his Sons, and in his definitions of the future of each
> Tribe.(1122) Moreover, the respective banners of the same tribes are said
> to have exhibited the same symbols and the same names as the Signs,
> repeated in the twelve stones of the Urim and Thummim, and on the twelve
> wings of the two Cherubs. Leaving to the said Mystics the proof of
> exactitude in the alleged correspondence, we quote it as follows: Man, or
> Aquarius, is in the sphere of Reuben, who is declared as “unstable as
> water” (the Vulgate has it, “_rushing_ like water”); Gemini, in that of
> Simeon and Levi, because of their strong fraternal association; Leo, in
> that of Judah, “the strong Lion” of his tribe, “the lion’s whelp”; Pisces,
> in Zabulon, who “shall dwell at the haven of the sea”; Taurus, in
> Issachar, because he is “a strong ass couching down,” etc., and therefore
> associated with the stables; (Virgo‐) Scorpio, in Dan, who is described as
> “a serpent, an adder in the path that biteth,” etc.; Capricornus in
> Naphtali, who is “a hind (a deer) let loose”; Cancer, in Benjamin, for he
> is “ravenous”; Libra, the Balance, in Asher, whose “bread shall be fat”;
> Sagittarius in Joseph, because “his bow abode in strength.” To make up for
> the twelfth Sign, Virgo, made independent of Scorpio, we have Dinah, the
> only daughter of Jacob. Tradition shows the _alleged_ tribes carrying the
> twelve signs on their banners. But indeed the _Bible_, in addition to the
> above, is filled with theo‐cosmological and astronomical symbols and
> personifications.
> 
> It remains to wonder, and to query—if the actual, living Patriarchs’
> destiny was so indissolubly wound up with the Zodiac—how it is that, after
> the loss of the ten tribes, the ten signs also out of the twelve have not
> miraculously disappeared from the sidereal fields? But this is of no great
> concern. Let us rather busy ourselves with the history of the Zodiac
> itself.
> 
> The reader may be reminded of some opinions expressed as to the Zodiac by
> several of the highest authorities in Science.
> 
> Newton believed that the invention of the Zodiac could be traced as far
> back as the expedition of the Argonauts; and Dulaure fixed its origin at
> 6,500 years B.C., just 2,496 years before the creation of the world,
> according to the _Bible_ chronology.
> 
> Creuzer thought that it was very easy to show that most of the Theogonies
> were intimately connected with religious calendars, and were related to
> the Zodiac as to their prime origin; if not to the Zodiac known to us now,
> then to something very analogous with it. He felt certain that the Zodiac
> and its mystic relations are at the bottom of all the mythologies, under
> one form or another, and that it had existed in the old form for ages,
> before it was brought out in the present defined astronomical garb, owing
> to some singular coördination of events.(1123)
> 
> Whether the “genii of the planets,” our Dhyân Chohans of supra‐mundane
> spheres, showed themselves to “holy prophets,” or not, as claimed in the
> _Dabistan_, it would seem that great laymen and warriors were favoured in
> the same way in days of old in Chaldæa, when astrological Magic and
> Theophania went hand in hand.
> 
>     Xenophon, no ordinary man, narrates of Cyrus ... that at the
>     moment of his death he thanked the Gods and heroes, for having so
>     often instructed him themselves about the signs in heaven—ἐν
>     οὐρανίοις σημείοις.(1124)
> 
> Unless the Science of the Zodiac is admitted to be of the highest
> antiquity and universality, how can we account for its Signs being traced
> in the oldest Theogonies? Laplace is said to have felt struck with
> amazement at the idea of the days of Mercury (Wednesday), Venus (Friday),
> Jupiter (Thursday), Saturn (Saturday), and others, being related to the
> days of the week in the same order and with the same names in India as in
> Northern Europe.
> 
>     Try, if you can, with the present system of autochthonous
>     civilizations, so much in fashion in our day, to explain how
>     nations with no ancestry, no traditions or birthplace in common,
>     could have succeeded in inventing a kind of celestial
>     phantasmagoria, a veritable _imbroglio_ of sidereal denominations,
>     without sequence or object, having no figurative relation with the
>     constellations they represent, and still less, apparently, with
>     the phases of our terrestrial life they are made to signify,
> 
> —had there not been a _general_ intention and a _universal_ cause and
> belief, at the root of all this!(1125) Most truly has Dupuis asserted the
> same:
> 
>     Il est impossible de découvrir le moindre trait de ressemblance
>     entre les parties du ciel et les figures que les astronomes y ont
>     _arbitrairement_ tracées; et de l’autre côté, _le hasard est
>     impossible_.(1126)
> 
> Most certainly chance is “_impossible_.” There is no “chance” in Nature,
> wherein everything is mathematically coördinate, and inter‐related in its
> units. Says Coleridge:
> 
>     Chance is but the pseudonym of God [or Nature], for those
>     particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with
>     His sign manual.
> 
> Replace the word “God” by Karma, and it will become an Eastern axiom.
> Therefore, the sidereal “prophecies” of the Zodiac, as they are called by
> Christian Mystics, never point to any one particular event, however solemn
> and sacred it may be for some one portion of humanity, but to ever‐
> recurrent, periodical laws in Nature, understood only by the Initiates of
> the Sidereal Gods themselves.
> 
> No Occultist, no Astrologer of Eastern birth, will ever agree with
> Christian Mystics, or even with Kepler’s mystical Astronomy, his great
> science and erudition notwithstanding; and this because, if his premisses
> are quite correct, his deductions therefrom are one‐sided and biassed by
> Christian preconceptions. Where Kepler finds a prophecy directly pointing
> to the Saviour, other nations see a symbol of an eternal law, decreed for
> the actual Manvantara. Why see in Pisces a direct reference to Christ—one
> of the several world‐reformers, a Saviour for his direct followers, but
> only a great and glorious Initiate for all the rest—when that
> constellation shines as a symbol of all the past, present, and future
> Spiritual Saviours, who dispense light and dispel mental darkness?
> Christian symbologists have tried to prove that this sign belonged to
> Ephraim, Joseph’s son, the _elect_ of Jacob, and that therefore, it was at
> the moment of the Sun’s entering into the sign of Pisces, the Fish, that
> the “Elect Messiah,” the Ἰχθὺς of the first Christians, had to be born.
> But if Jesus of Nazareth was that Messiah, was he really born at that
> “moment,” or was his birth‐hour thus fixed by the adaptation of
> Theologians, who sought only to make their preconceived ideas fit in with
> sidereal facts and popular belief? Everyone is aware that the real time
> and year of the birth of Jesus are totally unknown. And it is the
> Jews—whose forefathers made the word Dag signify both “Fish” and “Messiah”
> during the forced development of their rabbinical language—who are the
> first to deny this Christian claim. And what of the further facts that
> Brâhmans connect their “Messiah,” the eternal Avatâra Vishnu, with a Fish
> and the Deluge, and that the Babylonians also made a Fish and a Messiah of
> their Dag‐On, the Man‐Fish and Prophet?
> 
> There are learned iconoclasts among Egyptologists, who say that:
> 
>     When the Pharisees sought a “sign from heaven,” Jesus said, “there
>     shall no sign be given .... but the sign of the prophet Jonas.”
>     (_Mat._, xvi. 4.).... The sign of Jonas is that of the Oan or
>     Fish‐Man of Nineveh.... Assuredly there was no other sign than
>     that of the Sun reborn in Pisces. The voice of the Secret Wisdom
>     says those who are looking for signs can have no other than that
>     of the returning Fish‐Man Ichthys, Oannes, or Jonas—who could not
>     be made flesh.
> 
> It would appear that Kepler maintained it as a positive fact that, at the
> moment of the “incarnation,” all the planets were in conjunction in the
> sign Pisces, called by the Jewish Kabbalists the “constellation of the
> Messiah.” Kepler averred:
> 
>     It is in this constellation that the star of the Magi is to be
>     found.
> 
> This statement, quoted from Dr. Sepp(1127) by De Mirville, emboldened the
> latter to remark that:
> 
>     All the Jewish traditions, while announcing that star that many
>     nations have seen [!],(1128) further added that it would absorb
>     the seventy planets that preside over the destinies of various
>     nations on this globe.(1129) “In virtue of those natural
>     prophecies,” says Dr. Sepp, “it was written in the stars of the
>     firmament that the Messiah would be born in the lunar year of the
>     world 4320, in that memorable year when the entire choir of the
>     planets would be celebrating its jubilee.”(1130)
> 
> There was indeed a rage, at the beginning of the present century, for
> claiming restoration from the Hindûs for an alleged robbery from the Jews
> of their “Gods,” patriarchs, and chronology. It was Wilford who recognized
> Noah in Prithî and in Satyavrata, Enos in Dhruva, and even Assur in
> Îshvara. After being residents for so many years in India, some
> Orientalists, at least, ought to have known that it was not the Brâhmans
> alone who had these figures, or who had divided their Great Age into four
> minor ages. Nevertheless writers in the _Asiatic Researches_ indulged in
> the most extravagant speculations. S. A. Mackey, the Norwich “philosopher,
> astronomer, and shoemaker,” argues very pertinently:
> 
>     Christian theologians think it their duty to write against the
>     long periods of Hindû chronology, and in them it may be
>     pardonable: but when a man of learning crucifies the names and the
>     numbers of the ancients, and wrings and twists them into a form,
>     which means something quite foreign to the intention of the
>     ancient authors; but which, so mutilated, fits in with the _birth_
>     of some _maggot_ preëxisting in his own brain with so much
>     exactness that he _pretends_ to be amazed at the discovery, I
>     cannot think him quite so pardonable.(1131)
> 
> This is intended to apply to Captain (later Colonel) Wilford, but the
> words may fit more than one of our modern Orientalists. Colonel Wilford
> was the first to crown his unlucky speculations on Hindû chronology and
> the _Purânas_ by connecting the 4,320,000 years with biblical chronology,
> by simply dwarfing the figures to 4,320 years—the supposed lunar year of
> the Nativity—and Dr. Sepp has simply plagiarized the idea from this
> gallant officer. Moreover, he persisted in seeing in them Jewish property,
> as well as Christian prophecy, thus accusing the Âryans of having helped
> themselves to Semitic revelation, whereas the reverse was the case. The
> Jews, moreover, need not be accused of directly despoiling the Hindûs, of
> whose figures Ezra probably knew nothing. They had evidently and
> undeniably borrowed them from the Chaldeans, along with the Chaldean Gods.
> They turned the 432,000 years of the Chaldean Divine Dynasties(1132) into
> 4,320 lunar years from the world’s creation to the Christian era; as to
> the Babylonian and Egyptian Gods, they quietly and modestly transformed
> them into Patriarchs. Every nation was more or less guilty of such
> refashioning and adaptation of a Pantheon—once common to all—of universal
> into national and tribal Gods and Heroes. It was Jewish property in its
> new Pentateuchal garb, and no one of the Israelites has ever forced it
> upon any other nation—least of all upon the European.
> 
> Without stopping to notice this very unscientific chronology more than is
> necessary, we may yet make a few remarks that may be found to the point.
> The 4,320 _lunar_ years of the world—in the _Bible_ the _solar_ years are
> used—are not fanciful, as such, even if their application is quite
> erroneous; for they are only the distorted echo of the primitive Esoteric,
> and later of the Brâhmanical doctrine concerning the Yugas. A Day of
> Brahmâ equals 4,320,000,000 years, as also does a Night of Brahmâ, or the
> duration of Pralaya, after which a _new_ “sun” rises triumphantly over a
> _new_ Manvantara, for the Septenary Chain it illuminates. The teaching had
> penetrated into Palestine and Europe centuries before the Christian
> era,(1133) and was present in the minds of the Mosaic Jews, who based upon
> it their small Cycle, though it received full expression only through the
> Christian chronologers of the _Bible_, who adopted it, as also the 25th of
> December, the day on which all the _solar_ Gods were said to have been
> incarnated. What wonder, then, that the Messiah was _made_ to be born in
> “the _lunar_ year of the world 4,320”? The “Sun of Righteousness and
> Salvation” had once more arisen and had dispelled the pralayic darkness of
> Chaos and Nonbeing on the plane of our objective little Globe and Chain.
> Once the subject of the adoration was settled upon, it was easy to make
> the supposed events of his birth, life, and death, fit in with the
> Zodiacal exigencies and the old traditions, though they had to be somewhat
> remodelled for the occasion.
> 
> Thus what Kepler said, as a great Astronomer, becomes comprehensible. He
> recognized the grand and universal importance of all such planetary
> conjunctions, “each of which”—as he has well said—“is a _climacteric_ year
> of Humanity.”(1134) The rare conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars has
> its significance and importance on account of its certain great results,
> in India and China as much as it has in Europe, for the respective Mystics
> of these countries. And it is certainly now no better than a mere
> assumption to maintain that Nature had only Christ in view, in building
> her (to the profane) fantastic and meaningless constellations. If it is
> claimed that it was no hazard that could lead the archaic architects of
> the Zodiac, thousands of years ago, to mark the figure of Taurus with the
> asterisk _a_, with no better or more valid proof of it being _prophetic_
> of the Verbum or Christ than that the _aleph_ of Taurus means the “one”
> and the “first,” and that Christ was also the _alpha_ or the “one,” then
> this “proof” may be shown to be strangely invalidated in more than one
> way. To begin with, the Zodiac existed before the Christian era, at all
> events; further, all the Sun‐Gods—Osiris, for instance—had been mystically
> connected with the constellation Taurus and were all called by their
> respective votaries the “First.” Further, the compilers of the mystical
> epithets given to the Christian Saviour were all more or less acquainted
> with the significance of the Zodiacal signs; and it is easier to suppose
> that they should have arranged their claims so as to match the mystic
> signs, than that the latter should have shone as a prophecy for one
> portion of humanity, for millions of years, taking no heed of the
> numberless generations that had gone before, and of those that were to be
> born hereafter.
> 
> We are told:
> 
>     It is not simple chance that, in certain spheres, has placed on a
>     throne the head of this bull [Taurus] trying to push back a Dragon
>     with the ansated _cross_; we should know that this constellation
>     of Taurus was called “_the great city of God_ and _the mother of
>     revelations_,” and also “_the interpreter of the divine voice_,”
>     the Apis Pacis of Hermontis, in Egypt, which [as the patristic
>     fathers would assure the world] is said to have proffered oracles
>     that related to the birth of the Saviour.(1135)
> 
> To this theological assumption there are several answers. Firstly, the
> ansated Egyptian cross, or Tau, the Jaina cross, or Svastika, and the
> Christian cross, have all the same meaning. Secondly, no peoples or
> nations except the Christians gave the significance to the Dragon that is
> given to it now. The Serpent was the symbol of WISDOM; and the Bull,
> Taurus, the symbol of physical or terrestrial _generation_. Thus the Bull,
> pushing off the Dragon, or spiritual Divine Wisdom, with the Tau, or
> Cross—which is esoterically “the foundation and framework of all
> construction”—would have an entirely phallic, physiological meaning, had
> it not had yet another significance unknown to our Biblical scholars and
> symbologists. At any rate, it has no special reference to the Verbum of
> St. John, except, perhaps, in a general sense. The Taurus—which, by the
> way, is no lamb, but a bull—was sacred in every Cosmogony, with the Hindûs
> as with the Zoroastrians, with the Chaldees as with the Egyptians. So
> much, every schoolboy knows.
> 
> It may perhaps help to refresh the memory of our Theosophists if we refer
> them to what was said of the Virgin and the Dragon, and the universality
> of periodical births and re‐births of World‐Saviours—Solar Gods—in _Isis
> Unveiled,_(1136) with regard to certain passages in _Revelation_.
> 
> In 1853, the savant known as Erard‐Mollien read before the Institute of
> France a paper tending to prove the antiquity of the Indian Zodiac, in the
> signs of which were found the root and philosophy of all the most
> important religious festivals of that country; the lecturer tried to
> demonstrate that the origin of these religious ceremonies goes back into
> the night of time to at least 3,000 B.C. The Zodiac of the Hindûs, he
> thought, was long anterior to the Zodiac of the Greeks, and differed from
> it much in some particulars. In it one sees the Dragon on a Tree, at the
> foot of which the Virgin, Kanyâ‐Durgâ, one of the most ancient Goddesses,
> is placed on a Lion dragging after it the solar car. He said:
> 
>     This is the reason why this Virgin Durgâ is not the simple
>     _memento_ of an astronomical fact, but verily the most ancient
>     divinity of the Indian Olympus. She is evidently the same whose
>     return was announced in all the Sibylline books—the source of the
>     inspiration of Virgil—an epoch of universal renovation.... And
>     why, since the months are still named after this Indian solar
>     Zodiac, by the Malayalim‐speaking people [of southern India],
>     should that people have abandoned it to take that of the Greeks?
>     Everything proves, on the contrary, that these zodiacal figures
>     were transmitted to the Greeks by the Chaldeans, who got them from
>     the Brâhmans.(1137)
> 
> But all this is very poor testimony. Let us, however, remember also that
> which was said and accepted by the contemporaries of Volney, who remarks
> that as Aries was in its fifteenth degree 1,447 B.C., it follows that the
> first degree of Libra could not have coincided with the vernal equinox
> later than 15,194 years B.C.; if we add to this, he argues, the 1,790
> years that have passed since the birth of Christ, it appears that 16,984
> years must have elapsed since the origin of the Zodiac.(1138)
> 
> Dr. Schlegel, moreover, in his _Uranographie Chinoise_, assigns to the
> Chinese Astronomical Sphere an antiquity of 18,000 years.(1139)
> 
> Nevertheless, as opinions quoted without adequate proofs are of little
> avail, it may be more useful to turn to scientific evidence. M. Bailly,
> the famous French Astronomer of the last century, Member of the Academy,
> etc., asserts that the Hindû systems of Astronomy are by far the oldest,
> and that from them the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and even the Jews
> derived their knowledge. In support of these views he says:
> 
>     The astronomers who preceded the epoch 1491 are, first, the
>     Alexandrian Greeks; Hipparchus, who flourished 125 years before
>     our era, and Ptolemy, 260 years after Hipparchus. Following these
>     were the Arabs, who revived the study of astronomy in the ninth
>     century. These were succeeded by the Persians and the Tartars, to
>     whom we owe the tables of Nassireddin in 1269, and those of Ulug‐
>     beg in 1437. Such is the succession of events in Asia as known
>     prior to the Indian epoch 1491. What, then, is an epoch? It is the
>     observation of the longitude of a star at a given moment, the
>     place in the sky where it was seen, and which serves as a point of
>     reference, a starting‐point from which to calculate both the past
>     and future positions of the star from its observed motion. But an
>     epoch is useless unless the motion of the star has been
>     determined. A people, new to science and obliged to borrow a
>     foreign astronomy, finds no difficulty in fixing an epoch, since
>     the only observation needed is one which can be made at any
>     moment. But what it needs above all, what it is obliged to borrow,
>     are those elements which depend on accurate determination, and
>     which require continuous observation; above all, those motions
>     which depend on time, and which can only be accurately determined
>     by centuries of observation. These motions, then, must be borrowed
>     from a nation which has made such observations, and has behind it
>     the labours of centuries. We conclude, therefore, that a new
>     people will not borrow the epochs of an ancient one, without also
>     borrowing from them the “average motions.” Starting from this
>     principle we shall find that the Hindû epochs 1491 and 3102 could
>     not have been derived from those of either Ptolemy or Ulug‐beg.
> 
>     There remains the supposition that the Hindûs, comparing their
>     observations in 1491 with those previously made by Ulug‐beg and
>     Ptolemy, used the intervals between these observations to
>     determine the average motions. The date of Ulug‐beg is too recent
>     for such a determination; while those of Ptolemy and Hipparchus
>     were barely remote enough. But if the Hindû motions had been
>     determined from these comparisons, the epochs would be connected
>     together. Starting from the epochs of Ulug‐beg and Ptolemy we
>     should arrive at all those of the Hindûs. Hence foreign epochs
>     were either unknown or useless to the Hindûs.(1140)
> 
>     We may add to this another important consideration. When a nation
>     is obliged to borrow from its neighbours the methods or the
>     average motions of its astronomical tables, it has even greater
>     need to borrow, besides these, the knowledge of the inequalities
>     of the motions of the heavenly bodies, the motions of the apogee,
>     of the nodes, and of the inclination of the ecliptic; in short,
>     all those elements the determination of which requires the art of
>     observing, some instrumental appliances, and great industry. All
>     these astronomical elements, differing more or less with the
>     Greeks of Alexandria, the Arabs, the Persians and the Tartars,
>     exhibit no resemblance whatever with those of the Hindûs. The
>     latter, therefore, borrowed nothing from their neighbours.
> 
>     If the Hindûs did not borrow their epoch, they must have possessed
>     a real one of their own, based on their own observations; and this
>     must be either the epoch of the year 1491 after, or that of the
>     year 3102 before our era, the latter preceding by 4,592 years the
>     epoch 1491. We have to choose between these two epochs and to
>     decide which of them is based on observation. But before stating
>     the arguments which can and must decide the question, we may be
>     permitted to make a few remarks to those who may be inclined to
>     believe that it is modern observations and calculations which have
>     enabled the Hindûs to determine the past positions of the heavenly
>     bodies. It is far from easy to determine the celestial movements
>     with sufficient accuracy to ascend the stream of time for 4,592
>     years, and to describe the phenomena which must have occurred at
>     that period. We possess to‐day excellent instruments; exact
>     observations have been made for some two or three centuries, which
>     already permit us to calculate with considerable accuracy the
>     average motions of the Planets; we have the observations of the
>     Chaldeans, of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy, which, owing to their
>     remoteness from the present time, permit us to fix these motions
>     with greater certainty. Still we cannot undertake to represent
>     with invariable accuracy the observations throughout the long
>     period intervening between the Chaldeans and ourselves; and still
>     less can we undertake to determine with exactitude events
>     occurring 4,592 years before our day. Cassini and Maier have each
>     determined the secular motion of the moon, and they differ by 3m.
>     43s. This difference would give rise in forty‐six centuries to an
>     uncertainty of nearly three degrees in the moon’s place. Doubtless
>     one of these determinations is more accurate than the other; and
>     it is for observations of very great antiquity to decide between
>     them. But in very remote periods, where observations are lacking,
>     it follows that we are uncertain as to the phenomena. How, then,
>     could the Hindûs have calculated back from the year 1491 A.D. to
>     the year 3102 before our era, if they were only recent students of
>     Astronomy?
> 
>     The Orientals have never been what we are. However high an opinion
>     of their knowledge we may form from the examination of their
>     Astronomy, we cannot suppose them ever to have possessed that
>     great array of instruments which distinguishes our modern
>     observatories, and which is the product of simultaneous progress
>     in various arts, nor could they have possessed that genius for
>     discovery, which has hitherto seemed to belong exclusively to
>     Europe, and which, supplying the place of time, causes the rapid
>     progress of science and of human intelligence. If the Asiatics
>     have been powerful, learned and wise, it is power and time which
>     have produced their merit and success of all kinds. Power has
>     founded or destroyed their empires; now it has erected edifices
>     imposing by their bulk, now it has reduced them to venerable
>     ruins; and while these vicissitudes alternated with each other,
>     patience accumulated knowledge; and prolonged experience produced
>     wisdom. It is the antiquity of the nations of the East which has
>     erected their scientific fame.
> 
>     If the Hindûs possessed in 1491 a knowledge of the heavenly
>     motions sufficiently accurate to enable them to calculate
>     backwards for 4592 years, it follows that they could only have
>     obtained this knowledge from very ancient observations. To grant
>     them such knowledge, while refusing them the observations from
>     which it is derived, is to suppose an impossibility; it would be
>     equivalent to assuming that at the outset of their career they had
>     already reaped the harvest of time and experience. While on the
>     other hand, if their epoch of 3102 is assumed to be real, it would
>     follow that the Hindûs had simply kept pace with successive
>     centuries down to the year 1491 of our era. Thus, time itself was
>     their teacher; they knew the motions of the heavenly bodies during
>     these periods, because they had seen them; and the duration of the
>     Hindû people on earth is the cause of the fidelity of its records
>     and the accuracy of its calculations.
> 
>     It would seem that the problem as to which of the two epochs of
>     3102 and 1491 is the real one ought to be solved by one
>     consideration, viz., that the ancients in general, and
>     particularly the Hindûs, as we may see by the arrangement of their
>     Tables, calculated, and therefore observed, eclipses only. Now,
>     there was no eclipse of the sun at the moment of the epoch 1491;
>     and no eclipse of the moon either fourteen days before or after
>     that moment. Therefore the epoch 1491 is not based on an
>     observation. As regards the epoch 3102, the Brâhmans of Tirvaloor
>     place it at sunrise on February 18th. The sun was then in the
>     first point of the Zodiac according to its true longitude. The
>     other Tables show that at the preceding midnight the moon was in
>     the same place, but according to its average longitude. The
>     Brâhmans tell us also that this first point, the origin of their
>     Zodiac, was, in the year 3102, 54 degrees behind the equinox. It
>     follows that the origin—the first point of their Zodiac—was
>     therefore in the sixth degree of Aquarius.
> 
>     There occurred, therefore, about this time and place an average
>     conjunction; and indeed this conjunction is given in our best
>     Tables: La Caille’s for the sun and Maier’s for the moon. There
>     was no eclipse of the sun, the moon being too distant from her
>     node; but fourteen days later, the moon having approached the
>     node, must have been eclipsed. Maier’s tables, used without
>     correction for acceleration, give this eclipse; but they place it
>     during the day when it could not have been observed in India.
>     Cassini’s tables give it as occurring at night, which shows that
>     Maier’s motions are too rapid for distant centuries, when the
>     acceleration is not allowed for; and which also proves that in
>     spite of the improvement of our knowledge we can still be
>     uncertain as to the actual aspect of the heavens in past times.
> 
>     Therefore we believe that, as between the two Hindû epochs, the
>     real one is the year 3102, because it was accompanied by an
>     eclipse which could be observed, and which must have served to
>     determine it. This is a first proof of the truth of the longitude
>     assigned by the Hindûs to the sun and the moon at this instant;
>     and this proof would perhaps be sufficient, were it not that this
>     ancient determination becomes of the greatest importance for the
>     verification of the motions of these bodies, and must therefore be
>     borne out by every possible proof of its authenticity.
> 
>     We notice, 1st, that the Hindûs seem to have combined two epochs
>     together into the year 3102. The Tirvaloor Brâhmans reckon
>     primarily from the first moment of the Kali Yuga; but they have a
>     second epoch placed 2d. 3h. 32m. 30s. later. The latter is the
>     true astronomical epoch, while the former seems to be a civil era.
>     But if this epoch of the Kali Yuga had no reality, and was the
>     mere result of a calculation, why should it be thus divided? Their
>     calculated astronomical epoch would have become that of the Kali
>     Yuga, which would have been placed at the conjunction of the sun
>     and the moon, as is the case with the epochs of the three other
>     Tables. They must have had some reason for distinguishing between
>     the two; and this reason can only be due to the circumstances and
>     the time of the epoch; which therefore could not be the result of
>     calculation. This is not all; starting from the solar epoch
>     determined by the rising of the sun on February 18th, 3102, and
>     tracing back events 2d. 3h. 32m. 30s., we come to 2h. 27m. 30s.
>     a.m. of February 16th, which is the instant of the beginning of
>     Kali Yuga. It is curious that this age has not been made to
>     commence at one of the four great divisions of the day. It might
>     be suspected that the epoch should be midnight, and that the 2h.
>     27m. 30s. are a meridian correction. But whatever may have been
>     the reason for fixing on this moment, it is plain that were this
>     epoch the result of calculation, it would have been just as easy
>     to carry it back to midnight, so as to make the epoch correspond
>     to one of the chief divisions of the day, instead of placing it at
>     a moment fixed by the fraction of a day.
> 
>     2nd. The Hindûs assert that at the first moment of Kali Yuga there
>     was a conjunction of all the planets; and their Tables show this
>     conjunction while ours indicate that it might actually have
>     occurred. Jupiter and Mercury were in exactly the same degree of
>     the ecliptic; Mars being 8° and Saturn 17° distant from it. It
>     follows that about this time, or some fifteen days after the
>     commencement of Kali Yuga, and as the sun advanced in the Zodiac,
>     the Hindûs saw four planets emerge successively from the Sun’s
>     rays; first Saturn, then Mars, then Jupiter and Mercury, and these
>     planets appeared united in a somewhat small space. Although Venus
>     was not among them, the taste for the marvellous caused it to be
>     called a general conjunction of all the planets. The testimony of
>     the Brâhmans here coïncides with that of our Tables; and this
>     evidence, the result of a tradition, must be founded on actual
>     observation.
> 
>     3rd. We may remark that this phenomenon was visible about a
>     fortnight after the epoch, and exactly at the time when the
>     eclipse of the moon must have been observed, which served to fix
>     the epoch. The two observations mutually confirm each other; and
>     whoever made the one must have made the other also.
> 
>     4th. We may believe also that the Hindûs made at the same time a
>     determination of the place of the moon’s node; this seems
>     indicated by their calculation. They give the longitude of this
>     point of the lunar orbit for the time of their epoch, and to this
>     they add as a constant 40m., which is the node’s motion in 12d.
>     14h. It is as if they stated that this determination was made
>     thirteen days after their epoch, and that to make it correspond to
>     that epoch, we must add the 40m. through which the node has
>     retrograded in the interval. This observation is, therefore, of
>     the same date as that of the lunar eclipse; thus giving three
>     observations, which are mutually confirmatory.
> 
>     5th. It appears from the description of the Hindû Zodiac given by
>     M. C. Gentil, that on it the places of the stars named the Eye of
>     Taurus and the Wheat‐ear of Virgo, can be determined for the
>     commencement of the Kali Yuga. Now, comparing these places with
>     the actual positions, reduced by our precession of the equinoxes
>     to the moment in question, we see that the point of origin of the
>     Hindû Zodiac must lie between the fifth and sixth degree of
>     Aquarius. The Brâhmans, therefore, were right in placing it in the
>     sixth degree of that sign, the more so since this small difference
>     may be due to the proper motion of the stars, which is unknown.
>     Thus it was yet another observation which guided the Hindûs in
>     this fairly accurate determination of the first point of their
>     movable Zodiac.
> 
>     It does not seem possible to doubt the existence in antiquity of
>     observations of this date. The Persians say that four beautiful
>     stars were placed as guardians at the four corners of the world.
>     Now it so happens that at the commencement of Kali Yuga, 3,000 or
>     3,100 years before our era, the Eye of the Bull and the Heart of
>     the Scorpion were exactly at the equinoctial points, while the
>     Heart of the Lion and the Southern Fish were pretty near the
>     solstitial points. An observation of the rising of the Pleiades in
>     the evening, seven days before the autumnal equinox, also belongs
>     to the year 3000 before our era. This and similar observations are
>     collected in Ptolemy’s calendars, though he does not give their
>     authors; and these, which are older than those of the Chaldeans,
>     may well be the work of the Hindûs. They are well acquainted with
>     the constellation of the Pleiades, and while we call it vulgarly
>     the “Poussinière,” they name it Pillaloo‐codi—the “Hen and
>     chickens.” This name has, therefore, passed from people to people,
>     and comes to us from the most ancient nations of Asia. We see that
>     the Hindûs must have observed the rising of the Pleiades, and have
>     made use of it to regulate their years and their months; for this
>     constellation is also called Krittikâ. Now they have a month of
>     the same name, and this coïncidence can only be due to the fact
>     that this month was announced by the rising or setting of the
>     constellation in question.
> 
>     But what is even more decisive as showing that the Hindûs observed
>     the stars, and in the same way that we do, marking their position
>     by their longitude, is a fact mentioned by Augustinus Riccius
>     that, according to observations attributed to Hermes, and made
>     1,985 years before Ptolemy, the brilliant star in the Lyre and
>     that in the heart of the Hydra were each seven degrees in advance
>     of their respective positions as determined by Ptolemy. This
>     determination seems very extraordinary. The stars advance
>     regularly with respect to the equinox: and Ptolemy ought to have
>     found the longitudes 28 degrees in excess of what they were 1,985
>     years before his time. Besides, there is a remarkable peculiarity
>     about this fact, the same error or difference being found in the
>     positions of both stars; therefore the error was due to some cause
>     affecting both stars equally. It was to explain this peculiarity
>     that the Arab Thebith imagined the stars to have an oscillatory
>     movement, causing them to advance and recede alternately. This
>     hypothesis was easily disproved; but the observations attributed
>     to Hermes remained unexplained. Their explanation, however, is
>     found in Hindû Astronomy. At the date fixed for these
>     observations, 1,985 years before Ptolemy, the first point of the
>     Hindû Zodiac was 35 degrees in advance of the equinox; therefore
>     the longitudes reckoned for this point are 35 degrees in excess of
>     those reckoned from the equinox. But after the lapse of 1,985
>     years the stars would have advanced 28 degrees, and there would
>     remain a difference of only 7 degrees between the longitudes of
>     Hermes and those of Ptolemy, and the difference would be the same
>     for the two stars, since it is due to the difference between the
>     starting‐points of the Hindû Zodiac and that of Ptolemy, which
>     reckons from the equinox. This explanation is so simple and
>     natural that it must be true. We do not know whether Hermes, so
>     celebrated in antiquity, was a Hindû, but we see that the
>     observations attributed to him are reckoned in the Hindû manner,
>     and we conclude that they were made by the Hindûs, who, therefore,
>     were able to make all the observations we have enumerated, and
>     which we find noted in their Tables.
> 
>     6th. The observation of the year 3102, which seems to have fixed
>     their epoch, was not a difficult one. We see that the Hindûs,
>     having once determined the moon’s daily motion of 13° 10´ 35´´,
>     made use of it to divide the Zodiac into 27 constellations,
>     related to the period of the moon, which takes about 27 days to
>     describe it.
> 
>     It was by this method that they determined the positions of the
>     stars in this Zodiac; it was thus they found that a certain star
>     of the Lyre was in 8s 24°, the Heart of the Hydra in 4s 7°,
>     longitudes which are ascribed to Hermes, but which are calculated
>     on the Hindû Zodiac. Similarly, they discovered that the Wheat‐ear
>     of Virgo forms the commencement of their fifteenth constellation,
>     and the Eye of Taurus the end of the fourth; these stars being the
>     one in 6s 6° 40´, the other in 1s 23° 20´ of the Hindû Zodiac.
>     This being so, the eclipse of the moon which occurred fifteen days
>     after the Kali Yuga epoch, took place at a point between the
>     Wheat‐ear of Virgo and the star θ of the same constellation. These
>     stars are very approximately a constellation apart, the one
>     beginning the fifteenth, the other the sixteenth. Thus it would
>     not be difficult to determine the moon’s place by measuring her
>     distance from one of these stars; from this they deduced the
>     position of the sun, which is opposite to the moon, and then,
>     knowing their average motions, they calculated that the moon was
>     at the first point of the Zodiac according to her average
>     longitude at midnight on the 17th‐18th February of the year 3102
>     before our era, and that the sun occupied the same place six hours
>     later according to his true longitude; an event which fixes the
>     commencement of the Hindû year.
> 
>     7th. The Hindûs state that 20,400 years before the age of Kali
>     Yuga, the first point of their Zodiac coincided with the vernal
>     equinox, and that the sun and moon were in conjunction there. This
>     epoch is obviously fictitious;(1141) but we may enquire from what
>     point, from what epoch, the Hindûs set out in establishing it.
>     Taking the Hindû values for the revolution of the sun and moon,
>     viz., 363d. 6h. 12m. 30s., and 27d. 7h. 43m. 13s., we have—
> 
>     20,400 revolutions of the sun = 7,451,277d. 2h.
>     272,724 revolutions of the moon = 7,451,277d. 7h.
> 
>     Such is the result obtained by starting from the Kali Yuga epoch;
>     and the assertion of the Hindûs, that there was a conjunction at
>     the time stated, is founded on their Tables; but if, using the
>     same elements, we start from the era of the year 1491, or from
>     another placed in the year 1282, of which we shall speak later,
>     there will always be a difference of almost one or two days. It is
>     both just and natural, in verifying the Hindû calculations, to
>     take those among their elements which give the same result as they
>     had themselves arrived at, and to set out from that one among
>     their epochs which enables us to arrive at the fictitious epoch in
>     question. Hence, since to make this calculation they must have set
>     out from their real epoch, the one which was founded on an
>     observation and not from any of those which were derived by this
>     very calculation from the former, it follows that their real epoch
>     was that of the year 3102 before our era.
> 
>     8th. The Tirvaloor Brâhmans give the moon’s motion as 7s 20° 0´
>     7´´ on the movable Zodiac, and as 9k 7° 45´ 1´´ as referred to the
>     equinox in a great period of 1,600,984 days, or 4,386 years and 94
>     days. We believe this motion to have been determined by
>     observation; and we must state at the outset that this period is
>     of an extent which renders it but ill suited to the calculation of
>     the mean motions.
> 
>     In their astronomical calculations the Hindûs make use of periods
>     of 248, 3,031, and 12,372 days; but, apart from the fact that
>     these periods, though much too short, do not present the
>     inconvenience of the former, they contain an exact number of
>     revolutions of the moon referred to its apogee. They are in
>     reality mean motions. The great period of 1,600,984 days is not a
>     sum of accumulated revolutions; there is no reason why it should
>     contain 1,600,984 rather than 1,600,985 days. It would seem that
>     observation alone must have fixed the number of days and marked
>     the beginning and end of the period. This period ends on the 21st
>     of May, 1282 of our era, at 5h. 15m. 30s. at Benares. The moon was
>     then in apogee, according to the
> 
>     Hindûs, and her longitude was .. 7B 13° 45´ 1´´
>     Maier gives the longitude as .. 7 13 53 48
>     And places the apogee at .. .. 7 14 6 54
> 
>     The determination of the moon’s place by the Brâhmans thus differs
>     only by nine minutes from ours, and that of the apogee by twenty‐
>     two minutes, and it is very evident that they could only have
>     obtained this agreement with our best Tables and this exactitude
>     in the celestial positions by observation. If then, observation
>     fixed the end of this period, there is every reason to believe
>     that it determined its commencement. But then this motion,
>     determined directly, and from nature, would of necessity be in
>     close agreement with the true motions of the heavenly bodies.
> 
>     And in fact the Hindû motion during this long period of 4,883
>     years, does not differ by a minute from that of Cassini, and
>     agrees equally with that of Maier. Thus two peoples, the Hindûs
>     and the Europeans, placed at the two extremities of the world, and
>     perhaps as distant by their institutions, have obtained precisely
>     the same results as regards the moon’s motions; and an agreement
>     which would be inconceivable, if it were not based on the
>     observation and mutual imitation of nature. We must remark that
>     the four Tables of the Hindûs are all copies of the same
>     Astronomy. It cannot be denied that the Siamese Tables existed in
>     1687, when they were brought from India by M. de la Loubère. At
>     that time the tables of Cassini and Maier were not in existence,
>     and thus the Hindûs were already in possession of the exact motion
>     contained in these Tables, while we did not yet possess it. It
>     must, therefore, be admitted that the accuracy of this Hindû
>     motion is the point of observation. It is exact throughout this
>     period of 4,383 years, because it was taken from the sky itself;
>     and if observation determined its close, it fixed its commencement
>     also. It is the longest period which has been observed and of
>     which the recollection is preserved in the annals of Astronomy. It
>     has its origin in the epoch of the year 3102 B.C., and it is a
>     demonstrative proof of the reality of that epoch.(1142)
> 
> Bailly is referred to at such length, as he is one of the few scientific
> men who have tried to do full justice to the Astronomy of the Âryans. From
> John Bentley down to Burgess’ _Sûrya‐Siddhânta_, not one Astronomer has
> been fair enough to the most learned people of Antiquity. However
> distorted and misunderstood the Hindû Symbology may be, no Occultist can
> fail to do it justice once that he knows something of the Secret Sciences;
> nor will he turn away from their metaphysical and mystical interpretation
> of the Zodiac, even though the whole Pleiades of Royal Astronomical
> Societies rise in arms against their mathematical rendering of it. The
> descent and reäscent of the Monad or Soul cannot be disconnected from the
> Zodiacal signs, and it looks more natural, in the sense of the fitness of
> things, to believe in a mysterious sympathy between the metaphysical Soul
> and the bright constellations, and in the influence of the latter on the
> former, than in the absurd notion that the creators of Heaven and Earth
> have placed in Heaven the types of twelve vicious Jews. And if, as the
> author of _The Gnostics and their Remains_ asserts, the aim of all the
> Gnostic schools and the later Platonists
> 
>     was to accommodate the old faith to the influence of Buddhistic
>     theosophy, the very essence of which was that the innumerable gods
>     of the Hindû mythology were but names for the Energies of the
>     First Triad in its successive Avatârs or manifestations unto man,
> 
> whither can we better turn to trace these theosophic ideas to their very
> root, than to the old Indian wisdom? We say again: Archaic Occultism would
> remain incomprehensible to all, if it were to be rendered otherwise than
> through the more familiar channels of Buddhism and Hindûism. For the
> former is the emanation of the latter; and both are children of one
> mother—ancient Lemuro‐Atlantean Wisdom.
> 
> Section XVII. Summary of the Position.
> 
> The reader has had the whole case presented to him from both sides, and it
> remains with him to decide whether its summary stands in our favour or
> not. If there were such a thing as a void, a vacuum in Nature, one ought
> to find it produced, according to a physical law, in the minds of helpless
> admirers of the “lights” of Science, who pass their time in mutually
> destroying their teachings. If ever the theory that “two lights make
> darkness” found its application it is in this case, where one‐half of the
> “lights” imposes its forces and “modes of motion” on the belief of the
> faithful, and the other half opposes the very existence of the same.
> “Ether, Matter, Energy”—the sacred hypostatical trinity, the three
> principles of the truly _unknown_ God of Science, called by them PHYSICAL
> NATURE!
> 
> Theology is taken to task and ridiculed for believing in the union of
> three persons in one Godhead—one God as to substance, three persons as to
> individuality; and we are laughed at for our belief in unproved and
> unprovable doctrines, in Angels and Devils, Gods and Spirits. And, indeed,
> that which made the Scientists win the day over Theology in the Great
> “Conflict between Religion and Science,” was precisely the argument that
> neither the identity of that substance, nor the triple individuality
> claimed—after having been conceived, invented, and worked out in the
> depths of Theological Consciousness—could be proved to exist by any
> scientific inductive process of reasoning, least of all by the evidence of
> our senses. Religion must perish, it is said, because it teaches
> “mysteries.” “Mystery is the negation of Common Sense,” and Science repels
> it. According to Mr. Tyndall, Metaphysics is “fiction,” like poetry. The
> man of Science “takes nothing on trust”; rejects everything “that is not
> proven to him,” while the Theologian accepts “everything on blind faith.”
> The Theosophist and the Occultist, who take nothing on trust, not even
> _exact_ Science, the Spiritualist who denies dogma but believes in Spirits
> and in _invisible but potent influences_, all share in the same contempt.
> Very well, then; what we have to do now, is to examine for the last time
> whether _exact_ Science does not act precisely in the same way as do
> Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Theology.
> 
> In a work by Mr. S. Laing, considered a standard book on Science, _Modern
> Science and Modern Thought_, the author of which, according to the
> laudatory review of the _Times_, “exhibits with much power and effect the
> immense discoveries of Science, and its numerous victories over old
> opinions, whenever they have the rashness to challenge conclusions with
> it,” we read as follows:
> 
>     What is the material universe composed of? Ether, Matter, Energy.
> 
> We stop to ask, What is Ether? And Mr. Laing answers in the name of
> Science:
> 
>     Ether is not actually known to us by any test of which the senses
>     can take cognizance, but is a sort of mathematical substance which
>     we are compelled to assume in order to account for the phenomena
>     of light and heat.(1143)
> 
> And what is Matter? Do you know more about it than you do about the
> “hypothetical” agent, Ether?
> 
>     In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigations can
>     tell us ... nothing directly of the composition of living matter,
>     and ... it is also in strictness true, that we know nothing about
>     the compositions of any [material] body whatever as it is.(1144)
> 
> And Energy? Surely you can define the third person of the Trinity of your
> Material Universe? We can take the answer from any book on Physics:
> 
>     Energy is that which is only known to us by its effects.
> 
> Pray explain, for this is rather hazy.
> 
>     [In mechanics there is actual and potential energy: work actually
>     performed, and the capacity for performing it. As to the nature of
>     molecular Energy or Forces], the various phenomena which bodies
>     present show that their molecules are under the influence of two
>     contrary forces, one which tends to bring them together, and the
>     other to separate them.... The first force ... is called
>     _molecular attraction_ ... the second force is due to the _vis
>     viva_, or moving force.(1145)
> 
> Just so: it is the nature of this _moving force_, of this _vis viva_, that
> we want to know. What is it?
> 
> “We do not know!” is the invariable answer. “It is an empty shadow of my
> imagination,” explains Mr. Huxley in his _Physical Basis of Life_.
> 
> Thus the whole structure of Modern Science is built on a kind of
> “mathematical abstraction,” on a Protean “Substance which eludes the
> senses” (Dubois Reymond), and on _effects_, the shadowy and illusive will‐
> o’‐the wisps of a _something_ entirely unknown to, and beyond the reach
> of, Science. “_Self‐moving_” Atoms! _Self‐moving_ Suns, Planets, and
> Stars! But who, then, or _what_ are they all, if they are self‐endowed
> with motion? Why then should you, Physicists, laugh at and deride our
> “Self‐moving Archæus”? Mystery is rejected and scorned by Science, and as
> Father Felix has truly said:
> 
>     She cannot escape it. Mystery is the fatality of Science.
> 
> The language of the French preacher is ours, and we quote it in _Isis
> Unveiled_. Who—he asks—who of you, men of Science:
> 
>     Has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body,
>     the generation of a single atom? What is there, I will not say at
>     the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom? Who has sounded
>     to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand? The grain of sand,
>     gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science; she
>     has turned and returned it; she divides it and subdivides it; she
>     torments it with her experiments; she vexes it with her questions
>     to snatch from it the final word as to its secret constitution;
>     she asks it, with an insatiable curiosity: “Shall I divide thee
>     infinitesimally?” Then suspended over this abyss, science
>     hesitates, she stumbles, she feels dazzled, she becomes dizzy, and
>     in despair says: “I DO NOT KNOW.”
> 
>     But if you are so fatally ignorant of the genesis and hidden
>     nature of a grain of sand, how should you have an intuition as to
>     the generation of a single living being? Whence in the living
>     being does life come? Where does it commence? What is the life
>     principle?(1146)
> 
> Do the men of Science deny all these charges? By no means: for here is a
> confession of Tyndall, which shows how powerless is Science, even over the
> world of Matter.
> 
>     The first marshalling of the atoms, on which all subsequent action
>     depends, baffles a keener power than that of the microscope....
>     Through pure excess of complexity, and long before observation can
>     have any voice in the matter, the most highly trained intellect,
>     the most refined and disciplined imagination, retires in
>     bewilderment from the contemplation of the problem. We are struck
>     dumb by an astonishment which no microscope can relieve, doubting
>     not only the power of our instrument, but even whether we
>     ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable
>     us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature.
> 
> How little is known of the material Universe, indeed, has now been
> suspected for years, on the very admissions of these men of Science
> themselves. And now there are some Materialists who would even make away
> with Ether—or whatever Science calls the infinite Substance, the noumenon
> of which the Buddhists call Svabhâvat—as well as with Atoms, too dangerous
> both on account of their ancient philosophical, and their present
> Christian and theological, associations. From the earliest Philosophers,
> whose records passed to posterity, down to our present age—which, if it
> denies Invisible Beings in Space, can never be so insane as to deny a
> Plenum of some sort—the Fulness of the Universe has been an accepted
> belief. And what it was said to contain, one learns from Hermes
> Trismegistus (in Dr. Anna Kingsford’s able rendering), who is made to say:
> 
>     Concerning the void ... my judgment is that it does not exist,
>     that it never has existed, and that it never will exist, for all
>     the various parts of the universe are filled, as the earth also is
>     complete and full of bodies, differing in quality and in form,
>     having their species and their magnitude, one larger, one smaller,
>     one solid, one tenuous. The larger ... are easily perceived; the
>     smaller ... are difficult to apprehend, or altogether invisible.
>     We know only of their existence by the sensation of feeling,
>     wherefore many persons deny such entities to be bodies, and regard
>     them as simply spaces,(1147) but it is impossible there should be
>     such spaces. For if indeed there should be anything outside the
>     universe ... then it would be a space occupied by intelligible
>     beings analogous to its [the universe’s] Divinity.... I speak of
>     the genii, for I hold they dwell with us, and of the heroes who
>     dwell above us, between the earth and the higher airs; wherein are
>     neither clouds nor any tempest.(1148)
> 
> And we “hold” it too. Only, as already remarked, no Eastern Initiate would
> speak of spheres “_above_ us, between the earth and the airs,” even the
> highest, as there is no such division or measurement in Occult speech, no
> _above_, as no _below_, but an eternal _within, within two other withins_,
> or the planes of subjectivity merging gradually into that of terrestrial
> objectivity—this being for _man_ the last one, his own plane. This
> necessary explanation may be closed here by giving, in the words of
> Hermes, the belief on this particular point of the whole world of Mystics:
> 
>     There are many orders of the Gods; and in all there is an
>     intelligible part. It is not to be supposed they do not come
>     within the range of our senses; on the contrary, we perceive them,
>     better even than those which are called visible.... There are then
>     Gods, superior to all appearances; after them come the Gods whose
>     principle is spiritual; these Gods being sensible, in conformity
>     with their double origin, manifest all things by a sensible
>     nature, each of them illuminating his works one by another.(1149)
>     The supreme Being of heaven, or of all that is comprehended under
>     this name, is Zeus, for it is by heaven that Zeus gives life to
>     all things. The supreme Being of the sun is light, for it is by
>     the disk of the sun that we receive the benefit of the light. The
>     thirty‐six horoscopes of the fixed stars have for supreme Being,
>     or prince, him whose name is _Pantomorphos_, or having all forms,
>     because he gives divine forms to divers types. The seven planets,
>     or wandering spheres, have for supreme Spirits Fortune and
>     Destiny, who uphold the eternal stability of the laws of Nature
>     throughout incessant transformation and perpetual agitation. The
>     ether is the instrument or medium by which all is produced.(1150)
> 
> This is quite philosophical and in accordance with the spirit of Eastern
> Esotericism: for all the Forces, such as Light, Heat, Electricity, etc.,
> are called the “Gods”—Esoterically.
> 
> This, indeed, must be so, since the Esoteric Teachings in Egypt and India
> were identical. And, therefore, the personification of Fohat, synthesizing
> all the manifesting Forces in Nature is a legitimate result. Moreover, as
> will be shown later, the real and Occult Forces in Nature only now begin
> to be known—and even in this case, by heterodox, not orthodox,
> Science,(1151) though their existence, in one instance at any rate, is
> corroborated and certified by an immense number of educated people, and
> even by some official men of Science.
> 
> The statement, moreover, in Stanza VI—that Fohat sets in motion the
> primordial World‐Germs, or the aggregation of Cosmic Atoms and Matter,
> “some one way, some the other way,” in the opposite direction—looks
> orthodox and scientific enough. For there is, at all events, in support of
> this position, one fact fully recognized by Science, and it is this. The
> meteoric showers, periodical in November and August, belong to a system
> moving in an elliptical orbit around the Sun. The aphelion of this ring is
> 1,732 millions of miles beyond the orbit of Neptune, its plane is inclined
> to the Earth’s orbit at an angle of 64° 3´, and the direction of the
> meteoric swarm moving round this orbit _is contrary to that of the Earth’s
> revolution_.
> 
> This fact, recognized only in 1833, shows it to be the modern rediscovery
> of what was very anciently known. Fohat turns with his two hands in
> contrary directions the “seed” and the “curds,” or Cosmic Matter; in
> clearer language, is turning particles in a highly attenuated condition,
> and nebulæ.
> 
> Outside the boundaries of the Solar System, it is other Suns, and
> especially the mysterious Central Sun—the “Abode of the Invisible Deity”
> as some reverend gentlemen have called it—that determines the motion and
> the direction of bodies. That motion serves also to differentiate the
> homogeneous Matter, round and between the several bodies, into Elements
> and Sub‐elements unknown to our Earth, and these are regarded by Modern
> Science as distinct individual Elements, whereas they are merely temporary
> appearances, changing with every small cycle within the Manvantara, some
> Esoteric works calling them “Kalpic Masks.”
> 
> Fohat is the key in Occultism which opens and unriddles the multiform
> symbols and allegories in the so‐called mythology of every nation;
> demonstrating the wonderful Philosophy and the deep insight into the
> mysteries of Nature, contained in the Egyptian and Chaldean as well as in
> the Âryan religions. Fohat, shown in his true character, proves how deeply
> versed were all those prehistoric nations in every Science of Nature, now
> called the physical and chemical branches of Natural Philosophy. In India,
> Fohat is the scientific aspect of both Vishnu and Indra, the latter older
> and more important in the _Rig Veda_ than his sectarian successor; while
> in Egypt, Fohat was known as Toom issued of Noot,(1152) or Osiris in his
> character of a primordial God, creator of heaven and of beings.(1153) For
> Toom is spoken of as the Protean God who _generates other Gods_ and gives
> himself the form he likes; the “Master of Life, giving their vigour to the
> Gods.”(1154) He is the _overseer_ of the Gods, and he “who creates spirits
> and gives them shape and life”; he is “the North Wind and the Spirit of
> the West”; and finally the “Setting Sun of Life,” or the vital electric
> force that leaves the body at death; wherefore the Defunct begs that Toom
> should give him the breath from his _right_ nostril (positive electricity)
> that he might live in his _second_ form. Both the hieroglyph, and the text
> of chapter xlii in the _Book of the Dead_, show the identity of Toom and
> Fohat. The former represents a man standing erect with the hieroglyph of
> the _breaths_ in his hands. The latter says:
> 
>     I open to the chief of An (Heliopolis). I am Toom. I cross the
>     water spilt by Thot‐Hapi, the lord of the horizon, and am the
>     divider of the earth [Fohat divides Space and, with his Sons, the
>     Earth into seven zones]....
> 
>     I cross the heavens; I am the two Lions. I am Ra, I am Aam, I eat
>     my heir.(1155).... I glide on the soil of the field of
>     Aanroo,(1156) given me by the master of limitless eternity. I am a
>     germ of eternity. I am Toom, to whom eternity is accorded.
> 
> The very words used by Fohat in the XIth Book, and the very titles given
> him. In the Egyptian Papyri the whole Cosmogony of the Secret Doctrine is
> found scattered about in isolated sentences, even in the _Book of the
> Dead_. Number seven is quite as much insisted upon and emphasized therein
> as in the _Book of Dzyan_. “The Great Water [the Deep or Chaos] is said to
> be seven cubits deep”—“cubits” standing here of course for divisions,
> zones, and principles. Therein, “in the great Mother, all the Gods, and
> the Seven Great Ones are born.” Both Fohat and Toom are addressed as the
> “Great Ones of the Seven Magic Forces,” who, “conquer the Serpent Apap” or
> Matter.(1157)
> 
> No student of Occultism, however, ought to be betrayed, by the usual
> phraseology used in the translations of Hermetic Works, into believing
> that the ancient Egyptians or Greeks spoke of, and referred, monk‐like, at
> every moment in conversation, to a Supreme Being, God, the “One Father and
> Creator of all,” etc., in the way found on every page of such
> translations. No such thing indeed; and those texts _are not the original
> Egyptian_ texts. They are Greek compilations, the earliest of which does
> not go beyond the early period of Neo‐Platonism. No Hermetic work written
> by Egyptians—as we may see by the _Book of the Dead_—would speak of the
> one universal God of the Monotheistic systems; the one _Absolute_ Cause of
> all, was as unnameable and unpronounceable in the mind of the ancient
> Philosopher of Egypt, as it is for ever _Unknowable_ in the conception of
> Mr. Herbert Spencer. As for the Egyptian in general, as M. Maspero well
> remarks, whenever he
> 
>     Arrived at the notion of divine Unity, the God One was never “God”
>     simply. M. Lepage‐Renouf very justly observed that the word
>     Nouter, Nouti, “God” had never ceased to be _a generic name_ to
>     become a personal one.
> 
> Every God was the “one living and unique God” with them. Their
> 
>     Monotheism was purely geographical. If the Egyptian of Memphis
>     proclaimed the Unity of Phtah to the exclusion of Ammon, the
>     Thebeian Egyptian proclaimed the unity of Ammon to the exclusion
>     of Phtah [as we now see done in India in the case of the Shaivas
>     and the Vaishnavas]. Ra, the “One God” at Heliopolis is not the
>     same as Osiris, the “One God” at Abydos, and can be worshipped
>     side by side with him, without being absorbed by him. The one God
>     is but the God of the nome or the city, Nouter Nouti, and does not
>     exclude the existence of the one God of the neighbouring town or
>     nome. In short, whenever we are speaking of Egyptian Monotheism,
>     we ought to speak of the Gods One of Egypt, and not of the One
>     God.(1158)
> 
> It is by this feature, preëminently Egyptian, that the authenticity of the
> various so‐called _Hermetic Books_, ought to be tested; and it is totally
> absent from the Greek fragments known under this name. This proves that a
> Greek Neo‐Platonic, or perhaps a Christian hand, had no small share in the
> editing of such works. Of course the fundamental Philosophy is there, and
> in many a place—intact. But the style has been altered and smoothed in a
> monotheistic direction, as much, if not more than that of the Hebrew
> Genesis in its Greek and Latin translations. They _may_ be _Hermetic_
> works, but not works written by either of the two Hermes—or rather, by
> Thot Hermes, the directing Intelligence of the Universe(1159) or by Thot
> his terrestrial incarnation called Trismegistus, of the Rosetta stone.
> 
> But all is doubt, negation, iconoclasm and brutal indifference, in our age
> of a hundred “isms” and no religion. Every idol is broken save the Golden
> Calf.
> 
> Unfortunately, no nation or nations can escape their Karmic fate, any more
> than can units and individuals. History itself is dealt with by the so‐
> called historians as unscrupulously as legendary lore. For this, Augustin
> Thierry has made the _amende honorable_, if one may believe his
> biographers. He deplored the erroneous principle that made all the _would‐
> be_ historiographers lose their way, and each presume to correct
> tradition, “that _vox populi_ which nine times out of ten is _vox Dei_”;
> and he finally admitted that _in legend alone rests real history_; for he
> adds:
> 
>     Legend is living tradition, and three times out of four it is
>     truer than what we call History.(1160)
> 
> While Materialists deny everything in the Universe, save Matter,
> Archæologists are trying to dwarf Antiquity, and seek to destroy every
> claim of Ancient Wisdom by tampering with Chronology. Our present‐day
> Orientalists and historical writers are to Ancient History that which the
> white ants are to the buildings in India. More dangerous even than those
> Termites, the modern Archæologists—the “authorities” of the future in the
> matter of Universal History—are preparing for the history of past nations
> the fate of certain edifices in tropical countries. As said Michelet:
> 
>     History will tumble down and break into atoms in the lap of the
>     twentieth century, devoured to its foundations by her annalists.
> 
> Very soon, indeed, under their combined efforts, it will share the fate of
> those ruined cities in both Americas, which lie deeply buried under
> impassable virgin forests. Historical facts will remain concealed from
> view by the inextricable jungles of modern hypotheses, denials and
> scepticism. But very happily _actual_ History repeats herself, for she
> proceeds, like everything else, in cycles; and dead facts, and events
> deliberately drowned in the sea of modern scepticism, will ascend once
> more and reappear on the surface.
> 
> In Volume II, the very fact that a work with pretensions to Philosophy,
> which is also an exposition of the most abstruse problems, has to be
> commenced by tracing the evolution of mankind from what are regarded as
> supernatural beings—Spirits—will arouse the most malevolent criticism.
> Believers in, and the defenders of, the Secret Doctrine, however, will
> have to bear the accusation of madness _and worse_, as philosophically as
> for long years already the writer has done. Whenever a Theosophist is
> taxed with insanity, he ought to reply by quoting from Montesquieu’s
> _Lettres Persanes_:
> 
>     By opening so freely their lunatic asylums to their supposed
>     madmen, men only seek to assure each other that they are not
>     themselves mad.
> 
> [Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.]
> 
> FOOTNOTES
> 
>     1 See _Theosophist_, June, 1883.
> 
>     2 _Preface_ to the original edition.
> 
>     3 _Dan_, in modern Chinese and Tibetan phonetics _Chhan_, is the
>       general term for the esoteric schools and their literature. In the
>       old books, the word _Janna_ is defined as “reforming one’s self by
>       meditation and knowledge,” a second _inner_ birth. Hence _Dzan_,
>       _Djan_ phonetically; the _Book of Dzyan_. See Edkins, _Chinese
>       Buddhism_, p. 129, note.
> 
>     4 Mr. Beglor, the chief engineer at Buddhagâya, and a distinguished
>       archæologist, was the first, we believe, to discover it.
> 
>     5 See _Isis Unveiled_, Vol. II, p. 27.
> 
>     6 _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 23.
> 
>     7 _Ain í Akbari_, translated by Dr. Blochmann, quoted by Max Müller,
>       _op. cit._
> 
>     8 _Tao‐te‐King_, p. xxvii.
> 
>     9 Max Müller, _op. cit._, p. 114.
> 
>    10 Found out and proven only _now_, through the discoveries made by
>       George Smith (see his _Chaldean Account of Genesis_), and which,
>       thanks to this Armenian forger, have misled all the “civilized
>       nations” for over 1,500 years into accepting Jewish derivations for
>       direct _Divine_ Revelation.
> 
>    11 _Egypt’s Place in History_, i. 200.
> 
>    12 Spence Hardy, _The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists_, p. 66.
> 
>    13 E. Schlagintweit, _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 77.
> 
>    14 Lassen (_Ind. Althersumkunde_, II, 1,072) shows a Buddhist monastery
>       erected in the Kailâs. Range in 137 B.C.; and General Cunningham,
>       one earlier than that.
> 
>    15 Rev. J. Edkins, _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 87.
> 
>    16 See, for example, Max Müller’s _Lectures_.
> 
>    17 _Op. cit._, p. 118.
> 
>    18 _Op. cit._, p. 318.
> 
>    19 _Asiatic Researches_, I, 272.
> 
>    20 See Max Müller, _op. cit._, pp. 288 _et seq._ This relates to the
>       clever forgery, on leaves inserted in old Purânic MSS., and written
>       in correct and archaic Sanskrit, of all that the Pandits had heard
>       from Colonel Wilford about Adam and Abraham, Noah and his three
>       sons, etc., etc.
> 
>    21 From a lecture by N. M. Prjevalsky.
> 
>    22 Lün‐Yü (§ I a); Schott, _Chinesische Literatur_, p. 7; quoted by Max
>       Müller.
> 
>    23 _Life and Teachings of Confucius_, p. 96.
> 
>    24 Op. cit., p. 257.
> 
>    25 The name is used in the sense of the Greek word ἅνθρωπς.
> 
>    26 Rabbi Jehoshua Ben Chananea, who died about A.D. 72, openly declared
>       that he had performed “miracles” by means of the book _Sepher
>       Jetzirah_, and challenged every sceptic. Franck, quoting from the
>       Babylonian _Talmud_, names two other thaumaturgists, Rabbis Chanina
>       and Oshoi. (See _Jerusalem Talmud_, _Sanhedrin_, c. 7, etc.; and
>       Franck, _Die Kabbalah_, pp. 55, 56). Many of the mediæval
>       Occultists, Alchemists, and Kabalists have made the same claim; and
>       even the late modern Magus, Éliphas Lévi, publicly asserts it in his
>       books on Magic.
> 
>    27 It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the term Divine
>       Thought, like that of Universal Mind, must not be regarded as even
>       vaguely shadowing forth an intellectual process akin to that
>       exhibited by man. The “Unconscious,” according to von Hartmann,
>       arrived at the vast creative, or rather evolutionary plan, “by a
>       clairvoyant wisdom superior to all consciousness,” which in Vedântic
>       language would mean absolute Wisdom. Only those who realize how far
>       intuition soars above the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought
>       can form the faintest conception of that absolute Wisdom which
>       transcends the ideas of Time and Space. Mind, as we know it, is
>       resolvable into states of consciousness, of varying duration,
>       intensity, complexity, etc., all, in the ultimate, resting on
>       sensation, which is again Mâyâ. Sensation, again, necessarily
>       postulates limitation. The Personal God of orthodox Theism
>       perceives, thinks, and is affected by emotion; he repents and feels
>       “fierce anger.” But the notion of such mental states clearly
>       involves the unthinkable postulate of the externality of the
>       exciting stimuli, to say nothing of the impossibility of ascribing
>       changelessness to a being whose emotions fluctuate with events in
>       the worlds he presides over. The conceptions of a Personal God as
>       changeless and infinite are thus unpsychological and, what is worse,
>       unphilosophical.
> 
>    28 Plato proves himself an Initiate, when saying in _Cratylus_ that
>       θεός is derived from θέειν, to move, to run, for the first
>       astronomers who observed the motions of the heavenly bodies called
>       the planets θεοί, gods. Later the word produced another term,
>       ἀλήθεια—the breath of God.
> 
>    29 Nominalists, arguing with Berkeley that “it is impossible ... to
>       form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving”
>       (_Principles of Human Knowledge_, Introd., par. 10), may put the
>       question, What is that body, the producer of that motion? Is it a
>       substance? Then you are believers in a Personal God? etc., etc. This
>       will be answered farther on, in a further part of this work;
>       meanwhile, we claim our rights of Conceptionalists as against
>       Roscelini’s materialistic views of Realism and Nominalism. “Has
>       science,” says one of its ablest advocates, Edward Clodd, “revealed
>       anything that weakens or opposes itself to the ancient words in
>       which the essence of all religion, past, present, and to come, is
>       given; to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly before thy God?”
>       And we agree, provided we connote by the word God, not the crude
>       anthropomorphism which is still the backbone of our current
>       theology, but the symbolic conception of that which is the Life and
>       Motion of the Universe, to know which in the physical order is to
>       know time past, present, and to come, in the existence of
>       successions of phenomena; to know which, in the moral, is to know
>       what has been, is, and will be, within human consciousness. (See
>       _Science and the Emotions_, a Discourse delivered at South Place
>       Chapel, Finsbury, London, December 27th, 1885.)
> 
>    30 _Isis Unveiled_, II, 264‐5.
> 
>    31 Rig Veda.
> 
>    32 We are told by the Western mathematicians and some American
>       Kabalists, that in the _Kabalah_ also “the value of the Jehovah name
>       is that of the diameter of a circle.” Add to this the fact that
>       Jehovah is the third of the Sephiroth, Binah, a feminine word, and
>       you have the key to the mystery. By certain Kabalistic
>       transformations this name, which is androgynous in the first
>       chapters of _Genesis_, becomes in its transformations entirely
>       masculine, Cainite and phallic. The choosing of a deity among the
>       pagan gods and making of it a special national God, to call upon it
>       as the “One Living God,” the “God of Gods,” and then proclaiming
>       this worship monotheistic, does not change it into the One Principle
>       whose “Unity admits not of multiplication, change, or form,”
>       especially in the case of a priapic deity, as Jehovah is now
>       demonstrated to be.
> 
>    33 See that suggestive work, _The Source of Measures_, where the author
>       explains the real meaning of the word _Sacr’_ from which “sacred,”
>       “sacrament,” are derived, words which have now become synonyms of
>       holiness, though purely phallic!
> 
>    34 _Mândûkya Upanishad_, I. 28.
> 
>    35 _Bodhimür_, Book II.
> 
>    36 See the _Vedânta Sâra_, by Major G. A. Jacob; and also _The
>       Aphorisms of Shândilya_, translated by Cowell, p. 42.
> 
>    37 _Aitareya Upanishad._
> 
>    38 Nevertheless, prejudiced and rather fanatical Christian Orientalists
>       would like to prove this to be pure Atheism. For proof of this,
>       compare Major Jacob’s _Vedânta Sâra_. Yet, the whole of antiquity
>       echoes the thought:
> 
>       Omnis enim per se divom natura necesse est
>       Immortali ævo summa cum pace fruatur—
> 
>       as Lucretius has it—a purely Vedântic conception.
> 
>    39 The very names of the two chief deities, Brahmâ and Vishnu, ought to
>       have long ago suggested their esoteric meanings. Brahman, or Brahm,
>       is derived by some from the root _brih_, to grow or to expand (see
>       _Calcutta Review_, vol. lxvi., p. 14); Vishnu, from the root _vish_,
>       to pervade, to enter into the nature of the essence; Brahmâ‐Vishnu
>       thus being infinite Space, of which the Gods, the Rishis, the Manus,
>       and all in this Universe are simply the Potencies (Vibhûtayah).
> 
>    40 See Manu’s account of Brahmâ separating his body into male and
>       female, the latter the female Vâch, in whom he creates Virâj, and
>       compare this with the esotericism of Chapters II, III, and IV of
>       _Genesis_.
> 
>    41 Occultism is indeed “in the air” at the close of this our century.
>       Among many other works recently published, we would recommend
>       especially to students of theoretical Occultism who would not
>       venture beyond the realm of our special human plane, _New Aspects of
>       Life and Religion_, by Henry Pratt, M.D. It is full of esoteric
>       dogmas and philosophy, the latter, however, in the concluding
>       chapters, rather limited by what seems to be a spirit of conditioned
>       positivism. Nevertheless, what is said of Space as “the Unknown
>       First Cause,” merits quotation.
> 
>       “This unknown something, thus recognized as, and identified with,
>       the primary embodiment of Simple Unity, is invisible and impalpable
>       [as _abstract_ space, granted]: and because invisible and
>       impalpable, therefore incognizable. And this incognizability has led
>       to the error of supposing it to be a simple void, a mere receptive
>       capacity. But, even viewed as an absolute void, space must be
>       admitted to be either self‐existent, infinite, and eternal, or to
>       have had a first cause outside, behind, and beyond itself.
> 
>       “And yet could such a cause be found and defined, this would only
>       lead to the transferring thereto of the attributes otherwise
>       accruing to space, and thus merely throw the difficulty of
>       origination a step farther back, without gaining additional light as
>       to primary causation.” (_Op. cit._, p. 5.)
> 
>       This is precisely what has been done by the believers in an
>       anthropomorphic creator, an extra‐cosmic, instead of an intra‐cosmic
>       God. Many of Dr. Pratt’s subjects—most of them we may say—are old
>       Kabalistic ideas and theories which he presents in quite a new
>       garb—“New Aspects” of the Occult in Nature, indeed. Space, however,
>       viewed as a Substantial Unity—the living Source of Life—is, as the
>       Unknown Causeless Cause, the oldest dogma in Occultism, millenniums
>       earlier than the Pater‐Æther of the Greeks and Latins. So are “Force
>       and Matter, as Potencies of Space, inseparable, and the unknown
>       revealers of the Unknown.” They are all found in Âryan philosophy
>       personified as Vishvakarman, Indra, Vishnu, etc., etc. Still they
>       are expressed very philosophically, and under many unusual aspects,
>       in the work referred to.
> 
>    42 In contradistinction to the manifested Universe of matter, the term
>       Mûlaprakriti (from _mûla_, root, and prakriti, nature), or the
>       unmanifested primordial Matter—called by Western Alchemists Adam’s
>       Earth—is applied by the Vedântins to _Parabrahman_. Matter is dual
>       in religious metaphysics, and in esoteric teachings septenary, like
>       everything else in the Universe. As Mûlaprakriti, it is
>       undifferentiated and eternal: as Vyakta, it becomes differentiated
>       and conditioned, according to _Shvetâshvatara Upanishad_, I, 8, and
>       _Devî Bhâgavata Purâna_. The author of the Four lectures on the
>       _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, in speaking of Mûlaprakriti, says: “From its [the
>       Logos’] objective standpoint, Parabrahman appears to it as
>       Mûlaprakriti.... Of course this Mûlaprakriti is material to it, as
>       any material object is material to us.... Parabrahman is an
>       unconditioned and absolute reality, and Mûlaprakriti is a sort of
>       veil thrown over it.” (_Theosophist_, VIII, 304.)
> 
>    43 Esoteric Philosophy, regarding every finite thing as Mâyâ (or the
>       illusion of ignorance), must necessarily view in the same light
>       every intra‐cosmic planet and body, seeing that it is something
>       organized, hence finite. The sentence, therefore, “it proceeds from
>       without inwardly, etc.”, in its first clause, refers to the dawn of
>       the Mahâmanvantara, or the great reëvolution after one of the
>       complete periodical dissolutions of every compound form in Nature,
>       from planet to molecule, into its ultimate essence or element; and
>       in its second clause, to the partial or local Manvantara, which may
>       be a solar or even a planetary one.
> 
>    44 By Centre, a centre of energy or a cosmic focus is meant; when the
>       so‐called “creation,” or formation, of a planet, is accomplished by
>       that force which is designated by Occultists Life and by Science
>       Energy, then the process takes place from within outwardly, every
>       atom being said to contain in itself the creative energy of the
>       divine Breath. And, whereas after an Absolute Pralaya, when the
>       preëxisting material consists but of One Element, and Breath “is
>       everywhere,” the latter acts from without inwardly; after a Minor
>       Pralaya, when everything having remained _in statu quo_—in a
>       refrigerated state, so to say, like the moon—then at the first
>       flutter of Manvantara, the planet or planets begin their
>       resurrection to life from within outwardly.
> 
>    45 In the evolutionary cycles of ideas, it is curious to notice how
>       ancient thought seems to be reflected in modern speculation. Had Mr.
>       Herbert Spencer read and studied ancient Hindû philosophers when he
>       wrote a certain passage in his _First Principles_ (p. 482)? Or is it
>       an independent flash of inner perception that made him say half
>       correctly, half incorrectly, “motion as well as matter, being fixed
>       in quantity [?], it would seem that the change in the distribution
>       of matter which motion effects, coming to a limit in whichever
>       direction it is carried [?], the indestructible motion thereupon
>       necessitates a reverse distribution. Apparently, the universally
>       coëxistent forces of attraction and repulsion which, as we have
>       seen, necessitate rhythm in all minor changes throughout the
>       Universe, also necessitate rhythm in the totality of its
>       changes—produce now an immeasurable period during which the
>       attracting forces predominating, cause universal concentration, and
>       then an immeasurable period, during which the repulsive forces
>       predominating, cause universal diffusion—alternate eras of evolution
>       and dissolution.”
> 
>    46 Whatever the news of Physical Science upon the subject, Occult
>       Science has been teaching for ages that Âkâsha (of which Ether is
>       the grossest form), the Fifth universal cosmic Principle—to which
>       corresponds and from which proceeds human Manas—is, cosmically, a
>       radiant, cool, diathermanous plastic matter, creative in its
>       physical nature, correlative in its grossest aspects and portions,
>       immutable in its higher principles. In the creative condition it is
>       called the Sub‐Root; and in conjunction with radiant heat, it
>       recalls “dead worlds to life.” In its higher aspect it is the Soul
>       of the World; in its lower—the Destroyer.
> 
>    47 _Hypoth._, 1675.
> 
>    48 The “First” presupposes necessarily something which is the “first
>       brought forth,” “the first in time, space, and rank”—and therefore
>       finite and conditioned. The “first” _cannot be Absolute_ for it is a
>       manifestation. Therefore, Eastern Occultism calls the Abstract All
>       the One Causeless Cause, the Rootless Root, and limits the “First
>       Cause” to the Logos, in the sense that Plato gives to this term.
> 
>    49 See T. Subba Row’s four able lectures on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_, in
>       _The Theosophist_, Feb. 1887.
> 
>    50 Called by Christian theology, Archangels, Seraphs, etc., etc.
> 
>    51 “Pilgrim” is the appellation given to our Monad (the Two in one)
>       during its cycle of incarnations. It is the only immortal and
>       eternal Principle in us, being an indivisible part of the integral
>       whole—the Universal Spirit, from which it emanates, and into which
>       it is absorbed at the end of the cycle. When it is said to emanate
>       from the One Spirit, an awkward and incorrect expression has to be
>       used for lack of appropriate words in English. The Vedântins call it
>       Sûtrâtmâ (Thread‐Soul), but their explanation differs somewhat from
>       that of the Occultists; to explain which difference, however, is
>       left to the Vedântins themselves.
> 
>    52 It is not the physical organisms that remain _in statu quo_, least
>       of all their psychic principles, during the great Cosmic or even
>       Solar Pralayas, but only their âkâshic or astral “photographs.” But
>       during the Minor Pralayas, once overtaken by the “Night,” the
>       planets remain intact, though dead, just as a huge animal, caught
>       and embedded in the polar ice, remains the same for ages.
> 
>    53 Thus Spencer, who, nevertheless, like Schopenhauer and von Hartmann,
>       only reflects an aspect of the old esoteric philosophers, and hence
>       lands his readers on the bleak shore of Agnostic despair—reverently
>       formulates the grand mystery; “that which persists unchanging in
>       quantity, but ever changing in form, under these sensible
>       appearances which the Universe presents to us, is an unknown and
>       unknowable power, which we are obliged to recognize as without limit
>       in Space and without beginning or end in Time.” It is only daring
>       Theology—never Science or Philosophy—which seeks to gauge the
>       Infinite and unveil the Fathomless and Unknowable.
> 
>    54 Space.
> 
>    55 It is stated in Book II, ch. viii, of _Vishnu Purâna_: “By
>       immortality is meant existence to the end of the Kalpa”; and Wilson,
>       the translator, remarks in a foot‐note: “This, according to the
>       _Vedas_, is all that is to be understood of the immortality [or
>       eternity] of the gods; they perish at the end of universal
>       dissolution [or Pralaya].” And Esoteric Philosophy says: “They
>       ‘perish’ not, but are _reäbsorbed_.”
> 
>    56 Celestial Beings.
> 
>    57 And hence to manifest it.
> 
>    58 Nirvâna. Nippang in Chinese; Neibban in Burmese; Moksha in India.
> 
>    59 Nidâna and Mâyâ. The “Twelve” Nidânas (in Tibetan Ten‐brel Chug‐nyi)
>       are the chief causes of existence, effects generated by a
>       concatenation of causes produced.
> 
>    60 See Wassilief, _Der Buddhismus_, pp. 97‐128.
> 
>    61 The term “Wheel” is the symbolical expression for a world or globe,
>       which shows that the ancients were aware that our Earth was a
>       revolving globe, not a motionless square as some Christian Fathers
>       taught. The “Great Wheel” is the whole duration of our Cycle of
>       Being, or Mahâkalpa, _i.e._, the whole revolution of our special
>       Chain of seven Globes or Spheres from beginning to end; the “Small
>       Wheels” meaning the Rounds, of which there are also seven.
> 
>    62 Absolute Perfection, Paranirvâna, which is Yong‐Grub.
> 
>    63 See Dzungarian _Mani Kumbum_, the “Book of the 10,000 Precepts.”
>       Also consult Wassilief’s _Der Buddhismus_, pp. 327 and 357, etc.
> 
>    64 In clearer words: One has to acquire true Self‐Consciousness in
>       order to understand Samvriti, or the “origin of delusion.”
>       Paramârtha is the synonym of the term Svasamvedanâ, or the
>       “reflection which analyses itself.” There is a difference in the
>       interpretation of the meaning of Paramârtha between the Yogâchâryas
>       and the Madhyamikas, neither of whom, however, explain the real and
>       true esoteric sense of the expression.
> 
>    65 In India it is called the “Eye of Shiva,” but beyond the Great Range
>       it is known in Esoteric phraseology as “Dangma’s Opened Eye.” Dangma
>       means a purified soul, one who has become a Jîvanmukta, the highest
>       Adept, or rather a Mahâtmâ so‐called. His “Opened Eye” is the inner
>       spiritual eye of the seer; and the faculty which manifests through
>       it, is not clairvoyance as ordinarily understood, _i.e._, the power
>       of seeing at a distance, but rather the faculty of spiritual
>       intuition, through which direct and certain knowledge is obtainable.
>       This faculty is intimately connected with the “third eye,” which
>       mythological tradition ascribes to certain races of men.
> 
>    66 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. 21.
> 
>    67 And yet, one, _claiming authority_, namely, Sir Monier Williams,
>       Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, has just denied the fact.
>       This is what he taught his audience, on June the 4th, 1888, in his
>       annual address before the Victoria Institute of Great Britain:
>       “Originally, Buddhism set its face against all solitary asceticism
>       ... to attain sublime heights of knowledge. It had no occult, no
>       esoteric system of doctrine ... withheld from ordinary men” (!!).
>       And, again: “... When Gautama Buddha began his career, the later and
>       lower form of Yoga seems to have been little known.” And then,
>       contradicting himself, the learned lecturer forthwith informs his
>       audience that “we learn from _Lalita‐Vistara_ that various forms of
>       bodily torture, self‐maceration, and austerity were common in
>       Gautama’s time.” (!!) But the lecturer seems quite unaware that this
>       kind of torture and self‐maceration is precisely the lower form of
>       Yoga, _Hatha_ Yoga, which was “little known” and yet so “common” in
>       Gautama’s time.
> 
>    68 It is even argued that all the Six Darshanas, or Schools of
>       Philosophy, show traces of Buddha’s influence, being either taken
>       from Buddhism or due to Greek teaching! (See Weber, Max Müller,
>       etc.) We labour under the impression that Colebrooke, “the highest
>       authority” in such matters, had long ago settled the question by
>       showing that “the Hindûs were in this instance the teachers, not the
>       learners.”
> 
>    69 Soul, as the basis of all, Anima Mundi.
> 
>    70 Absolute Being and Consciousness, which are Absolute Non‐Being and
>       Unconsciousness.
> 
>    71 “Paramârthasatya” is self‐consciousness; Svasamvedanâ, or self‐
>       analyzing reflection—from _parama_, above everything, and _artha_,
>       comprehension; _satya_ meaning absolute true being, or _esse_. In
>       Tibetan Paramârthasatya is Dondampaidenpa. The opposite of this
>       absolute reality, or actuality, is Samvritisatya—the relative truth
>       only—Samvriti meaning “false conception” and being the origin of
>       Illusion, Mâyâ; in Tibetan Kundzabchidenpa, “illusion‐creating
>       appearance.”
> 
>    72 _Aphorisms of the Bodhisattvas._
> 
>    73 Âryâsanga was a pre‐Christian Adept and founder of a Buddhist
>       esoteric school, though Csoma de Körös places him, for some reasons
>       of his own, in the seventh century A.D. There was another Aryâsanga,
>       who lived during the first centuries of our era, and the Hungarian
>       scholar most probably confuses the two.
> 
>    74 _Vâyu Purâna_.
> 
>    75 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson, I. 20.
> 
>    76 Finite self‐consciousness, I mean. For how can the _Absolute_ attain
>       this otherwise than simply as an _aspect_, the highest of which
>       aspects known to us is human consciousness?
> 
>    77 See Schwegler’s _Handbook of the History of Philosophy_, in
>       Sterling’s translation, p. 28.
> 
>    78 Vajrapâni or Vajradhara means the diamond‐holder; in Tibetan
>       Dorjesempa, _sempa_ meaning the soul; its adamantine quality
>       referring to its indestructibility in the hereafter. The explanation
>       with regard to the Anupâdaka given in the _Kâla Chakra_, the first
>       in the Gyut division of the _Kanjur_, is half esoteric. It has
>       misled the Orientalists into erroneous speculations with respect to
>       the Dhyâni‐Buddhas and their earthly correspondencies, the Mânushi‐
>       Buddhas. The real tenet is hinted at in a subsequent volume, and
>       will be more fully explained in its proper place.
> 
>    79 To quote Hegel again, who with Schelling practically accepted the
>       Pantheistic conception of periodical Avatâras (special incarnations
>       of the World‐Spirit in Man, as seen in the case of all the great
>       religious reformers): “The essence of man is spirit ... only by
>       stripping himself of his finiteness and surrendering himself to pure
>       self‐consciousness does he attain the truth. Christ‐man, as man in
>       whom the Unity of God‐man [identity of the individual with the
>       universal Consciousness as taught by the Vedântins and some
>       Advaitees] appeared, has, in his death and history generally,
>       himself presented the eternal history of Spirit—a history which
>       every man has to accomplish in himself, in order to exist as
>       Spirit.”—_Philosophy of History_, Sibree’s English Translation, p.
>       340.
> 
>    80 Chohanic, Dhyâni‐Buddhic.
> 
>    81 Rûpa.
> 
>    82 Arûpa.
> 
>    83 “Mother of the Gods,” Aditi, or Cosmic Space. In the _Zohar_, she is
>       called Sephira, the Mother of the Sephiroth, and Shekinah in her
>       primordial form, _in abscondita_.
> 
>    84 Hence Non‐Being is “Absolute Being,” in Esoteric Philosophy. In the
>       tenets of the latter even Âdi‐Buddha (the First or Primeval Wisdom)
>       is, while manifested, in one sense an Illusion, Mâyâ, since all the
>       gods, including Brahmâ, have to die at the end of the Age of Brahmâ;
>       the abstraction called Parabrahman—whether we call it Ain Suph, or
>       with Herbert Spencer the Unknowable—alone being the One Absolute
>       Reality. The One Secondless Existence is Advaita, “Without a
>       Second,” and all the rest is Mâyâ, so teaches the Advaita
>       Philosophy.
> 
>    85 Motion.
> 
>    86 Wilson, I. iv.
> 
>    87 Mother‐Lotus.
> 
>    88 An unpoetical term, yet still very graphic.
> 
>    89 Gross, _The Heathen Religion_, p. 195.
> 
>    90 _Precepts for Yoga_.
> 
>    91 A Vedântin of the Visishthadvaita Philosophy would say that, though
>       the only independent Reality, Parabrahman is inseparable from His
>       Trinity. That He is three, “Parabrahman, Chit, and Achit,” the last
>       two being dependent Realities unable to exist separately; or, to
>       make it clearer, Parabrahman is the Substance—changeless, eternal,
>       and incognizable—and Chit (Âtmâ) and Achit (Anâtmâ) and its
>       qualities, as form and colour are the qualities of any object. The
>       two are the garment, or body, or rather aspect (sharîra) of
>       Parabrahman. But an Occultist would find much to say against this
>       claim, and so would the Advaiti Vedântin.
> 
>    92 _Sc._, Sons.
> 
>    93 Simultaneously.
> 
>    94 Moves.
> 
>    95 Periodical.
> 
>    96 Wilson, _Vishnu Purâna_, I. 40.
> 
>    97 Triangle.
> 
>    98 Quaternary.
> 
>    99 Hiranyagarbha.
> 
>   100 The three hypostases of Brahmâ, or Vishnu, the three Avasthâs.
> 
>   101 Number, truly; but never Motion. It is Motion which begets the
>       Logos, the Word, in Occultism.
> 
>   102 The “fourteen precious things.” The narrative or allegory is found
>       in the _Shatapatha Brâmanah_ and others. The Japanese Secret Science
>       of the Buddhist Mystics, the Yamabooshi, has “seven precious
>       things.” We will speak of them, hereafter.
> 
>   103 “The original for Understanding is Sattva, which Shankara renders
>       Antaskarana. ‘Refined,’ he says, ‘by sacrifices and other
>       sanctifying operations.’ In the _Katha_, at p. 148, Sattva is
>       rendered by Shankara to mean Buddhi—a common use of the word.”
>       (_Bhagavadgîtâ_, etc., translated by Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, M.A.;
>       edited by Max Müller, p. 193.) Whatever meaning various schools may
>       give the term, Sattva is the name given among Occult students of the
>       Âryâsanga School to the dual Monad, or Âtmâ‐Buddhi, and Âtmâ‐Buddhi
>       on this plane corresponds to Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti on the
>       higher plane.
> 
>   104 Amrita.
> 
>   105 Cory’s _Ancient Fragments_, p. 314.
> 
>   106 On Rosenkranz.
> 
>   107 i. 2.
> 
>   108 _John_, i. 4.
> 
>   109 Lanoo is a student, a Chelâ who studies practical Esotericism.
> 
>   110 “Whom thou knowest now as Kwan‐Shai‐Yin.”—_Comment._
> 
>   111 Eka is One; Chatur, Four; Tri, Three; and Sapta, Seven.
> 
>   112 “Tridasha,” or Thirty, three times ten, alludes to the Vedic deities
>       in round numbers, or more accurately 33—a sacred number. They are
>       the 12 Âdityas, the 8 Vasus, the 11 Rudras, and the 2 Ashvins—the
>       twin sons of the Sun and Sky. This is the root‐number of the Hindû
>       Pantheon, which enumerates 33 crores, or three hundred and thirty
>       millions of gods and goddesses.
> 
>   113 Stars.
> 
>   114 The Upper Space.
> 
>   115 Element.
> 
>   116 The Gnostic Sophia, “Wisdom,” who is the “Mother” of the Ogdoad
>       (Aditi, in a certain sense, with her eight sons), is the Holy Ghost
>       and the Creator of all, as in the ancient systems. The “Father” is a
>       far later invention. The earliest manifested Logos was female
>       everywhere—the mother of the seven planetary powers.
> 
>   117 See _Chinese Buddhism_, by the Rev. Joseph Edkins, who always gives
>       correct facts, although his conclusions are very frequently
>       erroneous.
> 
>   118 _Book of Sarparâjni_.
> 
>   119 By “God, the Father,” the seventh principle in Man and Kosmos are
>       here unmistakably meant, this principle being inseparable in its
>       Esse and Nature from the seventh cosmic principle. In one sense it
>       is the Logos of the Greeks and the Avalokiteshvara of the Esoteric
>       “Buddhists.”
> 
>   120 Fitzedward Hall’s edition, in the _Bibliotheca Indica_, p. 16.
> 
>   121 _Anugîtâ_, ch. xxvi, K. T. Telang’s Translation, p. 333.
> 
>   122 See Mariette’s _Abydos_, II. 63, and III. 413, 414, No. 1,122.
> 
>   123 _Book of Dzyan_, III.
> 
>   124 Od is the pure life‐giving Light, or magnetic fluid; Ob the
>       messenger of death used by sorcerers, the nefarious evil fluid; Aour
>       is the synthesis of the two, Astral Light proper. Can the
>       Philologists tell why Od—a term used by Reichenbach to denominate
>       the vital fluid—is also a Tibetan word meaning light, brightness,
>       radiancy? It also means “sky” in an Occult sense. Whence the root of
>       the word? But Âkâsha is not quite Ether, but far higher than that,
>       as will be shown.
> 
>   125 This is again similar to the doctrine of Fichte and German
>       Pantheists. The former reveres Jesus as the great teacher who
>       inculcated the unity of the spirit of man with the God‐Spirit or
>       Universal Principle (the Advaita doctrine). It is difficult to find
>       a single speculation in Western metaphysics which has not been
>       anticipated by archaic Eastern philosophy. From Kant to Herbert
>       Spencer, it is all a more or less distorted echo of the Dvaita,
>       Advaita, and Vedântic doctrines generally.
> 
>   126 Compare Dowson’s _Dictionary of Hindû Mythology_, p. 57.
> 
>   127 Whether the genus of the bird be _cygnus_, _anser_, or _pelecanus_,
>       it is no matter, as it is an aquatic bird floating or moving on the
>       waters like the Spirit, and then issuing from those waters to give
>       birth to other beings. The true significance of the symbol of the
>       Eighteenth Degree of the Rosecroix is precisely this, though it was
>       later on poetised into the motherly feeling of the pelican rending
>       its bosom to feed its seven little ones with its blood.
> 
>   128 The reason why Moses forbids eating the pelican and swan
>       (_Deuteronomy_, xiv. 16, 17), classing the two among the unclean
>       fowls, and permits eating “the bald locusts, beetles, and the
>       grasshopper after his kind” (_Leviticus_ xi. 22.), is a purely
>       physiological one, and has to do with mystic symbology only in so
>       far as the word “unclean,” like every other word, ought not to be
>       understood literally; for it is esoteric like all the rest, and may
>       as well mean “holy” as not. It is a very suggestive blind in
>       connection with certain superstitions—_e.g._, that of the Russian
>       people, who will not use the pigeon for food; not because it is
>       “unclean” but because the “Holy Ghost” is credited with having
>       appeared under the form of a dove.
> 
>   129 Chaos.
> 
>   130 Not the Mediæval Alchemists, but the Magi and Fire‐Worshippers, from
>       whom the Rosicrucians, or the Philosophers _per ignem_, the
>       successors of the Theurgists, borrowed all their ideas concerning
>       Fire, as a mystic and divine element.
> 
>   131 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 146.
> 
>   132 “Para” gives the force of beyond, outside.
> 
>   133 Purusha.
> 
>   134 Prakriti.
> 
>   135 I, I. 7.
> 
>   136 The Web.
> 
>   137 The Father.
> 
>   138 The Root of Matter.
> 
>   139 The Elements, with their respective Powers, or Intelligences.
> 
>   140 The Web.
> 
>   141 _Popular Astronomy_, pp. 507, 508.
> 
>   142 _American Journal of Science_, July, 1870.
> 
>   143 Winchell, _World‐Life_, pp. 83‐5.
> 
>   144 Of the Atoms.
> 
>   145 The Universe.
> 
>   146 Primeval Light.
> 
>   147 This is said in view of the fact that the flame from a fire is
>       inexhaustible, and that the lights of the whole Universe could be
>       lit from one simple rush‐light without diminishing the flame.
> 
>   148 Chap. viii., p. 80, Telang’s Translation.
> 
>   149 _Deuteronomy_, iv 24.
> 
>   150 _Thess._, i. 7, 8.
> 
>   151 _Acts_, ii. 3.
> 
>   152 _Rev._, xix. 13.
> 
>   153 Telang’s Translation, _Sacred Books of the East_, viii. 278.
> 
>   154 Dhyân Chohans.
> 
>   155 Formless.
> 
>   156 With Bodies.
> 
>   157 Pitris.
> 
>   158 The Four, represented in the Occult numerals by the Tetraktys, the
>       Sacred or Perfect Square, is a Sacred Number with the Mystics of
>       every nation and race. It has one and the same significance in
>       Brâhmanism, Buddhism, in Kabalism and in the Egyptian, Chaldean and
>       other numerical systems.
> 
>   159 In the _Kabalah_, the same numbers, viz., 1065 are a value of
>       Jehovah, since the numerical values of the three letters which
>       compose his name—Jod, Vau and twice Hé—are respectively 10 (י), 6
>       (ו) and 5 (ה); or again thrice seven, 21. “Ten is the Mother of the
>       Soul, for Life and Light are therein united,” says Hermes. “For
>       number one is born of the Spirit and the number ten from Matter
>       [Chaos, feminine]; the unity has made the ten, the ten the unity.”
>       (_Book of the Keys_.) By means of Temura, the anagrammatical method
>       of the _Kabalah_, and the knowledge of 1065 (21), a universal
>       science may be obtained regarding Cosmos and its mysteries (Rabbi
>       Yogel). The Rabbis regard the numbers 10, 6, and 5 as the most
>       sacred of all.
> 
>   160 The reader may be told that an American Kabalist has now discovered
>       the same number for the Elohim. It came to the Jews from Chaldæa.
>       See “Hebrew Metrology,” in _The Masonic Review_, July, 1885,
>       McMillan Lodge, No. 141.
> 
>   161 We find the same expression in Egypt. Mout signifies, for one thing,
>       “Mother,” and shows the character assigned to her in the triad of
>       that country. She was no less the mother than the wife of Ammon, one
>       of the principal titles of the god being “the husband of his
>       mother.” The goddess Mout, or Mût, is addressed as “Our Lady,” the
>       “Queen of Heaven” and “of the Earth,” thus “sharing these titles
>       with the other mother goddesses, Isis, Hathor, etc.” (Maspero).
> 
>   162 The Sparks.
> 
>   163 The permutation of Oeaohoo. The literal signification of the word
>       is, among the Eastern Occultists of the North, a circular wind,
>       whirlwind; but in this instance, it is a term to denote the
>       ceaseless and eternal Cosmic Motion, or rather the Force that moves
>       it, which Force is tacitly accepted as the Deity, but never named.
>       It is the eternal Kârana, the ever‐acting Cause.
> 
>   164 vi. 15. The _Anugîtâ_ forms part of the Ashvamedha Parvan of the
>       _Mahâbhârata_. The translator of the _Bhagavadgîtâ_, edited by Max
>       Müller, regards it as a continuation of the _Bhagavadgîtâ_. Its
>       original is one of the oldest _Upanishads_.
> 
>   165 This shows the modern metaphysicians, added to all past and present
>       Hegels, Berkeleys, Schopenhauers, Hartmanns, Herbert Spencers, and
>       even the modern Hylo‐Idealists to boot, no better than the pale
>       copyists of hoary antiquity.
> 
>   166 It is the knowledge of this law that permits and helps the Arhat to
>       perform his Siddhis, or various phenomena, such as the
>       disintegration of matter, the transport of objects from one place to
>       another, etc.
> 
>   167 These are ancient Commentaries attached with modern Glossaries to
>       the Stanzas, for the Commentaries in their symbolical language are
>       usually as difficult to understand as the Stanzas themselves.
> 
>   168 In a polemical scientific work, _The Modern Genesis_ (p. 48), the
>       Rev. W. B. Slaughter, criticizing the position assumed by the
>       astronomers, says: “It is to be regretted that the advocates of this
>       [nebular] theory have not entered more largely into the discussion
>       of it [the beginning of rotation] No one condescends to give us the
>       _rationale_ of it. How does the process of cooling and contracting
>       the mass impart to it a rotatory motion?” (Quoted by Winchell,
>       _World‐Life_, p. 94.) It is not materialistic Science that can ever
>       solve it. “_Motion is eternal in the unmanifested, and periodical in
>       the manifest_,” says an Occult teaching. It is “_when heat caused by
>       the descent of Flame into primordial matter causes its particles to
>       move, which motion becomes the Whirlwind_.” A drop of liquid assumes
>       a spheroidal form owing to its atoms moving around themselves in
>       their ultimate, unresolvable, and noumenal essence; unresolvable for
>       Physical Science, at any rate. The question is amply treated later
>       on.
> 
>   169 The x, the unknown quantity.
> 
>   170 Which makes Ten, or the perfect number, applied to the “Creator,”
>       the name given to the totality of the Creators blended by the
>       Monotheists into One, as the “Elohim,” Adam Kadmon or Sephira, the
>       Crown—are the androgyne synthesis of the ten Sephiroth, who stand
>       for the symbol of the manifested Universe in the popularized
>       _Kabalah_. The Esoteric Kabalists, however, following the Eastern
>       Occultists, divide the upper Sephirothal triangle (or Sephira,
>       Chokmah and Binah) from the rest, which leaves seven Sephiroth. As
>       for Svabhâvat, the Orientalists explain the term as meaning the
>       universal plastic matter diffused through space, with, perhaps, half
>       an eye to the Ether of Science. But the Occultists identify it with
>       “Father‐Mother” on the mystic plane.
> 
>   171 Arûpa.
> 
>   172 Boundless Circle.
> 
>   173 Subjective, Formless.
> 
>   174 Bhâskara.
> 
>   175 This refers to the Abstract Thought and concrete Voice, or the
>       manifestation thereof, the effect of the Cause. Adam Kadmon, or
>       Tetragrammaton, is the Logos in the _Kabalah_. Therefore this Triad
>       answers in the latter to the highest Triangle of Kether, Chokmah and
>       Binah, the last a female potency, and at the same time the male
>       Jehovah, as partaking of the nature of Chokmah, or the male Wisdom.
> 
>   176 The Secret Doctrine teaches that the Sun is a central star and not a
>       planet. Yet the ancients knew of and worshipped seven great gods,
>       excluding the Sun and Earth. Which was that “Mystery God” they set
>       apart? Of course not Uranus, only discovered by Herschel in 1781.
>       But could it not be known by another name? Says Ragon: “Occult
>       Sciences having discovered through astronomical calculations that
>       the number of the planets must be seven, the ancients were led to
>       introduce the Sun into the scale of the celestial harmonies, and
>       make him occupy the vacant place. Thus, every time they perceived an
>       influence that pertained to none of the six planets known, they
>       attributed it to the Sun.... The error seems important, but was not
>       so in practical results, if the astrologers replaced Uranus by the
>       Sun, which ... is a central Star relatively motionless, turning only
>       on its axis and regulating time and measure; and which cannot be
>       turned aside from its true functions.” (_Maçonnerie Occulte_, p.
>       447.) The nomenclature of the days of the week is also faulty. “The
>       Sun‐day ought to be Uranus‐day (Urani dies, Urandi),” adds the
>       learned writer.
> 
>   177 Planetary System.
> 
>   178 “The Sun rotates on its axis always in the same direction in which
>       the planets revolve in their respective orbits,” astronomy teaches
>       us.
> 
>   179 See _Anugîtâ_, Telang, x. 9; and _Aitareya Brâhmana_, Haug, p. 1.
> 
>   180 This essence of cometary matter, Occult Science teaches, is totally
>       different from any of the chemical or physical characteristics with
>       which Modern Science is acquainted. It is homogeneous in its
>       primitive form beyond the Solar Systems, and differentiates entirely
>       once it crosses the boundaries of our Earth’s region; vitiated by
>       the atmospheres of the planets and the already compound matter of
>       the interplanetary stuff, it is heterogeneous only in our manifested
>       world.
> 
>   181 Manas—the Mind‐Principle, or the Human Soul.
> 
>   182 Buddhi—the Divine Soul.
> 
>   183 See _Correlation of Physical Forces_, 1843, p. 81; and _Address to
>       the British Association_, 1866.
> 
>   184 Very similar ideas were those of W. Mattieu Williams, in _The Fuel
>       of the Sun_; of Dr. C. William Siemens, _On the Conservation of
>       Solar Energy_ (_Nature_, XXV, 440‐444, March 9, 1882); and also of
>       Dr. P. Martin Duncan in an _Address_, as the President of the
>       Geological Society, London, May, 1877. See _World‐Life_, by
>       Alexander Winchell, LL.D., p. 53, _et seq_.
> 
>   185 When we speak of Neptune, it is not as an Occultist but as a
>       European. The true Eastern Occultist will maintain that, whereas
>       there are many yet undiscovered planets in our system, Neptune does
>       not really belong to it, in spite of its _apparent_ connection with
>       our Sun and the influence of the latter upon it. This connection is
>       mâyâvic, imaginary, they say.
> 
>   186 Word, Voice and Spirit.
> 
>   187 These are the four “Immortals,” which are mentioned in the _Atharva
>       Veda_ as the “Watchers” or Guardians of the four quarters of the
>       sky. (See Ch. lxxvi., 1‐4, _et seq_.)
> 
>   188 _Conflict between Religion and Science_, pp. 132 and 133.
> 
>   189 _Principles of Science_, II. 455.
> 
>   190 _Les Mystères de l’Horoscope_, Ely Star, p. xi.
> 
>   191 _Psalms_, civ. 4.
> 
>   192 The difference between the Builders, the Planetary Spirits, and the
>       Lipika must not be lost sight of. (See Shlokas 5 and 6 of this
>       Commentary.)
> 
>   193 That is, he is under the influence of their guiding thought.
> 
>   194 Cosmic mists.
> 
>   195 The World to be.
> 
>   196 Atoms.
> 
>   197 See A. P. Sinnett’s _Esoteric Buddhism_, 5th annotated edition, pp.
>       171‐173.
> 
>   198 The first and greatest Tibetan Reformer who founded the “Yellow‐
>       Caps,” Gelukpas. He was born in the year 1355 A.D., in the district
>       of Amdo, and was the Avatâra of Amitâbha, the celestial name of
>       Gautama Buddha.
> 
>   199 T. Subba Row seems to identify him with, and to call him, the Logos.
>       (See his _Lectures on the Bhagavadgîtâ_, in the _Theosophist_, vol.
>       ix.)
> 
>   200 Helmholtz, _Faraday Lecture_, 1881.
> 
>   201 It is well known that sand, when placed on a metal plate in
>       vibration, assumes a series of regular figures of various
>       descriptions. Can Science give a _complete_ explanation of this
>       fact?
> 
>   202 See _The Masonic Cyclopædia_, Mackenzie; and _The Pythagorean
>       Triangle_, Oliver.
> 
>   203 Ormazd is the Logos, the “First Born,” and the Sun.
> 
>   204 _Against Apion_, I, 25.
> 
>   205 See _Isis Unveiled_, II., 430‐438.
> 
>   206 See Dowson’s _Hindû Classical Dictionary_.
> 
>   207 The mineral atoms.
> 
>   208 Gaseous clouds.
> 
>   209 See _Kabbalah Denudata_, “De Anima,” p. 113.
> 
>   210 “The doctrine of the rotation of the earth about an axis was taught
>       by the Pythagorean Hicetas, probably as early as 500 B.C. It was
>       also taught by his pupil Ecphantus, and by Heraclides, a pupil of
>       Plato. The immobility of the sun and the orbital rotation of the
>       earth were shown by Aristarchus of Samos as early as 281 B.C. to be
>       suppositions accordant with facts of observation. The heliocentric
>       theory was also taught about 150 B.C., by Seleucus of Seleucia on
>       the Tigris. [It was taught 500 B.C. by Pythagoras.—H.P.B.] It is
>       said also that Archimedes, in a work entitled _Psammites_,
>       inculcated the heliocentric theory. The sphericity of the earth was
>       distinctly taught by Aristotle, who appealed for proof to the figure
>       of the earth’s shadow on the moon in eclipses. (Aristotle, _De
>       Cælo_, lib. II., cap, XIV.) The same idea was defended by Pliny.
>       (_Nat. Hist._, II., 65.) These views seem to have been lost from
>       knowledge for more than a thousand years....” (Winchell, _World‐
>       Life_, 551‐2.)
> 
>   211 _On Vortex Atoms_.
> 
>   212 _Op. cit._, 567.
> 
>   213 Abridged from _Principia Rerum Naturalium_.
> 
>   214 The Lipika.
> 
>   215 That is: the First is now the Second World.
> 
>   216 The Formless Universe of Thought.
> 
>   217 The Shadowy World of Primal Form, or the Intellectual.
> 
>   218 In the _Rig Veda_, we find the names Brahmanaspati and Brihaspati
>       alternating with, and equivalent to, each other. Also see
>       _Brihadâranyaka Upanishad_; Brihaspati is a deity called the “Father
>       of the Gods.”
> 
>   219 _Logic_, II. 125.
> 
>   220 Having already taken the first three.
> 
>   221 Hosts.
> 
>   222 The four Aspects are the body, its life or vitality, and the
>       “double” of the body—the triad which disappears with the death of
>       the person—and the Kâma Rûpa which disintegrates in Kâma Loka.
> 
>   223 _On Amos_, iv.
> 
>   224 _Theol. Cir._, I. vii.
> 
>   225 See _The Occult World_, pp. 89, 90.
> 
>   226 Thus the sentence, “Natura Elementorum obtinet revelationem Dei”
>       (Clemens, _Stromata_, IV. 6), is applicable to both or neither.
>       Consult the _Zends_, II. 228, and Plutarch _De Iside_, as compared
>       by Layard, _Académie des Inscriptions_, 1854, Vol. XV.
> 
>   227 _Exodus_ xxvi, xxvii.
> 
>   228 _Antiquities_, I. VIII, ch. xxii.
> 
>   229 _Chinese Buddhism_, p. 216.
> 
>   230 “Man” was here substituted for “Dragon.” Compare the Ophite Spirits.
>       The Angels recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, who correspond
>       to these “Faces,” were with the Ophites: Dragon—Raphael;
>       Lion—Michael; Bull, or Ox—Uriel; and Eagle—Gabriel. The four keep
>       company with the four Evangelists, and preface the Gospels.
> 
>   231 _Ezekiel_, i.
> 
>   232 The Jews, save the Kabalists, having no names for East, West, South,
>       and North, expressed the idea by words signifying before, behind,
>       right and left, and very often confounded the terms exoterically,
>       thus making the blinds in the _Bible_ more confused and difficult to
>       interpret. Add to this the fact that out of the forty‐seven
>       translators of King James’ Bible “only three understood Hebrew, and
>       of these two died before the Psalms were translated” (_Royal Masonic
>       Cyclopædia_), and one may easily understand what reliance can be
>       placed on the English version of the _Bible_. In this work the Douay
>       Roman Catholic version is generally followed.
> 
>   233 The vertical line or the figure 1.
> 
>   234 Circle.
> 
>   235 Also for those who, etc.
> 
>   236 The Formless World and the World of Forms.
> 
>   237 _Theosophist_, Feb., 1877, p. 303.
> 
>   238 These voluntary reïncarnations are referred to in our Doctrine as
>       Nirmânakâyas—the surviving spiritual principles of men.
> 
>   239 Sûkshma Sharîra, “dream‐like” illusive body, with which are clothed
>       the inferior Dhyânis of the celestial Hierarchy.
> 
>   240 Compare this Esoteric tenet with the Gnostic doctrine found in
>       _Pistis‐Sophia_ (Knowledge‐Wisdom), in which treatise Sophia
>       (Achamôth) is shown lost in the waters of Chaos (Matter), on her way
>       to the Supreme Light, and Christos delivering and helping her on the
>       right Path. Note well, that “Christos” with the Gnostics meant the
>       Impersonal Principle, the Âtman of the Universe, and the Âtmâ within
>       every man’s soul—and not Jesus; though in the old Coptic MS., in the
>       British Museum, “Christos” is replaced by “Jesus” and other terms.
> 
>   241 _A Catechism of the Visishthadvaita Philosophy_, by N.
>       Bhâshiyacharya, F.T.S., late Pandit of the Adyar Library.
> 
>   242 _Träume eines Geistersehers_, quoted by C. C. Massey, in his preface
>       to Von Hartmann’s _Spiritismus_.
> 
>   243 _Le Livre des Morts_, Paul Pierret, Chap. xvii. p. 61.
> 
>   244 See also for other data on this peculiar expression, the Day of
>       “Come To Us,” _The Funerary Ritual of the Egyptians_, by Viscount de
>       Rougé.
> 
>   245 Chaos.
> 
>   246 Our Universe.
> 
>   247 _The Theosophist_, Feb., 1887, p. 305.
> 
>   248 _Op. cit._, p. 306.
> 
>   249 Madhya is said of something whose commencement and end are unknown,
>       and Para means infinite. These expressions all relate to infinitude
>       and to division of time.
> 
>   250 _Op. cit._, p. 307.
> 
>   251 From the Sanskrit _Laya_, the point of matter where every
>       differentiation has ceased.
> 
>   252 _Five Years of Theosophy_, Art., “Personal and Impersonal God,” p.
>       200.
> 
>   253 Elements.
> 
>   254 Fraction.
> 
>   255 Presidential Address before the Royal Society of Chemists, March,
>       1888.
> 
>   256 P. 242.
> 
>   257 Worlds.
> 
>   258 A period of 311,040,000,000,000 years, according to Brâhmanical
>       calculations.
> 
>   259 See the _Scientific Arena_, a monthly journal devoted to current
>       philosophical teaching and its bearing upon the religious thought of
>       the age. New York: A. Wilford Hall, Ph.D., LL.D., Editor, July,
>       August, and September, 1886.
> 
>   260 Such, we believe, is the name applied to what he also calls “Etheric
>       Centres,” by J. W. Keely, of Philadelphia, the inventor of the
>       famous “Motor”—destined, as his admirers have hoped, to
>       revolutionize the motor power of the world.
> 
>   261 The moon is _dead_ only so far as regards her _inner_
>       principles—_i.e._, _psychically_ and _spiritually_, however absurd
>       the statement may seem. Physically, she is only as a semi‐paralysed
>       body may be. She is aptly referred to in Occultism as the “Insane
>       Mother,” the great sidereal _lunatic_.
> 
>   262 Occultists, however, having the most perfect faith in their own
>       exact records, astronomical and mathematical, calculate the age of
>       humanity, and assert that men (as separate sexes) have existed in
>       this Round just 18,618,727 years, as the Brâhmanical teachings and
>       even some Hindû calendars declare.
> 
>   263 The commentaries on the Stanzas are resumed on p. 213.
> 
>   264 In _Esoteric Buddhism_ and _Man: Fragments of Forgotten History_.
> 
>   265 Many more planets are enumerated in the Secret Books than in modern
>       astronomical works.
> 
>   266 p. 48.
> 
>   267 See, in _Esoteric Buddhism_, “The Constitution of Man,” and the
>       “Planetary Chain.”
> 
>   268 Winchell’s _World‐Life_.
> 
>   269 P. 113 (5th edition).
> 
>   270 pp. 185‐6.
> 
>   271 Kosha is “sheath” literally, the sheath of every principle.
> 
>   272 Sthûla‐upâdhi, or basis of the principle.
> 
>   273 Life.
> 
>   274 The Astral Body, or Linga Sharîra.
> 
>   275 Buddhi.
> 
>   276 See Diagram II, p. 195.
> 
>   277 Extract from the Teacher’s letters on various topics.
> 
>   278 We are not concerned with the other Globes in this work except
>       incidentally.
> 
>   279 _Esoteric Buddhism_, p. 136.
> 
>   280 _Lucifer_, May, 1888.
> 
>   281 _Esoteric Buddhism_ (5th ed.), p. 46.
> 
>   282 _Op. cit._, p. 49.
> 
>   283 _Op. cit._, p. 140.
> 
>   284 p. 177 _supra_.
> 
>   285 Occultism divides the periods of Rest (Pralaya) into several kinds:
>       there is the _Individual_ Pralaya of each Globe, as humanity and
>       life pass on to the next—seven minor Pralayas in each Round; the
>       _Planetary_ Pralaya, when seven Rounds are completed; the _Solar_
>       Pralaya, when the whole system is at an end; and finally the
>       _Universal_ Pralaya, Mahâ or Brahmâ Pralaya, at the close of the Age
>       of Brahmâ. These are the chief Pralayas or “destruction periods.”
>       There are many other minor ones, but with these we are not concerned
>       at present.
> 
>   286 Pp. 48, 49.
> 
>   287 _Ibid._
> 
>   288 “Physical” here means differentiated for cosmical purposes and work;
>       that “physical side,” nevertheless, if objective to the apperception
>       of beings from other planes, is yet quite subjective to us on our
>       plane.
> 
>   289 Pp. 276 _et seq_.
> 
>   290 _Ibid._
> 
>   291 See diagram, _op. cit._, p. 277.
> 
>   292 _Op. cit._, pp. 273‐4.
> 
>   293 _Op. cit._, p. 274‐5.
> 
>   294 II. 278‐9.
> 
>   295 P. 48.
> 
>   296 The _Natures_ of the seven Hierarchies or Classes of Pitris and
>       Dhyân Chohans which compose our nature and bodies are here meant.
> 
>   297 Round, or revolution of Life and Being round the seven smaller
>       Wheels.
> 
>   298 Thirds.
> 
>   299 Race.
> 
>   300 P. 235.
> 
>   301 _Rev._, xii. 7‐9.
> 
>   302 See Vol. II, Shloka 17.
> 
>   303 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 299, 300. Compare also Dunlap, _Sôd: the Son of
>       the Man_, pp. 51 _et seq._
> 
>   304 On the authority of Irenæus, of Justin Martyr and of the _Codex_
>       itself, Dunlap shows that the Nazarenes regarded “Spirit” as a
>       _female and evil_ Power, in its connection with our Earth.
> 
>   305 Fetahil is identical with the host of the Pitris, who “created man”
>       as a “shell” only. He was, with the Nazarenes, the King of Light,
>       and the Creator; but in this instance he is the unlucky Prometheus,
>       who fails to get hold of the Living Fire necessary for the formation
>       of the Divine Soul, as he is ignorant of the secret name, the
>       ineffable or incommunicable name of the Kabalists.
> 
>   306 The spirit of Matter and Concupiscence; Kâma Rûpa _minus_ Manas,
>       Mind.
> 
>   307 _Codex Nazaræus_, ii. 233.
> 
>   308 This Mano of the Nazarenes strangely resembles the Hindû Manu, the
>       Heavenly Man of the _Rig Veda_.
> 
>   309 “I am the true _Vine_, and my father is the husbandman.” (_John_,
>       xv. 1.)
> 
>   310 With the Gnostics, Christ, as well as Michael who is identical with
>       him in some respects, was the “Chief of the Æons.”
> 
>   311 _Codex Nazaræus_, i. 135.
> 
>   312 See the Cosmogony of Pherecydes.
> 
>   313 I. 301, note.
> 
>   314 They are found, however, in the Chaldean _Book of Numbers_.
> 
>   315 _Op. cit._, II. 183 _et seq._
> 
>   316 For the difference between _nous_, the higher divine Wisdom, and
>       psyche, the lower and terrestrial, see _St. James_, iii. 15‐17.
> 
>   317 Jehovah’s connection with the Moon in the _Kabalah_ is well known to
>       students.
> 
>   318 For the Nazarenes, see _Isis Unveiled_, II. 131 and 132. The true
>       followers of the true Christos were all Nazarenes and _Christians_,
>       and were the opponents of the later Christians.
> 
>   319 See the diagram of the Lunar Chain of seven worlds, p. 195, where,
>       as in our own or any other Chain, the upper worlds are spiritual,
>       while the lowest, whether Moon, Earth, or any other planet, is dark
>       with matter.
> 
>   320 The whole Kosmos. The reader is reminded that in the Stanzas Kosmos
>       often means only our own Solar System, not the Infinite Universe.
> 
>   321 This is purely astronomical.
> 
>   322 For a clearer explanation of the above, see “Saptaparna” in the
>       Index.
> 
>   323 _Op. cit._, III. 346.
> 
>   324 _Book of Dzyan_.
> 
>   325 See _Index_, at the words “Evolution,” “Darwin,” “Kapila,” “Battle
>       of Life,” etc.
> 
>   326 _Isis Unveiled_, II. 260.
> 
>   327 _Vishnu Purâna_.
> 
>   328 Chain.
> 
>   329 Earth.
> 
>   330 Kenealy, _Book of God_, p. 118.
> 
>   331 Acosta, vi. 14.
> 
>   332 Kenealy, _Ibid._
> 
>   333 I, 587‐93.
> 
>   334 That which was _natural_ in the sight of primitive man, has only now
>       become _miracle_ to us; and that which was to him a miracle, could
>       never be expressed in our language.
> 
>   335 There is no nation in the world in which the feeling of devotion, or
>       of religious mysticism, is more developed and prominent than in the
>       Hindû people. See what Max Müller says of this idiosyncrasy and
>       national feature in his works. This is a direct inheritance from the
>       primitive _conscious_ men of the Third Race.
> 
>   336 _Lectures on Heroes_.
> 
>   337 Vehicle.
> 
>   338 Âtman.
> 
>   339 Âtmâ‐Buddhi, Spirit‐Soul. This relates to the cosmic principles.
> 
>   340 Again.
> 
>   341 Avalokiteshvara.
> 
>   342 Builders. The seven creative Rishis, now connected with the
>       constellation of the Great Bear.
> 
>   343 Earth.
> 
>   344 Rosenroth, _Liber Mysterii_ IV. 1.
> 
>   345 _Genesis_ i.
> 
>   346 _Auszüge aus dem Zohar_, pp. 13‐15.
> 
>   347 See _Vishnu Purâna_, Book I.
> 
>   348 Ch. lxxxviii.
> 
>   349 Ch. lxiv. 29, 30.
> 
>   350 _Ibid._, 34, 35.
> 
>   351 A World, when called a “higher World,” is not higher by reason of
>       its location, but because it is superior in quality or essence. Yet
>       such a World is generally understood by the profane as “Heaven,” and
>       located above our heads.
> 
>   352 Of Form, the Sthûla Sharîra, External Body.
> 
>   353 Pearls.
> 
>   354 Ἄνθρωπος, a work on Occult Embryology, Book I.
> 
>   355 Namely, a congenital idiot.
> 
>   356 _John_ iii, 8.
> 
>   357 Ch. cxlviii.
> 
>   358 _Ibid._, cxlix. 51.
> 
>   359 _The Seven Souls of Man_, p. 2; a Lecture by Gerald Massey.
> 
>   360 _De Iside et Osiride_, xliii.
> 
>   361 Ch. xli.
> 
>   362 iv. 5.
> 
>   363 Mariette’s _Abydos_, plate 51.
> 
>   364 P. Pierret, _Études Égyptologiques_.
> 
>   365 _Ritual_, ch. ii.
> 
>   366 Linked into.
> 
>   367 _Op. cit._, xvii. 4.
> 
>   368 Several inimical critics are anxious to prove that no Seven
>       Principles of Man, or Septenary Constitution of our Chain, were
>       taught in our earlier volumes, _Isis Unveiled_. Though in that work
>       the doctrine could only be hinted at, there are many passages,
>       nevertheless, in which the Septenary Constitution of both Man and
>       the Chain is openly mentioned. Speaking of the Elohim (II. 420), it
>       is said: “They remain over the seventh heaven (or spiritual world),
>       for it is they who, according to the Kabalists, formed in succession
>       the six material worlds, or rather, attempts at worlds, that
>       preceded our own, which, they say, is the seventh.” Our Globe, in
>       the diagram representing the Chain, is, of course, the seventh and
>       lowest; though, as the evolution on these Globes is cyclic, it is
>       the fourth, on the descending arc of matter. And again (II. 367) it
>       is written: “In the Egyptian notions, _as in those of all other
>       faiths founded on philosophy_, man was not merely ... a union of
>       soul and body; he was a trinity, when spirit was added to it.
>       Besides, that doctrine made him consist of ... body, ... astral
>       form, or shadow, ... animal soul, ... the higher soul, and ...
>       terrestrial intelligence ... [and] a sixth principle, etc.,
>       etc.”—the seventh—SPIRIT. So clearly are these principles mentioned,
>       that even in the _Index_ (II. 683), one finds “Six Principles of
>       Man,” the seventh being, in strict truth, the synthesis of the six,
>       and _not_ a principle but a ray of the Absolute ALL.
> 
>   369 See Diagram III, p. 221.
> 
>   370 pp. 340‐351, “Genesis of the Soul.”
> 
>   371 _De Mysteriis_, ii. 3.
> 
>   372 _Asiatic Researches_, xi. 99, 100.
> 
>   373 Ch. xxxii. 9.
> 
>   374 Their Upper Triad.
> 
>   375 Bhûmi or Prithivî.
> 
>   376 _Book of the Dead_, i. 7. Compare also _Mysteries of Rostan_.
> 
>   377 Kingdom.
> 
>   378 Kingdom.
> 
>   379 The first Shadow of the Physical Man.
> 
>   380 Man.
> 
>   381 The Moon.
> 
>   382 See _Mantuan Codex_.
> 
>   383 The formation of the “Living Soul,” or Man, would render the idea
>       more clearly. A “Living Soul” is a synonym of Man in the _Bible_.
>       These are our seven “Principles.”
> 
>   384 _Ha Idra Zuta Kadisha_, xxii. 746.
> 
>   385 xviii. 12.
> 
>   386 _Hebrews_, iv.
> 
>   387 Cruden, _sub voce_.
> 
>   388 _Book of Numbers_, 1. viii. 3.
> 
>   389 p. 389.
> 
>   390 Plate VII. p. 37.
> 
>   391 Esotericism teaches the same. But Manas is not Nephesh; nor is the
>       latter the Astral, but the Fourth Principle, and also the Second,
>       Prâna, for Nephesh is the “Breath of Life” in man, as in beast or
>       insect; of physical, material life, which has no spirituality in it.
> 
>   392 Éliphas Lévi, whether purposely or otherwise, has confused the
>       numbers: with us his No. 2 is No. 1 (Spirit); and by making of
>       Nephesh both the Plastic Mediator and Life, he thus makes in reality
>       only six principles, because he repeats the first two.
> 
>   393 _Zohar_, “Idra Suta,” Book iii., p. 292b.
> 
>   394 1. 302.
> 
>   395 Read, in _Isis Unveiled_ (ii. 297‐303), the doctrine of the _Codex
>       Nazaræus_. Every tenet of our teaching is found there under a
>       different form and allegory.
> 
>   396 _Manu_, Bk. I.
> 
>   397 The word “Sin” is curious, but has a particular Occult relation to
>       the Moon, besides being its Chaldean equivalent.
> 
>   398 Professor Zöllner’s theory has been more than welcomed by several
>       Scientists, who are also Spiritualists; Professors Butlerof and
>       Wagner, of St. Petersburg, for instance.
> 
>   399 “The giving reality to abstractions is the error of Realism. Space
>       and Time are frequently viewed as separated from all the concrete
>       experiences of the mind, instead of being generalizations of these
>       in certain aspects.” (Bain, _Logic_, Part II. p. 389.)
> 
>   400 _The Mysteries of Magic_, by A. E. Waite.
> 
>   401 Wilson, I. 23, 24.
> 
>   402 _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 169.
> 
>   403 In the Sânkhya philosophy, the seven Prakritis, or “productive
>       productions,” are Mahat, Ahamkâra, and the _five_ Tanmâtras. See
>       _Sânkhya Kârikâ_, III., and the Commentary thereon.
> 
>   404 See _Linga Purâna_, Prior Section, lxx. 12 _et seq._; and _Vâyu
>       Purâna_, ch. iv., but especially the former _Purâna_—Prior Section,
>       viii. 67‐74.
> 
>   405 _Vishnu Purâna_, Book vi., ch. iv. No use to say so to the Hindûs,
>       who know their _Purânas_ by heart, but very useful to remind our
>       Orientalists and those Westerns who regard Wilson’s translations as
>       authoritative, that, in his English translation of the _Vishnu
>       Purâna_, he is guilty of the most ludicrous contradictions and
>       errors. So on this identical subject of the seven Prakritis, or the
>       seven zones of Brahmâ’s Egg, the two accounts differ totally. In
>       Vol. i. p. 40, the Egg is said to be externally invested by seven
>       envelopes. Wilson comments: “by Water, Air, Fire, Ether, and
>       Ahamkâra”—which last word does not exist in the Sanskrit texts. And
>       in Vol. v. p. 198, of the same _Purâna_, it is written: “in this
>       manner were the seven forms of nature (Prakriti) reckoned from Mahat
>       to Earth” (?). Between Mahat, or Mahâ‐Buddhi, and “Water, etc.”, the
>       difference is very considerable.
> 
>   406 According to the great metaphysician Hegel also. For him Nature was
>       a _perpetual becoming_. A purely Esoteric conception. Creation or
>       Origin, in the Christian sense of the term, is absolutely
>       unthinkable. As the above‐quoted thinker said: “God (the Universal
>       Spirit) _objectivizes himself as Nature_, and again rises out of
>       it.”
> 
>   407 _Book of Dzyan_, Comm. III, par. 18.
> 
>   408 P. 19.
> 
>   409 Primitive, or First Man.
> 
>   410 Reïncarnation.
> 
>   411 Vehicle.
> 
>   412 See, for example, _Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and the
>       Quichés_, by Augustus le Plongeon, who shows the identity between
>       the Egyptian rites and beliefs and those of the people he describes.
>       The ancient hieratic alphabets of the Mayas and the Egyptians are
>       almost identical.
> 
>   413 In _The Theosophist_, 1881.
> 
>   414 T. Subba Row, _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 154.
> 
>   415 Also called the “Sons of Wisdom” and of the “Fire‐Mist,” and the
>       “Brothers of the Sun,” in the Chinese records. Si‐dzang (Tibet) is
>       mentioned, in the MSS. of the sacred library of the province of Fo‐
>       Kien, as the great seat of Occult learning from time immemorial,
>       ages before Buddha. The Emperor Yu, the “Great” (2,207 B.C.), a
>       pious Mystic and great Adept, is said to have obtained his Knowledge
>       from the “Great Teachers of the Snowy Range” in Si‐dzang.
> 
>   416 _Matt._ vi. 5, 6.
> 
>   417 _The Virgin of the World_, pp. 134‐5.
> 
>   418 _Paracelsus_, Franz Hartmann, M.D., p. 44.
> 
>   419 This word is explained by Dr. Hartmann, from the original texts of
>       Paracelsus before him, as follows. According to this great
>       Rosicrucian; “Mysterium is everything out of which something may be
>       developed, which is only germinally contained in it. A seed is the
>       ‘Mysterium’ of a plant, an egg that of a living bird, etc.”
> 
>   420 _Op. cit._, pp. 41, 42.
> 
>   421 It is only the mediæval Kabalists who, following the Jewish and one
>       or two Neo‐Platonists, applied the term Microcosm to man. Ancient
>       philosophy called the Earth the Microcosm of the Macrocosm, and man
>       the outcome of the two.
> 
>   422 “This doctrine, preached 300 years ago,” remarks the translator, “is
>       identical with the one that has revolutionized modern thought, after
>       having been put into new shape and elaborated by Darwin. It is still
>       more elaborated by Kapila in the Sânkhya philosophy.”
> 
>   423 The Eastern Occultist says that they are guided and informed by
>       Spiritual Beings, the Workmen in the invisible Worlds, and behind
>       the veil of Occult Nature, or Nature _in abscondito_.
> 
>   424 Wilson, I. ii., (Vol. I. 35).
> 
>   425 A frequent expression in the said “Fragments,” to which we take
>       exception. The _Universal Mind_ is not a _Being_ or “God.”
> 
>   426 _The Virgin of the World_, p. 47. “Asclepios,” Pt. I.
> 
>   427 _Divine Pymander_, ix. 64.
> 
>   428 _The Virgin of the World_, p. 153.
> 
>   429 _Op. cit._, pp. 139, 140. Fragments from the “Physical Eclogues” and
>       “Florilegium” of Stobæus.
> 
>   430 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. ii, Wilson, I. 13‐15.
> 
>   431 _Op. cit._, pp. 135‐138.
> 
>   432 This teaching does not refer to Prakriti‐Purusha beyond the
>       boundaries of our small universe.
> 
>   433 The ultimate quiescent state; the Nirvânic condition of the Seventh
>       Principle.
> 
>   434 The teaching is all given from our plane of consciousness.
> 
>   435 Or the “dream of Science,” the primeval really homogeneous matter,
>       which no mortal can make objective in this Race, or Round either.
> 
>   436 “Vishnu, in the form of his active energy, neither ever rises nor
>       sets, and is at once, the _seven‐fold sun_ and distinct from it,”
>       says _Vishnu Purâna_, II. xi., (Wilson, II. 296).
> 
>   437 “In the same manner as a man approaching a mirror placed upon a
>       stand, beholds in it his own image, so the energy (or reflection) of
>       Vishnu [the Sun] is never disjoined but remains ... in the Sun (as
>       in a mirror), that is there stationed.” (_Ibid._, _loc. cit._)
> 
>   438 Compare the Hermetic “Nature” “going down cyclically into matter
>       when she meets the ‘Heavenly Man’.”
> 
>   439 The writers of the above knew perfectly well the physical cause of
>       the tides, of the waves, etc. It is the informing Spirit of the
>       whole cosmic solar body that is meant here, and which is referred to
>       whenever such expressions are used from the mystic point of view.
> 
>   440 _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 110, 111, art., “The Twelve Signs of
>       the Zodiac.”
> 
>   441 See Stanzas III and IV, and the Commentaries thereupon, and
>       especially compare the comments on Stanza IV, concerning the Lipika
>       and the four Mahârâjahs, the agents of Karma.
> 
>   442 And “Gods” or Dhyânis, too, not only the Genii or “guided Forces.”
> 
>   443 The meaning of this is that as man is composed of all the Great
>       Elements—Fire, Air, Water, Earth and Ether—the Elementals which
>       respectively belong to these Elements feel attracted to man by
>       reason of their coëssence. That Element which predominates in a
>       certain constitution will be the ruling Element throughout life. For
>       instance, if man has a preponderance of the earthly, gnomic Element,
>       the Gnomes will lead him towards assimilating metals—money and
>       wealth, and so on. “Animal man is the son of the animal elements out
>       of which his Soul [life] was born, and animals are the mirrors of
>       man,” says Paracelsus. (_De Fundamento Sapientiæ._) Paracelsus was
>       cautious, and wanted the _Bible_ to agree with what he said, and
>       therefore did not say all.
> 
>   444 Cyclic progress in development.
> 
>   445 The God in man and often the incarnation of a God, a highly
>       Spiritual Dhyân Chohan in him, besides the presence of his own
>       Seventh Principle.
> 
>   446 Now, what “God” is meant here? Not God the “Father,” the
>       anthropomorphic fiction; for that God is the Elohim collectively,
>       and has no being apart from the Host. Besides, such a God is finite
>       and imperfect. It is the high Initiates and Adepts who are meant
>       here by the “few in number.” And it is precisely such men who
>       believe in “Gods”, and know no “God” but one Universal unrelated and
>       unconditioned Deity.
> 
>   447 _The Virgin of the World_, pp. 104‐5, “The Definitions of
>       Asclepios.”
> 
>   448 P. 120.
> 
>   449 _National Reformer_, January 9th, 1887. Article “Phreno‐Kosmo‐
>       Biology,” by Dr. Lewins.
> 
>   450 This is Cyclic law; but this law itself is often defied by human
>       stubbornness.
> 
>   451 Vol. I. p. 256.
> 
>   452 _Sepher Jetzirah._
> 
>   453 As far as “Divine Revelation” is concerned, we agree. Not so with
>       regard to “human history.” For there is “history” in most of the
>       allegories and “myths” of India; and events, real actual events, are
>       concealed under them.
> 
>   454 When the “false theologies” disappear, then true prehistoric
>       realities will be found, contained especially in the mythology of
>       the Âryans and ancient Hindûs, and even the pre‐Homeric Hellenes.
> 
>   455 See Section VII, “Deus Lunus.”
> 
>   456 From an MS.
> 
>   457 _Guide au Musée de Boulaq_, pp. 148, 149.
> 
>   458 As we said in _Isis Unveiled_ (II. 438‐9): “To the present moment,
>       in spite of all controversies and researches, History and Science
>       remain as much as ever in the dark as to the origin of the Jews.
>       They may as well be the exiled Chandâlas of old India, the
>       ‘bricklayers’ mentioned by Veda‐Vyâsa and Manu, as the Phœnicians of
>       Herodotus, or the Hyksos of Josephus, or the descendants of Pali
>       shepherds, or a mixture of all these. The _Bible_ names the Tyrians
>       as a kindred people and claims dominion over them.... Yet whatever
>       they may have been, they became a hybrid people, not long after the
>       time of Moses, for the _Bible_ shows them freely intermarrying not
>       alone with the Canaanites, but with every other nation or race they
>       came in contact with.”
> 
>   459 _Knowledge_, Vol. I; see also Petrie’s letter to _The Academy_, Dec.
>       17, 1881.
> 
>   460 _The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid_, p. 9.
> 
>   461 _Op. cit._, I. 519.
> 
>   462 _The Origin and Significance of the Great Pyramid_, p. 93.
> 
>   463 vii. 13 _et seq._
> 
>   464 P. 224.
> 
>   465 Vol. I. Part I. 46.
> 
>   466 x. 10.
> 
>   467 See _Isis Unveiled_, II. 442‐3.
> 
>   468 _Exodus_, 11. 21.
> 
>   469 George Smith, _Chaldean Account of Genesis_, pp. 299, 300.
> 
>   470 II. 3.
> 
>   471 As a reminder how the _esoteric_ religion of Moses was crushed
>       several times, and the worship of Jehovah, as reëstablished by
>       David, put in its place, by Hezekiah for instance, compare _Isis
>       Unveiled_ (II. 436‐42). Surely there must have been some very good
>       reasons why the Sadducees, who furnished almost all the High Priests
>       of Judæa, held to the Laws of Moses and spurned the alleged “Books
>       of Moses,” the _Pentateuch_ of the Synagogue and the _Talmud_?
> 
>   472 Once more, remember the Hindû Wittoba crucified in space; the
>       significance of the “sacred sign,” the Svastika; Plato’s Decussated
>       Man in Space, etc.
> 
>   473 See farther on the description given of the early Âryan Initiation:
>       of Vishvakarman crucifying the Sun, Vikarttana, shorn of his
>       beams—on a cruciform lathe.
> 
>   474 _Primeval Man Unveiled; or the Anthropology of the Bible_, by the
>       author (unknown) of _The Stars and the Angels_, 1870, p. 14.
> 
>   475 _Op. cit._, p. 195.
> 
>   476 Especially in the face of the evidence furnished by the authorized
>       _Bible_ itself in _Genesis_ (iv. 16, 17), which shows Cain going to
>       the land of Nod and there marrying a wife.
> 
>   477 _Ibid._, p. 194.
> 
>   478 _Ibid._, p. 55.
> 
>   479 _Ibid._, pp. 206‐7.
> 
>   480 _Acts_, xvii. 23, 24.
> 
>   481 _Taittirîyaka Upanishad_, Second Vallî, First Anuvâka.
> 
>   482 _Ephesians_, vi, 12.
> 
>   483 _Oracles of Zoroaster_, “Effatum,” xvi.
> 
>   484 _Georgica_, Book II. 325.
> 
>   485 _Isis Unveiled._
> 
>   486 _Op. cit._, I. 5‐13, Burnell’s translation.
> 
>   487 The ideal apex of the Pythagorean Triangle.
> 
>   488 See A. Coke Burnell’s translation, edited by Ed. W. Hopkins, Ph. D.
> 
>   489 Ahamkâra, as universal Self‐Consciousness, has a triple aspect, as
>       has also Manas. For this “conception of I,” or the Ego, is either
>       _sattva_, “pure quietude,” or appears as _rajas_, “active,” or
>       remains _tamas_, “stagnant,” in darkness. It belongs to Heaven and
>       Earth, and assumes the properties of Ether.
> 
>   490 See _Sânkhya Kârikâ_ III, and Commentaries.
> 
>   491 The word “eternity,” by which Christian theologians interpret the
>       term “for ever and ever,” does not exist in the Hebrew tongue.
>       “Oulam,” says Le Clerc, only imports a time when beginning or end is
>       not known. It does not mean “infinite duration,” and the term “for
>       ever,” in the _Old Testament_, only signifies a “long time.” Nor is
>       the word “eternity” used in the Christian sense in the _Purânas_.
>       For in _Vishnu Purâna_, it is clearly stated that by “eternity” and
>       “immortality” only “existence to the end of the Kalpa” is meant.
>       (Book II. chap. viii.)
> 
>   492 Orphic Theogony is purely Oriental and Indian in its spirit. The
>       successive transformations it has undergone, have now separated it
>       widely from the spirit of ancient Cosmogony, as may be seen by
>       comparing it even with Hesiod’s _Theogony_. Yet the truly Âryan
>       Hindû spirit breaks forth everywhere in both the Hesiodic and Orphic
>       systems. (See the remarkable work of James Darmesteter, “Cosmogonies
>       Âryennes,” in his _Essais Orientaux_.) Thus the original Greek
>       conception of Chaos is that of the Secret Wisdom Religion. In
>       Hesiod, therefore, Chaos is infinite, boundless, endless and
>       beginningless in duration, an abstraction and a visible presence at
>       the same time, Space filled with darkness, which is primordial
>       matter in its _pre‐cosmic_ state. For in its etymological sense,
>       Chaos is Space, according to Aristotle, and Space is the ever Unseen
>       and Unknowable Deity, in our philosophy.
> 
>   493 The _manifested_ Spirit: Absolute, Divine Spirit is one with
>       absolute Divine Substance; Parabrahman and Mûlaprakriti are one in
>       essence. Therefore, Cosmic Ideation and Cosmic Substance, in their
>       primal character, are one also.
> 
>   494 _Sepher Yetzirah_, Chap. I. Mishna ix.
> 
>   495 _Ibid._ It is from “Arba” that Abram is derived.
> 
>   496 _Zohar_, I. 2a.
> 
>   497 _Sepher Yetzirah_, Mishna ix. 10.
> 
>   498 _Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection_.
> 
>   499 Plato, _Timæus_.
> 
>   500 Suidas, _sub voc._ “Tyrrhenia.” See Cory’s _Ancient Fragments_, p.
>       309, 2nd ed.
> 
>   501 The reader will understand that by “years” is meant “ages,” not mere
>       periods of 13 lunar months each.
> 
>   502 See the Greek translation by Philon Byblius.
> 
>   503 Cory, _Op. cit._, p. 3.
> 
>   504 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 342.
> 
>   505 Mithras was regarded among the Persians as the _theos ek petras_—the
>       God from the rock.
> 
>   506 Bordj is called a fire‐mountain, a volcano: therefore it contains
>       fire, rock, earth and water; the male, or active, and the female, or
>       passive, elements. The myth is suggestive.
> 
>   507 _Op. cit._, I. 156.
> 
>   508 Henry Pratt, M.D., _New Aspects of Life_.
> 
>   509 _Siphrah Dtzenioutha_, i. 16.
> 
>   510 Damascius, in his Theogony, calls it Dis, “the disposer of all
>       things.” Cory, _Ancient Fragments_, p. 314.
> 
>   511 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 341.
> 
>   512 “Migration of Abraham,” 32.
> 
>   513 With the Greeks, the River‐Gods, all of them the Sons of the
>       Primeval Ocean—Chaos, in its masculine aspect—were the respective
>       ancestors of the Hellenic races. For them the Ocean was the Father
>       of the Gods; and thus in this connection they had anticipated the
>       theories of Thales, as rightly observed by Aristotle. (_Metaph._ I.
>       3‐5.)
> 
>   514 xxvi. 5.
> 
>   515 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 133‐4.
> 
>   516 The Spirit, or hidden voice of the Mantras; the active manifestation
>       of the latent force, or Occult potency.
> 
>   517 Orthography of the _Archaic Dictionary_.
> 
>   518 We do not mean the current or accepted _Bible_, but the _real_
>       Jewish Scripture, now kabatistically explained.
> 
>   519 See _Genesis_, ii. 4.
> 
>   520 It is “unutterable” for the simple reason that it is non‐existent.
>       It _never_ was either a _name_, or any _word_ at all, but an _idea_
>       that could not be expressed. A substitute was created for it in the
>       century preceding our era.
> 
>   521 The Cosmic Tabernacle of Moses, erected by him in the Desert, was
>       _square_, representing the four Cardinal Points and the four
>       Elements, as Josephus tells his readers. (_Antiq._ I. viii. ch.
>       xxii.) The idea was taken from the pyramids in Egypt, and also in
>       Tyre, where the pyramids became pillars. The Genii, or Angels, have
>       their abodes in these four points respectively.
> 
>   522 Isaac Myer’s _Qabbalah_, published 1888, p. 415.
> 
>   523 As, for instance, in _Vishnu Purâna_, Bk. I.
> 
>   524 Plutarch, _De Iside et Osiride_, lvi.
> 
>   525 _Spirit History of Man_, p. 88.
> 
>   526 Movers, _Phoinizer_, 268.
> 
>   527 Cory, _Ancient Fragments_, 240.
> 
>   528 _Vishnu Purâna_, Bk. I. Ch. iv., Fitzedward Hall’s rendering.
> 
>   529 Just as Mûlaprakriti is known only to Îshvara, the Logos, as he is
>       called by T. Subba Row.
> 
>   530 Franck, _Die Kabbala_, 126.
> 
>   531 Philo, _Quæst. et Solut._
> 
>   532 Franck, _Op. cit._, 153.
> 
>   533 The “Seven Angels of the Face,” with the Christians.
> 
>   534 _Philosophumena_, vi. 42.
> 
>   535 _The Kabbalah Unveiled_, 47.
> 
>   536 _Qabbalah_, 233.
> 
>   537 p. 79.
> 
>   538 Arnobius, VI. xii.
> 
>   539 We employ the term as one accepted and sanctioned by use, and
>       therefore more comprehensible to the reader.
> 
>   540 See Dunlap, _Sôd: the Mysteries of Adoni_, 23.
> 
>   541 With the ancient Jews, as shown by Le Clerc, the word Oulom meant
>       simply a time whose beginning or end was not known. The term
>       “Eternity,” properly speaking, did not exist in the Hebrew tongue
>       with the meaning applied by Vedântins to Parabrahman, for instance.
> 
>   542 _Zohar_, Part I. fol. 20a.
> 
>   543 In the Indian Pantheon the double‐sexed Logos is Brahmâ, the
>       Creator, whose seven “Mind‐born” Sons are the primeval Rishis—the
>       Builders.
> 
>   544 Says Rabbi Simeon: “Oh, companions, companions, man as an emanation
>       was both man and woman, as well on the side of the ‘Father’ as on
>       the side of the ‘Mother.’ And this is the sense of the words: ‘And
>       Elohim spake, Let there be Light, and it was Light’; ... and this is
>       the _two‐fold man_.” (_Auszüge ans dem Sohar_, 13, 15.) Light, then,
>       in _Genesis_, stood for the Androgyne Ray, or “Heavenly Man.”
> 
>   545 _Zohar_, iii. 290.
> 
>   546 _Op. cit._, ii. 261.
> 
>   547 ix. 1.
> 
>   548 _Chaldean Account of Genesis_, 62, 63.
> 
>   549 The Seven Swans that are believed to descend from Heaven on Lake
>       Mânsarovara, are in the popular fancy the Seven Rishis of the Great
>       Bear, who assume that form to visit the locality where the _Vedas_
>       were written.
> 
>   550 See Petronius, _Satyricon_, cxxxvi.
> 
>   551 _Progress of Religious Ideas_, I. 17 _et seq._
> 
>   552 iii. 165.
> 
>   553 Ch. liv. 3.
> 
>   554 Ch. xxii. 1.
> 
>   555 Ch. xlii. 13.
> 
>   556 Ch. liv. 1, 2; ch. lxxvii. i.
> 
>   557 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. 39.
> 
>   558 _Op. cit._, _ibid._
> 
>   559 Ch. xvii. 50, 51.
> 
>   560 Ch. xlii. 13.
> 
>   561 Ch. lxxx. 9.
> 
>   562 See Max Müller’s “Our Figures.”
> 
>   563 A Kabalist would be rather inclined to believe that as the Arabic
>       _cifron_ was taken from the Indian _sunyan_, nought, so the Jewish
>       Kabalistic Sephiroth (_Sephrim_) were taken from the word _cipher_,
>       not in the sense of emptiness, but in that of creation by number and
>       degrees of evolution. And the Sephiroth are 10 or [circle split by
>       vertical line].
> 
>   564 See King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, 370 (2nd ed.).
> 
>   565 _De Vita Pithag._
> 
>   566 The year of his birth is given as 608 B.C.
> 
>   567 That is to say 332 B.C.
> 
>   568 _Metaphysics_, vii., F.
> 
>   569 _Euterpe_, 75, 76.
> 
>   570 _De Cultu Egypt._
> 
>   571 xxi. 5 _et seq._
> 
>   572 II _Kings_, xviii. 4.
> 
>   573 _Supra_, pp. 386, 387.
> 
>   574 III. 124.
> 
>   575 Movers, _Phoinizer_, 282.
> 
>   576 See _Isis Unveiled_, I. 56.
> 
>   577 Weber, _Akad‐Vorles_, 213, _et seq._
> 
>   578 The Chinese seem to have thus anticipated Sir William Thomson’s
>       theory that the first living germ had dropped to the earth from some
>       passing comet. Query: Why should this be called _scientific_ and the
>       Chinese idea a superstitious, foolish theory?
> 
>   579 Compare Movers, _Phoinizer_, 268.
> 
>   580 His triadic Goddesses are Sati and Anouki.
> 
>   581 Ptah was originally the god of Death, of Destruction, like Shiva. He
>       is a Solar God only by virtue of the Sun’s fire killing as well as
>       vivifying. He was the national God of Memphis, the radiant and
>       “fair‐faced” God.
> 
>   582 _Book of Numbers._
> 
>   583 Wilson, _Vishnu Purâna_, I. Pref. lxxxiv‐v.
> 
>   584 There is a curious piece of information in the Buddhist esoteric
>       traditions. The exoteric or allegorical biography of Gautama Buddha
>       shows this great Sage dying of an indigestion of “pork and rice”; a
>       very prosaic end, indeed, with little of the solemn element in it!
>       This is explained as an allegorical reference to his having been
>       born in the “Boar” or Varâha Kalpa, when Vishnu assumed the form of
>       that animal to raise the Earth out of the “Waters of Space.” Now as
>       the Brâhmans descend direct from Brahmâ and are, so to speak,
>       identified with him; and as they are at the same time the mortal
>       enemies of Buddha and Buddhism, we have this curious allegorical
>       hint and combination. The Brâhmanism of the Boar or Varâha Kalpa has
>       slaughtered the religion of Buddha in India, swept it from its face.
>       Therefore Buddha, who is identified with his philosophy, is said to
>       have died from the effects of eating of the flesh of a wild hog. The
>       very idea of one who established the most rigorous vegetarianism and
>       respect for animal life—even to refusing to eat eggs as being
>       vehicles of latent life—dying of an indigestion of meat, is absurdly
>       contradictory and has puzzled more than one Orientalist. But the
>       present explanation, however, unveils the allegory, and makes clear
>       all the rest. The Varâha, however, is no simple Boar, but seems to
>       have meant at first some antediluvian lacustrine animal “delighting
>       to sport in water.” (_Vâyu Purâna._)
> 
>   585 According to Colonel Wilford, the conclusion of the “Great War” took
>       place in 1370 B.C., (_Asiatic Researches_, xi. 116.); according to
>       Bentley, 575 B.C.!! We may yet hope, before the end of this century,
>       to see the Mahâbhâratan epic proclaimed identical with the wars of
>       the great Napoleon.
> 
>   586 See _Royal Asiat. Soc._ ix. 364.
> 
>   587 Bk. vi. ch. iii.
> 
>   588 In the Vedânta and Nyâya, Nimitta, from which Naimittika, is
>       rendered as the Efficient Cause, when antithesized with Upâdâna, the
>       Physical or Material Cause. In the Sânkhya, Pradhâna is a cause
>       inferior to Brahmâ, or rather Brahmâ being himself a cause, is
>       superior to Pradhâna. Hence “Incidental” is a wrong translation, and
>       ought to be rendered, as shown by some scholars, “Ideal” Cause: even
>       Real Cause would have been better.
> 
>   589 XII. iv, 35.
> 
>   590 _Vâyu Purâna._
> 
>   591 Wilson, _Vishnu Purâna_, VI, iii.
> 
>   592 The chief Kumâra, or Virgin‐God, a Dhyân Chohan who refuses to
>       create. A prototype of St. Michael, who also refuses to do so.
> 
>   593 See concluding lines in Section, “Chaos: Theos: Kosmos.”
> 
>   594 _Ibid._, iv.
> 
>   595 This prospect would hardly suit Christian theology, which prefers an
>       eternal, everlasting Hell for its followers.
> 
>   596 The term “Elements” must be here understood to mean not only the
>       visible and physical elements, but also that which St. Paul calls
>       Elements—the Spiritual, Intelligent Potencies—Angels and Demons in
>       their manvantaric forms.
> 
>   597 When this description is correctly understood by Orientalists, in
>       its esoteric significance, then it will be found that this cosmic
>       correlation of World‐Elements may explain the correlation of
>       physical forces better than those now known. At any rate,
>       Theosophists will perceive that Prakriti has _seven forms_, or
>       principles, “reckoned from Mahat to Earth.” The “Waters” mean here
>       the mystic “Mother”; the Womb of Abstract Nature, in which the
>       Manifested Universe is conceived. The seven “zones” have reference
>       to the Seven Divisions of that Universe, or the Noumena of the
>       Forces that bring it into being. It is all allegorical.
> 
>   598 _Vishnu Purâna_, Bk. VI. Ch. iv., Wilson’s mistakes being corrected
>       and the original terms put in brackets.
> 
>   599 As it is the Mahâ, the Great, or so‐called Final, Pralaya which is
>       here described, every thing is reäbsorbed into its original One
>       Element; the “Gods themselves, Brahmâ and the rest” being said to
>       die and disappear during that long “Night.”
> 
>   600 The “Builders” of the Stanzas.
> 
>   601 From the _Siphra Dtzenioutha_, c. i. § 16 _et seq._; as quoted in
>       Myer’s _Qabbalah_, 232‐3.
> 
>   602 Compare the _Siphra Dtzenioutha_.
> 
>   603 Bk. I. Ch. iii.
> 
>   604 pp. 219, 221.
> 
>   605 See Jacolliot’s _Les Fils de Dieu_, and _L’Inde des Brahmes_, p.
>       230.
> 
>   606 If this is not prophetic, what is?
> 
>   607 Wilson, _Vishnu Purâna_, Bk. IV. Ch. xxiv.
> 
>   608 The _Matsya Purâna_ gives Katâpa.
> 
>   609 _Vishnu Purâna_, _Ibid._
> 
>   610 Max Müller translates the name as Morya, of the Morya dynasty, to
>       which Chandragupta belonged. (See _History of Ancient Sanskrit
>       Literature_). In _Matsya Purâna_, chapter cclxxii, the dynasty of
>       ten Moryas, or Maureyas, is spoken of. In the same chapter, it is
>       stated that the Moryas will one day reign over India, after
>       restoring the Kshattriya race many thousand years hence. Only that
>       reign will be purely spiritual and “not of this world.” It will be
>       the kingdom of the next Avatâra. Colonel Tod believes the name
>       Morya, or Maurya, a corruption of Mori, a Rajpût tribe, and the
>       commentary on the _Mahâvanso_ thinks that some princes have taken
>       their name Maurya from their town called Mori, or as Professor Max
>       Müller gives it, Morya‐Nâgara, which is more correct, after the
>       original _Mahâvanso_. The Sanskrit Encyclopedia, _Vâchaspattya_, we
>       are informed by our Brother, Devan Bâdhâdur R. Ragoonath Rao, of
>       Madras, places Katâpa (Kalâpa) on the northern side of the
>       Himâlayas, hence in Tibet. The same is stated in the _Bhâgavata
>       Purâna_, Skanda xii.
> 
>   611 _Ibid._, ch. iv. The _Vayu Purâna_ declares that Moru will
>       reëstablish the Kshattriyas in the Nineteenth coming Yuga. (See
>       _Five Years of Theosophy_, 483, art. “The Moryas and Koothoomi.”)
> 
>   612 See _Dissertations Relating to Asia_.
> 
>   613 Ch. lxxxi.
> 
>   614 I. 11.
> 
>   615 In the Indian _Purânas_, it is Vishnu, the First, and Brahmâ, the
>       Second Logos, or the Ideal and Practical Creators, who are
>       respectively represented, one as manifesting the Lotus, the other as
>       issuing from it.
> 
>   616 Not the efforts, however, of the trained psychic faculties of an
>       Initiate into Eastern Metaphysics, and the Mysteries of Creative
>       Nature. It is the Profane of the past ages, who have degraded the
>       pure ideal of cosmic creation into an emblem of mere human
>       reproduction and sexual functions: it is the Esoteric Teachings, and
>       the Initiates of the Future, whose mission it is, and will be, to
>       redeem and ennoble once more the primitive conception, so sadly
>       profaned by its crude and gross application to exoteric dogmas and
>       personations, by theological and ecclesiastical religionists. The
>       silent worship of abstract or noumenal Nature, the only divine
>       manifestation, is the one ennobling religion of Humanity.
> 
>   617 Surely the words of the old Initiate into the _primitive_ Mysteries
>       of Christianity, “Know ye not ye are the Temple of God” (1
>       _Corinth_, iii. 16), could not be applied in _this_ sense to _men_;
>       though the meaning _was_, undeniably, so stated, in the minds of the
>       Hebrew compilers of the _Old Testament_. And here is the abyss that
>       lies between the symbolism of the _New Testament_ and the Jewish
>       canon. This gulf would have remained, and have ever widened, had not
>       Christianity, especially and most glaringly the Latin Church, thrown
>       a bridge over it. Modern Popery has now spanned it entirely, by its
>       dogma of the two immaculate conceptions, and the anthropomorphic
>       and, at the same time idolatrous, character it has conferred upon
>       the Mother of its God.
> 
>   618 It was so carried _only_ in the Hebrew _Bible_, and its servile
>       copyist, Christian theology.
> 
>   619 The same idea is carried out exoterically in the incidents of the
>       exodus from Egypt. The Lord God tempts Pharaoh sorely, and “plagues
>       him with great plagues,” lest the king should escape punishment, and
>       thus afford no pretext for one more triumph to his “chosen people.”
> 
>   620 _Exodus_, ii. 10. Even to the seven daughters of the Midianite
>       priest, who came to draw _water_, and whom Moses helped to _water_
>       their flock; for which service the Midian gives Moses his daughter
>       Zipporah, or Sippara, the _shining_ Wave, as wife. (_Exod._ ii.
>       16‐21.) All this has the same secret meaning.
> 
>   621 With the Egyptians it was the resurrection in rebirth, after 3,000
>       years of purification, either in Devachan or the “Fields of Bliss.”
> 
>   622 Such “frog‐Goddesses” may be seen at Boulak, in the Cairo Museum.
>       For the statement about the Church‐lamps and inscriptions, the
>       learned ex‐director of the Boulak Museum, M. Gaston Maspero, must be
>       held responsible. (See his _Guide au Musée de Boulaq_, p. 146.)
> 
>   623 The Goddess Τρίμορφος in the statuary of Alcamenes.
> 
>   624 Ancient Mythology includes ancient Astronomy as well as Astrology.
>       The planets were the hands pointing out, on the dial of our Solar
>       System, the hours of certain periodical events. Thus, Mercury was
>       the _messenger_, appointed to keep time during the daily solar and
>       lunar phenomena, and was otherwise connected with the God and
>       Goddess of Light.
> 
>   625 A caricatured and dwarfed Vedântin notion of Parabrahman containing
>       within _itself_ the whole Universe, as being that boundless Universe
>       itself, and _nothing existing outside of itself_.
> 
>   626 Just as they are to this day in India; the bull of Shiva, and the
>       cow representing several Shaktis or Goddesses.
> 
>   627 Hence the worship of the Moon by the Hebrews.
> 
>   628 “_Male_ and _female_, created he them.”
> 
>   629 Because it was too sacred. It is referred to as THAT in the _Vedas_.
>       It is the “Eternal Cause,” and cannot, therefore, be spoken of as a
>       “First Cause,” a term implying the absence of Cause, at one time.
> 
>   630 _Pneumatologie: Des Esprits_, tom. III. p. 117; “Archéologie de la
>       Vierge Mère.”
> 
>   631 p. 23.
> 
>   632 Myer’s _Qabbalah_, 335‐6.
> 
>   633 _Moreh Nebhuchim_, III. xxx.
> 
>   634 See _De Diis Syriis_, Teraph., II. Synt. p. 31.
> 
>   635 I. i. 21.
> 
>   636 See _Pausanias_, viii. 35‐8.
> 
>   637 Cornutus, _De Natura Deorum_, xxxiv. 1.
> 
>   638 The Roman Catholics are indebted for the idea of consecrating the
>       month of May to the Virgin to the pagan Plutarch, who shows that
>       “May is sacred to Maia (Μαῖα) or Vesta” (Aulus Gellius, _sub voc._
>       Maia), our mother‐earth, our nurse and nourisher, personified.
> 
>   639 Thot‐Lunus is the Budha‐Soma of India, or Mercury and the Moon.
> 
>   640 _Ezekiel_, viii. 16.
> 
>   641 The Earth flees for her life, in the allegory, before Prithu, who
>       pursues her. She assumes the shape of a cow, and, trembling with
>       terror, runs away and hides even in the regions of Brahmâ.
>       Therefore, it is _not_ our Earth. Again, in every _Purâna_, the calf
>       changes name. In one it is Manu Svâyambhuva, in another Indra, in a
>       third the Himavat (Himâlayas) itself, while Meru was the milker.
>       This is a deeper allegory than one may be inclined to think.
> 
>   642 His _clear_ realization is, that the Egyptians _prophesied_ Jehovah
>       (!) and his incarnated Redeemer (the good serpent), etc.; even to
>       identifying Typhon with the _wicked_ dragon of the garden of Eden.
>       And this passes as serious and sober _science_!
> 
>   643 Hathor is the _infernal_ Isis, the Goddess preëminently of the West
>       or the Nether World.
> 
>   644 This is from De Mirville, who proudly confesses the similarity, and
>       he _ought to know_. See “Archéologie de la Vierge Mère,” in his _Des
>       Esprits_, pp. 111‐113.
> 
>   645 _Magie_, p. 153.
> 
>   646 De Mirville, _Ibid._, pp. 116 and 119.
> 
>   647 _Hymns to Minerva_, p. 19.
> 
>   648 _Sermon sur la Sainte Vierge._
> 
>   649 _Apoc._, ch. xii.
> 
>   650 Wägner and McDowall, _Asgard and the Gods_, p. 86.
> 
>   651 See _De Vitâ Apollionii_, I. xiv.
> 
>   652 _Adv. Hæres._ xxxvii.
> 
>   653 Gerald Massey, _The Natural Genesis_, I. 340.
> 
>   654 Ch. xv.
> 
>   655 Ch. xi.
> 
>   656 _De Mundi Opif._, _Par._, pp. 30 and 419.
> 
>   657 For the same reason the division of the principles in man into seven
>       is thus reckoned, as they describe the same circle in the higher and
>       lower human nature.
> 
>   658 Thus the septenary division is the oldest and preceded the four‐fold
>       division. It is the root of archaic classification.
> 
>   659 In Chinese Buddhism and Esotericism, the Genii are represented by
>       four Dragons—the Mahârâjahs of the Stanzas.
> 
>   660 _Op. cit._, II. 312‐13.
> 
>   661 _Ibid._, I. 321.
> 
>   662 Proclus, _Tim._, I.
> 
>   663 _Prep. Evang._, I. iii. 3.
> 
>   664 _Op. cit._, pp. 366‐8.
> 
>   665 _Job_, ii.
> 
>   666 _Genesis_, vi.
> 
>   667 _James_, i. 13.
> 
>   668 _James_, i. 2, 12; _Matth._, vi. 13. See Cruden, _sub voc._
> 
>   669 _Padma Purâna._
> 
>   670 _Vishnu Purâna_, I. i.
> 
>   671 Vol. II. ch. x.
> 
>   672 See Chwolsohn, _Nabathean Agriculture_, II. 217.
> 
>   673 One Day of Brahmâ lasts 4,320,000,000 years—multiply this by 360!
>       The A‐suras (No‐gods, or Demons) are here still Suras, Gods higher
>       in hierarchy than such secondary Gods as are not even mentioned in
>       the _Vedas_. The duration of the War shows its significance, and
>       also shows that the combatants are only the personified Cosmic
>       Powers. It is evidently for sectarian purposes and out of _odium
>       theologicum_ that the illusive form Mâyâmoha, assumed by Vishnu, was
>       attributed in later reärrangements of old texts to Buddha and the
>       Daityas, as in the _Vishnu Purâna_, unless it was a fancy of Wilson
>       himself. He also fancied he found an allusion to Buddhism in the
>       _Bhagavadgîtâ_, whereas, as proved by K. T. Telang, he had only
>       confused the Buddhists and the older Chârvâka materialists. The
>       version exists nowhere in other _Purânas_ if the inference does, as
>       Professor Wilson claims, in the _Vishnu Purâna_; the translation of
>       which, especially of Book III. ch. xviii, where the reverend
>       Orientalist arbitrarily introduces Buddha, and shows him teaching
>       Buddhism to Daityas, led to another “great war” between himself and
>       Col. Vans Kennedy. The latter charged him publicly with wilfully
>       distorting Purânic texts. “I affirm,” wrote the Colonel at Bombay,
>       in 1840, “that the _Purânas_ do not contain what Professor Wilson
>       has stated is contained in them; ... until such passages are
>       produced I may be allowed to repeat my former conclusions that
>       Professor Wilson’s opinion, that the _Purânas_ as now extant are
>       compilations made between the eighth and seventeenth centuries
>       [A.D.!], rests solely _on gratuitous assumptions and unfounded
>       assertions_, and that his reasoning in support of it is either
>       futile, fallacious, contradictory, or improbable.” (See _Vishnu
>       Purâna_, trans. by Wilson, edit, by Fitzedward Hall, Vol. V,
>       Appendix.)
> 
>   674 This statement belongs to the _third_ War, since the terrestrial
>       continents, seas and rivers are mentioned in connection with it.
> 
>   675 _Vishnu Purâna_, III. xvii (Wilson, Vol. III. 204‐5).
> 
>   676 Book I. chap. xvii (Wilson, Vol. II. 36), in the story of
>       Prahlâda—the Son of Hiranyakashipu, the Purânic Satan, the great
>       enemy of Vishnu, and the King of the Three Worlds—into whose heart
>       Vishnu entered.
> 
>   677 _Ibid._, I. iv (Wilson, Vol. I. 64).
> 
>   678 II _Chronicles_, ii. 5.
> 
>   679 “There was a day when the _Sons of God_ came before the Lord, and
>       Satan came _with his brothers_, also before the Lord.” (_Job_ ii.,
>       Abyss., Ethiopic text.)
> 
>   680 _Ibid._, Vol. III. 205‐7.
> 
>   681 _Journal of the Royal Asiat. Society_, xix. 302.
> 
>   682 Wilson’s opinion that the _Vishnu Purâna_ is a production _of our
>       era_, and that in its present form it is not earlier than between
>       the VIIIth and the XVIIth (!!) century, is absurd beyond noticing.
> 
>   683 P. 3.
> 
>   684 _Ibid._, p. 2.
> 
>   685 _Ibid._, p. 21.
> 
>   686 See _The Monthly Magazine_, for April, 1797.
> 
>   687 Ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γ’eνετ᾽ (l. 166); γένετο being considered in
>       antiquity as meaning: “was _generated_” and not simply “_was_.” (See
>       Taylor’s “Introd. to the _Parmenides_ of Plato,” p. 260.)
> 
>   688 It is the confusion between the “Bound,” and the “Infinite,” that
>       Kapila overwhelms with sarcasms in his disputations with the Brâhman
>       Yogis, who claim in their mystical visions to see the “Highest One.”
> 
>   689 _Ibid._
> 
>   690 See T. Taylor’s article in his _Monthly Magazine_, quoted in the
>       _Platonist_ of Feb., 1887, edited by T. M. Johnson, F.T.S., Osceola,
>       Missouri.
> 
>   691 _Vit. Pythag._, p. 47.
> 
>   692 _Asgard and the Gods_, 22.
> 
>   693 Vâch—the “melodious cow, who milks sustenance and Water,” and yields
>       us “nourishment and sustenance,” as described in the _Rig Veda_.
> 
>   694 _The Theosophist_, Feb., 1887, pp. 302‐3.
> 
>   695 _Ibid._, p. 304.
> 
>   696 _The Masonic Review_, June, 1886.
> 
>   697 Objective—in the world of Mâyâ, of course; still as real as we are.
> 
>   698 “In the course of cosmic manifestation, this Daiviprakriti, instead
>       of being the Mother of the Logos, should, strictly speaking, be
>       called his Daughter.” (“Notes on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_,” _op. cit._,
>       p. 305.)
> 
>   699 The wise men who, like Stanley Jevons amongst the moderns, invented
>       a method to make the incomprehensible assume a tangible form, could
>       only do so by resorting to numbers and geometrical figures.
> 
>   700 The Pranava, Om, is a mystic term pronounced by the Yogis during
>       meditation; of the terms called, according to exoteric commentators,
>       Vyâkritis, or Aum, Bhûh, Bhuvah, Svah, (Om, Earth, Sky, Heaven),
>       Pranava is, perhaps, the most sacred. They are pronounced with
>       breath suppressed. See _Manu_ II. 76‐81, and Mitakshara commenting
>       on the _Yâjnavâkhya‐Smriti_, I. 23. But the esoteric explanation
>       goes a great deal further.
> 
>   701 “Lectures on the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_,” _ibid._, p. 307.
> 
>   702 It is this Trinity that is allegorized by the “Three Steps of
>       Vishnu,” which mean—Vishnu being considered as the Infinite in
>       exotericism—that from Parabrahman issued Mûlaprakriti, Purusha (the
>       Logos) and Prakriti; the four forms—with itself, the synthesis—of
>       Vâch. And in the _Kabalah_, Ain Suph, Shekinah, Adam Kadmon and
>       Sephira, the four, or the three, emanations being distinct—yet One.
> 
>   703 Chaldean _Book of Numbers_. In the current _Kabalah_ the name
>       Jehovah replaces that of Adam Kadmon.
> 
>   704 Justin Martyr tells us that, owing to his ignorance of these four
>       sciences, he was rejected by the Pythagoreans as a candidate for
>       admission into their school.
> 
>   705 Diogenes Laërtius, in _Vit. Pythag._
> 
>   706 31415, or π, the synthesis, or the Host _unified_ in the Logos and
>       the Point, called in Roman Catholicism the “Angel of the Face,” and
>       in Hebrew, Michael, מיכאל, “who [is like unto, or the same] as God,”
>       the manifested representation.
> 
>   707 Appearing at the beginning of Cycles, as also of every Sidereal
>       Year, of 25,868 years. Therefore, the Kabeira or Kabarim received
>       their name in Chaldæa, for it means the Measures of Heaven, from
>       _Kob_, “measure of,” and _Urim_, “Heavens.”
> 
>   708 _The Natural Genesis_, II. 316.
> 
>   709 See Kircher’s _Œdipus Ægypt._, II. 423.
> 
>   710 This Egyptian word Naja reminds one a good deal of the Indian Nâga,
>       the Serpent‐God. Brahmâ and Shiva and Vishnu are all crowned and
>       connected with Nâgas—a sign of their cyclic and cosmic character.
> 
>   711 _Comment. on the Yashna_, 174.
> 
>   712 First Treatise, p. 59.
> 
>   713 Says the translator of Avicebron’s _Qabbalah_ of this “Sum Total”:
>       “The letter of Kether is י (Yod), of Binah ה (Heh), together YaH,
>       the feminine Name; the third letter, that of ’Hokhmah, is ו (Vav),
>       making together יהו YHV of יהוה YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, and really
>       the complete symbols of its efficaciousness. The last ה (Heh) of
>       this Ineffable Name _being always applied to the Six Lower and the
>       last, together the Seven_ remaining Sephiroth.” (Myer’s _Qabbalah_,
>       p. 263). Thus the Tetragrammaton is holy only in its abstract
>       synthesis. As a Quaternary containing the lower Seven Sephiroth, _it
>       is phallic_.
> 
>   714 The statement will, of course, be found preposterous and absurd, and
>       simply laughed at. But if one believes in the final submersion of
>       Atlantis, 850,000 years ago, as taught in _Esoteric Buddhism_—the
>       gradual first sinking having begun during the Eocene Age—one has
>       also to accept the statement for the so‐called Lemuria, the
>       continent of the Third Root‐Race, which was first nearly destroyed
>       by combustion, and then submerged. As the Commentary teaches: “_The
>       First Earth having been purified by the Forty‐nine Fires, her
>       people, born of Fire and Water, could not die ...; the Second Earth
>       [with its Race] disappeared as vapour vanishes in the air ...; the
>       Third Earth had everything consumed on it after the Separation, and
>       went down into the lower Deep [the Ocean]. This was twice eighty‐two
>       Cyclic Years ago._” Now a Cyclic Year is what we call a Sidereal
>       Year, and is founded on the Precession of the Equinoxes. The length
>       of this Sidereal Year is 25,868 years, and the period mentioned in
>       the Commentary is, therefore, in all equal to 4,242,352 years. More
>       details will be found in Volume II. Meanwhile, this doctrine is
>       embodied in the “Kings of Edom.”
> 
>   715 The same reserve is found in the _Talmud_ and in every national
>       system of religion whether monotheistic or exoterically
>       polytheistic. From the superb religious poem by the Kabalist Rabbi
>       Solomon ben Yehudah Ibn Gabirol, the “Kether Malchuth,” we select a
>       few definitions given in the prayers of Kippûr: “Thou art One, the
>       beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all edifices; Thou
>       art One, and in the secret of Thy unity the wisest of men are lost,
>       because they know it not. Thou art One, and Thy Unity is never
>       diminished, never extended, and cannot be changed. Thou art One, but
>       _not as an element of numeration; for Thy Unity admits not of
>       multiplication, change or form_. Thou art Existent; but the
>       understanding and vision of mortals cannot attain to thy existence,
>       nor determine for thee the Where, the How, and the Why. Thou art
>       Existent, but in thyself alone, there being none other that can
>       exist with thee. Thou art Existent, before all time and without
>       place. Thou art Existent, and thy existence is so profound and
>       secret that none can penetrate and discover thy secrecy. Thou art
>       living, but within no time that can be fixed or known; Thou art
>       living, but not by a spirit or a soul, for _Thou art Thyself_, the
>       Soul of all Souls.” There is a distance between this Kabalistical
>       Deity and the Biblical Jehovah, the spiteful and revengeful God of
>       Abram, Isaac, and Jacob, who tempted the first and wrestled with the
>       last. No Vedântin but would repudiate such a Parabrahman!
> 
>   716 Edkins, _Chinese Buddhism_, ch. xx. And very wisely have they acted.
> 
>   717 If he rejected it, it was on the ground of what he calls the
>       “changes,” in other words, rebirths of man, and constant
>       transformations. He denied immortality to the Personality of man, as
>       we do, not to Man.
> 
>   718 He may be laughed at by the Protestants; but the Roman Catholics
>       have no right to mock him, without becoming guilty of blasphemy and
>       sacrilege. For it is over 200 years since Confucius was canonized as
>       a Saint in China by the Roman Catholics, who have thereby obtained
>       many converts among the ignorant Confucianists.
> 
>   719 The animals regarded as sacred in the _Bible_ are by no means few in
>       number; as, for instance, the Goat, the Azaz‐el, or God of Victory.
>       As Aben Ezra says: “If thou art capable of comprehending the mystery
>       of Azazel, thou wilt learn the mystery of His [God’s] name, for it
>       has similar associates in Scriptures. I will tell thee by allusion
>       one portion of the mystery; when thou shalt have _thirty three years
>       of age_ thou wilt comprehend me.” So with the mystery of the
>       Tortoise. Rejoicing over the poetry of biblical metaphors,
>       associating “incandescent stones,” “sacred animals,” etc., with the
>       name of Jehovah, and quoting from the _Bible de Vence_ (XIX. 318) a
>       pious French writer says: “Indeed all of them are Elohim, _like
>       their God_”; for, these Angels, “ ‘assume,’ _through a holy
>       usurpation_, ‘the very divine name of Jehovah each time they
>       represent him’.” (De Mirville, _Des Esprits_.) No one ever doubted
>       that the Name must have been _assumed_, when under the guise of the
>       Infinite, One Incognizable, the Malachim, or Messengers, descended
>       to eat and drink with men. But if the Elohim and even lower Beings,
>       _assuming_ the God‐name, were and are still worshipped, why should
>       the same Elohim be called Devils, when appearing under the names of
>       other Gods?
> 
>   720 _Matth._, xxiv. 28.
> 
>   721 Bryant is right in saying “Druid bardism says of Noah that when he
>       came out of the ark (the birth of a new cycle), after a stay therein
>       of a year and a day, that is 364 + 1=365 days, he was congratulated
>       by Neptune upon his birth from the waters of the Flood, who wished
>       him a _Happy New Year_.” The “Year,” or cycle, esoterically, was the
>       new race of men, _born from woman_, after the Separation of the
>       Sexes, which is the secondary meaning of the allegory; its primary
>       meaning being the beginning of the Fourth Round, or the _new_
>       Creation.
> 
>   722 From an unpublished MS.
> 
>   723 Or literally: “One Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit: THAT was.” The
>       “Prâdhânika Brahma Spirit” is Mûlaprakriti and Parabrahman.
> 
>   724 Wilson, _Vishnu Purâna_, I. 73‐5.
> 
>   725 Origen, _Contra Celsum_, VI. xxii.
> 
>   726 _Timæus._
> 
>   727 “And the fourth creation is _here_ the primary, for _things_
>       immovable are emphatically known as primary”—according to a
>       commentary translated by Fitzedward Hall in his editing of Wilson’s
>       translation.
> 
>   728 How can “divinities” have been created _after_ the animals? The
>       esoteric meaning of the expression “animals” is the _germs of all
>       animal life_, including man. Man is called a _sacrificial animal_,
>       that is, the only one among the animal creation who sacrifices to
>       the Gods. Moreover, by “sacred animals” the twelve Signs of the
>       Zodiac are often meant in the sacred texts, as already stated.
> 
>   729 _Vishnu Purâna_, _ibid._
> 
>   730 _Op. cit._, I. ix.
> 
>   731 Myer’s _Qabbalah_, 415‐16.
> 
>   732 _Contra Hær._, I. xvii. 1.
> 
>   733 _Ibid._, I. xxx.
> 
>   734 Superior to the Spirits, or “Heavens,” of the Earth only.
> 
>   735 _Ibid._, I. v. 2.
> 
>   736 See _Isis Unveiled_, II. 183.
> 
>   737 See also King’s _Gnostics and their Remains_, p. 97. Other sects
>       regarded Jehovah as Ialdabaoth himself. King identifies him with
>       Saturn.
> 
>   738 _Ordinances of Manu_, I. 33.
> 
>   739 _Irenæus_, _op. cit._, I. xxx. 6.
> 
>   740 Elsewhere, however, the identity is revealed. See _supra_ the
>       quotation from Iba Gabirol and his 7 heavens, 7 earths, etc.
> 
>   741 This must not be confused with _precosmic_ “DARKNESS,” the Divine
>       ALL.
> 
>   742 I. 2; and also at the beginning of II.
> 
>   743 The quotations that follow in treating of the seven Creations,
>       except when otherwise stated, are all from _Vishnu Purâna_, Bk. I.
>       Ch. i‐v.
> 
>   744 I. 240.
> 
>   745 Brucker, _ibid._
> 
>   746 Compare _Genesis_ xix. 34‐8 and iv. 1.
> 
>   747 Vishnu is both Bhûtesha, “Lord of the Elements,” and of all things,
>       and Vishvarûpa, “Universal Substance” or Soul.
> 
>   748 Compare, for their “post‐types,” the Treatise written by Trithemius,
>       Agrippa’s master, in the sixteenth century, “Concerning the Seven
>       Secondaries, or Spiritual Intelligences, who, after God, actuate the
>       Universe,” which, in addition to secret cycles and several
>       prophecies, discloses certain facts and beliefs about the Genii, or
>       the Elohim, which preside over and guide the septenary stages of the
>       World’s Course.
> 
>   749 From the first, the Orientalists have found themselves beset with
>       great difficulties in regard to any possible order in the Purânic
>       “Creations.” Brahman is very often confused by Wilson with Brahmâ,
>       for which he is criticized by his successors. The _Original Sanscrit
>       Texts_ are preferred by Mr. Fitzedward Hall for the translation of
>       the _Vishnu Purâna_, to the text used by Wilson. “Had Professor
>       Wilson enjoyed the advantages which are now at the command of the
>       student of Indian philosophy, unquestionably he would have expressed
>       himself differently,” says the editor of his work. This reminds one
>       of the answer given by one of Thomas Taylor’s admirers to those
>       scholars who criticized his translations of Plato: “Taylor might
>       have known less Greek than his critics, but he knew more Plato.” Our
>       present Orientalists disfigure the _mystic_ sense of the Sanskrit
>       texts far more than Wilson ever did, though the latter is undeniably
>       guilty of very gross errors.
> 
>   750 _Vâyu Purâna._
> 
>   751 _Collected Works_, III. 381.
> 
>   752 Professor Wilson translates as though animals were higher in the
>       scale of “creation” than divinities, or angels, although the truth
>       about the Devas is very plainly stated further on. This “Creation,”
>       says the text, is both Primary (Prâkrita) and Secondary (Vaikrita).
>       It is the Secondary, as regards the origin of the Gods from Brahmâ,
>       the _personal_ anthropomorphic _creator_ of our material universe;
>       it is the Primary as affecting Rudra, who is the immediate
>       production of the First Principle. The term Rudra is not only a
>       title of Shiva, but embraces agents of creation, angels and men, as
>       will be shown further on.
> 
>   753 Neither plant nor animal, but an existence between the two.
> 
>   754 _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 276, art., “Mineral Monad.”
> 
>   755 “These notions,” remarks Professor Wilson, “the birth of Rudra and
>       the saints, seem to have been _borrowed_ from the Shaivas, and to
>       have been awkwardly engrafted upon the Vaishnava system.” The
>       esoteric meaning ought to have been consulted before venturing such
>       a hypothesis.
> 
>   756 See _Sânkhya Kârikâ_, v. 46. p. 146.
> 
>   757 Parâshara, the Vedic Rishi, who received the _Vishnu Purâna_ from
>       Pulastya and taught it to Maitreya, is placed by the Orientalists at
>       various epochs. As correctly observed, in the _Hindû Classical
>       Dictionary_: “Speculations as to his era differ widely, from 575
>       B.C. to 1391 B.C., and _cannot be trusted_.” Quite so; but they are
>       no more untrustworthy than any other date, as assigned by the
>       Sanskritists, so famous in the department of arbitrary fancy.
> 
>   758 They may indeed mark a “special” or extra “creation,” since it is
>       they who, by incarnating themselves within the senseless human
>       shells of the two first Root‐Races, and a great portion of the Third
>       Root‐Race, create, so to speak, a _new race_: that of thinking,
>       self‐conscious and _divine_ men.
> 
>   759 _Hindû Classical Dictionary._
> 
>   760 _Linga Purâna_, Prior Section, lxx. 174.
> 
>   761 See _Manu_, I. 10.
> 
>   762 See _Linga_, _Vâyu_ and _Mârkandeya Purânas_.
> 
>   763 Movers, _Phoinizer_, 282.
> 
>   764 Weber, _Akad. Vorles_, 213, 214, etc.
> 
>   765 IX. 850.
> 
>   766 _Stromata_, I. v. 6.
> 
>   767 The Gehenna of the _Bible_ was a valley near Jerusalem, where the
>       monotheistic Jews immolated their children to Moloch, if the word of
>       the prophet Jeremiah is to be believed. The Scandinavian Abode of
>       Hel or Hela was a frigid region—Kâma Loka again—and the Egyptian
>       Amenti a place of purification. (See _Isis Unveiled_, II. 11.)
> 
>   768 I. vi. i.
> 
>   769 _Cod. Naz._, I. 47; see also _Psalms_, lxxxix. 18.
> 
>   770 I _Cor._, viii. 5.
> 
>   771 _Concerning Divine Names_, traduction Darboy, 364.
> 
>   772 See de Mirville, _Des Esprits_, ii. 322.
> 
>   773 _The Correlation of Physical Forces_, p. 89.
> 
>   774 _Ibid._, xiv.
> 
>   775 II _Sam._, xxii. 9, 11.
> 
>   776 _Deut._, iv. 24.
> 
>   777 _Op. cit._, III. 415.
> 
>   778 II _Sam._, xxii. 14, 15.
> 
>   779 Herodotus, _Polymnia_, 190, 191.
> 
>   780 viii. 24.
> 
>   781 _Fa‐hwa‐King._
> 
>   782 See _La Mission des Juifs_.
> 
>   783 _China Revealed_, as quoted in Hargrave Jennings’ _Phallicism_, p.
>       273.
> 
>   784 p. 202.
> 
>   785 _Op. cit._, p. 60.
> 
>   786 _Ibid._
> 
>   787 O’Brien, _Round Towers of Ireland_, p. 61, quoted by Hargrave
>       Jennings in his _Phallicism_, p. 246.
> 
>   788 _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, p. 332.
> 
>   789 _Pantheon_, text 3.
> 
>   790 Their intellection, of course, being of quite a different nature to
>       any we can conceive of on Earth.
> 
>   791 See his Third Letter to Bentley.
> 
>   792 _Concepts of Modern Physics_, pp. xi, xii, Introd. to 2nd Ed.
> 
>   793 “Recherches expérimentales sur la relation qui existe entre la
>       résistance de l’air et sa température,” p. 68, translated from
>       Stallo’s quotation.
> 
>   794 From the criticism of _Concepts of Modern Physics_, in _Nature_. See
>       Stallo’s work, p. xvi of Introduction.
> 
>   795 Mr. Robert Ward, discussing the questions of Heat and Light in the
>       November _Journal of Science_, 1881, shows us how utterly ignorant
>       is Science about one of the commonest facts of Nature—the heat of
>       the Sun. He says: “The question of the temperature of the sun has
>       been the subject of investigation with many scientists: Newton, one
>       of the first investigators of this problem, tried to determine it,
>       and after him all the scientists who have been occupied with
>       calorimetry have followed his example. All have believed themselves
>       successful, and have formulated their results with great confidence.
>       The following, in the chronological order of the publication of the
>       results, are the temperatures (in centigrade degrees) found by each
>       of them: Newton, 1,699,300°; Pouillet, 1,461°; Tollner, 102,200°;
>       Secchi, 5,344,840°; Ericsson, 2,726,700°; Fizeau, 7,500°; Waterston,
>       9,000,000°; Spoëren, 27,000°; Deville, 9,500°; Soret, 5,801,846°;
>       Vicaire, 1,500°; Rosetti, 20,000°. The difference is as 1,400°
>       against 9,000,000°, or no less than 8,998,600°!! There probably does
>       not exist in science a more astonishing contradiction than that
>       revealed in these figures.” And yet without doubt if an Occultist
>       were to give out an estimate, each of these gentlemen would
>       vehemently protest in the name of “exact” Science at the rejection
>       of his special result.
> 
>   796 See _Correlation of the Physical Forces_, Preface.
> 
>   797 _Soirées_, vol. ii.
> 
>   798 Stallo’s above‐cited work, _Concepts of Modern Physics_, a volume
>       which has called forth the liveliest protests and criticisms, is
>       recommended to anyone inclined to doubt this statement. “The
>       professed antagonism of science to metaphysical speculation,” he
>       writes, “has led the majority of scientific specialists to assume
>       that the methods and results of empirical research are wholly
>       independent of the control of the laws of thought. They either
>       silently ignore, or openly repudiate, the simplest canons of logic,
>       including the laws of non‐contradiction, and ... resent with the
>       utmost vehemence every application of the rule of consistency to
>       their hypotheses and theories ... and they regard an examination (of
>       them) ... in the light of these laws as an impertinent intrusion of
>       ‘_à priori_ principles and methods’ into the domains of empirical
>       science. Persons of this cast of mind find no difficulty in holding
>       that atoms are absolutely inert, and at the same time asserting that
>       these atoms are perfectly elastic; or in maintaining that the
>       physical universe, in its last analysis, resolves itself into ‘dead’
>       matter and motion, and yet denying that all physical energy is in
>       reality kinetic; or in proclaiming that all phenomenal differences
>       in the objective world are ultimately due to the various motions of
>       absolutely simple material units, and, nevertheless, repudiating the
>       proposition that these units are equal.” (p. xix.) The blindness of
>       eminent Physicists to some of the most obvious consequences of their
>       own theories is marvellous. “When Prof. Tait, in conjunction with
>       Prof. Stewart, announces that ‘matter is simply passive’ (_The
>       Unseen Universe_, sec. 104), and then, in connection with Sir
>       William Thomson, declares that ‘matter has an innate power of
>       resisting external influences’ (_Treat. on Nat. Phil._, Vol. I. sec.
>       216), it is hardly impertinent to inquire how these statements are
>       to be reconciled. When Prof. Du Bois Reymond ... insists upon the
>       necessity of reducing all the processes of nature to motions of a
>       substantial, indifferent substratum, _wholly destitute of quality_
>       (_Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens_, p. 5), having declared
>       shortly before in the same lecture that ‘resolution of all changes
>       in the material world into motions of atoms _caused by their
>       constant central forces_ would be the completion of natural
>       science,’ we are in a perplexity from which we have the right to be
>       relieved.” (Pref. xliii.)
> 
>   799 Stallo, _loc. cit._, p. x.
> 
>   800 _Silliman’s Journal_, vol. viii. pp. 364 _et seq._
> 
>   801 See Clerk Maxwell’s _Treatise on Electricity_, and compare with
>       Cauchy’s _Mémoire sur la Dispersion de la Lumière_.
> 
>   802 Stallo, _loc. cit._, p. x.
> 
>   803 _Nature_, vol. xxvii. p. 304.
> 
>   804 _Op. cit._, p. xxiv.
> 
>   805 “_Somewhat_ different!” exclaims Stallo. “The real import of this
>       ‘somewhat’ is, that the medium in question _is not, in any
>       intelligible sense, material at all_, having none of the properties
>       of matter.” All the properties of matter depend upon differences and
>       changes, and the “hypothetical” Ether here defined is not only
>       destitute of differences, but incapable of difference and change—in
>       the physical sense let us add. This proves that if Ether is
>       “matter,” it is so only as something visible, tangible and existing,
>       for _spiritual_ senses alone; that it is a Being indeed—but not of
>       our plane—Pater Æther, or Âkâsha.
> 
>   806 _Veræ causæ_ for Physical Science are mâyâvic or illusionary causes
>       for the Occultist, and _vice versâ_.
> 
>   807 Very much “differentiated,” on the contrary, since the day it left
>       its _laya_ condition.
> 
>   808 _Op. cit._, pp. xxiv‐xxvi.
> 
>   809 _Sept Leçons de Physique Générale_, p. 38, _et seq._, Ed. Moigno.
> 
>   810 Defin. 8, B. I. Prop. 69, “Scholium.”
> 
>   811 See _Modern Materialism_, by the Rev. W. F. Wilkinson.
> 
>   812 “Attraction,” Le Couturier, a Materialist, writes, “has now become
>       for the public that which it was for Newton himself—a simple word,
>       an Idea” (_Panorama des Mondes_), since its cause is unknown.
>       Herschell virtually says the same, when remarking, that whenever
>       studying the motion of the heavenly bodies, and the phenomena of
>       attraction, he feels penetrated at every moment with the idea of
>       “the existence of causes that act for us under a veil, disguising
>       their direct action.” (_Musée des Sciences_, August, 1856.)
> 
>   813 If we are taken to task for believing in operating Gods and Spirits
>       while rejecting a personal God, we answer to the Theists and
>       Monotheists: Admit that your Jehovah is _one of the Elohim_, and we
>       are ready to recognize him. Make of him, as you do, the Infinite,
>       the ONE and the Eternal God, and we will never accept him in this
>       character. Of tribal Gods there were many; the One Universal Deity
>       is a principle, an abstract Root‐Idea, which has nought to do with
>       the unclean work of finite Form. We do not worship the Gods, we only
>       honour Them, as beings superior to ourselves. In this we obey the
>       Mosaic injunction, while Christians disobey their
>       _Bible_—missionaries foremost of all. “Thou shalt not revile the
>       Gods,” says one of them—Jehovah—in _Exodus_, xxii. 28; but at the
>       same time in verse 20 it is commanded: “He that sacrificeth to any
>       God, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” Now in
>       the original texts it is not “God” but Elohim—and we challenge
>       contradiction—and Jehovah is one of the Elohim, as proved by his own
>       words in _Genesis_, iii. 22, when “the Lord God said: Behold the Man
>       is become as one of us.” Hence both those who worship and sacrifice
>       to the Elohim, the Angels, and to Jehovah, and those who revile the
>       Gods of their fellowmen, are far greater transgressors than the
>       Occultists or than any Theosophist. Meanwhile many of the latter
>       prefer believing in some one “Lord” or other, and are quite welcome
>       to do as they like.
> 
>   814 To liken the “immateriate species to wooden iron,” and to laugh at
>       Spiller for referring to them as “incorporeal matter” does not solve
>       the mystery. (See _Concepts of Modern Physics_, p. 165 _et infra_.)
> 
>   815 See _Vossius_, Vol. II. p. 528.
> 
>   816 _De Carlo_, I. 9.
> 
>   817 _De Motibus Planetarum Harmonicis_, p. 248.
> 
>   818 _World‐Life_, Prof. Winchell, LL.D., pp. 49 and 50.
> 
>   819 _Panorama des Mondes_, pp. 47 and 53.
> 
>   820 Newton, _Optics_, III. Query 28, 1704; quoted in _World‐Life_, p.
>       50.
> 
>   821 _Ibid._
> 
>   822 When read in a fair and unprejudiced spirit, Sir Isaac Newton’s
>       works are an ever ready witness to show how he must have hesitated
>       between gravitation and attraction, impulse, and some other _unknown
>       cause_, to explain the regular course of the planetary motion. But
>       see his _Treatise on Colour_ (Vol. III. Question 31). We are told by
>       Herschell that Newton left with his successors the duty of drawing
>       all the scientific conclusions from his discovery. How Modern
>       Science has abused the privilege of building its newest theories
>       upon the law of gravitation, may be realized when one remembers how
>       profoundly religious was that great man.
> 
>   823 The materialistic notion that because, in Physics, real or sensible
>       motion is impossible in pure space or vacuum, therefore, the eternal
>       Motion of and in Cosmos—regarded as infinite Space—is a _fiction_,
>       only shows once more that such expressions of Eastern metaphysics as
>       “pure Space,” “pure Being,” the “Absolute” etc., have never been
>       understood in the West.
> 
>   824 From Winchell’s _World‐Life_, p. 379.
> 
>   825 _Correl. Phys. Forces_, p. 173.
> 
>   826 See _Revue Germanique_ of the 31st Dec. 1860, art., “Lettres et
>       Conversations d’Alexandre Humboldt.”
> 
>   827 Prof. Winchell.
> 
>   828 _World‐Life_, p. 553.
> 
>   829 But see _Astronomie du Moyen Age_, by Delambre.
> 
>   830 See _Isis Unveiled_, I. 270, 271.
> 
>   831 _World‐Life_, 554.
> 
>   832 Godefroy, _Cosmogonie de la Révélation_.
> 
>   833 The terms “high” and “low” being only relative to the position of
>       the observer in Space, any use of those terms tending to convey the
>       impression that they stand for abstract realities, is necessarily
>       fallacious.
> 
>   834 Jacob Ennis, _The Origin of the Stars_.
> 
>   835 P. 99, note.
> 
>   836 If such is the case, how does Science explain the comparatively
>       small size of the planets nearest the Sun? The theory of meteoric
>       aggregation is only a step farther from truth than the nebular
>       conception, and has not even the quality of the latter—its
>       metaphysical element.
> 
>   837 Laplace, _Système du Monde_, p. 414, ed. 1824.
> 
>   838 Faye, _Comptes Rendus_, t. xc. pp. 640‐2.
> 
>   839 Wolf.
> 
>   840 _Panorama des Mondes_, Le Couturier.
> 
>   841 _World‐Life_, Winchell, p. 140.
> 
>   842 Sir William Thomson’s lecture on “The latent dynamical theory
>       regarding the probable origin, total amount of heat, and duration of
>       the Sun,” 1887.
> 
>   843 Thomson and Tait, _Natural Philosophy_. And even on these figures
>       Bischof disagrees with Thomson, and calculates that 350,000,000
>       years would be required for the Earth to cool from a temperature of
>       20,000° to 200° centigrade. This is, also, the opinion of Helmholtz.
> 
>   844 Coulomb’s Law.
> 
>   845 _Musée des Sciences_, 15 August, 1857.
> 
>   846 _Panorama des Mondes_, p. 55.
> 
>   847 _Revue des Deux Mondes_, July 15, 1860.
> 
>   848 _Cosmographie._
> 
>   849 _Soirées._
> 
>   850 _Discours_, 165.
> 
>   851 p. 28.
> 
>   852 _Des Esprits_, III. 155, Deuxième Mémoire.
> 
>   853 Laing’s _Modern Science and Modern Thought_.
> 
>   854 _Ibid._, p. 17.
> 
>   855 _Heaven and Earth._
> 
>   856 Winchell, _World‐Life_, p. 196.
> 
>   857 _L’Univers expliqué par la Révélation_, and _Cosmogonie de la
>       Révélation_. But see De Mirville’s _Deuxième Mémoire_. The author, a
>       terrible enemy of Occultism, was yet one who wrote great truths.
> 
>   858 See _Kabbala Denudata_, II. 67.
> 
>   859 “Sur la Distinction des Forces,” published in the _Mémoires de
>       l’Académie des Sciences de Montpellier_, Vol. II. fasc. i, 1854.
> 
>   860 P. 123.
> 
>   861 _Der Weltæther als Kosmische Kraft_, p. 4.
> 
>   862 See _Popular Science Review_, Vol. V. pp. 329‐34.
> 
>   863 See _Correlation of Physical Forces_, p. 110.
> 
>   864 See Buckwell’s _Electric Science_.
> 
>   865 Schelling, _Ideen_, etc., p. 18.
> 
>   866 _Op. cit._, p. 161.
> 
>   867 _Princ._, Def. iii.
> 
>   868 _Philosophical Magazine_, Vol. II. p. 252.
> 
>   869 _Concepts of Modern Physics_, xxxi., Introductory to the 2nd
>       Edition.
> 
>   870 _Loc. cit._
> 
>   871 J. P. Cooke, _The New Chemistry_, p. 13.
> 
>   872 “It imports that equal volumes of all substances, when in the
>       gaseous state, and under like conditions of pressure and
>       temperature, contain the same number of molecules—whence it follows
>       that the weights of the molecules are proportional to the specific
>       gravities of the gases; that therefore, these being different, the
>       weights of the molecule are different also; and inasmuch as the
>       molecules of certain elementary substances are monatomic (consist of
>       but one atom each) while the molecules of various other substances
>       contain the same number of atoms, that the ultimate atoms of such
>       substances are of different weights.” (_Concepts of Modern Physics_,
>       p. 34.) As shown further on in the same volume, this cardinal
>       principle of modern theoretical chemistry is in utter and
>       irreconcilable conflict with the first proposition of the atomo‐
>       mechanical theory—namely, the absolute equality of the primordial
>       units of mass.
> 
>   873 Wundt, _Die Theorie der Materie_, p. 381.
> 
>   874 Nazesmann, _Thermochemie_, p. 150.
> 
>   875 Krœnig, Clausius, Maxwell, etc., _Philosophical Magazine_, Vol. XIX.
>       p. 18.
> 
>   876 _Philosophical Magazine_, Vol. XIV. p. 321.
> 
>   877 Referring to the “Aura,” one of the Masters says in the _Occult
>       World_: “How could you make yourself understood by, command in fact,
>       those semi‐intelligent Forces, whose means of communication with us
>       are not through spoken words, but through sounds and colours in
>       correlation between the vibrations of the two.” It is this
>       “correlation” that is unknown to Modern Science, although it has
>       been many times explained by the Alchemists.
> 
>   878 The Substance of the Occultist, however, is to the most refined
>       Substance of the Physicist, what Radiant Matter is to the leather of
>       the Chemist’s boots.
> 
>   879 The names of the Seven Rays—which are, Sushumnâ, Harikesha,
>       Vishvakarman, Vishvatryarchâs, Sannaddha, Sarvâvasu and Svarâj—are
>       all mystical, and each has its distinct application in a distinct
>       state of consciousness, for Occult purposes. The Sushumnâ, which, as
>       said in the Nirukta (11, 6), is only to light up the Moon, is the
>       Ray nevertheless cherished by the initiated Yogîs. The totality of
>       the Seven Rays spread through the Solar System constitutes, so to
>       say, the physical Upâdhi (Basis) of the Ether of Science; in which
>       Upâdhi, light, heat, electricity, etc., the Forces of orthodox
>       Science, correlate to produce their terrestrial effects. As psychic
>       and spiritual effects, they emanate from, and have their origin in,
>       the supra‐solar Upâdhi, in the Æther of the Occultist—or Âkâsha.
> 
>   880 Leslie’s _Fluid Theory of Light and Heat_.
> 
>   881 Buckle’s _History of Civilization_, Vol. III. p. 384.
> 
>   882 On the plane of manifestation and illusionary matter it may be so;
>       not that it is nothing more, for it is vastly more.
> 
>   883 Neutral, or Laya.
> 
>   884 _Scientific Letters_, Professor Butlerof.
> 
>   885 _Ibid._
> 
>   886 _Ibid._
> 
>   887 _Ibid._
> 
>   888 Called the “drinker of waters,” solar heat causing water to
>       evaporate.
> 
>   889 I. ii. (Wilson, I. 38.)
> 
>   890 Its founder, Râmânujâchârya, was born A.D. 1017.
> 
>   891 The Gandharva of the _Veda_ is the deity who knows and reveals the
>       secrets of heaven and divine truths to mortals. Cosmically, the
>       Gandharvas are the aggregate Powers of the Solar Fire, and
>       constitute its Forces; psychically, the Intelligence residing in the
>       Sushumnâ, the Solar Ray, the highest of the Seven Rays; mystically,
>       the Occult Force in the Soma, the Moon, or lunar plant, and the
>       drink made of it; physically, the phenomenal, and spiritually, the
>       noumenal, causes of Sound and the “Voice of Nature.” Hence, they are
>       called the 6,333 heavenly singers, and musicians of Indra’s Loka,
>       who personify, even in number, the various and manifold sounds in
>       Nature, both above and below. In the later allegories they are said
>       to have mystic power over women, and to be fond of them. The
>       Esoteric meaning is plain. They are one of the forms, if not the
>       prototypes, of Enoch’s Angels, the Sons of God, who saw that the
>       daughters of men were fair (_Gen._, vi.), who married them, and
>       taught the daughters of Earth the secrets of Heaven.
> 
>   892 Pp. 329‐334.
> 
>   893 Not only “through space,” but filling every point of our Solar
>       System, for it is the physical residue, so to say, of Ether, its
>       “lining” (envelope) on our plane; Ether having to serve other cosmic
>       and terrestrial purposes besides being the “agent” for transmitting
>       light. It is the Astral Fluid or Light of the Kabalists, and the
>       Seven Rays of Sun‐Vishnu.
> 
>   894 What need, then, of etheric waves for the transmission of light,
>       heat, etc., if _this_ substance can pass through vacuum.
> 
>   895 And how can it be otherwise? Gross ponderable matter is the body,
>       the shell, of Matter or Substance, the female passive principle; and
>       this Fohatic Force is the second principle, Prâna—the male and the
>       active. On our globe this Substance is the second principle of the
>       septenary Element—Earth; in the atmosphere, it is that of Air, which
>       is the cosmic gross body; in the Sun it becomes the Solar Body and
>       that of the Seven Rays; in Sidereal Space it corresponds with
>       another principle, and so on. The whole is a homogeneous Unity
>       alone, the parts are all differentiations.
> 
>   896 Or the reverberation, and for Sound repercussion, _on our plane_ of
>       that which is a perpetual motion of that Substance on higher planes.
>       Our world and senses are ceaselessly victims of Mâyâ.
> 
>   897 An honest admission, this.
> 
>   898 Yet it is not Ether, but only one of the principles of Ether, the
>       latter being itself one of the principles of Âkâsha.
> 
>   899 And so does Prâna (Jîva) pervade the whole living body of man; but
>       alone, without having an atom to act upon, it would be
>       quiescent—dead; _i.e._, would be in Laya, or, as Mr. Crookes has it,
>       “locked in Protyle.” It is the action of Fohat upon a compound or
>       even upon a simple, body that produces life. When a body dies, it
>       passes into the same polarity as its male energy, and repels
>       therefore the active agent, which, losing hold of the whole, fastens
>       on the parts or molecules, this action being called chemical.
>       Vishnu, the Preserver, transforms himself into Rudra‐Shiva, the
>       Destroyer—a correlation seemingly unknown to Science.
> 
>   900 Verily, unless the Occult terms of the Kabalists are adopted!
> 
>   901 “Unchangeable” only during manvantaric periods, after which it
>       merges once more into Mûlaprakriti; “invisible” for ever, in its own
>       essence, but seen in its reflected coruscations, called the Astral
>       Light by the modern Kabalists. Yet, conscious and grand Beings,
>       clothed in that same Essence, move in it.
> 
>   902 One has to add ponderable, to distinguish it from that Ether which
>       is Matter still, though a substratum.
> 
>   903 The Occult Sciences reverse the statement, and say that it is the
>       Sun, and all the Suns that are from it, which emanate at the
>       manvantaric dawn from the Central Sun.
> 
>   904 Here, we decidedly beg to differ from the learned gentleman. Let us
>       remember that this Ether—whether Âkâsha, or its lower principle,
>       Ether, is meant by the term—is septenary. Âkâsha is Aditi in the
>       allegory, and the mother of Mârttânda, the Sun, the Devamâtri,
>       Mother of the Gods. In the Solar System, the Sun is her Buddhi and
>       Vâhana, the Vehicle, hence the sixth principle; in Kosmos all the
>       Suns are the Kâma Rûpa of Âkâsha and so is ours. It is only when
>       regarded as an individual Entity in his own Kingdom, that Sûrya, the
>       Sun, is the seventh principle of the great body of Matter.
> 
>   905 To be more correct, let us rather call it Agnosticism. Brutal but
>       frank Materialism is more honest than Janus‐faced Agnosticism in our
>       days. Western Monism, so‐called, is the Pecksniff of modern
>       Philosophy, turning a pharisaical face to Psychology and Idealism,
>       and its natural face of a Roman Augur, swelling his cheek with his
>       tongue, to Materialism. Such Monists are worse than Materialists;
>       because, while looking at the Universe and at psycho‐spiritual man
>       from the same negative stand‐point, the latter put their case far
>       less plausibly than do sceptics of Mr. Tyndall’s or even of Mr.
>       Huxley’s stamp. Herbert Spencer, Bain and Lewes are more dangerous
>       to universal truths than is Büchner.
> 
>   906 _Geology_, by Professor A. Winchell.
> 
>   907 See _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 245‐262—Arts. “Do the Adepts deny
>       the Nebular Theory?” and “Is the Sun merely a Cooling Mass?”—for the
>       true Occult teaching.
> 
>   908 _Philosophie Naturelle_, art. 142.
> 
>   909 _Astronomie_, p. 342.
> 
>   910 Commentary on Stanza IV, _ante_, pp. 126‐7.
> 
>   911 _Popular Science Review_, Vol. IV. p. 148.
> 
>   912 And the _central mass_, too, as will be found, or rather the centre
>       of the reflection.
> 
>   913 This “matter” is just like the reflection in a mirror of the flame
>       from a “photogenic” lamp‐wick.
> 
>   914 See _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 258, for an answer to this
>       speculation of Herschell.
> 
>   915 _Ibid._, p. 156.
> 
>   916 Paracelsus for one, who called it Liquor Vitæ, and Archæus.
> 
>   917 _Alchemical_ “composition,” rather.
> 
>   918 “This vital force ... radiates around man like a luminous sphere,”
>       says Paracelsus in _Paragranum_.
> 
>   919 _Popular Science Review_, Vol. X. pp. 380‐3.
> 
>   920 _De Generatione Hominis._
> 
>   921 _De Viribus Membrorum_. See _Life of Paracelsus_, by Franz Hartmann,
>       M.D., F.T.S.
> 
>   922 P. 384.
> 
>   923 Ch. xiii; Telang’s translation, p. 292.
> 
>   924 _Ibid._, ch. xxxvi; p. 385.
> 
>   925 The division of the physical senses into five, comes to us from a
>       great antiquity. But while adopting the number, no modern
>       Philosopher has asked himself how these senses could exist, _i.e._,
>       be perceived and used in a self‐conscious way, unless there were the
>       _sixth_ sense, mental perception, to register and record them;
>       and—this for the Metaphysicians and Occultists—the _seventh_ to
>       preserve the spiritual fruitage and remembrance thereof, as in a
>       Book of Life which belongs to Karma. The Ancients divided the senses
>       into five, simply because their teachers, the Initiates, stopped at
>       _hearing_, as being that sense which developed on the physical
>       plane, or rather, got dwarfed and limited to this plane, only at the
>       beginning of the Fifth Race. The Fourth Race already had begun to
>       lose the _spiritual_ condition, so preëminently developed in the
>       Third Race.
> 
>   926 _Ibid._, ch. x: pp. 277, 278.
> 
>   927 _Mundakopanishad_, p. 298.
> 
>   928 _Bhagavadgîtâ_, ch. vii; _ibid._, pp. 73, 74.
> 
>   929 Ahamkâra, I suppose, that “Egoship,” or “Ahamship,” which leads to
>       every error.
> 
>   930 The Elements are the five Tanmâtras of earth, water, fire, air and
>       ether, the producers of the grosser elements.
> 
>   931 _Anugîtâ_, ch. xx; _ibid._, p. 313.
> 
>   932 The conductor in the sense of Upâdhi—a material or physical basis;
>       but, as the second principle of the universal Soul and Vital Force
>       in Nature, it is intelligently guided by the fifth principle
>       thereof.
> 
>   933 And too great an exuberance of it in the nervous system leads as
>       often to disease and death. If it were the animal system which
>       generated it, such would not be the case, surely. Hence, the latter
>       emergency shows its independence of the system, and its connection
>       with the Sun‐Force, as Metcalfe and Hunt explain.
> 
>   934 P. 387.
> 
>   935 _Paragranum; Life of Paracelsus_, by Dr. F. Hartmann.
> 
>   936 In a recent work on Symbolism in Buddhism and Christianity—in
>       Buddhism and Roman Catholicism, rather, many later rituals and
>       dogmas in Northern Buddhism, in its popular exoteric form, being
>       identical with those of the Latin Church—some curious facts are to
>       be found. The author of this volume, with more pretensions than
>       erudition, has indiscriminately crammed into his work ancient and
>       modern Buddhist teachings, and has sorely confused Lamaïsm with
>       Buddhism. On page 404 of this volume, called _Buddhism in
>       Christendom, or Jesus the Essene_, our _pseudo_‐Orientalist devotes
>       himself to criticizing the “Seven Principles” of the “Esoteric
>       Buddhists,” and attempts to ridicule them. On page 405, the closing
>       page, he speaks enthusiastically of the Vidyâdharas, “the seven
>       great legions of dead men made wise.” Now, these Vidyâdharas, whom
>       some Orientalists call “demi‐gods,” are in fact, exoterically, a
>       kind of Siddhas, “affluent in devotion,” and, esoterically, they are
>       identical with the seven classes of Pitris, one class of which endow
>       man in the Third Race with Self‐consciousness, by incarnating in the
>       human shells. The “Hymn to the Sun,” at the end of his queer volume
>       of mosaic, which endows Buddhism with a Personal God (!!), is an
>       unfortunate thrust at the very proofs so elaborately collected by
>       the unlucky author.
> 
>       Theosophists are fully aware that Mr. Rhys Davids has likewise
>       expressed his opinion on their beliefs. He said that the theories
>       propounded by the author of _Esoteric Buddhism_ “were not Buddhism,
>       and were not esoteric.” The remark is the result of (_a_) the
>       unfortunate mistake of writing “Buddhism” instead of “Budhaïsm,” or
>       “Budhism,” _i.e._, of connecting the system with Gautama’s religion
>       instead of with the Secret Wisdom taught by Krishna, Shankarâchârya,
>       and many others, as much as by Buddha; and (_b_) of the
>       impossibility of Mr. Rhys Davids knowing anything of the true
>       Esoteric Teachings. Nevertheless as he is the greatest Pâli and
>       Buddhist scholar of the day, whatever he may say is entitled to
>       respectful hearing. But when one who knows no more of exoteric
>       Buddhism on Scientific and Materialistic lines, than he knows of
>       Esoteric Philosophy, defames those whom he honours with his spite,
>       and assumes with the Theosophists the airs of a profound scholar,
>       one can only smile or—heartily laugh at him.
> 
>   937 _The Human Species_, pp. 10, 11.
> 
>   938 _The Theosophist._
> 
>   939 Not only does it not deny the occurrence, though attributing it to a
>       wrong cause, as always, each theory contradicting every other (see
>       the theories of Secchi, of Faye, and of Young), the spots depending
>       on the superficial accumulation of vapours cooler than the
>       photosphere (?), etc., etc., but we have men of Science who
>       _astrologize_ upon the spots. Professor Jevons attributes all the
>       great periodical commercial crises to the influence of the sun‐spots
>       every eleventh cyclic year. (See his _Investigations into Currency
>       and Finance_.) This is worthy of praise and encouragement surely.
> 
>   940 _Le Soleil_, II. 184.
> 
>   941 _World‐Life_, p. 48.
> 
>   942 Unfortunately, as these pages are being written, the “archebiosis of
>       terrestrial existence” has turned, under a somewhat stricter
>       chemical analysis, into a simple precipitate of sulphate of
>       lime—hence, from the scientific standpoint, not even an organic
>       substance! _Sic transit gloria mundi!_
> 
>   943 _Vishnu Purâna_, Wilson, I. 16, Fitzedward Hall’s rendering.
> 
>   944 _Popular Astronomy_, p. 444.
> 
>   945 In his _World‐Life_ (page 48), in the appended footnotes, Professor
>       Winchell says, “It is generally admitted that at excessively high
>       temperatures matter exists in a state of dissociation—that is, no
>       chemical combination can exist”; and, to prove the unity of Matter,
>       would appeal to the spectrum, which in every case of homogeneity
>       will show a _bright_ line, whereas in the case of several molecular
>       arrangements existing—in the nebulæ say, or a star—“the spectrum
>       should consist of two or three bright lines”! This would be no proof
>       either way to the Physicist‐Occultist, who maintains that beyond a
>       certain limit of visible Matter, no spectrum, no telescope and no
>       microscope are of any use. The unity of Matter, of that which is
>       real cosmic Matter to the Alchemist, or “Adam’s Earth” as the
>       Kabalists call it, can hardly be proved or disproved, by either the
>       French _savant_ Dumas, who suggests “the composite nature” of the
>       “elements” on “certain relations of atomic weights,” or even by Mr.
>       Crookes’ “radiant matter,” though his experiments may seem “to be
>       best understood on the hypothesis of the homogeneity of the elements
>       of matter, and the continuity of the states of matter.” For all this
>       does not go beyond _material_ Matter, so to say, even in what is
>       shown by the spectrum, that modern “eye of Shiva” of physical
>       experiments. It is only of this Matter, that H. St. Claire Deville
>       could say that “when bodies, deemed to be simple, combine with one
>       another, they vanish, they are individually annihilated”; simply
>       because he could not follow those bodies in their further
>       transformation in the world of spiritual cosmic Matter. Verily
>       Modern Science will never be able to dig deep enough into the
>       cosmological formations to find the Roots of the World‐Stuff or
>       Matter, unless she works on the same lines of thought as the
>       mediæval Alchemist did.
> 
>   946 _Concepts of Modern Physics_, p. vi.
> 
>   947 Book I. ch. II. p. 25. _Vishnu Purâna_, Fitzedward Hall’s
>       Translation.
> 
>   948 _Vide_ in preceding Section VII., “Life, Force, or Gravity,”
>       quotation from _Anugitâ_.
> 
>   949 The word “supernatural” implies _above or outside_ nature. Nature
>       and Space are one. Now Space for the metaphysician exists outside
>       any act of sensation, and is a purely subjective representation,
>       notwithstanding the contention of Materialism, which would connect
>       it forcibly with one or another datum of sensation. For our senses,
>       it is fairly subjective when independent of anything within it. How
>       then can any phenomenon, or anything else, step outside, or be
>       performed beyond, that which has no limits? But when spatial
>       extension becomes simply conceptual, and is thought of in an idea
>       connected with certain actions, as by the Materialists and the
>       Physicists, then again they have hardly a right to define and claim
>       that which can, or cannot, be produced by Forces generated within
>       even limited spaces, as they have not even an approximate idea of
>       what those Forces are.
> 
>   950 It is not correct, when speaking of Idealism, to show it based upon
>       “the old ontological assumptions that things or entities exist
>       independently of each other, and otherwise than as terms of
>       relations” (Stallo). At any rate, it is incorrect to say so of
>       Idealism in Eastern Philosophy and _its_ cognition, for it is just
>       the reverse.
> 
>   951 Independent, in a certain sense, but not _disconnected_ with it.
> 
>   952 “By Fohat, more likely,” would be an Occultist’s reply.
> 
>   953 The reason for such psychic capacities is given farther on.
> 
>   954 The above was written in 1886, at a time when hopes of success for
>       the “Keely Motor” were at their highest. Every word then said by the
>       writer proved true, and now only a few remarks are added with regard
>       to the failure of Mr. Keely’s expectations, so far, a failure now
>       admitted by the discoverer himself. Though, however, the word
>       _failure_ is here used, the reader should understand it in a
>       relative sense, for, as Mrs. Bloomfield‐Moore explains: “What Mr.
>       Keely does admit is that, baffled in applying vibratory force to
>       mechanics, upon his first and second lines of experimental research,
>       he was obliged either to confess a _commercial_ failure, or to try a
>       third departure from his base or principle, seeking success through
>       another channel.” And this “channel” is on the _physical_ plane.
> 
>   955 We learn that these remarks are not applicable to Mr. Keely’s latest
>       discovery; time alone can show the exact limit of his achievements.
> 
>   956 _Theosophical Siftings_, No. 9.
> 
>   957 This is also the division made by the Occultists, under other names.
> 
>   958 Quite so, since there is the _seventh_ beyond, which begins the same
>       enumeration from the first to the last, on another and higher plane.
> 
>   959 From Mrs. Bloomfield‐Moore’s paper, _The New Philosophy_.
> 
>   960 In answer to a friend, that eminent Geologist writes: “I can only
>       say, in reply to your letter, that it is at present, and perhaps
>       always will be, impossible to reduce, even approximately, geological
>       time into years, or even into millenniums.” (Signed, William
>       Pengelly, F.R.S.)
> 
>   961 Plato, in speaking of the irrational, turbulent Elements, “composed
>       of fire, air, water, and earth,” means Elementary Dæmons. (See
>       _Timæus_.)
> 
>   962 Plato in the _Timæus_ uses the word “secretions” of turbulent
>       Elements.
> 
>   963 Valentinus’ _Esoteric Treatise on the Doctrine of Gilgul_.
> 
>   964 See Mackenzie’s _Royal Masonic Cyclopædia_.
> 
>   965 See _Isis Unveiled_, II. 152.
> 
>   966 See Mackenzie, _ibid._, _sub voc._
> 
>   967 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 317.
> 
>   968 _Viveka Chudamani_, translated by Mohini M. Chatterji, as “The Crest
>       Jewel of Wisdom.” See _Theosophist_, July and August, 1886.
> 
>   969 The Tanmâtras are literally the type or rudiment of an element
>       devoid of qualities; but esoterically, they are the primeval Noumena
>       of that which becomes in the progress of evolution, a Cosmic
>       Element, in the sense given to the term in Antiquity, not in that of
>       Physics. They are the Logoi, the seven emanations or rays of the
>       Logos.
> 
>   970 Ch. xxxvi; Telang’s translation, pp. 387‐8.
> 
>   971 See _Theosophist_, August, 1886.
> 
>   972 The now universal error of attributing to the Ancients the knowledge
>       of only seven planets, simply because they mentioned no others, is
>       based on the same general ignorance of their Occult doctrines. The
>       question is not whether they were, or were not, aware of the
>       existence of the later discovered planets; but whether the reverence
>       paid by them to the four exoteric and three secret Great Gods—the
>       Star‐Angels, had not some special reason. The writer ventures to say
>       there was such a reason, and it is this. Had they known of as many
>       planets as we do now—and this question can hardly be decided at
>       present, either way—they would still have only connected the seven
>       with their religious worship, because these seven are directly and
>       specially connected with our Earth, or, using esoteric phraseology,
>       with our septenary Ring of Spheres.
> 
>   973 _John_, x. 30.
> 
>   974 _Ibid._, xx. 17.
> 
>   975 _Ibid._, xiv. 28.
> 
>   976 _Matt._, v. 16.
> 
>   977 _Ibid._, xiii. 43.
> 
>   978 1 _Cor._, iii. 16.
> 
>   979 _Theosophist_, Aug., 1886.
> 
>   980 These are planets accepted for purposes of Judicial Astrology only.
>       The astro‐theogonical division differed from the above. The Sun,
>       being a central _star_ and not a planet, stands, with _its_ seven
>       planets, in more occult and mysterious relations to _our_ Globe than
>       is generally known. The Sun was, therefore, considered the great
>       Father of all the Seven “Fathers,” and this accounts for the
>       variations found between the Seven and Eight Great Gods of Chaldean
>       and other countries. Neither the Earth, nor the Moon, its satellite,
>       nor yet the stars, for another reason, were anything more than
>       _substitutes used for Esoteric purposes_. Yet, even with the
>       exclusion of the Sun and the Moon from the calculation, the Ancients
>       seem to have known of _seven_ planets. How many more are known to
>       us, so far, if we throw out the Earth and Moon? _Seven_, and no
>       more: Seven primary or principal planets, the rest _planetoids_
>       rather than planets.
> 
>   981 When one remembers that under the powerful telescope of Sir William
>       Herschell, that eminent Astronomer—gauging merely that portion of
>       heaven in the equatorial plane, the approximate centre of which is
>       occupied by our Earth—saw in one quarter of an hour, 16,000 stars
>       pass; and applying this calculation to the totality of the “Milky
>       Way” he found in it no less than eighteen millions of Suns, one
>       wonders no longer that Laplace, in conversation with Napoleon I,
>       should have called God a _hypothesis_—perfectly useless to speculate
>       upon for _exact_ Physical Science, at any rate. Occult Metaphysics
>       and transcendental Philosophy will alone be able to lift the
>       smallest corner of the impenetrable veil in this direction.
> 
>   982 _Numb._, xi. 16.
> 
>   983 _Deut._, xxxii. 8, 9.
> 
>   984 _Ibid._, 9.
> 
>   985 C. W. King in _The Gnostics and their Remains_ (p. 344), identifies
>       it with “that _summum bonum_ of Oriental aspiration, the Buddhist
>       Nirvâna, ‘perfect repose, the Epicurean _Indolentia_’;” a view that
>       looks flippant enough in its expression, though not quite untrue.
> 
>   986 See Origen’s Copy of the Chart, or Diagramma of the Ophites.
> 
>   987 See also Section XIV.
> 
>   988 Abraham and Saturn are identical in astro‐symbology, and he is the
>       forefather of the Jehovistic Jews.
> 
>   989 _John_, viii. 37, 38, 41, 44.
> 
>   990 _Matthew_, v. 22.
> 
>   991 The Elemental Vortices inaugurated by the “Mind” have not been
>       improved by their modern transformation.
> 
>   992 I have often been taken to task for using expressions in _Isis_
>       denoting belief in a _personal_ and anthropomorphic God. This is
>       _not_ my idea. Kabalistically speaking, the “Architect” is the
>       generic name for the Sephiroth, the Builders of the Universe, as the
>       “Universal Mind” represents the collectivity of the Dhyân Chohanic
>       Minds.
> 
>   993 _Timæus._
> 
>   994 I. 258.
> 
>   995 _Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations_.
> 
>   996 _Modern Chemistry._
> 
>   997 _Isis Unveiled_, I. 137.
> 
>   998 _Faraday Lectures_, 1881.
> 
>   999 Thus, what the writer of the present work said ten years ago in
>       _Isis Unveiled_ was, it seems, prophetic. These are the words: “Many
>       of these mystics, by following what they were taught by some
>       treatises, secretly preserved from one generation to another,
>       achieved discoveries which would not be despised even in our modern
>       days of exact sciences. Roger Bacon, the friar, was laughed at as a
>       quack, and is now generally numbered among ‘pretenders’ to magic
>       art; but his discoveries were nevertheless accepted, and are now
>       used by those who ridicule him the most. Roger Bacon belonged by
>       right, if not by fact, to that Brotherhood which includes all those
>       who study the Occult Sciences. Living in the thirteenth century,
>       almost a contemporary, therefore, of Albertus Magnus and Thomas
>       Aquinas, his discoveries—such as gunpowder and optical glasses, and
>       his mechanical achievements—were considered by everyone as so many
>       miracles. He was accused of having made a compact with the Evil
>       One.” (Vol. I, pp. 64, 65.)
> 
>  1000 Just so; “those forms of energy ... _which become evident_ ...” in
>       the laboratory of the Chemist and Physicist; but _there are other
>       forms of energy_ wedded to _other forms_ of matter, _which are
>       supersensuous_, yet are known to the Adepts.
> 
>  1001 _Presidential Address_, p. 16.
> 
>  1002 It is just the existence of such worlds on other planes of
>       consciousness that is asserted by the Occultist. The Secret Science
>       teaches that the primitive race was boneless, and that there are
>       worlds invisible to us, peopled as our own, besides the
>       _populations_ of Dhyân Chohans.
> 
>  1003 _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 258 _et seq._
> 
>  1004 Says Mr. Crookes in the same address: “The first riddle which we
>       encounter in chemistry is: ‘What are the elements?’ Of the attempts
>       hitherto made to define or explain an element, none satisfy the
>       demands of the human intellect. The text books tell us that an
>       element is ‘a body which has not been decomposed;’ that it is ‘a
>       something to which we can add, but from which we can take nothing,’
>       or ‘a body which increases in weight with every chemical change.’
>       Such definitions are doubly unsatisfactory: they are provisional,
>       and may cease to‐morrow to be applicable in any given case. They
>       take their stand, not on any attribute of the things to be defined,
>       but on the limitations of human power: they are confessions of
>       intellectual impotence.”
> 
>  1005 And the lecturer quotes Sir George Airy, who says (in _Faraday’s
>       Life and Letters_, Vol. II., p. 354): “I can easily conceive that
>       there are plenty of bodies about us not subject to this intermutual
>       action, and therefore not subject to the law of gravitation.”
> 
>  1006 The Vedântic philosophy conceives of such; but then it is not
>       physics, but metaphysics, called by Mr. Tyndall “poetry” and
>       “fiction.”
> 
>  1007 In the form they are now, we conceive?
> 
>  1008 And to Kapila and Manu—especially and originally.
> 
>  1009 Here is a scientific corroboration of the eternal law of
>       correspondences and analogy.
> 
>  1010 This method of illustrating the periodic law in the classification
>       of elements is, in the words of Mr. Crookes, proposed by Professor
>       Emerson Reynolds, of Dublin University, who ... “points out that in
>       each period, the general properties of the elements vary from one to
>       another, with approximate regularity until we reach the _seventh
>       member_, which is in more or less striking contrast with the first
>       element of the same period, as well as with the first of the next.
>       Thus chlorine, the seventh member of Mendeleef’s third period,
>       contrasts sharply with both sodium, the first member of the same
>       series, and with potassium, the first member of the next series;
>       whilst on the other hand, sodium and potassium are closely
>       analogous. The six elements, whose atomic weights intervene between
>       sodium and potassium, vary in properties, step by step, until
>       chlorine, the contrast to sodium, is reached. But from chlorine to
>       potassium, the analogue of sodium, there is a change in properties
>       _per saltum_..... If we thus recognize a contrast in properties—more
>       or less decided—between the first and the last members of each
>       series, we can scarcely help admitting the existence of a point of
>       mean variation within each system. In general the _fourth_ element
>       of each series possesses the property we might expect a transition‐
>       element to exhibit.... Thus for the purpose of graphic translation,
>       Professor Reynolds considers that the fourth member of a
>       period—silicon, for example—may be placed at the apex of a
>       symmetrical curve, which shall represent for that particular period,
>       the direction in which the properties of the series of elements vary
>       with rising atomic weights.”
> 
>       Now, the writer humbly confesses complete ignorance of modern
>       Chemistry and its mysteries. But she is pretty well acquainted with
>       the Occult Doctrine with regard to _correspondences of types and
>       antetypes_ in nature, and to perfect analogy as a fundamental law in
>       Occultism. Hence she ventures on a remark which will strike every
>       Occultist, however it may be derided by orthodox Science. This
>       method of illustrating the periodic law in the behaviour of
>       elements, whether or not still a hypothesis in Chemistry, _is a law
>       in Occult Sciences_. Every well‐read Occultist knows that the
>       _seventh_ and _fourth_ members—whether in a septenary chain of
>       worlds, the septenary hierarchy of angels, or in the constitution of
>       man, animal, plant, or mineral atom—that the _seventh_ and _fourth_
>       members, we say, in the geometrically and mathematically uniform
>       workings of the immutable laws of Nature, always play a distinct and
>       specific part in the septenary system. From the stars twinkling high
>       in heaven, to the sparks flying asunder from the rude fire built by
>       the savage in his forest; from the hierarchies and the essential
>       constitution of the Dhyân Chohans—organized for diviner
>       apprehensions and a loftier range of perception than the greatest
>       Western Psychologist ever dreamed of, down to Nature’s
>       _classification_ of species among the humblest insects; finally from
>       Worlds to Atoms, everything in the Universe, from great to small,
>       proceeds in its spiritual and physical evolution, cyclically and
>       septennially, showing its seventh and fourth number (the latter the
>       turning point) behaving in the same way as is shown in that periodic
>       law of Atoms. Nature never proceeds _per saltum_. Therefore, when
>       Mr. Crookes remarks on this that he does not “wish to infer that the
>       gaps in Mendeleef’s table, and in this graphic representation of it
>       [the diagram showing the evolution of Atoms] necessarily mean that
>       there are elements actually existing to fill up the gaps; these gaps
>       may only mean that at the birth of the elements there was an easy
>       potentiality of the formation of an element which would fit into the
>       place”—an Occultist would respectfully remark to him that the latter
>       hypothesis can only hold good, if the septenary arrangement of Atoms
>       is not interfered with. This is _the one law_, and an infallible
>       method that must always lead one who follows it to success.
> 
>  1011 A group of electricians has just protested against the new theory of
>       Clausius, the famous professor of the University of Bonn. The
>       character of the protest is shown in the signature, which has “Jules
>       Bourdin, in the name of the group of Electricians, which had the
>       honour of being introduced to Professor Clausius in 1881, and whose
>       war‐cry (_cri de ralliement_) is _À bas l’Ether_”—down with Ether,
>       even; they want Universal _Void_, you see!
> 
>  1012 _Smithsonian Contributions_, xxi., Art. 1. pp. 79‐97.
> 
>  1013 _System of Logic_, p. 229.
> 
>  1014 Beyond the zero‐line of action.
> 
>  1015 _Progymnasmata_, p. 795.
> 
>  1016 _De Stellâ Novâ in Pede Serpentarii_, p. 115.
> 
>  1017 _Hypothèses Cosmogoniques_, p. 2, C. Wolf, 1886.
> 
>  1018 See _Philosophical Transactions_, p. 269, _et seq._
> 
>  1019 Laplace conceived that the external and internal zones of the ring
>       would rotate with the same angular velocity, which would be the case
>       with a solid ring; but the principle of equal areas requires the
>       inner zones to rotate more rapidly than the outer. (_World‐Life_, p.
>       121.) Prof. Winchell points out a good many mistakes of Laplace; but
>       as a geologist he is not infallible himself in his “astronomical
>       speculations.”
> 
>  1020 _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 249‐251, Art. “Do the Adepts deny the
>       Nebular Theory?”
> 
>  1021 Had Astronomers, in their present state of knowledge, merely held to
>       the hypothesis of Laplace, which was simply the formation of the
>       Planetary System, it might in time have resulted in something like
>       an approximate truth. But the two parts of the general problem—that
>       of the formation of the Universe, or the formation of the Suns and
>       Stars from the Primitive Matter, and then the development of the
>       Planets round their Sun—rest on quite different facts in Nature and
>       are even so viewed by Science itself. They are at the opposite poles
>       of Being.
> 
>  1022 Aristotle’s _Physica_, viii. 1.
> 
>  1023 _Hypothèses Cosmogoniques_, p. 3, Wolf.
> 
>  1024 Vol. I., p. 185, quoted by Wolf, p. 3. Wolf’s argument is here
>       summarised.
> 
>  1025 Note vii. Summarized from Wolf, p. 6.
> 
>  1026 _Five Years of Theosophy_, pp. 241, 242, and 239.
> 
>  1027 But the spectra of these nebulæ have never yet been ascertained.
>       When they _are_ found with bright lines, then only may they be
>       cited.
> 
>  1028 _Hypothèses Cosmogoniques_, p. 3.
> 
>  1029 Mr. Crookes’ Protyle must not be regarded as the _primary_ stuff,
>       out of which the Dhyân Chohans, in accordance with the immutable
>       laws of Nature, wove our Solar System. This Protyle cannot even be
>       the Prima Materia of Kant, which that great mind saw used up in the
>       formation of the worlds, and thus existing no longer in a diffused
>       state. Protyle is a _mediate_ phase in the progressive
>       differentiation of Cosmic Substance from its normal undifferentiated
>       state. It is, then, the aspect assumed by Matter in its middle
>       passage into full objectivity.
> 
>  1030 See Stanza III, Commentary 9, (p. 109) about “Light,” or “_Cold_
>       Flame,” where it is explained that the “Mother”—Chaos—is a cold
>       Fire, a cool Radiance, colourless, formless, devoid of every
>       quality. “_Motion as the One Eternal_ IS, _and contains the
>       potentialities of every quality in the Manvantaric Worlds_,” it is
>       said.
> 
>  1031 _Hypothèses Cosmogoniques_, pp. 4, 5.
> 
>  1032 _World‐Life_, p. 196.
> 
>  1033 _Westminster Review_, XX., July 27, 1868.
> 
>  1034 Vol. XIV. p. 252.
> 
>  1035 _Hypothèses Cosmogoniques._
> 
>  1036 Which “Light” we call Fohat.
> 
>  1037 This is a mistake, which implies a material agent, distinct from the
>       influences which move it, _i.e._, blind matter and perhaps “God”
>       again, whereas this One Life is the very God and Gods “Itself.”
> 
>  1038 The same error.
> 
>  1039 _Popular Science Review_, Vol. X.
> 
>  1040 “Is the Jîva a myth, as Science says, or is it not?” ask some
>       Theosophists, wavering between materialistic and idealistic Science.
>       The difficulty of really grasping Esoteric problems concerning the
>       “ultimate state of Matter” is again the old crux of the _objective_
>       and the _subjective_. What is Matter? Is the Matter of our present
>       objective consciousness anything but our _sensations_? True, the
>       sensations we receive come _from without_, but can we really—except
>       in terms of phenomena—speak of the “gross matter” of this plane as
>       an entity apart from and independent of us? To all such arguments
>       Occultism answers: True, in _reality_ Matter is not independent of,
>       or existent outside, our perceptions. Man is an _illusion_: granted.
>       But the existence and actuality of other, still more illusive, but
>       not less _actual_, entities than we are, is not a claim which is
>       lessened, but rather strengthened, by this doctrine of Vedântic and
>       even Kantian Idealism.
> 
>  1041 See _Musée des Sciences_, August, 1856.
> 
>  1042 Book II. of the _Commentary on the Book of Dzyan_.
> 
>  1043 Even the question of the plurality of worlds inhabited by sentient
>       creatures is rejected, or is approached with the greatest caution!
>       And yet see what the great astronomer, Camille Flammarion, says in
>       his _Pluralité des Mondes_.
> 
>  1044 Nevertheless, it may be shown on the testimony of the _Bible_
>       itself, and of such good Christian theologians as Cardinal Wiseman,
>       that this plurality is taught in both the _Old_ and the _New
>       Testaments_.
> 
>  1045 See _Plurality of Worlds_, Vol. II.
> 
>  1046 See on this _La Pluralité des Mondes Habités_, par C. Flammarion,
>       wherein is given a list of the many men of Science who have written
>       to prove the theory.
> 
>  1047 _World‐Life_, pp. 496‐498, _et seq._
> 
>  1048 _World‐Life._
> 
>  1049 _The Book of Enoch._ Trans. by Archbishop Laurence, Ch. LXXIX.
> 
>  1050 The Âtmâ, or Spirit, the Spiritual SELF, passing like a thread
>       through the five Subtle Bodies, or Principles, Koshas, is called
>       “Thread‐soul,” or Sûtrâtmâ in Vedântic Philosophy.
> 
>  1051 “The Septenary Principle,” _Five Years of Theosophy_, p. 197.
> 
>  1052 _Pythagorean Triangle_, by the Rev. G. Oliver, p. 36.
> 
>  1053 See Kant’s _Critique de la Raison Pure_, Barui’s transl., II. 54.
> 
>  1054 Plutarch, _De Placitis Philosophorum_.
> 
>  1055 In the Greek and Latin Churches—which regard marriage as one of the
>       sacraments—the officiating priest during the marriage ceremony
>       represents the apex of the triangle; the bride, its left feminine
>       side, and the bridegroom the right side, while the base line is
>       symbolized by the row of witnesses, the bridesmaids and best men.
>       But behind the priest there is the Holy of Holies, with its
>       mysterious containments and symbolic meaning, inside of which no one
>       but the consecrated priests should enter. In the early days of
>       Christianity the marriage ceremony was a mystery and a true symbol.
>       Now, however, even the Churches have lost the true meaning of this
>       symbolism.
> 
>  1056 _New Aspects of Life and Religion_, by Henry Pratt, M.D., p. 7. Ed.
>       1886.
> 
>  1057 _Ibid._, pp. 7, 8.
> 
>  1058 _Ibid._, p. 9.
> 
>  1059 _Pythagorean Triangle_, by the Rev. G. Oliver, pp. 18, 19.
> 
>  1060 P. 387.
> 
>  1061 P. 387.
> 
>  1062 In the World of Form, symbolism finding expression in the Pyramids,
>       has in them both triangle and square, four co‐equal triangles or
>       surfaces, four basic points, and the fifth—the apex.
> 
>  1063 Pp. 385, 386.
> 
>  1064 _Op. cit._ By Isaac Myer. P. 174.
> 
>  1065 P. 175.
> 
>  1066 P. 175.
> 
>  1067 “The lowest designation, or the Deity in Nature, the more general
>       term Elohim, is translated God.” (P. 175.) Such recent works as the
>       _Qabbalah_ of Mr. Isaac Myer, and of Mr. S. L. MacGregor Mathers,
>       fully justify our attitude towards the Jehovistic Deity. It is not
>       the transcendental, philosophical, and highly metaphysical
>       abstraction of the original Kabalistic thought—Ain‐Suph‐Shekinah‐
>       Adam‐Kadmon, and all that follows—that we oppose, but the
>       crystallization of all these into the highly unphilosophical,
>       repulsive, and anthropomorphic Jehovah, the androgynous and _finite_
>       deity, for which eternity, omnipotence, and omniscience are claimed.
>       We do not war against the _Ideal Reality_, but the hideous
>       theological _Shadow_.
> 
>  1068 Let not the word “Psychology” cause the reader, by association of
>       ideas, to carry his thought to modern “Psychologists,” so‐called,
>       whose _Idealism_ is another name for uncompromising Materialism, and
>       whose pretended Monism is no better than a mask to conceal the void
>       of final annihilation—even of consciousness. Here _spiritual_
>       Psychology is meant.
> 
>  1069 “Vishvânara is not merely the manifested objective world, but the
>       one physical basis [the horizontal line of the triangle] from which
>       the whole objective world starts into existence.” And this is the
>       Cosmic Duad, the Androgynous Substance. Only beyond this is the true
>       Protyle.
> 
>  1070 T. Subba Row. See _Theosophist_, Feb. 1887.
> 
>  1071 By W. Crookes, F.R.S., V.P.C.S., delivered at the Royal Institution,
>       London, on Friday, February 18th, 1887.
> 
>  1072 How true it is will be fully demonstrated only on that day when Mr.
>       Crookes’ discovery of radiant matter will have resulted in a further
>       elucidation with regard to the true source of light, and will have
>       revolutionized all the present speculations. Further familiarity
>       with the northern streamers of the _aurora borealis_ may help the
>       recognition of this truth.
> 
>  1073 _Genesis of the Elements_, p. 1.
> 
>  1074 _De Placit. Philos._
> 
>  1075 _The Path_, I. 10, p. 297.
> 
>  1076 P. 11.
> 
>  1077 Corresponding on the cosmic scale with the Spirit, Soul, Mind, Life,
>       and the three Vehicles—the Astral, the Mâyâvic and the Physical
>       Bodies (of mankind), whatever division is made.
> 
>  1078 _Ibid._ p. 16.
> 
>  1079 Vol. I, p. 429.
> 
>  1080 _Ibid._, p. 21.
> 
>  1081 “The Lord is a consuming _fire_.” “In him was _life_, and the life
>       was the light of men.”
> 
>  1082 Which if separated _alchemically_ would yield the Spirit of Life,
>       and its Elixir.
> 
>  1083 Foremost of all, the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature
>       as _inorganic_ substances or bodies. Stones, minerals, rocks, and
>       even chemical “atoms” are simply organic units in profound lethargy.
>       Their coma has an end and their inertia becomes activity.
> 
>  1084 _Ibid._, p. 144.
> 
>  1085 The orthography of the name—as spelt by himself—is Leibniz. He was
>       of Slavonian descent though born in Germany.
> 
>  1086 _Monadologie_, Introd.
> 
>  1087 “Leibnitz’s dynamism,” says Professor Lachelier, “would offer but
>       little difficulty if, with him, the monad had remained a simple atom
>       of _blind force_. But....” One perfectly understands the perplexity
>       of Modern Materialism!
> 
>  1088 _The Path_, I. 10, p. 297.
> 
>  1089 Leibnitz was an _absolute_ Idealist in maintaining that “material
>       atoms are contrary to reason.” (_Système Nouveau_, Erdmann, p. 126,
>       col. 2.) For him Matter was a simple representation of the Monad,
>       whether human or atomic. Monads, he thought (as do we), are
>       everywhere. Thus the human soul is a Monad, and every cell in the
>       human body has its Monad, as has every cell in animal, vegetable,
>       and even in the so‐called _inorganic_ bodies. His Atoms are the
>       molecules of modern Science, and his Monads those _simple atoms_
>       that Materialistic Science takes on faith, though it will never
>       succeed in _interviewing_ them—except in imagination. But Leibnitz
>       is rather contradictory in his views about Monads. He speaks of his
>       “Metaphysical Points” and “Formal Atoms,” at one time as
>       _realities_, occupying space; at another as pure spiritual _ideas_;
>       then he again endows them with objectivity and aggregates and
>       positions in their co‐relations.
> 
>  1090 _Examen des Principes du P. Malebranche._
> 
>  1091 The Atoms of Leibnitz have, in truth, nothing but the name in common
>       with the atoms of the Greek Materialists, or even the molecules of
>       Modem Science. He calls them “Formal Atoms,” and compares them to
>       the “Substantial Forms” of Aristotle. (See _Système Nouveau_, § 3.)
> 
>  1092 Letter to Father Desbosses, _Correspondence_, xviii.
> 
>  1093 _Monadologie_, § 60. Leibnitz, like Aristotle, calls the “created”
>       or _emanated_ Monads (the Elementals issued from Cosmic Spirits or
>       Gods)—Entelechies, Ἐντελέχειαι, and “incorporeal automata.”
>       (_Monadologie_ § 18.)
> 
>  1094 These three “rough divisions” correspond to Spirit, Mind (or Soul),
>       and Body, in the human constitution.
> 
>  1095 Brother C. H. A. Bjerregaard, in the lecture already mentioned,
>       warns his audience not to regard the Sephiroth too much as
>       _individualities_, but to avoid at the same time seeing in them
>       _abstractions_. “We shall never arrive at the truth,” he says, “much
>       less the power of associating with these celestials, until we return
>       to the simplicity and fearlessness of the primitive ages, when men
>       mixed freely with the gods, and the gods descended among men and
>       guided them in truth and holiness.” (P. 296.) “There are several
>       designations for ‘angels’ in the Bible, which clearly show that
>       beings like the elementals of the Kabbala and the monads of
>       Leibnitz, must be understood by that term rather than that which is
>       commonly understood. They are called ‘morning stars,’ ‘flaming
>       fires,’ ‘the mighty ones,’ and St. Paul sees them in his cosmogonic
>       vision as ‘Principalities and Powers.’ Such names as these preclude
>       the idea of personality, and we find ourselves compelled to think of
>       them as impersonal existences ... as an _influence_, a spiritual
>       substance, or _conscious_ force.” (Pp. 321, 322.)
> 
>  1096 _Buddhist Catechism_, by H. S. Olcott, President of the Theosophical
>       Society, p. 51.
> 
>  1097 _Ibid._ 51, 52.
> 
>  1098 We refer those who would regard the statement as an impertinence or
>       irreverence levelled at accepted Science, to Dr. James Hutchinson
>       Stirling’s work _As regards Protoplasm_, which is a defence of a
>       Vital Principle _versus_ the Molecularists—Huxley, Tyndall, Vogt,
>       and Co.—and request them to examine whether it is true or not to say
>       that, though the scientific premisses may not be always correct,
>       they are, nevertheless, accepted, to fill up a gap or a hole in some
>       beloved materialistic hobby. Speaking of protoplasm and the organs
>       of man, as “viewed by Mr. Huxley,” the author says: “Probably then,
>       in regard to any continuity in protoplasm of power, of form, or of
>       substance, we have seen _lacunæ_ enow. Nay, Mr. Huxley himself can
>       be adduced in evidence on the same side. Not rarely do we find in
>       his essay admissions of _probability_, where it is _certainty_ that
>       is alone in place. He says, for example: ‘It is more than probable
>       that _when_ the vegetable world is thoroughly explored we _shall_
>       find all plants in possession of the same powers.’ When a conclusion
>       is decidedly announced, it is rather disappointing to be told, as
>       here, that the premisses are still to collect [!!].... Again, here
>       is a passage in which he is seen to cut his own ‘_basis_’ from
>       beneath his own feet. After telling us that all forms of protoplasm
>       consist of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen ‘in very complex
>       union,’ he continues: ‘To this complex combination, _the nature of
>       which has never been determined with exactness_ [!!], the name of
>       _protein_ has been applied.’ This, plainly, is an identification, on
>       Mr. Huxley’s own part, of protoplasm and _protein_; and what is said
>       of one, being necessarily true of the other, it follows that he
>       admits the nature of protoplasm never to have been determined with
>       exactness, and that even in his eyes the _lis_ is still _sub
>       judice_. This admission is strengthened by the words, too, ‘If we
>       use this term (protein) with such _caution_ as may properly arise
>       out of our _comparative ignorance_ of the things for which it
>       stands’ ” ... etc. (pp. 33 and 34, ed. 1872, in reply to Mr. Huxley
>       in _Yeast_).
> 
>       This is the eminent Huxley, the king of physiology and biology, who
>       is proven playing at blind man’s buff with _premisses_ and _facts_!
>       What may not the “smaller fry” of Science do after this!
> 
>  1099 “The Cycles of Matter,” a name given by Professor Winchell to an
>       Essay written in 1860.
> 
>  1100 _World‐Life_, pp. 535, 548.
> 
>  1101 Quoted in Büchner’s _Force and Matter_.
> 
>  1102 Men of Science will say: We deny, because nothing of the kind has
>       ever come within the scope of our experience. But, as argued by
>       Charles Richet, the Physiologist: “So be it, but have you at least
>       demonstrated the contrary?... Do not, at any rate, deny _à priori_.
>       Actual Science is not sufficiently advanced to give you such
>       right.”—_La Suggestion Mentale et le Calcul des Probabilités._
> 
>  1103 _Lectures on the Philosophy of History_, p. 26. Sibree’s Eng.
>       Transl.
> 
>  1104 _Isis Unveiled_, Vol. 1, p. 34.
> 
>  1105 This symbolism does not prevent these now seemingly mythic
>       personages from having ruled the Earth once upon a time under the
>       human form of actual living, though truly divine and god‐like Men.
>       The opinion of Colonel Vallancey—and also of Count de Gebelin—that
>       the “names of the Kabiri appear to be all allegorical, and to have
>       signified no more [?] than an almanac of the vicissitudes of the
>       seasons—calculated for the operations of agriculture” (_Collect. de
>       Reb. Hibern._, No. 13, Præf. Sect. 5), is as absurd as his assertion
>       that Æon, Cronus, Saturn and Dagon are all one, namely, the
>       “Patriarch Adam.” The Kabiri were the instructors of mankind in
>       agriculture, because they were the Regents over the seasons and
>       Cosmic Cycles. Hence it was they who regulated, as Planetary Spirits
>       or Angels (Messengers), the _mysteries_ of the _art_ of agriculture.
> 
>  1106 “Who dread Karma‐Nemesis,” would be better.
> 
>  1107 Dryden.
> 
>  1108 Not all, however, for there are men of Science awakening to truth.
>       This is what we read: “Whatever way we turn our eyes we encounter a
>       mystery ... all in Nature for us is the unknown.... Yet they are
>       numerous, those superficial minds for whom nothing can be produced
>       by natural forces outside of facts observed long ago, consecrated in
>       books and grouped more or less skilfully with the help of theories
>       whose ephemeral duration ought, by this time, to have demonstrated
>       their insufficiency, .... I do not pretend to contest the
>       possibility of invisible beings, of a nature different from ours and
>       capable of moving matter to action. Profound philosophers have
>       admitted this in all epochs, as a consequence of the great law of
>       continuity which rules the universe. That intellectual life, which
>       we see starting in some way from non‐being (_néant_) and gradually
>       reaching man, can it stop abruptly at man to reäppear only in the
>       infinite, in the sovereign regulator of the world? This is little
>       probable.” Therefore, “I no more deny the existence of spirits than
>       I deny soul, while I yet try to explain certain facts without this
>       hypothesis.” _The Non‐Defined Forces, Historical and Experimental
>       Researches_, p. 3. (Paris, 1877.) The author is A. de Rochas, a
>       well‐known man of Science in France, and his work is one of the
>       signs of the time.
> 
>  1109 ix. 9.
> 
>  1110 xxxviii. 31, 32.
> 
>  1111 _Astronomie Antique._
> 
>  1112 The Pleiades, as all know, are the seven stars beyond the Bull,
>       which appear at the beginning of spring. They have a very Occult
>       meaning in the Hindû Esoteric Philosophy, and are connected with
>       _Sound_ and other mystic principles in Nature.
> 
>  1113 See _Astronomie Antique_, pp. 63 to 74.
> 
>  1114 _Temple de Jerusalem_, Vol. II, Part II, Chap. xxx.
> 
>  1115 Ch. vii.
> 
>  1116 Quoted by De Mirville, _Des Esprits_, iv. p. 58.
> 
>  1117 _Natural Genesis_, ii. p. 318.
> 
>  1118 _Proœm_, 2.
> 
>  1119 _Astronomy of the Ancients_, Lewis, p. 264.
> 
>  1120 _Natural Genesis_, ii. p. 319.
> 
>  1121 Proclus, _In Timæum_, i.
> 
>  1122 _Genesis_, xlix.
> 
>  1123 Creuzer, iii. p. 930.
> 
>  1124 _Cyropædia_, viii. p. 7, as quoted in _Des Esprits_, iv. p. 55.
> 
>  1125 _Des Esprits_, iv. pp. 59, 60.
> 
>  1126 _Origine de tous les Cultes_, “Zodiaque.”
> 
>  1127 _Vie de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ_, I. p. 9.
> 
>  1128 Whether many nations have seen that identical star, or not, we all
>       know that the sepulchres of the “three Magi”—who rejoice in the
>       quite Teutonic names of Kaspar and Melchior, Balthazar being the
>       only exception, and the two having little of the Chaldean ring in
>       them—are shown by the priests in the famous cathedral of Cologne,
>       where the Magian bodies are not only supposed, but firmly believed
>       to have been buried.
> 
>  1129 This tradition about the “seventy planets” that preside over the
>       destinies of nations, is based on the Occult cosmogonical teaching
>       that besides our own septenary chain of World‐Planets, there are
>       many more in the Solar System.
> 
>  1130 _Des Esprits_, iv. p. 67.
> 
>  1131 _The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients Demonstrated_; Part the
>       Second, or The Key of Urania: pp. 23, 24. Ed. 1823.
> 
>  1132 Every scholar is aware, of course, that the Chaldeans claimed the
>       same digits (432), or 432,000, for their Divine Dynasties as the
>       Hindûs do for their Mahâyuga, namely 4,320,000. Therefore has Dr.
>       Sepp, of Munich, undertaken to support Kepler and Wilford in their
>       charge that the Hindûs borrowed them from the Christians, and the
>       Chaldeans from the Jews, who, it is claimed, expected their Messiah
>       in the lunar year of the world 4,320!!! As these figures, according
>       to ancient writers, were based by Berosus on the 120 Saroses—each of
>       the divisions meaning six Neroses of 600 years each, making a sum
>       total of 432,000 years—they would appear to be peremptory, remarks
>       De Mirville (_Des Esprits_, iii. p. 24). So the pious professor of
>       Munich undertook to explain them _in the correct way_. He claims to
>       have solved the riddle by showing that “the saros being composed,
>       according to Pliny, of 222 synodial months, to wit, 18 years 6/10,”
>       the calculator naturally fell back on the figures “given by Suidas,”
>       who affirmed that the “120 saroses made 2,222 sacerdotal and cyclic
>       years, which equalled 1,656 solar years.” (_Vie de Notre Seigneur
>       Jésus Christ_, ii. p. 417.)
> 
>       But Suidas said nothing of the kind; and, even supposing he had, he
>       would prove little, if anything, by such a statement. The Neroses
>       and Saroses were the same thorn in the side of _uninitiated_ ancient
>       writers as the apocalyptic 666 of the “Great Beast” is in that of
>       the modern, and the former figures have found their unlucky Newtons,
>       as have the latter.
> 
>  1133 See _Isis Unveiled_, ii. p. 132.
> 
>  1134 The reader has to bear in mind that the phrase “climacteric year”
>       has more than the usual significance, when used by Occultists and
>       Mystics. It is not only a critical period, during which some great
>       change is periodically expected, whether in human or cosmic
>       constitution, but it likewise pertains to universal spiritual
>       changes. The Europeans called every 63rd year the “grand
>       climacteric,” and perhaps justly supposed those years to be the
>       years produced by multiplying 7 into the odd numbers 3, 5, 7 and 9.
>       But 7 is the real scale of Nature, in Occultism, and 7 has to be
>       multiplied in quite a different way and method than is as yet known
>       to European nations.
> 
>  1135 _Des Espirits_; iv. p. 61.
> 
>  1136 ii. p. 490.
> 
>  1137 See _Recueil de l’Académie des Inscriptions_, 1853, quoted in _Des
>       Esprits_, iv. p. 62.
> 
>  1138 _Ruins of Empires_, p. 360.
> 
>  1139 See pp. 54, 196, _et seqq_.
> 
>  1140 For a detailed scientific proof of this conclusion, see page 121 of
>       M. Bailly’s work, where the subject is discussed technically.
> 
>  1141 Why it should be “fictitious” can never be made plain by European
>       Scientists.
> 
>  1142 Bailly’s _Traité de l’Astronomie Indienne et Orientale_, pp. xx. _et
>       seq._ Ed. 1787.
> 
>  1143 Ch. III. “On Matter.”
> 
>  1144 _Lecture on Protoplasm_, by Mr. Huxley.
> 
>  1145 Ganot’s _Physics_, p. 68, Atkinson’s Translation.
> 
>  1146 See Vol. I. pp. 338, 339, quoted from _Le Mystère et la Science_,
>       Conférences, Père Félix de Notre Dame.
> 
>  1147 Behold the work of Cycles and their periodical return! Those who
>       denied such “Entities” (Forces) to be bodies, and called them
>       “Spaces,” were the prototypes of our modern “science‐struck” public,
>       and their official teachers, who speak of the Forces of Nature as
>       the imponderable energy of Matter and as modes of motion, and yet
>       hold electricity, for one, as being as _atomic as Matter_
>       itself—(Helmholtz). Inconsistency and contradiction reign as much in
>       official as in heterodox Science.
> 
>  1148 _The Virgin of the World_ of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, rendered
>       into English by Dr. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland. Pp. 83, 84.
> 
>  1149 “Hermes here includes as Gods the sensible Forces of Nature, the
>       elements and phenomena of the Universe,” remarks Dr. A. Kingsford in
>       a foot‐note explaining it very correctly. So does Eastern
>       Philosophy.
> 
>  1150 _Ibid._, pp. 64, 65.
> 
>  1151 See also Section IX, THE COMING FORCE.
> 
>  1152 “O Toom, Toom! issued from the great [female] which is in the bosom
>       of the waters [the great Deep or Space], luminous through the two
>       Lions,” the dual Force, or power of the two _solar eyes_, or the
>       electro‐positive and the electro‐negative forces. See _Book of the
>       Dead_, ch. iii.
> 
>  1153 See _Book of the Dead_, chapter xvii.
> 
>  1154 Chapter lxxix.
> 
>  1155 An image expressing the succession of divine functions, the
>       transmutation of one form into another, or the correlation of
>       forces. Aam is the electro‐positive force, devouring all others, as
>       Saturn devoured his progeny.
> 
>  1156 Aanroo is in the domain of Osiris, a field divided into _fourteen_
>       sections, “surrounded with an _iron_ enclosure, within which grows
>       the _corn of life seven_ cubits high,” the Kâma Loka of the
>       Egyptians. Those only of the dead, who know the names of the
>       janitors of the “seven halls,” will be admitted into Amenti _for
>       ever_; _i.e._, those who have passed through the Seven Races of each
>       Round—otherwise they will rest in the _lower fields_; and it
>       represents also the seven successive Devachans, or Lokas. In Amenti
>       one becomes pure spirit for the eternity (xxx. 4); while in Aanroo
>       the “soul of the spirit,” or the Defunct, is _devoured_ each time by
>       Uræus—the Serpent, Son of the Earth (in another sense the primordial
>       vital principles in the Sun), _i.e._, the Astral Body of the
>       deceased or the “Elementary” fades out and disappears in the “Son of
>       the Earth,” _limited_ time. The soul quits the fields of Aanroo and
>       goes on earth under any shape it likes to assume. (See chapter
>       xcix., _Book of the Dead_.)
> 
>  1157 See _Book of the Dead_, chapter cviii. 4.
> 
>  1158 Maspero in the _Guide au Musée de Boulaq_, p. 152. Ed. 1883.
> 
>  1159 See _Book of the Dead_, ch. xciv.
> 
>  1160 _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1865, pp. 157 and 158.
>
> — *The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 of 4 (Public Domain (Project Gutenberg))*